The Marriage at the Rue Morgue (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) (14 page)

Detective Carmichael cocked an eyebrow, and I thought Trudy would get a lecture of some kind. But he pulled off his hat and flicked it to her in exactly in the style I had imagined. She caught it and threw it back, not to me, but to the detective. That wasn’t what I had in mind, and I was already wondering how long I could maintain this charade or how long I would need to. To my surprise, he spun around and threw it to me from behind his back. I caught it and returned fire. Next he shot it overhand to Trudy. Then across his shoulder to me. Between his legs to Trudy. Seven times we threw his hat around between us, and I don’t think he returned it to us the same way twice. Trudy looked like she could hold her own, but I was hard pressed on my end to keep it from hitting the ground.

Finally, he finished with a flourish and bowed. “Champion disc golfer,” he said to me. “We play every Saturday down in Ironweed Park, and you ought to join back up, Miss Trudy. And bring your friend along. But what does that do toward getting yon deputy his hat back?”

By now, the other officers stationed around the enclosures were watching us, and when the detective bowed, they clapped appreciatively. Smoothly, Trudy said, “Look, it’s getting ready to throw. Now that we’ve shown it what one
does
with these funny flat things, it may flip it over to Deputy Greene.”

In fact, this was about the least likely thing to happen. The only thing I could say for sure was that we’d distracted the little animal from trying to eat the hat, as it had stared at us with a cocked head for most of the performance. It was still perched on its roost, waving the purloined item back and forth on the end of its tail. This evening was proving more interesting than any of the enrichment we could bury with its meals. And then another tail intervened and turned Trudy from liar to prophet.

“See!” Trudy said, as if she could have had any idea the hat would be stolen a second time. “They’re making their own version of the game.”

No. The second monkey came along and swiped the booty.

They couldn’t run away without dropping their prize, thanks to the enclosure’s mesh, and I was half afraid one or the other of them would pull the hat back to grab it with their fingers and direct it straight toward their sharp little teeth. Instead, they kept it up, stealing the hat back and forth with their tails in an apparent imitation of our throwing game.

“OK,” I said. “This isn’t how I imagined it, but they’re very creative little critters.”
No. Just very possessive ones.
“Officer Greene, there’s a broom handle over there.” We actually used it sometimes to hide objects under the hay at feeding time. “You need to poke it up and grab your hat exactly like they’re doing with their tails.”

To my complete surprise, it worked like a charm.

“Bravo,” Detective Carmichael said, as Deputy Greene dusted off his cap and replaced it on his head. “Now stand
right there.
” The detective indicated a spot for the young deputy to place his feet, then waved off the rest of our police audience. “If that’s everything, let’s go back up that hill and see what your husband has found.”

I wanted to say,
He’s not my husband yet,
but I simply lacked the energy to argue. Then, while we were walking up the hill, the senior detective caught up to us, and it was some time before we got back to Lance and the computer. Until the unfamiliar human voice temporarily out-shrieked the rackety primates, I had hoped our dart guns could magically arrive from all parts of the state before Carmichael’s possibly uncooperative supervisor returned from the woods. But a shout—“Wait for me, Andrew! Tell me more about these dart guns!”—quenched my hope.

Detective Carmichael introduced us. “Noel Rue, this is Detective Hugh Marsland.” I nodded, then turned and walked toward the barn to buy myself thinking time. Detective Carmichael wanted to help us. Trudy had been buttering him up the whole time he was in the barn, and she had used coffee and her own time working as a dispatcher to build a marvelous rapport. He thought if the darts came in before his boss got back, he could maybe pass them off as the best option. Now that strategy was moot.

Lance came out when we entered the barn, as soon as he heard us talking. Then we spent the better part of forty-five minutes arguing back and forth about the merits of dart guns. Detective Carmichael proved to be a strong advocate in spite of his junior status. Even though I got the sense that he was uncomfortable with it, he argued successfully to get the zookeepers admitted to the premises, at least long enough to give
us
the dart guns.

When Christian Baker from the Ohio Zoo arrived, he prevailed upon Marsland to accept use of the nonlethal weapons. Christian was a burly man, tall with a massive chest, a graying beard, and a vaguely Scottish accent. “Look,” he told the senior detective, “it was a public-relations nightmare when those poor critters had to be put down up north, wasn’t it?” Christian managed to sound far more sympathetic than I would have done.

His voice even remained gentle when correcting Marsland, who was referring to the orangutan as an “orang.” “That’s offensive,” Christian said. “ ‘Orang’ means person. ‘Orangutan’ means ‘person of the forest.’ You don’t want to be calling the orangutan the same thing as one of us.” He said it like a kindly chiding schoolteacher. He sounded so disappointed in the ignorant detective who had said it that I thought now was a bad time to tell him I had forgotten that bit of college learning myself. Working in a sanctuary, it was easy to get caught up in the needs of the animals we served.

By the time Christian was through, the destruction of all those wild creatures up north sounded like an unfortunate accident, completely the fault of the fools who had freed them. And I agreed they bore responsibility there. But the laws that allowed a poorly staffed roadside zoo to collect so many wild animals in the first place carried an even greater burden. And the police, who reacted with violence instead of thinking through the situation, held the most immediate and public responsibility for the grim outcome.

At some level, Marsland must have felt the same way, because he eventually allowed Christian to approach pairs of officers and show them how to operate the guns. Christian said he would stay here until this was taken care of. We needed his help badly. We didn’t even try to argue, and since he had our approval, the detectives didn’t argue with his remaining, either. Trudy and Darnell were good. But she was an intern, and he was a volunteer. If Lance and I planned to get married tomorrow, they needed expert guidance in our absence.

Detective Marsland started phoning to confirm that Art had been pronounced dead at the hospital so he could formally make the assault a death investigation. I couldn’t imagine why it mattered.

Trudy was allowed to go off premises to make copies of our controlled drugs cabinet key, and Christian patiently taught the officers how to fill the darts if they ever needed to make one themselves. Now I at least knew the right cocktail for an orangutan. In the wake of their efficiency, Lance and I found ourselves once more sitting in front of his computer, looking at the program that backed up our security footage each night. After all, nobody had actually confiscated it yet.

While we were down tormenting the spiders into relinquishing Deputy Greene’s cap, Lance had manually launched a backup. Now that it was complete, we had the files Art wanted us to look at. But before we could, Detective Carmichael appeared once more in the doorway.

“Why don’t you go home, get some sleep tonight, and get married tomorrow?” he asked.

I didn’t answer him.

Lance demanded, “Could
you
sleep?”

It was nine o’clock; the sun was finally setting. Christian, Trudy, and Darnell had worked out a sleep schedule that would allow them to rest and remain on the premises, and our overnight security had arrived in the form of a lumbering man named Jack and his equally burly partner Sam. Lance and I did not need to be here any longer. Yet the feeling remained that we could not go. The last time we left to go get married, someone died.

Detective Carmichael said, “I’m not the one giving orders. So it’s a suggestion, but now you’ve got me wondering why your friend had to go out at all if these security files back up to your computers every night.”

“My question exactly,” Lance said.

Following their train of thought, I added, “Art may have
said
he was going out to look at the videos, but maybe he was really going out to look at whatever the videos showed.”

“Does Miss Trudy know that?” Detective Carmichael demanded. “Because she and your volunteer were adamant . . .”

“I doubt they know it,” I said. “And if they do, who thinks of such things in a crisis?”

Exhaustion and sadness sat heavily on me as the detective perched on a chair between Lance and me to watch with us and maybe see what we couldn’t see. Maybe he was there because he wanted to keep us from deleting any files we might not have already launched. Or maybe he was simply being nice. Lance asked him, “Why don’t
you
go home? If you’re not the one giving orders, doesn’t that mean you have to get back to the station and fill out reports?”

“It does,” Carmichael said, glancing at Lance in a thin-lipped way. I wrapped my fingers under the chair’s edges and wriggled my toes rhythmically in my shoes.

Then Carmichael’s face relaxed. “The truth is,” he went on, “I’m not personally as ready to let go of this as I am professionally. Muscogen County barely has the resources to solve a domestic violence case these days. But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel a sense of responsibility to my neighbors. And your friend Art had a knack for making people mad.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, anger lifting some of the despondent fog.
How could anybody get
mad
at Art
?

“Ever since those animals up north got killed, he’s been in my office once a week pointing out the same thing could happen right here. He was so sure we would shoot your monkeys if they ever got out. And now one has. And we’re probably going to shoot it. Those dart guns are nice, but I don’t think we’ll see many cops on any force reach for one of them before they go for their service weapons. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel bad about that.”

“This one was never
in
to begin with,” I snapped. “Somebody dumped him off outside our gates in a wooden crate, then scooted.”

“And Art told us to look at the security footage,” Lance added. Then he went on, “I think he saw something on there that made him go out to check the gate. I don’t know why he didn’t take any of the others with him, or why he said he was going out to check the video when he had surely already seen it. But whatever he saw could lead us to his killer.”

“And if it
does,
I’m taking it straight to my boss,” Detective Carmichael snapped. “Someone unfamiliar with the way your center operates could watch these for weeks and not see anything. You know the place, and you’re more likely to recognize something unusual. But you are
not
to interfere with a police investigation.”

“I’m not planning to. Anything we see goes straight to you cops. If that’s why you’re staying, you can feel safe now about
going.
”

The detective sighed, his angry mask eroding further into weariness. “No,” he said, “I’m staying because I feel responsible. We didn’t even give your friend the time of day when he was thinking about the future. None of us did. The captain shunted him off on animal control; animal control waved him over to Detective Marsland; Marsland sent him to me because I’m junior; and I brushed him off entirely. I kept asking him if he was planning to break all his cages open and see what we did. He said, ‘Of course not’ and I tuned him out. Maybe if I’d been listening, he could have called me first when that animal got into your property this morning, and maybe he’d still be alive right now.”

Whatever his reasons, I was grateful for Detective Carmichael’s presence when the footage started to play. Having an audience forced me to hold my pain in check. It was unbelievably difficult to watch Art get batted out of the way at any speed. Without a third party to keep us focused in the present, my emotions would have gotten the best of me again.

Lance had downloaded all of yesterday’s recordings, from the areas surrounding the enclosures, the front gate, and even inside the barn, in addition to the footage from today. But we all agreed it was today’s film we wanted to view, specifically this morning’s adventure with the orangutan.

Our cameras were motion activated, and each new activity generated a new file. We didn’t have to sit through periods of stillness. My heart constricted every time Art wandered into the field. I waited with tension each time Lance started a new file, hoping and dreading.
Will Art be in this one?
I wanted to reach into the screen and pull him out here to sit beside us and tell us what we were looking for.

The ape’s arrival was fairly dramatic. The screen jumped to life with the image of a pickup truck hurtling down the lane. The detective drew in a breath, and I looked over to see him watching with wide eyes. He held his phone up like he was getting ready to dial it. In the back of the pickup, our orangutan was standing half out of his crate. The video didn’t capture sound, so we could see, but not hear as he splintered a board and held it aloft as he clambered out on top. The truck stopped at the gate beside our “please honk horn” sign. Undoubtedly, that was exactly what the driver was doing. Lance and I had heard it a lifetime ago when our worst problem was Alex’s unexpected arrival in town.

The orangutan jumped up on the cab and threw the crate out the side, then leaped out on top of it. The truck stayed around for a few seconds, then reversed out of the frame nearly as fast as it had arrived. We all watched the orangutan rip its crate apart for a little while. Then Art showed up and went into his ape whisperer routine.

“He’s lucky he didn’t get killed right
then,
” Detective Carmichael said.

I bit my lips and tried not to cry.

After that little bit of activity, the tapes revealed nothing unexpected. We captured the retreating truck’s front plate. “I have to call this one in,” Carmichael said, and left the room. After a few minutes, he came back and said, “I ought to get back to the station.” But he didn’t leave. Another hour of viewing showed nothing worthwhile on the other files that could have prompted Art to claim he was checking the tapes. For that matter, Art himself never appeared on camera again, confirming Lance’s point that he hadn’t needed to go out front and check the tapes, and had never intended to do so.