Este licked her lips, and some of her fierce certainty faded.
“He . . . knows some of the people involved in that group. He’s not a sympathizer, but he knew some of the members, from other, less . . . radical groups. I suppose he went to ask them to back off.”
Teddy hadn’t hung around, so he couldn’t say for certain, but it was a reasonable explanation. Ginny looked at him, her eyes asking for an opinion, and he shrugged slightly, and then nodded. It made sense, and since they had no real proof the graffiti was tied in to the missing money anyway . . .
“There’s no need to question him about what happened in the office,” Este went on. “He wasn’t involved in . . . any of the things going on.”
“But he did have access to the main office?” Ginny asked, picking up the fact that Este had brought up the office, when they’d been talking about something else.
“I mean he— Yes. He did.” She would have lied if she could, Teddy could tell from her expression, her body language, but she’d spoken without thinking, stressed into an incautious outburst, and once caught, she knew better than to backtrack.
“Because . . .” Ginny prodded her to finish.
“They were having an affair,” Teddy said, still watching Este’s face. “And they were using the office as their meeting place. Safer, more secure than a hotel, somewhere she controlled, where they both had a reason to be at any time, and nobody would question it.”
* * *
Ginny Mallard wasn’t exactly a prude, and she’d seen and heard enough of people’s private lives, working as a concierge, that it was hard to shock her. But Tonica’s comment left her flat-footed and maybe, just maybe, a little horrified. Not about the affair, and not at the fact that Este obviously liked younger men, but that they did it in the office . . . There wasn’t even a couch!
It made it incredibly difficult not to visualize that small office, the desk covered with papers, and imagine . . . No. Not going there. Think of anything other than that. Especially since she hadn’t gotten any in months.
“How do you know that he’s not responsible?” she asked instead. “If you gave him access to the main office, trusted him here when everyone else was gone . . .”
“He didn’t steal the money,” Este said. “I did.”
As conversation stoppers went, that one was damned effective. Ginny realized that her mouth was hanging open, and shut it with a snap. On the sofa next to her, Tonica wasn’t doing much better.
“You . . . what?”
“I stole the money. Jimmy . . . he came in one night he wasn’t scheduled, my own fault for giving him a key, and letting him know the security passcode.” Este drew herself up, and then exhaled. “He heard us, listened in like a little sneak thief, a voyeur. Listened and took notes and the next morning called me to set up lunch, said he had something we needed to talk about. I thought it was about the books, of course, so I said yes.”
“He blackmailed you? Threatened to tell Roger?” That was cause enough for murder.
“He threatened to tell everyone. I spent most of my life arranging other people’s public faces. I know what bad PR can do, even to someone as far out of the spotlight as I am now. A scandal—and an older woman with a much younger man is still a scandal, believe me, even at our age—would do no good, and possibly much harm. The shelter . . . this was our dream. A scandal could destroy it. And Roger . . . we’ve had our problems, but you know about his illness, his heart isn’t good. I couldn’t . . .”
“So you took the money to pay him off.” Tonica shifted, leaning forward to stare at her. “And got Nora, who is in no way qualified to be handling these things, to take care of the money. And then Nora, not being as dumb as you thought, hired us to investigate. . . .”
“I asked Nora to take over before . . . before everything. She was the best choice for it. . . .” Este almost smiled. “She proved she was the best choice, by realizing that something was wrong, despite my best efforts to confuse the issue.”
She had said something about it being a mistake to give the assignment to Nora, Ginny remembered. That was what she had meant.
“But I couldn’t dismiss you without raising even more questions—and keeping you close allowed me to know where you were going.”
“And now he’s dead,” Ginny said bluntly. “You know this makes his cause of death suspicious—and you the prime suspect?”
Este blanched, and her hands pressed down against the arms of her chair as though she were trying to hold the furniture down. Either she hadn’t thought of that, or she hadn’t thought they’d be tacky enough to mention it.
Ginny was feeling distinctly tacky just then. Also seriously irritated.
“Did you kill him?”
“No! God, no.”
Ginny looked at Tonica, who was studying the older woman, and saw his head tilt forward, barely a nod of his chin. He believed her.
Tonica was their body language specialist, the people-reader. She should trust his take—but Ginny wasn’t convinced. Logic said Este was the prime suspect, and prime suspects lied. She had already lied to them, over and over again, and had been cheating on her partner to begin with, so not the world’s most truthful person—although she supposed she could see where Scott Williams was more appealing than Roger.
People behaved badly. This was not news. But how badly?
“So the thing we were hired to solve is now officially solved, if not actually fixed. And I’m not sure it even matters, because even before then,” and Ginny tapped the copies of the records, “you were being stolen from. That leaves you still shy, what, twenty thousand dollars out of your budget, over the past few years?”
“Twenty thousand. Dear God. And no, I can’t replace that.” Irritation replaced the fear in her voice. “No wonder we were always scraping by, budget-wise, no matter how many donations we got. How the hell did we miss it?”
“My accountant took a look at your records, and says your bookkeeper was trying to unravel that, but it was really well done. Very subtle.” Ginny paused. “He may have been crap as a human being, but Jimmy was good at this job. And he didn’t like mysteries.”
Hard to imagine a blackmailer being conscientious enough to unravel another person’s theft, but maybe he didn’t like competition. Or wanted to take notes for his own use. Who the hell knew, and the guy was dead, so they couldn’t ask him.
“There are only so many people working here,” Tonica said, leaning back again. “And only half of them have access, assuming you weren’t handing out keys to every good-looking male. So who was cooking the books?”
“And who killed Jimmy?” Ginny asked. “Because at this point, I’m not buying the utter coincidence of a blackmailing, about-to-discover-embezzlement bookkeeper’s having-a-stroke, dying alone thing anymore, are you?”
Neither of them were, based on their expressions. Then Este’s expression changed again, looking over their heads, her eyes widening just enough to show real shock. “Roger?”
For a guy on the other side of sixty, Roger was pretty fast with the gun. Tonica had only just started to get out of the sofa when the weapon was pointed at him, the dark metal looking ominously, well, ominous. Ginny wished briefly that they’d let Georgie come in with them—the dog had already proven herself against one gunman before—and then she started looking for something within reach she could use as a weapon.
He’d come in through the clinic itself: nobody in the front office would know he was in there with them, assuming anyone even knew they were in there. And these old warehouses were solidly built; odds were nobody would hear the gun going off, either.
“I knew, when you said you were meeting with them, that it would all come out,” Roger said, his gaze only on Este. “Finally, it would all come out.”
“You killed him?” Este sounded more than surprised; she sounded horrified.
“You slept with him?” Roger replied, his tone mocking hers, although—weirdly to Ginny’s ears, not unkindly. He sounded mor
e . . . resigned.
“You were the one cooking the books,” Ginny said, everything clicking in place with a firm snap. “Sliding money out would be easy for the guy who was handling the finances, paying the bills, and nobody would ever know—until you got sick and had to be replaced.”
“Why?” Este had stood up, but not moved, staring at her partner. “Why on earth would you do that? If you needed money, all you had to do was ask!”
“It wasn’t about the money,” Roger snarled, the amiable façade cracking under his fury. “It was about you. Screwing him, here, in the office.”
“What?” She stared at him. “You haven’t been interested in sex for years, even before you got sick!”
“That didn’t mean you should sneak around, in our office!”
“I so didn’t need to know this much about other people’s sex lives,” Ginny said, not quite under her breath.
“You’ve been having this affair with Williams for how long?” Tonica asked. “Two years? Three?”
Este nodded, her gaze still locked with Roger’s.
“Same time he’s been fiddling with the books,” Ginny said. “Tit for tat?”
“You were going to destroy it all,” he said to Este, the words so carefully enunciated, they might have had actual edges. “Everything we worked for, so you could play cougar, and scratch your itch.”
“So you were going to destroy it first,” Ginny said, standing up—slowly, not wanting to freak him out, but not able to sit there passively. If she could move a foot away, he’d have to cover both of them with one gun, and they’d have a better chance. Maybe. “And then what, blame Williams for it? Or Este?”
Robert shrugged, but his hand holding the gun never wavered. “Didn’t know, didn’t care. I told you, it wasn’t about the money. It was a fixed routine. Every time she met with him, I took a little more out. It seemed fair play.”
It was, Ginny had to admit, a logical sort of revenge: if she stopped, so would he. Sick, but logical. She could almost admire the cold-blooded beauty of it.
“And now?” Tonica could have been asking the guy if he wanted another beer. But she saw how his hand was resting on the arm of the sofa; he wasn’t anywhere near as cool or calm as his voice sounded, but braced to explode into action if need be. The older man wouldn’t stand a chance—except for the gun.
Guns trumped muscle just about every time. Her self-defense teacher had told them that, back in college.
“You going to kill us, Roger?” she asked, trying to keep his attention on her, so if Tonica tried anything, maybe he’d have a few extra seconds to move. “Like you killed Jimmy?”
“I didn’t kill him!” Roger seemed to finally register what they were talking about, and looked dismayed at the thought that they could think he’d murder someone. Considering he was holding a gun on them, Ginny wasn’t reassured. “I found the gun, on my way in that night. Someone had thrown it in the alley behind the dog run. I picked it up; it wasn’t safe to leave there.”
“You just picked up a gun and walked into the shelter? Are you an utter idiot?” Este was beside herself.
“What was I supposed to do, leave it there for anyone to find? And then I saw the light on in my office and all I could think was that someone was in there, poking around in the books—”
“You knew we’d hired someone to do them!”
“I didn’t know he worked at three in the morning!”
“What were you even doing there at three in the morning?”
Ginny was pretty sure that the two of them had forgotten anyone else was in the room. Which would be great—she had no problem with two adults working their issues out by screaming at each other, except one of them was still holding that damn gun.
Time to do something about that.
* * *
The difference between shooting a guy and surprising him with a gun so he had a heart attack was something for lawyers and judges to figure out, but looking at the way Roger was holding the weapon, Teddy was pretty sure he was telling the truth about the gun not being his. He was also pretty sure that the only way Roger would hit anyone with a bullet would be by accident.
Never mind that an accident would be just as deadly as intent, in the relatively small space of the waiting room. He wished they’d taken Georgie in with them: a man this nervous would probably wet himself if a dog—even a sweet dog—growled at him.
Or maybe not, considering that the guy helped found an animal rescue shelter.
“There’s a way out of this that doesn’t involve a gun.” Ginny was stepping forward, her hands out to her side, her voice shaky but calm. Teddy wanted to yell at her—what the hell did she think she was doing, you don’t irritate a guy with a gun! But he was afraid to say anything, afraid to even breathe, trying to identify all the ways this could possibly—probably—go wrong.
But Roger took a step back, even though he was still aiming the gun at them, and seemed to be listening. Maybe she could talk him down after all.
“Right now, everything’s a terrible, tragic accident,” Ginny went on. “Nobody was intentionally hurt.”
Something brushed his ankle, and Teddy twitched instinctively, then looked down, somehow not surprised to see a cat winding her way around his legs. He was surprised to recognize Penny. She rested her head against his calf and looked up at him with those pale green eyes, like she was expecting him to do something.
He had just enough time to wonder how the hell she’d gotten here, how she’d found them, when a low growl filled the room, making everyone stop dead. For a moment, he had the crazy thought that Penny had somehow gotten Georgie out of the waiting room, but it didn’t sound like Georgie.
It didn’t sound like a dog at all.
Across from them, Este had gone ashen, her eyes looking to the left, but her entire body gone very still.
“Nobody move,” Roger said, his voice the kind of calm that made smart people break out in a cold sweat. “Nobody . . . move.”
“That’s not a dog,” Ginny said, as the growl sounded again, and this time it was definitely in the room.
14
There was a third low growl, this one ending with a weird kind of sneezing sound, and Ginny suddenly knew what was in the room with them: a cat. A big cat, deep-chested and muscled. She could feel it behind her, pacing along the wall, large, menacing, and nasty. She pictured it as a sabertooth, with glowing red eyes and drool, just waiting to pounce. Even if she’d wanted to jump and run, even if Roger hadn’t warned against exactly that, her body would have refused. Instinct froze her, still and silent as a mouse, hoping against hope the beast would choose someone else, or better yet, go away.
Someone, she didn’t know who, it might even have been her, let out a whimper, barely audible, and like a trigger being pulled, all hell broke loose. The leap was silent, but she could hear it, her nerves screaming at her body to move move move. She saw Roger turning, the gun he’d just been pointing at Este dropping lower, then rising to aim it at her—no, behind her—even as the door left ajar by his entry banged open, slamming against the wall with a sound like a gunshot.
“Don’t shoot!” Alice cried, panicked. “It’s valuable, don’t shoot it!”
The noise and the plea were just enough to make Roger hesitate. The cat, however, had no such consideration. Ginny’s muscles finally unlocked enough to let her slide to the floor, her only instinct to get out of the way, to be less of a target. Something brushed by her, and the cat’s scream was matched by a human cry of pain, not hers, too deep to be hers, was she hurt? Then there was a bellow that could only be Tonica entering the fray, with a woman’s voice calling out again, “Don’t shoot it don’t hurt it!”
And then another scream, this one fainter but no less fierce, and something launched itself over Ginny like an arrow, long and lean and . . . furred?
Ginny rolled over on her side in time to see a smaller cat, housecat-sized, land claws-out on the larger animal, her tail bottled and her ears flat.
>
“Penny,” Ginny whispered in shock, with no idea of how she could recognize the fierce warrior as the same smooth-coated cat who rubbed against her ankles, but she knew the tabby as easily as she would know Georgie. Fear was a sour taste in her mouth, watching the much smaller animal cling to the larger cat’s neck, hissing like some cartoon that wasn’t funny at all.
The tabby didn’t have a chance; the larger animal shook her off easily, and Penny landed on the floor, hard, and didn’t move.
Before the larger cat could recover enough to attack or flee, the vet tech was there, on her knees in what looked like the stupidest move ever, and stabbed the animal with a hypodermic needle. She stayed there by its side, either batshit crazy or just too exhausted to move. Her eyes were wide, her chest heaving as though she’d been running a sprint. Ginny could relate: she felt like she needed a paper bag to breath into, herself.
The cat—a tawny spotted beast a little larger than Georgie—struggled to get back on its feet, and then collapsed.
Ginny exhaled, coughed as her lungs demanded more air—now!—and was finally able to look around the room, to see what the hell had happened. Roger was down on the ground, on his hands and knees, his shirt ripped and bloody. Tonica was flat on his back, holding his arm to his chest, but she couldn’t see any blood. Their chairs were knocked over and scattered across the floor, her chest was heaving as though there weren’t enough air in the room, and she could feel bruises starting to form everywhere.
“What. The. Fuck?” Este’s voice came from behind the sofa, where she, smarter than the rest of them, had ducked the moment things went to hell.
Ginny stared at the cat—a cougar? No, the markings were all wrong, spotted, and it was too small—and nodded. “Yeah. What she said.”
“That’s an ocelot,” Este said, moving around the sofa cautiously now, staring at the cat. “A wildcat. What the hell?” The look she turned on the vet tech was venomous, and Ginny instinctively scooted back a few inches until her back was up against the coffee table, its out-of-date magazines and candy jar somehow unmoved by all the action.
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