Whiskers in the Dark

by Rita Mae Brown

  “Rev, why?” Harry was aghast.

  “The exquisite workmanship. The museum has that incredible Fabergé collection, Mellon’s equine art, and even those Degas figures that Degas worked with, so wouldn’t something like this be special? Maybe the sight of this ought to be available to all. Sometimes the museum sets up clothing exhibits.”

  “You are too kind, Rev. I say it belongs to us and we should use it for our endowment and even take a few thousand for work here. The church itself could use a new heating and cooling system, one that is more efficient and cheaper to run.”

  He furrowed his brow. “Actually, this is a puzzle for the board.”

  “What do we really know about the victim? A female, thirties at the most, and probably African American. Isn’t that what the medical examiner told you?” Harry looked at Cooper.

  “That’s what she told the sheriff. She also said that one can be about ninety percent sure on race. Also, with what they could tell from bones alone, she was probably healthy.” Cooper shone her light beam above. “Have the locksmith check the roof, too.”

  Harry bristled a little, thinking about the work she had put in, but thought better of saying anything.

  “Thank you for responding so promptly. I’d best be getting back to work. Need to write Sunday’s sermon,” Reverend Jones said.

  “You could just say, ‘Thank you, Jesus.’ ” Harry teased him.

  He laughed at his longtime parishioner. “That’s at the bottom of all my sermons, but I think I’d better expand.” With that, he walked back to his office at the end of the western arcade.

  Harry, Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, Tucker, and Pirate escorted Cooper back to the squad car.

  “I Googled Jason Holzknect,” Harry told Cooper outside. “Funny, when you hunt with people you don’t really care what their business life is or was. His career was a lot bigger than I thought. Then I switched to Facebook and found photos of him from his career.”

  “We did, too. Then I set about, with help from our forensics folks, identifying the other people in those photos. Lots of translators, policy wonks. Some faces recurred regularly. Usually translators from Russia or Greece. Not one Kurd, by the way.”

  “If you sit down at the table to talk to a political group, then you have recognized that group politically. The Kurds don’t really have a state, so they aren’t invited to the table,” Harry added thoughtfully. “How can thousands of people be denied basic rights?”

  Cooper leaned against the squad car door. “How terrible is it to give them a bit of land to call their own? It’s a big, wide world.”

  “Not if it’s your land. What are wars fought over? Land, money. This business about wars being fought over ideas or ideology or improving someone’s lot is pure bull.” Harry wasn’t the historian Susan was, but she had studied a bit.

  “The point is to always look like the good guy. I guess you’re right—it’s always smash and grab. Which keeps bringing me back to those damned pearls. Why not grab them?”

  “I want to know who she was. And I also want to know why Jason had his throat slit ear to ear,” Harry commented.

  Cooper crossed her arms over her chest. “We have a much better chance of finding Jason’s killer than the woman found buried here. When is Hounds for Heroes, by the way? I’m sure you told me but it’s slipped my mind.”

  “Next weekend, but I think Susan and I will go up earlier. There’s still some cleanup to finish. When you think about it, there’s been so much death at Aldie. Well, that’s not exactly murder, the war, I mean. It’s an impressive place and yet I feel a kind of sorrow. Especially when I walk along the path by the slightly raised mound, I feel a little cold air at my ankles and sometimes I feel that elsewhere.”

  Cooper said, “Little wind currents?”

  Tucker raised her head. “Ruffy.”

  Harry glanced down at her corgi and the others. “Well, let me haul this crew back to the farm and put them to work.”

  “I’m not working without more tuna,” Pewter declared as she leapt into the back of the Volvo station wagon.

  “Then you’ll fall asleep,” Tucker teased.

  Mrs. Murphy, right behind Pewter, said, “Given recent events, we’d better stay wide awake.”

  20

  April 21, 2018

  Saturday

  “You did it.” Cooper teased Harry as they studied her garden’s neatly plowed rows.

  “Yes, I did.” Harry, hands on hips, looked for even one little shoot in the kitchen garden, then focused on the garden. “You know the weather has been too crazy. Eventually the corn will come up and the tomatoes, but we are late this year. So, what did they decide happened at the church?”

  “Nothing. Someone had simply tried to pry the lock on the front door. Pretty stupid. They would have had even more trouble if they had known the pearls were at Keller and George. All these businesses have security systems, some better than others. Jewelry stores have good ones. The unearthed pearls are safe.”

  “Yeah, but if someone understands electronics, I bet any of these expensive security systems can be disarmed.”

  “Maybe,” Cooper responded. “A thief would need to be tremendously well trained plus have the means to disarm a system. Some of these systems cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Granted, the actual size of the store reflects some of that cost. Can you imagine the security system for Tiffany’s, what is it, five floors?”

  “Something like that. It’s been years since I passed through those doors on Fifth Avenue.” Harry knelt down to brush the moist soil with her gloved hand. “Still holding moisture. Then again, we got enough of it.”

  “No more snow,” Cooper pronounced with finality.

  “I doubt it. Then again, we aren’t living in Wyoming or Montana. Can snow there in May. Well, upstate New York, too. But we’ll get rain. Actually, the year has been wet and I think it will get wetter.”

  “Good for the water table.” Cooper, not a country girl, was learning.

  “That it is. We’ll be grateful come August and September. I love the changing seasons.”

  “Me, too.” Cooper glanced up at the sky. “Not a cloud.”

  Harry looked up. “Sometimes the blue is almost turquoise; other times, robin’s egg blue; and other times, a pale blue. Never fails to fascinate me. Now back to your garden. You really have to put up chicken wire or something because the second—and I mean the second—those first shoots finally make their appearance, so will the deer and the rabbits.”

  “You never have any problems,” Cooper said.

  “I have two dogs and two cats. I also have doors so they can come and go. The deer can’t pull their tricks up at the house in the night. I don’t care if they eat some of what I have as a crop, but not my little garden. One thing we have in our favor is there’s lots to eat for wildlife.”

  “Harry, when you go to some of the places I do, you understand there’s lots to eat for people.” Cooper laughed.

  “What is it, something like eighteen percent of Americans have diabetes?” Harry queried.

  “Can’t be that many.” Cooper shook her head. “Least I hope not but”—she shrugged—“too much sugar and not enough physical labor, I guess.”

  “Back to the failed break-in. Are there a lot of break-ins at businesses in the city and county?”

  “Actually, we’re below average in the county. Keller and George is the province of the city. But even in the shopping centers there’s not much planned theft. It’s impulsive. Someone gets caught shoplifting. And as we all know, impulses usually land you in hot water. Add drink or drugs and it’s a given.”

  “Ah. So the big crimes, big brains?”

  “Pretty much. Cyber theft has taken over for armed robbery. That used to attract the bright and the bold. Now the crooks sit their fat asses behind a computer. I assume their
asses are fat. Anyway, the crook could be in Bermuda, in Mumbai, in St. Petersburg.”

  “M-m-m, St. Petersburg. Wouldn’t that be a political crook?”

  “Harry, there are young people hired by older people all over the world who want to crack into credit card systems, bank systems, medical records. You name it. They are already here.”

  “What about the records of the sheriff’s department?”

  Cooper thought a moment. “I don’t know if they find us that important. A large city police department maybe, but those of us in law enforcement have to combat these cyber crooks, too. Our small department has two computer whizzes.”

  “Gregory Dwayne and who else?”

  “Sheriff just hired a young woman from UVA, Regan Moore. Both she and Dwayne will be out and about, but if anything is odd or we confiscate a computer, it’s their task to unlock it.”

  “I’m hardly in their class, but I did research Jason Holzknect. Good career in foreign service. Specialized in communications, especially electronic communications.”

  “He was on the wave of the future,” Cooper stated.

  “He was. He was good with people and I assume good with money. He always seemed sensible to me. I mean, neither he nor Clare threw money around.”

  Cooper smiled. “Thinking about crime, murder usually is an easy crime to solve because most murders are impulsive, like shoplifting is impulsive. The impulse isn’t gain, it’s rage, uncontrolled rage. Again factor in drugs or drink and there’s not an ounce of thought to it. Half the time the perp isn’t far from the corpse. Easy.” She paused. “A planned murder, like planned theft, isn’t easy. If you think about it, Harry, most everyone has someone who doesn’t like them. Maybe that tips over into murder if there’s an old wound, an old theft even. You get even.”

  “You can kill for material gain,” Harry posited.

  “You can, but there’s usually a trail. The motive is clear. Add political power to wealth and it’s doubly clear.”

  “You think the late Andrew Mellon had people who wanted to kill him?” Harry named a former secretary of the Treasury back in 1921–1932. He died on August 26, 1937, of cancer.

  “M-m-m, political enemies, yes, but I doubt most people knew what he was doing. As it turns out, he was right for his times. He cared about our country. Now even fewer people know what a secretary of the Treasury does, but they’ll want to kill him anyway. Crazy times.”

  “Crazy people.” Harry turned to head for Cooper’s house.

  Once inside, Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, Tucker, and Pirate woke up, all asleep on the kitchen floor near the hearth, a fire burning, for it was still cold enough. Cooper gave them so many treats, they chose to stay inside thanks to bowls of food, eating themselves insensate.

  The two women sat down, Cooper having made hot chocolate.

  “Bums.” Harry chided her pets.

  “It was too good.” Tucker lifted her head, then rested it again on Pirate’s flank.

  “You go back up to Aldie next weekend?”

  “Unless we’re needed earlier.” Harry smiled. “Such a good idea, Hounds for Heroes, and anyone can bring hounds and hunt. You don’t need to be a member of a recognized pack.”

  “What’s the goal? How much?”

  “Last year they raised twenty thousand dollars. That’s just Virginia.”

  “Wow.” Cooper’s eyebrows raised up.

  “Apart from the murder, I still see him flat on his back, but apart from that, every now and then I feel a little touch of cool air on my lower leg up there. Comes and goes. Odd. Then again, topography creates wind currents. A good huntsman knows how to use them.”

  “I expect.”

  “Thinking about what you said about murder, whoever killed the woman in the Taylors’ grave got away with it.”

  Cooper nodded. “I don’t know if it was easier then or not. Killing in the dark would be easy. Other than that, I don’t know. If there are people willing to help or to keep their mouth’s shut, it’s still easy.”

  “And yet someone knew.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why would the grave have been disturbed if someone didn’t know?”

  Cooper, cup in hand, thought about this. “I guess some stabbing in the soil is a form of disturbance; knocking over the tombstone, too. I wouldn’t bet on that one being figured out. Someone would have to make a terrible slip or reveal hidden information, hidden for over two hundred years, but I’d say the chances of finding Jason’s killer are pretty good as opposed to the killer from the eighteenth century.”

  “Why, because the murder’s not over two hundred years old?” Harry reached for a chocolate chip cookie.

  Cooper, who had put the plate on the table, reached for one, too. “No, because it has to be someone who was there.”

  “You don’t think someone could have snuck onto the grounds, killed him, then left?”

  Cooper shook her head. “No.”

  Harry waited a minute or two. “I know.”

  21

  April 22, 2018

  Sunday

  A light rain failed to dampen efforts to brighten up the Institute in preparation for the Hounds F4R Heroes. The women had been asked to come up early. Harry, along with her pets, swept out the stables. Susan, Mary Reed, and Arlene focused on the Institute building itself while Amy, her husband, Jeff, Dr. Rachel Cain, up from near the North Carolina line, and Beth Opitz, Virginia, crawled over the kennels. The fixed rooftops held tight in the rain, which threatened to grow stronger. The kennel group checked for dropped nails, any nail sticking out from the kennel itself. Looked clean.

  Inside, floors swept testified to the good wood. The walls, having recently been painted, to Susan’s eye a pale mint, were welcoming and all the furniture was vacuumed. The porch outside, some white chairs tucked back up to keep out of the rain, gleamed white.

  Harry rarely minded working without other humans. Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, Tucker, and Pirate were with her. She washed out every water bucket and hung it back up inside the stall. She thought about filling each bucket, then decided against it because the water would sit until Friday. She stacked good square bales of hay on a raised pallet. Again, no need to put hay in a stall’s corner. People preferred to feed their own animals. Some horses wanted three flakes, others two. Some needed a bit of grain, which the two judges would bring if they wished. Too much grain proved as bad as too little, so best left to the owner. The mule who would be in the barn was reported to have a healthy appetite.

  “Tidy,” she announced.

  “Because we killed all the mice.” Pewter lounged on a sturdy wooden bench between two stalls. This stood there for odds and ends each rider might put down, but Pewter commandeered one by stretching out.

  Off to the side was a sturdy yellow cart.

  Mrs. Murphy, like Harry checking each stall, puffed up her friend. “We did kill a lot.”

  “Bud the chickadee will tell everyone. Bet mice don’t dare come back in here for months,” Pewter predicted.

  A wheelbarrow at the end of the open aisle, rain blowing in a bit, filled with sweet-smelling shavings, next attracted Harry. She lifted up the handles, going to the first stall. A wide shovel allowed her to pitch in the contents. She returned to the shavings shed outside, moving quickly, filled the wheelbarrow, and returned to repeat the procedure. Once both stalls contained shavings, she took a rake, carefully spreading the shavings evenly. She wasn’t sure if one animal was coming or two, so she set up two stalls.

  Most all barns have nails so one can hang up shovels, rakes, brooms, even lunge whips. Keeping equipment up off the ground guaranteed a longer life for same.

  Finishing, she leaned on the rake, admiring her handiwork. “Ought to do it.”

  “Who will pick out the stalls?” Tucker asked.

  “Arlene, she’s i
n charge,” Mrs. Murphy answered.

  “If she doesn’t, Mom will.” Tucker watched as Harry made certain everything was just so, including tack hooks, which she brought and hung up.

  “She’s so orderly.” Pirate was learning to love Harry.

  “A greatly overrated virtue,” expressed Pewter, who was not.

  The rain, steady now, drummed on the barn roof. Harry walked to the end of the aisle, looked out. Checking her watch, she walked back and sat next to Pewter.

  “Let’s give it a little time before we make a run for it.”

  “It’s not going to stop.” Pewter put her front paws on Harry’s thigh.

  “Sky’s gray. Coming down in sheets now,” Tucker observed.

  “We should have left when it started,” Pewter complained. “Now I’ll get wet paws, which I hate. Takes so much time to dry between your toes.”

  The five creatures listened. A tiny mouse peeked out from its hole in one stall. No one saw her at all because of the shavings. She ducked back in. No need to set off the cats, and her living quarters were dry, filled with rag bits, lots of rag bits.

  “Jeez.” Harry listened.

  “I’m telling you. It’s not going to get any better. Make a run for it,” Tucker advised.

  “She can carry me.” Pewter rolled over to reveal an overlarge tummy.

  “You can run, Fatty,” Tucker undiplomatically barked.

  Pewter sat up. “I’ll scratch your eyes out.”

  No time for scratching as Harry stood up, walked to the end of the aisle, took a deep breath, and sprinted for the cabin. It was far enough from the barn that she was soaked by the time she reached it, threw open the door, and everyone piled in, dogs and cats shaking themselves dry. Not being able to shake, Harry stripped off her wet clothes. She’d started a fire when she and Susan first arrived, for the lowering clouds kept the mercury in the high forties, low fifties. The threat of rain, the dampness, added to the coolness. The slight chill cut right through her. She draped her clothing over the one rocking chair in front of the fire, wrapped herself in a heavy towel, which she’d brought, and sat down to dry herself.