Cats on the Prowl (A Cat Detective cozy mystery series Book 1) (4 page)

“Everybody knows that,” Jason replied.
“He had a thing going with Marlena Rappaport for over five years. He even got
his picture in the paper escorting her to the Metro Art Exhibition opening.”

Carl rubbed his chin. “Marlena
Rappaport, huh? Now that’s punching above his weight.”

“You’re telling me,” Jason returned.
“Don’t ask me how he bagged that bird, but he used to run off to her apartment
in the middle of shifts all the time. She must have had him on speed-dial.”

Naya chuckled. “I guess that’s why Josephine
got you on speed-dial.”

Jason made a disgusted face. “Josephine
never had me on speed-dial.”

“How often did she come to the back
door of the bakery?” Naya asked.

Jason looked away. “Not often.”

“Not often enough, you mean,” Naya shot
back. “Did she wait in her car across the street for Marlena to call up Roy,
and then after he left, come to the back door to call you out to the Nickel
Alley Cafe? Is that the way it worked?”

Jason dropped his voice to a husky
whisper. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Naya pushed her chair back. “You can go
now, Jason. You’ve been very helpful. If it makes you feel any better, I don’t
think you had anything to do with Roy’s death. You can put your mind at ease on
that.”

Jason jumped up and grabbed her hand.
He pumped it so hard he almost pulled it out of its socket. “Thanks a million,
Detective. I knew I could count on you.”

Naya laughed. “That’s all right. I hope
we can count on you if we need any more information for this case.”

“Oh, absolutely, Detective,” Jason
exclaimed. “You can count on me. You can count on me for anything you need. Day
or night, you call on me.”

Naya smiled up at him. “Thank you. I
will.”

Jason tore out of the room. The next moment,
you could hear the sound of his footfalls and drumming up the stairs. Carl
gazed down at the stack of paperwork in front of him and shook his head. “What
did you let him go so easy for? I had half a dozen more questions I wanted to
ask him.”

“Just wait a little while,” Naya told
him. “We’ll bring him in for questioning again, and when we do, we’ll have a
lot more information to use against him. Right now, we have bigger fish to
fry.”

“You can’t be thinking of Marlena
Rappaport,” Carl remarked. “She’s got a national reputation as a film diva. She
wouldn’t stoop to killing a harmless baker.”

“Who ever said Roy was harmless?” Naya
asked. “Marlena could have some reason to want to get rid of him. Either way,
even if she didn’t kill him, we still have to question her.”

“She didn’t kill him,” Carl insisted.

“What makes you so sure?” Naya asked.

“I know her,” Carl replied.

“Personally?” Naya asked.

Carl shifted in his seat. “Well, no,
not personally. But I’ve seen everything she’s ever been in. She doesn’t have
any reason to get rid of Roy. Jason told you she let herself be photographed
with him. She wouldn’t have cared who knew they had something going. She
wouldn’t even have cared about Josephine finding out. She would probably be
proud of the fact that she bagged a married man.”

Naya turned away and headed for the
door. “You might be right, but there’s one more person we haven’t thought
about. There’s one more person in this case who has a very distinct motive.”

Carl frowned. “Who’s that?”

“Jason’s girlfriend,” Naya replied.
“Marlena might not care who found out about her and Roy, but Jason sure didn’t
want his girlfriend finding out about his relationship with Josephine.”

Carl rifled through the papers. “Her
name is Annika Neilsson. She lives in Cherry Tree Court.”

“We’ll question Marlena tomorrow
morning,” Naya decided. “Then we can start looking into Annika.”

“But she would have no motive to kill
Roy,” Carl pointed out. “She probably didn’t even know him.”

“Maybe not,” Naya replied. “But she
could have had plenty of reason to frame Jason. If she found out about his
fling with Josephine, she could have gotten mad and tried to pin the murder on
him.”

Willow sat on Carl’s desk and peered
into the darkness. Nothing stirred in the deserted police station. Every now
and then, a red light blinked on the smoke detector on the ceiling. Other than
that, dead quiet filled the building.

Willow couldn’t sit still. Her whiskers
twitched, and her ears swiveled in every direction to catch the slightest
noise. The tiniest tick of the clock sent her nerves jangling. She whispered
into the darkness, “Are you there, Nat? Are you awake?”

For the first time in an eternity of
waiting, a gruff voice answered her. “I’m awake.”

Willow couldn’t tell which direction
the voice came from, but she jumped with a start and whirled around. “Where are
you?”

A spot in the inky blackness caught her
attention. A shadow moved in the gloom, but she couldn’t make out any distinct
shape. Only a semblance of movement convinced her Nat was somewhere over there.

Sure enough, his whiskers glistened in
the moonlight. He blinked. Willow caught her breath. She kept a firm hold on
herself to keep from racing toward him. She would have bowled him over and
jumped on top of him with her fangs bared, but that was kitten play. Nat didn’t
play that way.

“What are we going to do?”

Nat sat down in the square of moonlight
streaming through the window. “You heard Naya. They’re going to interview that
Marlena woman in the morning. We have to get out and find some more information
so we’re ready.”

“Ready for what?” Willow asked.

“Ready for the interview,” he told her.
“We’re going to be there, and we need to get out and stir up more information
before that happens.”

“Get out—you mean, into the field?” Willow’s
heart beat faster.

“That’s what I mean,” Nat replied.

Willow couldn’t hold herself back a
second longer. She sprang off the desk and danced circles around Nat. She kept
her composure just enough to avoid tackling him. “Oh, Nat! I can’t wait. Just
tell me what I have to do. Should I do anything to prepare? Should I groom
myself first? Do I look okay the way I am now?”

“You look fine,” he replied. “You don’t
have to do anything. You look a little too clean to go into the field as it is,
but that’s neither here nor there. You’ll get dirty enough where we’re going.”

“Where are we going?” Willow asked.

Nat started toward the door. “You’ll
see.” He slithered through the cat door and vanished into the night.

Willow raced after him, but when she
got through the cat door, she couldn’t see him anywhere. She paused and glanced
around. Then she spotted Nat crossing the park across the street and dashed
after him. She caught up with him next to the fountain and slowed to a walk at
his side.

“I really appreciate you bringing me
along,” she panted. “I know I’m just learning detective work.”

Nat shrugged, but he didn’t look in her
direction. He trained every sense into the wakening night. Willow watched him
in awe. Every sound and smell brought him news of the wide world. He didn’t get
overwhelmed by the excitement of it all.

Nat was a real police cat. He’d seen it
all before. He knew how to pace himself so every tin can with a piece of tuna
fish sticking to it didn’t send his heart fluttering. If only Willow could be
like him.

She kept quiet until they crossed the
railroad tracks. Then she just had to ask again. “Where are we going?”

“I have a couple of friends out here
who can help us,” Nat replied.

Willow almost stopped walking.
“Friends? Who?”

Nat didn’t answer. He scrambled over a
chain link fence and dropped down on the other side. He walked up an alley, and
Willow lost sight of him around a dumpster. She looked right and left. Should
she follow him?

She didn’t like where he was going, and
she didn’t want to go there after him. Her previous owner always told her to
stay on the grass. Even Willow’s own mother told her to stay clean and stay out
of the dirt.

Willow looked up at the fence. Could
she even climb it? Maybe she should head back to the station and leave the
detective work to Nat. He was the expert. She was good at looking pretty and
snuggling up to people.

All at once, Nat stuck his head out
from behind the dumpster. “Are you coming or not?”

Willow wrinkled her nose up at the
fence. “I don’t think I can climb this.”

Nat shrugged and turned away. “I guess
you’ll be left behind, then.” He vanished.

Willow’s heart sank. She couldn’t let
herself be left behind, not when she got all her hopes up of becoming a police
cat like him. She took a few steps back and, with a deep breath, she took a run
at the fence.

She never jumped over any fence before
in her life. She had no idea how to go about it. When she judged she was close
enough, she jumped blindly and put out her paws in a desperate hope of catching
something.

One paw went through a hole between the
wires, and she banged her nose on one of the links. She grunted in pain, but
when her body hit the fence, instinct took over. Without thinking, she started
clawing her way up. Her foot wound up in mid-air at every other step, but she
couldn’t do anything other than keep climbing.

At long last, she struggled over the
top of the fence and the alley on the other side spread out before her. She
caught her breath, but then she faced the greater challenge of getting down.

This time, she didn’t give herself a
chance to hesitate. If Nat could jump from that height without hurting himself,
she could, too. He wouldn’t expect her to do it if she couldn’t do it safely.
She took another deep breath and jumped.

She hit the ground on all four paws,
and the shock woke up some part of her cat soul she never knew she had. So this
was how the other half lived. The cats who didn’t have owners and police
detectives putting food out for them and turning on the heater on winter days
had to jump and climb and hunt for their living.

She stepped forward with a new
confidence in her gait, but she stopped dead when she spotted Nat on the other
side of the dumpster with two other cats. One was a dishwater grey Persian, but
he wasn’t a Persian like her. His face crunched up in a sour expression so he
looked ready to bite anybody’s head off that came too close. Dirt and rotten
food caked his fur, and he didn’t have any whiskers at all that Willow could
see.

The other cat was a microscopic little
scrap of a tortoise-shell Abyssinian. She looked like a kitten, except her head
wasn’t big enough compared to the rest of her body. What could make a cat so
small, in spite of being a fully mature adult? She wasn’t a miniature, either,
only a tiny adult cat.

Willow almost lost heart again. Her
mother always told her to stay away from alley cats. They didn’t have the
breeding of house cats, and they were smelly and dirty. That Persian certainly
was, although the Abyssinian looked all right. Still, they were liable to do
anything.

Nat sat down and looked around. “This
is the new police station cat, Willow. I’m showing her around until she gets
the hang of things.”

The Persian scowled at Willow. She
fidgeted. The Abyssinian bounced straight up in the air and landed on the very
rim of the dumpster. Willow stared at her. How could any animal accomplish such
a feat? Not even a cat could make that jump, and this cat didn’t look big
enough to jump out of a tea saucer, let alone up to the top of that dumpster.
She didn’t even crouch to spring first. She levitated straight off the ground
like a puppet on a string.

The Abyssinian spoke down to Willow in
a high-pitched squeak, and she spoke so fast Willow had to concentrate to catch
every word. “You show ‘em, girl. This town needs another police cat. You’ll be
the next wonder of the animal world before you know it.”

Nat sniffed at a pile of something
sticky on the pavement next to him and curled up his nose. “This is Chester, Willow.
He looks terrible, but he’s got his paw on the pulse of this town. Nothing
happens in this town that he doesn’t know about.”

The Persian made a horrible face and
turned away. Willow never met a cat she wanted so much to have nothing to do
with. But she couldn’t back out now without disappointing Nat. He brought her
here. He must have some reason for introducing her to these two oddities.

Nat flicked his ear at the Abyssinian.
“This is Bella. Try to speak slowly, Bella, so Willow can understand you.”

“I am speaking slowly,” Bella squeaked.

Nat turned back to Willow. “I’ve known
these two since I was a kitten. At least, I’ve known Chester since I was a
kitten. I’ve known Bella since she was a kitten.”

“How long ago was that?” Willow asked.

Bella let out a shriek that raised the
hair on Willow’s back on end. She hissed back at the tiny cat. Then she
realized Bella was laughing.