The murder of John Jaax threw Jerry into a paralysis of grief. Time is supposed to heal all things, but time opened an emotional gangrene in Jerry. Nancy began to think that he was in a clinical depression.
“I feel like my life is over,” he said to her. “It’s just not the same anymore. My life will never be the same. It’s just inconceivable that Johnny could have had an enemy.” At the funeral in Kansas City, Nancy and Jerry’s children, Jaime and Jason, looked into coffin and said to their father, “Gee, Dad, he looks like you lying there.”
He called Kansas City Homicide nearly every day during October and November. The investigator just couldn’t break the case. Jerry began to think about getting a gun and going out to Kansas City to kill John’s business partner. He thought. If I do it, I’ll be in jail, and what about my children? An what if John’s partner hadn’t been behind the murder? Then I’ll have killed an innocent man.
November 1, Wednesday
The colony manager at the Reston monkey house will be called Bill Volt. As he watched his monkeys die, Volt became concerned. On November 1, a little less than a month after the shipment of monkeys had arrived, he put in a telephone call to Dan Dalgard, telling him that the monkeys that had recently arrived from the Philippines were dying in unusually large numbers. He had counted twenty-nine deaths out of a shipment of a hundred monkeys. That is, nearly a third of the monkeys had died. At the same time, a problem had developed with the building’s heating and air-handling system. The thermostat had failed, and the heat would not go off. The heaters dumped heat at full blast into the building, and the airconditioning system would not kick in. It had become awfully hot inside the building. Volt wondered if the heat might be putting stress on the monkeys. He had noticed that most of the deaths had taken place in one room, Room F, which was located on a long hallway at the back of the building.
Dalgard agreed to drive over to the monkey house and have a look, but he became busy with other thing and did not get there until the following week. When he arrived, Bill Volt took him to Room F, the focus of the deaths, so that Dalgard could inspect the monkeys. They put on white coats and surgical masks, and the two men walked down a long cinder-block corridor lined on both sides with steel doors leading to monkey rooms. The corridor was very warm, and they began to sweat. Through windows in the doors, they could see hundreds of monkey eyes looking at them as they passed. The monkeys were exquisitely sensitive to the presence of humans.
Room F contained only crab-eating monkeys from the October shipment from Ferlite Farms in the Philippines. Each monkey sat on its own cage. The monkeys were subdued. A few weeks ago, they had been swinging in the trees, and they didn’t like what had happened to them. Dalgard went from cage to cage, glancing at the animals. He could tell a lot about a monkey from the look in its eyes. He could also read its body language. He searched for animals that seemed passive or in pain.
Dalgard’s staring into their eyes drove them berserk. When he passed a dominant male and looked carefully at it, it rushed him, wanting to take him out. He found a monkey whose eyes had a dull appearance, not shiny and bright but glazed and somewhat inactive. The eyelids were down, slightly squinted. Normally the lids would be retracted so that could see the entire iris. A healthy monkey’s eyes would be like two bright circles in the monkey’s face. This animal’s eyelids had closed down slightly, and they dropped, so that the iris had become a squinting oval.
He put on leather gauntlet gloves, opened the door of the cage, reached inside, and pinned the monkey down. He slipped one hand out of a glove and quickly felt the monkey’s stomach. Yes—the animal felt warm to the touch. It had a fever. And it had a runny nose. He let go of the monkey and shut the door. He didn’t think that the animal was suffering from pneumonia or a cold. Perhaps the animal was affected by heat stress.
It was very warm in this room. He advised Bill Volt to put some pressure on the landlord to get the heating system fixed. He found a second animal that also had droopy eyelids, with that certain squint in the eyes. This one also felt hot to the touch, feverish. So there were two sick monkeys in Room F.
Both monkeys died during the night. Bill Volt found them in the morning, hunched up in their cages, staring with glassy, half-open eyes. This greatly concerned Volt, and he decided to dissect the animals, to try to see what had killed them. He carried the two deceased monkeys into an examination room down the hallway and shut the door after him, out of sight of the other monkeys. (You can’t cut up a dead monkey in front of other monkeys—it will cause a riot.) He opened the monkeys with a scalpel and began his inspection. He did not like what he saw, and did not understand it, so he called Dalgard on the telephone and said, “I wonder if you could come over here and have a look at these monkeys.”
Dalgard drove over to the monkey house immediately. His hands, which were so confident and skillful at taking apart clocks, probed the monkeys. What he saw inside the animals puzzled him. They appeared to have died of heat stress, brought on, he suspected, by the problems with the heating system in the building—but their spleens were weirdly enlarged. Heat stress wouldn’t blow up the spleen, would it? He noticed something else that gave him pause. Both animals had small amounts of blood in their intestines. What could do that?
Later that same day, another large shipment of crab-eating monkeys arrived from Ferlite Farms. Bill Volt put the new monkeys in Room H, two doors down the hall from Room F.
Dan Dalgard became very worried about the monkeys in Room F. He wondered if there was some kind of infectious agent going around the room.
The blood in the gut looked like the effects of a monkey virus called simian hemorrhagic fever, or SHF. This virus is deadly to monkeys, although it is harmless to people. (It can’t live in humans.) Simian fever can spread rapidly through a monkey colony and will generally wipe it out.
It was now Friday, November 10. Dalgard planned to spend the weekend fixing his clocks in the family room of his house. But as he laid out his tools and the pieces of an antique clock that needed fixing, he could not stop thinking about the monkeys. He was worried about them. Finally he told his wife that he had to go out on company business, and he put on his coat and drove over to the monkey house and parked in front of the building and went in through the front door. It was a glass door, and as he opened it, he felt the unnatural heat in the building wash over him, and he heard the familiar screeches of monkeys. He went into Room F. “Kra! Kra!” the monkeys cried at him in alarm. There were three more dead monkeys. They were curled up in their cages, their eyes open, expressionless. This was not good. He carried the dead monkeys into the examination room and slit the animals open, and looked inside.
Soon afterward, Dalgard began to keep a diary. He kept it on a personal computer, and he would type in a few words each day. Working quickly and without much thought, he gave his diary a title, calling it, “Chronology of Events”. It was now getting close to the middle of November, and as the sun went down in the afternoon and traffic jams built up on Leesburg Pike near his office, Dalgard worked on his diary. Tapping at the keys, he could recall in his mind’s eye what he had seen inside the monkeys.