The Cat Dancers

30

The next morning, he inspected the Merc, looking for signs of intrusion in the electrical and ignition systems. He looked underneath, checked the brake lines, fluid reservoirs, the locking gas tank cap, the fire wall, and the entire interior of the vehicle. Then he checked for surveillance tracking devices behind the license plate frames and all the other places where he and his people routinely put such devices.

Then he pulled out the Blaupunkt radio and examined it for “extra” features, such as a second antenna or an additional tiny circuit card. A car’s radio was a favorite place to put a locating transmitter, because it had constant internal power and was hooked to an antenna. He found nothing out of the ordinary. Then he checked the permanently mounted cell phone, but that also looked undisturbed. The police radio was a multichannel transceiver, but it could not access the Sheriff’s Office secure communications system without someone entering a code that changed daily. Because it was a crypto device, it was a totally sealed unit, and there were no signs of intrusions there, either. He checked all the external antennas, looking for extra connections or splices in the antenna cables. Still nothing. He checked the front and rear frames for signs of recent towing. His guys had done that once-picked up a target’s car with a platform tow truck in the wee hours of the morning, taken it to the lab for installation of a surveillance system, and then towed it back to the street lot where the crook had parked it. There were no marks on the attachment points of his car.

He then ran all the same checks on his pickup truck, which was a full-size four-wheel-drive Ford with close to eighty thousand miles on it. When he was done, he sat in the truck’s front seat and thought about what he’d been doing. No signs of anyone screwing around with his rides, unless it had been a really sophisticated job. So that “deputy” talking about his ignition system? That had been a threat, pure and simple. Bellamy’s car had blown up when she’d started it. Yours can, too, partner, he told himself. On the other hand, the ATF report had said they’d found the remains of a timer in Annie’s yard. Their opinion was split: Either the timer had been the ignition device or it had been put into the car to deceive those who’d be doing the subsequent investigation. Some of their people were convinced that starting the car had set off the bomb. In their favor was the fact that the bombers couldn’t have known Annie would go down there at that particular moment. More important, the word circulating in the Sheriff’s Office was that it had been in the ignition circuit. The man last night had kept urging him to take a trip. Okay, maybe he would. There’d been no calls from Kenny Cox asking for details about this case or that, so if there were any loose ends, Kenny was handling them. And like his visitor had said, he was free to go anywhere. The round-the-world cruise might have to wait, but there was no sense in sitting at the wrong end of a shooting gallery, waiting for something bad to happen. He rubbed his chin and felt the beginnings of a heavy beard. He decided to let it grow out-a small statement of his newfound independence. There were no beards permitted in Bobby Lee’s Sheriff’s Office. And he’d stop getting a haircut every ten days, too. Enough of this Marine Corps stuff. He thought about taking up tobacco again, then smiled. It had taken him two years to quit, and there were some fires too dangerous to play with. But first he’d make one important change. He went back in the house and called his local Ford dealership to find out what they had in the way of new pickup trucks.

Just after sundown that day, Cam sat in an old rocking chair in the shadows of Kenny Cox’s front porch. It had cooled off considerably, and he was wearing jeans, a red flannel shirt, his black mountain man hat, and a bulky hunting jacket. He’d driven the old Merc, not willing to let anyone who knew him see him in his new truck quite yet. And his Mercedes was known. He’d passed a Sheriff’s Office cruiser set up as a radar trap while leaving Triboro, and the deputy had waved at him. Just for the hell of it, he’d deliberately misspelled his name on the new truck’s registration papers, hoping to evade the web of curious computers.

He’d brought along his favorite sidearm from his small collection, a replica single-action army Colt. 45. He knew that a single-action revolver would not be very useful in most tactical police situations, but he’d been taught to shoot at a Marine Corps school, which stressed the efficacy of wellaimed fire over the fire-hose approach. Having to pull back the hammer for each shot forced the shooter to slow down and take careful aim. The only things it required when some hopped-up bad guy was shooting at you were a steady hand and unblinking courage. Right now, the big Colt made a heavy, comforting lump in one of the coat’s roomy pockets.

He’d parked the car right where Kenny usually parked his own pickup truck-on the circular gravel drive in front of the house. He wanted to talk to Kenny, not surprise him. There was a sliver of a moon out, and silvery gray clouds were blowing across it in the night sky. The farm consisted of almost fifty acres, most of it bottomland along the banks of the Deep River. The two-story farmhouse was on a small knoll at the back of the property, surrounded by aging oaks and within earshot of the river when it was up and running. Kenny maintained the yard around the house, but the fields and fences had long ago reverted to nature. He could just make out the silhouette of an ancient tractor that was turning into a pillar of rust out in one of the fields.

The house itself was set back nearly a thousand feet from the county road, which gave Cam plenty of warning when Kenny finally pulled into the driveway. The truck’s high beams fully illuminated him on the porch for about five seconds before they were turned off. Kenny got out, closed the door, and came up the porch steps. He was in uniform.

“You didn’t tell me about all the meetings,” he said, stopping on the top step.

“Bureaucratic popularity,” Cam said. “Comes with the private cube and all that extra money.”

Kenny sighed. “You want a drink?”

Cam stood up and followed Kenny inside the house. They went straight back to the kitchen, where Kenny turned on some lights and retrieved a bottle of single malt. He poured them each a measure, handed one glass to Cam, and then hooked a chair out from under the kitchen table. Cam sat down and put his hat on the spare chair.

“One day and you already look different,” Kenny said.

“So do you. Congratulations on the promotion.”

“Very temporary,” Kenny said. “I hope.”

“Maybe not,” Cam said. They both drank some whiskey and stared off into the middle distance. Cam thought Kenny looked tired.

“About the other night,” Cam began, but Kenny waved him off.

“I was out of line,” he said. “You’d just been kicked in the teeth. I had no business being there, or bringing up that… other stuff.” He looked over at Cam. Even sitting at the table, he was still big enough that he had to look down to make eye contact.

Cam nodded for a moment, not trusting himself to speak without saying something stupid. “What’s the word on the bombing?” he asked.

“Can’t say,” Kenny replied. Cam raised his eyebrows.

“Sheriff told me you were on LOA,” Kenny explained. “One of the conditions of my taking over was that I wasn’t to tell you anything about anything.”

“What else did Bobby Lee tell you?”

“That if I did talk to you, it probably wouldn’t be a big problem, on account of the fact you’d be leaving town directly.”

“He say that?” Cam asked, trying not to show his surprise.

“What’s that you got in your jacket pocket there?” Kenny asked.

“Peacemaker,” Cam replied. “Replica.”

Kenny snorted. “Why bother?” he asked. “Single-action revolver-that’s useless.”

Cam shrugged, and in the process he palmed the revolver into his right hand and brought it up. Kenny stiffened when the gun appeared. Cam pretended to admire the heavy weapon. “Bobby Lee said I had to hand over all of my Sheriff’s Office gear,” he said. “But then he made sure I owned some personal weapons. I took that as a hint. So this is what I carry these days. I can still group pretty good at fifty feet.” He turned the gun over, half-cocked it, and spun the cylinder. He was careful not to point it at Kenny, whose empty hand was no longer visible, he noticed. Cop instincts. He let down the hammer on the one empty cylinder and slid the gun back into his jacket pocket. By then, both of Kenny’s hands were back on the table, and they sipped some more whiskey.

“So what are you going to do?” Kenny asked.

Cam shrugged again. “Don’t know yet,” he said. “Part of me wants to go digging around in this bombing case, but I know that would just piss everybody off.”

“Feds would grab your ass up for interfering,” Kenny said. “Especially the ATF broomhilda they have on this case.”

“Yeah, I do know that. I may just take that trip everyone keeps talking about.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” Kenny said. “Remove yourself from temptation.”

“It’s hard, though,” Cam said. “So much unfinished business.”

“That’s our problem now,” Kenny said, finishing his scotch. “I think all we have to do is find Marlor, and then this whole mess-that chair, the bombing-will unwind for us.”

Cam nodded. “About that other theory,” he began. Kenny didn’t shut him off this time.

“One guy couldn’t pull all this off,” Cam said. “So it would have to be a small cell, people who trusted one another implicitly. I’m talking experienced people. Veteran cops.”

“Someone like me?” Kenny asked.

Cam didn’t reply.

“Or someone like you?” Kenny said with a grin.

Cam stared at him, wondering if this was perhaps an oblique invitation.

“I mean, hell,” Kenny said, “don’t tell me you’ve never thought about it.”

“In the heat of the moment, maybe,” Cam said, remembering one street fight he’d been in as a young cop, where the situation would have justified his just blasting one meth-eyed suspect to hell and gone. Instead, he’d shouted the kid into submission. “But if someone had proposed organizing a squad, no. For one thing, it would be very hard to do.”

“Would it?” Kenny asked.

“Hell yes,” Cam said. “They’d have to have some kind of initiation process. A new recruit would have to do something way out there that would give the rest of the cell a lock on him.”

Kenny nodded thoughtfully.

“And they would need a secure comms system,” Cam continued, watching Kenny carefully, looking for some sign of acknowledgment. “A system within a system, maybe,” he said. “Some sort of code that could be overlaid on the existing secure comms. And a way to get around without calling attention to themselves.”

“I suppose it’s possible,” Kenny said, his face revealing nothing. “Although what we would see as simple justice, the law would call murder, straight up, every time.”

“Damned right, but being cops, they might think they were invulnerable, that being inside the system was such an advantage, they’d never be caught.”

“I don’t know, Cam,” Kenny said. “You know everybody in the Sheriff’s Office. We all talk trash about doing bad guys, but no one I know would jeopardize his job and his pension, not to mention his personal freedom, for a moment of satisfaction.”

“Business before pleasure, huh?” Cam said.

“Yeah, exactly. I mean, who wouldn’t like to pop some lowlife right in front of his mother? But, hell, Cam, get real. Ain’t a cop in the world who wants to go inside for that.”

“The only thing that could really threaten a cell like that would be another cop who got curious,” Cam said carefully. “He or she would have to be dealt with.”

“Yeah, and?” Kenny said, listening intently now.

“And maybe that’s the initiation fee,” Cam said. “A warning maybe, and then some direct action.”

“A warning like that would go a long way to proving that the cell exists,” Kenny said. “They wouldn’t be that dumb.”

“Unless they’d already made the decision to solve their problem.”

“But we haven’t lost any cops that way,” Kenny pointed out. “Every line-of-duty casualty we’ve ever had was thoroughly investigated. No mysteries. Not one.”

Cam nodded, no longer looking at Kenny. He was almost afraid to because of what he might read from Kenny’s eyes. They went way back. Plus, he’d been expecting Kenny to dismiss the whole notion, to call it all total bullshit. But that was not what was happening here. He decided to change tack.

“I can see one guy being able to take out the two minimart robbers,” he said. “But the incidents at Annie’s house-that would have to have been organized. Not one guy carrying a grudge, acting on sudden impulse.”

“Not one cop carrying a grudge,” Kenny said carefully. “She was universally despised in the Sheriff’s Office. You were probably the only cop in town who felt something besides contempt for her.”

Cam stared at his scotch. He knew that Kenny was a lot more complicated than his skirt-chasing, cop-as-cowboy public persona indicated. “It wasn’t love,” he said. “I think it was more like comfortable companionship.”

Kenny sniffed and made a face. “Well,” he said, “you know my history with her. She went after other cops, too. Don’t know who appointed her God, but that’s how she acted.”

Cam felt a surge of anger, but he hadn’t come here to fight, he reminded himself. He wanted to leave Kenny at least neutralized, so he didn’t point out that it was Kenny’s own actions that had brought the court’s sanctions. “Our relationship was a lot of things,” he continued. “Some old, some new, some just spur of the moment. You should also know that she wasn’t exactly happy the way the minimart case came out. But that was business, and, if you remember, more our fuckup than hers.”

Kenny grunted. “SWAT’s fuckup, you mean, and there was a lot more history between her and us than just that case. But either way, this has to be James Marlor. I’m sure of it. Occam’s razor: The simplest solution is usually the solution. Cop vigilantes don’t make sense, especially when there’s a perfectly good suspect right there. All we have to do is find his ass. Then it’s over.”

“I suppose,” Cam said. He wanted to leave it on an agreeable note. A disarming note, just in case. “I guess I do need to just get on with the rest of my life.”

“And your coming inheritance,” Kenny pointed out. “Assuming the feds let go of that.”

Cam wondered if that remark was a subtle threat, a little hint that the tables could still be turned. He smiled as he stood up. “Don’t have it yet,” he said.

“The taxman won’t take it all.”

“They’ll try,” Cam said. “Remember what you get when you put the words the and IRS together.”

“Enjoy your time off, then,” Kenny said. He remained seated at the table. His face was an interesting mixture of friendliness and quiet satisfaction. He chuckled. “Although the guys’re making book on how long you’ll stay away.”

“I may surprise you there,” Cam said, rubbing his stubbly beard. “Might grow to like it.”

Kenny tipped his empty glass up at him. “Happy trails, then,” he said. “Just remember-if you’re going to make the break, make the break. Don’t look back. And if we’ve got a vigilante problem, trust me, we’ll take care of it.”

“I’m sure you will,” Cam said, and then walked out of the house. And that was that, he thought.

From his car, he could see Kenny’s face in a front window as he backed out and then drove down the long drive toward the blacktop. He had come out here expecting vehement denial and some good arguments as to why he was all wet about a vigilante problem. Instead, he’d gotten-what, exactly? Kenny had brought up a disturbing possibility-that the investigation might well indeed turn around and focus on the man with all that newfound money. And the sheriff had been awfully quick to accommodate his leave of absence. If they couldn’t find Marlor, they very well might come after someone besides Marlor for all three murders.

“If you’re going to do something, you better do it quick,” he said aloud.

His personal cell phone rang. It was Jay-Kay. “I have good news, “she said. “A Lexington-area cell phone was used four miles from that place in the mountains you are interested in. Do I need to amplify that?”

“You do not, and thank you very, very much.”

“Be careful, Just Cam. I may not be the only one who knows that.”