“How many Band-Aids do you think I’ll need?”
“A couple on your hands and arms. And we’ll dab
some of that twenty-four-hour gel rouge on your nose
and neck. That’ll add to the . . .”
“Verisimilitude,” Quill finished for her. “Terrific. I’ll
look demented.” She flopped back on the couch and
stared at the ceiling. “This case is taking some very unfortunate turns.”
“At least we’ve got a case. I completed my half of the
mission today, too. And the news isn’t good.”
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“Uh-oh. What’s wrong?”
“Basically, everybody has an alibi, except,” Meg held
one finger up, “Rudy Baranga.” She tucked her feet under her and began to tick the points off on her fingers.
“First murder—Lila Longstreet. I checked the
whereabouts of all of our suspects on Monday night between seven and ten o’clock, since the autopsy hasn’t pinned down the time any closer than that, according to
Davy. Pamela was with Harland Peterson.” Meg interrupted herself, “And you know, Quill, the big goof’s absolutely gone on that woman. I swear she’s put something in his beer. Anyhow, Robin and Victoria Peterson were in the Tavern Lounge, drinking and fighting. Nate says so. Half the waitstaff says so. Robin stomped out for about half an hour sometime after
eight, according to Nate, but he stomped back in again
by quarter to nine. Nate remembers that time because
he was watching American Idol on the bar TV and
somebody got kicked off the stage. Whatever. Anyhow,
Priscilla Barnstaple read and watched TV in her room
all night. She called down to room service twice. Millard Barnstaple drove to Syracuse and back in the Inn van . . .”
“Oh my god,” Quill said. “Do we have Michelin
tires?”
“Who knows? Who cares?” Meg said bitterly, “Because Millard got both a parking ticket and an airtight alibi. The ticket was on the windshield when he got
back. He told Mike he wasn’t going to pay it because
the tickets follow the vehicle and not the driver, if that
makes any sense. Anyhow, the time on the ticket was
nine-thirty P.M. The address was outside the Marriott.
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And Millard was at a Vice-Free Vegans meeting there.
Before you ask, I talked to the conference organizer, and
there is no doubt that our passive-aggressive pal was
there from seven-thirty on. It wasn’t a ringer.” Meg contemplated her toes; her socks were a depressed gray.
She perked up a bit. “Nobody knew where Rudy was,
though. Nobody had a clue.”
“But why Rudy? He had everything to lose with both
Lila and Kittleburger dead. Pet Pro was Rudy’s largest
customer.”
“Motive,” Meg said sternly, “is trumped by good
hard evidence, every time.”
“True,” Quill admitted. “Okay. So nobody killed Lila
Longstreet. Except somebody did kill Lila Longstreet.
No one knows where Rudy was?”
Meg shook her head.
“I’ll ask him.” She scribbled on her sketchpad.
“There. I’ve made a note to myself.”
Meg looked skeptical. “You’re just going to waltz up
and ask him?”
“Not directly, no. But he drinks a lot of Johnny
Walker Blue . . .”
“At fifty dollars a shot?” Meg exclaimed. “Is he good
for his bar bill?”
“I hope so. Anyhow, after three or four of those, it
should be easy to find out where he was Monday night.
Now, about Maxwell Kittleburger . . .”
“Nobody killed Maxwell Kittleburger, either,” Meg
said a little glumly. “That nine forty-five time of death
is a real monkey wrench in the machinery.”
“Then the time of death has got to be wrong,” Quill
said positively. “I know that most of the IAPFP mem
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bers were at Pamela’s. Who supplied the alibi for the
time of Kittleburger’s murder?”
“Esther.”
“Esther?”
“You know West’s Best is right next door. It appears
she stopped into Pamela’s Pampered Pooch’s twice
Wednesday morning. She had some new ideas for the
puppy show. A costume class, I think she said. Anyhow,
she saw everyone through the plate-glass window, ‘waving their arms and yelling fit to bust’ except for . . .
“Rudy?” Quill said hopefully.
“And Robin.”
“Robin,” Quill said. “Ah-ha.”
“No ah-ha. I asked Dina to check on Robin’s alibi,
and yes, two co-eds ran across him when he was hiking
in the gorge. She knows one of the women pretty well
and says she’s reliable.”
“Hm,” Quill said. “But the gorge isn’t all that far
from the Inn. There’s a bare possibility Robin could
have whipped up the fire escape stairs and clobbered
poor Mr. Kittleburger, isn’t there?”
“Only if the police are wrong about the exact time of
death,” Meg said. “One of the students says it was about
nine-thirty when Robin joined them.”
“Kittleburger’s murder absolutely hinges on the supposedly exact time of death,” Quill mused. “If the time of death is wrong, both Rudy or Robin could be in the
frame. Now, Harker’s not the brightest bulb in the chandelier. There has to be a way to rethink that nine forty-five target.” She made another note to herself. “As for
Rudy?”
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Meg flung her hands out, palms up. “Nobody seems
to know.”
“Ah-ha.”
“Maybe. But we still haven’t discovered a logical
motive for him. So right now, it looks as if those suspects who had a reason to kill Kittleburger couldn’t have done it, and the guy who has no reason could have
done it.”
Both of them mulled this over. There was a crack in
the plastered ceiling that Quill hadn’t noticed before.
She swung her feet up on the couch and stared at it.
Suddenly, she was very tired. “Why don’t we just leave
this to the police? If we just left this to the police, I
could get back to making this place livable. And I
wouldn’t have to walk around looking like the kind of
fool that doesn’t know enough to stay out of a patch of
poison ivy.”
“The quicker we solve this case, the quicker Harker
will slither back to his place under the rocks. And the
quicker we’ll be rid of the poisonous pet people.”
“True.” Quill sat up. The ceiling could wait. “My day
was a little more successful, if a lot scarier. It was worth
it, Meg. Devon not only hacked into the forensics stuff
on Lila Longstreet, he pulled up the autopsy report on
Kittleburger. And a sort of ‘to do’ list that Harker had to
write in response from a pile of questions from Simon
Provost.”
“Hot diggety.” Meg curled in the corner of the couch
and prepared to listen.
Quill smoothed out the crumpled sheet of paper
she’d sneaked out of the trooper barracks. “As for Lila,
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the body was
moved. So she wasn’t actually killed at
Bernie Hamm’s. Which will make him feel a lot better.
The lab found traces of dog hair, animal feces, and sawdust all mixed up together in Lila’s clothes. None of it matched the area around the Hamms’ place.”
“Sawdust? Dog hair?”
“That, and some leaf mold.” Quill shook her head,
wonderingly. “It’s absolutely amazing, Meg. They’ve
pinpointed this particular kind of leaf mold. They
checked with the horticultural lab at Cornell, and it
comes from a spot three miles west of Route 353 near
the Horndean Gorge, which, I need not remind you, is a
ten-minute walk from our gorge.”
“Holy crow.” Meg sat up, her eyes alight. “So maybe
Robin could have had time to meet Lila and get back to
resume fighting with Victoria. And he might have had
time to knock off Kittleburger, too.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. We’ve got to work on the time
of Kittleburger’s death. That’s crucial.”
Meg drew her knees to her chin. “What about the
murder weapons?”
“Lila was run over. Let’s hope they find the truck. Let’s
hope they can find it and prove that it was somewhere
near the Inn with the keys in it so Robin could steal it.”
“Possible. But not probable.”
“At any rate, the lab ran some tests on the carpet fiber
they found on Lila’s right sleeve, right hip, and right
cheek. It’s the same kind of carpet that’s found in late-
model Dodge double-axle trucks. Unfortunately, like
the tires, there’s approximately forty thousand vehicles
with this kind of carpet in the backseat.”
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“I thought we were going to forget about pinning down
which of forty thousand trucks they put the body in.”
“But we can check out the spot where Lila’s murder
may have actually occurred.”
“Why?”
“Why? Clues, that’s why.”
“Phuut!” Meg said rudely. “The police will have
picked up anything important. You can just hack into
the files again.”
“I think we should check it out.”
“That whole area’s full of scratchy brush. You’re not
going to find me romping around in there. And I don’t
think you should, either.”
This was very unlike her adventuresome sister. Quill
regarded her for a long moment. “Okay. I know why
you think I should be home with my feet up. You want
me to be pregnant. Is there any reason why you should
be home with your feet up?”
Meg smiled mysteriously. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
“What does that mean?”
Meg started to hum an off-key version of “Sit Down,
You’re Rockin’ the Boat,” which Quill took (correctly)
to mean “butt out.”
“Are you and Jerry thinking of . . . um . . . anything
in particular?”
“Such as?” Meg demanded with a scowl.
“Such as nothing,” Quill said hastily. “But I still
think we should case the joint.”
“The joint being six acres of underbrush, rocks, and
various pitfalls. No way.”
Stubbornly, Quill made another note to herself and
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continued, “Now the autopsy report just had the ‘body
of a well-nourished white female between the ages of
twenty-four and thirty-four’ sort of thing. Pamela identified the body, by the way. So that puts the kibosh on Suspect X.”
“Suspect . . . oh. You mean the guy nobody knew existed coming out of the bushes to commit the murders.
Like in a Patricia Cornwell novel.”
“Right. At any rate, I didn’t take the time to write all
the autopsy results down—just the anomalies. There
wasn’t anything interesting. Her hair had been freshly
dyed. Things of that sort.”
“That color blonde is hard to keep up,” Meg observed.
“It’s also really hard to do with an at-home kit. So
let’s check out Nadine Peterson’s hair salon. That’d be
the most logical place for Lila to go—the nearest salon
is in Ithaca. And people tell their hairdressers the oddest
things.”
“You never know,” Meg agreed.
Quill made a third note to herself. The investigation
was shaping up nicely. “The scene of the crime report
listed her clothes, the contents of her purse, her shoes,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They listed everything.
Keys, makeup kit, Nokia cell phone, wallet, the lot. By
the way, Lieutenant Provost wrote a really sarcastic note
to the fingerprint lab. None of the fingerprints on the
purse matched the fingerprints on the body. The impression I got from reading the request Provost sent to them for more information was that Harker’s work is notoriously sloppy. And that Provost wasn’t about to put up with much more of it.”
Meg looked pleased.
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“Last note in the file was absolutely something we
can do ourselves. Provost wanted someone to check out
Lila’s banking arrangements.”
Meg nodded in agreement. “Now there’s a really
good idea. But does that mean we have to hack into the
state troopers computer system again? Because I’ll tell
you right now—there’s no way I’m dressing up in a wig
and tattoos.”
“We have Devon the hopeful FBI consultant,” Quill
said, a little smugly.
“Hm.” Meg said, “Okay. So we trick Devon into
thinking he’s working way undercover for the Feds and
he finds out all this financial stuff how?”
“Lila used a credit card to register, didn’t she?”
Meg’s eyebrows shot up and she nodded approvingly. “Okay. Good one.”
Quill tucked the paper in the back of her sketchpad.
“Now. Kittleburger. The autopsy hasn’t been done
yet. But it looks as if he was injected in the back of the
neck with some kind of powerful anesthetic. The scene
of the crime people took carpet samples, et cetera.
Thank goodness the room had been cleaned that morning. And you know how obsessive Doreen is about the housekeeping help. So they lifted very few fingerprints,
which is good for elimination, and routine samples from
his clothes.” She sighed, “Nothing’s really back, yet. I
hope Simon Provost will be more helpful than that
creep Harker. Although Myles might not mind giving us
a hand.”
“As if,” Meg said.
“At the very least, he can give Provost a hand.” Quill
took one last glance at her notes. “And that’s about it.
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The list of stuff Kittleburger had on him was the usual.
Briefcase, cell phone, no signed notes from the murderer. So that’s about it. But we’ve got some pretty good leads. And there’s one more lead that Harker didn’t list.
Although Provost might have thought of it already.” She
paused dramatically. “Is Lila’s mother really dead?”
Meg ran her hands through her hair. “Huh?”
“Lila left the conference early because her mother<
br />
died. That’s what she told Olivia. So, is her mother really dead? Or was it a trumped-up excuse? And if her mom’s alive and well—where was Lila really headed,
and why?”
“It’s Thursday,” Meg said. “We want these guys out
of the Inn by the weekend, right? Well, we’d better hop
to it.” She raised her fist in the air. “Rudy or Robin?”
“Maybe both?”
“Forward, Caldecott.”
“After you, Carstairs.”
CHAPTER 10
“Lila’s mother is in Niagara Falls?” Olivia said. “I don’t
understand you.”
“It is a little confusing,” Quill said kindly. “Would
you like a little more coffee?”
Olivia frowned at her cup. Then she frowned at Quill.
Olivia was having a late breakfast. It was well after ten
Friday morning and the dining room was nearly empty.
It was a glorious fall day. Outside the floor-to-ceiling
windows that overlooked the falls, the sun shone in a brilliantly blue sky. The trees had turned color seemingly overnight, and the canopy of leaves surrounding the Inn
was a riot of crimson, gold, and orange. Best of all, Quill
had discovered that Windex removed all of the telltale
tattoos, and she didn’t have to walk around like the deer
with a target birthmark on its chest in the Gary Larsen
cartoon, waiting for Harker the Hunter to haul her into
custody.
Olivia looked cross. “Is there a funeral home in Niagara Falls that the body’s been shipped to?”
“Mrs. Longstreet isn’t dead, Olivia,” Quill said, hoping
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that she was combining tact and directness in equal measure. “Lila lied about why she left the conference early.”
“Oh.” Olivia took a large bite of cranberry strudel
and shrugged. “In that case, it was probably some man.”
“What man would that be?” Quill spoke without
thinking, “Mr. Kittleburger was already here.”
“Lila didn’t confine herself to one man at a time.
Here’s Pamela. She can tell you more about Lila’s love
life than I can.”
“Hello, Quill. I was hoping to find you here.” Pamela
walked up to the table without the usual advance warning of jangling charm bracelets and heavy perfume. She was dressed in chinos that were a size too small for her
ample hips, and a sweater covered with dog hair. “Sorry
to drop in like this, y’all. But I had an early drive to
Syracuse this morning.” She smiled. “Picking up more
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