P Deutermann - The Cat Dancers

“Not so fast,” the sheriff said. “It might be productive, but it can also be very dee-structive. I don’t want to start any wildfires in the Manceford County Sheriff’s Office based on one dinner conversation, Lieutenant, and that with a civilian consultant, I might add, who works for a federal agency.”

“She called me, Sheriff,” Cam said.

“Okay,” the sheriff said. “Enough of this shit. Lieutenant, you keep MCAT looking for Flash Gordon and his pal. And for James Marlor. I’ll think about this other business. I do not want you to start any internal investigations, disrupt the whole damned Sheriff’s Office, until I’ve had time to think it through and talk in detail with SBI. Steven, you and I need to talk.”

That was a clear signal for Cam to go away, so he did. He went back to the office, which was empty. He called Marlor’s neighbor but only reached her answering machine. He asked her to see if all the checks were accounted for, especially one numbered 2499. That number sounded like the last check in a series. Then he took advantage of the fact that the rest of the crew were out of the office and called the field ops center and asked for the dispatch supervisor. He asked her to generate a list containing the names of every deputy who’d been signed out to a cruiser at the time of the shooting incident, and the call number of each cruiser. Being a cop, she asked what was going on, and, mindful of Bobby Lee’s warning about starting shit, Cam told her the MCAT needed to recanvass the neighborhood where the incident occurred. She said she’d send it by e-mail.

The next call would be cutting closer to the line, but he decided to go ahead anyway. He called the district office’s three garages, and spoke to the maintenance supervisors. He asked each of them to generate another list, this one indicating by call number any cruisers that had been in for maintenance during the last twenty-four hours. The supervisors were all civilian employees, so none of them asked any questions and all three promised him their lists in the next hour, again by E-mail. Then, using his own computer, he printed out a list of all the vehicles owned and operated by the Sheriff’s Office. He crossed off the special-use vehicles-such as the war wagon for the SWAT teams and the mobile-lab vans-and counted up all the cop cars.

With this list and the ones he’d requested, he would have the numbers of every cruiser in the Manceford County Sheriff’s Office that had been available for street duty at the time of the incident. He could subtract the assigned cruisers and the ones in for maintenance from the master list. That should leave only half a dozen vehicles. He could then go check to see where they were that night, and who’d been using them. He knew it was possible that street deputies could be involved in something like this, but it would more likely involve senior people, sergeants at least.

He heard voices out in the main MCAT office, so he put away what he was doing and locked his desk. It gave him a strange feeling to be looking inside the Sheriff’s Office for criminal activity, but the more he thought about it, the more he had the feeling that it needed to be done. Especially since one of his own people might be involved. He knew he had to be very careful-Bobby Lee kept his finger on the pulse of the entire Sheriff’s Office better than anyone he knew. The sheriff had to be looking at him, too.

Cam was awakened in the night by the phone. It was Kenny Cox. Cam could hear the sounds of a crime scene in the background: tactical radios, vehicle doors opening and closing, people talking about setting tape, portable generators humming urgently.

“The chair is real,” Kenny announced.

“What’ve you got?” Cam asked, turning on the bedside light and squinting at the clock, which read 4:30. Of course.

“I’m at the petroleum tank farm down by the rail yards, south Triboro. What we’ve got is a makeshift body bag. They decided to draw down a zillion-gallon diesel tank, and the pumps shut down due to a blockage when it was almost empty.”

“And?”

“They did a gas-free certification and then an open-andinspect. Found a bag. Looks like one of those big commercial laundry bags, about ten foot long. Plastic of some kind, nylon twine at the top. Only this one had K-Dog Simmonds inside.”

“Oh boy. Sufficiently preserved for ID?”

“Absolutely. Diesel cleans metal parts and apparently preserves human tissue just fine-even very badly burned human tissue. It’s him. You want to come down here? No media yet, but the night’s still young.”

Cam did his standard morning ablutions and made it to the tank farm about forty-five minutes later. Since it was an industrial area, he drove his pickup truck. A city cherry picker was parked next to the tank, and there were several hardhatted union workers in evidence, doing what they did best-standing around. The crime-scene crew had a small area taped off around the base of the tank, and Herman Yarnell, the Manceford County medical examiner, was there, making his usual profound observation: “That guy’s dead, all right.” A lengthy immersion in number two diesel was masking what should have been a perfectly awful stench, although not entirely.

Cam saw that it was Simmonds, and he had most definitely been southern-fried. K-Dog’s face perfectly matched the image imprinted into Cam’s memory at the end of Simmonds’s starring role in the first execution video. Cam felt a little bit sorry for him, but only a little bit. He was guessing that K-Dog now looked somewhat like those two people in the minivan when he and Flash got done setting them on fire. He wondered if he should call Jaspreet and let her come get some morbid satisfaction. But then, she’d already seen him die, and she’d been a believer right from the beginning.

“What’s the estimated time of death?” Cam facetiously asked the elderly ME, who just stared at him blankly until some of the other cops started laughing. “You don’t know who this is, do you?” Cam said.

He did not, so Cam explained it. He still didn’t get it. Cam gave up, remembering that county pathologists don’t get out much. That was especially true of Herman, who was rumored to really like his morgue.

“Anybody check to see if there were two of them in there?” Cam asked Kenny.

Kenny started to answer, but then he went over to talk to the visibly upset manager of the place to ask the same question. Minutes later, the workers bestirred themselves moving over to the cherry picker to take another look into the bowels of the big tank. Kenny came back over and Cam indicated that he wanted to speak privately. They moved away from the crime-scene technicians.

“Now what?” Kenny asked.

“Well, like you said, it’s real. The chair, I mean. That has to be Simmonds.”

“I suppose we have to wait for forensics, but, yeah, that’s him. And something definitely cooked his ass.”

“Stick with some body, ” Cam said, looking right at him. “The only question now is, Who?” If Kenny understood Cam’s challenging stare, he gave no sign. It was still just the two of them, sweeping against the entire criminal tide.

“I give up,” Kenny said. “Who?”

“Somebody with motive, opportunity, and means,” Cam said, reciting the standard murder formula. “My bet is still Marlor.”

“I’ll grant you motive, and maybe means. But tell me about opportunity. How would a guy like Marlor even find a hump like K-Dog?”

“Money,” Cam said promptly. “You know, stage something. Put the word out that he’s a-I don’t know. Publisher? Producer? Journalist? He’s offering to pay for K-Dog’s story. If it were me, I’d have called the producers of that show he went on and told them. They’d tell Simmonds, he and I would meet, and I’d show him some of that thirty-five K. Then we’d go someplace to do the deal and I’d bag his ass.”