Блейз Клемент - The Cat Sitter's Nine Lives

“Huh?”

“Why are you here?”

I was thinking I could easily have asked her the same thing. Mr. Hoskins couldn’t have been missing more than twelve hours or so, and a track of bloody paw prints across a countertop hardly seemed reason enough to launch a full-scale murder investigation, but then again, it was entirely possible McKenzie did know something I didn’t know. In fact, I had a feeling she knew a lot of things I didn’t know.

I showed her my book and flipped it open to the back. “It’s the one I bought from Mr. Hoskins last night. It’s missing a whole section in the end. I just stopped by to tell him.”

She said, “Hmm,” and then seemed to get lost in her own thoughts. “Well, call me if anything comes to mind.”

“Detective McKenzie, I’m worried about those chocolates.”

“What about them?”

“Well, they’re toxic to cats.”

She nodded. “I understand. I’ll remove them myself before we leave today.”

For a second I wondered what she planned on doing with them. Surely she wouldn’t just throw them away … I toyed with the idea of offering to “remove” them myself, but then a mobile forensics unit pulled up and I snapped back to my senses. Sometimes I really do wonder if I shouldn’t join the local chapter of Chocoholics Anonymous.

McKenzie signaled for two of the deputies to follow her back in the bookstore and then held out her hand. “Let me know if you remember anything else?”

I nodded and then watched her disappear into the bookstore as the lab techs opened up the side door to the truck and unpacked their gear.

When I was a deputy, which hadn’t been that long ago in the grand scheme of things, a mobile forensics unit had consisted of a couple of oversized tackle boxes, but in the past year an anonymous donor had given the department almost half a million dollars. That was enough to buy a new state-of-the-art mobile crime truck, complete with sophisticated evidence collection systems, lab chemicals, computers, and satellite Internet, not to mention two full-time lab technicians to drive it around.

I would have liked to see the inside of it, but I figured those techs had better things to do than give me a private tour. As I made my way back to the Bronco, a van pulled up. I imagined it was probably a photographer, called in to take pictures of every inch of the bookstore. A photographer is standard procedure at any crime scene. No matter what happened afterward—even if the entire place burned to the ground—there’d always be a detailed photographic record of exactly how everything looked at the scene of the crime. That way they wouldn’t have to rely on anybody’s memory to re-create it.

Which was good, because I planned on forgetting the whole thing as quickly as possible.

10

According to Cosmopolitan magazine, I am a woman in the prime of her life—physically, sexually, and mentally. Physically, I’d say my daily jogs with Billy Elliot keep me in relatively good health. Sexually, well, that’s in progress; I’ll report back later. Mentally? Well, for argument’s sake let’s just say yes.

Still, I misplace things all the time. I lose my car keys at least once a month. I’ve found them at the bottom of my dirty clothes hamper, I’ve found them in the washing machine, and more than once I’ve found them in the freezer, tossed in next to the ice cream and the frozen corn. Sometimes my mind just starts wandering and I forget what I’m doing.

Mr. Hoskins may have been a lot of things, but he was clearly not a man in the prime of his life. It seemed perfectly reasonable to me that he could easily have misplaced his keys somewhere. In fact, I distinctly remembered him patting his pockets and looking around as if he’d lost something, and that would explain why the door was left unlocked overnight.

It was simple. He couldn’t find his keys and it was the end of the day, he was tired, and he wanted to go home—who would rob a bookstore anyway? It’s not like they’re known for having lots of cash on hand, especially not in this day and age when anybody with half a brain and an Internet connection can sit around in their underwear all day and buy every book their little heart desires with just the click of a key. So Mr. Hoskins probably decided the store was perfectly fine and he’d just look for his keys in the morning, but to be on the safe side, he had emptied out the register and taken the cash with him. It all made perfect sense.

Except none of that explained the bloody prints on the counter, not to mention the fact that he hadn’t come home the night before … and he had seemed a little nervous …

I shook my head. There was nothing I could do about it, and it wasn’t my business anyway. I had already let myself get mixed up in plenty of things I shouldn’t in the past, and with Ethan, my life was already busy enough. I didn’t need any more things to distract me.

By the time I pulled into the covered carport at Julie Caldwell’s condo, I’d made up my mind. Whatever had happened in that bookstore after I left the night before had absolutely nothing to do with me. Yes, Detective McKenzie was a little odd, and yes, she made me feel like a child on the first day of kindergarten, but she was also about the smartest person I’d ever met, and if anyone could figure out what had happened to Mr. Hoskins, it was her.

Not to mention the fact that I was no longer with the sheriff’s department. For some reason I had to remind myself of that little fact every time I turned around. I had a whole new career, and I had just embarked on a whole new life with a smart, handsome man who didn’t know it yet but was about to start serving me breakfast on a regular basis.

I shut off the ignition and gave myself a little nod in the rearview mirror, as if to say, Good for you. It’s unlike me to just let things go, but I can recognize a good decision when I make one, and forgetting about Mr. Hoskins and whatever had happened in that bookstore was one of the best decisions I’d made in a very long time.

Then a little voice in the back of my head said, Yeah yeah yeah, but what about the cat?

I ignored it and grabbed my backpack.

Julie Caldwell is a cosmetologist. Originally I thought that meant she could tell me what my moon-sign says about my love life, but turns out I was wrong. Her specialty is hair color. Her clients, mostly doyennes of old Sarasota or young movie stars, pay up to eight hundred dollars for a single appointment. She’s got four chairs in her salon, and they’re usually all booked months in advance.

She gave me highlights once for free as a birthday present. As I sat in one of the chairs in her salon while she moved from client to client, I did the math:

4 appointments an hour × 8 hours a day = Julie is filthy rich

If I’d known I could have been a millionaire just by coloring people’s hair, I’d have gone to beauty school myself.

Julie had called me up the week before to ask if I could take care of her “cat” while she was in Miami for a few days. I say “cat” with quotation marks because Esmerelda is in no way an ordinary house kitty. She has a deep tawny coat splashed all over with chocolate brown spots, long graceful legs that ripple with lean muscle, and big cupped ears perched on top of her head like two furry satellite dishes. She clocks in on the scale at a whopping (for a cat at least) twenty-six pounds, and from the tip of her nose to the end of her tail, she’s four and a half feet of pure feline awesomeness.

Esmerelda is what is known in the cat world as a Savannah—a cross between a regular domestic house cat and a wild cat from Africa called a serval. Servals hunt at night, dining on everything from mice and crickets to frogs and fish, but they’ve been known to take down bigger animals, too, even the occasional deer, The first time I met Esmerelda, I took one look into her deep, yellow eyes and saw the wisdom of generations of proud, free-roaming cats. I got the distinct impression that she took one look at me and saw dinner. She had that same sparkle in her eyes I have when you slide a plate of bacon in front of me.