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The villa was built in hacienda style, with a wraparound porch and brightly colored window shutters. We entered the house via the front door, which was open, and found that the place was buzzing with activity. I saw the camera guy who’d accosted Odelia lament his fate to his comrades in a room off the main lobby, and watched as Clint Bunda stalked across the floor, barking orders into his cell phone. At least he was allowed to keep his phone, which didn’t seem entirely fair, I thought.

I even saw Kimmy, seated in an adjacent room at a desk, bent over her laptop and typing away.

“So many people,” said Dooley as we sat in a quiet corner and surveyed the activity.

“It takes a lot of people to create a big show like this,” I said. “People you don’t see since they all work behind the scenes.”

“So how are we going to find out who’s making these women disappear?” he asked.

It was an excellent question. There were easily dozens of people, holed up in the different rooms that made up the ground floor, which had been turned into offices. The room where Kimmy sat working, surrounded by others also pecking away on their laptops, had a sign that indicated this was normally the luggage room. And the room where the camera crew sat reposing was the massage parlor, though of massage activities there was to date no trace.

“Let’s take a closer look,” I suggested, and we moved into the room where the camera people were all gathered. The one who’d approached Odelia was still talking, and he didn’t have a lot of complimentary things to say about our beloved human.

“She told me to get lost—can you believe it? I was just doing my job and she told me off! The nerve of the woman.”

“Pretty little blonde, though, isn’t she, our Miss Poole?” said another guy of similar dimensions, who sat fiddling with his camera. “By far the prettiest of this new crop.”

“Then you haven’t seen Jackie,” said a third. “Just what the doctor ordered. Oo-wee!”

Somehow I had the feeling I wasn’t going to learn much from listening to these men commenting on Odelia and the other women like bumblebees on a meadow of particularly nectar-filled flowers, so I told Dooley I’d heard enough and we walked out.

“They do seem to like Odelia a lot, don’t they?” Dooley said.

“Yeah, I guess they do,” I agreed, though I wasn’t particularly partial to the kind of men who salivated over my human like a restaurant visitor over a juicy piece of steak.

We moved into the next room, but there wasn’t much information to be gleaned there either. Kimmy, along with a horde of writers and fellow assistant producers, kept pecking away at their laptops in utmost concentration, so that was a bust, too.

“Let’s go upstairs,” I suggested. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and learn something.”

We moved up the stairs and arrived on the landing, several doors leading off into the crew members’ respective rooms. The door to one room was ajar, and since I heard voices from inside, I decided to investigate further. No one ever pays attention to cats, which is why our association with Odelia has been so successful. We’re the perfect spies.

Inside the room we found Clint, seated on the bed and still talking a mile a minute into his phone. So we took a seat near the door and listened to what he had to say.

“I don’t care, Susan! It’s my way or the highway, haven’t I made that perfectly clear?” He listened for a moment, and I could hear a woman’s voice holding up her end of the conversation. “Look, I don’t want to talk about it. Because I don’t want to talk about it!”

There was more repartee, and I could see that Clint was getting more and more red in the face as the conversation dragged on.

“I think he’s going to have an aneurysm, Max,” said Dooley, noticing the same thing.

“I think so, too,” I agreed, and was already eyeing the door in case we needed to race out to fetch Odelia and a doctor.

“Look, it’s got nothing to do with me. If they decide to vanish from the face of the earth that’s their business. How the hell would I know where they’ve gone off to! It’s got nothing to do with me, I’m telling you!”

I had the impression he was talking about the missing women, so I pricked up my ears. Unfortunately, the conversation quickly wound down after that, and so before Clint discovered he was no longer alone, Dooley and I tiptoed from the room again.

Out in the corridor, Dooley said,“I think he was talking about the missing women, Max.”

“I think you’re right.”

“Does that mean he doesn’t know where they are?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “But I think we can put Clint’s name on our list of suspects.”

Though why the show’s producer would kidnap his own contestants was beyond me.

Chapter 18