The Cat Dancers

21

Annie Bellamy was not adjusting to the idea of house arrest very well. She wasn’t technically under any kind of arrest, of course, but, come evening, the easiest place to protect her was at her home, which meant that she’d lost most of her privacy. Her great big silver Mercedes stayed in the garage until daybreak or further notice. Cam had called her before coming over, and also the operations shift supervisor. Matters to discuss with the judge, he’d said. The supervisor said he’d have to allow him that. All of this was in order to keep any visits or contact Cam had with Annie strictly professional. He wasn’t willing yet to have everyone in the Sheriff’s Office know they were actually seeing each other socially or otherwise.

She handed Cam a scotch and they went into her study and closed the door. The detail consisted of one deputy in the house, one on the grounds, and a cruiser coming by at random intervals for a street pass through the neighborhood. They also had some electronic helpers stationed around the eight or so acres of manicured grounds. Marriage, however emotionally deficient, had been kind to Annie from a real estate perspective.

She was wearing a knee-length skirt and a sleeveless blouse, and she looked good. Tired, but definitely good. “Enjoying your captivity?” Cam asked.

“Not a lot,” she said. “I’d gotten used to the idea that divorce meant you didn’t have a man hanging around the house all the time.”

“We could detail more female officers,” Cam said, sitting down in one of the big leather chairs.

“No, don’t. They always want to talk.” She went over to the sound system and turned on some classical music, maybe two notches higher than absolutely necessary. Then she came over to the chair, sat down in Cam’s lap, unbuttoned and peeled off her blouse, and then lifted one long leg over so that she was straddling his knees.

“Tell me you don’t want to just talk,” she said, reaching back and undoing her bra.

As usual, she was right, Cam thought later. Judges are like that, he decided.

They put themselves back together, and then he confessed that he had come over to talk after all. She gave him a faintly disappointed look, but not that disappointed. Fortunately, there was more scotch in the study, so over drinks he told her about his meeting with Jaspreet, the Web wizard, and what she had suggested about a death squad.

“Has a pretty high opinion of herself, doesn’t she?” Annie said. She was sitting sideways at her desk, her bare feet on an open drawer.

“If they’re paying her two large a day, she must be worth it,” Cam replied.

“What’s she look like?”

“Indian. Exotic is the word I keep coming back to. Midthirties, nice figure, eyes so bright, they bounce around inside your head.”

She smiled, but it wasn’t a very pretty smile just then. “Would you like to sleep with her?” she asked.

Cam was ready for that one. Annie was nothing if not direct. “Let’s see,” he said. “She’s female, has a pulse-yup, vital criteria met. Absolutely.”

“I’ve got friends in Immigration,” she said, and then made the sound of a cat hissing and spitting.

“I’ve got to pass this one to Bobby Lee,” he said, getting back to business. “I’m thinking of a letter, preferably mailed from Greece or somewhere equally far away.”

“Greece is good,” she replied. “Ordinarily, that should go to the Bureau, but from what you’re telling me, the feds are at arm’s length and want to stay that way.”

Cam shrugged. “He asks formally, they have to come back in. The Internet’s involved-plus computer crime and intrusion.”

“They’ll leak it.”

“Then the killers will go to ground,” Cam said. “If it’s even true. I keep coming back to that. We have no physical evidence except absence. And cops are very adept at sniffing the wind. If there is a death squad of some kind, the cops involved would feel the police web tremble and submerge.”

“And then where are you?”

“Two bad guys who confessed to the crime are possibly dead. And nobody really cares.”

“People would care if cops did it.”

Cam wondered about that. J. Q. Public’s reaction to the chair had been the usual mixture of titillation and media twittering, but he hadn’t heard a whole lot of “It’s imperative that we catch the bastards who did this outrageous thing,” not even from the usual liberal wets who seemed to have infested the Old North State over the past ten years. He told her what Jaspreet had said about death squads getting a taste for it.

The inside deputy knocked quietly on the study door. “Another visitor, Your Honor,” he announced.

She said, “Okay,” and then, sotto voce, added, “And one with impeccable timing, I do believe.”

Cam got up, finished his drink, and patted his clothes to make sure everything had been put back together. She watched him with some amusement. “Should I open the windows?” she asked. She was actually blushing just a little bit.

“Might meet him at the front door,” Cam suggested, which is what they did. The inside cop went back to the kitchen. They stood in the open doorway as a car drove up. Cam recognized it as a Sheriff’s Office vehicle. He felt a little nervous to be standing silhouetted like that in a lighted doorway, until he saw that the driver was Kenny Cox.

Annie checked to make sure the deputy couldn’t hear them, and then she said, “If I was looking for a candidate to run a vigilante group-”

He shushed her as Kenny got out and nodded to the deputy in charge of surveying the grounds. He had materialized at the corner of the house when Kenny arrived.

“Your Honor,” he said to Annie as we came up the steps. “Boss.” He was in full uniform, complete with hat. “Thought I’d just check by, see if everything was okay.”

“Great minds think alike,” Cam said.

“Found any evidence that any of this is necessary?” Annie asked.

“No, ma’am,” Kenny said, glancing from her face to Cam’s and back to hers again. Cam found himself wondering what the sergeant knew. Kenny was one sharp investigator, and his ability to read body language was better than Cam’s. “Still no signs of Marlor or the two movie stars,” he said. “Everyone’s in mourning.”

“And we’re looking really hard, are we?” Annie asked.

“Yes, we are,” Cam said before Kenny could answer. “Finding either one of those guys is still the best way to call off your house arrest.”

Kenny gave him a look. “Or we could pull our people off right now, Lieutenant,” he said. “If Her Honor here doesn’t believe there’s a threat.”

Annie rolled her eyes. “Lieutenant Richter, thanks for the update. I’ve got briefs to read. She nodded frostily at Kenny. “Sergeant.”

She went back into the house and Cam closed the front door. “Let’s take a walk,” he said to Kenny.

They went out into the grounds surrounding the redbrick Federal-style house, which fell short of being a mansion, but not by much. There were eight beautifully groomed acres of lawns, gardens, and mature trees, and a big swimming pool with a pool house directly behind the main house. The rest of the property was surrounded by a brick wall on three sides and a ten-foot-high chain-link fence across the back, the latter hidden by a dense stand of cedars. There was a service alley running behind the property for garbage trucks. The front drive was rolled gravel, and it continued around one side of the house to a three-car detached garage that was perpendicular to the pool house. The front gates were ornate, wroughtiron panels that were electrically operated from inside the main house or via a dashboard scanner, which was now in the hands of the deputies on duty.

The outside deputy was dressed in modified SWAT gear, and his orders were to wander around the grounds, settling in for random periods of time in corners and shadows. He had night-vision gear and a MP-5 for business. He’d appeared again briefly when Kenny and Cam walked around from the front drive, but then slipped back into the darkness. There was no moon, but their eyes were adjusting to the darkness.

“So what the hell do we do next?” Kenny asked. “This shit could go on forever, especially if all the guy really wanted was to ice those two shit-heels. And since he’s done them, this threat to the judge doesn’t make sense.”

“It makes her life miserable,” Cam said. “If it is Marlor doing this shit, that makes some sense, especially if he can’t bring himself to electrocute a judge.”

“Depending on which judge, I could,” Kenny said, glancing back toward the house. Cam had been about to tell him what Jaspreet had come up with, but Kenny’s comment brought him up short. At that moment, there was a loud crash out behind the garage, followed by the sounds of a vehicle accelerating down the alley. The crashing continued, as if the vehicle was dragging a couple of metal trash cans behind it, and then the noise stopped. Cam saw a dark shadow move out from along the brick wall and trot back toward the stand of cedars at the back of the property.

Kenny had his weapon out and Cam drew his. They crouched down behind a large boxwood hedge. Behind them, the lights in the main kitchen flicked off, leaving only a yellow glow coming from the French doors that led from the central hallway out to the pool area. Cam knew that the two deputies should be in radio contact. Annie should be in her study, which was in the front of the house. Since he and Kenny weren’t up on the tactical net, they needed to stay put.

“We need to stay between the alley and the house,” Kenny said softly, echoing Cam’s thoughts. “Let the deputies figure out what the hell’s-”

Something whacked solidly into a tree about fifteen feet away from where they were crouching, followed instantly by the boom of a high-powered rifle from out in front of the house.

“Son of a bitch!” Kenny growled as the sound of second vehicle roaring down the front street became audible. “We’ve been suckered.”

They both stood up and ran back around the swimming pool, heading toward those French doors. A battery of motion-detector spotlights came on as they approached, momentarily blinding them both.

“On the back door,” Kenny yelled as they double-timed up the wide back steps. “Sergeant Cox and Lieutenant Richter, coming in!”

“Roger that,” came the deputy’s voice from inside the house. The central hallway lights were off now, but the front portico lights were still on, so they could see inside the house. The deputy joined them as they came in, his weapon out in a two-hand grip.

“Where’s the judge?” Cam asked.

“She was in the library when it started,” the deputy said. “Fucking thing sounded like an elephant gun.”

They walked quickly down the central hallway to the library doors, which were still shut. Cam knocked once and called out Annie’s name.

“Can I get up now?” she asked.

Cam pushed through the double doors. Annie was crouching down on the floor behind her desk. The front drapes were still drawn, but there was a pile of broken glass spilling out onto the carpet underneath the heavy curtains. An antique mirror hanging slightly above head height on the back wall had a large starred hole right through the middle. Cam walked over and helped her up. She was putting on a brave face, but the grip on his hand indicated otherwise. He steered her toward one of the big upholstered chairs as Kenny got on the phone to Central Dispatch. Annie squeaked at something behind him, and he turned and saw that the outside deputy was standing in the doorway. He had his NVG headset pushed up on his forehead, but the black outfit, Kevlar vest, and the MP-5 submachine gun had its effect. He’d been running, based on the way he was puffing.

“One vehicle dragged some trash cans down the alley and then took off,” he reported. “There was a second vehicle with the shooter at the front gates.”

Cam could hear Kenny organizing a quick stop-andsearch operation in the neighborhood, but he suspected they were too late. Both of the vehicles had had plenty of time to disappear into one of the many side streets in the area and get clear before the cops could converge.

“Looks like he knew where to shoot, too,” Cam said, looking at the mirror. “What’s behind that wall?”

“Pantry and storage area for the kitchen,” the cop assigned to house duty said.

“See what we’ve got,” Cam told him. Then he turned to the other deputy. “You get back outside and make sure there isn’t a second shooter setting up on the house while we’re all standing inside here with our thumbs up.”

The deputy disappeared in the direction of the front door. Kenny hung up.

“They’ve got units working a grid,” he said, but the look on his face showed that he, too, thought it was too late. Annie announced that she needed a drink. Cam fixed her a splash in a lowball glass from the bar. “What was that outside deputy doing inside the house?” Kenny asked.

“Fucking up,” Cam said. He heard some vehicles screech to a stop out by the front gates. “Why don’t you go organize all that,” Cam said to Kenny. “You’ll need one of the deputies to open those gates.” Kenny nodded, pulled out his pocket tape recorder, and left the room. Cam knelt down by Annie’s chair once he’d gone.

“Sorry about that, Your Honor,” he said. “Looks like we’re not just imagining things here.”

Annie had finished the scotch in one go, and now her cheeks were flushed. “Look at that trajectory, Cam,” she said, her voice trembling. “They knew where the desk was.”

“They certainly knew where the study was,” he said, nodding. “But those drapes had been drawn since-”

“I work after dinner every night except Friday and Saturday,” she said. “Guess who absolutely would know that?”

Cam just looked at her. “Every cop who’s been on duty here?”

She nodded. “These guys seem so friendly, courteous. Concerned, even. I can’t imagine…”

“They do a log every night. The log says where you are at all times. ‘Had dinner in the kitchen. Went for a swim. Went to the library to work. Went to bed at ten.’ Anyone who saw the log would know the pattern.”

“But the house plan? Who would know the house layout well enough to put a shot through closed drapes, right over my head? I felt that thing, Cam.”

Cam could hear the inside deputy coming back down the hall, so he stood up.

“Lieutenant?” the cop said, indicating he had something to show him. Annie, unwilling to be left alone in the library, went with them. They walked to the kitchen and then to the pantry area. Cam had his own tape recorder out now, ready to make notes. The round had blown the sheetrock off the interior pantry wall, gone through a box of dry cereal, which was now all over the floor, and then punched through the opposite wall and right through the outside brickwork. Cam remembered that solid whacking sound in the tree. He took the deputy to the back door and pointed at the tree. “Tell CSI to climb that tree-the round’s in there,” he said. The deputy stared at him. “I heard it hit, okay?” Cam said. “About twelve, fifteen feet up the trunk.”

They looked around for a few more minutes, trying to spot any other damage, and then finally heard more voices out front as Kenny brought in some crime-scene people. Cam told Annie that one of them would take her statement. She gave him a worried look but then reassembled her brave face and went with the growing crowd of cops back to the study area, her judicial aura reestablishing itself. Cam wished he could hold her for a moment, just to reassure her, but they both had to act their parts right now. Cam thought it was a good time to get out of there, let the techs do their work. He also badly needed some time to think.