Cats on the Prowl (A Cat Detective cozy mystery series Book 1)

Nancy C. Davis

©2015 Nancy C. Davis

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Thank you

Your Gifts

Willow, a fluffy white Persian, jumped
up onto Sergeant Carl Ridout’s desk and pushed the papers out of the way with
her paw. “I’ve never seen such an untidy man. I don’t know how he keeps track
of anything in this mess.”

Nat, the big tabby tom, lifted his head
from Detective Naya Wesley’s chair and chuckled. The sound rumbled out of his
chest in a deep purr. “He doesn’t keep track of anything. That’s exactly why he
does it.”

“Then how does he solve his cases?” Willow
asked. “He’s a police sergeant. He’s supposed to be catching criminals.”

“He doesn’t catch any criminals,” Nat
told her. “Haven’t you figured that out yet? It’s Naya who solves the cases. I
don’t think Sergeant Ridout has solved a case in the seven years I’ve been
living here at the Nelson Police Station. I’ve followed the details of every
case, and I’ve found it very clear who actually solves them.”

“How can he be a police sergeant,
then?” Willow asked. “Hasn’t anyone noticed he doesn’t do any work?”

“I didn’t say he doesn’t do any work,”
Nat explained. “He does a lot of work. Oh, my, does he ever do a lot of work!
It’s just not the kind of work that would solve cases.”

“What does he do?” Willow asked.

“You’ve seen him,” Nat shot back.
“You’ve been here almost a year now, ever since Naya found you in the drain
behind the station. What a sight you were that day. I can still remember it.
You looked like a half-drowned rat, with your hair all stuck to your head. We didn’t
know if you would survive. You looked like something the cat dragged in.”

Willow sniffed. “You don’t have to rub
it in. I remember it as well as you do. I didn’t think I was coming to live at
the police station to poke my nose into the confidential case files of the
Homicide Department.”

Nat licked his paw and cleaned the side
of his face. “I didn’t think I was coming to poke my nose into confidential
files, either. But when you’ve been here as long as I have, you can’t help but
notice who does what. Carl sits at his desk and pushes paper from one side to
the other until sweat pours off his forehead. He curses under his breath and
mutters about how he doesn’t know what the world is coming to.”

“I’ve seen that,” Willow replied.
“That’s why I assumed he got a lot done.”

“He gets a lot of filing done,” Nat
told her. “Then you look at Naya. She sits at her desk, but she doesn’t make a
sound. She doesn’t pick up one piece of paper and put it in a pile with a dozen
other papers. She sits there for an hour or more, going over every detail until
she finds out what she wants to know. Then she moves on to the next one and
does the same thing. That’s how she finds the clues to solve cases.”

“If you’re right,” Willow remarked,
“it’s a good thing Sergeant Ridout has Naya for a partner. He could take the
credit for her solving the cases.”

“Naya wouldn’t have lasted ten seconds
on the police force if she hadn’t had Carl for a partner,” Nat told her. “Naya
was a raw recruit from the Academy when they started working together. Carl
listened to her and believed in her when she solved her first case. She would
have lost heart and quit the force without his support.”

“Were you here back then?” Willow
asked.

“I was here,” he rumbled. “I’ve seen
dozens of recruits come and go in my seven years. Naya has only been here three
years, and Carl has been here five years. You watch them together. Naya comes
up with the clues, but it’s Carl who pushes the case to its conclusion. She’s
the brains and he’s the brawn. They’re a perfect team.”

Willow glanced down at the papers
around her feet. “I guess I have a lot to learn about police work. I don’t know
what half these papers say.”

“That’s because you can’t read,” Nat
pointed out. “If you want to find out what’s going on with human beings, that’s
the first thing you have to learn.”

“How am I going to do that?” she asked.

“I’ll teach you,” he replied. “It’s not
complicated when you get the hang of it.”

“How did you learn?” she asked. “Did
someone teach you?”

“No one taught me,” he replied. “I
figured it out for myself. I wanted to understand why people thought these
papers were so important. It took me a lot longer to learn by myself than it’ll
take me to teach you, but never mind. You’ll get the hang of it, and then you
can help me solve cases, too.”

Willow’s head shot up. “You solve
cases, too?”

“Of course,” he exclaimed. “I wouldn’t
be much of a police cat if I didn’t. I’ve been living at the police station for
seven years. I’ve got to earn my keep somehow.”

“I would love to solve criminal cases,”
Willow cried. “How do you do it?”

Nat sat up on the chair and faced her.
“The first thing you’ve got to do—which you don’t do now—is to start paying
attention around here. You can’t just lie around and purr and expect to become
a real police cat. You can’t just curl up on Naya’s lap and go to sleep. You have
to listen to what she says.”

Willow pretended to sneeze. “I don’t
just curl up on Naya’s lap and go to sleep. I’m not lazy. People keep cats for
comfort. That’s the service I provide in exchange for my keep.”

“Now, just listen to what I have to
say,” Nat returned. “I’m not saying curling up on Naya’s lap and closing your
eyes isn’t a good thing to do. I know giving people comfort is a big part of
being a cat, although I don’t really do that sort of thing myself. I’m a tom.
My job is singing on fences and spraying in their gardens. I’m just saying
that, when you curl up on Naya’s lap and close your eyes, you only pretend to
sleep. In reality, you keep awake and listen.”

“But they don’t talk about much of
anything,” Willow replied. “They mostly complain about the Captain and the
Union and a bunch of other things I don’t understand.”

“Those things you don’t understand are
the details of their cases,” Nat told her. “That’s why you have to listen.
While you’re learning to read the reports and letters and documents, you can
pick up all kinds of information from listening to their conversations. That’s
how I solve my cases.”

“Can you really solve cases by
listening to their conversations and reading all these papers?” Willow waved
her paw at the clutter on Carl’s desk. “Wow, Nat, I’m sorry I didn’t realize
you were so smart.”

“Don’t judge a book by it’s cover,” he
replied. “But I don’t solve cases by reading papers and listening to their
conversations. That’s just the beginning. Once you’ve gleaned all the information
you can from the papers and listening to them talk, you have to go out into the
field.”

“You mean like going out catching mice
and crickets and that sort of thing?” Willow asked. “I was never very good at
that. I get foxtails in my fur and grass in my ears. The last time I went, I
had to spend six hours at the vet getting a foxtail taken out of my ear. It
cost my owner seven hundred dollars, and she never let me outside again.”

“I don’t mean that,” Nat explained.
“When I say the field, I don’t mean grass and mice. I’m talking about hitting
the bricks and hunting down your clues. You have to track down your suspects
and find more clues and information. You won’t solve a case sitting behind a
desk.”

Willow put her head to one side. “Is
that what Naya and Carl do all day? I thought they just went out together for a
ride in the car.”

“They go their own way,” Nat replied,
“and I go mine. I have my own way of getting information. The good thing is, a
cat can go places and listen to things a person can’t. Two crooks will tell
each other their life stories with a cat sitting right in front of them.
They’ll reveal information to a cat they wouldn’t reveal to their own mothers.
That’s how you catch them.”

“But how can finding out what they did
help you catch them?” Willow asked. “They might talk in front of a cat, but you
can’t jump up and arrest them. You can’t handcuff them and throw them in the
county lock-up.”

Nat strutted along the edge of Naya’s
desk. “That’s where human beings come in very handy. You can’t arrest them, but
Carl and Naya can. You give them your information, and they arrest the
criminals for you.”

“How do you give them your
information?” Willow asked. “Do you write them a note?”

“Write them a note!” Nat snorted. “I
should think not. I am a cat. I do not write. Reading is one thing, but I
wouldn’t stoop so low as to write. Write! Ha!”

“How do you do it, then?” Willow asked.
“How can you give them information?”

Nat stood up tall and straight. The
moonlight streaming through the police station window stretched his shadow
across the carpet. “That, my dear, is the great secret of the cat race. We find
a way to draw Naya’s attention to the evidence, but we must be discreet. We
can’t let her know we found out the crucial piece of the puzzle to solve the case.
We must do it in a way that preserves the illusion that Naya solved the case
herself.”

“Why do we have to do that?” Willow
shot back. “If we solved the case, we should take the credit.”

“And how, exactly, would we do that?”
Nat demanded. “How do you think it would work if the world found out cats could
read and solve criminal cases? How do you think humans would react if they
finally got it through their heads that we could understand their
conversations? The world would be in turmoil within hours. It would never
work.”

“I don’t know,” Willow argued. “My
owner used to watch a show on TV about a boy who had a dog who helped him catch
criminals. The dog was called Lassie. No one gave that dog a second thought.”

“That’s a TV show,” Nat replied. “And
it’s about a dog, not a cat. Dogs are different. People can believe all kinds
of things about a dog, or even a fictional cat. But real cats? I don’t think
so. It works just fine for them to think of us as harmless pets. They wouldn’t
be very happy if they knew the truth about us.”

Willow gazed out the window at the
moon. “I know what you mean, although I don’t agree. People enjoy a certain
ignorance about what their cats really think and understand. They don’t
appreciate having those ideas contradicted. They get very snotty if anyone
tells them they’re wrong about anything.”

“So you can understand,” Nat went on,
“how these people would feel if they knew their cats were solving their cases
for them. These are professional police detectives. They’re supposed to put the
evidence together. They aren’t supposed to rely on cats to do it for them.”

“I see.” Willow jumped down and joined
Nat on Naya’s desk. “So when can we start?”

“Right now.” Nat turned and put his paw
down on the big calendar in front of him. “This is your first lesson. Do you
see that pointed shape right there? That is the first thing you have to learn.
That is the letter A.”

The police station door opened, and Willow
sat up on the couch. She forced herself to sit still, even though every fiber of
her being screamed to race across the room and jump into Naya Wesley’s arms.
But Nat wouldn’t approve. She had to act like a regular cat. She had to keep up
the pretense that she was completely oblivious to the human activity going on
around her.