Cat Shout for Joy by Shirley Rousseau Murphy

Author:Shirley Rousseau Murphy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

16

Joe’s second call to Max was disappointing.

After the intelligence that Max had shared with him earlier in the day, he’d thought their relationship had geared up to a new and more intimate confidence.

Not so.

As Joe sat on Clyde’s desk using the cell phone, trying to maintain the heightened relationship, telling Max about the mouse nest, the chief dropped back to his closemouthed demeanor of earlier calls, the one-­way snitch-­to-­cop dialogue that Joe was used to. Well, what could you expect? Listening to Joe’s wild tale of a mouse and torn photos, of course he’d clam up. “What were you doing poking around in mouse holes, what were you doing in Ben’s apartment? That’s a crime scene.”

“The crime tape was gone,” Joe said. “The windows were open. I was standing at the window looking in, wondering if your detectives missed anything, when this mouse ran across the floor. I guess mice take over right away when a place is empty. It had a piece of shiny red paper stuck to its fur.

“I remembered what you said about photographs. That paper was bright and shiny enough to have been chewed off a photo, and it made me wonder. I climbed in the window, had a look under the bed where the mouse had gone, and found the nest.”

Max’s heavy silence made him want to hang up and pretend he’d never made the call. Sitting among the clutter of Clyde’s bills and catalogs, he knew he’d talked himself into a corner.

But then Max said, sounding only slightly reluctant, that someone would investigate the mouse hole, and he thanked Joe and hung up.

Now Joe lay in his tower speculating on what would come from that phone call. Hoping the photos would be worth the effort—­his bitten paw still hurt. And then thinking about the one missing fact that Max and Bonnie Rivers knew and that he didn’t. About the real heart of the puzzle: the rest of the information on the San Francisco trial, the facts that he’d missed when he arrived late at Bonnie’s to eavesdrop through the front window.

A murder trial, but whose trial? What kind of murder? And when? He had left Celeste Reece’s house knowing more than when he arrived, but not knowing enough, not knowing what the department knew.

First thing in the morning he’d find out, when he hit Harper’s office. Now, curling among his pillows, looking out his tower windows at the night, he tried to be satisfied with that. At least now his belly was full of supper: cold spaghetti and smoked salmon that he’d scarfed down before he called Max. Yawning, he was dropping into sleep when below in the house, the phone rang. Two rings, then Ryan or Clyde picked up on one of the downstairs phones; he could hear no voice from Clyde’s study. All was silent again and he drifted off, he was down into heavy sleep, into a deep dream, when the doorbell rang and Ryan’s excited squeal jerked him wide awake.

Ryan never squealed.

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