| |
“What do you mean? Terrington is dead? How? Why?” I started trotting toward Mark as Marsala got into her car. “You saw Cooper kill him?”
Mark shook his head. I saw spots of blood on his safari vest. “Marsala did. I heard her scream and rushed toward her. Cooper looked like he was about to stab him again. He saw us standing there, dropped the knife, and ran.”
This was all so unbelievable. I’d spoken to Terrington around twenty minutes ago. Had the world started spinning double-time? My phone rang. I looked at the screen. Cooper was calling me. “Cooper?” I said into the phone, incredulous. My heart was pounding, and I’d had to struggle to keep my voice even remotely calm.
“Allie. You’ve got to help me,” Cooper cried. “Mark Singer and Marsala just...saw me with.... I was trying to...Terrington’s dead. Someone killed him. Stabbed him. His throat. I’m in such a mess. I’ll never survive this.”
Police sirens were wailing. They were turning into the parking lot of the café where I was expecting to meet Terrington.
“Where are you?”
“I’m in the parking lot. Of the Brunswick Café. The police are on their way. I’m just...I’m going to surrender to the police. But I didn’t do it, Allie. You have to tell them I didn’t do it.”
“Tell the police, you mean? I can’t. I can’t know that as a fact, one way or the other.”
Three police cars with flashing lights had rounded the café across the street. “Mark’s here. I was on my way to meet Terrington. Mark says you killed him.”
“He’s wrong. I didn’t kill him. I...I found his body is all. And I tried to do mouth-to-mouth and...and to stop the bleeding. But there was nothing I could do. It was too late.”
“We’ve got to go back to the scene, Marsala,” Mark shouted.
“He’s right, Marsala. You need to return to the restaurant with us,” I called to her.
“No. I don’t want to. It’s too horrid. Mark, tell the police I will wait right here. I can’t go back and see all that blood.” She, too, appeared to have red spots on her white blouse.
“Allie! Please,” I heard Cooper shout over the phone. I returned the phone to my ear. “You know me. You know I’m not a killer.”
“You need a lawyer, Cooper,” I said.
“I’ll get one. But I heard the stories people tell about you...about all the help you’ve given to the Boulder police, solving murders. That’s what I need. Someone I can trust to be my private investigator. You! I trust you! I’ll pay you...somehow. You know these same people I do. The same people Leach knew. People with a real reason to want to see him dead.”
“Look, Cooper. Let’s— I’ll be right there.” I hung up. I had been walking during my phone call and now realized that I’d reached the crosswalk. The walk light illuminated. I headed across the street. The police cars were behind the building, out of my periphery.
I rounded the building. A pair of officers were in the process of taping off the crime scene. I could see even at a thirty-feet-or-so distance that Cooper was shaking. His knees and shirt were stained with blood. He was being led by an officer toward the patrol car.
I didn’t really know Cooper Hayes all that well. I didn’t know if he was capable of murdering someone. He needed more help than I could give him if Mark’s story was accurate.
“It’s not true,” Cooper cried. His eyes were wide with terror and he was sweating profusely. “Terrington Leach. Somebody killed him. Not me.”
I couldn’t tell if he was talking to me or to the four police officers who’d emerged from the two patrol cars. I walked toward him, not wanting to make the officers edgy and think I was any kind of a danger to them.
“Leach confronted me in the café and told me to meet him outside. He was rolling up his sleeves. I didn’t want to fight. It was all too stupid. I waited a couple of minutes, then headed to the men’s room. He was leaning against the back door. He...I don’t know. Maybe he came in from the kitchen. Or outside. His face was white and his eyes were...blank. He was bleeding. He had a knife in his neck. The door opened from his weight, and he fell backward. I was frozen for a while. I yelled for help and was trying to hold his wound closed. Nobody came. Then Marsala did. Then Mark did.”
He looked over at me, his eyes wide. “Ask her. Ask Allie. She’ll tell you I wouldn’t kill anybody.”
“Are you a witness?” an officer asked, blocking my view as the officer’s partner started to put handcuffs on Cooper.
“Allie. Listen to me. Somebody listen. I was trying to save his life. Just as Marsala rounded the corner.” He sobbed. “I didn’t like the guy, but I didn’t murder him. I barely knew him.”
A third officer came toward me and gently pushed me away from Terrington and the other officers. “Miss, we’re taking him to the police station to ask him some questions. Are you related to the victim, or to this man?” He indicated Cooper with a slight gesture of his hand.
“No. I’m acquainted with both of them. I was supposed to meet Terrington Leach for coffee. I’ve watching a dog presenter practice in the main building of the fairgrounds and lost track of time. I was ten or fifteen minutes late.”
“Wait inside the restaurant, Miss.”
“Should I—” I vaguely gestured at the back door.
“No, go around—” He started to turn, then pointed. “Go wait under that tree. I’ll get an officer to talk to you as soon as I can.”
Several people dashed toward us along the sidewalk of the café. “Do not go to your cars,” a loud, amplified voice reverberated from behind the group. An officer must have been using a bullhorn. “Everybody go back inside the restaurant. You are not in danger. You can leave the restaurant after giving contact information.”
I went ahead and crossed the parking lot the short distance to the tree where I could stand in the shade. The officer who’d spoken to me was now arguing with two families. He was trying to block their view of Terrington and herd them back along the sidewalk. I took a couple of slow, calming breaths, then grabbed my phone to call Baxter. I heard footsteps behind me and turned. Mark and Marsala had followed me here. Marsala was weeping.
As Cooper was being helped into the police vehicle, she took a couple of steps toward him. “How could you do something like this?” Marsala screeched at Cooper. She turned toward me. I saw for certain that she, too, had spots of blood on her hands and on her blouse.
An hour or two later, I felt completely drained of energy and numb. Baxter had locked his office door behind me, pulled his two bargain-basement office chairs close together and allowed me to lean against him as he wrapped his arm around me. After a while, I felt like talking and relayed the details of what I’d already told the police during their long, tedious taking of my statement. “Did you find out what Marsala actually saw?” Baxter asked.
“She told me she saw Cooper with the knife in his good hand, and he dropped it when she screamed. She said it looked like he’d been pushing him down with the arm in the cast. I think he claims he was trying to keep compression on the wound after pulling out the knife.”
“Where did the knife come from?”
“The café kitchen, apparently. Right after Marsala and Mark got there, a cook came out and cried, ‘That’s my knife. Someone took it.’ So the killer must have snuck into the kitchen. It looks bad for Cooper, but Marsala also had blood on her clothing. She told me she got it from the back door, when she got woozy and was trying to stay upright.”
“Did that sound likely to you? To get it on her clothing?”
I nodded. “The door looked pretty gory. And it was on her sleeves. Mark said she’d gotten it on his clothes, too, when he was trying to comfort her.” I was starting to feel a little woozy myself.
Baxter kissed the top of my head. “You’re caught up in another murder. I’m so sorry, darling.” His voice was gentle and soothing.
“Did the police talk to you, too?”
“Not yet. For once, a long conversation with Davis Miller was lucky for me. We both have irrefutable alibis for the other.”
“That’s a relief.”
Someone knocked. Baxter stood up and opened the door. “Come in,” he said. Two uniformed officers entered.
“We’re investigating an incident that occurred across the street around noon. Are you Baxter McClelland?”
“Yes, I am.”
The older-looking officer eyed me. “And you are?”
“Allida Babcock. I spoke to the police earlier at the restaurant.”
“We’re just trying to get background information. The manager, Davis Miller, directed us to you.”
“Should I stay?” I asked.
“No,” both officers replied in unison.
“Are Jesse and Valerie still here?” Baxter asked me. “Do you have appointments for working their dogs this afternoon?”
“That’s a good question. I’d better talk to them and find out.”
He took my hand and helped me to my feet. We squeezed hands in a tacit goodbye. I stayed on the lookout for Jesse and Valerie as I walked the length of the building to the front door. I then headed straight to the second, smaller building and entered the agility show room. The ring was empty, and only one person was in the seats—Marsala Podnowski. She was gazing straight ahead, although there was nothing to see. I climbed the steps to her row. She glanced at me for a moment, then returned to her contemplative stare. She was now wearing a plain gray tee-shirt and a slightly tattered-looking pair of sweat pants. She had probably turned over the clothes she’d been wearing to the police.
“Hi, Marsala. How are you holding up?” I asked.
She exhaled loudly. “I can’t stop replaying the scene in my head.”
“I know what that’s like. Unfortunately.”
She stared at me. “So the rumors about you are true? That you’ve been involved in a couple of murders before this?”
I nodded. “I’ve been the first person to find a murder victim more than once.”
“Terrington and I used to date,” she replied, already back to staring at the arena below. “It feels so unreal.”
“I’m sure all of this is taking quite a toll on you.”
She gave no reply.
“You told me about your relationship with Terrington yesterday.”
“That’s right. I did, didn’t I.” Her voice was flat. I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d taken a tranquilizer to calm herself. “Mark hated Terrington. If Cooper is telling the truth, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mark killed him.”
“Really? Weren’t you two with each other the whole time?”
“No. Mark said he’d been heading toward the café coincidentally, and that he’d heard some men arguing behind the building. So he claims he happened to hear me scream just before he could arrive at the scene.”
“Huh. So you didn’t know he was even there until after you’d seen Cooper and Terrington?”
She nodded. “Pretty convenient coincidence,” she said, echoing my thoughts.
“Do you think Mark is lying when he claimed you’d transferred blood to his shirt?”
“I don’t know, Allida. I wasn’t in my real head when the police interviewed me. Nor when Mark was trying to help me calm down.”
I nodded and held my tongue. I wondered if fingerprints on the knife could prove who the killer was. But then, the killer could have snatched a pair of latex gloves from the kitchen, along with the knife.
“Mark said something about following me toward the restrooms, but I didn’t even know he was in the café. He always seems to be following me around. I’m almost surprised he actually left me alone here like I asked him to.”
“You’re no longer certain Cooper killed Terrington?”
“Not at all.” She shook her head. “By the time I talked to the police, I realized I’d panicked and wasn’t thinking clearly at first. All I’d seen was Cooper with a knife in his hand. He could have been telling the truth about pulling out the knife and trying to stop the bleeding.”
“Well, that’s a relief. Cooper called me saying that you saw him at precisely the worst possible moment. I’d like to think he’s innocent.”
Marsala searched my eyes. “Now that I think back, Mark’s the one who was insisting to me that I’d caught Cooper in the act. It freaked me out even worse. That’s why I ran away. I was scared for my own life.”
“Is that still what you think? Could Terrington have been ambushed by someone else...someone who’d grabbed the knife from the kitchen right when Terrington happened to be standing by the back door?”
“I guess it’s possible.” She studied my features. “I hadn’t heard any of their conversation. Then Terrington stood up, saw me, and said to Cooper, ‘Meet me out back.’ He looked at me again, and he actually winked at me. Then he marched out the front door.”
“Are you sure he left through the front door?”
“Positive. I noticed how odd that was, too.”
“Why would he leave by the front door, if he wanted to start a scuffle in the back?”
“I can’t understand why two men in their forties would want to exchange blows in a parking lot.”
“Maybe Terrington just wanted to argue verbally. Maybe he cooled down, decided to drop the whole thing, and came back in through the back door.”
“I don’t know. I don’t understand any of it.” She closed her eyes. “That was the last I saw of him.” Her voice was choked with emotion.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Welcome to my world,” Marsala grumbled. “My freaking ex-husband made our marriage a nightmare. I should have left him years ago. Instead I was stupid and desperate enough to fall for a serial flirt like Terrington. And, of course, Terrington dropped me as soon as he learned I was now single. I was safe and tantalizing to him just when I was a married woman.”
She was hardly painting herself in the best possible light. She had a good motive to have killed Terrington herself. All she had to do was hide herself at the corner of the building until she heard someone else discover Terrington’s body, and then rush around the building to make it look like she was there for the first time.
“Meanwhile,” she continued, “my ex moves back to Nebraska, marries his high-school sweetheart and is happy as a clam. While I’m having creeps like Mark Singer stalking me.”
“He’s stalking you?”
She sighed. “Sort of. He’s always keeping an eye on me. Let’s just say I’m really glad he’s judging agility, not Terriers, and that I don’t have any dogs entered in agility.”
“So...that’s all he’s done, though, so far? Follow you around?”
She grimaced. “So far. He was buzzing around me like a gnat at last year’s dog show in Greeley, too. He told me a couple of times that if I was available, I should ditch Terrington and look for a man who would treat me like a king.”
“Hmm. His house is hardly a palace,” I muttered.
“You can say that again. I’d be ‘the queen of nothing at all,’ to quote from a song lyric.” She shook her head. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all of this. It’s just...it’s been such a miserable day. My former lover was brutally murdered. The police talked to me for hours. Meanwhile, Mark Singer is bullying me. He kept correcting me when I tried to say what I saw—even though it was the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” She started crying. “I just wanted to get it out of my mind, but he was being a complete jerk. I told him I’d gotten enough of that from my ex-husband.”
“You might want to report your conversation with Mark to the police. It could be important to their evidence-gathering.”
We sat in silence as she got her emotions under control. “You’re right, Allie. I didn’t think of that, but he could have been trying to confuse me as a witness, so he could frame Cooper for a crime he himself committed.”
“It’s at least a possibility,” I said. If anything, though, my thoughts were how convenient it was for the killer to have two other suspects. I rose. “I’d better get going. I was looking for Valerie and Jesse to see if my appointments for dog training were still on for late this afternoon.”
“How late?”
“Four thirty, then five-forty-five.”
“I can already tell you that won’t work. Mark just finished telling me that Davis was notifying all of the judges, presenters, and staff members that they would have a mandatary meeting at five.”
Indeed, at five—quarter after five actually—everyone associated with running the show was called into an emergency meeting in the “conference” room, as it had been termed; it was just a reasonably large room in the very back of the staff-only portion of the building. It had some sort of built-in dais where Kiki and Davis Miller stood with a handheld microphone. Davis started saying, “Testing. One, two—” and Kiki took the microphone out of her father’s hand.
“We are all in shock, obviously,” she said. “This is a terrible, terrible thing that happened. But we can’t let it distract us from the job we’re doing. Believe you me, if we were to cancel at this late juncture, we would essentially bankrupt the FCDC (Fort Collins Dog Club.)”
Kiki continued to drive home her point about prevailing in the face of tragedy, until Davis literally yanked the mic from his daughter. “We need to stop any and all rumors. No more talking about the murder, even amongst yourselves.” He leveled a sharp gaze at me. “There are already radio reports going out. The story is on the internet. I’m sure it’ll be on the evening news. I don’t want anyone talking to the press. Or to their friends in the local media.” Again, he glared at me. Maybe he knew Tracy Truitt and I were friends. “If the dog owners ask you, any of you, any question, your answer is, ‘I heard some drugged-out-of-his-mind lowlife stumbled in through the back door of the Brunswick Café and stabbed the first person he saw.’ You will be telling the truth, because you just now heard me say it.’”
I raised my hand. Davis grimaced at me, which I decided to take as an acknowledgment. “Mr. Miller, it really isn’t a good policy for us to spread fake rumors. There hasn’t been an arrest, so if people believe that there’s some drugged-up man with a knife on the loose in the immediate area, they’ll stay away. We’ll lose our audience as well as our attendees. We might as well cancel the show.”
“Good point,” Davis said. “We need to, er, change that message. Let’s tell everyone we heard that the police just arrested a druggie lowlife.”
“Let’s just tell them that we don’t know anything more than what was released by the police in the media,” Baxter stated firmly.
“Brilliant idea, Baxter,” Kiki declared. She turned to face her father. “Let’s do what Baxter says. People do get killed, after all. It’s not like we’re going to be dealing with a stabbing epidemic, or anything.”
“Okay. Fine.” Davis sighed, handed the microphone to Kiki, and sank his hands deeply into his pant pockets. “Everybody out there okay with that?”
A general smattering of concurrence arose from the fifty or so attendees.
“Well done,” Baxter whispered in my ear.
I looked at him, sincerely unsure of myself. “Really? Everything that’s happened in the last twenty-four hours feels...loony tunes.”
“Someone getting killed is of course way beyond the pale. These pet-show events are always in a state of chaos. Pet shows are the new zoos.”
––––––––
The next morning, I drove in with Baxter to the Fort Collins Fairgrounds. I wanted to stay close to him, afraid for both our sakes that more chaos was to come. The news stations were reporting that Cooper had been designated as a “person of interest.”
With Baxter absorbed in answering one phone call after another from worried dog owners and dog lovers, I set out to get a look at as many dogs as I could on the fairgrounds. I loved being at dog shows, seeing the various beautiful animals looking their best. For my money, no human’s head of hair could match the luster and hue of a well-groomed Irish Setter. I’d been starting to picture myself with a pet Setter in my future.
Despite Davis’s oration yesterday, I was quite certain Terrington’s murder would be the constant topic of choice from now on. The show started tomorrow and lasted until Sunday night, when we could all pack up and go home.
The park itself was filling with trailers. This was the preferred method for show-dog owners to travel in style, enabling their entire families and their dogs to make the trip in a portable home. Weather permitting, many of the show rings were outside, so the dogs could merely trot ten or thirty yards from the trailer to the site of their competition. There were already plenty of dogs in the main building. Many of the old-guard dog owners were so used to the benched competitions, they were turning the main hall into a de facto bench competition, with the owners and handlers socializing and bringing dog beds and crates with them.
The groomers had already set themselves up in the designated room and were working on their clients’ fur, nails, and teeth. This was a space in which the childish aspect of sense of humor came out; the sight of dogs with curlers and hairpins in their fur always made me chuckle.
As I strolled around, I was pleased to see that there were several families with children here, looking at the dogs. Apparently the horrible news about Terrington wasn’t spooking potential attendees.
As I entered the Terrier section, a blonde, overweight woman dressed in all plaid—including her headband—rushed up to me. “Miss, do you work here?”
“Sort of. I’m going to be—”
She grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward a Westie that was fast asleep. “You need to tell us something. Why is Richard Cory out like a light? I can’t even wake him!” She lifted him out of his crate and held him in front of her as if she was presenting me with a tray.
“Allie Babcock,” someone called. I took a quick look and saw Valerie. She was holding a lovely Westie—not Sophie Sophistica—but I needed to concentrate on Richard Cory. I promptly took note of his slow breathing and gently pried an eyelid open. His eye was black—one large, dilated pupil.
“He’s been drugged,” I said.
“Somebody must have given him a shot! Who would do something like this?” She cradled her dog to her chest and whirled around. She looked at Valerie to one side and a woman I didn’t know to the other. “One of you two did this!”
“No, I didn’t,” they both cried.
“You can’t possibly suspect I would drug one of my dogs from my own stable!” Valerie continued. “I would never hurt a dog.”
“Besides, if someone did this to make your dog too sleepy to compete, why would they do it now? The competition doesn’t start for another two days,” the other woman pointed out.
“Richard Cory!” I shouted, testing his ability to respond. He opened his eyes, gave a little whimper, and went back to sleep. “He’s at least coming around a little.”
“Thank goodness!” The plaid-dressed woman gently put him back in his crate. “We need to get to the bottom of this. Immediately.” She put her hands on her hips and eyed Valerie.
“Don’t look at me like that! I was never even near your dog.” Valerie pointed at the camera in its dome above us. “There are only two security cameras in this entire building, and that’s one of them. Hopefully it’s up and running right now. Allie, go look at the recordings. The culprit has to have been caught on the camera.”
“Right,” I said. “I’ll get Baxter to give me access to review them.” I headed to his office and went inside. To my pleasant surprise he was shutting his computer and slipping it into his desk drawer.
“Hi, hon. I was just about to call you.” He rose and locked the desk. “Do you want to head outside with me? Davis asked me to make sure all the trailers are parked within the designated areas.”
“That has to wait. We need to look at the recording of the camera in aisle nine—where most of the smaller Terriers are. Someone drugged a Westie.”
He gazed at me for a second or two. “Okay. Let’s change my question. Would you like to walk indoors with me, while we head to the security room? I need to examine a camera recording.” He unlocked the desk and grabbed his laptop. “Might as well bring this. I’ll want my own copy of the incident, regardless.”