4.
Almost an hour after Nathaniel Barker identified the dead deer as his sister, Jay was sitting with George in the manager's office at the rear end of the bottom floor of the Downtown Zootopia Public Library, waiting for the fox to finish telling his story. Out in the stacks and cramped rows of cluttered desks, the library was bristling in quiet chaos; in the manager's quarters, it was a different story. Aside from the basement floor, which was at stock full of files and old crates and other academic detritus as it always was, this was perhaps the closest anyone in the library was going to get to any privacy for the time being. The few open storerooms in the lower levels were being used as temporary holding cells besides, with the day's usual assortment of drunks and debtors soaking in the dust of decade's worth of forgotten tomes.
Thus, George had ensured that office would also double as the Force's makeshift interview room by "requisitioning" the space from the rattled zebra who served as the library's head of staff. Presently, the zebra was busy making sure the building's meticulous systems of organization were not completely undone by the presence of the displaced Police Force, which meant that Jay and George could sit with Nathaniel while Frederick stood just outside the office doors, using his elephantine girth as a barrier for anyone that might have the poor sense to barge in and interrupt the Chief in the middle of his work.
Earlier, When Nathaniel saw the doe's body, he did not cry out in anguish; nor did he scream and lash out in a carnivorous display of rage, as Jay had halfway expected him to. The fox had simply stood there, stone silent, a few paces away from the corpse, not looking away from her, even when the sheet was lifted away to reveal everything that had been done to her in her final moments on Earth. The only thing he said then was barely a whisper, though Jay had no problem hearing it even from where he stood: "My God, Mir…"
The quiet resilience that Nathaniel displayed then had impressed Jay, and though it did not exactly draw the fox out from the web of suspicion surrounding the murder of his supposed "sister," Jay could tell that there was a font of grief coursing just beneath Nathaniel's otherwise stoic face. What Jay could not yet decipher was the nature of that grief – was it the honest kind, borne from love, loss, and longing? Or did that faraway expression in Nathaniel's mossy eyes carry the shame-tinged stain of regret that accompanied guilt and the keeping of secrets?
Another thirty seconds passed without anyone in the room uttering a word. Nathaniel looked aimlessly past the rabbit and the bear that sat across from him, his brow furrowed and his nose twitching slightly in agitation. Then, at last, George leaned in to speak. The office's two desks had been rotated and shoved together end-to-end to serve as an improvisational interrogation table, and George leaned hard enough into the one he and Jay sat in front of to cause the oak to creak and give way. Since the bear had not bothered to prepare any of his note taking tools, Jay readied his own pen and notepad so that he could jot down any new information.
"So," George said, "Tell us again, Mr. Barker, how you happened to stumble upon our investigation of the murder of a doe who you claim to be your sister, of all things, in spite of your…well, your lack of a family resemblance."
Nathaniel blinked, as if he hadn't expected to be spoken to, though this expression quickly became one of irritation and exhaustion. "I told the both of you already," he said, "Miriam was my sister by adoption. Her parents took me in when I was five, after my pa died. My mother was already long gone by then."
"Mixed-species adoption is illegal," George said. Nathaniel shot the Chief a barbed look, but his voice did not waver.
"I know that. So did the Rosewoods. It was informal, and not legally binding, sure, but Horace and Mary Rosewood raised me like one of their own for almost twenty years. I spent almost all of my life thinking of them as my parents, and Miriam as my sister, and there isn't any piece of paper that would could make that any less true."
"Alright then, I'll buy it. I've still never heard of a couple of herbivores going out of their way to nab themselves a meat-eating tyke to call their own. Did your father leave you on the Rosewood's doorstep one day, then? Dropped you off with some poor, unsuspecting herbivores so he could skip out on the local debt collectors? Or was he just too flighty to handle raising a kit all on his own?"
Jay had half a mind to speak up on the fox's behalf. The Chief was cutting deep with his remarks, and Jay knew it was intentional. George wanted to tick Nathaniel off with cheap knocks at predator stereotypes, to see if the fox would crack before even getting to the tough questions. It was an understandable strategy, Jay thought, but a cruel one, and Jay had already had his fill of cruelty for the day.
Nathaniel did not crack, though. He was furious, of that there was no doubt, but he as not so stupid as to get into a screaming match with the Chief Inspector of the Zootopia Police Force while locked up with the Chief Inspector of the ZPF. Once again, Jay was impressed with the fox. Had the tables been turned to put Jay at the receiving end of such a stinging inquisition, he was not sure he would have kept his composure as well as Nathaniel was.
"Horace knew my pa from work," Nathaniel continued. "They both had shifts at the Lionheart Canning Factory, where they process and package all that bug mulch us predators eat. My pa didn't run out on me, either. He died. It was a fire at the canning factory, actually; one of the biggest of the past twenty years. If you want proof, I'm sure one of these old newspapers here has an article about it. Twenty-five dead, I think, and my pa's name, Andrew Barker, would be right there on the list."
"I do recall that fire," Jay noted. "I was young when it happened, but I remember. Half of downtown smelled like smoked fish guts for a week afterwards. I don't recall seeing a blaze that bad again in Zootopia until…well, until today, I suppose." George grunted, but otherwise ignored his friend's contribution to the conversation.
"So, your mother's dead, and your father's dead, and this doe's parents – Horace and Mary Rosewood? Did they just take in a work mate's orphaned kid out of, what? The kindness of their hearts?"
"Horace was best friends with my pa for years, actually," Nathan continued. "The way Horace tells it, there was some kind of incident in the early days at the factory, where the other guys on the floor didn't take too kindly to an herbivore working the canning belt with them. The Rosewoods used to be better off than working a slum job like that, but the Panic of '73 had the whole family turned out onto the streets. I think the other animals at the factory could smell that the Rosewoods used to have money – three generations of bankers on Horace's side. Of course, that drove the factory boys nuts. Horace told me that some of them went so far as to rough him up one day after shift, but my pa stepped in before things got out of hand. It was the first time any predator had stood up for him like that, at least that's how it was told to me."
"So the Rosewoods took you in out of respect for your father?" Jay asked.
"Yeah, that's the long and short of it. I hope you both understand now what I mean when I tell you that Miriam was my sister. We don't look anything alike, and you won't find any papers or certificates that set us up on the same family tree or anything, but it doesn't matter. It never did, not for them, and not for me. If it wasn't for the Rosewoods, I'd be dead by now, or the closest thing you can be to dead after scrounging for scraps in Zootopia's slums your whole life. All of them treated me like family from the day I came into their home, and they never really tried to hide it either. And now…"
For the first time, Nathaniel's grief began to trickle through the wall he had been putting up ever since the sheet was lifted from Miriam Rosewood's broken body. His eyes shone a lucid green in the soft light of the manager's office. His muzzle shifted and twisted with muted emotion. George, for his part, had refrained from edging the poor fox on, though Jay could tell by the bear's steel-set features that Nathaniel would not be let off the hook just for getting emotional. George straightened in his chair, its wooden legs scraping dramatically against the hard floor.
"You speak about these Rosewoods in the past tense. Does that mean that the other two – the parents – have passed on as well?" Nathaniel nodded, slowly and solemnly.
"Yes," he said. "Both of them gone a few years now. Consumption."
Jay started at this enough to stop scribbling shorthand in his notebook. He glanced up, and saw that Nathaniel had noticed his reaction, which was perhaps the first time since their initial meeting in the alley that the fox had taken such direct notice of Jay. There was something in that recognition, a kind of understanding that passed between the two in that one moment. Why should it have mattered, though? Consumption was hardly a novel plague at this point – if you stopped any animal in Zootopia on the street, the odds were that they at least knew of someone who had succumbed to the illness, if they had not lost a loved one themselves. That this fox had lost not just his father, but his adoptive parents as well, was certainly tragic, but that should not have struck Jay as anything particularly meaningful. Zootopia may have been established as "the one great hope for predator and prey animal alike," but the flesh of all that progressive idealism was and always had laid atop the bones of citizens, animals whose lives were all made and unmade every day by their and triumphs and their tragedies alike.
Still, as committed as he was to maintaining the objective perspective that George had been counting on when he called on his help for this case, Jay could not help but feel a sharp pang of emotion for the fox sitting across their shabby makeshift table. The fox who, as Jay had to remind himself, could still very well be responsible for the grisly scene that had brought all three of them together today. That was the other thing. Tangled in with his empathy
(the flies, the shame, the rust, the blood)
was also rising pressure of another, more instinctual reaction in Jay's gut: Fear. There was a saying that passed through prey animal circles, though it was nowadays more hushed than it used to be, given that it ran contrary to the spirit of the whole enterprise that was Zootopia. There were variations of it that ran the gamut depending on the circumstances, but the one that might fit this situation went: "The only time a fox will shed a tear over a fawn is when his belly is stuffed full to bursting." Jay prided himself on not prescribing to such backward notions as so many animals in the city still clung to – he made it a point to work with clients of any shape, any size, and any dietary inclinations. The sticky copper smell of the doe's blood still clung to Jay's nostrils, though. He couldn't quite bring himself to ignore the way the fox's pupils went just a bit narrower as George's suspicious tone cut deeper, or the way his sharp teeth caught the light whenever he opened his mouth to speak.
George stood and strode past Nathaniel to peer through the blinds of the office window. He let the fox sit in silence for a minute while he watched his men do their work outside. Finally, he said, "You have to know how this looks, don't you, Nathaniel? Even if we can check out all of the details you've provided – the father lost in the factory, the benevolent family who took you in, all of it – what you have given us doesn't lead us anywhere back to you." He turned back to Nathaniel again. "Once more, what brought you to the scene this morning. Surely you didn't sniff out your own sister's blood from across the city."
"George!" Jay interjected, "Really, I don't know if—" George cut him off without a word, staring him down and silently telling him: "Quiet. Watch. Listen." Jay backed down, again, though he gave George a curt look that the bear would easily recognize as meaning "Tread carefully." The bear seemed to acknowledge Jay's meaning, but his tone went unchanged as he continued to press Nathaniel."
"As I was saying. Why were you there this morning, Mr. Barker? The deer couldn't have been dead for too long, and she was killed in the middle of the bloody night. You told us earlier that the two of you lived together in Savanna Central, all the way by the docks, on Berry Lane."
"The docks are where I work. It was the only job I could find here in town; it can be hard for us predators to find reliable employment these days, as I'm sure you well know. When Miriam and I left home after her mom and dad died, all we had was the little bit that they left us in their will, which was barely enough to get us on our feet. After months of scraping by with odd jobs between the two of us, I was finally able to get in moving crates around the shipyard at Longhorn's. Miriam got work cleaning apartments and doing laundry downtown. She worked odd hours, so sometimes she wouldn't come home until late, but last night was…different."
"Different?" Jay asked, sensing the hesitation in Nathaniel's voice. "How so?"
"I don't know how to put it," Nathaniel answered, "The night kept wearing on, and there was no sign of her. I got this feeling, a kind of worry, stuck in my head, turning around in circles over and over again…" It was obvious that there was more to the story than Nathaniel was letting on, at least to Jay. He caught it in the slight twitch of Nathaniel's ears as he spoke, and the ever-so-slight pauses he took to measure out his words. Jay stole another glance up to George to see if he was picking up the same thing, but the bear's features remained as neutral as ever.
"So you went searching for her?"
"Yes, I did. She rarely worked with the same client two days in a row, and her rounds had her covering practically half of downtown, but I knew the areas she frequented the most, so I started there. There was hardly anyone awake at first, except for the usual crowd. Patrolmen, vagrants, working women. Nobody who could tell me anything about Miriam. And then that fire got started, and all hell broke loose. I scrambled around for hours through the crowds, hoping to catch sight of Miriam. That was when I caught wind of a conversation as I passed by a couple of animals talking about some other crime scene, something nearby to do with a dead girl. They didn't know who she was, or what had happened, and I'm sure you all have to deal with dead folks all the time, but I got that awful goddamned feeling in my head again. It made my fur stand on end. It made me feel like I had to puke, even though I haven't put anything in my stomach since yesterday, save for that glass of water the rabbit brought me."
"My name is Jay, Mr. Barker." Though Jay was plenty used to animals referring to him simply as "rabbit," Jay made sure to add a twinge of irritation to his words. "Which is what I told you when you agreed to come speak with us today. Seeing that I'm one of the animals that is working to mete out justice for the crime committed upon your family, you would do well to remember my name."
To Jay's surprise, Nathaniel seemed genuinely remorseful when he answered, "You're right. Sorry. Jay, then. Thanks for the water. Anyways, that's everything there is to tell. I was worried something awful might have happened to Miriam in the night, and God help me, I was right." Nathaniel breathed in, slowly, raggedly. Then he exhaled. "Can I ask you something? I think I've answered enough questions to deserve one of my own." Jay and George exchanged glances before George waved a paw at the fox.
"Of course, Mr. Barker. I was just thinking we ought to wrap this interview up for now. Feel free to ask me and Mr. Lightfoot here anything before Officer Bailey sees you out. Within reason, of course."
Nathaniel took more time to consider what he said next. Given the circumstances, Nathaniel had demonstrated an incredible amount of composure while discussing the events leading up to his own sister's murder. It would have been easy to see this lack of overflowing grief as suspect, had Jay not been able to tell how hard the fox had been working to stifle his obvious pain since the moment he first laid eyes on what remained of Miriam Rosewood.
"Miriam is dead," Nathaniel said. "She was murdered." He hung on the word "murdered," like it was a jagged piece of bone that had gotten caught in his throat. "And yeah, I get it, our family history is strange, and I know for a fact you cops have made quite the industry out of locking predators like me up on account of all our awful, terrible crimes, many of which I'm sure we're actually guilty for. I don't really blame you for doing your due diligence questioning me like this. What else do you possibly have to go on? If I were in your position, I'd probably do the same thing." At this, Nathaniel fully let go of any stoic pretense. His green eyes were now streaked with red. Angry tears streaked through the fur on his face. "The thing is…she suffered. I wasn't able to…to see everything that was done, but I can venture to guess well enough. Miriam wasn't just killed by some mugger looking to run off with a paw full of cash. This wasn't simply the work of some gutter-crawling coward that was looking to get his kicks hurting innocent women. Whoever the bastard is that did this…they watched my sister die with glee. I just know it." Nathaniel was trembling with grief and rage, now.
"This wasn't just some savage animal getting their claws into whatever prey they could find. They took…pleasure in the things they did to her. In the things that they took. I thought I'd seen the worst Zootopia had to offer a thousand times over before today, but now…" Nathaniel looked from George, to Jay, and then back again, and Jay could hardly bear to look at the fox, such was the oppressive and stifling weight of his grief. In that instance, despite every ounce of intellect and instinct that screamed at him in the contrary, Jay realized he was now certain that Nathaniel Barker was innocent. He may yet have secrets worth uncovering, but he was no murderer.
"What I want to know," Nathaniel said, "Is how anyone could be so monstrous? So cruel? I want to know how either of you can possibly look at animals like me, or any one of us in this godforsaken city, and try to determine which one of us might possibly be capable of doing what was done to my sister? How can you sit there, knowing that something like this can happen in Zootopia, without the very notion driving you completely mad?"
To that, neither Jay nor George had any answer to give. They just sat in silence, while Nathaniel could do nothing more but sigh one final time and whisper, "That's what I thought. That's exactly what I thought…"
5.
Fifteen minutes later, Jay stood on the front steps of the library with George, the two of them watching the final embers of the ZPF Headquarters fire smolder out in a thick fog of smog and ash. George was presently stuffing tobacco into his favorite ivory pipe. Neither of them had said much in the time since they left Nathaniel to be processed and sent home by Officer Bailey.
When George finally packed his pipe full enough and began to fidget for the matchbook in his breast pocket, Jay snorted a droll laugh and said, "One would think you'd had enough of that stink to fill your lungs for one day." George sucked on his pipe with obvious pleasure, exhaling with a long, rumbling purr that Jay knew meant the bear was in a thoughtful mood. He allowed his friend another few puffs before continuing his line of discussion from where they had left off before. "What do you make of all this, George? I know you asked for my help precisely because you couldn't make anything of it, but it's just…well, Nathaniel was right I think. It's bloody monstrous is what it is. And you've seen something like it already, haven't you?" George indulged in one final draw of smoke before answering.
"Not exactly like it, but similar enough that I didn't have to think twice to seek you out. It was five days ago – no, six. My God, I feel like haven't slept in ages. Yes, six days ago. It was a wolf then, killed not too far from where we found Miriam. She was bled out just the same, too, though she wasn't…gutted like we saw today. That was new. The thing that caught my eye, though, were those damned markings painted on the wall. I don't know about Latin or any of that academic stuff, you know that well enough, but those, what do you call them? Those pictograms—"
"Hieroglyphs," Jay interjected. "Or maybe cuneiform; it's honestly hard to say without reference materials at hand. I didn't recognize the symbols from any of my admittedly amateurish experience with ancient cultures and writings, but that's what sprang to mind originally. Like something you'd find on some ancient sarcophagus." George chuckled, offering the first honest, if weary, smile Jay had seen from him in…well, it would have been years, at this point.
"Sure, Jay. That sounds right enough. In any case, those were the first things that stuck out to me when we got to Miriam this morning, if you'd believe it. I've seen enough dead girls by this point that I'm sorry to say that I'm almost getting numb to it, even with something as awful as what happened to that deer. It's a vicious world we live in, and getting worse by the day, I think. But those, er, hieroglyphs? I'd only ever seen those once before, and it was on the body of that dead wolf. The first time around, I'd almost mistaken it for some kind of, I don't know, gang symbol or something. A couple of small nicks and lines underneath a circular shape. The circle part had a slit down the middle, too; it looked like—"
"Like an eye, held up by a claw…" Jay finished. "You saw the same symbol smeared up on that brick wall by the body today. Then you came to me."
"Yes," George said. He'd already managed to finish off the entire wad of tobacco he'd just packed, and was tapping the ashes out on the library's stone steps. "I asked Bailey to be thorough in his debriefing with the fox. He'll likely be held up for another hour or so, provided Mr. Barker is cooperative, and he seems like the type. That ought to give you enough of a head start."
There it is, Jay thought. There's the catch I've been waiting for. It wouldn't be enough just to ask after my academic expertise, would it? He thought about pretending to be shocked, but this was too grave a situation to waste time with social niceties. "You want me to search Nathaniel's apartment," he said, not as a question, but a confirmation.
"Right again, my friend." That weary smile George had been wearing seemed positively exhausted now. There was no way Jay was going to say no, no matter how much he wanted to. "With things as chaotic as they are, there's no way we would be able to secure a warrant before the fox got home, and we're running perilously short on time. You remember, Jay, how quickly these kinds of situations can escalate. Maybe a week passes before the first kill and the second. Then a few days. Then just one. Every minute we waste is putting some poor creature's life at risk." Jay couldn't well argue with that logic. "Besides…" George paused, and that thoughtful rumble in his throat returned.
"You don't think he did it either, do you?" Jay guessed.
"No…no, I don't. I'm having Burns rummage through the records we have access to right now, and even though it'll take some time, I have no doubt that most of the fox's story is going to check out. He's hiding something, that much is obvious, and I doubt his cooperative mood would extend to letting the ZPF get their noses into his and his dead kin's belongings without due process. Even if he's lying to us, though, I don't think he's a killer. Or if he is, I suspect he isn't the kind of killer that could do that to his own family, or his lover, or whatever Miriam really was to him." Yes, Jay had considered that possibility as well. The adoption story was almost too farfetched to be untrue, but it would also make for perfect cover story in case other animals started asking questions. Predator/prey cohabitation was still technically illegal, not to mention being quite taboo. If such a convoluted cover story was what Nathaniel and Miriam needed to mask some kind of illicit affair, it could explain why Nathaniel was reticent to share the whole truth with the likes of the ZPF. "Still," George continued, "if we can get some kind of head start on finding the common thread between this girl, the wolf from last week, and those damned symbols, it will save lives in the long run. I'm not asking you to break in to the place or anything, but I'm sure you can beat him to the punch and ask him to show you around himself. You know, work that rabbit charm of yours."
"Ah yes," Jay laughed, "Because I am known throughout town for my immeasurable talents in social subterfuge."
"Because you're not ZPF," George said bluntly. "You're technically just a private citizen, seeking out the truth. Offer your services as a private investigator, if you have to. Then, come back to me with everything you've learned, and we'll see what we can possibly make out of this mess…"
Jay pretended to consider his options. "Fine," he said. "I'll do what I can." A thought occurred to him, almost out of nowhere. "Do you think he knows? About Miriam's…line of work?"
"What, do you mean the fact that the witching hours are an awfully inconvenient time for a maid to do most of her laundering? It's hard to say. The fella seems straight-laced enough, for a fox. Maybe he just never asked questions about exactly what kind of services Miriam was providing for her downtown clientele. Or maybe he did ask, and he didn't like what she had to say. When he's done sifting through the paperwork, I'll have Burns ask around the other who work the rounds in that area about if they knew a doe named Miriam. Who knows? Maybe she was a colleague of theirs." George slid his pipe back into his coat pocket and tipped his hat to Jay before turning back up the steps. "I'll leave you to it then, Jay," he said. "I've got another dozen fires to put out, of the metaphorical kind. Keep me informed."
"I will," Jay said. He stood there by himself awhile longer, contemplating the last plumes of the dying blaze, trying to gather what thoughts he could in the few moments he had before setting out again. When George had shown up on Carding Street, Jay had been apprehensive on account of their partnership ending in less than desirable terms. He was surprised, or at least he told himself that he was surprised, at how quickly the two had slid back into their old rapport. He would never admit it to the bear's face, but Jay was excited to be working a proper investigation again, though he wished the circumstances weren't quite so macabre as they turned out to be. Still, endless months of working out messy affairs and bitter property disputes had taken their toll on his passion for the work, has caused him to long for the days when he was the one trapped in the library stacks, poring through dusty old tomes within nothing but the dust motes to keep him company. This, though, wasn't just real investigative work; it was the closest thing to the thrill of the hunt Jay Lightfoot was ever going to experience.
There was fear there, too, at what manner of secrets lay waiting to be uncovered this time. Nobody in Zootopia knew of the kinds of creatures that lurked in the shadows of so many of the animals that walked its streets, of the sad, bloody tales carved into the underside of the grand myth that the city had become. Jay had begun to suspect that this particular tale was going to be altogether stranger than he could have ever expected just a few short hours ago. That scared him, but he had also come to accept that the fear was perhaps the part he relished the most, in the basest level of his own nature. Every rabbit lived in fear of being eaten, so what could possibly be more thrilling that going to stare down the jaws of death of one's own accord, only to outsmart it again and again?
In spite of everything, Jay found himself grinning, just a little. It was time to get moving.
