Blaize Clement - Curiosity Killed The Cat Sitter

“Dixie, I have to tell you something.”

“What?”

“Somebody was in the house today while I was gone. There were tire prints in the drive, and more prints of somebody walking across the sand to your place, then to the back door here. Whoever it was broke the lock and went inside, there were footprints all over the place. I didn’t find anything missing, but I guess something could be gone and I just don’t know what to look for. I went inside your place, and it’s the same. Nothing messed up, but sandy tracks on the floor.”

I was sitting stiffly upright with the back of my neck tingling. Michael’s house was old and the back door didn’t fit well. My French doors would be child’s play to an intruder.

“Did you call nine one one?”

A mosquito buzzed around Michael’s head, and he waved at it in the reflexive way Floridians do, not really expecting to remove it but needing to show some resistance so the mosquito wouldn’t think it had clear title to a particular piece of flesh.

“Yeah, they came out and dusted for prints, but I think they were just going through the motions to satisfy me.”

“You think it could have been a reporter?”

“No reporter would stoop that low. Well, they might, but I doubt it was a reporter.”

We sat silently for a few minutes. A muscle in Michael’s jaw was working, and I knew he was forcing himself to stay calm for my sake.

He said, “I had left the brisket cooking. At least the bastard didn’t take that.”

I grinned at his forced joke. “What makes you think it was a man? It could have been a woman.”

“Dixie, until they catch whoever killed those people, I want you to keep the hurricane shutters down when you’re home by yourself. There are too many crazies out there, and with that son of a bitch Win splashing your name all over the news, somebody’s liable to decide to come looking for you just for the hell of it.”

I said, “Winnick hasn’t even tried to see Phillip, and neither has his wife. He’s afraid the media will find out what happened to him and hurt his reputation. His own son! Can you believe that?”

“I can believe most anything, Dixie. But my main concern is you. I want you to stay out of all this. Don’t talk to anybody else. Don’t listen to anybody else’s sad story. Let the cops handle it by themselves.”

“I haven’t talked to anybody. Not really. Well, a little bit.”

“Just promise me you’ll back off, okay?”

“Okay. Come upstairs with me while I look around?”

He stood up and reached a hand to haul me to my feet, then put his arm around my shoulder and squeezed me to his side. “It’ll be okay, Dixie. Just be careful.”

Together, we went up the stairs to my apartment, but Michael had swept up all the sandy footprints, and nothing looked as if it had been disturbed. I stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek, thanked him for dinner, and promised again that I’d stay out of the investigation.

When he left, I closed the hurricane shutters and hurried to the desk in my closet–office to see if the mail I’d taken from Marilee’s house was still in the manila folder in the top drawer. It was, and I felt a little chagrined that I’d thought somebody had been looking for it. Meaning I had a guilty conscience. Not so guilty a conscience that I was ready to tell anybody about the letters, but guilty enough to be jittery about having them.

I put the folder back in the drawer and went in my bedroom and pulled my bed away from the wall. The bed is built on a wooden frame that has two storage drawers for linens on one side, but the side against the wall has another drawer that nobody knows about. It’s not exactly a secret, it’s just that nobody has ever asked and I’ve never mentioned it. When I pulled the drawer open, its contents were exactly as they had been when I put them there three years ago.

When a deputy quits or retires from the Sheriff’s Department, she can either purchase her department-issued gun or let it go back to the department. Todd’s 9-mm Sig Sauer went back when he was killed, and mine was turned in when I went on indefinite leave of absence. But almost every deputy qualifies for two or three personal backup guns as well as a department-issue weapon. Todd’s primary personal was a Smith & Wesson .40, and mine was a.38. Both guns were fitted into a special case in the drawer on the dark side of my bed.

During the six months I trained at the Police Academy, they kept score of who put the most bullets in the head or heart region of the cardboard targets. The rule was that out of forty-eight shots, a minimum of thirty-eight had to hit dead center. The person who most consistently hit on target got a plaque at the end of the six months. It surprised a lot of people that I got that plaque. I still have it. They called it a “marksmanship award,” but I was never able to forget that was a euphemism for “accurate killer.” Most people don’t know this, but it’s against the law for a law-enforcement officer to shoot to maim or disable. By law, an officer is obligated to shoot to “eliminate the threat”—which means to kill. People who can’t accept that shouldn’t go into law enforcement.

It had been three years since I’d handled my .38, but it felt familiar and right in my hand. I sat at my kitchen bar and took my gun apart and cleaned and oiled it. When I was done, I popped a magazine in the butt and put two extra magazines in the pocket of the cargo shorts I would wear the next day. I laid the gun on the bathroom counter while I showered and brushed my teeth. When I went to bed, I put it on the bedside table where I could get it quickly.

Somebody had already killed two people and had tried to kill a third. I didn’t intend to be next.

I drifted to sleep and dreamed that Marilee was clutching a cat exactly like Ghost to her voluptuous bosom, but his name was Phillip. She was pleading with me to save him. “You have the key, Dixie. All you have to do is use it.”

When the alarm sounded, it took me a few seconds to remember where I was. I went to the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror. Was it possible that my dream had actually been a message? If not from Marilee’s spirit, then from my own subconscious? Crazy as it seemed, I thought it was. Somehow, I had the key to solving the murders and to fingering the person who had attacked Phillip. I just didn’t know what it was.

I brushed my teeth, splashed water on my face, and pulled my hair into a ponytail. I pulled on a knit top and the cargo shorts I’d laid out the night before, and stepped into my Keds. Holding my.38 ready, I raised the storm shutters. The porch was empty, and I slid the gun into the right pocket of my shorts, where it made a satisfying pressure on my thigh. I had no idea what I was going to meet, or if, in fact, I needed to take a gun with me, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

By 4:15, I was halfway to my first stop, and the morning went smoothly. I didn’t find a single dead body, nobody got beat up, no reporter accosted me, and none of the cats on my schedule had done anything naughty that I had to clean up.

While I fed cats and groomed cats and changed cats’ litter boxes, my mind was on the strange message I’d gotten in my dream. I take dreams seriously because they’re the only way our subconscious can communicate with us. I went over the dream again and again—Marilee holding Ghost, except it wasn’t Ghost, but a cat named Phillip. Was that because I saw Phillip as a pet? No, I really didn’t. Was it because Phillip was similar to Ghost in some way? Maybe, but how? Ghost knew who the murderer was because he had been in the house when both murders happened. Did Phillip know, too? Had he recognized the woman he’d seen that morning and wasn’t saying? What was the key that I was supposed to have to all this? A key is like a code breaker, something that unlocks secrets, but if I had such a key, I didn’t know what it was.