Against the Paw

by Diane Kelly

  “Where are you working now?” I asked, wondering what kind of place would hire a man with a voyeurism conviction. Then again, it was only a misdemeanor. Did employers ask about misdemeanors on job applications? I wasn’t sure. Probably not.

  “I work in a warehouse,” he said.

  “You behaving?” I asked.

  He lips pursed. “It’s an all-male crew. I couldn’t misbehave even if I wanted to.”

  Well, he could, but he wouldn’t. Men clearly weren’t his cup of tea. I handed the baggage-fee receipts back to Looney. “Thanks for your time.”

  “We’re done?”

  “For now,” I said. Might as well keep the door open, just in case. The figurative door, that is. His actual door was still open only enough for his skull not to be crushed. I left him with an ironic warning. “Watch yourself.” And don’t watch anyone else.

  He closed the door behind me as I headed down the steps. Just in case his receipts had pervert cooties, I wiped my hands on my pants and made a mental note to wash them with antibacterial soap ASAP. When we reached the squad car, I opened the back door for my partner. “In you go, Briggie Boo.”

  She hopped into her space, seeming to have less trouble today. Perhaps her diet and her workouts with Frankie were paying off. I’d have to get her on the scale later and find out.

  When I’d looked into Todd Conklin and Say Cheese!, I’d learned that his photography studio, like his residence, was located within the boundaries of W1. In fact, the studio was housed in a small strip center near the intersection of McCart and Park Hill, not far from Looney’s place. I headed for the center, cruising slowly by, but saw only a glass-front space with the smiling mouse and cheese logo on it.

  “What do you know, mouse?” I asked.

  Alas, the mouse didn’t answer.

  We drove next to Nathan Wilmer’s apartment. To my surprise, I found a U-Haul parked out front and the scrawny, ginger-haired Nathan Wilmer inside, wrestling with a metal bed frame. So far, the frame was winning. It came apart and one of the pieces swung forward to smack him in the forehead.

  “Dammit!” He flung the frame back against the inside wall of the truck. Big mistake. The metal bar bounced off the side and fell at him again, this time hitting him directly on top of the head as he ducked.

  While Brigit sniffed along the ramp, I looked into the back of the truck. “Hello, Mr. Wilmer.”

  Startled, he snapped his head my way. A look of panic crossed his face. As well it should. Unless he’d provided the police department with the address where he was moving to, his sorry ass would soon be hauled off in handcuffs.

  “I’m Officer Megan Luz.” I raised Brigit’s leash. “This is my partner, Brigit. Having a bad day?”

  He swiped at a trickle of blood seeping from the gash in his forehead. “A bad day? Try a bad week. I’ve already been evicted and threatened. And I can’t imagine you’ve got good news for me.”

  Evicted, I understood. But threatened? Had Garrett Hawke and his cronies paid Wilmer a visit, too? “Who threatened you?”

  He opened his mouth as if to speak, then seemed to decide against it. “It was nothing. Never mind.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “It was a big man with a gun and two others.”

  “If you already know,” he said snottily, “I guess I don’t need to tell you, then.”

  An open cardboard box filled with a jumble of shoes sat near the back of the truck. I reached in, snagged a Da-Glo orange sneaker from the top, and lifted my own foot to compare soles. The brightly colored shoe was only slightly longer than mine, small for a man. When Brigit noticed I held a loose shoe, she sank her teeth into it and yanked it from my hand. Shoes were Brigit’s kryptonite.

  “Drop it, girl,” I ordered.

  She cut me an irritated look but dropped the slobber-covered shoe at my feet. I picked it up, chunked it back into the box, and returned my attention to Wilmer. “Moving out?”

  He gestured down to the boxes, then around to indicate the truck. “Uh, yeah.” His tone said what his words did not. Of course I’m moving. No shit, Sherlock.

  When would people learn that sarcasm was no way to score points with a cop? “Did you notify the police chief’s office of your new address at least seven days before your move like you are required by law to do?”

  “I couldn’t,” he said, the sarcastic tone now more of an uh-oh. “I’m not sure where I’m going.”

  “Not sure?” I said. “How can you not know where you’re going?”

  “I got behind on my rent and my landlord evicted me. I haven’t had a chance to find a new place yet.”

  “Tough break,” I said. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t relieve you of your obligation to notify the chief’s office.”

  He tossed his hands in the air. “What the hell should I have done? Tell the chief to look for me out on the streets?”

  If he was looking for sympathy, he’d get none from me. The guy had been convicted of drugging and having nonconsensual sex with at least two women. “Did you think of calling Bill Cosby? He might’ve let you use his guest room.”

  Okay, so it was a low blow. But this guy was low, so it was the right kind of blow.

  “As a registered offender,” I told him, “you’re expected to plan ahead. You knew you were behind on your rent. This eviction couldn’t have come as a surprise. Your parole officer could have helped you find a new place.”

  I took a step closer to the tailgate of the truck. There was no telling whether he might have a weapon in one of his pockets. I didn’t want his hands getting anywhere near them. And I certainly didn’t want to get into the cargo bay not knowing whether he might be armed. Close-quarters combat wasn’t really my thing.

  “Put your hands on the back of your head,” I told him, “and turn to face the wall.”

  “You’ve gotta be fuckin’ kidding me!” he shrieked, throwing his hands in the air again.

  “Not at all.” I pulled my baton from my belt and opened it with a flick of my wrist. Snap! “Now do what I told you to do or I’ll deploy my dog.”

  Knowing those words were a precursor to action, Brigit’s ears pricked and she watched me intently, her tail whipping back and forth in anticipation. What can I say? Brigit liked to kick ass.

  Wilmer looked down at the anxiously prancing dog at my side and let out another wail, but finally turned away from me and put his hands on the back of his head. I walked up the ramp to get into the truck, but Brigit elected to simply hop up. I looked down at her. “Show-off.”

  Tucking my baton under my arm, I retrieved my handcuffs, pulled Wilmer’s hands down behind him, and closed the cuffs around his wrists. Click-click.

  “Anything sharp in your pockets?” I asked.

  “There’s a box cutter in the front pocket of my jeans,” he said. “I was using it to cut the packing tape.”

  Carefully, I reached around his front and slid my hand into his right pocket. Nothing there. I slid my other hand into his left pocket. Nothing there, either.

  He laughed. “I must’ve left it inside. But thanks for the hand job.”

  “Jackass.” I patted the rest of him down, finding only a wallet in his back pocket. The pat-down complete, I ordered him to sit on the ramp of the truck while I radioed for transport. Once dispatch acknowledged my request, I reached back into the box for the sneaker and handed it to Brigit.

  “Hey!” Wilmer cried. “You can’t just give her my shoe!”

  “It’s evidence,” I said.

  “Of what?”

  “Your bad taste in footwear.”

  He looked down at the floor and muttered the C-word.

  I chose to ignore his insult and eyed him closely. “You the one who spied on those women in B-Berkeley Place?”

  He sneered. “You’ll never know.”

  A couple of minutes later, a cruiser whipped into the lot, tires squealing as it took the turn much too fast. The squeal turned to a screech as the officer at the wheel slammed on the brakes.
One glance at the cruiser told me who was behind the wheel. Derek. His flaming red hair was nearly as bright as Nathan Wilmer’s Da-Glo orange sneakers. Normally I wasn’t happy to see Derek, but right now I couldn’t have asked for a better officer to transport Wilmer.

  The Big Dick unrolled his window and looked over at me and Brigit. “Well, well, well. If it isn’t my two favorite bitches.” He threw his door open. “Where’s the pervert?”

  “Here I am!” Wilmer called in a falsely chipper singsong voice before resuming his sulking.

  Derek sauntered over, strolling up one side of the ramp and then the other as he looked Wilmer over, his lip quirking in disgust. “No wonder you had to drug women to sleep with you.” He grabbed Wilmer’s arms and jerked him to a stand. “Let’s go.”

  I walked over to Derek’s cruiser and opened the back door. Derek shoved Wilmer inside, slammed the door, and climbed in the front. As he rolled up his front window, the unmistakable sound of Derek passing gas reached my ears. Brrrratttt! It was the Big Dick’s personal brand, his own form of cruel and unusual punishment.

  In the backseat, Wilmer ducked his head to his chest, his cheeks bulging as he tried to hold his breath against the fumes. I knew from experience that it was an exercise in futility. There was no escape from Derek’s gas chamber.

  As Derek floored the gas pedal and turned the wheel at the same time, his cruiser performed a half doughnut, causing Wilmer’s body to lurch involuntarily to the side, his face slamming against the back window. SMACK! With that, the cruiser zipped out of the lot.

  Given that we’d just arrested Wilmer, I had probable cause to enter his apartment. I phoned the crime scene department first to see if they wanted to secure the area. Since no fingerprints had been found at the scenes where the BP Peeper had struck, they weren’t overly concerned with me contaminating his apartment with my prints. They also weren’t concerned with coming to take a look themselves. I couldn’t really blame them. They were busy folks and at this point all we had on Wilmer was that he’d failed to update his sex offender registry as required. There was nothing definitive linking him to the incidents in Berkeley Place.

  Nonetheless, I figured I’d take a look around. Who knows? Maybe I’d find a bulletin board covered with pictures of the women who’d been spied on, or napkins on which their addresses had been jotted down. Unfortunately, I found neither of these things, nor anything else to indicate he’d been the one at the windows of Kirstin Rumford, Alyssa Lowry, or Korinna Papadakis. I did, however, find plenty of evidence of how much a creep the guy was. His dresser drawers contained an extensive hard-core porn DVD collection, while copies of Hustler lay on his nightstand, coffee table, and in his bathroom. Ew. Ew. And Ew. He also had multiple pairs of high-powered binoculars in all different sizes, some large enough to require their own cases, others small enough to fit into a shirt pocket. Had he been using these to spy on women? Was he looking for his next victim? There was no way to tell.

  While I’d been searching the apartment, Brigit had lain on Wilmer’s floor and happily torn his shoe to shreds. Even so, she wasn’t ready to give up on it yet. When I rounded her up to go back outside, she picked up the ragged shoe and carried it with her.

  We returned to the truck, where I performed a quick search of the few boxes he’d managed to load onto the truck before I arrived. When I found nothing incriminating, I plunked my butt down on the tailgate and pulled the box of shoes over, picking them out one at a time and sniffing the bottom of each for a telltale scent of fresh compost. Brigit wasn’t the only one who could use her nose in her work.

  A fiftyish man who’d passed by a half minute earlier on his way to get his mail came back by, caught me sniffing the shoes, and muttered, “Now I’ve seen everything.”

  When I finished sniffing for clues, I pulled the back door down, and secured it the best I could with a zip tie. If someone stole Wilmer’s stuff, it would be too bad, so sad. I really didn’t give a rat’s ass. I also put in a quick call to the truck rental company to let them know where they could find their truck.

  Back in my cruiser, I phoned Detective Bustamente. “I just arrested Nathan Wilmer. He was moving out of his apartment without giving advance notice of his address change. I looked through his things but didn’t find anything incriminating.”

  “His arrest could help us,” the detective said. “If the peeper strikes again while Wilmer’s in jail, we’ll know it’s not him.”

  Good point.

  “Let’s keep this bit of info between you and me,” the detective said. “If he’s not the peeper, we don’t want the real culprit to lie low until Wilmer gets out of jail to throw us off his scent.”

  Also a good point. “Consider my lips sealed.”

  FIFTY-ONE

  SHOE-BE-DOO!

  Brigit

  What a great day! Megan had given her a shoe! And not just any old shoe, this one was wonderfully stinky and had laces she could pull on.

  She plopped down on the platform in the back of the cruiser and set back to work on the sneaker.

  Life doesn’t get any better than this.

  FIFTY-TWO

  ABRACADABRA

  Tom

  Thanks to the neighborhood watch schedule, Tom knew Rasheed Chutani had volunteered for shifts last night and tonight, and wouldn’t be at his home between the hours of 9 P.M. and 1 A.M. Less risk of Tom getting caught, with the husband out of the way. A wife was likely to merely scream, run, and call the police, but an angry husband might choose to pursue him. Best not to chance it.

  Tonight’s session was turning out to be a special coup. He’d known Wasima Chutani must have long, dark hair under her hijab, but up until now, only her husband, family, and female friends had seen it. But now, he was not only seeing it, he was recording her on tape, brushing out those long, lustrous locks, stroke after stroke after stroke …

  The wooden blinds over the bedroom window were closed tight, but with his cheek flattened up against the exterior wall of the house he could see her through the tiny gap between the edge of the blind and the window frame.

  Ironically, she wore a long-sleeved robe zipped up to her throat, revealing her face and hair but nothing else. Hell, he couldn’t even see her feet! He supposed it was too much to ask for a repeat of the lotion application/crotch shot he’d got last time. After all, beggars can’t be choosers. And peepers have to take what they get. In fact, part of the fun was not knowing just how far things might go …

  Still, if he could will her robe to vanish, he would. If only he could conjure up a genie by rubbing a magic lamp.

  I may not have a magic lamp, but I do have something else to rub …

  He tugged off his right glove, tucked it into his pants pocket, and unzipped his fly to release himself. As sexually stoked as he was, it took virtually no time for him to reach his release.

  Abracadabra and alakazam!

  No sooner had he zipped his fly than a car appeared on the street, the beam of an oversized LED flashlight playing across the space between the adjacent house and the Chutanis’. The beam swept toward him like a Jedi light saber ready to make a deadly strike. He had to move. Now!

  Tom turned and sprinted toward the back fence. He’d made it only five steps when fwump! His foot tangled in a garden hose coiled next to the house and tripped him, sending him skidding face-first across the grass.

  This is it.

  They have me.

  It was over.

  Or is it?

  The beam sailed two feet above him, leaving him in shadow on the ground. The light continued on down the side of the house, over the window where he’d been spying only seconds before, and disappeared as the car continued on down the street.

  He gasped for air and rolled onto his back, looking up at the night sky. A bright star twinkled at him, as if it had seen what he’d been up to down here on earth and given him a conspiratorial wink.

  That must be my lucky star, he thought. I’d better thank it.

  F
IFTY-THREE

  TIME TO WASH THE WINDOW

  Megan

  I’d just set out on patrol for the morning when a call came in on my cell from Detective Bustamente.

  “Good morning, Detective.”

  “We’ll see about that,” he said. “I’ve told dispatch to refer all nonemergency prowler calls in W1 to me. I’m heading out to one right now. You and your partner meet me there.”

  “Of course!”

  He provided an address in Berkeley Place, and within minutes I was pulling to a stop in front of the house. A man in a business suit and a tall woman in jeans, a striped blouse, and a turquoise-blue hijab stood on their porch, speaking with the detective.

  I climbed out of the cruiser and opened the back to let Brigit out, attaching her lead. We made our way to the porch.

  Bustamente made quick introductions. “Mr. and Mrs. Chutani, this is one of our finest K-9 officers, Megan Luz. Officer Luz, this is Rasheed and Wasima Chutani.”

  I shook each of their hands in turn, and tilted my head to indicate my partner. “Her name is Brigit.”

  Though Mrs. Chutani smiled down at my four-legged partner, her expression was also wary. Typical. People were intrigued by police dogs, but were often a little apprehensive, too. They had nothing to fear where Brigit was concerned, unless they were a bad guy. When not pursuing a suspect, Brigit was a friendly, fluffy goofball.

  Mr. Chutani gestured into the yard. “This way.” He proceeded to lead the rest of us around the corner of his house. “I came out to put seed in the bird feeder this morning and found something very disturbing.” He stopped before a window about halfway down the side and jabbed an angry finger in the direction of the glass. “There.”

  On the glass, about three feet up from the ground, a congealed streak began, running down to the bottom of the pane, where the substance sat in a glob, drying in the morning sun.