The Case of the Red-Handed Rhesus (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) (37 page)

Soon, we would give the chimps a shot at the program. For now, though, they were occupied, and we had to replenish our supply of volunteers and learn how to use the tablet before they got a turn. Chuck’s situation was disturbing, and I wanted to alleviate his loneliness. Tasha went over the basics and left Ace and Chuck with one of the tablets while she kept the other. Now, I
knew
she had been responsible for the speedy delivery. I did recall that she was the one who made me place the order on Friday in spite of everything that had already happened. I didn’t care. My plan to shake her ennui was working.

I left Ace holding one tablet within Chuck’s reach while the big ape tapped the screen and chuffed joy at the various pictures and sounds he could generate. Natasha tethered the other tablet to her phone, and she climbed into the van waiting for Chuck to find the vid-chat program.

“Don’t wait too hard, Tasha. He may get obsessed with something else today. This may take a while.” Now I could see the naked hope on her face. She wanted more regular access to Chuck. She looked so fragile. “I think it will work,” I told her. “But you’ve got to be patient.”
And I’d better order a third tablet. I’m sure I’ll find I didn’t pay for the first two in any case.

We arrived at the larger portion of our facility at feeding time, where all our hands were needed. William was clearly regretting his choice to skip school now. It was one thing to miss school when Hannah was braiding and quite another when he was bored. I had a distraction ready for him, too. We would still likely face a meltdown later, but being given his own small bucket to follow with me from enclosure to enclosure was a pretty good substitute in the short term.

Ohio’s new laws defining “sanctuaries” as areas free of children under sixteen would soon pose us problems in this area. Natasha would turn sixteen in time and wouldn’t be affected. But the twins soon wouldn’t be able to accompany us to work unless we chose to skirt the law or abandon our sanctuary to become part of the Ohio Zoo.

Our dwindling budget made the second possibility feel all too real. Short of a major grant coming in, we were going to have to ask Stan for help soon. Since he had so recently paid for the orangutan enclosure, Lance and I were both hesitant to take this step. Purely aside from the fact that he had already given us too much personally, we didn’t want to abuse the man’s generosity.

There was real argument for merging with the Ohio Zoo. Although affiliated with Ironweed University, Midwest Primates wasn’t a formal arm. The university
might
remain a major funder if we became an educational zoo and guaranteed we would only accept primates already in captivity while we continued to offer research opportunities for those studying their behaviors. Lance, Art, and I had volleyed this idea around many times over the years.

Ultimately, we had always come down against it, even though Christian and his employers at the Ohio Zoo were more than open to increasing
that
source of funding to add an exhibit with major tourist appeal to the primate collection. But now? How much would the university continue to provide without Art up there advocating for us?

I couldn’t realistically expect to get his job, not when the department chair resented me so much that he was trying to influence a job committee by scheduling my teaching demonstration in a room polluted with a bucket of dead fish. Not to mention the severed head. He swore he knew nothing about that, but he also refused to explain why he thought his own life was in danger when he saw it.

It might be time to ask our board to reconsider the zoo’s offer, even though it would mean making drastic changes to Art’s vision. Besides, even though I had previously been opposed to having children on our grounds, it was now hard to imagine the center without Sara and William on site.

“Noel!”

How long had I been ruminating? Judging by the number of crickets hopping around the bottom of the spider monkeys’ enclosure and the giggles from the children I’d been allowing to help me place them, quite some time.

“Noel, would you come here?” Jen, standing over by the rhesus macaque enclosure, looked less than impressed by my lack of focus.

“Sorry. Come on, kids. That’s enough enrichment to keep these guys from stealing anything for at least a week.” Sara and William only offered token protests when I prodded them forward, further confirming my suspicions. I’d been mentally absent for some time. “I don’t know what we’d do without you holding the reins here, Jen. What did you need?” I swore to myself to give her a more formal thanks in the near future. She was, after all, not even on our paid roster, but a complete volunteer.

She waved me off. “I think we have a problem?” She sounded a bit like Sara or William making a statement-question.

“What’s up?”

“I should have said something sooner, but you’ve been overwhelmed, and I kind of thought I was losing my mind. How many rhesus macaques do we have?”

“I can’t say off the top of my head. I’d have to look at the sheet. Why?”

“Fewer than two hundred twenty, right?”

“Many fewer. We don’t have capacity for more than one hundred fifty, and that, in and of itself, is a huge number.”

“The sheet says a hundred thirty-eight.”

“Sounds right.”

“Noel, I’ve counted multiple times since Wednesday. I thought it was because I’m doing too much, and maybe we didn’t get them back in the right enclosures. I thought I was maybe double-counting. But I had my husband come in and count with me. We have two hundred twenty monkeys in those enclosures. We’ve got major bloodshed. I’m refilling bowls as two or three monkeys fight to share it. We didn’t have this many before that poor man got killed here. We had a hundred thirty-eight. One monkey to a bowl, and nobody ever missed a meal. I should have said something right away, but it seemed outrageous to have so many monkeys.”

“How did it happen? Why didn’t we notice Wednesday?”

“We barely got to do a head count Wednesday. All we did was put away as many as we thought we had. There were so many of us working, we probably
all
counted to a hundred thirty-eight and thought we had it. Who would think we’d have
extras
? And it’s been pandemonium in these enclosures ever since.

“This is Merle’s area,” she went on, “and he hasn’t called back to even say he won’t be returning. I thought maybe I misunderstood something and rhesus macaques were different from the other kinds of monkeys. Like maybe you had to count some other time or you’d get confused. It’s not like I’ve got some kind of degree to be an expert.” Jen felt self-conscious because she didn’t have any affiliation with the college. She was just a member of the community with a fascination and desire to help.

And she was right. Normally, feeding time is also head count time, because the monkeys all come down for chow. We can verify we don’t have anybody missing because each individual comes to its bowl. Monkeys are territorial little critters, so there isn’t much danger of bowl hopping causing an accidental over-sight.

“Jen, thank you for telling me about this. The rhesus macaques
aren’t
any different from the others. And as for expertise, you don’t need a degree. The person with the expertise is the one on the ground. Most sanctuaries aren’t attached to colleges. They aren’t normally overflowing with overeducated people like me. In fact, it’s ironic that this one
is
, since part of Art’s mission, part of
our
mission, is to validate the experiences of keepers, many of whom get discredited because they haven’t got credentials or haven’t conducted a properly scientific study. You’ve been here long enough to know when something is wrong. Trust yourself. I know I do.”

Her whole face brightened when I said I trusted her, and I realized I had given her more than any medal or award. She hadn’t known until then she had been given the gift of my respect long before today. “What do we do?” she asked. “Somebody besides us is putting monkeys into our enclosures.”

She was right. We never would have accepted more monkeys than we could house. The wizened little macaques in this one enclosure were crowded together in far greater quantities, and a cursory count revealed far too many of them.

“We need more houses if we’re going to make room.” My mind spun backward over the last few days. Although I wasn’t completely sleep-fogged, I still felt jet-lagged and slow. I had an idea in there if I could clear things out long enough to think of it, I felt certain. “In the meantime, let’s start moving the extras to our quarantine areas. We’ve got all the most recent newcomers placed, and that gives us a little room to spread these guys out using those right now. That isn’t acceptable for the long term, but it will allow us to establish a healthier environment in the present tense.”

“Something wrong?” Darnell had been over by the colobus enclosure, but he joined us now.

“Merle?” I said to Jen. “Did you say Merle was in charge of this area?”

She nodded.

Merle is in charge of this enclosure. Merle is a no-call no-show at the pizza parlor. Merle was with Robby and Layla when Will vanished.
“What’s Merle’s blood type?” I asked of nobody. There were, of course, no answers. I had a nasty feeling it was Type A.

Darnell looked a question and I opened my mouth, then closed it again. What to say?
Lance thinks William saw something at the Marine. Something serious enough Robby was told to pick him up. And pick him up again. We have too many monkeys. Merle works at the Marine. Merle is in charge of the now vastly overpopulated rhesus macaque area.
“Something?” I answered. “I’d say lots of things.”

“Something
new
, I meant.”

“Count the macaques,” Jen said.

“One, two,” Sara and William complied immediately.

“Not you,” I told them. But I was only half listening, and they went on counting, both of them saying “five-teen” instead of “fifteen.”
The first time he came here, William melted down about the rhesus enclosures. He didn’t like the cages. He didn’t like circle-dot cars. Circle-dot cars might not be police vehicles.

“Too many,” Darnell said after a minute. “But I thought Chuck was the one breaking in before last week.”

What was I missing? “I think it happened last week,” I said.

“Who breaks in to dump animals
into
an enclosure?” Jen sounded completely lost. “Why not donate or surrender them the normal way?”

Her question crystallized the idea I had been trying to get in focus. “Because those aren’t somebody’s unwanted pets.”
That
was it.
That
was what I had been missing. “Those animals are being smuggled, and somebody is using our sanctuary as a clearinghouse.” I nearly said more, barely remembering in time Jen didn’t know Darnell in his agent role.

I held the rest of my theory in until I was alone with Darnell and the kids in the van. “You and Trudy were tracking a smuggling ring.” It wasn’t a question. “And you thought Gary was at its heart.”

“But he was doing something else entirely,” Darnell pointed out.

“No, he wasn’t. He was doing something else
additionally.
Let’s say your smugglers needed a holding zone between dropping their animals and moving them to a final destination, a pet store or someone’s home. They received the animals asynchronously and made their activity harder to track by disappearing them in between arrival and delivery. Where better to hide a bunch of monkeys than a primate sanctuary?

“I checked our files briefly before we left. Because the number of macaques kept going up, I assumed our volunteers were taking in more of those than others, but at a glance, I saw no more rhesus macaques than any other monkeys on the list, even though the sheet totals increased. Merle told us we had more. We never thought to see if he logged them formally. I think we’ve been getting extra macaques for a long time, and the real problem is Gary and Merle aren’t there any longer to siphon them off.

“And,”
I wound up, “We need to be looking at the Michigan Zoo’s former employees.”

“Like Ace?”

Did Darnell have to sound so hopeful? “Maybe. Whoever is bringing the animals in may know Chuck. But Chuck wouldn’t have to bust loose to see Ace, and I’d wager he’s breaking out to visit a friend. He follows along, watches the human messing with the macaque cage, and after the person goes, he tries his own hand at it. With the key that Ace stopped everything to test when I called him.”

Darnell had a major hole to poke in my theory. “Why doesn’t this person show up on the security footage?”

“Remember? The cameras were turned off or moved.”

“Not the cameras back here. The cameras on the road didn’t pick up anything.”

Natasha had been eavesdropping. She poked her head forward. “Bet they took the service road. It goes right by Chuck’s enclosure, there are no cameras, and it’s not much of a hike up the back way from his place to main if you know what you’re doing.”

This was true. It was one of the few periphery areas on the property without at least one camera, and so few people knew about the entrance we had never stationed a deputy there until after last Wednesday. We had plenty of places to take video, but our cameras only showed some of our enclosures fully, and there were enough gaps in our coverage that Chuck had been able to let himself out and ramble up to the main area, moving those cameras that might have caught him. That he knew where to find the cameras so he could move them bespoke a human connection, too. It took a muddy Sasquatch footprint to give him away.

“We need to look at their cars, too,” Darnell said. “Or are orangutans so good at discerning sounds they could figure out some unusual knock a human ear couldn’t pick up?”

“I don’t think so. As far as I know, it would have to be something distinct enough you or I would hear it.”

Natasha stuck an arm between us and turned the stereo up to blaring.

“Hey!” I turned it back down. “Put your seatbelt back on and sit back!”

“Bet the whole neighborhood heard that,” she said.

“Yes, I’m sure they . . . oh. You’re saying it could be a loud radio.” The deputies wouldn’t have heard even a blasting machine over the sound of monkey chatter, if the primates were keyed up.