Unknown - Cat_shining_bright_Merfi_630007

“I don’t want to do that, Max. I’ll take the cats to the Damens’, to keep them safe, but I’m staying here. I want to know what he wants, what he was looking for.”

“That,” Max said unnecessarily, “is our job. That is why I want you out of here. With the evidence we picked up on your carpet, this guy could be Barbara’s and Langston’s killer. Do you still think this was Rick Alderson?”

Max was quiet, watching her.

“I can only say he looks exactly like Calvin Alderson. Even when he was a little boy, Rick had the same wide, slanting shoulders, slim, long face, thin nose …”

Max shook his head. “This man isn’t Rick.”

She just looked at him.

“Dallas put a rush on the fingerprints. There is no record at all on this man. None. No charges, no arrests, no convictions. Not even a driver’s license—which implies he’s using a fake.”

“But Rick is bound to have prints on record, he’s spent half his life in prison.”

“We have Rick Alderson’s prints, from AFIS. This man who broke in is not Rick Alderson—but whoever this is, we have enough to hold him on the two murders, we have a BOL out on him.

“If—when—we pick him, have him behind bars, you can come down to the station, watch the interview on closed circuit. Meantime, I don’t want him back here while you’re in the house. I don’t want you cornering him in here thinking you can handle him alone, that you can force information from him, by yourself. That’s not even good police procedure.”

She didn’t answer. She wanted to say, Have you forgotten that I’ve interrogated hundreds of felons? She wanted to say, I think I might know what this is about. I’d like a chance to soft-talk him, see if I can ease it out of him. But she couldn’t tell Max about the book, not all of it, the core of the story was too close to the truth about Joe Grey and the rest of the cats.

They argued while they shared coffee and a plate of lemon bars she’d had in the refrigerator. No matter what excuse she made, Max outbullied her. Wilma might be stubborn, but the tall, lean chief—her own niece’s husband—was far more hardheaded.

She’d been thrilled when Max and Charlie married. Max’s combination of a cop’s tough single-mindedness and his kind gentleness was just what Charlie needed. And now, though she and Max disagreed, neither was really angry. But, knowing that the burglar could be the killer that Charlie narrowly missed this morning, she told herself Max was right. She would go to the Damens’. Scowling at the tall, lean chief, she knew she didn’t have a choice.

“We’ll move one of the officers into your house for a few days,” Max said. “Same lights in the bedroom, same routine of lighted rooms behind the drawn curtains, showers and meals at the same time, and maybe our thief will try again. My hunch is, he wants you here, that he’s looking for something you’ve hidden and, thwarted once, he intends to make you give it to him. That means he’ll come well armed. What might he be after? You don’t keep stocks and bonds or cash in the house?”

She shook her head. “Nor valuable jewelry or coins,” she said, laughing. She couldn’t tell Max the whole story, but she could tell him part of it.

The regular copies of the Bewick book were valuable enough, in their own right, to interest a small-time thief maybe intending to auction it to collectors. She told him about the ancient, hand-printed volume with its wood engravings, that for some time she’d kept in the house; she put its value at maybe eight thousand. She left out that this one volume had been a singular and very special copy. If it still existed, which it didn’t, the information it revealed would have brought maybe a hundred times that much. She just said, “A breakin, for an old book,” and shook her head.

“We’ll leave your car in the drive,” Max said, “so it looks like you’re here. I’d get on over to the Damens’ as soon as Ryan or Clyde can pick you up. We’ll have patrols on the streets. While you’re gone, Ryan’s men can replace your window—after the lab has a closer look at the evidence McFarland collected around the desk and your front door.”

When Max had left she put fresh sheets on her bed for Officer McFarland. He would keep the shades drawn, lights would go on and off on her usual schedule of supper, reading for a while before the fire, then off to bed to read there for an hour or so—her own habits would become McFarland’s habits, except for the company of the cats. Whatever the breakin might involve, she thought as she ran a load of laundry, she was lucky to have Max and MPPD at her back.

Joe Grey woke in his newly repaired tower, new glass in the damaged window, brand-new pillows, the old pillows thrown in the trash to be sure all the broken glass was gone. He yawned and stretched, wondering what had awakened him. Had he heard the phone, had Charlie called? Had the car thieves returned, after all that went on the night before? But then he smelled coffee.

He slid out from under the pillows, stretched again, pushed in through his cat door onto the rafter, and dropped to Clyde’s desk. Glancing into the bedroom, he saw Clyde’s side of the bed empty and that Ryan still slept. He beat it downstairs to see why Clyde was up at this hour.

Clyde sat at the kitchen table devouring cold, leftover lasagna. Joe leaped up beside him. “That’s disgusting. Cold lasagna and coffee in the middle of the night. The combination makes me retch.”

“No kind of food makes you retch. You love lasagna. I couldn’t sleep, waiting for the phone to ring.”

“My guess is, the crooks are gone. Maybe, with the cops all over that house on the corner, they got spooked.” Joe looked at Clyde, frowning. “Did one of that scruffy gang kill Barbara Conley? Is that why her house is cordoned off, is that the connection?” Joe intended as soon as Max got to work, to hit the station. Police reports scattered on Max’s desk were what he needed now.

“Speaking of Barbara Conley,” Clyde said, “why the hell did you bring the kittens to a murder scene? You need to be more careful, Joe! They’re too young to drag all the way across town and straight into a murder. What did Dulcie say? And what do you think the cops thought? It’s bad enough if you accidentally let yourself be seen snooping around—but to bring the kittens! What the hell were you thinking!”

“I didn’t drag them across town. I didn’t know they were there in Max’s office. They beat me to the station. They were hiding under the console when I got there. I didn’t see them until Charlie called in, and Max was out of there, me right behind him—and there were the damned kittens! What was I supposed to do?”

“Take them home,” Clyde said reasonably.

“There was a murder! Charlie called in a murder! Don’t you think I was scared for her? How could I … I just took them with me, what else could I do? They promised to behave. I didn’t know Striker was going to cut his stupid little paw and make a scene.”

“The way I heard it,” Clyde said, “Striker didn’t make a scene. Kate and Charlie made a scene getting you cats out of there. The whole department was watching. Wondering what you and your kittens were doing there. You’re always hanging around the station. Don’t you think they wonder, when you show up at a crime scene, too? Don’t you think some of those guys, particularly Max and the detectives, wonder why the hell you’re so interested? And now you’re bringing kittens …”

“Everyone knows cats are weird. Some cats steal their neighbor’s laundry and drag it home. Some cats … There was a clip on TV, some cat in England rides the train every day. Gets on in the morning, spends the day at the zoo, takes the train home again at suppertime. And James Herriot wrote about a cat that attended all the town meetings. Don’t you think Max and Dallas, if they do wonder, would do a little research? That they would look up that stuff on the web and understand that many cats do strange things, that some cats have weird interests like stealing clothes and shoes. Look at Dulcie. Stealing silk teddies from the neighbors. She started that when she was a kitten. There’s nothing strange for the cops to wonder about—or for you to get worked up about.”