Cat Telling Tales (21 page)

So far, they had been lucky no one had thought to compare paw prints found at a scene, with prints an officer could lift within the department itself. Joe imagined Juana or Dallas offering them little treats, and then restraining them long enough to ink their paws, to produce a set of fingerprint cards that would go into the office files. The idea gave him chills. Could he get used to wearing gloves? Pulling on little cat mittens?

Dulcie, taking the key carefully in her teeth, dropped to the floor looking smug, and they beat it out again, down the steps and around to the cellar door. Carefully Joe took it from her, and climbed up through the brittle branches of the nearest bush, trying not to drool, not get the key wet and slippery. Clinging within the bush, he found a steady position and pulled the lock to him with a careful paw.

Holding it steady, turning his head at an angle, he tried to ease the key in. Just a little finesse, and he'd . . .

He dropped it.

Silently Dulcie retrieved it, and climbed up through the bush; he took it, and tried again, but it wouldn't go. He turned his head, adjusted his balance. Another try, but it didn't fit. This wasn't the right key. Ears back, he tried forcing it, but still it wouldn't go. He turned around in the branches, poised to leap down.

“Try again, Joe. Is the lock rusty?”

Of course it was rusty. This baby'd been out in the weather since locks were invented.

“Take your time,” she said. “Try just once more.” In the female mind, any impossible problem can be solved with sufficient patience. Ducking lower, he tried again, bowing his back so the key wasn't angled, giving it a straighter approach.

Nothing. Nada.

“Turn it over.”

He'd already tried that. It wouldn't fit. He couldn't talk with his mouth full, couldn't even hiss at her. He was fighting it, the metal hard against his teeth, when he dropped it again. Dulcie gave him a look, dove into the bushes, rustled around, and came out with the key safe between her teeth.

Motioning with her head for him to get down, she climbed, silent and quick. Around them, the rain had quickened again, they were both soaking wet, the raindrops on Dulcie's back pale and icy. His paws felt like blocks of ice. Above him Dulcie was fiddling and fussing as she eased the key up to the lock. Females were so nitpicky, not direct like a tomcat.

Within minutes she had it open. With a quick paw she pulled the padlock off, let it fall, the key still protruding, a rustle and dull thud as it dropped to the ground among the bushes.

She didn't brag or tease him. “What shall we do with it?”

“Lose the key, keep the lock. If anyone else knows the key was inside the locked house, that leads right back to Emmylou. Maybe she's innocent,” he said doubtfully. “Maybe she's not.” He watched Dulcie remove the key and, with it safe between her teeth, they scrambled up the nearest pine and headed across the roofs.

They carried it six blocks away where two steep peaks angled together, and tucked it down beneath the overlapped shingles. Then shoulder to shoulder they headed for Dulcie's cottage, and a phone.

“I just hope Wilma's asleep, we don't need to drag her into this, in the middle of the night.”

“You don't want to listen to her scold,” Joe said, grinning. Though, in fact, Dulcie's housemate was as tolerant of the cats' involvement with the law as a human could be. Wilma had been, for twenty-five years, a federal parole officer, she knew very well the intense fascination of sorting out a crime, she knew how it felt to be deeply involved with a case.

But that didn't stop her from worrying, she knew the disasters, too. She worried because they were small and vulnerable, and because they were, in her opinion, far too brash and bold. Worry made her overprotective, and so she fussed at them. Joe followed Dulcie in through her cat door, stopping midway to ease the plastic flap down along his back, to keep it from swinging, thump, thump, and waking Wilma. She slept attuned to that sound, to any small noise that would herald Dulcie's return home.

Crossing the laundry, they left wet paw prints on the blue kitchen floor, left a wet trail across the oriental rug in the dining room, and when Joe leaped to Wilma's desk, again a damp row of prints incised across the blotter. As he pawed at the phone's speaker, pressing the arrow down until the sound was as soft as it would go, Dulcie slipped down the hall to the bedroom, peering in, to make sure Wilma was asleep.

Yes, she slept, breathing deeply, her back to the phone on the night table. Dulcie, watching her, decided she really was asleep and not faking, that she wouldn't see the phone's flashing light. Trotting back through the dim house and leaping to the desk, she watched Joe key in 911 and prayed, as she always did, that Wilma's ID blocking was working as it should. She'd heard a number of stories where the service had failed, incidents too alarming to bear thinking of, at that moment.

The night dispatcher came on, a young man they didn't know well. Joe asked for the chief or whichever detective was on duty.

“If this is not an emergency, you—” the dispatcher began.

“It
is
an emergency. Do it
now
. Max will be mad as hell if you fool around. And no, I won't give my name. Just
do
it!” There was a short silence, then Kathleen Ray came on. She knew his voice, she didn't interrupt as he described the location and probable condition of the body.

“In the crawl space of a dark cellar? How did you find that?”

“I was walking my dog, he smelled something. The body must be pretty rank.”

“You crawled back in there, to look?”

Joe went silent, and clicked off. “Does she have to be so damned nosy?”

“She's a police detective. That's her job.”

He hissed at her companionably and they waited, listening, looking out at the cold night. The raindrops had turned suspiciously white and slushy. Dulcie said, “It's going to snow.”

Joe turned, gave her a look. “Snow. Right. Since when did it snow on the central coast?”

But even through the glass, the night felt cold enough to freeze the rain solid. They were peering out when a lone siren cut through the silence from the direction of the station: one whoop, like a squad car clearing traffic as it sped away. They imagined the black-and-white moving fast through the village followed by another and maybe by Kathleen's white Ford two-door. Dropping from the desk, they slipped quickly out of the house, scrambled to the roofs again through the rain, which was heavier now, almost sleeting, and they followed where they knew the cop car was headed. The immediacy of the police response took precedence over the cold, over their sharp hunger, and over their need for sleep—even over their caution to remain unnoticed at the soon-to-be-busy crime scene.

24

W
ilma was awake when the cats quietly left the house. She'd heard them come in just moments earlier, the faint brush as they slipped through the cat door, and she'd thought Dulcie was in for the night. But then when Dulcie didn't trot in to leap on the bed, and she heard Joe's soft voice from the living room, she'd rolled over to look at the phone.

With the red light for the main line flashing, she knew the phantom snitches were at work, calling the department, she knew the scenario too well. She hadn't dared turn on her speaker to listen in, the little click would have alerted them at once. Swinging out of bed, shivering even in her flannel gown, she'd slipped barefoot to the bedroom door and listened, only mildly ashamed of herself. She could hear the faintest mumble, not Dulcie's voice, but Joe's, serious and urgent, too faint to make out a word he was saying.

She daren't slip closer, they'd hear even the faintest brush of her gown against the wall or door, or would scent her approach. The next moment, the whoop of a siren rose from the center of the village, a squad car leaving the station. How cold the night had grown, her bare feet were freezing. She'd stayed by the bedroom door debating whether to go on out, but then she heard them leave as stealthily as they'd entered. Searching for her slippers, she pulled them on and went up the hall to the living room, turned on the desk lamp, and hit the redial button.

The number 911 came on the screen, and quickly she clicked off.

She couldn't ask the dispatcher what was happening. How would
she
know they'd just received a tip from the snitches? That lone siren could have been a patrol unit pulling over a speeding driver, but from the cats' stealth and haste, she didn't think so. Something was happening out in the night, and she knew she wouldn't sleep again. Wide awake, she turned out the lamp and pulled the curtain aside.

The rain had turned to slush, the cold was as sharp as knives. Closing the curtain again, she moved into the kitchen, flipped on the light over the sink, got the milk from the refrigerator, and a saucepan, and made a cup of cocoa. Carrying it back to bed, she opened the curtain, then tucked up under the covers, getting warm as she sipped her cocoa and looked out at the night. The slushy rain was falling more slowly, in a strange, drifting pattern.

She sat up straighter when she realized it was snowing, small flakes floating beyond the glass. Snow, here on the coast. And the weatherman apparently hadn't had a clue.

This hadn't happened in a decade, smatterings of snow in the village, deeper drifts up in the surrounding hills, an amazement that had brought the whole village out to look. There were newspaper articles in the library's local history collection, pictures of heavy snow some fifty years ago when, one article said, Molena Point High School students abandoned their cars to throw snowballs in the drifts, getting to class hours late. That was the year that the steepest grades were too icy to drive on, and the Bing Crosby Pro-Am Golf Tournament was postponed because the golf course was covered with snow. The newspaper pictures made the higher elevations look like ski country, hills and roads solid white, roofs and the tops of the fence posts heaped with snow. The papers said that all day a steady stream of drivers headed up the valley to have a look and take photos.

And now here it was again. The real thing. She imagined the village waking in the morning to a white world, everyone running outdoors, excited by the novelty.

But right now, tonight, the two cats were out in it freezing their busy little paws. If they had alerted a patrol car, you could bet they were headed back to the scene, to whatever violence had occurred, that they'd be in the middle of the action, peering down from some freezing rooftop into the glare of strobe lights, hardly able to hear the officers' voices for the harsh radio's grainy insistence. Two little cats out in the icy night with no thought to frozen ears, their entire attention on the investigation unfolding below them.

It seemed so long ago that Dulcie was just a giddy kitten, with no thought to human crime, human evil, and with no notion of her true talents.

Though even then, that tiny little thing was strange and different. So covetous, for one thing, stealing the neighbors' sheer stockings and bright scarves right through their bedroom windows, even then a clever little break-and-enter artist. And look at her now, a bold, grown-up, crime-solving lady, too often wired for trouble.

The day Dulcie first spoke, that was a shock to them both, had left them both shaken, staring at each other, Dulcie's green eyes huge with amazement, Wilma trembling as if with vertigo. Dulcie's disbelief had made her laugh, and hearing her own human laugh, she was startled all over again.

And now, besides her aggressive fascination with village crime, look what else the feisty little tabby was up to. She was suddenly filled with poetry, caught up in a whole new obsession,
“What a lovely cat she is, Posed behind the curtain's gauze
. . .” And tonight, when Wilma stopped by the library after leaving the Damens', and had turned on the computer, she found a new poem waiting. She hoped this was only the first verse, only the beginning, because it did make her smile.

All along the cliff top blowing

She stalks her prey in grasses growing

Forest tall and thick above her

Quick and silent feline hunter

Queen of the high sea meadow

She thought there would surely be more verses, that Dulcie might even be toying with the lines as she crouched beside Joe out in the freezing night, watching the police at work. She longed to follow them, but sensibly she ignored the urge, finished her cocoa and set the mug aside. She drew the curtain again and switched on the lamp, dispelling the comfortable dark, and reached for her book. Sliding deeper under the covers, she read for the rest of the night, or tried to. Even through the book's gripping mystery she kept seeing the cats out in the cold, seeing the squad cars, the busy officers, wondering which detective had come out, which officers were on duty, all of them illuminated in theatrical unreality by the harsh strobe lights; she kept wondering what had happened to bring them out, what
was
happening, called out by the phantom snitches.

T
he cottage roof next door to Sammie's was quickly growing white with snow, and the cats' backs and noses were dusted with snow. This wasn't a five-minute flurry, destined soon to melt away again, this snow was building, it was clinging, it seemed to be serious. The harsh lights below them picked out each drifting flake, and reflected from the cops' slickers, and from the snow-covered patrol cars. One black-and-white was parked just below them in the side yard, one out at the curb beside Kathleen's white Ford. In the drifting snow, two officers were stringing crime-scene tape; they had already cordoned off the open cellar door, which spilled light out into the yard brightening each drifting snowflake. Only a few minutes ago, Detective Kathleen Ray had gone down into the cellar alone, carrying more lights and her black crime-scene bag. “Where's Davis?” Dulcie said.

“Her knee's worse,” Joe said. “I heard Brennan talking, said it was swollen twice its size, said she was meeting the doctor at his office. Brennan says she'll probably have to have a knee replacement.” Dulcie shuddered, she didn't like to think about surgery. When Wilma had had gall bladder surgery, that was bad enough, she'd worried herself into a frazzle until her housemate was healed and well again. Below, more lights came on in the cellar as Kathleen got to work. The tall, slim brunette had arrived dressed in jeans and a yellow slicker, her long dark hair stuffed up under a yellow cap. Entering the cellar, she had pulled on cloth booties over her running shoes. She reached out the door twice as Officer Crowley handed her additional lights and her camera bag. Kathleen was, in Joe Grey's opinion, too beautiful to be crawling around in the dirt, crawling back under there into that putrid stink.

“
I
crawled in,” Dulcie said. “You didn't worry about
me
spoiling
my
looks, or gassing myself or getting splinters in my paws.”

“You're tougher than a human woman,” Joe said, cutting her a look. “And far too beautiful to ever spoil your looks, even with dirt in your fur.”

They could see into the cellar for only a little ways, could see, in the painfully bright lights, deep marks in the earth where the body had been dragged in. Kathleen hunkered along at the side, away from these. Twice she paused to look at Dulcie's paw prints, and both times, she'd photographed them. The first time, she had called out to the waiting officers to ask if Sammie had cats.

“Did she have to notice that?” Dulcie said.

“Of course she'd notice, that's her job,” he said smartly.

Officer Brennan, looking like a tent with legs in his wide black slicker, had said Sammie had two cats, that when they found Emmylou Warren in the house she said she had come up to feed them, said she couldn't find them. Kathleen had nodded, and disappeared. There'd been a long silence in which they imagined her inching her way back toward the furnace, placing her lights as she went.

They imagined her finding the partially buried fingers, envisioned her carefully uncovering them until she had, like Dulcie, revealed the buried hand and arm; she would photograph them, and photograph the surround. She would be kneeling on a small sheet of plastic, and as she resumed digging, she would brush away a few grains of earth at a time with a soft paintbrush. To find what? Only the hand and arm? Or the murder victim?
Was
this Sammie Miller? And, beneath this bloated but intact body, what would she find to account for the far more sick-making smell that seemed to come from underneath?

Sounds were becoming muffled as the snow accumulated. On the snowy roof, the two cats huddled together shivering as the temperature dropped degree by falling degree. Dulcie hoped Wilma's garden wouldn't freeze, she hoped Wilma wasn't out there in her slippers and robe, covering her prize plants with newspapers and old sheets.

In the cellar, the position of the lights changed again and again, coming from different angles as Kathleen photographed the grave. They heard her talking on her cell phone, there was a little silence when the call ended, then the lift of her voice as she made a second call. At the third call, Dulcie eased forward. “Maybe I can just slip in and listen.”

“No way,” Joe said, hauling her back with a nip to the butt that got him a swat on the nose. “You want to get caught in there? She's already wondering about the paw prints.”

Sighing, she settled back, pawing snow off her ears. Silence again, only the soft mutter of the police radios. Kathleen would have a black-and-white camera in there, one for color, and a video. She would already have photographed the drag marks and, who knew, maybe she'd found a trace of the killer's footprints. By the time Dallas Garza's tan Blazer pulled up next to Kathleen's car, Sammie's yard and drive were more white than brown, and the pines and cypress trees looked like a Yosemite postcard.

Dallas stepped out of the Blazer looking as if he had just rolled out of bed, his heavy boots pulled over the gray sweats he might have slept in, his black slicker hanging crookedly, his short dark hair mussed from sleep. Walking the narrow path between two barriers of yellow tape, to the lighted cellar door, he knelt down, looking in, touching nothing as he talked with Kathleen.

“We have a body,” she said. “Smells like more than one. I called the state forensics lab, two techs are on the way. We'll have another in the morning, and possibly their entomologist. And I called Ryan. I'm thinking we could cut away the outside wall nearest the grave, give them space to work, room to move back and forth, and get the body out without trampling the surround.”

Dallas considered this, and nodded.

Atop the roof, Dulcie said, “Working in there, with that stink, has to be like working right inside the grave. Why does anyone do that, why do people choose this kind of work?”

“The need to know,” Joe said. “Why are
we
here freezing our butts and starving? You ever think what life would be like, if no one went after the bad guys?”

Dulcie sneezed. “So, all this work, and the courts let half of them loose again.”

Joe didn't have an answer to that. They were licking snow from their fur when Ryan's red king cab came up the street. Parking just beyond the squad cars, she moved down along the house following the officers' footsteps on the narrow, muddied path between the yellow tape. Crouching beside her uncle Dallas, she peered in. The conversation came in snatches as they considered ways to keep the scene from being trampled and contaminated by sawdust as she removed a portion of the wall.

“I can prefabricate a frame,” she said, “then bolt it together inside the cellar, a barrier between the basement wall and the grave. Staple a sheet of plastic to it, seal off the site before we start the tearout.”

Dallas nodded. “That should contain the debris, keep it off the surround and body.” They discussed the details of the construction, then he headed around the house to the front, to work the scene inside. Joe wanted to follow him, but there was a limit to how much they could push. Cats in the office. Paw prints at the scene. Cats following him around that little crowded space inside wouldn't be a good idea. Dulcie said, “I'm freezing and I'm starving, and there won't be much more action for a couple of hours, until the techs get here.”

He looked at her like she was abandoning the mission.

“Even then,” she said, “it could take them the rest of the night to free the body, bag the evidence underneath, take samples, get the corpse onto a gurney. And maybe have to dig out a second body. While we freeze our tails and starve, and then they're off to the lab, and we don't know any more than we do now.”