Kristi dragged me into her tiny office. Since there was only one chair, she steered me into it. Then she shoved aside a stack of fashion magazines and perched on her desk.
“I didn’t steal Kazoo,” I said quickly.
Kristi laughed. “If I thought you had, Teddy, I would have called security.”
It took me a moment to process that. “So . . . you already know it wasn’t me?”
“No, I don’t know anything for sure,” Kristi admitted. “I just don’t think you did it. You might be a handful, but you’re not stupid. However, I would like to know what you were doing in the exhibit last night.”
I explained everything. How Vance Jessup had forced me to play the prank at the shark tank, how Marge had caught us, and how I’d taken refuge in the exhibit. Kristi listened intently to it all. She even laughed a few times.
When I finished, she stared at me thoughtfully, then said, “You picked the wrong night to hide out here, Teddy. You’re in some serious trouble.”
“I know,” I said, then asked, “Why’s there a toy koala in the exhibit?”
Kristi reacted with surprise, but quickly broke into a smile. “I knew you were smart,” she said. “It’s there because we don’t have a real koala anymore.”
I was annoyed at myself for not realizing the Kazoo on display was a fake right away. After all, the toy koalas for sale in the gift shop looked almost exactly like the real thing; they would look even more real hidden behind a bunch of eucalyptus branches. What had kept me from putting it all together right away was denial: Even though FunJungle had done some sneaky things before, I still couldn’t believe that the park would try to pass off a fake koala as a real one.
“I know why you’re using a toy,” I said. “What I meant was, why hasn’t the public been told Kazoo is gone?”
Kristi raised her hands in a gesture of innocence. “I had nothing to do with this. In fact I think it’s terrible. But . . . well, you see, when the kidnapper took Kazoo last night, they put the fake one in the tree to cover their tracks.”
I sat forward, intrigued. “Really? Did it work?”
Kristi looked embarrassed. “For a few hours, I guess. No one’s quite sure when Kazoo was taken last night. But the fake was discovered around four thirty this morning.”
“Who noticed?”
“Someone in security. I forgot his name. Apparently, the toy koala fell out of the tree. At first, the guard thought it was really Kazoo and that he’d died. He called the vet on night duty, who determined it was a fake.”
“And so the park decided to just put it right back on exhibit?”
“Like I said, I don’t agree with this. The decision was made by the head of PR.”
“Pete Thwacker.” I wasn’t surprised.
Kristi’s eyebrows raised slightly. “You know him?”
“Unfortunately.” I’d run into Pete a few times while investigating Henry the Hippo’s death. He was a vain, cheesy man who knew very little about animals and a great deal about how to manipulate the public. I’d even considered him a suspect in Henry’s murder for a while.
“I’ve been trying to reach him all morning . . .” Kristi was interrupted by the ringing of her office phone. She glanced at the caller ID, then groaned. “Speak of the devil.” She signaled me to be quiet, then put on the speakerphone. “Kristi Sullivan.”
“Hi, Kristi. This is Pete Thwacker. I understand you’ve called my office a few times. Is something wrong over there?” Pete’s phone voice was extremely dramatic; it was probably a habit from being interviewed on TV all the time.
“Yes,” Kristi said. “I’d say that lying to the public is wrong.”
Pete hesitated upon realizing what all this was about, but when he spoke again, he sounded as confident as ever. “Kristi, we’re not lying to the public. We’re merely delaying the reveal of the truth until a more opportune time.”
“And when might that be?”
“Hopefully never. I’ve been assured that FunJungle security knows the identity of the perpetrator and is currently engaged in a full-scale manhunt. If they can find him and return Kazoo quickly, then what’s the point of upsetting people with the fact that the koala was ever gone?”
Kristi sighed, exasperated. “This isn’t right. You can’t pass a toy koala off as the real thing.”
“First of all, Kristi, it’s not a toy. It’s an emergency backup koala—”
“It’s a toy. From our very own gift shop.”
“Second, have any of the guests noticed?”
Kristi frowned. “No,” she admitted.
“Well, there you go!” Pete cried. “No harm done! I’m not saying that we here at FunJungle aren’t concerned about the welfare of our animals. We are. In fact that’s our primary directive. But our secondary directive is to provide our guests with a day of wholesome family fun. Frankly, I don’t see how informing them of Kazoo’s disappearance fits into that scenario. Instead it will merely distress them. And to what end? Isn’t it better for all these people—many of whom have come from quite far away to see a koala—to think they’ve seen one? Would you rather they came all this way only to be disappointed?”
“No,” Kristi said, sounding less sure of herself now. I couldn’t really blame her. Pete was surprisingly convincing. Even though I was sure his plan was morally wrong, there was a certain bizarre sense to it. “But what if our security doesn’t find Kazoo right away?” Kristi asked. “Or what if they never find him?”
“I think that’s unlikely,” Pete said. “I have every confidence in our security here.”
“I don’t,” Kristi told him. “Marge is a lunatic. So let’s suppose she fails. Won’t FunJungle look worse for covering this up?”
“Only if the public finds out we have covered it up, which they won’t,” Pete said. “As you’ve observed yourself, the emergency backup koala is working perfectly well. And I certainly hope you’re not thinking of spilling the beans.” As Pete said this, his voice gained an unsettling edge of menace.
“Of course not,” Kristi said.
“Good,” Pete replied. “Because doing so would be a violation of park policy, which is a fireable offense.”
Kristi swallowed, looking a little frightened. “And what if one of the guests notices on their own that the emergency backup koala is just a toy?”
“They won’t—as long as you take the proper steps to prevent such a scenario: Position the koala as far from the viewing windows and behind as much foliage as possible. And shift its location every evening so that it appears to have moved during the night. Frankly, I don’t see that you have anything to complain about. This seems considerably easier than taking care of a real koala.”
“I like the real koala,” Kristi protested.
Pete didn’t seem to hear her. “In fact,” he said, “it almost makes you wonder why we bother having real animals here at all.”
“What?” Kristi asked, aghast.
Pete either didn’t notice the horror in her voice, or he was too consumed with his own idea to hear it. “It’d be a significant financial savings for us,” he mused. “After all, fake animals don’t require expensive food or medical care—and they don’t poop, pee, or smell bad. Plus, it’s much easier to acquire a fake panda or rhinoceros than a live one.”
“You have to be kidding me,” Kristi said. “Tell me you’re not seriously considering this.”
“What’s so wrong with it?” Pete asked.
“Everything,” Kristi replied. “People don’t come to a zoo to see fake animals.”
“We have fake dinosaurs,” Pete countered.
“Because dinosaurs are extinct, you moron.”
Even this didn’t faze Pete. “I understand why you’re upset,” he said. “You’re worried that you’d lose your job if there weren’t animals to tend to. True, fake animals would certainly require fewer staff to care for them—at a further savings to the company, I might add—but we’d still need some people such as yourself to maintenance the creatures and sell the idea that they’re real. This is quite a groundbreaking concept, if I do say so myself. If you’ll excuse me, I need to go work up an action plan. It’s been a pleasure talking to you, Kristi.”
Kristi tried to say something else, but it was too late. Pete had hung up.
The koala keeper returned her attention to me. “See what I’m dealing with here?”
“Pete’s an idiot,” I said.
“Unfortunately, he’s an idiot with power.” Kristi sighed. “I’m just scared this whole thing’s going to blow up in our faces. And you know who’s going to look bad then? Me. Not Pete Thwacker. His whole plan hinges upon FunJungle security finding Kazoo quickly, and frankly, I don’t have much faith in them. They’re not even trying to find the real thief. They’re trying to find you.”
I nodded sadly, and then thought to ask, “Do you have any idea who the real thief is?”
“Sure,” Kristi said. “I have plenty of ideas. Only I can’t get Marge or any of her stooges to listen to one of them.”
I straightened up, intrigued. “I’m listening.”
Kristi gave me a doubtful look, then seemed to think better of it. “Okay. You’re the one who figured out who killed Henry, right? I think Freddie Malloy is a possibility.”
“The actor?” I asked. “Why would he want to steal Kazoo?”
“Because he thinks Kazoo ruined his career,” Kristi replied.
“How? If anyone ruined Freddie’s career, it was Freddie.”
“Well, let’s face it, Freddie’s a bit delusional. I mean, the guy thought that provoking dangerous animals on stage would be a good career move. He believes FunJungle canceled his show because they wanted to focus on Kazoo instead.”
“But then he ought to be angry at FunJungle, right?” I asked. “Not the koala.”
“Yes, if he were a rational human being,” Kristi replied. “But he’s not. He hates Kazoo. I saw him skulking around here all the time—and once, I heard him say he wanted to throw Kazoo into the crocodile pit.”
I gulped. I’d always thought Freddie wasn’t playing with a full deck, but this was worse than I realized. I thought back to my encounter with the actor that morning, how he was still skulking around KoalaVille, desperate to be noticed. If he’d gotten rid of Kazoo, it must have been driving him insane that a fake koala was still attracting more attention than he was. “And you told security about him?” I asked.
“I tried to. But Marge is so sure you’re the culprit here, she won’t listen to anything else.” Kristi rolled her eyes. “I probably should have reported the threat when Freddie first made it, but at the time I thought it was all just talk.”
“How long ago was that?”
Kristi shrugged. “Two weeks or so. Not long after Kazoo arrived here.”
“Who else do you think the kidnapper might be?” I asked.
“Charlie Connor,” Kristi replied. “He’s one of the guys who dress up in animal costumes here—”
“Oh, I know who Charlie is,” I told her. “He was a suspect in Henry’s murder.”
Kristi reacted with surprise. “Really?”
I nodded. Charlie was a dwarf ex-con who had become a clown after serving time in prison. He had briefly been at the same poorly run circus as Henry, where the hippo had attacked him one day. (Charlie had chalked this up to the hippo having an inexplicable hatred of little people.) Eventually, both of them had ended up at FunJungle. Charlie played a character named Larry the Lizard, which merely involved wearing a reptile costume and standing still so that tourists could take pictures with him. There were a lot of characters like this at FunJungle: Eleanor Elephant, Zelda Zebra, Uncle O-Rang—although Henry the Hippo had been the most popular by far. Until his alter ego had ended up dead. After that, fake Henry had been cut from the mascot squad.
“I’m surprised Charlie’s still working here,” I said. “He hates being a lizard.”
“He’s not a lizard anymore,” Kristi said. “He’s a koala.”
Now it was my turn to be surprised. “Since when?”
“Since Kazoo got here. FunJungle took everyone who used to play Larry the Lizard and switched them to playing Kazoo.”
“Then what happened to Larry the Lizard?”
“FunJungle surreptitiously retired him. I don’t think many people ever liked Larry. He wasn’t that interesting a character, and frankly, he looked like a mutant frog to me.”
I thought back to all the times I’d seen someone dressed as Kazoo at FunJungle. There were probably too many to count. To my surprise, I realized that someone in a Kazoo costume had been stationed near KoalaVille almost all the time during regular park hours. I’d simply stopped noticing. This happened a lot at FunJungle. You tended to forget that the characters were merely costumes with real people inside them and started to think of them as scenery. I wasn’t the only person who’d done this. The actors had plenty of stories about tourists discussing everything from crimes they’d committed to their secret ATM codes right in front of the mascots.
I had probably walked right past Charlie Connor a dozen times, if not more, without having any idea he was inside the Kazoo suit. This was a bit unsettling, as Charlie didn’t like me much. During the investigation into Henry’s death, Charlie had secretly given me some information, but park security had forced me to cough up his name, and Charlie had felt I’d betrayed him. Now that I thought about it, there were at least two times when Kazoo had tried to trip me as I’d passed. At the time I’d figured it was all in my head, but now I was quite sure it was Charlie Connor lashing out at me.
“Why was he angry at Kazoo?” I asked.
“He wasn’t,” Kristi told me. “He’s angry at FunJungle. He claims he was badly hurt here as a result of criminal negligence by the park.”
“How?”
“Large Marge fell on him.”
“Oh. I actually saw that happen.”
“Yeah. Large Marge was chasing me at the time. I was racing to tell J.J. McCracken that my parents had been framed for Henry’s death. Marge tried to stop me—and Charlie got in the way. She squashed him like a pancake.”
Kristi laughed, then seemed to feel bad about it. “Well, Charlie claimed he was suffering from chronic back pain as a result. He said he could barely walk and wanted a couple million dollars to settle. But the park hired a private detective who caught him dancing at a nightclub, and the case was bounced out of court.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked.
“Charlie told me,” Kristi said. “He talks to me a lot. He’s also asked me out a bunch of times.”
“What’d you say?”
“No, of course. Not because he’s a little person or anything, though. Because he’s a criminal. The guy admitted to trying to bilk a couple million dollars out of FunJungle—and then thought I’d go on a date with him? Forget it.”
“So how does Kazoo fit into all of this?” I asked.
“Charlie claimed he’d come up with a way to take FunJungle for even more money than he would have made through his insurance scam. He never told me what it was, but ransoming Kazoo fits the bill. Or selling him to some rich collector like Flora Hancock.”
“This crazy lady who collects wild animals,” Kristi told me. “Her husband made a ton of money in oil, and now she’s got her own private menagerie: lions, tigers, monkeys, bears. Some folks say she even has an elephant. She lives all the way up by Waco, but she’s already been here five times to see Kazoo. One of the other keepers pointed her out to me. She’s hard to miss. She’s the only person I’ve ever seen who comes here in designer clothes and high heels.”
“My parents said a collector might have wanted Kazoo,” I said. “Did you ever hear her say anything about that?”
“Oh yeah. She came right up to me here one day and asked about it.” Kristi stuck her nose in the air and spoke in a deep Texas accent. “ ‘Child, you must tell me. How did J.J. evah get himself a koala beah?’ ”
The impression was funny enough to make me laugh. “What’d you say?”
“That Kazoo didn’t belong to J.J. He belonged to Australia. And that no private collector can get themselves a koala. Australia would never allow it.”
“And what’d she say to that?”
Kristi shifted back into her Flora Hancock impression again. “ ‘Oh, they might, sugah. They just might.’ ”
“You think she looked into it?” I asked.
“She seemed very determined,” Kristi said. “And once she discovered there was no legal way to get a koala, maybe she started looking for an illegal way.”
“Like Charlie Connor,” I concluded.
“Exactly. I’m sure he saw her here. Maybe he overheard her talking about wanting a koala at some point and then approached her with a plan. If anyone could have made off with Kazoo, it’s him. He probably knows KoalaVille better than anyone. All he does is lurk around here in that koala suit eight hours a day.”
“And because he’s a criminal, he probably knows how to get around the security cameras and stuff,” I suggested.
“Oh, you don’t have to be a criminal to do that,” Kristi said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The security cameras inside the koala exhibit don’t work. They threw up this building so fast—they wired them in, but they never connected them to the main system properly.”
I sat up in surprise once again. “The cameras don’t record at all? Then how did I get filmed last night?”
“Because the cameras outside the exhibit work. They were all installed when the park was built. But the ones inside, everything in the viewing area, Kazoo’s pen, and even this one”—Kristi pointed at a camera mounted on the wall at the ceiling of her office—“they don’t do a thing. I’ve been complaining about it for weeks, but no one’s gotten around to fixing it. Marge told me not to worry because the cameras alone should have been a deterrent—as long as everyone thought they worked. But obviously, they weren’t.”
I shook my head sadly. “Did Charlie know the cameras didn’t work?”
“I didn’t tell him, but someone else might have. Or someone might have talked about it in front of him while he was wearing that ridiculous costume one day. Or maybe he just figured it out for himself.”
“And Freddie Malloy could have figured it out too,” I suggested.
“Absolutely,” Kristi agreed.
My phone buzzed. It was a text from my father: Done here. Where R U?
“Is that important?” Kristi asked.
“Kind of,” I said.
Kristi checked her watch and got to her feet. “I better get going. I didn’t expect to talk so long. I have to get back to pretending a stuffed animal is real for the tourists.” Kristi sighed. “Pete was wrong. Taking care of the fake isn’t less work than caring for the real thing. It’s more. Kazoo was easy to handle. But with the fake . . . I’m constantly worried someone’s going to catch on. And when they do, it’s going to be bad.”
I got up too, and Kristi shepherded me toward the door.
“Can I tell my parents about Freddie and Charlie?” I asked.
“That’s what I want you to do,” Kristi said. “That’s why I told you all this. I can’t get the ear of anyone important here. I’m just a keeper. But your parents are more connected. Someone has to either get our security to focus on finding the real kidnapper—or the police need to be brought aboard. We need to locate Kazoo and get him back here as fast as possible. Every minute counts.”
Her voice cracked, like she might be on the edge of crying. I froze, halfway through the door. “Why?”
“Most people don’t realize it, but koalas don’t eat just any eucalyptus,” Kristi said. “The type Kazoo eats is very special. It doesn’t grow in Texas, so we have to fly it in from Australia twice a week. Whoever stole Kazoo didn’t take any of it—”
“He doesn’t have any food?” I asked, concerned.
“No,” Kristi said sadly. “So if we don’t find Kazoo soon, he’ll starve to death.”