Cutwork Read online

  The storm’s purple clouds were only a short distance out on the lake, lightning still visible in them, and there were still audible rumbles of thunder.

  He stood a minute at the top of a plain wooden staircase leading down to the park, to look the scene over. Lake Street, which he’d just come up, ran along the lake until The Common began. Then the park stayed down near lake level while Lake Street climbed a steep hill. People alighting from their cars halfway along had to come down a bluff via the staircase. The street then went downhill until at the far end it was level with the park again.

  This section of park, a grassy field at the bottom of the stairs, was covered with hundreds of square white tents in neat double rows, with a single row along the lakefront. The tents were like stores, open at the front and full of art stuff for sale. The art fair was an annual event; Mike’s wife had gone last year and come home with a sheet-iron sunflower that weighed twenty pounds and rusted so bad it killed her favorite rosebush.

  Mike had no doubt where the problem was: An ambulance, two squad cars with their lights flickering, and Excelsior’s new fire truck were at the far end of a vertical row. Mike could see the deep grooves cut by the tires of the vehicles in the soggy grass, and decided to leave his pickup where it was. He ducked back in it briefly to get a notebook and pen from the glove box.

  The sun broke through as he went down the wet staircase, a slim man in his late thirties with a freckled face and a thin but sensitive mouth.

  The tents were emptying of people who had sought shelter from the rain. The artists were talking fast to the last of them, holding up items and gesturing. The tent he was passing was full of felt hats with floppy brims and fabric flowers. The artist wore one himself; he looked ridiculous. In the next tent there were glass cases on white pedestals under bright lights. In the cases were clumsy-looking rings and pins, some with colored stones. The prices on little cards in the boxes indicated the metal was real gold, the stones real gems. That didn’t keep them from being, in Malloy’s never-humble opinion, ugly. The next tent held kites. Not regular kites; there was one shaped like the Wright Brothers airplane that even had a silhouette of a man lying on it. Another was a three-dimensional pirate ship whose sails provided the lift like a box kite, probably. A really big one shaped like a dragon was being sailed skillfully higher and higher in the clearing sky. JR would love it if his dad brought one of these home. But not right now.

  Mike turned his attention away from the kites to focus on the tent at the end of the row.

  Three men whose shoulder patches said they were from Shorewood were keeping a crowd back, a crowd that had been small when Mike first spotted it, but was growing fast now the rain had stopped. Mike edged his way through and started to say something to one of the uniformed officers, but heard another already on his radio asking for yet more help. Thank God for the agreement that all the little departments in the towns around Minnetonka would come to one another’s aid.

  Mike went to the tent for a look. There were three men in civilian clothes standing with their backs to the tent, forming a screen of sorts. They were carrying the cases of equipment necessary for collecting evidence. Mike recognized one as an investigator from the state crime team, so probably the others were, too. Inside, a man with a video camera was recording the interior. The video operator moved aside and Malloy leaned way forward and got his first glimpse of the victim, sprawled on the floor in a big red—

  Malloy immediately turned away, wiping his face with one hand. Jesus! Jill’s description of “um, messy” was, um, right. He squeezed his eyes shut, blew gently, and saw Sergeant Jill Cross looking at him. She was all crisp and calm, like this was something you ran across every day. She nodded at him and came over.

  “What happened here?” he asked.

  “A knifing. This is the victim’s booth.” Sergeant Cross was a tall woman, a natural ash blond, not at all skinny but somehow not fat, either. She had a face that went with her voice, cool and showing nothing of her thoughts. She wasn’t an investigator but a supervisor, and so was in uniform. Mike had gone from not liking her when she signed on as a patrol officer—he disliked female cops in general—to an uneasy admiration. She rarely put a foot wrong and had all but aced the sergeant’s exam a few months ago. On the other hand, she and his nemesis were good friends, and his nemesis was an interfering civilian, old enough to know better.

  “Any idea who the victim is?” Mike asked.

  “Robert McFey. He was a wood carver, and it seems his throat was cut with one of his own knives.” Jill glanced sideways at the tent, which had shelves in it with carvings of animals on them, and a couple more on a long table set like a counter across the open front.

  “Any idea who might’ve done this?” he asked.

  “Not yet. The weapon appears to be the small knife beside the body. There’s an overturned cash box in there that seems to be empty.”

  “And Irene Potter saw it happen?”

  “No, she found the body. She’s here selling her needle art, she’s got a booth just up the way. She came over for a look at his work and went off like the noon siren.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Just before ten, the fair was about to start.” Mike checked his watch. Ten-fifty. “You want to talk to her?” Cross asked. “She walked off a while ago, but she’s back.”

  Mike sighed. “Okay, I’ll start with her.”

  “You want me to stay?”

  “No, no, just bring her over and then go back to crowd control or whatever you were doing.”

  “Yessir,” she said coolly. Had he put that clumsily? Mike had never felt comfortable around Cross. He didn’t want a sexual harassment suit, which in his opinion every female cop in the country was spring-loaded to bring. He looked at her, ready to give a friendly smile, but she was already walking away.

  Irene Potter was the same skinny little woman with shiny dark eyes and very curly dark hair he remembered. She wore a light brown dress and pink Keds. Her earrings were shaped like tiny scissors; they glittered in the fresh sunlight. Like her eyes.

  “Hello, Sergeant Malloy,” she said cheerily. “Isn’t this just dreadful?”

  Mike pulled his notebook from a back pocket and slipped the ballpoint pen clipped to its creased cover off. He opened the notebook to a blank page, noted the time, date, and Irene’s name. He said, “How did you come to find the body?”

  “I believe I was summoned by a Greater Power,” she chirped, and he repressed a sigh. She continued, “I was arranging my pieces in my booth when all of a sudden I had this . . . urge, a powerful urge, to go look at Mr. McFey’s work, even though it was raining hard. I took my umbrella and . . .” She gestured awe by raising both hands. “So beautiful! Such energy! I wanted to ask him how long he’d been doing his art. At first, I thought he had stepped out. But he hadn’t. Because then I . . . I saw him. I think I screamed, but I don’t know for sure, except my throat is sore, and it wasn’t sore before. So I really think I must have screamed.” She put one slim hand to her throat and smiled like a school-child with the right answer.

  Mike didn’t write any of this down. “Did you notice anyone hanging around his tent before you got this urge?”

  “No, I was busy with my own arranging. It’s so important to get everything just right, so the eye travels naturally from piece to piece until it reaches the one that pleases the eye, that one must buy.” Her eyes had gone dreamy and her hands moved upward again, this time arranging invisible works on an invisible wall.

  “Yeah, okay, you weren’t looking,” said Mike. “I understand. But you got your stuff arranged and came over to look at this man’s wood carvings and you saw him. What time was this?”

  “It was just a few minutes before the fair opened, though there were customers already starting to come through. It was raining simply buckets, but I had my umbrella, so I wasn’t afraid to go out of my booth. The fair opened at ten.” Mike kept looking at her, and she blinked and said gently, as to an obtuse
person, “It was about five minutes before ten that I went to talk to him.”

  He nodded and wrote that down. “Did you go in to see if he was still alive?”

  She looked horrified. “No, of course not! He looked dead—he was dead. There was so much blood, he must have been dead. But I must’ve screamed because two people came running. I think one of them went in. I felt—ill, so I went back to my booth and sat down.” She nodded at his notebook to encourage him to write. He made a brief note to find those two people who came when Irene must have screamed. Satisfied, she went on, “And someone must have called 911, because pretty soon there was a police car, and an ambulance, and the fire truck came, too; it had been on the grounds, it’s the new pumper. Or maybe the fire truck came first, I don’t remember. And I wasn’t looking, I’d gone back to my booth to sit down, and my heart was going at a terrific pace, quite frightening. A squad car came, then Jill, and last those people who are taking pictures. And now you. I wonder why Betsy Devonshire is not here. I mean, she’s here, she was working in the information booth earlier this morning. But she’s not here.”

  Mike said firmly, “Ms. Devonshire has no business at the scene of a crime.”

  Irene stared at him. “But she can help you, I’m sure she can. She’s so very clever about murder. You know that, Sergeant Malloy.”

  Mike found a patient smile somewhere. “How about you let the professionals have a go at it first, okay? Then if we need to talk to her, we will. Now, did you see anyone running away from this tent?”

  “No. All I saw was the body. And the blood. There seems to be a great deal of blood, doesn’t there?” She wrinkled her nose.

  “Yes,” said Mike, trying not to grimace back. “That’s all I have to ask you right now, but would you mind waiting here for a while, in case I have more questions later?”

  “I can’t, I have to go back to my booth. People are moving around again, with more arriving now the rain’s stopped. Shopping. Shoplifting. I’m across the row, up three booths, easy to find. Number forty-nine.” She nodded her head toward a tent up the way and started off.

  “Wait! Do you know, uh . . .” He checked his notebook. “Deb Hart?”

  A voice behind him said, “I’m Deb Hart.”

  Mike turned around to see a sturdy woman with her hair pulled back tightly from her face, which was innocent of makeup and carefully blank of expression. She was wearing a loose-fitting blue denim dress under a clear plastic raincoat whose snap fastenings were all undone. “Are you in charge of this shindig?” Mike asked.

  “Yes. Unfortunately.” Her blue eyes were intelligent and steady. “Mr. McFey was a very talented artist, and it is a terrible thing that he should be murdered here.”

  “Did you know him personally?”

  “No. Well, I talked with him yesterday after he was set up, but only briefly. He hadn’t been to many of these fairs, and this was his first time here. He won an award from us for his work, but I wasn’t his judge.” She looked around toward the tent, and Mike saw her dark blond hair was in a very long braid down her back.

  “But you’re sure the body in there is his. McFey’s.”

  Her head came back. “Yes.”

  “Do you know where he’s from?”

  “He’s from around here, Golden Valley or Hopkins, I can’t remember. Or Minnetonka?” She frowned, a little disturbed that she couldn’t remember.

  “Do you know how to spell ‘McFey’?”

  “Yes,” she said and did so.

  “Is there next of kin to be notified?”

  “Yes, a wife. He gave a separate phone number and address for her, out in Maple Grove, so maybe they’re divorced; but he listed her as the person to be notified in case of accident. I haven’t made the call yet.”

  “That’s all right, we’ll take care of it.”

  “Thank you.” Ms. Hart was relieved about that.

  “Have you had a problem with stealing here?”

  “Once in a while. Someone will take a piece, something small enough to fit in a purse or pocket, or up a sleeve, and walk away.”

  “I was thinking of the money. Stealing from the cash boxes.”

  “Oh. Well, no, not for several years. The fair is pretty well attended so it’s hard to do something like that and not be seen. Artists tend to put the cash box somewhere hard to reach, so other customers notice when someone tries to get at it. Is that what happened here? A robbery?”

  “We don’t know yet. I understand there’s an emptied cash box in the tent.”

  “Booth.”

  “What?”

  “Booth. These aren’t tents, they’re booths.”

  “That’s right, that’s what Sergeant Cross called it, too.” He nodded and repeated, “Booth, then. There’s an empty cash box in there.”

  “Oh. No one told me that. Interesting.” Ms. Hart looked thoughtful. “And stupid, really.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because nobody brings cash boxes in with yesterday’s receipts still in them, of course. And the fair was just getting under way today when this happened. There would have only been starting-up money in Mr. McFey’s box, just what he needed to make change.”

  “How much would that be?”

  “Not more than forty or fifty dollars, I’d say. How incredibly, incredibly stupid if a very fine artist is dead because somebody needed to steal fifty dollars.”

  Mike wrote some of that down while she waited, but at last she said, “I—I’d like to go back to my other duties now, if that’s all right.” She wasn’t looking at him anymore, but he could see that was because she was trying not to show how sad and angry she was.

  “Yes, all right. How can I get back in touch with you, if I have more questions?”

  “Look for my staff, people carrying walkie-talkies, I’ve got one, too.” She touched a big pocket on the skirt of her dress that was bulging heavily. “And I’m carrying a cell phone as well.” She gave him the number, then turned and walked away, her sandals squishing a bit in the sodden turf.

  Mike reviewed his notes. Okay, the dead man was Robert McFey, one of the artists selling his stuff here at the fair. His throat had been cut, probably by one of his own carving knives. His money box had been emptied, which probably meant this was about robbery. On the other hand, this guy wasn’t selling gold jewelry like the guy up the way, and had maybe fifty dollars, max, in cash, so why pick on him?

  Maybe because not many people were around when the robber was looking for a mark. Or maybe because the robber was an amateur. Mike didn’t like amateur murderers for the same reason he didn’t like amateur sleuths: They don’t play by the rules. Like here. Only an amateur would go after a man in a place crowded with people, and so unprepared he had to borrow the murder weapon from his victim.

  Of course, it was possible the victim was out of his tent—booth—for a while and came back in time to surprise someone getting into his cash box.

  Poor schnook, with the accent on poor. After all, selling wood statues out of a tent, that wasn’t any way to get rich. Harmless guy, probably, without an enemy in the world, who didn’t deserve to die like this.

  Which might mean this would be difficult to solve. Such a dumb amateur as this murderer could be hard to find, because he was so far off the pattern most perps followed.

  Truth be told, Mike preferred his victims also to be criminals. Dope dealers, for example. Pimps. Burglars. Loan sharks. The kind of pro with obvious enemies—and friends and associates who didn’t know what loyalty meant—all of them willing to drop a dime on the perp.

  (Funny how slang sometimes got stuck in a time warp, he considered. Snitches still dropped a dime on people, even though pay phone prices had long since gone trotting past fifty cents in the Twin Cities.)

  Of course, amateurs were sometimes careless about leaving clues behind and, once confronted, tended to blurt out incriminating details. So maybe this would be one of those times.

  It would have to be crazy Irene who found
the body. Her bright but careless embroidery—to Mike, any decorative stitchery was by definition embroidery—had been pronounced Important Art, which only confirmed Mike’s opinion that the smoke in her chimney didn’t go all the way up. Most artists were at least a little crazy, weren’t they? She hadn’t helped her case by asserting that he ought to send for Miss Nemesis.

  Deb Hart, Mike knew, owned an art supply store that catered to artists, but she wasn’t one herself. Also, she had run the art fair since it began twenty years ago, and both the store and the show did well, so it all went to show, right? Not an artist, not crazy.

  She had said this McFey fellow was from one of the Minneapolis suburbs. He had written that down, gratefully certain there weren’t many Robert McFeys in the phone book. Now, if he’d been Robert Larson, that would have made his life miserable. The Twin Cities was lousy with Larsons.

  About then, Sergeant Cross came back and said the police photographers had finished making their record of the scene on film and tape. Mike thanked her and walked slowly along the table, looking into the white tent. Booth.

  It was just like all the others at the fair, square, the size of a kid’s bedroom, straight-sided, and so tall you could stand up in it, with metal bracing under its peaked ceiling that made it look like it went up easy, like opening an umbrella. A heck of a deal, he thought enviously, having camped for years in a low, slope-sided, rip-stop nylon tent that was hard to put up and easy to blow down. He looked back up the aisle. Not one tent—booth—had blown down in the storm just over. Heck of a deal.

  On the table were wood statues, one of a lion about to take down an antelope that was very nice, very nice. And beside it was another one, of those little birds that chased and were chased by the waves on the seashore. Mike had seen those birds in movies and on television and once in person when he went to Atlantic City for a lawmen’s convention. The seashore was represented by a smooth, wavy piece of wood with the birds stuck on it by their wire legs. It had five birds, one with its beak driven like a nail halfway into the wooden seashore. Nice, but not as nice as the lion.