The Cat Dancers

16

As it turned out, McLain asked if Kenny could stay behind to work with Jay-Kay, so Cam ended up hitting the road alone. He checked in with the Surry County Sheriff’s Office in Dobson and then drove to a little town called Hanging Dog, up near the Blue Ridge Parkway.

The bank manager had started out being a little bit stuffy, so Cam had run the videotape of Flash’s execution for him, after which the level of cooperation rose substantially. The upshot was that James Marlor had indeed purchased a small tract up in the mountains west of town. It took another hour to retrieve plats and establish the rough location of the property. The Surry County Sheriff’s Office provided a deputy, who suggested they go in his cruiser. Cam thanked the sheriff for his help, and then they went up the state road until they crossed over the Blue Ridge Parkway. After that, Cam was really glad to have the deputy driving, because the road quickly deteriorated to a narrow lane, a barely paved affair with lots of one-lane bridges and some potholes capable of serving as tank traps. Heavily forested slopes rose on either side, making the road seem dark. The only signs of human habitation appeared along the road itself, and these ranged from neat little cottages to derelict trailers surrounded by rusting vehicles of every description. They had to stop short at a one-lane bridge to give way to an oncoming logging truck, whose brakes gave it the old college try but generated more smoke than stopping power. The driver gave the cop car a white-eyed look as he rumbled past, but the deputy didn’t seem particularly interested.

They wandered through one long, fairly continuous valley for five miles or so, then climbed a hair-raising switchback for twenty minutes in second gear. When they arrived at the top, they were not at the top of the mountains, however, and they cut through a steep pass alongside a rushing mountain stream. Cam caught a glimpse of a lake in the distance and asked the deputy which lake it was. He said it was the Sinclair Reservoir, backed up behind a four-hundred-foot-high dam. They branched right out of the pass and the road turned to gravel and then finally to red dirt. Fortunately, it hadn’t rained for a couple of weeks, so they could press on without four-wheel drive. There were no more signs of humans or their houses up here, but the road looked well used. The deputy explained that this was the access road to the hydro plant at the Sinclair dam.

They climbed some more, going between and occasionally across the face of increasingly steeper slopes. Cam couldn’t really see the scope and extent of the mountains because their car was confined to the road, which followed the lowest points. Finally, they climbed another scary switchback and came out onto an overlook. Cam was very glad there’d been no logging trucks on that last bit. The deputy glanced down at the plat map and pointed with his chin at a vista of rolling hills, an expanse of unrelieved forest green, and three large mountains whose tops were sheathed in a blue haze.

“That way, yonder,” he said. “Maybe eight miles in, and half of one up.”

The deputy’s “yonder” indicated a crumbling, brush-covered firebreak that led generally north and west into the wilderness. A set of high-tension lines snaked across the hills along the route of the firebreak. None of it looked suitable for wheeled vehicles. Tracked, maybe, but not wheeled. Cam asked if there was another way to approach the cabin’s location. The deputy said there was an abandoned cattle farm on the back of Blackberry Mountain, on whose front slopes the cabin supposedly was located. He gave Cam driving directions.

That evening, Cam checked in with Kenny to see how the zoo was taking shape. Kenny reported that the rest of the day had turned into a whirl of urgent meetings, conference calls, more meetings, and no visible progress in locating James Marlor. “The Bureau’s pulsed all their systems, and everything seems to end right about the time the neighbor says he beat feet. One gas card used a mile from his house around that time, and then genu-wine radio silence.”

“Is it still our case?”

“McLain’s been in with the sheriff, and he also met with the powers that be next door. I worked with Jay-Kay for a while, but then it became obvious I was way out of my league, so I just backed out and let her smoke the keyboard by herself.

“She get anywhere?”

“She says that each video clip was posted just once, and then the site it landed on forwarded it out to the world. Whoever did the posting came in via a secure server, banged it out there, and went back down. She’s working on a way to uniquely identify some aspect of the original post, and then there’s a govvie system that can lurk the Web and watch for that tag.”

“How the hell can she do that if he only posts and runs?”

“She says it has to do with the configuration of the actual packets he posts,” Kenny said. “At that level, it’s by me, boss.”

“What are the teams doing?” Cam asked.

“Still looking for K-Dog and Flash. Word’s out on the street that they’re real Internet movie stars now, so whatever help we might have gotten from the snitch network is drying up fast. Nobody wants to attract pickup trucks with hooded drivers.”

“You get word to Will Guthridge that he might be a target?”

“I talked to him myself,” Kenny said. “He’s not sweating it.”

It must be something they teach ’em at the Police Academy these days, Cam thought. Too many cops thought that the bad guys would always draw the line at doing a cop, because, according to Hollywood, that would spark a cop-killer frenzy and the heat wasn’t worth what would happen next. Cam knew it wasn’t true anymore, if it ever had been. Today’s bad guy would ice a cop as soon as hit a dog in the road. It wasn’t that they didn’t stop to consider the possible consequences. It was more that they didn’t associate consequences with anything they did, good or bad.

“Get to his district boss,” Cam said. “Get him into the district house on admin duty somehow until we sort this thing out.”

“Got it,” Kenny said.

“And then there’s the judge,” Cam said.

“The Feebs are working that one. They’re asking us to set up the protection loop. And that’s a pity.”

“You can think it, Kenny, but you can’t say it.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. But in my book, she started this shit. I’m surprised he didn’t start with her.”

“Well, we don’t want him to end it with her, either,” Cam said. “Bellamy’s a tough lady. She may need a talking-to, just like Will.”

“You ask me-” he began.

“I didn’t. I know how everybody feels about Judge Bellamy right now. I’ll talk to McLain when I get back tomorrow.”

“How about the cabin?”

“Round me up a state helicopter.”

“You gonna take McLain along?”

“No,” Cam said. “I’ll evaluate the situation, then get back to the office and huddle with them. After Eric Rudolph, they should be right up to speed on rousting bad guys out of the Carolina mountains these days.”

Kenny laughed at that one.