Randall glanced up.
“Is that Phinny?”
“No,” I said. “It’s my brother, Rob.”
“We heard something out there,” Rob said. The signal was weak and I turned on the speaker to hear better. “Sounded like fireworks or gunshots. Phinny was worried that the guards were trying to storm the barrier.”
“I’m right outside the barrier,” I said. “No storming going on at the moment. Hang on.”
“What’s up?” Randall asked.
“Maybe it’s not going to be so hard to prove Mr. Throckmorton’s innocence,” I said. “Rob’s still in there with him.”
“May I?” Randall held out his hand. I gave him my phone.
“Rob, have you been with Phinny for the past half hour or so?” Randall asked.
“Yes,” Rob said. “We’ve been playtesting my new game and—”
“Either of you out of each other’s sight in that time?”
A brief pause.
“Not for more than a minute or two,” he replied. “We’ve been playing a particularly tense part of the game.”
Randall frowned, and I sighed softly. So much for giving Phinny an ironclad alibi. The shots had taken a few seconds. An alibi with a hole of even a few minutes wasn’t much better than no alibi at all.
Just then Chief Burke stepped into the room. Randall handed me the phone again.
“Hello?” Rob’s voice was faint, but I could tell he was anxious.
“Hang on a sec, Rob,” I murmured into the phone. Then I hit the mute button.
“Welcome, Chief,” Randall was saying. “Those cowboys give you any trouble upstairs?”
“None that I didn’t give them back with interest,” the chief said. “What happened?”
“I was coming down to parley with Phinny, with two Star-Trib reporters and Meg along to witness,” Randall said. “We were just entering the courthouse when shots rang out. We followed the toy soldiers down here and found the body.”
“Who is she?”
“Colleen Brown. Works for the Evil— for First Progressive Financial.”
“The reporters get a good look?”
“And a few snapshots before we shooed them out with the toy soldiers.”
The chief winced.
“And one of the guards found what may be the murder weapon,” Randall added. “Gun thrown down in the no-man’s-land between the two barriers.”
“Wonder what made him think to look in there,” the chief muttered.
Randall shrugged elaborately.
“You can see what this looks like.” Randall pointed to the body and then to the barricade. The chief nodded.
“Meg,” the chief said. “Is your cousin in town?”
I nodded. I had several hundred cousins, if you counted all the second, third, fourth, and once- or twice-removed ones, the way Mother did. But I knew exactly which cousin he meant—Horace Hollingsworth, who worked as a crime scene investigator in our hometown of Yorktown, and through a longstanding intercounty arrangement, here in Caerphilly when needed.
I unmuted my phone.
“Gotta go,” I said to Rob. Then I hung up and dialed Horace.
“I know,” Horace said instead of hello. “I’m about two minutes away.”
With that he hung up.
“Two minutes,” I repeated to the chief.
“Debbie Anne?” The chief was talking on his own cell phone. “See if Dr. Smoot is in town, and findable, and can get his sorry self down here with reasonable speed.” He looked up at me. “This is going to be complicated,” he said. “If you can find your father—”
I nodded and hit a speed-dial button. By the time I had left a message for Dad and sicced Mother on the job of finding him ASAP, the chief had finished issuing instructions to his troops. He looked grim as he tucked his phone back into his pocket.
“So, talk,” he said. “Anybody.”
“You want the good news first?” Randall asked.
The chief growled slightly. Randall took that for a yes.
“Phinny didn’t do it.”
“Randall, I know he’s a friend of yours, but—”
“He may be alibied,” Randall said. “Rob Langslow has been in there most of the day. They’ve been playing one of Rob’s war games for the last several hours. With any luck they were in sight of each other when she was killed.”
“We can only hope,” the chief said.
“Of course, even if they were, it’s an alibi that would cause the devil’s own kind of trouble if we had to use it,” Randall said.
“Yes,” I said. “I shudder to think what would happen if you had to put Rob on the stand to alibi Mr. Throckmorton. As a kid, Rob was always getting punished for stuff he didn’t do because he got so rattled when anyone in authority interrogated him. A sharp DA could easily convince a jury Rob was confused or lying. Heck, they could probably even convince Rob.”
“Let’s hope Mr. Throckmorton doesn’t need his alibi, then,” Randall said. “Actually, I meant that using the alibi would give away the secret of the tunnel. Could cost the chief and me our jobs, and the town its lawsuit, and a lot of townspeople could be looking at a whole bunch of criminal charges. I’m no lawyer, but I bet there’s some kind of aiding and abetting charge they could file against every one of us if they found a sympathetic DA. Like if they got Hamish Pruitt reinstated as town attorney.”
The chief sighed and rubbed his forehead slightly, as if he felt a headache coming on.
“So you believe Mr. Throckmorton didn’t do it,” he said. “Any idea who did?”
“Someone who had access to the basement,” Randall said. “On this side of the barricade.”
“FPF hasn’t been allowing much access to the courthouse,” the chief said. From the look on his face, I could tell he knew exactly what Randall was getting at, but he was going to make Randall come out and say it.
“No,” Randall said. “Nobody much gets in here except for the guards and the creeps they work for.”
The chief nodded slightly.
“I don’t know whether we were a complication in their plan,” Randall said. “Or whether they deliberately did it when they did so Meg and I would be witnesses. Either way, they shot her—probably crouching down low, so it would look as if it came from behind the barricade.”
The chief had squatted down to get a closer look at the body. He glanced from it to the barricade as if following what Randall was saying.
“Then they could run up that back stairway while we’re coming down the front one,” Randall went on.
“One of the guards came down that way,” I pointed out.
“But not right away,” Randall said. “If the killer was a guard, all he had to do was run up till he was out of sight and then come down again and pretend to be in on finding the crime scene with us. If it was anyone else working for the lender, he could just trot on past the guards, get rid of his bloodstained clothes, and go back to doing whatever he was supposed to be doing when the news broke.”
“Good point,” the chief said. “Did anyone happen to notice which guards came down here?”
“I made a point of checking their name tags,” Randall said.
“So you think the killer’s either a Flying Monkey who’ll be trying to barge in on my case,” the chief said, “or a corporate goon who’ll be complaining to you that I’m not moving fast enough and telling the media we’re not competent to handle a case of this magnitude.”
Randall nodded.
“And if they find out about the tunnel, the manure will really hit the fan,” Randall said. “Unless, of course, we can prove one of them is the killer. Aiding and abetting a trespasser will seem like pretty small potatoes next to arranging a murder.”
“So all we have to do is figure out which one of a tight-knit group of corporate crooks and their hired thugs committed a murder,” the chief said. “Not just figure it out, but prove it, and all before the crooks manage to manipulate public opinion to the point that
we have to call in the State Bureau of Investigation or the FBI.”
“I didn’t say it would be easy,” Randall said. “But that’s what we have to do. And if anyone can do it, we can.”
Randall looked at Sammy and then at me, as if including us in the “we.” Sammy, who had been looking on with big eyes, stood a little straighter and lifted his chin. I hoped I didn’t look as tired and pessimistic as I felt.
“Just one thing,” the chief said. “I gather you think this is a conspiracy?”
Randall frowned for a moment, then shrugged.
“Who the hell knows?” he asked. “I think some of them are capable. And if it wasn’t a conspiracy to kill her, it could easily turn into a conspiracy to cover it up. Even more of them are capable of that, if you ask me.”
The chief nodded, and took a deep breath.
“Sammy,” he said. “You’ve been through that confounded tunnel a couple of times, haven’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” Sammy said. “To help Rob and Mr. Throckmorton test Rob’s new game.”
“Tunnel bother you at all?” the chief asked.
“Well, I don’t much like it, if that’s what you mean, sir,” Sammy said. “But I can do it if I have to.”
“Good. Go in there ASAP and secure the basement. No one goes in or comes out without my orders. Keep Mr. Langslow and Mr. Throckmorton away from the barricade. Bag their hands so Horace can test them for gunshot residue. Don’t let them wash or do anything until he gets there.”
“Yes, sir,” Sammy said. He loped off.
“Meg, if you don’t mind, can you keep an eye on that back stairway till I can get another deputy in here?” the chief said. “While you’re there, call your brother. You heard what I just told Sammy—brief him.” I nodded and pulled out my cell phone as I took my place at the bottom of the stairs. I dialed Rob, but his phone rang on unanswered.
“Randall—you said that newspaper photographer was in here?” the chief was asking.
“Taking pictures the whole time,” Randall answered, with a nod.
“Let’s get his film,” the chief said. “I want to see his pictures.”
“These days a lot of those fellows use digital,” Randall said.
“Then I need whatever he’s storing the photos on,” the chief said. “I could have an officer seize his camera, but maybe you could handle it more diplomatically.”
“Can do,” Randall said.
Rob’s phone finally went to voice mail.
“Call me,” I said. “ASAP.”
“Make sure he understands we’re not trying to take them away from him,” the chief said. “He can have his camera back as soon as we get copies of his pictures, but we need to see everything he’s taken so far today.”
“As soon as I find him,” Randall said.
“Check with Vern,” the chief said. “By now he should have the folks from the Star-Trib rounded up along with all the guards. I told him to keep the witnesses in the big auditorium tent.”
“Roger,” Randall said. “Soon as you’ve got some help down here, I’ll go over there and do what I can to make sure the media doesn’t get their version of the day’s events from the Flying Monkeys.”
He turned to leave and had to pause in the doorway as my father burst in with his old-fashioned black doctor’s bag in hand.
Chapter 9
“Sorry it took me so long,” Dad said, as he trotted over to where Colleen Brown’s body lay.
“You beat the ambulance,” the chief said.
Just barely. The EMTs swept in behind Dad, laden with high-tech equipment that I could have told them was going to be useless. They could probably see it, too, but like Dad, they were wearing determined looks.
If they were going to go through the motions of trying to revive the poor woman, I didn’t want to watch. I pulled out my cell phone and while I hit redial, I climbed a few steps up the stairway, to the point where I had to crane my neck to see Colleen Brown.
“She’s past anything we can do,” I heard Dad say, in a soft, discouraged voice.
This time Rob answered his phone.
“Where were you?” I snapped.
“At the other end of the basement,” he said. “You have to be up close to the barrier to get a cell signal down here.”
After relaying the chief’s instructions to Rob, I climbed up a few more steps. The stone walls and steps made the stairway curiously more comforting than the cinder block and linoleum of the basement. Or maybe I just wanted a little more distance between me and the crime scene. I called Michael.
“Meg! What’s going on?”
“There’s been a murder,” I said. “Someone who worked for the Evil Lender. Randall Shiffley and I were practically the first ones on the scene, so I might be tied up for a while being interviewed and processed and whatever.”
“What can I do to help out here?”
“Keep the boys safe. Get someone to change my sign so it says next blacksmithing demonstration to be announced. Plan something for dinner that’s not fried chicken, fried fish, or barbecue.”
“How about pizza?”
“Pizza would be excellent.”
We talked for a few more minutes, arranging all the small details of our afternoon and our evening. A welcome dose of the normal and mundane before I returned to the grim business at hand.
By the time I finished, another deputy had arrived to take my post.
“You can head over to the forensic tent,” he said.
The forensic tent. This morning we’d been calling it the town hall tent. As loudly as I used to complain that nothing much changed in Caerphilly from one decade to the next, I realized that I rather missed the quiet old days.
“Dr. Smoot!” Since climbing halfway up the back stairs I’d heard only indistinct sounds from below, but the chief’s bellow carried marvelously.
“I gather the medical examiner has arrived,” I said.
“Acting medical examiner,” the deputy said. Was he only imitating the chief, or did the entire department share the chief’s disapproval of the eccentric Dr. Smoot? “And arrived? That’s a matter of opinion.”
“Smoot!” People in next door Clay County probably heard that. I had been planning to go up the back stairs and out through the furnace room, but my curiosity kicked in and I headed back down to the basement.
When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I saw that Colleen Brown’s body was still there. Dad, Randall, several deputies, and the EMTs were anxiously staring at the chief, who stood at the bottom of the stairs with his hands on his hips and a thunderous look on his face.
“Smoot! Damn it, man, get down here!”
I was puzzled for a moment, until I remembered that our acting medical examiner suffered from crippling claustrophobia. He was probably balking at coming down the narrow, winding basement steps.
We all stared at the doorway for a few more moments.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have told him to leave his cape at home,” Randall said.
“We’re going to look foolish enough as it is,” the chief said. “We don’t need the Star-Tribune doing a human interest story on the town whose medical examiner thinks he’s a vampire.”
“He doesn’t think he’s a vampire,” Randall said. “He just likes to dress up like one. And it helps him with the claustrophobia.”
“He can dress any way he likes on his own time,” the chief said. “When he’s on the job he should look like a blasted professional. And if he can’t walk down a circular stairway or into an elevator without panicking, he should see a therapist, not an exorcist. It’s not as if I can move the crime scene upstairs for him.”
“We’re working on it,” Randall said.
“Moving the crime scene upstairs?” I asked.
“Getting your father appointed as a local medical examiner,” Randall said. “In the meantime, is there anything we can do?”
“I’ve already pronounced her dead,” Dad said. “It would be nice, of course, to have you
r medical examiner inspect the crime scene, but Horace and I have done so.”
“Looks a blessed sight better in court if your ME can bring himself to show up at the crime scene,” the chief said. “Of course, it also looks a blessed sight better if your ME’s not a complete nincompoop.”
Everyone looked uncomfortable. But I noticed that no one spoke up to say, “Oh, Smoot’s not so bad.”
“You’re going down to the hospital with the body, I assume,” the chief said to Dad.
Dad nodded.
“Can’t you find a way to take him with you?”
“Dr. Smoot?” Dad asked. “Why?”
“Surely he’s certifiable,” the chief said. “If he’s locked up in a psych ward somewhere I won’t have to explain his absence.”
“Yes, but it could call into question all of his recent findings,” Dad said. “Cause the state medical examiner a lot of extra work. And these days the bar for involuntary commitment is a lot higher than you’d think.”
“Heat exhaustion,” I said.
They turned to me with puzzled looks on their faces.
“You could admit Dr. Smoot to the hospital for heat exhaustion,” I said. “Even if he followed orders and left his cape home, you know he’s probably dressed in all black. And then running up the courthouse steps in the sun? An invitation to heatstroke.”
The chief and Dad looked at each other.
“I could give it a try.” Dad sounded dubious.
“I’ll help you.” I started for the stairs. “We’ll tell him he can either come down the stairs or pretend to have heat exhaustion.”
Once we reached the courthouse lobby, I saw Dr. Smoot cowering against the wall opposite the stairs. He was dressed in black slacks and a black turtleneck sweater, making him probably the only person in the county dressed even less suitably than the guards for heat in the high nineties. I revised my plan of action. Ordering him to do anything was probably fruitless.
“Dr. Smoot, are you all right?” I asked.
“I’ll just wait up here,” he said. “You can bring the body up here.”
“I’ve already certified her death,” Dad said. “Why don’t you just come along with me, and we’ll examine her together down at the hospital?”
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