Danger in Cat World (Shawn Danger Mysteries Book 1)

by Nina Post

  Shawn was struck by how both Haviland Sylvain and her pet tortoise were on autopsy tables the same day.

  There were several minutes of silence while Dr. Oliver looked at the slides through a microscope.

  When he finally raised his head, he said, “The histopathology shows submucosal hemorrhage associated with edema of the underlying muscle. The hemorrhagic area is 1.4 cm in diameter. This is an acute lesion, with no inflammatory response. So I can say without question that Ranunculus sp. was the cause of death.”

  Shawn opened his mouth to, no doubt, reveal his shocking ignorance. The vet preempted him with an answer.

  “The flowers would have been almost immediately fatal to Lyle. I would put the time of death sometime between two a.m. and four a.m. Thursday morning. As requested,” he said to Dr. Evans, “I’ll send you my samples, descriptions, and photographic documentation.”

  “Is it possible that someone killed Lyle on purpose?” Shawn asked, ready for them to give him that ‘what are you, an idiot?’ look he was used to.

  Dr. Oliver shrugged. “It’s possible. And if someone did, they most likely knew that buttercup flowers would be lethal to Lyle, and fast-acting. But then it’s possible that someone fed him the flowers without any ill intent. It’s also possible that Lyle ate them on his own. Tortoises lack an instinctive awareness of which plants are toxic to them. Design flaw.”

  Based on the jacket sleeve that was crammed inside Lyle’s beak, Shawn was going to go with the first option, that they knew the flowers would be fatal. “Would the tortoise eat the flowers if someone were holding them in front of him?”

  “Most likely, yes,” Dr. Oliver said.

  “Lyle could have been outside at the time, but he also could have been in his playroom in the middle of the night.”

  “Normally, a tortoise would be in its burrow, outside,” the vet said. “And brumating, or hibernating, there beginning in late October.”

  Shawn drummed his pen against his leg. “So if Lyle weren’t outside, whoever did this could have gone into Lyle’s bedroom, then somehow transported him downstairs and outside? With what, a pull-cart?”

  “They’d really be no other way. Lyle weighs over one hundred pounds, and is extremely unwieldy. But I have to presume he was outside, in his burrow, probably close by.”

  “Who brought Lyle to this office in the past?” Shawn asked.

  “Robert Westrom. He used a wagon to get Lyle from the Range Rover to the exam room. Have you spoken to him?”

  “Robert Westrom is missing,” Shawn said. “He hasn’t been seen since the morning before the murder.”

  “Oh! My.”

  “Did Mr. Westrom ever express any hostility or resentment toward Lyle?” Dr. Evans asked the vet.

  “No, he was very professional and quite gentle with Lyle. I would be shocked if he were responsible for killing Lyle, and much more so if it turned out that he killed Ms. Sylvain.”

  Shawn knew that many of the homicide victims he had worked for were almost certainly shocked by their killer. It was almost always someone they knew, and knew well. Someone they didn’t expect to betray them.

  “If it helps, your killer would have fed him, waited for him to die, then used the sleeve,” Dr. Oliver examined the slides. “When would you like to hold Lyle’s funeral?”

  “His funeral?”

  “Yes. The Sylvain family will be here soon after they hear about this. They’ll want a funeral.”

  “For Lyle,” Shawn said, just to be sure he was getting it right.

  “Lyle’s bloodline goes back hundreds of years with the Sylvain family.”

  “So, they wouldn’t care about Haviland Sylvain or her funeral,” Shawn said dryly.

  Dr. Oliver looked contrite. “No, not so much.”

  “In that case, I’d like to hold it tomorrow, if possible. They’re so rich, let them use some of their money to get here fast.”

  Dr. Evans smiled, a bit sadly. “They probably already have the perfect thing to wear for a tortoise funeral. Do you want to do Haviland Sylvain’s service afterward?”

  “Yes, even if she can’t be there.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. And the Sylvains have a lot of pull in this town.”

  Shawn returned to the squad office from Lyle’s necropsy and spent the rest of the night at his desk with the murder book and the timeline on the board. He paid one of the cleaning crew to run over to the twenty-four-hour Dunkin’ Donuts and get him one of their egg sandwiches, a cake doughnut, and one of their biggest-size coffees, black. He gave the guy enough to get the same for himself and went back to catching up on the avalanche of paperwork and updating the murder book.

  By the time he saw Sarah again, he’d look not much better than Lyle.

  Shawn worked until shortly after four a.m., then went into the bathroom to wash his face and put a couple of drops of Visine in each eye. The press conference was at seven-thirty, so he drove home to check on the house and get some good coffee.

  He got to the house at a half past four, and waded through a sea of identical coon cats. Though he was too tired to count them right away, then took a stab at it after he had made a pot of coffee with his Kona grounds (which made him feel ten times better just smelling it), and sank his exhausted body into a chair, hands cradling the hot mug.

  It took several tries to count the new cats, because some of them kept moving, but there were twenty-five.

  Twenty-five new cats. The first one showed up just before he left the house to drive to the scene, and that was twenty-five hours ago.

  Maybe…

  Nah. But the first one was twenty-five hours ago. Which would make it one new cat each hour. When would it stop? How could he get it to stop?

  The first thing Shawn did when he got back to the office was check with the lab. Then he made a few calls to the businesses around the Sylvain house. After that he went outside to the front steps to meet the group of reporters and television anchors in front of the doors to the County Police Department building. He coerced one of the other detectives to come with him and take photos. The detective split off to the side and unobtrusively shot photos of the crowd while Shawn talked.

  Shawn’s intention was to be direct with the media about the very small amount of information he was willing to give them. It was also to give the sound bites that television media, who were like small dogs hopped up on bennies, liked.

  With that in mind, Shawn told the reporters he was leading a murder investigation involving Haviland Sylvain. He chose not to share the cause of death, the weapon that was used to kill her, the circumstances around her death, and whether or not they had a suspect. The key was to act reticent about what you did tell them, so it seemed to have more weight.

  Haviland Sylvain herself was such a subject of fascination to the reporters that they barely even noticed she had been murdered. This was good because the news crews were distracted from the details of the murder itself. This was bad because Shawn always worked on the philosophy of deliberation and anticipation — he knew what questions he would be asked, and had the answers for them. But these questions were coming out of crazytown.

  “Was she running a brothel?”

  “Detective, was she running a meth lab?”

  “How many Bengal tigers did she have?”

  “Was she killed by one of her own Bengal tigers?”

  “Detective Danger, is it true that Haviland Sylvain was killed in her own particle accelerator?”

  Was that piece of equipment in the sub-basement a particle accelerator? Nah…but was it? How would they know that? They wouldn’t know that. Shut it, Danger.

  “Did she have a neural chip implanted in her brain?”

  “Was she abducted by aliens?”

  Where were people going to j-school these days? College of The Weekly World News?

  Once Shawn had refuted the first round of questions about the isolated heiress, the reporters launched into the second round. Shawn almost wished they were dog
gedly trying to find out the cause and means of death. If this was a tactic designed to get him so fed up he’d start volunteering information about the murder weapon, it wasn’t that far off from working.

  “Detective Danger, is it true that Haviland Sylvain was a backup singer for King Creole and the Coconuts?”

  “Was Haviland Sylvain really a man?”

  “I heard she spent all her money on men!”

  “Detective, I’ve heard that Haviland Sylvain never actually lived in this house.”

  “I heard she split her time between a man-made island in the South Pacific and a fortress in the Arctic, is this true?”

  Shawn put up his hands to shut them up, and revealed another one of his pre-planned statements.

  One of the news crew stepped up. “Detective, what do you have to say about the death of an African tortoise, Haviland Sylvain’s pet?”

  How the hell did they know about Lyle?

  The crowd’s noise level instantly jacked up ten decibels. Cameras and mics were thrust closer.

  “Detective, how was the tortoise killed? The same way as Sylvain?”

  “Did the same suspect kill the tortoise?”

  Shawn put up a hand again. “That’s all I can tell you for now. We’ll be holding a longer press conference soon.” And he went inside in front of more shouted questions.

  He spotted Andy, who looked guilty.

  “Aren’t you supposed to help with that?” Shawn asked.

  “Don’t tell – I don’t want to lose my job,” the PIO whispered in a desperate tone before he hurried off. “But I can’t deal with them, especially in person!”

  Shawn sat at his desk, called Sarah and asked if she could meet him

  By the time he got to Argosy, Sarah was already there, and arguing with the manager by the gumball machines.

  She counted off on one hand. “Your aisles are too tall, your lights are gratingly bright, your produce is sub-par, your employees define lassitude, and your entire store experience is soul-killing.”

  “Sarah, why do you have to tell me this every week?” The manager hung his head, hands planted on his pudgy hips.

  “Maybe if you made a good effort to change anything, I wouldn’t have to, Earl.”

  “I’m just the store manager, Sarah! There’s a regional manager, and a bunch of executives — it’s a chain, and I’m just one guy.”

  Sarah shot a glance at Shawn. “Earl, that’s a terrible attitude. How far do you think you’ll get thinking like that?”

  “Not far at all. But I’m not that ambitious.”

  “You’re not ambitious enough to improve the store?”

  Sarah shook her head as the manager shuffled through the automatic doors. Shawn walked up to her, admiring her dark jeans, blue and black duck boots, gray sweater, and dark peacoat.

  “How was your day yesterday?” he asked.

  “Emotionally distant and full of doubt and yearning. Yours?”

  “Yeah, same.” He grinned.

  They headed for the pet aisle.

  “Shouldn’t you be on the phone right now?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Go ahead. Reach out – reach out and touch someone,” she sang.

  Shawn’s heart lifted to see her. He palmed his phone but didn’t use it yet. “I want to take you on a real date. But I can’t yet. So here we are.”

  She tilted her head to the side and looked up at him. He knew he should really have one of the officers pick up some food and drop it at his place, but as much as he trusted a few of them to do their jobs right, he didn’t feel comfortable having someone get cat food for him and take it into his house. Especially with all of those cats. If he had done something to piss them off lately, they’d sic health and human services or animal control on him.

  He put his hand against her shoulder blades for a moment while they walked into the store.

  “You know, there’s still an Argosy employee I need to talk to. We should see if he’s working.”

  “Sure.” She looked at the products near the bottom of the aisle. “What kind of cat food do you like?”

  “I don’t eat cat food.”

  “If you had a cat, or fifteen of them —”

  “Fifteen cats! That would be awful. I’d never be able to bring a woman home again. Now, if I had, say, twenty-five cats – “

  “Twenty-five?” Sarah gaped at him and her eyes went wide.

  Shawn worried she didn’t believe him or would just cut her losses right at that second. “They may find that super attractive. They’d probably say, this is a man secure in his masculinity. He can really carry it off.”

  “You bring a lot of women home?” Sarah asked, facetiously.

  “So many. Entire volleyball teams, sometimes.”

  He gestured to a brand of dry cat food in five-pound bags, then stopped a passing employee and asked if the one of the employees he wanted to speak to was working. He was.

  “Tell him to come over here right away, would you?” Shawn flashed his badge to hurry it up. The stocker’s eyes widened and he rushed off.

  “Okay, now I want to be a homicide detective,” Sarah said, standing.

  A guy in an apron rounded the corner toward them. “I’m Tom. You’re looking for me?” Nervous, probably because he was just smoking weed in the back loading area. Sarah checked the ingredients on the back of a bag.

  “Were you working here during the overnight shift last night?” Shawn asked.

  “Yeah, stocking.”

  “Did you notice anything odd?”

  “Odd?”

  “Did you see any of these people?” Shawn flipped through a series of driver’s license photos of Haviland’s Sylvain’s house staff.

  The Argosy stocker scrunched up his face as looked at them. “Ehhh, I don’t…wait, I saw her.”

  Carolyn Lewis. “What time was this?”

  “When I first got on shift, so a little after midnight.”

  So Carolyn had lied to him about being home the whole night.

  “What was she doing? Do you know what she bought?”

  “No, but Leigh might know. She was working cashier.”

  “Is she here now?”

  “Right there.” He pointed at one of the registers, where a sullen, heavyset woman was doing her thing, barely.

  “Did you notice anything else about this woman? Maybe her behavior?”

  “She looked kind of squirrelly. You know, nervous. Fidgety. She knocked over a whole display of Granny Smith apples.”

  Shawn thanked him and Tom hurried into the back through a door.

  “How many cans? And do you want some catnip, too?” Sarah asked.

  “Catnip doesn’t do much for me.” Shawn did the mental calculations based on Comet’s typical eating schedule. “Several dozen cans, and ten five-pound bags. And some catnip.”

  “Kitty litter?” Sarah asked, while he keyed in a number on his phone.

  “Uh, better get five ten-pound bags. And grab a couple of the litter trays, too. I don’t have time to find them homes yet.”

  He called the late night pizza restaurant near the mansion. Sarah stacked the bags of litter at the bottom of the cart. He held the phone away from his head. “Let me do that!”

  “I can put cans and ten-pound bags in a cart. Earlier today I lifted a three whole reams of copy paper.”

  “I know you can, but — ” Shawn heard a voice from the phone and brought the phone back to his ear. “Shawn Danger, Jamesville County Police.” It was the girl who was delivering pizzas on the late shift the night of the homicide. Murder made people hungry.

  “I want a list of all the deliveries you made during your shift,” Shawn asked her. “Names, addresses. Can you fax it to the department?” He gave her the fax number. “I’ll hold to make sure it went through.”

  He winked at Sarah, who did a brief dance with two cans of cat food.

  He had to turn around and face the detergent side of the aisle, under the guise of better r
eception. “Thanks,” he said in the phone. “One more question, since I’m not in the office right now: did you make any deliveries to 77 Cherry Street?”

  It would be one stupid murderer who ordered pizza from the house where he killed someone, but maybe the killer really was that dumb. It wouldn’t be the first time. Shawn had already checked the phone records at the house, but the pizza could have been ordered on the web or from a cell phone. The answer was no. Worth a try.

  “Ready?” Sarah asked, then headed for checkout. “I have to say, I’ve been on better dates.”

  “No blind dates, no family-arranged monstrosities?”

  “My father likes to set me up with golfers.”

  “Professional golfers?”

  “No, of course not, but only under a certain handicap. It’s pretty strict, too. Those dates have been mildly awful.”

  “Only mildly awful? I’m aiming for ‘not that awful.’”

  “You’re pretty close.” They pushed the cart to the register of the employee he wanted to speak to.

  Shawn showed the cashier his badge. Her sullen expression didn’t change even slightly. He liked to show it when he was pressed for time. “Were you working between the hours of one and four a.m. last night?”

  “Yeah.” Swiping cans. Slowly.

  “Did you see any of these people?” He showed her the photos, starting with Carolyn’s. He went through all of them. She didn’t bother to stop sliding the items over the reader, though she was going so slowly it didn’t matter.

  “Her.”

  He separated Carolyn Lewis’s photo. “This woman?”

  “Yeah.”

  Sarah hauled the bags of litter on the counter from the bottom of the cart, and the cashier ran the handheld barcode reader over the UPC code.

  “Do you remember what she purchased?”

  The cashier sighed. “Yeah, I always remember exactly what the customers buy.”

  Sarcasm! He could do that, too. “Maybe it was unusual.” He smiled, he hoped winningly. “Try.”

  She held up the barcode reader like she was holding a cocktail. “Uh. I think she had a six-pack of Genesee and a frozen pizza or something like that. Oh, and a scrub brush.”