Unlocking the reptile house was like coming home after an annoyingly short absence. Many of the reptiles were still active after their long and exciting night. Some of them froze when they saw me walking by, their instincts kicking in and causing them to pretend to be bits of fallen wood or pieces of the wall. Others ignored me completely, so accustomed to humans that I was no more important to them than an empty room. If I came back with food, maybe then they’d give a crap about me.
Shami rose in the classic cobra “stand” position when I passed his enclosure, flaring his hood slightly as he looked at me. I stared into his unblinking eyes, trying to guess what he was thinking. It was easier with wadjet females. At least they looked mostly human, and could be counted on to show their emotions in the same way.
“Alex?” Dee sounded confused, like I was the last person she’d been expecting to find in the reptile house at this hour. The sound of the front door swinging shut followed her question. I turned to face her.
She was wearing a smart-looking blouse and pencil skirt combination, one that was just a little old-fashioned, and hence went perfectly with her impeccable beehive wig. Only the uneven curves of her painted-on eyebrows told me that she was as exhausted as I was. That was a good sign. I didn’t want it to be Dee. Whatever was going on, whoever was involved with it, I didn’t want it to be Dee. I somehow mustered a smile.
“Hi, Dee,” I said. “How are you this morning?”
“What are you doing here? It’s not even seven o’clock.” she asked, walking toward me, and then continuing on past me as she made her way to her office. “You never beat me into the office. Is everything okay at home?”
“We had sort of an exciting night last night.” My eyes were still dry, and I’d found sand on my pillow when I’d finally given up and gotten out of bed. “Do you have a minute to talk?”
“Sure. Come on in.”
Dee’s office was impeccable, unlike mine: every surface was cleaned to within an inch of its life, and only the most essential items were allowed to claim territory. There were a few carefully curated “personal touches,” including a forced-perspective picture of Dee, her daughter Megan, and her husband, whose name I realized I didn’t know. The camera angle had been chosen to make it harder to tell that he was in the neighborhood of seven feet tall, and it worked, mostly, if you didn’t know what you were looking for.
“Did you sleep last night?” she asked, putting her purse on her desk and leaning over to switch on the computer.
“Not really,” I said, following her into the office and closing the door. “I had a lot to do. Sleep wasn’t on the agenda.”
“Oh?”
There were a lot of places I could begin. I didn’t want to tell her about Shelby—not yet. That wasn’t my secret to share, and as long as Shelby wasn’t endangering the local cryptids, I didn’t have to force the issue. Instead, I went for the biggest shock value: “There was a cockatrice in my yard last night. I looked into its eyes.”
Dee’s gasp woke her hair. It hissed softly beneath her wig. “Alex! Oh sweet Athena! Are you all right? You’re all right, aren’t you?” She paused, almost visibly moving on to the next thought. “How are you all right? If you met its eyes, you should have . . . you should . . .”
“Luckily, my cousin was on hand, and I got a good enough look at it before my eyes started turning to stone that I was able to tell her which antivenin to use on me. It was a closer thing than I enjoy, but I’m fine now. A little dehydrated. Nothing a few bottles of Gatorade can’t fix.”
“So a cockatrice turned Andrew to stone?” Her voice was heavy was bald relief . . . and with eagerness. The only question was whether she was eager to have the mystery of Andrew’s death resolved, or eager to have me convinced of what had killed him.
“Yes,” I said, and watched her brighten. “Also, no.” She dimmed just as quickly, expression turning puzzled.
“I . . . I don’t understand. How was it a cockatrice if it wasn’t a cockatrice?”
“It wasn’t alone.” I pulled out my phone, opening my gallery. The most recent image—the puncture wound on Mr. O’Malley’s leg—filled the screen. I held it toward Dee, like Perseus holding his mirrored shield between himself and the fabled Medusa. “Look familiar? Because I checked these against the field guide, and they have the same diameter and spacing as the bite of a Pliny’s gorgon.”
The hissing was louder now, her wig beginning to pulse as her snakes worked themselves up into a fury. “I . . . I don’t . . .”
“We found this wound on my next-door neighbor’s leg after he died of petrifaction. I took venom samples from the surrounding tissue. They tested as gorgon. I didn’t get enough to tell the subtype, but we both know this bite wasn’t made by a greater gorgon, and the bite radius is pretty compelling.” I lowered my phone. “So you tell me, Dee. Please. How was this man killed by a cockatrice if he was bitten by a gorgon? Why was there a cockatrice in my yard? I can’t imagine the two things are unconnected. Then again, I’m the least imaginative member of my family. Maybe I’ll believe you, if you can explain.”
“I . . .” Dee’s shoulders slumped as she reached up to steady her pulsing wig. “I swear to you, Alex, I don’t know. I can’t say for sure that I’d tell you if I knew it was a member of my community who’d done this, because I’ve never been in that position, but I can tell you it’s not any member of my community who I know. They would never have done this.”
“You have to know how this looks.”
“Yeah, well, maybe so does somebody else, did you consider that?” She glared at me, the familiar fierceness back in her eyes. “Anybody who knows I work for you could have mocked up those bite marks as a way to make you accuse me.”
“To what end?”
“To keep you from looking for the real killer.”
I paused. “That’s not a bad theory,” I said, after a moment of thought. “There’s just one problem.”
“What’s that?”
“We’re right back at it being something other than just a cockatrice. So if it wasn’t a Pliny’s gorgon, what was it?”
Dee stared at me for a moment, eyes wide behind her tinted lenses. She started to open her mouth, presumably to offer an answer.
The sound of someone knocking on the office door stopped her cold.
With me and Dee both inside her office, the reptile house wasn’t officially open; what’s more, unless I’d been more careless than I thought, the outer door shouldn’t have been unlocked. We exchanged a glance. I nodded, and she reached up to put one hand on the arm of her glasses, clearly ready to pull them off. I couldn’t draw a firearm on zoo property without doing a lot of explaining, and so I just turned to the door, prepared to leap out of the way, and opened it.
Chandi didn’t flinch. She had eschewed her fancy clothes today, instead wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt advertising a brightly colored, presumably age appropriate puppet show called Lazy Town. There were alligator-shaped barrettes in her hair. “Am I going to be allowed to see my fiancé as we agreed?” she demanded, frowning.
“Chandi.” I returned her frown. “The reptile house isn’t open yet. How did you get in?”
Her eyes darted to the side. “The front door was unlocked.”
“No, it wasn’t,” said Dee, stepping up behind me. “Chandi, do you have a key? I thought we discussed this . . .”
“I have a key for emergencies,” said the little girl sullenly. “Humans being murdered inside the safe haven we arranged for Shami constitutes an emergency. I am allowed to use my key under these circumstances.”
“Okay, hold on a second,” I said. “Chandi, did you knock before you let yourself in?”
“No,” she admitted.
“So that’s where we draw the line, all right? You need to knock before you assume you’re allowed to let yourself in, whether or not you think we’re having an emergency.” I paused. “Wait—the zoo isn’t open yet. How did you even get to the reptile house?”
&
nbsp; “I just told you that,” said Chandi. “Humans are being murdered.”
The thought struck me and Dee at the same time. We exchanged a horrified look. “Lloyd,” she said.
“Chandi, I need you to listen to me very carefully.” I turned back to her. “Was the man at the front gate alive or dead when you came inside?”
“He was dead. Now may I see Shami?”
“Dee?”
“I’ve got it.” Dee stepped past me, putting her hands on Chandi’s shoulders and steering the little girl firmly away from the office door. “You can see him for a moment, sweetie, but if there’s been another murder, they’re going to close the zoo, and you don’t want to be here when that happens, do you? It would come with so many inconvenient questions, and I don’t think you want to explain them to your parents . . .” Her voice faded into so much reassuring muttering, punctuated by Chandi’s objections.
I didn’t stay to listen. I was already running for the front door.
The zoo was still deserted. What did I just do? I thought, racing down the main trail toward the gate. Lloyd had been alive when I arrived at work. Dee came in after me. If she was the killer, then I had decided to leave her alone with a little girl.
A little girl with venomous fangs of her own. We weren’t even sure wadjet could be harmed by gorgon venom, given their immunity to everything else. Chandi had a finely-honed sense of self-preservation, and an even more finely-honed sense of entitlement. If Dee attempted to attack her rather than giving her access to her fiancé, I was betting on the wadjet.
The sound of voices told me I was on the right track. I jogged to a stop where I would be concealed by a large patch of shrubbery and peered through the branches at the crowd that had gathered around Lloyd’s body. I hadn’t realized that many people came to the work this early. His clipboard was on the ground, its utility finally at an end. Although I supposed that if the police went looking for a murderer, it would give them a convenient list of suspects.
There were too many people there for me to risk approaching. They’d ask questions, and later they’d remember that I not only came in to work early, but appeared to conveniently “discover” the body with the rest of them. I turned away, pulling my phone from my pocket, as I walked slowly back toward the reptile house. I didn’t want to get her involved. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to speak to her right now. And that didn’t matter, because I needed the backup.
“Shelby? Hi, it’s Alex. We’ve got a problem at the zoo . . .”
Chandi and Dee were both alive when I stepped through the reptile house doors. That was a comfort. They were shouting at each other. That wasn’t.
“—can’t keep me out! I’ll tell my father! I’ll tell everyone! I’m allowed—”
“—believe your parents will be mad at me for looking out for your best interests? You need to think about your safety—”
“—am I supposed to develop a proper immunity if you don’t let me—”
“—will be time for that—”
I put two fingers in my mouth and whistled shrilly, bringing both sides of the argument to a crashing halt. The two turned to stare at me, eyes wide. For a moment, the only sound was the hissing of Dee’s hair.
“Both of you, listen up,” I said. “Lloyd is dead. Chandi, did you notice anything about the body when you came in?”
“Just that his eyes had turned to stone,” she said, as dismissively as a human child might report an adult with a visible booger.
“What?” said Dee. “But that’s—”
I cut her off. “That’s what I was afraid of. Dee, is there any way we can smuggle Chandi out of the zoo before the police get here?” I raised a hand to cut off her protests before they could begin. “You didn’t check in at the gate, Chandi, because if you’d tried, Lloyd would have made you wait until we opened. That means the police will be really interested in how you got inside, and why you didn’t call 911 as soon as you saw the dead man. Do you want to go through all that?”
“No,” she admitted sullenly.
“I can probably get her out one of the delivery gates if I take her now,” said Dee. “But, Alex, really, we need to talk about this.”
“We’ll talk about it when you get back here. Right now, getting Chandi to safety is more important.”
“I thought you might say that.” Dee frowned. “What are you going to do?”
“Isn’t that obvious?” I shrugged. “I’m going to get us ready to open.”
Dee looked briefly like she wanted to protest, but thought better of it. Instead, she took Chandi by the shoulder and walked her to the door. For once, the young wadjet didn’t object or try to bargain for five more minutes. She just went with Dee, leaving me alone with the reptiles.
I looked at the enclosures around me, sighed, and said, “All right, fellows. Let’s get ready for an opening that’s never going to happen.”
Shelby showed up five minutes before the reptile house doors were supposed to officially open. She was wearing her uniform and looked as fresh as a daisy, even though I knew she’d been awake almost as long as I had the night before. “The zoo’s closed,” she announced without preamble. Then she paused, looking around the open space. “Is Dee in her office?”
“No,” I said. “Dee had to deliver a package to one of the gates. She should be back any minute.”
Shelby’s eyes widened. “You let her go out there alone? Alex—”
“Why shouldn’t he have let me go out alone?” asked Dee, stepping through the door behind my girlfriend. “I’m his assistant, not his prisoner.”
“Oy!” Shelby whirled, taking a large step backward in the process, so that the three of us wound up standing in a loose circle. A loose, extremely tense circle. Shelby eyed Dee suspiciously. “Don’t sneak up on me like that!”
“Don’t stand in front of the door and maybe I won’t,” snapped Dee. She took a deep breath, calming herself, and said, “I’m sorry. That was rude. Did you hear about Lloyd?”
“What do you know about Lloyd, then?” asked Shelby.
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “That’s about as subtle as a hammer, Shelby.”
“Sometimes subtle isn’t the best plan,” Shelby shot back. “Sometimes subtle gets you killed. But you didn’t let me go on. The dead man—it’s not Lloyd.”
“What?” I lowered my hand. “What do you mean?”
“I mean it’s not Lloyd. It’s one of the other guards. They must have traded off before whatever happened.”
“Oh, thank God.” I realized how bad that sounded as soon as it was said. I didn’t waste time trying to take it back. Someone I knew and liked was alive; someone I didn’t know as well was dead. Being relieved was only human. “Dee, did you get Chandi out of the zoo without her being seen?”
Dee nodded, looking incredibly relieved for some reason. “She was really unhappy about it.”
“We’ll make it up to her somehow.”
Shelby blinked, looking more confused than suspicious as she asked, “Chandi? Isn’t that the little girl who’s always lurking about in here?”
“Every chance she gets,” I confirmed. I looked back to Dee. “Do you trust me?”
“You’re the boss,” said Dee.
“Okay. If that’s the case . . . the zoo’s closed. The police should be coming to talk to us all soon, since we were some of the last people to come into the zoo before the murder. Do you have my address?”
Dee nodded.
“Good. When we’re done here, we meet up at my place. All of us.” I could explain the situation to Grandma during my drive home, and Sarah would be fine as long as we distracted her somehow. This was getting bad. This was no longer the sort of thing I could take care of on my own, if it ever really had been—something I now sincerely doubted. Shelby was the closest thing I had to backup. I was going to be stuck with her for the long haul.
Dee’s eyes widened, and she darted an uneasy glance at Shelby. “All three of us? You know, if I’m not going
to be working today, I have some things at home that could really use—”
“The man at the gate wasn’t Lloyd, but he was still turned partially to stone,” I said. “So was Andrew. So was Mr. O’Malley. I don’t think you can stay out of this one, Dee. Will you come to my house, or do I need to find yours?” The unspoken threat hung in the air between us, only Shelby’s politely puzzled expression keeping it from turning truly menacing. If Dee wasn’t on our side, if she wasn’t an ally, there was every chance she was an enemy. I couldn’t afford to take that chance.
“I . . .” Dee hesitated. Then her shoulders slumped, and she nodded. “I’ll be there.”
“All right. Shelby? You want to head back to the big cats? Maybe it’s best if the police don’t find us together again.”
“Aye-aye,” she said, snapped a sloppy, mocking salute, and jogged back out the door to the zoo. In a matter of seconds, it was me, Dee, and the reptiles, alone again.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said, with a mistrustful glance. Then she walked away, heading for the closet where we kept the lizard food.
I grimaced and followed. Even if the zoo was being shut down for the day, even if we had a petrifactor to stop, the animals still needed to be fed.
The police arrived while I was tossing trout into Crunchy’s tank. The big alligator snapping turtle was still full from the night before, and took his time making the fish disappear. The officer responsible for taking my statement didn’t look happy about that. It could have been worse; he could have been talking to Dee, who was feeding our rattlesnakes.
The time line I’d guessed at from Chandi’s arrival was confirmed by the interviewing officer: Dee and I were among the last people to enter the zoo before the man at the gate had died. Not, I was relieved to realize, the very last—we were getting the same treatment Shelby and I had received the day before, and I doubted that would have been the case if either of us had been a prime suspect.
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