Himalayan Hazard (Pet Whisperer P.I. Book 8)

by Molly Fitz

  Chapter Seven

  Mom led the way into our victim’s private room. There lay Rhonda exactly as she’d been when I first discovered her less than half an hour ago. Poor soul.

  “I’d say next time we should upgrade our travel plans,” Mom said, shifting her light around the room and illuminating the cushy furnishings that I hadn’t really gotten the chance to notice earlier. “But this isn’t exactly a shining endorsement for first class.”

  “Can you shine the light on Rhonda’s body?” I asked, ignoring Mom’s ill-timed joke. “I want to see if there’s anything I missed before.” Because if I missed the entire room outside of her body, I probably missed some important clues, too.

  “You knew her?” Mom asked, her voice quirking in surprise.

  “We met in the dining car and talked for a little bit.”

  “How did that happen?” She found the light switch and flipped it back and forth, just in case. Nothing.

  Having Mom here centered me. Not only was there safety in numbers, but she also might catch something that I would otherwise overlook. Together, we could do some good here—or at least keep things from getting worse.

  “She asked me to sit with her and bond over our crazy cat ladiness,” I admitted with a fond smile as I remembered how desperate she had been simply to make a new friend. “That Himalayan belongs to her, and Octo-Cat is quite smitten.”

  “He always did like the finer things,” my mom said thoughtfully, then cleared her throat and focused her phone on Rhonda’s body. “Did she tell you anything that might be relevant to her murder?”

  I bit my lip as I studied Rhonda’s face. Her features weren’t distorted by terror or even anger. She simply looked at peace, which I found all the more unsettling. “We didn’t say much, and I wasn’t cataloging our conversation for later use, but at least one thing stood out. She either didn’t know or wouldn’t share her destination.”

  Mom flinched at this revelation, turning to face me with wide eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “I told her we were going to Georgia, and she said she’d probably get off before then. Probably. Not definitely.”

  “So she had no clear destination in mind,” she summed up.

  “That’s what I’m thinking. Or something happened to make her want to get off earlier than planned.” She’d looked distracted and had glanced out the window an awful lot. Could that be related?

  “Lot of good that did her.” Mom swept the light down Rhonda’s body and paused when she reached her stomach. “Stabbed multiple times. It looks like maybe five. It’s hard to tell with all the blood.”

  I felt sick to my stomach, remembering how much I’d craved steak earlier that evening. Now I would probably never want to eat it again—or at least I’d be using a butter knife to saw off bite-sized pieces. “Someone had to have enough foresight to take the steak knife from the dining car, but the presence of multiple wounds makes me think this was a crime of passion.”

  “So, premeditated, but only very slightly. Hmm.” Mom’s carefully coifed hair didn’t even move as she shook her head from side to side. Small wrinkles lined her forehead and the edges of her mouth, though, while she stared at the body pensively.

  “Grizabella—that’s her cat—said she heard Rhonda talking with someone after they entered the room. She was in the bathroom at the time and couldn’t make out any of the words. She also couldn’t tell if the visitor was male or female,” I revealed, wanting to make sure she had just as much information as I did.

  Mom sighed. “Meaning we don’t have much to go on.”

  “Maybe the room has a clue. You have the light, so maybe you can search her things while I see what I can find on her phone.”

  She turned on me so fast, I lost my breath from the sudden fright. “Why don’t you have a light?”

  “My phone is almost out of battery. Trying to conserve it in case there’s an emergency later.”

  Mom sighed. “I’d tell you to be more responsible, but I’m guessing this is already one heck of a lesson. Let’s find her phone so you can get started.”

  She shone her tiny flashlight around the room, locating Rhonda’s cell phone almost immediately. It lay on the dresser beside a small travel case that looked like it would be used for makeup or toiletries. “I’ll start here,” Mom said, unzipping the case and riffling through the contents.

  While she did that, I picked up the phone, praying it would be easy to access. And yes! Thankfully, Rhonda had elected to use a fingerprint to unlock her phone rather than a passcode, so I returned to her body, then very carefully and very respectfully pressed her index finger to the surface. The dark lock screen gave way to a photo of Grizabella sitting on a plump pillow and staring straight into the camera.

  Aww. She really had loved her cat.

  While that was sweet, however, it wouldn’t help me figure out who killed her or why. I needed to learn more than just the surface stuff during our search, needed to find something that could set me and my mom on the right path.

  So first I checked her email.

  All the unread messages made me cringe. I’d always been an inbox clearer and couldn’t understand people who hoarded thousands of unread messages, especially when so much of it appeared to be spam. After scrolling through the first several dozen emails and finding nothing but cat blogs and clothing sales, I decided to move on to her social media.

  Unsurprisingly, Rhonda’s Instagram was actually a fan account for Grizabella. She only had a couple thousand followers, but they appeared to interact regularly with her posts. I scrolled through the recent hearts and found almost every profile picture to be either a cat or a person smiling beside a cat. Well, Rhonda clearly had one very specific use for the platform—one and nothing else.

  On Twitter, she followed a handful of politicians and other celebrities but didn’t appear to tweet anything herself. Also not helpful.

  But what would Facebook bring? Hopefully something a bit more useful.

  Here, Rhonda had very few friends and posted rather infrequently. Her most recent update was a check-in at a train station in New Brunswick, which was strange because I was pretty sure I remembered seeing her on the platform when we’d boarded in Bangor.

  Rhonda’s post simply read: Off on another journey!

  Scrolling through her feed revealed the usual combination of baby pics, wedding pics, and humble brags from her modest friends list. Hmm.

  “Angie,” my mom whispered. She hadn’t been whispering before, so whatever she had to say, I was guessing it would be good. “I’ve found something.”

  I swung the phone around to illuminate the room and found her sitting on the edge of the bed with her legs crossed at the ankle. In her hand, she held a small book, and on her face she wore an excited smile.

  Here we go.

  Chapter Eight

  Like most older people I knew, Rhonda had kept her phone fully charged, which meant I didn’t need to be careful about preserving its battery life—and thank goodness for that. I used the screen to illuminate my path as I moved carefully past her body and joined my mother at the bed.

  “It’s her personal planner,” Mom revealed, flipping through the pages demonstratively. “You know, like the calendar app, but on paper.”

  “C’mon, Mom. I know what a personal planner is.” The cover on this one was made of blue leather that I suspected matched the exact shade of Grizabella’s eyes. Gold trimmed the edges of each page, not unlike a Bible.

  Mom shook her head and continued to search through the entries until she landed on the current week. “Here,” she pointed to the box reserved for yesterday. “She got on in New Brunswick. A bit earlier than us.”

  “I found the same thing on her Facebook profile, but I could’ve sworn we saw her when we were saying goodbye to Nan. She was in a hurry, but I definitely remember that blinged out cat carrier of hers.”

  Mom tucked her heavily hair sprayed hair behind her ears, but it immediately bounced back to its previo
us shape. “Huh. I don’t remember seeing her, but maybe she just got off to stretch her legs.”

  “Or to a say a quick hello to someone waiting at the station,” I suggested. We’d only seen her returning, though. Huh, indeed.

  “So she got off, but she got back on,” Mom recapped with a shrug. “Hang on. Let me see what else is in here.”

  While she thumbed through the planner, I returned to Rhonda’s email and searched the name of the train company. Sure enough, since she never discarded anything, her travel itinerary popped right up.

  “She was headed to Houston,” I told Mom hardly believing anyone would want to be on a train for such a very long trip, but then again, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad with a private room. Still, she had either knowingly lied to me or changed her plans quite suddenly. “She told me she’d probably get off before Georgia.”

  Mom stood and marched over to me, then shoved the planner in my free hand. “Her planner has a cat show in that area early next week.”

  So a sudden change of plans, then. “I wonder if the person she met at our stop said something that spooked her. Like maybe a threat. Maybe she reached out to me in the dining car because she felt safer with company.”

  Now I felt terrible. Had I been given the opportunity to save her, only to run away because I couldn’t take another mundane cat story?

  “That’s a lot of maybes,” Mom said, rubbing my shoulder like she somehow knew I was partially blaming myself for poor Rhonda’s fate. “I do agree this is all very suspicious, but we don’t know anything for sure.”

  I shook those feelings aside and focused on the facts. Whether or not I’d played a role in what had happened, the best thing I could do now was to find justice for the poor lonely woman who loved her cat more than anything else in this world.

  “She was wearing a necklace when I met her, but the necklace was gone when Octo-Cat and I came in presumably just minutes after her murder,” I told Mom, forcing myself to move on.

  Mom frowned and set the planner down where she’d initially found it. “Missing necklace. Quick visit to the platform in Bangor. Abandoned trip to Houston. Five stab wounds. We have a lot of little bits and pieces, but not enough to know what kind of puzzle we’re building.”

  “Don’t forget the distraught feline. It was Grizabella’s cries that alerted us to the trouble.” Despite the Himalayan’s cool demeanor when we’d first met her in the dining car, her reaction to Rhonda’s death showed the cat had loved her owner just as much as she’d been loved by her.

  “Now that’s interesting. Could it be a jealous cat show competitor?” Mom ventured, taking the planner back from me and holding it in both her hands as we continued to talk. “They were on their way to a show, after all. Maybe someone threatened them to keep them on the sidelines this year, so another cat could take the crown.”

  “I don’t think cat shows work the same as beauty pageants,” I said with a wry laugh. Laughing was good. It kept the horror from creeping in. “But it’s not a bad theory. A jealous rival killed her off and then took the necklace to make it look like a simple robbery.”

  Mom nodded, but her face remained grim. “There are worse reasons to take a life. Not many, mind you, but I’m sure there are at least some.”

  The door swung open so suddenly, it made us both jump in fright. My heart hammered a heavy tattoo against my chest.

  “Helloooooo!” a young male voice bellowed. Then he gasped and his voice became higher. “Holy heck, so that guy’s crazy claims are true, after all.” He moved into the room and shone his lantern-style flashlight on Rhonda’s body. The curly red hair immediately struck me as familiar. This was the same worker I’d spied in the snack car, the one I’d almost bought snacks from before Rhonda intercepted me.

  “Hi. That crazy guy was my husband,” Mom said, offering him a friendly wave.

  The man—who couldn’t have been much older than a teenager—staggered back and lifted a hand to his chest. “Yeesh, don’t do that! I thought the dead was rising again.”

  Okay, so this kid had seen one too many zombie movies in his day. He also had access to the dining car and all of its knives. Could he be the killer returning to the scene of the crime? If so, Mom and I could definitely take him. Not that I wanted to engage in a fight to the death… now or ever.

  “What are you doing in here?” I asked, studying him closely. His pale, blemished skin looked ghastly in the glow of his lantern. His skinny arms didn’t appear strong enough to inflict the wounds I’d seen on Rhonda, but then again, young mothers could lift entire vehicles to save trapped babies—or so the rumor went.

  “My boss sent me over here to check it out, since my station was the closest. He said that—” He stopped abruptly and raised his light higher. “Ha! Nice way to distract me. What are you doing in here alone with a dead body?”

  He took another big leap back into the hall, terror washing over his once accusing features. “Wait. Did you kill her? Are you going to kill me?”

  “Well, that depends…” Mom said and then moved slowly toward the frightened worker.

  Yikes! What was happening?

  Chapter Nine

  “Mom,” I shouted, at the same time elbowing her in the stomach.

  “She’s kidding,” I assured the young train worker. He hadn’t shown up at work today knowing he’d have a dead body and a crazy small-town news anchor to deal with, and Mom’s attempt at humor was definitely not helping to ease the tension this time.

  Mom said nothing, so I continued chatting nervously, even going so far as to raise my hands to show we meant the young man before us no harm. “We were the ones who discovered the body. Dad went to tell your boss while we stayed here to make sure no one would disturb the scene. You work in the dining car, right? I think I saw you there earlier. What’s your name?”

  He stepped back into the room, his shoulders sloped forward defensively or perhaps in defeat. “Yes, that’s me. My name is Dan, and I’m just trying to do my job and—you know—not get murdered.”

  “Aren’t we all?” Mom said, and I elbowed her in the ribs again.

  “I’m Angie, and I’m a private investigator back in Maine. The deceased is Rhonda Lou Ella Smith. I met her earlier today. Perhaps you saw us together in the dining car.”

  Dan nodded, even chanced a smile. “Yeah. Yeah, I think I did.”

  Good. This was good. Now that he recognized me, he relaxed enough to hold a rational conversation and to stop accusing me and mom of murder.

  “I’m trying to piece together what I can, so I can hand things over to the cops when they arrive,” I continued, motioning toward the planner in mom’s hands and then showing him the phone in mine. “Was she there a long time before I came in or a long time after I left? Did you notice anything unusual about her?”

  Dan took the phone from me but didn’t do anything with it other than hold it at his side. It seemed to further relax him, though. After all, most murderers wouldn’t hand over evidence that could likely convict them.

  “I don’t know,” he said after a slight pause. “She seemed normal enough. Weird, but normal.”

  “Weird how?” I pressed, keeping my eye on the phone. I would need that back at some point.

  “She kept talking to her cat like it was a person. I noticed people looking at her funny, but I thought it was kind of nice. Who’s to say cats can’t understand us, right?”

  “Sure,” I said dismissively, happy Mom kept quiet on that one. While she thought revealing my secret pet-whispering ability would make for a great human-interest story, she at least respected that I’d prefer not to let the world in on my strange power. “Did you notice when she arrived in the dining car or when she left?”

  “She came in right when we left the Bangor station,” Dan said, then nodded in confirmation. “I remember, because she was my first customer and it was just the two of us until you arrived a short while later.”

  “Did the two of you talk?”

  “Just enoug
h for her to place an order. It was a big one.”

  “Could you tell me if—?”

  The door swung open again, and in marched my father. The two cats followed him inside, and then a fourth figure joined us in the private room. Dad shut off his phone—not needing it now that Dan was here with his lantern—then made his way to Mom’s side.

  The cats stayed quiet, watching us from near the doorway.

  I couldn’t quite make out who the new person was, given that the brim of his hat cast his face in creepy shadows. But then he opened his mouth to talk, leaving no doubt as to his identity.

  “Wow,” he said on the wings of a dramatic exhale. “You read about it. You write about it. But you never think you’ll actually stumble upon a real-live murder mystery. And on a train. This is so Agatha Christie!”

  “Easy, Tolstoy. There’s been a murder here. Show some respect for those of us who didn’t make it,” my father warned, wrapping his arm around Mom’s waist protectively.

  “Who’s this guy?” Dan asked, swinging his light closer to the writer who’d invited himself into this intimate scene.

  “The name’s Melvin Mann. Remember it, because one day soon you’ll see it at the top of the New York Times Bestsellers list.” I couldn’t be sure given the current lighting situation, but I think he actually made jazz hands to punctuate his expression.

  Oh, brother.

  “Well, Melvin,” I said slowly, trying not to gag on my words. “This is a crime scene, not Grand Central Station. I think it’s time you went back to your seat.”

  “Oh, really? What gives you any more right to be here than I have?” He crossed his arms over his chest and stepped deeper into the room.

  “Because I’m a P.I. That’s why.” Would I really need to establish that with each new person who arrived? Apparently.