I leveled my gaze on Steele.
“Supposedly tigers have very bad eyesight,” I said, very quietly. “They attack on motion. Maybe if we both keep very, very still.”
The parrot conveniently practiced its growl again. I imitated Steele’s menacing smile.
Steele stayed very, very still.
Now what? We couldn’t stand here forever, me holding the sword pointed at Steele’s throat. Sooner or later, my arm would get tired. Or the parrot would switch from menacing growls to knock-knock jokes and give the game away. Or the real Salome would turn up.
Just when I was about to turn and make a run for it, I saw Steele begin to move. I stepped out of the line of his attack and was aiming a thrust at his midsection when I realized he wasn’t lunging at me—he was falling. I barely avoided skewering him as he flopped face first to the floor, with a small projectile protruding from his left buttock. A dart.
“Got him!” came a voice.
A woman in some kind of uniform appeared over the edge of the stage.
“Roger,” came a voice from the back of the ballroom. “You stay there; we’ve got a location on the tiger.”
“You can put the…weapon down now, ma’am,” the woman said. “He’ll be out for a while. We calibrated the dosage in the tranquilizer dart to knock out a two hundred pound tiger for an hour. I figure he’s in about the same weight range.”
I dropped the sword.
She wasn’t the cops, I noticed. The patch on her sleeves said “Loudoun County Animal Control.”
“I’m just glad you tranquilized him instead of me,” I said. “After all, I was the one holding the sword.”
“Yeah, but we saw what he was up to before that,” came another voice. “We caught most of it.”
Detective Foley.
“Caught most of it?” I said. “You mean you were watching somewhere and just let him chase me all over the room trying to cut my throat?”
“Relax, d’Artagnan,” he said, chuckling. “I meant we caught it all on camera.”
He pointed to the balcony. Yes, the cameras were there, pointed at the stage. I supposed that the little blinking red lights meant they were running.
“A whole bunch of people locked themselves in the Rivendell Room when the cat got loose,” Foley said. “They were watching the whole thing, and when they realized it wasn’t a skit, one of them called 911 on a cell phone and got patched through to us outside. Luckily the animal control truck had just pulled up; I felt a whole lot better coming in with them and their tranquilizer darts than I would have with just our guns.”
I glanced up at the balcony again and saw Foley’s partner appear.
“Of course, the sound quality’s probably pretty poor, but they can enhance that in the lab for the trial,” Foley said. “You want to say anything to your fans before we shut the cameras off and seize the tapes?”
“Shut the damned cameras off, Foley,” I said, sitting down on the stage. “What I have to say I don’t want on tape.”
“Yeah,” Foley said, nodding. “You can probably turn them off now, unless—”
“Freeze, Steele!”
We all whirled at the sound, and saw that Michael had burst out onto the ballroom stage from the door leading to the kitchens. He looked around at the half-dozen police officers aiming guns at him, glanced down at Steele’s unconscious body, and then his shoulders slumped, and he lowered the fire extinguisher he was holding.
“I thought I told you to stay out in the parking lot and let us take care of the situation,” Foley said, holstering his weapon and nodding to his troops to do the same.
“I would have, except your idea of taking care of the situation was to sit around watching while that lunatic killed Meg,” Michael said.
“Oh, Meg’s not as easy to kill as all that,” Dad said, following Michael onto the stage. “Though I would like to take a look at that cut.”
He was, of course, toting his small traveling doctor’s bag.
“Can you take a look at this guy while you’re at it?” the animal control officer asked, indicating Steele.
“How much longer will he be out, anyway?” Foley asked, glancing down at Steele.
“Beats me,” the officer said, shrugging. “We’ve never used the tranquilizer darts on a human before.”
“What kind of tranquilizer?” Dad asked.
While they fussed over Steele, Michael put down the fire extinguisher, walked over, and put his arms around me.
“Do you know how I felt when they told me what was happening?” he said.
“Hold that thought a second,” I said. “Foley! Are those damned cameras off yet?”
Chapter 42
By the time Michael and I finished celebrating my survival, Dad had pronounced that the tranquilizer dart wasn’t going to kill Steele. Foley won his argument with the newly arrived ambulance crew who wanted to whisk Steele away to the hospital, Foley’s partner gave up trying to evict Walker, who managed to sneak in with the medics, and a uniformed officer had rescued the irate health department man from the closet.
“Now, let’s see that cut,” Dad said. “Yes, I think a butterfly bandage and a bit of gauze should take care of it.”
“Should we be staying here?” I asked. “Have they caught Salome yet?”
“Safely sedated, and they’ll take her back to her cage as soon as they rig a stretcher,” Foley said. “Although considering how much prime rib she ate in the restaurant, she’d probably just have curled up to digest anyway. So how long have you known that your business partner was actually Ichabod Dilley? Am I going to have to arrest you for obstruction of justice?”
“He’s not my business partner—we were just splitting a booth for the weekend,” I protested. “I didn’t know he was the killer until after Francis set the tiger loose, and then it was too late to tell you.”
While Dad continued to do necessary but uncomfortable things to the cut on my arm, and Michael went off with his cell phone to call Mother and reassure her that I would live, I explained how the scrap of paper the producer had given me led me to Steele.
“At least we were right about Dilley still being alive,” Foley said, filing away the now-battered paper in an evidence bag, “even if we all had the wrong suspects.”
“Okay, so Nate’s innocent, and Francis isn’t Ichabod Dilley,” I said. “Do we have any idea who Francis is? And why seeing the police sent him scampering off like someone who just got top billing on
“Oh, yes,” Michael said, returning to the group. “He broke down in the parking lot and confessed everything. He’s a student radical who’s been on the run since 1970 when he and an accomplice burned all the files at the local draft board. The accomplice was arrested while disposing of the empty kerosene cans—that’s the other half of the Pasadena Pair he was shouting about. But Francis escaped and was never heard from again. Until today.”
“Wow,” Walker said. “So are they turning him over to the FBI?”
“Wouldn’t there be a statute of limitations on that?” I asked, glancing at Foley. “I mean, unless they killed someone, surely the FBI wouldn’t be all that interested after thirty years.”
“The FBI wasn’t all that interested after thirty days,” Foley said. “We did make a little progress on the case while you were swashing and buckling on stage here. Not only did the Pasadena Pair not kill anyone, apparently they didn’t even burn any draft board files.”
“That’s Francis all over,” Walker said, nodding. “Give him a can of kerosene and he still can’t light a fire.”
“Oh, he and his accomplices lit a fire, all right,” Foley said, suppressing a smile. “They just got the wrong
