Willow’s heart pattered when she got to the top of the fire escape. The ground reeled far below her. How could she ever climb all the way down without falling? Then she remembered Bella. The tiny Abyssinian would probably jump from the balcony all the way down to the ground in one spring without scratching her little toenails.
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?
Chapter 10
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 th
e 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?
Nat didn’t stick around to find out what would happen next. He tore sideways into another bedroom, skated across the hardwood floor, and flew into the open window. He landed on the windowsill and looked back to wait for Willow.
Even when she heard the footsteps coming toward her, she couldn’t make herself run until the last possible moment. There was still one element missing to this mystery, and what struck her as so familiar?
Annika shoved the door open and burst out of the room. She stood all of six foot three inches, and her lithe body stretched almost up to the ceiling. Her curly blonde hair hung almost to her waist. She strode down the hall heading for the kitchen or the bathroom.
Willow froze with every muscle taut to spring, but when her eye fell on Annika’s face, the puzzle pieces settled into place. She no longer thought about running away. She no longer thought about being a police cat. She no longer thought about anything at all. Her mind went blank.
Annika’s mouth fell open. “There’s a cat in here. It looks like my old cat.” She put out her hand. “Here, Snowy. Come here, pretty girl.”
Willow stared at her. Then, out of the depths of her soul, she meowed.
Nat called to her from the window in that intense whisper that forced her to look in his direction. “Are you coming, Willow?”
As soon as she looked away from Annika’s face, the spell shattered. She ran for all she was worth, down the hall, past the pictures and the medals hanging in frames, past the gilded citations and the smelly bathroom. She didn’t bother to stop on the windowsill. In one flying leap, she cleared the window ledge and landed on the concrete outside.
Every fiber knew what to do when she hit the ground. She rocketed forward and dove under the hedge. She didn’t stop running until the prickly darkness closed around her and blocked out the memory of everything she just saw.
As soon as the dark hedge enfolded her, she paused to catch her breath, but she didn’t stay there. She waited until Nat joined her. Then she tunneled her way back to the sidewalk and set of at a brisk gallop down the street.
Nat ran to keep up with her. “Willow, wait.”
She didn’t even turn around. “We don’t have time. We have to get back to the station and find Carl and Naya. I believe Jason is going to try something next, and we have to alert them.”
“But Jason didn’t kill Roy,” Nat pointed out. “You just heard Annika admit to putting the fuel cartridge in the bakery. Annika, Josephine and Marlena all planned to kill Roy together.”
Willow shook her head, but her thoughts were
never more crystal clear. “Annika planted the fuel cartridge in the bakery, but she didn’t start the fire.”
“What makes you say that?” Nat asked.
“Don’t you remember what Chester said?” Willow asked. “He said a regular flame wouldn’t cause that cartridge to explode and set the bakery on fire. Whoever set that fire used military grade blasting caps to ignite the fuel.”
“But we still don’t know who that was,” Nat pointed out. “Any one of those three women could have a military background.”
Willow stopped and faced Nat. “Don’t tell me the world-famous police cat didn’t notice what was right there in front of his eyes in that house. Don’t tell me little old Willow the house cat noticed something you didn’t.”
Nat frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“Didn’t you bother to look around the house?” Willow asked. “Didn’t you look to see what sort of people lived there?”
Nat’s whiskers twitched. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Willow started walking again. She answered Nat over her shoulder. “I was right about this neighborhood being familiar. I’ve been here before. In fact, I used to live here. Annika Neilsson was my old owner.”
Nat stopped in his tracks. “What?”
Willow nodded, but she didn’t stop walking. Every minute before they found Carl and Naya was a minute wasted. “I lived in that house. I know more about Jason Dempsey than anybody except maybe Annika herself. He was in the Marine Corps before he moved here. He was honorably discharged after serving five tours in Iraq, and he earned a whole pile of medals. He had them mounted in frames in the hall of that house, right in front of you, Nat.”
Nat looked away. “That’s impossible.”
“It’s the facts, Willow exclaimed. This was one big plot to kill Roy for his money and distribute it between the four of them. They were all in it together.”
Chapter 11
Nat surveyed the surroundings. “How are we going to break the news to Carl and Naya?”
Cats on the Prowl (A Cat Detective cozy mystery series Book 1) Page 6