The Cat Dancers cr-1 Page 15

  “I don’t know,” Cam said. “And Bobby Lee doesn’t care much for my theories along that line.”

  “You’ve talked to him?”

  “He’s the Man in this outfit. He’s not anybody’s friend, but I believe he’s honest. I can’t see him condoning vigilantes in his bailiwick, but just the whisper of an accusation like that would tear the place apart, so I’ve talked to him and only him.” As he said it, Cam realized that wasn’t entirely true. He’d also talked to Jaspreet Kaur Bawa. As usual, Annie read his feeble mind. “What?” she said.

  He told her in greater detail about his dinner with Jaspreet and the vibes bouncing around the FBI’s Charlotte field office. He also told her about their teleconference with McLain, and that the sheriff was talking quietly with the SBI.

  “Too many people talking,” she said. Your secret won’t be a secret for very long. Look-I have to get home. The FBI is sending your fancy computer expert friend to take a look at my computer. Apparently they think I compromised the judicial intranet and that’s how bad E-mails are getting through.”

  “You do access it from home?”

  “Of course-we all do. It’s supposed to be secure. How ’bout an escort?”

  Cam went to get his car while she closed up chambers and retrieved her car. He followed her back to the house and they continued the conversation in her study. “What’s really worrying me,” he said, “is the fact that we can’t find this Marlor guy.”

  “What’s worrying me is that someone might be trying to kill me,” she said, matter-of-factly, ever the judge. “Either some guy the whole world can’t find or some cops who are right now just biding their time, waiting for the heat to dissipate or the budget people to pull off the watchers.”

  “Can’t you take a vacation? Go to Europe or something?”

  “And what-postpone the inevitable? Whoever killed those two men went to extraordinary lengths to do it-an electric chair, for God’s sake! And then put at least one of the bodies in a place where it had to be found, instead of burying it up in the mountains somewhere.”

  “I don’t know, Annie,” Cam said. “Say it is cops. They’ve iced the two perps who did the crime, not to mention putting the fear of God into you. Sent you a threatening E-mail via a supposedly safe circuit. Fired a big rifle into your house. They’d have to know you’re scared-the deputies stationed here have to be talking about it at the district office, in the cop bars.”

  “Wonderful,” she said.

  “But here’s what I’m saying: it’s a huge step to go from harassing a judge to killing a judge. If it is cops, they’d have to know that the entire federal and local law-enforcement machine would turn on them, find them, and execute them, in this state. If they do nothing else, they’ve achieved their warped sense of justice already. I just can’t see it going past harassment.”

  She turned to look at him. “And for how long do the elephant guns through the windows go on? Until I resign from the bench? Is that what they want?”

  Cam threw up his hands. “I don’t even know if ‘they’ exist. Some kind of cop vigilante squad, I mean. It could be Marlor doing this stuff.” He told her what McLain had said about another judge sending her hate mail. But she’d hit on something there-if it was cops, getting her to resign from the bench would be a victory in some quarters of the Sheriff’s Office. Kenny Cox, for one, would be elated.

  “Well, whoever’s doing it can forget that shit,” she said, finishing her whiskey. “I’m not going anywhere. Bobby Lee issued me a carry permit yesterday and I’m packing a three fifty-seven from now on. Any more shit starts, I’m shooting back. You can put that word out in the cop bars if you’d like.”

  “I don’t go to cop bars,” Cam said. “And what do you know about shooting a Mag?”

  “You showed me, remember?”

  “That was many years ago,” Cam said. “I’m not even sure I could handle a Magnum pistol right now. My hands are getting old. This forty-five is a handful as it is.”

  She got up, went to the desk, and pulled out a shiny Smith amp; Wesson, took a fair to middling two-handed combat stance, and pointed it at the study door, right at the very moment the outside deputy knocked and opened it. His expression became quite interesting; if Cam hadn’t started laughing, the deputy might even have fainted. Annie lowered the gun, apologized, and shook her head.

  “What, Deputy?” she said in an embarrassed voice.

  “Um,” he replied, probably wondering about the state of his underwear, “There’s a delivery for you, Your Honor.”

  “What kind of delivery?” Cam asked. He hadn’t heard any vehicles.

  “FedEx. He said he didn’t need a signature.”

  Cam got out his trusty pocket tape recorder and turned it on. “Sure it was a FedEx truck?”

  “Yes, sir, a white van. You know the kind, had the FedEx sign on the side. Guy brought the package to the front gate, did his scan thing, and handed it through.”

  “You expecting FedEx?” Cam asked Annie. She shook her head.

  “Describe it, Deputy,” Cam said, making sure the voiceactivated recorder could pick up the deputy’s words.

  “Box of some kind, wrapped in brown paper, about the size of a shoe box, maybe a little bigger. Heavyish. Brown plastic tape. I didn’t look at the address label.” He pointed behind him. “It’s right out here, on the-”

  “In here,” Cam said, motioning for the deputy to come all the way into the study and close the door. “Okay. We’re going outside right now, through these French doors. Where’s the inside guy?”

  The deputy told Cam he’d switched stations with his partner, who was now covering the gate.

  Once they were all outside, Cam had the deputy call into operations and give the code for a possible explosive device and then the code for Annie’s house. Then they moved to the other end of the swimming pool complex. Cam told the deputy to come up on his secure radio circuit and describe in detail to operations what they had, and then he gave the deputy his pocket recorder and had him describe everything he could remember about the FedEx truck, the driver, and the package in case it went boom in the night. The deputy said the driver had been a white guy, medium, medium, tinted glasses, FedEx ball cap, white shirt with FedEx logo, dark pants, no distinguishing scars or marks. The guy had been in a hurry, didn’t say much.

  Annie asked Cam discreetly if maybe he was overreacting. “It might just be a FedEx package, Cam.”

  “It’s well after six P.M.,” Cam said. “The FedEx guys, the UPS drivers-they’re all back at their stations, filing the day’s reports. Anybody could make a magnetic FedEx sign, slap it on a white van, and nobody’d pay it any mind. So we play it safe.”

  The bomb squad got there in twenty minutes, during which time the four of them waited outside, swatting at lateseason mosquitoes. Finally, Cam told the deputy to resume his patrol of the grounds. He figured that if it was a bomb, it would trigger when opened and not by some timer, unless the deliveryman had pushed a button inside the package when he’d handed it over at the gate. Cam wasn’t going in there to find out. They continued to wait outside while the explosive guys did their thing, which ended when they launched their recovery robot into the hallway to grab it up and take it out to the transport truck, which hauled the object away.

  While they were standing there, Jay-Kay Bawa and a man who looked like an FBI agent came around the corner of the house. Cam introduced her to Annie Bellamy, and then the two women stepped aside to talk. Cam asked the agent if he’d been told what was going on; the man replied that they’d been out front for awhile, and that he’d made a report back to Charlotte.

  “We couldn’t get through the perimeter cops. It was Jay-Kay there who talked her way in and then came and got me.” He looked around. “They think it’s real?”

  The bomb squad’s supervisor, perspiring in his body armor, came out to where they were waiting.

  “Sure looks like one,” he said, “Although the sensor pack didn’t alarm on n
itrates or anything. But it’s heavy enough, and there’s no FedEx bar codes on the package. If it doesn’t go boom when they take it out to the range, we might get some decent forensics off that wrapping tape.”

  “The deputy said the driver scanned it,” Cam said.

  “Then he was acting,” the supervisor replied. “No bar code there to scan.”

  “Did you sweep the house?” Cam asked.

  “Yep,” he said. “Nothing overt.”

  “Because there was no one in there for twenty minutes, and for at least some of that time I had both deputies outside.”

  “One of your guys had to come open the gates for us,” he said.

  “Your Honor,” Cam said to Annie, “It’s safe for you to go back in the house. Can I ask that you and Deputy Arnold here do a walk-through, see if anything’s out of place or disturbed?”

  “Just me, Lieutenant,” she said. “If that was a bomb, I’m very much disturbed: Ms. Bawa, come along. You can look at my computer while we do a walk-through.”

  Cam told Annie sotto voce to come to his place once all the noise subsided. Then, since he couldn’t think of anything else to contribute, he went back to his office to write it up. He called the sheriff at home later that evening to report on what the bomb squad had discovered. It hadn’t been a bomb. But it hadn’t been a legitimate FedEx package, either. FedEx had no record of a delivery to Annie’s address, and Cam had been right about when the deliverymen returned to their stations for the day. The bomb squad had taken the package apart with their disassembly robot out at the bomb range, which was equipped for night work. They found a common cardboard box inside, and that contained a brick wrapped in bubble wrap. There were no wires, trigger mechanisms, or clocks. There was nothing unique about the brick or the box, and the brick had apparently been washed in diesel oil to get rid of any traceable elements. No prints on the package, tape, or the bubble wrap. But someone had inscribed the outer layer of bubble wrap with the roughly drawn letters BFB in permanent ink.

  “And you can guess what that stands for, right, Lieutenant?” the bomb squad supervisor had said to Cam.

  Cam absolutely could. Could have if he’d wanted to, that is. “Send me a report,” he’d said. “And we need some internal discretion on this, for reasons I can’t discuss right now.”

  When he’d heard the story, the sheriff said for Cam to get a report off to the Bureau office in Charlotte first thing in the morning.

  “They already have it, Cam said. He told Bobby Lee about Jay-Kay’s being there at the house, and the fact that her escorting agent had made a report.

  “How’d our favorite judge cotton to somebody from the Bureau poking around in her computer?” Bobby Lee asked.

  “The judge is a lot more frightened than she’s letting on,” Cam said. “This bomb shit, even if it was a fake, scared her even more. She had no problems letting the Bureau take a look.”

  He told the Sheriff he’d send a preliminary report to Charlotte before he went home, and follow that up when he had the formal paper in from the bomb squad. Then he called Kenny Cox at home, but he wasn’t in. Out on yet another hot date, or ditching a white van somewhere down in south Triboro? Cam was tempted to beep him, but since there’d been no bomb, he figured it could wait until morning. The district had put a three-district call out for any white vans sporting a FedEx logo, but that was pretty much a hopeless endeavor. The driver had had at least a half hour to pull in behind some strip mall, take off the signs, and get on down the road, having nothing to worry about except an unlucky traffic stop.

  Cam generated a summary report for the Bureau and sent it down to their secure communications facility. Then he checked his voice mail and listened to a message from Marlor’s neighbor down in Lexington. She’d looked in the checkbook, and, yes, there was one entire page of checks missing from the very end of the current series. She hadn’t noticed because she was still using checks in the front of the book, as she was writing only a few checks a month. The check numbers missing were 2497, 2498, and 2499, the last three in the book.

  She had notified the bank, which informed her that number 2499, a check in the amount of five hundred dollars, had been cashed in Winston and that they would issue a stoppayment order for the other two checks-for a standard fee, of course. Cam decided to go out and get something to eat. He’d tackle all this in the morning. But first, he wanted to swing by Annie’s house to make sure she was all right and to see what, if anything, Jay-Kay might have found in Annie’s computer. He’d made it out to the parking lot and was fishing for keys when his beeper went off. It was a message from field operations. “Call home, E.T.-911.” Those last three digits blinking on his pager meant something very bad had happened.

  26

  Cam unlocked his car, slid into the driver’s seat, and used his Sheriff’s Office cell phone. The operator patched him through to the operations supervisor, who informed him that there had been two bombs at Judge Bellamy’s place after all. The second one had worked like a fucking charm.

  Cam was struck speechless as a cold wave of acute nausea swept through his midsection.

  “Lieutenant, you there?” the sergeant asked.

  Cam found his voice. “Yeah, I’m here. The judge-is she…”

  “Oh, yes, sir, she, her car, and her garage. Apparently, it was a big fucking bomb. I’m fixing to beep the sheriff right now. You going on-scene?”

  Cam nodded, and then realized the sergeant couldn’t see that. “Affirmative,” he croaked, and hung up. BFB-just like the brick package had promised.

  His hands were shaking and suddenly he couldn’t see all that well in the semidarkness of the police lot. He sure as hell couldn’t drive right now, so he called back into the operations center and asked for a cruiser to take him out there. He met the car out front on Washington Street and they headed out to Annie’s neighborhood with sound and lights going. The deputy driving took one look at Cam’s face and tended to his driving.

  Annie was dead. Just when it seemed they might be able to get a life going again, now this. He couldn’t organize his thoughts or his emotions. He was just cold inside now, anxious to get to the scene, to do something. An image of the chair flashed through his mind.

  It was a blue-light circus out there by the time they pulled up. Cam badged through two perimeters and three different sets of scene-entry logs. He could smell the disaster over the wall before he could see it. A heavy pall of smoke still hung in the air, polluting the beautiful ambience of the grounds and shrouding the smaller trees. It looked like every light in the house was on, but then he realized that every window on the garage side of the house had been blown in. The main crowd was back at the garage, or where the garage had been, because it wasn’t there anymore. Only one end wall was standing, and not much of that one. There were crime-scene people, the bomb squad again, the fire department, of course, two ambulances, one with lights going, one with lights dark, and several deputies milling around with flashlights. It looked like the medical examiner’s people were working at the darkened ambulance, while the EMT boys were swarming around the one whose lights were still spinning. One injured, one dead. Not too hard to figure that out.

  The on-scene boss was the Sheriff’s Office watch commander for this shift, Lt. Frank Myers. Frank worked in the Major Crimes division. He was a big guy, also ex-Marine Corps, but he was of the gentle giant persuasion and well liked in the Sheriff’s Office. Cam headed toward him and found himself crunching through a thickening debris field as he crossed the dark lawn. His mind was in neutral, and the feeling of dread and nausea was returning. Part of his brain told him that he didn’t belong here just now, but he ignored that, pressed ahead, and got to where Frank was talking on a cell phone. The remains of Annie’s silver Mercedes smoldered in front of the garage foundations. Frank recognized Cam and cut off his conversation abruptly.

  “Jesus, Cam, I’m sorry as hell about this,” Frank said, which surprised Cam. It was not something that the officer in charge
on the scene of a bombing would say to the chief of the MCAT, and then Cam saw that several other cops were looking his way with expressions of real sympathy, as was Frank. It struck him then that his and Annie’s little secret may not have been so secret after all. He was overwhelmed for a moment, but then the situation intruded. Fuck it, he thought, taking a deep breath. Let’s get this over with.

  “Where is she?” he asked as quietly as he could, and Frank immediately pulled him aside. The other people were getting back to what they had been doing, but Cam noticed that there was a growing circle of space around the two of them out there in the ruined yard.

  “The judge’s remains are in that dark ambulance over there,” he said. Cam immediately turned in that direction but found that Frank had a hold of his arm and wouldn’t let go. Cam had to stop before he pulled himself off his own feet. He looked at Frank, who shook his head. “Don’t go there,” he said. “Keep what you got, Cam.”

  Cam tried to pull away again, but Frank was a big man, so then he just quit, which is when Frank let go of his arm and put a big paw around his shoulder. Cam felt tears streaming down his face. He didn’t know what to do, and Frank turned him gently away from the crowd of cops and lights and walked him out into the darkness of the lawn, still stepping through broken bits of wood, glass, and even metal-and possibly bits of Annie, Cam realized.

  Big fucking bomb.

  After a minute or so, he got control of himself, sort of, took several deep breaths, and asked what had happened.

  “Those FBI people left and then the judge decided she wanted to go out for a drive,” Frank said. “All of a sudden. Said the house was giving her the creeps, all this shit going on. The inside deputy informed the outside guy and central ops, said he’d go get the car. She said no, she’d get it, told him to meet her at the front gates.”

  “So he didn’t actually go with her?”

  Frank shrugged. “It was Arnold. He’s a second-year probationer, just off his tour at the LEC. She was a judge. He did what he was told.”