Саманта Сильвер - The Purr-fect Crime

“Excuse me? I didn’t see you doing anything to try and help,” Sophie told Charlotte, throwing a piece of popcorn at her.

“Ok hold up. Someone tell me what happened. Pretend I wasn’t there. Because, you know, I wasn’t,” I ordered, holding up my hands. Something told me this was a story I wanted to hear.

“Fine,” Charlotte started. “We watched the weird dudes for a while. All they did was stand around and stare. They didn’t talk to anyone, and let’s be honest, most people around looked like they were actually kind of scared of them. So Sophie decides to go up and chat up the young guy.”

“Oh my God, really?” I asked, laughing.

“Oh, so when you go talking to a weird guy it’s all cool and good for our investigation, when I do it it’s funny?” Sophie asked, shooting me a look and sticking her tongue out at me.

“I’m sorry,” I apologized, trying to hide the smile threatening to crawl back onto my face. “Please, Charlotte, continue.”

“And basically, well, Sophie got completely shut down by him. Like, he barely even looked at her.”

This time, I couldn’t hold it in. I lost it and burst out laughing. Sophie was gorgeous. She knew it. She had no problem getting guys, and I could probably count on one hand the number of times she’d been turned down before. And two of those times it was because the guy batted for the other team.

“Oh shut up,” Sophie told me, taking a big gulp of her wine. “It could have happened to anyone.”

“It almost makes me wish I was there to see it,” Bee purred from her spot on the windowsill, where she hungrily watched the birds outside, tracking them with her eyes.

“Agreed, Bee,” I told her.

“What? What did your cat say?” Sophie asked, glaring at Bee, who hadn’t even bothered to turn around, so couldn’t see.

“Bee said she wished she could have seen it.”

“I said I almost wished I could have seen it. I had a very warm ray of sun over here.”

“Fine, almost wished she could have seen it. Bee wants me to specify the almost in that sentence.”

“Thanks for your support, cat,” Sophie muttered, as Charlotte snickered.

“So basically, we’re nowhere once again,” Charlotte moaned.

“That’s not entirely true,” I said with fake cheerfulness. “Now we have not one, but two different groups of suspects! The mystery dude who’s been hanging around a lot, and the mystery dudes who are new, that showed up at the funeral.”

“Well, I did manage to take pictures of them while Sophie was getting totally brushed off by the young one, so if only we had access to like, the FBI’s facial recognition software or something, that might actually be handy.”

“Ugh, why does this have to be so hard ?” I asked, rubbing my face. It wasn’t like I expected the murderer to just fall into our lap. But this was getting to be pretty frustrating.

“I feel you. Plus, Patricia Wilson told me that she heard that a few people are thinking about leaving town after this. Hell, apparently the Klaussens are moving to Canada!”

I barked out laughing at that.

“Really? Because of one murder that they haven’t even given the police time to solve? Wow. People are crazy here.”

“They really are. But I guess for a family like that, who’s lived here forever, something like that is completely new to them. I mean, we’ve all lived in Portland for at least a couple years, but none of the Klaussens have.”

“That’s true.” If they left, though, I could chalk up one less client for the vet business. And it sounded like they weren’t the only ones considering it. We had to find who had committed this murder, and fast. I had a very limited client pool.

“So what do we do now?” Charlotte asked.

“Send me those pictures you took. I’ll go down and see Chief Gary tomorrow and see if he knows who they are. It’s unlikely, but maybe he can at least find out for us?”

“Yeah, but if he does he’s probably not going to tell us.”

“He might if we ask him really nicely,” I pointed out.

“I guess it’s worth a shot,” Charlotte said, taking out her phone and texting me the photos she took.

“Thanks,” I told her. “If there’s one thing TV has taught me, it’s that one pretty bad lead can end up breaking the whole case wide open.”

“I hope you’re right,” my sister replied as she reached over to grab more popcorn.

Chapter 13

Monday was my other day off at the vet clinic – except for emergencies which went straight to my cell – and so I took the opportunity to go visit Chief Gary while Charlotte was at school and Sophie went to do some grocery shopping. We wisely decided that I should be the one to go see Chief Gary, since he had always had that soft spot for Charlotte and I.

“Hey Chief!” I greeted him when I walked into his office, handing him a cup of coffee that I’d picked up at Betty’s on the way over, remembering what she’d said about him being a bit stressed over the case. And as soon as I saw him, I knew she was right.

Chief Gary looked like he’d aged about ten years since the last time I’d seen him. His normally brown hair now had streaks of grey around the edges, he had big bags under his eyes, and it looked like it physically pained him to look up from his desk. But, when he saw me coming into the office, he perked up, and even more so when I put the coffee down in front of him.

“Thought you could use a pick-me-up,” I said in way of greeting, and he gratefully took a long sip of the warm beverage.

“You’re a lifesaver, Angela,” he told me, leaning back in his chair. “What can I do for you today?”

“Oh, well, I was mostly just curious about how things are going with the Tony Nyman thing. I know I didn’t know him, but I still feel a bit of a connection, having found the body in my clinic and all.”

Chief Gary sighed.

“You know, I’m really not supposed to talk about open investigations. But as long as you can promise you won’t go around town telling everyone this – though I know you’ll tell Charlotte and Sophie – I can tell you that we’re not really getting anywhere fast. We have a few suspects, but virtually no evidence. It’s not exactly an ideal situation. I’ve been talking with the guys from Portland, but they’re pretty stumped as well.”

“That’s really too bad,” I told Chief Gary. And I meant it. The sooner anybody found who was behind this murder, the sooner the town could move on.

“It is,” he continued. “I’ve been getting a whole bunch of calls from panicked people asking if it’s safe to go out at night. Of course, most of the calls come in from people who don’t tend to go out that much anyway, but they’re still freaked out.”

I nodded. “I can understand that.”

“Exactly. This sort of thing never happens in Willow Bay; it’s so completely out of the ordinary.”

“You’re right. We were at Tony’s funeral yesterday, and it seemed like the whole town turned out. Not that I’ve met anyone who admits to knowing him as more than just a vague acquaintance.”

Chief Gary chuckled. “That sounds about right. We sent a couple officers down yesterday to have a look, they said the same thing. Everyone turned out to gossip about the poor guy.”

“Well that was another thing. When we were down there, Sophie saw a few guys that didn’t really belong, like we’d never seen them before, and there was just something… off about them. Sophie took their pictures and sent them to me, we were wondering if you could do some like, facial recognition magic on them, or something like that.” I opened up the photos and handed him my phone.

Chief Gary laughed good-naturedly. “I wish we had access to stuff like that here. But let me have a look anyway. I can get these photos to the guys from Portland, they’ll be able to access that kind of stuff.”