Some Like It Hawk (7 page)

“But since local law enforcement are not yet on the scene—” Wilt began.

“Yes, we are.”

We all turned to see Sammy Wendell standing at the foot of the stairway, looking tall and stern, with one hand resting firmly on his own holstered gun.

I realized my mouth had fallen open at the sight of the normally gawky and tongue-tied Sammy suddenly turned into John Wayne. I wiped the surprised look off my face. Randall managed to keep his astonishment to a brief flicker that Wilt probably didn’t even notice.

“There you are,” Randall said. “And I got a bit of law enforcement experience myself when I was in the service, so I think I can assist the deputy if he needs it. How about if you assemble your troops in the big tent right next to my office? Ah, there’s Deputy Morris. She can escort you.”

Aida Morris was a tall, coffee-skinned woman who competed in Ironman competitions in her free time. She took up a position on one side of the door to the stairs. She put her hands on her hips, although I noticed that the right one wasn’t quite touching—just hovering near her gun. Sammy took up the same position on the other side.

Wilt opened his mouth, probably to argue some more, but he took a good look at Randall and the two deputies and demonstrated more common sense than I’d have given him credit for.

“All personnel evacuate the building and report to me at assembly point Alpha Tango,” he snapped at his left shoulder, where the microphone was. Then he looked up at the four guards in the room with us. They were all tall—well over six feet—with the bulked-up, twitchy look of hardened gym rats who’d done too many steroids for way too long. What kind of security company would put loaded weapons in the hands of men like these? I wished Fisher, the Evil Lender’s sensible staffer, would show up. He’d been on the steps a few minutes ago—surely he couldn’t have gone far.

“You, too,” Wilt said, with a wave of his hand. “Alpha Tango, on the double.”

One by one the guards holstered their guns, backed away from the body, and retreated up the stairs. I was actually impressed. I’d once seen a dog trainer order three half-grown Dobermans to stop chasing a cat. They’d obeyed, visibly fighting to overcome their natural instinct to give chase. The guards gave me the same uneasy impression of barely controlled ferocity.

“You, too, ma’am,” Randall said to Kate, the reporter. Her photographer had already followed the guards. “Meg, can you stay here a minute to help me with something?”

The reporter left, looking back over her shoulder until she was out of sight. Aida Morris nodded to Randall and brought up the rear. I had no doubt that the Flying Monkeys would be waiting in the tent when Chief Burke went to see them. Unless he hurried, Aida would have already taken down all their names and addresses and lined them up in alphabetical order.

Sammy, Randall, and I all looked at each other and breathed audible sighs of relief when they were gone. Sammy also slumped, and wiped his palms on his uniform trousers.

“Holy cow,” he said.

“You did good,” Randall said.

“Sorry I took so long,” he replied. “Leg cramp.”

“It’s the heat,” Randall said. “Happens to me, too. Keep a watch over that back stairway.” Sammy nodded. He walked a few paces closer to the stairway, still limping slightly, and began staring fixedly at it. I supposed it beat looking at Colleen Brown. “Meg and I will stay here with the body until the chief gets here. If that’s okay with you,” he added, turning to me.

“I’m fine,” I said. Actually, fine wasn’t entirely accurate, but I figured I could handle being there if Sammy could. And my curiosity was kicking in.

“Who is she, anyway?” Sammy asked over his shoulder. “The bo— the deceased.”

“One of the lender’s people,” Randall said. “Name of Colleen Brown. The only other sensible one apart from Fisher. For that matter, I thought she was even more promising than Fisher. Didn’t seem to be on board with most of the crap they’ve been pulling. Which means if they wanted to frame poor Phinny Throckmorton, she’d be the perfect victim. Get rid of two thorns in their side in one move.”

“You think they did this to frame Mr. Throckmorton?” I asked.

He pointed to the barricades and then to the body.

“Looks like she was facing the barricade and fell back when she was shot,” he said. “I’ll leave it to the chief to figure out for sure, but on the surface it’s certainly supposed to look as if she was shot from down in the cellar. By someone who then tried to throw the gun outside and botched it, leaving the gun between the two barriers.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said. “Mr. Throckmorton would never have done anything like that.”

“That’s the point,” Randall said. “It’s a frame. We know that for damn sure. Proving it’s going to be another thing entirely.” He had moved a little closer to the body and was examining it as closely as he could without touching anything.

Just then my cell phone rang. Rob.

Chapter 8

“Meg, what’s going on out there?” he asked. The connection was faint and fragmented.

“Out there? Are you still in the cellar?”

Randall glanced up.

“Is that Phinny?”

“No,” I said. “It’s my brother, Rob.”

“We heard something out there,” Rob said. The signal was weak and I turned on the speaker to hear better. “Sounded like fireworks or gunshots. Phinny was worried that the guards were trying to storm the barrier.”

“I’m right outside the barrier,” I said. “No storming going on at the moment. Hang on.”

“What’s up?” Randall asked.

“Maybe it’s not going to be so hard to prove Mr. Throckmorton’s innocence,” I said. “Rob’s still in there with him.”

“May I?” Randall held out his hand. I gave him my phone.

“Rob, have you been with Phinny for the past half hour or so?” Randall asked.

“Yes,” Rob said. “We’ve been playtesting my new game and—”

“Either of you out of each other’s sight in that time?”

A brief pause.

“Not for more than a minute or two,” he replied. “We’ve been playing a particularly tense part of the game.”

Randall frowned, and I sighed softly. So much for giving Phinny an ironclad alibi. The shots had taken a few seconds. An alibi with a hole of even a few minutes wasn’t much better than no alibi at all.

Just then Chief Burke stepped into the room. Randall handed me the phone again.

“Hello?” Rob’s voice was faint, but I could tell he was anxious.

“Hang on a sec, Rob,” I murmured into the phone. Then I hit the mute button.

“Welcome, Chief,” Randall was saying. “Those cowboys give you any trouble upstairs?”

“None that I didn’t give them back with interest,” the chief said. “What happened?”

“I was coming down to parley with Phinny, with two
Star-Trib
reporters and Meg along to witness,” Randall said. “We were just entering the courthouse when shots rang out. We followed the toy soldiers down here and found the body.”

“Who is she?”

“Colleen Brown. Works for the Evil— for First Progressive Financial.”

“The reporters get a good look?”

“And a few snapshots before we shooed them out with the toy soldiers.”

The chief winced.

“And one of the guards found what may be the murder weapon,” Randall added. “Gun thrown down in the no-man’s-land between the two barriers.”

“Wonder what made him think to look in there,” the chief muttered.

Randall shrugged elaborately.

“You can see what this looks like.” Randall pointed to the body and then to the barricade. The chief nodded.

“Meg,” the chief said. “Is your cousin in town?”

I nodded. I had several hundred cousins, if you counted all the second, third, fourth, and once- or twice-removed ones, the way Mother did. But I knew exactly which cousin he meant—Horace Hollingsworth, who worked as a crime scene investigator in our hometown of Yorktown, and through a longstanding intercounty arrangement, here in Caerphilly when needed.

I unmuted my phone.

“Gotta go,” I said to Rob. Then I hung up and dialed Horace.

“I know,” Horace said instead of hello. “I’m about two minutes away.”

With that he hung up.

“Two minutes,” I repeated to the chief.

“Debbie Anne?” The chief was talking on his own cell phone. “See if Dr. Smoot is in town, and findable, and can get his sorry self down here with reasonable speed.” He looked up at me. “This is going to be complicated,” he said. “If you can find your father—”

I nodded and hit a speed-dial button. By the time I had left a message for Dad and sicced Mother on the job of finding him ASAP, the chief had finished issuing instructions to his troops. He looked grim as he tucked his phone back into his pocket.

“So, talk,” he said. “Anybody.”

“You want the good news first?” Randall asked.

The chief growled slightly. Randall took that for a yes.

“Phinny didn’t do it.”

“Randall, I know he’s a friend of yours, but—”

“He may be alibied,” Randall said. “Rob Langslow has been in there most of the day. They’ve been playing one of Rob’s war games for the last several hours. With any luck they were in sight of each other when she was killed.”

“We can only hope,” the chief said.

“Of course, even if they were, it’s an alibi that would cause the devil’s own kind of trouble if we had to use it,” Randall said.

“Yes,” I said. “I shudder to think what would happen if you had to put Rob on the stand to alibi Mr. Throckmorton. As a kid, Rob was always getting punished for stuff he didn’t do because he got so rattled when anyone in authority interrogated him. A sharp DA could easily convince a jury Rob was confused or lying. Heck, they could probably even convince Rob.”

“Let’s hope Mr. Throckmorton doesn’t need his alibi, then,” Randall said. “Actually, I meant that using the alibi would give away the secret of the tunnel. Could cost the chief and me our jobs, and the town its lawsuit, and a lot of townspeople could be looking at a whole bunch of criminal charges. I’m no lawyer, but I bet there’s some kind of aiding and abetting charge they could file against every one of us if they found a sympathetic DA. Like if they got Hamish Pruitt reinstated as town attorney.”

The chief sighed and rubbed his forehead slightly, as if he felt a headache coming on.

“So you believe Mr. Throckmorton didn’t do it,” he said. “Any idea who did?”

“Someone who had access to the basement,” Randall said. “On this side of the barricade.”

“FPF hasn’t been allowing much access to the courthouse,” the chief said. From the look on his face, I could tell he knew exactly what Randall was getting at, but he was going to make Randall come out and say it.

“No,” Randall said. “Nobody much gets in here except for the guards and the creeps they work for.”

The chief nodded slightly.

“I don’t know whether we were a complication in their plan,” Randall said. “Or whether they deliberately did it when they did so Meg and I would be witnesses. Either way, they shot her—probably crouching down low, so it would look as if it came from behind the barricade.”

The chief had squatted down to get a closer look at the body. He glanced from it to the barricade as if following what Randall was saying.

“Then they could run up that back stairway while we’re coming down the front one,” Randall went on.

“One of the guards came down that way,” I pointed out.

“But not right away,” Randall said. “If the killer was a guard, all he had to do was run up till he was out of sight and then come down again and pretend to be in on finding the crime scene with us. If it was anyone else working for the lender, he could just trot on past the guards, get rid of his bloodstained clothes, and go back to doing whatever he was supposed to be doing when the news broke.”

“Good point,” the chief said. “Did anyone happen to notice which guards came down here?”

“I made a point of checking their name tags,” Randall said.

“So you think the killer’s either a Flying Monkey who’ll be trying to barge in on my case,” the chief said, “or a corporate goon who’ll be complaining to you that I’m not moving fast enough and telling the media we’re not competent to handle a case of this magnitude.”

Randall nodded.

“And if they find out about the tunnel, the manure will really hit the fan,” Randall said. “Unless, of course, we can prove one of them is the killer. Aiding and abetting a trespasser will seem like pretty small potatoes next to arranging a murder.”

“So all we have to do is figure out which one of a tight-knit group of corporate crooks and their hired thugs committed a murder,” the chief said. “Not just figure it out, but prove it, and all before the crooks manage to manipulate public opinion to the point that we have to call in the State Bureau of Investigation or the FBI.”

“I didn’t say it would be easy,” Randall said. “But that’s what we have to do. And if anyone can do it, we can.”

Randall looked at Sammy and then at me, as if including us in the “we.” Sammy, who had been looking on with big eyes, stood a little straighter and lifted his chin. I hoped I didn’t look as tired and pessimistic as I felt.

“Just one thing,” the chief said. “I gather you think this is a conspiracy?”

Randall frowned for a moment, then shrugged.

“Who the hell knows?” he asked. “I think some of them are capable. And if it wasn’t a conspiracy to kill her, it could easily turn into a conspiracy to cover it up. Even more of them are capable of that, if you ask me.”

The chief nodded, and took a deep breath.

“Sammy,” he said. “You’ve been through that confounded tunnel a couple of times, haven’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” Sammy said. “To help Rob and Mr. Throckmorton test Rob’s new game.”

“Tunnel bother you at all?” the chief asked.

“Well, I don’t much like it, if that’s what you mean, sir,” Sammy said. “But I can do it if I have to.”

“Good. Go in there ASAP and secure the basement. No one goes in or comes out without my orders. Keep Mr. Langslow and Mr. Throckmorton away from the barricade. Bag their hands so Horace can test them for gunshot residue. Don’t let them wash or do anything until he gets there.”