Whiskers In The Dark

20

April 21, 2018

Saturday

“You did it.” Cooper teased Harry as they studied her garden’s neatly plowed rows.

“Yes, I did.” Harry, hands on hips, looked for even one little shoot in the kitchen garden, then focused on the garden. “You know the weather has been too crazy. Eventually the corn will come up and the tomatoes, but we are late this year. So, what did they decide happened at the church?”

“Nothing. Someone had simply tried to pry the lock on the front door. Pretty stupid. They would have had even more trouble if they had known the pearls were at Keller and George. All these businesses have security systems, some better than others. Jewelry stores have good ones. The unearthed pearls are safe.”

“Yeah, but if someone understands electronics, I bet any of these expensive security systems can be disarmed.”

“Maybe,” Cooper responded. “A thief would need to be tremendously well trained plus have the means to disarm a system. Some of these systems cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Granted, the actual size of the store reflects some of that cost. Can you imagine the security system for Tiffany’s, what is it, five floors?”

“Something like that. It’s been years since I passed through those doors on Fifth Avenue.” Harry knelt down to brush the moist soil with her gloved hand. “Still holding moisture. Then again, we got enough of it.”

“No more snow,” Cooper pronounced with finality.

“I doubt it. Then again, we aren’t living in Wyoming or Montana. Can snow there in May. Well, upstate New York, too. But we’ll get rain. Actually, the year has been wet and I think it will get wetter.”

“Good for the water table.” Cooper, not a country girl, was learning.

“That it is. We’ll be grateful come August and September. I love the changing seasons.”

“Me, too.” Cooper glanced up at the sky. “Not a cloud.”

Harry looked up. “Sometimes the blue is almost turquoise; other times, robin’s egg blue; and other times, a pale blue. Never fails to fascinate me. Now back to your garden. You really have to put up chicken wire or something because the second—and I mean the second—those first shoots finally make their appearance, so will the deer and the rabbits.”

“You never have any problems,” Cooper said.

“I have two dogs and two cats. I also have doors so they can come and go. The deer can’t pull their tricks up at the house in the night. I don’t care if they eat some of what I have as a crop, but not my little garden. One thing we have in our favor is there’s lots to eat for wildlife.”

“Harry, when you go to some of the places I do, you understand there’s lots to eat for people.” Cooper laughed.

“What is it, something like eighteen percent of Americans have diabetes?” Harry queried.

“Can’t be that many.” Cooper shook her head. “Least I hope not but”—she shrugged—“too much sugar and not enough physical labor, I guess.”

“Back to the failed break-in. Are there a lot of break-ins at businesses in the city and county?”

“Actually, we’re below average in the county. Keller and George is the province of the city. But even in the shopping centers there’s not much planned theft. It’s impulsive. Someone gets caught shoplifting. And as we all know, impulses usually land you in hot water. Add drink or drugs and it’s a given.”

“Ah. So the big crimes, big brains?”

“Pretty much. Cyber theft has taken over for armed robbery. That used to attract the bright and the bold. Now the crooks sit their fat asses behind a computer. I assume their asses are fat. Anyway, the crook could be in Bermuda, in Mumbai, in St. Petersburg.”

“M-m-m, St. Petersburg. Wouldn’t that be a political crook?”

“Harry, there are young people hired by older people all over the world who want to crack into credit card systems, bank systems, medical records. You name it. They are already here.”

“What about the records of the sheriff’s department?”

Cooper thought a moment. “I don’t know if they find us that important. A large city police department maybe, but those of us in law enforcement have to combat these cyber crooks, too. Our small department has two computer whizzes.”

“Gregory Dwayne and who else?”

“Sheriff just hired a young woman from UVA, Regan Moore. Both she and Dwayne will be out and about, but if anything is odd or we confiscate a computer, it’s their task to unlock it.”

“I’m hardly in their class, but I did research Jason Holzknect. Good career in foreign service. Specialized in communications, especially electronic communications.”

“He was on the wave of the future,” Cooper stated.

“He was. He was good with people and I assume good with money. He always seemed sensible to me. I mean, neither he nor Clare threw money around.”

Cooper smiled. “Thinking about crime, murder usually is an easy crime to solve because most murders are impulsive, like shoplifting is impulsive. The impulse isn’t gain, it’s rage, uncontrolled rage. Again factor in drugs or drink and there’s not an ounce of thought to it. Half the time the perp isn’t far from the corpse. Easy.” She paused. “A planned murder, like planned theft, isn’t easy. If you think about it, Harry, most everyone has someone who doesn’t like them. Maybe that tips over into murder if there’s an old wound, an old theft even. You get even.”

“You can kill for material gain,” Harry posited.

“You can, but there’s usually a trail. The motive is clear. Add political power to wealth and it’s doubly clear.”

“You think the late Andrew Mellon had people who wanted to kill him?” Harry named a former secretary of the Treasury back in 1921–1932. He died on August 26, 1937, of cancer.

“M-m-m, political enemies, yes, but I doubt most people knew what he was doing. As it turns out, he was right for his times. He cared about our country. Now even fewer people know what a secretary of the Treasury does, but they’ll want to kill him anyway. Crazy times.”

“Crazy people.” Harry turned to head for Cooper’s house.

Once inside, Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, Tucker, and Pirate woke up, all asleep on the kitchen floor near the hearth, a fire burning, for it was still cold enough. Cooper gave them so many treats, they chose to stay inside thanks to bowls of food, eating themselves insensate.

The two women sat down, Cooper having made hot chocolate.

“Bums.” Harry chided her pets.

“It was too good.” Tucker lifted her head, then rested it again on Pirate’s flank.

“You go back up to Aldie next weekend?”

“Unless we’re needed earlier.” Harry smiled. “Such a good idea, Hounds for Heroes, and anyone can bring hounds and hunt. You don’t need to be a member of a recognized pack.”

“What’s the goal? How much?”

“Last year they raised twenty thousand dollars. That’s just Virginia.”

“Wow.” Cooper’s eyebrows raised up.

“Apart from the murder, I still see him flat on his back, but apart from that, every now and then I feel a little touch of cool air on my lower leg up there. Comes and goes. Odd. Then again, topography creates wind currents. A good huntsman knows how to use them.”

“I expect.”

“Thinking about what you said about murder, whoever killed the woman in the Taylors’ grave got away with it.”

Cooper nodded. “I don’t know if it was easier then or not. Killing in the dark would be easy. Other than that, I don’t know. If there are people willing to help or to keep their mouth’s shut, it’s still easy.”

“And yet someone knew.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why would the grave have been disturbed if someone didn’t know?”

Cooper, cup in hand, thought about this. “I guess some stabbing in the soil is a form of disturbance; knocking over the tombstone, too. I wouldn’t bet on that one being figured out. Someone would have to make a terrible slip or reveal hidden information, hidden for over two hundred years, but I’d say the chances of finding Jason’s killer are pretty good as opposed to the killer from the eighteenth century.”

“Why, because the murder’s not over two hundred years old?” Harry reached for a chocolate chip cookie.

Cooper, who had put the plate on the table, reached for one, too. “No, because it has to be someone who was there.”

“You don’t think someone could have snuck onto the grounds, killed him, then left?”

Cooper shook her head. “No.”

Harry waited a minute or two. “I know.”