The Cat Dancers cr-1 Page 4

  “Hiawatha had it right,” said Horace Stackpole, the oldest detective on the team. “Hang him by his nuts and cut his fucking head right off.”

  “She’s an Indian princess, Stack,” Kenny said. “Not a Native American.”

  “Give a shit,” said Stackpole. “Hedge clippers would be the way to go. Dull hedge clippers. The manual kind.” He made the motion. “Lotsa fucking chops. You could sell tickets even, dollar a chop.”

  “You’d need to sell rubber aprons, too,” Tony offered. Tony was just a little bit weird.

  “I hope to God the families don’t see this obscenity,” Cam said, going back to his desk. “They haven’t sued us yet, but this would inspire even me to talk to a lawyer.”

  “Look at that little prick,” Kenny said, “Right out of a trailer park’s septic field and proud of it. Knows he’s bulletproof, too.”

  “Thank you, Judge ‘Let ’Em All Skate’ Bellamy,” Pardee Bell growled. He was one of two black detectives in the MCAT, the other being Billy Mays. Pardee was almost as big as Kenny, but not as tall, and he just loved to get in criminals’ faces, especially black criminals, and severely “punk ’em out,” as he was fond of saying. Everyone thought Pardee was on the team to provide some in-house muscle, but Pardee had a degree in computer science from NC State and could do some real damage with a desktop. Billy was called “Too Tall,” for obvious reasons; he was six eight, the team’s signals intelligence specialist and also a master at B and E. He had once shown up at a downtown gangsta-rap nightclub, decked out as a Masai warrior, complete with the appropriate edged weapons and pretending to be on a seriously bad ganja trip. He’d cleared the place out in one minute.

  Earlier in the week, the state attorney general had told Klein to cease and desist with all his bitching and moaning, pointing out that if the perp had thought he was in custody, then he was in custody, and the Miranda would have had to precede any allowable confessions. Since the SWAT sergeant had asked Simmonds flat out if he did it, with two or more armed gorillas sitting on his chest, the AG thought the thing was open and shut. Mostly shut. Word in the hallways was that the sheriff was trying to figure out how to step hard on McMichael’s neck without setting up the whole Sheriff’s Office for a lawsuit.

  Cam’s plan to send the guys out to beat the bushes on the two robbers hadn’t fared any better than Klein’s protestations. The sheriff had shot it down as soon as he got wind of it. Trying to avert even more serious consequences, Bobby Lee had already taken disciplinary action against Will Guthridge, suspending him without pay for two weeks and demoting him off the MCAT. Will was home, feeling both guilty and picked on, and the rest of the guys were pissed off at Bobby Lee and talking about the bad things that were going to happen to a certain sergeant. Cam knew that the sheriff had really been trying to preempt public opinion. Everyone was feeling the heat.

  Kenny stopped by Cam’s desk. “I sent you an e-mail report on James Marlor, the husband?” he said. “Turns out he’s a little bit more than just some timber cruiser.”

  “Couldn’t you just print it out and let me read it?” Cam asked. He was not fond of computers and all their works.

  “You gotta read your e-mail once in awhile, boss,” Kenny said with a malicious grin. He had embraced the world of the Internet years ago and was a true adept. Cam promised Kenny he’d look at it. Kenny politely reminded him to turn on his computer first. Then he and the detectives all left for lunch. Cam retrieved his mystery-meat sandwich from the office fridge and then reluctantly booted up his desktop.

  It turned out that James Marlor was not a forester, but a senior environmental engineer for Duke Energy. He was technically assigned to Duke’s headquarters near Charlotte, but actually worked out of his home, which was in Lexington, between Charlotte and Triboro. He’d been born and raised in southern Virginia and had a bachelor’s degree in forestry and a master’s in environmental science. He worked in the power conglomerate’s environmental-protection division. His specialty was the effects of coal-burning power plants on forest ecology. He’d done extensive field research, was the author of one book and two monographs on the subject, and also a candidate for a Ph. D. in environmental science at UNC-Chapel Hill. He’d been with the company for twenty-seven years.

  The late Vicki Marlor had been his second wife, and the deceased child was hers by a former marriage. His first wife had died in a car crash, the victim of a drunk driver. Whoa, Cam thought. Now he’s lost two spouses. No wonder there’d been no histrionics in the courtroom-brother Marlor had had some direct experience with grief. Prior to college and going to work for Duke Energy, he’d enlisted in the army and had attained the black beret of the Army Rangers. Tramping through the state’s forests must be good for him, Cam thought. He’s fifty-six, but he sure as hell doesn’t look it.

  Marlor had no criminal record, no tax problems, and no traffic offenses. And there was another surprise: he had been licensed by the state for fifteen years to carry a concealed weapon-the justification for this being that he had to go into some relatively primitive areas up in the Carolina mountain country. Got that right, Cam thought, mindful of some of his own experiences in them thar hills.

  Of interest was the fact that Malor had requested early retirement from Duke Energy two days ago. Cam wondered how the hell Kenny had dug that up. Corporate personnel departments were usually pretty closemouthed unless there was a warrant on the table. He started in on his sandwich, trying not to get too much of it onto the keyboard. So now what? he thought. Here’s a smart guy with a solid career suddenly shutting it all down after his wife and stepchild end up at the wrong place at the wrong time. Okay, he could see that. But what’s he going to do now? Cam wondered. An ex-Ranger, an outdoorsman, and a man who carries a concealed weapon. How would a guy like that react if he happened to stumble on a rerun of that talk show and see that worthless white trash acting out?

  Cam jotted down a reminder to talk to Kenny about doing a postincident follow-up with Mr. Marlor. He couldn’t shake the intuition that Marlor might go after those two. There’d been something in his face, something about his demeanor at that meeting after the court decision. Cam also realized that some of his instincts were driven by bureaucratic necessity. If Marlor did go after those two, he wanted the record to show that they’d covered this base at least once.

  Then he noticed that Kenny had sent two reports. He clicked on the second e-mail without crashing his computer, and saw that this one was on the “Indian princess,” as Kenny called her-Jaspreet Kaur Bawa, the minimart clerk’s niece. She’d come to the United States as a teenager to live with her aunt and uncle in Charlotte. The uncle was more father to her than her biological father, who had remained in the Punjab. Now a naturalized citizen, Bawa had graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill in only three years, with a double major in mathematics and computer science, followed by a three-year doctorate program in computer science from the Steinmetz Institute. Thirty-five, never married. Lived in a condo/office in Charlotte and did expert consulting work in systems engineering for mainly corporate clients, both in the United States and abroad. Her consulting fee was two thousand dollars per day, plus expenses, and there was a waiting list. She also apparently worked for the FBI from time to time.

  Not bad for thirty-five, Cam thought. Kenny had added some personal notes. Her hobbies included yoga, whitewater kayaking, and driving expensive cars. DMV records indicated that she drove a $115,000 BMW 760Li and had accumulated not a few speeding tickets. She was rumored to be a regular in the Blue Ridge Parkway night car-rally scene up in Swain County. Officially, the parkway closed at sunset, but the rally crowd would assemble on some secret signal on the segment of the parkway that ran through the Cherokee Indian reservation. They would then race for bragging rights.

  That last bit gave him pause. “Rumored to be”? Where the hell was Kenny getting this stuff? He made a second note to ask Kenny that very question.

  7

  That night, Cam took a wee dram of a boggy sing
le malt out to his back deck to watch night fall over the Carolina Piedmont. He lived alone with his two German shepherds in the northern part of Manceford County. His home was in a leafy subdivision called Lakeview, which backed up to the Lake Brandeman reservoir watershed area. The house was a one-story rambler with a large walk-out basement facing the backyard, which, in turn, led down a fairly steep hill to a small creek. The hillside rising up behind his property was an abandoned farm. In summer, he could hear the creek but not see it because of all the trees. He’d picked this area many years ago, after his divorce, and bought three adjacent lots on a cul-de-sac at the back of the subdivision while the bulldozers were still moonscaping. He’d built on the middle one and planted groves of Leyland cypress on either side for privacy.

  Cam would not have said that he lived alone, for the two shepherds offered amiable company. Frick was an Americanbred sable bitch who would happily amputate the extremities of any intruder. Frack, the larger of the two, was an all-black East German model. He was something of a blockhead, and he had a disconcerting habit of sitting down and staring at strangers, instead of running around and barking his fool head off. He had wolflike amber eyes, and lots of people were more than willing to believe Cam when he told them that Frack really was a wolf. As any dog owner knew, deterrence was 80 percent of the battle.

  With the notable exception of Kenny Cox and Tony Martinelli, the other MCAT detectives were married and apparently serious about it. Kenny was, by reputation, seriously devoted to the pursuit of any female who looked in his direction, much less smiled at him. Cam no longer pursued women, if, in fact, he ever had. He’d long ago discovered that pursuit could actually lead to catching one, and then life always got a whole lot more complicated-like when he had been married to the woman who was now the poster child for everything wrong with the criminal justice system, and the woman most hated by the Manceford County Sheriff’s Office, SWAT teams, and MCAT: Judge Annie Bellamy.

  His memories of marriage seemed more like a movie he’d watched as a teenager than as a sustaining personal memory. They’d both been young, on the make, and definitely on the move. Annie Bellamy had been an up-and-coming trial lawyer, and Cam a brand-new police sergeant with a college degree, a man who was going places in the Sheriff’s Office. All anyone had to do was ask him. Fortunately, as it turned out, they’d agreed to forgo having children in favor of lots of flashy catalog toys, ample credit-card bills, and a studiously energetic sex life. Any married couple who’d been together for a while would have known they couldn’t keep that deal going forever.

  Cam had broken out of the street-patrol force in record time. That was the good news. The bad news was that his quick advancement to detective just about guaranteed a long stint in his new sergeant’s rank, as older hands in the Sheriff’s Office exerted their influence to make sure the brash young college boy didn’t go too fast for his own, or their, good. And that had become the problem, or at least the casus belli, because his darling bride, all swishing legs, flashy smile, and that lightning quick litigator’s brain, went very fast indeed. He was still a detective sergeant earning his bureaucratic bones in a district office by the time she had stepped up to a partner’s office, and by then she had begun to move in very different economic and social circles. His boss at the time had been Connie Harding, a crusty captain of the old school, who was in charge of the district. He’d taken seven years to pin on sergeant stripes, and another five to make lieutenant. He’d pulled Cam aside one day and finally let him in on a secret, which apparently was no secret to anyone else-namely, that his wife was stepping out on him.

  “You’re the hotshot detective,” Connie had said somewhat sadly, Cam now realized. “Go check it out, Cam.”

  So of course he did and she was, and that ended that. They parted stiffly. With her six-figure income, she took over their joint financial obligations and even offered to pay him alimony. Being a good southern boy, and not too bright in the bargain, he had considered his pride and said no. She then made the mistake of marrying her current boyfriend, another lawyer, who was also married at the time of their little affair. In a parting gesture of disaffection, Cam had generously made the observation that if the guy had cheated on his first wife, he would surely cheat on his second. Within four years, the lawyer proved Cam right. A few years after that, she’d married again, this time to a money manager, who was substantially older and even richer than she was. Then one morning, the moneyman was found floating in his swimming pool, the body discovered by a twenty-five-year-old “executive assistant” who had supposedly just come over from the office to see why he hadn’t shown up for work. Except, of course, as things turned out, she’d been there all night-an apparently routine arrangement whenever Annie went on a business trip. Annie had been single ever since.

  Cam had kept track of Annie, however. She’d hurt his feelings, but over time he’d grown beyond that, understanding that a marriage based mostly on lust was never going to be a long-term thing. Now that she had taken marriage off her life’s agenda, too, they’d recently become friends again. Triboro was no longer the small southern town they’d started out in, but for people like Cam, who’d been there for most of his working life, keeping in touch with one’s ex was a routine social phenomenon. In some divorce cases, of course, it was more a matter of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer, but it had worked out better for them the second time around. They’d gotten together a few times, and then more frequently over the past two years. Cam figured they both appreciated the fact that there was no longer any element of competitive boy-girl pursuit, implied or otherwise, and certainly no long-term commitments being sought or offered. Plus, there was a store of knowledge about each other that made the context as comfortable as they wanted it to be.

  And then one evening-Cam wasn’t sure why, maybe just mutual horniness-they’d tried out the bedroom again. It had been better for both of them than anything in between, or so they told each other, and they laughed about that for a long time. They’d gravely set some conditions: no talking shop, and no fixed routines-his place one night, her place the next, that kind of crap. If one of them felt the urge to see the other, he or she would just call. It would happen or it wouldn’t. They didn’t go out to restaurants or parties where the socially prominent people went, but it wasn’t exactly some deep secret that they were seeing each other. They tried their best to keep it as private as possible, though. They’d solemnly agreed that if either one got bored with the other, they’d simply stop calling. Cam was beginning to think that in their own late-blooming fashion, they might be backing into the relationship they should have had when they were much younger. They both seemed to sense that the trick was not to talk about it, just to enjoy it. She’d even joked about putting Cam in her will, or if not Cam, then certainly Frick and Frack.

  The phone rang in the kitchen and he went to retrieve the portable phone. Speak of the devil: It was Annie. “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey, yourself,” he replied. “I was just thinking about you.”

  “Good or bad?”

  “I was thinking about your legs, actually,” he said, smiling into his scotch in the darkness. An owl called somewhere down along the creek. Another one answered. Frick woofed some criticism from a corner of the porch. “How they make that swishing sound when you wear tight skirts.”

  “Tight skirts are declasse just now,” she said, “especially at my age.” But he could tell she was flattered.

  “You ever sit on the bench with just your underwear on under those big black robes?” he asked. She had given up lawyering to become a judge about five years ago, although after two divorces and one agreeable probate, she was wealthy enough not to have to work anymore.

  “Is there book on that across the street, Lieutenant?”

  “Entirely possible, Your Honor.”

  “Well, you let me know when the odds are right and you’re on the long side, and maybe I’ll see what I can do,” she said, laughing. Cam loved her laugh.
It was throaty, bordering on a belly laugh tinged with the experiences of being an attractive woman for all of her adult life.

  “But hopefully you didn’t call to talk about my gambling jones,” he said.

  “No,” said Annie. “I’ve heard some stuff around the halls of justice.”

  “Stuff?”

  “Like detectives getting suspended and thrown off the MCAT, and a whole lot of political heat radiating from Raleigh, headed in our fair city’s direction.”

  Now that surprised him. What she was supposed to have said was that she wanted him to come over. No talking shop. “You heard correctly,” he said reluctantly. “Although that wasn’t really an MCAT deal.”

  “Guthridge was your guy, wasn’t he?”

  Cam didn’t say anything for a moment, taking a sip of scotch instead. Damn it, he thought. We had a deal. Plus, he wasn’t sure he wanted to talk to her about this mess, in which she had a starring role.

  “Technically, yes,” he said finally, and then explained what had happened.

  “I heard another rumor-that MCAT might be gathering a posse to revisit the minimart case.”

  Whoops, he thought. We definitely should have stuck to the rules. He wondered who her sources were. “Take the Fifth, Your Honor,” he said, trying to keep it light. “I’ve seen no evidence of said posse. You remember evidence, right?”