The Cat Dancers

26

Cam unlocked his car, slid into the driver’s seat, and used his Sheriff’s Office cell phone. The operator patched him through to the operations supervisor, who informed him that there had been two bombs at Judge Bellamy’s place after all. The second one had worked like a fucking charm.

Cam was struck speechless as a cold wave of acute nausea swept through his midsection.

“Lieutenant, you there?” the sergeant asked.

Cam found his voice. “Yeah, I’m here. The judge-is she…”

“Oh, yes, sir, she, her car, and her garage. Apparently, it was a big fucking bomb. I’m fixing to beep the sheriff right now. You going on-scene?”

Cam nodded, and then realized the sergeant couldn’t see that. “Affirmative,” he croaked, and hung up. BFB-just like the brick package had promised.

His hands were shaking and suddenly he couldn’t see all that well in the semidarkness of the police lot. He sure as hell couldn’t drive right now, so he called back into the operations center and asked for a cruiser to take him out there. He met the car out front on Washington Street and they headed out to Annie’s neighborhood with sound and lights going. The deputy driving took one look at Cam’s face and tended to his driving.

Annie was dead. Just when it seemed they might be able to get a life going again, now this. He couldn’t organize his thoughts or his emotions. He was just cold inside now, anxious to get to the scene, to do something. An image of the chair flashed through his mind.

It was a blue-light circus out there by the time they pulled up. Cam badged through two perimeters and three different sets of scene-entry logs. He could smell the disaster over the wall before he could see it. A heavy pall of smoke still hung in the air, polluting the beautiful ambience of the grounds and shrouding the smaller trees. It looked like every light in the house was on, but then he realized that every window on the garage side of the house had been blown in. The main crowd was back at the garage, or where the garage had been, because it wasn’t there anymore. Only one end wall was standing, and not much of that one. There were crime-scene people, the bomb squad again, the fire department, of course, two ambulances, one with lights going, one with lights dark, and several deputies milling around with flashlights. It looked like the medical examiner’s people were working at the darkened ambulance, while the EMT boys were swarming around the one whose lights were still spinning. One injured, one dead. Not too hard to figure that out.

The on-scene boss was the Sheriff’s Office watch commander for this shift, Lt. Frank Myers. Frank worked in the Major Crimes division. He was a big guy, also ex-Marine Corps, but he was of the gentle giant persuasion and well liked in the Sheriff’s Office. Cam headed toward him and found himself crunching through a thickening debris field as he crossed the dark lawn. His mind was in neutral, and the feeling of dread and nausea was returning. Part of his brain told him that he didn’t belong here just now, but he ignored that, pressed ahead, and got to where Frank was talking on a cell phone. The remains of Annie’s silver Mercedes smoldered in front of the garage foundations. Frank recognized Cam and cut off his conversation abruptly.

“Jesus, Cam, I’m sorry as hell about this,” Frank said, which surprised Cam. It was not something that the officer in charge on the scene of a bombing would say to the chief of the MCAT, and then Cam saw that several other cops were looking his way with expressions of real sympathy, as was Frank. It struck him then that his and Annie’s little secret may not have been so secret after all. He was overwhelmed for a moment, but then the situation intruded. Fuck it, he thought, taking a deep breath. Let’s get this over with.

“Where is she?” he asked as quietly as he could, and Frank immediately pulled him aside. The other people were getting back to what they had been doing, but Cam noticed that there was a growing circle of space around the two of them out there in the ruined yard.

“The judge’s remains are in that dark ambulance over there,” he said. Cam immediately turned in that direction but found that Frank had a hold of his arm and wouldn’t let go. Cam had to stop before he pulled himself off his own feet. He looked at Frank, who shook his head. “Don’t go there,” he said. “Keep what you got, Cam.”

Cam tried to pull away again, but Frank was a big man, so then he just quit, which is when Frank let go of his arm and put a big paw around his shoulder. Cam felt tears streaming down his face. He didn’t know what to do, and Frank turned him gently away from the crowd of cops and lights and walked him out into the darkness of the lawn, still stepping through broken bits of wood, glass, and even metal-and possibly bits of Annie, Cam realized.

Big fucking bomb.

After a minute or so, he got control of himself, sort of, took several deep breaths, and asked what had happened.

“Those FBI people left and then the judge decided she wanted to go out for a drive,” Frank said. “All of a sudden. Said the house was giving her the creeps, all this shit going on. The inside deputy informed the outside guy and central ops, said he’d go get the car. She said no, she’d get it, told him to meet her at the front gates.”

“So he didn’t actually go with her?”

Frank shrugged. “It was Arnold. He’s a second-year probationer, just off his tour at the LEC. She was a judge. He did what he was told.”

“And then?”

“The outside deputy was Merriweather. He got the word, saw the backyard spotlights come on, saw the judge walk across the drive, heading back toward the garage. He said his night vision was shot to hell by all the spots, so he drifted back toward the front wall to get some trees between him and the house. Heard the garage doors go up, thinks he heard the car start, then doesn’t remember anything after that. The EmTs say he got hit with a piece of the roof. They’re fixing to transport him now.”

“Badly injured?”

“Whacked in the head,” Frank said. “Who the hell knows.”

“And Arnold?”

“Physically, he’s fine,” Frank said pointedly, giving Cam a look that said, Don’t go out there and beat up on him for not going with Annie to the garage. Because if he had…

“Okay, okay,” Cam said. “He didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Yeah, that’s how we see it right now. If anything, they should have had the outside guy go look in the garage, make sure there were no bad guys lurking in there. Of course they’d never have seen this coming.”

“I should have,” Cam said. “They did this before.”

“They’? “What’re you talking about?”

“Diversion. The night they shot up the house. One guy in the alley, making noise, while the shooter pulls up front and pops the real cap. Same deal here. They deliver a fake bomb, we go off on it, find out it’s a fake, stand down. Then the real deal. Plus, the bomb squad swept the house, but none of the other buildings.”

“I don’t know, Cam,” Frank said after a moment. Cam thought Frank was being obtuse, but then he realized that he was still looking for someone to blame-that is, besides himself. “Whoever did this couldn’t have known she’d want to go out for a drive on the spur of the moment.”

“Depends on who it is and how well he knew Annie,” Cam said. He’d meant to say “the judge.” He hesitated, but Frank was a totally straight-ahead guy. “I-we-thought we were keeping what we had going… well, something of a secret.”

Frank looked down at the grass for a moment. “Probably not, Cam,” he said. “This ain’t the LAPD, you know? I mean, hell, there was nothing improper about it. You’d been married before. Most of your friends thought it was probably a good thing-for both of you.”

“You think this”-Cam pointed with his chin to the smoldering remains of the three-car garage-“was about her decision to dismiss on the minimart?”

Frank’s face settled back into a professional mask. “I have no fucking idea what this was about, Cam,” he said. “You do understand that you can’t work this one, right? Plus, this is most definitely for the feds.”

Cam nodded. Then he said he needed to go over to that darkened ambulance. Frank gave him an appraising look and then nodded, but they went together.

The ambulance’s emergency lights were dark, but the medical examiner’s staff people were there. One of them recognized Cam and nudged the other people. They closed the back doors and stood back as Cam approached. Hell’s bells, he thought, who hadn’t known?

They reached the side of the vehicle and Frank left Cam alone after signaling the ME’s people to back on out. Cam knew he wasn’t going to open those back doors. The lights were on inside the unit, but he didn’t dare look inside, either. Keep what you got, Cam, he told himself, remembering Frank’s words. He just stood there for what seemed like a very long time, leaning his head on the boxy white sides of the ambulance. The metal was cool against his forehead, and the sounds of the crime-scene activities faded behind him. A part of his mind sensed that he might be going into shock. Then suddenly, Bobby Lee was there, putting his arm around him and walking him firmly away from that ambulance and the mortal remains of Annie Bellamy.