P Deutermann - The Cat Dancers

Cam laughed. “Which grapevine was that, counselor?”

“Courthouse mail room, to be exact,” he said. “And they’re never wrong, as we all know. I don’t mean to pry, of course, but if you are going to make a career move, I have some good news and some bad news.”

“Bad news first, Mr. Strong. That’s been my diet recently.”

“Okay, the bad news is that the IRS has sent me a letter saying that we’ll need to suspend liquidation of Judge Bellamy’s estate because the prospective beneficiary is, and I’m quoting here, ‘a person of interest’ in an ongoing federal investigation. They cite the law about a bad guy not being permitted to benefit from the fruits of his criminal acts.”

The feds reminding me of who has the real power, Cam thought. “Person of interest’?” he said.

“That’s what they call somebody when they want to hang him but don’t have enough evidence to take the poor bastard to a federal indictment.”

“Okay, I think I understand that. And the good news?”

“Remember that provision about past-due alimony? Where she said that when you retired from police work, she would augment your pension?”

“Vaguely,” Cam said. “Although truly, I’m a whole lot more worried about finding a certain park ranger right now than I am about money, pension or otherwise.”

“I understand, Lieutenant, but you just might care. Because the way this works, as soon as you put your papers in, you will begin to get the earnings from her estate. Not the principal, of course, but whatever earnings some nine million dollars’ worth of investments produces will come to you in quarterly payments. Even at five percent, that will not be chopped liver, as the expression goes.”

“Are you shitting me?” Cam said.

“Not a pound, Lieutenant,” the lawyer said. “In fact, it’s worded so that even if you’re fired from the Sheriff’s Office, it still works. The relevant clause speaks to your leaving law enforcement permanently.”

Cam laughed. “I guess she knew that my getting shitcanned was always a possibility,” he said.

“Well, retire, resign, or piss somebody off, but if you leave law enforcement, you let me know, okay?”

Cam said he would, then hung up. He had meant what he’d said: He’d have preferred to have found Mary Ellen wrapped in duct tape in that trailer to all the money in China. He’d never had big bucks before, and he recognized that suddenly having money might present its own problems, especially if he left under what looked like an increasingly dark cloud. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t, he thought.

The phone rang again. He picked up and identified himself.

“You have mail,” said a clone of the chipper voice from AOL.

He laughed and hung up, thinking it was a joke, but then, curious, he went to his computer. He did have mail, and it was from JKB@tigereye. com. Well now, he thought. He opened the E-mail.

A color picture began to unfold on his screen. He couldn’t fathom it until it was just about done, and then he saw that it was of the interior of a dimly lit cavern that looked fairly large. In the foreground was what appeared to be an enclosure area with three large cages that had straw on the floor and watering troughs toward the back. Each cage was about twenty feet long and ten feet wide, and each had a heavy wooden door at the back.

The cages were empty. The reinforced wire doors at the front of each cage were standing open. All three of the wooden doors at the back were shut and barred by heavy metal strap handles. Superimposed at the top of the picture was a string of numbers, which Cam recognized as GPS coordinates. At the bottom there was a line of text, which read. “The lady or the tiger? Come at noon. Come alone or don’t bother.”

At noon the next day, he stood by his truck and looked across a creek at a very old house trailer and some sheds that were nestled in a fold at the base of a heavily wooded hill. He would have driven into the yard except that he didn’t think the rickety wooden bridge in front of him would hold up under his truck. He’d spent an hour finding the place once he’d left the paved road. The final mile had been little more than two ruts through the woods that paralleled the creek. The ruts kept going past this trailer, but the GPS unit on his dash said he was there.

He had come in patrol uniform, even though he had no Sheriff’s Office authority in this county. He was alone but not entirely on his own. He’d gone down to the hospital to see Bobby Lee after getting the E-mail, and he’d told the sheriff what he proposed to do. The sheriff looked somewhat better and was lobbying hard to go home. He immediately vetoed the whole idea of Cam going out there alone.

“If these were plain old kidnappers, I’d agree with that,” Cam said. “But these are cops. There’s no way I can arrange backup out there without them knowing it.”

“Then your hostage is a goner,” the sheriff said. “You go alone, they can kill you, and then her, and then they’re done with it.”

“If the hostage were a cop, I’d agree,” Cam said. “But she’s not. She doesn’t even know that much. I got her into this.”

The sheriff had heaved himself up from the bed and stared hard at Cam. “Why in the world would you trust these people?” he asked. “Just because they’re cops or agents? Just because Sergeant Cox said they’d never do another cop? Want to see the hole in my chest?”

Cam had no ready answer for that. “They made a deal” was all he could muster. The sheriff responded with a rude noise.

“Look,” Cam said. “She said if I took a dive, they’d hand Mary Ellen Goode over. Without my cooperation, the whole investigation is stymied. If I get her back alive and then go forward to the grand jury, I’ll be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life, and so will she. If I don’t testify, then we’re in a permanent Mexican standoff. They stop their shit. She’s alive. That’s a better outcome.”

“You’re being a fool about this, not to mention entirely unprofessional. I know she’s pretty, but is she really that special to you?”

“I… like her,” Cam said. “And she saved my ass out in that river. I owe her at least the effort.”

“Well, I can’t permit it,” Bobby Lee said. “In fact, if you proceed with this, I’d have to fire you. So what’s it gonna be?”

“I guess you’re going to fire me,” Cam replied.

“Okay, you’re fired. Now, you want me to call the sheriff of Carrigan County, tell him what’s going on, and ask him to go out there-wherever it is-with some deputies if you don’t call in after, say, two hours?”

“I’d appreciate that,” Cam said. “As long as they give me those couple of hours. I’ll tell them when I’m going in.” He’d paused for a moment. “I really do appreciate the shot.”

“And shot is probably what you’re going to get, Lieutenant. Now get out of here. I’m a sick man.”

Cam sized up the trailer and the yard now. It took up about a third of an acre and wasn’t trashed, unlike many of the places he’d seen along the way. There was a chicken coop, an outhouse, two closed sheds, a snowmobile up on blocks, and two canoes upside down on racks under a lean-to. A vegetable garden was rapidly going to seed at the side of the trailer. It was a bright sunny morning, and the place was obviously empty. No dogs, cats, chickens, or any other signs of life, other than a single lightbulb burning next to the trailer’s rusty screen door. There was no mailbox or any other indication of whose place this was. The electric utility poles ended with this trailer.

He locked the truck, hitched up his utility belt, and walked across the bridge, which bounced even under his weight. He went up to the trailer and knocked forcefully on the metal