Karen Harper - Shallow Grave

As she came closer, Claire saw a man, face up, grotesquely sprawled under the cat in a pool of blood. Brittany’s father! The tiger lowered its jaws to the big man’s ravaged, red neck and gave his limp body a hard shake.

“I’ll call 911!” Claire shouted at Brittany, who, now sobbing, clung to the bars of the cage.

Nick ran up, his cell phone already out of his jeans pocket. He was talking into it, asking for help, paramedics, the police. He put an arm around Claire, hugging her hard to him.

Brittany, hysterical, kept screaming at the beast. She began to rock against the bars as if she’d pull them from their moorings. Then she turned away, climbed the fence again, and tore around to the door of the interior part of the display where she’d told the kids there was a “tiger bedroom” and supplies. As she ran in, the door behind her caught and stood ajar. A red fire extinguisher was mounted there.

Ann Hoffman appeared, running, gasping. “What?” she cried, and then she saw. Nick hurried toward her. Unlike her daughter, the woman didn’t scream, but fastened her fists in her hair and stared aghast as if in shock.

“Do you have a gun here?” Nick asked the distraught woman. “Ann, do you have a gun? Tranquilizer darts?”

She just stared. Dear heavens, Claire thought, this was a nightmare. If Ben Hoffman wasn’t dead already, they’d never save him now.

Surely Brittany didn’t intend to go into that cage. This was no metropolitan zoo with protocols and stun guns. But that fire extinguisher gave Claire an idea.

She rushed to the door where Brittany had disappeared and shouted, “Brittany, come back! The fire extinguisher will stop him!” She lifted it from its holder attached to the inside of the door. Heavy. She staggered back with it. Nick ran to help. Good thing, because she realized she had no idea how to use it.

Leaning forward over the restraining fence, Nick yanked a ring on the metal extinguisher, pointed the hose and nozzle, and pulled the lever just as Brittany ran back out toward them with a long metal gaff. She must have meant to use it to shove the tiger away from her father, but the chemical spray hit the cat. Some of it bounced back toward them, and Nick aimed it better.

“Brittany!” 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.