Read Online Spotted Cats by William G. Tapply - Free Book Online

couldn’t have gotten close enough to them to cut their throats.’
    I nodded. ‘That’s what I’ve been thinking.’
    Maroney stared out the wall of windows. A brilliant, cloudless Cape Cod Saturday. The beaches would be mobbed, as would the pizza and ice-cream and T-shirt emporiums that lined Route 28 on the ocean side of the Cape. A fun place.
    ‘I suppose we could have somebody do an autopsy on the dogs,’ he said. ‘Don’t know what it would tell us.’
    ‘Shit,’ said Kinney. ‘Never heard of that.’
    ‘Me neither,’ said Maroney. He shrugged. ‘Are those jaguars insured, do you know?’ he said.
    I nodded. ‘Sure.’
    ‘A good thing. Someone best call Mr Newton’s adjuster. Describe the missing pieces for me.’
    ‘They were solid gold,’ I said. ‘Emerald eyes. Each weighed about twenty pounds. The smallest was fifteen and a half inches long. The biggest was nineteen and a quarter. They looked—like cats, you know? Jaguars, of course, are spotted. Like leopards. These gold ones weren’t spotted. Just burnished gold. Quite beautiful, in their fashion. A little crude, representative. Primitive. Jaguars were kind of gods to the Mayans.’
    ‘So the seven of them—they’d weigh well over a hundred pounds.’
    I nodded. ‘Closer to one-fifty.’ Maroney was taking notes.
    ‘What’s their value?’
    ‘They’re insured for seven hundred seventy thousand. One-ten each. They were appraised for about double that. That was a number of years ago.’
    Maroney whistled softly between his front teeth. ‘You have photographs of the cats?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Lily. ‘Want to see them?’
    Maroney nodded.
    She stood up. ‘I’ll get them.’
    She left the room. Maroney watched her go. ‘We’ll circulate the pictures,’ he said, still staring at the doorway through which Lily had disappeared. ‘Local art dealers, junk stores, and so forth. If we’re lucky, your burglars’ll turn out to be kids looking for crack money, have no idea what they’ve got for themselves, and your cats’ll turn up. I’m guessing that won’t happen, though.’
    ‘Because they brought sacks to carry them out in,’ I said.
    ‘I’m guessing that’s what they did,’ said the cop. ‘That plus the way they handled the dogs.’
    ‘What do you make of their slugging Jeff?’ I said.
    Maroney shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine right now. Maybe after we look around something’ll suggest itself. On the surface, it looks as if he heard something, maybe the dogs barking or something, and went outside to see what was going on—’
    ‘Those dogs didn’t bark,’ I said. ‘All they’d do was whine. You couldn’t hear them from inside the house.’
    He shrugged again.
    ‘And anyway, Jeff’s room’s in the back, and he doesn’t get around very well, and he takes sleeping pills. And if he did hear something, he’d most likely call for Lily.’
    Maroney cocked his head. ‘If she was there.’
    I shrugged.
    He glanced at Kinney, who was watching me.
    ‘Well,’ I said, ‘they weren’t kids. They were adults. Judging by their voices, anyway.’
    ‘Some kids on crack are pretty old,’ said Maroney.
    Lily came back and handed Maroney a large manila envelope. Maroney reached into it and took out a sheaf of eight-by-ten colour photographs. He shuffled through them. ‘Seven of them, right?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Lily.
    ‘Mind if I keep these?’
    She nodded. ‘We’ve got duplicates.’
    ‘Lily,’ I said, ‘were the papers there?’
    ‘Papers?’
    ‘The papers on the jaguars. The appraisal that Dan LaBreque and Maria Conway did, the import papers, insurance policies?’
    She nodded. ‘Yes. Right with the photos. The file cabinet’s in Jeff’s bedroom.’ She gestured at the mess of papers on the floor. ‘They must’ve been looking for them, huh?’
    ‘Looks like it,’ I said.
    Maroney tucked the photos back into the envelope and glanced at his notebook. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I need some