The Cat Dancers cr-1

by P. T. Deutermann

  The sheriff frowned, and Cam realized that he looked older and grayer than when this mess had begun. “I’ll do it, if you’d like,” the sheriff said. “You’ll have to say the words, but I’ll punch the buttons. I’ve got the SWAT team standing by, and the ops center is ready to trace the numbers that come up in the window.”

  Cam sighed and slumped in his chair. “She’s got me boxed, Sheriff,” he said. “With your support, I can probably avoid a federal prosecution, but if I don’t testify, I’m finished in law enforcement.”

  The sheriff didn’t say anything. He did check the watch, which was ticking away on his desk.

  “Where’s McLain and his tactical team?” Cam asked.

  “Don’t know,” the sheriff said.

  Mike Pierce came back into the room, clutching the report. He closed the door and sat down. “Please confirm your home phone number, Lieutenant,” he said. Cam gave it to him. Mike scanned the report and nodded.

  “You guys didn’t go through all the data, right? You read her executive summary and conclusions?”

  They nodded.

  “Well, she wasn’t kidding. She already had your phone number in here as one of the recurring contact numbers in the pay-phone network. She just didn’t call it out in the conclusions paragraph.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Cam said. “There it is. How the hell did she do that?”

  “I asked the tech control people at the phone company that question,” Pierce said. “And they said that the call logs are tied to the billing system. They don’t keep records on their customers on the off chance the cops might call, but they do keep records for bill generation. You know when you call into customer service and bitch about a bill?”

  They nodded again.

  “Well, you know how sometimes they make nice and remove a specific charge? The way they do that is by expunging the record of the call. The billing system then does the math. My point is, it’s not a secure system. Even a customer service rep in Bombay can do that.”

  “And she’s coming at them with a couple of mainframes,” Cam said. “Shit!”

  “How much time do we have?” Pierce asked.

  The sheriff looked at the watch. “Twenty-seven minutes,” he said, and then explained Cam’s concern with the speed-dial business. Pierce shook his head in frustration. “What choice do we have?” he asked. “They fry her, you’re still on the hook, especially with this shit.”

  “But she faked all that,” Cam protested.

  “And we have whose word for that?” Pierce asked gently.

  Cam wanted to hit someone.

  “There’s more,” Pierce said. “We called that woman’s number in Charlotte, got an answering service. The woman who returned the call said she was Ms. Bawa’s executive assistant. She doesn’t know where Ms. Bawa is, but that’s apparently not unusual. Just for the hell of it, I asked if you had been to that office. The officer with the dogs? she asked.”

  “I can explain that,” Cam said wearily. “I did-”

  Pierce had his hand up, indicating that Cam should stop talking. “I’ve been going to law school at night,” he said. “I think that right now you should follow the lady’s advice and say absolutely nothing. The sheriff here vouches for you, and that’s good enough for me. But the best option for the feds to solve their vigilante problem is to hang you out to dry, declare a public, if partial, victory, and then take their own manhunt underground. Image is everything to those guys.”

  “You do understand that this whole damned thing is a setup, right?” Cam said. He realized he was almost shouting.

  “You should have taken along some backup,” Pierce replied, unperturbed.

  “Who?” Cam said angrily. “Sergeant Cox?”

  “Enough,” Bobby Lee ordered. “Let’s focus on getting the ranger back alive, shall we?”

  The designated lieutenant for the SWAT team called, asking for an update, and the sheriff told him they’d be making the calls in about twenty minutes. “Hopefully, someone will call into the ops center with the location of the hostage after we do our phone drill.”

  They all looked at the cell phone and waited as the minutes ticked by. The more Cam thought about it, though, the less he believed there would be any calls, at least not immediately. He wanted to run out of the building and scream at the moon. All of this because some asshole had failed to read two scumbags their Miranda rights? He thought about Mary Ellen, strapped up in that horrific chair, waiting for someone to do something. How long had she been there? Was she still alive? Had that video been done the night she was taken hostage? Or were all those images fakes, the product of some other mad digital wizard. He visualized the oil-soaked corpse of the one robber lying out on the ground next to that diesel tank. Was that where Mary Ellen was now? “We’d never harm another cop,” Kenny had said, but now Kenny was a pile of picked-over frozen bones somewhere up in the western Carolina mountains.

  “Okay, we’re two minutes away,” the sheriff said. “This thing has a signal. You going to do it, or shall I?”

  “I’ll do it,” Cam said, getting up and going over to the sheriff’s big desk.

  They waited as the watch clicked down, and then jumped when the tiny little beep went off. Cam picked up the phone and hit zero three. He flinched when someone slammed the front door to the executive offices. Zero two killed the chair. Right?

  His hands were sweating as the phone rang and rang. C’mon, he thought. C’mon.

  Then it was answered by voice mail. To his astonishment, Cam heard his own voice mail greeting playing. He snatched the phone away from his ear and looked at the number he’d speed-dialed. It was his own home phone.

  “Well?” the sheriff said. “Aren’t you supposed to say something?”

  To my own fucking phone? Cam thought, but then he said the magic word and hung up.

  He reset the watch timer for five minutes and they waited some more. Then he took a deep breath and hit zero two. The phone rang once, twice, and then what sounded like a fax machine picked up and stopped. Silence followed and Cam hung up again.

  “You’re not going to believe this shit,” he announced. “The first number I called was mine.”

  “Figures,” said Mike Pierce. “She’s got that, too.”

  63

  They waited for another hour, but there were no calls. Cam finally called his own voice mail at home. One message, and not the one he had left. He listened carefully, played it again, and then saved it. “Sounded like a tape,” he reported. “A trucking terminal on the south side of I-Forty, off the airport road. We’re apparently looking for a trailer. They said for me to go alone, or they’d fire the chair.”

  “No,” Bobby Lee said. “No way.”

  “I got her into this mess, Sheriff,” Cam protested. “Least I can do is get her out.”

  “What you’d do is get yourself killed. No, I’m sorry, but there’s a hostage. I’m always sorry there’s a hostage. But we go in force.”

  “How about that Owl thing?” Pierce asked. “Send it overhead with some thermal-imaging gear, see if they can find a trailer that’s different from all the others?”

  “How long will that take?” the sheriff asked. Pierce didn’t know, but he went to find out.

  Thirty minutes later, they had a plan. The Owl would make its sweep and report any targets of interest. The SWAT team would deploy in the rail yards behind the trucking terminal. Cam would drive through the terminal in a lone cruiser, wearing full combat gear, and pretend to scan the trailers with a handheld thermal-imaging device. He’d drive around long enough to allow the SWAT team to get in position behind the trailer, and then they’d pounce. If the Owl didn’t find anything, they’d regroup and try something else.

  It took another hour to get the aircraft in position above the terminal. Cam rode out with his MCAT guys in a Suburban to a location three blocks away from the terminal. Then he shifted over to a cruiser while the guys went to join the SWAT team at the command post. The sheriff and Mike
Pierce went directly to the command post in the sheriff’s personal cruiser.

  Cam reached the terminal in five minutes and drove in past the security gates. The place was a medium-size terminal by Triboro standards-ten warehouses equipped with mechanized truck-loading docks. Some of the warehouses were inactive, but half had trucks and trailers backed up and forklifts operating in lighted doorways. The sergeant at the command and control vehicle announced over the secure tactical frequency that the aircraft was overhead, scanning the empty trailers parked at the back of the terminal. He said there were sixty or seventy trailers out there.

  Cam drove around with his window open. The dock workers didn’t seem to pay any attention to the lone cruiser prowling the area. Cam could communicate with the war wagon but not with the SWAT team. The aircraft reported that the roofs of the warehouses appeared to be clean, no lurking shooters. Ten minutes later, it reported one trailer had a different thermal signature from the trailers around it. They pinpointed its location along the back fence of the terminal, and the SWAT team went into motion.

  Cam continued his prowl, occasionally sticking the thermal-imager gun out the window as he waited for word that the team was in position behind the target. Finally, he was told to drive to the very back and begin a slow sweep of the trailers parked against the back fence. He started using his spotlight now, shining it under the parked trailers, which was the one place the Owl could not see.

  He drove the full length of the line, hoping like hell that there were no long-gun shooters in the trees, then switched off the spot and turned around. He started back along the line, imaging each trailer carefully as the tactical controller counted down the time on top. He pretended to be interested in one trailer until the war wagon announced that the team was in position in a line of trees behind the trailer park area and that the fence had been cut.

  Cam kept driving until he arrived at the trailer designated by the aircraft. He pointed the imager at it, but nothing came up in the viewfinder. The aircraft confirmed he was pointing at the right trailer. Now it was time to get out of the car. He wanted to do another spotlight sweep under the trailer, but that might illuminate the SWAT people on the other side. The trailer, like all the others, was parked with its foot stand facing the road and the cargo doors facing the fence at the back.

  He used his own headlights instead, parking at an oblique angle in order to throw some light under the trailer. He wished he had his shepherds with him-they’d have been able to find anything and anybody lurking out there.

  “In position,” he announced quietly to his shoulder mike.

  “Exit the vehicle and go around to the back of the trailer,” the voice in his earphone said. “ Owl reports no sign of ambush.”

  Cam swallowed, put the cruiser in park, and got out. The terminal lights did a fair job of illuminating the line back here, but there were lots of shadows. He just hoped that aircraft could see everything for a good five hundred yards around, because any competent sniper could take him out from that distance, body armor or no body armor. He walked carefully around the back of the trailer, shining his flashlight everwhere but back at the fence. He listened for any sounds of the Owl, but he heard only a soft wind in the tree line. He could see that the trailer was a refrigeration model, with a squat generator up top and heavy insulated sides. There was maybe twenty feet of space between the fence and the back of the trailer.

  The doors on the trailer were locked when he reached the back, so he made another circuit of the trailer while trying to suppress the creeping tingle he felt on his back. Were they here? Had they tumbled to the SWAT team? Was the guy in the Owl one of them?

  He came back around again to the rear doors. Nothing happened. “Clear,” he said to his shoulder mike.

  “Team go,” announced the controller, and then the whole area lit up as the SWAT guys, looking like storm troopers from a Star Wars movie, came swarming through the fence, followed by some portable spots, which soon had the entire area ablaze in blue-white light. More vehicles poured through the front gates of the terminal area and set up a perimeter. The sheriff drove up in his cruiser, followed by the command and control van.

  They walked back to the rear of the trailer. “I’m scared to death of what we’re going to find here,” Cam said.

  The sheriff didn’t say anything. Cam figured Bobby Lee had already framed Mary Ellen in his mind as being dead, which realistically was the way most cops visualized hostages. That way, when they got them back alive, it was a pleasant surprise. Mike Pierce didn’t say anything, either.

  The access crew brought over a large bolt cutter to open the doors of the trailer. Cam and the sheriff peered in as the noise suddenly subsided. Two portable spots were rolled up to the fence and their generators started up. The doors were swung open.

  Front and center was the electric chair from the Web videos. There was a flat table in front of that, and behind it a one-man tent had been erected in one corner. A brand-new welding machine was set up to one side of the chair, and heavy wires led to the back of the trailer and up the inside front wall toward the refrigeration unit’s generator at the top of the trailer. There were empty water jugs, a portable camp toilet, and a pile of army MRE ration containers piled in a trash heap. The generator switched on once the doors were opened.

  There was no Mary Ellen Goode.

  Cam swore silently.

  Two members of the team went in, being careful not to disturb any of the items lying around the floor. They checked the tent, where they found a mummy-style sleeping bag, an old duffel bag, and several scraps of duct tape. After a quick initial exploration, they backed out to wait for the CSI people. Cam could only shake his head in total frustration. Where the hell was Mary Ellen?

  “From all appearances,” the team leader said, “there was someone being held hostage in this thing. But not now.”

  “Any signs of violence?” the sheriff asked.

  “No visible bloodstains,” the lieutenant replied. “CSI will have to confirm that. That chair doesn’t smell so good, though.”

  “Did you see a cell phone in there?” Cam asked. The lieutenant was about to answer when a chirping noise started up inside the tent.

  On the third ring, they all heard the trailer’s generator ramp up. Red and green lights blinked on across the control panel of the welding machine. Cam and the sheriff exchanged glances and then the sheriff yelled for everyone to back out. The SWAT guys jumped down out of the trailer and joined the general exodus. The generator suddenly went to very high rpm as they swarmed back through the big hole in the chain-link fence. Cam and the sheriff were the last to get through the hole, and as they turned to watch, the chair turned into one massive arc as current flowed through wires attached to the the welding machine. With no one in the chair, its metal arms and legs dissolved in a blazing ball of directcurrent lightning, blinding all the cops as they stared in fascination. Then there was a deep red glare at the deep end of the trailer and then it blew up in one enormous fireball, blasting bits of metal, tires, and decking all over the parking lot. The two trailers on either side caught fire from the blast, and half the SWAT cops found themselves sitting on the ground, their ears ringing despite their helmets. Cam had turned away from the searing light and was thus standing partially behind the sheriff when the trailer went up. When he regained his balance and turned back around, the sheriff was sitting on the grass, looking curiously at a foot-long wooden shard that was sticking into his upper chest.

  “Medic!” Cam shouted as he knelt down beside the sheriff. His ears were ringing from the blast and he couldn’t be sure he’d made himself heard. The sheriff was bleeding, although not very much. He had been wearing his protective vest, but the piece of wood had gone right through him. The part of it sticking out of his back was blackly slick in the harsh light of the portable spots. Bobby Lee coughed weakly and Cam had to hold him upright as he swayed dangerously.

  The team’s medic came on the run, saw the shard, and called for an
ALS ambulance. Cam backed away as a second medic knelt down and helped keep the sheriff upright. Cam could see that there were other SWAT team members down, but they were all in full body armor and none of them looked to be seriously injured. Most were being tended by other members of the team. The ambulance came through the perimeter, its lights flashing. A heavy pall of bomb smoke lay over the parking lot, and Cam was pulled back to the sights and sounds of Annie Bellamy’s yard. It even smelled the same. C-4 again, he thought. So these bastards never hurt other cops, huh?

  Mike Pierce came over and watched with Cam as the medics loaded Bobby Lee onto a gurney and then pulled it through the fence to the meat wagon. While some of the cops were spraying the burning tires of the nearby trailers with fire extinguishers, other SWAT team members were standing around the back of the ambulance, saying encouraging things to the sheriff, which meant that he was still conscious.

  “That looked bad,” Pierce said.

  “It was high up,” Cam said. “Maybe clipped a lung, but there wasn’t much bleeding.”

  “Not outside anyway,” Pierce said, confirming what Cam had been thinking.

  “This changes the equation,” Cam said.

  “We sure that ranger wasn’t in there?”

  Cam nodded. “It was empty, but somehow they knew the trailer had been opened up. Either they had someone here or it was electronic.”

  “They told you to come alone. This wasn’t aimed at the SWAT guys.”

  “They had to have known we’d bring a crowd eventually,” Cam said. “They might have expected I’d open the trailer, but they must have figured there’d be backup.”

  “Sheriff’s Office bad guys would know,” Pierce said. “Federal bad guys might not.”

  “And where’s Mary Ellen Goode?”

  Several of the SWAT guys were looking up at something. Cam did the same and saw a small airplane with an oversized Perspex bubble cockpit and ridiculously long wings swoop low overhead.

  “ Owl says something blew up,” the controller announced in a dry tone.