Cats on the Prowl (A Cat Detective cozy mystery series Book 1) (6 page)

Willow ran to catch up with her. “If
you know something about this case, I sure wish you’d tell me. We can use all
the help we can get to find out who killed Roy.”

Bella sprang down to the ground and,
for the first time, she stood perfectly still in front of Willow. “Josephine
and Jason were in the alley. I saw them when I came out of the dumpster after
breakfast. But Jason didn’t stick around. He left….I'd say about eight o'clock.
You can ask Chester. He saw them, too.”

Willow looked around. “Where are they?”

Bella trotted forward. “Don’t worry.
They went to investigate the fire.”

“Where is that?” Willow asked.

“Right here.” Bella turned a corner and
disappeared.

Willow ran after her and rounded the
corner, but she froze in her tracks at what she saw. A big square of space
between the buildings yawned wide and empty in the moonlight. Black charred
remains of beams and sheetrock lay scattered over the ground, and piles of
charcoal gleamed in the darkness. A few spikes of steel roof beams stuck up out
of the ruins, but most of the concrete slab lay bare and blank before them.

Out of the darkness, a cat’s sneeze
brought Willow’s attention to the far corner of the site. She shot forward and
found Nat and Chester rummaging in a pile of broken glass and melted metal.

“Nat, Nat!” Willow panted. “Guess what?
Chester and Bella live in that dumpster behind the Nickel Alley Cafe. Bella
says Josephine and Jason really were in the alley when the fire started. That
means Jason’s alibi is solid.”

Nat pulled his head out from under a
charred two-by-four. “I’m glad to hear you’re keeping your wits about you, Willow,
but I already discussed the situation with Chester. He saw Josephine and Jason
in the alley this morning, too.”

“It looks like Naya was right,” Nat
replied. “If Jason’s alibi is solid, then he's innocent and someone framed him
for this murder. Too many of the other suspects have a motive to undermine him
and pin Roy’s death on him.”

“How can you be certain Naya believes
that?” Willow asked. “I understood from Carl’s remarks that she only told Jason
she thought he was innocent.”

Nat sneezed again and bent over the burned
remains of the bakery. “I don’t think so. She might not have completely ruled
him out, but he didn’t kill Roy. He had no motive, and now we’ve got
corroboration of his alibi. Meanwhile, we have three other people with motives
to frame him.”

“Three?” Willow asked. “I can only
think of two— Josephine and Annika Neilsson.”

“There’s Marlena,” Nat replied.

“What motive could she possibly have to
frame Jason?” Willow asked. “She didn’t even know him.”

“If she had a reason to kill Roy,” Nat
replied, “she would want someone to frame, wouldn’t she?”

“She had no reason to kill Roy,” Willow
argued.

“None that we know of,” Nat corrected
her. “Maybe she didn’t care who knew they were messing around with each other,
but she could have had another reason. We’ll find that out tomorrow when Carl
and Naya go to interview her.”

Nat and Chester stuck their noses
farther into the piles of charcoal and wooden fragments. Chester came out more
soiled and grimy than when he went in. Willow barely recognized him. He didn’t
even look like a cat anymore. He reminded her of some kind of reptile she saw
on
Animal Planet
. “What are you looking for?”

Nat sat back and brushed the soot off
his whiskers. “I had occasion to go into the Morningside Bakery once. This is
the corner where the ovens were hooked up to the gas lines. This would be the
corner where the crime lab found the accelerant that started the fire.”

“How did you manage to get inside the
bakery?” Willow asked.

Nat shrugged and turned away. “Roy left
the back door open on hot summer afternoons. The smell was irresistible. I went
in and stole one of the fresh chocolate chip cookies. I ran off with it while
Roy was on the phone. He never even knew I was there.”

Chester chuckled to himself. “That’s
just like you, Nat. You’re a terror.”

Willow shook her head in wonder. “I
wish I had the guts to do something like that.”

Nat started cleaning his face.
“Everybody’s got to start somewhere. You were a housecat until you came to the
police station. I was born wild, so these things come naturally to me. You’ll
get the hang of it, but you have to start practicing your craft.”

Willow nodded. “I’m beginning to
understand that.”

Bella touched a charred piece of metal
with her paw. “So what did you find? Did you detect any accelerant among the
remains of the bakery equipment?”

“As I told you,” Nat replied, “a cat’s
nose is several hundred times more sensitive than any detection method the
crime lab uses. There are traces of several chemicals in this corner. One of
them is paint stripper, and another is toluene with a trace of hydrocarbon
propellent. That kind of product comes in a spray can. Roy would have used to
clean the chrome on his BMW motorcycle.”

“Then Josephine was right,” Willow
remarked. “Roy kept chemicals in the bakery, and that’s what set off the fire.”

“Not so fast,” Chester added. “We also
detected a variety of jet fuel with an admixture of stabilizer to keep it in a
liquid state. The only place you find that particular combination of fuels is
in certain proprietary blends of camping stove cartridges.”

Willow blinked. She didn’t understand
half the big words the tom cats used. “Camping stoves? How did that wind up in
the bakery?”

Chester sneezed again, but he made no
effort to wash the black grime off his face and body. He must have enjoyed
making a startling impression. “That’s precisely the point, my dear. It
wouldn’t have wound up in the bakery unless someone put it there. Roy never
went camping in his life, and neither did Josephine.”

“Someone started that fire by planting
camping fuel in the bakery,” Nat added. “The question is, who had an interest
in camping?”

“Jason,” Chester replied.

Nat’s head shot up, and Willow whirled
around to face him. “He did?”

Chester snorted. “You police cats don’t
have your ears to the ground like we do. You need an alley cat to tell you
these things. Jason went camping almost every weekend. He would have had those
cartridges.”

“Tell the whole story, Chester,” Bella
chided. “Jason wasn’t the only one who went camping. He took his girlfriend
Annika with him when he went. She had access to those fuel cartridges, too.”

“That’s another reason to believe she
had something to do with the murder,” Nat remarked. “She could have started the
fire to cast the blame back on Jason.”

Willow shook her head. “Wait a minute. Bella
says Jason left the alley about eight o'clock. What if he went back to the
bakery and started the fire? He could be the one trying to frame Annika.”

Nat licked his now-clean lips. “When
you’ve been in this business as long as I have, you develop a sense of who’s
innocent and who isn’t. I have a feeling about Jason Dempsey, and he didn’t
kill Roy.”

“Not so fast, my friend,” Chester
grumbled. “You may be resident police cat around here, but stand aside for the
superior skills of the alley cat. Over here, you’ll find the trace of another
chemical I believe sheds a new light on this case.”

The other cats ran to the spot, and
Chester flipped over a shard of twisted metal with his paw. “What is it?”

“It looks like a soda can,” Willow
remarked.

“It’s the last fragment of the fuel
cartridge,” Chester told them. “It must have exploded when the fire hit it. You
can smell the fuel on it.”

“But that doesn’t tell us anything,”
Nat pointed out. “We already know the killer started the fire with a fuel
cartridge.”

“But there’s another smell on the
cartridge, too,” Chester replied. “Come have a whiff.”

Willow put her nose against the metal
and took a deep sniff. “It smells like alcohol.”

“That smell, my dear little house cat,”
Chester intoned, “is what human beings call perfume. It’s a chemical they use
to make themselves smell a certain way. It’s like spray, but it’s artificial.
It’s designed to disguise how they really smell.”

Willow frowned. “But what’s the point
of that? Their natural smells send signals back and forth so they can find
suitable mates. Why would they want to disguise that?”

“My point exactly,” Chester growled.
“They use these smells to make each other think they’re more suitable than they
really are. Sometimes the strategy works, but more often than not, it fails.
Humans are much more attracted to their mates’ natural smells than even they
realize or would be willing to admit.”

“What my esteemed colleague of the
alley hasn’t told you, though,” Nat countered, “is that perfume is most often
used by women, which would confirm my theory that Annika planted the camping
fuel to frame Jason.”

“What my esteemed colleague of the
police department doesn’t realize,” Chester shot back, “is that this is a
special kind of perfume known in the human world as cologne. It is used by
men.”

Willow and Bella looked back and forth
between the two cats.

“Roy could have been wearing that
cologne,” Nat argued.

Chester drew himself up. “Are you
telling me Roy Avino handled the fuel cartridge that took his life?”

“If Josephine is right,” Willow added,
“he could have left the cartridge here and left his cologne on it.”

“But,” Chester pointed out, “we already
determined that Roy didn’t go camping. I can also personally testify that he
never wore cologne. He was a sloven, and you can take my word that the term is
a very generous one.”

Bella tittered. “Look who’s talking.”

Chester ignored her. “Jason, on the
other hand, always went about the town drenched in cologne of this variety. He
fancied himself some kind of dandy. I can only imagine his fling with his
boss’s wife colored his imagination.”

“That still doesn’t rule out the
possibility that Annika planted the cartridge to frame Jason,” Nat pointed out.
“She could have selected a cartridge that had Jason’s cologne on it, or she
could have put his cologne on it herself to make it look like he put the
cartridge in the bakery.”

Willow blinked. “This Annika would have
to be pretty devious to plan something like that. I wonder what she’s like.”

“You won’t have to wonder,” Nat told
her. “We’re going to visit her tomorrow, right after we interview Marlena
Rappaport.”

“We?” Willow asked. “We interview
Marlena?”

Nat shrugged and turned away. “You know
what I mean.”

Chester waved his paw the other way.
“One more thing. Over here, we have another distinct chemical smell.”

“What is it?” Willow asked.

“It belongs to a certain class of
explosives known as blasting caps,” Chester told her. “I would say the killer
planted them close to the fuel cartridge to set it off. I haven’t seen the
cartridge in its whole state, so maybe it had a safety device that prevented it
from igniting on its own. The killer needed something to ignite it.”

Nat spun around. “But who would have
access to that?”

Chester poked the debris with his nose.
“These blasting caps are military grade. They contain traces of ignition fuels
found only in the military. Whoever used them had a military background.”

“That should help us narrow down the
list of suspects,” Willow remarked. “Which of them had a military background,
Nat?”

Chester turned to Nat. “Yes, Nat.
Please tell us which of the suspects had a military background.”

Nat kept walking. “Let’s go, Willow.
We're done here for tonight.”

Chester chuckled, and he and the other
cats followed Nat to the edge of the crime scene. They walked under the yellow
police cordon tape warning everybody to stay out. The cats stopped, and Willow
looked back. “We didn’t find the clues to solve the case.”

“The important thing is to collect all
the pieces of the puzzle,” Nat told her. “Only after you have them all do you
start fitting them together to make a complete picture of what happened.”

Willow turned to Bella. “What will you
two do for the rest of the night?”

“I’m meeting friends near the movie
theater,” Bella replied. “I’m not sure, but I think Chester is meeting the
other toms for choir practice on the roof of the apartment building at the end
of the alley. They have twenty toms who get together to test their voices
against each other.”

Willow giggled. “I’ll bet the people in
the apartment building love that.”

“They do,” Bella told her. “They always
come to their windows to listen, and they even shout encouragement. Some even
throw presents.”

“I wish we didn’t have to go so soon,” Willow
exclaimed. “We only just met, and I have so many things I want to ask you
about.”