The Cat Dancers

by P. T. Deutermann

  “You’re talking accomplice to kidnap and murder, then,” the sheriff said. “Cops would know that.”

  “I don’t know, Sheriff,” Cam said. “Yes, they should know that. But I can see some of the cops I know being able to make a distinction between executing somebody and leaking a little information. It’s not like they were putting cops or cases in danger; just giving an opinion as to where the likes of K-Dog and Flash hung out.”

  “But legally—”

  “Yes, sir, I know. But these might be new guys, easily influenced by older and more experienced cops.”

  “So who are the doers?”

  “Jaded cops. Senior hard-case guys with ten, fifteen, twenty years of pent-up frustration with the system. Not management types, but street supervisors. Maybe not just cops—maybe some Young Turk prosecutors. Probably they start out as sympathizers and then a select few graduate to actual doers. White Eye told me the group consisted of only seven guys—no more, no less. That’s a very small action cell, and you don’t get to play with those guys unless you’re man enough to do go do something like this cat-dancing shit.”

  The sheriff went silent, long enough for Cam to wonder if he’d lost the connection.

  “You get yourself back here ASAP,” Bobby Lee said finally. “I can’t move on this at all until I have you here.”

  Cam said he would be trying to get the sheriff of Garrigan County to contain the incident as much as possible, restrict it to local consumption, but that he’d probably need some backup on that, sheriff to sheriff. Bobby Lee understood and took Sheriff Hanson’s office number.

  “I have my dogs with me,” Cam said. “So I’ll need to go home first. Want to meet there? I have the inquest proceedings here tomorrow—that’s at two—and then I can be back in Triboro by seven, eight o’clock tomorrow night.”

  “All right. And make sure you talk to that Bawa woman. She’s been calling all damned day.”

  He got through to Jay-Kay an hour later. She revealed that her tigers had managed to penetrate the statewide records in her search for patterns involving prisoners, defendants, judges, and unsolved perp deaths.

  “Penetrate,” Cam said. “As in covertly?”

  “No, actually, as in freedom of information, with a little help from some federal resources. But here’s the interesting point: We were shut out after only three search sessions. I cannot find out why or by whom.”

  “Shut out?”

  “Access denied, across the board. And it looks like a machine is doing it, as opposed to, say, some sys op at a keyboard.”

  Cam wasn’t sure what a sys op was. “So what do you do next?”

  “Now we’re doing it my way,” she said brightly.

  “I don’t think I want to hear this,” he said with a smile. “New subject: What do the jungle drums tell you about federal interest in me for the bombing?”

  “Nothing. Which in itself says something—namely, that there is a stone wall in place. They know I’m working with you, and so no one tells me anything.”

  “Can you do it your way with regard to that question, too?”

  “It’s technically possible, but I wouldn’t want to. Unlike most state agency computer systems, the federal networks look back at intruders rather forcefully these days. When are you returning?”

  “Very soon,” he said. “Things got messy up here, but productive in one sense. Tell me, have you had any interaction with Sergeant Cox?”

  “Not directly. But shall we perhaps talk about that when you get back?” She replied, all but telling him, Not on an open line, dummy.

  Exhausted, Cam went back to the cabin and took an allafternoon nap. He was awakened at sundown by the sound of someone knocking on the cabin door. The dogs were interested but not alerting him. Nonetheless, Cam still wasn’t ready to open the door and find one of Night-Night’s relatives wanting to have a word. He asked who was there.

  “It’s Mary Ellen Goode,” a voice called. “I think we need to talk.”

  Cam was standing behind the door in his long johns, still not quite awake.

  “Um,” he said.

  “I’m sorry. I woke you up, didn’t I?” Let’s do this: Meet me at the Sky Lodge in an hour.” She gave him directions and then drove away.

  An hour later, Cam was seated by a window at the Sky Lodge, waiting for Mary Ellen. He’d wondered about the name when he first drove up, as the building was an unpretentious log lodge house from the front. When the hostess took him through the bar and down a flight of steps to the dining room, he saw the reason: A wall-length window looked out over a gorge that dropped at least five hundred feet below to a rushing stream. He ordered coffee and tried to wake up. Mary Ellen came in a few minutes later, and he woke right up. She’d changed out of her Park Service uniform into a dress, put on a little war paint, done something interesting with her hair, and was turning heads as she followed the hostess over to Cam’s table. Cam, wearing jeans and a lumberjack shirt, felt underdressed.

  “Well, my goodness,” he said, getting up. “It’s a girl.”

  She smiled as she sat down. “It’s a woman, actually,” she replied. “And she’s here to apologize for what happened to you up there in the woods.”

  He sat back down slowly. “Apologize?”

  She ordered a glass of wine from the waiter, who dropped two menus on the table.

  “I haven’t been entirely honest with you about this cat-dancing business. I need to explain some things.”

  The waiter brought her wine and she put a serious dent in it. “Okay,” she said. “Here goes. This concerns my late fiancé, Joel Hatch.” She paused. “How do I describe Joel?”

  “Lieutenant Grayson said he was a bit of a cowboy,” Cam offered. “A TV cop wanna-be, to be precise. Someone who liked the role of cop better than that of park ranger.”

  She stared down at the table for a moment, not speaking, and Cam wondered if he’d been too blunt. “Did they tell you what happened that day?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Not at first,” she said, “But then later, I talked to some of the cops involved. In fact, he and I’d had some words about the way he was acting, some of the stuff he was doing. And then, afterward …”

  “Afterward, you felt guilty because now he was dead.”

  “A little bit, yes, I did.”

  “I can relate to that,” he said, and told her about the bombing incident and his own complicated relationship with Annie Bellamy. The waiter came back and they ordered.

  “I guess I’ve become a fatalist,” she said once the waiter had departed. “I think that when you fail to put a proper value on the people you love, the gods take them away from you.”

  “I think you take what life has to offer and make the best of it,” he responded. “We’re not in control. You were going to tell me something about cat dancers?”

  She smiled. “Nothing wrong with your focus, is there? Okay, cat dancers. I first heard the term from Joel. He’d heard rumors that White Eye Mitchell was doing some weird stuff up in the backcountry and that it involved feral mountain lions.”

  “Which do not exist,” Cam said.

  “Right.”

  “On the other hand, you never went looking, did you?” he asked.

  “No, we have plenty enough to do. The station is undermanned, and the park visitors keep us quite busy. But Joel took off a couple of times in the year before he died, and I think he was looking. Then he stopped talking about it.”

  “But he did use the term cat dancing?”

  “Once. I remember it. He said it was the coolest thing he’d ever heard of. For Joel, cool was a word that usually involved extreme danger. But he didn’t say exactly what it was, other than it meant getting very close. Then it was as if he realized he’d been indiscreet, and he wouldn’t talk about it anymore.”

  The waiter arrived with their food, and Cam used the distraction to think about how much he should tell her. He liked her and he trusted her, and she’d already figured out that the
re was an Internal Affairs angle to what he was doing up here.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let me ask you one more thing: If you thought Joel was mixed up in something ‘weird’ involving wild panthers, why didn’t you report it?”

  “You’re a career cop,” she said. “You know the answer to that.”

  He thought for a moment. “Let’s see. Everyone knew the two of you were an item, and you were afraid that whatever it was he was doing, it might splatter your own career?”

  “Not exactly admirable, is it, but that’s the gist of it, yes. You had to know Joel. I rationalized it by telling myself that there simply weren’t any more big cats up there in the mountains. Not wild ones, anyway. And even if there were, no one would be fool enough to track one into a face-to-face confrontation.”

  He nodded. “I would probably have done the same thing,” he said. He decided to trust her, made her promise to keep it to herself, and then told her the whole story of why he had come up to the area.

  “My God,” she said softly when he was finished. “An initiation? And one of them was killed?”

  Cam looked around the dining room. It wasn’t full, but he still didn’t want to be overheard. “That’s what White Eye told me. And now that I’ve seen a supposedly tame one in action, I’m a believer.”

  She shivered. “They want me to testify tomorrow—at the inquest—about how that could happen. With his own cat, I mean.”

  “I may need you to testify for me,” he said. He stopped when he saw her expression. “Testify’s probably the wrong word. What I need is corroboration that I’m not making this up. And, of course, the much bigger issue is that we may have a statewide death squad working.”

  She sat back in her chair, dinner forgotten, thinking about what he was asking.

  “As you can imagine, this thing’s being run under a pretty damned tight wrap,” he went on. “You can’t talk about this. Hell, I can’t talk about this.” Even as he said it, he realized that he just had.

  “Because you don’t know who’s who in the zoo,” she said.

  “Precisely. I’m meeting tomorrow night with our sheriff and the DA.”

  “What on earth would I tell my boss?” she asked.

  “That you need a few days’ leave?”

  “I’ll think about it,” she said. “But damn, Lieutenant!”

  “You could call me Cam,” he said.

  “Sure about that?” she asked sadly.

  46

  THE DOGS WERE IN semidisgrace on the trip back. He had chided them about not following the Bronco and rescuing his sorry ass from the mountain lion. The looks on their faces said that no self-respecting, intelligent German shepherds would even mess with goddamned mountain lions, and besides, full food bowls on the porch had distracted them from doing their duty, no matter how wildly construed. He could see their point, but he still gave them a cold shoulder all the way back to Triboro. That seemed to bother them a lot, at least for the five minutes before they fell asleep in the backseat.

  It was just after sundown when Cam got back to his house in Summerland. He turned the dogs loose in the backyard, gathered up his mail, disarmed the alarm system, and went inside. A quick walk-through of the house turned up nothing visibly amiss. He called the sheriff at home and let it ring once, then hung up. He took a shower, got something to eat, and, on a hunch, changed into uniform. Bobby Lee arrived twenty minutes later in his personal cruiser. Five minutes after that, DA Steven Klein showed up. The sheriff was in uniform and Cam was glad he’d changed. He had not shaved his beard, however, and this provoked a fish-eye stare from Bobby Lee even as he handed Cam his official accoutrements. They sat down in Cam’s kitchen, and Cam poured out coffee for all hands.

  Cam then debriefed them on everything he’d learned up in Carrigan County, along with the details of the final night under Catlett Bald. He mentioned that he had a corroborating witness but said that she hadn’t decided whether she wanted to get involved. The sheriff described what Jaspreet Kaur Bawa had turned up in her database analysis of judges, cases, and walk-away perps who’d subsequently died. Her search went back over a decade, he informed them.

  “Seventeen DOA’s,” he announced somberly, and that brought a muttered oath from Klein. “Two of those may have been prison gang–related, but even discounting those, that still leaves fifteen unsolved cases, including the two recent Internet stars.”

  “Statewide?” Steven asked.

  The sheriff nodded. “Fifteen cases where clearly guilty bastards went free and then were extinguished, leaving us with stone-cold whodunits.”

  “We need to check on something else,” Cam said. “White Eye told me one of the cat dancers got himself eaten. He was kind of vague as to when this happened, and it might be bullshit, but we should look to see if any cops flat-out disappeared, in the past twelve years, say.”

  “Why twelve?” Bobby Lee asked.

  “Because White Eye said the guy who called himself Carl first came to him about fifteen years ago. He said it took him two years to train Carl to hunt the wild cats. Carl finally got his photo of a cat after three years. A few months later, he brought in the second guy and then the ones after that. Our cluster of unsolved cases involving dead perps seems to go back about ten years, so if it’s true, the initiate died somewhere between ten and twelve years ago.”

  “I’ll go to SBI with that one,” Bobby Lee said.

  “Or let Jay-Kay do it,” Cam said. “Her computers are already trained to do that kind of search.”

  “Trained’?” Steven said.

  “Don’t ask,” Bobby Lee told him, shaking his head. “She tried to explain how that all works and left me right in the damned dust.”

  “The real question is,” Steven said, “How do we smoke these bastards out, assuming they do exist?”

  Everyone concentrated on their coffee cups for a moment. A night wind came up outside, stirring the tops of the Leyland cypresses into a soft sound.

  “On the question of whether or not these are related killings, were there any correlative factors in the fifteen incidents?” Cam asked.

  “Such as?” the sheriff inquired.

  “Manner of death; location of discovery; time of death; wound patterns; probable sequence of events prior to their getting killed, such as abduction, a holding period, then execution, or was it just a drive-by?”

  “Don’t know,” Bobby Lee said. “Something else to check. But how the hell do we smoke ’em out? Turn loose another walk-away perp?”

  “I think Mitchell sicced that cat on me deliberately,” Cam said. “I think he was an integral part of this group, and they wanted me out of the way.”

  “You think,” Bobby Lee said. “You have a body and a dead mountain lion—a tame one, not a wild one. No one has yet to produce a wild one up there, just like the Park Service people have been saying all along. There’s no damned evidence.”

  “I think we do have some evidence,” Cam said. “We have the body of K-Dog Simmonds, found in a diesel-storage tank. That’s pretty elaborate for a prison gang hit or the revenge of a drug dealer. Plus the videos of the two executions, out there on the Internet, with corroborative damage to Simmonds’s body. We have a guy showing up here in a police cruiser telling me to get out of town. We have the shooting incident at Annie’s house, prior to the bombing, which had to have involved at least two people. And we have James Marlor, who somehow knew something about cat dancing.”

  Cam paused, waiting for comment, but the other two sat there looking down at the table. He then reiterated his arguments for there being cops involved. More silence.

  “Okay,” he said, “Some of that’s circumstantial, I admit. But we’ve put bad guys away on circumstantial evidence.”

  “If they’re cops,” Steven said, “they could just go dormant after what happened up there in Carrigan County, and we’d be left with fifteen unsolved and no frigging idea of who these people are.”

  “I know one way,” Bobby Lee said. They all looke
d at him.

  “Start talking about a show trial. Say we have evidence that there’s a vigilante hit squad operating in the state, that we have a star witness, in the person of Lieutenant Richter here, who knows who these people are because the old tracker gave him a deathbed confession.”

  “Wouldn’t that make Lieutenant Richter a tasty target?” Steven asked.

  “You said you wanted to smoke ’em out. I believe that would do the trick.”

  “Lieutenant?” Steven said. “How you feel about being the goat staked out in tiger country?”

  Cam let out a long breath. “If that’s what it takes,” he said. “I don’t have any better ideas. I mean, we can chase those corroborative factors, see if we can tie an MO to specific individuals or specific county sheriff’s offices, but that might take forever.”

  “They’ll know about Mitchell,” Bobby Lee said. “That’s been all over the news. They’ll know Lieutenant Richter brought him in. They have to be worried already.”

  “One problem,” Cam said. “I don’t think White Eye actually knew their names or anything about them, other than that he guessed they were cops. If that’s true, and they know that, setting up a trap might not work.”

  “Shit,” Steven said. “We’re going in circles here.”

  “Seven guys,” Cam said, stirring what was left of his coffee. “Seven guys who are so addicted to danger that they’d track a mountain lion close enough to take a picture of its face; who get together from time to time to hunt down and execute especially noxious perps; and who could organize a bomb at a judge’s house, which was under Sheriff’s Office protection. All this would take a very different kind of guy.”

  “Your point being?” Steven asked.

  “My point being: Let’s ask every sheriff in North Carolina to name one person in his office who might be twisted enough to qualify for membership in a group like this. I think we’re looking for senior street operatives—sergeants, probably—who’ve been through a lot and are hard as nails, pissed off at the system, and capable of getting out there on the edge and going full bore. We’ve all run across guys like that at one time or another. We usually push ’em into early retirement, too.”