Given what was lingering in the bedroom directly above his…probably not.
Here I’d been so sure Haskel would have answers. Too bad all I got was more questions.
I reassured Haskel that what he’d told me was off the record. Easy enough to claim. For his testimony to matter, we’d need an actual case. And other than a couple of psychic impressions—mine, and Boswell’s—I was coming up empty-handed.
And if lawyers got judges to throw out my testimonies, I could only imagine what a field day they’d have with Boswell’s. Speaking of whom….
“Simon! I brought treats!”
Even from inside, I could still hear him trying to cajole that poor cat into his van.
I stood to go and Haskel stopped me with a tentative hand on my arm. “That girl, Sarah…she’s okay, then?”
Sure, if you enjoyed being on the lam. But I could hardly blame her for wanting to give her nasty boyfriend the slip. “She’s okay,” I said, to Haskel’s great relief. I thanked him for his time and headed outside to do some damage control.
Predictably, I found Boswell doing something that only made sense in his Rube Goldberg contraption of a mind. The cat had slipped down the basement stairs of the building across the alley, which were barred with a locked accordion gate to keep out squatters (and, presumably, whack jobs like the one presently trying to circumvent it.)
Boswell had wedged his massive body in a half-cartwheel between the dumpster and the brick wall, one knee on a cinderblock, one arm stretched through the bars at an angle that looked like it was dislocating his shoulder. In his outstretchedhand, a crumbled cat treat. “C’mon, buddy, don’t leave me hanging. It’s Feisty Fiesta—your favorite!”
He’d agreed to screening. Was it too much to ask that he come down to HQ without a fight? “Listen, forget about the cat. It’s doing just fine.”
“For now. But a cold front is coming in. What then?”
A van would hardly be much better than wherever that cat was holing up…so I saw where this was going. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d hosted a random cat, and it wouldn’t be the last. Our house already stunk from its latest sage clearing, so why not? Borrowing a play from Jacob’sact-first, seek-permission-laterbook, I said, “If you can coax the cat out within the next five minutes, I’ll take it home with me. Otherwise—”
Something head-butted me in the back of the calf and started purring like a diesel engine.
I sighed.
“Simon?” Boswell unpretzeled himself from behind the dumpster. “If you’re over there, then what am I—?” He peered harder through the grate and said, “Oh, never mind.”
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “Rat.”
Boswell shook crumbled treat from his hand with great indignation. “The shadows were playing tricks on me.”
I checked the stairwell for signs of a haunting, but thankfully, other than an absurdly flat rat carcass half-buried by leaves, it was empty.
The cat head-butted me hard enough to make me stagger and ramped up the purring.
“I’ll grab the cat,” I said, “and you follow me to the office.”
“Simon will never fall for that. He’s very particular and discerning, and he doesn’t even know you.”
I scooped up the cat. He rubbed his face on my suit jacket hard enough to leave a trail of spit behind. I harbored no illusions that I was suddenly popular—I was just covered in catnip. Hopefully I’d be able to withstand all the rubbing, purring and salivating without needing an epi pen.
“I believe you know the way,” I told Boswell, and turned to go….
Only to find a woman standing behind us, hands on hips, eyes narrowed. Her clothes were plain gray sweats, her hair was tucked under a baseball cap, and her face was hidden by huge sunglasses, so it took me a second to register that I knew her.
Not only that, but I was looking for her.
Sarah Dombrowski. And I wasn’t the only one that recognition struck.
Boswell did a double-take and said, “Hold on, that’s the woman in the bedroom!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
OBVIOUSLY, SARAH WAS not the repeater in the bedroom, seeing as she was still alive. “Boswell, meet Sarah. You both share the dubious honor of living in that apartment.”
