Still, I was glad when I reached the car, clicked the door open, and sat down. Then I jumped up again with a yelp that was more surprise than pain. I pulled the crossbow bolt out of my back pocket and tossed it into the backseat before climbing in again and slamming the door closed.
I didn’t start the car immediately. I pulled out the first-aid kit I kept in the car, did a more thorough job of cleaning the blood off my cheek, and applied a bandage. And all the while I was listening to hear the thunking start up again.
Charlie waited a lot longer than five minutes. Probably more like fifteen. He wasn’t a stupid kid. And when you came right down to it, he was rather likable.
Neither of which ruled him out as a murderer. And it definitely wasn’t just Vern and Randall who blamed Lanahan for endangering Charlie's football scholarship. Charlie had the same idea.
I sighed with exasperation. I hated thinking that such a likable kid might be a murderer, but nothing he’d said or done ruled him out. I needed to check him out.
Chapter 29
When I came to the intersection with the main road I turned left, toward Caerphilly, rather than right to go home. I had quite a few unanswered questions about Charlie Shiffley, and for that matter about Patrick Lanahan and Montgomery Blake. I thought I could find a few answers online, and I didn’t want to wait until my nephew, Kevin, arrived to get our computers in working order again.
I left my car in the shade of a huge oak in the parking lot of the Caerphilly Library and strolled inside. Ellie Draper, the librarian, was reading to a group of rowdy toddlers in the children's room, so I waved at her and headed for the computer area. Luckily, it was at the other end of the library, but the din from story hour was still clearly audible. Of course, the noise level was probably the reason that only one of the library's two public-access computers was occupied. I snagged the other.
The cut on my cheek was throbbing a bit, so I muttered a few uncomplimentary things about Charlie Shiffley and went to check him out in the online archives of the Caerphilly Clarion. Lots of headlines from the sports section. Apparently Charlie was the mainstay of the high school football team—article after article credited him with scoring the winning points and beating school records that had stood since the fifties. My knowledge of football would fit nicely in a thimble, so most of the technical stuff was incomprehensible to me, but both local sportswriters seemed to agree that Charlie was something special—more than just this year's star athlete. Much rejoicing in print when Virginia Tech showed the good taste to offer him a football scholarship. Nice human-interest article, painting Charlie in a positive light—a B student, quiet and well-behaved. Active in the 4-H club. Spent his spring vacation volunteering on the Gulf Coast with Habitat for Humanity. The very model of a modern high school athlete. Nice picture of him surrounded by a dozen or so proud members of the Shiffley clan.
Nothing about the unfortunate slaying of Lanahan's stray antelope, though. Maybe the Clarion didn’t want to tarnish the local hero's halo.
I Googled him, and found much the same information, plus a lot of Virginia Tech football fan sites discussing his high school record and college prospects in mind-numbing detail. So much for the scoop on Charlie.
I returned to the Google search page, typed in “Patrick Lana-han,” and got thirty-nine thousand entries. The first twenty didn’t seem to have anything to do with our zookeeper. I tried again, adding “Caerphilly” after Lanahan's name, and hit pay dirt.
First in the queue was the Caerphilly Zoo's Web site. I should have looked for that in the first place, I thought as I clicked the link. Maybe I could find out about Lanahan and get a list of the animals in the zoo at the same time.
The home page had a large picture of Lanahan clowning around with a chimpanzee. I winced as I wrote, “Chimpan-zee(s)?” at the top of a blank page in my notebook. I had the feeling chimps were high maintenance and dangerously mischievous.
Lanahan looked much as he had when I’d seen him in our basement. He had a little more hair in the photo, and looked a lot more animated, but it was definitely the same guy I’d seen. I shook my head and moved on.
Unfortunately, the site was reticent about precisely what animals lived at the zoo. Pictures of all kinds of exotic species decorated the pages, but most of the photos hadn’t been taken at the Caerphilly Zoo—I could tell from the elaborate enclosures and lush vegetation. It was mostly a puff piece to get people to come to the zoo. Not useful for my purposes.
Lanahan's biography was more informative. Apparently his father had made a fortune in the chicken-farming business before selling out to one of the large national chicken-processing companies. Patrick had received his Ph.D. in wildlife science from Virginia Tech fifteen years ago, and then five years back he’d used part of his inheritance to establish the Caerphilly Zoo. Nothing about what he’d been doing in the intervening ten years. Perhaps none of the positions he’d held were sufficiently distinguished to grace the resume of the executive director of the Caerphilly Zoo.