Free The Anteater of Death by Betty Webb Page A

eyes so pale he looked half blind. Yet his vision was sharp and he missed nothing. “Remember what she did to the guy she caught trying to feed a razor-laced apple to the orangutans? Even after he went down she kept kicking him. His teeth were scattered all over the place.”
    “Are you saying you think she’s a murderer?” asked Miranda DiBartolo, a darkly pretty keeper who cared for the marsupials in Down Under. “Because if you are…” She moved toward Jack, her delicate hands balled into fists.
    The vet stepped between them. “Miranda, I want you to bring that new wallaby down to the Animal Care Center for a checkup. And Jack, I’m not sure the spectacled bears’ play platform will hold up under their weight, so look at it again. As for me, I’m going to lure Makeba and her baby into their night house for an examination. Now let’s calm down and get back to work. We all know the sheriff’s made a mistake, but there’s nothing any of us can do about it now.”
    Grumbling, we dispersed to our various areas, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Zorah. Instead of my standard long chat with Lucy, I merely left her to her breakfast. I repeated my hurried performance at Monkey Mania, where Marlon, who normally was so self-absorbed that keepers didn’t exist for him, noticed something was wrong and bared his teeth at me.
    For the next few hours, I rushed from one animal to another, not interacting with my charges in any meaningful way. I even brushed away the approaches of the other keepers when they wanted to discuss the arrest. Time was wasting, and I had places to go, prisoners to see.
    ***
    After stopping briefly at the Merilee , I drove to the county seat of San Sebastian, a small city founded in the late-eighteen hundreds by my great-great-great grandfather, cattle rancher Ezekiel Bentley. Fortunately for Zorah, loyalty to the Bentleys remained strong in the town. The sheriff was nowhere around, but Emilio Guiterrez, the deputy in charge of the lockup and a descendant of one of Ezekiel’s vaqueros, agreed to let me see Zorah even though visiting hours were over.
    “I’m pretty sure the sheriff’s gone for the day, but just in case, don’t let him find out about this,” Emilio cautioned.
    He unlocked the big metal door separating the jail’s business area from the netherworld beyond. After a short walk between cells filled with male drunks and thieves, we entered the smaller women’s section where Zorah sat slumped on a cot. At least she wasn’t alone. In the cell on her left was a raving white woman, on the right, a morose Hispanic. Clad in a bright orange jumpsuit which did nothing for her complexion, Zorah ignored them both and stared grimly at the painted cement floor.
    When she lifted her head and saw the deputy pulling up a chair for me outside her cell, the first words out of her mouth were, “How’s the baby giraffe? Is it walking around yet? Nursing?”
    Not Get me out of here, or I swear I’m innocent . She never worried about herself, only her animals.
    Happy to give her good news, I assured her the calf walked within thirty minutes of birth, nursed in forty.
    “It’s perfectly healthy, then? No problems at all?”
    The shrieks of the white woman in the next cell grew louder, so I had to shout. “It looks that way, but to make sure, Dr. Kate had moved mom and baby to the night quarters and plans to keep them under observation for awhile.” I scooted my chair closer until it almost touched the bars.
    Although the jail itself was almost a century old, the blanket on Zorah’s cot didn’t look it. Neither did her aluminum toilet and sink. In fact, both looked brand new. Apparently the sheriff had kept his campaign promise to modernize.
    “How about the Bengals? And the frilled lizards?”
    The white woman’s voice dropped a few decibels so I was able to assure Zorah in a more normal voice that those animals were fine, too. Because the rest of us had taken over a portion of her