Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

Mincemeat

Okay.

I got a party of one picnicking on smuggled-in rare roast beef in the outbuilding.

Inside the Sapphire Slipper, it is not a picnic, as several of my favorite humans and a whole passel of other Homo sapiens are twitching to the ends of their opposable thumbs about what the oncoming authorities will make of them when the murder at the Sapphire Slipper is everybody’s business, and especially the cops’.

I need to get Mr. Rare Roast Beef wrapped up in a nice exportable package before the county sheriff, the real-life Vegas CSI techs, and the law personnel who don’t know any of us from a Geico caveman (or those who do know my nearest and dearest all too well) get here to really mess up the crime scene.

All this guy out here needs to do when reinforcements arrive is retreat to the cover of the tumbling tumbleweed that surrounds this bit of salacious enterprise in the desert and he will be home Scottsdale-free. Heck, he may shortly be in Scottsdale if I do not stop him.

I could persuade my human cohorts to lean on the ambiguous Ms. Phyllis Shoofly and make he or she confess to aiding and abetting a murderer. But how?

I could betray the guy’s presence without allowing him to run. But how?

Everybody has focused on the brothel, on keeping the suspects in the brothel along with the body and crime scene.

Nobody has considered that the crime had an inside and outside man.

Maybe that is because of the intimate setting of the murder on a mass scale. Maybe that is because there are so many likely suspects inside, no one has seen the bigger picture. They cannot all be detecting geniuses like me.