by Gil Reavill
“George Wold,” Johnny Velske’s voice said. “I got a hit on your man. I’m pretty sure it’s him, anyway. Get this, he’s got some sort of animal-trainer license to keep chimps. He’s up in the mountains near Ojai.”
Velske gave her an address, and Remington repeated it back him. “Thanks, Johnny,” she said.
“You didn’t hear it from me,” Velske said, and rang off.
Now Remington had a pair of leads to follow up on, George Wold and Russell Dorian. Climbing into the truck, she faced a choice.
Wold or Dorian? Ojai or Mulholland Drive?
She chose wrong.
27
On the way up to Ojai, Remington scanned through the stations on the radio. She stumbled across a Mace Arthur prison-interview broadcast on KPED, an alternative station out of San Pedro. Through his notoriety in the Odalon case, Arthur was fast becoming a poster child for the animal-rights cause. Or maybe more of a poser child, Remington thought.
The interview had been recorded earlier. The husky-voiced female deejay fed Arthur softball questions. Remington surprised herself by feeling a twinge of nostalgia upon hearing the sound of the rock star’s voice. She recalled the afternoon the two of them had spent with Angle at the Spencer Graham estate, the chimp feeding pages of a paperback police thriller to a goat.
“Look, the warm and fuzzies of the world are never going to go extinct,” Arthur said, climbing up on his radio soapbox. “Nobody is ever going to have to form an organization called Save the Bichon Frisé. Anything human-friendly, anything safe and sweet and fluffy is going to be okay. But in the species holocaust that’s going on right now it’s the gnarly ones that are going fast. The sharks. The tigers. The Tasmanian devils.”
“And how does the chimpanzee fit into that equation?” cooed the interviewer.
“Well, we love chimps as pets, don’t we? They’re a superb source of diversion. Most of the Odalon Sanctuary chimpanzees acted as buffoons in movies. Bonzo—that’s our idea of the perfect ape. Or Clyde, the orangutan in the Clint Eastwood movies. ‘Mockman,’ you know? That’s what ‘chimpanzee’ means in Bantu. A little fake man.”
“We’ve made them into our clowns,” suggested the interviewer.
“That’s right. We’re like a king who keeps a dwarf around to amuse him. But what if they’re not so cute? What if they’re wild, violent animals? What if they turn all Travis on us, or into raging chompanzees? Then we want to exterminate them, hound them into extinction. Long live the dangerous ones, I say, long live the ugly and the wild and the unlovable creatures of the world. Those are the ones I want to protect.”
“Right on,” said the interviewer.
“I don’t want to save the apes because they’re mockmen,” said Mace Arthur. “I want to save them because they’re chimpanzees.”
The interviewer signed off the Q & A by mentioning the preliminary hearing in the Odalon case, still going on at the Santa Monica courthouse. Suddenly, Remington felt torn. She wanted to be there. Instead, she was off to see the Chimp Wizard.
She humped the truck over the transverse mountain ranges that cut the Los Angeles Basin off from the rest of the world. Back when Layla’s mother was still alive, Gene used to take the family to the Ojai area on camping trips. That was before the trust funders started flocking and the place got turned into the Shangri-la of Southern Cal. Development companies were carving up the landscape into multimillion-dollar ranchettes.
The address Johnny Velske gave her for George Wold was as far away from all that business as it could get. Remington took a dusty, rutted dirt road that snaked up into the Topatopa Mountains east of Ojai. She saw nothing trendy in the downscale cabins she passed, a few with rusty junk automobiles out front.
The public road led to a private one, which led to a barely-there track through stands of lodgepole pines. The last vehicle had passed her fifteen minutes back, around the time she saw the last mailbox. She wanted to ask someone for directions, but there was no one around to ask. The dirt tracks forked and re-forked until they turned into a maze. She was lost.
Getting out of the Ford to examine a wooden collection of address numbers tacked to a tree, she heard it. The far-off scream of an ape.
Remington turned the truck toward the sound. Maneuvering onto a long rutted driveway, she climbed over a rise to see a collection of ranch buildings: a barn, sheds, a corral, and a bunkhouse-style residence, all built of ancient cedar that had weathered to the flat gray of a wasp’s nest. Parked in front of the barn was—yes, indeed—a white Ford Econoline van, just like the one Cindy Iracane told Remington had been nosing around her block.
Parking alongside the vehicle, Remington noticed something odd: no license plates. Its doors were locked. But when she peered in through the front window she saw that a whole collection of license plates were stacked on the passenger seat. The back of the van was obscured by a leather curtain. It couldn’t block the smell: the heavy musk scent of the chimpanzee.
No one around—nobody human, anyway. Two pickups and an ancient Volkswagen bug were also parked in haphazard fashion in the yard. When Remington knocked on the door of the house, she got no response.
She eased her way around the back of the low-slung residence. Running off the barn was a row of concrete block cages. She couldn’t see the animals inside, but she heard the pant-hoots, grunts, and occasional scream of chimpanzees. When she shouted an alert of her presence, the caged creatures near the barn responded with a volley of calls.
She returned to her truck and removed her father’s Colt Python revolver from where it was clipped underneath the dash. Nothing dangerous had so far presented itself to her at the Chimp Wizard’s ranch, but the place somehow didn’t feel right. Remington fired into the air—what they used to call in the West a “hello shot.” The boom echoed off the hillsides. If that didn’t bring someone running, no one was home.
The sound of the gunshot brought out two someones.
A chimpanzee wearing a collar and chain burst around the corner of the barn, running on all fours. Behind the animal, Remington had a brief second to recognize the burn boss.
She had the pistol in her right hand, carrying it muzzle downward so the barrel extended alongside her leg. All she had to do was bring it up and fire. But the ape didn’t run, it flew at Remington, giving her barely enough time to raise the weapon before it slammed into her. The shot she managed served only to enrage the beast. The bullet missed both the creature and its wizard keeper, zipping harmlessly into the jack pines beyond the barn.
Once again, as the killer ape had done when last they met in the courtyard of Cindy Iracane’s apartment building, the beast smashed Remington to the ground.
Officer down.
The back of her head hit hard on something solid, a granite outcropping amid the gravel of the drive.
Officer out.
—
When Remington opened her eyes the light came at her like a hypodermic, stabbing directly into her brain, so she closed them again. Gagging repeatedly, she threw up.
Try again. She opened only one eye this time, only a little. A sound of screaming enveloped her. It was if she were inside the scream. Was it her own? No, her mouth remained shut tight, sealed with a rime of vomit.
Banging, bellowing.
Where was she? Remington’s brain wouldn’t work beyond the pain. She had to grope her way to thought.
One, she was still alive. Whatever creature attacked her, it hadn’t finished the job the way it had with Ian Terry, Dukundane Tamas, and Cindy Iracane.
Two, she was naked.
Three, she was caged. Visible through the bars was a dimly lit room, a workshop of some sort.
Four, in the enclosure next door was the crazed ape that had attacked her.
Choking back a whimper of fear, Layla tried to retreat away from the beast, but there was nowhere to go. The cage in which she was imprisoned was tight, the size of a small refrigerator. It stank of ape and urine and puke and feces.
; At random moments the killer beside her erupted into what she could think of only as ape-shit frenzies. Screaming, baring its fangs, rattling the mesh bars of its own cage until Remington’s cell shook. The beast spit at her and flung a clump of its own filth through the mesh that separated them.
Something else about the maddened chimpanzee, a terrifying detail, floated up through her concussion haze. It was a memory that had tantalized her from the first attack, a detail that she had tried and failed to remember. The screaming animal had a crude tattoo inked into its forehead, right between its red-rimmed eyes.
A swastika.
The ape exploded again. Evidently, it didn’t like to be looked at. Remington cowered away. She could move back only inches. The frenzy next door rose, abated, rose again.
Remington’s primate neighbor was the spitting (literally) image of Angle. Except not. There was the swastika, plus something had gone wrong with its skull. The shape of it was lopsided, as if the bone plates of the cranium had been taken apart and then put back together by a mad child.
A human voice broke the gloom.
“Manny,” it said in a tone of command. “Settle.”
Remington heard footsteps. Then a snap of electric sparks.
Now it was the crazed ape’s turn to cower. The creature sank back into itself, entering into an abrupt catalepsy.
“Do you know the term ‘winter mind’?” asked the voice.
Through barely opened eyes Remington saw the figure of a man. She heard his footsteps retreat and cross the room to some sort of workbench. He sat. Picking up what looked to Remington’s dim gaze like a tool of some sort, the man set about tinkering with a half-disassembled assault rifle.
Both she and the ape next to her were panting, taking in quick, shallow breaths.
“Winter mind?” the voice persisted.
“Where…where…where…” Remington’s word-pants came out in a fragile whisper.
She looked across the workshop to the bench. The burn boss sat there, the Chimp Wizard, the man in the photo that Emma Lucas had given Remington.
George Wold.
“Winter mind is a concept we associate with mental development,” Wold said to her, using the authoritative tone of a professor. “We emerge from the womb unfinished. We are born with a winter mind. For a primate brain to develop fully after birth, it turns out that it must be exposed to social interaction. Otherwise, it stagnates.”
Wold gestured toward the ape in the cage next to Remington. “That’s winter mind you see there in Manny. You yourself have a fully developed summer mind. But if you were raised in total isolation as a baby, deprived of any human contact, you’d be locked in the state of winter mind. Feral children, growing up in the wild, they have winter mind.”
“Water,” Remington managed. Wold ignored her.
“Manny’s full and proper slave name, his work name, is Manson. I tattooed that swastika on him once in a flight of fancy, in solidarity with his namesake. Silly, I know, but it scares the shit out of his victims. Charlie Manson did his own forehead swastika in prison, with ballpoint-pen ink. The mark of the beast.”
“You…you…you,” Remington panted.
“Now, imagine this.” Wold racked the assault rifle and then laid it down atop the workbench again. “Manson here and his identical twin, Angle, were the product of a fertility-manipulation program by a Semke Research employee named Benson Jans. Chimps don’t normally have multiple births, but Ben Jans wanted an increase in the yield for the company’s chimpanzee breeding program.”
“Sir? Sir?” Remington’s voice sounded plaintive and foreign to her ears.
Wold didn’t respond. “Also, identical twins…Well, developmental scientists just love identical twins. They collect them—did you know that? The better to figure out those pesky questions of nature versus nurture. Identical twins, you know, they aren’t precisely identical down to their cells. Their fingerprints, for example, are only ninety-five percent the same, but I guess that’s good enough for government work—at least for the forensic boys down at the L.A. coroner’s office.”
“Water…please,” Remington whispered.
Wold rose from the workbench. He brought a squeeze bottle over and shot some water in the general direction of Remington’s mouth. The ape beside her didn’t stir.
“You with me so far?” Wold asked. “Two chimp babies, their mother’s ovarian plumbing tweaked so she could have twins or die trying, which she did. Angle goes off to a warm family environment in Washington State, he learns communication skills and other capabilities, he develops what could be termed a spring mind, which is about the best our poor primate cousins can do. Not quite a summer mind, and nothing you’d be hiring as a rocket scientist or a homicide detective, but still, it’s pretty good.”
He gestured toward the animal next door to Remington. “Manson here—his name wasn’t Manson back then, I gave him that—all he had was a number affixed to his cage. Manson was kept at Semke for research purposes.”
“In one of these,” Remington said, raking her hand feebly over the mesh of her cage.
“That’s right!” Wold said. “Very good, Detective! The cage in which you find yourself is called an isolette, a name applied wholly without irony. Forty by thirty-one by twenty-six, in case you’re wondering, and that would be inches, not feet.”
“You worked at Semke,” Remington said.
“I did indeed,” Wold agreed. “And at Odalon, back in the day. I was interested in how it would all turn out, this hideous Nazi-style experiment, the tale of two chimps, Angle the sweetie pie and Manson the man-eater. Manson, son of man—get it? Because this boy was a Semke creation all the way. I rescued him and trained him up, but that winter mind of his stayed right where it was when he emerged after six years in the isolette.”
“You killed them all,” Remington said. “Terry and Tamas and Iracane.”
“Well, hell, I didn’t! Manson here did. I just brought him into a state of opportunity. All of them—the new staff that the little shit Russell Dorian put in place at Odalon after his daddy died—they were all in on it. Russell’s project. Kill the apes, free up the sanctuary land for some big-ass real-estate payday.”
“So it was revenge—”
“I’m afraid it’s gone quite a bit beyond that. We’re talking species extinction here. No more chimpanzees in the wild. They’re burning down the rain forest and hunting them for meat. And since they’re not breeding them any longer at research facilities, in fifty years there’ll be no more captive chimps, either.”
“You’re going to save the apes,” Remington said.
“I’m just allowing the chimp species to leave behind a little sting as it exits the stage.”
“Three people dead, one maimed. That’s a little sting?”
“Thirteen dead at Odalon. Plus, your count of the human dead is one short.”
Wold crossed the work space to approach a chest freezer. He opened it and extracted a plastic bag.
“I let Manny play with this one for a while,” he said, holding up a severed human head by its hair. The facial features were lumpy and misshapen in death, but Remington recognized the fat slob of a guy in the picture thumbtacked to the wall in Gregg Hickler’s study.
“You know him?” Wold asked her, an insane question to which he evidently didn’t expect an answer. “Willard ‘Fats’ Tremont, Russell Dorian’s butt boy. Fats here was a good kill, but I was sad to miss executing the Odalon shooter himself, this Hickler guy. He was a real crazy-ass piece of work. Did anybody come back from Iraq not absolutely bonkers?”
“You’re not finished yet, are you?” Remington asked.
In reply, Wold dropped the head back into the plastic bag and the plastic bag back into the chest freezer. “Collar, Manny,” he called, crossing to the cage next to Remington’s.
The ape stirred from his catatonic state. Manson bent his head forward and presented his neck to Wold. It was a move that reminded Remington of a prisoner at Metro pu
tting his wrists through a cell door’s hand hole to be cuffed. Cattle prod always at the ready, the trainer clipped a length of aluminum chain to the ape’s collar, opened the cage, and led him out.
“Sometimes, you know, when he’s resting, I just sit and stare at the swastika I put on him,” Wold said. “It’s like a mandala they use in Eastern meditation, you know? Clears your mind considerably.”
“Some chimp wizard,” Layla managed to say, her voice still a whisper. “Using a cattle prod.”
Wold stopped and looked back at her. “Do I contradict myself? All right, then, I contradict myself. It is my pleasure to use the monster against those who made him that way.”
He led the passive, shambling chimp toward the door of the workshop. Wold stopped to pick up the assault rifle he had been stripping down and putting back together.
“Wold,” Remington croaked, “don’t leave me here.”
“Goodbye, Detective. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
“Wold! George! Don’t leave me. Please!”
He was gone. After a beat, Remington heard the faraway sound of a car engine turning over.
She began to weep.
—
Her mind was not her own. As night began to settle on Wold’s workshop madhouse, the montane cold crept into her cage like fingers of death. Thirst gripped her until she felt capable of no other thought than the wish to quench it.
Her father walked into the room. “Daddy!” Layla called. Gene had come to rescue her the way he had so many times in her childhood. But something was wrong. He wasn’t really there. He hadn’t come. No one had. She was alone.
She thought of the ape story from Robert Heinlein that Gene had told her about. How, in a cell with four ways out, the ape had found a fifth way. Shivering, she scrabbled through the tight precincts of her confinement, searching for something—anything—that might help her escape. She chewed off one of her fingernails and tried to pick the lock of her cage with it. A sad, pathetic idea. She cried when it didn’t work.