Half-Off Ragnarok: Book Three of InCryptid (19 page)

Breaking into the zoo after hours was surprisingly easy: I had a key card, and there were no guards on duty this late at night. The security camera next to the south employee gate had been broken for months, and so there wouldn’t even be a tape to destroy. Grandpa carried the plastic garbage bag of what had been Mr. O’Malley, before his body met a bone saw and a deadline. Shelby followed him, and Grandma brought up the rear, having finally talked Sarah into going back to bed. We’d need her if anyone found us before we were finished.

Sometimes it’s a little depressing to realize how simple it is to make a person disappear. I tried not to dwell on that as we walked across the deserted zoo to the reptile house. I watched the bushes the whole way, searching for a sign that the cockatrice had been transported back to its original stomping grounds.

I didn’t see anything.

Inside the reptile house, the nocturnal animals were wide awake, slithering and skittering around their enclosures . . . and then there was Crunchy, who hung as still and patient as a stone in his tank, waiting to be rewarded for his persistence. I pulled out the stepladder and positioned it in front of the glass, climbing up to the top step. Once I was stable, I unlocked the panel that kept foolish kids from going for a swim, pushing it off to the side. Then I held out my hand.

“Give me a leg,” I said.

If Crunchy was surprised by this sudden manna from heaven, he didn’t show it. His neck lashed out as the leg drifted by, and with dismaying speed, what had been a piece of a human body was nothing but a thin red cloud in the water. In a few seconds, even that was gone. I held out my hand again. Grandpa passed me the next piece of Mr. O’Malley. Bit by bit, we fed the old man into the tank, until there was nothing left but a bloody plastic bag, which my grandfather solemnly folded and tucked into his coat.

“Let’s go home,” said my grandmother, sounding subdued.

“Alex—” began Shelby.

“Tomorrow, all right?” I locked the panel over Crunchy’s tank before climbing down from the stepstool and turning to look at her. She was beautiful in the reddish light of the heat lamps on the reptile enclosures. She was dangerous.

I needed to get her the hell away from my family.

“Promise?” she asked.

“I promise,” I said wearily. “Now come on. We’ll drive you back to your car.”

Together—hopefully for the last time—the four of us walked out of the reptile house and started across the empty zoo. It had been a long day. It had been a long night. And the next few days didn’t look like they were going to be any shorter.

“I have always enjoyed the company of dangerous women. Fortunately for me, many of them seem to enjoy the company of dangerous men.”

—Thomas Price

The reptile house of Ohio’s West Columbus Zoo, about an hour and a half before the zoo is supposed to open, waiting for a gorgon to come to work

B
ETWEEN THE BODY DISPOSAL,
cleaning the kitchen, and analyzing the samples we’d taken during our makeshift autopsy, I was too spun up to sleep. Oh, I tried. And when four o’clock in the morning arrived without my catching so much as a wink, I gave up. I’d spent the hours between then and leaving for work doing research, drinking coffee, and emailing home to ask for more details about the Thirty-Six Society—which I didn’t have, naturally, since everyone else in my family was smart enough to go to bed.

My car was one of the first into the parking lot. I got out and started down the path to the front gate, noting as I passed the pond that even the geese were still asleep. It was like I had the place to myself. Then again, that could have been a side effect of sleep deprivation.

I walked around the curve in the path and smiled, the feeling of isolation dissipating as I saw Lloyd already manning his position at the gate. “Good morning,” I called.

He jumped, coffee slopping over the lip of his mug as he turned to stare at me. “Dr. Preston?” he asked.

“I know, I’m early.” I shrugged. “I couldn’t sleep. How about you, Lloyd? They always make you come to work this early?”

“My shift starts as soon as there’s staff on the grounds,” he said, recovering some of his composure. He put his coffee down and reached for his clipboard. “ID?”

I shook my head as I pulled out my ID card and handed it to him. “Every day.”

“There were police here yesterday,” he said, in an overly patient tone. “Management wants to be extra sure they know who’s coming and going.” He found my name on his clipboard, checked it off, and handed my ID back to me. “Welcome to the zoo, Dr. Preston.”

“Thanks, Lloyd,” I said, and waved as I walked through the gate. He didn’t wave back. When I glanced over my shoulder he looked away, and I frowned. I must have been really early if my presence was this confounding to security.

The zoo was as deserted as the parking lot. I walked quickly, scanning the ground. I was wearing my glasses with the polarized lenses and carrying a hand mirror, just in case. Crow was still at home. If things went as badly as I feared that they might, he didn’t need to be here.

Unlocking the reptile house was like coming home after an annoyingly short absence. Many of the reptiles were still active after their long and exciting night. Some of them froze when they saw me walking by, their instincts kicking in and causing them to pretend to be bits of fallen wood or pieces of the wall. Others ignored me completely, so accustomed to humans that I was no more important to them than an empty room. If I came back with food, maybe then they’d give a crap about me.

Shami rose in the classic cobra “stand” position when I passed his enclosure, flaring his hood slightly as he looked at me. I stared into his unblinking eyes, trying to guess what he was thinking. It was easier with wadjet females. At least they looked mostly human, and could be counted on to show their emotions in the same way.

“Alex?” Dee sounded confused, like I was the last person she’d been expecting to find in the reptile house at this hour. The sound of the front door swinging shut followed her question. I turned to face her.

She was wearing a smart-looking blouse and pencil skirt combination, one that was just a little old-fashioned, and hence went perfectly with her impeccable beehive wig. Only the uneven curves of her painted-on eyebrows told me that she was as exhausted as I was. That was a good sign. I didn’t want it to be Dee. Whatever was going on, whoever was involved with it, I didn’t want it to be Dee. I somehow mustered a smile.

“Hi, Dee,” I said. “How are you this morning?”

“What are you doing here? It’s not even seven o’clock.” she asked, walking toward me, and then continuing on past me as she made her way to her office. “You never beat me into the office. Is everything okay at home?”

“We had sort of an exciting night last night.” My eyes were still dry, and I’d found sand on my pillow when I’d finally given up and gotten out of bed. “Do you have a minute to talk?”

“Sure. Come on in.”

Dee’s office was impeccable, unlike mine: every surface was cleaned to within an inch of its life, and only the most essential items were allowed to claim territory. There were a few carefully curated “personal touches,” including a forced-perspective picture of Dee, her daughter Megan, and her husband, whose name I realized I didn’t know. The camera angle had been chosen to make it harder to tell that he was in the neighborhood of seven feet tall, and it worked, mostly, if you didn’t know what you were looking for.

“Did you sleep last night?” she asked, putting her purse on her desk and leaning over to switch on the computer.

“Not really,” I said, following her into the office and closing the door. “I had a lot to do. Sleep wasn’t on the agenda.”

“Oh?”

There were a lot of places I could begin. I didn’t want to tell her about Shelby—not yet. That wasn’t my secret to share, and as long as Shelby wasn’t endangering the local cryptids, I didn’t have to force the issue. Instead, I went for the biggest shock value: “There was a cockatrice in my yard last night. I looked into its eyes.”

Dee’s gasp woke her hair. It hissed softly beneath her wig. “Alex! Oh sweet Athena! Are you all right? You’re all right, aren’t you?” She paused, almost visibly moving on to the next thought. “How are you all right? If you met its eyes, you should have . . . you should . . .”

“Luckily, my cousin was on hand, and I got a good enough look at it before my eyes started turning to stone that I was able to tell her which antivenin to use on me. It was a closer thing than I enjoy, but I’m fine now. A little dehydrated. Nothing a few bottles of Gatorade can’t fix.”

“So a cockatrice turned Andrew to stone?” Her voice was heavy was bald relief . . . and with eagerness. The only question was whether she was eager to have the mystery of Andrew’s death resolved, or eager to have me convinced of what had killed him.

“Yes,” I said, and watched her brighten. “Also, no.” She dimmed just as quickly, expression turning puzzled.

“I . . . I don’t understand. How was it a cockatrice if it wasn’t a cockatrice?”

“It wasn’t alone.” I pulled out my phone, opening my gallery. The most recent image—the puncture wound on Mr. O’Malley’s leg—filled the screen. I held it toward Dee, like Perseus holding his mirrored shield between himself and the fabled Medusa. “Look familiar? Because I checked these against the field guide, and they have the same diameter and spacing as the bite of a Pliny’s gorgon.”

The hissing was louder now, her wig beginning to pulse as her snakes worked themselves up into a fury. “I . . . I don’t . . .”

“We found this wound on my next-door neighbor’s leg after he died of petrifaction. I took venom samples from the surrounding tissue. They tested as gorgon. I didn’t get enough to tell the subtype, but we both know this bite wasn’t made by a greater gorgon, and the bite radius is pretty compelling.” I lowered my phone. “So you tell me, Dee. Please. How was this man killed by a cockatrice if he was bitten by a gorgon? Why was there a cockatrice in my yard? I can’t imagine the two things are unconnected. Then again, I’m the least imaginative member of my family. Maybe I’ll believe you, if you can explain.”

“I . . .” Dee’s shoulders slumped as she reached up to steady her pulsing wig. “I swear to you, Alex, I don’t know. I can’t say for sure that I’d tell you if I knew it was a member of my community who’d done this, because I’ve never been in that position, but I
can
tell you it’s not any member of my community who I know. They would never have done this.”

“You have to know how this looks.”

“Yeah, well, maybe so does somebody else, did you consider that?” She glared at me, the familiar fierceness back in her eyes. “Anybody who knows I work for you could have mocked up those bite marks as a way to make you accuse me.”

“To what end?”

“To keep you from looking for the real killer.”

I paused. “That’s not a bad theory,” I said, after a moment of thought. “There’s just one problem.”

“What’s that?”

“We’re right back at it being something other than just a cockatrice. So if it wasn’t a Pliny’s gorgon, what was it?”

Dee stared at me for a moment, eyes wide behind her tinted lenses. She started to open her mouth, presumably to offer an answer.

The sound of someone knocking on the office door stopped her cold.

With me and Dee both inside her office, the reptile house wasn’t officially open; what’s more, unless I’d been more careless than I thought, the outer door shouldn’t have been unlocked. We exchanged a glance. I nodded, and she reached up to put one hand on the arm of her glasses, clearly ready to pull them off. I couldn’t draw a firearm on zoo property without doing a lot of explaining, and so I just turned to the door, prepared to leap out of the way, and opened it.

Chandi didn’t flinch. She had eschewed her fancy clothes today, instead wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt advertising a brightly colored, presumably age appropriate puppet show called
Lazy Town
. There were alligator-shaped barrettes in her hair. “Am I going to be allowed to see my fiancé as we agreed?” she demanded, frowning.

“Chandi.” I returned her frown. “The reptile house isn’t open yet. How did you get in?”

Her eyes darted to the side. “The front door was unlocked.”

“No, it wasn’t,” said Dee, stepping up behind me. “Chandi, do you have a key? I thought we discussed this . . .”

“I have a key for emergencies,” said the little girl sullenly. “Humans being murdered inside the safe haven we arranged for Shami constitutes an emergency. I am allowed to use my key under these circumstances.”

“Okay, hold on a second,” I said. “Chandi, did you knock before you let yourself in?”

“No,” she admitted.

“So that’s where we draw the line, all right? You need to knock before you assume you’re allowed to let yourself in, whether or not you think we’re having an emergency.” I paused. “Wait—the
zoo
isn’t open yet. How did you even get to the reptile house?”

“I just told you that,” said Chandi. “Humans are being murdered.”

The thought struck me and Dee at the same time. We exchanged a horrified look. “Lloyd,” she said.

“Chandi, I need you to listen to me
very carefully
.” I turned back to her. “Was the man at the front gate alive or dead when you came inside?”

“He was dead. Now may I see Shami?”

“Dee?”

“I’ve got it.” Dee stepped past me, putting her hands on Chandi’s shoulders and steering the little girl firmly away from the office door. “You can see him for a moment, sweetie, but if there’s been another murder, they’re going to close the zoo, and you don’t want to be here when that happens, do you? It would come with so many inconvenient
questions
, and I don’t think you want to explain them to your parents . . .” Her voice faded into so much reassuring muttering, punctuated by Chandi’s objections.

I didn’t stay to listen. I was already running for the front door.

The zoo was still deserted.
What did I just do?
I thought, racing down the main trail toward the gate. Lloyd had been alive when I arrived at work. Dee came in after me. If she was the killer, then I had decided to leave her alone with a little girl.

A little girl with venomous fangs of her own. We weren’t even sure wadjet could be harmed by gorgon venom, given their immunity to everything else. Chandi had a finely-honed sense of self-preservation, and an even more finely-honed sense of entitlement. If Dee attempted to attack her rather than giving her access to her fiancé, I was betting on the wadjet.

The sound of voices told me I was on the right track. I jogged to a stop where I would be concealed by a large patch of shrubbery and peered through the branches at the crowd that had gathered around Lloyd’s body. I hadn’t realized that many people came to the work this early. His clipboard was on the ground, its utility finally at an end. Although I supposed that if the police went looking for a murderer, it would give them a convenient list of suspects.