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John-Henry gave that laugh again, but he cut off at the look on Emery’s face. “You’re serious?”
“Who are the Ozark Volunteers?” Jem asked.
“Imagine Jeff Foxworthy doing a standup routine about neo-Nazis,” North said drily, “and you’ve more or less got it.”
“Is that possible?” Tean asked. “Could Yesenia have gotten on their bad side? If she was investigating an animal trafficking operation—”
“Or benefitting from one,” Emery said. “We don’t know how she got those animals for her safari park, do we?”
“What kind of money are we talking about?” North asked. “I mean, birds, hell, even a tiger. How much money could they be making?”
“Enough money that drug cartels and terrorist organizations find it worth their time,” Emery said drily. “The entire business, from top to bottom, involves the worst pieces of human shit you can imagine. The irony is that only the ones at the top make a fortune. The ones at the bottom, the locals? They don’t get hardly anything. All these people stripping their country of its wildlife for a few fucking bucks.”
Tean shook his head. He caught himself and tried to stop, but it was too late.
“Something I got wrong, Dr. Leon?”
“We should focus on this connection,” Tean said.
“No, you looked like you wanted to say something.”
“Yesenia had those pictures for a reason. Una took those pictures, and we can assume she had a reason as well.”
“The birds,” Theo put in.
Tean shot him a grateful look. “Yes, that seems likely. And it also seems likely that, if someone is trafficking animals in the area—perhaps this group you mentioned—they’d have someone on their staff trained in some rudimentary veterinary practices.”
“Why not just shoot her?” Auggie asked.
“He’s right,” North said. “Why inject her with something at a chicken ranch—”
“Poultry farm,” Tean said, unable to stop himself.
“—and then bash her on the head? Everybody in a hundred miles owns at least one fucking gun. If she’s a problem, why not shoot her? And why the frame job?”
Tean glanced around. He was surprised to see John-Henry staring at Jem. Jem, for his own part, slouched in his seat, playing with the part in his hair, but Tean knew him well enough to recognize the coiled readiness that meant Jem sensed a threat.
“How did she get the pictures?” Shaw said. “I mean Yesenia. If she had a source among the traffickers, or if we can figure out how she learned about this, that might give us another angle.”
“The fucking Ozark Volunteers,” Emery said.
John-Henry asked, “What do you think, Jem?”
Blinking, as though the question had woken him, Jem gave a tired smile. “Oh, I know when I’m out of my league. I’ll let the pros handle this one.”
“I think you could help us a lot. For example, the Cottonmouth Club seems to be involved somehow. The Rangel brothers visited there while Ree and I were following them. And when Ree called the club, the Rangels panicked.”
Jem shook his head. “The Cottonmouth Club?”
He was so good, Tean thought, that unless you knew him, had known him over years, you wouldn’t have seen the glitch. And something opened inside Tean, a wide, yawning darkness, because he knew his husband was lying.
“That seems like a good place to start,” John-Henry said. “Tell us about the Cottonmouth Club, Jem.”
Jem’s smile was the right degree of uncertain, the right mixture of worry and amusement—like this might be a joke, and he wasn’t getting it. “I’ve never been to the Cottonmouth Club; we got here on Thursday.”
“Jem,” Tean said.
Jem flicked him a look, and it was like old transparency layers, the kind they’d used with overhead projectors when Tean had been in school. This Jem, the liar, on top, superimposed over the blurry other Jem, the real one, looking out at Tean and begging for help.
