Лори Касс - Borrowed Crime

Cats.

I smiled a Saturday-morning-that-I-didn’t-have-to-work smile, and headed down the stairs after him.

* * *

After a breakfast of slow-cooked oatmeal and orange juice, I decided to go for a walk while the sunshine lasted. “Do you want to come with me?” I asked my aunt.

Aunt Frances turned the page of a cookbook. It was one of many that were scattered around the kitchen table. “I’ll go later,” she said absently. “I want to try a new stuffing recipe for Thanksgiving, and I know I saw something in one of these books last summer. All I have to do is find it.”

I looked at Eddie, who was lying Sphinx-like on the newly installed padded shelf underneath the window. “How about you?” I asked. “A walk would do you good.”

He turned his head and closed his eyes.

“Well, it would,” I said, but all I got in response was a tighter closing of his eyes and another page turn from my aunt. Smiling, I headed for the outside world by my wild lone.

Once there, though, I wasn’t sure I’d made the correct decision. Last night’s wind had been a north one, and it had brought air so cold that it belonged more in January than in November.

I didn’t see another soul out and about on this chilly morning, and I felt almost as if I were the only person on the planet. For a moment I played with that idea, and decided that I would be a gibbering madwoman within a month. Maybe less.

Just as I was starting to feel what that might be like, I heard a distant noise. Mechanical, and in no rhythm whatsoever. It was clearly human in origin, and I felt as pulled to it as a child being led by the Pied Piper.

A few blocks later, I figured out where the noise was coming from: Bryant’s Repair, the garage that helped me take care of the bookmobile. Darren Bryant, mechanic extraordinaire, had willingly done a vast amount of research so he could do whatever maintenance and troubleshooting the vehicle would inevitably need. He’d even developed an e-mail network of bookmobile mechanics across the country. “If one bus has something going on, odds are good another one has already had the same problem,” he’d said.

Darren was a treasure, one of those mechanics who could talk car stuff both to enthusiasts and to people like me, who just wanted their vehicles to function. He was patient and he never used that annoying, condescending voice, and if he hadn’t been a little too old for me and married to a very nice lady who regularly checked historical fiction out of the library, I might have wanted to marry him.

I opened the shop’s door, and the noise, which had been muffled from without, was extremely loud within. Darren was standing on the front bumper of a large white pickup, leaning over the engine with what I now knew was an impact wrench in his hand.

He looked over at me. “Hey, Minnie. What’s up?” He triggered the wrench one last time while I put my fingers in my ears; then he jumped down and put the tool on the bench.

At most, Darren was an inch taller than I was, which had created a bond between us that we would never, ever, discuss. He grabbed a dirty rag and wiped his hands. “Anything wrong with the bookmobile?”

I shook my head. “Just my normal worries about the generator.” From everything I’d heard and read, generator issues were the bane of a bookmobile librarian’s existence. A generator was critical to the bookmobile’s operations, since it powered the lights and heat when the engine wasn’t running.

Darren switched to a slightly cleaner rag. “And I’ll tell you again, there’s nothing to worry about. It’ll be fine.”

I looked at him askance. “Are you saying that just to make me feel better or do you really mean it?”

“Don’t ask questions,” he said, grinning, “unless you really want to know the answer.”

I laughed. “I need to remember that. I’ve run into trouble more than once, because . . .” Something on the other side of the garage caught my attention. I couldn’t remember what I was saying, so I let the sentence trail off.

“Are you okay?” Darren frowned.

“Um, sure,” I said, peering at a crumpled SUV in the far bay of his shop. “Is that Denise Slade’s?” I pointed.

“Got it in yesterday morning. The insurance guy’s coming in to look at it on Monday. They’ll probably total it.” His face went from friendly and cheerful to thoughtful and considering. Maybe even troubled.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

He redirected his considering look from Denise’s SUV to my face. I don’t know what he saw there, but he gave a small nod and said, “If you were anyone else, I wouldn’t say anything, but you were there when Roger was killed.”

That didn’t make sense to me, but maybe things would become clear if he talked a little longer.

“Yeah.” He tossed the rag he was still using on his hands onto the workbench. “I know I don’t need to tell you to keep quiet about this, so I won’t. Denise’s SUV over there? I was poking around at it, seeing how much damage there was to the front end, and I think . . .” He stopped, sighed, and shook his head. “I think someone intentionally sliced the radiator hose. That’s why the engine seized up—I’m sure of it.”

The world around me tilted. I wanted to grab onto something, anything, to help steady me, but there was nothing that wasn’t scary, expensive, greasy, or all three, so instead I pulled in a deep breath and waited for the tilting to stop. “Did you tell the sheriff’s office?”

Darren laughed shortly. “I’m not telling those yahoos anything I don’t have to. I talked to Scott from the Chilson Police.”

I looked at him curiously. “You have a problem with the sheriff?”

It was the wrong question. He immediately launched into a long story involving an open trailer, a pile of metal he was hauling to the scrap yard, and an overeager deputy who ticketed him not only for an unsecured load, but also for driving too fast for conditions. And for having expired plates.

Darren, red-faced, was waving his arms and saying that his birthday wasn’t until the end of the month, and why should he pay for registration any earlier than he had to? But I wondered how quickly Detective Inwood would learn about the cut in the radiator hose.

Because he needed to know.

He needed to know that Roger had been murdered, that Denise had been the intended victim all along, and that Denise’s life was in danger.

* * *

I burst into the sheriff’s office. “I know it’s Saturday,” I said breathlessly, “but is there any chance that either Detective Inwood or Deputy Wolverson are here?”

The heavyset woman behind the counter nodded. “Both. You want to talk to them?”

I nodded, gave her my name, and I was soon admitted to the back, into the interview room.

A short time later, the detective came in. “Ms. Hamilton, what brings you to see us on a Saturday morning?”

I looked at him suspiciously. “You’re smiling.”

“My wife tells me I should do it more often,” he said, sitting at the table.

“She’s right.” His face transformed completely when he smiled. And in a good way. He didn’t look nearly the dour everyone-is-guilty-of-something cop when he did. “Why are you so happy about being at work on a Saturday morning?”

His smile went even wider. “You’ll be glad to know that we have a solid lead on the person responsible for Roger Slade’s death.”

“You . . . do?”

“No arrest, but with the help of the area’s conservation officer, we have a very good idea about what happened out there.”

“You do?”

Detective Inwood’s smile slipped a bit. “Don’t look so surprised, Ms. Hamilton. We may not solve crimes in an hour, but we actually do know what we’re doing.”