Hooked on Ewe (16 page)

Right then, the inspector arrived.

“What happened here?” he said, taking in the scene.

“She attacked me with pepper spray,” Kirstine said, still blind as a bat, but her tongue wagged away as sharp as ever. “I want her arrested!”

“Did ye have cause tae use the spray?” the inspector said to me, his face unreadable, his expression neutral.

“I have a warrant card,” I told him as though that explained everything.

“That’s not enough. Ye have tae have cause.”

“And I have cause. She tried to attack me with that.” I gestured toward the knitting needle on the ground.

“I did not,” Kirstine said.

“She most certainly might have.”

“That’s preposterous.”

We went back and forth that way for a few minutes, talking over each other, accusing, denying, until the inspector had had enough and ordered us to be quiet.

I got in a final word or two. “Look inside her trunk . . . uh . . . I mean boot,” I said.

With a questioning expression, the inspector did as I asked.

“Packages addressed fer posting,” he announced, instantly on the alert.

“Yarn club member kits,” I informed him. “The ones Kirstine claimed she’d mailed.”

“Is what Special Constable Elliott says true?” Jamieson practically roared, almost losing his normal reserve.

“I’m in pain,” she whined. “Please do something. Help me.”

“I’ll be helpin’ ye when ye answer my question.”

So the truth finally came out.

“I didn’t send them out because Vicki interfered with
the trials when she should have been holding off,” Kirstine admitted. “I was going to post them eventually, once the event was behind us.”

“Ye must have had some idea that they were important tae the investigation?”

“I didn’t know! And what about her, using excessive force?”

I managed not to roll my eyeballs. “Can I have a word with Kirstine in private?” I asked, realizing that she and I could go at each other forever without either of us winning. In the end, we both could lose.

“If ye can manage tae be civil tae each other,” he said. “I’ll count the shipping boxes in the meantime, and I’ll keep an eye on ye.”

“Listen to me,” I hissed at Kirstine while he investigated, “those kits you’ve been hiding here caused us a whole lot of extra trouble. I could push to have
you
arrested. But we both made mistakes. Let’s try to learn from them. Nobody needs to go to jail.”

Kirstine looked beaten down. That might not last long, but for now, she was considering my olive branch. Finally she said, “You’ll see that nothing happens to me?”

“I’ll try, but only if you overlook the fact that I pepper sprayed you. Remember, you attacked first.”

Kirstine opened her mouth to argue, thought better of it, and nodded. “See what you can do.”

So I went over and had words with the inspector.

“I wasn’t going tae cite her anyhow,” he said, happy to agree. But he still gave her a verbal reprimand and a caution regarding her cooperation in the future. Whether it happened to be he, himself, asking the questions or one of
his special constables, he said we all needed to, as he put it, “pull together.”

Then he took Kirstine’s car keys from me and led her into the shop. I saw John coming from the direction of one of the far fields. He hardly glanced my way before disappearing inside.

Several minutes later, the inspector came out and started in on me, as I’d anticipated, “Another situation like this one, and I’ll have tae take away the pepper spray.”

I nodded my understanding, trying to hold my tongue and take the dressing down like a professional.

“Ye’re tae use it in life-threatening situations only,” he continued. “And this dinnae qualify, at least not in my mind.”

I picked up the knitting needle and held it out, unable to keep quiet any longer. “If an enraged woman clutching this and refusing to back off after multiple verbal warnings doesn’t warrant pepper spray, who does? Should I have stood there without defending myself while she stabbed me?”

He pondered that, and wasn’t nearly as gruff when he answered. “She wouldnae used it. Most likely.”

“That’s certainly reassuring.”

“Cannae ye see it from her point o’ view?”

I saw a point, all right. One that could have been jabbed into my body. Or my eye. Or in my ear to puncture my brain like I’d seen on television. Or . . . the possibilities were endless and grotesque, and not one of them was to my liking.

“Ye were snooping through her auto,” he said. “Without the proper documents, without any legally binding cause, and ye stole her keys from inside her personal belongings besides. You woulda reacted the same as she did if the
situation were reversed. What ye should have done was ring me in advance.”

He was right, of course. I’d overstepped. But it had felt
so good
at the time.

“Ye’re a wee bit on the straightforward side, I can’t help noticing that.”

“Beating around the bush isn’t my style,” I admitted.

“It’s yer American upbringing,” he said, not quite as stern as before, blaming my impetuousness on my nationality. Did I even detect a bit of playfulness in his tone? “Ye’re direct. It takes some getting used tae.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.” I smiled before saying, “Should I call off Sean? He’s searching for these kits all across the countryside. Should we let him know we found them?”

“Ha! And spoil my day? Are ye mad, woman? Or was that a threat?”

But he already had his mobile phone to his ear, informing Sean of the newest development and giving him his next order. “Go over tae Senga Hill’s home and see if ye can find a sample o’ those sleeping pills the doc’s been givin’ his patients. Senga claims she threw them in the rubbish outside her apartment. See if she’s tellin’ the truth.”

When he returned the phone to his pocket, he addressed me. “That’ll keep him busy fer a time.”

“I already went through her garbage and didn’t find them,” I reminded him.

“Oh well,” he said, chuckling. “Best tae double-check, don’t ye agree?”

Vicki stared at the mound of shipping boxes in the back of the inspector’s police car, her face clouding over as the truth dawned. “Kirstine never sent them?” she said. Vicki’s feelings were hurt, and not for the first time, either. And probably not for the last.

“I found them in the trunk of her car,” I said, placing a hand on Vicki’s shoulder, a small token of my understanding of the tense situation between the two half siblings.

The inspector stood to the side and said gently, “There’s good that came out o’ this. Our Sean won’t have tae drive far and wide tae recover them.”

She nodded, and I could tell that she was doing her best to shake off her emotional upset, realizing that Kirstine’s treachery was actually a valuable shortcut in our hunt for the murder weapon. And it didn’t hurt that the inspector mentioned the benefit to Sean as well.

“Well, I doubt that we’ll find any skeins missing from
this lot,” he said, indicating the recent arrivals. “But we best be as thorough as we can and make a good showing o’ it.”

Together the three of us opened each package and examined the contents. We didn’t expect to find anything out of place, but it was a necessary task.

“All accounted fer,” the inspector said when we finished.

I placed Charlotte and Senga’s kits in with the others.

“Ye have handled yerself as a right professional,” Jamieson said to me. Was that a hint of a smile? “Don’t look so surprised, Eden. Ye’ve collected the majority o’ the kits in record time. With these, we’ve accounted fer nearly all the kits. Whose are still missing?”

“Only Andrea Lindsey’s and Harry Taggart’s sister’s,” I told him.

I heard Vicki gasp beside me. “Don’t tell me one of them murdered Isla!”

“That’s a bit premature,” the inspector reassured her. “Finding the source o’ the yarn will be only one o’ the missin’ links in this case. We cannae assume anything.”

I was in full agreement with Jamieson.

“However,” he warned. “We proceed with caution from this point forward. We are dealing with a desperate and violent individual.”

That, too. This murder hadn’t been hatched up long before Vicki had made up her yarn club kits. This was most likely a desperation killing. Otherwise the killer would have chosen a more convenient time and place. That same desperation might cause the killer to strike out again.

“Once I get the last kits, then what?” I asked, thinking
of cupcakes and sleeping pills, and a motive so compelling it seemed worth killing another human being over.

“Ye mean the last
kit
,” the inspector corrected me. “One of those two has tae be missing a skein o’ yarn.” Then he addressed Vicki. “We’ve gone over this, and ye say there isn’t any spare yarn. Not an extra skein tucked away?”

“No!” Vicki shook her head. “I used all of it to finish up the kits. That’s why I didn’t have any extras for the people asking.”

“So one o’ those two it ’tis,” he said, glancing at me. “Do ye want me tae take it from here? Finish up the collecting?”

“I can handle it,” I told him, not exactly sure what he’d been working on, but confident that it was at least as important as this task, most likely more so. And I wanted to see this through.

He nodded, pleased, and said, “I’ve been working on a plausible motive. I’ll send Sean to poke around a bit, speak with as many o’ the spectators as possible. We have a tough nut tae crack. But with each o’ us doing our part, we’ll soon have the proper suspect in custody and charged with homicide.”

The inspector seemed confident in the end result as he bade us farewell and we watched him drive away down the lane.

“Sometimes, the man is unreadable,” I muttered.

“He keeps too much to himself,” Vicki said, heading for the house. “But he has a difficult position and this is the way he’s learned to cope. And at least he has you and Sean to lean on.”

I followed her in and gave her a detailed accounting of my confrontation with Kirstine.

Vicki gasped in shock when I related the confrontation over the contents of the trunk, how Kirstine had chased me around the car. But after I described how Kirstine had been on the receiving end of a hefty blast of pepper spray, she was laughing out loud.

“You really let her have it?” Vicki squealed. “Oh, I wish I could have been there!”

I was feeling pretty satisfied with myself. It wasn’t too often that I got the best of Kirstine in our occasional skirmishes. But this time she’d really gotten what was coming to her. Maybe in the future, she’d think twice about crossing me. We were never going to be BFFs, but some plain old common courtesy would have been appreciated.

“You’re a loyal friend,” Vicki said after hearing every single detail of the pepper-spray scene and enjoying every minute of it. “Now I better get back to dying yarn, and you need to catch Harry before he finishes up and drives away.”

“He’s still out there?”

“He was not too long ago, and he had quite a lot of equipment to load,” Vicki informed me.

Good. That made him the obvious next person to contact. Besides, he would be the easiest of the last two to approach. Andrea would be with her grieving brother. I was going to feel like an intruder when I showed up, asking about her yarn kit.

And, according to Lily, Harry had been disappointed in the hospice fund-raising efforts. This was the perfect opportunity to follow up on that as well.

Leaving Vicki, I walked outside and found Coco and Pepper running toward me from up the lane. They followed me to the side of the barn, and I took the time to pet each
of them and give a little cuddling to Jasper, all while keeping one eye on the lane in case Harry drove past.

I sat down on the hay bale with Jasper in my arms, and while he purred my thoughts drifted.

Bryan and his wife had argued the night before she died. Why? Had she done something unforgivable, given her husband a reason so powerful that he’d lost control? Could he have really been so unaffected as to have killed his wife and then gone out to the field to compete—and win?

But Isla Lindsey seemed to have a knack for arousing strong emotions in just about everybody. Didn’t normal people have controls, switches that flicked on when their tempers flared? Instincts that warned them in advance when they started seeing red? But maybe somebody had finally snapped. It was possible.

Except the sleeping-pill-laced cupcake indicated that her murder wasn’t quite as spontaneous as all that. Someone had planned ahead far enough to make sure Isla was incapacitated before attacking her, which weren’t the actions of a person who had lost control. Same with the presumed rendezvous at Oliver’s van—if Isla went there on her own, it must have been prearranged.

The person responsible probably had to act quickly, yet execute with perfect precision and keep his (or her) wits about him all day long.

I smiled at Jasper and said, “Look at me. Pretending like I have experience dealing with a cold-blooded murderer.” He continued to purr, unconcerned with human issues.

I was certainly out of my element. There wasn’t exactly a huge need for researching homicides in the romance genre. I dealt in very different chemical reactions, mixing
male and female attractions and watching the results. Exploring life, not death.

I needed to keep this case in perspective, not let it get under my skin, not allow it to affect me on a personal level. Keeping emotions out of it wasn’t going to be easy. No wonder the inspector had an aura of sadness about him. I couldn’t imagine dealing with violence and the most perverse sides of humanity on a daily basis without being changed by it.

As Vicki had pointed out, at least the inspector had Sean and me. He could complain all he wanted about the volunteer, but Sean was eager to please. And now he also had me, for what that was worth. Maybe, eventually, he would learn to put more trust in my ability to shoulder at least a little of his responsibilities. A part of me really wanted that to happen. In fact, I told myself, he
did
act as though he valued my opinions. That was a start. If only he’d confide more, allow me a glimpse into his inner thoughts. What
was
the mysterious man thinking? Most of the time, I didn’t have any idea.

Sitting on the hay bale it occurred to me for the first time that I’d never picked up the lawn chairs I’d borrowed from the barn to watch the dog trials. I hoped they were still in the field.

I left Jasper, walked up the lane, and cut into the field, heading toward Harry’s truck parked in the general vicinity of the huge refreshment tent, which had been taken down and hauled away. The props—gates, pens, fences—had also been disassembled and removed, and any accumulated litter had been picked up and disposed of.

There was no sign of two lawn chairs.

Actually the grazing field had been restored to its original condition, leaving not a single sign of our human interruption other than a few tire tracks I noticed here and there where volunteers had driven through with their loads. A few more Highland rains and those would disappear, too.

A flock of sheep watched my progress from a hillside nearby. I saw two border collies higher still, lying on the shady side of that same hill, resting but alert to the possibility of wayward action on the part of his sheep. John wasn’t in view, but from past performance, the dogs knew their jobs inside and out and didn’t need anyone managing them on that front. Don’t let sheep stray, that was their mission.

Oliver and Lily, who’d arrived late in the cleanup process, had stayed until the end, and now I saw them walking away together in the direction of the lower lane where Lily had parked her car. They both waved and continued on.

For me, the only lasting reminder of the fund-raiser would be the memory of Isla Lindsey’s dead body and that awful moment when I’d opened the van door. Those few minutes would stay with me forever.

I veered toward where Harry’s truck was still parked, the cab pointed away from the lane, the bed filled with metal parts. And were those the lawn chairs on top of the pile? I saw Harry on the far side of the vehicle. He opened the driver’s door, then grabbed an overhead handgrip for leverage and pulled himself into the seat. I heard the motor start up, so I hurried around the back of his truck.

I was about to call out to him to get his attention, but his name lodged in my throat when I realized the truck’s taillights were glowing and the vehicle had begun to move backward, not forward as I’d expected. I was right in its path.

He gave the gas a blast, and the truck lurched directly at me. I had seconds to react. With my survival instincts in full gear, I realized there wouldn’t be time to sidestep clear.

I did the only thing that came to mind—I lunged to meet the gate at the back of the truck and anchored one foot on the bumper, then pulled myself up.

“Harry! Stop!” I managed to shout, clinging to the truck.

He must have heard me because he whipped his head around, and if the look on his face was any indication, he was just as startled as I was. He slammed on the brakes, threw the gears in park, hopped out, and ran around to help me down.

“Wha’ the blooming heck! Oh, my dear God! I didn’t see ye there!”

To say I was a bit rattled would be an understatement. It had been a close call.

“Are ye hurt?” he asked, helping me down.

“Shook up a little, that’s all.” The fear I’d been feeling subsided and turned to annoyance. Why had he backed up instead of driving forward and circling around? And didn’t an experienced driver automatically check the rearview mirror before backing up, even in an abandoned field?

“I never even saw ye back there!” he went on. “Ye coulda been kilt.”