The Cat Dancers

62

An hour and a half later, he was back downtown in the sheriff’s executive office. The precious cell phone lay on the sheriff’s desk. Cam’s watch lay next to it, its timer counting down the minutes.

The only outsider there when Cam got in was Mike Pierce of the SBI. Cam had described his little tryst with Jay-Kay. The sheriff wanted to get a line on her immediately, but Cam talked him out of it. “Let’s do the drill, get the ranger back, and then we can chase the bad guys,” he said. Mike Pierce had the scan report Jay-Kay had given them. He highlighted the numbers for the pay phones and went to get some help to access Cam’s phone records to see if it was true that Jay-Kay had implicated him.

Cam stared down at the cell phone after Mike left. “I have one big problem with all this cell phone shit,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“She said all three speed buttons would turn the chair on until I make that other call.” He looked over at the sheriff. “What if that’s still true after I make that call? Or when I make the ‘yes’ call? What if this is all bullshit and I end up sending the signal that kills Mary Ellen?”

The sheriff frowned, and Cam realized that he looked older and grayer than when this mess had begun. “I’ll do it, if you’d like,” the sheriff said. “You’ll have to say the words, but I’ll punch the buttons. I’ve got the SWAT team standing by, and the ops center is ready to trace the numbers that come up in the window.”

Cam sighed and slumped in his chair. “She’s got me boxed, Sheriff,” he said. “With your support, I can probably avoid a federal prosecution, but if I don’t testify, I’m finished in law enforcement.”

The sheriff didn’t say anything. He did check the watch, which was ticking away on his desk.

“Where’s McLain and his tactical team?” Cam asked.

“Don’t know,” the sheriff said.

Mike Pierce came back into the room, clutching the report. He closed the door and sat down. “Please confirm your home phone number, Lieutenant,” he said. Cam gave it to him. Mike scanned the report and nodded.

“You guys didn’t go through all the data, right? You read her executive summary and conclusions?”

They nodded.

“Well, she wasn’t kidding. She already had your phone number in here as one of the recurring contact numbers in the pay-phone network. She just didn’t call it out in the conclusions paragraph.”

“Son of a bitch,” Cam said. “There it is. How the hell did she do that?”

“I asked the tech control people at the phone company that question,” Pierce said. “And they said that the call logs are tied to the billing system. They don’t keep records on their customers on the off chance the cops might call, but they do keep records for bill generation. You know when you call into customer service and bitch about a bill?”

They nodded again.

“Well, you know how sometimes they make nice and remove a specific charge? The way they do that is by expunging the record of the call. The billing system then does the math. My point is, it’s not a secure system. Even a customer service rep in Bombay can do that.”

“And she’s coming at them with a couple of mainframes,” Cam said. “Shit!”

“How much time do we have?” Pierce asked.

The sheriff looked at the watch. “Twenty-seven minutes,” he said, and then explained Cam’s concern with the speed-dial business. Pierce shook his head in frustration. “What choice do we have?” he asked. “They fry her, you’re still on the hook, especially with this shit.”

“But she faked all that,” Cam protested.

“And we have whose word for that?” Pierce asked gently.

Cam wanted to hit someone.

“There’s more,” Pierce said. “We called that woman’s number in Charlotte, got an answering service. The woman who returned the call said she was Ms. Bawa’s executive assistant. She doesn’t know where Ms. Bawa is, but that’s apparently not unusual. Just for the hell of it, I asked if you had been to that office. The officer with the dogs? she asked.”

“I can explain that,” Cam said wearily. “I did-”

Pierce had his hand up, indicating that Cam should stop talking. “I’ve been going to law school at night,” he said. “I think that right now you should follow the lady’s advice and say absolutely nothing. The sheriff here vouches for you, and that’s good enough for me. But the best option for the feds to solve their vigilante problem is to hang you out to dry, declare a public, if partial, victory, and then take their own manhunt underground. Image is everything to those guys.”

“You do understand that this whole damned thing is a setup, right?” Cam said. He realized he was almost shouting.

“You should have taken along some backup,” Pierce replied, unperturbed.

“Who?” Cam said angrily. “Sergeant Cox?”

“Enough,” Bobby Lee ordered. “Let’s focus on getting the ranger back alive, shall we?”

The designated lieutenant for the SWAT team called, asking for an update, and the sheriff told him they’d be making the calls in about twenty minutes. “Hopefully, someone will call into the ops center with the location of the hostage after we do our phone drill.”

They all looked at the cell phone and waited as the minutes ticked by. The more Cam thought about it, though, the less he believed there would be any calls, at least not immediately. He wanted to run out of the building and scream at the moon. All of this because some asshole had failed to read two scumbags their Miranda rights? He thought about Mary Ellen, strapped up in that horrific chair, waiting for someone to do something. How long had she been there? Was she still alive? Had that video been done the night she was taken hostage? Or were all those images fakes, the product of some other mad digital wizard. He visualized the oil-soaked corpse of the one robber lying out on the ground next to that diesel tank. Was that where Mary Ellen was now? “We’d never harm another cop,” Kenny had said, but now Kenny was a pile of picked-over frozen bones somewhere up in the western Carolina mountains.

“Okay, we’re two minutes away,” the sheriff said. “This thing has a signal. You going to do it, or shall I?”

“I’ll do it,” Cam said, getting up and going over to the sheriff’s big desk.

They waited as the watch clicked down, and then jumped when the tiny little beep went off. Cam picked up the phone and hit zero three. He flinched when someone slammed the front door to the executive offices. Zero two killed the chair. Right?

His hands were sweating as the phone rang and rang. C’mon, he thought. C’mon.

Then it was answered by voice mail. To his astonishment, Cam heard his own voice mail greeting playing. He snatched the phone away from his ear and looked at the number he’d speed-dialed. It was his own home phone.

“Well?” the sheriff said. “Aren’t you supposed to say something?”

To my own fucking phone? Cam thought, but then he said the magic word and hung up.

He reset the watch timer for five minutes and they waited some more. Then he took a deep breath and hit zero two. The phone rang once, twice, and then what sounded like a fax machine picked up and stopped. Silence followed and Cam hung up again.

“You’re not going to believe this shit,” he announced. “The first number I called was mine.”

“Figures,” said Mike Pierce. “She’s got that, too.”