The Real MacAw (28 page)

“Maybe,” I said. “But last night when she left the barn, she didn’t look like someone who was making a bold decision to risk her job on a principle. She just looked miserable and scared. Maybe she made a run for it. Or maybe whoever killed Parker didn’t give her the chance.”

The chief studied me for a few moments with a faint frown on his face. Then he pulled out his cell phone and hit a few keys.

“It’s me,” he said. “Can you get the word out to all our officers that I want to talk to Ms. Louise Dietz?… That’s right.… No, just wanted for questioning. For now … Thanks. No, I’m down at the town—I’m down at the county courthouse. I should be back soon.”

He hung up, stuffed the phone into his pocket, and went back to loading the neatly labeled plants. But I thought I could see a little more haste in his manner.

“County courthouse,” I said. “I like that better than town hall.”

“It’s what we should have been calling it all along,” he said. “Blasted Pruitts!”

About ten seconds after we finished loading the last plant, the smallest and most elderly of the garden ladies trotted back down the sidewalk, beaming with delight.

“Finished so soon?” she trilled. “Wonderful!”

The chief and I watched as she dug into a straw purse, fished out an enormous cluster of keys, and hopped nimbly into the high cab of the truck.

“Thanks again!” she called as she drove off, shifting the truck’s gears as effortlessly as if she drove it every day. For all I knew she did.

“I’d better get back to the station,” the chief said. “Thanks for the information on Ms. Dietz.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “The way voter sentiment is running right now, the mayor will probably be recalled long before he has a chance to appoint a puppet.”

“Yes. I understand they already have a couple hundred signatures on the recall petitions,” he said. “And frankly, even if the mayor does hire a puppet in spite of the DA’s efforts, I’ll still be investigating the assault on your grandfather, which definitely happened in the county, not the town. We’ll manage.”

“You bet we will, Chief,” I said.

“Deputy Sheriff, you mean.”

I tried it on for size.

“No,” I said. “You’ll always be the chief to me.”

He smiled, nodded, and left.

Chapter 22

I decided to make my own escape before the garden club ladies returned with more backbreaking work. I headed for the police station parking lot to collect my car.

As I walked, I fretted over what I’d learned—and how very much we still didn’t know. If things were normal, I might have been able to shove the whole thing out of my mind. I’d have reminded myself that the chief, a very smart man and a seasoned homicide investigator, was on the case. And that I had two four-month-old sons at home who needed me a lot more than any investigation did.

But things weren’t normal. How much of his time could the chief spend on the murder case, and how much was he being pulled away to referee squabbles like the one between the mayor and me? For that matter, how much time had he and his officers spent packing up the police station when they needed to be working on their investigation? And next there’d be the unpacking, and then the inefficiencies and delays that always happen when you’re working out of a different space—even a perfect space, which Mother and Dad’s barn most certainly was not. And who knew what would be happening in town tomorrow when the workweek began and the lender found out that instead of paying the interest on its loan, Caerphilly was sticking them with a collection of well-used buildings full of ghastly oil paintings?

If I could think of anything that might help, I’d have done it, even if it got me in trouble with the chief for interfering. But try as I might, I came up empty.

The sun was setting. Part of me wanted to go home and cocoon with the twins. And part of me wanted to stay in town, help with the evacuation, and keep my ears open for stray bits of information that might prove useful.

I decided to compromise. I’d return to the library, do a little bit of packing or maybe only offer to haul a few boxes in my car. Then I’d drop by to pay a brief visit to Grandfather on my way home.

So after phoning home to make sure Timmy and the twins were doing okay with Michael, I headed back to the library.

Around nine in the evening, I was still doggedly packing books when I got a call from Dad.

“Meg? Are you still in town?”

“Unfortunately.” I stood up and winced. “I got caught up in the library packing, but we’re nearly finished.”

“Could you give me a ride home?” he asked. “I’m still helping out at the police station. Your brother could take me, but he has to head out now, and I was rather hoping to stop by the hospital one more time.”

“Of course,” I said. “Want me to pick you up now?”

“No, the chief can drop me off when we finish up here. Your grandfather’s in room 242—I’ll meet you there.”

“Roger.”

I felt a pang of guilt. I’d meant to drop by the hospital hours ago. And for all my complaining about how the twins tied me down, I realized I was missing them terribly after a day spent running around without them.

I hunted out Ms. Ellie and apologized for not staying till the bitter end. Then I drove the few blocks over to the hospital.

It might have been faster to walk. I had to pass by the town hall on my way, and the crowds and traffic were worse than ever. In fact, about halfway through the slow crawl around the town square, I turned off on a side street and began picking my way through the less crowded outskirts of town. Taking the long way round would probably save time, and the longest route I could possibly imagine would only take me twenty or thirty blocks out of my way.

My detour led me past the bus station and nearby, the dark building that held Parker Blair’s furniture store. I found myself thinking how remarkably close it was to the town hall. It would have been easy for Louise, Mayor Pruitt, Terence Mann, or anyone else working late at the town hall to slip away long enough to kill Parker and then return without anyone being the wiser. Given the elevator’s snail-like pace, one of them could easily stretch a supposed trip to the basement vending machine area to fifteen or twenty minutes. And that was assuming there was anyone around keeping close enough tabs that they had to explain their absence.

And the whole bus station area seemed short on both pedestrians and streetlights. Not hard to imagine Parker’s killer skulking along these rather run-down sidewalks without being spotted.

A pity Mayor Pruitt hadn’t included this part of town in the ruinously expensive beautification campaign. Of course, why would he? None of his family owned property here.

I almost hoped the mayor turned out to be the killer. The tabloids would love it—“Town Elects Psycho Killer as Mayor!”—but it would certainly make the recall campaign much easier.

The hospital and its parking lot were reassuringly bright by comparison. I realized my shoulders were tense and hunched. I didn’t normally stress out that much about driving through the bus station area—after all, I’d lived for many years outside Washington, D.C., and driven through neighborhoods that made the worst block in Caerphilly look like a garden spot.

Of course I’d never knowingly driven past a murder site in any of those neighborhoods. Or had to contemplate which of my acquaintances might be the killer.

Then again, maybe my tension wasn’t due to my route but my destination. I felt my shoulders tightening even more as I crunched across the gravel of the parking lot toward the hospital entrance.

“I hate hospitals,” I muttered.

Caerphilly Hospital was better than most, largely because it was smaller than most, and thus a lot less impersonal. They’d been nice to me when the twins were born. But it was still a hospital. I took a deep breath and strode through the entrance.

The front desk was staffed by a woman reading a copy of
People
. I knew her slightly—one of Randall Shiffley’s many cousins. We waved at each other. Since Dad had already told me Grandfather was in room 242, I didn’t have to ask directions. I pushed the elevator call button. She went back to her magazine.

No one rode up with me in the elevator. I stepped out onto the second floor and looked around. No one else in the hall, which was in some kind of night mode—still well lit, but less glaringly bright than it would have been in the daytime. The layout was much the same as it had been on the third floor, where I’d had my brief stay in the maternity ward in December. To my right, the corridor continued a little way. Then, after the nurses’ station, it made an abrupt left turn. To my left, it continued on much farther. Room 242, I realized, would be near the end of the corridor.

Why so far from the nurses’ station? Then I realized that his room would be directly over the ER, and only a short flight of steps or a quick trip in the service elevator away from whoever was on duty there. Maybe that was their usual place to put patients who were no longer on the ICU but still needed watching.

Or perhaps, even unconscious, my grandfather was enough of a troublemaker that the nurses wanted him as far away from them as possible.

I could see a nurse sitting at the station. Her head was bent, and she seemed to be reading something under the light of a desk lamp.

I decided to ask her about Grandfather’s remote location. When I’d taken a few steps toward her, she glanced up and I recognized her. One of the two women Corsicans who’d been so visibly upset by Parker Blair’s death. The well-dressed redheaded one. I smiled and searched my memory for her name as I approached the desk.

“Vivian?”

“Yes?”

“I almost didn’t recognize you in your uniform.” Actually, I had no trouble recognizing her. The red hair was unmistakable, and never had I seen a nurse who made her uniform look more like a Paris original.

Her professional smile froze for a moment, then changed to a more personal one as she obviously recognized me. “Oh, yes. You must be Dr. Langslow’s daughter. Maeve?”

“Meg.”

“The one who’s being so generous about sheltering the animals in your house.”

Clearly I hadn’t made my desire for the animals to leave clear enough, if the Corsicans were still calling me generous.

“You must be here to visit Dr. Blake,” she went on.

“How is he?”

“We were a little concerned for a while, but he regained consciousness about an hour ago and your father says everything’s looking good.”

“That’s wonderful!” Relief washed over me—relief, and just a touch of guilt that I hadn’t come down in time to provide moral support while he was still unconscious.

“By the way,” I added. “Why is he so far away from your station? Is there some reason you want him right over the ER?”

“We had to move him after he regained consciousness,” she said, permitting a slight frown to crease her brow. “He was disturbing the other patients.”

“Disturbing them how?” I had a brief vision of Grandfather howling in pain.

“Well, so far he’s complained about being left to starve, having to eat inedible food, being awakened for his meds, not being given his meds soon enough, the lack of the Animal Planet channel on his TV, the lukewarm water in his carafe, the bad taste of our ice cubes and—well, I don’t know what else.”

I winced.

“And I gather he’s not complaining quietly,” I said.

She shook her head.

“Luckily we’re not full up,” she said. “We were able to move him to the far end of the hall and the other patients up this way, so we can have a couple of empty rooms on either side of the hall as a buffer zone.”

“Sorry about that,” I said. “He’s a pain in the neck sometimes.”

“He’s a great man,” she said. “A noble crusader for the environment and the welfare of animals.”

“Yes,” I said. “But that doesn’t make him any less of a pain in the neck, does it? Can I go and see him now?”

She nodded and returned to her paperwork.

When I got closer to 242, I heard voices inside. I paused in the open doorway. The room’s bathroom door was to my left, off the small entrance hallway, and at the end of the hallway my view into the main part of the room was blocked by a curtain. Not a full-length curtain, though—I could see two pairs of male feet below it, presumably standing at the foot of the bed. One was a pair of glossy black oxfords whose regulation shine had held up well in spite of a long, busy day. The other was a pair of beat-up sneakers that Mother had been trying for years to get Dad to throw away.

“Retrograde amnesia,” Dad was saying. “It’s not uncommon after a blow to the head.”

“What are the chances he’ll eventually remember what happened?” the chief asked.

“Impossible to predict,” Dad said. “Some people completely recover their memories of the events leading up to the injury, some never get any better, and most fall somewhere in between.”

“Can’t you get some kind of forensic evidence from the room?” Grandfather said. I was relieved to hear his voice. Vivian had said he was conscious, but hearing him for myself made it more real. His voice didn’t sound as bold and resonant as usual, but it wasn’t that far from his normal irascible tone.

“Forensic evidence,” the chief echoed. “Like what?”

I stepped closer so I could peer through the curtain. Grandfather was sitting up, looking weak but feisty. Dad and the chief glanced my way. Dad waved. The chief nodded to me and turned back to Grandfather. I took this as permission to enter, so I did.

“I don’t know,” Grandfather said. “Aren’t you modern cops always picking up an eyelash hair and using it to prove it was Professor Plum in the library with the candlestick?”

“Only in the movies.” The chief sounded remarkably patient, considering. “In real life, forensic science has its limits. For example, in a case like this, just about everyone in town has been in that room, either to help with the animals or to gape at them. So even if we thought we knew who hit you, finding trace evidence that he’d been in Meg and Michael’s living room wouldn’t prove anything. If we found whatever he hit you over the head with, that might help, but it’s a long shot. Horace is working on it, though, on the admittedly unlikely chance that your attacker dropped his weapon in the house or yard.”