by Nina Post
Where else could the burglar have been careless? He looked over his bathroom. The asshole had squeezed out his prescription acne medications, sunscreen, his cologne, eye drops, and his emergency cold/flu meds stash on the floor and left the empty packaging. He tried turning on his electric razor, which made a brief whirring noise followed by silence. The burglar must have left it submerged in water long enough to short the motor out.
“Son of a bitch,” he said under his breath. All of his toilet paper rolls were in several inches of water in the bathtub. The shower curtain was stuffed into the toilet tank.
“And look for my cat, Comet,” Shawn told a tech behind him. “He’s a wirehair, mostly white, with black and caramel markings on the head.”
“It’s not one of these?” One of the techs with the camera equipment indicated the several coon cats that were milling around his legs and in and out of the room.
“Get those cats out of here.” Shawn swept his arm up. “And no, Comet looks totally different. Did I say that Comet was fifteen pounds and all-brown, with a fluffy tail?”
“Er, no.”
“I didn’t, and he’s not.” He looked around at the floors. “Document everything thoroughly and clearly. I’m not just saying that because it’s my house. Mistakes here could cost us in the Sylvain case.”
“You got it, Detective.” The others nodded and they all tried to herd the cats from the second floor.
His phone rang. Sarah was next to him. She picked up one of the cats and it licked her cheek.
“Detective Danger.” If whoever it was gave him any bullshit about his name, there would be hell to pay today. But a tentative female voice asked, “Are you the detective who came by the Mundo Mart the other day? You were asking me about one of my shifts?”
“Yes,” Shawn covered the receiver and went downstairs and stood by his destroyed trampoline.
“I – “
“You can tell me, whatever it is.” Sarah raised her brows in a question. He shrugged slightly. He figured this was the young woman who seemed like she wasn’t telling him something.
“What’s your name?” The techs ran around him trying to herd the cats into a jerry-rigged enclosure in the corner of the room, with little success.
“Pamela Wang.”
Yep, that’s her.
“Detective?” A tech poked his head around the archway between the dining room and the living room. “We need you to come look at this.”
“One sec.” He held up a finger and refocused on the phone conversation. Static blurted on radios and unintelligible dispatch voices rumbled. A couple of patrol officers were in the dining room.
“Do you remember seeing someone, maybe one of the photos I showed you, from that night?” Shawn asked Pamela Wang. She was obviously very reluctant to talk, hesitating, speaking so quietly he could barely hear her.
“One of those people was in the store that night, just after I came in,” she said in a near-whisper.
“Uh, Detective?” one of the two patrol officers approached him.
He covered the receiver. “This is a sensitive call from a reluctant witness.”
The patrol officer nodded. “I’m sorry to disturb you. But we had to call in the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Team.”
Shawn covered the receiver. “The bomb squad?”
“Yes, sir,” the patrol officer said, and returned to the dining room.
“Ms. Wang?” Shawn put a finger against his other ear.
“Yes.”
He felt a flood of relief that she was still there. “You were saying that you remembered seeing one of the people from the photos I showed you. Which one?”
“A man, early thirties, light brown hair. Not fat. Like most people.”
“You said that he came in shortly after you started working. What time did your shift start?”
“Eleven.”
“Eleven p.m. And you noticed this person at what time?”
“Around two?”
“Two a.m.?” Shawn clarified, to make sure he had the information right.
“Yes.”
The Explosive Ordnance Disposal Team knocked very solidly and loudly on the front door, then streamed in wearing their all-black carapace uniforms and headgear.
Shawn heard Sarah say, “In there.” She came back to Shawn and he put a hand on her shoulder. Into the phone he said, “Please stay on the line, Ms. Wang.”
To Sarah he said, “I want you to go home,” in a voice that brooked no disagreement. “I’ll call you as soon as I can. But I don’t want you here, it’s not safe. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to have Pete drive you. I don’t trust that your car is safe, and don’t want you driving alone.”
“That’s fine.” She put her hand up like she had no problem with that.
He put a hand around the back of her head, through her silky hair, leaned in and kissed her, hungry for her. He wanted to take her right there, up against the wall. So he let her go.
“Wait, is this our third date?” she said, after she leaned back.
He grinned, though considering his current condition, it was more like a wince, and gently pushed her toward the front door.
“The service is tomorrow. First Lyle’s, then Haviland Sylvain’s.”
“I’ll be there.” For once, didn’t seem in a hurry to get to her car door.
He didn’t want her to be alone and didn’t want her out of his sight, but she couldn’t stay in the house, not with the bomb squad there.
He brought up the phone again. “Ms. Wang? Sorry, give me a second.” He heard a murmur of agreement and went to find Pete to ask him to drive Sarah straight home.
“Okay, Ms. Wang. My apologies. What exactly did this person do while in the Mundo Mart?”
“He just walked around, but he did it for a long time.”
“Just around the aisles?”
The Ordnance Disposal Team crowded around something on the floor in the dining room.
“Yes, up and down the aisles,” Pamela Wang said. “After ten minutes, I asked him if he was looking for something. He said, ‘A little appreciation would be nice,’ which was weird. But I didn’t think it was directed at me. Sometimes people are having conversations in their heads that don’t involve you. You know?” She didn’t wait for an answer.
“Did he buy anything?”
“Eventually he bought a Coke, a package of chips —”
“Chips? What kind of chips?”
“Potato chips, I think.”
“What else?” Shawn spoke quickly and kept his eyes on the group in the dining room.
“He purchased a pack of those chocolate cupcakes?” Pamela Wang tended to end things with a question.
“Hostess?”
“Yes,” she said. “He also purchased Imodium, and, um, Excedrin? Also a package of donuts, large coffee, and um, some candy, something gummy. It looked like he was having a party. A by-yourself party. Or that he was bulimic? More men have eating disorders these days.”
“How did he seem to you? What was his mood?” Shawn didn’t want to suggest anything.
“Just like my brother acted just before prom.”
“Nervous? Maybe a little sweaty?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see what he was driving?”
“A small car, maybe blue.”
“Did he say anything else to you?”
“No.”
“Is there anything else you can tell me?”
“No, that’s all.”
“One more thing,” Shawn said, adrenaline threading through his body, “did he buy some strawberry milk?”
There was a pause. “Yes, I remember the bottle. It had a pink cow on it.”
Suddenly Shawn didn’t feel his lack of sleep at all. He felt like he could run a 10K.
“Why were you afraid to tell me?” he asked.
“I’ve gotten into the habit,” she said, and hung up.
The Ordnance Disposal Team hea
ded back out the door and Shawn pocketed his phone.
“One of you care to fill me in on what’s going on here?”
“False alarm,” one of the men from the Ordnance Disposal Team said.
“Gee, what a relief. What was a false alarm?”
One of the techs rubbed his forehead. “We thought we saw a bomb in the, uh – “
“In the radio,” another tech said.
“In the radio.”
“Yeah, that one on the floor.”
“We had one of our senior guys take a look at it, and he’s sure that it’s nothing to worry about,” the first one said, and they went back to work in the kitchen.
After the crime scene techs and the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Team and the patrol officers finally left his house, Shawn crawled up on his trampoline, laying perpendicular over the rips, not even caring if it held together, though it did. Some of the new cats, which had escaped their tenuous holding pen, jumped up onto the blue material and fell against Shawn, two of them whomping the breath out of his chest with their fifteen-pound-plus girth.
He should call Sarah.
He should call Sarah.
He should really call Sarah….
He missed her already, and on top of that, she had found homes for six of the cats, including, he hoped, one for herself. It would barely put a dent in the number, but he’d take it.
God, he was so tired. He struggled to sit up and supported himself with his elbows. More of the cats hopped up onto the trampoline and walked over Shawn. Dozens of cats, meowing, driving him mad.
The surface finally gave way and Shawn fell three feet to the floor with a thud that shuddered through his whole body. It hurt, but it felt kind of good, too, like he needed that full-body thump.
One of the cats stretched out across his face. He pushed it off, half-heartedly. The cat readjusted and covered most of his face with its belly.
This ogre who trashed his house, who completely destroyed his dead grandfather’s bomber jacket and his dead aunt’s radio and phone from the forties — he took Comet.
He took Comet.
He had to get up and call Sarah and go back to Vincent’s place and get at least some of these cats into other homes and close this case, but first, he had to get a huge cat off his head. It occurred to him that it was a good thing he wasn’t allergic.
And he had about a thousand things to do to fix his house, but he couldn’t deal with any of that now.
But he didn’t move. He didn’t even push off the cat.
So many cats. Thirty-four of them, and one more every hour. They were suffocating him, almost literally.
There were too many to find homes for, too many to take care of. He couldn’t even manage the energy to get this one off his head.
What did it matter? It had been almost thirty-six hours, and he still didn’t have a solid lead. No prints, no murder weapon, no solid DNA evidence yet.
Considering the very real possibility that he wouldn’t solve this case made him feel like an angry god had hollowed him out with an ice cream spoon and left him a papery husk, albeit one strong enough to support the weight of several coon cats, who would soon take over the house. He would have to move.
He would fail Haviland Sylvain. And it seemed so close, finding the slimebucket who did this, it felt like it was dancing on the border of his consciousness.
He took in a breath, got cat hair in his mouth, coughed, then blew it back out. So what if he wasn’t getting enough oxygen? Everything was falling apart anyway. Comet was missing and possibly dead. If someone could do that to his house, do that to his father’s military uniform, do that to his aunt’s radio and phone, and generally proceed as though he were Shawn’s all-time number-one enemy upping his game in a generations-old blood feud, why wouldn’t this person be capable of harming Comet? Especially if it was the same person who poisoned Lyle, let alone killed Haviland Sylvain?
He sighed again and nearly choked. Time to move the cat. But he couldn’t bring himself to even move his hand.
Pathetic, Shawn. Think of those guys in Homicide: Life on the Streets. Think of those guys on Law & Order. Did you see them on the floor under a trampoline, a giant cat cutting off most of their oxygen? No. And what if Sarah came in right now and saw you like this? Or someone from the squad? You may as well let the cats paw through the murder book and see what they can make of it.
He reached up and moved the cat. It made a gravely, disgruntled mrrowwrr but pranced lightly to the windowsill, where it bullied one of the other cats off.
He pushed himself off the floor through the destroyed trampoline and stepped over it, taking his keys and his coat. He had to check the surveillance footage from the c-store for that hour, and tighten his re-canvassing.
The Sylvain family bubbled up in Jamesville like a septic tank overflow. The group included Haviland Sylvain’s husband’s two twin cousins, and his aunt and uncle on his mother’s side. Haviland’s mother-in-law’s siblings were in their late sixties; the twins were eerily identical, in their early thirties, and obviously cared only about satisfying whatever desire flitted across their minds at any given moment.
Shawn knew this because they burst into the department offices and insisted on staying in the Sylvain mansion. Shawn had to inform them that it was still a crime scene, that it could be for up to a week. He told them that they would have to stay in one of the town’s few hotels or B&Bs instead, which was like he handed them pup tents, a roll of toilet paper, and some mosquito repellant.
Lyle’s funeral was first, in the afternoon, followed by Haviland Sylvain’s service and burial. Shawn would have liked to think that the Sylvain family made his look pretty good, but they didn’t.
Shawn arrived at the funeral home in his midnight blue suit, white shirt, and Gieves & Hawkes silk tie in a blue and gray stripe. He saw Sarah, in a black dress with short sleeves and a round neck, and a belt cinching in her small waist. She had more eye makeup on than usual, but only a light brush of balm on her lips, on her pale but radiant complexion. She cocked her head toward a pin on her dress. An enamel tortoise.
“You look stunning. Is this our second date?”
“No, it’s our third date,” Sarah corrected. “And thank you.”
“May I get you a drink? It’s open bar. A mimosa, perhaps.”
“Has a homicide detective ever said the phrase, ‘a mimosa, perhaps’?”
“Yes, just now. And you were here for it, so be sure to put it in your memoirs.”
“I’ll have a coffee.”
“That sounds good. Actually, it’s probably terrible quality.”
The Sylvains were at the service, of course, and so was Dr. Oliver, along with more local residents than he would have expected. They were probably there just to see the Sylvain family. Shawn circled around a cluster of the Sylvains, each of whom were drinking a Bloody Mary.
“Pardon me, are you the detective?” the aunt asked, despite meeting him the previous day when he told them to stay in a hotel – or when he handed them a shovel and said, ‘Dig a hole in the ground and drag a few branches over it.’
“Yes.” He got two coffees from the girl tending bar.
“Can you tell us how it happened?” the husband’s aunt asked.
“I can’t tell you any information about Ms. Sylvain right now —”
The aunt waved her hand dismissively. “No, not her. Lyle. What happened to Lyle, Detective?”
“I can’t tell you that.” Even if he could, he wasn’t about to tell these people a damn thing.
“Lyle’s bloodline has been in our family for many generations.” Her face contorted as though someone walked past her wearing overalls with no shirt, or like she had just arrived in a third-world country.
“You all have tortoise blood?” Shawn said, all innocence.
The twins snorted. The aunt touched her fingers to her chest. Sorry, décolletage. Shawn smiled at this.
“Excuse me?” the aunt said.
Shawn leane
d in and spoke loudly enough for the room to hear. “I said, the Sylvains have tortoise blood? Who was the relative responsible for that?”
The aunt gasped. Shawn made a show of pretending to wait for her answer and giving up. He grinned, raised the coffee, and walked away. Sarah took the coffee gratefully and drank half of it right away. It must not have been that hot.
The service started. The minister made his introduction, then asked if anyone wanted to say something about Lyle. The uncle walked up to the podium.
“Lyle was our pet in the Berkshires cottage while we were growing up. His nanny passed away a number of years ago, unfortunately. The weather was better for him there than the estate in Barbados… “
Shawn rolled his eyes.
“Our grandparents, Nan-nan and Pop-Pop, grew up with Lyle’s father, Edward.”
This went on and on from the aunt and uncle for some interminable and painful length of time, involving many anecdotes of the financially privileged, during which Shawn and Sarah passed a crossword puzzle she had in her purse back and forth until it was filled in completely and the service was done, the margins filled with their hastily scribbled comments about the elegy.
“Is it over? Thank God,” Sarah cracked her back by twisting around to each side. “Lyle deserved better.”
“Thank the minister. He shut them down.”
With a quick set change, it was time for Haviland Sylvain’s service. Sarah’s father had arranged everything, including brow-beating the director of the home into hosting two back-to-back services though he wasn’t due back at work from his vacation until three days later, and guilting the local Methodist minister into handling the services.
“Your father couldn’t make it?” Shawn asked in a low voice.
“He’s in court. DUI.” She waved a hand and closed her eyes briefly. “Not his, someone else’s.”
Shawn idly wondered who would be handling his own post-death details. The Detective Division, probably. His peers. And when his father died? Melly would handle it, or someone else with Stockholm Syndrome. He could dubiously thank Dr. Evans for this train of thought.
When the minister announced the beginning of the service for Haviland, the Sylvain family left the room. Shawn waited for them to come back in, presuming that they just stepped out for some air. Minutes passed, and Shawn and Sarah were the only ones still there.
