The Marriage at the Rue Morgue (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) (13 page)

But we had other worries, like the police car drawn up across the lane, and the large sheriff’s deputy standing outside the car, barring our entrance.

Lance pulled in, and the deputy was beside the truck before we could even open our doors. “Need to see some ID, folks,” he said. Someone had clearly prepared him for our arrival, because we didn’t get “Move along.” Fumbling for my wallet, I produced the envelope with the marriage license instead, and handed it to Lance so I could root deeper in my purse. The cop whistled and I looked up.

Lance had handed the envelope to the officer, who, naturally enough, had opened it. “Oh for pity’s sake.” I leaned across Lance to pluck back the marriage license and hand the man my driver’s license instead. “Why’d you give him that?” I asked Lance.

“You handed it to me,” Lance protested.

“To
hold
so it wouldn’t get messed up while I dug around in here.”

“Sorry.”

The cop said, “When’s the wedding?” as he studied my driver’s license and, apparently finding my own features similar enough to those of the woman in the picture, returned it.

“Tomorrow,” I muttered.
Not that it’s any of your business. And don’t you dare ask me if the deceased was going to be the best man.
But why would he ask that? Of course he wouldn’t. It was my own mind playing with my soul.

“Good luck,” he said. “Be careful going back there. Drive slowly. Critters run right across that lane.”

As if we didn’t know already. “Thanks.”

We had to get through another roadblock at our gate. “Keep your eye out for that monkey. It’s out there hollering in the trees now. We’re trying to get a mess of dogs in to take care of it.”

“You’re
what
? It’s . . .” Lance began.

“First of all, orangutans aren’t monkeys,” I interrupted him. “And second, you aren’t bringing a bunch of dogs onto this property without . . .” Without what?

“A warrant!” Lance, the lover of crime shows, finished for me.

The deputy shrugged. “Just don’t get killed.”

In the barn, we found a sheriff’s detective camped out in a folding chair, guarding Art’s office. He had interviewed our volunteers, and after they delivered lunch to the enclosures, he had sent them all home. Only Trudy and Darnell remained, at their own insistence because Lance had largely put them in charge and because the police seemed to think our apes and monkeys were getting ready to swarm out of their cages at any moment.

“This one’s over my head, folks,” the detective, Andrew Carmichael, said to Lance’s question about gaining access to Art’s office. “That computer is part of a chain of evidence. At this point, I’m trying to secure the scene.”

“What about dogs? The deputy out front said . . .”

The detective shook his head. “Garret’s terrified of the mosquitoes. Nobody’s said anything about dogs to me.”

I felt some measure of relief, but on the topic of Art’s office, he was polite but firm. We couldn’t get anything out, and the places we could go on our own property were limited. It didn’t help that in addition to all of the day’s sounds and images floating through my mind, the theme from
The Andy Griffith Show
had started whistling around in my head as soon as Carmichael introduced himself. His pale brown police hat evoked the program for me, even though Andrew Carmichael was black. “What about the orangutan?” I asked. Lance added his explanation about primates’ tool use, orangutans’ in particular.

Detective Carmichael said, “There’s a couple of things you aren’t considering. First of all, I know Miss Trudy. Love her to death, but she’s too quick to jump to conclusions from what she hears on our squawk boxes. We don’t
know
or
not know
about a murder weapon until anything we
might
have found has been analyzed and compared with your friend’s skin and clothing.” At least he didn’t call Art “the victim.” At the hospital, Art’s name had almost immediately been subsumed under this new identity as “the victim.” “Your friend” was much gentler.

“And from what little your people have told me, the animal could have killed your friend with its bare hands. Is that right?”

I nodded mutely, flashing back to this morning when the big ape smacked Art so casually across the road. Lance said, “Could have, but . . .”

Detective Carmichael went on. “So what if your friend tried to defend himself with a club? If there
was
a club, what if it had the ape’s blood on it?”

“But he said it tried to save him,” I protested.

“I hear you,” Carmichael told me. “I’m trying to get you to see this through my lens. I know this is hard for you. But I’m not doing my job if I don’t follow up on every single possibility. And right now, my best suspect is a pie-faced redhead who should really turn himself in for questioning.”

The detective’s attempt at humor fell flat. Lance said, “It can’t do that if you shoot it on sight.”

“No,” Carmichael said. “But it also can’t kill one of my officers or one of your people. Safety has to come first.”

Lance started to argue something else, but an idea struck me. I said, “So, ‘shoot’ could have a pretty broad interpretation, right?”

“What do you mean?” Carmichael asked.

I said, “If we could arm your people with
dart
guns, they could neutralize it with one of those. There’s no reason ‘shoot on sight’ has to mean ‘kill on sight,’ right? We’re not advocating letting the thing run wild. It’s in our best interests to see the orangutan contained.”

“Wait a minute.” The detective pulled out his cell phone, talked for a few minutes, then nodded, hanging up. “Maybe,” he said. “But it’s ultimately going to be my supervisor’s call. He’ll be back up to the barn pretty soon for you to ask him yourself.”

I shrugged. I couldn’t control that, much as I wanted to. When the animals were set loose from the private zoo in Michigan (and many of them wandered into Ohio), police had slaughtered them. Nearly fifty animals murdered because of a shoot-on-sight attitude. Lives lost because the police didn’t know how to contain the animals appropriately. About time they got an education.

Lance said, “Noel, we’ve only got two dart guns.”

“It’s enough to start out with,” I told him. “Damn shame if Art’s orangutan died on our watch.”

Somewhat reluctantly, Detective Carmichael let us into our own office, watching carefully while I looked up home numbers to beg help from the zookeepers I knew at the Ohio Zoo and elsewhere in the state. All four of them were willing to collect and deliver the dart guns in person. The mass execution of exotics saddened them as deeply as it did us. Our friends at the Ohio Zoo were particularly rent by the affair, since they and their staff had been scrambling to lure and contain the animals while the situation unfolded along the state border. But a scant six of the creatures freed into the wild had been rescued. They wanted to help us save the orangutan here. The others were equally passionate, but they were further away, both emotionally and physically. Still, they were coming.

They were coming, and I needed only to wait.

At last, I had done something, and some of my feelings of helplessness faded. Now I could turn my attention to the animals we were already responsible for. Random officers posted in and around the enclosure area had our primates in a high state of excitement, and I could hear the racket inside the whole time I was making my calls. I wanted to get out there as soon as possible to minimize disruptions to their lives.

Lance booted up his computer.

“What are you doing?” I demanded.

“Getting the security videos,” Lance said.

“Excuse me?” That was Detective Carmichael, eavesdropping on the conversation.

“I’m not planning to fool around in anybody’s crime scene,” Lance said. “The videos back up to Art’s computer and to ours. You are welcome to sit down and join us watching.” Lance braced himself in front of the machine, arms crossed like he thought he could actually stop the detective, or like he thought our computer wasn’t now in the officer’s provenance.

Carmichael seemed momentarily nonplussed. Trudy had, after all, and with our permission, given the police full control here. Detective Carmichael was, by his own description, the junior detective of two. The senior detective was still out on the grounds, at the place they had found by following Art’s bloody trail back into the forest. Carmichael was up here to babysit us. He hadn’t chosen the duty, but he was doing his best. Everybody else had been following his instructions pretty much to the letter. Our obstinacy clearly puzzled him.

For my part, while I didn’t want the police disrupting our animals or, God forbid, shooting one, I wanted them here. We were all aware that whoever hurt Art might still be out in the woods. I scolded myself mentally for minimizing the violence. Art hadn’t been hurt. He’d been killed. But I shied away from that knowledge to concentrate on the thing that had set me off on this train of thought. The police might believe he’d been attacked by an orangutan, but we knew he had not. There would no doubt be search warrants and the like to allow the cops full access in the future, and even if not, we
wanted
them here, and we
needed
to cooperate with them.

That was why we had agreed with Trudy’s willingness to give them full run of the place, even more than they would have needed. Even when Art was still alive. Maybe alive. Probably not. As I fished around in my mind to escape the cycle of Art’s death and find a tactful way to tell Lance to back off and let the detective do his job, a human voice rose above the ape and monkey chatter out back. “Hey, give that
back.
”

Detective Carmichael groaned. “Not again,” he muttered.

Instead of arguing with the man about our enclosures and office, his crime scene, and the boundaries of both, I jumped out of my chair. “Excuse me,” I said, and brushed past him to find out what was wrong, Lance close on my heels.

Even from the top of the hill where we were, I could see the spider monkeys were at it again. They had a hat, and the unnerved officer to whom it belonged was standing under their cage, shouting. Trudy, who was already standing at the barn door looking down on things, groused, “I told him not to stand so close.” Seeing us, she said, “Let me take care of it.”

I said, “This one probably needs a team approach.” She had been taking on the police as if they were her responsibility entirely, simply because she used to work dispatch, and I didn’t think this fair to her. So I followed her down the hill, along with the detective. Behind us, Lance faded back into the barn.

The young cop should have been more wary, given that Trudy had already rescued a service weapon from this group of troublemakers. But he was, as Carmichael confirmed in the string of curses that followed us down the hill, a damned rookie. And maybe the young man thought he was far enough away from the spider monkeys. If so, he was wrong. He probably didn’t even feel the tickly little tail encroaching on his head. I certainly hadn’t felt the one that stole my shirt and exposed Alex’s abuse so graphically to Lance.

We had to dodge yellow crime-scene tape and walk beside, rather than on, the worn footpath in the grass, as the police had carefully marked off Art’s trail. I found it hard to ignore the visceral reminder of his absence, so I focused instead on the rookie deputy engaged in a battle of wills with an animal more cunning and stubborn than he could have imagined.

“Hey!” the officer shouted again.

“You’re upsetting them. You’ll make it worse,” Trudy yelled. It was doubtful he heard her over the din.

The officer jumped up and made a swipe at the air, trying to retrieve his cap, but it was already miles above his head. He looked like a little kid in the middle of a game of keep-away. “Calm down!” Trudy called. “They’ll never give it back if they know you want it.”

He made another leap, and his fingers brushed the brim, but the monkey hoisted its tail higher.

“It’s laughing at me!” he said accusingly, as Trudy, Detective Carmichael, and I drew nearer.

“Of course it is,” I snapped. “You should have heard them the time they stole a shirt off of me. There I was in the middle of the yard half naked, and a bunch of nasty little monkeys laughing the whole time.” I didn’t know whether they were laughing or not. But I had seen Lance retreat toward our office, and I was looking for ways to buy him time.

“I need that hat!”

It was similar to Detective Carmichael’s, with a flat brim and round bowl of a top. Maybe this was the same guy who would be filling out a very awkward report about the theft and return of his sidearm later tonight. I wondered how young he was, then how old I was that I was sizing up an officer of the law and casually labeling him a child.

I said, “Stay calm and we’ll get it for you,” then turned to Trudy. “I’ll need your help to do this.”

She and I were standing side by side, angled to face each other without losing sight of the monkey or cap. The hat’s round top allowed the little monkey to balance it on its tail like a circus act with poles and spinning plates. On an inspiration, I pantomimed flicking something to Trudy. She smiled her understanding.

“Do what?” Detective Carmichael eyed me warily. “Feed it? She did that by herself earlier.” I half believed he was on to me. But then, maybe I was paranoid because I didn’t know exactly what my monkeys and I were engaged in myself. The detective was accidentally right. The best way to get the hat back would be to barter with the animal. Trudy had done that earlier, trading the gun for a choice treat. I didn’t want to succeed too soon, though.

“No sir,” I improvised. “If we have to, we’ll feed it, but that risks us being bitten. It’s going to be aware that we’ve already tricked it once with snacks and might not be responsive to that.”

“Then what? Deputy Greene needs his cap back.”

“Spider monkeys are best at imitative behavior,” Trudy piped up. “We need to show it what to do with its prize. Deputy Greene, stand back a little, and wait there, like you’re getting ready to grab a disc. Detective, can we play catch with your crown?”