Stork Raving Mad: A Meg Langslow Mystery (A Meg Lanslow Mystery)

exposé of animal abuse, like last year’s dogfighting documentary?
    “When the hell is the chief going to solve this thing?” he asked finally. Even more suspicious—he normally didn’t share Dad’s interest in murder mysteries.
    “As soon as he can, I’m sure,” I said. “It’s only been a few hours.”
    “He’s probably working on a bogus theory of the crime,” Grandfather said.
    “Bogus?”
    “I can’t imagine why anyone would have killed that Wright woman!” he exclaimed.
    “Of course not,” I said, in my most soothing tones. I was about to utter some noble platitudes about how utterly unthinkable murder was to any civilized being when he went on.
    “Not with that Blanco fellow around and equally available to anyone who felt like improving the tone of the neighborhood. Do you suppose whoever did it could have made a mistake and knocked off the wrong professor?”
    I eyed him suspiciously. My first thought was that Dad had spilled the beans to Grandfather on his poison-in-the-tea theory. After all, even a crazed killer would probably notice whether the person he was coshing on the head was a man or a woman. Poison, though, could easily go astray and be given to the wrong person. So if Grandfather was suggesting Dr. Wright had been killed by mistake . . .
    “Do you mean you think whoever hit her over the head did it by mistake while trying to kill Dr. Blanco?” I asked.
    “Of course,” he said. “Why not?”
    “They don’t look that much alike,” I said. “Different genders, to start with.”
    “I don’t mean to imply that the killer couldn’t tell them apart.” He frowned as if I were being deliberately obtuse. “But what if the killer rushed in, hoping to get the drop on Blanco,and realized, too late, that he was about to slay the wrong person? He might just go ahead with it. What else could he do if she’d already seen him about to kill her?”
    “I can think of plenty of things short of murder!”
    “Such as?” My grandfather crossed his arms and lowered his brows, as if he’d just issued an impossible challenge.
    “He could have shouted, ‘Look out! It’s right behind you! Have you ever seen a rat that big?’ Or stopped, and laughed, and said, ‘Haha! Fooled you!’ Or if he was a drama student, like ninety percent of the suspects, he could always stop in his tracks, look stern, and say, ‘No, no. That won’t work for this scene. What’s my motivation?’ Or—”
    “Yes, you can think of a lot of other things the killer
could
have done, but none of them sounds as logical as my theory,” Grandfather said. He began trying to take off his coat. “He knew if he let Dr. Wright live she’d cast suspicion on him when he eventually succeeded in killing Blanco, so he said to himself, ‘What the hell—in for a penny, in for a pound.’ ”
    “All of which would be worth considering if Dr. Wright were such a pleasant, likable person that no one could imagine anyone wanting to kill her. But unfortunately for your theory, most of the people around here hate her a lot more than Blanco.”
    “How can that be?” he said. “Damn—help me off with this thing.”
    Apparently venting was doing the trick.
    “Most of them haven’t the faintest idea who Blanco is,” I said as I held the coat for him.
    “That could be, I suppose,” he said. “But still—if my theory is right, Blanco’s next. Should we warn him?”
    “If you truly think he was the intended victim, maybe you should.”
    “You don’t think it might be more interesting to give the killer a sporting chance?”
    “No,” I said. “I don’t think killers deserve any kind of a chance. What do you have against Dr. Blanco, anyway?”
    My grandfather frowned, and at first I didn’t think he was going to answer. Then he harrumphed.
    “Blasted busybody’s the one standing between me and my building,” he said finally.
    “Your building?”
    “Been trying to donate a new building to the biology department,” he said.
    “They probably don’t want a new building,” I said.
    “Their facilities are completely antiquated, not to mention way too small for them. Why wouldn’t they want a new building?”
    “Because this is Virginia, remember?” I said. “Who wants convenience when they can have history? The biology building is the third oldest on campus and was used as a military hospital during the Civil War. Plus it’s barely large enough for all the tenured professors to have tiny, cramped