“I can’t believe this,” Harry said to Mrs. Murphy. “They say they’ve developed a winter-resistant Bermuda grass and it’s only $123.50 per hundredweight. First, I don’t believe it. Second, that is an outrageous price. Bermuda grass isn’t as good as alfalfa or orchard grass.”
“Then why use it?” The cat had a practical turn of mind.
Hearing the clear meow, Harry looked into the bright green eyes. “I love you, pussycat.”
“I love you, too,” the cat replied as the attractive forty-one-year-old woman returned to her task.
“It’s the terrible summers we’re having, Murphy. That’s what makes Bermuda grass useful. We now need some kind of forage that can withstand the heat and drought conditions. Unfortunately, it dies in the winter. It looks as though fescue, orchard grass, and timothy die in summer’s searing heat, but they do not. They burn off, or wilt. The pastures are brown, but with a bit of moisture or a snowy winter, those grasses pop back up. Of course, clover really holds water in nodules.” She nattered on, captivated with grass crops, as she had been since she was a tiny girl following her father around the farm.
While not enraptured by grasses, legumes, or corn, the tiger cat proved a good listener. Corn appealed to her because it brought in mice, foxes, and other animals seeking the high calories. Then she remembered the scarecrow and the crows.
Both Harry and Mrs. Murphy looked up when they heard a motor, then a door slam. Harry hurried outside to catch whomever it was before they ran through the rain to the back door.
“Coop, I’m in the barn,” Harry hollered.
The tall blonde deputy smiled and hurried into the barn. “Can you believe how much cooler it is all of a sudden?”
As she walked down the center aisle to the tack room, Harry replied, “October.”
Once inside, Cooper sank into a director’s chair. She leaned over to peer under the desk.
“So much for Tucker being a guard dog.”
Harry laughed. “She really is dead to the world, isn’t she?” Then she indicated the fat gray cat on the tack trunk. “Another one.”
“You need to tie a roller skate under Pewter’s stomach.”
“Coop, that’s a great idea.”
Mrs. Murphy giggled.
“How was church this morning?” Cooper inquired. “I overslept.”
“Herb gave a really good sermon, as always. He talked about harvesttime and read some passages from the New Testament about gathering. He always holds my interest.”
“He makes it real. Not a bunch of rules.” Cooper rented the Reverend Herb Jones’s homeplace, as the pastor of St. Luke’s Lutheran Church had moved in to the beautiful vicarage on the church grounds.
“Can you imagine building St. Luke’s? This used to be the Wild West. The Monacans”—Harry mentioned an Indian tribe—“weren’t happy to see us.”
“Still aren’t, I bet,” Coop said.
“Small wonder.” Harry inhaled. “Anyway, Albemarle County didn’t really start rolling until after the Revolutionary War. That’s when the first stone was laid for St. Luke’s. Don’t you love the church building that evolved?”
“I do. I love people that evolve, too.” Coop sighed.
“Okay, what’s on your mind?” Harry knew her friend and neighbor well enough to tell from the tilt of the conversation that Coop was turning something over in her mind.
“University of Virginia football, for one. Every time there’s a home game, it’s one scrape after another, plus we have to really keep our eyes out for the kids who are flat-out loaded. Hey, I was in college once, too. I don’t mind if you get drunk. Everyone has to learn that one, how to handle the bottle, but I don’t want them behind the wheel of a car.”
“That’s not going to change. Do you know who the scarecrow is yet?”
“No. We found a class ring.” Cooper leaned closer. “The crows had eaten the flesh from his fingers and hands. It slipped off. Actually, crows like shiny things. If we hadn’t gotten there when we did, that Virginia Tech ring would be in a nest somewhere.”
“Did it have initials and a year inscribed?”
“J.H., 1998.”
“Did you find anything else?”
“Nothing. Pockets empty. But we’ll get an ID soon enough. Well, I speak too soon. But the faster you have an ID, the easier some links of inquiry are. For all we know, the killer is in Paraguay by now.”
“I don’t think so.” Harry leaned forward.
“Actually, Harry, I don’t either.”
“I’ll see that scarecrow forever. The sight itself was unpleasant enough, but the whole idea of it is really disturbing, you know?”
“I do.” Cooper sat quietly for a moment. “Pewter snores.”
“Yes, she does.” Harry laughed.
“No one wants to sleep next to her,” Mrs. Murphy informed them to no avail.
“Where’s Fair?”
“He got an emergency call. Sometimes that man works around the clock. It’s a good thing he loves what he does.”
“Me, too,” Cooper chimed in.
“The horrible part of police work, like finding a corpse scarecrow, doesn’t get to you?” Harry wondered.
“I can’t say that finding murder victims thrills me, but finding their killer does.”
“You know I read the paper, magazines. There are articles claiming that there are identifiable traits in children who grow up to become violent. Some writers even suggest putting them away before a crime has been committed.”
“Even if we could violate individual rights that way, there would still be murders,” Cooper stated.
“The human condition?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
Pulling his veterinary truck up to the house that Sunday evening, Fair opened the truck’s door, then got out and wearily leaned against it.
Tucker, hearing the motor, dashed out the house’s animal door to greet him. “Hi, Pop. I missed you. I’m glad you’re home.”
The tall man bent down to pet the dog. “Hey, buddy.”
“You’re covered in blood and you’re sad and tired. Can I help?” Tucker implored him with her soft brown eyes.
Fair stroked the smooth head once more before standing. Taking a deep breath, he walked to the house.
In the kitchen, Harry heard his footfall but didn’t look up as she stuffed a Cornish hen. “First frost tonight, I think.”
“Feels like it.”
She turned and took in his bloodied, bedraggled appearance. “Oh, no! Honey, is the horse all right?”
He sank into a kitchen chair. “Couldn’t save her. She’d nicked her aorta. By the time Paul Diaz found her out in the pasture, she’d already lost so much blood. What a beautiful filly.” He rested his head in his hands. “The Medaglia d’Oro filly.”
“Oh, no.” Harry washed her hands. “Big Mim had such hopes for her.”
Medaglia d’Oro was a Thoroughbred stallion with a big career. Even in these hard economic times, his stud fees had been creeping up, and Big Mim had selected a mare to breed to him. He’d been siring winners on the track. The Queen of Crozet, as she was called behind her back and even to her face, had a knack for breeding, whether for steeplechasing or flat racing. It ran in her family. Her mother had it, too, and Big Mim passed it on to her daughter, Little Mim, who had recently given birth to a boy. Perhaps the magic would pass to him.
“That filly was one of the most correct horses I’ve ever seen. We all thought she was bound for greatness.”
Coming from Fair, that meant something.
“Is Big Mim okay?”
He thought a moment. “She’s a horsewoman. She accepts fate. But she’s upset. Seeing any animal you love die …” He shrugged.
Harry put her arms around him. “I know you did your best. I’m so sorry, honey.”
“The poor girl was down in the pasture. She’d lost so much blood, she couldn’t stand up, so I ran out, cleaned the wound, and she died while I was stitching her up. If she
’d lived, I think we could have rolled her onto a canvas and dragged her into the barn, gotten her in a stall. I was prepared to give her massive transfusions and drip antibiotics into her. Whatever it took.”
“Big Mim would have sat up with you.” Harry warmed at the thought of the svelte septuagenarian sitting in the aisle, wrapped in a blanket.
“She would; Paul would, too. I think even Jim”—he named Big Mim’s husband, who was not a horse person—“would have taken a turn.”
“Me, too.” She kissed him. “You are such a good veterinarian. Such a good man. I love that you care.”
He kissed her hand. “Most of us do. A person should only go into medicine, veterinary or human, if they really care.”
“Well, that’s a subject for a long discussion, and my money is on the vets.” She kissed his cheek again.
“Let me get out of these clothes, shower. I’ll throw them in the washer.”
“Fair, how did it happen?”
“No idea. Honestly, honey, if I knew how half my patients did the stuff they did to themselves, I would be a genius. Horses are pretty careful animals but they can do the dumbest things sometimes, and she was young.” He smiled. “That doesn’t help.”
“Doesn’t for us either.” Harry stopped. “Except now that I am officially middle-aged, I pray the young will be a little wild, take some crazy chances, think the unthinkable.”
He stood up. “You still do. Every now and then, I really have no idea what’s going on upstairs.” He tapped his head with his forefinger.
“He’s right,” Pewter, in her kitchen bed, remarked to Mrs. Murphy, who sprawled in Tucker’s bed as the dog followed Fair out of the room.
“Poor Fair.” Mrs. Murphy ignored Pewt’s comment about Harry—not because it would start an argument, but because she knew it was true.
“Tucker will cheer him up,” said Pewter.
“We could, too,” said the tiger cat. “We could take our catnip mouse in the bedroom and throw it around. Fair always laughs when we do that.”
Pewter was firm. “I’m not getting out of this bed unless food is involved.”
“Right.” Mrs. Murphy smiled at her friend.
Harry slid the two small Cornish hens into the oven. She’d made a salad earlier. Neither she nor Fair ate heavy rich foods and this would be a good supper for them. Also, Harry lacked the time to prepare complicated meals.
The wall phone rang.
She wiped her hands on a dish towel and picked it up. “Haristeen.”
“Cooper.”
“Hey, if you haven’t eaten supper, come on back. I’ll have plenty.”
“Date tonight.”
“You stopped by here and you didn’t tell me that? I am wounded, deeply wounded,” Harry teased.
“Forgot. It’s a first date. We’ll see. I’m just glad I have a night off. I’ve worked the last three weekends.”
“The county really needs to hire more people, don’t they?”
“No money. I called to tell you, since you and Fair found him: We have an ID on the scarecrow.”
“That was fast.”
“The ring really helped, and we have super people sitting behind those computers and making calls. I don’t think people in the county have any idea how good their sheriff’s department really is.”
“It’s kind of like making a will. No one thinks about it until they have to, I guess. So?”
“Joshua Hill, graduated from Tech in 1998. Accounting major. Worked for a large firm in Richmond for four years, then hung out his own shingle in Farmville, where he quickly built up a large clientele. Unmarried. Hobbies: fly-fishing, country music concerts.”
“How did you get so much information so quickly?”
“Caitlin did,” said Coop, referring to one of the criminologists on the staff, a fantastic researcher. “She went online, got the 1998 yearbook, and started looking. Even though our victim was torn up, we had a decent description of height, weight, approximate age, and hair color, and she narrowed it down to a few possibilities. Then she started calling places where the potential matchups worked. Josh didn’t come into his office on Friday, nor did he call, which his assistant found odd but she wasn’t overly concerned. I’m going down there Tuesday. Haven’t seen Farmville in a long time, and I hear Longwood University has grown. It’s a pretty school.”
“Yes, it is.” Harry paused. “Accountants don’t get themselves murdered too often, do they?”
“No. This is a curious case.”
“Who’s the date?” Harry just had to know.
“Barry Betz, new batting coach for UVA. First year here. This guy has the sweetest smile. He lights up a room.”
“Hope it’s fun. I’d go out with him just because of his name.” Harry smiled. “Thanks for calling me.”
Fair walked in, clean, wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants. When he sat down, she told him about Josh, the dead accountant.
“Maybe he was cooking the books,” said Fair, after devouring half of the Cornish hen Harry had cooked for dinner.
“If that’s a motive, wouldn’t there be so many more dead people in America, especially in certain professions and industries?” she remarked, gazing at him across the table.
“You’ve got a point there.” Fair was feeling better and so was Tucker, wedged between his slippered feet.
“Sometimes I think about why people commit crimes, not the impulsive ones but the premeditated kind,” Harry said. “I bet once you’re free from society’s rules or an ideology, anything is possible. The world is your oyster.”
“Never thought of it that way.” He stopped for a second. “This hen is wonderful.”
“Oh, thanks. Miranda’s recipe.” Harry knew any recipe from Miranda would be delicious. “It’s kind of like offense and defense. The criminal is the offense, so that split-second advantage is his. He knows what he will do. The law has to react.”
She neglected to add that the law could only react if they knew what was going on.
“I ought to arrest you, throw the book at you!” Cooper shouted at Harry two days later, on the street outside Joshua Hill’s office in Farmville.
“For what?”
“Stalking?”
“I came to shop. You have no grounds for suspicion.”
The attractive police officer shook her head. “Harry, how can you look in the mirror after a lie like that?”
“Farmville is famous for its furniture warehouses. I especially like Number 9, so named since all the warehouses had numbers on the outside, easy to see. And come on, Coop, you know I’ve been wanting to get down here for months. It’s been one thing after another.”
Calmed down a bit, Cooper replied, “You didn’t have to come today. You want to know what I found out at Hill’s office, and it was a big zero.”
“His assistant wouldn’t talk?”
“No.” The lean woman put her elbows on the hood of her unmarked car, called a slicktop. “She kind of just answers the phone. She has a million pictures of her grandchildren on her desk. It’s fair to say she isn’t overly involved in her work.”
“But she did note that her boss hadn’t called in?”
“Yes, but she also said a lot of times he worked at home, or he called on clients at their offices.”
“Did she give you a client list?”
“Harry!”
“Hey, you wouldn’t be on this case if I hadn’t found the body.” Though she knew this wasn’t one hundred percent true, Harry still pressed her point. “And murder is a lot more exciting than picking up drunk frat boys who then puke all over the back of your squad car.”
“No drunk has ever puked in my car.”
“Now who’s the liar?”
Cooper took out her service revolver. “I put this to their temple, and tell them if they throw up in my car, I will blow their brains out.”
“I can see how that might work.”
“One time,” the cop mused, “I had to pull over ’cause a guy pretende
d he was going to be sick, and then he ran into the woods.”
“What did you do?”
“Followed until he tripped and fell. It was pitch-black. Then he threw up. Drunks are truly disgusting.”
“Mmm. Anything of interest in Hill’s office?”
“You enter into a small waiting room. There are a few nature prints, both there and in his office. His desk didn’t have a single paper on it. I’ll get the Prince Edward County Sheriff’s Office to go over it all.” Cooper gave out just enough information to tease Harry.
“You’d think an accountant would have piles of papers on his desk,” said Harry.
“Or some, anyway,” Coop agreed. “Though clients send so much stuff through email.”
“Was his computer in the office?”
“Yes. Obviously, I can’t take it without jumping through all the proper legal hoops, but I’ve already set that in motion. A forensic accountant could find out if Hill was doing anything suspicious. Anything you put into a computer can be dug out. Best to not put it there in the first place. Of course, I don’t know that this murder has anything to do with numbers. Truth is, I don’t know what this murder is about at all. Usually, I get a hunch.”
“Don’t you want to know what I found in Number 9 warehouse?”
Cooper gave her a sharp look. “If you did find something, you’ll complain about the price.”
“Follow me.”
Harry climbed back in her Volvo station wagon. She’d parked outside Hill’s office once she’d cruised through her favorite warehouse so her excuse for being in Farmville wouldn’t be a total fib.
“Why should I follow you to see furniture?”
“Cooper, please follow me.”
Something in Harry’s voice made Cooper close the door to the slicktop, turn the key, and tag behind her neighbor.
Once at the warehouse, Harry opened the showroom door for Cooper. “Ready?”
Cooper stepped inside and stood a moment. “This place is huge.”
“Four big floors, I think. But what I want you to see is right here on the first floor, the flashy showroom floor.”
Briskly walking, Harry reached the middle of the cavernous building. Pumpkins, mums, and Halloween witches overhead all drew attention to a stunning country kitchen with a solid oak table, easily seating twelve.
The Litter of the Law Page 3