After dropping Nick off in the neighborhood around Holly's apartment building so that he could, in his words, "Work his magic," Judy made her first stop at the address that Hyperion Leaps had provided for the Zootopia branch of his greengrocer chain.
The store was a modest size, occupying most of the first floor of an older brick building. There was a white awning over the entrance, which was set at the corner of the building that intersected two streets, with the Green Gable Grocers logo (a cartoonish representation of a winking green rabbit head) emblazoned on it. While the exterior of the store looked essentially done, with the windows in particular standing out as brand new, the interior looked as though it still had a ways to go. The flooring was mostly done, and the shelving looked almost completely set up, but the store was starkly empty of produce. It made sense, of course–if the store really was a greengrocer's it wouldn't do to have product sitting and rotting before the store opened–but it made the sign in the window announcing the grand opening with a date only three days in the future seem somewhat optimistic. One thing the interior of the store was not lacking, however, was mammals. There was a crew of beavers hard huddled around a bunny who seemed to be giving them instructions. When he spotted Judy, he broke off and headed for her. "Excuse me, you can't be in–" he said, cutting himself off when he realized that she was wearing a police uniform.
"I'm sorry," he quickly apologized, "What can I do for you, Officer Hopps?"
He had obviously recognized her, which seemed like a general trend for bunnies living in the city. He was probably around forty or so, with a bit of a paunch and wire-rimmed glasses that seemed a bit incongruous with his ripped jeans and paint-splattered T-shirt. Despite his outfit, his fur was neatly styled and his nails were clean and shiny, which to Judy clearly indicated that he didn't do manual labor for a living. He looked more like a banker saving some money by doing his own renovations on his day off than the head of a group of contractors. "I'm investigating an assault," Judy replied, "Are you in charge here, Mr...?"
"Warren, Jim Warren," the bunny said distractedly, "Is Mr. Leaps OK? Did he get attacked like that actress?"
Warren seemed genuinely concerned for his employer and Judy was quick to assuage his concerns. "Mr. Leaps is fine, Mr. Warren. I'm actually here about that actress, Holly Leaves."
"What?" Warren asked, sounding puzzled, "Why?"
He quickly added, "I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude, but I just don't understand what she could have to do with any of us."
Judy paused for a moment as she evaluated his responses. So far, Warren had seemed honest, but she found herself wishing that Nick had been with her. He had a much better ability to read mammals than she did, but since she was on her own, she'd just have to rely on her own instincts. "Of course," she said, "Do you have someplace private we could talk?"
The crew of beavers hadn't moved after Warren had separated from them, and they were clearly trying to listen in without it being obvious. Seeming abashed, they scurried off to their work, but Warren didn't seem to notice their attempts at eavesdropping. "Sure, this way."
The office at the back of the store was labeled with a simple plastic placard on the door that read "Jim Warren, General Manager." After Warren led her in, Judy looked around. Perhaps clutter would accumulate once the store was actually open, but at the moment it was neat and orderly. There was a small, cheap desk with a desktop computer on top of it and a couple chairs in front of it. A number of filing cabinets dominated the rest of the room, but the sterile appearance of the office was broken up by a few children's drawings that had been framed and placed on the walls and a picture of Warren, his wife, and their kits on the desk itself.
Judy had figured that Warren would be more forthcoming with her if he wasn't worried about the contractors overhearing him, but from how preoccupied he was acting it probably wouldn't have made a difference. It might have been simply because he was juggling a dozen tasks for the store's grand opening and had been thrown off balance by the appearance of the police, but Judy knew better than to dismiss his behavior entirely. "I'm guessing that Mr. Leaps never told you this, but Holly Leaves is his sister," she began carefully, attempting to gauge his reaction.
"No, he never told me that," Warren said, looking surprised, "Actually, he never really spoke about his family. I always got the feeling it was kind of a sore spot for him. Better not to pry, that's what I thought. But... You don't think that he's the one who attacked her, do you? He'd never do something like that!"
Judy held up a paw placatingly. "Right now, we're just following up with the mammals who know her," she said soothingly, not wanting to agitate him.
"Oh," Warren said, "So how can I help you?"
"I just have some questions about Mr. Leaps," Judy said, "You must know him pretty well, right?"
"I suppose," Warren replied, "He brought me in about six months ago to set up this store and run it once it's open."
"What's he like to work with?" Judy asked.
She was mostly trying to get a better picture of Hyperion without saying anything about him that might cause Warren to talk offense on his behalf and become less forthcoming; it was clear that Warren strongly admired and respected Leaps, and his answers only bore that out. Hyperion was a perfectionist, and part of the reason the store was still so unfinished so close to the grand opening was because he had demanded that work that didn't meet his standards be redone. To hear Warren tell it, however, this was not a fault, but simply a sign of how much Hyperion cared about getting things right. And while Hyperion demanded a lot of the mammals who worked for him, he rewarded success quite lavishly. Hyperion had given the artist who painted a bucolic mural of rolling fields on the wall a significant bonus for the quality of her artwork, and every time he came into the store to check on the work and assist, he always made sure the workers got a free meal from him. "Last night, for instance," Warren said, "When we were getting the registers set up, he got everyone sandwiches and soup from this upscale little deli on the East side. Just about the best watercress sandwich I've ever had."
"Did he get it delivered, or did he go out and get it?" Judy asked.
Throughout Warren's monologue she had mostly made noises of agreement and a few statements to indicate she was paying attention, but this seemed as though it could be important. "He went out and got it," Warren said without hesitation, "Took him a while, but it was worth the wait."
"Traffic, right?" Judy said, carefully nodding in commiseration.
"Probably," Warren said with a shrug, "He left around 5:30 and didn't get back until about a quarter to seven."
"You know," Judy said, doing her best to sound casual and mask her excitement, "I'm a fan of watercress sandwiches myself. You wouldn't happen to have the address of that deli, would you?"
"Sure," Warren said, opening one of the drawers of his desk and flipping though it.
He eventually came up with a menu and handed it over. "Try the pumpkin soup, too," he said.
"I'll try both," Judy promised.
They left the office and Judy paused as she was about to leave the store. One of the empty displays was a glass case labeled "Fresh Flowers," but it wasn't quite empty. There were a few shriveled flower petals on the bottom of the case, and cones of cellophane and paper hung neatly off the side of it. "Were there flowers in this?" she asked, attempting to come across as casual.
"What? Oh, yeah," said Warren, scratching the back of his head, "The florist we get flowers from got the date of our opening wrong–wrote it as the 13th instead of the 18th. Mr. Leaps was pretty steamed about that, let me tell you. We had to throw them all out; they wouldn't have been any good by the time we open. Only the best, you know?"
Judy did the rather simple math in her head. The current date was the 15th, which meant that it would have been trivial for Hy to have held onto at least one bouquet's worth of flowers prior to using them to disguise the bolt cutters that had been used to gain access to Holly's apartment. Hyperion's trip to the deli was perfectly timed to give him the time to commit the crime and get back to the store, and he was fit enough to make it a reasonable conclusion that he could quickly climb up the fire escape to gain access to the sixth floor window. On the other paw, he had been estranged from his family long enough that he wouldn't have known where Holly lived and her address wasn't easily found or, at least, hadn't been prior to the assault. "Of course," Judy said, "Thanks for your help, Mr. Warren."
Judy wanted to immediately confront Hyperion, but the only evidence she had was, at the moment, highly circumstantial. She was determined to learn from the mistakes she had made in the Night Howlers case, and that meant continuing to investigate and keeping an open mind. While the evidence was starting to point at Hyperion being the guilty party, none of it said he had done it alone. With that in mind, she pulled out the list of doctors that Heather Leaves had provided and punched the first address into the squad car's GPS.
A couple hours later, a good portion of which had simply been spent waiting for mammals to become available to talk to her, Judy had gotten to the last and probably most important name and address. It was for the dialysis center that Heather had (supposedly) taken her mother to at the time that the raincoat wearing assailant had attacked Holly. As Judy parked the car outside the dialysis center, she hoped that it would be more fruitful than the other stops she had made following up on Heather and Hyacinth; the general summary of those stops was that Hyacinth was very sick and Heather took her to all of her many specialists.
The dialysis center's somber and somewhat brooding-looking brick exterior was markedly different from the interior, which was brightly lit and painted in soothing pastel colors. The cheery interior couldn't quite offset the nature of the facility; it had the same kind of antiseptic smell as a hospital. The mammal behind the front desk, a male caracal wearing a set of teal scrubs that complemented the color of his fur, seemed eager to talk to Judy. She got the feeling that, since he spent his days dealing with mammals who were sick and oftentimes dying, he probably didn't talk to many mammals at their best. It was something that she herself was familiar with after some shifts as a cop.
"I have to be careful about what I can tell you because of HIPAA," the caracal explained apologetically, "Unless you have a warrant. We take our responsibility to the security of our patients' medical data very seriously."
Judy nodded. She had gotten similar responses at the other locations she had gone to, although some of them had been a bit more lax. "Do you have a visitor's logbook I could see?"
"Here," the caracal said, pushing the logbook across his desk, "It's our policy that everyone, especially mammals coming to sit with the patients as they get treated, has to sign in and out."
Judy had to stand up on tiptoes to reach the book, but she managed to pull it down into her arms to flip through it. Once she got to the page for the date of the assault, she noted that Heather had signed in at around 3:30 PM, signed out at about a quarter to six, signed back in around 7 PM, and then back out at about 8 PM. When she flipped further back into the logbook, she figured that based on when Heather was signing in and out, Hyacinth was in for dialysis three times a week, always on the same days and times, and that the process took about four to five hours. Heather, however, didn't seem to spend every session waiting with her mother. While there were plenty of innocuous reasons why Heather might step out–anything from needing to run errands to simply having some time to herself away from her mother–she had indirectly lied to Judy by providing the excuse of her mother's treatment as her alibi for the night of the crime.
Judy returned the logbook to the caracal and thanked him for his time, and then made her way back to the squad car with her mind running at about a mile a minute. Had Heather or Hyperion committed the crime alone? Had they worked together? If neither of them had done it, who had? When Judy dialed Nick's number, he answered almost instantly. "Find anything, Carrots? I haven't."
"Maybe," she replied, trying not to sound too certain about what she had discovered, "I'm coming to get you, OK? Where are you now?"
"The apartment building."
"I'll be there in five."
As soon as she had picked Nick up, Judy headed back to the police station and started explaining what she had found, which took most of the trip. As she expected, Nick found it just as suspicious as she did that both Heather and Hyperion had gaps in their alibis that coincided with the crime so well. "We have some more video to review too," Nick said after he explained his mild success as he logged the evidence in, "Maybe we'll get lucky and one or both of them will be on it."
"Maybe," Judy said, "But we need to follow up with Heather and Hyperion. And talk to Holly's coworkers. And look into Jacques. And–"
Nick sighed. "We'll look into it tomorrow, Fluff. I believe we already have plans to do more research tonight."
His tail wagged playfully and he put the word "research" in finger quotes, which was entirely unnecessary considering the emphasis he had put on the word as he said it.
"Of course!" Judy replied cheerfully, "And I was expecting you to try to wiggle out of watching Black and White."
"Would I ever try to wiggle out of something that I didn't want to do?" Nick asked.
"Don't answer that," he added quickly, before Judy had the opportunity to do more than open her mouth.
"You sure?" she teased, "I think I could come up with enough examples to last all the way back to my place."
She wouldn't have actually done it, of course, but Nick's mock outrage and empty threats of reporting her for police brutality, and her own counters, were enough to keep their banter going from the time they left the station to the time they arrived at Judy's stop.