The Cat Dancers

65

A week later, Cam found himself sitting in his office, realizing that his career as a police officer was all over but the shouting. His formal announcement that he wouldn’t testify had put the expected crimp in the vigilante investigation. The day after his dogs disappeared, he’d been called into a meeting with DA Klein and the grand jury foreperson. He’d told them then that in order to save a hostage from certain death, he’d made a deal with his own voice mail that he wouldn’t testify.

“So what?” Steven said. “She wasn’t there, so they didn’t keep their part of the deal. Why should you?”

“Because we still don’t have her back,” Cam replied, suppressing a desire to add a “duh” to that. He pointed out that Jay-Kay never had answered his question as to when they’d get Mary Ellen back, and logically, that wouldn’t happen until they knew he wasn’t going to testify.

“Are you trying to tell me that the Sheriff’s Office is just going to quit on this one? And even if you all are, you don’t really suppose the feds will just close the book, do you?”

“I can’t speak for the feds, counselor,” Cam said. “But we got our vigilante, didn’t we?”

“You mean Sergeant Cox?”

“Yes, Steven,” Cam said with a sigh. “I meant Sergeant Cox. And as for the feds, they now know that their fancy consultant was on the wrong side of this problem. And now she’s out of the picture.” Until their computers blow up, he thought, although he didn’t say it.

“We have that list. I’ll remind you that my office didn’t make any deals.”

“You go right ahead, Steven,” Cam said evenly. “But if we get Mary Ellen back in a body bag, that will be on your head, not mine. Plus, Jay-Kay was pretty clear that at least some of the so-called evidence she gave you was not everything it seemed.”

Klein, furious, had thrown him out of the office. Cam was sympathetic but not too worried. Much of the cell’s effectiveness had been that no one suspected they even existed. And the Sheriff’s Office had that list, too. Bobby Lee would work it one day, back-channel if he had to. But first they had to vet the whole thing, because the source of the list was, of course, Jay-Kay. MCAT’s efforts to track her down had come to nothing. She had disappeared, leaving behind her office and apartment complex in Charlotte, along with two IBM mainframes running diagnostics on each other with nothing else left in their vast memory banks but some transient electrons. A check of airlines and passport controls revealed no one by that name leaving the country. Her fancy car was gone, and the Sheriff’s Office dutifully had a warrant out for the car and its owner. The Bureau reported similar results, although they were a little vague as to precisely which strings they had been pulling to find her. But Cam well knew that if anyone wanted to go off the grid, that woman was more than qualified. She could as likely be in Indiana as back in India.

The sheriff was recovering but slowly. The doctors had beaten one infection but were now confronting another one, and the range of antibiotics was narrowing. Cam had been able to see him twice, and, if anything, he looked sicker the second time. With the sheriff out of action, Cam had become increasingly isolated within the Sheriff’s Office, especially after Steven had started running his mouth. He had a similar meeting with the federal authorities from Charlotte. They had most of the secondhand story, of course, but short of imprisoning Cam until he talked to them, the only physical evidence anyone had amounted to one dead minimart robber and bits of the homemade electric chair that had killed him, one dead wilderness guide and the head of the mountain lion that had killed him, one missing Sergeant Cox, the remains of one smashed-up vehicle grille, and bits and pieces of two bombs, one from Annie’s house and a second from the trucking terminal.

Cam’s bigger dilemma was how to reestablish his good reputation within the Sheriff’s Office in general. It didn’t take a genius to tell that a slow freeze-out was beginning, and this was reflected in the way other officers in the Sheriff’s Office were treating him. There’d been polite hellos, but increasingly the others evaded him: “Sorry, don’t have time to shoot the shit right now. Lots going on. You know how it is.” The members of the MCAT team had been individually detailed to various training and recertification courses, and there were rumors that the team was going to be broken up, due, somehow, to “budget constraints.” Rumors were spreading everywhere, and he desperately wanted to sit down with his contemporaries and tell them why he had recanted.

From his hospital bed, the sheriff advised against that, saying the feds could come back and subpoena any or all of them, forcing them to reveal what Cam had said. He’d talked to Mike Pierce about his status as a potential suspect in the federal books. Pierce told Cam that as long as he kept quiet, nobody should be able to put any hooks into him. Pierce was also the first one to come right out and suggest that Cam take early retirement.

“Hang around for ninety days,” he suggested. “Tell Bobby Lee you’re going to put your papers in, give him time to either restructure MCAT or appoint a new boss. Then fold your tents and steal away into the desert night.”

“Should I go out the front door or the back?” Cam asked bitterly.

“Are you part of some vigilante group?” Pierce asked.

“Hell no.”

“Like I said before, if that’s good enough for Bobby Lee Baggett, that’s good enough for me, too. Which means it should be good enough for your friends, as well. Your enemies can go screw themselves, right?”

The report from the army had finally come in on the incident that had ended Kenny’s military career. He had been on a temporary assignment to Fort Huachuca in Arizona. He had failed to return on time from a seventy-two-hour leave. Subsequent investigation revealed that he and his brother, one James Marlor, had been engaged in an illegal hunting expedition on the federal reservation. James Marlor had been injured, and Kenny had taken him to a civilian medical facility for treatment. The ER people had reported to the local police that the injuries suggested a mountain lion attack. Because Kenny was army, the report made it back to Fort Huachuca.

The brothers had indeed been hunting mountain lion, which was forbidden within the installation’s vast boundaries. James Marlor had shot a cat. He’d approached the body, thinking the cat was dead, but it wasn’t, and it had mauled him. Kenny had killed it, then lied to protect his civilian brother. He was subsequently court-martialed, not for hunting mountain lion but for moral turpitude-that is, for lying to his superiors. He’d been dismissed from the service with a general discharge and had subsequently changed his name to Cox.

Cam wanted to pull Kenny’s Sheriff’s Office service records to see how he had accounted for those years in the army, but the personnel office had closed out the records upon notice of Kenny’s death. At this juncture, Cam wasn’t willing to pursue it. There had been a Sheriff’s Office memorial service for Kenny, where the sheriff spoke about the sacrifices police officers made in defense of the American way of life, among other platitudes. Department heads were told that Sergeant Cox had died in a hunting accident in the Smokies and that it was pure happenstance that Lieutenant Richter had been sent to look for him at the time of the incident.

Cam’s phone lit up for the first time in a week, snapping him out of his reverie. He picked up. It was Oliver Strong, Annie’s lawyer.

“Lieutenant, I’ve heard through the grapevine that you might be taking early retirement. Any truth to that?”

Cam laughed. “Which grapevine was that, counselor?”

“Courthouse mail room, to be exact,” he said. “And they’re never wrong, as we all know. I don’t mean to pry, of course, but if you are going to make a career move, I have some good news and some bad news.”

“Bad news first, Mr. Strong. That’s been my diet recently.”

“Okay, the bad news is that the IRS has sent me a letter saying that we’ll need to suspend liquidation of Judge Bellamy’s estate because the prospective beneficiary is, and I’m quoting here, ‘a person of interest’ in an ongoing federal investigation. They cite the law about a bad guy not being permitted to benefit from the fruits of his criminal acts.”

The feds reminding me of who has the real power, Cam thought. “Person of interest’?” he said.

“That’s what they call somebody when they want to hang him but don’t have enough evidence to take the poor bastard to a federal indictment.”

“Okay, I think I understand that. And the good news?”

“Remember that provision about past-due alimony? Where she said that when you retired from police work, she would augment your pension?”

“Vaguely,” Cam said. “Although truly, I’m a whole lot more worried about finding a certain park ranger right now than I am about money, pension or otherwise.”

“I understand, Lieutenant, but you just might care. Because the way this works, as soon as you put your papers in, you will begin to get the earnings from her estate. Not the principal, of course, but whatever earnings some nine million dollars’ worth of investments produces will come to you in quarterly payments. Even at five percent, that will not be chopped liver, as the expression goes.”

“Are you shitting me?” Cam said.

“Not a pound, Lieutenant,” the lawyer said. “In fact, it’s worded so that even if you’re fired from the Sheriff’s Office, it still works. The relevant clause speaks to your leaving law enforcement permanently.”

Cam laughed. “I guess she knew that my getting shitcanned was always a possibility,” he said.

“Well, retire, resign, or piss somebody off, but if you leave law enforcement, you let me know, okay?”

Cam said he would, then hung up. He had meant what he’d said: He’d have preferred to have found Mary Ellen wrapped in duct tape in that trailer to all the money in China. He’d never had big bucks before, and he recognized that suddenly having money might present its own problems, especially if he left under what looked like an increasingly dark cloud. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t, he thought.

The phone rang again. He picked up and identified himself.

“You have mail,” said a clone of the chipper voice from AOL.

He laughed and hung up, thinking it was a joke, but then, curious, he went to his computer. He did have mail, and it was from JKB@tigereye. com. Well now, he thought. He opened the E-mail.

A color picture began to unfold on his screen. He couldn’t fathom it until it was just about done, and then he saw that it was of the interior of a dimly lit cavern that looked fairly large. In the foreground was what appeared to be an enclosure area with three large cages that had straw on the floor and watering troughs toward the back. Each cage was about twenty feet long and ten feet wide, and each had a heavy wooden door at the back.

The cages were empty. The reinforced wire doors at the front of each cage were standing open. All three of the wooden doors at the back were shut and barred by heavy metal strap handles. Superimposed at the top of the picture was a string of numbers, which Cam recognized as GPS coordinates. At the bottom there was a line of text, which read. “The lady or the tiger? Come at noon. Come alone or don’t bother.”