“ ‘Slavering’?”
She ignored him. “Would you go after the medical examiner who gave some of the evidence first? Or would you go after the prosecuting attorney, or the arresting officers, or even your own attorney first?”
“Well, you know how I feel about lawyers. I’d definitely go for them first.” She whacked his arm. “No, I know. Point well taken. There’s another possibility. His car was in an accident, not bad enough to cause his injuries, but enough to give everyone involved a good smack. Maybe the other driver went ballistic. Cut loose on him.”
“Road rage run amok?”
“It happens.”
She worried her lower lip. “Could it have been personal? Someone he knew?”
He nodded. “In most assaults and homicides, the victim and the perpetrator know each other. That’s why I asked Paul about where Emil had been.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I don’t know. There are too many possibilities right now. I don’t like that. The only thing we know for sure is that the vehicle he hit was red. We got some paint scraping on his left-front fender.”
“We know he wasn’t robbed.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“One of the nurses gave Paul Dr. Dvorak’s belongings—clothes and stuff. He had a very expensive watch and a wallet full of credit cards. Untouched.”
“I almost wish he had been robbed. We’re going to have some good prints off Emil’s car, but they’re not going to do us any good if whoever did this hasn’t been arrested before.” Thunder rumbled, closer and louder than before. He glanced up. Heavy clouds had moved in, their under-bellies reflecting a faint sodium glow from the lights of Glens Falls. “Time to go. You can follow me back to Millers Kill if you need to.”
She reached into the pocket of her skirt and pulled out her keys. “I need to.” He watched her get into that ridiculous mosquito of a car. Another impractical sports car, and a convertible to boot. He shook his head. She had slipped, slid, and stuck in her old MG last winter, finally wrecking the thing trying to drive through a snowstorm on Tenant’s Mountain. He had assumed that would have taught her to buy a sensible four-wheel-drive vehicle. He had assumed wrong.
As he climbed into his cruiser, it struck him that he didn’t feel like a hormonal teenager anymore. He felt…pleasant. Friendly. He had enjoyed Clare’s company without making an idiot of himself. He reached for the mike to let dispatch know his destination. He was going to work out this friendship thing after all.
Chapter Four
Thursday morning, Clare woke early with the sound of helicopter rotors in her mind. She ran through the tree-lined streets of her neighborhood as the sun was rising, looping east to return along Route 117, parallel to Riverside Park and the abandoned nineteenth-century mills. A short run on Thursdays, so she could shower and be ready for the 7:00A.M. weekday service of Morning Prayer. It was one of her favorites: cheerful and intimate, with the same five or six faces showing up regularly. Since Memorial Day weekend a month back, the size of her Sunday-morning congregation had dropped like a stone through water. She was lucky if she saw thirty faces at the ten o’clock Eucharist. But she could rely on her Morning Prayer people, and no matter how much turmoil she brought with her, she always found her center in the orderly succession of prayers, psalms, and canticles.
Today, though, she was seized by the thought of Paul and Dr. Dvorak as she and her tiny congregation read the Second Song of Isaiah, the Quaerite Dominum. “ ‘Let the wicked forsake their ways and the evil ones their thoughts; And let them turn to the Lord, and He will have compassion….’” Paul’s broken, lost expression. Dvorak’s still form at the eye of a whirlwind of activity. “ ‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways my ways, says the Lord.’ ” She tried to imagine what would lead someone to stomp an unoffending man half to death. It seemed infinitely more vicious, more personally hateful than that American classic, murder by cheap gun. “ ‘So is my word that goes forth from my mouth; it will not return to me empty….’” Sometime during her once-a-week visits to the Millers Kill infirmary, Paul had become her friend, one of the very few people in Millers Kill who didn’t look at her and stop when they got to her collar. A man who spent his days caring for the weakest and most vulnerable members of society. His world had collapsed in the space of a few minutes because of—what? Careless malice? Cool calculation? An explosion of anger? “ ‘But it will accomplish that which I have purposed, and prosper in that for which I sent it.” She wanted to know. She wanted to know why. And who. Was it a monster? She didn’t believe in monsters. She believed in redemption. But some days, it was awfully hard.
After the service, she checked the calendar. Two premarital counseling sessions today and another three next week. Whoever said Generation X was not interested in marriage hadn’t been looking in the Adirondack region. And the MacPherson-Engals wedding rehearsal Friday evening. She underlined that. She left a note for Lois, the church secretary, asking her to contact the organist, and another for the sexton, reminding him to unlock the door by eight o’clock Saturday morning to give the florist time to arrange the wedding flowers. Then she dashed back to the rectory next door and changed into an outfit that compromised between the weather and her customary clerical uniform: a long, loose-fitting shift in black linen, with a collar attached by hand.
Outside, it was promising to be another ninety-degree day, but the storm last night had cleared the air. The light, dry breeze reminded Clare of the best sort of weather at her parents’ home in southern Virginia. She had dropped the top of her convertible, and once she had taken care of Paul’s dogs, she might have time for a little spin through the countryside before the first of her two counseling sessions that afternoon.
The first hitch in her plans came when she got to Emil and Paul’s handsome old farmhouse. For some reason, she had pictured little dogs, Jack Russells or toy poodles perhaps. The pair that bounded out of the attached barn were big. Really big. Big, hairy, bouncing, barking black-and-white Bernese mountain dogs. She turned around and looked at the minuscule backseat, which would have been a snug fit for Jack Russells. She looked back at the dogs, which were excitedly tearing along the limits of an invisible fence. “Oh…shoot,” she said.
The dogs were ecstatic at meeting her. As she crossed from the driveway onto the lawn, they leapt and wiggled against her, pawing at her ankle-length dress and frantically licking at her hands. “Not exactly standoffish, are you?” she said. They discovered her sandal-clad feet and immediately began licking her toes. “Stop!” she shrieked. “Sit!” They plunked down, looking up at her hopefully, their tails thumping hard against the grass. She fished for their collar tags among handfuls of silky hair. “Okay, Gal and… Bob?” The dogs thumped more energetically. “Who names a dog Bob?” She sighed. When he had mentioned the dogs while they were waiting in the emergency room, Paul had said their bowls and leashes were in the barn. “C’mon, then,” she said. “Let’s get your things. Then we’ll try to fit you into my car.”
She wound up squeezing Gal, who was the slightly smaller of the two, across the backseat, the dog’s head out one side of the car and her tail out the other. Bob sat in the passenger seat, his dinner plate–size paws precariously balanced on the very edge of the smooth leather. Clare’s trunk lid barely shut over leashes, bowls, fifty pounds of dog chow, and an assortment of squeaky toys the dogs had brought and dropped in her way while she was loading the car.
The second hitch came at the Clover Kennels. “I’m sorry, Reverend Fergusson,” the plump, blonde owner said. She vigorously scratched the dogs’ heads. “All of our big dog runs are booked up through next week. It’s the Fourth of July weekend, and lots of folks are traveling.” She crouched, running Gal’s floppy ears through her hands and kissing her nose. “And we can’t fit these two into anything smaller. You wouldn’t be able to move, would you, you sweet thing?” She looked up regretfully at Clare. “There are a couple kennels over to Saratoga, of course, but I’d call first before going over. It’s going to be hard to find any spaces this weekend. Maybe some friends could watch them?”