Belly Up

by Stuart Gibbs

  “Plenty.”

  “So you could go through all the tapes from the days before Henry died and see if you can spot the killer throwing the jacks into Henry’s mouth.”

  Buck frowned. “In theory, yes. But if it’s as simple to feed Henry as Teddy says, then I doubt the tapes will do us any good. If the killer knows about the cameras—and I have good reason to suspect he does—then there are plenty of ways he could have avoided being filmed: going to the most crowded viewpoint and blending in with everyone else—or maybe wadding the jacks into some bread and giving them to a child to feed to Henry—or wearing a disguise. A baseball cap pulled down low over the eyes would be enough. Plus, we all know hundreds of people threw food to Henry every day. How could we tell which of them was the killer?”

  “Good point.” Mom looked defeated as she said it.

  “Did you ever find out why all the cameras in Reptile World went down?” I asked.

  “Power failure,” Buck replied.

  “Only for those cameras?” Mom asked.

  “Yes. A fuse blew in the room where the recordings are kept.”

  “At the exact time that the mamba was being let out? That seems awfully suspicious.”

  “Yes,” Buck admitted. “Yes, it does.”

  “Could the fuse be tripped manually?” Mom asked.

  “It could.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Inside the administration building.”

  “You need official access to get in there,” Mom said. “Sounds like this was an inside job.”

  “Oh, I don’t think there was ever any doubt of that.” Buck stood and stretched. “Well, it’s late and I’ve got a long drive home. I hope you’ve taken this little talk to heart, Teddy.”

  “I have, sir,” I said.

  “I have your word you’re done investigating?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good to hear.” Buck tousled my hair and smiled.

  “Am I in trouble for going into Henry’s pool?”

  Buck chuckled. “For what? Showing a little gumption? Nothing wrong with that. Reminds me of a kid I knew growing up around here. Little squirt named John James McCracken. He turned out all right.” Buck sheathed his knife, then added, “Of course, J.J. always knew when to leave well enough alone. Hopefully, you do too.”

  Then he ambled off toward the employee parking lot.

  I turned to Mom, expecting to be sent straight to bed, but to my surprise, she wasn’t even looking at me. She was just staring after Buck, lost in thought.

  I went inside and headed for my room.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Mom asked.

  I looked back through the screen door. “I thought I was grounded.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “I’m not?”

  Mom shook her head. “I’m not saying I’m happy about what you did, but I see now that you didn’t have much choice. You told me Henry had been murdered, but I didn’t help you. No one did.” Mom came inside and pointed to a seat at the table. I sat while she cut slices of cake for both of us.

  “Do you think Buck can find the killer?” I asked.

  Mom took her time before answering. “I’m not sure,” she finally admitted. “Buck’s a good man, but . . . I’m not so sure he’s coming at this the right way.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, he seems far more concerned about Charlie than Pete and Marge. Now, yes, Charlie has a criminal past, but I find it hard to believe he’d kill Henry for revenge. If he really was angry at the hippo, wouldn’t he have killed it back in the circus? Why wait until now?”

  “I don’t think Charlie knows that much about animals,” I said. I was having a hard time imagining him doing something so clever as using the jacks to kill Henry. Or freeing the mamba. Plus, he wasn’t tall enough to cut the glass on the mamba’s exhibit without using a stepstool.

  “Pete doesn’t know anything about animals either,” Mom admitted. “But then, maybe that’s all an act. He was a very successful PR man at some of J.J.’s other companies before he was transferred here. He can’t be as much of an idiot as he sometimes seems.”

  “Do you think he and Marge killed Henry?”

  Mom sighed, then sat down with a glass of milk. “I don’t know. I can see the motive. Henry’s been a constant thorn in Pete’s side. I can even see Pete getting so frustrated that he’d say he wanted Henry dead. I just can’t see him actually going through with it.”

  “I can see Marge doing it,” I said. “She’s mean.”

  “Can you see Marge coming up with the plan with the jacks?”

  “No. But I can imagine her feeding them to Henry if someone told her how to do it.”

  “How about setting the mamba free?”

  I thought about that a bit. “Maybe if she thought it’d scare me. Not to kill me, though.”

  Mom took a long gulp of milk, then said, “I think Buck might be biased toward investigating an ex-con, rather than one of his own employees. Although there’s plenty of other people who could have done this as well.”

  “Like who?”

  “Pete wasn’t the only person that Henry caused trouble. For a hippopotamus, he had a lot of enemies. I know Martin hated him. Everyone in administration did. And the marketing department too. And if you’re going to throw Charlie Conner in the mix, then you might as well count every other person he’d ever attacked or covered with crap.”

  “What about his keepers? I heard none of them liked him.”

  Mom immediately shook her head. “Maybe they didn’t. But I’ve never met a keeper in my life who’d harm an animal. And anyone who works with hippos chose to do so. They’d know what the risks were. J.J. hired some of the best keepers from around the country to come here. Each of those people had years of experience with hippos. They wouldn’t kill him.”

  “Even for money? What if they were really broke and someone offered them a whole lot of cash?”

  “Like who?”

  I thought a bit, but could only come up with one person who had a great deal of money. “J.J. McCracken? I’m sure he wanted to get rid of Henry too.”

  Mom considered that, then reluctantly admitted, “I guess it’s possible. Whatever the case, that’s an awfully long list of suspects, any one of whom could have killed Henry—and gone after you .”

  I got a queasy feeling in my stomach. Every minute Buck spent going after the wrong suspect was a minute the real killer was still out there, free to come after me again.

  Mom must have noticed I was getting worried, because she reached across the table and set her hand on mine. “It’ll be okay,” she said. “We’ll get to the bottom of this. But for the time being, when I say ‘Stay in my office with me,’ stay there, all right?”

  I nodded. “Does this mean I’m not in trouble anymore?”

  “Yes. And I think it’d be okay if you came to the party tomorrow night.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. I’d like to meet this new friend of yours.”

  I blushed a bit, thinking of Summer. Mom laughed, then grabbed our plates and took them to the sink.

  Despite the good front she was putting up, I knew the real reason Mom was letting me go to the party: She felt I’d be safer there with her than I would be at home alone.

  Sadly, I felt the same way. Our trailer was a cheap prefab job with a cheesy lock on the door and walls you could practically poke your finger through. Plus, it sat in the middle of nowhere, thirty miles from the closest police station. True, we had neighbors, but they’d all be at the party the next night as well. You couldn’t really come up with a less protected place to be.

  That night, I went to bed with a chair jammed under the doorknob of my room, just to be on the safe side.

  No one tried to kill me during the night and the next day passed uneventfully. I stayed with Mom at work, although this time it was a bit more fun. I think she still felt guilty about not taking my claim that Henry had been murdered more seriously, bec
ause she let me go into the gorilla exhibit with her, which violated about forty-three FunJungle rules and directives. I didn’t go out where any of the tourists could see me, but it was still awfully cool. I hadn’t been so close to gorillas since Africa. Kwame, the two-year-old, came right over to play with me.

  Still, that was only about fifteen minutes out of what proved to be a very long day. I couldn’t wait for the party, not only because it meant I’d get to see Summer again, but because I was going nuts cooped up in Monkey Mountain, waiting for Buck Grassley to do all the investigating. Every time the phone rang, I’d tense up in anticipation, hoping it was Buck calling to report that he’d solved the case. Maybe he’d gone through Charlie Conner’s locker and found some jacks and a metal file—or he’d confronted Pete Thwacker and Pete had cracked like an egg and confessed to everything. The call never came, though. We didn’t hear a thing from Buck all day.

  Or from Summer, for that matter. I texted her a few times to see if she’d heard anything, but all I got back was a quick blurb: Meet me at the check-in desk at 7. And that was it. After a while, I decided not to reach out anymore or I’d start to look pathetic.

  It was a slow day at the park as well, easily the slowest since the opening. Few people wanted to come pay full price to visit the park without Carnivore Canyon when the exhibit was going to be open the very next day. Plus, the park shut down an hour early to prep for the big party.

  Mom and I headed home at six to shower and put on our best clothes, which wasn’t saying much. Mom had never had a reason to own a fancy dress—or even a place to hang one. Besides, she’d always felt it was a travesty to spend hundreds of dollars on clothes she was only going to wear once or twice when the durable ones she wore every day cost a fraction of that. “With all the money people spend on fashion every year,” she’d say, “we could cure every disease in Africa.” She just put on clean slacks, a nice blouse, and a little perfume. All I had to wear was a collared polo shirt and my one pair of pants without a tear in the knees.

  Not surprisingly, most of the other party guests had very different ideas about fashion. I’d never been to a big, fancy event before. (FunJungle’s Grand Opening had been far more family-friendly and casual.) It had never occurred to me that women would ever wear diamonds to the zoo. Or ball gowns. Or even high-heeled shoes. But there they were.

  The party attracted wealthy people from all over Texas. Even though Texas was a big state and it could be hours between cities, Texans still loved to drive. I’d heard of people driving from San Antonio to Houston just for dinner—and that was almost four hours each way. So it was no big deal for people to head in from every corner of the state for one of the biggest social events of the year. And then, to top that, there were people who’d flown in by private jet from other parts of the country.

  All in all, over two thousand people were coming. There was already a long line to pass through the metal detectors into the party when Mom and I arrived. Everyone was grousing about the extra security—they’d already passed through the detectors at the front gates before being shuttled to Carnivore Canyon in golf carts—but I was pleased to see it. I felt safe for the first time in days.

  Carnivore Canyon itself was too small to hold all those people, so the party took place on a wide lawn in front of the exhibit. J.J. McCracken had spared no expense. There were dozens of buffet tables piled with food, as well as several entire sides of beef roasting on spits. (Fans had been set up to blow the smell of meat away from Carnivore Canyon so it wouldn’t drive the animals crazy with hunger.) There was a big dance floor, which was completely empty—and an outdoor bar, which was packed. There were strings of lights and disco balls and ice sculptures that had probably been lions and tigers at one point, but they had already melted beyond recognition in the heat. The press was out in force. I recognized several local reporters working the party. Camera flashes were popping everywhere. And that was merely the press J.J. McCracken had allowed in. I heard several people say the paparazzi were piled four deep outside the front gates.

  Mom and I had little interest in the party itself. Instead, we made a beeline for Carnivore Canyon. All the hard work on the exhibit had paid off; it really looked like a natural canyon, carved by centuries of water running through rock, rather than something that had been built by men over a few months. An elevated walkway ran through most of it, letting you observe the animals from above, or see eye-to-eye with mountain lions as they perched on rock ledges or leopards nestled in the branches of trees. For the most part, there was no barrier between us and the animals; it felt like we were in their world, rather than the other way around. (Although there were a few points where a very fine wire mesh was strung, so thin you could barely see it.)

  Surprisingly, there weren’t many guests in the exhibit; most had come only for the party. Even the few who had ventured beyond the buffet tables paid little attention to the animals. Instead, they clustered on the walkways, sipping champagne and socializing.

  While I found their disinterest annoying, it was also to my advantage. Mom and I had much of Carnivore Canyon to ourselves. There were no crowds to shove through, no pedestrian traffic jams. The guests might have been ignoring the animals, but that was better than throwing food to them. As it was close to sunset, the animals were at their most active, having spent the day sleeping. They eagerly explored their new habitats, bounding through the rocks and splashing in their pools. Three young mountain lions wrestled comically; otters slid down a slope into their pond, and a grizzly bear the size of a car paced on a ledge a few feet away from us. I was so captivated, I forgot about Summer. It wasn’t until my phone rang at ten minutes after seven that I realized what time it was.

  “Where are you?” Summer snapped when I answered.

  “By the leopards,” I told her. “Sorry. I’ll come right out.”

  “No, stay there,” Summer said. “Where you are is better.”

  I wasn’t quite sure what she meant by that, but she hung up before I could ask. I got my answer soon enough, though. Summer got to the leopards quickly, bearing two skewers of chicken satay and a Diet Coke, her bodyguards in tow. She was wearing a pink dress and pink high heels. Her hair had been done; It looked like enough aerosol hairspray to rip a hole in the ozone layer had been deployed. I was now so used to seeing her dressed down, it took me a moment to recognize her.

  We were a good way into the canyon, so only guests who truly cared about seeing the animals had ventured that far. There were only a few people about; they all recognized Summer as she passed, but had the good manners to not pester her for autographs. I noticed they all kept an eye on her, however, and then stared at Mom and me curiously once Summer began talking to us, wondering who we were and how on earth we rated highly enough to earn her attention.

  “Yeah,” Summer said. “It’s way better back here. Did you see all the paparazzi out front?”

  “Nope,” I replied. “For some reason, they didn’t seem that interested in us.”

  Summer laughed, then turned to Mom. “You must be Mrs. Fitzroy.”

  Mom smiled. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Summer. Theodore’s told me a great deal about you.”

  I’m not sure why, but even that made me blush a bit. Summer and Mom talked a bit about Mom’s research and life in the Congo before I finally got a chance to ask, “Where’s your dad? I thought he was coming.”

  “He’s right over there.” Summer pointed with a chicken skewer. To my surprise, J.J. McCracken was already on the walkway, two exhibits farther down. He was talking to Doc.

  “How’d he get past us?” Mom asked, a second before I could say the same thing. “We’ve been here all along. . . .”

  “He came in the back way, through the keeper’s entrance to the exhibit,” Summer explained. “Daddy hates fancy events like this. He doesn’t like crowds.”

  “But he always seems so happy at them,” Mom said.

  “He fakes it well. All part of the business, he says. If Daddy had it
his way, the only way he’d socialize would be playing poker at the house. So he always slips in without anyone noticing, if he can. That’s why I said to stay back here. He wanted to meet Teddy where no one would see him.”

  I coughed, surprised. “Your father wants to meet me?”

  “Yeah. C’mon. He doesn’t have much time.” Summer quickly led us down the walkway. “The ribbon-cutting ceremony’s soon.”

  The sun had set now and the stars were coming out above. Lights had come on in the exhibits to allow everyone to see the animals—but the walkway was getting dimmer by the second. J.J. McCracken was just a silhouette as we approached.

  It wasn’t surprising that we hadn’t noticed him, despite being close by. Even though I’d seen thousands of pictures of him—maybe more—J.J. McCracken turned out to be an easy man to overlook. He was much smaller than I’d been led to believe, not much taller than his own daughter and surprisingly slight of build. He had very plain features that seemed mismatched on his face. J.J. made no secret of the fact that he wasn’t attractive, often remarking that he was “about as handsome as a toad in a suit”—and claiming that Summer obviously got her good looks from her mother, who was a famous fashion model. (Summer’s mother always said she’d been attracted to her husband’s ‘inner beauty’ but most people figured his massive bank account had probably been pretty attractive too.) J.J. was wearing a tuxedo, but he looked uncomfortable in it, constantly tugging at his tie and shifting about like he had ants crawling over him.

  As small as J.J. was, he had the personality of a man several times larger. I could sense it as we approached. He didn’t notice us right away, as he was deep in conversation with Doc and staring down into the exhibit below.

  I looked where he was looking. To my surprise, there were three jaguars down by a fake stream. I guess they’d arrived at FunJungle without anyone knowing.

  “So what happened to it?” J.J. was asking.

  “Toxoplasmosis,” Doc said. “It’s primarily a disease of house cats. Although wild cats can get it. And human infants, if they have pet cats.”