Alibis and Amethysts (25 page)

Keep reading for a preview of Sharon Pape’s A Portrait of Crime mystery

SKETCHER IN THE RYE

Available from InterMix December 2013

When Rory found Hobo he was frolicking in the mud with the pigs. By that time she
was half crazy with worry. Harper Farms covered thirty plus acres with indoor and
outdoor nurseries, a produce store and bakery, a petting zoo with pony rides and since
it was fall, a vast corn maze. There were too many places for a dog to hide, even
a dog as big as Hobo.

She was so relieved to see him again that his mud-caked appearance didn’t immediately
register with her. Hobo appeared to be just as pleased to see her. He bounded over
and launched himself, landing with his front paws squarely on her shoulders. The impact
knocked the wind out of her and sent her staggering backward until she slammed into
the side of the barn. Pinned there, she was treated to an enthusiastic face washing,
which she wouldn’t have minded under normal circumstances. But the pungent smell of
pig and overheated dog rose from Hobo in a steamy wave that threatened to bring her
breakfast back for an encore. She grabbed his mud-soaked leash and ordered him “off”
in the most commanding tone she could manage. After several failed attempts, she wound
up having to push him into obedience. By then she couldn’t be sure if he was finally
listening to her or was simply tired of standing on two legs. In any case, once he
was back on all fours he gave his coat a vigorous shake, the long fur spewing mud
everywhere like a food processor at top speed without benefit of a lid. Being only
a foot away from the eye of the mud storm, Rory got the worst of it. She was as muddy
and stinky as he was, not to mention chilled from the stiff November breeze that had
swept into the area while she’d been meeting with Gil Harper. In spite of it all,
she started laughing. And for a couple of belly-aching minutes she couldn’t stop.
She was glad there was no one around to see her reaction or they might have carted
her off to a nicely padded cell somewhere. As much as she hated to admit it, Zeke
was probably right. She really did need to hire a trainer for Hobo. She could just
picture the marshal wearing his “told-you-so” grin that hiked his moustache nearly
up to his sideburns.

What had possessed her to take Hobo along to a business meeting anyway? Oh yeah—a
good, old-fashioned dose of guilt. Work had been taking her away from the house and
her adjacent office so much lately that she was feeling bad about leaving him yet
again. Of course he wasn’t completely alone in the old Victorian she’d inherited from
her uncle Mac. Now that Hobo had adjusted to living with a ghost, and Zeke had worked
out his own issues with the arrangement, the two could often be found engaged in a
lively game of fetch, providing the marshal wasn’t too depleted from his own recent
outings. Although his ability to manifest in full 3D mode had improved well beyond
Rory’s expectations, and often her tolerance level, Zeke was still frustrated by the
limits death had imposed on him for more than a hundred and thirty years.

“You should be grateful you can leave the house at all,” Rory reminded him one day
when he was brooding about his situation. “Before I moved in here you couldn’t go
anywhere.” Back when Mac had been alive, the marshal had partnered with him on his
PI cases too, but always from the confines of the house. For some reason neither she
nor Zeke could fathom, as long as she was with him or at the other end of his journey,
he could now travel about. At least until sheer exhaustion pulled him bungee-like
back to the house where he’d exhaled his last breath.

“Hey, glad to see you found your dog,” Gil Harper called out as he came around the
corner of the barn and spotted them. The patriarch of the family business was tall,
lean and fiftyish with blonde hair that was doing a nice job of masking the incoming
crop of gray. “Looks like you’ll both be needing a bath though.” Although he sounded
genuinely relieved that Hobo was okay, his lips were twitching as if he was trying
hard not to laugh at the muddy spectacle before him. “Any idea how he got out of your
car?”

Rory was wiping at the mud on her face with hands that were equally dirty. “Well,”
she said realizing it was pointless, “I must have forgotten to lock the car. Then
I guess someone came along and thought it would be a good idea to set him free. Either
that or he grew opposable thumbs during the past hour.”

“Anything I can do to help?” Gil asked, backing away as he spoke. He might have had
the best intentions with his offer, but his subconscious was clearly not onboard with
them.”Thanks, but I’m afraid that soap and water is the only solution. The sooner
I get us home the better.” With a tight grip on Hobo’s muddy leash she headed off
in the direction of the car. But after the first few steps Hobo dug in his paws and
refused to move any farther. He’d never done anything like that before. Rory gave
the leash a sharp tug and ordered him to heel. The dog looked at her, then looked
over his shoulder at the pig pen and whined.

“You have got to be kidding!” she said. “Are you begging for more time in the mud?”

Harper started laughing. “I’m not laughing at you,” he assured her when he’d quieted
enough to speak. “I think I understand Hobo’s problem.” He pointed to a little pig
who was staring back at the dog and making a noise somewhere between a grunt and a
squeal. “I believe what we may have here is a budding interspecies romance.”

Rory didn’t know whether to laugh again or cry. She couldn’t exactly scoop a dog of
Hobo’s size into her arms and carry him back to the car.

“Let me grab Pigmalion and remove her from the equation,” Harper said, which was a
much more realistic option. As soon as he and the little pig were out of sight, Hobo
started whining again. Rory figured she could live with the whining as long as she
could get him moving. In her most authoritative voice, she ordered him to heel and
to her relief, he stood up and padded after her, his shaggy head hung low in resignation.

The parking lot had been almost empty when they’d arrived at eight AM, but now that
it was close to opening time cars filled nearly half of it. The corn maze and petting
zoo were big draws until the season’s first hard frost or snowfall officially shut
down those attractions for the winter.

Rory and Hobo had nearly reached the car when the wind gusted, blowing from the opposite
direction. Hobo stopped and raised his snout to take stock of the incoming air. Rory
hoped it was a promising sign that he’d forgotten Pigmalion and was moving on to other
interests. A second later she was nearly yanked off her feet as the dog raced helter
skelter toward the corn maze. Rory managed to stay upright, but she could feel the
leash slipping through her fingers. At the entrance to the maze, Hobo ploughed right
past a group of teenagers about to enter it as the first visitors of the day.

“Coming through,” Rory yelled in case they hadn’t noticed she was attached to the
crazy mutt who’d almost trampled them. Hobo sped on, taking the turns like a sailboat
heeling in rough surf. On the other end of the leash, Rory was tripping over furrows
and getting smacked in the face by dead corn stalks.

She felt like she’d been conscripted into a remake of a Three Stooges movie. After
one particularly bad stumble, she landed hard on her knees and the leash tugged free
of her hand. Hobo careened onward, either unaware or unconcerned that he’d left her
behind.

She jumped to her feet and took off after him, moving more quickly now that she wasn’t
being buffeted by corn stalks along the way. Up ahead Hobo had started some serious
barking, what Rory called his all points bulletin. He only used it when he was reporting
trouble. It was hard to get a good fix on just how far ahead he was, because the corn
stalks worked like a baffle, distorting the sound. She hoped he hadn’t cornered a
wild animal. Raccoons were a problem on Long Island and when they were prowling around
during the day, it generally meant they were rabid to boot. Hobo’s up to date on his
inoculations, her brain pointed out, whereas you have no such protection. Danger noted
and filed, her heart responded as she ran on. After several wrong turns led to frustrating
dead ends and wasted seconds, she rounded a curve and ran smack into the dog.

He was standing beside a man sprawled face down in the dirt. The good news—Hobo wasn’t
in any danger. The bad news—someone else was having a really terrible day. Rory grabbed
the dog’s leash to keep him from taking flight again. He didn’t appear interested
in going anywhere else, but with Hobo she couldn’t be sure. Now that he’d summoned
the cavalry, his barking had ebbed to a breathless chuffing. Rory stepped around him
and knelt beside the body to assess the situation. There was no blood on or around
the man, whom she guessed to be in his early thirties, and there were no bullet holes
or knife wounds, at least none she could see from his present position. When she checked
his neck for a pulse, there was none, and his skin was cold to the touch. She was
no doctor, but the few years she’d spent as a detective and sketch artist had given
her a working knowledge of what constituted “dead.”

She stepped back from the body, making an effort to walk in her own footprints. But
she quickly realized that it was pointless. The soft, moist ground was already covered
with overlapping footprints from all the people who’d recently visited the maze. It
would be impossible to get a cast of any one set.

She grabbed her phone from the muddy messenger bag slung across her chest and dialed
Leah at the Homicide Division out in Yaphank. Without preamble, she gave her friend
a rundown on the situation. It would take Leah and her partner forty-five minutes
to reach Huntington, but once they notified the local precinct, patrol cars would
be screaming to Harper Farms in a matter of minutes.

With that done, Rory needed to find Gil Harper and fill him in on what was happening.
She had no idea if he knew the victim, but whether he did or not, he was bound to
be distressed by the death. A dead body on the premises was never good for business,
especially if the death wasn’t attributable to natural causes. She tried his cell
number, but after several rings her call went to voicemail. This wasn’t the type of
news she wanted to deliver that way. She was torn between racing off to find him and
keeping watch over the crime scene until the local cops arrived.

“I leave you on your own for a couple of hours and you stumble over another body,”
a voice behind her said. There was no mistaking the sarcasm or the drawl, but Rory
was so caught up in her dilemma that she reacted as if someone had jumped out of a
dark alley and yelled “boo!” Even Hobo, with his more finely tuned senses, yelped
with surprise.

Rory wheeled around to face the marshal. “What are you doing here?” she demanded in
a harsh whisper. He was standing before her in his well-worn, western duds looking
every bit as alive as anyone else on planet Earth. She was always nervous when he
joined her out in public, due to the sheer potential for disaster. But in spite of
her concerns, things generally went well enough as long as no one tried to touch him,
and he remembered to use doors instead of walking through walls. Unfortunately though,
there were a number of people in long-term therapy as a result of his mistakes.

“What in tarnation happened to you?” Zeke asked, convulsing into laughter now that
she was facing him.

For a moment Rory couldn’t figure out what was so hilarious about a dead body, but
then she remembered that she was still covered in mud. “Hobo happened to me,” she
responded crisply.

“And could you please try to focus on the bigger picture here?” She didn’t mind being
the butt of a joke from time to time, but the marshal seemed to take an inordinate
amount of pleasure from her predicaments.

“You smell as ripe as a pigpen, darlin’,” he chuckled, nearly doubled over in his
glee.

“I’m aware of that,” she said evenly. Nothing fueled Zeke’s fire more than her irritation.
“And you’re here because . . . ?”

The marshal’s laughter throttled down to a chuckle.”Well, I was feelin’ rested, so
I popped in to say ‘hello.’ But since you and the mutt weren’t home, I came to see
what you were up to.”

“That’s nice, but you can’t be here now,” she said firmly. “Any minute now there’ll
be cops swarming all over this place.” As if on cue, sirens shattered the air, providing
a soundtrack to her warning. Even if Zeke had been dressed for the twenty-first century,
the police would want to know who he was and why he was there. And if they dragged
him down to headquarters for further questioning, there was a good chance he’d run
out of energy and vanish before their eyes. Rory shut down the “what ifs” before they
could reduce her to a babbling fool. She needed to have her wits about her.

“Of course I can be here,” Zeke said, giving her a wink as he disappeared. “But only
you and the mutt will know it.”

“Fine,” she conceded, since she didn’t have any real choice in the matter. “No comments
out of you either.”

“Not a one.”

“Zip it.”

“Yes, M’am . . . mmmmmmmm.”

There was the sound of squad cars screeching to a stop beyond the corn maze, then
multiple car doors being slammed shut and a smattering of voices. Rory couldn’t make
out what they were saying, but it was no doubt standard police chatter. Some of them
would be roping off the area with yellow, crime scene tape and trying to disperse
whatever crowd had gathered. Others would be making their way into the maze slowly
and with guns drawn, since they couldn’t discount the possibility that a potential
killer or killers might be waiting for them around the next bend. They also needed
to stay together in the maze or risk mistaking a fellow officer for a suspect.

Spurred by the sounds of people coming, Hobo had started barking again, which was
fine with Rory. The racket he was raising was far more effective than her own voice
would be at letting the cops know they were in the maze too. When the police finally
entered the row where she and Hobo waited with the body, Detective Harvey Cirello
was in the lead. Terrific. Rory and he had disliked one another from the first time
they’d met. He was one of the local detectives who’d responded when she’d found Hobo’s
owner dead on the kitchen floor. Cirello looked every bit as dour as he had when she’d
last seen him. If she were to sketch him, she’d place a lemon where his heart should
have been. The two patrolmen with him holstered their guns, but remained at the entrance
to the row like bouncers ready to keep the riff-raff out of an exclusive club.