One Hoof In The Grave [Carriage Driving 02] (32 page)

“Sure, you do. Raleigh was all yours until you called me in.”

“Well, this has got to be related. We know Dr. Gwen spent the night before Raleigh died at the Tollivers’ place working on a colic case. She must have seen something as she was leaving—maybe your girlfriend playing pin the tail on the donkey with Giles Raleigh. And tried a little blackmail. People always think they’re too smart for a blackmailer to turn the tables.”

“Merry’s not my girlfriend, and she doesn’t have enough money to pay blackmail.”

“She have an alibi for this morning? You, maybe?” Stan raised his colorless eyebrow.

“How many times do I have to tell you, I am not sleeping with her.”

“Why not? I would, if I didn’t know my wife would kill my ass.”

“Merry wouldn’t have you.”

Now both eyebrows went up. “Turned you down? The great Geoff Wheeler?”

“Moving right along,” Geoff said, “What about Troy? Is he in jail?”

“Mrs. Harris’s lawyer already arranged bail for him.” He shook his head. “That Harris woman’s lawyer wouldn’t let him say so much as his name. She musta’ pulled strings, because we barely had time to fingerprint him before here comes some hotshot attorney from Dahlonega with a bail slip from some tame judge. That lawyer drove Troy over to the church to pick up his truck.”

Geoff looked down at Gwen’s body. It seemed even smaller in death. “How long would you guess she’s been dead?”

“Not long. Early this morning or late last night. It was chilly last night, which would have speeded up rigor, but not by much.”

Geoff followed him over to one of the horse paddocks and leaned on the fence.

“Whew. Better,” Stan said. “I guess you’re used to the smell. I’m not.”

“You don’t ever get used to it,” Geoff said.

“Who’s got enough money to make blackmail worth Gwen’s while?”

“I’ve had one of our people in Atlanta checking on finances. Catherine Harris is comfortable, but not rich, and Troy doesn’t have any money to amount to anything. Morgan’s family is loaded. To say they don’t get along is like saying Al Qaida doesn’t get along with the CIA, but in a pinch, she’s still their baby girl. She’s definitely still Troy’s.”

“Yeah. He’d kill for her, I guess. Dumbass,” Stan said. “Need to check on his whereabouts. Brock’s too, I guess. He’s probably still at the Raleigh’s, but it would be nice to know he’s been there all night.”

“Check on Morgan and Catherine Harris too,” Geoff said.

“What are you going to do?” Stan asked.

“After I leave here, I’m going to check on Merry Abbott. I’m hoping this time she has an air-tight alibi.”

Half an hour later, Geoff and Stan watched the EMTs load Gwen’s body into their van and drive off. No sirens. No urgency.

Stan had sent the receptionist home in a squad car with a policewoman. Geoff had expected hysterics, but she was one stop short of catatonic. The woman could barely put one foot in front of the other. Stan wouldn’t get anything out of her for hours, maybe for days.

The office itself wasn’t precisely the crime scene, but Stan and Geoff agreed that until they knew for certain Gwen hadn’t been killed inside the clinic, they could consider the whole place a crime scene, and thus, they didn’t need a warrant. The minute he’d gotten the receptionist out, Stan sent a couple of officers in to search the office, and another officer to secure Gwen’s house. She lived in a fifties bungalow less than a mile from the clinic.

“We’ll need a search warrant for the house,” Stan said. “It would help to be able to specify what we’re looking for.”

“Money,” Geoff said. “Evidence of where she got it.”

Inside the office, two officers were carefully going over the storeroom.

“There’s Ketamine out the wazoo,” a young officer who might have been Stan’s younger clone said. “Lot of stuff would sell well on the street in Atlanta.”

“If it’s still here, she probably wasn’t killed in a theft,” Stan said. “I’ll get one of my people over here with the receptionist after she comes out of her shock. They can match inventory to prescriptions and suppliers.”

Geoff wasn’t needed inside, so he went back to the hay shed. The center portion of the shed between the alfalfa and grass hay had been empty until the techs tossed the bales of alfalfa away from Gwen’s body. Stan’s officers hadn’t moved the bales of grass hay at the other end of the shed.

He didn’t know much about horses, but he knew Merry seldom fed her horses alfalfa. She said it was too rich, and could cause digestive problems. It was also much more expensive than grass hay.

Maybe Gwen felt it was worth taking the chance to put weight on an underweight animal.

In moving the alfalfa into the center of the shed, the techs had upended several of the bales so that the bottom bales were now on top of the pile. “Man, these things are heavy,” one young officer said as he dug his fingers under the baling wire and hefted.

A puff of dust arose from beneath his fingers. He began to cough.

Geoff took a look at the cloud, grabbed the young man and dragged him into the air. “Get out of there, all of you,” he called.

Still coughing, the man said, “I’m allergic to dust. I’m okay.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Whatever that is, it’s not dust.” He could think of a dozen powders from plain old baking powder to anthrax that might be in that bale. “I need a respirator and a bunny suit,” Geoff said.

Five minutes later, wearing a fresh bunny suit and a respirator, Geoff dug his pocketknife into the bale of alfalfa, dropped a dab of white powder into one of the test tubes from Stan’s squad car and handed it over to the officer. He added the test agent, shook the tube, watched it turn indigo and whispered, “Oh, man.”

“Get Stan,” Geoff said.

An hour later the dismembered bales of alfalfa lay strewn around the shed. Of the twenty-two bales, thirteen contained neatly wrapped kilos of cocaine that now sat on a blue tarpaulin. “Well, now we know how she paid for that fancy equipment,” Stan said. “Not easy carving hidey-holes in alfalfa, then resealing them so they don’t look like anybody’s tampered with ‘em,”

“Wouldn’t work with grass hay,” Stan said. “The bales are too loose. Alfalfa has tough stems, but it packs solid.”

“I wonder where she buys her alfalfa,” the cop said.

“I can make a guess,” Geoff said. “She wouldn’t need a whole load. If Giles Raleigh fed alfalfa, she could have bought bales from him.”

“And Brock,” Stan said with satisfaction.

Geoff called Merry on his cell. “Where do you buy alfalfa?”

“I don’t. Why?”

“Where would you if you did?”

“Probably Texas or Oklahoma. Maybe Florida. It’s cheaper if you bring back a big trailer load and sell parts of it to other people, but you have to watch for blister beetles. One beetle can kill a horse. Why?”

“Tell you later. Where are you?”

“Where would I be? At the farm, of course.”

Did she sound defensive? That usually meant she’d been up to something he didn’t want to know about.

“How long have you been there? What are you doing?”

“I’ve been here all morning, and now I’m putting Heinzie to. What is this?”

“Peggy with you?”

“She and Dick just got here. They brought lunch.”

“Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be there in an hour.” He hung up on her protestations.

“Alibi?” Stan asked.

“Probably not.”

“Can I trust you to find out, or do I have come over there myself to question her?”

“You don’t honestly think Merry had anything to do with this, do you?” Geoff asked. “Looks pretty straightforward to me. Brock and Gwen had a falling out at the viewing. I’d guess it had something to do with the coke.”

“So why didn’t he take his merchandise when he happened to drop by to kill her?”

“He’d need time to cut it out of the hay. He wouldn‘t want the receptionist catching him,” Geoff said. “He probably plans to come back tonight after everyone’s gone. Normally we’d have released the crime scene by then. It’s sheer dumb luck the tech discovered the cocaine.”

“Yeah. I’d like to keep a lid on this until I get my hands on him,” Stan said. “You want to talk to the DEA?”

“No way. You take the credit,” Geoff said.

“How sure are we it’s Brock? Say sixty per cent?”

“My gut says Brock will turn up. If by any chance she wasn’t in business with Brock, then whoever her partner is should come to take back his dope the minute he finds out she’s dead and we’ve left the scene. He can’t take a chance we’ll find his stash.”

Stan’s elation was catching. His whole team was walking around wearing happy grins and giving one another fist bumps.

Giving Stan the drug bust glory would make him Geoff’s friend for life. And keep him off Merry’s back.

“What the hell does that mean?”

So I told him about my trek onto the governor’s property. He was not happy about it.

“Damn.” He flipped open his cell phone, held up a hand to shut me up and said, “Hey, Stan, Brock’s got an alibi of sorts. If TOD is early enough, he might have done it.” He listened, lowered the phone and said to me, “Go
away
.”

I slammed the door after me and went to find Peggy and Dick.

We had the Halflingers washed down and back in the pasture before Geoff came out.

“I have to go,” he said.

“What is going on?” Peggy asked.

“Tell you tonight. How about I buy you all dinner?”

“You don’t . . .”

“Yeah, I do.” He took my hand and pulled me out to the parking lot, at which point he leaned across and kissed me, hard. “You could have gotten shot as a trespasser. That would have pissed me off.”

“Thanks for your concern.”

“You saved us a lot of trouble. Try to stay out of it yourself.”

He left me staring after him as he drove off much too fast down the driveway. He’d be lucky if he didn’t go over the cliff. I wandered back into the stable in a funk. Just when I was sure the man was as cold as a flounder, he did something that—I mean, that was not a
friendly
kiss. He must be relaxing his rules about messing with anybody involved in one of his cases. Good. I could build on that.