The Penguin Who Knew Too Much(61)

“Just don’t get carried away and say it anywhere near Mother,” I said as I helped myself to a couple of prosciutto-wrapped melon balls.

“Do you think I’m a total idiot?” Rob said. “Never mind; don’t answer that.”

He strolled away to offer the tray to another group of guests. I spotted a flurry of activity at the other end of the lawn and went to see what was up.

Dr. Blake was performing for the cameras again, presenting a pro-zoo case to counter the protesters out front—at the moment, he was holding forth on the important contribution zoos could make to conservation and the preservation of endangered species. He was speaking eloquently, and I approved of every word he said, but I suspected it wasn’t playing as well as he wanted it to. Yesterday, he’d charmed the reporters with the lemur, but today's living prop, the baby possum, wasn’t working as well. Why had he chosen the possum anyway—surely he knew better than anyone that the term “playing possum” had been coined to describe what possums do under stress. Apparently the baby possum had gone limp shortly after the cameras began rolling, and it looked rather as if Blake were posing for the cameras with a large dead rat draped over one shoulder.

While I was watching, he figured this out, and gestured to Dad to come and take the possum. The reporters all breathed a visible sigh of relief, and the cameramen, who had been focusing tightly on Blake's face, pulled back to show the rich panorama of activity around him—to the great delight of all my family members who wanted to lurk just behind Blake, making a V-sign behind his head and waving to people at home. The only people not happy with the situation were a couple of protesters in SOB T-shirts lurking at the back of the crowd, leaning on their battered placards and scowling disapproval at all comers.

I wondered if the demonstration had ended or if Shea had merely declared a break until Blake was finished and the SOBs could reclaim the spotlight.

Not my problem. I needed to find Chief Burke and tell him the various things I’d learned today without giving him the impression that I was butting into his investigation. Probably not an easy task.

Then again, maybe I didn’t need to tell the chief everything. Maybe I should find a middleman. I looked around till I spotted my cousin Horace, leaning against the fence around the penguin pen, digging into a plate of food.

Horace. Not only could I enlist him to communicate what I’d learned to the chief, I might be able to get some useful or at least interesting information out of him at the same time.





Chapter 33

I cruised by the buffet table, grabbed a burger, and joined Horace.

“You know I can’t talk to you about the case,” he said when I leaned against the fence beside him.

Apparently Horace knew me too well.

“Fine,” I said. “We can talk about something else. Want to know what I’ve been doing today?”

“You mean you haven’t been running around prying into the murder investigation?”

“I’ve been running around trying to do something about the zoo animals’ plight,” I said.

“That's nice.”

“Of course, since the murder and the plight of the zoo animals aren’t entirely unrelated—” “Thought so.”

“Never mind, then,” I said. “I don’t suppose the chief wants to know that Sheila Flugleman was furious with Patrick Lanahan because he was ruining her ZooperPoop! business. Or that both his fellow zookeeper, Ray Hamlin, and Shea Bailey, the temperamental head of the SOBs, suspected Lanahan of involvement in canned hunting. Or that fifteen years ago Lanahan survived the car accident in which Dr. Blake's only grandson died. I don’t suppose any of that's of interest.”

Horace's face didn’t give away much, but I gathered at least one of my bits of information was news to him.

“I have no idea,” he said. “But if you like, I’ll ask him.” He took another bite of his corn on the cob. “Sometime today, maybe?” I said.

“What's the rush? It's not like you’re going anywhere.”

Except I was, assuming nothing dire happened to cancel Michael's and my Plan.

“Oh, no rush at all,” I said. “It's not as if a murderer were running around loose or anything.”

“Everyone's so impatient,” he said. “You almost never solve a murder this quickly, you know. The forensic work takes time. I’ll tell the chief as soon as I finish my dinner.”

I bit into my own burger, but curiosity got the better of me.

“So how easy or hard is it to do forensics on a crossbow bolt?” I asked. “To prove whose crossbow made the shot, for example?”