P Deutermann - The Cat Dancers

“Copy that,” he said. He went into the kitchen to crank up the coffeepot.

“So tell me, Lieutenant, what’s really brought you out here to our neck of the woods? You show up, telling tall tales about cat dancers, somebody steals my phone, makes an appointment he doesn’t keep, and now we have the first real sign of a mountain lion in thirty years.”

He pulled over a kitchen chair and sat down to wait for the coffee to percolate. She stayed over by the woodstove, nonchalantly trying to warm her buns and her hands at the same time. They both heard the ranger out front say “Yes!” as he found another track.

Cam stared down at the table for a long moment while he tried to figure out how much to tell her. She didn’t bug him. “Did you guys hear about those executions that showed up on the Web?” he asked her.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “That was all over the LE networks. I saw one of the videos.”

“That happened in our neck of the woods, and I’m working the whodunit.”

“All by yourself?”

He smiled. Smart girl, he thought. “For the moment,” he said. “We might have a wee bit of federal help.”

“Ah,” she said. “So there’s one game for your federal friends and another one for the sheriff’s edification?”

“Something like that,” he said. He wasn’t willing to broach the possibility that there were vigilantes involved.

“And didn’t you have a judge get herself blown up down there in Triboro recently?” she asked. “Was that related?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Truth is, we really don’t know, but we’re keeping our options open. She was the judge who let the two fryees loose on a technicality.”

She gave him a shrewd look from the other side of the room. “Liberal judge lets them go, they get rounded up by a person or persons unknown and end up in an electric chair?” she said.

“They killed the wife and daughter of a Duke Energy scientist in a holdup. They walked because of a police screwup. Then said scientist goes off the grid, followed by the two mopes doing a star turn in the chair. He’d been a Ranger back in the army. So…”

“And you guys think he did the judge, too?”

He shrugged uncomfortably. She was getting too close to figuring out what he was really investigating. “Like I said, it’s early days, and the feds have their own theories-as usual.”

“Lest we forget, Park Service is federal, too,” she said. “And that’s not an answer. We’re not necessarily the enemy, Lieutenant.”

He was saved by the percolator, which started making gasping noises. He got up and poured coffee into three cups. He handed one to her and then took one out to the ranger, who had uncovered a second track and was beginning to dust a third. She joined him in the doorway, stirring some sugar into her coffee. “How big, Larry?”

“Two meters plus,” the ranger said, sitting back on his haunches and blowing on the hot coffee between sips. “Can’t estimate weight on wooden floorboards like this, but at that stride length, it has to be seventy, eighty kilos. Big effing cat. This third impression is not very good, so I’m going to work the dirt just off the porch.”

“And what the hell was that thing doing here?” Cam asked.

“You let those dogs run around?” Mary Ellen asked.

Cam nodded.

“Then that’s probably what it was hunting,” she said. “A panther this big would definitely not be afraid of a couple of dogs. Slap, slap, chow time.”

Larry had moved off the porch and was excavating the snow at the end of the building. All scrunched up down in the snow, he looked like a grounded stork. Cam went back inside. “So maybe there is something to your cat dancer story,” she said. “But what’s the tie to what you’re investigating?”

He smiled at her. “I’m not sure there is one. Just something some guy mentioned in the course of our asking questions, so here I am. Basic follow-up. It’s what we do when we’re clueless. There probably is no tie.”

She gave him a skeptical look. “My doctorate’s in animal science,” she said. “My specialty happens to be bears, not big cats. These prints will make for some interesting discussions down at the tavern. But then we’re going to have to prove you didn’t fake them, of course. You know, Bigfoot Two. Sasquatch comes to the Smokies.”

“Knock yourself out,” he said. “It’s not like I’m looking for a feature story in the Enquirer. You’ve basically answered my questions.”

She nodded at him with a faintly triumphant smile. Shit, he thought. She just mouse-trapped me. Dr. Smiley. He grinned at her. “Okay. Nicely done.”

“Thank you. And the real story is?”

It was his turn to surprise her. “I can’t tell you anything else about this investigation,” he said. “It’s that sensitive, okay?”

She blinked. He stared at her until she got it. “Oh,” she said. “Internal problem.”

“I never said that, and that’s where we need to leave it,” he replied. “No offense intended.”

“None taken. How can we help?”

“Cat dancers,” he said. “Anything you can tease out of the local woodwork about that term might help. I’ll take rumors, hearsay, gossip, all the way to names and addresses. Anything.”

“You really are nowhere on this, aren’t you,” she said. “Okay, I’ll get the guys to ask around.” She thought for a moment. “At least now we seem to have the requisite cat.”

Cam waited around for another hour while the ranger tried to surface more prints, and then, after putting both dogs in the truck, he went back to the headquarters of the Carrigan County Sheriff’s Office and met with a Lieutenant Grayson, who headed up their Criminal Investigations department. He directly asked for their help in running down any information they could develop on the cat dancers story and any possible connections to White Eye Mitchell. He described the electric chair executions case, the bombing incident, and the fact that their prime suspect had committed suicide, but he did not allude to suspicions that police might be involved. Grayson, a tall, rangy individual in his fifties, took it all aboard and said they’d look into it, then asked whether Cam would mind if they checked back with Manceford County. Cam, “No problem,” and gave the lieutenant the appropriate phone numbers to get in touch with Bobby Lee.

“We heard some talk about a mountain lion this morning,” Grayson said.

Cam nodded. He’d forgotten how fast news could travel in a small county. He described the tracks and what the park ranger thought about them. He also mentioned Mary Ellen’s comment about the possibility that Cam had faked the tracks.

“Mary Ellen’s good people,” Grayson said. “They get to listen to a lot of BS at that station. Tourists see the damnedest things: panthers, wolves, king cobras, grizzlies, and I don’t know what all.”

“She gave me the official Park Service line in the office: Ain’t no panthers. Then later, she sort of hinted that that might not be true. Struck me as odd. She seems to be… nice.

“She tell you what happened to her fiance, Joel Hatch?”

“Knocking on the wrong door at the wrong time?”

Grayson tapped a pen on the desk for a moment. “Brother Joel was a bit of a cowboy, especially for the Park Service. Really got into the sworn officer bit. TV cop wanna-be, in our opinion.”

“Is that what got him shot?”

“What got him shot was that he called in the meth lab, was told to wait for backup from us, and then talked his partner into doing a John Wayne. No surprise to any of us, but we all felt bad for Mary Ellen. And his partner.” He gave Cam a significant look. “Mary Ellen’s a special lady in this community, if you follow me?” he said.