The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas (2 page)

I hurried to tell Jancey I would have the woman taken away, got off the line, and called 911.

“I’m a pet sitter, and I just walked in on an intruder in a client’s house. A woman. She seemed mentally disturbed and should be handled with care. There may be another person in the house as well.”

I gave the address, but when the dispatcher asked for the homeowner’s name, I tried to distract her.

“It’s a gated community. Whoever comes will have to use a code to get in. I guess they could use mine.”

Crisply, the dispatcher said, “No problem, ma’am. We have our own code. A deputy will be there shortly.”

I grinned and shut off the phone. I knew about the bar code affixed to the side of every Sarasota County emergency and law enforcement vehicle. As the vehicle approaches the gate, an electronic reader scans the code and automatically opens the gate.

I also knew that reporters with police scanners listened to 911 calls. I doubted that any of them knew Cupcake’s address, and I didn’t think they’d go to the effort of looking up the address I’d given the dispatcher. At least I hoped they wouldn’t. I hoped they’d yawn and wait for something juicier than a cat sitter calling about an intruder. If the stars were in the right alignment for Cupcake, the woman in his house would be hustled off without the world ever knowing she’d been there.

I waited in the Bronco, imagining Briana inside the house wondering why I was still there. Or maybe she wasn’t. She had seemed so spaced out that she might have forgotten me as soon as I left. Cupcake was right, the woman was mentally ill. Jancey was probably right, too. The woman had probably been in their bed and in their shower.

Deputy Jesse Morgan and an unsworn female deputy from the Community Policing unit arrived in separate cars, both parking behind me in the driveway and walking toward me with the near swagger that uniforms give both men and women. I didn’t know the woman, but Morgan and I had met a few times in situations I didn’t want to remember. I was never sure if he thought I was a total kook or if he thought I just had really bad luck.

Morgan is one of Siesta Key’s sworn deputies, meaning he carries a gun. He’s lean, with sharp cheekbones and knuckles, and hair trimmed so short as to be almost nonexistent. He wears dark mirrored shades that hide any emotion in his eyes, but one ear sports a small diamond stud. I’m not sure what that diamond says, but it’s about the only thing about Morgan that indicates a personal life outside the sheriff’s department. The Key has so little true crime that most of our law enforcement is done by the unsworn deputies of the Community Policing unit, like the woman with him. Community Police officers wear dark green shorts and white knit shirts. Except for a gun, their belts bristle with the same equipment used by the sworn deputies.

Morgan greeted me with the halfhearted enthusiasm with which a dog greets a vet wearing rubber gloves and holding a syringe. Civil, but pretty sure he’s not going to like what’s coming. He introduced Deputy Clara Beene, and she and I did a brief handshake. Beene seemed more intrigued by the house and grounds than by me, so I figured she had never heard of me. Like I said, my fame is very limited.

I said, “I’m taking care of two cats that live here. When I went in, I found a woman in the house. She claimed to be the wife of the owner, but I know she’s not. I think somebody else was in there, too. I came out and called the owners. They don’t know who the woman is. They think she must be mentally disturbed, and they asked for her to be committed to a hospital or something instead of put in jail.”

Morgan tilted his head to peer down at me. If I’d been able to see his eyes, I imagine they would have had a sharp glint in them. We both knew how hard it is for law enforcement officers to do anything constructive about lawbreakers who are mentally ill. Under Florida law, a cop who believes a person is about to commit suicide or kill somebody can initiate the Baker Act that involuntarily commits a person for testing. The commitment period lasts only seventy-two hours, and unless two psychiatrists petition the court to extend the commitment time for involuntary treatment, the person is released.

I doubted that Briana would be considered an imminent threat to herself or anybody else. More likely, she would be considered an extreme neurotic with a delusional crush on a famous athlete.

Without commenting on what he thought about trying to get Briana hospitalized, Morgan flipped open his notebook and clicked his pen. “What made you think somebody else was in the house with the woman?”

“Just a noise I heard. Like maybe somebody unlocking the lanai slider. It could have been something else.”

“But you didn’t see anybody else.”

“No, it was just a little clicking noise.”

“What’s the homeowner’s name?”

“Trillin.”

He lowered his pen and angled his head at me. “
Cupcake
Trillin?”

“I hope we can keep this out of the news.”

His jawbone jutted out a bit, like he’d just bit down hard on his back teeth. “I’ll just put ‘Trillin’ as the owner’s name. You ever see the woman inside before?”

“No. She said her name was Briana.”

“Briana who?”

Beene, the Community Policing woman, said, “She just goes by Briana. That one name. She’s a famous model.”

Morgan and I turned to look at her, and she shrugged. “I watch
Entertainment Tonight
.”

Morgan’s nostrils flared slightly as if it might be against department policy to watch shows like that.

“So?”

“So she’s here in Sarasota. I heard it on the news.”

Beene looked from Morgan to me. “You must have heard of her. She was all over the news last year. You know, she’s the model that caused a big stink at the fashion show in Milan.”

Morgan and I shook our heads. I might have heard about somebody in a cat show who’d made the news, but fashion shows were out of my world.

As if he had heard all he could stand about fashion models, Morgan put his pen and pad away and took a deep breath. With Beene a step behind him, he strode manfully to the door and rapped on it.

He yelled, “Sarasota Sheriff’s Department!”

The door didn’t open. No sound came from inside.

Morgan waited a few seconds, then knocked and shouted again. Nobody answered.

I felt a little shiver of guilty relief. Briana and whoever had been in the house with her had probably slipped out the back door while I watched the front. Maybe they were halfway to Tampa by now. Maybe they would never come back. Maybe Briana had learned her lesson and would stop stalking Cupcake.

Morgan turned to look at me as if it were my fault nobody had answered the door. “You got a key?”

“I have a security code.”

“Please use it.”

Feeling important under their gaze, I stepped forward and punched in my special number. The lock clicked, and I turned the knob and opened the door. Morgan motioned me aside, and he and Beene went into the house.

Once again, intuition or subliminal cues made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, as if trouble was barreling toward me.

I said, “Don’t let the cats out.”

My sixth sense was right about trouble coming, but it wasn’t two runaway cats.

2

Morgan and Beene left the foyer and went into the living room.

From where I stood by the front door, I couldn’t see them, but I heard Beene say, “Uh-oh,” the way people do when they see something bad.

Morgan didn’t answer.

Beene didn’t say anything else.

Nobody said anything else. Something was wrong.

I inched forward and tried to peer around the edge of the archway into the living room. All I could see was Morgan’s back where he had squatted on the floor to examine something. I became aware of an off-putting scent reminiscent of floral tributes leaning on a casket, that frigid, artificial, cloying fragrance you never forget. It’s also the odor of death.

A movement on the floor near Morgan caught my eye, a slow oozing, a snail’s trail of dark red, a glutinous horror inching across the floor. Dead bodies don’t bleed, and this blood was moving so slowly it could have come from a dying body or one whose death was only minutes old. I stepped backward, out of the foyer and into fresh air.

After a minute or two, the deputies came outside, Beene pale and pink-eyed and walking face forward, Morgan backing out behind her with a phone to his ear.

Morgan gave the address and said, “We’ve got a Signal Five here. Adult female. Killer suspect possibly still inside. We need backup.”

Signal Five is code for a murdered body. He didn’t say by what means the body had been killed, but the blood I’d seen told me it wasn’t by poison or suffocation.

Officer Beene and I made eye contact, and for a moment we stared at each other in silent sadness for a life that had been violently ended. Then she turned to go about her official duties, and I was left to deal with guilt and doubt dancing around me like dark sprites. The sound I’d heard must have been the killer coming into the house. Maybe Briana hadn’t heard the sound I’d heard, maybe I should have warned her, maybe I had wasted too much time calling Cupcake and Jancey before I called 911. I imagined somebody slipping into the house behind Briana and killing her while I sat unknowing in the driveway.

Morgan snapped his phone closed and turned to me. “Don’t leave. You’ll have to talk to Homicide.”

As usual, his dark shades hid the expression in his eyes, but his voice bore the custard skin of pity.

My face grew hot, and I folded my arms over my chest. “I know.”

Not so long ago, when somebody in the sheriff’s department said the word “homicide,” chances were they’d meant Homicide Detective J. P. Guidry, known to his friends and colleagues as Guidry, known to his mother as Jean Pierre, known to me as the second man I’d loved in all my life. But Guidry had returned to New Orleans several months ago. I could have gone with him. He had wanted me to go with him.
I
had wanted to go with him, but I had spent over three years learning to live again after my husband and little girl had been killed in a senseless accident, and I’d still been emotionally squishy, afraid I’d lose myself if I left the surf and sea breezes that had sustained me all my life.

Like everybody else in the sheriff’s department, Morgan had known that Guidry and I were
together,
emotionally and physically and every other way. But Guidry and I were both intensely private people, and when he left we didn’t announce to the world why I didn’t go with him. Some people probably believed he had chosen to leave me behind and felt sorry for me. Others may have guessed it had been my choice not to go and pitied me for being so stupid. I didn’t know what Morgan thought, but he had other reasons to think I was jinxed, so he probably felt sorry for me just on general principle.

Forcing my voice to sound neutral, I said, “You have a new homicide guy?”

Morgan shook his head. “Not yet. Hard to get somebody as good as Guidry.”

That was for damn sure.

Inclining my head toward the house, I said, “After I saw the woman and exited the premises, I was out here the entire time. I didn’t hear a gunshot.”

He said, “Ummm.” His face was so neutral he could have stood in a department store window and people would have believed he was a mannequin.

My face flamed again and I pressed my lips together. I had seen the blood, and Morgan had given a murder code, not a suicide code. So Briana had been either shot or cut. But I was a former deputy, and I knew better than to ask Morgan which it had been. In the first place, the department wouldn’t give any information until after the medical examiner had signed off on the body. In the second place, my presence would automatically make me one of the suspects.

Morgan and Beene strode down a walk leading to the back of the house, probably looking for signs of forcible entry. I walked to my Bronco and leaned on the back bumper. I pulled out my cell phone and called Cupcake again.

He answered on the first ring. “Dixie, did they get her out?”

I cleared my throat. “Cupcake, I hate to tell you this, but the woman is dead.”

“What do you mean, dead?”

“I mean
dead
dead, as in no longer living. While I called you and nine-one-one and waited for the deputies to get here, somebody came in and killed her.”

A beat or two went by. “Dixie, if this is a joke, it’s not funny.”

I heard Jancey in the distance. “Is that Dixie? Did she get rid of that woman?”

I said, “It’s no joke, Cupcake. I thought somebody was in the house with her because I heard a noise, but what I heard must have been a killer entering the house. I’m here with a couple of deputies waiting for the crime-scene people. I imagine I’ll be one of the suspects.”

“Good God, Dixie, why would they suspect you?”

“Because I was here.”

He heaved a great sigh, as if I had just confirmed some awful suspicion he’d long held. “Are the cats okay?”

“I don’t know yet. I didn’t see them, but they’re probably hiding. I won’t know anything until the crime-scene investigators get here.”

“I think we’d better come home now.”

“Probably.”

We promised each other we’d stay in touch, and I turned off my phone.

Cupcake wanted to come home because he was concerned about his cats and his house, and because he was creeped out at learning that a woman who’d been stalking him had been murdered. He didn’t realize yet that he would also be on a list of suspects. Criminal investigators know that most murders are personal, so if a stalker gets murdered in the home of a famous person, that famous person is going to be suspected of having something to do with it even if he was in another country when the murder took place.

Morgan and Beene were still investigating the back and sides of the house when several vehicles pulled into the driveway behind my Bronco. An ambulance with two EMTs, an unmarked officer’s car driven by Sergeant Woodrow Owens, and a green and white deputy’s vehicle with two deputies I didn’t know. I straightened up when I saw Sergeant Owens. Owens is a tall, lanky African American with basset eyes and a slow drawl that masks one of the quickest minds in the universe. I was in his unit when I was a deputy, so standing up straight was an instinctive reflex because Owens didn’t brook any lazy-ass slouching. He had also been the officer who had come in person to tell me my husband and little girl were dead. I hadn’t stood up straight then, but buckled like a felled tree. Owens had held me tenderly as a mother.