Лори Касс - Wrong Side Of The Paw

“But . . .” I didn’t know where to go with my question so I just let it hang there.

“I know,” Leese said. “How did someone with a broken neck get into the back of the truck? Especially considering how his neck was broken.”

“What do you mean?”

Leese shuddered. “His neck wasn’t the only thing broken. One scapula, a collarbone. The pelvis. Metatarsals and metacarpals. And his skull was fractured.”

I closed my eyes briefly. “What could have caused all that?”

“A fall,” Leese said quietly. “That was the report’s conclusion anyway. And from quite a height, at least thirty feet. Other factors are involved, too. The surface he fell onto, for one. They’ll be analyzing his clothes and skin.”

Of course they would. Maybe they’d find that Lacombe had fallen onto landscaping dirt specially ordered from a South American greenhouse that grew only exotic orchids, orchids that only one person in all of Michigan cultivated. Or maybe they’d find he’d fallen onto asphalt of the kind that paved every road and driveway in this part of the state because there was only one asphalt plant.

Questions bubbled up inside me. Were they trying to build a case against Leese? Would they wait for the forensics evidence to come in? From Ash, I knew that would take days to weeks, not the hours or minutes as shown on television. Would they start talking to her neighbors? Talking to her friends? To her clients?

Leese shifted. “So did he fall, or was he pushed? And how did he end up in the back of that truck?” She shook her head. “I’m a start-up business. Brand new. I can advertise all I want but what’s going to grow my practice is personal recommendations. Word of mouth.”

She toyed with the corner of the book. “In the last two days, I’ve lost two clients. They didn’t say why, but I believe it’s the suspicion that I killed my dad. The police came with a search warrant and went through my house, and—” She eyed me. “You hadn’t heard that, had you?”

“No.” And I didn’t like it one bit. That could only mean they were still considering Leese as a serious suspect.

“As far as I know, they didn’t find anything incriminating.” She gave a half laugh. “But the word is getting around. If I lose more clients, if I can’t get any more, I’m done. I can work without income for another few months, but I have to get more clients by the end of the year. I . . .”

Her voice cracked. She stopped talking and looked at me, her panic tamped down, but still visible in the taut lines around her eyes. “What am I going to do?” she whispered.

“Wrong question,” I said.

She blinked. “What?”

“The question,” I told her, “is what are we going to do. Because I’m going to help you.”

“You . . . are?”

“Absolutely. And I know exactly how to do it.”

Chapter 6

A little more than two hours later, I was done with work—leaving at five o’clock on the dot for the first time since I’d been hired—and was pulling into Leese’s driveway, the last one on the road before the asphalt turned into a dirt track.

Made of fieldstone, Leese’s house was snugged underneath a set of maple trees whose leaves were just starting to blossom into crimson. It had diamond-paned windows, a wide front porch, and a set of adorable eyebrow windows on the second floor.

She’d put a tasteful sign out front announcing the presence of LACOMBE LAW, SPECIALIZING IN ELDER AND COTTAGE LAW, and put an identical but smaller sign on the front door, clearly indicating where clients should enter.

As she’d instructed, I didn’t go in that way, but instead went around to the back door, which was right at ground level. I knocked a few times, opened the door, again as instructed, and went inside and up the few stairs to the kitchen.

One glance around the cream-colored room was enough to tell me that Leese was far more interested in cooking than I could ever imagine being. In addition to the shelves full of cookbooks, the knife block was fully occupied with actual knives, and there were countertop appliances whose functions I wasn’t completely sure about. There was also a plugged-in Crock-Pot issuing tantalizing smells.

Leese noticed my sniff. “Clam chowder,” she said. “For when you’re done. You didn’t eat already, did you?”

I shook my head, since no rational adult would consider a can of soda and a granola bar anything close to a meal. “It smells great.”

“Good. Gives you something to look forward to.” She paused, then said, “Good luck, I guess.”

The warm weather was holding, so there was no need to zip my coat as I walked down the driveway. I went out to the road and walked along the shoulder—the closest sidewalk was back in Chilson, about twenty miles away—and a few minutes later arrived at the driveway of Leese’s closest neighbor.

It was a ranch house with vinyl siding, clipped foundation hedges, and a recently sealed asphalt drive. The landscaping was so tidily maintained that not a single leaf lay on the broad expanse of lawn. Not a shred of personality showed and it made me a little twitchy.

Earlier, I’d asked Leese if she knew them, and she’d said their names were Alice and Bill Wattling. “We wave at each other when I drive past,” she’d said. “They seem nice enough.”

My idea to help Leese had been to talk to her neighbors, to see if any of them had noticed any vehicles stopping by her house at the time her father’s body must have been placed in the truck. This was a little difficult because we didn’t know the exact time we were talking about, but Leese had narrowed it down.

“There was nothing under the tarp on Wednesday night,” she’d said at the library, “because I’d gone grocery shopping and put some of the heavy stuff in the back. I would have noticed if . . . you know. And Thursday was the bookmobile day.”

All of which meant that Dale’s body had been moved between the time Leese had arrived home from the grocery store and when she’d left for the bookmobile on Thursday afternoon. She’d finished her grocery shopping just before the store closed at 10 p.m. and had left for the bookmobile after a post-lunch phone call with a prospective client.

That all worked out to about sixteen hours the truck was out in the driveway, unattended. Since it was unlikely anyone would have done the deed in broad daylight, what we were after was any information about Wednesday night.

Or early Thursday morning, I amended in my head, because if I’d been trying to sneak around, I’d do it at 3 a.m., a time far too late for most people to be up and too early for people working the night shift to be home.

Other people lived on the street, but the Wattlings were by far the closest. I trod up the prefabricated concrete steps and I pushed the rectangular doorbell button, lit from inside by a slightly creepy orange glow.

Inside, a low electronic chime gonged hollowly. Footsteps approached and the door swung open. “Alice said she saw someone coming up,” said the man I assumed was Bill Wattling. “Whatever you’re selling, we’re not buying.”

This was the neighbor who seemed nice? He was fifty-ish, with cropped graying hair and a mustache that badly needed a trim. The dress pants and plaid buttoned shirt he wore indicated some sort of professional job.

“Hi,” I said, being friendly, but not friendly enough to hold out my hand. “I’m Minnie Hamilton, assistant director of the Chilson Library,” I told him, figuring it never hurt to establish myself as a person worthy of trust, and if you couldn’t trust a librarian, the world might as well end. “I’m a friend of your neighbor, Leese, and I’m guessing you’ve already heard about her father.”