The Cat Dancers

25

Annie was sitting at her office conference table with her clerk when Cam knocked on the open door and went in. They finished up and the clerk closed the door behind him. Annie pointed to the liquor cabinet secreted in the bookshelf and Cam fixed them each a scotch. They sat together on the couch. The light outside was beginning to fade toward evening, and the lingering glare through the windows revealed some lines and shadows Cam normally didn’t see on her pretty face.

“So how’s the house arrest going?” he asked.

“Long,” she said. “Especially now that this chair thing is real.”

He nodded. “Seems so,” he said. “The pathologists may have a different opinion, of course, but I saw the body.”

“Great,” she said, and stared out the window. “So now what?”

He moved closer to her and rubbed the back of his hand across her cheek. Her skin felt faintly powdery, but the small bones of her face were tangible, which meant she’d lost some weight. “I wish I could go over there and just let you sleep in my arms,” he said.

She folded her face into his hand and nodded. “I’m being the big brave judge,” she said, “But I’m also scared.” She turned to look at him. “Was that a cop who fired that cannon at my house?”

“I don’t know,” Cam said. “And Bobby Lee doesn’t care much for my theories along that line.”

“You’ve talked to him?”

“He’s the Man in this outfit. He’s not anybody’s friend, but I believe he’s honest. I can’t see him condoning vigilantes in his bailiwick, but just the whisper of an accusation like that would tear the place apart, so I’ve talked to him and only him.” As he said it, Cam realized that wasn’t entirely true. He’d also talked to Jaspreet Kaur Bawa. As usual, Annie read his feeble mind. “What?” she said.

He told her in greater detail about his dinner with Jaspreet and the vibes bouncing around the FBI’s Charlotte field office. He also told her about their teleconference with McLain, and that the sheriff was talking quietly with the SBI.

“Too many people talking,” she said. Your secret won’t be a secret for very long. Look-I have to get home. The FBI is sending your fancy computer expert friend to take a look at my computer. Apparently they think I compromised the judicial intranet and that’s how bad E-mails are getting through.”

“You do access it from home?”

“Of course-we all do. It’s supposed to be secure. How ’bout an escort?”

Cam went to get his car while she closed up chambers and retrieved her car. He followed her back to the house and they continued the conversation in her study. “What’s really worrying me,” he said, “is the fact that we can’t find this Marlor guy.”

“What’s worrying me is that someone might be trying to kill me,” she said, matter-of-factly, ever the judge. “Either some guy the whole world can’t find or some cops who are right now just biding their time, waiting for the heat to dissipate or the budget people to pull off the watchers.”

“Can’t you take a vacation? Go to Europe or something?”

“And what-postpone the inevitable? Whoever killed those two men went to extraordinary lengths to do it-an electric chair, for God’s sake! And then put at least one of the bodies in a place where it had to be found, instead of burying it up in the mountains somewhere.”

“I don’t know, Annie,” Cam said. “Say it is cops. They’ve iced the two perps who did the crime, not to mention putting the fear of God into you. Sent you a threatening E-mail via a supposedly safe circuit. Fired a big rifle into your house. They’d have to know you’re scared-the deputies stationed here have to be talking about it at the district office, in the cop bars.”

“Wonderful,” she said.

“But here’s what I’m saying: it’s a huge step to go from harassing a judge to killing a judge. If it is cops, they’d have to know that the entire federal and local law-enforcement machine would turn on them, find them, and execute them, in this state. If they do nothing else, they’ve achieved their warped sense of justice already. I just can’t see it going past harassment.”

She turned to look at him. “And for how long do the elephant guns through the windows go on? Until I resign from the bench? Is that what they want?”

Cam threw up his hands. “I don’t even know if ‘they’ exist. Some kind of cop vigilante squad, I mean. It could be Marlor doing this stuff.” He told her what McLain had said about another judge sending her hate mail. But she’d hit on something there-if it was cops, getting her to resign from the bench would be a victory in some quarters of the Sheriff’s Office. Kenny Cox, for one, would be elated.

“Well, whoever’s doing it can forget that shit,” she said, finishing her whiskey. “I’m not going anywhere. Bobby Lee issued me a carry permit yesterday and I’m packing a three fifty-seven from now on. Any more shit starts, I’m shooting back. You can put that word out in the cop bars if you’d like.”

“I don’t go to cop bars,” Cam said. “And what do you know about shooting a Mag?”

“You showed me, remember?”

“That was many years ago,” Cam said. “I’m not even sure I could handle a Magnum pistol right now. My hands are getting old. This forty-five is a handful as it is.”

She got up, went to the desk, and pulled out a shiny Smith amp; Wesson, took a fair to middling two-handed combat stance, and pointed it at the study door, right at the very moment the outside deputy knocked and opened it. His expression became quite interesting; if Cam hadn’t started laughing, the deputy might even have fainted. Annie lowered the gun, apologized, and shook her head.

“What, Deputy?” she said in an embarrassed voice.

“Um,” he replied, probably wondering about the state of his underwear, “There’s a delivery for you, Your Honor.”

“What kind of delivery?” Cam asked. He hadn’t heard any vehicles.

“FedEx. He said he didn’t need a signature.”

Cam got out his trusty pocket tape recorder and turned it on. “Sure it was a FedEx truck?”

“Yes, sir, a white van. You know the kind, had the FedEx sign on the side. Guy brought the package to the front gate, did his scan thing, and handed it through.”

“You expecting FedEx?” Cam asked Annie. She shook her head.

“Describe it, Deputy,” Cam said, making sure the voiceactivated recorder could pick up the deputy’s words.

“Box of some kind, wrapped in brown paper, about the size of a shoe box, maybe a little bigger. Heavyish. Brown plastic tape. I didn’t look at the address label.” He pointed behind him. “It’s right out here, on the-”

“In here,” Cam said, motioning for the deputy to come all the way into the study and close the door. “Okay. We’re going outside right now, through these French doors. Where’s the inside guy?”

The deputy told Cam he’d switched stations with his partner, who was now covering the gate.

Once they were all outside, Cam had the deputy call into operations and give the code for a possible explosive device and then the code for Annie’s house. Then they moved to the other end of the swimming pool complex. Cam told the deputy to come up on his secure radio circuit and describe in detail to operations what they had, and then he gave the deputy his pocket recorder and had him describe everything he could remember about the FedEx truck, the driver, and the package in case it went boom in the night. The deputy said the driver had been a white guy, medium, medium, tinted glasses, FedEx ball cap, white shirt with FedEx logo, dark pants, no distinguishing scars or marks. The guy had been in a hurry, didn’t say much.

Annie asked Cam discreetly if maybe he was overreacting. “It might just be a FedEx package, Cam.”

“It’s well after six P.M.,” Cam said. “The FedEx guys, the UPS drivers-they’re all back at their stations, filing the day’s reports. Anybody could make a magnetic FedEx sign, slap it on a white van, and nobody’d pay it any mind. So we play it safe.”

The bomb squad got there in twenty minutes, during which time the four of them waited outside, swatting at lateseason mosquitoes. Finally, Cam told the deputy to resume his patrol of the grounds. He figured that if it was a bomb, it would trigger when opened and not by some timer, unless the deliveryman had pushed a button inside the package when he’d handed it over at the gate. Cam wasn’t going in there to find out. They continued to wait outside while the explosive guys did their thing, which ended when they launched their recovery robot into the hallway to grab it up and take it out to the transport truck, which hauled the object away.

While they were standing there, Jay-Kay Bawa and a man who looked like an FBI agent came around the corner of the house. Cam introduced her to Annie Bellamy, and then the two women stepped aside to talk. Cam asked the agent if he’d been told what was going on; the man replied that they’d been out front for awhile, and that he’d made a report back to Charlotte.

“We couldn’t get through the perimeter cops. It was Jay-Kay there who talked her way in and then came and got me.” He looked around. “They think it’s real?”

The bomb squad’s supervisor, perspiring in his body armor, came out to where they were waiting.

“Sure looks like one,” he said, “Although the sensor pack didn’t alarm on nitrates or anything. But it’s heavy enough, and there’s no FedEx bar codes on the package. If it doesn’t go boom when they take it out to the range, we might get some decent forensics off that wrapping tape.”

“The deputy said the driver scanned it,” Cam said.

“Then he was acting,” the supervisor replied. “No bar code there to scan.”

“Did you sweep the house?” Cam asked.

“Yep,” he said. “Nothing overt.”

“Because there was no one in there for twenty minutes, and for at least some of that time I had both deputies outside.”

“One of your guys had to come open the gates for us,” he said.

“Your Honor,” Cam said to Annie, “It’s safe for you to go back in the house. Can I ask that you and Deputy Arnold here do a walk-through, see if anything’s out of place or disturbed?”

“Just me, Lieutenant,” she said. “If that was a bomb, I’m very much disturbed: Ms. Bawa, come along. You can look at my computer while we do a walk-through.”

Cam told Annie sotto voce to come to his place once all the noise subsided. Then, since he couldn’t think of anything else to contribute, he went back to his office to write it up. He called the sheriff at home later that evening to report on what the bomb squad had discovered. It hadn’t been a bomb. But it hadn’t been a legitimate FedEx package, either. FedEx had no record of a delivery to Annie’s address, and Cam had been right about when the deliverymen returned to their stations for the day. The bomb squad had taken the package apart with their disassembly robot out at the bomb range, which was equipped for night work. They found a common cardboard box inside, and that contained a brick wrapped in bubble wrap. There were no wires, trigger mechanisms, or clocks. There was nothing unique about the brick or the box, and the brick had apparently been washed in diesel oil to get rid of any traceable elements. No prints on the package, tape, or the bubble wrap. But someone had inscribed the outer layer of bubble wrap with the roughly drawn letters BFB in permanent ink.

“And you can guess what that stands for, right, Lieutenant?” the bomb squad supervisor had said to Cam.

Cam absolutely could. Could have if he’d wanted to, that is. “Send me a report,” he’d said. “And we need some internal discretion on this, for reasons I can’t discuss right now.”

When he’d heard the story, the sheriff said for Cam to get a report off to the Bureau office in Charlotte first thing in the morning.

“They already have it, Cam said. He told Bobby Lee about Jay-Kay’s being there at the house, and the fact that her escorting agent had made a report.

“How’d our favorite judge cotton to somebody from the Bureau poking around in her computer?” Bobby Lee asked.

“The judge is a lot more frightened than she’s letting on,” Cam said. “This bomb shit, even if it was a fake, scared her even more. She had no problems letting the Bureau take a look.”

He told the Sheriff he’d send a preliminary report to Charlotte before he went home, and follow that up when he had the formal paper in from the bomb squad. Then he called Kenny Cox at home, but he wasn’t in. Out on yet another hot date, or ditching a white van somewhere down in south Triboro? Cam was tempted to beep him, but since there’d been no bomb, he figured it could wait until morning. The district had put a three-district call out for any white vans sporting a FedEx logo, but that was pretty much a hopeless endeavor. The driver had had at least a half hour to pull in behind some strip mall, take off the signs, and get on down the road, having nothing to worry about except an unlucky traffic stop.

Cam generated a summary report for the Bureau and sent it down to their secure communications facility. Then he checked his voice mail and listened to a message from Marlor’s neighbor down in Lexington. She’d looked in the checkbook, and, yes, there was one entire page of checks missing from the very end of the current series. She hadn’t noticed because she was still using checks in the front of the book, as she was writing only a few checks a month. The check numbers missing were 2497, 2498, and 2499, the last three in the book.

She had notified the bank, which informed her that number 2499, a check in the amount of five hundred dollars, had been cashed in Winston and that they would issue a stoppayment order for the other two checks-for a standard fee, of course. Cam decided to go out and get something to eat. He’d tackle all this in the morning. But first, he wanted to swing by Annie’s house to make sure she was all right and to see what, if anything, Jay-Kay might have found in Annie’s computer. He’d made it out to the parking lot and was fishing for keys when his beeper went off. It was a message from field operations. “Call home, E.T.-911.” Those last three digits blinking on his pager meant something very bad had happened.