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CSI: Knoxville
Investigating especially offensive offenses against humanity
by Scott McNutt

The scene opens in an ordinary living room, one that could be in any house in Anywhere, USA. A couch stands against one wall, a loveseat against another. Two lounge chairs are set at jaunty angles toward one another on opposite sides of a side table. Some papers lay on the floor at the table’s base. A man and a woman are crouching over the documents, examining them, but carefully avoiding touching them.

"What’s on the papers?" asks the woman.

"I’m not sure…" says the man.

"Oh my god! What’s that smell?"

I’m not sure…but I have a bad feeling we’re going to find out."

What are…what were those papers?"

"I’m not sure. But we know the marriage license and the guest list, along with notations of what gifts they gave, were on the table. And we know they no longer are on the table. Based on where these papers are on the floor, I’d say those are the license and the guest list."

"Damn," remarks the woman. "They’re useless to us now."

"That’s right," the man sighs, then looks closely at the soggy mass of documents. "Hm. I think I can see the outlines of more than one stain. Yes, it looks like…it looks like, yes, we have a stain covering a stain, and hey, hey, hey, we have another stain covering the stain covering the stain. And another! And…"

He straightens up. "What we have here is layered stains. And you know what, I think I see a print in the stuff saturating the papers. That cinches it. Standard modus operandi, the style is unmistakable."

"So it’s the usual suspects?"

"Definitely. It’s a paw print. The cats did this."

The Cat Stain Investigation Unit, that’s us. Whenever a crime scene investigation occurs at our house, it goes something like that. Our cats are our evil nemeses, who constantly commit crimes against humanity, or at least, against my wife and me, and flaunt their evil acts at us. They leave telltale clues for us to find, or, more precisely, stains for us to see and smell, then silently laugh at our futile attempts to catch them in the act. They are heinous.

In a way, it’s our own fault. It was Dana and I who brought these furry felons, these clawed criminals, these pee-pee perpetrators together. I brought brother and sister Linus and Lucy, a gray tuxedo kitty duo, to the household. Dana brought tortoiseshell Bailey. It was a day that would live in infamy, although little did we mark it at the time.

Right after we conjoined households, we began to notice that the trio were peeing outside their litter boxes. At first, we couldn’t fathom their motivation for doing so. For the three cats, we have four litter boxes. Five, if you count the back porch. Hundreds, actually, if you count all the other places they now pee. But, at the time, we supposed four litter boxes for three cats, changed regularly, would be sufficient for their needs.

However, we didn’t account for one factor. They hated each other. Bailey, although she doesn’t have full control of her hind legs, particularly relishes terrorizing Lucy. She delights in chasing Lucy all about the house until Lucy finds refuge by leaping up on some surface taller than Bailey’s less-functional legs allow her to attain. Bailey then retaliates by going off and peeing someplace. Lucy, meanwhile, is skulking off to another pee-place of Bailey’s to put her mark on it. Relentlessly, each launches proxy attacks on the other by peeing someplace the other has previously peed. One act sparks a retaliatory act. And so it goes. War is hell.

But it was the incident with the marriage license and the guest list that really let us know what collateral damage would ensue from their urine struggles, because Bailey and Lucy fight pee wars with the same gusto Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker fought Star Wars. It’s dueling territorial boundary marking in this Battle of the Bulging Bladders, and the combatants don’t care whose floor, rugs, walls, doors, drapes, bookshelves, books, furniture, appliances, clothes, and yes, important documents, are destroyed in the process.

What happened was this. The weekend after we were married, we had only partly completed the thank-you notes for our wedding gifts. Intending to resume the task the following weekend, we had left the guest/gift list on a table in the living room. The marriage certificate we left there out of laziness. Sometime over the course of the week, we noticed what had occurred. So if you gave us a wedding gift and never got a thank-you note, now you know why. And probably wish you didn’t.

That is the story of CSI: Knoxville.

If you have any ideas about how to stop cat-pee wars, let us know. Best suggestion wins a free cat. Runner-up gets two free cats.