“Tell her about the thing!” Dooley said.
“I am telling her!” said Max. “Though I probably better show you,” he added.
“Show me? Show me what?”
Max hesitated. “Are you up for a little drive?”
When finally Odelia found herself looking down the trash can Max had singled out for her attention, she had to admit he’d outdone himself this time.
“Amazing,” she said. “Are you sure about this?”
“Pretty much,” said Max. “It was the fake hamburger, you see.”
She didn’t, but she nodded anyway. Then she took out her phone. “I better wake up my uncle. He’s going to want to check this out.”
“What about Chase?” asked Max.
“There’s no way I can tell Chase that my cats found the key piece of evidence in Chris Ackerman’s murder investigation,” she said.
“So what are you going to tell him?”
She smiled. “I’ll think of something. Uncle Alec! Sorry to wake you. You’re not going to believe this…”
As it was, Uncle Alec did believe it. Long association with Odelia and her cats had taught him that nothing was impossible when it came to their powers of observation and keen deduction. He arrived five minutes later, looking as if he’d just rolled out of bed, which probably he had, his shirt untucked and the few remaining hairs on his head standing up.
“Where is it?” he asked, and when Odelia gestured to the trash can, he took out an evidence baggie and stared down at the piece of evidence Max had unearthed—or Clarice. The story was still a little fuzzy to Odelia.
“I think you’re going to need a bigger bag,” she said.
“I think you’re right,” he said. “Your cats found this?”
“My cats found this.”
“Huh. I guess I won’t be putting that in my report.”
“Not if you don’t want to freak out my new live-in boyfriend you won’t.”
Alec grinned. “I knew he’d pull it off.”
“He told you about the Ed Sheeran thing?”
“Are you kidding? He practiced on me first. The kid’s got crazy singing skills.”
Odelia decided not to dissuade her uncle from this conviction.
Chase had a lot of skills, but singing wasn’t one of them.
“So what happens now?” she asked.
“Now we send this off to the lab and see what comes back.”
“You better check all the CCTV cameras in the area.”
“Oh, I’m going to—don’t you worry about that.”
He took out a bigger baggie, a pair of tweezers, and plucked out the item, then deposited it into the baggie with a look of satisfaction on his face. “Nailed it,” he grunted.
“Not yet. We still have to identify—”
“Trust me, I will. You go on home. You’ve done enough.”
“But—”
“Go home, Odelia. Give your boyfriend a wake-up kiss. I’ll handle the rest.”
And he stalked off, an officious swagger to his hips, got into his car and drove off.
“That’s it?” asked Max.
“That’s it,” said Odelia.
“But… who did it?”
“I think I have a pretty good idea. And I’m going to prove it.”
Of course she could have let her uncle take care of things, as he’d indicated, but where was the fun in that? Besides, this was her investigation, and she was going to see it through to the end—whatever her uncle said.
Chapter 41
Chase woke up in an empty bed, his hand touching the spot where Odelia had been when he went to sleep. The spot was cold. He rubbed his eyes and groaned. He vaguely remembered some middle-of-the-night cat emergency, and Odelia slipping out of bed to feed them milk. So had she stayed up and gone straight to work? Or was she downstairs, still officiating the cat’s convention? To be completely honest, he wasn’t all that big on cats. Not that he was a cat hater, per se, but he’d never understood the extreme lengths cat lovers would go to to appease their furballs.
When he felt movement near his feet, he glanced down and saw that those furballs were fast asleep at the foot of the bed: four cats lying in a row. He had to admit, when they were sleeping like this they looked peaceful enough. Cute, even.
“So where’s your master, huh, cats?” he asked.
Max opened his eyes and he could have sworn the big red cat not only understood the question he’d posed him but was actually answering in lazy tones! Huh. Weird.
He got out of bed and sauntered to the staircase. “Odelia?” he yelled from the top of the stairs. “Are you down there?”
When Max suddenly appeared next to him and meowed some more, he started.
“What are you trying to tell me, buddy?” he said, then laughed at his own silliness. Cats were dumb creatures. Mousers, by and large, with some minor capacity for entertainment. He picked Max up and carried him down the stairs. “Are you hungry?” he asked, setting him down in the kitchen. A row of bowls sat on the floor, five in a row, and all of them featured names and were filled to capacity. So Max was definitely not hungry.
The little guy kept meowing up a storm, though, and since Chase had no way of determining what the heck he was trying to tell him, he merely grinned and decided to take a shower and start his day. Arriving upstairs, he saw that Chief Alec had left him a voice message. As he listened, his eyebrows rose. “What the…” he muttered.
There had been a breakthrough in the case, and he’d slept right through it!
“Christ,” he said.
This seemed to attract Dooley’s attention, who looked at him almost reverently.
“Hey, buddy,” he said. “Max is downstairs, Odelia is nowhere to be found, and I gotta run. Think you’ll be able to take care of yourself?” Then he laughed. “You big dummy! Now you’re talking to cats!”
He walked into the bathroom. Time for a quick shower and then he was off. He actually felt pretty excited about moving in. Time to put this relationship with Odelia on a more permanent footing. Soon he was enjoying the cascade of water and loudly singing the only song he’d ever memorized in his life. Ed Sheeran’s Perfect.
I was truly worried about Odelia. She’d given us the slip and now she was out there somewhere, chasing the bad guys with no backup from her legion of felines. I just hoped she would be careful. Odelia has a tendency to go all gung-ho without considering the consequences. When she’s on the hunt she sometimes forgets that the people she’s hunting are dangerous killers and creeps and would just as happily turn on her if it suited them.
And I’d just settled down in front of my bowl and gulped down a few tasty morsels when a loud panting sound reached my ears. Fully expecting Brutus, I didn’t even look up. But when the panting sound was replaced with stertorous breathing, I said, “Try to breathe through the nose, Brutus, not the mouth.” I hate mouth-breathing cats, don’t you?
“Huh?” said Brutus, only when I didn’t recognize his gruff voice I finally looked up and discovered it wasn’t Brutus but Big Mac breathing down my neck!
“Big Mac! What are you doing here?”
Probably all the pizza we’d fed him had led to him coming back for more.
“It’s your human!” said Big Mac. “I think she might be in big trouble.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I was downtown just now, staking out the Hampton Cove Star hotel, when suddenly I saw your human head inside. So I went in after her, and followed her all the way upstairs. She went into a room and never came out. Also, when I put my ear against the door, I heard people arguing and I heard your human yelling. And then she went quiet. Too quiet!”