The Cat Dancers cr-1 Read online

Kenny shrugged. “You know how that goes. Fuzzy blackand-white shot shows a white guy, ball cap, aviator sunglasses. The right kind of truck. Plus, he put two IDs-his driver’s license and his Duke Energy ID card-in the tray for them.”

  Cam sat down at his desk. “When did all this happen?”

  “Eight-fifteen this morning,” Kenny said. “They called Marlor’s bank to clear it. The teller who cleared it made a computer entry, and that sent an alert to the manager. She didn’t get in until eight-thirty, and she sent that e-mail ten minutes later. I rolled on it right away.”

  “So he’s alive, then,” Purdy said.

  “So it would appear,” Cam said, although he wasn’t entirely convinced.

  Kenny caught the hesitation. “What?” he said.

  “This guy pulls out thirty-five K in cash money just before he disappears,” Cam said. “What the hell’s he need an additional five hundred bucks for?”

  That provoked a thoughtful silence.

  “Maybe he paid a pro-you know, to take out the two mopes and the judge,” Purdy said finally.

  “How many hitters you heard of who use an electric chair?” Horace said. “And if a pro used an elephant gun, he’d have had a target in view, not a house.”

  “Okay,” Cam said. “We have to follow this up. Refresh the BOLO system. Tell field ops to highlight the vehicle description, get it back up in priority with the state guys, too. Let’s focus on that pickup truck if he’s driving around town. Purdy, anything on the crispy critters?”

  “Not a whiff, boss,” Purdy said. “And you’d think-”

  Cam just looked at him.

  “Okay, anyways, I pulled Simmonds’s prison records, talked to some of the jerkoffs he hung with in the joint, see if they could put a face on him. No joy. The CO’s up there who knew him said K-Dog was not exactly a memorable guy.”

  “And Flash? Any south Triboro intel?”

  “His mother admits he was a stone jitterhead,” Purdy said. “Those are a dime a dozen down there. I’ve checked with the morgue a coupla times. No well-done John Does listed, here or anywhere in the state system.”

  “Okay, Kenny? What’s the fallout from last night?”

  Kenny retrieved a copy of the patrol report. Definitely two vehicles, neither one of them visually identified. Guy in the alley tied a clothesline to a trash can and dragged it a hundred feet down the alley, then cut the line. Garden-variety clothesline, available at any Wal-Mart. The guy out front parked long enough to leave a puddle of AC water, but no brass from the cannon, which fit with a bolt-action heavy-caliber rifle. No wits to anything. By the time patrol set up the sector sweep, no suspicious vehicles noted in that neighborhood.

  “Which is not exactly a closed-off area,” Cam said, remembering the posh neighborhood. There were lots of woods and small parks among the mansions, along with streams, trees, grassy median strips, and not many streetlights. Very private big houses set in a very accessible neighborhood. It occurred to him that if cops were doing this, they could have used cruisers, which the patrol screen would have ignored totally.

  “We’re exploring the rifle angle,” Kenny said. “I know guys in the sporting-arms business here in the Triad, so I’ll run that down myself.” Cam nodded. Like many cops, Kenny had an extensive gun collection. It was mostly handguns, but included some deer-hunting rifles.

  “Marlor had a carry permit,” Horace pointed out. “Maybe he has a collection?”

  “We didn’t see a gun safe or anything like that in his house, but, yeah, that’s worth checking, too,” Cam said. “Check shooting clubs, local gun ranges in his area.”

  They were taking notes, but Cam didn’t exactly detect enthusiasm. This team was used to doing one case at a time and executing a complex campaign plan when they went after a single individual. Searching for three MIAs was not their usual line of work. They’d turned on all the state and local find-the-subject machinery, and usually what happened next was a long wait. They looked expectantly at Cam.

  “Yeah, well, I wish I had some brilliant ideas,” Cam said. “The toasts could be buried in a farmyard somewhere, or puffing out plastic bags at some landfill. And as to Marlor, he could have done those guys and the shooting and then driven to Mexico.”

  “He’d need money,” Horace said, and then frowned when he remembered the thirty-five thousand.

  “He might have all he needs for right now,” Cam said, “And the rest he can get at electronically anytime he wants.”

  “Let’s freeze it, then,” Purdy said. “He tries for his cash stash, we nab his ass.”

  Kenny said it before Cam did. “He hasn’t committed any crimes. We can’t do anything to him until we can prove he’s done something. No judge would freeze his accounts. His only ‘crime’ right now is that he’s gone off the grid.”

  “Well,” Horace said indignantly, and they all laughed. Horace had a certain fondness for the idea of a police state, which was why it was probably a good thing he was retiring. They all knew that a police state was no longer entirely out of the realm of possibility.

  “The fact is,” Cam said, “we’re stuck on this chair thing. We don’t even know if it was real or Memorex. So let’s concentrate on the shooting incident last night. Forget any connection to the chair, and make it a straight shooting incident. Redo the neighborhood canvass. That’s a unique rifle-pull that string hard. Somebody check Marlor’s credit cards going back for a couple of years for the gun.”

  “That’ll take a warrant,” Kenny said.

  “Go ask Bellamy,” Purdy said. “She’ll probably say yes for a fucking change.”

  23

  “Well?”the sheriff said.

  “Somebody who looked like Marlor, in a truck that looked like Marlor’s truck, and with two pieces of Marlor’s ID, cashed one of his checks for five hundred bucks at a drive-up window today.”

  “Or put another way,” the sheriff said, “James Marlor cashed a check this morning.”

  Cam reminded him about the thirty-five grand he’d taken out before he vanished. The sheriff asked if there’d been any big debts paid off-like the mortgage-with that money. Cam said no. The sheriff swore when he saw the hole in his argument.

  “The neighbor lady taking care of his house had the checkbook and her signature on the account card,” Cam said. “I’m going to ask her to see if there are any checks missing.”

  “What will that prove, even if there are?” Bobby Lee asked. “Marlor could have taken one or two with him.”

  That was certainly true. It was Cam’s turn to swear. Another damned dead end, but he was still going to ask the question.

  “Okay,” the sheriff said. “I’ll call McLain on the secure videoconference line. Might as well clear the air.”

  “He’s in Washington, according to the Charlotte office.”

  “Surely they have secure comms facilities in Washington,” Bobby Lee said. “But I’m still not convinced that we’ve got some wrong cops here. You getting all the assets you need to find these three guys?”

  Cam nodded, then told him what they were doing, which was mostly spinning their wheels.

  “I’m going to ask for some help from the state on this chair thing,” the sheriff said. “In the meantime, no more meetings with that Indian woman. We don’t know who she’s really working for, and that always makes me uneasy.”

  “Last night, she was going solo, I think,” Cam said. “She still wants someone’s head for what happened to her uncle.”

  “Not for money, then?”

  “Negative. She was pro bono with the Bureau, and she didn’t come near asking me for money to help out. I think it’s personal.”

  “Personal’s not professional, by definition,” he said. “Keep the investigation in the official loop for now. I’ll let you know what I get from SBI.”

  Cam thanked him and went back to his office. Going to North Carolina’s State Bureau of Investigation might be a good move. The SBI existed to provide state-level assets to local law; al
l a sheriff had to do was ask. North Carolina’s SBI agents were good people; Cam’s guess was that Bobby Lee might also broach this other problem with their Internal Affairs experts.

  In the meantime, his people were supposedly all in motion finding their three targets. But if this was a vigilante problem, some of them might be just going through the motions. Especially one.

  With a great deal of reluctance, he kept coming back to sergeant Kenny Cox. Kenny was eight years his junior, and, as his deputy, the logical choice to take over MCAT whenever Cam hung up his gun belt. He was originally from southern Virginia, raised in a farming family, and had a degree in criminology from a junior college. He’d served in the army and had achieved the Ranger designation before transferring to the Provost Marshal Corps. He’d done one and a half hitches and then gotten out, for reasons never clearly explained in the time Cam had known him. He suspected it had something to do with Kenny’s growing impatience at having to take orders from shavetails with zero military police experience but with plenty of instant authority over him.

  He’d ended up in Triboro in pursuit of a young lady, or so he’d said, and that aspect of his nature hadn’t changed one bit. He was reportedly a world-class skirt-chaser, but disarmingly up-front about it, and the women to whom he paid attention seemed to sense that and go with it. Cam had once asked him if he was ever going to get married and settle down, and he’d asked Cam to name one good reason to do that. Cam told him for the comfort of his old age, and Kenny allowed as to how old age wasn’t something he was going to plan for. His parents had both died in their late fifties from lung cancer. Kenny was a smoker himself and positively defiant about it whenever the subject of smoking and health came up. He once said that one of the advantages of being a cop was that there was a ready-made solution to the problem of a long-term wasting illness.

  He affected a cowboy attitude, but he was actually a highly competent detective who embraced technology in the pursuit of bad guys. He was also a natural leader. Some of that had to do with his imposing size, but he had a force of personality that tended to put him out front anytime something got going. He’d been involved in three shooting incidents during his career, all cleared as righteous. That was higher than average in the Manceford County Sheriff’s Office, but not unheard of, especially for someone who was SWAT-qualified. There’d been an equal number of incidents in which Kenny personally had talked a barricade subject down, and one where the subject had given it up the moment he saw Kenny, in full SWAT gear, step into the house and look at him.

  He was something of a legend among the younger single guys in the sheriff’s office, but not because he went around telling tall tales. In fact, he took the opposite approach, letting other people tell the tall tales and then just grinning innocently about it. Cam happened to know that he wasn’t much of a boozer and that he was a master of discretion when it came to his love life. Once in awhile, the MCAT crew would retire to one of the cop bars in the area, and Kenny was always the first to leave, usually hinting that he had some sweet young thing waiting. Maybe that was all true, or maybe it was just Kenny’s way of keeping the legend alive. The one and only time Cam had seen him really drunk was after one of his deer-hunting buddies had been killed in a SWAT operation. Kenny hadn’t been on the run that day, but the guy who’d shot his friend was a three-time loser who’d been let out on bond by none other than Annie Bellamy, as a matter of fact, once again because of a procedural screwup.

  The county cops had gathered down at Frank’s Place, a bar and grill favored by the Manceford County deputies over on the western edge of town. Cam had found Kenny drinking alone in a corner booth, and despite some warning looks from some of the other guys as he approached, Cam joined him. Kenny had been drinking Jack Daniel’s and had more than his load on, to the point where Frank had already picked up Kenny’s keys. Anyway, that was the first time Cam heard Kenny really unload on the subject of lawyers, judges, the criminal justice system, and the simplest cure to the problem of rising crime-namely, regular doses of twelve-gauge justice, preferably delivered from a darkened cruiser late at night.

  Cam knew Kenny was drunk, sad, and furious all at the same time, but this was a side of his deputy he’d never seen. Kenny’s face and voice revealed a potential for homicidal violence that was entirely consistent with both his size and aggressive nature but not with his being a supposedly mature and professionally seasoned cop. The booze overload finally propelled him out into the back parking lot for some purgative relief, after which Cam ran him home. Kenny had sat in the right front seat of the Mero, his head hanging out the window. Kenny lived alone on an old farm place on the banks of the Deep River, southwest of town, and they’d spent the remainder of the night drinking coffee and solving the problems of the world. By the time Cam left at dawn, the Kenny he knew was back and the murderous red-eyed monster who’d wanted to soak every single one of those wet-brained, creeping Jesus, Communist do-gooder, robe-swishing, gavelwielding sons and daughters of diseased whores in vats of battery acid had slouched reluctantly back into its lair.

  Cam had entertained some similar sentiments from time to time. He’d once toyed with the idea of getting a law degree to improve his resume, so he went over to UNC and took the L-SAT exam, which he failed miserably. He made an appointment with one of the law professors and asked what had happened. “Simple,” the professor had said when he looked at Cam’s test report. “You don’t think like a lawyer; you think like a human.” The test was rigged to allow the applicant to find either the just solution or the legal solution. Cam had gone for justice every time, which meant that he would never make it through law school. “The test did you a favor, young man,” the professor said.

  And that had been Cam’s problem with lawyers ever since: They examined criminal incidents from the perspective of the law, as they were supposed to. They applied their abundant intelligence, a body of complex ancient law, elaborate procedure, and the nicest sense of professional ethics to people who were hatched out on the margins of civilized society, hadn’t the first idea of right and wrong, and whose total intelligence manifested itself in cunning. The lawyers were never present when the cops caught these things, often still awash in the blood and gore of their victims, a sticky knife in one hand and blood lust glowing in their beady little eyes even as they were trying to figure out how to get out of the corner they were in yet again. That was when every cop out there, at one time or another, looked around for a club.

  Senior cops would tell junior cops just to put it away, saying that they didn’t want to get down there in the blood gutters with the animals. But the truth was, the longer one was in the cop business, the more one realized that the stinking killer cuffed in the backseat was going to get hosed down, cleaned up, and dressed in the first clean clothes he’d ever seen. Then he’d be taken into the cathedrals of The Law to appear before all its high priests, with a fair chance of getting away with whatever heinous crimes he’d committed, depending not on what the little monster had done but on how good or inept the opposing lawyers were when they eventually played their intellectual game.

  So, what to do next? His personal style would be simply to ask Kenny if he was running a vigilante squad, but that obviously wasn’t on, given the notoriety of this case. Internet service providers around the world had embargoed the original execution scene postings, but enough people had downloaded the video clips to keep the thing very much alive in all sorts of chat rooms. Assertions by police and other authorities that the execution scenes weren’t real rang increasingly hollow each day the two minimart heroes remained missing, and it was only a matter of time before one of the big news organizations ran a special, putting the videos together with the shooting at Annie’s house. Cam could still hear that voice from the crypt saying, “That’s two.”

  The sheriff’s secretary called and asked that he come down to the secure communications room for a video teleconference. Steven Klein was already there when Cam arrived, and Bobby Lee came in a momen
t after Cam did. They took their places in front of the camera bank, and then Bobby Lee explained to Steven what he was going to talk to the FBI about. Steven was appropriately horrified, as this was the first he was hearing about it.

  “Well, it’s more of a possibility that we’re exploring,” Bobby Lee said. “Lieutenant Richter here gives it better legs than I do right now, but since he’s had indications the Bureau people in Charlotte think we have a problem, I’m on with special agent McLain in”-he glanced at his watch-“three minutes. He’ll be speaking from Washington, apparently. Lieutenant, fill Mr. Klein in, please.”

  Cam went through it with Steven, who just sat there and listened. He was an inveterate note-taker, and the fact that he wasn’t writing any of this down showed that he knew how explosive it was.

  “That’s all so circumstantial,” he said when Cam was finished.

  “This whole mess is circumstantial,” Cam said. “The Bureau’s public position remains that there’s no physical evidence that the Internet executions are real. But that big-game rifle at Judge Bellamy’s house, that was real.”

  Steven shook his head. “We have plenty of nut jobs right here in the Triad who might want to do that. How do you tie this shooting to the chair thing?”

  Cam started to explain, but then the video circuit came up and they saw Special Agent McLain materialize on the forty-eight-inch main display screen. The red lights on all three face cameras came on, and the technician who established the link announced over the speakers that the connection was secure and that he was isolating the room.

  “Gentlemen,” McLain said, looking a little stiff in his suit and tie. The camera shooting him focused on the top third of his body, so if there was anyone else in the room, they weren’t able to tell. It being the Bureau, they were probably taping everything.

  The sheriff introduced Steven and Cam in case McLain had forgotten their names, then got right to it. “Mr. McLain, we’re hearing that the Charlotte field office thinks there might be a vigilante problem here in the Manceford County Sheriffs Office,” he said almost pleasantly. “Naturally, that disturbs me, so I thought I’d clear the air, one way or another.”