Never Sorry: A Leigh Koslow Mystery (6 page)

"Do you have a romantic interest in Dr. Tanner?"

The question hit Leigh like a load of bricks. She was tired of being self conscious about her emotions. The fact was, she still wasn't sure how she felt about Tanner, and it certainly wasn't anybody else's business—homicide investigation or no. She had nothing to do with Carmen's death—why should it give perfect strangers the right to know what she was thinking?

"No!" she said forcefully.

Katharine blinked. "Fine. And was Tanner involved with Carmen Koslow?"

"I don't know!" Leigh answered honestly, if a little too vehemently.

The lawyer studied her closely. Leigh made an effort to relax. She knew such people were trained to read body language, and it annoyed the heck out of her. Why couldn't she do all this online?

Katharine typed a few more lines, then closed the lid on her laptop. "Look, Leigh. I'm not accusing you of anything. I'm just trying to figure out where Frank's head is at. He's out there even as we speak searching for a motive. And I can tell you right now what he's thinking. He's thinking love triangle."

Love triangle
? Leigh's face grew hot, but she kept her mouth shut. A few innocent kisses, and she was on trial for bumping off the other woman. And who said Carmen was the other woman, anyway? Who said there even
was
another woman?

"That's all I need from you for now, Leigh," Katharine announced. "Lab results may come in as early as this afternoon. Blood matches, hair, fibers. Fingerprints."

"I'm not worried about that," Leigh said honestly. "I didn't touch anything in that shed except the doorknobs, the light switch, the knife, and the flashlight. And I don't know why the investigators were so fascinated with my car—I parked it yesterday afternoon and haven't touched it since."

"Good." Katharine looked at Leigh pointedly. "Frank may find you today, or he may call and ask you to go back down to the bureau. When he does, you call me immediately." She handed Leigh a business card. "And don't say a word until I get there. Understand?"

Leigh nodded. Frank was definitely
not
getting any more out of her.

***

When Warren's VW delivered Leigh into the main zoo parking lot, it was after 1:30 PM, and Leigh was worried that Tanner had been waiting for her.

"Are you going to take her advice?" Warren repeated, since Leigh wasn't listening to him.

"Yes, yes!" she answered, "But I'm not going to use her any more than necessary. I can't afford it."

"I already told you, it's a no-interest loan."

Leigh squirmed uncomfortably. "I appreciate that, Warren. But at the rate my finances are going, it will take me years to pay you back, and I don't like owing you. I don't like owing anybody. Can you understand?"

"Of course I can," he said gently. "But you can't get cheap on something this important. You're in trouble, and Katharine's the best. You deserve the best."

Evidently, the events of the last twenty four hours were beginning to wear on Leigh's emotions. Her eyes began to water with a vengeance.

She turned her face to the side, and when Warren stopped the car, she jumped out quickly.

"Will you need a ride home?" he asked.

She shook her head. "You've done enough for me already."

"If you change your mind, just call me at the City-County Building."

Leigh nodded, then beat a hasty retreat.

Warren could be so damn nice sometimes.

***

The zoo seemed more crowded than usual for a Thursday, and as Leigh began walking up the long hill to the hospital, she noticed that many of the visitors were heading toward the Asia section—and the tiger run.

Fabulous. The word is out.

She veered off in the opposite direction, taking the long way around goat mountain and the round barn. As she passed the administration building, her stomach gave a faint, healthier rumble. Evidently it remembered that she'd skipped lunch. It also remembered that the vending machines in the employee lounge stocked full-size candy bars.

She opened the door to a smoky, medium-sized room buzzing with conversation. By the time the door closed behind her, there was silence. She looked out nervously at the half-dozen pairs of eyes that were staring at her. It took a second, but she regained her composure.

"Well, I didn't have lunch," she announced to the crowd. "So I know there's no giant piece of broccoli in my teeth. What gives?"

A round of nervous laughter broke the tension. "Hi, Leigh," came a voice from the corner table. "Sorry. It's just—we didn't think you'd be in today."

The voice was that of Lisa Moran, the floater who had helped out at the hospital two days ago. Lisa was a tiny, perky natural blond, the kind of woman other women loved to hate. Leigh was not above such primal feelings, but right now, Lisa was her best candidate for an ally.

Leigh got her candy bar and walked over. "Gotta work," she replied. "You know how it is."

The other three keepers seated at the table nodded. Leigh knew two of them: Tish Holly, the rather frightening six-foot tall, anorectic-looking elephant keeper, and Tonya Rawlings, a thrice-divorced twenty-something who worked in the bird house. The third keeper was a young man with fuzzy red hair who Leigh thought worked with the reptiles.

"So you found her, huh?" The redheaded youth asked. His nametag said "Art Faigen."

Leigh swallowed a large bite of candy bar and nodded. She should have expected an interrogation. The other keepers were bound to be dying of curiosity. If the deceased had been anyone other than Carmen, they might have been grieving too.

"We've all been watching the news reports at lunch," Lisa chattered. "None of them mentioned your name, just that a zoo employee found her, and that parts of her body were in the tiger run."

"You gotta wonder where the rest of her is," Tonya chimed in. "Whoever did it was pretty stupid if they thought the tigers would eat everything."

Lisa nodded solemnly. "No way. Now, the polar bears—maybe. But nobody who worked around here would throw her to the tigers. Not unless they were starved first." 

"Hell, it still could have been anybody!" Tish broke in loudly. Her tone might have sent the uninitiated ducking for cover, but nobody at the table flinched. Tish always sounded angry. "They won't never figure out who did it. Too many people got screwed over by that bitch!"

The other keepers nodded in agreement, and Leigh noted that none of them seemed worried that Carmen's murder had been a random act of violence. They just assumed it was personal.

"She was, like,
with everybody
, wasn't she?" Art asked with a rakish grin.

Lisa and Tonya looked at each other and smirked. "Well, we don't know, Art," Tonya gibed. "
Was
she with
everybody
?"

All three women looked at the redheaded youth, who couldn't be more than twenty, and burst out laughing. He blushed crimson. "Hey, man, I'm not saying nothing."

The candy bar Leigh had wanted so badly lay in her stomach like lead. She hadn't expected Carmen to have been well liked. But the indifference of her coworkers was disconcerting. That, and the other thing they were implying.

She crumpled up her candy wrapper and threw it in the trash. "I've got to get to the hospital," she said casually. "I'm running late."

"Tell Dr. Mike we all said 'hi!'" Lisa called out in a singsong. Leigh walked out and closed the door behind her, not quick enough, unfortunately, to shut out the ensuing laughter.

***

Leigh wondered if a person could get used to this sour stomach, fleeting nausea thing. Didn't pregnant women do it? She trudged the rest of the way up the hill and walked in the door to the hospital. Doris, the full-time vet tech, looked at her disapprovingly. "She's here, Doc!" she called over her shoulder, then turned back to Leigh. "He's been waiting on you to do Ollie. I told him we could get it in this morning, but he said no. I'm off—got a doctor's appointment. Told him that two weeks ago."

Doris, a heavy-set woman in her early fifties, was highly competent and knew it. Unfortunately, she didn't seem to hold Tanner in the same high regard as she had held his now-retired predecessor. She banged out the door without another word.

Tanner appeared in the doorway. He looked at Leigh and smiled lazily. "She loves me, you know," he grinned, nodding towards the exit. "She just doesn't know it."

Leigh took one look at the welcome in his sparkling blue eyes and wanted to launch herself into his arms. But she didn't.

Tanner clapped his hands together with energy. "Well, shall we get going? Ollie's so nasty they can smell him in Cleveland."

Leigh picked up her share of the supplies, and they headed toward the ape house. When it was built in the early sixties, the ape house was state-of-the-art; but now that outdoor gorilla runs and rain forest motifs were commonplace, the rather plain concrete-and-glass exhibit had become passé. A new exhibit was already in the works, but would take several years to complete.

Tanner led Leigh to a locked back door, and knocked. In a few seconds, a greasy-haired, obese man in his thirties swung open the heavy metal door. He motioned for them to come in, then retreated. They filed through the door and into a dark, foul-smelling room with two chairs, a desk, and a small black-and-white television set. Charlie Maxwell, the keeper who had led them in, settled back into one of the chairs. In the other sat Detective Frank.

Leigh's heart stopped for a second, but she willed it to start back up again. She had to quit acting nervous around this man.
She hadn't done anything wrong
.

"Detective Frank," she said nobly, extending her hand, "so nice to see you again."

"Likewise, Miss Koslow," he smiled broadly. He seemed more chipper than he had last night, but still looked as though he needed a blood transfusion. He nodded to the vet. "Dr. Tanner."

Tanner returned the nod. Frank stood up. "Mr. Maxwell and I were just finishing. I'll be speaking with you two again later, I'm sure." He popped the foreboding notebook back into a pocket, smiled again, and exited through the door they had just come in.

Leigh felt her blood pressure drop with the swoosh of the closed door. She wasn't the only one relieved. Charlie Maxwell pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped beads of sweat from his brow. "I ain't never been questioned by police before," he said nervously. "This whole thing gives me the heebee jeebees. Cutting her up like that—damn. Some psycho, gotta be. Don't you think?"

Leigh made a mental note that at least one zoo keeper
did
think Carmen's murder was the act of a nondiscriminating lunatic. She also realized that she didn't agree. It wasn't hard to imagine Carmen making a mortal enemy, even one with macabre tendencies. The idea of a serial killer being in their midst, however, was too disturbing to contemplate.

Tanner looked distinctly uncomfortable. "We'd better get started, Charlie," he said evasively.

The keeper nodded and led them down the narrow corridor that ran behind the exhibits. "I got him by himself in the back. He ain't too happy about it."

Leigh leaned in close to Tanner as they walked. "Why would Frank be questioning
him
?" she whispered.

Tanner looked back at her, and his eyes seemed sad. "He's questioning everybody Carmen worked with. He's been here all morning."

Leigh found that revelation comforting. Carmen had to have enemies—plenty of them. Frank was merely ferreting them out. That was, after all, the logical way to find the real killer. And she hoped he succeeded—soon.

The corridor widened out into a small U-shaped room that surrounded a cage made of steel bars. A door with a sliding gate connected the cage with the public part of the exhibit, a ten-by-twelve-foot concrete run with a front wall of glass. Ollie, the two-hundred-pound patriarch of the zoo's orangutan collection, took one look at Tanner and began to snarl and grunt frantically. He retreated to the far corner of the cage, his eyes shooting daggers at the hated vet.

"That's the trouble with intelligent animals," Tanner said sadly. "They remember you." He loaded the anesthetic into the blow dart and aimed. The orangutan's cries escalated in pitch, and he covered his head with his long arms. "Watch out," Tanner warned Leigh, behind him.

"Why?" she asked playfully. "I thought you had good aim."

"I have great aim," he answered proudly. "But Ollie's not half bad either."

Leigh put herself on alert. Tanner shot the dart with a puff of air, and it landed in the muscle over Ollie's left shoulder. With an ear-piercing screech, the orang pulled out the dart and flung it straight back towards the vet.

Luckily, Tanner and Leigh had both ducked, and the missile collided harmlessly against the wall behind them, its needle bent from the force of the impact. "Get that, would you?" he asked.

Within a few minutes, the indignant orangutan lay sleeping peacefully, and Charlie opened the cage door to let them inside. "I got the extension cords ready, Doc," he offered.