Lisa Scottoline - Running From The Law

“Don’t forget to look at the ground!” Cam called out. “For evidence!”

So much for secrecy. I looked down but saw only the buzz-cut surface of Mrs. Mateer’s newly shorn lawn. “You do good work, you know that?” I told him.

“What?” He switched the trimmer off and wiped his brow. The steely hair at his receding hairline was so damp it had returned to its original black. “Maybe this’ll be a new career for me.”

“You’d make more at the track.”

“I don’t know, I liked that sit-down mower. I liked it a lot.” Cam had mowed the lawn with a rented Toro while I stayed out of sight. He was the one who went to Mrs. Mateer’s door because she might have recognized me, even in my disguise. “Felt like a buggy ride, that mower.”

“How do you know what a buggy ride feels like, city boy?”

“Are you kidding? I used to ride around with the iceman. We jumped on the back of the wagon to get the chips.”

I took another picture, one of the house in the distance. Then a shot of Cam getting down from the ladder, just for fun.

“Look at it this way, kid,” he said, tugging the ladder. “We had no problem gettin’ work. We got three lawns right off the bat.”

“That’s because we’re doing it for free, Cam. And you have your charms.”

“It’s the stump, it gets ’em every time.” He flapped his empty sleeve. “Theresa married me because of this stump, I swear. Said she felt sorry for me. When we got in a fight, I used to tell her I got phantom pains, then- bing -it was all over.”

I laughed, but I had banked on it. Who wouldn’t accept a free lawn cleanup from a handicapped senior trying to start a new business? Especially when he’d just done the two houses across the street and they looked terrific?

“So what’s the take so far?” he asked.

“You mean the defense evidence?” I reached into my fanny pack for my official evidence-collecting kit, a gold Lancome makeup case. I had plucked each item from the ground with a Revlon tweezers, put it in its own Baggie, and labeled it with a Clinique eye pencil. “Let’s see, Exhibit A is a Fruit Stripe gum wrapper. Exhibit B is a cigarette butt. We have a plastic figurine of Garfield the cat, in mint condition, as Exhibit C. The smart money’s on Garfield, Camille. He could crack this case wide open.”

“The toy is from the Donovan place?”

“Yes.”

He shook his head. “That Donovan kid was a brat. I never saw so many toys in a backyard in my life. And that castle thing with the green top and the sliding board? Did you get a load of that?”

“Little monster.” I had tripped on the tetherball pole. “Turd.”

He laughed. “When I was little I had a truck. A red truck. That was it.”

“The rich get richer, Cam.”

“Ain’t it the truth.”

He climbed back up the ladder and switched the trimmers on again. It buzzed away while I flipped through the thirteen bags I had collected. Each one contained apparent backyard trash, so I resumed my treasure hunt, walking along the hedgeline at the back of Mrs. Mateer’s property, eyes to the ground. At the bottom of the hedges were dry dirt, crumbling brown leaves, and at the end, pricey bark mulch.

The sound of the trimmers grew more and more distant. It took me five minutes to reach the property line, where the hedge abutted the equally vast grounds of Mrs. Mateer’s neighbor. The end of the line. Maybe I was wasting my time. And poor Cam’s, who was sweating away, with one arm, on a ladder. I would burn in hell and it would feel a lot like this.

I thought of trying to call Price, the motorcyclist, again, but I had already left three messages on his machine. I had packed a flip phone in my pants pocket in case he called back. If he didn’t, I’d visit him unannounced after this escapade was over.

I pivoted on my sneakers and saw the carriage house in the distance. It was crisscrossed with yellow police tape, sealed but unguarded. Still, I had to be subtle about my snooping because of the neighbors, and the suburbanites who slowed their Range Rovers to gape at the house where a woman bled to death.

I walked all the way back to Cam, nose to the ground like a bloodhound with a law degree, and retrieved a new blue-enameled Ames rake. Lawns ‘R Us was not only the most fashionable fraud on the Main Line, we were the best-equipped. I avoided thinking about what I was going to do with this stupid equipment later and concentrated on raking the hedge clippings into piles that I rolled toward the carriage house.

I looked everywhere as I raked and bagged any trash I found. An hour later, Cam was almost at the end of the hedgerow bordering the Mateer driveway, and my work shirt was drenched with sweat. On the lawn in front of me lay rolls of hedge clippings, like hoagies on a party tray. I had collected two more gum wrappers, both Doublemint, and yet another cigarette butt. Either it was a trashy backyard or a killer with a major oral fixation.

Picture time. I glanced around to make sure I wasn’t being watched, but everybody had gone to buy more things they didn’t need. I took some shots of the Mateer house from the vantage point of the carriage house, snapping away like a hungry realtor. When I looked through the square window of the Canon, I saw Cam, waving at me with his arm.

What a ham. I snapped the picture he was begging for and shifted the camera to get a better view of the Mateer house. Cam kept waving. It was a cute photo, but I didn’t think it would enlighten the jury. I took another picture of the Mateer house, showing how the view from the kitchen window was partially obstructed by the trees.

“June, June!” I heard Cam shout. It was the alias we’d agreed upon for me, since it was, after all, June. Plus I liked sounding like a centerfold for a change. “June!”

I looked at him over the camera.

Cam was waving again, but something in his movement was odd. Jerky. Either he’d found something or he was having dyspepsia. I looked through the lens and zoomed it up to telephoto so I could see his face. It was streaked with grime, strained and anxious. He was pointing excitedly to the ground at his feet.

Baby, baby. I broke into as subtle a sprint as possible, the camera swinging around my neck. Cam was standing on Mrs. Mateer’s asphalt driveway, where the end of the hedge reached the white stucco of the house.

“Rita, look,” he said, in a hushed tone.

I looked. Nestled among the hedge trimmings, a soggy green tennis ball, and a chubby pink begonia was a knife.

I blinked, but it was still there. I’d handled more than my share of knives in my father’s shop, but I didn’t know what kind of knife it was. It had a dark brown handle and its dull bronze blade was scarred by brownish stains. The stains could have been any kind of goo, but what it looked most like was dried blood. I couldn’t believe my eyes, neither could Cam. We stood over the knife like kids who’d found a garter snake in the backyard. Too afraid to touch, but too amazed to turn away.

“Way to go, Camille,” I said.

“I’m lucky today, kid. Maybe I shoulda gone to the track.”

“Then you would’ve missed playing junior detective.”

“You mean senior detective.” He smiled, then stared down at the knife. “What are you gonna do?”

An excellent question. Should I bag it? Should I call the cops? Can you pluck a knife with an eyebrow tweezers? “Damned if I know. Garfield I can handle, but this?”

“We can’t take it, can we?”

Hmmm. “Let me think about that.” Meantime, I grabbed the camera and fired off shots from every angle. From close up, from far away, I finished an entire roll on the knife alone. And the more I looked at the knife, through the white viewfinder inside the camera lens, the more I believed Cam had found what I hadn’t dared hope we’d find. The knife that killed Patricia Sullivan.