Ник Сайнт - Purrfect Advice. Purrfect Passion. A Purrfect Gnomeful

Joanna turned to her, looking shocked. “What?”

“Yeah, in Bangkok. He says you slipped out of bed in the middle of the night and went to visit another man in the next room.” It was a long shot, but she felt it might do the trick.

“I did not!” Joanna cried, indignant.

“So you didn’t crawl out of bed in the middle of the night?” asked Odelia pointedly. “Cause this guy swears up and down they filmed you.”

“They were filming us at the hotel?”

“Yeah, I guess they were.”

Joanna didn’t speak for a moment. She seemed to consider this. “Well, if they had caught me, don’t you think they’d have kicked me out of the competition even before it got started?”

“Good point,” Odelia agreed.

Joanna swallowed. “I did sneak out of bed that night, but not to visit another man.” She eyed Odelia keenly. “Promise you won’t tell Arthur?”

“I promise,” said Odelia.

“His thirtieth birthday is coming up, which is a big deal, and I’m organizing a surprise party. I’ve been making arrangements for weeks now. It’s supposed to take place when we get back from Thailand. I just wanted to make some final arrangements before they took away my phone. I’m arranging it with Arthur’s baby sister, and she can be a bit wishy-washy, so I wanted to have everything nailed down before we left.”

“Oh,” said Odelia, strangely elated. She’d quietly hoped Joanna was innocent.

“Arthur doesn’t suspect a thing. It’s going to be a big surprise. I even hired his favorite singer Jimmy Buffett, the Margaritaville guy.”

“That sounds great, Joanna,” said Odelia. “I think he’ll be thrilled.”

“Yeah, I hope so. It’ll be his last birthday before we tie the knot, and thirty is a big deal, right?”

“Oh, sure,” said Odelia. She was relieved Joanna wasn’t involved in some kidnapping ring, but also disappointed she’d lost another promising lead. It meant her only suspect now was Clint Bunda, the guy up top.

They’d arrived at the building where the spa was located and walked in. Tina and Jackie were already in the jacuzzi so they joined them. It would have been fun, having a soak with the contestants, if it hadn’t been for the three guys filming the whole thing.

How people managed to be spontaneous while being filmed was beyond her. There was probably a trick to it, but so far she hadn’t yet mastered it. And neither had the others, as the conversation was wooden and proceeded haltingly along familiar topics like the weather and the quality of the seducers.

And all the while Odelia’s mind kept drifting back to Clint.

His words to her that morning suddenly sounded more ominous than before: how she was his new star now. His favorite.

In other words, ripe to be kidnapped!

Chapter 37

As Odelia had instructed, Dooley and I snuck into the villa where the production team had set up shop, and started snooping around. Frankly I didn’t have high hopes that this time would be different than last time we’d inspected this place. Then again, the work of a detective, even a feline one, often consists of small repetitive tasks, not unlike that of a gold digger, who keeps sifting mud until finally one day he hopes to strike gold.

“Do you really think Clint is our guy?” asked Dooley.

Odelia had intimated the producer was her most likely suspect, and for us to look at him with renewed attention.

“I don’t know, Dooley, but he is the one who ultimately selects the candidates, so if he’s the kidnapper, that would make sense in that he can personally guarantee he’ll get what he wants.”

“But why would a man kidnap so many women, and all of them so similar? What does he do with them?”

I wasn’t prepared to lay it all out for him. It was obvious, though, what a man like Clint would do with all of those women. At least if he was the kind of man Odelia thought he was.

And as we walked into the villa, once again we passed the control room.

“Is it fixed?” asked the man named Frank.

“Yeah, it’s fixed all right,” said Rick. “No thanks to you, though. You couldn’t have given me the signal sooner, could you? She caught me crawling out the window.”

“She surprised me! She’s a fast walker.”

“You were probably playing Pokémon on your phone again,” Rick said as he surveyed the wall of screens.

Every single one of the screens was now displaying the jacuzzi, and as I watched in surprise, I saw that most of them were featuring one particular candidate: Odelia. That’s what you probably get when suddenly you’re deemed the star of the show.

Rick’s phone started belting out a tune. I recognized it as the same sound he’d produced before: the mating call of the hoopoe. The guy really had a thing for birds.

We decided to leave them to it. We had other fish to fry, so we repaired upstairs, and once again tried every door until we found one that was unlocked. Soon we were out on the balcony, traipsing past room after room.

“Maybe we should search every room,” Dooley suggested.

“Odelia told us to focus on Clint,” I reminded him.

“Yeah, but what if Clint is innocent? Odelia has been wrong before.”

He was right. Odelia has been wrong more times than she’s been right. So I shrugged and we entered the first room we found. If we were going to do this, we might as well go about it in a methodic fashion.

The first room told me that whoever stayed there was not a fan of cleanliness and hygiene, as the place was a big mess. Clothes were strewn about all over the place, wet towels covered the furniture, candy wrappers littered the floor, and in all of that mess there wasn’t a single sign of a laptop, cell phone or tablet computer. Probably the guy or gal who occupied the room liked to keep these possessions close to their person.

We did find a crumpled up note in the wastepaper basket. It appeared to be some kind of sweepstakes: the names of all of the candidates had been written on the left, and on the top of the page a series of names I didn’t recognize, except for Rick and Frank. Underneath these names, scores had been awarded each candidate. When tallied, Odelia’s name had received the highest score.

“This is a little thick,” I said when the significance of the document hit me. “These people are actually holding a wager, presumably putting money on the contestants.”

“You mean they’re gambling on the show’s outcome?” asked Dooley, surveying the document.

“Looks like it,” I said. “And Odelia’s name is at the top of the list. Meaning they figure she’ll probably succumb to the wiles of the seducers more likely than the others.”

“Was this before or after she hit Fred in the head?” asked Dooley pointedly.

I smiled. “Probably before. Looks like this person, whoever he is, lost a great deal of money betting on her to fall for Fred’s charms.”

“Or Mike’s charms,” Dooley added as he took a tentative sniff at a piece of underwear, then crinkled up his nose when its sheer rankness hit him.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said. “Plenty of rooms to check and only so much time.”

Unfortunately that first room was a harbinger of things to come. It soon became clear that every single member of Clint’s team engaged in betting on the candidates’ likeliness to fall for this or that seducer or seductress, and the pool must have been a pretty large one, judging from the numbers scribbled on the documents we found in most rooms. It was also the only clue we found, and not the kind of clue we were looking for. And when finally we made our way to Clint’s room, the man in charge, we were none the wiser.

We snuck into the big guy’s room and were surprised to see it occupied by none other than… Kimmy, eagerly going through the man’s personal affairs. She didn’t see us come in, as we treaded as softly and surreptitiously as usual, but we saw her clear as day as she dug through Clint’s laptop, darting anxious glances at the door from time to time.