P Deutermann - The Cat Dancers

He took the next fifteen minutes to walk around the immediate vicinity of the cabin. He looked in the outhouse, which was a primitive one-holer. His nose told him that it hadn’t been used in a long time, nor was there any toilet paper. There were no other structures in view, and no generator or electric chair, as far as he could see anyway. He then cut up the hill from the cabin to the edge of the woods and made a long circle around the cabin area, studying the ground. There were no visible tracks. All he could see were the steep, sloping hillside, dense trees and underbrush, and those long shadows in every direction, from which all manner of wildlife might be watching him with varying degrees of interest. The hills are alive, just like the song says, he thought. But is James Marlor still alive?

He changed to a clean uniform once back in the office and sat down to write up a report of his visit to the Marlor cabin. Bottom line: They still didn’t know anything. There was still no sign of Marlor or of the two cretins who’d done the minimart, but the absence of the three subjects didn’t prove anything, one way or another.

His phone rang.

“This is Jaspreet Kaur Bawa,” she said. “Do you remember me, Lieutenant?”

“Vividly,” Cam replied.

“Oh dear. Why vividly? Did I offend you?”

“No-o,” Cam said. “You didn’t offend me. I just remember that look you gave me after I met with you and Mr. Marlor. Plus your recommendations for dealing with those two criminals.”

“Mr. McLain told me that you were uncomfortable with my being involved with this investigation.”

“Which investigation, Ms. Bawa? I understood the Bureau backed out. I assumed you had backed out with them.”

“Please, call me Jay-Kay,” she said, sounding about three degrees more friendly. “In America, Ms. Bawa sounds too much like Mizz Bow-Wow. And you should never make assumptions about what the Bureau is or isn’t doing; surely you know that.”

“Well, Jay-Kay, I’m only going on what they told us.”

“I will be in Triboro this evening. I am giving a course at the Marriott tomorrow morning. Would you be my guest for dinner?”

Now this was a surprise. “Well, yes, I’d like that,” Cam said, hearing the hesitation in his response. “What time and where?”

“The hotel dining room is quite good. Eight o’clock?”

“Okay, I’ll be there. Shall I stay in uniform?”

It was her turn to miss a beat. “As you wish, Lieutenant. I never let men tell me what to wear, you know?”

Cam laughed, said he’d see her that evening, and hung up. Kenny, coming up behind him, said, “See who this evening?”

“A secret admirer,” Cam said. “What’s going on with our various searches?”

The short answer was not much. No hits on the electronic sweep on Marlor. No rumbles from the rat warren on K-Dog and Flash. Kenny looked a little tired. “Late night?” Cam asked.

He gave Cam a wry grin. “Baby-sitting duty at guess where,” he said. “Midnight to six. But I’m still young and strong, so it doesn’t show, right?”

Kenny Cox fancied himself an outdoorsman as well as an indoorsman of note. He went deer hunting every fall, turkey hunting every spring, and liked to push a bass boat sixty miles an hour way up into the back creeks and coves of the state’s many lakes to kill a big fish in the summertime. Cam had gone with him a few times, but he thought Kenny was an impatient hunter, which also reflected his approach to policing. Kenny was in it for the action, all the time. Cam debriefed him on his trip to the mountains.

“That rope made you think suicide?” he asked. His eyes were definitely red-rimmed, and Cam wondered if he himself could still stay awake from midnight to six and be of any use the next day. He tried to picture Kenny outside Annie’s house, looking in at the judge he despised so much, and wondered how Annie was bearing up under virtual house arrest at night.

“Yes, it did,” Cam said. “Or a game-cleaning rig for winter use. But if suicide, it begs the obvious question.”

“Yeah,” he nodded. “Who cut him down?”

That night, Cam parked his personal vehicle, a twenty-five-year old stick-shift Mercedes 240D, which he’d owned for the past ten years, in the Marriott’s parking garage.

Jay-Kay was perched attractively on a stool in the little alcove bar, having a desultory conversation with a guy who looked like a traveling salesman. She was wearing a gray silk pantsuit that clung in all the right places alarmingly well. Cam had changed from his uniform into a dark suit. He kept a ready-service suit, shirt, and tie ready to go in the office for just such situations as this. She smiled at him over the salesman’s shoulder, nodded good-bye to the guy, and they went into the dining room. The maitre’d took them to a table, seated Jay-Kay, dropped menus, took a drinks order, and left. It’d been an unusually warm fall day, so Cam ordered a gin and tonic for a change, and so did she.

“I didn’t get a chance to say this before,” he said, “but I’m really sorry about your uncle. I understand he meant a lot to you.”

“He did indeed, Lieutenant,” she said. “Do you remember his name?”

Cam had to admit he did not. He was bad enough with American names, and he hadn’t really even remembered hers once McLain had said everyone called her Jay-Kay.

“His name was Jasbir Chopra,” she said. “My aunt’s name is Surinder Chopra. She who is now a widow.”

Cam nodded. “I sincerely regret the fact that those two got away with it,” he said. “Please believe me when I say that was never anyone’s intention.”

“Most big mistakes are not,’ she said. “But thank you for your courtesy. My uncle was very close to me. He made it possible for me to succeed here in America. But I am no longer so sure they got away with it.”

“You think those video segments are real?”

She nodded as the drinks arrived. They exchanged a salud, and then she explained. “I think they are real because the video is of such poor quality. If it had been done by pros, say someone like Industrial Light and Magic, they would have been of much better quality. This stuff was filmed on an inexpensive digital camera and then downloaded to a PC via a firewire, and then uploaded via a broadband connection to the Web.”

Cam raised his eyebrows. “You know all that just by looking at it?”

“I know all that by analysis, Lieutenant,” she said. “I suspected it once I took a good look at it. Do you remember my name, Lieutenant?”

“Special Agent McLain said everyone called you Jay-Kay. I remember your last name, Bawa, but not your other names.”

“Jaspreet Kaur Bawa,” she said. Cam repeated it. She smiled to show that how people pronounced her name was not of earthshaking importance.

“Mine’s Cameron Richter,” Cam said, since they were exchanging names. “Friends call me Cam for short.”

The waiter returned to take their orders. “Is it true you run the Cherokee reservation’s parkway segment in a hopped-up BMW?” Cam asked.

It was her turn to raise eyebrows. “You have been checking up on me, Lieutenant Cam?”

“A little bit,” Cam said. “On you and James Marlor, both. He wasn’t as interesting. I’m told you make two thousand dollars a day doing your computer work.”

“Sometimes that, sometimes more,” she said. He couldn’t take his eyes off her face. Her light brown complexion was perfect, not a blemish anywhere, and that didn’t seem to be the result of makeup. She still wore no jewelry, but he detected a faint hint of perfume. She had on a lot of red lipstick, but against her skin, it didn’t seem excessive. Her teeth were very white and she had electrically alive dark brown, almost black, eyes. Cam couldn’t begin to guess her age, even though he thought Kenny had told him.