Shirley Murphy: Cat Striking Back

He expected Juana to be there already, but when he came down a pine tree and onto the roof of the house next door, there was no cop car, nor was Juana’s Honda in sight. He smelled water below him, and felt its cool breath though it wasn’t raining yet. When he looked down at the side yard, he froze.

The lower half of the driveway was glistening wet, while the upper half was dry-as if rain had already come pelting down, but only in that one place. From the center of the drive, back to the pool, the concrete was soaking wet, the bushes still dripping. The coping around the pool glistened with water, as did the portion of the pool’s tiled walls that he could see from that angle. Backing swiftly down the pine tree, he raced to the pool to look over.

The muddy concrete bottom was all changed. The drag marks and footprints were gone. A skin of fresh wa ter lay over the mud, still settling into new indentations where the mud had been reconfigured into long, fan-shaped trenches, the sort that would be made by the force of a hose sluicing across it. Swinging around, Joe looked for a hose.

There, just beyond the edge of the pool, beside the house. A hose wound on a caddy, its nozzle still dripping, the neat rubber coil shining wet, with grass stems sticking to it where it had been dragged across the lawn. He studied the rest of the yard.

Nothing else looked different except, near the street, where the driveway was dry, the tall grass at the edge was matted down in a narrow path where someone had not wanted to leave footprints on the concrete.

Trotting up for a look, Joe found blades of grass still springing back into place; and now he could smell the vague scent of a man mixed with the smells of mud, bruised grass, and another sharp, medicinal smell that, try as he might, he couldn’t place. He was still sniffing, trying to sort out that one elusive smell, when he heard a car coming. Jerking to alert, he headed fast up the pine and onto the neighbors’ roof again, where he crouched low on the rough, curling shingles.

Davis ’s blue Honda parked across the street but the detective didn’t get out, she sat behind the wheel studying the parked cars, scanning the neighborhood and the neatly kept houses and observing the empty house, watching its curtainless windows. How many times had Joe watched Juana Davis work a scene, always careful, always patient, never missing a detail. How many times had he and Dulcie and Kit worried that she’d find cat hairs at the scene?

But there were never cat hairs in the detective’s carefully detailed reports. Thanks to the great cat god, Joe thought. Or maybe thanks to some benign quirk in Juana Davis’s own subconscious that, as far as Joe was concerned, didn’t bear close examination.

When at last the detective swung out of the car, she carried a small satchel, a black leather bag that Joe knew contained basic crime scene equipment. And, the tomcat thought, smiling, wasn’t that a vote of confidence for the department’s unknown snitch.

JUANA CROSSED THE empty street, still studying the Parker house and its blank windows. She saw no movement there. Scanning the overgrown bushes, the tall grass, and the piles of leaves that had blown onto the porch and heaped against the front door, she thought what a pity it was to let this place go to ruin. The neighboring houses were well kept, the front gardens neat, some of them really beautiful. Divorce or not, the Parkers were foolish to let their investment go to hell. This house was worth enough to greatly ease the life of both members of the dissolving marriage, particularly to ease the life of Emily Parker. Juana knew, from gossip and from information picked up by the officer who patroled this neighborhood, that the Parkers had had several violent arguments, and that Emily wasn’t in an enviable position. As much as Juana disliked the idea of prenup agreements, which surely indicated a lack of trust and true love, this was one time that the woman would have benefited. Maybe, she thought, prenups indicated not only a lack of trust, but of judgment. Or a lack of faith in one’s judgment. Ever since the word “judgmental” had become politically incorrect, clear and logical thinking seemed to have gone out the window with it.

The Parker house had been empty for nearly a year. James had left Emily without warning after placing the house in someone else’s name and, without Emily’s knowledge, filing for bankruptcy. What he meant to do with the valuable property depended largely, Juana thought, on the outcome of the divorce proceedings, and she hoped Emily Parker had a good lawyer.

Walking up along the side of the drive, watching for footprints, she carried just the small evidence bag that held some basic equipment and a couple of cameras. Anything else she’d need was in the trunk of her car. Halfway down the drive, she stopped, puzzled.

Though the cement drive beneath her feet was quite dry, that in front of her glistened with water, her first thought was that it had rained just in this one spot, as it did in the tropics-but Molena Point wasn’t the tropics. She studied the tracks near her where the dry grass had been matted down and was wet. Looked at the grassy hose farther on, wound neatly on its reel, and it, too, was wet.

She photographed the area, then made her way carefully along the edge of the drive, watching the concrete for footprints and scanning the ground under the bushes. She circled the house looking for any sign of a break-in, but halfway back to the pool, she paused.

She took another photograph, then pulled on a latex glove and picked up the pair of silver-rimmed dark glasses lying in the tall grass. Dropping them into a paper evidence bag, she put that in her pocket. Then, pulling cotton booties over her regulation shoes, she approached the pool along the far side, where the apron was still dry save for a first few scattered raindrops.

The bottom of the pool had been hosed, and not long ago. Water was still settling in the long ripples of mud, like those a concentrated stream of water would leave in its wake. There were no drag marks such as the snitch had described, no footprints leading across to the steps. Standing at the edge of the coping, she suddenly felt watched, felt as if the perp was still nearby or that someone was, concealed in the yard or perhaps in the empty house. The feeling unnerved her. She didn’t often experience this sharp and sudden unease-when she did, she had reason. What had she seen and not consciously registered to prompt that instinct?

Looking around her, she assessed the area even more carefully. If she could believe what the snitch had told her, then someone had been here just moments earlier, between the time he observed the scene and when she arrived, someone who had watched the snitch leave and then had immediately washed away the evidence.

She wouldn’t want to think the snitch was lying. She knew his voice, and over the years she’d learned to trust him, as had the rest of the department. How many times had he helped them, and never once given them cause to doubt his word. Whoever the guy was, he and the woman who sometimes called, their tips, and sometimes the delivery of evidence, had always resulted in information that led to arrest, to indictment, and, most often, to a con viction. The department’s snitches were would-be cops, she thought, smiling. And more power to them, they were good at what they did.

She considered the house, wishing she had a search warrant in hand, then moved on and, in a workmanlike manner, searched around the pool for blood, kneeling to take samples then photographing the area despite the lack of any remaining shoe prints or drag marks. On the pool’s bottom a bird’s feather floated, along with bits of dry grass, as the fresh water eased into the sour mud. She shot a long video of the settling water, then went through a roll of still shots of the pool bottom, the walls, and the surround. Then she moved around the pool to where the paving was dry except for the gathering raindrops. Looking along the pool’s stained sides she considered individual chips and flecks of dirt in the old, cracked tile. Kneeling, she lifted some samples of a stain that had been missed by the hose, placing them on glass slides. Four looked and smelled like blood. She paused in her work long enough to call in, to ask the dispatcher if she’d come up with any missing-person’s reports from the surrounding area. But as she worked, she couldn’t shake the sense of being watched.