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.
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.”