The Kitty Haven is just around the corner from the diner, so I was there in no time to get Elvis and Lucy. I carried their cardboard carriers inside and helped Marge settle Elvis into the one with his scrap of paper still in it and Lucy into the other. I paid Marge, put the receipt in my pocket to give Cupcake and Jancey, and lugged the carriers out to the Bronco. As if she realized she was going home, Lucy poked a paw through the air holes and made excited noises. Elvis was quiet. Probably sniffing his paper to make sure nobody else had played with it since he left it.
15
All the way to the Trillins’ house, the phone call I would have to make to Guidry rode in the car with me like a little gray cloud. It was still with me when I pulled into the Trillins’ driveway and got the cat carriers from the Bronco. Jancey saw me from the living room window and opened the front door before I rang.
She said, “Good timing! We just this minute got here.”
She had an odd expression on her face—a normal reaction to returning to a house where a crime-scene cleanup team had removed all the familiar odors. Like other animals, humans rely on their sense of smell as well as their vision and hearing to recognize places and people. Take away the smell of your own home and it will seem alien.
In the living room, Cupcake was looking around like a tourist visiting a house of some historical figure.
I couldn’t keep from looking toward the spot on the floor where the dead woman had lain. The cleanup guys had done an excellent job. Nobody would have guessed the floor had been awash with blood a few days before. If Jancey and Cupcake noticed the absence of a rug that had lain on the tile, they didn’t mention it.
I set the cat carriers on the floor and knelt to open them. Each cat leaped out, Elvis carrying his beloved crumpled paper. Their ears flattened when they smelled the neutral air, and they both went hyper for a few minutes, racing around the room, leaping on furniture, generally acting like wild cats. Also a natural reaction to the absence of familiar odors in a familiar place.
After they had thrown enough of their own cells around to feel at home, they reverted to their sweet selves. Lucy rubbed her cheek against Jancey’s leg to deposit scent cells on her, and Elvis trotted confidently toward the media room, still carrying his precious paper. Having marked her territory with cheek glands, Lucy made a chirping noise and galloped after her brother.
Cupcake said, “Dixie, Sergeant Owens said for us to go through the house when we got home and make a note of anything changed or missing. You’d better come with us. You’d know if anything was moved after we left.”
I suspected they just wanted somebody else with them when they went through the house for the first time, but I would have felt the same way. We moved room to room, Cupcake and Jancey studying every piece of furniture, every picture, every curio. In the bathrooms, they stared at the towels and soaps as if they suspected them of being different than the ones they’d left there. In the kitchen, Jancey even pulled out drawers and looked inside them while Cupcake examined the interior of the refrigerator.
By the time we headed down the hall to the master bedroom, they seemed anxious in a different way. Personally, I was a wreck. I kept remembering the shirt Briana had worn the first time I saw her. I could imagine her tossing it on the bed and leaving it there for Jancey to find.
Jancey said, “If that bitch slept in our bed, I’m getting a new one tomorrow.”
The shirt wasn’t on the bed or on either of the two chairs in the room. The white silk duvet on the bed was smooth, too, and the artfully piled pillows showed no sign of having been dented by another woman’s head.
But a pair of black sneakers sat in the middle of the duvet. The sneakers looked brand-new. Each shoe had the stark white Nike swoosh. Each was roughly the size of a loaf of bread.
For a moment, we all stared at the shoes without speaking.
Jancey said, “Cupcake?”
He said, “I didn’t leave them there.”
They looked at me, and I shook my head.
They strode to the bed and each picked up a shoe. They turned those Nikes over, examined their insides, pulled their tongues out, sniffed them, and then turned them over again and repeated each step.
Jancey said, “They’re eighteen double-E’s.”
Cupcake nodded. “My size.”
“Are you sure you didn’t get them just before we left and put them here?”
“I didn’t buy these shoes. I didn’t leave them here.”
They turned to me again, and I shook my head again.
I said, “I always make a fast pass through the house when I’m here just in case a cat has done something I need to clean up. Those shoes weren’t here the last time I was in this room.”
Cupcake said, “That would be the day before that crazy woman broke in.”
“Right.”
Jancey said, “Cupcake, how does that Briana person know what size shoe you wear?”
“How the hell would I know, Jancey? I keep telling you, I don’t know her!”
Jancey said, “You shouldn’t wear those things. They could have radiation or flesh-eating bacteria on them that could kill you. Maybe you should give them to the police.”
Cupcake looked like he might cry any minute, just from confusion.
In my head, over and over, I heard Briana telling about breaking into houses with Cupcake: Cupcake mostly did it so he could get a pair of Nikes.
Jancey pulled back the duvet to uncover pale pink sheets neatly tucked under the mattress. Her face relaxed. “I don’t think she got in our bed.”
Cupcake said, “Jancey, I swear to God I never knew that woman. I’ve never talked to her. I don’t know anybody else who knows her.”
I said, “Maybe it wasn’t Briana who left the shoes. Maybe it was the woman who was murdered.” I didn’t believe that, but I wanted to.
Cupcake closed his eyes. “God, I’d forgotten about her.”
Shamed, Jancey said, “Me, too.”
Cupcake said, “Dixie, don’t you think it’s peculiar that nobody knows who that woman was?”
I said, “She didn’t have any identification on her body. No wallet, no purse, nothing with a name or address on it.”
“Couldn’t they tell from fingerprints?”
I told him the same thing I’d told Tom Hale. “Some people live their entire lives without being fingerprinted. There’s also a DNA database, but DNA is only collected in criminal cases.”
Jancey said, “You’d think her family would report her missing.”
“Maybe there is no family. Maybe she’s a loner that nobody misses.”
For a moment, my mind snagged on all the things we didn’t know—gaps in personal histories, holes in life stories, dark secrets that could cost another life. Briana was either from Switzerland or Louisiana. She had or had not known Cupcake as a kid. Somebody had left a new pair of Nikes in the middle of the Trillins’ bed, and nobody knew why. Men who spoke a foreign language had hurt me very badly, but I had no bruises to prove it. A woman had been murdered and nobody knew who she was.
In the media’s coverage, the murder in Cupcake’s house had been merely an excuse to explore Briana’s glamorous life and Cupcake’s sports history and philanthropic activities. When the dead woman was discussed at all, it was merely to give the particulars of her color, size, and approximate age. There hadn’t even been the usual nattering talk shows about how odd it was that not one but two women had broken into Cupcake’s house that morning.
The doorbell rang, and we snapped to attention.
I said, “I’d better go home now. Call me if there’s anything I can do to help.”
We all moved toward the front door, and Cupcake opened it. The homicide detective, Steven, stood outside.
He said, “Mr. Trillin? I’m Steven Jorgensen, with the FBI.”