of monkeys began to die at the Reston monkey house.
On October 4, the same day the shipment of monkeys reached the Reston monkey house, something happened that would change Jerry Jaax’s life forever. Jerry had a brother named John, who lived in Kansas City with his wife and two small children. John Jaax was a prominent businessman and a banker, and he was a partner in a manufacturing company that made plastic for credit cards. He was a couple of years younger than Jerry, and the two men were as close as brothers can be. They had grown up together on a farm in Kansas and had both gone to college at Kansas State.
They looked very much alike: tall, with prematurely gray hair, a beak nose, sharp eyes, a calm manner; and their voices sounded alike. They only difference in appearance between them was John wore a mustache and Jerry did not.
John Jaax and his wife planned to attend a parent-teachers’ meeting on the evening of October 4 at their children’s school. Near the end of the day, John telephoned his wife from his office at the manufacturing plant to tell her that he would be working late. She happened to be out of house when he called, so he left a message on the answering machine, explaining that he would go directly from the office to the meeting, and he would see her there. When he did not show up, she became worried. She drove over to the factory.
The place was deserted, the machines silent. She walked the length of the factory floor to a staircase. John’s office overlooked the factory floor from a balcony at the top of the staircase. She climbed the stairs. The door to his office was standing open a crack, and she went inside. John had been shot many times, and there was blood all over the room. It was a violent killing.
The police officer who took the case at Kansas City Homicide was named Reed Buente. He has know John personally and had admired him, having worked for him as a security guard at the Bank of Kansas City when John was president of the bank. Officer Buente was determined to solve the case and bring the killer or killers to trial. But as time went by and no breaks came along, the investigator became discouraged. John Jaax had been having difficulties with his partner in the plastic business, a man named John Weaver, and Kansas City homicide looked at the partner as a suspect. (When I called Officer Buente recently, he confirmed this. Weaver has since died of a heart attack, and the case remains open, since unsolved murder cases are never closed.) There were few physical clues, and Weaver, as it turned out, had an alibi. The investigator ran into more and more difficulties with the case. At one point, he said to Jerry, “You can have someone killed pretty easy. And it’s cheap. You can have someone killed for what you would pay for a desk.”
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
