Poached Read online

  “You have to be kidding me,” Kristi said. “Tell me you’re not seriously considering this.”

  “What’s so wrong with it?” Pete asked.

  “Everything,” Kristi replied. “People don’t come to a zoo to see fake animals.”

  “We have fake dinosaurs,” Pete countered.

  “Because dinosaurs are extinct, you moron.”

  Even this didn’t faze Pete. “I understand why you’re upset,” he said. “You’re worried that you’d lose your job if there weren’t animals to tend to. True, fake animals would certainly require fewer staff to care for them—at a further savings to the company, I might add—but we’d still need some people such as yourself to maintenance the creatures and sell the idea that they’re real. This is quite a groundbreaking concept, if I do say so myself. If you’ll excuse me, I need to go work up an action plan. It’s been a pleasure talking to you, Kristi.”

  Kristi tried to say something else, but it was too late. Pete had hung up.

  The koala keeper returned her attention to me. “See what I’m dealing with here?”

  “Pete’s an idiot,” I said.

  “Unfortunately, he’s an idiot with power.” Kristi sighed. “I’m just scared this whole thing’s going to blow up in our faces. And you know who’s going to look bad then? Me. Not Pete Thwacker. His whole plan hinges upon FunJungle security finding Kazoo quickly, and frankly, I don’t have much faith in them. They’re not even trying to find the real thief. They’re trying to find you.”

  I nodded sadly, and then thought to ask, “Do you have any idea who the real thief is?”

  “Sure,” Kristi said. “I have plenty of ideas. Only I can’t get Marge or any of her stooges to listen to one of them.”

  I straightened up, intrigued. “I’m listening.”

  Kristi gave me a doubtful look, then seemed to think better of it. “Okay. You’re the one who figured out who killed Henry, right? I think Freddie Malloy is a possibility.”

  “The actor?” I asked. “Why would he want to steal Kazoo?”

  “Because he thinks Kazoo ruined his career,” Kristi replied.

  “How? If anyone ruined Freddie’s career, it was Freddie.”

  “Well, let’s face it, Freddie’s a bit delusional. I mean, the guy thought that provoking dangerous animals on stage would be a good career move. He believes FunJungle canceled his show because they wanted to focus on Kazoo instead.”

  “But then he ought to be angry at FunJungle, right?” I asked. “Not the koala.”

  “Yes, if he were a rational human being,” Kristi replied. “But he’s not. He hates Kazoo. I saw him skulking around here all the time—and once, I heard him say he wanted to throw Kazoo into the crocodile pit.”

  I gulped. I’d always thought Freddie wasn’t playing with a full deck, but this was worse than I realized. I thought back to my encounter with the actor that morning, how he was still skulking around KoalaVille, desperate to be noticed. If he’d gotten rid of Kazoo, it must have been driving him insane that a fake koala was still attracting more attention than he was. “And you told security about him?” I asked.

  “I tried to. But Marge is so sure you’re the culprit here, she won’t listen to anything else.” Kristi rolled her eyes. “I probably should have reported the threat when Freddie first made it, but at the time I thought it was all just talk.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  Kristi shrugged. “Two weeks or so. Not long after Kazoo arrived here.”

  “Who else do you think the kidnapper might be?” I asked.

  “Charlie Connor,” Kristi replied. “He’s one of the guys who dress up in animal costumes here—”

  “Oh, I know who Charlie is,” I told her. “He was a suspect in Henry’s murder.”

  Kristi reacted with surprise. “Really?”

  I nodded. Charlie was a dwarf ex-con who had become a clown after serving time in prison. He had briefly been at the same poorly run circus as Henry, where the hippo had attacked him one day. (Charlie had chalked this up to the hippo having an inexplicable hatred of little people.) Eventually, both of them had ended up at FunJungle. Charlie played a character named Larry the Lizard, which merely involved wearing a reptile costume and standing still so that tourists could take pictures with him. There were a lot of characters like this at FunJungle: Eleanor Elephant, Zelda Zebra, Uncle O-Rang—although Henry the Hippo had been the most popular by far. Until his alter ego had ended up dead. After that, fake Henry had been cut from the mascot squad.

  “I’m surprised Charlie’s still working here,” I said. “He hates being a lizard.”

  “He’s not a lizard anymore,” Kristi said. “He’s a koala.”

  Now it was my turn to be surprised. “Since when?”

  “Since Kazoo got here. FunJungle took everyone who used to play Larry the Lizard and switched them to playing Kazoo.”

  “Then what happened to Larry the Lizard?”

  “FunJungle surreptitiously retired him. I don’t think many people ever liked Larry. He wasn’t that interesting a character, and frankly, he looked like a mutant frog to me.”

  I thought back to all the times I’d seen someone dressed as Kazoo at FunJungle. There were probably too many to count. To my surprise, I realized that someone in a Kazoo costume had been stationed near KoalaVille almost all the time during regular park hours. I’d simply stopped noticing. This happened a lot at FunJungle. You tended to forget that the characters were merely costumes with real people inside them and started to think of them as scenery. I wasn’t the only person who’d done this. The actors had plenty of stories about tourists discussing everything from crimes they’d committed to their secret ATM codes right in front of the mascots.

  I had probably walked right past Charlie Connor a dozen times, if not more, without having any idea he was inside the Kazoo suit. This was a bit unsettling, as Charlie didn’t like me much. During the investigation into Henry’s death, Charlie had secretly given me some information, but park security had forced me to cough up his name, and Charlie had felt I’d betrayed him. Now that I thought about it, there were at least two times when Kazoo had tried to trip me as I’d passed. At the time I’d figured it was all in my head, but now I was quite sure it was Charlie Connor lashing out at me.

  “Why was he angry at Kazoo?” I asked.

  “He wasn’t,” Kristi told me. “He’s angry at FunJungle. He claims he was badly hurt here as a result of criminal negligence by the park.”

  “How?”

  “Large Marge fell on him.”

  “Oh. I actually saw that happen.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah. Large Marge was chasing me at the time. I was racing to tell J.J. McCracken that my parents had been framed for Henry’s death. Marge tried to stop me—and Charlie got in the way. She squashed him like a pancake.”

  Kristi laughed, then seemed to feel bad about it. “Well, Charlie claimed he was suffering from chronic back pain as a result. He said he could barely walk and wanted a couple million dollars to settle. But the park hired a private detective who caught him dancing at a nightclub, and the case was bounced out of court.”

  “How do you know all this?” I asked.

  “Charlie told me,” Kristi said. “He talks to me a lot. He’s also asked me out a bunch of times.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “No, of course. Not because he’s a little person or anything, though. Because he’s a criminal. The guy admitted to trying to bilk a couple million dollars out of FunJungle—and then thought I’d go on a date with him? Forget it.”

  “So how does Kazoo fit into all of this?” I asked.

  “Charlie claimed he’d come up with a way to take FunJungle for even more money than he would have made through his insurance scam. He never told me what it was, but ransoming Kazoo fits the bill. Or selling him to some rich collector like Flora Hancock.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “This crazy lady who collect
s wild animals,” Kristi told me. “Her husband made a ton of money in oil, and now she’s got her own private menagerie: lions, tigers, monkeys, bears. Some folks say she even has an elephant. She lives all the way up by Waco, but she’s already been here five times to see Kazoo. One of the other keepers pointed her out to me. She’s hard to miss. She’s the only person I’ve ever seen who comes here in designer clothes and high heels.”

  “My parents said a collector might have wanted Kazoo,” I said. “Did you ever hear her say anything about that?”

  “Oh yeah. She came right up to me here one day and asked about it.” Kristi stuck her nose in the air and spoke in a deep Texas accent. “ ‘Child, you must tell me. How did J.J. evah get himself a koala beah?’ ”

  The impression was funny enough to make me laugh. “What’d you say?”

  “That Kazoo didn’t belong to J.J. He belonged to Australia. And that no private collector can get themselves a koala. Australia would never allow it.”

  “And what’d she say to that?”

  Kristi shifted back into her Flora Hancock impression again. “ ‘Oh, they might, sugah. They just might.’ ”

  “You think she looked into it?” I asked.

  “She seemed very determined,” Kristi said. “And once she discovered there was no legal way to get a koala, maybe she started looking for an illegal way.”

  “Like Charlie Connor,” I concluded.

  “Exactly. I’m sure he saw her here. Maybe he overheard her talking about wanting a koala at some point and then approached her with a plan. If anyone could have made off with Kazoo, it’s him. He probably knows KoalaVille better than anyone. All he does is lurk around here in that koala suit eight hours a day.”

  “And because he’s a criminal, he probably knows how to get around the security cameras and stuff,” I suggested.

  “Oh, you don’t have to be a criminal to do that,” Kristi said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “The security cameras inside the koala exhibit don’t work. They threw up this building so fast—they wired them in, but they never connected them to the main system properly.”

  I sat up in surprise once again. “The cameras don’t record at all? Then how did I get filmed last night?”

  “Because the cameras outside the exhibit work. They were all installed when the park was built. But the ones inside, everything in the viewing area, Kazoo’s pen, and even this one”—Kristi pointed at a camera mounted on the wall at the ceiling of her office—“they don’t do a thing. I’ve been complaining about it for weeks, but no one’s gotten around to fixing it. Marge told me not to worry because the cameras alone should have been a deterrent—as long as everyone thought they worked. But obviously, they weren’t.”

  I shook my head sadly. “Did Charlie know the cameras didn’t work?”

  “I didn’t tell him, but someone else might have. Or someone might have talked about it in front of him while he was wearing that ridiculous costume one day. Or maybe he just figured it out for himself.”

  “And Freddie Malloy could have figured it out too,” I suggested.

  “Absolutely,” Kristi agreed.

  My phone buzzed. It was a text from my father: Done here. Where R U?

  “Is that important?” Kristi asked.

  “Kind of,” I said.

  Kristi checked her watch and got to her feet. “I better get going. I didn’t expect to talk so long. I have to get back to pretending a stuffed animal is real for the tourists.” Kristi sighed. “Pete was wrong. Taking care of the fake isn’t less work than caring for the real thing. It’s more. Kazoo was easy to handle. But with the fake . . . I’m constantly worried someone’s going to catch on. And when they do, it’s going to be bad.”

  I got up too, and Kristi shepherded me toward the door.

  “Can I tell my parents about Freddie and Charlie?” I asked.

  “That’s what I want you to do,” Kristi said. “That’s why I told you all this. I can’t get the ear of anyone important here. I’m just a keeper. But your parents are more connected. Someone has to either get our security to focus on finding the real kidnapper—or the police need to be brought aboard. We need to locate Kazoo and get him back here as fast as possible. Every minute counts.”

  Her voice cracked, like she might be on the edge of crying. I froze, halfway through the door. “Why?”

  “Most people don’t realize it, but koalas don’t eat just any eucalyptus,” Kristi said. “The type Kazoo eats is very special. It doesn’t grow in Texas, so we have to fly it in from Australia twice a week. Whoever stole Kazoo didn’t take any of it—”

  “He doesn’t have any food?” I asked, concerned.

  “No,” Kristi said sadly. “So if we don’t find Kazoo soon, he’ll starve to death.”

  CARNIVORE CONTROL

  I called Dad right after leaving KoalaVille.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “Near Carnivore Canyon,” I replied. Technically that wasn’t a lie. I thought my father might get upset if he knew I’d been to KoalaVille.

  “Stay there,” Dad told me. “I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

  I hurried over to Carnivore Canyon, which was carved into a huge slab of rock close to the Land Down Under. During the summer it had been one of the most crowded exhibits at FunJungle, although today it was almost deserted. KoalaVille had siphoned off much of the attention. Plus, the really popular carnivores—the lions and tigers—had the good sense to stay indoors on cold days. Lots of smaller carnivores, like the otters and raccoons, stayed active during the winter, but for some reason, tourists didn’t care about them much.

  I liked the otters, though. So I posted myself in front of their exhibit and watched them cavorting until Dad arrived five minutes later. He was out of breath, having run across the entire park—and he was on edge, which was unusual for him. Dad was generally extremely unflappable. His work as a wildlife photographer had put him in plenty of dangerous situations. He’d faced everything from great white sharks to charging grizzly bears to third-world militias. But now he was a bundle of nervous energy.

  “I thought we agreed you’d stay with the crowds,” he said.

  “There aren’t many crowds to stay with today,” I replied.

  Dad frowned. “This isn’t a game, Teddy. You need to be careful.”

  “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  Dad hesitated a moment before answering, as though he was going to say one thing but decided to say something else instead. “I’ve just been worried about you. Come on.” He put an arm around my shoulder and steered me off the main route through the exhibit.

  I followed him down a thin dirt path through the landscaping. “Where are we going?”

  “To borrow a friend’s office for a bit.” Dad didn’t have an office at FunJungle. He could do almost anything he needed with a digital camera and a laptop computer, so he tended to work at home or borrow Mom’s office—when he wasn’t traveling the world on assignment.

  “Is Mom coming too?” I asked.

  Dad shook his head. “She really wants to, but she had another situation with Motupi.”

  I nodded understanding. Motupi was a five-year-old chimpanzee with severe anger-management issues. He had recently arrived at FunJungle, and while he behaved normally most of the time, every now and then he would have massive emotional eruptions. During these, he would tear up the landscaping, threaten the other chimps, and throw anything he could get his hands on—which was usually his own poop. FunJungle employees had started calling him Furious George.

  “What’d he do this time?” I asked.

  “Same as usual,” Dad told me. “One second he was fine; the next he was screaming like a banshee and throwing stuff. Mom decided she can’t leave him on display with the other chimps anymore, so she’s shifting him to a holding cell until she can figure out what’s triggering this behavior. If it weren’t an emergency, she’d be here for you. You know that, right?”


  “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

  Tucked behind the otter exhibit was a security door with the standard security keypad. Dad had written the day’s code for this door on the palm of his hand. I figured whoever we were visiting must have given it to him. Dad typed it in, the door clicked open, and we entered the tunnels behind Carnivore Canyon.

  Because the animal enclosures at the Canyon were built into the rock, the behind-the-scenes areas had needed to be carved out as well. The tunnel had the feel of a mine shaft and reeked of pee because all the big cats marked their territory several times a day. We passed behind the serval, bobcat, and mountain lion enclosures until we reached Carnivore Control. This was a surprisingly large room hollowed out in the rock. It was basically a man-made cave, albeit an incredibly high-tech one: There were computer monitors everywhere, providing live video feeds from the exhibits, although they could also be used to check everything from the feeding schedule to the animals’ most recent health reports. It looked like the top secret underground lair of a James Bond villain.

  A single keeper sat in the midst of the monitors, busily tracking all the carnivores at once. Most keepers tended to be darkly tanned from working hours outside each day. This keeper, however, was pasty from spending so much time underground, and the blue glow from all the monitors reflected off his white skin to give him a sort of ghostly pallor. He was so riveted to a video monitor that he barely glanced up when we entered.

  “Teddy, this is Arthur Koenig,” Dad said.

  “Thanks for helping us,” I said.

  Arthur waved this off without taking his eyes off the monitor. “No big deal,” he said. “Your father’s helped me plenty of times. Grab any computer you need. I can’t use them all.”

  Dad and I selected a computer right next to Arthur. Now that I could see his monitor, I realized what was so fascinating. He was watching video of FunJungle’s four new Siberian tiger cubs, which were only a few days old. Siberian tigers are almost extinct, so any babies were a huge boon to the survival of the species. People around the world had been thrilled by the news of their birth. Pete Thwacker was chomping at the bit to get them on display—or at least to get photos of them in the papers—but for the time being the cubs needed rest and privacy. Most FunJungle employees hadn’t even had the chance to see them yet. The cubs were all lodged at their mother’s teats, nursing hungrily. They were so helpless; they couldn’t even open their eyes yet.