That Thursday broke bright and clear and unseasonably warm, even for Florida. A sense of karmic justice shimmered in the sunlight. After a lifetime of consigning other animals to captivity, Lex had become the hunted. Newspaper editorials demanded his firing. Letter writers recited the litany of his alleged crimes against nature, from the murder of Enshalla to the heartless removal of the wild elephants from the savanna. Now the mayor had raised the possibility of criminal charges, a suggestion that evoked the remarkable image of a zoo director ending up caged.

Lex felt as though he had been invited to his own execution. Even so, he was not about to surrender. That morning, as he dressed and shaved and steeled himself to face the judgment of the other alphas, he believed he still had a fifty-fifty chance—a testament either to the strength of his character or the depth of his denial. There was no reason to stand before the board and make his case unless some part of him thought he could work his magic one more time and escape the trap in which he’d become so thoroughly enmeshed. It did not matter that he had laid the trap himself. He insisted that the audit was a sham that would never stand up in court. He saw himself as wrongly accused, misunderstood, persecuted. He wanted his moment.

He and Elena drove into Tampa together in their ’92 Nissan Pathfinder, so old and faded it was hard to tell it had once been gold. They had brought Pippi along for the ride, as well as another little terrier mix named Grub, possibly because he and Elena longed for the comfort of two creatures who still loved them. Lex was not about to explain such choices. He was in no mood for trifling questions. He no longer answered reporters’ phone calls, except to tell them never to call again. Whatever he had to say was for the board alone.

A swarm of TV news crews awaited them at a hotel near the airport. Usually the board meetings were convened at the school attached to the zoo, where young children attended classes and camps, but the board chairman had decided he didn’t want the kids being disturbed by the stampeding media.

There had been a debate over whether the zoo should allow the press and public to attend the meeting. Pointing out that Lowry Park relied at least partially on public funding, Mayor Iorio and other officials argued it was only right that the meeting should be open. Instead, Lowry Park stonewalled. In a move that would make it clear that the zoo’s image problems could not be blamed solely on Lex, the zoo had hired five uniformed Hillsborough County sheriff’s deputies to keep reporters under control and away from the boardroom. The decision reinforced the impression that Lowry Park had a great deal to hide and offered fodder to critics who pointedly asked how the zoo could justify spending tax dollars to hire guards to keep the public out.

Even before the meeting began, the scene at the hotel descended into farce. A spokeswoman, with a smile pasted on her face but with panic behind her eyes, waded into the crowd of reporters and photographers, trying to herd them into an upstairs room. The journalists, who knew a cage when they saw one, ignored her. They planned to maintain their vigil until Lex made his grand entrance—they needed the footage—and now they called out questions at board members who were trying their best to slip into the hotel unnoticed.

The savage nature of the moment kept surging to the surface. As the journalists grew more impatient with the efforts to corral them and more frustrated with how long it was taking Lex to arrive, their aggression mounted. We are sharks, one reporter told herself, waiting to be fed.

Lex and Elena were en route when word reached them about the mob out front. So they swung around to a back entrance. Lex got out and strode inside, ignoring the one or two reporters covering that door. Any thought of following him was rendered moot by the uniformed deputies.

With nothing else better to do, some of the journalists reluctantly retreated to the confinement of the media room and poured themselves coffee. A deputy stood outside the door, making sure they didn’t get close enough to the meeting to snoop. A couple of reporters drifted back toward the parking lot, hoping Elena would make an offering to the beast of their daily news cycle—a quote, a denial, even a muttered insult. Anything was better than the nothingness of the hotel corridors.

Elena parked the Pathfinder and hurried past them without a word, looking angry and disheveled. The reporters walked over to the SUV and noticed the vehicle had a bumper sticker in front: eat more beef. Peering inside, they saw one of Lex’s safari hats on the backseat, along with Pippi and Grub, who clamored by the window, barking at the strangers.

“Oh my God,” said one reporter. “There’s dogs in the car.”

By now it was midday and sweltering, with the sun bouncing off windshields. The reporters, sweating, looked at the terriers and knew they had a story. In Florida, dogs left in hot cars died all the time. Surely the wife of a zoo director would know that.

Someone inside the hotel warned Elena that reporters were lurking near the Pathfinder, so she came back out and moved it to a parking lot a couple of blocks in the distance. She wanted to hear Lex’s speech to the board, and she thought Pippi and Grub would be fine, because she’d left the SUV in the shade of a live oak and rolled the windows down a few inches. Undeterred, the reporters hiked over and kept an eye on the dogs. They called their editors, and soon the news appeared online. A reader, worried about Pippi and Grub, called Hillsborough County Animal Control.

“You can’t possibly be serious,” a spokeswoman for the agency said when she heard the news.

Inside the hotel, Elena was frustrated because she had been blocked from hearing Lex’s defense or even sitting with him outside the meeting. Like the journalists, she wasn’t allowed near the proceedings. Finally she gave up and made the long walk back to the Pathfinder and the dogs. An animal control investigator was waiting. By this point Pippi and Grub had been locked inside for anywhere from an hour to two hours. They were panting, but did not appear in serious distress.

The investigator confronted Elena.

“Would you leave your baby in a car with the windows cracked?”

Elena was tempted to reply that she wouldn’t put a dog collar on her baby, either, or have her baby neutered. Instead she looked at the investigator and said, “You’re absolutely right. I’m sorry.”

The investigator, Elena recalls, told her she was lucky not to be on her way to jail. If Elena had left the dogs in the heat any longer, the investigator said she would have been forced to break into the car and rescue the animals and have her arrested. Around them, the craziness kept escalating. A sheriff’s deputy pulled up, ready to take Elena into custody if necessary. Reporters hovered. A TV cameraman recorded Elena’s moment of shame. Pippi and Grub barked and barked.

“Welcome to my world,” Elena told the investigator.

Using a thermometer, the investigator determined that the temperature inside the SUV had climbed to ninety degrees. The investigator told Elena the dogs needed water. But when she brought some back, Pippi and Grub were more interested in declaring themselves to the cameraman. The investigator wrote Elena two tickets for improper confinement of animals, and two more for failure to have tags or vaccination records. Elena took the tickets, took the dogs, and drove away. Somehow, while her husband was inside fighting for his job, she had managed to get herself charged with animal cruelty.

The journalists scattered to call their editors again. Lowry Park’s efforts to muzzle the press had backfired. The whole thing was an embarrassment not just for Lex and Elena, but for the institution that had employed Lex for the past twenty years. Already, news of the cruelty charges was attracting hits on the news sites and spreading to animal lovers and zoo haters around the world.

The glee was unmistakable.

The afternoon dragged on. Inside the media room, the captive journalists bristled. One reporter had to ask for permission to use the bathroom. The others kept poking their heads into the hall, watching for board members coming or going. They texted officials inside the meeting, begging for updates.

Whatever transpired in the room—the arguments and counter-arguments, the vote itself—was supposed to remain a secret. Inevitably, though, details trickled out. The city auditor delivered a detailed accounting of Lex’s manifold sins, an indictment so scathing that it rattled at least one board member who had been inclined to think favorably of the CEO. The mayor, through a representative, made ominous suggestions about the dire consequences that would rain upon the zoo if Lex was not driven from their midst. One board member, a retired president of an insurance brokerage firm, defended the accused and cautioned against rushing to condemnation. As the man spoke, he had the impression that none of his fellow board members was paying him the slightest attention.

Through it all, Lex waited in a nearby room, sequestered from the general proceedings—an odd requirement, given that even defendants in criminal trials are allowed to sit in court and hear the testimony and evidence arrayed against their future. When the board finally allowed Lex entrance into the inner sanctum, he was confronted by rows of faces, many appraising him with a detachment that caught him off guard. Others appeared livid. In the past, some of the directors had called him their friend, and before he entered the room, he had hoped that at least a few would remember the world they had created together at the zoo.

Lex tried to make his case. He had prepared a bound volume of documents refuting the charges in the city audit and had made sure that a copy was placed before every board member. He was ready to demolish the audit, line by line. But as he stood there, he realized most of the board had not even glanced at his documents and had no intention of doing so. Looking them in the eye, he apologized for his part of what had happened, but insisted that the blame was not entirely his to shoulder. All he’d ever wanted to do, he told them, was build a zoo that mattered.

“Don’t judge me completely by the past year,” Lex said. “Judge me by all twenty-one years I’ve given.”

One of the board members, a woman he’d danced with at Karamu, aimed a dagger of a question at his jugular.

“Did anybody ever tell you no?” she asked.

“Sure,” said Lex.

When they were done with him, he was shown the door. By then all of his cautious hopefulness was gone. The hearing had been a well-designed piece of stagecraft, but the outcome had obviously been decided long before. Making matters worse, the news of Elena’s debacle with the dogs had spread through the hotel. If there had truly been hope of Lex holding on to his job, surely the animal cruelty charges had shattered it. Here was a man allegedly incapable of protecting his own pets. Could the board really trust him at the helm of an ark?

No. Lex would either step down, or they would fire him. The vote was unanimous. Even Lex’s defender went along with the motion, since it allowed his friend a measure of dignity. The board chairman went to the room where Lex was churning and laid out his options. Lex agreed to resign. Afterward, he emerged from the hotel, stony-faced and silent, and caught a ride to a friend’s house where Elena awaited with the dogs and the citations and her new infamy.

It was unlikely that they would ever be invited back to the garden again.