Cat Striking Back

34

DISPATCHER MABEL FARTHY clicked on the phone, answering Ryan’s call. Ryan pictured the hefty blonde speaking through her headset, sitting in the open cubicle formed by the reception counter, her cluttered desk, filing cabinets, and shelves crowded with radios and the fax and copy machines. “I’m up at the Cowen remodel,” Ryan told her. “On Blakely. Max and Dallas know where. We had a phone tip this morning, guy said we have a body buried up here, down in a drainage ditch-into which we’d just finished pouring fresh cement,” she said wryly. “We’ve dug that out, dug out the gravel. We’re down to raw earth and don’t want to go any further.”

Mabel didn’t ask questions. “The chief’s out. Hold on, I’ll buzz Detective Garza. You okay? You sound pale.”

“I’m fine,” Ryan said, smiling at Mabel’s turn of phrase. In a minute, Dallas came on. She said, “You know the ditch we dug inside the Cowen garage?”

“Yes, the second Panama Canal?”

“I got a phone call this morning that there’s a body buried there.”

“What kind of call? Who was it? What time? You get the name of the caller?”

“He wouldn’t give it. It was…I was on my way up to the job, it was about ten. He gave me the message, said, ‘The detectives and the chief know me,’ and he hung up.”

Dallas was silent for a long time, undoubtedly thinking about the department’s anonymous snitch, the voice from out of nowhere, to which they had all learned to listen.

“ Dallas, I believe him. You…You’re cutting out,” she said, not wanting to be interrogated.

“I’m on my way,” he said shortly, with considerable irritation. “Don’t do anything. Wait for me.” When he’d hung up she stood outside looking around the property, wondering how much their careless coming and going this morning, so many people back and forth, had destroyed of the tire tracks and footprints. When she glanced up the hill, where the grass was swaying, she was startled to see Tansy and Sage slipping away over the crest as if headed home. Her phone rang and it was Dallas. “We’re just turning onto Cohen.” In a moment she heard cars approaching up the narrow road, crunching bits of gravel beneath their tires. Dallas ’s tan Blazer appeared, and Max’s truck behind it. As they parked, she glanced at the bed of her pickup where the tarp was rippling in a quick, scurrying movement. For an instant, Joe Grey peered out, then vanished, and the tarp went still.

JOE WATCHED DALLAS swing out of his tan Blazer. His small SUV was a few years older than Charlie Harper’s red model, and showed far more wear. The dark-haired Latino detective wore jeans, a white shirt open at the collar, and a leather jacket. Max Harper, stepping out of his pickup, was dressed in uniform this morning, as if he might have been in court. The two men headed into the open garage, stepping as carefully as they could between piles of wet cement and cement-covered gravel. As they stood looking down into the pit, talking with Ryan and Scotty, the two Latino laborers moved away.

Max said, “When did you get this phone call? Was it on your cell? Where were you?”

“On my cell. I was coming up the hill. Scotty and his men had just finished working the cement. You think I didn’t want to strangle the guy? You know what concrete costs? You know how long it takes to finish it? And look at the mess we have to clean up.”

Max said, “I’m surprised you tore it out. You queried this guy? What exactly did he say?”

“I asked him how he could know this. Told him I wasn’t digging up that cement, that I’d have to have proof to do such a crazy thing. He said he saw the guy bury the body, that the only proof he could offer was the body itself. If we wanted to be sure, we’d have to dig.”

“And you took his word for it,” Max said. “Where did he say he was? Did you ask him to come in, give a statement?” That was a futile question. The cats knew it, and Max knew it, he knew their unknown snitch wouldn’t do that.

She said, “The guy hung up, Max! I thought it could be a crank call. But then I thought about your snitch, I know he doesn’t wait on the phone to answer questions. I had two choices. Let it go, let the concrete cure, and forget I ever got that call. Or dig it up and call you.”

In the pickup, Joe Grey smiled.

“Are you going to hang around while we dig? Or are you going to laugh at me and leave?”

Max tried not to grin as Ryan’s temper rose. He exchanged a look with Dallas, who spoke with Fernando in Spanish, which none of the three cats understood except for the occasional familiar word, including Manuel’s interjected, half-joking “loco” as he glanced across at Ryan.

That made Dallas laugh. “Maybe not loco at all,” he said in English. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

Max flipped open his phone and in a moment was speaking with the coroner. That cooled Ryan down, the fact that he wanted John Bern on the scene before they uncovered a corpse.

In Ryan’s pickup the cats settled in to wait, curled up for a little nap beneath the warm canvas. They were all three fast asleep when a car woke them, pulling up to park. Looking out from under the tarp, they watched John Bern step out of his white van.

Bern was young, slim, prematurely bald, his fine-boned face was unlined by the depressing nature of his job, as if the mysteries he set himself to unravel, in the cause of death and the identification of a body, far outweighed the grimmer aspects of the profession. Wiping his glasses, he entered the garage and stood talking with Ryan and Max and Dallas, looking at the lumps of gravel and the messy pile of slowly hardening cement.

“You did all this on the word of a guy you don’t know and who wouldn’t identify himself?”

“I believed him,” Ryan said shortly. “We’ve blown a whole morning and a bundle of money on this. He’d better be telling the truth.” She was losing patience and losing confidence. She wanted to get on with the dig, either to be vindicated or to stoically endure her embarrassment.

Bern climbed down the ladder into the pit, and Dallas followed. Max stood looking on, a little amused, a little put off. The cats couldn’t see to the bottom, could see into the garage only as far as the lip of the pit, where Ryan stood watching. They could hear the soft scrape of slow, careful digging, could see Fernando and Manuel just inside the door, idly shuffling their feet, waiting to witness Ryan’s embarrassment when all this digging turned up nothing-or perhaps to experience a macabre thrill if a corpse was uncovered. Soon the sounds of digging grew more tentative, there was a long, muffled discussion, then the cats could hear only soft scratching, such as their own careful paws might make. Dallas ’s exclamation was sharp.

Ryan stepped closer. Fernando and Manuel moved forward to look but then Manuel backed away, his face pale. Fernando stood looking, and then nodded at Ryan and gave her a shy smile

She grinned back but looked at the two men with concern. “You guys okay?”

“Okay,” Fernando said. Both men were looking at her now as if she possessed some magical power, as if she were some kind of witch to have known that there was a body buried there.

She said, “You’ll have to wait for the detective to take your statements, then you can go on home, take the rest of the day off with pay.”

That seemed to revive Fernando. Manuel gave her a lopsided, gentle smile. Down in the pit, Garza said something the cats couldn’t make out. Joe Grey wondered how many bodies Dallas Garza had helped to disinter over his twenty-five years in law enforcement. He wondered if it ever got any easier to deal with a victim of violence, to look on a battered or mutilated body and think about the cruelty that existed in one’s own species. The tomcat burned to slip out of the truck and move closer where he could see if he knew the woman, but Dulcie’s armored paw on his shoulder drew him back. She was always so afraid people would wonder why they were watching. He didn’t want to admit she was right.

It was some time before John Bern and Dallas finished bagging evidence. Joe, having at last lost patience, had left the pickup despite Dulcie’s protests and slipped into the garage behind the pile of cement. He had to smile when Dulcie and Kit followed him, crouching beside him where they, too, could see down into the pit but not be seen.

They could see Dallas ’s back where he knelt beside Bern, but couldn’t see much of the woman, only a glimpse of her arm and one bare, tanned leg. They jerked to attention when Bern said, “These look like cat hairs.”

The cats lived in fear of cat hairs being found at a scene, hairs that could give them away, and would certainly generate questions. But why were they flinching now? They hadn’t been near this victim, they hadn’t been in the pit. There was no way…

“Hairs stuck to her skin,” Bern said. “She’s oily, smells like suntan oil. She’s tan all over, not a pale mark on her. Was she in the habit of sunbathing naked?”

“I don’t know,” Dallas said dryly. “I never had the pleasure.”

Bern lifted a cat hair with forceps, to view it though his magnifying glass. “Yellow. Sure looks like cat hair. Maybe it came off her clothes, or…I wonder if those same hairs are stuck to the killer’s clothes?”

The cats crouched, frozen. A yellow cat? There were no yellow cats in that neighborhood except Theresa’s cat. Oh, this wasn’t Theresa. They felt as if they’d been kicked in the belly.

Max said, “Charlie has clients a couple of blocks from the empty swimming pool where we’re working that missing body. I think one of them has a yellow cat. I’ll get Charlie over to the morgue, see if we might get lucky and she can ID her.”

Frightened for Theresa, already grieving for her, the cats slipped out of the garage and across the drive to the shelter of Ryan’s truck. Crawling up beneath the tarp, they pushed close together, Joe and Kit pressing their heads against Dulcie.

“Oh, it isn’t Theresa,” Kit mewled. “No one…It mustn’t…It can’t be Theresa.”

“Not Theresa,” Dulcie said. “They’re wrong, it can’t be.” She pressed hard against Joe, her ears down, her eyes closed, and the three cats clung together, mourning Theresa as they had seldom, in all their lives, grieved for a human person.