The crime scene unit had been gone for something on the order of fifteen minutes now, and I was still trying to figure out how they could possibly manage to lay waste to someone’s home as quickly as they had in this case. All in all, it had taken them just under two hours to accomplish what I can only imagine would have taken a busload of sugared up toddlers an entire day to do.

The emotional response to the specter of the destruction even seemed to transcend the boundary between human and house pet, as evidenced by our cats-Dickens, Emily, and Salinger. At the moment, they were sitting in a loose semicircle on the coffee table, perusing the mess. Earlier, they had found places to hide away, as they always did whenever we had unfamiliar visitors, and had only ventured back out now that the commotion was done and gone. Watching them from across the room, it looked for all the world like they were having an impromptu emergency meeting. It was as if they were trying to come to some conclusion about the scene before them that would make sense to their feline brains. Every now and then they would look at one another then at me, nervously twitch their tails or ears, and then go back to swiveling their heads around the room, yellow-green eyes open wide with a glaze of curiosity and perhaps even fear.

I couldn’t blame them. Our house was, in a word, trashed. The only way I can explain the spectacle that greeted me upon re-entering my home was that it looked as though everything had been the victim of a very strong, but somewhat considerate earthquake. I say considerate because nothing appeared to have been broken, at least not that I could see. However, no matter where I looked, there was obvious visual evidence of the search.

Furniture had been moved out from walls and instead of being put back was simply left sticking out at odd angles. Books were piled on the floor instead of resting in their rightful places on shelves. Even DVD and videocassette cases created a haphazard mound on a chair after having been opened, inspected and discarded.