Cats on the Prowl (A Cat Detective cozy mystery series Book 1) by Nancy C. Davis Read Free Book Online Page A

barely recognized him. He didn’t
even look like a cat anymore. He reminded her of some kind of reptile she saw
on Animal Planet . “What are you looking for?”

    Nat sat back and brushed the soot off
his whiskers. “I had occasion to go into the Morningside Bakery once. This is
the corner where the ovens were hooked up to the gas lines. This would be the
corner where the crime lab found the accelerant that started the fire.”

    “How did you manage to get inside the
bakery?” Willow asked.

    Nat shrugged and turned away. “Roy left
the back door open on hot summer afternoons. The smell was irresistible. I went
in and stole one of the fresh chocolate chip cookies. I ran off with it while
Roy was on the phone. He never even knew I was there.”

    Chester chuckled to himself. “That’s
just like you, Nat. You’re a terror.”

    Willow shook her head in wonder. “I
wish I had the guts to do something like that.”

    Nat started cleaning his face.
“Everybody’s got to start somewhere. You were a housecat until you came to the
police station. I was born wild, so these things come naturally to me. You’ll
get the hang of it, but you have to start practicing your craft.”

    Willow nodded. “I’m beginning to
understand that.”

    Bella touched a charred piece of metal
with her paw. “So what did you find? Did you detect any accelerant among the
remains of the bakery equipment?”

    “As I told you,” Nat replied, “a cat’s
nose is several hundred times more sensitive than any detection method the
crime lab uses. There are traces of several chemicals in this corner. One of
them is paint stripper, and another is toluene with a trace of hydrocarbon
propellent. That kind of product comes in a spray can. Roy would have used to
clean the chrome on his BMW motorcycle.”

    “Then Josephine was right,” Willow
remarked. “Roy kept chemicals in the bakery, and that’s what set off the fire.”

    “Not so fast,” Chester added. “We also
detected a variety of jet fuel with an admixture of stabilizer to keep it in a
liquid state. The only place you find that particular combination of fuels is
in certain proprietary blends of camping stove cartridges.”

    Willow blinked. She didn’t understand
half the big words the tom cats used. “Camping stoves? How did that wind up in
the bakery?”

    Chester sneezed again, but he made no
effort to wash the black grime off his face and body. He must have enjoyed
making a startling impression. “That’s precisely the point, my dear. It
wouldn’t have wound up in the bakery unless someone put it there. Roy never
went camping in his life, and neither did Josephine.”

    “Someone started that fire by planting
camping fuel in the bakery,” Nat added. “The question is, who had an interest
in camping?”

    “Jason,” Chester replied.

    Nat’s head shot up, and Willow whirled
around to face him. “He did?”

    Chester snorted. “You police cats don’t
have your ears to the ground like we do. You need an alley cat to tell you
these things. Jason went camping almost every weekend. He would have had those
cartridges.”

    “Tell the whole story, Chester,” Bella
chided. “Jason wasn’t the only one who went camping. He took his girlfriend
Annika with him when he went. She had access to those fuel cartridges, too.”

    “That’s another reason to believe she
had something to do with the murder,” Nat remarked. “She could have started the
fire to cast the blame back on Jason.”

    Willow shook her head. “Wait a minute. Bella
says Jason left the alley about eight o'clock. What if he went back to the
bakery and started the fire? He could be the one trying to frame Annika.”

    Nat licked his now-clean lips. “When
you’ve been in this business as long as I have, you develop a sense of who’s
innocent and who isn’t. I have a feeling about Jason Dempsey, and he didn’t
kill Roy.”

    “Not so fast, my friend,” Chester
grumbled. “You may be resident police