I lowered. “Are you saying I’m
not
?”
“Each pet owner must decide if treatment is affordable,” Joralemon said. “Otherwise we can find an alternative option.”
“What option? What are you talking about?”
He produced another sigh of exasperation. “If one finds veterinary health care exceeds one’s budgetary limits, one must have the courage to admit it. Our receptionist can recommend a list of shelters that can place the animal with another owner. If no medical reason is found for euthanization , yes?”
I held Skiball protectively in my hands, my jaw almost dropping. Had Gail Pilsner been the only sane, compassionate, unrepulsive vet in the world?
“You’re a lunatic,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“Completely out of your mind.” I gripped Ski more tightly as she hunkered on the table, my fingers pressing into her sides. “A bonkers ghoul,
yes
?”
“Sky,” Vega said. “Maybe we should just leave—”
“And what? Keep hopping from one veterinary office to another?” I said. “This is becoming a nightmare, Alex. I can’t go on with it. And neither can Ski. I have to find out if anything’s wrong with her without Dr. Death here putting her in intensive care before she even gets a simple checkup.”
He thought a moment. “Hang on to her. I’ll go out and talk to the receptionist. Maybe we can see one of the certified vets right here at this clinic—”
Skiball suddenly hiccuped. It had a wheezy kind of sound that made me apprehensive at once.
“Hey, Ski, you okay?” I said. Another hiccup. “Ski?”
She retched. Did it again. Then did it even more violently a third time.
I realized how hard I’d been squeezing her since we’d entered the room, and abruptly eased up on my grip, hoping I hadn’t brought about whatever was going on with her. But it didn’t stop the spasms. She was gagging now, her mouth wide open.
“Ski!”
I stared at her with huge, panicky eyes, on the verge of screaming at the top of my lungs.
That was when she when she coughed the hair ball up onto the examining table. A black, yucky, and supremely enormous hair ball about the shape and thickness of my middle finger.
A moment later she settled down, licked her paw, and started grooming herself.
I snapped a look at Vega.
“Well,” I said, smiling. “Looks like our problem’s solved.”
“Yeah.” He grinned. “It does.”
I scooped Skiball off the table and she cuddled against my shoulder, purring, scissoring my neck between her front paws. Across the table, Joralemon poked her gross special delivery with a pair of tweezers and lifted it up to his eyes for inspection. Then he pulled a tissue from a box on a stand, folded it around the hair ball, stepped on the pedal of his wastebasket, and disposed of it.
“We may wish to forgo observation and send the animal home,” he said to me. “The receptionist will bill you for this consultation, yes?”
I was thinking of some choice words for him when Vega’s cell phone bleeped. He reached into his leather coat, flipped it open, listened intently.
“Where?” he said into the phone then. His face had grown taut. “You know who found . . . ? Okay, listen, have the men wait right there.”
“What’s wrong?” I said, staring at him. “Alex . . . ?”
He took hold of my elbow and led me aside.
“We have to head back to the Cove,” he said in an urgent whisper. “There’s been another forced entry.” His eyes were on mine. “It’s just like the last one, Sky.”
It took a moment before the meaning of that last sentence hit me.
“Oh my God,” I said. “Where?”
“Abbott Lane,” Vega said. “A woman named Natalie Oswald was found dead in her home.”
Chapter 16
As I braked at the police barrier closing off Abbott Lane, I saw Officer Connors in front of it, his patrol car nearby in the middle of the road. His baby-faced partner, Jerred, stood leaning against the parked cruiser with his arms crossed.
I lowered my window. There was an EMS vehicle pulled into Natalie Oswald’s driveway up the street, its rear panel doors wide open. Hibbard and Hornby were loading a gurney through the doors, an outline of a human body bulging the white sheet on top of it.
Connors approached the Versa, gave me a brief, curious glance through the window, and then looked over at the passenger side.
“That you, Chief?” he said, a hand over his eyes like a visor. “Sun’s so bright this morning I can hardly see.”
Vega leaned across my seat. “The coroner here yet?”
“And gone,” Connors said. “Maji sent his new assistant again. Liz Delman. She likes to be in and out, not that this one was too complicated.”
“What are you hearing?”
Connors nodded slightly at me in the guarded way police do when talking around civilians.
“Go ahead,” Vega said. “It’s all right.”
“The Oswald woman was shot,” Connors said. “Twice in the chest.”
I felt my heart thumping and tried to look relatively composed.
“Better let us through,” Vega said.
The cops moved aside the wooden barricade and I drove slowly up the lane. Two more cruisers were parked on the street, one behind the other. Several town policemen stood outside the saltbox handling a knot of stunned-looking neighbors. A couple of older women were in their house robes and slippers.
I eased to the curb behind the patrol cars. “Okay if I stop here?” I asked Vega.
“Yes, thanks.” He glanced over at me, Skiball’s cat carrier on his lap. “You all right?”
I nodded, wondering if I should have mentioned I’d been to that same street—and the very house where the crime occurred—just the day before. But that would have meant telling him what had brought me there, and I wasn’t doing it unless I thought it could possibly help with something. Which I didn’t. Although it was a definite goose bump inducer . . . and not the only one.
“Has it struck you that things end more or less the same way every time we get together?” I asked.
“I noticed,” Vega said. “We’ll have to change that.”
“Hope it’s soon.”
“I promise it will be.” He paused. “You don’t have to wait, Sky. I’ll give you a call later on.”
“I’d rather not leave.”
“I have no idea how long it’ll take,” he said, looking at me. “Whenever I’m through here, I’ll need to head over to the station. File a report, oversee the processing of evidence . . .”
“I can drive you. It’s on my way back to the Fog Bell anyway.”
Vega looked at me some more. “This isn’t a pleasant place to be. I wouldn’t figure you’d want to stick around.”
I simultaneously shrugged and shook my head. “I knew Natalie,” I said. “Guess I’m a little shaky for driving right now.”
Which was true as far as it went. It just wasn’t the whole truth. I also wanted to quiet any thoughts—unfounded, no doubt—that the coincidence of Chloe and her male friend having been at Nat’s house yesterday wasn’t altogether coincidental.
“Okay, I’ll be back,” Vega said. He passed me the cat carrier. “Better keep an eye on the little pest.”
I gave a wan smile as Vega reached for his door handle, then watched him walk toward the saltbox and stop briefly to speak with the EMTs in the driveway before he entered. After that, I sat tight for a few minutes, puzzling over what could have happened to Nat. But I wasn’t about to learn anything sitting in the Versa, and after a while got tired of it.
Finally I got out and went up the street, bringing Ski along in her carrier. I didn’t intend to ignore Vega and go too near the house with her. At the same time, I saw no reason to wait where I’d been. Maybe the bystanders gathered on the street out front could tell me something.
“Well, look who’s here.”
“Funny we no sooner see the police chief than she appears like magic.”
“Yeah, how about that?”
I stopped on the sidewalk and turned toward the emergency techs’ voices, thinking I’d been upset enough without having to deal with their deliberately loud, butter-knife-sharp repartee.
“Tell me you two have nothing to do besides bug me at a horrible time like this,” I said.
“Tell
us
how it is you show up right when we’re on another morgue run,” Hornby said.
“Poof,” Hibbard said. “Every time. Like magic, I’m serious.”
“Only goes to show.”
I stared at them. They’d slammed shut their vehicle’s rear doors and were looking back at me from the foot of the driveway.
“Show what?” I said.
“We’ll give you a hint,” Hibbard said. “Four for four.”
“That’s if you start counting with the Monahan murder.”
“If you start with Monahan, right. Otherwise, fair play, we’ll call it three for three.”
“Not that anybody’s calling you a jinx. Which was
your
unscientific expression, you may remember.”
I took a couple of steps forward, shaking my head in disgust and disbelief. I knew all about men and women in their profession keeping an emotional remove. But were they really that un-flustered after having wheeled a dead woman into their wagon?
“See you,” Hibbard said. “We were just leaving for the morgue anyway.”
“Not that she couldn’t have thought to say good-bye to us.”
“Not that she couldn’t have,” Hibbard said. “Or hi for that matter.”
Hornby harrumphed. “Bet she thinks to say hi
and
good-bye to Chief Kissy-poo.”
I froze again.
“What?”
“What ‘what’?” Hornby winked at his partner. “We just explained ‘what’ about something else.”
“How many
‘whats’
you want us to spell out for you?” Hibbard returned Hornby’s wink. “We won’t mention this last one concerns a private conversation you were listening in on.”
I glared at the techs, ready to shower them with the very same blue spew Joralemon the veterinary intern had managed to escape earlier that morning—and I mean language I hadn’t used since my days of dodging kamikaze New York cabbies. Before a syllable of that undiluted foulness left my mouth, though, Skiball produced a loud and very prolonged
reeehiiiieeeii
from inside the carrier.
Hibbard suddenly dropped his gaze onto it, trying to peer through the front mesh. “Speaking of ‘whats,’ ” he said, “what’s in there?”
“It isn’t that wallaby again, is it?” Hornby said.
“I read in the paper it was a chimp or something, after all,” Hibbard said. “Not that it makes us less curious about why you lug it around everywhere. And how you get away with bringing it along to possibly contaminate a forensic collection area, though we do have our suspicions.”
“Kissy, kissy, poo,” Hornby said, trading another wink with his partner just as Skiball made some more noise. This time it sounded kind of like
wow-wow-wee,
a good sign she was back to her usual self.
“Look,” I said. “Is there any special reason you two enjoy harassing me?”
“What do you mean ’harass’?” Hornby said.
“There’s no reason we’d want to harass you,” Hibbard said.
“Or anybody else for that matter,” Hornby said.
“In fact, we’re being conscientious,” Hibbard said. “Trying to warn you that whatever kind of living creature happens to be in there—”
“It actually sounds like an exotic feline, now that I think of it . . .,” Hornby said.
“Marsupial, simian, feline,
whatever
, doesn’t make a difference,” Hibbard resumed, frowning at his partner’s interruption. “My point is that it’s bound to cause a mix-up. When you consider there’s already rumored to be canine involvement in the shooting.”
I looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“A dog, for example.”
“Possibly a dog.”
“You can’t exclude other types of canines.”
“Though, the incident having taken place in someone’s home, you’d assume a dog would be high on the list of candidates.”
“Being they’re the most common domestic canines,” Hibbard said. “Not that you heard any of this from us.”
I sighed. “Okay, thanks for nothing. I should have figured you two were playing games.”
Their mouths turned down in nearly identical frowns.
“Now we’re insulted,” Hibbard said.
“And wounded,” Hornby said.
“Besides being disappointed, since we were giving you an honest tip,” Hibbard said.
I hesitated. Call me a sucker for punishment, but their pained expressions seemed genuine.
“Listen, no offense, but I know the definition of canine,” I said, deciding to rephrase my question. “What I asked was how a dog was involved in Natalie Oswald getting shot to death.”
The techs looked at each other a moment. Then Hibbard made a lip-zipping gesture and turned back to me.
“Sorry,” he said. “We don’t want to get in trouble.”
“I lose my job on account I talked out of school, the wife won’t want to hear any excuses.”
“My fiancée neither,” Hibbard said, nodding. “Believe me on that.”
“If it’s got fur, leave it behind, is the rule of thumb,” Hornby said. “Take that advice and leave it right there. So you don’t blow any homicide investigations when those sleazy defense lawyers come flocking around to pick apart the evidence. Or do I have to say the name Barry Scheck more than once?”
I scratched behind my ear. I wasn’t sure whether running into those two had left me more confused or aggravated—and frankly didn’t care.
“See you another time,” I said, and walked on.
I reached the group of bystanders, stopping at its periphery to seek out any familiar faces. After a quick scan I got lucky. Kimi Fosette from the tourist center was talking to one of the bathrobed older ladies. Or having to listen to her blab her ear off, from the looks of it. When we made eye contact, Kimi’s glance practically implored me to rescue her.
I waved and called her name over the buzz of the crowd.