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  “Code One, tiger.”

  Enshalla was out.

  Late that afternoon, the new keeper found himself alone with the tigers.

  Chris Lennon, thirty-three, and only a month into his job, would normally have had another keeper watching over him. But Carie was gone, and the other experienced keeper had been fired. Pam Noel, the assistant curator who supervised the Asia department, had been on duty earlier that day, but she’d been called away when one of her children suffered an asthma attack at school. Chris was on his own with Eric and Enshalla.

  By four thirty, he was ready to feed the tigers and shift them from the exhibit into the night house. He placed their dinner in separate dens, then pulled a lever that allowed Enshalla to enter the building. As always, a barrier of thick mesh stood between him and the tiger. And as was her habit, ever since she was young, she waited for him to walk past her den and then leaped toward him against that mesh.

  Chris continued with his routine. He was standing in a little corridor, preparing to shift Eric from the exhibit into his den, when something made him turn around. A sound, maybe. First he saw a chunk of meat in the hall where it should not have been. Then he saw Enshalla. She had left her den and had passed through a door he had accidentally left unlatched. Now the tiger was loose, only a few feet away, and eyeing him.

  If she wanted to attack, there was no place for Chris to go. The only exit was a door that led out into the exhibit, where Eric was still waiting to come inside.

  For reasons that no one would later be able to explain, Enshalla did not pad toward him. For almost fifteen years, she had displayed unremitting hostility toward humans. But on this day, she ignored the new keeper and kept moving. Chris hurried to the end of the hall and threw shut the night house’s mesh door, so Enshalla could not reach him if she changed her mind. He got on his radio and declared the Code One.

  Enshalla walked calmly out of the building and into the sunlight. For the first time in her life, she was free.

  This was the moment the staff had prayed would never come.

  Once the warning sounded over the walkie-talkies, the zoo went into emergency lockdown. By now it was approaching five. The few visitors who remained on the grounds were hurried to safety behind closed doors. The front gates were blocked off. The weapons team grabbed rifles and shotguns.

  From inside the night house, Chris told them Enshalla had gone into an area that until recently was the home of Naboo. The rhino had been moved because his exhibit was being remodeled. Even over the radio, the distress in Chris’s voice registered clearly. He sounded shaky, but was holding it together, reporting Enshalla’s movements. He watched the tiger as she lingered in Naboo’s former exhibit, now turned into a construction site.

  Years ago, before Naboo had arrived, this had been the Asian elephant exhibit. The night house through which Enshalla walked had once been the barn where Tillie the elephant had killed Char-Lee Torre. The exhibit beyond, where Enshalla had wandered, was ringed by a muddy moat filled with elephant grass. The moat was deep but not wide. It was designed to keep in elephants and rhinos, not an animal that could leap.

  Enshalla’s position put her a few strides from the front gates, near the manatee fountain so popular with small children on warm August days such as this one. If the tiger had escaped earlier, when the zoo was more crowded, she could have easily cleared the moat and gone hunting among toddlers.

  Following the Code One protocol for tigers, the weapons team surrounded the area. An assistant curator climbed with his rifle to the top of the Komodo building. Someone else took position behind the tiger night house. The protocol suggested that the team first attempt to lure the tiger back into her den with food, but that was not likely to work this time. Enshalla didn’t appear hungry; in fact, she’d walked past her food as she’d slipped out. Even so, she remained dangerous and was likely to defend herself if cornered.

  The weapons team waited for Dr. Murphy to arrive with his tranquilizer gun. Until then, they trained their weapons on Enshalla. Most of the team’s members had known the tiger for years. Several remembered her as a cub. Lex had known Enshalla since she was born at the zoo fifteen years before. Late that afternoon, when she escaped, the CEO was driving north on I-275 toward his Pasco County ranch when his cell phone rang.

  “Come back right away. There’s a Code One tiger.”

  Lex got off at the first exit and turned his truck around and sped back toward the zoo. By then Dr. Murphy was ready with his darts. The rest of the weapons team had Enshalla in its sights. Every time she moved, rifles followed. So far she had done nothing aggressive. She lay down for a few minutes, got back up, chewed grass, rested in the sun. She did not roar or growl. She was quiet.

  When Lex returned to the zoo, he took cover in a car parked on the sidewalk between Enshalla and the fountain. Inside the car were Lee Ann and a primate keeper armed with a 12-gauge shotgun. The team was trying to decide on the best vantage point for Dr. Murphy to dart Enshalla. They considered putting the vet on the zoo’s skyride—a safe position, but too high and far away. They also considered having him climb to the top of the tiger night house, but they didn’t want Enshalla to see him and become agitated. Like so many of the animals, Enshalla did not like Murphy, because she associated him with the jab of a tranquilizer. Just recently, he had immobilized her to perform the tests to determine why she hadn’t become pregnant.

  “This cat hates me,” Murphy told Lex.

  Knocking out Enshalla would be dangerous. Tranquilizers don’t always work instantly, as in the movies. Their effects depend on unpredictable variables—the animal’s emotional state, the exact place the dart enters the body. In 1974, at the Knoxville Zoo, a veterinarian had fired a tranquilizer dart into an escaped Bengal tiger. The tiger, approximately twenty-five feet away, leaped onto the vet and mauled him.

  “It happened so fast,” one witness said, “he didn’t have time to move.”

  News of the Code One was out. A guest, herded inside a building, had apparently phoned the media. Reporters were calling. In the sky, a news helicopter hovered. The weapons team hoped the chopping sound would not set the tiger on edge. Soon Enshalla was moving again. She walked to the edge of the exhibit, then jumped down into the tall grass inside the moat, making it harder for the weapons team to see her. She had found the perfect place to disappear.

  By now it was close to six o’clock. Enshalla had been out for roughly an hour. Dusk would be falling soon. If the team was going to tranquilize her, they knew they had to do it fast, or they risked losing her in the darkness. Murphy stepped onto the boardwalk that lined the exhibit, trying to stay out of the tiger’s sight. Lex got out of the car, armed with the shotgun, to cover the vet.

  Enshalla was still in the moat. Unable to get his shot with the tranquilizer gun, Murphy climbed to the top of a platform draped with ivy—a platform where, many years earlier, children had climbed onto the backs of elephants for rides. The platform was roughly seven feet high, giving Murphy the angle he needed. He aimed and fired. The dart hit Enshalla’s neck, but the drugs did not knock her out. Instead Enshalla was enraged. She lunged toward the vet, clawing up the ivy. She was only a few feet from Murphy when Lex fired.

  Enshalla dropped into the elephant grass, but was still moving. Lex fired three more times.

  Finally the tiger was still.

  Chapter 14

  Conspiracy Theory

  That Tuesday evening, as Carie finished her shift at the animal shelter, strange messages from friends at Lowry Park flooded her cell phone’s voice mail.

  “I’m sorry,” they told her. “You need to watch the news.”

  Then they hung up.

  The lack of any explanation was unsettling enough. But even worse was the urgency that Carie detected beneath the voices. On her drive home, when she finally had a moment free, she phoned someone at the zoo.

  “What’s wrong?” Carie asked. “What happened?”

  “I’ll tell you,” said the
friend, “but you have to pull over first.”

  At first Carie didn’t want to stop, but her friend insisted. She stopped the car on the shoulder, her sense of dread growing. “What is it?” she said. “Is Enshalla dead?”

  The friend paused, then said yes.

  Carie began to scream.

  The next morning, Lowry Park was all over the front page again. Even so, the zoo was open, and the canned jungle drums were beating their familiar message, and couples and families were lined up at the ticket windows. A bloody death, it turned out, was a good draw at the front gate.

  Despite the attempts at normalcy, the staff was visibly reeling. The deluge had already begun: news conferences, tearful interviews, petitions for Lex Salisbury’s firing. The furor grew when Lowry Park confirmed that Chris Lennon was new to the zoo and had apparently never before worked with large carnivores. By all accounts, Chris was so devastated by Enshalla’s death that he was holed up at his apartment, not even answering the phone. Lowry Park placed him on leave, then promptly fired him. A state wildlife inspector recommended that the young keeper be charged with improper handling of captive wildlife, a misdemeanor. Ultimately, though, the Hillsborough County state attorney’s office declined to press charges, saying there was no evidence of criminal intent.

  Lowry Park itself was reprimanded. The Tampa Police Department expressed frustration that the zoo had not immediately called 911 to report the escape of a dangerous animal. An inspector from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who visited the tiger night house after the shooting, declared the zoo’s training and safety procedures inadequate. The new keeper’s inexperience had been a safety hazard, the inspector said. So was the policy that had allowed one keeper, working alone, to shift dangerous animals from their exhibit into their dens. The inspector’s report concluded:

  Correct: Immediately.

  Outside the zoo, Enshalla’s shooting was more fodder for the endless debate over the ethics of keeping animals captive. Many were incensed at the CEO, calling him “Wild West Lex.” Others wondered why the zoo hadn’t found another way to pacify the tiger. Couldn’t someone have thrown a net?

  When asked these questions by reporters, several current and former keepers from Lowry Park all agreed that the zoo had done the only thing it could in an impossible situation. They explained how long it could take tranquilizers to kick in, how a net would not have contained an angry tiger’s teeth or claws. Once Enshalla leaped, they said, Lex had no choice but to pull the trigger.

  “That’s his only option,” said Brian Czarnik.

  Brian was the keeper who had been fired from the Asia department not long before Enshalla’s death. He was more critical of the events that had led up to the tiger’s escape. Like Carie, he believed the zoo had been stretched too thin for too long. To him, Enshalla’s escape as a result of a new keeper’s mistake only proved it. In interviews with the St. Petersburg Times and other news outlets, Brian listed his complaints. He didn’t understand why the zoo had only one staff veterinarian for approximately eighteen hundred animals—a question many others had asked as well. He believed Lex’s constant push for expansion had worn people down and driven a wedge between the keepers and management. And he was critical of the zoo’s eagerness to market the arrival of new baby animals such as Tamani.

  “If it’s nice and fluffy,” he said, “they’ll use it.”

  Brian said he’d been fired because he spoke up about problems and pushed for change. Other keepers, he said, had been dismissed after they protested. All of these firings, combined with the departures of Carie and Dustin and others who had left on their own, had created a vacuum of experience.

  At a news conference after Enshalla’s death, Lex was asked about Czarnik’s firing.

  “Our policy is not to go into employee matters,” said the CEO. “But the guy was fired for good reason.”

  Still, Lex confirmed that his reputation as a tough boss was well-deserved. “I am demanding, and I want this place to be the very best,” he said. “If people don’t perform, they generally are unable to stay here.”

  Looking into the news cameras, Lex maintained the calm exterior that had served him so well with mayors and governors and kings. A day after facing an escaped tiger, he was more than ready to stare down a room full of reporters. He said that Lowry Park hadn’t reported Enshalla’s escape to Tampa police because the zoo’s weapons team had the situation under control. He pledged that the zoo would call 911 more quickly, should such an emergency ever arise again. But his comments about the police were far from apologetic.

  “We don’t call them unless we need them,” he said. “We really don’t want people storming in with guns who don’t really understand animal behavior.”

  Someone asked Lex why he had insisted on being the one to put Enshalla down. Why hadn’t he let a member of the weapons team take the shot? Lex explained that he saw it as his job. He hadn’t wanted somebody else to be forced to gun down the tiger. Throughout the press conference, Lex tried to dial down the emotions of what had happened. Though he had known the tiger all her life, he avoided referring to her by name. The effect was disturbing. Suddenly Enshalla was no longer the fierce beauty who terrified and enthralled the public and her keepers and even her lethal suitors. Now she was simply the animal in question. It felt as though she were being erased.

  Lex acknowledged that her untimely death was unfortunate. But as the press conference went on, he did his best to move the conversation from the dead tiger to the ongoing mission of Lowry Park.

  “The thing that makes us want to keep going on is that we feel like we have a moral purpose, that we’re making a difference,” he said. “And I think we are.”

  The high-minded words did not stem the torrent of criticism. On the Internet, Lex was accused of murdering Enshalla. Lee Ann was stunned. She had seen Lex moments after he shot Enshalla, and no matter how controlled he’d appeared in front of the cameras, she knew how much the incident had shaken him. What was he supposed to have done when Enshalla attacked? she wondered. Just let the tiger kill Dr. Murphy? If anything, Lee Ann was grateful to her boss for taking on such an awful responsibility.

  “Lex did us a favor,” she said. “This is his zoo, and he cares about this place, and he had to make a difficult decision.”

  What almost no one noticed, in the fog of questions, was the way Lowry Park’s history had circled back on itself. But Lex saw it.

  On the afternoon of the press conference, Lex guided two reporters to the boardwalk above the rhino moat to show them exactly how he had ended up shooting Enshalla. He was not being boastful or defensive. The reporters had asked him to walk them through the complicated sequence, so they could describe it more accurately in their coverage, and he was simply granting their request.

  Away from the glare of the TV lights, Lex let down his guard. Enshalla’s death, he said, was the second most heartbreaking moment he had ever known at Lowry Park. The only thing worse had been the morning in 1993 when the elephant killed Char-Lee Torre. Both tragedies had unfolded in this corner of the zoo. When Lex fired at Enshalla, in fact, he had been standing beside a plaque memorializing Char-Lee’s death. He pointed to the plaque now, so the reporters would see it. Not to linger on the coincidence. Just to note it.

  In the years to come, as generations of new visitors strolled through the zoo, they would have no idea that a keeper and a tiger had both died in this spot. Once the exhibit was remodeled, it wouldn’t look remotely the same. But the history would still roil underneath.

  Two terrible days, thirteen years apart, now framing everything in between.

  In the primate department, there was talk of a statue. The keepers wanted some way to remember Herman, and the zoo was considering a plaque or perhaps even a bronzed figure to be erected in front of the chimp exhibit. Something respectful that honored his decades in this place and would allow him to reign on.

  The surviving chimps, meanwhile, had not fully recovered. They were still in tran
sition, waiting for the next alpha to declare himself and take power. The primate keepers crossed their fingers, hoping it would not be Alex. Since Herman’s death, the adolescent male had been stirring things up. He had even claimed Herman’s throne, staking out the former alpha’s station beside the waterfall. Bamboo, content to sit on the rocks one level below, didn’t bother trying to knock Alex off the perch. But as summer turned into fall, it became clear that Bamboo had accepted the mantle of the alpha. Bamboo wasn’t as self-assured as Herman, but he seemed reasonably comfortable with his new role. The chimps seemed to have stabilized again, at least for the time being. Sasha’s introductions with the rest of the group had continued since Herman’s death. Rukiya had accepted the role of the infant’s surrogate mother; Sasha had bonded with Rukiya and now followed her everywhere. Sasha was also extremely attached to Bamboo. One night, she had climbed into his nest in the night house and slept beside the new king.

  Those who loved Herman were still trying to decipher why he had been overthrown by Bamboo, the lowest member of the hierarchy. Clearly something had shifted in the group, something the keepers had not seen coming. But what had been the catalyst? Why would Bamboo have gone after Herman, who had treated him with respect? What had Bamboo stood to gain that wasn’t already available to him? He had a steady supply of food, and Herman had never tried to stop him from mating with the females. What could have set him off?

  Now that some time had passed, Lee Ann was able to talk a little about Herman’s death. She admitted she was still mystified by what happened. But she had arrived at a theory. Whatever had transpired, she believed that Rukiya had been at the center of it. Lee Ann thought back to the earlier fight between Bamboo and Herman, not long before the fatal attack. She remembered Rukiya grooming Bamboo and how unusual that had seemed. She thought about the many times she had seen Rukiya manipulating Herman and Bamboo, redirecting the males’ aggression. Somehow, she believed, Rukiya had quietly orchestrated the coup.