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Slowly she pulled the pantry door open-and slammed it closed again, trying to catch her breath.

Her first thought was that some kind of meat had been butchered in there and been flung around, then left lying in globs on the floor. Who would do such a thing? And there were hanks of hair on it, pieces of fur.

Dark fur, mixed with gore and blood.

Fur mottled like…

Terrified, ripping open the door again, she expected to see tortoiseshell fur mottled black and brown. Those cats roamed everywhere, they were likely to slip into anyone's house. But who would…?

Oh, not the kit. Please, not the kit.

Having flung open the door, she forced herself to look carefully.

Relief flooded her. This wasn't the kit's tortoiseshell fur, nor Dulcie's tabby-striped coat. This fur was coarse and rough-black and gray, not brown.

Raccoons?

Raisins and crackers were mixed with the blood. From the shelves, the contents of burst cans of corn and fruit salad dripped down. Raccoons couldn't do that-the cans had been blown open by some tremendous force.

She turned away, her breakfast wanting to come up. What kind of horrible prank was this? What sick joke? She stood holding her hand to her mouth, trying to mask the smell, trying to keep from heaving. Trying to construct a plausible scenario.

Chill air touched her from above, a cold draft. Looking up at the pantry ceiling, she saw the access door had been tampered with, the plywood cover apparently pulled aside, then pushed crookedly back again into place, its unpainted parts marking its altered position. Would raccoons be able to pull aside an attic door, would they know how to do that?

Certainly raccoons had broken into several village houses that were supposedly vermin proof. She remembered when a dozen of the beasts got into the Carvers' house through the attic and down into an upstairs bedroom, terrifying old Mrs. Carver nearly to apoplexy. And that wasn't the only bizarre tale of the damage raccoons could do. When two of them got into the high school by shoving aside an acoustical tile, they took over the principal's office and quite effectively rearranged his filing system before they could be evicted. As she stood studying the bloody mess, trying not to be sick, she realized she was looking, among a pattern of dark splatters, at a ragged hole in the Sheetrock.

A bullet hole? Was that what happened, had these animals been shot? She thought the bullet would have to have been a hollow-point, to tear the beasts up like that and to make that huge ragged hole in the wall.

She imagined the animals breaking in, making a racket as they attacked the food, then Elliott flinging open the door and shooting them. Afterward, he must have pushed the plywood back over the ceiling opening, maybe thinking that more of the beasts were up there.

Couldn't he have thought of some other approach than killing them? The police carried animal nets for this kind of emergency. Or the police would have called a specialist. There were several services in the area that had humane traps to deal with such cases. She felt rage that he had called no one, that he had shot the them. And then, to top it off, he had left the mess for her to clean up.

Swallowing back her anger, she fetched rubber gloves from her tote bag, and put on one of the surgical masks she carried for use when she didn't want to breathe caustic fumes. Tying a dish-towel over her hair, she cursed the Traynors. She was a cleaning professional, not a dead body disposal service. Not in this situation. This wasn't the aftermath of police business, to which she had been summoned. She felt like walking out, telling them to clean up their own mayhem.

With a roll of paper towels and a dustpan to use as a scoop and several heavy garbage bags, she cleared out the spilled food and scrubbed away the blood where it had splattered on the walls and shelves. She dumped the undamaged cans in a bucket of hot, soapy water and scrubbed each one. As she cleaned, she found three other holes. From one, she dug out a soft-nosed bullet smashed like a mushroom. The other was too deeply embedded. When she had finished scrubbing and disinfecting and carried the bags out to the garbage, she saw that her work wasn't finished.

The yard around the back door was covered with garbage- empty cans, soiled wrapping paper, all kinds of household refuse. Strange that the garbage can itself was upright, with the lid secured.

After pitching the scattered garbage piece by piece into a fresh plastic bag, she opened the tall can and saw that two bags were already there, heavy with something, and smelling of gore; and she felt disgust all over again. Traynor had put the bodies here. That sickened her. Couldn't he have given them a decent burial? This was going to be her last day working for Elliott Traynor. It took a really colossal nerve to leave such a mess, not only in the pantry but in the yard, not even to pick up the garbage, no matter how famous he was.

When she'd finished cleaning, she threw her mask and hair cover and gloves into the garbage, fetched a clean uniform and shoes from her van, and, in the Traynor's guest bath, washed her face and hands and arms, washed every exposed part of herself, dropping her soiled garments and shoes in a plastic bag to be discarded. She'd bill Traynor for replacements. Cleaning up after a murder didn't hold a candle to this.

Returning to the kitchen to fetch the vacuum, the thought struck her that not only raccoons but a man could have been shot in there.

How silly. Did she always have to imagine more than was possible?

And yet…

If there had been a man, she thought, panicked, she had destroyed the evidence.

Hurrying out to the garbage can, she hauled out the plastic bags she had filled and opened the two at the bottom.

Raccoons. Badly mangled. Surely that accounted for the blood and gore.

Tying up the bags again and stuffing everything back on top, she closed the lid tightly and went inside to scrub herself all over again-and to call the police department. Her feelings about Elliott Traynor, which had before today deteriorated from admiration to puzzled unease, had turned to disgust.

She supposed she was too inclined to see her heroes as giants above reproach. She expected Elliott Traynor to be without any possible fault.

Though she didn't suppose that it was illegal to shoot raccoons, under the circumstances, she thought she ought to tell Max of the incident, thought there might be some reason that he would need to know this. When she'd placed the call, the dispatcher told her Captain Harper was in court. She left a message for him to call her, she didn't want to tell the dispatcher why. She felt tired, enervated. Felt used and unnaturally defenseless-not her usual state of mind.

She wanted to see Max and feel the strength of him holding her, wanted to hear some wisecrack, some wry comment about murdered raccoons, some twisted cop humor that would make her laugh.

But then when she went to dust the dining room and mop its tile floor, she found Traynor's note. It lay on the table beside a hundred-dollar bill.

Ms. Getz:

Raccoons got in the pantry. No time to call anyone. I shot them with a target pistol. Sorry for the mess. Here's an extra hundred. Appreciate if you don't mention this. Embarrassing scene I’d not want talked about.

Not a graceful communication. Short and abrupt. Well, what did she want, a eulogy to dead raccoons? She felt inclined to leave his hundred-dollar bill. Surely Traynor had intended this as a bribe.

But she had more than earned the hundred, cleaning up his mess. If she didn't take it now, she'd be billing him for the extra work. Likely the money was intended as both payment and bribe.

She called it earned, slipped it her pocket, and got on with the vacuuming. She did the living room and front bedroom, emptying the wastebaskets with distaste, where Vivi's cherry seeds stuck to the plastic liners. Only when she started on Traynor's study did she slow her pace.