“You have all her medical records?” Matt asked her.

“Yeah, and I spoke with her vet personally. She’s got a clean bill of health. She’d had some intestinal problems a few months ago. Her owner liked to feed her chocolate truffles-I swear. Godiva truffles, and Beluga caviar on special occasions. Apparently Cleo’s very fond of dark chocolate with hazelnut filling, and caviar on lightly browned toast points.”

“Good God,” was Matt’s response.

“She’s left the high life, but I think she’ll adjust.” Lil forced herself not to climb right on in and take a look. “Take her on over to the temporary, Farley. Let’s get her out of the cage, and into her new home. I bet she’d like to stretch her legs.”

She glanced over to where two of the interns continued a tour for a small group. “Annie,” she said to the young woman at her shoulder. “Why don’t you go tell that group to head over toward the enclosure. This should be a real treat for them.”

She rode with them, standing on the running board. “We were expecting you about an hour ago,” she commented.

Tansy shifted in her seat. “We, ah, left a little later than we’d planned.”

“No problems?”

“No. No.” Tansy stared straight ahead. “No problems. Cleo handled the drive just fine. Slept through most of it. I’ve got all the paperwork if you want to go over it after she’s settled.”

Lil’s first look at the cat took her breath away. Sleek, muscular, her eyes tawny glints, Cleo sat in her travel cage like royalty on a throne.

She eyed the humans, with what struck Lil as a gaze of pure superiority, and let out her coughing roar in case they didn’t fully understand who was boss.

Lil approached the cage so the jaguar could get her scent. “Hello, Cleo. Yes, you’re gorgeous. Strong, powerful, and you know it. But I’m alpha here. No more Godivas or poodles on the menu.”

The cat tracked her with those exotic eyes as she circled. “Let’s get her out. Keep your hands away from the bars. Her favored killing method may be to pierce the skull, but she won’t quibble at taking a good swipe of a careless hand or arm. I don’t want any trips to the infirmary. And don’t let her taste for chocolate fool you. She’s got powerful jaws, arguably the most powerful of all felids.”

They lowered the cage by the lift, and as the tourist group took snapshots, positioned it at the entrance to the enclosure.

Cleo grumbled in her throat, displeased, Lil concluded, with the crowd, the scent of them, the scent of other animals. Across the compound the lion roared.

Lil lifted the cage door, locked it open, stepped back.

The cat sniffed the air as she scanned the space, the tree, the boulders, the fencing. And the other animals beyond.

Her tail switched as the lioness prowled along their shared fenceline and marked her territory.

“This melanistic, or black, female jaguar hasn’t reached maturity,” Lil began for the benefit of the tourists. “She gets her color from a dominant allele-a unique pairing of genes. But she does have rosettes-spots-that can be seen if you’re close enough. She’s one of the four big cats, along with the lion, the tiger, and the leopard.”

As she spoke, she studied Cleo’s reactions.

“As you can see, while young, she has a compact, muscular body.”

“It looks sort of like a leopard.”

Lil nodded at one of the men in the group. “You’re right. Physically she looks like a leopard, though she’ll be bigger and stockier in build. Behaviorally, she’s more like the tiger-and like the tiger, actually enjoys swimming.”

Cleo inched toward the opening of the cage. Lil stayed where she was, kept very still, and continued to talk. “And like the tiger, the female kicks the male to the curb after giving birth.”

That got a little laugh from the tour group as they angled for more pictures.

“She’s a stalk-and-ambush hunter, and no other species comes close to her abilities there. In the wild, she’s an apex predator, top of the food chain. Only man preys on her. Because of deforestation and encroachment and fragmentation of its habitats and poaching, jaguar populations are declining. The species is considered Near Threatened. Conservation efforts will help preserve her species, which in turn will help preserve other, smaller-range species.”

Crouched, the jaguar stepped out, nosing both ground and air. When she’d cleared it, Lil lowered the door on the enclosure, locked it.

The crowd applauded.

“She’ll be protected here,” Lil added. “Cared for by the staff, interns, and volunteers of Chance Wildlife Refuge, and through,” lest they forget, Lil thought, “the donations of our patrons and visitors. She’ll have a good life here, and may have it for over twenty years.”

She watched the black cat belly through the grass, nosing it, nosing the air, then rising to stalk. Squatting to pee, marking her territory as the lion marked hers.

She paced and circled, and even when she stopped to drink from her trough, Lil saw her muscles quivering.

She continued to pace, to prowl, sending out that hoarse roar. When she rose on her hind legs to sharpen her front claws on her tree, Lil felt her own muscles quiver at the beauty of the cat’s lines, the power of her build.

She watched, even when the others drifted away, she watched for nearly an hour. And smiled when Cleo leaped into the tree to spread her muscular body over a thick branch.

“Welcome home, Cleo,” she said aloud.

She left the new guest alone and went back to the office to check the paperwork.

She looked in on Matt first to find him reading the new addition’s medical records. “Everything as advertised?”

“Healthy female melanistic jaguar, who has not yet come into estrus. She’s had regular exams, the proper inoculations. Her diet has been somewhat suspect. Tansy brought blood samples, but I’ll want to examine her myself.”

“Understood. Let’s give her a day or two to adjust to her new environment before we put any more stress on her. I can get you some scat and urine without too much trouble if you want to start sooner.”

“Sooner the better.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

Lil walked to the office she shared with Tansy, and shut the door.

Tansy looked up from the keyboard. “Everything okay?”

“We’ll get into that in a minute. First, what’s up with you?”

“Nothing. I don’t want to talk about it now. I want to talk about it later,” Tansy decided. “With alcohol.”

“Okay, after tonight’s feeding. We’ll have some wine and a debriefing. But here’s what you have to know now.”

Lil sat and filled Tansy in on what had happened during her trip.

“My God, Lil. My God. You could’ve been seriously hurt. You could’ve been killed.” Tansy shut her eyes. “If one of the kids-”

“Middle of the night. The kids aren’t here. We’re taking steps. Every step we can. With the new alarm system the animals, the staff, everyone will be protected. I should’ve dug into the coffers for an updated system before.”

“It did the job, Lil. It did the job until some crazy person came around. You have to be crazy to open the enclosure that way. Whoever did it could’ve ended up as fresh meat just as easily as that elk. The cops can’t find him? Any trace of him?”

“Not so far. Coop thinks he has a line on who it is. Tansy, Carolyn Roderick-you remember her?”

“Sure. What does she have to do with this?”

“She’s missing. She’s been missing for months, disappeared from a group working in Alaska.”

“Missing? Oh, no. Her family. I talked to her mother a couple of times when Carolyn was here.”

“She had a boyfriend-an ex. He came around here when she interned.”

“The mountain-man type-Ed? No, not Ed.”

“Ethan.”

“Right, Ethan, of the I’m-descended-from-Crazy-Horse blather.”

“You remembered that faster than I did,” Lil replied.

“I had dinner with Carolyn and some of the other interns a few times, and he’d come along or show up. Full of himself and his proud heritage, which came off as bullshit to me. But she liked it, liked him. He brought her wildflowers, did some volunteering. Took her dancing. She was smitten.