Sofie Kelly - Copycat Killing - A Magical Cats Mystery

There was only one light fixture at the top of the stairs, but there was enough light to see Jaeger Merrill partly submerged, floating faceup in the water that half filled the basement.

He was dead.

6

Maggie made a strangled sound in the back of her throat and scrambled down the steps, her foot skidding on the fourth one from the top.

I grabbed the back of her sweatshirt. Momentum pulled us forward and for a moment I thought we were both going to end up in the cold, dirty water. I reached out blindly with my free hand for something to hold on to and found the top stair post, and Maggie somehow managed to keep her balance.

I sucked in a breath. “You okay?” I asked.

She sagged against the railing and nodded, her face pale. I let go of her shirt.

Jaeger’s feet and the bottom half of his legs were on the stairs, the rest of his body was in the water. My left leg was trembling and I could feel my pulse thumping in the hollow just below my throat. I was pretty sure Jaeger was dead but somebody had to make sure. I sank onto the top step and eased my way down to the next one and then the next one.

“Careful,” Maggie warned. Her voice was shaky. “It’s wet.” Her right hand hovered in the air, ready to grab me if I slipped.

Most of the top part of the body was underneath the water; just the eyes and nose were above the surface. Jaeger’s head was turned slightly to the right, his eyes were half closed, and his mouth was partly open.

I reached forward, keeping most of my weight on my good leg and lifted his left arm, feeling for a pulse at the wrist. It was icy cold and his body already seemed to be stiffening. There was a cut on the fleshy part of his palm and the skin around it was puckered and wrinkled. Clearly he’d been in the water for a while.

There was no pulse.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Maggie asked.

I turned to look at her. “Yes,” I said.

“Should we…pull him out of the water?”

I shook my head. “No. I think we’ve already touched more than we should have.”

She held out her hand and I grabbed it, stood up, and climbed carefully back up the steps. Maggie glanced back over her shoulder at the body and then we went out into the storeroom. I wiped my hands on my jeans and pulled out my cell phone. She slumped against the wall.

“We should probably go wait by the front door,” I said after I’d made the call.

Maggie nodded without saying anything and we made our way back to the front of the building. I leaned by the door, watching for the first police car. I was afraid if I sat down I wouldn’t be able to get back up again. She dropped onto the steps, leaning her elbows on her knees.

“What was Jaeger doing in the basement?” she said after a minute.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Seeing how much water there was for some reason, maybe.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. We were just down there at the meeting a couple of hours ago.”

“You said that you didn’t think Jaeger was going to let this sponsor thing go. Maybe he was looking for—something, I don’t know—something he could use to make his case.”

Maggie shook her head. “In the basement? In four feet of water?”

A police cruiser came around the corner then, no siren, pulling in at an angle behind my truck. The paramedics were right behind them. I wasn’t really surprised when Ric and his partner got out of the ambulance and grabbed their gear.

I’d seen the police officer that had responded around town and in the library a few times with his kids. He was tall, with dark hair cut close to his scalp and the kind of posture and assured bearing that suggested he was ex-military.

Heller? No. Keller. I couldn’t remember his first name.

Maggie got to her feet and pulled out her keys. “I’ll take them,” she said as I opened the door. “You should sit down.”

“Ms. Paulson?” the officer asked. I saw a flash of recognition in his eyes.

I nodded. “The uh…body’s in the basement.”

Maggie gestured toward the storage room. “This way.”

Ric nodded hello, but didn’t say anything.

“Please wait here, Ms. Paulson,” Officer Keller said. The three of them followed Maggie through the empty store to the back of the building.

Movement out on the street caught my eye. Another vehicle had pulled in at the curb. I realized it was Marcus’s SUV just as he got out of the driver’s side.

I met him on the sidewalk, trying hard not to limp. “Hi,” I said. I was uncomfortably aware of the fact that this was the second body I’d found in as many days.

He gestured at the building. “Hi. What happened?”

“Maggie and I found one of the artists—Jaeger Merrill—in the…uh basement. It looks like he fell down the stairs and drowned.”

He exhaled slowly. “That’s two bodies in two days, Kathleen.”

I shifted uneasily—and painfully—from one foot to the other. “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“I wasn’t blaming you,” he said, quietly.

I cleared my throat. “I thought you’d still be out at Wisteria Hill.”

Marcus shook his head. “Dr. Abbott and her team are finishing setting up a grid to search the area where you found the remains. There isn’t anything I can do out there right now.” He gave me a quick, appraising once-over. “How are you?”

“Just a little stiff.”

His eyes narrowed as though he didn’t quite believe me but for once he didn’t challenge what I’d said.

“Marcus, do you think those bones actually could be Roma’s father’s?” I asked.

His mouth moved and he pulled a hand back over his hair before answering. “This stays between you and me,” he warned.

I nodded. I’d kind of expected to get his stay-out-of-my-case speech. Maybe we were finally moving beyond that.

“Dr. Abbott doesn’t think it’s a smallpox burial site. She doesn’t believe the bones are that old.”

I rubbed my fingers over my bandaged thumb, picking at a loose edge of adhesive tape with one nail. “So it’s possible?”

He shrugged. “It’s just way too soon to tell.” He gestured toward the co-op building. “So why were you here?”

By now I was used to the way the conversation could abruptly change course with him. I looked back over my shoulder. “I brought the truck down to help Maggie take some things over to her studio at River Arts. She had some orders from the co-op Web site to pack.”

“Okay.”

“After we had the truck loaded, she wanted to check on the basement again. Larry Taylor may have a line on a pump, but there’s more rain in the forecast and there’s a lot of water down there already.”

“Who found the body?”

I stuffed my hand in my pocket before I could pick off the tape that was holding the gauze in place on my thumb. “We both did. When I realized Jaeger was dead, Maggie and I went out into the storeroom and I called 911.”

He nodded and looked around as though maybe there was something important here on the sidewalk. “The body was in the water?” he asked.

“Partly. His…feet were on the stairs. He…uh…was faceup, just the eyes and nose out of the water. There was water on the steps. They’re old—just painted wood—without any safety treads so they get slippery.”

He nodded again. Marcus never wrote anything down, that I’d ever seen, but he remembered everything. His blue eyes were focused on my face, but I could see that his mind was already working, shifting through my words. Just then Ric came out the door, stopping to pull off a pair of blue latex gloves. He looked at Marcus and gave a quick shake of his head.

“Do you want Maggie and me to stay around?” I asked.

Marcus patted his pocket. Looking for his phone, maybe? “No you can go. Where are you going to be?”