To Die Fur (A Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Mystery)

by Dixie Lyle

  Rajiv glared at her, but said nothing.

  “I’ll have the gangster’s portion,” said Oscar. “I don’t think he’s coming back.”

  * * *

  Afterward, the guests didn’t linger. Rajiv stormed off without a word, stomping upstairs presumably to pack. Karst ambled back to the study with Oscar, both of them with drinks in hand. Abazu said he was going for a walk, while Zhen, ZZ, and I went upstairs to ZZ’s study to discuss details of transporting the body.

  Navarro simply left. I think he’d already put his bags in the trunk of his car, because I never saw him return to his room. Whiskey told me he’d gone straight out the front door, and Shondra confirmed he’d driven through the front gate a few minutes after he’d left the dinner table. She was glad to see him go. I think she planned to search his room for booby traps before she went home.

  I was kept busy for the next hour or so, and then it was time to call it a night. Whiskey came home with me, as he always does, and Tango stayed behind, curled up on her favorite chair.

  Then I went to bed and lay awake thinking about how badly I’d screwed up.

  I hadn’t found the killer. Tomorrow everyone would leave. Augustus’s spirit was still prowling around the graveyard, essentially homeless, while a war brewed between two animal deities and I’d kept the guy who could prevent it busy preparing crème caramel.

  [Go to sleep, Foxtrot. You’ve done all you could.]

  Oh, sorry. Didn’t realize I was braincasting. Am I keeping you awake?

  [Only in the sense that every time I begin to drift off I become consumed with worry that giant dessert carts pulled by flaming lions are going to roll over the Zoransky estate, crushing everyone in their path.]

  It’s a valid concern.

  [Go to sleep, Foxtrot.]

  But I couldn’t. Because I didn’t trust Navarro, and he’d been waaay too agreeable. Because ZZ’s house was still full of potential poisoners. Because a devious tiger goddess was no doubt trying to seduce Augustus at this very minute.

  [Foxtrot.]

  Yes, Whiskey?

  [I do not—repeat, do not—wish to have my psyche permanently scarred by the image of two enormous cats coupling in a supernatural frenzy. Does that seem like a reasonable request to you?]

  Yes, Whiskey.

  [Good night, Foxtrot.]

  Good night, Whiskey.

  I guess I finally fell asleep, because the next thing I knew it was light out and the alarm was going off. I dragged myself out of bed, said a sleepy good morning to Whiskey, and went downstairs to make myself a pot of tea.

  Which was when the phone rang. It was Shondra. When I heard what she had to tell me, all my half-awake thoughts of a hot breakfast vanished, replaced by a cold sense of dread spiked with adrenaline. “I’ll be right there.”

  [Foxtrot? What’s the matter?]

  “No walkies today, partner. Come on, I’ll fill you in on the way to the crime scene.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The crime scene this time was the site of not a murder, but a burglary—and not even a successful one. Shondra met me at the loading bay of the menagerie’s veterinary building, which had one of those large metal doors that slide up into the roof. It was halfway open, and a discarded padlock lay on the concrete floor.

  “I can’t believe someone actually tried to steal the body,” I said.

  “The police are on their way,” said Shondra. “But we can look around, as long as we don’t touch anything. Whiskey should probably stay outside, though.”

  “Whiskey, stay.” He gave me a long-suffering look but sat down next to the door.

  I followed Shondra inside. A short corridor led from the loading bay to the examining rooms, and past those was the cold storage locker. A tire iron was stuck in the door handle, where someone had tried to pry it open. The large combination lock that secured the door showed signs they’d attempted smashing it first.

  “Looks to me like they picked the padlock on the outside door, then came in here and tried to brute-force the freezer open. Didn’t have any luck, though.”

  I bent down and peered at the lock. “When did you discover this?”

  “Caroline called me first thing this morning. She found it this way when she came in to work.”

  “She okay?”

  “More angry than anything else.”

  No surprise there. Caroline was fiercely protective not only of her animals’ safety, but also of their dignity. She’d view an attempted theft like this as a violation of their space as well as hers.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked Shondra.

  “That this wasn’t Navarro.”

  I agreed with her, but I wanted to know why she thought so. “Because?”

  “Because he would have succeeded. This guy didn’t.”

  I nodded. “He would have come prepared. Bolt cutters, at the very least. This was somebody improvising on the fly.”

  Shondra crossed her arms. “Which means it was most likely one of your guests.”

  I frowned. She was right, but—which one? Not Zhen, obviously. Abazu didn’t have the physical strength to muscle around a thousand-pound corpse. That left either Karst or Rajiv.

  “How were they planning on getting the body out of here?” I asked.

  “There’s a cart with a chain-and-pulley attachment in the next room. They were probably planning to load it onto a truck in the loading bay.”

  So maybe even Abazu could have done this with the help of a hoist. But how had any of them gotten their hands on a truck?

  “I’m guessing the security cameras didn’t show anything?” I asked.

  “No. No strange vehicles coming or going.”

  “Well, at least they didn’t succeed.”

  Caroline walked in as I looked around. It didn’t seem as if the burglar had disturbed anything else, but I’d have Caroline check to make sure nothing was missing. The vet was already spinning the dial of the combination lock on the freezer door, a grim look on her face.

  She got it unlocked and yanked open the door. Icy vapor drifted out, obscuring our view, but as soon as it cleared we could see that Augustus’s body was still there. Caroline stepped inside to verify it hadn’t been disturbed; after a quick check, she nodded. “Nobody’s touched him, as near as I can tell.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s clear out and wait for the sheriff’s department. Maybe they can find something.”

  I caught the look Shondra threw at me, and gave it right back. Our local PD is not exactly world-class, and the sheriff himself is not exactly Sherlock Holmes. He was used to dealing with traffic offenders and the occasional noise complaint, not serious crime. A break-in and attempted theft he might be able to handle, but I wasn’t going to get my hopes up, or even awake.

  We went back outside. Whiskey was lying in the sun with his head on his paws, looking bored.

  Sorry about that, I thought at him. But you know what Sheriff Brower’s like.

  [Yes. I met a Pomeranian once who was convinced anything taller than two feet was evil and had to be exorcised by vehement yapping. He was smarter than Brower, and less annoying.]

  “I have to take Whiskey for his walk,” I told Shondra. “I rushed over here so quickly he didn’t get it.”

  “Go ahead,” Shondra said. “If Brower’s up to his usual efficient pace, I’ll be waiting here for another hour, anyway.”

  We headed away from the clinic building and toward the menagerie. The environments ranged from small to huge, with animals of every kind; I was hoping one of them might have seen something, but I couldn’t talk to them without the assistance of my translator. “Okay, Whisk, I need you to go find Tango and bring her back here. You mind?”

  He gave a little mental sigh. [I can do it a lot faster alone, it’s true. But I resent being used as a glorified carrier pigeon.]

  “If you spoke Carrier Pigeon, I wouldn’t have to.”

  He gave me a look, then dashed off. With his nose, I had no doubt he’d trac
k her down quickly.

  In the meantime, I looked around on my own. If the burglar had come from the house, he would have walked right past this row of pens. Some of the animals would have been asleep, but the nocturnal ones might have seen him.

  And I was in luck. There were two nocturnal animals in the row.

  The first was a tarsier, a small furry primate with really long fingers and toes, an owl-shaped face, and enormous golden eyes. This one was peering at me from a branch sleepily, for some reason up past his bedtime.

  “Hi there,” I said to him. “I don’t suppose you noticed someone with a crowbar walking past here sometime in the middle of the night, did you?”

  He blinked at me slowly. I don’t speak Tarsier, of course, but I was hoping I could at least introduce myself. “Well, okay. My name’s Foxtrot, and I’m going to be dropping by later with my partner. Think about it.”

  I walked on, feeling like an idiot, and found the other nocturnal resident. This was an animal known as an aye-aye, a name that when I first heard it I thought must have something to do with pirates. Nope. They didn’t sport eye patches, their legs did not resemble pegs, and they had no affinity for parrots. They weren’t nautical in any way—though they did have a dark reputation in the part of the world they came from.

  They were symbols of death.

  I handled the paperwork for just about everything that the menagerie acquired, and my research fetish meant I often drove into the background of certain animals just because they sounded interesting. The aye-aye was hated in its native Madagascar, partially because it would eat just about anything—eggs, coconuts, mangoes, lychee nuts—but mainly because people thought it was evil. Despite being often killed on sight, they seemed to have no fear of human beings, often strolling right into a village. Natives in the area believed that if an aye-aye pointed one of its long, bony fingers at you, you were going to die; some even went so far as to say that an aye-aye would break through the thatched roof of a hut and kill a person in his sleep by poking one of those long fingers into their victim’s heart.

  So how did the aye-aye get its name? One explanation is that when asked to identify it by name, the locals said, “Heh heh,” which meant “I don’t know” in the Malagasy language.

  But they did know. They just didn’t want to say its name out loud, because they were afraid. Speak of the Devil, right?

  [How utterly appropriate. And here she is, as requested.]

  Whiskey and Tango trotted up.

  “Only in my head. Have I told you guys how disconcerting it is that you can hear my thoughts even when I don’t want you to?”

  [Only occasionally. We never eavesdrop on purpose.]

 

  “Then you’ll be pleased to learn that one of our potential witnesses is a kind of monkey called a lemur.” I indicated the cage, which at the moment appeared empty.

 

  “Aye-aye.”

 

  “That’s what I thought, but no. Ecologically speaking, they’re somewhere between a bat and a woodpecker.”

  Whiskey peered into the cage doubtfully. [I’m imagining something like a pterodactyl, but bright red.]

  I chuckled. “They don’t fly. But they do use echolocation to hunt their food, the only primate in the world that does so: They tap on branches, up to eight times a second, and listen intently to the sound it produces. Like a handyman rapping on a wall to find a joist, they can detect if the branch has any hollow parts, indicating a grub inside that’s eaten away the pulp. Then they use sharp, forward-slanting teeth to gnaw a hole, and stick a very long finger inside to pry out the grub.”

 

  [Wouldn’t have helped. Once she has a fact in her head, it’s like a flea; she won’t stop scratching at it until it comes out.]

 

  [Don’t be barbaric. These days they have a pill for that.]

  I sighed. “Speaking of relevant information—do you speak this particular variant of Lemur or not?”

 

  “Yes.”

 

  “How long are we going to keep this up?”

 

  I surrendered to the inevitable. “Avast then, matey. Scupper your poop deck and downsail the mizzenmast. Yar.”

  There was a moment of silence as both animals looked at me quizzically, then glanced at each other.

 

  [I’m afraid I have to agree, Foxtrot. That was hardly your best effort.]

  “What, you want me to make sense, too? About the only thing I know how to do is ask you to swab the deck, and that’s not really high on my list of priorities.”

  [Also, we don’t have a deck that needs cleaning.]

  Tango narrowed her eyes.

  “All right, all right! Uhhh…” I thought for a second. “Ahoy! I be needin’ t’speak with ye. Yon bilge rat and I are needin’ t’chin-wag and yer captain don’t speak his lingo.”

  Apparently this was acceptable, because Tango answered,

  [I believe we’ll have to wake the gentleman in question first.]

  An annoyed high-pitched chittering came from inside the cage.

 

  A skinny, rat-like nose poked out of the entrance of the den at the back of the cage. This was followed by a pair of large, perfectly round brown eyes, set widely apart, and a head topped with two bat-like ears. His thin, wiry hair was brown, tipped with white at the ends. He may not have been a bilge rat, but he wasn’t going to come in first at the Cutesy Awards, either.

  You’re on, I told Tango. “Hi. My name is Foxtrot. I’m sorry for disturbing your sleep.”

  It’s always weird to hear Tango launch into another language, but I was getting used to it. I listened to her translate what I said, then do the same for his reply.

 

  “No, thank you. I was just wondering if you’d seen anyone walk past here late last night.”

  <“What, right past here? Late last night?”>

  “Yes. They might have been carrying something, like a metal bar.”

  The aye-aye appeared to consider this, blinking his large eyes several times. <”Well, let me see, let me see … I did see one fellow. Didn’t have anything with him, though.”>

  “Can you describe him?”

  <“I don’t know. I’ll try, though. I’d say he was … short.”>

  “How short?”

  <“Quite short.”>

  That was no good; I needed a reference point. “Under four feet?”

  <“Oh, I imagine he’d fit under all sorts of feet. He really was very short.”>

  My turn to blink a few times. I saw my error and tried to fix it. “No, I didn’t mean he was underfoot, I meant how tall was he?”

  <“He wasn’t tall. He was short. Didn’t I make that clear?”>

  “My mistake. Was he shorter than me?”

  <“Oh, my, yes.”>

  I saw another potential trap and quickly added, “I meant shorter than the human who’s standing right here, not me.”

  The aye-aye gave me a dubious glance before replying. <“Aren’t you the human that’s standing right there? Am I missing something? Maybe you should have some grubs.”>

  Ever get that sinking feeling? And then realize you’re standing in a hole? And you appear to have a shovel
in your hand, but no idea how it got there?

  “Okay. Shorter than me. Was he this short?” I held my hand level with my nose.

  <“No. Shorter.”>

  I frowned and dropped my hand to my chin. “This short?”

  <“Shorter.”>

  “How about this?”

  <“Shorter.”>

  “This?”

  <“Shorter.”>

  “This?”

  <“Still shorter.”>

  By this point my hand was down to the level of Whiskey’s head, and since I really doubted our suspect was a leprechaun, I didn’t know what to think.

  Then a sudden thought struck me. It rebounded off my extraordinarily thick skull, circled back for another try, and this time it made it through. “How many feet did this person have?”

  <“The usual number—four.”>

  “Did he have a tail?”

  <“Yes.”>

  “I see. Was this person a mouse?”

  <“No, a rat. I tried to engage him in conversation, but he was too busy to stop and talk.”>

  I sighed. “How about a human being, walking on two feet? Did you see anyone like that last night?”

  I was expecting the answer to be no or to veer off on another useless tangent, so I was pleasantly surprised by his response: <“Hmm. Actually, yes. He had much darker skin than you, and those shiny things over his eyes you humans like to wear. Come to think of it, he had some kind of stick in his hand, too.”>

  There was only one of the suspects that fit that description.

  Abazu Chukwukadibia.

  * * *

  The aye-aye had nothing else to tell us, or at least nothing useful. I thanked him, turned down one final offer of grubs, and let him go back to bed. He cheerfully waved his extremely long middle finger at us as we left, which Tango told me meant something very different in Aye-Aye.

  [Soldiers don’t salute with their guns. And I thought you didn’t know that much about aye-ayes.]

 

  I was barely listening to Whiskey and Tango do their usual back-and-forth. I had a much bigger problem on my mind: Now that I knew who’d broken into the clinic, what did I do about it?