Nothing to Fear But Ferrets by Linda O. Johnston Read Free Book Online

Lexie’s way.
    The stench was sickening. And in the middle of the room, Friday night’s uninvited guest, the hunky, genial, and temperamental Chad Chatsworth, lay on his stomach, head turned toward the side. His clothes were in shreds, and so was he. Blood was spattered everywhere. Was he dead?
    “Chad?” I whispered, crouching on the floor to find out.
    I didn’t sense a shred of a pulse.
    But I did see a lot of what looked like small dog food chunks scattered all over Chad and the floor—and a bunch of blood puddled around Chad’s throat.
    It was 911 time. Déjà vu all over again, for Chad’s wasn’t the first body I’d stumbled upon in the last several months. But I was certain that the culprit in those cases was incarcerated.
    And it appeared, since Charlotte and Yul weren’t home, that the culprits in this case might have escaped from their wire prison before committing this direst of crimes.
    Had Chad been their lunch?

Chapter Six
    I CALLED 911 and Jeff, in that order. I had a feeling I might need my own private private investigator. Unfortunately, I got Jeff ’s voice mail, so I left a veiled message. I didn’t exactly want to blurt out over one unsecure cell phone to another that I’d just discovered a dead body—in my own house this time.
    After blocking the barking Lexie in the kitchen, I tried, briefly, to coax the ferrets back into their cage—carefully keeping far from their teeth, as poor Chad apparently hadn’t.
    It was like trying to talk water into meandering up a mountainside. “Not bloody likely,” the small, furry fellows screeched at me from beneath den furniture that was already partly mangled from the Hummer incident. Or at least I assumed that was what they were saying. It didn’t help me to stay calm and convincing to see them speckled with Chad’s blood.
    Nor to have Chad’s obviously deceased cadaver lying on the floor not far from me. And by doing anything at all about the ferrets, I was contaminating a crime scene, so I quickly decided to leave them alone.
    I supposed that if I’d spoken ferret, or they understood English, I’d have explained the legal system to them. No matter how bad things looked, they were entitled to a good defense.
    Weren’t they?
    I was reminded of a short story I’d read in my youth, “Sredni Vashtar,” by Saki, the pseudonym of H. H. Munro. In it, a young boy had hated his guardian and supposedly sicced his surreptitious pet ferret on her, killing her.
    I felt just terrible for Chad. No matter what the beef among Charlotte, Yul, and him, he’d seemed nice to me—not to mention alive.
    I soon heard a rapping from the direction of the open front door. “Police,” someone shouted. I headed that direction to greet them. It was a couple of patrol officers—a male and female this time—who’d followed the usual protocol of answering a call about a potential crime. When I showed them the body, they agreed a crime had been committed and called for backup.
    Why wasn’t I surprised, a while later, to see that the head of the detective detail at my front door was my old nemesis Detective Ned Noralles?
    Maybe it was because he was a top-rung homicide detective, and this was definitely the kind of case that rang his chimes.
    The hell of it was, despite my complete exoneration last time, Noralles didn’t look surprised to see me, either. “Hello, Ms. Ballantyne. I received a call about a possible homicide here. Would you know anything about that?”
    “I’d know about the homicide, Detective,” I told him. “But not how the victim got that way.”
    “Of course,” he said in a voice as smooth as his brown tweed suit. Detective Noralles was one good-looking African-American. He was also one good, determined homicide detective who clearly refused to let any case grow cold. He’d certainly kept the heat on me before, when he’d tried hard to prove I’d killed two of my favorite pet-sitting clients. He’d seemed a good sport afterward, when