The Cat Dancers

12

At 8:30 that night, Cam sat watching the electrocution scene again on his desktop in the office. The other detectives had all gone for the day. There’d been nonstop meetings with the sheriff and the public relations staff late that afternoon, the district attorney’s office, and with the MCAT detectives. They’d put the superstar of the month on ice in order to work this execution thing, so the team was spending a lot more time in the office than usual.

The bottom line was that K-Dog was not to be found. Tony and Horace had looked under all the usual rocks, and a consistent story emerged that no one had seen his sorry ass for about ten days. He’d been living with two women in a trailer outside of Triboro, and they were emphatically glad to be rid of him. His replacement, a Texan with one glaring eye, was firmly in residence and threatening to “slap an entire can of whup-ass on that punk” if he ever came back. The nature of K-Dog’s transgressions against the females had not been determined, although Tony allowed, having seen the two aforementioned women, they were probably deserved.

Billy and Pardee had had better luck. They’d tracked down Flash in about two hours. He was holed up at a crack whore’s squat one block back of Lee Street in south Triboro, sustaining his various addictions. Said crack whore did not know any ghost named K-Dog, so it appeared the dynamic duo had finally split up. Kenny got the Sheriff’s Office’s PR division to obtain a tape of the talk show starring K-Dog, and then they ran it and the execution scene side by side to make sure they were looking at the same guy. Everyone agreed that it certainly looked like the same guy. Horace was happily philosophical about it, saying, “Brag about getting away with murder in North Carolina, someone’s going to rise up and take care of business.” Cam landed pretty hard on him for the comment. “You can think it,” he’d said, “but you can’t say it out loud.”

The problem was what to do about it. The Web site showing the execution scene had made the local TV evening news and would surely go national pretty soon. The putative candidate for executioner, James Marlor, was not to be found. The voice had clearly said, “That’s one,” which meant that Flash was possibly in some danger. Everyone at all the meetings had had the same unvoiced philosophical problem: So what. The sheriff had finally come up with a reason to care. “Someone’s eventually going to start throwing shit at the Manceford County Sheriff’s Office,” he’d said. “They’ll point out that we screwed up the arrest and these shitheads got away with it, so now one of us has decided to take justice into his own hands. So keep your secret vigilante decoder rings in your lockers and go find out who’s doing this shit.” There’d been much rolling of eyes behind the sheriff’s back, but Cam thought he had a valid point. The only thing saving them from a media rumble right now was the fact that no one knew for sure if the execution was real or staged.

The next question was whether they should pick up Flash and hold him in protective custody. Klein had agreed to go talk to Judge Bellamy in chambers. He’d called back while the team was going over their search plan for Marlor and tearing up a pizza. Bellamy, as expected, had said no. They were to pick him up, get him sober enough to show him the video, make sure he understood what he was looking at, and then turn him loose. If he then came back in on his own volition and asked for protection, then and only then they could place him in protective custody. But he had to ask, and do so a second time in front of her. They’d sent a deputy out to pick him up, but it was dark by the time they got there and he was no longer at the squat, nor was the lady of the manor. This was duly reported back to Klein, who said he’d tell the judge in the morning.

Cam clicked the little x on the top right of his screen and the execution scene disappeared. He smiled; making sites disappear was at the top end of his computer abilities. He sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. His fingers smelled of pizza sauce. We’re going through the motions here, he thought. There isn’t anyone in this office who gives a shit that K-Dog rode the third rail. James Marlor had lost one wife to a drunk driver and now another one, plus his stepdaughter, to blind bad luck and the depredations of two walking, talking sewer rats. Marlor’s professional career was complete, if not over, his immediate family had been erased, and he was of an age where he might well have decided that he didn’t care what happened as long as he took these two pustules off the streets forever. Cam could even see himself pulling the switch on a mutt like K-Dog. The only good news was that, once the story went truly national, the Bureau would be into it, and then maybe the Manceford County cops could sit back and let the Ubermenschen from the Justice Department sort it all out.

His phone rang. He looked at his watch. Almost nine o’clock. He wasn’t on duty. Did he really want to answer this? Had he learned nothing in twenty-some years about answering office telephones after normal working hours? He picked it up, and it was the desk sergeant, reporting they had Flash in the drunk tank.

“Great. How bad is he?”

“Fustier than most,” the sergeant said. “Looks like the back side of a crack high, irrigated by some demon rum.”

“Is he coherent?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Okay, look. I need him mostly sober and reasonably presentable by around ten tomorrow morning. I’ll need him breathalyzed before he comes upstairs, so we can prove later on he wasn’t totally drunk when we interviewed him.”

“It’ll be close,” the sergeant said. “Jumpsuit okay? Because the clothes he came in had a lapful of breakfast. If you want him clean, we’ll need a fire hose.”

“Yeah. We’re not going into court or anything. Just us country boys.”

He hung up, then called Kenny’s office and left a message on his voice mail, reporting they had Flash. Now if only they could find K-Dog and Marlor, they’d be home free. Time to see-cure.

He was halfway home when his cell phone chirped. He chided himself for leaving it on, then realized it was his personal cell, not his police phone. It was Annie.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Halfway home,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

“Can you come over?”

Her voice seemed different. “Sure, but what’s the matter? You okay?”

“There’s nothing wrong,” she said. He thought he could hear ice tinkling in a glass. Horny, then.

“Look, I’ve had a long day,” he said. “Not all of it successful. I need a drink, a hot shower, and something to eat.”

“I can provide all of those things,” she said, and hung up.

When he got to her house and knocked on the front door, she opened it immediately. She was wearing one of her better Slinky-toy outfits. “Lucky I wasn’t the UPS man,” he said.

“How ’bout we reverse the order?” she said with that certain smile, and when he couldn’t think of anything clever to say, she pulled him through the door and kicked it shut with her foot. The rest of her was already busy.

Later, as they relaxed in the hot tub with a scotch for him and some vodka for her, she told him she’d seen the Web site. He frowned at her. Here we go again, he thought, talking shop after hours.

“I know, I know,” she protested before he could say anything. “But everybody was talking about it. It was even on the news. I think I was the only one in the courthouse who hadn’t seen it.”

“Go through some Kleenex?” he asked.

“That’s not funny,” she said. “Surely you don’t approve?”

He shrugged. “I wouldn’t want to watch it over dinner, not unless I muted that sound of frying bacon.”

“Cam!”

“Well, that little shit killed a woman, her daughter, and a store clerk, probably for a couple hundred bucks, tops. For reasons understood only by you lawyers, he ended up getting away with it. And he was proud of himself. From the perspective of the blindfolded, bare-breasted lady with the scales in one hand and a sword in the other? Seeing that fuck ride the electric pony to meet the baby Jesus didn’t exactly ruin my day.”

“Someone not only murdered him-horribly-but filmed it, for God’s sake. And put it out on the Internet for the whole world to watch. That’s grotesque.”

“So was his crime.”

“Cam!”

“Glad we reversed the order, Your Honor,” he said, reaching for a towel. “Yes, I’m upset that my guy screwed up and you had to let them go. I’m depressed about all the bad publicity and political heat that we’ve been eating, and that there’s more headed our way. But I’m not displeased with the fact that Simmonds got the jolt. If in fact he did-we still don’t know that. I think I’d better go.”

He started to get out, but she raised a leg, hung it over his right shoulder, and pulled. As signals went, it was reasonably effective. Annie did an hour of tantric yoga every day, and she could and did surprise him in the most amazing ways. Even if she is kind of bossy, he thought. After round two, she went to fix them a steak while he went to find some more scotch and catch his breath. Over dinner, he told her in general terms what they were planning to do about finding Marlor and Simmonds. He pointed out that, for the moment, these were just his plans, and that the sheriff might have other plans.

“Lots of fingers going to get into this pie,” he said. “Great steak, by the way.”

“You never could cook, not even on the grill.”

“That’s right, now that you mention it. I married you for your cooking, didn’t I?”

She laughed, and for a moment he envisioned the peaches and cream complexion, ash-blond hair, blue eyes, and endless legs of the woman he’d courted and married so many years ago. She saw the look.

“Every once in awhile, I get this terrible feeling we pissed away a good thing way back then,” she said. She drew her terry-cloth robe around her shoulders as if to ward off a chill.

“I don’t know, Annie,” he said. “I think you would have had to make your run, one way or the other, and I would have just held you back. Look where we are now-this is pretty good.”

She was still beautiful, with one of those faces that defied a lifetime of unfriendly gravity. She gave him a severe look. “Just pretty good?”

“We need more practice,” he said with a comic leer.

She laughed again. “As if,” she said, getting up to clear the plates.

“Was that a little wobble I just detected?” he asked.

“Shut up. I’ll call Steven in the morning, get him in chambers, let him explain the current thinking. This time, I’ll authorize PC for Butts, on the proviso there’s no attempt to force a confession or anything else related to the original crime.”

Cam nodded, more to himself than to anything she’d said. “Myself, I kept hoping we’d find K-Dog,” he said. “Otherwise we’re in for a long couple of weeks. We can’t hold Flash forever, and then… ‘That’s one’?”

“I may have to keep my eye on Mr. Steven Klein,” she said from the kitchen.

“How so?”

“You mentioned ‘political heat.’ You’re not exactly the Lone Ranger when it comes to getting heat over this mess.” She closed the dishwasher door and came back into the room. She could see he didn’t understand, so she laid it out. “I’ve been the subject of some pretty hostile BS these past few months,” she said. “Letting those little pricks off like that, et cetera, et cetera. You ever wonder why it was the judge who spotted the Miranda error in the arrest record, instead of, say, the DA?”

He had to think about that one.

“I mean, you cops work for the DA, not the court,” she said. “I think it’s entirely possible young Mr. Klein did see the problem and then decided to let it come to the hearing anyway. That way, I would be the one tossing the confession, not him, whose people had messed the thing up in the first place.”

“Why would he do that?” he asked.

“Because he knew I’d catch it. Because he knows I read everything in the package, sometimes twice. And he knew I’d toss it because it would never survive trial, much less appeal.”

“And his objective?”

“My term is for five years. I’m up for reappointment the end of this year. Enough political heat, I don’t get reappointed. That’s how vacancies on the bench occur.”

“Why, Steven, you clever little devil,” Cam said. “Who’d a thunk it? But, shit, I thought you judges had to die or go senile or something.”

“Senility is not necessarily a disqualification,” she said primly. “But death is, and so is pissing off the governor. Bet you don’t hear any talk about liberal, pink-ass, Communist ADAs, do you?”

“‘Pink-ass,’” he mused, as if considering the notion. She grinned despite herself, and even blushed a little. Well, well, Cam thought. I’ve done one thing right today. He reached for her hand, and there it was.