Half-Off Ragnarok
Page 46

“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?”
“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.