Блейз Клемент - The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas

Morgan tilted his head to peer down at me. If I’d been able to see his eyes, I imagine they would have had a sharp glint in them. We both knew how hard it is for law enforcement officers to do anything constructive about lawbreakers who are mentally ill. Under Florida law, a cop who believes a person is about to commit suicide or kill somebody can initiate the Baker Act that involuntarily commits a person for testing. The commitment period lasts only seventy-two hours, and unless two psychiatrists petition the court to extend the commitment time for involuntary treatment, the person is released.

I doubted that Briana would be considered an imminent threat to herself or anybody else. More likely, she would be considered an extreme neurotic with a delusional crush on a famous athlete.

Without commenting on what he thought about trying to get Briana hospitalized, Morgan flipped open his notebook and clicked his pen. “What made you think somebody else was in the house with the woman?”

“Just a noise I heard. Like maybe somebody unlocking the lanai slider. It could have been something else.”

“But you didn’t see anybody else.”

“No, it was just a little clicking noise.”

“What’s the homeowner’s name?”

“Trillin.”

He lowered his pen and angled his head at me. “ Cupcake Trillin?”

“I hope we can keep this out of the news.”

His jawbone jutted out a bit, like he’d just bit down hard on his back teeth. “I’ll just put ‘Trillin’ as the owner’s name. You ever see the woman inside before?”

“No. She said her name was Briana.”

“Briana who?”

Beene, the Community Policing woman, said, “She just goes by Briana. That one name. She’s a famous model.”

Morgan and I turned to look at her, and she shrugged. “I watch Entertainment Tonight .”

Morgan’s nostrils flared slightly as if it might be against department policy to watch shows like that.

“So?”

“So she’s here in Sarasota. I heard it on the news.”

Beene looked from Morgan to me. “You must have heard of her. She was all over the news last year. You know, she’s the model that caused a big stink at the fashion show in Milan.”

Morgan and I shook our heads. I might have heard about somebody in a cat show who’d made the news, but fashion shows were out of my world.

As if he had heard all he could stand about fashion models, Morgan put his pen and pad away and took a deep breath. With Beene a step behind him, he strode manfully to the door and rapped on it.

He yelled, “Sarasota Sheriff’s Department!”

The door didn’t open. No sound came from inside.

Morgan waited a few seconds, then knocked and shouted again. Nobody answered.

I felt a little shiver of guilty relief. Briana and whoever had been in the house with her had probably slipped out the back door while I watched the front. Maybe they were halfway to Tampa by now. Maybe they would never come back. Maybe Briana had learned her lesson and would stop stalking Cupcake.

Morgan turned to look at me as if it were my fault nobody had answered the door. “You got a key?”

“I have a security code.”

“Please use it.”

Feeling important under their gaze, I stepped forward and punched in my special number. The lock clicked, and I turned the knob and opened the door. Morgan motioned me aside, and he and Beene went into the house.

Once again, intuition or subliminal cues made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, as if trouble was barreling toward me.

I said, “Don’t let the cats out.”

My sixth sense was right about trouble coming, but it wasn’t two runaway cats.

2

Morgan and Beene left the foyer and went into the living room.

From where I stood by the front door, I couldn’t see them, but I heard Beene say, “Uh-oh,” the way people do when they see something bad.

Morgan didn’t answer.

Beene didn’t say anything else.

Nobody said anything else. Something was wrong.

I inched forward and tried to peer around the edge of the archway into the living room. All I could see was Morgan’s back where he had squatted on the floor to examine something. I became aware of an off-putting scent reminiscent of floral tributes leaning on a casket, that frigid, artificial, cloying fragrance you never forget. It’s also the odor of death.

A movement on the floor near Morgan caught my eye, a slow oozing, a snail’s trail of dark red, a glutinous horror inching across the floor. Dead bodies don’t bleed, and this blood was moving so slowly it could have come from a dying body or one whose death was only minutes old. I stepped backward, out of the foyer and into fresh air.

After a minute or two, the deputies came outside, Beene pale and pink-eyed and walking face forward, Morgan backing out behind her with a phone to his ear.

Morgan gave the address and said, “We’ve got a Signal Five here. Adult female. Killer suspect possibly still inside. We need backup.”

Signal Five is code for a murdered body. He didn’t say by what means the body had been killed, but the blood I’d seen told me it wasn’t by poison or suffocation.

Officer Beene and I made eye contact, and for a moment we stared at each other in silent sadness for a life that had been violently ended. Then she turned to go about her official duties, and I was left to deal with guilt and doubt dancing around me like dark sprites. The sound I’d heard must have been the killer coming into the house. Maybe Briana hadn’t heard the sound I’d heard, maybe I should have warned her, maybe I had wasted too much time calling Cupcake and Jancey before I called 911. I imagined somebody slipping into the house behind Briana and killing her while I sat unknowing in the driveway.

Morgan snapped his phone closed and turned to me. “Don’t leave. You’ll have to talk to Homicide.”

As usual, his dark shades hid the expression in his eyes, but his voice bore the custard skin of pity.

My face grew hot, and I folded my arms over my chest. “I know.”

Not so long ago, when somebody in the sheriff’s department said the word “homicide,” chances were they’d meant Homicide Detective J. P. Guidry, known to his friends and colleagues as Guidry, known to his mother as Jean Pierre, known to me as the second man I’d loved in all my life. But Guidry had returned to New Orleans several months ago. I could have gone with him. He had wanted me to go with him. I had wanted to go with him, but I had spent over three years learning to live again after my husband and little girl had been killed in a senseless accident, and I’d still been emotionally squishy, afraid I’d lose myself if I left the surf and sea breezes that had sustained me all my life.

Like everybody else in the sheriff’s department, Morgan had known that Guidry and I were together, emotionally and physically and every other way. But Guidry and I were both intensely private people, and when he left we didn’t announce to the world why I didn’t go with him. Some people probably believed he had chosen to leave me behind and felt sorry for me. Others may have guessed it had been my choice not to go and pitied me for being so stupid. I didn’t know what Morgan thought, but he had other reasons to think I was jinxed, so he probably felt sorry for me just on general principle.

Forcing my voice to sound neutral, I said, “You have a new homicide guy?”

Morgan shook his head. “Not yet. Hard to get somebody as good as Guidry.”

That was for damn sure.

Inclining my head toward the house, I said, “After I saw the woman and exited the premises, I was out here the entire time. I didn’t hear a gunshot.”

He said, “Ummm.” His face was so neutral he could have stood in a department store window and people would have believed he was a mannequin.