P Deutermann - The Cat Dancers

She turned to look at him. “And for how long do the elephant guns through the windows go on? Until I resign from the bench? Is that what they want?”

Cam threw up his hands. “I don’t even know if ‘they’ exist. Some kind of cop vigilante squad, I mean. It could be Marlor doing this stuff.” He told her what McLain had said about another judge sending her hate mail. But she’d hit on something there-if it was cops, getting her to resign from the bench would be a victory in some quarters of the Sheriff’s Office. Kenny Cox, for one, would be elated.

“Well, whoever’s doing it can forget that shit,” she said, finishing her whiskey. “I’m not going anywhere. Bobby Lee issued me a carry permit yesterday and I’m packing a three fifty-seven from now on. Any more shit starts, I’m shooting back. You can put that word out in the cop bars if you’d like.”

“I don’t go to cop bars,” Cam said. “And what do you know about shooting a Mag?”

“You showed me, remember?”

“That was many years ago,” Cam said. “I’m not even sure I could handle a Magnum pistol right now. My hands are getting old. This forty-five is a handful as it is.”

She got up, went to the desk, and pulled out a shiny Smith amp; Wesson, took a fair to middling two-handed combat stance, and pointed it at the study door, right at the very moment the outside deputy knocked and opened it. His expression became quite interesting; if Cam hadn’t started laughing, the deputy might even have fainted. Annie lowered the gun, apologized, and shook her head.

“What, Deputy?” she said in an embarrassed voice.

“Um,” he replied, probably wondering about the state of his underwear, “There’s a delivery for you, Your Honor.”

“What kind of delivery?” Cam asked. He hadn’t heard any vehicles.

“FedEx. He said he didn’t need a signature.”

Cam got out his trusty pocket tape recorder and turned it on. “Sure it was a FedEx truck?”

“Yes, sir, a white van. You know the kind, had the FedEx sign on the side. Guy brought the package to the front gate, did his scan thing, and handed it through.”

“You expecting FedEx?” Cam asked Annie. She shook her head.

“Describe it, Deputy,” Cam said, making sure the voiceactivated recorder could pick up the deputy’s words.

“Box of some kind, wrapped in brown paper, about the size of a shoe box, maybe a little bigger. Heavyish. Brown plastic tape. I didn’t look at the address label.” He pointed behind him. “It’s right out here, on the-”

“In here,” Cam said, motioning for the deputy to come all the way into the study and close the door. “Okay. We’re going outside right now, through these French doors. Where’s the inside guy?”

The deputy told Cam he’d switched stations with his partner, who was now covering the gate.

Once they were all outside, Cam had the deputy call into operations and give the code for a possible explosive device and then the code for Annie’s house. Then they moved to the other end of the swimming pool complex. Cam told the deputy to come up on his secure radio circuit and describe in detail to operations what they had, and then he gave the deputy his pocket recorder and had him describe everything he could remember about the FedEx truck, the driver, and the package in case it went boom in the night. The deputy said the driver had been a white guy, medium, medium, tinted glasses, FedEx ball cap, white shirt with FedEx logo, dark pants, no distinguishing scars or marks. The guy had been in a hurry, didn’t say much.

Annie asked Cam discreetly if maybe he was overreacting. “It might just be a FedEx package, Cam.”

“It’s well after six P.M.,” Cam said. “The FedEx guys, the UPS drivers-they’re all back at their stations, filing the day’s reports. Anybody could make a magnetic FedEx sign, slap it on a white van, and nobody’d pay it any mind. So we play it safe.”

The bomb squad got there in twenty minutes, during which time the four of them waited outside, swatting at lateseason mosquitoes. Finally, Cam told the deputy to resume his patrol of the grounds. He figured that if it was a bomb, it would trigger when opened and not by some timer, unless the deliveryman had pushed a button inside the package when he’d handed it over at the gate. Cam wasn’t going in there to find out. They continued to wait outside while the explosive guys did their thing, which ended when they launched their recovery robot into the hallway to grab it up and take it out to the transport truck, which hauled the object away.

While they were standing there, Jay-Kay Bawa and a man who looked like an FBI agent came around the corner of the house. Cam introduced her to Annie Bellamy, and then the two women stepped aside to talk. Cam asked the agent if he’d been told what was going on; the man replied that they’d been out front for awhile, and that he’d made a report back to Charlotte.

“We couldn’t get through the perimeter cops. It was Jay-Kay there who talked her way in and then came and got me.” He looked around. “They think it’s real?”

The bomb squad’s supervisor, perspiring in his body armor, came out to where they were waiting.

“Sure looks like one,” he said, “Although the sensor pack didn’t alarm on nitrates or anything. But it’s heavy enough, and there’s no FedEx bar codes on the package. If it doesn’t go boom when they take it out to the range, we might get some decent forensics off that wrapping tape.”

“The deputy said the driver scanned it,” Cam said.

“Then he was acting,” the supervisor replied. “No bar code there to scan.”

“Did you sweep the house?” Cam asked.

“Yep,” he said. “Nothing overt.”

“Because there was no one in there for twenty minutes, and for at least some of that time I had both deputies outside.”

“One of your guys had to come open the gates for us,” he said.

“Your Honor,” Cam said to Annie, “It’s safe for you to go back in the house. Can I ask that you and Deputy Arnold here do a walk-through, see if anything’s out of place or disturbed?”

“Just me, Lieutenant,” she said. “If that was a bomb, I’m very much disturbed: Ms. Bawa, come along. You can look at my computer while we do a walk-through.”

Cam told Annie sotto voce to come to his place once all the noise subsided. Then, since he couldn’t think of anything else to contribute, he went back to his office to write it up. He called the sheriff at home later that evening to report on what the bomb squad had discovered. It hadn’t been a bomb. But it hadn’t been a legitimate FedEx package, either. FedEx had no record of a delivery to Annie’s address, and Cam had been right about when the deliverymen returned to their stations for the day. The bomb squad had taken the package apart with their disassembly robot out at the bomb range, which was equipped for night work. They found a common cardboard box inside, and that contained a brick wrapped in bubble wrap. There were no wires, trigger mechanisms, or clocks. There was nothing unique about the brick or the box, and the brick had apparently been washed in diesel oil to get rid of any traceable elements. No prints on the package, tape, or the bubble wrap. But someone had inscribed the outer layer of bubble wrap with the roughly drawn letters BFB in permanent ink.

“And you can guess what that stands for, right, Lieutenant?” the bomb squad supervisor had said to Cam.

Cam absolutely could. Could have if he’d wanted to, that is. “Send me a report,” he’d said. “And we need some internal discretion on this, for reasons I can’t discuss right now.”

When he’d heard the story, the sheriff said for Cam to get a report off to the Bureau office in Charlotte first thing in the morning.