“Yes, Meg.” He didn’t sound impatient. In fact, he sounded expectant, as if hoping I had some useful bit of information. I hoped so, too.
“I just got a visit from a lawyer who’s looking for Ian,” I said. “I thought you might be interested in knowing about it.”
“I would indeed.”
While I relayed the gist of my conversation with Sloan, I multitasked and took pictures of the front and back of his business card. His law firm was in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Sloan wasn’t one of the four Scandinavian-sounding last names in its title, only a staff attorney. But it was a nice, elegant, expensive-looking card, printed in a slightly old-fashioned typeface on heavy, textured cream card stock. I texted my pictures to the chief.
“Interesting,” he said. “Given that his client was observed several times in the area of your house only a few hours before the murder. You didn’t mention that to him, I assume.”
“No,” I said. “A stranger shows up at my door asking to speak to a murder victim—call me paranoid but I’m not going to tell him anything I don’t have to until I figure out what he’s after.”
“Very wise,” he said. “Thanks for the heads-up. I will be interested to talk to Mr. Sloan.”
“If either he or his client shows up here again, I’ll let you know. By the way—I disavowed any knowledge of Ian’s whereabouts, but for all I know his car is still here, and if this lawyer happens to know the make, model, and license number—”
“It won’t do him much good, since Mr. Meredith’s car is now safely stowed in our impound lot.”
“We have an impound lot now?”
“That old shed behind the jail—the one where they used to store the coal before they put in the new heating system.”
“Oh, right.” The shed also served as Horace’s overflow evidence locker. With luck they’d already given it a thorough cleaning after last month’s exciting alpaca-rustling case.
“I had Osgood Shiffley tow it away around dawn this morning, so unless Mr. Sloan started casing your house in the middle of the night, he won’t know it was there. But I suppose his client might have seen it. Nothing we can do about that.”
We said our goodbyes and hung up.
And then something occurred to me. How had Ian’s killer found him back there at the ice rink? The ice rink whose very existence had been a secret until a few hours before his murder. Given the effectiveness of Caerphilly’s grapevine, most of the town would probably know about it by nightfall today, but last night the only people who knew about it were my family and the Canadians—two groups of people I didn’t want to think about as possible suspects.
Of course, if someone had it in for Ian they could have been stalking him. Could have followed him, either from the house or, more likely, from the Mutant Wizards parking lot.
The chief would already have thought of all this, I reminded myself. He wouldn’t overlook the possibility of a stalker. And he was probably able to be a lot more impartial about whether the Canadians—or my relatives—were viable suspects. I should stop worrying about it.
But I probably wouldn’t.
Just then, the doorbell rang again. Tink, who had settled down by the hearth, lifted her massive head and contemplated the front door. I scowled, feeling a quick twinge of annoyance. If that was Sloan again—
No reason for it to be, I reminded myself. And if it was, I’d deal with him. I returned to the front door and looked out through the peephole. No one on the front porch. No car at the end of the front walk. I opened the door to find a huge bouquet of red roses sitting on the doormat. More than a dozen. More than two dozen—probably forty or fifty perfect red blossoms.
There was no card on the vase or under it.
And no one in sight.
I stepped outside and looked up and down the porch. No one peeking around the corner of the house. I strode down the walk to the road. No cars disappearing into the distance. No one hiding behind the hedges.
Perhaps there was someone hiding in one of the cars parked by the side of the road. Or someone sprinting through the woods. I wasn’t about to risk frostbite to find out—I was shivering already.
I hurried back to the house, picked up the flowers, and took them inside.
Tink and the Pomeranians barely reacted to my return. Well, if the dogs weren’t worried, I’d try not to be. Sooner or later I’d figure out who’d left them.
I set the roses on the coffee table. They fitted in perfectly with Mother’s holiday decorations. Maybe that was the answer to the riddle. Maybe she’d arranged to have someone drop them off.
Back in the kitchen, Nora had moved on from onions to green peppers.
“Your breakfast’s gone cold.”
I nodded and punched the microwave buttons again. While waiting, I watched Nora at work. Amazing how fast she could chop. At half that speed, I’d already have added parts of several fingers to the peppers.
“I assume if you could use my help you’ll ask,” I said.
She nodded in time with her busy knife.
“I’ll stay out from underfoot, then.” I began putting on my wraps so I was ready to move when the microwave dinged. “I’ll be in my office.”
When I stepped outside, I frightened away rather a lot of birds that had been swarming the several bird feeders now occupying our backyard. Including several birds with a gray upper body and a white belly—were they juncos? If memory served, that was what juncos looked like. Maybe I’d do a little bird-watching when I got back to the house, and take a picture of anything that looked as if it might be a harbinger of snow.
Out in my office I nibbled at my breakfast as I sent my pictures of the front and back of Sloan’s business card to my computer. Luckily Rose Noire had included a lot of bacon, which survived its double nuking splendidly. The sausage, eggs, and hash browns didn’t suffer much, either, and I realized I was actually pretty hungry. I continued to munch while I opened up my email program, wrote a short description of my encounter with Sloan, and sent it to Festus and Stanley.
And then, since I was at my computer and still only halfway finished with breakfast, I did a few internet searches.
Katherine Anne Koenigslutter didn’t bring up any useful results under any of the variant spellings I could think of for her first, middle, and last name.
Cyrus Runk brought up a fair number of articles. Not a lot about his conviction, which seemed to have passed largely unnoticed except in the remote rural county in which his victim had lived. Quite a few about the surprising decision by the Court of Appeals to overturn his conviction. Much discussion about whether or not the Supreme Court of Virginia would hear the prosecution’s appeal, and a general consensus that a new trial, even with a change of venue, was unlikely to result in a different verdict. Not a single article mentioned the possibility of the DNA evidence being challenged, though, so evidently Runk’s lawyer was keeping his new tactic a secret for now.
More interesting were the pictures, especially of the defendant and his appellate lawyer. Cyrus Runk was nondescript, except for a broad nose that looked as if it had been broken a time or two. At twenty-two his hair was already receding at both temples, making his forehead rather M-shaped, and in the picture his small eyes looked hurt and anxious. I could see myself feeling sorry for him if he hadn’t been proven by DNA to have whacked a seventeen-year-old girl over the head with a foot-long flashlight. William T. Morgan, Esquire, was tall and arguably handsome, although not my type—I much preferred Michael’s lean, rangy look to Morgan’s beefy frame. I suspected his pin-striped suit was well tailored to disguise a once-athletic body slowly losing the battle against time and business lunches. Maybe it was just my imagination that made him look rather smug and self-satisfied. Or maybe I was prejudiced by the fact that he was trying to free a killer.
I studied them both. I’d know either of them if he showed up on my doorstep.
Although I really hoped neither of them would. And after all, with Ian no longer living here, why would they?
In fact, why would they even while Ian was still alive? Surely they’d be seeing him in court soon enough. Of course, if they did want to confront him in person, it would make sense that they’d take advantage of the fact that he was more accessible here than he would have been back in Canada. Runk didn’t look like the sort of guy who could afford to do much international travel, so he might not even have a passport. But what if he had been eager to confront Ian, and decided to take advantage of his enemy’s temporary stay here? The one substantive article I’d found suggested that Runk hadn’t planned the murder he’d been convicted of—that he’d done it after losing his hair-trigger temper. I could see the attack on Ian happening the same way, with the hockey stick—like the flashlight—a weapon of opportunity. So I assumed Runk would be high on the chief’s suspect list. Unless he was in jail. None of the articles said whether he was still locked up or out on bail. I jotted down a note to ask Festus and Stanley to find out. Or the chief. Surely he’d think that a reasonable request, so we could know whether we should be looking over our shoulders for Runk.
Morgan, his lawyer, could afford a jaunt to Toronto, but probably wouldn’t want to rack up big travel expenses on what I gathered was a pro bono case. Mason, Morgan, and Friedman was located in Richmond, so if he wanted to confront Ian for any reason, a trip to Caerphilly would be a lot cheaper and faster than an expedition to Toronto. But why would a high-powered attorney just show up here? Wouldn’t he be much more likely to make an appointment? Or at least try to?
And how would either of them have known Ian was here in the first place?
I snagged the clearest pictures of Runk and Morgan and sent them to Michael, Rose Noire, and Kevin, with a note explaining who they were and a suggestion that they call 911 ASAP if they saw either one.
I’d finished my breakfast by this time, so I shut down my computer, locked my office, and jogged across the backyard to the kitchen door, scattering juncos in my wake.
“You’re low on baking soda,” Nora said when I arrived in the kitchen. “And out of powdered sugar.”
“I’ll make a grocery run, then.” I had no desire to foil any plans Nora had that involved powdered sugar. “Can you jot down a list of everything you’d like me to get?”
“Already have.” Nora handed me a list. A rather long list.
Well, I needed to go into town anyway. I could check the cat traps at the Methodist church. And drop by Mutant Wizards to fill the bird feeders. With luck I could manage to overhear something that would justify dropping by the police station to tell the chief, which might let me pick up a little information on how his investigation was going.
“Call me if you think of anything you’ve left out,” I said.
Nora raised one eyebrow, as if to suggest that her grocery lists were never incomplete, and nodded slightly. Then she turned back to whatever she was working on—probably pie crusts. She had a lump of dough on a marble pastry slab with a rolling pin nearby.
I tore myself away and headed for the front hall.
As I left the kitchen I heard the front door open and close. I quickened my steps so I could see who was entering. Even as I did it, I wasn’t entirely sure why. No one could have gotten in without a key. And it wasn’t as if I felt obliged to play doorman, what with a dozen visiting Canadians and an ever-increasing number of relatives coming and going with their own keys. Maybe having a murder in the backyard had made me slightly on edge.
I saw Rhea standing in the hall—Rhea, who had been so excited at the idea of owling with Grandfather. How long ago that conversation seemed. I wondered if Caroline had organized the expedition—and whether they’d go forward with it in spite of Ian’s death. And it also occurred to me to wonder what Rhea was doing here in the middle of the day. Perhaps Ian’s death meant the Canadians would no longer be working such killer hours. Although I had the impression that they needed to work those hours to have any hope of finishing the project by the deadline Ian had committed them to. Had some of the Canadians figured out that the project was about to be canceled?
If it was, the owling trip would be an even more useful distraction, I decided, as I approached Rhea. She had unbuttoned her puffy coat but was still wearing it, as if she planned to leave momentarily. She looked tense and anxious. They probably all were. From what I had seen the Canadians seemed united in their intense dislike of their boss—but that didn’t necessarily mean that his death would improve their morale. At the very least, they had to be worried about their jobs—especially any of them who knew about Cyrus Runk’s lawsuit or the backlog of untested DNA kits piling up thanks to the lab that had the temerity to want payment for processing them. How many of them actually knew? And what other corporate dirty laundry were they aware of?
Rhea suddenly became aware of my approach. She started and turned around with a little gasp.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Not your fault,” she said. “I think we’re all a little on edge because of … you know.”
I nodded. Yes, I knew.
She glanced up the stairway and then back at me.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m impatient for Angela and Maeve to come down so we can head back to the office. Maeve left her migraine medicine here, and with everything that’s going on she didn’t want to come back for it all alone, so Angela and I came with her for moral support. But I don’t want to be gone too long. Which is silly, I suppose—it’s not as if anyone’s going to be counting the minutes we’re away from our desks—not with Ian gone.”
“I noticed he was a tough taskmaster,” I said.
“More of a petty tyrant,” she said. “A taskmaster would be trying to make sure we were getting our projects done—Ian just wanted to see us at our desks looking busy. Especially if he was giving a tour to potential investors.”
“You’re reminding me of all the reasons I’m self-employed,” I said.
She smiled at that and glanced up the stairs again.
“He didn’t see that sometimes staying chained to your desk is counterproductive,” she went on. “Sometimes if you can’t figure out the answer to a programming challenge, what you need is not to keep plugging away at what hasn’t been working. Sometimes, if you go outside for a brisk walk, your brain will solve the problem as soon as you stop trying to force it. And sometimes what you need to do is go down to the break room and talk the problem over with a couple of other programmers—you’d be amazed how often you solve your own problem when you’re trying to explain it to someone else. Ian never did understand that if he found a handful of people in the break room talking, they just might be working, not goofing off.”
I nodded. I’d heard Delaney and Kevin explain the same thing more than once. And I’d experienced it myself. Sometimes, if I had a thorny dilemma or a puzzling problem, the best thing to do was to spend some time at my forge. I’d emerge from a blacksmithing session tired and dirty but with a solution to my problem.
“And it’s the same for the genealogists like Angela and Maeve,” Rhea continued. “Sometimes they need to talk over their work with their colleagues or get away from it entirely so they can come back with fresh eyes. And he was particularly hard on Maeve. He never understood that if she felt a migraine coming on, she might be able to fend it off if she took her meds and lay down for a little while. And then she’d make up the time. She always did. He never understood that.”
I nodded. She glanced at me and winced slightly.
“Listen to me,” she said. “Telling you all the reasons why I disliked him. You’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead.”
“But you’re not obliged to lie about them, either,” I said.
“No,” she said. “And right now I don’t trust anyone who’s pretending to be all broken up about Ian’s death. Not that anyone’s celebrating, of course, but even though we feel guilty about it, I think a lot of us are feeling a sense of relief.”
“Mixed feelings are totally natural,” I said.
“And most of us are working on expressions of dignified sympathy for when Mr. Meredith arrives. Mr. Meredith senior,” she added, seeing my puzzled expression. “Ian’s father. He’s flying down later today.”
“Ah,” I said. “Good to know.”
“Oh,” she said. “You mean because he might end up staying here—I never thought of that.”
“Actually, if he needs a place to stay, I’ll probably send him over to Mother and Dad’s.” It also occurred to me that for one old man, and a bereaved one at that, Ekaterina might be able to arrange a room at the Inn for a night or two.
“He’s actually very nice,” Rhea said. “A sweet old gentleman. Maeve and Angela adore him—they’ve been with the company a lot longer than I have. It’s just that he has a blind spot when it comes to his son.”
“But I imagine he won’t want to stay this close to where Ian was killed,” I said. “And besides, Mother’s an expert at taking care of grieving survivors. I remember when she went to the funeral of a perfectly horrible woman, someone she considered her worst enemy. She managed to offer her condolences to the family with such touching sincerity that they asked her back to the house for the private lunch they were giving for just the family. And she wasn’t being insincere,” I added. “She didn’t tell a single lie about how fond she was of the dead woman—just expressed how genuinely sorry she was for their loss.”
“Let’s invite her over to the office when Mr. Meredith gets here,” Rhea said. “We all want to be sympathetic, but it’s hard not to be worrying about our own futures. Will we all have jobs by the end of the week? What if he shuts down the project? Or decides to sell the company?”
I wondered if all the Canadians felt this way. If so, it made them a lot less likely as suspects. “Do you think that’s a possibility?” I asked.
“Who knows?” she said. “I know there was a pretty solid rumor a while back that they had an offer from one of the big companies in our field. And most people were glad when it was turned down, because we liked working for a small company with a nice boss. That was when Mr. Meredith senior was in charge. But I’m not sure how much luck they’d have selling it now. Things haven’t been going all that well lately.”
“Since Ian took over?” I ventured.
She tried to look as if she didn’t quite understand, then gave in and nodded.
“Look, this is probably none of my business,” I said. “But I hope you were honest with Chief Burke about how you felt about Ian. Stuff like this always ends up coming out, you know.”
“And he’ll probably be a lot more suspicious of anyone who pretends they liked Ian,” she said. “I mean, he’s met him once or twice. I think most of us were pretty honest. I know I was. I just wish I’d managed to leave before now. I had my résumé out, and I had some nibbles. But Ian made it so hard to get away for an interview, and then he brought us down here and made it impossible. But I was planning on quitting on Friday. I talked to my parents, and they said they’d help out if it took a while to get a new job, and maybe I’d even be able to come home for Christmas. I’ve got my resignation letter in my laptop, ready to print out. I was going to do that either today or tomorrow. Maybe I still should.”
I couldn’t decide whether to be cheered or saddened by the look of pure happiness that crossed her face at the thought.
And did being on the brink of leaving make her less of a suspect for Ian’s murder? Or did his mistreatment of her—and all the rest of his staff—and the way he’d made it hard for her to find another job make her more suspicious?
Just then Angela and Maeve appeared at the top of the stairs. They stopped, and while I couldn’t see Angela’s face, Maeve’s showed a brief flicker of—fear? Anxiety? The expression passed, and her face returned to its usual look of kindly, thoughtful intelligence as they came down the stairs.
I liked Maeve and Angela. And I could relate to them better than to most of the other Canadians, who in addition to being much younger, were from the tech side of the company. Perfectly nice, all of them—I just hadn’t found that we had much in common. If I’d had to guess Angela and Maeve’s profession, I’d have said that they were either teachers or librarians—two of my favorite kinds of people. I wasn’t surprised when I learned that they were genealogists.
What had surprised me was the close friendship they appeared to have formed with the much-younger Rhea. But with what I’d learned about Ian in the past twenty-four hours, I was definitely wondering. Was this a friendship that had arisen naturally out of shared interests and congenial personalities? Or were Maeve and Angela being protective of Rhea? Never leaving her alone in situations where a known sexual harasser was present? Gently but persistently fending off Ian?
I considered this idea while they descended the stairway. Yes, I thought. It was the sort of mission I could imagine them taking on.
“How’s your head doing?” I asked Maeve.
“My head?” She looked briefly puzzled.
“I thought it was okay to mention your headache to Meg,” Rhea said.
“And it’s not a headache yet, and probably isn’t going to be,” Maeve said. “It’s amazing how well Depakote works when you manage to take it in time.”
“I’m glad I insisted on coming back for it,” Rhea said. “I mean, it’s not as if anyone expects to get a lot done today.”
“Still, we should be getting back.” Angela glanced at her watch. “If you think you’re up to it,” she added to Maeve.
“I’m sure it will be fine.” She gave a reassuring smile. “See you this evening,” she added to me.
They buttoned up their coats, pulled on their hats and gloves, and went out into the cold with the brisk steps of people for whom protracted temperatures in the twenties were merely a feature of life, not a rare and horrible event.
But there was something slightly furtive in their manner. Maybe they were still unused to being able to come and go from the office without being reprimanded. Maybe what I was seeing was guilt about how relieved Ian’s demise made them feel. Relieved—maybe even happy.
Still, I couldn’t help feeling that they were up to something. That I should call the chief and tell him about their thinly disguised relief and cheer. That I should rush upstairs and search all their rooms—for what? My curiosity warred with my self-respect.
Self-respect won—barely. It wasn’t as if I could expect to find a blood-soaked murder weapon in one of their rooms—the chief already had that. But they might not be the only Canadians feeling free to sneak away from the office with Ian gone, and I didn’t want to get caught snooping. Besides, Rose Noire would be tidying their rooms and maybe even changing their linens sometime this afternoon. I could let her do the snooping. Better yet, I could volunteer to help her. It wouldn’t count as snooping if I merely kept my eyes open while there on legitimate business, right?
In the meantime, I had errands. Shopping for groceries. Filling the bird feeders down at Mutant Wizards. Checking the cat traps. Maybe even taking the pregnant feral to Clarence’s if we caught her. I opened the closet and began bundling up against the cold.