Half-Off Ragnarok: Book Three of InCryptid (20 page)

There were too many people there for me to risk approaching. They’d ask questions, and later they’d remember that I not only came in to work early, but appeared to conveniently “discover” the body with the rest of them. I turned away, pulling my phone from my pocket, as I walked slowly back toward the reptile house. I didn’t want to get her involved. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to
speak
to her right now. And that didn’t matter, because I needed the backup.

“Shelby? Hi, it’s Alex. We’ve got a problem at the zoo . . .”

Chandi and Dee were both alive when I stepped through the reptile house doors. That was a comfort. They were shouting at each other. That wasn’t.

“—can’t keep me out! I’ll tell my father! I’ll tell everyone! I’m allowed—”

“—believe your parents will be mad at me for looking out for your best interests? You need to think about your safety—”

“—am I supposed to develop a proper immunity if you don’t let me—”

“—will be time for that—”

I put two fingers in my mouth and whistled shrilly, bringing both sides of the argument to a crashing halt. The two turned to stare at me, eyes wide. For a moment, the only sound was the hissing of Dee’s hair.

“Both of you, listen up,” I said. “Lloyd is dead. Chandi, did you notice anything about the body when you came in?”

“Just that his eyes had turned to stone,” she said, as dismissively as a human child might report an adult with a visible booger.

“What?” said Dee. “But that’s—”

I cut her off. “That’s what I was afraid of. Dee, is there any way we can smuggle Chandi out of the zoo before the police get here?” I raised a hand to cut off her protests before they could begin. “You didn’t check in at the gate, Chandi, because if you’d tried, Lloyd would have made you wait until we opened. That means the police will be
really
interested in how you got inside, and why you didn’t call 911 as soon as you saw the dead man. Do you want to go through all that?”

“No,” she admitted sullenly.

“I can probably get her out one of the delivery gates if I take her now,” said Dee. “But, Alex, really, we need to talk about this.”

“We’ll talk about it when you get back here. Right now, getting Chandi to safety is more important.”

“I thought you might say that.” Dee frowned. “What are you going to do?”

“Isn’t that obvious?” I shrugged. “I’m going to get us ready to open.”

Dee looked briefly like she wanted to protest, but thought better of it. Instead, she took Chandi by the shoulder and walked her to the door. For once, the young wadjet didn’t object or try to bargain for five more minutes. She just went with Dee, leaving me alone with the reptiles.

I looked at the enclosures around me, sighed, and said, “All right, fellows. Let’s get ready for an opening that’s never going to happen.”

Shelby showed up five minutes before the reptile house doors were supposed to officially open. She was wearing her uniform and looked as fresh as a daisy, even though I knew she’d been awake almost as long as I had the night before. “The zoo’s closed,” she announced without preamble. Then she paused, looking around the open space. “Is Dee in her office?”

“No,” I said. “Dee had to deliver a package to one of the gates. She should be back any minute.”

Shelby’s eyes widened. “You let her go out there alone? Alex—”

“Why shouldn’t he have let me go out alone?” asked Dee, stepping through the door behind my girlfriend. “I’m his assistant, not his prisoner.”

“Oy!” Shelby whirled, taking a large step backward in the process, so that the three of us wound up standing in a loose circle. A loose, extremely
tense
circle. Shelby eyed Dee suspiciously. “Don’t sneak up on me like that!”

“Don’t stand in front of the door and maybe I won’t,” snapped Dee. She took a deep breath, calming herself, and said, “I’m sorry. That was rude. Did you hear about Lloyd?”

“What do you know about Lloyd, then?” asked Shelby.

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “That’s about as subtle as a hammer, Shelby.”

“Sometimes subtle isn’t the best plan,” Shelby shot back. “Sometimes subtle gets you killed. But you didn’t let me go on. The dead man—it’s not Lloyd.”

“What?” I lowered my hand. “What do you mean?”

“I mean it’s not Lloyd. It’s one of the other guards. They must have traded off before whatever happened.”

“Oh, thank God.” I realized how bad that sounded as soon as it was said. I didn’t waste time trying to take it back. Someone I knew and liked was alive; someone I didn’t know as well was dead. Being relieved was only human. “Dee, did you get Chandi out of the zoo without her being seen?”

Dee nodded, looking incredibly relieved for some reason. “She was really unhappy about it.”

“We’ll make it up to her somehow.”

Shelby blinked, looking more confused than suspicious as she asked, “Chandi? Isn’t that the little girl who’s always lurking about in here?”

“Every chance she gets,” I confirmed. I looked back to Dee. “Do you trust me?”

“You’re the boss,” said Dee.

“Okay. If that’s the case . . . the zoo’s closed. The police should be coming to talk to us all soon, since we were some of the last people to come into the zoo before the murder. Do you have my address?”

Dee nodded.

“Good. When we’re done here, we meet up at my place. All of us.” I could explain the situation to Grandma during my drive home, and Sarah would be fine as long as we distracted her somehow. This was getting bad. This was no longer the sort of thing I could take care of on my own, if it ever really had been—something I now sincerely doubted. Shelby was the closest thing I had to backup. I was going to be stuck with her for the long haul.

Dee’s eyes widened, and she darted an uneasy glance at Shelby. “All three of us? You know, if I’m not going to be working today, I have some things at home that could really use—”

“The man at the gate wasn’t Lloyd, but he was still turned partially to stone,” I said. “So was Andrew. So was Mr. O’Malley. I don’t think you can stay out of this one, Dee. Will you come to my house, or do I need to find yours?” The unspoken threat hung in the air between us, only Shelby’s politely puzzled expression keeping it from turning truly menacing. If Dee wasn’t on our side, if she wasn’t an ally, there was every chance she was an enemy. I couldn’t afford to take that chance.

“I . . .” Dee hesitated. Then her shoulders slumped, and she nodded. “I’ll be there.”

“All right. Shelby? You want to head back to the big cats? Maybe it’s best if the police don’t find us together again.”

“Aye-aye,” she said, snapped a sloppy, mocking salute, and jogged back out the door to the zoo. In a matter of seconds, it was me, Dee, and the reptiles, alone again.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said, with a mistrustful glance. Then she walked away, heading for the closet where we kept the lizard food.

I grimaced and followed. Even if the zoo was being shut down for the day, even if we had a petrifactor to stop, the animals still needed to be fed.

The police arrived while I was tossing trout into Crunchy’s tank. The big alligator snapping turtle was still full from the night before, and took his time making the fish disappear. The officer responsible for taking my statement didn’t look happy about that. It could have been worse; he could have been talking to Dee, who was feeding our rattlesnakes.

The time line I’d guessed at from Chandi’s arrival was confirmed by the interviewing officer: Dee and I were among the last people to enter the zoo before the man at the gate had died. Not, I was relieved to realize, the
very
last—we were getting the same treatment Shelby and I had received the day before, and I doubted that would have been the case if either of us had been a prime suspect.

“Where can we find you if we need to ask additional questions?”

“I’ll be at home,” I said. If I wasn’t, well. There would be one or more cuckoos at home, and that would keep any policemen who showed up from walking away thinking I’d been uncommunicative.

“Your girlfriend, Shelby Tanner, works here at the zoo, does she not?”

“Yes, in the lion house. She’s a visiting researcher from Australia.”

The officer nodded. “You’re a visiting researcher yourself, aren’t you? California?”

“Yes. I’m on loan from the San Francisco Zoo.” My credentials would check out. The reptile house there was operated by one of the rare dragons who had chosen to go into something other than professional money-making. The rest of her Nest tolerated her bizarre interest in research because it gave them easy access to heated sand for incubating their eggs. “I’m doing a survey of the native amphibians of Ohio.”

“Fascinating stuff,” said the officer, flipping his notebook closed. “We’ll call you if we need anything.”

“Thank you,” I said, and tossed another trout into the tank.

The officer who had interviewed me walked toward the door, beckoning the officer interviewing Dee to follow him. My assistant stayed where she was, freezing with one hand still halfway in the timber rattler enclosure as she waited for the door to close behind the two blue-clad men. I was privately glad she hadn’t frozen like that until their backs were turned. There was something impossibly static about her stillness, a reptilian quality that screamed her inhuman origins more loudly than anything else about her disguised appearance.

Only when we were alone did she relax and start breathing again. She replaced the lid on the rattlesnake enclosure, stepping down from the stool she’d used to reach the opening, and said, “Alex, I don’t know how much of this I can take.”

“You’ll take as much as you have to.” I threw the last of the trout in with Crunchy and closed the hatch above his tank. Hopping down from my own stool, I grabbed it and carried it back toward the closet. “We’ll get through this, Dee. I promise.”

“You don’t honestly think I had anything to do with this, do you?”

I hesitated before shaking my head. “No. I admit, I had a few moments of doubt when we saw the puncture marks I showed you, but there’s no way you’d kill all these people. They’ve all been harmless so far. There’s nothing they could have done to you.”

“They could have found out where my community was located and threatened to expose us,” said Dee. She opened her lips wide enough to let me see the fangs that had unhinged from the roof of her mouth. They folded again before she said, “Because anyone who threatened my family would find themselves between a rock and a bad place.”

“I understand the sentiment,” I said.

“Do you really expect me to come back to your house and talk about this in front of your
girlfriend
?”

I allowed myself the thinnest stripe of a smile. “I think you’ll be surprised.”