It’s Everything but Party Time
Lisa Alber
It’s my humble opinion that nothing says “boondoggle” like a bunch of oddballs running around a hotel dressed in fursuits. Wolves, raccoons, polar bears, and kittens sitting around the Paradise Arms Hotel lounge munching on appetizers and scratching each other’s backs below a banner announcing “Furtopia—Welcome to Party Time!” didn’t bode well for the investigation.
My partner Mac skidded to a halt. “Sully? What the blazing fuck is this? You don’t warn me?”
“Nope. Hotel fully booked for a furry conference.”
The previous morning, paramedics had carted away a guy from room 306. Apparent heart attack. Only, the M.E. cut him open, cried “homicide,” and now here we stood, a day late to the investigation, surrounded by animal wannabes.
“So that lazy turd Weaver screwed up the initial investigation,” Mac said.
“Yep, settled for face value—natural causes. Didn’t lock down the scene properly. I’d probably have done the same thing.”
Mac punched me in the arm, too hard. “Not with me around.”
MacKenzie MacDougal, also known as Double-Mac-and-Cheese, Two-Mac, and Mac Attack, sports an unfortunate name to go with a fortunate tendency to rock her retro pantsuits. Ever more the professional than I, she perused the lobby area with its antique Italian marble, plaster ornamentation, and wrought iron fixtures straight out of Hollywood’s Golden Era and jotted a few notes.
A woman in a skunk suit—white stripes down the back of a fishnet bodysuit—sauntered up to us. Her name tag read “Pepita No Le Peu.”
She scanned me. “You’re cute for a human male, but you seem a little tense. How about a scritch?”
She wiggled black-painted fingernails at me then stepped past when she caught Mac’s frozen eyeball stare. A crocodile-Toucan Sam hybrid grabbed her up in a hug. They fell to the floor in an ecstasy of nuzzles.
“Furpile!” someone called, and six others leapt onto the first two with much scritching and licking.
“Fuckwits,” Mac muttered.
Mac’s from the Bronx. She banished the accent and added highlights to her hair, but she still swears like a crusty old sailor. Couldn’t ask for a better partner. She keeps me honest. Every time she pulls out her notepad, I straighten my shoulders and vow to take the job seriously. Sometimes, I even manage to be a decent detective for a few hours.
Too bad this case didn’t look to be one of those times, not with a contaminated crime scene and wackadoodle witnesses.
A man with an Adam’s apple the size of his nose approached. Elliott Norton, the hotel manager. Our footsteps echoed against the marble as he led us past the elevator.
“Let’s skip that.” He cleared his throat. “Seems to be a thrill for some of them. The elevator hookup. Don’t know what you’ll find inside.”
He led us out to a hidden paradise—a courtyard with a kidney-shaped pool and hibiscus, lily of the Nile, and bird of paradise growing along stone pathways. Wind gusts had dispersed the smog, leaving the air sultry and clear. Sunlight bounced off pink stucco walls and voices echoed along open-air corridors overlooking the courtyard.
“Last time I let a furry conference take over the hotel.” Norton yelled toward the pool. “No body paint in the pool! That was the deal!”
“And our victim,” Mac said. “A furry too?”
“Oh no. He had a standing reservation with us for one week every quarter while here on business from Louisiana. A pleasant man, a real southern gentleman. He’s booked out a couple of years in advance, and we’d never give away his reservation. Pissed the conference organizers to no end.”
Mac raised her eyebrows and scribbled a note in her pad.
Norton led the way up six stairwells to the third floor. Mac was kind enough to lag behind with me. “So how was your trip?” I asked.
“Let’s say I prefer a juicy unexplained death. Fill me in.”
She’d met me at the hotel straight from the airport, fresh off a plane from New York, where she’d been dealing with a family matter. She rarely takes time off, and I missed not having her around to keep me in line. But I suppose a sister graduating from rehab coupled with ailing parents was a good excuse.
I gave her the rundown on Gavin Delacroix, fifty-three, a Sazerac liquor sales rep from New Orleans. Housekeeping had discovered him lying naked on his bed with his head propped on a pillow and the television on, a full ashtray, and a half-eaten chocolate bar at his side. Besides wondering why anyone would lie around naked on a hotel bedspread, what perplexed me was the image of the spent cigarette cradled between two stiff, grayish fingers. Weaver had managed to take a few pictures before letting the body go.
“The guy was a hard-core smoker,” I said, “and his wife said he never exercised and ate crap while on the road.”
I stopped to catch my breath. Talk about ripe for a heart attack. Mac’s cheeks weren’t even flushed. She rolled her eyes at my out-of-shape carcass and tapped the tip of her tiny pencil against her notepad. “Cause of death?”
“A blow so catastrophic you’d bleed out internally in thirty seconds.”
A moose in a tiara barreled down the steps and stopped to paw the ground and snort at us with lowered head. His name tag read “Bull Twinkle.” We shifted out of the way and he passed with a loud bellow. From the pool, several people called out, “Buulll Tweeenkle!”
We started up the stairs again. “Here’s the bizarre part,” I said. “There’s no sign of trauma on his body. Organs mangled, ribs broken, but no sign of the cause. Only a small laceration on one of his testes—or rather, the scrotum skin. Swollen and bruised package, all right.”
“Massive kick to the balls,” Mac said.
“Maybe, but that doesn’t explain the rest of it, and the fact that he was relaxing nice as you please on the bed, binge-watching a sexy vampire show on Netflix.”
“Someone positioned him after death.” We’d made it to the third floor where Norton waited for us outside of room 306. I leaned over the balustrade to catch my breath. Mac frowned toward the revelers at the pool. “Or maybe it was a sex game gone wrong.”
I hadn’t thought of that. This is what I mean by Mac Attack. Her brain’s firing on all cylinders. Makes me look good every time.
“Or could be someone was pissed that he dared to usurp a precious room during the conference?” I said.
“But look at them.” Mac flicked her fingers toward the pool, grunting in disgust. “Nothing but sappy, happy around here.”
I’m younger than Mac by five years, but I’ve been a detective six years longer than she has. She got passed over too many times in her New York precinct and decided to start fresh in Los Angeles. Why not San Francisco, or maybe Portland, I asked. She said she was sick of shit weather and ordered me to fuck off with questioning her life choices.
To be honest she’s a better Angelino than I am even though I grew up a few miles west in Santa Monica. She’s tan and fit, got her teeth straightened with those invisible braces, and in unguarded moments issues statements such as “Dude, don’t trip out on me” or “Yo, bro, let’s bail.” She eats kale too, although I’ve heard it’s out of fashion in favor of algae.
Compared to Mac, I was a cop who’d lost his will. Life nibbled a piece out of me here, tore a strip off me there, and sucked out some of my juices along the way, so slow I didn’t notice. Mac kept telling me I was burned out and to seek a shrink, but I wasn’t buying it. How could I be burned out when I’d been coasting for years? My funk didn’t make sense.
I was just glad for Mac’s return. With her around, I cared enough to notice the scent of hibiscus heavy in the air as Norton opened the door to room 306. A corner room at the end of the corridor, its windows overlooked the garden half of the courtyard.
“You were here when crime scenes examined the room?” Mac said as she ducked under the yellow tape crisscrossing the doorway.
“Yep. Earlier today, better late than never. Unfortunately, Norton had already let housekeeping in.”
She groaned. “Total shit show. Talk to anyone yet?”
“Nope, waiting for you.”
“Thanks.” She patted my arm for extending the courtesy, but it wasn’t about that. I figured once she arrived, she’d lead, I’d follow, and life as a detective would be good for a few hours.
She didn’t fail me as she prowled around the room while I reviewed the basics. No sign of a break-in or struggle. Except for fingerprint powder, nothing disturbed the room. Delacroix’s wallet on the dresser with a wad of fifties inside it, so no robbery. No pills or other drugs in the room. Most of all, no blood.
By the time I finished reviewing the case, Mac was rubbing her hands together like a mad scientist. “Dude, this is the bomb. This is a case to make our careers, even if we have fuck-all for a crime scene.”
“Uh-huh.” Been there, done that, early on with a dozen great solves, but I remained in the same nowhere place.
She placed her fists on her hips and glared at me. “What’s up your ass? For weeks—”
“Months.”
“—you’ve been moping around like you’re starved of—I don’t know what, but I’m sick of it. You hear me? This is a worthy case. We’ll check the security footage and talk to the plushies—”
“Whoa there, Kemosabi, don’t call them plushies. They’re furries.”
“What’s the difference?”
I grinned. She was going to like this. “Furries are your garden-variety eccentrics. My take? They’re more comfortable covered up and acting out fursonas that they create.”
“Fursonas,” Mac said, deadpan.
“Plushies, on the other hand, may or may not be furries and from what I can tell, prefer to have sex with stuffed animals.”
Mac yowled. “You’re shitting me!” Then she snorted. “That’s crazy cakes.”
“Did you say—?”
“I did. Got it from my niece.” She issued one of her sweet, try-to-stop-me smiles. “I think I’ll say it all the time.”
“I forbid it.”
She shrugged and returned to business. “Maybe a couple of plushies mistook Delacroix for a stuffed bear. He was roly poly like one.”
A knock sounded on the door and a head popped in. Officer Andrew Taylor bounced into the room and stumbled over his huge feet, which he did often, earning him the nickname Stumblestilsken. “Checking in for duty.”
“On whose orders?” Mac said.
“Carlisle’s. I called him when I heard about the case. He said it would be okay to help you out.”
Mac squinted at Taylor and rubbed her thumb across his cheekbone. Glitter transferred itself to her skin. “You been snogging a furbeast?”
He flushed as he rubbed at his face. “I got caught in the elevator. There was a lot of—ah—energy in there.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “You’re also not in uniform, and I thought you were on vacation until next week.”
He looked from Mac to me with a smile puffing out his cheeks. “Not anymore!”
Chipmunk, I thought. That would be his furry costume. And his furry name? Chipper McChitter. Maybe I was getting the hang of this case, by golly.
“Right,” I said, “you can start by working with Norton over there on the security footage.”
Taylor sagged. “Can’t I stay with you?”
“Nope.” I pulled a photo of Delacroix out of my pocket. “This guy, and anything hinky with these furry freaks.”
“That’s not nice,” Taylor said.
Mac waved ta-ta to Taylor and Norton with her gaze skittering around the room. “By the looks of it, Delacroix wasn’t beaten to death here, yet apparently, he was.”
“Yep. The M.E. said the internal injuries were what you’d expect from crash victims or people found under heavy fallen objects.”
She pulled on her lips. “All without bruises on his chest. How does that happen?”
“My question exactly.” Not true. My question was whether any Sazerac liquor samples remained in the room.
“Cui bono?” Mac said. “Cui fucking bono, that’s the real question!”
I muddle through investigations, performing the next logical task and trusting my gut. Mac likes to cui bono it, which is to say angle in on who profits—the motive. Call it Detective 101, but using the Latin somehow elevates her to a modern-day trash-talking Sherlock. In her enthusiasm, she’d forgotten to tuck stray tendrils back into her work braid. Curliques danced around her face, and I imagined her as a curly-haired moppet playing Nancy Drew with a magnifying glass and a flashlight.
“What are you grinning at?” she demanded.
“Nothing. Glad you’re back.”
She scowled and went back to pressing her ear against the door of room 304 next to Delacroix’s. “Someone’s home.”
A lot of hissing and whispering and quick footsteps met her knock. “Yes?” a woman said.
Mac held her I.D. in front of the peephole. “Detectives MacDougal and Sullivan.”
The door opened to reveal a sexy Persian cat head with tufted ears, a blue forelock, and giant blue eyes like you see in Japanese animation—all iris and long lashes—atop a half-naked body in sports bra and shorty shorts.
Booze bottles, room service trays, guitars, and fursuit paraphernalia littered the room. Our greeter pulled off her cat head to uncover a young woman with a dark fringe of hair, a nose ring, and a bright smile.
“Sorry about that,” she said. “Gotta stay in fursona, you know.” She called, “All clear!” and three more young women tumbled out of the bathroom, also wearing skimpy loungewear.
They introduced themselves with a lot of words about how they needed a breather from all the fun. “Cuddle time!” one of them said. Instead of pursuing that interesting line of questioning—as I would have—Mac pointed to one of the empty bottles and rotated the label toward me with an “oh” of interest. Southern Comfort, which is produced by the Sazerac Company.
The leader, Hazel, a.k.a. Mistress Furzina de Persiana, sat on a bed and pulled a brush through the fur on her cat head while the others perched nearby.
“What’s the tricks?” Hazel said. “We heard a mundane infiltrated our con.”
“You’ve lost me,” I said.
“Outsiders who think if they dress up and mix in, they’ll get laid, like we’re a bunch of sexual deviants. We’re the Furballs, in case you’re curious. We’re the band.”
“The band?” I said, floundering without Mac to cut to the chase. She was too busy prowling around near the connecting door to Delacroix’s room.
“Tonight’s the big party. We’re the first all-girl band in the furry world, so we’re kind of famous. Get invited to all the cons.”
“Ah,” I managed. “Congratulations.”
To my relief, Mac chose that moment to scoot a chair toward the girls. Ever helpful, I stood in the background to get a read on them.
“We’d like to talk about the death that occurred next door in room 306. You were here on Thursday, night before last?”
Four sad-sighs and head shakes. Hazel spoke for them. “Decent guy for a mundane. He gave us a bunch of Southern Comfort to party with.”
“When did you meet him?”
“That night. Coming in from work and confused about the furnanigans. Everyone was just arriving for the weekend and glad to be here.”
“Lots of nuzzling,” the girl who went by “Candy CoonKat” said.
“These cons are like reunions. So fun,” Hazel said. “Anyhow, we ran into Gavin out there.” She pointed toward the corridor outside their room. “Gave us a couple of bottles in exchange for taking our party elsewhere after nine o’clock.”
“And you took your party elsewhere?”
“Sure. More fun to be had in the bar anyhow.”
The girls didn’t have much to add. They saw Delacroix around six and forgot about him until the paramedics wheeled him out the next morning.
Mac shifted from foot to foot. “Hear anything out of the ordinary? Arguments or fighting?”
Four head shakes, four puzzled expressions. A little worried, maybe, but nothing out of the ordinary.
Back in the corridor a minute later, Mac swore. “Couldn’t those fur balls have been high on smack or something? They were sickeningly wholesome. Even their costumes were angelic.”
“Not costumes, fursuits.”
“Right, and I’m Bonnie Bonobo the horny pink monkey.”
I laughed. Mac in a pink monkey getup dry humping everything in sight like her wildlife counterpart. I shunted aside an image of her landing on me. Unprofessional at best, downright furverted at worst. Besides which, I’d need a fursona, too. Perhaps a sloth. They have those big eyes on endearing faces, and they don’t accomplish much but in an endearing way. That would fit. Sully de Slotheron.
“Earth to Sully?” Mac said.
“Yep.”
“Those girls? They have no bono. Zero cui bono.”
“Maybe they lied and stole the booze out of Delacroix’s room through the connecting door. What do we know? Open the door, and voilà, furgy.”
“Furgy.”
“Furry plus orgy.” I ducked away from Mac’s punch. “Or maybe those angelic felines held him down and tried to infurtrinate him into the furry way with a little furrotica and things got out of hand.”
“Now you’re just embarrassing yourself. Come on. I need a drink.”
That’s the thing about Mac—she’ll down a drink on duty and give you the gonna-do-something-about-it? stare while she’s at it. Technically a no-no but reconnaissance work in the bar sounded good to me.
But first, a detour to security to find Taylor and Norton hunched in front of a video monitor. “Tell me,” Mac said.
“Delacroix arrived around six as usual,” Norton said. “He always drops by reception to grab a free cookie.”
Taylor swiveled back and forth on his chair. “And we have him talking to some furcon attendees outside his room. He ducked into his room to retrieve a couple of bottles of booze for them. See?”
Taylor re-wound the footage. “Kind of cute,” he said, as we watched the four girls surround Delacroix to nuzzle him, which he accepted with a bemused smile.
Taylor stood and stretched. “Well, that’s that—”
“Not so fast, rookie,” Mac said. “You need to watch comings and goings for the whole night.”
Norton cleared his throat. “I started going over them before you arrived. Hotel policy when a guest dies. Fast-forward to about eight that night.” He stepped away from Mac’s glare. “What? I’m telling you now.”
Taylor grumbled under his breath.
“Come again?” Mac said.
“Nothing.” He pressed play on the video. “I’m on it.”
From Chipper McChitter to Sir Prickly Pug. You ask to help on a case, you’re going to get the scut work. Them’s the breaks.
“Hello,” Mac crooned. “What do we have here?”
On the video, a fey-looking lavender werewolf and a raven with eerily realistic eyes entered the Furballs’ room with much hugging and nuzzling.
“I’ve seen those two around,” Norton said. “In the bar.”
“Fancy that, our next destination,” Mac said. “Anything interesting about them?”
“Same as everyone else,” Norton said. “Energetic and strange.”
Here’s what I like about Mac: She enjoys the way she confounds stereotypes. Raunchier mouth than a South Central gangsta yet only drinks girly cocktails, for example. Right then it was rum punch with skewered fruit and a pink umbrella. Around us, furries chatted. Typical bar scene if you were on Noah’s Ark.
Mac sipped through a straw with a pretty pout and jabbed the umbrella toward me. “You know what’s jamming me up?”
“You don’t own a pink monkey suit?”
She punched me in the arm, again too hard and in the same spot as previously. Would leave a bruise. I didn’t mind.
“Two things. The cigarette dangling from Delacroix’s fingers. No one goes to that much trouble if they’re positioning a body. And, I can’t fathom who profits.”
“Maybe he died minding his own beeswax,” I said. “La-di-da, while munching his Caramello. An accident.”
“Seriously? Now I know you’re depressed.”
“Or, maybe we’ve got a kinky assault with a long screwdriver jabbing up through the scrotum.”
Mac chinked her glass against my pint. “Now you’re talking. Maybe the party next door with the raven and werewolf went hinky on their asses.” She craned her neck to view over my shoulder. “Incoming, one black raven.”
At the other end of the bar, a birdman fluttered in a circle as he spoke to his friends. After his beer arrived, he drank by bobbing forward to sip from a straw.
“That’s some crazy shit,” Mac said.
Fifteen minutes later we followed the raven out of the bar. He flitted his way toward the men’s room, and I hesitated, unsure I could stomach witnessing how a guy in a fursuit pissed. Did they have zippers in their nether areas? Did they wear underwear?
Mac had no such qualms. She banged open the bathroom with a sunny, “Hello, gents!” A couple of dudes in capes and Batman masks stumbled out a few seconds later. I nabbed a woman in bunny ears to steer people away from entering. She twitched her nose in consent and began munching a carrot stick.
Inside the bathroom, Mac had maneuvered the birdman into a corner. His raven head sat in a sink basin while the human beneath cowered with trembling lips. A spray of acne dotted his forehead and a few baby fine mustache hairs lined his upper lip. Mac jerked her head at me to take over. She knows her weaknesses, one of them being an itchy reaction to kids—although I bet she’d make a great mom. She has it in her, but she’d pummel me through the floor if I dared to mention it.
“Apologies for my partner,” I said. “She’s a hexenbiest on the best days. What’s your name?”
The kid smiled. His shoulders dropped. “Winter Darkraven.”
Behind me, Mac sighed her I’m-about-to-lose-it sigh.
“How about your mundane name?” I said.
“David Clark. I’m not in trouble, am I? I’m here with my brother. He’s over twenty-one.”
“Does your mom know you’re drinking?”
He blushed, but with a hint of pride, too.
I made a production of collecting his personal information. “And your brother, he wouldn’t happen to be a purple werewolf, would he?”
David laughed. “No way. I only met that bonehead the other night.”
“Thursday night?”
“Uh-huh.” His tone turned wary. “Why?”
I gave him the gist of it with Delacroix. He gulped a few times. “Figured it was only more furries next door, so whatever.”
“Whatever about what?” I said.
He grabbed his raven head. “Goofing around. Never saw the guy next door.”
“Did you hear anything unusual while you were in the Furballs’ room?”
He shook his head, but he didn’t look too sure about it.
“And your purple friend? Where is he? What’s his name?”
He shrugged his feathered shoulder pads. “Haven’t seen him today. He goes by Dander Tronwere, that’s all I know.”
Frustrated energy waves shot off Mac. No doubt she longed to throttle the poor kid.
David shot a glance at her. “Nothing happened!” he squealed and darted for the door.
Mac stuck out her foot. The only thing saving the kid from a face plant was the stuffing in his puffed-out avian chest. Mac’s face lit up as David rocked like a stuck turtle, arms and legs flailing. She doubled-over in silent guffaws with hands pressed hard against her mouth.
“Come on,” David whined. “Help me up.”
I counted down from ten to let Mac blow off some steam—brightens my day to see her sick sense of humor in action—then hoisted David to his feet. After a lecture about underage drinking, I let him go. With his head back on, David stood taller and raised one feathered finger in the furquivalent of a fuck off before dashing out of the bathroom.
Mac shook her head and let the laughter rip. “For the love of Christ!”
I can always tell when Mac sinks into deep-thought mode, and by this, I mean beyond Detective 101. She’s sharp, and she deduces connections in an elegant way while I beat at investigations until they go belly-up. In the year since Carlisle assigned Mac as my partner, the solves have been more frequent and more fun. Which made my continual malaise all the more perplexing.
Standing in the lobby with notepad in hand, David the raven nowhere to be seen, Mac’s eyebrows, eyes, lips, even her cheeks squinched toward her nose like a grumpy hedgehog. Her thoughts may be elegant but how she appears when they’re processing, not so much.
“Come on,” she said. “I need to ponder and then hit up the Furballs again.”
We risked the elevator to return to the third floor. Nothing to see but a dragon in a wizard’s hat and tux who introduced himself as the master of ceremonies. Mac flipped through pictures on her phone and shut him down by flashing an image of Delacroix’s lacerated scrotum.
“Maybe he died fast.” I tapped the image while the dragon slipped out on the second floor. “Too fast for the cut to bleed.”
Mac’s grumpy look deepened. “Faster than a thirty-second internal bleed out? Trippy thought. You’re on fire today, buster.”
I glowed with the contentment I get when she calls me buster. In Mac world, that’s a term of endearment.
We let ourselves into Delacroix’s room with the key card Norton had provided. I peeked into the closet. Nothing. Liquor samples ransacked by housekeeping, no doubt.
Mac brushed a thumb over a blemish on the wall that looked to be caused by repeated thumps from the connecting door’s knob. No doorstop, I noticed. She pressed her ear against the door while she knocked.
Startled squeals from next door. “Detective MacDougal. Open your door, please.”
Mac unlocked our door and jerked it open to bang against the wall. She checked the blemish and grunted. From the other side, the girls futzed around to unlock their door.
“What’s up?” Hazel said.
The Furballs backed up as we entered. They wore slinky black catsuits and cat ear headbands like Josie and the Pussycats. The one named Tabby Deeelight stood in front of a mirror painting tiger stripes on her face. I figured I’d distract the girls while Mac continued pondering. I like to be useful that way.
“No fursuits on stage?” I said.
“Oh, hell no,” Hazel said. “Too hot.”
Mac stood with a grumpy but unseeing gaze aimed at Tabby Deeelight. With a huff, she about-faced toward the connecting door. She closed it and paused as another wall blemish caught her eye. She poked it and sniffed her finger.
“Yo, dude,” she called. She stomped toward me and stuck her finger under my nostrils. “What does this smell like?”
A pinkish pasty substance coated her index finger. I loitered longer than necessary to smell it. I’d never noticed the kaleidoscopic swirl of Mac’s eyes, the way they started out gold near the pupils and slid into gray with dark blue rims.
She blinked, and I came to. “Simon says toothpaste,” I said.
“Bingo.”
“And?”
“And nothing yet.”
The fourth Furball, who had yet to speak in our presence, pulled out a glass water pipe, lit up, and passed it around. The piney scent of pot drifted toward us. The girls settled on one of the beds, as if watching a movie, cat ear hair bands lopsided on their heads, made-up cat eyes following our movements.
Mac pulled me toward the toothpaste smear on the wall and pointed out purple glitter next to it. She lowered her voice. “We need to establish the crime scene in here, too.” She addressed the girls. “You forgot to mention your friends Dander Tronwere and Winter Darkraven. Care to explain?”
Hazel blew out a plume of smoke. “They were here for like an hour before we hit the bar together. Didn’t seem important.”
“Did Dander Tronwere by any chance like glitter?”
“Hello?” Hazel said. “We all like glitter. It’s practically underwear.”
I imagined it, enjoyed the visual, and stepped away from Mac’s punch. “Focus,” she said. “Where’s the rookie? We need him up here. Get Norton too.”
Mac moves fast when elegant thoughts are upon her. I called Taylor and told him to come up with Norton and to bring the crime scene tape with him.
While we waited, Mac walked back and forth between the rooms, cocking her head, crouching, hmmm’ing.
From Delacroix’s room, Taylor’s voice called out. “Detectives?”
The Furballs straightened and swiveled their heads in unison like a colony of inquisitive meerkats. Hazel whispered to Tabby, who continued the whisper down the line. Taylor did have an attractive baritone, for a twerp.
“In here,” Mac called.
Taylor peeked his head into the room and stumbled through the doorway.
“No way,” Hazel yelled.
Taylor froze.
Mac stood with arms crossed and hip cocked, a study in contemplation. The grumpy look disappeared. She raised her eyebrows at me. I mimed, “What the—?” and she smiled.
Hazel opened her mouth, but Mac shut her down with a zip-it gesture. She beckoned the hovering hotel manager into the room and ordered him to watch over the Furballs and to call up a security guard.
Back in Delacroix’s room, she slammed the connecting door against the wall. The blemish in the paint didn’t coincide with where the door knob hit the wall, after all. “See?”
“Yep.”
She held two fingers in front of my face, one smeared with toothpaste, the other shiny with purple glitter. “Get it?”
“Nope.”
“The way I figure it, you were right.”
“You’re talking to me?” I said.
“You’re not so stupid. You suggested an accident, and once I let that ass wipe of an idea sink in, I got to thinking about Delacroix’s death in a different way. Seems like the overworked M.E. let his initial assumption about natural causes cloud his judgment.”
Taylor sidled away from her.
Mac grinned. “Gunshot wound. A smaller caliber that slowed down when it passed through the wall from the Furballs’ room explains why there’s no exit wound on Delacroix’s body.”
A mental light bulb flashed. The toothpaste in the Furball’s room wasn’t a random smudge, but a hole plug. And the blemish on this side of the wall marked the exit route of the bullet. I sighted along an invisible trajectory through the wall and toward the bed, where a tired liquor salesman had lounged naked with legs stretched out. “Holy moly, Batman.”
“Exactly. Bullet in through the scrotum to ricochet around inside Delacroix while he smoked and watched sexy vampires. Died so fast no chance for his ball sack to bleed, like you suggested.”
The scrotum isn’t the tautest area of the male body. No way a bullet wound would look like a hole with all that flappy chicken skin. The skin would fold right back over on itself.
“And the bullet?” I said.
“I’m guessing still inside him. Hit the heart—bam—dead in seconds. Nothing a metal detector won’t find.”
My trash-talking Sherlock to the rescue every time. The M.E. was going to crap his knickers if her theory turned out to be true. Thing was, it was an elegant solution. How else could it have gone?
“And let’s not forget the glitter,” Mac said. “Purple glitter to go with a purple werewolf costume.”
“Fursuit,” Taylor said.
“You would know.” She approached Taylor and rubbed his cheek where a spray of glitter still glowed. Purple, I noticed now. “I’m curious where you stashed the gun inside your costume.”
By now the whites were showing around Taylor’s eyes. “A customized pocket?”
One minute I’m ogling Taylor in astonishment, the next he’s waving his standard issue Glock around the room and stammering that he didn’t mean for it to go off. He tripped over a Furball tail, that was all.
Taylor held out the gun, not meaning anything by it I’m sure, but the moment he did, I pushed Mac out of the way on instinctive order from my gut. Stumblestilsken with his big feet and sorry-ass gun etiquette—yep—the gun went off and down I went. Hard.
The Furballs’ voices rose in unison, “Tronweeere!”
My scrotal sack, thankfully, remained unharmed. My lower intestine, not so much. It wasn’t like I was for death right that second, so Mac took several moments to cuff Taylor and call the paramedics. From the other room, Hazel called out a promise that they hadn’t connected the gunshot to Delacroix’s death. Uh-huh. They’d have some ’splaining to do. Obstruction of justice, maybe. Coupled with Taylor the charmer showing off his sidearm to impress the ladies—boondoggle from the start.
“What about our concert tonight?” Hazel called.
“You wish!” Mac yelled back.
After that Mac stood over me and let loose a full arsenal of salty talk, ending with, “And you gotta piss me off like this?”
“Next time I’ll try harder,” I said. “Scout’s honor.”
“Not that, you dumb ass. Fact that you took a bullet for me.” She straddled me and pressed on the wound. Her tone softened beneath the surface fury. “You know what your problem’s been? You went and fucking fell in love with me.”
“Seriously?”
“Like a gut shot.”
That’s the thing about Mac, she’ll surprise you with her insights every time. Glad my ailment had a name, but dang, talk about inconvenient.
She wagged a pointer finger back and forth between us. “This, right here? Now we’ve gotta sort it out, and I’m telling you I’m not the one transferring out of the department.”
“Yep. But at least you solved the furicide.”
“Stop!” She punched me again, but not so hard. More like a tap.
I faded out then, but not before thinking, it’s everything but party time now. Not that I minded.