by Cate Conte
Something about her story was off to me, but she clearly wasn’t saying anything else. I kept my mouth shut for the rest of the drive until we pulled into the driveway. “Did you actually see Virgil? Before…” I couldn’t finish the sentence.
Katrina stared out her window so I couldn’t see her face when she responded, but her voice was flat. Like scary flat. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I did.”
Grandpa materialized next to the car, opening Katrina’s door for her and offering a hand to help her out. “Hey there, beautiful,” he said, wrapping her in a hug. “Hey, Leo,” she said, her voice muffled against his shoulder.
With a sigh, I turned off the engine and got out. I really wanted the full story about that night, but it was like pulling teeth.
And I wasn’t sure why.
Chapter 25
Monday, December 28: six days after the murder
7:30 p.m.
We convinced Katrina to stay over. It didn’t take much. She was exhausted and I could tell she really needed some good food, a warm bed, and comfy clothes. Grandpa and Ethan took care of the food (Grandpa’s famous chicken noodle soup and Ethan’s veggie burgers and fries), and Val took care of the guest room, complete with candles, a brand-new pair of jammies she’d picked up for her, flannel sheets, and the fuzziest blanket we had. Which left me in charge of going to get Katrina’s cats and some clothes for her.
She protested briefly, saying that she should come with me, but we all talked her out of it. When I left, she was wrapped in the blanket on the couch with Grandpa’s soup, a bourbon, and some comedy that Ethan insisted would fix everything.
I wished it was that simple.
I got into Grandpa’s truck and started the engine. While it was warming up, I called Becky and put her on speaker. “Katrina’s out,” I said when she answered.
“That’s good,” she said. “How is she?”
That was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it? “Not great, but she was glad to have real food and a blanket that didn’t smell like felons.”
“I’m sure. So what do you think?”
“She didn’t do it, Beck.”
“I know she didn’t do it,” Becky said impatiently. “Jeez, she’s my friend too. I’m not that ruthless. I just mean, what do you think is going to happen?”
“I don’t know. Lilah Gilmore said Virgil wasn’t getting along with a bunch of his neighbors. And that she told the cops that. But they still arrested Katrina.”
“Not surprising. The Turtle Point cops aren’t the best to work with.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, my antennae rising.
She paused for a moment. “Nothing bad,” she said finally. “I don’t mean they’re corrupt or anything. It’s just that nothing ever happens out there unless it’s something stupid like some stolen bikes—”
“Or stolen decos,” I added.
“Exactly. So they kind of Keystone Kop–it when something big happens. I don’t want to say they don’t know what they’re doing, but…” She let the sentence hang unfinished. “I couldn’t even get an official statement for two days on the arrest, and that’s an easy one. I also think they’re not used to talking to reporters about a case like this. Anyway, keep me posted.”
I promised her I would as I turned into Katrina’s driveway. I pulled my wad of keys out of my pocket, found hers, and headed up to the door. I scooped up the mail from that day that had been pushed under the door and brought it into the kitchen, adding it to the pile I’d already created on the counter, then I looked around for Fred and Ethel.
They were snuggled up together on their cat tree, watching me impassively. They were bonded siblings whom Katrina had rescued when they were kittens. They were almost twelve now.
I got them into their crate without a problem, then headed into the bedroom to get clothes. I picked out some sweats, leggings, and flannel shirts and packed them into her backpack, along with an extra set of pajamas and some socks, then paused to think what else she might want. She’d been so tired she hadn’t even given me any instructions before I left, which also wasn’t like her. I saw her phone charger on her nightstand and stuck that in the bag along with the book she seemed to have been reading. I glanced at the title. The newest Liane Moriarty book. That surprised me a little. Katrina was more of a thriller gal.
But then again, I guess I didn’t know everything about my friend.
I picked up the backpack and looked around one more time. “We ready?” I asked the cats.
They blinked at me.
“Okay, then.” I stooped to pick up their carrier and as I did, I noticed one more envelope that must have been stuck under the door. It was halfway under the mat, which was why I hadn’t noticed it the first time. I pulled it out.
It was blank. Which meant it hadn’t come in the mail. And the envelope hadn’t been closed all the way. It was basically open, so I peeked inside.
Cash. Wrapped in a piece of paper. I pulled it out and unfolded the paper. It didn’t say anything. I counted the money. Three hundred dollars. I placed it back into the envelope and put it with the rest of the mail, tucking it underneath.
Who had left her that money? The anonymous cat donor? She’d mentioned that someone had been giving her money. Leopard Man, I guessed.
Now I was curious, though. I flipped through the mail to see if there was anything else there that would shed some light, but nothing caught my attention. I poked around a little bit, feeling guilty, not even knowing what I was looking for. Well, that wasn’t true. I was looking for something that would tell me what Katrina and Virgil fought about, and why she was at his place the night he died.
Which was kind of a long shot.
Unless … I hesitated. I wondered if she kept a journal. As soon as the thought entered my mind I shoved it out. That would be the ultimate betrayal. Worse than Craig poking around in her past. How could I even think of doing that?
“Get it together, Maddie,” I ordered myself. “You are not going through your friend’s journal. If she even has one. Get out of here and go be supportive.”
I went back to the kitchen and picked up the backpack and the cat carrier. I was just about to leave when my phone buzzed. Val. I stopped to answer it.
“Hey. You still at Katrina’s?”
“Just walking out the door. What’s up?”
“She forgot to tell you Fred is on medicine. It’s in the cabinet right next to the stove.”
“Roger that.” I stuffed my phone back in my pocket and went back to the kitchen. I flipped open the cabinet, found the pills easily enough—it appeared to be for some kind of stomach ailment—and shut the cabinet. As I did, my eyes fell on the calendar Katrina had tacked to the cabinet door.
I glanced at the block for December 23, the day Virgil died. Nothing on there but pick up mom’s meds.
But now I was curious. And it was better than going through her journal. I pulled the calendar off the door and flipped back, checking dates over the past three weeks. Nothing made any reference to Sea Spray Lane, Virgil Proust, or anything else suspicious. I figured as much, but had to check.
I was just about to hang it back up when I noticed an address scrawled at the bottom of the November page. It had no appointment or even a day associated with it. Just 525 Bluff Point Drive.
Curious. It didn’t sound familiar to me. Maybe she’d gotten an animal call while she’d been home and scrawled the address on the nearest available piece of paper.
I hesitated, then copied it into the Notes on my phone. At the very least, I could Google it later.
* * *
I felt better knowing Katrina was safe at home with us. She was happy to have her cats, and she went straight to bed with them when I returned to the house. All in all, I was feeling pretty good before I went to bed myself. The only downer was getting a text from Lucas, telling me he missed me more than anything and could we please speak.
I didn’t answer.
I also felt like it was time to t
alk to Katrina. Now that she was home and she knew we were trying to help her, she would see that she needed to tell Grandpa and me everything, so we could figure out the best approach with her lawyer. Unfortunately that included needing to know about this terrible event from her past too. As much as I hated to admit it, Craig was right. Whether or not she had been responsible for what happened, if her name was attached to it in any way, it wouldn’t look good and we’d need to take a proactive approach.
I had no idea if she would talk to me about it. Sometimes I think Katrina still saw me as the younger kid she used to babysit, even though we were both adults now. A part of her would always want to protect me, and I loved that about her. But she would talk to Grandpa. Of that, I was positive.
Before I went upstairs, I headed down to Grandpa’s office. He’d disappeared down there earlier. I assumed he was doing some sort of work relating to Katrina. When I poked my head in, he was engrossed in something on his computer, but when he saw me he clicked away from it and sat back in his chair. “Hi, doll. What’s up?”
“What are you doing? Did you find out anything yet?” I knew I was being a pain asking him every five seconds. Especially when I knew how Grandpa worked. When he first started investigating something, he need space to gather data and organize his thoughts. In my (admittedly very limited experience) working with him on cases, he didn’t like to talk about it a lot at that point, until he’d coalesced the thoughts in his brain.
“Working on it,” he said simply, which confirmed my assessment. “You need something, Maddie?”
“I think we should talk to Katrina,” I said. “About everything. Get her to tell us what she was doing out there. And … we should ask her about the college thing. Even though she’s going to be angry about that. We probably shouldn’t tell her Craig found out.”
“He was trying to help her.”
“Do you believe it?”
“Do I believe that Katrina had anything to do with what happened to that young woman?” Grandpa sighed. “I never spoke to her about it, Maddie. I know what I read in the report, which didn’t have overwhelming evidence against her. I will say if she was caught up with the wrong people and found herself in a situation, she may have been an active participant, however unwilling.”
I hated to hear that, although I completely understood it. “We have to ask her, Grandpa.”
“Her lawyer will figure it out. That’s why we have Jack. He’s a pro at this stuff.”
I realized that Grandpa might be a little bit afraid of the answer too. Because otherwise he would’ve already had the conversation with her. “Right. But Jack doesn’t care if she really did it or not,” I said slowly. “Jack will only care about what he can redirect the jury to believe. Isn’t that what you always told me?”
Grandpa nodded slowly. “That’s right.”
“So he’s not going to really ask her if she did this. Just like he doesn’t want to know if she killed Virgil Proust. Which I know she didn’t, but still. He just wants to know enough that he can convince the jury there’s reasonable doubt.”
Grandpa remained silent, but his slight nod was enough.
“Well, great. But I still need to know.” I pushed my chair back. “And you’re her private investigator, aren’t you? Wouldn’t you want to know too?”
Chapter 26
Tuesday, December 29: seven days after the murder
7:45 a.m.
When Grandpa and I went looking for Katrina the next morning, we found her in the living room with a cup of coffee. JJ, Fred, and Ethel were all cuddled up next to her on the couch. So that’s where JJ had gone. I’d wondered why he wasn’t snuggled up on my head when I woke up. He was so sweet. He always knew who needed him most.
“Hey,” I said. “How’d you sleep?”
“So good,” she said gratefully. “Thank you for having me here. And for the coffee. It’s delicious.” She smiled, but it faded as she looked from me to Grandpa. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. We wanted to talk to you, if you have a few minutes.” Then I realized it was the middle of the week. “Unless you have to get ready for work. Or are you taking some time off? You should take some time off.”
She smiled, but there was no mirth in it. “You could say I have some time off.” Her gaze lingered on Grandpa for a moment.
Grandpa sat down next to her and took her hand. “It’s going to be alright, Katrina. I promise.”
She looked like she didn’t quite believe him, but no one challenged Grandpa. She squeezed his hand.
“What happened?” I asked. “I feel like I’m missing something.”
Katrina sighed. “Leo, did you tell her about my suspension?”
I stared at Grandpa. “No, he didn’t.”
“It really wasn’t my place,” Grandpa said.
“Well, our fabulous chief suspended me,” she said bitterly. “Doesn’t want to give the public the wrong idea that he’s letting a murderer run loose on their tax dollars.”
I looked at Grandpa. He gave me a curt nod of assent. So that’s why the chief had been at the arraignment, and why he and Grandpa were so engrossed in conversation. I’d thought he’d come to support her. Guess I’d been wrong again. My judgment about people was really lousy these days.
And it was probably why Craig had acted so weird yesterday too.
“So who is running the shelter?” I asked.
“No one,” she said.
“No one?” Grandpa and I repeated in unison. We looked at each other.
“How can that be?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Because it’s not important to him. He’s got dispatch monitoring calls and apparently has volunteers feeding and walking the dogs. Mick is on call for when real calls come in, but he’s doing it off the side of his desk. He’s actually good,” she said when I wrinkled my nose. “He cares. But the chief won’t let him spend any real time on this. They’re not going to do … anything like what I do. Unless he does it on his own time. Which he totally will, but that’s not realistic.”
I knew exactly what she meant. The animal control officer was, by charter, required to respond to any complaint or request that came into the department. An animal had to be held for a minimum of five days. What happened after that largely depended on the animal control officer. Some of them, the ones who I felt didn’t actually like animals, euthanized the animal pretty quickly, citing space and financial restrictions. It was even worse for wild animals, especially one that was sick or injured. They had no voice, so what happened to them was often not pleasant. Katrina was a horse of a different color. She worked pretty much around the clock, outside of her regular duties, to take in animals that there wasn’t space for in the facility so they got a fair shot. If the veterinary budget was over, she paid out of her own pocket.
And this business about Mick Ellory caring enough about animals that he’d work on his own time? I’d believe that when I saw it.
“So they’re basically not going to go out of their way to help any animals until this gets sorted out?” I felt my blood pressure rise and looked at Grandpa. “You have to do something.”
Grandpa sighed. “Madalyn. You act like I’m still in charge.”
“Grandpa, come on! You can do something about this. I know you can.” I gave him my best pleading look. Katrina watched him hopefully too.
His gaze went from me to her then back to me. “We need to make sure you’re back at your post very soon,” he said to Katrina. “So we have to clear your name. And speaking of that. We wanted to talk to you about some information that came to our attention.”
Katrina froze for the slightest of seconds. “Information?” she asked casually, but I saw her hand shake as she lifted her mug. “For what, my lawyer?”
Grandpa nodded. He still held her hand. “We wanted to make sure Jack had everything he needed and in enough time. I’m sure the prosecution is going to come across this information while preparing for the trial, if they haven’t already. B
ut it’s about what happened while you were at college.”
Katrina’s entire body deflated, right in front of us. She set her mug on the coffee table next to her, looking like a punctured balloon. Even her cheeks seemed to have sunk into her face.
“I figured,” she said in a voice that sounded like shards of broken glass. “Something like that will always come back to haunt you, right?”
Neither of us said anything, just waited for her to continue.
“I was young and fired up, and animals were always my thing,” she said. “I felt like I was actually out in the world, in a place where I could help make a difference instead of stuck out here on the island. I got involved in some animal rights groups in college. One of them wasn’t just college kids creating petitions. It was a group that included college kids, but was run by other people. Adults with agendas.”
“PETA?” I asked.
“No, but similar,” she said.
“But you hate PETA,” I said. “Because they do bad things to animals just to prove a point.”
She nodded vigorously. “I do. But I didn’t know that then. This group took a lot of pages out of PETA’s book, but they hid it nicely. And they sucked me in.” She stroked Fred. “I was overly enthusiastic and raring to save the world. You know how it is. They smelled me coming a mile away. The cute leader was so charismatic. He laid it on thick. Told me how much they needed me. Needed people like me in their group, fresh blood, yada yada. And I fell for it. I fell for him too, as cliché as that is. Brandon,” she said, tasting the name on her tongue and making a face. “He was a lot older than me, and I was the perfect target.”
“When did you realize they were … not what they made themselves out to be?” I asked.
Katrina kept petting Fred, her eyes focused somewhere on the carpet in front of her. “There was a lab in the science building. They tested on mice. Which a lot of people protested anyway, but it never did any good. So they staged a break-in and took all the mice out. This wasn’t terrible because they didn’t do anything bad—aside from the break-in. They saved all the mice,” she added. “Brought them to a rescue. But I was worried about getting in trouble. I didn’t, though.”