A Midwinter's Tail

23

“What did you do?” I asked, glaring at him.

He lifted one white-tipped paw and set it down on the piece of paper.

“You stole that from the detective, didn’t you?”

He sat up a little straighter, obviously proud of himself.

“I told Marcus I wouldn’t ask her about the case.”

“Merow,” Hercules said, looking down at the piece of paper and then back at me.

“Okay, so stealing something from a police officer”—I glared at him—“isn’t quite the same as asking her questions, but it’s still wrong.”

The cat’s expression didn’t change. This wasn’t the first time Hercules had swiped a piece of paper from someone connected to one of Marcus’s cases. In the previous cases it had actually helped me eventually figure out who the killer was.

I crossed the room, leaned back against the desk and picked up the piece of paper.

“I think this makes me an accessory after the fact,” I said.

His response was to lick his paw and take a couple of swipes at his face.

“Somehow I don’t think the fact that you’re cute is going to help me,” I said.

Hercules leaned against my arm as I looked at the page that he’d “borrowed” from Detective Webster. It was a list of items stolen from the pawnshop.

I looked down at the little tuxedo cat. There was something about his expression that made me think if he could talk he would have said, “See? Do you get it?”

The problem was I didn’t. I looked at the list again. What was I not seeing? Hercules thought this was a clue. Both Owen and Hercules somehow knew what was a clue and what wasn’t. I would have admitted Herc’s ability to walk through walls and Owen’s to become invisible before I would ever have admitted that to anyone. It still felt uncomfortable to admit it to myself.

The list of stolen items was surprisingly short, I noticed, several diamond rings, a couple of watches . . . and two rare books.

“Dayna Chapman had a ticket to Vincent Starr’s lecture,” I said to Hercules.

The wheels were turning in my brain. “Could Dayna have somehow been involved in that robbery?” I asked Hercules.

Something was there in the back of my mind, poking at me like a broken spring in a chair. I put my finger on the titles of the two stolen books. A first edition of Steinbeck’s East of Eden would have been worth maybe fifteen hundred dollars. The first edition of The Hobbit, a little more—probably between three and four thousand. Neither book was going to make anyone rich.

I replayed what Maggie had told me about Brady’s conversation with his mother. And then I had it. I looked at Hercules.

“I should be mad at you,” I said, “because you’re going to turn into a feline delinquent. But I think I have an idea of what Dayna was up to.” I looked at my watch. I was done for the day in about fifteen minutes. “We’re going to have to make a little side trip before we go home,” I said, reaching for the phone.

Maggie answered her cell on the third ring. “Hi, what’s up?” she said.

“I need to ask Brady a question about that conversation he had with his mother,” I said. “Could you set that up for me?”

“You figured something out.”

I stretched my legs out in front of me. “I’m not sure,” I said. “That’s why I need to talk to him.”

“I’m sitting here outside his office right now,” Maggie said. “We were going to have an early supper before class.”

“I can be there in about twenty minutes.”

I pictured Maggie pulling a hand through her blond curls. “Okay, I’ll see you then,” she said.

* * *

When I walked into Brady Chapman’s office, his receptionist smiled at me. “You can go on back, Ms. Paulson,” she said. “Mr. Chapman is expecting you.”

Brady was standing in his office doorway with Maggie. “Hi, Kathleen,” he said. “Maggie says you might have figured something out. What is it?”

“Tell me about the piece of paper with the address on it that your mother dropped,” I said.

“That isn’t going to help,” Brady said. “The street doesn’t exist. Not here. Not in Minneapolis or Red Wing, either.”

“Tamera Lane,” I said. “Right?”

Brady nodded.

I pulled a pen and a pad of paper out of my bag. “Like this?” I wrote the address across the middle of one page.

Brady shot Mags a puzzled look. “Yes,” he said.

I exhaled loudly and tapped the paper with one finger. “That’s not Tamera Lane,” I said. “It’s Tamerlane. All one word, and it’s not an address; it’s the name of a very, very valuable book.”

“How valuable?” Maggie asked.

“The last one sold at auction in 2009 for more than six hundred thousand dollars,” I said.