Рита Браун - The Litter Of The Law

“Doesn’t for us either.” Harry stopped. “Except now that I am officially middle-aged, I pray the young will be a little wild, take some crazy chances, think the unthinkable.”

He stood up. “You still do. Every now and then, I really have no idea what’s going on upstairs.” He tapped his head with his forefinger.

“He’s right,” Pewter, in her kitchen bed, remarked to Mrs. Murphy, who sprawled in Tucker’s bed as the dog followed Fair out of the room.

“Poor Fair.” Mrs. Murphy ignored Pewt’s comment about Harry—not because it would start an argument, but because she knew it was true.

“Tucker will cheer him up,” said Pewter.

“We could, too,” said the tiger cat. “We could take our catnip mouse in the bedroom and throw it around. Fair always laughs when we do that.”

Pewter was firm. “I’m not getting out of this bed unless food is involved.”

“Right.” Mrs. Murphy smiled at her friend.

Harry slid the two small Cornish hens into the oven. She’d made a salad earlier. Neither she nor Fair ate heavy rich foods and this would be a good supper for them. Also, Harry lacked the time to prepare complicated meals.

The wall phone rang.

She wiped her hands on a dish towel and picked it up. “Haristeen.”

“Cooper.”

“Hey, if you haven’t eaten supper, come on back. I’ll have plenty.”

“Date tonight.”

“You stopped by here and you didn’t tell me that? I am wounded, deeply wounded,” Harry teased.

“Forgot. It’s a first date. We’ll see. I’m just glad I have a night off. I’ve worked the last three weekends.”

“The county really needs to hire more people, don’t they?”

“No money. I called to tell you, since you and Fair found him: We have an ID on the scarecrow.”

“That was fast.”

“The ring really helped, and we have super people sitting behind those computers and making calls. I don’t think people in the county have any idea how good their sheriff’s department really is.”

“It’s kind of like making a will. No one thinks about it until they have to, I guess. So?”

“Joshua Hill, graduated from Tech in 1998. Accounting major. Worked for a large firm in Richmond for four years, then hung out his own shingle in Farmville, where he quickly built up a large clientele. Unmarried. Hobbies: fly-fishing, country music concerts.”

“How did you get so much information so quickly?”

“Caitlin did,” said Coop, referring to one of the criminologists on the staff, a fantastic researcher. “She went online, got the 1998 yearbook, and started looking. Even though our victim was torn up, we had a decent description of height, weight, approximate age, and hair color, and she narrowed it down to a few possibilities. Then she started calling places where the potential matchups worked. Josh didn’t come into his office on Friday, nor did he call, which his assistant found odd but she wasn’t overly concerned. I’m going down there Tuesday. Haven’t seen Farmville in a long time, and I hear Longwood University has grown. It’s a pretty school.”

“Yes, it is.” Harry paused. “Accountants don’t get themselves murdered too often, do they?”

“No. This is a curious case.”

“Who’s the date?” Harry just had to know.

“Barry Betz, new batting coach for UVA. First year here. This guy has the sweetest smile. He lights up a room.”

“Hope it’s fun. I’d go out with him just because of his name.” Harry smiled. “Thanks for calling me.”

Fair walked in, clean, wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants. When he sat down, she told him about Josh, the dead accountant.

“Maybe he was cooking the books,” said Fair, after devouring half of the Cornish hen Harry had cooked for dinner.

“If that’s a motive, wouldn’t there be so many more dead people in America, especially in certain professions and industries?” she remarked, gazing at him across the table.

“You’ve got a point there.” Fair was feeling better and so was Tucker, wedged between his slippered feet.

“Sometimes I think about why people commit crimes, not the impulsive ones but the premeditated kind,” Harry said. “I bet once you’re free from society’s rules or an ideology, anything is possible. The world is your oyster.”

“Never thought of it that way.” He stopped for a second. “This hen is wonderful.”

“Oh, thanks. Miranda’s recipe.” Harry knew any recipe from Miranda would be delicious. “It’s kind of like offense and defense. The criminal is the offense, so that split-second advantage is his. He knows what he will do. The law has to react.”

She neglected to add that the law could only react if they knew what was going on.

“I ought to arrest you, throw the book at you!” Cooper shouted at Harry two days later, on the street outside Joshua Hill’s office in Farmville.

“For what?”

“Stalking?”

“I came to shop. You have no grounds for suspicion.”

The attractive police officer shook her head. “Harry, how can you look in the mirror after a lie like that?”

“Farmville is famous for its furniture warehouses. I especially like Number 9, so named since all the warehouses had numbers on the outside, easy to see. And come on, Coop, you know I’ve been wanting to get down here for months. It’s been one thing after another.”

Calmed down a bit, Cooper replied, “You didn’t have to come today. You want to know what I found out at Hill’s office, and it was a big zero.”

“His assistant wouldn’t talk?”

“No.” The lean woman put her elbows on the hood of her unmarked car, called a slicktop. “She kind of just answers the phone. She has a million pictures of her grandchildren on her desk. It’s fair to say she isn’t overly involved in her work.”

“But she did note that her boss hadn’t called in?”

“Yes, but she also said a lot of times he worked at home, or he called on clients at their offices.”

“Did she give you a client list?”

“Harry!”

“Hey, you wouldn’t be on this case if I hadn’t found the body.” Though she knew this wasn’t one hundred percent true, Harry still pressed her point. “And murder is a lot more exciting than picking up drunk frat boys who then puke all over the back of your squad car.”

“No drunk has ever puked in my car.”

“Now who’s the liar?”

Cooper took out her service revolver. “I put this to their temple, and tell them if they throw up in my car, I will blow their brains out.”

“I can see how that might work.”

“One time,” the cop mused, “I had to pull over ’cause a guy pretended he was going to be sick, and then he ran into the woods.”

“What did you do?”

“Followed until he tripped and fell. It was pitch-black. Then he threw up. Drunks are truly disgusting.”

“Mmm. Anything of interest in Hill’s office?”

“You enter into a small waiting room. There are a few nature prints, both there and in his office. His desk didn’t have a single paper on it. I’ll get the Prince Edward County Sheriff’s Office to go over it all.” Cooper gave out just enough information to tease Harry.

“You’d think an accountant would have piles of papers on his desk,” said Harry.

“Or some, anyway,” Coop agreed. “Though clients send so much stuff through email.”

“Was his computer in the office?”

“Yes. Obviously, I can’t take it without jumping through all the proper legal hoops, but I’ve already set that in motion. A forensic accountant could find out if Hill was doing anything suspicious. Anything you put into a computer can be dug out. Best to not put it there in the first place. Of course, I don’t know that this murder has anything to do with numbers. Truth is, I don’t know what this murder is about at all. Usually, I get a hunch.”