Meow or Never (Vanessa Abbot Cat Protection League Cat Cozy Mystery Series Book 3) (2 page)

“They have protocols for reconstructing
explosions,” he told her. “They can piece a whole building back together from
twisted scraps of metal.”

Pete Wheeler sat down at Vanessa’s
kitchen table and sighed. “What a day I’ve had!”

Vanessa set down a cup of tea at his
elbow. “It wasn’t the department meeting, was it?”

“That wasn’t as bad as I thought it
would be,” he replied. “No, I just had a long meeting with the crime scene
investigator assigned to the aluminum plant case. He gave me this.” He held up
a narrow, paper-sized box.

“What’s in it?” she asked.

“It’s all the evidence they took from
the blast site,” he told her. “I was hoping you could go over it with me.”

“I’d love to,” she replied. “You know
how much I like helping you with your cases.”

Pete set the box down on the table and
looked around. “Where’s Henry? Maybe he’d like to have a look, too.”

Vanessa laughed. “Funny. No, he’s
camped out in front of the fire with Aurora.”

“Aurora?” he asked. “I thought Alexis
Fleetwood adopted her.”

“She did,” Vanessa replied. “After
Ollie was arrested for killing Sergio and Angus Furley, she wanted a kitten for
her children. She thought it would cheer them up. Everything was going well,
and Aurora and the children really loved each other. But then Alexis decided to
sell the house and move back to Ohio to live closer to her family.”

“I can’t really blame her,” Pete
remarked. “She’ll need all the help she can get when it comes to raising two
children by herself.”

“Exactly,” Vanessa agreed. “So she
couldn’t take Aurora after all. I have to find another home for her.”

“That’s too bad,” Pete exclaimed.
“She’s such a nice kitten.”

“She’s lovely,” Vanessa agreed. “She
needs the social contact of young people. She doesn’t belong in this dingy old
apartment with a cat lady and a bunch of old cats.”

“I would take her myself if I thought
she would be happy,” Pete went on.

“You!” Vanessa cried. “You live in a
rented room in a boarding house. You couldn’t take a cat.”

Pete shrugged. “Mrs. Harris wouldn’t
mind. She’d love a cat. But as you say, Aurora is a young cat who needs young
people. She wouldn’t be happy at Mrs. Harris’s house.”

Vanessa turned back to the box. “Let’s
have a look at what you brought.”

Pete slid the lid off the box and
lifted out the first page of the documents inside. “Right. Here we have a photograph
of the gas line in question.”

“I thought you said there would be
nothing left of it,” Vanessa reminded him.

“That’s what I thought,” he replied.
“Those crazy crime scene investigators found it and put the whole puzzle back
together. They’re amazing, really. Just look at this, I was right. It was
tampered with.”

“How can you tell?” she asked. “All I
see is a piece of torn metal.”

He put his finger on the photograph.
“See that right there? That circle is the indentation of a drill bit. Someone
drilled into the wall of the copper tubing to weaken it.”

“But the tubing didn’t give way right
there,” Vanessa pointed out. “If it had, we wouldn’t be looking at it. See? It
tore away over here, half an inch away.”

“That’s right,” he replied. “That’s
because the weakness in this part of the tubing put added stress on the copper
farther along the line. It buckled here and tore out there. That’s the way it
works.”

Vanessa shook her head. “I don’t
understand it, but I’ll take your word for it. So we have evidence that Eastman
was murdered. Now how are we going to find out who did it?”

He set the photograph aside. “Here we
have a schedule of everyone who went in and out of the foundry in the last
month. This roster lists a hundred and fifty names.”

Vanessa gasped. “How are we going to go
through all those? We’d be sitting here until doomsday.”

“We’re not going to go through it all,”
he replied. “We’re going to make a priority list of potential suspects and
cross-match it with what we know about anyone else who might have had a motive
to blow up the forge.”

“But that list doesn’t even count
people from outside the plant who might have wanted to kill Eastman,” she
pointed out. “It also doesn’t count the people who might have wanted to kill
someone else in the plant but got Eastman by mistake. That list doesn’t tell us
anything.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” he told
her. “Look here. This list covers everyone who went into and out of the
foundry, including regular employees and other people who were casual visitors
or building inspectors.”

“Does it show anything out of the
ordinary?” she asked.

“We can rule out delivery drivers and
messengers,” he replied. “They wouldn’t have been in the foundry long enough to
drill a hole in the gas line. The killer must have been in the building without
supervision long enough to climb up the scaffolding and drill that hole without
raising suspicion.”

“That’s a long time,” she remarked.

“That’s nothing,” he told her. “The
scaffolding would have to be positioned in the right place beforehand. That in
itself is a six-hour job. It’s not as though our killer could walk in, move the
scaffold from one part of the foundry to another, climb up and drill the hole,
and run away while everyone else was on their lunch break. This murder took a
lot of planning.”

“It sounds to me like it could only be
an inside job,” Vanessa suggested. “Who would have that kind of time and
opportunity, if not someone who belonged in the foundry in the first place?”

He grinned and pointed at her. “Now
you’re thinking. There’s one more thing I thought you ought to know about.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Do you remember Douglas Middleton, the
plant manager you thought was trying to stop us from investigating?” he asked.

“How could I forget?” she replied.

“Well, it turns out he has a history of
criminal activity,” Pete told her. “He was involved in a bank heist gone wrong
when he was a young man. After he served five years in the slammer, he went
back to school and got his engineering degree. That’s when he came to work as
manager of the aluminum plant.”

“That doesn’t prove anything,” Vanessa
countered. “Lots of people get into trouble when they’re young and then clean
up their lives later.”

“That’s not all, though,” he went on.
“The mastermind behind the bank heist was an old friend of ours. Douglas
Middleton was working for Walter Connelly.”

Vanessa almost choked on her tea.
“Walter?”

Pete nodded. “I don’t think it’s very
likely that Middleton was able to walk away from his connection with Walter.
Once a person gets mixed up in an operation as big as Walter’s, they stay in it
for life. Middleton would have to go into the witness protection program to get
out of Walter’s criminal empire. If I had to guess, I would say Walter put
Middleton through engineering school as a reward for keeping his mouth shut in
jail. Middleton might have kept his hands clean all these years, but when the
hammer came down, Walter called on him to do a job and he did it.”

Vanessa shuddered. “Are you telling me
Walter ordered a hit on Eastman? Why would he do that? Was Eastman involved in
Walter’s empire, too?”

“We don’t know that,” Pete replied. “We
don’t even know if the hit was for Eastman at all.”

“I find this hard to believe,” Vanessa
remarked. “Walter controls a vast criminal enterprise. If he wanted to kill
someone, he only had to snap his fingers and the person is dead. Why would he
go to all the trouble of sabotaging an aluminum plant?”

“Maybe it wasn’t more trouble,” he
suggested. “Maybe it was much easier to order Middleton to create an accident
at the plant than to do anything else. Think about it. Here’s Douglas
Middleton, living his life with no criminal activity in fifteen years. No one
suspects him of anything. He’s manager of the plant. He can order everyone
around as he pleases. Maybe he ordered a fire drill to get everyone out of the
foundry. He could easily arrange that to happen when the scaffolding was in a
convenient place. Then all he had to do was climb up, drill the hole, come
down, and order everyone back to work. Job done and no one’s the wiser.”

Vanessa blinked. “That’s a pretty
amazing tale. What else have you got in that box to back it up?”

Pete’s shoulders sagged. “Nothing.”

“There must be something in that pile
of documents that gives you some clue to this case,” she exclaimed.

“There’s nothing,” he told her.
“There’s nothing in the employment records about any disgruntled employee, or
ex-employee, who might want to damage the plant. There’s nothing in Eastman’s
record about him having any enemies. There’s not even any evidence that Eastman
or any of his fellow employees had anything to do with Walter or his criminal
dealings. There’s no connection between this explosion and anyone involved.”

“We should still keep Walter on our
radar,” Vanessa replied. “He’s sent someone to Caspar Crossing before to
threaten and kill us. I wouldn’t be surprised if he rigged this explosion to
pay us back for sending him to prison.”

“How could he do that?” Pete asked.
“None of the people involved in putting him away had anything to do with the
aluminum plant.”

Vanessa thought it over. “Let’s see. We
can rule out Penny Cartwright. She’s a wedding planner and has probably never
set foot in that plant. I know I never have. If you hadn’t invited me to view
the scene, I never would have gone there.”

“Ollie Fleetwood is out, too,” Pete
added. “He hasn’t been back to town since his arrest, and he won’t be coming
back again.”

“That leaves you and me,” Vanessa
concluded. “So why would Walter, or anyone else, blow up an aluminum foundry to
harm us?”

“They wouldn’t,” he replied. “It makes
no sense at all.”

Just then, Henry strolled into the
kitchen and meowed up at Vanessa. “Hello there,” she called down to him. “What
are you up to?” She picked him up and settled him on her lap. “Take a look at
the evidence, Henry. Maybe you can make sense of it.”

Pete Wheeler laughed, but at that
moment, Henry jumped up onto the table and knocked the box of documents to the
floor. The papers, photographs and tables scattered. “Henry!” Vanessa gasped.

Pete gazed down at the mess and sighed.
“Oh, well. I guess that’s the end of our brain-storming session for tonight.”

He bent down and gathered up the
papers. Vanessa put Henry back on the floor and helped him collect the
evidence. All at once, she gave a cry. “Oh, Henry. Why did I ever doubt you?”

“What is it?” Pete asked. “What did he
find this time?”

“We should have brought him in here the
minute you opened the box,” she told him. “Take a look at this.”

She handed him a piece of paper. “This
is just the list of former employees from the plant, and its dated more than
ten years ago. This can’t help us at all. None of these people have been at the
plant recently enough to be involved in this murder.”

Vanessa grinned and pointed at the
bottom of the page. “Look.”

He looked, and then he gasped. “Alan Braithwaite.
That’s Penny’s Brother.”

“And look what it says right there,”
Vanessa told him. “Look what it says right next to his name. Pipe fitter. Don’t
you remember? Alan got busted for stealing a car when he was working for Ollie
Fleetwood in his plumbing business. Alan is a pipe fitter. He worked in that
plant a long time ago. What do you want to bet there’s a connection between
Alan coming to work there and Douglas Middleton coming to work there?”

“But what connection could there be?”
he asked.

“Come on, Pete,” she told him. “Put all
the puzzle pieces together. Alan was mixed up with Walter’s criminal
activities. He got on the wrong side of Walter, and it was because of Alan’s
experience that we were able to pin Alfred Botchweather’s murder on him. Alan
was going to testify against Walter. Walter wanted to get rid of him the same
way he was going to get rid of you, me and Penny.”

“But he couldn’t have done that by
blowing up the aluminum plant,” Pete countered. “Alan hasn’t worked in that plant
for years.”

“We don’t know that,” she explained.
“We have to go back through the records and find out if Alan was ever in that
plant, even on a casual basis. If he was, Middleton would have known about it.
He would have known if Alan was scheduled to come in there anytime in the next
few days, and he could have sabotaged that gas line to kill him when he did
come in.”

Pete closed his eyes and shook his
head. “This makes no sense at all. How could Middleton have known when the gas
line would blow? He would have been taking a terrible chance that it would blow
at the wrong time and kill the wrong person.”

Vanessa nodded. “Maybe he knew exactly
when it would blow and something happened so Eastman was there instead of Alan.
Maybe Alan got sick, so Eastman had to take his place. Who knows?”