“Roger,” Randall said. “Soon as you’ve got some help down here, I’ll go over there and do what I can to make sure the media doesn’t get their version of the day’s events from the Flying Monkeys.”
He turned to leave and had to pause in the doorway as my father burst in with his old-fashioned black doctor’s bag in hand.
Chapter 9
“Sorry it took me so long,” Dad said, as he trotted over to where Colleen Brown’s body lay.
“You beat the ambulance,” the chief said.
Just barely. The EMTs swept in behind Dad, laden with high-tech equipment that I could have told them was going to be useless. They could probably see it, too, but like Dad, they were wearing determined looks.
If they were going to go through the motions of trying to revive the poor woman, I didn’t want to watch. I pulled out my cell phone and while I hit redial, I climbed a few steps up the stairway, to the point where I had to crane my neck to see Colleen Brown.
“She’s past anything we can do,” I heard Dad say, in a soft, discouraged voice.
This time Rob answered his phone.
“Where were you?” I snapped.
“At the other end of the basement,” he said. “You have to be up close to the barrier to get a cell signal down here.”
After relaying the chief’s instructions to Rob, I climbed up a few more steps. The stone walls and steps made the stairway curiously more comforting than the cinder block and linoleum of the basement. Or maybe I just wanted a little more distance between me and the crime scene. I called Michael.
“Meg! What’s going on?”
“There’s been a murder,” I said. “Someone who worked for the Evil Lender. Randall Shiffley and I were practically the first ones on the scene, so I might be tied up for a while being interviewed and processed and whatever.”
“What can I do to help out here?”
“Keep the boys safe. Get someone to change my sign so it says next blacksmithing demonstration to be announced. Plan something for dinner that’s not fried chicken, fried fish, or barbecue.”
“How about pizza?”
“Pizza would be excellent.”
We talked for a few more minutes, arranging all the small details of our afternoon and our evening. A welcome dose of the normal and mundane before I returned to the grim business at hand.
By the time I finished, another deputy had arrived to take my post.
“You can head over to the forensic tent,” he said.
The forensic tent. This morning we’d been calling it the town hall tent. As loudly as I used to complain that nothing much changed in Caerphilly from one decade to the next, I realized that I rather missed the quiet old days.
“Dr. Smoot!” Since climbing halfway up the back stairs I’d heard only indistinct sounds from below, but the chief’s bellow carried marvelously.
“I gather the medical examiner has arrived,” I said.
“Acting medical examiner,” the deputy said. Was he only imitating the chief, or did the entire department share the chief’s disapproval of the eccentric Dr. Smoot? “And arrived? That’s a matter of opinion.”
“Smoot!” People in next door Clay County probably heard that. I had been planning to go up the back stairs and out through the furnace room, but my curiosity kicked in and I headed back down to the basement.
When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I saw that Colleen Brown’s body was still there. Dad, Randall, several deputies, and the EMTs were anxiously staring at the chief, who stood at the bottom of the stairs with his hands on his hips and a thunderous look on his face.
“Smoot! Damn it, man, get down here!”
I was puzzled for a moment, until I remembered that our acting medical examiner suffered from crippling claustrophobia. He was probably balking at coming down the narrow, winding basement steps.
We all stared at the doorway for a few more moments.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have told him to leave his cape at home,” Randall said.
“We’re going to look foolish enough as it is,” the chief said. “We don’t need the Star-Tribune doing a human interest story on the town whose medical examiner thinks he’s a vampire.”
“He doesn’t think he’s a vampire,” Randall said. “He just likes to dress up like one. And it helps him with the claustrophobia.”
“He can dress any way he likes on his own time,” the chief said. “When he’s on the job he should look like a blasted professional. And if he can’t walk down a circular stairway or into an elevator without panicking, he should see a therapist, not an exorcist. It’s not as if I can move the crime scene upstairs for him.”