Cat Laughing Last. Cat Seeing Double. Cat Fear No Evil

Clyde was, Joe thought, improving his lying skills. At least he had, apparently, convinced Ryan.

Now, below the cats, the bride and groom drifted away among a tangle of friends, heading for the party tables. Only Wilma remained beneath the eucalyptus tree lingering in the grassy circle. Looking up, she spoke softly-anyone who knew Wilma Getz knew that it was not unusual to hear her talk to her cats.

“Come on, Kit. I’m going to the hospital.”

The kit’s eyes widened.

“Taking Cora Lee some party food.”

Kit scooted down at once, so eagerly that she nearly fell backward into Wilma’s arms. The cats knew the kit had been worried about the Creole woman. The two of them were fast friends. Though Cora Lee had no notion of the little cat’s true nature, the kit was special to her. This last spring, they had spent six weeks onstage together charming their audiences. No actress and her protege can star together bringing down the house every night without forming an indestructible bond.

Carrying the kit on her shoulder, Wilma headed away through the crowd. “I have a shopping bag in me car that should hide you, should get you into her room.” Reaching her car, she turned so they could both look back, watching the bride and groom dancing the first dance in the westbound lane of Ocean, the tall, handsome couple laughing as their shoes scuffed on the rough asphalt.

“They are happy,” Wilma whispered. “Safe, Kit, thanks to you. Thanks to their guardian angel, they are safe and happy. Very, very happy.”

The kit smiled, and snuggled closer. How strange life was, how strange and amazing. She never knew, one moment to the next, what new wonder would fill the world around her, dazzling and challenging her-and sometimes terrifying her.

The inside of the car smelled deliciously of the party food that Wilma was taking to Cora Lee. But as the kit settled down on the front seat beside her friend, extravagantly purring, neither she nor Wilma imagined that the day’s events would not be the last ugliness to twist this weekend awry and leave its ugly mark.

Descending the great eucalyptus tree, Dulcie and Joe Grey backed precariously down the slick bark below the branch line, slipping, dropping the last six feet, and headed directly across the street to the long buffet tables set up in front of the village shops.

At the center table where bottles of champagne were being popped, Max and Charlie stood cutting the cake, exchanging bites, smearing white icing across each other’s faces as the occasion was duly recorded by a dozen flashing cameras. The cats glanced at each other, purring. A gentleness filled the crowd, a gentleness in people’s voices and in their slower movements, an extra kindliness washing over the village, born of the near-disaster.

They saw Ryan and Dallas coming up the street, returning from the station where Ryan must have had a look at the young bomber. As she joined Charlie at a small table, Dallas stood conferring with Harper, then headed away toward the church to oversee the bomb team. And Harper himself headed quickly for the station, leaving Charlie to the first of the endless separations and delays that would accompany her life married to a cop. The cats trotted near them, to listen, settling down on the sidewalk between some potted geraniums.

Ryan sat down, touching Charlie’s hand. “You look pale.”

“I’m fine. Was it the same boy?”

“Same kid. Dallas knows him; he’s Curtis Farger.”

“Son of the guy Max and Dallas busted?” Charlie said. “He’s supposed to be down the coast with his mother. Maybe she’s not too reliable.”

The trial of Curtis’s father had ended just three weeks before. Gerrard Farger was doing six years on the manufacture of an illegal substance, and two years each on three counts of possession. The meth lab he’d put together had been in the woods below Molena Point, a shed behind a two-room cabin, the property roped off now with warning signs, and stinking so powerfully of drugs that it would likely have to be destroyed. Though the chemicals and lab equipment had been removed, the walls and floor and every fiber of the building still exuded fumes as lethal as cyanide.

“I had a look at him through the one-way mirror,” Ryan said. “When I was sure it was the same kid, Dallas took me on in. Kid looked at me like he’d never seen me. I told him I’d cleaned up my truck, found the cracker crumbs and Hershey wrappers in my tarp.”

“I’m missing a beat, here.”

Ryan laughed. “I didn’t know what had happened in my truck, only that someone had been in it. That had to be on my way down from San Andreas, or that night after I got home. But then when I saw the kid� well, it fit. I asked him if he’d hitched a ride down from the mountains. He just stared at me. When I pushed him, he said, ‘What of it, bitch? I don’t weigh nothin’. How much gas could it take?’”

Ryan shook her head. “Not a bit like the nice, polite, innocent kid he let me think he was, hanging around the Jakes job.”

“You’resureit’s the same boy?”

“The same. Same straight black hair, with a cowlick-big swirl on the left side. Same big bones, square-cut dirty nails. Same coal-black eyes and straight brows with those little scraggly hairs.” Ryan gave Charlie a wry smile. “He was so eager and polite when he and his two friends showed up around the trailer.

“And just now in jail, underneath his hateful stare and rude mouth, I think the kid was scared.”

“He should be scared,” Charlie said. “He’s in major trouble.”

“Dallas called Curtis’s mother. She said the boy wasn’t there right then, that he’d gone to a movie. A ten-year-old boy going to a movie alone, at this time of night? Dallas asked her what movie. She didn’t know, said she’d forgotten what the kid told her. Said whatever was playing in town. That there was only one theater, and one screen. Said she guessed he’d be home by midnight.” Ryan shook her head. “A ten-year-old kid running the streets at midnight. Dallas plans to go down in the morning, have a talk with her.”

Charlie nodded. “If that old man is Gerrard Farger’s father-Curtis’s grandfather� They’ve had a warrant out for him. Max and Dallas were sure the two ran the lab together, but when they busted Farger the old man was gone, not a trace. Now, if there’s a connection to San Andreas, that’s a whole new track to follow. We may not make it to Alaska.”

“I’m sorry.”

Charlie shook her head. “Whatever Max decides is okay. We can take the cruise later. That old man needs to be stopped. At the time of the drug raid, the second bedroom in the Farger cabin had been cleaned out, where he might have bunked with the boy. Nothing but a bare cot against the wall and an old mattress on the floor, and the kid’s clothes. Juvenile officer picked those up after the bust, when he took me kid down to his mother. Not a sign of the old man, and during the trial Gerrard wouldn’t say a word to incriminate his father.”

Ryan shrugged. “Nothing like family loyalty. Were they part of a bigger operation?”

“Max doesn’t think so. More of a family business,” Charlie said wryly. “Farger apparently thought he could run a small operation without alerting the cops or the cartel.”

Ryan laughed. “Sooner or later the cartel would have known about it-would have destroyed the lab or taken it over, made Farger knuckle under and follow their orders.” Both young women were very aware of the powerful Mexican drug cartel that operated in the Bay Area. “He’s lucky Max made the bust, he’s safer in jail. Was he farming marijuana too?”

“DEA is investigating,” Charlie said. The cartel used its meth profits to bankroll marijuana operations across the state-a behemoth of criminal activity as dark and invasive, in the view of law enforcement, as if the black death were creeping across California destroying families and taking lives. In the national forests and other remote areas, the marijuana patches were guarded by gunmen who shot to kill, so intent on protecting their crops that a deer hunter or a hiker venturing into the wrong area might never be heard from again.

And the toxic waste from meth labs was dumped down storm drains so it went into the sea, or was poured into streams so it got into the water supply, or was poured on the ground where it could stay for years poisoning fields and killing wildlife. Whoever said doing meth didn’t hurt anyone but the user didn’t have a clue.

“Youarepale,” Ryan said softly. “We shouldn’t be talking about this stuff. You want to get out of the crowd, go somewhere quiet and lie down?”

“I’m fine,” Charlie said crossly. “I don’t need to lie down.”

But she wasn’t fine, she couldn’t get over being scared. She’d thought she was okay until, walking up the grassy aisle, with all their friends, everyone she knew and cared about, standing like a wall to protect her, she kept imagining the grass exploding in front of Dallas and Wilma, exploding with all those people crowding close.

She felt ice-cold again. Her hands began to shake.

Ryan put her arm around her, hugging Charlie against her shoulder.

Charlie shook her head. “I’m sorry. Delayed reaction.”

“I guess that’s allowed. You don’t have to be stoic and fearless just because you married a cop.”

“It would help.”

They looked at each other with perfect understanding; but they glanced up when Clyde and Wilma approached their table.

Wilma was wrapped in a blue cashmere stole over her pale gown, against the night’s chill. She carried a woven shopping bag that bulged and wriggled.

Clyde carried two paper plates heaped with canapes and salads and sliced meats. As he set one in the center of the table and the other underneath, Joe and Dulcie slipped beneath the table; and from Wilma’s shopping bag the kit hopped out, strolling purposefully under the table to claim her share.

“Cora Lee’s fine,” Wilma said. “Apparently something hit her in the head, but no concussion. They want her overnight, though.” When, early in the spring, Cora Lee had walked into the middle of a robbery and murder, she had been hit by such a blow to her middle that her spleen had ruptured and had to be removed. The dusky-skinned actress told them later she was terrified she would never sing again. But she had sung, the lead in the village’s little theater production ofThorns of Gold.With the kit as impromptu costar during the entire run, the play had sold out every night.

“Dallas is trying to get Curtis Farger remanded over to juvenile,” Clyde said. “But since the fire, with their building gone, they’re not eager to take any kids. Kids scattered all over, in temporary quarters, and not great security.” He looked at Charlie. “Max would be smart to get a move on, before you decide to enjoy the cruise without him.”

“Maybe we’ll just do a few days in San Francisco, and book the cruise for next spring.” Their reservation at the St. Francis gave them three days in the city before boarding their liner for the inland passage. At the moment, that sounded pretty good to Charlie.

“Can you cancel a cruise like that?” Wilma said. “Even Max�” She watched Charlie, frowning. She wanted her niece and Max to get on that ship and be gone, to be away from the Farger family.

“Max knows someone,” Charlie said. “When he made the reservations, that was part of the package, that if something urgent came up, we could cancel.” She glanced beneath the table where the cats feasted, Joe and Dulcie eating fastidiously, the kit slurping so loudly that Ryan looked under too, and laughed.

When the cats had demolished their quiche, seafood salads, rare roast beef, curried lamb, and wedding cake, they stretched out between the feet of their friends for a leisurely wash, grooming thoroughly from whiskers to tail. They could have trotted over to the jail and had a look at Curtis Farger, but they were too full and comfortable. And Joe didn’t think they’d hear much. Very likely Curtis had already been questioned as much as he could be, until a juvenile officer arrived in the morning to protect the kid’s rights. Sleeking his whiskers with a damp paw, Joe Grey thought about the legal rights of young boys who set bombs to kill people.

No one liked to believe that a ten-year-old child had intended, and nearly succeeded in, mass murder. In the eyes of the law, Curtis and his grandfather were innocent until proven guilty. But in Joe Grey’s view they were both guilty until proven otherwise. If you attacked innocent people with all claws raking, you should know that your opponent would retaliate.

Charlie said, “This afternoon at the church-before the bomb-I felt like I was nineteen again, so scared and giddy. And then after the bomb went off, it was� I wasn’t nineteen anymore, couldn’t remember ever having been so young.” She chafed her hands together.

“There was some reason,” Ryan said, “some profound reason, why that bomb went off prematurely. What made the kid turn and run? What made him trip and fall? You couldn’t see much under those overhanging trees. He was lucky he didn’t break something, falling off that roof. Just bruises-and those scratches on his face from the branches.” She looked at Clyde. “Do you think hewouldhave set off the bomb if he hadn’t fallen? Do you think hewouldhave pressed that little button?”

Clyde and Charlie and Wilma avoided looking at each other. All were thinking the same. Had no one seen Kit attack the boy?

“The boy went to a lot of trouble,” Clyde said, “to suddenly abandon the idea. Whether he made the bomb or the old man did, don’t you think a ten-year-old would do what he was told to do? If the old man forced the kid to go up on the roof, if he threatened Curtis�”

“You’re saying hewouldhave done it,” Ryan said. “But then fate stepped in-as if Max and Charlie’s guardian angel was looking after them, looking after all of us.”

Wilma lifted her champagne glass. “Here’s to that particular angel. May our guardian angels never desert us.” And Wilma did not need to look beneath the table to know that the guardian angel was pressing against her ankle. That particular angel purred so powerfully that she shook both herself and Wilma.

6 [��������: pic_7.jpg]

The plattersof party food were empty, the wedding cake had all been eaten or small pieces wrapped in paper napkins and carried away as little talismans to provide midnight dreams of future happiness. The empty champagne bottles had been neatly gathered and bagged, the tables and chairs folded and loaded into waiting trucks. In the quiet night the grassy, tree-sheltered median was empty now and silent and seemed to Ryan and Clyde painfully lonely. As they headed for the few parked cars, Ryan took his hand.

The bride and groom had left for San Francisco, for the bridal suite at the St. Francis, the loveliest old hotel in the city. They had joked about arriving in Max’s Chevy king cab, and had talked about renting a limo but considered that extravagant. The pickup wasn’t fancy but it was safe on the highway, and in the city they would put it in storage during their cruise. They had three days to enjoy San Francisco before they moved into the stateroom of their luxury liner and sailed for Alaska-or before Max realized that he couldn’t leave, with the bombing case working, that they’d have to head home again.

“Maybe only a three-day honeymoon,” Ryan said sadly, already certain of what Max would do.

“Whatever they do,” Clyde said, walking her to Dallas’s car, “they’re happy.” He gave Ryan a hug by way of good night, watched her settle in beside Dallas, then swung into his yellow convertible to drive the three blocks home, leaving Ryan and her uncle heading for her place to collect what little evidence might remain in the bed of her truck. Strange about the kid hitching a ride, hiding under the tarp where he couldn’t be seen through the rear window-he had to know exactly when she’d be leaving San Andreas. He had made his way into the town itself, maybe hitchhiking, to wait for her there.

Clyde drove home thinking uneasily about Joe, and about the kit and Dulcie. The cats would be into this case tooth and claw.

A bombing was a different game than shoplifting, or domestic violence, or even domestic murder. A bomb investigation of any kind could be more than dangerous-and you could bet Joe Grey would be onto it like ticks on a hound.

Short of locking the cat up, there wasn’t much Clyde could do to stop him.

Joe claimed he had no right to try. And maybe Joe was right. As much as Clyde wanted to protect Joe, the tomcat was a sentient being, and sentient beings had free choice. Joe could always argue him down on that point.

Parking in his drive, Clyde took a few minutes to put up the top of the antique Chevy. Following the slow, cumbersome routine, pulling and straightening the canvas and snapping the many grommets in place, he thought how strange and amazing, the way his life had turned out. Who would have imagined when he was living in San Francisco walking home from work that particular evening, when he paused to kneel by the gutter looking at that little bundle of gray fur among the trash and empty wine bottles. Reaching to touch what he was sure was a dead kitten, who could imagine the wonder that lay, barely alive, beneath his reaching hand?

When he took up the little limp bundle and wrapped it in his wool scarf and headed for the nearest vet, who could have dreamed the off-the-wall scenario that would soon change his life? That he was holding in his hand a creature of impossible talents, a beast the like of which maybe no other human had ever seen, at least in this century.

No other human, except Wilma.

It didn’t bear pondering on, that Joe Grey and Dulcie had ended up with him and Wilma, who had been fast friends ever since Clyde was eight years old and Wilma was in graduate school. Through all of Wilma’s moves in her career as a parole officer, and through Clyde’s own several moves, they had remained close.

But how and why had the two cats come to them?

Dulcie said it was preordained. Clyde didn’t like to think about that stuff, any more than Joe did. The idea that some power totally beyond his comprehension had placed those two cats where they would meet, not only kept him awake at night but could render him sleepless for weeks.

And yet�

Fate,Dulcie said.

Neither Clyde nor the tomcat believed in predestination, both were quite certain that your life was what you made it. And yet�

Entering the living room and switching on the low-watt lamp by the front door, he found Joe fast asleep in his well-clawed armchair. The gray tomcat lay on his back, snoring, his white belly and white chest exposed, his four white feet straight up in the air. Obviously overfull of party food. He must have left the reception early and hiked right on home and passed out, a surfeited victim of gluttony. Clyde turned on a second lamp.

Joe woke, staring up at Clyde with blazing eyes. “Did you have to do that? Isn’t one lamp enough? I was just drifting off.”

“You were ten feet under, snoring like a bulldog. Why aren’t you hunting? Too stuffed with wedding cake? Where’s Dulcie?”

“She took the kit home, she doesn’t want her out hunting.” Joe flipped over. Digging his front claws into the arm of his chair, he stretched so deeply that Clyde could feel, in his own spine, every vertebrae separate, every ligament loosen. “She’s worried about Kit, afraid that old man saw her jump the boy and will come back to find her.”

Clyde sat down on the couch. This thought was not far-fetched. Already Joe and Dulcie had been stalked by a killer because of their unique talents. If the kit had foiled the old man’s plans, wouldn’t he wonder what kind of cat this was? Wouldn’t his rage lead him back to her? Clyde looked intently at Joe. “So where are you going to hide her?”

“I was thinking about Cora Lee French, when she gets home from the hospital. Since the play, she and the kit are fast friends. And that big house, that the four senior ladies bought for their retirement, has a thousand hiding places. Sitting there on the edge of the canyon, it would be a cinch for a cat to escape down among the trees and brushes-that old man would never find her, it’s wild as hell in those canyons.”

“Right. She can just slip away among the bobcats and coyotes, to say nothing of a possible cougar.”

Joe shrugged. “We hunt that canyon now and then, we’ve never had a problem.”

Clyde headed for the bedroom, pulling off his suit jacket and loosening his tie. You couldn’t argue with a cat. Behind him Joe hit the floor with a thud, and came trotting past him into the bedroom. Glancing up at Clyde, he clawed impatiently at the sarouk rug, waiting for Clyde to turn back the spread.

Share and share alike was okay, cat and man each claiming half the bed. But one couldn’t expect a poor little cat to turn back the covers.

Grumbling, Clyde pulled off the spread. At once Joe leaped to the center of the blanket and began to wash, waiting in silence for Clyde’s inevitable lecture.You don’t need to take your half in the middle. And as to that canyon, you can’t possibly foresee all the dangers in that canyon. You do remember the mountain lion? And we can all hear the coyotes at night yipping down there. And those bands of raccoons�

When Clyde’s words of caution were not forthcoming, Joe stopped washing to look at him.

Clyde said, “You are very cavalier when it comes to the kit’s tender young life.”

“That isn’t fair. That is really insulting-to me, and to the kit. Kit can smell another animal, she knows how to slip away.”

Clyde didn’t answer.

“What wouldyoudo,” Joe said, “if you were out on the hills and a cougar came prowling? You would simply keep your distance, use a little common sense.”

“I’d get the hell out of there. And I’m not seven inches tall.” He glared at Joe. “You can be so-cats can be so�

“Irritating,“Joe Grey said, smiling.“Cats can be so maddening and unreasonable.“Turning his back, he pawed his pillow into the required nest shape for absolute comfort. He was just settling down, warm and purring, when Clyde pulled off his shirt. Joe sat up again, staring at Clyde’s bare back, at the dried blood and raw, red wounds. “What happened to you? You look like you had a really wild night.”

“Don’t be crude.” Clyde twisted around pressing against the dresser to look in the mirror. “That’s the kit’s handiwork-when she jumped on me to warn us about the bomb.”

Joe watched Clyde dig through his top dresser drawer searching for the medication he used when one of the cats, or their elderly retriever, Rube, had a scratch. Clyde found the salve and, twisting and straining, began to spread it on the scratches.

“Dr. Firetti would be interested to know how you’re using his prescriptions. Aren’t you afraid of picking up something from old Rube or one of us cats? A touch of mange? Ringworm? Poison oak? Some ancient and incurable-”

“Cool it, Joe. This is all I have. I don’t handle this stuff carelessly. I don’t�” He stared at the open tube, and at his fingers, and turned a bit pale.

“There’s iodine in the medicine cabinet,” Joe said helpfully. “You used it on Rube when he cut his foot, but you poured it in a cup.”

Recapping the tube, Clyde went into the bathroom. Joe heard the shower running as if Clyde were scrubbing off the dangerously infected salve. When Clyde came out again he smelled sharply of iodine. Refraining from comment, Joe turned over and closed his eyes. He was soon deeply asleep while Clyde lay in the darkness worrying about ancient and unnamed diseases.

Two floodlights washed across Ryan’s drive, shining down from the roof of the duplex onto her new red pickup-not new from the factory, the vehicle was a couple of years old, but new to her, in mint condition and with really low mileage. A handsome new workhorse with locked toolboxes along both sides, and a strong overhead rack to hold lumber and ladders.

In the six-foot truck bed Dallas knelt examining the tarp that she had so carefully shaken out the night before and neatly refolded, unwittingly destroying all manner of evidence.

A few long black hairs remained, which Dallas removed with tweezers, and there were some short gray hairs, that Dallas hoped might have come from the old man. “I’ll need to take the tarp to the lab.”

“I have another.” She watched as Dallas finished up. As he packed away his fingerprinting equipment and locked the truck, she went up the outside stairs to make fresh coffee. Filling the coffeepot, she wasn’t sure how much information she could supply about Curtis Farger or about his two friends. She tried to recall the other boys’ names, tried to remember which direction they came from when they arrived at the trailer, and to remember any chance remarks that might help Dallas know where Curtis had been staying. It was nearly midnight. With so little sleep the night before, it was hard to keep her eyes open. As the coffee brewed she stepped into the closet and took off her suit and high-heeled pumps, pulling on a warm robe and slippers. The idea that that boy had hitched a ride for two hundred miles, and she’d never known, both angered and amused her. You had to give him credit.

Hadthe boy set that bomb? Had hewantedto set it, or was he forced to do it?

The kid was old enough to know right from wrong, old enough to have refused to take part in such a deed, even when he was ordered by a grown-up. What kind of boy was this? A child terrified of crossing the old man? Or a twisted child, excited by the thought of murdering hundreds of people?

That was a hard thought to consider. A child warped and crippled by those who had raised him? She didn’t like to think about that.

Returning to the kitchen, she watched Dallas pull a box of shortbread cookies from her freezer. He had his uniform jacket off, his collar loosened, and had poured the coffee and set the sugar and cream on the table.

They sat comfortably together the way they had when she was little, when she’d had a problem at school or when she wanted to hear for the hundredth time the old family stories about her dead mother, the tales about Dallas and her mother growing up on the little family acreage in the wine country east of Napa.

They remained talking until after 1:00, discussing the boy, and Ryan describing the Jakeses’ mountain cabin where she had added a new great room, turning the old living room into a master bedroom. They both knew the foothill area well, the rolling slopes that were green in winter until the snows came, green again in spring until the summer sun burned the hills to the golden brown of wild hay, broken by the dark green stands of pine. Scattered vacation homes were tucked among the hills along with pockets of older shacks down in the gullies where the drainage was poor and there was no sweeping view. There were a few large estates too, back away from the main roads, like that owned by Marianna and Sullivan Landeau, the couple whose weekend house she had recently finished, here in the village. The Landeaus’ San Andreas estate was huge, the house overbearing with its excessive use of marble. Not at all like the simple Molena Point cottage that Ryan had designed for them.

“Must be nice to have that kind of money,” Dallas said. “What, three houses-one in San Francisco?”

She nodded. “Nice, I guess. But they don’t seem all that happy.”

Dallas broke a cookie in half. “And the boy-you have no idea where he lived, where any of those kids lived?”

“They came up the drive, but you can’t see the road from the house. I never did see which direction they came from.” She named the other two boys but she didn’t know their last names, she was certain she’d never heard them.

“The kids didn’t talk about their families. They hung around the way kids do, showed up after school as if they were on their way home, and once or twice on the weekend. They seemed open enough, and friendly.

“Right in the beginning Curtiswassort of nosy, asking questions about where I was from, and did I do this kind of work for a living.” She glanced wryly at Dallas. “He looked� when I told him where I lived he did a little double-take, then immediately covered it up. We were busy surveying and laying out the addition, I didn’t dunk any more about it.”

She looked at Dallas. “Right then, did he decide to hitch a ride, when he knew where I lived? Did he have it all planned, weeks ago?

“And what was he doing up there? How did he get there, in the first place? And did the old man hitch too? That would make me feel really stupid, if those two were both in the truck.” Ryan shook her head. “Did I give them both a ride so they could set that bomb?”

“Soon as we get a lab report, likely we’ll start checking stores in the San Andreas area-hardware, drugstores, feed and grocery. That might be where the meth supplies were coming from. We sure didn’t turn up with big purchases here on the coast. That raid on the Farger shack netted us a hoard of antifreeze, iodine, starter fluid, fifty packs of cold tablets, just for starters. To say nothing of the mountain of empties buried in a pit. But no record-or no admission-of increased sales locally. Could be they got their bomb makings up there too.”

She looked at him. “I wasn’t carrying their bomb supplies! In the back of my truck!”

Dallas shrugged. “That could be hard to sort out. Ammonium sulfate, for instance. The bomb wouldn’t have taken much, compared to what a farmer might use.”

“That would be sick, Dallas. If I was hauling their bomb makings for them.”

“What time did you leave San Andreas? Took you about four hours to get home?”

“About seven in the evening. Took me five hours. I stopped in town to load some stained-glass windows I’d bought from an antique dealer. He’d said he’d wait for me. Then halfway home I pulled into a fast-food place for a burger.” She imagined the kid hunkered down under the tarp, cold in the wind and nearly drooling at the smell of greasy fries and burgers. “Why didn’t I see him? How could I have loaded the windows without�” She stopped, and sat thinking, then looked up at Dallas.

“When I loaded the windows, the guy had given me some cardboard to buffer them, so I didn’t need the tarp. I tossed it near the tailgate, still folded. There was no one in the truck, then.”

“When you’d loaded the windows, what did you do?”

“I went back inside to give the shopkeeper a check.”

“Was there any room left in the truck bed?”

“The windows were lined up in the front, riding on several sheets of foam insulation, and tied and padded. The back half of the truck bed was empty.”

Dallas kept asking questions. Yawning, she went over every detail she could remember. The hitchhikers could easily have dropped off the back of the truck when she pulled into her drive. In the dark, she wouldn’t have seen them.

“What other contacts did you have up there?”

“Lumber and building-supply people. Building inspectors. The furnace guy. A local realtor wanting me to do a remodel-a Larn Williams. Has his broker’s license. Works independently.”

“You take the job?”

“He wants to talk with his clients.” She yawned. “I think I may skip that one. He seems interested in more than the work.”

Dallas rose. “You’re beat. I’ll cut out of here.”

She grinned up at him. “You never get tired, when you’re on a case.” She got up too, and hugged him, and saw him out the door. But the moment he pulled out of the drive and headed down the hill, she turned off the light and fell into bed, dropping immediately into sleep-she was definitely not a night person.

But others in the world loved the night, others found the small hours after midnight filled with excitement. While Dallas and Ryan sat in her studio trying to get a fix on Curtis Farger, Joe Grey woke from his nap in the double bed beside Clyde, woke hearing Dulcie and the kit at his cat door banging the plastic flap.

Leaping down and trotting out through the living room, he found the kit on the porch slapping at the flap, and Dulcie stretched out on the mat beside her enjoying the cool night breeze. Within moments they were racing through the village past the dimly lit shops, dodging around potted trees, streaking through sidewalk gardens. Ocean’s wide median and one-way lanes were empty now and deserted, the wedding party vanished as if all the people and lights and tables of food had been sucked up by the sea wind. The cats didn’t pause until they were high in the hills where the tall grass whipped in long waves-they ran chasing one another, clearing their heads of too many voices, too much laughter, too many human problems. Alone in the night racing blindly through the tangles caring nothing tonight for caution, they laughed softly and taunted one another.

“Gotcha.“Then a hiss and a playful growl, humanlike voices no louder than a whisper.“Not me, you can’t catch me.” “Alley cat! You’re an alley cat!” “Last one up the tree is dog meat!”

Dulcie scorched up the branches of a huge oak that stood on the crest of the hill, a venerable grandfather flinging its black twisted arms out across the stars. Racing and leaping within the great tree, riding its wind-tossed branches like sailors clinging to a rocking masthead, the cats looked down the hills that fell away below them. Ancient curves of land that, just here, were still totally wild, empty of human civilization. And out over the sea the new moon hung thin as a blade. The stars among which the moon swam were, Dulcie liked to imagine, the eyes of spirit cats who had passed from the world before them.

The wind died. The cats paused, listening.

The night was so still they could hear each other breathing; and in the new silence, another sound.

Something running the hills, trampling the dry tall grass. A big beast running; they could hear him panting.

High above the ground, they were safe from dogs and coyotes. But cougars could climb. And now in the faint moonlight they could see the shadow running, a beast as big as a cougar, large and swift, dodging in and out among the hillside gardens.

It did not move like a cougar.

“Dog,” Joe hissed. “Only a dog.”

But the plunging beast ran as if demented, and it was a very big dog. Was it tracking them? Following the fresh scent of cat? In the still night, its panting implied a single-mindedness that made them climb quickly higher among the oak’s dark foliage.

Contrary to common perception, some dogs could climb quite handily up the sprawling branches of a tree such as this. They had seen such pictures, of coon hounds on a passionate mission. Dulcie glanced at the kit worriedly because me kit was young and small.

But she wasn’t small anymore,Dulcie realized.

The little tattercoat wasn’t a kitten anymore. She was as big as Dulcie herself and likely was still growing. And Dulcie knew too well, from their mock battles, that this kit was as solid as a rock. Beside her on the branch the kit sat working her claws into the rough bark, staring down at the racing dog with eyes burning like twin fires. As if she couldn’t wait to leap on that running back clawing and raking.

It seemed only yesterday that Dulcie and Joe had found the kit up on Hellhag hill, a little morsel of fur and bone so frightened, so bullied by the bigger cats mat she never got enough to eat. Such a strange little cat, vastly afraid one minute, and giddy with adventure the next, filled with excitement and challenge.

But that had been a year ago. A year since Joe saw that car plunge over the sea cliff and found the driver dead inside, a year since Lucinda Greenlaw buried her murdered husband and fell in love with his uncle Pedric. A year since Lucinda and Pedric married, and adopted the kit and set out traveling with her. The kit had been so excited, setting off to see all the world, as the kit put it-only to turn home again very soon, the little cat dreadfully carsick. Three times the Greenlaws had tried, three journeys in which the Kit became deathly ill.

Nearly a year since Lucinda brought the little tattercoat back for good, to stay with Wilma while the elderly newlyweds traveled.

She’s grown up,Dulcie thought sadly. That fact, coupled with the kit’s wild and unruly temperament, made Dulcie feel not simply lonely suddenly, but sharply apprehensive.

Once the kit realized that she was a grown-up cat who need not necessarily obey her elders, what might she do then?

Crouching among the branches watching the big pale hound racing along with his nose to the ground eagerly following their scent, Dulcie’s head was filled with a cat’s natural fear of the unfamiliar beast, and filled as well with all the fear that had accumulated during this strangest of days. With the terrible tragedy that might have been. And with the kit’s boldness in preventing that disaster.

And suddenly life seemed to Dulcie overwhelming.

She felt totally adrift, she and Joe and the kit. Alone in the vast world, three cats who were like no other-not totally cat, and not human, but with talents of both. Were they, as Joe had once said, the great cat god’s ultimate joke? Three amusing experiments invented for His private and twisted amusement?

She did not believe that.

And why, tonight, did her thoughts turn so frightened?

That terrible explosion had upset her more than she’d imagined.

“He’s leaving,” Joe said, peering down the hill where the dog had swerved away. They watched the animal disappear between cottages, causing housebound dogs all along the street to bark. Block by block, barking dogs marked his progress until all across the village, dogs bored with their dull lives chimed together delighted at any new excitement.

When the dog had vanished and the barking died, the cats dropped out of the tree and headed across the slope to hunt. Prowling in the still night, it was no trick to start a rabbit among the tall grass, to corner and dispatch it. Wedding party food was lovely, but it didn’t stay with one like a nice fresh rabbit. At three in the morning, by the chimes of the courthouse clock echoing across the hills, they were crouched in the grass sharing their third rabbit when two gunshots cut the silence.

Distant shots echoing back and forth across the hills.

The cats stopped eating.

The noise could have been backfires, but they didn’t think so. They hadn’t heard a car purring along the streets. And when they reared up to look above the high grass, they saw no reflection of headlights moving through the dark village. And the sounds had been sharper, more precise than the fuzzed explosion of a backfire-the cats knew too well the sound of a handgun, from listening outside the police station to cops practicing on the indoor range. And Joe and Dulcie knew, from being shot at themselves, an experience they didn’t care to repeat.

The echo bouncing among the houses had made it impossible to pin the exact location, even for sensitive feline ears. But certainly the shots had come from the north end of the village. Watching the few scattered lights in that direction, looking for a house light to go on or to be extinguished, they saw no change.

When no further shots were fired, the cats headed down the hills toward home and safety. They might love adventure, but they weren’t stupid. But then as they crossed the little park above Highway One, they heard a car somewhere off to their right, its progress muffled among the cottages.

Racing up a pine tree they spotted a lone car, its lights glancing across buildings and through the trees’ dark foliage, shafts of intermittent light bright and then lost, then appearing again. They heard it gear down, heard it rev a little as if it had turned in somewhere. Then silence. And the moving glow was gone. They waited for some time but it did not reappear.

It had vanished maybe ten blocks to the north. They couldn’t tell which street. Climbing higher up the pine they watched the dark configurations of cottages and dividing streets. No light came on in any house. The car didn’t start out again but they heard a car door open and close, the soft echo bouncing along the quiet streets.

They waited a long time, sprawled uncomfortably in the pine tree. The thin, prickly branches were not as accommodating as the easy limbs of a eucalyptus or oak; and the pine was sticky too, its pitch clinging in their fur in hard masses that couldn’t be pulled out and that were impossible to lick out. The only thing to do about pine pitch was to let Wilma or Clyde cut away the offending knots, an operation the cats abhorred. The darkness seemed lonely and frightening, now, to these cats who loved the night. Over on Ocean, where only hours before the streets had burned with candlelight and rung with music and laughter, now all was deserted and still and, after the two shots, the silence seemed laced with threat.

Quickly Joe backed down the rough trunk. “That car’s in for the night. Probably had nothing to do with the shots-if theywereshots.” Yawning, he watched the sleepy kit above them turn to make her way down headfirst. “Wake up, Kit! Don’t do that.” How many times did they have to tell her. “Watch what you’re doing! Turn around. Dig your claws in.”

The kit came down in a tumble, clawing bark and leaping to the sidewalk. She might be grown big, but she still pummeled out of a tree like a silly kitten. Righting herself, she looked at the older cats with embarrassment.

Dulcie winked at Joe and glanced away in the direction of Jolly’s alley. She had meant to part from him and head home with the kit, to a warm bed beside

Wilma. But maybe a few minutes behind Jolly’s Deli would cheer the kit and smooth away her fears.

Joe twitched a whisker, grinning, and headed for Jolly’s.

But, padding up the sidewalk staying close to the kit, Dulcie’s skin twitched at every shadow and at every patch of darkness. Things were not right, tonight. Whatwerethose shots? One culprit was already at large, his bombing attempt gone awry. And now, gunshots? What if the attempted bombing was just the tip of the iceberg? One move in some larger criminal entanglement-a tiny lizard tail that when seen in full, would turn out to be a rattlesnake?

7 [��������: pic_8.jpg]

Ryan wokebefore dawn, but woke not eagerly looking forward to her day as had been her habit lately, not leaping up to turn on the coffeepot and pull the curtains back to look out at the first hint of morning. Instead, an unnatural heaviness of spirit pressed her down; a sense of ugliness made her want to crawl into sleep again. Darkness and depression filled her. And an inexplicable fear. She felt as she had so many nights waking in the small hours to see Rupert’s side of the bed still empty, to wish wholeheartedly that she was somewhere else, in some other life.

But now, shewassomewhere else. Thiswasanother life. She was free of Rupert.

So what was wrong?

The pale room rose pleasantly around her, its high, white beams just visible in the near-dark. On the west wall the white draperies over the long bank of windows were starting to grow pale with the first promise of dawn. Before the draperies, her new desk, her drafting table and computer stood waiting for her just as she had arranged them for ultimate efficiency and pleasure. She was here in her private nest. Nothing could be wrong. Squeezing her eyes closed, she tried to get a fix on her powerful but unfocused dread.

A cloud of swirling smoke and churning flying rubble. Black, angry eyes staring at her. People running and screaming. The side of the church gone, the sky above filled with flying pieces of broken walls and with white petals falling, falling. Senseless fragments, borne of senseless hatred.

She lay shivering, seeing the black, hate-filled eyes of that boy. She sat up in bed, driving his image away. Deliberately she brought into vision the lovely bridal procession in the cool night, down the narrow grassy carpet between hundreds of friends all holding up fairy lights, or so it had seemed to her, ephemeral candles burning to mark the bride’s way. Charlie approaching her groom stepping to the rhythm of the sea’s music and to the rustle of the giant trees that stood guard over her.

Nothing,nothingcould have been more filled with joy and closeness. No ceremony could have better demonstrated Charlie’s and Max’s and the villagers’ stubborn defiance of evil.

Rising, she pulled on her robe and padded into the kitchen to fill the coffeepot, dumping out the grounds from last night. As the coffee brewed, she opened the draperies that ran the length of the studio.

Out over the sea, dawn’s light was somber. Impatiently waiting for the coffee, she imagined Charlie rising this morning to let in room service, or to fetch in the elegant breakfast cart herself, where it had been left discreetly outside the door of the St. Francis bridal suite. Charlie and Max were safe. They were safe.

Ryan poured her own first cup of coffee not from a silver server into thin porcelain, as Charlie would be doing, but into an old earthenware mug, breathing in its steamy aroma. She was deeply soothed by the absolute seclusion and calm of her own quiet space. And after two weeks of hot weather, of eighty-and ninety-degree temperatures in the California foothills, she was pleased to see a heavy mist fingering in from the sea, to chill the day. Opening the window, she breathed in the cool, damp breeze that smelled of the sea at low tide. Only as she turned did she imagine someone stirring in the apartment behind her.

But how silly. Moving into the empty studio, she could see into the bath and dressing room, could see from their mirrors’ reflections that she was quite alone. Her head must be muzzy from the late hours. Certainly her mind still rang not only with the explosion and the sirens and with her friends’ frightened cries, but with the forties music and laughter mat had come later.

Strange how sounds stayed with her. When she was working a job, her dreams would ring, each night, with the endless whine of the Skilsaw or with the incessant pounding as she drove nails in a rhythm which, even in dreams, was so real that she would wake to find her arm twitching with tension. Or in her sleep she would hear the repeatedthunk, thunkof the automatic nailer like a gun fired over and over. Those measuredbangswere with her now, a delayed but strangely insistent residue from days ago, from her long hours’ work on the San Andreas job.

Sipping her coffee, she decided to take herself out to breakfast before she tackled her mail and some phone calls, give herself a little treat. Maybe breakfast at the Miramar Hotel, sitting on the terrace watching the sea and enjoying a Spanish omelet-a small celebration to welcome herself home. She was never shy about tendering herself fancy invitations. Seven weeks in a cramped trailer sharing that tiny space with her two carpenters, and she deserved a little pampering. Particularly since their nights had been purely platonic, about as exciting as curbing up with the family picture album. Scotty was one of her two second fathers. And young Dan Hall was happily married, his wife coming up every weekend, further crowding the cramped, two-bedroom rig. On those nights when Dan needed a place of his own rather than bunking with Scotty, she had given him her room, and she had slept in the main house among stacks of lumber and torn-out walls. Dan Hall was a hunk, all right, and so was his beautiful wife, a slim girl with a body to kill for. Dan had lived from weekend to weekend in a haze of sickening longing, a yearning so palpable it was at times embarrassing.

It must be very special to know that your husband wouldn’t cheat on you, to be absolutely certain that he lived only to be with you, and would never play around or lie to you.

Ryan sighed. She had never believed for a minute that Rupert wouldn’t cheat. She had known better.

Why she had stayed with him so long was just as much a mystery to her as to everyone else. Both Scotty and Dallas, and certainly her dad, had been more than pleased when she left him. Through all the years she procrastinated, they had stood by her-and most of the time they had kept their mouths shut.

Scotty, her father’s big, redheaded brother, had inherited all the bold, blustery genes of the Flannery family. Her dad was quiet and low-keyed, his humor far more subtle-a little quizzical smile, and crow’s feet marking his green eyes. Michael Flannery enjoyed the world fully, but with little comment. Her uncle Scott Flannery took hold of life with both hands and shook it, and laughed when life banged and rattled.

But her dead mother’s brother, Dallas, was the rock. You had to know the stern, silent cop for a long while to enjoy the warmth and humor underneath.

She refilled her coffee mug and sat at the kitchen table, her bare feet freezing. The fog was moving in quickly, the sky turning the color of skimmed milk; she could hear the waves pounding the shore and the seals barking from the rocks, but the ocean itself was hidden in fog. Too restless to be still, she tied her robe more securely and went out along the front deck and down me long flight to get the paper.

The wooden steps were rough under her bare feet, the chill dampness of the fog stroking her ankles. The concrete drive was icy, the Sunday paper damp where it had been tossed against the bushes.

The church bombing covered the front page. A montage of pictures, the ragged, torn-out wall. The more severely wounded, the pictures taken at angles that magnified the seriousness of cuts and the size of bandages. She didn’t need to look at this. Refolding the paper, she turned back up the drive.

But, brushing by her pickup mat Dallas had gone over last night collecting evidence, she stopped, frowning.

She had left the truck relatively clean yesterday, much to Dallas’s chagrin. Now it wasn’t clean, but smeared with mud and with huge paw prints.

She’d had the truck only a month, had traded in the old company model for this reliable baby that made her work so much more fun. It had everything, king cab, lockable toolboxes down both sides, a bull-strong overhead rack. At this particular time in her life, no husband or lover could have given her the same ego trip, the same sense of self-worth, as that shiny new truck.

But now, the vehicle was filthy. Some dog as big as a moose had been all over it, some bad-mannered neighborhood beast had hopped up into the truck bed and apparently walked along the tops of the lockboxes too, rendering her shiny red paint a mess of dried, flaking mud and paw marks. Circling the truck, she headed around the side of the garage to the pedestrian door to fetch some rags and the hose. She didn’t realize until she was through the door that she’d left it unlocked last night, that, preoccupied with Dallas’s search for evidence she’d forgotten to punch the lock.

Switching on the light she dug under the sink for the box of rags she kept there, pulling out a handful of threadbare towels. Rising, she turned toward the frail, vintage windows that she’d brought down from the foothills, glad the mutt hadn’t been able to get into the garage to trash the antique stained glass.

She caught her breath and stepped back, banging into the sink.

The windows stood leaning away from each other, each set of four supported by a heavy box of plumbing fixtures, leaving an empty V space between. A man lay there, jammed between the windows, his face turned away.

The side of his cheek was very white, the blood on his neck and cheek dark and dry. His black hair was tossled and scattered with broken glass, as was the black stubble on his jaw and the black hair on his arm. His blood splattered the broken window and his shirt.

Rupert.It was Rupert.

Involuntarily she reached out a hand, but then drew back.

Not quite believing that this was her husband, not quite believing that anyone at all lay there, she moved around the windows to an angle where she could see his face, and stood looking down at him.

His skin was too white even for Rupert. He looked, in death, no more solemn than he had in life. His eyes were open and staring, his face grayish, like the melted paraffin that her mother had used long ago to seal jelly glasses.

The wound in his chest was dark around the edges, the hole in his forehead dark and ragged. Surely both were gunshot wounds.

When was he killed? She had heard no shots. Staring at the bone of his skull, her stomach turned. She badly wanted to heave.

The drying blood that had run down his face and stained his blue polo shirt was so dark it must surely be mixed with the black residue of gunpowder. His ear against the shattered glass was covered with tiny blue fragments. His dark hair was so mussed he looked almost boyish, though in life Rupert had never looked boyish. His broad gold watchband shone from his pale wrist pressing the white skin, nestled among thick black hairs. She thought of Rupert naked, the black hairs on his arms and chest and belly over the too-white flesh. She’d come to hate hairy men. She leaned to grab his feet to drag him out of there, get him away from the frail windows before his weight shattered them further but then, reaching, reality took hold and she backed away, chilled.

But the next moment she knelt. She felt compelled to touch him, though she knew he was dead. Reaching to his thigh, she jerked her hand away again at the feel of lifelessness, at the icy chill that shocked her even through the cloth of his chinos.

Kneeling over him, she didn’t know the fog was blowing away until the newly risen sun shot its rays in through the small high window at the back of the garage, a bolt of morning light that lay a glow across her hands and, gleaming through the colored glass, threw a rainbow of colors across Rupert’s shattered face. She rose, needing to be sick.

Getting her stomach under control, she stood staring down at the man she’d spent nine years alternately loving and hating until the hate outdistanced all else. And she realized that even in death Rupert had the upper hand.

That even in death, he had placed her in an impossibly compromising position.

She had no witness. He was dead in her garage. She would be the first, prime suspect. Maybe the only suspect.

Dallas could vouch for her until one o’clock this morning. No one could speak for her after Dallas left. She’d seen no one; no one had been in her house. What time had Rupert died? How could he have been killed here in the garage, not ten feet from her, and she had not heard shots?

And what was he doing in Molena Point? Why had he come down here from San Francisco? He had no friends here.

Had he come to confront her in person over the lawsuit where she was claiming her half of the business? She’d started proceedings five months ago. And who had been with him, to kill him? Even if the shooter had used a silencer, why hadn’t she at least heard glass breaking when Rupert fell? That sound should have waked her, occurring just beneath the floor where her bed was placed.

She glanced at the unlocked side door, trying to remember if shehadlocked it last night. Moments ago it had been unlocked. And she realized that when she turned the knob she had very likely destroyed fingerprints or perhaps a palm print.

She had to call Dallas.

The thought of calling the station, of calling for the police, of calling for Detective Dallas Garza, both comforted and sickened her.

She needed Dallas; she needed someone.

Dad would be out of town for two more weeks. And Scotty-big strong guy that he was, she was afraid that Scotty would do nothing but worry.

She needed Dallas. Needed, even more than Dallas’s comforting, the facts that he would put together. Fingerprints. Coroner’s report. Ballistic information. Cold forensic facts that would help her understand what had happened.

She wondered what the neighbors had seen. Her nausea had fled, but she felt shaky and displaced. Nothing made sense. Staring at Rupert, she found herself swallowing back a sudden inexplicable urge to scream, a primitive gutteral response born not of pain for Rupert or of empathy, but an animal cry of fear and defiance.

What had someone done? What had someone done not only to Rupert but to her?

Glancing to the back of the garage, into the shadows around the water heater and furnace she realized only then that the killer might still be there, perhaps standing behind those appliances silently watching her.

Backing away, she stared into the dim corners where the light didn’t reach, expecting to see a figure emerge, perhaps from behind the stacked plywood or from behind one of the old mantels she’d collected or the stack of newel posts. She had no weapon to defend herself, short of grabbing a hammer. She studied the low door beneath the inner stairs that opened to a storage closet. She breathed a sigh when she saw that the bolt was still driven home.

She longed for her gun, which was upstairs in her night table. How many times did one need a.38 revolver to fetch the Sunday paper? Frightened by the shadows at the back of the garage behind what Dallas called her junk pile, she turned swiftly to the pedestrian door and, using the rag in her hand to open it, she retreated to the open driveway.

If she’d had her truck keys she would have hopped in and taken off, made her escape in her robe and called the department from some neighbor’s home. Her cell phone of course was in her purse, by the bed, near her gun. Her truck keys were on the kitchen table. She felt totally naked and defenseless. Scuffing barefoot over the dried mud the neighbor’s dog had left across the concrete, she hurried up the outside stairs. She paused with her hand on the knob.

She’d left the front door unlocked behind her. Now, when she entered, would Rupert’s killer be waiting?

But why would someone set her up as if she’d killed Rupert, then destroy the scenario by killing her as well? That didn’t make any sense.

She could imagine any number of estranged and bitter husbands who would like to see Rupert dead, but why would they make her the patsy? What motive would any of them have-except to put themselves in the clear, of course? And why not? What better suspect than an estranged and bitter wife?

Moving inside, glancing through to the night table at the far end of the room, she slipped her truck keys into the pocket of her robe and eased open a cutlery drawer, soundlessly lifting out the vegetable cleaver. Then stepping to her desk, she dialed the department, using the 911 number.

The dispatcher told her that Dallas was out of the station. She told the dispatcher who she was and that there was a dead man in her garage.

“I’m going to search the apartment, if you’d like to stay on the line.” Laying the phone down as the dispatcher yelled at her not to do that, to get out of the apartment-and warily clutching the cleaver-she moved to the night table to retrieve her gun.

Pulling the drawer open, she stopped, frozen.

Empty.

Notebook, pencils, tissues, and face cream. No gun.

Her face burned at her carelessness. The gun was in her glove compartment. She hadn’t brought it up last night or the night before; it had been there since she left San Andreas. She hadn’t touched it since she packed up the truck and headed out, day before yesterday.

The wedding, and all the picky details of coming home and lining up her crew to start Clyde’s job tomorrow had totally occupied her. She told herself shewasn’tcareless with a gun, that Dallas had taught her better than that.

Yes, and Dallas had admonished her more than once for keeping the.38 in her glove compartment, which was against the law, and in her unlocked nightstand, which was stupid.

Approaching the bath and closet, most of which she could see from their mirrors, holding the cleaver behind the fold of her robe, she moved against all common sense to clear the area. This wasn’t smart. Even from the closet she heard the dispatcher shouting into the phone. And, louder, she heard a siren leave the station ten blocks away. Passing the door to the inner stairs, she saw that the bolt was securely home, blocking that entrance. As the siren came screaming up the hill she flung the closet door wider, to reveal the back corner.

8 [��������: pic_9.jpg]

The back of the closet was empty, only her clothes and shoes. A second siren started to scream from down the hills. She moved into the bath, clutching her cleaver, jerking the shower curtain aside. In her inept search of the premises she couldn’t stop her heart pounding.

The shower was empty. There was nowhere else for anyone to hide. Slipping out of her robe, she hastily pulled on panties and jeans and a sweatshirt as a squad car careened into the drive cutting its siren, and two more units squealed brakes as if pulling to the curb. Grabbing her sandals she moved across the studio to the front windows. Leaning her forehead against the glass, waiting for Dallas to emerge, she watched three officers get out of their two units, and behind them two medics from the rescue vehicle.

Dallas wasn’t with them. Officers Green and Bonner moved up the drive on the far side of her pickup. Green was a wizened, bearded veteran, Bonner a young, new officer as fresh-faced as a high school kid. Detective Juana Davis, dressed in jeans and a sweater, skirted the truck on the near side. All three had their hands on their holstered weapons. Shakily Ryan pulled on her sandals and went out on the balcony where they could see her. Looking down at Davis, catching her dark gaze, she couldn’t read what the detective might be thinking.

“In the garage,” Ryan said, her voice raspy, the way she’d sound if she had a sore throat. She watched the medics halt to wait until the officers had entered and cleared the garage. She couldn’t quell her fear, it was a gut reaction beyond reasoning, she was the only possible suspect, she was in exactly the position the killer had planned. Deeply chilled, she looked to the officers for direction. “Do you want me down there?”

“No,” Davis said. “Stay on the deck while we have a look.”

“Could I go inside to get my coffee?”

Davis nodded. Ryan returned to the kitchen to refill her cup, then stood on the deck again setting the mug on the rail, trying to stop her hands from shaking, thinking guiltily about Rupert.

The year they were married, he had been so enthusiastic about her joining the construction firm, taking a full-time job in the business. It had all seemed so wonderful, an opportunity for her to use her design education though she didn’t have a degree as an architect, an opportunity to learn some basic engineering from the firm’s structural architect. From the beginning Rupert had handled the business end, the hiring and bookkeeping and sales, while she assisted the architect and did more and more designing. When the architect moved on to a practice of his own, she had been able to take over all the designing with the help of a consulting engineer. Their clients had loved her work. She had served as a carpenter’s helper too, adding to the skills she’d mastered working with her uncle Scotty in the summers and weekends since she was a child.

She had gotten so good at the job that soon she was filling in for the three foremen. But then the trouble began. Rupert hadn’t liked that she was on the job alone with a bunch of men, even though she had saved them money. She had never drawn a salary, either as head designer or as a foreman; everything went back into the firm. She’d never wanted to know how much might go for Rupert’s personal pleasures. She guessed Scotty had tried to tell her, but she hadn’t wanted to listen.

Now Scotty was working for her, her dear, gruff, philosophical Scotty who loved carpentry and cabinetwork, who had never wanted to move into the management end of the business. Who had joined her immediately in Molena Point, no questions asked, her first carpenter and foreman. Moving in with Dallas, into their family summer cottage, Scotty had been as happy as she to be away from Dannizer Construction.

When she left Rupert there was never any question where she’d go. She’d loved Molena Point since she was a child. The evening she left Rupert she’d hauled out of San Francisco, taking the oldest company pickup loaded with most of her worldly possessions packed nattily in an assortment of liquor boxes from the local market. It was an easy two-hour drive. Arriving in the village, she had picked up a deli sandwich and a couple of cold beers, checked into the only motel with a vacancy, and called Dallas. When she told him what she’d done he couldn’t hide his happiness. She had told him she wanted to be by herself for a few days to lick her wounds, and he’d understood. She’d taken a long hot shower and tucked up in bed with her beer and sandwich trying to relax, trying to deal sensibly with her conflicting emotions, seesawing back and forth between victory in finally making the move, and fear of what lay ahead. Thinking one minute that she was crazy to go out on her own, that she couldn’t make a success of her own company, and wondering the next instant why she hadn’t done this sooner-knowing that if she sued him for half the company, Rupert would fight her, maybe so successfully that he would deplete her personal bank account and leave her destitute. Knowing that she had to find an attorney. And that the lawsuit would be incredibly stressful, but that half the business was rightfully hers and she meant to have her share, that she would need that money to get started.

Wondering if shecouldmake a go of her own business, if she had it in her to do that, she’d sat in bed trying to calm her nerves, so stressed she hadn’t even called her sister, though Hanni would have turned out the guest room, popped a bottle of champagne to toast her wise decision and her coming success.

Hanni had moved down to the village some months before Dallas made his own job change, and Ryan could have stayed with either of them; but Hanni was so positive and sure of herself and would tell her exactly what to do, would cross all the t’s and dot the i’s to make life easier for her. It would have been hard to explain to Hanni the illogical pangs that were mixed with her wild sense of euphoria at being free-almost free.

Alone in her motel room she’d gone to sleep hugging her pillow, congratulating herself that Rupert was out of her life, and scared silly of what lay ahead.

Now, standing at the rail watching Juana Davis come around the side of the garage and look up, she set her cup on the rail and went down to answer the detective’s questions.

In the early dawn, Jolly’s alley was softly lit by its decorative lights and by the gentle glow from the leaded windows and stained-glass doors of its little backstreet shops. The charming, brick paved lane, lined with potted trees and tubs of flowers, was not only a favorite tourist walk, but was the chosen gathering place for the village cats-for all the nonspeaking felines who knew nothing of Joe and Dulcie and Kit’s human speech nor, in most cases, would have been impressed. If the occasional cat looked at them with fear or with wonder, these moments were few and fleeting.

Entering at the eastern end of the block-long retreat, they found an old, orange-tabby matron beneath the jasmine vine, licking clean the big paper plate that George Jolly had set out. Joe knew the matron well, they had once been more than friendly but that was long before he met Dulcie. Probably the old girl didn’t remember those hasty trysts, and certainly Joe didn’t care to. He was a different tomcat now, totally faithful to his true love-though he still liked to look. No harm in a glance now and then.

The matron, finishing her breakfast, lay down on the bricks precisely where the first thin rays of morning sun would have gleamed, if the dawn sky had not been low with fog. Dulcie glanced at her absently, her mind on San Francisco and on Charlie and Max Harper awakening this morning in that beautiful city.

“Breakfast at the St. Francis,” she said softly, “looking down on the city.” Such a journey, to the city by the bay, had long been Dulcie’s dream. But at Dulcie’s words, the orange cat widened her eyes then turned her face away with disgust, tucking her nose under her tail. Such un-catlike behavior was both alarming and patently beneath her notice. Squeezing her eyes shut she refused to move away from them, though the skin down her back rippled with wary annoyance. Down at the end of the lane a homeless man ambled by, then two young lean women jogged past, their long hair pulled through the backs of their caps.

“Breakfast in bed,” Dulcie whispered, still dreaming, “then to wander that elegant city, to ride the ferries to Sausalito and to Oakland, to visit the museums and galleries.”

Joe looked at her and sighed. Sometimes it was hard to understand the shape and depth of Dulcie’s longings.

Though Joe was just as different from other cats as was Dulcie, he didn’t suffer from her exotic hungers and impossible yearnings. He didn’t steal his neighbor’s cashmere sweaters and silk teddies, for one thing, and haul them home to roll on like some four-pawed Brigitte Bardot. He didn’t imagine wandering through Saks, or Lord and Taylor. He had no desire to dine at the finest restaurants with views of San Francisco Bay. Joe Grey liked his life just as it was-as long as Dulcie was a part of it.

The two cats stirred suddenly. Their ears pricked. Their bodies went rigid as sirens screamed from the station four blocks away.

Swarming up the jasmine vine to the roof where the kit sat welcoming the dawn, they watched two whirling red lights racing north among the cottages where some hours earlier they thought they’d heard the two shots fired-and like any pair of human ambulance chasers, Joe and Dulcie took off across the roofs, intent on police business.

The kit trailed along halfheartedly, her mind on other matters.

Racing across the rooftops and crossing above two streets on spreading oak branches, Joe and Dulcie scrambled down a trellis and galloped along the damp morning sidewalks and through fog-wet gardens, eagerly following the sirens. A screaming rescue vehicle passed them. And somewhere in their mad race the kit vanished. Glancing around, Joe and Dulcie fled on; there was no keeping track of the kit. Up the next hill, the rescue vehicle and squad cars were parked in the drive and at the curb of Ryan Flannery’s apartment. The cats paused, slipping ahead warily, rigid with their sudden apprehension.

Though the dawn was now bright, a light burned around the edges of Ryan’s closed garage door. The voices that issued from within were low and muffled. The cats could hear Ryan, her voice taunt and upset, and could hear Detective Davis and Officer Bonner speaking solemnly. Davis, a longtime department veteran, was solid in her ways, businesslike and reassuring. The cats were still evaluating young Bonner. As they trotted up to the big, closed door and pressed against it to listen, the coroner’s green sedan pulled into the drive. Filled with curiosity, the cats slipped into the shadows beneath the stairs.

Stepping from his car, Dr. John Bern headed around to the side door. Bern was a slight, skinny man with a round face and a turned-up nose so small it seemed hardly able to support his wire-rimmed glasses. As he entered the garage, the cats padded through the shadows as silent as the fog itself and as innocent as any neighborhood kitty out for a morning stroll, and moved in behind him through the pedestrian door, to hide behind some leaning sheets of plywood.

A body lay among a stack of stained-glass windows, as if shrouded by them in some weird religious ritual. Where the windows formed a tall V shape, the cats could see the man’s feet sticking out at one end, clad in expensive Rockports. At the other end his head and one shoulder were visible. There was a small hole through his forehead. His neatly trimmed brown hair was soaked with blood. Dr. Bern opened the electric door to give more light, and knelt over the body, making certain the victim was dead. There was not much blood pooled beneath him. When soon the coroner rose again, he began taking photographs. Twice he glanced across the garage to the far, back wall as if tracing the line of trajectory that might have occurred if the victim had been standing when he was shot. Detective Davis, fetching a ladder from beside a stack of old doors, climbed to photograph at close range the twin bullet holes in the Sheetrock. She took pictures from several angles, then told Bonner to cut out that section of wall.

“Allow plenty of board, we don’t want to pull on it if there are nails near the shots. You may have to saw through the nails or slice out part of the stud.”

“Do we have the tools?”

“Ryan has.”

The cats could see, when Dr. Bern lifted the man’s head, how the shot had left the back of the skull with a wide, ugly tear wound and fragments of bone sticking out. As John Bern dictated his notes into a small tape recorder, he was hesitant in this assessment, offering several possible scenarios as to the sequence of events. When he had finished dictating, Detective Davis spent a long time herself photographing the scene, shooting the body from all angles, laying a ruler here and there around the corpse to show distances. She photographed most of the garage, the floor, the stored tools and plywood, the stacked paneling and newel posts, the furnace and laundry area, and the inside stair that led to the upstairs apartment. Only Joe Grey and Dulcie escaped documentation, crouching silently behind the plywood then moving behind some stored boxes then a mantel, on around the garage as Davis’s strobe light flashed. They froze in place when young Bonner glanced at the paw prints in the dust then at the cat door that Ryan had installed. As the officers worked, Ryan stood outside by her truck, pale and silent.

At last Davis put down her camera and began to collect small bits of evidence, threads, slivers of wood, hairs that she picked up with tweezers and dropped in evidence bags. It was late morning, just after 10:00 by the distant chimes of the courthouse clock, when she finished picking up the last nearly invisible bits, then went over the area again with a tiny and powerful hand vacuum. This part of an investigation always amazed the cats. Talk about tedious. They knew by now that the corpse was Ryan’s husband.

Once Ryan had answered Davis’s questions she sat in the garage on the inner steps, keeping out of the way, her hands folded on her knees, her expression closed and glum, so distressed that, across the garage in the shadows, Dulcie reached an involuntary paw to comfort her. But soon the sound of a car in the drive sent Ryan eagerly out the side door. The cats followed, slipping into a jungle of pink geraniums as Detective Garza swung out of his Chevy Blazer next to the coroner’s car.

9 [��������: pic_10.jpg]

Detective Garzastood with his arms around Ryan but looking past her at Rupert Dannizer’s body. He studied the stacked windows, the garage itself, the drive and Ryan’s truck and the front of the building, his photographic detective’s mind recording every smallest detail, though he would record it all again in careful notes and perhaps in photographs of his own. Dallas Garza was, the cats had come to learn, a meticulous investigator, his nature as stubbornly prodding as that of any feline.

Yet despite the detective’s thoroughness, there was sometimes information to which a human cop had no access, private doors he couldn’t legally enter, crannies and niches a human couldn’t squeeze into-clues, in short, that a clever cat might snatch from the shadows. Joe Grey’s fascination with police investigation was not in lieu of human talent, but was adjunct to that talent.

They watched Garza move inside the garage where he conferred with Davis and the coroner, carefully observing the victim and asking Dr. Bern questions. Garza’s position was indeed awkward, with his niece as prime suspect.

“Will he have to stay off the case?” Joe said softly. “Apparently not, or he wouldn’t be here at all.”

“The papers are going to love this,” Dulcie said dourly. “Even theMolena Point Gazette.I can just see it:Police detective’s niece arrested for murder.If they put a reporter on it who doesn’t like Garza, he’ll have a field day.”

Joe flicked a whisker. “And from what Clyde says, Rupert Dannizer was well known in San Francisco. This will be big news, with Dannizer dead before the property settlement, with Ryan standing to inherit�”

“No one would believe that!” she hissed.

“We don’t believe it. And the papers don’t have to believe it; they’ll print what sells. Their readers will eat it up.”

“If Ryan wanted to murder him, would she do it in her own garage?” Dulcie laid back her ears, her green eyes narrowing. “Question is, who hated Rupert DannizerandRyan enough to kill him and frame her for the crime?”

They watched Officer Bonner string crime tape around the garage and yard, while the coroner sat in his car making additional notes. But when Bonner and Detectives Garza and Davis escorted Ryan upstairs for a look at her apartment and for questioning, the two cats scorched around the building, to slip inside.

The steep hill at the back rose four feet away from the wall of the garage apartment. Crouched in the tall grass looking across to Ryan’s bathroom window, Joe Grey leaped. Hanging from the sill, he scrabbled with his hind claws while, with one white forepaw, he finessed open the sliding glass.

The cats had discovered this access when young Dillon Thurwell was kidnapped and they had rescued her from the garage below, from the little airless storage closet beneath the stairs. Because the window was too small to accommodate any human, no one had ever thought to lock it. Now, dropping down into the bathroom, they slipped past the tub and into Ryan’s closet-dressing room, to crouch among her jogging shoes and work boots.

The room was large enough for a chest of drawers, a bench with storage underneath, and a six-foot clothes rod that held little more than jeans and work shirts. A single, zippered garment bag appeared to hold a few dress clothes. Her good shoes, like the strappy sandals that she had worn to the wedding, must be tucked away in the plastic boxes they could see atop the closet shelf. The closet smelled faintly of rose perfume. They could hear Ryan and Dallas in the kitchen, talking. But Davis and Bonner were quiet. Very likely they were there as witnesses to prevent the close relationship between uncle and niece from any taint of collusion. At some point Davis would, the cats thought, have to take over the investigation from Detective Garza.

There was a flash of light from the studio, and another, and the cats peered out of the closet to see Davis photographing the apartment, seeking to record any smallest detail that might later fit into a jigsaw puzzle of evidence. As Davis turned toward the closet they drew back behind Ryan’s boots, closing their eyes so not to catch a flash of light, Joe ducking to hide his white face and paws and chest; all that remained was a gray mound. Davis took several shots in the closet causing the cats to pray that a stray paw or tail wouldn’t show up on the film-not that it mattered, Dulcie kept telling herself.We’re only cats.What if they were in a photograph, or if Davis did spot them? Dulcie could never overcome her fear of being discovered, never shake the feeling that the truth about them would be as clearly detectable as fresh blood on whiskers. Her need for secrecy overpowered all reason. Such fears were so foolish. After all, Ryan did have a cat door in the garage. If they were discovered, Clyde’s mouse hunters were simply on the premises doing their appointed job.

From the kitchen they heard a cup rattle as if Ryan had poured the coffee that had, from the smell of it, steamed in the pot for some time. Dallas asked, “When did you see Rupert last?”

“I haven’t-hadn’t seen him since early July. I caught sight of him here in the village. That startled me, he never came down here. I don’t think he saw me. I’d had dinner with Clyde-Clyde Damen. We were coming out of the grill when I saw Rupert at the bar with a tall, sleek blonde. Long, gleaming hair. I didn’t see her face but Rupert turned and I saw his profile. I have no idea what he was doing down here, he has no friends in the village that I know of.”

“And he didn’t see you?”

“I don’t think so. I practically dragged Clyde out of there. We� a divorce and lawsuit are not pleasant. Rupert hadn’t been very pleasant.”

The cats listened to Ryan describe when and how she had found the body, and what she had done afterward, how long it took her to go upstairs and call 911.

“Did you touch the body?”

“I touched his leg. I just� reached out before I thought. I was sure he was dead, the dried blood, and he was so white, but I� something in me had to be sure-that there wasn’t life there, that there was nothing I could do. He� he was so cold�”

“And what would you have done if you’d thought he was alive?”

“The same as I did, call the department-unless I’d thought CPR would� I suppose I would have tried that.”

“What did you tell the dispatcher?”

“That a man was dead in my garage. And I answered her questions.”

“You came upstairs to call?”

“Yes.”

“Do you own a gun?”

“Yes.”

Behind Ryan’s boots, the cats glanced at each other. Of course Dallas knew she owned a gun, but he was committed to asking all the necessary questions. He made her describe the black.38 Smith and Wesson, made her tell him where she kept it, where it had been that morning and where it was at that moment. The cats didn’t need to watch him to know he was carefully recording her answers both on tape and in his log-recording not to incriminate but to protect, to have the record straight.

“I forgot to bring my gun upstairs when I got back from San Andreas. Normally I would have put it in my nightstand. It� it’s been locked in my truck since I got back, night before last. I� just forgot about it.”

“Forgot about it?”

“I don’t feel the need, in Molena Point, to keep a gun with me at night the way I� the way one might in an isolated trailer.”

“You left it locked in your truck, where?”

“In the glove compartment.”

“I’ll need your keys.”

The cats heard keys jingle. Dallas said, “Are they all here? None have been removed?”

A pause, then, “Yes. All there. Apartment door, garage, truck keys, side lock boxes, glove compartment. Key to the house in San Francisco, which is still officially half mine.”

The cats glanced at each other. She was just a bit defensive. But surely she didn’t like being questioned this way, even by her uncle, even though she knew it was necessary.

“Last night, what time did you go to bed?”

“The minute you left here. Just before two.”

“Did you hear anything during the night, any noises?”

“No.”

“Nothing downstairs?”

“No.”

“Did you hear gunshots.”

“No I didn’t. I don’t understand why not.”

“What is your opinion about that?”

“That whoever killed him used a silencer. Or that he was shot somewhere else and brought here.”

“Does that strike you as rather improbable?”

“It’s improbable to find Rupert down there, dead in my garage. I only know that I didn’t hear shots. And it seemed to me there was very little blood, for a head wound.”

Joe Grey frowned, the white strip down his face squeezing into wrinkles. In the dim closet his yellow eyes shone black as obsidian. His whisper was soft. “If those two bullets, that went into the back wall, had been a couple of feet higher they could have come up through the floor directly where Ryan was sleeping.”

Dallas said, “Did you see any indication that the body had been moved to that location? Any blood trail? Any drag marks down the drive or in the yard?”

“No. You would have seen them too.”

“But there was a tire mark,” Dulcie said softly. “A little thin tire mark, like a bike, just at the edge of the drive.”

“I didn’t see that,” Joe hissed. “How could I miss that?”

“You were watching the coroner. I saw Detective Davis photograph the ground there, but the mark was really faint. I thought it went along the drive, maybe to the side door.”

“You heard nothing after you went to bed?” Dallas repeated. “You didn’t hear a shot fired.” The cats pictured Officer Bonner silently observing the detective, witness to the fact that Dallas was detached and objective and didn’t lead Ryan’s answers.

“I’m sure I’d have waked to gunshots,” Ryan said. “Unless there was a silencer.”

“And you heard nothing during the night?”

“Not that I remember. I was dead asleep, I was very tired.” But the cats glanced at each other. Ryan sounded as if she wanted to tell Dallas something more. As if perhaps later when they were alone, when she was not on record, she would share with him something that was bothering her?

“Those stained-glass windows,” Dulcie said softly. “How could the killer have wedged the body in like that? To lift a deadweight, pardon the pun, at that angle and ease the body down between the windows� That would be like standing on your hind legs lifting a dead rabbit as heavy as you, hoisting it way out at an angle and slowly down without dropping it. The killer had to be strong. But why bother? What was the point of leaving the body there?”

“You don’t think he was shot there?” Joe said.

“Nor do you,” she said, cutting her eyes at him. “Those windows are old and frail. You heard Ryan last night telling Clyde. That glass has to be brittle, and those strips of lead fragile. Those old stained-glass windows in the English Pub, the way if you rub against them, the glass will push loose from the leading? If Rupert had fallen there he’d have smashed those windows to confetti.”

Dallas said, “We’ll have to take your gun.” The cats heard chair legs scrape, then the front door open, heard the officers and Ryan going down the stairs.

Leaping from the bathroom window and down the hill, they were just at the edge of the drive when the officers and Ryan came down; and the medics set down their stretcher, prepared to take Rupert away. Slipping into the bushes, they watched Dallas unlock Ryan’s truck door then unlock her glove compartment. Flipping the glove compartment open, he turned to look at her.

“You said your gun was here?”

Ryan stared in past Dallas. She reached, but drew back.

Dallas pulled out a thin folder, and laid it back again. “Empty. I’ve never known a woman to keep an empty glove compartment.”

“I keep stuff in the console, you know that. Except my gun. Where’s my gun!”

“You didn’t take it upstairs?” he said sternly.

She shook her head, scowling. “No. I didn’t.”

“Let’s go over it again. You got home Friday night around midnight.”

“Yes. Unloaded the windows, unloaded a few tools, closed and locked the garage door. Went upstairs and fell into bed, dead for sleep.”

“And the next morning-Saturday morning?”

“Got up, made coffee. Came down and finished unloading, hauled my trash bags around the side of the garage. I’d bought a mantel up there, as well as the windows, and some carved molding. I stacked those better, along the back wall, and shook out the tarp and folded it, put it back in the truck bed where I keep it. It had crumbs and Hershey wrappers in it, and was folded differently than I’d left it. I learned Saturday night after the wedding, the Farger boy hitched a ride down from San Andreas without my knowing.” All this was for the record, for the tape that was surely running.

“And before we came upstairs last night, I locked the side door. I know I did. But this morning when I first went in, it was unlocked. And there were muddy paw prints in the truck bed as if one of the neighbors’ dogs got in during the night. My truck wasn’t muddy Saturday night when you examined it. It was when I went in the garage to get some cleaning rags that I� that I found Rupert.”

“Did you drive the truck anywhere Saturday?”

“No. I rode to the wedding with Clyde Damen. And you brought me home that night to look at the truck in regards to the Farger boy. It was clean then. It hasn’t been out of the drive since I got home Friday midnight.”

“Was there any mud in the garage yesterday when you cleaned up?”

“No, I’m sure. And it hasn’t rained. But behind the garage, to the side� I hosed down a shovel and rake back by the faucet, tools I’d used at the last minute, at the jobsite to set some stakes. It was muddy back there.”

They looked up as Officer Bonner came around the side of the garage carrying a black handgun by a stick through the trigger guard. The clean-shaven, neat young man did not look at Ryan, only at the detective.

“Found it in a trash bag, along with some wet, stained rags and stained bedsheets. Dark stains that could be blood.”

Ryan studied the gun. “It appears to be mine. If it’s mine, you’ll find the trigger guard is worn, the bluing worn off.” She began to shiver. Dallas didn’t touch the stick or the weapon. He looked at Bonner. “Has it been fired?”

Bonner’s shiny black shoes and the pant cuffs of his uniform were muddy. He sniffed the barrel briefly, as if he had already made a determination. “It smells of burnt gunpowder. I’d say it’s been recently fired. The trigger-guard bluing is worn off.”

“Bag it,” Garza said, and turned to Ryan, his face unreadable, that reined-in cop’s expression bearing no discernible message of love or familial closeness, offering her no support or encouragement.

Ryan looked back at him, very white. “How did this happen? That gun was locked up! You yourself unlocked the cab door after you collected evidence about the boy. Just now, you unlocked the glove compartment. How could-?”

Neither mentioned that such storage of a gun was not legal, that in California one had to have a special lockbox that could be removed from the car, a law that had never, to Joe Grey and Dulcie, made any sense. What good was a lockbox if it could be removed by a thief?

“Who else has keys to your truck?” Dallas asked.

“Scotty has a set because we used it on the job, but he’s family. I’ve only had this truck three weeks-I bought it in San Andreas.” She looked hard at Dallas. “Could someone in the truck sales, someone�?”

“Not likely, but we’ll check. Has anyone else driven it, besides your uncle Scott?”

“Dan Hall, once or twice. He used Scotty’s keys or mine. There was no one else up there but Dan and Scotty.”

“No one?”

“No one to drive the truck. Some kids were hanging around, the Farger boy and his friends, but they weren’t� they couldn’t�” She looked at him, shaken. “They had no chance, they couldn’t have taken my keys.”

“The kids were in the house trailer where you were staying?”

“A couple of times, but I was with them. They were never alone. I let them make sandwiches one day, while we were eating. They� well� there was one time,” she said faintly. “They� when I was surveying one day, they wanted to use the bathroom. I was right there, down the hill,” she said lamely.

“And your keys?”

“Either in my purse or on the table. I kept my purse in the bedroom closet.” She stared at Dallas. “That boy� why would he take my keys? Anyone,” she said more forcefully, “anyone could have gotten into the truck with a door tool, then used a lock pick on the glove compartment.”

“Could have,” Dallas agreed. He hesitated, glancing at the tape recorder. Then: “That boy very likely set a bomb, Ryan. Set it or helped someone set it. You think that was innocent, that bomb?”

She said nothing.

“Did you use the truck every day?”

“No, sometimes not for several days if we could get a lumber delivery in good time. But if he did take my keys,” she said softly, “what was the connection? Between the boy and Rupert?”

The two cats looked at each other. You are, Joe Grey thought. At the moment, Ryan, it looks like you’re the connection. The tomcat shivered. If someone wanted to harm the Molena Point police, first with the bombing that, lucky for everyone, hadn’t come off as planned, maybe they’d meant to ruin reputations, too, as a backup move.

So they chose Ryan, Detective Garza’s niece, as the patsy. Pin a murder on Ryan, they’d put Garza in an embarrassing position.

And, the tomcat thought with a soft growl, this scenario was far too much like the vicious attack earlier in the year when Police Captain Harper was set up as a killer.

Were Rupert Dannizer’s death and yesterday’s bombing connected to that other murder? Were all three crimes part of some planned vendetta against Molena Point PD? The possibilities rattled around in Joe Grey’s head as wildly as those little plastic balls in some diabolical pinball machine. He felt he was racing back and forth across the glass top swatting uselessly at unrelated facts, the little bright spheres forming, as yet, no logical configuration.

10 [��������: pic_11.jpg]

The images of death remained with Ryan long after Dallas and his officers left the crime scene. Rupert’s torn face, the coroner working over him, the strobe lights reflecting shatters of raw color across his body from the broken windows. The coroner wrapping Rupert in a body bag as if he were trussing up a side of beef, the emergency van hauling Rupert away through the village with no final ceremony, no tenderness, no one in attendance.

So what did she want, banks of roses strewn in his path embellishing his journey to the county morgue? Roses scattered by his former lovers? She imagined the coroner sliding Rupert into a cold gray storage locker, to remain forever alone. But the vision that clung most vividly was Rupert’s shattered face, his bloody broken face. That picture would remain with her for all time, generating a distressing internal response to every hurtful thought she’d ever entertained about Rupert Dannizer, to every angry wish she’d ever made about Rupert’s ultimate fate.

When all the vehicles had gone, she stood in the empty drive feeling small and scared. Wishing Dallas could have stayed with her, feeling like a child in need of strong male support and assurance.

But Dallas had been shaken too. He would never show it, but he was upset and worried for her.

He would do everything possible, he wouldn’t give up until he had unraveled the facts and put them in their proper order. Even if he had to step off the case, and surely he would, he’d remain in the background making certain that everything was done right, seeing that no clue was ignored, no investigative procedure disregarded.

She stood thinking about death, wondering if Rupert, as he lay in her garage gazing blindly up toward the rafters, might have experienced some final metamorphosis of the spirit, wondering if he’d perhaps undergone some sudden change of view. If Rupert, transformed into the eternal state, had awakened to face the error of his ways.

She was not a churchgoer. But she’d never doubted that there was more to the spirit than this one life.

However, given Rupert’s earthly performance, she really didn’t imagine that in some great toting-up he would be a candidate for a medal in exemplary behavior. More likely Rupert had, in his final moments, felt the searing heat and witnessed his first glimpse of the eternal flames. And that was all right with her.

Turning to go upstairs, she looked across the street at the neighbors’ blank windows imagining people peering out from behind their curtains wondering what kind of woman had moved into their neighborhood bringing murder, neighbors already certain thatshehad killed the victim, neighbors wondering who he was and what kind of stormy relationship had led to this particular act of violence.

Well, they’d know soon enough. The papers would have it all, every dirty aspect of hers and Rupert’s marriage. Some reporter would dredge up every harlot and married woman Rupert had ever bedded, every incident that would throw suspicion on her, his estranged and bitter wife.

Heading for the stairs, she stopped to inspect the truck again, and to brush some of the mud from its sleek red paint. Even her nice new truck, this solid and reliable symbol of her new and independent start in life, had become a part of the mess. Dallas and Officer Bonner had dusted it inside and out for fingerprints, a thorough job that had taken them the better part of an hour. Now, moving to the cab, she looked in at the red leather upholstery that puffed luxuriously over the two bucket seats. No hint of mud there. The day she bought the truck she had promised herself that the soft seats and pristine red carpet were going to stay as clean as her kitchen sink. No sawdust, no candy wrappers or greasy hamburgers or leaking Coke cans dripping their long sticky trails. No open tubes of caulking, no getting in the cab with wet paint or plaster on your jeans.

She had not imagined a strange dog tramping mud all over the truck bed-nor some evil little boy hiding under the tarp planning his sickening crime. She was incredibly tired from the morning’s adrenaline-heavy emotions. And scared of what lay ahead.

Innocent or not, if another suspect wasn’t found, the next few months would be ugly. And now that Dallas had taken away her gun, she had no protection against whoever was out there.

Did Dallas really think the killer wouldn’t return, that he’d have no further interest in her? She leaned on the truck, light-headed.

She needed a hot shower and some breakfast. She needed food, needed to get her blood sugar up, dump some protein into the system. Needed to get away from the house for a while.

As she started up the stairs she saw movement across the street in a window, the slats of a Venetian blind shifting. Scowling at the snooper she beat it up the steps, her face burning.

Her door wasn’t shut, it stood ajar. And a sound startled her, a soft hush through her open window that made her wrists go cold.

The stirring came again, a shuffling noise.

But she knew that sound, it was only the breeze through the open window rifling the papers on her desk, disturbing the stack of letters and bills and junk mail that had collected.

While she was gone, Hanni had come in every few days to go through her mail, to call her with anything important, but had left the rest for Ryan to clean up at her leisure. The mail blowing, that’s all the soft sound was.

But why was the door ajar?

Very likely she hadn’t closed it tightly when she and Dallas went back downstairs. It had a tendency not to want to latch. Certainly there was no one in there, no one would be dumb enough to enter with cops all over the place. Moving inside she thought she’d take a long hot shower then head out again and treat herself to a nice breakfast, try to get hold of herself, to get centered. She thought of calling Hanni, see if she could join her. Hanni wouldn’t let her get the shakes, she’d put a positive spin on any disaster. A few smart retorts, a touch of twisted humor.So you cut the cost of the lawsuit, so quit bellyaching, you’ve inherited the whole enchilada.

Shivering, she decided against calling Hanni. Stepping into the kitchen to turn off the coffeepot, she stopped.

She was not alone.

He stood beside the breakfast table, a muddy dog so big his chin would have rested easily on the tabletop. His short silver coat was smeared with dried mud. His pale yellow eyes watched her with a look so challenging that she stepped back.

He was bone thin, deep jowled and with long floppy ears. Built like a pointer, his tail docked to a length of six inches. The tail wagged once, a brief and dignified question. He had left a trail of flaking mud across her kitchen and into the studio, had tracked to her unmade bed then back to the drafting table and desk, apparently quartering the room in a thorough inspection. While she stood looking at where he had wandered, his gaze on her turned patronizing, as if she was very slow indeed to make him welcome.

And certainly she should welcome him, she had done so several times before but not in Molena Point. Up in San Andreas he had in fact been far more welcome than the three eager children with whom he had sometimes come to the trailer.

The kids said he was a stray, that he roamed all over the hills. That had seemed strange and unlikely for such a handsome purebred. But surely he’d been very thin, and though she’d reported him lost to the sheriff and had run an ad in the paper, no one had claimed him. She’d seen him only with the children, happy to be running with kids-kids didn’t demand that a dog follow rules, they themselves were rule breakers. Kids, still young animals in spirit, made fine companions for a wandering canine.

There was no question that this was the same dog, there could not be another weimaraner exactly like him, not with the same challenging look in those intelligent yellow eyes nor with the same small, lopsided cross of white marking his gray chest and the same notch in his left ear. The same old, cracked leather collar without any tags. She thought there could not be another dog anywhere with quite this insolent air. She knew that if she were to stroke his side and shoulder she would feel the little hard lumps where buckshot, sometime in his unknown past, must have lodged beneath his skin, gunshot likely administered by some angry farmer not wanting a hungry dog nosing around his chicken coops. She held her hand out to the big weimaraner, wondering what she had in her bare cupboards to feed him.

The dog stood assessing her, gauging her intentions.

“Hungry?”

His yellow eyes lighted, his long silky ears lifted, his short tail began to move slowly back and forth in a hesitant question.

She found a jar of peanut butter in the nearly empty cupboard and spread it on some stale crackers. When she held them down, he didn’t snatch them, he took each gently from her fingers. But he gulped them as if truly starving, and when she filled a bowl with water, he drank it all, never lifting his head until the bowl was empty. She stood considering him.

Looked like Curtis had a companion when he hid in her truck. She could just see Curtis climbing in and calling to the dog, the big weimaraner eagerly joining him. This had to have happened in the small town itself when she stopped to pick up the windows. She could imagine Curtis slipping into the truck after she loaded up, while she was inside paying her bill, and coaxing the dog under the tarp with him. What did Curtis think would happen to a nice dog like this running loose in the city? The kids had called him Rock, because of his color like an outcropping of gray boulders, though when clean his coat was more like gray velvet.

The dog was, in fact, exactly the same color as Clyde Damen’s tomcat, she thought, amused. Not only the same color, but both animals had docked tails that stuck up at a jaunty angle, and both had wise yellow eyes. How droll. Even their expressions were similar, bold and uncompromising.

The silly humor of dog and cat lookalikes helped considerably to ease her stress. She gave him all the crackers and peanut butter. There wasn’t anything else in the cupboard that would interest a canine, only a can of grapefruit. When she picked up her truck keys, thinking to go buy some dog food, he brightened and headed for the door looking up at her with eager enthusiasm, as if they did this every day.

Out on the deck behind Ryan, the two cats sat on the windowsill looking in, watching with fascination this amusing relief from the morning’s events. They had watched the dog earlier as he approached the police cars, trotting silently down the sidewalk, his tongue lolling in a happy smile as he headed for all the busy activity.

But then he had paused suddenly, testing the air, and abruptly he had turned aside, slipping into the tall bushes. There he had lain down out of sight, remaining still, only lifting his nose occasionally then dropping his head again to rest his nose on his paws-something about the crime scene, perhaps the scent of death, made him keep his distance.

When he had first pushed into the bushes the cats had tensed to race away to the nearest fence top. But the dog, sniffing idly in their direction and making eye contact, had only smiled with doggy humor and turned his attention to the human drama; he had exhibited no desire to haze or lunge at cats, had shown no inclination to snap up a cat and shake it-not at the moment. Though maybe another day, another time. One could not always be certain.

He had remained hidden and watchful until the officers’ attention was concentrated around the tailgate of Ryan’s truck, then with no humans watching to shout at him, he had moved from the bushes up the stairs casually sniffing each step. Within seconds he was nosing the door open to disappear into Ryan’s apartment. Soon they had heard the soft click of toenails on hardwood. And now through the window they watched Ryan feed him crackers and peanut butter, then pick up her truck keys.

“He’s beautiful,” Dulcie said. “He’s the same color as you.”

“What?”

“Exact same gray. And your eyes are the same color.” Her own eyes slitted in an amused cat laugh. “Even your tails are docked the same.” She looked at Joe and looked in at the big dog. “Except for size, and his doggy face and ears, he’s a mirror image.”

Joe Grey scowled; but he peered in again, with interest. He had to admit, this dog was unusually handsome.

Wondering what to do with the dog, Ryan glanced to the window and saw the two cats staring in. They didn’t seem afraid, only interested. Benignly the dog looked up through the window, giving no sign of wanting to chase.

When she had left San Andreas, and Scotty stayed on in the trailer to put in some landscaping, he had planned to feed the dog and continue to look for his owner. Both she and Scotty had wanted him, but neither had a decent way to keep him. She would be working eight and ten hours a day, and she had no fenced yard and none that could be properly fenced. The front lawn of the duplex was only a narrow strip, broken by the two driveways. Her side yard was six feet wide, not nearly big enough for a dog like this. And at the back, the hill went up far too steeply even for a billy goat. No place to keep a dog and no time to devote to this animal. Weimaraners needed to run, they needed to hunt or to work, that was what they’d been bred for. Without proper work, a dog like this could turn into a nightmare of destruction, fences chewed up and furniture reduced to splinters.

And Scotty had no home at all, at present. When he returned to Molena Point he’d be staying with Dallas, who already had two elderly pointers that he was boarding until he could build a fence of his own, aged dogs who were past the need to run for miles. Dogs that had never known the consuming needs of this more active breed.

The dog had appeared the first time, without the boys, on a moonless night as she and Scotty and Dan sat in the trailer eating supper. A soft movement at the open door, a pale shape against the dark screen so insubstantial and ghostly they thought it was a young deer stepping inexplicably up onto the tiny porch. Then they saw the dog peering in, sniffing the scent of food.

Of course Scotty invited him in. The dog had come willingly, staring at their plates but he didn’t beg or charge the table. He stood silent and watchful, observing them and their supper with those serious yellow eyes, studying each of them in turn. Scotty had hesitated only a moment, then blew on his plate to cool the hot canned stew, stirred and blew again, and set it on the floor.

Not until Scotty stepped back did the dog approach the plate. He paused, looking up at Scotty.

“It’s okay. It’s for you.”

The dog inhaled the stew in three gulps. They had fed him all their suppers and opened another can. After an hour they fed him again, bread and canned hot dogs. Over the period of several hours they cleaned out the cupboard. The dog had slept in the trailer that night, and the next morning they called the sheriff, thinking he’d gotten lost from some hunter. From then on the dog would show up every couple of days, usually with the kids, but always starving. The boys had no notion where he lived, nor did the sheriff or his deputies.

Now as Ryan opened the door the cats came alert, prepared to leap from the sill and away. The dog trotted out quietly looking them over but making no move to approach. Ryan, with a handful of paper towels, stood on the deck wiping the dried mud from his coat. But then as she started down to the truck, she paused, frowning, and turned back inside. The dog followed her, staying close, looking up at her begging her to get a move on.

Picking up the phone and dialing the station, she was relieved to be put through at once to Dallas. “Have you gotten Curtis Farger to talk? Gotten a line on where he was staying in San Andreas?”

“Nothing yet. Why? Officers searched the old man’s shack again this morning, but no sign that a bomb had been put together there-and no sign of Gramps and no fresh shoe tracks or tire tracks, no indication anyone’s been back there.”

“I think I might have something. I’d like to come talk with Curtis.”

“This hasn’t anything to do with Rupert?”

“No, it hasn’t.”

He waited, not responding.

“There was a dog up there around the trailer, hanging out with those kids. He’s in my kitchen now, looks like Curtis brought him along for company. Looks like when he got to Molena Point Curtis never thought to take care of the animal, but just let him run loose.”

“You didn’t mention a dog when we talked.”

“I had a reason.”

“Which was?”

“I’ll tell you later. It hasn’t anything to do with Curtis.”

“You sure it’s the same dog?”

“Same dog. A fine big weimaraner. There aren’t two like this one. Scotty and I tried to find his owners. We both wanted to keep him, but�”

“So what’s the secret?”

“When you see him,you’llwant him.”

Dallas laughed. “You think if you bring the dog in, you can soften Curtis up?”

“I think it’s worth a try. He seemed to really like the dog, maybe he would open up. When the dog was around, Curtis was always hanging on him, hugging him.”

“And you’re all right, about this morning?”

“I’m fine,” she lied.

“Come on in.”

“I need to get him some food, first. And feed myself, I’m dizzy with hunger. Have you eaten anything?”

“As we speak. Enjoying the last bite of a double cheeseburger.”

Hanging up, she got a bath towel and, down on the drive, gave the dog a thorough rubdown, sleeking his coat to a shine. Amazing how good he looked despite his half-starved condition. Laying another clean towel over the passenger seat of the cab, she told him to load up.

He knew the command, hopping right up into the bucket seat, sitting as straight and dignified as if he’d spent his life riding in the best vehicles.

Considering only briefly her promise to herself about no mud in the cab, she closed the passenger door, slid into the driver’s seat and headed for the market. Some promises, at certain moments in your life, were indeed made to be broken.

She was inside the market and out again breaking all records, her mind filled with stories of hyper-energetic weimaraners who had torn up the insides of a car or travel trailer with amazing speed and efficiency. In one instance involving a brand-new RV, a weimaraner with tooth-and-claw enthusiasm had created 20,000 dollars’ worth of damage in less than half an hour while the dog’s family grabbed a quick lunch.

Tossing a fifty-pound bag of dog kibble into the truck bed, and dropping the bag containing her deli sandwich next to her on the bucket seat, she headed for the little park at the bottom of her street where she and the dog could share their breakfast. In a fit of possessiveness she had bought, from the market’s pet section, a new leather collar, a leather leash, a choke chain, and a long retractable leash that would make Dallas laugh. No competent dog trainer would be caught dead with such a contraption, but for the time being she thought it might be useful. She had not seen behind her as she headed down the hill from her duplex, the two cats taking off on their own urgent errand, racing across the neighbors’ yards and down the hill in the direction of Molena Point PD.

Nor would she have paid any attention. She would have no reason to think that the cats were headed for Curtis Farger’s cell, to wait for her and Rock. That they would soon be crouched outside the high cell window which, on this bright morning, should be wide open, secured only by its heavy iron bars. She would have no reason to imagine that four-legged spies would be waiting, intent on any scrap of information she might glean from the young bomber.

11 [��������: pic_12.jpg]

News ofa murder in Molena Point traveled swiftly through the village, flashing from phone to phone, to on-the-street conversation, to phone again to gossip passed on by waiters, customers, shopkeepers, in short from friend to friend. Clyde Damen listened to the details as related to him by his supervising mechanic while Clyde inspected the engine of a ‘96 BMW. Turning away from the sleek convertible, he went into his office to call Ryan. When her phone rang ten times and no answer, he called Wilma.

Wilma had heard about the murder from the tortoiseshell cat when the kit came running home. The kit had heard about the death as she lingered beneath a table of the Courtyard Cafe. Kit would have been a witness to the police investigation except that early that morning she had veered away from Joe and Dulcie as they raced down the hills toward Ryan’s duplex following the sirens like a pair of cheap ambulance chasers.

The kit, heading into the village, had trotted along the sidewalk sampling the aromas from half-a-dozen restaurants. She had paused before the Swiss House patio examining the fine scent of sausages and pancakes. With whiskers and ears forward and her fluffy tail carried high she padded into the brick patio to wind around friendly ankles, smiling up at tourist and local alike, at whoever might feel generous.

The kit was not an opportunist. But having spent most of her short, transient life running with bigger cats who took all the garbage, leaving her with none, she viewed the matter of food seriously. Not until she met Joe and Dulcie and her first human friends, did she realize she could stop snarling over every morsel, that some cats and humans enjoyed sharing.

Now in the cafe’s patio she soon bagged a fine breakfast of sausage and fried eggs and thin Swiss pancakes, all laid out on a little saucer by a kind tourist. Life was good. Life was very good. The kit’s purr reverberated beneath the table like a small and busy engine.

But then, having eaten her fill, she slipped away before her benefactor knew she’d gone. Prowling the village, nipping into shops, wandering among antique furniture and displays of soft sweaters, she soon entered a rug gallery where she paused to have a little wash on an expensive oriental carpet. Wandering out again, she slipped into a gift shop, drawn by the scent of lavender. Then down the street threading between the feet of tourists and in and out of shops, alternately petted or evicted according to the shopkeeper’s temperament. When the sun had warmed the rooftops she wandered there, across the tilting shingles and peaks until she was hungry again, then followed the aroma of broiled shrimp to a nearby patio restaurant. It was here that she heard the news of a body in Ryan Flannery’s garage.

As the kit gobbled shrimp from a little plate beneath the table, rubbing against the ankles of the gallery owner who had provided the delicacy, that lady remarked to her companion, “He was a womanizer, you know. Rupert Flannery. It may be crude to speak so of the dead, but Ryan’s lucky to be rid of him.”

“Maybe that’s only gossip,” whispered her friend. “Maybe he�Doyou think she killed him? Right there in her own garage?”

“If she did, I wouldn’t blame her. You know, my dear, one of my gallery clients is Ryan’s sister, decorator Hanni Coon. Well, of course Hanni never said anything, but her office manager told Bernine� You know Bernine Sage, she worked for Beckwhite’s until afterhewas killed, then she worked for the library for a while. Well, Bernine knows some friends of the Dannizers in San Francisco, and she told me all about Rupert. She says he does like to sample the herd, as my husband would so indelicately put it.”

The kit wasn’t sure what that meant, but she certainly understood about the murder in Ryan’s garage. As soon as she’d finished all the handouts that seemed forthcoming she galloped down the street three blocks to the library and in through Dulcie’s cat door, and leaped to Wilma’s cluttered desk.

She waited in Wilma’s office for perhaps three minutes before she grew impatient and trotted out into the reference room. Hopping onto a library table, then to the top of the book stacks, drawing smiles from several patrons who were used to seeing her and Dulcie among the books, she trotted along the dusty tops of the stacks looking down on the heads of patrons and librarians until she spotted Wilma behind the checkout desk. Wilma stood shelving reserve books. Her long silver hair, bound back in a ponytail, shone bright against the dark bindings. The kit, hanging down over the shelves above Wilma’s head, mewed softly, the kind of small mutter she would use when speaking to another cat.

Looking up, Wilma reached to take the kit in her arms. She didn’t speak, the kit was too impetuous; Wilma was always afraid the little tattercoat would forget and say something back to her, blurt out some urgent message in front of other people. Certainly the kit had something vital to say, she was all wriggles, she could hardly be still.

But Wilma was not to be hurried. With the kit settled across her shoulder she finished her shelving, stroking the kit’s back and scratching her ears to keep her quiet. Taking her time, she at last headed for her office.

The moment the door was closed the kit launched into her story of murder, into every smallest detail she’d overheard. “� and Ryan hasn’t been arrested yet, but that woman who gave me the shrimp thought she would be. She said Ryan’s husband liked to sample the herd. What does that mean? Is that why someone killed him? Oh, Ryan didn’t kill him, Ryan wouldn’t kill anyone.”

Setting the kit on her desk, Wilma held her finger to her lips, and immediately she called the station. As the phone rang the kit jumped to her shoulder and settled down with one tortoiseshell ear pressed against the headset. She tried not to wriggle or purr as she listened.

When Dallas came on he gave Wilma the particulars of the death. Ryan had not been arrested. She was on her way to the station to interview the Farger boy.

Wilma had hardly hung up when Clyde called from the shop. As they talked, the kit left quietly again, through Dulcie’s cat door, and galloped over to the police station to hear what she could hear. That boy in jail didn’t need to see her, that boy she had jumped on and made to set off his bomb. She would just slip into the station past the dispatcher, she would be just a shadow, no one would see her.

In Ryan’s truck the dog sat cutting his eyes at the paper bag that lay on the console between them, sucking in the scent of charbroiled hamburger and fries. He made no move to touch it, and Ryan stroked his head. “You have lovely manners.” She studied him as she waited for a stoplight. “Wheredidyou come from? How could anyone abandon you?” This was a valuable dog, not one of the registered “backyard bred” animals whose owners had given no thought to what such a mating would produce. That happened too often when a breed became popular. This big, strong fellow was far above those ill-planned mistakes. He looked like he could hunt from dawn until dark and never tire. His breed had been developed for all-around work and stamina, to retrieve on land or on water, to point, to track, to hunt big game, to work by both sight and by scent. Watching him, Ryan was more than smitten, she was overboard with desire. This was a fine, intelligent animal, a hunter’s dream.

But she couldn’t keep him. When would she hunt him? When would she work him? It wouldn’t be fair to the dog.

Pulling up beside the little park she dropped the choke chain over his head, fastened on the leash, snatched up her sandwich bag as she stepped out, and gave him the command to come. He was immediately out of the truck sitting before her as she closed the door, then moving to heel.

Oh, yes, a dream dog, a treasure.

Leaning over the truck bed she opened the kibble bag and scooped a large serving into one of the two bowls she had bought. Carrying the bowls and a bottle of water and her own breakfast she headed for a sprawling cypress tree near the edge of the park, settling down beneath it on the grass. The cool fall morning was silent except for the cries of the gulls and the faintwhishof a few passing cars. The dog lay down beside her alertly watching the kibble bowl that she still held. At the other end of the park some children were playing catch, their voices cutting the silence. A few tourists wandered across the grass or sat on the scattered benches, and a pair of joggers passed her. When she put the bowls down, the kibble vanished quickly, as did half the water. She didn’t offer more food, she didn’t want him throwing up. Their alfresco picnic apparently presented an interesting study because several cars slowed to have a look. She savored her hamburger and fries, wondering if she was stupid to take the dog over to the jail.Wouldhis presence encourage Curtis to talk, or was that wishful thinking?

Whatever she thought of the kid, up in San Andreas he had seemed so tender toward the dog. But knowing now what he was capable of, that he had tried to kill half the village, maybe this visit was futile. And she wondered if, when she faced Curtis again, she could keep her anger under control.

Still, if Dallas didn’t find the old man, Curtis was the only lead they had to unraveling the full story of the bombing. Her preoccupation with that urgent matter served very well to ease her own fears, to put in perspective her own precarious position. This boy, son of the man Max Harper had helped prosecute for drug making, had nearly killed Max and Charlie and maybe the entire wedding party.

The silence of the early Sunday afternoon was broken suddenly by Dixieland jazz blaring from an approaching convertible, and a pale blue Mercedes pulled to the curb, parking illegally in the red zone, the top down, her sister Hanni behind the wheel. Hanni’s short silver hair was styled to a flip of perfection, her long silver earrings caught the sunlight, her million-dollar grooming made Ryan feel, as always, all ashes and sackcloth, made her snatch uselessly at her uncombed hair and stare down at the stain on her sweatshirt.

Hanni remained in the car quietly observing the dog in a way that made Ryan bridle with possessiveness. Then she looked up at Ryan with such concern that Ryan knew she’d heard about Rupert, that probably Dallas had called her. Hanni would know every detail: Ryan’s gun found in the trash, the bullets embedded in her garage wall, the fact that Ryan had no witness to her own whereabouts during the time that Rupert was killed.

“Private picnic?” Hanni called, turning the CD down to a soft rhythm and swinging out of the car. Her long, thin legs were encased in faded blue jeans that matched exactly the blue of the Mercedes, her slim, tanned feet cosseted in expensive handmade sandals. Above the denims she wore one of numerous handmade sweaters, this number a bright rainbow of many colors that set off Hanni’s prematurely gray hair. She stood looking at the dog with wide-eyed admiration.

“Where did he come from? He’s beautiful. Dallas didn’t mention a dog.” She waited impatiently for an explanation, watching Rock, not Ryan. Then seeing that no answers were forthcoming she sat down on the grass oblivious to dirt or grass stains-she wouldn’t have any, and Ryan didn’t know how she did that. Watching Ryan, Hanni searched gently for an exact reading to the morning’s events, making Ryan’s throat tighten. Sympathy always made her cry.

“You can tell me the bad stuff later,” Hanni said. “Except, is there anything I can do?”

Ryan shook her head. “It� I don’t think I want to talk about it.” She looked up at Hanni. “The dog isn’t mine. Well, maybe he is if I can’t find the owner. If I could figure out how to keep him,” she said hastily. “He showed up this morning, he was up in San Andreas.”

“You brought him back with you?”

“No, I told you� he showed up on his own. He was in the kitchen when I went up after� after Dallas left.”

Hanni frowned, puzzled.

“He was hanging around up at the trailer, with those kids. They said he was a stray.”

“A dog like this?”

“We tried to find his owner.” She told Hanni the story, and how she thought the dog had found his way to Molena Point.

“And now you’re going to reunite him with that Farger boy? See if you can get the kid to talk?” Hanni stared at her. “You think you can soften upthatkid? You think if he joined that old man in setting a bomb, you can get the kid to spill on him?”

“I need to try. The dogmightmake a difference.”

Hanni just looked at her; but then her gaze softened. “If I can help, I’m here.” Rising, she rubbed the dog behind the ears then opened his mouth with easy familiarity and looked at his teeth. “Young. Maybe two years old.” She gave Ryan a clear, green-eyed look. “If you can’t find the owner, you have a real treasure. He’s some handsome fellow.” She rose and backed away watching him move as he followed her. When she sat down again the dog dropped down beside her stirring a hot surge of jealousy in Ryan. To look at her and Hanni, anyone would pick Ryan as the rough-and-tumble dog person, not impeccably groomed Hanni Coon. Yet it was Hanni who seemed able to train the roughest dog and still look like she was dressed for a party, not a smear of dirt, not a hair out of place.

Hanni lifted the dog’s silky ears and looked inside, checking for ear mites and for a possible tattoo. She avoided mentioning Rupert directly. They both knew Ryan would be under investigation for his murder and that Ryan too might be in some danger. Picking up Ryan’s purse Hanni opened it, reached into her own purse and, shielded by the dog and by Ryan, she slipped an unloaded revolver into Ryan’s bag with a box of shells. She looked up at Ryan. “Until this is over, until you get yours back.”

“Did Dallas�?”

“No. He doesn’t need to know,” she said, ignoring the intricacies of California gun laws that gave a person a carrying permit for only specified models. Hanni patted Ryan’s hand with sisterly tenderness. “I’m headed for the Landeau house. You have time to come along?”

“The rug arrived from England, it’s in San Francisco. It will be down by truck, a day or two. I went over this morning to see if the gallery had delivered the sculpture for the fireplace. The floor’s wet, I guess from last week’s rain.”

“Wet? How can it be wet?”

“The Landeaus have already installed the sculpture, I don’t know when they were down. Not there now, and I can’t get them on the phone. I nearly sank in water, the floor’s soaked. That temporary rug under the skylight. We need to find the leak, we can’t put down the new rug, with a leak.”

“There is no leak. I didn’t build a leaky house. What did they spill?” Ryan could feel anger heat her face. “I installed that skylight myself, Scotty and I. It couldn’t have leaked, it has a huge lip and overhang and it’s all sealed, you saw how it’s made. That’s the top-of-the-line model. It’s molded all in one piece, absolutely leak-proof. We checked with the hose, Hanni! Did you call the Landeaus? What did they say?” The idea that an item she’d ordered and checked out might be shoddy infuriated her.

She had finished the Landeau remodel shortly before she left for San Andreas. The Landeaus had bought the place as a teardown, meaning to start from ground up, but she’d talked them into gutting and refurbishing the well-built old cottage, turning it into a small and elegant Mediterranean retreat. She had torn out walls to create a flowing space for living, dining and master bedroom, and removed the old ceilings. The high, angled roof beams rose now to an octagonal skylight directly over the sunken sitting area.

She had covered the concrete floor, which was broken into three different levels following the rising hill, with big, handmade Mexican tiles the color of pale sandstone. Only the sunken sitting area was to be carpeted, with the rug that Hanni had designed, a thick, deep wool as brightly multicolored as Hanni’s sweater, a rug to lie on reading, to sink into, to make love on. Hanni had ordered the handmade confection about the time Ryan started work on the house. The Landeaus had waited months for that rug, using a temporary brown shag that could be discarded when the new one arrived. And now that area was wet? The shag rug wet? She looked intently at Hanni. “The skylight did not leak. Marianna must have been down. What did she spill? Sullivan’s blood?”

“Be nice, Ryan. You don’t have to like the woman to do right by her professionally.”

“I am doing right by her professionally. The skylight didn’t leak.”

She had a satisfactory enough business relationship with Marianna Landeau but she wasn’t fond of her. Hanni jokingly said she was jealous of Marianna’s beauty, but it was more than that. Marianna was a difficult woman to warm to. The pale-haired ex-model of nearly six feet-fine-boned, slim-waisted, as broad-shouldered as a Swedish masseuse-was as cold as an arctic sea. Marianna dressed in silks with tangles of gold jewelry, and wound her flaxen hair in an elegant chignon so perfect that no ordinary woman could have mastered its construction on a day-to-day basis. Over the years that Ryan had worked with the Landeaus on their San Francisco house, she had never seen Marianna really smile, hadneverheard her laugh with pleasure, only with sarcasm. Marianna Landeau was beautiful ice, a client who paid on time, but a woman Ryan didn’t understand and didn’t care to know better.

Hanni gave the dog a pat. “It must have been awful this morning.” She waited quietly, watching Ryan, hoping that Ryan might unburden herself. Ryan scowled at her, and they sat not speaking. The dog sighed and stretched out. Hanni said, “What are you going to name him?”

“Why would I name him? The kids called him Rock.”

When Hanni reached to unbuckle the dog’s collar, Ryan said, “No ID on that, I just bought that collar. I have to get moving, Hanni. I told Dallas I’d be over before the juvenile authorities get there-I can meet you at the cottage in an hour or so.”

Hanni hugged the dog, and rose, one easy twist from flat on the ground to her full five-six, a movement like a dancer, the result of her passion for yoga. When Hanni got up, the big dog rose with equal grace and started to follow her. Ryan grabbed his collar. He gave her a sly sideways glance and sat down quietly beside her. It did cross her mind that they were both con artists.

“See you in an hour,” Hanni said and headed for her Mercedes where a New Orleans trumpet was entertaining the neighborhood of cottages that edged the small park.

“Hour and a half,” Ryan called, picking up her trash. Walking back with Rock to the truck, the dog turned puppyish, dancing around her, his tongue lolling. Loading him up, she headed for the police station wondering again if she was doing the right thing to approach Curtis Farger, if this was a smart move, trying to out-con that deceitful boy.

12 [��������: pic_13.jpg]

The parkinglot of Molena Point courthouse was shaded by sprawling oak trees that rose from islands of flowering shrubs. The building, set well back from the street, was of Mediterranean style with deep porticos, white stucco walls, and tile paving. The police department occupied a long wing at the south end that ran out to meet the sidewalk. Recently, Captain Harper had remodeled the department to afford increased privacy and heightened security. The jail was in a separate building, at the back, across the small, fenced parking lot reserved for police cars. Within the station itself one holding cell was maintained, opening to the right of the locked and bulletproof glass entry. The seven-by-eight concrete room had an iron bunk, a toilet and sink and one tiny window high in the east wall secured by bars and shaded by an oak’s dark foliage. The oak’s three thick trunks angled up from the garden as gently as staircases. Joe Grey and Dulcie were set to race across the garden and up into the branches that covered the cell window, when whispers from above them in the tree sent them swerving away again, to crouch among the bushes.

A man clung high above, among the dark leaves, his shoes and pant cuffs just visible, his balance on the slanting trunk seeming unsteady. He wore high-topped, laced shoes, old man’s shoes. Moving to a better vantage, the cats could see one gnarled hand reaching out to grip at the bars for support as he peered down through the little window. It must have been hard for the old boy to climb up, they could imagine him teetering, grabbing the surrounding limbs.

If this was Gramps Farger, he had plenty of nerve to come right to the station when every cop in the state was looking for him-or maybe he thought this was the last place they’d look. Joe wanted to shout and alert the department. His second, more studied response, was to shut up and listen.

The old man’s faint quarrelsome whispers and the boy’s hissing replies through the open window were so soft that even from within the police department, maybe no one would hear them, not even the dispatcher from her electronic cubicle; the whispers would be easily drowned among the noise of her radios and phones.

Slipping closer, where they could hear better, the cats began to smile.

“Them big mucky-mucks don’t care,” the old man rasped. “The way you muffed this one, Curtis, I’m sorry you showed up at all. You should’ve stayed in them mountains. Well, the deed’s done-you blew it, big-time. Your pa sure ain’t gonna be pleased.”

The kid’s reply slurred angrily against the rumble of a car engine starting in the parking lot. And not for the first time, Joe wished he had one of those tiny tape recorders, wished he was wired for sound.

“Your uncle ain’t gonna like it neither. You know Hurlie don’t tolerate sloppy work. And your ma�”

“None ofherbusiness.”

“Them cops’re gonna ask you plenty. You see you don’t mention Hurlie or them San Andreas people. You don’t tell no one you was up there. Pay attention, Curtis. You don’t know nothing about where Hurlie is, you don’t know nothing about where your old gramps is. You understand me?”

“What you think I’m gonna do,” the kid snapped. “Why would I tell the cops anything?”

Apparently, Joe thought, the old man didn’t know that Curtis had hitched a ride with Detective Garza’s niece. What a joke. Maybe Curtis himself didn’t know who she was.

“Keep your voice down. Don’t matter I’m your grampa, I cut no slack if you mess up again.”

“Mess up!That rabid damn cat near killed me. You don’t give a damn about me, you don’t give a damn if I die!”

“You ain’t gonna die. From a cat scratch? And you sure as hell didn’t see me over at that church, no matter what they ask.” The old man peered down into the cell. “I’m out of here, Curtis. Meantime, you keep your mouth shut.” And Gramps started shakily down the tree snatching at branches, putting his unsteady feet in all the wrong places. Nearly falling, stumbling down the last few feet he tumbled into the geraniums so close to Joe and Dulcie that they spun around, melting deeper into the bushes.

The old man rose, apparently none the worse for the spill, and turned toward the parking lot. The cats followed him out across the blacktop, staying under parked cars when they could, slipping along in the river of his scent, which was so overripe they could have trailed him blindfolded. This old codger needed a bath, big-time. A Laundromat wouldn’t hurt, either. Pausing beneath a plumbing repair truck, they looked ahead for an old pickup, as the kit had described, for some rusted-out junker. The old man was passing a black Jaguar convertible when he whipped out a key.

It was not a new-model Jag but it was sleek and expensive. The top was down, and several celluloid kewpie dolls hung from the rearview mirror. The bucket seats were fitted out with tacky zebra-patterned covers as furry as an Angora cat. A very nice car, royally trashed.

Unlocking the driver’s door, Gramps slid in and kicked the engine to life. Pulling on a tan safari hat, he tucked his long shaggy hair under, and wriggled into a khaki jacket straight out of an old B movie. The attempted disguise was so ludicrous the cats wanted to roll over laughing. This old man wasn’t for real, this old man was dotty.

But, in fact, he had changed the way he looked. As the old man sat at the wheel tying a white scarf around his throat, Joe glanced tensely back toward the station, his heart thudding with urgency. The old boy would be gone in a minute, he was going to get away, and all they had was the license number. Crouching to scorch up the tree thinking to shout through the holding-cell window and alert the dispatcher, get some muscle out there, Joe paused.

If he knew where the old man was going�

The tomcat crouched, tensed to leap in. Dulcie stopped him with a swipe of her paw, ears back, eyes blazing. “Don’t, Joe!”

He backed off, hissing.

Gramps put the car in gear, revving the engine like a teenager-and at the same instant, Gramps saw Joe. Staring down at Joe, his expression said this guy was not a cat lover. Joe’s paws began to sweat. Gramps cut the wheels suddenly and sharply toward the tomcat and gave it the gas-and the cats were gone, scorching under the plumbing truck, the Jaguar headed straight for them. Maybe, since the aborted church bombing, Gramps Farger hated all cats.

Safe under the big yellow vehicle, but ready to run again, they cringed as, at the last instant, Gramps swung a U just missing the truck and screeched off toward me street.

Coming out shakily, they fled up the nearest oak. Staring out, they could see the Jaguar heading north and then east, up into the hills. They watched until the car disappeared over the next rise.

At least they had a general direction, and they had the make and license. Who would be dumb enough to drive such an easily identifiable vehicle? Talk about chutzpah. And the old boy might as well have driven the Jaguar right on into the station, every cop in the village was looking for him. Did he think his stupid disguise would fool anyone?

But maybe it had fooled someone. Turning out of the lot, Gramps had passed two young officers returning on foot to the station. Both had looked right at him. With the scarf tucked up around his beard, and his grisly long hair out of sight, Gramps looked like just another eccentric, another tourist. The rookies looked at him and kept walking, no change of expression, no glance at each other, no quickening of their walk to hurry into the station. Complacent, Joe Grey thought. Harper needed to talk to those guys, shake them up.

But the two cops weren’t the only ones to miss something.

Though the two cats couldn’t have seen her, and with Gramps’s overripe scent they would never have smelled her, the kit passed within feet of them crouched on the floor of the Jaguar. They had no hint that she was huddled behind the driver in the escaping car, shivering with excitement and with fear.

The kit knew Joe and Dulcie were there. From deep in the garden she had watched the old man pull into the lot and had watched him climb to the kid’s cell window, had watched the two older cats approach to listen. Downwind from them, she had listened, too, then had beat it for the Jaguar, leaping in while Gramps was still precariously descending the tree. And now she was being borne away who-knew-where, in a car racing way too fast and she couldn’t jump out and she was getting pretty scared. Was regretting, not for the first time, what Wilma called her impetuous nature.

“Who from San Andreas?” Joe said, feeling defeated and cross. “Who else besides this Uncle Hurlie? Who was the old man talking about?”

“I don’t� There’s Ryan’s pickup, just pulling in.” As Ryan parked and swung out of the truck, the gray dog leaped out too, coming to heel. And Dallas stepped out of the station as if he had been waiting for them.

The detective looked the dog over. “Youfoundthis animal? How long was he running loose-five minutes?” The dog watched Dallas brightly, his yellow eyes alight as if he recognized a dog man, a kindred and understanding spirit. Only when Dallas put his arm around Ryan did the weimaraner growl.

Grinning, Dallas stepped away. “Looks like he’s found his home.” He looked down at Ryan. “You doing okay? You all right about what’s ahead of you?”

“I guess. There’s nothing I can do about it. Have you� You haven’t been in touch with Harper?”

“He called, the murder’s been on the San Francisco news. He and Charlie are coming back, canceling the cruise.”

“Oh, damn! Because of me. Because of Rupert-and the bombing. Why does this have to spoil their honeymoon?”

Dallas squeezed her shoulder. “One of life’s nasty tricks. One big, double calamity, sandwiched in with the good stuff.” He knelt and beckoned the dog to him. Not until Ryan released him with a command, did Rock approach, sniffing Dallas’s hand. The detective looked up at her. “You’re going to keep him.”

“I can’t, Dallas. I don’t�”

“He’s pretty protective already, a little work and he could be useful.”

“I don’t need protection.”

He just looked at her.

“Hanni-Hanni loaned me a gun.”

“I don’t need to know that. You could build a fence up that back hill for him, I’m sure Charlie wouldn’t mind.”

“Let’s go in. I told Hanni I’d meet her up at the Landeau place in an hour, there’s some kind of water problem. Leaky skylight, Hanni said.”

“You’ve never installed a leaky skylight.”

She tugged on his arm, heading for the station. “I’m losing my nerve. I’m not looking forward to this.”

By the time they entered through the bulletproof glass doors, the cats were high in the oak outside the boy’s window. Hidden among the leaves, they listened to thescritchof metal against metal as the cell door swung open.

No one spoke. They heard a sudden intake of breath and a doggy huff, then the scrabbling of claws on concrete. Warily they peered down through the bars.

Ryan sat alone on the end of the boy’s cot. The boy stood rigid, his back to the wall, staring at her with rage as he held up an arm halfheartedly fending off the dog who, wild with joy, was leaping and pressing against him, his whine soft, his short tail madly wagging. Ignoring him, Curtis’s cheek was touched with shine. Was the kid crying-or was that dog spit?

Ryan watched him evenly. “What’s his real name, besides Rock?”

“How would I know? He’s a stray. Why did you bring him here? What do you mean, his real name?”

“He rode down in the truck with you.”

“So he got in the truck. What was I supposed to do, shove him out? And what difference? He don’t belong to no one-he don’t belong toyou.”

“He’s a beautiful dog. I can see he’s your buddy.”

“Do I look like he’s my buddy? What do you want?”

“He rode down with you, so I figure you’re responsible for him. You want him running the streets, hit by a car on the highway? That would be ugly, Curtis.”

“So take him home with you.”

“I can’t keep him. I live in a small apartment, I have no yard for a dog.”

“Feed him, he’ll stay around.”

“I can’t let him run loose. If I knew where he lived�”

Curtis just looked at her.

“I could take him back to San Andreas, to his owners, or to the people you were staying with.”

No answer. The dog licked Curtis’s face then looked past him through me bars, watching someone. In a moment there was a stirring at the cell door, and the air was filled with the smell of hamburgers and fries.

The blond, matronly dispatcher, glancing in at Ryan, handed a large paper bag through the bars. Boy and dog sniffed as one, eyeing the grease-stained bag.

Tearing open the bag, Ryan spread it out on the bunk, revealing four burgers, a box of fries, a large box of onion rings and a tall paper cup that, when the boy began to drink, left a smear of chocolate across his lip. Curtis didn’t wait to be asked. Gulping most of the first burger, he slipped a few bites to the dog. Ryan said, “If you can’t tell me where he lives, I’ll have to take him to the pound.”

Curtis glanced around the tiny cell as if thinking the dog could stay there.

“I work all day, Curtis. I can’t keep him. Maybe the pound will find him a home before they have to gas him.”

For the first time, the boy’s defiance faltered. “You looked all over up there for his owner. There’s no way you’d take him to the pound.”

“I have no choice, unless I can find his owner. I’d drive him back up to San Andreas, to people who’d take care of him, if you’ll tell me where. Otherwise it’s a cage at the pound and maybe the gas chamber.”

“You won’t do that.”

“Try me. I can’t keep him, and I don’t know anyone who can. I’d rather take him home. If I have to, I’ll call the weimaraner breeder’s association. They’d have the name of the registered owner.”

The boy nearly flew at her. “You can’t! They’ll kill him.”

“Whowould kill him?”

The boy reverted to glaring. Beside him, the dog’s brow wrinkled as he looked from one to the other, distressed by their angry voices.

“You want to fill me in, Curtis? Tell me where he belongs?”

“The dog’s a stray. I meant-the place I was staying, they� they don’t like dogs. They ran him off.”

“Where were you staying, Curtis? Who were you staying with?”

Curtis turned his back, and said no more. The cats were nearly bursting, wanting to shout the name Hurlie, burning to tell Ryan about the uncle that the old man wanted so badly kept secret.

Ryan stayed with the boy for perhaps half an hour more, but nothing was forthcoming. She gave up at last and left the cell. The cats could hear her talking with Dallas, out near the dispatcher’s cubicle, then their voices faded as if they had headed back to his office. “Maybe,” Joe said, “Ryan’s cell phone is in the truck, and we can fill them in about Hurlie?”

“She’ll have locked it,” Dulcie said. “But she’s meeting Hanni. Hanni leaves her phone in the car with the top down.”

Joe Grey smiled.

Dropping from the oak tree, they crossed the parking lot running beneath parked cars and leaped into the back of Ryan’s truck, settling down beneath the tarp ready for a ride up the hills.

A cat, at best, is not long on patience. Ask any sound sleeper whose cat tramps across his stomach at three in the morning demanding to be let out to hunt. Joe Grey was fidgeting irritably by the time they saw Ryan coming. Burrowing flat as pancakes beneath the folded tarp, they were glad that Rock had taken over the front seat, that he wouldn’t leap into the truck bed nosing at their hiding place.

But as it turned out, it would be Rock who would nose out, for the cats, the connection between the church bomber and Rupert Dannizer’s killer.

Ryan was pulling out of the parking lot when a horn honked. The cats didn’t peer out from beneath the tarp, but when she slowed the truck they heard Clyde’s voice over the sound of the idling antique Chevy.

“Can I do anything?” he said quietly.

“Thanks, but it’s all in hand-at the moment.”

“You okay?”

“So far. Just on my way over to the Landeau place to meet Hanni.”

Clyde’s car moved ahead a little. “Free for dinner?”

“Matter of fact, I am. That would be nice-something early? Burgers and a beer? And we can go over some last-minute details on tomorrow’s work. Could I come by for you, and put this fellow in your yard?”

“Sounds good, and you can tell me about him. Around six?”

“See you then.”

Clyde pulled out, shifting gears. As he drove away, and Ryan turned into the street, Joe’s thoughts returned to the Farger clan, to Curtis’s uncle Hurlie. Riding beside Dulcie half-smothered by the tarp, he was all twinges and prickling fur, the San Andreas connection compelling and urgent. Did Gramps get the makings for the bomb up in San Andreas with the help of Hurlie? Hurlie gave that lethal package to Curtis, and Curtis carried it down to Molena Point in the back of Ryan’s truck? Curtis delivers the gunpowder or whatever in Ryan’s truck, Gramps makes up the bomb, then sends Curtis up on the roof to set it off.

Of course the law would be onto it. Now that Ryan had found a connection between Curtis and San Andreas, Garza and Harper would be onto it like pointers on a covey of quail.

But was the law missing one piece of vital information? As far as Joe could tell, they had no clue yet about Hurlie Farger. Or, if they knew that Hurlie existed, they apparently didn’t know that he was in San Andreas, thathewas the San Andreas connection.

But Joe forgot Hurlie as Ryan turned into the drive before the Landeau cottage. As she pulled up to park, the big dog began to lunge at the window, leaping at the half-open glass roaring and snarling, pawing to get out.

13 [��������: pic_14.jpg]

The oldman was a fast driver. He took the winding road at such a pace that, on the floor behind the driver’s seat, the kit had to dig her claws hard into the thick black rug. The Jaguar fishtailed and skidded around the tight curves swaying and twisting ever higher into the hills. Against the late afternoon sky, she couldn’t see any treetops but sometimes she could glimpse the wild, high mountains toward which they were headed. Behind the car, the sun was dropping, shifting its position as the road turned. She had no notion where he was going or how she would get home again; she was sorry she’d hidden in the old man’s car. She’d started to be sorry when she heard him come across the parking lot and open the car door but already it was too late, he was starting the engine. Now the cold wind that swooped down to the floor of the convertible snatched at her fur and whistled inside her ears, and the sharp chemical smell that clung inside the small space burned her nose so that tears came. When the car began to climb even more steeply she felt her stomach lurch until soon she thought she’d have to throw up as she always did when riding in cars. But she daren’t, he would hear her retching.

Soon, above the ugly stinks, she could smell sage and mountain shrubs. At every squeal of tires she hunched lower. When at last he skidded to a stop on dirt and gravel, she thought she must be a hundred miles from home. Even Joe Grey would not have been foolish enough to get in the car with this man. She could smell dry dust, and the rich scent of chickens, and more chemical smells. She was terrified he would look in the backseat and find her.

But he didn’t look, he got out and slammed the car door. She heard him go up three wooden steps and into a house or building and slam that door too. She waited, shivering. When after a long time she heard nothing more she slipped warily up the back of the furry zebra seat and poked her nose over the edge of the door, looking.

She was so high up the hills that only the jagged mountains rose above her, tall and rocky and bare, their thin patches of grass baked brown from the heat of August and September, brown and dry. Down below her, the road they had taken wound sickeningly along the side of the cliff. The rough clearing where the car stood was only a shelf cut into the bank, just big enough to hold an unpainted cabin and two sheds, all so close to the edge that she imagined at the slightest jolt of earthquake the buildings sliding off into the chasm below.

She could see, farther down the cliff, three rough chicken pens made of wire, with plywood roofs, and though she could smell the dusty scent of chickens, she could not hear them clucking or flapping.

When she looked toward the shack she could see through a dirty window the old man moving around in there, she could hear him opening cupboards or shifting furniture, making some kind of dull thudding racket. Had that boy lived here with him? Curious to see more, she hopped to the back of the front seat. She was rearing up on her hind paws when the old man came out again suddenly. In panic she dropped to the ground beneath a clump of dry sage-leaving pawprints etched in the dust behind her.

Maybe he would think they were the tracks of ground squirrels or rabbits. Hiding among the bushes she watched him carry out four black plastic garbage bags tied at the tops, their bulging sides lumpy with what looked like boxes and cans, bags that stunk like a hundred drugstore chemicals spilled together or like the garden center of the hardware store with all its baits and poisons where she had wandered once and been scolded by Dulcie and Joe, smells that made her want to back away sneezing. Was this the bomb stuff? She tried to remember what Clyde and the police had said when they were talking about the bomb. She wasn’t sure what she remembered and what she’d imagined about that terrible day. She remained frozen still as the old man loaded the dirty bags into his nice car. When he started the car she fled away deeper among the tangled growth that edged the yard.

He turned the car around in the clearing, its wheels just inches from the drop-off, and headed away down the twisting road leaving her alone. As the car descended snaking along the edge of the ravine she reared up looking at the land, hoping to see the way home. She could have been on the moon, for all the feel of direction she had after that blind and twisting ride.

Though anyone would know east by the rising mountains, and west by the dropping sun. The sunwasdropping, fast. She did not want to be caught here at night. The kit loved the night, she loved to roam in the night, but up here in the wild high ridges where bobcats and cougar and coyotes hunted, night was another matter.

Standing at the edge of the clearing, her ears and her fluffy tail flattened by the wind, she looked west down curve after curve of summer-brown slopes, far down to the shifting layers of fog and to the tiny village, so far away.

Well, she wasn’t lost. Cats didn’t get lost. Not when they could see the mountains and the sun hanging low in the sky and the wide fog-bound Pacific.I’m a big cat now.And, scanning the falling hills for possible places to hide when she was ready to make her way home, she spotted the best of all refuges.

Far below among the tree-scattered hills stood the dark tangle of broken walls and crumbling buildings that marked the Pamillon estate where she had hidden from the cougar, and from a human killer. Where she had once, as the cougar slept in the sun on the cracked brick patio, almost touched him, until Joe snatched her away. There among the Pamillon ruins were all manner of caves and crannies.

Now that she knew where to hide in the falling night, she didn’t hurry. First she would do as Dulcie and Joe Grey would do. She was about to approach the cabin when, way down on the winding road, she saw a car moving fast toward the ruined estate, a black, open convertible.

Why would the old man go there? It would soon be too dark for humans in that place. What was he doing? Did he mean to dump his plastic bags there? Was the Pamillon estate, with all its mystery, nothing more to that old man than a place to get rid of his garbage?

Turning away with disgust, trotting up the steps to the cabin and hearing no sound within, she considered the ill-fitting door. Standing on her hind legs, then swinging on the knob, she forced it open and quickly she slipped inside.

The floor was dirt, tramped hard, and the wooden walls were so rough that when she pressed her nose against the planks their splinters stuck her. Nor was there much furniture. Two rough wooden armchairs with ancient dusty seats, a scarred aluminum dinette table with two mismatched aluminum chairs, a small old bookcase filled with jars of peanut butter, pickles, baked beans, and a half loaf of bread that smelled stale.

Attached to one wall was a plain laundry sink and next to it a tiny old refrigerator whose motor sounded sick. A second room led off the first, a niche no bigger than Wilma’s bathroom, just enough space for two cots at right angles and a wooden chair with a pair of man’s shoes tossed underneath. Every surface was rimed with dust, even the plank walls. Big nails in the wall held some wrinkled shirts and pants, some of a small size that might belong to the boy. Certainly the old man slept here, she could smell him. No cat would let himself get so rank, only a dog and some humans would tolerate that kind of stink on themselves. She could still smell the nose-burning chemical smells too, so strong she could taste them. Something about those smells rang alarms for her, something that came from police talk. Nosing along the walls she looked for a closet to investigate, but there was none.

Slipping outside again panting for fresh air she circled the small, crude building, padding quickly around it even where it hung out nearly over the ravine; and the chemical smell led her down the steep canyon toward the chicken pens.

She had no notion how long the old man would be gone. The cages all looked abandoned. Longing to head down the hills into fresh air and into the golden light of last-sun, instead she trotted closer, approaching the wire enclosures.

Heading for the Landeau cottage, Ryan’s thoughts were still on Clyde, comforted by his easy ways and quiet reassurance; just their few brief words, in the parking lot of the station over the sound of their idling engines, had eased her tension. Maybe she’d call him early, see if they could take Rock for a run before dinner. Maybe with Clyde she could sort out the fear that had shadowed her ever since she found Rupert’s body. She didn’t ordinarily confide in new acquaintances, but Clyde was Max Harper’s lifelong friend. Dallas trusted him; and Clyde had stood steadfastly by Harper when the captain was accused of murder. And better to burden Clyde with her fears than Dallas. Her uncle wasn’t in an easy position. New man in the department, appointed chief of detectives over someone with more seniority, and now his niece was under suspicion of murder. No need to lay more stress on him.

She supposed she wasn’t very trustful of men anymore, not since marrying Rupert. Not trustful as she had once been when she was young, growing up in a household nurtured by three strong men. Those associations, and spending her weekends bird hunting with her dad’s and Dallas’s friends, or hanging around San Francisco PD waiting for Dallas, or at the probation office with her dad, she had always felt easy and confident. Though, in fact, in that law-enforcement atmosphere shehaddeveloped a wariness too. A wait-and-see view of outsiders that some folks would call judgmental, but that a cop would call sensible. More than once that mind-set had served her well, though it sure had deserted her when she met Rupert.

She wondered if, after you died, you had the chance to look back and assess the way you’d lived your life. She couldn’t seem to leave that thought alone.

Even after seeing Rupert cruelly torn she could feel nothing generous toward him. That fact distressed her, that she was thinking about Rupert as heartlessly as Rupert himself had thought about others. This was not a time to be bitter. Maybe Clyde could help her put these last few days into a kinder framework-a friend she could lean on, someone not family and not part of law enforcement, someone who need not be careful of his conversation with a frightened murder suspect. Just someone steady to help her sort through the tangle. And, turning into the drive of the Landeau cottage, dunking about Clyde, Ryan had no idea that other friends were ready to help her, friends so near to her at that moment that she could have stepped back and touched them, two small friends ready to assist in their own quiet way.

14 [��������: pic_15.jpg]

The Landeau cottage stood among live oaks in the rising hills north of the village, its leaded windows set deep into white stucco walls, reflecting the mossy, twisted branches. A ray of late-afternoon sun shone down through the trees illuminating the domed skylight and tile roof. The clearing in front of the cottage was planted with a variety of drought-resistant native shrubs artfully arranged among giant boulders. Beneath a grandfather oak a wide parking bay was paved with granite blocks, and a granite drive led back to the garage, which was hidden behind the house in the style of 1910 when cars had just begun to replace horses and were put in the barn at night like their predecessors. The neighboring houses were hardly visible, just a hint of roof to the north between the dense trees, and on the south a few feet of blank garage wall; a private and secluded retreat, for an undisturbed weekend. As Ryan pulled her truck onto the parking next to Hanni’s blue Mercedes, Rock went rigid, sniffing warily through the partially open window, his gaze fixed on the house, and the next moment leaping at the glass, barking and fighting to get out.

Easing open her door, Ryan meant to slip out and leave him inside until she knew what was the matter, but he exploded past her jamming one hard foot into her thigh, half knocking her out of the truck. He hit the drive roaring. She piled out behind, hanging onto his leash. He lunged again, up the drive, charging ahead with such force that she had to turn sideways jerking the leash tight across her legs to keep from being pulled to her knees.

The cottage door opened. Hanni stepped out watching the dog and glancing toward the back of the house where Rock was staring as if to launch for someone’s throat-the dog looked toward the house too, his lip curled over businesslike teeth, but then returned his attention to whoever stood, out of sight on the drive. Ryan thought of Hanni’s gun tucked in her purse, which she’d tossed on the seat of the truck when Rock bolted past her.

But this was a small, quiet village, not the streets of east L.A. Even with Rupert’s murder and the church bombing, as horrifying as both had been, Molena Point wasn’t a crime zone. Yet, watching Rock, watching the drive, she was deeply chilled.

From the woods where they had hidden when they dropped out of Ryan’s truck, Joe Grey and Dulcie watched the big dog too, the fur on their backs rigid, every muscle tense, ready to scorch up a tree out of harm’s way.

But then suddenly Rock relaxed, raised his head and cocked his ears and gave a questioning wag of his short tail. And as Ryan eased back, seeming to let out her breath, Rock trotted eagerly forward, all smiles and wags.

The old man who came up the drive was tiny, dressed in faded work clothes and carrying a stack of empty seedling flats. He seemed not much taller than the hound; and surely Rock’s teeth were sharper. What dog would think of growling at Eby Coldiron? The cats slipped closer toward the drive as Ryan hugged Eby. Eby stroked Rock then backed away to have a look at him.

“This is a fine animal, Ryan. When did you get him? Will he hunt?”

“It’s a long story, Eby. Complicated-the kind of story for over a cup of coffee when Louise is here too.”

Eby grinned at her and nodded and continued to pet Rock, who wriggled and danced under the small gardener’s hand. Typical canine behavior, Joe thought. So hungry for acceptance. Eby and his wife were Ryan’s landscaping contractors and they worked with Hanni, as well. The Coldirons were in their eighties, Eby no bigger than a twelve-year-old boy, white-haired and frail-looking, but as strong as coiled steel. The skilled landscaper shared Ryan’s liking for native plant environments in an area where water was often scarce. He was dressed this morning in his usual khaki shirt, his jeans rolled up over muddy jogging shoes. Eby bought his clothes in the boys’ department of Penny’s or Sears.

“Where’s your truck?” Ryan said. “Where’s Louise?”

“She took the truck, went to shop. Said she’d bring back a pizza but she gets in those stores, forgets the time.”

Eby’s wife was as minute as he, and nearly as wiry.

Like Eby, she bought her clothes in the children’s section, size ten-to-twelve. Eby maintained a capable gardening crew, but he and Louise liked to do the new landscaping themselves. They might be old and wizened, the cats thought, but Ryan said she had never seen a happier marriage. The Coldirons not only handled the landscaping for half-a-dozen builders, but now and then they purchased a decrepit old house and refurbished it, doing much of the work themselves. And they took a nice cruise every winter to Hawaii or to Curacao or the Bahamas. As Eby stacked his flats at the curb and returned to the back of the house, and Ryan and Hanni disappeared inside, Joe leaped into Hanni’s open convertible looking for her cell phone.

It wasn’t there. Not on the seat, not under the seat, not in the console that he managed to flip open, nor in the glove compartment. Dropping out of the car again, he headed for the house beside Dulcie. On the porch the dog lay obediently, his leash hooked around the six-by-six stanchion that supported the sweeping line of the roof. Ryan had left the door open, apparently so she could watch him.

Seeing neither Ryan or Hanni inside, the cats padded casually across the stone porch, facing the big weimaraner, ready to run if he lunged at them.

Rock looked at them with doggy amusement, not offering to attack in a sudden game of catch-the-kitty. Quickly they slipped inside, to crouch behind a carved Mexican chest beside the front door.

The room was big and open, the floor on several levels. The seating area was the lowest, with glass walls on three sides, a glass cube set against the oak woods. Its fourth side stepped up to the tiled entry. Its high rafters rose to the skylight, where the midmorning sun sent diffused light down across the tall fireplace. The built-in, raised seating was covered with bright pillows tossed against the glass walls. With the woods crowding in from outside, the sunken room was like a forest grotto, the embroidered pillows brilliant against the leafy background. Ryan knelt before the fireplace examining the wet rug.

She glanced up at the skylight, and studied the face of the fireplace: the plain white slab that rose from floor to vaulted ceiling showed no sign of water stains. Its surface was broken by three tall rectangular indentations, painted black inside, each holding a stainless-steel sculpture of abstract design.

From behind the Mexican chest, Dulcie drank in the beautiful room with twitching tail and wide eyes. The tiled entry stepped up again to the raised dining area, which gave the impression of a cave. To the right of that, and two steps higher, rose the master bedroom, its bank of white, carved doors standing open, its bright bedspread mirroring the colors of the sitting-room pillows. Looking and looking, Dulcie had the same rapt expression on her tabby face as when she made off with a neighbor’s cashmere sweater, the same little smile in her green eyes-a greedy female joy in beauty, a hunger for the lovely possessions mat no cat could ever truly own.

Kneeling in the sitting-well examining the wet rug, Ryan wondered who Marianna had sent down to install the three pieces of sculpture. Maybe the sculptor himself? He lived fairly near, some miles south of San Francisco. The job wouldn’t have taken long. One didn’t have to drill, just install and tighten the tension brackets, but certainly it wasn’t like Marianna to lift a hand. Marianna had left no message on Hanni’s tape, as she might if she’d been down. When Ryan felt the rug, it was wet all along the fireplace and back about three feet. Already it smelled of mildew. Using a screwdriver, she pried up a corner to feel the pad beneath.

The pad was sopping. Looking up at the skylight, she studied its pleated shade that had been drawn across the transparent dome. Not a sign of water stain, nor were the white walls of the skylight-well stained.

Rising, she fetched the pole with which to open the shade. When she accordioned it back, there was no spill of water, only sunlight fell more brightly into the room. Fetching a ladder from the truck she covered its ends with clean rags so not to mar the wall, and climbed to examine the Plexiglas dome at close range.

Finding no tiniest streak or discoloration, she frowned down at Hanni. “There’s no leak, never has been.”

Hanni stared up at her. “But the Landeaus haven’t been here. And it did rain last week. Go up on the roof, Ryan. Have a look up there.”

“When you called them, told them the rug was wet, what did they say?”

“My god, I didn’ttellher it was wet. I just casually asked if they’d been down. She saidno.I should tell that woman the roof leaks? You want her all over you?”

“But it hasn’t leaked. Either they’ve been down or someone else has been here. Did you check for a breakin? Call her again. Make her tell you when they were here, and what happened, or if they loaned out the key.““MakeMarianna tell me?” Hanni stared up at her, then went to check the windows. Soon the cats could hear her phoning. Ryan came down the ladder, telescoped it, and carried it outside where she extended it full length against the house.

Swinging onto the roof, she removed her shoes and laid them in the gutter. Walking barefoot across the glazed clay tiles, she knelt beside the skylight. She examined every inch. There was no way this baby could leak. She checked the installation of roof tiles over its two-foot apron, where the roof slanted down. There was no hairline crack in either the Plexiglas bubble or in the casing. Intending to develop irrefutable proof, she went down to the backyard, got a plastic pail from the garage, filled it with water, carried it up, and slowly poured it over the unoffending skylight while Hanni watched from inside.

Only after four bucketfuls of water and no leak was Hanni willing to call Marianna again. She came back from the phone shaking her head.

“Not home. I got Sullivan. They haven’t been down. Maybe it’s from underneath the floor, maybe a broken water line.”

“There is no water line there,” Ryan said irritably. “The water lines, Hanni, are under the kitchen and bath.”

“Waste line?” Hanni said lamely.

“For a top interior designer, you awe me with your ignorance.”

“Just trying to be helpful.”

Ryan knelt, sniffing at the rug at close range, moving to smell several places. She looked up at Hanni. “I smell wine. Call her, Hanni. Ask her if she spilled wine. My god, if she tried to mop it up, with that amount of water-she must have spilled the whole bottle.”

“I don’t want to call again. Let’s take the rug up.”

Within ten minutes they had the wet rug up. Moving the car and truck, they spread it across the parking apron as if carpeting the driveway for royalty. While they were thus occupied, and Joe watched from the living room windows, Dulcie found Hanni’s purse in the kitchen and pawed inside searching for Hanni’s cell phone.

Not there.

The Landeau phone stood on the kitchen counter right above her, but she daren’t use it. Even as Joe stood watch, Ryan and Hanni returned to the house.

“Theywerehere,” Ryan grumbled, coming in. “And they spilled something. Did you tell Sullivan we’re laying the new rug tomorrow?”

“I told him.”

“Why didn’t he tell you what they did? We can’t lay the rug until we know for sure what this is. The only other possibility is groundwater, and I have a deep trench clear around the hillside. Maybe Marianna came down alone and didn’t tell Sullivan.”

Hanni raised an eyebrow.

“Have you checked your tape again? Maybe she left you a message.”

Hanni just looked at her, her short white hair catching a gleam through the skylight.

“Call your tape. Where’s your cell phone?”

“Forgot to charge it last night,” Hanni said. “Left it home in the charger.”

“If you’d get another battery�”

Hanni shrugged, and headed for the kitchen as Ryan stepped outside to stroke Rock. The dog glanced in toward the space behind the carved chest where the cats crouched, but then he grew rigid, looking nervously around the room and pulling to get inside. Hanni returned, looking at her watch.

“Marianna called my tape half an hour ago. Said she just woke up, said she was down day before yesterday and spilled a bottle of pinot noir, that she came down to tend to some errands and to arrange a birthday surprise for Sullivan-that it was too late to call me, that she hadn’t told Sullivan she was down here and she knew I wouldn’t spoil the surprise. She took a lot of time explaining it all,” Hanni said, amused.

Ryan laughed. “So. Cold-blooded Marianna has a lover?”

Dulcie glanced at Joe, her green eyes equally amused. Sullivan Landeau was out of town a lot, was on the boards of half-a-dozen companies. She had heard Ryan and Clyde speculating on what Marianna did for entertainment.

“She said the wine bottle spun and fell before she could grab it, that there was wine everywhere, that she sopped it up with towels, and sponged the rug.”

“Can you imagine Marianna Landeau sponging a rug?”

“Dallas was on my tape too. He has the report from ballistics. He wants you to go on back to your place, he’ll meet you there.”

Ryan had knelt to examine the wood floor. Looking up at Hanni, she stiffened. “Why my place, why not the station when it’s only a few blocks away? Why doesn’t he want me to come to the station?”

“He said he’d let himself in. Shall I come with you?”

“Why do I feel so cold? I have no reason to fear the ballistics report.”

“You didn’t kill him, so what’s the big deal?”

Ryan rose, biting her lip. As they turned to leave, the cats slipped out past them and dropped into the bushes, moving so close to Rock they brushed against his leg, startling the big dog. They were concealed among the lavender bushes when Ryan undid Rock’s leash.

Crossing to her truck as Hanni locked the house, Ryan was just getting into the cab when the Coldiron truck arrived, Louise driving. Hanni waved to her. “Good shopping?”

“Awesome,” the little woman said, laughing.

“You want a rug for one of your rentals?” Hanni gestured toward the ten-by-ten square of beige shag. “It’s nearly new. A bit damp. It smells like pinot noir.”

“Added bonus,” Louise said as Eby came up the drive.

The cats watched Ryan turn out onto the street as Louise and Eby and Hanni rolled up the rug. And still they hadn’t called Dallas to tell him they’d seen the old man, to give the detective the make and license of the unlikely car Gramps was driving.

“Senior citizens,” Ryan told the big silver dog as she turned out of the drive, glancing back at the Coldirons. ‘Tough as old boots.” Of the half-dozen older people she had met since she moved to the village, the Coldirons were not unusual. Theirs was a tough generation. She wondered if her own age group could half keep up with them, or with Charlie’s gray-haired aunt Wilma who walked miles every day, and could hold her own on the pistol range. Or with Cora Lee French or with sixty-some Mavity Flowers who still did forty hours a week cleaning houses. “Those folks were the depression children, the children of war, the survivors,” she told Rock. ‘Tough as alligator hide.” And she kept talking to the big dog to avoid thinking. She did not want to go home and face, Dallas’s ballistics report.

“She’s scared,” Dulcie said, watching from the bushes as Ryan’s red truck pulled away. “Scared to go home, afraid of what Dallas has found. If Rupert was shot with her stolen gun�”

“So someone set her up. Question is, what other contrived evidence did they leave for the police to find?” Joe watched Hanni help the Coldirons load the rug. When the truck and Hanni’s Mercedes pulled away, he rubbed his face against a warm boulder then leaped atop the smooth granite, looking around the garden. “What was the dog on about? What did he smell?” He stood looking, then dropped down again and trotted back along the drive sniffing at the concrete.

He picked up Eby’s scent, then that of Hanni and of the dog. He found the fainter scent, perhaps days old, of a woman, most likely Marianna Landeau. Nothing else. Whatever the dog had smelled, escaped him. His mind still on getting access to a phone and calling Dallas, he turned to look at Dulcie.

“It’s only ten blocks to Ryan’s place, and the day’s getting warm. Maybe she’ll leave the truck window down for a few minutes-right there in her own driveway. Maybe we can call Dallas while he’s still at her apartment.”

“Just a nice run,” Dulcie said, and she took off through the woods heading downhill toward Ryan’s duplex. Leaping bushes or brushing beneath them, she was thankful that she and Joe had been given more than the usual amount of feline stamina; most cats were sprinters, your average housecat was not made for long-distance running. Careening down the last hill to the back of Ryan’s apartment and around to the front, she wasn’t even panting hard.

A squad car sat in the drive beside Ryan’s truck. The cats smelled fresh coffee. They circled both vehicles, but all the windows were up; and the covered door handles were beyond a cat’s ability to manipulate. Joe leaped at them, trying, but it was no good. There was no chance of using either phone to call the detective. Joe gave her a sour look and they fled around the side of the duplex to the back, where the tiny bathroom window waited.

15 [��������: pic_16.jpg]

Leaping atthe sill, Joe snatched and clung, hanging by his claws, peering down into the empty bathroom, then dropping to the sink and to the linoleum. As Dulcie followed, faintly they heard Ryan and Dallas talking, their voices so solemn that Dulcie shivered.

She liked Ryan Flannery; the young woman was bold and bright. She liked her because Clyde did, and because she was Dallas Garza’s niece. Liked her because Ryan had taken hold of her life and straightened out the kinks, exercising an almost feline degree of sensible independence: If you’re not welcome, if you’re badly treated, make a new start on life.

Now that Ryan was just into her new life, she didn’t need this malicious attempt to ruin her.

From behind, Joe nudged her. “Get a move on.” She’d been crouched as still as if frozen at a mouse hole, overwhelmed by her own droughts. Trotting into the studio, out of sight of the kitchen, they slipped beneath Ryan’s daybed.

The hardwood floor was admirably clean, no sneeze-making dust, not a fuzz ball in sight. That was another plus for Ryan. There was something really depressing about finding the underside of a couch thick with stalagmites of ancient, congealed dirt, the dusty floor littered with bobby pins, lost pencils, and old gum wrappers, with tangles of debris that clung to the whiskers or was gritty to the paws.

Looking across the big room to the front windows, they could see neat piles of papers stacked on Ryan’s desk but they couldn’t see much of the kitchen, just the end of the table and Dallas’s shoulder. They could smell, besides fresh coffee, the greasy-sugar scent of doughnuts, and could hear the occasional cup clink against a saucer. Dallas said, “I wish your dad were here.”

“Please don’t call him, there’s no need for him to think about the murder just now, to take his mind off what he’s doing. I’ll tell him when he gets home, when he’s done with this training. You’re my dad too, you and Scotty. Except,youcan’t play that role just now.”

“I can play any hand I like. But it would be nice to have Mike here. You sure you don’t want to stay with me or with Hanni, not be alone?”

“I’m fine. If the killer had wanted me dead, he’d have come after me instead of Rupert. I need to do a ton of desk work, clean up a stack of letters, pay my bills. I did manage to do the Jakeses’ billing, I have that almost ready to mail.”

“I’m glad you’ve got this big guy.” The cats heard Dallas patting the silver dog.

“What did Captain Harper say when he called, when you told him there’d been a murder? I can imagine he wasn’t happy.”

“He didn’t say much, took it in stride. Said he and Charlie are having a great time in the city. They’re taking a couple of days to drive home, through the wine country. And before they leave San Francisco he’s going to make a contact for me. Something I’d rather he did in person.”

“About Rupert?”

“A couple of guys on the force owe me. Good friends. You remember Tom Wills and Jessie Parker.”

“Of course. They were partners. Tom’s wife teaches second grade.”

“I’m giving them a list of the women I know Rupert was involved with. They can do a rundown on them, and on their husbands and boyfriends. Here’s the list. Anyone you’d care to add? Or any facts that would help?”

The cats heard paper rattle, then a little silence. Then, “You were very thorough, all these years. I don’t know half these names. Barbara Saunders? Darlene Renthke? June Holbrook? Martie Holland? I haven’t a clue, I never heard of these women. My god. How many were there? And you never told me. This makes me feel so unclean. Well here are five I know, all right. And you can add Priscilla Bloom. She drives a little red Porsche with, very likely, marks from a tow chain on the rear bumper, and a citation on record for blocking traffic on the street in front of my house.”

Dallas laughed.

“So Max will spend his honeymoon getting that line of the investigation started,” Ryan said. “And on the way home, they’ll swing through San Andreas to check on the Fargers? I’ll bet Charlie’s thrilled, having to cancel a dream voyage.”

“I imagine they made that decision before they left the village. Doesn’t matter,” Dallas said. “Those two will have a long and happy honeymoon no matter where they are.”

There was longer silence, broken by doggy chuffing as if someone was feeding the weimaraner doughnuts. Ryan said, “I feel so stupid not to have heard anything that night, not to have waked up. You’re going to make him sick with doughnuts.”

“Why don’t you call Charlie on their cellular, see if she’ll let you put up a fence out back. It’s not the optimum yard but it’ll do.”

“I told you, I don’t plan to keep him.”

“Of course you’ll keep him. I wouldn’t want to try to take him away. When I touch him, you’re jealous as a hen with chicks.”

“Why does everyone in the family always know what I’m thinking! And what I intend to do!”

“He’s a stray, Ryan. He’s been abandoned. You going to take him to the pound, like you told Curtis? If he’d been lost, the owner would have been looking all over San Andreas for him.”

She sighed. “You look tired. Have you eaten anything this morning besides doughnuts? Did you have breakfast?”

“Eggs and bacon. I’m fine. Davis took the evidence up to the county lab herself, the casts of footprints, the dried mud she bagged, the garbage. She wasn’t happy with Bonner walking through the mud behind the garage. Between the gun and bloody rags in the trash, of course the footprints were important.”

The cats had heard that before, that police officers were too often the biggest contaminators of a crime scene. Cops walking through the evidence, maybe in a hurry to apprehend a prowler. It just went to show, life wasn’t perfect. What was a cop supposed to do, fly around on little angel wings?

“Davis did a good job photographing the prints,” Dallas added.“Shestayed out of the mud.”

“You’re stalling. Was it my gun that killed him?”

“It’s Sunday, Ryan. I had to get a ballistics man off his fishing boat. He wasn’t happy. The only reason I did was to keep from having to arrest you and set up an arraignment.”

“If it wasn’t my gun, you’d have told me right away.”

“I’ll have the full report tomorrow. But ballistics turned up enough to keep from booking you.”

“What!Itwasn’tmy gun? Why didn’t you tell me!”

“The two bullets in your garage wall were fired from your gun, but ballistics doesn’t think they killed Rupert. There was no blood or flesh on them.”

“But how�? Those holes in the wall were so small. They couldn’t be my loads, mine would have done more damage. The holes in the back of his head�” she said sickly. “What am I missing here?”

“Forensics says Rupert was shot at about six feet by a hard case thirty-eight bullet or maybe a thirty-two.”

“But I load hollow points. You know that.”

There was a long silence.

“What?” she said. “You know I load with hollow points.”

Another silence. They heard the dog’s toenails on the linoleum. Dallas said, “Are you sure of your load? Are you certain what you loaded?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

Another heavy pause as if each word took great effort. “Your thirty-eight, registered to you, with your prints on it, was loaded with hard case. Four rounds and two empty cylinders.”

“No. I loaded hollow point, that’s all I use except on the range.”

“Maybe you forgot to reload out there? Left the�”

“You know I use wad-cutters for practice. You know I wouldn’t leave those loads in.”

“Anyone can make a-”

“Didn’t,” Ryan said. “I remember reloading-with hollow point.”

The cats well understood about hollow-point ammo and why Ryan used it. If she ever had to shoot in self-defense, a hard shell could travel an incredible distance, the bullet might go right through the intended and hit someone beyond. They’d read about such cases. But a hollow point would stop in the object or person hit, and would be more certain to halt an attacker-and that was what defensive shooting was about. The only reason Ryan would shoot someone was if her life were threatened and she had no choice.

“Someone not only took my gun from the locked glove compartment,” she said in a shaky voice, “they reloaded it.”

“You want the last doughnut?”

“Eat it. Don’t give Rock any more, you know better.”

“We searched every inch of the garage again, came back while you were with Hanni, went through every piece of that damned stuff you have stored down there. Did you ever think of taking that clutter to the dump?”

“That stuff’s valuable, sooner or later I’ll use every piece of those wonderful old details. I’ll use it if I� if I’m still in the free world to use it.”

“Come on, Ryan. Your prints weren’t on the trigger of the Airweight, though it had been fired.”

“Whose prints�?” she began excitedly.

“None. No prints on the trigger. Your prints were on the smooth parts of the grip and on the holster we took from the glove compartment.”

“I cleaned the Airweight last week. Scotty and I spent the afternoon at the San Andreas range, while we were waiting for the plumber. Cleaned it, loaded it with hollow point and holstered it. I did not,” she said as if Dallas was staring at her, “reload with practice ammo.”

“And what did you do with the gun?”

“Dropped it in my purse, kept it with me in the trailer, put it in my glove compartment when I started home. Locked the compartment when I left the truck to load the windows, and again when I stopped to eat.”

“It was there when you left the restaurant and hit the road again? Did you look?”

“No, I didn’t look. The truck was locked. I could see it from the restaurant. No one bothered it. But I� I left the gun in the truck that night and the next-in the locked truck in the locked glove compartment. When I got home I was so tired, I just unloaded the windows and came up and fell into bed. And the next night, after the wedding, you were all over the truck. No one had bothered it.”

“I wasn’t into the glove compartment, wasn’t in the cab.”

“Someone,” Ryan said softly, “someone unlocked my truck the night I got home, or the next night. Down there in the drive. Unlocked the glove compartment, took my gun, reloaded it, and either carried it away and killed Rupert, or killed him here, after you left-while I was right here asleep. Not ten feet from him.

“And where,” she said, “was Rock, that night? Where were you, big boy, while all this was happening? Out running the neighborhood chasing the ladies?”

“The better question,” Dallas said, “is what would he do if it happened again? He has a strong feeling for you, now.

“Except, you don’t know his background or training. You don’t know what he’s trained to do. I’d feel better if you’d move in with me for a while.”

“You can’t baby-sit me twenty-four hours a day. Whoever killed Rupert could break into your downstairs in the middle of the night, just as easily as into my truck and garage-even if Scotty’s back, staying with you. He sleeps like� he wouldn’t hear anything. Rock,” Ryan said softly, “Rock and I will do just fine.”

Joe glanced at Dulcie. Had Rupert’s killer also prowled around the Landeau cottage that night? Was that what Rock had smelled this morning that sent him snarling and ready to attack?

Maybe the killer had been after Marianna too? Did he have some vendetta against Marianna Landeau as well as against Rupert and Ryan?

But what vendetta? What was the connection? Did the killer plan to murder Marianna, as well, and incriminate Ryan for that crime?

More puzzling still, Ryan had seen how the dog behaved at the Landeau cottage, but she hadn’t told Dallas. Did she think the dog’s wariness wasn’t important, that he had simply been startled by Eby Coldiron, by the sound of someone unseen approaching up the drive?

And that was only one crime, one set of players. What about the bombing? The cats needed urgently to pass on to Detective Garza the information about Curtis’s uncle Hurlie who had perhaps sheltered the boy when he ran away to San Andreas, who had perhaps been involved in the bomb-making. They needed to call Dallas, or call Harper himself on his cell phone before he arrived in San Andreas, let him know about Hurlie, and that the address Curtis gave Dallas was probably as fake as a rubber rodent stuffed in a mouse hole.

The cats could see, from beneath Ryan’s daybed, Ryan’s phone sitting on the desk, its summons so strong that Joe was tempted beyond reason to creep across the room and try phoning Harper. With his voice drowned by Ryan and Dallas, could he make a quick call?

Oh, right. And see his entire life and Dulcie’s irrefutably hit the fan.

Dallas said, “You’re starting Clyde’s job tomorrow, you’ll be too busy to worry while we get on with the investigation.”

“I’m thinking of putting Clyde off. I don’t want to start ripping into the roof, then have to leave him with the house torn apart.”

“Have you told him that?”

“No. We’re having dinner. I’ll tell him then.”

“Is your crew ready?”

“Two good men. But I don’t like to�”

“Can you call Scotty? Does he have to stay up there?”

“He’s just doing some landscaping, putting in some sprinklers and walks. I guess he could-”

“Call him,” Dallas said. “Get him down here and get on with the Damen job. I wish your dad was here. Call Scotty. You need to stay on schedule. Clyde’s easy,” he said, his voice lighter, “he’ll understand if we throw you in jail, if he has to live for a few weeks with the roof off his house.”