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Authors: P.T. Deutermann

BOOK: The Cat Dancers
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“Because you don’t know who’s who in the zoo,” she said.
“Precisely. I’m meeting tomorrow night with our sheriff and the DA.”
“What on earth would I tell my boss?” she asked.
“That you need a few days’ leave?”
“I’ll think about it,” she said. “But damn, Lieutenant!”
“You could call me Cam,” he said.
“Sure about that?” she asked sadly.
THE DOGS WERE IN semidisgrace on the trip back. He had chided them about not following the Bronco and rescuing his sorry ass from the mountain lion. The looks on their faces said that no self-respecting, intelligent German shepherds would
even
mess with goddamned mountain lions, and besides, full food bowls on the porch had distracted them from doing their duty, no matter how wildly construed. He could see their point, but he still gave them a cold shoulder all the way back to Triboro. That seemed to bother them a lot, at least for the five minutes before they fell asleep in the backseat.
It was just after sundown when Cam got back to his house in Summerland. He turned the dogs loose in the backyard, gathered up his mail, disarmed the alarm system, and went inside. A quick walk-through of the house turned up nothing visibly amiss. He called the sheriff at home and let it ring once, then hung up. He took a shower, got something to eat, and, on a hunch, changed into uniform. Bobby Lee arrived twenty minutes later in his personal cruiser. Five minutes after that, DA Steven Klein showed up. The sheriff was in uniform and Cam was glad he’d changed. He had not shaved his beard, however, and this provoked a fish-eye stare from Bobby Lee even as he handed Cam his official accoutrements. They sat down in Cam’s kitchen, and Cam poured out coffee for all hands.
Cam then debriefed them on everything he’d learned up in Carrigan County, along with the details of the final night under Catlett Bald. He mentioned that he had a corroborating witness but said that she hadn’t decided whether she wanted to get involved. The sheriff described what Jaspreet Kaur
Bawa had turned up in her database analysis of judges, cases, and walk-away perps who’d subsequently died. Her search went back over a decade, he informed them.
“Seventeen DOA’s,” he announced somberly, and that brought a muttered oath from Klein. “Two of those may have been prison gang–related, but even discounting those, that still leaves fifteen unsolved cases, including the two recent Internet stars.”
“Statewide?” Steven asked.
The sheriff nodded. “Fifteen cases where clearly guilty bastards went free and then were extinguished, leaving us with stone-cold whodunits.”
“We need to check on something else,” Cam said. “White Eye told me one of the cat dancers got himself eaten. He was kind of vague as to when this happened, and it might be bullshit, but we should look to see if any cops flat-out disappeared, in the past twelve years, say.”
“Why twelve?” Bobby Lee asked.
“Because White Eye said the guy who called himself Carl first came to him about fifteen years ago. He said it took him two years to train Carl to hunt the wild cats. Carl finally got his photo of a cat after three years. A few months later, he brought in the second guy and then the ones after that. Our cluster of unsolved cases involving dead perps seems to go back about ten years, so if it’s true, the initiate died somewhere between ten and twelve years ago.”
“I’ll go to SBI with that one,” Bobby Lee said.
“Or let Jay-Kay do it,” Cam said. “Her computers are already trained to do that kind of search.”
“Trained’?” Steven said.
“Don’t ask,” Bobby Lee told him, shaking his head. “She tried to explain how that all works and left me right in the damned dust.”
“The real question is,” Steven said, “How do we smoke these bastards out, assuming they do exist?”
Everyone concentrated on their coffee cups for a moment. A night wind came up outside, stirring the tops of the Leyland cypresses into a soft sound.
“On the question of whether or not these are related killings, were there any correlative factors in the fifteen incidents?” Cam asked.
“Such as?” the sheriff inquired.
“Manner of death; location of discovery; time of death; wound patterns; probable sequence of events prior to their getting killed, such as abduction, a holding period, then execution, or was it just a drive-by?”
“Don’t know,” Bobby Lee said. “Something else to check. But how the hell do we smoke ’em out? Turn loose another walk-away perp?”
“I think Mitchell sicced that cat on me deliberately,” Cam said. “I think he was an integral part of this group, and they wanted me out of the way.”
“You
think,
” Bobby Lee said. “You have a body and a dead mountain lion—a tame one, not a wild one. No one has yet to produce a wild one up there, just like the Park Service people have been saying all along. There’s no damned evidence.”
“I think we do have some evidence,” Cam said. “We have the body of K-Dog Simmonds, found in a diesel-storage tank. That’s pretty elaborate for a prison gang hit or the revenge of a drug dealer. Plus the videos of the two executions, out there on the Internet, with corroborative damage to Simmonds’s body. We have a guy showing up here in a police cruiser telling me to get out of town. We have the shooting incident at Annie’s house, prior to the bombing, which had to have involved at least two people. And we have James Marlor, who somehow knew something about cat dancing.”
Cam paused, waiting for comment, but the other two sat there looking down at the table. He then reiterated his arguments for there being cops involved. More silence.
“Okay,” he said, “Some of that’s circumstantial, I admit. But we’ve put bad guys away on circumstantial evidence.”
“If they’re cops,” Steven said, “they could just go dormant after what happened up there in Carrigan County, and we’d be left with fifteen unsolved and no frigging idea of who these people are.”
“I know one way,” Bobby Lee said. They all looked at him.
“Start talking about a show trial. Say we have evidence that there’s a vigilante hit squad operating in the state, that we have a star witness, in the person of Lieutenant Richter here, who knows who these people are because the old tracker gave him a deathbed confession.”
“Wouldn’t that make Lieutenant Richter a tasty target?” Steven asked.
“You said you wanted to smoke ’em out. I believe that would do the trick.”
“Lieutenant?” Steven said. “How you feel about being the goat staked out in tiger country?”
Cam let out a long breath. “If that’s what it takes,” he said. “I don’t have any better ideas. I mean, we can chase those corroborative factors, see if we can tie an MO to specific individuals or specific county sheriff’s offices, but that might take forever.”
“They’ll know about Mitchell,” Bobby Lee said. “That’s been all over the news. They’ll know Lieutenant Richter brought him in. They have to be worried already.”
“One problem,” Cam said. “I don’t think White Eye actually knew their names or anything about them, other than that he guessed they were cops. If that’s true, and
they
know that, setting up a trap might not work.”
“Shit,” Steven said. “We’re going in circles here.”
“Seven guys,” Cam said, stirring what was left of his coffee. “Seven guys who are so addicted to danger that they’d track a mountain lion close enough to take a picture of its face; who get together from time to time to hunt down and execute especially noxious perps; and who could organize a bomb at a judge’s house, which was under Sheriff’s Office protection. All this would take a very different kind of guy.”
“Your point being?” Steven asked.
“My point being: Let’s ask every sheriff in North Carolina to name one person in his office who might be twisted enough to qualify for membership in a group like this. I think we’re looking for senior street operatives—sergeants, probably—who’ve been through a lot and are hard as nails, pissed off at the system, and capable of getting out there on the edge and
going full bore. We’ve all run across guys like that at one time or another. We usually push ’em into early retirement, too.”
Cam saw that the sheriff was giving him a studiously appraising look, as if to say, You’ve got someone in mind right here in Manceford County, don’t you? “You’d have to do that sheriff to sheriff,” he said to Bobby Lee.
“And then what?” Steven asked. “Say you get a list?”
“Sweat ’em,” Cam said. “Use whatever IA channels we have to find out where they were and what they were doing when Flash was abducted in a hail of blank bullets. Or when Annie Bellamy went into low-earth orbit.”
“That’s such a shotgun approach,” Steven said. “Maybe not even legal.”
“Any better ideas?” Cam asked. No one said anything. “Of course, we wouldn’t get ’em all, but we might get lucky,” he continued. “Nail one, turn him, get the rest. Grind through them. Turn one of the Bureau’s interrogation teams loose on them. Tie them physically to Carrigan County. Sweat the wives and girlfriends: Does he go out west a lot? Go hunting a lot? Take a lot of leave?”
The sheriff wasn’t convinced. “If they’re veteran cops, and they’ve shared this initiation with mountain lions, you won’t get a word out of them. Then what?”
“Invoke the Patriot Act,” Cam said. “Send them down to Guantánamo Bay and let some of those retired CIA sweepers go to town. That bombing would be sufficient justification.”
“Okay, I agree,” Steven said. “If Lieutenant Richter is willing, I think the idea of trolling that deathbed confession within Sheriff’s Office circles is the best course of action. If they’ve hit a judge, they won’t balk at taking another cop out.”
“Then I’d want some federal help in protecting him,” the sheriff said.
“Right,” Steven agreed. “We need to work up a plan. They’ll need time to organize, make their decision, and then get set up. I need to get with McLain down in Charlotte. Sheriff, let’s you and me meet in my office tomorrow morning.”
Bobby Lee agreed. Steven said he had to go. Bobby Lee
stayed behind after Klein left. “You okay with this?” he asked as they stood out on Cam’s front porch.
Cam shrugged. “As long as we move pretty quick,” he said. “I don’t know how these guys move around or communicate, but it might not take them all that long to come calling.”
“You want some people here tonight?”
“Who you gonna call, Sheriff?” Cam asked. “Hate to have the wrong guy show up as part of my protective detail.”
“You think Sergeant Cox is one of them, don’t you?” Bobby Lee said.
Cam had to think for a moment before replying. “Who would you offer up,” he said finally, “if that question came around about cops who operate on the edge?”
The sheriff nodded slowly. “He’s gone over the line more than once. That’s why Bellamy hammered him in the first place. Except …”
“Except the MCAT was the perfect place for him,” said Cam, finishing the sentence for him. “Nobody ran ’em down like Kenny Cox.”
“Should I move him out?”
“How?”
“A temporary assignment? A special project, say, with the Bureau down in Charlotte?”
“Wouldn’t that be interesting,” Cam said. He heard his phone ringing inside but ignored it. “If my theory is correct, they don’t let any of the cell members do anything on their own home ground. The out-of-towners come, like that guy who showed up to calibrate me. No, I’d say we find a way to know where he is at all times and then see what happens.”
“Hmmh,” the sheriff said. “Come in early tomorrow morning. You’re awfully isolated out here.”
Cam snapped his fingers and both shepherds were at the door in a heartbeat, ears up and looking for a job. “Not entirely,” Cam said.
After the sheriff left, he retrieved the phone message. It was from Jay-Kay. “Can you come down here to Charlotte? No phone calls. Just come as soon as possible.” Reluctantly he went to make some coffee.
IF JAY-KAY WAS SURPRISED to see him at 3:30 in the morning, she gave no sign of it. From her appearance, Cam guessed that she had already been up. He’d known many computer types who worked at night as much as they did by day. He sat in her ultramodern kitchen and filled her in on his trip west. She was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt and her hair was wrapped in a tight bun. She took a look at his weary face and made coffee, which she did with the same clean, quick efficiency she exhibited in her professional work. The kitchen didn’t really look lived in. She winced when he described what had happened to White Eye Mitchell. She wrote down Mary Ellen’s name and office number.
“My parents used to tell stories of man-eating tigers taking villagers from their beds at night,” she said. “Gave me bad dreams for years.”
“I don’t think that cat knew what it was doing—or to whom,” Cam said. “It was reflexive, and amazingly quick.”
She set down a cup of coffee for him and a mug of tea for herself. “You, sir, have a problem,” she announced.
“Just one?”
“One is enough,” she replied. “I was in the FBI building today, on a nonrelated issue. Two of the agents with whom I worked previously were chatting me up about cars. Naturally, western Carolina came up, and I mentioned that you were out there working on something to do with the Bellamy bombing. One of them revealed that the ATF and the Bureau are split on which way to go with that case.”
“Split how?”
“The Bureau has a ‘distinctive theory of the case,’ as this young man put it. He would not elaborate, but he did say that
the ATF thinks you may have had a hand in the bombing because you knew about the great wealth that would come your way if she died.”
Cam shook his head. “I’m a cop,” he said. “I’d have to have known that I’d be the first guy everyone looked at. And I would also have known that if I were implicated in her death, I’d never see a dime. What’s the Bureau’s read?”
“Only that they do not agree and are waiting for a line of inquiry to produce some results before they’ll go forward.”
“I’d forgotten they talk like that. And that’s the extent of ATF’s theory? I’m the heir and thus guilty of murder?”
“They have ruled out terrorism on the basis of the bomb’s physical characteristics, which apparently was extremely crude and entirely too big for the job at hand. Plus the fact that you would have been in perfect position to feed James Marlor locating data on the two chair victims, and that you were the only one who witnessed, as it were, Marlor’s demise.
“And now this business in Carrigan County,” Cam said. “Marlor points me at this cat dancer club; I come up with the man who trained them to hunt the mountain lions, and he dies in my presence.”
She nodded. “The prime suspect in the execution videos was Marlor,” she said. “And he died right
after
you interviewed him to find out how much he knew. Then, as you just said the central player in this cat-dancing scheme dies, in your presence. And there’s only your word as to what happened in both instances. And you requested the leave of absence after the Bellamy bombing.”
“The sheriff suggested that, for Chrissakes!”
“Did he?” she asked. “I thought you requested it.”
So I did, Cam thought. Shit.
“The agents focus on paper trails. You applied for it in writing. Why? To take care of loose ends. Which are duly taken care of.”
He stared at her and she gave him an impassive look. “You believe all this?” he asked finally.
“No, I don’t,” she said. “But as they said, it hangs together.”
Cam got up to stretch his legs. “You said earlier you’d
found out something about Kenny Cox,” he said. “That we’d talk later?”
She stirred her tea for a moment. “Yes, I did. You asked me to run his cell phone calls. I did, both his personal cell as well as his operational phone.”
“And?”
“The official cell phone was used only for official calls. There were almost no calls made on his personal phone. Admittedly, he’s got a minimal calling plan, the payments autodeducted from his checking account.”
“Sounds like mine.”
“But you use yours, Just Cam. This one mostly just sits there, and that made me curious. I mean, if all he wanted was a nine-one-one phone, those are dirt cheap. So I went at it in reverse.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I then did a scan to see what other bills are being autodeducted from that checking account.”
“How in the world could you do that?” he asked. “Banks don’t hand that information out to just anybody.”
She smiled. “I emulate. Or rather, the tigers do. In this case, we emulated an IRS audit contractor’s query. It’s a routine question during one of their so-called reality audits. Because of budget cuts, the IRS uses contractors to do scut work like account scans. I can’t emulate the IRS, but I can emulate some of their contractors. I do it for the Bureau all the time when they don’t want to tip their hand in an investigation.”
“And a bank just lets you in? Without a warrant?”
“Who tells the IRS to go away? Besides, big banks get dozens of queries every day from credit bureaus, mortgage companies, debt collection agencies, other banks. It’s not like they want money, and any IRS query is answered immediately.”
“Damn. And what did the IRS find out?”
“That he has another phone account—in a different name. And this is going to interest you a lot, I think. The name is Carl Marlor. Ring any bells?”
“Marlor!”
Cam said softly. He sat down again. “Holy shit.” Then the first name hit him, too. Carl.
The original cat dancer? He thought for a moment, trying to recall White Eye’s description of the man who called himself Carl. Big guy. Had a look about him that would keep other men from getting mouthy in a bar. Had he described him? Fair-haired or dark? He couldn’t remember.
“And the cell company doesn’t check people out to see if they’re using a bogus name?”
“Only if the customer wants credit of some kind. The competition in that business is so cutthroat these days, they’d sign up Mickey Mouse. Think of all those eager young men waving cell phones at you in the mall.”
“You’re saying Kenny has established an identity for this Carl Marlor? He’s committing identity fraud?”
“The reverse. He’s not stealing someone else’s identity for money. He’s done precisely what you need to do to have an identity—opened some consumer accounts, paid them through autodeductions so they’re always up-to-date. He has an address, which is real. He has no landline phone, only a cell phone—but that’s all the rage these days. Plus, the number is real.”
“What about a Social Security number?”
“He’s using his own. His real one.”
“And that doesn’t trip up some computer-check program?”
She nodded. “The credit bureaus have Carl Marlor listed, with an interesting notation in the comments section—two names coming up with the same Social Security number. But the explanation appears to be real. He changed his name almost fifteen years ago.”
“Legally changed his name?”
“Apparently. There’s even a court order on file.”
“And that just solves it?”
“There are no fraud implications to paying a consumer bill,” she said. “Applying for a loan or credit? That’s different, and he’d have to explain it, although a credit check reveals the answer. An IRS audit would catch it immediately, of course, which is exactly what happened when I queried.”
“Except he’s not stealing or defrauding anyone. It is legal to change your name.”
“Yes. And it allows him to create phone records in another name, and thereby make calls with impunity if he
is
doing something illegal. As in many, many calls around the state to numbers that all turned out to be for telephone booths. Especially one in the town of Pineville.”
“Recently?”
“Very.”
He rubbed his face with both hands. The image of a cop car parked next to a phone booth rose in his mind. He’d seen it all the time. “Tell me,” he said. “You said your computers are expert at doing pattern analysis. Could they search the phone records of the phone booths he called and then determine if calls were made from those phone booths to any others on a regular basis?”
“Of course.”
He eyed her. “Just like that?”
She smiled. “No, not just like that. But what you’re looking for is a geographical area of probability, aren’t you?”
He nodded. “My theory is that these seven guys are cops. Either active duty, retired, or even fired cops. I think they’re all over the state, and get together to do vigilante business once in awhile. A very secret society, with the price of admission being a picture of a mountain lion taken at eight paces.”
“Your cat dancers.”
“Not mine, but yes. And I’ve asked the sheriff to make some inquiries, this time for what we call ‘cowboys’ in the sheriff’s offices throughout the state. If we can get the locale of the phone booths and some names to coincide, we have a shot.”
“Is your sheriff on your side in this?” she asked.
“I think so, yes. I’ve kept him in the loop, and he’s a straight arrow. If there’s a bad apple in his office, he’ll crush it.”
“Can you get him to task me for those two pattern analyses? I want some top cover.”
“Absolutely,” he said. “You think these guys will get onto you when you go poking around?”
She shrugged. “It would depend on where the data is
stored and how much attention they’re paying to their on-line accounts. I’ve got the tigers watching for James Marlor’s computer, in case Sergeant Cox has it.”
Cam stifled a yawn. “I know there’s something else I need to do, but damned if I can surface it right now.”
“Look,” she said. “You’re exhausted. There’s a guest suite down that hall. Go get a hot shower and some sleep. Clear your brain. I have work to do in the lab. Go sleep for a few hours.”
Cam found himself nodding. She was making perfect sense. Then he remembered the dogs were down in the truck. He explained the problem.
“Take them across the street. There is a ten-acre building site there. Then you can bring them up here.”
“They shed,” he warned her.
“Don’t we all, Just Cam,” she said with a sympathetic smile. “Go.”

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