Never Steal a Cockatiel (Leigh Koslow Mystery Series Book 9) (28 page)

Leigh blew out a breath. “It’s what he does. Like a wounded gazelle on the Serengeti — he can show no weakness. I’m sure he did his best to sound perfectly normal to you, then collapsed as soon as he hung up. He hasn’t said a word to me or my mother all afternoon!”

Maura reached up and scratched her head. “Well, that explains that, I guess.”

“Why didn’t the police just tell me when I got here?” Leigh questioned.

“The guy watching the lot didn’t recognize you,” Maura answered. “By the time they figured out who you probably were, the perp was at the door.”

“So they figured they’d just let me stumble into some potentially homicidal maniac?” Leigh asked, irritated.

Maura smirked again. “You weren’t in any danger. There was no indication the perp was armed, and if it looked like you were getting into any trouble, they would have intervened. But as long as you stayed out of his way, they figured they might as well see how far he’d go. They had him on breaking and entering at the door, but when he picked up the rabbit cage, that clinched it.”

The boy swore again. The police officers had been reading him his rights while Maura and Leigh talked, but he appeared to be listening more to Maura. Now his grisly face swung toward Kirsten.

“It was a setup, you idiot!” he yelled.

“Well, how was I supposed to know?” Kirsten screeched back.

Leigh looked down at the stuffed bunny she still held in her hands.

“That’s Eddie’s,” Maura said proudly. “Cute little thing, isn’t it? Very realistic.”

Leigh considered. It all made perfect sense… in retrospect. Kirsten’s appearances at the clinic might be sporadic, but when present, she did have access to all that happened therein. She had been somewhere in the back when Paige treated Lucky’s bleeding nail and she had been in the room when Olan said he would die if anyone ever stole his prized cockatoo. Even more telling, she could have seen the cockatiel cage at the clinic on Tuesday and known that Randall planned to take the bird home.

But she was just a kid!

Leigh looked at the sobbing blonde. The teen appeared mortified. But apparently she was not so cowed that she wouldn’t try one last-ditch effort to save herself, even if it meant throwing her boyfriend under the bus. As Leigh watched, Kirsten looked from one policeman to the other and then suddenly assumed a hurt expression. “You never told me you were going to
steal
the animals!” she accused, blinking at Scarface through mascara-smeared lids.

The boy’s eyes rolled.

“I didn’t know what you were doing!” Kirsten protested, her attempt to sound innocent so fake it was cringeworthy. “You never told me!”

“Yeah, right,” he spat back sarcastically. But then his thin shoulders slumped in resignation. “
Whatever,
Kirsten.”

“All right, you two,” the chief ordered. “Let’s head back up the stairs. Going to take a little ride to the station now. You can call your parents from there.”

Kirsten sniffed.

Scarface spouted another vulgarity.

The policemen marched them both up the stairs.

“Well, good job Koslow,” Maura said magnanimously, giving her a hefty clap on the shoulder.

Leigh barely remembered to brace herself. She looked up at her friend with skepticism.

“No, I mean it,” Maura said, smiling. “You could have screwed the whole thing up completely. As it was, you were only a pain in the ass.”

“Thanks,” Leigh said dryly.

Maura laughed. “No, really. You stayed quiet and stayed out of it. What more can the Avalon PD ask of a private citizen?”

Leigh continued the skeptical look. Her friend had been possessed by disturbingly good cheer ever since she realized she was going to have a healthy baby at age 43. Leigh kept expecting that the euphoria would wear off eventually, but so far it had not. “I can’t believe you’re smiling,” Leigh said cautiously, “when you know this means my name will appear on yet another police report.”

The detective shrugged. “Hey, at least I don’t have to write it. I’m not even on duty yet, remember?”

The one other officer remaining in the basement approached Leigh. “Sorry about the… er, manhandling,” he said sheepishly. “We were hoping you’d want to keep out of sight, but if you’d bumped into me in that kennel I suspect you would have been too startled to stay quiet.”

“You assumed correctly,” Leigh agreed. “No problem.”

“Can I get a quick statement from you?”

Leigh not so patiently answered the officer’s questions as Maura prowled around the remainder of the clinic. When the technicalities were concluded, the last policeman left and Leigh dropped down on the staircase, scattering wood chips in the process. “Jared will not be happy about the state of this place,” she said tiredly as Maura sank down beside her.

“Au contraire,” Maura said cheerfully. “He’s just like your mother, you know. He’ll clean it right up and then spend the rest of the day telling everyone what a mess it was.”

Leigh smirked. “You know, you’re right. He’ll be thrilled.”

“I’m always right,” the detective said smugly.

Leigh scowled at her. “You could have
told
me you suspected Kirsten.”

Maura perked an eyebrow. “Me? I never gave the girl a second thought. I barely knew she existed.”

Leigh frowned. “Then how—”

Maura made the annoying smirk again. “Okay, so I’m not
always
right. Myself. But I’m usually right, because I know who to listen to. Who’s in the right place at the right time noticing all the right sorts of things.”

Leigh considered. “Allison?”

“Incredible instincts, that girl,” Maura praised. “She had Kirsten pegged as a phony from the get-go, but she didn’t leap from that to petnapper. Not immediately. But when we were looking at people inside the clinic, Allison didn’t automatically rule her out just because she was young, pretty, and innocent-looking, either.”

Leigh groaned. She herself
had
discounted Kirsten, albeit subconsciously, for no better reason than that the girl was so close in age to her own kids. As if a child’s actions, by definition, could be of no consequence. Had Kirsten not been standing right there when Olan mentioned the mango? Allison had remembered that.

“I’ve got to give her credit,” Maura continued. “Allie didn’t like the girl, but she didn’t jump to conclusions because of that. She waited, and she watched. And when I told her you guys had found Zeus wandering around Avalon, she had a different take on it than we did.”

“Oh?” Leigh asked, growing annoyed that it was Maura, and not herself, who had been the recipient of her daughter’s musings.

Maura nodded thoughtfully. “We assumed that Zeus had escaped, just like Lucky did. Most likely because he got aggressive with his captor.”

“Well, looking at the guy’s face, that’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?” Leigh insisted.

“Well, yeah, but Allison was thinking more about how the animals came to be wandering around free afterwards. With Lucky, it makes sense. Kirsten would have known that the dog hated being picked up, and would have certainly told her boyfriend to avoid that. But you know Lucky… he’s good at lulling people into a false sense of security. The petnapper could have lured him with food, put a leash on him, and convinced him to jump in a car. But then what do you do with him? What if he wouldn’t get out of the car? What if he got progressively more nervous and refused to go in a strange house? What if the petnapper used up his treats? You can imagine the guy forgetting all about the warning and just grabbing the dog to hurry it along. Then
whammo,
got your face. You know what I’m saying?”

Leigh nodded. It was easy enough to picture. “So then Lucky’s free, and he trots right down the Boulevard and back home. Where does Romeo live, by the way?”

“Other side of Bellevue,” Maura confirmed. “But with Zeus, Allison wasn’t buying it. She didn’t believe he’d gotten away.”

Leigh’s brow creased. “Why not?”

“Because he would have been in a cage. Or a carrier. Or something. Olan found fruit on the ground and figured the perp had put fruit in the destination cage, opened both doors, and voila. The bird moved from one to the other and the perp slammed the door.”

“Yeah,” Leigh argued, “but he could have gotten away easily enough the second the door was opened again. They would have to feed him or give him water or something, and he would almost certainly attack.”

Maura smiled. “Exactly. And Allison insisted that Kirsten would know that. That she would know
better,
particularly after what had just happened with Lucky. No one had to open the door at all. It would be easy enough to slide food through the bars and hang up a water bottle.”

“So what did happen?” Leigh asked, irked that whatever it was that must have occurred to her daughter still hadn’t occurred to her.

“Allison’s theory was that Zeus was intentionally let go,” Maura explained. “Which, if you think about it, could be even riskier than keeping him in the cage.”

Leigh pictured someone putting the carrier on the ground, opening the door, and backing away a few feet.
Yeah, right…
she thought grimly.
Good luck with that.

Cockatoos weren’t stupid. And they had long memories.

“But why on earth would they let him go?” Leigh asked. “After taking such a huge risk to capture him?”

“Because they knew that Olan had spilled the beans.”

Leigh mulled the thought. “They couldn’t have. Olan called my dad at home Thursday night. There was no conversation about it at the clinic; the clinic was already closed. And Kirsten didn’t even come in Friday. She couldn’t possibly have overheard anything!”

Maura shook her head. “She didn’t.”

“Then how could either of them have known that Olan squealed? Kirsten heard him say he would
die
if anything happened to the cockatoo — I was there. I wouldn’t have guessed he’d take the chance, either. I still don’t think he would have if my dad hadn’t talked him into it.”

“Kirsten knew that Olan called your dad,” Maura replied.

“How?”

“Texting,” Maura answered. “Another thing that comes more immediately to Allison’s mind than it would to yours or mine. I mean, we text, sure. But teenagers—”

“I
know
how much teenagers text,” Leigh grumbled. The picture became clearer. “It was Matt, wasn’t it? He was texting Kirsten, probably about five times a minute all week.”

Maura nodded. “Yep.”

“So he just happened to tell her that Olan called, and that Zeus was stolen, and that the police were going to get involved. And here Kirsten and Scarface—” she stopped and looked at Maura. “What is his name?”

“Shawn.”

“And here Kirsten and Shawn are sitting with a cageful of unhappy, screaming cockatoo that everyone in the North Boros is soon going to be looking for.”

“Exactly.”

Leigh blew out a breath. “So they let him go. Drove him somewhere dark in the middle of the night and just opened the cage door. They wouldn’t have cared if he lived or died at that point, as long as he couldn’t be traced back to them.” She considered some more. “It makes sense, but it’s hardly proof. The bird
could
have attacked while they were feeding it or moving it from cage to cage.”

“Yes,” Maura agreed. “But even so, it was unlikely they would attempt such a thing
outside,
as loud as the bird could be.”

“Shawn would have been bleeding like a stuck pig,” Leigh argued. “It could have gotten away from them somehow, whether they intended it or not.”

“Absolutely true,” Maura agreed. “I wasn’t convinced, either. Not until I ran a check on the boyfriend. Turns out he’s a dropout just shy of eighteen, with a juvey record. So Allison proposed a sting operation.”

“Why didn’t she tell me any of this?” Leigh protested. “Why didn’t you?”

“She told me that you insisted this morning that you had enough to worry about just taking care of your parents.”

Leigh frowned. She made a mental note never to say anything like that to Allison ever again.

“And as I explained already,” Maura continued, “I thought your dad told you everything else.”

“Fine,” Leigh conceded. Then she remembered Gil’s reporting to her that Allison and Matt had been arguing all day. “Matt didn’t want to believe that Kirsten was involved, I bet,” she theorized. “He also wouldn’t want to admit that he’d inadvertently leaked critical information to the petnapper. Allison would have a field day with that.”

Maura grinned. “I believe the youths had words, yes.”

Leigh shook her head. “But she convinced him to try a sting?”

“She did,” Maura confirmed. “Matt texted Kirsten that the security system at the clinic had broken down, and that your Dad was upset because it couldn’t be fixed until Saturday morning. Matt also told her that Lenna was freaking out because her bunny was down there, and she was afraid it wasn’t safe.”

“Why would a pet rabbit be in the clinic over a Friday night?”

Maura shrugged. “Who knows? Who cares? The point is, Matt told Kirsten it was there. He also bragged to Kirsten that if the petnapper
did
steal it, it would be a real windfall, because Lenna’s dad was super rich and would pay anything to get his baby girl’s precious bunny back, and Randall
couldn’t
report it because once word got out that a pet had been stolen from the clinic, he’d be ruined.”

Leigh blew out a breath. “My God, that’s brilliant. Far out, but brilliant.”

“Well, they bought it,” Maura declared. “Not only that, but they decided — like the teenagers they are — that such a ridiculous risk was actually worth it. With the community banding together and sharing information, the next pet they targeted was almost certain to be their last. But I think the easy money had gone to both of their heads. The bait Allison dangled was just too perfect to resist. Harmless bunny. No security. Rich Daddy. Strong motive for silence. Shawn probably figured he’d do just this
one last job,
and then he could go out a winner.”

Maura shrugged. “And if not, well, the sting would give the Avalon PD a little something different to do on a Friday night. We had a guy watching the drop-off point for Zeus’s ransom too, just in case. But of course nothing happened there.” Maura smiled. “Because your brilliant daughter was right all along.”