The Cat Dancers

48

He awoke to the sound of scratching at his door and looked at his watch. It was 2:30. He blinked. Two-thirty in the afternoon? He got up, found a robe in the bathroom, and opened the door. Both dogs were sitting outside his door, ready to go outside, and their look said, Now would be nice. He groaned and went to find his clothes.

When he got back, he found that Jay-Kay had left him a note in the kitchen. She had fed the dogs. She’d be gone all day, and he was to help himself to whatever he needed. He walked through the living quarters and was struck again by the feeling that no one really lived here. But she had actually gone out and bought a can of dog food, and there was even a water bowl put down. He wondered when she slept, but he felt 100 percent better. He made himself some toast and coffee and then called Bobby Lee.

“You’re in Charlotte?” the sheriff asked. Cam thought he heard voices in the background.

“Consulting with our consultant,” Cam said, wondering who else might be in the room with the sheriff. “We need to meet. Privately.”

The sheriff started to say something, but Cam cut him off, suggesting the bar at the Marriott at 7:30.

He then sat down at the kitchen table with a pad of legal paper and began writing a report, starting with the execution videos. He made it as factual as he could, offering no theories or suppositions. It came to some twenty pages when he was all finished.

Then he wrote another one, this time outlining his theories about what was going on with respect to a vigilante cell in North Carolina. He asserted, in writing this time, that he’d known nothing about Annie’s bequest, pointing out that the will had been written back when they were already divorced and no longer living together. He stated that Oliver Strong had been her personal lawyer for many years and that Strong could testify that he had never met Cam before summoning him after she had been killed. He denied as forcefully as he could do in a letter that he had had anything to do with her death.

Then he wrote up a third paper, this one laying out what he would like the sheriff, or, for that matter, the federal authorities, to authorize Jay-Kay to do-pursuant to formal warrants this time-to investigate the personal background of Sgt. Kenny Cox of the Manceford County Sheriff’s Office. He suggested that military authorities be contacted to get some sense of Cox’s military service and how that had ended. He pointed out that if Kenny and James Marlor were related, then the execution videos probably indicated police collusion in the murder of the two robbers, and that since Marlor had told “them” where the chair was-probably right there in Triboro-there might be further executions. He then wrote out the pattern analysis he and Jay-Kay had discussed during the night, and he recommended that this be pursued as a matter of urgency.

When he was finished, it was almost dark. He went downstairs to the receptionist’s area. She was still there, and she helped him to make three copies of what he had written. He addressed one copy to Thomas McLain at the FBI’s Charlotte field office. He sent a second copy to Mike Pierce at the SBI. The third one, he packaged up to take to Bobby Lee.

When he finally got near Triboro, he took a shortcut off the interstate, a route leading to the downtown area. Being back in Manceford County, he gunned it, forgetting that he was no longer in a vehicle that would be recognized by local law as being driven by a fellow cop. Five minutes down the road, he saw blue strobes in his mirror. He swore and began braking. The cruiser came right up behind him and the strobes dimmed, which meant that they were grille lights. He looked again in the mirror as he started to pull over, confirming there was no light rack on the vehicle behind him. That made him wonder. The state cops used slickbacks on interstates, but the Sheriff’s Office traffic detail did not. And this was not a road the state troopers would be working at rush hour.

He pulled off the concrete and onto the berm. The other vehicle closed it right up tight, which was something else no deputy would do. You always left some space, if for nothing else but to register the license plate on the dash Cam. This guy was right behind him. He left his engine running and reached for his ID. The shotgun was still under the seat, but there was no way he could reach for that, not without the cop seeing him bend over. But something wasn’t quite right here. There was no one getting out of the cop car behind him. Another car came along and then passed them, briefly illuminating two silhouettes in the car behind him.

Now he definitely knew something wasn’t right: Manceford County never ran two officers in a cruiser, and he was in Manceford County. The shepherds, sensing Cam’s growing apprehension, were getting antsy and looking for instructions. He gave them both a down command to keep them flat on the backseat, then rolled down both rear windows, as well as his own. He put both his hands high up on the steering wheel and watched his mirrors. Sure enough, both men in the vehicle behind him got out at the same time and started forward. He could see white faces in the glare of their headlights, but not whether they were in uniform. Neither one had put his hat on, which was another thing a deputy always did when he got out to issue a traffic citation. Citizens recognized the hat, even when they couldn’t see a full uniform.

These guys were not Manceford County deputies.

The men came forward, and Cam caught a glimpse of drawn weapons, which they were holding in front of them, pointed down in two-handed grips. Wrong, all wrong. He thought about grabbing the shotgun, but there was no time and there were two targets. Rather than turning to look at the one coming up on his side, he kept his head straight ahead and scanned the three mirrors with his eyes. The instant the man on the left drew even with the rear window, Cam barked a command. Both rear windows were suddenly filled with a snarling German shepherd in the twenty-snaps-per-second mode. Frick was working Cam’s side of the truck, while Frack was doing the same routine out the other window, causing both men to jump back from the truck. The one on Cam’s side actually tripped and sprawled out into the roadway in his frantic attempt to avoid being bitten. Cam slammed the truck into reverse and drove the pickup’s protruding bumper hitch ball deep into the other vehicle’s radiator, then shifted into drive and peeled out of there, blowing gravel, grille debris, and road trash into their faces before either of them had a chance to use guns. He was doing ninety before he knew it and almost lost it on the next curve, but there were no lights in his rearview mirror just now. He slowed down and checked on his buddies in the back. The dogs were sitting up, their legs splayed due to all the maneuvers. Their claws gripped the seat tightly, but they were wearing their very best “That was fun” expressions. Cam relaxed and rolled up the windows.

The sheriff shook his head when Cam told about being picked up on the road back into Triboro.

“That was on me,” he said with an annoyed look on his face. “When I said, ‘You’re in Charlotte?’”

“Who was in the room?”

“Horace Stackpole. And Kenny.”

“Oh no,” Cam muttered, startling the pretty young waitress who was putting their drinks on the table. Cam handed over his report package. He described what was in it and said he’d sent one each to McLain and Mike Pierce at the SBI. Before Bobby Lee could protest, Cam related what Jay-Kay had told him about the ATF-FBI split on the bombing case.

“My take is that the Bureau is undecided about us here in Manceford County,” Cam said. “The ATF apparently has its own agenda. Something’s going on there, and I can’t figure it out. Mike Pierce will turn on the right people at the SBI. That’s why I put it in writing. It looks a whole lot better coming from me than at me.”

“That’ll get you suspended,” the sheriff said. “That’s the first thing that’ll happen.”

“Suspension isn’t all bad,” Cam replied. “Look, these guys have tried for me two times. So far, I’ve been damned lucky, but the next time it’s going to be a long gun, and that’ll be all she wrote. This way, we do what we do best: We bring a crowd. Make it official-warrants, court orders. And if you’re into suspensions, you’d better move on Sergeant Cox.”

“Is she sure she’s got that right-that his name used to be Marlor?”

“You can ask her directly, but that lady doesn’t mess around with those damned computers.”

“And I thought women with guns were frightening,” Bobby Lee said.

He sipped his drink. “I hate the fact that there are so damned many people into this hair ball.”

“Politically?”

“I can handle that,” the sheriff said, waving his hand dismissively. “I’m talking about getting these guys off the street. Did you call in the fake stop out on the connector?”

“Negative.”

“Where exactly did it go down?”

Cam told him. “There should be a small lake of antifreeze out there on the side of the road,” he said, “even if they did get the vehicle moved.”

The sheriff got out his cell phone and made a call. He instructed the Southside district office to get a forensics unit out to the location to see what they could find, then report directly back to him. While they ate, Cam explained his theory on how to correlate the phone booth records with the cowboy list, and Bobby Lee told him he’d already started the ball rolling on developing the list. As they finished, the sheriff’s cell phone chirped. He answered, listened, and then said to get every piece of debris bagged up.

“They found it?” Cam asked.

“Yep. They spotted a coyote lapping something up in the vicinity and found the antifreeze, plus a lot of plastic bits and a piece of radiator core. There were some big truck tracks ahead of your scratch marks, so they probably called a wrecker. We’ll canvass the tow guys in the area. This isn’t going to be that hard.”

“That’s one dead coyote,” Cam said. He knew that farmers used to put out bowls of antifreeze when coyotes and other predators began killing livestock. The animals couldn’t resist it, and they died horribly. The biggest problem was that it killed everything in the woods that got within scent of it.

“How are you going to handle Kenny?” Cam asked after the waitress cleared away their plates.

“When will SBI get your package?”

“The Bureau will have it first thing tomorrow, SBI by noon.”

“I’ll call Mike Pierce first thing in the morning, give him time to read your reports, and then set up an interview with Kenny tomorrow afternoon with the SBI in my office.”

“If he’s one of them, he’ll know about what happened tonight,” Cam said.

“Maybe, maybe not. If your theory’s correct about them not operating on their home turf, he might not. I think we have a day. By then, we’ll have something on that vehicle.”

“I guess it could have been undercover state guys,” Cam began.

The sheriff shook his head. “They’d have shown ID. Made the usual apprehension noises. And there’d have been runner reports all over the place, somebody got away from troopers like that. I’d have been beeped by now.”

Cam nodded. In a way, he’d have preferred that there was another explanation.

“Where will you go tonight?” the sheriff asked.

Cam shrugged. “Back home, I guess.” Even as he said it, he realized that that would be a dumb idea.

“Get a motel somewhere,” the sheriff said. “Hell, stay right here. This is a hotel.”

“I’ve got the dogs with me.”

The sheriff looked around. “That’s why God made side entrances and service elevators,” he said. “Actually, you can probably get ’em in on that parking garage sky bridge on the second floor. Sounds like they saved your ass tonight.”

Cam nodded. He wanted to go home, get a change of clothes, see what, if anything, had happened to his house, but the sheriff was right.

“When would you want me in tomorrow?” he asked.

“Go home in the morning, get cleaned up, and then come in. We’ll have us a crowd of helpers going by then.”

“I don’t look forward to this,” Cam said.

The sheriff stared of across the lobby for a moment. Cam thought he’d aged in the past week. “We’ll recover,” he said finally. “But probably not before we tar some good people.”