“It’s Willimer, isn’t it?” Randall had grabbed the second offered shovel.
“No idea,” I said. “The body’s buried under the snow. And remember, he’s not the only person missing at the moment.”
“I’m exercising mayoral privilege and going out to supervise the crime scene.” Randall shouldered the shovel as if he were a soldier about to carry his rifle in a parade and headed toward where the chief was squatting in the snow, scribbling in his notebook.
“Out here it’s county manager privilege,” I reminded him as I tagged along at his side. Ever since the departure of the unloved Pruitts, the century-old enmity between town and county had disappeared, and Randall now held both jobs—just as the chief, here on the Willimer farm, was actually functioning in his dual role as sheriff.
“Let’s just hope the chief doesn’t say it’s baloney and to get away from his crime scene,” Randall said in an undertone as we approached where Dad and the chief were standing. “Because I need to know what’s going on and how it’s going to affect our festival.”
Horace came running up behind us.
“Horace, take a few pictures, quick,” the chief said. “Then we’re going to dig him out. Dr. Langslow thinks it unlikely this poor soul is alive, but we’re going to mess up your crime scene, just in case.”
Horace’s camera was already clicking.
“Ready,” he said, after a few seconds, and held out his hand for a shovel.
We watched as Randall and Horace quickly but carefully uncovered the foot’s owner. It soon became obvious why his boot was sticking up out of the show—he’d sprawled back over a small fallen tree whose trunk held the foot up just enough to make it stick out of the snow—and at just the right angle for the snow to slide off. If the tree hadn’t been there, or if we’d had a few more inches of snow, we might not have found him for days.
I noticed we were saying he, but at first there wasn’t anything to indicate whether our victim was a man or a woman. The boots could have belonged to either. The same with the jeans-clad legs. Though they were such long legs that I was betting on a man. The quilted jacket, partly unzipped, and the plaid flannel shirt beneath weren’t too different from what I sometimes wore on snowy days.
But the next shovel full of snow left bare an Adam’s apple. And the one after that revealed a face.
My first reaction was a sigh of relief. It wasn’t Haver. I saw a thin, sunken-cheeked face with several days’ growth of beard and a receding chin. His eyes were open and staring. And there were two bullet holes in his forehead.
“Meg?”
I looked up and realized everyone was staring at me.
“Is it Willimer?” the chief asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Pretty sure it’s the guy I saw coming out of Willimer’s house and putting the box in Haver’s car. Of course, keep in mind that I only saw him briefly through binoculars and people look different when they’re … um…”
“Dead,” the chief said, nodding.
“Actually, I was going to say frozen—but yeah, that too. So if the guy I saw coming out of the house was Willimer, that’s him.”
The chief took out something from between the pages of his notebook and handed it to me. A DMV document with a copy of Willimer’s driver’s license photo.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s the guy I saw.”
“And it seems to be the gentleman we have here,” the chief said, after we’d looked back and forth between the corpse and the photo. “Although we should probably still get an ID from Mrs. Frost.” The chief didn’t sound happy about the idea.
“Okay for me to do my thing?” Horace said.
“Yes,” the chief said. “Meg, could I have a word with you?”
We walked halfway back toward the watching crowd before he stopped.
“That gun you found in Mr. Haver’s dressing room has just become a great deal more interesting to me,” he said.
“You think Haver could be the killer?” It seemed a leap, unless he knew something I didn’t know.
“It’s far too early to speculate on that,” he said. “But it’s a gun that was in possession of someone who may be one of the last people to have spoken to the deceased.”
“Not to mention someone who appears to have vanished during the night when the murder occurred,” I said.
“Precisely,” the chief said. “Could you describe the gun’s hiding place to Aida with sufficient accuracy that she could find it? And arrange for her to enter the drama building to secure it?”
“Absolutely.”
“I’m trying not to be superstitious,” he said. “But I can’t help feeling chastened. Only yesterday I was feeling so smug about the fact that, unlike Clay County, we didn’t have any dead bodies on our hands.”
“But not a John Doe,” I pointed out. “You’ve already identified him.”
“And God willing, we’ll find out who killed him. But in future, I will take this as a lesson to be more charitable in my thoughts.”
He turned and began trudging back toward the body.
“Chief,” I called. “What about the animal rescue? Should that continue?”
He turned and winced as his gaze traveled over the assembled rescuers, who were all standing and staring, with or without puppies in their arms.
“Good lord,” he said. “This won’t be the first time I’d had half a hundred well-meaning civilians contaminating my crime scene before I even knew it was a crime scene. But it will be the first time I brought them along myself.” He looked up at the sky and shivered. “That arctic air mass is definitely rolling in. Temperature’s dropping already. We should get the animals out of here, pronto. Yes, we should get everybody moving.” Although he didn’t do anything right away—he just stood staring glumly at the rescuers.
“The power’s out,” I said. “So we should probably transport Mrs. Frost before too long.”
“I should break the news to her soon. I need to ask Horace and your father a few things, then I’ll take care of it. Randall!” he called, a little louder. “Get the rescue moving again!”
He then took out his phone and punched a few buttons.
“Debbie Ann?” I heard him say. “We have a homicide at the Willimer farm. I want all hands out here, on the double.… yes, the tourists will have to mill about on their own for a while. And another thing…”
I realized that I was shamelessly eavesdropping. I strolled away before the chief could notice, pulled out my own phone, and glanced at the time. Eight thirty. Unless Rose Noire had been unusually persuasive in begging the boys to let their daddy sleep in, Michael was probably up. I hopped into the Twinmobile, as much for protection against the wind as for privacy, and dialed him.
I was relieved when he answered on the first ring, sounding post-coffee coherent.
“Good morning! You’re missing some excellent pancakes. How’s the roundup going?”
“It just turned into a murder investigation.”
“Oh, God. Hang on.”
I heard quick footsteps and could imagine him hurrying out of the pancake-filled kitchen into the hall.
“Is it Haver?”
“No, it’s the bootlegger.” I gave him the high points of my morning so far. “And Haver’s still AWOL, which means he’s a suspect, or maybe the chief is just using his absence as a reason to confiscate the gun I found in his dressing room. Any chance you could arrange for someone to meet Aida at the theater, let her in, and show her which dressing room is his?”
“I’ll do it myself,” he said. “I can be there in twenty minutes or so. I don’t want to sound lugubrious, but how certain are they that our bootlegger is the only victim?”
“Not certain at all,” I said. “He was buried in the snow, all but one foot. If one of the puppies we’re rescuing hadn’t gotten loose and started barking at the foot, we probably wouldn’t have found him till the snow melted. So yeah, there could be another body out there. I don’t have to tell the chief that.”
�
��Let me know if Haver turns up,” he said. “Dead or alive.”
“And you do the same,” I said.
I told Aida that Michael was on his way to the drama building, and she took off—no doubt happy to escape being enlisted to help extract Mrs. Frost from her lair.
I studied the little knot of activity around the body. Dad seemed to be dividing his attention between watching what Horace was doing and scanning the nearby landscape with binoculars. The chief was nowhere in sight.
Randall came to stand beside me.
“The chief inside breaking the news?” I asked.
Randall nodded.
“Please tell me Dad’s not birdwatching at the crime scene.”
“He’s probably watching the volunteers the chief sent in to search the woods.”
“In case Willimer’s not the only body?”
“Yup.” He nodded slowly. “And the chief also had me track down my cousin Dagmar to bring her dog. Lot of woods and pasture out there. We were lucky to find Willimer—if he hadn’t fallen the way he did, with one leg sticking up, he’d have been just another lump under the snow. We might not have found him till spring. It’s not like the old lady could roll herself out here and look for him.”
“Is Dagmar’s dog a search-and-rescue dog or a cadaver dog?” I asked.
“Trained for both, so we’re covered either way.”
We stood there watching for a few moments. The wind was definitely getting fierce and the temperature seemed to be dropping precipitously. Randall shivered, in spite of his heavy coat.
“The chief sent Vern over to talk to Mort Gormley,” Randall said. “The sheep farmer who thought Willimer’s dogs were killing his flock.”
“Does he think Mr. Gormley might have done this?” I asked.
“He can be a hothead.”
I found myself fervently hoping that the hotheaded sheep farmer would turn out to be the culprit. Caerphilly could get along with one less sheep farmer, but if Haver turned out to be the killer—I shoved the thought aside. I’d worry about that later.
“Let’s hope the dog gets here soon,” I said. “Or the search-and-rescue part of its training will be pretty useless.”
“Gets here soon and comes up empty-handed,” Randall muttered as he took off toward the crime scene.
Chapter 19
I went inside the barn to help with the puppies. The volunteers were nearly finished with the task of sorting out which puppies belonged to which of the eight adult female golden retrievers so they could be transported and then fostered in family groups.
“Most of these puppies look a little young to be separated from their mothers,” Clarence was explaining. “So initially we really need eight families willing to take in a mother and her whole litter.”
“Is it really that much of a disaster to separate the puppies earlier?” one of the volunteers asked.
Those of us who knew how strongly Clarence felt about this subject groaned inwardly. For the next fifteen minutes or so, as we sorted puppies and loaded them into the crates with their mothers, Clarence gave us chapter and verse on the behavioral issues that could arise from too-early separation from the mother dog, and I amused myself by trying to figure out whether this could account for the behavioral problems of some of my less-than-favorite humans.
At the other end of the barn, Grandfather and two Brigade volunteers were sitting in folding camp chairs watching the tiger. The chimps—two of them—and the four smaller monkeys were sulking in large nearby cages. The finches and the hunting dogs were long gone. But the tiger was still pacing restlessly up and down its tiny cage.
“He’ll be a lot happier with all the space he’ll have out at the zoo,” one of the volunteers said.
“Are you planning on packing him up and taking him there anytime soon?” I asked as I strolled over to join them.
“We’re waiting for the tranquilizer darts to take effect,” Grandfather replied.
I looked more closely. Yes, protruding from the tiger’s hip was a little glass and metal projectile with a festive pink and yellow tip. Another dart lay on the floor of the chain-link cage.
“I still think we should have fed him the tranquilizers,” one of the Brigade volunteers said. “Knead it into a couple of pounds of ground sirloin—he wouldn’t know what hit him.”
“The darts are usually faster,” Grandfather said. “Assuming you hit your target properly.”
The other volunteer winced. I deduced that he had been the dart shooter.
“I don’t think the first one even broke the skin,” the first volunteer said.
“We can’t be sure,” the second volunteer said. “It’s a pity he chose that moment to pee all over everything, so we can’t tell how much of the tranquilizer’s contents went into him and how much dribbled down on the straw.”
Grandfather growled in frustration. The tiger, alerted to the nearby presence of a fellow predator, narrowed his eyes and laid back his ears.
“We need to give it a little more time,” Grandfather said. “In case the dart did hit him and he’s just a slow reactor.”
“Look, he stumbled!” The second volunteer was pointing at the tiger. “That’s a good sign, right?”
“Meg?” Randall stuck his head into the barn. “Chief’s looking for you.”
I left Grandfather and the volunteers to their tiger watch.
I saw the chief standing on the front steps of the farmhouse, taking deep breaths. Was he only recovering from the stench, or was he also counting to ten, or even twenty, as I knew he did when struggling to keep his temper.
I strolled over to him.
“Any idea how soon we can transport Mrs. Frost?” I asked. “The volunteers are nearly finished with the animals in the barn and they’d like to get started on the cats.”
“Soon,” he said. “Ms. Flugleman is helping her finish up her packing. I broke the news to her and got confirmation of Mr. Willimer’s identity.”
“That’s good, I guess.”
“I may ask your father to see if he can get Dr. Kelleher in to see her,” the chief added.
“The shrink? You think she took it that badly?”
“No.” He shook his head slowly. “Well, yes and no. One minute she’s weeping and wailing over her dear Johnny, and the next minute she’s cooing over a cat, and then the cat knocks over a vase and she tells Ms. Flugleman not to worry, Johnny will clean up the pieces. So we break the news to her again and she’s inconsolable again. She could have cognitive issues.”
“Could have?” I echoed. “One look at that house—or one whiff—and you know she has cognitive issues.”
“Good point.” He glanced back at the house and shuddered slightly. “I hope we can find some other family members—she certainly isn’t capable of taking care of herself out here. She couldn’t even get out of the house in an emergency—there are steps at both the front and back doors. They’ve been here nearly a year—you’d think Willimer could have found the time to build her a ramp.”
“Maybe there wasn’t anything she wanted to come outside for,” I said.
The chief nodded as his eyes swept the landscape. The snow made the weathered buildings prettier, but it did nothing to hide how isolated the run-down farmstead was.
“I’ll ask her about family later,” the chief said. “I’ll have to come by the Inn to interview her again. Every time I tried to ask her what, if anything, she remembers about last night, the waterworks started up. So are you the one taking her and Ms. Flugleman back to town?”
“I want to be there to ease her arrival at the Inn,” I said. “Aha—they’re backing the big truck up to the barn. They must be ready to move the tiger.”
The biggest Shiffley moving truck was carefully backing up to the barn door, with the largest of the cages in its huge freight compartment.
“Move the tiger?” The chief sounded alarmed. “Just how are they going to do that?”
“They shot him with a couple of tranquilizer darts a whi
le back,” I explained. “Grandfather must have decided he was finally completely unconscious.”
The chief didn’t seem to find that entirely reassuring. He set off toward the barn at a quick pace. I trailed along after him.
We reached the barn door and peered in. The door to the tiger’s chain-link pen was open. Clarence was sitting by the tiger, listening to its chest with a stethoscope. Grandfather was directing the seven or eight volunteers who were laying out a giant canvas stretcher beside the tiger. The stretcher arranging wasn’t going all that smoothly, in part because most of the volunteers couldn’t tear their eyes off the tiger and kept tripping over the stretcher and each other.
I could understand. I didn’t want to take my eyes off him, and I wasn’t in the cage with him.
“That’s got it,” Grandfather said at last. “Now line up on the other side and put your backs into it.”
The volunteers obediently lined up and began trying to roll the sleeping tiger onto the stretcher. At first their combined efforts seemed to do nothing. Perhaps they were afraid if they pushed too hard they’d wake him. Or perhaps they didn’t realize at first how hard it would be to move the dead weight of an unconscious animal. But then gradually his body began to move, little by little, until they had him on the stretcher.
“Okay—grab that stretcher!” Grandfather called. All eight of them grabbed one or another of the stretcher poles and heaved the sleeping beast into the air. Then they made their slow way to the truck. As he rolled, the dart stuck in his flank came into view, and Clarence carefully plucked it out.
“Just slide the stretcher in,” Grandfather said. “No need to take him off the stretcher. If he’s still unconscious when we reach the zoo, we can carry him off on it, and if he wakes up, he’ll bounce out under his own steam once we open the door.”
The volunteers set down the stretcher and scampered very briskly out of the cage. Clarence and Grandfather swung the cage door closed, and they both double-checked to make sure the locks were closed tight.
When they finished, Grandfather pulled out his cell phone, looked at it, and frowned.
“Damn,” he said. “Still no word from Ruiz.”
How the Finch Stole Christmas! Page 13
