13 Hollywood Apes Read online

  Motivation, means, and opportunity. The detective’s holy trinity. The means in the Terry and Tamas homicides was pretty clear: the ape as instrument of violence. The opportunity, likewise: both Ian Terry and Dukundane Tamas were alone and vulnerable at the time of the attacks. But motivation? Revenge could always serve. Mace Arthur had worked himself up into a paroxysm of homicidal rage over the Odalon Sanctuary massacre. He had elected himself a divine messenger of retribution, out to settle the score.

  And he had aimed his anger at the former caretakers of the Odalon apes. Terry and Tamas must have done something to warrant Arthur’s ire. Somehow, in some way, they had managed to present themselves as suitable targets for their killer’s vengeful wrath. Had they participated in the massacre?

  Rick Stills made it clear, after Angle and Arthur had surrendered, that revenge was a story he felt comfortable putting across to a judge, first, at the upcoming prelim, and eventually to a trial jury, if it came to that. Remington didn’t see things quite as cut-and-dried as Stills did, but for now she was keeping her mouth shut.

  Two days after Mace Arthur’s brief first court appearance, Kenny Bedford called her from the coroner’s office. Remington already had the results from the Terry and Tamas postmortems. Now the nonhuman autopsies in the Odalon case were ready, Bedford said. Remington asked that he forward the reports to her over the department’s secure intranet. An hour later the computer at her desk chimed thirteen times, once for each incoming document.

  She spent the afternoon going through them. Absorbed in the death narratives that had been prepared by the pathologists, Remington was aware of a slight tug of guilt. That morning Rick Stills had again directed her to begin spreading her focus and give time to other cases. But all Remington wanted to do was work Odalon.

  Through the open louvered blinds on the window of the ADA’s inner office, she could see Stills at his desk as she sat at hers. She threw some burglary case documents up onto another window of her computer, so that she could flip screens if Stills came by, and look as if she was paying attention to something other than dead apes and killer chimps.

  Once again, she tried for a big-picture approach when reading the autopsies, sifting through the wealth of material for a nugget that might indicate some overall conclusion she could draw. Nothing jumped out at her. The evidence regarding ballistics seemed odd. A total of five rounds had been recovered from the bodies of the thirteen chimpanzees. The remainder of the bullets had passed right through the soft tissue of the animals and, presumably, lodged in the dirt of the Odalon yard. That dirt had been too torn up by the hotshot crews to yield much of anything, nothing ballistics analysis might use or any impression evidence such as footprints.

  The ballistics report from the firearms section of the forensics lab listed such data as recovery date, location, name of possessor (“John Doe”), seizing officer (“Det. Invest. L. Remington”), seizing officer’s badge number (“12894”), along with several “not entered” categories pertaining to the unknown firearm from which the rounds were discharged. The Odalon autopsies listed four discharged bullets and one discharged bullet fragment, ID’ing each one by an evidence number. An “Addendum Notation” intrigued Remington:

  All exhibits were examined microscopically and processed chemically for the presence of gunpowder and/or lead residue. Metallurgy tests confirm lead (Pb) projectiles w copper (Cu) coating from similar batching (handloader?) in extremely large caliber, .700: ORS#41 and ORS#43 (q.v.) recovered relatively intact from subject OR3 and OR12, respectively. Due to lack of firearm for testing, no meaningful muzzle-to-subject distance can be given. N.B.: All recovered bullets and fragments demonstrate remarkable absence of grooves and lands, indicating clean-firing, un-rifled barrel, i.e., musket-type firearm. Heirloom black powder weapon (not BPCR)? Muzzleloader? WTF?

  She put in a call to Bedford. The pathologist answered on the first ring. “I thought you’d be reaching out,” he said.

  “What’s BPCR?” Remington asked.

  “Black-powder cartridge rifle. Sort of a specialty for gun hobbyists. But that’s what it most definitely is not—you saw that, didn’t you? Not from a rifled weapon.”

  “And how about WTF—what does that stand for?”

  “That means what it usually means, ‘what the fuck?’ ” Bedford said, laughing. “Suzanne Durgess, our firearms analyst, said she’s never seen anything like it. She said she would have recognized BPCR if that’s what this was. The combination of large caliber with a non-rifled barrel is just too odd. Suzanne thinks the weapon had to be specially machined in some tool shop somewhere.”

  “Weird,” Remington said.

  “Yeah, weird,” Bedford agreed. “A lot of trouble to go to just to euthanize some animals.”

  “If euthanasia is what it was,” Remington said.

  “You saw the other thing in the reports, right?”

  “What was that?”

  “In the blood work, the different levels of histamines in the cells.”

  Remington had, in fact, missed whatever it was Bedford was talking about. She flipped through the autopsy reports, trying to find it.

  “Histamine is a nitrogen compound,” the pathologist said. “It’s a good marker for trauma or stress.”

  “Right,” Remington said. She knew that.

  “We had a devil of a time locating normalized levels with which to compare the samples from the subjects,” Bedford said. “Dr. Gladney finally turned up something in a research journal.”

  “I thought Gladney wanted no part in this,” Remington said, remembering the coroner’s resistance to the whole idea of autopsying the apes.

  “He couldn’t resist,” Bedford said. “This business became a sort of pet project, so to speak, for the whole department. We had a forensic veterinarian in.”

  So there is such a thing after all, thought Remington, recalling that Rick Stills denied their existence. “The histamine levels?” she asked, trying to get Bedford back on track.

  “Look at the blood numbers—they’re listed,” the pathologist said. “If you do a comparison between the subjects, you’ll find that while they all had elevated histamine levels, twelve had off-the-charts numbers, while one was only slightly elevated. That one stands out.”

  Remington was trying to follow him, clicking through the documents on the computer screen.

  “Subject one,” she said. “That would be…” She cross-checked the reports. “The adult male called Booth.”

  “Right,” said Bedford. “He was also the largest of the bunch.”

  “So, what—he was the one who wasn’t stressed out? He was some kind of mellow fellow?”

  “We talked it out around here. How to account for the different levels? We came up with a theory—nothing more than conjecture, really, but it might be useful to you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Just a hypothesis.”

  “Are you going to make me beg for it?” Remington said.

  “You can read a sort of narrative in the histamine levels. In the pre-incident time frame, before the shootings, every individual is slightly stressed, feeling a definite but very low level of fear. We figured that might have been from the presence of fire in the neighborhood.”

  “Could be,” said Remington, imagining the unpeaceful mood of the chimp family with the Lost Hills wildfire nearby.

  “Then boom, the assault by gunfire begins,” Bedford said. “Everyone’s fear level immediately spikes. Histamines start to pour into the cells.”

  “Except for Booth’s.”

  “That is correct,” Bedford agreed. “And the reason for that—this is just speculation, mind you—”

  “Booth was killed first.”

  “Very good, Detective,” Bedford said. “That’s what we thought around here. His histamine levels didn’t spike because he was already dead. The others spiked because they were reacting to the assault on Booth.”

  “Where does that leave us?”

  “I don’t know.
You tell me. The largest of the troop was killed first.”

  Monkeys are troops, not chimps, thought Remington. Apes are families, colonies, or—if you happen to be feeling poetic—“a shrewdness of apes.” But she didn’t correct Bedford. Instead, looking through the reports, she said, “Well, Mister Jeepers was almost as big as Booth, wasn’t he?”

  “A half-kilo difference,” Bedford told her. “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe histamine levels don’t indicate anything about the order of death. But that’s what we look for. Anomalies, things that stand out.”

  Remington thanked the pathologist. He wished her luck before he rang off.

  Without her noticing, Rick Stills had approached Remington while she was on the phone with Bedford. He stood behind her, looking over her shoulder at her computer screen, where the ape autopsy reports were still pulled up. He appeared to be on the verge of saying something, to rebuke her in some way. But with a shake of his head he turned around and went wordlessly back to his office.

  —

  Try as he might to tie off the Odalon case and move on to other business, Rick Stills couldn’t resist journeying down to Santa Monica to oppose Trish Sedgewick’s custody petition in person. He didn’t want Remington to come along, pointing out that she had other work to do, but she wheedled him into it. It wasn’t that hard. A man always likes an audience.

  Stills and Sedgewick had one, in spades. The media showed up in force to cover the outlandish idea that a chimpanzee might be allowed to testify in court. The C-movie crew of actors and their fans were there, too. If Odalon was turning into a circus, this hearing would be the opening sideshow.

  Patricia Sedgewick petitioned the court for permission to represent Angle “in all judicial proceedings pertinent to his person.” The issue, according to Jus Animalium Law Center’s application to the court, was that no one could really trace the legal ownership process by which the ape was claimed by Hollywood Animal Rescue. Pia Liebstein, HAR’s lawyer, might have been able to weigh in…had she not been attacked by the very ape in question.

  The previous afternoon, Liebstein’s brain swelling had gone down to the degree that the neurologists at Cedar-Sinai felt safe coaxing her out of the induced coma. As Remington feared, when the woman regained consciousness she had zero recollection of the Bronson Canyon attack. She could hardly speak, much less provide the prosecution with any useful information. Her physical rehabilitation was going to be long, painful, and incomplete. She would never be the same person that she had been.

  Liebstein’s firm, BBOS, responded to Jus Animalium’s request for ownership papers with a plea for a two-month delay in the proceedings, in order that attorneys other than Liebstein could sort through HAR’s documents. In fact, most of the parties involved weren’t able to appear in Judge Etha Keris’s courtroom. Mace Arthur, the accused human agent behind the attacks, remained at Metro, refusing to post bail in sympathy with his partner in crime. The chimp stayed sequestered in the Griffith Park zoo.

  Sedgewick pleaded for immediate injunctive relief, indicating Jus Animalium’s concerns that the state might execute Angle at any time.

  “Your Honor, we feel that the individual in question is in mortal danger, due to the predatory and arbitrary control the state exerts over his incarceration, treatment, indeed, his very life.”

  Rick Stills stood for the state, but it was Judge Keris who held up her hand. The short, curly-haired jurist managed to project authority despite her small size.

  “I’m not sure I get your standing in this matter, Ms. Sedgewick,” she said.

  “I am petitioning for guardianship, in view of the individual’s diminished capacity to act for himself.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Stills muttered.

  “Jus Animalium, the law center where I serve as the director, claims standing in all matters pertaining to the welfare of animals.”

  “You can go ahead and claim all you want.” Judge Keris was frowning. “Do you know the expression ‘If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride’?”

  “Your Honor, I can cite copious precedents.”

  “Most of them connected to the welfare of human children, no doubt,” Judge Keris said. “I’ve read your brief. Let’s put the question of your standing aside for a moment and hear from the state.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor.” Rick Stills rose to his feet again. “This animal is in custody because the state believes it can establish probable cause in the prosecution of two homicides and another near-fatal assault. The state thus has an overriding interest in maintaining control of said animal in order to prevent further attacks. I’m relying on California state statute 1989, c. 761, section 1, amended by state statute 1998, c. 931, S.B.2139, section 168, effective September 28, 1998.”

  Remington noticed that while he was rattling off case law Stills didn’t once refer to notes. Very impressive.

  “Your Honor,” Sedgewick said, standing, “the state statute the assistant district attorney cited refers to the euthanasia of dangerous dogs. Chimpanzees are not dogs, Counselor. They are a whole different species.”

  “Of course, I also could cite precedents,” Stills persisted. “There are quite a few regarding the confiscation of animals termed ‘instruments of danger,’ from numerous species—”

  “Please, we’re pettifogging here,” Sedgewick broke in. “All I’d like is some form of legal assurance that I’m not going to wake up some morning to the news that the state has executed this individual without due process.”

  “Is that going to happen, Mr. Stills?” Judge Keris asked.

  “Under the law, the state reserves the right to euthanize animals that are a danger to humans at any time—after a proper administrative hearing, of course.”

  “There, Counselor,” Judge Keris said to Sedgewick. “You have your due process.”

  “I’d like my concerns entered into the record,” Sedgewick insisted.

  “I see that the chimpanzee named Angle is currently housed in secure quarters at the Los Angeles Zoo.” Judge Keris referred to her notes. “Is there something the matter with his treatment, Ms. Sedgewick? Do you allege abuse on the part of the authorities?”

  “Yes, to the degree that the sanctity of his life and limb is under constant threat. I would further petition the court to grant a swearability hearing in order that Angle may testify on his own behalf.”

  A small buzz in the gallery. This was what everyone had come for. Remington had a mental image of Angle in the witness stand, dressed up in a suit and tie.

  “I believe you are the one mixing up your species,” Judge Keris said after a pause. “Swearability is a process to determine whether an underage Homo sapiens sapiens may testify in court. With Pan troglodytes, there are serious questions about mental faculties, such as intent, free will, consciousness, the mechanics of memory, and the basic awareness of time that are very much beyond this court’s purview.”

  However bogus the Jus Animalium petition might prove, it was clear that Keris had done her homework.

  “We can furnish expert testimony—” Sedgewick began, but she was again cut off by Keris’s upraised hand.

  “I understand that you and your law center are advocating for a specific agenda, that you want to establish and extend the legal rights of personhood to the four species of great ape. I am not sure your general claims are legitimate, but in this specific case you are seriously overreaching. I am tempted to declare your petition frivolous and thus hold you liable for costs. I could even see my way clear to issuing a contempt citation. I hesitate to do that, Ms. Sedgewick, because I recognize the sincerity of your beliefs. But I warn you not to waste the time of this court again.”

  The judge looked out over the courtroom. “I hereby deny the petition and all applications carried with it.” She slammed her gavel down, rose from the bench, and was gone in a swirl of black robes.

  20

  “Hi there,” Layla cooed. “Hi, buddy.”

  Angle ambled over to
the bars of his cage and reached through. The skin on his fingers appeared creased and animal-like, but when he and Remington held hands she experienced the exact feel of a human touch. Though she tried to resist, she dropped once again into the warm pools of the ape’s eyes.

  “You all right in here? They treating you well?”

  She felt like a relative on a jail visit. Tex, one of the zoo’s caretakers, had given her a carrot and a zucchini. She passed them one at a time through the bars. Angle consumed the raw vegetables contentedly, feeding them steadily into his huge set of choppers as if into a juicer.

  The sound of his crunching soothed Remington, reminding her, oddly, of being present at a family dinner. Angle stopped to offer her the gnawed, ragged end of the carrot. When she shook her head, he went back to eating.

  Remington had gotten into the habit of stopping off to see Angle at the Griffith Park zoo. She didn’t tell anyone about it, not even her father. The first time, the day after the celebration at Whitey’s, she was there simply to supervise the taking of a fresh set of the ape’s fingerprints, for a just-to-make-certain comparison with the prints lifted from Ian Terry’s van.

  By now Remington was familiar with Angle’s ape smell, the vinegar stink of his quarters. Her visits had become a daily—actually, a nightly—ritual. Remington rationalized it as a brief stopover on her route from Malibu to her dad’s condo in Glendale. Such visits were well within her rights as a detective investigating a case. She was checking on a prime suspect. The zoo was right on her way home, after all.

  She formed an easy alliance with Paul Kennedy, the head of zoo security. She’d pull the U-boat up to the employee gate and Kennedy would meet her, allow her to park in a privileged space, and conduct her via golf cart to Building 14 in the rear, off-bounds sector of the zoo. On the way, they spoke of the weather, the Santa Anas, the wildfires. He didn’t ask too many questions about what Remington was doing there.

  What was she doing there? She didn’t really know.

  After he finished with the vegetables, Angle slapped his hands together to free them of the last bits of food, resembling some busy little sous chef. Remington had to laugh. The chimp repeated the “Let me outta here!” ASL hand signs, as well as others that she didn’t understand. Then he presented his back to Remington, moving right up against the bars.