The Hot Zone (17 page)

On Wednesday, October 4, 1989, Hazleton Research Products accepted a shipment of a hundred wild monkeys from the Philippines. The shipment originated at Ferlite Farms, a monkey wholesale facility located not far from the city of Manila. The monkeys themselves came from coastal rain forests on the island of Mindanao. The monkeys had been shipped by boat to Ferlite Farms, where they were jammed together in large cages known as gang cages, in which the male monkeys often fought and bloodied and killed one another. The monkeys were then put into wooden crates and flown to Amsterdam on a specially fitted cargo airplane, and from Amsterdam they were flown to New York City. They arrived at
JFK
International Airport and were driven by truck down the eastern seaboard of the United States to the Reston monkey house.

The monkeys were crab-eating monkeys, a species that lives along rivers and in mangrove swamps in Southeast Asia. Crab eaters are used as laboratory animals because they are common, cheap, and easily obtained. They have long, arching, whiplike tails, whitish fur on the chest, and cream-colored fur on the back. The crab eater
is a type of macaque (pronounced ma
-KACK)
. It is sometimes called a long-tailed macaque. The monkey has a protrusive, doglike snout with flaring nostrils and exceedingly sharp canine teeth, able to rip flesh as easily as a honed knife. The skin is pinkish gray, close to the color of a white person. The hand looks quite human, with a thumb and delicate fingers with fingernails. The females have two breasts on the upper chest that look startlingly human, with pale nipples.

Crab eaters do not like humans. They have a competitive relationship with people who live in the rain forest. They like vegetables, especially eggplants, and they like to raid farmers’ crops. Crab-eating monkeys travel in a troop, making tumbling jumps through the trees, screaming,
“Kra! Kra!”
They know perfectly well that after they have pulled off an eggplant raid on a farmer’s field they are likely to have a visit from the farmer, who will come around looking for them with a shotgun, and so they have to be ready to move out and head deep into the forest at a moment’s notice. The sight of a gun will set off their alarm cries:
“Kra! Kra! Kra!”
In some parts of the world, these monkeys are called
kras
, because of the sound they make, and many people who live in Asian rain forests consider them to be obnoxious pests. At the close of day, when night comes, the troop goes to sleep in a dead, leafless tree. This is the troop’s home tree. The monkeys prefer to sleep in a dead tree so that they can see in all directions, keeping watch for humans and other
evil predators. The monkey tree usually hangs out over a river, so that they can relieve themselves from the branches without littering the ground.

At sunrise, the monkeys stir and wake up, and you hear their cries as they greet the sun. The mothers gather their children and herd them along the branches, and the troop moves out, leaping through trees, searching for fruit. They like to eat all kinds of things. In addition to vegetables and fruits, they eat insects, grass, roots, and small pieces of clay, which they chew and swallow, perhaps to get salt and minerals. They lust after crabs. When the urge for crabs comes upon them, the troop will head for a mangrove swamp to have a feeding bout. They descend from the trees and take up positions in the water beside crab holes. A crab comes out of its hole, and the monkey snatches it out of the water. The monkey has a way to deal with the crab’s claws. He grabs the crab from behind as it emerges from its hole and rips off the claws and throws them away and then devours the rest of the crab. Sometimes a monkey isn’t quick enough with the claws, and the crab latches onto the monkey’s fingers, and the monkey lets out a shriek and shakes its hand, trying to get the crab off, and jumps around in the water. You can always tell when crab eaters are having a feeding bout on crabs because you hear an occasional string of shrieks coming out of the swamp as a result of difficulty with a crab.

The troop has a strict hierarchy. It is led by a dominant male, the largest, most aggressive monkey.
He maintains control over the troop by staring. He stares down subordinates if they challenge him. If a human stares at a dominant male monkey in a cage, the monkey will rush to the front of the cage, staring back, and will become exceedingly angry, slamming against the bars, trying to attack the person. He will want to kill the human who stared at him: he can’t afford to show fear when his authority is challenged by another evil primate. If two dominant male monkeys are placed in the same cage, only one monkey will leave the cage alive.

The crab-eating monkeys at the Reston monkey house were placed each in its own cage, under artificial lights, and were fed monkey biscuits and fruit. There were twelve monkey rooms in the monkey house, and they were designated by the letters A through L. Two of the monkeys that arrived on October 4 were dead in their crates. That was not unusual, since monkeys die during shipments. But in the next three weeks, an unusual number of monkeys began to die at the Reston monkey house.

On October 4, the same day the shipment of monkeys reached the Reston monkey house, something happened that would change Colonel Jerry Jaax’s life forever. Jerry had a brother named John, who lived in Kansas City with his wife and two small children. John Jaax was a prominent businessman and a banker, and he was a partner in a manufacturing
company that made plastic for credit cards. He was a couple of years younger than Jerry, and the two men were as close as brothers can be. They had grown up together on a farm in Kansas and had both gone to college at Kansas State. They looked very much alike: tall, with prematurely gray hair, a beak nose, sharp eyes, a calm manner; and their voices sounded alike. The only difference in appearance between them was that John wore a mustache and Jerry did not.

John Jaax and his wife planned to attend a parent-teachers’ meeting on the evening of October 4 at their children’s school. Near the end of the day, John telephoned his wife from his office at the manufacturing plant to tell her that he would be working late. She happened to be out of the house when he called, so he left a message on the answering machine, explaining that he would go directly from the office to the meeting, and he would see her there. When he did not show up, she became worried. She drove over to the factory.

The place was deserted, the machines silent. She walked the length of the factory floor to a staircase. John’s office overlooked the factory floor from a balcony at the top of the staircase. She climbed the stairs. The door to his office was standing open a crack, and she went inside. John had been shot many times, and there was blood all over the room. It was a violent killing.

The police officer who took the case at Kansas City Homicide was named Reed Buente. He had known John personally and had admired him, having
worked for him as a security guard at the Bank of Kansas City when John was president of the bank. Officer Buente was determined to solve the case and bring the killer or killers to trial. But as time went by and no breaks came along, the investigator became discouraged. John Jaax had been having difficulties with his partner in the plastic business, a man named John Weaver, and Kansas City Homicide looked at the partner as a suspect. (When I called Officer Buente recently, he confirmed this. Weaver has since died of a heart attack, and the case remains open, since unsolved murder cases are never closed.) There were few physical clues, and Weaver, as it turned out, had an alibi. The investigator ran into more and more difficulties with the case. At one point, he said to Jerry, “You can have someone killed pretty easy. And it’s cheap. You can have someone killed for what you would pay for a desk.”

The murder of John Jaax threw Jerry into a paralysis of grief. Time is supposed to heal all things, but time opened an emotional gangrene in Jerry. Nancy began to think that he was in a clinical depression.

“I feel like my life is over,” he said to her. “It’s just not the same anymore. My life will never be the same. It’s just inconceivable that Johnny could have had an enemy.” At the funeral in Kansas City, Nancy and Jerry’s children, Jaime and Jason, looked into the coffin and said to their father, “Gee, Dad, he looks like you lying there.”

Jerry Jaax called Kansas City Homicide nearly
every day during October and November. The investigator just couldn’t break the case. He began to think about getting a gun and going out to Kansas City to kill John’s business partner. He thought, If I do it, I’ll be in jail, and what about my children? And what if John’s partner hadn’t been behind the murder? Then I’ll have killed an innocent man.

The colony manager at the Reston monkey house will be called Bill Volt. As he watched his monkeys die, Volt became alarmed. On November 1, a little less than a month after the shipment of monkeys had arrived, he put in a telephone call to Dan Dalgard, telling him that the monkeys that had recently arrived from the Philippines were dying in unusually large numbers. He had counted twenty-nine deaths out of a shipment of a hundred monkeys. That is, nearly a third of the monkeys had died. At the same time, a problem had developed with the building’s heating and air-handling system. The thermostat had failed, and the heat would not go off. The heaters dumped heat at full blast into the building, and the air-conditioning system would not kick in. It had become awfully hot inside the building. Volt wondered if the heat might be putting stress on the monkeys. He had noticed that most of the deaths had taken place in
one room, Room F, which was located on a long hallway at the back of the building.

Dalgard agreed to drive over to the monkey house and have a look, but he became busy with other things and did not get there until the following week. When he arrived, Bill Volt took him to Room F, the focus of the deaths, so that Dalgard could inspect the monkeys. They put on white coats and surgical masks, and the two men walked down a long cinder-block corridor lined on both sides with steel doors leading to monkey rooms. The corridor was very warm, and they began to sweat. Through windows in the doors, they could see hundreds of monkey eyes looking at them as they passed. The monkeys were exquisitely sensitive to the presence of humans.

Room F contained only crab-eating monkeys from the October shipment from Ferlite Farms in the Philippines. Each monkey sat in its own cage. The monkeys were subdued. A few weeks ago, they had been swinging in the trees, and they didn’t like what had happened to them. Dalgard went from cage to cage, glancing at the animals. He could tell a lot about a monkey from the look in its eyes. He could also read its body language. He searched for animals that seemed passive or in pain.

Dalgard’s staring into their eyes drove them berserk. When he passed a dominant male and looked carefully at it, it rushed him, wanting to take him out. He found a monkey whose eyes had a dull appearance, not shiny and bright but glazed and somewhat inactive. The eyelids were down,
slightly squinted. Normally the lids would be retracted so that you could see the entire iris. A healthy monkey’s eyes would be like two bright circles in the monkey’s face. This animal’s eyelids had closed down slightly, and they drooped, so that the iris had become a squinting oval. That was a sign of illness in the monkey.

He put on leather gauntlet gloves, opened the door of the cage, reached inside, and pinned the monkey down. He slipped one hand out of a glove and quickly felt the monkey’s stomach. Yes—the animal felt warm to the touch. So it had a fever. And it had a runny nose. He let go of the monkey and shut the door. He didn’t think that the animal was suffering from pneumonia or a cold. Perhaps the animal was affected by heat stress. It was very warm in this room. He advised Bill Volt to put some pressure on the landlord to get the heating system fixed. He found a second animal that also had droopy eyelids, with that certain squint in the eyes. This one also felt hot to the touch, feverish. So there were two sick monkeys in Room F.

Both monkeys died during the night. Bill Volt found them in the morning, hunched up in their cages, staring with glassy, half-open eyes. This greatly concerned Volt, and he decided to dissect the animals, to try to see what had killed them. He carried the two deceased monkeys into an examination room down the hallway and shut the door after him, out of sight of the other monkeys. (You
can’t cut up a dead monkey in front of other monkeys—it will cause a riot.) He opened the monkeys with a scalpel and began his inspection. He did not like what he saw, and did not understand it, so he called Dalgard on the telephone and said, “I wonder if you could come over here and have a look at these monkeys.”

Dalgard drove over to the monkey house immediately. His hands, which were so confident and skillful at taking apart clocks, probed the monkeys. What he saw inside the animals puzzled him. They appeared to have died of heat stress, brought on, he suspected, by the problems with the heating system in the building—but their spleens were weirdly enlarged. Heat stress wouldn’t enlarge the spleen, would it? He noticed something else that gave him pause. Both animals had small amounts of blood in their intestines. What could do that?

Later that same day, another large shipment of crab-eating monkeys arrived from Ferlite Farms. Bill Volt put the new monkeys in Room H, two doors down the hall from Room F.

Dan Dalgard became very worried about the monkeys in Room F. He wondered if there was some kind of infectious agent going around the room. The blood in the gut looked like the effects of a monkey virus called simian hemorrhagic fever, or
SHF
. This virus is deadly to monkeys, although it is harmless to people. (It can’t live in humans.) Simian fever can spread rapidly through a monkey colony and will generally wipe it out.

It was now Friday, November 10. Dalgard planned to spend the weekend fixing his clocks in the family room of his house. But that Saturday morning at home, as he laid out his tools and the pieces of an antique clock that needed fixing, he could not stop thinking about the monkeys. He was worried about them. Finally he told his wife that he had to go out on company business, and he put on his coat and drove over to the monkey house and parked in front of the building and went in through the front door. It was a glass door, and as he opened it, he felt the unnatural heat in the building wash over him, and he heard the familiar screeches of monkeys. He went into Room F.
“Kra! Kra!”
the monkeys cried at him in alarm. There he found three more dead monkeys. They were curled up in their cages, their eyes open, expressionless. This was not good. He carried the dead monkeys into the examination room and slit the animals open, and looked inside.