Danger in Cat World (Shawn Danger Mysteries Book 1)

by Nina Post

  It would be even better if they could catch him on a different camera even closer to the house, but this was very good news.

  As soon as he hung up, the phone rang again.

  “Did you ever see Kendall Peterson’s special closet?” Vincent.

  “We’re not that close of friends. I did see his Kinder Surprise collection closet, which he doesn’t show to just anyone.”

  If Shawn ever took a hostage negotiation workshop through the department, the first day would probably tell them that under no circumstances were they to do the things he was doing.

  “Let me put it this way: it’s like something an African dictator might have in his panic room.” Vincent, playful. Shawn wanted to slug him so bad it hurt. “Just so you know.”

  “You no longer have an alibi.” Vincent wouldn’t be seeing Mrs. Ross again. “Just so you know.” Shawn hung up then called in backup for an armed hostage situation.

  While he waited for the cavalry, he wondered where in hell Comet was. He needed to get Sarah out of there. He looked through the telescope and shifted it slightly to look into Lyle’s room. Nothing. But if Comet were in there, was he supposed to know Shawn was looking, and maybe bounce up from the floor a couple of feet so he could see into the carriage house?

  The patrol officer called to let him know that they were at the apartment.

  A news van (WJAM) pulled into the driveway and out hopped a female anchor in a skirt and suit jacket, with two camera and sound guys. Shawn took this in with equanimity. They didn’t know where he was, or where Vincent was, unless Vincent called them himself, which he apparently did, because how else would they know? Maybe there was some scanner chatter, or someone at the department who dropped a tip.

  The patrol officer called from Vincent’s apartment to say that they found the boots in a small closet just off the kitchen. The tech said it looked like a match, but they were going to bring the boots back to the lab for testing.

  The phone rang. Sarah’s number.

  “Hi.” Sarah. “He wants me to tell you that the anvil-keeper is also here.”

  “Kendall Peterson?”

  There was a slight hesitation, then she said “Yes.”

  “Give me Vincent, please, Sarah.”

  After a moment, Vincent took the phone.

  “Why did you kill Haviland, Vincent?” Shawn rocked on his heels by the large glass window on the north end of the carriage house, shifting his eyes from the confused news crew to the door closest to the basement.

  “Why do you think?”

  “I want you to tell me.”

  “All I wanted was to be helpful to her — “

  “By reading to Lyle? Taking him for walks?” Shawn turned away from the window and walked slowly down the middle of the room, head down.

  “Yes, that, and making sure he was fed the right foods – “

  “Like buttercups?”

  Silence. Then Vincent’s voice lowered to a menacing tone. “Look, I took care of Lyle. I made sure he got enough sunlight, and made sure his burrow wasn’t disturbed, and made sure he had enough entertainment. I soaked him in the bath every day. I made sure his nails were trimmed. I got him out of holes —”

  “You took care of him until you killed him. Right after you killed Haviland Sylvain.”

  Vincent hung up.

  “Shawn Danger, crack hostage negotiator,” Shawn said to the empty room. “Brought in for one last job.”

  He looked out the window at the news crew, who had been joined by a second van from a different station (WVOJ, Voice of Jamesville, which must have had a problem with being called something else). They and WJAM would be fighting over the best filming spot for a while.

  He took out Haviland’s notebook and thumbed through it after the page he had bookmarked. He flipped through a few pages of more crazy stuff Vincent had said, along with another cat sketch — they were more common the further ahead he went, as though the heiress had become more and more preoccupied, even obsessed, with the same cat that had taken over his house. There were some notes on breakfasts she had enjoyed — wait. There…

  A page torn out. The last one.

  He flipped ahead, jolted, then flipped back. What was that, a football play? It was the last thing before the missing page. Shawn had no idea how to interpret it. His father, that scabrous old vet, would know this. Just his luck.

  The phone rang again. Vincent really was a needy bastard. No wonder he triggered Haviland Sylvain’s EC.

  “You told me that you also had to be the strong one in your family. That you also tried to please everyone.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “That was bullshit, wasn’t it? Just something you told me to relate to me, so I would talk to you more. Slip up. Right?”

  “It’s true that was not my role in the family.”

  “What was your role?” Vincent asked.

  “Goat.”

  “But you have a family.” Vincent’s voice was tight.

  “I guess, technically, you could call it that.”

  “Well, I don’t have a family — “

  “Because you killed them in Syracuse?”

  A beat of silence, then Vincent kept going. ” — And you purposely misled me. So I’ll tell you what, Detective. I want a current photo with you and all of them, together.” He sounded like he really enjoyed saying that.

  “That’s not going to happen, Vincent.”

  “But I insist.”

  “Sorry, no. What else you got?”

  Vincent carried on as though he hadn’t spoken. “I’m not going to release my hostages unless and until you show me that photo. Make sure that your parents are in it. Maybe I’ll be more in the mood to keep them here forever, if you don’t bring me that photo.” He sounded pleased with himself.

  “Absolutely not. I don’t even think that’s possible.” Oh god, they were having that big get-together today, too.

  “It’s simple, Detective. If you want Sarah and Comet back, you’ll get that photo. If you want them to end up like a certain paper heiress and spoiled African tortoise, then don’t bother.”

  Vincent disconnected.

  Shawn requested that a sniper be stationed in position to shoot Vincent, if he threatened the safety of the hostages. He waited for the confirmation that the sniper was in place. Then he ran to his car, started it up, and backed out fast, the anchors running toward him with microphones. Like his motor pool car had something to say?

  His family had been at him for days to attend this family event. Now he would show up right at the end of a case, thus seeming to negate everything he had ever said to them.

  He looked to the left and pulled out onto the one-lane street that led out of the area. This would really set him back. He could hear them now, in his head. At the stoplight, Shawn stared ahead, the way to his father’s house, with a grim determination. His stomach roiled. It was a good thing he had been too busy to eat. Every nerve in his body wanted him to turn left or right, and keep driving until he reached water, and then take a plane across the water to the next continent, and then keep going until he reached the very opposite point.

  But Sarah and Comet weren’t a part of that. He had to keep them in his head like other detectives kept photos of their family — their wives and children — in their wallets, on their desks. So he kept driving straight ahead, in increasingly strange weather, to his father’s house, and parked on the curb. He rested his head against the seat, trying to calm his heart and his fluttering stomach. The only way he was going to do this was to do it fast, like setting a dislocated finger.

  Sarah and Comet. Just think of Sarah and Comet.

  And Kendall Peterson, if he was in there, too.

  Shawn took a series of deep breaths as he logged in to the webcam in Lyle’s room. “You are a homicide detective,” he said in the car. “You need to solve this case. You need to get this photo.” He repeated that twice as he waited for the screen to focus.

  The other Shawn was also gettin
g a family portrait done, but everyone was wearing rolled up blue jeans and white shirts. They were gathering willingly in the backyard and seemed like different people, though they weren’t. There was even a Golden Retriever that sat in the front middle and let its tongue loll out.

  “You are kidding me.”

  He got out of the car and shut the door quietly. He felt about a minute away from just passing out. Part of the problem, he knew, was the protracted build-up to this birthday party for his father — the scabrous, whiskey-loving man who returned from Vietnam with a hair-trigger temper and intense resentment of his wife and children, who was now confined to a bed. And Shawn was going on the demand of someone who murdered a woman, poisoned a tortoise, destroyed his beloved aunt’s antique phone and radio and his grandfather’s bomber jacket, took his cat and the woman he liked, and went through his house like an F4 tornado. Which made him resent doing this in every possible way, from every possible angle.

  It was in this mood that he walked into the house through the already open door and walked through rooms he had grown up in. The kitchen had been updated, not for the better, in Shawn’s opinion, and some of the furniture had been replaced with things you would buy at a hardware superstore. He hated it. But then, he didn’t much like it before, either.

  “Oh-ho, there’s the famous detective!”

  “We’ve been watching you on TV. When are they going to call in someone good?”

  “Looks like you can take some time away for your family after all.”

  Sarah and Comet. Sarah and Comet.

  His aunt handed him a plate and steered him to a table piled high with food. He took a modest amount, then someone else — Melly — grabbed his plate, added twice that, and gave it back to him.

  His grandfather wobbled in. “Where’s the sponge candy?”

  “Ko-Ed isn’t shipping it ‘til after Halloween.” His mother took the lid of a plastic platter of veggies then took a pitcher out of the fridge.

  “It’s not Halloween yet?”

  “No!”

  “Don’t they want to sell anything?” his grandfather asked, in a yell.

  “It’s the weather! It’s not cold enough yet!” his mother yelled back.

  “We have to wait until it’s forty below? Give me the damn phone, I’m going to call those jokers and give them a piece of my mind.”

  “I have some frozen from last year!”

  “We finished that!” Melly yelled.

  “I take it you put someone else in charge over there?” one of his uncles asked him, thankfully not in a yell.

  “Where?” Shawn’s head starting to pound.

  “That woman’s mansion,” the uncle said. “It’s always good to delegate. Maybe call in one of those specialists who know what they’re doing.”

  SARAH AND COMET.

  Shawn wondered if there was any point to telling them that he was the lead, and only, homicide detective, working the case. That he could, and did, delegate witness statements, canvassing, and other tasks, but when it came to finding the person who committed that homicide? That was all him.

  The stick game was thrown down, and he had to make those sticks connect. If he didn’t do it, it didn’t happen.

  He really wanted that torn-out page in Haviland’s journal.

  “You know what I’d really like to do while we’re all here?” Shawn said with a wide grin, thinking he should be up for an Academy Award. “Get a photo of all of us. Who’s got the camera?”

  “Julie has a camera,” one of his cousins said.

  “Great!” Shawn clapped his hands together like he couldn’t wait. “Let’s all line up in the backyard.” This was much more difficult than he had expected, and he had low expectations. A few people wandered in that general direction, but others said they had something to do in the kitchen, and the men went back to watching football, waiting for the women to insist on their presence, and the cousins kept on being future menaces to humanity, popping the balloons that others had so carefully tied to table legs and door handles.

  Melly sidled up next to him and spoke in his ear like Iago. “Who are you and where is the real Shawn?”

  Shawn tried to find Julie, or at least Julie’s camera, which he hoped wasn’t a land camera, and that alone took him nearly ten minutes. He checked his phone. Media, media, media, captain, captain, beat cop, captain, media. Damn.

  Julie was in the den playing a game with cousins her own age. Shawn leaned in. “Julie, would you mind coming out to the backyard to take a photo of everyone? It’ll just take a minute.”

  She rolled her eyes but tossed her controller on the sofa and grabbed her camera. He took her by the shoulders and steered her out of the living room into the backyard. “Stay there. Please.”

  Then he went back through the open door and pulled his mother out of the kitchen.

  “Don’t you think your father should be in the photo?”

  “Absolutely.” Shawn fumed inside. “You want to take the photo in his room?”

  “Well, let me go ask him.”

  Shawn wondered if he may actually go insane. Then his family would have won. He couldn’t let that happen.

  “Please hurry,” he said through his teeth. She made an exasperated expression and went into a hallway down to his father’s room. Shawn loved that his family hassled him as much as they did, but when he actually seemed to want to do a family thing, they were annoyed.

  Just a little longer. You don’t need absolutely everyone. How would Vincent know if everyone wasn’t in it?

  What seemed like epochs later, time during which civilizations rose and fell and stars went supernova, his mother came back out. “He’s not happy about it, but I think I talked him into it.”

  His Aunt Jo walked up to them and crossed her arms. “I know you want to see your father, anyway.”

  About as much as he wanted to stand in front of a tsunami.

  “Okay, let’s do this.” Shawn ran out to the backyard and signaled Julie to come into his father’s room, which used to be a den on the first floor. It was now a bedroom filled with softly beeping hospital equipment.

  As he stepped into the room, a male nurse looked at him as though to say, ‘Who the hell are you?’ This was understandable, considering he had never seen Shawn before. He showed his badge. “Shawn Danger, Jamesville Police, homicide.”

  His mother laughed contemptuously at Shawn.

  SARAH AND COMET!

  “Danger? Any relation to Bill Danger, Senior?” the nurse asked.

  Shawn liked to indulge the teenage fantasy that he had been switched at birth in the hospital. But since he didn’t physically resemble anyone in the family, this seemed like a real possibility.

  “Son,” Shawn conceded, reluctantly. The nurse raised a brow slightly, but took a step back and raised an arm to indicate that Shawn should enter. His father’s eyes were closed. Shawn held Haviland’s notebook and thought he should get a bracelet with the acronym W.W.T.O.S.D. What would the Other Shawn Do? Even though he kind of hated the guy.

  “Dad.”

  After a moment, his father’s papery eyelids fluttered then opened halfway in a scowl.

  “You.”

  Shawn leaned in to his mother and said, under his breath, “Mom, could you help me get everyone in place, please?”

  His mother started moving people around like furniture, telling some to go toward the back and some in front of them, according to height. The old men grumbled, and when there was a touchdown, two of them left. Shawn went after them, and said the photo would only take a minute.

  “Whatever,” his grandfather said. Did they get that from their grandchildren, or vice versa?

  Shawn’s mother took the old men by the shoulders and maneuvered them in place.

  “Now, Julie,” Shawn said, as though he had a very short window to beam them all into another universe.

  “Smile!” she said, in a completely insincere tone.

  “Or not,” Shawn said. “It’s up to you.
Take it, Julie.”

  Julie took several shots before Shawn’s family — finding it completely unnatural to be together and to conceptualize themselves as part of a family — began straying.

  “Can I borrow your camera for a few hours?” Shawn asked Julie.

  She scrunched up her face and shrugged one shoulder. “I guess.”

  “Great.” Shawn took the digital camera, pressed the play button to verify that the images were on there, and slung it over his shoulder. He desperately wanted to leave, but there was one more thing he had to do.

  He approached his father in the bed, took out Haviland’s notebook, and flipped to the right page.

  “I want you to look at something,” Shawn said, cutting to the chase.

  “No bullshit, huh? Better be a nudie mag. I can’t even get some hot chippie nurse. Stuck with this jerk-off.”

  Shawn slid his eyes to the nurse, a very fit, very capable-looking man who shrugged and flashed a tight smile. Yeah, try growing up with it. Shawn held the notebook open. “What do you make of this?” He tapped the specific part with his thumb. “It’s a football play, right?”

  He didn’t know a damn thing about football. Maybe it had something to do with his Dad watching it with a bottle of Jack, yelling at everyone to shut up or get out of the way. Valuing the game a lot more than his own family. Shawn grew up hating it.

  “Holy crap.” His father glared at him with icy blue eyes underneath gray eyebrows that resembled a new species of venomous caterpillar that scientists found in Indonesia. “You’d think you weren’t my son. You think this is a play schematic? Did you learn nothing?”

  On purpose.

  “So if it’s not a football play, what is it?” Shawn asked, tired.

  “It’s a goddamn infantry maneuver! Send in a bunch of soldiers one by one, tell them to walk in different directions, and confuse the other side while you waltz straight down the middle.”

  Shawn closed the notebook. “Great, Dad. Thanks for your help.”

  “Next time, bring some Jack. Least you could do, considering I raised you.”

  “Good to see you, as always.” Shawn paused at the door and turned to look back at his father in the bed. “I hope I don’t trip on one of these big cords on the way out. That would be a tragic loss to the world.”