LITMIR.BIZ

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Claire shouted. “Help is coming!”

      “He’ll bleed out by then! Dear God, why did you do it this way?” she screamed into the cage.

      Why did you do it this way? The tiger? Her father?

      Again, Brittany climbed the restraining fence and threw herself against the bars again, gripping them, thrusting the gaff through the bars. What if the big cat rushed her too?

      Ann Hoffman had collapsed to her knees and began to wail. Nick climbed the fence too and aimed the extinguisher through the bars, pinning the big cat back in a corner of the cage where it roared as if in pain. Finally, after an eternity—but then they were outside town on a county road—they heard sirens screaming. Claire hadn’t realized she was crying. She was hyperventilating, shaking.

      “We need to get the kids home—out of here,” she told Nick as the spray fizzled out. “What if that tiger had escaped?”

      In that deep, calm lawyer voice of his, Nick said, “Go tell Darcy to divide up the other kids, with Bronco and Nita, and take Lexi too. They should leave right now, but we’ll have to stay here to help Brittany and Ann.”

      Ann! Claire thought. She’d been so intent on the cage. She turned to see Ann Hoffman still on her knees, her body racked with sobs, her face in her hands.

      Claire turned back to Nick. “Yes, we might have to answer questions since we were kind of first responders. Should I call Jace to help Brittany?”

      Nick shook his head. “Only if you want him to parachute in and try to take over. Go on, sweetheart, tell Darcy, and don’t run. Maybe Brittany and her mother will need a lawyer. This extinguisher’s out of spray, but the tiger looks like he’s staying put. And find out where Jackson went, their custodian.”

      On her way back to the kids and their chaperones, Claire saw two police cars pull into the parking lot outside the entry, but the EMR vehicle drove right in through the open gate. She pointed out the direction they should go but realized they’d never get over the moat bridge in the vehicle. She hurried to get the Comfort Zone kids away.

      Comfort zone. Had Ben been so comfortable with the tiger that he’d walked into that cage, or had something or someone made him enter? No one else was around. And what had Brittany meant by why he did it this way? Was she screaming at the tiger, or at her father?

      * * *

      Claire stared at the chaotic, tragic scene. Ben Hoffman had been pronounced dead by the Collier County Medical Examiner. Ann Hoffman was in such a state of shock that the medics, who had been called and arrived before the ME, had attended to her too. Brittany was pacing just as fiercely as Tiberia had earlier, only outside the fence surrounding the cage where the cat now lay limp from tranquilizer darts.

      The tiger had been darted by workers from the Naples Zoo so that the medics and ME could get to the victim and the police could more closely survey the scene. The police had strung their neon yellow CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS tape and cleared the area, except for the owners/family and eyewitnesses who were first on the scene.

      The body, at first covered by a tarp, was finally taken away by the ME in an official van. Unfortunately, the media had picked up on the tragedy already, and a curious crowd was beginning to gather at the front gate, now closed, where Claire spotted two TV vans with satellite dishes on their roofs. Others who had intended to visit today at the regular opening time—it looked like some grandparents with kids—still milled around, trying to learn what was going on.

      Also, Nick had said that a few picketers for the humane treatment of cats, no less, were already walking back and forth outside with signs, chanting. Jackson, who had gone to run a short errand, was back now and had more than once tried to disperse the crowd. The police had briefly questioned him, but as he hadn’t been on-site, he’d just gone back to guarding the front gate. Nick had seen the guy had tears in his eyes. After all, Brit had said he was friends with her father. Jackson kept shaking his head, stunned about how this could have happened.

      “Counselor Markwood,” a policeman who recognized Nick called from inside the taped-off area, “you here as a guest, or you representing someone?”

      Nick rose from the bench where he sat with Claire and walked a few steps away to talk to the officer. “I’m a guest, at least for now,” Nick told him. “My wife and I brought a group of charity kids here today before regular opening hours. We didn’t see this happen but ran over when we heard the noise. I don’t think anyone knows why he did that—the deceased.”

      “Yeah, especially since he evidently didn’t enter with the animal’s food,” the officer told him. “A box of it was dropped just inside the enclosure but wasn’t taken in or thrown into the cage. Real weird if it was an accident, but the detectives will check security protocol when they get here, and we’ll have to wait for the ME’s report. It was suicide to go in there. He should have known that. His wife and daughter are too shaken to explain things so far, and his son’s playing in a concert uptown. His phone’s off right now, according to his wife, so we don’t have all next of kin notified. Wish the media buzzards wouldn’t circle,” he added with a glance at the growing crowd at the gate.

      With a tap of his fingers to the bill of his cap, the officer went back to his position by the cage. Despite sitting, Claire’s legs were shaking as she watched and listened. Observation and analysis were in her forensic psych blood. The only time her brain wasn’t spinning with what, how, who and why was if she slept or messed up her meds and had a narcoleptic nightmare. But a nightmare this was.

      Nick came back over to her. “You still doing okay? You should carry your pills even when you rely on herbal tea.”

      “I thought we’d be home by now. Nick, I know your ears perked up when you heard him say accident or suicide, but who would choose that dreadful way to kill himself and horrify his family and others when he could just jump in the Gulf or get a gun?”

      He nodded as they huddled together on the wooden bench. “You know, this all hits close to home. I’d really be all in if this had any implications of being a murder like with my father, but you can’t charge a big cat with that.”

      He put one arm around her and gripped her knee with his other hand. He was shaking too. She knew how hard he’d struggled to cope with the supposed suicide of his father when it had turned out to be murder, one that had taken Nick years to prove and to bring the killer to justice.

      That early loss had so impacted his life that he’d founded the private South Shores investigation company. With its small, secret staff, he kept it separate from his law firm, and most of the cases managed to fly under the radar. Through South Shores funding and legal expertise, he helped others who had lost a loved one by mysterious means. He was especially drawn to cases where the cause of death was undecided and unproven: accident, suicide or murder. And had they walked into another tragic situation, or would Ben’s family have an explanation of how or why this happened?

      Brittany’s frenzied words still haunted Claire: Why would you do it this way?

      * * *

      Jace Britten brought the Zika virus mosquito–spraying plane into the Marco Island airport and, after waiting for an old Piper Cub to land behind him, taxied toward the small hangar. What a far cry from his navy pilot days landing his fighter jet on a carrier at sea or flying solo missions over endless, blazing sand in Iraq. As much as he longed to take to the skies again in an F-35 or a big commercial Airbus loaded with lives he would die to protect, this was it for now.

      But, he had to admit, he kind of liked this assignment to spray for those hellish mosquitoes that caused women to deliver babies with congenital birth defects. Zika danger had hit not only Southeast Florida but now threatened here, Southwest Florida too. And his ex-wife was pregnant with her new husband’s baby. As much as he had issues with Nick and Claire sometimes, they were good for his daughter, Lexi, and he hoped like hell that Claire would have a healthy baby. Maybe this spraying would help.

      But he was serving above and beyond that too, since he was tracking the whereabouts not only of drug dealers but other criminals

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