The Case of the Red-Handed Rhesus (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) (43 page)

In spite of the fact that Gert and Stan had been sprung from rehab, they simply weren’t ready to have Natasha home yet. Her grandparents tired quickly, and Gert especially still needed a slow, quiet pace of life. Tasha tried to pretend it was okay she had to come home to our place, not to her own home, every day, but except for daily visits with Chuck, she had been dejected ever since we escaped Charles and Ivy.

“All that, and the journal was in his apartment the whole time, if I’d remembered it,” she moaned.

“They found
plenty
of other things to wrap up their investigation in that basement,” I reminded her. “And if not for
that
, you’d never have remembered him asking Merle to cut a hidey hole in his apartment wall.”

“Yeah. I guess that’s what matters. They got it in the end.” The apartment had long since been rented again, and nobody would have thought to search it so thoroughly again. And the journal was every bit the goldmine authorities had hoped for. Among other things, it contained the first solid leads on the other children in the organization. Natasha should have felt only pride.

Instead, her hysterical nightmares had returned, and it was hard for her to even talk to her therapist about the flashbacks that were surfacing. If Ivy Dearborn and her friend had not been safely under lock and key, they might have been in serious danger from Lance’s and my fury at the progress they had unraveled.

Perhaps the red-suited gentleman walking up to the front door might turn her around. “Tasha, Tasha! Santa camed here for you!” Sara wasn’t quiet in the least as she bounded past me down the hall. “He camed! He did! He’s here right now!”

“All the way from the Northpoleland!” The dog chased Will, barking at his heels.

“Lance, honey, hurry up. I’m going to pull the cars out. We’ve got a couple of wheelchairs to get inside through the kitchen.”

Later, I told Stan, “We were going to bring her to you.”

“I know, but then she’d have missed out on your family’s celebration this afternoon, and she’s been looking forward to that, too. This way, she won’t have to choose, and we got to watch them all open their stockings. We forgot we were old and infirm for a morning,
and
I finally found someone capable of signing my cast.” I wasn’t sure whether he actually wanted that last or if he was being polite because Sara hadn’t offered him a choice in the matter. “Noel, she needs to be around you kids a while longer. It’s been good for her. Gert and I won’t give her up forever, but as much as she’s impatient for it, she needs to come home slowly as much as we need her to.”

We pretended not to notice Gert had dozed in her wheelchair for a good portion of the morning. She was improving daily as the effects of Ivy’s poison wore off, but she had several doctors who would have preferred she return to the nursing home for care. They only consented to Stan’s insistence she go home because he could practically re-create a medical ward in her bedroom.

They were lucky. The nursing home was a huge facility, and Stan and Gert had been in different wings. Trying to be inconspicuous, Ivy had no justification to visit Stan’s room, even if she was Gert’s favorite nurse. As long as Stan was alive, Gert was potentially valuable to use against him. If she had managed to kill Stan, Ivy surely would have done the same to his wife. She still did plenty of damage.

The morning had been suspiciously devoid of Stan forcing gifts upon Lance and me. We were grateful. But our radar was turned down by the time we left the twins with Mama and Daddy to go shut down at the center for the evening, Jen having let the other volunteers in that morning. We met a whistling Rick in the parking lot of the new enclosure and found surveyors’ stakes in the space adjoining Chuck’s outdoor home.

“What’s that?” I asked him. “What are you doing here on Christmas?” I spun in time to catch a glimpse of Natasha fleeing toward Chuck’s enclosure, doubtless to text her grandfather the picture she’d just taken. She was giggling, the first happy sounds I’d heard from her in weeks.

Rick ignored the second question to concentrate on the first. “Come spring,” he said, “it’s going to be your rhesus macaque house.”

“It’s enormous.”

“I hear you’ve got the state involved to hold onto those extras for you. Nobody else is liable to want them, right? He said you’ve got ideas about your mall, too. Let me know so we can start working with the architect to get some plans together.” Rick did not have to say who
he
was. We would be writing a
lot
of thank-yous to Stan Oeschle.

“When can you fill in that basement?” Lance wanted to know.

“It will have to wait until spring, and I guess the authorities will have to clear it. I know you want it gone, but I think we’re all going to have to be patient while they finish sorting all this out.”

There wasn’t much left to sort. We had all guessed a little bit of the puzzle. Ivy and Charles hadn’t known precisely where Gary recorded when he filmed with the animals, but they
had
known it was on the sanctuary grounds. And they knew he had a journal, and, having searched for it everywhere else, they narrowed in on here.

They had apprehended Hugh Marsland, thinking he would know where the filming room was because of the police’s thorough search of the area back in June. When he proved useless, they killed him. He had been dead for some time, his head most likely stored in lye before it was placed in the university’s cupboard. Then they started looking for the man they believed built the sanctuary, Merle Evans. They didn’t have to search hard.

Gary had kept his monkey smuggling activities largely separate from his filming. Though, as the journal revealed, he delivered his films disguised as pizza deliveries, he did not tell this to the employees at the Marine who helped him smuggle the animals. Robby and the Marine’s delivery truck driver, Justin, along with Merle, were all in on the macaque smuggling. Merle was the one who had shown Gary the “old records room,” which he had built to brew drugs years before when he had been forced to take down the beginnings of the original sanctuary. Now that he knew it was a floodplain, he also knew nobody else would want to build there, making it ideal to hide his own activities. But Merle was, it seemed, as bad at drug manufacture and distribution as everything else, and he hadn’t used it for years before he introduced Gary to it.

After that, Merle had only ever known it as a holding space for the rhesus macaques they were moving in and out. Gary never explained the other equipment stored there, and nobody ever asked. Because Gary and Merle took care of the rhesus macaque area at the sanctuary, they were able to juggle the headcount sheets to look right as animals flowed into the center, arriving once a month on the pizza truck’s weekly delivery.

It was difficult to say, but at a best guess, the monkeys had started piling up because the chain broke at some point after Gary died. Not immediately, because Justin, who was all too willing to talk to possibly avoid jail, said he was still getting paid through July. But when the money dried up, Merle didn’t stop accepting monkeys. He kept storing them in that dank basement, siphoning off our food to care for them, since there were more than he could sneak into an enclosure.

Merle, his driver, and his sixteen-year-old protégé were left with an increasing number of rhesus macaques to hide in our facility. Justin didn’t know who brought the monkeys. He was in charge of collecting them from a barn, where he led us to thirty more of the little animals caged. He claimed he and Robby had fed them until the Friday when Robby was caught, but I doubted this.

Robby, when he finally broke, insisted that when Merle was about ready to give in and start bringing the animals in again, even if he couldn’t once more move them back out, Chuck started opening the enclosures and Lance took over the head count.

Merle planned a return to Michigan to attempt to set the old distribution system back up. Trudy said she thought it was more likely Merle was getting ready to skip town. When Lance finally gave the care of the rhesus macaque area back, Merle immediately began moving animals in. It was on one such journey that Ivy and Charles accosted him, tipped off by Justin.

Justin said he was accosted at the Marine several times by Charles and Ivy, who scared him. He was increasingly out of pocket to Merle and, like Trudy, he felt the man was about to skip town. Finally, he claimed to Charles that he and Robby didn’t know where the records room was located but that Merle might. Thinking Charles was another disaffected member of the smuggling ring with a plan to get the money from Merle, he told Charles when to find Merle alone at the sanctuary.

The day William ran up the delivery truck ramp was also a monkey delivery day, and Charles, having already tried Robby and Merle for information, had been harassing Justin on the opposite side of the truck when the child appeared. Besides seeing rhesus macaques in cages inside the truck, William probably also saw the two men talking nearby. Ironically, it was Will’s appearance that delayed Charles’s discovery of the monkey smuggling, since he left quickly once he thought the child had seen him.

According to Robby, Merle dispatched him to capture Will, and Justin backed Merle’s authority. Neither he nor Merle recognized the significance of the conversation Justin had been holding at the same time. None of them had met Charles until then, and it wasn’t until Charles killed Merle that Justin realized Charles had only learned about the monkeys at all by talking to the three of them.

Merle simply wanted to intimidate the child into silence about the monkeys. But when Robby brought William home, it quickly became clear that he couldn’t explain what he had seen. Unsure what to do with him until Merle’s shift was over, he locked Will in his garage. That was where Layla found and accidentally freed him. Panicked, and completely believing Robby’s story, Layla got Ivy involved. Layla revealed little, but it was clear from what she
did
say that Ivy had learned how attached Natasha was to the twins from the whole affair and filed it away for future use.

After they killed Merle, Charles and Ivy decided Natasha was the only one left who could tell them about the records room. They sent Robby and Justin one of Merle’s fingers and an anonymous threat to their own lives if they didn’t catch the little boy for them. Justin convinced Robby to use Layla to steal Will. Ivy meant to use him to get Natasha.

Of course, Charles and Ivy denied all of this and all responsibility for Hugh Marsland’s death. Authorities believed the deputies nearly caught Merle transferring monkeys into the enclosures. He instead disabled them and hid their cruiser out of sight well before Ivy and Charles arrived. When
they
found him, perhaps Merle refused to tell them what they wanted to know even when threatened. Perhaps he didn’t have time to answer them. Ivy seemed the impulsive type.

Nobody was admitting what happened after, but it was clear Merle never left the sanctuary. His head, hands, and feet remained missing. But the ring Drew recovered from the spider monkeys had belonged to him, and he did indeed have A-negative blood.

“None of that goes to tell us who gave you that knot on the head,” said Mama. She and I were lunching with Bryan and Travis, whose duties had lightened considerably. Mama and Bryan were working up one-liner responses for “What’s Next, Nora?” I was mostly along for the ride, having developed a new appreciation for my mother, now that I had children myself.

Travis rolled his eyes. He disliked talking about this. “Knots,” he said. “And it was Winnie. Can’t prove it. I barely remember anything except waking up in the dark a couple of times. The closest they have to a picture of my assailant is when he roars up and dumps me in Lance and Noel’s car. He was driving a common vehicle without license plates, and it’s impossible to say who it is.

“Have I ever told you how grateful I am you forgot to lock your van, Noel? Lenore, you can see in the video that I was already struggling by the time he threw me in there. God only knows what he’d have done if I’d had time to really come around again.”

“You think he did that over a cooler of fish?” Mama demanded.

“See, we know he’d been intimidated.” Dr. Prescott had received a finger, just like Robby and Justin. Like them, he had thrown it away in a field, where it was never found. “I think it sent him off the deep end. By the time that detective’s head fell out of the cupboard, he’d already conked me out. But when he saw it, I think he figured out poor old Merle was dead.”

Dr. Prescott admitted all of these things except taking Travis. He even said he located the original plans for the sanctuary in Merle’s old records and delivered them to an empty field. Unless those plans were different from the ones Rick had, the records room wasn’t on them, which was why Charles and Ivy had begun to focus so heavily on Natasha.

“Well, I’m glad he’s leaving you alone now,” said Mama. “Letting you have lunch once in a while.”

I snorted. “He’s retiring in May. The fish cooler incident was egregious enough that tenure was not enough protection. Ironic that the thing that
really
tanked my interview was the one intended to intimidate
him.
”

“You’re such a pessimist,” said Travis.

T-Bow Orrice seemed to be biding his time. I thought Robby ought to watch his back whether he got out of jail or, as was far more likely, was prosecuted more deeply into the system. William was safe from Robby. But Robby wasn’t safe at all from William’s biological father, especially if Layla ever turned on him.

That Will
was
safe now, we felt certain. Or anyway, as safe as he could be with a murderer for a parent. I wasn’t sure how Lance and I could move out from under that shadow, but the threat felt more distant, more like it would be to us, not our child if it came at all. T-Bow Orrice knew too much about us, but we couldn’t live our lives in hiding from him, and we seemed, at the moment at least, to be out of his scope of interest.

Jen dragged in her husband and his sister to replace Trudy and Darnell in our volunteer roster. The husband was good-humored about having been wrangled, though it was clear his passions didn’t lie in monkey dung and lunch buckets. His sister, on the other hand, already seemed as passionate as Jen herself. As for Trudy and Darnell, they left us for Columbus nearly immediately after they had collected all the information they could from Gary’s storehouse. Liam Metcalf had always wanted them back in town, and he convinced their boss to recall them quickly.