“All the time you need,” the chief repeated under his breath.
We heard cheering outside.
“What the dickens?” the chief muttered.
“Come on, Meg,” Randall said. “Time we checked out how your cousin is doing with the Flying Monkeys.”
“Time I did the same,” the chief said. He strode briskly out of the door, and I got the impression he preferred arriving at the forensic tent first, so I paused to give him a few moments. Randall stood beside me.
“We’re going to need to help the chief on this one,” he said.
“The chief might not like that idea,” I replied.
“I figured as much,” he said. “And I don’t want to pull rank on him, but I will if I have to.”
More cheering from outside. Presumably greeting the chief’s appearance. I was willing to bet he wasn’t liking that much, either.
“So let’s discuss it at tonight’s Steering Committee meeting,” Randall added.
I suppressed a tired sigh. Publicly, the Steering Committee was the group tasked with organizing and implementing the ongoing Caerphilly Days celebration. Its covert mission was to ensure that the celebration included a sufficient number of noisy attractions to cover the opening and closing of the trapdoor. As one of the most prolific generators of noise, I’d been recruited to join. The committee was important, fascinating, rewarding—and, like all committees, incredibly time consuming. I’d have resigned long ago if they hadn’t taken to meeting in our library—now, temporarily the fiction room of the Caerphilly public library. Having the meeting that close made it easier to attend, but also a lot harder to weasel out of.
“We had a Steering Committee meeting last night,” I pointed out. “We don’t have one scheduled for tonight.”
“We do now,” Randall said. “And what’s more—”
Another cheer went up outside. Randall’s head snapped toward the door.
“Let’s see what that is, shall we?”
Chapter 10
Randall and I both hurried out the door and over to the top of the steps, where we had a panoramic view of the town square. A great many faces, tourist and local, looked back up at us from behind a barricade made of sawhorses and crime scene tape. Patrolling up and down the sidewalk just inside the barricade were several people wearing the red, white, and blue armbands we’d devised to identify the auxiliaries—citizens recruited by the Steering Committee and deputized by the chief to help with crowd control when the throngs attending Caerphilly Days grew unusually large.
Another cheer greeted our arrival, and at least a dozen digital cameras or cell phones captured it for posterity. I could see Chief Burke’s stocky figure striding across the cordoned-off street. Probably still scowling. Randall responded to the cheering with smiles and waves, and it continued rather longer this time.
“Chief’s going to love this,” I said. “A cheering audience for his investigation.”
“Soooo-EEEEEE!”
The amplified hog call rang out.
Normally our local hog callers were sticklers for competing the old-fashioned way, without microphones, but they’d agreed to sacrifice the purity of their art to the cause of making as much noise as possible. I could see people’s heads whipping back and forth, torn between the certain entertainment of the hog-calling contest and the dubious pleasure of standing in the hot sun waiting to see if something interesting would happen here at the courthouse.
I hoped the hog calling would win before they brought the body out.
Randall waved one last time and began striding down the steps.
“Mr. Mayor! Mr. Mayor!”
I watched as Randall deftly fielded questions from the few journalists present—the Caerphilly Clarion’s one general purpose reporter, a gawky sophomore from the college rag, a stringer from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and our two Star-Trib witnesses, who had apparently eluded the deputies on the way to the tent. Randall managed to say nothing in particular with great charm and earnestness, so that the press all focused on him and didn’t even notice when the EMTs wheeled the gurney with Colleen Brown’s body down the handicapped ramp that zigzagged along the right flank of the courthouse. Then Randall cut the two Star-Trib reporters out of the herd and guided them gently toward the forensic tent.
I had no desire to see if I was as good as Randall at dodging reporters’ questions, so I gave them a wide berth and trudged on toward the waiting tent.
The tent had two entrances. I spotted Horace and the chief near the farther one and took a few steps in their direction to see what was up.
“Chief,” Horace was saying, “the odds are low that these GSR tests will show anything we can use. And they’re going to be hideously expensive to process.”