Lady Anthea was talking before I even said hello. “Sue, I need to tell you something. I apologize and have to say that I don’t know how this came about.”
She hesitated and I jumped in before she could say any more—before she could add another complication to my perfectly ordered life. “Shelby just found a dead body.”
“I’m on my way! Don’t start without me!”
Chapter 5
“I know him,” I said. I was kneeling by my garage door, studying the elderly man lying dead on my driveway.
Chief Turner had made a zone of calm and privacy for me to view the lifeless form. Turner’s body language got more done than the average person’s. Magazine articles said crossed arms meant he or she liked or didn’t like you, or whatever it was the studies by experts had decided. John Turner’s body language could calm people down, make them talk, or that morning in front of my house, clear a space.
The man was crumpled on his side with a bloody gash on his head, left ear, and neck. The arm under his body reached above his head.
“What’s his name?” he asked.
“Beats me,” I said.
“You said you knew him.”
“Everybody knows him. He works at Mozart’s, the German deli on Second Street.”
“Let me see,” Shelby said, scooting in. “You’re right!”
I looked up into the sunlight at Chief Turner, who was checking his watch. I wanted to ask him if he had a bus to catch. A pill to take? Was the dead man keeping him from something more important? Was he that unfeeling?
“He sings opera while he waits on customers,” I explained. “How could you live here all these months and not know him?” There was more. I knew something else about him, but that information was determined to stay out of reach. Did I know his family? Had he brought his dog to Buckingham’s? Maybe he’d been at the Pet Parent Appreciation Gala? I closed my eyes and tried to imagine him somewhere other than the deli. Nope, I only knew him from where he worked. I opened my eyes and looked for a clue. He wore a faded plaid shirt, with long sleeves that ended at an unbuttoned cuff and a skinny wrist. “No wallet?” I asked.
Chief Turner gave an exasperated shake of his head. He jerked his thumb to the other officers on the scene. “They told me he had nothing at all in his pockets.”
“What’s this?” I said. Then I figured it out. “There’s blood on his fingers.”
John knelt down next to me for a closer look but didn’t say anything. I got up and moved away, to give them room to work. I walked to the middle of my driveway, making my way through waiting police officers and other official-looking types. Shelby followed me. Bernice was close by her side, now on a leash and with zero slack. The dog was enthralled with the yellow crime scene tape that fluttered in the breeze. It had been strung on orange cones lined up on the street the length of my front yard, and then up the side property lines.
“Dana came in and she’s babysitting the mystery dog until one of us gets back,” Shelby said.
We planned to take the Pug to our local vet, Lewes 24-hour Pet Care, to be scanned for a chip. In the meantime, he was quarantined, since we didn’t know his vaccination status.
“She doesn’t have classes today?” I asked. Dana, a senior at Cape Henlopen High, was one of Buckingham’s afternoon part-timers.
“She saw the police cars on her way to school and came in. When Mason told her we had another dead body, there was no way she was leaving. I told her we would be back soon, so she wouldn’t miss too much school.” Shelby hesitated. “You know she still says she wants to be a detective after we asked her to help us with that internet research last year.”
I leaned over and gave Bernice a scratch under her chin. Her tricolor coat was thick and slightly wavy. She was sitting like such a good girl. I was waiting for John to say something about the dog contaminating the crime scene, but he hadn’t. Instead he looked around and with a slight nod gave permission for the body to be covered, in preparation for being moved, then walked up to us. “Shelby, let’s go over this again. When you arrived the car we believe was involved in this morning’s robbery at the Pet Place was parked in the driveway, correct?”
“Pet Palace,” I interjected.
“Yes, that’s right,” Shelby said.
“You didn’t see anyone inside the vehicle?”
“No, I didn’t.”
He looked at the street, then to the garage door, then back to Shelby. “If the body had been lying there when the car was parked here, would you have been able to see it?”
She motioned to my neighbor’s house. “We went around the other side of that house to get to the backyard, so I wouldn’t have seen what was in front of the car.” She hesitated, then said, “I don’t know, I mean, it’s a tiny car, so maybe I could have if I had looked down.”
The clanking of metal made all three of us look back at the deceased man. The stretcher was raised to waist height of the three people who would take him away. “Where are they taking him?” I asked. All of a sudden it was important to me. More important than the break-in, or the dog on the lighthouse, or the robbery at Raw-k & Roll. I knew that something would be missing when he was gone. For a second there I thought I was going to remember what else I knew about the guy but no such luck. “Has his family been told what happened?”
Chief Turner looked at his watch again. “No, for now he’s a John Doe. Since you told me where he works I’ll wait for the deli to open and go over there.”
“Oh,” I said, glad I hadn’t given him grief about checking the time.
He rubbed the back of his hand back and forth across his forehead. “We know there were two people here.”
“You’re just now ruling out suicide?” I asked.
“I’ll ignore that,” Chief Turner said. “I was about to say that the car you described was too small for two people to be hiding in it without their heads being seen. Somebody drove the car away. But then how did the second person get here?”
“Where were they when Shelby and Bernice were here?” I asked myself.
Chief Turner motioned for a man and woman waiting in the street by the crime scene van to join us. “Fred, dust for fingerprints on all the doors. Marie, look around all sides of the house for tamped-down grass.” He pointed at the far side of my house. “Start over there.”
The gurney was pushed down the driveway on the way to the ambulance.
“You think he and who ever drove the car away came together?” I asked. “And then, what? Got in an argument? One killed the other?” I pulled my phone out of my pants pocket and began scrolling through the photos.
“That’s a possible scenario. Wait, we’re not starting the text-ifying thing again, are we?”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m checking the photographs I took this morning.”
“You took photographs of the car used in a murder and a burglary—”
“Robbery,” I corrected him.
“And you’re just now showing them to me?”
I held my phone up for him to see. “Look, just one driver.” I heard a noise coming from my living room window. It was Abby scratching to let me know she hadn’t been taken out for her walk. I went up the driveway to the garage door.
“Yes, someone drove the car away,” Chief Turner said. “Would you send me those photographs? Where are