Cat Chase The Moon

8

Joe Grey entered through the bulletproof glass doors of MPPD on the heels of two garbagemen marching a dirty-faced young boy between them. Their truck was parked in the red zone. The taller, better-groomed city servant held a young calico cat close against his shoulder, held her tight but gently. Joe, only glimpsing her, thought for a second it was Courtney but then saw that it was not. He felt further dismay when he realized that his office friend, blond, plump Mabel Farthy, was not at the dispatcher’s desk with her welcoming smile. Instead, sour-faced EvaJean Simpson scowled at the calico, at the dirty, fighting boy being dragged through the door, and at the garbagemen. She gave Joe himself a poisonous stare.

The real surprise was that the waiting room was half full of calico cats, each in a battered carrier, the cages lined up in the far corner between the long counter and the window. Joe pushed in behind the garbagemen and fighting kid and ducked under a folding chair, searching through the bars of each cage for Courtney.

She wasn’t there, no one looked back at him with eager amber eyes, no one yowled out to her daddy.

Where had these cats come from? Had they been collected by sticky-fingered little thieves like that kid, after reading Charlie’s posters? Clean, healthy neighborhood cats maybe snatched from their own front porches, each “rescuer” eager for his thousand dollars.

Money they’ll never see, Joe thought, extending his claws.

He was only partly hidden in the chair’s shadow. In a minute EvaJean would see him and make a royal fuss—once she was finished dressing down the garbagemen. “That cat does not belong here. Look at the poster, at the phone numbers. Call them, call the shelter, call those rescue people. All this fuss over a cat. This is a police department, not an animal pound.”

The man with the cat fetched an empty cage from those stacked to one side. He put the cat gently in, gave her a last pet, and set the cage with the others.

EvaJean said, “I suppose you want to book that boy. People don’t realize . . .”

“We don’t need to book him. Just take his name and address and file a complaint. We already gave him a talking-to that ought to cool him for a while. If he pulls something like this again, you can take care of him.”

“I don’t take care of little boys, or cats. I want him and those cats out of here.”

The glass door opened and Charlie Harper came in. She nodded curtly to EvaJean and began collecting the cats in their cages. The two men helped her carry the calicos out to her SUV where she had backed into the red zone and opened the rear door. She carried in some extra cages, for further contributions.

“Where will you take them?” said the shorter, unshaven man.

“To the vet, to be checked for an identification. You know, those implanted chips. If we can’t find all the owners, we’ll take those cats to our shelter.” She glanced under the chair at Joe Grey, her green eyes laughing as he left the shadows and walked boldly past EvaJean’s counter, following Charlie as she headed for the hall and Max’s office.

“The cat can’t go back there,” the clerk said sourly. “Catch him, Mrs. Harper. Take him away. Your husband doesn’t need a cat in there, he’s in a meeting.”

Charlie smiled. “Joe spends half his life in that office, he’s been in meetings before. You’re a temp, EvaJean. You’re signed up to work here all week, until Mabel gets back. You wouldn’t want to be in the chief’s bad graces all week, let alone the rest of the department?”

EvaJean’s look was snake-cold. Ignoring Charlie, she turned away to the copy machine.

But Charlie didn’t want to break into the meeting. She loaded the last of the caged cats in her SUV and took off for Dr. Firetti’s. Joe Grey smiled as he sauntered on down the hall and pushed into the chief’s office through the slightly open door. If Max was in a meeting, it would most likely be about yesterday evening’s murder and robbery and their connection to the other bank thefts. Maybe he’d also hear some casual mention of missing Courtney, maybe some of the guys were keeping an eye out as they went about their patrols. To a cop, a vanished cat doesn’t compete with theft and murder. But maybe Charlie had sweet-talked Max into seeing that his men keep a lookout. Courtney was Joe Grey’s own kitten, and most of the officers considered Joe family, a part of the department, though they had no idea that Joe, so many times, had helped them wrap up a case.

Now, maybe it was their turn to help Joe.

Max and three detectives were crowded around the desk examining half a dozen pages of what looked like the coroner’s preliminary report, with graphs, colored photographs, charts, and various printouts. Leaping to the desk, Joe pushed comfortably between Detective Juana Davis and the chief. Max looked down at him like, What the hell do you want? Maybe he was grumpy from being awakened at three in the morning.

Juana’s dark eyes smiled down at Joe, and she scratched his ears. Her black hair had just been cut, straight black bangs, smooth black bob above her collar, a few streaks of gray that gave it a nice flair. Her black uniform smelled of her two young cats. Max Harper’s western shirt and jeans smelled of horses. Across the desk, Dallas Garza looked at Joe with interest just as Max was looking, Dallas’s dark Latin eyes half amused, half questioning. “Why do you always show up when new information has just hit the desk?”

“Leave the poor cat alone,” Juana said. “Look how frazzled he is, he’s probably been out half the night hunting for his kitten. Looks like the whole village is looking for her.”

“Not the whole village,” Dallas said, reaching to pet Joe. “Though there are a lot of people wandering around and looking in windows. I know Joe’s bright, but to hunt for hours for his lost kitten?” He looked up at Detective Davis. “Hell, Juana, she’ll show up.”

Pretending ignorance, Joe stepped delicately around Max’s assorted papers, onto the edges of camera views and X-rays of the robbery victim’s injured head, of his bloody neck and shoulder. That whole upper part of his body had been hit when the thief slammed the door on him, grisly color shots of blood and crushed bone. The victim’s foot and leg were twisted and looked broken. The coroner’s written report lay right in front of him, facing Max. Joe would have to read it upside down, but he didn’t think that would fly. A cat reading right side up, nose to the page, would be incriminating enough. He caught the name, Jon Jaarel. Jaarel’s charming bar and grill had been a Molena Point landmark for years. Now Jaarel was gone, Joe thought sadly. And would the treasured restaurant soon vanish, too?

“The killer must have thrown all his weight against that door,” Dallas said.

For some reason, Joe had the strange feeling that when the robber slammed the car door, he didn’t mean to kill Jaarel. A man so eager for the money that he did in his victim with more speed than thought, striking fast but clumsily.

And who was the witness, the unknown snitch who had called Max?

Max’s careful notes were there. The snitch had given him a more detailed description of the crime than Joe himself usually gave—yet this snitch had offered little to describe the killer, he said he hardly saw the man.

Well, Joe’s own tips were often just as disjointed: details left out or confused in the fast action of the crime. A witness couldn’t catch everything. And how could the killer vanish so quickly in that small, crowded shopping center?

But Max and Juana Davis were talking about what to do with Joe’s own case, as he thought of it. Whether to transfer the woman from the hospital to a nursing home where she could rest and heal, under police guard, when Kit came bolting in through Max’s door, wild-eyed. Joe crouched to leap down. Had she found Courtney? Had something terrible happened? She could say nothing until he’d raced out behind her, until they’d bolted to the roof and were alone, Joe nervous with worst-case scenarios.

In the office behind them Harper, Davis, and Garza stared after the cats, uncomfortably puzzled. “Cats,” Dallas said. “Flighty as a drunk squirrel.”

Juana smiled indulgently, thinking of her own cats. “Who knows what’s in their minds?”

Max’s expression didn’t change, no one knew what he was thinking.