The Same Place (The Lamb and the Lion #2) - Gregory Ashe Page 0,134

wherever he keeps the animals. She was—oh shit. She was going to let them out. Set them free. Something like that. That’s why father and daughter didn’t get along. He loved animals. So did she. But he kept them, and she wanted to release them.”

“She must have—she must have made a mistake,” Tean said. “Gotten too close to the alligator. Gotten attacked. An injury like the one she suffered, with the arm amputated—she would have lost consciousness in fifteen seconds. She would have been dead shortly thereafter.”

“And nobody else was there. She got clear of the tank or wherever the alligator was being held, so it didn’t do any further damage to the body, but then she died. The next time Leroy shows up, he finds her dead, and he knows the gator did it. He’s lost his daughter, and I’m sure that’s a blow, but he can’t stand the thought of the state taking the alligator and killing it.”

“Worse than that,” Tean said. “He would have faced criminal charges, and he would have lost all his animals. He couldn’t let that happen.”

“So he covered it up. He chopped up her body to hide how she died, and then he tried to frame Zalie and Sievers. When that didn’t work, and he knew the police had their eye on someone else, he planted the hatchet at Hannah’s.”

“Holy shit,” Tean said, a huge smile growing.

“Quarter in the swear jar,” Jem said.

The voice was still buzzing on the phone. Tean lifted it to his ear, listened, and then broke in. “Yes, Norbert. As a matter of fact, I am with my boyfriend. Now, if you don’t want to lose your pension and job in a sexual harassment lawsuit, shut the fuck up. I need you to look something up in the computers for me.”

“Your boyfriend,” Jem whispered.

Tean pointed a finger at him and mouthed, Be quiet.

“This is the best day of my life,” Jem said.

35

“He’s still not answering,” Tean said.

Jem said, “Not a good quality in a future boyfriend.”

Tean grimaced and put a finger to his lips. They were still standing in front of the wall of photographs in Leroy Erickson’s home. Tean waited for his third call to Ammon to go to voicemail, and then he left a message explaining what they believed they had figured out.

When Tean disconnected, Jem said, “I just think, as your future boyfriend, he ought to—”

“Jem, now is not the time.”

“God, but I have so many good ones.”

With his phone, Tean took pictures of the photographs, moving along the wall in regular increments, making sure he got overlapping shots so they could reconstruct the arrangement if necessary. Eventually, this would be a crime scene, or at least part of a police investigation, but there was no telling what might happen in the meanwhile. If Leroy Erickson came home and decided to dispose of his mementos—

“So how are we going to find him?” Jem said.

“We’re not. We’re done. Let’s get out of here, and we’ll lock the door behind us, and that’s the end of it. Ammon and Kat can take over from here.”

“Hold on, hold on, hold on,” Jem said, scrambling to bar Tean’s path. “What about Hannah?”

“What do you mean? She’s going to be fine. Once they can prove what happened—”

“But we don’t know that they’ll be able to prove it,” Jem said. “They didn’t get this far, did they?”

“Because Hannah lied to them.”

“She might keep lying to them.”

“But we’ll tell Ammon, and he and Kat will find—”

“How?”

“They can access police records.”

Jem rolled his eyes. “Do you really think that Leroy’s secret animal kingdom is in a building he owns or rents under his own name? He’s got light and water in his name? Maybe a trash pickup for all the severed limbs?”

“He might be renting. There’s no central database for rental agreements, and they often include utilities.”

“And his landlord isn’t going to care about the kiddie pool with the alligator inside?”

Tean frowned.

“Look,” Jem said. “We find Leroy. That’s all. As soon as we know where the animals are, we call Ammon. It’s an anonymous tip. The police come out, hey, illegal animals, and you get called in. You, because you’re a genius vet, realize the alligator might have killed Joy, and you get X-rays of its teeth—”

“Dental impressions.”

“—and Hannah gets to come home, and I get to open my own business as a first-class detective. My slogan is going to be, ‘I’m better than Ammon Young at three things: solving crimes, making conversation, and