Die Like an Eagle (24 page)

“And who the hell are you?” Biff snarled, turning to the new arrival.

“Padgett Shiffley. County health inspector.” Padgett opened up his wallet and held it out, obviously to show Biff an official ID of some sort.

Biff blinked for a few moments. Rose Noire stepped aside, though I noticed she was staying close enough to eavesdrop.

“Well, who the hell left those there anyway?” Biff muttered.

Padgett just stared impassively at him. Biff scowled fiercely and retreated.

“Good riddance,” Padgett said.

“Except we still need him to open the Snack Shack door,” Rose Noire said.

“Blast the man.” Padgett took off after Biff.

Seeing that Biff had gone, Mrs. Patel timidly returned to Rose Noire's side. She looked anxious when Biff came storming back, waving his key ring.

“Do I have to do everything around here?” he muttered.

I could see Rose Noire pressing her lips together, as if fighting not to point out that she and Mrs. Patel were the ones who'd be doing the work, if only he'd let them get on with it.

Biff unlocked the door, pulled it open, and was about to barge into the Snack Shack—no doubt to find something else to complain about.

“Something else, Mr. Brown,” Padgett said.

Frowning, Biff turned to face him. With his back turned, Mrs. Patel ducked under his arm and scurried past him into the Snack Shack. Biff turned and yelled at her to keep out. A sudden sharp thunk! rang out, and Mrs. Patel began screaming hysterically.

Biff, who could see inside the door, turned pale, and his jaw fell in shock. Rose Noire, Padgett, and I leaped toward the door, shoving the frozen Biff aside.

Mrs. Patel appeared unharmed, although she was curled in a ball in the far corner, screaming. Over her head, a foot-long machete blade was buried in the wall on our right, about five feet up from the ground. On a shelf on the opposite wall was a complicated metal gadget that looked like a cross between a crossbow and a giant mousetrap.

“What the—” Padgett exclaimed.

“A booby trap,” I said as I pulled out my phone. “I'm calling nine-one-one.”

“You poor thing!” Rose Noire exclaimed, racing forward to comfort Mrs. Patel before I could shout out a warning about the possibility that there could be other booby traps. Fortunately there weren't.

The chief and several deputies were there in minutes. Rose Noire led Mrs. Patel away to the Eagles bleachers to be comforted by the rest of the team mothers and grandmothers.

Not surprisingly, the chief declared our newly repainted Snack Shack a crime scene. I dispatched a brace of burly cousins with a truck to haul several of the folding tables from our house to the field.

Biff stood rooted in place just outside the Snack Shack for fifteen or twenty minutes, staring through the doorway at the machete and muttering things like “that was meant for me,” and “I could have been killed.” After inspecting the machete and the device that had launched it, the chief went over to talk to him.

“You see,” Biff said. “Someone is after me. I'm always the first one in the shack. If that woman hadn't barged past me, I'd have been killed.”

The chief just frowned and nodded. Biff did have a point. He was incredibly lucky that Mrs. Patel had barged past him. And we were all incredibly lucky that tiny little Mrs. Patel was on Snack Shack duty. If Rose Noire or I or any of the other team parents had walked into that booby trap, we might be dead by now.

Eventually a couple of Stoat fathers came over and escorted Biff over to his team's dugout. I felt bad for Biff. Not as bad as I felt for poor Mrs. Patel—but still, he'd had a shock.

Dare we hope that he'd stay subdued once the game started? Probably not. Every time I glanced over at the Stoats' dugout, he seemed more himself. Pity.

The burly cousins returned with the tables and we set up a new outdoor Snack Shack about twenty feet from the old. Rose Noire recruited Janet Wong as a replacement for the still shaky Mrs. Patel, and the two of them began calmly selling chewing gum and bottles of water. Eagles fans in black and red dominated the crowd, but I could also see kids from other teams, especially the red-and-white uniforms of the Muckdogs and the River Rats in their yellow and gray, since they were playing right after the Eagles vs. Stoats game. And by the size of the crowd, I suspected half the town had come out to enjoy a day at the ballpark.

Just before the game started, my cell phone rang. I looked down as I pulled it out and checked the caller ID. Festus Hollingsworth. Aha! My chance to ask my cousin about the tracking device. As I answered it, I looked around for someplace reasonably private to talk. About the only place in sight not packed with people was the far end of the clearing, beyond where Biff's replacement porta-potty stood, so I headed that way.

“Meg, thank you!” Festus said. “The Yoder farm is perfect!”

“You've seen it already?”

“Only your pictures and the county property records, but I can tell it's exactly what I want, and although it's not actually on the market yet, Mr. Yoder's going to have to sell, which gives me the chance to make a deal with him. And you were absolutely right—Yoder's been in litigation with the Brown Construction Company for five years now. Mr. Brown began a major renovation of the Yoder barn and then abandoned all work on it at a point when it was completely unusable. That hasn't been Yoder's only financial problem, but it's probably the thing that drove him over the edge.”

By this time I'd reached the general area of Biff's porta-potty and taken my seat on a nearby fallen log. My retreat had the added advantage of letting me keep an eye on the Snack Shack, where the chief and Deputy Vern Shiffley stood, apparently watching Horace doing forensics on the booby trap.

“Be nice to Mr. Yoder,” I said to Festus. “If he's been in litigation with Biff for five years, he's been through hell already.”

“Don't worry,” Festus said. “I have every intention of being nice to him, by which I assume you mean giving him a fair price for his farm. I don't want every farmer in the county to hate me from the minute I arrive. Mr. Yoder is a very nice man, and I'm exactly what he's been looking for—someone who can afford to buy his farm and has no intention of turning it into condominiums or a golf club or anything like that. In fact, when he asked me what I intended to do with the land, I told him that I didn't intend to do anything except see if I could find someone to farm it for me. And he indicated he might be willing. And that's perfect! I can look out my window and see cows and sheep and corn and whatever else farmers grow around here and not have to feed or plow anything myself.”

“That's great,” I said. “Assuming he's still around to do the farming.”

“He wants to stay around,” Festus said. “He's got grandkids in the area.”

“I'm sure he does,” I said. “But right now he's definitely one of Chief Burke's suspects in yesterday's murder.” I explained about the uncanny resemblance between Biff and Shep and Mr. Yoder's odd, surreptitious visit to Brown Construction. Festus remained quiet for a few long moments after I'd finished.

“Troubling,” he said finally. “I can certainly testify that he's angry enough at Mr. Brown.”

“Angry enough to kill?” I asked.

“Angry enough to be a suspect. If he gets arrested, let me know. I will find him a very good defense attorney. I don't want to see anything get in the way of my—hmmm … buying the farm sounds a bit ominous. Purchasing it.”

“Will do. By the way, in return for steering you to the farm, may I cadge a small bit of free legal advice. Not for me, actually.”

“Absolutely.” Suddenly his voice had reverted to Festus Hollingsworth, Esquire.

 

Chapter 19

“Grandfather has a new toy,” I said. “His weasels have been regularly escaping from their habitat, so he's attached tiny little geolocator tags to them. It not only helps him recapture them, but he can record data from the tags in his computers and use it to track the weasels' movements and figure out how they're escaping.”

“I have a sinking feeling I know where this is going,” Festus said. “Please tell me your grandfather hasn't decided to tag some human being whose whereabouts he wants to investigate.”

“No, he hasn't,” I said. “And I can't imagine he ever would—when has Grandfather ever taken the slightest interest in the whereabouts of anything other than his beloved wildlife?”

“That's a relief,” he said.

“But what if someone did?”

“Meg! You didn't!”

“No,” I said. “I didn't, either. But what if someone did. Let's leave it at someone for now. And just so you know, we're not talking about anyone you're related to, in case you were suspicious of Dad. Stop trying to guess who the someone is and tell me exactly how much trouble the someone is in.”

“Not my primary area of expertise, so I'd have to do some research, but I'm pretty sure it's illegal. Hang on, let me run a search.”

I tapped my foot impatiently for what seemed like several hours, though it was probably only a few minutes that I stood there, listening to what sounded like the rattle of a keyboard.

“Yes,” he said finally. “‘
Any person who installs or places an electronic tracking device through intentionally deceptive means and without consent, or causes an electronic tracking device to be installed or placed through intentionally deceptive means and without consent, and uses such device to track the location of any person is guilty of a Class 3 misdemeanor.'”

“What do they do to you for a Class 3 misdemeanor?”

“A fine of up to five hundred dollars,” he said.

“No jail time?”

“Not if that's all she did.”

“He or she,” I corrected, but I also let out the breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding.

“But if someone did that to me and I resented it enough, I'd start looking to file a civil suit.”

Not good. Still, as long as Caroline wasn't going to jail. Or me, for that matter, if getting data from the GPS counted as aiding and abetting her.

“So,” I said aloud. “If my hypothetical someone had done this, what should I try to get them to do now?”

“Is there any chance they could retrieve the tracker without being detected?”

“I don't know,” I said. “It's possible. Should I tell them to try?”

“Yes, but they should make sure they know a good criminal attorney in case they're caught.”

“Got it,” I said. “So as long as we're talking about my hypothetical someone's hypothetical felony—what if the data they got from the tracker was potential evidence in a criminal investigation? What if it proved or disproved someone's alibi?”

Silence. A rather long silence. So long I began to worry that we'd been cut off.

“Festus?” I said finally.

“Maybe I should rethink this moving to Caerphilly thing,” he said. “Clearly it is not the peaceful bucolic refuge I was imagining. Did anyone on your police force encourage your friend to plant this device or know about it in advance?”

“No,” I said. “I think planting it was a pretty spur-of-the-moment thing. And as far as I know, so far the police are unaware of its existence.”

“Then the data from it would probably be admissible. Illegally obtained evidence is usually admissible as long as it wasn't illegally obtained by the government. The Fourth Amendment doesn't protect us from illegal searches by private individuals. Give me a little more information here. Who was the victim of this bugging, and what did the person doing the bugging hope to achieve by it, and why do you think the police would be interested in the data?”

“The victim was Biff Brown, who barged into Mother's party and accused us of having an illicit baseball practice—he seems to think he can keep the other teams from practicing except for the very limited times when he lets them use the official fields. The person who planted the bug wanted an Early Biff Warning System, so if Biff showed up, the team could pretend to be just having a picnic and go back to practicing when we were sure he wasn't lurking in the shrubbery. Because even if what we were doing was perfectly acceptable within the Summerball rules, we didn't want to waste time arguing with him about it. Shep Henson's murder happened a few hours later, and the data appears to confirm Biff's alibi—that he was with one or both of the deputies searching his construction yard for a possible prowler for the whole period during which the murder could have been committed.”

“Well, that's good,” Festus said. “If you—correction, your friend—had been sitting on evidence that would have sent the chief down a completely different investigatory path, he might be more than a little peeved. Look, I need to come down soon to inspect my future farm in person. I'll see if I can arrange to meet with Mr. Yoder this afternoon or maybe tomorrow. While I'm down there, I can talk with your friend, and if he, she, or it is comfortable being represented by me, I can try to set up a meeting with Chief Burke and the county commonwealth attorney to negotiate turning over the data.”

“Does this mean he, she, or it shouldn't try to get back the devices?”

“I'd still go ahead with that. Better safe than sorry.”

“Roger.”

We hung up, and I stood, phone in hand, scanning the crowd around the field. No sign of Caroline. The Eagles were still in the outfield, warming up, but it was almost game time, so I was sure she'd be here somewhere.

I dialed her cell phone.

“Meg! Why aren't you here at the ball field?”

“I am,” I said. “I need to talk to you—someplace reasonably private.”

“Well, no place around here, then,” she said. “It's a zoo. Want to meet in the parking lot and drive somewhere?”

“I'd rather stay here and keep an eye on things,” I said. “Can you meet me near the Brown porta-potty?”