Shirley Murphy - Murphy_Shirley_Rousseau_Cat_Telling_Tales_BookFi

Before crawling in for a closer look, she circled the tree and poked her camera in through the leaves, taking shots of the trunk, the roots, the faintly disturbed mat of dry leaves. When at last she entered, looking unconvinced she’d find anything of value, Misto and Pan were on the roof with Dulcie and Kit, only Joe was absent.

From their high vantage, they couldn’t see in under the falling branches, the tree was like a little tent; but they could see Kathleen’s shadow, kneeling as if she was shooting close-ups of the dark stains on the pale roots.

The detective took her time beneath the tree, lifting blood samples and then digging carefully through the leaves looking for any smallest item of evidence, a human hair, a torn fingernail, a shell casing. She was thus occupied when Kit caught a glimpse of something shiny, just by Kathleen’s left boot—a leaf had been turned over as she shifted position, and something bright shone out. They all saw it, they all stifled a mew, and Kit drew back her paw where she’d reached as if to alert Kathleen.

But the next instant something, some unknown sense, made Kathleen turn and look, too.

Carefully she lifted the leaves away.

A cell phone lay buried among the mat of leaves, its bright surface plastered with damp acacia leaves. Carefully Kathleen photographed it in the position she’d found it and then, with her gloved hand, she slipped an evidence bag over it, and dropped it in her pocket. Whatever was there, phone numbers, notes, or perhaps photographs, she would examine back at the department, once she’d finished working the scene. The cats looked at each other, and grinned, and they felt high on the discovery. What would she find? Had the killer dropped it? Or had one of the victims buried it there, unseen, hoping to pass on what evidence?

Or had the phone nothing at all to do with the killer, maybe had lain there long before the victims died? The detective continued to search among the moldering leaves, and then she rose to examine the tree itself. She started when her exploring fingers found a tiny dimple within the damaged bark.

Photographing this, and then exploring it with a small dental tool, carefully she bent away a small sliver of bark, to reveal a spent shell.

She cut out a piece of the tree itself, leaving the slug embedded, and carefully she bagged it. She had the bullet. It would be too much coincidence to think this slug hadn’t killed one of the victims—though stranger anomalies had happened. The cats were considering this when two of the CSIs came out of the cellar, and fetched a stretcher from their van and a body bag; as the four watched from the roof, Joe Grey slipped out across the yard and quickly up to the roof to join them, pushing beneath the shadowed branches.

The CSI team, having photographed the first body and its surround, had covered the victim’s hands for more careful examination at the lab, then had spent several hours lifting trace evidence. Now they wanted Dallas and Kathleen in the cellar before they eased the corpse into the body bag, wanted to see if either of them knew the woman. With the bloating and discoloration that takes place even in a week or two, a victim is not always easy to identify. The cats watched the two detectives slip in through the hole in the wall.

The detectives were in there for some time; when they came out again, the expressions on their faces told the cats clearly that they didn’t recognize the victim. Now, in the cellar, the team would be bagging the body. Below the cats, Dallas was on the phone to Mabel Farthy. “I want a BOL on Emmylou Warren, you have the description. We need her to look at a body. If she’s picked up within the hour, let me know, before the CSI unit takes off.”

Otherwise, Joe thought, they’d have to haul Emmylou up to San Jose, to the crime lab, to ID the body. If that was Sammie Miller buried under her own house. As reclusive as Sammie seemed to be, and with most of her neighbors moved away, Emmylou might be the only one who did know her—besides the killer, and Sammie’s vanished brother. As Dallas ended the call, the five cats slipped away, disappearing like ghosts among the snowy rooftops.

27

Before Billy fed the Harmanns’ horses, he had called MPPD from their stable. By the time he’d pumped his bike back up the hill to the burn, Detective Garza was there, his tan Blazer parked in the yard, and old man Zandler was long gone. Garza wore jeans and a faded down jacket, his dark Latino eyes smiling when he looked at Billy. Billy had done some thinking since he called the station, and he was debating just how much he should keep to himself. If Gran did have money hidden in the cave—and what else could have made her so protective?—what would the cops do with it? Would it belong to Debbie and Esther? They were her daughters, but he was only the grandson. That money would be all he had to take care of himself, except for what he could earn, and at twelve, that still wasn’t much. He hadn’t helped take care of Gran all these years without learning the value of money, seeing how much she spent on whiskey that could have bought something to eat besides beans and potatoes and cheap sausage, could have bought new tires for his bike, might have paid rent on a house where the wind didn’t blow through the walls. If he told the law about the money, would he have to give it to his aunts? He hoped Zandler hadn’t found it, but maybe not, the boards and old doors didn’t look disturbed. Detective Garza was photographing the burned house all over again, where Zandler had dug into the rubble. When he finished taking pictures, he began to dig around in the rubble, himself, photographing wherever he could see that Zandler had disturbed anything. “You got moved in okay,” Garza said, talking as he worked. “You and the cats?”

“Yes,” Billy said, “just fine.”

“You have any idea what Zandler was looking for? He wouldn’t have been looking for the cause of the fire, he knows it was a grease fire.” Max Harper had told Billy that, that it looked like Gran had started making her breakfast, put potatoes on to fry and then went back to bed, forgetting the burner was on. She’d done that more than once, their skillet was blackened and crusty where she’d burned it. That was mostly at supper, though. She’d put something on to cook, then forget it, but Billy had been there to smother the flame before it got going.

That morning, he wasn’t there.

Garza poked around for a while longer, then rose, looking across at Billy. “The week or two before the fire, was Zandler up here?”

Billy shook his head. “I doubt it, Gran didn’t say anything, and it wasn’t rent time. That’s the only time he ever came. Maybe he came up to be sure Emmylou was gone, though, after he evicted her, make sure she hadn’t come back.”

“Hesmerra was working regularly?”

Billy nodded.

“Did she have a bank account?”

“She didn’t like banks, she kept the money somewhere around the place. She never even told me, she’d never get into her stash when I was home. She said once, if I knew where her money was, I’d take it so she couldn’t buy what she wanted. She meant, so she couldn’t buy whiskey.”

Billy knew what the next question would be: Could the money be in the cave? He was surprised when Dallas didn’t ask it. The detective said, “We’ll compare these shots with the photographs we have, maybe they’ll show us if he took anything.”

Billy waited until Garza left, made sure he’d turned onto the highway, then he pulled some boards away from the cave’s entrance, and moved the old door just enough to slip inside, into the smell of sour earth and rotting timbers. Maybe the money was here, maybe she’d saved back more than he’d thought, between what she’d earned and what Mr. Kraft gave her.