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

cat around here, but stand aside for the
superior skills of the alley cat. Over here, you’ll find the trace of another
chemical I believe sheds a new light on this case.”

    The other cats ran to the spot, and
Chester flipped over a shard of twisted metal with his paw. “What is it?”

    “It looks like a soda can,” Willow
remarked.

    “It’s the last fragment of the fuel
cartridge,” Chester told them. “It must have exploded when the fire hit it. You
can smell the fuel on it.”

    “But that doesn’t tell us anything,”
Nat pointed out. “We already know the killer started the fire with a fuel
cartridge.”

    “But there’s another smell on the
cartridge, too,” Chester replied. “Come have a whiff.”

    Willow put her nose against the metal
and took a deep sniff. “It smells like alcohol.”

    “That smell, my dear little house cat,”
Chester intoned, “is what human beings call perfume. It’s a chemical they use
to make themselves smell a certain way. It’s like spray, but it’s artificial.
It’s designed to disguise how they really smell.”

    Willow frowned. “But what’s the point
of that? Their natural smells send signals back and forth so they can find
suitable mates. Why would they want to disguise that?”

    “My point exactly,” Chester growled.
“They use these smells to make each other think they’re more suitable than they
really are. Sometimes the strategy works, but more often than not, it fails.
Humans are much more attracted to their mates’ natural smells than even they
realize or would be willing to admit.”

    “What my esteemed colleague of the
alley hasn’t told you, though,” Nat countered, “is that perfume is most often
used by women, which would confirm my theory that Annika planted the camping
fuel to frame Jason.”

    “What my esteemed colleague of the
police department doesn’t realize,” Chester shot back, “is that this is a
special kind of perfume known in the human world as cologne. It is used by
men.”

    Willow and Bella looked back and forth
between the two cats.

    “Roy could have been wearing that
cologne,” Nat argued.

    Chester drew himself up. “Are you
telling me Roy Avino handled the fuel cartridge that took his life?”

    “If Josephine is right,” Willow added,
“he could have left the cartridge here and left his cologne on it.”

    “But,” Chester pointed out, “we already
determined that Roy didn’t go camping. I can also personally testify that he
never wore cologne. He was a sloven, and you can take my word that the term is
a very generous one.”

    Bella tittered. “Look who’s talking.”

    Chester ignored her. “Jason, on the
other hand, always went about the town drenched in cologne of this variety. He
fancied himself some kind of dandy. I can only imagine his fling with his
boss’s wife colored his imagination.”

    “That still doesn’t rule out the
possibility that Annika planted the cartridge to frame Jason,” Nat pointed out.
“She could have selected a cartridge that had Jason’s cologne on it, or she
could have put his cologne on it herself to make it look like he put the
cartridge in the bakery.”

    Willow blinked. “This Annika would have
to be pretty devious to plan something like that. I wonder what she’s like.”

    “You won’t have to wonder,” Nat told
her. “We’re going to visit her tomorrow, right after we interview Marlena
Rappaport.”

    “We?” Willow asked. “We interview
Marlena?”

    Nat shrugged and turned away. “You know
what I mean.”

    Chester waved his paw the other way.
“One more thing. Over here, we have another distinct chemical smell.”

    “What is it?” Willow asked.

    “It belongs to a certain class of
explosives known as blasting caps,” Chester told her. “I would say the killer
planted them close to the fuel cartridge to set it off. I haven’t seen the
cartridge in its whole state, so maybe it had a safety device that prevented it
from igniting on its