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But lucky for us Fido finally intervened and turned down the fan.“What did I tell you, Buster,” the irate barber admonished his Main Coon. “No messing with the fan.” And muttering under his breath, he returned to his customer, who for some reason was having her hair painted a distinct shade of purple, and continued his work.

I was still feeling a little shaky, but Buster whooped and said,“Drop by any time, fellas. This heatwave doesn’t stand a chance against the WindBlaster 5000!”

Dooley glanced at me, I glanced at Dooley, and we both shook our heads. Clearly Buster wasn’t in the right frame of mind to be questioned about missing ladies from twenty years ago. So we thanked him for his time, and went on our way. A good detective knows when to ask questions, but also when to keep his tongue, and clearly this was one of those occasions where silence is golden.

“I’m sure Buster doesn’t know anything about a woman who went missing twenty years ago anyway, Max,” said Dooley as we traversed the sidewalk, which was already hotting up considerably. Soon it would be too hot for our sensitive paws to tread on.

“Yeah, I guess this is going to prove a tough one, Dooley,” I intimated. “Not many pets were even alive twenty years ago, so it might be difficult to find an actual witness.”

“At least now we know that Wilbur lost his beard and that Charlene is thinking about losing her face,” he offered.

“Yeah, at least there’s that,” I agreed.

And we’d just arrived at Odelia’s office to give her our report from the frontline—no matter how inconsequential—when the door of the Gazette burst open and Odelia appeared. Her eyes were sparkling, and her cheeks flushed, and at that moment she looked the picture of the raging reporter, on her way to her next big story.

When she saw us, she practically screamed,“Perfect timing, guys—there’s been a murder! Let’s go!”

Only serial killers and reporters can be this happy when a murder has taken place, I found myself thinking, but then I was swept up in my human’s excitement and moments later we were in Odelia’s car and on our way to whatever adventure awaited us this time.

Chapter 11

Odelia got to the place where it happened in record time. The moment her uncle had called her to tell her the news, she’d been up and ready for duty with not a single second lost. The summer months are often described as the slow news season for your news-hungry journo, and the last couple of days had seen an absolute dearth of newsworthy facts and factoids to report. In fact Dan, Odelia’s editor, had already complained that they were going to have to fill the next edition of the Gazette with interviews with farmers complaining about the heat. Farmers were always a popular subject when there was nothing else to write: they always had something to complain about. The weather was too wet, too hot, too dry, too cold. Unfortunately readers often skipped these stories, and if the dry spell went on for too long, they might end up skipping the Gazette altogether.

“How do you know it’s a murder, Odelia?” asked Dooley from the backseat, where he and Max had asked to be strapped in before she roared away from the curb.

“Because my uncle said so,” she explained.

“So Uncle Alec is the one who decides if something is a murder or not?” asked Dooley a follow-up question.

“Yeah, I guess so,” she said, weaving in and out of traffic at breakneck speed. She’d turned up her airco, as the day was already growing unbearably hot again, and the cold air was blasting her face.

“And what made him decide that this particular dead person was murdered?” asked Dooley, still not fully satisfied.

“I’m not sure, but I guess we’ll find out in….” She checked her watch. “Five minutes.”

“Did you know that Charlene Butterwick is going through an extreme makeover?” asked Max, expertly changing the subject.

“No, I didn’t know that. Who told you?”

“Buster. Charlene was in there yesterday, and asked for an entirely new coiffure.”

“She’s also having her face replaced,” said Dooley. “But won’t Uncle Alec be upset when he sees his girlfriend with a completely new face, Odelia? He might not even recognize her anymore.”

Odelia laughed.“I’m sure it won’t be so bad. She probably wants to have her eyebrows done. Busy woman like Charlene doesn’t always find the time for that kind of thing, and seeing as she’s always in the public eye, she wants to look presentable.”

“Oh,” said Dooley, thinking about this.

“Have you found out anything about Vicky Gardner?” asked Odelia now. The missing woman was of more concern to her than Charlene Butterwick’s eyebrows, to be honest. She’d talked to Dan about Vicky’s disappearance, and he was most interested. Missing persons cases, especially when they concerned the wife of one of the richest men in town, always capture readers’ imagination, even after twenty years. And Vicky’s case was one of those cases that had never really gone away. The mystery was so great and so enticing people had speculated about it ever since.