Losing Patients (Animal Instincts Book 4) (8 page)

“Well, I couldn’t hear since I was in the front of the room, but I could hazard a guess. I’ve seen other conversations like this before. They were loud, but they also tried to keep it quiet. My guess would be guy or girl trouble. It smacked of that.”

“Did anything else happen that night? What about the lady with the ferret? Did she do anything in particular?”

Allison paused again. “Not really. She gave me a hard time about not rescuing ferrets. That’s how I remember her. But she wasn’t causing a commotion. She did eat a number of cookies though. I remember that too. It was two strikes against her. Ferrets and the ability to eat what she wanted.”

I thought about the combination of all three of those people there with Hale coming in to drop off the baked goods. What had happened there that at least two people had witnessed and been killed for? I couldn’t possibly imagine why they had seen it, and Allison had not. She’d been in the front of the room, facing everyone. Shouldn’t she have seen anything that happened there?

I said a few words to her and hung up. I still hadn’t heard from Detective Green, but now I knew I needed to tell her something that could impact her investigation. Before I did, I made multiple copies of the attendance list from the May seminar. I wanted to have my own copies even if she confiscated the one I had.

I took a deep breath and called her number. She picked up on the second ring. “What?”

“Hi to you, too,” I said cheerily. “I was hoping to talk to you for a few minutes. I have something that I think you might want to hear.”

“Was it about the little wine fest you had with Dr. Wilson last night? I know all about that. Is that what you wanted to tell me?” The tone was clipped, and I knew she was mad about something.

I was surprised at her anger. She’d been angry with me before, but mostly over incidents where I’d interfered with her investigations or clues to a crime. I’d been walking on eggshells with this case in order not to do that. Still she was angry. Was this jealousy? I’d have to ask someone about this, because anyone feeling emotions for me was outside of my comfort zone. I was supposed to be inauspicious in my manner, not the center of a fight for my affections.

“I was following a lead. She had wine, because I was asking her to work overtime to go through a mountain of papers. It was not fun work.”

“After your last talk with me, TPD decided to talk to her to see if Hale was a patient. She told me that you two had found an attendance sheet from a seminar where everyone was there. The blanket was still on the floor and the wine bottle was in the trash. It wasn’t hard to see what happened.”

“Then you know about the rescue seminar that they all attended?” I was trying to steer the conversation back to safer ground. I wanted to solve this and earn the rest of my fee. I didn’t want this to become an issue for Sheila Green and me.

“Yes, I do. Granted, it is suggestive, but it’s not worth you spending an evening with another woman.”

I ground my teeth, not knowing how to fix this situation. I took a long deep breath and thought of her. She was one of the prettiest women I’d ever met with her light brown hair and silver eyes. I didn’t want to screw this up. “Look, I understand that you’re angry but I never looked on this as anything other than a chance to solve this case. I would have done the same thing if she was three hundred pounds and a man.”

The honesty seemed to lighten her mood some. “Well, she’s not. She’s very pretty. I would have liked it better if she was a fat guy.”

“She stood between me and getting the information that might crack the case. I had to go there and look through the papers myself. I found it in like the third stack that we looked through. Nothing happened, and I don’t want anything to happen either.” I felt a little jittery. I sat down to continue the conversation.

All this emotional stuff took a toll on me. Our family had become experts at non-confrontation after Susan disappeared. That probably explained why my mother had not told me about her own dating life. She knew that I would have questions and disapprove. So instead she had opted to take the easy way out. Now I could understand why she had. This discussion of feelings stuff was hard.

“Thank you for that,” Sheila Green said finally. “It means something. I wish I’d known, because I wouldn’t have been surprised when she told me. I got my feelings hurt. Next time, would you…?” She let the words trail off, but I knew what she meant. She wanted some confirmation that something was here – between us.

“Absolutely. It was just that I’d already called, and you were on a new homicide case. I wasn’t trying to hide anything. I was just trying to not interrupt you at a very busy time.” I wanted to bring the discussion back around to the homicide and return to my comfort zone. It was a bit sad that murder was more calming to me than dating.

“So which one?” she asked. “Givens or Adamson? They each had a motive to kill their spouse. Did they each kill their own? Did they kill each other’s spouse? I don’t want another
Strangers on a Train
bit going on here.”

“What?” I asked, feeling like I’d missed something.

“
Strangers on a Train
was a book, then a Hitchcock movie where two guys killed someone for the other one. Then they had alibis for the killing that mattered to them, and no one would suspect the real killer because there was no motive. Sometimes I swear, I think you live under a rock.”

I groaned, ignoring the comments about my knowledge of pop culture. “There’s a small problem here. Both of them were at the hotel in Lima the night that Mrs. Adamson killed herself. So they both couldn’t have done it.” I followed up by telling Sheila Green how easily I’d left the room without being seen by anyone.

“Then we need to find someone who did? Could the girl from the hotel tell you anything more?”

I thought back to her and what she’d told me. I wondered if she could remember much more about what happened. Adamson had arrived first. He had to since the room was in his name. Therefore, Mrs. Givens would be the person to arrive later, giving her more of a window to kill Mrs. Adamson.

However, Mrs. Adamson had been strung up and hung to emulate suicide. I wasn’t sure how Mrs. Givens, who was a small woman would have been able to do that on her own. So it boiled down to the fact she had more opportunity, but less means. I shared all of this with Sheila.

“That doesn’t mean that one or both of them couldn’t have left in the middle of the night, killed her and then driven back. It’s very unlikely that they’d be seen at 1am or 3am, and no one would call the room either. So we’re stuck with two horses in the race, and no way to tell which one is the winner here,” she added.

“Couldn’t you arrest both of them? Charge them together?” I asked, thinking of all the legal thrillers I had seen when not watching
Strangers on a Train
.

“Not when there’s a perfectly good suspect who could have done it too. It would be reasonable doubt that one or the other of them acted alone as well. It’s a mess. We need to be able to figure out which one did this, and we need to do it soon. The bodies are piling up here.”

“What about their alibis for the two killings that you have? Could it have been either one of those?”

“We haven’t checked. We’re going to have to now. It seems like one or more of them is involved in this. Up until now, we still thought of them as separate cases. Now we have an angle to work on. I wonder what was said there that sparked such bloodshed.”

I cleared my throat. “My thought is that Mr. Givens and Mrs. Adamson talked to each other and found out somehow that their spouses were cheating with each other. That would fit the personal, but quiet talk they had by the cookies.” I explained my call to Allison, reminding Sheila that she’d met Allison before. I hoped that was good protocol for the dating situation I was now in.

“So there were words by the two victims that night and the other two were present. Witnesses?” Sheila Green was back into detecting mode, and I felt much more relaxed in discussing this now.

“It’s possible, but why just those two and what could they have heard?” I wondered if they could have heard anything that would have led to murder. Allison had been in the same room, but nothing had been done to her. Why not?

“I’m going to start asking some questions of the Marksberry family. Maybe someone in the family will remember that meeting. Maybe she said something when she came home from the meeting that will give us a clue to what really happened.”

“Would you let me know?” I asked, unsure of what her response would be. I thought it would be helpful to my own investigation.

“I’ll try. It depends on what I get and when I get it. Maybe you should ask around some more too,” she suggested. “By the way, I got your request for the phone calls for your sister’s phone. I’ll see what I can do. Siever is being a real jerk about this. I’m not sure why he’s so involved still.”

I told her what I’d learned about my mother and Sergeant Siever. She didn’t say anything for a long time. I heard her breathing so I knew that she was still there. Finally, she said, “That would explain why he’s been blocking so much on this. I wanted to bring you more, but he stopped me from getting the information. Now I’m really interested to get that call log. I wonder what’s on it that he doesn’t want you to know.”

I had no idea at all. Maybe I’d just been out of the loop for too long, but I had no clue why her calls would be that important. First my mother and then my brother and now Siever were all keeping this information from me. Granted I’d been the youngest kid in the family, and probably the most likely to have missed any subtle things going on in the household, but I wondered how I could have missed whatever this was.

We finally hung up. Things seemed to be much better than they had been before the call. My investigation was still just that, and not a surreptitious way of dating Dr. Wilson.

I decided that I was going to do some thinking while I walked the dogs. I put the harness on Number 32. Before I could finish fitting Bruno into his, 32 had escaped down the hall. I picked up the harness and found that at some point she had chewed through the side of the harness which had allowed her to escape from it. I thought back to the life jacket that had been cut. Could this have been used in the same manner?

I realized that I was going about this all wrong. If I wanted to learn who did this, then I was wasting my time in looking at alibis. Either person could have cut the life jacket well in advance of the day they went boating. Then they were relieved of having to find a boat and overpowering Givens. They had to just wait until a time when he jumped in the water and found that his life jacket was cut. He’d know in his last minutes that he’d been set up to die. It was as patient of a way of killing someone as putting a poison pill in a bottle of otherwise healthy medicine.

This was going to boil down to motive. I needed to find out who was the person who gained the most from all of this.

I found another harness and put Number 32 into it, so that she wouldn’t escape during our walk. I thought about the best place to start, and I decided to start with the other people at the rescue seminar. Four people from that session had ended up dead. Two in what appeared to be an accident and a suicide, the other two flat out murders.

I found the paper that Dr. Wilson had given me and I began calling the numbers. The first three were not home, but I got lucky with the four-person on the list.  Her name was Blanche Graham and she remembered the evening all too well.

“I should say that I did remember it. I’ve never seen anything like that,” she humphed as she told me the story.

“What exactly were they upset about? Someone told me that they’d heard them discussing something personal in a loud voice, but they didn’t hear the words.” I tried to pretend like I was in the know about everything that had happened there last night. People were more inclined to confirm something that you already knew rather than tell you brand new information. I wasn’t sure why, but it was definitely a trick that worked in my business.

“Several of us did,” she replied. “It wasn’t hard to do. The woman who was there told the man that his wife was having an affair with her husband. It was more soap opera than seminar. Several people in the audience tried to ignore them, but it was hard to do. Those two finally got up and went over to the refreshments. They almost ran into the man who was setting up the refreshments. Given that I think half of the audience just came for the treats, I think there would have been a riot.”

She was a second confirmation that Hale had been at the rescue seminar that night. I wanted as much as I could documented before I turned this over to Green and the TPD.

“What else do you remember? Anything specific would be greatly appreciated.”

She sighed, and there was a silence over the line for a few minutes. “Well, we’d been there a few minutes, and the lady leaned over to the man and asked if he was Mr. So-and-so, sorry I can’t remember the name. He said that he was, and she said that his wife was sleeping with her husband.”

“Wow, that’s quite an announcement during a seminar at the vet’s,” I said, hoping to get her to tell me more.

“Several people turned around and looked. He said something back to her, and then they moved over to where the refreshments were. She told him that they were planning to divorce and marry each other.”

“I wonder why they didn’t go out into the hallway or to get a cup of coffee?” I asked, thinking of the roomful of witnesses they were providing.