Death of a Crafty Knitter (22 page)

"There's nothing wrong with multitasking."

"Speaking of which, you didn't ask her much about your cold case."

"It's not going to get any colder." He went to the door and popped his head out to make sure the hallway was clear. "She doesn't know her employer's niece is a suspect. I don't think Dharma is hiding here, or the maid would have been more nervous. Most people—the non-sociopath ones, anyway—find it incredibly difficult to lie, especially if you're nice to them."

"Good to know." I looked around at the many weapons. "Are we done? This room's amazing, but it's starting to give me the creeps."

Erica reappeared with pen and paper in hand. "Your friends just showed up," she said.

We went to the window, which faced the front entrance, and looked down. Tony and Kyle were walking toward the door from their police vehicle. They'd parked right in front, not in the visitor's parking, where they wouldn't have missed seeing my car.

My father turned to Erica. "Quick. Is there a sneaky back way out of here?"

Chapter 21

There wasn't just
one sneaky back way out of the Koenig Mansion, but a dozen. My father and I left through a delivery entrance, easily avoiding the official police.

Erica hadn't enough time to write out the list of dinner guests, but there seemed to be no point anyway, since the staff and out-of-towners were all accounted for on the morning of the murder. My father asked Erica to email him the list anyway.

I didn't breathe normally until we were driving away from the mansion.

"That was a bit close for comfort," I said. "You're sure Erica won't tell Tony we were there?"

"She said she wouldn't."

"Erica seemed nice. Is she about my age, or is she younger?"

He declined to answer that question.

We approached the gates, which opened automatically, as before.

"Talk us through the case," he said. "What do we know about Dharma Lake?"

"For starters, she believes in karma, which means doing good things for others, so it comes back to you. She probably has strong ideas about right and wrong. From what I heard at the pub, she thought Voula Varga's black magic was wrong. She wanted her to stop doing whatever she was doing."

"There's the motivation," he commented. "We need means, motivation, and opportunity."

"As for
means
, there's the gun missing from the armory back there. Now, whether it was Dharma, or her husband, or another accomplice who grabbed it from the room, it's easy to connect her and the gun. Then she made her own
opportunity
when she went to the house that morning. Maybe she showed up at the woman's door to apologize."

My father's head bobbed. "But when you go somewhere to apologize, you bring flowers or chocolate, not a gun. Maybe flowers
and
chocolate."

"You would know," I teased.

He had a point, though. A weapon was protection, or for threatening someone. If Dharma really believed Voula was practicing black magic, wouldn't a magic necklace be better protection?

After a moment, my father said, "Let's say Dharma showed up with the gun, acting like the sheriff of a Wild West town, trying to run the voodoo lady out of town. Things get heated. They argue, wrestle over the gun, and it goes off. Total accident. She'll serve some time for manslaughter, but she'll still have her good karma, because she thought she was doing the right thing."

"If the shooting was an accident, that would explain why her getaway driving wasn't exactly sneaky." I tapped on the steering wheel. "What if she didn't know the gun was loaded? That weapons collection back there was pretty intense. Is Mr. Koenig nutty enough to display loaded guns?"

"I checked a few of the other handguns. There were some nice pieces in there, and I couldn't resist. No ammunition in the ones I looked at, and I didn't see any bullets in the room. If I were him, leaving my cases unlocked to better show off my collection, I'd be damn careful to keep the bullets in a safe that only I had the combination to."

"How many places in town sell ammunition?"

He stared out the window for a minute, at the passing snowy terrain, then turned to me. "Just one place, and it's next to that sandwich shop that does the grilled panini with three kinds of cheese. I suppose we could swing by Wild Buck's, just to be thorough. I might be persuaded to buy you lunch."

I nodded. "We do need to eat."

My father knew
the owner of Wild Buck's, the town's hunting and fishing shop. The man was neither wild, nor named Buck; he was Owen Johnson, a small man with a smooth scalp, a squeaky voice, and a warm handshake. When I was younger, I thought Owen Johnson was the cartoon Elmer Fudd,
hunting wabbits
, come to life.

Upon our arrival, Owen was restocking shelves with fishing lures. My father told him to keep working, and not to let us stop him.

I picked up one of the feathered lures to admire the design. "This could be a cute little earring," I said.

Owen Johnson smiled a crooked smile. I guessed it wasn't the first time he'd heard a woman say that exact thing.

He opened a cardboard box on the worn linoleum floor and started sorting through the packed items. He said, "Finnegan Day, you don't look dressed for ice fishing, so you must be here to ask me about that woman's suicide."

"Suicide?"

My father and I exchanged a confused look.

"Seems like an open-and-shut case to me," Owen said. "I'm no detective, but when a woman comes in and buys a box of bullets, then turns up dead the next day, a guy's gotta figure it was no accident."

A confusing mix of horror and curiosity came over me.

I knelt down so I could look into Owen's face while he stooped over the box of lures. "Mr. Johnson, are you sure it was Voula Varga who came in and bought bullets? She had long black hair, very curly, and was probably dressed in layers of dark, flowing clothes. Was it definitely her who bought the bullets and not another woman, say, with silver-white hair?"

"I know who it was," he said. "She was always driving around in that coffin-mobile with her name on the side. Sheesh. Can't miss a character like that. Then she wanted bullets for a twenty-thousand-dollar gun. I was like, hey, lady, why are you ripping off the good folks of Misty Falls with your little palm-reading act if you can afford a twenty-thousand-dollar gun? Sheesh. Some people."

"She told you she had a gun worth that much?"

"She said she was gettin' it the next day, and was in a mood to celebrate." He slowed down in his movements, but continued unpacking the fishing lures from the box to the shelf.

"It sounds like she was happy," I said. "Why do you think it was a suicide?"

"With some folks it's like that, toward the end. They come in all happy. And you think you're gonna see them around at the gun range for target practice, but then they won't take a flyer, and you think,
Owen, you should call someone
. You think about calling and saying someone might be thinkin' about murderin' themselves. But then you say,
Owen, that's not your business. Mind your own business.
"

My father put his hand on Owen's shoulder. "You couldn't have known. You did all right."

Owen unpacked the box with gusto, his whole bald head flushing pink with effort.

We thanked him for his help, and I purchased a half-dozen feathered lures as a token of gratitude for his time and honesty.

We got back into the car—me getting in the passenger door and sliding over to the driver's side rather than falling on my butt again.

We didn't have anywhere else to go, and we'd stopped at the cafe for panini sandwiches before the visit to Wild Buck's, so I started driving my father and his new rug and laptop to his house.

After a few minutes, I said, "Suicide? Is it possible?"

"Suicide by shooting the chest is less common than the head, but does happen. They don't usually shoot through clothing, though, which is just one of several reasons why the police are investigating it as a homicide. Hang on."

He pulled out his phone and explained he was reviewing notes from what Kyle had leaked to him.

After a few minutes, he said, "Okay, here we go. No suicide note, as you know. Coroner report confirms a single bullet wound to the chest, and the angle tilted down, suggesting a killer who was taller than her, unless she'd been on her knees. Probably not a suicide. If it had been a self-inflicted shot, those usually tilt upward slightly."

"There's no way we'll know for sure, is there?"

"No. We only know what's typical for a female."

"True, but Voula Varga wasn't the typical sort of female, was she? The woman drove a hearse."

"Some people are just nuts."

With my next thought, my stomach clenched around the panini sandwich from lunch, which suddenly felt like a stone.

"Dad, what if she meant for me to be the one to find her? I'm sorry to sound like I think everything is all about me, but this is two bodies in two months. Bad things come in threes. I'm not sure if I'll be leaving the house in February."

"Don't you start turning superstitious on me, wearing bracelets to fend off the evil eye, putting upside-down brooms behind the door, and all that nonsense. I've seen a lot of things in my years on the force, and I can guarantee you bad things don't come in threes. Bad things come all the time, one-two-three-four-five-six-infinity."

His words echoed in my head.
Bad things come all the time. Infinity.

We drove in silence, leaving the town center. As we picked up speed, the wind played with the rug on the roof, making it flop against the metal like a prize marlin.

My father cleared his throat. "Good things come all the time, too. All the time."

"I know. Thanks for taking me with you today. I really learned a lot. You're good at this stuff. Really good."

He leaned over to check my speedometer. "You're speeding."

"Don't change the subject. You're good at investigating. So… what's the plan? You're going to help Kyle with this cold case, and then what?"

"We'll see."

"But what's next in your plan? Uh, I mean, your process?"
A process is better than a plan, because plans go wrong.

With a smirk, he said, "Beer. Every time you say
cold case
, I think,
cold beer
. That's all I have planned for tonight."

We sat in easy silence until we reached his street, then parked over in front of his house. We still had to untie his rug, so I waited for him to shift out of the passenger side so I could get out. My hip was starting to ache from my previous smooth exit.

"How about you?" he asked. "Big plans for tonight?"

"Knitting. I've got a ball of yarn I should do something with."

"You could make a scarf."

"Yes, I think that's about my skill level."

He winked at me. "Don't sell yourself short."

Chapter 22

The next morning,
I could barely get out of bed, thanks to a baseball-mitt-sized bruise on my buttock, acquired by falling out of my car window at the Koenig Mansion.
Some souvenir.

"Look at the size of that thing," I said.

Jeffrey didn't seem particularly shocked by the shades of purple and ochre covering a good portion of the fleshy region I normally sat upon.