Cat Trick

“She gave the table a shove.” I mimed the motion. “Mike tried to grab his briefcase and he was off balance when the table hit him. He went backward and was knocked out for a minute. He was probably still groggy when whoever killed him showed up.”

Owen’s head snapped up as though he’d had the same realization I’d just had.

“Where did the briefcase go?” I said. I pictured the inside of the tent, working my way around it in my head. There had been no leather briefcase on the grass, no briefcase on the table. I looked at Owen. “Did you see it?” His golden eyes met mine and he gave a sharp meow.

No.

“The killer must have taken it,” I said. “But why?”

Owen didn’t have an answer for that question. But it seemed Hercules did. He jumped onto the chair opposite me and poked at my laptop with one paw.

I remembered that I hadn’t read Lise’s e-mail, so I pulled the computer closer and turned it on. “Chairs are for people,” I said to Hercules.

He gave me a blank look. Both cats thought they were people.

“People with two legs,” I added. “And you’re sitting on my sweater.”

He jumped down, making complaining noises low in his throat. Then he launched himself onto my lap, a glint of triumph in his eyes.

There was an e-mail from my sister, Sara, in my in-box too, but I opened Lise’s message first. She’d found out quite a lot in just a couple of days.

According to Lise’s information, Alex and Chris Scott wouldn’t have been able to push Mike out of the business that easily. He apparently had a deal that entitled him to major compensation if they let him go before the fourth full year of his contract—more than a million dollars.

“People have killed for less,” I said to Hercules. “And that would explain why Mike’s briefcase disappeared.” It also explained the way Mike Glazer had been killed. Holding something over someone’s face until they stopped breathing would take strength—it would also take a lot of anger.

“Both Scott brothers were at that fund-raising dinner in Minneapolis,” I said to Herc. “And yes, it is a very nice coincidence that they happened to be just an hour away when their partner was killed. But how could they be there and here at the same time?”

Hercules touched the screen with his paw as though he were pointing to Sara’s e-mail.

“Okay, I’ll read Sara’s e-mail,” I said. “I don’t have any other ideas.”

Sara had sent some of the photos from the video shoot. My favorite image was the guys looking like clean-cut members of a boy band in white shirts with the sleeves pushed back, vests, loosened skinny ties and not a sign of piercings, tattoos or even stubble. The shot of them in their ruffled pirate shirts was pretty funny, too. I remembered what she’d said about seeing way more of the guys than she’d ever wanted to: Best way to cover up all their ink was to airbrush. It did a great job, but none of those guys were on my list of men I wanted to see without their shirts.

Hercules cocked his head to one side. His whiskers twitched as though he were waiting for me to make the connection. And just like that, I figured it out.

I closed my e-mail and used a search engine to bring up all the photos I could find from the dinner in Minneapolis. I checked each one carefully. It wasn’t what I was seeing on the screen that told me who had killed Mike Glazer; it was what I wasn’t seeing.

There were no images of Alex and Christopher Scott together. In the dozens and dozens of pictures from that night, not once had the brothers been photographed together. Because both of them hadn’t been there.

It was a pretty outrageous plan, Christopher covering up his tattoo and pretending to be Alex for part of the evening. On the other hand, they were identical twins and it couldn’t have been the first time they had impersonated each other.

“They planned it,” I said to Hercules. I thought about the frosting spatula belonging to Georgia Tepper that had been shoved down into the dirt by the edge of the tent. “Do you think that making it look like Georgia was involved somehow was part of the plan too?”