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“The name is Moses, cat, and I’ll be back for sure—to give you another taste of revenge!”

And with these words, he was gone.

“It’s in my mouth, Max,” Dooley repeated, then glanced at me. “And it’s in your eyes.”

I was too furious for speech, but then decided that whoever this Moses character was, he wasn’t going to get the better of me, and so I vowed revenge, right then and there. Then again, wasn’t that the word he’d used? Revenge?

“What was he talking about, Max?” asked Dooley. “He said something about revenge. But what did we ever do against that bird?”

“I don’t know, Dooley,” I said. “As far as I can tell I’ve never seen this Moses before.”

“He must be mistaking us for a pair of other cats,” Dooley ventured.

“Yeah, must be,” I said, then set about the arduous task of cleaning myself up with the use of my tongue, and so did Dooley.

“Sometimes, Dooley,” I said as I removed the final residue of pigeon poo from my features, “I wonder if humans maybe are smarter than they look by not using their tongues for hygienic purposes. I mean, a nice shower suddenly doesn’t sound like such a bad idea right now.”

“Pigeon poo tastes horrible, Max,” Dooley said with a shiver. “But I’ll take it over a shower any day.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

Though it has to be said Moses’s initiative had almost made a shower believer out of me. Maybe water wasn’t so bad after all. It couldn’t possibly be worse than poo, right?

Chapter 13

“This is impossible,” said Quintin Gardner. He was an imposing man, and even at sixty-three was also an exceedingly handsome man, Odelia thought.

She’d accompanied her uncle and Chase for this first interview with Vicky Gardner’s husband, hoping to shed some light on recent events.

Mr. Gardner looked up from the picture of the dead woman.“Is this… Vicky?” he asked. “Did you finally find her?”

It was obvious from the tremor in his voice that even twenty years after her disappearance, the man still carried a torch for his wife.

They were standing in the doorway of his grand mansion, having parked in the circular driveway. Max and Dooley were eager to get inside out of the heat, and frankly so was Odelia. Uncle Alec was mopping his brow and probably could have used a cold shower. The only one who wasn’t affected by the heat was Chase, who looked his usual cool and composed self. It was he who was holding up his phone and had asked Mr. Gardner if he recognized the woman in the picture.

“We found her just now,” Chase explained. “We believe she was murdered.”

“Vicky? Murdered?” asked Mr. Gardner, who seemed as confused by all this as Odelia was feeling. “But…” He studied the picture once more. “She looks just like she did when she went missing,” he said, a flicker of a smile touching his lips, then his shoulders sagged. “I don’t understand any of this. Won’t you come in for a moment?”

Gratefully they all stepped inside, and it was a testament to Mr. Gardner’s general state of confusion that he didn’t even ask about the two cats that tripped in after Odelia.

“Please,” said Mr. Gardner, and gestured to a sitting room just off the main atrium, which was two floors high and bathed in the light streaming down from a skylight.

They entered the sitting room but instead of sitting, stood around waiting for Mr. Gardner to offer them a seat. But the older man was so discombobulated that the thought didn’t even enter his mind. At least it was nice and cool inside the house.

“I don’t understand,” the man repeated. “You say you took this picture this morning?”

Chase nodded.“The resemblance with your wife is striking, Mr. Gardner, which is why we thought to drop by here first.”

“But… how can this be?” asked the man. “Vicky would be forty-eight if she were still alive. And this girl—this woman—she’s what, twenty-five? Twenty-eight?”

“We were hoping you had an explanation for us,” said Odelia gently. “Maybe your wife had relatives? A niece who resembled her? Or a daughter, maybe?”

“No,” said Mr. Gardner, shaking his head distractedly. “We were never lucky enough to have kids. Maybe if Vicky had lived we would have started a family, but we figured we still had plenty of time.” His voice broke, the grief still palpable, even after all these years.

“Then… a niece, perhaps? Or some other relative?” Odelia insisted.

But Mr. Gardner shook his head.“Vicky was an only child, and so were her mom and dad. It’s always possible that she had some distant cousins she didn’t know about, of course, but the resemblance, my God…”

He did take a seat then, on an overstuffed black leather chair, but didn’t offer the same convenience to his guests. “Can I see that picture again, Sergeant?”

“Detective,” Chase murmured, and obligingly handed over his phone.