Twenty feet above us, Elvis and Lucy watched from their racetrack at the ceiling. The track had padded sides to keep them from accidentally slipping off while they bounded after each other, so we could only see their heads and wide eyes looking down at us. Maybe it was my imagination, but they seemed to be offended that I was snooping into their napping and hiding places. I didn’t blame them.
I prayed that Elvis hadn’t dropped the list on the racetrack. Getting up that high and inspecting every foot of the track would take people with more experience and taller ladders than I had.
I was mentally thumbing through the names of painters and paperhangers I knew when I climbed to the top rung of the ladder and looked into a bright orange tube. A crumpled slip of thin paper lay pushed against one side, as if a cat had napped with the paper against his back. Holding my breath, I reached inside and pulled the paper out. About six inches long and four inches wide, it had been folded and stuffed in a handbag, held between a cat’s teeth, laid upon, and pushed between a cat’s body and the side of the tube. It held the imprint of feline incisors, and the ink was blurred by cat spit, but the names, addresses, and phone numbers were legible. I recognized some of the names of upscale stores where wealthy tourists shop when they come to southwest Florida.
I looked up at Elvis, who was fixing me with the steely-eyed look of a department store detective about to make an arrest.
“Sorry, Elvis.”
Clutching the list with the same determination with which Elvis had held it, I climbed down the ladder. I held the paper out to Steven.
“These are Briana’s local contacts. I’m sure she has a similar list for other cities, but this is the one she and her rivals thought I had. She had it in her handbag when she broke in here to leave the Nikes on the bed. The cat got it and took it up to his hiding place on the climbing tree. Briana’s former boyfriend gave the list to her before he went to prison. His partners saw that as a betrayal, so they had him killed. Their security people knocked me out because they thought I had the list.”
Steven took the paper and gave it a cursory glance. “How do you know this?”
“Briana came in one of the houses where I was pet sitting. She offered to cut me in on her business because she thought I had the list of merchant names. She had the counterfeit merchandise, so she thought we could be partners. I told her I had made multiple copies of the list and that I would make them public if anybody leaned on me.”
He nodded as if he approved. I didn’t care.
I said, “This has to stop, Steven, and it has to stop now. The stalking, the assaults, the home intrusions. You’re the law enforcement officer here, not me. So stop all this.”
Steven opened a small notebook, carefully laid the list of names inside it, and closed it.
“Two details still to be answered, Ms. Hemingway: Why the Nikes on the bed, and who killed the woman?”
“Like I said, Steven, it’s your job to figure those things out, not ours. Briana told me the woman was an FBI agent. I assume that means your people were already watching Briana before the murder.”
Cupcake said, “They must not have been watching very well.”
Steven flushed, and I realized that humiliation was part of the reason the FBI hadn’t released the murdered agent’s name. Cupcake was right. They hadn’t protected one of their own, and she’d been murdered.
Steven said, “Ms. Hemingway, did Briana say anything about the murder?”
“She claims she doesn’t know who did it. I didn’t press her on it.”
“So how did your meeting end?”
“I told her to leave me alone, and to leave Cupcake and Jancey alone.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. She left, and I finished my rounds and came here.”
“How did you know where you’d find the list?”
I shrugged. “I know Elvis. He has a paper fetish.”
He looked as if he doubted that a cat could have a fetish of any kind but wisely kept quiet about it. He thanked me for giving him the list, apologized to Cupcake and Jancey for the inconvenience they’d endured, and went off in his nondescript brown sedan to do FBI things.
Cupcake and Jancey and I said exhausted good-byes, and I went off in my Bronco to find solace in my apartment. I didn’t see them do it, but I’d bet good money that Elvis and Lucy bounded down to snuggle into their favorite roosts on the climbing tree. Whether you’re a cat or a human, nothing makes you feel as safe as the comfort of a soft enclosure.
22
I should have felt enormous relief, but I didn’t. I was glad I’d found the precious list that Briana had left in Cupcake’s house, and glad I’d given it to an FBI agent. Now he knew which store owners in the area were knowingly selling fraudulent merchandise and charging for the real thing. Of course, targeting retailers and arresting them for selling fake merchandise was only half the solution. The other half was arresting Briana for providing the merchandise, and there was no proof the list had come from Briana.
Except for breaking into Cupcake’s house, there was no absolute proof of any criminal act that involved Briana. She hadn’t been charged with the agent’s murder. She hadn’t even been held in jail as a material witness. Either the homicide officers believed she was completely innocent of any knowledge of the crime or they were waiting for her to lead them to the killer. There was a good likelihood that she would walk away with only a fine for breaking and entering. She would return to Rome or Paris or wherever she lived and continue to run a business that manufactured fake designer merchandise.
Even more depressing was the fact that the person who had killed the FBI agent in Cupcake’s house would probably never be identified or apprehended. I didn’t believe Briana’s claim that she had disengaged one section of the security system for only the time it took her to enter the house. I thought it was more likely that she had left it disengaged the entire time she was inside. The security people wouldn’t have noticed that one small section was switched off, so the security cameras that should have captured photos of Briana, the FBI agent, and the killer entering the house would have been inoperative.
Law enforcement people don’t like to talk about it, but every police department and sheriff’s office has files of homicides in which somebody literally got away with murder. Most homicides are committed by people with whom the victim has some connection. A rejected lover, a disgruntled employee, a jealous husband or wife, people whose emotional barometer went kaflooey one day and sent them into a self-pitying rage that ended with another person’s death. Those killers leave a trail, either a physical trail or a historical one. But when the victim is a law enforcement officer and there are no witnesses or trace evidence left behind, the hunt for the killer becomes highly problematic.
While my mind chased after all the loose ends of the entire Briana situation, a solemn voice in my head asked, What is that to you?
I didn’t have much of an answer. As long as nobody attacked me or stalked me, none of it had anything to do with me. Oh, I could drum up some righteous indignation about people stealing designers’ ideas and selling them as originals instead of the knockoffs they really were, and I deplored slavelike conditions forced on workers in factories churning out fake designer products, but my supply of righteous indignation can only stretch so far, and there were plenty of things closer to home to get riled up about.
Even the FBI agent’s murder was an objective fact to me, not something that engaged my private emotions. I was sorry it had happened, but sorry in the way I was sorry when I read about the murder of any other person I didn’t know. Sorry I belonged to a species that includes beings who have lost their minds and souls to such an extent they can destroy another being. Sorry for the anguish the victims’ deaths caused their families and friends, sorry for the anguish the killer’s family and friends suffered. But the sadness wasn’t personal. It didn’t change my life. No matter how awful I thought the whole thing was, my sadness wouldn’t bring the agent back to life, and my disgust wouldn’t stop some people from cheating other people. Maybe it was pure self-centered selfishness on my part, but my main feeling was that I hoped I never saw Briana again.