The Firefly Page 8

  The elderly cat was stone-dead on the pantry threshold, curled into a grotesque ball and surrounded by copious amounts of bodily fluids. His neck was twisted sideways and his familiar old face was contorted in a rictus of agony, with every one of his teeth showing and his angry eyes wide-open.

  “What the hell happened here?” Connie murmured, aghast at the sight. The cat was clearly well beyond anything a vet could do. She set about cleaning up the mess, bagging the cat in a plastic kitchen trash bag, and setting the bag outside on the porch. The cat looked as if he’d been poisoned. The milk? she wondered. Or had Buster gotten into something outside in his wanderings, some rat poison or something like that in one of her neighbors’ yards?

  She retrieved the milk container from the fridge and smelled it. Nothing obvious there. The sell-by date was tomorrow, but it was skim, which kept well past the sell-by date. She smelled it again. Milk. Even so, she poured it down the sink and threw the plastic container into the trash.

  Poor damned cat, Connie thought as she splashed some Clorox on the floor and sponge-mopped the entire area. When she went to rinse the sponge, she found another lump of that mud. This one was just like the others, rectilinear, as if extruded by some tiny machine. She hefted the thing in her hand. This mud had come from a boot, a boot with a really aggressive tread. She owned one pair of hiking boots, but she hadn’t had them on for three weeks. This mud was fresh.

  Mud here and in the bedroom. Fresh mud. Has someone been in the house? she wondered.

  She put the mop down and set the piece of mud on the kitchen table, where it made a small damp stain. The other pieces had already been eaten by the vacuum cleaner. She checked the back door for signs of forced entry, but everything there was normal. She heard the winter wind stir the big old trees in the backyard. The branches of some dormant wisteria scratched at the windows along the park side of the house. Suddenly, the old house felt wrong to her. She thought of Cat Ballard and decided to call him.

  She went into the dining room and sat down. She tried the office and got the after-hours menu. She hung up, dialed his direct extension, and got a hit.

  “Homicide, Lieutenant Ballard,” he answered, sounding very official.

  “It’s me,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am? How can I help you?”

  She smiled. Very formal. The captain must be in listening range. “He’s right there, huh?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “I love it when you call me that,” she said, “Makes me feel so…mature.” She could just see the muscles in his face starting to twitch. “Actually,” she continued, “I think someone’s been in my house. And it wasn’t a break-in, either. Can you come by on the way home?”

  “You’ve got the wrong division, ma’am. You need to call burglary at extension four-one-two-three. They’ll probably be there for another half hour or so.”

  “So I’ll see you in forty-five, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Thanks, Cat. Believe it or not, I’m a little scared. Thanks for doing this.”

  His tone softened just a bit. “You’re very welcome, ma’am,” he said, and hung up.

  She put the phone down. She and Cat had met eight years ago at a cop promotion party. They’d dated for three years, then drifted apart, by mutual agreement. He’d met someone else, married her, and started a family, but occasionally he would call Connie just to talk. Two years ago, they’d met for lunch, ostensibly to celebrate his promotion to lieutenant, but with the help of one thing and another and more than a little nice wine, they’d ended up in her bedroom for a memorable few hours. He told her he was perfectly content with his marriage, and his wife had two little ones to keep her occupied. Unfortunately, neither of her babies had been a sixty-pounder, so there was now a lot more of Lynn than when they’d married. Which is when he remembered how much he had enjoyed time in bed with Connie Wall. She knew she should have been put off by his rather callous attitude, but actually the situation suited her. She had no intention of ever getting married, was increasingly leery of the singles scene with all its attendant health risks, and Cat more than adequately met her physical needs. It wasn’t as if she expected him to leave Lynn and marry her.

  An hour later, she heard his car pull into her driveway. She watched him drive all the way to the back of the driveway and stop behind her red vintage Shelby, which was parked right in front of the detached garage. The night was beginning to fog up, creating halos around the streetlights. He came around to the back door, as usual. She met him on the porch. He was just under six feet, and the closer he got, the bigger he seemed. He was three years older than she was, had sandy-gray hair, a usually smiling Irish face, and large, powerful hands.

  “Hey, there, ma’am,” he said with a disarming grin. He reached for her and she came into his arms gratefully, surprising herself. He kissed her and then drew back his head. “You are upset.”

  “Yeah, a little,” she said, drawing him into the pantry and closing the back door.

  “Shit, what’s that smell—Clorox?”

  She nodded and dropped into a chair at the kitchen table. She told him about the cat, and finding the mud bits. He peeled off his overcoat as he listened.

  “This is what they looked like,” she said, pointing to the bit of mud. He picked it up carefully.

  “Boot tread,” he said.

  “Yeah. That’s what the other pieces looked like, too. I have some boots that could do that, but I haven’t worn them in weeks.”

  “Where are they?” he asked. She pointed to the pantry area and he went out and retrieved them. He put one boot upside down on the table and tried to fit the piece of mud into the tread. “Not these boots,” he said immediately. “Where are the other pieces?”

  She got out the vacuum cleaner and then watched as he rousted out the bag and sliced it open, then went fishing among all the debris for the other two pieces of mud. Neither of them fit her boot tread. “This stuff is pretty fresh,” he said. “I think you’re right. Some mutt’s been creepin’ your house. Lemme go check the doors and windows. Put that mud in a plastic Baggie, and try to keep it intact.”

  He was back in ten minutes, shaking his head. “No signs of forced entry that I can see. You got a spare key?”

  She retrieved it from the row of cup hooks mounted on the wall of the pantry. “Any more of these?” he asked. She’d considered giving him a key a long time ago but had held back.

  “No,” she said, then frowned. “Actually, yes. There were two, I think. Although I haven’t used them for years.” She went back to the pantry but couldn’t find the second spare among the pile of mystery keys.

  “You keep it hanging out here by the back door?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “People do the damnedest things,” he snorted. “Lock the door, and then leave the keys in sight of the big glass window.”

  “So someone could have gotten in here, lifted one of the spare keys?” she said. “But nothing’s been stolen or anything.”

  “You know that? You’ve looked at your jewelry? Your folks’ silver service?”

  She blinked. “No,” she said. “So I guess I’d better go do that.”

  She checked the silver service, which was still in its box inside the buffet in the dining room. Then they went upstairs and she went over to her bureau. She kept her jewelry box in the lowest right-hand drawer. She hauled it out. She rarely wore jewelry, and the only nice things in the box had been her mother’s. She shook her head.

  “All here,” she said, and put it back. “Wait,” she added, still down on one knee.

  “What?”

  “This drawer,” she said, pointing to the bottom left-hand drawer. “It’s closed.”

  “So?”

  “It won’t close. It’s always an inch open. And look, there’s a scuff mark. Someone’s kicked it closed.”

  “What’s in there?”

  “Stockings. Panty hose.” She tugged at the drawer, but i
t wouldn’t open. He reached down and pulled it open, but even he had to work at it. They knelt side by side.

  “Anything missing?”

  She looked into the drawer, but the stockings were in a jumble and she couldn’t really tell. Then she opened the next one and pawed through it. There was a beige half-slip missing. And maybe some of her panties.

  “Possibly,” she said. “I’m not sure about the stockings, but I think some of my underwear is gone. And that drawer is never closed all the way. That I know.”

  “Was one of the mud bits right here?”

  She looked over at him and nodded. “Right there.”

  “Close enough. Probably when he kicked the drawer. Shit.”

  They both got back up and she went over to the bed and sat down on the edge. “I hate this,” she said softly. “Some pervert’s got a key? And he’s pawing through my underwear?”

  Cat sat down beside her and took her hand. “I’ve always been interested in your underwear,” he said. “Especially when you’re in it. But look, this could be a neighborhood creep, you know. Some kid who’s had a hard-on for you since he first found his pud. Or maybe a middle-aged peeper.”

  She shook her head. “This neighborhood is pretty geriatric. People here are contemporaries of my parents. Teenagers are extinct around here.”

  “Sounds nice. No young people at all?”

  She shook her head. “The paperboy is a seventy-year-old Vietnamese guy. Goddamn it, Cat, I don’t need this shit right now. What do I do?”

  “First, change the locks; then call a security service. Get a system put in. Sure you’re not wearing that underwear right now?”

  She gave him an exasperated look and he grinned. “Worth a thought,” he said. But then his face grew serious. “Lemme look outside, see what I can see. You got a flashlight?”

  He was back at the door in five minutes. “Get a coat and come out here,” he said. When she returned, he took her over to the side of the back steps. He went down on one knee and laid the flashlight flat on the ground, its beam pointing just over the tops of the wet grass in the direction of the park. She shivered in the cold evening mist. He motioned for her to get down so she could see along the beam of the flashlight as he swept it back and forth over the wet grass.

  “See it?” he asked.

  She could. The tips of the dormant grass were glistening with dew. But there was clearly a trail of tramped-down grass leading from the cedars beyond the driveway right over to the porch. He took her down to the cedars and they pushed their way into the densely packed trees, getting wet in the process. On the other side, which overlooked the darkness of Rock Creek Park, he knelt down again and fingered the dirt. Then he swept the light back and forth until he found the trail where Heismann had come up the slope. There was at least one footprint where the tread was obvious.

  “Not particularly careful about it, was he?” he said, shining the light down onto the boot prints. “He parks down there somewhere, comes up in broad daylight, walks to your back door, and lets himself in. Regular Cool Hand Luke.”

  “And takes underwear?”

  He stood up, switching off the light. “And maybe poisons your milk?” he said softly.

  Back in the kitchen, he put on some of her rubber cleaning gloves and retrieved the empty milk container and slipped it into a plastic trash bag. Then he peeled off the gloves and dropped them into the bag, too. He sat down at the kitchen table and got out his notebook. “Tell me everything you did once you came home.”

  She went through it, prompted from time to time by questions from Cat. He was specifically interested in the time interval between feeding Buster and finding him dead.

  “I should have kept that milk, I suppose,” she said.

  “As long as you didn’t rinse the container, the lab’ll find out what was in it. From what you’ve described, it sounds more like food poisoning of some kind. As opposed to, say, arsenic or strychnine.”

  They made a joint tour of the house, looking at every room, the closets, the stairs, the pantry, and even the outside garage. While he looked for any more mud or other signs of intrusion, he asked her to tell him if anything was out of position or missing. But beyond what they’d already discovered, everything seemed to be in order. They went back into the kitchen and he made some more notes. She asked if he wanted coffee. Cat looked at his watch and told her he had to get home. Connie gave him a wan smile. She suddenly envied him his home life. He took her hand across the table.

  “Look, Connie. I don’t know what to make of all this, but I was serious about the locks and an alarm system.”

  She nodded. “I will,” she promised. “Tomorrow.”

  He hesitated, then asked her one more question. “Could this have something to do with the clinic?”

  “Don’t start,” she protested, “We’ve been through all that.”

  He was shaking his head. “No, we haven’t. You clam right up every time I bring it up.”

  “That is—was—a private practice. By definition, the staff does not run its mouth about who the patients are or what procedures they had done.”

  He sat back in his chair and looked at his watch again. “I know,” he said. “But that fire gave those people all the privacy they’ll ever need. And you should know that the D.C. Arson guys think that whole deal was suspicious.”

  She stared down at the table. She’d read the newspaper reports about the four people she had worked with for years being roasted alive. But Cat was still a cop, and there were things she couldn’t share with him.

  “Cat,” she began, but he waved her off and got up.

  “Forget it,” he said. “Lemme use your phone to call Lynn. New department regs—we can’t use our cell phones to make personal calls.”

  He picked up the wall unit and punched in a number, waited, then listened. “This thing busted?”

  “Wasn’t this morning,” she said.

  “It is now,” he told her. “Your phones are dead.”

  She shook her head. “I called you an hour or so ago.” Then she realized she’d used the dining room table phone. Cat was ahead of her. He went into the dining room, listened to the phone, and then came back to take the wall phone apart. He popped the cover off with a penknife and then asked her for the flashlight. Then he gave her a sheepish smile, fished out a pair of reading glasses, and peered down into the guts of the phone. “Aha.”

  “Aha what?”

  “One of the wires has been cut. No, not cut. Just bent back off the terminal. This little red one here.” He fiddled with the wire, then listened to the handset. “Dial tone’s back.” He reassembled the cover and turned to look at her. “Whoever was here put some evil shit in your milk, then disabled the one phone you might reach when you did the macarena on the kitchen floor and tried to call nine-one-one. And you’re telling me this has nothing to do with those night clinic guys?”

  Connie bit her lip. “I can’t see how,” she said in a small voice. But of course she could. Everyone involved in the night clinic was dead except her. Because she hadn’t been there. Cat just looked at her, as if he were waiting for her to get it.

  “I can’t talk about it, Cat,” she said. “The whole premise of the clinic was secrecy. Hell, the patients’ names were all in code on the records.”

  “Who’s to care, Connie? Those guys are all toast.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  Cat gathered up his coat and the trash bag. “I’ll get our lab to take a look at this,” he said. “Don’t know how quickly, though. We find out this is poison, then I’m back, officially this time. And you may want to rethink your position on this privacy bit, Connie. Arson people declare it S.O., it’ll come to us. You still have that pocket gun?”

  Cat had given her a small, .45-caliber derringer-style handgun back when they were dating full-time. It was taped to the back of the drawer in her night table. She nodded.

  “Start carrying it,” he said. “Load it and carry it. Leave it in the car w
hen you’re going to face metal detectors, but otherwise, carry it, Connie.”

  “I don’t have a permit. And the District—”

  “Carry it, Connie. Whoever’s been screwing around in here won’t sweat the District’s gun laws.”

  Jäger Heismann stopped on the sidewalk in front of the U.S. Supreme Court just after 10:00 P.M. and pretended to gaze in awe at its magnificent facade. The temperature had dropped down into the high twenties, and he was wearing the loden overcoat, but with heavy black gloves and a homburg this time. He had changed his facial appearance with some extensive aging makeup, oversized tinted glasses, and a white wig. He had a thick rubber-tipped cane and had been affecting the labored steps of an old man ever since getting off at the Capitol South Metro station and walking up Capitol Hill on First Street. No fewer than four police cars had passed him along First Street, but none of the cops had given him a second glance. Even on a January night, old men took walks, and there were too many cops around the brightly lighted public monuments for night-time muggers.

  Visually sweeping the empty street for more police cars, he turned around slowly and looked across First Street toward the Capitol. The manicured lawns, now dormant, and the curved approach roads were all studded with antivehicle barriers, and there were police walking patrols out on the grounds and standing next to each visible entrance. He wondered if there were sentinels stationed high up on the lofty parapets of the Capitol, armed with Stinger missiles, looking back at him through night-vision goggles. Probably, he thought, but one solitary old man shouldn’t arouse much in the way of suspicion, even in terrorist-obsessed Washington. Unless he lingers too long or makes more than one pass along First Street.

  He’d been taking periodic walks on Capitol Hill now for almost six months, both during the daytime and at night, often in different disguises, just to get a feel for the target area. Not that he’d be anywhere near the building on der Tag. Earlier this afternoon, he’d taken a walk by the house the bank had rented for him. He’d occupy the house in three days and then start his final planning for both the attack and his getaway. He thought that he had a fair chance of escaping the American government’s security forces; Mutaib’s people might be another problem, because they knew where he had to be on the day in question. But what he’d had done at the clinic over the past year could give him the crucial sixty seconds he’d need to get clear of the house.