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How people managed to be spontaneous while being filmed was beyond her. There was probably a trick to it, but so far she hadn’t yet mastered it. And neither had the others, as the conversation was wooden and proceeded haltingly along familiar topics like the weather and the quality of the seducers.

And all the while Odelia’s mind kept drifting back to Clint.

His words to her that morning suddenly sounded more ominous than before: how she was his new star now. His favorite.

In other words, ripe to be kidnapped!

Chapter 37

As Odelia had instructed, Dooley and I snuck into the villa where the production team had set up shop, and started snooping around. Frankly I didn’t have high hopes that this time would be different than last time we’d inspected this place. Then again, the work of a detective, even a feline one, often consists of small repetitive tasks, not unlike that of a gold digger, who keeps sifting mud until finally one day he hopes to strike gold.

“Do you really think Clint is our guy?” asked Dooley.

Odelia had intimated the producer was her most likely suspect, and for us to look at him with renewed attention.

“I don’t know, Dooley, but he is the one who ultimately selects the candidates, so if he’s the kidnapper, that would make sense in that he can personally guarantee he’ll get what he wants.”

“But why would a man kidnap so many women, and all of them so similar? What does he do with them?”

I wasn’t prepared to lay it all out for him. It was obvious, though, what a man like Clint would do with all of those women. At least if he was the kind of man Odelia thought he was.

And as we walked into the villa, once again we passed the control room.

“Is it fixed?” asked the man named Frank.

“Yeah, it’s fixed all right,” said Rick. “No thanks to you, though. You couldn’t have given me the signal sooner, could you? She caught me crawling out the window.”

“She surprised me! She’s a fast walker.”

“You were probably playing Pok?mon on your phone again,” Rick said as he surveyed the wall of screens.

Every single one of the screens was now displaying the jacuzzi, and as I watched in surprise, I saw that most of them were featuring one particular candidate: Odelia. That’s what you probably get when suddenly you’re deemed the star of the show.

Rick’s phone started belting out a tune. I recognized it as the same sound he’d produced before: the mating call of the hoopoe. The guy really had a thing for birds.

We decided to leave them to it. We had other fish to fry, so we repaired upstairs, and once again tried every door until we found one that was unlocked. Soon we were out on the balcony, traipsing past room after room.

“Maybe we should search every room,” Dooley suggested.

“Odelia told us to focus on Clint,” I reminded him.

“Yeah, but what if Clint is innocent? Odelia has been wrong before.”

He was right. Odelia has been wrong more times than she’s been right. So I shrugged and we entered the first room we found. If we were going to do this, we might as well go about it in a methodic fashion.

The first room told me that whoever stayed there was not a fan of cleanliness and hygiene, as the place was a big mess. Clothes were strewn about all over the place, wet towels covered the furniture, candy wrappers littered the floor, and in all of that mess there wasn’t a single sign of a laptop, cell phone or tablet computer. Probably the guy or gal who occupied the room liked to keep these possessions close to their person.

We did find a crumpled up note in the wastepaper basket. It appeared to be some kind of sweepstakes: the names of all of the candidates had been written on the left, and on the top of the page a series of names I didn’t recognize, except for Rick and Frank. Underneath these names, scores had been awarded each candidate. When tallied, Odelia’s name had received the highest score.

“This is a little thick,” I said when the significance of the document hit me. “These people are actually holding a wager, presumably putting money on the contestants.”

“You mean they’re gambling on the show’s outcome?” asked Dooley, surveying the document.

“Looks like it,” I said. “And Odelia’s name is at the top of the list. Meaning they figure she’ll probably succumb to the wiles of the seducers more likely than the others.”

“Was this before or after she hit Fred in the head?” asked Dooley pointedly.

I smiled.“Probably before. Looks like this person, whoever he is, lost a great deal of money betting on her to fall for Fred’s charms.”

“Or Mike’s charms,” Dooley added as he took a tentative sniff at a piece of underwear, then crinkled up his nose when its sheer rankness hit him.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said. “Plenty of rooms to check and only so much time.”