“You are too kind.” She fluttered her eyelashes, mocking what Northerners thought Southern belles did to ensnare men. Harry’s experience was that men wanted to ensnare her a lot more than she wanted to ensnare them, but tonight Fair did look good.
“What about a nightcap?”
“Uh, okay.”
They reached the farm in fifteen minutes. The cats and dog joyously greeted them.
Harry poured a scotch for Fair and made herself a cup of Plantation Mint tea.
They sat side by side on the sofa.
“Big Mim’s being a snot about Blair.”
Fair felt the warmth of the scotch reach his stomach. “He’ll win her over—if that’s what he wants to do. I still can’t make up my mind about that guy.”
“What do you mean?”
“He seems like a real guy but I don’t know, modeling is, well, it’s not a guy thing.”
“Fair, that’s not fair.”
“Terrible to have Fair for a name. Am I prejudiced? To a degree.”
“Well, at least you’re honest.” Harry decided not to get into an argument about male sexuality.
“Pewter and I ought to be models for Purina or IAMS or one of those cat food brands. We could sell ice to the Eskimos,” Mrs. Murphy purred.
“Bet I could, too.” Tucker put her paws on the sofa.
“You’d be irresistible, Tucker,” Pewter complimented her. “Those expressive brown eyes, that big corgi smile.”
“Thank you.” Tucker, with effort, got up on the sofa.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Little Mim be silly. She wasn’t even silly when we were children,” Harry mused. “Nailing us with olive pits.”
The tall man got up from the sofa.
“Where’s he going?” Mrs. Murphy rubbed her paw behind her ear.
“Where are you going?” Harry echoed her.
“More ice.”
He walked into the kitchen. Harry’s refrigerator did not have an icemaker. He removed an ice tray, held it over the sink, twisted the plastic tray and the cubes popped out into the sink, onto the counter. Some broke, leaving little shards like glass glistening in the light.
Harry heard him curse. She joined him in the kitchen. The animals came in, too.
“I’ll clean it up.” Harry grabbed a dish towel.
“I made the mess. I’ll clean it up. Damn, Harry, I’ll buy you a new refrigerator with an icemaker!” He began picking up the fractured ice cubes. “Ouch!” A spot of blood bubbled on the tip of his forefinger.
“That’s it!” the animals shouted.
Fair sucked his wound.
Harry tore a little strip of clean, soft napkin and held it to his forefinger.
The animals continued making a racket.
“Will you all shut up?”
“Pay attention! You want to be a detective. Detect.” Mrs. Murphy thrashed her tail.
Harry shushed them.
Fair laughed. “It’s not that bad.” He put his hand over Harry’s. He pulled her hand away. She still had a grasp on the napkin. The dot of blood, cherry red on the white, almost sparkled.
Both humans stared at it for an instant, then at one another.
“Fair?”
“I’m thinking the same thing.” His eyebrows shot upward.
“Good God. It’s diabolical.” Harry sagged against the kitchen counter for a moment.
“Yes! Ice!” all three animals bellowed.
“But it makes sense.” Fair swept the ice fragments into the sink. “Bill Langston mentioned cold’s ability to numb. I should have thought of that.” He frowned.
“None of the rest of us did. It’s, well, it’s so imaginative.” Harry took his hand, leading him back to the living room.
They sat down. The cats jumped on the sofa as did Tucker with more effort.
“We’re finally getting somewhere,” Pewter said.
“You forgot your ice cube.” Harry rose.
Fair pulled her down. “Forget it. Ice. An ice dart. The dart melts. No weapon. The poison is on the tip of the dart. The person wouldn’t risk ingesting it. Perfect.”
“Right. And the poison, I mean toxin—BoomBoom did some research on that—is delivered as the ice melts. But Fair, what in the world could work that fast?”
“I don’t know.” He sipped his scotch. “But our tiny weapon could have been delivered in a number of ways. Think about it. Fred could have stuck him in the parking lot. Or someone could have thrown it at him as he walked to his car. But how do you throw a piece, a little piece, mind you, of ice?”
“You don’t. You’d have to stab.” Harry listened to the logs crackle in the fireplace. “Unless you blow it. Like Little Mim blowing the olive pits.”
“Yes—yes.” He folded his hands together. “Some kind of blowgun. With that it would be pretty easy to hit H.H. as he walked through the parking lot. Or even the hallway.” He thought a moment. “Too crowded. The parking lot.”
“That gets Fred off the hook.”
“Yes.”
“A noisemaker. That could hide a blowgun. Fair, this could have been done at the end of the game while we were in our seats. H.H.’s body melts the ice sliver and the toxin hits him in the parking lot.” She paused a long time. “Behind me. The killer sits behind me.”
“But what does Mychelle have to do with this?” He felt confused. “Maybe her death isn’t connected.”
“It’s connected. It’s connected and the killer is Matthew Crickenberger.”
Fair’s eyes widened. “But why? That makes no sense. Anne makes sense. And, Harry, much as we like her, she has the motive.”
“So how did she kill him?”
“Puts her arm around him or touches his neck.”
“And the warmth of her fingers won’t melt the ice? This has to be a thin, sharp dart delivered with force.”
“Blowgun.” He nodded in agreement.
“But why?”
“I don’t know. Harry, other people sat behind you.”
“I know, but the Sanburnes, BoomBoom, Hayden McIntyre—no motive. Matthew was connected by business.”
“Or Mychelle?” Fair said.
“He’d won out over H.H. He has a boatload of money. Why?”
Fair took a deep breath. “Well, this is all conjecture. We don’t really know that it’s Matthew.”
“Maybe he hit Tracy over the head. He was removing evidence.” She clapped her hands together, startling the animals. “After a while, your head spins.”
* * *
49
The first thing Harry did the next morning, Wednesday, was call Rick, also an early riser. She was just thrilled with herself.
He seemed less thrilled. “Thank you, Harry, that’s very interesting.”
“Interesting?”
“Harry, the investigation is moving along. I thank you for your effort. Go to work. Goodbye.”
Harry hung up the phone. “Damn him!”
She bundled her animals into the truck and drove to work. Fair had already left at five-thirty in the morning as he had early farm calls. January meant breeding for the Thoroughbred people who wanted foals born as close to the next January as possible. Too late and the horse would be at a disadvantage racing. All Thoroughbreds have the birthday of 1 January in the year they were born for racing purposes. Of course, if they were born 2 February, that was noted in the foal’s records. Since a mare carried for eleven months, people were getting their mares prepared for breeding. It was a lot of work for the owners and vets.
Harry dreamed of a small broodmare operation someday but on this frosty morning she was too angry to bask in her dreams. She pulled in behind the post office, unlocked the back door, clicked on the lights. It was seven in the morning. By the time the teakettle was singing, Miranda, wearing red fuzzy earmuffs, walked in.
“Good morning.” She hung up her quilted coat, stamped her feet, unwound the cashmere scarf and hung it with the coat. She put the poppyseed muffins on the table.
>
“Miranda, I am so mad I could eat a bug!”
“Oh dear.” Miranda thought she’d had a fight with Fair or Susan.
She told Miranda everything, including the call to Rick. “He didn’t pay the least bit of attention to me.”
“Now you know he did. He probably can’t say what he’s up to—you know, he might be close to an arrest.”
“Sure.” A dejected Harry reached for a moist poppyseed muffin. A few savory bites restored her spirits, somewhat. “I’ll call Cooper.”
“That’s a good idea,” Miranda appeased her.
Although Cooper received Harry’s thoughts with more enthusiasm, she, too, remained noncommittal.
Frustrated, Harry attacked the duffel bags filled with mail when Rob Collier dropped them off.
“She’s going to put that case of the mean reds somewhere.” Pewter laughed as she ate up poppyseed crumbs.
“God only knows what she’ll do next,” said Mrs. Murphy.
“You’re such a pessimist.” Pewter rubbed the side of her paw along her whiskers.
Harry’s mood sank again although when Little Mim came in for her mail she asked if she could borrow her noisemaker. Little Mim laughed but agreed, going out to her car, returning to give it to Harry.
Miranda tidied up the package shelves. “Harry, sugar, don’t fret. It’s a slow day anyway. Oh, Vonda called you from the Barracks Road post office.”
“Did she say what she wanted?”
“Yes. She said she heard it from the postmaster at Seminole Trail. We are getting a new, modern post office.”
Seminole Trail was the location of the county’s main post office.
“No way.” Harry grabbed the phone. Within minutes Vonda was giving her the blow-by-blow. When Harry hung up, she said quietly, “I guess we are. We don’t really need one, Miranda. This one works just fine. And Vonda’s moving back to Charleston, West Virginia. I can’t stand it. Barracks Road P.O. won’t be the same without her. Bet the gang down there isn’t thrilled, either.” Harry considered her compatriots at the Barracks branch an overworked bunch.
“Growth projections.” Miranda quoted what she had heard when she spoke to Vonda. “And I’m sorry she’s leaving, too.”
“It’s a waste of money. A new P.O. A big waste!”
“You haven’t learned that government exists to squander your tax dollars? If we can put in our two cents maybe we can make it functionally, m-m-m, useful.”
“I don’t want a new post office.” Harry stubbornly sat down.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t, either.” Miranda sat opposite her. She looked out the front window. “It’s like a ghost town today.”
“Yeah.”
“You aren’t going to do something foolish, are you?” Miranda tilted her head.
“No. Why would you think that?”
“Your jaw has that set to it.”
“Oh.”
Miranda quoted Psalm 141, verse 3: “‘Set a guard over my mouth, O Lord, keep watch over the door of my lips!’ ”
Harry said nothing.
* * *
50
Rick and Cooper labored at their desks. The sheriff had taken the precaution of assigning an officer to stay with Anne Donaldson.
“Sheriff, pick up the phone!” Lisa Teican, at the switchboard, hollered as Rick had been ignoring the blinking light on his phone.
“Sheriff Shaw.”
“Joe Mulcahy. You wanted me to call you—” The head of toxicology in Richmond was interrupted.
“Thank you. What was it?”
“Batrachotoxin.”
“Never heard of it.”
“There’s no reason you would. I’ve never seen this stuff before in my life, either. Never once has it shown up.”
“Well, what is it?”
“It’s an acutely lethal substance, so lethal, Sheriff, that nanograms cause instantaneous death to an organism. A microgram could wipe out a platoon.”
“Jesus! Is this something some nut can cook up in a lab?” Rick, like other sheriffs throughout the United States, had undergone training to combat bioterrorism.
“That’s highly unlikely. I mean, it can’t be cooked up in a lab and it’s unlikely some nutcase could acquire enough of the batrachotoxin to pose a large-scale problem.”
“So, how did the killer get it?”
“From the skin of poisonous frogs, little tiny, actually, like two to five centimeters, tiny frogs. Bright colors with stripes and spots. Beautiful little things, really.” Joe opened a book then continued. “Once we isolated the toxin I became fascinated. These little buggers live in the rain forests of South America and the natives would catch them and stress them out. Now they wouldn’t necessarily kill them but they’d worry them and the frogs would secrete liquid from the bumps on their back. The natives would collect that, carefully, obviously, and let it dry. Then they’d smear it on darts, arrows, whatever.”
“And you said it works quickly?”
“Amazingly fast. It blocks the transmission of nerve impulses and the heart just stops. Dead.”
“Jesus.”
“He can’t help the victim.” Joe couldn’t resist a joke.
“Guess not. In your research did you find out just where someone could procure these frogs?”
“Well, that’s not my department but there’s an underground for exotic creatures. Smuggling in contraband animals is a big business and Dulles Airport is a big, big airport. Be pretty easy, I’d think. And hey, all you need is two, a male and a female. You’re in business.”
“But you’d need to create a specialized environment.”
“Sheriff, they’re tiny. A small aquarium with the correct humidity and lots of bugs would keep Mr. and Mrs. Frog very happy. And water. Lots of water. Pretty fascinating.”
“Mr. Mulcahy, thank you.”
“I’ll send the full report out FedEx Ground.”
“I’ll read every word but this phone call is what I’ve been waiting for.”
“Glad I could be helpful.” Joe hung up.
Rick motioned for Cooper to come to his desk. She did and he told her what he’d just heard.
“Damn, how can we trap him?” Cooper, like most everyone in town, knew about Matthew’s rain forest. It wasn’t a stretch to figure out he could provide a wonderful place for poisonous frogs. Who would know?
“Could be someone in the biology department at UVA. Don’t forget, Anne is a botanist.”
“It could be her but it isn’t. It’s Matthew.”
Rick held up his hands, palms outward, a gesture of supplication and in this case a bit of frustration. “Yes, I think he’s our man. It’s not Anne. I just don’t yet know how to prove it.”
“Gut feeling—Mychelle?”
Rick knew what she meant. He nodded. “Yes, I think he killed her, too. Different MO but somehow she got in the way.”
“Maybe he was having an affair with her or had in the past?”
“Possible.” He tapped the side of his cheek with a pencil. “Something cold about these murders. If it were sex or love, it’d be different. I just think it would be different.”
“He’s close to Anne.”
“That worries me. In fact, it all worries me. We’ve got our killer. All my instincts tell me that and the donkey work is leading us right to him, as well. But why? Why?” He threw up his hands.
* * *
51
Friday night the girls played North Carolina State. Harry, Little Mim’s noisemaker tucked into her blazer pocket, sat next to Fair.
In front of her, Cooper sat between Greg Ix and Peter Gianakos in H.H.’s seat. Irena Fotopappas, back in uniform, was home with Anne and Cameron. Rick had given the young officer strict orders not to allow Matthew or his wife, just in case, into the house.
Harry had a handful of dried peas in her pocket along with the noisemaker which she had altered by running a small peashooter inside the paper.
Everyone else sat in their usual
spots with Bill Langston taking Dr. Hayden McIntyre’s seat. Little Mim had once again invited Tazio. Bill leaned back quite a bit to talk with Tazio. BoomBoom on Little Mim’s right side noticed. Blair sat on Little Mim’s left next to Tazio. Usually he sat where BoomBoom now sat and she was one seat away from Little Mim but both women had cooked up the idea that Blair should be next to Tazio. It would make the new man in town pay more attention to her, even if he’d heard that Blair and Little Mim were an item. BoomBoom and Little Mim, great believers in testosterone, figured Bill would have to be more attentive, more clever, simply because there was another very handsome man there.
The Tail of the Tip-Off Page 29