Блейз Клемент - The Cat Sitter's Nine Lives

I guess I must have been distracted, because instead of taking the dogleg at Higel and shooting straight down to Midnight Pass, I took a left on Ocean Boulevard, which of course took me right by the bookstore. I’d like to think I didn’t do that on purpose, that what I really meant to do was get on with my day and forget about the whole bloody mess and let Detective McKenzie take care of it on her own.

But I’m not sure.

As I approached the bookstore, I slowed down and studied the front entrance. The police tape was gone, which meant the bookstore was officially no longer an active crime scene. I could see the display of books through the front window, and the stack of dictionaries on the side where Cosmo liked to nap.

I pulled over to the side of the road and stopped. There was a CLOSED sign hanging in the window, and the lights were off. I wondered what the chances were that in the seven seconds the webcam’s view had been blocked by the waiter at Amber Jack’s, the woman in white had come out of the bookstore before I got there.

I looked at the door and tried to calculate how long it would take. I imagined someone pulling it open, exiting the store, and walking down the sidewalk. One-one thousand, two-one thousand … Then I stopped.

In the video, the woman had walked into the frame on the left-hand side just as I had, from the north. When she came out of the store, if she’d gone back in the same direction, it would have taken her much longer than seven seconds to leave the webcam’s view, and we would have seen her in the video as soon as the waiter moved out of the way. The angle of the camera didn’t provide as long a view going in the other direction. If the woman in white had turned south when she came out of the store, she would have disappeared out of frame in less than four seconds, giving her more than enough time to leave without being recorded.

That was one possibility. I pulled back out on the road and tried to imagine the other option, that she’d gone out the back door instead. Maybe she’d parked back there, or maybe she just felt like taking a tour of the alley … No. I’d been in that alley. There was no place to walk and no designated parking spots, and anyway it was filthy. No woman in her right mind would go walking around back there willingly.

The reason it mattered how the woman in white left the store, and the reason I was so distracted now, was that Detective McKenzie was suggesting something that sent a chill down my spine. Yes, the blood on the countertop was human, that was certain, but McKenzie had said “ which human.” All this time I’d been asking myself, who could have murdered Mr. Hoskins? I’d missed another possibility altogether.

McKenzie was suggesting that if the woman in white had left the shop by the back door, it might very well mean that she was the murderer. On the other hand, it could just as easily mean she was the victim.

If that was true, sweet old Mr. Hoskins had a very good reason to disappear.

16

As I made my way south toward the end of the Key, the sun was dead center in the sky and there were wavy lines of heat radiating off the asphalt up ahead. My mind was swimming. Could there have been something about Mr. Hoskins that I had overlooked? Something he was hiding? He had seemed so harmless and sweet, even grandfatherly.

Of course, the fact that I liked Mr. Hoskins should probably have been a little red flag. I don’t know why, but I seem to be drawn to people who give off a certain kind of energy, people who are just a little bit unhinged. I’m not sure if they’re the flame and I’m the moth or vice versa, but I do know one thing: People that are a little bonkers can be a lot of things, but they’re rarely boring. Unfortunately for me, there’s a very fine line between crazily interesting and interestingly crazy, and it occasionally gets me in trouble.

The point is, I had liked Mr. Hoskins right away. He just seemed to have a good soul. The idea that he might have been busily hiding a dead body in the back of the store while I browsed around the aisles made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It just wasn’t possible. It’s true that Mr. Hoskins had seemed a little eccentric and odd, but he certainly didn’t seem capable of that kind of evil, not to mention hoisting a deadweight over the railing of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge.

Then again, I know from firsthand experience that with a strong enough dose of adrenaline pumping through its veins, the human body is capable of almost anything.

I decided to make a quick stop at the drugstore across the street from the diner. Murderer or not, Mr. Hoskins had an agreement with me, and I felt like I’d let him down. The fact that he was wholly unaware of our agreement didn’t deter me in the least, and I had a plan to fix it. All I needed was some supplies: a pack of bright construction paper, some big markers, and a staple gun.

My plan was to put signs up all along Ocean Boulevard, and maybe all over the Key. I didn’t have a picture of Cosmo, but I felt as if I’d gotten a pretty good look at him, or at least good enough to come up with a fairly accurate description of his two main traits: big and orange. I didn’t much like the idea of putting up signs with my phone number for every loony-tune on the street to see, but I didn’t think I had much of a choice—I had to do everything in my power to find that cat.

I even considered calling Detective McKenzie and asking if she might consider getting me back in the bookstore to look for a picture of Cosmo I could use for the signs. Perhaps Mr. Hoskins had a photo in that desk in the back room, or failing that there might even be a pen-and-ink drawing of him hanging somewhere in the store.

Either way, I thought, how many big fluffy orange cats with white-tipped tails could there be running around Siesta Key? It’s a small island, and if it was possible that Butch the Butcher had seen him, the chances that someone else could have seen him too were pretty strong.

I decided once I found Cosmo, if Mr. Hoskins hadn’t turned up by then, I’d take him to the Kitty Haven, a cat kennel and rescue center run by my friend Marge. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that under these circumstances, Marge would take Cosmo in free of charge.

When I came out of the drugstore with all my goodies, I thought of one more thing I might try.

Gia was sitting behind her little window in the vet’s office. She had just hung up the phone and was writing something down in a notepad on her desk. There was only one person in the waiting room, except he was so big he took up at least three seats. A young man with muttonchops and a crew cut, he looked like he weighed at least three hundred pounds. I figured he was probably a linebacker for the Sarasota Thunder, our local football team, but lots of professional sports teams come to Sarasota for summer training, so he could have been from anywhere. His arms were as big around as my waist, and it took a couple of looks for me to realize that there was a tiny white Shih Tzu sitting primly on one of his gigantic knees.

Gia has dark cropped hair framing a cute gamine face with deep green eyes like a woodland nymph’s. When she looked up to find me standing in front of her window she said, “Oh my gosh, Dixie, what’s wrong?”

I said, “Shut the front door. Do I look that bad?”

She laughed. “Sorry. You just look pretty worried is all.”

“I guess I’m a little preoccupied. I have a friend who lost his cat a couple of nights ago. I was hoping if somebody saw him they might have called you.”

She shook her head. “Nobody’s called saying they found a cat, but tell me what he looks like and I’ll keep my ears open.”

“He’s big, long-haired, orange, with a white-tipped tail. His name is Cosmo.”