Improbable Cause (25 page)

“That’s Daisy’s other uniform,” Rachel said, “but what’s that all over it? It looks like it’s ruined.”

“Try the shoes, Beau.”

A pair of Maine waders lay at the front of the trunk. One was upright, but the other one had been knocked over on its side, revealing a distinctive chain-link pattern.

“It looks like the one Foster took from the scene,” AI added, speaking guardedly.

“From the scene,” Rachel echoed, looking back and forth between us. Suddenly everything we were saying seemed to coalesce in her mind. “You mean from my nephew’s office? You’re saying that’s blood on Daisy’s clothes?”

I nodded.

“Oh no,” I heard her say. Without another word and in painfully slow motion, Rachel began slipping toward the floor. I caught her and pulled her to her feet, where she sagged in my arms like a limp rag doll. Still leaning heavily against me, she glanced once more toward the trunk, then turned away.

“It isn’t true! It can’t be true!”

“I’m afraid it is, Rachel. Where is your sister now?”

I expected a violent storm of tears. Instead, Rachel Miller shuddered visibly like a tree caught in a strong gale; then, with determined effort, she pulled away from me and drew herself erect.

“At the zoo,” Rachel answered slowly, pronouncing each word slowly and carefully as though it belonged to some complex foreign language. “She’s helping decorate for the party tonight. The guided tours don’t start until five.”

“What tours?”

“Behind-the-scenes tours, where people get to talk to the keepers and touch the animals. They put them on for the zoo patrons each year. Daisy’s scheduled to work some of those.”

“Will you help us find her?” I asked.

Rachel nodded in defeat. “Yes,” she said, “but first let me call George. I’ll see if he can come over and watch Dotty while we’re gone. I can’t leave her here all alone.”

Following Rachel back into the house, we waited while she talked to George. “He’ll be over in half an hour,” she said quietly when she put down the phone.

“Rachel,” Dorothy demanded impatiently. “Isn’t that coffee ready yet?”

With a sigh, Rachel turned to the cupboard and began making coffee. Al got on the phone and called Bill Foster.

“We need a crime-scene team out here right away,” he said, giving Bill the address of the Edinburgh Arms and bringing him up to date. “I’ll meet you out on the next street by the garages,” he added. “There’s no sense in your coming in here.”

I dogged Rachel’s heels while she made the coffee and set a tray with the special bone-china cups and saucers as well as a plate • loaded with ancient Oreo cookies. She carried the tray into the living room and served her sister first, then she offered some to me.

It was a game gesture of hospitality, of carrying on with the niceties of life in the face of certain disaster. Out of respect for what she was doing, I accepted both the coffee and the cookie. I wasn’t tough enough to turn her down.

While we waited for George to appear, Rachel carefully explained to Dorothy that she would have to be put for a while but that someone would be there in case anything was needed. It sounded like a mother explaining the presence of a baby-sitter to a willful child.

I didn’t see Bill Foster arrive. The street was out of my range of vision, but Al came in a short time later and gave me a thumbs-up sign indicating the garage end of the situation was under control.

Rachel handed Al a cup of coffee, too, and there we sat, the four of us, all of us drinking coffee with three of us lying through our teeth. That’s wrong. We were all four lying, come to think of it, but Dorothy Nielsen had been lying to herself and everybody else for so many years that she no longer knew the difference.

I could understand why Rachel wasn’t ready to tell Dorothy the truth about what was going on. Big Al and I followed her lead. It was the least we could do.

When George finally showed up, Rachel met him outside. His initial grin at seeing her quickly faded as she talked to him, outlining the problem. He was somber but nodding in agreement as they came into the apartment.

“I’ll be glad to stay just as long as you need me to, Rachel,” he was saying.

Rachel smiled up at him gratefully, then she turned to me. “I should go upstairs and put on my uniform,” she said. “It’ll make it a whole lot easier for us to get around in the zoo.”

Big Al and I exchanged wary glances. We’d been led down the primrose path on this kind of deal once before by the very same lady.

She read our reluctance correctly. “It’s okay,” she said. “There’s no outside door up there.”

“How about windows?” I asked.

“I told you I’d help,” she answered.

In the end, we let her go upstairs to change. She was back downstairs in her uniform in less than five minutes.

“We’d better get started,” she said, leading the way to the door. “The zoo’s a big place. It’ll be crowded.”

It was one of the world’s all-time understatements.

On the way to the zoo, Big Al drove and I rode shotgun, while Rachel sat in the backseat. Big Al looked at me and nodded toward the radio. “Get dispatch and have them send us out some help,” he suggested.

“What good would that do?” I returned. “Nobody else down there knows what she looks like.”

“But if we try to do it all ourselves, it’ll take forever. This place is huge. I brought my grandson here a couple of times. He walked both my legs off.”

“It’s only ninety-two acres,” Rachel said reassuringly from the backseat.

“Ninety-two acres is a hell of a lot of territory for three of us to cover.

Get

us some help,“ Al insisted irritably.

“You know what comes with help,” I argued. “Reporters, television cameras, the works.”

“Please, no cameras,” Rachel begged.

Her whole short course in media relations came from what had happened to her as a result of her nephew’s murder. She may not have had my kind of longevity in the battle, but Rachel Miller and I were very much of the same mind when it came to the media. She didn’t want her sister hunted down with nosy cameras recording the arrest.

In the end, Rachel’s plea swung the vote. Al reluctantly conceded defeat, and that’s how the three of us—two seasoned homicide detectives and a gray-haired little old lady— scrambled out of a departmental vehicle at the western entrance to the Woodland Park Zoo. We hurried inside with one single purpose: find Daisy Carmichael.

The Woodland Park Zoo got its start in 1903 when the City of Seattle purchased a pioneer family’s estate and left a previously established herd of deer in residence. With the addition of various animals, the zoo evolved gradually over the years until the thirties when major development work was done by Frederick Olmsted, the same man who created Central Park in New York City.

Rachel had told us that the zoo covers ninety-two acres, and it’s true.

If you happen to be a wheat farmer who lives in the vast rolling hills of Washington“s Palouse, ninety-two acres probably doesn’t sound like much. And ninety-two acres is small potatoes when compared to the eight hundred acres in Central Park. But on a rainy summer’s day, with only three people searching for a fourth, ninety-two acres is plenty big enough.

Rachel Miller took off like a shot and led us into the zoo through a building marked ARC. That may sound like a cutesy reference to Noah, but it actually stands for Activities and Recreation Center. The place was bursting at the seams with dozens

of

children who streamed in and out of a room marked Discovery. Echoes of laughter from a noisy slide show leaked out of the room into the lobby, where Rachel left us standing while she hurried off down a hallway marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.

“Something’s bothering me,” Big Al said after she left.

“What’s that?”

“If Daisy took all that time and trouble to clean up the dental pick and rinse off her clothes, why the hell didn’t she get rid of them before we found them?”

“Maybe she never got the chance.” I suggested.

“From what Dr. Leonard said, they’ve been busy as hell getting ready to move Dorothy into the house. Or maybe Daisy figured she’d get caught eventually and that it wouldn’t do her any good. Sometimes people want to get caught.”

“Right up until they hear the iron door of the slammer.” Big Al observed. “Then they chicken out.”

I heard his words and felt the gut-wrenching pain I always feel when something reminds me of the past I keep trying to forget. Al had no way of knowing how his words affected me. He wasn’t my partner then. We barely even knew each other. If he had heard about Anne Corley at all, it was only peripherally, but his casual comment there in the buzzing zoo lobby jarred me good.

Making a pretense of checking out the children’s slide show, I walked away from him. I wandered into the Discovery Room and stood for a long time peering over the shoulder of a little girl who was engrossed in trying to reassemble the skeleton of a long-dead turtle. Eventually I got myself back under control and returned to the lobby

just as Rachel

hurried into the room. She was frowning, shaking her head.

“I don’t understand it—Daisy isn’t officially scheduled to be here working at all. I was sure she told me she was leading some of the behind-the-scenes tours. She always does that, but her name isn’t on the list.”

“What did I tell you?” Big Al muttered under his breath. “This whole thing is nothing but a wild-goose chase, if you ask me.”

“I’m sure she’s here,” Rachel insisted. “Where else would she be?”

“Try Mexico, maybe,” Big Al suggested dourly. His remark wasn’t lost on Rachel, who gave him a withering look as she marched away, leaving us no choice but to tag along behind her.

She led us around to the back of the building where a waterproofed notebook hung by a chain from a peg in the wall. Rachel lifted it down. When she opened it, I could see that the notebook contained a volunteer sign in/ sign-out sheet. Rachel made a notation after her own name, then scanned up the list until she located Daisy’s.

“See there?” Rachel announced with a sharp glance in Al’s direction. “She’s here. I told you she was.”

He shook his massive head. “All that means is she signed in. She

could

have done that any time—yesterday or the day before, for that matter. There’s no time clock, no way to check it. And it doesn’t mean she’s still here, either.“

“So where do we start?” I asked, wanting to begin the search before Big Al could think of another reason to call the whole thing off or bring in reinforcements.

“The north meadow,” Rachel answered. “That’s where the tents are. Maybe she’s helping set up for the dinner or the auction.”

Finding a lost person at the Woodland Park Zoo would be a tough assignment on any ordinary day, but on the day of the Jungle Party, it was a joke. The Jungle Party is an annual affair, the zoo’s one big fling of a fundraiser. The place was a madhouse.

Rachel left the building and set off in a bee-line for a huge white-and-yellow-striped tent that had been erected in a clearing northeast of the activities center. To one side of the main tent were two smaller ones.

“They’re for the silent auction,” Rachel explained as we passed the smaller tents. “The big one is for the dinner and the live auction.”

The large tent must have been at least 150 feet long by 80 feet wide. One side and one end were open. A raised stage ran the length of the open side. On it auction items were being displayed. Behind the short closed end, a caterer’s caravan of trucks was setting up shop.

Inside the cavernous tent itself a small army of workers erected tables and covered them with brilliant wine red underskirting and plush white table linen. Tall stacks of wooden chairs with padded seats were scattered here and there around the area, waiting to be put in place once the tables were dressed. The end result looked far more like the huge dining room of a fine hotel rather than the interior of an outdoor tent.

Rachel beckoned for us to follow her as she threaded her way through various groups of workers. Now and then she stopped to ask someone if they had seen Daisy. The answer was always negative. We searched through all three tents to no avail.

“She must not be working on setup.” Rachel admitted at last.

“So what now?” Al asked.

“Keep looking.” I said. “Rachel, you lead the way.”

Big AI grunted an objection, but he trudged along behind me as I followed Rachel out of the last tent. We moved north and east, leaving in our wake the three tents and all their feverish activity.

I have no idea how many people were at Woodland Park Zoo that afternoon. Hundreds for sure, maybe even thousands. It seemed like that many.

Aside from the people directly involved in preparation for the banquet, the place was alive with Parks and Recreation personnel putting a spit-and-polish face-lift on the grounds for the mayor’s annual obligatory visit. Add to that the regular zoo staff members plus a whole wad of uniformed docents. All told, it made quite a crowd before you got around to counting the ordinary zoo-viewing public.

The zoo-viewing public is a world unto itself.

By the middle of July, frantic mothers all over the city had finally realized just how long they had to hold out before being able to send their little darlings back to schools and teachers, where they belonged. Desperate to get their children out of the house, even at the cost of going out in the rain, mothers by the hundreds had flocked to the zoo with their broods that soggy afternoon.

The animals were locked up. Believe me, they should have been grateful. Hordes of children, very few on leashes or under voice control, were running loose and tearing the place apart. They were everywhere at once— in, over, under, around, up, and down—playing tag and war and screaming at the tops of their lungs.

Evidently, Big Al was thinking much the same thing. Two howling children darted between us and one of them landed squarely on his toe.

“These goddamned kids are the ones who ought to be in cages,” he fumed. It was a private exchange, meant for my ears only, but Rachel picked up on it.

She glanced back over her shoulder. “We don’t call them cages here,” she chided. “They’re exhibits.”