Cats on the Prowl (A Cat Detective cozy mystery series Book 1) (8 page)

Willow plucked up her courage and set
off down the fire escape after Nat. “But you don’t really believe Marlena’s
story about being in a meeting with her agent. That must have been a lie.”

Nat sighed. “You’re a young cat, Willow,
and you don’t know much about what goes on in this town. Marlena’s agent is
Hanford Laghlan. He’s a known lady’s man, and he’s had a thing going with
Marlena for years. He’s also extremely rich and lives in one of the most
expensive apartment buildings in the city.”

Willow stopped and stared at him. “Do
you mean she wasn’t really in a meeting with him at seven o’clock in the
morning?”

Nat chuckled. “Let’s just say it was a
meeting, but it wasn’t a business meeting. What Marlena said about his building
having security cameras everywhere is true. She wouldn’t use Hanford Laghlan as
an alibi if she wasn’t sure the cameras would corroborate her story. I’m afraid
her alibi is a lot more water tight than Jason’s.”

“So what are we going to do next?” Willow
asked. “How can we find out if Jason was in the alley with Josephine at the
time of Roy’s murder? Chester and Bella said he left at eight. Maybe he went
back to the bakery and lit the fire.”

Nat stopped on the last fire escape
platform. “We’ll go interview Annika Neilsson right now.”

“How will we interview her?” Willow
asked. “Are Carl and Naya going there after they finish with Marlena?”

“No.” Nat looked down at the apartment
building parking lot. “Look. There they go. They’re heading back to the
station. It must be getting close to lunch time. Maybe they’ll interview Annika
this afternoon. They must have realized Marlena’s alibi was too good for her to
be the killer. I knew she didn’t kill Roy. She has no motive and a heck of a
lot to lose if she got caught.”

“Oh, look at that, Nat!” Willow
exclaimed.

The two cats sat still and watched
Marlena Rappaport come out of the building. She paused to look both ways, but
when she saw the parking lot empty, she hurried out and got into a lime green
Porsche coop. The engine roared, and she screeched out of the parking lot.

“Where is she going?” Willow asked.

“I don’t know,” Nat replied, “but we
can’t follow her. Let’s get over to Annika’s house and see what we can find
out.”

He jumped to the ground, and Willow
dropped down next to him. The thrill of success rippled through her body when
she landed on all four feet with a satisfying spring. She trotted after Nat
with a hop and a skip.

Nat glanced over at her. “You’re sure
enjoying yourself.”

“You were right,” she replied. “Getting
out into the field and investigating cases is much more interesting than
sitting around the station all the time. And that nap this morning was just
what the doctor ordered.”

“We aren’t finished yet,” he told her.
“We’ve got the rest of the day, and the rest of the case to solve.”

They darted down the street. They
stopped in the shadows of buildings and garbage cans to look around, but no one
noticed them. Willow followed Nat’s lead, and after a while, they left the
congested city center for the outlying residential neighborhoods.

“I recognize this place,” Willow
remarked. “I think I used to live here before I came to the police station.”

“That’s not very likely,” Nat returned.
“There are dozens of these neighborhoods all over town, and they all look
exactly the same. You could have come from any of them.”

Willow fell silent, but the farther
they traveled, the faster her heart beat. “I definitely think I recognize this
place. Look at that playground over there with all the kids in it. I’ve seen
that before.”

“You’ve seen it on every street
corner,” Nat shot back. “Come on. Stop lagging. The case won’t solve itself.”

Willow gazed at the children swinging
on the swings and spinning around on the monkey bars. Their delighted laughter
and shouting sent a chill up her spine. That sound called to her from out of
her past. Could she find the place she lived before Naya brought her to the
police station? Could she find her way back home to the people who cared for
her?

Then she remembered her desire to
become a police cat like Nat. She couldn’t go home again if she wanted to be
one. She had to learn to read suspects, climb fire escapes and dig for clues in
crime scenes. Her past life was gone forever.

But the voices of the children wouldn’t
let her go. She took a step toward the playground. She had to find out what
about them bewitched her heart and mind.

She cast a glance at Nat, but he was
already halfway down the block. If he noticed her stray, he didn’t show it. Willow
didn’t let herself hesitate a second longer. She ran after Nat and raced him
around the corner where she couldn’t hear the children anymore.

“There it is,” Nat told he.

“What?” she asked.

He pointed his nose toward a little
brick cottage behind a thick hedge. “That’s Annika Neilsson’s house. That’s
where she lived with Jason for the last year and a half.”

Willow took a step forward. “Great.
Let’s go.”

“Not so fast. Take a look over there.”
He pointed his nose the other way.

A lime green Porsche coop sat parked
down the block and around the corner. Willow hadn’t noticed it between two
trees. “What’s that doing here?”

“Good question,” Nat growled. “But we
can’t just walk in the front door like I planned. We’ll have to go around the
back way.”

“But didn’t you say nobody notices a
cat listening to their conversations?” Willow asked. “They wouldn’t care if we
did walk in the front door.”

Nat headed toward the hedge. “It’s
better to be safe than sorry.”

He ducked under the hedge, but he
didn’t come out again. Willow waited for him, but when he didn’t reappear, she
tiptoed toward the hedge. “Nat? Are you there?”

No sound came from the wall of
vegetation. Willow crouched down. She pushed her head under the lowest bushy
branch and came face to face with Nat. “What are you doing under there?”

“Don’t say anything,” he whispered.
“Just do exactly as I do.”

“But there’s no danger here,” she
pointed out. “No one knows us here.”

He hissed at her and slithered away
through the dirt. Willow hated to get her fur dirty, but she didn’t see how she
had much choice but to follow him.

The hedge ran up the side of the house
and around the back yard. How did Nat know where to stay under the hedge to
keep hidden and where to come out when he wanted to dart up to the back door? Willow
shouldn’t have wondered that he knew every detail of every inch of the city. He
must have been doing this detective work since long before she was born.

He squeezed out from under the hedge
and peered around. Then he ran in a line straight for the open back door. Willow
hesitated a moment longer. Nat couldn’t be wrong, and even if he was, what
could possibly go wrong? If the owners found a couple of stray cats in their
house, they might yell and wave their arms until the cats ran away. They
couldn’t exactly call the police, could they?

Willow ran to Nat’s side at the back
door, and they both froze with every hair on high alert. Then Nat ventured onto
the cold linoleum of the kitchen floor. Not a sound echoed through the house. Willow
crept after him, but something caught her attention that distracted her.

She wrinkled her nose toward the corner
by the refrigerator. A cat food smell clung to the base board and the crack
where the linoleum met the wall. Saliva filled her mouth. A memory of food
flooded her mind, so she almost forgot to follow Nat into the hall.

Nat crouched in the middle of the hall
and listened. Human voices came from one of the rooms. Willow trotted to his
side, but another cluster of smells assaulted her brain from the bathroom.
Mixed in with the stench of disinfectant and shower jell rose the combination
of human bodies, and not just any human bodies. She knew these people. She was
never more certain of anything in her life.

A shout brought her attention back to
the business at hand. “How many times do I have to tell you? I can’t get access
to the money until the police finish their investigation. I’ve tried, but they
have procedures to follow.”

Another female voice answered the
first, and Willow couldn’t mistake it for anyone other than Marlena Rappaport.
“This isn’t what we planned. I should have known better than to trust you.”

“You can rant and rave all you want.
That’s not going to get you your money any faster.” Willow recognized the first
voice as belonging to Josephine Avino. “We planned everything down to the
smallest detail, but we didn’t plan on waiting around to get our pay-off.
You’ll just have to put your cruise to French Polynesia on hold, just like the
rest of us.”

A third voice joined the conversation. Willow
recognized that voice, too, but she couldn’t quite place it. “So what are we
going to do?”

“There’s nothing we can do but wait,”
Josephine replied. “The police interviewed me and Marlena. Now it’s your turn,
Annika.” So the third voice belonged to Annika Neilsson.

“What are they going to interview me
for?” Annika asked. “I didn’t even know Roy, and I didn’t have any reason to
kill him.”

“You had a reason to frame Jason for
the murder,” Josephine replied. “You have to admit, Annika, in the eyes of the
police, you had just as much to gain by getting rid of Roy as Marlena and I
did.”

“I had a lot more reason to do it than
either of you,” Annika shot back. “and I could end up being the one who goes
down in all of this. If I don’t get my share of the bank accounts, I could lose
my house. I could lose everything.”

“Don’t sing me that song of
heartbreak,” Marlena snapped. “Everybody thinks because I’m some kind of film
star that I’m rolling in loot. It isn’t true. I haven’t worked on a film in ten
years, and no one signs me for endorsements anymore. I’ve been living on my
credit cards for over a decade.”

“Who’s fault is that?” Annika returned.
“So you squandered your fortune. Cry me a river. You’ve never had to do a day’s
work in your life.”

“Get over it, Annika,” Josephine
grumbled. “Jason’s been supporting you with his bakery wages ever since you two
first moved in together. Why do you think he started looking for a woman with
some motivation? If you’re going to lose your house, you could always go out
and get a job of your own. You don’t have to sit here complaining about it.”

“Don’t start in on me,” Annika shouted
back. “You have nothing to blame me for. You milked Roy for every penny you
could get. Then he wised up to the fact that you only cared about his money,
and he took away your ATM cared. That’s when you came up with this idea to kill
him for the last of his cash. Jason may have supported me, but at least I
wasn’t spending his money on high-priced shoes.”

Marlena laughed, but her laugh sounded
like glass breaking under a car tire. “Girls, girls, girls. We don’t have to
fight amongst ourselves. We’re all in the same boat.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Annika
countered. “I’m the one who put that fuel cartridge in the bakery. If those
police detectives suspect me of anything, I’m sunk and you two will ride off
into the sunset with Roy’s money. I’ll bet you planned it that way from the
very beginning.”

“You may have put the cartridge there,”
Josephine told her, “but Marlena and I are just as culpable of murder as you
are. The murder never would have succeeded without each of us playing our
parts. I was the one who told Roy I needed to speak with Jason and got him out
of the bakery so that you could sneak in the back. 

“If I hadn’t kept Roy occupied on the
phone,” Marlena added, “you wouldn’t have been able to put the cartridge behind
the oven without getting caught.”

“So you see,” Josephine went on, “we’re
all in this together.”

“Still,” Annika argued. “You’ve both
faced the interrogation chamber with perfectly good alibis. I still have to go
through the questioning without one.”

“I don’t have an alibi,” Josephine
pointed out. “I had to tell those cops I didn’t know anything about Jason
Dempsey and I wasn’t with him when the fire started. Leaving him without an
alibi left me without an alibi.”

“What about you, Marlena?” Annika
asked. “You can’t claim to be in the same boat with the rest of us. You’re not
a suspect for this murder.”

Marlena considered the matter. “I admit
I do have the best alibi of the three of us. I planned it that way. I didn’t
want to live in mortal fear of the day some flatfoot showed up on my door. I
did my part to bump off Roy Avino from the safety of a maximum security
apartment. The security cameras can prove I was nowhere near the bakery when it
caught fire. If you girls had any imagination, you would have come up with
alibis of your own.”

“I couldn’t exactly come up with an
alibi, could I?” Annika replied. “Someone had to do the dirty work of going
into the bakery.”

Something moved in the room from which
the voices came, and footsteps approached the door. Willow crouched in
readiness to flee, but something she couldn’t understand made her hesitate one
last time. Was it fear, or something familiar?