“Police!” Anna yelled, as loud as she could, which was pretty loud. She scrambled and caught Quincy, who had leapt away from the fray.
Chase shook her head in an effort to clear the stars spinning inside her skull. Ivan straddled her, clutched her wrist, and pressed, trying to get her to release the collar. Quincy, maybe having a change of heart, jumped from Anna’s arms. He pounced and bit down, hard, on Ivan’s forearm. The man yowled and rolled off Chase.
The policeman Chase had seen enter was there an instant later. He lifted Ivan off the ground and held him by both arms. Chase still had the collar. She slowly rose from the floor, rubbing the back of her sore head. Other officers stayed inside the door to the hallway, beckoning a dozen more uniformed police officers inside. She could barely see the tops of their heads, but she could easily tell which one was Detective Olson because he was a bit taller than the others.
Ingrid stood behind Peter, her hands clutching her horrified face.
“What’s going on?” the policeman asked. He was a large, stern-looking man of about forty with bristly dark brown hair, an acne-scarred face, and substantial jowls.
“It should belong to us,” Ivan snarled. “The money spent on that thing should have gone to pay Peter. She should not have it.” He tossed his head toward Chase on the word she.
The officer detached a pair of plastic strips from his belt and looped them around Ivan’s wrists behind his back, ignoring what Chase held. Chase could tell Ivan was rubbing the officer the wrong way.
“How did it get in your carrier?” Anna asked.
Peter shrank back. “I didn’t know it was there,” he protested.
“How could you not?” asked Anna. “Didn’t you bring your cat here in that carrier?”
Peter nodded. “Yes, but . . . I don’t know. I didn’t know it was there,” he repeated.
“Did your cat notice it was there?” Chase stepped closer, putting her face in his.
Peter frowned and looked down at the cat, who sat crouched at the foot of the stand all this time. Peter picked him up. “That’s strange. You’d think Shadow would have found it.”
“Maybe he doesn’t like butter as much as Quincy does,” Chase said. Quincy, in her arms again, was now licking bits of it off the collar she still held.
“I hope none of those diamonds are loose,” Anna said. “Maybe I’d better take it.”
“Has anyone called Detective Olson over here?” Chase asked.
The policeman finally took a close look at what was in Chase’s hand. “This is the missing artifact, isn’t it?” the man said. He held out his hand, one arm on Ivan’s upper arm, and Chase gave it to him. “I’ll get backup right now.” He slipped it into a paper bag and into a pocket one-handed. He waved toward where Olson stood, now surrounded by two dozen police. He took a whistle from his belt and blew it.
Chase watched Ivan. His eyes never left the collar as the man tried to summon more police.
“Why does your father have this?” Chase asked Peter. She wanted to hear someone else say it.
“I have no idea. I don’t know how it got there.” Peter looked genuinely puzzled.
Patrice came running over, carrying Princess Puffball. “That’s him!” She pointed at Ivan. “That’s the horrible man who threatened me!” Her eyes were wild. “He wanted me to give him the collar.”
Ivan had wanted Patrice to give it to him, she said, after she stole it. He was the reason she’d put it inside the butter sculpture in the first place. “There’s only one way it could have ended up in the carrier if you didn’t put it there,” Chase said to Peter.
Ingrid was giving Peter peculiar looks. He glanced back at her once, then quickly away.
“Yes, you’re right.” He looked at his father with sorrow in his eyes. “Papa? You took this? From the butter sculpture?”
Ivan had to have seen Patrice hide it there and gone to retrieve it.
“So what if I did? You should have it.”
Chase could see the top of Detective Olson’s head as he finally made his way through the throng toward them.
“But what else did you do when you took it?” Peter’s voice shook and tears flowed down his face, scrunched in agony.
“All right,” Ivan shouted. “I killed that man! He came in and saw me. I had to.”
Gasps were heard from everyone crowding around the spectacle. Chase let one escape, too, at the unvarnished confession.
“Stand back, everyone,” the policeman said. “You’re not going anywhere,” he told Ivan. “Everyone stay put until the detective gets here. No one is to move an inch.”
They all watched as Detective Olson and six uniformed backup officers strode through the crowd toward Ivan. Ivan glared at everyone and hissed, showing his teeth. Chase thought he looked like an angry cat.
“That’s him!” Patrice shouted again, stabbing her finger at Ivan, but staying a good distance away from him. Her mother, Mike’s aunt Betsy, had made her way over and folded Patrice, cat and all, to her bosom.
Mike was right behind them. He went directly to Chase and put an arm around her shoulder.
“What’s going on now?”
“Now we know who killed Oake.” She leaned into him and watched Ivan.
When Olson reached them and confronted Ivan, the fight went out of the cranky old man and he submitted to a pat-down without further resistance. He kept his mouth shut, although he threw daggers at both Chase and Dr. Ramos.
Patrice repeated everything about Ivan’s threats when he’d seen her with the collar, as one of the officers took notes.
Peter conferred with Inger briefly before following his father as he was taken out of the arena by two of the officers.
People were slowly beginning to leave the arena, one at a time, after being questioned by the police at the door.
Chase and Mike stepped aside, to the edge of the now-dwindling crowd.
“What just happened? I could see what I thought was a struggle, but too many people were in the way.”
“Quincy and I found the diamond collar!”
“Where was it?”
“In Shadow’s carrier. Ivan is the one who murdered Larry Oake.”
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Ivan tried to get it from me, but Quincy bit him on the arm. It was awesome. You should have seen it. I didn’t get hurt much.”
“How about out there with the van? You got hurt there, didn’t you?”
“Not really. My hands are sore and a little bruised from Hardin pounding on my knuckles, but nothing too bad.” They were a dozen yards away from where the guard held Ivan’s biceps in an iron grip. “And I hurt my knees a little bit.”
“What exactly did you do?” Mike took her hands in his and inspected them, frowning at her bandages. His hands were warm. His own knuckles looked bruised. She rubbed a finger over them.
“I hung on to the car while he tried to drive away.”
“If you had fallen off, you’d have been badly hurt.”
Chase grinned. “But I didn’t. How about you?”
“My hands are sore, too, from pounding on the wall of the van,” he admitted. “Thank goodness you realized what was happening.”
“We’re quite the pair, with our injuries. But why did Hardin kidnap you?”
“I couldn’t figure that out at first. I startled him earlier, on the midway. He was coming out from the aisle next to the butter building. He looked panicked—I didn’t know why—but just ran away. After he took me to the van and threw me inside, he was raving about something he thought I’d seen. He thinks I saw him kill someone back there behind the booths!”
“It all started when Hardin saw Ivan run away after killing Oake.”
“He saw him run from the building?”
“Yes. He told Sally, one of the travel agents, but then refused to talk about it, especially with the police.”
Mike’s jaw swung open. “Why? Why wouldn’t he tell anyone what he saw?”
“He’s a murderer who escaped from prison and changed his name. If the police found out, he’d be going back to prison. I’m not sure why he told Sally. He was probably trying to impress her. She was good-looking and was about the only person here that talked to him. She said she would go to the police if he didn’t. I guess he thought it was worth harming both of us to stay out of prison.”