by Judy Clemens
“I told you, I was sort of asleep before they came in, and then I was hiding so they wouldn’t see me. So I didn’t see anybody else, either.”
“Okay.” Watts let out a slow breath. “Let’s go through it all again.”
I glanced at my watch. Time was creeping toward Laura’s event. If we didn’t get out of there soon, she wouldn’t have time to get Bunny ready. I slid out my phone and texted Zach. It took me a year, but I did it.
could someone check on bunny
I only had to wait a few seconds before receiving an answer:
bobby and claire got it covered
Awesome. It made sense, since their judging wasn’t until tomorrow, and they knew what was needed to get Bunny presentable. All that would be left would be for Laura to get changed and present her calf at the ring on time.
“You again?”
It took me a moment to realize Laura had stopped talking and everyone in our little group was looking up. Gregg had broken away from his fan club, and was steamrolling my way, murder in his eyes.
Chapter Twenty-one
Gregg stopped a few feet away, staring at me, looking even wilder than he had when he’d first arrived. I slowly closed my phone, not wanting to spook him, but chose not to say anything. He obviously wanted a fight, and it wouldn’t be the smartest thing for me to slug him with all of our county’s finest standing around watching.
“Why are you here?” He wasn’t going to let it go. He obviously lacked my maturity. “Are you a suspect? Or just butting into things that aren’t your business?”
“I’m not a—”
“Mr. Gregg.” Watts stood up and moved in-between me and the idiot. “Ms. Crown is merely helping with our inquiries.”
“Oh, so it’s like that, is it? You are a suspect?” He took a step toward me, Watts mirroring his move.
“Mr. Gregg, please. I’m conducting an interview. If you could please move along, I would appreciate it. This doesn’t concern you.”
“Of course it concerns me. One of my most promising young protégés is dead, and this woman is in the middle of it.”
Oh, for Pete’s sake. Protégé? Really? The word “conquest” came to mind much easier than protégé. “I’m not in the middle of anything,” I said. Which wasn’t exactly true, seeing how I’d found the body, and had brought one of the last people to see her alive to talk to the cops. But who was counting? “I’m just being a good citizen. And you know what good citizens do? They report things they see. Like seeing someone have an argument with Rikki only hours before she shows up dead. Would you know anything about that?”
He went white, then red. Like a barber shop pole. He even looked like he might start spinning around. “What are you—Who is she to—”
“David? Anything wrong?” The sheriff—Watts’ dad—came up behind Gregg.
“That woman.” He pointed a shaking finger at me. “I want her arrested.”
“For what?”
“Killing Rikki Raines.”
The sheriff looked at Watts, who was rolling her eyes like a teenager. “She’s not even a suspect, Da—Sheriff.”
He walked over to me, holding out his hand. “Sheriff Nathaniel Schrock.”
I stood up to meet him. “Stella Crown.”
“Ah, the young lady who found our victim.”
“What?” Gregg was so loud the rest of the room went silent.
The sheriff hesitated for a second, then said, “It’s okay, everybody. Nothing to see here.”
Gradually, the voices started up again.
Gregg’s voice shook, but at least he wasn’t screaming anymore. “Are you telling me this…this woman found Rikki?”
Watts nodded. “She did.”
Gregg really was going to explode. I wondered how messy it would be. Eh. I’d seen worse.
“David, come on. Doesn’t one of your girls have an event coming up?”
Gregg blinked, like he wasn’t sure what the sheriff was talking about.
“Remember?” I said. “One of the events you bought for your daughters?”
Gregg made a move toward me, but the sheriff stepped in front of him, while Watts gave me the evil eye. I know. I needed to shut up.
Schrock pulled a schedule out of his pocket, along with a pair of glasses that he perched on the end of his nose. “There, see? Calf judging. Your youngest is in it. It starts in a half hour.”
Laura jerked her head up. “Half hour?”
I held my hand out toward her, like I would a frightened animal. “Watts?” I kept my voice low.
She swiveled her eyes toward me.
“We gotta go. Laura’s in an event. That same one your dad’s talking about.”
Sheriff Schrock led Gregg away, Gregg looking back over his shoulder at me, until finally they were out of hearing range, with several other people between us.
“Thanks for coming in, Laura,” Watts said. “Next time, though, it would be better to come right away, all right? Now, here.” She gave each of us a card. “Call me if you think of anything else.”
Taylor pocketed the card. “We can go?”
“Yes. Thank you. Stella, you have a second?”
I jerked my head at the girls, and they took off. “What?”
Watts glanced the direction her dad had gone, then scooted her chair closer. “Do you know the woman who is the official veterinarian for this year’s fair? I figured you might, since you’re a farmer.”
“Yeah. Her name’s Carla Beaumont. Why?”
Watts’ stylus hovered above her iPad. “What do you know about her?”
My hackles rose. It had only been an hour since Bryan had said someone was out to get my best friend. Was that “someone” the police?
“We have a theory about what killed Rikki Raines,” Watts said. She hesitated, as if deciding whether or not to share. She probably shouldn’t. But I wasn’t going to tell her that.
“We think it might have been poison,” she finally said. “Administered with a syringe.”
“So?”
“Stella, think about what Dr. Beaumont would have here, at the fair. Syringes. Medicine. All being carried around with her. Lots of it deadly to humans.”
I laughed. “Are you for real? Tons of people have syringes at the fair. I give my animals injections all the time for worms or whatever. Not a new thing.”
“This wasn’t a worm medicine.”
My mind raced back to a few months ago, when someone had stolen meds from the back of Carla’s truck. “Ketamine?”
“We don’t know for sure. They’re still running tests.” She glanced at her notes. “But it was something that caused paralysis, and we know Dr. Beaumont would have those things in her box. For surgery, and other things.”
“Was it Ace?”
“What’s that?”
“Acepromazine. A tranquilizer.” Vets used it as a sedative before operations, or even to help with car sickness in dogs. It had actually started out being used on humans, and still was sometimes used as an anti-psychotic drug. It shouldn’t be deadly, not unless…“How much medicine was she given?”
“Enough of whatever it was that her throat swelled to the point she couldn’t breathe, or swallow. She basically suffocated.”
My stomach dropped. Poor Rikki.
“She never had a chance,” Watts said. “And the worst thing is she would have known what was happening, but couldn’t do anything about it.” She shook her head, and I saw the sympathy in the slump of her shoulders. It was nice to see a cop care about the victim, especially after she’d been questioning my own emotions the night before.
But wait. She was saying Carla had something to do with it.
“Watts, Carla would never do something like that.”
“I’m not accusing her. Yet. But it does look suspicious.”
“Because she’s a vet? What does that have to do with Rikki Raines? Carla didn’t even know her.”
Watts’ eyebrows rose. “And you know this how?”
“We talk. If she knew Rikki Raines, I would have heard about it.”
“Just how well do you know Dr. Beaumont?”
Should I tell her? “Carla’s my best friend. Or one of them, anyway. I’ve known her forever.”
“So I can’t trust you to see the truth.”
“Truth? What truth? All I see is stupid suspicion.”
“It’s a syringe. And a good possibility of veterinary medicine.”
“Oh, come on. There’s no way for you to know that about the medicine unless you have a detailed report. Do you?”
No response.
“Plus, anybody could get a syringe. And how do you know it’s a vet’s syringe, anyway? Syringes all look the same.”
She blinked. “Do they?”
“Well, sure. Except for the honking huge needles, I would think. And as for the medicine, you said it yourself she has it here at the fair. Anybody could have taken it.”
“Really? She’s that careless with her box?”
“She’s not…Listen, Watts. She couldn’t have done it. I was with her while Rikki was getting murdered.”
She went all skeptical.
“And not just me. My fiancé. Her boyfriend. We were doing the whole fairway games and unhealthy food thing. We met her after the concert and went from there. And it was for a while before Rikki was killed, because Laura saw Rikki after that.”
Watts tapped on her iPad. “What time are you saying you met her?”
“I’m not just saying it. It happened. And it would have been, I don’t know. Ten-thirty. Eleven. Way before Rikki died. And listen, I’m sure the carnies wouldn’t remember us, but the kids saw us over by the double Ferris wheel. That was right before Nick and I went back to the calf barn and found Rikki dead. Carla was with us the whole time. You can look it up in your notes. I told you that last night, the same as I told all the other cops.”
She frowned. “But—”
“So you can’t pin the murder on Carla. It didn’t happen.”
“But it could be her medicine.”
“Possibly. If someone broke into her stuff.”
She let out a huge sigh and sank back into her chair.
“Sorry to blow your lead, Watts, but I’m not going to let you destroy my friend just so you can look good to Daddy.”
“That is not—”
“What made you think of her, anyway?”
She wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“Let me guess. Anonymous tip?”
“We have to take every one seriously.”
“Whatever.” I stood. “I gotta go. And look, I really do hope you find who killed Rikki, but you’re wrong on this one.”
I left her hunched over her iPad, tapping uselessly on the screen.
Chapter Twenty-two
I stopped outside the building and called Willard. When he answered, I told him what had just happened. “Can you find out what they know? Is this official?”
“I haven’t heard anything,” he said. “I’ll check it out.”
I thanked him, then caught up with the girls at Laura’s stall after trying to call Carla. I wasn’t going to let her be ambushed by Watts without warning. Even if there was no way Watts could reorganize the timeline to implicate Carla, she still might try to pin the stolen meds on her. That would tear Carla apart, if it were true. Carla didn’t answer, so I texted her, telling her briefly that Watts might be around asking stupid questions. I did a quick sweep through the dairy barn on my way to the calf barn, but didn’t see her anywhere. I hoped she would see my message sooner rather than later.
“Stella!” Taylor was still at Laura’s stall. “Laura just left.”
“Come on. Let’s get a seat.”
Taylor and I hoofed it to the arena just as the bucket calves were being judged. This is the youngest class, born only months before the fair, between March fifteen and May thirty. They were still in their adorable knobby-kneed stage, not as awkward as newborns, of course, but still fresh and innocent. The 4-H’ers were knobby-kneed, too. Younger than Zach, since they had to be between eight and thirteen to show this class. They looked as cute as their calves, wearing their white clothes, their nervousness showing in their stiffness and obvious discomfort about where to stand and how to hold the halter ropes. The older kids were fairly experienced, in most cases, but the eight-year-olds still had a lot of learning to do.
Bobby and Claire had found seats across the arena, Bobby very bright in an eye-splitting neon shirt, but there was no room with them, so Taylor and I squeezed into some free seats on the bleachers. Only then did I allow myself to relax. My sore foot, which I’d been on way too much that morning, let itself be known, but I didn’t care. I was just glad to be where I wanted to be for the first time that day. I would have hated to miss Zach’s market judging event, and poor Laura would have been devastated if her opportunity to show her calf had been lost. No matter that what we’d just done was necessary, missing her event would have tarnished Laura’s 4-H experience forever—what hadn’t already been tarnished.
The final six bucket calves were lined up in the front of the ring now, and the judge was looking them each over, marking a tablet, stepping closer for a look at this or that. He seemed agreeable enough, talking with the kids, asking questions we couldn’t hear, and nodding or smiling at their responses. Twice he had calves change places, until he seemed satisfied with his arrangement.
He visited the table to the side of the ring, and a ring man accompanied him back to the center, carrying ribbons. Using the handheld microphone, he praised the class for their care and quality of their calves, and congratulated them all on a job well done. The group in the back line realized by now that they wouldn’t be ribbon winners this year, and their disappointment showed in their hunched shoulders and forlorn expressions. The younger few were still excited, watching everything with wide eyes, but the older ones understood it was over.
The judge handed out the ribbons, from sixth to first place, and took a moment to acknowledge the attributes of the champion. The girl holding the halter appeared ready to burst with pride and joy, and practically danced her way out of the ring when it was all over.
“We’re next?” Taylor said.
We. She and Zach were already a “we”? Or was she lumping herself in with me? Were she and I a “we”? Not my usual speed for bonding.
“Zach and Laura will show in this next group,” I said, “along with Austin and Randy.”
“And them.”
I followed Taylor’s gaze to the bleachers on the other side of the ring. Mrs. Gregg perched on the edge of the first row, with her two older girls beside her. One of them was texting, and the other one was practically sitting on the lap of the guy next to her. He didn’t seem to be protesting.
Mr. Gregg slid into aisle space beside Mrs. G, but didn’t sit. His arms were crossed, and while he’d smoothed down his hair, his face still bore the expression I’d last seen in the cop building. Pissed off and freaked out. I guess that’s what happens when you get called out for being an asshole, and you don’t have any defense. Especially when you’re used to people pandering to you because they want something. His wife didn’t look overjoyed to see him. In fact, she didn’t even acknowledge his presence. Couldn’t blame her.
“You think they’ll win?” Taylor’s pretty face bore a frown.
“Unfortunately, there’s a good chance of it.”
“Cheaters.”
“Hey, there. Room for us?” Nick stood beside me, Miranda with him, showing what some might consider to be an expression of curiosity. I knew she was just trying not to smell anything.
I nudged Taylor with my hip, and she scooted down, making room.
Nick sat beside me, slipping his arm behind me, grabbing the edge of the bench. “You okay?”
“It’s been a long morning. I’ll explain later. Your day?”
“Productive.”
“Well, at least that’s one of us. What are you doing here?”
“D
idn’t want to miss Zach’s event. He’s practically my nephew, you know.”
We smiled at each other, until I fully realized who’d come with him. “What about her?”
He gave me his innocent look. “She wants to spend quality time with me, while she can.”