Catnapped

by Gabriella Herkert

  “Why did you kill Matthew Cort?”

  “His interest was personal.”

  It made a sick kind of sense. Cort was investigating for his old school friend, for his widow. For Jeff, a personal agenda meant Cort wouldn’t likely be bought off or manipulated into giving up. Killing him was the only choice. Jeff took a step closer and pressed the gun to my forehead. I could barely breathe.

  “Where is my money?”

  I raised my hands a little higher, a lump swelling in my throat. A chill slid through me, and I shuddered. From now on I was going to do everything Connor told me. I wasn’t even going to question him. Please, God. Just let me get out of this and I promise I won’t give him another minute of worry. I’ll eat right and exercise. I’ll mind my own business. I’ll floss after every meal. Anything to get out alive.

  “It’s here.” I made a wave at the computer without ever taking my eyes off the gun. Please let me be right about this. Stall. I had to stall. Slowly, so slowly that he wouldn’t feel the least bit threatened, I lowered my hands until they rested on either side of me on the desk. What had been on the desk? I couldn’t turn around and look. Remember, Sara. Picture the desk. That’s good. A phone, a stapler. Was it heavy enough to use as a weapon? A stapler against a gun. Brilliant, Sara. Why don’t you just offer to jump from the roof?

  “Now, Sara.” Our eyes met, sending another shudder through me. Calm. I had to stay calm. Connor. Please, God. Or Wesley. If the cop showed up at this moment, I’d gladly confess to all the things I’d done since birth in thanksgiving.

  “The Caymans.” When it doubt, lie. Lie big. Lie often. Lie convincingly. “I was just about to log onto the computer to access the account number.” Wow. That had almost sounded legit even to me.

  “Do it.” He used the gun as a pointer.

  “Sure. Just stay cool, okay?”

  I stood, turning my back to him with my internal alarm shrieking. I flinched as a sliver of sweat rolled between my shoulder blades, icing my spine. Carefully I pulled the chair out and slid into it. My eyes did a desperate inventory of the desk. The stapler was a plastic, portable model. The phone was hooked on the wall. Other than the computer, which would be held down by its various cables, there wasn’t anything with enough heft to put a dent in him. He rested the gun barrel against the back of my neck. Bile rose in my throat as I went statue-still.

  “The account number.” I pulled the keyboard closer, noticing for the first time that it was cordless. I shifted it, subtly testing its weight. The gun jammed harder against my head.

  “I’m trying. But I’m having a little trouble concentrating with that thing shoved against my skull like that.”

  “Just get going or you’re going to end up like the last man who crossed me—dead in some alley.”

  A murderer. That was really starting to sink in. Oh, man. The muzzle of the gun caressed my cheek. He’d kill me. Finding the money wouldn’t matter. He was going to kill me anyway. I needed a plan. Fast. I clicked a couple of keys, pulling the keyboard a couple of inches off the edge of the desk as casually as I could, shifting in my chair to shield the move. I turned my head slightly, risking a glance toward Jeff to gauge his distance, freezing when my gaze met an angry stare from the shadowed recess of a bookcase. Flash.

  His eyes glowed like coals, pulsing with liquid fire. The energy in the room shifted, alliances were formed, and I looked up at Jeff with a renewed sense of calm. I needed to stall. A plan. Think, Sara, think.

  “Jepsen couldn’t find it either,” I babbled. “He knew about this room, of course.” I pointed in the general direction of the decomposing evidence of Jepsen’s inside information.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” His voice was harsh as he leaned farther over my shoulder toward the screen.

  “That’s why he was always hanging around. He was looking for the money, too. After he killed Burke, anyway.” Talk. Nice, casual conversation. Keep him calm. Like hostage negotiators on TV. It could work.

  Jeff pushed his face close to mine. I caught a whiff of improbable mint even as I sat up, trying to edge the chair farther away. He stared at me, his pupils dilated, his skin still slick with sweat. His mouth was set in a fixed line, his lips narrowed to a sliver. I froze. He was crazy. Hail Mary, full of grace. What was the rest? Damn it, what the hell was the rest of the prayer?

  “You’re stalling. You don’t know where my money is. You lied to me.” He was whispering now, his blue eyes blazing. Give me screaming lunatics any day. His quietness was freaking me out. He placed one hand on my shoulder near my neck, squeezing hard enough to bruise. I was going to die.

  “There.” He pointed at the screen to a file named Millicent. I stared. I found it. Oh, my God, I’d actually found it. I moved the mouse to open the file.

  “Open it, goddamn it.” He pushed me away, moving the mouse himself.

  “What the hell?” Jeff’s head reared back as he took in the screen. Risking a glance up, I stopped short as Millicent’s—or Maggie’s—photograph stared back at me from the upper left corner of the screen. Next to it was her rap sheet, a dozen arrests for fraud neatly displayed in chronological order. Jeff seemed equally stunned. We gaped at each other. Then he turned back to the screen.

  I propelled the chair back, putting full body weight into driving the hard edge of the keyboard into Jeff’s exposed Adam’s apple. The force of the blow threw him gagging against the bookcase, where a furious hiss preceded Flash’s claws-extended touch-and-go down the exposed length of Jeff’s face. Contact was met by a gurgling scream and followed an instant later by an explosion as the gun went off, shattering the computer screen. My ears ringing, I slammed the keyboard against Jeff’s head. He slumped, his arms coming up to protect himself. The keyboard came down, again and again, until he lay still, covered in his own blood. I stared down at the keyboard, the broken plastic case cracked and smeared with crimson, the keys mangled from the blows. Bile rose in my throat and I gagged, dropping the keyboard and reaching up to cover my mouth, unable to look away from the devastation.

  At my feet, a loud meow brought me back.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  I kept my hands wrapped around the Styrofoam cup, trying to force some vestige of warmth into my chilled fingers. The little room was stifling with the summer heat and nonexistent air-conditioning, but shudders racked me. I sat on a hard, straight-backed chair, pulled close enough to a rickety table so I could no longer see the blood splatters on my shorts and legs. Flash had abandoned me, moving to one corner of the room and going to sleep. He lay on his back, his sleek gray-and-white body fully stretched with his paws over his head, their pads tapping against the air as he dreamed. The door swung open and I cringed, hunching my shoulders and pressing my legs together as I stared at the congealed cream on the surface of the coffee.

  “Sara?”

  “Is he dead?”

  “No. How’re you doing?” Sergeant Wesley’s graveled voice held real concern. I looked up at him, blinking back tears of relief and revulsion as another vision of Jeff flashed through my mind. Wesley had loosened his tie and removed his jacket, revealing a crumpled white short-sleeved shirt with sweat stains under his arms. The gray of his eyes was steady and reflected the same genuine caring I had heard in his voice. I bit hard on my lip to stop it from trembling.

  “You’re sure he’s not dead?”

  “I’m positive.” He moved to the far side of the table and pulled out the other chair, slumping his heavy frame into the tiny seat. “I just talked to my guy over at the hospital. Randall’s gonna be fine. He’s got a concussion, couple of broken bones, and some cuts and bruises. No big deal.”

  “I did it.” The cup in my hands began to crumple under the pressure. Quickly Wesley reached over and removed the Styrofoam from my grip, peeling my fingers away and placing the lopsided cup off to one side on the small wooden table. “He was going to kill me. He was going to kill me.” I wrapped my arms around myself, my fingers digging into my uppe
r arms.

  “Yes, he was.” Wesley agreed gently. He leaned forward, resting his arms on the table in front of him. He was being so nice I wanted to cry.

  “You know?” Barely a whisper.

  “Yeah.”

  “He killed that private detective. Cort. The one in the alley.” My fingers dug deeper into the flesh of my upper arms as I tried to hold the shakes inside.

  “You did what you had to do, Sara.”

  “Can I call my husband?” Suddenly I wanted Connor with an intensity that swamped me. He would come. I knew he would. Even if he was still mad about before, if I called him he’d show up. To help me. To be with me. The shaking intensified. “Please.”

  “I already called him. I had to leave a message. Is there another number we could try?”

  “Why are you being so nice? I’m arrested. I hit him. A lot. And I meant it, too.” I blinked, feeling a slow tear roll down my face. I wiped hard at it before deliberately folding my hands and placing them on the table. I sat up straighter, pulling myself together with all my strength. All I wanted was to go home.

  “You’re not arrested, Sara. You’re the victim. We only brought you down here to answer a few questions, maybe tie up a couple of loose ends.” He reached for his pocket, pulling out the same tattered notebook he’d been carrying the night I found Cort in the alley. When was that? Tuesday? Wednesday? It felt like a lifetime. Someone else’s lifetime.

  “Okay.”

  “Why did you go to the house?”

  “It was the picture.”

  “What picture?”

  “Jeff showed it to me the first day. When I went to talk to him about Flash. He had a picture of Millicent—or Margaret, or whoever she was—holding the cat. But when I went through her room, she didn’t have any pictures. None at all. Nothing personal, even though the whole room was opulent and, well, not staid. But he had a picture of her. In a frame. She wasn’t wearing the ugly suit. The boring stuff was the public Millicent. The other stuff, blond hair and fashionable clothes, that was Margaret. He had a picture of Margaret.” I was trying to keep things straight in my mind but it all came out in a tangle.

  “Margaret? You mean Margaret Trilling?”

  “You know about that?” I shifted in my chair, pulling myself infinitesimally closer to the table.

  “Why don’t you tell me what you know about Margaret Trilling?” He flipped a page.

  “She switched places with the real Millicent. She’d been arrested. Fraud, mostly. And she worked with a partner. She was arrested, then—I think, anyway—turned evidence against her partner. He went to prison. She took her cat and went straight, or tried to. She put the money they’d stolen into a trust for her cat.” I reached for the abandoned coffee, taking a gulp of the tepid liquid. I gagged at the taste. I put the coffee cup aside, carefully matching its position to the ring I had already left on the pressed-wood surface.

  “And how did you figure out Millicent was Margaret?”

  “I didn’t. Cort did. We just followed his trail.”

  “So when you found out, you knew she was running a game on Masterson?” He looked up, raising one eyebrow.

  “That’s what we thought, yeah. It wasn’t true. Masterson hired her. Got Jepsen to do it, actually, but Masterson knew about her background all along. It was on his computer. He was setting up Jepsen to take the fall when the theft was discovered, but no one would believe Jepsen had the computer know-how to pull it off alone. Margaret had the tech background. She’d always worked with a partner and she had a record. The worst part was that she was trying to go straight, so she wasn’t worried about how things would look. She wasn’t up to anything. When the theft was discovered, who’d believe her?”

  I massaged my temples, my head pounding. I pushed my hair behind my ears and then pulled it free again. I was so tired.

  “It’s a good theory,” Wesley said, “but we’ve got as much circumstantial evidence against Masterson as we do against Jepsen.”

  “I hope she didn’t know she was getting played from the start. Maybe she did take advantage of people in her past, but I think she did genuinely try to change. She was there for Emma Burke. And if she used people in the past, she got used back. Jeff. Masterson.”

  “A couple of real prizes,” Wesley agreed.

  “Exactly. The will was just overkill.”

  “What will?”

  “Masterson was getting ready to execute a new will disinheriting his children and leaving all that remained of his estate to Henry Jepsen. It was a final screw-you to all of them. He goes out of his way to tell his offspring he couldn’t care less about them while gifting Jepsen with a big bag of nothing. All the while, he’s sipping rum drinks on a nonextradition beach somewhere with millions in the bank. He really was a bastard.”

  I took a sip of cold coffee. “How did you figure out the money was missing? Everyone had been sworn to secrecy.”

  “The feds served a subpoena on Masterson Enterprises at six this morning.”

  “The feds work on Sunday?”

  He laughed. “Took me by surprise, too. Maybe that’s why they do it that way.”

  I grunted in near amusement, too tired to put any energy into a laugh. “So what went wrong? I mean, if that’s Masterson’s body in the house, he never made it to the promised land with the cash. Who killed him?”

  “Henry Jepsen, if you believe the secretary. They’re both playing Let’s Make a Deal. She told us that Jepsen confessed to her. He went to the estate . . .” Wesley cleared his throat. “Excuse me, allegedly went to the estate, to have it out with Masterson about the lawsuit. Masterson told him he’d never see a dime, that he—Masterson, that is—would strip the company of every last dollar before Jepsen got near a judge. Jepsen went crazy and shot him. Jepsen’s version is that Masterson attacked him and was killed during the struggle. Self-defense.”

  “I hadn’t realized self-defense required burying somebody behind a wall.”

  He shrugged. “A good point. It does look like Masterson was behind the theft, but it’s hard to argue with ballistics. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bullet we dig out of that body turns out to match one of the guns we found at Jepsen’s house. Seems Henry favored the thirty-eight.”

  “How does he explain Mitchell Burke?”

  “More self-defense. A lot of that going around. Said Burke came to him and tried to blackmail him with information about a pension swindle. When Jepsen said no, Burke attacked and Jepsen defended himself.”

  “And pushed his car off a cliff?”

  “Yeah, the story’s got some holes.”

  “How could he put him behind the wall? I don’t think he knew about the room. Or at least how to get in.” I was confused.

  “Don’t quote me, but I think our girl Millicent put him there.”

  “Why?”

  “Randall was already on the scene. Millicent either witnessed the murder or found the body. She did live there. She couldn’t go to the police. Like you said—zero credibility. Besides, she had Randall to contend with. If he knew that Masterson was dead and the money was out of reach . . .”

  “He would have killed her in a New York minute.”

  “He’s a bad guy.”

  “How did you get in?”

  “It was an electronic opener on her key chain. It opens the garage, too, so no one ever thought about it, and the fob had an M for Millicent. Or Masterson. What’s the secretary’s version?” I asked. Somehow, I knew she’d have a version.

  “She didn’t know anything. She picked up her boss and that’s it.”

  “Did you go to the impound lot?”

  “Yeah, I took some of our crime scene guys out with me. The locals were not happy. There are some inconsistencies; plus we’ve got chain-of-custody and evidentiary problems. Anyone”—he leaned closer and stared hard at me—“anyone could have gotten in there and tampered with evidence. It’ll be a tough case.”

  “But it’s an open case?” I asked.

 
; “Yeah, it’s open.”

  “What about the official cause of death?”

  “We’re changing it to suspicious. We’ll get them. It’ll take some time, but we will put them away.”

  I believed him. I knew I wouldn’t want Sergeant Wesley tracking me.

  “Millicent—I mean Margaret—was she involved at all?”

  “Everything we found out seems to indicate that she really had tried to turn her life around,” Wesley said. “She made up a story to get a job, but she did the work. Everyone I talked to at Masterson Enterprises liked and respected her.”

  “She had lousy taste in men, though. What about Flash’s trust fund?”

  I looked over to where Flash was twitching in his sleep, unconcerned by his financial future.

  “Real money. We confirmed with the bank. North of two million.”

  “That’s a lot of catnip,” I said.

  Chapter Forty

  Russ was waiting for me when I finally left the station, holding a cardboard pet carrier. I reached through the cutout on the side and stroked Flash’s fur. He didn’t stir.

  “Are you okay?” Russ asked.

  “Yeah.” I hugged him, the cat, and the cardboard all at once. “Where’s Connor?”

  “C’mon. The car’s this way. We’ve got to hurry.” Russ started down the street, using his long legs to eat up the blocks.

  “Hurry where? Where’s Connor?” Maybe he was still mad about before. I wondered if he’d stay mad forever.

  “He’s on his way to the airport.”

  I stopped short. “The airport? You mean he’s leaving?”

  “He had to.” Russ pulled at my arm. “He got a call. He had to go. We didn’t know where you’d gone or what had happened to you.”

  “But I called. I left a message.”

  “I don’t know about any message. All I know is, the guy was beside himself with worry. What the hell were you thinking, anyway? Then he got this call and he had to go back right away.”