The Cat Dancers

24

Cam was awakened in the night by the phone. It was Kenny Cox. Cam could hear the sounds of a crime scene in the background: tactical radios, vehicle doors opening and closing, people talking about setting tape, portable generators humming urgently.

“The chair is real,” Kenny announced.

“What’ve you got?” Cam asked, turning on the bedside light and squinting at the clock, which read 4:30. Of course.

“I’m at the petroleum tank farm down by the rail yards, south Triboro. What we’ve got is a makeshift body bag. They decided to draw down a zillion-gallon diesel tank, and the pumps shut down due to a blockage when it was almost empty.”

“And?”

“They did a gas-free certification and then an open-andinspect. Found a bag. Looks like one of those big commercial laundry bags, about ten foot long. Plastic of some kind, nylon twine at the top. Only this one had K-Dog Simmonds inside.”

“Oh boy. Sufficiently preserved for ID?”

“Absolutely. Diesel cleans metal parts and apparently preserves human tissue just fine-even very badly burned human tissue. It’s him. You want to come down here? No media yet, but the night’s still young.”

Cam did his standard morning ablutions and made it to the tank farm about forty-five minutes later. Since it was an industrial area, he drove his pickup truck. A city cherry picker was parked next to the tank, and there were several hardhatted union workers in evidence, doing what they did best-standing around. The crime-scene crew had a small area taped off around the base of the tank, and Herman Yarnell, the Manceford County medical examiner, was there, making his usual profound observation: “That guy’s dead, all right.” A lengthy immersion in number two diesel was masking what should have been a perfectly awful stench, although not entirely.

Cam saw that it was Simmonds, and he had most definitely been southern-fried. K-Dog’s face perfectly matched the image imprinted into Cam’s memory at the end of Simmonds’s starring role in the first execution video. Cam felt a little bit sorry for him, but only a little bit. He was guessing that K-Dog now looked somewhat like those two people in the minivan when he and Flash got done setting them on fire. He wondered if he should call Jaspreet and let her come get some morbid satisfaction. But then, she’d already seen him die, and she’d been a believer right from the beginning.

“What’s the estimated time of death?” Cam facetiously asked the elderly ME, who just stared at him blankly until some of the other cops started laughing. “You don’t know who this is, do you?” Cam said.

He did not, so Cam explained it. He still didn’t get it. Cam gave up, remembering that county pathologists don’t get out much. That was especially true of Herman, who was rumored to really like his morgue.

“Anybody check to see if there were two of them in there?” Cam asked Kenny.

Kenny started to answer, but then he went over to talk to the visibly upset manager of the place to ask the same question. Minutes later, the workers bestirred themselves moving over to the cherry picker to take another look into the bowels of the big tank. Kenny came back over and Cam indicated that he wanted to speak privately. They moved away from the crime-scene technicians.

“Now what?” Kenny asked.

“Well, like you said, it’s real. The chair, I mean. That has to be Simmonds.”

“I suppose we have to wait for forensics, but, yeah, that’s him. And something definitely cooked his ass.”

“Stick with some body, ” Cam said, looking right at him. “The only question now is, Who?” If Kenny understood Cam’s challenging stare, he gave no sign. It was still just the two of them, sweeping against the entire criminal tide.

“I give up,” Kenny said. “Who?”

“Somebody with motive, opportunity, and means,” Cam said, reciting the standard murder formula. “My bet is still Marlor.”

“I’ll grant you motive, and maybe means. But tell me about opportunity. How would a guy like Marlor even find a hump like K-Dog?”

“Money,” Cam said promptly. “You know, stage something. Put the word out that he’s a-I don’t know. Publisher? Producer? Journalist? He’s offering to pay for K-Dog’s story. If it were me, I’d have called the producers of that show he went on and told them. They’d tell Simmonds, he and I would meet, and I’d show him some of that thirty-five K. Then we’d go someplace to do the deal and I’d bag his ass.”

Kenny was shaking his head. “It might have been money,” he said. “But I don’t think scientist Marlor is the kind of guy who could do this by himself. Fry a guy and then get him into an oil tank? He had to have help.”

The cherry picker’s engine revved up as the basket went high over the tank. A tank diver in a white plastic suit with an air-tank respirator was riding in the bucket with the operator.

“Yeah, maybe,” Cam said, watching the bucket as it jerked its way toward the access plate. “But how many hit men come equipped with an electric chair? Three-tap with a silenced twenty-two Mag’s more like it.”

“But how would Marlor get a commercial dry-cleaning bag?” Kenny asked. “And how would he get the body into that tank? You saying he rented a cherry picker? Came down here in the dead of night, unbolted that dome cover and then the access hatch, and dumped a hundred-plus-pound bag into an operational fuel tank?”

“You see any surveillance on this place?” Cam asked, looking around. “Cameras? Random vehicle patrols? A fence, even?”

They both looked around, and Kenny had to admit Cam was right. There were lights, but the tanks were huge, maybe a hundred feet in diameter and at least fifty feet high. The tops of the tanks were above the sodium vapor lights standards, so somebody climbing around up top would not be in the cone of light. There were wide gravel lanes between the rows of tanks, and a circular raised berm around each one, big enough to contain a small to moderate leak. But neither of them saw any video cameras, not one, and there was no fence around the tanks, either. There was a railroad siding on one side of the complex and a highway on the other. A string of tank cars was parked on the siding. The only fence was on the other side of the railroad tracks. Cam didn’t know how easy it would be for a pickup truck simply to drive into the tank farm, but if there was a checkpoint, it might not be a twenty-four-hour-a-day checkpoint.

“Okay,” Cam said. “Those are all strings to be pulled.” The medical examiner walked over to where they were standing. “When can we get an autopsy report?” Cam asked him.

“When it’s done,” Herman said amiably.

“We think this individual was electrocuted intentionally,” Cam said. “As in executed in an electric chair. I’d like an opinion on what kind of current did this-AC or DC-and how much, if that’s possible.”

The ME scratched his head with his ungloved hand. “I’ll have to do some research on that,” he said. “Not sure there’s a difference. Cooked meat is cooked meat. You say there’s a video of this?”

Cam told him there was.

“I’d need to see that, then,” he said. “AC and DC produce a slightly different arc color. This video in color?”

“Oh yes,” Cam said. “Vivid color.”

“Okay, then. Since this isn’t really the murder scene, I’m releasing him to transport.”

Since Kenny was technically in charge of the scene, Cam looked at him for approval and he nodded. He already had a crew line-walking the area around the tank, and of course the thing lying on the ground was now of interest to only the forensic pathologists. Cam spied a white TV van being stopped beyond the perimeter by a deputy.

“Time for me to boogie,” he told Kenny. “I’ll get the word to Bobby Lee.” He looked back at the body and sighed. “I was really hoping these two humps were out in LA somewhere, where they belong.”

“He’s exactly where he belongs,” Kenny said. “In hell. Precooked even.” Cam definitely heard a note of triumph in his voice. I’d also better tell Annie, Cam thought.