Cats on the Prowl (A Cat Detective cozy mystery series Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

night, you call on me.”

    Naya smiled up at him. “Thank you. I
will.”

    Jason tore out of the room. The next moment,
you could hear the sound of his footfalls and drumming up the stairs. Carl
gazed down at the stack of paperwork in front of him and shook his head. “What
did you let him go so easy for? I had half a dozen more questions I wanted to
ask him.”

    “Just wait a little while,” Naya told
him. “We’ll bring him in for questioning again, and when we do, we’ll have a
lot more information to use against him. Right now, we have bigger fish to
fry.”

    “You can’t be thinking of Marlena
Rappaport,” Carl remarked. “She’s got a national reputation as a film diva. She
wouldn’t stoop to killing a harmless baker.”

    “Who ever said Roy was harmless?” Naya
asked. “Marlena could have some reason to want to get rid of him. Either way,
even if she didn’t kill him, we still have to question her.”

    “She didn’t kill him,” Carl insisted.

    “What makes you so sure?” Naya asked.

    “I know her,” Carl replied.

    “Personally?” Naya asked.

    Carl shifted in his seat. “Well, no,
not personally. But I’ve seen everything she’s ever been in. She doesn’t have
any reason to get rid of Roy. Jason told you she let herself be photographed
with him. She wouldn’t have cared who knew they had something going. She
wouldn’t even have cared about Josephine finding out. She would probably be
proud of the fact that she bagged a married man.”

    Naya turned away and headed for the
door. “You might be right, but there’s one more person we haven’t thought
about. There’s one more person in this case who has a very distinct motive.”

    Carl frowned. “Who’s that?”

    “Jason’s girlfriend,” Naya replied.
“Marlena might not care who found out about her and Roy, but Jason sure didn’t
want his girlfriend finding out about his relationship with Josephine.”

    Carl rifled through the papers. “Her
name is Annika Neilsson. She lives in Cherry Tree Court.”

    “We’ll question Marlena tomorrow
morning,” Naya decided. “Then we can start looking into Annika.”

    “But she would have no motive to kill
Roy,” Carl pointed out. “She probably didn’t even know him.”

    “Maybe not,” Naya replied. “But she
could have had plenty of reason to frame Jason. If she found out about his
fling with Josephine, she could have gotten mad and tried to pin the murder on
him.”

Chapter 5
    Willow sat on Carl’s desk and peered
into the darkness. Nothing stirred in the deserted police station. Every now
and then, a red light blinked on the smoke detector on the ceiling. Other than
that, dead quiet filled the building.

    Willow couldn’t sit still. Her whiskers
twitched, and her ears swiveled in every direction to catch the slightest
noise. The tiniest tick of the clock sent her nerves jangling. She whispered
into the darkness, “Are you there, Nat? Are you awake?”

    For the first time in an eternity of
waiting, a gruff voice answered her. “I’m awake.”

    Willow couldn’t tell which direction
the voice came from, but she jumped with a start and whirled around. “Where are
you?”

    A spot in the inky blackness caught her
attention. A shadow moved in the gloom, but she couldn’t make out any distinct
shape. Only a semblance of movement convinced her Nat was somewhere over there.

    Sure enough, his whiskers glistened in
the moonlight. He blinked. Willow caught her breath. She kept a firm hold on
herself to keep from racing toward him. She would have bowled him over and
jumped on top of him with her fangs bared, but that was kitten play. Nat didn’t
play that way.

    “What are we going to do?”

    Nat sat down in the square of moonlight
streaming through the window. “You heard Naya. They’re going to interview that
Marlena woman in the morning. We have to get out and find some more information
so we’re ready.”

    “Ready for what?” Willow asked.

    “Ready