Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon(10)

“Poke his stomach,” I said.

    He did, tentatively.

“Harder,” I said. “Vent your frustration over being tripped.”

    The chief punched, harder, and I suspected, from his form, that he had boxed during his youth.

“Don’t keep anger and hurt feelings bottled up inside,” the bear advised. “Find positive ways of expressing negative feelings.”

“Mouthy little thing,” the chief said, heaving himself up with the help of a worried-looking officer in uniform. “Sure hope the grandkids don’t want one of them for Christmas. So - good Lord.”

    He’d noticed George.

“Office mascot,” I said quickly.

“Okay,” the chief said. “Thought for a moment maybe you’d waited a little too long to call us.”

    We both laughed - nervously, and maybe a little more than the joke deserved. I found myself wondering if they saw many murders here in Caerphilly.

“I’m going to have to clear people out of the crime scene while we investigate,” he said.

“I figured as much,” I said. “Can we shoo everybody down to the parking lot?”

“Well, by crime scene, all I meant was this room here, where he was killed.”

“Yes, but he wasn’t killed here. He was killed on the mail cart.”

“Which is here in the reception area.”

“Yes, now it is; but he certainly wasn’t killed here. I’ve been sitting here at die switchboard all morning. I think I’d have noticed something as bizarre as one of my coworkers getting strangled with a mouse cord.”

“Um… right,” the chief said, glancing at George. “So someone moved the body?”

“Not really. He was on the mail cart.”

“You’re not suggesting some lunatic wheeled the mail cart in here without even noticing there was a dead body on it?”

    I explained about the automated mail cart, Ted’s obsession with it, and his annoying antics of the morning.

“Let me get this straight, then,” the chief said. “We have no idea where he was killed, because he was riding the mail cart all over creation, and no idea when, because everyone was ignoring him all morning.”

“You got it.”

“You’re not going to make this easy, are you?” he said. I was startled, until I realized he was looking up, not at me. “Okay,” he said, turning back in my direction. “I guess we have to move all these good people out into the parking lot after all. You got an accurate list of who’s supposed to be here?”

“On the reception desk,” I said. “There’s a copy of the phone list. I already marked the employees who aren’t here today, earlier this morning, so I wouldn’t put through calls to them; and the sign-in sheet shows the visitors.”

    Half a dozen police officers fanned through the suite to herd everybody out. Just then Liz appeared in the reception area.

“Chief Burke?” she said, extending her hand. “I’m Elizabeth Mitchell, the firm’s general counsel.”

    The firm. I noticed that, as usual, she avoided uttering the words “Mutant Wizards.” According to Rob, about every six weeks she’d send another earnest memo suggesting half a dozen logical reasons for changing the company’s name. I could have told her this was useless - the only reason Rob had named his company Mutant Wizards was that he thought it sounded cool. If she wanted to change the name, she should forget logical reasons and try to think of an even cooler name.

“Pleased to meet you,” the chief said. He looked a little wary. Maybe he expected her to raise some objection to his investigation. Or maybe he just found her a little intimidating - many people did. Not physically - she was only about five feet four. But I’d seen some pretty tough characters, like the guys from the moving company, back down when she went toe to toe with them.

    She was dressed, as usual, in monochrome - a slim, tailored black skirt, an off-white silk blouse, a scarf in tones of gray, black hose, and sensible black pumps. Only her face and hands kept her from looking like a black-and-white movie; and come to think of it, they didn’t look real - just badly colorized. But she oozed chic, and I could easily have hated her, except for one thing - she always had some tiny flaw in her outfit. The sort of thing only another woman would notice. One day she’d been wearing two similar but not identical shoes. Another day one of her earrings had been bent at an odd angle so it looked as if a tiny hand was giving the world the bird. Last Friday, all day, she’d walked around with a spent staple stuck to the back of her calf, inside the pantyhose.