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the box and leapt from the edge of the table.
    My first thought was that Rena’s ferret, Val, had hitchhiked to the show in the box, but then I realized that Rena would have left Val at home for the day and that the critter who’d scampered from the box was too small to be a ferret.
    “Was that Gandhi?” Rena squealed.
    Lord have mercy. It absolutely was Gandhi, making one of his rare and inopportune appearances.
    Nearly a year before, a woman named Sherry Harperhad died in my back alley, and her auburn guinea pig, Gandhi, had escaped into the wild. Over the months, we’d tried to catch him as he took up residence in businesses up and down the alley: Richard Greene’s Greene Brigade, then my friend Taffy’s tea shop, and eventually in Xander Stephens’s record shop, Spin Doctor. I lived in fear that he’d find his way to Ken West’s restaurant, Red, White & Bleu, and end up in an exterminator’s crosshairs.
    I hadn’t seen Gandhi inside Trendy Tails since he first went missing, but somehow he must have gotten in and managed to elude Jinx for long enough to hop a ride to the M-CFO cat show.
    The absolute last place a guinea pig should be.
    I crouched down to see if I could spot the little fella, but between the table drapes and the sea of legs, he was long gone.
    “Lose something?” I looked up to find Jack smiling down at me.
    “Yes. No. Sort of,” I muttered as I climbed to my feet. Jack stood next to my aunt Dolly, who—alarmingly—held Packer, my pug-bulldog mix, on a leash.
    I hugged everyone in sight, including my dog, who returned my affection with a big slobbery puppy kiss, before narrowing my eyes and chiding Jack and Dolly. “Why did you bring Packer?”
    Jack shoved his hands in the pockets of his cargoshorts and shrugged. “Don’t look at me. I’m just the driver.”
    Right. “Just the driver.” Like he had no control over Dolly, no obligation to rein her in. Jack knew Dolly did inappropriate things on a daily basis; it took a village to keep Dolly in check. Besides, Jack was a cop, for heaven’s sake. He should have been the voice of reason. But I was inclined to give him a pass. Once Dolly got an idea in her head, it was hard to talk her out of it. In fact, the more rational you tried to be, the more she dug in her heels. While Jack was very serious about his copness, he wasn’t a bully; I couldn’t imagine him forcing Dolly to do something she didn’t want to do.
    For her part, Dolly cocked her white-haired head and narrowed her eyes right back at me. “Izzy McHale. I never knew you to be so discriminatory. Packer has just as much right to be here as anyone else.”
    “But it’s a cat show.” I knew I was stating the obvious, but what else could I say? I swept my arm around to display the tables full of cats.
    “And I’m sure all the cats are lovely,” Dolly said. “But Packer wanted to join in on the fun, and you know he’ll be a perfect gentleman.”
    I knew nothing of the sort. Both Packer and Jinx were ill-behaved little creatures, spoiled rotten by Ingrid, Dolly, and occasionally me. Besides, evenassuming we could corral Packer under our display table, I knew his presence would disturb the cats.
    Sure enough, Packer let out a snuffling little bark, and the cats in the cages closest to my table started to
roo
. The international feline call of distress spread from cage to cage, table to table, until the collective keening of two hundred cats overwhelmed the room. Even Jinx had her ears flattened back on her skull, and she usually ignored Packer like he was a piece of furniture.
    As though the cat calls had summoned her, Pamela Rawlins strode into the ballroom through the main door, about twenty feet from my table. She had her eyes downcast and her shoulders hunched with tension as she made a beeline toward the prize table. She leaned in to examine the glittering collar dangle, head cocked this way and then that, before turning on her heel and walking back the way she’d