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

“The cottage was locked. I tried everything. Finally balanced on the branch of an oak tree and clawed through a roof vent, in through a filthy attic and down through the crawl space. Had to claw away the plywood cover like we did when those raccoons chased us.” She sneezed. “All dust and cobwebs. I got the plywood aside and slipped down on the closet shelf.

“Closet was empty, just some empty hangers. But the door was open. I looked out into the room, ready to hit the attic again and vanish. That cottage is just one big room, like a studio apartment. No one was there, nada. I searched the whole place. Found exactly nothing. Checked the dinky bath and kitchen, fought open every cupboard and drawer. Not one stolen garment. Not much of anything else except mouse droppings. It’s just a crummy rental, no better than where a homeless would crash.

“I was so mad that I’d wasted my time. I could have been hunting, or could have been tossing Dorriss’s place with you-couldhave been prowling the village with Kit,” she said gently, glancing down at the tattercoat. “I was about to storm out when someone opened the garage door. Shook the whole house, rumbling up. I crouched, ready to leap back to the attic. The garage door closed again, and something metal clanged in there. When the door between the garage and the house opened, I whipped around and dove under the couch.

“I could hear them giggling before I got a look, Dillon and her two schoolmates. Consuela wasn’t with them. They got some soft drinks from the fridge, some chips from the cupboard that the mice hadn’t been at, and they began to drag in clothes-from their car, I thought then. New clothes, Joe. Beautiful clothes. Leather. Cashmere. Silk. Piling them on the couch and daybed and chairs.

“They pushed the closet door wide open-it has a mirror on the inside-and they began trying on clothes and giggling, vamping, hamming it up. All the clothes had tags, tags hanging down from the couch in my face, every one from Alice’s Mirror.

“The blond girl, Candy, said they shouldn’t take anything, the cops would recognize whatever they wore. Leah, the tall one, said that was stupid, how would the cops be able to tell. It ended up, Leah and Candy each took a couple of leather jackets and some sweaters. Dillon didn’t take anything. She tried on clothes but put them down again. They talked about another job tonight, only to do it really early, just after the stores close. A different MO, Candy said, to throw the cops off. What a dim brain. She thinks the law won’t expect another job so soon, won’t be watching.”

“Did they say what store?”

Dulcie sighed. “The Sport Shop. But� I really don’t want to�”

“Dulcie, it doesn’t do Dillon any good to get away with this stuff. She’s going to be in trouble sooner or later. Better she gets it over with, before it’s something worse.”

“I suppose. But there’s more. I saw more.” She rose and began to pace. From the love seat, the kit watched her quietly.

“I followed them into the garage and slipped under a workbench, watched them hang the clothes in metal lockers. That’s the clanging I heard. They snapped a padlock on the locker and left. Five were already locked, Joe. They filled and locked four more. I didn’t see if they had a car out front. Leah used the garage opener to get out, I saw her drop it in her pocket as the door came down behind them.

“When they’d left, I bumped against the lockers. Leaped and thumped at them. None sounded hollow, they all sounded dull, crammed full.”

Joe was quiet. Then, “Do you want to call the station? Or shall I?”

She sneezed. “The whole scene makes me sick.” Resignedly she moved to the phone, hit the speaker button, and pawed in the number of the station. And reluctantly she did the deed. When she had finished telling the dispatcher what she knew, she stretched out on the desk blotter next to the torn papers and ragged brown envelope, looking very sad.

“It’s best,” Joe said, his ears down, the white strip on his nose creased into a frown.

Dulcie studied the pile of bills and the torn pages. “It’s all right for you to talk. You didn’t betray a friend.”

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The shadows of night seemed reluctant indeed to tuck themselves down around the village. In Joe Grey’s private tower the cats waited impatiently for darkness. Beneath Joe’s paws lay a new brown envelope containing a gallon plastic freezer bag. They had stuffed Marlin Dorriss’s bills and the torn notebook pages inside the clear container so that, when they delivered the evidence to the station, it would not cause a departmental panic. Would not trigger hasty emergency procedures to deal with a package that, at first touch, might blow the place sky high. Sealed with careful paws, and the excess air pressed out, the bag awaited only darkness to be hauled across the rooftops. Fidgeting, the messengers washed and groomed, willing night to hurry.

On the street below the Damen roof, a few tourists wandered in twos and threes and fours, and local residents hurried past heading home to hearth and supper. As the cats watched familiar cars turn up the side streets and disappear into carports or garages, Joe’s thoughts were on Marlin Dorriss, on what might happen when Dorriss opened his file drawer and found the bills missing, found the outdated substitutes in their place.

“So what’s he going to do?” Dulcie said. “If he finds the bills missing and reports the theft, then we’re staking out the wrong mouse hole. But if he’s guilty,” she said, smiling, “you won’t hear a word.” She gave Joe a long and appraising stare, her green eyes darkening in the slowly falling evening. “He reports it, you can write him off as a suspect. So what’s the big deal?” She touched his nose with a soft paw. “Relax, Joe. Relax and roll with it.”

But she gave him a narrow look. “You’re all fidgets and claws.Youknow this whole business is a gamble.” She leaned to nuzzle his whiskers. “I’ll bet my best wool blanket that you’ve nailed him, that you’ve got your thief.”

Joe looked at her and tried to shake off the edginess. As he licked the last grain of sand from the Dorriss front yard off his paw, dusk began to thicken slowly around them, a gentler light to soften the rooftops. He looked at Dulcie and Kit reclining on the new pillows in his tower and he had to smile at how much they enjoyed a bit of luxury. And soon beyond the arches of the tower the dark foliage of the pines and oaks began to blur. In the east the gibbous moon began to rise, a lopsided globe far brighter than they would have chosen for this particular trek. When at last darkness deepened across the rooftop shadows, the three cats rose and stretched.

Leaving Joe’s tower, Joe and Dulcie dragged the package between them. Hurrying across the roofs from concealing chimney to darkening overhang to sheltering branches, they skirted around second-floor windows where some apartment dweller or late office worker might be idly looking out. They remembered too well how Charlie had first glimpsed them on the rooftops and had heard Dulcie laugh, and how she began, then, to wonder.

Walking home from a later supper, Charlie had looked up to see the cats running along the peaks and had recognized against the bright night sky Joe Grey’s docked tail and white markings. Hearing a young, delighted laugh, she had been puzzled. That incident combined with several others had led Charlie to guess the truth about them-but Charlie was an exception. Most humans would not make that leap, would not be willing to entertain such an amazing concept.

Now, above the rooftops, above the hurrying cats the moon lifted higher, increasing its glow and diminishing the size of the shadows. The night wind blew colder. Their hard-won package grew heavier, pulling at neck and shoulder muscles, making their jaws ache. Joe and Dulcie pushed ahead, dodging patches of light, ducking beneath branches, their teeth deep in the heavy packet. The kit trailed behind, unusually quiet, not pressing to help them. Then just across the last street lay the long expanse of the courthouse roof and the roof of Molena Point PD, the rounded clay tiles gleaming in the moonlight.

The chasm of the street was wide. One ancient oak spanned above the concrete, its branches meeting the smaller branches of its counterpart that grew close to the opposite sidewalk. Dragging their burden across the thick, leafy limb, trying not to hang it up among the twigs or to drop it, Joe and Dulcie felt as graceful as a pair of clipped-wing pigeons flopping among the branches. The kit crossed on a branch above them, precarious and uncertain herself as she watched their unsteady progress.

Reaching the courthouse roof, the three cats together hauled their prize the long length of the courthouse, bumping on the round tiles and into the oak tree that stood beside the police department. Now they had three choices.

They could haul the envelope down to the front entry and prop it against the glass door. They could hike it around back, to the locked back door that opened on the police parking lot where Harper and the two detectives usually left their cars, where Harper himself would more likely find it. The time was seven P.M. Watch would change at eight. Most of the officers and the dispatcher would leave by the front door, heading for their personal cars that were parked in the front lot. The first officer out would see the package and retrieve it, and go back to log it in and alert the watch commander.Voila,mission accomplished.

Or, third choice, they could shove the plastic package through the high bars of the holding cell window. It would land behind the barred door, not ten feet from where the dispatcher ruled over the front of the station. Surely she would see it and take it into safe custody-if she didn’t hit the panic button.

Looking through the depths of the oak leaves to the cell window, Dulcie was in favor of that route. “We drop it down there, no one outside on the street is going to see it and pick it up.”

“Right,” Joe said, padding along the branch to the barred window and peering down inside. “Except that the cell’s occupied. Can’t you smell him?” He twitched his nose, flehming at the scent-but then, that cell never smelled like a flower garden.

Below them, stretched out on the bunk lay a rumpled, sleeping body, his arms flailed out, one hand resting on the floor. A tall, thin guy maybe in his late twenties, with long dirty hair, dirty ragged clothes, and a handlebar mustache. He did not look or smell like someone they wanted to trust with the evidence. Even if he was indeed asleep, the thud of the dropping package would very likely wake him.

“Maybe he’s just been arrested,” Dulcie said. “Maybe he’s waiting to be booked, then they’ll take him on back to the jail.”

“And maybe not,” Joe said. “Do you see anyone down there getting ready to book him?” Beyond the bars of the holding cell door, the area around the dispatcher’s counter and the booking counter was empty. They saw only the dispatcher herself in her open cubicle, talking on the radio, apparently to an officer who, somewhere in the village, was just leaving the scene of a settled domestic dispute-always a touchy call.

Dulcie watched the drunk sleeping below them. “I’lltakethe package in. I can drop down there with it, a lot quieter than we can toss it. I can haul it through the barred door without waking him, without anyone seeing me.”

“And what if he isn’t asleep? What a story he’d have to tell the cops, to trade for a quick release. ‘I know how that package got in here, officer. I saw a cat drop down in here carrying that thing in its mouth.’”

“He’s drunk, Joe. They’re going to believe him? I can be in there and down the hall to Harper’s office before his boozy head clears, before he figures out what he saw.”

“And even if no one sees you, Dulcie, when Harper finds the evidence deposited neatly on his desk, what then? He won’t ask how it got past the dispatcher? And past his new, state-of-the-art security system? He won’t start suspecting one of his own officers?” He stared at Dulcie. “He starts suspecting Garza or Davis, who both know he wants those bills.Thenit would hit the fan.”

“He’s going to ask questions anyway.”

“He isn’t going to ask questions if it isn’t found inside.”

“But�”

“Wait,” Joe said. “Someone’s coming.”

And, like Diana smiling on sainted lovers, good luck smiled on the two cats. They watched Officer Brennan coming down the hall, his uniform tight over his protruding stomach.

Below them, metal clanged against metal as Brennan opened the barred door, hustled the drunk awake, and marched him out of the cell. The guy half fell against the dispatcher’s counter, staggered against the booking counter, then stumbled away in front of Brennan, down the hall toward the back door and the jail.

The minute he was gone the cats hauled the package through the oak tree’s snatching foliage and over the sill and shoved it through the bars. It fell with a hushing, sliding thump just inside the cell door that brought the dispatcher to her feet, startled.

This particular dispatcher was a full-fledged officer. She was armed, and she approached the cell with her hand on her holstered weapon. Above her, the gun-shy cats backed away up the tree. They could just see her studying the packet then staring above her, searching the high, open window. Then she whirled away, back to her station. They heard her quick footsteps, then the building’s shrill alarm.

Officers came running from the back offices, and out the front door. Before the cats could leap across the moonlit roofs to freedom, cops were swarming out wielding handheld searchlights, shining them toward the roof and into the tree. They hunched down deep among the deepest leaves, their reflective eyes tight shut.

Beside Dulcie, the kit was not secretly smiling at the commotion, as she usually would be. Her tail was not twitching and dancing with excitement. She was deeply quiet. The kit’s grieving worried Dulcie.

When the torches swung away at last, to sweep on across the parking lot and gardens, within the prickly leaves the three cats peered out. Below them, patrol cars had swung around from the back of the building to angle across the driveways and along the street, blocking the escape of all other vehicles. And officers on foot surrounded the gardens, their searchlights leaping from bush to bush and into the parked cars. The lights shone across the moon-bright roofs behind the cats. They were trapped like three treed possums.

But whilethe cats crouched within the heavy oak leaves wishing the moonlight and searchlights would vanish, wishing mightily for absolute darkness, Kate Osborne was doing her best to avoid the dark.

She had left work a bit late, finishing up some ordering and some computer sketches. It was just six thirty, but she was so tired and so ravenously hungry that she hardly cared if tonight a whole battalion of strangers followed her. Going down the elevator from her office to the parking garage, slipping quickly into her car and pulling out into the lighted street, half of her wanted to go straight home, wolf down a sandwich, and fall into bed. The other half wanted a nice, warming dinner that she didn’t have to lift a hand over, wanted to sit at a cozy table and be waited on-wanted not to be alone for a while longer, but to remain safely among people.

For days after the Greenlaws’ deaths she didn’t think she was followed. She kept watch around her but didn’t see anyone; but then on Thursday when she looked out her apartment window she had seen the same man standing in a doorway across the street. She did not simply imagine it was the same man. His sloped shoulders and stance were the same. And this time she had gotten a good look at his pale muddy hair, his sloping forehead and large nose.

If he meant to harm her, why did he just stand there? She almost wished, with a perverse cold fear, that instead of following, hewouldapproach her, that he would come upstairs and knock on her door because she had grown more angry than afraid. Angry at this harassment, at this invasion of her privacy, at this hampering of her free, easy movement around the city.

Besides the pepper spray, she had begun to carry a pair of scissors in her purse, a decision that was probably incredibly stupid. She wished she weren’t such a wuss, that she’d learned karate or knew how to handle a gun, that she had some skill that would make her feel less vulnerable.

Both Hanni and Hanni’s sister, Ryan, were comfortable and competent with firearms. Having grown up in a police family they had been trained early and well. And Charlie, too, since she married Max, had learned the same careful, responsible skills. Such expertise and confidence would be comforting now.

She decided to stop for dinner, and to hell with being followed. Driving through the crowded, narrow streets, she turned north up Columbus toward a favorite small seafood cafe. Dolphin’s would be well lighted, and the sidewalk would be busy with pedestrians this time of evening. Just two blocks from the restaurant she was lucky to spot a car pulling out, and she swerved in.

Locking her car and hurrying up the street, she was half a block from Dolphin’s when she glanced back and saw the same man following her. She was so angry she almost approached him, pepper spray in hand

But then fear filled her, and she hurried on toward Dolphin’s, trying to stay among people, she did not like living this way. She thought, not for the first time, of how it would be when she chucked city life and moved home to Molena Point. Where she could indeed feel safe again. Crossing the street away from him as he followed, she hurried on-but when she glanced in the shop windows where she could see behind her, he had crossed, too. He was pacing her, his thin reflection moving jaggedly from one square of dark glass to the next. When she slowed, he slowed.

When she quickened her step, so did he. When she reached Dolphin’s she slipped quickly inside and pulled the door closed hard behind her. She’d have liked to lock it.

Her favorite waitress, Annette, looked up from clearing a table and smiled, and nodded toward her usual table. Annette was rotund, in her thirties, with a slender, fine-boned face that seemed to belong to a much thinner woman. She had lovely dark eyes and a beautiful complexion. As Kate crossed the restaurant between the crowded tables she kept her back to the window. But when she glanced around, the man stood outside looking in through the glass.

When she stared hard at him, he moved on. When he’d passed beyond her view she sat down at the table with her back to the wall, where she could see the street. Annette brought her usual pot of tea and paused, a question in her eyes. Kate said nothing. She ordered a bourbon and soda as well, and a shrimp melt on French and a salad. Annette stood a few minutes making small talk, as Kate continued to watch the window.

Annette and her husband, an army sergeant, had moved to San Francisco when he was transferred to the Presidio. She liked to tell Kate of the new places she had discovered in the city, and Kate loved to make suggestions. The absence of the man outside the glass did not ease Kate’s anxiety, he could be just down the street waiting for her, maybe standing against the next building just beyond the window. The early evening street did not, tonight, hold its usual charm. The cozy shops along this block presented, tonight, a more threatening aspect of North Beach. She felt safe only within the restaurant, she did not like to think about going out again. She thought, when she was ready to leave, she might call the police.

But what kind of complaint would she make? The man hadn’t confronted her, he hadn’t touched or spoken to her. She could only say she’d been followed. Very likely they would think she was a nut case, imagining things. She supposed she could go out through the kitchen, to the alley, slip around the block to her car. She closed her eyes, trying to slow her pounding heart.

When she opened her eyes she saw him directly across the street walking among a crowd of tourists. Same man, looking directly across to Dolphin’s windows, his slumped shoulders and rocking walk making him easy to recognize. When he’d passed beyond her view she rose and moved to the front window, standing to the side where she wouldn’t be seen.

He had crossed to her side of the street but was heading away; soon he disappeared. Had he followed her from her office? Followed her clear across town and somehow found a parking spot near where she parked? Or had he already known her favorite small restaurants? Had he simply swung by each, looking for her? Why hadn’t she gone somewhere different, someplace she seldom frequented? She was still at the window when a young woman burst in through the front door, turning to look back at the street.

She looked familiar, and Kate watched her with curiosity. She was looking around for someone. When she spotted Kate she nearly lunged at her.

“Kate? Yes, you are Kate Osborne?”

Kate had started to back away-but shedidknow this woman. Nancy something, the design client who had approached her at the office, whom she had turned over to another designer. She was a delicate, elegant person, maybe in her early thirties. Beautifully groomed with a flawless creamy complexion, her face scrubbed clean, her blue-black hair smoothed into a simple chignon. She had wanted to do her apartment with South American furnishings; Kate had been sorry to turn down the project. The woman was simply dressed in a cream skirt and creamy sweater and carried a pale silk raincoat. Her dark eyes were huge. “YouareKate Osborne?” she repeated. “We met�”

“Yes,” Kate said. “I remember. You-What’s wrong? You look distressed.”

“Could we step away from the window? There’s� I think� I know it sounds wild, but I think a man has been following you.”

Kate led her to the small corner table. The young woman sat down so that she, too, could see the street. “I’m Nancy Westervelt.”

“Yes. I hope you found a designer you will enjoy working with.”

“I have an appointment next week. Thank you.” The woman chafed her hands together lightly, as if she were cold. “Tonight when I saw you on the street I thought I recognized you. When I turned to look, my attention was caught by a man who seemed to be following you. I watched him. When you came in the restaurant he drew back out of sight but then in a minute he slipped forward and looked in the window. Then he went on past, crossed the street, came back along the other side, and kept watching. He so bothered me that I knew I must tell you.”

“I appreciate that. When did you first notice him?”

“I saw you get out of your car. He was in a cab right behind you, he got out as you were parking. He started right off following you, though I didn’t realize at first what he was doing.

“Maybe it’s nothing, but it frightened me.” Nancy’s voice was soft and well modulated. They sat a few minutes discussing her design project, waiting to see if he would return, both watching the window. Then, in the shadowed door of a T-shirt shop across the street the man appeared, as if perhaps he had been there for a while but had just stepped forward. Nervously Kate glanced toward the kitchen, where the back door opened to the alley.

The young woman’s eyes widened. “Can you go out the back? If you could slip out that way, and around to your car� you could take my raincoat, there’s a hat in the pocket, you could pull that down over your hair.”

Kate almost laughed, the idea of a disguise was so bizarre. And what if he caught her in the back alley? She would like to call the police, she was really tired of this. She wished she knew the names of the two detectives that Dallas Garza had worked with here in the city. If they knew that she was a friend of Garza’s, would they be more likely to help her? More likely to believe that she’d been followed, and to listen to her?

But she didn’t know their names, and anyway she would be embarrassed to call the busy San Francisco PD and ask them to send out a patrol car for something so� something that, when she repeated it back to herself, seemed so without substance.He has been following me for weeks, I see him standing in doorways�

If her car or her apartment had been broken into, the police would take her seriously. But this� Well, she had to do something. Glancing toward the kitchen, she rose.

Nancy rose with her, handing her the raincoat. “I’ll go out with you. He won’t expect to see two women.”

Sliding some money onto the table, Kate followed her toward the back. Watching Nancy, she tried not to warm to the woman’s gentle manner-but why did she have to be so suspicious? Nancy Westervelt was only trying to help her, was only concerned for her. As they paused by the door to the kitchen, Kate pulled on the raincoat, then the hat, tucking her blond hair up inside. She felt better doing something positive, even if this was melodramatic. Nancy looked hard at her. “I was followed once.” She was quiet a moment. “It wasn’t nice. It wasn’t something I’ll forget.”

A faint nausea touched Kate, a shaky sickness.

As they moved through the kitchen among the busy chefs, among hot, delicious dinners being prepared along the big stainless-steel tables, the workers frowned at them, puzzled. A round, dark-eyed chef appraised Kate so critically that she thought he would tell them to leave. But then Annette caught up with them, handing Kate a foil-wrapped package, Kate could smell the warm shrimp melt. And quickly Annette led them through the kitchen, shepherding them with authority. Between a stack of cans and boxes, and storage lockers, they approached the back screen door covered by a dark security grid.

“Wait here.” Annette’s thin, oval face was quietly serious. “Let me look out the back window.” She disappeared into a storeroom, but was gone only a moment. Returning, she didn’t ask questions. “There’s no one there that I can see, the alley looks empty.”

They slipped out through the screen door fast, Nancy going first, Kate staying close behind her shrouded in the cream raincoat, the slouch hat pulled down nearly to her eyebrows. She felt like Groucho Marx in drag; she wondered if the lame disguise would fool anyone. Hurrying beside Nancy along the faintly lit alley she headed for the side street that would take them to Columbus again and her car.

20 [��������: pic_21.jpg]

The roof of the courthouse reflected bright moonlight, offering no dark niche where a cat could hide. Along the edges of the tile roof, harsh searchlights scanned the night’s shadows bleeding up into the sky. Only within the gloom of the oak tree’s thick foliage, where the leaves caressed the roof of the MolenaPoint PD, was there safety. The three cats huddled down, blending as well as they could among the shadows, their paler parts carefully concealed from the dazzling beams. Joe Grey’s white chest, nose, and paws were tucked under him as neatly as if he were a rolled-up ball of gray yarn.

It might seem overkill to send the entire department out looking for whoever had dumped that clear plastic package in through the holding cell window. But these days, any object tossed into a police building had to be regarded with suspicion. Anything, any time, could be a bomb. For too many, law enforcement had become the enemy.

Just when searchlights ceased to scour the parking lot and progressed deeper into the village, a squad car pulled in from the street to park in the red zone facing the station. The cats watched warily.

Young Officer Rordan was behind the wheel. The thin, dark, more-seasoned Officer Sacks rode in the passenger seat. Had they picked up someone they thought had dumped the package, some unintended victim of feline subterfuge? But then the cats saw the three figures in the backseat.

All were female, slim, and young; one with pale hair piled on top of her head, one a tall girl with long dark hair tied back in a ponytail. And, a too-familiar figure with a sassy bob that, even in the glow of the vapor lights, gleamed as red as new rust.

Stepping from the vehicle, Officers Rordan and Sacks ordered the girls out. The three crawled out of the back, angry and disheveled, and were marched into the station, Candy and Leah scowling with rage. Dillon looked frightened and ashamed. Officer Sacks carried two large paper grocery bags crammed full of clothes; the cats could see bits of leather and velour, an expensive-looking running shoe. The officers and their prisoners disappeared inside, and the cats heard a metal door slam. Pushing through the oak’s thick leaves to the high barred window, they peered down into the holding cell.

The girls sat sprawled on the stained bunk, all three now sullen and defiant. In the style of fashion-conscious young teens, none was dressed warm enough for the chill evening. Candy wore tight faded jeans, a white tank top that hiked well above her middle, and goose bumps. She slouched at the far end of the bunk watching as Officer Sacks booked Leah and then Dillon: name and address, parents’ names, school, and any statement they cared to make. Leah’s answers were so rude the cats wondered if shewantedto be locked up for the night or perhaps longer. Her thin, sagging T-shirt looked no warmer than Candy’s tank top. Her lipstick was the color of raspberry jam. Only Dillon answered Sacks’s questions with any civility, as she glanced past him into the station. Was she looking for Captain Harper, perhaps hoping he wasn’t there? She was wearing red jeans and an old, creased leather jacket with nothing but a bra underneath. Her boots were thick and heavy, of the kind that, well aimed, could break a person’s leg. When Sacks finished with the girls, they lounged on the hard bunk, scowling and silent.

Max Harper arrived some twenty minutes later. He hardly glanced at the dispatcher’s counter but went directly to the cell, his expression tightly controlled, a look that the cats knew very well. A line in his cheek twitched with anger, with disappointment. Dillon Thurwell was, in many respects, as close to a daughter as Max Harper might ever have.

Opening the cell door, he summoned the two arresting officers and sent Leah and Candy back to the jail to be locked up there. Then he turned his attention to Dillon. Stepping into the cell and locking the door behind him, he stood looking down at her, studying the top of her head as she sat staring at the floor. Watching them, the cats crowded against the bars, their ears back, not liking the hurt they could see in Max Harper’s stern face. When Dillon wouldn’t look up at him, he sat down beside her.

“I called your parents.” He took her chin in his hand, turned her face so she had to look up at him. Her scowl was fierce, and frightened.

“I want to hear your version. I want to hear exactly what you three did tonight.”

“If you called my dad, why isn’t he here? How come he’s taking so long?”

“I called him on my way down to the station. It’s been only a few minutes. Tell me what happened, Dillon. Tell me now.”

“Iknow the drill!” she snapped. “It will go easier for me if I tell the truth. Everything will be cool if I tell you all about it. The truth and only the truth and that will make life just peachy.”

“Which one of you broke the lock?” Harper asked quietly.

No answer.

His expression didn’t change. “Who went in through the window?”

Nothing.

“You girls planned your other burglaries more smoothly than this one. I have to say, you accomplished some fancy footwork at Alice’s Mirror. Even if it was all going to go against you, in the end.”

She looked at him, surprised, then scowled harder. “I broke the lock.I went through the window.I handed the stuff out. Okay? So what? That’s some kind of federal offense?”

“If it were a federal offense I wouldn’t have to mess with you. I’d turn you over to the feds. Where’s the fourth member of your little club? Where’s Consuela? She slip out before my officers arrived? Leave you to take the heat?”

“She wasn’t there,” Dillon said. “She’s off somewhere.”

“Off where?”

“How would I know.”

“Did she set this burglary up before she left?”

Dillon didn’t answer.

“Or did you plan it yourselves, without her? You’ve been busy, haven’t you, teaching yourself how to steal.” He looked steadily at her. “Where do you plan to go with that?”

No response. She tapped her boot on the concrete in a steady and irritating rhythm.

“I don’t have to spell it out for you, Dillon. You know how to make your own choices. You’re building a life here. You don’t get to go back and try again, you don’t get to start over.”

Harper looked up when Officer Sacks came through the front door carrying two big paper drink containers with straws stuck in the lids. As Sacks handed them through the bars to Harper, the cats sniffed the sweet smell of chocolate. When Harper handed a container to Dillon, she looked like she wanted to throw it in his face. He watched her, amused, while he sipped on his own malt. From above them, the cats watched Dillon, equally amused. She refused to touch the malt, though she was probably thirsty and hungry, and much in need of a sugar fix, after her anger and fear. A chocolate malt, to a young girl, had to be like a nice juicy mouse to a cat who was hungry and in need.

Max Harper sat with Dillon for some time not talking, finishing his malt. Dillon tasted hers at last, glanced ashamedly at him, and ended up slurping the contents as if she was indeed starving. Sitting on the bunk beside her, Harper put his arm around her. Dillon, letting her guard down, looked now on the verge of tears. But she glanced up scowling again when the front door of the station opened.

Helen Thurwell entered. The cats were pleased to see that she had come, until they saw Marlin Dorriss behind her. Talk about bad taste, talk about thoughtless and rude.

The couple was dressed to the nines, Dorriss in a dinner jacket, Helen in a long slim black dress with a V-neck, a gem glittering against her throat, suspended on a platinum chain.

Moving to the barred cell door, Helen stood looking in at her daughter. Her frown of distaste included not only the jail cell, but Captain Harper himself. Behind her, Marlin Dorriss stood not five feet from the dispatcher’s desk, his back to the sealed freezer bag that lay in plain sight, displaying his paid Visa bills and the torn pages of the little notebook. The cats, watching the potentially explosive scene, were rigid, all three hearts pounding in double time. As Dorriss turned toward the counter, Joe Grey sucked in a breath ready to yowl, desperate to create a diversion-but at the same moment the dispatcher slid the packet underneath the counter out of sight. Both Joe and Dulcie went limp, and their pounding hearts slowed.

Officer Jennifer Keen was a rookie who filled the dispatcher position when the regular dispatchers took time off. She was a pretty brunette with a voice as hoarse as sandpaper. Having glanced at the contents of the plastic package, she had been adequately quick on the draw.

At the cell door, Helen looked from Harper to her daughter. “Which one of you wants to talk?” Her look at Harper seemed almost to imply that the break and enter had been his fault. The cats wondered where Dillon’s father was. John Thurwell was the nurturing one, the wronged parent who stayed home with Dillon while her mother played fast and loose. It was her father who should be with Dillon now.

Within the cell, Max Harper sat quietly beside Dillon waiting for her to explain to her mother what she had been unwilling to tell him. Dillon was silent, staring at the floor.

Harper opened the cell door and Helen, with an expression of extreme distaste, stepped inside. Closing the cell door behind her, he stood to the side, just below the cell window. Across the foyer, Marlin Dorriss’s expression where he stood beside the dispatcher’s desk was cool with disdain, as if his relationship with Helen Thurwell really ought not to include involvements with the police, or with her errant daughter.

Watching him, Joe Grey wondered. What was it about Dorriss’s expression? Filled with distaste, but something deep down, as well, seemed tense with apprehension. And as Helen tried to get Dillon to tell her what had happened, and Dillon remained silent and uncooperative, Dorriss began to fidget. At last Helen turned to him.

“I know you have to get to the airport, Marlin. I’ll walk the few blocks home; it’s a nice evening.” Summarily dismissing him, she reached through the bars of the closed door. He took her hand, pressed her hand in both of his, but did not offer to kiss her.

Not in front of her daughter? Or not in front of the captain? Or did he not want to get that close to the bars of a jail cell?

When Dorriss left the station the cats slipped to the edge of the roof and watched him swing into his black Mercedes. Heading for an evening flight, where? A trip that would remove him from the village for how long?

When Dorriss had gone and the cats looked again down into the cell, Harper was holding a police report, reading it to Helen in a gesture the cats thought was as much to shame her as to shame Dillon.

The burglary had occurred at the Sports Shop on Lincoln Street. The officers had found the lock on the back door broken, and the girls in possession of some five thousand dollars’ worth of imported sweaters, leather coats, and top-of-the-line running shoes.

“How doyouknow how much it was worth?” Helen challenged.

“My officers can add,” Harper told her. “They can read price tags. Mrs. Barker is on her way in.” He looked at Dillon, repeating his earlier questions. “Who took the stuff, Dillon? Who handled the breakin, and who stood watch?”

“I took it! I broke in, I told you! They stood watch. I took the stuff. Okay? How come we didn’t hear the alarm?”

“Silent alarm,” Harper said. “It alerts the security firm. I guess, this time, you didn’t do your homework.” According to the report, the two officers arrived on the scene as Dillon handed out the first bag. Apparently neither Candy nor Leah had seen the two officers approach them among the shadows of the alley.

Max Harper’s lecture to Dillon was short, to the point, and not appreciated by Helen Thurwell. “You are fourteen years old, Dillon. In four years you’ll be responsible for your own physical, financial, and emotional well-being. It takes some effort and thought to equip yourself for that, for the time when you’ll have no one but yourself to lean on.”

He put his hands on Dillon’s shoulders. He looked a long time at her, the kind of look as when she’d done something stupid that had endangered a good horse. He tilted her chin, again forcing her to look at him. “You’ve learned to handle a horse competently, under difficult conditions. Now it’s time to remember your lessons, to treat yourself with equal respect.

“You cannot,” he told her, “let someone else’s emotional baggage cripple you. Even if that someone is your mother.” He looked hard at her. “You cannot cripple yourself to teach your mother a lesson.”

Helen Thurwell looked mad enough to hit Harper, looked like she would grab him, jerk him around, and punch him. Dillon glared at him, but angry tears were running down. He put his arms around her and pulled her close. Above them, the cats hardly breathed. They were so caught by the drama, they hung halfway in between the window bars. The vicissitudes of humanity were sometimes so overwhelming, the scene they witnessed was so emotionally draining, that when Dillon’s father arrived to take his daughter home, the cats felt like three limp dishrags hung to dry in the branches.

21 [��������: pic_22.jpg]

Crossing the sidewalk quickly to the passenger side of her car, Kate unlocked the door meaning to slide across to the driver’s side; hoping she wouldn’t be noticed from across the street. Turning to thank Nancy, who had been more than kind to help her, Kate caught her breath:

Nancy came at her fast, pushed her hard across the console to the driver’s seat, bruising her leg, and swung in behind her. “Move it! He’s coming!”

Kate stared at the girl.

“He’s coming. Let me out in a block or two. Give me the coat, maybe I can mislead him.”

Kate started the car. For a second, the look in Nancy’s dark eyes iced her blood, but then she saw him; he came running from between two buildings. She revved the engine and burned rubber, skidding away from the curb. As he ran beneath a streetlight she saw his face, but at an angle that startled her.

He looked like the waiter who had died in the gallery.

Oh, but she must be wrong. Driving as fast as she dared, she was too busy dodging cars to look again. As she maneuvered past other traffic, the two faces shone in her mind like two portraits flashed on a screen. The same high sloping forehead, the same large nose and thin face.

When she had seen the waiter that night, his looks had startled her. She hadn’t known why. She even then must have seen his resemblance to the man who had followed her. Swerving around a corner heading home, she glanced at Nancy.

The woman was shrugging into the coat Kate had shed, pulling the hat down over her face. When Kate was some ten blocks from the restaurant, when she was sure that no car was following, she stopped at a well-lit corner beside an open grocery where Nancy might take shelter and call a cab. Kate had started to thank her when the girl shoved a gun in her ribs.

Her voice was less cultured now, quick and forceful. “He won’t follow you now. Move it. Get rolling.” The gun was a black automatic. Kate didn’t know much about guns. She had no idea whether the safety was on or off, no idea how to tell if it was loaded, though she thought that the clip was in place.

“Where’s the jewelry?”

“In� in my apartment.”

“Try again. We already tossed your apartment. If we go there now and you can’t produce the jewelry, I’ll kill you.”

“There’s a ruby choker in my apartment. I can give you that.”

“I have the choker. Where’s the rest, the other nine pieces?”

Kate studied the traffic, wanting to jam her foot hard on the gas and swerve into an oncoming car, to cause such a wreck the police would be called and a crowd would gather. Stopping at a signal, staring at the gun, she was afraid to jump out of the car and try to run, afraid the woman would shoot. Warily Kate watched her. What was it about her face, something strangely familiar and unsettling?

The day Nancy Westervelt came to her office, wanting a designer for her new apartment, she had been waiting for Kate not in the reception area but in Kate’s private office. Kate had come in to find her standing at the window looking out at the street, not four feet from Kate’s desk and file cabinet. Had she been searching the desk?

She looked over defiantly into the woman’s dark eyes, trying to imagine Nancy Westervelt’s smoothly coiffed hair frizzled in a black cloud, imagine her eyes heavily lined with black, and thick, nearly black lipstick. When the light changed, Kate nearly ran into the car ahead: she was looking at the young woman from the village, at the woman who had come here to rob her.

Turning onto Stockton, where she had to stop for a cable car, she looked over at her passenger, trying to ignore the gun pointed at her. Surely, above the gun barrel, Consuela Benton looked back at her.

She should have known. Kate remembered cloying perfume, heavy, cheap jewelry, a low-cut tank top tight across her breasts-she should have known at once, there in her office or certainly the minute the woman walked into the restaurant. But this woman was a master of change. From a frowzy teenager to this sophisticate. Who would guess? Moving belatedly ahead with the traffic, she felt as if she was in some sadistic fun house, felt so off balance she nearly did wreck the car, skidding sideways into the next lane.

“Watch your driving! Answer me! Are they in your office?” Her voice was shriller, harsh with impatience.

“I rented another safe deposit box. After you stole my key and check carbon. Do you think the bank doesn’t have your fingerprints? Do you think the police won’t-”

“I wore gloves. You did not rent a new deposit box, not in that bank or any bank in this city.”

Kate laughed. “That bank knows the story. You won’t learn where from them; you won’t get into that box.”

Consuela poked her hard with the gun. “I’ll ask you one last time. Where is the jewelry? You answer me or our friend will take over. He’s directly behind us, in the gray car. Are the jewels in your office?”

“You’re welcome to look if you like.” Ignoring honking horns and skidding brakes Kate swung a U-turn in the middle of the block and headed across town for her office. Her head was pounding. She felt ice cold, then the next moment hot and flushed. She wondered if she could swerve the car hard and wrest the gun away. She wished she knew more about firearms. Driving in silence, trying to think of a plan, then at last pulling up beside the darkened office building, she felt totally defeated. She knew nothing about how to defend herself. As the woman instructed, Kate turned down into the underground parking garage.

In the greasy yellow glow of the vapor bulbs, the garage was empty of all but a few cars. Consuela made her slide back across and get out the passenger side. The woman walked so close to her they could have been joined at the hip, the gun under her coat pressed against Kate like a scene from some gangster movie. Kate tried to imagine kneeing her in the groin, jabbing the heel of her hand to the girl’s chin or nose, hurting her bad enough to crumple her. Imagined herself grabbing the gun-imagined herself, untrained and uncertain, making a mess of it and ending up shot, maybe dead. Inadequate did not half describe her sense of frustration; she hated her ineptitude and cowardliness. Ringing for the elevator and moving inside it with Consuela, she punched the fifth floor.

Unlocking the outer office door and switching on the lights, Kate crossed the reception area, with its pale, deeply carved carpet and its mix of antique and contemporary furnishings, its handsome potted plants and rich oil paintings. When she didn’t move fast enough, the gun barrel poked her in the back. Unlocking the door to her office, she stepped directly to the file cabinet and unlocked that. There was no point in pretending the jewels weren’t there. Opening the bottom drawer, she reached to the back, drawing out the plain little cardboard box.

“Open it. Pull the tape off.”

Reaching for her desk scissors, Kate imagined stabbing Consuela more quickly than Consuela could pull the trigger, but instead, of course, she obeyed, cutting the tape and opening the lid, removing the little suede evening bag. Opening its clasp, she tipped out the nine pieces of jewelry onto the blotter. The silver and topaz choker she had worn to Charlie’s party. A ruby pendant, two diamond bracelets, a gold and onyx necklace, two rings, one set with diamonds, one with a sapphire, and an emerald bracelet and choker, the jewels and heavy gold settings flashing in the overhead lights, the strange medieval design fascinating Kate even now.

“Put them back in the box. Tape it up.”

Kate put the pieces back into the blue suede bag, lay that in the box, and fetched tape from her desk drawer. When it was sealed she watched the girl work the box into her raincoat pocket, never turning the gun or her gaze from Kate. Did Consuela mean to kill her now, and leave her body to be found by the janitor?

Consuela forced her back through the reception room and into the elevator, shoving her out again into the parking garage. “Unlock the car.”

Kate unlocked it.

“Give me the keys.”

Did she mean to shoot her here?

“The keys! And get in the driver’s seat.”

“You have the jewelry. What do you want now?”

“Give me the keys and get in the car.”

Kate did as she was told.

Consuela got in, slammed the door, then handed her the keys. “Drive directly to your apartment.”

Kate swallowed.

If she were shot at home, as if she had walked in on a burglar, she might lie there for a very long time before anyone thought to look for her. She often didn’t call in in the morning but went directly out on house calls.

Turning on Van Ness, she watched a gray hatchback staying close behind her. Turning onto Stockton, she glanced at Consuela. “Are you connected to Emerson Bristol?”

The girl just looked at her. “Who’s that?”

“The� an appraiser.”

Consuela gave her a blank look. Neither spoke again until they reached Kate’s parking garage, where Consuela gestured for her to pull in.

Parking, Kate had her hand on the door when Consuela stopped her. “Give me your keys.”

Kate’s heart sank.

Consuela opened the passenger side window and threw the keys as hard as she could among the darkest, farthest rows of parked cars.

“Stay here inside the car. You will sit here for ten minutes after I leave, facing straight ahead. If you look around or get out you will be shot.”

Kate glanced past her, to see the gray car waiting at the curb.

Getting out, Consuela moved quickly through the garage to the street and slid in beside the driver. Kate caught a quick glimpse of high forehead and prominent nose. And then they were gone, driving quietly up the dark street. The minute they were past her building Kate slid out, snatching her flashlight from the glove compartment, and moved into the blackness among the parked cars searching for her keys.

Why had Consuela left her alive? Because she didn’t want to face a murder charge in case they were caught? But why had she bothered to bring her home? Did the woman think she would be less likely to call the cops if she were returned to her own apartment? That maybe she would run upstairs, collapse in tears, and that would be the end of it? Or at least if she did call the cops, they had a little time while she retrieved her keys-maybe a lot of time, if the keys had gone down through one of the storm grates in the garage floor.

She found them at last; it took her nearly half an hour. They were lodged on the hood of a big Buick, where the black grid of air ducts met the windshield, the keys half hidden beneath the edge of the hood. Retrieving them and hurrying up the closed stairway to her apartment, she flinched at every imagined shifting of the shadows above her, at every hint of sound from the upper landing. At her own door she fumbled with her key, pushing nervously inside. Slamming and locking the door, she leaned against it, her heart pounding.

When she looked up at her apartment, she felt her heart skip, and she went sick.

It appeared as if a tornado had touched down, flinging and smashing furniture, spewing the contents of every drawer in its violent tantrum of destruction. The couch and chairs lay upside down, the upholstery ripped, cotton and foam stuffing pulled out in hunks, even the dust covers shredded off the bottoms, revealing springs and webbing.

Numbly she moved through the mess feeling physically bruised. Along nearly every wall the carpet and pad had been ripped away to reveal the old wooden floors beneath. The kitchen looked like a garbage dump. She stood looking in, and did not want to enter. Every cupboard had been flung open, the contents thrown to the floor, spilled food mixed with broken china. A cold draft hit her, though she had left no window open.

Certainly not the kitchen window, which now stood open, letting in the damp breeze.

She wanted to race for the front door, fling it wide, and run. Backing away from the kitchen, she crossed to the fireplace and picked up the poker that lay incising its black soot across a satin pillow. Clutching the poker, she moved again to the kitchen, shaking with shock and rage. She crossed to the sink and window, glancing behind her to watch the kitchen door, wading through debris that crunched under her shoes.

The window had been jimmied open four inches. That was as far as the second, newer lock would allow. Not wide enough for human entry. Examining the older lock, she could see where it was broken, the metal cracked through. Looking out at the adjoining rooftops, she shut the window and jammed a long carving knife between the end of the sliding glass and the wall.

She stood looking at the broken dishes and scattered rice and cereal. Every container had been emptied, flour and sugar bags lay atop the mess, along with a coffee can. Had the thieves thought she’d keep the jewels in such places? With every new example of their thoroughness, the monetary value of the jewels became more certain in her mind. They were not paste. Why her parents or grandfather would leave such a fortune, taped into a cardboard box at the back of a safe, for a child who might never see that fortune, was a mystery she might never solve.

Moving back through the grisly mess, clutching the poker, she ventured toward the rest of the apartment, turning first to her study.

The two file cabinets were open, the drawers gutted, files and papers flung everywhere. Books were toppled from their shelves and were lying open, the spines awry, pages ripped out as if in their search Consuela and her friend had had, as well, a high good time. This was not searching; this was destruction. Maybe with people like this, it took only opportunity. Time and place invited, they seized the moment as hungrily as an addict would seize drugs. She was so angry that if she had her hands on Consuela now, gun or not, she would lay her out cold or die trying.

Picking up her office phone, she heard no dial tone. She hit the button, listened. Nothing; again the line was dead. Why did the phone company have to string its wires up the side of the building, prey to every prowler?

She had dropped her purse on the table by the front door. During the time Consuela had the gun on her she had toyed with the thought of trying to slip the phone from her purse and dial 911, but there was never a second when Consuela glanced away.

Still carrying the poker, she fished the phone from her purse and dialed 911 now. She gave the dispatcher her address and described the breakin, trying to make clear the extent of the destruction. The dispatcher told her to get out of the apartment until officers could clear it.

“No. I feel safer here. I was� I was kidnapped tonight, as well. They could still be out there.” This sounded really weird, so strange that she felt embarrassed. The woman would think she was a nut.

“Can you go to a neighbor’s?”

“I don’t know my neighbors. I’ll stay here.”

“Where in the apartment are you?”

“By the front door, in the entry. I’ve searched part of the apartment, all but the bedroom.”

“Officers are on the way. Please stay on the line. When exactly were you kidnapped?” Was the woman patronizing her? Trying to assess her degree of sanity or insanity?

Well, she couldn’t blame her.

Or did she simply want to keep her talking until help arrived? She repeated as briefly and clearly as she could the events since she entered the restaurant until she arrived home. She told the dispatcher about giving Consuela the jewels. She explained Consuela’s change in appearance and gave her a description of her male partner, and of the car. That seemed to impress the dispatcher. She explained that Consuela had been in Molena Point and that the police there might possibly have some information on her.

Talking with the dispatcher, Kate pulled the foil-wrapped sandwich from her purse and moved into the kitchen. She was amazed that she could think of food, but she felt weak and faint, and knew she needed to eat something. Finding a saucepan among the rubble and an unbroken cup half buried in flour, she washed both thoroughly in hot soapy water, tucking the phone between her ear and shoulder. Filling the pan with water, she set it on a burner, brought up a gas flame, and searched among the debris for a tea bag.

Unwrapping the little bag of English Breakfast, she dropped it in the cup, poured boiling water over it, and carried teacup and sandwich into the little dining room, stepping over her nice place mats that were wadded on the floor. She needed to eat. She was weak; her diminished blood sugar dragged her courage even lower. She told the dispatcher where she now was in the apartment. She was pulling out her chair when a movement in the living room brought her up short. She turned, swallowing a cry of alarm.

A black cat sat on the overturned couch disdainfully watching her.

He was huge; his amber eyes blazed so fiercely they seemed filled with licking flames.

There could not be another like him, this cat who called himself the death angel, this cat who had stolen her safe deposit key and had stolen her signature; the same thieving cat that had arrived in the village last year with Greeley Urzey to steal from the village shopkeepers. The beast that, at supper after Charlie’s gallery opening, had looked down through the skylight watching them. She stood beside the table facing him, as ice cold as if all her blood had drained away. She looked down at the phone in her hand, and quietly broke the connection.

The cat smiled. “Little Kate Osborne. Pretty little Kate Osborne.”

“Why did you help Consuela? What do you get out of it? Why would a cat like you be interested in a handful of costume jewelry with paste stones? Your thieving partner could steal anything you want.”

“What partner would that be?”

“Old Greeley,” she said, sitting weakly down at the table, cupping her cold hands around the warm teacup.

“I don’t run withhimanymore. She is my partner now, sometimes. I see that you gave her the jewels.”

“How would you know what I gave her?”

“I saw her leave the parking garage. She would not have left unless she had the jewelry.”

“And is he your partner, too? The man with the big nose?” She sipped at her tea. Where were the police? What was taking so long? What would they do, now that she had hung up?

The cat’s eyes narrowed to slits and his ears laid close to his head. “If the jewels are only paste, why doyoutreasure those pieces so highly?” His crouch was so tense she thought he would leap on her, biting and clawing.

“The jewelry is part of my past. A past that has no meaning for you, or for Consuela and her friend.”

Again the cat smiled. “I could tell you about your past.” He looked at her sandwich, which lay untouched in the open foil wrap, the melted cheese turned to the consistency of rubber. “You were told at the orphanage that McCabe might be the name of your grandfather.”

“How would you know that?”

He rose and stretched, eyeing her dinner. “Is that shrimp I smell? Grilled shrimp?”

Defensively she picked up her sandwich. The cat leaped six feet to an overturned chair and leaped again onto the table. He stood on her dining table staring intently at her supper.

Removing half the sandwich from the open wrapper she shoved it across to him, leaving a greasy path on the nice oak. She’d have to have a cleaning crew in; she wasn’t going to deal with this alone.

Gobbling greedily, the black tom was as messy as a stray dog. The sandwich was gone in six gulps. Licking grease from his whiskers, he eyed her half. She ate quickly though it was cold and rubbery. If in her uneasy hunger she gulped as ravenously as the tom, she didn’t care.

“Ican tell you about McCabe,” the cat said.“Ican tell you about your grandfatherandyour parents, if you indeed want to know.”

“How wouldyouknow about my heritage?” The cat’s words deeply frightened her. Her search, which had started out nearly three years ago as a fledgling interest in her strange heritage, had turned into a nightmare of fear.

The black tom pricked his ears, watching her. “You’d be a pretty little cat, Kate Osborne. Oh, yes, all cream and silk. Maybe more willing than little Dulcie or that tortoiseshell. I do like a partner with my own talents.”

His audacity enraged her. And the feline part of her nature deeply upset her. The joy she had once taken in those talents had vanished-to be a cat, rolling in the garden, racing over rooftops. Those changes had occurred only those few days when her life was threatened; they had not remained a part of her life. She looked at the tomcat. “Tell me why Consuela wanted the jewels. Why she would want paste jewels?”

“Shall we say she collects oddities?”

“She’ll go to jail for robbing me, her fingerprints are on my safe deposit box, her forgery is on the bank records. That’s a big risk, for oddities.”

The cat’s eyes grew as large as moons; he stared at her, keening a wild hunting cry, creeping toward her-she imagined his teeth in her flesh. Palms sweating, her heart racing, she rose and backed away.

He sat down suddenly on the table and began casually washing his paws, his expression one of deep amusement.

Watching him, she didn’t know why she had launched herself into this search for her past, why she had opened this Pandora’s box of perplexing connections, seeking matters that any sensible person would leave alone.

The black cat looked deeply at her. His purr was ragged. “You have amazing talents, Kate Osborne.”

“Not anymore. That is past. I am no more than what you see.”

The cat smiled. “You were under great stress at that time. Your life was threatened, your marriage shattered, your fear that your husband would kill you shocked and sickened you. Perhaps that was why the changes occurred-but what a lovely white and marmalade cat you must have been. And now� Perhaps the stress of present events will-”

“No!” Kate flung her cup at him; he leaped out of its path and it shattered against the wall. He sat down again facing her, his yellow eyes filled with a mad light. The catwasmad. There was no reason that such a beast, with the sentient skills of a human, could not be as stark raving crazy as some poor, demented human.

But she did want to know how he had learned about her, and what else he might know.

Watching her, he smiled. “The Cat Museum, Kate Osborne. There is more information there than you have found.”

“I have been thoroughly through the archives.”

“The oral tradition, among our kind, is reliable and useful.” The cat’s eyes narrowed. “Nothing written. Much that can be told.”

She thought of the other cats prowling the museum gardens, and she shivered. She had wondered about those cats. But now� she would not, could not ever go there again, to that place she had loved so well.

“They do not like me there,” he said. “Those cats who are like us, they do not like me.” He looked deeply at her. “There is indeed a hidden world, Kate Osborne. That is the world I seek. That is your true home, the world where the jewels come from.”

“What, some commune hidden back in the mountains? Some colony of crazies with guards at the gate?“Where were the police?She wanted this cat out of there, she wanted this unpleasantness over with.

“A world lying deep beneath this city, Kate, a world cavernous and vast. That is the world that should have been McCabe’s. The world where I, too, belong.”

She was certain that when the law arrived the cat would vanish the way he had come, that she would be rid of him-he wouldn’t dare stay, he daren’t sit watching while she answered the officer’s questions, while she tried to skirt around the answers that she couldn’t offer. Hurrying to the kitchen she removed the carving knife and opened the window again, providing for him the same four-inch escape route by which he must have entered. Sickly, desperately, she wanted this cat gone. What did he want with her? Moving quickly back into the dining room Kate found the cat still on the table, nosing at her cell phone. Snatching it up, she dropped it in her pocket. She wanted to snatch up Azrael and shove him out the window, but she was too afraid of him.

Surely when the patrol car came, if it ever did, then he would leave. The uniforms would do their work and go away again, and she would be alone. If she could ignore her ruined apartment, she’d take a long hot shower, pull some bedding together, lock her bedroom door against all possible intruders, and go to sleep. Tomorrow she’d muster the strength to pack what was fit to keep, send everything else to the trash, and� What? Move out? Abandon the city now, at once? Give notice at the studio and move back to Molena Point immediately, where she’d be safe?

Or she could transfer to Seattle, far away from the Bay Area, to work in the firm’s new office there. She had not before seriously considered that option.

Watching her, the black cat yawned. “Thereissuch a world, Kate Osborne, a world where all cats speak, a world of subterranean valleys and caverns where jewels are dug from the walls. Diamonds, rubies� Where jewelsmiths are as common as dust. Where do you think that strange work comes from that no one can identify? You know the old Celtic tales, the Irish and Welsh sagas. Do you think that ancient history is all lies because it comes to us in the form of story? Do you reallynotbelieve in those worlds, told of again and again throughout history?”

“They areonlystories! Folktales! Flights of fancy, anyone knows that. Thereisno other world; such a thing is not possible.” She stared hard at the inky beast. His amber eyes blazed back at her, as hot as the flames of hell.

“The jewels can lead us there,” the cat said complacently. “If we can learn where they came from in this world, we can find the way down. A door, a passage down into that lost world.” He looked at her intently.

“You are mad,” she whispered. “There is no world but this.This world! Here! Now.” Snatching at the edge of the table, she tilted it so violently the black tomcat could only leap off. He landed on the buffet. She wanted to throw the table at him. “Leave me alone!Shehas the jewels! Go to Consuela. Take the jewels. Go find your mythical door. Get out of here. Go to that other world or wherever. But get the hell out ofhere,I have nothing for you!”

He stood atop the buffet glaring at her, panther-black and as powerful and sinewy as any jungle beast. “What bargain would it take, Kate Osborne, for you to help me find that world and enter it? You have talents that I do not. And the jewels themselves from that world are surely a badge of power�”

“Get out!” She swung around, grabbing the poker.

He stared at her unflinching. “There is a house, Kate Osborne. An old gray Victorian in Pacific Heights, an earthquake-damaged house, closed now and awaiting repairs. Cats live there, cats that do not fit into the dull gardens of the Cat Museum, beautiful, dark-souled cats who were driven out by their tame cousins. Those cats could lead us� or perhaps we will find the door there, in that wrecked dwelling, perhaps-”

“Then go there! Go to your rebel cats! Such beasts should welcomeyou.Go down to that world and leavemealone.” The cat was mad, he was indeed Poe’s black beast, as Joe Grey once had once observed. “Go tothem,“she repeated. “I can’t help you.”

“They do not want me there. Those cats fear me; they fear my power. They rise like a tide against me.”

“So what do you want from me?I can’t help you.”

“Those beasts come and go freely from that world. Perhaps indeed a portal is there, in that ruined place� I have seen them appear out of the darkness of that house, I have seen their eyes. I have smelled the scent of deep, dank earth on them.” His eyes burned with desire. “They drive me out, Kate Osborne. They do not want me in that world.”

She watched him, chilled by his words but not understanding.

“Even the dark souls, Kate Osborne, make war among themselves, battles of jealousy and power. If that world has turned dark as I think it has, if the hell beasts now rule there� then only a badge of power can have authority.” His yellow eyes gleamed. “I believe the jewels with their symbols of cats wield the power I want. A talisman of authority from that world�”

She shivered, drawing back. The cat was insane, driven by an ego bigger than any lost world-and yet despite her fear of him, his words and his cloying voice strangely quickened her heart. And a little voice deep inside her kept asking,Why are there no public records for McCabe, or for my grandmother or my parents? WhatareMcCabe’s oblique references in his journals to some other world?

She shook her head, turning away. She did not want to think about this; she did not want any of this.

But then she turned back, watching the tomcat. “Isshea part of this? Is Consuela part of this insanity? Does she believe in such a world?”

His laugh was cold, teeth bared with derision. “She knows nothing about my true purpose. She has taken the jewels for her lover.”

“The man who followed me?”

The cat laughed again, a snarling hiss that gave her goose bumps. “That man is not her lover. Her lover is her partner, as am I. We are three in our ventures. The man who followed you is a pawn, a simple lackey.” He watched her appraisingly. “If you want to know about her partner, you must help me.”

The cat jerked around as footsteps sounded outside the door in the stairwell.

“Go!” she hissed.

The cat sat unmoving, his smile evil.

Kate was so enraged, so at the end of her temper, that she snatched up the beast by the nape of his bullish neck and his thick black tail and, holding him away from her, she hiked him through to the kitchen. She was sure he’d twist around and slash her-he could shred her arm in an instant.

But he did nothing. He hung limp, watching her and laughing.Laughing.Enraged, she shoved him through the narrow opening, forcing him through with her hand on his rump then closing the window, wedging it again with the butcher knife. Then she went to open the front door. In her last view of Azrael, the tomcat sauntered boldly away into the black night of the rooftops.

22 [��������: pic_23.jpg]

In the presence of the two officers, Kate was foolishly embarrassed by the shambles of her apartment. Shaken by her encounter with the black tomcat, she felt dull and slow, as if her normal senses were muffled.

Of the two officers, the tall, thin one was young, maybe in his late twenties, with startling blue eyes. He stood in the open door, his smile reserved, appraising her and watchful.

“Mrs. Osborne? I’m Officer Harden. This is Officer Pardue.” Harden’s instant scan passed beyond her to the destroyed living room, seeming to record every small detail, every break and spill and tear, every gouge and stain.

Officer Pardue was shorter and older, perhaps in his fifties, the lines in his face sculpted into the look of someone with a perpetually sour stomach. His survey of the room seemed more wary, more attuned to watching for a hidden presence, for someone waiting out of sight. When she stepped back for them to enter, Officer Pardue began at once to move through the apartment to clear it, his hand on his gun. Officer Harden remained standing with her, asking questions but sharply alert until Officer Pardue returned. Only then did Harden begin to fill in his report, walking through the rooms with her, then sitting with her at the dining table, avoiding the grease.

As Pardue waited by the door, Kate told Officer Harden that before she got home she had been followed, and that she had been kidnapped for perhaps an hour and then released in her own parking garage. It all sounded so hokey, so made up. She gave him the detailed circumstances and described the jewelry the woman had taken. He interrupted her once to call the station, to speak with a detective. He did not want her to clean up the apartment or to move anything at all until the detective arrived. That he was concerned enough to bring in an investigator, made her feel better. Harden wanted to know what she had touched after she got home. When she told him she had made tea and eaten a sandwich he seemed amused.

“I felt faint; I had to have something. I sat here, at the table.” She did not, of course, mention her uninvited dinner guest. If, later, the detective found paw prints on the table, so be it. When Harden went to look at her phone line, he found that it had been cut just outside her kitchen window. He reported this for her through the dispatcher.

As he filled out his report, he made her repeat many answers. She did not like that he was testing her. He asked her three times whether she knew the man, and made her repeat that she wasn’t sure. Asked her twice to describe how she knew Consuela. She would have to answer all this again, for the detective. She hoped he would not be as heavy-handed. Explaining that in Molena Point Consuela had posed as a teenager, she was most uncomfortable at how addled that sounded. She was relieved when Detective Jared Reedie arrived some ten minutes later.

His quick arrival surprised her, implying to her that this particular burglary might be important. Reedie was a shockingly good-looking young man with dark brown hair and brown eyes, dressed in cords and a suede sport coat, a young man so handsome that Kate immediately found herself mistrusting him. When the two officers had left, Reedie walked through the house with her, taking photographs, then at last he came to sit with her at the table as Harden had done. She told her story over again knowing he would compare it with what she’d told Officer Harden-as if she were the one on trial. She understood why this was necessary, but that didn’t make her any more comfortable with the fact-finding process to which the law was committed.

Reedie said, “There was a report tonight of a woman being followed into a restaurant on Columbus.”

She nodded. “I think the waitress, Annette, might have called. She helped me leave-helped that woman and me go out the back.”

“You saw the car that followed you.”

“A gray hatchback. I don’t know what make. Fairly new, though.”

“And you got a look at the man?”

When, for the fourth time, she described the man, she caught a gleam of interest from Reedie. He spent quite some time going over her description of him, and of the waiter in Molena Point. He seemed equally interested in her two very different descriptions of Consuela.

“You think they were the same person, this sophisticated Nancy Westervelt, and the teenager you described from Molena Point?”

“Yes, I’m sure it’s the same woman.” This was such a tangle. She had to tell him about the theft of her safe deposit key. She was nervous not to, because she had reported it to the bank. The detective seemed to sense that she was leaving things out, though he did not accuse her of that. When he kept questioning her about Consuela she said, “Maybe it would help if you talked with Captain Harper in Molena Point, or spoke with one of his detectives, with Dallas Garza or Juana Davis. All three know Consuela, and maybe they could shed some light. They should know if she’s left the village.”

“What is your connection to Molena Point PD?”

“I worked for Dallas Garza’s niece, here in the city. While Dallas was still with your department. If I return to Molena Point to live, his niece wants me to join her again. She now has her own design studio there.” She studied his handsome face, his expressionless brown eyes. “Captain Harper is a personal friend, as well. He was very helpful and supportive when my husband�”

She faltered, then, “Do you remember a money-laundering and car-theft scheme in Molena Point three years ago? They killed the owner of the car dealership when he found out what they were doing.”

Reedie nodded. “I remember.”

“My husband, James Osborne, was part of it. When I found out, he arranged with his partner to kill me. It was Captain Harper who broke the case. The two are now in San Quentin.”

Her explanation seemed to put Detective Reedie somewhat at ease, and the remainder of his interview was less rigid. She described for him in as much detail as she could each piece of jewelry that Consuela had taken. She told him where she had had them appraised. By the time the detective rose to leave, he had a detailed account of her evening, had taken three rolls of photographs, and had a description of the man who had followed her. The detective seemed, in fact, so intent on the man that she wanted to mention the newspaper article she had read about the jewel robbery in the city and the escape of one of the thieves.

But he would know that; maybe that was why he was interested. When Reedie asked if she wanted to press charges against Consuela, she hesitated.

“If I press charges, and she’s caught and the jewelry is recovered-if she actually goes to trial, I won’t get the jewelry back until the trial’s finished. Is that right?”

“Yes. And then only if you can identify it.”

“I don’t have photographs. Would my fingerprints on the jewelry count for anything?”

Detective Reedie smiled. “I can see that it counts for something-if she doesn’t wipe them clean. Your descriptionofthe pieces will be taken into consideration. You might want to get a written description from the appraiser and a letter from the attorney who gave them to you.”

“Yes,” she said doubtfully. “If the attorney ever looked at them, if he ever opened that sealed box. But�” She looked up at Reedie. “I think I could draw them with some accuracy.”

“That might be helpful. It couldn’t hurt.”

“If I don’t press charges of theft, but report the jewelry taken, could I expect to get the jewelry back?” She didn’t want to wait months or maybe years for the overcrowded San Francisco court system to release the evidence. “If I did that, what could you hold her on? Would you have enough to hold her?”

Reedie smiled. “You can press charges for kidnapping, for breaking and entering, and for malicious damage. But the case would be stronger if you charge her with taking the jewelry as well.

“It’s not as if the jewelry went missing during the breakin,” he said. “You were forced to give her the box. It would make a far stronger case if you laid it all out as it happened.” He studied her. “But we have to keep that kind of evidence for the trial.

It’s not like, say, stolen merchandise where you can check the price tag, know the exact value, and return it to a store that has been robbed. The court would insist on holding it for actual consideration during the trial.”

“Do I need to come into the station to file charges?”

He removed a sheaf of forms from the back of his clipboard and handed her two, offering her a pen. Kate gave him a grateful look and began to fill in the required information. She did not take time to run her phone messages until half an hour after Detective Reedie left.

When the police had gone, she took a long hot shower, made herself a bourbon and water, and tucked up in bed, locking her bedroom door. With her cell phone she called the message service for her home phone. Detective Reedie had reported her phone line cut, but she could access the service from anywhere. She supposed the land line would be repaired in the morning.

Alone and safe in her bedroom, jotting down messages, punching erase or save, she was torn by the thoughts that the black tomcat had stirred.

Yet, when she faced her decision to abandon the search into her family, to forget the past and settle down to real life, an emptiness yawned, making her feel very alone. To cut those nebulous ties to her heritage, no matter how strange that past was, made her feel totally cut off from the world.

Huddled up in bed, frightened again and lonely, she felt a deep need for her friends, for Wilma and Charlie, for Clyde, for Hanni and Ryan. Unexpected tears started flowing, and before she finished listening to her messages she hung up and dialed Molena Point.

Clyde answered. His voice was muzzy with sleep. She glanced at her bedside clock. It was nearly ten.

“I was reading,” he lied.

“You were asleep.”

“In my study, reading. Foggy out, really socked. Guess I drifted off.”

“In your study with a fire burning,” she said longingly.

“A fire burning, a glass of bourbon. All I need is you, it couldn’t get any better.”

She laughed. “You’re such a philanderer. What about Ryan?”

“She’s at home working on blueprints.”

“And Joe is sprawled on your feet?” Kate wanted to keep him talking, keep hearing his voice so familiar and comforting. She wished she were there; she needed Clyde, needed a strong shoulder to lean on.

“Joe’s out hunting, waylaying innocent rabbits. Damn cat. I hate when he hunts in the fog; it’s the most dangerous time. But you can’t tell him one damn thing; might as well talk to the wall. How are you, Kate? You sound� what’s wrong?”

“I’m too tired to repeat it all again. The police have been here, and a detective. I had a breakin. I just� needed to hear your voice. I’ll explain it all later. Trashed my apartment. I’m fine now, apartment’s secure.”

“Tell me the rest.”

“Could I tell you tomorrow? I just� wanted to hear your voice. I felt so lonely.”

“Don’t leave me hanging. Talk to me.”

“I’m just so tired.”

“Try,” he said unsympathetically

“That girl from the village, that cheap girl running with Dillon? Consuela something?”

“Yes?”

She told him, starting with the theft of her safe deposit key.

Joe Grey, in his typical tomcat secrecy, had told Clyde none of that. She left the phone once to refill her drink, and they talked for nearly an hour. Clyde’s questions were endless. He said, “I’m coming up, Kate. First thing in the morning.”

“That isn’t necessary, I don’t want you to do that. I just wanted to hear your voice. I’m fine, Clyde. The police have it in hand.”

When she hung up, having convinced him at last not to come, she went to the kitchen and managed to find another tea bag. Taking a cup back to bed, she continued running her messages. That was when she got Lucinda.

She had erased the ninth message, from a client, having made the necessary notes. She had begun to play the next one when she sat straight up in bed. Holding the phone away from her, staring at it, she missed vital words.

She replayed it, unbelieving. At first, for an instant, she thought it was an old message that had somehow gotten saved.

“Kate, it’s Lucinda. We weren’t in that wreck, we’re all right. We wanted, for a while, to not tell anyone at all, not even the sheriff. We’ll explain it all when we see you, we’re heading for San Francisco�”

Alive? They were alive?She felt cold with shock, then delirious with relief. She wanted to jump up and down on the bed, to turn cartwheels. Punching save, she ran the message four more times.

“If you’re out late,” Lucinda said, “if you try to call me back and we’re asleep, leave a message. We’re at the Redwood, in Fort Bragg. We don’t want to come barging in tomorrow, if it’s not convenient. We just� It will take a while to tell you all that’s happened. But we’re fine. We got out of the RV long before the wreck; we weren’t anywhere near when it burned.” Lucinda’s voice sounded strong and happy.

“We’ll be in the city in the morning, I made reservations at that little hotel just down from you. Maybe, if you’re free, we can have breakfast?”

She listened. Played it again. Again.Alive! They were alive!Three days since the wreck and no word,and now they were alive!

This could not be a joke, she knew Lucinda’s voice. What had happened? Where had they been? Whyhadn’tthey been in touch?Why hadn’t they called her, or called Wilma? Why hadn’t they contacted the police?She sat holding the phone, staring at it, her hands trembling; she was grinning like an idiot.

When at last she called their hotel, she got the message service. Well, it was after eleven, likely they were asleep. She didn’t try their cell phone. She left a message, then tried to call Wilma but got a busy signal. Did Wilma know? Had Lucinda already called her? Were they talking right now? When she had talked with Clyde, he didn’t know.

And most important, did the kit know? Did Kit know that the family she loved so fiercely was safe, the family for whom she had been grieving?

Lucinda’s message had been left at 8:30 P.M., just about the time she had walked into her trashed apartment. She couldn’t stop thinking of the kit, of how excited the little tattercoat would be. She tried Wilma again but her line was still busy, and so was Clyde’s.

Before Wilma called to give Clyde the amazing news about Lucinda and Pedric, Clyde stood in his study wondering whether to throw some clothes in a duffel and take off at once, drive on up to the city, and give Kate some moral support, or whether to go sensibly to bed and take off at first light. Kate sounded in really bad shape, he had never heard her so weepy.

Not even during that bad time when Jimmie wanted her dead and when under stress Kate had experienced the feline side of her nature in a manner that he still found hard to deal with.

Moving into the bedroom, he had snatched his leather duffel from the shelf in the walk-in closet and was stuffing in a couple of pairs of shorts and socks when the phone rang. Picking up the bedside extension, he could hear a cat yowling in the background.

Within moments he knew they were alive; Lucinda and Pedric were alive. Wilma was laughing and crying. He could hear the kit in the background yowling and laughing; she sounded demented. He sat down on the bed.

He had to tell Joe. Why wasn’t he here? Where the hell was Joe Grey?

23 [��������: pic_24.jpg]

By ten that night, the fog had packed itself as tight as cotton wool into Molena Point, drowning the village trees and rooftops and gathering like an advancing sea along the sidewalks and against the faintly lit storefronts. The oaks that guarded Wilma Getz’s house stood shrouded as pale as ghosts above the mist-flooded flower beds. Not the faintest smear of light shone in Wilma’s front windows, but at the back of the house her bedroom bled golden light out onto the grassy hill.

Within the cozy room a lamp burned, and three small oak logs blazed in the red enamel stove. On Wilma’s bed, curled up on the thick, flowered quilt, Dulcie and Kit lay limp and relaxed as Wilma read to them.

Wilma would not have chosen for the night’s reading a volume of Celtic folklore, but the kit had begged for it. Those stories, so reminiscent of Lucinda and Pedric, made the kit incredibly sad, yet she demanded to hear them. The tale was deep into stone circles and underground kingdoms when the phone rang, its shrill sound jerking the three of them abruptly from those distant realms. The two half-dreaming cats started up wide eyed, visions from the story crumbling as Wilma reached for the phone.

Her hand paused in midair. Did she really want to answer? Could it be a sales pitch this late? If a salesman got the answering machine, he’d hang up-that’s what the machine was for. The last time the phone rang late at night, it had been terrible news: the deaths of two dear friends.

But then, ever curious, ever hopeful that something wonderful was happening in the world, Wilma picked up.

When she heard the voice at the other end she caught her breath, her heart started to thud-then she began to smile, then to laugh. “Hold on,” she said. “Hold one minute.”

Hitting record, she reached out to the kit. “Come here quick. You were right,” she whispered, gathering the kit in close to her. “Kit, you were right, they’re alive.” Cuddling the kit in her arms, she held the receiver so they both could listen. “They’re alive, Kit! Lucinda and Pedric are alive.” Then, remembering the speaker, she pressed the button. “Go on,” she said. “We’re all three listening.”

Lucinda’s voice sent the kit rigid. She stared at the phone that, she had thought a few months ago, was some kind of magic. She stared up at Wilma.

Lucinda was saying, “After I left a message on Kate’s phone, Pedric and I went out to dinner. We just got back. I expect Kate has already called you. Well, we’re fine, Wilma. We’re just fine. Is the kit there?”

The kit stared at the speaker and touched it with a hesitant paw. Pressing against Wilma, looking up into Wilma’s face, she tried to read the truth of what she was hearing. All her kittenhood suspicion of telephones and things electronic tumbled through her head, rendering her deeply uncertain. She couldn’t stop shivering.

But thatwasLucinda’s voice, she knew Luanda’s voice.

“Kit? Are you there? It’s really me, it’s Lucinda. We’re fine, Pedric is right here with me. We got out of the RV before the wreck. We’re coming home, Kit. Coming to stay, to build our house for the three of us.”

Kit shoved her nose at the speaker.“Lucinda, Lucinda�” And for once the kit abandoned all powers of speech and fell into mewling cries.

“We’re in Fort Bragg,” Lucinda said. “We’ll be in the city tomorrow morning. We’ve left a message for Kate. There’s so much more to tell her-so much to tell you. So much that I think we need to tell Captain Harper. Now. Tonight. Would he mind if we called him at home?”

“Of course he wouldn’t mind. He’ll be thrilled to hear your voices and so will Charlie. But what�?”

“The man who stole our RV, who probably intended to kill us-we think we know him. We think this could be connected somehow to events in the village.”

Wilma sat quietly listening to Lucinda’s story, seeing the old couple locked in their bedroom in the RV as the man pocketed their ignition keys, as he unhooked the gas and electric lines, the water and waste systems from the RV parking slot.

“What time was this?” Wilma asked. “Didn’t anyone in the campground see him and wonder?”

“It was early, just after dark. But no one could see our rig. We always choose a private space with just the woods around us.

“Well, when he started the engine and took off, we were locked in the bedroom. We crawled under the bed into the storage compartment and waited until he slowed to turn onto the highway, then went out the other side into the bushes, dragging a duffel with a few clothes and some money. And a blanket. No need to be cold; we slept all night in the woods.”

“But what did he want?” Wilma said. Not that anyone these days needed an excuse for cold-blooded behavior.

“The jewelry,” Lucinda told her. “That costume jewelry. Can you believe that? It’s lovely, but it’s only paste.”

“Are you sure that’s what he wanted?”

“It’s what he told us.”

“And you gave it to him?”

“We told him we’d put it in a safe deposit box in Eureka with some personal papers. He demanded our key and a sample of Pedric’s signature. We gave him both.”

Lucinda laughed. “The safe deposit key is not for a bank in Eureka. That’s where he was headed when we bailed out of the RV. The jewels were in the storage compartment of the RV, we got them out in the duffel. Pedric-”

“You had them� have them with you?”

“Of course. We took them when we crawled out.”

Wilma smiled at their resourcefulness, then shivered. “Do be careful, Lucinda. Why would he� Are you so sure they’re paste?”

“Kate had hers appraised. Ours are just like hers; same style, same kind of setting. We couldn’t have bought those pieces up in Russian River for the little we paid if the jewels were real.”

Wilma looked at Dulcie. They were both thinking the same thing. Wilma said, “Lucinda, it’s time for another appraisal. Meantime, please be careful. Even when you get to the Bay Area, miles from Russian River, you could still be in danger.”

When Lucinda hung up to call Max Harper, Wilma sat holding the two cats close, the kit purring so loudly that she drowned out the crackle of the fire and the distant pounding of the surf. Wilma said, “Can you imagine Max and Charlie’s delight when they find out the Greenlaws are alive?”

“I can imagine,” Dulcie said tersely, “Captain Harper asking more questions than you did. What man? How do they know him?Howis this connected to the village?”

“I didn’t want to grill her. She’ll tell all that to Max. Be patient, Dulcie. We’ll hear it all from him, or from Charlie.” Wilma straightened the flowered quilt, smoothed the sheet, and turned out the light. She and the cats were just settling down when again the phone rang. It was Kate.

They spent the next hour talking with her. The fire died down, the room grew chilly, and they wrapped themselves in the quilt. What an amazing night! Kate’s breakin, her ruined apartment, Azrael entering through her kitchen window to open the door for that woman, then staying to harass her. Wilma didn’t say it, but Kate sounded like a basket case.

“Consuela Benton,” Wilma said, amazed.

But of course the kit and Dulcie had known. They didn’t tell Wilma everything-not when that black tom had prowled her house so brazenly, not when Kate’s key had been stolen right here in Wilma’s own guest room, practically under Wilma’s nose. Though they might opt to tell her soon, if Consuela and that beast returned to the village.

“So smooth and sophisticated,” Kate said, “not a thing like Consuela. Hardly any makeup, her hair simple and clean, no ghoulish black eye makeup, no skintight jeans and bare belly button-”

“Kate, I’m going to call Charlie in the morning. See if I can pick up her barrette and take the two pieces to be appraised, here in the village. Maybe Lucinda would take her pieces to someone, maybe someone Dallas Garza could remember, in the city.”

“I’ll suggest it,” Kate said. “I’ll try.”

They hung up. Wilma and the cats snuggled down again, and the kit fell asleep at once. So much excitement, so much wonderment and joy Now she totally crashed, worn out, curled in a tangle of the quilt, dropping deep, deep under, exhausted clear down to her tortoiseshell paws.

24 [��������: pic_25.jpg]

Theringing phone woke Charlie. She was alone in bed, alone in the house. The time was 11:40. Muzzily she picked up the receiver dunking it was Max. The woman who spoke, her voice, her words, sent chills wriggling down Charlie’s spine.“Who?“She sat up in bed, switching on the lamp.“Who is this?”

“It’s Lucinda, my dear. Lucinda Greenlaw.”

Outside the bedroom window, the thick fog was smeared yellow by the two security lights that illuminated the yard and stable. Clutching the phone, Charlie didn’t speak.

“Oh dear, I don’t mean to shock everyone. I thought Kate might have called you. We weren’t in the RV when it crashed, Charlie. We’re alive. We�”

What kind of scam was this? Charlie listened warily. If the Greenlaws were alive, Max would have known right away, from the sheriff. And Lucinda would have called Wilma at once. Charlie sat holding the phone, trying to figure out what was going down.

“Charlie, thisisLucinda. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I just talked with Wilma. I need to talk with Max� You’re not on a cell phone?”

“No,” Charlie said. “It’s the be�” She caught her breath. She’d started to say the bedroom phone. She stared toward the hall, wondering if someone had gotten in the house, if someone was on one of the extensions, playing some insane trick. “Whoisthis?” She wished Max were there. There was no way this could be Lucinda. Max should be talking to this woman.

“It’s Lucinda, my dear. Is the captain there? I just talked with Wilma-and with Kit, Charlie. I talked with Kit.”

She pulled the covers up. “Lucinda?” She stuffed both pillows behind her.

“We weren’t in the RV when it crashed and burned, Charlie, we’d already gotten out, before it reached the highway.”

“But where have you been? Why didn’t you call? The whole village is grieving.”

As she listened to Lucinda’s explanation and imagined the elderly couple crawling into the storage compartment and out the other side, slipping and sliding down into the muddy drainage ditch, Charlie began to grin.

She knew that Pedric had completed some work on the new RV to customize it before they ever began to travel, but she hadn’t known how much.

“I didn’t know,” she said, laughing, “how sly Pedric could be. I didn’t know with what foresight he did those improvements.”

“Sometimes it pays,” Lucinda said, “to have grown up in a family of thieves. Pedric knows every way there is to get into-or get out of-a house or trailer or RV.”

“This is just� You two are incredible. Max will want to hear this. Call him now, Lucinda. At the station.”

“It’s all right to call there so late?”

“More than all right.” Charlie gave her the number. “We love you, Luanda.”

Hanging up, turning out the light, and pulling up the covers, Charlie snuggled down. This was indeed a gift of grace-for the Greenlaws, for the kit, for all their friends. A deep sense of protection filled her, as powerful as when, on her and Max’s wedding day, they had escaped that terrible explosion that had been set to kill them and most of the wedding party. Escaping that disaster, she had felt that all of them were blessed and watched over. She felt the same now, with this amazing reprieve.

Within the fog-shrouded police station, Max Harper and Detective Garza sat on either side of Harper’s desk with Marlin Dorriss’s phone and credit card bills spread out between them. Garza was busy recording pertinent motel stays or gas or restaurant purchases onto a chart, next to the corresponding burglaries. So far they had put Dorriss near the scene of seven thefts. Interestingly, during five of those, his motel bill showed double occupancy.

Harper said, “I hope to hell that wasn’t Helen Thurwell. That would tear it. You want to check Helen’s time off from the real estate firm?”

Garza nodded. The fact that Dorriss’s bills had come to them through the holding cell window did not dampen the intensity with which the officers sorted through them-though how their informant had gotten away so fast off the roof, with uniforms blasting the sky with searchlights, neither Harper nor Garza cared to speculate.

As they studied the information, preparing to petition the judge for a search warrant, the informant himself looked down on their heads from atop Max Harper’s bookcase. The tomcat appeared to be sleeping, his yellow eyes closed, his breathing slow and deep. Occasionally, one or the other of the officers would glance up at him, amused. No one knew why the cat was so attracted to cops.

The cat was good company, though, on a quiet late night. Probably he was addicted to the fried chicken and doughnuts that the dispatchers saved for him. Whatever reasons the cat might have, the nervy little freeloader had become a fixture around the station. As were his two lady pals, though the females didn’t sprawl all over a guy’s desk quite so boldly, nosing at papers and reports.

By the time Harper and Garza set the bills aside, they had eleven possible hits. Leaning back in his chair, Harper propped his feet on the desk, grinning at Dallas. “I think we’ve made Marlin Dorriss. We sure have enough for a warrant.”

“But why the hell,” Garza said, “if Dorriss also has a dozen false identities, with credit cards and drivers’ licenses as our informant claims he does, why didn’t he set up to use those for the thefts?” Their informant had, an hour after the Visa bill drop, called the station to relay the information about the false IDs to the captain.

Garza shrugged. “Guess he couldn’t though. In every one of those thefts, there was some affair or charity dinner, so he had a reason to be there. How would he receive phone calls? And in a small town, if he checked into a hotel under a false name, there would be too many possible leaks.”

Harper rose to refill their coffee cups. “This is some kind of game for the thief-some high-powered game. Steals one trophy piece from each residence, leaves a fortune untouched.”

Garza shrugged. “Takes all kinds.”

“I’ll see the judge first thing in the morning.”

Joe found it hard not to yowl with triumph, not to leap down and give the officers a high five. He listened, very still.

“You really think,” Dallas said, “there’s any point in searching his local residence? Why would he stash his take anywhere near the village?”

“Not likely, but we’ll have to cover it. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me to find it right here. I went through his Molena Point house when it was being built. Contractor is a friend of mine. Dorriss doesn’t know I was ever in there.”

Harper’s dry smile rearranged his lean, tanned wrinkles. “You know how the rich like to build with hiding places, foil the bad guys. That house has it in spades. All those different alcoves, it must have a dozen double walls, hidden dead spaces that no one would ever notice. Sealed up, no access you’d easily see.”

“What about the contractor? Dorriss trusted him?”

“I think Dorriss had a little something on the guy.” Harper set down his cup. “If the local search gives us nothing, maybe there’s rented storage space, though I doubt it. More likely his San Francisco condo, or even Tahoe. I’ll call Judge Brameir in the city, get him early in the morning, see if he’ll issue a warrant for the condo.”

Above the officers’ heads, Joe Grey smiled. That was his thinking exactly. And, if Azraelhadbeen in Dorriss’s house, as he suspected, if the cat was welcome there, and if Azrael ran with Consuela, then was she Dorriss’s partner? Had Consuela been Dorriss’s companion in those double occupancy rooms while Dorriss pulled off his burglaries?

If Dorriss’s stash was there at the condo, Joe thought, what about Clyde’s antique Packard? Was it there, as well, hidden in a garage? Wouldn’t that be a hoot. San Francisco PD goes out with a warrant, searches the place, and there’s Clyde’s valuable restored Packard sitting right there waiting for them. Joe’s head was so full of possibilities he thought he’d explode. He had risen, faking a yawn, burning to leap down and go tell Clyde his theory, when the phone buzzed.

Harper hit the speaker.

The dispatcher said, “Thought you’d want this one, Captain.”

When she’d put through the call and when Joe heard Lucinda’s voice, he nearly fell off the bookshelf.The Greenlaws were alive?Not in the hospital, not harmed in any way, but alive and heading for the city?

Joe listened with the two officers to Lucinda’s amazing story, watched the two men’s pleased smiles, and listened to Harper’s questions and Lucinda’s responses: no, they hadn’t yet talked with the sheriff, yes they were watching that they weren’t followed. When Harper had the whole story and had hung up, he and Dallas were both grinning. This time, even without the law, it looked like the bad guy had got what he deserved. The sense of satisfaction that filled the officers and filled Joe Grey was thick enough to cut with a knife.

As the tomcat dropped from the bookcase to the desk, hit the floor yawning, and padded lazily out of the room, he was so wired that he could barely keep from racing up the hall to the glass door shouting for the dispatcher to let him out-by this time Dulcie knew, the kit knew, and he could hardly wait to hear the little tattercoat’s excited yowls.

25 [��������: pic_26.jpg]

The Garden House Hotel had once been a pair of private residences, handsome Victorian homes each adorned with cupolas and round shingled towers, with diamond-paned bay windows and gingerbread trim along the intricate roof lines. To join the two houses, the architect had constructed a domed solarium, a large and handsome Victorian-style structure to accommodate the gardenlike lobby, the registration desk, and the patio portion of a casual restaurant. There were two elevators, one for each wing. Lucinda and Pedric Greenlaw parked in the small lot next door that was reserved for hotel guests. The time was 9 A.M. They had risen early, as was their custom, and had checked out of their Fort Bragg motel after only a quick snack for breakfast. Driving carefully in the dark predawn for a while, they hoped to hit the lull before the late morning traffic that would be moving into the city across the Golden Gate Bridge.

Arriving at the Garden House, parking in the lot next door, and locking their rented Olds Cutlass, they hurried into the hotel carrying their only luggage: two small duffels, one old and scarred that had rolled with them out of the RV on that fateful night, and a new red canvas bag that they had purchased in a drugstore in Fort Bragg along with extra sweatshirts, socks, underwear, canned fruit, snack food, and half a dozen bottles of water. The two bags contained most of their worldly possessions, except for their CDs and investments. Approaching the door to the hotel, they were both thinking hungrily of pancakes and bacon and coffee when Lucinda, glancing up at the third and top floor of the hotel, stopped, laughing.

“How nice! They allow pets. Or maybe they have a hotel cat.” A black cat sat in the window, staring down at them. They glimpsed the animal for only a moment before a woman picked it up, and both disappeared. Pedric looked at her, smiling. If Lucinda had a soft spot for anything in the world it was cats-though particularly their own tortoiseshell Kit, whom they had both missed very much during their travels.

Last night on the phone, the kit had nearly deafened them both, yowling and shouting with joy, so thrilled that they had survived the crash, demanding to know when they would be home and for how long. When Lucinda repeated to her, “For good, Kit. Forever and good,” the kit had, as Wilma said, bounced off the walls with excitement. Now Pedric stood holding Lucinda’s hand, both watching the high window thinking the cat might reappear, and admiring the hotel’s domes and gingerbread and the soaring solarium; and the tall, thin, handsome eighty-year-olds grinned at each other like children. How pleasant to be in the city for a few days before they headed home. For a few moments they stood watching passersby on the street, too, and seeing what shops were nearby and admiring the San Francisco skyline against the blue sky.

But then, turning to approach the solarium lobby, looking through the long, bright windows into the tiled garden room with its lush plants, Pedric drew Lucinda back suddenly.

“Come away quickly.” Turning and pulling her away, he hurried her down the street, into the first doorway they came to, into the entry to a used bookshop, a low-ceilinged, shadowed niche where the morning sun had not yet found access. “Give me your cell phone,” Pedric said.

“It’s in the car,” Lucinda said, peering out, pressing forward trying to see. But Pedric pulled her back and inside, through the open door of the bookshop.

The store was small and dim, its shelves arranged with unusual neatness for a used bookstore, and it smelled dust-free and clean. Most of the volumes had leather bindings and looked expensive and in fine condition. The gold lettering on the front window, when they read it slowly backward, informed them that the shop featured California History, for collectors. Frowning, Lucinda peered out through the glass, watching the street and the hotel entry.

“Didn’t you see him?” Pedric said. “Look there! Just shutting the trunk of that car! The man who stole the RV.”

“It can’t be.” Lucinda dropped her duffel bag by a stack of books, craning to see out through the crowded display window between the neatly arranged volumes.

On the curb before the hotel, a thin, sandy-haired man was just swinging in through the passenger door of a pale blue Corvette. They could see a woman driving, could see her profile and a tangle of curly black hair. As she pulled away, a dark shape blurred across the back window as if a small dog had jumped up on the ledge behind the seat. Then the car was gone, losing itself in the traffic.

Turning back, Pedric snatched a business card from the counter and noted down the license. Slipping this in his pocket and taking Lucinda’s hand, he moved with her deeper into the store, where the proprietor watched them-a short, thirtyish man with a round, smooth face, an unusually short haircut that let his scalp shine through, dark shirt and slacks, and a wrinkled corduroy jacket. When Pedric asked to use the phone, he passed the instrument over the counter at once with a gentle, almost Old World courtesy.

Within minutes, Pedric had called the police, had described the theft of their RV up in Humboldt County so the dispatcher could check police records, and had given them a description of the thief and the car, and its license number. The bookstore owner had turned back to shelving books, but was quietly listening.

A patrol car must have been in the neighborhood because by the time the elderly couple had walked back to the hotel and checked in, a squad car was pulling to the curb. They went out to join the two officers.

A young black woman officer emerged from the driver’s side. “I’m Officer Hart.” She looked like she was fresh out of college. The older officer, Sean Maconachy, was a ruddy-faced man with graying hair and a sour, closed expression.

“Let’s step inside,” Maconachy said. “Can you be certain that was the man who kidnapped you?”

“We are certain,” Pedric said. “Yesterday evening we filed a complaint with the Humboldt County sheriff. Will that allow you to pick up the car and arrest the man?”

“According to our information,” Maconachy said, “the accident happened last Sunday. Nearly a week ago. And you did not file the report until yesterday?”

“It’s a long story,” Pedric said. “We were afraid to file before. We had escaped the RV before the wreck, but afterward, when the thief wasn’t found, we assumed he had escaped too. We didn’t know where he might be. We holed up in a motel, afraid he might find us. Afraid, for a while, even to contact the sheriff.

“When the man didn’t show, when we felt sure no one was watching the motel, then we called the sheriff’s office.”

Maconachy nodded. Turning aside, he made a call to the station, putting the blue Corvette on wanted status and asking for a copy of the report. He glanced down the street as if he would like to go after the car himself. But the patrol units in the area would by now have been alerted. Maconachy nodded toward the hotel entry, and Lucinda and Pedric went on inside with the officers.

The interior garden areas were planted with ferns and with the bright blooms of cyclamens, the floor laid with pale travertine, the seating areas furnished with cushioned wicker chairs arranged on Turkish rugs. The clerk behind the desk was Asian and very tall. Lucinda and Pedric, standing with the two officers, gave him a description of the sandy-haired man with the high forehead and prominent nose.

“They checked out just before you came in,” the clerk said.. “He wasn’t registered but he has been staying with the woman. She registered for two. Clarice Hudson.”

The officers looked at Lucinda and Pedric.

“The name means nothing to us,” Pedric told them.

Officer Hart took Clarice Hudson’s credit card information and home address from the clerk, information that very possibly would turn out to be of no value.

“The woman had a cat,” the clerk said. “Big black cat. We welcome pets, it’s our specialty, but� well, the cat stayed in the room all right when the maid did it up, but she couldn’t work near it; it snarled at her several times. Really a brute. We need to take another look at the rules. Gave me the chills, that cat.”

Moving across the lobby with the two officers, Lucinda and Pedric sat with them around a low table in the comfortable wicker chairs, answering questions as the officers recorded what happened on the night their RV was stolen.

“He may have been staying at the same campground,” Pedric said. “We would see him walking through, but neither of us noticed him entering or leaving any vehicle. He’d say a distant good morning, or nod. Seemed pleasant enough but preoccupied.”

“The night he stole the RV,” Lucinda said, “we had gone out to dinner-we always pulled a ‘94 Saturn behind the rig, for transportation. We went into Russian River, to a place called Jimmie’s. We got back to the campground around seven, later than we’d planned. We don’t like to drive very far at night.”

“We locked the car,” Pedric said, “unlocked the RV. When we flipped on the lights there he was sitting at the dinette, a big black gun on the table pointed straight at us. An automatic, but I couldn’t see what make.

“He didn’t ask for money. He wanted, specifically, some pieces of jewelry that Lucinda had bought in Russian River on our last trip. That was more than strange, because it’s only costume jewelry. At least, a friend has some like it that she had appraised, and hers is of no special value, a few hundred dollars for the gold work. But that was what he wanted. When we said we didn’t have the jewelry with us, that Lucinda had left it in Molena Point, he didn’t believe us. He grew really angry, started shouting.”

“He began to search the RV,” Lucinda said. “Tore everything up, banging cupboards, making such a racket that we hoped someone would come to see what was happening.

“But we always park off to ourselves, choose the most private spot,” she said. “We like to look at the woods and wildlife, not at other campers. Well, no one came to help us and that was just as well, I guess, since the man was armed.”

Pedric said, “He shoved Lucinda in the bedroom. When I hit him from behind he turned and threw me in too.” The old man grimaced. “I’m not as strong as I once was. In my prime, I’d have taken that guy out. He demanded the jewels again, then demanded the ignition keys. When I didn’t hand them over, he roughed me up pretty bad, jerked the keys out of my pocket, and locked us in the bedroom.”

“Pedric still has bruises,” Lucinda said. “All along his side and back. A wonder he didn’t break something. Well, he didn’t get the jewelry.”

Officer Hart looked hard at them. “You had it all the time, and you didn’t hand it over, even though it was only paste?”

“We don’t like being told what to do,” Lucinda said, “and by that time we were both wondering if itwaspaste.” She smiled at the officers. “What he didn’t know was that Pedric had modified the RV.”

“I lived most of my life on the road,” Pedric said. “Traveling in trailers and all kinds of rigs.” He grinned at the officers. “The reason isn’t important, it doesn’t apply right now, but one thing I learned early, you need more than one or two ways out of a rig-in case of fire, in case of a wreck, in case the law comes down on you suddenly.”

Officer Maconachy grinned.

Pedric said, “That was a long time ago, but some habits don’t change easily. I built two storage compartments into the RV that opened from both the outside and from within. One was the mattress platform. I had to do quite a lot of adapting, and give over some of the space for functional equipment, but I made it work.”

“When he locked us in,” Lucinda said, “we packed a canvas duffel with a few clothes, some money we kept stashed, and the jewelry-it was with the money in one of Pedric’s special hiding places.”

“Took him a while to unhook the rig,” Pedric said. “Waste lines, water and gas and power. We just sat there on the bed, locked in. We didn’t want to hide in the compartment until he took off; we were afraid he’d come back there again, wanting to know how to find some latch, how to unhook something.

“Well, he had no trouble. Must have known how an RV works. The minute he started the engine and got moving, we slid into the compartment.”

Lucinda laughed. “We lay cramped in there bumping along as he drove out through the campground. We unlocked the outside door, and when he slowed to turn onto the highway, we dropped out of the rig and into the bushes dragging the duffel and our blanket-we didn’t see any point in sleeping cold.”

Both officers were smiling, with a gentle appreciation.

“We considered going to the camp manager,” Pedric said. “Spend the night there. But we decided that wasn’t smart. If this guy discovered us gone, if he’d stopped for something and opened the bedroom, that would be the first place he’d look.”

“So we took off hiking,” Lucinda said. “We went a good way from the grounds in the dark. When we were off alone by the river, we made ourselves a little camp in the bushes where we could see there wasn’t any poison oak.”

“We lay listening for a while,” Pedric said. “Then we curled up under the blanket like two spoons, and went to sleep.”

Officer Hart was laughing. Officer Maconachy sat grinning. “You did right well,” he said. “Very well, indeed.”

“According to the news accounts,” Pedric said, “he wrecked the rig about four hours later. We had no idea whether he searched the rig before that, whether he knew we were gone.”

Pedric looked at the officers. “I can’t say I’m pleased that he got out alive. Seems to me that would have been a nice turn of justice, if he had died instead of the tanker driver. We feel real bad about that.”

Lucinda said, “We left the Saturn there in the campground. We were afraid if we took it, that night or later, and he came back looking for us, we’d be easy to follow.”

“The next morning,” Pedric said, “we walked into Russian River. We were going to go to the sheriff, but then we decided that wasn’t smart, either. Decided to stay hidden for a while. We rented a car, drove over to Fort Bragg, and checked into the oldest and most inconspicuous tourist place we could find. Stayed there for several nights, and when no one came snooping around we headed down this way.”

“We have a friend here,” Lucinda said. “We’ll be here with her a day or two, then home to Molena Point.”

“Will you give me those addresses?” Maconachy asked.

She gave them Wilma’s address and phone number in the village; but when she told them Kate’s address just a block away on Stockton, both officers were suddenly keen with an unspoken watchfulness.

Officer Hart said, “When did you last speak with Ms. Osborne?”

“What is it?” Lucinda said. She leaned forward studying the two officers. “What’s happened? We called last night. I didn’t talk with her; I left a message on her machine. Oh my God. What’s happened?”

“She’s all right, she’s fine,” said Officer Hart quickly. “She had a breakin last night. Someone trashed her place.”

Both officers watched them intently.

“What time was this?” Pedric said.

“Late afternoon or early evening. She got home and found it around eight-thirty,” said Hart. “Totally destroyed the place, overturned and broke the furniture. They were after some jewelry.”

Lucinda looked quietly back at them then hurried out to the car. She returned carrying her cell phone, shaking her head. There were no messages.

“She surely would have told us,” Lucinda said. “Maybe she called our motel in Fort Bragg and left a message there. When we went to bed, we turned the ringer down. Maybe she left a message with the motel and somehow, checking out, we didn’t get it.”

The officers sat filling in their reports while Lucinda called Kate. Kate answered on the first ring.

“Kate? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, Lucinda. My line was out last night. I didn’t get your message until late. Where are you? I’m so eager to see you. The place is a terrible mess but I’ve straightened up the guest room-I think you’ll be comfortable. Have you had breakfast? You did get my message? Where are you?”

“We’re just down the street. No, we didn’t get your message, but we know what happened. I’ll explain when we see you. Do you know who broke in? Did you see anyone?”

“I know who she is,” Kate said.

“It wasn’t a man? You didn’t see a man?”

“A manhasbeen following me, Lucinda. Why? He stopped following for a while, and I’d hoped it was over. But now he’s back. How do you-Why do you ask?”

“What does he look like?”

“He� he looks like that waiter. In the village. At Charlie’s gallery opening. I told you about that. The waiter who-”

“The waiter who died,” Lucinda said. “Yes, Captain Harper called us. Sammy Clarkman. I told Harper his name, and where we met him, but I didn’t know anything more about him.” She glanced at the attentive officers. “Clarkman died in Molena Point, of a days-old trauma,” she told them. And, to Kate, “We’ll be there within the hour, see you then.”

“The man we saw this morning,” she told the officers, “the man who broke into our RV, he surely looked like that waiter. Clarkman died two weeks ago, while serving at a gallery opening. Kate says that would describe, as well, the man who followed her.

“We met Sammy in Russian River a few months ago, when he was waiting tables at the hotel. Then in Molena Point we saw him at Jolly’s Deli. Well, he helped cater the exhibit of a friend of ours there. He died while serving drinks, just fell over dead. The coroner said from a days-old blow to the head. He looked enough like the man who stole our RV to be his brother.”

Officer Maconachy said, “Can you tell me the date of the opening?”

Lucinda thought a minute. “October twenty-fourth. A Sunday night.”

He watched her thoughtfully. “Do you know anything about Clarkman, how long he lived in Russian River, or in Molena Point?”

“No, I’m sorry. Nor do I know what took him away from Russian River.”

“Do you know if he ever lived here in the city?”

“He didn’t mention living here. I don’t remember that he mentioned San Francisco at all.”

Maconachy rose. “After you’ve met your friend, would you come down to the station and talk with the detective who’s been in touch with Mendocino County? He’ll want to hear what you have to say.”

As the officers headed away, and the Greenlaws stepped to the desk to cancel their reservation, just a few miles south Clyde Damen approached the city driving a borrowed Cadillac sedan that was heavier and thus safer on the road than his antique roadster. On the seat beside him, Joe Grey stood with his paws on the dash, looking out at the approaching city with deep interest.

26 [��������: pic_27.jpg]

The time was 9:30, the morning sun burning off the last of the valley fog as Clyde and Joe Grey approached San Francisco. They had left the house at 7:30. The Cadillac still smelled new though it was a year old, a trade-in that Clyde had borrowed from the dealership with which his automotive shop shared space. A car more reliable on the freeway at high speed than Clyde’s dozen vintage antiques, most of which were tucked away in the back garage awaiting Clyde’s further attention in therapeutic engine mechanics, body smoothing, and, ultimately, cosmetic detailing and bright new paint. The sun, rising ahead of them, drenched the San Francisco skyline, offering, to Joe Grey, a far more inviting view of the city than the dim, garbage-strewn alleys of his kittenhood.

Peering out, Joe thought about the Greenlaws turning up alive, about Kate’s trashed apartment, and about Marlin Dorriss’s various enterprises. If these matters were connected, the thread that bound them was tangled enough to give anyone a headache. Quietly he glanced at Clyde-his housemate was in a better mood since he’d downed some caffeine; in San Jose they’d made a pit stop, picking up a cup of coffee, a cinnamon bun, and, for Joe, a quarter-pounder, hold the pickles and lettuce. Joe had taken care of his own pit stop under a tree behind the fast food emporium while Clyde kept an eye out for dogs, and they were on the road again. Their argument this early morning over whether Joe should accompany him had been stressful for them both.

Clyde said the San Francisco streets were dangerous for a cat. Had pointed out that Joe hadn’t survived those streets very well as a young cat, that Clyde had rescued him from the gutter, half dead. Joe said he’d gotten along just fine until his tail got broken, and that on this present junket he did not expect to be running the city’s back streets and alleys.

“You damn near died in that gutter.”

“I’m not going back to the gutter.”

Clyde had maintained there was nothing Joe could do in San Francisco to help Kate. Joe reminded him that Azrael was there harassing Kate and that Clyde, despite his many talents, was not skilled at getting up the sides of buildings or slipping through cat-size openings to chase a surly tomcat. But the fact remained that Clyde was deeply concerned about Kate. Joe watched his housemate with interest. His sense was that, no matter how much Clyde was put off by Kate’s unusual feline talents, no matter how she had distanced herself from him romantically, they needed each other very much as friends.

The two went back a long way. They had been good friends while Kate and Jimmie were married. The three were often together, though even then Clyde and Kate seemed close, laughing and having fun together and enjoying Clyde’s various pets, while Jimmie hated cats and had always seemed the odd man out. Jimmie had often been sarcastic and patronizing to Kate, and that hadn’t gone down well with Clyde.

It seemed to Joe that, when the beginning romance between Clyde and Kate went so quickly awry, the feelings that remained had slowly mellowed into a deep and needful friendship. And that was nice. Friendship between two of opposite sexes, without the need to crawl into bed, was one of the values of human civility and intelligence that Joe Grey had come to admire.

Joe did not reveal to Clyde hisreal reason for demanding to accompany him to the city, and that had deepened their early morning conflict. And of course Clyde had said, “What about Dulcie and the kit? Don’t you think they’ll be mad as hell when they find out we ran off to San Francisco without them? With all Dulcie’s dreams of spending a weekend at the St. Francis? Of shopping at Saks and I. Magnin? As Dulcie would put it, like a grand human lady?”

“So I’ll buy them a present from Magnin,” Joe had said irritably, and that had been the end of the matter. Clyde had only glared at him, so annoyed himself that he’d refused to call Kate to tell her he was on the way. He said she’d only fuss at him.

But now, as they pulled into the city and Clyde headed for Kate’s apartment-with no other destination intended-Joe’s thoughts were racing. He watched Clyde narrowly.

“I guess San Francisco PD should have a search warrant by now,” Joe said. “I guess they’ll be searching Dorriss’s condo-Harper said he’d call the judge early.” He watched Clyde appraisingly. “Maybe they’ve already found the Packard.”

Clyde turned to look at Joe. “We didn’t come up here to look for the Packard. That is so unrealistic, to think it’s in the city. We came to help Kate, to give Kate moral support. What makes you think my car would be hidden in San Francisco?”

Joe shrugged. A subtle twist of his gray shoulders, a flick of his ears. “Call it cat sense.”

“What?”

“That sixth sense the authorities talk about.”

“What authorities?”

“Cat authorities. People who study cats, who write about our ability to sense an earthquake before it happens, or a storm or hurricane. Same thing.”

Clyde glared at him, almost missing a red light, slamming on the brakes. “What’s so great about that? A weatherman can predict storms and hurricanes.”

“He can’t predict an earthquake. He can’t feel a storm in his paws like I can.”

“A weatherman doesn’thavepaws,” Clyde shouted.

“Same with the Packard,” Joe said. “I have this really strong sense that it’s here in the city. And I’m not the only one. Max Harper thinks it could be at the Dorriss condo. And Captain Harper is not given to what you call foolish notions.” Joe looked hard at Clyde. “It wouldn’t hurt to look. We could just-”

“We can’tjustanything. We’re here for Kate, not on some pointless chase. Not to get involved in some police investigation that is absolutely none of our business and where we’d be in the way. If there’s anything the cops hate, it’s civilians messing around a search, not to mention some nosy tomcat.”

“Dorriss’s condo has to have a garage. If Harper’s right, your precious Packard could be sitting there just waiting for you.” He looked intently at Clyde. “The cops get to it first and haul it away to their lockup, no telling what kind of damage they’ll inflict. What do they know about classic cars? Dent a fender, break one of those windows that you had such a hard time finding�”

“The police are trained to take care of valuable evidence.”

Joe Grey smiled.

Heading up Stockton, Clyde tried to call Kate. She didn’t answer her home phone or her cell phone. He hung up without leaving a message. “Maybe she’s meeting Lucinda and Pedric, or they’re out to breakfast.” He glanced at Joe. “You think, if the Packard was there in Dorriss’s garage, that some uninformed rookie might manhandle it? I’m not saying it is there, I’m�”

“The Dorriss condo isn’t far, just up Marina.”

Clyde tried Kate again. This time he left a message. “We’re headed for your place, Kate. Going to stop up on Marina. Be along shortly.” And again Joe Grey smiled.

As Clyde turned up toward Marina, his mind on his 1927 Packard roadster, just a few blocks ahead Kate and Lucinda and Pedric, in the Greenlaws’ rental car, were heading for breakfast at one of the intriguing restaurants in Ghirardelli Square. The Greenlaws were far too hungry to stop by the San Francisco PD before breakfast.

Canceling their hotel reservation but paying a one-night penalty, the Greenlaws had arrived at Kate’s apartment knowing that she’d had a breakin, but still shocked at the extent of the damage. Wading among the remains of what had been a handsome living room, stepping over lovely brocade cushions torn apart among broken pieces of cherry end tables, among upholstery stuffing scattered like snow, Lucinda shook her head. “Did they have to tear it up like this? What was the point?”

“Scum doesn’t need a reason,” Pedric said angrily. The old man seldom raised his voice. Now his words were filled with rage. Threading their way between Kate’s handthrown lamps that stood on the floor where she had righted them, stepping carefully around heaps of designer’s catalogs and fabric books tangled beneath the overturned couch and chairs, the couple made their way to the dining table, where Kate had coffee waiting.

She had cleared a space for them, had wiped off the chairs and table. Lucinda and Pedric sat down gratefully, breathing in the welcome scent of a good Colombian brew. Kate filled their mugs and passed a plate of shortbread and the cream and sugar. Lucinda considered the empty cardboard cartons heaped against the wall, and against the dining-room window, a collection of vodka, gin, tomato sauce, paper towel, and soup boxes.

“I just got back,” Kate said, “snatched them from the corner market before they broke them down. Made two trips and I’m still out of breath, hauling them up the stairs. I’m going to have to start working out.”

“That woman did all this?” Lucinda said. “Consuela, and that man? What kind of people are these?” She looked intently at Kate. “What do they want? Not a handful of fake jewels?”

“I don’t any longer believe that those jewels are paste,” Kate said. “But why would that appraiser� Emerson Bristol� He has such a good reputation. At least� I thought he did.” She studied their thin, lined faces. “Even if I’ve been overly casual in some ways, I did use some caution. I gave him a false address. On a hunch, I guess. I don’t really know why. Some little niggling feeling-notthat it did any good apparently, as he had me followed anyway. Or someone did.”

Kate sipped her coffee. “After being married to Jimmie, thinking it was a good marriage, I guess I lost faith in my own judgment. I sure lost faith in the apparent trustworthiness of other people.”

She shook her head. “With that attitude, you’d think I’d have checked out the appraiser. But I believed fully in the knowledge of those who recommended him. Then, too, it was hard to imagine that anything of great value would be tucked away in that old safe all those years, nearly thirty years.”

Lucinda nodded. Pedric looked as if he found nothing really surprising, only another interesting twist in the intricate fabric of the world. Pedric Greenlaw had seen a lot in his eighty-some years. He expected, before he died, to see a good deal more.

“I suppose,” Kate said, “every few years someone in the firm asked about the box in the safe, hauled it out and read the note again, checked whatever records they kept, then shoved the box back out of the way. Without the note tucked in the box, who knows what would have happened.”

Kate refilled their coffee cups. “I have the name of another appraiser. I called Detective Garza this morning. He said San Francisco PD uses this man, and so do the San Francisco courts. Garza has complete trust in him. Steve Tiernan. Too bad I don’t have the pieces now to take to him. Who knows if I’ll ever get them back. But I wondered if you might like to have your own jewelry appraised, since the work is so very similar.”

“We would like to do that,” Lucinda said.

Kate fetched her sweater, and as they headed out to breakfast in the Greenlaws’ rental car, Lucinda told her about the black cat that the young woman at the hotel had had with her.

“That has to be Consuela,” Kate said. “So that’s where she was staying. How convenient-the cat could come right across the roofs. I wonder where they’ve gone now. The cat was in here last night, it’s that beast from Molena Point. Azrael, the tomcat that ran with old Greeley Urzey.”

Lucinda shook her head. “Not just some ordinary cat.”

“The cat broke in, then let Consuela in. Long after she left to come and find me, Azrael stayed behind. When I got home, after Consuela left me, that animal was sitting right there on the overturned couch staring at me.”

“And what did he want?” Pedric said.

“He wanted me to help him. It was so� I’d think it funny, except that he terrifies me. He talked about some kind of hidden world that-”

The minute she said it, she was sorry. Both Lucinda and Pedric turned to stare at her. Lucinda drove in silence for some minutes, then Kate showed her where to turn into Ghirardelli Square. When she’d parked the car, Lucinda said, “Did the beast imply that thejewelrycame from some� hidden world? Did he say that, Kate?”

Before Kate could answer, Pedric said, “A world beneath the green hills.” His thin, lined face was so intent. His eyes never left hers. Kate had to remind herself that this old man had grown up on the ancient Celtic tales, that those myths were an important part of his heritage.

“A world entered through a cave,” Pedric said, “or through a door, or through a portal into a hill. A door that, in the old country, might be found hidden at the back of a root cellar.”

Kate wanted to say,Those are only stories, Pedric. Ancient, made-up stories.But she couldn’t say that to him. She glanced at Lucinda. The old woman touched her hand.

“Joe and Dulcie and Kit are real,” Lucinda said. “In their amazing talents of speech and understanding, they are very real. Yet most everyone in the world would say that such a thing is impossible, that such a cat can be no more than myth.”

The old lady cracked the windows so they could sit in comfort for a few minutes. Around them, the gardens and the lovely complex of shops and restaurants presented a sense of safety, a bit of the world where nothing bad could happen. The warm air was filled with the smell of chocolate mixed with the scent of flowers. All along the square, the shop windows presented wares beautifully wrought, delights meant to be enjoyed in a safe and ordered world. But within the car hung the hoary shadows of a chaotic environment, and it seemed to Kate that around her writhed dark myths, chill and threatening.

Looking at Kate, Pedric said gruffly, “The kit believes in another world than this. All her short life she has longed for that world.”

But then the old man smiled and shook his head. “Joe Grey wants nothing to do with such an idea. Joe says this world is quite enough for him. Let’s go have some breakfast.”

But, over breakfast, Kate could not leave such thoughts behind her. The Greenlaws had stirred anew her unease, mixed with the persistent small thread of interest. She thought about the black cat, about the old house he believed opened to that other world, thought how deftly the snarling tom had guided her unwilling thoughts. Last night after his visit to her apartment she had found herself, just at the edge of sleep, imagining such a world and falling into dreams where she wandered that exotic land-and she had awakened that morning lost and frightened.

Now, sitting comfortably at the little breakfast table between Lucinda and Pedric in the pretty cafe, she took Lucinda’s hand, holding fast to the old woman’s steadiness, holding fast to the real and solid world.

27 [��������: pic_28.jpg]

Marlin Dorriss’s condo was in the Marina District with a fine view of the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz Island, and the cold blue waters of San Francisco Bay. The complex was prime residential property and beautifully maintained. The sky to be seen from the condo’s wide, clean windows this morning was streaked with wisps of white cloud that lay so low they threaded through the tall orange towers of the great bridge. The occupants of the condo, at the moment, were not enjoying the view but were cursing the brightness of the day.

The prominent location of the sprawling third-floor apartment was not an element that pleased them. Cops cruised that street routinely; and twenty minutes ago a silver gray Cadillac had parked across the street but no one had gotten out. Under the shadows of the tree that half hid the vehicle, they couldn’t tell much about the man sitting in the driver’s seat, but he had to be watching their building.

“Marlin could have bought a place away from the main drag,” Hollis growled. “There’s another cop car.”

Consuela shrugged. “Maybe they’re watching the tourists, getting an eyeful of those short little skirts blowing up around their crotches, and no bras under their sweaters.”

“Cops seen all that stuff. And you had to park right in plain view. Might as well put up a sign.”

“They won’t spot the car; they have no make on the car.”

“She’s got a make on it. How many blue Corvettes do you see? You should’a done her.”

“That’s so childish. I don’t do things like that; that’s stupid. I’d rather spend a few years locked up with free meals, free phone, and laundry service, than to burn.”

“You don’t burn in California. Get a lawyer, you’re out before your clothes start to stink.”

“If you’d find the key to the garage, we could get the car out of sight.”

“Youshould know where he keeps the key, you spend enough time here. I’m surprised you stayed in that fancy hotel across town.”

“That place was perfect, a block from her apartment.” She glanced up to the top of the armoire. “Damn cat liked it fine. In and out of her window, and I didn’t even have to open the door for him.”

From atop the armoire, the damn cat fixed Consuela with a look that came close to doingher.If looks could kill, she would be squirming like a decapitated cockroach.

Hollis, picking up a cloisonne lamp that stood on a carved end table, put it roughly on the floor, and sat down on the table, straddle-legged, looking out the window to the street below. Munching on a quarter-pounder, he dripped an occasional slop of mustard and greasy meat juice onto the oriental rug. Consuela, sprawled in a leather chair beside the phone, munched French fries and chicken nuggets that she had dumped onto a porcelain tray and sipped a Coke, leaving rings on the burled maple. She had been dialing Marlin Dorriss’s cell phone for half an hour. They had dropped their jackets and canvas duffel and the takeout bags on the brocade couch.

The condo, which had smelled subtly of furniture polish and fine leather when they first entered, now smelled of fries and mustard, rancid grease and raw onions. Atop the tall, hand-decorated Belgian armoire, the black tomcat had already slurped up his burger. Digging his claws into the hundred-year-old cabinet, he studied Consuela and her disgusting friend, wondering how long he wanted to tolerate the pair. He didn’t mind working with Consuela, this randy master of shifting identities, as long as she was associated with Dorriss. Only under Dorriss’s influence-or because she wanted to influence Dorriss-did the little slut put on any class. She’d far rather dress like a streetwalker than make herself up for Kate Osborne, even if her turnout had been nearly flawless.

Hollis, on the other hand, was always scum. No one could clean up Hollis Dorriss or make him into anything more acceptable. No wonder Marlin had all but disowned his useless pair of sons. No wonder he preferred that they go by the name Clarkman.

Dorriss had used them whenever they came around, then paid them off and sent them packing. Now of course he had only one to deal with, and good riddance. That last fiasco, here in the city-Sammy teaming up with that cheap gang of third-rate jewel thieves and getting hit on the head-that had been the ultimate stupidity. Sure as hell it was Sammy’s ultimate stupidity; that little caper got him dead.

But then Hollis flubbed it even worse stealing that RV and hitting that tanker. Too bad the jerk got out alive. Well, it didn’t matter; Hollis was just marking time until some cop slapped the cuffs on him-jail meat waiting to happen.

You’d think, with the number of ventures the two had tried, they’d have put away some kind of stash. Instead, Hollis and Sammy had spent whatever they stole. Having done everything from residential break-and-enter to mugging old ladies, the two hadn’t learned much. He’d heard it all from Dorriss; the man did not seem the kind to go on about his personal life, particularly to a cat. But a few drinks, late at night, and Dorriss’s soft underbelly showed. The sophistication peeled away and he let it all out, his disappointments-and his grandiose and elaborate plans.

Well, you had to admit, those carefully thought-out burglary scenarios were not hot air. Marlin Dorriss could pull off the most bizarre operation without a flaw-thanks, in part, to yours truly. Azrael was quite aware that he had spectacularly increased the range and possibilities of Marlin Dorriss’s ventures.

Fixing his gaze on the display wall that so tastefully filled the north end of the living room, on Dorriss’s exhibition of rarities as he called it, Azrael studied Dorriss’s acquisitions from a year’s worth of inspired and masterful burglaries: a fortune in stolen treasures.

Each piece of jewelry was elegantly framed, behind unbreakable glass. Each larger item, the historic silver pitcher, the antique porcelain pieces, the contemporary sculpture, was appropriately set into a thick glass cubicle. A display so elegant, and of such value, that it might have graced the wall of Tiffany’s. The man was insane to keep the stuff here, even if the wall was normally hidden behind locked panels. He had been insane to give Consuela the combination of the panel locks-if he had given it to her. Maybe she’d filched it.

The four panels, each four feet wide, had been slid back into their pockets allowing Consuela to view the master’s work-not because she idolized Dorriss’s expertise, but because she’d had a hand in the thefts. Traveling with Dorriss and Azrael, performing various supportive chores, she had played backup as Azrael himself and then Dorriss entered the chosen residence. Between the tomcat and Dorriss, no security system was invulnerable.

Once inside the house, a diamond choker in a lady’s boudoir, for instance, required no more than the silent feline paw, the quick feline wit, while Dorriss kept watch. A locked safe? There Dorriss himself was the master. Consuela did the outside work, waiting with the car or SUV| keeping lookout with the cell phone, which would send a silent vibration to Dorriss’s phone.

Of course, if their target was a painting or a larger piece of sculpture, Dorriss did the removal. But he could not have functioned so flawlessly without Azrael’s unique talents.

The black cat yawned, licking his paw and purring with satisfaction. He liked this life of luxury. Since he had parted from drunken Greeley Urzey, and then from the insipid blonde he’d met in Panama, he had come into his true calling. Marlin Dorriss treated him royally, and Dorriss fully respected his erudite and resourceful talents. The man was quite cognizant that Azrael’s feline skills were far superior to the cleverest human thief. Trusting Azrael, Dorriss had no idea that his feline partner might harbor an agenda of his own.

Both Azrael and Dorriss had been intrigued with the photographs of Kate’s antique jewelry that had been forwarded by Emerson Bristol; Dorriss was certainly considering the jewels for a future project. He had no notion, at this moment, that the matter had already been taken care of.

While Consuela’s hunger to curry Dorriss’s increased favor was totally juvenile, her desire had made her useful. Her stealing these jewels for Dorriss rather than for herself had worked very well into his, Azrael’s, plans.

And after all, it was Consuela’s jealousy of Helen Thurwell-after Consuela played matchmaker between the two-that had driven her to this theft, that had made her so wild to impress him.

Suggesting that Dorriss use information he could gather by getting friendly with Helen Thurwell, Consuela herself had helped to launch Dorriss into this new operation. But then his resulting cozy affair with Helen had enraged Consuela. Humans could be so amusing.

Well, that series of capers, which had nothing to do with the recent jewel theft, was now ripe for harvest. In fact, this very morning Dorriss should be making his first moves.

Too bad the plan for the new project did not include feline assistance. However, the timing had worked out very well. While Dorriss was busy fleecing a flock of brand-new sheep, he, Azrael, was carrying out his own agenda. He might, a few days hence, be exercising his considerable talents in an environ far more fascinating than this poor world. Yawning again, he was considering a nap when Consuela and Hollis started bickering. So boring, so loud and childish.

Beyond them out the window he could see another cop car cruising. Didn’t the law have anything else to do? Bastards made him nervous. He was just curling up, despite the annoying argument, when the doorbell rang.

Alarmed, he dropped off the armoire and leaped to the windowsill where Consuela stood looking down, trying to conceal herself behind the shutter. A second cop car stood just below, in the red zone. The bell rang again. Consuela glanced at her purse where she’d stashed the jewels.

“The panels!” Azrael hissed at her. “Shut the panels.”

Hastily she and Hollis slid the wall panels in place and locked them, then she stood with her hand on the intercom, undecided.

“You better let them in and play dumb,” Azrael said. “Stash the jewels first.”

“What are they doing here?”

“Maybe they have a warrant,” Hollis said stupidly. “Maybe that woman made you, figured out who you are, linked you up with Dorriss-and that led them right here.”

“Linkedyouup with Dorriss,” Consuela snapped.“You’rehis son.”

The bell rang again. Consuela snatched up her purse, pulled out the small blue evening bag that held the jewels, and looked at Azrael. The tomcat looked back at her, jolted by a rush of adrenaline. This gig was working out just fine.

In the silver Cadillac, on the front seat beside Clyde, Joe Grey stood up on his hind paws peering through the windshield. The condo building was of Mediterranean design and was fairly new, with well-maintained gardens and fresh cream-toned paint. It was lent an air of hominess by the many roses blooming in raised planters against the building’s walls and in the entry foyer. He watched the two officers from San Francisco PD enter. The taller one, who was in uniform, reached to ring the bell. The other guy was in plainclothes, but he had cop written all over him. Detective, Joe thought, smiling. A moment after they rang, at a third-floor window, a black cat appeared beside the dark-haired woman who stood half concealed behind the shutters. The cat was huge, as black as cinders; the woman’s hair was curled in a cloud around her pale face. The way the morning light struck the window and shone down through a skylight, Joe could see clearly a portion of the high-ceilinged room behind them.

As the woman turned away, Joe watched her sliding some sort of wide panels across an elaborately decorated wall. He saw light hit the decorations glancing from them in a flash of brilliance, then they were hidden as the panels closed.

In the window, the cat moved as if trying to see better down into the street. When he pressed his face against the glass as if watching their car, Joe slid out of sight beneath the dash.

Beside him, Clyde had the phone to his ear, leaving another message for Kate. Hanging up, he studied the black cat in the window, then looked down at Joe. “You’re afraid of that clown?”

“Not at all,” Joe said testily. “I don’t want him to know I’m here. Whatever they’re up to, I’d rather not be made before I go snooping. Did Consuela let the cops in? What’s the cat doing, can you still see him?”

“You’re not going out there. You’re staying in the car.” But Clyde dug the binoculars from the glove compartment. “I came over here to look for my Packard, not to chauffeur some self-designated feline busybody bent on making trouble.”

Joe slid up on the seat again. The two cops had disappeared, presumably buzzed through to the stairs or elevator. The black cat had vanished, too. Stepping onto Clyde’s legs, Joe was prepared to leap out the open window, when Clyde grabbed the nape of his neck.

“Let go! I’m just listening!” With his head out the window, he tried to catch a word or two when Consuela opened the upstairs door to the officers, but he could hear nothing over the sound of a passing car. Glancing back at Clyde, he lifted a paw, claws out, until Clyde sensibly loosened his grip.

Having closed and locked the panels, Consuela shoved the blue suede evening bag at Azrael. “Get in the bedroom. If they start to search, take it up the trellis. Hide it on the roof.” “You better unlock the French doors.” Azrael lifted the bagful of jewelry, bowing his neck. Damn thing weighed a ton. She fled past him for the bedroom; he heard the French doors open. As he dragged the bag up the hall, she hurried out again.

“Get a move on,” she snapped over her shoulder. “If I don’t let them in, and if the bastards have a warrant, they’ll call the manager to unlock the damn door.”

Taking the bag in his teeth, he dragged it across the bedroom and onto the balcony. The weight of all that gold nearly dislocated his spine. How did she think he was going to get that thing up the trellis? Damn humans. As much as he wanted a few select pieces, he didn’t need to take it all, not for his purposes.

But there was no time to try to dig the bag open. Chomping down securely on the blue suede, he leaped onto the trellis and tried to climb.

The trellis was a frail thing, and the vine was just as thin, hardly strong enough to hold a good-size sparrow.

A sturdy enough pine tree stood beyond the window, its branches rising above the building, but the trunk was too far away for a leap, even without his burden. If the cops arrested Consuela and Hollis, he had two choices. He could secure the jewelry for Dorriss, and could pretty much write his own ticket: hide the bag on the roof and, when the law finished searching the condo and took away those two losers, call Dorriss. What could be easier?

Or he could choose the most impressive piece or two, a bracelet or choker that would fit around his neck perhaps. Dump the rest on the roof for the pigeons, then go on to follow is own plans.

Dragging his burden off the trellis onto the clay tiles, he could hear, below, businesslike voices from the living room as the cops questioned Consuela.

28 [��������: pic_29.jpg]

The binoculars had been Joe’s idea. Clyde had to admit, the 7X35 lenses gave him a sharp, almost intimate view through the third-floor window of the condo where Consuela and the uniformed officer stood talking. “I don’t see the plainclothes guy.”

“See the cat?”

“Not a sign of him.”

That made Joe nervous. “What are they doing in there? Wish you could lip read. Why don’t you call Harper, see if he got the warrant, see if that’s what thisisabout.”

Clyde lowered the binoculars, looking at Joe. “Harper doesn’t need to know I’m here. And how wouldI know about a warrant?”

“Just play dumb. Tell him you came up to the city because you were worried about Kate-tell him the truth, Clyde. He doesn’t need to know what else you’re interested in, or where you are at this particular moment.”

“So when I tell him I came up to see Kate, he’s going to offer gratis information about a search being conducted by San Francisco PD?”

“Feel him out, draw him out. You can do that. Maybe those guys are just fishing-that’s more thanwehad time to do.”

Their plan had been to walk through the complex trying to see into the garages that occupied the first floor beneath the apartments. They’d thought maybe there’d be windows in the back. But they hadn’t had time to look for the Packard before they saw Consuela and the black tomcat, and then the cops showed. Now, as the uniformed officer moved out of sight, Clyde’s cell phone rang.

“Damen,” he said softly. Then, “Where are you?”

Joe leaped to the back of the seat to press his ear to the phone. Kate was saying, “We’re at Ghirardelli Square for breakfast, waiting for our order. I’ve made an appointment with an appraiser, for Lucinda’s jewelry, just before noon. I just stepped outside to do that, and to check my messages; the gardens are so beautiful. What’s this about your car? Where are you?”

“Just up from you, opposite the yacht harbor. Do you-Hold on.”

Above them in the condo, Consuela had left the window. But the black cat had appeared at the other end of the condo on a balcony. Clyde felt Joe’s claws digging into his shoulder as together they watched Azrael climb up a bougainvillea vine, clawing his way toward the roof. The black cat moved slowly, dragging something heavy that was dangling from his clenched teeth. “What is that thing?” Clyde said. “Something blue. Looks like a woman’s purse.”

On the phone, Kate gasped, “That’s�”

But Joe was out the window, slashing Clyde’s hand when Clyde tried to grab him, dropping to the street behind a passing car. He could hear Kate shouting into the phone as Clyde bailed out behind him, swerving into the path of a cab. Joe was safely across when tires squealed, and then Clyde was across, yelling as Joe headed for the end of the building where a pine tree rose, as bare as a telephone pole, its high, faraway branches brushing the roof where Azrael had disappeared.

Storming up the tree, Joe leaped for the roof, his claws scrabbling and slipping on the slick, rounded tiles. Ahead of him among a maze of heating vents and chimneys a black tail flashed and was gone. Watching for the tomcat to show again, Joe studied the shadows among the rooftop machinery.

Joe waited for some time, then slipped in among the pipes and wire mesh boxes, sniffing the air. All he could detect was the smell of machine oil, ocean, and fish from the wharves.

But then, where the shadows of two chimneys converged, he saw a faint movement. He remained still, his heart pounding.

Azrael appeared suddenly, leaping to the top of a wire cage. Dropping the blue bag between his paws, he hunched low over it, watching Joe. Crouched in attack mode, his amber eyes were slitted, his teeth bared. At this moment, against the sky, he looked as huge and fierce as if the beast did, indeed, bear the blood of jaguars as he boasted.

Warily, Joe approached him. As he rounded on Azrael, he heard from the apartment below a crash that sounded like furniture breaking, heard Consuela swear, then a softer thud, and one of the cops shouted. At the same instant, Joe made a flying leap onto the mesh box and straight into Azrael’s claws. Burying his teeth in the tomcat’s shoulder, he bit and raked, ripping his hind claws down Azrael’s side. Azrael, twisting with the power of a thrashing boa, bit into Joe’s belly. Below them glass shattered, a cop barked an order, and then silence, sudden and complete.

Coming at Joe with all the screaming power of an enraged jaguar, Azrael slashed at Joe’s face; Joe tasted blood. Clawing at each other, the two toms slid across the tiles rolling and scrabbling. And as Joe leaped for the black cat’s throat, the pounding of hard shoes came running, sliding, and Clyde loomed over them, diving for Azrael. Azrael gave a violent surge that hurled Joe sideways, slashed Clyde’s arm, and twisted out of Clyde’s hands, snatching the bag where it had fallen among the shadows. Weighted by his burden, Azrael sailed off the roof into the overhanging branches of the pine and was gone, scorching down in a shower of pine bark. Joe streaked down after him, hitting the ground with a thud that knocked his wind out. Already Azrael was half a block away flashing through the condo gardens and up the hill at the back, his neck bowed sideways as he dragged the blue suede bag. As Joe leaped after him, he heard Clyde running across the roof above, and down wooden stairs somewhere at the back.

And as Joe fled after the black tom, intent on Kate’s vanishing jewels, down the coast in Molena Point, Dulcie and Kit lay quietly in Detective Juana Davis’s office observing a material witness to the death of James Quinn. Listening to the woman who, though in part responsible for the real estate agent’s demise, seemed without knowledge of that fact.

Dulcie lay curled in Juana’s in box as unmoving as a sleek toy cat. Across the desk from her, the kit lay sprawled across a stack of reports, belly up, fluffy tail dangling over the edge of the desk, her long fur tumbled in all directions like a ragged fur piece. Detective Davis sat at her desk between the two cats, apparently amused by the pair, making no effort to evict them. Across from her, settled at one end of the couch, Helen Thurwell looked up at Davis, calm, composed, and puzzled.

“I thought I’d told Detective Garza everything that might help,” Helen was saying. “It wasn’t much, but� you’re still thinking that it might not have been an accident? That someonekilledJames?”

Neither cat opened her eyes. Neither cat allowed her ears to rotate following the conversation. Both seemed deeply under, twitching occasionally as if wandering somewhere among mysterious feline dreams.

“I understand that this is painful,” Juana was saying. “But I believe you can help. Quinn was your partner for how many years?”

“Nearly ten years,” Helen said. “He was a good partner, always careful in his record keeping, always cordial and considerate of our clients, never impatient with them-never stepping on my toes in a transaction. You don’t work with someone that long, and that closely, and not grow to care for them.”

“No one is suggesting that there was any problem between you.”

Dulcie slitted her eyes open just enough to watch Davis. Juana Davis was a no-nonsense sort of woman in her fifties, squarely built, with dark hair and dark eyes. She was a steady, commonsense person, but along the way she hadn’t lost her sympathy for another human being. She was just very selective as to who deserved it. Dulcie thought that Juana was still making up her mind about Helen Thurwell.

On a hunch, Dulcie unwound herself from the in box, sat up yawning, and leaped to the couch to settle down beside Helen, curling up close to her, to see what she would do.

Davis’s couch was old, tweed-covered, and smelled of cocker spaniel from some past life before she bought it at the Pumpkin Coach Charity Shop. The city did not pay for items the city fathers considered luxury purchases. Dulcie didn’t see why a couch would be considered a luxury; but then, she wasn’t the city manager. On the coffee table before Helen lay a thick briefcase. Before she reached for her files, Helen turned to stroke Dulcie.

She seemed to know how to pet a cat, so gentle and reassuring that Dulcie began to purr. Interesting that Helen wasn’t this reassuring with her daughter-but then, maybe petting an animal helped to ease Helen’s tension. And dealing with her daughter did not?

When at last Helen opened the briefcase, she removed a large black ledger. “This was what you wanted? The record of my work days?” Rising, she passed the ledger across the desk.

Juana opened it, studied several pages, and nodded. “Do all real estate agents keep this kind of record?”

Helen shook her head. “The agent who trained me, the man I worked with when I first started out, he taught me to do that. He’d had a court case once where he had to testify about the specific circumstances of a sale. I guess it got pretty ugly. He couldn’t be sure of some of the times involved and, as it was a murder case, he felt he hadn’t been very helpful.

“Some of our documents are marked with the time of signing as well as dated; others are not. In a case like his, he’d had to go through them all, do the best he could to remember specifics. After that, he began to keep a log. He trained me to do that, and I’ve done it ever since.” Helen looked at Juana inquiringly.

Rising, Juana moved to the credenza. Turning over two clean cups, she poured fresh coffee from a Krups coffeemaker. “Cream and sugar?”

“Neither please. Just black.”

Setting one mug on the coffee table and the other on her desk, Juana picked up a sheaf of photocopies that lay on the blotter and stood looking down at Helen. “These are copies of the pages of a notebook.” Juana handed the papers to Helen. “The original pages had been ripped in quarters. We taped them together and made copies, then locked them in the evidence room. Do you recognize the handwriting?”

Helen examined the first few pages. “It’s James’s handwriting. But these entries� these are the names of my clients.” She looked up at Juana. “We both had our own clients. We simply worked backup for each other.” She examined several more pages.

“I think these are the dates that offers were made, or maybe that a client went into escrow. I’d have to check the ledger.” She looked up at Juana. “I don’t understand. Why would James keep this? This information is all recorded in my ledger. And in the various papers that are on file.”

“You notice the little symbols before each entry? What are those?”

Helen shook her head. “I don’t know. Asterisk. Pound sign. Circle. Repeated over and over. I haven’t any idea. I don’t understand why James would keep any kind of list of my clients.”

“Can you find any pattern? Remember any special circumstances about these particular meetings? Would the symbols indicate whether you met with the client in the office, or somewhere else? Whether anyone besides your office associates was present? Anything at all out of the ordinary?”

Helen studied the entries for some time, sipping her coffee. When she reached absently to pet Dulcie again, her hand had grown tense and cold. She sat a minute with her eyes closed, as if thinking. As if trying to remember, perhaps to make sure of something. When she looked up at Juana, her hand had grown very still on Dulcie’s fur. And her cheeks were flushed.

“I think� I’m pretty sure there was someone in the office during each of these transactions.”

Juana sat watching Helen, her square, tanned face impassive. Helen’s hand on Dulcie’s shoulder was so tense that under other circumstances Dulcie would have risen and moved away. Helen said, “Marlin Dorriss was� was in the office during each of these meetings. I’m sure of it. Waiting for me somewhere in the office.”

Juana continued to watch her, in silence.

“Sometimes, he’d be sitting reading in a client’s chair, beside some empty desk. Sometimes in one of the chairs against the wall just beyond my desk. You know how our office is, each desk with space enough to draw up chairs and sign papers, but no separate conference room for the signings.”

“Anyone besides Marlin Dorriss?”

“No.” Helen’s face colored. “Waiting for me to go to lunch or maybe dinner.”

Dulcie was pleased that Helen had the grace to feel ashamed.

“After your clients finished their business and left, did Marlin usually come on over to your desk?”

Helen looked surprised. “Yes, he did,” she said thoughtfully. She gripped Dulcie’s shoulder so hard that it was all Dulcie could do not to hiss. Dulcie watched Helen, fascinated.

Had Helen never once questioned Dorriss’s presence in her office? Had she never wondered if Dorriss would snoop on a client’s personal information that was all laid out on her desk? Dulcie imagined him retrieving bank names, memorizing street addresses, information from loan applications, social security numbers. Had he been able, as Helen turned away perhaps putting her papers in order, to jot down bank account numbers, business references, mother’s maiden name-a regular buffet of vital information?

“When the clients left,” Juana said, “and Dorriss came to your desk, their papers might be still lying there?”

“Yes,” Helen said shakily. “Sometimes.” She pressed a fist to her mouth. “But he wouldn’t� He wouldn’t have�” She realized she was clutching Dulcie, and took her hand away.

Juana said, “Do you have a restroom in the office?”

“Yes.”

“Did he usually use it before you left for� lunch or whatever?”

“Always. But he� he is very careful about germs, almost a fetish.”

Right,Dulcie thought. She could imagine Dorriss in the locked restroom busily recording all the vital information from Helen’s clients. This smooth snooping had to be the setup for identity theft. She licked her paw, thinking.

Identity theft could go on for many months before the victim had any clue. Who knew how soon the recipients of such attention would wake to find their houses mortgaged or sold, their CDs cashed, their bank accounts stripped, and their credit destroyed? How many people had he already swindled?

And Dorriss had left town last night, had caught a flight somewhere. Setting out to transfer other people’s funds, to collect cashier’s checks secured by other people’s real estate?

Dropping down from the couch she leaped to Juana’s desk where she prowled innocently among the detective’s stacked papers. Juana, watching her, moved her cup so as not to have cat hair or maybe a cat nose in her coffee. As Dulcie turned away she spotted it, lying on a stack of papers: The photocopy of a flight schedule, with the name of a local travel agency at the top, and Marlin Dorriss’s name beneath.

Pretending to play, gently pawing at the papers, she studied the schedule. Dorriss or the agency had thoughtfully typed a cover sheet, a condensation, on one page, giving seven destinations and dates. The pages stapled behind it would surely give departure and arrival times, airline, airport, flight number. Well, the cover sheet was all she needed. She couldn’t help it; she looked up at Davis, smiling and purring. Oh, the detective was on top of it; Detective Davis had run with her suspicions before ever interviewing Helen Thurwell. Dulcie could imagine Davis calling all the travel agents in town until she hit pay dirt.

Dorriss had flown out last night to LA. Two days in LA then to San Diego where he’d pick up a car. He must be driving back up the coast, because the next flight was out of San Francisco, heading north. The itinerary gave not only flights and car rentals, but hotel reservations in Laguna, La Jolla, then Santa Barbara, and Sacramento, before he caught the San Francisco flight. The entire trip would take just under two weeks.

It must be nice to enjoy such a long working vacation. Was this another string of strange burglaries? Or a chorus of well-planned securities sales or purchases and bank withdrawals, all in names other than Marlin Dorriss?

Lying down on the desk, Dulcie watched as Juana rose to see Helen out. Helen looked pleadingly at Juana; she was very quiet now, very subdued, understanding at last that she had been the unwitting collaborator in a high-powered criminal undertaking. The detective put her arm around Helen. “We’ll get to the bottom of this. You did nothing deliberately. Try not to worry.”

“I wasdeliberatelystupid,” Helen said. “So criminally stupid that I got my partner killed.” She looked miserably at Juana. “I have no doubt, now, that his death was not an accident.”

She shook her head. “James was not careless, he would not have left the gas on like that. He was not forgetful, not even in the smallest matters.” She found a tissue in her pocket and wiped her eyes. “I have been stupid for a very long time.” She was crying in earnest, her shoulders shaking.

The expression on Juana Davis’s face was a mixture of discomfort, sympathy, and a cop’s restrained look of triumph. Taking her arm from around Helen, Juana touched Helen’s shoulder, heading her into the hall.

And Dulcie, watching the two women, found it hard to muster much sympathy for Helen Thurwell. All the empathy in the tabby’s heart was for Juana Davis as the detective set out on what could be a difficult task, heartbreaking for many more people than Helen Thurwell.

Dulcie knew, from listening to Dallas Garza and Captain Harper, that the crime of identity theft might be uncovered and the culprit apprehended; the perp might even be prosecuted, but the damage done might never be undone, the victims’ money might never be recovered.

29 [��������: pic_30.jpg]

Streaking between the complex of condo buildings and up the hill behind, through the gardens of expensive estates, Joe drew nearer the black tom but then lost him again among a cluster of smaller homes. Racing past two houses that were still boarded up from the last earthquake, Joe paused in their neglected gardens seeking for Azrael’s scent.

There: the black beast appeared suddenly crossing the street while dragging his burden, leaping clear of a car. The cat was slowing and tiring. Swiftly Joe closed on him. He was about to leap and grab Azrael, when behind him a car slid across both lanes and screeched to the curb; Joe caught a glimpse of Lucinda bent over the wheel, and Pedric beside her. The back door opened and Kate slid out.

She caught Joe up, snatching him in mid-stride and kept running, chasing the black tom, clutching Joe to her so hard he could hardly breathe. Ahead of them Azrael was a smear of black swerving away from the street through the bushes and heavily over a fence. Kate, running along the fence, found a gate and fought it open. Crossing the yard clutching Joe, she lost minutes finding the way out.

“Let me go, Kate! You’ve lost him!”

“No! I can catch him!” She glanced down at him, her blond hair plastered with sweat, her eyes frightened.

“He has the jewels,” Joe coughed, half strangled. “Ease up, I can’t breathe.”

Tightening her grip on the back of his neck, she eased her hand on his chest. He gulped for air. “I didn’t know you could run like that. How did you find us? Where’s Clyde? Why are you�?”

She didn’t answer. Glimpsing Azrael swerving into an alley, she flew after him across someone’s patio and through another garden. Lucinda’s car was lost beyond the yards and fences. They passed a boarded-up house, then soon another, not derelicts but nice houses; Joe thought they were somewhere in Cow Hollow where there had been a lot of damage in the earthquake. Ahead on the sidewalk, the black tomcat appeared suddenly; he stood panting as if at the end of his strength, the blue bag at his feet. Joe tensed to leap down.

It was here that Lucinda found them and pulled to the curb. Azrael snatched up the bag and disappeared into the bushes, heading for a boarded-up house as Clyde’s car swerved in behind Lucinda. Kate dropped Joe and lunged through the bushes after the black tom. The beast bolted up the steps and through a broken window between crookedly nailed boards, dragging the blue evening bag.

The faded Victorian house listed to the left, supported by a scaffolding of rough lumber all along one side. All the windows were secured with boards over the dirty and broken glass. Two boards were nailed across the front door, and there was a chain barrier across the front steps. The trim on the three stories was splintered along one side, and shingles had fallen into the bushes.

Slipping under the chain barrier, Kate was working at the doorknob and pushing at the door. The house must once have been a comfortable home for a big family. Joe wondered why these houses had been let sit for so long. Through the broken window where the black tomcat had gone, Joe could see pale shadows moving. Kate put her shoulder to the door, sent it flying open, ducked under the boards, and disappeared inside.

Warily Joe followed her. He didn’t like the place; he didn’t like its deep hollow silence. It smelled of something dank and foreign. As he moved up the steps, Clyde thudded up behind him. They entered together, Clyde ducking beneath the boards.

Only a dull light seeped through the dirty, boarded-up windows. They stood for a moment in the gloom, then moved on in, the floor creaking beneath Clyde’s feet, the dry dust puffing up beneath Joe’s paws-dust that was marked all over with paw prints. Beyond the dim living room, in what appeared to be the dining room, Kate stood facing a tall china cabinet that towered in the darkest corner, a folded mattress leaning up against it amid a tangle of ragged lumber.

Kate stood looking up through the shadows at the black tom. Crouching atop the tall cabinet he stared down at her, his amber eyes narrowing as if waiting for her to speak. The blue suede bag lay between his paws; he loomed over it, fiercely possessive. A split second and he could leap down squarely into her face, clawing and biting; his eyes blazed and threatened, making her tremble.

Around her the house was silent. It stunk of cat. Heaps of trash were piled in the dark corners, papers, wine bottles, beer cans. She thought there would be hoards of mice to feed the pale cats she’d seen slipping away. To her left a broken stairway led partway up to the floor above, where a ragged hole gaped. A pale cat peered down, then was gone, a cat that looked as hard of body as a dog, and with a lean killer’s face. Beneath the stairs blackness loomed so dense, so complete that she felt as if the house floated in a void, as if the floor on which she stood had nothing but emptiness beneath. The room was cold, a coldness that went to the bone. Watching the cat, his hints of another world that had so stirred her dreams now filled her with fear. How could she have wanted any such world, how could she want any world to which this beast was drawn?

But she wanted her property back; she was not willing to turn away from what was hers. Moving closer in among the leaning boards, she thought that if she stood on the humped and folded mattress, she could reach the bag and snatch it away.

He watched as she began to climb, his smile slow and amused. And suddenly grabbing the bag in his mouth, he leaped directly past her face. She lunged, snatching the bag from his mouth-and felt claws like knives down her arm. The suede ripped open, too, under her spurting blood. The jewels spilled, falling away to vanish among the boards. Dropping down, she snatched at a bracelet, quickly kneeling among the boards reaching to catch the slithering chain of a locket. Snarling, the black tom came at her-and Joe Grey came flying, toppling boards and knocking Azrael among them. Jewelry scattered and fell between the fighting tomcats, lost in the rubble, hidden beneath falling boards.

Snatching up the emerald bracelet, Azrael spun and ran, leaping for the blackness beneath the stairs.

Kate rose to follow but Clyde grabbed her, drawing her back.

They stood at the edge of the hole staring down beneath the stairs into total blackness. They could see nothing, no hint of foundation, no broken timbers or tumbled earth. Only emptiness falling away, deep black space that seemed to go down and down as if it spread out beneath the house, black and endless, as if perhaps the quake had shifted the earth, leaving a cavern beneath that part of the house. Kate backed away, dizzy. Leaning against Clyde, she leaned against Joe Grey as well where Clyde had snatched him up, holding him safe from that abyss. In Clyde’s arms Joe met her stare with the same deep fear that filled Kate herself; and from somewhere within the blackness, Azrael spoke to her.

“You would do well to follow me, Kate Osborne. You would do well to come with me.” Was he crouched on some ledge or fallen timber that was invisible to her? She stared and stared but could see nothing, no glint of his yellow eyes. Then beside Kate something moved among the rubble, and from the shadows a pale cat leaped past her into the blackness, then another, another-and they too vanished. And from deep within that dank space, Azrael’s purr rumbled. “You will forever regret your cowardice, Kate Osborne, if you stay behind. You can see that they accept me now. Because I took the jewels. Because I bear the emerald choker. They will lead me now, down into that world.” The cat purred louder, his rumble echoing. “Come with me, Kate Osborne. Come now�”

Kate backed farther away.

“If you will follow me, I will lead you home, Kate, where hidden rivers run beneath the earth among green meadows, where you can dig jewels from the cavern walls, all the wealth you want, for the taking.” A cold breath touched Kate, a stink of damp sour earth as if stirred by movement somewhere deep within that void. And Azrael did not speak again.

She stared down into the empty dark that waited just beneath her feet, and she turned away sickened, leaning into Clyde’s steady grip. He pulled her away, putting his arm around her; she could feel Joe’s heart pounding fast between them. The relief on the tomcat’s face was comical.

Behind Clyde, Lucinda and Pedric stepped from the shadows. Whatever they felt, whatever they had seen, they did not speak. The four of them knelt, searching for Kate’s inheritance among the rubble and broken lumber, while Joe Grey sat washing blood from his paws.

Moving one splintered board at a time, they uncovered and retrieved nine pieces of the jewelry. When Pedric got a flashlight out of his car and shone it under the stairs, they could see only blackness, as if indeed, beneath the house, a vast area of landfill had shifted away, leaving the building on some earthquake-riven ledge. There was no sign of the choker, no answering flash of gold and green from those murky depths.

“Out,” Kate whispered, backing away, the true sense of danger coming home to her. They moved swiftly out beneath the door’s barrier, into the fresh air.

A police car was pulling to the curb. As Detective Reedie stepped out, Joe Grey slid from Clyde’s arms into Lucinda’s, and under her jacket, out of sight. And the old woman wandered away with him.

Kate, smoothing her disheveled hair, smiled at the detective and held out her folded sweater, in which she had wrapped the jewels and the shredded blue bag. “We have them!” she said breathlessly, trying to invent a plausible story that did not include a thieving black tomcat. “How did you find us?”

Reedie looked at the jewels and at her bleeding arm, at her dirty hands and streaked face. “I saw you running,” the detective said warily, “from the window of the condo. What was that you were chasing?A cat?It was carrying that blue bag?” The handsome young detective looked hard at her. “You want to tell me what happened?”

Kate didn’t know what to say. He watched her, waiting. His thatch of brown hair made that handsome face look even more boyish; his brown eyes looked half angry at being scammed, half filled with curiosity.

“I saw Consuela’s car,” she said, “we were coming back from breakfast. The blue Corvette? I pulled over, hoping it was hers, and saw something running-a big black cat-from under a pine tree at the end of the condo. I couldn’t believe� It was dragging something blue. My bag, I knew it was my bag. I just� jumped out of the car and ran.”

The detective turned, glancing toward Clyde. “And your friend in the silver Cadillac?”

He had obviously seen Clyde parked in front of the condo. Kate explained that Clyde had seen the Corvette, too, that he had been sitting in his car watching the building where it was parked, wondering if it belonged to Consuela. She was faltering when Clyde took over.

Clyde seemed truly amazed that the cat had grabbed the blue bag; he thought Consuela must have thrown it out the window when she knew the police were at the door. “I was turned away,” he said. “I thought I heard something hit the ground among the dead leaves. When I looked, I saw a snatch of blue. But why that cat would grab it up�” Clyde shook his head, at a loss to explain the black beast. “Cats do weird things. Well,” he said, grinning, “Kate got her jewels back.” He studied Reedie. “Was that Marlin Dorriss’s condo? I’d heard it’s in the Marina. Was Consuela connected with Dorriss?”

“It is Dorriss’s condo,” Reedie said stiffly. “What made you ask?”

“A hunch,” Clyde lied. “I saw them together once, in Molena Point, and wondered. Are you going back there now?”

“I am. You have some business there?”

“I would like to follow you back, talk with you.”

Reedie glanced at Kate, then nodded.

Kate just hoped Reedie wouldn’t go digging for more answers than he needed.

Well, her story sounded plausible to her. The best lie, sometimes, was the truth, with the incriminating parts left out.

After Reedie left, Lucinda dropped Clyde and Joe back at the condo. There, Joe quietly slipped into the Cadillac while Clyde talked with Reedie then went with him to look for the Packard-but only after Reedie called Molena Point PD and talked with Harper.

Clyde told Reedie that he had no proof of any misconduct on Dorriss’s part. Just a feeling, Clyde said. A hunch that Dorriss might be involved in the thefts. He lied to Reedie, and through Reedie he lied to Harper, and all to protect Joe Grey. He said to Reedie innocently that, if the officers had found any stolen items in the condo, then maybe Dorriss had the Packard as well. In short, Clyde wove a tangle in a way that he abhorred, all for the gray tomcat.

Kate said later that she wished Clyde didn’t have to stir up so many questions for Reedie, when the detective would be talking more than once with Harper and Garza about the case. But it couldn’t be helped, if Clyde wanted to look for his Packard-and Clyde loved that Packard.

She did wonder privately sometimes if any woman ever in Clyde’s life would stir the possessive emotions generated by those abused and neglected old cars that he made whole and new again.

Dropping Clyde off at the condo, Kate and Lucinda and Pedric, feeling suddenly nervous at carrying all the jewels with them, headed for the Greenlaws’ appointment with the appraiser, hoping he would see them though they were nearly an hour late. They agreed to meet for lunch either at Kate’s favorite sidewalk cafe, or across the street at I. Magnin where Clyde-after he found the Packard, he said, as if he was certain he’d find it-had a bit of shopping to do. Off Kate and Pedric and Lucinda went, carrying with them what might be a fortune wrapped in Kate’s sweater; and Clyde and Joe Grey went to shop, all as if this were a perfectly ordinary morning.

30 [��������: pic_31.jpg]

Thewomen’s accessory department of I. Magnin smelled subtly of expensive perfumes and, if one had a feline’s ability to detect fainter scents, of fine leather and silks and velvets and imported wools. Joe Grey was not visible, but the customer looking at cashmere scarves and evening stoles carried a large, apparently heavy backpack, one of those models with netting set into the sides.

Though the subject was clean-shaven and his short dark hair well cut, though he was neatly dressed in sport coat and slacks, a store detective watched him. The unobtrusive observer stood several counters away appearing to be selecting a woman’s sweater. His skilled surveillance was hardly noticeable as he waited for the guy to lift a hundred-dollar scarf and slip it in the backpack. If the prospective shoplifter seemed to be talking to himself, he could be a bit strange, or that could be a ploy, a weird but deliberate distraction. The detective watched him lift one scarf from the rack, hold it suspiciously up to the backpack, wait a minute, then lay it back over the rack. The customer had been perusing the merchandise thus for about ten minutes, one scarf or stole after another. The clerk waiting on him was patient, but she was not smiling; the man made her nervous.

But then a woman joined the customer, a striking blonde, and the subject’s solitary remarks became part of normal conversation. Now the blonde held up the scarves, one at a time, and she seemed almost to be talking to the backpack. The store dick moved closer.

Just as he decided to approach the pair, two elderly folk joined them. Their behavior, however, was equally bizarre. Sometimes he wished he’d stayed working warehouse security, where life had been simpler. Now the tall wrinkled woman held up scarves, going through the same routine as the other two; and the strange thing was, all four of them seemed to be losing patience. The detective glanced at his watch. This charade was cutting into his lunch hour. Moving away into women’s shoes but keeping an eye on the party, he saw to his great relief that the guy with the backpack had finally selected two cashmere stoles. One was ice blue, one amber. Making his purchases, he paid cash. If he was passing counterfeit money he wouldn’t have made such a spectacle, would have been in and out fast. Wanting his lunch, the detective turned away-if the backpack contained stolen merchandise, the electronic gate would pick it up and signal an alarm. It was an extremely touchy procedure to confront a customer for shoplifting while that person was still in the store. Abandoning the group, he headed out a side door and up the street for a quick hamburger.

The four people followed him out and headed down the block for their own lunch. Only the passenger in the backpack had paid any attention to the store dick. Watching him through the mesh, Joe was highly amused by the man’s frustration.

When the detective had disappeared, Joe nuzzled into the package that Clyde had dropped into the pack, sniffing deeply at the expensive wool. Dulcie would be thrilled; so would the kit. Ice blue for Dulcie, amber for Kit, both stoles softer than bird down. Joe had never before purchased a gift of any kind, certainly not a two-hundred-dollar stole for his lady.

He had, of course, not paid directly for the gifts. But as Clyde had offered a reward for information leading to recovery of the Packard, Joe figured he’d earned that amount, and more.

Swinging back by the condo after chasing Azrael, they had found Consuela and Hollis already removed to the city jail, and the uniforms still searching the apartment. The officers had found the hidden locks on Dorriss’s sliding wall panels, and were photographing the stolen items. They had called for, and had posted, a guard of five additional officers, and the street was crawling with police cars. The condo manager, who lived on the premises, had gone around with Clyde and Detective Reedie to open the doors of Dorriss’s three single garages.

They had found two empty. The third contained a vehicle lovingly protected by a thick waterproof cover made especially for a 1927 Packard roadster. Clyde might never know whether Dorriss had bought the cover some time before he stole the Packard, fully intending to possess that particular car, or whether he rashly ordered it from an automotive specialty shop after the deed was accomplished.

Leaving the garage and parting from Detective Reedie, Clyde had returned to the Cadillac grinning with success.

Joe Grey had said nothing. But with every line of his body, the angle of his ears and the slant of his whiskers, the look in his eyes, he had given back to Clyde a cool and judgmental I-told-you-so.

Now as Clyde and Kate and the Greenlaws took their seats at the sidewalk table, Clyde carefully set Joe’s pack on an empty chair beside him and opened the flap.

Yawning, Joe looked out as Clyde read several items from the menu. With a twitch of his ears at the right moment, he gave Clyde his lunch order, then curled down again on the soft I. Magnin package. He had almost shut out his friends’ small talk when Lucinda said, “It makes me feel very much easier with those people in jail, particularly now.”

Joe slitted open his eyes.Particularly now, what?What had he missed?The appraisal,he thought, coming up out of the backpack.

Lucinda leaned over to speak softly to Clyde, waiting until the waiter set down their onion rings and beer. Joe had thought the appraiser would keep the pieces for a day or so before returning them with his evaluation, but apparently not.

“They’re real,” Lucinda said softly to Clyde. “Our seven pieces, and Kate’s nine. All of fine quality, the appraiser said. Thank goodness we were able to rent safe deposit boxes, this time with more security we hope than Kate’s box had, and with some extra precautions.”

The idea of another safe deposit box alarmed Joe. But where else was there that would be more secure? Watching Kate, he expected her to be radiant with the news but she didn’t seem to be, she was very quiet as Clyde laid his hand on hers.

“What?” Clyde said.

“Just� reaction, I guess,” she said softly. “Yes, it’s wonderful, the appraisal, having that treasure to fall back on, to tuck away for some emergency. I just� need to get over all the rest of it.” She squeezed Clyde’s hand. She looked, Joe thought, deeply introspective. Maybe she’d celebrate her new fortune later, maybe wildly. But right now she needed some downtime, maybe to get used to the idea of what might be a fortune.

Well, he understood that. He had no idea what he would do with a large wad of cash-but then, Joe thought, there wasn’t much chance he’d ever need to worry about such matters.

He was surprised Clyde hadn’t asked how much the jewels were worth. Clyde hadn’t; not then, not there on the street. Joe was burning to know-not that it was any of his business, or Clyde’s either.

Watching Kate, he knew she needed to settle back into the real world, after the dark sorcery of the black tom, after the touch of a beast who would take great pleasure in destroying Kate’s natural joy of life, a beast who worshiped only destruction.

The waiter brought their sandwiches, and Kate’s salad and Joe’s shrimp cocktail sans sauce. Joe ate with greedy concentration, standing up in the backpack with his front paws on the table, lifting each shrimp out where he could chomp it more handily. If he garnered glances and smiles from nearby diners, he ignored them. Finishing the shrimp he had a little wash, then, yawning, he curled down inside the backpack again, against the soft package. It had been a busy morning. Drifting off, he wondered where Kate would go from here? Back to Molena Point, to work for Hanni? Or Seattle, as she’d told Clyde she might, to work there for her present firm?