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

calm.
    Noralles stood beside me. “Now, we can do this in a game of twenty-plus questions, or you can just tell me what you know. Which will it be?”
    I preferred the former, but it would take extra time and piss him off even more. Besides, even with a suspended law license, I was an officer of the court. That meant I had to cooperate with the law, like it or not.
    I therefore latched on to Noralles’s latter suggestion and told him, “I believe the victim is a man named Chad Chatsworth.”
    “But you don’t know him, even though he’s now dead in your house?”
    “Not really, though I met him here on Friday night.” I told Noralles that I still I rented out the large house on my property owing to economic necessity. I described the Hummer accident, and how I’d found the ferrets. Then I told him about the party. “Chad and I happened to walk in at the same time. Later, one of the neighbors who watched the show my tenant Charlotte starred in said that Chad Chatsworth was the guy she dumped in favor of money and future TV projects.”
    “And Chatsworth was a guest at the party?”
    “I think he crashed it. The neighbor also told me that one of the rules that allows Charlotte to keep her prize is that she can’t have contact with her dumpee.”
    “You came in with him?”
    “Kind of. I saw him first on the front walk. He introduced himself as Chad. No one greeted us at the door, so he just walked in. Me, too. I lost track of him and later heard Charlotte and her boyfriend, Yul, ask him to leave.”
    Okay, so I spoke euphemistically. But I’d been the subject of a couple of Noralles’s murder investigations. I wasn’t about to sic him on my tenants just because they’d had a falling-out with the victim.
    Of course, that victim was found dead in the house they rented, after he’d been told never to darken its doorstep again.
    But Charlotte a killer? Yul?
    Ferrets?
    What if Charlotte actually had been having a relationship with the guy who’d won her heart on that reality show—and tried to keep it from the world so she could keep her financial winnings, too? Did he threaten to out their relationship and jeopardize her juicy prize?
    Did Yul find out about said relationship and get peeved enough to pull a Sredni Vashtar on Chad?
    Or did the freed ferrets do it on their own?
    If so, who’d freed them? Chad? And then he’d lain down on the floor so they could chew him to death? I didn’t think so.
    Could it have been an accident—Chad tripping, falling in a way that scattered both ferrets and their food while hitting his head and falling unconscious?
    Then the ferrets, while scarfing up their spilled food, scarfed up some of Chad’s flesh, too?
    Seemed pretty far-fetched.
    Before Noralles could bombard me with more questions than I’d asked myself, a woman wearing latex gloves slipped out through the kitchen door. Lexie squirmed in my arms, but I held her there. “I’d like to go over a few things with you where we found the victim, Detective. It looks as if he was attacked by those ferrets—all over, but most severely at his neck. His carotid artery was severed, and he died from loss of blood.”
    “Have you called L.A. Animal Services?”
    “Yes, and a couple of their officers are here now.”
    I followed Noralles back inside the house, Lexie still wriggling under my arm. I watched as a guy and a girl in blue shirts and light pants who’d collected the ferret cage maneuvered out the den door as Noralles stood back to let them pass.
    “What’s going to happen to them?” I asked, holding the fascinated Lexie all the tighter.
    “We’ll hold them pending the outcome of the investigation into this incident,” the woman said, stopping just outside the door and effectively blocking Noralles from entering the den. Though she was slighter than her male counterpart, she seemed to be having an easier time holding up her end of the cage.
    “If it turns out that the ferrets were guilty only of chewing a