Shirley Murphy - Murphy_Shirley_Rousseau_Cat_Telling_Tales_BookFi

And left me asleep, he thought irritably. But in his own fascination at the snowy world, he raced away over the white roofs, swerving around chimney drifts and leaping weighted branches, running until his paws were so numb with cold that he had to stop and lick them.

In the center of the village he watched half a dozen early-rising locals cavorting in the snow, as excited as kids themselves. He watched several pairs of tourists, emerging from the motels, head for one or another of the village bakeries, stomping off snow in the doorways, pushing inside to warm up on coffee and strudel or cheese Danish. Dulcie would say, the village looked like a scene from Dickens. Where was she? Why wasn’t she out in this, racing through the frozen morning? Leaping away, he headed for her place, but on the pristine rooftops he saw not one paw print, not Dulcie’s, not Kit’s or Misto’s, not even a squirrel. Maybe Dulcie was already at the crime scene, maybe watching the early-arriving forensics team.

He thought of the techs driving two hours down from San Jose on the icy freeway, eating doughnuts and coffee in the cab of their warm van. Once they got to work, they’d bundle up, heavy sweaters under their lab coats, faces masked against the smell. Maybe they’d be warmed a little by heat from the high-powered spotlights shining beneath the beams and cobwebs as they brushed away earth from the first body. A pair of techs crouching low in the tight space, dropping bits of trace into evidence bags: fibers, hairs that might be other than the victim’s, maybe a button or a fragment of shoelace. He hoped not cat hairs. Maybe a broken fingernail, but not a broken claw. Maybe the forensics entomologist was there, as well, waiting for the second body to be exhumed, to diligently consult the colonies of insects that had created their own tiny worlds within and, in fact, might turn out to be the only living witnesses to the time of death.

Inside Sammie Miller’s house, Dallas finally had the lights on, after an earlier call to the power company. It was cold as hell in there. He’d left the furnace off, keeping the atmosphere in the house as he found it, and so as not to disturb the scene below where the old furnace, which had to be far from airtight, would suck and expel air and disturb all manner of evidence. The house and yard were cordoned off, and most of the overgrown lot, and they’d established a control center where Officer Brennan was handling the documenting. He’d told Davis to stay home, her knee was pretty bad. She’d said it was damn near as big as a basketball, and she was trying to wrap her mind around the upcoming surgery.

He had photographed the interior of the house, which, in this mess, had taken the better part of two hours, had done three rolls just of close-ups of the tangle of clothes and scattered household debris. What was a part of Sammie’s lifestyle, and what disarray the vandals had caused—raccoons or humans or both—was pretty much up for grabs. He had gathered trace evidence, including the intrusive raccoon fur, and begun lifting prints and scanning electronically for footprints, working one section at a time as he tried to figure out what might be out of place and how much of the mess Sammie had left herself. So far he had prints for what looked like four separate individuals, besides those of the damned raccoons. Talk about contaminating the scene. One set would be Sammie’s, one possibly Emmylou Warren’s. The stink of the raccoons, mixed with the smell of death and the smell of spoiled food from a refrigerator without power, made him sorry he’d eaten breakfast. No wonder Emmylou Warren, when she came in here, hadn’t smelled the body. Below him in the cellar, the forensics team should be pretty close to lifting the victim, sliding a stretcher under it and easing it out onto a gurney. The question was, what would they find underneath?

And the real question was, how the hell had the snitch found the damned grave? What was he doing snooping around underneath Sammie Miller’s house, in the middle of the night?

Or had this call not been from their regular snitch at all? Kathleen wasn’t as familiar with the snitch’s voice as he and Davis were. What if it was someone else?

Had that meth bunch broken in, thinking to hide more chemicals under there? Or to stash the meth itself, get it out of their possession where they thought no cop would look?

Or had someone broken in under there to get out of the cold, maybe meant to sleep safely hidden beneath the house? Maybe Emmylou Warren had returned but afraid to go back inside after they ran her off? She slips in underneath, maybe thinks the furnace is running and it will keep her warm. But then she smells the stink and makes a hasty retreat?

But she didn’t call the department, it was a man who called—unless she was pretty good at disguising her voice.

He thought about the snitch, this guy, and the gal, who were so unlike the usual informant with whom you maintained a quiet relationship; someone you knew and could talk to, a barkeep, a mechanic, city clerk, someone who had contact with a lot of people, and who liked the high of helping the law, liked to feel they were on the inside. And, he thought, smiling, liked seeing their marks go to jail.

They knew most of their snitches and nurtured the relationships, yet for some six years now they’d been getting anonymous calls from this man or the woman and they didn’t have a clue to either one. Yet not once had they been led astray, every tip was a good one, though too often perplexing in the things they turned up. Evidence no cop might have come up with, items lifted that no one could have gotten their hands on without a pretty elaborate break-in. Information that didn’t involve locked houses or cars but seemed to have been overheard under the most unlikely of circumstances. It was almost as if they had a ghost on the payroll, someone skilled beyond any normal ability to get their hands on all manner of evidence, someone almost uncanny at eavesdropping, and at slipping in and out of locked houses and offices unseen. An invisible snitch who left no smallest mark of jimmied lock or fingerprints, no trace of any kind.

Sometimes a few cat hairs at a scene, as if maybe the snitch kept cats. But what were you going to do with that? Half the people in the world owned cats. What, run DNA on the cat hairs and then run DNA on every cat in the village until you found the right owner?

As Dallas mulled over the puzzle of the snitches, he had no idea his two informants crouched just above his head on the neighbors’ rooftop. When Joe first arrived he’d found Dulcie already hunkered down there against the brick chimney where the snow hadn’t gathered. Freezing their restless paws, they’d listened to the faint voices of the two crime-scene investigators working in the cellar, and they could see down across the narrow scrap of yard through the hole Ryan had cut in the wall, could see the men’s shadowed movements. They had watched Kathleen find and bag the open padlock, and had prayed that if the lab found fingerprints, they wouldn’t find cat prints badly smearing them. Dulcie said, “If the lab picks up a few good fingerprints, why would they bother with the smears? With even one good print, plus whatever information they get from the body itself, maybe they won’t be so nosy.”

“And maybe they will,” he said. “Nosy is what makes good police work.” He wished the sun would come out, he’d had enough of the cold. Snow was fine as a novelty, but this freezing morning, snow was best seen from a snug house as you lay curled before a crackling fire.

They had watched Dallas enter the house, glimpsed him through the windows as he worked the scene lifting prints, taking blood samples, taking roll after roll of photographs of the detritus from every angle, a hard job, sorting out anything that might be linked to the murder, among that chaos. Seemed like Dallas had been in there forever before the front door opened, he stepped out, and secured it with the department’s own lock. He stood on the little porch looking around at the snowy neighborhood as if he’d expected, when he came out, the snow would have started to melt.