Cat In A Leopard Spot

“Is it easier to let them take potshots at poor dumb animals, instead of you?” Temple asked, goaded beyond empathy. “Is that why you don’t care about these helpless animals being gunned down without even a fighting chance? Your husband is dead. You don’t have to live like you did. You’re not just another hunted-down trophy. You can stop it now.”

Leonora went white, her bizarre feline face a ghost of itself, like the white lions that Siegfried and Roy trained. “You…you—”

“I’m out of this.” Courtney turned on her Anne Klein heels and stamped away.

Leonora’s narrow catlike nostrils flared as her breath huffed out of her body like a noxious exhalation. “What do you know? What do you want?”

“I want that panther. Alive. Let’s hope he still is. Take me there.”

“You’re crazy. It’s out on the desert. We can’t walk there.” She looked down at their strappy, high-heeled sandals.

By some bizarre stroke of fate, Temple realized, they were both wearing the same model of Onyx sandals. Talk about walking in someone else’s shoes…The realization almost knocked her off her feet, which the desert would do later if shock failed now.

Max was counting on her to improvise.

“Then we’ll drive.” Temple grabbed Leonora’s stringy arm and shoved her into the passenger side of the Storm. It was like maneuvering a puppet.

Luckily, she had left her keys in the ignition, so was saved the time of dredging her tote bag for them. “Which way?”

“Left at the fork.” Leonora pointed, her taloned hand shaking. She glanced at Temple quickly, aslant, like a feral animal. “What do you know?”

Temple jerked the steering wheel and set the Storm rocking down a rutted trail made for four-wheel-drive vehicles painted desert-ratchic camouflage.

“I know why you’ve had your face remade. It had to be, to hide the damage. Not hide, camouflage. You don’t have to buy into Cyrus’s violence and obsessions anymore. He’s gone. You can start doing things your way now.”

“I have no way,” Leonora said bitterly. “No way but his.”

“You have the money.”

She shook her mane as if dislodging flies. “Money. I suppose so, but I don’t care. Isn’t it odd that a leopard named Osiris did Cyrus in?” she asked dreamily. “Maybe it was karma.”

“It was coincidence,” Temple said. “And maybe the leopard is innocent.”

Leonora was suddenly quiet.

“I just don’t get why you stayed, put up with it.” Temple had to watch the—“road” was too good a term—ruts. “How far do we go? Is the panther still alive?”

“I haven’t heard shots,” Leonora said in a monotonous voice. “You usually hear shots. Unless the client is a bow hunter.”

Temple gunned the motor, making the Storm buck like a turquoise-painted pony. “Just get me to where it’s happening. That’s all I ask.”

“I don’t know. This is a big place. It may be fenced, but the animals have room to roam. I don’t know where they’re doing it this time. Besides, what can you do about it?”

“Something. Buy the panther back from the hunter.”

Leonora’s slitted amber eyes slid Temple’s way again, wary, challenging. “You don’t know hunters, or you wouldn’t say that. You wouldn’t ask why I stayed.”

“So why?”

“Because he would have tracked me down if I left. Hunters never stop hunting. And it’s a rule of the chase. If you wound something, you follow it until you can finally kill it.”

Her toneless words made Temple shiver despite the heat. She had never heard such an apt description of domestic abuse in her life. The analogy of the hunter and prey fit the situation like a throttling glove. About now she was ready to kill Cyrus Van Burkleo.

“There.” Leonora was pointing to a line of squat, scraggly trees.

One of the dusty little Jeep Laredos the security staff drove was parked nose-first in the shade the brush provided.

Parked and empty. It meant the riders were on foot, and had become stalkers.

Chapter 45

The Most Dangerous Dame

I sit down in the dust.

“Now I wish I had those two little beetle-noses.”

“Beetle-noses?” Midnight Louise inquires.

“They are shiny and black, are they not? The Yorkies’ noses.”

“Ours are shiny and black as well,” she says.

“Ours are matte and black. Much more elegant. But ours do not smell as well.”

“What kind of smelling do you require?”

“The Gees and I trailed our way all night, for miles and miles, all the way to the Animal Oasis, where I then interviewed the suspect in the Van Burkleo murder, Osiris the leopard.”

“And while you were off doing that, someone absconded with your secret witness. Now that the witness is missing, perhaps you will tell me what or who it is.”

I paw disconsolately at a cage bar. “It is Butch.”

“Butch? I am glad you are on a first-name basis with one and all, and thankful that you are not so with me. But who the Devon Rex is Butch?”

“Your lunch pal.”

This gives the kit pause. She frowns prettily, but I dare not tell her so.

“My lunch pal…oh, you mean the panther from between whose paws I nipped the treat for Osiris.”