Shirley Murphy - Cat Playing Cupid

Glowering at Charlie's blackmail, Kit stalked through the house and out the cat door to the car, her ears flat, her tail low. When Charlie opened the door, she leaped in past Sage like a streak, over the back of the seat and down onto the shadowed floor among a tangle of bridle parts and sketch pads. There, crawling under a strong-smelling saddle blanket, she rode in sulking silence.

Kit didn't know how she felt. She cared for Sage, but he enraged her. She wanted to be with him, but she didn't. She felt a terrible disappointment in him for wanting to destroy the beautiful book. And why did he have to admire and try to be like Stone Eye? Wasn't there more to Sage than that hard and narrow view? Hunched in the dark under the horse blanket, Kit put her chin down on her paws and tried not to think about Sage, and could think of nothing else.

And when they got to the ranch, the moment Charlie parked and opened the door, Kit leaped out and raced straight to the barn and burrowed in a pile of straw. There she spent the rest of the morning, wishing Sage would come out and apologize, and ready to tear him apart if he tried.

CORONER JOHN BERN'Sbald head and glasses caught the light as he turned to look at Lindsey. "Who did you say this is?"

She stood at the edge of the freshly turned earth looking down at the grave, at the frail dark bones, at the thin legs in their heavy boots, at the skeletal arm and gold bracelet. "I said I don't think this is Olivia Pamillon."

She was surprised when Bern nodded as if agreeing with her. "This is a far younger woman. The incomplete fusion of the skull, the lack of degenerative changes…We'll do some studies in the lab, but this can't be Olivia. She was active in the village well into her seventies." He looked at her questioningly. "Do you know who this might be?"

Everyone was still, watching Lindsey. She glanced across the grotto to Dallas. "Nina Gibbs?" she said hesitantly, looking back at Bern. "Could this be Ray Gibbs's wife, who went missing?"

Above, on the roof, Joe watched her with interest. Despite the hesitancy of her response, he thought she was very sure.

"But that has to be Olivia," Ryan said. "The bracelet…I remember now, I read about it when I was doing research for the Stanhope studio renovation. She always wore it, didn't she? A gold bracelet with a cat on it, a one-of-a kind piece that was designed for her." She'd started to say, that seemed to have some special meaning, then realized what she would be saying, and became silent.

Dr. Bern shook his head. "I don't know about the bracelet, but this isn't Olivia. These are the bones of a woman half her age, maybe thirty to forty."

"And," Lindsey said, " Nina has…had the bracelet. She wore it long after Olivia died. She told me there was only one, that her aunt had left it to her." She looked at Dallas, and glanced toward the Blazer.

"We have pictures," Dallas said. "From Lindsey's locker, shots of Nina wearing it."

"Nina told me once," Lindsey said, "…it was at a party, when she'd been drinking…that the bracelet held the key to great wealth. I have no idea what she meant. She said it as a sort of drunken bragging, but of course she didn't explain."

John Bern looked away toward the distant rose garden, where its overgrown bushes crowded among the Pamillon family headstones. Saying nothing, he moved toward the old, neglected cemetery. Everyone followed him but Dallas, who remained with the grave-and Joe Grey on the roof above.

The tomcat watched across the far rubble as Bern eased in among the tangled rosebushes, carefully pulling aside thorny branches to examine the old headstones and marble slabs. Three ornate marble angels stood up among the sprawling bushes and the figure of a little winged child. Bern moved among the Pamillon dead slowly until at last he paused, not beside a headstone but at an unmarked patch of earth that, Joe could see, had settled into a shallow concavity. The tomcat, dropping down a honeysuckle vine, out of sight, fled through the morning shadows between the fallen walls and up onto a pile of stones where he could see better-could see that at one end of the unmarked, sunken grave the soil had been disturbed. As if a marker had been removed?

Both Bern and Davis photographed the area from many angles, capturing shadows and indentations. Then they both dropped to their knees as if praying for the souls of the surrounding dead, and carefully searched the hard earth around the unidentified concavity for fragments, for minute shreds of cloth or a lost button, for footprints or any foreign debris.

Watching from among the tumbled stones, Joe grew increasingly impatient because he couldn't examine the grave site himself to sniff out scents that no human would discover. He waited, fidgeting, for nearly an hour before Bern and Davis returned to the grotto and the body to finish labeling and boxing up the bones.

Only when everyone had left the family cemetery did Joe conduct his own investigation. Sniffing every inch of the unmarked grave and its surround, he found very little. Once he caught a whiff of an unfamiliar perfume or shaving lotion, but it was so faint and so entwined with fresh human scents now, and with the smell of the few roses that still bloomed, that even a cat couldn't sort it out; he returned at last to the roof above the grotto, having learned nothing.

Bern and Davis were packing up their equipment, preparing to leave. Joe watched Dallas cross the grotto, dropping into his pocket a small paper evidence bag containing the last item Dr. Bern had found: two minuscule lumps Bern had unearthed beneath the body, at the bottom of the grave.

If these were what Joe thought, they must have settled during the preceding years, possibly falling as the flesh decayed around them. He'd gotten a clear look as Bern bagged them, and he was sure they were bullets crusted with detritus and earth.

Joe found it interesting that as Ryan and Clyde helped carry the coroner's cases to his car, the newlyweds moved close together, as if, in the face of death, they needed to touch, to reassure each other of their own well-being and safety. And when Joe looked at Mike and Lindsey, they were behaving the same, Lindsey leaning into the tall, lanky Scots Irishman, his arm protectively around her. They glanced up when Detective Davis looked in their direction, then turned away as Davis headed for Detective Garza.

Joe watched Davis slip a small plastic bag from the pocket of her dark uniform. He could see a half sheet of paper inside. Was that the note Ryder had brought in earlier? But why bring it here? It was already logged in, and Lindsey had already seen it. The look on Davis's face was one of half annoyance, half amusement. As she handed Dallas the small evidence bag, Joe slipped silently along the edge of the roof until he was just above them.

Whatever this was, it wasn't the letter Ryder had brought, this wasn't hand printed, but typewritten on smooth white paper.

"Brennan found this at the back door this morning," Davis said. "Just after change of watch. No one saw who left it, and there are no latents." The look between the two detectives was one the tomcat knew well, that wry glance of frustration that heralded another anonymous tip, both welcome and highly frustrating.

But this wasn't Joe's tip. Nor, surely, anything Dulcie or Kit would have taken to the station. Edging farther over the lip of the roof, Joe read the letter over Dallas's shoulder, watched Dallas glance across the grotto at Lindsey, much as Davis had done.

Lindsey was watching them, the end of her scarf thrown back over her shoulder, her tan very appealing against the white tank top. At that moment, Joe would have given a brace of fat mice to know her thoughts.

But he would give a lot more to know them if the detectives shared the letter with her.