Free Murder on the Astral Plane (A Kate Jasper Mystery) by Jaqueline Girdner Page B

idea as I sat back in my chair and tried to process the information Justine had given us.
    Too much was new to me. Psychics, alien presences, bisexuality, classic signs of cocaine addiction. Gag gifts were looking easier all the time.
    Linda galloped into the room just as I was drifting off into the land of computer mouses. That made sense. She was a veterinarian after all.
    “The kitties are glad you came, Kate,” she assured me. And then I had an idea.
    “Do your kitties know who did it?” I asked. “I know you’ve asked them before, but now that it’s calm…”
    “Femur, Tibia?” she called out and the marmalade and tabby appeared magically. Maybe there was something to this psychic stuff. C. C. never came when I called.
    Linda got down on the floor, all the way down on the floor, lying on her belly, propped up on her elbows, eye-to-eye with her feline friends.
    “Kate wants to know if you know who killed Silk,” she told the cats. “Please, can you tell her, sweeties?”
    The cats tilted their heads. I had a feeling that they were really thinking that this human was very strange.
    After a minute, Linda told us the score. “Femur and Tibia are confused,” she explained. “They don’t recognize Silk as dead because her aura is still walking around.”
    “All right,” I said, trying to keep my mind open, as goose bumps puckered the skin on my arms. “Can you ask them who put the wire around Silk’s neck?”
    “Oooh, good, Kate,” Linda cooed. “Can you, kitties?”
    The cats looked at each other and stomped out of the room, yowling their answers, whatever they were.
    “Oh darn, they thought you meant a flea collar,” Linda translated. “They hate flea collars.” She pulled herself up to sitting position and wrapped her arms around her knees. “See, animals are floating in this kinda continuum of time and space. They’re not aware of separateness in the same way as we are. You know, they’ve got, like, less ego, so they merge with other beings easily. It’s kinda like they experience blurred lines between the astral and physical vibratory planes.”
    As far as I was concerned, cats thought about one thing: food. And I was thinking about food. too. Linda smelled too much like whatever she’d been cooking.
    “See, cats aren’t like people,” Linda went on. “That’s what Zarathustra and I were talking about before Silk was killed. He’s such a cool kid—”
    She jumped up, suddenly on her feet.
    “Oooh, the soups’s burning,” she told us and raced back into the kitchen.
    Our one person space-time continuum, gone in a nanosecond.
    “She isn’t quite as spacey as she looks,” Justine assured me. “You should see her at work. She’s very precise and thorough in her veterinary practice.”
    Did Justine protest too much? Hadn’t she already told me Linda could be focused? I wondered once more if Linda had been jealous of Silk.
    Justine was quick to answer me.
    “No, Linda and I both cared for Silk, but it didn’t make either of us jealous.”
    Damn, I hadn’t even thought of Justine being jealous.
    “Kate,” Justine told me, “you have a lot to process here—”
    “And I should go home and do it,” I finished for her. Two can play the psychic game.
    Justine laughed, a deep, rolling laugh that left me smiling.
    “Maybe you have less to process than I thought,” she whispered as she ushered us out the door.
    Barbara and I ate a very quick and excellent lunch of Thai salad rolls and coconut soup on the way home, marred only by my incessant worrying about Wayne. And Barbara’s incessant theorizing on the subject of Silk’s murderer.
    Barbara was still theorizing and I was still worrying when we finally pulled into my driveway, popping gravel.
    We were both so involved in our one-sided conversations that we didn’t notice the two men at my front door until we had climbed the steps to the deck.
    Lieutenant Kettering had his finger poised above my doorbell, ready to ring. Chief