Diaries of an Urban Panther (24 page)

“What do you want to do?” he asked as we sped back to my place.

In the car, I had found a piece of her door that had jumped into a pocket of my coat. I spun it around and around. “Will you watch her tonight?”

“You gonna be okay by yourself?”

I was quiet. I didn’t really have the heart to lie to him right now.

Chapter Twenty-Two

A
s we drove up to my house, the two police cars waiting outside made the hairs on my arm stand up straight. Two uniforms were standing outside like dark blue lawn sculptures.

Chaz pulled up to the curb on the other side of the street and I jumped out. No fire. No flood. Locusts maybe?

Slowly, I walked across the street. People had gathered outside the other units and were gossiping. Their whispers carried on the wind.
Poor single girl in 2G
.

An officer approached me quickly as I crossed the yard. “Hold on a moment, ma’am.”

“This is my house. What happened?”

The man turned over his shoulder. “Get Briggs.”

The other officer walked through my front door and disappeared into my living room. My living room. Without my permission.

“Tell me what happened.” My fists were little balls at my side.

Chaz put his hand on the center of my back and the adrenaline and fear pooled in my chest dissipated for a moment.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

The officer nodded. “We got a call from a fellow officer about a break-in.”

“Break-in?” An immediate inventory of everything worth anything ran through my head. My computer, my laptop, my binders full of research material, my French press, my violet box.

The man who exited my front door looked familiar as he walked across my front yard. “Miss Jordan. I’m Officer Briggs.”

His face finally clicked when I saw the tennis shoe in his hand. “You’re the one from the hit and run.”

The man smiled a soft sympathetic smile. “I’m afraid I have some disturbing news.”

“Apparently my house was broken into.”

He nodded and handed me my shoe, which I immediately began to twist mercilessly with anxiety.

“I stopped by to return your sneaker from that day. I’d thrown it in the back of my squad car and I kept meaning to return it, but you know how life goes.” He motioned that we should follow him to the threshold. “I rang the doorbell and heard a crash in the back. When no one answered, I tried the handle and it was open.”

“We’ve taken pictures and we think we know what happened. But we need to ask you a few questions. I have to warn you. It looks pretty bad.”

I gulped and my knees went a little weak. I leaned back into Chaz whose solid form braced mine for a moment.

With a deep breath, we followed Officer Briggs into my living room. I slipped a little in the tiled foyer. Chaz caught my elbow.

When I looked down, cotton stuffing covered the floor. The pool of white wisps drew my eyes into the living room to my gutted couch. Pillows lay disemboweled all over the floor. Picture frames were smashed. A canvas painting above the couch was shredded on the wall. Books were ripped in two.

I stepped into the middle of the storm and took in a deep breath. The oxygen-filled lungful was supposed to keep me from breaking down into a puddley mess but I was met with the pungent odor of wet dog. It stung my nose and I winced.

“Sonovabitch,” I heard Chaz whisper behind me.

I nodded as my jaw clenched. Those damn dogs. They were dead. The next time they came within five feet of me, they were toast and I was in for a mutt-shaped rug in front of my fireplace.

The wisps of cotton began to stir around my feet.

“Calm down there, kitten,” Chaz whispered.

I hadn’t even noticed my borders were out of place, let alone flailing out in all directions. As I tried to reel it in, putting up the brick walls in my head, I swore I could still feel the energy of the dogs bouncing around the room, shaking their vicious little heads as they ripped apart my decorative pillows.

I put my sleeve to my nose and took in a long deep calming breath only to find that my sleeve smelled like Chaz’s new car. It didn’t suck.

“When were you home last?” Officer Briggs asked as he drew a notebook out of his front pocket.

“This morning,” I answered as I moved slowly though the first floor.

“What time did you leave?”

“Noon.” The toppled over clock on my wet bar had stopped at 4:15. When we were with Cristina.

The surface of the coffee table had been busted out; sparkly glass covered the destruction of the couch. It was like sparkling snow. I hate snow.

“Did you lock the doors?”

“Yes. I remember flipping the lock before we left.”

“We?”

I hitched my thumb over at Chaz who was standing still in the middle of the living room, watching me work my way through the wreckage.

“And you are?”

“Charles Garrett.”

“And what is your relationship to Miss Jordan?”

My eyes snapped to Chaz’s golden ones.
This should be an interesting answer
. He was looking straight at me when he answered. “I’m a close friend.”

There was a little shiver down my spine that I blamed on the slimy feeling now permeating the place. The Violet warmth was gone, replaced by something cold and exotic. It drove me deeper into the wreckage of my first floor.

I stopped before the turtle table. The few remaining survivors from the disaster with Jessa had been ground into bits of porcelain and stone and left in perfect little piles of dust. That was just cruel.

“Does anyone else have keys to your house?”

“Yeah, my friend Jessa, but I saw her today.”

“Did you give anyone permission to be here? Workmen? Electrician?”

“No.”

I turned to walk into the kitchen when I saw something that was almost more disturbing than the blizzard that I called my living room.

There was a crystal vase, something dug out of the back of my kitchen, filled with two dozen lavender roses. The bouquet stood as tall as I did and the scent of the fresh flowers almost overpowered the fragrance of wet fur.

“Chaz,” I whispered.

He was at my side in an instant.

“Please God tell me those aren’t from him,” I whispered. The pit of my stomach began to tremble and I reached out to grasp the top of my dining room chair. The only one that hadn’t been turned into match sticks littering the floor.

Chaz leaned in. He shook his head stealthily.

There was another officer taking pictures of the shattered back glass door. The glass reflected the flash of his camera everywhere around us like a disco ball.

I released the top of the chair only to find my hands covered in black powder.

“Fingerprint powder. The tech came through here a few minutes before you arrived. We might need your prints.”

I nodded as I wiped the black powder on my jeans, which in turn now had black streaks across the thighs.

“And you, Mr. Garrett?”

“They’re on file.”

“Oh, that’s a story you can distract me with later,” I muttered as I turned towards the kitchen.

Not that I had much food at any given moment anyway, and practically nothing after being gone for a week. But what I had was spilled across the kitchen floor. Cereal boxes had been ripped in half. Coffee beans were thrown around like sprinkles on top of the floured floor.

I put my face in my hands. That was a twenty dollar a pound Hawaiian blend. Those dogs were not just going to die but going to die a painful horrible death.

Chaz put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed.

Officer Briggs’s voice broke my moment of canine contemplation. “If you’re up to it, I’d like you to look around to see if anything was taken.”

I ran my fingers through my hair and nodded. Chaz followed me back through the first floor. The TV was still there, the DVD player, the DVDs, even the rentals from Blockbuster that I’d forgotten to return before I left to LA.

“Violet,” Chaz whispered.

I followed his pointing finger to the mantle. The very empty mantle.

“Oh god. Seriously?”

The absence of the silver frame with the picture of my mother felt like a knife wound. I held my stomach in place as it turned over on itself.

“Miss Jordan?” the officer walked up beside me.

“A picture of my mother and me in a silver frame.”

“Is it of any worth?” he asked as he scribbled notes.

“It’s an heirloom from my mother’s side.”

The officer nodded as he scratched down notes. “Would you like to go upstairs?”

Chaz and I slowly walked upstairs. I was imagining the same fate for my bed as the couch had suffered. The doorframe was covered in the same black powder from down stairs so I nudged the door open with my foot.

The bedroom hadn’t been touched. The bed was still half made. The vanity, which was usually disorganized anyway, hadn’t been re-disorganized. My small closet door was still standing half open just as I’d left it. Nothing had been touched.

There was a smell there, though. Glad that the officers weren’t around, I sniffed at the air. It was something sharp, like exotic flowers. There wasn’t any wet dog here at all. A single stemmed purple rose rested gently on my pillow. Another shiver ran down my spine.

The bastard had been in my bedroom.

Chaz gasped when I dropped to my knees by the edge of the bed. I reached under the edge and scooted the violet box towards me.

Kneeling, I opened the box and counted all the items inside. I took in a deep breath and felt a small bit better. At least they didn’t touch this. I got to my feet and clutched the box to my chest as I walked to my office. I was going to burn those sheets.

I think I wrote a poltergeist scene once, set in a library. It was an angry little girl who was trying to kill the little girl in the house so she would have a playmate. She had levitated all the books off the shelves and then dropped them all to the floor.

Someone did this to my office. Books lay on the ground ankle deep. The computer monitor was on the floor, but the tower was still there. My lap top bag was upside down, but my lap top was sitting on the chair. The software binders were still there, the phone, the fax machine had been knocked off but was still there and there was another strong odor of dog.

“Is that urine?”

Chaz nodded as he nudged a few of the books over with his boot.

“But nothing’s gone,” I said still looking around.

“Don’t think they were after your stuff, Violet,” Chaz said as he lead us downstairs.

I kept the box tightly to my chest. Officer Briggs came to stand with us at the base of the stairs. “What’s missing?” he asked, his note pad ready.

“Nothing. Nothing except that picture.”

A deep crease formed between the man’s brows. “Nothing?”

“Computer’s still there, laptop, everything’s here, just upside down.”

Briggs closed his note pad. “Can you think of anyone who might want to do this to you?”

I looked at Chaz who shook his head. “No,” I said. “I’m no one. I’m a writer for a Dallas blog.”

“Professional enemies?”

I dropped my chin in disbelief. “I’m a writer. We don’t interact with people. We don’t like you, a character dies a horrible death. Most of us rarely leave the house.”

“What about you, Mr. Garrett? Do you have enemies?”

Chaz shook his head. “None that I can think of, sir.” Note to self, not only is Chaz good looking enough to be on TV, he’s got the acting chops to back it up.

Office Briggs sighed and scratched underneath his hat behind his ear. I remembered him doing that after the hit and run. Those hats must be uncomfortable.

“It does sound personal, Miss Jordan. Very rarely do people just break in to ransack the place. Unless this is some sort of gang prank. But I doubt it. There’s been nothing like this in the neighborhood.”

“What do I do?”

Officer Briggs nodded as the other men packed up and gestured that they were going to be outside. “If you’ve got someplace to stay, I suggest you go there. Maybe stay with Mr. Garrett or that friend of yours?”

I nodded. “Thank you, Officer Briggs.”

“You’re welcome, Miss Jordan. I’ll be in touch with any information that might come off the prints or if anything new arises.”

I stood there quietly as the men paraded out of my house. I counted to ten after the door closed, box clutched tightly to my chest, before the tirade began.

“What the hell?” I screamed. “This is my house. The bastards broke into my house.”

I wanted to pick up the vase of roses and throw them across my already destroyed house. Instead I put my box down on the table next to it and searched for a card.

“No card,” Chaz said calmly. “But I think the message is clear.”

“What?” I snapped.
“I’m a crazy lunatic
.
”

“More like he knows where you live and he can do whatever he wants.”

Volcanic didn’t quite describe my anger. It sizzled down my back as I leaned forward and gripped the edge of my table. I completely understood the phrase of seeing red as my nails dug into the wooden edge.