Drake snapped his head up and knocked into the mug in Tom’s hand, sending an arc of coffee into the air. “Hey!” yelled Tom, pulling his other arm free of Jay and trying to get up from under the dogs. Drake froze, his lip caught on his canine and one ear folded back, and rolled his eyes toward the front of the house. Jay bellowed, “Boof!” The two dogs launched themselves from the couch, their back feet shoving with a combined force of a hundred and fifty pounds. The couch, and Tom, slid a couple of inches, and another slosh of coffee rocketed out of the mug.
Tom was on his feet, swearing, holding the mug at arm’s length. I was up and untangling myself from the fleece wrap. I took the mug from Tom’s hand and stifled myself long enough to ask, “Are you okay? You didn’t get burned, did you?” When Tom said he was wet but not scalded, I started to laugh. And laugh.
“What the hell was that?” said Tom, pulling his wet shirt away from his chest with fingertips. He started to laugh, too.
I was still laughing when I followed the dogs and opened the front door just as the man outside reached for the bell.
“Oh!” said Hutchinson. At first I thought he was just surprised that I had opened the door, but when I saw that he was rigid and the dogs were jostling and sniffing all around him, I realized he wasn’t completely cured of his fears.
“Come on, guys, let him in,” I said, tapping each dog on the fanny and signaling them into the house. “You, too,” I told Hutchinson, and he relaxed a tad and followed me in. Tom told the dogs to lie down, and then he disappeared into his bedroom. Hutchinson started to sit on the couch, but I aimed him at my chair and said “Hang on.” I got a towel and, as I blotted the coffee from the couch, said, “Little mishap when the dogs heard you coming.” I spread a second towel over the wet spot and sat down. “Thank goodness for microfibers.”
Tom reappeared in a dry sweatshirt. They shook hands, but Hutchinson declined refreshments. “I can’t stay, I just …” He sat forward in the chair, elbows on his knees. “Alberta was picked up for questioning this afternoon. I tried to call you …”
The phone call. I had meant to call him back, but between Billy Bob’s escapade, my headache, and the rainy drive, I had forgotten about his message. “Sorry, I would have called …”
Hutchinson nodded. “No problem.”
“Wait. What do you mean ‘picked up’? They interviewed me at home.”
“No, it’s fine,” he said, not really answering the question. “She asked me to see if you could go feed her dogs.”
“Oh!” I glanced at my wrist, but didn’t have my watch. “Are they … I can go now …”
“I took care of it,” said Hutchinson. “Twinkle needed her medicine, and Alberta was worried.”
That took me up short. Alberta had four Welsh terriers, and their barking could be intimidating if you didn’t know them. Maybe Hutchinson was more cured of his cynophobia than I thought. “You went and fed her dogs?”
“Yeah,” said Hutchinson. “They know me, you know, from my visits to see the kitties.”
“Where is she now? Is she okay?” asked Tom.
“Yeah, she’s back home now.” His forehead was wrinkled up, but he said, “She’s mostly ticked off. But a little scared, I think.”
I thought back to my own adventures in police interrogation and said, “You guys are terrifying.”
Hutchinson’s eyebrows shot up, and he stared at me and finally said, “I guess. Anyway, she’s not off the hook yet. They—we, I guess—just don’t have enough to arrest her.”
“Oh, come on.” I said. “Alberta? She’s five feet tall and can’t walk three feet without wheezing. Rasmussen was a big guy. She couldn’t have killed him.”
“You’d be surprised what people can do given the right weapon,” said Hutchinson.
“Do they have a weapon?” asked Tom.
“They might,” said Hutchinson.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Do they have an actual weapon, or do they think they know what kind of weapon it was?” I asked.
“They found something,” said Hutchinson. “On Sunday. They just aren’t sure yet that it was used to kill him.”
Tom and I asked simultaneously, “What is it?” and “Where was it?”
“They sort of have two things,” said Hutchinson.
“What do you mean, sort of ?” I asked.
“Look, I’m not on the case, so I’m getting bits and pieces as I can. I’m still on the potential suspect list myself, so some of the guys are careful what they tell me.” He stopped talking and signaled Jay to come to him, then continued to talk while he scratched behind Jay’s ears. “Remember I told you the E.M.T. found shi …, er, feces in the guy, Rasmussen’s, wound and hair?”
I nodded.
“They found one of those whaddyacallums, you know, for picking up dog, umm, droppings …”
“Pooper-scooper?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
Tom and I exchanged a glance. “There were pooper-scoopers all over at the trial,” I said, mentally taking stock. “At least five of them. Probably more.” But even as I said the words, I heard Giselle telling me how she had swung and hit with a pooper-scooper, over and over and over. At the time I had assumed she had been hitting the ground. Now part of me wished I had asked her, and part of me didn’t want to know. The old Lizzy Borden jump-rope rhyme surfaced from deep memory, but in a new version. Giselle Swann had a scoop, Hit Rasmussen with the poop, When she saw … Hutchinson’s voice broke in and drew me back to the moment.
“No, yeah, I know. No, this one was in the garbage. They’re pulling prints and checking for trace, you know, blood or whatever. The handle was broken. Snapped through.”
“That would take a pretty good force,” said Tom. “Skulls just aren’t that hard. I don’t think the handle would snap from hitting the guy.”
The voice of reason. I thought I might be able to breathe again.
“I don’t know,” said Hutchinson. “Just telling you what they found.”
“But prints? They’re going to find just about everyone’s prints, you know.” I tried to remember whether I had used any of the scoopers over the weekend. I didn’t think so. I rarely do unless my pockets are out of plastic bags.
“I suppose,” said Hutchinson. “But placement of the prints will say a lot. You know, how the person gripped the handle.”
Then I remembered something. “You said they had two things, possible weapons. What’s the other one?”
“Yeah, they found blood on that table thing.”
Table thing? I stared at him.
“You know, that thing the dogs sit on.” Hutchinson used his hands to shape a square.
“The pause table?” said Tom. “Where the dogs sit or lie down during their runs?”
“Yeah. The pause table,” said Hutchinson. “But they don’t know that it’s his blood. Could be from a dog, right?”
“Could be,” I said, although it seemed extremely unlikely to me. I tried to remember where the pause table was in relation to the tunnel where Rasmussen’s body was found. As I recalled, it was about twenty feet out and just off a beeline to the tunnel’s mouth. I’d have to check my photos, although I had only taken a few that morning. I wasn’t the official photographer, but I had gotten a few shots of my friends’ runs.
Tom said, “Nobody hit him with a pause table, that’s for sure. So it if is Rasmussen’s blood, he must have fallen.” He looked at me, then at Hutchinson. “And that would make it an accident.”
Unless someone shoved him, I thought. Or tripped him, as I had done during the kerfuffle earlier on Saturday. Or whacked him with the pooper-scooper so that he fell and hit the table. My imagination went wild and a series of candidates lined up in my mind—Alberta, Jorge, Giselle, Anthony Marconi, Rasmussen’s not-so-grieving w
idow, Louise. Even the police officer sitting here petting my dog.
“Here’s something funny, though,” said Hutchinson, although he wasn’t laughing. “There were odd footprints on the table.”
That didn’t seem all that odd. The ground had been soft and damp in spots, and probably a hundred dogs had landed on that table on Saturday. But then a horrifying thought hit me and I asked, “Bloody footprints?”
“No,” said Hutchinson, and I let out my breath. “Just a little mud. But Gerald, you know, one of the other cops? He’s taken a lot of tracking courses and he hunts, too. He’s the one that noticed them among the others.”
“And?” asked Tom.
“Cat. He said they were from a cat.”
Marietta had said that someone had been chasing a cat across the agility course. Or at least that was what Jorge told her.
Hutchinson gave Jay a last chin scratch, stood to go, and said, “I hope she didn’t do it. But Alberta really hated that guy.”
Who didn’t? I thought.
thirty-one
The fragrance of warm yeast enveloped me when Goldie opened her door, and I thought I might swoon. Goldie had taken Leo to her house the night before, as she often did if I stayed at Tom’s after doggy school, and I was there to pick him up. I had thought I’d just pop in, grab my cat, and go right home, but who can resist fresh, homemade sweet rolls? So at nine thirty Tuesday morning, I was sitting in my best friend’s kitchen sipping a breakfast blend from Charleston Tea Plantation and nibbling my second sweet roll. Leo purred like thunder on the chair beside me, and Goldie told me about her newest project.
“I think I’ll give it a try,” she said. “I need a new project for the winter, and I do have a lot of odd recipes.”
“Creative, not odd,” I said, although she was right, some of her concoctions were nothing short of odd. White chocolate and lavender cookies. Chicken licorice soup. Pasta with pine nuts and violas. “If you need photos, let me know. I’ve always wanted to take photos for a cookbook.”
“So did you ask him?” Goldie has been my biggest cheerleader in the game of love ever since I met Tom, even when I’m not sure what a “win” might look like.
I shook my head, and Goldie’s shoulders sagged. I said, “I was just about to, but Hutchinson showed up, and then I called Alberta to see if she was okay. Tom made me a second Irish coffee, and by the time I finished that, I couldn’t keep my eyes open.”
Goldie rolled her eyes and got up from the table, our mugs in her hands.
“I’m going to talk to him today. It’s better, really, in the cold light of day.” I wasn’t sure whether I was talking to Goldie or myself. “Not so hormonal, you know?”
Goldie peered out the window as she poured more tea. “Looks cold out there.”
“Miserable. The radio said it’s thirty-eight degrees, and it’s trying to rain. But it is November.” I closed my eyes as another bite of sweet roll worked its magic on my taste buds, then said, “We lucked out for the agility trial.”
“Not everyone,” said Goldie.
“No, not everyone,” I said. “I meant the weather. And I’m not sure luck had anything to do with Rasmussen’s demise.”
“And the police questioned you?”
I thought about the two humorless cops who had come to my house the previous day. “I spent about ninety minutes with them. I’d forgotten how terrifying that is,” I said. “I guess Jo Stevens and Hutchinson scared me like that at first.” Stevens had been Hutchinson’s partner when a series of murders rocked the obedience community earlier in the year. We had ended up becoming friends, but I had definitely been on her person-of-interest radar at first.
“Oh, yes, my dear. You were a mess,” said Goldie, stirring a spoonful of honey into her tea. “So what did they ask?”
“A lot of questions about where I was all day, and what I was doing. They knew that Rasmussen’s father-in-law was my mother’s, umm, friend. They knew Rasmussen had threatened to have me arrested for trespassing last week.” I felt a little woozy and stopped to take a couple of deep breaths. “I think I’m basically off the hook. I mean, Tom vouched for my whereabouts,” I giggled at the sound of that, “and I vouched for his. I’m quite sure our stories matched up, since we both told the truth.”
“Almost always a good idea,” said Goldie.
“So then they asked what I knew about other people’s feelings about Rasmussen. I hated that,” I said. “And besides, I have no idea where anyone else was when Rasmussen was killed. Tom and I left long before that.”
“But you have your suspicions. Who do you think it was?” Goldie’s eyes sparkled.
“You have a very nosy streak, you know that?” I said.
“Like you don’t.”
“No idea. Alberta hated his guts, of course.” Goldie already knew about Rasmussen’s attempts to develop the wetlands and woods next to Alberta’s house, but she didn’t know about their conflict over the cats. I told her about his campaign against Alberta’s trap-neuter-release efforts in their neighborhood. “He wasn’t alone, of course, but I guess he was the most vocal and the most threatening.” I pictured him bullying his wife in her studio and at the agility trial. “And he had a violent streak.”
“But why did he care if she fed a bunch of poor, homeless cats?” asked Goldie. “Why would anyone object to kindness?”
“Some people say that feral cats kill too many birds and other animals,” I said. “And that is a problem in some places. It has been in some environments, like islands, where any kind of predator can be a problem for ground-nesting birds, or any endangered species.”
Goldie snorted. “I think there are a lot of bigger dangers to creatures of all kinds in that neighborhood. Like the chemicals they use on the golf course and on their perfect lawns and manicured gardens.” Goldie has a stunning organic backyard filled with flowers, herbs, vegetables, and fruit three seasons of the year. Four, really, since she plants shrubs that have winter berries for the birds.
I put down the sweet roll I was nibbling. Talk about ecological violence always hits me with a cocktail of fury, sorrow, and despair. “I know. Every time I see ducks and geese on the pond by the entrance, I think about the chemicals swimming there with them.”
“So Alberta has been angry at Rasmussen for a long time, right? Why would she kill him now, and why do it at the trial?”
“Well, she was pretty angry about what how he treated his wife, and she probably knew that he tried to move his father-in-law out of Shadetree because his so-called morals were offended,” I said, thinking I’d better go check on my mother when I finished with Goldie.
“Did something push her over the edge, you think?”
Rasmussen’s face as he spewed venom at Alberta came back to me. “He said he had ‘taken care of’ the cats and rats. We all assumed he had set poison out. Alberta was in a complete panic, of course.”
“That’s terrible!” Goldie chopped her sweet roll in half with the butter knife. “He killed the cats?”
“No, Louise made a call and people went out looking for any sign of poison, and they picked up the food that was out, but there was no sign that he had actually done anything.”
Goldie clucked and shook her head. “Emotional violence.”
“And of course his wife … widow … Louise. Her anger had been building for years, but apparently the way Rasmussen treated he father put her over the edge.” I knew that Goldie’s next question would be ‘why Saturday, why there,’ so I said, “He yelled at her father, Anthony Marconi, in front of everyone, and shoved him.”
“So Marconi had motive, too, then.”
“Yes. But I just don’t think he could have done it.”
“Maybe Rasmussen didn’t see it coming,” said Goldie. “Marconi could have clocked him from behind, right?”
I nodded, and went on with my list. “Rem
ember Giselle Swann? She hated Rasmussen, too. And she told me she had sort of blown a gasket at the trial, she was so angry.”
“What did she do?”
I didn’t feel comfortable repeating Giselle’s story about swinging the pooper-scooper, so I ignored the question. “And Jorge, the handyman at Dog Dayz, hated Rasmussen, too. But I don’t know, Jorge is small, shorter than I am and skinny. And that kid, Rudy Sweetwater. But I saw him leave with his mother and he’s only fifteen, so he couldn’t have driven back.”
“Maybe it’s like Murder on the Orient Express,” said Goldie.
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe they all did it.”
thirty-two
As usual, the parking lot at the university was packed. Waves of rain and dry leaves whirled in short, raw blasts of wind. As I drove around looking for a space, I spotted Giselle getting out of her car in the far end of the lot. Her wool poncho billowed around her as she hugged a backpack to her body and wrestled with the wind for possession of her umbrella. A sudden gust spun rain and leaves in the air and shook my van. I pulled up beside Giselle just as her umbrella flipped inside out and half the fabric tore loose.
“Get in,” I shouted.
Giselle didn’t need a second invitation. “Oh man,” she said. “You’re like an angel. Thank you.”
“Ha! I haven’t been called that in a while,” I said. “Where are you headed?”
“I have biology class?” Giselle often spoke in the interrogatory when she was stressed.
“No, I mean where? Which building?”
“Oh.” She pulled a tissue from her backpack and blew her nose. “Right here?”
We were approaching the row of visitors’ spaces right in front of the doors when a pair of tail lights flashed and a car started to back out. “Looks like you’re my good luck for the day,” I said. “I drove by here about five times before I picked you up.”
“Yay,” said Giselle, although her tone belied the usual excitement of the word.
Catwalk Page 14
