P Deutermann - The Cat Dancers

“So he’s alive, then,” Purdy said.

“So it would appear,” Cam said, although he wasn’t entirely convinced.

Kenny caught the hesitation. “What?” he said.

“This guy pulls out thirty-five K in cash money just before he disappears,” Cam said. “What the hell’s he need an additional five hundred bucks for?”

That provoked a thoughtful silence.

“Maybe he paid a pro-you know, to take out the two mopes and the judge,” Purdy said finally.

“How many hitters you heard of who use an electric chair?” Horace said. “And if a pro used an elephant gun, he’d have had a target in view, not a house.”

“Okay,” Cam said. “We have to follow this up. Refresh the BOLO system. Tell field ops to highlight the vehicle description, get it back up in priority with the state guys, too. Let’s focus on that pickup truck if he’s driving around town. Purdy, anything on the crispy critters?”

“Not a whiff, boss,” Purdy said. “And you’d think-”

Cam just looked at him.

“Okay, anyways, I pulled Simmonds’s prison records, talked to some of the jerkoffs he hung with in the joint, see if they could put a face on him. No joy. The CO’s up there who knew him said K-Dog was not exactly a memorable guy.”

“And Flash? Any south Triboro intel?”

“His mother admits he was a stone jitterhead,” Purdy said. “Those are a dime a dozen down there. I’ve checked with the morgue a coupla times. No well-done John Does listed, here or anywhere in the state system.”

“Okay, Kenny? What’s the fallout from last night?”

Kenny retrieved a copy of the patrol report. Definitely two vehicles, neither one of them visually identified. Guy in the alley tied a clothesline to a trash can and dragged it a hundred feet down the alley, then cut the line. Garden-variety clothesline, available at any Wal-Mart. The guy out front parked long enough to leave a puddle of AC water, but no brass from the cannon, which fit with a bolt-action heavy-caliber rifle. No wits to anything. By the time patrol set up the sector sweep, no suspicious vehicles noted in that neighborhood.

“Which is not exactly a closed-off area,” Cam said, remembering the posh neighborhood. There were lots of woods and small parks among the mansions, along with streams, trees, grassy median strips, and not many streetlights. Very private big houses set in a very accessible neighborhood. It occurred to him that if cops were doing this, they could have used cruisers, which the patrol screen would have ignored totally.

“We’re exploring the rifle angle,” Kenny said. “I know guys in the sporting-arms business here in the Triad, so I’ll run that down myself.” Cam nodded. Like many cops, Kenny had an extensive gun collection. It was mostly handguns, but included some deer-hunting rifles.

“Marlor had a carry permit,” Horace pointed out. “Maybe he has a collection?”

“We didn’t see a gun safe or anything like that in his house, but, yeah, that’s worth checking, too,” Cam said. “Check shooting clubs, local gun ranges in his area.”

They were taking notes, but Cam didn’t exactly detect enthusiasm. This team was used to doing one case at a time and executing a complex campaign plan when they went after a single individual. Searching for three MIAs was not their usual line of work. They’d turned on all the state and local find-the-subject machinery, and usually what happened next was a long wait. They looked expectantly at Cam.

“Yeah, well, I wish I had some brilliant ideas,” Cam said. “The toasts could be buried in a farmyard somewhere, or puffing out plastic bags at some landfill. And as to Marlor, he could have done those guys and the shooting and then driven to Mexico.”

“He’d need money,” Horace said, and then frowned when he remembered the thirty-five thousand.

“He might have all he needs for right now,” Cam said, “And the rest he can get at electronically anytime he wants.”

“Let’s freeze it, then,” Purdy said. “He tries for his cash stash, we nab his ass.”

Kenny said it before Cam did. “He hasn’t committed any crimes. We can’t do anything to him until we can prove he’s done something. No judge would freeze his accounts. His only ‘crime’ right now is that he’s gone off the grid.”

“Well,” Horace said indignantly, and they all laughed. Horace had a certain fondness for the idea of a police state, which was why it was probably a good thing he was retiring. They all knew that a police state was no longer entirely out of the realm of possibility.

“The fact is,” Cam said, “we’re stuck on this chair thing. We don’t even know if it was real or Memorex. So let’s concentrate on the shooting incident last night. Forget any connection to the chair, and make it a straight shooting incident. Redo the neighborhood canvass. That’s a unique rifle-pull that string hard. Somebody check Marlor’s credit cards going back for a couple of years for the gun.”

“That’ll take a warrant,” Kenny said.

“Go ask Bellamy,” Purdy said. “She’ll probably say yes for a fucking change.”

“Well?”the sheriff said.

“Somebody who looked like Marlor, in a truck that looked like Marlor’s truck, and with two pieces of Marlor’s ID, cashed one of his checks for five hundred bucks at a drive-up window today.”

“Or put another way,” the sheriff said, “James Marlor cashed a check this morning.”

Cam reminded him about the thirty-five grand he’d taken out before he vanished. The sheriff asked if there’d been any big debts paid off-like the mortgage-with that money. Cam said no. The sheriff swore when he saw the hole in his argument.

“The neighbor lady taking care of his house had the checkbook and her signature on the account card,” Cam said. “I’m going to ask her to see if there are any checks missing.”

“What will that prove, even if there are?” Bobby Lee asked. “Marlor could have taken one or two with him.”

That was certainly true. It was Cam’s turn to swear. Another damned dead end, but he was still going to ask the question.

“Okay,” the sheriff said. “I’ll call McLain on the secure videoconference line. Might as well clear the air.”

“He’s in Washington, according to the Charlotte office.”

“Surely they have secure comms facilities in Washington,” Bobby Lee said. “But I’m still not convinced that we’ve got some wrong cops here. You getting all the assets you need to find these three guys?”

Cam nodded, then told him what they were doing, which was mostly spinning their wheels.

“I’m going to ask for some help from the state on this chair thing,” the sheriff said. “In the meantime, no more meetings with that Indian woman. We don’t know who she’s really working for, and that always makes me uneasy.”

“Last night, she was going solo, I think,” Cam said. “She still wants someone’s head for what happened to her uncle.”

“Not for money, then?”

“Negative. She was pro bono with the Bureau, and she didn’t come near asking me for money to help out. I think it’s personal.”

“Personal’s not professional, by definition,” he said. “Keep the investigation in the official loop for now. I’ll let you know what I get from SBI.”

Cam thanked him and went back to his office. Going to North Carolina’s State Bureau of Investigation might be a good move. The SBI existed to provide state-level assets to local law; all a sheriff had to do was ask. North Carolina’s SBI agents were good people; Cam’s guess was that Bobby Lee might also broach this other problem with their Internal Affairs experts.

In the meantime, his people were supposedly all in motion finding their three targets. But if this was a vigilante problem, some of them might be just going through the motions. Especially one.