“No sense asking for trouble,” he said as he dusted the remaining fragments of kibble off his hand.
“What kind of trouble? Animals wandering over by mistake from the zoo to the range?”
“What?” Hamlin said, startled. “Hell no. That's Patrick's game. No, I meant trouble from those animal-rights activists.”
“Oh, right.”
“ ‘Cause you don’t want to get those SOBs from the SOB mad at you,” Hamlin said, wheezing again at his own joke. “ ‘Specially not that Che guy who leads them.”
“Shea,” I corrected.
“Yeah. Human pit bull, that guy.”
“But he only cares about the rights of exotic animals?”
“Dunno. Maybe he cares about animals like mine, but he's smart enough to know he can’t get much publicity out of them. They’re not rare, they’re not cute, they’re obviously not starving, and most of them are animals people are too used to seeing on their dinner plates. No one wants a story like that. So they picket the Caerphilly Zoo and leave me alone.”
“That makes sense.”
“But it would all be different if I had a bunch of cute animals—those leemings of Lanahan's, for example.
“Leemings?” I said. “Oh—you mean lemmings. He had lemmings?”
We didn’t have any lemmings yet, and I found myself visualizing a vast quantity of them swarming inexorably toward our house.
“Yeah, like the one Blake was carrying around on his shoulder on TV. Those monkey things with the long tails.” “Lemurs,” I corrected.
“Whatever,” Hamlin said. “Look, I’m not a fancy animal zoologist like Lanahan and Blake. I’m just a guy who loves animals. You tell me what I have to do to keep ‘em happy and healthy, and I can do it, no problem. Can and will. I’m also a businessman. I know how to keep my budget balanced. Won’t find me selling off the animals to devil knows who, just to pay the feed-store bill.”
“Is that what Lanahan was doing?”
“I got no proof, but the way animals seemed to come and
go... “
He let his voice trail off and shrugged. He tossed another handful of kibble to the goats and moved on to the sheep pen. The sheep were all looking in the other direction, apparently oblivious to the frantic excitement of the goats. As the kibble disappeared, the goats returned to the fence, one by one, and propped their front feet on it. Several of them were making reasonably good efforts to crawl over it. The sheep continued to gaze serenely into the distance.
“So you think Lanahan was involved in canned hunting?”
“I can’t imagine he was involved in it,” Hamlin said. “It's illegal in Virginia, you know.”
“Involved at least by selling animals to the people who did organize canned hunts?”
“Could be,” he said. “Selling's not illegal, you know. Wouldn’t set well with most people around here, I imagine, but there's nothing illegal about selling animals. And I suppose if it came out he was doing it, he could always claim he didn’t know what they were doing. If Chief Burke's smart, he’ll go over Lanahan's papers with a fine-tooth comb. You find who Lanahan's been selling to, maybe you’ll find his killer.”
The sheep finally noticed our presence and shuffled over to beg for kibble. Hamlin had used up all his kibble on the goats. I dumped the last of mine into the sheep's pen. There were other enclosures, but what few animals I could spot were at the far ends, so I decided to skip them.
“Thanks for the tour,” I said. “I gather anything that lives in a field you could probably take almost anytime, but you’d need time to find a home for anything that needs a special cage.”
“That's about the size of it,” he said. “And I bet it's the very ones we’d have to build something for that you’re most interested in getting rid of. Those hyenas, for example. Bet you’d be happy to see the back of them.”
“You have no idea,” I said. “When I’ve got a list, I’ll get in touch. Where can I reach you?”
“Hang on,” he said. He pulled a wad of assorted papers out of his shirt pocket and shuffled through them for a few moments, glancing at several business cards until he came across the one he wanted.
“You can reach me here most days,” he said. A card for the Antique and Junque Market. “I own a couple of other businesses—in fact, between me and my brothers, we own just about everything in Clay County that isn’t a farm. But me, I’m trying to get out of the low-rent businesses. Used cars, bait and tackle, the shooting range—they’re all very well right now, but you can see the writing on the wall with them. You get more of your gentrification going on, more rich commuters moving in, and your upscale businesses, like the antique market, are going to take off.”