Cat Deck the Halls Read online

  “Why the hospital?” Kit said worriedly as Davis started the engine. “Why would she…”

  “They’ll need to see if she’s hurt,” Joe said. “See if there are any marks on her.” He looked intently at Kit. “See if she’s been abused.”

  “Oh,” Kit said, shocked. “Oh, not that little girl.”

  “Maybe Juana can get her to talk,” Joe said. “Get her to describe the killer and tell what happened.”

  “She didn’t speak at all,” Kit said doubtfully. “Not a word, not a sound. And she’s such a little girl. Not like an adult witness.”

  But as the two cats whispered in the bushes, and Juana Davis headed for the hospital, not even the cats saw the dark figure in the building across the street, watching from the black window of the vacant store; they did not catch his scent among the sharp smells of tar paper and new lumber, were not aware of the lone man watching Juana Davis, listening as Davis told Detective Garza where she was headed, for the hospital and then her own condo.

  J AMES KUDA WATCHED the woman cop come out carrying the kid, all hugs and soft words, and his hand tightened on the automatic-but hell, he couldn’t shoot her in a cop’s arms; he’d never get away. Well, now he knew where she’d be. When the cop drove away, Kuda turned back into the black interior of the bare store, moving so silently that even the cats across the street didn’t hear him, nor did they glimpse a shifting shadow or change of light within the dark interior-an omission that, if they’d known of it, would have embarrassed both felines.

  After the white patrol car sped off toward the hospital, Kuda waited. He waited a long time, until the coast was clear, until most of the cops finished up and left, then he retrieved the bike he’d stashed behind the lumber, wheeled it out through the back door, and vanished into the night; rode fast and silently, thinking about his moves from the moment he’d slipped up on his victim-but then thinking uneasily about that faint sound on the roof, just after the shooting. Raccoon, probably. Except that didn’t explain who’d called the cops.

  He’d just made it, before the sirens blasted, had dragged the body into the car, keeping to the walk so as not to step in the soft garden dirt. Pulling the heavy man along, sweating from nerves. But he’d made it, got the body out of there. And now, a little while longer and he’d have disposed of it. Then to take care of the girl. Not likely she’d ever ID him, kid that age and all, but even so it might be better not to push his luck.

  6

  T HE SCREAM OF sirens had awakened Joe Grey’s tabby lady; Dulcie slipped out from beneath the flowered comforter and sat up in bed beside her human housemate and lifted one dark striped paw, listening to the high woo woo of an ambulance followed by the urgent wail of the police units. Lashing her tail, her sharp ears forward, she was as alert as any ambulance-chasing lawyer. Though her intentions were less greedy, she was just as hot for the excitement of the hunt. The screaming stopped somewhere on Ocean at the north end of the village. Somewhere, she thought, near Joe Grey’s house. Shaking free of the quilt, trying not to disturb Wilma, she was off the bed and up the hall, a dark tabby streak heading for the kitchen and her cat door, when she heard Wilma stir behind her, heard the mattress give as she sat up in bed.

  “You don’t have to chase every ambulance and cop car that leaves the station, Dulcie.” Wilma’s voice was hoarse from sleep, but alert enough to give her hell. Her annoyance brought Dulcie padding dutifully back to the bedroom, her ears back, tail lashing.

  Her housemate sat clutching the quilt around her. The woodstove’s cozy fire was long dead, and their bright bedroom was bone-chillingly cold.

  “I just…” Dulcie began. “It sounds like it’s near Clyde and Joe’s house. I have to go and see,” she said reasonably.

  “Feline hearing is amazing. There are dozens and dozens of houses and shops near Clyde ’s house. Can you tell me the exact address?”

  “You don’t need to be sarcastic,” Dulcie hissed. “You’re getting as testy as Clyde.”

  Wilma smiled. “I’m sorry. I guess that was rude.”

  “I guess.”

  Wilma’s long silver hair hung loose from its usual ponytail, flowing down over her flowered flannel nightgown. She looked a long time at Dulcie. “Guess I still have a case of nerves, after the kidnapping.”

  “I know,” Dulcie said gently, jumping up on the bed to rub against her. When Wilma had been kidnapped a few months earlier, it had seemed the end of the world to Dulcie. The dark-striped tabby stared into Wilma’s face. “Why don’t you buy another police scanner? That was the only thing missing, when Cage Jones broke in here. If we had one now, we wouldn’t have these arguments. We’d know what’s happening on the street!”

  “What difference would it make? You’d go anyway. You know Max seemed suspicious when I bought that one. As if, why did I really want it? You know that’s why…”

  But before Wilma finished, Dulcie had escaped, racing away up the hall and through the kitchen, and plunging out her cat door.

  Behind her, Wilma sighed and lay down, pulling the quilt close around her. No point in trying to stop the hardheaded tabby; Dulcie would have her way, and they both knew it.

  Fleeing across the yard through Wilma’s lush winter flowers, Dulcie sped across the empty street and up a pine tree to the rooftops, then ran like a streak for the village, hitting little more than the high spots. She guessed she couldn’t fault Wilma for worrying. Wilma, as a retired probation officer, could not be fooled about the dangers the cats faced when snooping into police matters-she understood very well the compulsion that drew the three cats to the scene of a crime and also drew them, with stubborn commitment, to track the thief or killer, to join with law enforcement using their own special talents of scent detection and anonymity. Wilma understood but that didn’t keep her from worrying.

  Leaping up a steep, shingled peak and down into a gust of cold wind, Dulcie had no doubt that Joe Grey and the kit were already at the scene, summoned by the siren’s wails-she had no notion that it was Kit who had started the action when she called 911, but she wouldn’t have been surprised. She just prayed the problem was not at Joe’s house.

  She came down from the roofs at the divided expanse of Ocean Avenue, raced across behind three parked police units making sure there was no approaching vehicle, and up a bottlebrush tree to the roof of the plaza. There, crouched on the cold, rounded tiles, she looked down on the whirling red lights. Cop cars all over the place, and the rescue vehicle was backed up onto the little walk that led between the first shops, two of its wheels in a flower bed crushing the bright cyclamens, its siren silent now, its rear door open.

  Trotting across the roof of the one-story wing at the front, to where she could look down into the gardens, she was below the top of the village Christmas tree; its colored lights mingled now with the whirling red emergency lights. Directly below her, the paramedics and officers stood well back from the Christmas tree as Detective Dallas Garza photographed the scene. She saw and smelled blood, smelled death, but there was no body. She peered down into the emergency vehicle, and found it empty, and she flicked her ears, puzzled. No one would move a body until the coroner and detectives were finished with it.

  Hunched at the edge of the roof, she could see no damage to the surrounding shops, as from vandalism; no shop window broken, no benches or small tables overturned. The Christmas tree didn’t seem to have been damaged. The oversize wooden toys were disarranged, but nothing looked broken or missing. Yet the stink of human death rose up to her sharply, making her flehmen and shiver. No clearer message was needed of what had come down here. But, where was the body?

  And where were Joe Grey and Kit? They couldn’t have missed hearing sirens.

  She watched Detective Garza taking pictures, moving carefully around the tree and then the surrounding area. As he stepped aside from where he’d been blocking her view, Dulcie studied the blood on the blue drop cloth. Bloodstains on the toys, too, on the rocking horse and on an oversize baby doll.
Flehming at the stink, she listened to the cops’ shorthand remarks until, piece by piece, she put together some idea of what had happened here.

  A disappearing dead man? And a live, frightened child who had also vanished? And then on the roof tiles she found the scent of Joe and Kit, where they had leaped into a tree, heading down into the gardens. They’d be down there now, the tabby thought, searching for the child just as were half a dozen officers, the beams of their flashlights swinging in and out among the shrubbery and tall flowers as the officers themselves kept carefully to the brick walks so as not to leave footprints or destroy evidence.

  Peering over the edge of the roof, she watched Detective Garza begin to bag fibers and bits of bloody leaves. The bloody rocking horse was bagged along with the two bloodied, oversize toys and locked in a squad car. Dallas had already photographed half a dozen partial shoe prints and a clear tire mark in the dirt of the garden, and now he nodded to Eleanor Sand, to begin pouring plaster casts of these. There were three sets of footprints in the earth, and all appeared to be men’s shoes. So far, no prints of a child.

  “If there really was a child,” Sand was saying, looking up at Garza from where she knelt, preparing a cast.

  “This better not be a hoax,” Garza said. “If that analysis comes back as animal blood…”

  “Was it the same informant?” Sand said.

  Dallas nodded.

  Sand just looked at him. “She wouldn’t do that, she wouldn’t lie to us. You know she wouldn’t.”

  Dallas nodded and turned away. But he was still scowling, his square, Latino face drawn with anger, surely thinking of the cost of such a hoax, cost to the city for trained personnel coming out on such a call, to say nothing of the diversion of Molena Point’s police and rescue units from some other crime or serious incident. On this stormy December night, a diversion of their forces could, at the very worst, prove life threatening.

  But that wasn’t the case, Dulcie knew. Kit placed the call, she thought, her predatory fires stirring. Where is Kit? Where’s Joe? She peered down again into the dark gardens.

  Apparently the body had been taken away in the vehicle that had left its tire tracks in the garden. If that was so, it hadn’t been very smart. Didn’t the killer know the kind of evidence he was leaving? Or maybe he thought he’d gotten away clean. Dulcie was crouched to slip down into the gardens and sniff at the edges of the crime scene, see what kind of scent she could pick out, when Garza’s radio came to life: Officer Brennan’s voice. She paused, listening.

  “I have the little girl. She seems all right. Hiding in that little pump house behind the dog fountain…I don’t want to drag her out, she’s scared as hell…You got a woman out there?”

  Garza glanced at Eleanor, who was busy with pouring casts, then looked up toward the street, where Detective Davis was just coming around the corner. “Juana’s on her way,” he said shortly.

  “Get a blanket,” the detective told Juana, nodding toward the rescue unit, which was closer than her squad car, “and hike on back to the fountain-the pump house-we’ve got a scared little girl hiding back there, apparently a witness.”

  An EMT handed Juana a folded blanket; she tucked it under her arm and headed swiftly back between the plaza gardens. The square, dark-haired detective was in uniform, unlike Dallas, who was dressed in jeans and a wrinkled sweatshirt. Dulcie was crouched to race after her when, out front, a Chevy pickup pulled up and Chief Harper swung out, and again Dulcie waited, listening.

  Max Harper was long and lean and hard-muscled, his thin leathery face sun-lined, his brown eyes watchful now, a cop’s eyes-but eyes that could laugh and look loving, particularly when he looked at his redheaded bride. He and Charlie had married when Charlie was in her thirties, Max the other side of forty. Charlie was Wilma Getz’s niece, and was just about the only family Wilma had left.

  “Call to dispatch came from our snitch, from the woman,” Dallas told Max. “How the hell do they do that? This stuff gives me the creeps. How is one or the other always on the scene?”

  Max said nothing. Dulcie knew their calls upset and worried the chief, whether from Joe or from her or Kit. And despite the fact that she often felt guilty for deceiving him, Dulcie had to smile at their delicious deception. The mystique for which cats were most admired was, for them, a fine and satisfying source of entertainment.

  As far as the cats knew, Dulcie and Kit’s telephone voices were enough alike so that Harper and his two detectives, and the dispatchers, thought there was only one female snitch, along with the one male-but Joe Grey’s gravelly telephone voice was well known to a good many in the department, and Dulcie wondered sometimes if Joe’s harsh meow didn’t match the tomcat’s human words too closely.

  Still, no cop seemed ever to have caught on. To believe in a talking cat would be just too far out for a fact-oriented law enforcement officer-unless they spoke directly with the cat, unless they confronted in-your-face proof.

  Harper and Dallas had moved up the walk beyond the Christmas tree, Dallas filling him in on what had gone down, when Davis ’s voice came on the radio. She had the little girl, and was on her way to the hospital.

  “She seems fine,” Juana said. “Cold and scared, but she doesn’t seem hurt. She hasn’t said a word. I’ll go straight to the children’s wing, and stay with her. She doesn’t need to be left with strangers. If she’s okay, how about I take her home with me for the night? She is so scared, Max.”

  “Do it,” Max said. “Make sure the dispatcher knows. Tell Mabel to double the officers on the patrol around your condo.” Juana’s apartment was directly across the street from the station, which would contribute somewhat to the child’s security. Juana had bought the condo just last year, a small one-bedroom unit with a view of the village, and a deck large enough for a chaise, a comfortable wicker chair, and a few pots of flowers, and from which Juana could see the station.

  Now, as the radio went silent, Dulcie leaped across the roof to where she could look down on the side street, where Juana’s police unit was pulling away from the plaza. Peering over, she saw Joe and Kit just below, half hidden in the bushes. They looked up at her, and scrambled up a bottlebrush tree to the roof. They smelled of little girl. All three cats, in an unaccustomed breach of vigilance, had missed the movement of the dark shadow in the shop across the street.

  On the roof they settled down near the Christmas tree, their paws in the leafy gutter, watching Garza finish bagging evidence. And now with the bloodied toys removed, he retrieved his camera for some close-ups of the disturbance in the blue plastic dropcloth where it was rumpled and stained.

  When he finished photographing, he began to lift additional particles from the plastic, tilting them into a clear bag, sealing that in an evidence bag and dropping it into the deep pocket of his sweatshirt with the bags of fiber and hair samples. The cats, looking beyond Garza, watched uniformed officers cordoning off the plaza with yellow crime-scene tape; and they looked at one another with a sudden sense of amazement.

  It was daunting to see the officers of Molena Point PD doing a full crime-scene investigation without a victim, doing it on their word alone, on the word of a tortoiseshell cat.

  But the evidence was there, and the blood was on its way to the lab. And now they had found the child who, if she would speak, was surely further proof of the snitch’s veracity.

  When Garza had finished with the immediate scene, he and tall blond Eleanor Sand moved on into the gardens looking for footprints among the flower beds and bushes. The cats watched him photograph the child’s small footprints that led to the pump house, then photograph that refuge inside and out. Then Eleanor, who was slimmer, pushed as far as she could through the little door, to collect samples from where the child had hidden.

  “We could collect samples for them,” Dulcie said wistfully, “if we had opposing thumbs.” The tabby imagined, not for the first time, the endless possibilities available when one had clever human hands.

  “At least,
” Joe said, “if they lift cat hairs in there, they’re legit.” The cats worried, often, about cat hairs at a crime scene where none should be found; cat hairs duly bagged could royally confuse a police investigation. Dulcie sometimes had nightmares of Max Harper confronting her, shaking a handful of tabby hairs in her face, demanding that she explain. She would wake mewling and clawing at the quilt, waking Wilma, who would hug her tight and tell her not to worry-but Wilma, herself, could offer no solution to the problem. She could only repeat that no cop would ever believe such a wild phenomenon as talking cats. Telephone-literate cat snitches. Cats addicted to the same adrenaline-high challenge of law enforcement that the cops themselves experienced.

  When Eleanor backed out of the pump house, placing several small bags of evidence in her pocket, the two officers walked the length of the dark plaza using their lights to examine windows and doors, moving slowly along beside the small shops though Dallas had already walked the scene. The cats watched Garza post guards around the plaza and send the few remaining men back to their patrols, watched him leave in his own unit, heading for the department. When chief Harper left, the cats, with the scene cleared of human disturbance, spent more than an hour prowling the gardens, walking the scene themselves, in their own way, sorting through hundreds of scents-trying to identify them all, and to isolate the one fresh scent they didn’t recognize, trying against heavy odds to sort out the smell of the killer.

  They found nothing definitive. They isolated a scent that might be the killer, but there was no way to be sure. With the smell of death around the Christmas tree, they had no sure point of reference. At last, their heads full of questions, the three cats called it a night and headed home, tired and hungry.

  Kit’s Lucinda and Pedric Greenlaw, being early risers, would soon be out of bed to make her a nice breakfast. Dulcie was thinking of a quick little snack in the kitchen, without rousing her housemate, and then crawling back under the warm comforter beside Wilma-of not waking Wilma, unleashing a barrage of questions and receiving another lecture. But Joe Grey, racing home along the plaza wall, was too hungry to wait for Clyde ’s alarm to go off. He meant to wake Clyde at once and demand a good hot breakfast. Eggs, bacon, cheese, and anchovies-the works.