I was pushing the button to start the dishwasher when Rob sidled in.

"Um ... Meg? Could you help us with something? Just for a minute?"

Chapter 4.

"Help you with what?" I turned around and tried not to frown as I waited to hear more. Evidently I failed.

"See!" he exclaimed. "That's exactly what you need to do to him. Give him that stern, maternal look."

I wasn't sure I liked that thought.

"Who are we talking about?"

"The guy who's here to take the animals away," he said.

"Rob, you're a lawyer. Can't you deal with him?"

"He's got an official order and everything."

I was opening my mouth to say something harsh-something that would probably have included the words "grow up." But I reminded myself that there was a reason Rob made his living as a designer of bizarre computer games rather than in the legal system.

"I told him he needed to talk to the owner of the property first," Rob said. "I've set the stage-all you have to do is waltz in and squelch him."

"Okay," I said. "I'll see what I can do."

Rob raced out. I followed at a more sedate pace, putting on my sternest, most businesslike manner.

"I still don't see why the Corsicans can't fend him off themselves," I muttered.

A small panel truck had backed up to the barn door. Its back doors were open and a ramp led up from the ground to the body of the truck.

But nothing was being loaded. The barn doors were closed, and I could see Corsicans peering from most of the barn windows. Rob stood in front of the barn door, arms folded, looking very stern now that he had me to back him up.

The driver of the truck was sitting on the truck bed beside the ramp. He was a lanky young man who looked barely old enough to drive, in a uniform clearly intended for someone several inches shorter and at least a hundred pounds heavier. He looked up when I approached, and scrambled to his feet.

My appearance on the scene was greeted with cheers from the Corsicans.

"Are you the owner?" the driver asked.

"Of this property, yes," I said. "What can I do for you?"

"I have this paper," he said.

The Corsicans had begun chanting, "Hell, no! We won't go!"

I turned to Rob.

"Please ask your fellow members of the committee to refrain from any action that would exacerbate the situation," I told him.

"Um ... okay." He took a few steps closer to the barn, and then stage whispered, "Hey! Meg says shut up."

Not precisely what I had in mind for him to do. I could have done that myself.

I turned back to the kid in uniform. He handed me a sheet of paper.

It was on stationery from the mayor's office. The heading read "EXECUTIVE ORDER!!!"-not only in all caps but in boldface, in type several sizes larger than the body of the document.

It was barely light, and yet already the mayor had not only found out about the animal shelter burglary, but had presumably rousted several hapless civil servants out of their beds-one to fetch the animals and one to type this document. He hadn't done it himself. The lack of typos and spelling and grammar errors was a dead giveaway. But whoever had typed it could do nothing about his ghastly style.

I had to read the text two times to realize that underneath all the bombast and persiflage was an order directing that the animals should return to the shelter. I had a brief, improbable vision of the animals gathering around to read the proclamation, and then forming an orderly procession to march back to town and surrender themselves. Under other circumstances, I might have found the whole thing funny. Of course, presumably the mayor was aware that even if the animals could read his order, they weren't likely to comply, so he'd sent this kid to collect them. I recognized the uniform he was wearing now-the little logo on the pocket said, "Caerphilly County Solid Waste Department."

"You work at the county dump," I said. "You're not taking the animals to the dump, are you?"

"No, ma'am," he said. "Back to the animal shelter. All three of the shelter employees quit this morning, so the mayor sent me."

"Quit or got fired?" I asked.

"Quit," the kid said, with the ghost of a grin. "He called them up before dawn and told them to come out here to collect the animals or he'd fire them, and they all up and quit before he could do it."

Interesting. The animal shelter was technically owned by the county, but the county board allowed the town council to handle day-to-day operations. They did that with most of the county facilities located within the town limits because otherwise the council members had almost nothing to do, and spent way too much energy tweaking town parking zone restrictions and speed limits. But the county ran the dump directly.

So the mayor was giving orders to county employees. Did that mean he and the county manager were working together on the animal shelter problem? Or had the mayor simply given an order whose authority the kid hadn't thought to question. I could see either happening. Not something I could find out from the kid, who looked as if doing anything more complicated than loading trash might be an intellectual leap. No sense giving him a hard time. But I couldn't let him take the animals. Inspiration struck.

"Well, this seems to be in order," I said.

Shouts of "No! No!" "Traitor!" and a few more rounds of "Hell, no! We won't go!" from the barn.

"Just one more thing," I said. Why not? It worked for Colombo; why not for me? "I have to call someone to clear this. Won't take long."

The kid had clearly learned to exercise patience in the face of bureaucracy. He leaned against the side of his truck and folded his arms to wait. Realizing that I might be up to something useful, the Corsicans in the barn shut up again.

I walked around to the side of the house to a point where I could see the front yard. As I'd suspected, the chief's car was no longer parked on the road near our front walk.

So I called the police station. The nonemergency number. Debbie Anne, the stalwart police dispatcher, answered both, so it wasn't as if I'd get a slower response than on 911. And even in an emergency, I often called the regular number. Less stressful for Debbie Anne.

"Hey, Meg," she said. "How are you holding up with that whole menagerie in your barn?"

"Reasonably well," I said. "The Corsicans are here in force to take care of them. The animals are the reason I'm calling. Could I talk to the chief?"

"Is it urgent?" she asked. "Because you know how he gets when he's on a case."

"This could be related to his case," I said. "I don't know yet. And while I'm not positive he'd find it urgent, it's definitely time-sensitive."

"Okay," she said.

"I should be getting back to town with those animals," the kid called out. It was a token protest, with no real sense of urgency behind it. I returned to the barn door. He was slumped back onto the tailgate of the truck.

"This won't take long," I told him.

He sighed as if he'd heard that before.

"Ms. Langslow?" The chief. "Is there something I can do for you?"

"Thanks for taking my call," I said. "I just wanted you to know that the mayor sent someone down here to collect the animals and take them back to the shelter."

"Poor creatures," he said.

"And before I let him take them, I thought I'd check to see if you still wanted them held as evidence."

"The animals? Evidence in the murder? Or in some other crime that certain people are blasted lucky we don't have the time to investigate right now?"

"If you're finished with the animals, he can take them back to the shelter. I think they have some itchy trigger fingers down there. Or itchy lethal injection fingers. But if you still want them held as evidence..."

The chief finally got it.

"Oh, I see," he said. "No, you mustn't let him take the animals. They're evidence, all right."

"Let me put you on speaker." I punched the correct button and walked over until the kid was within earshot.

"To repeat," the chief said, his voice loud and distinct. "I do not want those animals moved! They are material evidence in at least one felony, and I want them to stay right where they are until I release them. If anyone really wants to incur a charge of interfering with a police investigation-"

"No, no," the kid said, sitting up straight for the first time since I'd seen him. "We're good. I'll go back and tell them. No rush."

He was backing away as if afraid the chief would come through the phone at him. The chief tended to have that effect on people. Even people who didn't know him. The kid began fumbling to load the ramp back into the truck, and Rob jumped to help him.

"Ms. Langslow?"

I turned the speaker off.

"Was there anything else?" the chief asked.

The kid had started his truck, and was lurching down our dirt driveway back to the road. I waved at the Corsicans and headed back for the house.

"Thanks," I said to the chief. "You've got him on the run."

"Sooner or later, you're going to have to figure out what to do with those confounded animals," he said. "I don't like the idea of killing them either, but do you realize how hard it's going to be finding homes for all of them?"

"I'll get the Corsicans to start working on that." I glanced back, decided I was safely out of earshot of anyone at the barn, and continued. "That's the Committee Opposed to the Ruthless Slaughter of Innocent Captive Animals."

"Yes, I'm aware of them," the chief said. "Were they all involved in planning the shelter burglary, do you think, or was that your grandfather's pet project?"

I winced.

"No idea," I said. "Since I'm not a Corsican."

"A pity you're not," the chief said. "I expect you'd have talked them out of this nonsense. Well, with any luck, by the time I have resources to divert to the burglary, some of the saner county board members will have persuaded the mayor and the county manager that pressing charges would be a PR disaster. Right now I'm focusing on Parker Blair's murder. So how many of these so-called Corsicans knew about the plans for the burglary, do you think? Apart from the actual burglars, who alibi each other rather convincingly."

"No idea," I said. "From what I've overheard, I think the burglary plan was an open secret throughout the organization."

"Drat," he said.

"Of course, a lot of them could be just pretending," I said. "To look like they're part of the inner circle. And I doubt if too many people knew exactly where they were planning to meet Parker."

"Which would be relevant if he'd been killed at the rendezvous spot, but he wasn't."

"Where was he killed? And how? I haven't-"

I stopped myself. On the other end of the call, the chief was silent. I mentally kicked myself. Clearly that question had crossed some kind of boundary.

Then the chief sighed.

"It'll be in the papers tomorrow," he said. "He was shot at relatively close range, apparently through the open driver's side window of his truck. Which was still parked behind his furniture store. He might not have been found till morning, except that the truck's lights were on, and one of the neighbors called to complain that they were shining in her windows."

"And that location doesn't help your investigation one little bit, does it?" I said. "All the Corsicans would have expected him to be involved in the burglary, because he's one of the few members with a truck big enough to haul away all the animals. And anyone who guessed he was involved could also guess that sometime that evening he'd show up in the parking lot behind his store to pick up his truck."

"It's also possible that his murder had nothing to do with the Corsicans," the chief said. "His store's only two blocks from the bus station, you know."

"Ah," I said. To an outsider, of course, the chief's words would have made no sense, but locals all knew-and newly arrived students soon figured out-that the few blocks around the bus station were the closest thing Caerphilly had to a high-crime, low-rent district. During his years on the Baltimore PD, the chief had seen plenty of neighborhoods that made Caerphilly's worst look like Beverly Hills, so it was amusing that he'd started referring to places near the bus station with the same vague dismay as the rest of the town.

"Of course you're right," he said. "The Corsicans are prime suspects. Which is unfortunate, since now I have to check alibis on every single blessed one of them. Doing one alibi is time consuming; can you imagine how much work it's going to be doing dozens?"

I made a sympathetic noise.

"Speaking of dozens," he went on. "It was nice of you to figure out a way to save the animals, but you do realize that now you're stuck with the whole kit and caboodle for the time being?"

"I don't see a way out of that," I said, with a sigh. "Do you?"

A small pause.

"I hereby authorize you to deputize additional concerned citizens to assist you in preserving the evidence from the animal shelter." Did I detect a note of amusement in his voice?

"Will that hold up in court?" I asked.

"Shouldn't need to," he said. "I grant you, there probably are wretches who'd try to take kittens and puppies away from decent homes on a point of law and put 'em back in a shelter. And if you wanted to suggest a certain local elected official is curiously indifferent to the welfare of those kittens and puppies, I wouldn't give you much of an argument. But even Mayor Pruitt's not stupid enough to try and take the animals back once someone's adopted them. Makes for bad campaign publicity, crying children asking why he took away Fluffy or Fido. So if you and the Corsicans can get those animals into loving homes, for heaven's sake, do it, quick."

"Roger," I said. "And thanks."

"You know those kittens that were trying to climb my trousers? They spoken for?"

I blinked in surprise.