Shop Till You Drop (35 page)

“She’s got an alibi?” Helen said.

Grace rolled her eyes. “You watch too many cop shows. Tara is blessed with a nosy neighbor who watched her the whole time. Said no cars left the driveway. Even knew she and her boyfriend had Chinese delivered Saturday and Papa John’s pizza on Sunday. The neighbor said her boyfriend never came out of the house until after three p.m. Monday to pick up the morning paper, and he was still wearing his bathrobe. Tara didn’t appear until nine Monday night, and she sat in the hot tub for twenty-seven minutes. ”

“That neighbor must be one lonely old lady.”

“Mr. Rodriguez would resent that description,” Detective Grace said. “He’s a lively seventy-eight-year-old with high-powered binoculars. He waits for Tara to go sunbathing in her bikini. She also likes to sit nude in the hot tub after dark. The old boy watches her like the Secret Service watches the president. He even keeps a diary.”

“I guess you can find those things out when you’re the police,” Helen said.

“I hope you are not wasting your time playing detective. You don’t have my resources or my training.”

“No, but I find stuff anyway. Look at those.” Helen pointed to Christina’s other CDs with the blackmail material. She kept her promise to Sarah and did not bring out the Niki cassette. “And you were wrong. My fingerprints aren’t on Brittney’s pictures or any of the others. I’ve opened them up wearing gloves.”

Helen showed her the pair of twelve-button search gloves, which were getting slightly gray at the finger tips.

“I didn’t realize it was a formal search,” Detective Grace said, as she pulled on her own gloves. They were latex, not twelve-button kid. One by one, she opened the cases.

“Quite a collection of individuals here,” Grace said, after she finished. Helen thought “individual” was cop-talk for “scumbag.”

“I’ll alert our special victims unit about the sexual abuse of a minor. But all of these individuals have alibis for the time of the murder.”

“You checked them?” Helen said. She was surprised.

“What do you think I was doing? Sitting on my hands? I checked out all the shop’s regulars.”

“So the only two without alibis are Brittney and Joe,” Helen said. At least, that’s what she and Sarah had managed to find out.

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Maybe not, but I’m right. And I’ll bet you don’t believe in coincidence. I get death threats. Then I go to Brittney’s house and see the dead woman’s missing cat. I confront Brittney, and that same night somebody tries to kill me.”

“I don’t believe in coincidence,” Detective Grace said. “But I need a connection. It will take time to establish one.”

“I know a shortcut,” Helen said. “What if I could prove Brittney has Christina’s cat?”

“How? It’s an alley cat.”

“DNA,” Helen said. “Animals have it, too. Were any cat hairs found on Christina’s body?”

“Four or five,” Detective Grace said.

“And you found cat hair in Christina’s condo?”

“A whole brushful,” she said.

“Then all we need is the cat, and we can get a DNA test.”

“Two problems,” Detective Grace said. “First, Sunnysea Beach is not going to pay for a DNA test for a cat. DNA tests cost thousands, and we don’t have that kind of money.

“Second, even if they did, we’d need a court order to get Brittney’s cat. There’s no way a judge would give us one. It would be your word—the word of a woman on the run—against a solid citizen.”

“Look,” Helen said, desperately, “the last detective who used this technique was named Officer of the Year. He got a ton of publicity. You could get out of Sunnysea Beach and get a job with a better force. Get a decent partner instead of Dwight.”

“And where do I get the money for the test?” Detective Grace said. She was considering it, Helen thought. A little more persuasion, and she’d say yes.

“The merchants association has a twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward for anyone who gives information leading to the arrest and conviction of Christina’s killer. Put my name in for the reward, and I’ll pay for the DNA test if your department won’t.”

“Deal,” Detective Grace said. “But we still need the cat’s hair.”

“I can get it,” Helen said. “Brittney’s house has a pet door. The cat goes out at night. I’ll grab it and get a few hairs.” Helen didn’t want to think about pulling hair from a live cat. A live cat with more than his share of razor-sharp claws.

“I don’t want to know any more,” Grace said. “Just don’t call me from the Bridge Harbour police station.”

“First, I have to call the animal DNA expert,” Helen said.

Helen enjoyed running up Juliana’s phone bill to track down the DNA expert. Dr. Joy Halverson was at QuestGen laboratories in Davis, California, four time zones and twenty-five hundred miles from Florida.

“Do you have cat-hair samples with roots?” Dr. Halverson asked.

“Detective Grace says a grooming brush filled with hair was found in the dead woman’s penthouse.”

“That’s a good source. There should be root material,” Dr. Halverson said. “What about the hairs found on the woman’s body?”

“I don’t know,” Helen said. “Is it important?”

“Yes. There are two kinds of DNA testing in forensics. STR, short tandem repeats, is the most accurate test, but it needs nuclear DNA. You get that from blood samples, saliva, or hair with roots. A shed hair does not have a lot of root material. You might get lucky, though. One of the hairs found on the body may have a root. You need to check.”

“What if it doesn’t?” Helen said.

“Then the probabilities change drastically. If you get a match when you use STR testing, there is only one chance in a billion the test is wrong. That’s fairly convincing evidence. If you use the non-root material, the chances drop to maybe one in three hundred.”

The whole case was riding on a hair. A cat hair.

“If I go ahead with the test, what will it cost?” Helen said.

“It’s for you, not the police, right?”

“The local police department can’t afford a DNA test for a house cat,” Helen said. Neither can I, she thought.

“If a private person did it, the test would run about a thousand dollars,” Dr. Halverson said. “If I did the test, it would take two to three weeks. The price goes up to two thousand or more if I have to testify in court.”

The DNA test would take a huge bite out of Helen’s suitcase stash. It’s an investment, Helen decided. If I get the reward, I’ll still have twenty-three thousand dollars. But I can’t get anything without it.

“How much hair will I have to pull off the cat for comparison?” Helen said. She was not looking forward to this part.

“None,” the doctor said. “I need a cheek sample. You can use a fine brush, like a baby tooth brush, or a cotton swab. Just brush it on the inside of the cat’s cheek, and that will get the DNA sample.”

Great. Helen had to steal cat slobber instead of cat hair. How was she going to stick a Q-tip in a strange cat’s mouth?

“Do you have a court order for the cat?” Dr. Halverson said.

“No,” Helen said. “I can get what I need by other means.”

“Like climbing the fence?” the doctor said shrewdly.

“I’m hoping the cat will come out to the sidewalk,” Helen said. She knew how hopeless that sounded.

Next, Helen checked with Detective Grace. “We have to be the only people in America who want cat hair,” Grace said.

“Not just any cat hair,” Helen said. “It has to have roots.”

“I’ll get back with you,” she said.

Detective Grace called Helen back two hours later. “We’re in luck. There’s a root on one hair.”

“Then I’m about to become a cat burglar,” Helen said.

“We better scout Brittney’s place. I want to see what it looks like at night,” Margery said.

“The same as in the day, only darker,” Helen said.

“Not true. Every place looks different at night. Acts different, too. Trust me on this. I’m an old night owl.”

Helen wondered what Margery saw at the Coronado after dark. Her landlady was providing the wheels for the cat caper. “Brittney goes to a different South Beach club almost every night,” Helen said. “Wednesday nights she goes to the Delano. Usually leaves sometime after nine.”

“Fine,” said Margery. “We got a date tonight at ten. It’s Tuesday, so we’ll nail the cat tomorrow.”

At ten o’clock, they pulled out of the Coronado and headed for the Seventeenth Street Bridge. Margery drove an old white Cadillac half a block long. Helen wondered if it was a state law that when you reached age seventy, you had to drive a big white car.

On the other side of the bridge, Margery made a left onto Bridge Harbour Parkway, and they were suddenly in the hushed, winding streets of the wealthy. Her landlady was right. Bridge Harbour was different after dark.

The huge houses looked more like hotels, with their two-story entryways. Huge, enormous, and giant described everything about these houses, except their lots, which were barely big enough for a modest ranch house.

“How come major mansions are built on such little lots?” Helen said.

“You can get land in Omaha,” Margery said. “They want water. The fewer drawbridges your yacht goes through before you get to the ocean, the better. Bridge Harbor is only one drawbridge away.

“Now, can we skip the house tour and get to work? Did you see all these ‘No Parking’ signs? What are we going to do with this car? I can’t park it. And look at these security patrols.”

Bridge Harbour houses were built along a system of canals. The security service had white patrol cars stationed at every little canal bridge.

“I counted six rent-a-cops on wheels,” Margery said. “This is not going to be easy. Show me the house. And tell me it doesn’t have a seven-foot wall, like every other place we’ve passed.”

“Oh, no,” Helen said. “It has a tall hedge, but a nice open driveway. The cab pulled right in.”

But no car could get in at night. The driveway was closed by an electric gate.“That wasn’t here during the day,” Helen said.

“At least it’s fancy wrought iron,” Margery said. “The cat can slide through the curlicues. I don’t like those security lights. Place is lit up like Times Square.”

Helen thought she saw something white flitting through the bushes. Was the cat on his nightly prowl? It was hard to tell in the glaring lights.

“Let’s get out of here before they notice my license plate,” Margery said. “We’ve got planning to do.”

They stopped at a Pollo Tropical and picked up dinner to go. Even the fast food in Florida was exotic. Where else in America could you get fried plantains at a franchise? They ate their chicken tropi-chops (three dollars and seventeen cents, with rice and beans) in Margery’s kitchen.

“With all that security, we’re going to need an excuse for wandering around,” she said.

“I could be a jogger,” Helen said.

“Security won’t fall for that,” Margery said, stabbing at her chicken. “Did you see any joggers on those streets at ten o’clock?”

“No,” Helen said. “Wait. What if I was looking for my lost cat?”

“I like that,” Margery said. “It’s almost true. It would explain why I was driving around, and why you were trying to catch a cat.

“Now we have to figure out how to get the cat. Are you sure it goes out at night?”

“There’s a cat flap in the door. I thought I saw something white in the bushes. But I don’t know how to get it to come to me. I’ve never had a cat.”

“We need catnip and peacock feathers,” Margery declared. “My friend Rita Scott grows her own catnip and makes these toys stuffed with catnip. Her cats go nuts over them. I’ll get some, and a peacock feather, and meet you at my car at ten o’clock tomorrow night.”

 

Helen spent all day Wednesday wondering if she’d get caught and spend the night at the Broward County Jail. She was glad it was a dark night with no moon. The two cat burglars met at Margery’s car. Margery was wearing a purple velour jogging suit and mauve tennis shoes. Helen had on jeans and a black sweatshirt. She always felt so conservative compared to her landlady.

On the Cadillac’s back seat was a peacock feather and a plastic ziplock bag. Inside the bag were fabric cat toys no bigger than Helen’s hand. She picked one up and sniffed it.

“It smells like grass,” Helen said.

“That’s the most potent catnip in the feline world,” Margery said. “Rita says you call the cat by name, none of that ‘kitty, kitty’ stuff. Then stick the peacock feather through the gate and wiggle it around. Cats love playing with peacock feathers. When the cat gets close to the fence, bring out the catnip toy. It will come running. No cat can resist Rita’s catnip.”

“What’s in that paper bag on the back seat?” Helen asked.

“Our last resort,” Margery said. “Do you have everything?”

Helen patted her fanny pack. “Yep. Q-tips in a plastic bag. Small Ziplocs for the sample.”