Shandi vaguely recognized him from school, though she was more familiar with his popular sister. Shandi couldn’t quite place his name. “I’m not here to cause trouble. Just trying to report the news.”
Immediately the ranger seemed to loosen up. “Someone broke the fence here and some of our cheetahs escaped. This pen held our new mother, Adalina, and her two cubs.”
Shandi pulled her phone out and popped open the voice memo app. “Do you mind if I record this?”
The ranger looked slightly uncomfortable, but gave a curt nod. Shandi requested he repeat his last statement so she could record it. A name like Adalina stood little chance of sticking in her brain otherwise.
“Thanks,” Shandi said, being sure to flash him her best smile. “So, have you recovered the three escaped cheetahs yet?”
Even from her peripheral vision, Shandi noticed Dub shift nervously next to her. The ranger glanced across the cage almost imperceptibly, causing Shandi to follow his gaze to an area of the cage littered with tufts of cheetah fur.
The ranger cleared his throat. “We’re actively searching for only, uh, two of the cheetahs.”
A second glance revealed bits of cheetah carcass mixed with the fur; one of the cubs, no doubt. The poor thing had been ripped to pieces. Blood and entrails were strewn about.
“And why did you wait so long to report this?”
The ranger seemed confused by the question. “It happened last night. We reported it first thing this morning.”
Last night? That seemed impossible. If the cheetahs had escaped last night, then they couldn’t have possibly perpetrated the livestock mutilations.
It hit her all at once. Whatever had mutilated the goat at Serendipity, and the lamb at Watermelon, had likely killed this cub. She looked at the fence again. She assumed earlier that it had been cut open, but the jagged, uneven points of the metal suggested otherwise, each link stretched to the breaking point.
Her mind raced as she turned towards Dub. “Are there any suspects yet? And don’t say coyotes.”
Dub pulled his straw cowboy hat from his head and wiped his brow with the back of his hand. He stalled for time while he thought about his answer. Shandi recognized his discomfort about talking to her—Cam would surely disapprove—but he liked her too much to take a hard stance with her.
“Well, it obviously wasn’t coyotes, no. Maybe some kids thought it would be funny or something. Or maybe some of those hippies from Austin drove up. Some of ‘em don’t care for Relics keeping these wild animals all caged up like this.”
“Thanks, deputy. Seems pretty cruel for anyone to do that to a cheetah cub. Surely the mother would have defended her cub from that.”
“Yes, Ms. Mason,” the ranger interjected. “We would expect so. We can only assume that whoever did this took the other two. Maybe to sell. Cheetahs could fetch a hefty sum to the right buyer.”
Dub shifted his weight and glanced sheepishly at Shandi. He hid some tasty nugget of information, she could tell, something that might run counter to the ranger’s theory, perhaps. If neither Dub nor the Ranger could be persuaded to tell her, she would just have to find something herself.
“Thanks,” Shandi said. “Mind if I take a look around, take a few pictures? No bad publicity—I promise. Getting this in the paper might help you find the perpetrator.”
The ranger assented with a nod, clearly unhappy with the situation. No doubt, he didn’t have full jurisdiction in this case, and would have to answer for his cooperation to his superiors later. The cold-hearted journalist in Shandi didn’t care much if the ranger got in trouble.
She walked around the scene and took some pictures. Between the fence and the dismembered cub, Shandi became increasingly intrigued with each new piece of evidence. The slaughter of the cub certainly seemed like it could be related to the livestock mutilations, but tearing a fence in half required even more strength.
As she snapped macro shots of the fence, she glanced down and noticed blood on the ground outside of the enclosure. She walked back to the cub. Her skills lacked much in the way of zoology training, but all the pieces of the cub seemed to be accounted for, so where did the blood outside of the cage come from?
She took note of where the ranger and deputy had gone. The ranger sat in his jeep, frantically barking into his cell phone. Deputy Higgins leaned over the hood of his squad car, filling out paperwork. They were separated. Perfect.
Shandi walked over to Dub and lightly brushed her hand across his back to get his attention. His damp uniform practically dripped with sweat. By the time Dub looked up from his paperwork, Shandi greeted him with a fixed stare and a wide smile.
“Off the record here, Dub. Are the other cheetahs even alive?”
Dub looked her up and down, possibly to figure out whether she hid a recording device, or possibly because her tank top revealed a little too much cleavage and his height gave him a good view.
“Dunno. Maybe. Maybe not.”
“What about that extra blood over there? Is that from one of the other cheetahs?”
Dub glanced over at it. “Oh that. No. That’s from a gazelle. They found it dead there at the opening to the fence. All in one piece and everything. Something managed to snap its neck and then ate through its belly. The ranger thinks maybe they used it to lure the cheetahs into submission or something. He thinks it’s the cheetahs that ate out the belly.”
“Seems strange that someone would kill a gazelle by snapping its neck, right?” Shandi said. “Why not just rope it and lead it over here while it was still alive? Or shoot it.”
Dub shrugged. “I don’t know. The fence is the most suspicious thing to me. I’m not sure how they opened it that way. I would have expected the links to be cut, not broken. And I’d think that dismantling the door would be
