| |
“You really don’t have to do that,” Kat said, watching as Andrew scrubbed cat vomit out of her bedroom carpet.
Much to her surprise, he had insisted on following her home from the police station. She had been too focused at the time to realize how bothered he was by her conversation with Zack, but as they left the jail area she noticed him walking a little closer than usual, almost as if her proximity to a potential killer had triggered some primitive compulsion within him to protect her. Touched by his concern, she hadn’t protested when he’d said he would be escorting her back to her apartment.
“I know I don’t have to help,” Andrew said. “But I’m not going to sit around watching you work your fingers to the bone while I do nothing.” He paused, his gaze sliding over his shoulder to where Matty and Tom were languidly stretched out on the bed. “Not like these two.”
Both cats had grabbed spots on the edge of the stripped-down mattress as soon as they’d noticed Kat tearing off the soiled bedding. Matty had taken it upon herself to supervise the humans’ clean-up effort with a critical eye. She didn’t seem too impressed with their abilities, but she also had yet to volunteer her own assistance.
Tom, on the other hand, didn’t look inclined to care whether the spit-up stains ever came out. Kat didn’t know if he remembered his role in creating this mess, but if he felt guilty about it she couldn’t tell by looking at him. With his front paws tucked underneath his chest and his hind legs splayed behind him in a splooting pose, he didn’t appear to have a care in the world.
Andrew brought his face up to the big cat’s. “Your mama told me on our way upstairs that you’re the one responsible for this.”
Tom meowed his zero-compunction agreement before closing his eyes and purring with contentment.
Kat laughed, relieved to see him acting like his normal self. She still planned to keep a close eye on him tonight, but her immediate worries about his health were slowly ebbing away.
Which just left her with more mental bandwidth to puzzle over Natalie Grimes’s murder.
Kat stopped scrubbing and glanced over at Andrew. “Do you think Zack was telling the truth about being innocent?”
“It’s not for me to decide.”
“Regardless, you must have an opinion one way or another.”
“My opinion isn’t going to change anything, so why dwell over it?”
“Um, it’s called natural human curiosity.” Kat rolled her eyes. As much as she loved him, Andrew sure could be frustrating at times.
Matty clearly agreed, giving her tail a flick before turning her nose up at their guest, the tortoiseshell’s own version of an eye roll. If anyone in this room knew about being curious for curiosity’s sake, it would be Matty.
“So,” Kat said, “I didn’t get a chance to tell you, but while I was at work I confirmed Wendy was the one who made that call to the station.”
“I gathered that from your chat with Lawson,” Andrew said. “But who’s Wendy?”
“Receptionist Wendy from DataRightly. I must have mentioned her before.”
He used his arm to shove the hair on his forehead aside. “Maybe.”
He obviously didn’t have a clue, but Kat wasn’t going to call him on it. “Anyway,” she continued, “apparently she and Zack share some sort of history together.”
“What kind of history?”
“I’m not sure. We were interrupted before I could pry the details out of her.”
Andrew set his scrub brush down and swiveled sideways to fully face her. “Kat, if there’s any chance she’s connected with this murder, you need to be careful and stay out of it.”
“Weren’t you the one who told me to come down to the station to talk to Zack?” she pointed out.
“Yes, but only because Chief instructed me to relay Lawson’s message, not because I truly wanted you to speak with him.”
“So if it were up to you, you wouldn’t have told me he’d asked to see me?”
“I would have fulfilled my professional responsibility as required.”
Kat wasn’t sure what that meant. Neither did Matty or Tom, if the puzzled crook of their whiskers was any indication. She considered pressing Andrew for an explanation, but if he admitted he would have kept Zack’s request a secret she would only get angry. And after such a long day she had no energy left for a fight.
“Well, whatever.” She scoured her section of carpet with more vigor. “My point is that Wendy might know something important.” She paused. “Do you think she encouraged Zack to move to Cherry Hills just so she could turn him in? She knows Suzanne is getting ready to go on maternity leave. She could have told him there was a position opening up.”
“Why would she go through all that trouble just to get him arrested?” Andrew asked. “Why not skip all the job stuff and simply alert the police to his whereabouts?”
“Maybe she didn’t know his whereabouts. Maybe him getting that job at DataRightly was the only way she could lure him out from wherever he was hiding. Or maybe she told him about that job with the intent of helping him out, only when he got here and she saw him in person she developed a guilty conscience.”
“He didn’t seem all that upset when you suggested she was the one to turn him in,” Andrew commented.
“He didn’t, did he? Could it be he’s secretly happy to have been caught? Three years is a long time to be on the run. Maybe he’s relieved it’s over.”
“I suppose anything’s possible.”
Matty hopped off the bed and wandered over to inspect one of the newly clean carpet patches. She must have decided Kat had done a decent enough job because she proceeded to lie down, dragging her cheek back and forth against the sanitized spot before rolling over onto her back and exposing her downy, yellow stomach. She then locked eyes with Kat as if to say, ‘Aren’t I the cutest?’
Kat grinned. If her hands weren’t wet she would be unable to resist rubbing the silly cat’s tummy.
She wondered if Zack’s rescued tortoiseshell had looked anything like Matty. Thinking about the abandoned animal getting a second lease on life because someone cared enough to take her in filled Kat’s heart with joy.
The scrub brush slipped from her hand as she fully processed that thought. She had been wavering before, but somewhere along the line she must have made up her mind.
She didn’t actually believe Zack Lawson was guilty.
The revelation sent a shock wave through her system. She couldn’t pinpoint exactly what he’d said to erase her last doubt, but there it was. She believed he was innocent.
So where did that leave her? Her conviction didn’t change the fact that a brutal murder had occurred three years ago. It also didn’t change the fact that she had no clue where to even start with identifying who might have really killed Natalie Grimes.
Scratch that, she thought. She did have one clue where to start: with Zack’s old friend, Wendy Dumont.
“Well,” Andrew said, slapping his thighs hard enough for Kat to flinch, “at least this whole ordeal is almost behind us. In a day or two Lawson will be sent back to Idaho, and then we can all move on.”
Kat bit her tongue as she ducked her head and scrubbed a little harder. She wasn’t so sure she could let go that easily, not without a resolution to Natalie Grimes’s murder.
And she was equally sure if she confessed her plan to Andrew, he would try his hardest to talk her out of it.
