P Deutermann - The Cat Dancers

He sat back down slowly. “Apologize?”

She ordered a glass of wine from the waiter, who dropped two menus on the table.

“I haven’t been entirely honest with you about this cat-dancing business. I need to explain some things.”

The waiter brought her wine and she put a serious dent in it. “Okay,” she said. “Here goes. This concerns my late fiance, Joel Hatch.” She paused. “How do I describe Joel?”

“Lieutenant Grayson said he was a bit of a cowboy,” Cam offered. “A TV cop wanna-be, to be precise. Someone who liked the role of cop better than that of park ranger.”

She stared down at the table for a moment, not speaking, and Cam wondered if he’d been too blunt. “Did they tell you what happened that day?” he asked.

She nodded. “Not at first,” she said, “But then later, I talked to some of the cops involved. In fact, he and I’d had some words about the way he was acting, some of the stuff he was doing. And then, afterward…”

“Afterward, you felt guilty because now he was dead.”

“A little bit, yes, I did.”

“I can relate to that,” he said, and told her about the bombing incident and his own complicated relationship with Annie Bellamy. The waiter came back and they ordered.

“I guess I’ve become a fatalist,” she said once the waiter had departed. “I think that when you fail to put a proper value on the people you love, the gods take them away from you.”

“I think you take what life has to offer and make the best of it,” he responded. “We’re not in control. You were going to tell me something about cat dancers?”

She smiled. “Nothing wrong with your focus, is there? Okay, cat dancers. I first heard the term from Joel. He’d heard rumors that White Eye Mitchell was doing some weird stuff up in the backcountry and that it involved feral mountain lions.”

“Which do not exist,” Cam said.

“Right.”

“On the other hand, you never went looking, did you?” he asked.

“No, we have plenty enough to do. The station is undermanned, and the park visitors keep us quite busy. But Joel took off a couple of times in the year before he died, and I think he was looking. Then he stopped talking about it.”

“But he did use the term cat dancing?”

“Once. I remember it. He said it was the coolest thing he’d ever heard of. For Joel, cool was a word that usually involved extreme danger. But he didn’t say exactly what it was, other than it meant getting very close. Then it was as if he realized he’d been indiscreet, and he wouldn’t talk about it anymore.”

The waiter arrived with their food, and Cam used the distraction to think about how much he should tell her. He liked her and he trusted her, and she’d already figured out that there was an Internal Affairs angle to what he was doing up here.

“Okay,” he said. “Let me ask you one more thing: If you thought Joel was mixed up in something ‘weird’ involving wild panthers, why didn’t you report it?”

“You’re a career cop,” she said. “You know the answer to that.”

He thought for a moment. “Let’s see. Everyone knew the two of you were an item, and you were afraid that whatever it was he was doing, it might splatter your own career?”

“Not exactly admirable, is it, but that’s the gist of it, yes. You had to know Joel. I rationalized it by telling myself that there simply weren’t any more big cats up there in the mountains. Not wild ones, anyway. And even if there were, no one would be fool enough to track one into a face-to-face confrontation.”

He nodded. “I would probably have done the same thing,” he said. He decided to trust her, made her promise to keep it to herself, and then told her the whole story of why he had come up to the area.

“My God,” she said softly when he was finished. “An initiation? And one of them was killed?”

Cam looked around the dining room. It wasn’t full, but he still didn’t want to be overheard. “That’s what White Eye told me. And now that I’ve seen a supposedly tame one in action, I’m a believer.”

She shivered. “They want me to testify tomorrow-at the inquest-about how that could happen. With his own cat, I mean.”

“I may need you to testify for me,” he said. He stopped when he saw her expression. “ Testify ’s probably the wrong word. What I need is corroboration that I’m not making this up. And, of course, the much bigger issue is that we may have a statewide death squad working.”

She sat back in her chair, dinner forgotten, thinking about what he was asking.

“As you can imagine, this thing’s being run under a pretty damned tight wrap,” he went on. “You can’t talk about this. Hell, I can’t talk about this.” Even as he said it, he realized that he just had.

“Because you don’t know who’s who in the zoo,” she said.

“Precisely. I’m meeting tomorrow night with our sheriff and the DA.”

“What on earth would I tell my boss?” she asked.

“That you need a few days’ leave?”

“I’ll think about it,” she said. “But damn, Lieutenant!”

“You could call me Cam,” he said.

“Sure about that?” she asked sadly.

The dogs were in semidisgrace on the trip back. He had chided them about not following the Bronco and rescuing his sorry ass from the mountain lion. The looks on their faces said that no self-respecting, intelligent German shepherds would even mess with goddamned mountain lions, and besides, full food bowls on the porch had distracted them from doing their duty, no matter how wildly construed. He could see their point, but he still gave them a cold shoulder all the way back to Triboro. That seemed to bother them a lot, at least for the five minutes before they fell asleep in the backseat.

It was just after sundown when Cam got back to his house in Summerland. He turned the dogs loose in the backyard, gathered up his mail, disarmed the alarm system, and went inside. A quick walk-through of the house turned up nothing visibly amiss. He called the sheriff at home and let it ring once, then hung up. He took a shower, got something to eat, and, on a hunch, changed into uniform. Bobby Lee arrived twenty minutes later in his personal cruiser. Five minutes after that, DA Steven Klein showed up. The sheriff was in uniform and Cam was glad he’d changed. He had not shaved his beard, however, and this provoked a fish-eye stare from Bobby Lee even as he handed Cam his official accoutrements. They sat down in Cam’s kitchen, and Cam poured out coffee for all hands.

Cam then debriefed them on everything he’d learned up in Carrigan County, along with the details of the final night under Catlett Bald. He mentioned that he had a corroborating witness but said that she hadn’t decided whether she wanted to get involved. The sheriff described what Jaspreet Kaur Bawa had turned up in her database analysis of judges, cases, and walk-away perps who’d subsequently died. Her search went back over a decade, he informed them.

“Seventeen DOA’s,” he announced somberly, and that brought a muttered oath from Klein. “Two of those may have been prison gang-related, but even discounting those, that still leaves fifteen unsolved cases, including the two recent Internet stars.”

“Statewide?” Steven asked.

The sheriff nodded. “Fifteen cases where clearly guilty bastards went free and then were extinguished, leaving us with stone-cold whodunits.”

“We need to check on something else,” Cam said. “White Eye told me one of the cat dancers got himself eaten. He was kind of vague as to when this happened, and it might be bullshit, but we should look to see if any cops flat-out disappeared, in the past twelve years, say.”