If only she’d rehired me after the first breakin! I’d have set up nanny cams and caught him peeing in her makeup. What a lever that would be in settlement negotiations. The kittens were a vicious return on his serve, more interested in hurting him than protecting her belongings. That put her a good six steps up the crazy stairs from standard divorce behavior. A BANK case was usually selfish people trying to keep the largest stack of goodies as they tore each other up. But she’d put Clark in the hospital. Had she known how much it would hurt him? Maybe. If so, it was crazy-smart. If he’d wheezed himself to death on a fine coat of kitten dander, well. I’d like to see the DA that could get around reasonable doubt on that one.
“Do you think I’m in trouble?” she asked, sulky and so twee it was almost baby talk.
I shook my head. “Oakleigh, if I let you get arrested for revenge-kittening, I will personally eat my law license and become a fry cook, okay? When the police come, look as demure as you can in that dress and let me do ninety percent of the talking.”
“Is it legal to not mention that I let kittens play in his clothes?”
“We’re not going to bring it up if they don’t ask. And they won’t ask that,” I said, distracted.
So Clark wasn’t robbing her. He was gaslighting, moving and ruining all her favorite things strictly to drive her nuts. I was now quite keen to meet this shoe-drowning, lipstick-defiling fellow and see what he looked like unembellished. The sheer, personal vitriol of his small-minded attacks put him at least as high up the crazy stairs as she was. Also, he had a secret way in and out of the house, and he knew down to the minute when she left home.
I said, “He’s got eyes on you. You get that, yes? His breakins happen fast, immediately after you leave.”
“You think he’s been watching me?” It honestly hadn’t occurred to her. This supported my theory that she was only exceptionally bitchy rather than a criminal mastermind plotting the perfect murder via adorable baby animals. But it also resparked the ugly rage I’d seen earlier. “That bastard!”
“We’ll report this to the cops, but I want to get my own PI in here to sweep your house for bugs.”
“You think Clark’s filming me?” Oakleigh shrieked, with such instant panic that it set me wondering who she was screwing. I’d need to prepare if there was a chance Clark had a sex tape to spring on us in mediation.
“I don’t think so. Calm down. If he had video in here, he’d have seen what you did with the kittens.”
She didn’t calm at all, stalking back and forth in a lather. “So he has somebody following me?”
“Maybe,” I said. He could well be watching her himself.
I needed Birdwine, but I wouldn’t pull him off Hana’s trail for Oakleigh Winkley. Not even if Oakleigh were on fire and he had the world’s last extinguisher tucked in his front pocket. I wished instead that I had extra Birdwines, three or four, at least. Amazing to me that some people staggered through their lives with none. I would have to use Nick’s guys to do a bug sweep and figure out how he was getting past her security system.
“How is he getting in?” Julian said. Bright boy, he had followed my same chain of thought.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But we’ll find it. Then we can either close it down or put some cameras—”
“Screw that. Leave it open. Let him come. I am going to shoot him so much,” Oakleigh interrupted, whirling to face us. “This is still America. I can shoot anyone who breaks in, right?”
Julian went very still, but I rolled my eyes.
“Please don’t plot murders in front of me, Oakleigh. It will make it morally quite sticky if you do kill him and need me to defend you.” I spoke in a bored tone that told Julian I wasn’t taking her threat seriously. My firm passed the very ugliest of dissolutions to me, so death threats were de rigueur. I’d heard them by the hundreds, and I’d never had a client make good on one. Not yet, anyway.
“It’s not funny,” she said, very screechy. As she spoke, she was stomping across the room, heading for the entertainment center. “We have two guns, one in the bedroom and one down here.” She jerked open a large drawer near the bottom and began pulling out old remotes and rolls of cable, dumping them haphazardly on the floor. Then she grabbed a wooden box out of the back. “Clark got them for me, in case anyone broke in when he was traveling. Well, it would serve him right if—” Her voice cut out abruptly as she opened the gun box. It was empty. Her face went ashen and her eyes bulged like a pug dog’s. Love betrayed was the ugliest thing alive, and as we watched, she devolved into its lowest common denominator. When she spoke again, her face twisted and froze in a rictus of loathing, genuinely deadly. “That bastard. That bastard. He stole my guns!”
We were now steps past regular, even for my cases. I rose and put propitiating hands out. “Okay, let’s calm down. Close that up. Pack the things back in the drawer. The police will be along any—”
She wasn’t listening. She was already running to the foyer. We heard her boot heels thundering up the stairs, no doubt going to check for the other gun. After another minute we heard her unleash a bloodcurdling string of curses, so it was missing, too.
“Holy crap!” Julian whispered. “Is she—”
I waved it away. “This is a bit much, with the kittens and the urine and the missing guns. But I’ve seen worse.”