Copycat Killing

15

Maggie was watching for me at the front door of the co-op. I stepped inside and she smiled. “The pump’s working.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “The street’s open in front of the library so we’re reopening tomorrow and”—I held out my arm and rolled my left wrist in the air—“there’s no rain in the forecast for at least the next twelve hours.”

Maggie laughed. “Harry said the same thing. Well, technically his leg did.”

“There you go,” I said. “A forecast from two unimpeachable sources.”

Maggie scrunched up her face as she checked out my forehead. “That looks awful,” she said.

“Thank you for sharing.”

“No. I mean it looks sore.”

“It’s okay unless I forget and push my hair back or try to wiggle my eyebrows,” I said. I could feel Hercules getting restless in the bag. “And that little packet of herbs you gave me for the bathtub helped. I’m not nearly as stiff as I was.”

“You know, I have a marigold salve in my office that Rebecca taught me how to make. That would help your head,” Maggie offered.

“Okay.” My ankle felt better thanks to the salve Rebecca had given me. It wasn’t the first time one of her herbal remedies had made a difference.

“What’s in the bag?” Maggie asked. “I thought we were going to Eric’s?”

“I brought you a visitor,” I said. I unzipped the top of the bag and Hercules poked his head out, looked right at Maggie and meowed.

“Hey, Hercules,” she said. Then she looked at me and lowered her voice. “Why did you bring him?”

“You don’t have to whisper,” I said. “I brought Hercules so he could make sure there aren’t any other furry little visitors in the building.” And do a little sleuthing for me, I added silently.

I lifted the cat out of the bag and set him on the floor. The first thing he did was shake himself and take a couple of swipes at his face with a paw. It’s important to look good when one is nosing into other people’s business.

“Are you sure he’s not going to take off?” Maggie said.

“Hercules?” I said. “There might be dirt outside. There might be puddles. Not a chance.”

Maggie bent down to the cat. “Thank you for coming, Hercules,” she said. “I owe you a can of sardines all to yourself for this.”

He gave her a decidedly upbeat “meow” and licked his lips.

“Maggie, you talk to them like they’re people,” I said as she straightened up.

“I can’t help it,” she said. Hercules was looking around, plotting, maybe, where he was headed first. “They just bring out that kind of response in me.” She reached over and locked the door. “Anyway, you talk to them like they’re people too.”

Hercules meowed loudly. He was looking past me into the store space. “Go ahead,” I said. “You know what to do.”

“See what I mean?” Maggie said, starting up the stairs.

“The only reason I talk to Hercules and Owen as though they understand is because they have a very large vocabulary,” I said, following her up the steps into the studio space. The cat was already out of sight. “They’re like that dog we saw on the news a few months ago that knows over a thousand words.”

“Do you think Owen and Hercules know a thousand words?” she asked.

“Absolutely,” I said. “And they all have to do with food.”

“So why didn’t you bring Owen?” she said as she unlocked her office door.

“Because all he would have done was moon around you. The Godzilla of rodents could be in the room and he wouldn’t see it. If cats can have crushes, Owen has one on you.”

“I like the little fur ball,” Maggie said as she unlocked the cupboard opposite her desk. “Look at how he brought that chicken out to Roma. You can’t tell me he didn’t know she was upset. Okay, there it is.” She held up a small glass jar.

“What are you going to do about tai chi and yoga classes?” I asked.

“I’m hoping by Tuesday I can get everything out of the studio and back downstairs so we can have class again.”

“That would be good,” I said.

She put one hand on her hip and looked me up and down. “Have you been practicing the form?”

“Some.”

Her green eyes stayed fixed on me. “A little,” I said, ducking my head.

She grinned. “Maybe I’ll teach some of the movements to Owen and Hercules and then you’ll have someone to practice with.”

I got a mental picture of the two cats doing cloud hands and laughed. “Hey, have you talked to Roma?” I asked, only partly to change the subject.

Maggie shook her head. “I called her, but all I got was her voice mail. I’ll try her again later.”

“I will too,” I said.

She gestured to her desk chair. “Sit down.” She went into the little bathroom to wash her hands, then came back, pinned my hair off my face and put a thin layer of the salve on my scraped head. “How’s it feel?” she asked.

“Good,” I said, “and it doesn’t smell like feet.”

Maggie rolled her eyes and screwed the lid back on the little jar. She—with Rebecca’s help—had made a wrap for my wrist after the cast had come off last summer. It had helped the ache and the stiffness, but it had smelled, well, like feet.

“So what happens now?” I said. “Is Marcus still investigating Jaeger’s death?”

Maggie sat on the corner of her desk. “I don’t know. Did he say anything to you this morning?”

I shook my head. “No.” I thought about what I’d said to Lucy about Marcus and felt my face flush. Luckily Maggie had gotten up to put the salve back in her cupboard. “I did share your theory with him.”

“Let me guess; he wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about it.”

“Marcus isn’t the kind of person who’s going to give much credence to a gut feeling,” I said.

Maggie closed the cupboard and leaned against it. “I guess I can’t fault him for that. You can’t exactly take a gut feeling to court.”

The tiny purple buffer was in my pocket. I pulled it out. “Mags, have you ever seen this before?” I asked.

She frowned and moved in for a closer look. Then her expression cleared. “Sure. It’s one of the many, many attachments Jaeger has—had—for this little rotary tool he used for working on his masks. From Sweden. Very exclusive.”

So I was right.

She looked around the crowded office. “Was it on the floor? Don’t tell me I brought one of his boxes in here by mistake.”

I shook my head. “It was at Wisteria Hill.”

She froze, then swiveled slowly and deliberately to face me. “Wisteria Hill?” she asked.

“I picked it up right before the embankment collapsed.” It occurred to me that if I hadn’t picked up the little buffer pad, I might not have been so close to the edge, and the ground might not have fallen out from under my feet. Which meant Tom Karlsson’s body might never have been found. One thing was connected to the other, the way so many things—and people—seemed to be in Mayville Heights.

Maggie crossed her arms over her chest and leaned against the wall. “He was out there.”

“It looks like it.”

Her head was going up and down like a bobble-headed doll. “He was out there, probably looking for wood so he could go back to forging those religious icons. It’s probably why he was in the basement, too.”

I exhaled softly. “I had the same thought.”

Maggie fixed her green eyes on me. “You don’t sound completely convinced. In fact, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but is Marcus Gordon rubbing off on you?”

I got a mental picture of myself, running my hands along his strong jawline. I shook my head. Where had that come from?

“No,” I said. “But I do know how he thinks. Marcus is going to say we can’t prove this thing belonged to Jaeger and even if we could, it doesn’t prove he’d gone back to a life of crime, so to speak.”

Maggie scrunched up her face. “I hate it when you’re logical and sensible.”

“I’ll try not to do it too often,” I said. That made her smile. “And I do agree with you. Jaeger was up to something. I think we just need a little more evidence for Marcus.” I didn’t say I had Hercules roaming the building hunting for it.

“I can’t believe Jaeger lied to all of us,” she said. “I talked to Sam and helped Jaeger get this studio space and I vouched for him with Eric when he was looking for part-time work.” She shook her head. “So much for my good judgment. I didn’t even know the real person.”

“Neither did anyone else,” I pointed out.

“Am I overreacting? Do you think Jaeger had an agenda from the beginning?” she asked. “I mean, other than just a fresh start? He really was a nice guy in the beginning—or at least he seemed like one.”

“I don’t think you’re overreacting,” I said. I ran my hand along the arm of Maggie’s chair. It didn’t look very comfortable but it was. “Aside from the fact that Peter Lundgren was his lawyer and Peter was from here, Mayville seems like an odd choice for a place to start over. And Jaeger changing his name, changing the way he looked, just because he’d been in prison, it seems a bit much.”

“Why did Peter go along with the whole charade?” she said, stretching both arms up over her head.

“Probably some kind of lawyer/client thing.”

Maggie nodded, but I realized most of her focus was on the piles of boxes in the room. “You know, there’s a lot of Jaeger’s stuff to be dealt with between the studio and here,” she said slowly.

“I wonder if he had any family,” I said.

She twisted her mouth to one side in thought. “Peter has lunch at Eric’s at least a couple of times a week.”

“He does.”

She made a show of looking at her watch—or where her watch would have been if she’d been wearing it. “If we left now, maybe we could catch Peter and see if he knows who Jaeger’s next of kin is.”

“Maybe we could,” I said, getting to my feet. “It’s not as though you want to vent on Peter a little.”

“Uh uh,” Maggie said.

I did the Mr. Spock eyebrow.

She flushed. “Well, maybe just a little.”

I stared at her without saying anything.

“Well, maybe a lot,” she said. “I just need to wash my hands again and we can go.”

“All right,” I said.

Maggie stopped in the doorway. “Wait a second. What are we going to do with Hercules? We can’t take a cat to Eric’s.”

It didn’t seem like a good idea to tell her I’d actually done that once.

“We could leave him here in your office,” I said. “He’s nosy, but he won’t damage anything. He’ll probably end up sleeping in your desk chair.”

“Fine with me,” Maggie said.

While she went to get cleaned up, I went out into the open area at the top of the staircase where we hung up our coats and changed our shoes for tai chi class, intending to call Hercules. He was sitting under the coat hooks next to a pile of boxes and he looked, well, smug. That look generally meant he’d found something. I’d given up trying to find a logical explanation for the cats’ skill at sleuthing. My best guess was that it was somehow connected to their other abilities.

I shot a quick glance back over my shoulder, and then I bent down and held out my hand. “Spit it out,” I said. “Maggie will be back in a minute.”

He spit out what looked like part of an old pen. I stuffed it in my pocket and wiped my hand on my pants. The cat walked over to the top of the stairs, glanced down and meowed.

I looked over the railing. There was a corpse of something gray and furry lying by the front door. “Very nice,” I said approvingly. I crouched down to scratch the top of his head. “It is dead, right?” I whispered.

His response was to start washing his face with unconcerned confidence.

Maggie appeared then. “Stay here for a minute,” I said to her, straightening up.

Her eyes went from me to the cat. “Why?” she asked, her voiced edged with suspicion.

“Hercules found…something.”

She took an involuntary step backward. “Something…alive?”

I glanced over the railing again and gave a slight shake of my head. “Not anymore.”

Hercules was still zealously washing his face. I was pretty sure I knew whose job cleaning up down by the door was going to be.

When I came back up the stairs again, Maggie was sitting on the bench, talking to Hercules who sat about three feet away from her. “You’re my hero,” I heard her say. He did his best aw-shucks head dip.

“Gone,” I said to Maggie. Then I bent down and picked up the cat who was still doing his modest shtick, looking at Maggie sideways through his whiskers. “You’re laying it on a little thick,” I whispered as I carried him into Maggie’s office.

I fished in my purse for the little bag of cat crackers I’d brought with me. Maggie found a small glass bowl and went to get some water. “We’ll be less than an hour,” I said in a low voice. “You better be in here when we get back.”

Hercules pretended to suddenly be very interested in the bottom of his right front paw. “I know you’re not actually going to stay in this room the entire time but don’t leave the building.”

He looked up, all green-eyed kitty innocence. Then he licked my chin.

“I’m not kidding,” I said sternly. “I have three words for you: Animal Control Officer.”