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“Jem, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but I don’t think I’m going to be much help.”
“Give it a try.”
“I am trying.”
Suddenly, Jem cocked a grin at him. “Under what circumstances would a vet piss and shit on someone else’s bed? Besides, you know, kink.”
“That’s not something a vet would do. It’s not something a human would do. It’s not even something an animal would do, not unless—”
He’d been rattling off the words unthinkingly, and now the tail of his thoughts caught up with him.
“Not unless what?”
“Not unless it was trying to mark its territory.”
Jem frowned. “What?”
“Maybe we’ve been thinking about this the wrong way. Maybe we’ve been thinking about motive the wrong way. What if the killer murdered Yesenia like you said—because of some strong emotion? But it wasn’t rage, not exactly.”
“He was protecting his turf?”
“It’s not unbelievable. Humans manifest territorial behavior in all sorts of ways.”
“Ok, but what territory—”
Tean slid over to the pile of clothes on the floor and rooted around for his phone. Cassidy’s stomping had cracked the screen, but it still worked. “The land. Heather’s land.”
“Heather didn’t kill Yesenia. At least, I don’t think she did. You heard her last night; she went all in on the psychic stuff, and if she’d killed Yesenia, she would have showed some sign of it.”
“Not Heather.” Tean pulled up the maps app, pinched, zoomed, panned, swiped. And then he held it out for Jem’s inspection. On the screen, a pin marking Heather’s house was only a few millimeters from a pin marking the Mid-Missouri Big Cat Sanctuary. “Rod.”
22
It took them hours to get ready, to go over the plan, to be sure everything was in place, and by the time they arrived at the sanctuary, only a glint of the sun remained above the horizon.
In the last light of day, the cat sanctuary looked more run down than Tean remembered. The perimeter fence sagged, and the NO TRESPASSING signs were sun bleached and tattered. Rust stained the wire panels for the enclosures. A cougar slept on top of a cracked concrete block, and for a moment the sun seemed to pick out each individual tuft of fur, surrounding the big cat like a nimbus. A rut jarred the Jetta, and Tean pulled his attention back to the road.
When they reached the welcome center, the parking lot was empty. Tean parked the Jetta across several of the accessible stalls, front and center and facing out toward the exit, in case they needed to make a quick getaway. That made him think he sounded like a bank robber or a getaway driver or a wheelman. And the fact that he knew all those terms meant he’d watched Jem play way too muchGrand Theft Auto.
“You’re my wheelman,” Jem said.
Tean groaned.
“What?” Jem asked. His laugh was a little too fast, the color in his cheeks a little too high. The hard side part was perfect again, and his beard was on point. His eyes were stormy blue squalls the way the sky would look through the rain.
“Nothing.”
That made Jem laugh again.
They got out of the car, and Jem took the lead, loping past the entrance to the welcome center and following the side of the building. Tean came after him, glancing around. There had to be some staff at a place like this, even after hours. To keep people from making off with the cats if nothing else. But he still saw no other vehicles—no trucks that belonged to the cat sanctuary or to a contracted security company, not even a golf cart like a mall cop might use. The swampy heat felt like a wet cloth over his face, and sweat prickled under his arms.
When they reached a metal door near the back of the building, Jem produced a set of picks. He had the door open in thirty seconds, and he held it with his shoulder and stuck his head inside. After a moment, he beckoned for Tean to follow.
Inside, the air was cool and smelled like the air conditioning system, and a security light gave enough for them to see by. They stood in a narrow hall that could have been plucked from any low-rent office anywhere: drywall with a few dings and utilitarian gray paint; fluorescent panels; a water cooler with an empty jug; commercial-grade green carpet stained from years of traffic. Tean passed a pair of disposable gloves to Jem, and he started trying doors.
They found an employee restroom that smelled of old urine and even older urinal cakes, a tiny utility room with a furnace and water heater, a room filled with cardboard boxes, and discarded plastic wrap—a quick check of the closest box revealed hundreds of donation envelopes, the kind a visitor might pick up on their way out of the sanctuary. The next door Jem tried was locked.
“Give me a break,” he muttered.
