The Cat Dancers (27 page)

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Authors: P.T. Deutermann

BOOK: The Cat Dancers
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He moved sideways off the porch, still watching the lane and the surrounding cabins. The shepherds were both staring at something in the direction of the office. Cam reached the corner of the building and looked around it into the darkness. He studied the snow, but there were no indentations. He stepped around the corner and, keeping his back to the wall of the cabin, slid sideways along the rough boards until he reached the back corner. Then he realized he didn’t have the dogs with him. He called them as quietly as he could, but they didn’t come. He swore and edged his way back to the front of the cabin, feeling very exposed in the weird twilight created by the falling snow. He peered around the corner.
The dogs were gone.
He looked around and thought he saw their tracks headed
up the lane toward the cabin office. The wind groaned again, and the snow wheeled in response. Something else cracked out in the woods. Get inside, a little voice in his mind told him. Get inside
now.
He did. Not trying to be quiet anymore, he crunched through the snow to the back deck and let himself into the cabin. The sudden warmth from the woodstove was very welcome. He closed the back door and then went to the front windows to see if the dogs were visible, but they weren’t. He flipped on the porch light, unlocked and opened the door, and called them. No dogs. He closed the door. If they’d gone after a deer, they could be in real trouble, because a deer could run them to death in these hills. If they’d gone after a goddamned mountain lion, they could be in real trouble, period. The wind outside was blowing steadily, rattling the damper in the woodstove’s chimney. He threw another log into the firebox and stirred the coals. He knew there was no point in going out there on foot to look for the shepherds. He could easily get himself lost in all this snow, and he was neither dressed nor equipped for that kind of adventure. Then something banged against the back door and he heard the skittering of anxious claws. He unlocked the door and let them in. They ran around the cabin excitedly, panting hard, as if they’d just had great fun with a good chase. He was tempted to yell at them, but then he realized he was very grateful that they were back.
He checked that all the doors were locked and then got ready for bed. Tomorrow, he’d get a trace on that cell number and see if he could track down the mysterious caller. The wind outside blew harder and sleet rattled against the roof. He turned off all the lights, took another look out all the windows, set the Colt on the nightstand, and climbed into the heavily quilted bed. The dogs dropped down near the woodstove and curled up. As he drifted off to sleep, he thought he heard a distant prolonged shriek above the wind coming down from the ravines, but he assured himself that it was just the snowstorm. Of course it was.
MARY ELLEN GOODE WAS still smiling when Cam walked into the ranger station the next morning. The day had dawned bright and clear with about a foot and a half of snow on the ground and the temperature at a sinus-clearing ten degrees. The county roads had been scraped and sanded, so he’d made decent time getting over to the ranger station. He’d put on his old deputy’s hat and mirrored sunglasses against all the glare, and Mary Ellen told him with a perfectly straight face that no one would ever make him for a cop.
She offered coffee, which he accepted gratefully. He explained the note and the phone number, and her eyebrows went up.
“That’s the number for my Park Service cell phone,” she said. “But it’s right over—” She started looking around her desk. “Well, it was right here. This is the charger for it.”
“Whoever left the note knew who owned the phone, then,” he said. He wondered if it was someone in this office. He explained about the initials on the note.
“I don’t like the sound of that at all,” she said, frowning.
“Let me ask you this: If tracks were made by a large animal in the snow, and then there was more snow, and then a crust of sleet froze over all of that, could someone still excavate those tracks?”
She stared at him for a moment. “I couldn’t, but we have a ranger on staff who maybe could.”
An hour later, they were back at Cam’s cabin. A long, tall, gaunt ranger who looked uncannily like Abraham Lincoln was down on hands and knees on Cam’s front porch, scraping gently at the snow with a woodworker’s two-handled draw
knife. Cam and Mary Ellen, trying to ignore the cold, watched from the doorway.
“Normally,” the ranger said, “the prints would simply fill up, but you said you saw an ice film. That’s what I’m looking for. How deep would you say the snow was when the prints were made?”
“A dusting of blown snow,” Cam said. “Maybe half an inch deep, max.” Everyone’s breath was making puffs of condensation in the frigid air, and now the ranger shifted to a paintbrush as he continued to mine his way down through the snow along a three-foot-long stretch outside of the area where Cam and the dogs had trampled the snow. Two pairs of German shepherd ears were silhouetted in one of the front windows.
“Well, this may all be for nothing if that layer of ice—wait one. Here we go. Here we go.”
The ranger shifted from the big paintbrush to a much smaller and finer brush and began to remove snow across the line of his original shallow trench. As he did so, the outline of a paw print began to emerge.
Mary Ellen looked over his shoulder and whistled quietly. “That’s a big bastard,” she said.
“Yeah, I’d say so,” the ranger replied, clearing away the remaining snow almost grain by grain until he had the entire print revealed. Then he brought out a spray can from his field kit and sprayed the entire depression. “It’s a silicone-based compound,” he said. “Solidifies on cold contact.” The material was barely tinted yellow, but it held enough color that the print was thrown into clear relief. This time, Cam could see the tops of claw marks, and it wasn’t a happy sight. The ranger sat back on his haunches. “Now that,” he declared, “is a large cat. Panther, from the size of it.” He laid down another coat of varnish, waited a moment, and did it again.
“And not declawed,” Mary Ellen commented.
“Yeah,” the ranger said, getting a camera out of his pack. He fired off several pictures from different angles, then swore, fished out a ruler, laid it down by the track, and did it all again. The print looked to Cam to be about ten inches across.
“Are there more?” the ranger asked.
“There was a line all the way across this porch,” Cam said. “The dogs came in here by the door and messed stuff up, which is why I had you start in the middle of the porch. There’s more on that porch over there.”
The ranger nodded and began to extend his trench in the snow. “I need one, preferably two more to get an estimate of stride length. This’ll take awhile.”
The dogs were getting antsy inside the cabin, so Cam went back in, and Mary Ellen followed. She greeted both dogs affectionately and they returned her favor.
“Great shepherds,” she said. “Let me guess: This one’s business and this one’s pleasure?”
“Right you are,” Cam said. “Although the black one can do business if he has to. Mostly, he just scares people by looking at them.”
“Works for me,” she said. “How’d they react to that thing being out there on the front porch?”
“Not bravely,” he replied.
“Smart dogs,” she said, shaking off her coat now she was inside the warm cabin. She had a field belt on under her bulky Park Service coat, complete with what looked like a Glock. She saw him looking. “I don’t leave home or the office without it,” she said. “Ever since …”
“Copy that,” he said. He went into the kitchen to crank up the coffeepot.
“So tell me, Lieutenant, what’s really brought you out here to our neck of the woods? You show up, telling tall tales about cat dancers, somebody steals my phone, makes an appointment he doesn’t keep, and now we have the first real sign of a mountain lion in thirty years.”
He pulled over a kitchen chair and sat down to wait for the coffee to percolate. She stayed over by the woodstove, nonchalantly trying to warm her buns and her hands at the same time. They both heard the ranger out front say “Yes!” as he found another track.
Cam stared down at the table for a long moment while he tried to figure out how much to tell her. She didn’t bug him.
“Did you guys hear about those executions that showed up on the Web?” he asked her.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “That was all over the LE networks. I saw one of the videos.”
“That happened in our neck of the woods, and I’m working the whodunit.”
“All by yourself?”
He smiled. Smart girl, he thought. “For the moment,” he said. “We might have a wee bit of federal help.”
“Ah,” she said. “So there’s one game for your federal friends and another one for the sheriff’s edification?”
“Something like that,” he said. He wasn’t willing to broach the possibility that there were vigilantes involved.
“And didn’t you have a judge get herself blown up down there in Triboro recently?” she asked. “Was that related?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Truth is, we really don’t know, but we’re keeping our options open. She was the judge who let the two fryees loose on a technicality.”
She gave him a shrewd look from the other side of the room. “Liberal judge lets them go, they get rounded up by a person or persons unknown and end up in an electric chair?” she said.
“They killed the wife and daughter of a Duke Energy scientist in a holdup. They walked because of a police screwup. Then said scientist goes off the grid, followed by the two mopes doing a star turn in the chair. He’d been a Ranger back in the army. So …”
“And you guys think he did the judge, too?”
He shrugged uncomfortably. She was getting too close to figuring out what he was really investigating. “Like I said, it’s early days, and the feds have their own theories—as usual.”
“Lest we forget, Park Service is federal, too,” she said. “And that’s not an answer. We’re not necessarily the enemy, Lieutenant.”
He was saved by the percolator, which started making gasping noises. He got up and poured coffee into three cups. He handed one to her and then took one out to the ranger, who had uncovered a second track and was beginning to dust
a third. She joined him in the doorway, stirring some sugar into her coffee. “How big, Larry?”
“Two meters plus,” the ranger said, sitting back on his haunches and blowing on the hot coffee between sips. “Can’t estimate weight on wooden floorboards like this, but at that stride length, it has to be seventy, eighty kilos. Big effing cat. This third impression is not very good, so I’m going to work the dirt just off the porch.”
“And what the hell was that thing doing here?” Cam asked.
“You let those dogs run around?” Mary Ellen asked.
Cam nodded.
“Then that’s probably what it was hunting,” she said. “A panther this big would definitely not be afraid of a couple of dogs. Slap, slap, chow time.”
Larry had moved off the porch and was excavating the snow at the end of the building. All scrunched up down in the snow, he looked like a grounded stork. Cam went back inside. “So maybe there is something to your cat dancer story,” she said. “But what’s the tie to what you’re investigating?”
He smiled at her. “I’m not sure there is one. Just something some guy mentioned in the course of our asking questions, so here I am. Basic follow-up. It’s what we do when we’re clueless. There probably is no tie.”
She gave him a skeptical look. “My doctorate’s in animal science,” she said. “My specialty happens to be bears, not big cats. These prints will make for some interesting discussions down at the tavern. But then we’re going to have to prove you didn’t fake them, of course. You know, Bigfoot Two. Sasquatch comes to the Smokies.”
“Knock yourself out,” he said. “It’s not like I’m looking for a feature story in the
Enquirer.
You’ve basically answered my questions.”
She nodded at him with a faintly triumphant smile. Shit, he thought. She just mouse-trapped me. Dr. Smiley. He grinned at her. “Okay. Nicely done.”
“Thank you. And the real story is?”
It was his turn to surprise her. “I can’t tell you anything else about this investigation,” he said. “It’s that sensitive, okay?”
She blinked. He stared at her until she got it. “Oh,” she said. “Internal problem.”
“I never said that, and that’s where we need to leave it,” he replied. “No offense intended.”
“None taken. How can we help?”
“Cat dancers,” he said. “Anything you can tease out of the local woodwork about that term might help. I’ll take rumors, hearsay, gossip, all the way to names and addresses. Anything.”
“You really are nowhere on this, aren’t you,” she said. “Okay, I’ll get the guys to ask around.” She thought for a moment. “At least now we seem to have the requisite cat.”
CAM WAITED AROUND FOR another hour while the ranger tried to surface more prints, and then, after putting both dogs in the truck, he went back to the headquarters of the Carrigan County Sheriff’s Office and met with a Lieutenant Grayson, who headed up their Criminal Investigations department. He directly asked for their help in running down any information they could develop on the cat dancers story and any possible connections to White Eye Mitchell. He described the electric chair executions case, the bombing incident, and the fact that their prime suspect had committed suicide, but he did not allude to suspicions that police might be involved. Grayson, a tall, rangy individual in his fifties, took it all aboard and said they’d look into it, then asked whether Cam would mind if they checked back with Manceford County. Cam, “No problem,” and gave the lieutenant the appropriate phone numbers to get in touch with Bobby Lee.
“We heard some talk about a mountain lion this morning,” Grayson said.
Cam nodded. He’d forgotten how fast news could travel in a small county. He described the tracks and what the park ranger thought about them. He also mentioned Mary Ellen’s comment about the possibility that Cam had faked the tracks.
“Mary Ellen’s good people,” Grayson said. “They get to listen to a lot of BS at that station. Tourists see the damnedest things: panthers, wolves, king cobras, grizzlies, and I don’t know what all.”
“She gave me the official Park Service line in the office: Ain’t no panthers. Then later, she sort of hinted that that might not be true. Struck me as odd. She seems to be … nice.
“She tell you what happened to her fiancé, Joel Hatch?”
“Knocking on the wrong door at the wrong time?”
Grayson tapped a pen on the desk for a moment. “Brother Joel was a bit of a cowboy, especially for the Park Service.
Really
got into the sworn officer bit. TV cop wanna-be, in our opinion.”
“Is that what got him shot?”
“What got him shot was that he called in the meth lab, was told to wait for backup from us, and then talked his partner into doing a John Wayne. No surprise to any of us, but we all felt bad for Mary Ellen. And his partner.” He gave Cam a significant look. “Mary Ellen’s a special lady in this community, if you follow me?” he said.
Caution received, Cam thought as he nodded.
“They get any hairs from those prints?” Grayson asked.
“I believe they did,” Cam said. He remembered the ranger going out to the SUV to get some evidence bags.
“Good,” Grayson said. “We have some mounted specimens from the early nineteen hundreds here in town, in private hands. They can do a DNA comparison, see if we’re talking eastern or western panther. Or rabbit fur stretched over a dinner plate with bear claws glued to it. What’s the connection with White Eye in all this?”
Cam hesitated. He was pretty sure that Grayson’s sudden shift in topic had been calculated, so he decided to take refuge behind the same line he’d given Mary Ellen Goode.
“There’s more to this case than I’m allowed to talk about,” he told the lieutenant.
“No shit,” Grayson said with an amused look on his face.
Cam smiled sheepishly. “Best thing is probably for your boss to talk to my boss. That way, I’m not going to wander too far off the reservation with what I say or don’t say. Personally, I think Mitchell might know something about this cat dancer story, although he says he’s never heard of such a thing.”
“Nor have I,” Grayson said. “Not to mention that that would be a damn fool thing for any man to try with a panther.”
“Exactly. This whole thing is probably a dead lead.”
“Except for the fact that we have you coming all the way out here from Manceford County, asking around about
mountain lions, and suddenly we have what looks like the first confirmed evidence of a panther in many years. Quite a coincidence there, and I assume you feel the same way we all do about coincidences.”
“I do,” Cam said. “There is one thing, though.” He described his casual conversation with the two deputies in the Waffle House, and his suspicion that they actually might know something, too. Grayson made a note, said he knew who they were and that he’d pull that string.
Cam thanked him. “Like I said, we’re more than a little bit behind the power curve on this one. And we have feds in our hair just for grins.”
“Is there just possibly an IA angle on this deal?” Grayson asked.
Cam looked at him with as innocent a face as he could muster. “Why ever do you ask that, Lieutenant?”
Grayson smiled and said they’d poke around and get back to him. Cam thanked him again and left.
He got back to the cabin park a little after sunset. The skies were filled with ragged white clouds drifting down off the Smokies and the temperature was dropping quickly. As he turned in, he was surprised to see that the security light on the front of the office was out, leaving the line of cabins in even darker shadows than usual. The gloom was relieved by an occasional burst of moonlight on the hard-packed snow. He pulled into the parking notch by his cabin and let the dogs go. After a day of being cooped up in the truck with only occasional tree breaks, they happily took off into the snowy woods. Cam hoped there weren’t any hungry
things
out there.
He’d spent the afternoon hitting more of the guide shops and asking around about Mitchell and the wild tale about men tracking mountain lions just for fun. He’d learned exactly nothing. He’d then stopped by the Park Service rangers’ office, ostensibly to see what they’d come up with on the prints, but mostly to see Mary Ellen smile again. The prints had been cast into plaster of paris and were going to UNC for evaluation. Mary Ellen was getting ready to go to a one-day conference in Asheville and, while polite and even friendly,
she’d made it clear she was busy. Disappointed, Cam had backed out and returned to his cabin.
He could hear the dogs barking at something up on the slopes behind the cabin as he let himself in, but they didn’t sound frantic about it. They were just making shepherd noise for the sake of making noise. He closed the door and flipped the light switch up. Nothing happened. So now he knew why the security light wasn’t on up front: The power had to be out for the whole complex. The interior of the cabin was almost totally dark, illuminated only by the brief glimpses of moonlight coming through the windows. His breath was visible in the cold air. At least the woodstove ran on wood alone, so while it might be dark, there would be heat. He shucked his coat, hung it up by the front door, and went to reload the woodstove. He was bent over the front of the stove, trying to get a match to stay lit despite a back draft coming from the stove, when he saw something in the corner of the main room that made him become very still. The match began to burn the tips of his fingers, so he dropped it, missing the paper crumpled under the logs completely.
His eyes told him that what he was looking at was a pair of green eyes that were locked onto his own eyes like tracking beams. The eyes disappeared when the clouds covered up the moon, but they reappeared each time the moonlight did. His first thought was, Where are the damned dogs when I need them? They were still outside and still barking, but farther away now. He stared back into the corner, and, sure enough, there was a large feline face surrounding those yellow-green eyes: tawny fur marked with a darker mask and two rounded ears with tufts of white inside. It was a big face, much bigger than he had imagined.
He remained motionless for a long thirty seconds, and then slowly, very slowly, while still down on one knee in front of the woodstove, he fished out another match and struck it up, illuminating the room this time. The flare of light confirmed his worst suspicion: There was a mountain lion in his cabin.

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