Cat In A Leopard Spot

Osiris knows he is in the wrong place. He must return to where he is supposed to be.

He runs past the two-leg.

For a moment he scents flesh and running blood beneath it and his fangs and tongue yearn, as they had for so many unsatisfied hours. But he is fresh-free now. Good boy. Handsome boy. He runs past the flailing figure, butts it in passing, feels it overturn like the mother shape.

He senses for a moment that the Hunger is with him again, and says stop. Sniff. Lick. Bite.

But he is full. Good boy.

He runs until he is in the dark again, and feels safe.

Nothing smells like his home lair. Now that the Hunger is quieter he feels another yearning. Home lair. He wants to be in home lair. He is a good boy.

Chapter 21

Taxidermy Eyes

“I can’t believe it,” Molina says.

It is 5:00 A.M. and she stands in a living room as upscale as a high-roller suite at the Bellagio, staring down at a corpse.

The captured killer stares down at the corpse too, eyes dilated, whiskers visibly twitching.

Molina regards the full-grown leopard.

It stands in the cramped cage brought to the crime scene by three animal control people, who have retreated to the room’s threshold to stare wide-eyed at the entire scene, as if they were sleepwalking.

The leopard roars plaintively and everybody jumps.

This is one perp who can plead diminished capacity and get away with it.

Molina turns to the other exotic animal in the room: the widow.

“It’s a good thing you knew how to corral the creature,” Molina comments.

She doesn’t mean a word of it, she just wants to get the woman talking so she can figure out what happened here.

All she knows so far is that victim is moneyed, that his body bears the tracks of a big cat. And that he has fallen onto the stuffed head of an oryx (she thinks) whose unicornlike horn has performed a quadruple bypass on his major cardiac organs.

Which beast is the actual killer: the live one, or the dead one?

The widow might be dead too. She has said nothing, but sits staring at a huge square glass-topped cocktail table. Carved wooden elephants with upheld trunks support it at each corner. Even in a wooden form elephants have to work.

Molina blinks bleary eyes. She is surrounded by the glassy taxidermy eyes of a couple dozen trophy heads staring down from the two-tiered living room’s walls. She can’t name all the species, except that they run the gamut from hooved to clawed. The beastly atmosphere is so overwhelming that she is beginning to think the widow looks like a mountain lion.

“Mrs. Van Burkleo?”

The woman’s oddly small eyes seem absent without leave in the overbearing frame of her massive facial bone structure. Her face looks like it has been trampled by an animal. She also has taxidermy eyes. Glassy amber eyes, bizarre somehow. From the age difference between the skewered corpse and the comatose widow, Mrs. Van Burkleo was a trophy wife. Fit right into the decor, especially with that lion’s mane of thick tawny hair.

“Mrs. Van Burkleo, how did the leopard get into the house? Was it a…pet?”

“A leopard is a wild animal,” the woman answers in a deep, low voice. “It’s foolhardy to keep one as a pet.”

“Did you and your husband—?”

“No. I don’t know how the leopard got here. There was no cage, nothing. Just the leopard. And Cyrus.”

Molina walks toward the body the widow regards with dazed indifference, as if he were now part of the trophyscape. Cyrus was a nondescript man in late middle age, thick of middle, thin of hair. Sixty-something.

The widow could be anywhere from twenty-nine to forty-nine, one of those high-fashion icons who freeze-frame into permanent limbo in the aging department.

Must take all of her spare time, and—Molina was finally believing the evidence of her own eyes—a lot of plastic surgery. Unsuccessful plastic surgery, or maybe too successful. The woman’s face seemed kissing cousin to more than one head on the wall.

Van Burkleo, he was Homo sapiens at its most uninspiring, a figure of power for his money alone, surrounded by figurative reminders of what enough money and high-caliber equipment will buy the aging white hunter.

“Any children?” Molina asks.

The widow Van Burkleo shrugs lean and bony shoulders revealed by a tiger-print spandex halter top. “The usual two. Before my time. They’re somewhere in the Midwest.”