One Hoof In The Grave

by Carolyn McSparren

  “I’ve had one of our people in Atlanta checking on finances. Catherine Harris is comfortable, but not rich, and Troy doesn’t have any money to amount to anything. Morgan’s family is loaded. To say they don’t get along is like saying Al Qaida doesn’t get along with the CIA, but in a pinch, she’s still their baby girl. She’s definitely still Troy’s.”

  “Yeah. He’d kill for her, I guess. Dumbass,” Stan said. “Need to check on his whereabouts. Brock’s too, I guess. He’s probably still at the Raleigh’s, but it would be nice to know he’s been there all night.”

  “Check on Morgan and Catherine Harris too,” Geoff said.

  “What are you going to do?” Stan asked.

  “After I leave here, I’m going to check on Merry Abbott. I’m hoping this time she has an air-tight alibi.”

  Half an hour later, Geoff and Stan watched the EMTs load Gwen’s body into their van and drive off. No sirens. No urgency.

  Stan had sent the receptionist home in a squad car with a policewoman. Geoff had expected hysterics, but she was one stop short of catatonic. The woman could barely put one foot in front of the other. Stan wouldn’t get anything out of her for hours, maybe for days.

  The office itself wasn’t precisely the crime scene, but Stan and Geoff agreed that until they knew for certain Gwen hadn’t been killed inside the clinic, they could consider the whole place a crime scene, and thus, they didn’t need a warrant. The minute he’d gotten the receptionist out, Stan sent a couple of officers in to search the office, and another officer to secure Gwen’s house. She lived in a fifties bungalow less than a mile from the clinic.

  “We’ll need a search warrant for the house,” Stan said. “It would help to be able to specify what we’re looking for.”

  “Money,” Geoff said. “Evidence of where she got it.”

  Inside the office, two officers were carefully going over the storeroom.

  “There’s Ketamine out the wazoo,” a young officer who might have been Stan’s younger clone said. “Lot of stuff would sell well on the street in Atlanta.”

  “If it’s still here, she probably wasn’t killed in a theft,” Stan said. “I’ll get one of my people over here with the receptionist after she comes out of her shock. They can match inventory to prescriptions and suppliers.”

  Geoff wasn’t needed inside, so he went back to the hay shed. The center portion of the shed between the alfalfa and grass hay had been empty until the techs tossed the bales of alfalfa away from Gwen’s body. Stan’s officers hadn’t moved the bales of grass hay at the other end of the shed.

  He didn’t know much about horses, but he knew Merry seldom fed her horses alfalfa. She said it was too rich, and could cause digestive problems. It was also much more expensive than grass hay.

  Maybe Gwen felt it was worth taking the chance to put weight on an underweight animal.

  In moving the alfalfa into the center of the shed, the techs had upended several of the bales so that the bottom bales were now on top of the pile. “Man, these things are heavy,” one young officer said as he dug his fingers under the baling wire and hefted.

  A puff of dust arose from beneath his fingers. He began to cough.

  Geoff took a look at the cloud, grabbed the young man and dragged him into the air. “Get out of there, all of you,” he called.

  Still coughing, the man said, “I’m allergic to dust. I’m okay.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Whatever that is, it’s not dust.” He could think of a dozen powders from plain old baking powder to anthrax that might be in that bale. “I need a respirator and a bunny suit,” Geoff said.

  Five minutes later, wearing a fresh bunny suit and a respirator, Geoff dug his pocketknife into the bale of alfalfa, dropped a dab of white powder into one of the test tubes from Stan’s squad car and handed it over to the officer. He added the test agent, shook the tube, watched it turn indigo and whispered, “Oh, man.”

  “Get Stan,” Geoff said.

  An hour later the dismembered bales of alfalfa lay strewn around the shed. Of the twenty-two bales, thirteen contained neatly wrapped kilos of cocaine that now sat on a blue tarpaulin. “Well, now we know how she paid for that fancy equipment,” Stan said. “Not easy carving hidey-holes in alfalfa, then resealing them so they don’t look like anybody’s tampered with ‘em,”

  “Wouldn’t work with grass hay,” Stan said. “The bales are too loose. Alfalfa has tough stems, but it packs solid.”

  “I wonder where she buys her alfalfa,” the cop said.

  “I can make a guess,” Geoff said. “She wouldn’t need a whole load. If Giles Raleigh fed alfalfa, she could have bought bales from him.”

  “And Brock,” Stan said with satisfaction.

  Geoff called Merry on his cell. “Where do you buy alfalfa?”

  “I don’t. Why?”

  “Where would you if you did?”

  “Probably Texas or Oklahoma. Maybe Florida. It’s cheaper if you bring back a big trailer load and sell parts of it to other people, but you have to watch for blister beetles. One beetle can kill a horse. Why?”

  “Tell you later. Where are you?”

  “Where would I be? At the farm, of course.”

  Did she sound defensive? That usually meant she’d been up to something he didn’t want to know about.

  “How long have you been there? What are you doing?”

  “I’ve been here all morning, and now I’m putting Heinzie to. What is this?”

  “Peggy with you?”

  “She and Dick just got here. They brought lunch.”

  “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be there in an hour.” He hung up on her protestations.

  “Alibi?” Stan asked.

  “Probably not.”

  “Can I trust you to find out, or do I have come over there myself to question her?”

  “You don’t honestly think Merry had anything to do with this, do you?” Geoff asked. “Looks pretty straightforward to me. Brock and Gwen had a falling out at the viewing. I’d guess it had something to do with the coke.”

  “So why didn’t he take his merchandise when he happened to drop by to kill her?”

  “He’d need time to cut it out of the hay. He wouldn‘t want the receptionist catching him,” Geoff said. “He probably plans to come back tonight after everyone’s gone. Normally we’d have released the crime scene by then. It’s sheer dumb luck the tech discovered the cocaine.”

  “Yeah. I’d like to keep a lid on this until I get my hands on him,” Stan said. “You want to talk to the DEA?”

  “No way. You take the credit,” Geoff said.

  “How sure are we it’s Brock? Say sixty per cent?”

  “My gut says Brock will turn up. If by any chance she wasn’t in business with Brock, then whoever her partner is should come to take back his dope the minute he finds out she’s dead and we’ve left the scene. He can’t take a chance we’ll find his stash.”

  Stan’s elation was catching. His whole team was walking around wearing happy grins and giving one another fist bumps.

  Giving Stan the drug bust glory would make him Geoff’s friend for life. And keep him off Merry’s back.

  Chapter 32

  Merry

  Peggy and Dick had brought plenty of food to feed Geoff too. While Peggy and Dick were at the table in the clients’ lounge with us, we made small talk. The minute they left to put the Halflingers to, I asked him, “Why on earth do you want to know about alfalfa?”

  “None of your business.”

  “What’s going on? I’ll find out, you know.”

  “Eventually,” he said as he crumpled his paper napkin and lobbed it accurately into the waste paper basket in the corner. “So, you were here alone this morning?”

  “Uh-huh.” I hadn’t told him yet about my foray into the jungle next door. I wasn’t looking forward to his reaction.

  “I know that look. Everywhere but at me. “

  I lobbed my napkin at the waste basket and missed. That’s
why I never played basketball.

  “You’re up to something.”

  “If you say, ‘Lucy, you got some s’plainin’ to do,’ I swear I’ll deck you.”

  “Give it your best shot.” He opened his arms wide.

  “Oh, heck. I did pick up feed this morning, and I saw Brock meet the governor’s man Whitehead for breakfast at the diner next to the feed store.”

  “What time?”

  “Six-thirty, seven.”

  “Then you came back here and didn’t leave again.”

  “Well, not precisely. I listened in on their conversation.”

  “Merry, for the love of God . . .”

  “Don’t you want to hear what they said?” I reported almost word for word.

  “Tell me you drove straight home after that and didn’t leave,” he said.

  “Almost.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  So I told him about my trek onto the governor’s property. He was not happy about it.

  “Damn.” He flipped open his cell phone, held up a hand to shut me up and said, “Hey, Stan, Brock’s got an alibi of sorts. If TOD is early enough, he might have done it.” He listened, lowered the phone and said to me, “Go away.”

  I slammed the door after me and went to find Peggy and Dick.

  We had the Halflingers washed down and back in the pasture before Geoff came out.

  “I have to go,” he said.

  “What is going on?” Peggy asked.

  “Tell you tonight. How about I buy you all dinner?”

  “You don’t . . .”

  “Yeah, I do.” He took my hand and pulled me out to the parking lot, at which point he leaned across and kissed me, hard. “You could have gotten shot as a trespasser. That would have pissed me off.”

  “Thanks for your concern.”

  “You saved us a lot of trouble. Try to stay out of it yourself.”

  He left me staring after him as he drove off much too fast down the driveway. He’d be lucky if he didn’t go over the cliff. I wandered back into the stable in a funk. Just when I was sure the man was as cold as a flounder, he did something that—I mean, that was not a friendly kiss. He must be relaxing his rules about messing with anybody involved in one of his cases. Good. I could build on that.

  Chapter 33

  Geoff

  By the time Geoff got to Stan’s interrogation room, Stan had brought in Brock. He acted enraged, but Geoff saw fear in his eyes. He’d been properly Mirandized, and so far hadn’t asked for a lawyer. Amazing the number of otherwise intelligent people who thought they could handle the police on their own. The police fostered that view for as long as possible.

  “I got a barn to run,” Brock said. “Y’all drag me down here and treat me like I’m the one did something wrong. I told you already, I didn’t kill Mr. Raleigh.”

  “Uh-huh,” Stan said. He looked down at the yellow legal pad in front of him as though referring to notes. Geoff could see over his shoulder that they looked like Stan’s grocery list.

  After a moment, in which Brock slid around on his chair, Stan looked up and smiled. “Got to give y’all credit. Slick trick, doctoring those bales of alfalfa so nobody could tell they were stuffed with coke.”

  Brock jumped a foot. “What in hell you talking about?” He started to stand, but Stan waved him back to his chair.

  “Probably wouldn’t fool a sniffer dog, but then they don’t normally sniff hay haulers, do they?”

  Geoff watched Brock’s pupils dilate. A thin film of sweat had broken out above his eyebrows.

  Stan looked down at his pad and asked, “Just so we’re clear, where were you this morning?”

  Brock caught his breath. “What time this morning?”

  “Oh, say, between midnight and now.”

  For a moment Brock looked confused. Then he looked even more frightened. Geoff wondered whether he’d spent the night in Sarah Beth’s bed, and if so, what time he got up to tend to the horses.

  “I got to bed early.”

  “Where?”

  “At home.”

  “Whose home?”

  “I live in the guest cottage behind Raleigh’s stable,” Brock sounded annoyed, but he’d relaxed. This wasn’t the scary question.

  “Alone?”

  “Yes, alone.”

  “Mrs. Raleigh didn’t join you?”

  “What the hell kind of question is that? The woman just lost her husband.”

  “The woman’s also carrying your baby,” Stan said quietly. “I don’t imagine your girlfriend Gwen was happy about that, Mrs. Raleigh being a rich woman and suddenly available and all.”

  “I didn’t even know Mrs. Raleigh was pregnant.” Brock’s pupils had gone back to nearly normal size. The pulse at his neck still thrummed, but not as fast as it had.

  “Then why’d you tell Whitehead she was?”

  Stan’s Berserker forebears showed in his smile. Brock must have caught a whiff of Norse Warrior too, because he seemed to diminish in his chair right before their eyes. Whitehead?”

  “You mentioned it at breakfast this morning, right?”

  He gaped. “Who? Wha . . .”

  “You ought to know by now you can’t stir your coffee in public without somebody noticing,” Stan said. “Why’d you need money so bad? Deal for the coke fell through?”

  “What coke? Who says I need money? You keep talking about coke like I’m supposed to know about it.”

  Stan gave him a sad ‘more in sorrow than anger’ look. “Thirteen kilos on their way to Atlanta to a secure evidence locker. Amazing the number of prints Saran Wrap preserves. Since we took yours on Sunday after Raleigh’s death, we had them on file all ready to check.”

  Brock looked as though he might throw up. Stan was as fastidious about his interview rooms as about his squad car, so Geoff hoped Brock would not toss his cookies.

  “Guess whose prints we found all over all the packages? Yours, my friend.”

  Brock went very still. “Do I need a lawyer?”

  “You can have one if you want one.” Stan sat across from him totally relaxed. “Course, we’ll stop the interview and put you in a cell ‘til he gets here. ‘Course, I won’t be able to help you then.”

  Geoff could see the wheels turning in Brock’s brain.

  “Help me how?”

  “You’ve got thirty seconds to get in front of this,” Stan said. “First rat gets the cheese. Maybe we can cut a deal if you give us some names. People higher up the food chain.”

  Geoff could almost read the sign on Brock’s forehead: abandon ship, every man for himself. “I can’t go to jail. If I talk, can I get probation?”

  Stan cut his eyes at Geoff and said, “Lord knows. The judge might give you probation, depending on how good your information is.”

  On a cold day in hell Brock would get probation.

  “All I ever did was help pack and drive the hay up from Florida,” Brock sounded close to hysteria. “If you want to know who it belongs to, ask Gwen. I don’t even know who picks it up. It was her gig from the get go.”

  “Where from? How often?”

  “Look, you sure I can get probation?”

  “You got to give me more than that,” Stan said. “How’d you get into this?”

  According to Brock, Gwen worked in a big south Florida practice after she qualified as a vet. “They handled a bunch of high-dollar racehorses for some of the drug kingpins. Gwen got to know them. They were her ticket to her own practice.”

  “How’d you two hook up?”

  “Raleigh goes down to Wellington and Ocala to drive every winter for a couple of months. We used Gwen for our vet down there, and she and I hit it off.”

  “Who worked out the way to hollow out the alfalfa and fit the coke inside?”

  “I guess it was a joint effort.”

  “How long have you two been doing this?”

  “Gwen had something going before with prescription drugs. She said it was easier to con
ceal in a large practice, but it’s chancy and doesn’t pay all that well. She’d made enough to set up her clinic, but not to pay for the equipment she wanted.”

  “Why pick north Georgia?”

  “Lot of horse people up here go down to Florida. They agreed to use her if she settled here. She really is a great vet.”

  “How long you been working together?”

  “I told you, I’m just the driver! I just started!”

  They waited. Geoff watched Brock calculating how much he could lie, then give it up. “Three years.”

  “How many loads a year?”

  “Three or four, if the price of alfalfa was cheap enough in Florida to make it worth Raleigh’s time to bring up extra loads.”

  “Who else was in on it?”

  “Nobody up here. Gwen made the arrangements. I don’t know any names. I’d pick up the alfalfa, meet a couple of guys to help me stow it inside the bales, then I’d drop off the bales with the coke in Gwen’s shed, and take the clean stuff on to Raleigh.”

  “Then what?”

  Brock shook his head. “I don’t know who picked it up from her. She’d pay me, and that would be the end of it until the next time.”

  “When was your last load?”

  “First week in April.”

  “That’s over a month ago. Why was it still at Gwen’s?”

  “She said the guys who were supposed to pick it up had been busted up north somewhere. Her Florida connection figured it was safe where it was, until they could get another crew together.”

  “Where were they moving it?”

  Again Brock shook his head. “I told you, I don’t know anything about that end of it. All I did was help pack it and drive it to Gwen.”

  “How did Raleigh find out?” Geoff asked. They were moving into murder territory now, so he took over.

  “Who says he knew?” Brock’s eyes swiveled to look at Geoff, all his belligerence back in place.

  “You did. You told Gwen he intended to fire you and turn you over to the cops.”

  “How did you . . . ?”

  “Is that why you killed him?” Geoff asked.