so softly that Quill had to bend to hear her. “He had other
companies, other businesses, but this was the one that reflected his own philosophy. His own principles. He loved animals. Not,” she jerked her chin contemptuously toward the parking lot, where Olivia Oberlie’s crew was setting up the cameras, “that kind of exploitative crap. But he had a real appreciation for who they are. How they relate
to the rest of us.” She bent over and ruffled Max’s ears.
“He would have had a soft spot even for this guy.” She
straightened up. “As for Millard. Well, I was fooled, at
first, by the wire-rimmed glasses and the ponytail and all
that blather about our animals are our brothers and how
material things didn’t matter. But he turned out to be just
like the rest of them. After my money.” Her mouth drew
downward in a bitter curve. “What happened, exactly?”
“Rudy and Millard were pretty upset that I’d discovered the freezers full of . . . umm . . . product. Rudy’s solution was pretty straightforward. If they got rid of
me, they got rid of the problem. But Meg and Jerry burst
in, and for a few seconds, there was a free-for-all.”
“Millard actually hit somebody?” Priscilla said with
mild interest.
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“Well, no,” Quill admitted. “Actually, he ducked out
the door and jumped into Rudy’s Cadillac. Rudy
jumped in after him. The last I saw, they were headed
north on I-80.”
“Toward the Adirondacks?” Priscilla’s odd laugh
barked again. “Millard hates trees.”
“I did overhear something that puzzled me, Priscilla.
Millard said that he’d paid the last five hundred thousand to Kittleburger Monday morning?”
“The last five hundred thousand what? Dollars?”
“To complete the purchase of Pet Pro. Yes.”
“Nonsense. I was in the process of buying Pet Pro.
Max and I had an agreement in principle, but nothing
had been signed yet.” Priscilla’s face was set in ugly
lines of anger. “Five hundred thousand, you say? The
only way Millard could have gotten that kind of money
was to borrow on his stock. Where’s Victoria?”
Quill looked around the field. “There she is. It looks
like she’s just leaving.”
Victoria, trailed by a sulking Robin, was halfway
down the trail to Peterson Park.
“Hi! Victoria!” Priscilla shouted. “Come here!”
Victoria said something to Robin, and then headed
across the field toward them. Robin turned and disappeared into the green of Peterson Park.
“What is it, Priscilla?” Victoria’s face was flushed
with annoyance but her tone was polite. She’d made a
bright print scarf into a headband to hold back her dark
hair; the effect made her look gaunt.
Priscilla thrust a long finger at her. “What was
Maxwell on about, selling Pet Pro to Millard behind my
back?”
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“Maxwell wasn’t doing any such thing,” Victoria
said. “Who told you that?”
“I did.” Quill frowned a little. “I’m afraid I have
proof.”
“Proof?” Victoria’s lips thinned. “What kind of
proof?”
Quill felt herself blush. One of the unpleasant parts
of being a detective was that you had to snoop. And in
the process of solving the case, sometimes other people
would realize that you were a snoop. It was very embarrassing. But nothing would be gained by backing away from the current situation, so she said: “I overheard
Millard tell Rudy Baranga that the last payment of five
hundred thousand dollars had been made to Maxwell
Kittleburger on Monday. It was the final earnest money
for the purchase of Pet Pro.”
“What Millard said and what Millard did could be two
different things entirely,” Victoria said. “That isn’t proof.”
“Five hundred thousand dollars had been deposited
into Lila Longstreet’s money-market account Monday
morning,” Quill said. “She supervised the bookkeeping
for Pet Pro, didn’t she?”
Victoria shook her head slowly. “This makes no
sense to me at all. And how did you get access to that information anyway? You aren’t with the police.”
“Um. No. But we were, ah—doing a credit check,”
Quill improvised, “and we sort of ran across the information accidentally.”
“At the least,” Victoria said icily, “you’ve obtained
that information illegally. And I want to see it.”
“And I,” Priscilla was equally angry, “want my five
hundred thousand dollars back.”
CHAPTER 12
“It was there this morning,” Devon said. “I saw it. Agent
Quilliam saw it . . .”
“Agent Quilliam?” Victoria stared at Quill. Quill in
turn stared accusingly at Marge. Since Marge had the
sensitivity of a charging rhino, she merely said, “Shut
up, Devon. And how long are you two planning to tie up
my consultant? I want to know where to send the bill.”
Victoria gave Marge a brief flash of teeth, “Not long.
And I’m sure that you wouldn’t want me to make public
the fact that your genius consultant here,” she laid one
hand on Devon’s shoulder, “is committing at least three
federal offenses. If not more.”
It was Marge’s turn to glower accusingly at Quill.
“You’re sure you saw my money, young man,”
Priscilla said.
“If that five hundred K was your money, then yeah,
we both saw it.”
“Then where is it?”
Devon clattered away at the keyboard for a moment.
“It got moved to an offshore account,” he said. “And let
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me tell you, even I can’t hack into those Cayman Islands files. And if I can’t do it,” he added with simple pride, “no one can.”
“So you don’t know who has it?” Victoria said. “If it
even existed, that is.”
“Oh, it existed all right.” Devon clattered away at
the keyboard again. “There it is. The account history.”
Devon stretched his arms over his head and yawned.
Priscilla gave a howl of rage. Victoria leaned over his
shoulder and stared at the scene intently. “It looks as if
close to two million dollars has moved through that account in the last few weeks.”
“That’s how much Maxwell wanted up front,”
Priscilla said. “We’d agreed on that in principle last
week.”
Victoria pulled her cell phone from her purse. “I’m
going to punch in a call to the bankers. I wonder if they
know anything about this.” She thumbed the phone,
looked at it, and said, “Damn it all to hell.” She tossed
the phone onto the floor. Without thinking, Quill bent
and picked it up. “Maxwell’s been dead, what, two
days? It didn’t take them long to cut off the company
phones.”
Quill looked at the cell phone in her hand. It was a
Nokia, an expensive one. “Did everyone at Pet Pro have
a cell phone like this?”
“What?”
Victoria had grabbed the handset of the
landline next to Devon’s computer.
“You’re not making long-distance calls on that
phone,” Marge said. “Hang it up.”
Quill repeated her question.
Victoria threw the handset into the rest with a clatter
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and a nasty look at Marge. “Yes, we all had phones like
this. Why?”
“Mr. Kittleburger had a Nokia, just like this one?”
Quill persisted. “And Lila Longstreet, too?”
“What of it?” Victoria snapped. “Max got a volume
discount.” Victoria glared down at Devon. “Can you
print that bank statement out for me?”
“Not without getting the bank on my tail,” Devon
said cheerfully.
“Not on your life,” Marge said. “I’ve had it with this
hacking business. Close it down, Devon.”
“I can bring it up on someone else’s computer,
though,” Devon offered. “If you want to print it out, it’ll
be your problem. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Schmidt is
right, I should get out of there right now.” He bent forward and punched several keys. The little spinning icon that had driven Trooper Brookes to distraction replaced
the data on the screen. “Don’t want to hang out there too
long, or they’ll be knock-knock-knocking on my door.”
For a moment, there was silence in the room. Quill
was absorbed in assessing the significance of the Pet
Pro cell phones. Provost had told her Kittleberger had
been found with a Minolta. The Minolta was on the evidence list. The time of Kittleburger’s murder was wrong. It had to be.
Devon broke the silence with a loud yawn. “Guess I’d
better be going. Got a hot date. See you tomorrow, Mrs.
Schmidt. Watch your back, Quill.” He gave her a thumbs-
up, grabbed his briefcase and shambled out of the room.
Victoria watched him leave. She looked at Marge.
“Can he keep his mouth shut?”
“I don’t know,” Marge said testily. “Probably, yeah,
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if I ask him to. But I didn’t exactly have this kind of
crap in mind when I hired him on.”
“And what kind of crap would that be?” Victoria
asked silkily.
“Money laundering?” Marge folded her arms under
her considerable bosom. Her jaw was at a truculent angle. “Illegal transfer of funds? Theft?”
Victoria’s smile combined superiority and condescension in equal parts. “We’ve been watching too much television, Mrs . . . Schmidt—is it?”
“M. E. Schmidt,” Marge said. “Yeah. That would be
me.”
“M. E.” Victoria’s smile faltered. “You wouldn’t be
related to the M. E. Schmidt Corporation of Allentown,
Pennsylvania?”
“I’d be the owner, yeah,” Marge said.
“Mrs. Schmidt.” Victoria, Quill noticed, fawned like
an expert, “If anything I’ve said has offended you at
all . . .”
“You breathin’ my air has offended me. If you’ve finished your business in here, you can beat it.”
Victoria scrabbled in her briefcase. “Just for emergency purposes, Mrs. Schmidt, here’s my card. I’m licensed to practice in the state of New York, and compared to that, the Pennsylvania bar is no . . .”
Marge narrowed her eyes to steel points. Victoria adjusted her hair band, gripped Priscilla by the elbow, and left, trailing “good-byes” and “real pleasure to meet
you’s.”
Quill leaned against a filing cabinet. “Marge, do you
mind if I make a call on that landline? It’s to Ithaca, so
it will be a toll call.”
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“Help yourself.”
Quill dug Simon Provost’s card out of her purse and
keyed in the numbers. He answered on the first ring,
which was good, but he sounded extremely testy, which
was bad.
“It’s Sarah Quilliam,” she said. “You said to call if I
had any new information for you?”
“Yeah,” Provost said warily.
“Well, I might. But I need to know what kind of cell
phone was found on Maxwell Kittleburger’s body. I
think you said it was a Minolta? ‘We checked out the
Minolta’—those were your exact words?”
“That’s right, Mrs. McHale. Now what . . . ?”
“Thank you!” Quill hung the phone up with care.
“Yes!” she said. “The first break in the case.”
Marge looked at her glumly. “Can you maybe forget
the darn case for just a couple of minutes?”
“But, Marge . . .”
“Hey!” Marge blew out her breath in a long whistle.
“I thought maybe you could give me a hand with something right now.”
“But Marge! The case has opened up. The whole
thing is making a lot more sense to me now.”
“It is?” Marge said without much interest. “This
thing I want you to help me with can’t wait. Those dead
guys can. C’mon. I’ll tell you about it over Betty’s pot
roast.”
Max had abandoned his spot by the lamppost outside
Marge’s office for parts unknown. Quill called his name
to no effect.
“He’ll be rummaging in somebody’s Dumpster,”
Marge said.
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This was true. Quill tried unsuccessfully to suppress
her guilt. “I should train him better.”
Marge tramped halfway down the sidewalk and
turned impatiently. “C’mon. There’s usually a run on
the pot roast Friday nights.”
“I’d just like Max to enjoy staying home,” Quill said
a little wistfully.
“Then you’d have to get another kind of dog,” Marge
said unfeelingly. She snickered, “Like a Pekinese,
maybe. D’ya see Harland with that damn little dog of
hers?”
They were passing by Pamela’s Pampered Puppy
Palace. The windows were dark, the CLOSED FOR NAP
PIES! sign prominent in the window. Pamela herself was
nowhere in sight. “I did,” Quill said. “And he didn’t
look too happy about it, Marge.”
“That little pink leash? That rhinestone collar? You
can bet old Harland’s going to hear about it.” Marge’s
satisfaction was short-lived. She sighed, and they
trudged along in silence. “You know about men, Quill.
All the experience you’ve had.”
“Me?” Quill said in indignation.
“Musta. Men seem to like the beautiful ones.”
“On a first date,” Quill admitted, “that’s true. But
men stick with the good ones, Marge. Looks don’t matter a whole lot after the first infatuation’s over.”
“So you say,” Marge said bitterly. “Well, hang it.
There’s his dually. He’s in my bar right now. What d’ya
want to bet it’s with her?”
Harland’s familiar red pickup was parked right in
front of the bar. Quill followed Marge in, and yes, there
he was, the bozo, sitting at the bar up front, a beer in
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one hand, and Pookie’s pink leash in the other. Pamela
herself was nowhere in sight.
<
br /> Marge behaved as if he were invisible. Quill said,
“Hello, Harland.”
“ ’Lo, Marge. Quill.” He eased himself off the bar
stool and thrust the leash in Quill’s direction. “I was
wondering, Quill, if maybe you’d hang on to this for a
little bit.”
“Well, sure, Harland. But . . .”
“Just till she gets back from the ladies.”
“Ol’ Harland’s gonna start using the ladies, too!”
Geoff Peterson, another member of the far-flung Peterson clan, shouted out down the length of the bar. “Coeee, sweetcakes!” A roar of laughter swept the room.
Pookie yapped in excitement. Harland, Quill noticed,
seemed to have spent most of the afternoon in embarrassment because of the Peke, and it looked as if this evening was going to continue the trend. The blush
crept up the back of his neck and seemed to suffuse his
eyeballs.
“Anyhow,” he rumbled, “I gotta go somewhere.” He
thrust the leash at Quill again. This time she took it.
“And Margie?”
Marge, nodding to various acquaintances, affected
deafness. Harland scraped his feet. “You tell her, Quill.
I’ll see her around.” He shouldered his way out the door.
Quill looked down at the Peke, who had lifted his leg
against a bar stool. “Cut that out, you.”
“Pookie!” Pamela’s long red nails flashed in front of
Quill’s eyes. The leash was snatched from her hand.
“Hello, Quill. What are you doing with my dog?”
“Harland had to go somewhere,” Quill said, scrupu
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lously exact. “And he left the dog with me. Until you
got back from the bathroom.”
“Oh.” Pamela looked disconcerted. “What about dinner?” She flashed her teeth at Marge, who’d turned to give her a scathing stare. “I’ve heard Betty makes the
best pot roast in the county. It’s funny though, the Big
Guy didn’t seem to like it all that much. He wanted to
take me all the way to Syracuse.”
“Dog’s not allowed in the bar,” Marge said gruffly.
“State health rules. And we’re out of pot roast.”
“But I just saw Betty serving some!”
“You coming, Quill?” Marge turned her back and
marched down the center of the dining room to her
usual booth. Quill gave Pamela a little wave and followed her.
“Well,” she said, as she settled herself across from
Marge, “I’d say that was quite encouraging.”
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