P Deutermann - The Cat Dancers

“They already have it, Cam said. He told Bobby Lee about Jay-Kay’s being there at the house, and the fact that her escorting agent had made a report.

“How’d our favorite judge cotton to somebody from the Bureau poking around in her computer?” Bobby Lee asked.

“The judge is a lot more frightened than she’s letting on,” Cam said. “This bomb shit, even if it was a fake, scared her even more. She had no problems letting the Bureau take a look.”

He told the Sheriff he’d send a preliminary report to Charlotte before he went home, and follow that up when he had the formal paper in from the bomb squad. Then he called Kenny Cox at home, but he wasn’t in. Out on yet another hot date, or ditching a white van somewhere down in south Triboro? Cam was tempted to beep him, but since there’d been no bomb, he figured it could wait until morning. The district had put a three-district call out for any white vans sporting a FedEx logo, but that was pretty much a hopeless endeavor. The driver had had at least a half hour to pull in behind some strip mall, take off the signs, and get on down the road, having nothing to worry about except an unlucky traffic stop.

Cam generated a summary report for the Bureau and sent it down to their secure communications facility. Then he checked his voice mail and listened to a message from Marlor’s neighbor down in Lexington. She’d looked in the checkbook, and, yes, there was one entire page of checks missing from the very end of the current series. She hadn’t noticed because she was still using checks in the front of the book, as she was writing only a few checks a month. The check numbers missing were 2497, 2498, and 2499, the last three in the book.

She had notified the bank, which informed her that number 2499, a check in the amount of five hundred dollars, had been cashed in Winston and that they would issue a stoppayment order for the other two checks-for a standard fee, of course. Cam decided to go out and get something to eat. He’d tackle all this in the morning. But first, he wanted to swing by Annie’s house to make sure she was all right and to see what, if anything, Jay-Kay might have found in Annie’s computer. He’d made it out to the parking lot and was fishing for keys when his beeper went off. It was a message from field operations. “Call home, E.T.-911.” Those last three digits blinking on his pager meant something very bad had happened.

Cam unlocked his car, slid into the driver’s seat, and used his Sheriff’s Office cell phone. The operator patched him through to the operations supervisor, who informed him that there had been two bombs at Judge Bellamy’s place after all. The second one had worked like a fucking charm.

Cam was struck speechless as a cold wave of acute nausea swept through his midsection.

“Lieutenant, you there?” the sergeant asked.

Cam found his voice. “Yeah, I’m here. The judge-is she…”

“Oh, yes, sir, she, her car, and her garage. Apparently, it was a big fucking bomb. I’m fixing to beep the sheriff right now. You going on-scene?”

Cam nodded, and then realized the sergeant couldn’t see that. “Affirmative,” he croaked, and hung up. BFB-just like the brick package had promised.

His hands were shaking and suddenly he couldn’t see all that well in the semidarkness of the police lot. He sure as hell couldn’t drive right now, so he called back into the operations center and asked for a cruiser to take him out there. He met the car out front on Washington Street and they headed out to Annie’s neighborhood with sound and lights going. The deputy driving took one look at Cam’s face and tended to his driving.

Annie was dead. Just when it seemed they might be able to get a life going again, now this. He couldn’t organize his thoughts or his emotions. He was just cold inside now, anxious to get to the scene, to do something. An image of the chair flashed through his mind.

It was a blue-light circus out there by the time they pulled up. Cam badged through two perimeters and three different sets of scene-entry logs. He could smell the disaster over the wall before he could see it. A heavy pall of smoke still hung in the air, polluting the beautiful ambience of the grounds and shrouding the smaller trees. It looked like every light in the house was on, but then he realized that every window on the garage side of the house had been blown in. The main crowd was back at the garage, or where the garage had been, because it wasn’t there anymore. Only one end wall was standing, and not much of that one. There were crime-scene people, the bomb squad again, the fire department, of course, two ambulances, one with lights going, one with lights dark, and several deputies milling around with flashlights. It looked like the medical examiner’s people were working at the darkened ambulance, while the EMT boys were swarming around the one whose lights were still spinning. One injured, one dead. Not too hard to figure that out.

The on-scene boss was the Sheriff’s Office watch commander for this shift, Lt. Frank Myers. Frank worked in the Major Crimes division. He was a big guy, also ex-Marine Corps, but he was of the gentle giant persuasion and well liked in the Sheriff’s Office. Cam headed toward him and found himself crunching through a thickening debris field as he crossed the dark lawn. His mind was in neutral, and the feeling of dread and nausea was returning. Part of his brain told him that he didn’t belong here just now, but he ignored that, pressed ahead, and got to where Frank was talking on a cell phone. The remains of Annie’s silver Mercedes smoldered in front of the garage foundations. Frank recognized Cam and cut off his conversation abruptly.

“Jesus, Cam, I’m sorry as hell about this,” Frank said, which surprised Cam. It was not something that the officer in charge on the scene of a bombing would say to the chief of the MCAT, and then Cam saw that several other cops were looking his way with expressions of real sympathy, as was Frank. It struck him then that his and Annie’s little secret may not have been so secret after all. He was overwhelmed for a moment, but then the situation intruded. Fuck it, he thought, taking a deep breath. Let’s get this over with.

“Where is she?” he asked as quietly as he could, and Frank immediately pulled him aside. The other people were getting back to what they had been doing, but Cam noticed that there was a growing circle of space around the two of them out there in the ruined yard.

“The judge’s remains are in that dark ambulance over there,” he said. Cam immediately turned in that direction but found that Frank had a hold of his arm and wouldn’t let go. Cam had to stop before he pulled himself off his own feet. He looked at Frank, who shook his head. “Don’t go there,” he said. “Keep what you got, Cam.”

Cam tried to pull away again, but Frank was a big man, so then he just quit, which is when Frank let go of his arm and put a big paw around his shoulder. Cam felt tears streaming down his face. He didn’t know what to do, and Frank turned him gently away from the crowd of cops and lights and walked him out into the darkness of the lawn, still stepping through broken bits of wood, glass, and even metal-and possibly bits of Annie, Cam realized.

Big fucking bomb.

After a minute or so, he got control of himself, sort of, took several deep breaths, and asked what had happened.

“Those FBI people left and then the judge decided she wanted to go out for a drive,” Frank said. “All of a sudden. Said the house was giving her the creeps, all this shit going on. The inside deputy informed the outside guy and central ops, said he’d go get the car. She said no, she’d get it, told him to meet her at the front gates.”