Excerpt from The Dragon Behind the Glass by Emily Voigt, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

CHAPTER ONE
The Pet Detective
NEW YORK

On a freezing Tuesday in March 2009, my alarm blared at 4:00 a.m. By 6:45, I stood shivering outside a housing project in the South Bronx with Lieutenant John Fitzpatrick and three junior officers, fresh-faced graduates of the Academy. The entire scene was gray—the potholed roads, the sooty snow, the late-winter sky—except the officers themselves, who provided the only glimmer of green. Rather than standard NYPD issue, they wore olive uniforms and trooper hats, à la Ranger Smith from The Yogi Bear Show. As they crunched across the unshoveled walkway, a passing teenage girl wisecracked, "Ain't you supposed to be in the forest?"

Fitzpatrick, who had been patrolling the same beat since 1996, ignored her, keeping his eyes trained on one of the brick high-rises lined up like dominoes. As a cop (of sorts) from Brooklyn, descended from a clan of cops from Brooklyn, he looked the part, a towering man of forty-one with a crew cut and dimpled chin. Tucked under his arm was a file containing a photograph of the suspect he was after—someone he believed could be armed and dangerous.

Inside, the building's lobby was dimly lit and gloomy. The elevator clattered open, and we crowded in, squeaking up to the eighth floor, where the officers' boots echoed down the long hall before halting outside one apartment. Fitzpatrick pounded on the door. After half a minute passed and nothing happened, he raised his fist again, pounding harder and longer. A baby cried down the hall. At last, a male voice, gravelly with sleep, croaked, "Who is it?"

"State Environmental Police," Fitzpatrick announced.

"Who?" said the voice, sounding genuinely confused.

The door cracked open to reveal a stocky young man with full-sleeve tattoos wearing flannel pajama bottoms, his eyes squinting against the light. His name was Jason Cruz. Asked if he knew what brought the officers to his door, he shook his head no and said, "I don't at all."

"We're here," Fitzpatrick enlightened him, "because of the alligator that you were offering to sell on Craigslist."

•••

I was reporting a story about exotic pets for a science program on NPR, and it had taken me six months to get permission to join Fitzpatrick, a detective with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, on one of his busts. When I'd first called him the previous summer, I'd found him brimming with bizarre tales from an urban bestiary. During his time policing the city's illegal wildlife trade, he had encountered everything from gorilla-hand ashtrays to twelve hundred turtles crammed into a swank Tribeca loft, their owner left with no room for a bed. There was the Harlem man who kept Ming the tiger and Al the alligator in the apartment where his mother was raising eight small children; the wealthy Brooklyn family who treated their African Diana monkey, one of the rarest primate species on earth, like a second Fitzpatrick jotted this on a notepad. "Now it's down to just a few million people in the Bronx," he said drily.

I was as disappointed as Fitzpatrick to have narrowly missed the alligator. I'd been hoping for a scene like the time he taped up the snout of a three-foot-long caiman and drove it thrashing in his front passenger seat to the Bronx Zoo. What's more, Cruz didn't live up to Fitzpatrick's billing of the typical alligator aficionado as an exemplar of machismo and aggression. Pet alligators were supposed to be particularly hot among gang members and drug dealers, but Cruz didn't seem like either. Before his daughter was born, he used to keep pit bulls, as evidenced by black leather harnesses with metal studs hanging from the wall; but the dog barking in the bathroom turned out to be a poodle.

"You can really get in trouble over, like, an alligator?" Cruz asked Fitzpatrick, still bewildered by what was happening.

Excerpted from The Dragon Behind the Glass by Emily Voigt. Copyright © 2016 by Emily Voigt. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.