The Cat Dancers

45

He tramped over a mile of hard-packed snow to find the Bronco, which started just fine, he discovered. He drove the vehicle back up to the edge of the oak grove and loaded Mitchell’s body. He’d tried to move the cat, but it was simply too heavy, so he found a hatchet in the Bronco, hacked off the cat’s head, and put that next to Mitchell’s body, covering the whole mess with a tarp as best he could for the trip back. Ordinarily, he’d have left the entire scene alone and called for the authorities, but nothing would be left once the scavengers found it, and there wasn’t exactly good cell-phone service up in these mountains. He drove back the way they’d come, getting stuck only once, which cost him a half hour of digging and shoving.

He drove directly to the Carrigan County Sheriff’s Office in Pineville, arriving bleary-eyed just after sunrise. The duty officer came out to the Bronco, pulled back the tarp, whistled once, and called the sheriff at home. Cam gave them a brief synopsis of what had happened, then said he needed to get back to the cabin, change, clean up, and get something to eat. He told them that he’d be back at ten o’clock for a detailed statement. That seemed to suit all concerned. After another, much longer interview, he put a call through to Bobby Lee to tell him that something had happened and that the locals wanted him to stay up there for a few more days.

“Something?’” the sheriff had asked.

“Office line,” Cam said, reminding Bobby Lee of his own orders. No phones, no e-mails. Cam asked him to call his cell phone from a more secure line.

“How’s this tie in with our problem?” Bobby Lee asked five minutes later.

“A small group of cops-revealed to us by a suspect, James Marlor-who are doing this pursuit of wild mountain lions as some sort of an initiation into-what?” Cam said.

“And you think these are our vigilantes?”

“It’s certainly possible, Sheriff,” Cam said. “Especially if they’re from all over the state. Not one sheriff’s office, but seven. A loose network of out-there cops who get together periodically to take care of unfinished business. They’d be strangers in Manceford County-like that guy who warned me to get out of town.”

“But you said Marlor admitted to doing the two minimart guys.”

“With the help of someone in law enforcement who told him where they could be picked up. And the bomb at Annie’s house? That wasn’t Marlor.”

“We only have his word for that.”

“There was the shooting incident prior to that-that took two people. Marlor was a lone wolf. I think these guys took advantage of what Marlor was doing to eliminate a judge they despised. Relate the two sets of incidents and we all looked at Marlor.”

The sheriff sighed audibly. “You’re saying we’ve got one of these guys in our house.”

“Either that or one of them had access to someone in our office who’s at least sympathetic to their program,” Cam said. “And that might be how this is working. This could be a small cell of doers with a much larger base of sympathizers, cops or admin types who are willing to answer a question without asking too many of their own. Guys who don’t want to know what’s going to be done with the information, but are willing to pass stuff along for the cause of achieving real justice, like when those two minmart assholes went free.”

“You’re talking accomplice to kidnap and murder, then,” the sheriff said. “Cops would know that.”

“I don’t know, Sheriff,” Cam said. “Yes, they should know that. But I can see some of the cops I know being able to make a distinction between executing somebody and leaking a little information. It’s not like they were putting cops or cases in danger; just giving an opinion as to where the likes of K-Dog and Flash hung out.”

“But legally-”

“Yes, sir, I know. But these might be new guys, easily influenced by older and more experienced cops.”

“So who are the doers?”

“Jaded cops. Senior hard-case guys with ten, fifteen, twenty years of pent-up frustration with the system. Not management types, but street supervisors. Maybe not just cops-maybe some Young Turk prosecutors. Probably they start out as sympathizers and then a select few graduate to actual doers. White Eye told me the group consisted of only seven guys-no more, no less. That’s a very small action cell, and you don’t get to play with those guys unless you’re man enough to do go do something like this cat-dancing shit.”

The sheriff went silent, long enough for Cam to wonder if he’d lost the connection.

“You get yourself back here ASAP,” Bobby Lee said finally. “I can’t move on this at all until I have you here.”

Cam said he would be trying to get the sheriff of Garrigan County to contain the incident as much as possible, restrict it to local consumption, but that he’d probably need some backup on that, sheriff to sheriff. Bobby Lee understood and took Sheriff Hanson’s office number.

“I have my dogs with me,” Cam said. “So I’ll need to go home first. Want to meet there? I have the inquest proceedings here tomorrow-that’s at two-and then I can be back in Triboro by seven, eight o’clock tomorrow night.”

“All right. And make sure you talk to that Bawa woman. She’s been calling all damned day.”

He got through to Jay-Kay an hour later. She revealed that her tigers had managed to penetrate the statewide records in her search for patterns involving prisoners, defendants, judges, and unsolved perp deaths.

“Penetrate,” Cam said. “As in covertly?”

“No, actually, as in freedom of information, with a little help from some federal resources. But here’s the interesting point: We were shut out after only three search sessions. I cannot find out why or by whom.”

“Shut out?”

“Access denied, across the board. And it looks like a machine is doing it, as opposed to, say, some sys op at a keyboard.”

Cam wasn’t sure what a sys op was. “So what do you do next?”

“Now we’re doing it my way,” she said brightly.

“I don’t think I want to hear this,” he said with a smile. “New subject: What do the jungle drums tell you about federal interest in me for the bombing?”

“Nothing. Which in itself says something-namely, that there is a stone wall in place. They know I’m working with you, and so no one tells me anything.”

“Can you do it your way with regard to that question, too?”

“It’s technically possible, but I wouldn’t want to. Unlike most state agency computer systems, the federal networks look back at intruders rather forcefully these days. When are you returning?”

“Very soon,” he said. “Things got messy up here, but productive in one sense. Tell me, have you had any interaction with Sergeant Cox?”

“Not directly. But shall we perhaps talk about that when you get back?” She replied, all but telling him, Not on an open line, dummy.

Exhausted, Cam went back to the cabin and took an allafternoon nap. He was awakened at sundown by the sound of someone knocking on the cabin door. The dogs were interested but not alerting him. Nonetheless, Cam still wasn’t ready to open the door and find one of Night-Night’s relatives wanting to have a word. He asked who was there.

“It’s Mary Ellen Goode,” a voice called. “I think we need to talk.”

Cam was standing behind the door in his long johns, still not quite awake.

“Um,” he said.

“I’m sorry. I woke you up, didn’t I?” Let’s do this: Meet me at the Sky Lodge in an hour.” She gave him directions and then drove away.

An hour later, Cam was seated by a window at the Sky Lodge, waiting for Mary Ellen. He’d wondered about the name when he first drove up, as the building was an unpretentious log lodge house from the front. When the hostess took him through the bar and down a flight of steps to the dining room, he saw the reason: A wall-length window looked out over a gorge that dropped at least five hundred feet below to a rushing stream. He ordered coffee and tried to wake up. Mary Ellen came in a few minutes later, and he woke right up. She’d changed out of her Park Service uniform into a dress, put on a little war paint, done something interesting with her hair, and was turning heads as she followed the hostess over to Cam’s table. Cam, wearing jeans and a lumberjack shirt, felt underdressed.

“Well, my goodness,” he said, getting up. “It’s a girl.”

She smiled as she sat down. “It’s a woman, actually,” she replied. “And she’s here to apologize for what happened to you up there in the woods.”

He sat back down slowly. “Apologize?”

She ordered a glass of wine from the waiter, who dropped two menus on the table.

“I haven’t been entirely honest with you about this cat-dancing business. I need to explain some things.”

The waiter brought her wine and she put a serious dent in it. “Okay,” she said. “Here goes. This concerns my late fiance, Joel Hatch.” She paused. “How do I describe Joel?”

“Lieutenant Grayson said he was a bit of a cowboy,” Cam offered. “A TV cop wanna-be, to be precise. Someone who liked the role of cop better than that of park ranger.”

She stared down at the table for a moment, not speaking, and Cam wondered if he’d been too blunt. “Did they tell you what happened that day?” he asked.

She nodded. “Not at first,” she said, “But then later, I talked to some of the cops involved. In fact, he and I’d had some words about the way he was acting, some of the stuff he was doing. And then, afterward…”

“Afterward, you felt guilty because now he was dead.”

“A little bit, yes, I did.”

“I can relate to that,” he said, and told her about the bombing incident and his own complicated relationship with Annie Bellamy. The waiter came back and they ordered.

“I guess I’ve become a fatalist,” she said once the waiter had departed. “I think that when you fail to put a proper value on the people you love, the gods take them away from you.”

“I think you take what life has to offer and make the best of it,” he responded. “We’re not in control. You were going to tell me something about cat dancers?”

She smiled. “Nothing wrong with your focus, is there? Okay, cat dancers. I first heard the term from Joel. He’d heard rumors that White Eye Mitchell was doing some weird stuff up in the backcountry and that it involved feral mountain lions.”

“Which do not exist,” Cam said.

“Right.”

“On the other hand, you never went looking, did you?” he asked.

“No, we have plenty enough to do. The station is undermanned, and the park visitors keep us quite busy. But Joel took off a couple of times in the year before he died, and I think he was looking. Then he stopped talking about it.”

“But he did use the term cat dancing?”

“Once. I remember it. He said it was the coolest thing he’d ever heard of. For Joel, cool was a word that usually involved extreme danger. But he didn’t say exactly what it was, other than it meant getting very close. Then it was as if he realized he’d been indiscreet, and he wouldn’t talk about it anymore.”

The waiter arrived with their food, and Cam used the distraction to think about how much he should tell her. He liked her and he trusted her, and she’d already figured out that there was an Internal Affairs angle to what he was doing up here.

“Okay,” he said. “Let me ask you one more thing: If you thought Joel was mixed up in something ‘weird’ involving wild panthers, why didn’t you report it?”

“You’re a career cop,” she said. “You know the answer to that.”

He thought for a moment. “Let’s see. Everyone knew the two of you were an item, and you were afraid that whatever it was he was doing, it might splatter your own career?”

“Not exactly admirable, is it, but that’s the gist of it, yes. You had to know Joel. I rationalized it by telling myself that there simply weren’t any more big cats up there in the mountains. Not wild ones, anyway. And even if there were, no one would be fool enough to track one into a face-to-face confrontation.”

He nodded. “I would probably have done the same thing,” he said. He decided to trust her, made her promise to keep it to herself, and then told her the whole story of why he had come up to the area.

“My God,” she said softly when he was finished. “An initiation? And one of them was killed?”

Cam looked around the dining room. It wasn’t full, but he still didn’t want to be overheard. “That’s what White Eye told me. And now that I’ve seen a supposedly tame one in action, I’m a believer.”

She shivered. “They want me to testify tomorrow-at the inquest-about how that could happen. With his own cat, I mean.”

“I may need you to testify for me,” he said. He stopped when he saw her expression. “ Testify ’s probably the wrong word. What I need is corroboration that I’m not making this up. And, of course, the much bigger issue is that we may have a statewide death squad working.”

She sat back in her chair, dinner forgotten, thinking about what he was asking.

“As you can imagine, this thing’s being run under a pretty damned tight wrap,” he went on. “You can’t talk about this. Hell, I can’t talk about this.” Even as he said it, he realized that he just had.

“Because you don’t know who’s who in the zoo,” she said.

“Precisely. I’m meeting tomorrow night with our sheriff and the DA.”

“What on earth would I tell my boss?” she asked.

“That you need a few days’ leave?”

“I’ll think about it,” she said. “But damn, Lieutenant!”

“You could call me Cam,” he said.

“Sure about that?” she asked sadly.