31906844db5c02010017a90f3f2ca805

She immediately called up the email app and scrolled through Wolf’s emails. When she saw he had a hundred unread ones, she typed Dany into the search window. Nothing. She thought for a moment, then brought up the WhatsApp app. And immediately hit the motherlode. She scrolled through Dany and Wolf’s chats. It was all pretty saucy stuff.

“Mamma mia,” Chase muttered as they read a few excerpts together. “EL James should turn this into a book.”

It confirmed that Wolf and Dany had been in a relationship, but nothing more. Odelia idly read through a few of the more recent exchanges while Chase dug through Wolf’s closet, in search of something to tie the director to the murder.

Dany had been worried about Wolf’s wife Emily, apparently, repeatedly asking Wolf how far along he was in his divorce procedure. Wolf kept assuring her he was going to file for divorce any day now, and she kept asking him to talk to his wife soon.

Finally, in the last message she’d sent him, she’d said, ‘I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to keep quiet. Each time I meet Emily I’m afraid I’m going to just blab it out!’

Odelia frowned. Wolf might have construed this as a threat. He might never have had any intention of divorcing his wife, who apparently was the source of his wealth and an important part of his business. So maybe he’d killed Dany before she could ‘blab it out?’

Suddenly, she noticed Chase was wildly gesturing at her from the closet he was digging through. She hurried over, Wolf’s phone still in her hand. When Chase stepped aside, she saw it: a yellow parka, tucked away in the far corner of his packed closet.

Chase gave her a meaningful look and took it out by the clothes hanger, careful not to touch the jacket itself. And the moment he did, she saw the tiny red dots that were spattered all across the front of the parka.

Blood.

Dany’s blood.

[Êàðòèíêà: img_2]

Dooley and I were walking back to the car when Harriet came walking up to us. Head hanging down, she didn’t look like her usual feisty self.

“Hey, Max. Hey, Dooley,”’ she said, and even sounded downcast.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Where is Brutus?”

“Oh, around, I guess,” she said, sounding as cheerful as a zombie who hasn’t had their daily portion of brains.

Just then, there was a yelp followed by a scream, and then we were running towards the source of the sound. I’d recognized the yelp as coming from Brutus, the scream as human in origin.

When we rounded the house, we discovered the scream had come from a small duck pond. What was it with duck ponds today? The pond itself was dwarfed by a rock wall that rose up like some jagged-edged monstrosity. The front was outfitted with climbing holds but the top hovered over that pond like a giant black beak.

When we arrived on the scene, a potbellied man was sitting on a bench, right beneath the promontory, looking dazed, with Brutus positioned squarely on his stomach.

“Brutus!” I cried. “What happened?”

“He-he saved me,” said Brutus, staring at the man with some incredulity, as the man, equally flustered, was staring right back at him. “He just saved my life.”

“Good thing you landed on my tummy, little buddy,” said the man now. “Otherwise you’d have been nothing but a grease spot on this bench.”

“See?” said Dooley. “My analogy was right on the money.”

“Oh, shut up, Dooley,” said Harriet. “Brutus?” she said croakily. “Are you all right?”

“I am now,” he said. He looked shaken, not stirred, but otherwise in excellent fettle. The man, on the other hand, now pushed the black cat from his belly and rubbed it. He looked a little winded. Being hit by a falling Brutus would do that to a person, of course.

We all looked up, at the promontory thirty feet over our heads. It wouldn’t have killed Brutus, and then again it might have.

“How the hell did you get up there?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I was wandering, thinking, and suddenly… I was falling.”

“The back of the wall must be a gentle slope down. Probably there’s some kind of path leading from the top, so climbers can walk down once they’ve reached there,” I said.

“This makes it the third time I almost died today,” said Brutus with an uncharacteristic tremor in his voice. “Maybe I should just lock myself up in the house from now on, and stay put.”

“Hey, that reminds me of those movies,” said Dooley.

“What movies?” I said.

“ThoseFinal Destinationmovies. A group of teenagers cheats death, and then death comes after them, killing them in increasingly freaky and horrible ways, one by one, until they’re all dead, except for the token survivor, who gets it in the next movie.”

“Dooley,” I said, shaking my head. “Not now.”

“But it’s exactly the same thing!” He turned to Brutus. “Did you cheat death by any chance in the past couple of weeks?”

“I cheated death three times today,” he said. He could have been white around the nostrils. It’s hard to tell with a cat, what with all the fur.