The Cat Dancers

41

Cam waited around for another hour while the ranger tried to surface more prints, and then, after putting both dogs in the truck, he went back to the headquarters of the Carrigan County Sheriff’s Office and met with a Lieutenant Grayson, who headed up their Criminal Investigations department. He directly asked for their help in running down any information they could develop on the cat dancers story and any possible connections to White Eye Mitchell. He described the electric chair executions case, the bombing incident, and the fact that their prime suspect had committed suicide, but he did not allude to suspicions that police might be involved. Grayson, a tall, rangy individual in his fifties, took it all aboard and said they’d look into it, then asked whether Cam would mind if they checked back with Manceford County. Cam, “No problem,” and gave the lieutenant the appropriate phone numbers to get in touch with Bobby Lee.

“We heard some talk about a mountain lion this morning,” Grayson said.

Cam nodded. He’d forgotten how fast news could travel in a small county. He described the tracks and what the park ranger thought about them. He also mentioned Mary Ellen’s comment about the possibility that Cam had faked the tracks.

“Mary Ellen’s good people,” Grayson said. “They get to listen to a lot of BS at that station. Tourists see the damnedest things: panthers, wolves, king cobras, grizzlies, and I don’t know what all.”

“She gave me the official Park Service line in the office: Ain’t no panthers. Then later, she sort of hinted that that might not be true. Struck me as odd. She seems to be… nice.

“She tell you what happened to her fiance, Joel Hatch?”

“Knocking on the wrong door at the wrong time?”

Grayson tapped a pen on the desk for a moment. “Brother Joel was a bit of a cowboy, especially for the Park Service. Really got into the sworn officer bit. TV cop wanna-be, in our opinion.”

“Is that what got him shot?”

“What got him shot was that he called in the meth lab, was told to wait for backup from us, and then talked his partner into doing a John Wayne. No surprise to any of us, but we all felt bad for Mary Ellen. And his partner.” He gave Cam a significant look. “Mary Ellen’s a special lady in this community, if you follow me?” he said.

Caution received, Cam thought as he nodded.

“They get any hairs from those prints?” Grayson asked.

“I believe they did,” Cam said. He remembered the ranger going out to the SUV to get some evidence bags.

“Good,” Grayson said. “We have some mounted specimens from the early nineteen hundreds here in town, in private hands. They can do a DNA comparison, see if we’re talking eastern or western panther. Or rabbit fur stretched over a dinner plate with bear claws glued to it. What’s the connection with White Eye in all this?”

Cam hesitated. He was pretty sure that Grayson’s sudden shift in topic had been calculated, so he decided to take refuge behind the same line he’d given Mary Ellen Goode.

“There’s more to this case than I’m allowed to talk about,” he told the lieutenant.

“No shit,” Grayson said with an amused look on his face.

Cam smiled sheepishly. “Best thing is probably for your boss to talk to my boss. That way, I’m not going to wander too far off the reservation with what I say or don’t say. Personally, I think Mitchell might know something about this cat dancer story, although he says he’s never heard of such a thing.”

“Nor have I,” Grayson said. “Not to mention that that would be a damn fool thing for any man to try with a panther.”

“Exactly. This whole thing is probably a dead lead.”

“Except for the fact that we have you coming all the way out here from Manceford County, asking around about mountain lions, and suddenly we have what looks like the first confirmed evidence of a panther in many years. Quite a coincidence there, and I assume you feel the same way we all do about coincidences.”

“I do,” Cam said. “There is one thing, though.” He described his casual conversation with the two deputies in the Waffle House, and his suspicion that they actually might know something, too. Grayson made a note, said he knew who they were and that he’d pull that string.

Cam thanked him. “Like I said, we’re more than a little bit behind the power curve on this one. And we have feds in our hair just for grins.”

“Is there just possibly an IA angle on this deal?” Grayson asked.

Cam looked at him with as innocent a face as he could muster. “Why ever do you ask that, Lieutenant?”

Grayson smiled and said they’d poke around and get back to him. Cam thanked him again and left.

He got back to the cabin park a little after sunset. The skies were filled with ragged white clouds drifting down off the Smokies and the temperature was dropping quickly. As he turned in, he was surprised to see that the security light on the front of the office was out, leaving the line of cabins in even darker shadows than usual. The gloom was relieved by an occasional burst of moonlight on the hard-packed snow. He pulled into the parking notch by his cabin and let the dogs go. After a day of being cooped up in the truck with only occasional tree breaks, they happily took off into the snowy woods. Cam hoped there weren’t any hungry things out there.

He’d spent the afternoon hitting more of the guide shops and asking around about Mitchell and the wild tale about men tracking mountain lions just for fun. He’d learned exactly nothing. He’d then stopped by the Park Service rangers’ office, ostensibly to see what they’d come up with on the prints, but mostly to see Mary Ellen smile again. The prints had been cast into plaster of paris and were going to UNC for evaluation. Mary Ellen was getting ready to go to a one-day conference in Asheville and, while polite and even friendly, she’d made it clear she was busy. Disappointed, Cam had backed out and returned to his cabin.

He could hear the dogs barking at something up on the slopes behind the cabin as he let himself in, but they didn’t sound frantic about it. They were just making shepherd noise for the sake of making noise. He closed the door and flipped the light switch up. Nothing happened. So now he knew why the security light wasn’t on up front: The power had to be out for the whole complex. The interior of the cabin was almost totally dark, illuminated only by the brief glimpses of moonlight coming through the windows. His breath was visible in the cold air. At least the woodstove ran on wood alone, so while it might be dark, there would be heat. He shucked his coat, hung it up by the front door, and went to reload the woodstove. He was bent over the front of the stove, trying to get a match to stay lit despite a back draft coming from the stove, when he saw something in the corner of the main room that made him become very still. The match began to burn the tips of his fingers, so he dropped it, missing the paper crumpled under the logs completely.

His eyes told him that what he was looking at was a pair of green eyes that were locked onto his own eyes like tracking beams. The eyes disappeared when the clouds covered up the moon, but they reappeared each time the moonlight did. His first thought was, Where are the damned dogs when I need them? They were still outside and still barking, but farther away now. He stared back into the corner, and, sure enough, there was a large feline face surrounding those yellow-green eyes: tawny fur marked with a darker mask and two rounded ears with tufts of white inside. It was a big face, much bigger than he had imagined.

He remained motionless for a long thirty seconds, and then slowly, very slowly, while still down on one knee in front of the woodstove, he fished out another match and struck it up, illuminating the room this time. The flare of light confirmed his worst suspicion: There was a mountain lion in his cabin.