P Deutermann - The Cat Dancers

“Enjoy your time off, then,” Kenny said. He remained seated at the table. His face was an interesting mixture of friendliness and quiet satisfaction. He chuckled. “Although the guys’re making book on how long you’ll stay away.”

“I may surprise you there,” Cam said, rubbing his stubbly beard. “Might grow to like it.”

Kenny tipped his empty glass up at him. “Happy trails, then,” he said. “Just remember-if you’re going to make the break, make the break. Don’t look back. And if we’ve got a vigilante problem, trust me, we’ll take care of it.”

“I’m sure you will,” Cam said, and then walked out of the house. And that was that, he thought.

From his car, he could see Kenny’s face in a front window as he backed out and then drove down the long drive toward the blacktop. He had come out here expecting vehement denial and some good arguments as to why he was all wet about a vigilante problem. Instead, he’d gotten-what, exactly? Kenny had brought up a disturbing possibility-that the investigation might well indeed turn around and focus on the man with all that newfound money. And the sheriff had been awfully quick to accommodate his leave of absence. If they couldn’t find Marlor, they very well might come after someone besides Marlor for all three murders.

“If you’re going to do something, you better do it quick,” he said aloud.

His personal cell phone rang. It was Jay-Kay. “I have good news, “she said. “A Lexington-area cell phone was used four miles from that place in the mountains you are interested in. Do I need to amplify that?”

“You do not, and thank you very, very much.”

“Be careful, Just Cam. I may not be the only one who knows that.”

As he drove back toward Triboro, he received a message from dispatch to meet the sheriff at the Triboro Arboretum. He got there twenty minutes early. The front gates were closed, but the service road on the back side didn’t have any gates. The place was a combination arboretum and botanical garden out in the middle of a high-end residential district. Right now, it was more garden than arboretum, courtesy of an ice storm that had taken down about 60 percent of the trees a year ago. He parked toward the back in the staff parking lot, turned off his lights, and waited. There was a single amber streetlight illuminating the entire parking lot. Security wasn’t a big issue at an arboretum.

He saw a cruiser with just its parking lights on coming up fast through the service entrance, and a moment later Bobby Lee was getting into the passenger side of the Merc.

“Sorry for all the cloak-and-dagger,” he said as he closed the door.

“Me, too,” Cam said. He wondered if the sheriff knew how the entire operations department tracked him from street sighting to street sighting. What they called him on the net. He probably did.

The sheriff gave Cam’s face a once-over. “You need a shave, Lieutenant.”

“Might be growing a beard,” Cam said.

They sheriff rolled his eyes. “You’re taking this leave of absence far too seriously, I do believe. Look, I’ve been thinking about what you said.”

Cam didn’t have to ask what they were talking about.

“I do want you to take a look. See if you can develop something besides bull-pen rumors on these incidents, or even past incidents. Something substantial.”

“Like evidence.”

“Yeah, evidence would be nice.”

“I’d need computer access,” Cam said immediately.

“For?”

“To look into back cases. See if there have been any other suspects who’ve been evened out.”

“Okay, but how would we get you in without people like the system administrator knowing?”

Cam shrugged. “I don’t know, Sheriff,” he said. “But I know someone who probably does.”

The sheriff looked at him blankly for a moment, and then he remembered. “But she works for the feds,” he said.

“That was my second consideration,” Cam said. “The feds would have to know that I was doing this officially. Otherwise, we cross paths-”

“And they’d freak. Right. Can you trust that woman?”

“With my personal safety? No. But she would be a reliable channel back to the feds.”

“How does that help us?”

“Shows them we’re looking into our possible problem. Here’s what I suggest: You go directly to Jay-Kay. Tell her I’m working undercover. Then you hire her on some pretext. She invents a fictitious consultant or associate, who would be me, and I’ll do my thing as I need to, using her for the computer side. That accomplishes two things: It covers my ass, because I’m official, and covers yours, because you’re taking proactive steps to see if there’s anything going on.”

He didn’t add the third consideration: If he was working undercover, it would neutralize any federal efforts, and Kenny’s, too, for that matter, to pin something on him.

The sheriff nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, that computes. The problem is that I’d need to leave you on LOA to maintain the cover. Administratively, I mean. That means no paycheck.”

Cam smiled. “I’ll take it as back pay when we bag the bastard.”

The sheriff grunted.

“How will we communicate?” Cam asked.

“I’ll get us some pagers,” Bobby Lee said. “We talk only when we can meet. No phones, and no damned E-mail.”

“And nobody in the Office but you in the loop?”

The sheriff nodded. “Not my preference, but for something like this…”

“How about Steven Klein?”

“I’ll think about it. Steven likes to showboat sometimes, impress people with what he knows. Especially at dinner parties.”

Cam thought about the Sheriff’s Office own Internal Affairs people, but then he discarded the idea. “What changed your mind?” he asked.

The sheriff looked over at him. His face was drawn in the amber light and he looked older than Cam had remembered.

“The feds have stopped talking to us,” he said.

“Well, I’ve been talked to,” Cam said, and he told the sheriff about his night visitor. The sheriff swore when Cam was finished.

“Could you tag him from a picture?” the sheriff asked.

“Probably not,” Cam admitted. “That forty-five had most of my attention. I was just surprised all to hell when he did that. Definitely an older cop. Of course the uniform and the car could all have been a fake, too. Somebody buying an old cruiser from a Sheriff’s Office auction.”

“Looked and sounded real, did he?”

“Yes, sir, he did.”

“And he admitted doing the two shooters and the judge?”

“No-o, he didn’t,” Cam said. “He was just there to tell me to get out of town.”

“Son of a bitch. Then it’s true.”

“He wasn’t one of ours, Sheriff,” Cam said.

“That’s small consolation. I’ve got to report this to the feds.”

“If they’re not talking to you, why talk to them?” Cam asked. “Start your own internal investigation, within the county sheriff’s network. At some point, they’ll want to trade information, and you’ll have something to tell them.”

“And meanwhile?”

“Meanwhile, I have to make it look like I got the message,” Cam said.

Two days later, Cam was walking steadily up a ragged trail on the north side of Blackberry Mountain. The Sinclair Reservoir glinted across its two thousand acres to the northwest, casting the trees behind him into black silhouettes in the morning’s hazy glare. His two shepherds ranged ahead of him, crossing and recrossing the winding trail, noses down and tails wagging enthusiastically. There was a mist lingering across the tops of the ridges, and the heavy air made his footsteps seem unusually loud. A light breeze flowing down from the heights couldn’t make up its mind as to whether it wanted to be warm or cold. Since it was officially bow-hunting season, he wore a bright orange nylon vest over his lumber man’s jacket. He carried a six-foot-long yew walking stick, and he had the big Colt in one jacket pocket and a thin can of pepper spray in the other. He was toting a small backpack on his upper back. He didn’t plan to stay out overnight, but he never went into the woods without a pack continuing a minimal amount of survival gear, especially in the fall. The western Carolina mountain weather could change seasons on a hiker dramatically in just a few hours, and there were dark clouds gathering over the Blue Ridge to the west.