Cats on the Prowl (A Cat Detective cozy mystery series Book 1) Read online

  Cats on the Prowl: A Cat Detective cozy mystery series

  Nancy C. Davis

  ©2015 Nancy C. Davis

  Copyright © 2015

  No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known, hereinafter invented, without express written permission from the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Thank you

  Your Gifts

  Chapter 1

  Willow, a fluffy white Persian, jumped up onto Sergeant Carl Ridout’s desk and pushed the papers out of the way with her paw. “I’ve never seen such an untidy man. I don’t know how he keeps track of anything in this mess.”

  Nat, the big tabby tom, lifted his head from Detective Naya Wesley’s chair and chuckled. The sound rumbled out of his chest in a deep purr. “He doesn’t keep track of anything. That’s exactly why he does it.”

  “Then how does he solve his cases?” Willow asked. “He’s a police sergeant. He’s supposed to be catching criminals.”

  “He doesn’t catch any criminals,” Nat told her. “Haven’t you figured that out yet? It’s Naya who solves the cases. I don’t think Sergeant Ridout has solved a case in the seven years I’ve been living here at the Nelson Police Station. I’ve followed the details of every case, and I’ve found it very clear who actually solves them.”

  “How can he be a police sergeant, then?” Willow asked. “Hasn’t anyone noticed he doesn’t do any work?”

  “I didn’t say he doesn’t do any work,” Nat explained. “He does a lot of work. Oh, my, does he ever do a lot of work! It’s just not the kind of work that would solve cases.”

  “What does he do?” Willow asked.

  “You’ve seen him,” Nat shot back. “You’ve been here almost a year now, ever since Naya found you in the drain behind the station. What a sight you were that day. I can still remember it. You looked like a half-drowned rat, with your hair all stuck to your head. We didn’t know if you would survive. You looked like something the cat dragged in.”

  Willow sniffed. “You don’t have to rub it in. I remember it as well as you do. I didn’t think I was coming to live at the police station to poke my nose into the confidential case files of the Homicide Department.”

  Nat licked his paw and cleaned the side of his face. “I didn’t think I was coming to poke my nose into confidential files, either. But when you’ve been here as long as I have, you can’t help but notice who does what. Carl sits at his desk and pushes paper from one side to the other until sweat pours off his forehead. He curses under his breath and mutters about how he doesn’t know what the world is coming to.”

  “I’ve seen that,” Willow replied. “That’s why I assumed he got a lot done.”

  “He gets a lot of filing done,” Nat told her. “Then you look at Naya. She sits at her desk, but she doesn’t make a sound. She doesn’t pick up one piece of paper and put it in a pile with a dozen other papers. She sits there for an hour or more, going over every detail until she finds out what she wants to know. Then she moves on to the next one and does the same thing. That’s how she finds the clues to solve cases.”

  “If you’re right,” Willow remarked, “it’s a good thing Sergeant Ridout has Naya for a partner. He could take the credit for her solving the cases.”

  “Naya wouldn’t have lasted ten seconds on the police force if she hadn’t had Carl for a partner,” Nat told her. “Naya was a raw recruit from the Academy when they started working together. Carl listened to her and believed in her when she solved her first case. She would have lost heart and quit the force without his support.”

  “Were you here back then?” Willow asked.

  “I was here,” he rumbled. “I’ve seen dozens of recruits come and go in my seven years. Naya has only been here three years, and Carl has been here five years. You watch them together. Naya comes up with the clues, but it’s Carl who pushes the case to its conclusion. She’s the brains and he’s the brawn. They’re a perfect team.”

  Willow glanced down at the papers around her feet. “I guess I have a lot to learn about police work. I don’t know what half these papers say.”

  “That’s because you can’t read,” Nat pointed out. “If you want to find out what’s going on with human beings, that’s the first thing you have to learn.”

  “How am I going to do that?” she asked.

  “I’ll teach you,” he replied. “It’s not complicated when you get the hang of it.”

  “How did you learn?” she asked. “Did someone teach you?”

  “No one taught me,” he replied. “I figured it out for myself. I wanted to understand why people thought these papers were so important. It took me a lot longer to learn by myself than it’ll take me to teach you, but never mind. You’ll get the hang of it, and then you can help me solve cases, too.”

  Willow’s head shot up. “You solve cases, too?”

  “Of course,” he exclaimed. “I wouldn’t be much of a police cat if I didn’t. I’ve been living at the police station for seven years. I’ve got to earn my keep somehow.”

  “I would love to solve criminal cases,” Willow cried. “How do you do it?”

  Nat sat up on the chair and faced her. “The first thing you’ve got to do—which you don’t do now—is to start paying attention around here. You can’t just lie around and purr and expect to become a real police cat. You can’t just curl up on Naya’s lap and go to sleep. You have to listen to what she says.”

  Willow pretended to sneeze. “I don’t just curl up on Naya’s lap and go to sleep. I’m not lazy. People keep cats for comfort. That’s the service I provide in exchange for my keep.”

  “Now, just listen to what I have to say,” Nat returned. “I’m not saying curling up on Naya’s lap and closing your eyes isn’t a good thing to do. I know giving people comfort is a big part of being a cat, although I don’t really do that sort of thing myself. I’m a tom. My job is singing on fences and spraying in their gardens. I’m just saying that, when you curl up on Naya’s lap and close your eyes, you only pretend to sleep. In reality, you keep awake and listen.”

  “But they don’t talk about much of anything,” Willow replied. “They mostly complain about the Captain and the Union and a bunch of other things I don’t understand.”

  “Those things you don’t understand are the details of their cases,” Nat told her. “That’s why you have to listen. While you’re learning to read the reports and letters and documents, you can pick up all kinds of information from listening to their conversations. That’s how I solve my cases.”

  “Can you really solve cases by listening to their conversations and reading all these papers?” Willow waved her paw at the clutter on Carl’s desk. “Wo
w, Nat, I’m sorry I didn’t realize you were so smart.”

  “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover,” he replied. “But I don’t solve cases by reading papers and listening to their conversations. That’s just the beginning. Once you’ve gleaned all the information you can from the papers and listening to them talk, you have to go out into the field.”

  “You mean like going out catching mice and crickets and that sort of thing?” Willow asked. “I was never very good at that. I get foxtails in my fur and grass in my ears. The last time I went, I had to spend six hours at the vet getting a foxtail taken out of my ear. It cost my owner seven hundred dollars, and she never let me outside again.”

  “I don’t mean that,” Nat explained. “When I say the field, I don’t mean grass and mice. I’m talking about hitting the bricks and hunting down your clues. You have to track down your suspects and find more clues and information. You won’t solve a case sitting behind a desk.”

  Willow put her head to one side. “Is that what Naya and Carl do all day? I thought they just went out together for a ride in the car.”

  “They go their own way,” Nat replied, “and I go mine. I have my own way of getting information. The good thing is, a cat can go places and listen to things a person can’t. Two crooks will tell each other their life stories with a cat sitting right in front of them. They’ll reveal information to a cat they wouldn’t reveal to their own mothers. That’s how you catch them.”

  “But how can finding out what they did help you catch them?” Willow asked. “They might talk in front of a cat, but you can’t jump up and arrest them. You can’t handcuff them and throw them in the county lock-up.”

  Nat strutted along the edge of Naya’s desk. “That’s where human beings come in very handy. You can’t arrest them, but Carl and Naya can. You give them your information, and they arrest the criminals for you.”

  “How do you give them your information?” Willow asked. “Do you write them a note?”

  “Write them a note!” Nat snorted. “I should think not. I am a cat. I do not write. Reading is one thing, but I wouldn’t stoop so low as to write. Write! Ha!”

  “How do you do it, then?” Willow asked. “How can you give them information?”

  Nat stood up tall and straight. The moonlight streaming through the police station window stretched his shadow across the carpet. “That, my dear, is the great secret of the cat race. We find a way to draw Naya’s attention to the evidence, but we must be discreet. We can’t let her know we found out the crucial piece of the puzzle to solve the case. We must do it in a way that preserves the illusion that Naya solved the case herself.”

  “Why do we have to do that?” Willow shot back. “If we solved the case, we should take the credit.”

  “And how, exactly, would we do that?” Nat demanded. “How do you think it would work if the world found out cats could read and solve criminal cases? How do you think humans would react if they finally got it through their heads that we could understand their conversations? The world would be in turmoil within hours. It would never work.”

  “I don’t know,” Willow argued. “My owner used to watch a show on TV about a boy who had a dog who helped him catch criminals. The dog was called Lassie. No one gave that dog a second thought.”

  “That’s a TV show,” Nat replied. “And it’s about a dog, not a cat. Dogs are different. People can believe all kinds of things about a dog, or even a fictional cat. But real cats? I don’t think so. It works just fine for them to think of us as harmless pets. They wouldn’t be very happy if they knew the truth about us.”

  Willow gazed out the window at the moon. “I know what you mean, although I don’t agree. People enjoy a certain ignorance about what their cats really think and understand. They don’t appreciate having those ideas contradicted. They get very snotty if anyone tells them they’re wrong about anything.”

  “So you can understand,” Nat went on, “how these people would feel if they knew their cats were solving their cases for them. These are professional police detectives. They’re supposed to put the evidence together. They aren’t supposed to rely on cats to do it for them.”

  “I see.” Willow jumped down and joined Nat on Naya’s desk. “So when can we start?”

  “Right now.” Nat turned and put his paw down on the big calendar in front of him. “This is your first lesson. Do you see that pointed shape right there? That is the first thing you have to learn. That is the letter A.”

  Chapter 2

  The police station door opened, and Willow sat up on the couch. She forced herself to sit still, even though every fiber of her being screamed to race across the room and jump into Naya Wesley’s arms. But Nat wouldn’t approve. She had to act like a regular cat. She had to keep up the pretense that she was completely oblivious to the human activity going on around her.

  Willow glanced at the bundle of woolen blankets crumpled behind the water cooler. Nat never twitched a whisker. No one would guess he was awake and taking in every detail.

  Naya and Carl Ridout entered the police station amid the busy hum of voices, phones ringing, and computers pinging at every desk. No one paid any attention to the cats.

  Naya wore a tight-fitting brown leather jacket with a wooly collar over her tailored white button-down shirt. Her tight blue jeans ran down into knee-high brown leather boots. Carl wore a rumpled blue suit that barely fit around his massive shoulders. Scuff marks and dried mud soiled his shoes, and a rim of sweat darkened his collar and the cuffs of his sleeves.

  Naya pulled out her chair, but she didn’t sit down. “I’m just saying it doesn’t make sense. Why would Jason Dempsey say he wasn’t there when we all know he was? Why would he lie about it?”

  “Why do you have to read so much into everything?” Carl shot back. “You know how people get when they have to answer questions from the police. They’ll say anything that pops into their heads. Maybe he thought he had to come up with some reason why he wasn’t there. Maybe he thought we would suspect him if we thought he was there. Who knows?”

  “Come on, Carl,” Naya chided. “We already knew he was there. Him lying about it would make us suspect him.”

  “But he doesn’t know that, does he?” Carl pointed out. “People don’t think the same way about these things as homicide detectives. All they can think is run and hide. I’ve seen it a thousand times. He got scared, and he lied. No big deal.”

  Naya shook her head. “You can’t convince me of that. He was scheduled to work this morning, and his girlfriend saw him leave the house. The clerk at the drive-through saw him park in the employee parking lot behind the Morningside Bakery, and we found the charred remains of the time clock in the fire. The imprint of his time card is the last imprint on the tape before the place went up in smoke.”

  “But don’t you see?” Carl asked. “That just proves he didn’t set that fire. He wouldn’t have clocked himself in right before the place went up in flames. If he planned to tell everyone he wasn’t anywhere near the bakery when it burned down, he wouldn’t have clocked in at all. He would have set the fire from somewhere outside the building and beat a hasty retreat. Clocking in isn’t the behavior of a would-be arsonist and murderer. He didn’t have time to light the fire before the whole place went up. He was lucky to get out of the bakery with his life.”

  “You’re not thinking clearly, Carl.” Naya rummaged through the papers on her desk. “Where is it? Oh, here it is. Now, let’s see. Yes. Right here. This is the insurance policy on the bakery. It clearly states the building was stucco on the outside. Jason couldn’t light the fire from outside. He had to go inside to light the fire, and the best way he could do that was to wait until he was scheduled to work. He clocked in, and once inside, he set the fire and ran away.”

  “Then how do you explain him lying about his whereabouts?” Carl asked. “He couldn’t be so stupid as to expect us to believe he really wasn’t there.”

  Naya grinned at her big partner. “Maybe he th
ought he could count on a loveable cop like you giving him a break. Maybe he had some other reason to hide his actions. Or maybe, like you say, he just got scared and said the wrong thing.”

  Carl sat down at his desk and picked up a stack of papers. “The good news is that we have a chance to question him more thoroughly later today. We’re also questioning the bakery owner’s widow. She might have a motive to kill her husband.”

  “Josephine Avino might have a motive to kill her husband, Roy,” Naya pointed out. “But she had no opportunity. She didn’t work at the bakery. There’s no evidence she was there this morning.”

  Carl held up his index finger. “That’s what she wants us to believe. Just because she wasn’t clocked in doesn’t mean she wasn’t there. Her husband was there, and Jason was there. She could have walked through the open kitchen door anytime she wanted to.”

  “Don’t you think Jason would have told us if there was another person in the bakery?” Naya asked. “He could have deflected the blame for the fire onto Josephine. Betrayed wife kills philandering husband. It’s the perfect set-up.”

  Carl held up his hands. “Well, you’ve blown my tidy little theory to smithereens. Thank you very much. Now I don’t know who to believe.”

  Naya sat down across from him and bent over her paperwork. “Let’s not over-think things. We just started working on this case, and we’ve got a lot of work to do before we’re done.”

  Willow listened to their conversation with every whisker alert. After the detectives fell silent, she sauntered across the station room as calmly as she dared. She tiptoed up to Nat’s blanket bed and stepped over him. She missed her footing and accidentally stepped on his leg. Her paw rolled off and she toppled over onto him.

  He growled under his breath, but he gave no indication of even noticing her. Willow curled up next to him. “Can we go out into the field now? We could go see the burned-down building and have a look around.”