Furbidden Fatality

by Deborah Blake

  Bryn talked to the cat in a soothing tone all the while speaking in an aside to Kari. “We’re going to need Dr. McCoy, if you think he’ll come out at this time of night. I think she needs stitches.” The petite calico hissed at Bryn from where she was backed into a corner. “And probably a sedative, frankly.”

  Kari felt like she could use a sedative herself, but that would have to wait until the crisis was over. “I’ll try calling him. Do you think you can catch her and get her into the treatment room without getting scratched?”

  “Grab me a big towel,” Bryn said. “This girl and I go way back. We’ll be fine. If I can get a towel wrapped around her, she’ll calm down some. I think it makes her feel less vulnerable.”

  Kari ran to get a clean towel from the long shelf that lined the hallway between the rooms and handed it to Bryn. She watched long enough to see that the girl was okay and able to grab poor Tinkerbell, then walked back into the main room, where Jim had stacked all the cat carriers against the wall as far from the mess as possible and was sweeping the broken glass into one corner.

  “Bryn and Suz got the last of the cats out of the feline room,” she told him. “If you could put plywood over those windows, we can clean up the glass in there first. We’ll have to sweep up the big pieces, then damp mop, and vacuum all the cat trees and rugs. At least we can just toss new clean bedding in there, so we’ll know that’s okay.”

  She could have wept at the thought of all the work it would take to make sure the place was completely free of even the tiniest sliver. But she told herself it could have been worse—at least it happened when they weren’t up and running at full capacity.

  Leaning against the wall, feeling half-crushed by exhaustion and anger, she called and woke up Angus, who promised to drive right over. She felt like she could have stayed propped up there forever, or at least for five minutes to catch her breath, but flashing red lights warned her of the belated arrival of the law.

  She was pretty sure that if Deputy Carter walked through that door with his bristling mustache and snarky attitude, she was going to burst into tears.

  Thankfully, however, it was the sheriff himself, with a very nervous Overton trailing behind him.

  “Quite the mess you have here,” Sheriff Richardson said. “Somebody really doesn’t like you.”

  “I kind of got that message,” Kari said wearily. “And I’m such a sweet and charming person, too.”

  The sheriff surprised her by laughing at her lame joke. “You’re not bad, as murder suspects go. Believe me, I’ve met worse.” He turned to the young deputy, who was still hovering in the doorway. “What the heck is wrong with you, Overton? Just because it is Carter’s night off and he isn’t here to hold your hand doesn’t mean you don’t have to do your darned job.”

  “It’s okay, Deputy,” Kari said. “The dogs are all locked up. And there are no windows in their kennels, so you won’t have to go anywhere near them. As long as you don’t mind cats, you should be fine.”

  The man’s overly broad shoulders stopped hunching up by his ears and he relaxed enough to come inside. “Oh, good. I like cats. My mom has one.”

  “Jeez, Overton,” Richardson said, rolling his eyes. “I don’t care if your mother has a pet boa constrictor. Go get the camera and take pictures of the crime scene, will you?” He glanced around. “I see you’ve already started cleaning up. You really should have left things the way you found them, Ms. Stuart.”

  Kari grimaced. “There were broken windows in the feline room, Sheriff. We have two cats that were injured as it is. If we’d waited, there might have been more.”

  “Hmmm,” he said. But he didn’t disagree. Kari remembered Sara telling her he was a dog lover, so maybe he cared about the animals after all. It was just her he didn’t like. Ironically, that actually made her feel better.

  He pulled out a notebook and had her run through everything that had happened from the time the noise had woken her up. At one point, Angus came in, medical bag in hand, and nodded at her as he walked through on his way back to the treatment area.

  “Well, there isn’t much we can do here,” Richardson finally said, flipping his notebook shut with a sigh. It occurred to her that he was probably almost as tired as she was.

  “What about taking fingerprints or something?” she asked.

  “Of what?” Richardson gestured at the piles of glass on the floor. “Those? Besides, you’ve had volunteers, employees, and workmen coming through here for days. There’s no way to eliminate all those people. Not to mention that the culprit probably used something like a baseball bat and then took it away with him.”

  “Or her,” Suz said cheerfully from where she was taping heavy plastic over the empty frame of a window. They’d run out of plywood already. “Never underestimate the power of a pissed-off woman.”

  The sheriff gazed at her, taking in her height and the muscles that came from wrangling hundred-pound dogs, and nodded.

  “Okay, or her. But either way, the odds are against our finding out who did this, unless someone saw or heard something suspicious and comes forward to report it.” He rubbed one hand through the stubble just starting to come out on his chin. “My recommendation, Ms. Stuart, is that you get an alarm system and some security cameras. That way if your unwanted visitor comes back, you might end up with something we can work with. Or scare him”—he glanced at Suz—“or her off before they can do any more damage.”

  “Security systems are pretty expensive, aren’t they?” Kari asked.

  The sheriff waved one hand around the room. “Cheaper than having to replace all your windows and repaint the place on a regular basis, I’d say.”

  He had a point. Besides, Mr. Lee would love the sound of an alarm going off in the middle of the night. Nothing like making friends with your neighbors.

  * * *

  * * *

  Kari sat at the front desk, one hand propping up her aching head as she gazed blearily at pictures of alarm systems on the Internet. They’d finally gotten things as under control as possible by around three in the morning. Tinkerbell’s cut was stitched up and she was settled into one of the cages in the main room until it healed enough and Angus decided it was safe for her to go back in with the others. As far as Kari was concerned, the vet was her knight in shining armor. He hadn’t even let her pay him, although she’d vowed to herself that she’d find some way to show her appreciation when things had calmed down.

  The windows in the feline room were secured with plywood, although a local company was due to come this afternoon and replace all the glass. This time she was going to spend the extra money for the more expensive safety glass that would break into tiny harmless pieces, although just for that space. The rest of the shelter would get regular glass, which would be costly enough. She didn’t know if the person who broke the windows was trying to scare her or punish her, but mostly they were really starting to piss her off.

  In the meanwhile, the other cats had also been placed in the largest of the individual cages, some of them together, if they got along. Once the windows were repaired and the volunteers had come in and finished the cleanup, they could go back into their room.

  She’d sent Suz and Bryn home to get some rest, but Jim had insisted on sleeping at the shelter, just in case their intruder came back. He’d hauled a sleeping bag out of the back of his truck and spread it out in the middle of the floor, and there had been no budging him. Jim was what Daisy referred to as a diamond in the rough—his manners weren’t very polished and he wasn’t well educated, but his dedication to the animals made those things seem incidental and unimportant. Initially, his head-to-toe tattoos and lack of conversation had made Kari doubt him, but after tonight she’d never do that again.

  He’d finally left around eight when everyone else showed up to do the morning feed and clean. Once the other volunteers and part-time employee Emma had been brought up to sp
eed, and Sara had finished complaining that no one had woken her up to come help, he’d finally agreed to go get some breakfast.

  Now it was a little after eleven and things were almost back to normal. All the glass had been swept up and placed in the dumpster, the floors had been mopped and vacuumed twice, and the dogs had been walked as far away from the areas of destruction as possible. Other than the occasional vocal complaint about being locked into cages instead of roaming free in their room, the cats seemed to have recovered from the trauma of the night before.

  Kari wished she could say the same.

  It wasn’t that she was having doubts, exactly. She still believed that buying the shelter had been the right thing to do, and despite the fact that her lottery winnings were disappearing at a slightly faster rate than she’d anticipated, there was still plenty left for the long-term work of saving as many animals as possible.

  It was just that, well, she hadn’t been expecting all the rest of this. The dead body—that was really unexpected, but in a way, it wasn’t the worst of it. (Although the nightmares of those ghastly staring eyes could stop any time now.)

  But the vandalism, and the clear malice behind it, that was starting to wear on her, along with the late nights and the constant frustrations. Part of her wanted to give up on trying to figure out who had killed Bill Myers in the hope that whoever was targeting the shelter would lay off if they did. But as Suz had said last night when Kari had voiced that thought aloud, as long as the real killer was unidentified, Kari and Daisy and Bryn’s aunt Izzy were all in danger of being arrested. And then there was poor Buster.

  As if her thinking about the issue had conjured up one more problem, a dark green SUV with magnetic County Dog Warden signs on the sides pulled into the parking lot.

  Kari stared at her empty coffee cup. She had really hoped to get more sleep before she had to deal with the new dog warden, but apparently neither the sleep gods nor the coffee gods were on her side today. If there were run-down-rescue gods, they had been conspicuously absent since she made her first appearance, although Sara kept insisting they’d sent Kari in the first place.

  A compact but muscular man wearing a simple uniform of khakis and a tan work shirt pushed open the front door and looked around. He had short dark hair and green eyes that were surprisingly vivid in his tanned face, which made it clear he spent more time outside than sitting behind a desk in an office. Kari thought he was probably about her age, although it was hard to tell for sure.

  “Hello,” he said, pleasantly enough. “I’m looking for Kari Stuart or Daisy Parker.”

  Kari came forward to greet him, trying to remind herself that just because the last dog warden had turned out to be an evil man who didn’t care about animals, that didn’t mean his replacement was the enemy. She hoped her doubt and nerves didn’t show. Queenie, who had been sleeping in a box of papers on the desk, lifted her head in interest but didn’t bother to get up.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’m Kari. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m Jack Falco, the new dog warden,” he said, holding out one callused hand for a firm handshake. “I’m here to follow up on a report about a dog named Buster.”

  Kari took a step backward. “Oh,” she said flatly. “I see.”

  “I’m trying to get up to speed on all the pending cases listed in my predecessor’s files,” he explained. “There seem to be a lot of them.”

  “Yes,” Kari said in a dry tone. “From what I can tell, he was very enthusiastic about his job.”

  “That’s one way of putting it,” Falco said. “I just moved to the area, but I was the dog warden in the city I lived in back in Ohio, and I didn’t have half the cases he did.” He gazed at the wide swaths of plastic covering the holes in the walls. “Are you renovating? Most people don’t remove the old windows until they have new windows to put in. This really isn’t safe for the animals.”

  Kari hadn’t had either enough sleep or enough coffee for this conversation. “You don’t say. That never would have occurred to me.” She moved toward the coffeemaker, which had thankfully been in the glass-free zone. “Can I make you a cup of coffee, Mr. Falco?”

  “No, thank you.” He made a few notes on the clipboard he was carrying. “Can you tell me when you intend to have new windows put in?”

  She poured cream into her coffee, put the container back into the mini fridge that had been added to the main room during the renovations, and added a spoonful of sugar. After a moment’s hesitation, she put in a second one. Kari had a feeling her morning was going to need all the sweetening it could get.

  Taking a deep breath, she turned back around to face the new dog warden, trying to plaster a convincing smile on her face. From his expression, she wasn’t sure she’d completely succeeded.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Falco. It was a long night. Someone vandalized the place last night and broke all the windows, as you can see. We were up late taking care of the cats who were in a room with broken glass, and trying to clean up the mess.” She took a long swig of coffee. “I’m afraid you’re not catching me at my best.”

  His eyes widened. “Someone did this on purpose? Why?”

  Kari shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine,” she said. “Apparently whoever did it wasn’t an animal lover.” For a split second she wondered if the Lees had come over from next door and trashed the place in an effort to get them to leave, so their nights would be quieter. But she dismissed the thought as crazy, even for her.

  “Were any of the cats hurt?” the dog warden asked, the lines around those remarkable eyes deepening with concern. “What about the dogs?” He glanced at his clipboard again. “You still have some of both here, correct?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Kari said, trying not to overreact to his official tone. He was just doing his job, after all. “Eight dogs and twelve cats. Usually the older cats are in the feline room, but we don’t want to put them back in there until the windows are replaced. The glaziers are coming later this afternoon,” she said, only a little defensively. “I’m paying them extra to fit us in right away.

  “Anyway, in answer to your questions, only two of the cats were hurt, and the vet has already been out to take care of them. The dogs are all fine. The kennels don’t have windows in them.”

  “They really should,” Falco said. “All animal areas are required to have adequate ventilation.”

  Kari thought he sounded as though he had memorized the rule book. Luckily, so had she. “‘For natural ventilation to be effective, it must function well in all types of weather. Since favorable external winds and weather conditions cannot always be relied upon, vents should be installed to increase air circulation.’”

  She walked back to the desk and held up the big blue binder they kept there with copies of all the forms the shelter used, rules for cleaning and feeding the animals, volunteer duties, and the section she had just quoted from, the entire mandated state code for shelters. “We have vents. We will also be installing air-conditioning, but it’s on the Need list, not the Do Yesterday list.”

  Kari was pretty sure she was babbling. But hey, she’d only had three hours of sleep, and it had been a stressful night.

  Falcon held up one hand. “I’m sorry, we seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot. I wasn’t criticizing. You clearly are well aware of the regulations. It had been my understanding that the shelter was in violation of a number of the codes, but perhaps my predecessor was mistaken.”

  She slumped against the desk, letting the book fall onto the surface with a thud. “There were a few issues, all of them due to lack of money. Daisy, the former owner, was trying to stem a flood with a teacup, but she did the best she could, and helped a lot of animals that wouldn’t have been helped otherwise. Now that I own the place, I’m getting everything up to speed as fast as I can.”

  “Ah, I see.” Falco nodded, giving her a sympathetic look. “Bit off
a little more than you can chew, eh?”

  Kari rolled her eyes, irrationally peeved at him despite that fact that he was only saying what she’d been thinking right before he walked in. “It would be a lot easier if I weren’t having to deal with vandalism on top of everything else.”

  Falco stared at her. “This wasn’t the first incident?”

  “Second,” she said. “The first time someone painted murderer and whore in bright red paint all over the newly redone exterior. Well, hore.” She spelled it out for him.

  “Ouch,” he said, wincing. “Maybe you should get a security system.”

  She pointed at the computer screen. “I was working on just that when you interrupted me.”

  He winced again. “Sorry. I’m just doing my job. I’ll try to get out of your hair as soon as possible. What can you tell me about this dog Buster?”

  “No, I’m sorry,” Kari said, wiping one hand over her face. “I don’t mean to be rude. I’m just tired and frustrated.”

  “We seem to be apologizing to each other a lot,” Falco said with a crooked smile. “Shall we try again? Hello, I’m Jack Falco, and I am the new dog warden. I promise, I’m one of the good guys.”

  That remained to be seen, depending on how things went with Buster, she thought. But at least she could give him the benefit of the doubt for now.

  “Why don’t you come back and meet Buster?” she suggested, waving him toward the door that led to the dog kennels. “He’s really a sweetheart. No one who works here believes that he bit anyone.” She turned to the desk. “Queenie, we’re going to go visit Buster. Do you want to come?”

  Queenie jumped off the desk and sauntered toward them, her tail straight up in the air and her small face eager as she walked to the door.