An Embarrassment of Itches Read online

  Fortunately, I was impervious to devils now. The law, however, not so much.

  I handed the phone over. “My entire life is on that phone. Appointments, contacts, Plumb’s, everything. I can’t function without it.”

  He used a pair of blue nitrile gloves to accept the phone and slipped it into an evidence bag. At my sharp glance, he said. “Purely procedural. What exactly is a Plumb’s?”

  “A medical formulary this big.” I spread my thumb and forefinger four inches apart. “Beats carrying around a book the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica.”

  “We’ll get it back to you as soon as possible.” He sealed the bag and placed it in his pocket. “In the meantime, I’m afraid I have to ask you to wait here a bit longer.”

  I glanced at my old Timex, glad that I hadn’t given in to the smartwatch craze. “I’ve got patients to see. And I need to pick up a burner phone.”

  “Can’t be helped.” His shrug didn’t seem particularly sympathetic. “You’ll need to come down to the office and sign a statement when we’re through here.”

  “I need to check on the dog soon. He probably has to pee. And I’m sure I have another pair of shoes somewhere in the car if I just look hard enough. If I could—”

  “I can’t let you in your car until it’s been processed.”

  I know I must have goggled at him. “Processed? Joe, I run my business out of that car. My dog is in that car. How long is this going to take?”

  “As long as it does. Sorry, Ginny, but an unexplained death takes precedence over your schedule.”

  “I’m not saying it doesn’t,” I snapped. “In case you haven’t noticed, I want to know as much as the next person what happened to Amanda. Maybe even more so. But I have responsibilities as well.”

  “The sooner you cooperate, the sooner you can get back to them.”

  In the rearview mirror, I could see a black Taurus crawling up the drive, followed by an ambulance with the sirens off. Remy turned at the sound and woofed. His bark, normally deep and booming, was muted as though he were in a soundproof booth.

  Joe started to get out, but I stopped him with a hand on his arm. He looked down at it in some surprise, and then shot me a glance that practically smoldered. Regardless of what he thought, my intention was only to get his attention.

  “There are animals that need to be taken care of here,” I said.

  “That’ll be up to the next of kin.”

  I shook my head. “One of the horses is mine. It’s no problem for me to feed them and make sure everyone’s okay—I do that when Amanda goes out of town, anyway. But Ming needs medication twice a day, and not everyone can pill a cat. He should come with me until Amanda’s family decides who will take him.”

  Joe hesitated. His expression shuttered, and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. He glanced impatiently at the coroner, who was walking toward us. “Wait here. I can’t let you back in the house until after the coroner views the body. I’ll get Holly to bring the cat out.”

  I started to tell him why this was a bad idea, but he was already getting out of the car. “His carrier is usually in the hall closet,” I called as he shut the door.

  I watched as Joe shook hands with the coroner, and the two went round to the back of the house. My brain was coming back online after the hyper-sweet coffee and I reviewed my schedule for the day. I’d left myself plenty of time to meet with Amanda, knowing I’d want to visit with her before I left. I had nothing else scheduled until 2 p.m., when I supposed to do therapy on a dog we were managing conservatively for a torn cruciate ligament. After that, I had an appointment to vaccinate Waddles, an elderly pug. Surely, the police would release me before then. I might even have time to run by the house and change clothes. At some point, I’d have to pick up a burner phone for short-term use. I couldn’t run my business without one.

  The minutes crawled, and I grew increasingly restless. I wasn’t used to sitting down except at the end of the day. Normally, if I had a few minutes between appointments I’d read, but the new urban fantasy I’d started was also on my phone. That’s the last time I’d leave the house without at least one or two print books as backup.

  Bugger this.

  Holly had a notepad and pen in the coffee holder of her cruiser. Scratching out a quick note to explain where’d I gone, I left it on the dashboard. I winced my way over the frozen ground and found my spare boots under the passenger seat. Telling Remy to stay, I grabbed my coat and made my way down to the barn. With any luck, by the time I came back, I’d be able to leave with Ming.

  I rushed through feeding the horses. I left the medications I’d brought for the ferals in the tack room. There was no point in trying to treat them today. The unusual traffic on the farm had most of them in hiding. Only Harley, the tamest of the wild toms, showed up when I shook the container of crunchies. I filled the bowls and climbed my way back up to the house at the top of the hill. At least it had stopped sleeting.

  Joe waited by my car. His lips had flattened in a tight line and for once his eyebrows were neither flirty nor charming, but lowered thunderously instead.

  “I left a note.” I pointed to the car before he could speak.

  It didn’t help. His mouth tightened further, and when he spoke, anger clipped his words. “I told you your car was off limits. That the entire farm was a death scene investigation. I have a good mind to cuff you and toss you in the back of the patrol car.”

  I gasped. He wouldn’t. Or would he? He looked pissed enough that I couldn’t be sure. What would happen to Remy if I got hauled into jail? Would they call animal control and take him to the pound?

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. Or rather, I was thinking the horses needed to be fed, and—”

  “The damn animals always come first with you, don’t they?” He took me by the arm and marched back toward the patrol car, dragging me in his wake.

  His words were like a punch to the gut. Was that why he’d left all those years ago?

  “Joe, please. I said I was sorry.” I stumbled along behind him.

  He wheeled on me, stopping so abruptly I almost ran into him. “How would you feel if you were prepping for surgery and someone breached your whatchamacallit—your sterile field? It’s bad enough I have to work with people who don’t have the sense God gave a goose, but you? I expected better of you, Ginny.”

  Ouch. That stung badly enough to make me wince. But instead of throwing me in the back of the patrol car, he began taking me toward the front door.

  “Where are we going?”

  He shot a seriously pissed off glare in my direction but never slowed down. “They can’t catch the cat. Come with me.”

  As I followed him through the front door, the sense of loss hit me afresh. Amanda’s personality spoke in the crisp, bright colors, the tasteful arrangement of furniture, and the vibrant artwork on the walls. My house was decorated in the Early Salvation Army Style, with a dash of Goodwill on the side. We passed through the living area and down the corridor to the kitchen. From within, I heard the low-pitched yowl of an angry Siamese. Before we reached the door, there came a crash, and vehement cursing.

  “What on earth is going on here?” I demanded on entering the room. “Are you trying to kill the cat?”

  Containers of flour and sugar had been toppled from their position on the counter, and their contents were scattered on the floor. Holly held the door open to a large cat carrier as though it were a sack she intended to use to scoop up a rabid animal. Frank, wild-eyed and disheveled, glared at the top of the cabinets, where Ming crouched, ears back and mouth open in a hiss.

  Frank pointed vehemently at the cat. “That thing is a bloody devil.”

  Blue eyes in a chocolate face narrowed into slits, and the eeriest sound emanated from the cat. It started low, like the rumble of distant thunder, and rose to an earsplitting pitch that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

  “He has a medical condition. His blood pressure is probably going through t
he roof right now.” I pointed at Holly. “You. Put the carrier down. Everyone else—out.”

  Frank and Holly exchanged glances with Joe, who seemed to give them non-verbal permission to leave, an order they obeyed with alacrity, heading back down the stairs to the basement. Joe leaned against the island in the center of the kitchen with his arms folded across his chest. “Someone has to monitor your activity in the house.”

  Grown women don’t stick their tongues out at the law, no matter how tempted. From the glint in Joe’s eye, he could read my mind, however. I ignored him. I started for the cabinets until Joe clucked and handed me a pair of gloves. I slipped them on and opened several cabinets until I found what I was looking for: canned cat food. Amanda had placed an old piece of carpet inside the carrier to make it more comfortable, so once I could get Ming inside, we were good to go. After positioning the carrier with the door open, I popped the can’s top and slid the entire can toward the far end.

  Then I joined Joe at the island.

  Ming had stopped snarling at the sound of the opening lid, and no sooner had I moved away than he leapt down from the top of the cabinets onto the counter. From there, he dropped to the floor and zipped into the carrier. I jumped forward and slammed the door. Inside, the sound of growling competed with the sound of a cat wolfing down his food.

  “How’d you know that would work?” Joe asked.

  After making sure the door was securely latched, I stood. “His condition makes him ravenous. He literally can’t get enough to eat. That’s why he needs medication.”

  Joe made no offer to carry the cat as he walked us back to the front door. When I would have reached for the medical bag I’d left there, he stopped me. “You’ll have to leave that for now. I’ll see that someone gets it back to you later.”

  “I can make do with other thermometers.” Though I really didn’t want to. The one in my bag was lightning fast and cost a bloody fortune. “But I need my stethoscope.”

  With a nod, he took out the pair of blue gloves again and retrieved the stethoscope from my bag.

  “Hot pink?” He lifted an eyebrow as he passed it toward me.

  Ninety-nine percent of every day was spent wearing colors that wouldn’t show the blood, mud, or animal hair. The occasional splash of color was vital to my sense of wellbeing. He didn’t need to know that, however.

  “At least no one will mistake it for belonging to someone else.” I hung the stethoscope around my neck.

  The crime scene processors waited by my car. Suited up in white nylon outfits that covered them from head to toe, they reminded me of beekeepers.

  “We’ve processed the exterior of the car,” one of the CSIs said as we approached.

  “Use the gloves I gave you.” Joe nodded toward my car. “Get Remington out and keep him beside you.”

  I set Ming’s carrier down and opened the driver’s side door. Remy tried to shoot out—I grabbed his collar before he could escape—and I rooted around in the passenger’s seat before coming up with his leash. He leapt out of the car with a painful joie de vivre, springing into the air all around me so that all four feet left the ground.

  “Settle,” I scolded, for all the good it did. He spied Ming in the carrier and dragged me toward it, jumping back when Ming struck at the door full force with a loud yowl of rage.

  The specialists fell on the interior of my car en masse, liberally casting fingerprint powder in all directions.

  I turned to Joe in outrage. “Do you have any idea how hard it will be to get that powder out of my car? Is it really necessary for them to open all my containers? I’ll have to wipe down every vaccine vial, every bottle of medicine before I can use it.”

  Joe ruffled Remy’s damp ears and gave that unsympathetic shrug again. “We have to prove Amanda Kelly has never been in your car. Speaking of which, we’ll need your fingerprints for comparison, so when you come in to sign your statement, we’ll take them then. We’ll return your clothing once it’s been processed.”

  By all rights, at this point Remy should have picked up on my intense loathing of one Sheriff Joe Donegan and bitten him on the leg.

  Sadly, he looked up at Joe with canine adoration on his face and curled his entire body into a wag.

  Traitor.

  Just then, the rescue squad wheeled a stretcher around from the back of the house. Strapped to it was a body bag, like in the movies. In a rare moment of solidarity, we watched them load the stretcher into the back of the ambulance. When they’d closed the rear doors and climbed into the cab, Joe spoke once more. “The coroner discovered evidence of blunt force trauma on the back of Amanda Kelly’s head.”

  I was stunned. “I didn’t see any blood.”

  He nodded in slow agreement. “Probably not the primary cause of death. Just hard enough to knock her out.”

  Gaping at him, I found myself stuttering again. “But that means...”

  “Yeah.” He gave me a long, cool, assessing look. It was unnerving. “It wasn’t suicide.”

  Chapter Four

  My visit to the police station didn’t take as long as I feared, and after they’d taken my prints and brought me a statement to sign, I still had time to run by Bucky’s grocery store to pick up a few things.

  Until they’d built the supercenter over in Clearwater, twenty-five miles away, Bucky’s had been the place where you went to get everything in Greenbrier, from cat food to bathroom caulking to a propane tank for your backyard grill. And yes, burner phones too. A member of the ubiquitous Linkous family, Bucky walked the fine line between charging what the market would bear and understanding sometimes it was worth paying four dollars for a box of saltines rather than to drive into Clearwater. We all gave a little sigh of relief when the supercenter provided Bucky with a little competition.

  As luck would have it, I ran into the mayor and her son at the store. She spotted me a fraction of a second before I saw her, and I recognized the abrupt about-turn in an attempt to avoid a direct meeting. Hey, I’d been guilty of the same myself, bumping into chatty clients who wanted to talk about how their pets were doing when all I wanted to do was grab some grub and scurry home. So, I’d had a little sympathy for the mayor when I called out her name and saw her stop in her tracks and stiffen her spine before turning to greet me. Her son, a young teenager wearing ear buds, never looked up from the cell phone in his hand. From the way his fingers flew over the keyboard, he must have been playing a game.

  Mayor JoAnna Austin was immaculate as always, facing me with a bright smile as she gave her bouffant light brown hair a pat and twitched her heavy wool skirt straight. She wore a matching blazer over a white blouse that peeked out of the end of her sleeves with frilly cuffs. I’d never seen her at less than her professional best, and given the way her smile had faded as she gave me a startled once-over, I probably looked as though I’d chosen my outfit from a garage sale. Her forced expression of cheerfulness gave way to real concern when she peered at my face.

  “Dr. Reese, are you all right?”

  I hesitated. If I told her the reason for my disheveled appearance, the news of Amanda’s death would derail the conversation I wanted to have with her. But she was going to find out about it eventually, and it would seem odd that I hadn’t said anything.

  “Rough morning.” I gave her what was probably a sickly smile. Lowering my voice with a meaningful glance at her son, I said, “I found Amanda Kelly drowned in her swimming pool when I went to her house this morning.”

  Mayor Austin gasped, and after noting her son hadn’t even registered our conversation, tapped him on the shoulder. Startled, he looked up and popped one ear bud out.

  “Wait here, Craig. I’ll be right back.”

  He nodded and replaced the ear bud, returning to his game.

  She left her cart to approach me. Grabbing my arm, she dragged me out of the flow of traffic in the aisle until my knees bumped up against the boxes of sugary cereal on the shelves beside us.

  “Drowned!” She looked agh
ast as she let me go. Sparing a moment to glance around to see if anyone was listening, she asked, “What happened?”

  “She didn’t answer the door when I went there to meet her this morning. I found her at the bottom of the pool.” No sense in giving her all the details. For starters, I wasn’t sure Joe would be happy if I shared that kind of on-scene information.

  “Oh, dear. How horrible.” The mayor’s face melted into a kind of standard political empathy. “So, suicide, then?”

  It pissed me off. Why was everyone so quick to assume Amanda had killed herself?

  I responded rather coolly, “That remains to be seen. The coroner will decide after an examination.”

  I’d leave that up to Joe to make public as he chose.

  “Of course.” The smooth way she delivered her agreement left no doubt she believed the coroner’s assessment to be a mere formality.

  I could practically see the wheels turning as Mayor Austin mentally prepared a statement to the press on the loss of a prominent member of the community. Before she could press me for further details, I added, “That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about, however.”

  “Oh?” A look of wariness crept back into her eyes before she stiffened once more. “If it’s about the zoning—”

  “No, it’s about this lifetime dog license. How did such a measure pass? It’s stupid. Before, you couldn’t get the dog tags unless you had documented proof of a current rabies certificate. Now, there’s no guarantee that a dog wearing one of these lifetime tags is current on its rabies vaccination.”

  She looked at me as though I’d sprouted a second head. “You found a dead body this morning and you want to talk to me about rabies vaccines?”

  Her voice carried to the woman shopping for granola behind us, and the shopper turned with a horrified expression on her face before hastily pushing her cart down the aisle.

  “Besides, I had nothing to do with that measure.” Her tone turned hard as she frowned, and I cringed a little inside at the voice of authority. “That was a decision made by the County Treasurer, not by the mayor’s office or any member of the Town Council. So, you see—” She smiled as she thought of a clever quip, “—you’re barking up the wrong tree.”