The Case of the Red-Handed Rhesus (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) (38 page)

“He comes to music.”

“Next time, say so instead of giving William and Sara the screaming meemies.”

“Sorry. My point was it could be anybody who listened to rap and was dumb enough to blast it when they drove in during the night.”

Darnell followed her where I did not. “It’s the kind of thing a teenager would do.”

“Don’t look at me! I can’t drive! But Layla can. I don’t care if she is only fourteen.”

“Or Robby.”

Darnell wasn’t completely on board yet. “But where would those two get a bunch of monkeys?”

“Bet Merle knows,” I said. “Too bad nobody can find him.” As I said those words, a sinking feeling took over my gut. I hated to give my husband away, but if our volunteer who worked at the Marine had now gone missing, Lance was in more danger than he thought. Plus, if he was looking
behind
the truck, he was searching the wrong gap anyway. “Now would be a good time to ask Mr. Gibson what exactly arrives in his Monday delivery truck. I don’t think it’s necessarily flour and pizza sauce.”

ATTN: ADVICE

Dear Nora:

You’re a seamstress! Make those kids some fun togs. That’s what I say.

Well Dressed in Muscogen

“Why didn’t you tell me where Lance was in the first place?” Darnell jabbed buttons on his phone while I sped home. He had dispatched Drew to the Marine as soon as I admitted my husband was holding his own personal stakeout. Now he was trying to dial Trudy.

“Because I hadn’t figured the thing about Merle or realized what was in the truck.”

“What makes you so sure . . . hang on . . . Trudy! Why didn’t you answer the first three times? Oh . . .”

“It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

He waved me off. “She what? Noel, your grandmother got flummoxed and told T-Bow Orrice everything.”

“What did you expect?” And I doubted she’d gotten flustered in the least. Franny Cox told the truth, and she did it bluntly. “What did he say about the picture?”

I heard Trudy’s answer through Darnell’s phone. “He said, ‘I never should have trusted that crook.’ ”

“And which one of them had she shown him at that point?” Darnell went on.

“Both. He thought they were the same guy. That’s what threw her off so badly. He didn’t explain what he never should have trusted the ‘crook’ about, though. He wasn’t handing out news bulletins, and I’m not sure he really thinks she came alone. But Darnell . . . Noel, can you hear me?” I could, but Darnell put the call on his speaker anyway. “He told her to ‘get those babies out of sight.’We need you out of your parents’ house by tonight, no matter
what
your mother says.” I tended to agree.

“Sorry, Tasha.” I turned up the video playing on the overhead DVD player to drown out our conversation. Though I was trying to keep the twins from overhearing, she took two inhaler puffs, and I thought she didn’t need to hear this either.

Darnell flipped off the speaker. “Are you coming back now, Trudy? Good. I’ll see you in an hour.” After he hung up, Darnell explained.

“Besides the badge he stole at your fundraiser, which he used to access Orrice, Dalton had already hacked some passwords. I told you how he sent emails to our boss that made it look like Liam was changing his mind about what to think of our investigation.

“
Charles
was the one who was so adamant Trudy and I needed to stay here. We think he felt sure the feds would have
someone
involved, and he preferred for it to be people he’d already made. Trudy wanted you to invite Liam to your gala so he could see how large of a territory we really had to search.”

“They
were
there in their official capacity.”

“Yes. He wanted us recalled. He has influence, and we wanted to show him we were still needed here. That woman showing up with the capuchin convinced him for a little while, but he was on our boss again after about a month. And then he wasn’t. And then he was. It was the waffling all over again.”

“Ironic the crazy capuchin lady would cause you guys to think something was up.”

“Seemed pretty obvious to us.”

“Darnell, we get people like her all the time. They don’t usually show up in the middle of fundraisers, but they all think they’re donating something valuable to us and want legal acknowledgment. And they run the gamut from naive parents with heartbroken kids to . . . well, her. You’ve seen them.”

“Noel, she was a work of art. She used the monkey as a distraction to steal Liam’s wallet and badge.”

“How could she have known he’d be there?”

“Like I said, hacked computer passwords. But you didn’t hear me say that. Those were more damaging by far than the badge was to us. He could never have used the badge to enter one of our offices.”

“Ouch.”

“Not long after, Trudy started seeing Liam around town, but he walked away every time she tried to approach him. She was suspicious there was something he didn’t want us to find in the city. We figured that was why he suddenly wanted us here half the time. When Natasha identified the man in the picture as Charles Dalton, we thought we had it. We thought, just like Orrice did, that Dalton
was
Metcalfe, which would have meant serious high-level corruption. But when Trudy took the picture to our boss, our boss took the pictures straight to Liam, because
she
saw the differences quickly enough. She interacts with Liam more regularly and wasn’t as easily taken in. It’s a good imitation, but not perfect. The two of them figured out Dalton’s deception and how long it’s been going on.”

“Okay, I’m following . . .”

“I want to come back to you and Lance. Why do you think the Marine’s supply truck is what’s being used to smuggle animals? And what does your husband think he’s doing?”

“I have no
idea
what my husband is thinking. And I think the Marine has become a monkey-house because my sanctuary has too many macaques.”

“I’m not seeing the connection.”

I thumped the steering wheel, and the horn blatted. “You weren’t
there
the first day we brought William with us. He recognized those guys, and he didn’t like them. He wasn’t upset about the chimp enclosure. He was completely fascinated by the spiders. It was the rhesus macaques bugging him. He’d seen
all
of those things at the zoo before, and there was no reason for him to be especially upset by this one species. He
saw
something upsetting about the macaques. We thought it had to do with the monkeys themselves and didn’t pay enough attention. He kept saying, ‘no cages.’ I think he saw them in cages in that delivery truck. I think he was afraid of what we would do to them, and by extension, him, since the
last
time he saw rhesus macaques, he wound up locked in somebody’s garage.”

“But maybe it’s because the macaques looked so human.”

“Come off it. Rhesus macaques look like little old men. Capuchins and chimps have more humanesque features. He
saw
something at the pizza parlor, and somebody is either afraid he’s going to tell us or thinks he already has.”

Darnell didn’t argue with me further for the rest of the drive home, though he clearly remained unpersuaded. I could see why Lance had chosen a solitary stakeout. Darnell’s skepticism was wholly misplaced. My husband was going to be furious with me. But I had already decided I preferred him alive and angry. Darnell, and probably Trudy, wanted to waste too much time being sure when the truth was warbling around in my macaque enclosure risking the little animals’ sanitary conditions and all of our lives. Once I saw all those monkeys, I knew we had reached the point of needing Stan’s help, and we’d gotten there even sooner than I’d anticipated. We needed a new enclosure. Maybe two.

Firth (
firth? Were my ordinals devolving into lemon-nanners?
), we needed to re-catalog
all
our monkeys. Was it only rhesus macaques? What if we had extras everywhere? What if
all
our head counts were off? Seconth (
yes, lemon-nanners and cheese-lights
) we needed to stop the inflow before things got worse.

Nana went to have what she called a lie-down as soon as she and Trudy arrived. Since she hardly ever napped at Mama’s house, I knew this morning had taken a toll on her. “Noel, come help me get settled,” she ordered.

I followed. It saved me Trudy and Darnell’s demands and Lance’s towering silence. Drew had cleared him out before going inside to confront the Gibsons, and we hadn’t heard from Drew since.

“You were right,” I hissed at my husband in passing. “And you couldn’t have done anything else but get hurt by staying back there.” We didn’t have confirmation, and it was always possible this particular truck had held no monkeys. But I was sure. The monkeys were coming through the Marine.

As soon as I returned to the kitchen, Natasha called, “Here she is. Sit down, Noel. Close your eyes.”

“What . . . ?”

“Sit.” Once I was arranged, she went on. “I now present to you their majesties Sara and William, crown princess and prince of the Rue-Lakeland household.” When I didn’t do anything, she added, “Uh, you can open your eyes now.”

Sara’s princess gown was finished. It was elegant and pink, with drapes of fabric fitting for any royalty, but a practical hemline ending above its owner’s ankles. “Nobody has
ever
made me a dress before for my own,” she proclaimed. I doubted most kids her age had custom dresses. But it clearly meant more to this one than the other children my mama had sewn for in the past. Margie and I took her for granted growing up, yearning for department store clothes so we could be more like our friends. My nieces had lost their love of her creations several years ago. And my nephew never did have much interest to begin with.

“It comes with the territory of having a seamstress for a grandmother,” I told Sara, thinking suddenly of the stream of similar dresses my mother had produced from this exact pattern. All three of my nieces had princess outfits, and I wasn’t sure, but I thought it resembled the one Marguerite and I used to fight over as children. I wondered if it was too late to ask Mama to sew my clothes again.

Far more amusing was William. Mama had retrieved and washed the suit with powder blue lapels Will had worn all weekend. She had already altered it for my son, and the fit was perfect. It was the way he wore it, rocking even as he strutted, flapping his arms and spinning as he moved, that made him so delightfully funny. The suit and dress clashed majestically, and I had to hold back laughter. The twins carried themselves tall, both beaming lopsided joy. “Your highnesses,” I told them, “you look wonderful.”

They paraded out. Lance followed them, still pointedly ignoring me. He returned quickly enough when Trudy sat down and started talking, though. “You have to understand, T-Bow Orrice isn’t your average gang-banger,” she began. “He’s an empire-builder. He’s probably got thirteen kids, and he’s intensely protective of them, even though, except for his oldest son and Layla, he pretends they don’t exist. He’d rather not claim Layla, but he had custody of her for too long to deny it. His son is running his empire right now, not that anybody can prove it, and Layla’s running wild. He’d go to great lengths to ensure their safety,
if
he thought it would work.

“I have it on good authority Layla’s life has been threatened more than once in the last several weeks. I think Orrice believes he has been working with Liam Metcalf to ensure her protection. In all reality . . . I already told you what I think Dalton intends.” She shot a glance toward the hall, where Tasha had the twins modeling on an imaginary catwalk. He was probably the person pulling Gary’s strings last June. I just wish Orrice didn’t know so much. Assuming Dalton
is
alive, I’d like the man to live long enough for me to arrest him.”

Maybe Nana
had
been flummoxed. She certainly sounded worn-out upstairs, and like she didn’t want the man to know any more than she had to reveal. “Don’t get mad at somebody whose last act of subterfuge was pretending to be married to Mama’s daddy to keep from getting ostracized in the 1950s. She can’t lie smoothly.”

“Point taken. And Dalton surely would love to find that journal. Natasha has said before that he was one of the group’s distributors. We knew his name, but we had no formal evidence connecting him to the group. Since he has not been arrested, he must know we don’t have all the evidence yet. He may think Tasha knows but has kept the journal from us to use for herself.”

“I would never!” Natasha called from the hall.

“I didn’t say
we
think it,” Trudy assured her. “We need to go over all the places Gary spent time in this county again.”

Not long after, Drew arrived. If Lance wasn’t speaking to me at this point, he was at least standing close to me again. “You will not be surprised to learn,” Drew said, “the Gibsons didn’t invite me in back or volunteer to hand over the monkeys you think they’re harboring.”

Lance shot me a look.
See?
I returned his glower with my best Intractable Professor Rue face.

Drew sat down, and Trudy brought him up to date. “Now what?” Drew asked, when she had finished. “Anybody got a magic lamp or psychic to show us to that journal?”

“Can I ask a stupid question?” Natasha returned from playing with the twins. “Relax, the front, parlor, and patio doors are locked,” she said as Lance and I turned her way. “William can’t get out except through
this
door.”

Of course he could. But the kitchen door was open, I could see him parading, and quite honestly, this conversation needed Natasha more than me. I moved to a position where I could monitor the twins and smiled, hoping my expression was light and relieved, not heavy with worry. “Thanks, hon. Ask away.”

“You guys have searched the old records room with the film equipment, right?”

“The what?” said Lance.

“The old records room at the sanctuary.”

“We’ve been through our office a dozen times.” Lance caught my hand on the way by and held it, so that, although I could still keep an eye on the twins, I couldn’t leave the kitchen.