Read Online Indian Pipes by Cynthia Riggs - Free Book Online Page A

smacked his lips together, and smiled sheepishly. “This paperwork is an ideal excuse for a nap,” he said. He stood up and held out both hands to Victoria, who took them in hers. “I thought you had run away, Dojan. Gone to the beach with your girlfriend?” The chief smiled. “The police have closed the case, you know.”
    “It was no accident,” Dojan said.
    “Yes. Yes, certainly. We agree.” The chief shrugged.
    “Suppose we were to find a weapon,” Victoria asked. “Would the police reopen the investigation?”
    Chief Hawkbill looked from Victoria to Dojan and back to Victoria. “Let us see your weapon. Please sit, Victoria Trumbull. And you, Dojan Minnowfish.”
    Dojan hefted Victoria’s cloth bag onto the chief’s desk with a thunk of rock against varnished wood.
    Victoria pulled her chair close to the desk.
    “What have we here?” the chief asked.
    “We don’t want to scratch the finish on your desk,” said Victoria.
    The chief pointed. “Dojan, please hand me that copy of the
Enquirer.”
He moved what he’d been working on from his desk to a table behind him and spread the newspaper out.
    Victoria pulled out one rock after another until they covered the desk. “One of these may have been the murder weapon,” she said.
    The chief looked over the top of his thick glasses. “So the three of us will look them over carefully for hair and blood,” he said. “If we identify any such thing, we will call the Aquinnah police.”
    Victoria’s eyes were bright and she nodded.
    “Not at all likely,” the chief said. “Have you identified them in
    some way?”
    Victoria showed him her notebook with its sketch maps. Chief Hawkbill picked up one of the rocks and turned it over, scattering damp sand on the newspaper. “Not likely, Mrs. Trumbull,” he repeated.
    Victoria could hear the distant sound of breakers on the South Shore, the cry of a hawk, the mewling of gulls.
    The chief glanced out the window. “The wind is dying down. It’s going to be hot this afternoon.” He opened his desk drawer and gave Victoria a large magnifying glass.
    “What’s this!” Victoria had found some hairlike stuff clinging to the seventh or eighth rock she examined.
    “Seaweed,” Dojan said. “Algae.”
    She set the rock aside and continued her search.
    “Ah!” She handed another rock to the chief, pointing to a brown stain on it.
    The chief looked it over carefully. “That is an iron stain. That rustred color is common on the Aquinnah beach and cliffs.” He shook his head. “You have gone to a great deal of effort in vain. It is most unlikely that two amateurs—wise and clever amateurs, it’s true,” he looked over his glasses at them-”would find a rock that happens to show evidence of murder. We don’t know for a certainty that Mr. Burkhardt was killed on the beach. Nor do we know it was a rock that killed him.” He sighed. “The police, even believing his death to be an accident, have been over that beach with the same thought, looking for anything he might have fallen onto that would have killed him.”
    “It’s worth looking,” Victoria said, stubbornly.
    “Yes, it is worth looking. But the tide has been in, the tide has been out, four or five times in the two days since Mr. Burkhardt was killed. You will only find evidence remaining on a weapon if it was left above the high tide line.” The chief peered at them. “A murder that may not be a murder, on a beach that may not have been the site, with a weapon that may or may not have been left at the scene. Why wouldn’t the killer use the simple expedient of tossing the weaponinto the ocean? Surely he wouldn’t drop it where you, Victoria Trumbull, and you, Dojan Minnowfish, would find it?”
    They continued to look at the rocks, but found nothing more than hairlike seaweed and bloodlike iron stains.
    The chief sat back when they had finished. “If I were planning a killing, I would not take a chance on finding a deadly beach cobble.