Рита Браун - The Tail Of The Tip-Off

Harry loved leaving Charlottesville, rolling into the quiet of the countryside. She'd shift her eyes right and left searching for the reflection off a deer's eyes or a raccoon. Seeing that greenish glare, she'd slow down.

Then she reached the intersection of Route 250, which curved left toward Waynesboro and then Staunton. She took the right into Crozet, new subdivisions dotting the way into town. She passed the old food processing plant, currently empty and a cause for sadness. She passed the tidy row of small houses on the north side of the road. A tricky little curve ahead kept her alert. The supermarket was on the right and the old, still-intact train station perched on her left.

When she reached the intersection with the flashy new gas station she turned left. A blessed absence of traffic allowed her to poke along. She could see the lights on in Tracy Raz's apartment. He'd renovated the top floor of the old bank building, which he was buying. Closemouthed, he wouldn't tell anyone what he planned to do with the building but, knowing Tracy, it would be interesting. He hadn't even told Miranda, whose curiosity was reaching a fever pitch.

When she finally pulled into the long driveway to the farm she felt oddly happy. She loved her little part of the world and most of the people in it. She knew people's grandparents and parents, she knew their children, she knew their kith and kin including the ones not worth knowing. She knew their pets and their peculiarities-both the pets' and the people's. She knew who had the oldest walnut tree, the best apple orchard, who put up the best Christmas decorations, who was generous, who was not. She knew who liked the color red and who liked blue, who had money, who didn't, and who lied about what they did have. She knew who could ride and who couldn't, who could shoot and who couldn't. She knew the frailties of ego and body. She'd seen the ambitious rise, the lazy fall, and drink and drugs claim their fair share of souls. She'd watched the ebb and flow of gossip about any one person and had been a victim of it herself, divorce being a spectator sport. She'd seen undeserving people prosper occasionally and the deserving brought low through no fault of their own. She knew chaos was like a chigger. You couldn't see the little blighter but the next thing you knew, there it was under your skin biting the hell out of you.

Murder was chaos. Apart from the immorality of it, it offended her sense of order and decorum. Furthermore, a murder acted like cayenne pepper on her system, it speeded her up. It inflamed her own ego. How dare someone do this? And what really nibbled at her was the fact that whoever did thought they were smarter than other people. She flat-out hated that. She would not be outsmarted.

When she pulled up to the back door, she saw three pairs of eyes staring out from the kitchen window. She heard Tucker barking a welcome.

She sprinted to the door, walked through the screened-in porch, opened the door to the kitchen and a rapturous welcome.

"My little angels."

"Mom!" came the chorus.

"Kids, I'm going to figure out what's going on around here. We'll show 'em."

"She never learns." Tucker's ears drooped for a moment.

"And we do double duty. Her senses are so dull, without us she would have been dead a long time ago," Pewter complained.

"And so would we," Mrs. Murphy forcefully said. "She saved me from a sure death at the SPCA and she took care of you, too, Pewter. She talked Market Shiflett into giving you a home when he found you abandoned under the Dumpster. The fact that you ate him out of his convenience store is another matter. She saved us both. Where she goes, we go."

Pewter, chagrined, replied, "You're absolutely right. One for all and all for one."

Tucker laughed. "You all are so original."

As Tucker had been a gift to Harry from Susan Tucker, she didn't feel saved but she still felt lucky. Harry loved her and Tucker loved Harry, devotedly.

"Aren't we chatty tonight?" Harry picked up Murphy, kissing her forehead, and then she picked up Pewter, kissing her, too.

"Human kisses." Pewter grimaced.

As Pewter wriggled out of Harry's arms, Murphy kissed the human back, her rough tongue making Harry giggle. Then she put Murphy down and knelt to kiss Tucker. Harry loved her animals and, if truth be told, she probably loved them more than people.

As for her declaration that she would figure out what was going on, she might have been a little less cocky if she had been sitting in on Mychelle Burns's autopsy.

26

Cooper, wearing a lab coat, stood beside the corpse as Tom Yancy worked.

Sheriff Shaw had prowled the corridors of the Clam during the game. He didn't have to say why. She knew her boss. He was a good law officer, his methods were laudable, but he also had a sixth sense. Sometimes if he'd just walk around or sit at a crime scene, he'd get what he called "a notion." Through his example, she'd learned to trust her own instincts. There was no shortcut to hard police work but, still, those instincts could put you on the right track.

"No strangulation. No rape." Yancy talked, his face not two inches from Mychelle's neck. "No bruises."

"No struggle?"

"No. The first wound you saw, the one here right under the thoracic cavity didn't kill her. It was this one, not so easily seen." He pointed to a surprisingly clear stab wound. A few drops of blood discolored the entry point right below her heart. "The weapon nicked her heart but it took some time for it to kill her. She had a strong heart."

"No similarity at all to H.H.?"

"No. Not in method. She faced her killer. He or she stabbed her once, then twice. Close. The killer was very close. He used a stiletto or thin-bladed knife. Delivered with force. The internal bleeding was much more severe than the external. As I recall, you said there was blood but not a mess of it."

"Right."

"She wasn't expecting the blow. There are no fingerprints on the back of her neck. If she had tried to flee, the killer would have reached around and held her by the back of the neck to deliver this wound at this angle. If she'd turned away or he'd grabbed an arm, the wound would be at a different angle, flesh would be torn. My educated guess is this blow was a complete surprise delivered by someone she knew well enough to let him or her get very close."

"Stiletto." Cooper thought to herself that this was an odd choice for a weapon, something for opera, not real life or death.

Yancy half-smiled. "Be a lot easier to knock someone off with a butcher knife but a big knife is harder to conceal."

"Anything else I should know?" Cooper asked.

Yancy shrugged. "She had genital herpes."

"Did H.H.?"

"I saw no external sign."

"Do you have any blood left from that autopsy?"

"Down in Richmond. Yes."

"Better run a test for it. It'll show in the blood, won't it?"

"Oh yeah." Yancy exhaled. "I wish we'd get that toxicology report on H.H. soon."

"Amazing what shows in the blood, isn't it?"

"The human body is amazing, how people abuse it and it just keeps ticking. I've cut open people whose livers were like tissue paper. I'd lift them out and they'd disintegrate, I mean come apart between my fingers. And that wasn't what killed the corpse. Makes me wonder."

"Apart from the genital herpes, anything else?"

"She was in good health. The knife pierced the left lung, as you can see here"-he held down the chest cavity where he'd opened her up-"then nicked the heart. With each beat of the heart the nick tore a little bit more. The blood seeped out."

"Was it painful?"

"Yes. You can feel your heart."

"Jesus."

"Hope she believed in Him. Maybe it gave her comfort."

"How strong would you have to be to stab her twice like that?"

"Not weightlifter strong but strong enough."