Never Steal a Cockatiel (Leigh Koslow Mystery Series Book 9) Read online

  What the hell was the man up to? When he’d said Kyle had “people after him,” Leigh hadn’t thought he meant the law. She’d been thinking more along the lines of creditors. But why would Mason even bring up the ruse about a pawnbrokers’ convention? Could he be running from the law himself?

  Leigh stubbornly dismissed the notion. When he’d awoken her before dawn, he hadn’t seemed like a man who was sweating over a pursuit by the police or anyone else. He had seemed like a man who was anxious to go somewhere, but was being frustrated by an unexpected nuisance: a.k.a., a neighbor’s pets. Once Leigh had said she would take care of the animals, Mason had acted downright chipper.

  So where was he going?

  She returned to her parents’ living room to find her mother staring at her with arms crossed and reading glasses removed. “Now,” Frances said crisply. “You can tell me what that was all about. What kind of trouble are you in this time?”

  “I’m not in any trouble!” Leigh protested, knowing it was pointless. Never mind that she really wasn’t in any trouble. This time. She had given the same answer too many times before when it was… perhaps slightly less applicable.

  “Oh, patoot!” Frances retorted.

  Leigh sighed. Where was the kindly granny who’d been making goofy faces at little Eddie just minutes ago? “I’m not in any trouble, Mom,” she repeated. Then inspiration struck. “It’s just that there’s something pet-related going on in Avalon and Ben Avon.” She explained about the petnapping rumors and Skippy’s overzealous defense of her parrots. “But Maura says the police can’t really do anything until an actual crime victim comes to them,” she finished.

  “I see,” Frances said thoughtfully. With one brisk motion, she replaced her reading glasses. “Well, we’ve got work to do. Well begun is half done. Spit spot!”

  Leigh’s teeth gritted. She rued the day her mother had ever watched Mary Poppins.

  After what seemed like a hundred hours — but was actually more like six — Leigh was thrilled to hear the sound of car doors slamming out front. Cara was scheduled to deliver Randall back to the house, and she would have the entire Pack in tow. If Leigh was lucky, Cara would also bring along some sort of food for Leigh to microwave for her parents’ dinner.

  “So, how did it go?” Leigh asked as she held open the door for her father to hobble inside. It took him a while. “It was frustrating,” Randall said tiredly. “But I’ll make it.”

  “We took a bit of a spill on the steps outside the clinic,” Cara lamented, walking close beside him with both hands out. “I’m not very good at this, I’m afraid.”

  “Nonsense,” Randall insisted. “I just lost track of my feet.”

  They moved on through the door, and Leigh looked behind them. Lenna and the boys were waiting in the van, but Allison was standing on the porch holding the cockatiel’s cage. “Why do you have that? Aren’t we taking the bird back to our house?” Leigh asked, confused. The plan was for Allison and Ethan, along with the corgi, to spend tonight at Cara and Gil’s, since Leigh would be in West View and no one knew how late Warren might get home.

  “Grandpa wants to watch him here,” the girl answered, walking inside.

  Leigh closed the door and turned to see Cara helping Randall onto the edge of the inflatable bed. “You should lay down and prop those feet up,” Cara suggested, fetching pillows.

  Frances’s eyes fell on the bird cage. “Ack!” she erupted, her finger wagging in Allison’s direction. “You leave that thing right there on the tile, young lady.”

  Randall sighed. “I thought it would be best if I kept the bird here,” he said to Leigh. “I don’t believe there’s anything physically wrong with it, but having a strange cat and dog around could certainly be a stressor. A little more human activity, on the other hand, could be helpful.”

  “Excuse me?” Frances protested, glaring at her husband. “Have I been consulted on this matter?”

  “We’ve had birds before,” Randall reminded. “It’ll only be for the rest of the week.”

  “The birds we’ve had before,” Frances said slowly, enunciating each word, “have scattered seed husks, feathers, and that deplorable dust throughout the entirety of our home. Which is why we no longer have any.”

  Leigh looked anxiously from one parent to the other. She remembered well the insane schedule of vacuuming and dusting her mother had insisted on whenever they’d had finches or budgies in the house. When Leigh was very small, there had even been an Amazon that Frances herself had been fond of, despite its nasty tendency to bite anyone or anything that came near its perch. The bird had sealed its place in Frances’s heart by learning to screech “clean that up!” every time anyone dropped anything.

  “It’ll only be for a few days,” Randall repeated calmly.

  Frances continued to glare at her husband even as her hand reached for her clipboard. “I’ll adapt the cleaning schedule,” she said dryly.

  Leigh and Cara exchanged a look of dread.

  “I’m trying to reach the owner to come pick him up,” Leigh assured them all. “Hopefully it won’t take long.”

  Frances’s glare remained skeptical. She scribbled furiously on her clipboard.

  “I told Grandpa I’d come feed the bird and clean his cage,” Allison offered.

  “That’s lovely of you, dear,” Frances said, still scribbling. “He’ll have to go in the dining room. But the furniture must all be covered first. With plastic sheeting. 10 mil, I think…”

  When at last France stopped writing and looked up, it was only to hand out such onerous work assignments that Cara did not actually manage to leave with the Pack for a full half hour, and by the time Frances was satisfied that her dining room was protected to Haz Mat standards, Leigh and Randall were both starving.

  Sadly, Cara had not brought any food.

  “There’s a fresh whole chicken in the refrigerator,” Frances insisted. “And potatoes in the basement pantry. If you applied yourself, you could have a proper meal ready in an hour and a half.”

  Leigh ordered pizza.

  Chapter 8

  None of the Koslows seemed in the mood for conversation, much less a card game, and the evening dragged. Randall’s covert wincing convinced Leigh that he had bruised himself significantly in today’s “bit of a spill,” and after a solid hour of listening to his wife explain what was wrong with the clinic’s filing system, he seemed exhausted. Leigh was happy to get both her parents to bed early, and after sending her own hardworking husband a “what do you look like again?” text, she crawled into the lower bunk of her childhood bedroom certain that she would sleep like a rock.

  She was wrong.

  After tossing and turning forever, she had been asleep for what felt like only minutes before the ringing of her cell phone woke her up again. She looked at the caller ID and scowled. The area code was unfamiliar. It was only spam. She rejected the call and looked at the time. It was 1:00 AM.

  She turned over and closed her eyes again. A minute later they flew back open.

  Someone downstairs had coughed. It was a man’s cough, but it didn’t sound like her father’s. She had heard Randall cough through many bouts of cold and flu, and this sound was different. It had the distinctive hacking sound of a smoker’s cough.

  Leigh swung her feet off the bunk and stood up. Randall had not smoked since he was a teenager. But what if his cough sounded odd because he had fractured a rib or bruised a lung?

  She made her way down the stairs and into the living room. It was dark, and she stumbled twice over the rearranged furniture, stubbing a bare toe. But eventually her eyes adjusted enough to see that both her parents were asleep. She stood a moment, watching the rise and fall of the sheet over her father’s chest. He didn’t cough again. His breathing seemed normal.

  Puzzled, but relieved, she started to make her way back to bed. She had just put her throbbing right toe on the first step when she heard the noise.

  It was a rasping, sawing noise. As if s
omeone were cutting through metal, like a screen. And it was coming from the kitchen.

  Leigh reached for a cell phone she didn’t have. She was barefoot in a sleepshirt. Her phone was upstairs beside the bunk beds. The house’s landline was in the kitchen, where both her parents’ cellphones were recharging.

  She made a quick assessment. If the intruder was a petty thief, he would probably run away as soon as she flipped on the lights or made noise. But if she made her presence known now and he was some psycho serial killer, she’d never make it to the kitchen phones. And if she ran upstairs to get her own cell, she’d be leaving her sleeping parents at his mercy.

  She drew in a breath and crept stealthily toward the kitchen doorway. The landline was on the wall just inside. She would take a quick look around, make sure she wasn’t imagining things, then call 911. As soon as she dialed the number, she would flip the lights on. Most likely, he would run away then. But even if he attacked her with a meat cleaver and she never got a word out, the landline would give the police their location.

  She listened as she crept, but the floorboards creaking under her feet nearly obscured the rasping noise.

  Leigh’s pulse pounded. Had her mother left the windows unlocked? Frances often left the windows open in the summer, rather than “waste money blowing around unnecessarily cool air.” But her parents always made sure to shut and lock the windows at bedtime, at least those on the first floor.

  A pang of guilt shot through her. Well, they weren’t even walking at the moment, were they? It was her job to make sure all the windows were locked. They had been closed when she arrived, so she had assumed… but she shouldn’t have.

  This was all her fault!

  With her heart in her throat, she inched her head around the kitchen doorway just far enough to peer in.

  Through the window, she could see a pale hand with a knife working to pull down a large flap of screen wire.

  Leigh fought to control her breathing and stay silent. She withdrew her head, reached her arm around the corner, felt for the phone cradle, and then lifted the headset. Her hands were shaking as she quickly punched in the numbers. The dial tone had become audible as soon as she picked up the phone… had the intruder heard it?

  A sort of a popping sound, followed by a creak, sounded from the kitchen. The window was sliding open.

  Leigh’s call connected. She could hear it ringing at the other end.

  THUMP.

  Her heart raced. Something had definitely happened. She heard a scuffling noise. The intruder was coming through!

  She knew she should stay out of sight. But she couldn’t help herself. She poked her head back around the doorframe.

  “Leigh Eleanor Koslow!” Frances hissed from the living room. “Whatever are you doing wandering around down here in the middle of the night?” A dim light shone from behind Leigh as Frances turned on the table lamp in the living room.

  Leigh stared into the kitchen. Through the hole in the screen protruded the upper torso of a man — a boy? — wearing a dark gray hoodie with the hood pulled up. He was bent over the window ledge at the waist, awkwardly paused midway through the act of vaulting himself inside. Leigh saw him for only a second, and his face was concealed by the hood. But she was able to discern two things. He was a wiry caucasian with narrow shoulders, and Leigh and her mother had just scared the crap out of him.

  He mumbled a four-letter word, braced his hands on the sill, and backed himself out again. Leigh heard another thump as he hit the ground, followed by the predictable pounding of retreating footfalls.

  “Nine-one-one,” a voice on the phone said calmly. “What is your emergency?”

  “Whatever is going on in there?” Frances shouted.

  The footsteps were heading toward the street. Leigh dropped the phone, raced around to the front door, turned the bolt, and swung it open.

  “Leigh!” Frances persisted.

  Leigh stepped out on the porch and looked down the street. She could see the man running. He was wearing jeans and dark shoes… beyond that she couldn’t tell much.

  She closed and relocked the door, then rushed back to the kitchen and picked up the ancient phone, which was attached to the wall base by a spiral cord. “A man tried to break into my parents’ house,” Leigh told the dispatcher. She gave the address and a quick description. “He just ran away down the street. Toward Perry Highway.”

  “Leigh Eleanor!” Frances shrieked. “You come in here and tell us what’s happening this instant!”

  “Leigh?” her father called blearily. “Is something wrong?”

  “Don’t you dare get up!” Frances screeched at him.

  The cockatiel squawked and fluttered in his cage.

  Leigh stretched the phone cord as far as she could move toward the living room. “It’s okay,” she attempted to soothe. The couple were sitting bolt upright on the inflatable bed, Frances pale with panic and Randall red-faced with frustration, his one good leg swung over on the floor and ready to go. “Somebody tried to break in, but he’s gone now,” she explained. “Just a minute.”

  Leigh turned her attention to the dispatcher’s questions and moved into the kitchen. The burglar had clearly known what he was doing; the hole in the screen that he had cut so expertly was plenty big enough to admit his entire body. Without interruption, he could probably have slipped inside with a minimum of noise. If her parents had been asleep upstairs as they normally were, they wouldn’t have heard a thing. Leigh probably wouldn’t have either, if the man hadn’t coughed first.

  What would have happened if he had surprised her parents in the middle of the living room?

  Leigh shuddered. She answered the rest of the dispatcher’s questions and hung up to await a visit from the Ross Township police. Her heart was still pounding. Her palms were sweaty and she felt a little light in the head.

  How the heck did Maura do this all the time?

  And what the devil had the man wanted? If he was after jewelry, he should have broken in during the day, when he could rifle through the bedrooms unmolested. If he was after valuable electronics, he was a moron. One look through the window at her parents’ Paleozoic box television should have nipped that idea in the bud. He must have been after cash — most likely a desperate search for drug money. But why target this house at all, with her Aunt Lydie’s house sitting empty right next door?

  A stab of fear shot through her chest. Had he broken into Lydie’s house, too?

  She started to turn toward the front door again, but stopped herself. The police could check that out. There was nothing she could do about it now, anyway.

  Leigh heard a clunking noise and turned to see her father standing in the kitchen doorway leaning on one crutch. He spied the ruined window screen and exhaled. “It’s hard to find that size anymore,” he said tiredly.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sakes, Randall!” Frances shrieked from the living room. “We could have been murdered in our beds!”

  “Not much profit in that,” he murmured, turning himself around. Leigh followed him out of the kitchen and back to the bed, not at all sure he wouldn’t fall again.

  “Leigh Eleanor,” Frances ordered, her panic now giving way to action. “Go upstairs and put on something decent immediately. You can’t talk to the policemen wearing that!”

  Leigh looked down at her worn sleep shirt. It had Winnie the Pooh on the front and had been a Christmas gift from the twins when they were four years old. She really, seriously needed to catch up on the laundry.

  “And fetch my blue pantsuit,” Frances added earnestly. “With a pair of knee-high hose. And oh, heavens! I’ll need my hair spray!”

  “No, you don’t, Mom,” Leigh mumbled as she headed up the stairs. No sooner had she returned with her own bathrobe on and two more thrown over her arm than she saw the flashing lights of a police car outside. She handed the robes to her parents and headed for the door.

  “I can’t talk to the police in bed!” Frances protested, frantically shruggin
g her thick corduroy robe over her shoulders. “It isn’t proper! What will they think? Randall, tell them we don’t normally sleep down here!”

  Leigh’s father put on his own robe. He made no response.

  Leigh opened the door. She looked out to see a single Ross Township policeman striding up her walk. A short, bearded man who appeared to be somewhere in his thirties, he stopped short on her porch steps and studied her. “Are you Leigh Koslow?” he asked, sounding oddly wary.

  “Yes,” she replied, feeling suddenly wary herself.

  “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” he asked.

  Crap. “You know Detective Maura Polanski?”

  “Yeah, sure.” His eyes widened. “Oh, right. You’re that Leigh Koslow.”

  Leigh sighed. The policeman didn’t look familiar, but that hardly mattered. Her reputation preceded her. She was never quite sure what that reputation was, since she made a point of never doing anything criminal. The fact that criminal things regularly happened in her vicinity was a metaphysical phenomenon beyond her control.

  “Officer Sims. We’ve met before,” he declared. “After the… uh… incident at the theater last spring. But I doubt you’d remember me.”

  “Sorry,” Leigh replied lightly, holding the door open. “Please come inside.”

  Officer Sims was soon joined by three of his colleagues, lighting up the Koslow stretch of Ridgewood Avenue like the Fourth of July. The police searched through the house and yard, took statements from her and her parents, and checked out Lydie’s house next door. They found no damage other than the Koslows’ cut window screen, and no conveniently left-behind clues either. No one else had seen the fleeing intruder, and Leigh declined an offer to look at mug shots. The light had been too dim and the hood too concealing for her to notice any identifying features. In fact, after being questioned on the specifics of what she remembered, she couldn’t even swear that the intruder was male. She had seen caucasian hands and a skinny torso. But the voice uttering the single four-letter-word wasn’t particularly low in pitch and the running figure had been too far away to judge build or height.