The Cat Dancers

20

He changed to a clean uniform once back in the office and sat down to write up a report of his visit to the Marlor cabin. Bottom line: They still didn’t know anything. There was still no sign of Marlor or of the two cretins who’d done the minimart, but the absence of the three subjects didn’t prove anything, one way or another.

His phone rang.

“This is Jaspreet Kaur Bawa,” she said. “Do you remember me, Lieutenant?”

“Vividly,” Cam replied.

“Oh dear. Why vividly? Did I offend you?”

“No-o,” Cam said. “You didn’t offend me. I just remember that look you gave me after I met with you and Mr. Marlor. Plus your recommendations for dealing with those two criminals.”

“Mr. McLain told me that you were uncomfortable with my being involved with this investigation.”

“Which investigation, Ms. Bawa? I understood the Bureau backed out. I assumed you had backed out with them.”

“Please, call me Jay-Kay,” she said, sounding about three degrees more friendly. “In America, Ms. Bawa sounds too much like Mizz Bow-Wow. And you should never make assumptions about what the Bureau is or isn’t doing; surely you know that.”

“Well, Jay-Kay, I’m only going on what they told us.”

“I will be in Triboro this evening. I am giving a course at the Marriott tomorrow morning. Would you be my guest for dinner?”

Now this was a surprise. “Well, yes, I’d like that,” Cam said, hearing the hesitation in his response. “What time and where?”

“The hotel dining room is quite good. Eight o’clock?”

“Okay, I’ll be there. Shall I stay in uniform?”

It was her turn to miss a beat. “As you wish, Lieutenant. I never let men tell me what to wear, you know?”

Cam laughed, said he’d see her that evening, and hung up. Kenny, coming up behind him, said, “See who this evening?”

“A secret admirer,” Cam said. “What’s going on with our various searches?”

The short answer was not much. No hits on the electronic sweep on Marlor. No rumbles from the rat warren on K-Dog and Flash. Kenny looked a little tired. “Late night?” Cam asked.

He gave Cam a wry grin. “Baby-sitting duty at guess where,” he said. “Midnight to six. But I’m still young and strong, so it doesn’t show, right?”

Kenny Cox fancied himself an outdoorsman as well as an indoorsman of note. He went deer hunting every fall, turkey hunting every spring, and liked to push a bass boat sixty miles an hour way up into the back creeks and coves of the state’s many lakes to kill a big fish in the summertime. Cam had gone with him a few times, but he thought Kenny was an impatient hunter, which also reflected his approach to policing. Kenny was in it for the action, all the time. Cam debriefed him on his trip to the mountains.

“That rope made you think suicide?” he asked. His eyes were definitely red-rimmed, and Cam wondered if he himself could still stay awake from midnight to six and be of any use the next day. He tried to picture Kenny outside Annie’s house, looking in at the judge he despised so much, and wondered how Annie was bearing up under virtual house arrest at night.

“Yes, it did,” Cam said. “Or a game-cleaning rig for winter use. But if suicide, it begs the obvious question.”

“Yeah,” he nodded. “Who cut him down?”

That night, Cam parked his personal vehicle, a twenty-five-year old stick-shift Mercedes 240D, which he’d owned for the past ten years, in the Marriott’s parking garage.

Jay-Kay was perched attractively on a stool in the little alcove bar, having a desultory conversation with a guy who looked like a traveling salesman. She was wearing a gray silk pantsuit that clung in all the right places alarmingly well. Cam had changed from his uniform into a dark suit. He kept a ready-service suit, shirt, and tie ready to go in the office for just such situations as this. She smiled at him over the salesman’s shoulder, nodded good-bye to the guy, and they went into the dining room. The maitre’d took them to a table, seated Jay-Kay, dropped menus, took a drinks order, and left. It’d been an unusually warm fall day, so Cam ordered a gin and tonic for a change, and so did she.

“I didn’t get a chance to say this before,” he said, “but I’m really sorry about your uncle. I understand he meant a lot to you.”

“He did indeed, Lieutenant,” she said. “Do you remember his name?”

Cam had to admit he did not. He was bad enough with American names, and he hadn’t really even remembered hers once McLain had said everyone called her Jay-Kay.

“His name was Jasbir Chopra,” she said. “My aunt’s name is Surinder Chopra. She who is now a widow.”

Cam nodded. “I sincerely regret the fact that those two got away with it,” he said. “Please believe me when I say that was never anyone’s intention.”

“Most big mistakes are not,’ she said. “But thank you for your courtesy. My uncle was very close to me. He made it possible for me to succeed here in America. But I am no longer so sure they got away with it.”

“You think those video segments are real?”

She nodded as the drinks arrived. They exchanged a salud, and then she explained. “I think they are real because the video is of such poor quality. If it had been done by pros, say someone like Industrial Light and Magic, they would have been of much better quality. This stuff was filmed on an inexpensive digital camera and then downloaded to a PC via a firewire, and then uploaded via a broadband connection to the Web.”

Cam raised his eyebrows. “You know all that just by looking at it?”

“I know all that by analysis, Lieutenant,” she said. “I suspected it once I took a good look at it. Do you remember my name, Lieutenant?”

“Special Agent McLain said everyone called you Jay-Kay. I remember your last name, Bawa, but not your other names.”

“Jaspreet Kaur Bawa,” she said. Cam repeated it. She smiled to show that how people pronounced her name was not of earthshaking importance.

“Mine’s Cameron Richter,” Cam said, since they were exchanging names. “Friends call me Cam for short.”

The waiter returned to take their orders. “Is it true you run the Cherokee reservation’s parkway segment in a hopped-up BMW?” Cam asked.

It was her turn to raise eyebrows. “You have been checking up on me, Lieutenant Cam?”

“A little bit,” Cam said. “On you and James Marlor, both. He wasn’t as interesting. I’m told you make two thousand dollars a day doing your computer work.”

“Sometimes that, sometimes more,” she said. He couldn’t take his eyes off her face. Her light brown complexion was perfect, not a blemish anywhere, and that didn’t seem to be the result of makeup. She still wore no jewelry, but he detected a faint hint of perfume. She had on a lot of red lipstick, but against her skin, it didn’t seem excessive. Her teeth were very white and she had electrically alive dark brown, almost black, eyes. Cam couldn’t begin to guess her age, even though he thought Kenny had told him.

“I am a highly trained and highly intuitive computer systems engineer,” she continued. “Something your country used to produce before your school systems evolved into glorified day-care centers.”

During dinner she told him about her upbringing in both India and, later, the States. They talked generally about education systems and the world of computer science. Cam asked how it was that she was so highly paid. She said that in one day she could sometimes solve a problem that had been vexing a company or a lab for several weeks, or even longer. That equated to big money, and she worded her consulting contracts in such a way that if she broke a problem quickly, she received a chunk of the savings. She said her Beamer had been given to her by the big BMW factory in South Carolina because she had unstuck in three hours a production-line problem that was costing them $200,000 a day. “I like fast, powerful things,” she said. “Fast, powerful computers, fast, powerful cars. To me, they’re the same thing: intelligent, highly reactive engineering systems. I suppose I’m a thrill junkie. The more extreme, the better.”

“You said earlier that your analysis revealed several things about those execution videos. Is this analysis you did for the Bureau?”

She smiled again, but it was a crafty look, not one of seduction. “I was wondering when you would ask that, Lieutenant Cam,” she said.

“If they’ve had you on the problem, then-”

“Yes,” she said. “They think it’s real, too.”

“But when they backed out, they said it was for lack of physical evidence, that there was no indication one way or another that those videos were real.”

“Yes, they did,” she said, and waited for him to catch on. He still couldn’t see what she was driving at. He’d understood and sympathized with their resource problem-terrorism versus local crime-and he’d also understood their position on the execution videos: They had lots of negative indications, but no positive proof that anyone had been harmed.

Or… there was another reason. He drank some wine while he thought about it. The waiter cleared the dishes away and went to get the check.

Cam put down his wineglass when he finally saw what she was getting at. She looked at him expectantly. “They think there’s a problem in the Sheriff’s Office,” he said.

“Full marks,” she replied. “Do you remember how you received the information about the first execution scene?”

“Yeah, Computer Crimes called me. Said I should go to a Web address.”

“What else did they say?”

He thought back. “It came via an E-mail, which supposedly came from-”

“The Bureau field office in Charlotte,” she finished. “But of course it hadn’t.”

“Right. And so-”

“And so I looked at your intranet fire walls that day I was there,” she said. “They are set up to prevent the passage of anything faintly resembling a full-motion video file.”

“But then how could I get on that Web site? I remember Kenny saying that the site was buffering or something.”

“Yes indeed, and that’s a separate problem. But there is no way your Computer Crimes section could have received that video file from the Web. Not on the Sheriff’s Office intranet.”

“So you’re saying-what, that it originated inside the Sheriff’s Office?”

“Logic would so dictate,” she announced. “Have you had any other recent anomalies in your intranets?”

“No-o,” Cam said, and then remembered Annie’s threatening e-mail. Jay-Kay picked right up on his hesitation. “What?” she asked.

“The judge in the case, Bellamy? She received an e-mail on the private state judiciary network that said she was ‘next,’ in so many words.”

“Did she, now,” Jaspreet said. “Tell me-do you know if the judge ever accesses her office computer from her home computer?”

“No idea-I suppose she could.”

“If she does, she creates a vulnerability within the secure intranet. I should take a look at that. Have you told the Bureau that she received a threat?”

“No,” Cam said, looking around to make sure they weren’t being overheard. The ornate dining room was nearly empty, with only three other couples present. The waiter returned with the check and she dropped a credit card. “The Bureau had backed out, so, no, we didn’t send that on.”

“Perhaps you should,” she said. “Mr. McLain is fully conscious that the judge in this case might be a target. He also said that protecting judges is part of their ‘bag,’ as he put it. On the other hand…”

“Yeah, on the other hand, that would point yet another finger back to the Sheriff’s Office.” Good God, he thought, could cops be doing those executions?

“Are you there?” she asked, and he looked up. Her eyes were boring into his like an owl’s, totally focused, zero parallax. It was a physical impact. He felt as if his brain were being scanned.

“This has all the earmarks of a political disaster, not to mention the criminal aspects,” he said. Shit! She was a civilian. Why was he telling her this? Because she’d reached out?

She sat back in her chair and rearranged the remaining silverware on the tablecloth. “The Bureau is an interesting organization,” she said after a minute or two. “The people there seem to weigh the political consequences of everything they do or know. It is their principal limitation, other than the sheer size of the Bureau.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, that this is no different from the problems I engage in the computer industry. Software systems are the closest physical analogue to human societal systems. Every problem always comes back to a human error somewhere. You fix software by examining the underlying logic, something besides the raw ones and zeros. There are no political consequences in my world.”

“Of course there are,” Cam said. “If somebody screwed up the software, that somebody’s in trouble. Just like our outfit. The sheriff isn’t like a chief of police. He answers directly to the electorate. If some of his people have formed a death squad, he’s finished.”

“Not as finished as the people being killed by the death squad,” she said.

Sounds just like Annie, Cam thought. He closed his eyes and exhaled.

“I’m prepared to help you,” she said. “Especially now that those two thugs are dead.”

Cam opened his eyes and just looked at her. She shrugged. “I told you before what I thought should happen to them,” she said. “So now justice has been served, after a fashion, hasn’t it?”

“How could you help, then?” Cam asked.

“I can find out who sent that judge an e-mail and how they did it.”

“She said it had been deleted.”

“There is deleted and then there’s deleted,” she said. “Let me look.”

He had to ask. “Why do you want to help-now?”

She thought about her answer for a moment. “Because in India we have had some experience with death squads. Inevitably, the executioners begin to like it-killing people, settling old scores. And then eventually they realize they need to clean up after themselves-take care of loose ends, people who might know too much.”

Cam had this feeling she was thinking way ahead of him again.

“Someone like me,” she said. “If they’re operating on the Web, they would have to know that someone like me can probably find them.” She paused. “And of course, someone like you, especially if you decide to look for them.”

Cam hadn’t thought of that, but then he hadn’t thought about any of this. “How do you know I’m not one of them?” he asked.

“I don’t, of course,” she said. “But at that first meeting, you were embarrassed, not angry, that the judge had let them go. Some of those other officers, on the other hand, were very angry. As was I.”

“We may yet turn up K-Dog or Flash,” he said. “Or even Marlor.”

“Let’s hope you do,” she said, looking at her watch. “I must go. I have to lead a technical seminar in the morning.” She fished out a business card. “Call me, Lieutenant Cam. I think you need me right now.”