The Cat Dancers cr-1 Read online

  “May I ask where you got that, Sheriff?” McLain asked. Bobby Lee looked over at Cam expectantly.

  “I had dinner the other night with your computer consultant, Jaspreet Kaur Bawa,” Cam said. “She voiced the opinion that, contrary to published Bureau opinion, you all felt the execution videos were real, and that because of the way the threat was sent to Judge Bellamy, someone inside our system either sent it or provided the access. This was before the shooting incident at Judge Bellamy’s house.”

  “Whoa,” McLain said. “What shooting incident?”

  Bobby Lee got an annoyed look on his face. “I assumed that had been reported to your field office,” he said.

  “I’m on temporary duty in Washington, Sheriff,” McLain said. “It may have been reported. What happened?”

  The sheriff gave him the essential elements. McLain nodded when the sheriff was finished. “I think Ms. Bawa overheard a conversation,” he said, “rather than an official statement of Bureau policy. People are of two opinions on the execution videos, as I suspect they are in your shop, Sheriff. The policy, on the other hand, is that without physical evidence, the Bureau will not proceed.”

  “Okay,” Bobby Lee said calmly. “What’s behind all the conversation, then?”

  “Our computer-lab types talked to your Computer Crimes people,” he said. “To get a system description on your security hierarchy. Ms. Bawa was part of that discussion. The consensus was that your system is reasonably effective, so logic would dictate that the E-mail came from inside the system. Actually, based on the password setup, probably from another judge. In our opinion.”

  “In your opinion,” Bobby Lee prompted.

  McLain shrugged. “One could argue it wasn’t much of a threat,” he said. “And if judges want to snipe at judges, that’s their prerogative. No crime, for one thing, and judge-to-judge communications are privileged. That’s why we didn’t share our opinions. Any signs of the two purported execution victims, by the way?”

  “Nope,” Bobby Lee said. “Nor any sign of our prime suspect, James Marlor, either.”

  What about the check? Cam thought, but then decided to keep his yap shut for a change.

  “Well, that’s a pisser,” McLain said. “I happen to be in the ‘Maybe it’s real’ camp, but I must reiterate-we won’t get into it until there’s physical evidence of a crime. Bodies, I’m talking about. And even then, we might not take it on. Washington headquarters has a point: We spin up on this one and we’ll create a cottage industry of Webheads generating drama for our investigatory pleasure. Did you say you have that judge under police protection?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, I’d suggest that’s where you need to start, Sheriff. Make the assumption that it was cops doing that, or not-that’s your call, of course. You said you flooded the area with patrol units right after the shooting. Canvass the neighborhood-see if there were cop cars out there before the shooting. Like that.”

  “Believe it or not, we’re already doing that,” Bobby Lee said somewhat heatedly.

  “No offense intended, Sheriff,” McLain said, but Cam noticed he wasn’t smiling. “Your office has the highest reputation. But the hard part is that initial assumption. As I remember from my visit there, your rank-and-file people were really pissed when that judge let those subjects go. If you’re nervous about lighting that fuse, maybe get the SBI into it?”

  “I’ve got that in motion, too,” the sheriff said. That was quick, Cam thought.

  “Look, I’ve got a meeting,” McLain said. “Anything else to talk about?”

  “Nope,” the sheriff said. “Thanks for your time. Good-bye.” He hit a button on the table before McLain could say anything and the connection was broken abruptly. The screens went dark.

  “Arrogant sumbitch,” Bobby Lee grumbled.

  Steven disagreed. “No, they’re just staying at arm’s length,” he said. “Bureaucratically, that’s the smart thing to do right now, and in that outfit, Washington sets the policy, not the field offices.”

  “But that doesn’t mean Charlotte’s not working it,” Cam interjected.

  “Explain that,” the sheriff said, a suspicious look on his face. His jaw was set, which meant he was still angry at McLain.

  Cam leaned forward. “He didn’t react when I said his consultant had been talking out of school. I’m thinking he sent her to put us on notice. He knew I’d bring that back to you. As in ‘Officially, this electric chair thing is your problem, but we’re watching your local yahoo asses.’”

  “What about that ‘judge-to-judge’ business?” Steven asked. “That bothers me more than their speculations on the chair thing.”

  “Based on what Computer Crimes told me, it could just as easily be someone with access to another judge’s computer,” Cam said. “Not necessarily one of the celestial beings themselves. Once it goes over the Internet, they can trace back to an address, but not to whose fingers were on the keyboard.”

  “But isn’t that just their point?” Klein asked. “That message to the judge wasn’t on the Internet in the sky. It was on the in tra net. The judicial intranet.”

  “Whatever,” Cam said. “But I think he had one good point: Let’s focus on who’s behind the shooting, where we do have some tangible evidence of a crime. That might be more productive than this endless search for Marlor, Simmonds, and Butts.”

  “Not so fast,” the sheriff said. “It might be productive, but it can also be very dee-structive. I don’t want to start any wildfires in the Manceford County Sheriff’s Office based on one dinner conversation, Lieutenant, and that with a civilian consultant, I might add, who works for a federal agency.”

  “She called me, Sheriff,” Cam said.

  “Okay,” the sheriff said. “Enough of this shit. Lieutenant, you keep MCAT looking for Flash Gordon and his pal. And for James Marlor. I’ll think about this other business. I do not want you to start any internal investigations, disrupt the whole damned Sheriff’s Office, until I’ve had time to think it through and talk in detail with SBI. Steven, you and I need to talk.”

  That was a clear signal for Cam to go away, so he did. He went back to the office, which was empty. He called Marlor’s neighbor but only reached her answering machine. He asked her to see if all the checks were accounted for, especially one numbered 2499. That number sounded like the last check in a series. Then he took advantage of the fact that the rest of the crew were out of the office and called the field ops center and asked for the dispatch supervisor. He asked her to generate a list containing the names of every deputy who’d been signed out to a cruiser at the time of the shooting incident, and the call number of each cruiser. Being a cop, she asked what was going on, and, mindful of Bobby Lee’s warning about starting shit, Cam told her the MCAT needed to recanvass the neighborhood where the incident occurred. She said she’d send it by e-mail.

  The next call would be cutting closer to the line, but he decided to go ahead anyway. He called the district office’s three garages, and spoke to the maintenance supervisors. He asked each of them to generate another list, this one indicating by call number any cruisers that had been in for maintenance during the last twenty-four hours. The supervisors were all civilian employees, so none of them asked any questions and all three promised him their lists in the next hour, again by E-mail. Then, using his own computer, he printed out a list of all the vehicles owned and operated by the Sheriff’s Office. He crossed off the special-use vehicles-such as the war wagon for the SWAT teams and the mobile-lab vans-and counted up all the cop cars.

  With this list and the ones he’d requested, he would have the numbers of every cruiser in the Manceford County Sheriff’s Office that had been available for street duty at the time of the incident. He could subtract the assigned cruisers and the ones in for maintenance from the master list. That should leave only half a dozen vehicles. He could then go check to see where they were that night, and who’d been using them. He knew it was possible that street depu
ties could be involved in something like this, but it would more likely involve senior people, sergeants at least.

  He heard voices out in the main MCAT office, so he put away what he was doing and locked his desk. It gave him a strange feeling to be looking inside the Sheriff’s Office for criminal activity, but the more he thought about it, the more he had the feeling that it needed to be done. Especially since one of his own people might be involved. He knew he had to be very careful-Bobby Lee kept his finger on the pulse of the entire Sheriff’s Office better than anyone he knew. The sheriff had to be looking at him, too.

  24

  Cam was awakened in the night by the phone. It was Kenny Cox. Cam could hear the sounds of a crime scene in the background: tactical radios, vehicle doors opening and closing, people talking about setting tape, portable generators humming urgently.

  “The chair is real,” Kenny announced.

  “What’ve you got?” Cam asked, turning on the bedside light and squinting at the clock, which read 4:30. Of course.

  “I’m at the petroleum tank farm down by the rail yards, south Triboro. What we’ve got is a makeshift body bag. They decided to draw down a zillion-gallon diesel tank, and the pumps shut down due to a blockage when it was almost empty.”

  “And?”

  “They did a gas-free certification and then an open-andinspect. Found a bag. Looks like one of those big commercial laundry bags, about ten foot long. Plastic of some kind, nylon twine at the top. Only this one had K-Dog Simmonds inside.”

  “Oh boy. Sufficiently preserved for ID?”

  “Absolutely. Diesel cleans metal parts and apparently preserves human tissue just fine-even very badly burned human tissue. It’s him. You want to come down here? No media yet, but the night’s still young.”

  Cam did his standard morning ablutions and made it to the tank farm about forty-five minutes later. Since it was an industrial area, he drove his pickup truck. A city cherry picker was parked next to the tank, and there were several hardhatted union workers in evidence, doing what they did best-standing around. The crime-scene crew had a small area taped off around the base of the tank, and Herman Yarnell, the Manceford County medical examiner, was there, making his usual profound observation: “That guy’s dead, all right.” A lengthy immersion in number two diesel was masking what should have been a perfectly awful stench, although not entirely.

  Cam saw that it was Simmonds, and he had most definitely been southern-fried. K-Dog’s face perfectly matched the image imprinted into Cam’s memory at the end of Simmonds’s starring role in the first execution video. Cam felt a little bit sorry for him, but only a little bit. He was guessing that K-Dog now looked somewhat like those two people in the minivan when he and Flash got done setting them on fire. He wondered if he should call Jaspreet and let her come get some morbid satisfaction. But then, she’d already seen him die, and she’d been a believer right from the beginning.

  “What’s the estimated time of death?” Cam facetiously asked the elderly ME, who just stared at him blankly until some of the other cops started laughing. “You don’t know who this is, do you?” Cam said.

  He did not, so Cam explained it. He still didn’t get it. Cam gave up, remembering that county pathologists don’t get out much. That was especially true of Herman, who was rumored to really like his morgue.

  “Anybody check to see if there were two of them in there?” Cam asked Kenny.

  Kenny started to answer, but then he went over to talk to the visibly upset manager of the place to ask the same question. Minutes later, the workers bestirred themselves moving over to the cherry picker to take another look into the bowels of the big tank. Kenny came back over and Cam indicated that he wanted to speak privately. They moved away from the crime-scene technicians.

  “Now what?” Kenny asked.

  “Well, like you said, it’s real. The chair, I mean. That has to be Simmonds.”

  “I suppose we have to wait for forensics, but, yeah, that’s him. And something definitely cooked his ass.”

  “Stick with some body, ” Cam said, looking right at him. “The only question now is, Who?” If Kenny understood Cam’s challenging stare, he gave no sign. It was still just the two of them, sweeping against the entire criminal tide.

  “I give up,” Kenny said. “Who?”

  “Somebody with motive, opportunity, and means,” Cam said, reciting the standard murder formula. “My bet is still Marlor.”

  “I’ll grant you motive, and maybe means. But tell me about opportunity. How would a guy like Marlor even find a hump like K-Dog?”

  “Money,” Cam said promptly. “You know, stage something. Put the word out that he’s a-I don’t know. Publisher? Producer? Journalist? He’s offering to pay for K-Dog’s story. If it were me, I’d have called the producers of that show he went on and told them. They’d tell Simmonds, he and I would meet, and I’d show him some of that thirty-five K. Then we’d go someplace to do the deal and I’d bag his ass.”

  Kenny was shaking his head. “It might have been money,” he said. “But I don’t think scientist Marlor is the kind of guy who could do this by himself. Fry a guy and then get him into an oil tank? He had to have help.”

  The cherry picker’s engine revved up as the basket went high over the tank. A tank diver in a white plastic suit with an air-tank respirator was riding in the bucket with the operator.

  “Yeah, maybe,” Cam said, watching the bucket as it jerked its way toward the access plate. “But how many hit men come equipped with an electric chair? Three-tap with a silenced twenty-two Mag’s more like it.”

  “But how would Marlor get a commercial dry-cleaning bag?” Kenny asked. “And how would he get the body into that tank? You saying he rented a cherry picker? Came down here in the dead of night, unbolted that dome cover and then the access hatch, and dumped a hundred-plus-pound bag into an operational fuel tank?”

  “You see any surveillance on this place?” Cam asked, looking around. “Cameras? Random vehicle patrols? A fence, even?”

  They both looked around, and Kenny had to admit Cam was right. There were lights, but the tanks were huge, maybe a hundred feet in diameter and at least fifty feet high. The tops of the tanks were above the sodium vapor lights standards, so somebody climbing around up top would not be in the cone of light. There were wide gravel lanes between the rows of tanks, and a circular raised berm around each one, big enough to contain a small to moderate leak. But neither of them saw any video cameras, not one, and there was no fence around the tanks, either. There was a railroad siding on one side of the complex and a highway on the other. A string of tank cars was parked on the siding. The only fence was on the other side of the railroad tracks. Cam didn’t know how easy it would be for a pickup truck simply to drive into the tank farm, but if there was a checkpoint, it might not be a twenty-four-hour-a-day checkpoint.

  “Okay,” Cam said. “Those are all strings to be pulled.” The medical examiner walked over to where they were standing. “When can we get an autopsy report?” Cam asked him.

  “When it’s done,” Herman said amiably.

  “We think this individual was electrocuted intentionally,” Cam said. “As in executed in an electric chair. I’d like an opinion on what kind of current did this-AC or DC-and how much, if that’s possible.”

  The ME scratched his head with his ungloved hand. “I’ll have to do some research on that,” he said. “Not sure there’s a difference. Cooked meat is cooked meat. You say there’s a video of this?”

  Cam told him there was.

  “I’d need to see that, then,” he said. “AC and DC produce a slightly different arc color. This video in color?”

  “Oh yes,” Cam said. “Vivid color.”

  “Okay, then. Since this isn’t really the murder scene, I’m releasing him to transport.”

  Since Kenny was technically in charge of the scene, Cam looked at him for approval and he nodded. He already had a crew line-walking the area around the tank, and of
course the thing lying on the ground was now of interest to only the forensic pathologists. Cam spied a white TV van being stopped beyond the perimeter by a deputy.

  “Time for me to boogie,” he told Kenny. “I’ll get the word to Bobby Lee.” He looked back at the body and sighed. “I was really hoping these two humps were out in LA somewhere, where they belong.”

  “He’s exactly where he belongs,” Kenny said. “In hell. Precooked even.” Cam definitely heard a note of triumph in his voice. I’d also better tell Annie, Cam thought.

  25

  Annie was sitting at her office conference table with her clerk when Cam knocked on the open door and went in. They finished up and the clerk closed the door behind him. Annie pointed to the liquor cabinet secreted in the bookshelf and Cam fixed them each a scotch. They sat together on the couch. The light outside was beginning to fade toward evening, and the lingering glare through the windows revealed some lines and shadows Cam normally didn’t see on her pretty face.

  “So how’s the house arrest going?” he asked.

  “Long,” she said. “Especially now that this chair thing is real.”

  He nodded. “Seems so,” he said. “The pathologists may have a different opinion, of course, but I saw the body.”

  “Great,” she said, and stared out the window. “So now what?”

  He moved closer to her and rubbed the back of his hand across her cheek. Her skin felt faintly powdery, but the small bones of her face were tangible, which meant she’d lost some weight. “I wish I could go over there and just let you sleep in my arms,” he said.

  She folded her face into his hand and nodded. “I’m being the big brave judge,” she said, “But I’m also scared.” She turned to look at him. “Was that a cop who fired that cannon at my house?”