The Cat Dancers

46

The dogs were in semidisgrace on the trip back. He had chided them about not following the Bronco and rescuing his sorry ass from the mountain lion. The looks on their faces said that no self-respecting, intelligent German shepherds would even mess with goddamned mountain lions, and besides, full food bowls on the porch had distracted them from doing their duty, no matter how wildly construed. He could see their point, but he still gave them a cold shoulder all the way back to Triboro. That seemed to bother them a lot, at least for the five minutes before they fell asleep in the backseat.

It was just after sundown when Cam got back to his house in Summerland. He turned the dogs loose in the backyard, gathered up his mail, disarmed the alarm system, and went inside. A quick walk-through of the house turned up nothing visibly amiss. He called the sheriff at home and let it ring once, then hung up. He took a shower, got something to eat, and, on a hunch, changed into uniform. Bobby Lee arrived twenty minutes later in his personal cruiser. Five minutes after that, DA Steven Klein showed up. The sheriff was in uniform and Cam was glad he’d changed. He had not shaved his beard, however, and this provoked a fish-eye stare from Bobby Lee even as he handed Cam his official accoutrements. They sat down in Cam’s kitchen, and Cam poured out coffee for all hands.

Cam then debriefed them on everything he’d learned up in Carrigan County, along with the details of the final night under Catlett Bald. He mentioned that he had a corroborating witness but said that she hadn’t decided whether she wanted to get involved. The sheriff described what Jaspreet Kaur Bawa had turned up in her database analysis of judges, cases, and walk-away perps who’d subsequently died. Her search went back over a decade, he informed them.

“Seventeen DOA’s,” he announced somberly, and that brought a muttered oath from Klein. “Two of those may have been prison gang-related, but even discounting those, that still leaves fifteen unsolved cases, including the two recent Internet stars.”

“Statewide?” Steven asked.

The sheriff nodded. “Fifteen cases where clearly guilty bastards went free and then were extinguished, leaving us with stone-cold whodunits.”

“We need to check on something else,” Cam said. “White Eye told me one of the cat dancers got himself eaten. He was kind of vague as to when this happened, and it might be bullshit, but we should look to see if any cops flat-out disappeared, in the past twelve years, say.”

“Why twelve?” Bobby Lee asked.

“Because White Eye said the guy who called himself Carl first came to him about fifteen years ago. He said it took him two years to train Carl to hunt the wild cats. Carl finally got his photo of a cat after three years. A few months later, he brought in the second guy and then the ones after that. Our cluster of unsolved cases involving dead perps seems to go back about ten years, so if it’s true, the initiate died somewhere between ten and twelve years ago.”

“I’ll go to SBI with that one,” Bobby Lee said.

“Or let Jay-Kay do it,” Cam said. “Her computers are already trained to do that kind of search.”

“Trained’?” Steven said.

“Don’t ask,” Bobby Lee told him, shaking his head. “She tried to explain how that all works and left me right in the damned dust.”

“The real question is,” Steven said, “How do we smoke these bastards out, assuming they do exist?”

Everyone concentrated on their coffee cups for a moment. A night wind came up outside, stirring the tops of the Leyland cypresses into a soft sound.

“On the question of whether or not these are related killings, were there any correlative factors in the fifteen incidents?” Cam asked.

“Such as?” the sheriff inquired.

“Manner of death; location of discovery; time of death; wound patterns; probable sequence of events prior to their getting killed, such as abduction, a holding period, then execution, or was it just a drive-by?”

“Don’t know,” Bobby Lee said. “Something else to check. But how the hell do we smoke ’em out? Turn loose another walk-away perp?”

“I think Mitchell sicced that cat on me deliberately,” Cam said. “I think he was an integral part of this group, and they wanted me out of the way.”

“You think, ” Bobby Lee said. “You have a body and a dead mountain lion-a tame one, not a wild one. No one has yet to produce a wild one up there, just like the Park Service people have been saying all along. There’s no damned evidence.”

“I think we do have some evidence,” Cam said. “We have the body of K-Dog Simmonds, found in a diesel-storage tank. That’s pretty elaborate for a prison gang hit or the revenge of a drug dealer. Plus the videos of the two executions, out there on the Internet, with corroborative damage to Simmonds’s body. We have a guy showing up here in a police cruiser telling me to get out of town. We have the shooting incident at Annie’s house, prior to the bombing, which had to have involved at least two people. And we have James Marlor, who somehow knew something about cat dancing.”

Cam paused, waiting for comment, but the other two sat there looking down at the table. He then reiterated his arguments for there being cops involved. More silence.

“Okay,” he said, “Some of that’s circumstantial, I admit. But we’ve put bad guys away on circumstantial evidence.”

“If they’re cops,” Steven said, “they could just go dormant after what happened up there in Carrigan County, and we’d be left with fifteen unsolved and no frigging idea of who these people are.”

“I know one way,” Bobby Lee said. They all looked at him.

“Start talking about a show trial. Say we have evidence that there’s a vigilante hit squad operating in the state, that we have a star witness, in the person of Lieutenant Richter here, who knows who these people are because the old tracker gave him a deathbed confession.”

“Wouldn’t that make Lieutenant Richter a tasty target?” Steven asked.

“You said you wanted to smoke ’em out. I believe that would do the trick.”

“Lieutenant?” Steven said. “How you feel about being the goat staked out in tiger country?”

Cam let out a long breath. “If that’s what it takes,” he said. “I don’t have any better ideas. I mean, we can chase those corroborative factors, see if we can tie an MO to specific individuals or specific county sheriff’s offices, but that might take forever.”

“They’ll know about Mitchell,” Bobby Lee said. “That’s been all over the news. They’ll know Lieutenant Richter brought him in. They have to be worried already.”

“One problem,” Cam said. “I don’t think White Eye actually knew their names or anything about them, other than that he guessed they were cops. If that’s true, and they know that, setting up a trap might not work.”

“Shit,” Steven said. “We’re going in circles here.”

“Seven guys,” Cam said, stirring what was left of his coffee. “Seven guys who are so addicted to danger that they’d track a mountain lion close enough to take a picture of its face; who get together from time to time to hunt down and execute especially noxious perps; and who could organize a bomb at a judge’s house, which was under Sheriff’s Office protection. All this would take a very different kind of guy.”

“Your point being?” Steven asked.

“My point being: Let’s ask every sheriff in North Carolina to name one person in his office who might be twisted enough to qualify for membership in a group like this. I think we’re looking for senior street operatives-sergeants, probably-who’ve been through a lot and are hard as nails, pissed off at the system, and capable of getting out there on the edge and going full bore. We’ve all run across guys like that at one time or another. We usually push ’em into early retirement, too.”

Cam saw that the sheriff was giving him a studiously appraising look, as if to say, You’ve got someone in mind right here in Manceford County, don’t you? “You’d have to do that sheriff to sheriff,” he said to Bobby Lee.

“And then what?” Steven asked. “Say you get a list?”

“Sweat ’em,” Cam said. “Use whatever IA channels we have to find out where they were and what they were doing when Flash was abducted in a hail of blank bullets. Or when Annie Bellamy went into low-earth orbit.”

“That’s such a shotgun approach,” Steven said. “Maybe not even legal.”

“Any better ideas?” Cam asked. No one said anything. “Of course, we wouldn’t get ’em all, but we might get lucky,” he continued. “Nail one, turn him, get the rest. Grind through them. Turn one of the Bureau’s interrogation teams loose on them. Tie them physically to Carrigan County. Sweat the wives and girlfriends: Does he go out west a lot? Go hunting a lot? Take a lot of leave?”

The sheriff wasn’t convinced. “If they’re veteran cops, and they’ve shared this initiation with mountain lions, you won’t get a word out of them. Then what?”

“Invoke the Patriot Act,” Cam said. “Send them down to Guantanamo Bay and let some of those retired CIA sweepers go to town. That bombing would be sufficient justification.”

“Okay, I agree,” Steven said. “If Lieutenant Richter is willing, I think the idea of trolling that deathbed confession within Sheriff’s Office circles is the best course of action. If they’ve hit a judge, they won’t balk at taking another cop out.”

“Then I’d want some federal help in protecting him,” the sheriff said.

“Right,” Steven agreed. “We need to work up a plan. They’ll need time to organize, make their decision, and then get set up. I need to get with McLain down in Charlotte. Sheriff, let’s you and me meet in my office tomorrow morning.”

Bobby Lee agreed. Steven said he had to go. Bobby Lee stayed behind after Klein left. “You okay with this?” he asked as they stood out on Cam’s front porch.

Cam shrugged. “As long as we move pretty quick,” he said. “I don’t know how these guys move around or communicate, but it might not take them all that long to come calling.”

“You want some people here tonight?”

“Who you gonna call, Sheriff?” Cam asked. “Hate to have the wrong guy show up as part of my protective detail.”

“You think Sergeant Cox is one of them, don’t you?” Bobby Lee said.

Cam had to think for a moment before replying. “Who would you offer up,” he said finally, “if that question came around about cops who operate on the edge?”

The sheriff nodded slowly. “He’s gone over the line more than once. That’s why Bellamy hammered him in the first place. Except…”

“Except the MCAT was the perfect place for him,” said Cam, finishing the sentence for him. “Nobody ran ’em down like Kenny Cox.”

“Should I move him out?”

“How?”

“A temporary assignment? A special project, say, with the Bureau down in Charlotte?”

“Wouldn’t that be interesting,” Cam said. He heard his phone ringing inside but ignored it. “If my theory is correct, they don’t let any of the cell members do anything on their own home ground. The out-of-towners come, like that guy who showed up to calibrate me. No, I’d say we find a way to know where he is at all times and then see what happens.”

“Hmmh,” the sheriff said. “Come in early tomorrow morning. You’re awfully isolated out here.”

Cam snapped his fingers and both shepherds were at the door in a heartbeat, ears up and looking for a job. “Not entirely,” Cam said.

After the sheriff left, he retrieved the phone message. It was from Jay-Kay. “Can you come down here to Charlotte? No phone calls. Just come as soon as possible.” Reluctantly he went to make some coffee.