Chapter 38
“What do you mean ‘disappeared’?” I asked. “I thought this was a complete list of animals in the zoo.”
“As of the time I showed up,” Blake said. “But from the cursory review I’d been able to make of Patrick's records last week, I found there was an extraordinary amount of attrition over the last two years.”
“Attrition?” I repeated. “What kind of attrition.”
“Animals he sold, animals who died, and animals simply unaccounted for,” Blake said. “And all three worry me. Take the animals who died. Sounded to me as if the mortality rate was a little high.”
“Could that just be a statistical anomaly?” I asked.
“Possibly. Or it could be reasonable—Patrick did say that the animals he’d been able to afford were often relatively mature when they arrived at the zoo. That's probably understandable, given his financial situation.”
“Like Reggie, the invisible lion,” I said. “In other words, he was buying over-the-hill animals at cut-rate prices to fill the zoo.”
“In a nutshell, yes,” Blake said. “And I don’t see a problem with that. Geriatric animals need a place to live, too. And from the size of his outstanding veterinary bills, it doesn’t look as if he stinted on their medical care. But I wanted to review each animal's case in detail. See if they all sounded reasonable. And I’m even more worried about the animals he sold. An unusually large number of animals, most of them relatively young, healthy animals that would be in high demand.”
“Isn’t that the flip side of buying over-the-hill animals?” I asked. “Not that I particularly like this business of buying and selling animals like groceries or something, but doesn’t it make sense that if he was too broke to buy anything but geriatric animals, he was probably too broke to resist selling off the more valuable animals? To buy food for the rest?”
“After all, selling them's so much less messy than feeding the gazelles to the wolves,” Rob said.
“Yes,” Blake said to me. He was pointedly ignoring Rob. “But he doesn’t seem to have good records showing where he sold them. And it makes a difference. Did he sell them to other reputable zoos? That's fine. To private individuals? Much more dubious. Or to one of those so-called game ranches?”
“The places that run the canned hunts,” I said. “Yeah, that would be bad.”
“I don’t yet know he did that,” Blake said. “We were supposed to sit down and go over his records in excruciating detail this coming week. Medical records for the animals that died, sales records for the ones he sold, and whatever the hell kind of records he had for the animals who were missing. Animals don’t just go missing from zoos. Not often.”
“What kind of animals went missing?” Dad asked, sounding concerned. I wondered if the visions his imagination was tossing out were as interesting as mine. Emerald tree boas turning up on people's rose arbors. Water buffalo devastating the backyards of the Caerphilly Garden Society members. Rogue hyenas lurking behind the freshman dorms.
“Various kinds of exotic deer and antelope,” Blake said. “Wild sheep, goats, and boars. In fact, that's also the kind of animal he sold.”
“From what I can see, those were the mainstays of the zoo,” I said. “Animals he could just turn loose in a pasture to graze.”
“They also happen to be the mainstays of these canned-hunting places,” Blake said.
“So you already suspected him of some kind of involvement in canned hunting,” Dad said, sounding shocked.
“No,” Blake said. “But I was starting to worry about whether he was really responsible enough to be running a zoo, even a small one. It wasn’t till Meg mentioned it that the pieces fell in place. Maybe I should have realized it sooner, but I didn’t really want to believe it. A trained zoologist. A friend of my grandson's.”
He shook his head and took a big swallow of his white wine.
“But before you could sit down to give Lanahan the third degree about his missing animals, he turned up dead.”
“Which means I still have to figure out what happened at the zoo, and I don’t even have Patrick to interrogate,” Blake said.
“Weird,” Rob said, refilling his wineglass. “If you were the murder victim, it would all make sense now. Lanahan would have killed you to keep you from finding out his crimes. But this doesn’t help us figure out who offed Lanahan.”
“Those animal-rights activists who’ve been marching up and down outside Meg's house all day,” Blake said. “Their leader's a nutcase, if you ask me. Trying to turn the hyenas loose with all those prey animals at large.”