“Mine’s on a rider to my home owner’s insurance,” Peggy said and looked at me.
“No idea, but I doubt it,” I said.
“Are we agreed that somebody was probably searching for something?” he asked. “The books on the lower shelves were dumped, but not on the upper ones.” He looked at me. “Somebody about your height,” he said. “Couldn’t reach the top shelves without the library ladder and didn’t take the time to get it.”
“We have alibis, Amos, unless you think we had a high old time doing this together before we took Sherlock to Hank’s.”
“Now, Peggy, don’t get your back up. That was an observation, not an accusation.”
“What about fingerprints?” Peggy asked.
“Not much chance, although I’ve dusted the back door. I’ll take both of yours to rule them out, but I doubt it’ll do any good. Most thieves wear gloves.”
“Why not steal the laptops?” Peggy said. “Why break them?”
“Pure-D nastiness. You’d be surprised. You’re lucky they didn’t hurt the other cats.”
Just what Peggy needed to hear. She was already on the verge of hysterics.
“What about the tuna casserole?” I asked. “That was meant for us, not Sherlock.”
“Won’t know ‘til we find out what’s in it, will we?” Amos asked. I’m sure he was generally a calming influence, but I wasn’t in the mood to be calmed. He turned to Peggy. “Anything that might have that kind of effect growing this early in the poison garden?”
“I beg your pardon?” I turned to stare at her.
“Amos Royden, you know darned well I tore it out a couple of years ago after my granddaughter figured out how to climb the gate.” She ran her hands through her hair. She looked exhausted and her eyes were swollen. “All I have now are wild flowers.”
“Some of which are pretty poisonous themselves,” Amos said.
“Lots of plants are poisonous,” Peggy said. “But I promise you I didn’t do this.”
“Nobody’s saying you did.” He put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “But you have a better knowledge of vegetable poisons than most people around here, so put your mind to it and see what you come up with. In the meantime, I’m taking the rest of the tuna with me. If Hank doesn’t come up with what’s in it by noon, I’ll FedEx it to the GBI lab in Atlanta.”
The cats disappeared when he opened his fingerprint kit. Probably didn’t like the smell. While we washed the ink goop off at the kitchen sink, he checked the kitchen door. “Got any plywood you can put over this broken pane?” he asked. “Mighty thoughtful intruder. Broke only one pane, reached in, unhooked the chain and the lock. I take it the deadbolt wasn’t locked?”
Peggy raised her wet hands, palms out. “I know, I know, but I never can find the key, so I only ever use the latch.”
“Well, find the key, keep it on your key chain, and from now on, use the dad-blasted deadbolt. Give me a roll of aluminum foil and a stapler. Think you can find that in all this mess?”
She made a rude gesture, but dug out a small stapler from the junk drawer in her kitchen. Amos made a pad of foil and stapled it over the empty pane in Peggy’s window. “Not what I’d call secure, but it’ll keep the cold air out and the cats in.”
We thanked him and watched him drive away without lights and siren.
“Thank heaven,” Peggy said. “One squawk from his siren or flashing blue light and we’d have the entire neighborhood down here to find out what happened.”
“I should move out tomorrow,” I said as I dumped the shards into the trashcan under the sink.
She rounded on me. “Oh, no you don’t! You’re not going anywhere, young lady. This was already personal. Now I’m well and truly angry. Nobody hurts my cats and gets away with it.” She glared at me, then her eyes widened. “These people kill human beings, and here I am worrying about cats.”
“That’s why I should . . . ”
“We have no idea which of us is the actual target. When they couldn’t locate what they wanted in Hiram’s apartment, they sent that tuna casserole to make us so sick we’d go to the hospital so the house would be empty and they could search.”
“We don’t know that,” I said as I swept the broken glass from the laptop screens into the dustpan.
“So two sets of people hate us? I don’t think so.” She sank into a kitchen chair. “Leave it. Leave it all until tomorrow. I am flat worn out.” I wanted to soak in a hot tub and sleep. Despite everything, I was also hungry. Peggy knew who had sent the ham and turkey, so I took a couple of sandwiches down to the apartment with me and devoured them in front of something mindless on TV.
I had a bazillion more phone calls to return, emails to answer, and lists to make, but they could wait until tomorrow. Mostly I needed time to mourn. So far I’d been too busy. I suspect that’s the point of the logistical nightmare entailed in funerals.
My mother warned me when Gram died that the death of a parent means the death of possibility. All the words we thought we had time to say will go unsaid. All the family stories that should have been passed down will be lost forever like the recipe for Gram’s ambrosia.
Grief felt strange when Hiram and I hadn’t seen one another for so many years and had only begun to reconnect in the last few months, but his death left an unexpectedly big hole in my life. I had been a daddy’s girl until I was seventeen.
He had been a wanderer since Mom divorced him, and I had become rootless after my divorce. He had finally rooted himself in Mossy Creek and asked me to be part of his world again.
No one else shared our memories. Who did we have except one another?
I cried big, gulping, sobbing, gut-wrenching, agonized, empty wails of loss and longing for the way we thought our lives would turn out.
Eventually I gulped and hiccupped into silence and curled into a fetal position on the couch.
I could accept his death by accident or disease, even if I resented it. But someone who was theoretically a human being had cut my father down. Had he been frightened? Known he was dying? Cried out for pity or help? Had he been tortured?
Nobody had the right to kill to solve a problem. The moment that human agency crushed the life out of Hiram, it had ceased to be human, had become something truly ‘other’. It should be easily recognizable, wear a ‘C’ for ‘Criminal’ on its forehead. But the ‘C’ was in the soul and didn’t show on the outside. Could I unmask the person who had committed the one crime that could not be expiated?
And had my impending visit been a catalyst? Without realizing it, had I somehow caused my father’s death?
Chapter 19
Late Tuesday afternoon
Geoff
Ideally, Geoff should have had a team of three or four forensic techs to work the barn and the surrounding area, but then ideally he should have done this search while the body was still in situ.
He set his kit beside him, pulled on his gloves, turned on his flashlight, and began to walk the grid. He knew about the blood where Lackland’s head had lain, but no one had discovered the weapon that caused the crack in his skull. Actually, no one had looked.
After a step-by-step search of the dirt floor, Geoff turned off the overhead lights and clicked on his Lumalight. Luminol spray was not only toxic, but expensive, so he wanted to narrow down the possible murder weapons before he used it. He slipped a painter’s mask over his mouth and nose. If he’d been spraying extensively in an enclosed space, he’d have used a respirator, although most CSIs were pretty casual. In this large open space, however, he figured the small mask was sufficient.
None of the hand or power tools carefully laid out on the workbench and hung on pegs above it showed blood. Lackland was meticulous about his tools. They were all clean, polished, and in their proper places. A newly polished murder weapon wouldn’t show up under ordinary light. Using the Lumalight, he checked for specks of blood where handles joined heads.
Nothing. So that he could tell a jury that he had checked p
ersonally, he sprayed the wheel from the vis-à-vis.
Blood from the thin cut across Lackland’s throat stained the rim and seeped down two of the wooden spokes. The circle of blood in the dirt under where his head had lain was larger.
So what had the killer used to incapacitate Lackland? Had he brought his murder weapon and taken it away? Had he come planning to kill Lackland?
The medical examiner’s report said the weapon was wooden and longish. Flecks of black paint were embedded in the scalp. Possibly something like a baseball bat.
Hiram either had been caught unawares or had trusted his assailant enough to turn his back on him. Or her. A woman could crush a man’s skull with a baseball bat. Laying out the man’s unconscious body and dropping the wheel on him took time, but not a lot of strength.
Geoff got down on hands and knees and went over the wheel spoke by spoke searching for fingerprints. Nothing. Either the assailant had worn gloves or wiped the wheel clean. He was about to give up when he noticed several places on the spokes where the dust lay thinner. Flat on his stomach, he gently brushed the top layer of dust aside.
He took a second to realize what he was looking at. The print of the toe of a trainer or athletic shoe. Medium size. Hard to say whether it belonged to a man or a woman. He wasn’t certain he could pick up the impression, but he pulled his tape out of his case and lifted what was there. With luck he could bring up the shoe print and identify tread and size. He brushed fingerprint powder over it and took several photos.
He sat back on his heels. Looked as though he had knocked Hiram out, arranged his unconscious body, dropped the wheel so that the rim fell across his throat, and then stood on the spokes close to the rim to increase the pressure until the hyoid bone was crushed.
The throat wound had bled, but that alone had not killed him. He had essentially been strangled, although he might well have died from his crushed skull.
Callous bastard, whoever he was.
So who had Hiram trusted? Peggy Caldwell. If Merry Abbott had showed up early in the storm or the middle of the night, he would have welcomed her. Jacob Yoder. Hiram had perceived no physical threat from whoever struck him.
By the time Geoff had crisscrossed the room foot by foot and reached the two carriages along the back wall, his knees ached, his back ached, and his head throbbed from the toxic fumes. He should have used a respirator.
He checked the carriages only so that he could say he’d done it. He was about to give up when he looked at the carriage shaft from the doctor’s buggy. It was six feet long at least, but when he touched it, he discovered it weighed much less than he’d suspected. He sprayed along its length and used the light.
Nothing.
Where was the second shaft? He found it under the carriage in two pieces, but the break in the wood looked old.
He knelt and pulled the two pieces out, then sprayed them and clicked on the light.
Five inches of the thick end piece lit up like a bottle of lavender fireflies.
“My, my.” He left the piece untouched, brought his camera from his bag, packed the Lumalight and Luminol spray and picked up his brushes and fingerprint power.
The other shaft was extremely dusty, but streaks along this one showed it had been wiped clean within the last three or four days. “Can’t win ’em all,” he said. A nice set of fingerprints would have been helpful.
He slipped the wooden piece of shaft into paper evidence bags one from the top, one from the bottom so that they met in the middle. He didn’t have a single bag long enough. He taped them together, signed and dated his makeshift package, then sealed it. Amos could send it down to Atlanta to the lab for confirmation of the blood and DNA typing to prove it came from Hiram.
He called Merry’s number, but received no answer. He figured she’d be upstairs with Peggy, so he swung by anyway. By the time he reached the Caldwell house and knocked on Merry’s door it was dark, he was hungry, achy and grimy from crawling all over Hiram’s workshop. He was also very late.
He was about to knock a second time when he heard the chain rattle. A moment later Merry opened the door and walked away from him into the small living room.
“You look like hell,” he said when she turned to face him.
“So do you.”
“I’m just dirty. You’ve been crying.”
She curled up in a corner of the sofa. “You bet. And raging against the dying of the light.”
“Got any teabags?” He opened cabinets in the small kitchen.
“I have no idea. I’m supposed to make you tea? Sorry, I’m fresh out of crumpets.”
“Here we are.” He ran water in the sink, soaked the teabags and wrung them out, then handed them to her in a paper towel. “Lie back and put these on your eyes.”
“So I can’t watch you plant evidence?”
“So tomorrow morning you don’t look like a fighter after ten rounds with Mike Tyson.” He shrugged. “Even with your eyes wide open I could still plant evidence. You’d never catch me.”
She snorted, leaned back and laid the teabags on her eyes. “What were you intending to plant?”
“If I knew that I’d do it.”
She sat up and dropped the teabag into the palm of her hand. “You haven’t talked to Amos recently, have you?”
He came instantly alert. “Not since before I drove out to your farm. Why? What’s happened?”
She pointed to the leather chair across from the couch she sat on and told him.
Halfway through he came to his feet and began to pace. “I ought to toss you and Ms. Caldwell both into jail.”
“What have we done?”
“At least you’d be safe.”
She waved him away. “I’ve been searched, Peggy’s been searched. I’d guess Hiram’s barn was searched. We’re probably safer here than we’d be in that bread box of a jail where we’d be sitting ducks, thank you very much.”
“So leave town.”
She fell back against the sofa and began to laugh. “Even if Amos or the sheriff of Bigelow County would let me, which I doubt, I’m not going anywhere until after Hiram’s funeral, and maybe not then. Hiram was never there for me when I needed him. I intend to be here for him now.”
“That makes no sense.”
She shrugged. “Makes sense to me. I’m here until Hiram’s killer is caught, or until I run out of money, whichever comes first.”
“Talk with your eyes closed.”
She slid the teabags back into place, and leaned back.
”When you were burgled Sunday evening, could you tell if anything was stolen?” he asked.
She shook her head without disturbing the teabags. “Who knows? We found old driving magazines, some bills, some junk mail . . . ”
“Personal letters?”
“I would have remembered, or maybe I wouldn’t. I was pretty wasted by that time. Peggy came down and straightened up Monday morning while I was down at Amos’s with you.”
“So she could have removed anything that incriminated her?”
She sat up, peeled off the teabags and frowned at him. “Why would she write him when she could bang on his door?”
“Well . . . ‘I hate you and never want to see you again. Get out of my apartment.’ Easier to do on paper than face to face. Safer, too.”
“Get real. Hiram wasn’t violent. They didn’t fight.”
“Who told you that? Ms Caldwell? Where was he planning for you to sleep? Was he planning to bunk in with her?”
“Peggy has offered me her guest room, but this sofa makes into a queen-sized bed. I suspect he would have given me his bed and slept on the couch. We’ve both slept on a bunch worse. He never mentioned he would move out while I was visiting, certainly not upstairs.”
Geoff sat in the club chair across from her. “My father and I have gone through some rough times, but we still talk to one another at least a couple of times a week.”
She laid the teabags on her eyes again. “If that is your subtle way of
asking me whether we were estranged because he abused me when I was a child, you can forget it. I adored him when I was little. Hiram was not God’s gift to marital fidelity, but he liked his women rich, beautiful, adult, and preferably married.”
“You don’t just drift apart from a parent. What caused the estrangement?”
“Why is that any of your business?” Merry asked. He was getting into tough territory.
Good. He waited. Few people could endure silence.
She couldn’t. She folded her arms tight across her chest, oblivious to the damp teabags that fell onto her polo shirt. “I didn’t realize how low my mother and I were on Hiram’s totem pole until I was a teenager. After her accident and the divorce, I went with her to St. Louis to live with my stepfather. Hiram was in Virginia or North Carolina or Florida most of the time. He had no facilities to look after a teenager. I couldn’t visit, and he seldom came as far west as St. Louis.
“The couple of times he did come to town and take me out to dinner, he tried to act like the authoritarian father.” She rolled her eyes. “He didn’t know a damned thing about me. He certainly had no right to tell me what to do with my life.”
“What accident?” he asked. Something in her tone had alerted him. Maybe Hiram had hurt her mother. On purpose.
“She fell off a carriage I was driving and nearly lost her leg.”
“So he was not responsible?”
“Depends on your point of view. He wasn’t around, if that’s what you’re asking. I walked away from driving and even gave up horses completely for a while until I realized I couldn’t bear life without them and went back to working with them. I’d probably still be married and a damned sight richer if I hadn’t. Seductive beasts.”
“Why do you call him Hiram?”
“Started as a put-down, then became a habit. Saying he wasn’t really my father.”
“Did he resent it?”
“If he did he never mentioned it.”
“Okay. Put the teabags back. I’ll be quiet while I search.”
“Leave my stuff alone, please. It wasn’t here when Hiram lived here, so it’s not part of your crime scene or whatever you call it. What’s not hung up is still in my suitcase at the foot of the bed.”
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