The Case of the Red-Handed Rhesus (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) (36 page)

“You have to sit
still
for your braids.” Hannah had finished Sara’s hair Saturday afternoon before she took off on an adventure. When William saw the finished product, he had immediately started pestering Hannah to do the same thing with his. But Hannah was leaving from our house that day for an estate auction somewhere in Pennsylvania on Sunday. Besides finding vintage clothes for Hannah’s Rags, she was travelling with another local business owner who sold antiques. They would be gone Saturday and Sunday night. If she was back, I had either slept in mightily, or she had showed up with the chickens.

“How are
you
this morning, Natasha?” My grandmother’s voice answered my question before I had properly formed it. If
she
was here, I
had
slept in. Franny Cox might go to bed late and wake up early, but she was never on the road before nine or ten. She didn’t trust her eyes until the third cup of coffee, and she didn’t trust her bladder for long after. At eighty, we all wondered how much longer she’d be driving herself, and at what point she’d start accepting our offers of a familial taxi service for more than the highway rides.

“Sara, come try this on,” said Mama.

“My
princess gown
!” Mama had been busy this weekend making play clothes for both children. Now, William was home because “not school-timed until he haved braidy hair now” had become Sunday’s refrain. It was odds on he was still wearing the ring-bearer suit from our wedding that he had worn all weekend. But the suit was working wonders. We had let him sleep in it, and he discovered bladder control he couldn’t have imagined, leaping out of bed twice a night to go to the bathroom, sleeping lightly for fear of wetting it.

“I guess I’m okay. I feel so
stupid . . .
” Natasha began.

“No, don’t think that way.” Nana was practical. She didn’t tolerate much moping and might be the perfect antidote to the blues that had enveloped Tasha since Layla and Robby nearly stole William. We had an emergency therapy appointment scheduled for her this afternoon.

“But I
hate
her. I
know
not to trust her. I shouldn’t have even answered the
phone . . .
”

“Natasha, you’re fifteen. You’re human. You made a mistake. Nobody is angry with you but yourself,” said Mama in her and-that’s-final voice. Lance and I had both told her the same thing, our memories of our own monumental mistakes keeping us vocalizing sympathy instead of criticism.

“But the worst thing is I
still
feel bad for her!”

“I know,” said Nana. “It’s hard.”

I rolled out of bed and fumbled for my clothing in the suitcase Lance and I were living out of. The first thing I found was my cell phone. It had a sticky note affixed to the top. “Took some video. Push play. No worries. XOXO.”

I fumbled with the screen and considered asking Tasha for help. But the handwriting was Lance’s, and if he was leaving me messages via cell phone, there was a good chance he wasn’t sharing with anybody but me. Indeed, when I finally got the video going, the first words he spoke were, “Hope you figured this out without help. If not, Tasha, off you go.” Then he waited, presumably for Natasha to leave. In the silence, he aimed the phone all around the bathroom he was speaking from. “It’s me here. No bad guys.” No, no bad guys. I heard my own voice shouting something in the background, confirming my suspicion he had recorded himself at some point during a period when I had been unable to find my phone.

“I want to check something out,” he continued. “And I’m sick of our police escort. I’m going out early to run errands and set up the lab for my class. I’m telling everyone else that. And I’m
not
letting Trudy, Darnell, and Drew come with me. And when I’m gone, I’m parking my car in Natalie Forrester’s street and walking the whole way back to the Marine. I don’t care what Robby the Wreck says; he didn’t pick William up on a misguided rescue mission last time, and he didn’t do it for Layla on Friday.”

Didn’t Lance and I have this conversation already? I thought so. When Robby and Layla’s story had spun out, we saw holes in the portions we heard. Law enforcement agreed with us. Possibly Robby was playing Layla. But possibly someone was playing both of them. From what little we knew of him, which was admittedly limited to accepting pizza deliveries and watching him try to abscond with our son, we thought Robby was too stupid to have acted alone in developing either kidnapping plot. Last I heard, Drew was petitioning the court to have both Robby
and
Layla removed from parental custody.

“Come on, Lance. Tell me something new,” I muttered to the phone.

“I’m not going to school at all today. I’m cancelling my class. Robby was too upset on Friday that he’d be missing delivery day Monday . . . well, today by the time you get this I’ll be at the Marine. I want to see what goes on in the blind spot on the other side of that truck out back.

“We all know William went in the kitchen when he got away from Natalie in the restaurant that day. I think he saw something back there in the first place. And I don’t think anybody has taken the time to learn what it might have been. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be freezing in the honeysuckle bushes behind the Dumpster at the Marine all day. My phone will be
off.

“If I’m not home by seven or so, tell our Drew what I’ve gone and done. But buy me time until then, because he’s the only one we can fully trust. Trudy and Darnell have their own agenda, Noel, and I don’t care what they claim, I don’t think our safety is anywhere near its heart. You can play them the next video if you need a time-waster.” He blew a kiss at the camera and the video ended. I groaned, briefly played myself the second video, then finished dressing.

Darnell seized upon me before I got as far as the kitchen. “
What
is Lance doing?” he demanded.

“You tell me.”

“Noel, we can hardly assure your . . .”

Buy me time.
I wanted to play the first video. But I
needed
to trust my husband. I had more faith in our federal friends than Lance, but I also agreed with him the Marine was unexplored territory and a great deal could have happened on the other side of the security cameras.

“Coffee.” I refused to talk to Darnell until I’d poured myself a cup of Mama’s exotic finest.
Then
I played him the second video.

Lance repeated the routine with “no bad guys” and then launched into a detailed and completely falsified version of the activities he was planning. “I should be home by seven this evening. If I’m not,
then
I guess I did something idiotic. See you later. Love you.” He blew the kiss again.

Darnell and Trudy launched a plan to find him. They figured out Natalie Forrester’s within five minutes. They would have worked out the Marine in ten. “Quit,” I said. “I think he was pretty specific this morning about not wanting company. You’ve already got today mapped out, and I don’t think your plans should change.”

That started another argument, one centering on my ability to make wise decisions under the current circumstances. But Nana saved me. “Come on, Trudy. If you’re driving me down to prison, you’d better hurry up. You’re already going to be making pit stops every ten miles.”

“All right.” Trudy surrendered. The information Trudy wanted to know from T-Bow Orrice had become more, rather than less, urgent once she started getting support from Columbus.

“I need to know if he can tell the difference between Liam and Charles,” she confided. “That’s not something he’s going to tell an agent, but I need a fast, direct answer. He knew Dalton on the inside, and he’s worked with Metcalfe extensively on the inside. If
he
can’t tell the difference, there’s a good chance I’m right about Dalton getting into the prison posing as Metcalfe. If Dalton came up with a good enough story, Orrice might have given him access to significant resources.”

“Why the deception? Orrice worked with Gary and the Dalton brothers. Why not ask as Charles Dalton? I’d think T-Bow Orrice might be as worried as Dalton about what Gary might have in a journal.”

“This isn’t about a journal. Or not wholly. We have every reason to believe Dalton is hunting Natasha. And Orrice wouldn’t give Charles a thing. He shut down Terry Dalton, perhaps had him killed, for a deception. And he has learned how Natasha was exploited. No, if Dalton wants access to Orrice, he would have to get in by lying. And what would Dalton find sweeter than to use T-Bow’s network to kill T-Bow’s kid?”

“That’s . . .” I fumbled for a concept and ultimately chose Darnell’s. “Brazen.”

“Yes. And if he did it, but Orrice caught on, that may have been Dalton’s body at your center.”

She left Darnell to babysit us for the day. I heard him calling Drew at least once. Darnell needed a distraction.

“I’m supposed to be at the center this morning,” I informed him. “And I’m taking everybody but Mama and Daddy with me.” I had all three children, Sara because of the suspension, Natasha because she was so depressed and scared that it was hard to get her to leave my sight, and William because Hannah had to go to work
long
before finishing his braids. “I presume you’re my personal escort, and I could use your help out there. We’re short of hands these days. Would you rather babysit the old folks or the youngsters?”

He tried to cajole Mama and Daddy to come with us, but neither had any interest in being rousted from their daily routines. They may simply have wanted a break from their chronic houseguests. They enjoyed company, but they were quite fond of their solitary lifestyle, and Mama had Christmas gifts to get ready. Plus, there was the squad car parked at the end of the cul-de-sac. They insisted watchfulness and caution would ensure their safety.

In the end, Darnell accompanied us, grumbling about people who didn’t have regard for their own safety or respect for the people trying to protect them. Truly, I wasn’t merely getting the agent out for an airing. I needed to get Tasha to the center. I had research of my own needing completion, and it held absolutely no life-threatening potential whatsoever and every potential to distract her out of her blues until her therapy appointment.

“What have you figured out?” I asked Ace when we reached the orangutan enclosure.

Our resident keeper was instantly on the alert. “Chuck been roaming again?”

“Not that I know of,” I told him. “But we still don’t know enough about what he was doing when he
was
on the loose.
If
he was on the loose.”

“He’s getting out, all right, but I don’t know much more than that.”

“Fair enough. We
do
know he’s bored, so I’ve got a new toy.” Our chimps are bright. They’ve got smarts most people wouldn’t believe. But we’ve had chimpanzees at our facility since early in my tenure here. Orangutans, on the other hand, are completely new to us. Ours is only the second sanctuary in the United States to house the orange apes, and Chuck, our pleasantly grouchy single resident, was about to have his mind blown.

The program Lucy had been using to communicate with her baby and the surrogate wasn’t unique. As soon as I looked into it, I realized there was an entire electronic enrichment program available to our bored friend, assuming he didn’t simply poke his fingers through the mesh and chuck down one of the two tablets that had been waiting in my department mailbox when Lance and I stopped by the university yesterday. I hadn’t expected a twenty-four-hour or weekend delivery after I placed the order in a stupor Friday night, but Natasha wouldn’t answer me when I asked her if she knew anything about our mailbox’s Sunday surprise. Where Lance was interested in gallivanting off to save the world, I didn’t care much. Not today.

As I got out the tablets and brought up the series of apps available to Chuck, Ace came back to the subject of the roaming. “I put a stop to it easy enough. He was using a stick to jab the security camera in the lens until it pointed off in the wrong direction. I took away the stick, and I’ve been careful he doesn’t get another one in there. But I’m darned if I know what he did
after
he moved the camera. I’d love to find out.”

“You and me both. And
I
want to know how he let the monkeys out up there without tearing anything apart.”

“Check this out.” Tasha, who had been greeting Chuck, now brought me a key.

“Where’d you get that?” I turned it over in my hand.

“I saw Chuck hiding something shiny and got him to trade.”

“What’s
he
doing with a key?” asked Ace.

She shrugged.

“It’s too little for his enclosure,” I mused, “day
or
night. This is more the size of . . .” I turned to Ace, an unspoken question on my face.

“Nawww,” he said. “No way.”

“It doesn’t explain how he got out,” I went on. “But . . . listen . . . if you have a minute later, would you humor me and test this on the old door from the enclosure we got from the Michigan zoo? I think Rick brought all the junk down here after he fixed us up.”

“Yeah, he did. It’s in the new admin building,” said Ace. He accepted the key. “I’ll tell you something,” he finally admitted. “They used to have the worst trouble keeping a couple of the exhibits locked up there.”

“Did they? I wish I knew more about his life up there.”

“I was
with
him, and I wish that.”

“And I wish he wasn’t so canny about the cameras.” Security footage either cut off before any useful filming began, or else the cameras were spun, apparently from behind.

“Either way, I’ll try to see if he’s got other keys besides this one.”

With the exception of Natasha, only Ace had a strong relationship with Chuck. For months, the primate waited patiently for Ace to shear off his fecally encrusted dreadlocks and clean him through the mesh. If anybody could coax additional purloined goods out of him, it would be Ace.

“Okay, but I need to show you this!” Natasha pulled out the tablets and, being far more electronically savvy than I, took over Ace’s training. It was mental enrichment of a kind we had never before been able to offer any of our apes.