CHAPTER FOURTEEN

SHE froze.

More pounding. “Police! Open up.”

When she opened the door, the two uniformed policemen eyed her with carefully bland faces. One was tall, with sandy hair, the other slightly shorter and stocky, with short black hair.

“Would you mind telling us what you’re doing here?” The taller man spoke to her.

“Don’t get excited. I’m a cop.”

He raised skeptical eyebrows. She started to get identification from her shoulder bag and the stocky man took a step closer. “Don’t move.”

“What’s your name?” the taller man asked.

“Susan Wren. Yours?”

“Riley.” He inclined his head at the other officer. “Brandelli.”

“Well, Officer Riley, the young woman who rented this room has been strangled.” She paused. “Her body’s under the bed.”

Riley tensed, looked at Brandelli and gave a short nod. Brandelli squatted by the bed, lifted the bedspread, looked up at Riley and nodded in return.

“Have you any identification, Miss Wren?”

She patted her bag. Brandelli held out a hand. “If you don’t mind.”

He took the bag and dumped the contents on the table, then grinned at her, a flash of white teeth in a dark face. “Got a permit for this?” Taking a pen from his shirt pocket, he isolated Daniel’s .38.

Funny man. She glared at him and pointed out her identification.

“Hampstead,” he said with not quite a sneer, and handed it to Riley. “What we have here is a chief of police.”

Riley glanced at her identification, then said to Brandelli, “Call it in.”

*   *   *

AN hour later, she was perched on a hard wooden chair in Captain Dayton’s office. She was alone. He’d left her to stew, a trick she’d used many times herself, and now she was realizing just how effective it was. The professional part of her mind pointed out she’d been very stupid and just might see her career as a cop swirl and disappear down the drain with a glug.

The door opened behind her and she jumped. Captain Dayton strode to the desk, stood there and regarded her with cynic’s eyes. She sat up straighter; she was in the presence of authentic authority. He was a large, square man in a rumpled brown sport coat, with a heavy jaw and a dark stubble of beard, thick dark eyebrows and a receding hairline. He tossed her ID on the desk. It landed with a slap. They both stared at it.

“Says here”—he leaned forward and obliterated her picture with a blunt thumb—“you’re Susan Wren.” He had a deep gravelly voice.

She nodded.

“Says you’re chief of police of Hampstead, Kansas.”

She looked up at him.

“That right, young lady? You really Hampstead’s police chief?”

“Yes, sir.”

He grunted and threw down her driver’s license, tapped her picture with his thumb. “Says here you’re Susan Donovan.”

“Maiden name. I … uh, I’ve not been married long.”

“Says here San Francisco. San Francisco, California. That right?” He glared at her, then hooked an ankle around the chair leg, pulled it out and dropped into it. “So, Susan Wren or Susan Donovan or whatever your name is, what were you doing in that hotel room?”

She took a breath and let it out slowly. “Lucille Guthman’s been missing for three days. I’ve been looking for her, to question in connection with a murder.” She gave him a succinct and coherent report of the investigation into Daniel’s death.

Dayton listened without comment except for an occasional grunt or lift of his dark eyebrows. It might have been her former boss she was facing with queasy apprehension. Chase Reardon was smoother and slicker, soft-voiced, and communicated with words rather than grunts, but the atmosphere and its effect on her were the same. She’d been called in to get her ass chewed, and the awful part was she knew she deserved it.

When she was finished, Dayton crossed his arms over his broad chest and glowered from under his dark eyebrows. “Why did you go in that room?”

“I don’t—”

“You ever hear of a goddamn search warrant? You ever hear of probable cause? I don’t know how you do things in your area, but around here we don’t illegally enter hotel rooms. Citizens have rights.” His voice held no sarcasm; captains didn’t need to be sarcastic.

“She was dead.”

“So she was. You claim you didn’t know that when you went in.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You left Hampstead at what time?”

“Twelve-thirty.”

“Uh-huh.”

There was an uncomfortable silence.

“Coffee?” he asked.

She took a breath, then nodded.

He leaned forward with a jerk of the chair, picked up the phone and growled at somebody. Replacing the receiver, he leaned back again.

An officer brought in two Styrofoam cups and put them on the desk. Dayton leaned forward, removed a plastic lid, sailed it toward the wastebasket and offered her the cup.

She took a sip. “I’m out of cigarettes.”

He fished a crumpled pack from his shirt pocket and tossed it on the desk. She shook one out and lit it. It wasn’t her brand, and the smoke was harsh against her dry throat. She coughed. Well, Daniel, what do you think? Presumptuous of me to assume I could handle your job, and serves me right?

Dayton raised his cup and eyed her over the rim. “How did you know Miss Guthman had been strangled?”

“What?”

“You told Riley she was strangled. How’d you know?”

“I saw her. I lifted the bedspread and there she was with the scarf around her throat and her face blue. Strangled is strangled, Captain, whether it’s my area or around here.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm and she regretted it immediately. His expression told her if she worked for him she’d be back on patrol in a minute. Reardon would have reacted the same, if she were lucky.

“You entered the room shortly after five. Riley got there at five-ten. You were in there with the body for about ten minutes. What did you do?”

“I didn’t know the body was there. I went in and I looked around. I only found her just when Riley got there.”

“You searched the room.”

She hesitated, nodded.

“Find anything?”

“No, sir.”

“Destroy anything?”

“No, sir. How long has she been dead?”

Silence. Then he said, “A while. We won’t know until after the autopsy. Probably dead somewhere around twelve to sixteen hours.”

Lucille had been killed then, Susan thought, Wednesday night or early this morning.

“You ought to be charged,” he said.

“With what?”

Shark’s smile. “How about impersonating a police officer?”

Ha ha. “How did you know I was in there?”

“The maid. Who got to worrying about her job. Who told the receptionist, who told the manager, who called us.”

He stared at her, black eyes pinning her stiffly to the chair. “There are a number of legal possibilities here,” he said. “Like accessory after the fact. Obstructing—”

“I’m not an accessory to anything. I’ve obstructed nothing. Are you going to charge me?”

He grunted and shoved the phone toward her. She raised an eyebrow.

“Get somebody down here with proper credentials to vouch for you.”

She picked up the receiver and punched a number. Parkhurst answered. Damn, damn. She’d hoped for George.

“This is Susan,” she said crisply and explained where she was. “I’d appreciate it if you’d come here.”

When she hung up she said to Dayton, “A man named Parkhurst will be here as soon as he can. He will tell you I am who I am.”

“Ben Parkhurst?”

“You know him?”

Dayton gave a bark of laughter. “I’ve worked with him.”

Bloody hell, of course he had. She might have known.

Again, Dayton left her alone in his office. The same officer brought her more coffee and her own brand of cigarettes. She asked him if he could find her some Kleenex and he brought those too. It was almost nine when Dayton returned; Parkhurst, darkly angry, was with him. She stood up. Parkhurst, dressed in black pants, gray sweater and a black jacket with the collar turned up, looked at her with a hard, flat expression. Dayton’s fleshy face held an expression of amused malice; he had, no doubt, been enjoying jokes at Parkhurst’s expense.

“The hotel manager,” Dayton said, “is more bothered by a guest murdered than a room entered illegally.” He glowered at her, then finally said, “Get out of here.”

She took a breath, removed her trench coat from the back of the chair and slipped it on.

“Been interesting running into you,” Dayton said to her, then gave Parkhurst a wolfish grin. “Good to see you again, Ben.”

A muscle twitched in Parkhurst’s jaw. “I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know what surfaces in the investigation, and I’d like a copy of the autopsy report.”

Right. I’d appreciate that too.

Dayton nodded. “You’ll get it.”

She could feel Parkhurst seething as he followed her down the stairs. She had committed an unforgivable sin, embarrassed him in front of his colleagues.

At the front desk, a man stood talking to two uniformed officers; a tall man with blond hair, straight eyebrows and a square jaw. His gaze caught hers and held it for a moment; then one of the officers spoke to him and he turned away. She didn’t know him, but there was something intense about his scrutiny of her. Had he been brought in for questioning in Lucille’s death? She started toward him.

Parkhurst caught her arm. “Where’re you going?”

“To find out who that is.”

“Come on.”

“I just want to—”

He hustled her out the door. She went along with him, furious with herself for doing so. When they reached his Bronco, she felt the effort it took for him to refrain from shoving her inside. Her chest was tight with her own anger: anger at herself for letting him drag her away, anger at him for rescuing her and anger at Lucille for getting killed.

“Why the hell did you do a stupid thing like that?” he said as he started the Bronco and sped out.

“Like what?” The dark streets were empty and glistened under the headlights, trash fluttered around the frozen slush along the curbs.

“Don’t be obtuse. If you’re going to play at being chief, you’d better stick to the rules.”

Rules. Rules of the game. Games and rules. She knew the game and she knew the rules just as well as he did, but Daniel was dead and now Lucille. “I didn’t plan on getting caught.”

“Every dumb shit who holds up a gas station thinks like that.”

She took short, fast breaths; the tension in the car seemed to burn up all the oxygen. It was too warm and the thrum of the heater resonated through her head.

“You’re getting yourself in trouble and making Hampstead look like a joke.” Streetlights threw flickering shadows across his dark face, briefly highlighting his cheekbones and upper lip.

Not Hampstead, him. Making him look like a joke. She wanted to tell him to go to hell, but he was right. In the line of duty, he could inform the mayor, and Bakover could justifiably dismiss her. She’d behaved like a civilian and had no right to be angry. “I found Lucille.”

His upper lip pulled flat, giving her a glimpse of white teeth. “Yeah, you did that.”

“I’ll have to tell the family.”

Parkhurst pulled into the hotel parking lot where she’d left the pickup. “I’ll go with you,” he said as she got out of the Bronco.

She slammed the door; cold air hit her like a fist. Shaking, she climbed into the pickup and drove too fast, came into a curve with the tires screaming and a slow motorist just ahead. She swerved around and dropped back to a much safer speed. Parkhurst stayed three car-lengths behind and once they reached Hampstead, he followed all the way to the Guthmans’.

*   *   *

FRIDAY morning in Daniel’s office, her eyes felt gritty, and even coffee hadn’t much affected her sluggish brain. The only good news, her cold was getting better. It had been late by the time she’d gotten home after telling the Guthmans of Lucille’s death. When she finally went to sleep she dreamed. Over and over, she bent to lift the bedspread and stare into the dead blue face.

She glanced through the reports Osey had left on the desk. Perfectly typed, no errors or strikeovers, but that’s all she could say for them. Floyd Kimmell claimed he hadn’t gone to Kansas City Wednesday night. He’d been at home, in bed, asleep. He hadn’t strangled Lucille. Vic Pollock, with a great deal of bluster, claimed much the same.

She rubbed her eyes. Inconclusive. Either could be lying. Floyd lived alone and, with his wife gone, so did Vic. Either could have driven to Kansas City, strangled Lucille and driven home. Why had Lucille gone to Kansas City?

She tried to reach Doug McClay, with no luck. Even though the Kansas City police were investigating Lucille’s murder, her death was connected with Daniel’s, and Susan intended to question McClay.

She lit a cigarette and smoked in short, frustrated puffs, wondering what Jack Guthman could tell her about McClay. Crushing out the cigarette, she rang Jack’s number, then tried the Guthmans’. The housekeeper informed her Jack had gone into Emerson.

She slid on her white trench coat, slung the strap of her bag over her shoulder and went out to the pickup. When she pulled out of the lot, she had to brake quickly to avoid a dusty gray Mustang that turned abruptly in front of her.

Emerson College, founded in 1858, now covered 320 acres with buildings including dorms, labs, chapels and a small theater, all settled into gently rolling hills with large ancient trees: bare-limbed maples, elms and walnuts. The buildings were a mixture of old and modern, many of them made of the warm, creamy-colored limestone. Pathways cut across snow-covered slopes that sparkled in the bright sunshine, and students in jeans and down jackets hurried along heading for classes.

Susan turned into an oval street with a canopy of giant maples and stopped in front of the administration building. It was one of the older buildings, rectangular, three-storied with a flat roof and three imposing stone arches guarding the main door.

The office seemed dark after the bright sunshine; she blinked to help her eyes adjust, then asked a young woman behind the counter where she could find Jack Guthman. The woman consulted a schedule and said Dr. Guthman was at the Rumen Metabolism Laboratory in the rear of Lehman Hall. Susan asked for directions and set off on one of the pathways, slushy with trampled snow.

A student ran flat-footed toward her, papers clutched between his outstretched hands, and muttering, “Oh God, oh God.” He gave her a wild-eyed stare. “I didn’t hear the alarm,” he said, and plunged down the path.

She smiled sympathetically. Her student days at the University of California in Berkeley were long in the past, but not so long that she’d forgotten the late nights finishing assignments and the frantic scrambles getting to class in the morning. Back then, she was working for civil rights and calling cops pigs. Things do change.

At Lehman Hall, she wandered down a corridor and stopped in the doorway of a lab to ask a student in a white smock where experiments in bovine nutrition were being done. She was told the doorway at the end.

The large metal door held a sign that read “EXPERIMENT IN PROGRESS. DO NOT ENTER.” She knocked. Jack, wearing a long white lab coat and carrying a clipboard, opened the door. He looked terrible, face haggard and gray, dark shadows under his eyes. There seemed to be less of him, as though he’d lost weight overnight.

“A few questions,” she said gently.

A spark of emotion flashed briefly in his eyes, but was gone before she could interpret it. Anger, probably, at the messenger who’d brought the bad news.

He hesitated a moment, then looked at his watch. “I have a few things to check.”

“I’ll wait.”

The large, high-ceilinged room was windowless and dimly lit. Four cows, mahogany-colored with white faces, stood placidly in head stanchions. Each one had a round, black object like half a tennis ball protruding from its side. A student in a long black apron, with an elbow-length plastic glove on one arm, waited by the cows, looking at her with interest.

“Eric,” Jack said as they walked toward him, “this is Chief Wren. My assistant,” he said to Susan. He made a notation on the clipboard, then nodded to Eric, who reached for the black cap and pulled, removing it like a cork from a bottle and exposing the interior of the cow’s stomach. Susan felt her own stomach muscles tighten and she swallowed.

“It was done surgically,” Jack said. “So we can see what’s happening in the digestive tract.”

Inching closer, she bent to look at the deep inner secrets of the animal: dark, humid reservoir, gurgling sounds. A mass of partially digested hay floated on liquid.

Jack nodded again at Eric, who reached into the cow and pulled out a handful of grayish-yellow hay. The cow seemed sublimely unconcerned. Eric held out the steaming, dripping mass for Jack’s inspection.

He made a notation on the clipboard. “This one’s healthy. Nice mat of hay for the scratching action that’s vital.”

Delicately, like an ornithologist replacing a hatchling in its nest, Eric reinserted the sodden hay and put back the rubber cap. The next cow seemed listless. It was swaybacked and stood with its feet spread as though to keep from falling. When Eric removed the cap, the animal wheezed and lurched. A dirty gray froth bubbled up from the hole.

“This is the result of a high-starch diet and no hay. Bacteria overproduce and create the foam.” Jack made notes on the clipboard and, when he finished, went to a deep sink in the corner to wash his hands.

Taking off the lab coat, he hung it in a cupboard and pulled on a tweed jacket. “My office,” he said, and she nodded.

They walked along the dim corridor and out into the cold air and bright sunshine. She squinted. He didn’t speak as they took a pathway down a slope to another building, but she could sense some strong internal struggle going on in his mind. As they passed the admin building, she noticed a dusty gray Mustang pull up in front.

In his office, she sat in a chair by the metal desk piled with exam papers. He sat behind it, as though it were a barricade that might protect him, with his back to the window, which looked out over the path they had just walked down. Chemistry textbooks and bound copies of professional journals jammed all the bookshelves except one in the middle that had a neat row of plastic bags. A poster of Swiss Alps and a framed sketch of an old man peering through a microscope hung on the wall.

Wearily, he rubbed eyes that had the slightly unfocused look of shock, then ran a thumb and forefinger down his moustache. “I canceled my classes, but you can’t just cancel experiments. They don’t wait. You have to—” He shook his head and shoved his hand in his jacket pocket.

“Yes.” If he thought she disapproved of his working on the day after learning of Lucille’s death, he was wrong. Whatever gets you through. “I believe Lucille was killed because she knew something about Daniel’s murder.”

“I keep seeing her. Lucille. I was eight when she was born. Red-faced squalling little thing. Seeing her. The new bike she got for her birthday. She was ten, I think. Always following me around. Graduation from high school. First job. First day at the newspaper.”

“What did Lucille know?”

He shook his head.

“Think, Jack. She knew something. What was it?”

“I’ve tried to think. My mind just—”

That neat, efficient mind, so good at solving problems with cows’ stomachs, was unequipped to cope with his sister’s death.

“Anything, Jack. A comment, a question, an odd response.”

“I— No,” he said. “No, nothing.”

“She knew something, suspected something that made her death imperative. What was it?”

His face seemed even grayer and he looked at her blankly, then shook his head, more as though trying to clear it than in negative response to her questions.

“Why would she go to Kansas City?”

“I don’t know.”

“What reason could she have?”

“Maybe—maybe simply to get away.”

“Why, Jack? Why would she want to get away?”

He slumped back in his chair and she could feel him drawing further in on himself, putting up protective barriers against her probing.

“What do you know about Doug McClay?”

“He’s a reporter for the Kansas City News, doing the kind of thing Lucille wanted to do.” Jack took his hand from his pocket and bounced five or six small colorless pebbles on his palm.

“He was a friend?”

“Yes.”

“Close friend? A lover?”

Jack turned to stare out the window and let the pellets trickle through his fingers. “I expect so. He asked her to marry him. She told him she wasn’t ready to get married.”

“Have you met him?”

“Once. He didn’t like me.”

“Why?”

Holding the pellets in one palm, he rubbed his thumb over them. “Just one of those things.”

Not surprising maybe, jealousy of the adored brother. None of this was getting her anywhere; her shotgun questions weren’t penetrating his shock and grief. Maybe he didn’t know anything to tell her. She watched him toss the pellets from one hand to the other.

“What are those?”

He looked at the pellets as though he didn’t know how they’d gotten there. “Artificial roughage.” He let them dribble through his fingers onto the desk. “They always seem to be in my pockets. I’m not sure how that happens.” He tried a smile that didn’t work.

She picked up a pebble that looked like a miniature ten-gallon hat.

“I think that’s it,” he said.

“What?”

“The right shape.” He rose, collected several plastic bags from the shelf and lined them up on the desk.

“This is what I started with.” Opening a bag, he poured out a handful of dish-shaped pellets. “This has all taken so long because I’ve had to hustle around for grant money.”

He opened another. “I had high hopes for this shape, but cattle wouldn’t eat them.” Picking up a handful of cylindrical pellets, he let them slip through his fingers like a prospector handling gold nuggets.

“After it’s been chewed and swallowed, it looks like this.” From another bag, he pulled out a clump of grated material that looked like some sort of weird seaweed that might accompany a Japanese dinner.

He flipped a hat-shaped pellet toward her. “Try it.”

She looked at it dubiously.

“Go ahead. It’s not harmful.”

She stuck it in her mouth and tried to bite down. It felt like chomping on a toothbrush handle.

“It’s incredible,” he said. “It works fantastically better than I ever expected. It’s going to make great changes in the cattle business.”

She chewed. Gradually, the pellet flattened and became the consistency of the jujubes she used to get at the movies when she was a kid. Her jaw muscles ached. She took it out and stuck it in her pocket.

“Jack.” She was sorry to bring him back. “If you think of anything that might help, please let me know.”

The lines of strain returned and a look of pain crossed his face. She thought he was again seeing images of Lucille.

“I—” He picked up a handful of pellets. “Yes, of course.”

She stood up. “I will find out who killed her,” she told him quietly.

“Will you?” His voice was distant. His hand scooped up a few pellets and he pushed them into his pocket.

“Oh yes,” she said softly.

She trudged back up to the admin building where she’d left the pickup. A dusty gray Mustang was parked next to it. Waste of time, she thought as she started the truck. She’d made Jack think about Lucille’s death and gotten nothing. Better if she’d spent the time tracking down Doug McClay. Why was he so hard to get hold of? She stopped at Erle’s Market and bought soup, cheese and bread and went home to have lunch.

Taking the mail from the box, she tucked it under her arm and unlocked the door. She turned up the heat and glanced through the mail. The letter from her mother brought a rush of homesickness. The rest of the mail she added to the pile on the desk in the small room with French doors off the living room.

In the kitchen, she put away groceries and opened a can of chicken noodle soup. While it heated, she read the letter. Tears puddled up. She saw her mother’s face looking down at her with great tenderness. She was six years old and miserable with some kind of flu. She wanted to rush right home and give herself up to her mother’s care.

Across the bottom, her father had written, “When are you going to stop this nonsense and get back here!” That did it. A perceptive man in so many ways, he had never learned that pushing his only child was guaranteed to make her go the opposite way.

She stirred the soup, then stared out the window over the sink at the bird feeder on the elm tree. A pair of starlings perched briefly and then flew away. Daniel liked to feed the birds. The feeder hadn’t been filled since he died, one week and one day ago. Maybe she ought to buy birdseed. Just as she poured soup in a bowl, the door bell rang.

The tall blond man on her doorstep was the man she’d seen at the Kansas City police station last night. He wore a dark blue jacket, corduroy pants and black gloves. Parked in the driveway was a dusty gray Mustang.

“Chief Wren?” It was a statement more than a question, and he gave her a diffident smile. “My name is McClay. I’ve been trying to catch up with you all morning.”