Murders of a Feather, page 22
Chapter Thirty
After meeting Mike, I made a list of the people I needed to contact. I felt as though the sluggish cloud of shock over Babs’s death was lifting. My usual organizational skills had taken a hit investigating a tragedy this personal. After watering the houseplants and playing with Buddy and Bella, I strode into the clinic the following morning with a newfound enthusiasm.
No one’s mood matched mine.
Over the usual breakfast coffee, I tried to rope Mari and Cindy into my sleuthing plans, but this time the idea hit a wall. Mari shared that she’d just climbed out of the “blues” and didn’t want to be pulled back under by even thinking of murderers among us. Cindy informed me that the paperwork and time commitment serving as the executor of Babs’s estate took up most of her free time.
An unexpected gloom hung in the air.
“The lawyers sent out letters to all the beneficiaries mentioned in the will and used public records to try and find a next of kin,” she said while staring at her computer. “I’m still going through her files and boxing things up. My hubby protested, so I can only devote a few hours of my time on the weekend. It’s going very slowly. We’re trying to hire someone to help, but the money needs to be approved.”
“Let me help. Just tell me when and where,” I said. For some reason all the Valentine decorations in the reception area seemed cheery today. “I’ll do it for free.”
“Thanks, Kate.” Cindy walked over to one of the computer screens. “But you don’t have much free time either. Everything must be meticulously documented for the court. At first I thought my family could help, but it’s certainly not a job for my teenager. Or most people I know. It’s also more emotionally draining than I realized.”
I waited for her to finish.
“Look. I’m behind on the hospital monthly supplies order. I’ll talk to you later.” Her focus shifted away as she began typing vigorously on the computer keypad. Through the office picture window, I noticed snow beginning to fall.
I snuck back to my office without her noticing.
My Gramps always said to cut the people around you some slack. I’d found human behavior to be less predictable than animal behavior. Very rarely did I get tricked, scratched, or bitten by my furry patients. Most people I’ve met over the years turned out to be great; however, a select few were devious, self-serving, or downright liars.
And some were killers.
Chapter Thirty-One
“Your cat has feline acne,” I told the young couple in front of me holding a wide-eyed orange tabby.
“He’s got what?” the boyfriend said, leaning back on the exam room wall.
“Fela-what?” his girlfriend asked. “Is it cancer? Is he going to die?”
All three stared at me the same panic in their eyes. I decided to use nonmedical terms. “Your cat has zits. Blackheads on his chin.”
“Cats can get zits? But he’s a year old.”
Mari pried Gingersnap off his owner’s shoulder and placed him on the exam table. The handsome housecat sized up the situation quickly, his yellow eyes checking me out. I put my hands on him, petting him while examining his musculature. I immediately felt him relax.
Cats can feel the people who know and love them.
He purred so loudly I couldn’t hear his heart, so I blew in his face. Startled, he stopped long enough for me to listen. In general, there is a higher prevalence of heart disease in male cats than females, especially purebred Maine Coon, Persians, Cornish and Devon Rex, and the hairless Sphynx. Nonpurebred Gingersnap’s heart sounded strong and healthy.
We got down to his obvious problem. I’d noticed from experience that most orange cats have dark freckles on their lips and nose pads. Those are normal. The inflamed blackheads on his chin were not.
Some cats are more prone to getting acne, I explained. We start by advising owners to stop using plastic bowls, and instead switch to metal or ceramic and clean them often in the dishwasher. I suggested buying multiple water and food dishes, so there’s always a clean one. If you feed your kitty wet food, you need to clean his chin after eating—like you would a toddler. Some kitties tolerate an astringent cleaning pad, while others prefer a hypoallergenic baby wipe. Once the problem is resolved, it often comes back. Checking your pet’s chin periodically is a good idea.
The couple bobbed their heads like they understood, but I’d have Mari demonstrate the cleaning technique for them later. As always, we’d send the client home with a printout on their cat’s problem.
“I’d like to give Gingersnap’s chin a good cleaning,” I told them. “Can you leave him here with us for a while?”
Their faces burst out in grins. “Sure. We’ve got errands to run and haven’t eaten lunch yet.”
Mari piped up. “You can pick him up any time after three. We close at five tonight,” she warned them. Since we rarely got out before five thirty or six p.m., this extra half hour to forty-five minutes was our built-in buffer time for clients who might be running late.
Under the bright adjustable surgical light over the treatment table, I took a close look at Gingersnap’s chin.
“Are you going to pop them like that pimple doctor on TV?” Mari asked with a little too much enthusiasm, her bad mood gone.
“Some need to be expressed,” I replied, sticking to medical terminology. “We’ll see as we go along.”
Gingersnap stared at us with intelligent yellow eyes. He knew something was up. With only a slight tensing of his back legs as a warning, he catapulted into the air in full escape mode.
Mari played defense and caught him like a football with claws. She pressed him into her chest while I opened a top cage door. My assistant planted the cat behind the bars for a touchdown, while I sealed the point by closing and locking the cage.
“He’s an escape artist,” I warned Mari, flicking the stainless-steel lever that double-locked the door.
Every vet and vet assistant has a story about a pet that escaped. Most often it is a cat. Cat escape tales abound when people in the animal care profession get together.
My favorite story starred a small semiferal cat that knocked out a suspended ceiling panel and spent two weeks living in the crawl space above the animal hospital. Every day the staff put out food in a Have-A-Heart trap, and every morning they’d come in to no food and no cat. Finally, an intricate baited tunnel system did the trick. Cats will take advantage of any opening, like holes in the drywall around pipes left by plumbers or behind banks of cages. Eventually, all kitties are caught, to the relief of everyone concerned.
Gingersnap didn’t know it, but he was up against a formidable team consisting of Mari, Cindy, and me. Now that we knew he wasn’t going to play nice, we brought out the dreaded towel.
Since his chin acne was the target, the plan involved wrapping him up like a burrito in a towel, thus limiting his movement. At least, that was the plan.
Placing the towel on the stainless-steel treatment table, we held Gingersnap firmly and deposited him on the towel. After a few minutes of calm petting, we started to slowly wrap him up, making sure he was in a comfortable position—similar to swaddling a newborn covered with fur. Mari finished in under a minute.
“Duct tape?”
“Why not?”
She secured the towel with the tape no one should be without, attaching the towel to itself, being careful not to catch any kitty fur. To relax our patient, we stroked the cat’s head and ears and made nice. A thoughtful look shone in Gingersnap’s yellow eyes. He focused on the top of the cages.
“Keep hugging him to you,” I advised my assistant. “He’s casing the joint.”
Cat chin fur is very short. I didn’t want to upset our patient any more by shaving it off. Between the noise and smell and feel, I know if I were a cat I would try to bolt. Most of his zits were clustered on one side, so before we started, I checked his teeth. With tooth or mouth pain, an animal gets in the habit of chewing on the side that doesn’t hurt. His teeth appeared fine, so I ruled that out as a contributing cause.
“Mari,” I said, “can you scratch the top of his head?” This move was to divert sensation away from his chin while I worked on it.
Since I had a fondness for dermatology, getting rid of blackheads and cleaning the area with a mild astringent suited me just fine. A barrier protected the cat’s eyes and nose from the fumes. Once confined, Gingersnap lay perfectly still in stoic silence broken periodically by a plaintive high-pitched meow.
“Good work,” Mari said. “Maybe next time I have a pimple…”
“No dice. If you’ve got no fur, it won’t occur.”
“Funny.”
Since one of the zits was infected and swollen, I administered a shot of antibiotics. The owners would have their hands full cleaning Gingersnap’s chin each day, without also having to force a pill into him twice a day.
Once in his cage and free of the towel, Gingersnap bore no grudge, but brushed against the cage bars, demanding to be petted. His loud purrs and loving demeanor said I would never do anything bad, Doc, I promise. Trust me. We still double-locked the cage door.
That afternoon on my long lunch hour, I sat on the sofa with both dogs, unwinding from the morning appointments. I thought about Cindy, working her way through her friend’s possessions, Bruce finding the first bodies, and Mari’s trauma seeing another body trapped under the ice.
I began to write down random thoughts in my notebook. Why was Bruce up there in the woods? Did Alicia’s mother-in-law back off her Facebook posts now that her target was dead? Who benefits from these murders? Is there a money trail somewhere? What about Alicia’s stalker? Could Greg Owens, who filed a lawsuit against José for the death of his wife, have taken justice into his own hands?
And why was Mike so sure that Babs’s murder was the key to everything? I texted Mike for an answer but didn’t get a text back.
Unable to relax, I opened my laptop, cleared the kitchen table, and stared at the notes I’d jotted down. I’d started a file on the investigation but hadn’t opened it recently.
The file began well enough, with a column of facts on each victim. A spreadsheet attempted to cross-reference jobs, friends, loved ones, etc. Other pages held random notations that catalogued rumors and interviews with acquaintances of the victims. I’d even written down ten reasons why Bruce must be the killer. The reasons sounded lame even to me, but I highlighted his name in yellow anyway.
After going through the entire notebook, I came up short.
I didn’t want to add to Cindy’s stress, but I had some specific questions she and/or the chief probably knew the answers to. After making yet another list, I called her cell.
“I’m so sorry to bother you,” I began before she interrupted.
“No worries. I really need a break.” Cindy groaned a bit then continued, “What’s up?”
“I’m trying to prepare some sort of a time line and connections chart on Babs, José, and Alicia, and I have to ask a few questions, if you don’t mind.”
“Fire away.”
“Ah, okay. Did Bruce tell the police what he was doing up in the forest?”
She thought a moment. “He said he was thinking of ice fishing and went to check out the lake. After he found the body, he insisted to the chief he panicked because of a case of severe shock.”
Right. Listening carefully, I wrote down the official story Bruce gave the police. It brought back recollections of his panicked voice and clear evidence of vomiting in the snow. Was he simply a jerk in the wrong place at the wrong time?
“What about Rob, José’s roommate?” I asked her.
“What about him?”
“Did the police check his alibi?”
There was a rustle of papers, then she answered. “Sorry. Doing two things at the same time. Yes, I believe he was cleared by his girlfriend.”
“Which one?” I quipped. Rob had an active social life.
“That I don’t know. I’ll have to get back to you.”
Another thought bothered me. “What will happen if a blood relative of Babs’s can’t be found? And why aren’t they using DNA to find them?”
“Babs refused to have her DNA on any of those genealogy sites. That’s what’s taking so long. If no close relative is found, all of her assets go to animal-based charities.”
The idea of an enthusiastic animal lover wiping out three people for the money sounded ludicrous. I sensed Cindy fading, so I asked her one last question. “Did you know Alicia? What did you think of her?”
This time there was a longer pause. “I only saw her one time. Alicia was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met. Every man in the room stared at her as well as most of the women. In her pictures she’s lovely, but in person—she was exceptionally gorgeous. Like a model in a magazine.”
That made me think. I’d seen two photos of José and Alicia together, one close-up with both in profile gazing at each other, and one long, full-length hugging. Neither showed her face completely. In person, I’d only seen Alicia staring up at me with wide frozen eyes.
My text chime pinged. Mike told me he’d been suturing up a large laceration on a rambunctious foal. A second chime contained photos of the wound, before and after. I sent back a close-up of Gingersnap’s chin.
Who knew enough about Alicia to fill in the blanks? I decided to start with her sister, Ursula.
“Thank you so much for taking my call,” I said over the phone after introducing myself. “I’m not with the police…”
“Good. They haven’t made much progress.” She cleared her throat and asked, “Why are you investigating then? Are you some kind of Internet troll?” Her strong angry voice resonated in my ear. “I’m hanging up unless you immediately tell me who you are.”
Quickly, I briefly explained who I was. No reaction—until I mentioned Babs.
“Babs worked with you at the animal hospital?” Ursula asked. “Alicia admired her.”
Finally, someone who connected Babs and Alicia.
Sliding the journal over, I began to take notes. “Yes, we worked together. Babs worked relief jobs all over the valley. In fact, before she died, she mentioned Alicia and José.”
The sound of someone blowing their nose exploded in my ear. I waited, pen in hand, until she gathered her thoughts.
“José was crazy in love with my sister. But then that’s the effect she had on men. They flew out over Christmas and stayed with me here in Santa Barbara. Both were miserable and wanted to leave New York, so I told them I’d help.” She choked back a sob, muffling the receiver.
Listening to someone’s raw pain made me feel helpless.
“Sorry,” she said. “It hits me at random moments that I’m not going to see my baby sister again.”
Her remark resonated because it was the first time I’d heard someone express sadness on the couple’s passing in such a horrific way. I wondered why.
“Ursula,” I began. “I never met Alicia. Can you tell me about your sister?”
That was all she needed. A sea of remembrance poured out, the story of a beloved younger sister who’d been spoiled by the entire family. Alicia growing from a charming, beautiful child into a popular teenager. Prom queen, head cheerleader, on the swim team…
“Wait,” I said. “Alicia was on the swim team in high school?” Babs mentioned this too.
“Yes,” replied Ursula. “She also made the swim team in college, but she quit after freshman year. It took too much time, and the chlorine ruined her hair.”
Now was not the time to discuss the irony of her sister’s body being found in a frozen lake. A horrible thought struck me. Had Alicia been conscious for part of her murder, submerged in the ice? Swimmers are trained to hold their breath. The cause of death was strangulation, but did consciousness leave before or after she went into the lake?
To spare Ursula pain, I concentrated on Alicia’s past.
“Babs once told me that Alicia had problems with a boy in high school. Do you know anything about that?”
“Yeah. A nerdy guy in one of her classes. Math, I think. They ate pizza after class, and he thought it was a date. When she set him straight, he stalked her. She confronted him. Said she’d report him to the police when he suddenly apologized and asked if they could remain friends.”
“Did he keep his promise?” I asked her.
“I think so. She didn’t have any other problems with him that I heard about. One of her boyfriends died in a car accident, senior year of high school,” Ursula added. “A one-car, late-night thing. His vehicle went into a lake. Truthfully, I didn’t pay that much attention because I had a job scouting film locations. My mom would know, but she’s in a care facility for dementia.”
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “You and Alicia were the only children?”
“Yes. Mom and Dad adopted me first from China. I was more than three years old by the time they brought me back to the States. About a year later they got pregnant with Alicia. They called her their miracle baby.”
“How did she end up in Oak Falls?” I asked.
“Our dad grew up near Rhinebeck and we used to visit our grandparents out there most summers. After high school Alice applied to a fast-track college law program in Albany. She wanted to see seasons and snow and get a fresh start after her boyfriend died. Later she applied for an internship at the law firm in Kingston. There she met James, and you know the rest.”
I didn’t know all the details, but Ursula filled me in.
For the next ten minutes Alicia’s big sister told a story of a young woman who rebounded from the death of her boyfriend into the arms of an older married man—a man who lied and told her he had separated from his wife. By then, madly in love, she insisted he get a divorce. The day after the divorce decree was finalized they eloped and flew away on an expensive honeymoon in Paris.
But the romance quickly faded, Ursula said. Alicia was hounded on social media. James’s kids all hated him and needed therapy. His income dropped, as more and more clients learned of the divorce drama. The couple fought and eventually separated. Alicia flew out to California to visit her sister and mother and said she’d been thinking of trying to save her marriage. Before she talked to James, he committed suicide.
