All Rights Reserved
RESERVE BITCH
by: John A. Taylor
Had the call come in five minutes later it would have caught Detective Steve Richards on his morning break, and probably would have been routed to one of the other two detectives in the largely rural county.
Richards always felt more than a little self-conscious, if not downright guilty, about his morning-break ritual. Two chocolate-covered donuts and a leisurely large cup of coffee at a nameless donut shop on the edge of town.
While the caffeine addiction was to be expected of anyone keeping his odd hours and investigating his tedious case load, Richards hated to add grist to the mill of the donut-eating cop stereotype. Whenever an acquaintance, or even a stranger, caught his eye as he sat on the third stool in from the door, Richards imagined a little smirk crossing the lips of the judgmental, self-righteous ass. Still, Richards was never one to cave in to public opinion, and there was something about a freshly glazed donut, dripping with melted chocolate, that Richards found irresistible about eight o'clock every morning.
The dispatcher, a perky little thing called Nancy, reached him just as his conspicuously inconspicuous cream Plymouth was pulling into the coffee shop's parking lot. "Glad I caught you. How are Pop Shipley's donuts today, Steve?" she inquired with mock interest.
The detective winced a little with mild embarrassment. He squinted and rubbed his brow. Richards liked Nancy, but she was pressing her luck with a man whose morning coffee hadn't yet been consumed, much less had an opportunity to kick in. "What's up? I'm... busy."
"I think you'll want to put off your donuts this morning. It's a murder, Steve - at the fairgrounds. A trooper's already on the scene."
Nancy filled him in on some of the details as Richards proceeded to the county fairgrounds out on Route 50, where he found the situation just as Nancy had described it.
This was the seventh annual dog show of the Easton County Kennel Club. The fair grounds were covered with a motley variety of trailers, vans and utility vehicles, many of which contained metal crates full of yapping fur. In the center of the fairgrounds, the two show tents stretched out in parallel, each bounded on two sides by outdoor show rings with posts indicating their ring numbers. Surrounding the show rings, at a diameter of about a hundred yards, was a perimeter of sales tents - dealers hustling grooming supplies, breed-specific trinkets and food for the discriminating canine and the indiscriminate hominid.
Richards walked past all of this, to the grooming tents where dog owners and paid handlers prepared their animals for the show ring. Richards entered one of the few walled tents where he met a young uniformed state trooper. The cause for their visit lay flat on the bare grass of the floorless tent, mostly covered with the trooper's state-issued blanket.
The state trooper looked up from his pad as the detective entered the small tent. "Trooper Davis?" Richards recognized the young state policeman's face from a few drunk driving homicide investigations, but still had to cheat by reading his name badge.
"Yes sir. Good morning, sir." He responded with military rigidity, and a little too loudly for that early in the morning. His manner fit well with his buzz hair cut, shiny brass and a uniform that looked like it was soaked in starch and pressed every day.
"What have we got here, trooper?" asked Richards, glancing quickly around the tent in a futile attempt to answer his own question.
"Well, sir, the decedent's name is Rhonda Morton. She was a dog breeder and handler. It appears as though the decedent was poisoned." He spoke as though reading from a typed report. "Her assistant walked into the tent and found her convulsing. When I arrived, the decedent was already dead. I found a pint bottle of cheap vodka in the decedent's grooming box. It had a distinct odor about it that I think I recognized. I sent it out to be analyzed, but I'm pretty sure it's going to come back toxic."
"Have you spoken with her assistant yet?"
"No, sir. That's as far as we've gotten. The assistant's name is Denise Jacobs. She's in the next tent over. She's pretty upset, but she's rational."
Richards left the young trooper and, after discovering that knocking on the door of a tent is quite impossible, entered the adjoining tent unannounced. He found Denise Jacobs sitting on a collapsible canvas stool.
She was hunched over and drawn into herself - shaking slightly and clutching a gob of Kleenex. She looked up suddenly as she heard the detective enter the tent. Her eyes were red and bleary, and it was obvious she had been crying hard.
Richards had never been good at the next-of-kin thing. The gruff policeman tried, with some difficulty, to soften his voice to a kind sing-song tone one would use in talking to a child who had scraped her knee. In this case, it might have been appropriate, since Denise Jacobs appeared to be only about sixteen.
"Denise? I'm Detective Richards. How are you holding up?"
"Okay I guess." She leaned her head back slightly and drew in a sharp snork through her nose. She dabbed her eyes with the Kleenex.
Richards began his inquiry, approaching her furtively and bent slightly to one side, as though at any moment she might explode in a rain of tears or snot. "I know you've already spoken with the state trooper, but I'd like you to tell me again what happened."
"Well," she said, already beginning to regain her composure, "I was in here grooming a dog, and I went into her tent and she was lying on the ground kind of, you know, wriggling. I ran out of the tent to tell someone and found Mike Sterling. Mike's got one of those car phone things, where you don't actually have to have a car. I told him to call an ambulance."
"By the time I got back, she'd stopped moving and was just lying there. Her dog, Gizmo, was standing over her licking her face and sniffing at her. I pulled Gizmo off, and waited for the ambulance. The trooper arrived first, and said she was dead. He said it was poison."
"Did you see anybody else go in or out of the tent this morning?"
"No, but I was over here in this tent most of the time. Other breeders come and go a lot at these shows... borrowing stuff, but mostly just visiting. It's like a monthly social event. If somebody went in the tent, I wouldn't necessarily know it."
"Can you think of anyone here who would have a reason to kill Ms. Morton?" He began his canned witness interrogation.
She looked at him with mild confusion. "I know you do this for a living and everything... but I think you're looking at the wrong end of the lead."
The reference eluded him completely, having not had even a sip of his morning coffee (though, in truth, it probably wouldn't have mattered). His lack of comprehension must have shown on his face, as Denise thankfully continued.
"... I think you should be looking for the person who wanted to see Gizmo dead."
Richards could tell that the young girl thought the latter statement somehow clarified the former, but he was more confused than ever.