Cat Striking Back (22 page)

S
ITTING AT THE
big, round table in the ranch kitchen, still in her old plaid robe and with her first cup of coffee, Charlie tried again to reach her absent clients. She didn't understand why no one was answering their messages. She didn't care if she woke them, but even that seemed impossible. Did they all turn their phones off at night?

Most likely they did, she thought crossly, at least when they were on vacation. As she listened to yet another recording, looking out across the window seat to the ranch yard, she watched the sky lighten into a clear dawn. She could hear Redwing in the barn pawing at her door, wanting her hay and wanting to be turned out. It wasn't quite feeding time, but the mare had seen Max leave earlier and had decided she'd been forgotten. Charlie hung up the phone after getting another “not available” no point in leaving another message. She had risen to refill her coffee cup when her phone rang. Turning hastily back to the
table, spilling her coffee, she saw that the number on the screen was Ryan's. She picked up, grabbed a towel, stood with the phone to her ear, mopping up coffee.

“I got Carl Chapman,” Ryan said. “He'd just turned his phone on. When I filled him in, he didn't sound eager to tell Theresa about the paintings, said she was still asleep. He gave me the number for their insurance agent, asked if you'd call him. He's hoping you can take the adjuster in the house for a look, give him a tentative list of what's missing. He asked me to check on several other items in the house, he gave me a list. You have a pencil?”

Dutifully Charlie copied down the list, thinking that this whole thing was more of a pain than she wanted, that she'd be glad when she'd sold the business. At the moment she had only one serious prospect: a woman who, at one time she'd not have trusted to take over the service she'd so lovingly built, a woman she'd thought was dishonest until she'd learned that she was working undercover on the side of the law.

“I'll keep trying the Beckers,” Ryan said. “Any luck with the others?”

“Not yet. I tried until well after midnight. Knowing Frances Becker, I expect when you get her, with half her antiques missing, she'll head right home.”

She'd hardly hung up when the phone rang again. She picked up to Earl Longley's dry voice. “Eleen's out shopping,” he said. He sounded even more irritable than usual. He spent considerable time cross-examining her about just how many books were missing, and which ones. He didn't seem nearly as upset over Eleen's paperweight collection, which, Charlie thought privately, was understandable.
The loss of a closet full of pornographic paperweights really didn't stir her.

She must be on a roll, because the next call was from Ben Waterman. They were in Greece, had flown in that morning. It was cocktail hour, Ben said Rita was just getting out of the pool. When Charlie told him about the break-in, and described the events of the previous night, he startled her with his anger.

“What the hell were you doing? Don't you lock up your keys? Who had a set, how many of your people? I hate to tell Rita, she's going to be mad as hell.”

“Ben, I don't blame you. But let's concentrate on finding this guy, on getting the jewelry back if we can. Does Rita have some kind of inventory?”

“She has a full inventory,” he said coldly. “She has a photograph of each piece, with written descriptions and appraisals. You know the gems were all paste? But the settings were antique, some very old, and they didn't come cheap.”

“Are the photographs and inventory in the house where we can find them? If the department can get copies to identify—”

“Why would they be in the house? So they could be stolen, too? Or burned up? It's all in the safe-deposit box.”

“Does anyone else have access?”

“Of course not.”

“And your insurance agents. Do they—”

“I'll call our agents and give them your number. I'm not sure what Rita gave them.” He hung up. Charlie sat holding the phone, swallowing back her anger. Did he
have to be so cross? Now, if the department arrested a suspect and the jewelry was on him, they'd have to wait nearly two weeks for a positive identification. She was fixing herself some breakfast when Ryan called back to say she'd gotten Ed Becker.

“Guess I woke him. He was pretty cranky. He said, ‘How many people did Mrs. Harper tell we'd be out of town?' I told him that wasn't very realistic, that everyone in the neighborhood knew they were gone. He accused your crew of loose tongues and carelessness with the keys, of possibly copying the keys. Complained because you hadn't come by in the evenings to turn on the lights, which, I pointed out, you hadn't arranged to do. I suggested several things they could have done, like automatic light controls. He said Frances wouldn't do that, that she was afraid one would short out and cause a fire.”

“Well, that's all four couples notified,” Charlie said noncommittally, “and only half of them critical. I'll be so glad when I sell the business. Thanks for helping, and thanks for the moral support.”

“Gotta go,” Ryan said. “I need to check on two jobs in the village and be up at the remodel when the gravel and cement arrive, around ten. Clyde says—”

Her phone went dead. Charlie hung up and waited, supposing Ryan was out of range. She waited quite a while, but Ryan didn't call back. When she dialed her she got an “out of service” message, so maybe she'd forgotten to charge her phone. That wouldn't be the first time—though it was about the only inattention to detail that Charlie had ever noticed in her efficient friend.

Putting Max's dishes in the dishwasher, she warmed
up a slice of cold bacon and her scrambled eggs, and made some toast, preoccupied with the robberies. The whole scenario was strange, she couldn't shake the thought that she was missing something, was overlooking some crucial element that should be perfectly obvious.

Setting her breakfast on the table, wanting to hurry and go feed the horses, she realized that part of her unease was the phone calls themselves. Neither she nor Ryan had talked with any of the four wives, they had spoken only with their husbands.

In all four instances, there were good explanations: Rita in the pool; Theresa asleep, and probably Frances Becker, too; and Eleen shopping, maybe for more paperweights. She was reaching in the drawer for a fork when she stopped. Stood looking down into the drawer, at the new rubberized fabric with which she'd recently lined it, but seeing Theresa Chapman's kitchen drawers.

Leaving her breakfast to get cold, she picked up the phone to call Max.

The dispatcher said he was out, so she talked with Detective Garza. “Dallas, Theresa Chapman had keys for maybe half a dozen neighbors, all those with pets. She sometimes took care of the animals if someone was delayed at work; and she would sometimes let a workman in. She kept them in the kitchen silverware drawer, underneath the wooden divider and the liner.”

“We'll have a look,” Dallas said. “How many others, besides the neighbors themselves, knew that?”

“I don't know. She told me she was very careful, didn't let anyone see where she kept them. She let the workmen think she had a key just for the day. The keys weren't
marked, the names weren't on them. They were all different colors.”

Hanging up, she warmed her plate in the microwave again, and returned to the table, opening the morning paper. She was just finishing breakfast when Dallas called back.

“Keys were here. I've printed them and will take them with me.” He laughed. “You want me to feed the cat? She's playing up to me shamelessly. Those kittens are pretty cute.”

“Yes, feed her,” Charlie said, amused. “Cat food's on the washer.” She guessed Joe and Dulcie and Kit were not only good at sleuthing, they were skilled, as well, at expanding the horizons of a dedicated dog person. Dallas had had pointers all his life, mostly German shorthairs. He was a bird hunter, a gun-dog man, and until recently he'd had no use at all for cats. She hung up, smiling at the change in him, wondering if he'd like to make a home for one of Mango's little kittens.

 

R
YAN AND
S
COTTY
stood looking at the broken window, at the hammer gleaming up at them among the fall of shattered glass. Scotty made no comment about the paw prints; she hoped he thought they belonged to some prowling neighborhood cat. “
Someone
was here,” she said. “Someone broke into the garage and threw your hammer out through the window.” She looked at him helplessly. “Just like the caller told me.”

Scotty shrugged and scratched his beard. “We won't
know for sure until we've dug out the concrete. You're willing to take his word for it, whoever it was?”

“I don't see that we have a choice. The department
does
have a report on a missing body. The lab has identified human blood, human hair, and human skin in the drag marks. And now someone says there's a body buried here? You think we have a choice?”

“Come on, then. The cement's setting up.”

As she turned away to the garage, Kit squirmed in her arms and jumped down. Ryan watched her trot away and leap into the bed of her pickup. The labor and expense of digging out the concrete and of a new pour lay totally on the word of one small cat who, by sensible standards, could not exist at all.

Well, hell,
she thought, moving into the garage and taking up her shovel. She watched Scotty fetch a wheelbarrow and give Manuel and Fernando their orders. Manuel looked as if Scotty had gone mad, but obediently he fetched a heavy pick. Small Fernando of the scarred face didn't move, stood frowning at Scotty.

Scott Flannery was a big man, broad shouldered, a bit wild looking with his thick red beard. But he was a quiet man, and patient—until his temper kicked in. Now when he grabbed a second pick, Manuel backed away.

Scotty tested the hardening concrete with the pick, and then lit into it, swinging so hard he sent damp, crumbling debris flying. He handed the pick to Manuel.

“Dig now! Dig here, dig now, or you'll have no job to come back to and no pay.” He repeated his orders in fractured Spanish.

Soon the two men were digging out the setting ce
ment. With Scotty and Ryan working beside them, it didn't take long to clear away the carefully poured floor and rake the debris into a heap to be hauled away. Ryan couldn't stop thinking how embarrassed she'd be if, after they moved the gravel and dug down into the earth, they found nothing. No grave, no body. It hurt her to see the men's faces as their careful work was destroyed, as the nice smooth cement job was trashed into rubble.

She thought life might have been simpler if they'd quit work after the pour, paid the men, and sent them home for the rest of the day, and then she and Scotty had done the digging alone. She hoped to hell the missing corpse was down there so she wouldn't come up a liar. She was dismayed that she could never tell Scotty the real source of her information, that she had to lie to her uncle. Scotty had helped Dallas and her dad raise her and her sisters after their mother died, they were family and they seldom kept secrets from one another.

Through her goggles she watched patches of dark gravel appear, mixed with cement. Soon, Fernando and Manuel started heaving the gravel out, piling it against the garage wall where, later, it could be shoveled back into the pit—after the body had been disinterred.

If there was a body. And if there was…She thought about Dallas or Davis and the coroner working the scene; about the long wait of perhaps weeks or months until the case was resolved and they could close up the pit again, and pour fresh cement. She thought about her clients who were waiting anxiously to move in, who expected the work to be finished promptly—now, she was going to have to pay a steep penalty. Not envisioning this kind of delay,
she'd deviated from her usual contract and allowed a time restriction to be written in, docking her a hundred dollars a day for every day over the agreed-upon finish date.

Earth began to show beneath the gravel. As Fernando reached to move a black drainpipe aside, Scotty reached to stop him, and Ryan fished her phone from her pocket. Time to call the department, they didn't want to disturb anything more until they had Max or a detective on the scene.

The two men climbed up the ladder. Glancing at each other and at Ryan with renewed skepticism, they stood waiting at the edge of the pit to see what would happen next. Despite their boss's crazy female notions, they were too curious to walk away. No one noticed that beyond the open garage, in the bed of Ryan's pickup, the three cats sat in a row, half hidden beneath the tarp, also waiting for the victim to be revealed. No one could have said whether the four humans, or the three cats, were the more curious and impatient.

D
ISPATCHER
M
ABEL
F
ARTHY
clicked on the phone, answering Ryan's call. Ryan pictured the hefty blonde speaking through her headset, sitting in the open cubicle formed by the reception counter, her cluttered desk, filing cabinets, and shelves crowded with radios and the fax and copy machines. “I'm up at the Cowen remodel,” Ryan told her. “On Blakely. Max and Dallas know where. We had a phone tip this morning, guy said we have a body buried up here, down in a drainage ditch—into which we'd just finished pouring fresh cement,” she said wryly. “We've dug that out, dug out the gravel. We're down to raw earth and don't want to go any further.”

Mabel didn't ask questions. “The chief's out. Hold on, I'll buzz Detective Garza. You okay? You sound pale.”

“I'm fine,” Ryan said, smiling at Mabel's turn of phrase. In a minute, Dallas came on. She said, “You know the ditch we dug inside the Cowen garage?”

“Yes, the second Panama Canal?”

“I got a phone call this morning that there's a body buried there.”

“What kind of call? Who was it? What time? You get the name of the caller?”

“He wouldn't give it. It was…I was on my way up to the job, it was about ten. He gave me the message, said, ‘The detectives and the chief know me,' and he hung up.”

Dallas was silent for a long time, undoubtedly thinking about the department's anonymous snitch, the voice from out of nowhere, to which they had all learned to listen.

“Dallas, I believe him. You…You're cutting out,” she said, not wanting to be interrogated.

“I'm on my way,” he said shortly, with considerable irritation. “Don't do anything. Wait for me.” When he'd hung up she stood outside looking around the property, wondering how much their careless coming and going this morning, so many people back and forth, had destroyed of the tire tracks and footprints. When she glanced up the hill, where the grass was swaying, she was startled to see Tansy and Sage slipping away over the crest as if headed home. Her phone rang and it was Dallas. “We're just turning onto Cohen.” In a moment she heard cars approaching up the narrow road, crunching bits of gravel beneath their tires. Dallas's tan Blazer appeared, and Max's truck behind it. As they parked, she glanced at the bed of her pickup where the tarp was rippling in a quick, scurrying movement. For an instant, Joe Grey peered out, then vanished, and the tarp went still.

 

J
OE WATCHED
D
ALLAS
swing out of his tan Blazer. His small SUV was a few years older than Charlie Harper's red model, and showed far more wear. The dark-haired Latino detective wore jeans, a white shirt open at the collar, and a leather jacket. Max Harper, stepping out of his pickup, was dressed in uniform this morning, as if he might have been in court. The two men headed into the open garage, stepping as carefully as they could between piles of wet cement and cement-covered gravel. As they stood looking down into the pit, talking with Ryan and Scotty, the two Latino laborers moved away.

Max said, “When did you get this phone call? Was it on your cell? Where were you?”

“On my cell. I was coming up the hill. Scotty and his men had just finished working the cement. You think I didn't want to strangle the guy? You know what concrete costs? You know how long it takes to finish it? And look at the mess we have to clean up.”

Max said, “I'm surprised you tore it out. You queried this guy? What exactly did he say?”

“I asked him how he could know this. Told him I wasn't digging up that cement, that I'd have to have proof to do such a crazy thing. He said he saw the guy bury the body, that the only proof he could offer was the body itself. If we wanted to be sure, we'd have to dig.”

“And you took his word for it,” Max said. “Where did he say he was? Did you ask him to come in, give a statement?” That was a futile question. The cats knew it, and Max knew it, he knew their unknown snitch wouldn't do that.

She said, “The guy hung up, Max! I thought it could be a crank call. But then I thought about your snitch, I
know he doesn't wait on the phone to answer questions. I had two choices. Let it go, let the concrete cure, and forget I ever got that call. Or dig it up and call you.”

In the pickup, Joe Grey smiled.

“Are you going to hang around while we dig? Or are you going to laugh at me and leave?”

Max tried not to grin as Ryan's temper rose. He exchanged a look with Dallas, who spoke with Fernando in Spanish, which none of the three cats understood except for the occasional familiar word, including Manuel's interjected, half-joking “loco” as he glanced across at Ryan.

That made Dallas laugh. “Maybe not loco at all,” he said in English. “We'll have to wait and see.”

Max flipped open his phone and in a moment was speaking with the coroner. That cooled Ryan down, the fact that he wanted John Bern on the scene before they uncovered a corpse.

In Ryan's pickup the cats settled in to wait, curled up for a little nap beneath the warm canvas. They were all three fast asleep when a car woke them, pulling up to park. Looking out from under the tarp, they watched John Bern step out of his white van.

Bern was young, slim, prematurely bald, his fine-boned face was unlined by the depressing nature of his job, as if the mysteries he set himself to unravel, in the cause of death and the identification of a body, far outweighed the grimmer aspects of the profession. Wiping his glasses, he entered the garage and stood talking with Ryan and Max and Dallas, looking at the lumps of gravel and the messy pile of slowly hardening cement.

“You did all this on the word of a guy you don't know and who wouldn't identify himself?”

“I believed him,” Ryan said shortly. “We've blown a whole morning and a bundle of money on this. He'd better be telling the truth.” She was losing patience and losing confidence. She wanted to get on with the dig, either to be vindicated or to stoically endure her embarrassment.

Bern climbed down the ladder into the pit, and Dallas followed. Max stood looking on, a little amused, a little put off. The cats couldn't see to the bottom, could see into the garage only as far as the lip of the pit, where Ryan stood watching. They could hear the soft scrape of slow, careful digging, could see Fernando and Manuel just inside the door, idly shuffling their feet, waiting to witness Ryan's embarrassment when all this digging turned up nothing—or perhaps to experience a macabre thrill if a corpse was uncovered. Soon the sounds of digging grew more tentative, there was a long, muffled discussion, then the cats could hear only soft scratching, such as their own careful paws might make. Dallas's exclamation was sharp.

Ryan stepped closer. Fernando and Manuel moved forward to look but then Manuel backed away, his face pale. Fernando stood looking, and then nodded at Ryan and gave her a shy smile

She grinned back but looked at the two men with concern. “You guys okay?”

“Okay,” Fernando said. Both men were looking at her now as if she possessed some magical power, as if she were some kind of witch to have known that there was a body buried there.

She said, “You'll have to wait for the detective to take your statements, then you can go on home, take the rest of the day off with pay.”

That seemed to revive Fernando. Manuel gave her a lopsided, gentle smile. Down in the pit, Garza said something the cats couldn't make out. Joe Grey wondered how many bodies Dallas Garza had helped to disinter over his twenty-five years in law enforcement. He wondered if it ever got any easier to deal with a victim of violence, to look on a battered or mutilated body and think about the cruelty that existed in one's own species. The tomcat burned to slip out of the truck and move closer where he could see if he knew the woman, but Dulcie's armored paw on his shoulder drew him back. She was always so afraid people would wonder why they were watching. He didn't want to admit she was right.

It was some time before John Bern and Dallas finished bagging evidence. Joe, having at last lost patience, had left the pickup despite Dulcie's protests and slipped into the garage behind the pile of cement. He had to smile when Dulcie and Kit followed him, crouching beside him where they, too, could see down into the pit but not be seen.

They could see Dallas's back where he knelt beside Bern, but couldn't see much of the woman, only a glimpse of her arm and one bare, tanned leg. They jerked to attention when Bern said, “These look like cat hairs.”

The cats lived in fear of cat hairs being found at a scene, hairs that could give them away, and would certainly generate questions. But why were they flinching now? They hadn't been
near
this victim, they hadn't
been
in the pit. There was no way…

“Hairs stuck to her skin,” Bern said. “She's oily, smells like suntan oil. She's tan all over, not a pale mark on her. Was she in the habit of sunbathing naked?”

“I don't know,” Dallas said dryly. “I never had the pleasure.”

Bern lifted a cat hair with forceps, to view it though his magnifying glass. “Yellow. Sure looks like cat hair. Maybe it came off her clothes, or…I wonder if those same hairs are stuck to the killer's clothes?”

The cats crouched, frozen. A yellow cat? There were no yellow cats in that neighborhood except Theresa's cat. Oh, this wasn't Theresa. They felt as if they'd been kicked in the belly.

Max said, “Charlie has clients a couple of blocks from the empty swimming pool where we're working that missing body. I think one of them has a yellow cat. I'll get Charlie over to the morgue, see if we might get lucky and she can ID her.”

Frightened for Theresa, already grieving for her, the cats slipped out of the garage and across the drive to the shelter of Ryan's truck. Crawling up beneath the tarp, they pushed close together, Joe and Kit pressing their heads against Dulcie.

“Oh, it isn't Theresa,” Kit mewled. “No one…It mustn't…It
can't
be Theresa.”

“Not Theresa,” Dulcie said. “They're wrong, it can't be.” She pressed hard against Joe, her ears down, her eyes closed, and the three cats clung together, mourning Theresa as they had seldom, in all their lives, grieved for a human person.