Thick greenery ringed the circular garden on all sides, surrounding the brick patio flooring and lone picnic table with a concealing veil. Hardy, just-exotic-enough flowers bloomed riotously among the general wash of green, planted by gardeners who enjoyed their privacy as much as Shelby and I did. Even the noises of the zoo were dampened here, muffled by the vegetation, until we could pretend that we were someplace much less artificially designed. A real jungle, maybe, albeit one with an inexplicable amount of landscaping.
“You want to talk about it?” asked Shelby.
“I honestly don’t know where to begin. Do you know much about colony collapse disorder?”
“Isn’t that the thing with the bees?”
“Yeah, it’s . . . the thing . . .” I tapered off mid-sentence, losing the thread of what I’d been trying to say as I stared at the object protruding from one of the decorative hedges.
“Alex?” I heard Shelby sliding off the table. She sounded alarmed. I couldn’t say for sure that it was the wrong emotional response.
The object in question was a shoe. Just a simple white sneaker, the laces still tied. That wasn’t unusual, in and of itself: lots of people manage to lose shoes at the zoo, for reasons that I have never quite understood. No, the problem was what was protruding from the shoe.
The problem was the human ankle.
I stepped closer to the hedge, leaning forward to gently part the branches and look down into the greenery. Shelby stepped up behind me, resting her hands on my shoulders as she craned her neck to get a better view. I didn’t ask her to move back, even though all my years of training were telling me that I should be doing exactly that.
“Well,” I said, after a long moment of silence had passed between us, “I guess I know why Andrew didn’t show up for work this morning.” I released the hedge. It mercifully sprang back into its original formation, blocking the horrified, distorted face of the junior zookeeper from view. I turned, and Shelby put her arms around me, folding me into a strong embrace. I closed my eyes. It didn’t help. Even with my eyes closed, I could still see his expression.
Worse, I could still see his eyes, which had been gray from side to side. Something had turned them to stone. Something that had killed him at the same time. Something not human.
We had a serious problem on our hands.
Five
“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It’s much easier to be brave when you don’t believe that the monster under your bed is real.”
—Alexander Healy
Ohio’s West Columbus Zoo, telling polite lies to the local police to avoid panic, institutionalization, or institutional panic
I ADJUSTED MY GLASSES with one hand, resisting the urge to glance toward the unfortunate Andrew’s half-calcified body. My fingers itched. I wanted—no, I needed—to get my dissection tools and dig into his remains. Whatever had petrified him would have left traces, subtle cues in the striations of the stone that had replaced an undetermined amount of his original substance. The local medical examiner would never be able to decode those markers. Even if I stole a copy of his autopsy report (and let’s be honest here: I was going to steal a copy of his autopsy report), I wouldn’t have all the data. We’d still be essentially flying blind.
“Now, you say that you were simply enjoying lunch with your—what did you say your relationship to Miss Tanner was, again?” the officer asked.
“She’s my girlfriend.” The words were out before I realized they were a relationship upgrade. I winced, but pressed on, saying, “We’ve been seeing each other socially for about three months.”
“I see. And is your relationship public knowledge?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Are you asking if I arranged for the bizarre death of one of my junior zookeepers because Shelby was some kind of dirty little secret? Zoo management is completely aware of our arrangement. It was the zoo’s HR director who introduced us. We don’t work in the same part of the zoo, we don’t answer to the same managers, and a little fraternization is encouraged if it means we’re more likely to volunteer for overtime and double-shifts.” Like when your significant other had already been drafted by her own manager, thus canceling yet another in a long string of canceled dates.
Shelby was on the other side of the tiger garden with another policeman, sitting atop the picnic table and giving her version of the story. From the occasional words that drifted my way, I was willing to venture that her version matched mine in the broad strokes, but was both more carnal and more profane in its details.
“Now, I don’t know whether I would have said that about your coworker’s heritage,” I said mildly, after Shelby made a particularly salty comment.
My policeman narrowed his eyes. “Please pay attention to your own situation, and not your girlfriend’s, Mr. Preston. Can you account for your whereabouts this morning between eight and eleven?”
“Yes, I can,” I said. “I was at the reptile house for most of the morning, along with my assistant, Deanna Taylor-Rodriguez. She’s still there now. I arrived at work about a quarter after eight. Lloyd was the guard on duty at the front gate.” For the first time, I found myself grateful for Lloyd’s slavish dedication to following the letter of the law. He’d have a triple-checked timestamp verifying exactly when I arrived.
That meant he probably had one for Andrew, too. I made a mental note to check with Lloyd once I was done explaining my innocence to the local police.
“Did this Lloyd gentleman walk you to the, ah, snake house?”
“No, he didn’t,” I admitted. “But if you check with Dee, you’ll find that it took me a maximum of ten minutes to cross the grounds to the reptile house.” I subtly stressed the word “reptile.” I wasn’t trying to mock him or piss him off. I just wanted him to remember that I knew my own business. “I honestly have no idea what happened to Andrew. Whatever it was, it probably took more than ten minutes.”
The first part wasn’t entirely a lie: there were a number of things that could have turned my unfortunate junior zookeeper into stone, and most of them were viable suspects, since he was still meat-based enough that he could have been zapped by anything from the bottom to the top of the power scale. The second part was one hundred percent fiction. Depending on the strength of the creature doing the petrifaction, it takes a few seconds, sometimes less. When something that’s capable of doing that to living flesh makes eye contact with a mammal . . . game over. I could easily have turned Andrew into stone and still made it to the reptile house on time. Except for the part where I’m human.
The policeman frowned at his notes. I seized the opportunity to add, a little more sheepishly, “Also, if I did . . . whatever it is . . . do you honestly think I would have brought my girlfriend here? I mean, I was hoping to have sex again in this lifetime, and most girls get sort of upset when you take them to see a dead body.”
Most girls. Not, apparently, Shelby, who was now laughing with her policeman, both of them appearing to have a grand old time as they reviewed her statement. I didn’t know how she did it, but I loved her for it in that moment, just as I’d loved her for every similar thing I’d ever seen her do.
My policeman followed my gaze to Shelby. Then, to my surprise, he smiled. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “You’re free to go back to work. Please don’t leave town, Mr. Preston, we may need to speak to you further about this incident. I have your contact information, and I assume that your paperwork with the zoo office is up to date?”