“We have a search warrant to search your premises,” I explained. “Including any vehicles.”
I took the official document from my coat pocket and handed it to her. Without bothering to look at it, she flung the warrant and the keys on the floor of the garage and marched off toward the apartment with me on her heels.
We went back inside through the kitchen door. While Rachel dialed the zoo on the kitchen phone, Buddy tried desperately to draw me into conversation. “What’s your name?” he whined plaintively. In his lonely kitchen exile, he was evidently quite miserable.
Rachel finally got through to the zoo and asked for someone to check the sign-in sheet. For several minutes she waited on hold, without speaking to me or acknowledging my presence. When the other person returned and began speaking, Rachel’s head bobbed up and down in vigorous agreement.
“See there?” she said to me, holding the phone away from her mouth and covering the mouthpiece. “I told you she was there. Her signature is on the sheet right where it’s supposed to be. In at twelve-thirty and out at three-thirty.”
“How can that be? It doesn’t make sense,” I commented.
“Of course it makes sense,” Rachel snapped. “I tried to tell you this was all a mistake.”
“Did you say she was conducting tours?”
Rachel nodded.
“Who’s in charge of them?”
“The tours? Madge,” she answered. “She arranges the scheduling.”
“Check with her and find out if Daisy actually appeared for her one o’clock tour.”
Although Rachel clearly thought me unreasonable, she removed her hand from the receiver and asked to speak with Madge. It was a minute or so before she was connected.
“This is Rachel,” she said into the phone. “Rachel Miller, Daisy’s sister. I wanted to check on the tour Daze did on Saturday.” There was a long pause and Rachel began to frown. “She didn’t?” Her tone was incredulous. “You’re sure?”
She listened to the answer, then hung up the phone. With a sigh she turned to face me. “Madge says Daisy never showed up. They held the tour for a while, but they finally had to send it out with somebody else. I don’t understand. Why would she sign in and then not go on her tour?”
“Maybe she signed in and out later, hoping to give herself an alibi,” I suggested.
Just then Al reappeared at the kitchen door. “You should come look at this, Beau.” He nodded curtly in Rachel’s direction. “You’d better come along, too.”
“Rachel, what’s happening in there?” Dorothy called from the living room. “I thought you were going to make us a pot of coffee.”
“In a minute,” Rachel replied. “I’m busy-right now.”
Big Al led the way back to the garage and around the car to the BMW’s open trunk. “Look at that,” he said.
A rumpled docent’s uniform lay on the floor of the trunk. There had been some attempt to rinse the clothing out, but a splatter of brownish stains was still plainly evident on the material.
“That’s Daisy’s other uniform,” Rachel said, “but what’s that all over it? It looks like it’s ruined.”
“Try the shoes, Beau.”
A pair of Maine waders lay at the front of the trunk. One was upright, but the other one had been knocked over on its side, revealing a distinctive chain-link pattern.
“It looks like the one Foster took from the scene,” AI added, speaking guardedly.
“From the scene,” Rachel echoed, looking back and forth between us. Suddenly everything we were saying seemed to coalesce in her mind. “You mean from my nephew’s office? You’re saying that’s blood on Daisy’s clothes?”
I nodded.
“Oh no,” I heard her say. Without another word and in painfully slow motion, Rachel began slipping toward the floor. I caught her and pulled her to her feet, where she sagged in my arms like a limp rag doll. Still leaning heavily against me, she glanced once more toward the trunk, then turned away.
“It isn’t true! It can’t be true!”
“I’m afraid it is, Rachel. Where is your sister now?”
I expected a violent storm of tears. Instead, Rachel Miller shuddered visibly like a tree caught in a strong gale; then, with determined effort, she pulled away from me and drew herself erect.
“At the zoo,” Rachel answered slowly, pronouncing each word slowly and carefully as though it belonged to some complex foreign language. “She’s helping decorate for the party tonight. The guided tours don’t start until five.”
“What tours?”
“Behind-the-scenes tours, where people get to talk to the keepers and touch the animals. They put them on for the zoo patrons each year. Daisy’s scheduled to work some of those.”
“Will you help us find her?” I asked.
Rachel nodded in defeat. “Yes,” she said, “but first let me call George. I’ll see if he can come over and watch Dotty while we’re gone. I can’t leave her here all alone.”
Following Rachel back into the house, we waited while she talked to George. “He’ll be over in half an hour,” she said quietly when she put down the phone.
“Rachel,” Dorothy demanded impatiently. “Isn’t that coffee ready yet?”
With a sigh, Rachel turned to the cupboard and began making coffee. Al got on the phone and called Bill Foster.
“We need a crime-scene team out here right away,” he said, giving Bill the address of the Edinburgh Arms and bringing him up to date. “I’ll meet you out on the next street by the garages,” he added. “There’s no sense in your coming in here.”
I dogged Rachel’s heels while she made the coffee and set a tray with the special bone-china cups and saucers as well as a plate loaded with ancient Oreo cookies. She carried the tray into the living room and served her sister first, then she offered some to me.
It was a game gesture of hospitality, of carrying on with the niceties of life in the face of certain disaster. Out of respect for what she was doing, I accepted both the coffee and the cookie. I wasn’t tough enough to turn her down.
While we waited for George to appear, Rachel carefully explained to Dorothy that she would have to be put for a while but that someone would be there in case anything was needed. It sounded like a mother explaining the presence of a baby-sitter to a willful child.
I didn’t see Bill Foster arrive. The street was out of my range of vision, but Al came in a short time later and gave me a thumbs-up sign indicating the garage end of the situation was under control.
Rachel handed Al a cup of coffee, too, and there we sat, the four of us, all of us drinking coffee with three of us lying through our teeth. That’s wrong. We were all four lying, come to think of it, but Dorothy Nielsen had been lying to herself and everybody else for so many years that she no longer knew the difference.
I could understand why Rachel wasn’t ready to tell Dorothy the truth about what was going on. Big Al and I followed her lead. It was the least we could do.
When George finally showed up, Rachel met him outside. His initial grin at seeing her quickly faded as she talked to him, outlining the problem. He was somber but nodding in agreement as they came into the apartment.
“I’ll be glad to stay just as long as you need me to, Rachel,” he was saying.
Rachel smiled up at him gratefully, then she turned to me. “I should go upstairs and put on my uniform,” she said. “It’ll make it a whole lot easier for us to get around in the zoo.”
Big Al and I exchanged wary glances. We’d been led down the primrose path on this kind of deal once before by the very same lady.
She read our reluctance correctly. “It’s okay,” she said. “There’s no outside door up there.”
“How about windows?” I asked.
“I told you I’d help,” she answered.
In the end, we let her go upstairs to change. She was back downstairs in her uniform in less than five
