7. CAT LAUGHING LAST

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Theman lay facedown, bleeding into the braided rug of Susan Brittain’s breakfast room, the fallen keyboard of Susan’s computer dangling from the edge of her desk and dripping blood onto his face. The sliding glass doors of the large, bright room stood open, admitting a damp, chill breeze. The white shutter doors of the floor-to-ceiling cupboards had been flung back, the contents of the shelves thrown to the floor, a jumble of office supplies, boxes of costume jewelry, and ceramic dishes. Susan’s prized houseplants were crushed beneath broken ceramic planters and heaps of black potting soil; every surface was dusted with soil and with clinging black powder where a plastic bottle of copier toner had burst open, the inky haze charring a blood-splattered doll and crusting the lenses of Susan’s good reflex camera.

One shoe print was incised in the toner powder but had been partially smeared away. The computer had been turned on, the program on the screen a list of eBay auction items showing photographs of each offering with its price. The time was 6:30 A.M. Susan had been gone from the house for half an hour. As the victim lay committing his blood to her hand-braided rug, across the village three seemingly unrelated events were taking place, three small dramas that might, at a future date, help construct a scenario of interest to Molena Point police-and to one gray tomcat and his tabby lady.

At the south side of the village, in the old mansion that housed Molena Point Little Theater, a young tortoiseshell cat prowled alone among the sets, her bright, inquisitive mind filled with wonderful questions. She was not hunting mice or snatching spiders from the cobwebs that hung in the far, high corners of the raftered ceiling. Her curiosity centered on the theater itself. She had watched the sets being built and painted, marveling at the green hills that looked so very like the real Molena Point hills over which she ranged each day. When she backed away from the sets, as the artist often did, the rolling slopes seemed nearly as huge and throbbing with light, the land running on forever along the edge of the Pacific. Only these hills didn’t smell like green grass and earth, they smelled like paint. And no houses nestled among them, just scattered oaks, and wandering herds of longhorn cattle and deer and elk, from a time long past.

“Did Molena Point truly look like this?” she whispered to the empty theater. “All wild and without people? And such big animals everywhere? Were there no little cats then? And no rabbits or gophers to hunt?”

Every wonder that the kit had encountered in her short life had demanded vociferous response. She had to talk about each new event, if only to herself. She stood watching the hills, filled with questions, and she looked above her, too, at the ropes and props of the theater, at the catwalk where she liked to prowl, at the electrical buttons and cords that operated the various curtains, and at the overhead pulleys and lights, all complicated and wonderful. Muttering among ragged purrs, she sat admiring the set of the Spanish hacienda, with its deep windows and ornamental grills, and its broad patio with masses of roses blooming. The long, painted tables seemed very real standing about the patio with their white cloths and silver and crystal and vases of flowers, waiting for the wedding party-for a bride and groom two hundred years dead. And the sadness of the love triangle sent a shiver through the kit, as if Marcos Romeros had just now been shot, this early dawn, as if at this moment he lay dying and betrayed.

The kit relished the stories that humans told-but especially she loved the ancient Celtic folklore that spoke of her own history. She had never seen any kind of play being made, she had never seen any story brought alive, onstage. This new kind of storytelling filled her with wonder almost greater than her small, tortoiseshell body could contain.

Whilethe tattercoat kit dreamed alone in the empty theater, and the morning sky over Molena Point brightened to fog-streaked silver, the man who lay bleeding in Susan Brittain’s breakfast room stirred. His fingers twitched, his hand moved. His eyes opened, his expression puzzled and then afraid.

And across the village in a handsome stone cottage, a phone rang. One ring, two. On the third bell the system switched to an answering tape, recording a long message from a New York literary agent. Ten minutes later the instrument rang again, and an equally terse and irritated communication was committed to the machine from a prestigious New York editor. No one emerged from the bedroom to check the messages, certainly not the handsome, silver-haired author, a man one would expect to stroll out garbed in an expensive silk dressing gown and hand-sewn slippers. But it was, after all, only 6:50, California time. A writer who worked into the small hours had no desire to rise with the sun.

Several blocks away, in the crowded front yard of the Roy McLeary residence, as villagers gathered for the McLeary yard sale, an altercation was about to erupt over a small and unprepossessing wooden box that lay half hidden among cast-off household accessories and scarred furniture. A clash of emotions that would amuse and surprise the dozens of early bargain hunters, and would sharply alert the two cats who lay draped over the branch of a huge oak at the edge of the yard, greatly entertained by the intense atmosphere of the early gathering.

Joe Grey and Dulcie, having come from a predawn hunt up on the open hills, had arrived before daylight prepared to enjoy the bargaining. Though most of Molena Point’s yard sales started officially at 8:00 A.M., by 6:30 or 7:00 they were well under way, every shopper eager for the best buys.

Among the dark, prickly leaves, Joe’s sleek silver gray coat blended so well that he was hardly visible. But one white-booted paw hung over the branch, and the white strip down his face and his white chest might be glimpsed among the dense foliage by an observant visitor. His yellow eyes gleamed, too, watching, highly intrigued by the human passion to possess another person’s broken cast-offs. Beside him, Dulcie’s green eyes were slitted with amusement. The tip of her dark tail twitched, and her dark brown stripes blended with the oak’s shadows. Neither cat anticipated the trouble that was about to explode below them; neither was prepared, this morning, for the innocent gathering to turn violent.

And while the three events were yet to merge into an interesting scenario, six blocks to the west, out on the wide, sandy shore where the breakers rolled steadily like an endless heartbeat, Susan Brittain and her big black poodle turned to head home, following their own double trail of footprints back toward the village. Susan’s short, white hair was covered by a baseball cap, the collar of her faded jacket turned up against the sea wind. On Saturdays she walked Lamb very early so she could get to the yard sales, and could beat the other first arrivals who would snatch up all the best items. This morning she had left the house at 5:30, heading downhill from her apartment toward the heart of Molena Point, the village rooftops and oak trees massed below her, like black cutouts against the silver gleam of the sea. She had passed only a few cottages with their lights on, and then the shop windows softly illuminated-little lighted stages showing off bright jewelry and imported sweaters and fine china. Susan didn’t need to urge Lamb along; knowing the Saturday routine, he leaned his strong ninety pounds on the leash as he did at no other time, looking back at her urging her to hurry. Heaven knew she moved as fast as she could, considering her seventy years; but not fast enough to suit Lamb.

There was nothing lamblike about the big dog. A standard poodle was not a cuddly playtoy Her daughter had called him Lamb when he was six weeks old, a small bundle of fluff then, and the name had stuck. Now, Lamb’s long aristocratic head and his muscular body beneath his short-clipped, tightly curled black coat showed clearly his power and dignity. Susan felt bad, sometimes, that he had never been taught the formal rituals of retrieving, of gathering in game birds, working with a human hunter on California’s lakes and rivers, that he had never been allowed to develop the instinctive art that ran so powerfully in his blood. He was a companion dog, forced to trade his wild yearnings for home and fireside.

Around them as they headed home, the village was waking, cottage lights popping on behind curtained windows, the smell of freshly brewed coffee warming the damp sea air. She never tired of the village’s diverse architecture, the small houses and shops an amazing and congenial mix of Bavarian, Swiss, Mexican adobe, California contemporary, Mediterranean, Victorian, all softened by the richly flowering gardens for which Molena Point was known, and by the dark and sprawling oaks and cypress trees that stood guard over the crowded rooftops. Somewhere ahead, a dog barked counterpoint to the sea’s steady thunder. She’d had a lovely, quiet ramble with Lamb along the empty shore, looking away where sea and sky stretched forever, and she felt at peace. She had no clue that when she arrived home, her life would be precipitously altered.

Hurrying up Ocean between the shops, she saw only a few other dog walkers, saw none of her dog-owning friends; nor did she encounter the quiet New Yorker, Lenny Wells, and his sad-faced dalmatian. The young man was new to Molena Point; she had stopped with him for coffee several times, sitting at a sidewalk table, their two dogs lying quietly by their feet. She had suggested several congenial groups that Lenny might join, to get acquainted. He seemed so shy and uncertain; that was little enough that she could do to help him get settled. He was years her junior, quiet and respectful, very gentle with the young dog.

By the time Susan and Lamb reached home they had done two miles, a distance that Lamb considered trifling, little more than a warm-up. They were back at the house at 6:40, the sky cream and silver above them over the Molena Point hills. Starting in through the side door of the garage, Lamb growled and lunged through ahead of her, his ears back, his teeth gleaming as fierce as the fangs of an attacking wolf.

Alarmed, she pulled him back forcefully, shut the door, and moved away, speaking softly to Lamb. Someone was there, or had been-the big dog was not given to flights of fancy. Snatching up a sturdy, five-gallon plastic pot that had come from the nursery, she turned it over beneath the garage window and stood on it to peer in.

She no longer kept her car parked inside; it had sat out on the drive since she’d converted the double garage into a neat and efficient workroom for the storage and shipping of yard sale purchases. Looking in, she caught her breath.

The three big work tables had been overturned, and one of the legs broken. Shelves were ripped from the wall, cupboard doors torn off-and all the carefully cataloged treasures that she and her friends had purchased at countless yard and estate sales lay broken and scattered across the concrete.

Stepping down from the makeshift stool, feeling more angry than afraid, she retrieved the short-handled shovel from where she’d leaned it against the wall last evening when she’d finished planting some lavender bushes in the side yard. Holding the shovel like a battering ram, and speaking quietly to the growling poodle, she flung open the garage door.

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Likea colony of pack rats,” Joe Grey said. “Such an appetite for other people’s possessions, it’s enough to make a possum laugh.” He turned to look at Dulcie. “Humans are as bad as you, when you steal the neighbors’ silk undies.”

If a cat could blush, Dulcie’s furry face would be red. She didn’t like him to laugh at her. But it was true, she’d been driven by a longing for cashmere and silk, for soft, pretty garments, since she was a kitten. Such a keen desire that she would slip out of the house in the small hours, and into her neighbors’ homes, pressing in through a partially open window or swinging on the knob of a back door left unlocked. Slipping toward the bedroom, she would depart moments later dragging a silk teddy in her teeth or a sheer stocking or a bright, soft sweater, taking each lovely item home to roll on, to sleep on, to rub her face against. And how else was she to have the lovely garments that she so coveted, except to borrow them? She was a cat. She couldn’t indulge in shopping sprees at Lord& Taylor’s or I. Magnin’s. She only wanted to enjoy those treasures for a little while before the neighbors came to retrieve them. Well, shehadkept Wilma’s good watch for over a year, hidden under the claw-footed bathtub.

As the sun rose beyond the cats’ leafy treetop, the crowded roofs of Molena Point caught gleams and flashes of light. Shingled roofs and red tile, sharp peaks and slanted were soon all aglow. The time was not yet 7:00. In the distance a dog barked, an insistent staccato against the soft pounding of the sea. The morning air smelled of pine, and iodine, and of multitudes of small, dead shell-creatures. Out over the Pacific, dawn was reflected from the sea like burnished metal. But beyond lay black rain clouds-they might blow away north toward San Francisco or might creep in over the village and rain on the McLearys’ sale.

Slow-moving traffic filled the narrow street as new arrivals tried to find parking places, so many eager shoppers that the lane was choked with vehicles. And the lawn was crowded with folks wandering among borrowed church tables piled with toys and clothes and baby garments, with bent silverware, outdated golf clubs, tarnished jewelry, with dented cookpots and old handbags and faded Christmas decorations. Between the tables stood scarred dressers, beds, breakfast tables, and toy chests.

Watching folks argue over prices or haul away chairs and tables and broken toys, jamming their newly acquired treasures into cars and SUVs and pickups, watching all the little dramas, Joe and Dulcie, replete with a breakfast of wharf rat and young rabbit, were of much of the same frame of mind as a human couple who, after a satisfying supper, had settled down in a front row at the theater to be entertained.

“The McLearys must have cleaned out not only their own attic,” Dulcie said, “but the houses of all their cousins and uncles.” Indeed, the Molena Point McLearys were a large clan. “An anthropological treasure trove, an artifactual record of four generations of McLeary family history.”

“Four generations of bad taste. A microcosm of useless human consumerism.”

She stared at him.

He shrugged his sleek gray shoulders. “Look around you.

Abandoned projects, thrown-away intentions, broken dreams, soured ambitions. Relics of human disenchantment.”

Easing his position on the branch, he looked at her with tomcat superiority. “You don’t see a cat going off on a dozen projects-golf, snooker, Chinese checkers, paint by numbers, needlework, photograph albums. You don’t see a cat tossing away one craze after another. Look at the wasted time and effort, to say nothing of the wasted money. And then they have to get rid of it all. And their neighbors grab and snatch, until their own closets are bulging.”

“You’re in an ugly mood. What happened to live-and-let-live?”

Joe Grey shrugged.

“What you see down there,” she told him, “is a lifetime of magnificent intentions. An incredible richness of human endeavor and imagination. You’re looking at dreams down there-at the products of creative human energy. At happy, vital, and endlessly diverse moments in McLeary family history.”

Joe Grey snorted, his ears and whiskers back in a derisive cat laugh.

She widened her green eyes, but kept her voice low. “I’ve never seen you so sour. Are things not good at home? What, Clyde’s messed-up love life is making you cross? Or,” she said, “is Clyde still thinking of selling the house? Is that what’s eating you?”

“My mood has nothing to do with the house, or with Clyde’s love life. I am not driven by Clyde Damen’s vicissitudes. I am simply making an observation about the confusion of the human mind. You don’t see a cat throwing out the livingroom furniture every year and buying all new stuff. Look around you. Why would-”

“Cats don’t have livingroom furniture.”

“I have an easy chair.” His tone was so pompous that they both laughed. Joe’s upholstered chair, which sat in the Damen living room by the front window, was so ragged and faded it resembled nothing as much as the hide of an ancient and molting pachyderm. “You don’t see me tossing my good chair away at some yard sale.”

“If that chair’s a prototype of the quality of your life, that clawed-to-rags, fur-matted, stained and smelly horror, then you, my dear tomcat, are in trouble.”

Joe nudged her playfully; but soon they peered down again, fascinated by the bargain hunters. The locals were dressed in jeans and sweatshirts, some folks freshly scrubbed, some still uncombed as if they’d just rolled out of bed. The conviviality of neighbors brightened the morning with friendly talk and wisecracks. Here and there a weekender wandered, just as eager for a bargain, a tourist dressed in brand-name shorts, starched shirt, and Gucci sandals, or golf or tennis attire. Some shoppers carried nonspill coffee mugs that they had brought from their cars. Two were munching on breakfast rolls, wrapped in squares of waxed paper, that they’d picked up at one of the bakeries on the way over. At events such as this, one saw a true cross-section of the village. Besides the rich and comfortable, and the famous, who “did” the yard sales for a lark, one saw clearly the Molena Point residents who lived on limited funds, people trying to stretch every dollar. The inveterate bargain hunters, rich or poor, showed up at every such event. The cats watched a portly, bleached blond lady in walking shorts, a blue sweatshirt, and red tennis shoes try to fit a six-foot wicker bookcase into a small Jaguar sports car. She had wrapped the bookcase carefully in blankets-whether to protect her ten-dollar bargain or protect the hundred-thousand-dollar Jag wasn’t clear.

Nearer to the cats’ oak tree, two women stood arguing over a glass-topped patio table that both claimed to have spoken for first. And directly below, a huge-bellied man, stripped to the waist, carried a ruffled, flowered chaise lounge over his head, in the direction of a battered pickup truck. The cats watched a tiny little old lady precariously juggle a glass punch bowl of such proportions that she could have used it for a sitz bath. Maybe that was her plan. Fill it with champagne, and voila, just like the old Harlow movies. The sight of her prompted Dulcie to quote to herself,When I am old, I will wear purple, and bathe in French champagne.She caught her breath when the lady nearly dropped her gleaming treasure, and before she thought, Dulcie reached down a paw as if to offer assistance-but drew back quickly, glancing at Joe with embarrassment.

No one looked up to wonder what that cat was doing. No one had seen the two cats in the tree or, if they had seen them, no one would imagine their conversation, or dream of the thoughts churning through those sleek feline heads. Their human neighbors would never imagine that cats might discuss human frailties-though they might allow that cats didn’t give a damn about human foolishness.

Of the residents of Molena Point, only four people knew that Joe Grey and Dulcie could speak, that the two cats read theMolena Point Gazettefar more perceptively than some human subscribers, that they liked to frequent the village news racks perusing the front page of theSan Francisco Examiner,and that when there was nothing more interesting at hand, they watched prime-time TV Only four people knew that Joe Grey and Dulcie were not your ordinary, everyday kitties or that they had, during various criminal investigations by Molena Point PD, not only pointed a paw at their share of killers and thieves, supplying critical evidence to convict the miscreants, but that they had spied as well on any number of villagers, in the comfort of the villagers’ own homes. No one knew that, posing as stray kitties, the two were adept at passing on sensitive information to police detectives. Not even Max Harper’s own cops, nor Captain Harper himself, knew the identity of their best informants; Joe Grey and Dulcie were far too smooth to blow their own cover.

But the two cats had other human friends besides the four who shared their secrets. Peering down, they watched three of their favorite senior ladies making their yard sale selections with careful judgment-and with huge dreams. These three women weren’t shopping for fun, they were searching out purchases to secure their own futures.

Mavity Flowers, small and sturdy in her threadbare maid’s uniform, perused a display of china and crystal about which, through necessity, she had come to know quite a lot. Cora Lee French, a head taller than Mavity, a lovely, slim Creole woman with graying hair, slipped lithely among tables of needlework and linens, touching the stitching with gentle, experienced hands. And tall, blond Gabrielle Row checked over the clothes that hung on long metal racks, looking not only for resalable bargains, but for anything useful to the little theater costume department.

Gabrielle was still elegant, despite her sixty-some years. Her short-clipped gray hair was skillfully colored to ash blond, and the cut of her cream blazer was long and lean over her white slacks. Working full-time as seamstress in her own shop, she had for many years been wardrobe director as well for Molena Point Little Theater. And now, frequenting the yard sales, she was not only hunting for costume material but was planning, too, for a time when she would be less active.

Five ladies made up the Senior Survival Club: Mavity, Cora Lee, and Gabrielle. And Susan Brittain, who was not to be seen this morning, though Susan hardly ever missed a sale. Susan’s garage was headquarters for wrapping and shipping the items the ladies sold on the Web. She handled, on her computer, all their eBay sales. The fifth member was Wilma Getz, Dulcie’s housemate, retired parole officer, gray haired, in her late fifties. Wilma might be called a silent partner, agreeing with the women’s plan, meaning to take part at some future time, but not totally committed.

The ladies were looking toward buying a communal dwelling that would accommodate them all plus a housekeeper and a caregiver when that time arrived. All of them had some savings, or home equity. And the cats were amazed at how much money they had set aside by hitting the yard sales and selling at auction. So far, it amounted to over ten thousand dollars.

Senior Survival’s plan for mutual security and comfort, in a world of dwindling incomes, increasing taxes, and the possibility of deteriorating health, seemed to Dulcie infinitely courageous, a bold alternative to the ladies’ separate interments in retirement or convalescent homes-a plan of mutual cooperation but individual responsibility. These ladies didn’t like conventional institutions.

Slowly the sun slid higher above the hills, slashing through the oak leaves into the cats’ faces, making them slit their eyes. Joe’s white paws and chest, and the white triangle down his nose, gleamed like snow against his smooth gray fur. As Dulcie backed along the branch, her dark stripes cloaked in shadow, she resembled a small, dark tiger. Only her green eyes caught the light. A breeze fingered into the tree, to rattle the leaves, a chill breath that, by its scent and direction, promised not rain as the marine clouds implied, but a warm day to come. Perhaps only a cat would be aware of the message-how sad that humans, trying to assess the weather, had to read barometers and listen to the questionable advice of some book-educated meteorologist hamming his way through the morning news. Such dependence left one open to innumerable misjudgments in attire-to getting one’s head and feet wet; while all a cat had to do was taste the wind and feel in every fiber of his body the changes in barometric pressure.

The sun was returning to stay, no doubt of that. No more tearing March storms with winds wild enough to jerk a cat right out of his own pawprints. Spring was settling in at last, the acacia trees exploding with brilliant yellow blooms that smelled like honey. All the early flowers were opening. Village cats rolled with abandon in the gardens, and the outdoor cafes were filled with locals and tourists-a perfect spring, in the loveliest of villages. Who needed to travel the shores of Britain and France, Dulcie thought, or trek through Spain and Africa? Molena Point was so beautiful this morning that Dulcie’s purrs hummed through the branches like bumblebees.

But suddenly an unease touched the cats, a foreboding that made Dulcie stiffen and sent a chill twitching down Joe Grey’s spine as sharp as an electric shock.

They studied the crowd below, puzzled and alarmed, their ears flicking forward and back, every nerve on alert, as they tried to figure out what had alarmed them. They were crouched on the branch, wary and keenly predatory, when sirens sounded: a police car leaving the station, they could see beyond the treetops its red whirling beacon heading away through the village, in the same direction where, a quarter hour earlier, an ambulance had departed.

An ambulance, alone, was not uncommon. It could mean severe illness, a heart attack, the agony of a broken hip. A squad car alone could mean anything-a strayed child, a driver ramming into a tree. But the two vehicles together, the law and the medics, were inclined to mean trouble.

The cats had crouched to leap away across the roofs to have a look when Joe saw, in the street below, the source of their sudden unease. A growl rose in his throat as a petite young woman stepped out of her black Lincoln. The cats watched Vivi Traynor cross to the McLeary yard, trampling through a flower bed, shoving a child aside as she hurried to the sale tables. She was small and curvy, her black tights, plaid miniskirt, and black sweater clinging, her black hair teased into a bird’s nest around her thin face, and held back with a red bow. As she rifled through assemblages of household cast-offs, the village locals, who had not yet seen the author’s wife at a yard sale, watched her with interest. A portly tourist whipped out a scrap of paper as if to ask for Vivi’s autograph. Did the wife of an internationally famous novelist rate the status of autographs? Certainly Vivi always attracted attention. The couple had been in town barely three weeks, Elliott Traynor having come to oversee a little theater production of his only play, an experimental form that theGazettecalled innovative and exciting.

Word had it that Elliott was fighting cancer, that this theatrical production was a project he longed to enjoy while he was still able. The play was set in this area of the California coast where Molena Point now stood, and the musical score had been written by a well-known composer who made his home in the village. The cats watched Vivi wander the garden intently searching-for what? Perhaps looking for some stage prop? Slipping between a stack of used windows and a flowered couch, she performed a theatrical little hip wiggle to ease past a rusty barbecue, then giggled shrilly as she shouldered aside a portly lady tourist. The sight of her made Joe’s fur twitch.

Since their arrival, Elliott Traynor had kept largely to himself as he finished the last chapters ofTwilight Silver,the third novel in his historical trilogy. But Vivi had made herself known around the village, and not pleasantly-as if she enjoyed being rude to shopkeepers, as if she took pleasure in being abrupt and demanding.

The Traynors had not wanted a staff for the cottage they were renting, but had hired the cleaning service provided by Wilma Getz’s redheaded niece, Charlie. Charlie tended the Traynor house herself, early each morning, then left the couple to their privacy.

Molena Point’s residents, numbering so many writers and artists, were not put off by Elliott’s reclusive ways. They talked among themselves about his books and about the play, waved when occasionally they saw him on the streets or in the black Lincoln, as they headed to the theater; otherwise they left him to his own devices. The presence, alone, of the prestigious writer, seemed adequate enrichment to their well-appointed lives.

But no one had warmed to Vivi.

Traynor’s previous wife had died three years before. Six months later, he married Vivi, a woman forty years his junior. Besides her loud, rude ways, something else about her made the cats want to back away, hissing, a chill that perhaps only a cat would sense. Whatever reason she had for appearing this morning in the McLeary garden could only, in Joe Grey’s opinion, mean trouble.

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The light in Susan Brittain’s garage was dim. Standing in the doorway, again peering into the gloom, the first rays of sun striking in past her shoulder, she searched the shadows among the overturned shelves and tables, looking for someone perhaps still crouched there among the ripped-off cupboard doors and scattered empty shipping boxes. An unwound roll of bubble wrap lay twisted across the fallen shelf units like the cast-off skin of a giant snake. Susan could see no one standing silently, waiting for her to enter. Had the vandal been after something he imagined was secured behind the cabinets? Why else would he rip them from the wall? What could he imagine she had, of enough value for him to go to all that trouble? Her instinct was to run, to get away from the house, to call the police from her neighbor’s.

Was the vandal in the house somewhere? Had he broken into her home as well?

The door from the garage to the breakfast room was closed. She couldn’t see whether it had been tampered with, but when she headed further inside to try the lock, Lamb lunged into her path again, snapping at her leg and growling. She backed out of the garage, her hand on his head, grateful for his protection.

She didn’t want to go around to the patio entry. If someone was inside, she would be easily seen through the glass doors of the breakfast room before she could reach the front door.

Carrying the oversized plastic nursery pot from the side of the house, she stood on it again, to peer through the high windows into her bright breakfast room.

The cupboard doors stood open, their contents pulled out in a mess on the floor among the overturned dinette chairs, her watercolors jerked from their hooks, and the glass broken, her expensive ceramic pots thrown to the floor, spilling their delicate plants in heaps of black soil. Her heart was pounding so hard she felt faint. Both anger and panic blurred her vision-and fear.

A man lay sprawled beside her desk, facedown and unmoving, his blood mixed with spilled copier toner, the toner floating on top the viscous red pools like scum on a stagnant pond. She couldn’t see his face. What had he wanted? What had happened to him? She owned nothing of great value. Was this simply vandalism, senseless and cruel? Not a burglary at all, but someone mindlessly stoned and intent on destruction, who ended up harming himself?

Whatever had happened, she felt totally violated, felt far more wounded than she’d ever envisioned when she’d heard about others’ breakins. Reading those accounts, she’d tried to imagine how one would react, but she hadn’t had a clue.

She wondered, sickly, if he had trashed the whole house. Maybe he’d already made off with her TV and CD player, maybe with the few pieces of gold jewelry she kept in the top drawer of her dressing table, then had returned to see what else he could find. Had someone else been here, and hit him? He was very still, though from the way the blood and toner were smeared, it looked as if he had moved, maybe tried to roll over.

This was the stuff of some lurid movie. She needed the police, she needed someone. Her pride in her independence didn’t stretch this far.

Beside her, Lamb looked up at her with solemn, dark eyes, alert and questioning. Reaching down to stroke him, she tried to reassure herself, to take herself in hand.

Why had the burglar turned on her computer? Its light shone faintly across the man’s body, reflected from the eBay auction lists.

Andwasthere another vandal? Was he out here in the yard somewhere, watching her? Looking in both directions along the side of the house, she knew she should get away.

None of this made sense. Could that man in there be lying so still to deceive her, wanting to lure her inside and grab her? Someone who would hurt her simply for kicks? Lamb continued to watch the window, the gleam in his dark eyes hard and alert like a snake ready to strike.

Certainly, with Lamb by her side, she would be safe going in. If she went inside, she could see better what had happened, could see if the man was dead, then call 911.

Oh yes, she could do that. And maybe she should take his pulse, she thought, disgusted with herself.

Hands shaking, she stepped down off the plastic planter and backed away. Pulling Lamb’s leash tight, she slipped around to the drive where her car was parked. Unlocking the door, she signaled Lamb to get in. Following him, she locked the door again and used her cell phone, which she kept plugged into the dash, to call 911, her voice shaking so badly she could hardly make herself understood. That surprised her, that she would lose control. She managed to tell the dispatcher there was a man lying wounded in her house, bleeding and possibly dead, that there must have been two men. After she hung up, she wondered if she should back out of the drive, get away from there, even if the car was locked.

But it wouldn’t be long. She would wait in the drive until the police came.

They arrived within five minutes, a patrol officer-one of two new rookies, she thought. And the new detective from San Francisco, Detective Dallas Garza. She was aware of Garza from her friend Wilma, who knew most of the officers in the Molena Point PD. She wished that Captain Harper himself had come.

The captain had a terse but comforting way about him. During all that trouble up at the retirement home last year, when she’d been staying there recovering from her car accident, and those people were killed up there, Harper’s laid-back, quiet resolve had made everyone feel easier, had kept the elderly residents from panicking. But the department was growing, and Harper didn’t go out on many calls anymore.

Detective Garza was a squarely built, solid man in his late forties, dressed in slacks and a sport coat, his short black hair neatly trimmed, his black Latin eyes unreadable. The uniformed officer with him was young, with dimples and a cleft chin. Susan gave Dallas Garza her house key, and remained in her car with the doors locked, as he instructed, while they cleared the house. Garza had told her to be ready to drive away if anyone came out or if she felt threatened.

He was in there a very long time. Through her slightly open driver’s window, she heard the glass door of the breakfast room slide back, as if they had gone out that way and were looking over the patio. Then she heard the back patio gate creak open. Beside her, Lamb listened, following every sound.

Maybe ten minutes later she heard the gate shut again. She sat in the car feeling useless and uncharacteristically frightened. She didn’t approve of such fear in herself; she wondered sometimes if this Senior Survival plan was simply a sign of weakness-a gaggle of old ladies who felt they couldn’t cope with life alone? Looking over at Lamb, she was mighty thankful to have him. The big poodle, sitting erect in the passenger seat, watched the house as intently as if he could see through the walls. Another police car arrived, parking on the street. Garza came out of the house to confer with the officer, then walked over to her car, looking down at her as she rolled down her window.

“There’s no one in there, Mrs. Brittain.”

“That’s a relief. Is the man dead?”

“There’s no one in the breakfast room. There’s no body.” Garza looked at her carefully. “There’s a lot of blood. Detective Davis is on the way. She’ll photograph, take samples, and lift prints. Do you want to tell me again what you saw?”

Her hands began to shake. She couldn’t believe what he told her. Reaching to Lamb, she clutched her fingers into his short dense curls.

“You couldn’t have mistaken what you saw? Saw the blood, perhaps, and imagined�?”

“Of course not! Are you sure there was no one? You’re saying that man got up and walked away?”

“There was no one in the breakfast room. The glass door was unlocked and ajar. Did you leave it that way?”

“I left it locked. I would have heard it open. I looked in the window, standing on that plastic pot, and he was there. I came right to the car, locked myself in, and called you. Well, I guess he could have opened it then, when I was calling, and I wouldn’t have heard. But he was so still, and so much blood�”

“Could you describe again exactly what you saw?”

“A man. He looked dead. Lying on his stomach. Denim shirt and jeans. Lying in blood. His own blood, I supposed. Spilled printer toner mixed with blood, floating on top. Blood running into the spilled potting soil. He� the man was turned away, I couldn’t see his face. He had short brown hair, and he was thin.” She closed her eyes, trying to bring back the scene, then looked up at Garza. “I think he was young. Smooth neck, smooth hands.”

“Was he wearing rings or a watch?”

She closed her eyed again, but she couldn’t remember. Just kept seeing the blood.

“Did you notice anything else? His shoes? What kind of shoes?”

Again she tried to bring back the scene. “Blood and potting soil, or toner, on his shoes. They must have been jogging shoes. Yes, white. Blood and toner staining the white.”

Garza nodded. “There was a blood trail out the glass door and across the patio. But no one in the house. Your keyboard is filled with blood and could have prints. May we take it as evidence?”

“I have another, I just recently bought that curved one-to help prevent wrist problems, you know.”

Garza nodded. “And you’re all right waiting here while we finish the initial investigation?”

“I’m fine.” But,I’m hungry,she thought.Iwant my coffee.

She could go to the neighbors, beg a cup of coffee. But she didn’t want to talk to anyone, didn’t want to answer questions. And she didn’t want to ask to go in the house while they were taking evidence. They wouldn’t want her there getting in the way, maybe destroying something they felt was important.

As Garza turned away, a plain green Chevy pulled up the drive, parking beside Susan’s car. Detective Juana Davis got out, a squarely built Latina woman in her mid-thirties with short black hair. She smiled and waved to Susan, and went inside with Garza. Susan sat in her car thinking about having to clean up that mess, and about this loss to the Senior Survival club fund. They’d had no one item of value, but many small treasures that altogether would have brought a nice sum on the Web-now all shattered and destroyed. And she thought about the five members of the Senior Survival club buying a house together, wondered if five women living together might be more secure, maybe take better precautions-or if five lone women in a house would be sitting ducks for anyone who wanted to harm them.

I’m getting paranoid, this is crazy, this is not the way I look at life.She stroked Lamb and looked into his eyes, and saw such steadfast courage that she was ashamed of her own cowardice.

It was half an hour later that Davis came out to tell Susan that the trail of blood led across her backyard, across her neighbors’ side yard, and disappeared at the curb of the street below her house.

“The victim may have gotten into a car. Do you remember a car parked down there?” Davis pushed back her short hair. She was in uniform, though usually the detectives dressed in civilian clothes.

“I didn’t come home along the lower street,” Susan said. “I came up the other way, directly from the village. Walking. I’d been walking Lamb, on the beach.”

Davis nodded. Her dark Latin eyes warmed to Susan, and she reached to pat her arm. “You’ll continue to wait until Detective Garza can talk with you again? Are you comfortable?”

“Of course,” Susan said, badly wanting her coffee.

The detectives spent nearly two hours going over the scene, photographing, dusting for prints, taking blood samples from several locations, and taking Susan’s own fingerprints for comparison. After about an hour, Davis asked her if she wanted to come in and make coffee.

As she sipped that first, welcome cup, Detective Garza sat with her in her living room, refusing coffee, asking endless questions. She allowed him to examine her hands and arms for any cuts or scrapes or bruises. She tried not to let that ruffle her. This was part of his job, to be sure she hadn’t been involved, that she wasn’t holding back information.

“Who knows your routine, Mrs. Brittain? Who would know that you are in the habit of walking early in the morning?”

“All my neighbors know that. And my women friends. Wilma Getz� Shall I give you a list?”

“Yes, with addresses and phone numbers, if you would. Anyone else?”

“Other dog walkers would know. Anyone used to seeing me and Lamb in the village or on the beach. This is a small town, Detective Garza. Everyone knows your business.” Garza had only been in the village a few months; but surely even working in San Francisco, he’d be aware that some of the neighborhoods were like a small town, where everyone knew everyone else. And Garza knew the village, he had vacationed here for years.

“When can I begin to clean up?” she asked. “Do I have to leave that mess?”

“For a while you do. We’ll be putting up crime scene tape, we’ll want everything left untouched until we notify you. Can you stay with a friend for a few nights? Stay out of the house until we’re finished?”

“I’ll call Wilma. I’m supposed to meet her and some friends for brunch, but I�”

“It might help to have friends around you. And please don’t leave your dog here, for his own safety.”

“No, I wouldn’t leave Lamb. He’ll go with me.”

“He’s a fine, dignified fellow. Does he hunt?”

“No. My daughter never trained him. She got him for companionship. She’s working in San Francisco now, so I inherited Lamb. Do you have dogs?”

“I used to raise pointers. I have two that I’ll be bringing down later, when I get the backyard fixed up for them.” He smiled. “Go on to brunch, Mrs. Brittain-you and Lamb. I’ll wait while you pack an overnight bag.”

She gave Detective Garza her spare house key that she kept in her dresser, and packed a bag while he waited. His presence in the house was reassuring. Before she left, they checked the doors and windows together. As she drove away, she saw Detective Davis canvassing the neighborhood to see who might have been at home, who might have heard or seen anything unusual. The disappearance of the body-of the wounded man-distressed her. She didn’t like the idea that he might return.

But, comforted by the officers’ thoroughness, she began to feel easier. She was not a flighty woman, she was not going to get hysterical over this. After the wreck that had left her so crippled, which had taken a year to recover from, she had been able to keep herself together. So why go to pieces over something so much smaller? All the time she was in the wheelchair she had not lost her nerve or resolve-at least, not very often. She told herself that this breakin, this ugly invasion of her privacy, was nothing compared to that nightmare. Yet she couldn’t shake the sense of being totally violated.

She supposed everyone felt this way when such a thing happened, felt incredibly angry at their own helplessness. If she could get her hands on either of those men, even the hurt one, and if she was strong enough, she wouldn’t answer for what she might do.

Parking a block from the Swiss Cafe, she smoothed her short hair and put on some lipstick. Detective Garza was right, she needed her friends. Clipping on Lamb’s leash, she let him out of the car and headed for brunch, praying that she wouldn’t end up crying in her pancakes, making a fool of herself.

4 [��������: pic_5.jpg]

When the ambulance screamed again through the village, Mavity Flowers jumped, startled, dropping the handful of old beaded evening bags she’d been sorting through. That violent noise tore right through a person. She never got used to it, not since the ambulance came when her husband died, when Lou was taken away.

Pushing back her kinky gray hair, she knelt to pick up the little old purses, clutching them against her white uniform. Rising, she laid them out across the cluttered table atop a mess of other bargains so she could choose the best ones. You’d think she’d be used to sirens at her age, and with so many older folk in the village. The ambulance went out often, even if only for some poor soul who had taken a bad fall-went out more frequently than she liked to think about. She felt uneasy suddenly, thinking about her Senior Survival friends. But Cora Lee and Gabrielle were right there at the sale. Wilma never came to these events-but Wilma was healthy as a horse, working out twice a week and walking every day.

She hadn’t seen Susan, and that was strange. Susan got up so early, she was always among the first, eager to get the best buys.

Looking around for her, Mavity wanted to use the McLearys’ phone, see if she was all right.

But that was foolish, that was the kind of fussing that would deeply annoy Susan. She was too independent to tolerate her friends’ checking on her for no sensible reason.

Mavity knelt to pick up the purses, selecting the nicest ones, and looking to see if any beads were missing. She hoped that when her time came to depart this world, there would be no need for sirens. That she’d go fast, that she wouldn’t have some terrible, debilitating stroke to leave her lingering. It terrified her to think of growing weak and helpless, of being unable to care for herself.

Even though she was getting up in years, she felt young inside, and she kept herself in good shape, cleaning houses all day. She could still walk a mile into the village, buy her groceries, and carry them home again, and not be breathing hard when she plunked the bags down on the kitchen table. Still wore a size 4, even if all she bought was white uniforms in the used-clothing shops. Only when she looked in the mirror at her wrinkles and crow’s-feet did she see the truth about her age.

She had no children to look out for her if she got sick. Now that her niece was dead, she had only her brother Greeley, and what good was he? Older than she was, and he’d be all thumbs, trying to care for a person. Irresponsible, too. Living down there in Panama like some foreigner. The last time he flew up to see her, look at the trouble they’d had, him stealing, right there under her nose, robbing from the village stores.

No, she couldn’t depend on Greeley. When her time came, she prayed for one massive stroke. Zip. Gone-to whatever lay beyond.

Maybe she’d see Lou again, maybe not. Two old folks wandering hand in hand again. Or maybe they’d be young again. No aches and pains. Wouldn’t that be nice.

She hadn’t been to church for years, didn’t remember how a priest described Heaven. Well, if there wasn’t any Heaven, if there was nothing after this life, she wouldn’t know it, would she? Might as well think like there was, and enjoy the promise.

Anyway, now she wouldn’t be alone if she got decrepit, now she had a new kind of family to depend on, and to depend on her.

She’d balked at first at the idea of the Senior Survival club; it had seemed silly, and she’d never been a joiner. But maybe it would work. They were committed now, the five of them set on making their lives easier by their own efforts, not depending on some agency that they had no control over. Susan said they were reinventing their futures. Well, they weren’t planning on nothing fancy, no grand cruises or flights to Europe. Just a way to grow old with more security, by helping each other, using the money they were making right now as they picked over the McLearys’ cast-off junk, plus the money they’d all make selling their houses.

Mavity had to smile. This all sounded like a confidence scheme. Except there was no outsider to rip them off. It had been their own idea, the five of them, all friends for years. Four of them widowed, and Wilma divorced, all alone now and tossing out ideas for their futures. She paused a moment, looking across the garden at her friends, at Gabrielle, and at Cora Lee. And for a moment, she couldn’t help it; she felt a nudge of envy.

Mavity’s daydreaming again,” Dulcie said. “Woolgathering.” She watched Mavity, who was watching Gabrielle and Cora Lee, and she could almost guess what Mavity was thinking-a little of Mavity’s indulgent daydreaming. Across the McLeary garden, Gabrielle was inspecting a tableful of silverware, her tall slim figure handsome in her pale blazer, her short, soft blond hair catching the sunlight. Beyond her, Cora Lee French sorted through some boxes of books, her cafe-au-lait coloring and long white sundress making her look about seventeen, despite the salt and pepper in her black hair.

“What are you grinning about?” Joe asked, cutting her a look.

“About Mavity-at what she’s thinking.”

“What? You’re psychic suddenly?”

“She’s thinking,In my next life, I’ll be tall and willowy like Gabrielle and Cora Lee.”

“Come on, Dulcie�”

“She is. I’ve heard her say it often enough, rambling on while she’s helping Charlie clean someone’s house. It’s Mavity’s one discontent, that she isn’t tall.If I was born again tall and slim and beautiful, and with a little cash, I’d know I was in heaven.”

“You’re making fun of her.”

“Not at all. I love Mavity,” Dulcie said, her green eyes widening, her tail lashing. “But that is what she’s thinking. And probably thinking, too,Well you can’t have everything�And maybe,I’m healthy and independent. I can outwork most women half my age.“And the cats looked down fondly on little Mavity Flowers, hoping she’d be tall in the next life, the way she wanted to be.

They watched her select a pearl-beaded bag and tuck it with five other evening bags into her two-wheeled, wire mesh cart, laying half a dozen hand-embroidered hankies on top so they wouldn’t wrinkle. All would bring a nice profit on eBay. Amazing, the things people would buy on the Web. They’d listened to the ladies tell how they’d cleaned out their own mother’s attics years before, and sent to charity items they wished they had back. Old Sandwich glass, Dulcie remembered, that Gabrielle had once thought was so tacky. And the old brass binoculars that Wilma said would now bring eighty or ninety dollars.

Water under the bridge,Mavity would say, and that made Dulcie purr.What’s gone is gone.She could just hear her.Look at what’s right here under your nose, don’t be crying for what’s lost, that you can’t bring back.

“Youaremaking fun of her,” Joe said. “You’re smirking like the Cheshire cat.”

“I’m not. Anyway, Mavity doesn’t care what anyone thinks-she wouldn’t care what a cat thinks. Look, she’s going to buy those used uniforms, too, like she always does.”

Joe didn’t reply. He was watching an old man try out a set of golf clubs. Old guy had a real hook. He ought to take up checkers.

Dulcie smiled as Mavity held a white uniform against herself for size. Mavity bought the generic uniforms that would do for any trade, beautician, waitress, or her own job of housecleaning. The little, spry woman was proud of her work. Her square, blunt hands were rough from scrubbing, but gentle when they petted a cat. Her face was brown and lined from the California sun and from the sea wind that blew down the bay into her small house when she left the windows open.Fishing shack,Mavity would say,if the truth be told.

But now Mavity’s house was called a bayside cottage, and worth half a million. Mavity said that she and Lou had paid thirty thousand for it, forty years ago when they were first married. Just a little house on stilts, at the muddy edge where the marsh met Molena Point Bay. Amazing, everyone said, what had happened to the Molena Point economy-to the whole country’s economy. Mavity was, through no effort of her own, a well-to-do property owner.

Except that soon the house wouldn’t be hers. The home she’d kept dear since her husband died was, the ladies said, about to be gobbled up in the all-powerful sweep of village politics. About to be condemned, as was the whole row of bayside houses.

“Well, Mavity has a good job,” Dulcie said. Working for Charlie’s Fix-It, Clean-It, she couldn’t have a better boss. Tall, redheaded Charlie Getz was such a no-nonsense person. And now since Charlie had bought that old rundown duplex, she and Mavity were working on it, painting and sanding the floors. Mavity liked working in an empty place more than she liked cleaning while someone was in the house. She always said she didn’t like anyone looking over her shoulder, and Dulcie understood that.

Vivi Traynor was still picking and poking, now among some stacked boxes. When Charlie cleaned for them, she’d told Wilma, she had to be really quiet. She said Elliott was the temperamental kind of writer, couldn’t stand noise. She said less complimentary things about Vivi. One thing was sure, Vivi Traynor was young enough to be the novelist’s granddaughter.

Snippy, too,Dulcie thought.With a giggle like a freight train whistle.And Dulcie had seen Vivi flirting with the village men. Though if her famous husband was too busy with his writing to care, why should anyone else? He stayed at home in the afternoons and in the evening, shut up in his study, but most mornings when Charlie did up the place, the Traynors were at the little theater.

Vivi, having apparently found no treasure worth purchasing, rose from the clutter of boxes. She stood glancing around her, jingling her car keys and jangling those bangle bracelets she always wore, then she moved on again, looking, slipping among stacks of broken toys and used clothing. Dulcie watched her lift a folded bedspread to see what was underneath, then rifle through a stack of suitcases, shifting the dusty valises and opening them. She was very focused, as if she were looking for something special. As she pried and prodded, never stopping to admire any item, her face was frozen with distaste-maybe she couldn’t bear dirt or the smell of old things; but her black eyes darted everywhere, looking. And across the yard, Gabrielle had stopped collecting sale items, and stood very still, watching Vivi.

Strange that Gabrielle hadn’t greeted Vivi, that the two women hadn’t acknowledged the other. But Gabrielle was like that, she wouldn’t press their brief acquaintance. Despite her look of smooth sophistication, Gabrielle was shy and reserved-she had met the Traynors during a trip she’d made last fall to New York, one of those senior tours. She had gone to school with Elliott’s sister, and had called them, then stopped by their apartment to extend her condolences for the sister’s death, a year earlier.

Gabrielle stood frowning uneasily toward Vivi, as if puzzled or, Dulcie thought, almost uncomfortable because Vivi was there. But when Vivi glanced up, Gabrielle turned quickly away.

And here came Richard Casselrod, getting out of his Mercedes SUV Casselrod always seemed a bit seedy, his tweed sport coat worn and wrinkled, his black hair mussed. His pockmarked complexion made him look like a street bum-yet he did keep an elegant shop, two floors of lovely antique furniture and accessories. Wilma had bought several nice pieces from him, including her cherry desk where Dulcie liked to sit in the sunshine, looking out the front window. Strange, in Casselrod’s sour face, how his black eyes were always smiling-as if he loved everyone he met.

He showed up at all the yard sales and estate sales. The ladies of the Senior Survival club said he was always buying, and that they’d see him in the consignment shops, too, and the charity stores when they were looking for things Susan could sell on eBay. They said Casselrod had no compunction about elbowing a person out of the way to snatch up some nice bargain before you could get at it.

No compunction either about selling the stuff he bought in his fancy antiques store, Gabrielle said. She said he would buy stuff from his neighbors and from the charity shops, put it in his show window, and double the price for the tourists. The locals held out for better prices; they knew how to bargain with him. And now, Susan said, he was selling his purchases on the Web as well.

But the Senior Survival ladies were selling in the same way-only theirs was for a better cause. And after all, if that was the way Richard Casselrod wanted to make his living, it was no one’s business. No one had to patronize his store. All three senior ladies watched him as he moved along the tables examining each item, collecting a few nice things that, very likely, they wished they had grabbed up first.

But Casselrod’s attention was half on Vivi Traynor, giving her quick, sliding glances, making Dulcie wonder if Vivi was the kind that appealed to Richard Casselrod. She didn’t see how could Vivi be attractive to any man, with that grating giggle, and the way she was always sucking on a cherry, her mouth all pursed up.

I am being mean,Dulcie thought, smiling. Charlie said Vivi kept a container of cherries in the freezer, so she could suck on them like little round Popsicles. Even as Dulcie watched, Vivi spit out the pits and dropped a handful of cherry stems on the grass.

Casselrod had turned away, moving toward Cora Lee, who knelt sorting through a tangle of toys and small appliances. As she reached for something underneath, Casselrod moved closer.

Cora Lee was still a moment, then stood up holding a white-painted box, a small chest the size of a toaster. The wooden cask was lumpy looking, and the paint was streaked like thick whitewash. The front seemed to be carved with some kind of crude design. Examining it, touching the lid, she glanced up, startled, when she sensed someone watching her.

She stood looking at Casselrod, then turned away quickly, carrying the box, heading for the driveway, where Mr. McLeary sat at a card table, taking in the sale money and making change. She was paying for the chest when Casselrod moved past her up the drive and turned, blocking her way.

Cora Lee accepted her change and started to hurry past him, then everything happened at once, so fast that later, trying to recall the moment, even the cats weren’t sure what they had seen.

As Cora Lee started past Casselrod, he shouldered her aside, jerking the box from her hands. Then he swung around, and the box hit her in the shoulder so she stumbled and nearly fell. Casselrod backed away cradling the box, muttering a quick “Sorry.” He shoved a bill at Cora Lee as if to pay for what he’d taken, then spun away toward his SUV.

Cora Lee stood looking after him, the bill blowing on the grass at her feet. But Vivi Traynor took off following him, running, swiveling through the crowd and sliding into her black Lincoln, burning rubber as she headed out, on the tail of Casselrod’s Mercedes. Joe and Dulcie watched, rigid with interest.

A dozen people crowded around Cora Lee, helping her and looking away after Casselrod, all talking at once. Mavity hurried to her, but Gabrielle didn’t move. Her hand was lifted, as if she’d wanted to snatch Casselrod back, but she was very still.

“What was that about?” Joe said, digging his claws into the rough bark. “All over some piece of junk?”

“Apparently Casselrod didn’t think so. Nor Cora Lee,” Dulcie said. “Does he plan to put that ugly old box in his shop and call it an antique? Make up a history about it the way he does some old kitchen chair and sell it for a bundle?”

Joe looked intently at Dulcie. “Casselrod might boost the price, but he knows his antiques. And why was Vivi Traynor so interested?”

Dulcie flicked her tail. “I don’t-” But suddenly, below, something moved in a jumble of broken toys and faded baskets, a dark shape pressing the baskets aside. A mottled black-and-brown shadow coming to life, her dark, plumed tail flipping free, her long fur tangled with leaves. Her round yellow eyes were wide and earnest, gazing up at them.

“Well, Kit,” Dulcie whispered. “Come on up here.”

“Get up here, Kit,” Joe Grey snapped. “Get your tail up here. What are you into, with that innocent look?”

Like an explosion the kit swarmed up the oak’s thick trunk and onto Dulcie’s branch to nuzzle at her, purring.

“Where have you been?” Dulcie said suspiciously.

“Nowhere,” said the kit, her expression secretive.

“You smell of paint. You’ve been in the theater again.”

The kit smiled. Joe and Dulcie exchanged a look, but what could they say? The theater was huge and dark and mysterious-all the things that drew the little tattercoat. Though she was usually there with Cora Lee, and what could happen when Cora Lee was nearby to watch over her?

5 [��������: pic_6.jpg]

On the patio of the Swiss Cafe, only one table offered any degree of privacy where it stood in the corner behind a pair of potted trees and a climbing jasmine vine. The restaurant itself defined two sides of the terrace, while a high brick wall offered shelter from the street and side street. Atop the wall concealed within the flowering vine the three cats had joined, in their own way, the ladies of the Senior Survival club. Hidden, they looked down on Mavity and Wilma, Cora Lee and Gabrielle. The ladies had just ordered, and had ordered for Susan, as well. Wilma sat with her back to the wall, cozy in a red sweatshirt, a red scarf tying back her long white hair. She looked up as Susan arrived, with Lamb walking quietly at heel. Susan sat down unsteadily, next to Mavity. Her hands didn’t want to be still. She fiddled with her menu and stroked Lamb, who settled under the table leaning his head against her knee. She had called Wilma from her car, as she headed for the restaurant after her long session with Detectives Davis and Garza.

“I filled everyone in,” Wilma said. Cora Lee looked at Susan with sympathy, pulling her white stole closer around her shoulders, as if trying to ward off the ugliness of Susan’s experience.

Mavity put her arm around Susan. “What a shocking, terrible thing, and how frightening. Do the police have any idea who the man was? But there had to be two men.”

Susan shook her head. “If they can find the wounded man, find out what he was looking for� I didn’t know a breakin could make you feel so helpless.”

“As if you aren’t safe anymore,” Mavity said. “Can’t feel safe in your own home.” The ladies said all the trite, comforting things, hoping to ease Susan’s distress.

Cora Lee laid her hand on Susan’s, her slim, dusky fingers still graceful, though knotted from work and age. Her nail polish was the soft, blush red of persimmons, pulling attention away from the darkening veins. “What could they have wanted? No single item we’ve ever bought would be worth breaking in for and tearing up a house, pulling the shelves from the wall. All our work�”

“We’ll make it right,” Mavity said. “We’ll clean up. Could they have thought something was hidden behind the shelves? But it would have to be thin. A painting, maybe? How silly-like some old B movie. Or did they think there was another cupboard built in behind the shelves?”

Beside Mavity, Gabrielle was quiet, looking from one lady to the other. Above, them on the patio wall, the cats listened and wondered. Joe’s scowl was deep as he weighed the events of the morning. The kit snuggled close between Joe and Dulcie, her black-and-brown coat a part of the shadows, her attention not on the conversation but on the surrounding tables, where pancakes swam in butter, and sausages and ham laced the breeze with their delicious aroma. It wouldn’t take much, Dulcie knew, and the kit would be down there with her feet in someone’s breakfast.

But when, pressing against the little tattercoat, Dulcie gave her a warning look, the kit smiled back at her innocently, her round yellow eyes bright and teasing.

Only Wilma seemed aware of the cats-and Lamb, of course. He knew they were there. Entering the patio, he had rolled his eyes up at them as if amused, then had padded obediently under the table, the big poodle far too much of a gentleman to bark at cats.

“After all the trouble we went to,” Cora Lee said. “All those lovely shelves-all the hours we spent, putting them together. And our nice work tables broken. Did they get the digital camera?”

“No,” Susan said. “It was locked in the file drawer of my desk. I guess they didn’t have time to break the lock. They certainly broke everything else. And they didn’t take my reflex camera, just dumped a pile of dirt on it. They had the computer on, too. But why? It’s so frustrating not knowing what they were after-and maddening not to be able to get into my own house. I want to clean up that mess. All I did was pack a bag and lock up-after I looked things over for Detective Garza, trying to see what might be missing.”

“And?” Gabrielle said. “Nothing was missing?”

“Not that I could see. I went over it all as carefully as I could. It made me sick to look at so many of our treasures destroyed. I thought it strange that both detectives came out on the call, but they were very thorough-and they’re not finished. I hated leaving everything in that mess.”

“If the intruder turns up dead,” Wilma suggested, “your house would be the scene of a murder. There’s only one chance to collect evidence properly at a murder scene-when it’s fresh. You start cleaning up, the whole thing is contaminated.”

“How will you clean up?” Cora Lee said. “Do the police do that? I never thought about it. Or do we all pitch in?”

“Detective Garza suggested I call Charlie,” Susan said, glancing at Wilma. “He said Charlie’s Fix-It, Clean-It has had training in crime scene cleanup.”

Gabrielle looked surprised. “Is that wise?” she said hesitantly. “Should Charlie be doing that-accepting police work, when she and Captain Harper are� an item?” She looked at Wilma shyly.

“Charlie’s the only one in the village who’s had the special training,” Wilma said. “No other cleaning outfit has bothered to take those courses.”

“Well, I didn’t mean to imply�” Gabrielle began, embarrassed. “I know Captain Harper wouldn’t play favorites. I just� I’m sorry. This has been an upsetting morning.”

Yes it had, Dulcie thought. But upsetting for all the ladies. Well, Gabrielle was easily stressed. Watching the five women, she wondered whether anyone would guess that Gabrielle, or Cora Lee with her dark beauty, was over sixty. Both could pass for far younger than Wilma or Mavity or Susan, with their silver hair.

But it was more than their hair that made Cora Lee and Gabrielle look maybe ten years younger.It’s the bone structure,Dulcie thought.Long, lean bones. Like two Siamese cats, one dark, one light.And, watching Gabrielle, she wondered what was bothering the tall blonde, who seemed even more uncertain than usual, withdrawn and on edge.

“I hadn’t realized before,” Susan said, “but of course that man’s blood would be considered hazardous. I hope it will come out of my rug and walls, that I don’t have to get rid of my nice, hand-braided rug. Though I may have to repaint.” She sipped her coffee. “My insurance should pay for the cleanup. I’ll call them after breakfast.”

“And you have no idea who the man was?” Mavity said, brushing a crumb from her white uniform.

“He was lying with his back to me. Detective Garza said I shouldn’t discuss it. I just� No, I don’t know who he was. When Charlie’s done with the bad part of the cleanup,” she said, “would you�”

“Of course we will,” Cora Lee said. “We’ll get the workroom back in order, make it fresh and new again. And the broken items should be a claim loss.”

Susan nodded. “But only for the purchase amount, not for the profit we would have made.”

“Not a good morning,” Mavity said. “On top of it all, Richard Casselrod stole a wooden chest from Cora Lee.”

“He did what?” Susan said softly. “A wooden chest?”

“Snatched it from her, nearly knocked her down, threw her some money, and took off. He hit her with it, really hurt her,” Mavity said.

Cora Lee pulled back her stole to reveal a large bruise, ugly against her white sundress. “If Casselrod’s looks could kill, I’d be singing with the angels. Those black eyes flashing-as if I was the one who had snatched the box away.”

“What did it look like?” Susan said.

“That’s what’s so strange,” Cora Lee said. “Just a crude wooden box with a bad paint job. It didn’t look like it was worth fifty cents. I’m not sure why I wanted it. Something about its shape, about the hint of carvings under the paint. It made me think of the stage props-the boxes we made to look like carved Spanish chests, for Elliott Traynor’s play.”

Susan looked startled. She started to speak, then glanced at the tables around them and seemed to change her mind.

Mavity had no compunction about being overheard. “Vivi Traynor was so interested that she jumped in her car and took off after Casselrod.”

Susan sipped her coffee, both hands around the cup, as if trying to get warm. Beneath the table, Lamb whined, and she reached to stroke him.

Mavity said, “That Vivi Traynor is such a snip. She didn’t even wave to you, Gabrielle-as if she’d never seen you in her life. After all, you did go to school with Elliott’s sister and you did visit them in New York.”

“The day I stopped by their apartment, she was only there a few minutes,” Gabrielle said. “Elliott fixed coffee for me, but Vivi had an appointment. She probably doesn’t remember me. My visit was really a duty call, condolences for his sister’s death; she died a year ago. I never met him when she and I were in college. He was nice enough, but I only stayed a little while.

“He’s surely very busy,” she added, “and preoccupied, if he’s finishing up a novel. I must confess I haven’t read his books.”

“He’s quite a wonderful writer,” Wilma said. “This last trilogy of novels is set right here, along this part of the California coast. It takes you from the Spanish occupation through the land grant days, the Mexican revolution, and on through to the gold rush. But you’ve read the play; you know it’s based on a segment from the novels.”

Gabrielle nodded. “Cora Lee and I read it as soon as we knew we were doing the play here.”

“It’s such a painful story,” Cora Lee said. “And lovely. The music is beautiful.”

Days earlier, the cats, slipping into the empty theater, had heard Cora Lee singing one of the numbers, practicing to try out for the lead inThorns of Gold.Dulcie thought the dusky-skinned, dark-eyed woman would make a wonderful Catalina Ortega-Diaz. The play began when Catalina was very young-and onstage Cora Lee had looked young. The way she sang the lonely Spanish laments made Dulcie shiver right down to her claws. And Wilma had read the play to Dulcie and the kit, the three of them tucked up in bed with a warm fire burning in the grate; they agreed that Cora Lee would be wonderful in the part, that the sad story seemed to fit her.

“I don’t understand why,” Cora Lee said softly, “if Elliott Traynor is working so hard to finish his current novel, and he’s being treated for cancer, he would come all the way out to California. Why he didn’t stay in New York, not spend the time and energy to make such a move. Even if this play is close to his heart, you’d think� Oh, I don’t know. It just seems strange.” Cora Lee knew well the value of unbroken solitude in which to create.

Gabrielle offered no opinion. She seemed, Dulcie thought, distressed when the ladies talked about the Traynors.

Well, Gabrielle would be seeing them at the theater, as soon as they began to cast the play. She would be doing the costumes. Dulcie supposed whatever friction was between them would sort itself out then.

She knew from Wilma that Gabrielle had already bought the fabric or found costumes from other plays that she would remake.

Of course, Catalina’s Spanish finery was traditional, the bride’s white embroidered gowns, her white and black mantillas, her fans and lace flounces and Roman sashes, as well as the caballeros’ bright ruffled silks and sombreros and serapes.

In the village library, while Gabrielle had done her research, making sketches and photocopies, Dulcie had wandered across the library tables near her, and for a while had sat on the table beside Gabrielle’s books, looking at the illustrations. The library patrons were used to Dulcie; she prowled the stacks as she pleased. No one paid much attention to her except to pet her and sometimes to bring her little treats.

Often she stayed into the small hours, long after the library closed. Her access to the empty rooms, through her cat door in Wilma’s office, was one of the best perks of being Molena Point’s official library cat. Even Dulcie’s favorite library patrons would never imagine the little cat’s midnight literary excursions. They were happy just to enjoy her purring attention during library hours; and the children liked her to curl up with them on the window seat during story hour, while the librarian read to them.

But late at night, in the silent rooms, reading by the faint village light that filtered in through the library windows, Dulcie enjoyed an amazing kind of freedom. She could touch, then, any world she chose, could enter any year or century that appealed to her, could be transported away to far and wonderful places before she returned to the blood-hungry aspect of her nature and went to hunt rats with Joe, on the Molena Point hills.

And though Dulcie had been fascinated with the Spanish costumes forThorns of Gold,imagining the soft silks and velvets, the kit was wild with enthusiasm. The little tattercoat had fallen in love with the play, with the music, with the sets. She would follow Cora Lee into the theater and watch for hours as Cora Lee painted those vivid scenes.

The kit did have a fine imagination, Dulcie thought. Look at the kit’s stubborn insistence that she could slip underground through a cave or fissure into a subterranean world that waited to welcome their kind of cat; into a netherworld of green wizard light and granite sky, a country the kit described in such detail that sometimes she frightened Dulcie-but sometimes she had Dulcie dreaming, too, imagining that place as real, that land where speaking cats might have had their beginnings.

“I think we should all be careful for a while,” Wilma was saying. “To avoid another breakin, or worse. Susan will be staying with me, but� We all live alone. And all of you are seen at the sales. Until we know what this is about, I think we should watch ourselves. Check our locks and windows, look around outside before we go in the house, see if any window is broken or jimmied, that sort of thing.”

Wilma didn’t mention that she had some defense, where the others did not. Though if they’d thought about it, surely the ladies would guess that a retired U.S. parole officer might keep a firearm at home, might like the security of being armed. Not all Wilma’s parolees were far away; several had turned up in Molena Point, some with no love for the woman who had sent them back to prison.

Gabrielle said, “Wilma, you and the captain are good friends. Can’t you find out the identity of the man-so we’ll know what to watch for?”

“It’s too early for the department to know that,” Wilma said. “Even if they have a lead, it’s too early to share that with a civilian, even with me.”

There was a little silence as their waitress brought their breakfasts. Then after some moments, over pancakes and omelettes, the five ladies turned to quietly discussing the kind of comfortable Molena Point house they would like to find, with many bedrooms and baths, a home big enough to accommodate a housekeeper and caregiver when the ladies grew frail-which none of them was, yet-and maybe an extra bedroom or two that could be rented out to pay upkeep and taxes. The women had it all worked out. A private, do-it-yourself retirement home where they would share all expenses and all profits.

Only Wilma remained somewhat removed from their plans. Dulcie’s housemate wasn’t nearly ready yet for a change in lifestyle. She liked doing her own housework and gardening. She worked out at the gym twice a week and walked two miles a day, intending to hang on as long as she could to her independence. But Wilma said the ladies were to be admired, that too many women couldn’t bear to leave their own homes despite better alternatives, that these ladies were making their own options, and she respected that adventuresome turn of mind.

Though Mavity had no choice, Dulcie knew. She’d have to move when the city condemned her house. As for Cora Lee and Gabrielle, with both their husbands gone, they seemed eager to throw in together. And Susan, too, was a widow, living in the two-apartment home she had bought from her daughter just recently when the daughter’s job took her to Portland.

The thought of Wilma moving was unsettling to Dulcie. Moving was easier for a human than for a cat. When people changed to a new home, they took all their familiar possessions with them, all the things that gave their daily lives resonance. A cat couldn’t take her treasures. A cat’s hoard was places, a nook in the garden wall, the shade beneath a favorite bush, a tree branch that suited her exactly, the best mouse runs. All these formed a cat’s world, affording her security and comfort, giving her own life structure. A cat’s treasures could not be carried with her.

That was why, when humans moved with their cat, the cat wanted to return. The humans took their belongings. The cat was forced to leave hers. That was why, when sensible folk moved to a new home, they kept their cat inside for a month, gave her time to establish new indoor haunts, discover new pleasures, wrap that new world around herself. They didn’t let the cat bolt out the door and head straight for the old homestead-a matter of a mile away, or maybe hundreds of miles. Distance didn’t matter to a cat, all she wanted was to be among her belongings.

Well, whatever Wilma did in the future, Dulcie thought, the two of them were together. Just as were Joe Grey and Clyde.

Besides, she and Joe and the kit had ties to the whole village; their treasured haunts were scattered all over the square mile of Molena Point-and no one ever imagined that Wilma or Clyde would move away from the village.

The kit’s own situation was not quite so secure. Her real home was with elderly newlyweds Lucinda and Pedric Greenlaw, but she had moved in with Dulcie and Wilma on an almost permanent basis. Shortly after the Greenlaws were married they had succumbed to travel lust, had begun driving up and down the coast and through Arizona and Nevada and Oregon in their comfortable RV. The kit had a special bed in the RV, where she could look out the windows; she should, with her wild enthusiasms, have relished such traveling. But all that driving caused her to throw up, made the little tattercoat as sick as a poisoned hound dog.

“Could there be,” Mavity was saying, “a connection between Richard Casselrod’s snatching that box and the breakin at Susan’s house? So strange� two violent, senseless attacks in the same day, at almost the same time, and both to do with buying people’s cast-offs.”

Joe and Dulcie exchanged a look, Joe’s ears flat to his head, the white triangle down his face narrowed in a frown. Of course it was strange. These elderly ladies, who should be safe and cozy in the small village, had twice this morning been senselessly attacked. Whatever was astir put his fur on edge, made his yellow eyes blaze with challenge.

6 [��������: pic_7.jpg]

The kitchen counter was cold, the tile icy beneath Joe Grey’s paws. Beyond the closed shutters, the glass radiated a sharp chill. Turning his back to the night, he watched, beneath the yellow kitchen lights, as Clyde worked at the table laying out the snacks for a poker game. Clyde’s muscular frame showed clearly his addiction to the weights and bench press. His dark hair was freshly cut, sporting a thin line of pale skin around his ears. At forty, he might pass for thirty-five, Joe thought, if the lights weren’t so bright.

The tray he was arranging was impressive: thin slices of roast beef and turkey, three imported cheeses, and deviled eggs done up fancy with ruffled tops and sprinkles of paprika. No grocery store deli tonight, served up in their paper wrappings. Joe studied his housemate. “Who’s coming? How many ladies?”

Clyde laid out slices of imported Tilsit fanning one atop the next. “What ladies? Poker’s a man’s game.”

“Right. And for a couple of guys you’re wearing a new polo shirt and freshly pressed chinos? New Birkenstocks instead of those grungy jogging shoes?” Joe reached to snag a slice of Tilsit from the open wrapper. “Smoked Alaskan salmon instead of sardines? George Jolly’s world-class shrimp salad instead of grocery store potato salad? Hey, for Max Harper, you serve from cardboard cartons. So who’s coming?”

Clyde fixed a small plate for Joe, heavy on the roast beef. “This is to avoid problems later in the evening.” He fixed Joe with a look. “To keep your big feet out of the platter.”

“That is so rude. When have I ever touched your fancy buffet-in front of guests? So who’s coming?”

“Charlie and Detective Davis are coming, if it’s any of your business.”

“It’s my house, too. Charlie’s my friend as well as yours. What’s the big deal?”

Charlie Getz was, in fact, Joe’s very good friend, one of the four humans who knew his and Dulcie’s secret and with whom the cats dared speak. Until recently, Joe had hoped that Clyde and Charlie would marry, but then she got cozy with Max Harper.

Joe had briefly considered Detective Kathleen Ray as a wife for Clyde. It was time Clyde got married; he was getting reclusive and grouchy. And Kathleen was a looker, slim and quiet, with nice brown eyes and sleek dark hair. But then Kathleen had taken a detective’s job in Anchorage, where her grandfather had grown up. She’d packed up and moved practically to the north pole, surprising everyone.

“I miss Detective Ray,” he told Clyde, slurping up shrimp salad. “She was a real cat lover. You think she’s happy in Alaska?”

“How do you know she’s a cat lover? I never saw her make over you and Dulcie, or even notice you.”

“No one said you were super-observant. Kathleen had her moments-a pretty glance, a gentle touch, a little smile.”

“Well, aren’t you the ladykiller.”

“She’s happy in Alaska?”

“Harper says she loves it. She sends him e-mail messages every few days telling him how great it is. I think she has talked him into going up there on vacation.”

Joe snorted. “Max Harper hasn’t taken a vacation from Molena Point PD for as long as I’ve known him.”

“Harper and Charlie. They’ll take the cruise, spend a month with Kathleen.”

Joe stared at Clyde. “You are so laid back about this. Charlie was your girl. Your girl! I never saw you as serious about anyone. Now Harper takes over, and look at you. Couldn’t care less. You actually seem pleased with the idea. What, were you glad to dump Charlie?”

Clyde glared.

“Well, of course, now that Kate Osborne’s in the picture�”

“Kate is not in the picture, as you put it. We are merely friends.”

“I like Kate all right. But I like Charlie, too. I thought you and Charlie might get married.”

Clyde stopped dishing up shrimp salad into his best porcelain bowl. “Why do you always go on about my getting married? What earthly business is that of yours? Why do you always have to-”

“Keep in mind,” Joe said, “that Kate can’t repair the roof or fix the plumbing. Charlie can do those things. I don’t even know if Kate can cook.”

Clyde wiped the rim of the bowl, licked half the spoon, then held it out for Joe. “Who I marry is my business.IfIget married. And in case you’re interested, one doesn’t marry a woman because she can fix the plumbing.”

“You have to admit, it’s a nice perk. With the cost of plumbers and carpenters, Charlie’s skills shouldn’t be sneezed at.”

“If I get married, I will pick the woman-without quizzing her on her skills as a handyman and without any help from a cat.”

Joe licked shrimp salad from his whiskers. “Your face is getting red. Have you had your blood pressure checked lately?”

“Marriage is serious business.”

Joe gave him a hard, yellow-eyed stare. “Has it occurred to you that Charlie Getz knows all about me and Dulcie?”

“So does Kate.”

“But Max Harper doesn’t.”

“So?”

“If Charlie and Harper are as serious as they seem to be, and if they get married, what then?”

“Whatwhat,then?”

“It’s hard to keep a secret when you’re married. Every time Harper gets an anonymous phone call from me or Dulcie, he gets edgy. If the tip is something no human could easily know-like when we found that killer’s watch way back in that drainage pipe where no human could have seen it, he gets really nervous. If he finds cat hair at the scene of the crime, you can see him wondering. That stuff really upsets him.”

“So? What are you getting at?”

“So, how is Charlie going to handle that? Seeing him upset like that, when she knows the truth? Don’t you think she’d want to let him in on the facts, so he could stop worrying?”

Clyde turned hot water on the spoon, dropped it in the dishwasher, and turned to look at Joe. “You think that would stop Max Harper from worrying? Charlie tells him that a cat is the phantom snitch? That Clyde Damen’s gray tomcat is messing with police business and placing anonymous phone calls? That is going to ease Harper’s mind?”

“If she explained it to him, if he knew the truth�”

Clyde’s look at Joe was incredulous. “That information, if Charlie could prove it to Harper, could make him believe it, could put Harper right over the edge. Drop him right into the funny farm.”

“Come on�” Joe said, trying to keep his whiskers from twitching. Clyde did rise to the bait.

“Cops are fact-oriented, Joe. Harper couldn’t deal with that stuff!” He looked hard at Joe. “Anyway, Charlie has better sense, she knows what that would do to Max.”

“Pretty hard to keep her mouth shut when she’s crazy in love and sees him suffering, and when she wants to share everything with him.”

“Who said she’s crazy in love?”

“She would be, if she married him. Don’t you think-”

“I think you should mind your own business. I think that would be a nice perk in my life. And for your information, Max Harper is not constantly puzzled, as you seem to believe, about a few anonymous phone calls.”

“More than a dozen arrests and convictions,” Joe said, “thanks in part to our help. Harper’s record of solved crimes has made a big impression on the city council.”

“Talk about an overblown ego. You take yourself way too seriously.”

“Such a big impression on the city council that the one bad egg on the council tried to ruin Harper’s career, set Harper up to be prosecuted for murder. Tried to get him off the force big time-get him sent to prison on a life sentence.”

Clyde slid the platters of meat and cheese into the refrigerator, with the bowls of salad, and busied himself arranging crackers.

“Who found young Dillon Thurwell when she was kidnapped-when all the evidence pointed to Harper? Who helped her escape?”

“Harper would likely have found her.”

“Right. After she was dead. That woman was going to kill her.”

“All right,” Clyde said. “I have to admit you and Dulcie saved Harper’s skin on that one, and maybe saved Dillon’s life. But you two have come to believe that Harper can’t solve a crime without you, and I call that really insulting. You two cats think-”

“I never said he can’t solve a crime without us. I said we’ve helped him, that we’ve offered some positive input-the way any good snitch would do. Why can’t you enter into a simple discussion of the facts without getting emotional? Without getting your back up, to use a corny and inappropriate colloquialism!”

Clyde sat down at the table and put his face in his hands, shoving aside the rack of poker chips and two new decks of cards. He didn’t say, What did I do to be saddled with this insufferable, ego-driven animal? But it was there, in his silence, in the slump of his shoulders.

“And,” Joe said, “when you do marry, you’ll be in the same position as Charlie is with Harper. You marry anyone but Kate or Charlie, marry a woman who doesn’t know what kind of cat you live with, you try to hide the truth from her, there’s going to be trouble. It would never work. I’d have to move out, find another home-or you’d end up telling her about me! Sharing my fate with a total stranger. Compromising and endangering my life, and Dulcie’s. Putting us-”

Clyde swung around in his chair, his face decidedly red. “If you don’t get out of this house now, and stay out until we’re done playing poker and everyone has gone home, I swear I will not only evict you and nail your cat door shut, I will take you to the pound. Shove you in a cat carrier and leave you at the animal shelter. See you locked in a metal cage forever-because no one would want you. No one would adopt such a bad-tempered tomcat.”

Joe Grey smiled, leaped to the center of the table, and lifted a gentle white paw to Clyde. “You are becoming very creative. If you even tried such a thing, I would spill it all to Max Harper. I would break out of the pound-no trick for yours truly. I’d go straight to Harper. Sit down face-to-face with him and tell him my entire story. I would lay it all on him, every corroborating fragment of proof, every tip, every detail of past phone calls. Proof that I-I alone, not Dulcie-am his phantom snitch.”

He thought Clyde would laugh, but Clyde’s brown eyes blazed with anger. “If you ever did such a thing, I swear, Joe, I’d kill you.”

Clyde shoved his face close to Joe’s. “Do you remember the night at Moreno’s Bar, after Janet Jeannot was murdered, when Harper tried to tell me his suspicions about certain cats being involved in the case? About certain mysterious phone calls? And you were eavesdropping under the table? Do you remember how shaken Max was?”

“Come on, Clyde�”

Clyde glared. “You so much as whisper to Max Harper, and you’re a dead cat. Finished. Comprende?”

“You are so grouchy. You really need to get your life in hand.”

Joe dropped down to the linoleum, stalked through to the living room, pushed out his cat door, and crept under the front porch. He’d never seen Clyde so irritable.

He really did have to blame Clyde’s mood on pretty, blond Kate Osborne. Clyde and Kate were old friends, but now that Clyde had really fallen for her, she’d turned standoffish. Wouldn’t come down from San Francisco, hadn’t been down for over a month, didn’t want Clyde to come up. Something was going on with her. Clyde didn’t know what it was, and as a result, he’d been fierce as a goaded possum. Maybe it was Kate’s search for her unknown family, maybe she was totally wrapped up in that, didn’t want to think of anything else. Though that project, in Joe’s opinion, could lead her into more grief than she’d ever wanted.

Looking out through the cracks between the porch boards, he saw Charlie coming down the street, walking the few blocks from her apartment-and looking very pretty, her kinky red hair tied back with a calico ribbon, her blue-and-white striped dress as fresh as new milk. When she had hurried up the steps above his head and gone inside, he slipped out of the musty dark to the porch again and sat down beside his cat door, his face to the plastic flap to listen.

“Hi! Clyde, you there? Am I the first one here? You in the kitchen?”

Her cheery greeting met silence. Joe heard the kitchen door swing. “Hi! There you are. I brought some chips.”

No answer.

“What?” Charlie said.

“Can’t you knock? Since we’re not dating anymore, you could at least-”

“Well, pardon me.”

Again, silence.

“Where’s Joe?” she said. “You two have a fight?”

A longer silence.

“Well?”

“No, we didn’t have a fight!”

“So where did he go to sulk? And you’re sulking in here, in the kitchen. Were you fighting about the house again, about selling the house?”

“No, we weren’t fighting about selling the house.”

Charlie said no more. Joe heard one of them open the refrigerator and pop a couple of beers. Charlie knew how to handle him; Clyde’s moods didn’t bother her. And she was partly right. The problem about the house did make him cross.

Ever since construction had begun on Molena Point’s new, upscale shopping plaza-ever since its two-story, plastered wall had risen at the boundary behind Clyde’s backyard, blocking their view of the sunrise and the eastern hills, Clyde had been entertaining offers from realtors. The mall hadn’t affected the property values, not in Molena Point, where village lots were so scarce that a buyer would pay half a million for a teardown. And this latest offer to Clyde had topped all the others. It was not from someone wanting a home or vacation cottage, but from a restaurateur planning to open an upscale cafe-a perfectly understandable plan, in a village where the businesses and cottages were mingled, many shops occupying former residences.

The offering realtor said the house would remain, along with the house next door, which the buyer had already purchased. The two buildings would be converted into dining and kitchen space and joined by a patio whose tile paving would run back to the two-story plaster wall, with outdoor tables and umbrellas and potted trees.

Dulcie thought it would be charming. Joe thought there were enough patio restaurants in the village. Clyde vacillated between outright refusal and considering the offer; he couldn’t make up his mind. But he was as angry as a maimed wharf rat about his view being destroyed. Joe could understand that. The wall made Joe, too, feel like he was in a cage.

But what if Clyde did sell? Where would they live? The idea of moving upset Joe and seemed nearly as unsettling to Clyde.

Joe thought maybe his own distress came from his kittenhood, from the time when he’d had no real home, just an alley and a few one-night stands, then for a while a stranger with a shabby apartment and a bad disposition-until he met Clyde.

His and Clyde’s move down from San Francisco, when he was still a half-grown kitten, had left him nervous for weeks afterward, distraught at losing the only real home he knew. Even Charlie’s recent moves had unsettled him, first from her aunt Wilma’s and Dulcie’s house into an apartment, then into another apartment. Places that he’d liked to visit, gone before he got used to them. And now Mavity Flowers was about to be evicted, closing another door to him-and Mavity’s cottage held some rare memories.

It was there that he had spied on the black tomcat and his human partner in crime, Mavity’s no-good, thieving brother. It was there that Joe had routed some of the evidence that convicted the killer of Mavity’s niece. Besides, though Mavity’s cottage was just an old fishing shack, it was all Mavity had-he felt, too sharply, the little woman’s distress at her own impending loss.

If all those houses along the bay were destroyed, who knew what the village would do with that land? The city council was still arguing the issue. And now, with Mavity’s friends planning to sell their houses too, and buy some big old house where they would rattle around, everything was changing. All these moves and prospective moves made the whole world seem shaky under his paws.

And to top it off, the entire Molena Point Police Department was being renovated, Harper’s officers taking up temporary quarters in the courthouse while Harper remodeled the building.

Already Joe missed the big, casual squad room with all its desks and clutter. Now the space was full of lumber and Sheetrock and carpenters with loud hammers and louder power tools. The department that Joe thought of as the heart of the village was going to be totally different. He had no idea whether, with the new design, he’d even be able to get inside. When finally the renovation would be complete and everyone back together again, who knew what the offices would be like? Harper might make the building so secure that no cat could breach the locks to slip in to hide under the first handy desk.

What was he going to do then? It was hard enough for a cat to get police intelligence. Imagining the new setup made him feel like he was walking on a broken tree limb that hung shattered and ready to fall. As if there was nothing secure left in the world, nothing steady that he could count on.

When two cars pulled to the curb in front of the house, he dropped off the porch into the bushes. Watching Detectives Dallas Garza and Juana Davis and Captain Harper thunder up the steps, laughing-likely at some rank cop joke-and bang into the house, Joe felt for an instant incredibly lonely. Quickly he slipped through his cat door, following them inside. Slipping behind the couch, he heard beer cans being popped and the cards shuffled. He listened for some time, staying out of sight as Clyde preferred, and feeling put upon, but the conversation didn’t touch on the breakin at Susan Brittain’s house, it was just light banter. He had nearly dozed off when the phone rang.

Clyde answered, then Detective Garza took the phone. It was apparently a personal call, from the tone of Garza’s voice. Yes, he was talking to his niece, Ryan, a young woman who was as close to Garza as if she were his own daughter.

“You what? You’re kidding!” Garza sounded pleased. But Joe could hear the faint echo of a tight, angry female voice from the other end of the line.

“You’re leaving him?”

Ryan was Garza’s youngest niece. He had helped raise her and her two sisters after their mother died. Likely Ryan was calling from San Francisco, where she and her husband ran a building construction business-or apparently had run it. Sounded like they were splitting. For an instant Joe sensed what Garza must be feeling, deep parental distress for a young woman who had apparently decided to pull up stakes, chuck everything, and start her life all over again.

The foolish mobility of humanity,Joe thought.People abandoningfamilies, racing off in every direction-it’s a wonder the world itself doesn’t fly apart.

“That’s the best news I’ve had in ages,” Garza said, laughing. “Where are you now? You have your key to the cottage?”

Garza listened, then, “Of course I understand. Guess I’d feel the same. But the cottage is there if you want it-when you want some company.”

They talked for some time, something about a job Ryan had just finished. Interested, Joe trotted into the kitchen and leaped to the counter. When Garza hung up, he was grinning. He sat down at the table between Clyde and Juana Davis, where Clyde was counting out poker chips.

“She’s left him. Packed up and moved out. He’s been cheating on her for years. She came on down to the village, she’s in the Turtle Motel up on Fifth. Wants some time alone. Wants to look for a house. Sounds like she means to stay.”

Joe couldn’t remember when he’d seen Garza looking so pleased. Stretching out, he waited to hear how the scenario would develop-and waited as well for the conversation to turn, as it inevitably would, to police business. Did the department have a make on Susan Brittain’s burglar? Had they found him? Surely by now they would have a record of his prints. Joe waited patiently to pick up whatever tidbits the officers might toss back and forth over the poker table-until he felt Clyde’s gaze on him. Then he closed his eyes and tried for a soft, rhythmic snore-not to fool Clyde, but to keep his relationship with the department as untainted as a sleuthing cat could manage. No point in enraging Clyde further, and making Harper edgy; though it was hard to resist the urge to taunt them both.

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Clyde pulled the snack tray from the refrigerator and set it on the counter, giving Joe a warning look, his dark eyes threatening dire repercussions if Joe so much as reached a paw into the party food or made a scene in any way. Joe hissed at him in a casual manner and settled more stubbornly down onto the cold tile counter, watching the three officers and Charlie rise to load their plates, then fit them in beside their cards and poker chips and beer cans.

Harper’s lined, sun-wrinkled face made him seem years older than Clyde, though they were the same age, had gone all through grammar school together, had rodeoed together when they were in high school. With his lean, tall build, he looked very at home on horseback.

Dallas Garza was built more like Clyde, blocky and solid. He was about the same age as Clyde and Harper, somewhere around forty. His tanned Latino face was square and smooth, his expression closed, his black Latin eyes watchful-a man who exuded a steady and comforting presence. Garza seemed always in control, calm and unruffled. And Joe had learned that Garza was an officer to be trusted-as was Detective Davis, with her dark, steady gaze.

Juana Davis was maybe in her early fifties, had been widowed, and had two grown children, both cops.

Charlie was the only fair one at the table, with her bright freckles and brighter hair. She was younger, too, maybe four years out of art school-which she described as her squandered past.

Garza said, “Ryan’s been up in San Andreas for a month, designing the addition to a vacation cottage, surveying the land, finalizing the plans. She gets home, another woman’s clothes are in her closet, a strange car in her half of the garage.

“She said she wanted to put her pickup in four-wheel drive and run that little red convertible right through the back of the garage. Only thing that stopped her was the legal mess she’d be in-and she didn’t want her insurance canceled.”

“I’d have killed him,” Juana said, with a twisted smile.

Charlie nodded. “A slow and painful death.”

“Rupert did her one good turn,” Garza said. “The nine years they’ve been married, she’s had a chance to work into the building trade-but only at her insistence. She got him to let her do some designing and to work on the jobs. She’s learned the business well, and she has solid carpentry skills.”

Garza discarded two cards and watched Juana deal. “In all other ways, Rupert’s a real loser. But Ryan’s good at what she does, she’s made a name for herself as well as for the firm-something Rupert never gave her credit for. She has a nice design style, very original. She wants to get her license in this county, start her own construction firm. She loves the village. When the girls were small, we spent a lot of summers and holidays down here.”

From the kitchen counter, Joe watched Garza with interest. He’d seen something of Garza’s closeness with Ryan’s sister Hanni, who now lived in the village and had her own interior designing firm. But he’d not seen this degree of fatherly pride that Dallas had for Ryan. He knew that, under the guidance of Garza and the girls’ father, the three sisters had learned not only to cook and clean house, but to shoot and handle firearms properly, to train the hunting dogs that Garza loved, and to ride a horse-all skills, apparently, that the two law enforcement officers felt would build strong young women. Joe had learned a lot about Garza when he’d moved in with the detective last winter, playing needy kitty.

That was when Garza was first sent down to the village, on loan from San Francisco PD, to investigate the murders for which Max Harper was the prime suspect. When Garza first arrived, Joe and Dulcie both had thought they smelled a rat. They’d been sure that in this prime case of collusion to ruin Harper, Garza was part of the setup. The week that Joe had lived with the detective, he had playing up to Garza as shamelessly as any groveling canine in order to learn Garza’s agenda.

He’d ended up not only sharing Garza’s supper, and privately accessing Garza’s interview tapes and notes, but admiring and respecting the detective. Then later, when the case was closed, Max Harper had thought enough of Garza to ask him to join Molena Point PD. Garza had jumped at the chance to get out of San Francisco for the last five years of his service.

“She’ll be taking her maiden name again,” Garza said, “R. Flannery. She wants no part of Rupert, except to be paid for her half of the business. Said she doesn’t want to see me or her sister for a few days, either, until she gets herself together. That’s the way she is. Hardheaded independent.”

“Don’t know where she got that,” Harper said, grinning.

“One thing,” Garza said, shuffling the cards. “She drove one of the company trucks down, to haul her stuff. Said the brakes were really soft.” He looked at Clyde. “Would you�?”

“First thing in the morning,” Clyde said. “Tell her we open at eight.”

“Likely she’ll be waiting at the door.” Garza paused, surveying his cards. “She did say something strange-she asked about Elliott Traynor. Said she’d heard the Traynors were in the village, asked if I’d met them. Said they’d spent a month in San Francisco last fall. Before Traynor got sick, I guess. They flew out from New York, apparently on business. She and Rupert met them through mutual friends.”

At mention of the Traynors, Charlie looked quickly down at her cards. Laying her cards facedown, she bent her head to retie the ribbon that bound back her kinky hair, hiding her face, concealing some swift and uncomfortable reaction that made Joe Grey watch her with interest. Was there a look of guilt on her freckled face? But why would Charlie feel guilty about Vivi and Elliott Traynor?

As Clyde dealt a hand of five card draw, Joe’s attention remained on Charlie. They played three more hands of stud before Clyde mentioned the breakin at Susan Brittain’s. “Have you found the guy yet? Or found his body?”

“Nothing,” Harper said. “One set of prints isn’t on record.”

“That’s unusual.”

“Very,” Garza said. “Information on the other set hasn’t come back yet.”

Clyde sipped his beer, setting the can on a folded paper napkin. “How did Susan handle the breakin? Was she pretty shaken?”

“Not at all,” Garza said. “In fact, very cool. She seems a straightforward woman. She thinks she might know the man. She saw only his back, but when she thought about it awhile, she was certain he looked familiar.” He paused, waiting for Clyde to bet. Charlie raised Clyde, and Garza and Davis folded. Harper raised Charlie, winning the pot with three jacks, giving her a superior look that made her laugh.

“So who is he?” Clyde said.

“She thinks he might be an early morning dog walker she’s run into, a newcomer to the village, a Lenny Wells. Young man who just moved down from San Francisco. About thirty, six feet, maybe a hundred and seventy, she thought. Light brown hair. She stopped for coffee with him a couple of times when they were walking the dogs, said she told him a little about the village to help him get settled.”

Juana Davis dealt the next hand, upping the ante on seven card stud. Clyde showed a pair of aces, but when the hand was finished Davis raked in the pot on three eights. Their poker was never high-powered, with the keen attention and subtleties of a serious professional game, just a friendly excuse to get together. The conversation turned to the remodeling of the police station and how soon the contractor would be finished. “An equation,” Harper said, “arrived at by squaring the original four months to completion time.”

Joe thought about Susan’s breakin, and about the grungy white box that Richard Casselrod had snatched from Cora Lee French. He saw again the shocked, angry look on Cora Lee’s face when Casselrod swung the box and hit her, saw her dark eyes blazing with hurt surprise.

He wanted a look at that box, he wanted to know what made it so valuable.

Richard Casselrod’s antique shop was in a tight building, not easy to get into, after hours, even for an expert at break-and-enter. But there was one high, attic window that Joe meant to check out.

He’d as soon not slip in during the day and hide until they closed up. There was something about Richard Casselrod that did not invite close proximity among closed doors and solid walls.

He came to attention when Charlie raised on a pair of sixes, though Juana had three jacks showing. Was Charlie bluffing? Did she have two sixes in the hole? Or was she merely preoccupied?Wake up, Charlie. Pay attention. What are you thinking about?

Charlie saw her mistake and watched Juana rake in the pot, her mind uncomfortably on Elliott Traynor. How strange that Garza’s niece should know Traynor. And how interesting that the Traynors had so recently been in San Francisco. Maybe that explained the envelopes with San Francisco postmarks that she’d found in Traynor’s wastebasket.

When you’re cleaning for such interesting tenants, and when they’re gone most mornings, it’s hard not to snoop. At least it was hard for Charlie, when the snooping involved an author whose work she so greatly admired. The Traynors had been in the village for over two weeks. She cleaned their cottage each morning, did the shopping and the laundry, put the dinner and breakfast dishes in the dishwasher, and sometimes started lunch or something for dinner with Vivi’s written instructions. She was at the cottage from eight until twelve, quite often alone because Traynor wrote at night, and they went to the theater some mornings, or out walking. When she did see him, he seemed dour and unresponsive.

Traynor was a wide-shouldered man in his late sixties. Close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, a nice tan despite his illness, strong-looking square hands that she could imagine handling a sail and jib or a hunting rifle. Friendly green eyes that seemed to analyze and weigh her far too closely The eyes of a writer, exhibiting a nature intriguing but too intimately curious for comfort. An unusually virile-looking man, considering that he was suffering from some serious sort of cancer-she hadn’t asked what kind. Not that it was any of her business. The times when she did see him, he would look her over in that too interested, piercing way, then would turn remote and unsmiling.

Well, she was, after all, only the cleaning woman. And he had to be preoccupied-from his cancer treatments, and working on his new book, and overseeing the production of his play. His medical treatments alone could make him feel too ill to be civil. Very likely it was all he could do to handle his work and find time for the theater; surely there was nothing left over with which to be courteous to some housekeeper.

Except, much of the time, he wasn’t civil even to his wife. That relationship, on both their parts, seemed cold and rigid-certainly not in keeping with what Gabrielle and Cora Lee had told Wilma, that at the theater, meeting with the producer and directors, Vivi clung to Elliott so attentively that he could hardly move.

The six envelopes that Charlie had pulled from the trash in Traynor’s study-just to have a quick look, out of innocent curiosity, she told herself-had not been wadded up but simply dropped into the leather wastebasket all together. Lifting them out to put them in her trash bag, she had flipped through them, her face warming with embarrassment at the transgression.

All were from San Francisco, all but one from antique dealers, maybe answering some research questions about the furniture or artifacts of the period in which his novel was set. At first she thought there were no letters, just the envelopes, all handwritten and sent first class. But then she saw the one letter, tucked under the flap of the last envelope. It was also from the city. Both the letter and the envelope were typewritten, from Harlan Scott of theSan Francisco Chronicle,a book reviewer whom Charlie usually read. Had Scott written about a review? Did authors have their work reviewed before they finished it? She read quickly.

Dear Elliott,

Good to hear from you and to know you’re settled so quickly and back at work. The new book sounds fascinating. You’re to be commended for being able to finish writing the novel and oversee production of the play-two very distinct projects-when you’re feeling under the weather.

Yes, there are several collectors in the bay area. I’ll put together a list, try to get it off to you at the end of the week. All my good thoughts are with you. I hope the casting and rehearsals go well. Hope the treatments are not too uncomfortable. Sounds to me like you’re doing very well. Give me a call if you and Vivi want to come up for a talk with these people, or if you simply want to get away for a weekend.

Very best, Harlan.

When she heard the Traynors returning, she had dropped the envelopes and letter hastily into her trash bag. But it was the next day that she faced real temptation, when Traynor’s manuscript pages began to appear on his desk, one new chapter each morning, printed out, lying beside the computer.

Alone in Traynor’s paneled study with its leaded windows and pale stone fireplace, she had guiltily reached for the first pages, telling herself she wanted just a peek. Because she loved his work. Because she longed to see his work in progress, still forming, see how he accomplished his smooth and exciting prose. The guilt she should normally feel took a weak second place to the artistic hunger that rose in her, a keen fascination at the proximity of this fine writer.

Traynor’s study looked the same each morning when she entered, the desk immaculate, no paper left out. The little footstool pushed just so, to the corner of the desk against the bookcase, its loose, tasseled pillow aligned perfectly on top. She thought perhaps he used the pillow to ease his back as he worked. The books he had brought with him from New York were few, and all on California history-a row perhaps two feet long standing neatly on the otherwise empty shelves, beside a stack of photocopied research material. The bookshelf stood at right angles to his desk, close enough to be reached from his chair. It was flanked by a window directly at the end of the desk that looked out on the drive and front garden.

Charlie’s aunt Wilma, who was a research assistant at the Molena Point library, had mailed a thick package of machine copies to Traynor nearly a year ago, all research on local California history, much of it family journals collected over the years by priests at the nearby mission, and a history of the mission itself as well as the surrounding land, which had been divided by grants into huge cattle spreads. Because of Wilma’s thoroughness in her assistance, Traynor had sent quite a nice, and welcome, donation to the library’s book purchasing fund.

Alone in Traynor’s study, eagerly picking up the pages, Charlie had thought,Why am I doing this, why am I so interested? I’m not a writer, I have no professional curiosity.Her animal drawings were quite demanding enough of her creative skills; there was plenty to learn studying bone structure and doing quick sketches of moving animals. She had no time to divert her attention to a second discipline, no matter how much the beauty of the written word made her want to try. And yet any work of art, in a state of becoming, was fascinating stuff, seeming to her vividly alive. She had begun to read eagerly, glancing out the window in case they might return.

She’d had no idea how Traynor’s prose would affect her-no notion of the sudden, perplexed unease that would wash over her.

She had laid the pages down, had stood beside the desk staring out at the empty drive, confused and puzzled, not understanding why he had written this-how he could have written this.

This was not the lyric prose she had so admired from Elliott Traynor; his sentences were awkward and confused. The experience had shocked and saddened her. There was no other explanation than that his illness had affected his work. She had turned away filled almost with a personal loss. And ashamed, too, that she had pried-and she was touched as well with a cold little fear for herself, with a sharp sense of helplessness, that creative skills might so suddenly be diminished.

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Clyde woke in the dark predawn when he felt Joe drop off the far side of the bed. He hadn’t slept well, had just managed to drift into sleep, and wasn’t happy to be jerked awake again. He’d dreamed of Kate, not pleasant dreams. Why did she insist on staying in San Francisco? Jimmie was safely in prison, he couldn’t hurt her now. In the dream, she’d been so-distant. So removed, darkly preoccupied, not at all like the bright, sunny Kate Osborne he knew.

He could feel the warmth at his back where the tomcat, moments before, had been curled up asleep before he thumped softly to the wood floor, apparently trying to be silent. Why all the stealth; what was he up to? Joe’s usual departure was a four-star performance, tramping across Clyde’s stomach with those big, hard paws, dropping to the floor with all the finesse of a truckload of rocks.

In the near-dark, Clyde watched Joe pad softly around the end of the bed, a shadow sneaking across the Sarouk rug, heading away down the hall.

In a moment he heard Joe’s cat door slap, swinging against its metal frame.

Between Joe’s unusual behavior and his own unpleasant dreams, Clyde was wide awake. Leaving the warm bed, he stood at the open window, peering out from behind the curtain like some little old lady spying on the neighbors. The sea breeze was cool against his skin. In the faint moonlight that filtered through the blowing oak leaves, he could see Joe fast disappearing up the sidewalk, his gray coat nearly lost among the leafy shadows, only his white paws clearly visible, flashing along with swift determination.

Joe went out every night to hunt rabbits or, if he was obsessed with some police business that was none ofhisbusiness, to peer into windows or slip into people’s houses, poking and prying-Clyde had ceased to ask for details. But the tomcat was seldom silent in his nocturnal departures. And it wasn’t like there was some big crime under current investigation-nothing but that breakin at Susan Brittain’s place. No jewel heist or bank robbery, no murder that they knew of. Well, the damn cat wouldn’t leave anything alone. Let someone steal a pencil, Joe was on their case.

Wide awake and angry, he had half a mind to pull on his jeans and shoes and follow Joe. He could see him, almost to Ocean now, hardly visible in the blowing night. Clyde reached for his jeans but didn’t pull them on. If he tried to follow, the tomcat would simply take to the roofs and vanish.

His dream of Kate was still vivid; he’d been with her in San Francisco, walking the windy midnight streets. She told him she wasn’t coming back to Molena Point ever, that she wouldn’t see him again, that they didn’t belong together, that he wasn’t right for her.

But they had been right for each other, they’d known it long before she left Jimmie, though neither did anything about it. And then suddenly Jimmie was involved in murder and car theft; those days came back to him sharply. A killer loose in the village, hired by Jimmie to murder Kate-an incredible scenario, and the Welshman killer also had personal reasons for stalking Joe Grey and Dulcie.

That was when Clyde first learned that Joe Grey could speak, and Joe himself first became aware of that alarming talent-as if the shock of seeing a man murdered had thrust Joe from one facet of his existence into a deeper consciousness. That was when Joe’s true nature had come to light, and of course Dulcie’s hidden abilities as well.

Standing before the open window in his shorts, holding his jeans and a sweatshirt, he wondered how long before Katewouldget over her fear of being in the village and decide to move back home. He thought of her not as in the dream, but as she really was, imagined her there with him, her golden hair catching the faint moonlight, her eyes loving and kind. Dreaming of Kate, he started when a dark shape leaped to the window, crouching on the sill, pressed against the screen.

In the darkness, Joe’s white paws and chest were sharply defined, the white triangle down his nose pinched into a scowl. He looked intently at Clyde, at the jeans and sweatshirt. “What are you doing, Clyde? You weren’t going to follow me?”

Clyde looked at him innocently. “Couldn’t sleep,” Clyde said inadequately.

“You weren’t going to sneak out into the night and follow me? Pry into my private business? At three in the morning?”

“Would I do that? That’s very insulting. In all the hundreds of times you’ve gone out looking for trouble, in all the nights I’ve lain in bed worrying that you’d got yourself killed, have I ever followed you?”

“So why were you putting on your jeans?”

“I wasn’t putting them on. I was holding them. And is there any law against putting my pants on, going into my own kitchen, and making a sandwich? I couldn’t sleep. All right?”

“You never put your pants on when you invade the kitchen in the middle of the night, waking up old Rube and the other cats. Why are you so testy? Why would you want to follow me?”

Clyde glowered. Why did he have to get involved with a tomcat who seemed to know exactly what he was thinking?

“You were dreaming about Kate, calling her name in your sleep. Go on out in the kitchen, Clyde. Drink some hot milk and brandy, maybe that will help you sleep.”

Clyde just looked at him.

“You want to know where I’m going,” Joe said. “What difference does it make? You can’t stop me, and you can’t help me. You’re getting way too nosy in your advanced years.”

“Forty-some is not advanced, as you put it. I had no intention of stopping you. I simply wondered where were you going. Wondered why the secrecy? Why all the silence, slipping out trying not to wake me?”

“For your information, I was being thoughtful. Apparently that concept escapes you. You were obviously having trouble sleeping. You’d dozed off at last, and I didn’t want to wake you. Okay?”

“So where are you going? This is some kind of state secret? I know what you do at night, I know about your snooping. Someday, Joe-”

“If it’s any of you business, Dulcie and I thought we’d wander over to Hidalgo Plaza and check out the shops.”

“At three in the morning.”

“Why not? We can look in the windows. Dulcie loves to look in shop windows.”

“So you’re nosing around Casselrod’s Antiques, just because he snatched that old chest from Cora Lee. And would this have anything to do with the breakin at Susan Brittain’s?”

Joe sighed. “For your edification, antique stores, estate sales, yard sales� That’s where any cop would start looking for the guy who trashed Susan’s place.”

“That’s so simplistic. Max Harper would laugh his head off.”

“Not at all. A cop checks out the obvious first, even if it is simplistic. Take my word. Dallas Garza will be having a good look among the local junk dealers.” Joe gave Clyde a toothy smile, twitched a whisker, and was gone as swiftly as he had appeared, swarming up the oak tree to the roof, where he would again head for Ocean Avenue. Clyde imagined Dulcie waiting for him there among the trees of Ocean’s wide, grassy median, imagined the two galloping up the median to disappear in the direction of the long, wild park that bordered Molena Point on the southeast.

At the mouth of the park stood the cluster of converted buildings that made up Hidalgo Plaza, a collection of steep-roofed houses and old barns remodeled into a complex of antique and craft shops, boutiques, and art galleries. The largest structure among them, the old Hidalgo mansion, was now Molena Point Little Theater. Above many of the shops were offices and small businesses that didn’t need the exposure of a storefront. Casselrod’s Antiques occupied the entire two floors of its building, with wide showroom windows facing the brick walk.

Up on the roof, on the tilting peak, the two cats padded along the sharp hip. Where the peak ended, they dropped down to the tiny false balcony that protruded from the featureless wall three stories above the ground.

Rearing up on the four-inch protrusion, Joe pawed at the glass, shaking and forcing the frail old casement. Because the window opened in a sheer wall with only the fake four-inch balcony, it had never presented a security problem, and no one had bothered to lock it. The casement gave, and Joe and Dulcie slipped inside.

Padding through the dark attic beneath stacked chairs and tables, between ancient trunks and antique dressers and cartons of bric-a-brac, their paws stirring through rivers of dust, they were searching for a way down to the shop below when they saw, against the far attic window, a figure poised, backlighted from the street below. Though they had been silent, and hadn’t spoken, she was surely watching them.

Scenting out, they couldn’t smell anything remotely human. Warily, they crept closer.

“A mannequin!” Dulcie breathed.

“Buckram and wire,” Joe said, disgusted. Sniffing at the construction then brushing past the flimsy form, he headed for the stairs.

The second floor of Casselrod’s Antiques was not only cleaner and smelled better but was handsomely arranged, with small groups of ornate furniture displayed on fine Oriental rugs, against nice paintings and antique screens.

“Just like the architectural magazines,” Dulcie said, lifting a paw to stroke the soft patina of a fine cherry dresser, patting at the clustered grapes that had been wrought by a master carver.

Trunks and small chests stood on the floor among the furniture or on various tables. “Mostly Chinese,” Dulcie said. Certainly they were not roughly made, like the chest from the McLeary yard sale. Some were no bigger than a little birdhouse, some large enough to conceal a German shepherd. The cats prowled every dark corner and open shelf but did not find the chest they were looking for.

Descending the last flight to the main floor, they faced a wide bank of windows where beyond the glass shone the street lights of the plaza, and the softly lit windows of other shops. Here on the main floor, they could smell the perfume of Richard Casselrod’s assistant, a distinctive and clinging scent, in one of the upholstered chairs where Fern Barth had apparently sat. Joe sniffed at the too sweet perfume and made a flehmen face, lifting his lip in disdain. “Does she buy that stuff by the quart? Smells like dimestore jelly beans.”

“Maybe it’s something very expensive, to appeal to the opposite sex.”

“I bet it has the men flocking.”

Dulcie backed away from the smell, leaped to the shelves, and prowled carefully along them, skirting among delicate Dresden figures and porcelain dinnerware. To her right, a table was covered with boxes of silver flatware and stacks of lace and linens. Amazing how much care, how much time and art went into the accessories for human lives. “No matter how much we dislike Richard Casselrod,” she said softly, “you have to admit, he buys lovely things.”

But Joe had vanished. No shadow moved, not a sound. She mewed softly.

Nothing.

Leaping to the top of a drop-front desk, she yowled.

“In here,” he hissed from beyond an open door.

Dropping to the floor, trotting under the chairs and between table legs, she paused at the door to a small, fusty office that was nearly filled with a rolltop desk. “In here?”

No answer. Moving on, she slipped into a large workroom that smelled of paint, and raw wood, wax and varnish. The floor was scattered with sawdust and with curls of wood trimmings that tickled her paws. Joe stood atop a worktable, poised rigid with interest. She leaped up.

High above them through a small window set among the rafters, faint light seeped in from the street, seeming in the dusty air to filter all to one place, onto seven white slabs of painted, carved wood that lay among a collection of hammers and screwdrivers.

Two sides, two ends, and the lid of the chest lay beside two planks that had made up the base. These appeared to fit together like two slices of bread for a sandwich, each slice hollowed out in the center to form a shallow dish. When joined by their neatly carved wooden dovetails, the base of the chest would have a hiding place.

Joe sniffed at the planks. “Smells like jelly beans.”

“I smell Casselrod, too,” Dulcie said. “That tweedy, musty scent. So what was hidden in here? Or did they take it all apart and find nothing? What were they looking for?”

Where the joints of the little trunk had been left unpainted, the old, seasoned oak shone deep and rich. The four sides and top had been carved in geometric patterns, with a circular design in the center. The paint over the carving was thick and uneven, filling up some of the indentations. “The circle is a rosette,” Dulcie said. “It’s a�” she stared at Joe. “Oh, my.”

“What?”

“It’s a Spanish motif. I’ve seen it on pictures of Spanish furniture.”

“So?”

“Like the old Spanish chests in Elliott Traynor’s play, that Catalina’s lover carved and gave to her, where she kept some of the letters she wrote to him, that she never sent. Couldthisbe one of those? Is that why Casselrod was so interested-why he snatched it from Cora Lee?” Her green eyes widened. “The research that Wilma collected for Elliott Traynor said that likely the old casks had been lost, broken or rotted or burned in the fire that destroyed the rancho some years after Catalina died.”

Joe nosed at the rough white slabs. “This stuff doesn’t look all that valuable.”

But Dulcie was fascinated, tingling with a resonance that made her whiskers twitch. She wasn’t sure what to call the feeling, but the sensation made her purr boldly, the same as when she had a rat by the scruff of the neck, ready to dispatch it.

Was this the key to the events of the last few days? Was the answer right there in Elliott Traynor’s play? Had some of the letters survived that Catalina wrote to her lover? Dulcie was wild with excitement-but Joe was still thinking it over.

“Why now?” he said. “Why would Casselrod and the men who broke into Susan’s suddenly be so interested?”

“Because now that the play is about to be produced, everyone has a script. All of a sudden, more people know about the letters.”

Joe wasn’t convinced but he helped her search for some old, frail letter written in Spanish, trying the desks and file cabinets and the rolltop desk which looked like a good place to hide valuables. All its drawers were locked with heavy, old-fashioned brass locks that wouldn’t budge.

And later, when Dulcie asked Wilma’s opinion, Wilma said, “I’ve always supposed the letters didn’t survive. Or maybe that some collector had them tucked away. I’ve never given them much thought.” She looked at Dulcie as doubtfully as Joe Grey had done, as if Dulcie was way off base on this one.

But then Joe and Dulcie caught Charlie snooping through Elliott Traynor’s desk, something they’d never dreamed that Charlie would do. Spying was a cat’s prerogative, but there was Charlie brazenly prying, shocking the cats with her nosiness and delighting them-and soon, both Charlie and Ryan Flannery would add tinder to the fires of their sharp curiosity.

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In the velvet evening, Mexican music beat brassy and sweet, and the aroma of chilies and roasted meats floated on the cool air, enticing Joe Grey and Dulcie as they trotted along behind their human friends. Licking their whiskers at the good smells, the two cats tried not to draw attention to themselves. But the kit raced boldly ahead, brushing past Charlie’s ankles and between Max Harper’s feet with no thought to keeping a low profile. Charlie glanced down at her once, grinning, and reached down to stroke her. Walking between Max Harper and Clyde, Charlie moved together with Harper as if their thoughts, their very spirits were in perfect sync.

Lovers, Dulcie thought, watching them. Or soon to be lovers. You could always tell, in the beginning. And that made her feel sad for Clyde, made her wish Clyde and Kate would work out their differences, wish that Kate would come home, that she would get serious about Clyde and move back to the village. Clyde seemed so-unfinished, Dulcie thought. She knew, with typical female logic, that it was time Clyde Damen got married.

Though apparently Joe didn’t think so. Why must he always know her thoughts? Beside her, he flicked a whisker with annoyance, his yellow eyes burning, his look saying clearly,Leave it alone, Dulcie. Leave Clyde alone, quit matchmaking.Joe said when she was matchmaking, her tail flicked in a certain way. Well, he wasn’t any help, he did nothing to nudge Clyde along. For all of Joe Grey’s input, Clyde could stay a bachelor forever.

Only, sometimes she did catch an irritated and speculative look in Joe’s eyes that made her wonder what he and Clyde talked about, in private. Made her wonder if, alone with Clyde, Joe hassled him to get married more than she imagined. Maybe, she thought, amused, Joe didn’t want her to catch him matchmaking.

When Clyde and Charlie and Harper entered the patio of Lupe’s Playa, moving in through the wrought iron gate, the kit barged in right between their feet-until Dulcie snaked out a swift paw and snatched her back, hissing at her and then purring and licking her ear.

Chastened, the kit followed Dulcie and Joe away from the entry and around behind the restaurant and up a bougainvillea vine to the top of the high patio wall. Padding along above the diners’ heads, the three cats slipped into a mass of purple blossoms where they were well concealed yet had a fine view of Lupe’s Playa. Below them, at Harper’s usual table, Detective Garza and his slim, dark-haired niece were already seated.

The patio was softly lighted by colored oil lamps that hung from the branches of three giant oak trees around which the tables were clustered. From the eaves of the building hung bright pinatas and Mexican flags. The restaurant itself, with its bright dining rooms, flanked two sides of the terrace, the lighted windows revealing more crowded tables and happy, laughing diners. Lupe’s Playa was the piece de resistance for fine Mexican food, a four-star winner, Harper and Clyde said. Both men were authorities, their appraisal of Mexican cuisine a serious avocation.

In their rodeo days, Max Harper and Clyde had frequented every good Mexican cafe between Portland and San Diego, and inland to the Nevada border. Both could describe in detail the specific virtues of an excellent chili relleno or an enchilada ranchero, both would turn up their noses at ground beef as a filling; both could name the painstaking steps in the proper preparation of tamales, a process that, when correctly done, took three days, from the soaking and roasting of the corn to the drying of the husks and the final rolling of the tamales.

Garza and his niece sat with their backs to the wall, unaware of the three cats hidden in the vines above them. The cats’ view of Ryan was the top of her head, her dark curly hair tousled and windblown. She was dressed in jeans and a pale blue T-shirt with no cutesy logos emblazoned on it. Was she reading Garza off, or only laying out her troubles? Whichever, this lady had a hot temper.

“This is not a simple quarrel! I’m not going back to him. I’m not staying with a man I don’t trust or respect.” She shifted in her chair, looking at Dallas more directly, her green eyes blazing beneath thick black lashes.

Garza was grinning. “Don’t lay your anger on me-I couldn’t be happier. You should have done this years ago.”

“I have an appointment tomorrow morning with the attorney Max Harper recommended. Thanks for talking to him.” She sipped her beer. “I want to get the divorce started, get my contractor’s license-and my half of the value of the business. In a few months, I’ll be running my new company. R. Flannery Construction.” She laid her hand on his. “I want to get into a place of my own, lick my wounds alone. Does that disappoint you?”

“Of course it doesn’t. You’re in the village, we can have dinner, run the dogs when I bring them down-go hunting this fall without Rupert pitching a fit.” He patted her hand. “Just glad to have you near, honey. Glad to see you free of him.”

“An apartment with good storage space,” Ryan said. “Have to buy all new equipment, power tools, ladders, wheelbarrows, you name it. Have to do some advertising-to say nothing of hiring. Besides the job in San Anselmo, I have a couple of other nibbles, contacts from San Francisco. One of our-of Rupert’s-clients wants me to build a small vacation cottage down here. They bought a lot last year, a teardown.”

“So you’re not only going to fight Rupert for your half of the business, you’re going to steal the firm’s clients.”

“I don’t consider it stealing, if they come to me. None of them was happy with Rupert, with his attitude.”

“I have to say, you came away armed. Armed for what, time will tell.”

“Don’t be a cop, Dallas. I’ll work it out.”

Garza stood up as Clyde and Charlie and Harper approached. Harper pulled out a chair for Charlie; but as the three were seated, Joe nudged Dulcie. She followed his gaze across the patio, where Vivi and Elliott Traynor had just appeared, waiting for a table.

Vivi looked incredibly small and thin next to Elliott, who seemed twice her size. He was a handsome man, with well-styled silver hair, dressed in a suede leather sport coat and pale slacks, a man who looked used to living well. Vivi, in her black tights and black sweater and wildly frizzy hair, looked like something he might have picked up south of town.

Glancing around the patio, Vivi began to fidget as if she should not have to wait to be seated. When she spotted their table she did a comic double take, turned her back to the party, and grabbed Elliott’s arm, dragging him toward the door. Looking surprised, Traynor followed her. When the maitre d’ turned back to them, they were gone.

Ryan sat very still, staring after them. “Why did they turn away? She spotted us, and spun around like she’d been scalded.”

“I told you the Traynors were here,” Garza said. “She was looking straight at you.” He studied his niece. “Something happen in San Francisco? I thought you hardly knew them, that you’d met them only once. Some business dinner?”

“Rupert and I had dinner with them one evening, with friends. Then Rupert insisted we take them out. We did, but I didn’t especially enjoy it. Though I can’t think of anything that would make them avoid me.

“Unless�” Ryan colored. “Unless she and Rupert�”

Garza’s expression didn’t change.

“Dinner waswell, both evenings were pleasant enough, really. But Rupert was fidgety and rude because he had to listen to details about Elliott’s play. He thought Elliott was totally egocentric. I didn’t think so, I liked him, he’s a charming man. He’d been making arrangements with Molena Point Players, someone down here was doing the music and lyrics. Mark King?”

“Yes,” Charlie said. “Mark King.”

“He talked about his historical trilogy, too,” Ryan said. “It was interesting. But Rupert� Well,” she said slowly, “Rupert did spend a good deal of time talking with Vivi.” She went a shade paler, lowering her gaze.

Charlie looked across at Ryan. “Elliott Traynor’s play-isn’t it based on the same historical material as his last three novels?” Under the table, Charlie and Harper were holding hands. Only the cats could see them, from the angle of the wall. The kit’s tail twitched with merriment.

“Yes,” Ryan said. “He seems totally caught up in early California history. But the material of the novels is different. The play centers around Catalina Ortega-Diaz and her love story.”

“My aunt Wilma supplied some of the research for the books,” Charlie said, “as well as for the play, from the library’s local history collection and from the records kept at the mission.”

“I haven’t read the trilogy,” Ryan said. “But Traynor told us the true story of the play. Catalina was the daughter of a wealthy Spanish ranchero-this would be somewhere in the eighteen fifties, when the rancheros began to mortgage parcels of their land to buy luxuries-silks, crystal, golden goblets brought over by ship from Europe. Apparently they and their families lived pretty high, enjoyed life day to day and really didn’t take the mortgages seriously. Didn’t think the notes would ever be called in.

“The heart of the play is the effect of this on Catalina’s life. When the notes were foreclosed and the merchants started taking over the land, some of the rancheros went bankrupt, Catalina’s father included. Well, I didn’t mean to lay out the whole story.”

“Go on,” Charlie said. “Don’t leave us hanging.”

Ryan smiled. “Along comes a wealthy American named Stanton, offering to pay off Ortega-Diaz’s debts in exchange for his land-and for Catalina’s hand. Keep the ranch in the family. He promised Diaz that he could stay there in his own home and live well. It was the answer to the ranchero’s prayer.

“But Catalina was in love with someone else,” Ryan said. “When she refused to marry Stanton, her father locked her in her room, fed her on bread and water. According to Traynor, she finally gave in. Though she married Stanton and bore his children and made a respectable life, she wrote letters to her lost love until she died.

“No one knows how many of the letters she sent. According to Traynor, she hid many of them in her chambers-rather like a secret journal. The way Traynor described it, the whole thrust of the play is on the letters between Catalina and Marcos Romero-her songs are the letters. Traynor tells the story so beautifully. I was fascinated. But Vivi seemed annoyed that he talked so much about the play; she seemed as bored as Rupert.”

Charlie laughed. “I know how she is. I work for them, I do their cleaning. Vivi can be� off-putting.”

“I liked Elliott,” Ryan said. “He’s a fiery man, but he seemed kind. I think he could be kind-without Vivi.”

From atop the brick wall, Dulcie watched the two women, thinking that they hit it off very well. They seemed about the same age, and certainly they agreed about Vivi-but then, who wouldn’t?

When the waiter came with their menus, the conversation died. From the wall, the three cats peered over, considering the selections and what they might be able to cadge. That was when Clyde spotted them, when the kit thrust her nose out to see better. Everyone looked; no one laughed. Detective Garza seemed to find their presence amusing. “That gray tomcat gets around, Damen. I never saw a cat quite so-with so much presence. He’s almost like a dog.”

The tomcat thought of several things he’d like to tell Detective Garza, none of them polite.

Clyde shifted his chair so his back was to the cats, disclaiming all responsibility for their presence; but he included in his order a selection of their favorites on a paper plate: chicken fajitas with jack cheese and sour cream. The egg-and-batter portion of a chili relleno, with mild sauce. And a cup of flan, for the kit. Ryan appeared as entertained as Garza; she kept glancing up at the three cats, as if watching for further developments.

When the orders came and Clyde placed the paper plate on the wall, the cats feasted, Joe and Dulcie eating in silence and neatly licking their whiskers, the kit guzzling loudly and enthusiastically, smearing flan from her whiskers to her ears. She received amused glances from several tables.

The village was used to dogs in their restaurant patios, but companion cats were another matter, though most of the villagers knew Clyde Damen’s odd preference for the gray tomcat. This was a community of writers and artists and of people rich enough or confident enough to be as eccentric as they liked-if Damen wanted to bring his cats to dinner, that was fine.

But Dallas was asking Charlie about the apartment she had for rent. “Max told me it was a duplex?”

“Yes, both sides of a duplex.” She looked at Ryan. “One is a studio, double garage underneath. The other has one bedroom, same garage arrangement.”

“I’d like to see the studio,” Ryan said. “Would you mind my keeping construction equipment there?”

“Not at all. It’s a perfect arrangement. After dinner, you want to take a look?”

“Love to.”

“So would I,” said Clyde. “I haven’t seen it since you painted and fixed it up.”

“We’re not finished with the larger one,” Charlie said, watching him with interest. “Mavity’s helping me. The studio side is done.”

“I’d like to see the one-bedroom,” Clyde said. “We’re-I’m thinking of taking that offer for the house, since they built the wall of China behind me.”

Joe and Dulcie exchanged a look.

“What about your own apartment building?” Charlie said.

“Those are all one-year leases, Charlie, with options to renew. You were there when I rented those units, you were still working on the outside of the building.”

Charlie tried to look at him seriously, but the cats saw a sly grin creep across her freckled face, as if she could read Clyde too well. Her look seemed a mixture of jealousy, levity, and honest pleasure and relief.

How complicated humans were, Dulcie thought. A she-cat would either turn away uninterested, or would leap on her rival spitting and clawing.

But Charlie had already abandoned Clyde, he was a free agent. Dulcie watched the exchange of looks between Charlie and Harper. Charlie’s leg was pressed against his under the table. Clyde didn’t seem to notice, his full attention was on Ryan. He rose with her as dinner ended and as Harper and Garza headed back to the station. He escorted her out as if she were his date, handing her into his antique yellow roadster to ride the few blocks to the duplex. The kit crouched, meaning to leap down and follow, but Dulcie snatched her back.

“Let them go, Kit. We don’t need to act all that eager for a car ride. No need to put too many questions in people’s heads.” She looked after Clyde’s convertible. “Ryan Flannery is a looker. I don’t think Kate will like this.”

“Serve her right,” Joe said, wondering how this would play out. Ryan was a beauty, all right, and apparently full of fight and determination. She seemed, in fact, the kind of human woman he most admired. Well, but so was Charlie. Determined and feisty.

But the woman he was really curious about, who sent Joe leaping from the wall and snaking away up the street between pedestrians’ legs, was Vivi Traynor. Why had she practically run from the restaurant to avoid either Detective Garza or his niece Ryan Flannery?

Heading across the darkening village dodging tourists’ shoes, the three cats’ eyes caught light from shop windows and from passing cars. The sky above them was heavy with cloud behind the black silhouettes of oak and pine trees. Above the cats, a little bat darted over the treetops, squeaking its high-pitched sonar. Dulcie, hurrying along beside Joe, puzzled over Vivi Traynor’s hasty retreat but also kept thinking about Traynor’s play and about the research that Wilma had done for him.

Wilma had read her some of the research that came from the mission archives, before she sent it to Traynor. Apparently one of the priests knew about Catalina’s letters and wrote about them in his journal. The Ortega-Diaz ranch wasn’t far from the mission. “That priest wrote that Catalina made little paintings on the letters-of the ranch, of branding, whatever they do with cattle. How strange,” she said, “the way humans collect and record history.”

“How else would they do it?” Joe said sensibly.

“I don’t know. All the letters and journals and all kinds of old records woven together to make a pattern of the past. To a human, that may seem dull. I think it’s like making magic, to be able to bring the dead past alive.”

Joe stared at her. “You’re talking just like the kit,” he said rudely.

Hurt, she glanced back at the kit, who had stopped to paw at a snail. “Sometimes,” Dulcie said, “I feel like the kit.” And she turned away from Joe.

But he pressed against her, licking her ear. “That’s why I love you,” he said softly. “Because you see not only the rat to hunt but also the flowers where it’s crouched.”

She looked at him, her eyes wide, then gave him a nuzzling purr. Sometimes this tomcat wasn’t so rough and uncaring. Sometimes he truly surprised her. And in a little while, she said, “Hundred-and-fifty-year-old letters from California history with sketches of the period should be worth a bundle, Joe. Maybe Traynor’s looking for them himself.”

“Traynor or Vivi? It was Vivi who followed Casselrod when he snatched the white chest.”

“If Traynor wants the letters, why would he put them in the play so everyone would know about them? So other people would start looking?”

“Maybe he planned to have found them already before the time the play was produced.” Joe leaped to the top of a fence and down the other side. He watched Dulcie and the kit drop down beside him. “If Elliott and Vivi are still having dinner somewhere, and if we’re fast, we can be inside their cottage before they ever get home.” Joe’s yellow eyes blazed. “I want to know more about Vivi, about both the Traynors.”

10 [��������: pic_11.jpg]

Trotting single file along a twisted oak branch, the three cats crossed above Elliot Traynor’s roof to the high clerestory windows that looked down into the living room. Within the house, no lights burned. The Traynor’s black Lincoln was not in the drive where they usually parked. Peering down through the glass, the cats could see the stone fireplace and a pale leather couch and love seat, set on a richly patterned area rug. The handsomely designed room was now strewn with items of clothing as if Vivi had wandered through undressing as she went. Joe was pawing at the sliding panels trying to open one, when car lights swept the garden. As the Lincoln turned into the drive, the cats closed their eyes so not to catch the glow like a row of miniature spotlights mounted among the shingles.

Vivi got out of the driver’s side carrying a large paper bag in both hands. The cats could smell enchiladas. Elliott followed her in though the back door, and light came on in the kitchen, reflecting across the drive and illuminating the flowering shrubs, burnishing their leaves like polished copper.

Soon the cats could hear water running in the kitchen, then a metallic clatter as if silverware was being taken from the drawer.

They imagined Elliott and Vivi sitting down to Styrofoam containers heaped with enchiladas and tamales. Maybe, when the cats saw them hurry out of Lupe’s, they told the waiter that they’d changed their minds and that they wanted takeout, then had waited outside for their order like any ordinary villager, lurking beyond the patio wall where they wouldn’t be seen.

When the clerestory windows wouldn’t open, Dulcie dropped from the roof and headed for the back door to see if it might be ajar, though she didn’t relish slipping into the house that close to Vivi. Trotting through the dark garden toward the back porch, she brushed through tall stands of daisies and overgrown clumps of daylilies and yellow-flowering euryops bushes, collecting their scents on her coat. Above her, up the stone walls of the cottage, the many-paned windows remained dark, there was only that light at the back, in the small bay window that extended out from the kitchen. The spicy smell of Mexican food filled her nostrils, so strong she could taste it. She heard Vivi giggle somewhere inside, that high, irritating laugh that set Dulcie’s fur on edge. Elliott said something that Dulcie couldn’t make out, and Vivi snapped angrily at him, her shout coming clearly enough.

“She was with two cops. Those guys were cops. That tall skinny one is the chief. What did you expect me to do?”

Elliott’s muttered reply wasn’t clear. It sounded like, “� other one� didn’t see the� mumble mumble�”

“Well, she would remember!” Vivi said. “One wrong word in front of the law, one little wiggle� If you run into her, you be careful. You’re way too casual about this.”

Again his response was too low to be heard, sullen and angry. Why didn’t he yell at her? He was way too casual about what? Had Vivi had an affair with Ryan’s husband, the way Ryan thought? And Vivi didn’t want to confront Ryan? But if Elliott knew about that, didn’t he care? How strange humans were, Dulcie thought. Joe would have killed another tomcat who touched her.

He had wanted to kill that black tom, Azrael. Had tried to kill him. Though Dulcie hadn’t really looked at another tomcat since she met Joe, there had been that one weak moment when Azrael came on to her, she remembered ashamedly. When the dark voodoo cat ignited a frightened purr-until she angrily rejected the philandering thief.

They were still snapping at each other as Vivi’s high heels clicked across the room toward the back door. Dulcie backed into the bushes as the door opened and light spilled out. She could never get over the feeling that people would know she was eavesdropping; she always wanted to hide.

But how could anyone know? So Vivi saw a cat in the garden. What was she going to do, throw the garbage can at her?

Knowing Vivi, she might. Vivi dropped a bag of trash into the garbage can. She stood a few moments in the cool night as if trying to control her temper, then turned back inside, where Elliott had switched on the TV and the canned voices of a late newscast filled the kitchen.

Racing back through the quiet dark of the garden, Dulcie let the human sounds fade behind her, let the garden smells fill her nose, and the damp earth ooze cool beneath her paws. Brushing through the scented leaves of geranium and lavender, in the deepening evening chill, she raced up the oak tree again. From somewhere high above her came the scream of a screech owl crying his hunting call-hunting in the wind, diving among the pines and oaks. Catching arboreal mice? she thought, amused. Or snatching up tree-climbing crickets?

Feeling lonely suddenly, she fled to Joe. She and Joe were launched on their own kind of hunt, the game far larger and more dangerous than anything that little owl could trap. And, thinking of what they might find, she was suddenly afraid.

Storming up through the thick foliage of the oak tree, darkness seemed to crush in around her. Racing along the branch with clinging claws, she nudged Joe with her nose, sniffing in his scent, rubbing her face against his sleek, silken fur. But after a moment, she asked, “Where’s the kit?”

Joe smiled and glanced above them. She followed his gaze to where the kit clung nearly at the top of the oak among the smallest branches, a dark lump, her long, fluffy tail hanging down like a pendulum, the tip of it twitching in that slow rhythm that indicated some prankish desire or some other, equally busy mental process.

“Vivi and Elliott were arguing,” Dulcie told Joe. “Talking about Ryan. Vivi said, ‘She would remember. And she was with two cops-those guys were cops.’ Then, ‘That tall skinny one is the chief. What did you expect me to do?’”

Joe listened, saying nothing.

“Elliott muttered something like,’� other one� didn’t see�’ That’s all I could make out. She told him to be careful, that he was way too casual. Then she closed the door tight. And no windows are open.”

Somewhere near, a barn owl hooted, deep and frightening, and the kit came backing down the tree fast, to snuggle between them. Joe peered in again through the high window. “Strange, what a bad feeling I have about this.”

“So do I,” she said. “Likely it’s Vivi, she’d make anyone uneasy. Wilma calls her a name I won’t repeat,” she said, glancing at the kit.

“What name?” asked the kit.

No one answered her. Joe worked at the window again, clawing and pulling, then backed down the tree to the garden and went to circle the house, a gray streak in the darkness leaping up at each window, scrabbling and pawing. Dulcie followed him down to try the vents in the foundation. She was clawing at a grid when suddenly from above, lights poured down on them. They fled into the bushes, hunching down in the leaves, looking up through the little twiggy branches at the one window, halfway along the house, that shone brightly.

No figure moved against the glass, no one looked out. They could see beyond the curtains a tall chest of drawers with a small mirror standing on top, light reflecting from it.

Lights blazed on in a second room, at the front where the draperies were drawn, then a smaller window in between burned brightly. They heard water running, but then at last the bathroom light went out and the back bedroom darkened except for the glow of a TV.

In the illuminated front room, a shadow moved behind the draperies, thrown tall by the lamp, and then sat down. In a few minutes they heard the soft click, click of computer keys.

“So Vivi’s gone to bed to watch TV,” Dulcie said. “And Elliott’s at work on the book.”

Moving out from beneath the bush, Joe looked up at the vents of the attic.

“Wait for me,” he whispered. “Watch the window.” And he was gone up the rose trellis, his white paws flashing as he skillfully avoided the thorns. She watched nervously from the bushes, wishing she didn’t feel so edgy. In a moment she heard him scratching and tearing at the wall, rustling within the foliage. She had never seen Joe so interested, when no serious crime had been committed. Usually he reserved his predatory sleuthing for some major transgression, but tonight he was keen to break and enter, hot on the trail-of what? Oh, Vivi and Elliott did put him off, did make him uneasy. Above her, Joe snatched and clawed at the vent as he swung from the trellis anchored only by his hind paws, fighting to get inside, following his instincts.

Max Harper, she thought, would never move on cop sense alone, on some itchy feeling, without due cause. Whatever problems the Traynors had, such as their avoidance of Ryan Flannery, and Vivi’s nervousness around police, didn’t necessarily point to criminal activity. And yet�

She wondered if they could be dealing drugs. She didn’t like to think that about someone like Elliott Traynor. Were his medical bills so high that he was desperate, hard up for cash even if he was a famous writer? Cancer treatment must be very expensive. Maybe writers didn’t have medical insurance. Certainly drugs were easy to sell. On the streets of New York and San Francisco there would be plenty of buyers eager to hand over their money.

But she was letting her imagination go wild. And how was Garza’s niece involved? Did Ryan know more about the Traynors than she was saying-more than she wanted to tell her uncle?

“I could go to the door,” the kit said. “Scratch at the door.”

“Do what, Kit?” Dulcie stared at her, then looked up to where Joe had his claws hooked in the vent, stubbornly pulling.

“I could play lost kitty like Joe did at Detective Garza’s house, when he moved in to spy. Like you did with that old lady, after Janet Jeannot was killed. You lived with that old woman for a week, and look how much you found out! I could-”

The vent came loose and fell, as Joe leaped clear. It clattered loudly to the brick walk-and Elliott’s typing stopped. Dulcie and the kit froze, ready to run. Above them, Joe disappeared into the attic.

In a moment the typing started again. The kit, fascinated with her idea, went on as if she’d never been interrupted. “I could make nice to Elliott Traynor and Vivi and get them to feed me and make a bed for me and I would purr for them, and when they went to sleep I would open the door for you, catch the knob in my paws, and swing and hold tight-I can do that. I could-”

“Hush, Kit, you’re making me crazy. You mustn’t do any of that. Be still.” She could hear sounds from the front of the garden. Someone was coming. She pulled the kit deeper under the hydrangea bush. Crouching among the leaves and branches, they listened.

Was it a person approaching in the dark? More likely a dog, Dulcie thought. The brushing noise was too low to the ground for a human. The kit, very still now, pressed close to her as something came lumbering in their direction, waddling back and forth on all fours.

This was no dog. Dulcie could feel the kit’s heart pounding against her. She could see the beast’s stripes now, his black beady eyes, could see the mask across his face. He was bigger than a bulldog and seemed twice as broad, and behind him came four smaller raccoons looking out from behind identical masks, swinging along predatory and bold on their dainty black paws. Five lethal fighting machines. Dulcie and the kit didn’t breathe.

The raccoons lurched past not ten feet from them, their raised noses sucking in the lingering smell of enchiladas. Maybe that garlicky confection of meat and chilies and cilantro would hide the smell of cat. Lurching toward the back of the house and the garbage cans, they were soon scrabbling on metal and chittering impatiently, pawing to get the lids off. A lid dropped into the bushes. The can fell, breaking leafy twigs and immediately the raccoons were into it, scrabbling and fighting.

Dulcie led the kit back up the trellis, the kit’s long fine fur catching in the thorns with little ripping sounds.

“We’re safe now,” the kit whispered, edging toward the hole that Joe Grey had opened to the dark attic.

“Hush!” Dulcie said. “They can climb, too. Get yourself inside!” Below them, the sounds of bickering and of claws tearing at Styrofoam gave her the shivers. She imagined the animals devouring enchilada-flavored Styrofoam as if it were candy. But when they finished with the garbage, what would they do next?

Following the kit into the dusty, mouse-scent dark of the attic, she mewed softly for Joe Grey. There was no answer, no movement among the shadows. She heard, from the yard below, the sounds of the raccoons change from gorging garbage to little chirps of curiosity, then heard the beasts coming back, shouldering through the bushes toward the trellis that she and the kit had climbed. Beside her, the kit peered down. “What are they doing? Why�?”

“Be still! They’ll climb up here quick as squirrels!” She looked hard at the kit, whose tail was twitching with that devilish, looking-for-trouble rhythm.

“Didn’t you ever have to battle raccoons, Kit, when you lived with that traveling band of cats? They’re as dangerous as coyotes or bobcats.”

“The big cats fought them. I was too little. I always hid. But I’m big now, and you and Joe are big. They wouldn’t-”

“Oh wouldn’t they?” She turned blazing eyes on the kit. “Have you never seen a cat torn apart by raccoons? Like you would tear apart a little mouse!”

The kit’s eyes grew round. She dropped her tail, dropped her ears flat to her head, and backed away from the vent into the deeper shadows of the attic. And Dulcie began to search for something heavy they could push against the vent hole.

11 [��������: pic_12.jpg]

In the black attic Dulcie raced among hulking furniture, clawing at cartons, searching for a box that she could move, could shove against the hole to block the raccoons’ entrance. In the little square of moonlit sky that marked the vent hole, a black shape loomed, and another was coming fast up the trellis. Her nose was filled with the smells of mildew and dust and ancient mouse droppings, as if all the house dirt of generations had been sucked upward into this dank space. Searching, pulling at heavy boxes, she watched the lead raccoon forcing himself through the little vent, could hear the others behind him pushing up the trellis following the scent of cat.

They daren’t shout; the Traynors would hear them-she wondered if Elliott heard the raccoons scrabbling up the wall of the house. She attacked another box, straining with claws and teeth to drag it toward the opening. Where was Joe? Cats weren’t built to move heavy loads. If she got a grip with her claws and pulled, she pulled her own back feet out from under herself. When she tried pushing with her shoulder, the box might as well be nailed to the floor. Straining, lying on her back, pulling, she mewled when the box gave suddenly, was shoved so hard it nearly ran her over. She rolled away as it rammed against the wall.

“Push, Dulcie. Push now!” Joe hissed. In the darkness behind the box, his white face and chest gleamed. But as they fought the carton toward the opening, the beast pushed through, forcing the box back in their faces. He was a huge animal; he seemed to fill the attic.

“Run, Kit. Run.” The three cats flew through the dark, dodging between the legs of stacked furniture.

“Here,” Joe hissed. “Down through the crawl door.” He shouldered the kit toward a thick slab of plywood lying askew on the rough flooring, a crack of blackness showing at its edge.

“This?” Dulcie said. “We have to move this?” She pawed uselessly at the slab.

“All together. Hook your claws in the edge.”

They hooked into the rough splintery plywood and pulled, lunging backward. The slab moved, and moved again. Behind them, the beasts came swaying and lumbering. Pulling again, they jerked the cover aside far enough to free a six-inch hole. As the masked bandit lunged at them, Joe shoved the kit, and they dropped through into blackness.

They landed on hard linoleum, in a little room walled by shelves that smelled of raisins, brown sugar, cereal. Above them in the hole, a masked face peered down, and another. Trapped in the pantry, they watched the raccoons turn, preparing to back down, watched the first one reach a hind foot to grip the nearest shelf.

Leaping, Joe pawed at the pantry door swinging on the knob and turning it. The door flew open, they were through.

“Get your tail through, Kit.”

She flicked her fluffy tail away, and Joe flung himself against the door again, slamming it closed.

They heard the raccoons drop, then a terrible thudding racket as they fought among themselves, scrabbling at the door to force it open. The cats fled, searching the kitchen for a place to hide, listening to the latch rattle as if any minute it would give.

The animals charged the door for some moments, then began, apparently, to vent their rage and hunger on the pantry shelves. Cans and boxes fell clattering, cardboard was torn and ripped to the sounds of munching and slurping-five voracious eating machines heralding their entry into Elliot Traynor’s cottage, announcing their arrival with enough noise to wake the village.

The Traynor kitchen, even without lights, was a bright room, its cabinets and tile floor creamy pale, its wide bay window over the sink offering a vista of starlight above the massed houseplants. But its pristine counters afforded no shelter. When a door banged, down the hall, the cats fled behind the refrigerator.

Elliott Traynor came running, Vivi close behind him. Peering out, the cats watched the Traynors pause, staring at the closed pantry door where, within, the raccoons were knocking down cans and thudding against the walls. Elliott was dressed in a velvet robe, pajamas, and slippers-and carrying a black automatic. Crouched behind the refrigerator, Dulcie and the kit hunched close to Joe.

Moving to the pantry, Elliott paused for a long minute, listening. When he jerked the door open, Vivi screamed. Two shots rang. At the booming explosion, the cats scorched down the hall, into the living room and underneath the couch.

“He shot them,” Dulcie whispered, shocked. As terrified as she’d been of the raccoons, she was appalled that Traynor had killed them. Crouching in the black dusty dark beneath the couch, she pressed against Joe, shivering. “He might have shot us.”

“Shhh.” Joe’s warning hiss was cut off by Vivi’s high, nervous giggle.

“My God! Why did you have to shoot them! Look at the mess you made. What on earth are they, what kind of animal would�?” She giggled again. “Oh, it’s gory. What are we going to do?”

“Raccoons,” Traynor snapped. “Get some garbage bags.”

“You had to load with soft-nose.”

“Be glad I did. Bullet could go right through these walls, who knows where. Then there’d be hell to pay. Get me the damn bags. Hope to hell the neighbors thought it was a backfire.”

“How did they get in?”

Silence-as if Traynor might be pointing above them, to the crawl hole.

“Well, how did they get in there?”

“How the hell do I know? There are vents in an attic. Get the damn bags.”

“You don’t need to snap at me.”

“I’ll snap if I want. And look in the garage for a ladder.”

Beneath the couch, Dulcie said, “Maybe our uneasy feeling wasn’t so silly. Why would Traynor have a gun?”

“I don’t know, Dulcie. Maybe he carries it when he’s traveling. Clyde carries a gun in the car when-”

“The Traynors flew out. People aren’t supposed to carry guns on planes.”

“They can, if they check their bag. And lock it. Unload the gun and declare it. Get a special tag-”

The back door banged. Elliott snapped, “Hold the damn bag open!”

“I don’t want to do this! Leave that for the cleaning woman-keep it away from me. This makes me sick.”

“Shut up and hold the bag!”

They listened to sounds of scraping, laced with plenty of swearing. Pretty soon they heard the back door open again, then the clanging of metal from the backyard as if Elliott had righted the garbage can that the raccoons had earlier turned over. The idea of a dead animal, even a raccoon, stuffed into a garbage can sickened the cats. They heard Traynor secure the lid and pound it down, as if with an angry fist.

“How many did he kill?” Dulcie said. “There were only two shots. Why didn’t we hear the others running away across the attic?”

“Maybe two for one,” Joe said coldly. “I hope he closed the door tight.”

The kit began to wriggle. Joe scowled at her.

“Curl up, Kit. Close your eyes. We can’t leave with them fussing around in the kitchen.

“Come here, Kit,” Dulcie said, nudging her. She licked the kit’s face and ears, washing her gently until the kit stretched out and dozed off. Dulcie didn’t mean to sleep, but she woke later with the kit curled against her and Joe Grey gone.

Listening, she heard not the faintest noise in the house. Leaving the sleeping kit, she crept out from behind the couch and followed Joe’s scent down the hall.

No light burned beneath the bedroom door. She could hear Vivi and Elliott breathing, in two separate rhythms. Their human sleep-smell was sour. Beyond the bedroom, Elliott’s study was dark, the door pulled nearly closed. Pressing it open, she padded in.

Against the pale color of the drawn draperies, where a thin wash of moonlight brightened the window, Joe sat atop Elliott Traynor’s desk, his silhouette black, his white markings gleaming, his ears pricked sharply-he was as still as a sphinx, watching her. The illuminated clock on the desk said 1:30. She leaped up beside him.

A heavy brown folder lay at his feet, from which he had pawed out a thick sheaf of papers, scattering them across the blotter. There was barely enough light to read, even for a cat. She looked at the pages, frowning.

“Traynor’s research,” he said softly. “Take a look at this. A San Francisco museum owns some of Catalina’s letters, which they have translated-pretty impassioned letters,” he said, grinning. “She was mad as hell when her father made her marry the American. And look at this.”

With a deft claw he pulled out several pages revealing a paper tucked between them, an auction house notice offering two letters written by Catalina Ortega-Diaz, the bidding for each to start at ten thousand dollars. A handwritten notation at the bottom indicated that one had sold for twelve thousand, one for fourteen. Clipped to the notice was a printed statement listing the two items, and making payment to Vivi Traynor.

In the gloom, Joe Grey’s eyes were as black as obsidian. “Did someone say there’s been no crime? Famous author or not, this is most interesting. There’s money here, Dulcie-how many letters did she write over her lifetime? How many did she never send?

“Catalina had seven carved chests that Marcos made for her. Was that white cask one of them? And did they all have secret compartments? Even so, how did she keep her husband from finding them?

“The research said they had separate chambers-bedrooms- where the chests were hidden.”

Dulcie looked at the date on the auction notice. “Only a few weeks since these letters were sold. Then Susan Brittain’s house is broken into, and the burglar is attacked. Did those men think she had one of the chests? And the same morning, Casselrod snatches the white one.”

“Add to that,” Joe said, “that Elliott carries a gun and that Vivi and Elliott are afraid of the cops and apparently of Garza’s niece.” He looked intently at Dulcie, his yellow eyes gleaming with a hot predatory flame-with the same resolve that he had reserved, in the past, for thieves and killers.

“He’s a famous author,” Dulcie said softly. “He’s� Well, I don’t know. To accuse a man like that�” Looking around the study, looking at the papers that Joe was neatly pawing together, she shivered. “Prying into Elliott Traynor’s business makes me nervous.”

“Come on,” he said, pawing the envelope open and pushing the papers in. “Get the kit, let’s get out of here. I need fresh air, away from these people.” Quickly he pushed beneath the draperies and slid the window lock. He had the glass open when Dulcie returned with the yawning kit. And they left the Traynor’s with far more silence than they had entered, softly sliding the window closed behind them, as they dropped down among the bushes.

But Joe Grey was back inside the cottage again by the time Charlie got to work. He had watched from the oak tree as Vivi and Elliott left the house, had come in through the window, returning to Elliot’s study, his curiosity not nearly satisfied.

He had no idea what else he would find-and no idea that he would catch Charlie snooping, exactly as he and Dulcie had done, hiding her prying with energetic bouts of vacuuming and dusting.

12 [��������: pic_13.jpg]

Whetheryou’re a cop with a search warrant or the weekly cleaning person come to scour the bathrooms and vacuum the rugs, if you peek through someone’s private papers you can stir matters you might wish you’d let lie. The more bizarre the results of such prying, the more compelled one may feel to keep searching, to see what else might come to light.

Charlie Getz had no idea, when she let herself into the Traynor cottage at nine on Monday morning, of the bloody mess she’d have to clean up or of what she would find later in Elliott Traynor’s study.

The cottage the Traynors had rented was one of the most charming in the village, with its pale stone exterior and winding brick walk through a lush and tastefully planted garden. The high roof, above tall clerestory windows, was sheltered by an ancient oak. The front porch was laid with pale stone. The hand-carved front door opened into a handsome foyer brightened by a skylight and by a floor of cream-toned Mexican tiles. From the high-ceilinged living room to the tile-floored kitchen, the interior was filled with light.

The furnishings were casual and well designed, the copies of antique Persian rugs well made and rich in color, every detail planned for a tasteful but durable upscale rental. The owners had only recently refurnished, storing their antique pieces in the insulated attic among chests of outgrown children’s toys and personal mementos.

Unloading her grocery bag, Charlie rinsed the salad greens and the pound of Bing cherries she had bought for Vivi, put the cherries into a flat plastic container, and slipped them in the freezer-frozen cherries for Vivi to suck on during the day, a childish habit that seemed to Charlie to have weird sexual connotations.

Moving into the living room, she watered the plants with a specially prepared plant food that was kept in a gallon plastic bottle under the wet bar. It was when she returned to the bright kitchen to get the vacuum from the cleaning closet next to the pantry, that she smelled something sour and metallic, a vile stink like spoiling meat, seeping out around the pantry door. Had some food gone bad, or a can of something exploded?

That didn’t seem likely. She had stocked the shelves herself, only three weeks before, with freshly purchased staples, following instructions from the rental agent. Reaching for the doorknob, she hesitated, filled with a strange apprehension.

Slowly she pulled the pantry door open-and slammed it closed again, trying to catch her breath.

Her first thought was that some kind of meat had been butchered in there and been flung around, then left lying in globs on the floor. Who would do such a thing? And there were hanks of hair on it, pieces of fur.

Dark fur, mixed with gore and blood.

Fur mottled like�

Terrified, ripping open the door again, she expected to see tortoiseshell fur mottled black and brown. Those cats roamed everywhere, they were likely to slip into anyone’s house. But who would�?

Oh, not the kit. Please, not the kit.

Having flung open the door, she forced herself to look carefully.

Relief flooded her. This wasn’t the kit’s tortoiseshell fur, nor Dulcie’s tabby-striped coat. This fur was coarse and rough-black and gray, not brown.

Raccoons?

Raisins and crackers were mixed with the blood. From the shelves, the contents of burst cans of corn and fruit salad dripped down. Raccoons couldn’t do that-the cans had been blown open by some tremendous force.

She turned away, her breakfast wanting to come up. What kind of horrible prank was this? What sick joke? She stood holding her hand to her mouth, trying to mask the smell, trying to keep from heaving. Trying to construct a plausible scenario.

Chill air touched her from above, a cold draft. Looking up at the pantry ceiling, she saw the access door had been tampered with, the plywood cover apparently pulled aside, then pushed crookedly back again into place, its unpainted parts marking its altered position. Would raccoons be able to pull aside an attic door, would they know how to do that?

Certainly raccoons had broken into several village houses that were supposedly vermin proof. She remembered when a dozen of the beasts got into the Carvers’ house through the attic and down into an upstairs bedroom, terrifying old Mrs. Carver nearly to apoplexy. And that wasn’t the only bizarre tale of the damage raccoons could do. When two of them got into the high school by shoving aside an acoustical tile, they took over the principal’s office and quite effectively rearranged his filing system before they could be evicted. As she stood studying the bloody mess, trying not to be sick, she realized she was looking, among a pattern of dark splatters, at a ragged hole in the Sheetrock.

A bullet hole? Was that what happened, had these animals been shot? She thought the bullet would have to have been a hollow-point, to tear the beasts up like that and to make that huge ragged hole in the wall.

She imagined the animals breaking in, making a racket as they attacked the food, then Elliott flinging open the door and shooting them. Afterward, he must have pushed the plywood back over the ceiling opening, maybe thinking that more of the beasts were up there.

Couldn’t he have thought of some other approach than killing them? The police carried animal nets for this kind of emergency. Or the police would have called a specialist. There were several services in the area that had humane traps to deal with such cases. She felt rage that he had called no one, that he had shot the them. And then, to top it off, he had left the mess for her to clean up.

Swallowing back her anger, she fetched rubber gloves from her tote bag, and put on one of the surgical masks she carried for use when she didn’t want to breathe caustic fumes. Tying a dish-towel over her hair, she cursed the Traynors. She was a cleaning professional, not a dead body disposal service. Not in this situation. This wasn’t the aftermath of police business, to which she had been summoned. She felt like walking out, telling them to clean up their own mayhem.

With a roll of paper towels and a dustpan to use as a scoop and several heavy garbage bags, she cleared out the spilled food and scrubbed away the blood where it had splattered on the walls and shelves. She dumped the undamaged cans in a bucket of hot, soapy water and scrubbed each one. As she cleaned, she found three other holes. From one, she dug out a soft-nosed bullet smashed like a mushroom. The other was too deeply embedded. When she had finished scrubbing and disinfecting and carried the bags out to the garbage, she saw that her work wasn’t finished.

The yard around the back door was covered with garbage-empty cans, soiled wrapping paper, all kinds of household refuse. Strange that the garbage can itself was upright, with the lid secured.

After pitching the scattered garbage piece by piece into a fresh plastic bag, she opened the tall can and saw that two bags were already there, heavy with something, and smelling of gore; and she felt disgust all over again. Traynor had put the bodies here. That sickened her. Couldn’t he have given them a decent burial? This was going to be her last day working for Elliott Traynor. It took a really colossal nerve to leave such a mess, not only in the pantry but in the yard, not even to pick up the garbage, no matter how famous he was.

When she’d finished cleaning, she threw her mask and hair cover and gloves into the garbage, fetched a clean uniform and shoes from her van, and, in the Traynor’s guest bath, washed her face and hands and arms, washed every exposed part of herself, dropping her soiled garments and shoes in a plastic bag to be discarded. She’d bill Traynor for replacements. Cleaning up after a murder didn’t hold a candle to this.

Returning to the kitchen to fetch the vacuum, the thought struck her that not only raccoons but a man could have been shot in there.

How silly. Did she always have to imagine more than was possible?

And yet�

If there had been a man, she thought, panicked, she had destroyed the evidence.

Hurrying out to the garbage can, she hauled out the plastic bags she had filled and opened the two at the bottom.

Raccoons. Badly mangled. Surely that accounted for the blood and gore.

Tying up the bags again and stuffing everything back on top, she closed the lid tightly and went inside to scrub herself all over again-and to call the police department. Her feelings about Elliott Traynor, which had before today deteriorated from admiration to puzzled unease, had turned to disgust.

She supposed she was too inclined to see her heroes as giants above reproach. She expected Elliott Traynor to be without any possible fault.

Though she didn’t suppose that it was illegal to shoot raccoons, under the circumstances, she thought she ought to tell Max of the incident, thought there might be some reason that he would need to know this. When she’d placed the call, the dispatcher told her Captain Harper was in court. She left a message for him to call her, she didn’t want to tell the dispatcher why. She felt tired, enervated. Felt used and unnaturally defenseless-not her usual state of mind.

She wanted to see Max and feel the strength of him holding her, wanted to hear some wisecrack, some wry comment about murdered raccoons, some twisted cop humor that would make her laugh.

But then when she went to dust the dining room and mop its tile floor, she found Traynor’s note. It lay on the table beside a hundred-dollar bill.

Ms. Getz:

Raccoons got in the pantry. No time to call anyone. I shot them with a target pistol. Sorry for the mess. Here’s an extra hundred. Appreciate if you don’t mention this. Embarrassing scene I�d not want talked about.

Not a graceful communication. Short and abrupt. Well, what did she want, a eulogy to dead raccoons? She felt inclined to leave his hundred-dollar bill. Surely Traynor had intended this as a bribe.

But she had more than earned the hundred, cleaning up his mess. If she didn’t take it now, she’d be billing him for the extra work. Likely the money was intended as both payment and bribe.

She called it earned, slipped it her pocket, and got on with the vacuuming. She did the living room and front bedroom, emptying the wastebaskets with distaste, where Vivi’s cherry seeds stuck to the plastic liners. Only when she started on Traynor’s study did she slow her pace.

When she wheeled the vacuum into Traynor’s study, it was as neat and tidy as ever. Nothing on the desk but his computer and the freshly printed chapter he had written the night before. He always left the new chapter on the desk, possibly to go over the next day when he and Vivi returned from their walk or from the theater. They went often to approve the sets that Cora Lee was painting, then had breakfast out.

Tryouts were tonight. Charlie supposed that when rehearsals began they’d be at the theater for longer periods. It seemed a rigorous routine for someone being treated for cancer. Traynor had told her, when they first arrived and were discussing her work routine, that he worked late into the night. He said that was when the juices flowed. She remembered the amused look in his eyes, some private joke-or maybe his faint smile was simply juvenile humor at the off-color connotation. A strange man. He still interested her, despite her anger this morning.

He was far more stern in real life than he looked in the promotion picture on his book jackets. Long before this morning, Traynor had made her uncomfortable. He seemed to analyze and weigh a person far too closely-maybe a writer’s penetrating observation, she supposed, as he tried to see beneath the surface.

Did she, when she was sketching an animal, stare like that at her subject? Did she make her animals uncomfortable? With Joe and Dulcie, she’d seen them both wince when she was drawing them. And despite the kit’s bright disposition, several times when she’d looked too hard at the kit, she’d gotten a hiss in return or a striking paw that surprised her and made her draw back.

Who knew what an animal felt when you stared at them? In the animal world, a stare meant the threat of attack. One was supposed to stare at a mountain lion, to keep him from attacking first-to show superiority. But one was not, while hunting, supposed to look a deer or rabbit in the eye, that only alerted them.

Joe and Dulcie and the kit were sentient cats, not instinct-driven wild beasts. Most of the time, logic drove those three-but a logic overlying the same deep feline nature as any ordinary kitty-they weren’t any less cat, they were simply more than cat.

Vacuuming beneath the fine walnut desk and along beside the walnut bookshelves, she reached to try the desk drawers and file drawers. As usual, they were locked. Hesitantly she reached for the new pages of Traynor’s book that lay before her.

All week she had been sneaking looks at Traynor’s manuscript. Last Friday, reading his earlier pages, she had been shocked and deeply upset. She’d been so excited to have a look at his work, had told herself that after all, it was written for public consumption, and it was right there on the desk; she only wanted to see how he developed his prose, from the beginning. In school she had been interested in writing fiction-though far more fascinated, always, with drawing, with the visual images she wanted to create. But Traynor had always been a favorite; she had loved reading some of his passages over and over, simply for their poetry.

She’d heard him tell someone on the phone that this new book was set in Marin County, above San Francisco, at the turn of the century. She liked the title,Twilight Silver.She had stood with the vacuum paused and roaring, reading the neatly printed pages.

They’d been dreadful. The words stumbled, the paragraphs didn’t make sense. She had started again, thinking her lack of comprehension was her fault. She had skipped ahead several pages, but had found no improvement. She’d decided this must be a first draft, a rough beginning. Surely a writer was allowed a flawed first draft.

But why print it out so neatly? Why bother, until it was the way he wanted it-why print out these garbled pages, this lack of clarity with not a hint of his lucid style?

Being an artist herself, with a duly accredited degree-for whatever that was worth, she thought wryly-she felt that she had some sense of how a work of art, a drawing or manuscript, grew to fruition. But those pages, despite the promise of an exciting plot, had been so clumsy they embarrassed her.

Had the illness done this to Traynor? Was it slowly taking his mind as well as his body? The thought deeply distressed her.

Well, she didn’t know much about how writers worked. Maybe from this draft he would construct the smooth prose that she so loved. Still, she’d thought that writers edited on screen, didn’t print until they felt they had something of value. But maybe not. Surely they didn’t all work the same.

That morning, aligning the pages as she had found them, she had felt a deep disappointment, almost a loss.

But now, this morning, maybe these pages would be better. Watching the driveway through the study window, she picked up the current chapter. She read hopefully, but only for a moment. His words were just as inept, just as off-putting. She read two pages, then tried again, but it was no better. She stopped when she heard a car pulling in, and laid the chapter on the desk.

But the car appeared in the next drive, parking before the house next door. Aligning the pages, she glanced up into the bookshelves-and caught her breath.

Joe Grey stepped out from behind the row of books, his yellow eyes wide with amusement. “I’m surprised at you, Charlie. I didn’t dream you’d take the Traynor’s money as a trustworthy professional, then pry into their personal business.”

“What are you doing here? What are you up to?”

Joe smiled. “Does he always lock the drawers?”

Charlie grinned. “Why would you snoop on the Traynors?”

The tomcat shrugged, a tilt of his handsome head, a twitch of his muscled gray shoulders.

“Where’s Dulcie? And what,” she said, fixing Joe with a deep scowl, “did you have to do with that mess in the pantry?”

“You think I shot those beasts? That I’ve learned to use a pistol? Come on, Charlie.”

“What did you have to do with those raccoons getting in the house?”

His gaze was innocent.

“Besides the raccoons-besides that gruesome mess that I had to clean up, what are you up to? There’s not enough crime in the village? You’ve been reduced to idle snooping?”

“And what about you?” He lifted a white-tipped gray paw. “You sound so much like Clyde it’s scary. No wonder you stopped dating him-before you turned into his clone.”

“That is really very rude.” She reached up to stroke Joe’s gleaming gray shoulder. “Come on down. Were you looking for Traynor’s research about Catalina’s letters?”

Joe twitched an ear.

“I saw how interested you were, that night at Lupe’s Playa. So, did you find it?”

He smiled. “It was right here in this stack. I pulled it behind the books, to read it while you vacuumed-while you snooped.”

“And?”

“Catalina’s letters to Marcos Romano are worth something. Two of them sold recently at Butterfield’s for over ten thousand apiece.”

“You’re kidding me.”

He pawed the sheaf of research from behind the books. “Between pages six and seven.”

The auction notice lay there with Traynor’s receipt. Joe showed her the notation at the bottom.

She raised her eyes to his, their faces on a level. “How many letters were there? How many did she write?”

“I don’t know, Charlie. Maybe no one knows.”

“If they’re that valuable, why did he write a play about them-or why is he letting it be produced? Already, apparently, people are looking for them.”

“Maybe he couldn’t resist. Maybe, despite the wisdom of keeping them secret, the letters kept bugging him. The way you get bugged, wanting to draw something. The way you stare at a person, your fingers itching for a piece of charcoal.”

“Aren’t you perceptive this morning.”

“My dear Charlie, cats invented perceptive. If some of Catalina’s lost letters are still out there, and if Traynor thinks he can find them, maybe he figured he’d come on out to the coast and search for them while the play was still in rehearsal, before anyone saw the play, before anyone else thought of looking for them.”

“But�”

“Maybe it was thinking and thinking of the letters that made him write the play in the first place. But now he’s sick and dying, he’s in a hurry. He wants the letters now. Once he’s dead, he won’t care who finds them.”

He looked at her steadily, his yellow eyes wide and appraising. “What do you think of his work in progress?”

Charlie only looked at him.

“I’m no literary critic,” Joe said. “But in my humble feline opinion, that stuff stinks.”

Charlie laughed. She stepped to the window, to check the street, then sat down in Elliott’s padded swivel chair.

Dropping down from the bookshelf to the desk, Joe patted the new chapter. “Right now, there are more questions about the Traynors than answers. Why did Vivi want to avoid Ryan Flannery? And why did she come in here early this morning and print the pages?” Joe shrugged. “Maybe he didn’t feel like it last night after all the excitement. Makes you wonder how he does feel, despite what she tells people about how well he’s doing with the treatments.”

“She printed out his work this morning?”

“She did. And don’t you wonder,” Joe said, “why he packs a gun? Why he brought a gun out here from New York? He must not have declared it, must have hidden it in his luggage, with New York so strict about gun ownership.”

Charlie sat frowning. “For a rotten-tempered tomcat, you come up with some interesting questions. What� Here they come.”

As the Traynors’ car turned in, Charlie snatched Joe from the desk, tucking him under her arm like a bag of flour, forcing an indignant snarl from the tomcat.

“Shut up, Joe. Hold still.” Lifting the vacuum with her other hand, she watched the car pass the window, heading for the back.

“Wait,” Joe hissed. “The research. Put it in the stack, on the bottom.”

She dropped both Joe and the vacuum, hid the research, and they headed fast for the front door. “Where’s Dulcie?” she whispered. “Where’s the kit?”

Dulcie and the kit flew out past her as she jerked the door open. Picking up the doormat, Charlie stepped down into the yard to shake it. Already the three cats were gone, vanished among the bushes.

13 [��������: pic_14.jpg]

The tall Tudor mansion that housed Molena Point Little Theater thrust above the smaller cottages like a solemn matriarch, its old shingles gray with time. But its high windows shone clean, reflecting the midmorning sky in a deep, clear azure. Sixty years earlier, the residence had been headquarters for Hidalgo Farms, an upscale cattle and sheep operation. When, in the seventies, the outbuildings and carriage house and barns had been turned into Hidalgo Plaza, wide paseos and promenades had been added, brick-paved, and roofed with trellises to join one building to the next.

The house itself had been gutted, its inner walls torn out and replaced by heavy beams, to form the vast and high-ceilinged theater. The stage occupied what had once been the large parlor. The old formal dining room and morning room and study, now flowing together, were fitted with comfortable rows of theater seats upholstered in mauve velvet.

Three large ground-level bedrooms had become the cluttered backstage with its dressing rooms, two small baths, and the vast costume room. Other workrooms and the prop room had taken over the kitchen and butler’s pantry and carriage house.

The upstairs bedrooms supplied office space and a balcony looking down on the audience, a long, narrow gallery that accommodated the control panel for the house lights and stage lighting, an area strung so densely with conduit and thick wires that it looked like a den for families of sociably oriented boa constrictors. The balcony was separated from the raftered ceiling space beyond, which yawned over the rows of seating, by a three-foot-high plastered rail. Beyond the balcony, beams and rafters stretched away in an open grid on which were hung banks of lights. The timbers, jutting across empty space, provided to the surefooted and arboreally inclined a fine series of catwalks above the heads of the audience.

Though it was midmorning, barely 10:00 A.M., the vast and empty theater was as dark as night, a sepulchral world woven of flattened shadows and inky and indecipherable vistas. No window opened into this part of the theater. The outer walls of the old mansion, where tall panes of glass had once lighted the living areas, were now blocked by inner barriers. The ten-foot space between these walls was broken into small offices, and storage and work rooms, all cheerfully brightened by those antique panels of mullioned glass. A sunny morning without, but the theater within so dark that only a cat could see her way. On a ten-by-twelve beam above the stage, the kit prowled impatiently, an agile tightrope walker, a swift black-and-brown smear of shadow within shadows, a small phantom personage alone in the empty building, waiting for Cora Lee to appear for work dressed in her painter’s smock.

Usually Cora Lee arrived at the theater much earlier, unlocking the back door from the parking lot and turning on the lights so the stage shown cheerfully around her as she painted the sets forThorns of Gold.This morning, the kit had waited a long time. She had been here from first light, impatient and hungry. Cora Lee always brought a snack to share with her. She waited, dreaming of far worlds peopled by cats like her and Dulcie and Joe Grey, worlds she half invented, and half knew from the tales of elder cats and from the old Celtic myths. But now, as morning wore on, even those stories paled. Her patience frayed at last. Painfully lonely in the empty silence, she gave up on Cora Lee.

Leaping down to the top of an open stepladder and then to the stage, and across the stage and down to the carpeted aisles before the seats, she went to explore the rest of the theater. Trotting into the outer rooms where the windows let in light, she made her way toward the prop room. She knew the theater office; she had walked on all the desks there, across stacks of playbills and papers, had rooted in the wastebaskets, prowled the cluttered shelves, and snatched cookies from a desk drawer. In the wardrobe room, she had wandered dreaming beneath the rows of hanging costumes, sniffing the old smells of lace and satin and leather and the metallic scent of tarnished necklaces. She had patted her paw carelessly into a jar of greasepaint that had been left open, then had printed her paw marks along the hall floors. She had, upstairs on the balcony, tapped at dozens of light switches on the control panel, an exercise that, if the main switch had been on, would have created a wonderland of flashing lights in the theater below. She had tasted the powdered cream in an open jar in the cluttered coffee room and had stuck her nose in the sugar bowl. But best of all she had wandered through the prop room exploring an amazing array of surprises.

It was there she headed now, purring to herself. She had no notion that she was not alone, she heard no sound but her own purring. Only when she stopped purring to nibble at an itch on her shoulder did she pause, suddenly wary.

She’d heard nothing, really. But she thought the air stirred differently, the spaces around her disturbed in some way, as if something was moving unheard and unseen through the theater’s dark reaches.

It was not Joe Grey or Dulcie. They would have mewed a tiny sound asking if she was there, a faint murmur inaudible to human ears. And when they drew close, she would have smelled their scent. Now she smelled nothing different at all among the rich medley of theater scents. What was here in the dark with her that she couldn’t see? Few humans could be so quiet. And why would a human come into the theater and not put on a light?

Did she smell Gabrielle’s lavender scent? The tall blond lady was, after all, the wardrobe mistress; she came and went quite a lot.

Or perhaps she caught a whiff of candy? But, trying to identify the smell, her nose was too filled with the harsh aromas of dust and paint, of turpentine, floor wax, and the body smells of humans. She stood sniffing, more curious than wary, trying to understand the mysterious movement she could detect among the black and angled shadows.

She had heard no door close. Had someone been in here all along, even before she herself came through the narrow attic window beneath the big duct pipes and black ropes of electrical cords? Before she squeezed down through the hole from the attic, past the round silver heat duct, and dropped to the balcony among the huge snakes of wire that always gave her the shivers?

Well, whatever was in here, she was safe. No human would see her in the darkness, and anyway, she could dodge any human.

Happily she padded on again toward the prop room, to play her solitary games among that richness of crazy human possessions that no yard or garage sale could match, among the baby crib and beer signs and bicycles, the wrought iron gates and painted china bowls and metal shields and stuffed horse’s head and the front end of an ancient car. Everything in the world was there-beaded floor lamps, rocking chair, ten green glass bottles each as big as a doghouse, a set of elk horns, pieces of machinery so strange that not even Joe Grey, who had named these things for her, could identify them. The saddest objects were a ship’s lantern and anchor smelling of dust and not of the sea, as if these nautical wonders had forgotten where they belonged.

The game was to see if she could roll and walk and tag among the shelves without knocking anything off. When she tired of that she liked to lie on the pink satin fainting couch that stood wedged between the unicycle and a woodstove with a red paper fire burning in it-not warm, but pretty to look at. She liked to nap on the pink couch imagining what the play would be like all in costume and Cora Lee singing under the lights, and she, Kit, lying on a rafter above the stage, enjoying the best seat in the house. But now, crouched beside the horse’s moldering head, she heard a footstep.

Well, a footstep was better than hearing nothing when she knew someone was there. As the door swung open, the kit slid beneath the old car, tucking her long, fluffy tail under too.

A light blazed, a harsh flashlight beam striking the shelves and moving along them, stopping now and then, a great eye of light searching and peering.

The woman who held the light was small and thin, dressed in dark tights, her black hair pulled back under a cap. Vivi Traynor smelled of cherries. Her full attention was on the crowded shelves, her movements as wary as a thieving dog’s.

But what would the theater’s junk room offer that a famous author’s wife couldn’t buy? Whatever she was looking for, it wasn’t small; she wasn’t poking into the narrow niches. The kit thought of the white chest that man, Casselrod, had snatched and that Vivi wanted badly enough to follow him-but that chest was in his store, already torn apart.

Working her way along the shelves, pushing and pulling and rearranging, Vivi turned at last to fetch the dusty ladder from the corner. Climbing to investigate the topmost shelves, again she moved only large items. She investigated a closed cardboard box, a leather suitcase, a lidded roasting pan big enough to cook a St. Bernard. Vivi opened each, looking in, then closed it again and shoved it back. When she had finished with pulling things apart, looking in and under, and didn’t find what she wanted, she gave a huff of anger, backed down leaving the ladder standing open, and went out again.

The kit followed her, slipping through the door before she closed it, silent and unseen, then padding along behind. She had never seen a human who could be so quiet.

She had never seen a human she disliked in quite this way.

When the raccoons were shot and that smell filled the house, she had blamed that all on Vivi. If Vivi Traynor had been a black lizard the kit would have chomped her, and spit her out dead, then chewed leaves to get the taste out. Following Vivi through the theater, she slipped ahead, stopping under the front row of seats, peering out at the darkly clad woman.

Vivi passed by, inches from her, moving silently to the exit door. There was not a creak when she opened and closed it, and then she was gone, no squall of hinge or snap of the latch. The kit made a flehmening face of disgust. What had she been after? Another chest like the white one? Were there letters worth a lot of money, like Joe Grey said? She hoped, if there were such letters, that Vivi Traynor wouldn’t find them. Or Richard Casselrod either. She hoped her own friends would find them and sell them for a lot of money and buy a nice big house with a nice cozy kitchen and room for a cat to visit. She would like a little bed in a sunny window or by a fireplace. Meantime, she wanted to know what Vivi Traynor was up to with her snooping and prying, and she wished that Cora Lee was there close to her because she suddenly felt very lonely. Her paws were cold with fear.

14 [��������: pic_15.jpg]

Racing up and down the empty beach in the early dawn, the dog searched frantically for his master, his black-spotted white body sharply defined against gray sky and sea. He stopped to stare at anything moving, a wave, the shadows of a wheeling gull, then plunged on again, racing so fast that his polka dot markings smeared to lines across his snowy coat. His expression was urgent and confused. From a block away, Wilma Getz saw him, where she was walking her usual two miles down the shore. She stopped, watching his frantic seeking.

She could still taste her morning coffee, its flavor mixed now with the smell of the sea. She had pulled on a red sweatshirt over her jeans, against the chill; she wore a red wool cap to keep her ears warm, her long white hair hanging down her back, bound with a silver clip. The time was barely six. She had parted from Susan in the village, after they had walked down from Wilma’s house together. Susan and Lamb had turned up the shore to the north for the big poodle’s run, where Lamb liked the outcropping rocks and the tide pools in which to pad a hesitant paw.

Wilma stood very still, watching the dalmatian. When the dog spied her, he came racing, so glad to see a human in this empty world. She knelt, fending off his excited licking, and took hold of his collar. Had he strayed from some tourist, a dog who didn’t know the area, didn’t remember how to get back to an unfamiliar motel? But she already suspected who he belonged to. Trying to hold him still, she searched for a tag or a metal plate on his collar. There were not many dalmatians in the village, and this dog was not one she knew.

The leather collar was old and curled and wet from the sea. There was no identification of any kind to tell her the dog’s name or the name or phone number of his owner. He was a young animal, and so thin she could see every rib. He pushed against her, panting and slurping as if she was his last hope.

“Do you belong to the mysterious walker? To Susan’s young friend? To Lenny Wells?” The dog shivered and licked at her. She looked up and down the beach. “Do you belong to the man who broke into Susan’s house?”

Why would someone abandon such a nice dog? Could the young man have died from his head wound? Perhaps passed out in the bushes after he escaped Susan’s, never waking again from a severe concussion? She imagined him slowly making his way to the shore with the dog beside him, trying to get away from the police, perhaps not realizing how badly he was hurt. Where had the dog been while he broke into Susan’s? Why hadn’t the police seen him when they searched the neighborhood? If Lenny had died on the beach, had the dog, when he could not rouse his master, run away confused and kept running?

But that was two days ago. Someone would have found the body by now. The beach was full of people once the sun came out, kids playing in and out among the greenbelt that met the sand. Why hadn’t someone taken charge of the dog, and called the police or the animal shelter?

Turning back toward home with the dalmatian clinging close to her, she walked him through the village to meet Susan. He didn’t try to leave her, but pressed against her leg as if in terror that she would abandon him. He had to be starved. She had turned into the village market to buy dog food when she saw Susan ahead, on the far side of Ocean, her multicolored sweater and red scarf bright against the pale stucco shops. Drawing near, Wilma held on to the dalmatian’s collar. The minute he saw Lamb he lunged and squirmed, trying to race to the big poodle, leaping and dancing like a puppy so it was all she could do to hold him.

“Same dog?” she called to Susan when they were still half a block apart.

Susan nodded, holding Lamb on a short lead. “Same dog. Where did you find him?” She hurried to them and knelt to inspect the dog, looking at his collar. “Same three long overlapped spots on his left ear. Same thin face and frightened expression. Jobe, Lenny called him.” She looked along the street as if Lenny might suddenly appear, then looked up at Wilma. “He wasn’t with anyone? You didn’t see Lenny?”

“No, no one on the beach. He was frantic, running, doubling back and forth. I couldn’t leave him there, even if I’d wanted to. He’s clung to me like glue. Do you think Lenny was the man in your breakfast room?”

“I keep wondering. I saw only the back of the man’s head, but he was like Lenny. Same color hair, same general build. Lenny always wore-wears a cap, usually with his collar turned up.” Susan hugged the dalmatian, drawing a disapproving glare from Lamb. “This poor dog. Has he been wandering for two days, trying to find his master?”

“Harper will want to know about him.”

Susan nodded. “Is it all right to bring him to your house? We can put him in the garage. I brought plenty of food for Lamb. Or we could put him on a long line in the drive, leave the garage door open, make him a bed inside.”

Wilma was glad she had finished her garage enclosing the carport. It had come in handy. Her English-style cottage had no backyard at all, only a narrow stone walk between the house and the hill behind that rose in a steep, unfenced wilderness. “Of course it’s all right.” Certainly Susan respected her front flower garden as off-limits to canine romping and digging. Lamb was always a gentleman, although it hadn’t been easy for him having no fenced yard to run in.

“Oh,” Susan said, watching the two dogs play, “Lamb does like him. But we can’t have them together in the house, not romping like that.”

“He’ll settle down when he’s eaten,” Wilma said.

Susan snapped Lamb’s leash on the dalmatian, handed it to Wilma, and commanded Lamb to heel. Heading home to Wilma’s, they soon turned up the stone walk through her deep garden, the air cool and still beneath the giant oaks. The pale stone cottage, with its steep slate roof, mullioned windows, and stone chimney, sat against the hill behind as if civilization ended at its back door, the well-maintained house with its carefully tended flowers an abrupt contrast to the hill’s wild tangles. They took the dogs inside through the back door, which opened to the street at the opposite end of the house from the front door, and into the kitchen. Susan fed both dogs while Wilma heated the skillet and laid strips of bacon in it. She had already made the pancake batter. Balancing the cordless phone in the crook of her shoulder as she cooked, she called Max Harper at home before he left for the station. The phone rang five times.

“Did I wake you?”

“I’m in the stable feeding the horses. Had a loaded pitchfork in my hands. This a social call?”

“We-Susan and I-have the dalmatian that belonged�”

“Have you? Hang on to him, I’ll be down in twenty minutes. Sure it’s the same dog?”

“Susan says so. He was running the beach, lost.”

“Did you look around? See anyone?”

“I scanned the beach. Didn’t beat the bushes. He acted like he’d been left.”

“Be right down. No, I haven’t had breakfast,” he said to her unasked question.

Wilma hung up, laughing, made fresh coffee, and put more bacon in the skillet.

When Harper arrived, Lamb greeted him with dignity. But the dalmatian was all over him, whining and leaning against him. Harper looked him over, feeling him for wounds, looking at the pads of his feet. Removing his collar, he examined it. He looked in the dog’s eyes, his ears, his mouth-wanting to know the dog was all right, Wilma thought, simply because he was that kind of man. But, as a cop, wanting to find anything unusual about the lost animal.

Apparently he found nothing of note. Buckling the collar on again, he gave the dog a pat. The dalmatian lay down by the door, full of breakfast and attention, sighing deeply.

Harper sat at the table between Wilma and Susan, looking with appreciation at the tall stack of pancakes on his plate, and the eight slices of bacon. Max Harper still ate like the wild young bull rider he’d been at eighteen; and he weighed about the same. Clyde claimed Harper took in enough groceries for three men. Everyone had said he’d gain weight when he quit smoking, but he hadn’t.

“We have no line on a Lenny White,” he told Susan. “No one by that name or fitting that description was treated in the hospital emergency room. We do have a response on the other set of fingerprints-which could belong either to the victim, or to whoever attacked him.”

Susan stopped eating, watching Harper.

“There was a fair set of prints on the computer. None on the hammer we picked up, though it appears to be the weapon. Traces of blood and flesh embedded in the creases of the metal. The prints belong to a man named Augor Prey. Does that name mean anything?”

“No.” Susan shook her head.

“We’ll have a picture later today. Prey’s father is a professor of history at Cal, Berkeley. Dr. Kenneth Prey. He taught at Davis while the son was in grammar school. Augor’s description fits your dog-walking friend. Thirty-four, slim, about six feet, brown hair, hazel eyes.”

Susan nodded uneasily. “If that is Lenny, he gave me a false name. And it’s strange. He said he’d moved out from New York, but he didn’t sound like the New Yorkers I know.”

“Prey seems to have spent his adult years bumming around up and down the coast, working here and there. Never been in real trouble. A few minor arrests, fighting, tearing up a beer tavern, petty theft. No record of burglaries. He ran an antique shop in Salinas for eight months, and worked in a San Francisco book store. He’s been living in a cheap room in Half Moon Bay, sometimes works in an antiques shop up there. He’s also worked here in Molena Point, for Richard Casselrod, when Casselrod or Fern has taken time off. When he does that,he sleeps at the shop. Casselrod said he hasn’t needed extra help recently, hasn’t seen Prey for six months.

“If Augor Prey is your Lenny White,” Harper said, “it’s possible he may have been staying somewhere else in the village. We’ve found no motel registration in either his name or for Lenny White.”

“You’ve been very thorough,” Susan said, “considering that we don’t know whether this was a murder or an assault, considering the only charges I could make were for breaking and entering, and vandalism-not for theft.”

“It could turn into murder,” Harper reminded her. “Meanwhile, the detectives have been over your place again. They have everything they’re going to get, pictures, prints, blood. You can go ahead and get someone in to clean up, get your life back in order.”

Susan smiled. “I’ll call Charlie this morning.”

“Please let us know if you find anything missing when you get back home. You still have no idea what they might have been after?”

“No. The only thing I’ve bought recently that wasn’t in the house was the carved chest I called you about. That was in my trunk.”

“I’d like to see it.”

Taking her keys from her pocket, Susan stepped out to the drive. In a moment, they heard her car trunk slam. She returned carrying a small wooden chest, perhaps eighteen inches long, its lid shaped like a peak, with the top cut off to form a three-sided slab. She set it on the table before the police captain.

“There’s an old chest like that in the mission museum,” Harper said. “Only much larger-made to use as a saddle rack. Just fits a stock saddle.”

The sides and lid of the chest were roughly carved with geometric patterns and simple medallions. The wood was oak, apparently unfinished, darkened by age. One end had split through the carvings. The inside of the box was so rough they could see the chisel marks.

“You said you bought this at the Barmeir estate sale?” Harper asked.

“Yes. I got there before seven that morning, took a number, came back at ten to wait my turn. It was mobbed; the estate sales always are. When I saw this little chest on a table in the den, I just-well I grabbed it up and bought it and got out of there. Didn’t even look at anything else.”

“Why?” Harper asked, watching her.

“Because of the play. Elliott Traynor’s play. Do you know the story?”

Harper nodded.

Susan looked at Harper. “Catalina died on the Stanton Ranch, just a few miles from here. Apparently no one knows what happened to the chests.”

“You bought this after you met Augor Prey?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever mention it to him?”

“I-yes, I did. We talked about the yard sales, and about our plans for Senior Survival, about our buying and selling on the Web. I’m afraid I did tell him about the chest.”

“How long was this before the breakin? You discussed these matters only once or several times?”

“Only once. Just� just a few days before the breakin.” She lowered her gaze. “I told a lot to a stranger. Though most of our conversation,” she went on defensively, “concerned my suggestions for him to meet people in the village, meet some younger folks.”

Wilma said, “Didn’t it seem strange to you that he would need help meeting people? Everyone’s friendly, and there’s more to do here than a person could handle in ten lifetimes with plays, concerts, classes.”

Susan nodded. “I put it down to shyness.”

“Did he know where you lived?” Harper asked.

“Yes,” she said, embarrassed. “He never came to the house, but I told him where it was, while talking about the weather, about how much wind we get. So foolish of me.”

Wilma rose to pour coffee, glancing out her kitchen window. “There’s Mavity.” She went to open the back door, calling out as Mavity turned up through the garden. “We’re in the kitchen. Where’s your VW? Don’t tell me you’re having car trouble?”

Mavity laughed. “That old bug wouldn’t dare. I’m parked up the street to clean at the Rileys’. They like me early, but� Well, I saw the captain’s pickup truck�” She glanced shyly at Harper. “Wondered if anything was wrong, if anything else has happened�”

Wilma poured coffee for her. “Have you had breakfast?”

“Oh, yes. But coffee would taste good. Yours always tastes better than mine.” She sat down, smiling at Susan. “It’s pretty early, even for the Rileys. Guess I get restless staying home anymore, thinking about the city tearing down my house. Seems like I can’t feel cozy, knowing it will be gone soon. I just wish the city would make up its mind. If they decide to condemn, then get on with it.” Mavity’s uniform this morning was the ubiquitous white, with pale blue piping at the seams, likely a top-of-the-line model that had seen its share of launderings.

Wilma laid her hand over Mavity’s. “You know my guest room’s yours as long as you want.”

“And my house, too,” Susan said. “I’ll be going home today, to get that mess cleaned up. And who knows how soon we might find a big place that’s just right for all of us.”

Mavity nodded, looking both uncertain and hopeful. She reached out to touch the oak chest. “This is old. Look at that crack, and how dark the wood is. It’s sort of like those wood carvings my brother, Greeley, sends me sometimes from Panama.”

“I got it at the Barmeir sale. I had it in the trunk of my car the morning that man broke in.”

“It’s nicer than that white chest Richard Casselrod made such a scene over-stole it, is what he did. No other word for it. Jerked it right out of Cora Lee’s hands, even if he did throw down some money.”

Harper rose, calling the dalmatian to him. “I’ll take him up to Dr. Firetti to board. Firetti owes me a favor.”

“I�” Susan began. “He and Lamb get along very well. If you don’t find Lenny�”

Harper nodded. “That would be fine. But right now, it isn’t wise for you to keep him. You don’t want Lenny White coming around, using the dog as an excuse. In fact,” Harper said, “I’m not keen on you going back home alone.”

“I’ll be fine with Lamb. If Lamb had been home that morning, those men wouldn’t have gotten in.”

Harper didn’t reply. He rose and left, taking the spotted dog with him. Wilma stood at the window, watching the dalmatian leap up into the cab of Harper’s Chevy pickup. And Susan sat looking silently at Wilma and Mavity, realizing suddenly how very much she did not want to be home alone, did not want to go to sleep at night wondering if someone would break a window and come in-except of course Lamb would bark and wake her.

But she grinned at Mavity’s wrinkled frown of concern. “A poodle’s no sissy, Mavity. Those teeth could take your arm off.”

Though in truth, it was Lamb she worried about. Worried that someone would hit him with a heavy weapon or shoot him, leaving both of them defenseless.

15 [��������: pic_16.jpg]

Driving up Ocean, with the dalmatian in the seat beside him, Max Harper’s mind remained on Susan Brittain. An extra patrol around her place wouldn’t hurt, as long as he had the manpower. Turning off Ocean beside Beckwhite Automotive, he glanced toward the east wing of the handsome Mediterranean building where Clyde Damen’s large, sprawling repair shop was housed, with its separate body and paint shops, its storage sheds and parking space, and Clyde’s private workshop where he restored antique cars. He could see into the main shop, but he didn’t see Clyde. The low morning sun brightened the red tile roof of the complex and picked out the brilliant colors of the Icelandic poppies that bloomed before the dealership’s show windows. The bright colors made him think of his dead wife, of the garden Millie had loved.

Through the shaded glass of the showroom, he could see a dark green Rolls-Royce gleaming, and two new Jaguars, one bright red. He wondered how it would be to have that kind of money.

Grinning, he stroked the spotted dog. “I wouldn’t spend it on cars,” he told the dalmatian. “Spend it on horses, and maybe dogs, too-and on Charlie,” he said. And maybe that was all right.

Millie had told him more than once that she wouldn’t want him to be alone. Until now he’d been content enough, cherishing only her memory.

Dr. Firetti’s home and hospital were just beyond Beckwhite’s, on a residential side street. His facility was a complex of three small, frame cottages that had been built back in the thirties, and were now joined by high patio walls to make an entry and secure dog runs. Harper sat in his truck a moment before going in.

“I guess,” he told the dog, “when this blows over, if no one’s claimed you, Susan would give you a fine home.” He ruffled the dog’s ears. “Companion for Lamb. I bet you’d like that.”

Susan Brittain had had enough trouble with that wreck that had put her in the retirement home, that had left her so crippled her daughter wasn’t sure she’d walk again. But walk she did, got herself up out of the wheelchair, surely with the help of the poodle for moral support. And now this mess at her place, which he hoped wasn’t going to escalate into something worse. Seemed to him that a woman living alone ought to have better security. He had some thoughts on the matter, but his ideas weren’t popular.

This breakin had him uneasy; there were too many vague connections. But that’s what investigating was about. What was the matter with him? Was he getting old, losing his edge? Fetching a halter rope from the back of the truck, he snapped it on the dalmatian’s collar and led the dog into the waiting room.

The ten-by-ten foyer was furnished with a green tweed carpet, green leather couch and love seat, and a couple of wooden chairs. A small old lady sat on the love seat, clutching a cardboard cat carrier on her lap. As Harper entered, a low hiss filled the room, sending the dalmatian bolting away from the carrier, toward the door. The receptionist nodded to Harper, spoke into the intercom, and in a moment motioned Harper on back to Firetti’s office.

Firetti was a small man with a smooth round face, pale hair thinning on top, and rimless glasses. When he examined a large dog, as he prepared to do now, he put on safety glasses. He’d been hit in the face more than once by a lunging animal. Changing glasses, he lifted the dalmatian to the table, though Harper hadn’t suggested an examination.

“Just a quick look-over. What’s the problem?”

“Can you keep him out of sight for a while? One of those back kennels? If you get anyone in here inquiring, let me know at once. Or if it’s a phone call, get whatever information you can. Say you’ll keep a lookout, and call them.”

Firetti nodded, smiling as if pleased to be a part of police business. He ran his hands down the dog, stroked him, checked mouth and teeth and ears, took his temperature, listened to his heart, then set him down off the table. He didn’t ask questions, just nodded to Harper, and led the dog away to the isolation wing. Harper was back at the department in time for court, acting as a witness on a drunk driving case that he hoped would net the defendant the maximum sentence.

He was out of court again by 10:50, heading down the hall to the department, wishing the remodeling was finished, wondering if things would ever be back to normal. Why did any kind of building project take four times as long as the contractor promised? Half his officers were in temporary quarters scattered all over the courthouse. The other half were doing their desk work among bare stud walls, stacks of two-by-fours, sawhorses and piles of sawdust and screaming power tools, and no kind of security. He wondered why he’d started this project.

Though, to give the contractor credit, his carpenters were as quiet as they could be, they didn’t shout, didn’t talk on the job except when their work demanded a few words-no long-winded bouts of sports talk and male gossip that most carpenters indulged in while they hammered away.

When he checked with the dispatcher, two calls got his attention.

At 9:15, the neighbor living next door to Elliott Traynor had called to report gunfire the night before. A Lillian Sanders. She said she couldn’t call until her husband went to work because he had considered the noise backfire and said she shouldn’t bother the police, that she would only make a fool of herself. Checking back over last night’s calls he found four reports of possible gunfire, though it could have been only backfire. An officer had patrolled the area for some time, with no indication of trouble.

At 9:40, Charlie had called for him but wouldn’t leave a message. That wasn’t like Charlie. The number she gave was Elliott Traynors’. She told the dispatcher she’d be there until noon.

Leaving the station, he headed for the Traynors’. Why anyone needed their house cleaned every day was beyond his comprehension. The Traynors didn’t even have children or pets to mess things up.

But Charlie did the shopping as well, and some meal preparation, so she functioned more as a housekeeper than a cleaning service. He wondered, if he and Charlie got married, if she’d want to keep the business or sell it. They hadn’t really discussed marriage. He just kept thinking that way.

Never thought he’d want to marry again. Sometimes it seemed like he’d betray Millie if he married Charlie. But other times, he thought Millie would approve. Thought if she could speak to him she’d tell him she liked Charlie, that he was a damn fool to feel guilty. Thought she’d tell him to get on with what was left of his life.

As for Charlie’s Fix-It, Clean-It business, maybe she’d just hire more help. She’d worked hard building the service, had turned it into a first-class operation in just a couple of years. It would be a shame to let it go. But her real work was her animal drawings, that was where he’d like to see her spend her energy. Her work was very fine, and that was not only his opinion.

She’d tried commercial art, after getting her degree, and had left the field totally discouraged. She had no patience working for others. Maybe that’s why they got along so well. She’d been feeling desperate, just about at rock bottom when she left San Francisco and moved down to Molena Point, living with her aunt Wilma and starting Charlie’s Fix-It, Clean-It.

Then a local gallery had seen her animal drawings. This was the only artwork she truly loved doing. They’d liked her work enough to give her a show and represent her, and she was making a name for herself. She had a feel for animals, she knew anatomy, and she truly captured each personality. She’d done two of his horses, large framed portraits that he treasured. And Clyde’s and Wilma’s cats-Charlie made them look so intelligent they almost scared him. That was the only time he’d seen her digress from an animal’s true character. He didn’t know why, when she drew those three cats, she gave them more intelligence and awareness than even the brightest animal could command. Maybe she didn’t realize how bright she made them look.

Or maybe she did that to please Wilma, and to stroke Clyde’s ego. Clyde did love the gray tomcat, Harper thought with amusement. He’d never thought, when they were young kids bronc-riding and raising hell, that Clyde would end up with a houseful of cats. Clyde had three cats besides the gray tom, though you hardly noticed them much; they seemed to drape themselves around the house minding their own business. It was the gray cat that seemed to be always in your face.

Arriving at the Traynors’, he found that Charlie had already gone, apparently earlier than she had expected. He sat in his truck for a few moments, studying the cottage, then called Charlie on his cell phone. He’d like to question the Traynors, to ask if they’d heard gunshots, but he had no real reason to do that. Charlie answered on the second ring.

“You free for lunch?”

“Yes. I meant to stay there until noon, but I was so ticked. When they got home early I knew I’d better get out or I’d blow at them.”

“You want to tell me now?”

“No. Shall I order some deli?”

“Yes. I’ll meet you in front of Jolly’s.”

When he arrived at the deli, Charlie had just picked up their lunch. She left her van at the curb, and they drove down the coast to the state park. Cruising in through the security gate and slowly through the cypress woods to the ocean, they parked where they could enjoy the waves crashing high against the jagged rocks. Charlie was pale, her freckles dark, the way she looked after a flash of anger or disappointment. She had ordered crab sandwiches, coleslaw and nonalcoholic beer.

He opened two bottles of O’Doul’s. “A neighbor of the Traynors thought she heard gunfire last night. Thought it might have been from their place.”

“You talked to them?”

“I had no real reason to. Several calls were logged in last night, and an officer did an area check. He found nothing. Most of those reports turn out to be backfire.” He looked at Charlie, waiting.

“There was gunfire. It was so� Traynor left me a hundred dollars for cleaning up the mess he made.”

Harper let her tease him along, amused at her anger.

“Raccoons, Max. In the pantry. They got in from the attic. They must have made a racket-tore everything up. He shot them, right there in the pantry. He made a terrible mess, blood and gore mixed with all the food they had spilled.”

She didn’t know whether he was going to laugh or continue to sit there watching her. “Traynor shot them, and put the two bodies in the garbage. Left that mess for me to clean up, along with all the garbage strewn across the yard.”

She saw a grin start at the corner of his mouth, a wry smile that made her want to smack him, then want to laugh, herself. “There was a loose vent into the attic. I got a ladder, nailed it back in place. The raccoons had worked the plywood cover off the crawl hole. Traynor left me a note and a hundred-dollar bill. Said he shot them with a target pistol-didn’t want me to tell anyone.”

The lines that mapped his lean, tanned face deepened with interest.

“It’s a big pantry, a walk-in. Took me half the morning. I didn’t do much else; I’ll make up for it tomorrow. He got home as I was leaving, said he thought it was a burglar in there, that he got the pistol, jerked the door open, saw these huge raccoons tearing up boxes of food. Said they snarled at him and scared him, and he didn’t know what else to do but shoot them. Said he was really afraid of them.”

“A lot of explanation.”

“Why would he not want me to tell anyone? Not want me to tell you? Because he has a gun?”

“It’s not illegal to have a gun if he stores it properly and if he’s not a felon. If he keeps it locked up in the house, it’s not my business.”

He looked deeply at Charlie. “You might want to watch yourself around Traynor, until we know what that’s about. He has to have a hot temper, to blow away two innocent animals when he could have called the dispatcher and gotten some help.”

“It’s hard for me to think of him as being crosswise with the law. Though I do have other questions about him.”

“Oh? Like what?”

“Umm-about his writing.”

“About his writing?” Harper leaned back, watching the breakers crash against the rocks sending up white showers of spray. The smell of brine was sharp through the open window.

“I read part of his manuscript that he left lying on the desk.”

He looked at her, raising an eyebrow.

She ignored his silent sarcasm. This was nothing she wanted to joke about. “It’s crude, Max. Clumsy. I don’t understand. Traynor’s a beautiful writer.”

“I didn’t know you were a literary critic. Or that you were so nosy.”

“Call it hero worship,” she said lightly. “But this has truly upset me-a real let-down.”

He began to peel the label from his beer, rolling it into a little ball. “It’s a let-down because his writing is bad. Because you admired his work. You’re disappointed in the man you thought of as perfect.”

“Maybe.” She sipped her beer, staring out at the sea, eased by its endless and constant rhythm. “Somehow the Traynors make me uneasy. They aren’t what I expected. I guess I thought Vivi, too, would be different. That she would be gentler, wise and capable and supportive. My idea of an author’s wife,” she said, laughing. But then, watching Max, she frowned. “You-the police have no reason to be interested in Traynor?”

“Not at all. Not at the moment.”

She watched him, then changed the subject. “I’m keeping the hundred dollars. I earned it. Tucking it away for a special occasion.”

“Like what? A bottle of champagne for our wedding?”

He shocked himself. Shocked them both. Charlie’s eyes widened. Beneath her freckles, she blushed.

He said, “Maybe a wedding and champagne on shipboard, on our way to Alaska?”

“Now I know you’re putting me on. You haven’t been away from the department since you joined the force.”

“Not true. Been to Quantico twice for FBI training. And more conferences on police administration than I want to remember.”

“Well, bully for you.”

He grinned. “A lot of vacation time to use up. I figure a month’s cruise, this fall, before the weather turns.”

Her response was so enthusiastic that she startled Harper. The moment amazed them both. It was a while before they opened their sandwiches and the containers of coleslaw and popped another beer. She tried to get hold of herself, but she couldn’t. When she started to laugh, she couldn’t stop. She leaned against him, laughing.

“So what’s the joke?”

She knew her face had gone red. “Just� just excitement,” she lied. “I�” She looked up at him. “Just happy!” But what she’d thought of suddenly was about telling Dulcie and Joe Grey. Thinking how happy the cats would be-and then that knowledge sobered her.

That was a hard call; no matter how close she and Max might be for the rest of their lives, there was one secret she could never tell him. One part of her life that she could never share.

16 [��������: pic_17.jpg]

Spotlights illuminated center stage. The house lights were dark, the rows of seats marching away empty into the hollow blackness of the theater. Only a few front seats were occupied where Elliott and Vivi Traynor, director Samuel Ladler, and music director Mark King sat together softly talking, and occasionally rattling a script. Elliott had hunched down in his wrinkled corduroy sport coat as if perhaps he felt unwell. On the far side of the theater near the exit door, a dozen actors had taken a block of seats, whispering among themselves, waiting for their callback auditions forThorns of Gold.Above the house among the rafters, where night clung against the high ceiling, crouched an attentive feline audience of three: two pairs of yellow eyes, one pair of green, catching glances of soft light. No human, below, bothered to look up, to find those tiny spotlights.

“But where’s Cora Lee?” Dulcie said softly, peering down at the waiting actors.

“Still backstage,” said the kit. “Painting sets like she doesn’t care at all about the part.”

Of the seven women who had read and sung for the part of Catalina during yesterday’s tryouts, Cora Lee was one of two callbacks. Director Ladler felt so pressed for time that he had notified the actors last night before they left the theater, had stood on the patio with the little group gathered around him and read out the names of the callbacks. Then he had quickly turned back inside before anyone could challenge his decisions. No director liked that part of the casting; no one enjoyed seeing the disappointment of those who were turned away.

Below the cats, Vivi leaned over to Elliott, whispering something, then giggling. She leaned forward in her chair, looking down the several seats to question Sam Ladler and to give him orders. Elliott hardly paid attention. Surely he wasn’t feeling well, Dulcie thought. Maybe the decisions that should be his had suddenly fallen on Vivi’s shoulders and she was nervous about that.

Director Sam Ladler was a lean, tanned man with thinning hair that heightened his forehead into a deep widow’s peak. He looked like he ran or played tennis. He was dressed this morning in old jeans and a limp sweatshirt. He was a terse man, Wilma had said, with a dry humor. Wilma said that he and his casts had created outstanding theater for Molena Point. He sat between Traynor and Mark King, the two directors having managed to put Vivi down at the far end of the row.

Mark King was smoothly pudgy, a young man who seemed to have turned middle-aged before his time. He was short, maybe five-four, with straight, faded brown hair down to his shoulders and rimless half-glasses that he kept wiping as if he found it impossible to remove the smudges. He wore wrinkled chinos and a T-shirt with palm trees printed across it. He rose as Ladler called for Catalina and moved up onto the stage, to the piano.

“We’ll have Fern Barth,” Ladler said, looking down at the little group of actors. Fern was Richard Casselrod’s assistant at the antiques shop, a pale, spiritless woman, in Dulcie’s opinion, whose singing during tryouts had sounded as if she was practicing for second line in the choir box, hitting the notes okay, but with no more feeling than a china doll. As Fern stepped up on stage, a whiff of her perfume rose to the cats as sweet as cake icing.

“Why,” Dulcie whispered, “was this woman called back?”

Joe Grey shrugged, yawning. “Doesn’t stand a chance.”

“I hope not,” Dulcie said uneasily. And her dismay was sharp when Fern had finished, and Vivi smiled and nodded at Sam Ladler. Elliott came to life long enough to give Fern a friendly wink. Sam Ladler looked over at them blankly and called Cora Lee.

Cora Lee came out from the wings rolling down the sleeves of her smock and wiping paint from her face. Moving to center stage, she turned to the piano, smiled at Mark King, then stood quietly looking out at the rows of empty seats, collected and composed.

“Read from where she refuses to marry Stanton,” Ladler said. “Then where she’s locked in her room, and that first number.”

Cora Lee read her lines with cold anger as Catalina was led away to her prison. Watching her, the cats forgot her stained smock and the green smear down her cheek. She stood and moved with the grace and dignity of generations of Spanish queens.

But when Catalina faced the audience from behind her locked door, her movements were restricted and disheartened, her song holding all the misery of imprisonment and of love denied.

“One more number,” Ladler said. “Let’s hear her plea.”

As Catalina begged for rescue, her audience on the rafters above was very still. The kit mewled softly, and Dulcie felt her own heart twist. This was not Cora Lee French, the gentle waitress with gray in her hair; this was a young girl frightened and alone, her pain wrenching their very cat souls. When the number ended, there was not a sound in the theater. Cora Lee bowed slightly to Samuel Ladler and to King, but did not move from the stage. The ghosts from the past that she had summoned clung around her, lingering in the shadows.

“Thank you,” Ladler said softly, and watched Cora Lee move offstage. But as she stepped down to sit with the other actors, again Vivi leaned to speak to Ladler, shaking her head. Her whisper rose clearly to the cats. “Too bad, Sam. She’s just not right for the part-that gray hair, for one thing. Really too bad, but the part calls for a younger woman.

“And,” Vivi said, “to be honest, Elliott doesn’t care for overacting.” She gave Ladler a bright smile. “Well, Fern is perfect for the part. We’re fortunate to have her. So sweet-just the way a young girl would sing, with a broken heart.”

Sam Ladler sat looking at Vivi, very still and rigid. He rose, turning to Elliot. “Shall we step out to the lobby to discuss this?”

“There’s no need,” Vivi said. “We love Fern’s performance. Elliott loves her. She’s perfect.” Beside her, Elliott nodded.

Sam continued to look at Elliott. “I don’t discuss the tryouts in front of the actors. Would you like to continue this in private?”

Vivi said, “You notified the others right away, before they left the theater.”

“Fern’s the one,” Elliott said. “No question.”

Sam looked across to the waiting actors. “Go home. We’ll call you in the morning.”

“No!” Vivi snapped. “Let them stay. You know we’re short on time.” She looked hard at Ladler. “Have you forgotten, conveniently, that Elliott’s permission to produce is subject to his approval of the cast?”

Ladler nodded to the small group and they settled back, dropping their jackets and scripts again on empty seats. “Fern, if you and Cora Lee would like to go out to the lobby and get a Coke, we’ll call you in a few moments.”

Cora Lee slipped away backstage. Fern took a seat beside Vivi, looking defiantly at Ladler. The cats watched the little drama, fascinated. They felt terrible for Cora Lee. The kit’s tail lashed so hard that Dulcie put a paw on it. “Stop it, Kit. Before someone looks up here.”

Ladler looked Fern over. “All right, if you want to hear this.” He turned his back on her, facing Elliott. “Fern’s not right for the part. She can’t hold a candle to Cora Lee. Not right physically or emotionally. Her singing does not do justice to the songs, or to your play.”

“I have to disagree,” Elliott said. “Fern has the part, or there is no play.”

“They’re not in the same league,” Sam snapped, the color coming up in his lean face. “Cora LeeisCatalina. We couldn’t have a better fit. What is it you’re seeing here? Do you want to try to explain?”

“Fern’s completely right for the part,” Traynor repeated, glancing at Vivi. “I’m the writer. I know what I-”

Mark King, stepping to the edge of the stage, stood looking down at Traynor. “There’s nothing right about her. Fern, you really ought to leave, and not have to hear this. But I have to agree that Cora Lee is perfect.”

“That is so shallow and wrong,” Vivi snapped, her look nudging Elliott.

“I’m sorry,” Elliott said stiffly. “It’s my play. Fern Barth has the part or you can stop production.”

Ladler looked them both over. “Cora Lee French has the part or I don’t direct the play.”

Elliott rose, staring at him.

Ladler stiffened almost as if he would hit Elliott. High above them, the three cats looked down from the shadows ready for a good brawl, even if Elliott was to be considered an invalid.

Ladler looked at Elliott a long time, then turned away. “Stuff the play.” He dropped the script on the floor and moved on down to the little group of fascinated actors. “Go home. The play is canceled. You’ll have to wait for this one until Mr. Traynor finds another theater.”

Vivi rose, snatching up her jacket, but Elliott pushed her into a seat, glaring at her, and moved after Ladler. “Wait, Sam.”

Ladler turned, scowling. Quickly Elliott took his arm and walked him outside through the exit door. From the stage, Mark King stood watching them, his round, bespectacled face pale with anger, then he moved away toward the dressing rooms, where Cora Lee had disappeared.

Elliott and Ladler were gone for some time. Fern sat quietly beside Vivi, both staring straight ahead, never glancing toward the other actors. No one spoke, the atmosphere in the theater had swung from the poignancy of Catalina’s lament to conflict as brittle as shattered glass. Above in the darkness the kit rose and padded along the rafter heading backstage, looking for Cora Lee.

When Elliott and Sam Ladler returned, Elliott was smiling amiably, Ladler stonefaced. He paused stiffly before Fern.

“The part is yours. Cora Lee will understudy.” He turned away to the waiting actors and sat down among them.

In a few moments, Cora Lee and King came out from backstage. Cora Lee looked at Ladler for a long moment. He said, “Will you understudy?”

“I suppose I will,” she said, her face closed and expressionless. As she turned away again, the cats could see the kit behind her, lurking in the shadows.

“What did Traynor offer him?” Joe said. “And why? What does Fern have that Traynor needs? Or what does she have on Traynor?”

Ladler rose from the group of actors. “Let’s get on with it. I want readers for Marcos. We’ll get through tryouts tonight. Rehearsals will start Wednesday.”

Joe and Dulcie were too disappointed to listen to further readings; they didn’t care who got the part of Marcos. The dark, good-looking young Latino man would likely have it. Or maybe the pale-haired surfer, who had a good voice, too, but would certainly have to resort to dark makeup and black hair dye. Probably it wouldn’t matter to Cora Lee who got the male lead. Dulcie could imagine her backstage, dealing with her disappointment, maybe with the kit snuggling up close, trying to cheer her. Why had Elliott Traynor gone along with this? It had certainly been Vivi who pushed for it. Neither Joe nor Dulcie had any answers. Among the rafters, they dozed until tryouts ended. As the players rose to leave, they heard Vivi arrange quietly to meet Fern at Binnie’s Italian.

Beating it out of the theater, the two cats headed for Binnie’s, galloping across the dark roofs beneath a skittering wind. Watching the street below, they saw the Traynors’ black Lincoln pass them, and when they dropped down to a low overhang, then to the sidewalk around the corner from Binnie’s, the Lincoln was parked at the curb. Elliott and Vivi were still in the car, arguing.

Crouching by the rear tire, the cats listened, trying not to sneeze at the stink of hot rubber and exhaust fumes.

“� know damn well you went too far,” Elliott was saying. “Don’t you think that looked-”

“What was I supposed to do? That was the deal, that Fern get the part. And you were going to cave!”

“This Cora Lee French was good, Vivi. How do you think this looks, when we-?”

“Good has nothing to do with it! Looks have nothing to do with it. What the hell are you thinking!”

“I’m thinking that if you keep this up, you’ll blow it. Ladler will back out. And don’t you think people will start asking questions?”

“Sam Ladler knew it was part of the deal. Fern has the part, or there’s no money on the side. What made him defy you like that? How did you straighten him out?”

“I upped the ante. It isn’t every day a little theater director sees that kind of money.”

“And he didn’t ask questions?”

“What’s he going to ask? He knows not to ask. We’ve been through this. I said he’d get twice what you offered.”

“You what? Didn’t you think-”

“Twice what you offered. You don’t have a choice, Vivi. So shut up. Right now, I’m in the driver’s seat.”

17 [��������: pic_18.jpg]

The two cats watched Fern’s Toyota pull up in front of Binnie’s Italian. Vivi and Elliott were still sitting in their black Lincoln, snapping at each other. When Fern parked in front of them Vivi got out and hurried into the restaurant with her, slamming the glass door nearly in Elliott’s face. Catching the door, he swung in behind them and eased it closed.

On the warm concrete beneath the newspaper rack, Joe and Dulcie crouched looking up through the restaurant window where Vivi and Fern and Elliott were settling into a booth. Vivi glanced out blankly to where the cats were idly washing their paws, the cats of less interest to her than the metal newsstand. Dulcie loved spying on someone when she was in plain sight. Through the thin glass they could hear every word.

The waitress on duty was Binnie’s niece, a slight, shy Italian girl who didn’t look old enough to have a work permit. Certainly she was too young to serve liquor. When Vivi ordered a bottle of Chablis, Binnie himself hurried out with it, uncorking the bottle across his white-aproned, ample belly, his jowled face rosy from the kitchen. Binnie did enjoy going through the little tasting ritual. Elliott handled Binnie’s ceremony with abject boredom.

Binnie poured in silence, smiled hesitantly at Vivi, and when his smile was not returned, he retreated quietly to his kitchen.

“Here’s to it,” Vivi said, lifting her glass. “So far, very smooth. Even Ladler wasn’t much of a problem.”

“It’s a wonderful part,” Fern gushed. “I’ll do well by it, you’ll see.” She patted Elliott’s hand. “I’m going to be great in this part; it’s going to make my career.” Fern was, apparently, not the brightest young woman. The cats sat through interminable small talk, licking their whiskers when the pizza was served. Vivi and Elliott ate in silence, letting Fern ramble, a tedious monologue that left Joe and Dulcie yawning. They were ready to cut out and go hunt rats when Clyde and Ryan Flannery came around the corner, walking arm in arm, softly laughing.

Clyde didn’t see the cats slip deeper under the newsstand, he was totally involved with Ryan. “So that’s the rest of the shop. That’s what we do, master mechanics to Molena Point’s wheels.”

“All those beautiful Mercedeses, Jags, and BMWs parked in your garage, to say nothing of that silver Rolls. It’s a great shop, Clyde. I’m awed by the state-of-the-art electronic equipment-a far cry from my cordless drill and electric saw.” As the couple passed the window, Vivi’s eyes widened. She nudged Elliott so sharply he spilled his wine.

“You really find that stuff interesting?” Clyde said, holding the door for Ryan. Before he could close it, the cats slipped through behind him. He scowled down at them, surprised and annoyed, but said nothing.

“If I hadn’t ended up as a building contractor,” Ryan said, “I might be a mechanic. I seriously thought about it at one time.”

Elliott had risen and was heading toward the men’s room, behind a partition that also led to the kitchen. Ryan looked after him, glanced at Vivi, and turned away, moving beside Clyde to a table in the far corner. Clyde looked toward the kitchen, waving to Binnie, and they slid into the booth. “You’d like being a mechanic? Working with a bunch of guys? They can get pretty rank.”

“I do work with a bunch of guys,” she said, laughing. “They’re okay if you set some ground rules. But, I don’t know, there’s something restful about putting things together, about figuring out the little mechanical glitches, solving the problems and making them right. Makes me feel safe, somehow, in a chaotic world. Does that make any sense?”

“Quite a lot of sense.”

Under the table, the cats settled down next to Clyde’s shoes, looking around his pant cuffs to where the Traynors sat. The carpet smelled clean and was of good quality, not like some restaurants where the rug stank of ancient French fries. Elliot had not returned. At the Traynor table, Vivi was pale and agitated, gulping her wine. Fern only looked perplexed, her round face and short golden hair catching light from a stained glass corner fixture. Binnie had recently redecorated, abandoning the simple red checkered tablecloth and candle-in-a-bottle motif, with which the village had long been familiar, for bright abstract murals covering the walls and tabletops, splashes of primary color illuminated by the colored glass fixtures. The effect was cozy and inviting. But then, any place that smelled as rich with tomato sauce and garlic and herbs as Binnie’s had to be inviting. As the cats watched Vivi nervously wolf her dinner, Ryan bent down to look under the table.

“Hi, cats. You having pizza?” They smiled at her and purred, and Dulcie rose to rub against her extended hand. She scratched Dulcie’s ear, looking pleased with the greeting. Her face was flushed from the chill outdoor air, her dark hair tangled in a mass of short, unruly curls. In a moment she sat up again. “They’re charming, Clyde. As responsive as any dogs.”

“I suppose they can be charming,” Clyde said. “When it suits them.”

“But pizza, and Mexican food? Doesn’t that stuff upset them? What does the vet say?” She was wearing faded jeans, and brown leather sandals that smelled of saddle soap. Her ankles were nicely tanned. Joe sniffed at her toes until Dulcie hissed at him, laying back her ears. “You don’t need to smell her feet!”

Clyde said, “The food doesn’t bother them; they seem to have cast-iron stomachs.” He looked under. “What do you want on your pizza? Cheese, hamburger, and anchovy?”

Joe Grey purred, thinking,Heavy on the anchovies and plenty of mozzarella.

“Where’s the third cat?” Ryan asked. “The little dark one? Doesn’t she belong to Wilma Getz? Wilma worked with my dad, years ago before she retired, in the San Francisco probation office. The dark cat-what’s that color called?”

“Tortoiseshell,” Clyde said. “She’s been hanging around the theater lately. She likes to prowl the rafters.”

Ryan laughed. “Theatrical aspirations? But when the cats are out on the village streets at night, don’t you worry about them?”

“They’re careful about traffic. And all three are pretty resourceful.”

“My family has never had cats, only dogs. I had no idea cats would-well, these two follow you, don’t they? And they mind you.”

“Sometimes,” Clyde said. “If they’re in a cooperative mood.”

“When my sisters and I were young, and we came down to the village for weekends, we always brought the dogs. Dallas was raising pointers then. We’d each get to bring our favorite pup, we ran them on the beach, took them in the outdoor cafes. It was great fun, everyone made a fuss over them-we were very popular. I’ve always loved the village. I’m going to love calling it home. San Francisco, under the right circumstances, is wonderful, but I think my nesting place is here.”

“And you liked Charlie’s apartment-the duplex?”

“It’s perfect. One big room, and I love the high ceiling. Charlie says we can put in a wood-burning stove if I like. And that wonderful garage, that’s the space I really need. She told me she bought the place for a song.”

“In village numbers, yes. It was pretty run down. Will you need furniture?”

“I don’t need much. Right now, I just want the necessities.”

“Which are?”

“Drafting table. Bed. Breakfast table and a couple of chairs. Desk for my computer.”

“Your taste may be too simple for the Iselman estate sale, but it wouldn’t hurt to look.”

“Which is when?”

“Saturday morning. You go around seven, take a number, go back at ten to be called. They let people in a few at a time.”

“Want to come?”

“Sure. We’ll get our numbers, go have breakfast, and walk the beach.”

The cats looked at each other, amused. Clyde never did waste time. When the pizza was served, they could hear Clyde cutting their share into bite-sized pieces, could hear him blowing on it to cool before he set it on the floor. Across the restaurant, Vivi and Fern were still alone; Elliott had not returned. Vivi was paying the bill. In a moment she rose, said something to Fern, dropped a tip on the table, and was gone, leaving Fern to finish her dinner alone.

“She sure didn’t want any part of me,” Ryan said softly. “Elliott can’t still be in the men’s room.”

“I think that slamming kitchen door might have been Elliott leaving,” Clyde said.

“Maybe Vivi and my womanizing husband did get together last fall. But why would Elliott avoid me? I can understand Vivi staying away-though at this point, I couldn’t care less. But why Elliott? He and I are the wronged parties.”

From beneath the table, the cats watched through the far window as Vivi hurried around the corner to her car. They heard her gun the engine and the Lincoln roared away, apparently leaving Elliott to walk home.

The cats looked at each other with amusement. What a tangle humans could devise. No group of cats ever made such a muddle of their personal affairs. Vivi and Elliott’s behavior not only entertained Joe and Dulcie but left them puzzled and unsettled. As if they’d followed a rabbit scent that led nowhere; that ended abruptly with no rabbit hole, and no rabbit.

They would be far more concerned, however, when the night ended; when dawn broke and they confronted a dead body, a bloody scene of battle, and one very distraught tortoiseshell kit.

18 [��������: pic_19.jpg]

Rehearsal was over. Everyone but Cora Lee had left the theater. Mark King had closed the piano and departed reluctantly, worrying about Cora Lee, standing backstage holding her hands, his round face flushed with anger and concern.

“I’ll be fine, Mark. I just want to sit here for a few minutes alone, in the quiet theater. Guess this part meant more to me than I thought,” she said, laughing.

“There’s nothing I can say about this. It’s incredible. I’m hoping something will happen to change Traynor’s mind,” he said darkly, then turned and moved away through the dressing rooms.

The kit heard the back door slam. When Cora Lee sat down on a folding chair near the piano, the little tortoiseshell came out from the shadows and crawled up into her lap. Around them, the empty theater seemed to echo with the spirits that had been summoned from the past-and with the tensions, with the inexplicable trade-off for which Mark King and Cora Lee had no answers. The kit reached a paw, touching Cora Lee’s cheek.

“All right,” she told the kit. “Let someone else play Catalina. But does it have to be Fern Barth! Fern will destroy Catalina. I do love the story, I love the songs, Kit. I feel so close to Catalina-I don’t want her story made ugly and common.”

She hugged the kit close. “Maybe after Traynor’s dead,” she said coldly, “if he is indeed dying, there’ll be a real performance somewhere ofThorns of Gold.But not for me, Kit. It will be too late for me.

“I’m sixty-four years old. I keep myself in shape, but there’s a limit. Maybe Vivi Traynor’s right, maybe I’m already too old.”

Cora Lee wondered-was it possible that, for some reason she didn’t understand, Vivi didn’t want this play produced? She looked around the empty theater. “There are ghosts here, Kit. All the ghosts of plays past, people who have been brought alive here. Did you know that?”

The kit knew. She climbed to Cora Lee’s shoulder, nosing at her cheek.

“Emotions so powerful, Kit, that they’re part of the old walls, even part of the plywood sets that we cut up and use over and over until there’s nothing left but chips. All those lives are here. And now, is Fern’s saccharine version of Catalina going to join them?”

She rose abruptly, settling the kit more securely on her shoulder. “Well, I can’t help it. I can’t make anything different, I can’t unmake whatever twisted motives Vivi and Elliott Traynor follow.” She cuddled the little cat close. “It isn’t losing the part that makes me cry, Kit. I cry from anger, always have. Anger at unfairness, at human coldness. Why would Elliott Traynor butcher his own play?

“When I was little, Kit, in second grade, we had a teacher who baited us unmercifully. Prodded us, bore down on us, accused us of things we didn’t do, ridiculed and beat us down until she made me cry out of pure rage.”

Cora Lee looked down into the kit’s round yellow eyes. “I’ve always been like that. I’m irate when I feel helpless, when I feel used.” She touched the kit’s nose with her nose. “Can you understand, Kit, how it is to cry with anger when you feel helpless?”

The kit understood. She knew exactly how that felt. The smallest cat in the band of roving cats she’d traveled with, she’d been the butt of them all, two dozen big, cruel felines who delighted in tormenting her, who abandoned her in alleys, who drove her away from whatever food they found to fight over. She knew how helplessness felt. But she couldn’t tell Cora Lee that.

“On the streets, in New Orleans, when bigger kids ganged up and hit us and wouldn’t let us go, and no grown-up would help us, that made me cry-with pure temper, because no big person would help us.” Cora Lee laughed. “I got so mad sometimes that I broke things. Threw china at the wall. That wasn’t civilized, but no one took the time to teach us about being civil. Throwing china was the only way I knew to drive away the demons and make me feel better.”

The kit shivered. The look in Cora Lee’s black eyes was so deep it was like falling into bottomless chasms.

“You make me feel better, Kit. You’re good company. You listen and don’t try to destroy me. Could I take you home with me tonight? It’s just at the other end of the building. I don’t like to leave you alone in the theater, and I won’t turn you out in the dark. Would Wilma mind?” She looked at the kit, puzzled. “What makes you come here, Kit? What draws you here?”

The kit purred and kneaded her mottled black-and-brown paws gently into Cora Lee’s shoulder, careful to keep her claws tucked in.

Cuddling the kit, Cora Lee went backstage to the wall phone beside the dressing rooms, and in the soft light, she dialed Wilma’s number. The kit lay her face against Cora Lee’s cheek to listen, feeling deliciously secretive and smug, her fluffy tail twitching with pleasure.

“Your tattercoat kit is here, Wilma. In the theater.”

“I’m not surprised,” Wilma said, laughing. “Shall I come get her?”

“She’s been here since early in the tryouts. Could I keep her overnight? She’s� we’re friends. I have cold roast chicken and milk custard, if you think that would agree with her.”

The kit smiled and snuggled down with contentment.

“Those delicacies are certainly allowed,” Wilma said. “You’d better have your share first, or she’ll eat it all. How did tryouts go?”

“Could we talk about that tomorrow? I� didn’t get the part.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“I�” Cora Lee’s voice trembled.

“Tomorrow,” Wilma said. “Take the kit home. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Just need some rest. I’m going to feed the kit and myself, have a hot bath, and get into bed. I’ll bring her home in the morning.”

“Have another towel handy. She likes to dabble her paws in the tub. Give her something that floats, and she’ll have the whole bathroom soaked, splashing at it.”

Cora Lee laughed. The kit didn’t see anything funny. Hanging up, Cora Lee carried the kit over her shoulder as she turned out the last light and then locked the back door behind her. Heading past several closed shops with their softly lit windows, a dress shop, a toy store, a knitting studio, she turned up a lighted stair tucked between two parts of the building. Climbing two flights, with the kit snuggling against her chin, she moved along an open balcony overlooking the street. Unlocking the third door, she switched on a lamp and shut the door tightly behind her. She set the kit down on a creamy leather sofa so soft that the kit rolled and rubbed her face into the pillows.

The room was done all in almond and white and cafe au lait-ice cream colors, the kit thought. She liked that; this room made her purr. Cora Lee opened a tall, whitewashed music center, and put on a CD of soft jazz. She gave the kit a little smile, as if maybe she had come to some kind of decision. The kit couldn’t ask to share her secret.

The small kitchen had a creamy tile floor and white cabinets. Cora Lee fixed a plate for each of them, poured a glass of wine for herself, and carried their tray into the living room, putting the kit’s plate on the hearth and her own dinner on the coffee table.

Cora Lee ate slowly, relaxing in the music she loved and in the company of the little cat. It was nice to have a special animal to share her supper, it had been some years since she’d had a pet, since she’d put her dear old spaniel to sleep. She still missed him. She’d depended on him a lot when she was newly widowed, in those months just after Robert died.

Robert was killed on their thirtieth anniversary in a plane accident, on his way to meet her for a week in the Sierras as an anniversary present. She had never felt quite whole since. But she had not felt, until recently, the true fear of being alone as she grew older, fear of the approaching years when she might be ill and need assistance, and had no one to help her, no family. That sense of helplessness had made her take a hard look at her life.

Was their Senior Survival plan going to work? Was this going to be a practical solution for all of them?

“It sure beats paying five thousand dollars a month, Kit, in a retirement home. I couldn’t do that. All of us have too much money to go on welfare, and too little to pay those kinds of prices. We’re caught in the middle, Kit.”

She thought that, with the right legal setup, they could make something better for themselves. Watching the kit lapping up custard, she wished the little cat could understand what she was saying, she seemed such a sympathetic little soul. Rising, she went to the kitchen to dish up more custard, hoping she wouldn’t make the kit sick. Wilma was right, this little cat ate like a St. Bernard.

Returning, she refilled her wineglass and turned down the lamp. Could four or five women living together really get along? Was that going to work; would they make the necessary decisions without bickering? If they could hire someone to cook and clean and care for them when they were older, would they find someone they could trust? But they were civil people. And they had three trustees picked out to handle many of the problems.

When the kit had licked up the last of the custard, Cora Lee took their dishes to the kitchen, washed them in hot soapy water, and put them in the drain. “Come on, Kit. I’m bushed.”

She ran a hot bath, found a sponge to float for the kit, and spent more time laughing than relaxing. She mopped up the water afterward with four big towels, wondering where this little cat had sprung from, who was so different and amusing. They were in bed by midnight, snuggled together.

As Cora Lee’s breathing slowed toward sleep, the kit lay looking around her at the carved, whitewashed bedroom furniture, at the sheer white curtains blowing across the open window. Even the paintings on the walls were cream toned. What a pity that Cora Lee would have to leave this apartment when the ladies all moved in together. These bright rooms with their cafe au lait carpet soft under her paws, and the jazz music and cold chicken and custard, this was a lovely place to live. The kit liked it all so much, that she couldn’t stop purring. And, purring, she drifted off into dreams.

But in her dreams she was standing on a strange sidewalk, in a strange part of the village and there was blood on the concrete along with broken glass. Afraid, she woke mewling and pressing tightly against Cora Lee.

But it was a dream, only a nightmare like when she was small and the big cats made her sleep alone in the cold behind the garbage cans and she had bad, bad dreams.

Only then there had been no one to hold her. Now there was someone safe, and she burrowed closer under Cora Lee’s chin, safe with Cora Lee, and warm.

19 [��������: pic_20.jpg]

Fog softened the lines of the long, two-story building, the milky dawn seeming almost to have absorbed its pale walls. The structure was, in fact, two buildings, with a narrow walkway between. The first floors housed various small businesses, including a cell phone repair shop, and an upholsterer. Offices and apartments occupied the second floor. Of the seven cars parked diagonally at the curb before the Pumpkin Coach Charity Shop, four were frosted with water drops as if they had stood there all night. Cora Lee French’s green ‘92 Chevy was dry and faintly dusty, and the engine and hood were still warm. The driver’s door stood open, the keys in the ignition. Cora Lee’s purse lay on the seat.

The Pumpkin Coach was a favorite village institution, staffed by volunteers who arranged and sold the used books and furniture and clothes that were donated, the paintings and tableware and office equipment and children’s toys and every kind of bric-a-brac from Chinese cloisonne and old pewter to Mexican glassware, all gifts from upscale Molena Point households that were moving or changing decor. The shop’s annual income, more than $200,000, was given in total to Molena Point charities-the boys and girls clubs, the Scouts, County Animal Shelter, Meals for the Elderly, and over two dozen other like organizations. At peak hours the Pumpkin Coach was so busy that visitors found it hard to snag a parking place in the large lot. Now, at 6:00 A.M., the shop, of course, was closed.

Cora Lee’s car was not reflected in the large front window of the Pumpkin Coach, though it stood not ten feet from it, just across the sidewalk. None of the cars was mirrored there, nor were the trees that edged the parking lot, or the houses and shops across the street. The window could reflect nothing; its plate glass lay shattered across the paving, its jagged shards reflecting only the milky sky. Sharp pieces of broken glass stuck up from the window frame like knife blades.

The shop’s window was done up each Monday night with particularly appealing items, usually arranged on some theme. On Tuesday, viewers could enjoy the display, read the price list, and make their selections. They would return on Wednesday morning to hand over their cash and record their names on the “sold” list, often having to stand in line for the privilege. They would pick up their merchandise the following week, after the window was changed. Though the shop didn’t open until 10:00, the first arrivals might be there before 7:00, bringing their camp chairs, intent on being first in line.

The Pumpkin Coach was a mecca for the ladies of the Senior Survival club. They tried to rotate their visits so one or the other dropped by several times a day as new donations were put out. Usually Cora Lee took the Tuesday morning run to check out the contents of the new window display. This morning was the same as usual; she had stopped to check the window on her way to take the kit home-and had looked on the scene startled.

Within the display, broken glass sparkled across the small and handsome caned writing desk that held center stage and across the embroidered table cover tossed casually over one end. There was nothing on the desk, but three indentations had been left in the folded cover. Behind the desk hung five paintings and seven carved toys, all skewed aside where the backdrop had been pulled awry, revealing the dark shop behind.

At the foot of the desk Fern Barth lay unmoving, the wounds in her chest and shoulder bleeding into the spills of shattered glass, her blond hair flecked with glass, her fingers clutching a fragment of old, faded ribbon. Cora Lee stood looking, feeling cold, her hands shaking, and for a long moment she didn’t know what to do.

Joe Greyand Dulcie got theirfirst lookat themorning paper as they returned from a midnight hunt. TheMolena Point Gazettelay folded on a driveway, the front page partially visible. Hastily they pawed the paper open, crouching over the picture.

The Pumpkin Coach was enjoying extra publicity; the shop’s display was featured prominently, its window nearly filling the space above the fold-a picture that, if they were right, was going to cause plenty of activity in the village, and not all of it welcome.

Since midnight they had stalked rats beneath the low, dense foliage of a dwarf juniper forest. The decorative conifers covered a residential hillside, a mass of three-foot high bushes so thick-growing that even in the silver dawn the world beneath had been without light, its prickly tangle of interlaced branches stretching away in pure blackness. The warm, sandy earth beneath was riddled with rat holes-a hunting preserve for the small and quick.

Their breakfast catch had consisted of two fat rats and a small rabbit. They could have killed many more, but they couldn’t eat any more. Leaving the bony parts and the skin and fur, they had spent leisurely moments washing their paws and whiskers, then wound their way out of the dark jungle, their eyes shuttered and their ears back to avoid the tiny, prickly twigs. They came out onto the concrete drive just below a two-story house whose shades were still drawn. The cats’ coats smelled sharply of juniper, and their mouths were filled with the rusty aftertaste of rat. It was as they padded down the damp concrete drive toward the street below that the morning paper caught their attention.

Thanks to the cheaper production costs of modern technology, the photo was in full color. It showed three carved wooden chests sitting on an embroidered table cover atop a small writing desk in the shop window. Joe pawed the paper open to the article, his dark gray ears sharp forward, his yellow eyes keen with interest. He glanced up once at the windows of the house but saw no one, and heard no sound. Flattening the pages with quick paws, they crowded together side by side to read. Any neighbor peering out would suppose the kitties had found a mealy bug or some such innocuous creature in the damp folds of newsprint and were about to eat or torment it. The article held their full attention.

ISELMAN ART COLLECTION UNDER BLOCK

Dorothy Iselman, widow of village benefactor James Iselman, has put the couple’s multimillion-dollar art collection up for sale, retaining only a few favorite items. The oils and watercolors by famous eighteenth-century artists will be auctioned at Butterfield’s in San Francisco in mid-July. Less valuable pieces, such as the African and Mexican folk art that Iselman enjoyed owning, have been sold to several local galleries and collectors. Several nineteenth-century wooden toys and primitive, carved chests have been donated to the Pumpkin Coach, a special offering for its charity sales. These can be seen in a handsome display installed last night in the shop’s front window.

“What do they mean by primitive?” Joe said.

“Rough, bold. Not all refined and polished,” Dulcie said knowledgeably. Her green eyes widened. “Don’t they look Spanish? Could these be three of the Ortega-Diaz chests? Sitting in the Iselman house for how many years?”

“Not likely. Wouldn’t Casselrod have known about them, tried to buy them?”

“Maybe he did try, we don’t know. And did the Iselmans know about the letters? Would they have thought to look for some hidden compartment, like the white chest had?”

The cats looked at each other and took off down the drive heading for the Pumpkin Coach. Galloping through the fog across the empty residential streets, brushing through flowerbeds and trampling a delicate stand of Icelandic poppies, racing through patios and gardens, they had nearly reached the two long buildings standing end to end that housed the charity shop when a pale car pulled out of the street behind, coming straight for them. Dodging across the sidewalk into a recessed entry, they crouched against the door of a tile shop. Joe got one good glimpse of the license.

“Got the first four digits. 2ZJZ. A tan Infinity.”

They stood looking after the vanished driver, then raced down the narrow brick walk between the two buildings, approaching the front of the charity shop. Somewhere in the village, a siren screamed, not uncommon in the early morning hours. Galloping past parked cars whose metal bodies exuded chill, they passed a car still warm, a green Chevy with the driver’s door open.

“Cora Lee’s car?” Dulcie said.

Joe glanced in, catching Cora Lee’s scent, wondering why she had left the door open, and where she was. Skirting the glass that glinted across the sidewalk, warily he approached the shop window.

They could smell blood, and the sweet scent of candy. Circling around the glass, the cats reared up to look.

Fern Barth lay in the window, the blood from her wounds turning dark. Joe, leaping up over the jagged teeth of glass that protruded from the sill, stepping carefully around the blood and debris, put his nose to hers.

She wasn’t breathing but she was faintly warm. He was backing away when sirens came screaming and a squad car and an emergency vehicle careened around the corner. Joe sailed out of the window over the ragged glass and behind the potted plants that stood before the shop. The cats were never able to shake their need to hide-and maybe for good reason. Max Harper wasn’t unaware of cats showing up at a scene, of cat hairs clinging to evidence, of paw prints where they should not have been.

An officer swung out of the car, gun drawn, scanning the area, leaving his partner behind the wheel. From the ambulance, two medics stepped up into the shop window as if they knew exactly where to go. As the officer on foot checked the parked cars, the police unit took off toward the back street, apparently to circle the building. The officer on foot approached the green Chevy. Looking inside, he didn’t touch anything. He checked the backseat, but didn’t close the door. As he checked out the other cars, Joe and Dulcie slipped through the shadows to the bushes that lined the walk between the buildings. There, Joe tried to pull glass from his paws, dragging his pads across the small branches to dislodge clinging shards, then plucking some out with his teeth, spitting glass into the dirt, his ears back with annoyance.

The officer on foot had left the cars and moved up into the window, they heard him walk on back inside the shop. The minute he was gone, Joe sped for the Chevy and leaped into the seat.

He sniffed at Cora Lee’s purse, but when he smelled the dash and the cell phone, he shook his head with disbelief. Dropping out again, he returned to the bushes, to Dulcie.

“The kit’s scent is all over the phone.”

“The kit made the emergency call?”

“Apparently. She’s watched us enough times.”

“So where is she? She stayed with Cora Lee last night. Where is Cora Lee? Oh, she’s not in the shop! Lying hurt in there! But what happened?” Dulcie peered out toward the shattered display window, then turned to look at Joe, her eyes wide. “Or did she�? Oh, but Cora Lee wouldn’t�”

Joe just looked at her.

“She was really hurt when she lost the part,” Dulcie whispered. “Angry at Traynor, at Vivi, at Sam Ladler-she must have hated Fern. But she wouldn’t�”

Joe was busy sniffing the bushes. “Cora Lee brushed by here. So did the kit. Come on.”

They followed the scents of woman and cat up the brick walk and around to the street behind the Pumpkin Coach, where the shop’s back door opened. The empty street smelled of car exhaust. They didn’t see the officer on foot, nor was the squad car in sight. As they approached the small, blind utility alley just beyond the Pumpkin Coach, the scents they followed deepened. They could see nothing in the short dead-end alley but a heap of wadded white paper down at the end piled between the trash cans.

But something else was there, besides paper. They glimpsed dark hair among the white, and a tan arm. Then they saw the kit crouched over the figure, pawing at her, trying to wake her.

Cora Lee lay among the rubble, her white dress twisted, her face grayish and sick. When the kit saw Joe and Dulcie she bolted into them mewling.

“She’s dead. Oh, she’s not dead! Oh, help her!”

Sirens screamed again as another squad car roared through the side streets. Pushing the kit away, Joe nosed at Cora Lee trying to detect breathing. Yes, a faint, warm breath, though her skin was chilled.

“She’s alive, Kit. We need the medics, the cops. But you called-”

“From Cora Lee’s car phone like you showed me. I told them there was a dead woman in the window.”

“You told them Cora Lee was here?”

“She wasn’t-I didn’t know she was here. Just that Fern woman in the window.”

“Stay with her, Kit. Stay until we-”

But Dulcie had already raced away, headed for Cora Lee’s car and cell phone.

20 [��������: pic_21.jpg]

The ambulance had gone, taking Cora Lee to the hospital bundled onto a stretcher, tucked up under a blanket. Dulcie imagined her in surgery surrounded by doctors and nurses working over her. Stubbornly she imagined Cora Lee awake again, sitting up in a white hospital bed with flowers and get-well cards around her. And, crouched in the shadows of the alley, cuddling the kit close, she tried to stop the little tattercoat’s frightened shivering. Licking the kit’s ear, Dulcie purred against her, whispering, “It’s all right. She’ll be all right, Kit.” But they couldn’t be certain of that.

“She ran from that man,” the kit said. “He chased her, he must have hit her. When I found her here she was so cold, then sweating, and then cold again. She looked at me and cried, ‘Don’t!’ and tried to get up and then she twisted, and cried out, then fainted.” The kit looked wildly at Dulcie. “All those terrible tubes hanging when they put her in the ambulance. What did they do to her?”

“The tubes could save her life, Kit. The medics will do all they can, and we must be patient.” But Dulcie didn’t feel patient.

The kit’s dark mottled fur stuck up in frantic wisps, and her yellow eyes were as round as moons. “She was taking me home to Wilma’s, she�”

“I know, Kit. I was there when she called Wilma. She said she’d stop here to look in the shop window at the new display. She’ll be all right, Kit. She’ll be fine. Did you have a nice evening?”

“Oh, yes. Custard and chicken and music and such a pretty house and a nice creamy blanket on her bed, but I had a bad dream and then this morning it came true. When we got here the window was all broken, and I could see someone lying in there. Cora Lee rushed to look, she was so upset and wanting to help that she left the car door open, didn’t think about a cat running away. But I didn’t run, I jumped on the dash and watched her through the window. She looked in at the dead woman, then she whirled around toward the car like she meant to call the police, but there was a little white packet nearly under her feet, like papers. She snatched it up, hardly stopping.”

“What papers, Kit?”

“I don’t know, papers tied in a ribbon, and she was almost to the car when a man burst out of the window and hit her and grabbed at them. She kicked him and hit him and twisted away and ran. She still had the little packet. Ran around the side of the building. I remembered about the phone and punched the numbers like I saw you and Joe do, and told them about the woman in the window.

“He chased her, and I followed them. I was so scared and I wanted to claw him. He chased her into the alley and hit her hard. When she fell he grabbed the papers and ran. Left her there all huddled up clutching her middle. I heard a car roar away. She tried to crawl but she was hurt too bad and I didn’t know what to do. She looked at me like she didn’t see me right, like she didn’t know what I was. I licked and licked her face and was going to go talk in the phone again, but she was so hot and then cold and then I heard the siren, and then you came.”

“Kit, what did the papers look like?” Dulcie said.

“Folded up and tied with an old faded ribbon. Old brownish paper like if it’s been in the trash a long time.”

“What did the man look like?” Dulcie glanced around for Joe but didn’t see him.

“Just a man. I don’t know. Tan clothes. Tall, sort of thin, running away.”

“What color hair? Would you know him? Recognize his smell?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” The kit looked crestfallen, her head down, her ears back to her head. “I’m not sure. Maybe I would.” She began to sniff around the alley. But the medics and police had been there; the smells were all mixed up.

“Come here, Kit,” Dulcie said. “It will be all right, we’ll find him.” But her mind was on Joe Grey, uneasy because Joe had vanished.

Was he back there among the officers? Had he followed them into the shop through the broken window? Armed officers going in after a killer would be alert to any smallest movement. The faintest disturbance among the shelves and furniture, and their guns would be on him.

But she was being foolish. Police officers didn’t fire blind-not like some untrained deer hunter shooting at a sound in the brush.

Yet still she worried, pacing the alley, afraid Joe would do something foolish, something macho and foolish.

Withinthe shop, Joe looked far from macho. Crouched under a rack of women’s dresses with a lacy hem dragging over his ears, he peered out from between swaths of silk and velvet, watching Dallas Garza clear the premises. The resale store was so crowded with racks and shelves and overflowing boxes that he felt like he was back among the heaped refuse of some San Francisco alley-except these cast-offs were a far cry from the junk he’d encountered in the city; that trash had been so tacky that even the homeless didn’t want it. This shop had some nicer cookware than Clyde’s kitchen, some handsome lamps, and typewriters and even a microwave oven. In the center of the room between the clothes racks stood a child’s desk, a faded easy chair, a pink crib, three dining chairs, and a sign proclaiming that all mechanical items were in working order.

Slipping along beneath the ladies’ hems, flinching as clothes slithered down his back, he followed Detective Garza. Garza was taking his time, photographing and making carefully recorded notes in a small black notebook.

Pausing under a rack of men’s pants and shirts, Joe followed Garza through an archway, creeping belly-to-carpet among the shadows, into the back room-into chaos. A bookshelf lay toppled, its books scattered open across a cascade of phonograph records and broken china. An accordion lay crushed beneath an overturned table, among a spill of mismatched shoes. And there were splatters of blood, the smell of human blood.

Beneath the fallen books and records, he saw a small, carved chest. A second chest lay half hidden by a scatter of baby clothes. Both looked old, dark, and roughly made, very much like those in the newspaper picture. Watching Garza photograph the scene, Joe slipped behind an upended suitcase for a better look. He wondered if Garza had seen the morning paper, if he was aware of the wooden casks. One was the size of a small bread box, incised with primitive birds and painted in soft greens and blues. The other was half that big, carved with flowers and stained in red and green. The pieces of a third box lay beneath it, smashed and split, with the lid torn off. Joe studied the scene of what must have been a violent fight, and sniffed the tangle of smells.

He had, following Garza in through the front door, reared up to look into the window at Fern’s body where she lay waiting for the coroner. The two bullet holes, one through her chest, one through her throat, were both small and neat. As the detective turned away, Joe had nipped into the window for a better look.

The bullet holes were larger in front, raggedly splattering blood and flesh, as if she’d been shot in the back. Certainly she had been shot at close range. He couldn’t see her back, to know if there were powder marks. The unpleasant smells of death mixed sickly with Fern’s perfume.

But here in the back room, Fern’s perfume came sharper, clinging among the broken furniture.

Had she fought with her killer here? Had she been shot here, from behind, then dragged into the broken window? Or had she managed to crawl there before she died? Or had she run, and gotten as far as the window? He watched Garza photographing, taking advantage of every angle, capturing every smallest detail. Was it Fern who broke the window to get at the chests or did her killer show up first and shatter the glass? If Fern broke in, why would she bring the casks in here? Maybe she was followed, maybe she ran back here to get away.

Too many possible scenarios. He wanted to hear the kit’s story. And he wanted to know more of what Garza and Davis found before he tried to fit the pieces together.

The fur flew in both directions. Joe’s clandestine method of investigation, even with the advantage of his highly superior scent detection, his finer night vision, and his acumen at breaking and entering, was seldom adequate alone, without input from the police. A cat sleuth, picking up what the cops missed, was still deeply dependent on the findings of the crime lab.

Face it, Joe thought, he and Dulcie and the cops were a team-even if MPPD knew nothing of the arrangement. What a cat laugh, Joe thought, stretching out under an antique baby carriage, watching Garza bag evidence. The department had no notion that it was the cooperation of cat and human that had made them one of the finest detecting machines in the state, had put them right up there in the top percentage of cases solved.

Garza had photographed the area where the three chests lay, and was now bagging them, taking great care, placing each piece of the broken cask in a separate evidence bag. One thing was sure. If the fight in the back room was between Fern and the man who hit Cora Lee, if Fern had held her own long enough to create this amount of damage and chaos, Fern was stronger than she looked.

But she would be strong, Joe thought. Working for Richard Casselrod in the antiques shop, she not only kept the books but helped with the displays and moved heavy pieces of furniture. Though a lot of that skill was in the balance, in little tricks like moving a heavy dresser across smooth floors on an upside-down throw rug, sliding it along as he’d seen Wilma do when she rearranged her furniture.

Say the unknown man broke the glass and grabbed the chests, but saw Fern approaching. He ran into the shop. Fern followed him, tried to take the chests, and there was a fight. One of them fell, breaking the one chest. The guy pulled a gun, Fern ran, and he shot her.

Too soon to speculate. So far, his ideas were no more than a forensic shell game-Clyde would say Joe was playing Monday morning football. Yet he couldn’t leave it alone; something kept nudging him. He was missing something, some fact right in front of his nose, some small bit of evidence that, apparently, even Dallas Garza hadn’t found.

He sure didn’t want to think that Cora Lee was involved in this. And so far, he’d found no scent of her within the shop, or in the window.

One thing was certain. When the ladies of the Senior Survival club had gotten interested in the old chests, they had fallen into more than they bargained for. Someone intent on making a bundle from the Ortega-Diaz letters had become a real threat to the ladies’ innocent pursuit.

Creeping close on Garza’s heels among the clutter, Joe sniffed every object, trying to sort out the smells. It wasn’t easy, with recurring whiffs of Fern’s gumdrop perfume mixed with the aroma of old books and old clothes and shoes, with a regular soup of ancient stinks. Yet he did find one scent worth sorting out, a hint hardly detectable over Fern’s perfume. Padding closer to a heap of clothes, he fixed on a tiny bit of refuse barely visible beneath a wrinkled scarf.

He was looking at telling evidence, at a missing piece of the puzzle.

He reached out a paw, but didn’t touch. He shoved the scarf away, so the cherry pit was in plain sight. He was crouched, looking, when Garza turned.

Backing into cover, Joe remained frozen behind a rack of dresses. Garza stared in his direction and stood watching for further movement, his square, tanned face immobile, his dark eyes watchful, his hand on his gun.

When the detective moved suddenly, rolling the clothes rack aside, Joe moved along with the rack, staying under the clothes, his nose inches from Garza’s black shoes.

When Garza found no one behind the rack he circled it, and investigated two more racks that stood against the wall before he decided he was alone.

But he had seen the cherry pit. He stood looking, then knelt and scooped it into an evidence bag.

Smiling, with a twitch of whiskers, Joe Grey fled the scene, fading among the shadows to the front door, pawing it open where an officer had left it ajar. Racing up the sidewalk and around the corner to find Dulcie and the kit, the last bit of evidence burned in his brain, Vivi’s forgotten little cherry seed, sucked clean.

21 [��������: pic_22.jpg]

“This isn’t going to work,” Joe said, looking up at the new, locked front door of the police station.

“Of course it will work.” Dulcie backed deeper into the bushes, away from the sidewalk and the scudding wind that dragged leaves along the pavement past their noses. They were quiet a moment, warm against each other, watching the pub door, half a block down, waiting for Max Harper. Every time the door opened, the wind carried to them the heady scent of beer and hot pastrami.

When Harper emerged at last, returning from an early dinner, Dulcie slipped from the bushes into the shadow behind the twin urns of potted geraniums that flanked the door. When he entered the station she padded in directly behind his heels, as silent and intent as a stalking tiger.

Joe moved close to her and they slipped behind the front desk, across from the dispatcher’s counter. Above them, the new front window was just beginning to darken, the spring sky streaked with swiftly blowing clouds. As Harper headed down the hall to his office, Dulcie slipped out again and approached the dispatcher’s open cubicle. Padding in under the counter, looking up at the dispatcher, she mewed softly.

The evening dispatcher was a middle-aged woman with blond curly hair and a thick stomach that pulled her uniform into horizontal wrinkles. She occupied a nine-by-nine room with open counters on three sides, loaded with electronic equipment. When she saw Dulcie, she glanced across the entry and down the hall to make sure no uninvited human had entered with the cat.

“Will you look at this. Where did you come from, you pretty thing? Did you follow the captain in here? Oh, aren’t you sweet!” She knelt to pet Dulcie, her curly blond hair brassy in the overhead light. Maybe the little chirping noise she made was the way she talked to her own cats. She was new to the station, working the four-to-twelve watch. Her name tag said Officer Mabel Farthy. Opening a drawer under the counter, she produced a ham sandwich from a crackling paper bag.

“Come on up on the counter, kitty. Want a little bite? Come on up here.”

Dulcie leaped onto the counter, smiled sweetly, and accepted the offering, gobbling the ham but daintily spitting out the bread. At least the woman didn’t use mustard. Mabel stood stroking and talking to Dulcie until an emergency call pulled her away. When she turned to handle the radio, Dulcie walked along the counter to where she could see Joe peering out from behind the information desk. He couldn’t see down the hall but she could.

The coast was clear, not an officer in sight. She flicked her tail, and Joe streaked down the hall toward the offices.

Light spilled from two rooms. The one at the far end was where Harper had disappeared. When Joe vanished into the first room, Dulcie turned to study the communications layout.

This setup had far more space than the old communications desk, and Harper had purchased more and fancier equipment. The three new computers and three radios were indeed impressive. Mabel answered two more calls, sending her squad cars out, then took advantage of a lull in the action to offer Dulcie another morsel of ham, petting and talking to her. Oh, Dulcie thought, fate did smile upon the righteous feline. This woman was a pushover.

Dulcie remained on the counter for some time, shamelessly purring and rubbing her face against Mabel’s stroking hand, cementing their relationship. With the increased security in the remodeled department, Mabel and the two other dispatchers were going to be key players.

She just hoped one of the three didn’t turn out to be ailurophobic. Smiling up at Mabel, she purred a song of delight that left the officer beaming, and left Dulcie feeling that she could tame the most timorous cat hater. All she and Joe had to do was hang around the department and make cute, and they’d soon be regulars. Maybe they could even become department mascots, and she could turn her gig as official library cat over to the kit for a while.

This morning, when Cora Lee was taken straight from the Emergency Room into surgery, the kit had been a basket case, pacing and worrying until Wilma, in desperation, took the kit to work with her at the library. The kit had seemed to like that. Cora Lee was out of surgery by noon, minus her spleen, which Wilma said was not critical. Otherwise, Wilma said, she was doing well. Wilma had promised the kit that, if she behaved, she’d smuggle her in when Cora Lee was ready for visitors.

A cat in a briefcase? Or maybe concealed in a pot of fake flowers? Smiling, Dulcie pictured a gift box fitted out with a little door and perforated with air holes.

Following Max Harper’s scent down the hall, Joe tried to get the lay of the new design. The remodeling wasn’t yet finished, but most of the drywall was up and plastered, and ready to paint. The new bulletproof windows were in place, as well as bulletproof glass between the offices. He missed the huge squad room crowded with desks, with all the officers doing their paperwork and taking their phone calls in communal chaos. Now that Harper and the two detectives had private offices, Joe’s own life would be more difficult.

Dallas Garza sat at the desk in the first lighted office, deep in paperwork. But the instant Joe peered cautiously in around the door, Garza glanced up, suddenly all attention. “What the hell?”

Joe stepped out into plain sight, his paws sweating, telling himself to stay cool.

Garza laughed. “How the hell did you get in here?” He held out his hand to Joe. Annoyed, Joe approached him and rubbed his face against Garza’s fingers. This was so demeaning, to have to ingratiate himself-but then, he did like Garza. It wasn’t as if he was playing up to some stuffed-suit type.

“You trying to adopt me, cat? You move into my house, and now here you are in the station. What happened to our beefed-up security? You must really want to be a cop’s cat.”

Joe! The name is Joe!

Garza rubbed Joe’s ears the way he would a dog’s, gave him a pat on the butt, and turned back to his reports. Casually Joe trotted away, hoping the detective wouldn’t think to mention the incident to Max Harper. Harper would not be so forgiving. He soon found the report-writing room with its six computers, each in a private carrel, with bulletproof glass between. He found the coffee room, and had a little snack of someone’s leftover doughnut. But it was the small, padded interrogation room that really interested him.

The cubicle was just big enough for a little table and two chairs. A TV camera was mounted high in one corner. It would be connected to screens in other parts of the building, maybe in the communications room, Joe thought, and in Garza’s and Harper’s offices, areas where an enterprising cat might, with a cavalier smile and purr, pick up all manner of police intelligence.

The door to the basement was kept closed. He knew that the disaster center down there had been upgraded with state-of-the-art communications equipment, a large supply of emergency food and water, six narrow bunk beds lining one wall, and improved bathing facilities. Harper had described with some pride this brains of rescue operations, to be used in case of flood, earthquake, riot, or war.

Max Harper had created a new and improved crime-fighting plant with all the bells and whistles-efficient, but not cat friendly. Maybe Dulcie was right; maybe feline PR was the best antidote to all this upscale security.

Times change,Joe thought.Everything today hinges on good PR. Whether you’re a writer like Elliott Traynor or just an everyday cat sleuth, face it, networking’s become important.He guessed he could go along with the program, could put forth a little in-your-face chutzpah. If Dulcie could play lonesome kitty, so could he.

He didn’t care to see the updated basement firing range; he’d rather just imagine the cavernous room from seeing similar ones on TV. He didn’t like the smell of gunpowder. That stink brought back a couple of decidedly unpleasant moments in his career.

Harper had described very graphically to Clyde how the firing booths had been improved, with thicker barriers between them, and more sophisticated targets; with moving figures electrically operated and enough sound effects and flashing lights to unnerve any shooter. Joe was headed back toward the dispatcher, slipping past Harper’s lighted office hoping the captain wouldn’t look up from his desk, when the dispatcher buzzed Harper. “Long distance, Captain.”

“Tell them-”

“It’s New York. Some literary agent.”

“A what?”

“Literary agent,” she said. “An Adele McElroy.”

Drawing back into the shadows, Joe listened with a thrill of interest. He heard Harper pick up and identify himself, then the captain was quiet for a moment. Then, “Of course I know Traynor. He’s big news here in the village.”

Joe didn’t like hearing only one side of a conversation. He began to fidget. When Harper paused again, he beat it into the first empty office.

Leaping atop a makeshift desk of plywood balanced on sawhorses, he slipped the phone from its cradle.

Silence. Wrong line. He punched the lighted button.

“� all right,” Harper was saying, “as far as I know. Yes, Mrs. Traynor’s here with him. They’ve cast his play and are starting to rehearse. What is this about?”

“Maybe nothing,” the agent said. “Elliott is three months overdue on this book, and that’s not like him. He’s always ahead of schedule. And he’s acting so very strange, he has me worried. We’re good friends, Captain, social friends. But now suddenly he won’t talk to me. Won’t tell me what’s wrong, yet I have the distinct impression something’s very much amiss.

“I’m concerned about him, Captain Harper, and I didn’t know who else to call. Elliott’s always been so conscientious, enthusiastic about his work, always had the material to me months ahead of time-and he has always confided in me.

“I know about the cancer, of course, I know he’s continuing treatments out there. It may be nothing more than his not feeling well, the depression that can accompany ill health. I can’t get anything out of the medical people here. I’ve called his doctors but they won’t talk to me.

“I can’t help thinking there’s something really wrong-more than the illness. I know it sounds strange, but-do you know him well?”

“No, Ms. McElroy, I don’t. I really don’t see that-”

“This-this may sound like nothing to you, but he’s sending me chapters-a few at a time, which I asked him to do. Chapters that are� they have me upset about his mental state. They’re so� so inferior to his usual work�”

“That really isn’t-”

“We’re talking a half-million-dollar advance, here. I don’t think he’s in any condition to write this book. But he won’t talk to me. Nor will Vivi. This isn’t like Elliott. And I� I need help here, and I don’t know who else to call.”

Harper was silent.

“I called a friend of his, out there, a Gabrielle Row, asked her if Elliott was all right. She said she really didn’t know, that she didn’t see that much of them, that they were only casual acquaintances. I had thought differently, from Elliott. I had trouble getting her number, and I still haven’t reached Richard Casselrod, though I’ve left messages.”

“You want to fill me in on your relationship with Gabrielle and with Casselrod?”

“Well, it’s really Elliott and Vivi’s relationship. Gabrielle was here in the city last fall. She had lunch with Elliott. And Casselrod was here in December for the antiques show. He contacted Elliott and spent some time with him, something to do with research on the new book.”

As far as Joe knew, Casselrod hadn’t socialized with the Traynors in the village. Now, Harper was cool to the agent. “Can you be more specific about the problem?”

“It’s his writing, Captain. It’s� I know this sounds silly, but these last chapters are so very different from Elliott’s lyrical style, so different that I’m worried about his state of mind.”

“Ms. McElroy, there’s nothing the police can do about Mr. Traynor’s writing skills or his state of mind. I’m not some literary shrink committed to treating writer’s block. If Traynor should become violent or present some kind of danger�”

“Or, Captain, if he is in danger? I think that might be a possibility.”

“If he’s threatened or harmed, Ms. McElroy, of course it’s our business. But he would have to file a complaint.”

Why was Harper being so stuffy? And sarcastic! Joe felt a quick stab of anger at the man he admired. This woman sounded in real distress.

And he could understand why, having read Traynor’s latest work. If he were Traynor’s agent, he’d be worried, too. This Adele McElroy was three thousand miles away, trying to deal with a writer who seemed to have lost his grip, who seemed to be dumping a million-dollar novel down the drain. She needed some help here. Why wouldn’t Harper at least be civil? Joe wanted to tell her she should hop on a plane, get on out here, deal with Traynor in person.

“Captain Harper, let me give you my number. Would you call me� if you find anything you think would be of help?”

Harper grunted. She repeated her number. Hastily Joe memorized it, saying it over to himself. The handicap of being unable to write didn’t bother him often. But when a problem did arise, it really bugged him-just as Harper’s attitude was bugging him.

Though to be fair, he had to consider the matter from Harper’s view. This really wasn’t police business. Not unless a complaint was filed, as Harper said, or something happened to Traynor that would bring in the law. Max Harper was a cop, not a social worker.

And yet, Joe thought, knowing Harper, and despite what Harper told Adele McElroy, he bet the captain would go the extra mile, that he’d look into Traynor’s condition far more thoroughly than he had told Ms. McElroy he could do.

After all, there was plenty of indication that Traynor might be going funny in the brain. Like shooting raccoons in his pantry-some people might consider that strange. And Traynor’s extreme irritability. And Traynor demanding that Fern Barth play the lead, instead of Cora Lee, a decision any fool could see was softheaded. And Traynor’s two disappearing acts from local restaurants, apparently to avoid a face-to-face with Ryan Flannery. Added up, all this seemed to Joe Grey to amount to a decidedly squirrelly mental condition.

Sliding the phone back onto its cradle, Joe trotted down the hall, catching Dulcie’s eye where she sat on the dispatcher’s desk purring and preening. He watched Dulcie give the dispatcher an enthusiastic head rub, and drop to the floor meowing loudly.

Obediently Mabel Farthy came out from her cubicle. Maybe she had cats at home who had conditioned her to the imperative mew. Looking out carefully through the glass exterior door, she threw the lock and opened it.

The cats trotted through. Looking back at her, they had to hide a laugh. She stood at the glass watching them but when she saw them looking she grinned sheepishly and returned to her station.

The minute they were out of sight and earshot, Dulcie was all over Joe, lashing her tail, nudging him into the bushes so they could talk. “What was that about? What’s with Elliott Traynor? His agent called? What’s happening?”

Moving along through the bushes that edged the sidewalk, Joe was quiet. Dulcie nudged him harder. “What? Talk to me! Tell me what’s happening!”

Joe turned to look at her. She looked so bright and sweet, peering at him through the camellia bushes-exactly like the first time he’d seen her. She’d been peering out at him, then, her dark tabby stripes blending with the foliage, her pink mouth turned up in a smile, her emerald green eyes flashing. In that one moment, he’d been hooked. Head over heels. He’d never regretted it.

“Come on, Joe. Talk!”

“Traynor’s agent’s worried about him. Partly because his work’s overdue, partly because it isn’t up to his usual standards-she’s worried about his mental condition.

“She said she’d called Gabrielle, that Gabrielle said she hadn’t seen them, that they were barely acquainted. The agent said Elliott had told her otherwise.

“And she said Richard Casselrod spent some time with the Traynors in New York last December.”

Dulcie sat down beneath a camellia bush. “We haven’t seen Casselrod with Traynor or Vivi. I don’t-”

The kit appeared suddenly from nowhere, pushing under the bush beside Dulcie, batting at the fallen camellias. Pressing against Dulcie, she was very quiet. Dulcie nosed at her. “What, Kit? You feel all right?”

“Fine,” said the kit in a small voice.

“You miss Cora Lee,” Dulcie said. “She’ll be home soon. Didn’t you enjoy the library today?” Despite the success of Cora Lee’s operation, everyone was concerned about her. “She’ll be home soon, Kit. Home to Wilma’s house until she feels stronger. Maybe you can sleep on her bed, if you’re careful of her incision.” Dulcie looked at Joe. “We need to-”

“Check out Casselrod,” Joe said. “See what we can find. Maybe letters or an address book, something to connect him to the Traynors. And don’t you wonder about Gabrielle?” Joe gave her a long look, and sprang away, heading for the shops south of Ocean.

Buffeted by the wind, and dodging tourists’ feet, within ten minutes they were across the village and up onto the roofs of Hidalgo Plaza. Here on the tiles and shingles, the wind blew harder. Unimpeded by the barriers of solid walls, it shook the tops of the oak trees, the gusts so violent that it flattened the three cats against the slanting peaks. They had to dig in their claws and wait for the hardest blows to ease. Pummeled and prodded, they at last reached the lighted attic window of Gabrielle Row’s sewing workroom.

The open curtains revealed five sewing machines, three padded worktables as long as beds, and racks of hanging clothes and stacks of fabric. Beneath the fluorescent lights, Gabrielle stood alone leaning over a table cutting out a pattern pinned to a length of heavy white silk.

“Could that be Catalina’s wedding gown?” Dulcie said. “Or her nightie? Spanish brides had elaborate nightgowns.”

The kit wriggled close between them, her black-and-brown fur tugged by the wind. “So far away, that other world,” the kit whispered.

“What other world?” Joe said uneasily. He didn’t like the kit’s dreaming. “That talk isn’t going to get us Gabrielle’s address book.”

“Worlds beyond worlds,” the kit said. “Centuries all gone, in another time. An address book? But we can just slip in through the window. Help me push.”

“Not here,” Joe said. “We just wanted to make sure her apartment was empty.” And fighting the wind he took off again over the roofs, then along an oak branch above an alley; then up a peak so steep they slid as they climbed and nearly tumbled down the far side, approaching Gabrielle’s small third-floor window.

Though the glass, they could smell spices, and coffee grounds. Three potted plants stood on the deep sill, between the dark pane and the drawn curtain. The room beyond was dark. They pawed uselessly at the glass. It looked like it had never been opened. All the other apartment windows but one were inaccessible even to a cat, all faced a sheer, two-story drop to the street. Not a vine, not a trellis, not even a protruding windowsill.

The larger window, which was tucked away around the corner among the rooftops, was heavily draped, too, emitting only the thinnest glow at one side, as if from a nightlight.

“Double locked,” Joe said, peering sideways along the glass. “A heavy sliding bolt.”

“Listen,” Dulcie whispered. They all heard it, a click from somewhere deep within the apartment.

Another click, and a soft thud. No lights came on. They’d heard no door open and close as if Gabrielle had finished work and hurried home. She’d hardly had time to do that; they’d come themselves swift as the wind, blown by the wind straight across the rooftops.

From the kitchen, a stealthy sliding noise, like a drawer being pulled out. Another. And another. Then cupboard doors clicking open. Belatedly, a light went on in the kitchen, throwing a shadow on the opaque curtain; a shadow that rose tall, then dropped low as the searcher moved and knelt, opening cupboard doors.

Unable to see in, and unable to reach any other window or try the front door, whose stairway they knew quite well opened from a locked foyer, the cats waited with tail-lashing frustration. The sounds ceased with a final click, and soft footsteps went away again, then a thud as of the front door closing.

Peering over the edge of the roof above the lobby door, they watched a figure emerge, a tall man in a tan coat, with a floppy hat pulled down low. He hurried to the corner and disappeared around it, a slim man with a long, easy stride.

Racing across the shingles they looked down at the side street where he moved quickly toward a tan Infinity. He pulled his hat off and slid in. He had light brown hair, neatly trimmed. The car was a sleek model with curving lines and a sunroof. As its lights came on, Joe leaned so far from the roof that little more than his rump remained on the shingles. When the car roared off he hung there a moment then backed away from the edge.

“2ZJZ417,” Joe said, smiling. “That’s the car from the Pumpkin Coach that almost hit us.” He looked away where the Infinity had disappeared. “Could be Augor Prey. The guy fits his description. Let’s have a closer look.” And they took off across the roof and down a pine tree to the street. Who knew what scent the tires may have left on the blacktop? Whatever might be there, Joe wanted to find it before wind and passing cars wiped it away.

22 [��������: pic_23.jpg]

The street was empty except for two parked cars half a block away. Despite the wind, the smell of exhaust still clung along the concrete. Where the tan Infinity had parked, the pavement was patterned with fragments of crumbled eucalyptus leaves, already stirred by the wind, deposited in the shape of tire grids and decorated with crushed green berries.

“Pyracantha berries,” Joe said, sniffing. “Don’t get that stuff on your nose, Kit. It’s poison.” The tomcat sat down on the curb. “If that was Augor Prey, maybe he’s renting a room, like Harper thought.”

How many places in the village rented rooms, and had eucalyptus and pyracantha by the street or by a parking space? Two dozen? Three dozen? The cats looked at each other and shrugged.

“What else have we got?” Dulcie said.

Most likely the guy hadn’t been lucky enough to get a garage. Garages in the village were scarcer than declawed cats in a room full of pit bulls. Even a single garage built for a 1920s flivver was a premium item much in demand. The first place that came to Joe’s mind was up the hills on the north side. The other house was a block from the beach; both had a eucalyptus tree, pyracantha bushes, and rooms to rent.

“But before we go chasing after Augor Prey,” Joe said, “let’s give Casselrod a try. See if we can find a connection between him and Traynor.” He was silent a moment, his yellow eyes narrowed, his look turned inward as if listening to some interior wisdom.

“What?” she said softly.

“I keep thinking we’re missing something. Something big and obvious, right in front of our noses.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know, Dulcie. Are the chests the connection between Susan’s breakin and Fern’s murder? Are a few old Spanish chests enough to kill for?”

“The chests, and Catalina’s letters-at some ten thousand each. How many letters were there? Ten letters is a hundred thousand bucks.” The concept of that much cash, to a cat, was surreal. Did you count that kind of money by how many cases of caviar that would buy?

“And there are not only Catalina’s letters,” Joe said, “but Marcos Romero’s answers. According to the research in Traynor’s office, those letters were smuggled back and forth for years-by travelers, the servants of travelers, by vaqueros herding cattle. Even by some of the mission Indians.”

He rose impatiently. “We’re not going to learn anything sitting here in the gutter.” He headed up the pine tree again, and away across the roofs, Dulcie and the kit close behind him, fighting the wind, heading for Casselrod’s Antiques.

In through the high, loose window they moved swiftly, and through the dusty attic presided over by the motionless sewing dummy. She stood stoic and silent, as if disapproving of their trespass. The kit stared at her, and hissed, then approached her cautiously. Sniffing at her iron stand, she turned away with disgust, and was soon caught up in the attic’s jumbled maze, lost among Casselrod’s ancient and dusty collections. Dulcie glanced back at her only once before following Joe, galloping down the two flights to the main floor.

The first order of business was to call Harper.

Because the information they’d collected was so fragmented, they had delayed that sensitive call, hoping to put some of the pieces together into a tip that was worth passing on. Joe couldn’t remember when a case had been so frustrating.

He wondered sometimes if his phone voice carried some disturbing feline echo that made Max Harper uneasy; some unidentifiable overtone, some exotic nonhuman timbre that unsettled the captain.

Harper was an animal-oriented guy, attuned to the moods and body language of dogs and horses, to their subtle communications. What might such a person detect in the timbre of Joe’s phone calls that another human might not sense?

Heading across Casselrod’s dark showroom into the office, he leaped to the battered secretarial desk, slipped the phone off its cradle, and punched in the number of Harper’s cell phone. Following him up, Dulcie pressed her face close to his to listen, her whiskers tickling his nose.

Harper answered curtly. His voice cut in and out as if he might be moving through traffic. Joe knew he could call the station for a better connection, but he never liked doing that.

“You are looking for Augor Prey, Captain. He may be driving a tan, two-door Infinity. Fairly new model. License 2ZJZ417.”

Harper repeated the number, not wasting time on small talk. Long ago he had quit asking the snitch useless questions. Maybe, Joe thought, he was getting Harper trained.

“That man tossed Gabrielle French’s apartment this evening,” Joe said. “And there’s another matter that might interest you.”

“Go on.”

“Elliott Traynor has sold at least two valuable old letters written by-”

“Hold it,” Harper said, “you’re cutting out. Wait until I turn the corner.”

There was a pause.

“Okay,” Harper said, coming in more clearly. “Letters written by who?”

“Catalina Ortega-Diaz, the heroine of his play. Traynor sold those two letters for over twenty thousand bucks to a San Francisco dealer.”

“What does that-?”

“The history of Catalina tells not only about her letters but about the carved chests in which she kept them-like the three taken from the Pumpkin Coach window, when Fern Barth was killed. Vivi Traynor seems interested in similar chests, as is Richard Casselrod. The white chest that Casselrod took from Gabrielle Row at the McLeary yard sale could be one of the group of seven. Casselrod took it apart, and there was a secret compartment in the bottom, plenty big enough to hold a few letters.”

Joe didn’t wait for Harper to respond. That was all he had to tell the captain. He punched the disconnect, shoved the phone back in its cradle, and leaped from the desk to a bank of file cabinets, then onto the chair before the rolltop desk.

The lock was engaged, as before. Inserting a claw into the keyhole, he felt delicately for its inner workings.

He tried for some time to line up the tumblers, with no luck. From two flights above them, they could hear the kit leaping and playing among the stored furniture. The lock was more cleverly fashioned than Joe had thought. Both cats tried until their paws felt raw, then Joe tried the metal file cabinets, with no more success. To lose against an inanimate object gave him the same feeling as being caged, a helpless anger gripping him. The drawers were as impenetrable as if Richard Casselrod had invoked some kind of office voodoo. Joe and Dulcie ended up hissing irritably at each other as they pawed through Casselrod’s stacked papers.

They found no mention of Elliott Traynor.

“Maybe,” Dulcie said, “it was Fern Barth who put Casselrod onto the letters.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Say that Fern heard about the play last summer, when Mark King was writing the music. If she wanted the part, she’d have gotten a copy of the script the minute Molena Point Little Theater decided to do it.”

“So?”

“Will you stop pacing those bookshelves! How can I talk to you!”

He sat down on the top shelf beside an ancient leather dictionary.

“Fern reads the play. She talks to Casselrod about the story and about Catalina’s letters. Casselrod gets interested, begins to wonder if there really were letters. He does some research, finds that there were, and wonders how much more information Traynor has in his possession.

“When Casselrod goes to New York, he gets in touch with Elliott. Elliott has to know the letters are valuable. Casselrod’s an antiques dealer, he could help Traynor search for them.”

“That doesn’t wash. Why, if Traynor thought there was money in the lost letters, would he deal Casselrod in?”

“He has cancer, Joe. He might be dying, or at the least is very ill. He wants to find the letters, but he doesn’t have the time or the energy to pursue such a search. And he doesn’t have a contact on the coast that he trusts.”

“He has Vivi,” Joe said. “He could send her out. He doesn’t even know if the letters are still on the West Coast, after some hundred and fifty years.”

Dulcie’s green eyes widened. “Would you trust Vivi to run that kind of search? Competently? And not cheat your socks off?”

Joe smiled.

She said, “Casselrod is based here on the coast. He has contacts among the antiques dealers and wholesalers, he’s in the perfect position to search for the chests and the letters. Traynor will supply the research, find out all he can. Casselrod will do the legwork.

“Casselrod comes home to Molena Point, starts talking to dealers, looking in other antiques shops, checking out the private collections. They figure collectors might want the chests, but probably very few people know about the letters.

“But then Fern finds out that Traynor and Casselrod have joined forces; that her own boss didn’t include her, after she was the one who told him about the letters. She gets her back up.”

“A lot of conjecture,” Joe said. “And how do you explain Traynor giving Fern the lead inThorns of Gold?”

Dulcie shrugged. “Fern gets mad, wants to get back at them. Say she can’t find any hold on Casselrod. Maybe she starts digging into Traynor’s past, and finds some dirt on him, maybe some illegal business dealings. She trades her silence for the lead in the play, for the chance to be Catalina.”

“That’s reaching, Dulcie.”

“Maybe. But you keep saying there’s something we’re not seeing. Maybe that’s it.”

“So, say you’re right. What does-did Fern have on Traynor?”

“That’s the mouse that doesn’t want to come out of its hole,” she said softly. She began to pace along the bookshelves lashing her tail, thinking, working off frustration.

When a scent caught at her, pulling her back, she sniffed deeply at a leather-bound set of Dickens.

“But Gabrielle was in New York, too,” Joe was saying. “Maybe she’s part of this, maybe�”

Dulcie wasn’t listening. She crouched, frozen, staring at the old handsome set of classics. Her tail was very still, then began to twitch. Her whiskers and ears flat, she stalked the leather-bound volumes.

She paused. Carefully she pawed at the books’ spines, trying to separate them.

The leather looked old, marred, and faded, but it wasn’t crumbly like old leather. The books didn’t smell like leather. Looking along the tops of the volumes, Dulcie smiled. Joe watched her with interest.

Dulcie wasn’t a library cat for nothing, she knew how to hook her claws behind a book and slide it from the shelves. But these babies wouldn’t budge. It was all the two cats could do, together, to pull the set out. Even as it balanced on the edge of the shelf, the books stuck together. One last hard pull, and they leaped aside as the set fell to the table.

It was only a two-foot drop, but the books sounded like a load of bricks dumped from the back of a truck. And they were still stuck all together-one of those clever “hide your valuables” numbers advertised in trinket catalogs.

“No one,” Joe said, laughing, “certainly not Richard Casselrod, would be dumb enough to hide anything in this.”

“So why is it locked? Maybe it’s so obvious, he figured no one would bother to look.”

Joe pawed at the lock, certain that this one, too, would resist them. But after four tries something snapped, a faint, clinking sound, and they slid the back of the set away to reveal a hollow brass interior, dry and clean and smelling sharply metallic.

A brown envelope lay within, a small, padded mailer.

“I don’t believe this,” Joe muttered. But carefully he clawed the envelope out, its cushioned lining crackling. They were working at its little metal clasp when the kit came charging down the stairs, exploding onto the table.

“What?” Joe said, alarmed. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” said the kit, surprised. “I just got lonely.” She brightened with interest as Joe reached a paw into the crinkling envelope and slid out a letter.

It was fragile and old and musty, the ink faded, the handwriting thin and beautiful.

“Cara mia,” Dulcie whispered, picking out a few words she knew from the carefully written Spanish. The paper was so frail that she dared touch it only with the gentlest paw. Hesitantly she lifted the page and turned it over to the small, scrolled signature.

“Catalina,” she said softly.

Joe sat looking, twitching a whisker. The kit was very quiet, sniffing the scent of old paper. Dulcie tried to find other Spanish words that she recognized, but she could not. The handwriting was fine and elegant and, in itself, hard for her to read. “What will we do with it?” she asked Joe. “We can’t take it with us. If it blew away, if we lost it� Maybe we should put it back where we found it? So Casselrod won’t-”

“No way. No matter what kind of monkey wrench we throw in the works, we’re not leaving this here.”

With misgivings, she helped him slide the letter back into the padded brown envelope and claw-closed the metal clasp. A letter worth ten thousand dollars, which they would have to carry between them, across the windy rooftops.

They spent a long time working at the brass box to shift it back into the shelves. They had to push books under to lift it up, tipping it to insert one book at a time until they had it to the height of the shelf, then shoving it back where they’d found it. The operation seemed to take forever. But maybe, with the fake set of Dickens back in its exact place, Casselrod wouldn’t look at it for some time. At last they headed for the attic, Dulcie carrying the envelope in her teeth.

“Interesting,” Joe said, trotting up the wooden steps, “that Casselrod put the letter there instead of in the big combination safe downstairs.”

Her voice was muffled by the envelope. “Did he put it there? Or did Fern? It smells of both of them.” As they dropped from Casselrod’s attic window onto the windy balcony, she concentrated on keeping the envelope from being snatched from her mouth. Starting across the roofs, they held it between them, fighting the scudding gusts. When their passage startled a sleeping bird that flew up in their faces, the kit took a swipe at it; but she let it go and came chasing after them, her galloping paws thudding on the shingles. Only the kit could run the rooftops sounding like a herd of horses, yet could race, when she chose, as silent as a soaring owl. Twice the wind snatched the envelope nearly from their teeth; they could only pray that the letter wasn’t damaged. At last the three cats were off the roofs, backing down a pine tree two blocks from Joe’s house, Joe’s teeth clamped into the edge of the envelope. As he looked ahead to the white Cape Cod, suddenly he ached to be inside his own house, warm and full of supper and settled down in his clawed and comfortable chair.

How lonely the house looked. Not even the porch light was on, and no car in the drive.

But no matter, it was home, he just wanted to be inside. Wanted his creature comforts-some supper, and a few hours snooze, and he’d be ready to roll again.

But then, padding up the dark steps, he imagined his home turned into a restaurant with lights burning everywhere and cars filling the street and crowds of strangers shouting and laughing in the rooms that were his own, and he didn’t like that scene.

Hastily dragging the envelope, with Dulcie and the kit close behind him, he pushed through his cat door into the welcoming dark and the good familiar smells of home-smells of old Rube, of the household cats, of kibble and spaghetti and furniture polish and Clyde’s running shoes, all the comforting mix of aromas that had never been so welcome.

23 [��������: pic_24.jpg]

The first thing the three cats saw as they entered Joe’s darkened house, even before the plastic flap of Joe’s cat door stopped slapping behind them, was the sheet of white paper that had been lodged securely under the foot of Joe’s well-clawed lounge chair.

A note? Clyde had left a note?

Warily approaching, Joe saw the familiar handwriting. What could be so important that Clyde would leave a note in the middle of the living room, where anyone could see it? What if Ryan came back with him? That would be cute. How was Clyde going to explain a note left under the leg of the chair? Joe could imagine him rushing into the house ahead of her, snatching up the scrap of paper and shoving it in his pocket.

The message was cryptic enough.I’m out with Ryan. Goodies in refrigerator. Don’t make yourselves sick.

Joe read it twice, looking for some concealed meaning. What uncharacteristic fit of generosity had prompted Clyde to leave treats for them? Probably some leather-hard remnant of an over-done hamburger that he wanted to get rid of.

But Dulcie was pacing and nervous. “Come on, Joe. We have to hide this thing.”

“What about the bookcase? A bookcase is where we found it.”

“Oh, right. In the bookcase where every housebreaker since books were invented has looked for hidden money, where half the doddering old folks in the world hide their cash.”

“Where, then? The freezer, where everyone who doesn’t read books keeps their valuables?”

She looked pointedly at his chair. “No sensible human wants to sit in, let alone touch, that monstrosity.”

Joe shrugged. He’d hidden valuables there before, and not too long ago. Had hidden jewels and stolen money during that rash of thefts that accompanied the Patty Rose lookalike contest. What a week that had been, with all those beautiful wouldbe stars, and the retired movie star herself, all tangled up in two murders.

“Lift the cushion, Joe, so we don’t damage the letter any more than we already have.”

Nosing the seat cushion up, shoving his shoulder under it, he watched Dulcie lift the envelope in her teeth and gently slide it into the dark recess, accompanied by the faint crinkle of the bubble-wrap lining.

“That’ll do until we find something better,” she said. “Only Clyde would know to look there-and it’s a sure thing no one will sit there.” She paused to consider Joe. “No chance he’d be sending that chair to the Goodwill anytime soon?”

“No chance Clyde wants to meet his maker anytime soon.”

When, some months back, Charlie Getz had helped Clyde redecorate his living room, Joe’s chair had been a matter of heated discussion. Charlie had wanted to replace the chair with a new one and had talked Clyde into it, generating an argument so volatile that at one point Joe had had both Charlie and Clyde shouting at him.

Charlie said his chair belonged in the city dump. But she’d apologized later. She had been, Joe thought, truly contrite. Joe had prevailed, outshouting, outswearing, and finally shaming them both into acceptance. He’d had that chair since he was a half-grown kitten, since he first came to live with Clyde. That was the first time he had ever seen Clyde or Charlie promoting an act to hurt a poor little cat, and he told them so.

The Damen living room, in spite of being decorated around Joe’s chair, had become, under Charlie’s ministrations, a handsome, cozy, and welcoming retreat. Charlie’s artful accessorizing had made his chair look more than acceptable. “It is,” Charlie had decided, “the epitome of shabby chic.” She had selected, to harmonize with it, a handsome group of African baskets and sculpture, all done in tones of black and brown. These, with Charlie’s framed animal drawings, white-matted against the tan walls, gave the room additional style. And the black-and-brown African throw rugs over the pale carpet tied Joe’s chair right into the decor as one more rare and valuable artifact. The carved bookcases and entertainment center and tables had cost a bundle, but Clyde had simply sold another antique car. The room looked great. The humans were happy. Joe was happy. The night Charlie completed the room by hanging the newly framed drawings, she had taken Clyde and the cats out to dinner. Celebrating the fact that they had all been able to agree, she had treated them to broiled lobster in the patio of their favorite seafood cafe.

Glancing up at the kit, always amused that her black-and-brown coloring fit so perfectly into the room, Joe though it would be a pity to even drink of selling this house, now that it was looking so good.

With the envelope safely hidden, the three cats headed for the kitchen, the responsibility of Catalina’s ten-thousand-dollar letter weighing heavily on Joe. What, ultimately, were they to do with it?

They could make a discreet phone call to Max Harper or Detective Garza, then leave the envelope at the back door of the station. That would put the ball in their court. Except, with carpenters and painters still busy on the premises, the fate of a lone envelope could be uncertain.

They could drop the envelope at Dallas Garza’s cottage door; or they could tell Clyde about it. Let Clyde take over, though this suggestion was totally against Joe’s nature.

Maybe, after all, he’d just leave it where it was, wait to see what developed.

Standing on the kitchen counter hooking his claws in the refrigerator door, Joe pushed backward, wrenching it open. He caught it with a fast paw, before it swung closed again.

On the bottom shelf lay a takeout tray glistening with clear wrap to keep it fresh. This was no collection of dry leftovers, this was a work of art, an elegant and expensive party tray, a concoction from Jolly’s Deli, meant for true indulgence. This was their little snack? Joe wondered if he’d read the note right.

But the tray had been placed in his personal area, on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator.

“To what,” Dulcie said, “do we owe this? Has Clyde not been well?”

They removed the tray carefully and laid it on the linoleum. “Maybe he’s trying to make up for past cruelties,” Joe said, clawing at the plastic wrap. The tray contained an assortment as fine as any George Jolly had ever put together. There was imported Brie, Beluga caviar, Alaskan smoked salmon, king crab, shrimp salad, cold mushroom quiche, spinach souffle, four small cannoli, and brandy-flavored sponge cake, a treat that most cats would give up eight of their lives for but would find dangerous to their digestion. Enough party food, in short, to give the three cats heartburn for a month if they did not employ some restraint. The two older cats tried to eat slowly, savoring each bite. But the moment the wrap was off, the kit plowed in as if she hadn’t seen food in weeks, slurping, guzzling, smearing the floor and her whiskers.

Joe glanced at Dulcie as if she ought to teach the kit some manners, but Dulcie was too busy enjoying her own supper. When at last they were sated, they pawed the plastic wrap back over the uneaten portions and, like the good cats they were, they put the tray back in the refrigerator. In case Clyde would like a bite later.

With their bellies full, they curled up together in a heap on Joe’s chair, atop Catalina’s hidden letter. They were asleep in seconds.

They barely woke when Clyde came in, didn’t hear him go to bed. They slept until the small hours called to them, the bright and imperative predawn summons that routs all night predators long before the sun appears-that shot of psychological adrenaline that has belonged to cats since the world began. This was the witching hour, the hour when the village was its most silent and when, on the hills, the succulent little rabbits danced.

But tonight, they hunted human prey.

Pushing out through Joe’s cat door, they galloped across the village watching for marauding raccoons and the occasional coyote that might wander the village streets. Overhead, every star that ever burned seemed to crowd the rooftops. They had chosen five locations where the man in the tan Infinity could be staying, all houses with rooms to rent and with the requisite eucalyptus tree and pyracantha bushes. They separated before they reached Ocean Avenue, Joe heading for a cottage to the south, the kit for the one nearest the shore, and Dulcie for a motel just beyond the courthouse. The kit had been given specific instructions and stern warnings about what not to do.

Many villagers didn’t like eucalyptus trees, those handsome, aromatic imports from New Zealand that had so changed the face of California. In a high wind, their trunks broke too easily; and their wood was so full of oil that they created considerable hazard in case of a nearby fire. But other villagers loved them; and to a cat, certain varieties were excellent to climb, with open spaces between their wide-reaching branches, and clumped foliage that could conceal. And tonight those landmark trees might lead them to Susan Brittain’s thief and maybe to Fern’s killer.

Dulcie, trotting away from Joe and the kit, galloped by the courthouse, looking ahead to the tall, rangy eucalyptus that thrust above the cypresses and pines, its silver foliage pale against the night. Beyond it stood a small, old motel of ten cottages surrounding a patio. The softly lighted sign read,No Vacancies. No Pets.The only parking, besides the street itself, was around back, four spaces; first come, first served. Trotting across the neatly tended patio garden between massed blooms of geranium and lavender, and watching for the motel cat, who, being elderly, was probably still asleep, she scrambled up the six-foot gate. Perched atop the fence, she looked down at the bare-dirt parking strip.

A line of pyracantha bushes bordered the drive, and on the narrow space, parked two behind two, were a Ford convertible, a white Olds coupe, a blue Chevy S10 pickup, and a black Jaguar. No Infinity, tan or otherwise. And nothing of that description was out on the nearby streets when she circled several blocks looking. She gave it up at last, and went to meet Joe and the kit. Joe, meanwhile, was trapped in the bedroom of a young woman.

The lady had woken suddenly when Joe jumped to the dresser, though he’d made only a tiny thump. Looking sleepily around the room, she had pulled the blankets up against the early dawn chill, but then had risen to shut the window, effectively trapping Joe inside, unless he could slide the glass up again. She hadn’t noticed the hole in the screen, or that it was unlatched. She had apparently been too sleepy to notice a cat blending into the shadows around the dresser. Joe wondered if all the young women of her generation slept in oversized Tshirts with pictures and statements of a personal nature stenciled on them. This lady liked champagne, diamonds, and hot cars. The room was on the first floor of an old, brown, shingled rooming house sheltered by a large eucalyptus. Joe had found the Infinity parked behind, license 2ZJZ417. Oily leaves stained its sunroof, and from the pyracantha bushes that grew along the drive, green berries were crushed beneath its wheels.

Sniffing along the edge of the driver’s door he had detected the scent of a man, of shoe polish, and of sugar doughnuts. He had followed the trail to the front door of the building, which of course was locked. A small, demure sign by the door said Do Not Disturb Resident. This meant, in village jargon, that the owner rented out a room or two, possibly illegally, a common practice in Molena Point, where any kind of housing was at a premium. He had tried the first open window, had smelled sugar doughnuts within, and had entered.

He’d found the doughnut bag wadded up in the trash, and only the young woman in residence. Had Prey been here, visiting her, and already left? Joe waited until she was breathing deeply again, then fought the window open a few inches. He heard her stir, but he was out before she saw him.

Leaping to the next sill, peering in through the glass, he listened to ragged male snoring. Even through the closed window, he smelled the same male scent as on the car, as well as the sugar-sweet doughnuts. Maybe the two tenants had shared a little snack.

He could detect no smell of dog-but the guy had dumped the dalmatian. Maybe the dog had caused trouble with the landlady, maybe dogs weren’t allowed. Maybe the guy had tried to smuggle it in and got caught, so he left it somewhere.

What kind of a man would abandon a nice dog? Couldn’t he find some other solution? Board the animal? At least take him to the pound if there was no alternative, not just dump him, frightened and hungry.

The man slept naked in the single bed, the sheet thrown back, one arm draped over the side. Enough starlight washed into the room so Joe could see his face clearly. Thin cheeks, muddy-brown hair, pale brows and lashes, his ears set close to his head. His nose was long and thin, with slightly pinched nostrils. His forehead was high, for such a young man, rising into a widow’s peak. A fresh scar burned across his brow, red and puffy, pushing up into his hair just where Susan Brittain’s intruder had been wounded.

The window was locked tight, Joe could see where the bolt had been thrown. But above him to his left, the high, narrow bathroom window was cracked open, the occupant assuming correctly that no human burglar could get through that small opening.

Scorching up a bottlebrush tree that crowded against the house, Joe jumped to the sill and hung, scrabbling onto the narrow ledge. Clawing a hole in the screen, he unhooked the latch and slipped inside.

He balanced for a moment on the sill, looking, then dropped to the cluttered sink among a jumble of shaving gear, antiseptic bottles, adhesive tape, and oversized Band-Aids. A tangle of wet towels hung on the two rods. The walls smelled of mildew. Slipping silently down to the linoleum, without his usual heavy thud, he moved into the bedroom.

The mismatched furniture was scarred and old, possibly purchased from the Goodwill with just this rental in mind. A calendar of the Grand Canyon hung above the bed, a stone landscape without any hint of plant or animal life, so dry looking it made Joe’s paws feel parched. A half-eaten doughnut lay on the dresser next to the guy’s billfold. Leaping up, Joe nosed the billfold open and had a look at the driver’s license.

The face matched that of his sleeping friend. The name given was Lenny Wells-Susan’s dog-walking companion. The address was in San Francisco. He went through the billfold, stubbornly pulling out credit cards with his teeth. He found no other identification. But this guy with the fresh scar on his forehead had to be Augor Prey.

Using teeth and claws, he managed to slide the little plastic cards back into the tight leather compartments, leaving curious indentations for Prey to puzzle over, and coveting, not for the first time, the luxury of human thumb and fingers. He searched the dresser, easing the drawers open, trying his best to be quiet and not make scratching sounds, and glancing up frequently to be sure Prey hadn’t awakened.

He needn’t have worried; the guy slept like the dead, didn’t make a wiggle. Maybe he’d OD’d on too many sugar doughnuts. Finding nothing in the drawers but a few pairs of jockey shorts and athletic socks, and nothing taped beneath the drawers against the rough undersides, he inspected beneath the dresser.

Nothing for his trouble but dust in his nose and whiskers. When he crawled beneath the bed, his inventory included five large dust balls, three gum wrappers, and a wadded-up paper bag, which, when he got it open, proved to be empty. He found nothing remotely resembling Catalina Ortega-Diaz’s letters.

When he shouldered the closet door open, he found the interior bare except for a row of rusty wire hangers. Apparently Prey preferred the backs of chairs for keeping the wrinkles from his jacket and spare shirts. Not until Joe slipped stealthily up onto the bed itself and approached Prey by padding across the blankets did his search pay off.

Watching Prey, ready to leap free from grabbing hands, slipping to within inches of Prey’s stubbled face and redolent night breath, Joe pushed an exploring paw beneath the pillow.

Under the pillow lay a gun, just beneath Prey’s head. Joe could smell burnt gunpowder, as if the piece had been fired recently but not cleaned. The cold barrel lay against his paw; he touched along its length, careful to stay away from the trigger, then gingerly he pressed a paw against the back of the cylinder.

He could feel one shell casing, in the little exposed part of the cylinder that protruded out beyond the barrel. That could mean anything. A full load of five or six shots? A partial load? Only one bullet, in that particular chamber? Or even a spent shell. But surely no one would fire a gun and leave the empty shell casings in the cylinder.

He sure wasn’t going to try to open the cylinder and eject the shells to find out, even if he could manage that. Not without some pistol training-which he didn’t think was in his immediate future. And not while crouching on the bed with his face just inches from Augor Prey’s face.

He had no way to know if this was the gun that shot Fern-but it sure did smell of burnt gunpowder. Slowly he backed away, watching the sleeping man, moving softly across the bed. When his heart stopped pounding, he leaped to the dresser again and sat for some time studying Prey.

The wound on Prey’s forehead was still angry, and darkly scabbed over. Joe could see the rectangle of sticky lines where adhesive tape had been pulled off. When Prey stirred and moved his hand, Joe dropped down to the rug again as silently as he could, and headed for the bathroom.

Onto the counter, among the jumble of toiletries, one leap to the high windowsill, and he pushed out beneath the screen.

Dropping to the grass, he headed through the village, for the house just beyond Molena Point’s tallest eucalyptus tree, where the kit had gone to look for Prey. There must, he thought, be another two dozen houses in the village with eucalyptus trees and pyracantha bushes; and who knew how many of those rented rooms. He and Dulcie, picking the three they knew best, had gotten lucky. Trotting along the sidewalk beside the deep flower gardens of a handsome Tudor cottage, he wondered if his anonymous report of the revolver would be enough for Harper to get a warrant, either for Prey’s arrest or to search the premises. Ahead stood the hundred-foot eucalyptus, at the edge of the little sand park.

The park, running between the Bakery Restaurant and the beach, was a block-square oasis of low sand dunes, twisted cypress trees, and patches of hardy shore plants. The eucalyptus stood on the corner, its pale bark peeled off in long rolls like parchment, its white arms stretching against the night sky. Among its clumps of long silver leaves, he could see something dark, high up; something alive and clinging, wriggling nervously from the highest branch. He caught the gleam of frightened eyes.

“Wow,” said the kit from that great distance.

“Come down,” Joe said softly. “Come down, Kit.”

“Can’t,” bawled the kit. She clung like a dark little owl, high and alone in the night sky.

“What do you mean, can’t? Why did you go up there? You’re not afraid?”

“Tomcat chased me up. I’ve never been this high.”

“Where’s the tomcat?”

“I slashed his nose. He went down again, and Dulcie chased him.”

Joe looked around for Dulcie but didn’t see her. He didn’t hear any anguished cries from the neighboring yards. “What tomcat?”

“A spotted tomcat, in that house I looked in. Came right through the window at me! Mad! Really, really mad!”

Joe Grey sighed. “Come on down, Kit. Come down now!”

She turned on the branch, heading down headfirst.

“No! Don’t do that! Turn around, and back down. You know how to back down a tree with your claws holding you.” He was shouting, angry and terrified that she’d fall, and praying that no one was out walking this late. Or that some homeless soul had decided to sleep in the sand park and would wake highly entertained by their little drama. Why was it that a cat who knew better would lose all good sense when high up in a tree? Why would any sensible cat insist on starting down headfirst, knowing very well that she would be unable to stop herself?

“Turn around, Kit!”

She turned, wobbly with fear, clinging onto one small branch. She started to slip.

“Get your claws in the tree. Back down with your claws! Watch where the bark is loose, don’t�”

She backed straight into the loose bark and slid fast, the bark curling down with her. Frantically she scrabbled and grabbed and nearly fell, then got her claws into a hard place. He could feel his own claws clutching, trying to help her. But at last she seemed to have a good hold. She backed down slowly, though he could still hear her claws ripping the bark. Where was Dulcie? Why had she run off chasing some worthless tomcat? The bark slid again, and he crouched to leap up after the kit, to break her fall.

A voice stopped him. “You’ll only make things worse.”

Dulcie pushed against him, her whiskers brushing his, both of them staring up at that small, scrambling creature. “She has to do it on her own. She has to know she can.”

“If she doesn’t break her silly neck.”

They waited, not breathing, watching the kit fight her way down. She dropped the last six feet into the sand, crouched there panting, then slogged across the sand to them, her paws seeming heavy as lead, her head and ears down, her fluffy tail dragging.

They praised her for coming down so cleverly, then scolded her for going up so stupidly high. They licked and nuzzled her and praised her again until she began to smile. Then they headed for Jolly’s alley, just to cheer her. They were all three stuffed from Clyde’s costly deli plate, but nothing else would delight the kit as much as that little side trip. Trotting close together, soon they turned onto the brick walk, beneath the little potted trees. Light from the two decorative lamps reflected in the stained glass doors and mullioned shop windows. The jasmine vine that hid Jolly’s garbage cans breathed its sweet scent onto the cool night breeze.

But the bowls that George Jolly had set out last evening had been licked clean, the other village cats had been at them. They sniffed with interest the lingering scents of vanished smoked salmon and seafood salad, a little nosegay of mouthwatering goodness where no scrap remained. Facing the empty bowls, the kit hunched down with disappointment.

“You’re not starving, Kit,” Dulcie said. She leaped to a bench beside a potted euryops tree, and stretched out beneath its yellow flowers. Above the tree, the stars burned like the eyes of a million cat spirits. “You found Augor Prey,” she said, watching Joe, amused by his smug look.

Joe Grey smiled. “Fits the description. Fresh scar on his forehead. Driver’s license in the name of Lenny Wells. Revolver under his pillow, that’s been fired recently.” He looked intently at Dulcie. “It’s time to call Harper. Time to find a phone,” he said shortly.

Since he’d grown dependent on placing a call for certain matters, and since every human he knew had a cell phone, the inability to access a phone anywhere, at any time, had begun to make him irritable-instant phone access was now the norm. He didn’t like being left behind.

Right. And he was going to subscribe to Ma Bell Cellular? Walk around wearing a phone strapped to his back like some kind of service cat all duded up in a red harness? Though he had to admit, phones were getting smaller all the time. Who knew, maybe the day of Dick Tracy’s wrist radio wasn’t far in the future. Maybe he could wear one on a collar, designed to look like a license tag.

Though the electronic wonder that concerned him most at the moment was caller ID. How long would it be until Harper sprang for caller ID on his cell phone? That was going to complicate life. As would this new system that would give police the originating location of all cell phone calls via satellite. That would be more than inconvenient.

Wilma had subscribed to caller ID blocking, and so had Clyde, in both cases to give Joe and Dulcie some anonymity. But it didn’t work very well. Whether the phone company didn’t bother to maintain the service, or whether there was some electronic problem, the cats didn’t know. But the fear of identification by telephone deeply bothered Joe and Dulcie, and these new developments presented a constant threat of discovery.

“MaybePrey shot Fern,” Dulcie said. “And maybe Casselrod killed her. If she knew about the letter that Casselrod found, would he try to silence her? Or hire Prey to do it?”

“For a letter worth ten thousand bucks? Not likely. Maybe for ten or twenty letters.” Joe looked hard at her. “In all of this, Dulcie, there’s still something missing. Something right in front of our noses. Don’t you sense it? I can’t leave that idea alone. Some obvious fact that’s the key to everything else.”

He began to pace. “Nothing’s going to fit, nothing’s going to make sense until we find it, or the department does.” He stopped prowling to irritably wash his paw, then paced again. At the far end of the alley he turned to look back at her. “Let’s go, Dulcie. Let’s make that call-let’s nudge Harper, and see what we can stir up.”

24 [��������: pic_25.jpg]

As the courthouse clock struck 4:30, its chimes ringing sharply across the dark and silent village, the three cats galloped up Wilma’s drive and in through Dulcie’s cat door, their backs wet with dew from Wilma’s flowers and splotched with primrose petals.

The dark kitchen smelled of last night’s roast chicken. Hurrying across the slick, chill linoleum and through to the living room, Joe leaped to Wilma’s desk. He felt shaky suddenly, and uncertain.

With this phone call, he’d be playing on pure hunch. No shred of proof, no real information. He’d fingered Susan’s burglar, he was pretty sure-or had fingered one of them. But did this information point to Fern’s killer as well? So far, all circumstantial.

And as to the other matter he meant to bring up with Harper, that might be all smoke dreams. He could, Joe knew too well, be dead wrong in his suspicions.

Glancing to the hall, he locked eyes with Dulcie, where she sat listening outside the bedroom door to make sure Wilma didn’t wake. Wilma knew they used the phone; she wouldn’t be surprised that he was calling Harper. It was the second call that would be the touchy one, that he would just as soon she didn’t know about.

For a moment he wanted to back down, his bold tomcat chutzpah deserted him.

But he’d made up his mind to do this. And when Dulcie gave him a tail-up all clear and an impatient look to get on with it, he swallowed back his misgivings and reached a paw to knock the phone from its cradle.

Dialing Harper’s number, he was glad Cora Lee hadn’t been released from the hospital yet, that he didn’t have to worry about her overhearing him from the guest room. A surgery patient, who would surely be in some pain, probably wouldn’t sleep too well. While tossing and turning, in the small hours, he wouldn’t want her to discover more than she needed to know.

Harper answered crossly, on the second ring, irritable at being awakened. Joe knew from past calls, and from prowling Harper’s ranch house up in the hills, that at night, the captain kept his cell phone on the bedside stand next to the house phone-Joe liked to think that might be because Harper had come to respect and value his two unidentified snitches, who preferred the cell phone number.

“Captain Harper, I can tell you where to find the tan infinity, license 2ZJZ417, the one I called you about last night.”

Harper was quiet.

“And I can describe better now the man who drives it. I believe you’ll recognize him.” He gave Harper the location of the cottage and described the occupant of the rented room. “He carries a driver’s license in the name of Lenny Wells.” He could hear Harper breathing. Once in a while, Joe thought, he’d like to hear more than silence to the gems he passed on, would like to hear something besides Harper’s smoker’s cough and his gruff, one-syllable responses.

“Prey has a gun. A revolver, I don’t know what caliber. It has been recently fired and not cleaned. He was asleep an hour ago, with the gun under his pillow.”

He knew that this information would generate some hard questions with Harper. How had the informant gotten into Prey’s room? How had he been able to look under Prey’s pillow and not wake him?

He couldn’t help that. Harper had to take him on faith. He had done that, so far, and had benefited from the exchange.

“Captain Harper, do you have the feeling there’s something we’re not seeing? Some piece of information that would tie all the pieces together? Something so obvious that we’re blind to it?”

“Such as?”

“I wish I knew. I’d be happy to share it. This gut feeling I have, maybe it involves the Traynors.”

Harper remained silent.

“Captain?”

Nothing.

Joe pressed the disconnect, keeping his paw on it to prevent triggering that annoying little voice that said,If you want to make a call, please hang up and dial again. If you need help�

He knew from his past calls that Harper’s lack of response was usually positive. But this silence had seemed somehow heavily weighted.

Was Harper having the same nibble of unease that he himself was experiencing?

Call it cop sense or feline intuition. Didn’t matter what you called it, those little irritating nibbles, for both Joe and Harper, had turned out more than once to be of value. He stared at the phone, trying to steel himself for the next call.

Beyond the window, the sky was beginning to lighten. The time on the East Coast would be about 7:40. He glanced out to the hall toward Dulcie where she lay relaxed, washing her shoulder, giving no indication that Wilma had stirred. He had no idea whether the number he had memorized would be the agent’s office number or her residence. Or if, indeed, she worked out of her home.

If he were a New York literary agent, that would be the lifestyle he’d choose. No office rent and no commute. He’d watched a miniseries once on writers’ agents. A lot of stress there. But with an office at home, you could get up at three in the morning, if you felt like it, to take care of your paperwork. Plenty of time during the day to hit the street for lunches with editors. And then on other days, one might want to just schlep around ungroomed or unshaven with no one but the occasional delivery person to know any different.

He knew he was killing time, half scared to make this call. Carefully he pawed in the number. He was mulling over the wisdom of leaving a recorded message if she didn’t answer, when she picked up. Her early morning voice was low and steamy, like Lauren Bacall in one of those old romantic movies that Wilma and Dulcie liked to watch. But she was even more irritated than Harper at being awakened. Hey, it was 7:40 on the East Coast.

Well, maybe New Yorkers didn’t get up too early.

“Ms. McElroy, this is about your friend and client, Elliott Traynor. You’ve been concerned about him.”

“Yes, I have. Who is this?”

“I won’t identify myself. I’m calling from Molena Point. You’ll want to hear what I have to say. I believe your questions about Traynor might be answered if you would take a photo of Traynor over to NYPD and talk to one of their detectives. Tell them your concerns about Traynor. I can imagine you haven’t wanted to do that and stir up the press, but I think that time is past. In fact, the time may be growing short for you to trigger an investigation.”

“Why would I want an investigation? Who is this? I don’t understand what you’re saying.” She was silent a moment, then, carefully, “You think the police could help me? In exactly what way?”

“I have an idea that your questions about Elliott will be answered,” he said obliquely.

“You realize that I have caller ID. That it won’t be hard to find your name and address.”

“Ms. McElroy, I’m doing you a favor. You’ll understand that when you’ve followed up. You can return that favor by destroying any record of this number, by preserving my anonymity. Someday you may understand exactly why that is so important. In the meantime, you will be protecting someone seeking only to help you.”

He hit the disconnect, feeling scared. The woman had, when talking to Harper, given Joe the idea that she kept careful records of phone numbers and names.

Dropping down from the desk, he sat a moment, carefully washing, getting hold of himself. He did not feel good about this.

He certainly didn’t want Wilma dragged into this because he’d used her phone, didn’t want Ms. McElroy phoning Molena Point Library, checking the cross-reference, gaining access to Wilma’s name and address-or maybe getting that information from some Web directory. He’d sure hear about that from Clyde and Wilma. He prayed that Ms. McElroy would get herself over to NYPD and not waste time tracing calls, hoped she’d see a detective first thing this morning. Because if he was right, there truly might not be much time left.

Joe worried all day about that phone call, fretted over it almost to the point of losing his appetite-to the point where at the animals’ suppertime, Clyde started feeling Joe’s nose for fever and smelling his breath. Talk about indignity.

“I feel fine! Leave me alone! I have things on my mind.”

Clyde looked hard at him. “Do you know that cats can have heart attacks? That cats can suffer from debilitating, life-threatening stress, just like humans can?”

“No cat I know ever had a stroke.”

“So now you’re a vet, with unlimited research and information. How many dead cats have you autopsied? This sleuthing business is-”

“You talk about stress. Riding me unmercifully every minute gives me more stress than any kind of activity I might choose!”

“I’m not riding you every minute. I ask one simple question-”

“Two questions. Two questions too many.”

They’d argued until Clyde made himself late picking up Ryan for dinner, then stomped out of the house swearing that it was Joe’s fault. And all the time, Clyde didn’t have a clue what was really wrong.

An ordinary cat expects the house person to know what’s bugging him. An ordinary cat thinks that a sympathetic human is clairvoyant-that he knows when and where you hurt and knows what to do about it. Your everyday cat expects an able human companion to know what has upset him, what kind of food he wants, where he wants to eat his supper, where he wants his bed. The ordinary cat thinks humans can divine that stuff, that they just know. And he’s royally put off when some dumb guy can’t figure it out.

But when you have more than the usual feline cognizance, when logic tells you that humans aren’t really that sharp, then you have to inform them. Though at the moment, Joe wished that Clyde could divine just a little bit of what he was feeling.

He hadn’t wanted to go into a big thing of explaining about Adele McElroy, but it would be nice if Clyde could guess. Because he couldn’t stop worrying about that New York phone call. He had the gut feeling that McElroy would be in touch with Harper this morning and that very soon, Max Harper would be asking Wilma about her outgoing phone calls. He was irritable all day and didn’t sleep well that night, even after Dulcie told him that Wilma hadn’t talked with Harper. He felt all pins and needles, was so filled with questions that two hours before daylight he slaughtered two moles in the front lawn just for the hell of it and conducted a complimentary vermin eradication marathon among the neighbors’ gardens. Leaving twelve little bodies lined up on the front porch for Clyde, he headed for the Traynor cottage.

As Joe prowled a rooftop looking down into the Traynors’ windows, and as the sun rose, sending a fiery glow across the bottom of the low clouds, Charlie stood at her apartment window pouring her first cup of coffee. Looking out at the first streaks of sunrise, and down at the village rooftops that always seemed fresh and new, she was thinking about Max as she did most of her waking moments. But she was thinking, too, about the job he’d given her to do, a sensitive bit of subterfuge that both amused and flattered her.

She hadn’t the faintest idea why he wanted the evidence, and he hadn’t offered to tell her. But the chance to play detective in the Traynor household had set her up, big time.

She took her time finishing her coffee, enjoying the sunrise, then showered and dressed and took herself out to breakfast, treating herself to pancakes at the Swiss Cafe. She did Vivi’s grocery shopping and stopped by the drugstore, arriving at the Traynors’ just as their black Lincoln was pulling out of the drive.

Waving, she turned in, parking by the back door. Using her key, which the rental agency had given her before they moved in and that Vivi had so reluctantly agreed she keep, she carried the groceries and her tote bag into the kitchen.

Putting away the canned goods, milk, salad greens, and cherries, she waited long enough to be sure Vivi wouldn’t forget something and come hurrying back, then got to work with the evidence bags.

She left the house ten minutes later carrying her tote, which now contained six dirty glasses from the Traynors’ dishwasher, each lifted out with a spoon and dropped into a separate bag. Out of six, Detective Garza hoped to lift prints for both Vivi and Elliott.

She wondered what Clyde would think of her doing this. Not that he needed to know. Last night, she and Max had planned to have potluck with Clyde and Ryan, but then Max and Dallas had received a call that sent them off to the station. Charlie had used the excuse to go home and curl up with a sandwich and a good mystery, sending Clyde and Ryan out alone for dinner-a far better arrangement, in her opinion.

Interesting, she thought, that Clyde’s attraction to Ryan truly pleased her. And it wasn’t that she was happy to dump him, to have someone take up the slack when she started seeing Max. It was more than that. She thought Ryan Flannery might be very good for Clyde.

Wheeling out of the Traynors’ drive, she met Max two blocks away at the designated intersection. Both stayed in their vehicles. Double-parking beside him, she moved over to the passenger window and handed the bagged glasses through to him. He grinned at her, his brown eyes amused. “Will they notice them missing?”

“I bought six like them at the drugstore, it’s a common style. When the agency furnished the house to rent, they didn’t want to use the owner’s crystal. The new ones are in the dishwasher, where Vivi left these.”

Max gave her a wink that made her toes curl. She grinned back at him, did an illegal U-turn in front of him, and returned to the Traynors’. She felt so pleased with herself that before she began to clean she wheeled the vacuum into Traynor’s study, to have an excuse for being there while she copped a peek at the latest chapter. Maybe this would be better, maybe these pages would be as fine as his old work.

She couldn’t leave it alone; the flawed novel drew her, habituating and insistent.

But, starting to read, she was more dismayed than before. Even considering that Elliott was ill, the work left her perplexed. She didn’t understand this writer who had for years charmed her with his prose. She was convinced his mind was deteriorating, and that was incredibly sad. She wondered if he might be in the first stages of Alzheimer’s and wondered if Vivi understood how much Traynor’s work had changed, if Vivi really knew or cared. Laying the pages back on the desk, she had a terrible, juvenile urge to grab a pencil and start editing, the way she would have done one of her own amateurish school papers.

The history was all there, but reading this was so dull. Elliott Traynor’s words should flow, be alive, propel the reader along. She wanted to see these chapters as he should have written them. She felt strangely hurt that Traynor was ruining his own work.

Aligning the pages, she had no notion that she was not alone. A thump on the desk brought her swinging around-to face Joe Grey. He stood boldly on the blotter, a smug smile on his gray-and-white face.

“At it again, Charlie.”

“How did you get in? I fixed the vent.”

“What did you take to Harper?”

She simply looked at him.

“What did you take to Harper? Something from the dishwasher, but you had your back to me. I couldn’t see much through the window.”

“How did you get inside?”

“Slipped in behind you when you got back from meeting Harper.”

“That makes me feel pretty lame that I didn’t even see you.”

“I was on the roof next door when you came to work. Watched you through the window, digging around in the dishwasher. Bagging plates, Charlie? Followed you over the roofs. What’s Harper after, fingerprints? All that fuss with evidence bags.”

Charlie sighed. “Dirty glasses. I don’t know what it’s for, okay?”

He glanced at the pages in her hand. “When did Harper ask you for the prints?”

“He called me early this morning, if it’s any of your business.”

“What time this morning?”

“Why? What difference does it make? I don’t know. He woke me up. Around five, I guess.” She looked at him, frowning. “He said he was working on a hunch. That he didn’t want to make waves yet-that an early morning tip got him thinking.”

Joe Grey smiled.

She reached to touch his shoulder. “What? What did you say to him?”

Joe glanced at the manuscript. “What do you think of the latest chapter?”

Charlie sighed. You couldn’t force information from anyone, certainly not from a hardheaded cat. She looked down at Traynor’s offending pages. “This should be a wonderful book; so much was going on in the early eighteen hundreds. He’s done a huge amount of research, but he’s going nowhere with it. This makes me want to write it the way it should be. How can he-”

They heard the back door close softly, though no car had pulled up the drive and they had seen no one approaching the house. At the sound, Charlie flipped on the vacuum. “Get lost, Joe. Hide somewhere.” Maybe Vivi or Elliott had cut through the backyards from the side street.

“Open the window,” Joe hissed.

Flipping the latch and sliding the glass back, she watched Joe leap through and vanish in the bushes below. She was vacuuming when Vivi appeared, pausing in the doorway to watch her. She was dressed in blue tights, a short denim skirt, a black halter top, and a black cap, her dark hair pulled through the back in a ponytail. Charlie turned off the vacuum.

“Why did you leave this morning, Charlie? You left just after you got here. What did you take away with you in the tote bag?”

“I went to get my purse, I left it in the grocery. I had trash in the bag,” Charlie said, laughing. “Thought I had my purse. The house I cleaned last night-I dropped the trash in my bag and forgot about it. What’s wrong?”

“You could have thrown it in our trash.”

“I dropped it in the grocery dumpster.” Unplugging the vacuum, she looped the cord up, to wheel it to another room.

“And why is Elliott’s manuscript all mussed?” Vivi’s eyes were wide and knowing; slowly they narrowed, never leaving Charlie. “Have you been reading this?” Her face drained of color. “Elliott doesn’t like people reading his work-in-progress. What were you doing, Ms. Getz? And why is the window open?” She was suddenly so heated that Charlie backed away. “Speak up, Ms. Getz. What were you doing in here?”

Charlie looked Vivi in the eye. “I guess I brushed against the pages. I had no idea he was so-that he, or you, would be upset.” Her look at Vivi was as puzzled as she could manage. “As to the window, I was warm. If you don’t like me opening a window, I won’t do that anymore.” Closing the glass, she moved away down the hall to clean the bedroom.

Vivi didn’t follow her; she remained in the study a long time. As Charlie made the bed and hung up their clothes, she heard Vivi unlock the desk, heard her open and close the drawers and shuffle papers, perhaps trying to see what else Charlie might have been into. So what was she going to do? Charlie thought, amused. Report her to Max Harper?

Vivi was gone when she finished vacuuming and dusting, had apparently left the house. Charlie supposed, if Vivi had followed her earlier this morning and had seen her meet Max, she would have been far angrier, would have confronted her with that information in a real rage.

Or would Vivi actually have confronted her? Maybe Vivi had seen them, maybe she was desperate to know what Charlie had taken from the cottage.

She went about her work absently, leaving at noon to take care of a number of small household repairs for other customers while Mavity and her crew did their cleaning. She couldn’t wait to see if Max had been able to lift two good sets of prints. She finished up at five and hurried home to her apartment to shower and start dinner, stopping first by Wilma’s to pick a little bouquet from the garden, daisies and some orange poppies, simple flowers that should please Max.

Frying hamburger to add to the bottled spaghetti sauce, she made a salad and pulled a cheesecake from the freezer. Max got there early, coming directly from the station. He sat on her daybed drinking an O’Doul’s, making no comment as she recounted the events of her morning. She left out only her conversation with Joe Grey. Moving from stove to table, and to the daybed, she sat down at the end tucking her feet under her, sipping her beer while the spaghetti boiled. She liked living in a small space, everything near at hand. This apartment was so compact she could almost cook her breakfast before she got out of bed.

She looked at Max comfortably, quietly relishing his presence here in her private space. “I’ve never felt quite the degree of anger and confusion that I do with Vivi Traynor. You’re right, she’s not a likable person. And she was so suspicious of me,” she said, grinning. “I don’t think she saw me meet you, but I can’t be sure. She was so prodding and pushy.”

“Don’t you feel sorry for her husband?” Max said, amused.

Charlie shrugged. “He married her. Poor man. Maybe he got more than he bargained for. Did you get their prints all right?”

“Two perfect sets. Unless they’ve had company in the last couple of days, we have prints for both Vivi and Elliott.”

“And you’re not going to tell me why.”

“Not yet.”

She rose to test the boiling spaghetti and to dress the salad of baby greens and homegrown tomatoes that their local market had been featuring. As she shook the dressing, Harper’s cell phone rang. She drained the pasta quickly and dished it up as he talked, afraid he would be called away. She liked watching him, liked his thin, brown hands, his angled, leathery face. She liked the contrast between how he looked in his uniform, a very capable, no-nonsense cop, daunting in his authority, and how he looked in faded jeans and western shirt and hat, with a pitchfork in his hand, or on horseback. That same sense of ultimate control was there, only more accessible.

“Yes, I have them,” he said into the phone. “I sent the card this morning, overnight mail. You’ll let me know-you can guess we’re wanting this one yesterday.”

He smiled, glancing at her as he listened. “You bet it will. Answer a lot of questions. Was she dealing with it all right?”

Another pause.

“Very good. Maybe we’ll get it sorted out.”

He hung up, winking at Charlie, and poured another O’Doul’s. He said nothing about the call. She was certain it had to do with the Traynor’s prints. Across the table from him, she ate quietly, content in his silence. When he was ready to share information, he’d do that.

But, she thought, that sharing would present a prime dilemma.

Because, was she going to pass on whatever he told her to Joe Grey? Or was she going to guard the confidence Max Harper had in her?

25 [��������: pic_26.jpg]

Beyond Wilma’s windows, the garden was pale with fog, the twisted oak trees and flowers washed to milky hues. Looking out from the desk in the living room, Dulcie enjoyed both worlds, the veiled garden from which she had just emerged and the fire on the hearth behind her. Near the warm blaze, Cora Lee was tucked up on the love seat, with the afghan over her legs and the kit cuddled on her lap.

Wilma had just this morning brought Cora Lee home from the hospital and gotten her settled in the guest room. It seemed to Dulcie that her housemate was always sheltering one friend or another. Charlie had first come to her aunt when she fled San Francisco after quitting her commercial art job, convinced she was a failure, that she would never make it on her own. Then after Charlie started her cleaning business, she had come home to Wilma’s again when she was evicted from her first apartment, dumping her cardboard boxes and bits of furniture back in Wilma’s garage. And Mavity had come here from the hospital after she’d been hit on the head and left unconscious in her wrecked car-had come with a police guard, round-the-clock protection. And now another police patrol was cruising the streets, watching over Cora Lee.

Dulcie looked up, purring, when Wilma appeared from the kitchen carrying the tea tray-a final comforting touch on a cold afternoon. The little tabby looked around her at the perfection of their small, private world, with the fire casting its warm flickering light across the velvet furniture and over the shelves of books and the bright oil painting of the Molena Point hills and rooftops. As Wilma set the tray at the end of the desk, Dulcie sniffed delicately the aromas of almond bread and lemon Bundt cake; but she kept a polite distance. Some folks might not like cat noses in their dessert. Wilma flashed her an amused look and cut two tiny slices for her, slathering on whipped cream. Wilma was wearing a new turquoise-and-green sweatshirt, printed in a ferny leaf pattern, and her gray-white hair was sleeked back with a new turquoise clip.

“You spoil her,” Cora Lee said sleepily, watching Wilma set Dulcie’s plate on the blotter. “What about the kit? Can she have some?” She stroked the kit, who, at the sound of knife on plate, had come wide awake. Cora Lee was dressed in a creamy velvet robe, loose and comfortable, covering her bandages.

“Both cats will feast,” Wilma said, preparing a second plate, “while you and I wait politely for our guests.”

Cora Lee shivered, pulling the afghan closer around her. “A week in the hospital, and I still feel weird and disoriented.”

“It’s the residue of shock, from the surgery,” Wilma said. “Plus the shock of what happened-of someone intentionally hurting you, and of seeing Fern dead.”

Dead, Dulcie thought, after maybe Cora Lee had idly wished something of the kind for Fern. That wouldn’t be easy to live with.

Certainly Cora Lee was still pale, her color grayish, her ease of movement, and lithe ways replaced by stiff, puppetlike gestures, though already she had begun a regimen of exercises designed to strengthen her injured muscles. Very likely painful exercises, Dulcie thought, stretching her own long muscles, extending her length with ease and suppleness. She thought of the distress Cora Lee must be experiencing-and was ashamedly thankful suddenly for her own lithe feline body.

“Growing up in New Orleans,” Cora Lee said, “murder wasn’t uncommon. It was ugly, but we accepted it. Even as a child, street murder, gang murder, drug-related killings, we were well aware of them.

“But here, in the village that I chose for its small-town gentleness and safety, murder and violent attack seem to me far more shocking.” Cora Lee smiled. “I guess I haven’t come to terms with that yet,” she said lightly.

“We should not have to come to terms with it,” Wilma said. “And if you hadn’t been bringing the kit home-”

“I would have gone by the Pumpkin Coach anyway. You know I stop every Tuesday morning to see if anything in the window is worth getting in line for.” She looked solemnly at Wilma, her thin, oval face drawn and serious. “I should have driven away when I saw the window was broken, when I saw Fern lying there.

“I got out to see if she’d fallen. I had this silly notion that she had been decorating the window-you know how they do, different volunteers taking a turn each week. Fern worked for Casselrod’s Antiques; I assumed she’d be a natural one to ask. I was so focused on the idea that she had fallen and hurt herself that I didn’t think at all to close the car door, to shut the kit in. I felt guilty afterward.

“When I was close to the window and saw the blood, saw the terrible wounds, I knew I should get away. Like a dummy I stood there trying to see back inside the shop, looking for whoever had hurt her. So foolish�

“Then when I turned to the car to phone for an ambulance, there was the pack of letters on the sidewalk. I didn’t know what they were but something, a twinge of excitement, made me snatch them up-and then that man leaped out of the window, from nowhere�”

“And you ran�” Wilma encouraged. It was good for Cora Lee to talk about it, try to get rid of the trauma. “The letters� Old paper, you said�”

“Old and yellowed. The ribbon was faded and sort of shredded.

I got only a glance-the handwriting like old copperplate. Then he was after me. I ran, I got up that little walkway and around the corner before he grabbed and hit me and snatched the letters. The pain in my middle was so bad I knew I’d pass out.

“It’s strange. Once I thought the kit was there with me. Then later when I woke in the hospital I thought about leaving the car door open and I worried about her.

Cora Lee smiled. “Detective Garza didn’t know how I could outrun the guy as far as I did, could get clear around to the back street-I told him I run at the sports center. When the guy did catch me, when he grabbed me, I really don’t remember all of that clearly. I don’t remember how I got into the alley where the police found me.”

She looked at Wilma, frowning. “Just� him hitting me, grabbing the letters, twisting my hand. I remember falling, doubling up with the pain, and I heard a car take off. I don’t know who called the police. A woman, they told me. They said she made two calls. I suppose it was someone in one of the upstairs apartments, but no one knows who. I’d like to thank her.”

On Cora Lee’s lap, the kit rolled over purring and looked up at her with a little curving smile. And Dulcie thought,Careful, Kit. Be careful.She watched Cora Lee with apprehension.

If Cora Lee, in her deepest mind, remembered that the kit was there with her, licking her face, did she remember, in some lost dream, the kit speaking to her? Remember three cats crowding around her, talking about her? Did unconscious people hear and remember what was said in their presence? Some people thought so, even some doctors thought they did-but Cora Lee mustn’t. Enough people already shared their secret, they didn’t need anyone else knowing, even a person they liked as much as Cora Lee French.

Besides Wilma and Clyde and Charlie, Kate Osborne knew about them. They didn’t see Kate often; and Kate would never ever tell their secret, one that was so close to her own. But one other person knew, as well-a sadist now locked in San Quentin, a man who had broken out once and followed Kate, surely meaning to kill her just as he had wanted to kill Dulcie and Joe.

Dulcie watched the kit, on Cora Lee’s lap, licking the last specks of cake and cream from her whiskers.

“I’m surprised she doesn’t make herself sick.” Cora Lee said. “She ate like that at my house, too.”

Wilma laughed. “Nothing seems to bother her. Apparently she has the same cast-iron constitution as Dulcie and Joe.”

“Maybe they’re a special breed.” Cora Lee stroked the kit. “Certainly this little one is more intelligent than most cats, she seems to know everything I’m saying.”

The kit glanced up at Cora Lee, then looked at Dulcie guiltily. Cora Lee seemed unaware of having said anything alarming; her expression was completely innocent. Watching her, Dulcie started when the doorbell rang.

Wilma rose to answer it, hurrying Mavity and Susan in out of the cold fog. Mavity’s uniform of the day sported pink rickrack around the white pant cuffs and collar. Over this she wore a zippered green sweater, and her frizzled gray hair was covered by a pink scarf damp with mist.

Susan Brittain was snuggled in a brown sweatshirt over her jeans, and a tan jacket, her short white hair curly from the fog. Gabrielle came up the walk behind them, her smart cream pants suit well tailored, probably fashioned by one of her seamstresses. The three women crowded around the fire and around Cora Lee, making a fuss over her, though they had visited her in the hospital only the day before, taking her flowers and the latest magazines that Wilma had good-naturedly carted home again this morning. On the way home, Wilma had driven Cora Lee by the police station to talk with Detective Garza again. Then at home, she had had a nice lunch waiting. Dulcie herself had curled up on the afghan with the kit while Cora Lee had a long nap.

Gabrielle helped Wilma serve the coffee, then sat down at the end of Cora Lee’s chaise. “Did the doctor say whether-say when you can go on with the play? I’ve started your costume.”

“Will there still be a play?” Cora Lee said, surprised. “But they won’t want me, they’ll put out a call for new tryouts. Truly,” Cora Lee said, “with Fern dead, in such an ugly way, I feel ashamed to think about the play.” Coloring faintly, she looked up at Susan, where she stood before the fire. “Ashamed that I would still want to do Catalina,” she confessed softly.

“Feeling guilty?” Susan said.

“I suppose. Because I did so want that part.”

“You’re not responsible for Fern’s death,” Susan said.

“I can’t help feeling guilty, though, because I surely wished her no good the night of the tryouts.”

“Wishing didn’t kill her,” Wilma said sharply.

“And whatever debt the Traynors owed Fern Barth,” Susan told her, “to make them give her the lead, that’s over now.”

“Well, they won’t want me,” Cora Lee said. “Vivi Traynor won’t.”

“What did the doctor say?” Mavity asked. “How soon will you feel right? How soon can you sing again?”

Wilma said, “There’s a lot of muscle tightening around the incision. She’ll be stiff for a while, and hurting, and fluids will collect there. The doctor wants her to be careful so it doesn’t go into pneumonia. He’s told Cora Lee not to take any fill-in restaurant jobs until she’s completely healed.”

Cora Lee touched her side. “If anyone wanted me-if Sam Ladler wanted me bad enough to arrange it, I’d be ready. Two or three weeks, I could be ready to rehearse. But I�” Her face reddened. “That won’t happen.”

Gabrielle said, “Were you able to help the police? To give them information that would be useful?” She fiddled nervously with her napkin. “I hope Detective Garza doesn’t feel that you were involved in Fern’s death in some way?”

“Why would Garza say that?” Wilma asked. “Though, in fact, he has no way to know at this point. Until he’s sorted through the evidence, he has only Cora Lee’s word. He has to wait for the lab tests, has to remain detached.”

“I suppose,” Gabrielle said. “But Captain Harper knows Cora Lee.”

“That really doesn’t matter,” Cora Lee said. “Wilma’s right.”

“But,” Mavity said, “what exactly did happen? The part you can talk about? It was all so confusing. The paper said there were blood splatters in the back room and on those three wooden chests, that there was a fight back there. I don’t-”

Wilma put her hand on Mavity’s. “Cora Lee doesn’t need to talk about this anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” Mavity said contritely. “Of course you don’t.”

“In fact there’s very little that Cora Lee is free to discuss,” Wilma added.

“But those three carved chests,” Gabrielle began, “Catalina Ortega-Diaz’s letters�”

“No one knows,” Wilma said, “if any of the letters have survived all these years. Those letters could be nothing but dust.”

Gabrielle put her hand on Wilma’s. “I� have something to tell you.” She looked shy and uncomfortable. “I didn’t before because� Well, I hadn’t intended to do anything about it-I didn’t do anything about it, so I didn’t think it mattered.”

They all looked at her.

“When I was in New York and stopped to see Elliott, he was more than cordial. He fixed lunch for me-Vivi had gone out-and he wanted to talk with me about Molena Point.” She sipped her coffee, looking down as if finding it hard to tell her friends whatever was bothering her.

“Elliott told me about the Spanish chests, about the research. He said he had been corresponding with a museum that had one of the chests, and that it had contained three of Catalina’s letters. He thought there might be other chests still around, with letters hidden in them-a false bottom, something like that. He told me they would be worth ten to fifteen thousand dollars each.

“He wanted me to look for similar chests when I got back to the coast. He said that if I found any, he would handle selling them to the highest bidder, and we could split the money-that I would be acting as his agent.

“I didn’t like the idea. The more I thought about it, the less I wanted to do that. I told him I’d think about it, but when I got home I wrote him a note, said I wasn’t interested, that I was sorry he had told me.

“I was up front with him, I told him about Senior Survival and that we were shopping on our own for antiques. I said it wouldn’t be fair to you if I were to be shopping for someone else.

“He never answered my letter. And then when they arrived he didn’t get in touch. I felt awkward about it, but what could I do. I feel awkward about doing the costumes, about working with him. And I suppose I ought to talk with Captain Harper. Just� to fill him in?” she said, looking at Wilma.

“I think you must,” Wilma said.

Gabrielle twisted her napkin. “Well, there it is. I knew all along that Elliott could be connected somehow to the theft of that white chest and to your breakin, Susan, though I’m sure Elliott wouldn’t do anything violent. That had to be someone else.”

The kit’s eyes had grown so wide as she listened that Dulcie leaped at her, landing on the arm of Cora Lee’s chaise, licking the kit’s face until she had her full attention. The kit subsided, tucking her face under her paw.

“With all the violence these last weeks,” Mavity said, “I’m not sure I’ll go to any more sales. That Iselman estate sale, that should be grand. But if the Iselmans had those old carved chests, what else might they have that would cause trouble?”

“I’m going,” Susan said. “I’m not letting Elliott Traynor, if he is involved, or anyone else frighten me. We can make some money out of that sale, if we buy carefully. I think we should all go.”

“And carry our pepper spray,” Mavity said, laughing. Pepper spray was the one legal weapon a woman could carry without any kind of permit. After Susan’s breakin, Wilma had bought vials for all of them, and taught them the safety procedures-including careful awareness of which way the wind was blowing.

“Why not with pepper spray?” Susan said. “I carry mine all the time. I don’t like to be intimidated. If I’d been at home, with that little vial in my pocket, my house wouldn’t have been trashed. I’d have given them something to think about, and so would Lamb.” She looked around at her friends. “I’ve been selling on eBay all week. I’ve sold nearly everything on our shelves that wasn’t destroyed. If we mean to go on with this, to keep putting money in the bank, we need to start buying again.”

“Are we smart to go on with this?” Gabrielle asked hesitantly. “Or are we only fooling ourselves? Are we going to make enough money to do this? And is it going to work?”

“We’ve been over the numbers,” Susan said. “We’ve already put ten thousand in the bank from our sales, and we’ve only been at it six months. If we do this for a couple of years, plus the money from our own houses� mine and Mavity’s�”

“And mine,” Wilma said, “if I’m ready to throw in with you.”

“And the profit from my two rentals,” Cora Lee added. “And from that lot you own, Gabrielle�”

“I hope it will work,” Gabrielle said uncertainly.

“It will work,” Wilma said.

“We’ll all have our privacy,” Mavity said, “and our own space-maybe as much as I have now, in that little house. Plus a nice big living room and kitchen and a garden, maybe a nice patio.

“But then, it’s different for me. I have to move.” She looked around at her friends. “I got the notice this morning. The official condemnation. Thirty days. The letter said they made it such a short time because it’s been talked about so long, because we all knew it was coming.”

“You’ll move in with me,” Wilma said, “until you decide what to do. There’s plenty of room for your furniture in the garage.”

“By the time you’re ready,” Cora Lee said, “I’ll be home again, and Wilma’s guest room will be yours.”

“We can move you,” Susan said. “Rent a truck, maybe hire one of Charlie’s guys to help us-make a party of it, go out to dinner afterward.”

And on Cora Lee’s lap, the kit was looking back and forth again, from one to the other, paying far too close attention. Dulcie tried to distract her. When the kit ignored her, she swatted the kit as if in play, forcing her off Cora Lee’s lap and chasing her through the house to the kitchen.

Excusing herself to refill the cream pitcher, Wilma followed them, shutting the kitchen door behind her.

Backing the kit into the corner behind the breakfast table, Dulcie hissed and spat at her. “You didn’t see yourself. You were taking everything in, looking far too perceptive and interested.”

“But no one would guess,” the kit said. “No one�”

“Cora Lee says you seem to understand everything she tells you. They could guess, Kit! Charlie did! How do you think she found out?”

“I thought-”

“Charlie figured it out for herself. She watched and watched us. She figured out that we were more than ordinary cats, and those ladies-especially Cora Lee-could do the same.”

“Oh, my,” said the kit.

“Charlie would never tell,” Dulcie said. “But those other ladies might, without ever meaning any harm. You be careful! If you’re going back in there to sit with Cora Lee, you practice looking dumb! Dumb as a stone, Kit! Sleepy. Preoccupied. Take a nap. Play with the tennis ball. Have a wash. But don’t look at people when they talk!”

The kit was crestfallen, her yellow eyes cast down. She looked so hurt that Dulcie licked her face. “It’s all right. You’ll remember next time,” she said, giving the kit a sly smile. “You will, or you’ll be licking wounds you don’t want.”

Wilma looked at the kit a long time, then picked up the two cats and carried them back to the living room. She gave them each another piece of cake, lathering on the cream, setting their plates side by side on the blotter. Watching the kit guzzle the rich dessert, Wilma was torn between frustration at the willful little animal and love and amusement. But always, she was filled with wonder, with the miracle of these small, amazing beings.

If the cats would only leave police business alone. Theft, armed robbery, murder, Joe and Dulcie were in the middle of it all, refusing to back off. And the kit was becoming almost as bad. The cats’ intensity at eavesdropping among questionable characters and their diverse ploys when digging out hidden information left her constantly worried about them.

But maybe, this time, what appeared to be a tangled case would turn into nothing. Maybe Fern’s death wasn’t connected to Susan’s breakin or to the carved chests. Maybe Fern had happened on some gun-happy youth looting the store and in panic he had shot her.

Maybe,Wilma thought. But how, then, to explain the three chests pulled out of the window, and, days earlier, Richard Casselrod snatching the white box?

Dulcie watched Wilma, half amused and half irritated. They’d been together a long time, she knew how Wilma thought. Wilma was hoping right now that this case would turn out to be a dud. Just as Clyde seemed to be hoping. What was it that so disturbed them? The fact that a famous personality was involved? Both Clyde and Wilma seemed to want present circumstances to go away. And that wasn’t going to happen.

For one thing, neither Wilma nor Clyde had all the facts. Neither knew that Joe had called New York this morning, setting in motion a whole new string of events. Nor did they know that Joe had found Augor Prey and found the gun that may have killed Fern, or that Joe’s subsequent phone call had prompted Harper and Garza to stake out Prey’s room.

And no one, not Wilma nor Clyde nor the police, knew that a second stakeout had been set up on the roof next door to Prey. A twenty-four-hour observation post with instant communication to Molena Point PD. A surveillance operation, Dulcie thought, that was soon going to need a nice hot dinner-a little sustenance for a cold and hungry tomcat.

26 [��������: pic_27.jpg]

Where a steep roof rose from a flat one, the space beneath the slanted overhang formed a small, triangular cave protected from rain and from the sea wind, and from the eyes of curious pedestrians. One last ray of the setting sun shone in, where Joe Grey lay on the warm shingles looking down at Augor Prey’s windows. Clyde’s cell phone was tucked on the roof beside him-a real mouthful to carry through the village for five blocks, during the dark predawn hours, and to drag up the pine tree and across the slippery shingles. Before he left home, at 4:00 this morning, he had turned the ringer off to avoid alarming any late-night pedestrians or street people. And certainly, here on the roof, he didn’t want a shrilling phone to announce his presence. He’d been here all day; it was twilight now and he was hungry.

Peering down into Prey’s room, he could see the bed and dresser and a pair of jeans thrown over the armchair whose back served as a hanger for Prey’s shirts. Prey had just gone out, walking, leaving his car parked on the street. Joe had watched one of Harper’s rookie cops, a young man dressed in jeans and T-shirt, idle along a block behind him, appearing as aimless as any tourist.

After Joe’s call to Harper, the captain had made no move to take Prey in for questioning or to search his room for the gun, but he had put a tail on Prey. Maybe he and Garza didn’t want to tip Prey too soon. Or were they not willing to take the word of their unknown informant that this guy was, in fact, Augor Prey?

Certainly when they did arrest him, if the guy’s prints matched those in the Pumpkin Coach and in Susan Brittain’s breakfast room, they had more than enough to hold him. The delay in making an arrest had Joe digging his claws into the shingles wishing they’d get on with it.

But impatience wouldn’t cut it. All he could do was wait, and back up Harper’s surveillance by observing Prey from the roof, where a cop could hardly remain unnoticed. Crouched in the chill evening, he was hungry as a homeless mutt. He wished Dulcie would show up, before he had to snatch some sleepy bird from its nest. Tonight, with the cold wind parting the fur along his back and shoulders, sending its icy breath clear through him, he’d really rather have a nice hot, home-cooked supper.

By the chimes of the courthouse clock, it was nearly 7:00. During the fifteen hours he’d been on the roof, with only a few short breaks down to the garden, he’d followed Prey to breakfast and then to lunch, shadowing him from above. After lunch he had watched Prey as he sprawled on the bed entertained by a series of mindless sitcoms, snacking on candy bars and a Coke. He couldn’t figure out why Prey was hanging around; why, if he killed Fern, he hadn’t skipped.

And if Prey hadn’t killed her, Joe didn’t know who to look at next, among the several candidates. Besides Prey, who had attacked Cora Lee and whose scent was all over the charity shop, Vivi had been in the shop, sucking on frozen cherries. And quite possibly others. Scent detection in that medley of furniture and old clothes and shoes was no easy matter.

When Prey headed out again, likely for dinner this time, Joe tucked the cell phone deeper under the overhang, and followed across the roofs to the same restaurant where Prey had enjoyed his previous repasts, a plain box of an eatery that looked like it belonged not in Molena Point but beside some central California freeway catering to the camper trade. Prey’s restaurant of choice had no garden blooming in front, no murals or elegant paintings on the walls, no potted plants inside. The harsh lighting illuminated a plain room with bad acoustics, chrome-and-plastic furniture, and the thick smell of a menu heavy on fried foods. No light California fare of the interesting combinations that Dulcie loved, but that, in Joe’s opinion, was like mixing the garden flowers with the mousemeat.

Across the street and half a block away, the rookie cop who was following Prey stood huddled in a doorway trying to keep out of the wind. Joe, from his own high vantage, wondered who was watching the back door. Likely no one; Prey’s shadow had him in plain sight.

Dropping to a low overhang above an art gallery, Joe hit the sidewalk, crossed the street among the feet of wandering tourists, and galloped half a block down to the alley behind the restaurant.

The kitchen door was ajar to let in fresh air amidst the hot smell of onions and frying meats. Trying not to drool as he pawed the screen open, he slipped in past the cook’s heels, across the kitchen, and under an empty booth at the back.

At a front table, Prey was just ordering, glancing repeatedly toward the window. Did he know he had a tail? Watching him, Joe tried to figure out where he’d hidden the packet of letters that he snatched from Cora Lee. Earlier in the day, while Prey ordered his lunch, Joe had returned to his room to toss it again, checking all his pockets, slipping a paw between the mattresses and crawling in as far as he could reach without smothering himself. He had fought the dresser drawers open again and climbed in behind them, and peered up at the undersides of the drawers. He’d found nothing more valuable than a rusted bobby pin and an old gum wrapper.

So maybe Prey had the letters on him. Maybe they’d been under the pillow along with the gun, and he’d missed them. There was a limit to how familiar the searcher could get without waking the searchee and getting one’s tail in a knot.

Or had Prey given the letters to Richard Casselrod, maybe to sell and split the take? Joe was yawning with boredom by the time Prey paid his bill and rose to leave. Jerking awake, Joe rose to follow. Slipping beneath the tables and around assorted pant cuffs and stockinged ankles, he left the restaurant by the front door directly behind Prey’s heels; but dropped back when the rookie fell into line.

Prey stopped at the market to pick up a six-pack, then headed back to his room. Could he be waiting for someone? Was that why Harper was watching him and not making an arrest? Back at their mutual destination, as Joe scorched up the nearest pine tree to the roof, Prey’s room light and the TV came on. Joe watched him pop a beer and settle down on the bed, again not bothering to remove his shoes or to pull the shade. Joe could still taste the meaty cooking smells from the cheap cafe. Crouched in the wind, his stomach rumbling with hunger, he began to worry about Dulcie. He kept peering over the edge of the roof to the sidewalk below and to the scruffy patch of garden that ran between the houses, but there was no sign of her. Every time he glanced up into Prey’s dismal room, he felt like he was peering in at a captive. Prey had, for all intents and purposes, made himself a prisoner, or nearly so-watching him had become as boring and tedious as watching paint flake from a rusting car.

Joe thought about the comfort of his own home, about his soft easy chair clawed to furry perfection, and the big, well-stocked refrigerator, and the wide, warm bed he shared with Clyde-but then his fear of Clyde’s selling the house returned to haunt him. The idea of abandoning his home and going to live somewhere unfamiliar was totally depressing, the idea of a strange house filled with the unfamiliar smells of departed strangers and departed animals, where nothing fit just right or smelled right. The thought of moving and of starting over dropped him right down into a black well of dejection.

“You look limp as a fur rug.”

He jumped, startled. Dulcie stood behind him dangling a paper bag from her teeth. He could smell pot roast, he could tell that it was still warm and succulent. She dropped the bag on the shingles, nosed it open, and clawed out a Styrofoam dish. It took her a moment to undo the little clasp, revealing a heap of sliced roast beef, crisp string beans, and au gratin potatoes.

“Hot from Wilma’s microwave. Dig in. I had my share, didn’t want to carry it all.”

“Wilma puts up the best leftovers in the village.”

“Not leftovers, really. She cooks a big roast, all the fixings, then portions it out for future meals.”

“The blessings of a woman’s touch.”

“That’s very sexist. Is that why you want Clyde to get married?”

“It couldn’t hurt,” Joe said with his mouth full. And when he came up for air, slurping and purring, he said, “Frozen suppers, ready for the microwave. We could do that when the rabbits are out by the hundreds, bring home a brace, portion them out into little dishes�”

Laughing, she lay down on the shingles, soaking up warmth from the vanished sun. “Not even Wilma and Clyde would dedicate their freezer to our hunting kill.”

“Does Wilma know why she fixed supper for me? Does she know I’m up here?”

“Of course. I had to tell her something. She didn’t say a word, except did you have Clyde’s cell phone up on the roof because Clyde’s pitching a fit, trying to find it. He thought maybe he’d left it at her house.” Curled up in the shadows of the overhang, she began to wash her paws. “You could call Clyde and put his mind at rest-so he won’t think he lost it and someone’s going to run up a big bill.”

“He doesn’t need the phone.”

“So call him. He’s not going to come up here on the roof to get his phone back.”

“I wouldn’t count on it. He’s been so grouchy lately-and nosy. But what’s happening at the station? What did you find out? Did you get in all right?”

Dulcie smiled. “I’m a permanent fixture. The day dispatcher’s just as much a cat person as the lady on second watch. She made all kinds of fuss over me, made a bed for me on her sweater. All the officers stopped to scratch my ears and chuck me under the chin like some hound dog. They’re so funny. Don’t they know how to pet a cat?”

“Harper doesn’t think it strange we’re suddenly showing up there?”

“He gave me a look or two. Said maybe I was getting bored with being the library cat. But what would he suspect? A cat could shout obscenities in his face, and Harper wouldn’t want to believe it.”

Joe shrugged and licked the Styrofoam one more time in case he’d missed a drop of gravy.

“Clyde stopped by the department,” she said. “Asking Harper about Fern’s murder. Didn’t even wait until they went out for coffee, just started asking questions. I think he’s worried about you-about us. Maybe it’s all this business of trying to decide whether to sell the house, maybe he’s feeling insecure.”

“Clyde’s feeling insecure, so he takes it out worrying about us.”

“Maybe, for humans, that’s the way it works. Life gets uncertain, and every little frustration becomes a big problem. But listen to this,” she said, her green eyes gleaming. “Garza brought the Traynors in.”

“On what charge?”

“No charge. Just to talk to them. He couldn’t hold them. Elliott was totally silent, didn’t even complain about the inconvenience. You’d think he’d pitch a fit. You can bet Vivi whined; she said this would throw Elliott behind schedule, that he had to finish his book. She ranted on while Elliott sat there saying not a word and looking miserable.”

“So how did the questioning go?”

Dulcie looked abashed. “I tried, Joe. I thought it would be a snap, that I could sit on the dispatcher’s counter and watch the interrogation on her monitor, but I should have known better. Garza just took them into his office. And shut the door. Practically in my face. I lay down on my back against the door playing with my tail, but I got only part of it. Those doors are thick, maybe bulletproof. Garza asked about their leaving New York, about their movements just before their flight. Vivi sounded surprised, but then she got really mad.”

Joe smiled. “Sounds like Adele McElroy did talk to the New York detectives. But why would Garza ask questions and alert Vivi? If there is anything to my theory, they’ll pack up and skip.”

“My thought exactly. But I really didn’t hear enough to make sense of it. Garza drove them back to their cottage himself.

“But he put a tail on them,” she said, grinning. “So maybe that’s his idea, too, to catch them skipping.”

“Who did he send?”

“Davis. She’s good, but I can find out more than she can. I can look in the windows to see if they’re packing, and I can slip inside.”

“Watch yourself, Dulcie. Don’t forget Elliott has that ‘target pistol’ as he calls it.”

“I don’t think he’ll use that again.” She gave him a whisker kiss, and left him, leaping into the pine tree and scrambling backward down the rough trunk carrying the empty Styrofoam dish in its paper bag. She dropped it beside the steps of Prey’s landlord, next to the trash can.

Prey had turned the light off; only the glow of the TV remained. Across his windows the evening sky reflected in a glut of slow-moving clouds. Joe could smell rain. He hoped it would hold off. Even under the two-foot overhang, a sudden downpour would splash up from the shingles, drenching him and playing hell with Clyde’s cell phone.

He watched Prey pop another beer, sitting on the bed leaning against the pillows. Playing with the remote, Prey began to channel-hop, producing a staccato of jolting squawks and flashing light. As the evening deepened, the pine tree that rose beside the roof turned from separate green needles to a black and shapeless mass, and the house walls darkened to nondescript shadows blending with the ragged bushes. Only the pale sidewalk directly below retained its sharp edges, the concrete empty now except for a scattering of dead leaves skittering in the wind. Stretching out, Joe rested his chin on the metal roof gutter, looking down, half dozing, his bored gaze fixed on Prey.

He stiffened.

Something dark was sliding among the bushes; a figure was approaching Prey’s windows noiselessly from the street, Joe caught a glimpse of jeans and a dark shirt. Was it the rookie that Garza had sent to tail Prey? Had he pulled a heavier shirt on over his pale T-shirt, and put on a black cap? The man moved along beside the shrubs below the window, making no sound at all.

At nearly the same moment, Prey flicked the overhead light on again. As the harsh glow struck the bushes like a searchlight, the guy ducked away. Joe picked him out of the blackest shadows, crouching, watching the window above him. He looked bigger than the young cop. Inside the room, the glow of the single bulb shattered across the dresser’s oval mirror, picking out Prey as he opened a third beer, the scar across his forehead angry in the artificial light. Staring at himself in the mirror, he moved to the bathroom and rinsed out a washcloth.

Returning to the TV, he lay down and folded the cool compress across the healing wound. Outside the window the silent watcher waited. Above the dark treetops, the clouds lowered and extended, cutting away the last of the fading daylight, casting the village into darkness. The watcher moved closer, peering in through the glass.

Snap,his shoe broke a dead twig. He crouched, frozen, as Prey swung up from the bed and switched off the light.

Prey stood for some time peering out, picking nervously at the scar, glancing behind him around the room.

When he pulled the blind, Joe could hear him moving, could hear drawers opening. Nipping across the roof, Joe dropped to the branch outside the bathroom window.

In the lighted bathroom, Prey was sweeping razor and toiletries into his jacket pockets, along with a pair of socks that he snatched from the shower rod where apparently he had hung his laundry. When he left the bathroom, Joe slid the window open. In a moment he heard Prey punch the phone, and listened to him ordering a cab.

Leaping back across branches to his own roof, Joe pawed at Clyde’s phone, hitting the on button and the redial, the way he had set it up. In seconds he was speaking to the dispatcher.

“Augor Prey is getting ready to split, packing clothes and shaving gear in his jacket. He just called a cab.”

“Will you repeat your message?”

“Prey’s ready to skip. Tell Detective Garza, now! I don’t know where the tail is. There’s a guy watching him, but I don’t think it’s your man.” Joe watched Prey lift the mattress, shouldering it up high enough to reach clear to the middle, deeper than Joe had been able to search without smothering himself. “Well, I’ll be damned,” Joe said. “I think-tell Garza that I think Prey has the letters.”

He watched Prey carefully stuff a little packet wrapped in clear plastic, into his inside pocket. It looked like letters; he thought he could see a ribbon wrapped around the small bundle.

Garza came on the line. He was as matter-of-fact as Harper had been lately. As if maybe Harper had talked to him about this snitch, had told him this informant was eccentric but reliable. “Is Prey’s car still there?”

“It’s there,” Joe said. “He’s called a cab. Guess he means to leave the car, and leave his bag in the room, just walk away as if he’s coming back. He’s armed. If that is your man right outside Prey’s window, he’s too close for you to risk your calling him.”

“There is no officer on duty.”

“You’ve had a tail on him all day.”

Garza hesitated as if not sure how much to trust this stranger.

“That officer is back at the station,” he said at last. “We have not sent a replacement. You say someone is watching Prey?” Garza’s voice was sharp.

Joe leaned over the gutter, peering down. The guy was still there. “You have no tail on him now?”

“No tail. If you’d give me your name�”

Joe watched the squarely built, darkly dressed figure, caught a glimpse of a pockmarked cheek.

“That’s Richard Casselrod,” he hissed suddenly. “Casselrod’s tailing him-black sweatshirt, black cap and shoes.”

Prey left his room and in a moment came out the back door of the house, looked around him, and quickly crossed the side yard.

“He’s making for the back street,” Joe said softly. “He’s standing in the shadows of a cypress tree. I can hardly see him under the low branches. Casselrod’s following him, moving in behind him.”

Casselrod made not a sound. Nor did Garza. The phone sounded like it had gone dead.

“Are you there?” Joe whispered.

No one answered; Garza was gone. Joe watched a cab turn into the street, its lights reflecting across darkened house windows. As Prey started toward the taxi, Casselrod lurched out of the night and grabbed him, swinging Prey around and shoving a gun in his face.

Jerking Prey’s jacket back over his shoulders to confine his arms, Casselrod took Prey’s own gun. Joe watched him pat Prey down and remove the plastic-wrapped packet from Prey’s shirt pocket.

Holding his gun on Prey, Casselrod backed toward the cab. At the same moment, police cars moved in from both corners, parking diagonally to block the narrow street. Detective Garza swung out, followed by three uniforms. They grabbed Prey, and Garza was on Casselrod. Kicking him toward the cab so he went off-balance, Garza swung him around, taking his gun and forcing him against the vehicle.

Within seconds, Prey and Casselrod had been searched and cuffed and secured in the backseat of a squad car. Garza had their guns, and he had the plastic-wrapped package. Joe Grey sat on the roof smiling with satisfaction as the black-and-whites pulled away, taking the two to their new accommodations. He hoped MPPD could offer them a long, extended visit.

27 [��������: pic_28.jpg]

Thesetting moon painted a line of brilliant light along the clouds’ ragged edges, a display so spectacular that up on the hills the two cats paused from devouring their freshly killed rabbit and sat looking toward the heavens, held by that burning stitchery.

It was only a few hours since Augor Prey and Richard Casselrod had been arrested, a positive event in an ongoing scenario that seemed, to Joe Grey and Dulcie, far more nebulous than the clouds shifting above them. The department had Prey’s.38 revolver. By tonight or tomorrow the ballistics report should be in. With that thought to cheer them, the cats fell to again, sharing their warm, bloody kill.

They ate in silence, making a leisurely meal, then washed up, licking gore from their whiskers. Around them the tall grass shivered in the predawn wind. What concerned the cats at the moment was that Vivi and Elliott had been released.

They had no idea on what grounds Garza had picked up the Traynors and brought them in for questioning; but the thought that they were free again was not encouraging. They had no notion, either, what Adele McElroy might have learned from NYPD about the Traynors.

“If this comes down the way I think,” Joe said, “Vivi and Elliott could split any minute-get edgy and pack a bag the way Prey did, and they’re gone. Well, Harper and Garza will be expecting that.” But still, he began to pace, looking restlessly down the hills toward the Traynor cottage.

“Relax,” she said complacently. “You know Harper has an officer in place. And they weren’t packing earlier. I watched until they went to bed.”

“A tail won’t know until they get in the car and take off.”

“So, the law will pick them up.” She licked blood from her paw. But then she rose, with a little half-smile. “You’re not going to rest until we have a look.” And she took off down the hills. Galloping through the forest of tall grass, the two cats could not be seen-only the thrashing line of their flight wildly tossing the grass heads.

Dropping down off the hill, they raced beneath a rail fence and through a garden that had been decimated by grazing deer, its roses nibbled away until only ragged fragments of petals remained, scattered like potato chips. Down through the village gardens they sped, as the courthouse clock struck five, then swiftly across empty side streets. Approaching the Traynor cottage, they passed the department’s surveillance car, an old blue Plymouth Rent-A-Wreck parked four doors away, its engine and tires still warm, the smell of coffee perfuming the air around it, though no driver was visible.

The Traynors’ black Lincoln was gone. The house was dark. Scorching up the oak tree to the high livingroom windows, they looked down through the glass.

“They haven’t moved out,” Dulcie said. “Vivi wouldn’t leave that tangerine satin robe, it’s too gorgeous. She wears it every morning.” The room was its usual mess, the robe tumbled across a chair under Vivi’s red sweater, a pair of sandals tossed on the coffee table next to an empty cup and a torrid-looking paperback romance, the heroine with enough cleavage to hide a sheep dog.

Dropping to a lower branch, they looked into the study.

The computer still reigned on the desk like a small electronic god. The stack of research was still on the shelf. Only the new chapter was missing; there were no freshly printed white pages aligned neatly beside the blotter. The cats waited for what seemed hours, and no sign of the Traynors. The sun was pushing above the hills when Charlie’s old Chevy van pulled into the drive, its bright blue paint glistening, its rebuilt engine purring. Last year Clyde had completely rebuilt the engine and fixed the rusting body, pounding out dents, applying filler and primer, then expertly sanding before it was painted-a labor not of love but in return for Charlie’s carpentry work on the neglected apartment building that Clyde had purchased. Their exchange of work had been a fair trade all around.

They watched Charlie swing out of the van, hauling her caddy of cleaning supplies to the back door, to disappear inside. Soon they heard her loading the dishwasher, then opening cupboards.

But soon the study light came on, and she wheeled the vacuum in. Standing at the desk, she bent to try the drawers, her kinky red hair falling loose from its ribbon. Was she looking for the manuscript? All the drawers were locked.

“If the Traynors have skipped,” Joe said, “maybe they mailed the manuscript to Elliott’s agent, maybe hoping when they surface again the second half of the advance will be waiting?”

Dulcie sneezed. “Could they really believe that?”

When Charlie hastily turned on the computer, the cats hurried along the branch where they could see the screen, watching her bring up chapter 1 ofTwilight Silver,then move to the final pages. They were so fascinated that when a mockingbird flitted boldly past their noses, they hardly noticed its rude taunting.

Taking a floppy disk from her pocket, Charlie put it in the computer and went through the steps to make a copy.

Glancing out toward the drive, she dropped the disk in her pocket, then went through the little ritual of shutting down the machine. “Nice timing,” Joe said. The computer was chuckling its closing noises when the Lincoln turned into the drive.

Vivi got out of the car alone; Elliott wasn’t with her.

“He’s not in the house?” Dulcie said, glancing through the study door to the empty hall.

The moment the car turned in, Charlie snatched up Traynor’s research from the bookshelf and slipped it into the waistband of her jeans, tucking it out of sight under her sweatshirt. By the time Vivi crossed the drive and turned her key in the back door, Charlie was vacuuming the hall. And the cats learned nothing more until that night when Charlie and Harper, Dallas Garza and his niece showed up at Clyde’s for sandwiches and a few hands of poker.

Harper and Garza were in a gala mood, their expressions as smug as Joe had ever seen. Clyde looked at them patiently, waiting for whatever big news they were holding back. When the officers said nothing but simply began to count out chips and shuffle cards, Clyde glanced at Joe, as frustrated as the tomcat. Couldn’t people just come out and say what was going on with them, couldn’t they simply tell a person why they were grinning? Ryan and Charlie remained expressionless, waiting to see what would develop.

The kitchen smelled of salami and onions, and echoed with the clink of poker chips. Harper dealt, fanning the cards with a thin, practiced hand. The cats, to keep a low profile, retreated to the laundry and cozied down on the bottom bunk next to Rube. The old Lab was sound asleep, softly snoring. Harper said, “That’s a nice car, that Lincoln the Traynors drive. I understand they picked it up from the Ford dealer when they got off the plane, ordered it months ago, before they left New York.”

Clyde looked at Harper, puzzled. “Are we supposed to be impressed?”

Harper shrugged. “I don’t know. You wouldn’t expect a multimillion-copy best-selling author to drive a ten-year-old Mazda.”

Joe couldn’t figure out where this was leading. Apparently, neither could Clyde, and he was not amused. He sat staring at his cards, scowling darkly. Well, he’d been touchy all week. Joe knew that he’d called Kate several times and that he kept leaving messages but she hadn’t returned his calls. At one point, worried about Kate, Clyde had called the designer’s studio where she worked. She was there, they told him, but very busy.

At the poker table, Clyde said, “If Traynor’s so rich, why did he opt for a Lincoln instead of a Jag or BMW?”

“You mean, why didn’t he buy from Beckwhite’s?” Harper said, laughing. “What, you’re getting a percentage from the showroom now? I’ll take two cards.”

Clyde flipped cards around the table. “Second-rate car. And a wife young enough to be his granddaughter.”

Ryan and Charlie were silent, glancing at each other.

“Forty years younger,” Garza said, his square, Latino face not changing expression. “He and Vivi were-have been married three years.” Garza slid two chips to the center. “His fifth wife. But the first time around for her-first time for a legal relationship.” He glanced at Harper again, the faint gleam of humor sparking between them.

Joe stretched and curled up with his chin on Rube’s golden flank. Beside him, Dulcie closed her eyes. They listened with keen interest; they’d never before heard Harper and Garza amuse themselves at Clyde’s expense.

When Harper raised the bet, Garza slid two chips to the center. “Vivi’s first marriage,” Harper said, “after a long line of live-ins and one-night stands. She’s been busy for a girl of twenty-five. Apparently she’s lived off rich men since she was fifteen.”

Garza said, “I wonder if Elliott knew, when he married her, that she would be his last.”

Clyde came to full alert. And in the laundry, Joe’s and Dulcie’s ears cocked sharply forward.

Clyde watched Garza raise the bet, then folded. Garza took the pot. No one said anything more, the table was silent, Harper and Garza stonefaced and ungiving. Joe wondered if a cat could expire from unfulfilled curiosity.

The poker players ran three more hands, talking only in monosyllables. “Raise you two.” “Three cards.” “I fold.” Twice Clyde glanced across the kitchen at Joe, at first with the same unfulfilled curiosity, a moment of mutual sympathy-before he gave Joe thatnone-of-your-business, why-don’t-you-go-out-and-play-like-a-normal-catlook that made Joe hunker down harder against Rube, stubbornly waiting for Harper’s punch line.

28 [��������: pic_29.jpg]

Harper raked in the largest pot of the night, stacking his chips in neat rows. “That would have been tight,” he said, “keeping a twenty-four-hour surveillance on the Traynors, pulling men off patrol.”

Garza nodded. “Better off in custody. New York is sending Vivi’s case file?”

Clyde stared at his cards and said nothing. And from the bunk in the laundry, Joe and Dulcie watched with slitted eyes, pretending to be asleep.

Harper said, “Homicide put it in the mail this morning. No wonder Traynor’s agent was upset.”

“All right,” Clyde said, “that’s enough. Let’s hear it.”

“If not for Traynor’s agent,” Garza said, ignoring Clyde, “hassling NYPD, they might never have identified the body.”

Joe had sat up, staring at the two cops so intently that Dulcie nudged him. He lay down again, tense with interest. At the poker table, Charlie and Ryan were quiet, watching Harper feed the story to Clyde piece by puzzling piece, the captain loving every excruciating minute.

And Joe and Dulcie looked at each other, buzzing with questions. Had the case come down like Joe thought? Was that what Garza and Harper were saying? Had Adele McElroy and NYPD found the missing piece? Did Harper and Garza have to be so damned oblique? They were not only teasing Clyde, they were driving two poor innocent cats nearly crazy.

“You’re not saying,” Clyde snapped, “that Elliott Traynor is wanted in New York? For homicide? You’re saying he killed someone? This guy is famous. You’re saying he-”

“He didn’t kill anyone,” Harper said mildly.

“Vivi?” Clyde said. “Vivi killed someone?”

Harper shrugged.

Clyde laid down his cards. “No more poker. No more beer. Nothing more to eat until you guys lay out the story.”

The officers began to laugh.

Ryan said, “� he and Viviweremarried three years?Weremarried�?”

Charlie repeated what Harper had said earlier.“DidElliott know that she would be last? That she would be Elliott’s last wife, Max?”

Clyde said softly, “Elliott Traynor is dead. When did this happen?”

“Before we ever met him,” Garza told Clyde.

Joe Grey felt his heart pounding, and felt Dulcie’s heart pounding against him. He’d been right. A wild guess, a shot in the dark, and he’d pounced on the big one. Had nailed his quarry right in the jugular.

Clyde looked hard at Harper. “This is not Elliott Traynor, this guy in the Traynor cottage who’s the spitting image of Traynor, who looks like Traynor’s picture on his book jackets, who is supposed to be suffering from terminal cancer? Who is overseeing the production of Traynor’s play and finishing up Traynor’s novel?”

“Fry cook from Jersey,” Garza said. “Dead ringer for Traynor.”

Clyde shook his head. “And Traynor’s agent was worried because his work was so bad? A fry cook is writing Traynor’s book? And is Vivi a fake as well?”

“That’s Mrs. Traynor,” Harper said. “They came close to pulling it off.”

“They killed him?”

“Not sure yet,” Harper said. “New York’s working on that.”

“How did you�?

“Someone knew,” Garza said. “Or suspected. Someone blew the whistle. Called the agent, told her it was time to take her problem to NYPD, to talk to the detectives.”

Clyde shuffled the deck. “I’m getting lost here. It would be nice if you guys would start at the beginning.”

“Talk about chutzpah,” Harper said. “Fry cook with no literary talent, impersonating one of the country’s top writers.”

“And you have them in jail.”

“Brought them in late this morning,” Garza said. “They were packing up, getting ready to skip. We’re holding them on illegal disposal of a body, until New York decides if it was homicide.”

Garza counted his chips, then looked up at Clyde. “Elliott Traynor died six weeks before they were to fly out here. No one knew, there was no report made of his death. For all intents and purposes, Elliott boarded the plane with Vivi.”

“No one might have known,” Harper said, “except that Traynor’s book wasn’t finished when they left New York. When they got out here, the writing suddenly turned inept. Apparently this fry cook can’t write worth a damn.”

“What did they do with the body?” Clyde asked. “You can’t just-”

“Seems Vivi dressed him in old ragged clothes, old shoes. Elliott had lost weight, didn’t look well, and that fit right in. She left him in an alley-a dead John Doe, one of New York’s homeless.”

“Agent got concerned,” Garza said, “because Traynor’s last chapters were so bad. She started poking around, then called Max.

“Agent was waiting for us to check on Traynor, when someone from Molena Point called her. Suggested she get over to NYPD and talk to the detectives, take them a picture of Traynor.”

Clyde didn’t ask who called the agent. Under the table, his foot was tapping. He eased back his chair as if he found it hard to sit still.

“The agent’s visit paid off,” Garza said. “One of the detectives remembered a John Doe that looked like Traynor. Body was tucked away in the morgue waiting to be ID’d. The detective took the photo and ran with it. Got the agent to bring him some manuscript pages-some that Traynor sent before they left New York, and some later chapters that were sent from here.”

Harper said, “Prints on the chapters Traynor wrote before they left the city matched the John Doe. The other set, on the chapters sent from Molena Point, are Vivi’s, most of them. One or two that match up with the fry cook. And,” he glanced at Charlie, “some prints where the housekeeper had moved the manuscript, when she dusted the desk.”

“You had Vivi’s and this guy’s prints?” Clyde asked.

“We were able to lift them from the house,” Harper told him, “sent them overnight to New York.”

“Another few weeks,” Garza said, “and Elliot might have been buried in a pauper’s grave to make room for new bodies.”

“But why would Vivi� How did Traynor die?”

Harper shook his head. “The body was found by a garbage collector behind a row of trash cans. Unshaven, dirty, shaggy hair. Nothing visible to indicate the cause of death. Usually, whether the coroner suspects murder or not, on a John Doe they’ll take blood and tissue samples for later investigation.

“Even though he was really too clean, no thick calluses on his feet, no sores or signs of prolonged ill health, New York thought Traynor was homeless. They’re a busy department. Overworked, backed up on investigations, as is the medical department. They didn’t take samples. Tucked him away hoping they’d get an inquiry, someone looking for him.”

“But why didn’t they run his prints?”

“They ran his prints,” Harper said. “No record. Even if he’d had a driver’s license, New York DMV doesn’t take prints. Only a picture. Could be, they would never have made the connection except for Traynor’s agent and whoever tipped her. I talked with her this afternoon. She’s not taking this too well-they were close friends. She’s convinced it was murder.

“She said Traynor had plotted a smashing ending to the book, a finale that fit the story yet would blow the reader away. Said Traynor plotted carefully before he began to write, and that he always adhered to his outline. She said the plot was followed in the last chapters, but the writing was not like Traynor’s work. She thought for a while that it was the medication.

“She said that for several weeks after he sent the first chapters, while he was still in New York-when the writing first turned bad-Vivi wouldn’t let her talk with Traynor when she called. Vivi claimed he had a bad cold, on top of the cancer and his treatments, that his condition was pretty serious, so McElroy didn’t push it. Said she was leaving town for a week’s conference. When she got back, Traynor did finally return her calls but he was forgetful and his voice muted, like the cold was hanging on. What upset her was that he didn’t want to talk about the book, didn’t seem able to talk intelligently about it. She wondered if he’d had a stroke, but Vivi denied that.

“Then,” Harper said, “Traynor decided to come to California to oversee the play and finish the book, despite his illness. McElroy said she was worried about him doing that.”

“But,” Clyde said, “if Traynor died naturally, from the cancer, if Vivi didn’t kill him, why wouldn’t she have a bang-up funeral and collect his estate?”

“If the book wasn’t finished,” Harper said, “she might have to give back his advance. And the guy had four previous wives. Maybe he didn’t leave much to Vivi.”

“Then you’re saying she had no motive to kill him? That he died a natural death, but she didn’t want anyone to find out?”

“That remains to be seen,” Harper said.

Joe and Dulcie exchanged a glance of smug satisfaction. But they lowered their eyes when they saw Clyde watching them, and began diligently to wash-the age-old ritual of pulling a little curtain of disinterested preoccupation around themselves.

Garza said, “Apparently she met this fry cook some six months ago. Willy Gasper, working in a little hole-in-the-wall in Queens.” That made Joe swallow back a laugh. This tall, well-dressed, elegant-looking man that everyone thought was an author of international fame-this guy’s name was Willie Gasper?

“Think about it,” Garza said. “She discovers a dead ringer for Elliott. Elliott’s ill, she assumes he’s terminal somewhere down the line. She knows that when he dies, the writing income is reduced, and that very likely four ex-wives could have some claim on his assets. Willie presents a ready-made way to keep Elliott in the picture, convince everyone that he’s still alive. Not hard, she thinks, if she offers Willie the right deal.

“She’ll have to take over Elliott’s writing, but she has his research, and this book’s three-fourths finished. She figures she can do that.”

Garza smiled. “Apparently it didn’t occur to Vivi that she might not be able handle the literary side of the matter. The opportunity was too good. How could she pass it up?”

Harper said, “The New York medical examiner should have an answer in a day or two as to whether she killed him or he died of natural causes. Meantime, the two of them are in jail raising all kinds of hell.

“When we get this sorted out,” Harper continued, “we may find a link between these two and Augor Prey. We picked Prey up last night. Prey and Casselrod.”

“On a tip,” Garza said quietly. “From this phantom snitch of Max’s, that no one has identified.

“Last night,” Garza said, “I’d pulled off the officer I had watching Prey. We had a party to break up south of the village, a free-for-all fight-kids-and someone fired a few shots from a twenty-two. We had everyone down there. Maybe Prey knew the officer had been pulled back. Maybe not. But whoever called in was close enough to Prey to see him packing up-and to see Richard Casselrod follow him.”

Garza frowned, aligning the cards into a neat stack. “I’d like to find this informer. See what other information he might have-see what his interest is in all this.”

Harper was quiet. Clyde was quiet. Charlie rose to refill the plate of cold cuts. And in the laundry, crouched on the lower bunk, Joe Grey smiled.Don’t waste your time,he thought, glancing at Dulcie, and he put his head down on Rube’s leg, feeling pretty good about life.

If he hadn’t called Adele McElroy, she might not have gone to the New York police until it was too late, until the body had been disposed of-if he hadn’t had that niggling little itch that wouldn’t let him rest. Cop sense, Harper called it.

And apparently Harper, too, had felt that a big piece of the puzzle was right there, looking him in the face.

Though Harper, constrained by certain ethics and codes, might not have been able to take the freewheeling approach that a cat could employ.

Joe knew it wasn’t smart to get smug about a case until there was an arraignment, a court date, and the wheels of the law were grinding, but he couldn’t help it. Dropping off the bunk to accept a plate of snacks from Clyde, he found himself rumbling with purrs. And when he looked up into Clyde’s eyes, the two shared a rare moment of perfect understanding. Clyde was proud of him, and that made Joe want to yowl.

All he and Dulcie had to do now, he thought, giving Clyde a purr and a head rub, was wait to see whether Vivi, maybe with Willie Gasper’s help, had indeed killed Elliott. Or whether she simply took advantage of the situation at hand.

Or, Joe thought suddenly, had Elliott himself done the deed? Had Elliott Traynor, following the philosophy of some other terminally ill folks, unwilling to deal with increasing pain and weakness, taken his own life? Had he stepped out of the sickness, perhaps with the expedient use of some powerful and legally prescribed pain medication? Joe was thinking so hard about this possibility that he didn’t wonder until later about Willie Gasper’s “target pistol,” about the.38 with which Willie had killed the raccoons. He didn’t wonder until late that night if Garza had searched the Traynor cottage and found the weapon.

As he curled down on the pillow beside Clyde, he knew there must be more to the story that Harper and Garza hadn’t yet told, and he began to wonder, anew, what the two officers were holding back.

Maybe there was something they were feeling edgy about, not yet certain how the facts were unfolding? Well, if Harper and Garza wanted to play that hand close to the chest, that was their call. Maybe they knew where the gun was, and weren’t spilling that part just yet.

29 [��������: pic_30.jpg]

The ladies of the Senior Survival club met early Saturday morning to stand in line for the Iselman estate sale and ended the day falling in love. To their great dismay, the object of their affections was not available, but was spoken for by another. The day was breezy, streaks of clouds blowing so low over the hills that, high up where the Iselman house rose, they seemed to catch on the rooftops. Mavity and Gabrielle and Susan waited in line at the door for the tickets. The house stood on a steep street of expensive residences at the east side of the village, a large two-story structure of stucco and rough-hewn timbers, with multiple wings and patios, and angled tile roofs. At precisely 7:00 A.M. John Tharp, manager of Tharp Estate Sales, opened the front door from within and, holding a large roll of blue tickets, began passing out numbers to be presented three hours later for admittance. Already the line snaked to the street and half a block along the sidewalk. The three ladies took their numbers and greeted Clyde and Ryan, who stood behind them some ten places.

“Will you join us?” Susan asked. “We’re having breakfast at La Junta.” La Junta Hotel’s patio breakfasts were a village favorite.

“Wilma and Cora Lee are meeting us. After the sale, we’re going to look at houses.”

Clyde raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t know you were that far along in your plan.”

“Neither did we,” Susan said, “but the marsh houses are being evicted since the city finally made up its mind. Mavity has thirty days to get out, so we thought we’d have a look.”

“Well, it’s a buyer’s market,” Clyde said. “But we’ll take a raincheck on breakfast, we’re going to the state park-deli picnic, and a hike before the sale begins.” He moved up beside Ryan to accept their tickets and the ladies turned away to Susan’s car.

They read the real estate ads over breakfast, and marked the most desirable houses.

Walk to the village from this charming five-bedroom home� One-of-a-kind design, separate guest quarters� Secluded setting, large house delightfully crafted� Bathed in sunshine, four bedrooms, two baths, and large office� Spectacular ocean views. Solarium. Two fireplaces�

It would take a lot of looking before they found the house that suited, and in their price range. The ladies lingered over the ads, enjoying their breakfast, then hit Iselman’s estate sale shortly before 10:00. Shopping for only an hour, they covered the ten rooms that were open to the public carrying away cloisonne bowls, Haviland china, ebony carvings, and some nice old brass pieces that should do well in the eBay auctions. Packing their purchases into Susan’s and Gabrielle’s cars, they unloaded them in Susan’s garage with only faint unease. With both Augor Prey, aka Lenny Wells, and Richard Casselrod out of circulation, their purchases would be perfectly safe. The first open house was a residence so immaculate, with its creamy fresh paint and white carpets, that they all were afraid to set foot inside. The garden was equally well manicured, each tree and rosebush trimmed to a perfection seldom found in nature. The house had five large bedrooms and four baths, and a kitchen to die for; but no one felt comfortable.

“Too picture perfect for me,” Mavity said. “I’d be afraid to breathe.”

“And me,” Susan agreed. “Not a home for a dog, even as well mannered as Lamb.”

“I like it,” Gabrielle said, imagining herself in the largest, front bedroom, the one with the fireplace. Neither Wilma nor Cora Lee showed much interest. The house was beautiful, with its large living room and sunken seating area, its white satin draperies and white tile fireplace; but it wasn’t the home they wanted. Anyway, the price was out of their reach. They moved on to the next open house, and the next, traveling in two cars in case Cora Lee should grow weary.

Some of the houses were elegant. Some showed the love marks of hard wear by large families. Some had good space, an appealing kitchen, or a welcoming garden, but none quite fit. Not enough bedrooms. Rooms too small. And of course the universal complaint: too much money.

Mavity, at the end of thirty days, would receive a cash payment, the city taking out a low-interest loan for its investment. The council had voted to turn three-fourths of the land back to the marsh as a bird and wildlife refuge, and to sell the remaining acre at a profit for a small, tasteful condominium in the heart of the sanctuary. The “nature” units would be much in demand. Mavity made no comment about the city’s intentions. She walked through the open houses with little enthusiasm, caught in the trauma of dislocation, feeling insecure and off-center and frightened. Wilma put her arm around her friend, knowing that when her own time came to move, she’d feel the same.

Wilma didn’t intend to leave her stone cottage anytime soon, but it was nice to have a plan for the future, a place to go if she should become ill. And now, driving to the next open house, she couldn’t get her mind off Dulcie and Joe Grey.

The cats had made a point of asking when Cora Lee might be going home, but they wouldn’t tell her why-only a sly little smile from Dulcie. They were preparing some surprise. Knowing those two, she remained uneasy. As she pulled up in front of the last open house on their list, two cars were leaving, and a black BMW was parked at the curb.

This was probably the ugliest house in the village, a brown wooden box with a flat roof, cracked siding, and peeling trim, the fascia boards pale and discolored. On top of the large main floor stood a second, smaller cube, apparently a single room, resembling nothing so much as the wheelhouse on a Mississippi riverboat. The structure was, in fact, very much like Mavity’s little fishing cottage, in a larger and more sprawling version and without the stilts that held Mavity’s home above the muddy marsh.

The house backed on one of the wild canyons that bisected the Molena Point hills. Maybe, Wilma thought, the view from the back would be nice, out over the canyon and across Molena Valley to the low mountains that edged the rocky coast. These fissures that cut through the hills had, eons past, been deep sea canyons, this whole neck of land lying beneath the ocean. It was the canyons, in part, that kept Molena Point from becoming overpopulated. One couldn’t build in them, and the lush terrain, with wild bushes and grasses, offered food and shelter to deer and coyotes, to occasional bobcats, and, just this last spring, to a large male cougar. How interesting that the house stood between the two worlds, the rear decks forcing out into the wild land, the front of the house solidly a part of manicured human civilization.

The front yard was enclosed by a tall wooden fence and belonged apparently to one or more large dogs that were not at the moment in residence. The earth was trampled bare beneath a few sickly bushes and dotted with their chewed rubber toys. At least the owners had cleaned up the dog do; and probably they had taken the dogs away for the day-the sight of canine pets could cause a prospective buyer to look twice as hard for interior damage, for chewed door moldings, scratched floors, and stained carpet. The ladies gathered in front, beside the “Open House” sign.

“I don’t think�” Gabrielle began, looking the house over, “I don’t think this one�”

Wilma took her arm. “Come on. It won’t hurt to look, it’s the last one on the list. Nearly four thousand square feet, Gabrielle, and it has enough water credits to start a hotel.”

The adread, five bedrooms and five baths, five custom-built fireplaces plus two sunny, legal basement apartments.The wordlegalshould mean not only that the land was zoned for two apartments, but that every water fixture on the premises had a proper permit.

All over Molena Point there were unobtrusive apartments tucked into a hillside basement or over a garage, some legal, some not. All were in demand as rentals. Molena Point’s water code mandated an official permit for any household fixture that used water in its functions, from a king-sized shower to a bar sink. New credits were not an option; your house had just so many. If you wanted another washbasin, you had to give up a fixture in exchange.

“There’s plenty of parking space,” Susan said. “Three-car garage and this nice wide drive. And the front planting, between the fence and the street, is nice, where the dogs don’t play.” That wide area was lush with native bushes, succulents, and large volcanic boulders. Susan’s Lamb, though he, too, had a fenced yard, had in his poodle dignity allowed Susan’s garden to flourish and even the lawn to present a respectable green carpet.

The front door was open. They saw no one inside. Entering, they formed a divergent group, Mavity in her maid’s uniform, Wilma in jeans and a red T-shirt, Gabrielle wearing a linen suit and heels, and Cora Lee in stretch pants and the oversized shirt that hid her bandage. Susan wore a calf-length denim jumper over a white T-shirt, and leather sandals. They moved into the foyer.

“Oh, my,” Mavity said.

“Oh!” Cora Lee whispered.

They stood in a wide entry, its tile floor and skylight bathing them in brilliance. Potted plants filled the corners. Through a door to their left, they saw a young couple in the large, light kitchen, talking with realtor John Farmer. Glancing up, he waved to Wilma. A stairway rose to their right. Passing it, they moved ahead into a large living room dominated by a fireplace of native stone.

The gray-blue walls wanted paint, and the carpet still showed stains despite an apparently recent cleaning. But the ceiling was high, with tall windows, a spacious room very different from what the exterior implied.

The three bedrooms on the main level, two to the right of the living room and one to the left past the dining room, were all large. Each had a private bath, and two had raised fireplaces.

The oversized kitchen was done in cream-and-white tiles. Opening off this were an ample laundry and storeroom, before one entered the garage. All the walls needed paint, and some needed patching. The doors were marred with claw scratches, made, apparently by a very large dog. Returning to the entry hall, they climbed the stairs.

The upstairs cubicle, that looked so small from without, offered a large master suite with another raised fireplace, a private deck, an ample study that would do for another bedroom, and a view straight down into the canyon. Three levels of decks overlooked the canyon. The ladies glanced shyly at each other, but no one spoke. They hurried down again, to the basement apartments.

Both apartments were fusty and needed work. But both had their own small kitchens. Either would do for a housekeeper, a caregiver, or as rental income.

Returning to the living room, they could see John Farmer still in the kitchen with the young couple. Farmer was in his forties, a man with surprisingly round cheeks, a pink-and-white complexion, a slim, sculpted nose, and dark hair in a military cut. He sat at the dining table with the blond young woman and the slim, red-haired young man. Their voices were low, their conversation solemn, the couple’s expressions excited and serious.

“They’re too young to afford this house,” Mavity whispered.

“And whose BMW is that at the curb?” Susan said softly.

The sight of the young man making out a check wilted the ladies. When the couple had left, shaking hands with John Farmer and tucking away a deposit receipt, Farmer joined them.

“Did they offer full price?” Wilma asked.

John Farmer nodded, and put his arm around Wilma. “You folks were serious.”

“We were,” Wilma said. “Very serious. Are they requesting an inspection?”

“Yes. And the sale, of course, is contingent upon their getting their loan. If you’d come half an hour earlier�”

Wilma looked at the others; she didn’t know what had come over her, she wasn’t ready to sell her house, but they couldn’t let this one go. Maybe the loan would be refused. Maybe the inspector would find some disastrous seepage problem that the couple wouldn’t want to bother repairing.

“You can make a second deposit,” John said. “Contingent upon their not completing the sale.”

An hour later, after walking around the outside and inspecting the furnace and the ducts and wiring as best they could, and writing in several contingencies to their deposit, the checkbooks came out. The ladies split the deposit five ways and called their attorney to help set up the venture. The legal work seemed tedious, but they were caught up in the thrill of the purchase and in the trauma of not knowing whether they had actually made a purchase.

While Wilma and her friends agonized over their hunger to own this particular house, across the village in Wilma’s guest room, Joe Grey and Dulcie were pawing a few scattered cat hairs from the dresser, where they had left a brown, padded envelope. They had placed a computer-printed note on top, weighting it down with Cora Lee’s bracelet so it couldn’t be missed.

Cora Lee,

The letter in this envelope belongs to you. You bought the white chest at the McLeary yard sale. Richard Casselrod took it from you by force, even if he did shove some money at you. He took the chest apart and removed this letter from the false bottom, so it should be legally yours, to keep or sell.

A friend

The letter had been Dulcie’s longest effort at Wilma’s computer. Her paws felt bruised, and her temper was still short. It took a lot of squinching up to hit only the right keys, and took far more patience than patrolling the most difficult mouse run.

They had gotten Catalina’s valuable letter out of Joe’s house before Clyde might, in fact, decide to pack up and move. Before he fell prey to the hunger for change that had gripped the ladies of the Senior Survival club. At least three of those women seemed fairly itching to box up their belongings.

Now, following Joe out through her cat door, Dulcie said a little prayer for him, a plea that Clyde wouldn’t sell their house, that there would be no move for the tomcat, that Clyde and Joe would stay where they belonged, and Joe could quit worrying so foolishly about homelessness and displacement.

30 [��������: pic_31.jpg]

The front page of theMolena Point Gazette was deeply shocking to citizens who knew nothing of recent events. But to Joe Grey and Dulcie and to the Molena Point police, the headline was satisfying, the indication of a job completed. The national noon news on TV and radio may have scooped theGazette,but still the paper sold out in less than two hours. Every daily across the country carried the story.

AUTHOR ELLIOTT TRAYNOR MURDERED VISITING AUTHOR AN IMPOSTOR

The handsome gray-haired author living among us while his play,Thorns of Gold,was being cast, has turned out to be an imposter. The man whom villagers assumed to be Elliott Traynor is, in fact, a New York fry cook from Queens bearing an uncanny resemblance to the author. The real Traynor died six weeks ago on the New York streets, in a drama more bizarre than any of Traynor’s many works of fiction.

The debonair and charming fry cook who impersonated Traynor was able to deceive the entire village, including director Samuel Ladler and musical director Mark King. Only Traynor’s wife, Vivi, seems to have known the truth.

The body of the real Elliott Traynor was identified late yesterday by New York police after it had lain for six weeks in cold storage in the New York City morgue, tagged as a John Doe. Molena Point police are holding Vivi Traynor and the fry cook, Willie Gasper, for transport back to New York where they will face murder charges. Until this morning, Traynor’s death was considered a possible suicide. Police now have a witness to the murder.

Traynor was found dead in early March, in an alley frequented by the homeless. There was no identification. He was dressed in rags. The fingerprints lifted could not be matched in any New York State or federal records. On Friday, Traynor’s widow and Gasper were arrested and held for possible illegal disposition of a body, but early today a witness was located claiming to have seen the author’s wife smother him with a pillow and dump him in the alley.

Early this month, Elliott and Vivi Traynor were thought by Traynor’s publisher and his New York agent to have flown to the West Coast, where Traynor meant to complete his latest novel and oversee the production of his play. According to New York police, Traynor died the night the couple’s flight left John F. Kennedy Airport. Gasper, impersonating the world-famous author, accompanied Mrs. Traynor on the flight to California using Traynor’s identification, then posed as Traynor, even acting as consultant on the production of Traynor’s only known play.

New York medical examiner Holland Frye told reporters that Traynor’s body contained a large dose of Demerol laced with alcohol, a potentially lethal combination. Traynor had a legal prescription for Demerol, which is a powerful pain reliever. The pillow with which Traynor was smothered was hidden by the witness to his murder. Subsequently turned over to police, it was booked as evidence and sent to the state crime lab for identification of hairs clinging to the fabric and DNA testing of possible saliva stains.

Max Harper and Dallas Garza watched the evening newscast while standing in Clyde’s living room. The three cats lay on the back of the couch behind Charlie and Ryan, pretending to doze but Joe was so interested he could hardly lie still. Both theGazetteand the newscasters had mentioned only one New York witness.

So, Joe thought, smiling, NYPD had been able to keep some of the details under wraps.

Besides Marcy Truncant, the bag lady who had awakened to see Vivi kneeling in the alley holding a pillow over Traynor’s face, a neighbor of the Traynors, living upstairs from them in their mid-town apartment building, had come forward. She had told detectives that she saw Vivi and Elliott leave the building early the evening of his death, five hours before the Traynors’ flight. She remembered the date because it was her wedding anniversary, the first since her husband had died. She saw the couple go out the front door of the building and down into the parking garage, then in a few minutes saw their car pull out of the garage. She told police she saw both of them inside the car as they turned into traffic and sat waiting for the traffic light.

She said that approximately twenty minutes after the Traynors left the building, Elliott returned, coming into the lobby through the front door, and that he was dressed differently. He had left the building dressed in a suit and tie and had returned wearing chinos, a T-shirt, and a frayed denim jacket, attire devoid of the meticulous care that Traynor always exhibited. She didn’t see their car return, but an hour later when she went down to the garage, the Traynors’ black Jaguar was in its slot.

Joe imagined a scenario where Vivi and Elliott left in the Jaguar, then Vivi had somehow gotten Elliott into Willie’s car, maybe had feigned car trouble. She had gotten some liquor into him and perhaps additional Demerol. When he passed out they had changed his clothes and dumped him in the alley, and apparently smothered him to make certain he was dead. Crude, Joe thought. But effective.

Willie had driven the Jaguar back to the building and put it away, so it would appear that Elliott and Vivi were at home. In Elliott’s place, he had gone up to the apartment. He had changed clothes, called a cab, and headed for the airport to meet Vivi, to catch their red-eye flight out of JFK. Willie’s car had not yet been located. Joe wondered what they’d done with Elliott’s dress clothes. Had they been stained or torn when Vivi dispatched Elliott?

When the TV news switched to tensions in the Middle East, Harper turned the volume down. Joe could hear Clyde in the kitchen tossing the salad and stirring the spaghetti sauce. The house smelled of Italian sausage and garlic. Elaborately, Joe stretched, trying to get the kinks out. His whole body felt tense. He’d rest easier when the two detectives had arrived from New York, and had taken Vivi and Willie Gasper away with them. He kept thinking, without any logic, that all the confusion with the Spanish chests and Catalina’s letters wouldn’t end until Molena Point had seen the last of Vivi Traynor-as if Vivi’s switch-and-bait game had somehow contaminated everything she touched in the village.

Catalina’s hidden letters, if the ladies of Senior Survival had been able to buy all the chests and found all the letters in them, would have contributed nicely to their future security. But that hadn’t happened. Too many people knew about the letters. Of the seven chests that Marcos Romero had carved for Catalina, five were now accounted for. The white chest that Casselrod took from Gabrielle, in which he found the hidden compartment; the three chests that the Iselman estate gave to the Pumpkin Coach; and the chest that Susan Brittain had bought on eBay. Susan had examined it carefully, but had found nothing inside.

Five chests. And nine letters-the one Casselrod found in the white chest and that Joe and Dulcie had returned to Cora Lee, and the eight letters taken from one of the chests donated by the Iselman estate, that Augor Prey took from the smashed chest in the Pumpkin Coach. Those would remain with the police as evidence until after Prey’s trial, then would be returned to the Pumpkin Coach to sell. Eight letters, each valued at some ten thousand dollars, though both the curator at the museum of history where Susan inquired, and an official at Butterfield’s, thought that at auction they would bring more. Forty to eighty thousand clams, Joe thought, for the boys and girls clubs, the Scouts, and Meals for the Elderly-and maybe the local Feline Rescue. That would be nice, to see some of it go for indigent cats. After all, without a cat or two, Augor Prey might have slid out of Molena Point with the letters, as slick as a greased rat.

When Joe heard Clyde dishing up the spaghetti, he dropped off the couch and melted into the kitchen, rubbing against Charlie’s ankles, then leaped to the far end of the counter beside Dulcie and the kit.

Curled up on the cool tile, impatiently awaiting their turn, the cats watched Clyde serve the plates. Charlie unwrapped garlic bread hot from the oven, as Ryan popped cold beers. The Italian feast smelled like the cats’ idea of heaven, making them drool with greed.

Humans wind their spaghetti between spoon and fork, but cats slurp it-in this case while listening guiltily to Rube whining at the back door. The old dog’s digestion could no longer handle spicy food. Clyde fed him a special diet about as appealing as tom burgers.

But hey,Joe thought,the stuff is good for him.He watched Charlie and Harper at the table, observing the sense of shared sympathy between them. And he had to smile, that Clyde and Ryan seemed to be hitting it off. Certainly Clyde was scrubbed and neatly dressed in a V-neck sweater over a white turtleneck and freshly washed jeans, and he hadn’t grouched once-he was, in fact, observing impeccable behavior. That never hurt, Joe thought, amused.

“When is Augor Prey’s arraignment?” Charlie asked. “Are you sure he’ll be indicted?”

“Time and patience,” Harper said. “You can never be certain of anything, but I see no reason why the grand jury won’t hand down an indictment. We have the gun that killed Fern, with Prey’s prints on it.”

Charlie nodded. “Along with Willie Gasper’s prints, and Vivi’s?”

Harper nodded. “It was apparently Willie’s gun or hers. There was no registration. And no way to know if that gun killed the raccoons. It was the same caliber weapon, but with a hollow point that spreads all over, you’re not going to see any riflings. If it was the same gun, Gasper apparently wiped off the trigger. It showed only Prey’s prints.

“Prey’s story is that, the morning Fern died, Vivi followed Fern in through the broken window, into the back room, and pulled the gun on them while they were fighting over the wooden chests. That he snatched it from her and it went off, killing Fern. We have evidence that Vivi was in the back room at some point.” Joe thought about the cherry pit that Garza had picked up, and about Prey’s sworn statement putting Vivi there. The cats, playing up to the night dispatcher, had found a copy of Prey’s signed statement that Garza had left for Harper. Easing the door of Harper’s office closed and flipping on the desk lamp, they had crouched on the blotter, reading.

Not only had Fern tried to grab the chests from Prey-a real fistfight, as Prey had described it-but Prey said that one of the chests had been smashed, and that Fern managed to snatch up the letters that fell out of it.

Joe assumed there had been some gentle pressure from Garza or Harper to obtain the rest of Prey’s statement. Prey said that when Fern ran toward the window he lost his head, went kind of crazy, as he put it, and shot her again, firing at her in a fit of confusion.

He said that Vivi had disappeared; and that when he saw he’d likely killed Fern, he jammed the gun in his pocket and ran for the back door, jumped in his car, and took off. He said that, driving away, he wanted to go back and talk to the police, that he heard the sirens and wanted to tell them what had happened, but he was afraid to. That had made the cats smile. Anyone who thought Prey was trying sincerely to make amends for an innocent mistake ought to think again. For one thing, both shots had been from behind, entering Fern in the back.

“It’s interesting,” Garza said, “that Vivi saw him shoot Fern, but didn’t try to blackmail him. Likely she didn’t want to call attention to herself at that point. Apparently she just went home and laid low, but then she got nervous and started to pack.”

Harper leaned back in his chair. “Not too nervous to send those chapters she was writing off to New York before she and Willie tried to sneak out. Maybe she hoped that in the next few weeks, New York would dispose of Elliott’s body and no one would ever know he was dead. She may have planned for Willie to keep right on being Elliott Traynor, she may have really believed that Elliott’s publisher would think that what she wrote was Elliott’s work. It takes,” Harper said with a lopsided grin, “some kind of talent to write like Elliott Traynor.”

The shadow of a smile touched Charlie’s face; and she rose quickly to dish up more spaghetti. The cats watched her with interest; but it was not until the next morning that Joe was certain of what he suspected.

It was just after ten when Joe trotted in through Dulcie’s cat door; she met him in the kitchen, her green eyes bright, her tabby tail lashing with excitement. He’d seen Charlie’s van out front, and Gabrielle’s and Mavity’s cars. In the living room, Charlie and all the ladies of Senior Survival were gathered; all seemed to be talking at once. Joe sniffed the good smells of coffee and chocolate and sweet vanilla, and twitched an ear toward the animated female voices.

“They’re celebrating,” Dulcie said. “They got the house. They really got it, they’re so happy they’re almost purring.”

“What house?”

“The last one they looked at, the one they’ve all been talking about, the one above the canyon. Don’t you listen? Tomcats,” she said, flattening her ears with annoyance. “It has a bad water problem, so that young couple didn’t get their loan. Anyway, they didn’t want to do the repairs. The ladies are so thrilled.”

“Right. That’s just what they need, a huge house with a water problem. Plumbing? Leaking basement? What? Do you know how much it costs to-”

“Ryan looked at it. She said she can fix it.”

Joe narrowed his eyes. “Saying something and doing it are not always the same. The drainage on those hills-”

“Come on, Joe. They’re so happy. It’ll be all right-let’s stay for a little while. Charlie’s here. She will be one of the trustees. But she’s-I don’t know what’s wrong with her. She’s acting as nervous as a mouse at a cat show.”

Heading for the living room beside Dulcie, Joe glanced up at the buffet. “Is that the chest Susan bought, the one that was in her car during the breakin?”

“Wilma’s keeping it for her.”

“Out in plain sight?”

“Since Augor Prey and Casselrod went to jail, why not?”

“I wouldn’t leave it lying around. You don’t know who else�” Exasperated with Susan and Wilma, he leaped up to have a look.

The box smelled just like the others, of old, seasoned wood. The geometric carvings were primitive and handsome, each side with a rosette in the center. Pawing the top open, he sniffed at the empty interior.

The walls and bottom seemed too thin for a false compartment. Likely this was just a nice collector’s piece that would bring maybe four or five hundred dollars, he thought, dropping to the floor. Heading for the living room, the two cats slipped into the cave beneath Wilma’s desk beside the kit, where she lay on her back playing with one of Cora Lee’s slippers, holding it between her front paws, killing it violently.

Moving deeper in beside her, Joe and Dulcie listened to the ladies’ plans, to Susan’s decision to put her house on the market, and to their discussion of the legal aspects of a joint purchase that their attorney had outlined. All the numbers and percentage points made the cats’ heads reel. Curled up together, they were almost asleep when Charlie’s cell phone rang.

Answering, her face colored. She glanced around at her friends, then rose, heading for the kitchen, cradling the phone to her ear, her sudden excitement seeming almost to send sparks. Quickly the three cats slipped out to follow her, pushing through the kitchen door before she closed it. Leaping to the table, they crowded around her. The voice at the other end reached them like a bee buzz. Charlie listened for some time, going pale; absently she petted Dulcie.

Slipping close to her, Joe put his face next to Charlie’s. She didn’t push him away. The woman’s voice at the other end was husky and familiar. “� totally unprecedented. There are a lot of well-known writers who would like to step into this contract. I can’t make any kind of promise, but I have to say, I like this very much. Really, I find it difficult to separate your work from Elliott’s. I’m hoping Elliott’s editor will feel the same.

“I’m taking it over to her this afternoon. This whole thing has been upsetting to everyone-and you can imagine that several writers’ agents have already contacted Kathleen Merritt and called me.”

Nervously, Charlie hugged Joe.

“If she does like it, can you meet the August tenth deadline?”

“Yes,” Charlie said, looking with panic at the cats.

“You said you’re not a writer by profession?”

“I’m an artist. I do animal drawings. I’m represented in Molena Point by the Aronson Gallery. And I� I own a cleaning and maintenance company.”

“So you work full-time?”

“I can meet the deadline. I have reliable crews. My time is my own.” She didn’t mean to sound defensive. Beside her, Joe and Dulcie were smiling and purring. The kit looked wide-eyed and puzzled. When Charlie hung up the phone, she grabbed the cats in a huge hug.

“Our secret,” she said softly, glancing toward the living room.

Joe listened to the faint sound of the ladies’ voices, preoccupied with loan points and interest rates. Strange, he thought, that loud, giggling Vivi Traynor, when she brought her ugly little secret to Molena Point, might have launched Charlie into a new and exciting venture.

Though if Charlie hadn’t been so nosy, as curious as a cat herself, even Vivi’s subterfuge wouldn’t have made that happen. And it was Charlie’s love of Traynor’s work that had truly set her on this path.

“Not even Wilma,” Charlie whispered. “Don’t even tell Wilma. Not yet. Not until I see if this will fly.”

“It will fly,” Dulcie said softly.

Charlie looked at them uncertainly. “Maybe. And maybe this is all foolishness, maybe I’ll fall on my face.” She grinned. “But I’ve done that before, and gotten up again.”

Joe twitched a whisker. He could imagine Charlie sitting up late at night, into the small hours, in her little one-room apartment, working on a borrowed computer at her breakfast table. Stopping work sometimes to stand at her window looking down on the rooftops as she formed, in her thoughts, her own kind of magic for the last chapters of Elliott Traynor’s novel. And he rubbed his face against Charlie’s, raggedly purring.

31 [��������: pic_32.jpg]

It was opening night ofThorns of Gold. Among the shadows above the dimly lit theater, Joe and Dulcie lay stretched out along a rafter, watching the crowd streaming in below them laughing and talking, the seats quickly filling up. The villagers were dressed all in their finest, in coats and ties, and long gowns. Dulcie was wide-eyed at the lovely jewelry and elegant hair arrangements. Despite Elliott Traynor’s death, despite the fact that Vivi Traynor and Willie Gasper were back in New York and had been arraigned for murder, the producers had moved on with the play-finding Elliott’s agent far easier to deal with than Vivi in matters of production and casting.

Elliott’s move, in making Adele McElroy recipient, in trust, of his works, had been a surprise to everyone. In Joe’s opinion, considering the number of ex-wives in the picture, that had been very wise. He wondered, when Traynor set up the trust two years earlier, if he’d guessed how soon it would take effect. One thing was certain: Vivi hadn’t known about the arrangement.

Joe and Dulcie had watched as Vivi and Willie Gasper were marched from Molena Point jail handcuffed, and locked into the backseat of the New York detectives’ rented car, for the ride to the airport, and they had witnessed her vile language. There were no giggles now, nervous or otherwise. Certainly the New York grand jury’s ruling indicting Vivi for murder had set off enough national headlines and prime-time news to be heard even by Elliott himself wherever he was in heaven’s high realms.

Joe supposed that if the New York police hadn’t had an eye witness to Elliott’s murder, Adele McElroy herself, because she was trustee and partial heir, might have been a suspect.

In Molena Point, Augor Prey had been convicted for breaking and entering and vandalism. That had netted him two years in county jail and two thousand dollars restitution to be paid to Susan Brittain. Though very likely, Susan wouldn’t see much of the money. Prey’s upcoming trial for Fern Barth’s murder should, if all went well, put him behind bars and out of the workforce for some time to come. Joe Grey smiled, feeling greatly at ease with the world, feeling much the same as when a brace of fat mice lay lined up before him-a nice finish to a day’s hunting.

Butthe kit, though pleased that justice had prevailed and that Vivi was behind bars, wasn’t nearly finished with related matters. Nor was she up among the rafters, tonight, with Joe and Dulcie, watching the house fill with eager theatergoers.

Sprawled across Cora Lee’s dressing table, her black-and-brown tattered coat looking like nothing so much as a ragged fur scarf, the kit watched the star of the play button her satin gown for the first act. They could hear from the audience tides of hushed voices echoing back to them where folk were laughing and greeting friends. The proximity of a real audience excited the kit so much it made her paws sweat.

Sitting down at the dressing table, Cora Lee drew on eye makeup and applied mascara while leaning over the kit, and blushed her cheeks brighter than the kit had ever seen. When she slipped on her wig of long, shining black hair, those sleek Spanish tresses curling around her shoulders, she wasn’t Cora Lee anymore.

She rose from the dressing table as a young, vibrant Spanish woman, splendid in cascading folds of pale ivory satin. Catalina stood stroking the kit, her hands shaking.

“You bring me luck, Kit. You are my luck.” Her fingers were so cold that the chill came right through the kit’s fur, making the little cat shiver. Cora Lee stood still for only a moment, then began to pace the small dressing room, singing softly the lines of her opening number-whether to calm her nerves or to warm up, the kit didn’t know. She sang part of a song from the second act, the verses so hurt and lonely they made the kit want to yowl-Catalina’s lament touched the kit so strongly that she mewled, lifting her paw to her friend.

“Does that number make you sad, Kit?” Cora Lee tilted the kit’s chin up, looking into her eyes. “Say, ‘Break a leg,’ Kit.”

The kit’s eyes widened with alarm, making Cora Lee laugh.

“That’s what theater people say, for good luck. Break a leg. If you could talk, that’s what you could say to me.” Careful of her costume, Cora Lee picked up the kit and hugged her. “I’m so nervous. I haven’t done this since New Orleans-not a musical. Well, it’s not a musical. Experimental, Mark calls it. But for so long, I’ve only done speaking parts. And then I used to sing sometimes in small clubs. It still hurts to sing, Kit-like a knife in my middle. I don’t care, this is Catalina’s night, Catalina is alive, tonight, and she will be wonderful.”

She will be wonderful,the kit thought.You are Catalina, and you are wonderful.

The music began. There was a knock at the door. Cora Lee set the kit on the dresser. “Stay here, Kit. Think good thoughts.” And she left the dressing room, heading backstage behind the sets.

The kit waited only a moment, then followed her. Staying among the shadows, she hid herself in the wings behind the long curtains where she had a good view of the stage. Above her in the rafters, high over the gathered audience, Joe and Dulcie saw her. Dulcie smiled, but Joe Grey tensed. “What’s she doing?”

“She’s just watching,” Dulcie said quietly. “She loves Cora Lee. And she loves the play; the songs seem really to charm her. She’ll just sit there purring,” she said complacently.

But Joe’s yellow eyes shone black in the shadows, burning with unease.

“Not to worry,” Dulcie said. “What could she do? She’s a sensible little cat.”

“She’s too close to the stage. Why doesn’t she come up here?”

“She wants to be close to Cora Lee, she wants a front-row seat.” She gave him a sweet look. “It’s opening night, everyone’s talked about opening night. Of course the kit’s excited.” She peered down over the rafter below them, where Clyde and Ryan were taking their seats. Clyde was dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and tie, and was holding Ryan’s hand. Ryan wore a long emerald green dress. Dulcie loved all the pageantry and elegance. It would be no good to have a play, if the audience didn’t dress up, too.

To the cats’ left sat Wilma and Susan, and Gabrielle and Mavity, all wearing long dresses and whispering among themselves. Three rows in front of them, Max Harper and Charlie were finding their places.

“Can you believe that Harper sprang for front-row seats?” Dulcie whispered. Harper was dressed in a well-tailored, dark sport coat, tan slacks, pale shirt, and tie. Charlie wore a long, rust-toned skirt and a brocade jacket in orange and turquoise that was, Dulcie whispered, “stunning with her red hair.”

The house lights dimmed and the orchestra shifted from a soft tango to the opening strains of Act 1. The curtain opened to the patio of the Ortega-Diaz hacienda, filled now with angry, arguing rancheros-with Don Ortega-Diaz and a dozen of his contemporaries, resplendent in Spanish finery, discussing with Latin passion the sudden foreclosure on their lands. Not until the American, Hamilton Stanton, appeared in their midst offering to pay Ortega-Diaz’s commitments, did the mob quiet. What was this? What a fortunate turn of events, that their friend could marry off the eldest of his five daughters to a rancher of obvious means and, at the same time, save his lands.

But when Catalina’s hand was promised, she stepped from the shadows fiery with rage against her father; the angry violence of her song shook the audience. When the lights came up at the end of Scene 1, the theater was silent. Applause, when it broke, was like sudden thunder.

It was Scene 2, as servants locked Catalina in her room, that her saddest lament rose-and that a small movement in the shadows drew Cora Lee’s attention. The cats saw her glance into the wings though her singing didn’t falter. Dulcie caught her breath. Joe Grey crouched, ready to leap across the rafters and down, to haul the kit off the stage.

Dulcie stopped him, her teeth gently in his shoulder. “Wait, Joe. Watch-look at the audience.”

Catalina’s voice faltered for only a second as she reached out to the dark little cat that had slipped up onto her couch beside her. As Cora Lee’s song held the audience, she drew the kit to her in a gesture natural and appealing. Singing with a broken heart, she cuddled the kit close. Every person present was one with them, not a sound in the darkened theater. Cora Lee and the kit held them all.

The kit appeared in two more scenes, both times when Cora Lee glanced into the wings to draw her out again, the two seeming perfectly attuned to one another. Cora Lee might be amazed at the kit’s behavior, but she was a child of the theater. And the audience loved the small cat. When Cora Lee glanced into the wings at Sam Ladler, he was smiling-Cora Lee played the kit for all she was worth. When Catalina was fed on bread and water, the kit slipped in through the window grate to keep her company. The kit disappeared after the wedding and did not return until Catalina’s lover, in desperation, began to ravage the Ortega-Diaz lands, stealing cattle and burning the pastures. Now again the kit was there, with exquisite timing, as Catalina herself set a trap for her lover.

In the last scene, when Marcos escaped Hamilton Stanton’s vaqueros and came to take Catalina away, and when Stanton was there in her stead, Catalina stood in her chamber holding the kit in her arms, weeping for Marcos, for her part in his death, as the curtain rang down.

Among the cats’ closest friends, response to the kit’s theatrical adventure was frightened and guarded. While everyone in the village raved about Cora Lee’s performance and about the wonderful part the little cat played, and the kit had front-page newspaper coverage, her friends worried for her and wanted badly to put a stop to her foolishness.

“You’re racing too close the edge,” Dulcie told her. “Don’t you think people will wonder?”

“But no one-” the kit began.

“Kit, this scares me. Don’t you understand what could happen?”

The kit looked at Dulcie sadly, filled with misery.

“You’re lovely in the play, Kit. You’re exactly what the play needed. Everyone loves you. But, Kit, you know that not all humans can be trusted. Even if they believe you’re no more than a trained cat, the way Wilma and Clyde have tried to convince people, don’t you know how many no-goods would steal such a cleverly trained kitty and try to sell you.”

“But they wouldn’t hurt me. And I would escape, I would get away.”

Dulcie just looked at her. Life before the kit had been so peaceful and predictable-and, compared to lifewiththe kit, seemed in retrospect deadly dull. “If we stick with Wilma’s plan,” Dulcie said, “maybe it will come right.” It broke her heart to scold the kit, the kit took such joy in the play. But when she licked the kit’s ear, the kit brightened.

By the next morning, Wilma and Charlie and Clyde had convinced Cora Lee that it would be best to tell admirers that she and Wilma, together, had trained the kit. They set up a scenario for the remainder of the play that included Wilma taking the kit to the theater each night, standing in the wings with her, and giving her hand signals like a trained dog. Cora Lee followed the plan, understanding quite well the danger to the kit-as far as she knew it.

But the wonder of the kit’s creative performance didn’t pale. To Cora Lee and to her audiences, the kit was a four-legged angel, a magical creature.

Wilma told Sam Ladler that onstage, when Cora Lee’s emotions built through song, the young cat was naturally drawn to her in a powerful response. She said that was how she trained the kit. Ladler said the kit’s appearance had been a nice surprise, that the kit added just the fillip the play needed. “This couldn’t have happened,” he said, laughing, “if Vivi had been present. She would have pitched a fit.”

The play was to run for six weeks. Dulcie told the kit, “Except for performances, you’ll stay in the house. When the play’s over, you’ll stay in the house until, hopefully, people forget about trained cats.”

“If they ever forget,” Joe said darkly.

“I will stay in the house,” the kit said dutifully, her round amber eyes glowing with the magic of the theater, with a wonder and dimension that stayed with her each night long after the last curtain had fallen, so it was hard for her to fall asleep. She prowled the house worrying Dulcie, prompting Wilma to rise and warm a pan of milk for her then stroke her until she slept. If Wilma began to look haggard, people put it down to her demanding cat-training regimen.

Thorns of Gold,with the kit’s added magic, contributed to the village of Molena Point a warm and glowing experience; and maybe the magic spilled over to anoint others. It was a week after opening night that Charlie made her announcement, at the engagement party at Clyde’s house in honor of her and Max.

Ryan came early to help Clyde lay out plates and glasses on the seldom-used dining table. Mavity and Susan arrived just before Charlie and Max, bringing trays of canapes. Wilma and Gabrielle and Cora Lee of course were at the theater. Mavity had dressed in a powder blue pants suit that was not a uniform. Susan wore a long skirt and a hand-knit sweater. Soon after Detectives Garza and Davis arrived, loaded down with ice buckets and champagne, and before the engagement announcement, Charlie broke her news.

“Looks like the last chapters of Elliott Traynor’sTwilight Silverwill be published after all,” she said quietly.

Garza frowned, “How did that happen? I thought Vivi couldn’t write her way out of a paper bag. That’s what alerted her agent in the first place.”

“Vivi won’t be writing the last chapters,” Harper said.

“Who, then?” Garza said, waiting for the punch line. “Not Willie Gasper?”

“Charlie will be writing them,” Harper said. “She talked with Traynor’s editor yesterday. They like her work very much, they’re sending her a contract.”

“And,” Charlie said tremulously, “I guess I have a literary agent. If I� if I decide to write something more.”

Dulcie glanced at Joe, remembering how frightened Charlie had been when she first learned that her drawings had been accepted by the Aronson Gallery, how nervous she had been before the gallery opening-then how bubbly with excitement when everyone loved her work.

She was just as frightened now. But that didn’t matter. Charlie did fine under pressure.

Harper put his arm around her, grinning down at her, then looking around at their gathered friends. “We’ve set the wedding date-four months from today, then we’re off to Alaska. When we get back, maybe I can talk Charlie into supervising Charlie’s Fix-It, Clean-It from her studio at the ranch, and spend the rest of her time working on whatever projects she maps out-provided she makes spaghetti once a week, and helps me with the horses.”

Champagne corks were popped, toasts offered up, and the party food was attacked with enthusiasm. A dozen more officers arrived, some with their wives, and most of the librarians who worked with Wilma, and soon other friends began to straggle in. With the party in full swing, people crowding in wall-to-wall, the two cats, having eaten their fill, retired to the bedroom. It was perhaps half an hour later that Clyde appeared to ask Joe’s advice. He shut the door behind him.

“You want my advice?” Joe said. “You’re asking for my opinion? What’s the catch?”

“Just be quiet and listen. Do you always have to be so sarcastic?” Clyde stood scowling down at him. “What would you think, if I didn’t sell the house?”

Dulcie mewed softly. But Joe’s heart gave a leap as violent as if he’d swallowed a live mouse.

“What would you think if Ryan added a second-story bedroom and office, with a view over the village-so we could see the ocean? And redesigned the backyard into a walled Spanish patio with those outdoor heaters, and a raised barbecue and fireplace?”

“Be okay, I guess,” Joe said noncommittally. He didn’t dare glance at Dulcie for fear he’d lose his cool. He wanted to do back flips, to yowl with happiness. “With, say, one of those cupola things on top of the new bedroom, a sort of cat tower? Could she do that?”

“She could do that,” Clyde said. “But of course we’d have to live with a restaurant next door, with all the traffic, and people going in and out.”

“We would,” Joe said carefully, keeping the conversation low-key. He looked hard at Clyde. “Let’s give it some thought. Think about our options.” And for the first time, the idea of moving didn’t seem like the end of the world. If he had options, and if Clyde was including him in on the decision making, then it wasn’t like being thrown out homeless, back into the alleys. For the first time, the various possibilities held such interest for the tomcat that he couldn’t help but purr.

Amazing what a difference it made when Clyde softened up a little and asked his advice. Joe felt like he’d fallen right back into his secure and comfortable life, as cozy as his own easy chair. Smiling up at Clyde, and then at Dulcie, he was caught in a warm froth of family sentimentality. “After all,” he told Clyde, “if we did decide to move, we have the whole village to choose from.”

Clyde grinned and picked Joe up, setting him on his shoulder, then tucked Dulcie under his arm. “You two did all right with the Traynor case. That phone call to Adele McElroy was, I have to say, a stroke of genius.”

He looked down at Joe. “I don’t want to know how you knew about her, or how you two softened Max Harper up to the point of allowing you in the station. The dispatchers seem quite taken with Dulcie.

“And Harper doesn’t want to know, ever,” Clyde said, “why there were gray and white cat hairs in the window of the Pumpkin Coach, among the broken glass.” And he headed back for the party, dropping the cats on the couch beside Charlie. Harper, sitting close to her, turned to look at the cats, his expression stern and withdrawn-but there was, deep in the captain’s eyes, something uneasy, something questioning.

Joe looked back at Harper as blankly as he could manage, and kneaded Charlie’s knee, keeping his claws in. Charlie looked down at him, her eyes filled with amusement, and reached over him to hold Max’s hand. And Joe thought, no matter how many thieves and deadbeats there were in the world, there were far more good folks. No matter how many tarty little murderers like Vivi Traynor, with her frozen cherries and her giggles, there were many more humans who were totally okay, folks a cat could count on.

All a cat had to do was right a few wrongs when he could, ignore the human transgressions he couldn’t change, love his true friends, and always, always have the last laugh.

8. CAT SEELING DOUBLE

1

Ryan Flannery had no idea, when she dressed for the wedding of Chief of Police Max Harper on Saturday afternoon, that she would soon face the police not as a wedding guest among friendly uniformed officers, but as a prime murder suspect. No notion that the tentative new friendships she’d made within the department would turn without warning to that of investigators and possible offender.

An hour before the ceremony, half-dressed in a slip and scuffs and the first skirt she’d had on in weeks, she stepped into the kitchen alcove of her studio apartment to nuke a cup of coffee. Through the wide front windows the dropping sun blinded her, reflecting from the village rooftops and repeated as hundreds of brilliant signals across the surface of the sea, as if all the sea creatures held up little mirrors attempting to communicate with the land-bound before evening descended. Nearer, just below her balcony, the mosaic of rooftops among the oak trees was as serene as a storybook hamlet where all promises ended happily-ever-after. No smallest twinge of unease touched her, no sixth sense that early the next morning uniformed attendants to a murder would fill her garage stringing yellow crime tape, the coroner working on poor Rupert taking care not to disturb any evidence among the stack of broken windows with which the body was entangled-her ex-husband lying white and lifeless among shards of colored glass. And Ryan herself facing Detective Dallas Garza answering her uncle’s questions as, cold and detached, he recorded her formal statement.

Pouring a cup of cold coffee left from breakfast, a brew that at 3:00 in the afternoon closely resembled crankcase oil, she stuck the cup in the microwave. She needed something to keep her awake. Even at what she considered the tender age of thirty-two she could no longer stay up until 1:00 in the morning and feel human the next day.

She’d driven down late last night from the mountains after paying off her carpenters and wrapping up a construction job, wanting to be back home and have her work squared away in plenty of time for the wedding. She’d pulled into her drive well after midnight dead for sleep, had unloaded the precious stained glass windows she’d found in a junk shop in San Andreas, locked her garage and truck and come upstairs. Pulling off her boots and jeans, she had fallen into bed-wondering only briefly why her tarp, folded behind the stack of windows, had what looked like cracker crumbs and half-a-dozen Hershey wrappers among the layers when she unfolded it.

Someone had been in the truck bed, but she wasn’t sure when. Maybe one of the kids hanging around the job site, up there. Well, nothing was missing. Too tired to care, she’d rolled over and known nothing more until nearly dawn.

Waking, she’d lain in bed staring out at the black September sky, then dropped into sleep again like diving into deep, silky water. Awakening again at 9:00 feeling dull, she’d showered, unpacked her duffel, dumped her laundry in the washer, made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for breakfast, and spent the middle of the day cleaning out her truck, putting away tools and stacking the antique windows more securely in the big double garage. Seven beautiful old windows she’d bought for a song, with wonderful designs of birds and leaves. It was amazing what you could pick up in the little back hills junk shops even today when every tourist was a bargain hunter.

Clyde had left a message on her phone tape, that he’d pick her up at 3:30 for the wedding. The ceremony was scheduled for 4:00 with a casual reception afterward in the garden of the village church. Ryan had helped Charlie pick out her wedding dress, and Charlie’s aunt Wilma and several friends had handled the arrangements and the caterer and informal invitations, all of which had given Charlie a prime case of nerves. Charlie Getz, inclined to be a loner, was better at the easel or the typewriter or at housecleaning and maintenance repairs than at sorting out the details of a social function that would change her life as she knew it.

Because Charlie’s parents were dead and she had no close male relatives, Ryan’s uncle Dallas would give her away. And Clyde Damen, Max Harper’s lifelong friend, would be best man. She wondered if he’d show up for his official duties dressed in sweatshirt and jeans.

Never one for polish, Clyde was as unlike Ryan’s philandering ex-husband as it was possible to be, and that made her like him quite a lot.

As she reached to open the microwave, a scratching sound at her window made her start. Turning, she caught her breath then swallowed back a laugh..

Two cats crouched on the sill peering in at her: Clyde’s big gray tomcat and his lady pal, dark-stripped Dulcie. Two bold freeloaders who, before she left for San Andreas, had been at her door every morning.

How could they have known she was home? Or had they come every day for two months, expecting the handout they’d grown accustomed to? Oh, surely not. No cat was that tenacious, and certainly these cats never went hungry-though at the moment, with their noses close to the glass, their whiskers drawing delicate patterns through the dusty surface, they presented the picture of ultimate greed and impatience.

And the tomcat had brought her a gift.

From the gray cat’s sharp white teeth dangled a dead mouse.

Joe Grey held his kill securely by its rear, its fur matted and wet from mauling. She stared at it, and looked into the burning yellow eyes of the self-satisfied tomcat, and choked back a laugh. Joe remained staring at her, his expression growing to deeper impatience. He began to shift from paw to paw.

Did he think he was going to bring that thing in the house? Was the mauled mouse a gift? An offering to human gods?

Knowing Joe Grey, she didn’t think so. If that cat considered anyone a god in his relationships with humans, the god would be Joe himself.

Both cats cocked their ears, watching her. The tom’s short fur was as sleek as gray satin clinging over strong muscles, the white triangle down his nose and his white paws and chest looking freshly scrubbed-no tinge of mouse blood. His yellow eyes were fierce. Clearly he expected her to hurry to the door and to formally accept his treasure.

His tabby lady was more demure. Her brown curving stripes, catching the light of the dropping sun, were as rich as silk batik. Her pink mouth was open in a plaintive little mew that sounded through the glass as thin and wavering as a cry from another dimension. Ryan reached to crack open the window.

“As happy as I am, Joe, to see you kill the mice, as grateful as I am for your efforts, you’re not bringing that thing in here.”

Joe Grey glared as if he understood, as if this was not an acceptable response.

The tomcat’s avid commitment to ridding her garage of mice, an undertaking that had begun several months ago, had left her both puzzled and amused.

Having complained to Clyde about the vermin, about the voracious little beasts that had burrowed into her brand-new rolls of insulation and were nibbling on the electrical cords of her power tools, she hadn’t expected Clyde to offer up his own private feline exterminator. She’d have poisoned the mice, but she had feared for the neighborhood pets; and Clyde had insisted that Joe Grey would eradicate them. Of course she hadn’t believed him. “Why should they hunt in my garage when they have all the wild hills? You can’ttella cat where to hunt, Clyde. I’ve seen them hunting up the hills. I’ve seen those two killers dragging rabbits through the grass.”

“You feed them when they show up, give them a little snack, and install a cat door into your garage, and I guarantee they’ll catch the mice.”

“But that’s silly.”

“Try it. I promise.”

“A cat door will only let in more mice.”

“The mice are already getting in somewhere,” he had pointed out, “despite the fact that you and Charlie went over the garages of both duplexes and patched all the holes. What difference is one more opening? Trust me. Cut the door, and leave a little snack.”

Build it and they will come, she’d thought, wanting to giggle.

“Just do it. Joe and Dulcie will clear the place.”

Out of desperation she’d followed his instructions, visualizing extended families of mice marching in through the newly cut cat door to set up housekeeping, vast generations of rapacious rodents settling in to gnaw the cords off drills and saws and droplights. Reluctantly she had put in the cat door and then had gotten on with the job at hand, which was the renovation of Clyde’s backyard, transforming his weedy garden and scruffy lawn into a handsome outdoor living area.

After a week, all signs of mice in her garage had vanished.

Maybe this mouse that Joe dangled was the last one.

Maybe, she thought giddily, Joe Grey had brought this last mouse to her to receive her final stamp of approval.

Or her final payment? Would he present a bill? Or was this extermination job in partial exchange for Clyde’s yard renovation? Well, Clydehadbeen pleased with the renovation.

Months earlier, when a small, exclusive shopping plaza was built behind Clyde’s house, it had turned the property line at the back into a two-story concrete wall that destroyed Clyde’s view of the eastern hills. She’d pointed out the virtues of the new wall, how it could be turned from what Clyde considered a negative feature to a positive asset. In the plan she submitted, she’d made every effort to replace the loss of a view with satisfying architectural interest, enclosing the outer limits of the yard with six-by-six pillars that met the smoothly plastered wall and supported a heavy overhead latticework in a simple Spanish style. This structure framed the maple tree and enlarged deck, the new southwestern style fireplace, wet bar, and outdoor grill. Beneath the trellises she had constructed a series of raised planters arranged in different heights among plastered benches. They’d installed tile decorations for the high wall, and had arranged interesting, bold-leafed plants against it.Voila,an eyesore turned into a handsome private retreat.

Soon, now that she was home from the San Andreas job, she would begin the second phase of Clyde’s renovation, a second-floor addition, jacking up the attic roof to create the walls of a new master bedroom and study. Here in this small, lovely village of Molena Point, with its high demand for real estate, Clyde’s upgrading was well worth the investment. The third phase of his project would complete the transformation as she opened the kitchen to the small dining room, then nudged the face of the Cape Cod cottage into a more contemporary aspect with a Mexican accent. Some people might call that bastardization. Ryan called it good design.

In the five months since she moved to Molena Point, she’d accomplished a lot. Had gotten her local contractor’s license and the necessary permits to launch RM Flannery, Construction, had put together two good crews, and had finished three jobs beside Clyde’s: a drainage project for four ladies who had just bought a home together for their retirement, the addition in San Andreas, and the far more complicated Landeau vacation cottage here in the village, which waited now only for the new handwoven carpet that had been ordered from England. The rug wasn’t part of the architectural work but was the province of her sister Hanni, who had done the interior design. All in all a satisfying beginning for her new venture.

She had escaped San Francisco for Molena Point the night she finally decided to leave Rupert, had packed her personal possessions into cardboard boxes, loaded them into a company truck and taken off in a cold rage-in a move that was long overdue. Heading south along the coast, for the village she loved best in all the world, for the little seaside town where she had spent her childhood summers, she was filled not only with hurt anger at Rupert but with excited dreams for a new beginning-her own business, totally hers, completely free of Rupert.

But she fully intended to receive in cash her share of Dannizer Construction, which she had helped Rupert to build.

Her sudden decision to leave-when she found another woman’s clothes in her closet-had been bolstered by the fact that her uncle Dallas and her sister Hanni had already moved to Molena Point, that both would be nearby for moral support. Dallas had taken a position as chief of detectives for Captain Harper in the smaller and more casual police department, shaking off the heavy stress of San Francisco PD for his last few years before retirement. And early this spring Hanni had opened a design studio in the village, leaving the large city studio where she had worked under too much pressure. Maybe this sudden midlife bid for new directions, this need to pull back and be more fully one’s own boss, was in the blood.

When she looked again at the window, the gray tomcat was still staring.

“That’s very good, Joe Grey. I’m proud of you. It’s a fine mouse. But youcan’tbring it inside.” What did he want her to do, fry it up for supper? At her words, his yellow eyes narrowed with defiance, his stubborn look so droll that she cracked open the door a couple of inches to see what he would do.

The sight that met her made her choke.

On the mat lay five dead mice lined up as neatly as the little toy soldiers she’d marshaled into rows, as a child.

The instant she cracked the door open, the tomcat dropped the sixth mouse precisely beside the others. He didn’t try to bring it in; he simply laid it on the mat perfectly aligned, and looked up at her.

Was he grinning? The cat was definitely grinning.

She studied the tomcat, and the six dead mice presented for her review. This was some trick of Clyde’s. He must have slipped up the steps and set up the dead mice as a joke. Now he would be watching her, hidden somewhere, like a kid glancing around the corner of the building. Except, what had made the tomcat drop the sixth mouse there?

She looked along the street for Clyde’s car and up the side streets as far as she could see. Maybe he’d parked the yellow roadster up the hill on the back street.

But where did he get the mice? How could he have made the cat take part in such a ruse? Make the cat look in the window at just the right moment, dangling another mouse in his jaws, and then lay it on the mat?

Certainly Joe Grey was no trained cat, she thought, smiling. Clyde wasn’t even able to train a dog effectively. She’d heard about the fiasco with the two Great Dane puppies that Clyde had raised, a pair of huge adolescent dogs with no hint of manners, two canine disasters until Max Harper and Charlie took over their training.

She wondered idly if Max and Charlie’s romance actually began up in the hills at his ranch as they taught two misbegotten puppies some manners and trained them to basic obedience. Charlie had never said. But if that was the case the pups really should be ring bearers, she thought, amused, imagining the two big dogs trotting down the aisle with little satin pillows tied to their noses bearing matched wedding rings.

She had to get hold of herself. She really hadn’t had enough sleep.

Charlie had stopped by this morning on an errand despite the fact that it was her wedding day, and they’d had a short, comfortable visit. Ryan had liked the freckled redhead from the moment they first met, had liked that Charlie didn’t talk trivia and that there was no friction between them because Charlie had recently and seriously dated Clyde and now Ryan was seeing him.

She admired Charlie for starting her life over after a false beginning, chucking an unsatisfactory career as a commercial artist at which she’d realized she’d never be tops, tossing away four years of art school education. Moving down to Molena Point to stay with her aunt Wilma, Charlie hadn’t wasted any time in putting together an upscale housecleaning and repair business, a service that Charlie now ran so efficiently she found time not only to do her wonderful animal drawings, but had launched herself into a brand-new venture writing fiction for a national publisher.

Charlie took the attitude that if you were hungry to do something, give it a try. If you fell on your face, try something else. They’d laughed about that because Ryan had been hungry for such a long time to be free of Rupert and on her own. Charlie’s understanding had been very supportive, had sustained her considerably as she established her own firm.

Cracking the door wider for a better look at Clyde’s practical joke all laid out on her doormat, she didn’t protest when the tomcat immediately shouldered past her into the kitchen-sans mouse. Both cats strolled in with all the pomp of a well-dressed couple stepping from their Rolls-Royce in response to her formal invitation to tea. Even the cats’ glances were unsettling, Dulcie’s green eyes and Joe’s yellow gaze far too imperious and self-possessed. Were all cats so self-assured and bold? Padding past her into the big studio room they lay down in the center of the Konya rug, the most beautiful and expensive furnishing she owned, and simultaneously, as if on cue, they began to wash.

Watching them, she decided the two cats added warmth to the room, as well as a sense of whimsy.

The studio was large and airy, its white walls bathed with late afternoon sun. Only on the north side of the twenty-foot-square room did the ceiling drop to eight feet where one long barrier wall defined the kitchen, bath, and closet-dressing room. The studio’s sleek, whitewashed floor showed off to perfection the rich colors of the Turkish Konya rug that she and Clyde had found at an estate sale, its thick pile and primitive patterns glowing in vibrant shades of deep red and turquoise and indigo.

That shopping spree had been their first date. Clyde had brought a fabulous deli basket for an early, presale picnic breakfast along the rocky coast. Sitting on the sea cliff where the salty spray leaped up at them, he had served her wild mushroom quiche, thin slices of Belgian ham, strawberry tarts, and espresso-a very sophisticated meal for a guy who often seemed ordinary, even cloddish. That morning, teasing her about being a lady contractor, he had made her laugh when she’d badly needed to laugh.

After breakfast, returning to the handsome villa, they were among the first group to tour the estate. They’d found wonderful bargains that they loaded into her truck. Her few furnishings had all come from that sale except her new drafting table. The desk that faced her front windows was a handsome solid oak unit with a dull, pewter stain and an ample wing for her computer. The two tomato-red leather chairs occupied the back of the room facing a wide wicker coffee table, and a wicker daybed covered with a handwoven spread and an array of tapestry pillows-all were from the sale, even the carved, multicolored Mexican dining table and four chairs that were tucked into the kitchen alcove. She’d brought nothing with her from the San Francisco house but her clothes and files and books, had wanted as little as possible from her old life, had wanted to start with everything new after what seemed an endless term of enslavement.

Nine years with Rupert. Why had she stayed so long? Cowardice? Fear of Rupert? The forlorn hope that things would get better? Chalk it up to ennui, to lack of direction-to stupidity. She felt, now, that she could whirl in circles swinging her arms and shouting and there was no barrier to force her back into that confining cage-a cage wrought of Rupert’s vile rages that burned just on the edge of violence, and of his drinking and womanizing.

No more barriers in her life.

Except that this morning when she ran her phone tape she’d had not only the welcome message from Clyde saying he’d pick her up for the wedding, but a tirade from Rupert, a communication she had not expected, hadn’t wanted and didn’t understand.

You didn’t think you’d hear from me, Ryan. I can’t condone what you did running off and trying to take half my business that 1 owned before we were married.

Ican’t condone what you did to Priscilla but I feel obligated to tell you�

That had made her smile. Whatshedid toPriscilla?That day before she left him she’d arrived home from a week in north Marin County finishing up an apartment job, had opened the garage door and found, in her half of the garage, a little red Porsche parked next to Rupert’s BMW. She’d thought, thrilled and amazed, that Rupert in some uncharacteristic fit of generosity or guilt had bought her an anniversary present two weeks early.

But, opening the unlocked door of the Porsche, she had smelled the stink of cigarette smoke and perfume and seen another woman’s clutter in the backseat-hairbrush, pink fuzzy sweater, wrinkled movie magazine. Checking the registration, she’d tried to recall who Priscilla Bloom might be.

And then in the house she’d found the woman’s belongings all over the conjugal bedroom, Priscilla’s clothes in the closet jamming her own garments to the back. That was the moment she ended the marriage.

Hauling out every foreign item from the bedroom, all of it reeking of cigarette smoke and heavy perfume, she had dumped it all in the little red car. Seven trips from house to garage, then she had backed her truck up the drive, hooked her heavy-duty tow chain to the back bumper of the Porsche, and pulled it out into the middle of the street blocking both lanes and seriously slowing traffic. What she’d wanted to do was move her truck up behind the Porsche and push it right on through the front garage wall, effectively wrecking the structure and the car in one move. Only the legal aspects of such an action had deterred her. She didn’t need any further court battles.

The car sat in the middle of the street until the police came to issue a ticket, impound the vehicle, and haul it away. She hadn’t answered the door when the officer rang; she’d been busy cleaning out the room she used as an office. When at last she came out to load her truck, the police and the Porsche were gone. Smiling, she’d locked the house and taken off for Molena Point.

The message she’d listened to this morning had badly jolted her�tell you that someone’s been asking questions about you� about your plans this weekend. Are you going to some wedding? As little feeling as I have left for you, Ryan, I have to say be careful. I don’t want anything on my conscience�

There’d been a long pause, then he’d hung up. She’d sat at her desk staring at the phone trying to figure out what he was talking about. Did his call have something to do with Priscilla Bloom getting back at her? But surely not. Why would the opportunistic Priscilla or any of Rupert’s female friends have any connection to Max Harper and Charlie’s wedding or even know about it? How would she know them at all?

Maybe Rupert had heard about the wedding and wanted to upset her by implying there was some kind of danger. That would be like him. Innuendo was just the kind of meaningless warning that would highly amuse him. She was so tired of his stupidity. Even the court battle now in process, that Rupert’s attorneys had managed to delay endlessly as she fought for her rightful half of the business, even Rupert’s testimony in court had been all hot air, all fabrication and lies-silly delaying tactics.

She’d worked hard to help build that business into what it now was. She wasn’t dumping it all and walking away from what she’d earned. The Molena Point attorney she’d contacted had recommended an excellent San Francisco firm, and they were handling the case with minimum fuss for her despite the antics of Rupert’s slick lawyers.

She rinsed her empty cup and lay it in the drain rack, glancing in at Joe and Dulcie, treating the two cats to a string of rude remarks about Rupert Dannizer. Then she went to finish dressing.

Ryan didn’t see behind her the two cats’ response to her longshoreman’s description of Rupert, didn’t see Joe Grey’s yellow eyes narrow with amusement, and Dulcie’s green eyes widen with laughter at her characterization of the man she so despised.

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She wasreaching for her suit jacket when she remembered she’d have to change purses, that she couldn’t dress up for a wedding and carry a canvas backpack. Crossing the studio in her slip, Ryan glanced again at the two cats sprawled across the blue-and-garnet rug, admiring Dulcie’s chocolate stripes and Joe’s sleek silver gleam. Quietly they stared up at her, Joe’s gaze burning like clear amber, Dulcie’s eyes as bright green as emeralds. But the intensity of their concentration forced her to step back. And as she moved away toward the dressing room she was certain that behind her they were still watching.

Strange little cats, she thought. Why was their interest so unsettling?

“Strange little cats,” she had once told Clyde.

“How so? Strange in what way?”

“There’s something different about them. Don’t you notice? I’ve never had cats, only dogs, but�”

“All cats are strange, one way or another. That’s what makes them appealing.”

“I suppose. But those two, and the black-and-brown one you call the kit, sometimes they behave more like dogs than cats. The way they follow you around. And all three cats seem so intense, their glances are so� I don’t know. The way they look at a person, the way the kit looks at you, they’re not the way I think of cats.” She had watched Clyde, frowning. “Neither Wilma nor you finds your cats odd? Doesn’t Wilma ever comment on how different they seem?”

Clyde had shrugged. “I don’t think you’ve observed cats very closely. Catsarestrange, catsstareat you, and every cat is different in some way. Unpredictable,” he’d said. “Dogs are more alike, easier to understand.”

“I see,” she’d answered doubtfully, wondering why he sounded so defensive.

Glancing in the dressing room mirror, she slipped on the beige linen suit without a blouse. The deep V of the neck set off the best of her tan-perfect for cleavage if she’d had any. Well, her tanwasgood. No one could tell it was a farmer’s tan, ending where her shirt collars and sleeves began. With jacket and skirt in place, and pantyhose, most of her little bruises and cuts from working construction were well enough hidden.

The thought did nag her that she ought to do something about her general appearance, the most pressing item being her hair, which badly needed cutting. Two months on the job without stopping to get a haircut had left it longer than she liked, and ragged. Her nails were rough too and her skin felt as dry and leathery as an old carpenter’s apron. What she could have used was a week at some cushy spa with luxurious daily massages, perfumed oils, professional hairstyling, steam baths, manicure, pedicure-a complete overhaul guaranteed to put all emotional and physical parts back into working order.

It amused her to wonder what those high-class masseuses and beauty specialists would make of her calloused, torn hands and cut thumbs and assorted body bruises-little marks of hard labor earned by toting heavy lumber and plumbing fixtures, and leaning into two-by-fours to hold them in place as she nailed them solid. At least her fancy masseuse could have admired her slim butt and super muscle tone, even if the skinny package was as full of bruises as the dents in an ancient farm pickup.

Fastening on an ivory pendant, she brushed back her dark hair into some semblance of order and sprayed it, and applied lipstick. So much for elegance. She’d leave the pizzazz to her sister. Hanni would arrive at the wedding dressed in something that caught all eyes, something almost too wild, too far out, but that would look great on Hanni, with her prematurely white, wildly curling coiffure, her long lean body and her total self-assurance. Hanni was the show-off of the family, the onstage personality, the wouldbe model, Ryan thought warmly. She’d missed Hanni and Dallas, just as she constantly missed her dad. She hadn’t seen much of him since she left the city, but she missed him more now, knowing he was so far away, on the East Coast. He’d been gone for nearly a month, conducting training sessions; she’d be glad when he was home again.

She found herself looking forward eagerly to the wedding, to a bit of social life, to being with friends, and with at least two members of her family. And looking forward too, to the quiet and meaningful ceremony.

Just because her own marriage had been ugly didn’t mean she had to rain on others’ bliss.

The marriage of Max Harper, that wry-witted police captain who, Clyde said, had seemed so very alone after his wife died, was a cause of celebration for the entire village-or at least for all those who didn’t hate Harper, who didn’t fear Harper’s thorough and effective response to village crime.

To see Charlie and Max marrying pleased Ryan very much. The two were just right for each other. Two no-nonsense people who, despite their down-to-earth attitudes, were each in their own way dreamers. Though you’d never know that about Max Harper; he’d never let you know that.

Charlie and Max had wanted a small, private wedding that better fit their approach to life and was in keeping with Max’s low-key style as chief of police. But the villagers were so excited about the occasion, everyone wanted to be a part of the wedding. The couple had settled for a ceremony in the small village church with the wedding guests mostly police officers and their wives and a few close friends, but with all the village crowded around in the adjoining rooms of the church and in the garden, and at the open patio doors where they could hear the couple’s vows. The garden buffet afterward would be for the whole village.

She thought about Rupert’s message.Someone’s asking� about your plans for the weekend� Areyou going to some wedding?� I don’t want anything on my conscience�

She shook her head. That was all talk. She was stupid to let Rupert worry her, that was exactly what he wanted. Rupert’s warped sense of the melodramatic was inappropriate and embarrassing.

Finished dressing, she decided to make fresh coffee for Clyde; he was usually early, a quality mat had at first annoyed her but that she’d come to find reassuring. Clyde didn’t like to be late and neither did she. Having not seen each other for over two months, they could sit and talk for a moment before being swallowed up in the crowd and the ceremony. The coffee was brewing when she heard him double-timing up the stairs. She opened the door eagerly, before he had time to knock, forgetting the mice on the mat.

He stood at the edge of the mat staring down without expression. She remained silent, unwilling to respond to his corny joke, and wondering again how he’d accomplished it.

Looking up at her, he started to grin. His short, dark hair was freshly cut, his shave smooth and clean, making her want to touch his cheek. She loved the scent of his vetiver aftershave. She had never seen him in a suit before, only in jeans and a polo shirt or, for evening, jeans and a sport coat. Today, as best man, hehaddressed handsomely, choosing a dark navy suit, a pale, pinstriped shirt and a rich but subdued paisley tie. He seemed truly surprised by the dead mice.

“That’s what your tomcat brought me.”

“He does that,” Clyde said casually. “He does that at home.”

“Leaves mice on the mat? Lines them up like a pack of sausages? Come on, Clyde.”

Clyde looked at her innocently. “All in a row. I haven’t been able to break him of it.” His look was blank and serious.

She didn’t pursue it. Maybe the cat had done it on his own. This was not the day to discuss the vicissitudes of Clyde’s cat.

But as she turned to pour the coffee, she glimpsed the look he shot the tomcat. A glare deeply indignant, as if the cat should have used better judgment. And Joe Grey was staring back at Clyde with amused indulgence, with me kind of silent look mat might pass between a dog and his trainer. She’d seen Dallas exchange such a glance with his pointers or retrievers, not a word spoken, or maybe a single word so soft that no one but man and dog heard it-a close, perceptive contact between man and animal.

Was such contact with a cat possible?

Well, why not? Maybe catswereas intelligent as a well-bred pointer or retriever. Whatever the case, Clyde was apparently more skilled with cats than with canines.

Stepping over the mice and into her kitchen, Clyde fetched a plastic bag from the drawer beside the refrigerator and returned to the deck to dispose of the bodies, shaking them from the mat into the bag, and carrying it down to the drive and around behind the garage to the garbage can. She heard him rinse his hands at the outdoor faucet. She listened to him come up the stairs, still wondering how many cats would line up their mice on the mat, or would think to do such a thing. Maybe she should learn more about cats. The subject might be entertaining. Clyde returned as she poured the coffee. Pulling out a chair, he glanced in once more toward Joe Grey and Dulcie. “The kit wasn’t with them?”

“No. Just the two of them.”

He shrugged. “She’s getting big, growing up. I guess she can take care of herself.”

“You and Wilma have to worry about your cats. They wander all over the village. And the hills� it’s so wild up there. I can hear the coyotes yipping at night. Don’t you-”

“How many times have you asked me that, Ryan? Yes, we worry.” He looked at her intently. “Cats are not dogs, to be fenced and leashed. I went through this with Charlie. She couldn’t believe we let the cats wander. She understands them better, now. You can’t shut them in, they’d die of boredom, their lives would be worth nothing. They’re intelligent cats. They need to pursue-whatever weird little projects cats pursue. They need to hunt. They’re careful. I’ve watched them crossing the streets; they look, they don’t just go barging out.”

“But the coyotes. And the dogs-big dogs.”

He sipped his coffee. “I’m sure they know when the coyotes are near, they can hear and smell them-and dogs and coyotes can’t climb.” He gave her a little smile. “Those three cats will chase a dog until he wishes he’d never heard of cats. I once saw the kit ride the back of a big dog, raking and biting him, rode him from Hellhag Hill clear into the village. She was only a kitten, then. I’d hate to see what she could do now.”

The tortoiseshell kit had been with Charlie’s aunt Wilma and Dulcie for nearly a year while her owners were traveling. Ryan thought she was charming, those round, golden eyes in that little black-and-brown mottled face always delighted her. The kit’s looks were so expressive that, more than once, Ryan caught herself wondering what the little animal was thinking.

“You’re tan. It was hot up in the foothills.”

“Ninety to a hundred. Surveying, laying out foundation, and putting up framing in the hot sun.”

She loved the rolling hills at the base of the Sierras, the rising slopes golden with dry summer grass beneath islands of dark green pine trees, the kind of vast grazing country that had fed millions of longhorn cattle two centuries before when California was part of Mexico, and at one time had fed vast herds of buffalo and elk.

Rising, she fetched a pack of photos from her desk, to show him the added-on great room she had just completed. “Job went like a charm. No major delays in deliveries, no really critical battles with the inspectors, no disasters. But I’m glad to be home, after living with those two in that trailer.”

Dan Hall was a Molena Point carpenter who had been willing to work on the San Andreas job providing his young wife could come up on weekends. Scott Flannery was Ryan’s uncle, her father’s brother, a burly Scotch-Irish giant who had helped to raise Ryan and her two sisters after their mother died. Scotty and her mother’s brother Dallas had moved in with them when Ryan was ten, a week after her mother’s funeral. The three men had kept up the lessons their mother had insisted on, teaching the girls to cook and clean house and sew and to do most of the household repairs. Scotty had added more sophisticated carpentry skills, and Dallas, then a uniformed officer with San Francisco PD, had taught them the proper handling and safety of firearms as well as how to train and work the hunting dogs he raised. While other little girls were dressing up, learning party manners, and how to fascinate the boys, Ryan and her sisters were outshooting the boys in competition, were hunting dove or quail over one or another of Dallas’s fine pointers, or were off on a pack trip into the Rockies.

“Guess I’m getting old and crotchety,” Ryan said. “That big two-bedroom trailer seemed so cramped, I found myself longing for my own space. The whole time, I didn’t see anyone but those two, and a real estate agent who wants me to do a remodel-and a couple of kids underfoot.”

Clyde looked at his watch and rose to rinse their cups. “Neighbor’s kids?”

She nodded. “I never did figure out where they lived. They said up the hills. Those houses are scattered all over. You know how kids are drawn to new construction.”

Clyde picked up Joe Grey, who had trotted expectantly into the kitchen. “So did you take the remodeling job?”

“I think I’ll let that one go by,” she said briefly.

Slinging the tomcat over his shoulder, Clyde scooped up Dulcie too, cradling the little female in the crook of his arm..

“You’re taking them to the wedding,” Ryan said. It was not a question. Clyde took the gray tomcat everywhere.

“Why not? It’s a garden wedding. If they don’t like it, they can leave.” He grinned at her. “Max has a thing about cats. I like to tweak him. I thought it would be amusing to bring the cats to his wedding, let them watch from the trees. Charlie will appreciate the humor.” They moved out the door and down the steps to his antique yellow roadster, where Clyde dropped the cats into the open rumble seat.

“Bring them up front with me, Clyde. You don’t want them jumping out. I’ll hold them.”

“They won’t jump. They’re not stupid.”

“Bring them up here. They’re cats. Cats don’t�” She shut up, looking intently at Clyde and at the cats. Joe Grey and Dulcie lay down obediently on the soft leather rumble seat, as docile as a pair of well-mannered dogs-as if perhaps theyhadbeen trained to behave.

“They’ll be fine,” Clyde said, starting the engine. “It’s a nice day, they want a bit of sunshine.” And as he headed down the hills, the cats remained unmoving, seeming as safe as if they wore seat belts. Ryan was sure there couldn’t be another cat in the world that wouldn’t leap out to the street or stand on the edge of the seat and be thrown out. Cats riding in open rumble seats, cats attending weddings.

Dulcie looked up at her with such contentment, and Joe Grey’s expression was so smug that she almost imagined they were proud to be riding in that beautiful vintage car.

Clyde had completely restored the ‘28 Chevy-new, butter-yellow leather upholstery, gleaming yellow paint. Old cars were Clyde’s love, the Hudsons and Pierce-Arrows and old Packards that he worked on in the back garage of his upscale automotive shop. When he got one in perfect condition he would drive it for a while and then sell it. He was paying for the remodeling of his cottage with the profits from one car or another, just as he had paid to renovate the derelict apartment building he had bought. It was clear that he took great joy in acquiring abandoned relics, in making them new and useful again. Maybe that too was why she liked Clyde Damen.

In the bright autumn weather Molena Point was mobbed with tourists, but despite the glut of out-of-town cars Clyde found a parking place half a block from the church. Swinging a U-turn he neatly parked, scooped up the two cats to keep them safe from traffic, and they crossed to the deep garden in front of the Village Church.

The garden paths were already crowded with villagers. Pausing beside a lemon tree, Clyde half-lifted and half-tossed the two cats into the branches away from crowding feet. Ryan watched them climb, as Clyde headed inside the church to his duties as best man.

She saw, across the garden, her uncle Dallas and her sister. Hanni, decked out in outrageous rags, looked like a million dollars. It was the first time in months that she had seen Dallas in uniform and not in his detective’s plainclothes. The entire police force had turned out spit-and-polish, everyone in the village was dressed up and in a party mood. In the excitement of celebration on such a lovely day she had no reason to imagine that disaster would, within moments, rock the church and the garden.

But as the wedding guests laughed and gossiped, and inside the church the groom in his captain’s uniform paced with nerves, an unexpected event began to unfold, a drama that could alter-or cut short-the course of many lives.

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At first,no one saw the lone witness. Not even Joe Grey and Dulcie, crouched high among the branches of the lemon tree, saw the tortoiseshell cat on the rooftops across the street. The two older cats had no glimpse of the tattercoat kit hunched on the dark shingles hidden beneath the overhanging oak branches; they had no hint of the panic that would, in a moment, course through the kit’s small, tensed body.

The community church was set well back from the street within its garden of flowering shrubs and small decorative trees. The nonsectarian meeting rooms of the one-story Mediterranean building were employed for all manner of village functions besides church services, from political discussions to author readings. The kit had hung around the church all morning watching the cleaning crew performing a last polish and setting up buffet tables on the back patio; and she had watched masses of white flowers being delivered and arranged within the largest meeting room. Only when the wedding guests began to arrive had she trotted across the narrow residential street, to be out of the way of sharp-heeled party shoes and the hard black oxfords of the many uniformed officers. Swarming up a jasmine trellis to the roof of a brown clapboard cottage, she had stretched out where an oak tree’s shadows darkened the weathered shingles. Here, she had the best seat of all, with a clear view across the garden and through the wide glass doors to the lectern where the bride and groom would stand, exchanging their sacred vows.

She had watched Charlie and Wilma arrive, Wilma carrying the bridal dress in a long plastic bag and Charlie carrying a small suitcase. What a lot of preparation it took for humans to get married, nothing like the casual trysting of the feral cats she had run with when she was small. The two women entered the south wing of the church through a back door, where the bride would have a private office in which to dress. The kit was watching the growing crowd when, below her, the bushes stirred with a sharp rustle, and a man spoke.

He must be standing between the close-set houses. The timbre of his gravelly voice suggested he was old. He sounded bad-tempered. “Go on. Boy. Get your ass up there, you haven’t got all day.”

No one answered, but someone began to climb the trellis, slowly approaching the roof. The kit could hear me little crosspieces creak under a hesitant weight. Padding warily away across the shingles, she crouched beneath overhanging branches out of sight, where she could see.

A young boy was climbing up. A thin dirty boy with ragged shirt and torn jeans, his face smudged, but pale beneath the dark smears. His black eyes were oblique and hard, his hands brown with dirt. One pocket bulged as if maybe he’d stuffed a candy bar in it, fortification against sudden hunger. The kit knew that feeling.

Peering over, she studied the man who stood below. He was equally ragged, his faded jeans stained, his face bristling with a grizzled beard, his gray hair hanging long around his shoulders. Both man and boy stunk of sharp scents that made the kit’s nose burn. The boy had gained the roof. He didn’t swing up onto it, but stopped at the edge, turning to look down.

“Goon,Curtis. They’ll be filling the church in a minute.”

“I don’t�”

“Just lie under the branches, no one’ll see you. Wait till Harper’s in there and the girl and them cops, then punch it and get out. I’ll be gone like I told you, the truck gone. You just slip away, no one’ll see you.”

Clinging in the vines, the boy looked both determined and scared, like a cornered rat, the kit thought, trapped in a tin can with nowhere to run.

“Just punch it, Curtis. Your dad’s in jail because of them cops.”

Swinging a leg over, the boy gained the roof, crouching near the kit beneath the oak branches. She didn’t think he saw her, he seemed totally centered on finding a vantage where he would be hidden but could best see the church.

When he’d chosen his place he removed from his pocket a small smooth object like a tiny radio, and laid it on the shingles beside him. The kit puzzled over it for some time before she understood what it was, this small, plastic, boxlike thing that the boy could hide in one hand. Wilma had one, and so did Clyde. And the old man’s voice echoed,Just punch it and get out.She didn’t understand-there was no garage door in the church to open. Why would�

Just punch it and get out�

What else could a garage-door opener do, the kit wondered, besides open the door for which it was intended? With its little battery inside, its little electrical battery, what could it do?

Just punch it and get out� Wait until Harper’s in there, and the girl�

That little electrical battery, that little electric signal�

All the wonders of electrical things that had so astonished the kit when she first came to live among humans: the dishwasher, the refrigerator, the warmth of an electric blanket, the magical lifting of the garage door while Wilma was still in the car, its signal leaping from that opener-its electrical signal leaping�

She remembered cop talk about triggering devices. She stared across the street into the church where someone had left a gift for the bride and groom, a silver-wrapped package tucked down into the lectern where Charlie and Max Harper would stand to be married. She had seen it earlier as she watched the workers, had thought it was a special present hidden just where the preacher would stand, where the bride and groom would stand, a gift all silver-wrapped with little silver bells on the ribbon�

A special present�

A gift that was not a gift,she realized with a quaking heart, and the kit exploded to life, racing at the boy, leaping on his back, raking and biting and forcing him away from that electric signal-maker, that plastic box that could send its message across the street into the church, could send its triggering message�

She might be wrong. The boy’s actions might be innocent. But�Your dad’s in jail because of them cops� Punch it and get out�Terrified and enraged, she clawed and raked and bit, driving the boy away across the roof, forcing him toward the trellis. Nearly falling, he swung away down the trellis, the kit clinging to his back.

Before he hit the ground she dropped clear and ran flashing across the street between cars�

There� there was Clyde hurrying out of the church toward his car as if he had forgotten something. As he leaned into the open convertible, reaching, she leaped to his back nearly shouting in his ear, only remembering at the last instant to whisper�

“Bomb, Clyde. There’s a bomb in the church in that oak stand, in the lectern. A boy on the roof� garage door opener to set it off� tell them to run, all to run� I chased him, but�” And she bailed to the ground again and was gone, racing back across the street causing Clyde to shout after her. The street was thick with cars letting people off.

But then seeing her appear at the far side and swarm up a tree to the rooftops, he spun away, never questioning the kit’s warning. Not daring to question, not this small cat. Never daring to question her any more than he would question Joe Grey�

Moments earlier, Dulcie had been licking blood from her paw where she’d cut herself on a thorn of the lemon tree. She sat among the branches licking at her pad and looking across the garden into the church, admiring the big meeting room with its high, dark-raftered ceiling and white plastered walls and its two long rows of glass doors looking out on the front and back gardens. Vases of white flowers were massed at both ends of the room, and someone had tucked a gift down inside the lectern. She could see a corner of the silver paper, maybe something special to be presented at the ceremony, though that did seem odd.

Imagining the ritual of the wedding, she was filled with purring happiness. No matter what ugliness might happen elsewhere in the world, no matter what hideous events occurred outside their own small village, here, today, human love ruled.

Behind her Joe Grey hissed, “What’s she doing?”

She turned on the branch, never doubting from Joe’s distraught tone that he was talking about the kit, this kit to whom disaster clung like needles to a magnet.

He was staring across the street at a dark-shingled roof. Dulcie could just see the kit crouched on the edge of the roof beneath overhanging branches.

There was a boy on the roof. The kit watched him intently, rigid with anger-and the next instant she leaped, clawing the boy and raking him. He swatted at her and ran. The kit rode his back, scratching and biting, forcing the boy off the roof, riding him down then leaping away to race across the street.

The kit hit Clyde, flying up clinging to his shoulder. They could see her poke her nose at his ear, whispering� lashing her tail and whispering�

In the church office provided for her use, the bride dressed slowly and carefully in her simple linen gown, trying not to fall apart with nerves. In the mirror her freckles looked as dark as paint splatters across her pale cheeks.

Charlie’s kinky red hair was pulled back and smoothed, as much as it could be smoothed, into a handsome chignon and clipped with a carved ivory barrette loaned to her by her aunt Wilma. Wilma, tall and slim and white-haired, stood behind Charlie buttoning her dress. The starched-lace wedding veil and crown of white flowers sat on a little stand, on the office desk.

For something blue, Charlie wore blue panties and bra printed with white roses, a private joke between her and Max. Over this, a white lace half-slip and camisole. The “something old” was her mother’s wedding ring, one of the few mementos she had from her dead parents. Thenewsomething was her long white linen gown with its low embroidered neckline and embroidered cap sleeves. Charlie’s calloused and capable hands shook both from nerves and excitement and from a sense of the unreal. Time seemed out of kilter, as if in some strange fantasy, the wedding preparations of the preceding few days swirling around her, each moment warped in time and place by her own disbelief.

She was no child bride. At thirty-something she had almost abandoned the idea of falling truly in love and being married. Now that it was happening, and seeming so inevitable, she felt as if she had stepped into a different world and different time, or maybe stepped into someone else’s life.

For a while she’d thought Clyde was the one, and that they might marry, but she’d never had this totally lost and committed and ecstatic feeling with Clyde. She and Clyde had ended up no more than good friends, the best of friends. Her feeling for Max was totally different. Her love for Max was the kind of nervous oneness thatmadeher hands shake, made her tremble sometimes, and turned her terrified because he was a cop, terrified that he would be hurt, that she would lose him.

“Is that a tear?” Wilma said, watching Charlie in the mirror. Wilma was dressed in a long, pale blue shift, her gray-white hair done in a bun bound low at her neck.

“Of course it’s not a tear. I’m not the weeping sort. Steady as a rock.” She knew she’d have to get over her fear for Max, that a cop’s wife couldn’t live like that or she would perish; but right now it was all she could do to keep herself together and get to the altar with Wilma’s help and not collapse in a fit of uncontrollable nerves.

“You’re not steady at all. Are you this nervous on the firing range?”

“I’m not on the firing range. I’m getting married.” She stared at her aunt. “Thisisdifferent than the firing range. Tell me it’s different. Tell me�” She collapsed against her aunt, shivering, her head on Wilma’s shoulder.

Wilma hugged her and smoothed Charlie’s hair. “It’s different when you’re marrying someone like Max Harper. You’re having a perfectly normal case of nerves. And maybe second thoughts?” She held Charlie away, looking deeply at her, then grinned. “A simple case of premarital hysteria. I expect Max is having the same. You’ll be fine.”

“Not second thoughts. Not ever. It’s just that� If I worried about him before, what will it be like after we’re married?”

“He’s sharp enough to have lasted this long,” Wilma said brusquely. “If something were to happen� just give him everything you can. Just fill what time he has-what time we all have. Youmust notfear the future, no one can live like that.”

Wilma looked deeply at her. “You know what to do-you prepare as best you can for the bad times-then live every moment with joy.” She touched Charlie’s cheek. “Law enforcement and protecting others, that is his life, Charlie. You can’t change what he wants from his life.”

“And there’s Clyde,” Charlie said, her perverse mind wanting to dredge up every vague cause for unease. “No matter what he says, I feel�”

“Guilty.”

“As if I dumped him. But he�”

“Not to worry,” Wilma said. “Not only is he bringing Ryan Flannery to the wedding, he’s still pursuing Kate Osborne, trying to get her to move back down from San Francisco. I don’t think with two women to sort out, trying to pay attention to both, that Clyde is going to spend much time grieving.”

“Well, that’s not very flattering,” Charlie said, grinning. She smoothed the tendrils of her hair that would keep slipping out from the carefully arranged chignon.

“Quit fussing. You look like an angel, a curly-haired, redheaded angel. Now hold still and let me finish fastening. Where are your shoes? You didn’t forget your shoes?”

“On the desk. Now who’s fussing?”

“It isn’t every day my only niece gets married-my only family.” Turning to fetch the shoes, Wilma moved to the window and slid the drapery back a few inches to look out into the garden where their friends were gathering. The afternoon was bright and serene. “What a lovely crowd. And people still arriving. Even�” Wilma held out her hand. “Come and look.”

They stood together peering out, two tall, slim women, the family resemblance clear in their strongly sculpted faces. “Look in the lemon tree. Two of your most ardent admirers, all sleeked up for the occasion.”

They could just see Joe Grey and Dulcie peering out from among the leaves, watching something across the street, Joe’s white paws bright among the shadows, Dulcie’s brown tabby stripes blending into the tree’s foliage so she was hardly visible.

“What are they up to?” Charlie said. “They look�”

“They’re not up to anything, they’re waiting to see you and Max married. They have a perfect view, they’ll be able to see, above the crowd, right in through the glass doors.”

“Where’s the kit?”

“I don’t see her, but you can bet she won’t miss this ceremony.”

Charlie turned from the window, reaching for her veil. Wilma, watching her, thought that her niece seemed as close to an angel as it was possible for a flesh-and-blood person to look. She willed the day to be perfect, without a flaw, a golden day for Charlie and Max, with not a thing to spoil it. Charlie was fussing with her veil when the door flew open and Max burst in grabbing her, pushing her toward the door and reaching to Wilma. “Get out!Now!Away from the building. Run, both of you-blocks away.Go, Charlie. Bomb alert.”

Wilma grabbed Charlie, pulling her away as Charlie tried to follow Max into the garden. Charlie turned on her with rage. “Let me go. Let me go! I can help.”

Max spun back, grabbing her shoulders. “Go now! Get the hell out of here!”

She fought him, trying to twist free. “What do you think I am! I can help clear the area!” Her green eyes blazed. “I’m not marrying a cop I can’t work beside!”

He stared, then turned away with her into the garden. “That woman in the wheelchair, those women around her-get them off the block and down the street.” And he was gone among his officers, keeping order as tangles of wedding guests moved quickly out of the garden, and a few confused elderly folks milled together in panic. Charlie grabbed the wheelchair as Wilma corralled half a dozen frail ladies.

The cats didn’t see Charlie and Wilma come out. They were watching the kit where she had fled back across the street and up the trellis. The boy had climbed again too. Running across the roof, he knelt, reaching for something. But again the kit landed on his shoulders raking and biting. What was the matter with her? Then suddenly all the cops were running, fanning out across the street, staring up at the roof. The boy snatched something from the roof and spun around, racing across the shingles, trying to dislodge the kit. He slipped and fell, and seemed to drop in slow-motion, falling and twisting.

He hit the ground and an explosion rocked the garden. A sudden cloud of smoke hid the church and trees, smoke filled with flying flecks of plaster and torn wood and broken shingles-as if the church had been ground up and vomited out again by a giant blower.

The side of the church was gone. There was only a jagged, smoking hole where the wall of the church had been.

Ragged fragments of the building, and of broken furniture and wedding flowers lay scattered across the bricks and clinging to trees and bushes, and still the sky rained debris.

The two cats crouched clinging to the branches choking with smoke and dust, shaken by the impact. Had it been a gas explosion? Maybe the church furnace? But it was a warm day, and the furnace would not be running. They stared down at a young woman staunching a child’s bloody arm, at a young couple holding each other, an old woman weeping, at officers clearing the area. A bomb. It had been a bomb.

But no villager could do this, not now when the very thought of a bomb was so painful for every human soul.

They saw no one badly hurt, no one was down. “The kit,” Dulcie said. “Where is the kit?” She hardly remembered later how she and Joe reached the kit, where she clung in a pine tree across the street. She only vaguely remembered racing between parked cars and people’s legs, scorching up the pine tree and cuddling the kit against her, licking her frightened face.

Below the pine, officers surrounded the boy. Had that small boy caused the explosion? He couldn’t be more than ten. A ragged child, very white and still.

That was why the kit had jumped him! To stop him! Then she had raced to Clyde. Dulcie licked the kit harder. What kind of childwasthat boy, to do such a thing?He’s just a child,Dulcie thought, shivering. But then she saw the boy’s eyes so cold and hard, and she felt her stomach wrench.

Sirens filled the air. Dulcie looked around for Charlie and Wilma.Don’t let anyone be dead, don’t let anyone be badly hurt.What kind of sophisticated electronic equipment did this little boy have, to set off such an explosion? He seemed just an ordinary, dirty-faced kid, handcuffed now and held between two cops. Just a boy-except for those hard black eyes.

But as Dulcie and Joe peered down from the pine tree with the kit snuggled between them, the boy looked around as if searching for someone. His gaze rose to the roofs and surrounding trees-and stopped on the three cats.

He looked straight at the kit, his eyes widening with rage.

And the tattercoat kit dropped her ears and backed away, deeper among the dark, concealing branches.

4 [��������: pic_5.jpg]

The debris’ filledsmoke twisted and began slowly to settle. The dropping sun sent its deep afternoon light streaming down through the torn roof of the church, illuminating airborne flecks like falling snow through which officers searched the rubble for wounded, and quickly moved shocked onlookers away, in case of a second blast.

No one seemed badly injured; but the miracle of escape was slow to instruct the villagers. They stood in little clusters holding one another, the shock of the deed reverberating in every face, beating in every heart.

Charlie looked around her at the white petals of the wedding bouquets scattered across the detritus-as if some precocious flower girl had thrown a tantrum flinging her pretty treasures. Near her an old woman stood with her handkerchief pressed to her bloody forehead. As Charlie moved to help her, she heard Ryan shout for a medic, and saw Ryan supporting Cora Lee French, Cora Lee’s dark arm around Ryan’s shoulder. Holding the old woman, Charlie wanted to run to Cora Lee.

Pressing her handkerchief to the old woman’s forehead, Charlie got her to sit down on the sidewalk. It was not a deep cut, only a scratch in an area that would naturally bleed heavily. As the woman rested against her, Charlie looked at the church where she and Max were to have been married. Where, if they hadn’t been alerted, she and Max, Clyde and Wilma and the minister would have been standing with nearly the whole village crowded around them.

The three standing walls of the church bristled with shards of debris embedded in the cracked plaster. The rows of velvet-padded chairs that had awaited the wedding guests lay splintered into kindling and blackened rags. One side of the carved lectern lay whole and apparently untouched, smeared black and dotted with silver-bright specks. The corner of a cardboard box lay near it, still covered with silver paper. How odd, that the center had remained nearly undamaged. Sirens screamed again in the narrow street as two more ambulances careened to the curb beside squad cars whose trunks stood open, officers snatching out first aid equipment.

No villager could have done this. No villager could have performed such an act. Not now� No one could have wanted to destroy�

Destroy Max�?

Destroy Max as someone had tried to destroy him last winter, setting him up for murder?Charlie began to shiver, she was ice-cold. She turned her eyes to Max across the garden where he stood talking with two officers. Was this what their marriage would be like, this icy internal terror? Would she go through all their life together ridden by this terrible fear, so that fear touched every smallest joy, turned all their life ugly?

Fury filled her, hot rage. She wanted to pound someone, pound the person who had done this. She looked across the street at Clyde and the officers, handcuffing that young boy. And she turned away, not wanting to think a child had done such a tiling.

She watched the two medics arguing with Cora Lee until at last Cora Lee obediently lay down again on the stretcher. She watched Max talking on his field phone as his officers cleared the street, sending people home. She walked the old woman to the open door of Cora Lee’s ambulance and saw her settled inside. As she turned away, the squad car carrying the boy passed her, the kid scowling out from behind the grid, his face all sharp angles and angry. So very angry.

The cats watched a squad car take the boy away, the child crouched sullenly in the backseat behind the wire barrier. Officer Green had taken the broken garage door opener from the boy’s pocket. The small remote had looked badly smashed where the kid had fallen on it. They could see, within the torn church, detectives Davis and Garza photographing the scene, Juana Davis holding the strobe lights down among the dark rubble so Garza could shoot close-ups of scraps of splintered wood and torn carpet and shattered plaster and bits of silver gift wrap. Dulcie shivered. That prettily wrapped box that they had glimpsed and ignored. That innocent-looking box.

She didn’t understand humans, she didn’t understand how the bright and inventive human mind could warp into such hunger to destroy. She didn’t understand how the human soul, that in its passion could create the wonders of civilization, could allow that same passion to warp in on itself and burn, instead, with this sick thirst for destruction.

Evil,she thoughtPure evil. That kind of sickness is part of the ultimate dark, the dark power that would suck all life to destruction.

“Well, therewillbe a wedding,” Dulcie said softly, lashing her tail, looking at the kit, then looking down at their human friends, at Charlie in her blood-splattered wedding dress holding two children by the hands as their mother tried to calm a screaming baby. “Therewillbe a wedding.” That boy had destroyed the wall of the church, but he hadn’t destroyed anyone’s spirit. He had not destroyed love, or human will.

She watched officers stringing yellow crime tape, securing the area. She had heard Captain Harper calling for a bomb team, she supposed out of San Jose. She knew that those forensic technicians would spend hours going over the area, photographing, fingerprinting, bagging every possible bit of evidence. But once the team arrived, when the work at hand was organized, would mere be a wedding? Surely somewhere within the village, Charlie and Max Harper would be married.

Beside her, the kit was hunkered down among the branches looking so small and miserable that Dulcie nosed at her with concern. “What, Kit? What’s the matter?”

The kit shut her eyes.

“Don’t, Kit. Don’t looksad.You saved lives. You saved hundreds of lives. You’re a hero. But how did you know? How did you know what he planned?”

“I heard them. I heard mat old man telling the boy what to do, an old man with a beard and a bent foot. He shook the boy and told him to wait until everyone was in the church, the bride and groom and minister and everyone, then to punch the opener. I didn’t know what he meant. He said to punch it and run, to get off the roof fast and get away. The boy was angry but he climbed up to the roof and the old man hobbled away. I didn’t mean for the bomb to explode, I wanted tostopwhatever would happen, I didn’t mean for a bomb to go off,” the kit said miserably.

Dulcie licked the kit’s ears. “If you hadn’t jumped that boy, then warned Clyde, then jumped the boy again, he would have killed everyone. You’re a hero, Kit. Do you understand that? Who knows how many lives you saved.”

Dulcie twitched an ear. “To those who know, to Clyde and Wilma and Charlie-to all ofus,Kit, you’ll forever be a hero.”

“Absolutely a hero,” Joe Grey said softly, nudging the kit. “But where did the old man go? Did you see where he went? Did he have a car?”

The kit shook her whiskers. “I didn’t see which way. I didn’t see him get in a car, but�” She paused, thinking. “He said to the boy, ‘The truck will be gone.’ And mere was an old truck parked down the side street, a rusty old pickup, sort of brown. And when� when I jumped the boy and the man ran, I think� IthinkI heard a rattley motor.”

Joe’s eyes widened, and immediately he left them, backing down the tree and streaking for Clyde’s open convertible. He would not, among a crowd of humans, ordinarily be so brazen as to leap into the car and paw into the side pocket, hauling out Clyde’s cell phone. But he had little choice. Looking up over the car door, seeing no one watching him, he punched in a number.

Dulcie and Kit heard Max Harper’s cell phone ringing, across the garden. How strange it was that Joe’s electronic message could zip through the sky who knew how many miles to some phantom tower in just an instant, and back again to Harper’s phone where he stood only a few feet away.

Harper answered, listened, and gave an order that sent officers racing away on foot through the village, and sent squad cars swerving out fast to cruise the streets looking for an old brown truck and for the old man who was the boy’s accomplice. And above the searching officers, Dulcie and the kit raced away too. Flying across the rooftops they watched the sidewalks below, peering down into shadowed niches and recessed doorways where a hidden figure might be missed; and soon on the roofs two blocks away they saw Joe, also searching.

For nearly two hours, as dusk fell, and as the police combed the streets and shops below, the cats crossed back and forth along balconies and oak branches and across peaks and shingles, peering into dark rooftop hiding places and in through second-floor windows looking for the bearded, crippled old man.

There was no sign of him. When at last the search ended, below in the darkening streets the entire population of the village joined to move the site of the wedding. Men and women in party clothes hauled tables and chairs from dozens of shops, carrying them for blocks, setting them up in the center of the village. And when the cats returned to the church garden, it was lined with cars again-the bomb team had arrived.

Within the barrier of yellow tape, grid markers had been laid out. Five forensics officers were down on their hands and knees under powerful spotlights working with cameras and small instruments and collection bags, carefully labeling each item they removed. The process seemed, even to a patient feline hunter, incredibly tedious. Watching from the roof across the street, the cats were overwhelmed by the work that must be accomplished. Clyde found them there, intently watching, perched on the edge of the roof like three owls in the cool and gathering dusk.

“Come on, cats. It’s time for the ceremony. Come on, or you’ll make us late.”

5 [��������: pic_6.jpg]

In thedarkening evening, Ocean Avenue’s two lanes were closed off by rows of sawhorses; and its wide grassy median beneath spreading eucalyptus trees was filled with wavering lights; lights shifted and wandered and drew together in constellations. Nearly every villager carried a candle or battery-operated torch or, here and there, a soft-burning oil lantern retrieved from the bearer’s camping supplies.

Down the center of the median a narrow path had been left between the crowd, for the wedding procession. The long grassy carpet led to a circle of lawn before a giant eucalyptus whose five mammoth trunks fanned out from the ground like a great hand reaching to the star-strewn sky. Within the velvet-green circle ringed by wedding guests, the pastor waited, holy book in hand. Beside him, the groom looked more than usually solemn, his thin, lined face stern and watchful.

Tall and straight in his dark uniform, Max Harper was not encumbered with the cop’s full equipment, with flashlight, handcuffs, mace, the regulation array of weapons and tools; only his loaded automatic hung at his hip. His gaze down the long green aisle where the bride would approach was more than usually watchful; and along the outer limits of the crowd, his uniformed officers stood at attention in wary surveillance. This was what the world had come to, even for an event as simple as a village wedding-particularly for such an event. Harper’s nerves were raw with concern for Charlie.

She stood a block away at the other end of the grassy path waiting, apparently demurely, between her aunt Wilma and Dallas Garza, her red hair bright in the candlelight, her hands steady on the bridal bouquet of white and yellow daisies-she had chosen his favorite flowers. No stain of blood shone on her white linen dress or on Wilma’s blue gown, as if the two women had diligently sponged away the slightest hint of trouble.

Charlie did not look up along the grassy path at him but glanced repeatedly to the street watching for Clyde’s arrival. Max got the impression that the moment the best man’s yellow roadster appeared, at one of the side-street barriers, she meant to sprint down the lane double-time and get on with the wedding, before another bomb rent apart their world.

But then when Clyde’s car did race into view, parking in the red before the sawhorses, Max saw Charlie laugh. He couldn’t see what she found amusing, but among the guests who had turned to look, several people smiled.

Only when Clyde and Ryan came across the street, did he catch a flash of movement along the ground-three small racing shadows almost immediately gone again from view, among the wedding guests. He wasn’t sure whether to laugh, or to swear at Clyde. Buddies they were, but there were limits. Watching his best man push through to take his place, Max fixed him with a look that would intimidate the coldest felon.

Clyde’s sly grin told him that indeed cats were among the wedding guests; and the faintest scrambling sound behind Max told him those guests were now above his head, in the branches of the eucalyptus tree-doing what? Cats did not attend weddings, cats did not know about weddings. Max looked down the long grassy aisle to Charlie, needing her commonsense response to such matters. This business of weirdly behaving cats left him out of his element, off-center and shaky, as nothing else could do.

The instant Clyde parked, the three cats had leaped out of the open convertible and streaked across the empty eastbound lane hoping not to be noticed on the dark street. Slipping into the crowd, swerving between shoes and pant cuffs and silk-clad ankles they stormed up the far side of the giant eucalyptus. Concealing themselves among its leafy branches, they looked down on the crowd below, massed in the falling evening among the sheltering trees.

“Oh,” Dulcie whispered. “Oh,” said the kit. The faces of the villagers were lighted from beneath by candles and torches like the faces of children carrying votive candles in solemn procession. The scene put Dulcie in mind of some ancient woodland wedding performed in a simpler time, perhaps a Celtic ceremony in a far and magical past.

The minute Clyde took his place beside the groom, Wilma began her measured walk up the grassy aisle, her step dictated not by wedding music, for there was none, but by the rhythm of the sea that broke some blocks away on the sandy shore, the surf’s eternal hush deep and sustaining. Behind Wilma, the bride approached on the arm of Dallas Garza between the flickering lights, her dress gleaming white. “She’ll have sponged it,” Dulcie whispered.

Some of the wedding guests sported bandages; but only Cora Lee French was in the hospital. “For observation,” Clyde had said. Cora Lee’s lack of a spleen after her attack and surgery last spring prompted her doctor to keep close watch on her. Very likely, the cats thought, Cora Lee was fully prepared to enjoy the wedding secondhand from her friends’ eager descriptions and from the plates of wedding cake and party food that would be carried over to the hospital.

As Charlie, Wilma, and Dallas took their places, Dulcie felt a tear slide down her whiskers. The ceremony was simple. At, “who gives this bride to be wed?” when Detective Garza led Charlie forward to stand beside Captain Harper, Joe Grey muttered a little prayer that in all the confusion Clyde hadn’t lost the rings. Only when Clyde slipped his hand in his coat pocket and the ring boxes appeared, did the cats relax, watching with fascination as the traditional wordsto love and to cherishformed a deep and solemn promise. Dulcie’s eyes were indeed misty. Looking down through the branches, the cats watched Max Harper place the gold band on Charlie’s finger. As Charlie slipped Max’s ring on, another tear slid down Dulcie’s nose, a tear that no ordinary cat could shed. Joe looked at her intently. “What’s to cry about? This is thestartof their new life.”

“A tomcat wouldn’t understand. All females cry at weddings, it’s in the genes.”

But in truth all three cats were touched by this human ritual. The kit snuffled into her whiskers; and as the villagers gathered around the bride and groom kissing and hugging them, the cats moved higher up the great tree, easing out along a wide branch through the softly rustling foliage, where they had a wider view of the village street. As Max and Charlie mingled with their friends, and someone’s CD player brought alive the forties swing that Charlie and Max loved, Ryan and her Uncle Dallas left the party hurrying in the direction of the police station.

“To have a look at the boy,” Joe said. “To see if Ryandoesknow him.”

“That seems so strange,” Dulcie replied, “to think that she saw him all that far away, in San Andreas.”

Earlier, at the bombed church, coming down from the roof and allowing Clyde to carry them to the car, they had crowded gratefully onto Ryan’s lap, even Joe Grey with no show of macho independence.

“Do you mind holding them? I think they’re scared.”

“We’re all scared. They can comfort me.” Ryan had hugged the cats, crushing them gently together; they had ridden the few blocks to the wedding like three furry prizes she might have won at some carnival booth, three rag animals held tight by a fearful little girl. “Does anyone know the boy?” Ryan said. “Know who he is?”

Clyde turned to look at her. “Detective Davis thought she recognized him. I got the impression Garza might know him, but he wasn’t saying much.”

“I might know him. Or he’s a dead ringer for one of the boys hanging around the trailer, in San Andreas.”

“That would be pretty strange. I got the feeling he’s local, that he might be involved with that last bust Harper made, that meth lab up the valley. I think the guy they sent up had a kid.”

“I think it’s the same boy, Clyde.”

He looked over at her. “Was there an old man with him, up there?”

She shook her head. “I saw only the boy. Tell me again how you knew about the bomb, what made you run shouting for everyone to get out. Through aphone call?”

“I’d gone into the church with my phone in my suit pocket, and someone said it made a lump. I went back to the car to leave it. When it rang I wasn’t going to answer, I don’t know what made me pick up. It was a woman, whispering. Said there was a bomb, that a boy on the roof had the trigger, a garage-door opener.” Clyde shrugged. “You know the rest. I didn’t darenotbelieve her.”

Clyde was, Joe thought, improving his lying skills. At least he had, apparently, convinced Ryan.

Now, below the cats, the bride and groom drifted away among a tangle of friends, heading for the party tables. Only Wilma remained beneath the eucalyptus tree lingering in the grassy circle. Looking up, she spoke softly-anyone who knew Wilma Getz knew that it was not unusual to hear her talk to her cats.

“Come on, Kit. I’m going to the hospital.”

The kit’s eyes widened.

“Taking Cora Lee some party food.”

Kit scooted down at once, so eagerly that she nearly fell backward into Wilma’s arms. The cats knew the kit had been worried about the Creole woman. The two of them were fast friends. Though Cora Lee had no notion of the little cat’s true nature, the kit was special to her. This last spring, they had spent six weeks onstage together charming their audiences. No actress and her protege can star together bringing down the house every night without forming an indestructible bond.

Carrying the kit on her shoulder, Wilma headed away through the crowd. “I have a shopping bag in me car that should hide you, should get you into her room.” Reaching her car, she turned so they could both look back, watching the bride and groom dancing the first dance in the westbound lane of Ocean, the tall, handsome couple laughing as their shoes scuffed on the rough asphalt.

“They are happy,” Wilma whispered. “Safe, Kit, thanks to you. Thanks to their guardian angel, they are safe and happy. Very, very happy.”

The kit smiled, and snuggled closer. How strange life was, how strange and amazing. She never knew, one moment to the next, what new wonder would fill the world around her, dazzling and challenging her-and sometimes terrifying her.

The inside of the car smelled deliciously of the party food that Wilma was taking to Cora Lee. But as the kit settled down on the front seat beside her friend, extravagantly purring, neither she nor Wilma imagined that the day’s events would not be the last ugliness to twist this weekend awry and leave its ugly mark.

Descending the great eucalyptus tree, Dulcie and Joe Grey backed precariously down the slick bark below the branch line, slipping, dropping the last six feet, and headed directly across the street to the long buffet tables set up in front of the village shops.

At the center table where bottles of champagne were being popped, Max and Charlie stood cutting the cake, exchanging bites, smearing white icing across each other’s faces as the occasion was duly recorded by a dozen flashing cameras. The cats glanced at each other, purring. A gentleness filled the crowd, a gentleness in people’s voices and in their slower movements, an extra kindliness washing over the village, born of the near-disaster.

They saw Ryan and Dallas coming up the street, returning from the station where Ryan must have had a look at the young bomber. As she joined Charlie at a small table, Dallas stood conferring with Harper, then headed away toward the church to oversee the bomb team. And Harper himself headed quickly for the station, leaving Charlie to the first of the endless separations and delays that would accompany her life married to a cop. The cats trotted near them, to listen, settling down on the sidewalk between some potted geraniums.

Ryan sat down, touching Charlie’s hand. “You look pale.”

“I’m fine. Was it the same boy?”

“Same kid. Dallas knows him; he’s Curtis Farger.”

“Son of the guy Max and Dallas busted?” Charlie said. “He’s supposed to be down the coast with his mother. Maybe she’s not too reliable.”

The trial of Curtis’s father had ended just three weeks before. Gerrard Farger was doing six years on the manufacture of an illegal substance, and two years each on three counts of possession. The meth lab he’d put together had been in the woods below Molena Point, a shed behind a two-room cabin, the property roped off now with warning signs, and stinking so powerfully of drugs that it would likely have to be destroyed. Though the chemicals and lab equipment had been removed, the walls and floor and every fiber of the building still exuded fumes as lethal as cyanide.

“I had a look at him through the one-way mirror,” Ryan said. “When I was sure it was the same kid, Dallas took me on in. Kid looked at me like he’d never seen me. I told him I’d cleaned up my truck, found the cracker crumbs and Hershey wrappers in my tarp.”

“I’m missing a beat, here.”

Ryan laughed. “I didn’t know what had happened in my truck, only that someone had been in it. That had to be on my way down from San Andreas, or that night after I got home. But then when I saw the kid� well, it fit. I asked him if he’d hitched a ride down from the mountains. He just stared at me. When I pushed him, he said, ‘What of it, bitch? I don’t weigh nothin’. How much gas could it take?’”

Ryan shook her head. “Not a bit like the nice, polite, innocent kid he let me think he was, hanging around the Jakes job.”

“You’resureit’s the same boy?”

“The same. Same straight black hair, with a cowlick-big swirl on the left side. Same big bones, square-cut dirty nails. Same coal-black eyes and straight brows with those little scraggly hairs.” Ryan gave Charlie a wry smile. “He was so eager and polite when he and his two friends showed up around the trailer.

“And just now in jail, underneath his hateful stare and rude mouth, I think the kid was scared.”

“He should be scared,” Charlie said. “He’s in major trouble.”

“Dallas called Curtis’s mother. She said the boy wasn’t there right then, that he’d gone to a movie. A ten-year-old boy going to a movie alone, at this time of night? Dallas asked her what movie. She didn’t know, said she’d forgotten what the kid told her. Said whatever was playing in town. That there was only one theater, and one screen. Said she guessed he’d be home by midnight.” Ryan shook her head. “A ten-year-old kid running the streets at midnight. Dallas plans to go down in the morning, have a talk with her.”

Charlie nodded. “If that old man is Gerrard Farger’s father-Curtis’s grandfather� They’ve had a warrant out for him. Max and Dallas were sure the two ran the lab together, but when they busted Farger the old man was gone, not a trace. Now, if there’s a connection to San Andreas, that’s a whole new track to follow. We may not make it to Alaska.”

“I’m sorry.”

Charlie shook her head. “Whatever Max decides is okay. We can take the cruise later. That old man needs to be stopped. At the time of the drug raid, the second bedroom in the Farger cabin had been cleaned out, where he might have bunked with the boy. Nothing but a bare cot against the wall and an old mattress on the floor, and the kid’s clothes. Juvenile officer picked those up after the bust, when he took me kid down to his mother. Not a sign of the old man, and during the trial Gerrard wouldn’t say a word to incriminate his father.”

Ryan shrugged. “Nothing like family loyalty. Were they part of a bigger operation?”

“Max doesn’t think so. More of a family business,” Charlie said wryly. “Farger apparently thought he could run a small operation without alerting the cops or the cartel.”

Ryan laughed. “Sooner or later the cartel would have known about it-would have destroyed the lab or taken it over, made Farger knuckle under and follow their orders.” Both young women were very aware of the powerful Mexican drug cartel that operated in the Bay Area. “He’s lucky Max made the bust, he’s safer in jail. Was he farming marijuana too?”

“DEA is investigating,” Charlie said. The cartel used its meth profits to bankroll marijuana operations across the state-a behemoth of criminal activity as dark and invasive, in the view of law enforcement, as if the black death were creeping across California destroying families and taking lives. In the national forests and other remote areas, the marijuana patches were guarded by gunmen who shot to kill, so intent on protecting their crops that a deer hunter or a hiker venturing into the wrong area might never be heard from again.

And the toxic waste from meth labs was dumped down storm drains so it went into the sea, or was poured into streams so it got into the water supply, or was poured on the ground where it could stay for years poisoning fields and killing wildlife. Whoever said doing meth didn’t hurt anyone but the user didn’t have a clue.

“Youarepale,” Ryan said softly. “We shouldn’t be talking about this stuff. You want to get out of the crowd, go somewhere quiet and lie down?”

“I’m fine,” Charlie said crossly. “I don’t need to lie down.”

But she wasn’t fine, she couldn’t get over being scared. She’d thought she was okay until, walking up the grassy aisle, with all their friends, everyone she knew and cared about, standing like a wall to protect her, she kept imagining the grass exploding in front of Dallas and Wilma, exploding with all those people crowding close.

She felt ice-cold again. Her hands began to shake.

Ryan put her arm around her, hugging Charlie against her shoulder.

Charlie shook her head. “I’m sorry. Delayed reaction.”

“I guess that’s allowed. You don’t have to be stoic and fearless just because you married a cop.”

“It would help.”

They looked at each other with perfect understanding; but they glanced up when Clyde and Wilma approached their table.

Wilma was wrapped in a blue cashmere stole over her pale gown, against the night’s chill. She carried a woven shopping bag that bulged and wriggled.

Clyde carried two paper plates heaped with canapes and salads and sliced meats. As he set one in the center of the table and the other underneath, Joe and Dulcie slipped beneath the table; and from Wilma’s shopping bag the kit hopped out, strolling purposefully under the table to claim her share.

“Cora Lee’s fine,” Wilma said. “Apparently something hit her in the head, but no concussion. They want her overnight, though.” When, early in the spring, Cora Lee had walked into the middle of a robbery and murder, she had been hit by such a blow to her middle that her spleen had ruptured and had to be removed. The dusky-skinned actress told them later she was terrified she would never sing again. But she had sung, the lead in the village’s little theater production ofThorns of Gold.With the kit as impromptu costar during the entire run, the play had sold out every night.

“Dallas is trying to get Curtis Farger remanded over to juvenile,” Clyde said. “But since the fire, with their building gone, they’re not eager to take any kids. Kids scattered all over, in temporary quarters, and not great security.” He looked at Charlie. “Max would be smart to get a move on, before you decide to enjoy the cruise without him.”

“Maybe we’ll just do a few days in San Francisco, and book the cruise for next spring.” Their reservation at the St. Francis gave them three days in the city before boarding their liner for the inland passage. At the moment, that sounded pretty good to Charlie.

“Can you cancel a cruise like that?” Wilma said. “Even Max�” She watched Charlie, frowning. She wanted her niece and Max to get on that ship and be gone, to be away from the Farger family.

“Max knows someone,” Charlie said. “When he made the reservations, that was part of the package, that if something urgent came up, we could cancel.” She glanced beneath the table where the cats feasted, Joe and Dulcie eating fastidiously, the kit slurping so loudly that Ryan looked under too, and laughed.

When the cats had demolished their quiche, seafood salads, rare roast beef, curried lamb, and wedding cake, they stretched out between the feet of their friends for a leisurely wash, grooming thoroughly from whiskers to tail. They could have trotted over to the jail and had a look at Curtis Farger, but they were too full and comfortable. And Joe didn’t think they’d hear much. Very likely Curtis had already been questioned as much as he could be, until a juvenile officer arrived in the morning to protect the kid’s rights. Sleeking his whiskers with a damp paw, Joe Grey thought about the legal rights of young boys who set bombs to kill people.

No one liked to believe that a ten-year-old child had intended, and nearly succeeded in, mass murder. In the eyes of the law, Curtis and his grandfather were innocent until proven guilty. But in Joe Grey’s view they were both guilty until proven otherwise. If you attacked innocent people with all claws raking, you should know that your opponent would retaliate.

Charlie said, “This afternoon at the church-before the bomb-I felt like I was nineteen again, so scared and giddy. And then after the bomb went off, it was� I wasn’t nineteen anymore, couldn’t remember ever having been so young.” She chafed her hands together.

“There was some reason,” Ryan said, “some profound reason, why that bomb went off prematurely. What made the kid turn and run? What made him trip and fall? You couldn’t see much under those overhanging trees. He was lucky he didn’t break something, falling off that roof. Just bruises-and those scratches on his face from the branches.” She looked at Clyde. “Do you think hewouldhave set off the bomb if he hadn’t fallen? Do you think hewouldhave pressed that little button?”

Clyde and Charlie and Wilma avoided looking at each other. All were thinking the same. Had no one seen Kit attack the boy?

“The boy went to a lot of trouble,” Clyde said, “to suddenly abandon the idea. Whether he made the bomb or the old man did, don’t you think a ten-year-old would do what he was told to do? If the old man forced the kid to go up on the roof, if he threatened Curtis�”

“You’re saying hewouldhave done it,” Ryan said. “But then fate stepped in-as if Max and Charlie’s guardian angel was looking after them, looking after all of us.”

Wilma lifted her champagne glass. “Here’s to that particular angel. May our guardian angels never desert us.” And Wilma did not need to look beneath the table to know that the guardian angel was pressing against her ankle. That particular angel purred so powerfully that she shook both herself and Wilma.

6 [��������: pic_7.jpg]

The plattersof party food were empty, the wedding cake had all been eaten or small pieces wrapped in paper napkins and carried away as little talismans to provide midnight dreams of future happiness. The empty champagne bottles had been neatly gathered and bagged, the tables and chairs folded and loaded into waiting trucks. In the quiet night the grassy, tree-sheltered median was empty now and silent and seemed to Ryan and Clyde painfully lonely. As they headed for the few parked cars, Ryan took his hand.

The bride and groom had left for San Francisco, for the bridal suite at the St. Francis, the loveliest old hotel in the city. They had joked about arriving in Max’s Chevy king cab, and had talked about renting a limo but considered that extravagant. The pickup wasn’t fancy but it was safe on the highway, and in the city they would put it in storage during their cruise. They had three days to enjoy San Francisco before they moved into the stateroom of their luxury liner and sailed for Alaska-or before Max realized that he couldn’t leave, with the bombing case working, that they’d have to head home again.

“Maybe only a three-day honeymoon,” Ryan said sadly, already certain of what Max would do.

“Whatever they do,” Clyde said, walking her to Dallas’s car, “they’re happy.” He gave Ryan a hug by way of good night, watched her settle in beside Dallas, then swung into his yellow convertible to drive the three blocks home, leaving Ryan and her uncle heading for her place to collect what little evidence might remain in the bed of her truck. Strange about the kid hitching a ride, hiding under the tarp where he couldn’t be seen through the rear window-he had to know exactly when she’d be leaving San Andreas. He had made his way into the town itself, maybe hitchhiking, to wait for her there.

Clyde drove home thinking uneasily about Joe, and about the kit and Dulcie. The cats would be into this case tooth and claw.

A bombing was a different game than shoplifting, or domestic violence, or even domestic murder. A bomb investigation of any kind could be more than dangerous-and you could bet Joe Grey would be onto it like ticks on a hound.

Short of locking the cat up, there wasn’t much Clyde could do to stop him.

Joe claimed he had no right to try. And maybe Joe was right. As much as Clyde wanted to protect Joe, the tomcat was a sentient being, and sentient beings had free choice. Joe could always argue him down on that point.

Parking in his drive, Clyde took a few minutes to put up the top of the antique Chevy. Following the slow, cumbersome routine, pulling and straightening the canvas and snapping the many grommets in place, he thought how strange and amazing, the way his life had turned out. Who would have imagined when he was living in San Francisco walking home from work that particular evening, when he paused to kneel by the gutter looking at that little bundle of gray fur among the trash and empty wine bottles. Reaching to touch what he was sure was a dead kitten, who could imagine the wonder that lay, barely alive, beneath his reaching hand?

When he took up the little limp bundle and wrapped it in his wool scarf and headed for the nearest vet, who could have dreamed the off-the-wall scenario that would soon change his life? That he was holding in his hand a creature of impossible talents, a beast the like of which maybe no other human had ever seen, at least in this century.

No other human, except Wilma.

It didn’t bear pondering on, that Joe Grey and Dulcie had ended up with him and Wilma, who had been fast friends ever since Clyde was eight years old and Wilma was in graduate school. Through all of Wilma’s moves in her career as a parole officer, and through Clyde’s own several moves, they had remained close.

But how and why had the two cats come to them?

Dulcie said it was preordained. Clyde didn’t like to think about that stuff, any more than Joe did. The idea that some power totally beyond his comprehension had placed those two cats where they would meet, not only kept him awake at night but could render him sleepless for weeks.

And yet�

Fate,Dulcie said.

Neither Clyde nor the tomcat believed in predestination, both were quite certain that your life was what you made it. And yet�

Entering the living room and switching on the low-watt lamp by the front door, he found Joe fast asleep in his well-clawed armchair. The gray tomcat lay on his back, snoring, his white belly and white chest exposed, his four white feet straight up in the air. Obviously overfull of party food. He must have left the reception early and hiked right on home and passed out, a surfeited victim of gluttony. Clyde turned on a second lamp.

Joe woke, staring up at Clyde with blazing eyes. “Did you have to do that? Isn’t one lamp enough? I was just drifting off.”

“You were ten feet under, snoring like a bulldog. Why aren’t you hunting? Too stuffed with wedding cake? Where’s Dulcie?”

“She took the kit home, she doesn’t want her out hunting.” Joe flipped over. Digging his front claws into the arm of his chair, he stretched so deeply that Clyde could feel, in his own spine, every vertebrae separate, every ligament loosen. “She’s worried about Kit, afraid that old man saw her jump the boy and will come back to find her.”

Clyde sat down on the couch. This thought was not far-fetched. Already Joe and Dulcie had been stalked by a killer because of their unique talents. If the kit had foiled the old man’s plans, wouldn’t he wonder what kind of cat this was? Wouldn’t his rage lead him back to her? Clyde looked intently at Joe. “So where are you going to hide her?”

“I was thinking about Cora Lee French, when she gets home from the hospital. Since the play, she and the kit are fast friends. And that big house, that the four senior ladies bought for their retirement, has a thousand hiding places. Sitting there on the edge of the canyon, it would be a cinch for a cat to escape down among the trees and brushes-that old man would never find her, it’s wild as hell in those canyons.”

“Right. She can just slip away among the bobcats and coyotes, to say nothing of a possible cougar.”

Joe shrugged. “We hunt that canyon now and then, we’ve never had a problem.”

Clyde headed for the bedroom, pulling off his suit jacket and loosening his tie. You couldn’t argue with a cat. Behind him Joe hit the floor with a thud, and came trotting past him into the bedroom. Glancing up at Clyde, he clawed impatiently at the sarouk rug, waiting for Clyde to turn back the spread.

Share and share alike was okay, cat and man each claiming half the bed. But one couldn’t expect a poor little cat to turn back the covers.

Grumbling, Clyde pulled off the spread. At once Joe leaped to the center of the blanket and began to wash, waiting in silence for Clyde’s inevitable lecture.You don’t need to take your half in the middle. And as to that canyon, you can’t possibly foresee all the dangers in that canyon. You do remember the mountain lion? And we can all hear the coyotes at night yipping down there. And those bands of raccoons�

When Clyde’s words of caution were not forthcoming, Joe stopped washing to look at him.

Clyde said, “You are very cavalier when it comes to the kit’s tender young life.”

“That isn’t fair. That is really insulting-to me, and to the kit. Kit can smell another animal, she knows how to slip away.”

Clyde didn’t answer.

“What wouldyoudo,” Joe said, “if you were out on the hills and a cougar came prowling? You would simply keep your distance, use a little common sense.”

“I’d get the hell out of there. And I’m not seven inches tall.” He glared at Joe. “You can be so-cats can be so�

“Irritating,“Joe Grey said, smiling.“Cats can be so maddening and unreasonable.“Turning his back, he pawed his pillow into the required nest shape for absolute comfort. He was just settling down, warm and purring, when Clyde pulled off his shirt. Joe sat up again, staring at Clyde’s bare back, at the dried blood and raw, red wounds. “What happened to you? You look like you had a really wild night.”

“Don’t be crude.” Clyde twisted around pressing against the dresser to look in the mirror. “That’s the kit’s handiwork-when she jumped on me to warn us about the bomb.”

Joe watched Clyde dig through his top dresser drawer searching for the medication he used when one of the cats, or their elderly retriever, Rube, had a scratch. Clyde found the salve and, twisting and straining, began to spread it on the scratches.

“Dr. Firetti would be interested to know how you’re using his prescriptions. Aren’t you afraid of picking up something from old Rube or one of us cats? A touch of mange? Ringworm? Poison oak? Some ancient and incurable-”

“Cool it, Joe. This is all I have. I don’t handle this stuff carelessly. I don’t�” He stared at the open tube, and at his fingers, and turned a bit pale.

“There’s iodine in the medicine cabinet,” Joe said helpfully. “You used it on Rube when he cut his foot, but you poured it in a cup.”

Recapping the tube, Clyde went into the bathroom. Joe heard the shower running as if Clyde were scrubbing off the dangerously infected salve. When Clyde came out again he smelled sharply of iodine. Refraining from comment, Joe turned over and closed his eyes. He was soon deeply asleep while Clyde lay in the darkness worrying about ancient and unnamed diseases.

Two floodlights washed across Ryan’s drive, shining down from the roof of the duplex onto her new red pickup-not new from the factory, the vehicle was a couple of years old, but new to her, in mint condition and with really low mileage. A handsome new workhorse with locked toolboxes along both sides, and a strong overhead rack to hold lumber and ladders.

In the six-foot truck bed Dallas knelt examining the tarp that she had so carefully shaken out the night before and neatly refolded, unwittingly destroying all manner of evidence.

A few long black hairs remained, which Dallas removed with tweezers, and there were some short gray hairs, that Dallas hoped might have come from the old man. “I’ll need to take the tarp to the lab.”

“I have another.” She watched as Dallas finished up. As he packed away his fingerprinting equipment and locked the truck, she went up the outside stairs to make fresh coffee. Filling the coffeepot, she wasn’t sure how much information she could supply about Curtis Farger or about his two friends. She tried to recall the other boys’ names, tried to remember which direction they came from when they arrived at the trailer, and to remember any chance remarks that might help Dallas know where Curtis had been staying. It was nearly midnight. With so little sleep the night before, it was hard to keep her eyes open. As the coffee brewed she stepped into the closet and took off her suit and high-heeled pumps, pulling on a warm robe and slippers. The idea that that boy had hitched a ride for two hundred miles, and she’d never known, both angered and amused her. You had to give him credit.

Hadthe boy set that bomb? Had hewantedto set it, or was he forced to do it?

The kid was old enough to know right from wrong, old enough to have refused to take part in such a deed, even when he was ordered by a grown-up. What kind of boy was this? A child terrified of crossing the old man? Or a twisted child, excited by the thought of murdering hundreds of people?

That was a hard thought to consider. A child warped and crippled by those who had raised him? She didn’t like to think about that.

Returning to the kitchen, she watched Dallas pull a box of shortbread cookies from her freezer. He had his uniform jacket off, his collar loosened, and had poured the coffee and set the sugar and cream on the table.

They sat comfortably together the way they had when she was little, when she’d had a problem at school or when she wanted to hear for the hundredth time the old family stories about her dead mother, the tales about Dallas and her mother growing up on the little family acreage in the wine country east of Napa.

They remained talking until after 1:00, discussing the boy, and Ryan describing the Jakeses’ mountain cabin where she had added a new great room, turning the old living room into a master bedroom. They both knew the foothill area well, the rolling slopes that were green in winter until the snows came, green again in spring until the summer sun burned the hills to the golden brown of wild hay, broken by the dark green stands of pine. Scattered vacation homes were tucked among the hills along with pockets of older shacks down in the gullies where the drainage was poor and there was no sweeping view. There were a few large estates too, back away from the main roads, like that owned by Marianna and Sullivan Landeau, the couple whose weekend house she had recently finished, here in the village. The Landeaus’ San Andreas estate was huge, the house overbearing with its excessive use of marble. Not at all like the simple Molena Point cottage that Ryan had designed for them.

“Must be nice to have that kind of money,” Dallas said. “What, three houses-one in San Francisco?”

She nodded. “Nice, I guess. But they don’t seem all that happy.”

Dallas broke a cookie in half. “And the boy-you have no idea where he lived, where any of those kids lived?”

“They came up the drive, but you can’t see the road from the house. I never did see which direction they came from.” She named the other two boys but she didn’t know their last names, she was certain she’d never heard them.

“The kids didn’t talk about their families. They hung around the way kids do, showed up after school as if they were on their way home, and once or twice on the weekend. They seemed open enough, and friendly.

“Right in the beginning Curtiswassort of nosy, asking questions about where I was from, and did I do this kind of work for a living.” She glanced wryly at Dallas. “He looked� when I told him where I lived he did a little double-take, then immediately covered it up. We were busy surveying and laying out the addition, I didn’t dunk any more about it.”

She looked at Dallas. “Right then, did he decide to hitch a ride, when he knew where I lived? Did he have it all planned, weeks ago?

“And what was he doing up there? How did he get there, in the first place? And did the old man hitch too? That would make me feel really stupid, if those two were both in the truck.” Ryan shook her head. “Did I give them both a ride so they could set that bomb?”

“Soon as we get a lab report, likely we’ll start checking stores in the San Andreas area-hardware, drugstores, feed and grocery. That might be where the meth supplies were coming from. We sure didn’t turn up with big purchases here on the coast. That raid on the Farger shack netted us a hoard of antifreeze, iodine, starter fluid, fifty packs of cold tablets, just for starters. To say nothing of the mountain of empties buried in a pit. But no record-or no admission-of increased sales locally. Could be they got their bomb makings up there too.”

She looked at him. “I wasn’t carrying their bomb supplies! In the back of my truck!”

Dallas shrugged. “That could be hard to sort out. Ammonium sulfate, for instance. The bomb wouldn’t have taken much, compared to what a farmer might use.”

“That would be sick, Dallas. If I was hauling their bomb makings for them.”

“What time did you leave San Andreas? Took you about four hours to get home?”

“About seven in the evening. Took me five hours. I stopped in town to load some stained-glass windows I’d bought from an antique dealer. He’d said he’d wait for me. Then halfway home I pulled into a fast-food place for a burger.” She imagined the kid hunkered down under the tarp, cold in the wind and nearly drooling at the smell of greasy fries and burgers. “Why didn’t I see him? How could I have loaded the windows without�” She stopped, and sat thinking, then looked up at Dallas.

“When I loaded the windows, the guy had given me some cardboard to buffer them, so I didn’t need the tarp. I tossed it near the tailgate, still folded. There was no one in the truck, then.”

“When you’d loaded the windows, what did you do?”

“I went back inside to give the shopkeeper a check.”

“Was there any room left in the truck bed?”

“The windows were lined up in the front, riding on several sheets of foam insulation, and tied and padded. The back half of the truck bed was empty.”

Dallas kept asking questions. Yawning, she went over every detail she could remember. The hitchhikers could easily have dropped off the back of the truck when she pulled into her drive. In the dark, she wouldn’t have seen them.

“What other contacts did you have up there?”

“Lumber and building-supply people. Building inspectors. The furnace guy. A local realtor wanting me to do a remodel-a Larn Williams. Has his broker’s license. Works independently.”

“You take the job?”

“He wants to talk with his clients.” She yawned. “I think I may skip that one. He seems interested in more than the work.”

Dallas rose. “You’re beat. I’ll cut out of here.”

She grinned up at him. “You never get tired, when you’re on a case.” She got up too, and hugged him, and saw him out the door. But the moment he pulled out of the drive and headed down the hill, she turned off the light and fell into bed, dropping immediately into sleep-she was definitely not a night person.

But others in the world loved the night, others found the small hours after midnight filled with excitement. While Dallas and Ryan sat in her studio trying to get a fix on Curtis Farger, Joe Grey woke from his nap in the double bed beside Clyde, woke hearing Dulcie and the kit at his cat door banging the plastic flap.

Leaping down and trotting out through the living room, he found the kit on the porch slapping at the flap, and Dulcie stretched out on the mat beside her enjoying the cool night breeze. Within moments they were racing through the village past the dimly lit shops, dodging around potted trees, streaking through sidewalk gardens. Ocean’s wide median and one-way lanes were empty now and deserted, the wedding party vanished as if all the people and lights and tables of food had been sucked up by the sea wind. The cats didn’t pause until they were high in the hills where the tall grass whipped in long waves-they ran chasing one another, clearing their heads of too many voices, too much laughter, too many human problems. Alone in the night racing blindly through the tangles caring nothing tonight for caution, they laughed softly and taunted one another.

“Gotcha.“Then a hiss and a playful growl, humanlike voices no louder than a whisper.“Not me, you can’t catch me.” “Alley cat! You’re an alley cat!” “Last one up the tree is dog meat!”

Dulcie scorched up the branches of a huge oak that stood on the crest of the hill, a venerable grandfather flinging its black twisted arms out across the stars. Racing and leaping within the great tree, riding its wind-tossed branches like sailors clinging to a rocking masthead, the cats looked down the hills that fell away below them. Ancient curves of land that, just here, were still totally wild, empty of human civilization. And out over the sea the new moon hung thin as a blade. The stars among which the moon swam were, Dulcie liked to imagine, the eyes of spirit cats who had passed from the world before them.

The wind died. The cats paused, listening.

The night was so still they could hear each other breathing; and in the new silence, another sound.

Something running the hills, trampling the dry tall grass. A big beast running; they could hear him panting.

High above the ground, they were safe from dogs and coyotes. But cougars could climb. And now in the faint moonlight they could see the shadow running, a beast as big as a cougar, large and swift, dodging in and out among the hillside gardens.

It did not move like a cougar.

“Dog,” Joe hissed. “Only a dog.”

But the plunging beast ran as if demented, and it was a very big dog. Was it tracking them? Following the fresh scent of cat? In the still night, its panting implied a single-mindedness that made them climb quickly higher among the oak’s dark foliage.

Contrary to common perception, some dogs could climb quite handily up the sprawling branches of a tree such as this. They had seen such pictures, of coon hounds on a passionate mission. Dulcie glanced at the kit worriedly because me kit was young and small.

But she wasn’t small anymore,Dulcie realized.

The little tattercoat wasn’t a kitten anymore. She was as big as Dulcie herself and likely was still growing. And Dulcie knew too well, from their mock battles, that this kit was as solid as a rock. Beside her on the branch the kit sat working her claws into the rough bark, staring down at the racing dog with eyes burning like twin fires. As if she couldn’t wait to leap on that running back clawing and raking.

It seemed only yesterday that Dulcie and Joe had found the kit up on Hellhag hill, a little morsel of fur and bone so frightened, so bullied by the bigger cats mat she never got enough to eat. Such a strange little cat, vastly afraid one minute, and giddy with adventure the next, filled with excitement and challenge.

But that had been a year ago. A year since Joe saw that car plunge over the sea cliff and found the driver dead inside, a year since Lucinda Greenlaw buried her murdered husband and fell in love with his uncle Pedric. A year since Lucinda and Pedric married, and adopted the kit and set out traveling with her. The kit had been so excited, setting off to see all the world, as the kit put it-only to turn home again very soon, the little cat dreadfully carsick. Three times the Greenlaws had tried, three journeys in which the Kit became deathly ill.

Nearly a year since Lucinda brought the little tattercoat back for good, to stay with Wilma while the elderly newlyweds traveled.

She’s grown up,Dulcie thought sadly. That fact, coupled with the kit’s wild and unruly temperament, made Dulcie feel not simply lonely suddenly, but sharply apprehensive.

Once the kit realized that she was a grown-up cat who need not necessarily obey her elders, what might she do then?

Crouching among the branches watching the big pale hound racing along with his nose to the ground eagerly following their scent, Dulcie’s head was filled with a cat’s natural fear of the unfamiliar beast, and filled as well with all the fear that had accumulated during this strangest of days. With the terrible tragedy that might have been. And with the kit’s boldness in preventing that disaster.

And suddenly life seemed to Dulcie overwhelming.

She felt totally adrift, she and Joe and the kit. Alone in the vast world, three cats who were like no other-not totally cat, and not human, but with talents of both. Were they, as Joe had once said, the great cat god’s ultimate joke? Three amusing experiments invented for His private and twisted amusement?

She did not believe that.

And why, tonight, did her thoughts turn so frightened?

That terrible explosion had upset her more than she’d imagined.

“He’s leaving,” Joe said, peering down the hill where the dog had swerved away. They watched the animal disappear between cottages, causing housebound dogs all along the street to bark. Block by block, barking dogs marked his progress until all across the village, dogs bored with their dull lives chimed together delighted at any new excitement.

When the dog had vanished and the barking died, the cats dropped out of the tree and headed across the slope to hunt. Prowling in the still night, it was no trick to start a rabbit among the tall grass, to corner and dispatch it. Wedding party food was lovely, but it didn’t stay with one like a nice fresh rabbit. At three in the morning, by the chimes of the courthouse clock echoing across the hills, they were crouched in the grass sharing their third rabbit when two gunshots cut the silence.

Distant shots echoing back and forth across the hills.

The cats stopped eating.

The noise could have been backfires, but they didn’t think so. They hadn’t heard a car purring along the streets. And when they reared up to look above the high grass, they saw no reflection of headlights moving through the dark village. And the sounds had been sharper, more precise than the fuzzed explosion of a backfire-the cats knew too well the sound of a handgun, from listening outside the police station to cops practicing on the indoor range. And Joe and Dulcie knew, from being shot at themselves, an experience they didn’t care to repeat.

The echo bouncing among the houses had made it impossible to pin the exact location, even for sensitive feline ears. But certainly the shots had come from the north end of the village. Watching the few scattered lights in that direction, looking for a house light to go on or to be extinguished, they saw no change.

When no further shots were fired, the cats headed down the hills toward home and safety. They might love adventure, but they weren’t stupid. But then as they crossed the little park above Highway One, they heard a car somewhere off to their right, its progress muffled among the cottages.

Racing up a pine tree they spotted a lone car, its lights glancing across buildings and through the trees’ dark foliage, shafts of intermittent light bright and then lost, then appearing again. They heard it gear down, heard it rev a little as if it had turned in somewhere. Then silence. And the moving glow was gone. They waited for some time but it did not reappear.

It had vanished maybe ten blocks to the north. They couldn’t tell which street. Climbing higher up the pine they watched the dark configurations of cottages and dividing streets. No light came on in any house. The car didn’t start out again but they heard a car door open and close, the soft echo bouncing along the quiet streets.

They waited a long time, sprawled uncomfortably in the pine tree. The thin, prickly branches were not as accommodating as the easy limbs of a eucalyptus or oak; and the pine was sticky too, its pitch clinging in their fur in hard masses that couldn’t be pulled out and that were impossible to lick out. The only thing to do about pine pitch was to let Wilma or Clyde cut away the offending knots, an operation the cats abhorred. The darkness seemed lonely and frightening, now, to these cats who loved the night. Over on Ocean, where only hours before the streets had burned with candlelight and rung with music and laughter, now all was deserted and still and, after the two shots, the silence seemed laced with threat.

Quickly Joe backed down the rough trunk. “That car’s in for the night. Probably had nothing to do with the shots-if theywereshots.” Yawning, he watched the sleepy kit above them turn to make her way down headfirst. “Wake up, Kit! Don’t do that.” How many times did they have to tell her. “Watch what you’re doing! Turn around. Dig your claws in.”

The kit came down in a tumble, clawing bark and leaping to the sidewalk. She might be grown big, but she still pummeled out of a tree like a silly kitten. Righting herself, she looked at the older cats with embarrassment.

Dulcie winked at Joe and glanced away in the direction of Jolly’s alley. She had meant to part from him and head home with the kit, to a warm bed beside

Wilma. But maybe a few minutes behind Jolly’s Deli would cheer the kit and smooth away her fears.

Joe twitched a whisker, grinning, and headed for Jolly’s.

But, padding up the sidewalk staying close to the kit, Dulcie’s skin twitched at every shadow and at every patch of darkness. Things were not right, tonight. Whatwerethose shots? One culprit was already at large, his bombing attempt gone awry. And now, gunshots? What if the attempted bombing was just the tip of the iceberg? One move in some larger criminal entanglement-a tiny lizard tail that when seen in full, would turn out to be a rattlesnake?

7 [��������: pic_8.jpg]

Ryan wokebefore dawn, but woke not eagerly looking forward to her day as had been her habit lately, not leaping up to turn on the coffeepot and pull the curtains back to look out at the first hint of morning. Instead, an unnatural heaviness of spirit pressed her down; a sense of ugliness made her want to crawl into sleep again. Darkness and depression filled her. And an inexplicable fear. She felt as she had so many nights waking in the small hours to see Rupert’s side of the bed still empty, to wish wholeheartedly that she was somewhere else, in some other life.

But now, shewassomewhere else. Thiswasanother life. She was free of Rupert.

So what was wrong?

The pale room rose pleasantly around her, its high, white beams just visible in the near-dark. On the west wall the white draperies over the long bank of windows were starting to grow pale with the first promise of dawn. Before the draperies, her new desk, her drafting table and computer stood waiting for her just as she had arranged them for ultimate efficiency and pleasure. She was here in her private nest. Nothing could be wrong. Squeezing her eyes closed, she tried to get a fix on her powerful but unfocused dread.

A cloud of swirling smoke and churning flying rubble. Black, angry eyes staring at her. People running and screaming. The side of the church gone, the sky above filled with flying pieces of broken walls and with white petals falling, falling. Senseless fragments, borne of senseless hatred.

She lay shivering, seeing the black, hate-filled eyes of that boy. She sat up in bed, driving his image away. Deliberately she brought into vision the lovely bridal procession in the cool night, down the narrow grassy carpet between hundreds of friends all holding up fairy lights, or so it had seemed to her, ephemeral candles burning to mark the bride’s way. Charlie approaching her groom stepping to the rhythm of the sea’s music and to the rustle of the giant trees that stood guard over her.

Nothing,nothingcould have been more filled with joy and closeness. No ceremony could have better demonstrated Charlie’s and Max’s and the villagers’ stubborn defiance of evil.

Rising, she pulled on her robe and padded into the kitchen to fill the coffeepot, dumping out the grounds from last night. As the coffee brewed, she opened the draperies that ran the length of the studio.

Out over the sea, dawn’s light was somber. Impatiently waiting for the coffee, she imagined Charlie rising this morning to let in room service, or to fetch in the elegant breakfast cart herself, where it had been left discreetly outside the door of the St. Francis bridal suite. Charlie and Max were safe. They were safe.

Ryan poured her own first cup of coffee not from a silver server into thin porcelain, as Charlie would be doing, but into an old earthenware mug, breathing in its steamy aroma. She was deeply soothed by the absolute seclusion and calm of her own quiet space. And after two weeks of hot weather, of eighty-and ninety-degree temperatures in the California foothills, she was pleased to see a heavy mist fingering in from the sea, to chill the day. Opening the window, she breathed in the cool, damp breeze that smelled of the sea at low tide. Only as she turned did she imagine someone stirring in the apartment behind her.

But how silly. Moving into the empty studio, she could see into the bath and dressing room, could see from their mirrors’ reflections that she was quite alone. Her head must be muzzy from the late hours. Certainly her mind still rang not only with the explosion and the sirens and with her friends’ frightened cries, but with the forties music and laughter mat had come later.

Strange how sounds stayed with her. When she was working a job, her dreams would ring, each night, with the endless whine of the Skilsaw or with the incessant pounding as she drove nails in a rhythm which, even in dreams, was so real that she would wake to find her arm twitching with tension. Or in her sleep she would hear the repeatedthunk, thunkof the automatic nailer like a gun fired over and over. Those measuredbangswere with her now, a delayed but strangely insistent residue from days ago, from her long hours’ work on the San Andreas job.

Sipping her coffee, she decided to take herself out to breakfast before she tackled her mail and some phone calls, give herself a little treat. Maybe breakfast at the Miramar Hotel, sitting on the terrace watching the sea and enjoying a Spanish omelet-a small celebration to welcome herself home. She was never shy about tendering herself fancy invitations. Seven weeks in a cramped trailer sharing that tiny space with her two carpenters, and she deserved a little pampering. Particularly since their nights had been purely platonic, about as exciting as curbing up with the family picture album. Scotty was one of her two second fathers. And young Dan Hall was happily married, his wife coming up every weekend, further crowding the cramped, two-bedroom rig. On those nights when Dan needed a place of his own rather than bunking with Scotty, she had given him her room, and she had slept in the main house among stacks of lumber and torn-out walls. Dan Hall was a hunk, all right, and so was his beautiful wife, a slim girl with a body to kill for. Dan had lived from weekend to weekend in a haze of sickening longing, a yearning so palpable it was at times embarrassing.

It must be very special to know that your husband wouldn’t cheat on you, to be absolutely certain that he lived only to be with you, and would never play around or lie to you.

Ryan sighed. She had never believed for a minute that Rupert wouldn’t cheat. She had known better.

Why she had stayed with him so long was just as much a mystery to her as to everyone else. Both Scotty and Dallas, and certainly her dad, had been more than pleased when she left him. Through all the years she procrastinated, they had stood by her-and most of the time they had kept their mouths shut.

Scotty, her father’s big, redheaded brother, had inherited all the bold, blustery genes of the Flannery family. Her dad was quiet and low-keyed, his humor far more subtle-a little quizzical smile, and crow’s feet marking his green eyes. Michael Flannery enjoyed the world fully, but with little comment. Her uncle Scott Flannery took hold of life with both hands and shook it, and laughed when life banged and rattled.

But her dead mother’s brother, Dallas, was the rock. You had to know the stern, silent cop for a long while to enjoy the warmth and humor underneath.

She refilled her coffee mug and sat at the kitchen table, her bare feet freezing. The fog was moving in quickly, the sky turning the color of skimmed milk; she could hear the waves pounding the shore and the seals barking from the rocks, but the ocean itself was hidden in fog. Too restless to be still, she tied her robe more securely and went out along the front deck and down me long flight to get the paper.

The wooden steps were rough under her bare feet, the chill dampness of the fog stroking her ankles. The concrete drive was icy, the Sunday paper damp where it had been tossed against the bushes.

The church bombing covered the front page. A montage of pictures, the ragged, torn-out wall. The more severely wounded, the pictures taken at angles that magnified the seriousness of cuts and the size of bandages. She didn’t need to look at this. Refolding the paper, she turned back up the drive.

But, brushing by her pickup mat Dallas had gone over last night collecting evidence, she stopped, frowning.

She had left the truck relatively clean yesterday, much to Dallas’s chagrin. Now it wasn’t clean, but smeared with mud and with huge paw prints.

She’d had the truck only a month, had traded in the old company model for this reliable baby that made her work so much more fun. It had everything, king cab, lockable toolboxes down both sides, a bull-strong overhead rack. At this particular time in her life, no husband or lover could have given her the same ego trip, the same sense of self-worth, as that shiny new truck.

But now, the vehicle was filthy. Some dog as big as a moose had been all over it, some bad-mannered neighborhood beast had hopped up into the truck bed and apparently walked along the tops of the lockboxes too, rendering her shiny red paint a mess of dried, flaking mud and paw marks. Circling the truck, she headed around the side of the garage to the pedestrian door to fetch some rags and the hose. She didn’t realize until she was through the door that she’d left it unlocked last night, that, preoccupied with Dallas’s search for evidence she’d forgotten to punch the lock.

Switching on the light she dug under the sink for the box of rags she kept there, pulling out a handful of threadbare towels. Rising, she turned toward the frail, vintage windows that she’d brought down from the foothills, glad the mutt hadn’t been able to get into the garage to trash the antique stained glass.

She caught her breath and stepped back, banging into the sink.

The windows stood leaning away from each other, each set of four supported by a heavy box of plumbing fixtures, leaving an empty V space between. A man lay there, jammed between the windows, his face turned away.

The side of his cheek was very white, the blood on his neck and cheek dark and dry. His black hair was tossled and scattered with broken glass, as was the black stubble on his jaw and the black hair on his arm. His blood splattered the broken window and his shirt.

Rupert.It was Rupert.

Involuntarily she reached out a hand, but then drew back.

Not quite believing that this was her husband, not quite believing that anyone at all lay there, she moved around the windows to an angle where she could see his face, and stood looking down at him.

His skin was too white even for Rupert. He looked, in death, no more solemn than he had in life. His eyes were open and staring, his face grayish, like the melted paraffin that her mother had used long ago to seal jelly glasses.

The wound in his chest was dark around the edges, the hole in his forehead dark and ragged. Surely both were gunshot wounds.

When was he killed? She had heard no shots. Staring at the bone of his skull, her stomach turned. She badly wanted to heave.

The drying blood that had run down his face and stained his blue polo shirt was so dark it must surely be mixed with the black residue of gunpowder. His ear against the shattered glass was covered with tiny blue fragments. His dark hair was so mussed he looked almost boyish, though in life Rupert had never looked boyish. His broad gold watchband shone from his pale wrist pressing the white skin, nestled among thick black hairs. She thought of Rupert naked, the black hairs on his arms and chest and belly over the too-white flesh. She’d come to hate hairy men. She leaned to grab his feet to drag him out of there, get him away from the frail windows before his weight shattered them further but then, reaching, reality took hold and she backed away, chilled.

But the next moment she knelt. She felt compelled to touch him, though she knew he was dead. Reaching to his thigh, she jerked her hand away again at the feel of lifelessness, at the icy chill that shocked her even through the cloth of his chinos.

Kneeling over him, she didn’t know the fog was blowing away until the newly risen sun shot its rays in through the small high window at the back of the garage, a bolt of morning light that lay a glow across her hands and, gleaming through the colored glass, threw a rainbow of colors across Rupert’s shattered face. She rose, needing to be sick.

Getting her stomach under control, she stood staring down at the man she’d spent nine years alternately loving and hating until the hate outdistanced all else. And she realized that even in death Rupert had the upper hand.

That even in death, he had placed her in an impossibly compromising position.

She had no witness. He was dead in her garage. She would be the first, prime suspect. Maybe the only suspect.

Dallas could vouch for her until one o’clock this morning. No one could speak for her after Dallas left. She’d seen no one; no one had been in her house. What time had Rupert died? How could he have been killed here in the garage, not ten feet from her, and she had not heard shots?

And what was he doing in Molena Point? Why had he come down here from San Francisco? He had no friends here.

Had he come to confront her in person over the lawsuit where she was claiming her half of the business? She’d started proceedings five months ago. And who had been with him, to kill him? Even if the shooter had used a silencer, why hadn’t she at least heard glass breaking when Rupert fell? That sound should have waked her, occurring just beneath the floor where her bed was placed.

She glanced at the unlocked side door, trying to remember if shehadlocked it last night. Moments ago it had been unlocked. And she realized that when she turned the knob she had very likely destroyed fingerprints or perhaps a palm print.

She had to call Dallas.

The thought of calling the station, of calling for the police, of calling for Detective Dallas Garza, both comforted and sickened her.

She needed Dallas; she needed someone.

Dad would be out of town for two more weeks. And Scotty-big strong guy that he was, she was afraid that Scotty would do nothing but worry.

She needed Dallas. Needed, even more than Dallas’s comforting, the facts that he would put together. Fingerprints. Coroner’s report. Ballistic information. Cold forensic facts that would help her understand what had happened.

She wondered what the neighbors had seen. Her nausea had fled, but she felt shaky and displaced. Nothing made sense. Staring at Rupert, she found herself swallowing back a sudden inexplicable urge to scream, a primitive gutteral response born not of pain for Rupert or of empathy, but an animal cry of fear and defiance.

What had someone done? What had someone done not only to Rupert but to her?

Glancing to the back of the garage, into the shadows around the water heater and furnace she realized only then that the killer might still be there, perhaps standing behind those appliances silently watching her.

Backing away, she stared into the dim corners where the light didn’t reach, expecting to see a figure emerge, perhaps from behind the stacked plywood or from behind one of the old mantels she’d collected or the stack of newel posts. She had no weapon to defend herself, short of grabbing a hammer. She studied the low door beneath the inner stairs that opened to a storage closet. She breathed a sigh when she saw that the bolt was still driven home.

She longed for her gun, which was upstairs in her night table. How many times did one need a.38 revolver to fetch the Sunday paper? Frightened by the shadows at the back of the garage behind what Dallas called her junk pile, she turned swiftly to the pedestrian door and, using the rag in her hand to open it, she retreated to the open driveway.

If she’d had her truck keys she would have hopped in and taken off, made her escape in her robe and called the department from some neighbor’s home. Her cell phone of course was in her purse, by the bed, near her gun. Her truck keys were on the kitchen table. She felt totally naked and defenseless. Scuffing barefoot over the dried mud the neighbor’s dog had left across the concrete, she hurried up the outside stairs. She paused with her hand on the knob.

She’d left the front door unlocked behind her. Now, when she entered, would Rupert’s killer be waiting?

But why would someone set her up as if she’d killed Rupert, then destroy the scenario by killing her as well? That didn’t make any sense.

She could imagine any number of estranged and bitter husbands who would like to see Rupert dead, but why would they make her the patsy? What motive would any of them have-except to put themselves in the clear, of course? And why not? What better suspect than an estranged and bitter wife?

Moving inside, glancing through to the night table at the far end of the room, she slipped her truck keys into the pocket of her robe and eased open a cutlery drawer, soundlessly lifting out the vegetable cleaver. Then stepping to her desk, she dialed the department, using the 911 number.

The dispatcher told her that Dallas was out of the station. She told the dispatcher who she was and that there was a dead man in her garage.

“I’m going to search the apartment, if you’d like to stay on the line.” Laying the phone down as the dispatcher yelled at her not to do that, to get out of the apartment-and warily clutching the cleaver-she moved to the night table to retrieve her gun.

Pulling the drawer open, she stopped, frozen.

Empty.

Notebook, pencils, tissues, and face cream. No gun.

Her face burned at her carelessness. The gun was in her glove compartment. She hadn’t brought it up last night or the night before; it had been there since she left San Andreas. She hadn’t touched it since she packed up the truck and headed out, day before yesterday.

The wedding, and all the picky details of coming home and lining up her crew to start Clyde’s job tomorrow had totally occupied her. She told herself shewasn’tcareless with a gun, that Dallas had taught her better than that.

Yes, and Dallas had admonished her more than once for keeping the.38 in her glove compartment, which was against the law, and in her unlocked nightstand, which was stupid.

Approaching the bath and closet, most of which she could see from their mirrors, holding the cleaver behind the fold of her robe, she moved against all common sense to clear the area. This wasn’t smart. Even from the closet she heard the dispatcher shouting into the phone. And, louder, she heard a siren leave the station ten blocks away. Passing the door to the inner stairs, she saw that the bolt was securely home, blocking that entrance. As the siren came screaming up the hill she flung the closet door wider, to reveal the back corner.

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The back of the closet was empty, only her clothes and shoes. A second siren started to scream from down the hills. She moved into the bath, clutching her cleaver, jerking the shower curtain aside. In her inept search of the premises she couldn’t stop her heart pounding.

The shower was empty. There was nowhere else for anyone to hide. Slipping out of her robe, she hastily pulled on panties and jeans and a sweatshirt as a squad car careened into the drive cutting its siren, and two more units squealed brakes as if pulling to the curb. Grabbing her sandals she moved across the studio to the front windows. Leaning her forehead against the glass, waiting for Dallas to emerge, she watched three officers get out of their two units, and behind them two medics from the rescue vehicle.

Dallas wasn’t with them. Officers Green and Bonner moved up the drive on the far side of her pickup. Green was a wizened, bearded veteran, Bonner a young, new officer as fresh-faced as a high school kid. Detective Juana Davis, dressed in jeans and a sweater, skirted the truck on the near side. All three had their hands on their holstered weapons. Shakily Ryan pulled on her sandals and went out on the balcony where they could see her. Looking down at Davis, catching her dark gaze, she couldn’t read what the detective might be thinking.

“In the garage,” Ryan said, her voice raspy, the way she’d sound if she had a sore throat. She watched the medics halt to wait until the officers had entered and cleared the garage. She couldn’t quell her fear, it was a gut reaction beyond reasoning, she was the only possible suspect, she was in exactly the position the killer had planned. Deeply chilled, she looked to the officers for direction. “Do you want me down there?”

“No,” Davis said. “Stay on the deck while we have a look.”

“Could I go inside to get my coffee?”

Davis nodded. Ryan returned to the kitchen to refill her cup, then stood on the deck again setting the mug on the rail, trying to stop her hands from shaking, thinking guiltily about Rupert.

The year they were married, he had been so enthusiastic about her joining the construction firm, taking a full-time job in the business. It had all seemed so wonderful, an opportunity for her to use her design education though she didn’t have a degree as an architect, an opportunity to learn some basic engineering from the firm’s structural architect. From the beginning Rupert had handled the business end, the hiring and bookkeeping and sales, while she assisted the architect and did more and more designing. When the architect moved on to a practice of his own, she had been able to take over all the designing with the help of a consulting engineer. Their clients had loved her work. She had served as a carpenter’s helper too, adding to the skills she’d mastered working with her uncle Scotty in the summers and weekends since she was a child.

She had gotten so good at the job that soon she was filling in for the three foremen. But then the trouble began. Rupert hadn’t liked that she was on the job alone with a bunch of men, even though she had saved them money. She had never drawn a salary, either as head designer or as a foreman; everything went back into the firm. She’d never wanted to know how much might go for Rupert’s personal pleasures. She guessed Scotty had tried to tell her, but she hadn’t wanted to listen.

Now Scotty was working for her, her dear, gruff, philosophical Scotty who loved carpentry and cabinetwork, who had never wanted to move into the management end of the business. Who had joined her immediately in Molena Point, no questions asked, her first carpenter and foreman. Moving in with Dallas, into their family summer cottage, Scotty had been as happy as she to be away from Dannizer Construction.

When she left Rupert there was never any question where she’d go. She’d loved Molena Point since she was a child. The evening she left Rupert she’d hauled out of San Francisco, taking the oldest company pickup loaded with most of her worldly possessions packed nattily in an assortment of liquor boxes from the local market. It was an easy two-hour drive. Arriving in the village, she had picked up a deli sandwich and a couple of cold beers, checked into the only motel with a vacancy, and called Dallas. When she told him what she’d done he couldn’t hide his happiness. She had told him she wanted to be by herself for a few days to lick her wounds, and he’d understood. She’d taken a long hot shower and tucked up in bed with her beer and sandwich trying to relax, trying to deal sensibly with her conflicting emotions, seesawing back and forth between victory in finally making the move, and fear of what lay ahead. Thinking one minute that she was crazy to go out on her own, that she couldn’t make a success of her own company, and wondering the next instant why she hadn’t done this sooner-knowing that if she sued him for half the company, Rupert would fight her, maybe so successfully that he would deplete her personal bank account and leave her destitute. Knowing that she had to find an attorney. And that the lawsuit would be incredibly stressful, but that half the business was rightfully hers and she meant to have her share, that she would need that money to get started.

Wondering if shecouldmake a go of her own business, if she had it in her to do that, she’d sat in bed trying to calm her nerves, so stressed she hadn’t even called her sister, though Hanni would have turned out the guest room, popped a bottle of champagne to toast her wise decision and her coming success.

Hanni had moved down to the village some months before Dallas made his own job change, and Ryan could have stayed with either of them; but Hanni was so positive and sure of herself and would tell her exactly what to do, would cross all the t’s and dot the i’s to make life easier for her. It would have been hard to explain to Hanni the illogical pangs that were mixed with her wild sense of euphoria at being free-almost free.

Alone in her motel room she’d gone to sleep hugging her pillow, congratulating herself that Rupert was out of her life, and scared silly of what lay ahead.

Now, standing at the rail watching Juana Davis come around the side of the garage and look up, she set her cup on the rail and went down to answer the detective’s questions.

In the early dawn, Jolly’s alley was softly lit by its decorative lights and by the gentle glow from the leaded windows and stained-glass doors of its little backstreet shops. The charming, brick paved lane, lined with potted trees and tubs of flowers, was not only a favorite tourist walk, but was the chosen gathering place for the village cats-for all the nonspeaking felines who knew nothing of Joe and Dulcie and Kit’s human speech nor, in most cases, would have been impressed. If the occasional cat looked at them with fear or with wonder, these moments were few and fleeting.

Entering at the eastern end of the block-long retreat, they found an old, orange-tabby matron beneath the jasmine vine, licking clean the big paper plate that George Jolly had set out. Joe knew the matron well, they had once been more than friendly but that was long before he met Dulcie. Probably the old girl didn’t remember those hasty trysts, and certainly Joe didn’t care to. He was a different tomcat now, totally faithful to his true love-though he still liked to look. No harm in a glance now and then.

The matron, finishing her breakfast, lay down on the bricks precisely where the first thin rays of morning sun would have gleamed, if the dawn sky had not been low with fog. Dulcie glanced at her absently, her mind on San Francisco and on Charlie and Max Harper awakening this morning in that beautiful city.

“Breakfast at the St. Francis,” she said softly, “looking down on the city.” Such a journey, to the city by the bay, had long been Dulcie’s dream. But at Dulcie’s words, the orange cat widened her eyes then turned her face away with disgust, tucking her nose under her tail. Such un-catlike behavior was both alarming and patently beneath her notice. Squeezing her eyes shut she refused to move away from them, though the skin down her back rippled with wary annoyance. Down at the end of the lane a homeless man ambled by, then two young lean women jogged past, their long hair pulled through the backs of their caps.

“Breakfast in bed,” Dulcie whispered, still dreaming, “then to wander that elegant city, to ride the ferries to Sausalito and to Oakland, to visit the museums and galleries.”

Joe looked at her and sighed. Sometimes it was hard to understand the shape and depth of Dulcie’s longings.

Though Joe was just as different from other cats as was Dulcie, he didn’t suffer from her exotic hungers and impossible yearnings. He didn’t steal his neighbor’s cashmere sweaters and silk teddies, for one thing, and haul them home to roll on like some four-pawed Brigitte Bardot. He didn’t imagine wandering through Saks, or Lord and Taylor. He had no desire to dine at the finest restaurants with views of San Francisco Bay. Joe Grey liked his life just as it was-as long as Dulcie was a part of it.

The two cats stirred suddenly. Their ears pricked. Their bodies went rigid as sirens screamed from the station four blocks away.

Swarming up the jasmine vine to the roof where the kit sat welcoming the dawn, they watched two whirling red lights racing north among the cottages where some hours earlier they thought they’d heard the two shots fired-and like any pair of human ambulance chasers, Joe and Dulcie took off across the roofs, intent on police business.

The kit trailed along halfheartedly, her mind on other matters.

Racing across the rooftops and crossing above two streets on spreading oak branches, Joe and Dulcie scrambled down a trellis and galloped along the damp morning sidewalks and through fog-wet gardens, eagerly following the sirens. A screaming rescue vehicle passed them. And somewhere in their mad race the kit vanished. Glancing around, Joe and Dulcie fled on; there was no keeping track of the kit. Up the next hill, the rescue vehicle and squad cars were parked in the drive and at the curb of Ryan Flannery’s apartment. The cats paused, slipping ahead warily, rigid with their sudden apprehension.

Though the dawn was now bright, a light burned around the edges of Ryan’s closed garage door. The voices that issued from within were low and muffled. The cats could hear Ryan, her voice taunt and upset, and could hear Detective Davis and Officer Bonner speaking solemnly. Davis, a longtime department veteran, was solid in her ways, businesslike and reassuring. The cats were still evaluating young Bonner. As they trotted up to the big, closed door and pressed against it to listen, the coroner’s green sedan pulled into the drive. Filled with curiosity, the cats slipped into the shadows beneath the stairs.

Stepping from his car, Dr. John Bern headed around to the side door. Bern was a slight, skinny man with a round face and a turned-up nose so small it seemed hardly able to support his wire-rimmed glasses. As he entered the garage, the cats padded through the shadows as silent as the fog itself and as innocent as any neighborhood kitty out for a morning stroll, and moved in behind him through the pedestrian door, to hide behind some leaning sheets of plywood.

A body lay among a stack of stained-glass windows, as if shrouded by them in some weird religious ritual. Where the windows formed a tall V shape, the cats could see the man’s feet sticking out at one end, clad in expensive Rockports. At the other end his head and one shoulder were visible. There was a small hole through his forehead. His neatly trimmed brown hair was soaked with blood. Dr. Bern opened the electric door to give more light, and knelt over the body, making certain the victim was dead. There was not much blood pooled beneath him. When soon the coroner rose again, he began taking photographs. Twice he glanced across the garage to the far, back wall as if tracing the line of trajectory that might have occurred if the victim had been standing when he was shot. Detective Davis, fetching a ladder from beside a stack of old doors, climbed to photograph at close range the twin bullet holes in the Sheetrock. She took pictures from several angles, then told Bonner to cut out that section of wall.

“Allow plenty of board, we don’t want to pull on it if there are nails near the shots. You may have to saw through the nails or slice out part of the stud.”

“Do we have the tools?”

“Ryan has.”

The cats could see, when Dr. Bern lifted the man’s head, how the shot had left the back of the skull with a wide, ugly tear wound and fragments of bone sticking out. As John Bern dictated his notes into a small tape recorder, he was hesitant in this assessment, offering several possible scenarios as to the sequence of events. When he had finished dictating, Detective Davis spent a long time herself photographing the scene, shooting the body from all angles, laying a ruler here and there around the corpse to show distances. She photographed most of the garage, the floor, the stored tools and plywood, the stacked paneling and newel posts, the furnace and laundry area, and the inside stair that led to the upstairs apartment. Only Joe Grey and Dulcie escaped documentation, crouching silently behind the plywood then moving behind some stored boxes then a mantel, on around the garage as Davis’s strobe light flashed. They froze in place when young Bonner glanced at the paw prints in the dust then at the cat door that Ryan had installed. As the officers worked, Ryan stood outside by her truck, pale and silent.

At last Davis put down her camera and began to collect small bits of evidence, threads, slivers of wood, hairs that she picked up with tweezers and dropped in evidence bags. It was late morning, just after 10:00 by the distant chimes of the courthouse clock, when she finished picking up the last nearly invisible bits, then went over the area again with a tiny and powerful hand vacuum. This part of an investigation always amazed the cats. Talk about tedious. They knew by now that the corpse was Ryan’s husband.

Once Ryan had answered Davis’s questions she sat in the garage on the inner steps, keeping out of the way, her hands folded on her knees, her expression closed and glum, so distressed that, across the garage in the shadows, Dulcie reached an involuntary paw to comfort her. But soon the sound of a car in the drive sent Ryan eagerly out the side door. The cats followed, slipping into a jungle of pink geraniums as Detective Garza swung out of his Chevy Blazer next to the coroner’s car.

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Detective Garzastood with his arms around Ryan but looking past her at Rupert Dannizer’s body. He studied the stacked windows, the garage itself, the drive and Ryan’s truck and the front of the building, his photographic detective’s mind recording every smallest detail, though he would record it all again in careful notes and perhaps in photographs of his own. Dallas Garza was, the cats had come to learn, a meticulous investigator, his nature as stubbornly prodding as that of any feline.

Yet despite the detective’s thoroughness, there was sometimes information to which a human cop had no access, private doors he couldn’t legally enter, crannies and niches a human couldn’t squeeze into-clues, in short, that a clever cat might snatch from the shadows. Joe Grey’s fascination with police investigation was not in lieu of human talent, but was adjunct to that talent.

They watched Garza move inside the garage where he conferred with Davis and the coroner, carefully observing the victim and asking Dr. Bern questions. Garza’s position was indeed awkward, with his niece as prime suspect.

“Will he have to stay off the case?” Joe said softly. “Apparently not, or he wouldn’t be here at all.”

“The papers are going to love this,” Dulcie said dourly. “Even theMolena Point Gazette.I can just see it:Police detective’s niece arrested for murder.If they put a reporter on it who doesn’t like Garza, he’ll have a field day.”

Joe flicked a whisker. “And from what Clyde says, Rupert Dannizer was well known in San Francisco. This will be big news, with Dannizer dead before the property settlement, with Ryan standing to inherit�”

“No one would believe that!” she hissed.

“We don’t believe it. And the papers don’t have to believe it; they’ll print what sells. Their readers will eat it up.”

“If Ryan wanted to murder him, would she do it in her own garage?” Dulcie laid back her ears, her green eyes narrowing. “Question is, who hated Rupert DannizerandRyan enough to kill him and frame her for the crime?”

They watched Officer Bonner string crime tape around the garage and yard, while the coroner sat in his car making additional notes. But when Bonner and Detectives Garza and Davis escorted Ryan upstairs for a look at her apartment and for questioning, the two cats scorched around the building, to slip inside.

The steep hill at the back rose four feet away from the wall of the garage apartment. Crouched in the tall grass looking across to Ryan’s bathroom window, Joe Grey leaped. Hanging from the sill, he scrabbled with his hind claws while, with one white forepaw, he finessed open the sliding glass.

The cats had discovered this access when young Dillon Thurwell was kidnapped and they had rescued her from the garage below, from the little airless storage closet beneath the stairs. Because the window was too small to accommodate any human, no one had ever thought to lock it. Now, dropping down into the bathroom, they slipped past the tub and into Ryan’s closet-dressing room, to crouch among her jogging shoes and work boots.

The room was large enough for a chest of drawers, a bench with storage underneath, and a six-foot clothes rod that held little more than jeans and work shirts. A single, zippered garment bag appeared to hold a few dress clothes. Her good shoes, like the strappy sandals that she had worn to the wedding, must be tucked away in the plastic boxes they could see atop the closet shelf. The closet smelled faintly of rose perfume. They could hear Ryan and Dallas in the kitchen, talking. But Davis and Bonner were quiet. Very likely they were there as witnesses to prevent the close relationship between uncle and niece from any taint of collusion. At some point Davis would, the cats thought, have to take over the investigation from Detective Garza.

There was a flash of light from the studio, and another, and the cats peered out of the closet to see Davis photographing the apartment, seeking to record any smallest detail that might later fit into a jigsaw puzzle of evidence. As Davis turned toward the closet they drew back behind Ryan’s boots, closing their eyes so not to catch a flash of light, Joe ducking to hide his white face and paws and chest; all that remained was a gray mound. Davis took several shots in the closet causing the cats to pray that a stray paw or tail wouldn’t show up on the film-not that it mattered, Dulcie kept telling herself.We’re only cats.What if they were in a photograph, or if Davis did spot them? Dulcie could never overcome her fear of being discovered, never shake the feeling that the truth about them would be as clearly detectable as fresh blood on whiskers. Her need for secrecy overpowered all reason. Such fears were so foolish. After all, Ryan did have a cat door in the garage. If they were discovered, Clyde’s mouse hunters were simply on the premises doing their appointed job.

From the kitchen they heard a cup rattle as if Ryan had poured the coffee that had, from the smell of it, steamed in the pot for some time. Dallas asked, “When did you see Rupert last?”

“I haven’t-hadn’t seen him since early July. I caught sight of him here in the village. That startled me, he never came down here. I don’t think he saw me. I’d had dinner with Clyde-Clyde Damen. We were coming out of the grill when I saw Rupert at the bar with a tall, sleek blonde. Long, gleaming hair. I didn’t see her face but Rupert turned and I saw his profile. I have no idea what he was doing down here, he has no friends in the village that I know of.”

“And he didn’t see you?”

“I don’t think so. I practically dragged Clyde out of there. We� a divorce and lawsuit are not pleasant. Rupert hadn’t been very pleasant.”

The cats listened to Ryan describe when and how she had found the body, and what she had done afterward, how long it took her to go upstairs and call 911.

“Did you touch the body?”

“I touched his leg. I just� reached out before I thought. I was sure he was dead, the dried blood, and he was so white, but I� something in me had to be sure-that there wasn’t life there, that there was nothing I could do. He� he was so cold�”

“And what would you have done if you’d thought he was alive?”

“The same as I did, call the department-unless I’d thought CPR would� I suppose I would have tried that.”

“What did you tell the dispatcher?”

“That a man was dead in my garage. And I answered her questions.”

“You came upstairs to call?”

“Yes.”

“Do you own a gun?”

“Yes.”

Behind Ryan’s boots, the cats glanced at each other. Of course Dallas knew she owned a gun, but he was committed to asking all the necessary questions. He made her describe the black.38 Smith and Wesson, made her tell him where she kept it, where it had been that morning and where it was at that moment. The cats didn’t need to watch him to know he was carefully recording her answers both on tape and in his log-recording not to incriminate but to protect, to have the record straight.

“I forgot to bring my gun upstairs when I got back from San Andreas. Normally I would have put it in my nightstand. It� it’s been locked in my truck since I got back, night before last. I� just forgot about it.”

“Forgot about it?”

“I don’t feel the need, in Molena Point, to keep a gun with me at night the way I� the way one might in an isolated trailer.”

“You left it locked in your truck, where?”

“In the glove compartment.”

“I’ll need your keys.”

The cats heard keys jingle. Dallas said, “Are they all here? None have been removed?”

A pause, then, “Yes. All there. Apartment door, garage, truck keys, side lock boxes, glove compartment. Key to the house in San Francisco, which is still officially half mine.”

The cats glanced at each other. She was just a bit defensive. But surely she didn’t like being questioned this way, even by her uncle, even though she knew it was necessary.

“Last night, what time did you go to bed?”

“The minute you left here. Just before two.”

“Did you hear anything during the night, any noises?”

“No.”

“Nothing downstairs?”

“No.”

“Did you hear gunshots.”

“No I didn’t. I don’t understand why not.”

“What is your opinion about that?”

“That whoever killed him used a silencer. Or that he was shot somewhere else and brought here.”

“Does that strike you as rather improbable?”

“It’s improbable to find Rupert down there, dead in my garage. I only know that I didn’t hear shots. And it seemed to me there was very little blood, for a head wound.”

Joe Grey frowned, the white strip down his face squeezing into wrinkles. In the dim closet his yellow eyes shone black as obsidian. His whisper was soft. “If those two bullets, that went into the back wall, had been a couple of feet higher they could have come up through the floor directly where Ryan was sleeping.”

Dallas said, “Did you see any indication that the body had been moved to that location? Any blood trail? Any drag marks down the drive or in the yard?”

“No. You would have seen them too.”

“But there was a tire mark,” Dulcie said softly. “A little thin tire mark, like a bike, just at the edge of the drive.”

“I didn’t see that,” Joe hissed. “How could I miss that?”

“You were watching the coroner. I saw Detective Davis photograph the ground there, but the mark was really faint. I thought it went along the drive, maybe to the side door.”

“You heard nothing after you went to bed?” Dallas repeated. “You didn’t hear a shot fired.” The cats pictured Officer Bonner silently observing the detective, witness to the fact that Dallas was detached and objective and didn’t lead Ryan’s answers.

“I’m sure I’d have waked to gunshots,” Ryan said. “Unless there was a silencer.”

“And you heard nothing during the night?”

“Not that I remember. I was dead asleep, I was very tired.” But the cats glanced at each other. Ryan sounded as if she wanted to tell Dallas something more. As if perhaps later when they were alone, when she was not on record, she would share with him something that was bothering her?

“Those stained-glass windows,” Dulcie said softly. “How could the killer have wedged the body in like that? To lift a deadweight, pardon the pun, at that angle and ease the body down between the windows� That would be like standing on your hind legs lifting a dead rabbit as heavy as you, hoisting it way out at an angle and slowly down without dropping it. The killer had to be strong. But why bother? What was the point of leaving the body there?”

“You don’t think he was shot there?” Joe said.

“Nor do you,” she said, cutting her eyes at him. “Those windows are old and frail. You heard Ryan last night telling Clyde. That glass has to be brittle, and those strips of lead fragile. Those old stained-glass windows in the English Pub, the way if you rub against them, the glass will push loose from the leading? If Rupert had fallen there he’d have smashed those windows to confetti.”

Dallas said, “We’ll have to take your gun.” The cats heard chair legs scrape, then the front door open, heard the officers and Ryan going down the stairs.

Leaping from the bathroom window and down the hill, they were just at the edge of the drive when the officers and Ryan came down; and the medics set down their stretcher, prepared to take Rupert away. Slipping into the bushes, they watched Dallas unlock Ryan’s truck door then unlock her glove compartment. Flipping the glove compartment open, he turned to look at her.

“You said your gun was here?”

Ryan stared in past Dallas. She reached, but drew back.

Dallas pulled out a thin folder, and laid it back again. “Empty. I’ve never known a woman to keep an empty glove compartment.”

“I keep stuff in the console, you know that. Except my gun. Where’s my gun!”

“You didn’t take it upstairs?” he said sternly.

She shook her head, scowling. “No. I didn’t.”

“Let’s go over it again. You got home Friday night around midnight.”

“Yes. Unloaded the windows, unloaded a few tools, closed and locked the garage door. Went upstairs and fell into bed, dead for sleep.”

“And the next morning-Saturday morning?”

“Got up, made coffee. Came down and finished unloading, hauled my trash bags around the side of the garage. I’d bought a mantel up there, as well as the windows, and some carved molding. I stacked those better, along the back wall, and shook out the tarp and folded it, put it back in the truck bed where I keep it. It had crumbs and Hershey wrappers in it, and was folded differently than I’d left it. I learned Saturday night after the wedding, the Farger boy hitched a ride down from San Andreas without my knowing.” All this was for the record, for the tape that was surely running.

“And before we came upstairs last night, I locked the side door. I know I did. But this morning when I first went in, it was unlocked. And there were muddy paw prints in the truck bed as if one of the neighbors’ dogs got in during the night. My truck wasn’t muddy Saturday night when you examined it. It was when I went in the garage to get some cleaning rags that I� that I found Rupert.”

“Did you drive the truck anywhere Saturday?”

“No. I rode to the wedding with Clyde Damen. And you brought me home that night to look at the truck in regards to the Farger boy. It was clean then. It hasn’t been out of the drive since I got home Friday midnight.”

“Was there any mud in the garage yesterday when you cleaned up?”

“No, I’m sure. And it hasn’t rained. But behind the garage, to the side� I hosed down a shovel and rake back by the faucet, tools I’d used at the last minute, at the jobsite to set some stakes. It was muddy back there.”

They looked up as Officer Bonner came around the side of the garage carrying a black handgun by a stick through the trigger guard. The clean-shaven, neat young man did not look at Ryan, only at the detective.

“Found it in a trash bag, along with some wet, stained rags and stained bedsheets. Dark stains that could be blood.”

Ryan studied the gun. “It appears to be mine. If it’s mine, you’ll find the trigger guard is worn, the bluing worn off.” She began to shiver. Dallas didn’t touch the stick or the weapon. He looked at Bonner. “Has it been fired?”

Bonner’s shiny black shoes and the pant cuffs of his uniform were muddy. He sniffed the barrel briefly, as if he had already made a determination. “It smells of burnt gunpowder. I’d say it’s been recently fired. The trigger-guard bluing is worn off.”

“Bag it,” Garza said, and turned to Ryan, his face unreadable, that reined-in cop’s expression bearing no discernible message of love or familial closeness, offering her no support or encouragement.

Ryan looked back at him, very white. “How did this happen? That gun was locked up! You yourself unlocked the cab door after you collected evidence about the boy. Just now, you unlocked the glove compartment. How could-?”

Neither mentioned that such storage of a gun was not legal, that in California one had to have a special lockbox that could be removed from the car, a law that had never, to Joe Grey and Dulcie, made any sense. What good was a lockbox if it could be removed by a thief?

“Who else has keys to your truck?” Dallas asked.

“Scotty has a set because we used it on the job, but he’s family. I’ve only had this truck three weeks-I bought it in San Andreas.” She looked hard at Dallas. “Could someone in the truck sales, someone�?”

“Not likely, but we’ll check. Has anyone else driven it, besides your uncle Scott?”

“Dan Hall, once or twice. He used Scotty’s keys or mine. There was no one else up there but Dan and Scotty.”

“No one?”

“No one to drive the truck. Some kids were hanging around, the Farger boy and his friends, but they weren’t� they couldn’t�” She looked at him, shaken. “They had no chance, they couldn’t have taken my keys.”

“The kids were in the house trailer where you were staying?”

“A couple of times, but I was with them. They were never alone. I let them make sandwiches one day, while we were eating. They� well� there was one time,” she said faintly. “They� when I was surveying one day, they wanted to use the bathroom. I was right there, down the hill,” she said lamely.

“And your keys?”

“Either in my purse or on the table. I kept my purse in the bedroom closet.” She stared at Dallas. “That boy� why would he take my keys? Anyone,” she said more forcefully, “anyone could have gotten into the truck with a door tool, then used a lock pick on the glove compartment.”

“Could have,” Dallas agreed. He hesitated, glancing at the tape recorder. Then: “That boy very likely set a bomb, Ryan. Set it or helped someone set it. You think that was innocent, that bomb?”

She said nothing.

“Did you use the truck every day?”

“No, sometimes not for several days if we could get a lumber delivery in good time. But if he did take my keys,” she said softly, “what was the connection? Between the boy and Rupert?”

The two cats looked at each other. You are, Joe Grey thought. At the moment, Ryan, it looks like you’re the connection. The tomcat shivered. If someone wanted to harm the Molena Point police, first with the bombing that, lucky for everyone, hadn’t come off as planned, maybe they’d meant to ruin reputations, too, as a backup move.

So they chose Ryan, Detective Garza’s niece, as the patsy. Pin a murder on Ryan, they’d put Garza in an embarrassing position.

And, the tomcat thought with a soft growl, this scenario was far too much like the vicious attack earlier in the year when Police Captain Harper was set up as a killer.

Were Rupert Dannizer’s death and yesterday’s bombing connected to that other murder? Were all three crimes part of some planned vendetta against Molena Point PD? The possibilities rattled around in Joe Grey’s head as wildly as those little plastic balls in some diabolical pinball machine. He felt he was racing back and forth across the glass top swatting uselessly at unrelated facts, the little bright spheres forming, as yet, no logical configuration.

10 [��������: pic_11.jpg]

The images of death remained with Ryan long after Dallas and his officers left the crime scene. Rupert’s torn face, the coroner working over him, the strobe lights reflecting shatters of raw color across his body from the broken windows. The coroner wrapping Rupert in a body bag as if he were trussing up a side of beef, the emergency van hauling Rupert away through the village with no final ceremony, no tenderness, no one in attendance.

So what did she want, banks of roses strewn in his path embellishing his journey to the county morgue? Roses scattered by his former lovers? She imagined the coroner sliding Rupert into a cold gray storage locker, to remain forever alone. But the vision that clung most vividly was Rupert’s shattered face, his bloody broken face. That picture would remain with her for all time, generating a distressing internal response to every hurtful thought she’d ever entertained about Rupert Dannizer, to every angry wish she’d ever made about Rupert’s ultimate fate.

When all the vehicles had gone, she stood in the empty drive feeling small and scared. Wishing Dallas could have stayed with her, feeling like a child in need of strong male support and assurance.

But Dallas had been shaken too. He would never show it, but he was upset and worried for her.

He would do everything possible, he wouldn’t give up until he had unraveled the facts and put them in their proper order. Even if he had to step off the case, and surely he would, he’d remain in the background making certain that everything was done right, seeing that no clue was ignored, no investigative procedure disregarded.

She stood thinking about death, wondering if Rupert, as he lay in her garage gazing blindly up toward the rafters, might have experienced some final metamorphosis of the spirit, wondering if he’d perhaps undergone some sudden change of view. If Rupert, transformed into the eternal state, had awakened to face the error of his ways.

She was not a churchgoer. But she’d never doubted that there was more to the spirit than this one life.

However, given Rupert’s earthly performance, she really didn’t imagine that in some great toting-up he would be a candidate for a medal in exemplary behavior. More likely Rupert had, in his final moments, felt the searing heat and witnessed his first glimpse of the eternal flames. And that was all right with her.

Turning to go upstairs, she looked across the street at the neighbors’ blank windows imagining people peering out from behind their curtains wondering what kind of woman had moved into their neighborhood bringing murder, neighbors already certain thatshehad killed the victim, neighbors wondering who he was and what kind of stormy relationship had led to this particular act of violence.

Well, they’d know soon enough. The papers would have it all, every dirty aspect of hers and Rupert’s marriage. Some reporter would dredge up every harlot and married woman Rupert had ever bedded, every incident that would throw suspicion on her, his estranged and bitter wife.

Heading for the stairs, she stopped to inspect the truck again, and to brush some of the mud from its sleek red paint. Even her nice new truck, this solid and reliable symbol of her new and independent start in life, had become a part of the mess. Dallas and Officer Bonner had dusted it inside and out for fingerprints, a thorough job that had taken them the better part of an hour. Now, moving to the cab, she looked in at the red leather upholstery that puffed luxuriously over the two bucket seats. No hint of mud there. The day she bought the truck she had promised herself that the soft seats and pristine red carpet were going to stay as clean as her kitchen sink. No sawdust, no candy wrappers or greasy hamburgers or leaking Coke cans dripping their long sticky trails. No open tubes of caulking, no getting in the cab with wet paint or plaster on your jeans.

She had not imagined a strange dog tramping mud all over the truck bed-nor some evil little boy hiding under the tarp planning his sickening crime. She was incredibly tired from the morning’s adrenaline-heavy emotions. And scared of what lay ahead.

Innocent or not, if another suspect wasn’t found, the next few months would be ugly. And now that Dallas had taken away her gun, she had no protection against whoever was out there.

Did Dallas really think the killer wouldn’t return, that he’d have no further interest in her? She leaned on the truck, light-headed.

She needed a hot shower and some breakfast. She needed food, needed to get her blood sugar up, dump some protein into the system. Needed to get away from the house for a while.

As she started up the stairs she saw movement across the street in a window, the slats of a Venetian blind shifting. Scowling at the snooper she beat it up the steps, her face burning.

Her door wasn’t shut, it stood ajar. And a sound startled her, a soft hush through her open window that made her wrists go cold.

The stirring came again, a shuffling noise.

But she knew that sound, it was only the breeze through the open window rifling the papers on her desk, disturbing the stack of letters and bills and junk mail that had collected.

While she was gone, Hanni had come in every few days to go through her mail, to call her with anything important, but had left the rest for Ryan to clean up at her leisure. The mail blowing, that’s all the soft sound was.

But why was the door ajar?

Very likely she hadn’t closed it tightly when she and Dallas went back downstairs. It had a tendency not to want to latch. Certainly there was no one in there, no one would be dumb enough to enter with cops all over the place. Moving inside she thought she’d take a long hot shower then head out again and treat herself to a nice breakfast, try to get hold of herself, to get centered. She thought of calling Hanni, see if she could join her. Hanni wouldn’t let her get the shakes, she’d put a positive spin on any disaster. A few smart retorts, a touch of twisted humor.So you cut the cost of the lawsuit, so quit bellyaching, you’ve inherited the whole enchilada.

Shivering, she decided against calling Hanni. Stepping into the kitchen to turn off the coffeepot, she stopped.

She was not alone.

He stood beside the breakfast table, a muddy dog so big his chin would have rested easily on the tabletop. His short silver coat was smeared with dried mud. His pale yellow eyes watched her with a look so challenging that she stepped back.

He was bone thin, deep jowled and with long floppy ears. Built like a pointer, his tail docked to a length of six inches. The tail wagged once, a brief and dignified question. He had left a trail of flaking mud across her kitchen and into the studio, had tracked to her unmade bed then back to the drafting table and desk, apparently quartering the room in a thorough inspection. While she stood looking at where he had wandered, his gaze on her turned patronizing, as if she was very slow indeed to make him welcome.

And certainly she should welcome him, she had done so several times before but not in Molena Point. Up in San Andreas he had in fact been far more welcome than the three eager children with whom he had sometimes come to the trailer.

The kids said he was a stray, that he roamed all over the hills. That had seemed strange and unlikely for such a handsome purebred. But surely he’d been very thin, and though she’d reported him lost to the sheriff and had run an ad in the paper, no one had claimed him. She’d seen him only with the children, happy to be running with kids-kids didn’t demand that a dog follow rules, they themselves were rule breakers. Kids, still young animals in spirit, made fine companions for a wandering canine.

There was no question that this was the same dog, there could not be another weimaraner exactly like him, not with the same challenging look in those intelligent yellow eyes nor with the same small, lopsided cross of white marking his gray chest and the same notch in his left ear. The same old, cracked leather collar without any tags. She thought there could not be another dog anywhere with quite this insolent air. She knew that if she were to stroke his side and shoulder she would feel the little hard lumps where buckshot, sometime in his unknown past, must have lodged beneath his skin, gunshot likely administered by some angry farmer not wanting a hungry dog nosing around his chicken coops. She held her hand out to the big weimaraner, wondering what she had in her bare cupboards to feed him.

The dog stood assessing her, gauging her intentions.

“Hungry?”

His yellow eyes lighted, his long silky ears lifted, his short tail began to move slowly back and forth in a hesitant question.

She found a jar of peanut butter in the nearly empty cupboard and spread it on some stale crackers. When she held them down, he didn’t snatch them, he took each gently from her fingers. But he gulped them as if truly starving, and when she filled a bowl with water, he drank it all, never lifting his head until the bowl was empty. She stood considering him.

Looked like Curtis had a companion when he hid in her truck. She could just see Curtis climbing in and calling to the dog, the big weimaraner eagerly joining him. This had to have happened in the small town itself when she stopped to pick up the windows. She could imagine Curtis slipping into the truck after she loaded up, while she was inside paying her bill, and coaxing the dog under the tarp with him. What did Curtis think would happen to a nice dog like this running loose in the city? The kids had called him Rock, because of his color like an outcropping of gray boulders, though when clean his coat was more like gray velvet.

The dog was, in fact, exactly the same color as Clyde Damen’s tomcat, she thought, amused. Not only the same color, but both animals had docked tails that stuck up at a jaunty angle, and both had wise yellow eyes. How droll. Even their expressions were similar, bold and uncompromising.

The silly humor of dog and cat lookalikes helped considerably to ease her stress. She gave him all the crackers and peanut butter. There wasn’t anything else in the cupboard that would interest a canine, only a can of grapefruit. When she picked up her truck keys, thinking to go buy some dog food, he brightened and headed for the door looking up at her with eager enthusiasm, as if they did this every day.

Out on the deck behind Ryan, the two cats sat on the windowsill looking in, watching with fascination this amusing relief from the morning’s events. They had watched the dog earlier as he approached the police cars, trotting silently down the sidewalk, his tongue lolling in a happy smile as he headed for all the busy activity.

But then he had paused suddenly, testing the air, and abruptly he had turned aside, slipping into the tall bushes. There he had lain down out of sight, remaining still, only lifting his nose occasionally then dropping his head again to rest his nose on his paws-something about the crime scene, perhaps the scent of death, made him keep his distance.

When he had first pushed into the bushes the cats had tensed to race away to the nearest fence top. But the dog, sniffing idly in their direction and making eye contact, had only smiled with doggy humor and turned his attention to the human drama; he had exhibited no desire to haze or lunge at cats, had shown no inclination to snap up a cat and shake it-not at the moment. Though maybe another day, another time. One could not always be certain.

He had remained hidden and watchful until the officers’ attention was concentrated around the tailgate of Ryan’s truck, then with no humans watching to shout at him, he had moved from the bushes up the stairs casually sniffing each step. Within seconds he was nosing the door open to disappear into Ryan’s apartment. Soon they had heard the soft click of toenails on hardwood. And now through the window they watched Ryan feed him crackers and peanut butter, then pick up her truck keys.

“He’s beautiful,” Dulcie said. “He’s the same color as you.”

“What?”

“Exact same gray. And your eyes are the same color.” Her own eyes slitted in an amused cat laugh. “Even your tails are docked the same.” She looked at Joe and looked in at the big dog. “Except for size, and his doggy face and ears, he’s a mirror image.”

Joe Grey scowled; but he peered in again, with interest. He had to admit, this dog was unusually handsome.

Wondering what to do with the dog, Ryan glanced to the window and saw the two cats staring in. They didn’t seem afraid, only interested. Benignly the dog looked up through the window, giving no sign of wanting to chase.

When she had left San Andreas, and Scotty stayed on in the trailer to put in some landscaping, he had planned to feed the dog and continue to look for his owner. Both she and Scotty had wanted him, but neither had a decent way to keep him. She would be working eight and ten hours a day, and she had no fenced yard and none that could be properly fenced. The front lawn of the duplex was only a narrow strip, broken by the two driveways. Her side yard was six feet wide, not nearly big enough for a dog like this. And at the back, the hill went up far too steeply even for a billy goat. No place to keep a dog and no time to devote to this animal. Weimaraners needed to run, they needed to hunt or to work, that was what they’d been bred for. Without proper work, a dog like this could turn into a nightmare of destruction, fences chewed up and furniture reduced to splinters.

And Scotty had no home at all, at present. When he returned to Molena Point he’d be staying with Dallas, who already had two elderly pointers that he was boarding until he could build a fence of his own, aged dogs who were past the need to run for miles. Dogs that had never known the consuming needs of this more active breed.

The dog had appeared the first time, without the boys, on a moonless night as she and Scotty and Dan sat in the trailer eating supper. A soft movement at the open door, a pale shape against the dark screen so insubstantial and ghostly they thought it was a young deer stepping inexplicably up onto the tiny porch. Then they saw the dog peering in, sniffing the scent of food.

Of course Scotty invited him in. The dog had come willingly, staring at their plates but he didn’t beg or charge the table. He stood silent and watchful, observing them and their supper with those serious yellow eyes, studying each of them in turn. Scotty had hesitated only a moment, then blew on his plate to cool the hot canned stew, stirred and blew again, and set it on the floor.

Not until Scotty stepped back did the dog approach the plate. He paused, looking up at Scotty.

“It’s okay. It’s for you.”

The dog inhaled the stew in three gulps. They had fed him all their suppers and opened another can. After an hour they fed him again, bread and canned hot dogs. Over the period of several hours they cleaned out the cupboard. The dog had slept in the trailer that night, and the next morning they called the sheriff, thinking he’d gotten lost from some hunter. From then on the dog would show up every couple of days, usually with the kids, but always starving. The boys had no notion where he lived, nor did the sheriff or his deputies.

Now as Ryan opened the door the cats came alert, prepared to leap from the sill and away. The dog trotted out quietly looking them over but making no move to approach. Ryan, with a handful of paper towels, stood on the deck wiping the dried mud from his coat. But then as she started down to the truck, she paused, frowning, and turned back inside. The dog followed her, staying close, looking up at her begging her to get a move on.

Picking up the phone and dialing the station, she was relieved to be put through at once to Dallas. “Have you gotten Curtis Farger to talk? Gotten a line on where he was staying in San Andreas?”

“Nothing yet. Why? Officers searched the old man’s shack again this morning, but no sign that a bomb had been put together there-and no sign of Gramps and no fresh shoe tracks or tire tracks, no indication anyone’s been back there.”

“I think I might have something. I’d like to come talk with Curtis.”

“This hasn’t anything to do with Rupert?”

“No, it hasn’t.”

He waited, not responding.

“There was a dog up there around the trailer, hanging out with those kids. He’s in my kitchen now, looks like Curtis brought him along for company. Looks like when he got to Molena Point Curtis never thought to take care of the animal, but just let him run loose.”

“You didn’t mention a dog when we talked.”

“I had a reason.”

“Which was?”

“I’ll tell you later. It hasn’t anything to do with Curtis.”

“You sure it’s the same dog?”

“Same dog. A fine big weimaraner. There aren’t two like this one. Scotty and I tried to find his owners. We both wanted to keep him, but�”

“So what’s the secret?”

“When you see him,you’llwant him.”

Dallas laughed. “You think if you bring the dog in, you can soften Curtis up?”

“I think it’s worth a try. He seemed to really like the dog, maybe he would open up. When the dog was around, Curtis was always hanging on him, hugging him.”

“And you’re all right, about this morning?”

“I’m fine,” she lied.

“Come on in.”

“I need to get him some food, first. And feed myself, I’m dizzy with hunger. Have you eaten anything?”

“As we speak. Enjoying the last bite of a double cheeseburger.”

Hanging up, she got a bath towel and, down on the drive, gave the dog a thorough rubdown, sleeking his coat to a shine. Amazing how good he looked despite his half-starved condition. Laying another clean towel over the passenger seat of the cab, she told him to load up.

He knew the command, hopping right up into the bucket seat, sitting as straight and dignified as if he’d spent his life riding in the best vehicles.

Considering only briefly her promise to herself about no mud in the cab, she closed the passenger door, slid into the driver’s seat and headed for the market. Some promises, at certain moments in your life, were indeed made to be broken.

She was inside the market and out again breaking all records, her mind filled with stories of hyper-energetic weimaraners who had torn up the insides of a car or travel trailer with amazing speed and efficiency. In one instance involving a brand-new RV, a weimaraner with tooth-and-claw enthusiasm had created 20,000 dollars’ worth of damage in less than half an hour while the dog’s family grabbed a quick lunch.

Tossing a fifty-pound bag of dog kibble into the truck bed, and dropping the bag containing her deli sandwich next to her on the bucket seat, she headed for the little park at the bottom of her street where she and the dog could share their breakfast. In a fit of possessiveness she had bought, from the market’s pet section, a new leather collar, a leather leash, a choke chain, and a long retractable leash that would make Dallas laugh. No competent dog trainer would be caught dead with such a contraption, but for the time being she thought it might be useful. She had not seen behind her as she headed down the hill from her duplex, the two cats taking off on their own urgent errand, racing across the neighbors’ yards and down the hill in the direction of Molena Point PD.

Nor would she have paid any attention. She would have no reason to think that the cats were headed for Curtis Farger’s cell, to wait for her and Rock. That they would soon be crouched outside the high cell window which, on this bright morning, should be wide open, secured only by its heavy iron bars. She would have no reason to imagine that four-legged spies would be waiting, intent on any scrap of information she might glean from the young bomber.

11 [��������: pic_12.jpg]

News ofa murder in Molena Point traveled swiftly through the village, flashing from phone to phone, to on-the-street conversation, to phone again to gossip passed on by waiters, customers, shopkeepers, in short from friend to friend. Clyde Damen listened to the details as related to him by his supervising mechanic while Clyde inspected the engine of a ‘96 BMW. Turning away from the sleek convertible, he went into his office to call Ryan. When her phone rang ten times and no answer, he called Wilma.

Wilma had heard about the murder from the tortoiseshell cat when the kit came running home. The kit had heard about the death as she lingered beneath a table of the Courtyard Cafe. Kit would have been a witness to the police investigation except that early that morning she had veered away from Joe and Dulcie as they raced down the hills toward Ryan’s duplex following the sirens like a pair of cheap ambulance chasers.

The kit, heading into the village, had trotted along the sidewalk sampling the aromas from half-a-dozen restaurants. She had paused before the Swiss House patio examining the fine scent of sausages and pancakes. With whiskers and ears forward and her fluffy tail carried high she padded into the brick patio to wind around friendly ankles, smiling up at tourist and local alike, at whoever might feel generous.

The kit was not an opportunist. But having spent most of her short, transient life running with bigger cats who took all the garbage, leaving her with none, she viewed the matter of food seriously. Not until she met Joe and Dulcie and her first human friends, did she realize she could stop snarling over every morsel, that some cats and humans enjoyed sharing.

Now in the cafe’s patio she soon bagged a fine breakfast of sausage and fried eggs and thin Swiss pancakes, all laid out on a little saucer by a kind tourist. Life was good. Life was very good. The kit’s purr reverberated beneath the table like a small and busy engine.

But then, having eaten her fill, she slipped away before her benefactor knew she’d gone. Prowling the village, nipping into shops, wandering among antique furniture and displays of soft sweaters, she soon entered a rug gallery where she paused to have a little wash on an expensive oriental carpet. Wandering out again, she slipped into a gift shop, drawn by the scent of lavender. Then down the street threading between the feet of tourists and in and out of shops, alternately petted or evicted according to the shopkeeper’s temperament. When the sun had warmed the rooftops she wandered there, across the tilting shingles and peaks until she was hungry again, then followed the aroma of broiled shrimp to a nearby patio restaurant. It was here that she heard the news of a body in Ryan Flannery’s garage.

As the kit gobbled shrimp from a little plate beneath the table, rubbing against the ankles of the gallery owner who had provided the delicacy, that lady remarked to her companion, “He was a womanizer, you know. Rupert Flannery. It may be crude to speak so of the dead, but Ryan’s lucky to be rid of him.”

“Maybe that’s only gossip,” whispered her friend. “Maybe he�Doyou think she killed him? Right there in her own garage?”

“If she did, I wouldn’t blame her. You know, my dear, one of my gallery clients is Ryan’s sister, decorator Hanni Coon. Well, of course Hanni never said anything, but her office manager told Bernine� You know Bernine Sage, she worked for Beckwhite’s until afterhewas killed, then she worked for the library for a while. Well, Bernine knows some friends of the Dannizers in San Francisco, and she told me all about Rupert. She says he does like to sample the herd, as my husband would so indelicately put it.”

The kit wasn’t sure what that meant, but she certainly understood about the murder in Ryan’s garage. As soon as she’d finished all the handouts that seemed forthcoming she galloped down the street three blocks to the library and in through Dulcie’s cat door, and leaped to Wilma’s cluttered desk.

She waited in Wilma’s office for perhaps three minutes before she grew impatient and trotted out into the reference room. Hopping onto a library table, then to the top of the book stacks, drawing smiles from several patrons who were used to seeing her and Dulcie among the books, she trotted along the dusty tops of the stacks looking down on the heads of patrons and librarians until she spotted Wilma behind the checkout desk. Wilma stood shelving reserve books. Her long silver hair, bound back in a ponytail, shone bright against the dark bindings. The kit, hanging down over the shelves above Wilma’s head, mewed softly, the kind of small mutter she would use when speaking to another cat.

Looking up, Wilma reached to take the kit in her arms. She didn’t speak, the kit was too impetuous; Wilma was always afraid the little tattercoat would forget and say something back to her, blurt out some urgent message in front of other people. Certainly the kit had something vital to say, she was all wriggles, she could hardly be still.

But Wilma was not to be hurried. With the kit settled across her shoulder she finished her shelving, stroking the kit’s back and scratching her ears to keep her quiet. Taking her time, she at last headed for her office.

The moment the door was closed the kit launched into her story of murder, into every smallest detail she’d overheard. “� and Ryan hasn’t been arrested yet, but that woman who gave me the shrimp thought she would be. She said Ryan’s husband liked to sample the herd. What does that mean? Is that why someone killed him? Oh, Ryan didn’t kill him, Ryan wouldn’t kill anyone.”

Setting the kit on her desk, Wilma held her finger to her lips, and immediately she called the station. As the phone rang the kit jumped to her shoulder and settled down with one tortoiseshell ear pressed against the headset. She tried not to wriggle or purr as she listened.

When Dallas came on he gave Wilma the particulars of the death. Ryan had not been arrested. She was on her way to the station to interview the Farger boy.

Wilma had hardly hung up when Clyde called from the shop. As they talked, the kit left quietly again, through Dulcie’s cat door, and galloped over to the police station to hear what she could hear. That boy in jail didn’t need to see her, that boy she had jumped on and made to set off his bomb. She would just slip into the station past the dispatcher, she would be just a shadow, no one would see her.

In Ryan’s truck the dog sat cutting his eyes at the paper bag that lay on the console between them, sucking in the scent of charbroiled hamburger and fries. He made no move to touch it, and Ryan stroked his head. “You have lovely manners.” She studied him as she waited for a stoplight. “Wheredidyou come from? How could anyone abandon you?” This was a valuable dog, not one of the registered “backyard bred” animals whose owners had given no thought to what such a mating would produce. That happened too often when a breed became popular. This big, strong fellow was far above those ill-planned mistakes. He looked like he could hunt from dawn until dark and never tire. His breed had been developed for all-around work and stamina, to retrieve on land or on water, to point, to track, to hunt big game, to work by both sight and by scent. Watching him, Ryan was more than smitten, she was overboard with desire. This was a fine, intelligent animal, a hunter’s dream.

But she couldn’t keep him. When would she hunt him? When would she work him? It wouldn’t be fair to the dog.

Pulling up beside the little park she dropped the choke chain over his head, fastened on the leash, snatched up her sandwich bag as she stepped out, and gave him the command to come. He was immediately out of the truck sitting before her as she closed the door, then moving to heel.

Oh, yes, a dream dog, a treasure.

Leaning over the truck bed she opened the kibble bag and scooped a large serving into one of the two bowls she had bought. Carrying the bowls and a bottle of water and her own breakfast she headed for a sprawling cypress tree near the edge of the park, settling down beneath it on the grass. The cool fall morning was silent except for the cries of the gulls and the faintwhishof a few passing cars. The dog lay down beside her alertly watching the kibble bowl that she still held. At the other end of the park some children were playing catch, their voices cutting the silence. A few tourists wandered across the grass or sat on the scattered benches, and a pair of joggers passed her. When she put the bowls down, the kibble vanished quickly, as did half the water. She didn’t offer more food, she didn’t want him throwing up. Their alfresco picnic apparently presented an interesting study because several cars slowed to have a look. She savored her hamburger and fries, wondering if she was stupid to take the dog over to the jail.Wouldhis presence encourage Curtis to talk, or was that wishful thinking?

Whatever she thought of the kid, up in San Andreas he had seemed so tender toward the dog. But knowing now what he was capable of, that he had tried to kill half the village, maybe this visit was futile. And she wondered if, when she faced Curtis again, she could keep her anger under control.

Still, if Dallas didn’t find the old man, Curtis was the only lead they had to unraveling the full story of the bombing. Her preoccupation with that urgent matter served very well to ease her own fears, to put in perspective her own precarious position. This boy, son of the man Max Harper had helped prosecute for drug making, had nearly killed Max and Charlie and maybe the entire wedding party.

The silence of the early Sunday afternoon was broken suddenly by Dixieland jazz blaring from an approaching convertible, and a pale blue Mercedes pulled to the curb, parking illegally in the red zone, the top down, her sister Hanni behind the wheel. Hanni’s short silver hair was styled to a flip of perfection, her long silver earrings caught the sunlight, her million-dollar grooming made Ryan feel, as always, all ashes and sackcloth, made her snatch uselessly at her uncombed hair and stare down at the stain on her sweatshirt.

Hanni remained in the car quietly observing the dog in a way that made Ryan bridle with possessiveness. Then she looked up at Ryan with such concern that Ryan knew she’d heard about Rupert, that probably Dallas had called her. Hanni would know every detail: Ryan’s gun found in the trash, the bullets embedded in her garage wall, the fact that Ryan had no witness to her own whereabouts during the time that Rupert was killed.

“Private picnic?” Hanni called, turning the CD down to a soft rhythm and swinging out of the car. Her long, thin legs were encased in faded blue jeans that matched exactly the blue of the Mercedes, her slim, tanned feet cosseted in expensive handmade sandals. Above the denims she wore one of numerous handmade sweaters, this number a bright rainbow of many colors that set off Hanni’s prematurely gray hair. She stood looking at the dog with wide-eyed admiration.

“Where did he come from? He’s beautiful. Dallas didn’t mention a dog.” She waited impatiently for an explanation, watching Rock, not Ryan. Then seeing that no answers were forthcoming she sat down on the grass oblivious to dirt or grass stains-she wouldn’t have any, and Ryan didn’t know how she did that. Watching Ryan, Hanni searched gently for an exact reading to the morning’s events, making Ryan’s throat tighten. Sympathy always made her cry.

“You can tell me the bad stuff later,” Hanni said. “Except, is there anything I can do?”

Ryan shook her head. “It� I don’t think I want to talk about it.” She looked up at Hanni. “The dog isn’t mine. Well, maybe he is if I can’t find the owner. If I could figure out how to keep him,” she said hastily. “He showed up this morning, he was up in San Andreas.”

“You brought him back with you?”

“No, I told you� he showed up on his own. He was in the kitchen when I went up after� after Dallas left.”

Hanni frowned, puzzled.

“He was hanging around up at the trailer, with those kids. They said he was a stray.”

“A dog like this?”

“We tried to find his owner.” She told Hanni the story, and how she thought the dog had found his way to Molena Point.

“And now you’re going to reunite him with that Farger boy? See if you can get the kid to talk?” Hanni stared at her. “You think you can soften upthatkid? You think if he joined that old man in setting a bomb, you can get the kid to spill on him?”

“I need to try. The dogmightmake a difference.”

Hanni just looked at her; but then her gaze softened. “If I can help, I’m here.” Rising, she rubbed the dog behind the ears then opened his mouth with easy familiarity and looked at his teeth. “Young. Maybe two years old.” She gave Ryan a clear, green-eyed look. “If you can’t find the owner, you have a real treasure. He’s some handsome fellow.” She rose and backed away watching him move as he followed her. When she sat down again the dog dropped down beside her stirring a hot surge of jealousy in Ryan. To look at her and Hanni, anyone would pick Ryan as the rough-and-tumble dog person, not impeccably groomed Hanni Coon. Yet it was Hanni who seemed able to train the roughest dog and still look like she was dressed for a party, not a smear of dirt, not a hair out of place.

Hanni lifted the dog’s silky ears and looked inside, checking for ear mites and for a possible tattoo. She avoided mentioning Rupert directly. They both knew Ryan would be under investigation for his murder and that Ryan too might be in some danger. Picking up Ryan’s purse Hanni opened it, reached into her own purse and, shielded by the dog and by Ryan, she slipped an unloaded revolver into Ryan’s bag with a box of shells. She looked up at Ryan. “Until this is over, until you get yours back.”

“Did Dallas�?”

“No. He doesn’t need to know,” she said, ignoring the intricacies of California gun laws that gave a person a carrying permit for only specified models. Hanni patted Ryan’s hand with sisterly tenderness. “I’m headed for the Landeau house. You have time to come along?”

“The rug arrived from England, it’s in San Francisco. It will be down by truck, a day or two. I went over this morning to see if the gallery had delivered the sculpture for the fireplace. The floor’s wet, I guess from last week’s rain.”

“Wet? How can it be wet?”

“The Landeaus have already installed the sculpture, I don’t know when they were down. Not there now, and I can’t get them on the phone. I nearly sank in water, the floor’s soaked. That temporary rug under the skylight. We need to find the leak, we can’t put down the new rug, with a leak.”

“There is no leak. I didn’t build a leaky house. What did they spill?” Ryan could feel anger heat her face. “I installed that skylight myself, Scotty and I. It couldn’t have leaked, it has a huge lip and overhang and it’s all sealed, you saw how it’s made. That’s the top-of-the-line model. It’s molded all in one piece, absolutely leak-proof. We checked with the hose, Hanni! Did you call the Landeaus? What did they say?” The idea that an item she’d ordered and checked out might be shoddy infuriated her.

She had finished the Landeau remodel shortly before she left for San Andreas. The Landeaus had bought the place as a teardown, meaning to start from ground up, but she’d talked them into gutting and refurbishing the well-built old cottage, turning it into a small and elegant Mediterranean retreat. She had torn out walls to create a flowing space for living, dining and master bedroom, and removed the old ceilings. The high, angled roof beams rose now to an octagonal skylight directly over the sunken sitting area.

She had covered the concrete floor, which was broken into three different levels following the rising hill, with big, handmade Mexican tiles the color of pale sandstone. Only the sunken sitting area was to be carpeted, with the rug that Hanni had designed, a thick, deep wool as brightly multicolored as Hanni’s sweater, a rug to lie on reading, to sink into, to make love on. Hanni had ordered the handmade confection about the time Ryan started work on the house. The Landeaus had waited months for that rug, using a temporary brown shag that could be discarded when the new one arrived. And now that area was wet? The shag rug wet? She looked intently at Hanni. “The skylight did not leak. Marianna must have been down. What did she spill? Sullivan’s blood?”

“Be nice, Ryan. You don’t have to like the woman to do right by her professionally.”

“I am doing right by her professionally. The skylight didn’t leak.”

She had a satisfactory enough business relationship with Marianna Landeau but she wasn’t fond of her. Hanni jokingly said she was jealous of Marianna’s beauty, but it was more than that. Marianna was a difficult woman to warm to. The pale-haired ex-model of nearly six feet-fine-boned, slim-waisted, as broad-shouldered as a Swedish masseuse-was as cold as an arctic sea. Marianna dressed in silks with tangles of gold jewelry, and wound her flaxen hair in an elegant chignon so perfect that no ordinary woman could have mastered its construction on a day-to-day basis. Over the years that Ryan had worked with the Landeaus on their San Francisco house, she had never seen Marianna really smile, hadneverheard her laugh with pleasure, only with sarcasm. Marianna Landeau was beautiful ice, a client who paid on time, but a woman Ryan didn’t understand and didn’t care to know better.

Hanni gave the dog a pat. “It must have been awful this morning.” She waited quietly, watching Ryan, hoping that Ryan might unburden herself. Ryan scowled at her, and they sat not speaking. The dog sighed and stretched out. Hanni said, “What are you going to name him?”

“Why would I name him? The kids called him Rock.”

When Hanni reached to unbuckle the dog’s collar, Ryan said, “No ID on that, I just bought that collar. I have to get moving, Hanni. I told Dallas I’d be over before the juvenile authorities get there-I can meet you at the cottage in an hour or so.”

Hanni hugged the dog, and rose, one easy twist from flat on the ground to her full five-six, a movement like a dancer, the result of her passion for yoga. When Hanni got up, the big dog rose with equal grace and started to follow her. Ryan grabbed his collar. He gave her a sly sideways glance and sat down quietly beside her. It did cross her mind that they were both con artists.

“See you in an hour,” Hanni said and headed for her Mercedes where a New Orleans trumpet was entertaining the neighborhood of cottages that edged the small park.

“Hour and a half,” Ryan called, picking up her trash. Walking back with Rock to the truck, the dog turned puppyish, dancing around her, his tongue lolling. Loading him up, she headed for the police station wondering again if she was doing the right thing to approach Curtis Farger, if this was a smart move, trying to out-con that deceitful boy.

12 [��������: pic_13.jpg]

The parkinglot of Molena Point courthouse was shaded by sprawling oak trees that rose from islands of flowering shrubs. The building, set well back from the street, was of Mediterranean style with deep porticos, white stucco walls, and tile paving. The police department occupied a long wing at the south end that ran out to meet the sidewalk. Recently, Captain Harper had remodeled the department to afford increased privacy and heightened security. The jail was in a separate building, at the back, across the small, fenced parking lot reserved for police cars. Within the station itself one holding cell was maintained, opening to the right of the locked and bulletproof glass entry. The seven-by-eight concrete room had an iron bunk, a toilet and sink and one tiny window high in the east wall secured by bars and shaded by an oak’s dark foliage. The oak’s three thick trunks angled up from the garden as gently as staircases. Joe Grey and Dulcie were set to race across the garden and up into the branches that covered the cell window, when whispers from above them in the tree sent them swerving away again, to crouch among the bushes.

A man clung high above, among the dark leaves, his shoes and pant cuffs just visible, his balance on the slanting trunk seeming unsteady. He wore high-topped, laced shoes, old man’s shoes. Moving to a better vantage, the cats could see one gnarled hand reaching out to grip at the bars for support as he peered down through the little window. It must have been hard for the old boy to climb up, they could imagine him teetering, grabbing the surrounding limbs.

If this was Gramps Farger, he had plenty of nerve to come right to the station when every cop in the state was looking for him-or maybe he thought this was the last place they’d look. Joe wanted to shout and alert the department. His second, more studied response, was to shut up and listen.

The old man’s faint quarrelsome whispers and the boy’s hissing replies through the open window were so soft that even from within the police department, maybe no one would hear them, not even the dispatcher from her electronic cubicle; the whispers would be easily drowned among the noise of her radios and phones.

Slipping closer, where they could hear better, the cats began to smile.

“Them big mucky-mucks don’t care,” the old man rasped. “The way you muffed this one, Curtis, I’m sorry you showed up at all. You should’ve stayed in them mountains. Well, the deed’s done-you blew it, big-time. Your pa sure ain’t gonna be pleased.”

The kid’s reply slurred angrily against the rumble of a car engine starting in the parking lot. And not for the first time, Joe wished he had one of those tiny tape recorders, wished he was wired for sound.

“Your uncle ain’t gonna like it neither. You know Hurlie don’t tolerate sloppy work. And your ma�”

“None ofherbusiness.”

“Them cops’re gonna ask you plenty. You see you don’t mention Hurlie or them San Andreas people. You don’t tell no one you was up there. Pay attention, Curtis. You don’t know nothing about where Hurlie is, you don’t know nothing about where your old gramps is. You understand me?”

“What you think I’m gonna do,” the kid snapped. “Why would I tell the cops anything?”

Apparently, Joe thought, the old man didn’t know that Curtis had hitched a ride with Detective Garza’s niece. What a joke. Maybe Curtis himself didn’t know who she was.

“Keep your voice down. Don’t matter I’m your grampa, I cut no slack if you mess up again.”

“Mess up!That rabid damn cat near killed me. You don’t give a damn about me, you don’t give a damn if I die!”

“You ain’t gonna die. From a cat scratch? And you sure as hell didn’t see me over at that church, no matter what they ask.” The old man peered down into the cell. “I’m out of here, Curtis. Meantime, you keep your mouth shut.” And Gramps started shakily down the tree snatching at branches, putting his unsteady feet in all the wrong places. Nearly falling, stumbling down the last few feet he tumbled into the geraniums so close to Joe and Dulcie that they spun around, melting deeper into the bushes.

The old man rose, apparently none the worse for the spill, and turned toward the parking lot. The cats followed him out across the blacktop, staying under parked cars when they could, slipping along in the river of his scent, which was so overripe they could have trailed him blindfolded. This old codger needed a bath, big-time. A Laundromat wouldn’t hurt, either. Pausing beneath a plumbing repair truck, they looked ahead for an old pickup, as the kit had described, for some rusted-out junker. The old man was passing a black Jaguar convertible when he whipped out a key.

It was not a new-model Jag but it was sleek and expensive. The top was down, and several celluloid kewpie dolls hung from the rearview mirror. The bucket seats were fitted out with tacky zebra-patterned covers as furry as an Angora cat. A very nice car, royally trashed.

Unlocking the driver’s door, Gramps slid in and kicked the engine to life. Pulling on a tan safari hat, he tucked his long shaggy hair under, and wriggled into a khaki jacket straight out of an old B movie. The attempted disguise was so ludicrous the cats wanted to roll over laughing. This old man wasn’t for real, this old man was dotty.

But, in fact, he had changed the way he looked. As the old man sat at the wheel tying a white scarf around his throat, Joe glanced tensely back toward the station, his heart thudding with urgency. The old boy would be gone in a minute, he was going to get away, and all they had was the license number. Crouching to scorch up the tree thinking to shout through the holding-cell window and alert the dispatcher, get some muscle out there, Joe paused.

If he knew where the old man was going�

The tomcat crouched, tensed to leap in. Dulcie stopped him with a swipe of her paw, ears back, eyes blazing. “Don’t, Joe!”

He backed off, hissing.

Gramps put the car in gear, revving the engine like a teenager-and at the same instant, Gramps saw Joe. Staring down at Joe, his expression said this guy was not a cat lover. Joe’s paws began to sweat. Gramps cut the wheels suddenly and sharply toward the tomcat and gave it the gas-and the cats were gone, scorching under the plumbing truck, the Jaguar headed straight for them. Maybe, since the aborted church bombing, Gramps Farger hated all cats.

Safe under the big yellow vehicle, but ready to run again, they cringed as, at the last instant, Gramps swung a U just missing the truck and screeched off toward me street.

Coming out shakily, they fled up the nearest oak. Staring out, they could see the Jaguar heading north and then east, up into the hills. They watched until the car disappeared over the next rise.

At least they had a general direction, and they had the make and license. Who would be dumb enough to drive such an easily identifiable vehicle? Talk about chutzpah. And the old boy might as well have driven the Jaguar right on into the station, every cop in the village was looking for him. Did he think his stupid disguise would fool anyone?

But maybe it had fooled someone. Turning out of the lot, Gramps had passed two young officers returning on foot to the station. Both had looked right at him. With the scarf tucked up around his beard, and his grisly long hair out of sight, Gramps looked like just another eccentric, another tourist. The rookies looked at him and kept walking, no change of expression, no glance at each other, no quickening of their walk to hurry into the station. Complacent, Joe Grey thought. Harper needed to talk to those guys, shake them up.

But the two cops weren’t the only ones to miss something.

Though the two cats couldn’t have seen her, and with Gramps’s overripe scent they would never have smelled her, the kit passed within feet of them crouched on the floor of the Jaguar. They had no hint that she was huddled behind the driver in the escaping car, shivering with excitement and with fear.

The kit knew Joe and Dulcie were there. From deep in the garden she had watched the old man pull into the lot and had watched him climb to the kid’s cell window, had watched the two older cats approach to listen. Downwind from them, she had listened, too, then had beat it for the Jaguar, leaping in while Gramps was still precariously descending the tree. And now she was being borne away who-knew-where, in a car racing way too fast and she couldn’t jump out and she was getting pretty scared. Was regretting, not for the first time, what Wilma called her impetuous nature.

“Who from San Andreas?” Joe said, feeling defeated and cross. “Who else besides this Uncle Hurlie? Who was the old man talking about?”

“I don’t� There’s Ryan’s pickup, just pulling in.” As Ryan parked and swung out of the truck, the gray dog leaped out too, coming to heel. And Dallas stepped out of the station as if he had been waiting for them.

The detective looked the dog over. “Youfoundthis animal? How long was he running loose-five minutes?” The dog watched Dallas brightly, his yellow eyes alight as if he recognized a dog man, a kindred and understanding spirit. Only when Dallas put his arm around Ryan did the weimaraner growl.

Grinning, Dallas stepped away. “Looks like he’s found his home.” He looked down at Ryan. “You doing okay? You all right about what’s ahead of you?”

“I guess. There’s nothing I can do about it. Have you� You haven’t been in touch with Harper?”

“He called, the murder’s been on the San Francisco news. He and Charlie are coming back, canceling the cruise.”

“Oh, damn! Because of me. Because of Rupert-and the bombing. Why does this have to spoil their honeymoon?”

Dallas squeezed her shoulder. “One of life’s nasty tricks. One big, double calamity, sandwiched in with the good stuff.” He knelt and beckoned the dog to him. Not until Ryan released him with a command, did Rock approach, sniffing Dallas’s hand. The detective looked up at her. “You’re going to keep him.”

“I can’t, Dallas. I don’t�”

“He’s pretty protective already, a little work and he could be useful.”

“I don’t need protection.”

He just looked at her.

“Hanni-Hanni loaned me a gun.”

“I don’t need to know that. You could build a fence up that back hill for him, I’m sure Charlie wouldn’t mind.”

“Let’s go in. I told Hanni I’d meet her up at the Landeau place in an hour, there’s some kind of water problem. Leaky skylight, Hanni said.”

“You’ve never installed a leaky skylight.”

She tugged on his arm, heading for the station. “I’m losing my nerve. I’m not looking forward to this.”

By the time they entered through the bulletproof glass doors, the cats were high in the oak outside the boy’s window. Hidden among the leaves, they listened to thescritchof metal against metal as the cell door swung open.

No one spoke. They heard a sudden intake of breath and a doggy huff, then the scrabbling of claws on concrete. Warily they peered down through the bars.

Ryan sat alone on the end of the boy’s cot. The boy stood rigid, his back to the wall, staring at her with rage as he held up an arm halfheartedly fending off the dog who, wild with joy, was leaping and pressing against him, his whine soft, his short tail madly wagging. Ignoring him, Curtis’s cheek was touched with shine. Was the kid crying-or was that dog spit?

Ryan watched him evenly. “What’s his real name, besides Rock?”

“How would I know? He’s a stray. Why did you bring him here? What do you mean, his real name?”

“He rode down in the truck with you.”

“So he got in the truck. What was I supposed to do, shove him out? And what difference? He don’t belong to no one-he don’t belong toyou.”

“He’s a beautiful dog. I can see he’s your buddy.”

“Do I look like he’s my buddy? What do you want?”

“He rode down with you, so I figure you’re responsible for him. You want him running the streets, hit by a car on the highway? That would be ugly, Curtis.”

“So take him home with you.”

“I can’t keep him. I live in a small apartment, I have no yard for a dog.”

“Feed him, he’ll stay around.”

“I can’t let him run loose. If I knew where he lived�”

Curtis just looked at her.

“I could take him back to San Andreas, to his owners, or to the people you were staying with.”

No answer. The dog licked Curtis’s face then looked past him through me bars, watching someone. In a moment there was a stirring at the cell door, and the air was filled with the smell of hamburgers and fries.

The blond, matronly dispatcher, glancing in at Ryan, handed a large paper bag through the bars. Boy and dog sniffed as one, eyeing the grease-stained bag.

Tearing open the bag, Ryan spread it out on the bunk, revealing four burgers, a box of fries, a large box of onion rings and a tall paper cup that, when the boy began to drink, left a smear of chocolate across his lip. Curtis didn’t wait to be asked. Gulping most of the first burger, he slipped a few bites to the dog. Ryan said, “If you can’t tell me where he lives, I’ll have to take him to the pound.”

Curtis glanced around the tiny cell as if thinking the dog could stay there.

“I work all day, Curtis. I can’t keep him. Maybe the pound will find him a home before they have to gas him.”

For the first time, the boy’s defiance faltered. “You looked all over up there for his owner. There’s no way you’d take him to the pound.”

“I have no choice, unless I can find his owner. I’d drive him back up to San Andreas, to people who’d take care of him, if you’ll tell me where. Otherwise it’s a cage at the pound and maybe the gas chamber.”

“You won’t do that.”

“Try me. I can’t keep him, and I don’t know anyone who can. I’d rather take him home. If I have to, I’ll call the weimaraner breeder’s association. They’d have the name of the registered owner.”

The boy nearly flew at her. “You can’t! They’ll kill him.”

“Whowould kill him?”

The boy reverted to glaring. Beside him, the dog’s brow wrinkled as he looked from one to the other, distressed by their angry voices.

“You want to fill me in, Curtis? Tell me where he belongs?”

“The dog’s a stray. I meant-the place I was staying, they� they don’t like dogs. They ran him off.”

“Where were you staying, Curtis? Who were you staying with?”

Curtis turned his back, and said no more. The cats were nearly bursting, wanting to shout the name Hurlie, burning to tell Ryan about the uncle that the old man wanted so badly kept secret.

Ryan stayed with the boy for perhaps half an hour more, but nothing was forthcoming. She gave up at last and left the cell. The cats could hear her talking with Dallas, out near the dispatcher’s cubicle, then their voices faded as if they had headed back to his office. “Maybe,” Joe said, “Ryan’s cell phone is in the truck, and we can fill them in about Hurlie?”

“She’ll have locked it,” Dulcie said. “But she’s meeting Hanni. Hanni leaves her phone in the car with the top down.”

Joe Grey smiled.

Dropping from the oak tree, they crossed the parking lot running beneath parked cars and leaped into the back of Ryan’s truck, settling down beneath the tarp ready for a ride up the hills.

A cat, at best, is not long on patience. Ask any sound sleeper whose cat tramps across his stomach at three in the morning demanding to be let out to hunt. Joe Grey was fidgeting irritably by the time they saw Ryan coming. Burrowing flat as pancakes beneath the folded tarp, they were glad that Rock had taken over the front seat, that he wouldn’t leap into the truck bed nosing at their hiding place.

But as it turned out, it would be Rock who would nose out, for the cats, the connection between the church bomber and Rupert Dannizer’s killer.

Ryan was pulling out of the parking lot when a horn honked. The cats didn’t peer out from beneath the tarp, but when she slowed the truck they heard Clyde’s voice over the sound of the idling antique Chevy.

“Can I do anything?” he said quietly.

“Thanks, but it’s all in hand-at the moment.”

“You okay?”

“So far. Just on my way over to the Landeau place to meet Hanni.”

Clyde’s car moved ahead a little. “Free for dinner?”

“Matter of fact, I am. That would be nice-something early? Burgers and a beer? And we can go over some last-minute details on tomorrow’s work. Could I come by for you, and put this fellow in your yard?”

“Sounds good, and you can tell me about him. Around six?”

“See you then.”

Clyde pulled out, shifting gears. As he drove away, and Ryan turned into the street, Joe’s thoughts returned to the Farger clan, to Curtis’s uncle Hurlie. Riding beside Dulcie half-smothered by the tarp, he was all twinges and prickling fur, the San Andreas connection compelling and urgent. Did Gramps get the makings for the bomb up in San Andreas with the help of Hurlie? Hurlie gave that lethal package to Curtis, and Curtis carried it down to Molena Point in the back of Ryan’s truck? Curtis delivers the gunpowder or whatever in Ryan’s truck, Gramps makes up the bomb, then sends Curtis up on the roof to set it off.

Of course the law would be onto it. Now that Ryan had found a connection between Curtis and San Andreas, Garza and Harper would be onto it like pointers on a covey of quail.

But was the law missing one piece of vital information? As far as Joe could tell, they had no clue yet about Hurlie Farger. Or, if they knew that Hurlie existed, they apparently didn’t know that he was in San Andreas, thathewas the San Andreas connection.

But Joe forgot Hurlie as Ryan turned into the drive before the Landeau cottage. As she pulled up to park, the big dog began to lunge at the window, leaping at the half-open glass roaring and snarling, pawing to get out.

13 [��������: pic_14.jpg]

The oldman was a fast driver. He took the winding road at such a pace that, on the floor behind the driver’s seat, the kit had to dig her claws hard into the thick black rug. The Jaguar fishtailed and skidded around the tight curves swaying and twisting ever higher into the hills. Against the late afternoon sky, she couldn’t see any treetops but sometimes she could glimpse the wild, high mountains toward which they were headed. Behind the car, the sun was dropping, shifting its position as the road turned. She had no notion where he was going or how she would get home again; she was sorry she’d hidden in the old man’s car. She’d started to be sorry when she heard him come across the parking lot and open the car door but already it was too late, he was starting the engine. Now the cold wind that swooped down to the floor of the convertible snatched at her fur and whistled inside her ears, and the sharp chemical smell that clung inside the small space burned her nose so that tears came. When the car began to climb even more steeply she felt her stomach lurch until soon she thought she’d have to throw up as she always did when riding in cars. But she daren’t, he would hear her retching.

Soon, above the ugly stinks, she could smell sage and mountain shrubs. At every squeal of tires she hunched lower. When at last he skidded to a stop on dirt and gravel, she thought she must be a hundred miles from home. Even Joe Grey would not have been foolish enough to get in the car with this man. She could smell dry dust, and the rich scent of chickens, and more chemical smells. She was terrified he would look in the backseat and find her.

But he didn’t look, he got out and slammed the car door. She heard him go up three wooden steps and into a house or building and slam that door too. She waited, shivering. When after a long time she heard nothing more she slipped warily up the back of the furry zebra seat and poked her nose over the edge of the door, looking.

She was so high up the hills that only the jagged mountains rose above her, tall and rocky and bare, their thin patches of grass baked brown from the heat of August and September, brown and dry. Down below her, the road they had taken wound sickeningly along the side of the cliff. The rough clearing where the car stood was only a shelf cut into the bank, just big enough to hold an unpainted cabin and two sheds, all so close to the edge that she imagined at the slightest jolt of earthquake the buildings sliding off into the chasm below.

She could see, farther down the cliff, three rough chicken pens made of wire, with plywood roofs, and though she could smell the dusty scent of chickens, she could not hear them clucking or flapping.

When she looked toward the shack she could see through a dirty window the old man moving around in there, she could hear him opening cupboards or shifting furniture, making some kind of dull thudding racket. Had that boy lived here with him? Curious to see more, she hopped to the back of the front seat. She was rearing up on her hind paws when the old man came out again suddenly. In panic she dropped to the ground beneath a clump of dry sage-leaving pawprints etched in the dust behind her.

Maybe he would think they were the tracks of ground squirrels or rabbits. Hiding among the bushes she watched him carry out four black plastic garbage bags tied at the tops, their bulging sides lumpy with what looked like boxes and cans, bags that stunk like a hundred drugstore chemicals spilled together or like the garden center of the hardware store with all its baits and poisons where she had wandered once and been scolded by Dulcie and Joe, smells that made her want to back away sneezing. Was this the bomb stuff? She tried to remember what Clyde and the police had said when they were talking about the bomb. She wasn’t sure what she remembered and what she’d imagined about that terrible day. She remained frozen still as the old man loaded the dirty bags into his nice car. When he started the car she fled away deeper among the tangled growth that edged the yard.

He turned the car around in the clearing, its wheels just inches from the drop-off, and headed away down the twisting road leaving her alone. As the car descended snaking along the edge of the ravine she reared up looking at the land, hoping to see the way home. She could have been on the moon, for all the feel of direction she had after that blind and twisting ride.

Though anyone would know east by the rising mountains, and west by the dropping sun. The sunwasdropping, fast. She did not want to be caught here at night. The kit loved the night, she loved to roam in the night, but up here in the wild high ridges where bobcats and cougar and coyotes hunted, night was another matter.

Standing at the edge of the clearing, her ears and her fluffy tail flattened by the wind, she looked west down curve after curve of summer-brown slopes, far down to the shifting layers of fog and to the tiny village, so far away.

Well, she wasn’t lost. Cats didn’t get lost. Not when they could see the mountains and the sun hanging low in the sky and the wide fog-bound Pacific.I’m a big cat now.And, scanning the falling hills for possible places to hide when she was ready to make her way home, she spotted the best of all refuges.

Far below among the tree-scattered hills stood the dark tangle of broken walls and crumbling buildings that marked the Pamillon estate where she had hidden from the cougar, and from a human killer. Where she had once, as the cougar slept in the sun on the cracked brick patio, almost touched him, until Joe snatched her away. There among the Pamillon ruins were all manner of caves and crannies.

Now that she knew where to hide in the falling night, she didn’t hurry. First she would do as Dulcie and Joe Grey would do. She was about to approach the cabin when, way down on the winding road, she saw a car moving fast toward the ruined estate, a black, open convertible.

Why would the old man go there? It would soon be too dark for humans in that place. What was he doing? Did he mean to dump his plastic bags there? Was the Pamillon estate, with all its mystery, nothing more to that old man than a place to get rid of his garbage?

Turning away with disgust, trotting up the steps to the cabin and hearing no sound within, she considered the ill-fitting door. Standing on her hind legs, then swinging on the knob, she forced it open and quickly she slipped inside.

The floor was dirt, tramped hard, and the wooden walls were so rough that when she pressed her nose against the planks their splinters stuck her. Nor was there much furniture. Two rough wooden armchairs with ancient dusty seats, a scarred aluminum dinette table with two mismatched aluminum chairs, a small old bookcase filled with jars of peanut butter, pickles, baked beans, and a half loaf of bread that smelled stale.

Attached to one wall was a plain laundry sink and next to it a tiny old refrigerator whose motor sounded sick. A second room led off the first, a niche no bigger than Wilma’s bathroom, just enough space for two cots at right angles and a wooden chair with a pair of man’s shoes tossed underneath. Every surface was rimed with dust, even the plank walls. Big nails in the wall held some wrinkled shirts and pants, some of a small size that might belong to the boy. Certainly the old man slept here, she could smell him. No cat would let himself get so rank, only a dog and some humans would tolerate that kind of stink on themselves. She could still smell the nose-burning chemical smells too, so strong she could taste them. Something about those smells rang alarms for her, something that came from police talk. Nosing along the walls she looked for a closet to investigate, but there was none.

Slipping outside again panting for fresh air she circled the small, crude building, padding quickly around it even where it hung out nearly over the ravine; and the chemical smell led her down the steep canyon toward the chicken pens.

She had no notion how long the old man would be gone. The cages all looked abandoned. Longing to head down the hills into fresh air and into the golden light of last-sun, instead she trotted closer, approaching the wire enclosures.

Heading for the Landeau cottage, Ryan’s thoughts were still on Clyde, comforted by his easy ways and quiet reassurance; just their few brief words, in the parking lot of the station over the sound of their idling engines, had eased her tension. Maybe she’d call him early, see if they could take Rock for a run before dinner. Maybe with Clyde she could sort out the fear that had shadowed her ever since she found Rupert’s body. She didn’t ordinarily confide in new acquaintances, but Clyde was Max Harper’s lifelong friend. Dallas trusted him; and Clyde had stood steadfastly by Harper when the captain was accused of murder. And better to burden Clyde with her fears than Dallas. Her uncle wasn’t in an easy position. New man in the department, appointed chief of detectives over someone with more seniority, and now his niece was under suspicion of murder. No need to lay more stress on him.

She supposed she wasn’t very trustful of men anymore, not since marrying Rupert. Not trustful as she had once been when she was young, growing up in a household nurtured by three strong men. Those associations, and spending her weekends bird hunting with her dad’s and Dallas’s friends, or hanging around San Francisco PD waiting for Dallas, or at the probation office with her dad, she had always felt easy and confident. Though, in fact, in that law-enforcement atmosphere shehaddeveloped a wariness too. A wait-and-see view of outsiders that some folks would call judgmental, but that a cop would call sensible. More than once that mind-set had served her well, though it sure had deserted her when she met Rupert.

She wondered if, after you died, you had the chance to look back and assess the way you’d lived your life. She couldn’t seem to leave that thought alone.

Even after seeing Rupert cruelly torn she could feel nothing generous toward him. That fact distressed her, that she was thinking about Rupert as heartlessly as Rupert himself had thought about others. This was not a time to be bitter. Maybe Clyde could help her put these last few days into a kinder framework-a friend she could lean on, someone not family and not part of law enforcement, someone who need not be careful of his conversation with a frightened murder suspect. Just someone steady to help her sort through the tangle. And, turning into the drive of the Landeau cottage, dunking about Clyde, Ryan had no idea that other friends were ready to help her, friends so near to her at that moment that she could have stepped back and touched them, two small friends ready to assist in their own quiet way.

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The Landeau cottage stood among live oaks in the rising hills north of the village, its leaded windows set deep into white stucco walls, reflecting the mossy, twisted branches. A ray of late-afternoon sun shone down through the trees illuminating the domed skylight and tile roof. The clearing in front of the cottage was planted with a variety of drought-resistant native shrubs artfully arranged among giant boulders. Beneath a grandfather oak a wide parking bay was paved with granite blocks, and a granite drive led back to the garage, which was hidden behind the house in the style of 1910 when cars had just begun to replace horses and were put in the barn at night like their predecessors. The neighboring houses were hardly visible, just a hint of roof to the north between the dense trees, and on the south a few feet of blank garage wall; a private and secluded retreat, for an undisturbed weekend. As Ryan pulled her truck onto the parking next to Hanni’s blue Mercedes, Rock went rigid, sniffing warily through the partially open window, his gaze fixed on the house, and the next moment leaping at the glass, barking and fighting to get out.

Easing open her door, Ryan meant to slip out and leave him inside until she knew what was the matter, but he exploded past her jamming one hard foot into her thigh, half knocking her out of the truck. He hit the drive roaring. She piled out behind, hanging onto his leash. He lunged again, up the drive, charging ahead with such force that she had to turn sideways jerking the leash tight across her legs to keep from being pulled to her knees.

The cottage door opened. Hanni stepped out watching the dog and glancing toward the back of the house where Rock was staring as if to launch for someone’s throat-the dog looked toward the house too, his lip curled over businesslike teeth, but then returned his attention to whoever stood, out of sight on the drive. Ryan thought of Hanni’s gun tucked in her purse, which she’d tossed on the seat of the truck when Rock bolted past her.

But this was a small, quiet village, not the streets of east L.A. Even with Rupert’s murder and the church bombing, as horrifying as both had been, Molena Point wasn’t a crime zone. Yet, watching Rock, watching the drive, she was deeply chilled.

From the woods where they had hidden when they dropped out of Ryan’s truck, Joe Grey and Dulcie watched the big dog too, the fur on their backs rigid, every muscle tense, ready to scorch up a tree out of harm’s way.

But then suddenly Rock relaxed, raised his head and cocked his ears and gave a questioning wag of his short tail. And as Ryan eased back, seeming to let out her breath, Rock trotted eagerly forward, all smiles and wags.

The old man who came up the drive was tiny, dressed in faded work clothes and carrying a stack of empty seedling flats. He seemed not much taller than the hound; and surely Rock’s teeth were sharper. What dog would think of growling at Eby Coldiron? The cats slipped closer toward the drive as Ryan hugged Eby. Eby stroked Rock then backed away to have a look at him.

“This is a fine animal, Ryan. When did you get him? Will he hunt?”

“It’s a long story, Eby. Complicated-the kind of story for over a cup of coffee when Louise is here too.”

Eby grinned at her and nodded and continued to pet Rock, who wriggled and danced under the small gardener’s hand. Typical canine behavior, Joe thought. So hungry for acceptance. Eby and his wife were Ryan’s landscaping contractors and they worked with Hanni, as well. The Coldirons were in their eighties, Eby no bigger than a twelve-year-old boy, white-haired and frail-looking, but as strong as coiled steel. The skilled landscaper shared Ryan’s liking for native plant environments in an area where water was often scarce. He was dressed this morning in his usual khaki shirt, his jeans rolled up over muddy jogging shoes. Eby bought his clothes in the boys’ department of Penny’s or Sears.

“Where’s your truck?” Ryan said. “Where’s Louise?”

“She took the truck, went to shop. Said she’d bring back a pizza but she gets in those stores, forgets the time.”

Eby’s wife was as minute as he, and nearly as wiry.

Like Eby, she bought her clothes in the children’s section, size ten-to-twelve. Eby maintained a capable gardening crew, but he and Louise liked to do the new landscaping themselves. They might be old and wizened, the cats thought, but Ryan said she had never seen a happier marriage. The Coldirons not only handled the landscaping for half-a-dozen builders, but now and then they purchased a decrepit old house and refurbished it, doing much of the work themselves. And they took a nice cruise every winter to Hawaii or to Curacao or the Bahamas. As Eby stacked his flats at the curb and returned to the back of the house, and Ryan and Hanni disappeared inside, Joe leaped into Hanni’s open convertible looking for her cell phone.

It wasn’t there. Not on the seat, not under the seat, not in the console that he managed to flip open, nor in the glove compartment. Dropping out of the car again, he headed for the house beside Dulcie. On the porch the dog lay obediently, his leash hooked around the six-by-six stanchion that supported the sweeping line of the roof. Ryan had left the door open, apparently so she could watch him.

Seeing neither Ryan or Hanni inside, the cats padded casually across the stone porch, facing the big weimaraner, ready to run if he lunged at them.

Rock looked at them with doggy amusement, not offering to attack in a sudden game of catch-the-kitty. Quickly they slipped inside, to crouch behind a carved Mexican chest beside the front door.

The room was big and open, the floor on several levels. The seating area was the lowest, with glass walls on three sides, a glass cube set against the oak woods. Its fourth side stepped up to the tiled entry. Its high rafters rose to the skylight, where the midmorning sun sent diffused light down across the tall fireplace. The built-in, raised seating was covered with bright pillows tossed against the glass walls. With the woods crowding in from outside, the sunken room was like a forest grotto, the embroidered pillows brilliant against the leafy background. Ryan knelt before the fireplace examining the wet rug.

She glanced up at the skylight, and studied the face of the fireplace: the plain white slab that rose from floor to vaulted ceiling showed no sign of water stains. Its surface was broken by three tall rectangular indentations, painted black inside, each holding a stainless-steel sculpture of abstract design.

From behind the Mexican chest, Dulcie drank in the beautiful room with twitching tail and wide eyes. The tiled entry stepped up again to the raised dining area, which gave the impression of a cave. To the right of that, and two steps higher, rose the master bedroom, its bank of white, carved doors standing open, its bright bedspread mirroring the colors of the sitting-room pillows. Looking and looking, Dulcie had the same rapt expression on her tabby face as when she made off with a neighbor’s cashmere sweater, the same little smile in her green eyes-a greedy female joy in beauty, a hunger for the lovely possessions mat no cat could ever truly own.

Kneeling in the sitting-well examining the wet rug, Ryan wondered who Marianna had sent down to install the three pieces of sculpture. Maybe the sculptor himself? He lived fairly near, some miles south of San Francisco. The job wouldn’t have taken long. One didn’t have to drill, just install and tighten the tension brackets, but certainly it wasn’t like Marianna to lift a hand. Marianna had left no message on Hanni’s tape, as she might if she’d been down. When Ryan felt the rug, it was wet all along the fireplace and back about three feet. Already it smelled of mildew. Using a screwdriver, she pried up a corner to feel the pad beneath.

The pad was sopping. Looking up at the skylight, she studied its pleated shade that had been drawn across the transparent dome. Not a sign of water stain, nor were the white walls of the skylight-well stained.

Rising, she fetched the pole with which to open the shade. When she accordioned it back, there was no spill of water, only sunlight fell more brightly into the room. Fetching a ladder from the truck she covered its ends with clean rags so not to mar the wall, and climbed to examine the Plexiglas dome at close range.

Finding no tiniest streak or discoloration, she frowned down at Hanni. “There’s no leak, never has been.”

Hanni stared up at her. “But the Landeaus haven’t been here. And it did rain last week. Go up on the roof, Ryan. Have a look up there.”

“When you called them, told them the rug was wet, what did they say?”

“My god, I didn’ttellher it was wet. I just casually asked if they’d been down. She saidno.I should tell that woman the roof leaks? You want her all over you?”

“But it hasn’t leaked. Either they’ve been down or someone else has been here. Did you check for a breakin? Call her again. Make her tell you when they were here, and what happened, or if they loaned out the key.““MakeMarianna tell me?” Hanni stared up at her, then went to check the windows. Soon the cats could hear her phoning. Ryan came down the ladder, telescoped it, and carried it outside where she extended it full length against the house.

Swinging onto the roof, she removed her shoes and laid them in the gutter. Walking barefoot across the glazed clay tiles, she knelt beside the skylight. She examined every inch. There was no way this baby could leak. She checked the installation of roof tiles over its two-foot apron, where the roof slanted down. There was no hairline crack in either the Plexiglas bubble or in the casing. Intending to develop irrefutable proof, she went down to the backyard, got a plastic pail from the garage, filled it with water, carried it up, and slowly poured it over the unoffending skylight while Hanni watched from inside.

Only after four bucketfuls of water and no leak was Hanni willing to call Marianna again. She came back from the phone shaking her head.

“Not home. I got Sullivan. They haven’t been down. Maybe it’s from underneath the floor, maybe a broken water line.”

“There is no water line there,” Ryan said irritably. “The water lines, Hanni, are under the kitchen and bath.”

“Waste line?” Hanni said lamely.

“For a top interior designer, you awe me with your ignorance.”

“Just trying to be helpful.”

Ryan knelt, sniffing at the rug at close range, moving to smell several places. She looked up at Hanni. “I smell wine. Call her, Hanni. Ask her if she spilled wine. My god, if she tried to mop it up, with that amount of water-she must have spilled the whole bottle.”

“I don’t want to call again. Let’s take the rug up.”

Within ten minutes they had the wet rug up. Moving the car and truck, they spread it across the parking apron as if carpeting the driveway for royalty. While they were thus occupied, and Joe watched from the living room windows, Dulcie found Hanni’s purse in the kitchen and pawed inside searching for Hanni’s cell phone.

Not there.

The Landeau phone stood on the kitchen counter right above her, but she daren’t use it. Even as Joe stood watch, Ryan and Hanni returned to the house.

“Theywerehere,” Ryan grumbled, coming in. “And they spilled something. Did you tell Sullivan we’re laying the new rug tomorrow?”

“I told him.”

“Why didn’t he tell you what they did? We can’t lay the rug until we know for sure what this is. The only other possibility is groundwater, and I have a deep trench clear around the hillside. Maybe Marianna came down alone and didn’t tell Sullivan.”

Hanni raised an eyebrow.

“Have you checked your tape again? Maybe she left you a message.”

Hanni just looked at her, her short white hair catching a gleam through the skylight.

“Call your tape. Where’s your cell phone?”

“Forgot to charge it last night,” Hanni said. “Left it home in the charger.”

“If you’d get another battery�”

Hanni shrugged, and headed for the kitchen as Ryan stepped outside to stroke Rock. The dog glanced in toward the space behind the carved chest where the cats crouched, but then he grew rigid, looking nervously around the room and pulling to get inside. Hanni returned, looking at her watch.

“Marianna called my tape half an hour ago. Said she just woke up, said she was down day before yesterday and spilled a bottle of pinot noir, that she came down to tend to some errands and to arrange a birthday surprise for Sullivan-that it was too late to call me, that she hadn’t told Sullivan she was down here and she knew I wouldn’t spoil the surprise. She took a lot of time explaining it all,” Hanni said, amused.

Ryan laughed. “So. Cold-blooded Marianna has a lover?”

Dulcie glanced at Joe, her green eyes equally amused. Sullivan Landeau was out of town a lot, was on the boards of half-a-dozen companies. She had heard Ryan and Clyde speculating on what Marianna did for entertainment.

“She said the wine bottle spun and fell before she could grab it, that there was wine everywhere, that she sopped it up with towels, and sponged the rug.”

“Can you imagine Marianna Landeau sponging a rug?”

“Dallas was on my tape too. He has the report from ballistics. He wants you to go on back to your place, he’ll meet you there.”

Ryan had knelt to examine the wood floor. Looking up at Hanni, she stiffened. “Why my place, why not the station when it’s only a few blocks away? Why doesn’t he want me to come to the station?”

“He said he’d let himself in. Shall I come with you?”

“Why do I feel so cold? I have no reason to fear the ballistics report.”

“You didn’t kill him, so what’s the big deal?”

Ryan rose, biting her lip. As they turned to leave, the cats slipped out past them and dropped into the bushes, moving so close to Rock they brushed against his leg, startling the big dog. They were concealed among the lavender bushes when Ryan undid Rock’s leash.

Crossing to her truck as Hanni locked the house, Ryan was just getting into the cab when the Coldiron truck arrived, Louise driving. Hanni waved to her. “Good shopping?”

“Awesome,” the little woman said, laughing.

“You want a rug for one of your rentals?” Hanni gestured toward the ten-by-ten square of beige shag. “It’s nearly new. A bit damp. It smells like pinot noir.”

“Added bonus,” Louise said as Eby came up the drive.

The cats watched Ryan turn out onto the street as Louise and Eby and Hanni rolled up the rug. And still they hadn’t called Dallas to tell him they’d seen the old man, to give the detective the make and license of the unlikely car Gramps was driving.

“Senior citizens,” Ryan told the big silver dog as she turned out of the drive, glancing back at the Coldirons. ‘Tough as old boots.” Of the half-dozen older people she had met since she moved to the village, the Coldirons were not unusual. Theirs was a tough generation. She wondered if her own age group could half keep up with them, or with Charlie’s gray-haired aunt Wilma who walked miles every day, and could hold her own on the pistol range. Or with Cora Lee French or with sixty-some Mavity Flowers who still did forty hours a week cleaning houses. “Those folks were the depression children, the children of war, the survivors,” she told Rock. ‘Tough as alligator hide.” And she kept talking to the big dog to avoid thinking. She did not want to go home and face, Dallas’s ballistics report.

“She’s scared,” Dulcie said, watching from the bushes as Ryan’s red truck pulled away. “Scared to go home, afraid of what Dallas has found. If Rupert was shot with her stolen gun�”

“So someone set her up. Question is, what other contrived evidence did they leave for the police to find?” Joe watched Hanni help the Coldirons load the rug. When the truck and Hanni’s Mercedes pulled away, he rubbed his face against a warm boulder then leaped atop the smooth granite, looking around the garden. “What was the dog on about? What did he smell?” He stood looking, then dropped down again and trotted back along the drive sniffing at the concrete.

He picked up Eby’s scent, then that of Hanni and of the dog. He found the fainter scent, perhaps days old, of a woman, most likely Marianna Landeau. Nothing else. Whatever the dog had smelled, escaped him. His mind still on getting access to a phone and calling Dallas, he turned to look at Dulcie.

“It’s only ten blocks to Ryan’s place, and the day’s getting warm. Maybe she’ll leave the truck window down for a few minutes-right there in her own driveway. Maybe we can call Dallas while he’s still at her apartment.”

“Just a nice run,” Dulcie said, and she took off through the woods heading downhill toward Ryan’s duplex. Leaping bushes or brushing beneath them, she was thankful that she and Joe had been given more than the usual amount of feline stamina; most cats were sprinters, your average housecat was not made for long-distance running. Careening down the last hill to the back of Ryan’s apartment and around to the front, she wasn’t even panting hard.

A squad car sat in the drive beside Ryan’s truck. The cats smelled fresh coffee. They circled both vehicles, but all the windows were up; and the covered door handles were beyond a cat’s ability to manipulate. Joe leaped at them, trying, but it was no good. There was no chance of using either phone to call the detective. Joe gave her a sour look and they fled around the side of the duplex to the back, where the tiny bathroom window waited.

15 [��������: pic_16.jpg]

Leaping atthe sill, Joe snatched and clung, hanging by his claws, peering down into the empty bathroom, then dropping to the sink and to the linoleum. As Dulcie followed, faintly they heard Ryan and Dallas talking, their voices so solemn that Dulcie shivered.

She liked Ryan Flannery; the young woman was bold and bright. She liked her because Clyde did, and because she was Dallas Garza’s niece. Liked her because Ryan had taken hold of her life and straightened out the kinks, exercising an almost feline degree of sensible independence: If you’re not welcome, if you’re badly treated, make a new start on life.

Now that Ryan was just into her new life, she didn’t need this malicious attempt to ruin her.

From behind, Joe nudged her. “Get a move on.” She’d been crouched as still as if frozen at a mouse hole, overwhelmed by her own droughts. Trotting into the studio, out of sight of the kitchen, they slipped beneath Ryan’s daybed.

The hardwood floor was admirably clean, no sneeze-making dust, not a fuzz ball in sight. That was another plus for Ryan. There was something really depressing about finding the underside of a couch thick with stalagmites of ancient, congealed dirt, the dusty floor littered with bobby pins, lost pencils, and old gum wrappers, with tangles of debris that clung to the whiskers or was gritty to the paws.

Looking across the big room to the front windows, they could see neat piles of papers stacked on Ryan’s desk but they couldn’t see much of the kitchen, just the end of the table and Dallas’s shoulder. They could smell, besides fresh coffee, the greasy-sugar scent of doughnuts, and could hear the occasional cup clink against a saucer. Dallas said, “I wish your dad were here.”

“Please don’t call him, there’s no need for him to think about the murder just now, to take his mind off what he’s doing. I’ll tell him when he gets home, when he’s done with this training. You’re my dad too, you and Scotty. Except,youcan’t play that role just now.”

“I can play any hand I like. But it would be nice to have Mike here. You sure you don’t want to stay with me or with Hanni, not be alone?”

“I’m fine. If the killer had wanted me dead, he’d have come after me instead of Rupert. I need to do a ton of desk work, clean up a stack of letters, pay my bills. I did manage to do the Jakeses’ billing, I have that almost ready to mail.”

“I’m glad you’ve got this big guy.” The cats heard Dallas patting the silver dog.

“What did Captain Harper say when he called, when you told him there’d been a murder? I can imagine he wasn’t happy.”

“He didn’t say much, took it in stride. Said he and Charlie are having a great time in the city. They’re taking a couple of days to drive home, through the wine country. And before they leave San Francisco he’s going to make a contact for me. Something I’d rather he did in person.”

“About Rupert?”

“A couple of guys on the force owe me. Good friends. You remember Tom Wills and Jessie Parker.”

“Of course. They were partners. Tom’s wife teaches second grade.”

“I’m giving them a list of the women I know Rupert was involved with. They can do a rundown on them, and on their husbands and boyfriends. Here’s the list. Anyone you’d care to add? Or any facts that would help?”

The cats heard paper rattle, then a little silence. Then, “You were very thorough, all these years. I don’t know half these names. Barbara Saunders? Darlene Renthke? June Holbrook? Martie Holland? I haven’t a clue, I never heard of these women. My god. How many were there? And you never told me. This makes me feel so unclean. Well here are five I know, all right. And you can add Priscilla Bloom. She drives a little red Porsche with, very likely, marks from a tow chain on the rear bumper, and a citation on record for blocking traffic on the street in front of my house.”

Dallas laughed.

“So Max will spend his honeymoon getting that line of the investigation started,” Ryan said. “And on the way home, they’ll swing through San Andreas to check on the Fargers? I’ll bet Charlie’s thrilled, having to cancel a dream voyage.”

“I imagine they made that decision before they left the village. Doesn’t matter,” Dallas said. “Those two will have a long and happy honeymoon no matter where they are.”

There was longer silence, broken by doggy chuffing as if someone was feeding the weimaraner doughnuts. Ryan said, “I feel so stupid not to have heard anything that night, not to have waked up. You’re going to make him sick with doughnuts.”

“Why don’t you call Charlie on their cellular, see if she’ll let you put up a fence out back. It’s not the optimum yard but it’ll do.”

“I told you, I don’t plan to keep him.”

“Of course you’ll keep him. I wouldn’t want to try to take him away. When I touch him, you’re jealous as a hen with chicks.”

“Why does everyone in the family always know what I’m thinking! And what I intend to do!”

“He’s a stray, Ryan. He’s been abandoned. You going to take him to the pound, like you told Curtis? If he’d been lost, the owner would have been looking all over San Andreas for him.”

She sighed. “You look tired. Have you eaten anything this morning besides doughnuts? Did you have breakfast?”

“Eggs and bacon. I’m fine. Davis took the evidence up to the county lab herself, the casts of footprints, the dried mud she bagged, the garbage. She wasn’t happy with Bonner walking through the mud behind the garage. Between the gun and bloody rags in the trash, of course the footprints were important.”

The cats had heard that before, that police officers were too often the biggest contaminators of a crime scene. Cops walking through the evidence, maybe in a hurry to apprehend a prowler. It just went to show, life wasn’t perfect. What was a cop supposed to do, fly around on little angel wings?

“Davis did a good job photographing the prints,” Dallas added.“Shestayed out of the mud.”

“You’re stalling. Was it my gun that killed him?”

“It’s Sunday, Ryan. I had to get a ballistics man off his fishing boat. He wasn’t happy. The only reason I did was to keep from having to arrest you and set up an arraignment.”

“If it wasn’t my gun, you’d have told me right away.”

“I’ll have the full report tomorrow. But ballistics turned up enough to keep from booking you.”

“What!Itwasn’tmy gun? Why didn’t you tell me!”

“The two bullets in your garage wall were fired from your gun, but ballistics doesn’t think they killed Rupert. There was no blood or flesh on them.”

“But how�? Those holes in the wall were so small. They couldn’t be my loads, mine would have done more damage. The holes in the back of his head�” she said sickly. “What am I missing here?”

“Forensics says Rupert was shot at about six feet by a hard case thirty-eight bullet or maybe a thirty-two.”

“But I load hollow points. You know that.”

There was a long silence.

“What?” she said. “You know I load with hollow points.”

Another silence. They heard the dog’s toenails on the linoleum. Dallas said, “Are you sure of your load? Are you certain what you loaded?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

Another heavy pause as if each word took great effort. “Your thirty-eight, registered to you, with your prints on it, was loaded with hard case. Four rounds and two empty cylinders.”

“No. I loaded hollow point, that’s all I use except on the range.”

“Maybe you forgot to reload out there? Left the�”

“You know I use wad-cutters for practice. You know I wouldn’t leave those loads in.”

“Anyone can make a-”

“Didn’t,” Ryan said. “I remember reloading-with hollow point.”

The cats well understood about hollow-point ammo and why Ryan used it. If she ever had to shoot in self-defense, a hard shell could travel an incredible distance, the bullet might go right through the intended and hit someone beyond. They’d read about such cases. But a hollow point would stop in the object or person hit, and would be more certain to halt an attacker-and that was what defensive shooting was about. The only reason Ryan would shoot someone was if her life were threatened and she had no choice.

“Someone not only took my gun from the locked glove compartment,” she said in a shaky voice, “they reloaded it.”

“You want the last doughnut?”

“Eat it. Don’t give Rock any more, you know better.”

“We searched every inch of the garage again, came back while you were with Hanni, went through every piece of that damned stuff you have stored down there. Did you ever think of taking that clutter to the dump?”

“That stuff’s valuable, sooner or later I’ll use every piece of those wonderful old details. I’ll use it if I� if I’m still in the free world to use it.”

“Come on, Ryan. Your prints weren’t on the trigger of the Airweight, though it had been fired.”

“Whose prints�?” she began excitedly.

“None. No prints on the trigger. Your prints were on the smooth parts of the grip and on the holster we took from the glove compartment.”

“I cleaned the Airweight last week. Scotty and I spent the afternoon at the San Andreas range, while we were waiting for the plumber. Cleaned it, loaded it with hollow point and holstered it. I did not,” she said as if Dallas was staring at her, “reload with practice ammo.”

“And what did you do with the gun?”

“Dropped it in my purse, kept it with me in the trailer, put it in my glove compartment when I started home. Locked the compartment when I left the truck to load the windows, and again when I stopped to eat.”

“It was there when you left the restaurant and hit the road again? Did you look?”

“No, I didn’t look. The truck was locked. I could see it from the restaurant. No one bothered it. But I� I left the gun in the truck that night and the next-in the locked truck in the locked glove compartment. When I got home I was so tired, I just unloaded the windows and came up and fell into bed. And the next night, after the wedding, you were all over the truck. No one had bothered it.”

“I wasn’t into the glove compartment, wasn’t in the cab.”

“Someone,” Ryan said softly, “someone unlocked my truck the night I got home, or the next night. Down there in the drive. Unlocked the glove compartment, took my gun, reloaded it, and either carried it away and killed Rupert, or killed him here, after you left-while I was right here asleep. Not ten feet from him.

“And where,” she said, “was Rock, that night? Where were you, big boy, while all this was happening? Out running the neighborhood chasing the ladies?”

“The better question,” Dallas said, “is what would he do if it happened again? He has a strong feeling for you, now.

“Except, you don’t know his background or training. You don’t know what he’s trained to do. I’d feel better if you’d move in with me for a while.”

“You can’t baby-sit me twenty-four hours a day. Whoever killed Rupert could break into your downstairs in the middle of the night, just as easily as into my truck and garage-even if Scotty’s back, staying with you. He sleeps like� he wouldn’t hear anything. Rock,” Ryan said softly, “Rock and I will do just fine.”

Joe glanced at Dulcie. Had Rupert’s killer also prowled around the Landeau cottage that night? Was that what Rock had smelled this morning that sent him snarling and ready to attack?

Maybe the killer had been after Marianna too? Did he have some vendetta against Marianna Landeau as well as against Rupert and Ryan?

But what vendetta? What was the connection? Did the killer plan to murder Marianna, as well, and incriminate Ryan for that crime?

More puzzling still, Ryan had seen how the dog behaved at the Landeau cottage, but she hadn’t told Dallas. Did she think the dog’s wariness wasn’t important, that he had simply been startled by Eby Coldiron, by the sound of someone unseen approaching up the drive?

And that was only one crime, one set of players. What about the bombing? The cats needed urgently to pass on to Detective Garza the information about Curtis’s uncle Hurlie who had perhaps sheltered the boy when he ran away to San Andreas, who had perhaps been involved in the bomb-making. They needed to call Dallas, or call Harper himself on his cell phone before he arrived in San Andreas, let him know about Hurlie, and that the address Curtis gave Dallas was probably as fake as a rubber rodent stuffed in a mouse hole.

The cats could see, from beneath Ryan’s daybed, Ryan’s phone sitting on the desk, its summons so strong that Joe was tempted beyond reason to creep across the room and try phoning Harper. With his voice drowned by Ryan and Dallas, could he make a quick call?

Oh, right. And see his entire life and Dulcie’s irrefutably hit the fan.

Dallas said, “You’re starting Clyde’s job tomorrow, you’ll be too busy to worry while we get on with the investigation.”

“I’m thinking of putting Clyde off. I don’t want to start ripping into the roof, then have to leave him with the house torn apart.”

“Have you told him that?”

“No. We’re having dinner. I’ll tell him then.”

“Is your crew ready?”

“Two good men. But I don’t like to�”

“Can you call Scotty? Does he have to stay up there?”

“He’s just doing some landscaping, putting in some sprinklers and walks. I guess he could-”

“Call him,” Dallas said. “Get him down here and get on with the Damen job. I wish your dad was here. Call Scotty. You need to stay on schedule. Clyde’s easy,” he said, his voice lighter, “he’ll understand if we throw you in jail, if he has to live for a few weeks with the roof off his house.”

“‘Specially if it rains.” Ryan returned his laugh shakily, sounding close to tears.

Chair legs scraped as if he had risen. “Hang in there, honey. We’ll get it sorted out. We’ll do our work, and you do yours, and it’ll come out all right.”

The cats heard him leave, and watched Ryan at the window following the detective’s progress as his car headed down the hill. Beyond the windows the setting sun hung like a third-degree spotlight blazing in at her, and forcing the cats’ pupils to the size of pinpricks. The sun would be gone soon, pressed into the sea by the dark clouds that hung heavy above it.

Ryan worked at her desk for some time. The cats napped lightly. So did the weimaraner, who must be very full indeed, of sugar doughnuts. As the sky dimmed, only the desk lamp and the light of the computer brightened the darkening room. Ryan didn’t pull the curtains. When her phone rang she answered abruptly, as if irritated at being disturbed.

“R. Flannery.”

As she listened, a smile touched her face. “Yes, I’m about ready, I just want to finish up some billing. We need to go over the time schedule too and rethink a few details.”

The call had waked Rock. Sniffing the scent of cat, and not preoccupied with sugar doughnuts, the big weimaraner trotted across the studio to where Joe and Dulcie were hidden, and poked his nose under the daybed.

“Get back!” Joe hissed in the faintest voice. “Get back!”

The silver dog, having no experience with obedience commands from a cat, flashed him a look of disbelief and hastily backed away.

“Sit,” Joe breathed.

Rock, his yellow eyes wide with amazement, sat down on the handwoven rug.

Ryan, still talking to Clyde, was punching in a program. “They’re open on Sunday? Mexican food sounds like heaven. See you in a few minutes.”

As she hung up the phone, behind her the big dog was trying, from a sitting position, to scoot closer to the daybed for a better look at the amazing talking cats.

“Stay,” Joe told Rock. “Stay!”

Frowning and perplexed, Rock settled back on his haunches. Ryan did some final addition, hit the print button, and headed for the bathroom. The cats could hear her brushing her teeth, then the little crackling sounds, barely audible, as she brushed her hair. She appeared again when the phone rang, smelling of dusting powder and mouthwash. She was wearing lipstick.

Standing by the desk she lifted the papers from the printer and picked up the phone. “Flannery,” she said shortly. “Oh� Hi, Larn.” She didn’t sound pleased. As she listened, she glanced over the printed sheets, then laid them on top of what was probably a stack of bills. “You did? No, I haven’t run my messages. I left San Andreas very late. Did your remodel client get in touch?”

Balancing the phone between shoulder and cheek, she tamped the papers to align them. “Looks like I’m booked for a few months, picked up another couple of jobs. And as for tonight, I’m sorry but I have a date. I was just going out the door.”

She hung up and turned, looking relieved that she had a ready excuse. She looked at Rock, frowning. He was still in the sitting position, hunched down staring fixedly under her daybed. As she started forward, the cats tensed to run.

“What are you staring at?”

The big dog turned to look at her.

“What?” she said softly. She looked at him and at the daybed which had only five inches of space underneath, not enough to accommodate any prowler. She glanced toward the closet and bath, and toward the door that led to the inside stairs, and silently she moved to try its bolt.

“What is it?” she asked Rock. “What’s the matter? Come, Rock,” she whispered. Again she glanced toward the closet and bath. But she had just come from there. She turned, looking into the empty kitchen.“Come,Rock.”

Rock seemed torn between the two commands. When Ryan knelt, the cats backed out from beneath the daybed on the far side.

But she wasn’t looking underneath. She reached out to Rock from his level as if she thought he needed that face-to-face reassurance. Rock went to her at once.

“You want to go for a romp with Rube, in Clyde’s yard?” At the wordgo,Rock began to dance. Ryan endured several minutes of wagging, leaping delight before she got him settled down.

Turning on the copier, she made a second set of bills, addressed a large brown envelope and tucked the copies inside with her printout. Weighing the envelope, she slapped on some stamps, picked up her purse, spoke to Rock again and they headed out, Ryan carrying the envelope and key-locking the door behind her.

The minute they heard her descend the stairs, the cats leaped to her desk. In the darkening evening, they watched her truck lights come on. Waiting to be sure she wouldn’t forget something and come rushing back, Joe nosed at the San Andreas bills for lumber, electrical and plumbing supplies, and miscellaneous hardware. Dulcie sat admiring Ryan’s business cards.“R. Flannery, Construction.Very nice. Home phone and cell phone.” Quickly she memorized the numbers.

But Joe, reaching a paw to the phone, stared out through the window hissing with surprise, watching a gray hatchback pull out without lights, following Ryan’s car; and before Dulcie could say a word Joe was pawing in the number of Ryan’s cell phone. The cats caught one glimpse of the driver as the car moved under a streetlight.

Ryan answered at once.

“This is a friend. It appears that a car is following you, a block back, without lights. A gray hatchback.”

“Who is this?”

“A neighbor, just happened to look out and see you leave in your red truck, saw this guy pull out from up the hill and take off following you. You might want to see if you can lose him. I didn’t see the plate number.”

“How many people in the car?”

“One man,” Joe said. “Tall and appeared to be thin. Seemed to have a relatively short haircut. That’s all I could see.”

“Where do you live? A neighbor? How did you-”

Joe hit the disconnect, then punched in another number, accessing Max Harper’s cell phone. Dulcie sat quietly listening, washing her paws and whiskers. She liked watching Joe at work. He’d told her about the first time he had ever used a phone, how scared he was. In the village drugstore, crouching behind the counter, he had used their business phone to call Clyde. That had been a big-time emotional trip, a milestone trauma for both the tomcat and Clyde.

It was different now. Joe had developed a really professional telephone presence.

When Dulcie heard a woman answer, she put her face close to Joe’s, to listen. He’d gotten Charlie. Dulcie gave him a stern sideways glare, adon’t you dare play gameslook.Don’t you dare draw Charlie into a conversation in front of Harper-if indeed the captain was present. Knowing Joe, the temptation had to be great, and she watched him with a warning gleam.

“Captain Harper’s number,” Charlie repeated.

“Charlie? It’s� This is�” Joe swallowed. “I have information for Captain Harper.”

“May I take a message?” The cats could hear in Charlie’s voice a desperate attempt to hide a guffaw of laughter. This was a first for her, taking a call from Joe Grey for the captain. Passing on a secret feline communication that, if Harper knew the identity of the caller, would send him right over the edge. “I� he’s driving,” she told Joe shakily. “Wait, I’ll turn on the speaker.”

There was a pause as if she was looking for the speaker button. “Go ahead.”

“Captain Harper? That boy, Curtis Farger-I think he gave you a no-good address in San Andreas.”

“Wait a minute, you’re cutting out,” Harper said. There was a long pause. Then, “Okay, go ahead.”

“Apparently Curtis was staying with his uncle up there, a Hurlie Farger. I think Hurlie is Gerrard’s brother. I don’t know where he lives. I get that the Fargers have friends or a contact of some sort in San Andreas, maybe friends of Hurlie’s.”

“Do you have something more specific?”

“At the moment, that’s all I have, that was all I could pick up, and you’ll have to run with that.”

“Where did you hear this?”

“I� a discussion between the boy and the old man.”

“A discussion where?”

“The old man was talking through the kid’s cell window. I’m sure Detective Garza will want to know that the old man is still in the village. Will you fill him in?”

“I’ll do that.” Was Harper laughing? Joe didn’t know how to take that. Laughing at what? He turned an alarmed look on Dulcie.

But maybe Harper was only laughing because the snitch was telling the captain what to do.

“Maybe someday,” Harper said, still with a smile in his voice, “you’ll have sufficient trust in me-as I’ve learned to trust you-to share your sources with me, and share your identity.”

Joe hit the disconnect, his paws tingling with nerves, his whiskers twitching. He looked at Dulcie, frowning. “I think I’ll tell Garza myself.”

She shrugged, amused at him because Harper had made him nervous.

Dialing a third number, he looked at Dulcie’s grin and pushed the headset across the blotter. “It’s your turn, miss smarty. You talk to Garza.”

“I can’t. What�” Taken off guard, she was silent when Garza came on the line.

“Detective Garza,” he repeated.

She swallowed. “That old man,” she said in the sultry voice that she saved for these special calls, “that old man that bombed the church. Are you looking for him?”

“We are,” Garza said, dispensing with unnecessary questions.

“He’s in the village, or he was around noon today. He’s driving a black Jaguar convertible�” She allowed herself a little laugh. “Done up real classy with zebra seat covers. California license two-Z-J-Z-nine-one-seven.

“He talked with the boy, through that high little window into the holding cell. He climbed up that leaning oak trunk, and nearly fell. He’s pretty crippled. They have-the boy has an uncle in San Andreas. Hurlie Farger, apparently Gerrard’s brother. That’s where the boy was staying. We’ve already informed Captain Harper. He was in his car, so they may already be on their way to San Andreas.” And before Garza could ask any questions, Dulcie hit the disconnect and collapsed on the blotter.

Joe watched her, grinning. “That should shake things up. Let’s hit for Lupe’s Playa, before we miss the action-and miss supper.”

16 [��������: pic_17.jpg]

The aromasof garlic and chilies drew Ryan like a benediction. The enticement of a spicy, delicious meal, the hot Mexican music, the soft light cast by the swinging lanterns, all the rich setting of Lupe’s Playa seemed to cosset and comfort her. On the brick patio beneath the gently blowing oaks, they had their favorite table in the far corner beside the brick wall. This was where she and Clyde had first met, when she first arrived in the village and Dallas brought her here for dinner. Now, seated beside Clyde, ordering a beer, she took his hand, comforted by his strong presence. Ever since taking the call on her cell phone she had felt even more uncertain, even more raw and exposed.

She hadn’t told Clyde about the call, hadn’t wanted to spoil their evening. Now, she tried not to keep glancing out through the pieced-brick patio wall, to the street, to see if shehadbeen followed. Yet she couldn’t help watching the host’s desk, through the patio doors, studying each new arrival, wondering� a thin man, the caller had said. She had no idea whether she would know the person-ifshe’d been followed, if this wasn’t some hoax, someone wanting to harass her. Who could have made such a call?

Certainly Max Harper received some strange phone calls. But she wasn’t a cop, she was a private citizen. How could this call tonight have any connection to a police informant?

Whatever the truth, that anonymous call, just after the murder, had given her a deep and lasting chill.

It wasn’t as if she knew her neighbors, as if any of them would be concerned about her safety. Certainly none of them would have her phone numbers handy.

“So, you have another date? You want to hurry on through dinner?”

She looked at him blankly.

“You’ve been staring out at the street like you’re waiting for a lost lover.”

“I had a phone call, coming down. He wouldn’t give a name. Said that when I left the apartment I was followed. I didn’t want to tell you, and spoil the evening. He described a slim man driving a gray hatchback, said he’d been parked above the apartment apparently waiting for me. It’s probably some nut call, but�”

Clyde’s expression startled her. His face flushed but he didn’t seem exactly surprised. “What the hell. You don’t need crazy phone calls on top of everything else.”

“It made me a little nervous, that’s all,” she said quickly. She wiped some water from the table with her napkin and unrolled the blueprints, weighting them down with the chip and salsa bowls. Clyde leaned over, studying the drawings. She had presented the floor plan and several elevations. The vaulted ceiling of the new room was impressive, both from the street and from within.

But even with the excitement of the promised addition, Clyde’s mind remained on the phantom snitch. His thoughts about the tomcat were not charitable. Did Joe have to upset Ryan? Probably the car Joe saw had been some neighbor or visitor pulling away, and Joe had let his imagination run. Damn cat had to mind everyone’s business. And what was he doing near Ryan’s place? Or,inRyan’s place? Involuntarily Clyde glanced out through the pierced wall, himself, at the slowly passing cars, wondering if someonehadfollowed her-and that message to Ryan wasn’t the only phone call Joe had placed tonight.

Just before Clyde left the house Max had called, on his way from San Francisco to Sonoma. The snitch had been in touch, the same unidentified voice that contacted Harper periodically. Max always filled Clyde in because those calls made Max nervous. The snitch had never been identified, the caller refused to give his name, and he did not fit the profile of most snitches-he sure never asked for payment.

The bottom line was, Joe Grey could not stay off the phone.

And now, tonight, had the snitch gone too far? He had told Harper that the San Andreas address for Curtis Farger was a fake, that Curtis had been staying with an uncle up there. How could the tomcat know such a thing, so soon after the bombing? Know more about the young prisoner than did either Garza or Detective Davis, both of whom had questioned Curtis?

This time, Clyde didn’t see how Joe could have a solid source, for either call. So he saw someone driving down Ryan’s street behind her. Probably some guy running down to the store for a bottle of milk or a six-pack. Joe had to be snatching at whirlwinds, clawing at unreliable “facts” that would only serve to muddy the investigation. Clyde didn’t like to think that of Joe.

Certainly he’d underestimated Joe in the past; but these calls just seemed too far out-scaring Ryan, and maybe sending Harper on a wild-goose chase. And there was nothing that he, Clyde, could say to Harper to stop him from wasting his time.That was my tomcat calling, Max, and this time, I gotta say, he was way off base.

Right.

Clyde did not stop to examine his perplexed anger, or to consider that it grew precisely from his own increased respect for the small hunter’s skill. Deeply irritated with Joe, wanting only to dismiss the matter, he concentrated on the blueprints.

The first stage of the work to update his modest Cape Cod cottage called for converting the smaller of Clyde’s two bedrooms into a stairway and storage closet, the stairs to lead to the new second floor. Ryan planned to jack the tilting roof straight up to form two walls of the new upstairs. She said this was the fastest and most economical approach, and it was a concept that made sense to Clyde. The new master bedroom would have a fireplace, two walk-in closets, a compartmentalized bath, and a large study with a second fireplace. Both fireplaces would have gas logs but could be converted easily to burning wood. Neither Clyde nor Ryan had mentioned that the suite was admirably set up for a couple.

The waiter appeared. As they ordered, Clyde glanced out through the wall again, to where Ryan’s truck was parked. Several tourists were passing, glancing into the cab as people seemed compelled to do, peering into empty vehicles.

“It’ll take only a day to raise the roof,” Ryan said, “once we have the end walls off. A few days to build and sheath the new roof and new end walls. Then we’ll be dried in and it won’t matter what the weather does.“Or if I go to jail,she thought. “My uncle Scotty will be coming down to work on the job. My dad’s brother.”

Clyde nodded. “Dallas calls him a red-faced rounder of an Irishman with a Scotch name and the mind of an insanely talented chess player.”

She laughed. “Scotty loves analyzing the smallest detail, sorting out every possibility. It was from Scotty I learned to love all kinds of puzzles-that’s what made me want to be a builder. When I was little he taught me about space, the uses of space. I learned to design from Scotty-silly games a kid loves, that teach you to look for all possibilities in how you arrange and use space.”

She looked at him solemnly.He didn’t teach me about finding a dead body in your space. What kind of puzzle is that?She said, “Dallas called Harper. He and Charlie are coming back, canceling the cruise.”

“Yes, Harper called me just before I left the house. They were on the road, going to stay somewhere in the wine country tonight then spend a day or two in San Andreas, see if they can get a line on what the boy was doing up there.”

“Some honeymoon.”

“Dallas said you talked with the kid again, in jail. What do you make of him, now?”

“He’s difficult to read. Maybe scared, maybe just hard-nosed defiant. It’s ugly to think about a ten-year-old kid without conscience, but it can happen. Or maybe,” she said, “maybe he’s trying real hard to protect his grampa.”

“You think the old man set the bomb?”

“His son’s in prison for running a meth lab. The fact that Harper couldn’t make a case against Grampa may have left the old boy feeling like he had to do a little payback.”

“Pretty heavy payback. Have you wondered if the kid, when he was up in San Andreas, had anything to do with copying your truck keys?”

“It’s possible. That was the first thing Dallas asked me. We both had keys, Scotty and I. I suppose mine could have gone missing for hours, and I wouldn’t notice. But that’s�” She shivered. “If that’s the case, who got him to steal them?”

Clyde buttered a tortilla. “Whatever they find out about the boy, looks like the department’s stuck with him for a while. Harper said juvenile hall can’t take him, he’d just talked with Dallas. The fire they had last month destroyed most of the building, and the temporary quarters aren’t that secure. Juvenile authorities want Curtis to stay where he is.”

“When Max called, did you talk with Charlie too?”

He nodded. “She had lunch with Kate Osborne yesterday in the city while Max made some phone calls and kept an appointment-a couple of Dallas’s buddies on San Francisco PD,” he said softly. “They’ll be checking, unofficially at this point, on Rupert’s connections in the city.”

“The girlfriends,” she said. “That’s encouraging.”

He nodded. “The girlfriends, and their male companions. Maybe they’ll turn up a jealous lover or two, find something they can run on.”

“I hope.” She touched his hand. “I feel shaky about getting through your job without the grand jury coming after me. If you want to�”

“Will you quit that? You didn’t kill him and you’re not going to jail.” He took her hand. “You figure a month to do my upstairs. You were right on schedule with my patio construction, so I’m guessing you will be with this. Long before that, Dallas and Harper will have Rupert’s killer behind bars.”

She just looked at him.

“Believe me. You have no faith in those guys? In your own uncle?” He winked at her. “You’ll have to stay out of jail if you mean to be on time, so you can get on with the next project.” They had agreed early on that ripping out one downstairs wall, opening Clyde’s seldom-used dining room to the kitchen to make one big space for casual entertaining, fit Clyde’s lifestyle. Clyde and his friends played poker in the kitchen, and enjoyed their potluck meals there, or on the new enclosed patio.

“And you still want the little tower at one end of the new upstairs?”

“Absolutely. Joe would feel slighted if he didn’t have his own place.”

Ryan laughed. “You don’t spoil your animals.” “Of course not.“A private cat tower,Joe Grey had said,with glass all around. Sun warmed, with an ocean view. A private feline retreat, off-limits to humans.

But as he joked with Ryan and tried to reassure her, Clyde kept wondering if the cats had called her from her apartment. And wondering if someonehadfollowed her. Wondering if they might have doubled back when they were sure the apartment was empty, maybe used a duplicate key? And that worried him. If someone was in there, he prayed the cats had left.

The gray hatchback did return to Ryan’s place while the cats were still crouched on the desk. They were poised to leave when the same car passed below the windows, coming slowly up the hill, and parked half a block up the street.

A tall man emerged moving swiftly toward the building and silently up the wooden stairs. He was maybe forty, with soft brown hair in a handsome blow-dry and, in his right hand, a small leather case the size of a cell phone. As he approached the door the cats dropped off the desk and under the daybed. They were beginning to feel like moles, or like a pair of fuzzy slippers abandoned beneath the mattress. He knocked, knocked again, waited a few minutes, knocked a third time. Then faint scratching sounds began.

“Picking the lock,” Joe said.

He was inside within seconds, moving directly to Ryan’s desk. Pulling the curtain across the broad windows, he switched on the lamp to low and reached to a pile of files. But then he shoved them back, laughing softly, and picked up the bills and the copy of her billing for the Jakes job, that lay on the blotter. Chuckling, he turned on her computer. The cats glanced at each other. What had these no-good types done before the invention of computers? Seemed like every kind of villainy, these days, required electronic assistance.

But Dulcie couldn’t be still, she kept fidgeting and glancing away toward the bathroom window, thinking about going home, thinking about the kit. Joe laid his ears back, hissing.

“Will you cut it out? She’s fine.”

“We don’t know that. We don’t know where she is. I don’t like when she’s gone for hours and hours. We haven’t seen her since breakfast.”

Joe hissed again gently to make her shut up, and watched their burglar bring up Ryan’s bookkeeping program. He went immediately to the Jakes account.

He made a disk copy of the pages, then changed the figures on her hard drive, making them higher, adding several thousand dollars to the bill. Cooking Ryan’s books, setting her up for some kind of swindle. Turning on her copy machine, he made two sets of her lumber and supply bills. He put one set in his pocket, and worked on the other with an eraser and Wite-Out, apparently inserting new figures to match the higher numbers in her computer. He made fresh copies of these. As he ran a printout of the doctored billing, the cats could only puzzle over where this was leading. Ryan had taken her completed bill with her, ready to mail. Had the guy guessed that? Had he seen her through the window working at her desk? Did he plan somehow to intercept the envelope after she mailed it?

Or had she not had time to mail it? Was the envelope still in her truck? If he had followed her to the restaurant, he’d know she didn’t stop at a mailbox. Maybe he’d strolled by her truck and seen the envelope lying on the seat.

Shutting down the machine and slipping his various sets of bills and the printout into his pocket, he was out of there quickly, locking the door behind him. The cats fled to the desk watching him descend the stairs, walk the half block up the bill, and swing into the gray hatchback. He headed back toward the village.

“What now?” Dulcie said. “If she’s already mailed her bill, what’s he going to do with that stuff? Do you think that was Larn Williams? That he called earlier just to see if she was going out this evening?”

Joe didn’t answer. Knocking the phone off the cradle, for the second time that night he pawed in the number of Ryan’s cell phone.

Ryan was enjoying the last of her flan when her cell phone rang. She didn’t want to answer, she pushed it across the table to Clyde.

“R. Flannery, construction,” he said between mouthfuls.

“May I speak to R. Flannery? I called earlier, I have an urgent message for her.”

“I can take the message,” Clyde told Joe, trying not shout with rage.

At the other end, Joe sighed. “All right,” he said. “Ithinkthe guy who followed her is going to break into her truck, within the next few minutes. It’s kind of complicated.”

Clyde stared at the phone. “Just a minute.” He handed the phone to Ryan. “You’d better take this.” But he leaned close to listen.

“It’s me again,” Joe said. “I believe someone is intent on falsifying your billing for the Jakes addition in San Andreas. Have you mailed that bill?”

“I� who is this? How do you�? What are you talking about?”

“Have you mailed the bill or is it still in your truck?”

“No. Yes. It’s in my truck. What�?”

“The person who followed you earlier returned to your apartment and broke in. With lock picks. While you’ve been having dinner he changed the billing on your computer and made copies of the original bills and doctored them. He ran a new printout, made copies of the doctored bills, and left. I’d guess he’s headed your way.”

“Who is this? How could you know such a thing?”

“He prepared the new statement for considerably more than your original cost-plus numbers. If you’ve mailed the bill, probably no harm done-unless he is able to intercept it at the other end. If you haven’t mailed it, I think he’ll try to break into your truck, open the envelope, and switch billings. In other words, he wants to set you up, add embezzlement to the possible charge of murder.”

“Why would he bother? Isn’t murder enough?”

“Maybe he thinks embezzlement would in some way strengthen the murder charges.”

“What does this guy look like, who’s supposed to be doing all this?”

Listening to the caller’s description of the burglar, she felt all warmth drain from her hands and body.

“Don’t let him get that envelope,” the caller said. “There isn’t much time.” And he hung up.

Hitting the disconnect, Joe dropped to the floor and headed for the bathroom window. Ahead of him Dulcie, balanced on the windowsill, said, “I’m going home first, see if the kit’s there. She�”

“There’s not time,” he said, leaping past her. “We’ll miss the action.”

“Can’t help it. Go watch Ryan’s truck. I’ll be along when I know the kit’s safe.”

“But�”

Dropping from the window she fled around the building and raced down the sidewalk heading for home, filled with worry.

17 [��������: pic_18.jpg]

The rustywire netting of the chicken houses was half falling down like those the kit had seen long ago in her travels when she was small. She longed to push inside and have a look but the smell stopped her, burning and stinging her nose. The stink came strongest where the dirt floor of the pens was covered with sheets of rotting plywood. In the darkening evening she could see that one of those had been shifted aside. A black emptiness loomed beneath, a hole big enough for a man to slip through. Why would a man want to go down there? Padding around the side of the pen, she could see down into the pit where heavy timbers stood against the earthen walls. Rough steps led down.

Backing away sneezing and coughing, she knew she had found something important. What was the old man up to? She wanted to look closer, but she daren’t creep down into his stinking cellar, that smell was like something that would reach up and grab her. Tales filled her of human people dying, of skin and eyes burned, of lungs rotted, and even their brains turned to dust, and she hurried away, afraid clear down to her paws.

But she could follow the old man, if she kept her distance. She could see what that was about, dumping his bags of garbage down there among the ruins.

Hurrying away from the ugly, deserted cabin, she raced down the narrow road and down the scrubby, empty hills as fast and silent as a hawk’s shadow. But she ran scared. Traveling the darkening, empty land so far from home, alone, was not like when she slipped through the night shoulder to shoulder with Joe Grey and Dulcie feeling bold and safe. Watching the falling blackness around her for prowling raccoons and coyotes or bobcats, she ran pell-mell for the Pamillon estate.

Dulcie hurried through the village beneath pools of light from the shop windows heading home, praying the kit was there, an uneasy feeling in her stomach, a frightened tremor that drew her racing along the sidewalks brushing past pedestrians’ hard shoes and dodging leashed dogs, running, running until at last she was flying through Wilma’s flowers and in under the plastic flap of her cat door. Mewing, she prowled the house looking for the kit, mewing and peering behind livingroom furniture and under the beds, unwilling to speak until she was sure Wilma didn’t have company.

Determining at last that the house was empty of humans and of the kit as well, she called out anyway, her voice echoing hollowly. “Kit, come out. Kit, are you there? Please come out, it’s important.” All this in a voice that was hardly a whisper though her calls would reach feline ears.

There was no answer, not a purr, no soft brush of fur against carpet or hardwood as she would hear if the kit sneaked up on her, playing games.

At last, leaving the house again, she scented back and forth across the garden, and searched driveway and sidewalk for a fresh track. She raced up a trellis and sniffed all across the roof too and up the hill in back through the tall dry grass where hated foxtails leaped into her fur. Finding no fresh scent of the kit she grew increasingly worried. Kit hadn’t been home at all.

Well, she couldn’t search the whole world, one couldn’t searchallthe hills though she and Joe had tried to do just that when the kit disappeared for three days last winter.

But the kit had been smaller then, and more vulnerable. She was a grown-up cat now. And, as Kit was far more than an ordinary cat, Dulcie thought stubbornly, she would have to take responsibility for herself.

Hurting and cross but giving up at last, Dulcie headed for Lupe’s Playa.Imust not worry, I hate when Wilma worries about me. The kit is big now and can take care of herself.But Dulcie was so unsettled that when she saw Joe on the low branch of a cypress tree outside Lupe’s Playa she scorched up the trunk ploughing straight into him, shivering.

He hardly noticed her; his entire attention was on Ryan’s red pickup parked just across the street.

The passenger door stood open. A man sat inside, poised with one foot on the curb and watching the restaurant through the window, as if ready to slip away at any sign of Ryan.

Joe Grey glanced at her, and smiled. “He opened the envelope. Removed Ryan’s billing.” They watched him fill Ryan’s large brown envelope with the sheaf of papers from his pocket. “He opened the door with a long, thin rod. Only took a second. Opened the bottom of the envelope, peeled it back as slick as skinning a mouse. He doesn’t see Ryan and Clyde watching.” He looked toward the patio wall where the bricks were spaced in an open and decorative pattern offering passersby a teasing view of the garden and diners. In the restaurant’s soft backlight Dulcie could just see Ryan and Clyde with their heads together, peering out through the wall’s concealing vine. Talk about cats spying.

“I wonder if Ryan called Detective Garza,” Dulcie said, glancing along the street as if Garza or Detective Davis might have hurried over from the station to stand among the shadows.

“I don’t think so. She means to lead the guy on-that’s Larn Williams, all right.” Joe flicked an ear. “I was on the wall when he approached the truck. She told Clyde she can make a second switch, print a new, correct bill and mail it. Let Williams think he was successful, let him wait for the Jakeses to hit the roof because the bill’s so high, wait for them to maybe file a lawsuit. She thinks he might tell the Jakeses that she cooked the books, even before the bill arrives, make up some story about how he found out.”

“Would they believe him?”

“Are Larn Williams and the Jakeses close friends? We don’t know a thing about them.” Again Joe smiled. “One more phone call. Who knows how much Harper can pick up about Williams, while he’s in San Andreas?”

“You’re going to askHarperto gather informationfor you?”

“Turnabout,” the tomcat said softly, looking smug.

Dulcie stared at him for a long time. She did not reply.

Williams sealed the envelope and laid it on the seat. “Same position as he found it,” Joe said. Quietly Williams depressed the lock, shut the truck door and slipped away up the street, disappearing around the corner. The cats heard a car start. He was gone when Ryan and Clyde emerged.

Ryan drove slowly away as if she had no idea the truck had been broken into. Clyde, parked in the next block, followed her.

“What will they do now?” Dulcie said.

“She’ll swing by our place, I guess. She left Rock there. I’m betting that when they finish going over tomorrow’s work Clyde will follow her home. Check out her apartment. Maybe try to talk her into staying at her uncle’s for a few nights.”

“She won’t, she’s too independent. And if Larn Williams wanted to kill her, why would he bother setting her up for a lawsuit?” Dulcie backed quickly down the tree and headed up the street toward home. “Maybe the kit’s back, maybe she’s raiding the refrigerator right now.”

And Joe, his stomach rumbling with hunger, galloped along beside her. Within minutes they were flying through Wilma’s garden among a jungle of chrysanthemums and late-blooming geraniums, the flowers’ scents collecting on their coats as they approached the gray stone cottage.

Padding up the back steps and in through Dulcie’s cat door, entering Wilma’s immaculate blue-and-white kitchen, Joe headed directly for the refrigerator but Dulcie never paused, off she went, galloping through the house again searching for the kit.

The first time Dulcie ever brought Joe here, she had taught him to open the heavy, sealed door of the refrigerator, to leap to the counter, brace his hind paws in the handle and shove. Now, forcing it open, he dropped to the floor catching the door as it swung out. The bottom shelf was Dulcie’s, and Wilma always left something appealing; she didn’t forget half the time the way Clyde did. Joe might find on his own refrigerator shelf a fancy gourmet selection from Jolly’s Deli, left over from the last poker game, or the dried up end of a fossilized hot dog.

Dulcie’s private stock tonight included two custards from Jolly’s, sliced roast chicken, a bowl of apricots in cream, and crisply simmered string beans with bits of bacon, all the offerings stored in Styrofoam cups that were light enough for a cat to lift, and with easily removable lids that were gentle on feline teeth. He had them out and was opening them when Dulcie returned.

“Kit’s not home. And Wilma’s still gone. I think she said there was some kind of lecture tonight on the changing tax picture.”

“Sounds deadly. Why does she go to those things?”

“To reduce her taxes, so she can buy gourmet food for us.” She nosed at the array of delicacies that he had arranged on the blue linoleum. “I wish the kit would come home.”

But the kit did not appear. Joe and Dulcie feasted, then Joe retired to Wilma’s desk to call Harper. He punched in the number but there was no answer. He tried again half an hour later, and again.

“The phone’s turned off,” Dulcie said. “Leave a message.”

Joe didn’t like to use the phone’s message center, but he did at last, then curled up on the blue velvet couch beside Dulcie and fell quickly asleep. Curled next to him, Dulcie lay worrying. The kit’s propensity for trouble seemed so much worse at night, when Dulcie imagined all kinds of calamities. She dozed restlessly, jerking awake when Wilma came in, and again at 6:00 in the morning when she heard her cat door flapping.

She leaped up, fully alert as the kit galloped into the living room, her tail high, her yellow eyes gleaming. Above them, the windows were growing pale. Hopping to the couch, Kit nosed excitedly at Dulcie. “I found the old man. I found where he lives. I smelled chemicals so maybe it’s where he made the bomb. I found where he dumps his trash. Why does bomb-making leave all that trash?”

‘Trash?” Joe said, sitting up yawning. “What kind of trash?”

“Boxes and cans that smell terrible of chemicals.”

He rose to stand over her. “Where, Kit? How much trash? Where did you find it?”

The kit looked longingly back toward the kitchen where she had raced past the empty plastic dishes. “Is there anything left to eat?”

“We left a custard in the refrigerator,” Dulcie said, “and some chicken.”

The kit took off for the kitchen. Following her, they watched her jump up to force open the heavy door. The minute it flew back she raked out the cartons, fighting open the loosely applied lids, and got down to the serious business of breakfast. She ate ravenously, gobbling more like a starving hound than a cat, making little slurping noises. She didn’t speak or look up until the custard and the chicken had disappeared and the containers were licked clean.

“All right,” Joe said when the kit sat contentedly licking her paws. “Let’s have it.”

“I need to use the phone,” the kit said softly. “Right now. I need to call Detective Garza.”

Joe and Dulcie stared at her. “Come in the living room,” Joe said. “Comenow,Kit.”

Cutting her eyes at Dulcie, the kit headed obediently for the living room and up onto the blue velvet couch.

“Start again,” Joe said, pacing across the coffee table. “From the beginning.”

“I found where the old man lives. Up the hills above the Pamillon estate in a shack on the side of a cliff above that big gully and a chicken house hanging-”

“Kit.Howdid you find him?”

“I hid in his car. A black Jaguar with the top down. He drove so twisty it made me carsick again. An old shack and the chicken houses hanging on the edge of the cliff and I could smell chemicals and there weren’t any chickens, maybe the chemicals killed them all. He filled his car with stinking garbage bags and went away and then I saw his car far down in the old ruins and-”

“Kit,” Joe said, “slow down. This is all running together. What are you leaving out?”

The kit stared at him.

“For starters, where did you find his car?”

“At the police station. After he talked to that boy. He drove like fury. I didn’t know why he had such a nice car or why he would load it down with garbage. I-”

Dulcie licked Kit’s ear. “Go slower. Tell us slower.”

The kit started over from where she had slipped into the old man’s black Jaguar. She described the shack and how she had gone inside. How he had loaded up his trash and driven down into the Pamillon estate. “I went there. I ran and ran.”

The hills had loomed below her black and silent, and her head was filled with unfriendly beasts hunting for their supper. She ran listening for every sound, watching for any movement among rock and bushy shadow. Ran flying down the hills as night fell, trying to make no noise herself in the dry grass, ran terrified until the half-fallen mansion loomed against the darkening sky, and ancient dead trees rose up with reaching arms.

Slipping into the ruins among the old oaks she had padded among fallen walls into the empty mansion with its rooms open to the stars. She could smell where the old man had walked, his scent thick, his old-man stink mixed with the nose-burning chemical odors. His trail led through the half-fallen parlor and through the kitchen and down into the cellars, his sour trail clinging along the walls.

The cellars were too black even for a cat to see. She had to travel by her whiskers alone, by the little electric messages telegraphed from muzzle and paws. Warily jumping at every imagined movement, she drew deep beneath the mansion. A thinnest light came at last seeping in from a great crack in the cellar wall. And smells exploded suddenly, as loud as a radio blaring on. She could barely make out, ahead in the blackness, a looming form like a huge misshapen beast. It was silent and still, and it stunk: the garbage bags, black and lumpy. Imagining the old man standing there too, she spun and ran again back and up through the tunnels until at last she could see starlight once more, above the open rooms.

Hiding behind fallen stones panting and staring out at the night sky, she had crept up the broken stairs to the nursery and into the old chest beside the fireplace where once her friend Dillon Thurwell had hidden. There, hungry and frightened and very tired, she had curled up in a tight ball trying to comfort herself, and soon she slept.

She had awakened when the first hint of dawn shone in one long pale crack beneath the lid of the chest. Pushing up the lid with her nose, and crawling out, she had padded across the second-floor nursery to where the wall fell away. There she stood looking down at the heaps of rock and dead oaks that bristled like some gigantic devil’s garden, stood looking past the ruins to the hills that dropped away below her. Wanting to be home right then, right that minute, wanting breakfast, wanting most of all to telephone Dallas Garza and tell him where that old man was, who had tried to kill half the village. Was she the only one in the world who knew where that old man was hiding? Consumed by her need she had leaped down the ragged stairs flying over heaped stones and through tangled bushes running for home, running.

“And here I am,” said the kit, licking a last smear of custard from her whiskers. “No one else knows where that old man is. No one but the boy because the boy’s clothes were in the shack but that boy will never tell anyone.” And she sailed to the desk and pawed at the phone, her ears and whiskers sharp forward, her long fluffy tail high and lashing-this kit who was scared of the phone but who, right now, was more full of herself and more eager to confide in the law, or at least to confide in Detective Garza.

18 [��������: pic_19.jpg]

“Very smooth,“Joe said, leaping on the breakfast table, landing inches from Clyde’s plate.

“What’s smooth?” Clyde said, wiping up the last of his fried eggs. “Where’ve you been? Your breakfast’s getting cold.”

“Up on the roof, watching them put up the platform and stairs. Pretty fast workers.”

“Scaffolding. It’s called scaffolding.” Clyde glanced at his watch. “They got here before seven, one of the carpenters had the lumber on his truck. They’re expecting another delivery at eight.”

“I gather Ryan’s not a union member. She’d never get away with starting work so early.” Already Joe’s ears felt numb from the thunder of hammers and the rasping scream of the electric saws. He might boast superior knowledge and skills, for a tomcat, with none of the normal feline fears, but the sound of a Skilsaw or an electric drill still sent shivers up his furry spine.

The scaffolding that Ryan had constructed along the side of the house, with a temporary stairway from the front sidewalk, was indeed a platform large and strong enough to support any number of carpenters plus a considerable weight in lumber and building materials. The men wouldn’t have to enter the house except to connect the plumbing and, at some point in the job, to build the inner stairway in half of Clyde’s small guest room. Clyde’s present bedroom would become the new guest room, without his desk and weight equipment that now cluttered the little space. That would all be moved upstairs.

“They plan to have the shingles off the roof this morning before the lumber arrives,” Clyde said. “There’ll be roofing nails all over the yard. I’m taking the morning off to vacuum them up, but you cats stay out of the way. Watch your paws. Stay inside when the truck gets here, until they’ve dropped that load of lumber. Be sure the kit is inside.”

“Anything else? Don’t pick up any fleas? Stay away from barking dogs?”

Clyde gave him a long, patient look. “I am only a human. You can’t expect me to be as intelligent or perceptive as a feline. But because I am human, I worry about you. That is what humans do. You are going to have to make allowances. If you want to keep me healthy and happy and keep me bringing home the kippers, you will have to humor me. Stay out of the way of the truck. Is that clear?”

“There is no need for early morning sarcasm. I already told Dulcie about the lumber. And I laid down the law to the kit. You don’t need to write a script and do a two-minute stand-up.”

Clyde glared.

But Joe Grey smiled. “A load of lumber in the yard will be the end of that patch of scruffy grass you euphemistically call the front lawn.”

Ignoring him, Clyde rose to rinse his plate. Joe nibbled at his own breakfast. “Very nice omelet.” Savoring the Brie-spinach-bacon-and-cheese concoction, he pawed open the morning paper.

DETECTIVE’S NIECE PRIME MURDER SUSPECT

San Francisco contractor Rupert Dannizer was found shot to death Sunday morning in the garage of local contractor Ryan Flannery, niece of newly appointed police detective Dallas Garza.

Rupert’s death had not come to the attention of reporters until the Sunday edition was already on the street. This Monday morning it filled me front page above the fold. There was no photograph of the body or of Ryan; likely Dallas had seen to that. Joe scanned the article, which said nothing that he didn’t already know. The press had made clear mat the murdered man’s widow, in whose garage the body had been found, was not only police detective Dallas Garza’s niece, but was the sister of local interior designer Hanni Coon. And that Ryan’s father was Michael Flannery, chief U.S. probation officer for the northern district of California, based in San Francisco. The article pointed out that Ryan had filed for divorce from Dannizer six months earlier when she moved to Molena Point to open a separate contracting business. It gave the name of her new business and some interesting details about the lawsuit in which she was suing Dannizer for half the value of their San Francisco firm, Dannizer Construction. That lawsuit was now unnecessary. The paper made it clear that, with Rupert’s death, Ryan would be a wealthy woman. Joe scanned, as well, theGazette’slatest article on the church bombing, but it was only a rehash of previous reports, except for information on those who had been treated for minors wounds or shock, and that Cora Lee French had been released from the hospital.

Now that Cora Lee was home, Joe thought, it was time to take the kit up to stay with her. The kit could have gotten herself into all kinds of trouble, up at that old man’s shack. Cora Lee would love playing hostess to her favorite cat, and until this bombing business was cleared up, the unpredictable tattercoat would be safer-and Dulcie wouldn’t be wound in knots. Joe was more than curious to see if Garza would run with what the kit had told him.

It did occur to the tomcat that, in worrying over the kit, he was behaving exactly like Clyde and Wilma. But he immediately dismissed that thought. This was an entirely different circumstance. The kit was still young, innocent, and totally unpredictable.

Abandoning the newspaper and his empty plate, Joe dropped off the table. If the police had further information about the bombing, it wasn’t in theGazette.But, of course, Garza would keep any new leads strictly within the department. Nipping out his cat door and up a neighbor’s pine tree, he stretched out on a branch where he could watch Ryan tear up the roof, and could think over the two cases.

As to evidence in the church bombing, he knew the county lab was backed up for months and that they made very few exceptions. But couldn’t they try, for a case such as this? Harper said every department and every court had to wait its turn. So why wasn’t there more staffing? Joe scratched an itch that was definitelynota flea. All kinds of people were out of work, yet these high-tech jobs were going begging. Why? Humans were adaptable, they were smart. If a cat couldn’t catch rats, he’d go after other game.

Still, he guessed it was hard to make a change in your life.

He watched Ryan and a young, long-haired carpenter cut and nail plywood flooring. Above them on the attic roof the other carpenter knelt, ripping off shingles, dropping them down to the yard and sidewalk. In a moment Clyde wandered out of the carport with a rake and went to work down at the end of the yard where shingles already Uttered the grass and cement. Sometimes, all the banging and hustle that accompanied busy human endeavor wore a cat right out.

Dulcie would say all that hustle was what humanity was about. Build, invent, improve, and move on. Push the envelope. The ingenuity of the human mind was no longer involved simply with hunting. A billion possible scenarios now waited, to be deftly harnessed. She would say, only when that eager creativity was twisted into negative channels, into destruction, did mankind falter and slide back to the cave mentality.

Now that old man, old Gramps Farger.Therewas a cave mentality, with his bombs and drugs.

Gramps had disappeared completely from the little house where he and Curtis’s father had run their original meth lab. Harper’s men hadn’t found a sign of life when they went back after the bombing, again looking for Gramps. The lab had been out back, a quarter mile away from the house, in a rough shack. Harper said it stunk so bad that the officers had to wear masks. Those chemicals got right in your lungs. Maybe the house would have to be burned down, Joe thought, and the earth turned under like some atomic waste.

And now Gramps was running free, letting the kid take the rap, letting a ten-year-old boy cool his heels in jail.

Joe watched the carpenters tearing out the two end walls, preparing to cut loose the apex of the roof. Eight huge, businesslike jacks stood ready to lift the long halves of the roof straight up, turning them into walls. He wondered how dangerous that would be, jacking up those two forty-foot sections. Wondered how Ryan was going to secure them in place while she built the new roof on top and built the end walls. He’d hate to be underneath if one of those mothers gave way. Talk about a cat pancake.

But watching the dark-haired young woman swing her sledgehammer knocking out two-by-fours, Joe didn’t doubt that Ryan’s plan would work, that it was efficient and professional, and as safe as any construction operation could be.

Still, though, he thought he’d keep his distance during the jacking up. He was just wondering if Ryan planned to do that after lunch, when Rock’s booming challenge filled the morning, echoing from the backyard where Rock had been confined with old Rube.

Leaping to the next tree between the neighbor’s house and his own, Joe watched Rock cavorting and dancing around Rube trying to get the old black Labrador to play. The two elderly cats and the young white female looked on from atop the trellis, not yet comfortable with the big energetic weimaraner. Poor Rube seemed willing to romp, ducking his gray muzzle and pawing at the paving but his limbs and joints didn’t want to cooperate. Joe mewed softly, knowing how much Rube hurt and feeling bad for him, knowing that even with the wonders of modern medicine Dr. Firetti couldn’t turn off all the pain of arthritis.

At least Rube had a nice backyard. And the patio’s heavy Spanish-style trellis provided fine aerial walkways for the cats. To say nothing of the warmth-the high stucco wall at the back trapped the afternoon sun so the patio was warm as a spa, holding the heat well into evening where an animal could stretch out for a luxurious nap.

Ryan had even provided a decorative tile border around old Barney’s gravestone. The golden retriever, Rube’s lifelong pal who had died last year, was buried just beyond the oak tree. Ryan had, with tenderness, retained the small sentimental elements that were important to their little family while, in more practical terms, pursuing a remodeling regimen that would make the house worth twice its present value.

Clyde’s “building money” for this project had been, just as when he bought the old apartment house, cash earned from the sale of his restored antique cars. The latest vehicle, a refurbished 1942 LaSalle, Clyde had purchased in a shocking condition of rust and neglect. Now, renewed nearly to better than its original state, the antique car had sold almost at once for more than enough to complete the upstairs project, a sum hard to comprehend in terms of kitty treats or even in confections from Jolly’s Deli.

Watching his contented housemates, Joe was glad Clyde hadn’t sold their little home. As for the house next door, it had not been turned into a restaurant after all, but had been sold again. The one property alone, apparently, hadn’t been large enough to make the venture cost-effective.

Listen to me, Joe thought, alarmed. Cost-effective? Worth twice its present value? Sometimes I worry myself, sometimes I sound way too much like a human. Next thing you know, I’ll be buying mutual funds.

It was well past noon when Ryan and the carpenters broke for lunch, when Clyde’s car pulled in. The sudden silence of the stilled hammers and power tools was so profound it left Joe’s ears ringing. Any sensible cat would have left the scene hours before to seek a quiet retreat, but he didn’t want to miss anything-and now he didn’t want to miss lunch. He watched Clyde come up the steps toting a white paper bag that sent an aroma of pastrami on rye like a benediction, watched Ryan hurry down the makeshift stairs and around to the backyard to see that Rock had water and a few minutes of petting, before she ate her lunch. As she returned, Joe settled beside Clyde, where he sat on the new subfloor, opening the white paper bag. He felt sorry for the household cats, that they couldn’t have gourmet goodies. The vet had warned Clyde long ago about the dangers of such food to felines. Dr. Firetti had no idea of the delicacies in which Joe and Dulcie and the kit indulged, apparently without harm. They all three checked out in their lab tests and exams with flying colors. “Healthy as three little horses,” the doctor always said, congratulating Clyde and Wilma on their conscientious care. “I see you’re sticking to the prescribed diet.” And no one told him any different.

Listening to Ryan’s soft voice, Joe tied into his share of Clyde’s sandwich, holding it down with his paw. Far be it from Clyde to cut it up for him. Glancing above him, he saw that Ryan hadn’t yet cut loose the roof along the peak. All was solid up there over their heads. The two carpenters sat at the other end of the room, their radio playing some kind of reggae, turned low. Both were young and lean and tanned, one with a rough thatch of hair shaggy around his shoulders, the other, Wayne, with dark hair in a military trim that made Joe wonder if he was moonlighting from some coastal army camp. Ryan’s uncle Scotty hadn’t yet arrived.

Ryan was saying, “When I got home last night, Rock took one sniff at the stairs and the door and charged into that apartment roaring. He knew someone had been in there. He raced around looking for him, pitching a fit. Took me a while to get him settled. I didn’t want to discourage him from barking but 1 sure don’t want the neighbors on my case.”

“Neighbors ought to be happy to have a guard dog in residence. Put it to them that you had a prowler and you’re sure glad the dog ran him off.”

“I wonder if the neighbors saw Larn, if anyone saw him come in. You’d think if they had, they’d have called the station.”

“Did you tell Dallas?”

“Yes. He’s checking for prints, something for the record.” She looked at him solemnly. “My dad called early this morning from Atlanta, he’d heard about the murder on the news.”

“He didn’t know?”

“I asked Dallas not to tell him. There’s nothing he can do and I thought it would only distract him. Don’t those TV stations have anything to fill up their time besides a murder clear across the country? They gave it the same spin as the San Francisco papers, contractor’s money-hungry wife.”

Clyde handed her a container of potato salad, glancing across at the carpenters. The two men were deep in conversation, paying no attention to them. “What are you going to do about Williams?”

“Wait and see what he does. I sent a correct bill this morning to the Jakeses by registered mail. Put the doctored billing in my safe deposit box with a note about the circumstances.”

Clyde raised an eyebrow.

She shrugged. “Just being careful.”

“Your dad was upset when he called?”

“Mad as hell, ready to kick ass. I told him it would be okay, I told him Dallas would get it sorted out. He’d already talked with Dallas. He’ll be back at the end of the week, plans to catch the shuttle on down here.”

“You told him about Larn Williams, about the billing switch?”

“Yes. He agreed with me, that I should wait to see what Larn will do.”

Clyde was quiet.

“If Larn wanted� he could have killed me the night he killed�”

She stared at him, her eyes widening at what she had said, what she’d been thinking. They were both silent.

“I have no way to know that,” she said quietly. “That just slipped out. I� it will be interesting to see if Larn calls me again. Maybe to see if his switch of the billing worked.” She smiled. “Maybe I can lead him on, maybe learn something.”

“What does that mean? You wouldn’t go out with him.”

“That would be foolish.”

“That’s not an answer.”

She was silent.

“Would you call me if you decide to see him? Let me know where you’re going?”

She just looked at him.

“Will you call me? I make a good backup. Like the safe deposit box.”

She grinned. “All right, I’ll call. If you’ll stay out of the way.”

“Totally invisible,” Clyde said. They were finishing their lunch when Dallas showed up wearing scruffy clothes and driving a rusted-out old Chevy. He stood in the yard watching Ryan descend.

“On my way up the hills, see if I can find Gramps Farger. A tip that he’s living up there in some old shack.” Dallas looked at Ryan. “We have some blowups of the murder-scene photos. Found the hint of a tire mark, thin tire like maybe a mountain bike. Lab is doing an enhancement.”

He put his arm around her. “From the small amount of blood and the condition of the body, and the angle of the shots, coroner says Rupert wasn’t killed in your garage.”

Ryan relaxed against him, letting out a long sigh. “I didn’t know any news in the world could sound so wonderful.”

Clyde said, “What’s this about Gramps Farger?”

Dallas moved toward the back patio out of range of the two carpenters. “I got a tip, early this morning, a young woman. She said the old man’s living in a fallen-down shack up along that ravine above the Pamillon estate.” The detective leaned over the gate to pet Rock who had come racing up. Rearing, the big dog planted his front feet on top the gate and reached to lick Dallas’s face.

Dallas rubbed behind the dog’s ears. “That old place was sitting vacant. We check on it every couple of weeks-he could have moved in right after our last run up there. A guy can make a lot of mischief in two weeks. Informant said he’s dumping bags of trash down among the ruins.”

Clyde nodded. “Like maybe drug refuse?”

“Maybe.” Dallas smiled. “If I can lay my hands on Gramps Farger, he’ll be out of circulation for a while, you can bet.”

“You going up there alone?”

“Davis is meeting me. If we can corner Gramps, we’ll go on down to the Pamillon place, have a look. Whoever the caller was, I hope she’s right on this one.”

Joe glanced at Clyde’s scowl and looked away. The kit would be pleased, would be all puffed up with triumph.

But until Gramps Farger was in fact behind bars, how safe was she?

He waited until Dallas left in the old surveillance car, then he took off before Clyde thought to stop him. Clyde would think he was headed for the hills to get in the middle of the potentially dangerous arrest of Gramps Farger. When, in fact, he was only going to have a talk with Dallas’s young, female informant.

19 [��������: pic_20.jpg]

Rocky FaceInn outside San Andreas featured private patios with a wide view of the pine-covered Sierra Nevada Mountains, and the best pancakes and home-smoked ham in Calavaras County. Even the coffee tasted wonderful to Charlie, though maybe that was owed in part to the fresh mountain air and the scent of pines, and the fact that they had been driving since 6:00 in the morning, heading inland from Sonoma. Charlie was an early riser but she’d never match Max. If he wasn’t up well before sunrise he felt that the day was half gone. Having checked in at 8:00 in the morning and enjoyed a leisurely breakfast, she didn’t welcome the sight of Max picking up his jacket and reaching for his truck keys.

“You could stay here,” he said. “Lie by the pool.”

“Only if you stay with me.”

Max picked up her chair with her in it, and tilted her out. “Get your coat, we’re burnin’ daylight,” he said in his best John Wayne imitation.

She made a face at him. “Don’t need a coat. It’s going to be ninety.”

Slapping her on the rump, he nudged her out the door. “I want to get over to the Jakeses’ house before Ryan’s uncle leaves for the coast, spend the rest of the morning talking to the local shopkeepers, see if they’ve had any unusually large chemical sales. We’ll grab a bite of lunch somewhere then have a look for Hurlie Farger. Probably a wild-goose chase, but who knows. And maybe we can get a line on this Larn Williams.”

He had, in San Francisco, made contact with Sergeant Wills and Detective Sergeant Parker, and had given them the names that Dallas wanted checked out. Within a few hours of Max’s meeting with them, Parker had called to say that two of the women were out of me country, Barbara Saunders and Martie Holland, or appeared to be, at this juncture. June Holbrook was working down in Millbrae and had, several months ago, left her husband. Tom Wills would go down there this morning to see what he could find.

Max ruffled her hair and opened the truck door for her. Settling in the cab, he unfolded the local map, took a quick look then pulled out to the highway.

With the information the two officers supplied, Dallas would work what he could from Molena Point, doubling back to Parker and Wills with questions they could best handle. Charlie had never before been so fully aware of the cooperation among law-enforcement officers. Of the women that the two officers were unofficially investigating, had the jealous husband or lover of one of them killed Rupert and set up Ryan, as a handy alibi?

Driving north from the inn, they turned onto a newly laid granite-block driveway before a peak-roofed, rustic house that had, on the north side, a pale new addition, its fresh cedar siding and shingles reflecting the morning sun. At the side of the garden a man rose from his knees, a big, wide shouldered, redheaded man, his jeans splattered with mud and his hands wet where he had been working on a sprinkler pipe.

He stepped up to the car, wiping his hands on a clean handkerchief. “Scott Flannery. You two are up early.” He winked at Charlie. “Nice to meet you both. Come on in.” His neatly trimmed hair was, if possible, a brighter red even than Charlie’s own. His voice was deep and soft as it had been last night on the phone when he returned Max’s call-a comforting sort of man, Charlie thought. A reassuring kind of man to have helped raise Ryan and her sisters after their mother died.

“Those kids showed up this morning,” Scotty said, ushering them into the house. “There’s something about cooking pancakes and bacon with the windows open that draws wandering kids same as it draws bears. Come in, come in, I just made a fresh pot of coffee. The Jakeses moved the house trailer yesterday, to the far side of the pasture.”

Seated at the breakfast table in the large, high-raftered family kitchen, Charlie breathed in the scent of new cedar lumber, and, through the wide, open windows, admired the dark mountains that rose in the distance above the golden hills.

“Kids’ names are Andy and Mario,” Scotty said. “I stuffed them with pancakes, and we talked about the dog. I said I missed seeing him, said maybe the dog was with their friend Curtis, that I hadn’t seen him, either. They weren’t quick to answer. Maybe they don’t have a clue that anything’s wrong, and maybe they do. They said sometimes Curtis doesn’t show up for a while, that sometimes he goes off with his uncle, cutting timber.”

“Did they mention Hurlie by name? What did you learn about him?”

“One of them slipped and mentioned his name, then tried to cover up. They referred to him as Curtis’s uncle. Said he works odd jobs around the area, some up in the larger estates. The way this land lies, the wealthy areas are shoulder to shoulder with the rundown little farms, depending on the drainage and on the view.

“The kids claimed they didn’t know where Curtis lived, that they just saw him at school, or ‘around’ as they put it.” Scotty made a wry face, not buying that. “The boys could live in a little shacky area just east of here, Little Fish Creek. I’d look for Hurlie there too. You talk with the sheriff?”

Harper nodded. “He mentioned Little Fish Creek as a transient area, and several other places. Said Hurlie works odd jobs, including some of the larger estates. After some prodding, he suggested the Carter place, the Ambersons and the Landeaus.”

“He left you wondering,” Scotty said.

Max nodded. “A bit reluctant. Particularly regarding the Landeaus. As if he gave me those names to cover himself, in case I got information from other sources. You see a problem, there?”

“Possibly. I’ve heard hints, from our lumber people, but nothing specific. A sense of things unsaid, an unease.” He laughed. “If I were a local, they’d talk more. You asked about Larn Williams. He and Ryan had dinner to discuss a possible remodel. I don’t think she considered it a date. He had come around to look at her work, seemed to like it. Small-time realtor. Works on his own, I gather. She wasn’t real taken with him.”

“Have you heard anything�off,about him?”

“Nothing. I see Williams sometimes in town when I go for lumber. I’ve seen him a couple of times talking with Marianna Landeau. Once on the street, once in the door of his office. They seemed-easy with one another. And the Landeausareinto real estate, or at least her husband is. Apparently a big-time operator.”

Charlie watched Scotty with interest. Everything he said was soft-spoken, but he wasn’t shy, he seemed bursting with male energy. She liked this “second father” of Ryan’s, already she felt comfortable with him. She could imagine growing up under the humorous eyes of a man like this, so different from her own reserved and austere father whom she had known only until she was nine. As Scotty refilled their coffee cups, she rose. “Could I take a quick look at the new wing?”

Scotty waved his arm toward the large living room that she could glimpse beyond the kitchen, and she moved on through, into a space that took her breath away.

The room was the size of a triple garage, but with a high-raftered ceiling that made it seem much larger. It was still empty of furniture. The north side was dominated by a river-rock fireplace that rose from the pine floor, soaring ten feet up to the cedar beams. To her right, the floor-to-ceiling windows looked at the mountains, but to her left the tall glass panes embraced a view of the yellowed hills against the sky, hills dotted with dark oaks and with a scatter of grazing cattle.

Stepping out onto the stone terrace, she could see a fence line far below, and as she watched, three deer wandered across the pasture among the black Angus steers and stopped to graze.

Turning back inside, she imagined the room furnished with Navajo rugs and soft leather couches and, in the shelves that lined the back wall, hundreds of books. Through an alcove into the dining room she could see a rough-hewn table set before another fireplace and, on the plain white wall, a collection of small framed landscapes. For a long moment she imagined herself and Max there having supper by the fire, watching their horses down in the pasture.

Oh, the stuff of dreams.

But she and Max had what they wanted, they had a nice home and plenty of room for the horses, and soon, probably under Ryan’s skilled hand, they would add a studio where she could work. But, most wonderful of all, and amazing, was that she and Max had each other.

Slipping into the older part of the house she admired the way Ryan had converted the original living room into a handsome master bedroom and turned the old, smaller dining area into an ample dressing room. There were fireplaces everywhere. The original rough-stone fireplace now faced the bed beside window seats where one could look down on the hills. Charlie wondered how Ryan would approach their own building project. Maybe they could turn part of the existing house into studio space, and build a new great room. That possibility was even more exiting.

As she returned to the kitchen, Max was saying, “You’re guessing the kids know about the bombing, know that Curtis is in jail?”

“Those kids are secretive about something,” Scotty said. “But maybe only about their own situations. There’s a lot of petty crime back in these hills, a lot of guys with small marijuana patches. Whatever the problem, the kids sure wouldn’t open up about Hurlie. I hope you turn up something more at Little Fish Creek.”

Harper nodded, and rose. Charlie touched his arm. “Can you take a minute? To walk through the house? It’s quite wonderful.”

“Guess I’d better,” he said, grinning, “if we’re going to hire this gal.”

Charlie sat with Scotty, letting Max look on his own without her comments. She told Scotty about Max’s ranch and the studio they planned to add.

“A studio,” Scotty said, “where you will draw animals. Ryan says you’re the best she’s seen. You’ll be wantin’ to draw that big dog that hitched a ride with her, he’s a fine, well-bred fellow. He should be hunting. Someone’s a fool to have lost a dog like that, and not look for him.” Scotty frowned. “Those boys know more about that dog too than they’re saying. Maybe something they’re ashamed of?” He gave her a puzzled look. “Can’t figure out what it might be. The dog was sure easy with them all, not like they’d hurt him.”

Charlie watched him a moment, wondering, then Max returned. Rising, Scotty held out his hand to them. “You have the kids’ descriptions. Sorry I didn’t learn more. I’ll be headin’ back for the coast mid-afternoon.

Ryan’s ready to jack up the roof, in the morning, and that takes six men-five men and Ryan. She’s got a couple of off-duty officers coming over to help out-for pay of course,” Scotty said, watching Max.

Max nodded. “Nothing wrong with that. They earn little enough. I hope they do good work.”

“She’ll see they do,” Scotty said. “I’ll be staying with Dallas down there, if there’s anything I can do. You want to take my old truck? You’d be less conspicuous up in the Little Fish neighborhood than with that late-model king cab.”

“Thanks for the offer,” Max said, shaking his head. “But we’ll stick with this one. At least it’s respectably dusty.”

Scotty walked to the truck with them, lifting his hand as they backed out then bending again to his sprinkler pipes. Pulling down the drive, Max glanced at Charlie. “I like the new addition, like what Ryan did. You want to talk to her about enlarging our place?”

“I’d like that. And I’d like to work with her on the project. That could save us a little money, and would be good for my carpentry skills. What if we find Hurlie Farger? Do you have cause to arrest him?”

“I don’t have a warrant, but I sure have one for Gramps Farger. Maybe Gramps is in Molena Point as Dallas was told, and maybe he’s not. And if I have cause to think Hurlie had something to do with the bombing, I can get a warrant in a hurry. Now watch for Little Fish Road. I’d like to bundle up the whole Farger family and take them out of circulation.”

At his words, the same icy chill touched Charlie as when she’d heard the blast and saw the church wall broken out. She was filled again with fear for him. And with cold anger. Because Max had done his job well, had seen Gerrard Farger sent to prison, the Fargers had begun this nightmare.

But she’d known the shape of their future together. Had known it far too well after the Marner murders last winter, when she realized the killer had set up Max to take the rap. She knew what Max’s life was about. She meant to be a part of his world, exactly the way he wanted to live it, and she didn’t intend to back off. She would not let herself cringe from what the future might hold.

She spent the rest of the morning, and midday, sitting happily in the cab sketching whatever she found of interest, as Max made his calls at every general store, feed supply and hardware, returning to the truck to fill out his field sheets. They ate lunch at a ma-and-pa cafe of questionable cleanliness, but with wonderful berry pie. Around 2:00 they headed for Little Fish Creek, on a road that dropped suddenly down between steep hills, through tall yellow-dry grass.

Below them, little shacks were scattered among animal pens and old car bodies, the small wooden houses and sheds bleached pale, the fences wandering and leaning. The occupants had been creative, though, fashioning some of their fences from rows of old bedsprings wired together, or old camper covers placed on their sides, each concave interior floored with scattered straw as a shelter for pigs or chickens. The whole settlement looked bone-dry and scrubby, except for the vegetable gardens. These were dark with rich earth and green with luxuriant crops, though some of the rows were fading to brown now in the September heat. Each property boasted a mixed collection of mongrel dogs and nondescript farm animals too, with scruffy, dust-dulled coats. Charlie glanced slyly at Max. “Which is the honeymoon cottage? Did you make reservations?”

“You can take your choice.” But his tone was cool. Something about her remark didn’t sit well, and she was sorry she’d said that. Max didn’t like that kind of sarcasm. As a matter of fact, neither did she. Not everyone in the world had a choice about where they lived, certainly the children didn’t. When she glanced at Max, he looked back at her grinning, knowing very well what she was thinking.

Sitting in the truck while Max went from door to door talking with different families trying to get a line on Hurlie, she watched the mangy dogs and dirty children and thought about Curtis living there and wondered uncomfortably about his life. If Curtishadrun away from his mother, what had his life been like, with her? And as the afternoon dulled and began to dim, Charlie felt sad, and unaccountably angry.

20 [��������: pic_21.jpg]

At each small, paintless shack, Max stepped out, hallooed the house, then asked the same questions of the occupant, about where he might find Hurlie Farger. He had already found Hurlie’s farm, from the directions the sheriff gave them. The place seemed deserted. No sign of anyone home, no resident animals, no recent footprints across the dirt yard, the garden dried to the color of scorched paper. Though Max had not been fully satisfied that Hurlie wasn’t living there among the rubble he could see through the uncurtained windows. He had continued to look, wading through the dust of countless yards making nice to a motley assortment of suspicious dogs, and cajoling their scowling masters who didn’t trust a stranger and could smell a cop ten miles away even when he was wearing jeans and wrinkled boots. Charlie sat in the truck watching Max and making quick sketches of the assorted livestock, pausing only to wipe sweat from her forehead; the thermometer was in the nineties.

Far above them, up the last dry hill of Little Fish Creek, Hurlie Farger sat in his old truck looking down the falling land watching Harper ply the narrow roads and switchbacks. He had been there for three hours, killing a six-pack of beer and wagering with himself how long would it take the tall skinny cop to grow discouraged and leave, not accomplishing what he had come for. Knowing cops, he expected Harper might keep looking until nightfall, until it was too dark among the hills for any cop with good sense to hang around, when he was out of his own jurisdiction.

Hurlie Farger, at thirty-eight, was the spit’n image of how his gramps had looked at that age. And he could almost be the twin of his younger brother Gerrard. Certainly anyone running across Gerrard down in San Quentin, and knowing Gramps Farger from the old man’s sojourns in various California prisons, would see at once that the sullen, wiry inmate with the muddy brown eyes and pitcher ears was a Farger, and they’d know Hurlie just as easily. All the Farger men had the same chicken-thin neck, the same narrow bony shoulders and lank, muddy hair. Maybe the Farger clan wasn’t handsome, but the family genes were strong. In the long haul, Hurlie knew, it’s blood that counts.

Watching the newlyweds ply the Little Fish Creek neighborhood, Hurlie had eased down comfortably in his old, rusted-out Ford truck drinking a warm Coors and cradling his cell phone, following Harper’s progress not only with binoculars but via the wonders of modern electronics. From his good neighbors he had received a running account of all conversations. He had watched Harper circle his own place peering in the windows, and knew that Harper had gotten the address from Sheriff Beck. But Hurlie had made very sure that the visiting law would find nothing of interest.

Though Harper had the rural-route mailbox numbers of Hurlie’s two cousins, he learned nothing from either, or from their kids. Hurlie spoke with and laughed with each of them after Harper left the premises. When Harper drove out of Little Fish Creek, surely hot and thirsty and short-tempered, and headed up the mountain in the direction of the Landeau place, Hurlie tucked the phone on the seat under his folded jacket, started the rattling Ford and headed down the road to meet him.

“They’re covering for him,” Max said with an amused grin as he turned onto the upper road the sheriff had described. “The laughter hidden down behind those sour faces. Hurlie’s cousins nearly busted a gut trying not to laugh at me.” He glanced over at Charlie. “See that occasional flash of sunlight up there atop the hill, see where that old truck’s sitting?”

“You’ve been watching it.”

“I’d say that’s Hurlie up there.” Max eased the truck steadily up the rutted, one-car road. Five turns later he slammed on the brakes.

The rattletrap truck sat in the road crosswise. Hurlie stood beside it resting on the fender like the heavy in an old B movie, a small-caliber rifle leaning beside him. Max touched his holstered Glock, wishing he’d left Charlie at the inn. He stepped out of the pickup. “Good morning, Hurlie. You want to move your truck out of the way?”

“I heard you was looking fer me. Thought I’d save you any more driving around, in this hot weather. What exactly did you want? You some kind of law?” Hurlie glanced in at Charlie with an insolence that made Max step closer to him.

“Right now I want you to move your truck. You’re blocking the road.”

Hurlie stared, his chin jutted out, his eyes on Max but glancing down at the Glock. “You were lookin’ fer me you musta had a reason. I do somethin’ wrong?” Gently his hand eased toward his pants pocket.

In one move Max grabbed Hurlie, spun him around and shoved him against the rusted truck, kicking his rifle into the dust. Pressing the Glock into Hurlie’s ribs he patted him down, removing a snub-nosed Saturday night special from his pants pocket, two hunting knives and a straight razor from various pockets.

Hurlie, facing the cab of Max Harper’s pickup, his hands pressed against the vehicle’s roof, looked around at Harper. “So what’s this about. I ain’t done nothin’.”

Max glanced at Charlie where she sat with her hand on the phone. He nodded.

As Charlie called the sheriff, Hurlie’s expression remained one of puzzled innocence. Max arrested him for impeding the duties of a police officer, and cuffed him. “Sit down on the ground, Hurlie.”

“It’s dusty. Dust makes me cough.”

“Sit down now.”

Hurlie sat, stirring a cloud of dust.

“Why were you waiting for me? Why were you blocking the road?”

“You’re that police captain from over to the coast.”

“So?”

“So I heard you wanted to talk to me. I was just being cooperative, waiting here.”

“Where’s Gramps Farger?”

Though Dallas had a lead on Gramps, he hadn’t found him yet, and there was no harm in shaking Hurlie up, see what he could jar loose. “Gramps staying with you, Hurlie? You’ll feel better if you don’t lie to me.”

“What you want with him?”

“Is he living with you?”

“I ain’t seen him since you sent my brother to prison.”

“I don’t believe that. And I know Curtis has been living up here with you.”

“Ain’t seen neither one. Can I get up? Like to smother in dust down here. Ain’t no call to make me sick.”

“Your shack is full of dust. You have everyone in that hollow covering for you. If I find Gramps up here, I’ll lock your ass up for good, along with his. How long was Curtis here? Why did he go home? Be straight with me, Hurlie.”

“You can’t lock me up for nothin’.”

“Harboring a delinquent, for starters. How long was Curtis here? What was he doing up here?”

“He wasn’t here. I ain’t seen him.”

“You working up at the Landeau place?”

“What’d I do up at that fancypants place? Polish the silver? Where’d you get that notion?”

“Are you working for them up there?”

“Doing what?” Hurlie snapped. “Them high mucky-mucks wouldn’t have me.” As he scowled up at Max, a dust cloud appeared down the hill, the sheriff’s car at its center winding up the twisting road.

The kit might be in exile, but her luxurious accommodations quite suited her. Wilma had left work at the library early in order to get her settled, and to visit with Cora Lee. She had brought Dulcie along for the ride, though Dulcie wouldn’t be staying.

Following Cora Lee through the big, high-ceilinged living room, Wilma looked around with pleasure. The tired old hillside house, under the ministrations of its four new owners, was more charming each time she saw it. The four senior ladies were doing wonders, most of it by their own hard work.

The two women made an interesting contrast, both tall and slim, both in their sixties. Wilma’s gray-white hair was done in a long, thick braid wound around her head. She was dressed in jeans, a red turtleneck T-shirt and red blazer. Cora Lee wore pale cream chinos and a mocha sweater that complemented her dusky complexion. She never understood why women of her coloring liked to wear plum and purple, the very shades that picked up all the wrong highlights. Moving toward the stairs, she was eager to see Wilma’s reaction to how she had decorated her own room. The four ladies had drawn straws to choose their rooms, but Cora Lee suspected the outcome had been fixed. The upstairs room was the only one that offered a large alcove off the bedroom, which she could use as studio space.

The house belonged in part to Wilma; she and the other four ladies of the Senior Survival Club had bought the property together as a private retirement retreat. The structure was large enough to give each a spacious room and bath, and to accommodate as well a housekeeper and perhaps a practical nurse or caretaker when that time arrived. It hadn’t yet, for any of the ladies. While each woman’s room was designed to her own taste, the common living, dining, and kitchen areas were a triumph of compromise, a fascinating eclectic mix that the ladies had put together with a minimum of harsh words. In their intelligent cooperation Wilma found great encouragement against the time, far in the future, when she would sell her own home and move in with them.

The raftered great room with its raised fireplace and long window seat was done in a combination of wicker and leather, with contemporary India rugs, white plantation shutters and, scattered among the books in the wall of built-in bookcases, a collection of local, handthrown ceramics. Whoever had built the house had loved fireplaces; there was a raised wood-burning fireplace in nearly every room. Following Cora Lee up the stairs, Wilma was not prepared for her friend’s decorating approach to her own large bedroom.

Because the apartment Cora Lee had recently vacated had been all in shades of cream and white and cafe au lait, Wilma expected the large, sunny upstairs retreat to be much the same.

But this room was wild with color, as bright as the Dixieland jazz that Cora Lee and Wilma loved. The walls were a soft tomato red. The long, cushioned seat that filled the big bay window, the wicker armchairs, and the bed, were piled with patterned pillows brighter than the artist’s paints that Cora Lee favored. The room was a medly of reds and greens and blues and every possible color, all in the smallest and most intricate patterns. Pillows like jewels, like flower gardens; and Cora Lee’s paintings on the walls were just as bright.

The kit, crouched on Cora Lee’s shoulder, looked and looked, then leaped into the heap of cushions on the window seat rolling and purring.

“I think,” Wilma said, “that she likes it. Ilove it!”

Cora Lee stood in the center of the room caught between laughter and amazement. “She does like it. Well, new things always smell good to cats. But� look at her pat at the brightest colors. Cats don’t see color?”

“Maybe they do,” Wilma said uneasily. “The world of science hasn’t discovered everything yet.” She glanced at Dulcie who stood beyond Cora Lee admiring every detail, and the two shared a look of delight. The private chamber was jewels set in cream, flowers scattered on velvet. The minute Cora Lee sat down on the window seat the kit stepped into her lap, nuzzling her hand, looking from her to Wilma so intelligently, so much as if she meant to join in the conversation, that Wilma stiffened, and Dulcie leaped to the cushions to distract her.

But the real distraction was the tea that Cora Lee had set out on the coffee table before the blazing fire. As the two women made themselves comfortable, the cats looked with interest at the lemon bars and shortbread; and Wilma fixed her gaze on the kit. ‘This is your home for a little while, Kit. You are to behave yourself, you are to mind your manners.”

Cora Lee grinned at Wilma’s stern tone, but Wilma’s look at the kit was serious and cautionary.Don’t speak, Kit. Don’t answer by mistake. Don’t speak to Cora Lee. Don’t open securely closed doors or locked windows. Don’t under any circumstance forget. Do not talk to Cora Lee or to anyone. Keep your little cat mouth shut.

The kit understood quite well. She smiled and purred and washed her paws. Certainly she was content to behave herself, at least until late at night. Only then, if her wanderlust grew too great, who would know? If, while Cora Lee slept, she lifted the window latch and roamed, who was to see her?

Meanwhile the bits of tea cake that Cora Lee fixed on two small plates were delicious. The kit, finishing first, eyed Dulcie’s share but she daren’t challenge Dulcie. She listened to Wilma’s half-truths about how she had had a prowler and was worried about the kit because of her reputation as a highly trained performing cat, how she thought it best to get her away for a while.

Early this summer when the kit’s surprise appearance onstage with Cora Lee had turned out to be the sensation of the village, Wilma had gone to great lengths to make Kit’s appearance seem the product of long hours of careful training. But even trained cats were valuable.

“I’ll keep her safe,” Cora Lee said. “We all know the doors must be kept shut. I have no theater sets to work on now, not until close to Christmas. I’ll be right here most of the time, working on the house. We still have the two downstairs apartments to paint and recarpet. Kit will be up here, two floors away from the paint fumes, and with the windows just cracked open-she can’t get through those heavy screens. I’ve hidden some toys and games for her around the room, that should keep her entertained. Well, she’s already started to find them.”

The kit, exploring the bedroom, had discovered an intricate cardboard structure with many holes where, within, a reaching paw could find and slap a Ping-Pong ball. Next to it, hardly hidden but blending nicely in the fanciful room, stood a tall, many-tiered cat tree that led up to a high, small window. She found a tennis ball beneath Cora Lee’s chair, and a catnip mouse under the bed.

“You will,” Wilma told the kit again, sternly, “behave as we expect you to do. You will mind Cora Lee and stay inside this room, you will not slip away on some wild midnight excursion.”

Cora Lee laughed. “I’ll see that she behaves.”

But the kit’s look at Wilma was so patently innocent that all Wilma’s alarms went off-alarms just as shrill as when, during her working career, she had assessed a parolee’s too-innocent look and listened to his honeyed lies.

The sheriff pulled up beside Max’s pickup, drowning them in dust. He was a heavy man, maybe six-four, with a prominent nose and high cheekbones, and in Charlie’s opinion an overly friendly smile. He loaded Hurlie into the backseat of his unit, behind the wire barrier. “What charges?”

“Interfering with the duties of a law-enforcement officer,” Max said. “Harboring a felon.”

“Fine with me.”

“And obstructing justice. I’ll want his prints.”

The sheriff nodded. “You want to toss his place? You have a warrant for the old man. Or I can do it on the way down.”

Max considered. “Let’s run down together and have a crack at it.”

The sheriff made Hurlie hand over his keys, and moved Hurlie’s truck onto the shoulder; Max and Charlie followed him down toward Little Fish Creek. As the two men entered the cabin, Charlie waited in the truck. Max had parked where she could see in through the window of the one-room shack. A single bed, covers in a tangle. An easy chair so ragged that not even Joe Grey would tolerate it, far scruffier than Joe’s clawed and hairy masterpiece. One plate and cup on the rough wooden sink drain. A door open to a fusty-looking little bathroom that she imagined would be dark with mold. Max and Sheriff Beck were in the shack for nearly half an hour; she watched them going through the few cupboards, checking under the mattress, pulling off wallboard and ceiling tiles in various locations. They performed similar searches in the two scruffy outbuildings. The sheriff’s unit, parked directly in front of the shack, afforded prisoner Hurlie Farger a direct view of her. She sat sideways, with her back to him, but she could feel him staring. Max came away from the search looking sour. He stood a moment in the dusty yard beside the truck, with the sheriff.

“You ask questions around those estates,” Beck said softly, “you might want to watch yourself. DEA seems interested in that area. They took out two small marijuana plots up in the national forest, day before yesterday, and they still have a plane up. I haven’theardof anything on those estates, but they’re all big places and there’s sure plenty of money up there.”

“I’ll be careful,” Max said, studying Beck. He nodded to the sheriff. And the officer stepped into his unit and pulled away, chauffeuring Hurlie Farger to a cleaner bed man he was used to.

Swinging into the pickup, Max grinned at Charlie. “What?” he said, seeing her uncertain look.

“I half thought you were going to ask me to ride back with the sheriff. So you could run this one alone.”

“Would you have gone?”

“I wouldn’t have gotten into that patrol car with Hurlie Farger, even with the sheriff there, if you gave me a direct order to that effect.”

Max studied her with a small, twisted smile. “I don’t think I’d want to try giving you a direct order, Charlie Harper.” And he headed up the hills and across a forested plateau approaching the Landeau estate.

But sitting close beside Max, Charlie was quiet, trying to rearrange her thinking. Hurlie Farger had scared her. Something in his eyes, as well as his bold challenge of Max’s authority, had left her chilled. And the sheriff’s attitude hadn’t helped.

Well, she had to learn to live with this stuff, learn to accommodate the ugly, adrenaline-packed moments. In fact, she guessed maybe it was time for a down-to-earth assessment of the way she looked at the world.

She had never been hidebound in what she expected of life. Life was what you made of it, and you sure didn’t have to knuckle under just because there were bad guys around. But marrying Max had made her far more aware of that element. Had shoved people like Hurlie Farger right in her face.

Well, she’d experienced some unsettling changes in her thirty-two years. And every one had called for a change in attitude. The adjustments she must make now would be the hardest-but every one would be worth it.

She just wanted, right now, to get through this visit to those estates, to the Landeau place, get through the day and be alone again with Max.

Maybe the aftermath of the church bombing was still with her. The pain of the last few days mixed with Hurlie’s attitude had hit home unexpectedly. Laying her hand on Max’s knee and leaning to kiss his cheek, she looked ahead to the tall, marbled-faced Landeau mansion with its high forbidding wall. This was just a routine visit. It would soon be over. They’d soon be alone again cuddled before the fire at the inn, ordering in a hot, comforting supper.

21 [��������: pic_22.jpg]

Clyde’s attic,once a dark tomb for generations of deceased spiders, was now free of cobwebs and dust and ancient mouse droppings, and swept clean of sawdust. The last rich light of the setting sun gleamed in where the end wall had been removed, and a soft breeze wandered through, sweet with the scents of cypress and pine. The attic was silent too, the power tools and hammers stilled, the carpenters gone for the day-it was Joe’s space now. He lay stretched out across a sheet of plywood that was propped on two sawhorses, lay relaxed and purring, digesting a half-bag of corn chips that had been abandoned by one of the carpenters. The wind off the sea caressed him. The buzz of a dispossessed wasp distracted him only faintly, humming among the rafters. He was nearly asleep when footsteps on the temporary stairway forced him to lift his head-though really no action was required, he knew that step. Clyde’s head appeared at the north end of the attic silhouetted in the bright triangular space. Rising up the last steps, Clyde ducked beneath the apex, walking hunched over. By this time tomorrow evening he would be able to stand tall, would be able to reach up and not even touch the ceiling-barring some delay in construction, Joe thought. Barring some accident. What if, tomorrow morning, the roof-jacks didn’t hold until the newly raised walls had been secured? What if�

But such thoughts belonged to the more human aspect of his nature. Humans loved to fret over the disaster that hadn’t happened and likely wouldn’t happen. Joe’s more equitable feline persona lived for the moment and let the future fall how it might, pun intended.

Yawning, he considered Clyde with interest. Clyde stood with his back to Joe, looking out toward the sea, his short black hair mussed up into peaks the way it got when he was irritated. Was he not seeing Ryan tonight? Certainly he wasn’t dressed for an exciting evening or even a casual dinner. Arriving home, he had pulled on his oldest, scruffiest polo shirt, the purple one with the grease stains across the front and the hole in the sleeve. And when Clyde turned to look at him, his scowl implied, indeed, an incredibly bad mood. Joe licked his whiskers. “You look sour enough tochewthe roof off.”

No response.

“This is more than a bad day at the shop. Right?”

Nothing. Clyde’s body was rigid with annoyance.

“You have a fight with Ryan? But she’s doing a great job, the new room will be something. I love that you can see right down to the beach, between the roofs and trees.”

A slight shifting of shoulders.

“And the new tower,” Joe said. “That’s going to be some kind of elegant cat house.”

Clyde continued to glare.

“What did you fight about?” Joe studied Clyde’s ruddy face trying to read what exactly that particular scowl might mean. “She’s too hardheaded and independent?” he asked tentatively-as if he were Clyde’s shrink drawing him out. “She wants to install pink flamingos in the front yard with fake palm trees?”

Clyde sat down on a carpenter’s stool, a boxy little bench used for tool storage, for cutting a board, for scabbing two boards together, to stand on, or to sit on while eating lunch, a very clever little piece of furniture. He glared. “She’s going out with that guy tonight. Out to dinner. The guy who broke into her truck and switched her billing. She’s goingoutwith him.”

“Why would she do that? The guy’s a crook. He tried to set her up. Why would she�” He stared at Clyde. “She’s going to sethimup? But what does she�?”

“She wants to see what else he might try. He doesn’t know she switched the billing back to the original, he’ll think the fake bill is in the mail. She wants to see what he’ll talk about, what questions he might ask her. She thinks she can figure out what he’s after.”

“Oh, that’s smart. What ifhekilled Rupert? Say he murdered her husband. Shot him in the head. So she goes out to dinner with him.” Joe looked hard at Clyde, assessing his housemate. “You couldn’t stop her short of locking her up. And you’re scared for her.”

Clyde nodded, looking miserable.

“So, follow them.”

“She figured I might. She said that would blow it, said maybe he knows me and would certainly know my yellow roadster. That I might put her in danger.”

Joe sighed. He licked his paw, waiting. But Clyde was silent again-far be it from Clyde to come out andaskfor help. “So, where are they going?”

“She’s meeting him at the Burger Basher at seven. She called me at work, broke our date for dinner. Asked if I’d keep Rock for a couple of hours. I thought I’d�”

“What? Just happen in for a beer? That’ll fix it.”

“I plan to wait outside. In case she needs someone. In case he tries to strong-arm her, get her in his car.”

“That’s so melodramatic.”

“And a dead body in her garage is not melodramatic.”

Joe washed his right ear. “And that’s why you drove that old brown Hudson home. I wondered what that was about.”

“She’s never seen that car, and certainly Williams wouldn’t have seen it.”

Clyde had in his upscale automotive shop, in a private garage at the rear of the complex, enough rare old cars to run surveillance in a different vehicle every night for a month. Clyde’s assortment of classic and antique models, all waiting to be restored, might seem to some a monstrous collection of junk. To Clyde Damen those old cars were CDs in the bank, gold under the mattress.

Clyde looked at him a long time.

Joe licked some crumbs from inside the ripped-open corn chip bag. “Burger Basher. Seven o’clock. Okay. So you owe me one.”

“How would you go about it without getting-without them seeing you?”

“Feeling guilty already?”

“Burger Basher is all open, just that little low wall around the patio, then the sidewalk. And Ryan knows you. If she sees you schlepping around there, she’ll have to wonder. She already thinks you’re a bit strange.”

“Strange in what way? Why would she think me strange? And what’s she going to wonder? If I’m running surveillance? Oh, right.”

“That little trick with the mice on her doorstep, you think I didn’t have to stretch to make that little caper seem even remotely unremarkable? What made you�?”

“Do you want my help or not? I have a hundred ways to spend my evening.”

Clyde shrugged, looking embarrassed.

“And,” Joe said, eyeing Clyde closely, “I have a hundred ways to listen to those two without being seen. In return, if you want to contribute a little something tasty to my supper plate before I undertake this risky venture�”

“Tastyis such a crass word, even for a cat. It isn’t a word. I’ve never heard you use such a common expression.”

Joe smiled. “Dulcie couldn’t agree more. She thinks that word is incredibly crude. Let’s put it this way. I’m hungry. I’d like something for my dinner that is in keeping with my elevated status as your newly hired private investigator.”

Clyde moved toward the stairs. “I just happened to bring home some filet. I’ll go on down and slap it in the skillet.”

Clyde’s skillet-broiled steak, rare and juicy in the middle, crisp and dark on the outside, suited Joe just fine. Leaping past Clyde down the stairs, he headed for the kitchen to sit in the middle of the table as Clyde put supper together. “What time is he picking her up?”

“They’re meeting there, at seven. She wanted it to seem as little like a date as possible, just friends meeting for dinner.”

“You better park a block away. If she’s in immediate danger I’ll slip out and alert you. I wish, at times like this, that I had access to a walkie-talkie or a small and unobtrusive cell phone.”

“Don’t you think a cat carrying a phone around the village is going to attract attention?”

“Not if an enterprising firm would make one that looks like an electronic flea collar. It wouldn’t have to ring, it could just vibrate. And�”

Clyde turned away to dish up supper.

And Joe, savoring his steak, looked forward with great anticipation to the evening. There was nothing, absolutely nothing as satisfying as sharing your professional skills with those who were less talented.

At seven in the evening Burger Basher’s patio was crowded to overflowing: people had gathered out on the sidewalk and sat on the two-foot high wall of the patio, waiting for their names to be called. Ryan and Larn sat on the wall, drinking beer from tall mugs. Half a block away, Joe watched them through the windshield of Clyde’s old Hudson. Beside him Clyde had slouched down in the seat with a cap pulled over his eyes, a real B-movie heavy, so ludicrous Joe nearly choked, laughing.

“So what are they doing?” Clyde said, his voice muffled.

“Still waiting for their table. From the looks of the crowd, I’d say about twenty minutes. Williams parked just down the street. He’s driving a white SUV, not the gray hatchback.”

“Hope they don’t decide to take a walk. Maybe I should move the car.”

“Don’t fuss. No one’s going to spot you, you look like an old wino gearing up for a big night of panhandling. Turn on the radio. Listen to a tape. Play some nice hot jazz and let me concentrate. I need to figure where I want to land, in there-the place is about as accommodating as an airport terminal at rush hour.”

“I told you it was too open. And why would I turn on the radio? I can hear the restaurant tape just fine. How about that little service counter? You could hide behind the coffeepots.”

“And if I suffer third-degree burns? We don’t have pet insurance.” Studying the crowded dining patio, Joe picked out four possible refuges, none of which looked adequate to hide a healthy mouse. Listening to the sweet, rocking runs of Ella Fitzgerald, he considered the layout.

Maybe the best method was the direct one. The in-your-face approach. Why not? A mew and a wriggle.Well, hello, Ryan, fancy seeing you here.A good loud purr.So what are you having for supper?

The moment Ryan and Larn were shown to their table, Joe slipped through the open window of the Hudson, dropped to the sidewalk, and headed for the jasmine vine that climbed to the roof beside the kitchen.

The couple was seated nearly in the center of the patio, not his preferred location. From high up within the vine, he watched them peruse their menus. He could feel Clyde watching him-the same sense of invasion as if Clyde were looking over his shoulder while he worked a mouse hole.

Ryan was wearing a handsome pair of faded jeans, a pearl-gray sweatshirt, expensive-looking leather sandals, and gold earrings. Her color was high, her makeup more skillfully applied than Joe had before seen, her dark hair curling fresh and crisp. A nice balance between the casual and self-assured village look, and feminine charm. A very effective statement:Idon’t care,but still a come-on designed to intrigue Williams.

Williams, in contrast, had made a conscious and awkward effort to impress. He was not an attractive man, and his too-careful attire didn’t help. He might be thirty-five or so. It was hard to tell, with humans. He was thin-shouldered, his hair mousy and lank around his shoulders, his thin face resembling a particularly sneaky rodent. He wore crisply pleated brown slacks of some synthetic fabric that had an unpleasant shine, and an expensive paisley print shirt beneath a brown tweed sport coat-all just a bit too much, particularly in Molena Point. His shiny brown shoes were meant for the city, not for a casual village evening. As a waiter approached the couple, Joe slipped down the vine, meandered across the bricks in full sight between the crowded tables, stepped beneath their table, and lay down.

Staring at Ryan’s sandals and at Williams’s hard, cheap shoes he sniffed the heady aroma of charbroiled burgers. If Ryan was aware of him she gave no sign-until suddenly, startling him, she draped her hand over the side of her chair and wiggled her fingers.

Maybe she did understand cats, Joe thought, grinning. He rubbed his face against her hand, wondering why she didn’t make some joke to Williams about the freeloading cat. Wondering, as he listened to them order, if he might be able to cadge a few French fries.

While Joe ran surveillance on Ryan Flannery and Larn Williams, and Clyde sat in the old Hudson with his cap over his face ready to leap out and protect Ryan, or maybe even protect a certain tomcat, two hundred miles away Max Harper, standing in the high-ceilinged white marble entry of the Landeau mansion, was kept waiting for nearly twenty minutes after the short, stocky, white-uniformed housekeeper admitted him.

According to the Landeaus’ sour-face maid, Mrs. Landeau was out of town but Mr. Landeau would soon be with him. She did not invite the captain in past the cold marble entry, but motioned with boredom toward a hard marble bench. As if he were one of an endless line of door-to-door hustlers selling magazines or some offbeat religion.

Accompanied by a white marble faun and two nude marble sprites, Harper waited impatiently, wondering at the architecture and decor the Landeaus’ had chosen in selecting this particular mountain retreat. There was no hint of the natural materials that one expected in a country setting, no wood or native stone to give a sense of welcome. He had cooled his heels for seventeen minutes and was rising to leave when Landeau made an appearance.

Sullivan Landeau was tall and slim, with reddish hair in a becoming blow-dry, an excellent carriage, a moderate tan that implied tennis and perhaps sailing but some concern for the damages of the harsh California sun. He was dressed in immaculate white slacks, a black polo shirt and leather Dockers. His gold Rolex, nestled among the pale, curly hairs of his wrist, caught a gleam from the cut-glass chandelier. His smile was cool, faintly caustic. “Mrs. Landeau is not at home. As a matter of fact, she’s down in your area, on business. Staying in Half Moon Bay tonight, then on down to Molena Point early in the morning to attend to some rental property. I hope you are not here because of some problem with one of our tenants.”

“Not at all,” Max said, looking him over.

Landeau waited coolly for Harper to state his business, his expression one of tolerance with which he might regard a slow bank teller or inept service-station attendant.

“Perhaps I should be speaking with an estate manager,” Max said. “Someone who would be familiar with your employees.”

“I am familiar with my employees.”

“I’m looking for information about Hurlie Farger, I’d like some idea of his work record, what kind of service he’s given you, how long he’s been with you.”

Landeau looked puzzled. “I’m afraid I don’t know the name. Are you sure this person worked here? When would that have been? We’ve had the estate only three years. In what capacity would he have been employed?”

“My information is that he works here now, part-time, odd jobs on the grounds crew and filling in as a mechanic.”

Landeau shook his head. “We don’t have aFarger.You had better speak with my estate foreman. He’s working east of here about four miles, up that back, dirt road. They’re cutting timber.” He glanced at his watch. “But of course they’ll have quit for the day.”

Max slipped a mug shot of Gerrard Farger from his pocket. The brothers so closely resembled each other that a person would have to know them very well to see a difference. “You may not recall his name, but as owner of the estate you would remember the faces of those who serve you.” Max smiled. “I see he looks familiar.”

Landeau had let down his guard for an instant, lowering his eyes as if deciding which way to play his response.

“My information,” Max said, “is that he’s worked for you for several years.”

“The face, yes,” Landeau said smoothly. “I believe I recognize this man. If I’m correct, if I have the right man, I believe he was fired six months ago. Something, as I recall, about an arrest, which I won’t tolerate. I believe he got into some kind of trouble down in San Andreas. Burglary or shoplifting, or maybe it was something to do with a woman, I don’t recall.” Landeau looked levelly at Harper. “We don’t condone that kind of behavior, it leads to trouble for the estate. Has he been into more trouble? I hope nothing too serious. But it must be serious,” Landeau added, “for a chief of police from the coast to come all the way up here.”

“Not at all,” Harper said. “We’re on vacation, heading home. Thought it expedient to collect what information we could, not lay more work on your sheriff.” He had no way to know whether Landeau was aware of the bombing in Molena Point. “You say Hurlie Farger hasn’t worked for you in six months.”

“To the best of my knowledge.”

“Would you say that if we show otherwise, you would be open to a charge of obstructing justice?”

“I certainly wouldn’t want that,” Landeau said. “It may have been less than six months.”

“Or perhaps you only considered firing him? Perhaps you changed your mind and let him stay on?”

Landeau shook his head. “It’s possible my wife may have done so, in a fit of charity. You know how women are.”

“What can you tell me about Farger?”

“If you would care to come into my study, I’ll see what I can remember.”

Harper moved with Landeau through a vast sitting area whose windows overlooked the top of the darkening pine forest. The mirrored walls reflected chrome-framed chairs, chrome-surfaced tables, and chrome-framed couches upholstered in silver-dyed leather, all straight from some futuristic space movie. The white marble fireplace boasted a huge gas log that either had never been lit, or was scrubbed clean after each use. The black marble floors were unadorned except where the furniture formed “seating areas,” each set off by an ice-blue shag rug that made the chrome above it look blue.

“This is my wife’s part of the house,” Landeau said, watching Harper. “The portion reserved for entertaining.” He led Max into a cypress-walled study furnished with natural-toned leather couches, framed antique maps, and a dark oriental carpet, a room that seemed to Max equally posed and out of character, planned for effect, not for any personal preferences. There were no papers on the desk, nothing of a personal or business nature visible, no photographs, no books, no shelves to put books on. Even Landeau’s offer of brandy seemed a tired line from a tired old movie. Declining a drink, Max couldn’t decide what kind of man Landeau might be. Everything about him seemed studied and timed for effect.

Stepping to a walnut credenza below the window, Landeau poured himself a Scotch and water, and turned to regard Max. And as the two men faced each other, outside on the large parking apron Charlie sat in the pickup studying the house and listening for any smallest sound from within. To her right stood five tennis courts, the heat from their green paving rippling across their chain-link barriers. She could see behind them a pool and ornate pool house in the Grecian style, set against the heavy pines in an idyllic tableau. She could imagine bathers there, beautiful women with figures as sculptured and polished as marble themselves, each woman’s skimpy bikini costing more than her entire wardrobe. In the dimming afternoon, the carefully trimmed lawns and precisely shaped bushes seemed as artificial as the house. The six-foot concrete wall that encircled the acreage gave her not a feeling of security but of confinement. Far to her left stood ten dog runs with a kennel at the back of each. The three dogs she could see pacing behind their fences were German shepherds. Maybe the guard dogs had been acquired after the breakins the sheriff had mentioned to Max.

And Ryan had told her that the Landeaus entertained some high-powered investors up here too, that apparently they had bought the mansion to accommodate Sullivan’s real-estate clients. The timbering and whatever else the estate was involved in, Ryan had thought, was secondary to its prime purpose as an elegant business write-off.

Max said the Landeaus had had more than breakins. That there’d been some trouble from local groups who didn’t want them to raise and cut timber, that they had in fact suffered considerable loss from arson. Charlie supposed if she were rich and someone burned her property, she’d have guard dogs too. As she idly studied the kennels, two rottweilers appeared pacing inside their runs, their blunt heads down like bulls ready to charge. All five dogs watched her more intently than she liked. She’d feel easier when Max was out of there, when, safe together in the truck, they were headed back to the inn to a nice private supper before the fire, to a night of lovemaking and let the rest of the world go hang. She was watching for Max, watching for the black-lacquered front door to open, when behind the pool house a white van appeared moving along a service road or drive, parking behind the house.

At that distance, in the falling light, she couldn’t read its logo; she could see a crown, with dark lettering beneath. They had passed two vans as they came up the narrow country road, both heading down, one belonging to a dry cleaner, one to a catering service, both seeming out of place in the backwoods setting.

Max had handed her the field book to jot down company names and license numbers. She had a sudden desire, now, to slip out of the car and take a look at this vehicle.

But something stopped her. She wasn’t sure what Max would want her to do. This was not the kind of home where one was welcome to wander about the gardens for a friendly assessment of the flower beds. She imagined walking along the side of the mansion setting off some kind of electric eye that would open the kennel gates and bring that brace of hungry mutts charging out in a timed race to see who got the juiciest supper. She heard car doors open, and in a few minutes close again, and she watched the van head away, up a back road into the woods until soon it was lost from view. She sat looking after it, disgusted at her own hesitancy.

She wouldn’t tell Max she’d been afraid and uncertain. She hadn’t spent time with a dozen police wives, at various backyard cookouts and parties, hadn’t seen how laid-back and cool those women were, not to be ashamed of her sudden timidity-surely there was nothing that would so seriously cool their romance, as to let fear intervene.

Though Max was the most monogamous and straightforward of all possible husbands, she knew that. She knew a lot, from Clyde and from the people in the department, about Max and Millie’s marriage, which had ended with Millie’s death. She knew enough to be certain that she had a lot to live up to, in that hard-shelled and loving lady detective.

She could never replace Millie. But she could give Millie the compliment and respect of trying, and in so doing maybe she could make Max happy.

A figure moved behind the house where the van had disappeared. Charlie, turning the key that Max had left in the ignition, hit the window button and rolled down the glass, to listen.

There was no sound. The early evening air was heavy with the scent of pine and with a less pleasant smell from the kennels. Somewhere behind the house a car started, she heard it move away, the scrunch of tires on gravel and the engine hum soon fading. She thought of Hurlie Farger and his old truck, but this vehicle was newer, purring softly. Anyway, this wasn’t her business. This was department business. She was a civilian, she needed to behave like a civilian. Max had collected some valuable information today concerning large sales of bleach, fertilizers, iodine, antifreeze, glass bottles and jars and propane, among the local stores. She didn’t need to do anything to distract him or to complicate his work.

But,Come on, Max. Come out of there. I want you safe. I want you to myself for a little while, and safe.

22 [��������: pic_23.jpg]

The brick-pavedpatio of Burger Basher was lit by lanterns placed along the perimeter and by shifting washes of moonlight beneath fast-running clouds. Though the sea wind was brisk, the forty-by-forty-foot space was comfortably warm, heated by six outdoor gas burners suspended on poles overhead. Joe Grey, sitting beneath Ryan’s table, tried not to lick his whiskers at the scent of broiling burgers. Though he’d had filet for supper, who could resist a Basher’s double? Encouraged by Ryan’s petting, he stood up on his hind paws, looking as plaintive as a begging beagle into her amused eyes.

“Come on, Joe Grey. You want to sit up here? We have an empty chair.”

Larn Williams looked disgusted. But Joe was aware of other diners watching him and smiling. Beneath a nearby table, a springer spaniel whined with interest. Leaping into the chair, Joe watched appalled as Williams slopped on mustard, ruining a fine piece of meat. Ryan, sensibly waving away the condiments, cut off a quarter of her burger and dissected it carefully into cat-sized bites. Placing these on a folded paper napkin, she set the offering on the chair before him. “There you go, big boy. See what you can do with that.”

Rewarding Ryan with a purr and a finger-lick, Joe sampled the char-grilled confection. This was the way surveillance should be conducted, in plain sight of the subjects while one enjoyed life’s finer pleasures. He tried to eat slowly but he didn’t come up for air until every morsel had vanished. Yawning and stretching, again he fixed his gaze on Ryan, licking his whiskers.

She cut her eyes at him as she devoured her own burger. “No more. You’ll get fat, lose your handsome tomcat figure.”

Williams watched this exchange coldly. “I didn’t ask you out to dinner-such as it is-to watch you feed some alley cat.”

“He’s not an alley cat, I know him very well.”

“When did you get home? I swung by the Jakeses’ place up there but you’d already left. I didn’t know you were leaving. One of your carpenters was still there, that old redheaded guy with the beard.”

“I don’t consider Scotty old. I consider him handsome and capable. I got home Saturday night, in time to go to a wedding on Sunday, and start a new job this morning.”

Williams nodded more amiably, seeming actually aware of his surliness. “Seems like, if you’re gone a few weeks, everything piles up, the laundry, the junk mail.”

When she didn’t respond, he began asking questions about the new job she had started. Her answers were as vague as she could politely make them; Joe hid a pleased smile. Somewhere in the conversation, Williams edged his way back to his primary interest.

“It’s that backlog of paperwork I really hate. Every real-estate sale-a landslide of forms to be filed. I don’t have to tell you, the paperwork gets worse every year. That, and the billing. And then it’s time for taxes.”

If, Joe thought, the evening was to be filled with such gems as this, he might as well be home eradicating the front lawn of gophers. Stretched out across the chair, he yawned so deeply that he almost dislocated his jaw; and he lay observing Williams. The guy had a face as bland as yogurt, his pale brown eyes soft-looking and seeming without guile. Gentle, submissive eyes-as if there was no way this good soul could bear to swat a fly. The kind of expression that made any sensible cat uneasy.

And when Joe glanced at Ryan, she was watching Larn with the same distaste, her dislike thinly veiled-though she appeared to take the bait. “At least,” she said, sipping her beer, “I caught up with my billing, and got it in the mail. Didn’t have any choice. No money coming in, the creditors will be at my throat.”

Williams didn’t turn a hair. “The building-supply people in San Andreas are pretty good about letting a contractor ride over a month or two.”

“That’s nice, but I don’t do that, I don’t work that way. And the Jakeses are good about paying, they were very prompt on the two San Francisco jobs that Dannizer Construction did for them. I expect I’ll see their check before the end of the week.”

No change of expression from Williams. “I never quite trust people whoalwayspayalltheir bills on time. Makes me wonder why they’re so careful.”

Ryan made no reply. Was he trying to be funny? Joe had never heard any of Clyde’s friends talk that way.

Certainly not Clyde himself, Clyde valued his prompt-paying customers, and he let them know it.

“Did you say your father was on the East Coast? I imagine you miss him just now, with this unfortunate murder to deal with. I was sorry to hear about your husband’s death, in that ugly way. I hope things have-not been too rocky.”

“He’s on the East Coast, yes,” Ryan said, smiling. “I’m doing fine. Thanks for asking.” She was trying hard to be nice to Larn. Joe wondered that Williams didn’t detect her veiled effort-or didn’t seem to.

“Hot weather back there just now. I hope he took something light. Cotton’s best, in the humidity. But I suppose he knows all about that.”

Joe narrowed his eyes, studying Williams. This guy was strange.

“Do the police have any line on a suspect? On who would do such a thing?”

Ryan just looked at him.

“I don’t understand much about the circumstances, but I hope they’ve made some progress in locating the killer. What a terrible shock, to find� Well, I am sorry.”

And youaregoing on about it, Joe thought, curling up with his back to Williams.

“I hope they have enough evidence so you are no longer a suspect. I would hate to be suspected of a murder, even though everyone knows better. It would be so� demeaning.” Williams was not keeping his voice down. People at the nearby tables had begun to watch them. Ryan looked increasingly uncomfortable.

“Do they have fingerprints, or anything on the weapon? That would certainly make you feel easier.”

“I really can’t discuss these matters, Larn. And we’re attracting attention.”

“I only meant�” He looked suitably stricken. “I only thought� You know, hoping there was something to ease your mind, to take the pressure off,” he said, lowering his voice. “Hoping you’re able to feel more comfortable about this ugly mess.”

“I was told not to discuss it.”

“Well, if there’s anything I can do to be of help, I just want you to know you can call on me.”

“Nothing that I know of.”

“When will your father be home?”

This guy was so damned nosy Joe wanted to claw him. Or, he wasn’t quite steady in the attic.

“1 really don’t know, Larn.” Her voice was decidedly cooler, as if she were sorry she had come tonight.

But Larn didn’t seem to get the drift. “He has a good reputation in the city. I don’t know many folks in law enforcement, but people say he does a good job.I certainly don’t believe the gossip, I don’t pay attention to that kind of thing.”

Ryan had stopped eating. “What gossip?” she said softly. “What are you talking about?”

People at the surrounding tables had turned away making an effort not to stare. Williams lifted his hand in embarrassment, as if he realized he’d made a blunder. But Joe could see under the table Williams’s left fist on his knee beating a soft, energetic rhythm, his body language laying out all too clearly his cold deliberation.

“What gossip?” Ryan repeated, her eyes never leaving Williams. “You’d better explain what you’re talking about.”

“Well, Iamsorry. I thought of course you’d heard it like everyone else� It’s common� Oh, hell, I thought� Can we just drop it? Forget I said anything?”

“Of course we can’t drop it,” she said raising her voice, not caring if people turned to look. “What is this about?Whathave you heard about my father?”

“It’s only gossip, it doesn’t mean anything. Let’s forget it.”

Joe didn’t need to look up into Ryan’s face to see her rage. Every angle of her body was tense and rigid. She waited unmoving for Williams to explain.

“Well,” he said reluctantly. “It’s just-the women� you have to know about the women.”

Her silence was like thunder, so volatile that Joe thought the air around her might explode.“Whatwomen?What exactly are you talking about! And where did you hear such a thing!”

Larn sighed, his pale eyes shifting. “Don’t be so loud. People are staring.” This guy was far more than a nut case.

“Well?”

“It’s common gossip in the city, Ryan. I can’t believe you never heard it.”

“What, exactly,is common gossip? You’ll have to spell it out.”

He sighed again, implying that this was all very painful. “You have to know that Flannery had plenty of women.”

Ryan only looked at him.

“And that� Well,callit gossip, that Flannery had affairs with more than a few of his female parolees. Most of that, the way I hear it, was before he was appointed chief. I thought of course you’d heard this. But gossip doesn’t make�”

Ryan was white. “That is so patently a lie. I have never heard a hint of such a story. I certainly would have heard that from Rupert, he’d have been the first to pass on such a tale, would have been delighted to repeat that.” She was almost shouting at Williams. “This is not a story that anyone in San Francisco has ever heard. Why are you telling me this?” People around them were growing uncomfortable. Two couples, hurrying through their meals, rose to leave. “Where did this come from? What is your purpose in saying such a thing?”

Larn looked totally apologetic, really crushed. Joe was so fascinated he had to remind himself to stop staring. Turning away, he began to wash again, watching Williams with occasional sideways glances.

“I don’t know where I heard it. Everywhere. And then just this week I heard it in conjunction with the murder,” Larn said embarrassedly. “The implication was that� that maybe Rupert had been talking about one of Flannery’s affairs, spreading around names and details, and Flannery had-”

Ryan gaped at him then was out of her chair jerking Larn up-he came up under her grip as limp as a doll, looking shocked but making no effort to resist her. She spun him around with surprising strength, forced him between the tables and out through the patio to the street, his arm bent behind him. Forced him down the sidewalk away from the restaurant. As Joe leaped to follow them the thought did cross his mind that someone ought to pay the bill. Well, he sure couldn’t. One of the perks of being a cat, you never got stuck with the bill.

Half a block down, she shoved Williams into an alley. Joe glanced across the street where Clyde sat in the Hudson, poised as if ready to move. Joe peered around into the brick alley where Ryan had Williams backed against the building. The man was totally submissive. Was he enjoying himself? Getting it on with this woman’s rage? Torn between disgust and amusement, Joe settled down between the trash cans to watch.

Ryan looked like she was about to pound Williams when the scuff of shoes made Joe spin around. Clyde stood with his fists clenched as if he wanted to pile into Williams. But Ryan’s display of anger held him frozen.

The hint of a grin ticked at the corner of Clyde’s mouth as he studied Williams’s pallor and Ryan’s businesslike grip on the man’s collar. She glanced at Clyde, her face coloring.

“What was he doing?” Clyde said, amused.

She said nothing, but turned back to Williams. “If Ieverhear that kind of talkanywhere,I’ll know it came from you. I swear I’ll pound you, Williams, then sue your pants off for slander. I have four top attorneys in the city, and I would like nothing better than to see them take you down.”

Jerking Williams away from the wall, she shoved him hard. He stumbled and half fell out onto the sidewalk. “Go home, Larn. Go back to San Andreas. I don’t know what your purpose is. But you pull anything more-anything,and you’ll be cooling your ass in the slammer.”

Larn rose from an off-balance crouch, stared at Ryan and at Clyde, his face unreadable, and headed away fast. Ryan watched until he reached his car and had driven off, then she collapsed against Clyde, her face buried against him. Her shoulders were shaking, whether shivering with nerves, or rocking with laughter, Joe couldn’t tell. The gray tomcat, sitting among the garbage cans in the dark alley, was sorry that Dulcie had missed this one.

23 [��������: pic_24.jpg]

A week earlier, Joe Grey would have sworn that this would never happen, that he and Clyde would never go undercover together running surveillance, tooling along in Clyde’s old Hudson behind Larn Williams’s Jeep like a pair of buddy cops. But here they were, slipping up the hills through the night behind Williams’s white SUV.

Clyde had waited, in front of Burger Basher, as patiently for Joe as Holmes waiting for Watson while Joe played electronic bug underneath Ryan’s table. Then that little affair in the alley that had left Joe weak with laughter, and left Clyde wired for action, ready to move as Ryan headed for Clyde’s place to pick up Rock. Clyde had told her, in the alley, that he was just passing, that he had an errand. Whatever she believed, she’d grinned at him and thanked him nicely for coming to her rescue; no harsh word for following her. Gave him a buss on the cheek and said she’d see him in the morning.

So here they were following Williams, Clyde dawdling in traffic so not to be noticed, then panicked when Williams turned a corner for fear they’d lose him.

Joe did his best not to laugh. Watching Clyde practice his surveillance skills was an absolute and entertaining first.

And it was, as well, an occasion that Joe suspected he would deeply regret. First thing he knew, Clyde would be telling him exactly how to conduct every smallest detail of his private business.

“Where’she headed?” Clyde said, frowning.

“I could be wrong. I’m guessing the Landeau cottage. Watch the road,” Joe hissed as Clyde turned to look at him.

“Why would he go there?”

Joe himself was surprised. But maybe he shouldn’t be. There was nothing to show a connection between Williams and the Landeaus, but they did live in the same small town of San Andreas, they could know each other.

Or, Joe thought, maybe this was the meaning of Gramps Farger’s remark,Them San Andreas people.

The Fargers and the Landeaus? Talk about an unlikely mix.

Once they were above the village the residential streets were black, where the moon had dissolved above pale clouds. Joe glanced at Clyde. “Better turn off your lights.”

“I’m not driving with my lights off. And hit some animal?”

“He’ll make you, otherwise. There’s not a car per square mile moving up here.”

Clyde cut his lights. The street went black.

“Drive slower.I can see the street, I can see if there’s an animal. Maybe he’ll think you turned off. He’s not moving very fast.”

“Why would he trash her father? Why would he go to the Landeau place? What’s the connection? What’s this guy up to?”

“Slow down, he’s turning in.”

Easing to the curb a block before the cottage, Clyde cut the engine. Williams had pulled onto the parking close to the cottage door, making no effort to hide his car. On the dark granite paving, the white Jeep stood out like snow on tar. “Roll down your window,” Joe said softly. “You’ll stay in the car like you promised?”

“Didn’t I promise?”

“That’s not an answer.” Joe glanced at Clyde. “He sees you, you could blow everything-and could put me in danger.” Before Clyde could answer, he leaped across Clyde’s legs, dropped out the window, and beat it up the street. He had no idea how long Clyde would remain patiently behind the wheel or, in his new investigative enthusiasm, come sneaking along the street like some two-bit private eye. Surveillance was easier with Dulcie. No human in their right mind would suspect a pair of cats.

He was just in time to see Williams let himself in with a key. Swiftly Joe slipped into the house behind his heels, just making it through as Williams slammed the door, and sliding behind the Mexican chest.

Williams didn’t pause as if getting his bearings, nor did he turn on the light. He headed straight for the bedroom, knowing his way. Moving up the four steps he sat down on the bed and pulled off his shoes. The bed was unmade, the brightly patterned designer sheets and spread tangled half on the floor. Dropping his shoes, Williams picked up the phone. As he dialed, Joe crept past through the shadows, and hightailed it into the kitchen.

Leaping to the dark granite counter, slick as black ice beneath his paws, he searched frantically for the extension. The counters were nearly empty. A set of modern canisters. Nothing behind them. Bread box, but no phone inside. Did they keep the phone in a cupboard?

Or was there only one phone, and Williams had moved it to the bedroom at some earlier time?

Yes, behind the bread box he found the empty jack. Was the guy staying here with the Landeaus permission? Or without their knowledge? Why else would he not turn on the lights?

Dropping to the floor as silently as he could manage, he slipped into the bedroom in time to hear Williams say, “Yes, but I don’t see the point. So the Jakeses sue her. So what does�?”

Pause� Behind Williams’s back, Joe slid across the room and under the bed.

“Why is it none of my business! If I’m going to do the work, I� Does this have to do with her divorce?”

Joe could make out a faint metallic reverberation from the other end. Sounded like a woman’s voice, sharp with anger. Creeping along under me bed, gathering strands of cobwebs that made his ears itch, he crouched directly beneath Williams. Amazing how fast these little busy spiders could set up housekeeping.

“Of course I did.Yes,a code she won’t find. What do you think? So the Jakeses hit the fan, what then? So what’s the purpose?”

Angry crackling. Definitely a woman.

“Thanks.I go to all the trouble, to say nothing of the risk, and all you can say is,Don’t sweat it! Youtellmedon’t sweat it!”

Crackle, hiss�

“She’s what? What time in the morning?”

A terse response.

“Whattime? That’s the crack of damn dawn.Well, isn’t that cute�Of course I’ll be out of here. When did you find this out? Why didn’t you� Well, allright.Don’t be so bitchy� No, I won’t leave anything lying around!”

Crackle, crackle�

“All right. And what if I spill aboutMartie?”

The voice at the other end snapped with rage. Williams listened, drumming his fingers on the bedside table. “Well, it’s just between you and me,” and he brayed a coarse laugh. “Just between us andMartie! Martie Martie Martie.“He pounded on the night table.“Martie Martie Holland…” then banged the phone down, giggling a laugh that made Joe’s blood curdle.

This guy was one weird player.

And Ryan had gone out with him. Ryan had, Joe thought with a sharp jolt, Ryan had beat up on him� this guy who was, in Joe’s opinion, first in line for the nut farm. And, first in line as having killed her husband.

For instance, what would most men do if a woman tried to beat up on them? Grab her arms and get her under control-or knock her around and pound her. Williams had done neither. How many men would just stand there and take it, as limp as a decapitated mouse? No, Larn Williams, in anyone’s book, was a long way from normal.

And what did he mean to do to Ryan later? What might he be saving up to do?

Furthermore, if that was Marianna on the other end of the line, why would she want to cook Ryan’s books? What did Marianna have to gain by framing Ryan?

And who was Martie Holland?

Above Joe on the bed, Williams shifted his weight, still giggling and muttering. Joe heard him pick up the phone again, heard the little click of the headset against the machine, heard the dial tone then a fast clicking as if Williams had hit the redial.

Laughing that same crazy laugh, Williams shouted the name over and over,“Martie Holland Martie Holland Martie Holland,“then he slammed the phone down again, rose, and padded into the kitchen. Joe heard him open the refrigerator, then the cupboard, heard the icemaker spitting ice cubes into a glass, and could smell the sharp scent of whisky. While Williams mixed a drink, Joe lay under the bed trying to make sense of his phone conversation. Williams brought his drink into the bedroom, set it on the nightstand, and stretched out on the bed so the springs creaked above Joe’s head. He heard Williams plump the pillows then straighten the covers as if perhaps preparing for sleep. The tomcat was about to cut out of there when he heard, outside the window, the faintest rustling of bushes.

Scooting on his belly to the window side of the bed, he peered up at a familiar shadow dark against the glass-then it was gone.

He didn’t wait to find out if Williams had seen Clyde. Leaving the bedroom fast, he leaped at the front door, praying the dead bolt would give before Williams heard him-wondering if he’d beableto turn the bolt.

There was not a sound from the bedroom except Williams shaking the ice in his glass. Joe leaped again, and again. Dead bolts were hell on the paws, most of them stronger and with less leverage than a cat could manage. Had Williams heard him? Why was he so quiet? Joe was swinging and kicking when, glancing across the living room where moonlight slanted down against the mantel, he saw something that made him drop to the floor, looking.

Something about the three smooth black indentations that held the three pieces of sculpture wasn’t right. Two were smooth and properly constructed. But in the angled moonlight, the right-hand rectangle looked rough and unfinished. Someone had taken less than the required care in smoothing the concrete, had left a ragged line and rough trowel marks.

Considering the perfection of detail in the rest of the house, that did seem strange. Considering Marianna Landeau’s reputation for demanding perfection, it seemed more than strange. He was about to slip closer, for a better look, when beyond the front door he heard Clyde’s whisper.“Joe? Are you there? Joe? “

In the bedroom, Williams stirred, sending a shock of panic through Joe. He turned, watching the man. He didn’t think he wanted to play innocent lost kitty with this guy.

Leaping for the lock in huge panic, driven by desperation, he just managed to turn the dead bolt, seriously bruising his paws-the door flew open. Clyde loomed, his familiar scent filling Joe’s nostrils. Joe glanced to the bedroom again, but Williams had turned over and seemed to be dozing off.

“Wait,” Joe said. “Pull the door to and wait, I just want to�”

“Wait, hell. Come out of therenow.”

“One second,” Joe said, and he was across the room rearing up, staring up at the moonlit mantel.

Yes, definitely flawed. Sloppy work that Marianna should never have permitted, or for that matter, Ryan either-though possibly you couldn’t see this in the daylight; Joe hadn’t seen it then. Only now did the sharply angled light pick out clearly the thin, ragged line that ran diagonally across the black concrete.

Wondering if such a flawcouldhave gone undetected, he heard Williams stir again and push back the covers. Taking one last look at the rough black concrete, Joe fled for the door. Clawing past Clyde’s feet, he was out of there racing ahead of Clyde across the yard into the dark, concealing woods, where they crouched together among the bushes like two thieves.

“What was that about?” Clyde snapped, snatching Joe up in his arms. “Why did you go back? That guy�”

“I� something I needed to look at.”

Behind them there wasn’t the faintest sound, the front door didn’t open. Rising slowly, holding Joe half-concealed under his jacket, Clyde slipped out of the woods and headed fast for the car. Jerking open the driver’s door of the Hudson, he tossed Joe on the torn seat, slipped in and locked the door behind them. “You’re risking your neck in there and risking mine, you sound like a herd of bulls jumping at the door, but then you just have to go back-for another look at what? Did it occur to you that this guy might snatch up a cat and�”

“It occurred. It occurred. It was something urgent.”

Clyde started the engine. “I endanger life and limb playing bodyguard to a demented gum-paw, and something in there is so important you risk both our necks, going back.”

“We didn’t risk our necks. That guy’s a wimp.Ryanbeat him up.”

Clyde sighed and headed down the hills, turning his lights on the instant he was around the first curve. Watching him, Joe felt almost bad that he wasn’t sharing what he’d seen with Clyde.

But for the moment he wanted to keep that puzzling glimpse of the fireplace to himself, wanted to think about it without Clyde’s take on the matter, without anyone’s input. When something strange nagged at him, he liked to let it fall in place by itself. Let it rattle around with the rest of the mismatched facts and see how they shook out; see what his inner thoughts would do, without outside influence.

He’d had the feeling, when he looked up at that black recess, that this was the moment of truth. That he stood teetering on the brink of one big, momentous discovery.

Beside him, driving down the dark and narrow, twisting streets, Clyde was nearly squirming with curiosity. “So besides whatever you went back for, whatever you’re keeping so secret, what else went on in there? Did I hear him talking on the phone? I thought sure he’d find you, I was ready to smash a window.” He looked sternly at Joe. “This stuff’s hard on a guy’s blood pressure, you ever think of that?”

Joe smiled. “He was talking to a woman. I’m guessing it was Marianna, that he’s here with her permission, that they’re friends.”

“That would be a twist. So what was he shouting about?”

“I think the guy’s crazy. Kept shouting the name Martie Holland, over and over, wasn’t making any sense. You ever hear of a Martie Holland? Harper or Dallas, or Ryan, ever mention that name?”

“Not that I recall.”

Joe frowned. He didn’t like when the pieces wouldn’t add up. Heading home in the Hudson beside Clyde, he thought he’d catch a few hours’ sleep until Williams left the Landeau cottage and then, if Ryan or Hanniwasto be there early in the morning-and who else would it be?-he’d play friendly kitty with those two, and get a closer look at the flawed mantel.

24 [��������: pic_25.jpg]

When Ryanleft Burger Basher heading for Clyde’s place to pick up Rock, she was still steaming with anger; playing back Larn Williams’s words about her dad, she was mad enough to chew nails. Clyde had hurried away in his old Hudson on some errand, and just as well. She was in no mood to be civil for long, even to Clyde, though she had greatly appreciated his coming to her rescue-he might have followed her, and that was okay. He might have rescued her from killing Williams, the way she’d felt at that moment.

As she pulled to the curb before Clyde’s house, Rock heard the truck and began to paw at the gate. Hurrying back to release him, reaching to open the latch, she stopped. Rock had backed off from her, snarling with a cold, businesslike menace.

“What’s wrong?” She reached for him. “Come, Rock.” He dodged away growling. She thought of rabies, and shivered; but quietly she moved toward him. He showed his teeth, focused on something she couldn’t understand.

Last night he’d been this way. Leaving Lupe’s Playa after Williams switched the contents of the envelope on the seat of her truck, following Clyde home, opening this same gate, Rock had been delighted to see her-but when she opened the truck door and told him to load up, he’d pitched a fit, smelling the scent of someone strange in the cab. And when they got home and Rock encountered the stranger’s smell there in the apartment, he’d nearly torn the place apart, looking for the intruder.

The smell of the intruder, of Larn Williams. Now that smell was on her. She stared at her hands where she had marched Williams into the alley and shoved him against the wall. And, stepping into the yard past the growling, puzzled weimaraner, she moved around to the outdoor sink and washed thoroughly, scrubbing to her elbows.

Then again she approached Rock.

He cringed low but came to her. He sniffed again at her hands, and he grinned up at her and began to dance around her, all wags and kisses, whining and licking and loving her.

Putting him on the lead and shutting the gate securely behind her, she settled him in the truck and headed home. He watched her seriously, his pale yellow eyes puzzled, as if he couldn’t understand about the smells. In the passing lights, his sleek silver coat gleamed like satin. She scratched his ears. “You not only have a very good nose, my dear Rock. Considering the source of your anger, you have superior judgment.”

At her lighter tone, Rock grinned and wagged, his long, soft ears thrust eagerly forward. Smiling to herself, she wondered what Rock would do, face-to-face with Williams. And again she saw Williams in the alley, his white, shocked expression as she backed him against the wall. The incident, thanks to Clyde, hadn’t turned as nasty as she’d expected. She really wasn’t sure how the encounter would have ended if Clyde hadn’t appeared so suddenly.

She didn’t often lose her temper like that, and tonight was certainly not the time or the place. She would most likely regret later her public display of rage.

What was the source of Larn’s remarks about her dad? There could be no source. Sick words from a twisted mind. Williams was riding a loose rail.

Or was it more than that?

And what a bizarre twist, that Clyde’s tomcat had been in the restaurant with her and Larn, then had apparently followed them to the alley; she’d caught just a glimpse of him as Clyde snatched him up, heading for his car. “A very peculiar cat,” she told Rock. “I don’t like to insult present company, but he really does act more like a dog, if you could manage to take that as a compliment.”

Rock grinned and wagged, happy for her improved mood. But then as she turned into her drive he stiffened again, watching the stair and her studio windows and glancing at her as if for direction, the hair along his back rising in a harsh ridge.

Scanning the yard and the upstairs windows, she slipped Hanni’s gun from her glove compartment. She wondered if she dare let Rock out of the truck? If someone was there, would she be able to control him?

Or was he simply wired again after sniffing the scent of last night’s intruder on her hands? She would have to learn to control the dog, andsoon,if she meant to keep him.

Slipping the loaded, unholstered gun into her jeans pocket and putting Rock on leash, she moved quietly up the outside stairs. Rock, walking at heel, almost slunk along, silent and wary. She had unlocked the door and stepped in and turned on the light when the phone rang. She didn’t pick up but stood looking around the apartment, letting the machine answer.

The room didn’t seem disturbed. The kitchen was as she’d left it, cups and glasses in the drain, an inch of stale coffee in the pot. The studio windows all closed and locked. She moved with Rock to the hall, approaching the closet-dressing room and bath. Together they cleared the apartment, and she checked the lock on the door of the inner stairs. When all seemed secure she released Rock. He continued to prowl, perhaps making certain the intruder’s scent was not fresh. Sitting down at her desk, she hit replay.

It was Hanni. She was wired, laughing with excitement. “The rug’s in! Delivered this afternoon while I was out installing the Brownfield house-I just got home. Starved. Exhausted. The kids hardly know me, I haven’t had time to breathe. Jim and the kids unpacked it, we couldn’t wait. It’s in the living room, one end draped over the couch.It’s fab, Ryan! Just fab! Are you there? Pick up the phone!Can you meet me in the morning? I was going over anyway, early, to take some Mexican planters. I’m glad we ripped out the old carpet. It won’t take us a minute to put this down, just a little two-sided tape. It’s going to be sensational. Eight o’clock too late? Call me. I know you’ve started a new job. Call me please before I go to sleep, and let me know!”

Stripping off her jeans and sweatshirt, Ryan washed her face and brushed her teeth then pulled on her robe and crossed the studio. Pulling the curtains, she made herself a drink, and turned her bed back, removing the hand-printed spread to reveal its matching comforter. Carrying the phone to the bed, she made herself comfortable propped against the pillows. Immediately Rock stepped up onto the foot of the bed looking questioningly at her.

“It’s okay,” she said softly. Who would know if she spoiled him? If he was going to be her dog, she could spoil him as she pleased. All her childhood, one or another of the hunting dogs had been allowed to sleep on her bed. After her mother died, that nighttime companionship had been important. A warm, caring creature to lie across her feet or to snuggle with.

Easing back into the pillows, sipping her drink, feeling the last of her gritty anger at Larn Williams ease away, only then did she pick up the phone and call Hanni.

Hanni had turned off her tape. Letting it ring, Ryan sat enjoying the high-ceilinged studio, taking pleasure in its plain white angles and tall, open space. Someday she’d want paintings, more furnishings, bright and intricate accessories maybe to the point of crowding. But right now the open, nearly empty interior was deeply soothing. The only real luxury items were her handblocked spread and quilt in shades of black and white and tan, a primitive Australian pattern on which, at the moment, one long, lean, silver-coated freeloader reclined, his short pointer’s tail gently thumping as he looked shyly at her, not totally certain that she meant to let him stay. Hanni answered.

Ryan said, “We’re working on Clyde’s attic, ready to jack up the roof first thing in the morning. Can the rug wait?”

“I can’t stand to wait. It’s so beautiful. You can’t imagine how elegant and rich. I’ve already added it to Marianna’s insurance policy, and I� I could lay it myself, but I don’t want to use the stretcher. Could we do it at seven? You don’t start work until eight.”

“If I can be on the job by eight.”

“It won’t take long. You’ll be so thrilled. See you at seven.”

Ryan sighed and hung up. She had to remember that Hanni had designed that rug, that she had indicated the placement of every hand-knotted piece of yarn, that the rug was Hanni’s painting, her latest masterpiece. Of course she was excited-and Hanni was never one to quell her passions.

Turning out the bedside lamp she sat going over tomorrow’s work to see if she’d forgotten any detail. Against her feet Rock was like a furnace. The fact that he was taking half the bed, that she would likely sleep with her feet hanging out, or twisted up like a pretzel, didn’t off-balance her satisfaction at having him there. Maybe, when she had a little break in Clyde’s job, she’d put a couple of her men up here to fence that steep backyard, maybe bring some heavy equipment in to terrace it. Finishing her drink she stretched out with her feet tucked securely against the big weimaraner.

But then she couldn’t sleep.

She lay wondering if Larn had killed Rupert, wondering if she had had dinner tonight with the man who murdered her husband.

She had gone out for that casual dinner drawn by curiosity, just as Larn had meant her to be. Manipulated like a puppet. And she had learned nothing true about her father, had learned only that Larn Williams was driven by motives she didn’t yet understand.

Dad had had woman friends over the years since her mother died, good friends, women he’d dated and whom he’d brought home for dinner or picnics or to hunt with them. Maybe in all those years, no more than four or five woman friends. He’d never been serious enough to think about marriage, he’d always let his daughters know that no one ever would replace their mother. And certainly none of his dating had been of the kind that would embarrass himself or his children. He had never,wouldnever have dated any parolee or probationer. Her father was too much a stickler for professional behavior to do such a thing, he would fire any of his officers caught in such a situation.

So what was Williams trying to accomplish?

Larn Williams was, as far as she knew, no more than a small-town realtor who had, she’d thought, been interested in her work in San Andreas. She’d made it clear that she’d only just left her husband, and wasn’t dating. That she would have dinner with him to discuss possible remodel work for his San Andreas clients.

What if it turned out that Larn had killed Rupert?

But what connection could there have been?

If Larn were arrested for Rupert’s murder, how would that look to the dozens of people who had seen them having dinner, and heard them arguing? Two conspirators having a falling out? She had turned on her accomplice in anger?

She imagined she was drifting off, she was trying to drift off, when the phone jerked her up and startled Rock so he stood up on the bed with one hard foot on her leg barking loud enough to break eardrums.

Hushing him, she picked up the phone, answering crossly, wishing she’d let it go on the tape. Rock, watching her, hesitantly walked up the length of me bed and lay down beside her.

“It’s Clyde. I just� wanted to be sure you’re okay.”

“I’m fine. Was nearly asleep. Thanks for pulling me out of that, no telling what I might have done. That man� I’ll fill you in later, more than I did. I may be late in the morning, would you leave a note for Scotty and Dave? I have to meet Hanni at the Landeau place at seven, to lay the new rug. She’s so excited, I couldn’t put her off. Do you have company? Who are you talking to?”

“The damn cat. Insists on hogging the bed, sprawling all over my pillow. Guess he likes the sound of the phone.”

She laughed. “Don’t knock it. It’s nice to have a four-legged pal to warm your feet. What ever made me think I wouldn’t keep Rock?”

“I never thought that,” Clyde said, laughing.

Hanging up, she burrowed into her pillow. She was deeply asleep when the phone rang again encouraging another round of barking. Hushing Rock, she wondered how long it would take to teach him the futility of barking at the phone, while not discouraging his other alarm responses.

The voice at the other end was Dallas. “You asleep?”

“No, not now.”

He chuckled. “Thought you’d like to know that Davis and I picked up the old man, up at the Pamillon place. That we’ve got enough on him, for drug making, to go to the grand jury and maybe enough for a bomb-making charge.”

“What did you find?”

“Has a lab up there, all right. We had to suit up like astronauts to go down into it. Talk about stink. It’s in a cellar under some chicken houses.” Ryan could hear the smile in his voice. “All kinds of stuff with his prints on it, glass jars, retorts. Old man must have thought we’d never find the place.

“And he’d dumped mountains of trash down in the estate, in a cellar, again with his prints on everything-including some electrical parts and a bag of ammonium sulfate that could relate to the bomb. We’re taking prints from samples of the trash, and listing the brands, to compare with Max’s list of purchases in San Andreas. Should tell us quite a lot.”

“That’s really great news. That’s one down�”

“And one to go. I’d sure like to thank our tipster. Hope we have as good luck with the murder, with these women we’re talking to. You can be sure that Wills and Parker are getting all they can.”

“You don’t have anything, this soon?”

“In fact, I think we can scratch three. Parker called me an hour ago. Three of them have pretty solid stories. That leaves seven, with two of those out of the country, as far as we know.”

“I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I’m sure glad you have capable friends when you need them.” She yawned, and rubbed Rock’s ears.

“Go to sleep,” Dallas said, laughing. “Keep the good thoughts.”

She hardly remembered hanging up. She was deeply asleep when the phone rang again. Again, the loud, frantic barking jerking her awake along with the ringing, making her cringe at what her neighbor, on the other side of the duplex wall, would be saying-she hoped they didn’t call the department.

“Ryan, it’s Dad. Sounds like I woke you. I’m in San Francisco, just got back, checked into an airport motel. Catching the early shuttle down to the village in the morning. You want to meet my plane?”

“I� I’d love to. You’re coming because of me, because of the murder. You haven’t been home.” How strange she felt, talking to her own father. How uncertain-because of what Williams had said. But how silly.

“I’m coming because I have a few days leave and need to rest up after running that training session, before I go back to work. Can you meet my plane or shall I�?”

“Yes, I can meet it. What time?”

“If it’sontime, five a.m.”

“I’ll be there but I can’t wait past six-thirty, I promised Hanni. An early installation, one she refuses to put off.”

“If you’re not there, I’ll take a cab or call Dallas. You sound-tired? A bit stiff. You okay? You’re not letting this thing get to you? I haven’t talked with Dallas. What kind of leads is he getting?”

“It’s not that. I� He’s working on it, has a couple of guys in the city checking out Rupert’s� Rupert’s women. And, they know my gun didn’t kill Rupert.”

“Then you should sound very up, not like you just lost your last friend.”

“I’m fine, really. Very very up. Just� dead tired, Dad. That’s all. I’ll see you in the morning, bright and early. We can have breakfast, if you’re on time.” But her voice caught, and the tears were just running down. What was wrong with her?

“Ryan? What?”

“Nothing. Honest. Pancakes and bacon. See you at five. G’night.” She hung up, choking with tears. She wanted to bury her face against her father’s chest and hear him tell her that everything Larn said was lies, that everything about her father was just as she had always believed, just as it should be. She felt like she was six years old again, badly needing comforting by her dad. Did anyone ever get too old for such comforting?

But the worst thing was, he’d heard exactly how she felt. He’d heard all the dismay and uncertainty that she didn’t even know was there, all the stupid questions.

This wasn’tlikeher, to let Williams lay this kind of trip on her. Williams was lying, there was no way she was going to believehim.

And, suddenly, she buried her face against Rock and bawled.

25 [��������: pic_26.jpg]

It was 4:40 in the morning when Ryan pulled into Peninsula Airport, parking in the short-term lot. She left Rock in the cab of the truck, cracking the windows and locking the doors, and hurried into the lobby hoping Dad’s flight was on time. She didn’t like leaving Rock very long on that expensive leather upholstery.

The big dog hadn’t offered, so far, to do any of the damage his breed was famous for, but she couldn’t forget the horror stories. Before she entered the small terminal she removed a police badge from her purse and pinned it on her jacket, a procedure highly irregular and illegal. Entering, she nodded to several security people, gave over her purse for perusal when requested, glad she’d remembered to remove Hanni’s gun. She stood reading the schedule, then approached the security desk. The guard on duty was maybe thirty, good-looking, clean shaven, with nice brown eyes and no wedding ring.

“I have a security dog in my truck, I’m meeting his handler.” Ryan widened her eyes, looking deeply at him. “This is� a sort of surprise for him. Mike worked with the dog for a year and then� well, he was wounded on the job and now he’s coming home.” She took a step closer to the counter. The guard did the same. “Would it� would it be okay if I bring the dog inside, just until flight six-oh-two-seven lands? My boss will be so thrilled. I promise the dog won’t be a problem, I’ve been training him since Mike was hurt�”

The guard grinned at her and waved her on in. She touched his hand briefly, smiling up at him and headed for the truck.

Rock was as thrilled to see her as if she’d been gone for weeks. She hugged him extravagantly because he hadn’t torn up the upholstery then leashed him and slipped the yellow vest on him that she had made with felt and a marking pen, neatly letteringWorking Dogon both sides. Commanding Rock out of the truck she told him to heel, praying that he wouldn’t let the strange sights and sounds of the terminal undo him. She didn’t yet know this dog very well, he might have all manner of behavior problems that could surface suddenly in the very different environment of the airport.

Before taking him into the terminal she walked him a block up the sidewalk and back. He honored every command. Heading for gate B she glanced across at the guard. He gave her a bright smile and a thumbs up, openly admiring Rock. Outside the gate she settled down at the end of a bench, feeling strangely nervous at meeting her dad, trying not to hear Larn Williams’s words:I don’t believe the gossip� I thought of course you ‘d heard� It’s common knowledge� The women� you have to know about the women� I can’t believe you never heard� Flannery had plenty of women� affairs with more than a few female parolees�

None of that was common knowledge, none of it ever happened. Not Mike Flannery, who had been totally committed to raising his girls the way their mother would want, totally committed to their high morals and to keeping alive the memory of their mother. Not this thoughtful man who had said to them a thousand times,What would your mother have done at your age, in that situation?Not Mike Flannery who had spent every free minute with his daughters working the dogs or hunting or riding, who had never had any free time unaccounted for, not Mike Flannery who had never given Ryan or her sisters any tiniest cause to doubt him. Growing up in a law-enforcement family, Ryan and Hanni and their older sister were not naive, they had all three been wise beyond their years, any of them would have noticed, would have known if their dad was fooling around.

She startled suddenly when Rock whined. Looking down at him, she realized she’d been rubbing his ears so hard she’d hurt him. She stroked his head softly and apologized. He whined in return, never offering to move from the sit-stay command she had given him almost ten minutes ago. Ten minutes� and as she looked out at the empty runway here came a plane landing.

As it taxied out of view to the south, she waited, heart pounding, for it to return up the long field. Watching it slowly pull up to gate B, she felt queasy in her middle.

This wasn’t going to be easy, telling him what she’d heard. But then it wouldn’t be easy, either, facing her dad with a murder charge hanging over her, a charge that, even if it was a setup, could affect both Dad’s career and Dallas’s, could ruin both their futures.

Standing out of the way she watched people flock as near to the doors as they were allowed, watched and waited nervously with her hand sweating on Rock’s leash. She felt far more nervous than when, at twelve, she’d struck a ball through the neighbor’s window, or when she’d let one of the pups run off and nearly get hit by a car, or the time she had accidentally fired a round through the roof of the firing range. She was far more nervous now, at seeing her own father.

Make a fuss over him, Rock. A fuss and a diversion. And don’t make a liar of me, in the eyes of that security guard.Who knew when she might need to rely on that guard for some yet unimagined emergency? When he looked up, watching her, she smiled and petted Rock.

Her dad was among the first off the plane, right behind the first-class passengers. She waved to him but kept Rock out of the crowd, letting Dad come to her winding his way through, his tall, lean frame easy in a suede sport coat and jeans and boots, his familiar grin, his pleasure at seeing her.

He didn’t hug her or touch her until he knew what the dog was all about.

“Make a fuss over him, a big fuss, he’s supposed to be your dog. I’ll explain later. His name’s Rock.”

Mike Flannery took in the badge on her lapel, and Rock’s vest, and let Rock smell his hand then talked softly to him until Rock was dancing around him, whining and so happy with this new friend that any minute he might start barking. Dad glanced at her, laughing. “This better be good. I’ll get my bags. Where’s the truck?”

“New� red Chevy king cab. Short-term parking, aisle three.” She grinned at him and headed for the door, the big dog looking back longingly at Mike Flannery-and so did she. Just being with Dad had chased away her stupid doubts.

She had settled Rock in the backseat when Dad came across the lot with his all-purpose, scarred and battered elk-hide bag. She stowed it in the backseat beside Rock, but where Mike could keep an eye on it so the big dog wouldn’t chew. “We have plenty of time for breakfast. We’ll go to the Courtyard where Rock can lie under the table-he doesn’t need elk-hide for breakfast.” Wheeling out of the airport, she headed for the freeway.

“So why is he supposed to be my dog? What’s with the working dog getup? All that fuss just so you could take him into the airport?”

She grinned. “Weimaraners are famous for tearing up the inside of a car.”

“So I’ve heard. This is the stray Dallas told me about? Looks like he’s not a stray anymore.”

“I guess.”

“You’ve had him vetted? Had his shots?”

“Urn� Not yet. Haven’t had time.”

Her father looked at her sternly.

“It’s just two days. Maybe I can-”

“You want me to do it? I’m hanging around for a few days. I can drive one of Harper’s surveillance wrecks.”

She turned off the highway into the village. “Would you? It’s Dr. Firetti, up near Beckwhite’s Automotive.”

“I know Firetti. Shall I have him check for an ID chip?”

She was surprised at the sinking feeling that gave her, that maybe Firetti would find Rock’s owner with that simple electronic scan. “I guess you’d better.” As she pulled up before the Courtyard, Flannery looked intently at her, and patted her knee. “It’ll be all right. Outside of being afraid you’ll lose your fine hound, what else is bothering you? Besides, of course, Rupert’s murder?”

She swung out of the truck, saying nothing, and unloaded Rock, moving ahead of her father into the restaurant. When they were seated, he gave her a questioning look. “You don’t want to talk about it, this early in the morning.”

“Not really. Not here. Just� gossip.” The longer she put it off, the harder it would be.

“Gossip about you, because of the murder? Well I wouldn’t-”

“Could we talk about it tonight?”

“Shall I pick up some steaks?”

“Perfect.” Fishing in her purse, she found the extra key Charlie had given her, and watched him work it onto his key ring. They talked about the remodel she was starting for Clyde, about Scotty moving down to the village to work for her, about the rug she and Hanni were laying and how excited Hanni was, about all the inconsequentials. They enjoyed waffles and sausage and quantities of coffee then she dropped her dad and Rock at the police station. But, heading for the Landeau cottage, she was again tense with unease. Too many things going on, too many problems butting at one another.

Scotty said life wasn’t full of problems, it was rich with decisions. He said a person was mighty lucky to have the privilege of making choices, even hard ones. That the more carefully you thought out your decisions, the more the good times would roll. All her life Scotty had told her that if you did nothing but worry, if you were indecisive and scared to make decisions, then the good times would escape like a flock of frightened birds.

She guessed she’d better listen. If she got herself into a knot, she wouldn’t conquer any of the present tangles. They would conquer her.

It wasn’t yet dawn when the three cats arrived at the Landeau cottage, Joe fidgeting and pacing, consumed with getting inside for a look at the mantel. The kit too was wired, so excited to be out and free again and on an adventure. She had been home at Wilma’s since the night before, when Cora Lee reluctantly returned her and was pleased to stay for dinner. Now that Dallas had arrested Gramps Farger, now that the old man was safely tucked away in jail, it had seemed all right to bring the tattercoat home.

The kit loved Cora Lee, and certainly she had loved Cora Lee’s extravagant attention, but the kit easily grew restless. Cora Lee said she’d been peering out the windows with far too keen an interest. Having promised not to let the kit out, Cora Lee had worried at her unrest.

Now behind the Landeau cottage in the dark woods where the three cats crouched, the kit’s tail lashed with excitement. Her eyes burned round and black, she could hardly remain still.

“Cool it, Kit,” Dulcie said softly. “We’re not set to charge that cottage like a platoon of commandos.”

The kit eased the tail action to a slow twitch. But her eyes remained wide and burning. If they’d been hunting rats, her enthusiastic vibes alone would have cleared the premises. As the cats watched for Ryan and Hanni, above them the sky faded from black to dark pearl. The moon hung low in the brightening sky, circled by a nimbus of mist. Within the cottage, beyond the floor-to-ceiling glass, there was no sign of Larn Williams. The bed was neatly made. The sunken sitting area shone like a softly lit stage. Joe watched intently the flawed black niche in the fireplace, but the moon’s diffused fight, from a different angle at this later hour, showed him nothing. He could smell on the breeze the stink of exhaust from the departed Jeep. The cats were dozing when Hanni pulled onto the granite parking.

She wasn’t driving her powder-blue convertible but a white van with the dolphin-shaped logo of her design studio. Certainly the Mercedes wasn’t made to haul the ten-foot rug that stuck out the back where the rear doors stood open and tied together. Swinging out, she began to unload some huge, Mexican ceramic pots that were wedged in beside the rug. She was dressed this morning in faded designer jeans and a tomato red velour top that set off her short, windswept white hair and her flawless complexion and dangling gold earrings.“Smashing,“Dulcie whispered. Hanni Coon had a wonderful talent for elegance. If Dulcie were a human, she’d kill to look like that.

Hanni had the pots unloaded when Ryan’s truck turned in. Ryan swung out dressed in her usual nondescript work jeans, a navy flannel shirt over a cotton blouse, and rough work boots. Hanni looked her over, a quick assessment of how Ryanmightdress herself, how Ryanmightlook, a hasty glance that seemed to the cats little more than habit. “Where’s Rock?”

“Dad’s back, he called last night, I picked him up this morning. He’s getting Rock vetted.”

“He came directly here? Because of Rupert! We could have dinner. He’s staying at the cottage?”

“I� There’s something I need to talk with him about.”

“Personal? About the murder?”

Ryan looked at her helplessly. “That okay?”

“Of course it’s okay. Can I help?”

“No, just� Could I explain later? It’s� Makes my stomach churn. I’m trying to be cool.”

Hanni looked at her quietly, and began to ease the wrapped rug out of the van. They carried it into the house, one at each end as if, Joe thought, they were toting an oversized cadaver. Ryan opened up the sliding glass walls of the sunken sitting area while Hanni vacuumed the wood floor. Then, kneeling, they unwrapped the rug, stripping off the heavy brown paper. When at last they had it laid out on the wood floor, even Joe was dazzled. Dulcie caught her breath, creeping closer to the window through the fallen branches.

“I’ve never seen anything so beautiful,” she whispered. She and the kit stared and stared at the medley of brilliant colors, the thickly woven, intricate patterns. The kit crept closer still, watching the rug and watching Ryan and Hanni where they knelt in the middle pressing the rug gently toward the walls securing the edges with two-sided tape. Kit was so fascinated that her nose was soon pressed against the screen of the open window. Hanni’s masterpiece, handwoven in England at a fortune per square yard, made all three cats want to sink their paws in and roll with purring abandon. Silently Dulcie reached a paw, as if hypnotized, sliding the tall screen open, and padded delicately into the room.

The kit followed. They were poised among the pillows looking down at that sea of colors and sniffing the scent of clean wool when Ryan and Hanni looked up.

Ryan lifted her hand as if to stop them, but Hanni laughed. Any other designer, confronted with cats on her costly installation, would have shouted and chased them away. Hanni simply watched them, watched Joe Grey pad in too, stepping diffidently among the pillows.

“What harm can they do?” Hanni said. “Come on, cats. Are your paws clean?” She looked where they had trod and saw no dirt. “Come on, have a roll before the grande dame arrives. It’s your only chance. Marianna would eat you alive.” She grinned at Ryan. “Can you imagine? Cats on her hundred-thousand-dollar masterpiece?”

“Don’t you worry they’ll pull a thread?”

“It’s a well-made piece, the English know how to make rugs that last-the Englishknowthere’ll be cats on them. And Joeisa perfect gentleman. Kate and I kept him for a week, at the cottage, when we were down looking at the Pamillon estate. Something about Clyde painting his place. The cat had perfect manners then. Why would he be different now?”

Beneath the cats’ paws, the wool was softer than a featherbed. Dulcie and the kit rolled deliriously, wriggling, sinking into the thick pile, the kit flipping back and forth lashing her long, fluffy tail.

But Joe rolled for only a moment. He came to rest lying on his back, his white paws waving in the air as if in total abandon while he considered the flaw in the fireplace.

In the morning light, from this angle, he couldn’t see that out-of-place, ragged scar. Rolling across the rug as if crazy with play, he looked again.

Nothing. The rising dawn light coming from every direction showed the black recess as smooth as the other two. But last night hehadseen the diagonal scar running down the right-hand rectangle, as sure as his name was Joe Grey. Rolling again, he tried another angle.

“See,” Hanni said, “they’re not doing any harm. But, oh boy, wouldn’t Marianna flip!”

“You love doing something that would enrage her.”

“She’ll never know, as long as they’re out before she gets here.”

“She’s coming down? This morning?”

“She’s in Half Moon Bay-or was, last night. She called me about something, I told her the rug was here. She sounded pretty excited, for ice queen Marianna. Said she’d be down early, that she had some business in the village. One of their rentals, I suppose.” Sullivan had, several years before when the real-estate market was soft, made some excellent investments in Molena Point.

“There, that’s the last of it,” Hanni said, smoothing the corner of the rug. Standing, she stepped up to the tiled entry with Ryan for a full view. They could see, even with the three cats sprawled across the rug, that it lay smooth and flat, a perfect fit, a meadow of color as fine as any painting.

“I’d like to roll on it, myself,” Hanni said.

“Go ahead, you earned it. It truly is magnificent. You can-”

Both women turned as a car pulled into the drive. They couldn’t see it from the entry, that wall and the door were solid. Hanni, stepping into the bedroom to look through the window, hurried out again. “Get the cats out! Come on Joe Grey, Dulcie. Move it, she’s coming.”

Her excited voice would have startled even the dullest cat. But as Joe and Dulcie leaped for the open screen, Marianna, with her usual dispatch, was out of the car and through the front door, her tall, slim figure frozen in the doorway.

The cats, crouched among fallen branches, looked for the kit, but she had vanished. They peered back toward the bright room, where Marianna stood on the landing. She was dressed in a severe black suit, long gold earrings, black stockings, black sandals with four-inch heels. Her eyes were fixed on the fireplace, her expression unbelieving.

Staring back at her from among the freshly split logs, the kit crouched unmoving, her black-and-brown coat hardly visible against the pine bark, but her yellow eyes wide with fear.

Having apparently, in her panic, bolted straight through the mesh curtain, she was trapped. When Marianna approached the firebox, the kit backed deeper, shivering, too frightened to bolt past her and run.

26 [��������: pic_27.jpg]

Kit stared out of the fireplace at the tall, black-suited, spike-heeled blonde with all the fear she would exhibit facing Lucifer himself. And from the woods outside, Joe and Dulcie watched with the same fear of the woman. Even Ryan looked uncertain.

But Hanni moved into the empty silence, laughing. “One little cat, Marianna. Look at her, she couldn’t resist your lovely new rug. Your English weavers would say that’s good luck, to have a little cat bless their creation.”

Marianna gave Hanni a look that should have reduced her to a grease spot. Hanni took Marianna’s hands in her own and tried to ease her down the steps onto the thick, bright rug. Marianna resisted as rigidly as if cast from stone; and Hanni smiled more brightly. “Slip off your sandals, Marianna. Come, sit on it, isn’t it a wonder?” Hanni sat down cross-legged on the bright weave. “I am just so thrilled. Tell me you’re as pleased as we are.”

“There was not one cat in here, Hanni, mere were three. I can’tbelieveyou would letcatsinto my home to make their messes on a brand-new, hundred-thousand-dollar, one-of-a-kind handmade rag, to leave filthy fleas, and very likely ticks.”

“We didn’tseethem come in,” Hanni said, smiling. “We didn’t see them until just as you pulled into the drive, they can only have been in here for a second while our backs were turned.”

Beyond the screened windows crouched among the forest’s foliage, Joe and Dulcie looked at each, laughing at Hanni’s chutzpah, but frightened. The kit was still trapped in there, crouched in the firebox staring up at Marianna. From the look in the kit’s eyes, Marianna would not be smart to reach into the fireplace meaning to snatch her out and evict her.

As they watched, Ryan knelt, reaching in to the kit. The kit came to her at once. Ryan picked her up, carried her to the long windows, set her through and gave her a Utile pat, then closed the screen.

Kit was a streak, fleeing to them. Behind her, Hanni laughed. “What harm did she do? Just a pretty little neighborhood cat.”

Pressing between Joe and Dulcie, the kit shivered with the residue of fear, but lashed her tail with anger. “I would have slashed her, I would have bloodied her.” But soon she began to wriggle, to scratch at something in her fur. Turning, she licked her back, fidgeting as if she itched all over.

“What?” Dulcie said. “What did you do?Didyou pick up a tick? Don’t get it on me. Let me have a look.”

“Hard,” the kit said, licking again and spitting something into the dry leaves and pine needles. “Not a tick. Rocks in my fur.”

Joe nosed at the bit of debris that had fallen among the leaves, and peered closely. He turned it over with his nose, then looked at the kit. “Are there more of these in your fur?Don’t shake them off!Come out to the drive. Don’t spill any! Walk carefully. Hurry, Kit! Comeon!”

Puzzled but obedient, the kit followed. Joe nudged her to a spot on the drive not visible from the living room, and licked at her fur until he had dislodged three more rough pebbles. On me smooth drive he pawed at them, turning them over until each piece lay with its smooth side up, the surface painted jet black. They were bits of broken cement, each with one smooth surface.

“Did you feel those before you hid in the fireplace?”

The kit shook her whiskers. “No.”

Carefully Joe pawed the fragments onto an oak leaf, and slid that beneath a bush. When he turned to look at them, his yellow eyes burned with excitement. And quickly he moved to Ryan’s truck. “Watch for me, Dulcie, in case anyone comes.”

“But you�”

“It’s the only phone handy.” Slipping under me truck to the far side, he was up through the window in a second and punching in information. Another minute and he had rung the Coldiron number and was talking with Eby. “This is a neighbor of me Landeaus�”

He peered out once, but the three women were still inside; and Dulcie sat watching the door, the tip of her tail twitching. When he’d finished explaining to Eby Coldiron what needed to be done, he dropped from the window. “Go home, Dulcie. Go call Dallas, I’m afraid to do that from this phone.Hehas caller ID. I’ll be along soon.”

She looked at him with suspicion.

“It’s safe, trust me. Would I do something foolish?” He brushed his whiskers against hers.

She widened her eyes, and cuffed him. Of course he would do something foolish.

“Tell Garza, if he’ll get over to the Coldirons pronto, they’ll give him a rug from the Landeau cottage, that it’s vital evidence. They’re waiting for him. Tell him to look for little bits of concrete with black paint on them, and to check for blood. My guess is, the DNA will match that of Rupert Dannizer. Tell him the rug has been sponged, then doused with wine.”

“You’re building a lot on a few little bits of concrete.”

“And a scar on the fireplace. Go on. If Dallas isn’t there, talk with Davis.”

“Of course I’ll talk with Davis.” But she gave him a whisker kiss, and a nudge for luck. “Come on, Kit, get moving.” And as she and the kit headed at a gallop toward the village and home, Dulcie wondered: with Garza checking on Rupert’s lovers, would this call about the fireplace tie in somehow? Would it, she thought shivering, tie in with his ballistics report?

Joe was not the most patient of tomcats. Waiting in the bushes by the front door, he kneaded the dry leaves, and scratched his ear. He wanted to yowl at the three women to get on with it, finish their business and leave. But when at last Ryan’s truck pulled out, Marianna and Hanni stood in the doorway-not three feet from him, just above the holly leaves-indulging in incredible inanities as both women tried to smooth over their earlier confrontation. Hanni would make amends because Marianna was her client. Marianna’s motive, in being nice, was less clear.

He tensed as Hanni turned to leave, and crouched.

The instant Marianna turned back inside he was through the door behind her like a shadow easing behind the Mexican chest.

He heard Hanni’s van start and pull away. He was alone with Marianna Landeau, locked inside the cottage. Any route of escape would take at least a few minutes to accomplish, perhaps under conditions he didn’t want to consider. He could hear her rummaging in the bedroom as if she was shifting the clothes in the closet, maybe one of those pointless rearranging orgies to which all women seemed addicted. When he heard her go into the bathroom he strolled through the bedroom door and slipped under the bed, frightening a little spider, wishing someone would dust under there. Didn’t she have a cleaning crew?

A light shone under the bathroom door, and the closet door stood open, the big walk-in space all fitted out with sleek white shelves and drawers and zippered garment bags. Absolutely neat. No place in there for a cat to hide. The hanging rods contained minimal wardrobes, his and hers. He supposed if one had three residences, it would be convenient not to cart suitcases back and forth.

The bathroom door opened and Marianna’s elegantly sandaled feet appeared inches from his nose, her stiletto heels suggesting formidable weapons. He listened to her rummaging in the closet again, heard a zipper close.

Stepping out, she dropped a small duffel by the bedroom door then crossed the tile entry to the sunken sitting area. He heard her close the long windows and lock them, then she stood at the top of the steps with her back to him, as if admiring the rich new rug.

But then she moved swiftly to the kitchen, returning with one of those little plug-in hand vacs designed for quick cleanup, for those moments when someone scatters coffee grounds or cookie crumbs across the kitchen floor. With the brand-new rug, what was there to clean up? Joe went rigid, watching.

Kneeling before the fireplace, her tight skirt hiked up around her thighs, Marianna slid the mesh curtain back and reached in to vacuum the corners of the firebox behind the clean, stacked logs. Surely removing the same debris that the kit had picked up on her fur.

She did a thorough job, forcing the nozzle into the back corners. But when she returned the little machine to the kitchen, Joe smiled. She’d forgotten something. Retrieving the duffel bag from the bedroom, and shutting the closet door, she jingled her keys and was out of there, locking the front door behind her.

Not until he heard her car pull away, did he come out from under the bed.

First he tossed the bedroom, working open the night table drawers, then the drawers of the television armoire. He checked between the mattresses, poking a wary paw in, then crawling deeper, but he found only lint. Swinging on the closet-door handle, he was in within seconds, leaping at the bank of built-in drawers, gripping and kicking.

Forcing each one open in turn, he pawed carefully through. Dulcie would love Marianna’s expensive lace undies, the silk and satin perfumed with fancy little sachets. The last drawer contained half-a-dozen evening bags and as many compacts, all of them expensive looking. Crouched on the edge of the drawer, Joe frowned. Should he?

Well, why not? What could be more opportune? Pawing half-a-dozen compacts into a quilted evening bag, he snapped closed his prize and carried it in his teeth to the front door. There he began the tedious, paw-bruising, leaping contortions necessary to slide the dead bolt, turn the knob, and escape from his self-made prison.

Lashing her tail with amusement, Dulcie pushed the phone back onto its cradle and rolled over on Wilma’s bed, her paws in the air, a Cheshire cat-smile lighting her tabby face. Oh, she did enjoy these anonymous phone calls. Dallas had not only assured her that he would drive over to the Coldirons’ cottage at once, to pick up the brown shag rug, but he thanked her. He knew as well as she that it was futile to ask her questions.

Though at first, he had argued with her. He said the concrete crumbs in the rug could be simple debris left over when the fireplace was built. Dulcie reminded him that the black recesses had been painted some time after the fireplace was built, and the fragments had black paint on them. Then Garza said that the three sculptures had been installed in those niches only recently, andthatprobably accounted for the black-painted chips. He’d gone silent when Dulcie informed him that the sculptures were fitted with special tension brackets at the back, so they had no need of bolts to hold them in place.

Garza hadn’t asked how she knew so much about the sculptures and about the interior of the Landeau cottage. Like Max Harper, Detective Garza had learned that it was useless to ask such questions, that he’d best take what he was offered and run with it. So far these anonymous tips had been 100 percent; both cops knew that. And maybe, she thought, this information might dovetail with lines of investigation that Garza was already pursuing. That would be interesting.

And, she thought rolling over and purring,thismorning, withthisphone call, Detective Garza had almost taken orders from her. He had agreed to collect the rug right away, absolutely trusting her, never once making light of her instructions. Oh, she couldn’t wait to tell Joe.

The quilted evening purse, stuffed with its six compacts, was hellishly heavy. But Joe wasn’t willing to jettison even one bit of possible evidence. Why a woman needed a dozen compacts was beyond him. Well, he never claimed to be an authority on female vicissitudes, cat or human. He could track a rabbit through rocky terrain, could dispatch the biggest wharf rat that ever snarled in a cat’s face, could leap six feet between rooftops. But he couldn’t tell you much about a lady’s love of finery. Gripping the quilted bag firmly between determined teeth, he hurried through the bright morning along the less frequented lanes of the village, avoiding passing cars and pedestrians. Dragging the bag up three trees and across innumerable rooftops, he arrived home at last with aching neck muscles and tired jaws. Crouched on the front porch, he listened to the racket above him, from the attic, hammers pounding, nails being forced from old wood with tooth-jarring screams, human voices sharp with tension.“Hold it. There. Back a little. Whoa-Put your level on it. Up� A little more� There! Nail it!“Above him, the porch roof shook. Sticking his head through his cat door, he looked around the living room.

Empty and safe. The house had that hollow feel mat heralded deserted space. Shoving the satin bag in onto the carpet, he followed it, collapsing beside it.

He didn’t want to drag it over to the station or to Garza’s cottage in the daylight, he’d had enough trouble getting it home without alerting some nosy citizen.Oh look, what’s that cat got? Come here, kitty. Let’s have a look�

Right.

He sat contemplating the several options he could employ as a safe hiding place until dark. He considered his battered easy chair that Dulcie and Clyde and several other insensitive folk said resembled the hide of a molting elephant. He had hidden several valuable items in that well-clawed and fur-coated retreat. The purse need remain there only until dark, until he could carry it unseen across the village and slip it into the police station, or maybe into Garza’s car-if he didn’t rupture a neck muscle, getting it there.

Shoving the little bag between the cushions, he stretched out in front of his chair across an African throw rug, wondering what Clyde had left him for breakfast. And praying that his evidence would nail Marianna Landeau. Praying that Ryan’s ordeal was about to be resolved.

27 [��������: pic_28.jpg]

The pan-broiled steaks were two inches thick, crisp and dark on the outside, deep pink within, so juicy and tender that Ryan almost groaned. She had left the curtains open so they could enjoy the sunset that blazed beneath the dark clouds. Sitting across from her dad at the kitchen table, tasting her first bite of steak, she sighed with a fine, greedy pleasure. “You can do, with a plain black skillet, what most chefs can’t manage even with their fancy grills.”

Mike Flannery grinned. “I’ve heard that line.” She laughed, but she watched him carefully too. He wasn’t even home yet, this was only the last leg of his trip, he had come down here to help her, worried about her, and she was going to dump these ugly rumors on him, lay out all Larn Williams’s lies to cheer him.

But she had to talk about this if she were to resolve her own uncertainty, her own fears. Thinking about Williams’s vicious story, on top of his tampering with her billing, she had grown increasingly frightened of what else he might plan to do, of what his ultimate goal might be.

Was Williams’s mind simply twisted, was he an impossible mental case? Or had he killed Rupert? But why would he draw attention to himself?

Maybe his actions were a carefully planned harassment designed to keep her off-center and perhaps complicate the murder investigation? Designed to throw the police off track and protect someone else?

Her father put down his fork, watching her, his expression half amused at her fidgeting, half a frown of concern. “Whatever’s bothering you, Ryan, spit it out. Before you choke on it.”

“Something someone said. It’s all lies. But� Well, lies that are hard to repeat.”

“If it makes you this edgy, if you’re embarrassed to say it, it has to be about me. What have I done? What did someone say I did?”

She looked at him helplessly.

“It wouldn’t be the first time someone told a lie about law enforcement.”

“He said it was common gossip in the city but I never heard anything like it, in the city or anywhere else.”

He waited patiently, buttering his baked potato.

Hesitantly she began, repeating Williams’s accusations. Flannery listened without comment, without interrupting. When she finished he asked only, “Do you believe him?”

“Of course I don’t believe him. But-what’s he up to? Is there some strange little thread on which he could build such lies? And there’s more.”

She told him about the breakin, about Larn cooking her books and switching the bills. “What’s scary is, this has to fit in with Rupert’s murder. That’s what’s scary.”

“What makes you think that?”

“You and Dallas always say, never believe in coincidence.”

“Have you told Dallas what Williams said, and about the billing?”

“I called him about the bills, the night it happened. But what Williams said� I didn’t tell him that.”

“Why not?”

“Partly because I made a spectacle of myself in the restaurant when he told me those things. I lost my temper, big-time. Strong-armed him and marched him outside. I just� I suppose Dallas has heard that, by now. If Clyde hadn’t come along and stopped me, Iwouldhave pounded him. What a weird bird. He just went limp, didn’t try to fight me, didn’t do anything. As if-”

“As if he likes the ladies to pound him?”

“That’s sick.”

“Can you make any connection between Williams and Rupert? Or, even between Williams and the bombing on Sunday?”

“No, I can’t. It’s such a muddle. Except, it all seems to connect to San Andreas. Williams lives and works there. I just finished the Jakes job there. And Curtis Farger was staying up there before the bombing. He came down from San Andreas inmytruck, hidden in the back with the dog.” She sighed. “Maybe one thing just led to another, but�”

“Go over it step by step, the relationships. Begin with your job in San Andreas.”

“I had remodeled a house for the Jakeses in the city, so it was natural for them to come to me for their vacation addition. They approached me, in fact, before I left Rupert. After I left, I told them I didn’t want to take the job away from the firm, but they said they wanted me, that they didn’t want to deal with Rupert. So I agreed.

“Then when I moved down here to the village, the Jakeses recommended me to the Landeaus because Marianna and Sullivan had bought a teardown here. The Landeaus came down and we talked. She sort of scared me, she was so� austere. One of those gorgeous natural blondes, but without any warmth. Intimidating. We went over the property, I gave them my assessment, and I ended up remodeling the teardown.

“As to Larn Williams, he just showed up when I was working on the Jakeses’ place. Wanted me to bid on a job for one of his real-estate clients.” She looked helplessly at her father. “I can’t see a connection. I didn’t realize then how strange Larn is, I didn’t see that.” She studied her dad’s preoccupied frown. “What?”

Flannery was quiet.

“Do you know something about Larn Williams?”

“Would you have a picture of Mrs. Landeau?”

“No. Why?”

“How old would you say she is?”

“I� Maybe a beautiful forty-some.”

“I had a parolee who would fit that description. Let me do some checking. What do you know about her?”

“That they’d been living in L.A. for some years before they moved to the Bay Area, maybe a year ago.”

“Did she say that she’d lived in San Francisco before?”

“Marianna doesn’t chitchat. But she does know the city. She didn’t ask directions when Hanni and I sent her to various out-of-the-way shops and decorator supply houses.”

“What does Hanni think of her?”

“Cold fish,” Ryan said, grinning.

“I had a woman on my caseload a few years back who would fit her description. She came out on parole after serving a conviction for bank fraud. I hadn’t had her a month when she was into a complicated embezzlement operation. I told her to clean it up or she was going back. When she tried to make trouble, Isenther back. A vindictive sort. Served the balance of her sentence, when she came out I had no reason to keep tabs on her. I heard she’d moved down to L.A. and married into a fair amount of money, not all of it clean.”

He cut some scraps from his steak and put them on a plate for Rock. Ryan watched him spoil the big weimaraner in a way he would never have allowed for his own dogs. “Seems far-fetched,” he said, “but let me see what I can find out.”

“But why would she-”

“Let’s see what I can turn up. If thisisMartie Holland, I’ll tell you the rest of the story.” Watching her expression, he laughed. “No, I wasn’t involved with her.”

“No,” she said. “But Rupert was. Right?”

Flannery nodded.

“Dallas knows her, she’s on me list he’s investigating. I think she’s one of the two supposedly out of the country. The Bahamas, I think he said.” And she felt cold again, icy.

The Garza cottage clung to the side of a steep hill north of the village, its front windows looking down on rooftops and oak trees that now, at night, were a black mass broken by only a few scattered lights from the houses tucked among them. At the back of the cottage, the kitchen windows faced the rising hill, the steep backyard softly lit by ground-level lamps that Joe and Dulcie avoided as they approached the back steps-two neighborhood cats checking out the garbage cans.

No lights were on in the kitchen, but a glow from deeper in the house suggested that Garza sat at his desk, perhaps catching up on paperwork.

Approaching the back door, with quick paws Joe tucked the little purse under the mat. And as Dulcie curled down on the cool earth beneath the bushes to watch the door, Joe nipped down the hill to the lower-level guest rooms-family bedrooms from the time when they all came down for weekends.

Crouched on the windowsill he reached a paw through the burglar bars and through the hole in the screen, product of his own handiwork some months back, when he’d done serious spying on Garza himself. Flipping the latch and sliding the screen open, he jiggled the window until its lock gave.

He was through the bars and inside. Leaping to the small desk, he touched the phone’s speaker button. This was the only phone in the house with two lines. The upstairs fax, and the main line, were on different instruments, the fax tucked away, he hoped, in a cupboard in the desk where Garza wouldn’t see its telltale light blinking. Hitting line two, he pawed in the main phone number that he had long ago memorized. Joe’s talents didn’t extend to writing down phone numbers, he was forced to keep all such urgent information in his head-a living computer that, over time, had become strong and reliable.

Garza answered on the second ring.

Dispensing with polite formalities, Joe kept his message short. “I’ve shoved a little purse under the back doormat; it contains items taken from Marianna Landeau’s closet that I hope will reveal her fingerprints.

“You may find the prints are also those of a Martie Holland. I don’t know who this person is, but perhaps that information will be of interest when the lab has finished with the rug-the one you picked up from the Coldirons. And when you’ve had a look at the mantel in the Landeau cottage.

“You should find four more chips from the mantel on a leaf under a lavender bush just south of the Landeau front door. Those were removed from inside the fireplace before Marianna vacuumed there. She used the hand vac from the kitchen, and I don’t believe she emptied it when she finished.”

He felt as if he was spelling the steps out too clearly, insulting Garza’s intelligence. But if Garza nailed Rupert’s killer, that was all that counted. Police work was a cooperative undertaking, a team effort-even if part of the team was irrevocably undercover. He had hardly hit the speaker button to end the call when he heard Garza cross the room above him, and hit the stairs. And Joe was out of there, out the window sliding it closed, diving into the bushes as Garza switched on the light. Had the phone made a telltale click? Why did Garza suspect the caller was down there?

Checking out both bedrooms, and bam and closets, Garza cut the lights again and turned to the window. Standing just above Joe behind the burglar bars, looking out, he was still for a long time. Below him, crouched in a tangle of prickly holly, patiently Joe waited until at last the detective turned away. Joe heard him mount the stairs.

He waited until he heard the kitchen door open then close again. When he knew that Garza had the little evening purse and the compacts, he beat it up the hill to Dulcie.

Above them the kitchen light was on. Rearing up in the hillside garden, they could see Garza sitting at the table wearing cotton gloves, opening the little purse.

He didn’t touch the compacts, he simply looked. He looked out the window at the rising yard, and sat for a long moment doing nothing. At last, rising, he fetched a folded paper bag from a kitchen drawer, dropped the purse inside, and marked the bag with his pen.

“What now?” Dulcie said. “Can he send the prints to AFIS electronically?” She thought the automated fingerprint identification system that California used should take only an hour or two.

“I think he can. But it will show only a California record. Maybe he’ll send it to WIN too, for the western states. But if she had only a federal rap, it could take weeks.”

The Western Identification Network, which supplied fingerprint identification for the eight western states, was usually prompt, as well. But if an officer got no results there, and had to go through the FBI that covered the entire country, he’d better be prepared for a wait.

“You think Marianna and Martie Holland are the same person?” Dulcie said softly.

“I’m betting on it. I think Larn Williams either works for Marianna, or they’re good friends.”

“You think she planned the bombing? But why? And how does that connect to Rupert? She knew Rupert in San Francisco, but�”

“My guess is, the bombing was all the Fargers’ doing, payback for Gerrard’s prison sentence.” He turned to look at her. “But my gut feeling, Dulcie, is that Marianna killed Rupert. We just don’t know, yet, why she killed him.

“Something tore up that fireplace, after the three niches were painted. If the mason had left it like that, she’d have pitched a fit. I think she installed those three pieces of sculpture to hide the flaw in the concrete that she tried to fix.”

“But the woman is a stickler for perfection. Why didn’t she do a better job?”

“If she was trying to get rid of the body, maybe she didn’t have time. She wanted to be gone, out of there before anyone knew she was at the cottage. Maybe that plaster job was the best she could do, in a hurry to get it dried and painted. Maybe, in the artificial light, she didn’t see the flaw. I didn’t see it until the moonlight slanted at an angle. And remember, she had to sponge his blood out of the rug too. And dump that bottle of wine, trying to cover her tracks.”

“But how did she get the body out of there? She looks strong, but-if she dragged it to her car, then dragged it into Ryan’s garage, there’d have been marks.”

“There were marks-those narrow tire tracks along Ryan’s drive. Dallas photographed them. By now he has to know those weren’t bike tracks. Maybe a wheelbarrow, or more likely a hand truck. Maybe she brought it with her from the city.”

“Grisly. She loads a hand truck into her expensive car, knowing she’ll soon have a body to haul away. If the cops find it, and check out her car too, there should be plenty of traces for the lab.”

“And before that,” Joe said, “there should be replies on Marianna’s fingerprints, and the lab report on the rug. I wonder how long that will take.” He narrowed his eyes. “And what was the dog on about, when he pitched that fit there in the driveway? It sure wasn’t Eby Coldiron who made him so mad.”

28 [��������: pic_29.jpg]

Police dispatcher Mabel Hammond saw the gray tomcat slip into the station on the heels of two officers returning from lunch, strolling in behind them through the security door with all the assurance of the chief himself.

Glancing down over her counter, Mabel grinned at him. “Come on up, Joe Grey. I have fried chicken.” The officers looked around laughing, and went on down the hall.

Mabel was fifty-some and inclined to be overweight. Her curly white hair was dyed blond. Her thick stomach didn’t allow her to lean too far over the dispatcher’s counter that defined her open cubicle on three sides. On the back wall was an array of computer and video monitors, radios, and other state-of-the-art electronic equipment that Mabel commanded. She not only handled emergency calls and dispatched officers, relaying all urgent communications, she juggled incoming faxes and the computers for vehicle wants and warrants and for wanted persons, and indexed officers’ reports.

Joe Grey, never one to refuse fried chicken, landed on the counter among the in-boxes of files and papers, just inches from Mabel’s face, smiling and purring up at her, laying on the charm. Mabel’s hair smelled of perfume or maybe cream rinse; he wasn’t an authority on these matters. Rubbing against her outstretched hand, he made super-nice in deference to the promised snack, and in keeping with his and Dulcie’s commitment to improved public relations.

Ever since Harper had remodeled the station, increasing security and locking all outside doors, Joe and Dulcie’s only sure access was the quick leap inside behind a returning officer. Their previous technique of pawing open the unlocked front door was no longer an option. Everything had changed. The new, efficient reception area was totally empty of desks to hide under. Upon entering, one faced only me dispatcher’s cubicle, the booking counter, the holding cell back in the corner, and in the other direction a long, blank hallway. And the dispatchers didn’t miss so much as a fly coming through the glass doors. Fortunately, those good women were all cat lovers.

Mabel had three cats of her own and, having recently married, shared her home as well with her husband’s two dogs and his parrot. But despite her domestic menagerie, Joe Grey always amused her. The tomcat seemed to Mabel the epitome of cool feline authority. Mabel’s work could get stressful; to have a four-legged visitor smiling and purring, sharing a few free moments, seemed to make her day shorter.

It interested her that the tomcat and his two lady pals liked to prowl the whole department, slipping in and out of the various offices. And, as cats were among the few visitors that could present no breach of security, most of the officers made a fuss over them. No one knew why the cats had grown suddenly so friendly to the department after the renovation, but the little freeloaders did like to share the officers’ lunches.

Reaching to a low shelf, Mabel opened the paper bag containing her own lunch and removed a fried chicken thigh. Tearing the chicken off the bone into bite-sized pieces, she laid these on a folded sheet of typing paper, on the counter.

The tomcat scoffed up the chicken, licked his whiskers, then padded along the counters investigating her cubicle as he often did. Pausing, he peered across the entry to the holding cell, which to a cat must smell to high heaven.Shecould still smell the fingering scent of the last occupant. Oh, not the boy. He’d smelled okay. But after they took the boy out to the regular cells, and brought that old man in,he ‘dstunk up the whole building.

The tomcat, returning to Mabel’s in-boxes, began intently to watch the piles of papers that she’d set aside to index, patting and feinting at the reports as if maybe he’d seen a spider. Hot weather always brought out a few harmless spiders. The deadly ones stayed more in the dark, but did not five long if she spied them. Pawing at the papers, Joe went very still, staring as if he would grab whatever had crawled underneath. He remained for some time fixed on Gramps Farger’s arrest sheet and then on the AFIS fax that had just come in for Detective Garza. It was wonderful, these days, how quick you could get back fingerprint information, to speed up the department’s work. She watched Joe turn away at last, as if losing interest in the spider. What a strange cat, so deliberate in his actions. Now suddenly his attention was totally on the front door where he could see, through the glass door, Detective Garza returning from lunch.

She buzzed the detective through. “Captain Harper’s back, he just came in.”

Garza nodded and headed down the hall; and Joe Grey dropped from the counter and followed, making Mabel smile. Too bad the captain and Charlie had to shorten their honeymoon, though it was nice to have him home. The department had seemed just a bit off-kilter with the captain gone, not quite steady or comfortable.

Following Detective Garza, Joe could hardly keep from turning flips; he was as high as a junkie from the fingerprint report on Marianna Landeau giving her real name as Martie Holland.Martie Holland Martie Holland Martie Holland�Joe thought, grinning. And the sight of Gramps’s arrest sheet had almost made him open his mouth in a wild and unsuitable cheer.

Though even without the arrest sheet he’d know that Gramps had recently occupied the holding cell, by the stink that emanated from that corner. Didn’t the old man ever bathe? Did the shack where Gramps lived have no running water? But it must have, if Gramps was making drugs up there. He guessed the old man was just naturally slovenly. You wouldn’t catch a cat, even a very old cat, stinking that bad. A dog maybe. Never a cat.

The time of arrest was recorded as 7:15 last evening. The place of arrest was that cliffside shack up the mountain above the Pamillon estate. The charges on the arrest sheet were possession of explosives, evading custody, and manufacturing illegal drugs.

Well done, Kit!Joe thought, smiling. The kit had fingered Gramps Farger all by herself. Had practically wrapped him up, helpless as a slaughtered mouse, waiting for Garza to come find him. Phoning Garza, placing her first call, her first hard-won and important tip, she’d been so excited she hadn’t thought how scared she was. She’d given Garza the facts just as skillfully as he or Dulcie would have done. And she’d hit gold. She had helped nab the bomber that Garza might never have found-that old man had ditched the law once, as slick as if the shack in the hills wasn’t his only place to hide.

The tattercoat was growing up, Joe thought with a twinge of sadness. That fanciful youngster capable of such wild and passionate dreams was developing a solid, hardheaded turn of mind. This was all to the good, the kit was learning to take hold of a problem and deal with it. But he was going to miss her scatterbrained enthusiastic plunging into trouble that had so far marked the kit’s approach to life.

Following Garza to Harper’s office, Joe lay down in plain sight in the doorway. Garza had already seen him on the dispatcher’s counter, so why not? Might as well try a little feline indolence, play the four-footed bum.

Harper glanced out at him, and shook his head. “That cat been hanging around?”

Garza laughed. “Off and on. I let him stay, he doesn’t do any harm-keeps the mice away.”

“You get Curtis to talk?”

Garza shook his head. “Tight-mouthed. He’s been an unhappy kid since we brought Gramps in. You can bet he’s scared of the old man. Well, he wasn’t too happy before, either. He blames us and the whole world for his dad being in prison. But he wasn’t like this, we need to move him somewhere. Even separated the way they are, the old man’s been threatening him, hinting as much as he dares, figuring we have a bug on him, back in the jail.”

Which of course they would, Joe thought. It was perfectly legal, once a man was arrested, to bug his cell.

“You think the boy’s scared enough, now, to talk if we get him away from Gramps?”

“He might. I’m sure he could use a friend. I was thinking of bringing Ryan back with the dog, try that again before we send him to some juvenile facility farther away.”

Harper said, “I was thinking of taking him over to drug rehab, give him a tour of the juvenile section, let him see what his daddy’s and grandpappy’s drugs did to those kids.”

“Might work,” Garza said.

Why, Joe wondered, would a boy who tried to kill several hundred people care about the suffering of drug addicts, even if they were kids his own age? Still, though, what could it hurt?

Garza said, “You find Hurlie?”

“He found us. I arrested him on obstruction of justice, sheriff took him in. We tossed his place. Didn’t find any link to the bombing, but I have a nice list of purchases in the area, and three shopkeepers made Hurlie, from his brother’s mug shot. Sheriff says Hurlie works sometimes for the Landeaus. At first, Landeau said he couldn’t place him. Then I pressed a little. Not a friendly welcome.”

Garza nodded.

“I left Charlie in the car with the keys and phone and radio. She was more scared than she let on. Landeau’s guard dogs watched her the whole time, while Landeau jived me along. Sheriff said the feds are spotting marijuana patches up there, that they took out a couple last week, over in the national forest. The sheriff was� maybe holding something back. Telling me what he knew I’d learn anyway.”

Max leaned back in his desk chair absently reaching for a cigarette though it had been more than a year since he quit. “I talked with DEA. They think the Landeaus have been backing small meth labs in several counties, using the take to finance some marijuana operations. Good chance Hurlie could be involved.”

“As could the sheriff?”

Harper grunted. “I hope not. Maybe intimidated-that’s a political appointment, you well know. Important thing is, you have enough on Gramps to go to the grand jury.”

“I have more than that. I might have Rupert Dannizer’s killer.”

“Oh?”

“I ran prints on Marianna Landeau. Her real name came up Martie Holland.”

“That’s one of the women we couldn’t get a line on, supposed to be in the Bahamas. Some years back, Mike had her on parole.”

Dallas nodded. “That’s a long story. Your snitch got her prints to me last night. Don’t know how. Don’t know why,” he said quietly.

Harper listened, saying nothing.

“I came down last night, ran them through AFIS. Had a warrant for her issued on information, and called San Francisco.”

“She was in the city. Well, I sure missed that one.”

“As did Wills and Parker. Well, the woman has a whole new identity. If you’d never seen her� San Francisco picked her up at her Nob Hill address early this morning. All packed, said she was going up to their country place. But she had a ticket for Caracas.”

Harper grinned.

“They took her in, impounded her car. Searched the house, found a hand truck in the garage that, from its dust tracks, had been moved recently. Track marks match those from Ryan’s driveway. I thought I’d send Green and Davis early tomorrow, to pick her up. D.A. has called the grand jury for her, and for Gramps Farger. They’re able to meet day after tomorrow.”

“Very nice.”

“I’ll rest easier when Ryan’s completely in the clear. We’ll all rest easier when this bomb trial is under way.”

Harper nodded. “Ryan doing all right?”

“Keeping her head.”

“When did you talk with Mike Flannery?”

“He’s back, he came straight down here, got in yesterday morning, worried about Ryan. He didn’t know then about Martie Holland’s prints, the snitch hadn’t delivered them yet. Brought them right to my door, last night. Half-a-dozen compacts the guy apparently lifted from the Landeau cottage.” The two officers looked at each other, aDon’t ask, don’t try to figurelook. And out in the hall, Joe Grey turned to scratch a nonexistent flea, then appeared to collapse once again into sleep.

“Mike says he has enough on Martie Holland to establish motive,” Dallas said. “He’ll testify before the grand jury. I remember a good deal about her from when he had her on parole; I was working in north Marin then, never ran into her. Don’t remember seeing a mug shot. But I knew then, through Mike, that she was involved with Rupert. I don’t think Ryan ever knew about that. Mike will be by in a while, to fill you in. Where’s Charlie?”

“Up at the house getting settled. And seeing her cleaning crews. We’ll bring the horses back down tomorrow. You going to let that cat sleep in your door all day?”

“Why not? Well, now look. You woke him.”

Yawning, Joe Grey rose and headed up the hall in the direction of the locked security door. If no officer opened it, he knew that Mabel would come out from behind her counter and oblige. He had a lot to tell Dulcie, and a lot to tell the kit that would please her.

He’d like to have one more look at Marianna-Martie, at that cold piece of work, before she went to prison.

He could watch the trial, of course, if it was held in Molena Point. He and Dulcie had, during past trials, enjoyed a private and uninterrupted view from the window ledge above the courtroom; they wouldn’t miss a thing providing the weather was warm enough so the windows were open.

But he’d like a look at Mariannanow,when they brought the woman in. He didn’t know why, or what he expected to see. Call it a hunch. What he’dliketo see was how Rock responded to Marianna Landeau-Martie Holland.

Itwasonly a hunch, but a hunch so strong it made the fur down Joe’s spine rise and prickle.

29 [��������: pic_30.jpg]

The roof had been raised; its two long slanting surfaces stood upright, forming the new walls of the bedroom suite. The new roof trusses overhead were covered with tar paper and plywood and shingles, weather tight. Where the fresh studs of the end walls were still open the setting sun slanted in, turning the late afternoon light golden with floating dust motes. The forty-foot space was otherwise empty, or nearly so. The carpenters were gone for the day, the two younger men heading home as Ryan and her uncle Scotty descended the stairs to the kitchen, brushing off sawdust. Joe and Dulcie wandered the sun-warmed space alone, relishing its vastness and the challenge of unconquered heights.

Leaping to a sawhorse then atop a ladder they gained the soaring rafters. From that vantage they could see, through the open ends of the vast room and beyond the tops of the dark oaks, the ocean’s breakers blowing with foam. Nearer, just below them, the village rooftops angled cozily, inviting a run across those slanting shingles. On a neighbor’s roof a flock of bickering crows shouted and swore. From the outside stairs, Scotty looked up at the cats, and laughed, taking pleasure at the sight of them. The redheaded, red-bearded giant had told the younger carpenters that cats were just as lucky at the site of new construction as were cats on shipboard.

Close around the cats, the warm air smelled sweetly of fresh-cut lumber-and of hickory-scorched beef from the back patio, where Clyde had the rotisserie turning over glowing charcoal, preparing a welcome home dinner for the newlyweds. But when, from the rafters, the cats spotted Harper’s truck turn onto the narrow street they galloped down the stairs, pushing into the kitchen through Rube’s dog door.

They watched Ryan throw her arms around Charlie then hold her away. “You got back yesterday! You look great! How was the wine country? Did you have lunch at Beaudry’s? Isn’t it beautiful! You’re sunburned.”

Charlie laughed. “Like a patchwork quilt. We saw the Jakeses’ new addition. We love it, Ryan. It’s beautiful. When can you build my studio? Maybe redo the kitchen and enlarge the master bedroom. Or maybe-”

“Anyone home?” Dallas shouted, coming in through the front door with Mike Flannery. Wilma entered just behind them carrying a bakery box under one arm, and the tattercoat kit balanced on her shoulder. She set the box on the kitchen counter, but the kit made no move to jump down or to leap to the top of the refrigerator beside Joe and Dulcie. She clung to Wilma, tucking her face beneath Wilma’s chin and would not look up at the two cats. Wilma looked highly amused, the laugh lines around her eyes crinkled. Her long white hair was escaping in tendrils from its clasp and her lipstick was worn away as if she’d hardly had time to tend to her own concerns.

Full of uneasy questions, Joe and Dulcie followed the party as everyone carried plates and silverware and beer out onto the patio. Charlie and Ryan were still deep in conversation. The cats liked seeing Charlie find a woman friend she truly cared for, she’d always been such a loner. They had observed Wilma and her older contemporaries long enough to see the warmth and strength that could evolve from such a sisterhood, a friendship very different from Charlie’s solid friendship with Clyde-and now of course her most enduring friendship of all, with Max himself.

Well, Joe thought, Charlie had liked Kate Osborne too. They could have been close friends if Kate had stayed in the village. They had in common, for one thing, the privilege of the cats’ own secret. But Kate had abandoned Molena Point for San Francisco and abandoned Clyde, leaving the field wide open to Ryan-humans, one had to admit, could be every bit as fickle as the randiest tomcat.

Yet despite human vicissitudes, Joe found himself deeply purring as he watched Charlie and Max. Mr. and Mrs. Maximilian Franklin Harper, he thought, grinning. A name that very few people had ever heard, Max himself finding his full name far too fancy and formal.

Joe had missed the chief.

Well, I missed needling Harper, he thought, embarrassed by his sentiment.

And hehadmissed Charlie, missed her steady support. Because Charlie knew the cats’ secret, she had been there for them in the same way that Clyde and Wilma were there. She knew what they were up to, and was ready to help if she could. Joe had, in fact, found Charlie, just a few months ago, snooping among the same incriminating books and papers that he himself had found suspicious, evidence that had ultimately helped convict a killer.

He watched Charlie and Ryan and Wilma set the table and lay out, on the edge of a planter box, a place mat and three small cat dishes, causing Max to give Charlie a sour look. Little did Harper know that Charlie was setting the supper table for his three best informants. But Joe’s eyes grew round with surprise when Dallas took the kit from Wilma and held her, gently stroking her, his dark eyes laughing.

“Since when,” Ryan said, “were you so fond of cats?”

“Since I had to arrest this little terror,” Dallas said, settling the kit on his shoulder. “Talk about chutzpa.” He looked into the kit’s yellow eyes. “This one’s a regular little burglar.” He didn’t seem to notice Charlie turn pale, or Clyde stop speaking. The kit closed her eyes, hiding her face against Garza’s shoulder.

“You arrested her where?” Ryan said. “What could a little cat do?”

Garza sipped his beer. “You know how secure a grand jury room is. No one’s allowed in except the prosecuting attorney and witnesses, and the court reporter.

“I was called in this morning to testify, but also to evict the cat from underneath a chair. I had to haul her out by the nape of the neck before I could give testimony. No one knew how she slipped in. The jurors were not amused. Clerk of the court took it as a personal affront that a cat had sneaked past her into that part of the building. I took Kit to the dispatcher, and she called Wilma to come get her.”

Wilma said, “I found her on the dispatcher’s counter lapping up a carton of milk. I don’t know what got into her,” she said innocently. “Why would a cat�? Well, I kept her in the house the rest of the day, shut in the bedroom.”

Clyde had turned away to check the prime rib, hiding a laugh. Joe watched him, scowling. Why were the kit’s adventures so entertaining, when his own serious surveillance and information gathering drew nothing from Clyde but insults? Joe supposed that the kit, because she was responsible for Gramps Farger’s arrest, had wanted to be in on the kill. He watched Clyde remove the roast from the rotisserie to a platter and, with a lethal-looking carving knife, begin to cut off paper-thin slices so juicy and pink that the tomcat began to drool. He watched Dulcie wind around Clyde’s ankles with the three household cats, and the two dogs crowd so close their noses were scant inches from the carving board. It was only when everyone was seated, tying into the delicious meat and two vegetable casseroles and salad, and the animals all had their own plates, that Clyde said, “After the grand jury evicted Kit, what did they find?”

“With the evidence we had,” Dallas said, “they indicted Martie Holland for Dannizer’s murder. And they indicted Gramps Farger. Four charges of manufacturing drugs, two of attempted murder for the bombing, two on inciting a juvenile.”

Behind Dallas, the kit looked incredibly smug.

“Whataboutthe boy?” Ryan asked.

“We’re still holding him,” Dallas said. “He’ll be remanded over to juvenile. There’ll be a hearing. I expect juvenile court will either put him in a foster home and maybe a trade school, or send him to one of the boys’ ranches if they think he’s a good enough risk. I doubt it. I don’t like to think we’ll be seeing that kid back in jail in years to come, but you know the statistics.

“No one knows for sure what was in the kid’s head-whether he was as hot to blow up the church as his grampa says, or whether the old man forced him to climb up on the roof, maybe threatened him.”

Garza frowned. “Some kind of grandfather. He laid as much blame as he could on the boy, said Curtis wanted to set off the bomb.” He looked at Ryan. “If the defense attorney can get the boy to lie, on the stand, to protect Gramps, that could complicate matters. Would you want to talk with him again? See if he’ll open up? He’s scared now, since we arrested Gramps. The old manhasthreatened him. But maybe if we can convince him Gramps will stay locked up, and with the dog to comfort him, maybe he’ll open up, tell us what happened.”

“I could try,” Ryan said doubtfully. “It can’t hurt to try.”

“I took makings for the bomb from that shack where Gramps was living, and from the trash bags he hid at the Pamillon estate, along with the stuff from his underground meth lab. Empty containers of Drano, white gas, alcohol. Propane cylinders, you name it. The old man’s prints all over everything. And the Jag is registered to Curtis’s mother, she’s been driving the old man’s broken-down truck.” He looked at Max. “I’d sure like to thank your snitches.

“I’m guessing the old man waited until we checked that area up there, before the trial and again last month, waited until he thought we’d lost interest, then moved in.”

Max nodded. “Checked every out-of-the-way house and shack in the county.Andthe Pamillon ruins.”

“It’s called egg on our face,” Dallas said, laughing. “Anyway, the grand jury had a full and productive day. Davis will have Holland back here safe and sound, early tomorrow.”

Ryan looked at Clyde. ‘That’s what Larn Williams was talking about when he accused Dad of having affairs with his caseload-a parolee named Martie Holland, alias Marianna Landeau. Only it wasn’t Dad she was involved with. It was Rupert.”

Flannery said, “Martie came out of federal prison ten years ago. Beautiful woman, could have had anything she wanted. But she couldn’t stay out of trouble. She wasn’t out two months, she was into an extortion racket. When I told her to clean up her act or I’d send her back, she came on to me. She thought she could buy the world.

“When she understood thatI wasn’t buying, she decided to target my family. She wasn’t used to not having her way. She settled on Ryan, I guess because Rupert was� accessible. She was soon in bed with him and teaching him how to skim the company books. When I found out, I revoked her, sent her back.

“She came out with no time to serve. Was in L.A. for a while, got married. Became Marianna Landeau. I didn’t keep track of her, didn’t know they’d moved back to the Bay Area or that she’d laid a false trail under her own name to the Bahamas.

“Apparently she got involved with Rupert again, perhaps out of spite. Martie was never what you’d call forgiving. They began skimming the books again, before Ryan left him. We’ve talked with Ryan’s attorneys. If I’d known that Martie was back in the city�”

“The woman I built that house for,” Ryan said angrily, “the woman I created that beautiful cottage for. That was their love nest. Her and Rupert’s love nest. She killed him there, to pin the murder on me. To destroy me.”

“To destroy me,” Flannery said, “by destroying you.”

“She shot Rupert in there,” Ryan said. “A love nest as lethal as the web of a black widow. Luring the male in, to kill him.”

Dallas said, “The lab found blood in the rug that was taken from the cottage, the rug Ryan and Hanni gave to the Coldirons. That too was a tip from one of Harper’s snitches. The lab came through right away. Since the county allotted more funds, they’ve been able to do some hiring. We’re waiting for an answer on the DNA. If it’s Rupert’s, we’ve got a closed case.

“She shot him in front of the fireplace,” Dallas said. “Shot into the niche where the right-hand sculpture is placed. Where the concrete had been patched and repainted, Davis and I dug out two spent bullets. I have no idea how the informants knew about the damaged fireplace. Maybe I don’t want to know. The important thing is, their information dovetailed in nicely with our investigation.”

“We’re not sure yet,” Harper said, “what else the Landeaus were into. The feds will be dealing with that. Could be, we’ll be able to nail them with backing the Fargers’ meth labs, we don’t know yet. As to the bombing, from the evidence we now have, that was strictly a Farger family project.”

“And what about the dog?” Clyde asked. “With all the threads that stretch from San Andreas to Molena Point, everyone’s guilty but the dog.”

Mike Flannery laughed. “He’s the only innocent.”

“Maybe,” Dallas said, “Rock can help convict Gramps, if he and Ryan can get Curtis to talk.” He glanced at his niece. “And maybe Rock’s some kind of compensation, for Ryan having to go through this mess.”

Ryan grinned, and rubbed Rock’s ears, where the big dog leaned against her.

30 [��������: pic_31.jpg]

When Ryanleft the job at noon with Rock, heading for the PD, she had more stowaways than she’d accommodated coming down from San Andreas. Hidden under the tarp in the truck bed the three cats crouched as warm and cozy as three football fans snuggled under blankets in the bleachers awaiting the big game.

Despite the hard bouncing of the truck, Dulcie and the kit purred and dozed; but Joe crouched tense and excited, ready to scorch out the minute Ryan parked, and slip inside the station. If their luck held, if the timing worked, this might be the game of the season.

He had placed one phone call just after breakfast. Using the extension in Clyde’s bedroom to dial Ryan’s cell phone, where she worked in the attic above him, he had suggested that today at noon might be the optimum time to have that talk with Curtis Farger, and he had shared with Ryan his take on the matter.

“Have you wondered why Rock pitched a fit, the day you took him to the Landeau cottage?”

“Yes, I have,” she’d said softly. She didn’t ask how he could know about that. Like Max Harper and Dallas, she kept her answers brief, and she listened.

“Davis and Green will be bringing Marianna in from San Francisco around noon,” Joe said. “Would it be instructive to let Rock have a look at her-kill two birds with one� stone?”

She was silent, as if thinking about that.

“Couldn’t hurt, could it?” Joe said.

She remained quiet. But then when she spoke, there was a lilt of excitement in her voice. “I’ll be there at noon,” she said softly. Then in a faintly seductive voice, “You know a lot about this case. I can keep a secret, if you care to tell me who you are.”

Joe had hit the disconnect, pushed the headset back on its cradle, and left the house by his cat door. Slipping along beneath the neighbors’ bushes, he’d followed a route away from the house that he well knew was invisible from the room above.

And now as he rode into the courthouse parking in Ryan’s truck, he was highly impatient, tense to fly out. Ryan found a parking slot just to the right of the glass doors, one of those spaces markedVisitors Only, Ten Minutes,where the cars nosed up to a wide area of decorative plantings. Stepping out of the cab, commanding Rock to heel, she locked the door behind her. While she stood waiting to be buzzed inside, Joe dropped from atop a toolbox into the bushes. Behind him, the kit and Dulcie would take another route. As Ryan moved inside, Joe slipped in behind her and under the booking counter. Rock rolled his eyes at the tomcat, but didn’t make a wiggle.

The shelves under the counter were stacked with rolls of fax paper and computer paper, cartons of pens and pencils, and all manner of forms, neatly arranged. Slipping in between boxes of printer cartridges and computer disks, he crouched where he could see both the front entry and the holding cell, but could pull back quickly out of sight. Curtis sat in the cell looking glum. He had apparently been brought up where he could speak freely, out of earshot of Gramps. Joe could hear from above the ceiling the faintest rustle of oak leaves as Dulcie and the kit swarmed up like a pair of commandos to the high, barred window mat looked down into the cell.

But where the sun shone in against the cell wall, silhouetting the oak branch, it silhouetted, as well, two pairs of feline ears, sharply pricked. Joe prayed Dulcie would see the reflection, that she and the kit would back off.

Ryan stood outside the cell with Rock waiting for an officer to unlock the door. Rock stared in at the boy, whining. And beyond the glass doors of the front entry, a police unit pulled into the red zone. Talk about timing! Joe could see, behind the unit’s wire barrier, the golden-haired passenger. He watched Detective Juana Davis and Officer Green emerge from the car observing the area around them, then quickly unlock the back door and order Marianna out.

She slid from the car maintaining her grace despite being shackled by handcuffs. Immediately Davis marched her toward the glass doors. The dispatcher hit the admittance button. Joe glanced to the cell’s telltale shadow again, and saw that the two pairs of pricked ears had vanished. The officers and Marianna were hardly inside, with the door locked behind them, when all hell broke loose. A roar of anger greeted Marianna, and a leaping gray streak went for her, held back only by Ryan, crouching with the leash across her legs. The dog fought the leash snarling and barking. Joe glimpsed, in Ryan’s eyes, a terrible hunger to let the dog loose. She held him as he fought her trying to get at Marianna, ignoring her command to sit.

Marianna did not back away.“Hold!” She snapped at him. The dog froze stone still, his lips drawn up over killer teeth.

“Rock, sit!” Marianna commanded.

Rock sat, but he kept snarling, torn between hatred and what he’d been trained to do. So, Joe thought. So they had indeed found Rock’s owner. Ryan stepped to the dog’s side, taking hold of his collar.

But a catch of breath made Joe look past the rigid tableau to the holding cell where Curtis Farger stood at the bars, his face white, his dark eyes burning not with anger but with fear. The boy’s knuckles were white where he clutched the bars.

Marianna-Martie, drawn by that hush of breath, turned. The look between Marianna and Curtis was so filled with hatred that Joe Grey backed deeper among the boxes, shivering as if their mutual rage were daggers flying or lethal gases ready to explode.

The keys, Joe thought. Curtisdidtake those keys for Marianna to copy. Somehow he did it and brought them back again. And now� now her look has warned him, Don’t talk, Curtis. Don’t dare tell them�

At the sound of Rock’s barking, Garza and Harper had appeared in the hall with several officers. The whole station seemed to be gathering, crowding down the hall, all the officers watching the dog, Martie, and Curtis. Only Davis and Green remained focused totally on their prisoner. Rock, though still sitting as he’d been commanded, was tensed to leap, his gaze fixed on Marianna’s throat.

“Down, Rock. Back and down.”

Now, he defied her. He backed one step, but he wouldn’t lie down for her. He stood snarling as, beside him, Ryan turned to look at Curtis.

She said no word, just looked. Curtis looked back, his eyes huge.

“Whose dog is this?”

“Her dog. He’sherdog.” His voice was unsteady.

“Shut up, you little bastard!”

“Hers. She tried to train him like the others, like those rottweilers, but she only made him mad, made him turn on her.” Curtis looked terrified. “She beat him, beat him bad. She shot at him with a shotgun. You feel his skin, the little lumps? Buckshot where she shot him to run him off the place because half the time he wouldn’t mind her. He wouldn’t attack for her so she didn’t want him anymore.”

Marianna swung around, fixing on Detective Garza. “You have no right to allow this dirty little boy to say such things. I still have rights. My lawyers will take you apart, officer. Get that little bastard out of my sight, get him out of here.”

Dallas looked at Curtis. “How do you know who owns him?”

“I� Someone I know works up there. I went with him sometimes. I saw her try to train Rock, her and that real-estate guy. It takes two to train a guard dog. That Williams was the� I don’t know what to call it. He wore the padded suit.”

“The agitator?” Dallas said.

Curtis nodded.

Marianna was very white. “I’ve heard enough of this. If you insist on arresting me-and you will ultimately be very sorry for that, officer, then I insist on being shown to my cell or whatever you call it, and afforded some modicum of privacy-if your little hometown jail can offer such a thing.”

“Larn was good friends with her?” Dallas asked Curtis.

“Isaid…” Marianna began. But Davis gripped her arm in a way that silenced her.

“He was all over her,” the boy said. “Her husband never knew, he was gone half the time. Hu-my friend saw Williams sneaking around.”

Dallas said, “Why didn’t you tell me before, who owned the dog?”

“Afraid you’d take him back toher”

“And what about the sheriff?” Dallas asked Curtis. “Did he know where the dog belonged?”

“He knew. He didn’t want him taken back there and penned up. She’d have killed him. So Sheriff just�” Curtis shrugged. “Sheriff keeps his mouth shut. Maybe he hoped Ryan would take him. Then when you didn’t,” he said, looking at Ryan, “and my gramps told me�” He stopped speaking, and his face reddened. “When I decided to hitch a ride home to Mama, I brought Rock with me. Well, he wanted to come. Couldn’t drive him away if I’d tried. Couldn’t leave him there.”

“And your gramps wanted you to come back,” Ryan said softly.

“No! I told you, I decided to come back to Mama.”

“Then why didn’t you go on down the coast to your mama?”

“I called her to come get me but she wasn’t home, she didn’t answer the phone. I thought to stay with Gramps for the night and call her again.”

“Did you take my keys?” Ryan said. “Did you give them to Marianna?”

“I want my lawyernow!You can’t question that boy like that. I want�” Davis twisted her arm, hard.

Curtis glanced at Marianna and looked away. He nodded. “Yes,” he said softly. “I got them for her.”

“Do you know what she did with them?”

Curtis shook his head. “She said she’d keep her mouth shut about� certain things, if I’d get the keys.”

Ryan, keeping Rock close to her, had moved nearer to Curtis. She stood just beside his door, her back to the gathered officers and to Marianna. Rock stuck his nose through the bars, licking Curtis’s hand. Looking around at Dallas, Ryan nodded. Dallas nodded to Davis, and the detective led Marianna away, down the hall toward the jail. Ryan stayed focused on Curtis. She spoke quietly, as if they were alone.

“Would you testify for me, Curtis? This is a murder charge. I could be facing life in prison. Or worse.” She reached through the bars, to touch his hand. “If Marianna killed my husband, she should be convicted. If she is, she’ll be locked up for a long time where she can’t get at you.”

She looked at him deeply. “Would you tell a jury the truth? That you took my keys for Marianna? Things� might go easier for you, at your grampa’s trial,” she said softly. “No one could promise such a thing, but the judge or jury might look on you more kindly, if you’ve already told the court the truth about Marianna.”

Curtis looked back at her. “Would you keep Rock? For good? For your own dog?”

“I promise I’ll keep him for good. For my own dog.”

“Could I visit him?”

“You could visit him,” she said softly. “Or he could visit you.”

Curtis nodded. “If you’ll promise to keep him, I’ll tell� testify.”

“Please understand, Curtis. I want you only to tell the truth.”

Curtis nodded. “If you’ll keep him, I can do that.”

And Joe Grey heard, from high above him, the faintest mewl echoing through the roof, the kind of murmur Dulcie or the kit made when they got emotional, a plaintive cry too soft for human ears. A tenderhearted mutter that made him frown with male superiority.

Licking his own salty whiskers, the tomcat did not consider that he was emotional.Hewas only wired, only congratulating himself that his timing had worked out for optimum results. Worked out in a manner that seemed to him to cap both cases-testimony to help hang Martie Holland, certainly. But in the process, perhaps a change of heart in Curtis Farger? A greater willingness to tell all he knew about the church bombing as well as about Martie Holland?

Perhaps, Joe Grey thought. He hoped so.

But in the case of young Curtis, the only proof would be time-and what Curtis decided to do with that time.

For a long moment, the uncertainty of a boy’s life, heading either for good or for the sewer, left Joe a bit testy, as if he had a thorn in his paw.

And it was not until later that night that Joe began to look with equanimity upon the unanswered questions regarding Curtis Farger. When, as Clyde and Ryan sat in the expanded attic watching the stars through the newly cut windows, Joe began to unwind and take the longer view.

Dulcie and the kit lay on the rafters looking out at the sea, their paws and tails drooping over. But Joe prowled among the beams looking down on Clyde and Ryan where they sat on the floor leaning against the newly constructed wall, sipping coffee. Rock lay sprawled beside Ryan, deeply asleep, his coat silver in the faint light.

Moving restlessly along the heavy timbers, Joe tried to work off the tangle of thoughts and events that crowded inside his head, as irritating and insistent as buzzing bees. Maybe he needed some down time, needed to slaughter a few wharf rats, some uncomplicated bit of sport to get centered again, now that the human rats were locked up.

But when he glanced across to Dulcie, she too was restless, the tip of her tail twitching, then lashing. Joe, leaping from rafter to rafter, brushed against her and led her along the center beam and up into his small, private tower that rose above the new structure.

The cat-sized retreat was still only framed, its six sides standing open to the night. It would have glass windows that Joe could easily open. Its hexagonal roof was fitted with pie shapes of plywood, and shingles. There would be cushions later, and a shelf to hold a bowl for fresh water.

Sitting close together beneath the little roof, Joe and Dulcie watched the ocean gleaming beyond the dark oaks. They were mesmerized for a long moment by the endless rolling of the white breakers, by the sea’s beating thunder. Nearer to them humped the village rooftops, the cats’ own exclusive world, its angles and crannies and hiding places far removed from human problems and human evils-though Dulcie, as usual, could not divorce herself from human needs.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “I’ll go into the library early.” She gave him a guilty look. “I’ve made myself too scarce.” She was, after all, official library cat, and she had let her chosen work slide. “Tomorrow is story hour. I’ll snuggle on the big window seat with the children, let them pummel and pet me.” She smiled. “Too bad I can’t read to them, Wilma says I have a lovely reading voice.”

“The kids would love it. Probably triple attendance.”

But then she shivered. “I keep thinking about the bombing. And about those drug labs that might have killed as many people as the bomb would have done.”

“It’s over, Dulcie. Everyone’s safe. Those people are locked up.”

“And I was thinking about Marianna-Martie Holland. About her cruelty to Rock, to that sweet silver hound.” Dulcie turned to look at Joe, her green eyes wide and dark. “That woman cares for no living thing. She cares for nothing but her own destructive schemes-as if she’s linked to all cruelty in the world. As if hate and cruelty are one massive force that she’s part of, a force that can shape itself into a million faces.”

Joe Grey licked his whiskers. “But there’s more that’sgoodin life, Dulcie. Clyde and Ryan down there, so right and comfortable with each other. Charlie and Max at home together, safe and happy. The ladies of senior survival tucked away in their new home. Wilma, and our good police and detectives.” Thinking about their human friends, he grew almost mellow. He looked hard at her, the starlight catching a gleam across his pale whiskers and dark eyes. “Whattheyhave, Dulcie, is way more powerful than evil.” And the tomcat looked, not predatory then or teasing as he so often looked, but only wise. “The force of goodness is stronger, Dulcie.”

“Goodness,” she said, “and the little droll things, the humorous turns of life.”

“Such as?”

Dulcie laughed. “Silver tomcat and silver dog like mirror images.”

Joe Grey smiled. He guessed, in this case, comparison to a dog wasn’t an insult. He purred deeply. “Despite bombs and lethal drugs, despite all the evil, there’s far more that’s good. The humorous things,” he said, smiling. “The positive things.”

And it was true. At that particular moment, their own bit of the world was safe and right. They were all together in their small village, the three cats and their friends. Those who would harm them were otherwise occupied, and no matter what disasters might visit among them in future, they were there for each other. Nothing, Joe Grey thought, nothing even in death could separate their closeness, could change the fact that they were family.

9. CAT FEAR NO EVIL

1

During first week of October, when an icy wind blew off the Pacific, rattling the windows of Molena Point’s shops, and the shops, half buried beneath blowing oaks, were bright with expensive gifts and fall colors, residents were startled by three unusual burglaries. Townsfolk stopping in the bakery, enticed by saffron-scented delicacies, sipped their coffee while talking of the thefts. Wrapped in coats and scarves, striding briskly on their errands, they had left their houses carefully locked behind them.

Burglaries are not surprising during the pre-Christmas season when a few no-goods want to shop free of entailing expense. But these crimes did not involve luxury items from local boutiques. No hand-wrought cloisonne chokers or luxurious leather jackets, no sleek silver place settings or designer handbags. The value of the three items stolen was far greater.

A five-hundred-thousand-dollar painting by Richard Diebenkorn disappeared from Marlin Dorriss’s oceanfront home without a trace of illegal entry. A diamond choker worth over a million vanished from Betty and Kip Slater’s small, handsome cottage in the center of the village. And the largest and hardest to conceal, a vintage Packard roadster in prime condition was removed from Clyde Damen’s automotive repair shop, again without any sign of forced entry.

Police, searching for the 1927 Packard that was valued at some ninety thousand dollars, combed the village garages and storage units, assisted by Damen himself. They found no sign of the vehicle. Police departments across the five western states were alerted to the three burglaries. Now, three weeks after the events, there were still no encouraging reports, and police had found little of substance to give detectives a lead. And Molena Point wasn’t the only town hit. Similar thefts had occurred up and down the California coast.

With most of Molena Point’s tourists gone home for the winter, and local residents settling in beside their hearths in anticipation of festive holidays, the disappearance of the valuables made people nervous-though certainly the victims themselves were above reproach. All three were law-abiding citizens well known and respected in the community. Clyde Damen ran the upscale automotive repair shop attached to Beckwhite’s foreign car dealership. He took care of the all villagers’ BMWs and Jaguars and antique cars as if they were his own children.

The owner of the Diebenkorn painting, Marlin Dorriss, was an urbane and wealthy semiretired attorney, active on the boards of several charities and local fund-raisers. Betty Slater and her husband, Kip, who reported the diamond choker missing, ran the local luggage-and-leather shop and were longtime residents who traveled to Europe once a year and gave heavily to local charities.

Both residences and the Damen garage had alarm systems. All three systems had been activated at the time of the thefts, but no alarm had been set off. Considering this, the citizens of Molena Point thought to change the locks on their doors and to count the stocks and savings certificates in their safe deposit boxes in the local banks.

When there was a lull in the thefts for a few days, people grew more nervous still, waiting for the next one, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

But maybe the sophisticated thief had moved on, tending to the similar thefts along the California coast. All California police departments were on the alert. The newspapers had a field day. However, Molena Point police captain Max Harper and chief of detectives Dallas Garza offered little information to the press. They pursued the investigation in silence. The MO of the thief was indeed strange.

In each instance, he left all valuables untouched except the single one he selected. In the case of the diamond choker, he had ignored pearl-and-ruby earrings, a sapphire bracelet, and five other pieces of jewelry that together totaled several million dollars. In the theft of the painting, only the Richard Diebenkorn landscape had disappeared-it was Dorriss’s favorite from among the seven Diebenkorns he owned. And Clyde Damen’s Packard was only one of twelve antique cars in the locked garage, several of them worth more than the Packard.

Clyde had purchased the Packard in rusted and deteriorating condition from a farmer in the hills north of Sacramento, who was later indicted for killing his grandfather. It was now a beautiful car, in finer shape than when it had come from the factory. Just before it disappeared, Clyde had placed several ads in collectors’ magazines preparing to sell this particular treasure. At the time of the theft, the gates to his automotive complex had been locked. The lock and hinges did not appear tampered with, nor had the lock on the door that led to the main shop-Clyde’s private shop-in any way been disturbed. The deep-green Packard with its rosewood dashboard and soft, tan leather upholstery and brass fittings was simply gone. When Clyde opened the shop very early, planning to spend the morning on his own work, the space where the Packard had stood beside a half-finished Bentley was empty. Shockingly and irrefutably empty. A plain, bare patch of concrete.

Before calling the cops Clyde did the sensible thing. He locked the shop again and went out into the village to find his housemate, a large gray tomcat. Finding Joe Grey trotting along the street headed in the direction of the local deli, Clyde had swung out of the car and rudely snatched him up. “Come on, I have a job for you!”

“What’s with you!” Joe hissed. “What the hell!” He had been headed to Jolly’s Deli for a little late snack after an all-night mouse hunt. He was full of mice, but a small canape or two, a bit of Brie, would hit the spot-then home for a nap in his private, clawed-and-fur-covered-armchair.

“I need you bad,” Clyde had said. “Need you now.”

At this amazing announcement, too surprised to argue further, Joe had allowed himself to be hoisted into Clyde’s yellow Chevy coupe and chauffeured around to the handsome Mediterranean complex that housed Beckwhite’s Foreign Car Agency and Clyde’s upscale automotive shop. Joe was a big cat, muscled and lithe. In the morning sun, in the open convertible, his short gray coat gleamed like polished silver. The white triangle down his nose gave him a perpetual frown, however. But his white paws were snowy, marked with only one stain of mouse blood, which he had missed in his hasty wash. Standing on the yellow leather seat of the Chevy, front paws on the dashboard, he watched the village cottages and shops glide by, their plate glass windows warping in the wind. His whiskers and gray ears were pinned back by the blow. His short, docked tail afforded him a singular profile, like that of a miniature hunting dog. He had lost the tail when he was six months old, a necessary amputation after a drunk stepped on it and broke it-Clyde had been his savior, rescuing him from the gutter, taking him to the vet. They’d never been apart since.

Clyde pulled up behind the shop, unlocked the back shop door, and slid it open. “Don’t call the station yet,” Joe said, trotting inside. “Give me time to look around.”

But, prowling the scene, he found not the smallest detail of evidence. Not even the faintest footprint. No scent, no smell the cops could not detect-except one.

Just at the edge of the bare concrete where the Packard had been parked, he caught the smell of tomcat.

Staring up at Clyde and growling, he crouched to sniff under the remaining cars. The scent was far too familiar-though it was hard to be certain, mixed as it was with the smell of oil, gas, and fresh paint. All of which, Joe pointed out to Clyde, were death to cats.

“You won’t be breathing them that long. You’ve only been in here three seconds.”

“Three minutes. It doesn’t take long to damage the liver of a delicate and sensitive feline. You’re buying me breakfast for this favor.”

“You had breakfast. Your belly’s dragging with mice.”

“An appetizer, a mere snack. Are you asking me to work for nothing?”

“Kippers and cream last night, with cold poached salmon and a half pound of Brie.”

“Half anounceof Brie. And it was all leftovers. From your dinner with Ryan. Actually from Ryan’s dinner. She’s the only one who-”

Clyde had turned on him, scowling. “She’s the only one whowhat}Who pays your deli bill when you have your goodies delivered? May I point out to you, Joe, that no one else in Molena Point has deli delivered to their cat door.”

“The deli guy doesn’t know it’s the cat door. I tell them-”

“What youtellthem is mycredit card number.If I weren’t such a sucker and so damned kindhearted-”

“I just tell them to leave it on the porch. Why would they suspect the cat door? What I do with the delivery after they leave can’t concern them.”

“No oneelse in the world, Joe, pays his cat’s deli bill.”

“No one else in the world-except Wilma Getz-lives with a cat of such impeccable culinary-”

“Can it, Joe! Tell me what else you smell. Not merely some wandering neighbor’s cat that probably came in yesterday when the garage doors were open. Can’t you pick up the scent of the thief? Ifyoucan’t track him, no one can,” Clyde said with unexpected flattery.

But in fact Joe could smell nothing more. He wondered if perhaps the thief had worn gas-and-oil covered shoes to hide his own scent. And if he had, why had he?

Maybe he thought the cops would use a tracking dog? But Molena Point PD didn’t have any dogs, tracking or otherwise. Everyone in the village knew that.

Or did the thief hide his scent because he knew about Joe himself? That thought was unsettling. Nervously he watched Clyde call the station.

By the time three squad cars pulled up, Joe was out of sight in the rafters. He stayed there observing from the deepest shadows, watching Detective Garza photographing and fingerprinting, listening to him question Clyde, Garza’s square, tanned face serious, his dark eyes seeing every detail. Officers lifted prints from every available surface. They went over the shop inspecting every car. They examined both the front and back entrances. The thief sure hadn’t taken the car out through a window. Nor did it appear that he had entered that way Best bet was, he knew the combination to the back door’s state-of-the-art numerical lock, or was very good at lock picking. The prints that did not belong to Clyde or to one of his mechanics would be duly checked. Garza would do his best to obtain prints on the prospective buyers who had answered Clyde’s ad for the Packard. Only after the officers had left, a matter of several hours, did Joe pick up the scent of aftershave around the big double doors, a splash of Mennen’s Original that likely was left by one of the cops, a brand so common that half the men in the village might be wearing it. But then he found the scent down the alley as well, along with a faint breath of diesel fumes.

“I think Garza’s right,” Joe said. “I think they loaded the Packard on a truck bed.” Detective Garza had found a partial tire mark farther down the alley, the track of a large truck in a bit of dust out near the street. He had photographed that and had made a plaster cast. Garza did not wear Mennen’s Original.

The upshot was that, except for the scent of tomcat that continued to worry Joe, he found nothing else that the cops missed, and that fact deeply annoyed him.

“You’re starting to think you run the show,” Clyde said. “That the law can’t function without you.”

He only looked at Clyde, he need not point out that he and Dulcie and Kit were the best snitches the department had. That they had helped Molena Point PD solve more than a few burglaries and murders. That the evidence they had supplied had allowed the city attorney to prepare for solid convictions, that many of those no-goods were presently enjoying cafeteria meals, free laundry service, and big-screen TV supplied by the state of California. He need not point out to Clyde that Max Harper and his officers did not make light of the anonymous information that was passed to them by phone. They no longer questioned the identity of the callers, they took what was offered and ran with it-to the dismay of those criminals subsequently prosecuted.

But now, as Joe prowled the rooftops long after midnight, it was not only the theft of Clyde’s Packard roadster and the other high-class burglaries that bothered him. The identity of the illusive tomcat whose scent he had detected in Clyde’s garage continued to prod at him. As did the problem of Dillon Thurwell.

Fourteen-year-old Dillon was deep into some kind of rebellion that, because she was Joe’s good friend and a friend of Joe’s human friends, worried everyone. Cat and human alike were amazed at her sudden change of character, at her angry defiance toward those she had seemed to love-yet no one could blame Dillon’s anger on her age or on crazy hormones; her sudden rage at life was more than that. The unexpected disruption of her seemingly close and solid family had been a shock to the village. Who would have imagined that Dillon’s quiet, businesslike mother, who seemed to manage her home life and her real estate work with such happy efficiency, would suddenly be slipping deep into an affair with one of the village’s most prominent bachelors? Because of this, Dillon had changed overnight from an eager and promising young woman to a surly, smart-mouthed teen running the streets at all hours as she had never done-or been allowed to do. Dillon’s sudden apparent hatred for herself, and for everyone she had cared about, deeply frightened Joe.

Beneath the bright half-moon Joe stalked the roofs fussing and worrying as only a sentient cat can, as only a cat-or a cop-with a compulsion for asking hard questions can chew on a puzzle. As above him the moon and stars glinted sharply in the cold black roof of the sky, the three problems racketed around in his head like fast and illusive ping-pong balls tossed out by some demonic tease: Dillon; the scent of a tomcat that did not belong in the village; and the mysterious burglaries.

Around him the moonlight struck pale the crowded, angled rooftops, and gleamed white below him across the sidewalks and across the faces of cottages and shops, slanting moonlight that threw stark tree shadows along the bleached walls. And the shop windows shone softly, their lights glowing across their bright wares like miniature movie sets. The village at three in the morning was so silent and still that it might lie frozen in some strange and uneasy enchantment. Prowling the roofs, Joe Grey himself was the only sign of life, his gray ears laid back, his yellow eyes narrowed to slits as he paced and worried.

But then, as he stalked from peak to peak among a forest of chimneys, he was suddenly no longer alone. He paused, sniffing.

Beneath his paws the shingles smelled of tomcat, of the worrisome intruder.

Flehming at the stink that was already far too familiar, Joe scanned the night, studying the dark shingled slopes and shadows, hoping he was wrong and knowing he wasn’t. He moved on quickly, prowling block by block, searching, crossing high above the narrow streets along branches of ancient oaks as he scanned the streets below. Pausing beneath second-floor windows, he peered in where the tomcat might have stealthily entered.Thistomcat could jimmy almost any lock, and his intentions were never charitable. Around Joe Grey nothing stirred, no faint sound, no hush of another cat brushing against a window frame. And though the shadows were as dense as velvet, they didn’t move-shadows that could hide the black tom the way the darkest pool hides a swimming snake.

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The cold wind off the sea blew up Joe’s tail and flattened his ears and whiskers where he stood watching the shadows and convincing himself he’d been mistaken, that he hadn’t scented the black tomcat. And suddenly a quick black shape slid into the gloom beside a penthouse. A big, muscled shadow vanishing into an ebony-cleft of night. A beast taller and broader than any village tomcat. Joe remained crouched, his gaze glued to the inky tangle of rooftop vents and air ducts and converging overhangs. It was over a year since the evil black tomcat and his thieving human partner had first appeared in the village, and Joe had hoped he’d seen the last of them.

He waited a long time. Was about to turn away when the animal reappeared, slipping through a wash of starlight, his belly caressing the shingles. He was quite aware of Joe, his ears flat to his broad head, his long thick tail lashing with menace. On the ocean breeze the tomcat’s stink was as predatory as any hunting leopard. A subtle shifting of his weight, and Joe could see his yellow slitted eyes.

A year ago last month, the black tom had appeared in the village with his human partner, old whiskey-sodden Greeley Urzey, the pair having flown up from Panama to Molena Point so Greeley could visit his sister. The old man had taken Azrael’s carrier right on board the PanAm 727, right into the cabin-an action tantamount, in Joe Grey’s opinion, to carrying a loaded assault rifle across international borders.

But then, Greeley himself was no innocent. Ragged old Greeley Urzey, despite his resemblance to a penniless tramp, was highly skilled at his chosen craft. He could gently manipulate the dial of a safe, listen to the tumblers fall, smile that stubbled lopsided smile, and open the iron door right up. And his sleek black tomcat partner was equally skilled at his particular brand of break-and-enter. Wrenching open a second-floor window or skylight, slipping through and dropping down into a jewelry or liquor store, the black cat would fight open the front door’s dead bolt. Andvoila,Greeley was inside with his clever drills and lock picks.

Joe Grey smiled. After only a few of those midnight raids, he and Dulcie had nailed those two like hamstringing a pair of wharf rats, and the thefts had stopped.

But Joe and Dulcie hadn’t alerted the department. That one time, they hadn’t called the cops. They didn’t need news of an amazing talking black tomcat to hit the news media-to hit the fan big time. They had, instead, watched the thieving pair sneak quietly out of the village to return to their home in Central America, had celebrated Azrael and Greeley’s departure praying they would never return.

Now, crouched low, intent on the shadows, Joe watched those burning yellow eyes scan the rooftops and he was filled with questions. Had these two stolen Clyde’s Packard? Were they behind these clever thefts? Such virtuosity, and the sophisticated contacts needed to fence the jewelry, to say nothing of the resources to dispose of such a large item as a Diebenkorn painting or the Packard, did not seem in character for those two. Greeley liked to steal cash and disappear, liked to drink up the profits, then steal again, that was Greeley Urzey’s style.

As he watched, the black tom disappeared as quickly as he had slid into view. Studying the darkness, Joe could taste the beast’s testosterone-heavy stink. He remained still, listening for the nearly inaudible pad of a paw, for the scuff of a careless claw or the shift of a piece of loose gravel.

Tensely waiting, he heard nothing. Only the hush of the breeze among the oak leaves. Moving across the roofs he followed Azrael’s scent, tracking him in a circuitous route up steeply slanted peaks and around platoons of chimneys, drawn on over the rooftops for three blocks, four, in and out of narrow clefts and across twisted limbs high above the empty streets-tracked him until the trail suddenly and insolently turned back to Joe’s own roof. To the bright new cedar shingles of the Cape Cod cottage that Joe shared with his human housemate.

There on the roof Azrael stood boldly facing him, stood barring the entrance to Joe’s private tower that rose above the new shingles, his cat-sized penthouse, his own private rooftop retreat. The tomcat blocked his entry with gleaming teeth and bared claws.

The tower, rising above the new master bedroom, was an architecturally pleasing hexagon four feet across and four feet high. Its six glass sides supported a peaked hexagonal roof. Within, Joe’s aerie opened by a cat door to the master suite below. Joe’s private tower was off limits to all village cats. It was marked by his own scent and defended when necessary, no prisoners taken. Only Joe’s tabby lady, Dulcie, and their pal the tattercoat kit, were welcome here. Watching the black tom blocking his private property, Joe tensed to spring.

The second-floor master suite, which had doubled the size of Clyde’s single-story cottage, included a large bedroom with wood-burning fireplace, a second fireplace in the spacious study, a bath, and dressing room. The contractor had included ample high shelves and beams where a cat could climb. The largest beam gave to a ceiling niche above Clyde’s desk, from which opened Joe’s door to the tower. Contractor Ryan Flannery had tackled the challenge of a cat-friendly structure with amused delight. Over a late dinner, she and Clyde had designed the glass-sided aerie, allowing ample space for deep cushions, a water bowl-and the door out onto the roof where the black cat had now insinuated himself, his acid-yellow eyes challenging Joe, his hissing smile as evil as the name he liked to call himself, the death angel.

Azrael’s voice was as hoarse as scuffed gravel. “So, little kitty. Your Clyde�Damen,is it?� has added onto his house. Isn’t he clever. And this little pimple sticking up here, what is this? A dovecote? Have you been reduced to raising tame pigeons for your hunting, birds too fat to fly away?” Azrael’s sulfur-yellow eyes were as belligerent as those of an underworld gang leader.

Considering the defiant beast, Joe felt much the same as a cop would observing some street scum whose dirty hands were smearing his patrol car.

The fact that Azrael had been born far more skilled and intelligent than ordinary cats, had fostered in this animal not joy and goodness but a keen hunger for evil.

An ordinary cat was not expected to be moral, your everyday household kitty was not supposed to behave with the welfare of others in mind. Certainly many cats were blessed with sensibilities that led them to warn their families of burglars or fire or a leaking gas line. But for a speaking cat of Joe Grey and Azrael’s talents, far more, it seemed to Joe, was expected-if you were dealt a winning hand, you were expected to sweeten the pot. That was Joe’s opinion. If you were given the extra talents, you were committed by the power that made all life to give back in kind. Expected to make the lives around you brighter. To help take down the no-goods, not to join them.

Stepping boldly in through Joe’s cat door and leaving a tuft of black fur on the metal rim, Azrael lifted his tail. Joe leaped, enraged, as the tom sprayed Joe’s favorite cushions with a stink powerful enough to corrode a steel building. Joe hit him, knocking him away as the beast sprayed Joe’s water bowl. They were clawing and raking, the force of Joe’s attack soaking them both. Sinking his teeth into Azrael’s neck, Joe forced him against a window, clawing and ripping at him. Hanks of black and gray fur flew. Locked together, yowling and screaming, the tomcats thundered against the small windows threatening to break glass, a spinning ball of raking claws and torn and shredded cushions. Below, in the master bedroom, Clyde shouted.

Brought up from a deep sleep, Clyde yelled again and leaped out of bed. “What the hell? Joe, where are you?” He stared toward the ceiling of the study that seemed under siege by a small and violent earthquake.“Whatthe hell’s going on!” Racing into the study in his shorts, he climbed atop the desk and peered up through the cat door, where a ruckus like fighting bulls shook the ceiling.

Above him, in the little glass house, whirled a dervish of screams and spinning fur. “Joe! What the hell-” Reaching up inside the tower, he tried to separate the fighters. Grabbing the black tom, he tried to pull him off Joe.

“Get away from him!” Joe yelled. “He’ll take your arm off.”

The cat’s claws raked Clyde. Hot with anger, Clyde jerked the black tom down through the cat door. He wasn’t sure whether he had hold of head or tail until teeth sank into his thumb. Swearing, he snatched the cat’s neck between tightening fingers. He had him now, one hand gripping the cat’s tail, the other hand clutching the beast’s thick black neck. Holding the twisting, screaming tom away from his own tender hide, Clyde stood on the desk nearly naked, his arms oozing blood, his black hair tousled from sleep, his bare feet scattering papers and bills like autumn leaves. In his hands, the flailing black monster clawed the air and swore like a stevedore. Clyde hadn’t heard such creative invective since his rodeoing days; the beast swore in Spanish as well as English, the Spanish expletives sounding far nastier. Gripping the flailing cat was like holding a whirling radiator fan with knives embedded in the blades-a machine Clyde didn’t know how to turn off. He was tempted to keep squeezing until the cat stopped yelling and hopefully stopped breathing. He knew what this cat was, and he didn’t like him any better than Joe did. It would be so easy to collapse that vulnerable feline throat.

He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t kill even this lowlife who, if he were set free, would likely go for Clyde’s own throat.

Maybe if Clyde had been convinced that the tomcat was totally evil, he would have done the deed. In Clyde’s view, Azrael was an irritation, but he didn’t see the cat yet as the pure, deep evil that demanded without question to be eradicated from the known world. That, Joe Grey would later inform him, was a serious flaw in Clyde’s judgment.

Easing his grip on Azrael’s throat but continuing to clutch tightly the nape of the cat’s neck and his tail, holding the screaming, flailing animal away from him to avoid ending up in the emergency ward, Clyde stepped down off the desk.

Standing in the middle of the study, he wondered what to do with the beast. If he tossed the cat across the room, it would spin around and leap at him; he could clearly imagine Azrael tearing at his face and at other tender parts. Above Clyde, Joe Grey crouched peering down through his cat door, his white nose and white paws red with blood, his cheek torn in a long, bleeding gash, his yellow eyes blazing with rage.

But now, as well, alight with deep amusement.

Ignoring Joe’s silent laughter, Clyde found himself wanting to reach up for the gray tomcat, hold him close, and wash the blood from his face-a gesture impossible at the moment, and one that at any time would meet with indignant resistance.

Joe looked down at Clyde. Clyde looked up at Joe Grey. In Clyde’s hands Azrael fought and flipped and twisted so violently that Clyde felt every jolt.

“Help me out, here, Joe. What do I do with the beast?”

Joe stifled a laugh. “The cat carrier? Or the bathtub filled with water? My suggestion would be to squeeze real hard and put an end to him.”

“I can’t do it.”

Joe’s yellow eyes burned with a look that was all wild beast, that saidkill,that contained no hint of civility.

“It would be like lynching a killer without due process.”

“You think the California legal system would givethislowlife due process?”

Clyde shrugged, engendering a moment of miscalculation in which the black tom raked his hind claws down Clyde’s shoulder, bringing new blood spurting, one claw dug deep. Joe stopped smiling and leaped from the tower like a swooping eagle, knocking the tomcat from Clyde’s grip. The two cats hit the floor locked in screaming battle, then Joe flipped the tom twice, forcing him into the cold fireplace.

Crouched over Azrael among the ashes, Joe blocked his retreat with a degree of viciousness Clyde had never before seen in his feline pal. Azrael, driven by Joe’s frenzied attack, backed against the firewall pressing hard into the bricks-as if wishing the wall would give way and let him through into the dark chimney.

Watching the two tomcats, Clyde stood clutching his arm and applying pressure to the wound. The cats communicated now only in silence, their body language primal. Clyde could read Joe’s superiority of the moment as Joe goaded and stalked his quarry. The black tom showed only uncertainty in the twitch of his ears and the drop of his whiskers.

Joe moved from the fireplace just enough so Azrael could step out. His meaningful glance toward the glass doors at the south end of the study was more than clear. As Joe herded the flinching black tom toward the roof deck, Clyde stepped to open the door.

Silently Azrael padded past them onto the deck, as docile as any pet kitty. Silently Joe Grey stood in the doorway beside Clyde watching as Azrael crossed the wide deck over the roof of the carport, leaped into the oak tree, and fled down it to the sidewalk. As Azrael disappeared up the street, Joe Grey turned back inside, never looking to see which route the cat would take. Azrael had left the premises cowed and obedient, and that was all he cared about-for the moment. If, before the black tom was driven from the village, he presented more serious problems, Joe would deal with trouble as trouble arose.

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It took the rest of the waning night for Clyde to clean and doctor Joe’s wounds and tend to his own lacerations. He just hoped the black tomcat didn’t have rabies or some exotic tropical disease. When he was finished with the disinfectants and salves, he sported seven oversize adhesive bandages on his hands and arms and shoulder. Joe Grey’s injuries hardly showed, hidden beneath his short, dense fur. One could see only a few greasy smears where his silver coat parted, plus the bloody bare patch on his nose that was already beginning to scab over.

Joe’s vet would have shaved the torn areas and maybe stitched them. Joe didn’t want to see Dr. Firetti, preferring to appear in public as undamaged as possible. He was not through with Azrael, and he had no desire to be observed around the village looking like the walking wounded. He hoped his nose would heal fast.

Watching Clyde set up a ladder and climb from the upstairs deck to the roof, Joe wondered what had brought Azrael back to the village. He knew for a fact that Greeley was still in Central America, as Wilma had had a letter just last week from his wife, who owned the Latin American shop in the village.

The tomcat had returned to the village just once since he and Greeley sneaked away after robbing the village shops; traveling with them was Greeley’s new wife-to-be. Sue flew often to Latin America on buying trips, so it was no problem for her to leave her shop in the hands of a manager. The couple were married in Panama and settled down in a Panama City apartment; but their conjugal bliss had, apparently, not appealed to Azrael.

Dumping Greeley and Sue, he had taken up with a little blonde he found in a tourist bar, and soon Azrael and Gail Gantry headed back to the States. Ending up in Molena Point, they had pulled some slick burglaries until Gail was arrested for the murder of a human accomplice. Immediately Azrael had slipped away and disappeared, had not been seen in the village again until last night.

Now, licking a scratch on his shoulder, Joe peered up into the tower. Above him, on the roof, Clyde had set down his bucket of hot water and cleaning rags and opened the tower windows. Joe watched him remove the shredded, ruined pillows and drop them in a plastic garbage bag. Joe had liked those pillows. Clyde removed Joe’s water bowl and scrubbed it, then washed the inside of the tower, the walls, the floor, the ceiling and windows. The place would smell like Clorox for a week. Better that than tomcat spray. Clyde left the windows open so the tower could dry and air. Neither Joe nor Clyde had any idea what would prevent Azrael from a second foray, other than the smell of Clorox. Joe wondered if one black ear hanging from the peak of the tower’s hexagonal roof would serve to keep the beast away.

He wished that he had obtained such a trophy.

Clyde finished cleaning the tower as the first blush of morning embraced the rooftops. Coming down the ladder and returning to the master suite, Clyde showered and dressed. Joe, waiting for him, prowled the two big rooms. The suite, with its pale plastered walls and cedar ceiling, with its dark hardwood floors and rich Turkish rugs, was really more than a bachelor needed. Joe wondered, not for the first time, if Clyde would ever, finally, settle down with a wife.

There had been plenty of women, for a night, a week, not pickups but good friends, lovers who, having ceased to be lovers, were still the best of friends. That said something positive about Clyde, something Joe liked. But he did wonder if Clyde would ever take a wife. If, in building this comfortable upper floor, Clyde was preparing for just such a move.

If he was, Clyde hadn’t confided inhim,in his steadfast feline housemate.

Joe had thought for a while that Clyde and Charlie Getz would marry, but then Charlie had fallen head over heels for Clyde’s best friend, police chief Max Harper. An old story, Joe guessed, the guy’s friend gets the girl. The stuff of fiction. But it had worked out all right, all were still best friends, and Charlie and Max’s love was powerful and real.

Maybe he’d marry Ryan Flannery, Joe thought. Maybe Ryan, unknowing-or maybe hoping?-had built this upstairs addition as if destined to live here with Clyde herself?

So far, Joe could only wonder. Clyde had been as close-mouthed as a fox with a squirrel in its teeth. But the two got along very well, had fun together, and had the same sense of humor; they were comfortable together, and that meant a lot. And of course Joe never pried-not to the point where Clyde swore at him and threw things.

They went downstairs together, Joe padding quietly beside Clyde’s jogging shoes, feeling Azrael’s bites and scratches across every inch of his sleek gray body.

In the big remodeled kitchen Clyde started a pot of coffee and gave old Rube and the three household cats their breakfast. All four animals were nervous, the cats skittery and quick to startle, the old black Lab growling and staring up at the ceiling as if afraid whatever riot had occurred might yet come plunging down into the kitchen.

Sucking on his first cup of caffeine, Clyde fetched the morning paper from the front porch, spreading it out on the table so they could both read it-an act so magnanimous that Joe did a double take. “Why so generous? As you’ve said in the past, it’syourpaper,youpay for it.”

Clyde glared at him. “You don’t need to be sarcastic. This morning scared me. He’s a big bruiser, Joe. I hope you can stay away from that cat. Next time, he might not back off so easy.”

Joe shrugged, pacing the plaid oilcloth. What a downer, to find that beast prowling the village just before Christmas.

“What do you want for breakfast?” Clyde said diffidently.

“Any salmon left?”

“You ate it all last night. Settle for a cheese omelet?”

Joe yawned.

“With sour cream and kippers?”

Joe thought about that.

Clyde rose and began to make breakfast. “You look terrible. You’re all frowns and droopy whiskers.”

“You don’t look so great yourself with adhesive tape stuck all over.”

“Maybe the cat is just passing through,” Clyde said. “Anyway, you don’t need to be worrying about some mangy alley cat. You should be feeling like the proverbial fat feline, with the church bomberandRupert Flannery’s killer both set to go to trial.”

Clyde was being so kind and complimentary that Joe found himself waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Though he had to admit, their work on the church bomber and on the murder in Ryan Flannery’s garagehadbeen satisfying. No human cop could have done what they did, could have slipped in through Ryan’s narrow bathroom window to spy on a prowler. Or could have trotted into the scene of the crime on the heels of a prime suspect, listened to his phone conversations, and passed on the information to the detective division. With those cases wrapped up, Joe knew he should be feeling as smug as if his whiskers were smeared with caviar.

But he didn’t feel smug; he felt edgy.

Turning from the stove, Clyde looked deeply at him. “It’s not just that tomcat that’s eating you. It’s those high-powered burglaries.”

Clyde gave him a lopsided grin, shaking his head. “You think Azrael was involved in those thefts? No way, Joe. That wasn’t Azrael. No cat, not even a beast ofhiscaliber, withhisthieving talents, could have pulled off those robberies.”

Joe said nothing. He wasn’t so sure. Joe was thinking about Azrael and what the unscrupulous black tomcat might be up to, wondering what had brought him back to Molena Point, and his stomach was full of nervous flip-flops.

Well, but maybe he was just hungry. Maybe he’d feel better when he’d stoked up some fuel, when his killer genes were appeased with a nice helping of fat and cholesterol.

Turning back to the skillet, Clyde said, “If you’re going to count worries, what about my missing Packard? That car’s worth a bundle; I spent almost a year restoring it. For that matter, if you want to worry, what about Kate? This search for her family is upsetting her big time.”

Kate was another of Clyde’s good friends whom, at one time, Joe had hoped Clyde would marry. Joe himself had a lot in common with Kate; for one thing, she knew his secret, she knew that he could speak, that he was more than an ordinary cat. And Joe, in turn, knew the equally bizarre secret of Kate’s own nature.

Kate had, nearly three years ago, moved from the village up to San Francisco, and there had begun searching for some clue to her parents, whom she had never known. The adoption agency and foster homes had supplied just enough facts to frighten her. Personally, Joe thought she was more than foolish to be prying into a history that was best left alone.

But curiosity was just as much a part of Kate’s nature as it was of Joe’s own feline spirit.

Skillfully Clyde folded the omelet. “Since she started this search for her history she won’t talk to you, she won’t talk to me. She’s so damn stubborn. When she called last night sounding scared, wouldn’t say why she was scared�” He turned to stare at Joe. “She calls, then will hardly talk.”

Clyde dished up the omelet. “You were listening, you know how she sounded. You were all over me, stuffing your ear in the phone.”

“Maybe you should go up there. Two hours to San Francisco�”

“She’ll be down for Charlie’s gallery opening on Sunday. Maybe I can find out then what’s going on.” He set their plates on the table. He had added kippers only to Joe’s part of the omelet.

Crouching on the table, Joe waited for his breakfast to cool; he didn’t like burning his nose. “I still don’t see why Sicily has her openings on Sunday. You’d think that earlier in the weekend�” Cautiously he licked at the edge of his omelet.

Clyde shrugged. “Those parties spill out the door. Since she’s changed to Sunday, the crowd has nearly doubled.”

Joe didn’t reply. He was too busy tucking into breakfast-a good fight made him hungry as a starving cougar. But after several bites he looked up at Clyde. “Kate’s situation is the same as Dillon’s.”

Clyde looked at him. “I don’t see the two situations as even remotely the same. Dillon’s mother has broken up their family. Kate has no family, she� Oh well,” Clyde said, shrugging, “both are family problems.”

Joe twitched an ear. “Both shattered families. Only in different ways.”

Because he’d been an abandoned kitten, Joe had done a lot of thinking about family. Had wondered how life would have been with that kind of security, a mother to take care of him, other kittens to play with�

Maybe his mother had been run over in the San Francisco streets. He always told himself that was what happened, that she hadn’t simply abandoned him. He didn’t remember if he’d had brothers or sisters. Whatever, with no mother to fetch him up past the first couple months of life he’d had nothing to depend on but his wits. Catch a meal or a one-night stand wherever he could con some apartment dweller, then off again searching for something better. Not until he was lying fevered in the gutter nearly dead from a broken and infected tail, and Clyde discovered him, did he see the world as more than the pit of hell.

And not until he was grown and learned suddenly, after a rude shock, that he could speak and could understand human language-not until he began to think like a human and to understand human civility, did he realize what a family was all about.

He was getting so philosophical and sentimental he made himself retch-but the fact remained, he could now understand why Kate wanted to know her heritage, why she wanted her past to be a part of her no matter how bizarre-just as he understood why Dillon was so shattered by the destruction of her family, by her mother all but abandoning her.

That was the trouble with thinking like a human. You started empathizing. Suffering the pain of others. Compromising your autonomy as a cat. You were no longer satisfied to slaughter rats, get your three squares, and party with the ladies. Even his previous promiscuity he now found juvenile and boring. Now his partnership with Dulcie was deep and abiding.

When Kate called last night, Clyde had been sprawled in bed reading the latest thriller. Joe, lounging on the pillow next to him reading over his shoulder, had reluctantly left the aura of the story and pressed his ear to the phone.

“You sound way stressed,” Clyde said. “What’s the matter?”

“Just need to talk, I guess.” Kate’s voice sounded tight and small. “Maybe need a change, maybe I’ll move out of the city for a while, come back to the village.” She had sounded so deeply upset and off center, that Joe went rigid listening.

“Is it your job? Has work gone sour?”

Joe had rolled his eyes. Clyde could be so imperceptive.

“No, the studio’s wonderful.”

“It’s the search for her grandfather,“Joe had whispered, nudging Clyde.

“Is it the search for your family?”

“Maybe. I guess. I don’t want to talk about it. I just want to get away, to be with-with friends.”

“Kate�”

“Well I’m coming down,” she’d said putting more spunk into her voice. “Even if just for a few days. I want to see Charlie’s show-her first one-man exhibit. At the Aronson. I’m coming to the opening; I can’t wait. While� while I’m there, maybe I’ll look at apartments.”

“You can stay here while you look. In the new guest room. Strictly platonic.”

Well, Joe thought, it had always been platonic, their friendship had never gone any further. One thing about Clyde, when Kate was married and living in the village, and she and Jimmie saw a lot of Clyde, it was just friends and nothing more. Clyde would never have gotten involved-but there had always been that spark between them, Joe had seen it even then.

“Thanks for the invitation.” Her voice started to sound weepy again. “I’ve already called Wilma, already arranged to stay with her. But can we have dinner?”

“I’d like that. You�”

“I know you’re dating Hanni’s sister. Could we make it a threesome? Or why not everyone? Ryan, Hanni, their uncle Dallas, Charlie and Max and Wilma�”

Clyde stared at Joe. Joe stared back at him. Now she was gushing. She didn’t sound at all like herself.

“Royally scared,” Joe had said when Clyde hung up. “Maybe she’ll talk to me, maybe I can get a line on what’s bugging her.”

“Maybe you can meddle.”

“Maybe I canhelp.”

“In your case, helpingismeddling. Leave it alone, Joe. She doesn’t want to talk, she just wants company. Kate’s a big girl. If she wants to keep this private, she can handle her own problems.”

“Well, aren’t you out of joint. And she doesn’t seem to be handling them, she’s scared out of her pretty blond head.”

“Just give her some space. Don’t overreact.” Clyde’s nose, in other words, had been royally put out of joint. Joe had tramped across the bed to his own pillow, kneaded it with a vengeance that threatened to send feathers flying, and curled up for sleep with his back to Clyde.

Kate washisfriend, too. Thinking about her problems left him as irritable as a trapped possum.

But now, finishing breakfast in a withdrawn silence, neither Joe Grey nor Clyde imagined that soon the lives that touched them would fall into a deeper tangle. That at Charlie’s gallery opening they would be treated to a glimpse of future events as dark as the leer of the black tomcat.

4 [��������: pic_5.jpg]

The party was in full swing, the champagne flowing, the talk and laughter in the Aronson Gallery rising louder than the three cats found comfortable; despite the din they peered down from the loft far too interested to abandon festivities: three furry people-watchers taking in the glitter, the excitement, the popping of corks, and the women’s elegant gowns.

Of course the guest of honor was most elegant of all. The cats seldom saw Charlie in anything but jeans and workshirts. Her transformation was impressive, her gold lame sheath setting off her tall slim figure and picking up the highlights of her red hair. “Oh, to be an artist,” Dulcie said, “to have your own exhibit, with all the lovely people and champagne and delicious food, and to wear gold lame like a movie star.”

Joe cut her a tolerant look. Dulcie’s dreams ran heavily to silk and cashmere and gold lame.

“And the gallery’s never been more elegant. I’m sure,” she said with a little grin, “that Sicily Aronson built the loft just for us.”

“Right,” Joe said, laughing.

“Well wearethe star models, with our portraits in the window,” she told him. As well as the drawings of the three cats in the window and in the gallery below, many of the works on the loft walls were of them: small, quick sketches of the cats playing and running.

But the real ego trip was the large portraits in the gallery below, hanging shoulder to shoulder with some very handsome horses and dogs. Peering down through the rail watching the crowd, the cats tried to look everywhere at once. The opening was mobbed with Charlie and Max’s friends, art patrons, and animal lovers-and of course there were lots of cops present. The cats could see how pleased Charlie was that the department had turned out for her-well, for Max, she’d be thinking. For their chief. But then, the whole department had been at their wedding, just three months ago, where the head of detectives had given the bride away, and Clyde had been best man.

Clyde and Max Harper had been friends since high school, when during summers and on weekends they followed the rodeos up and down California, riding broncs and bulls. Harper, lean and sun-leathered, still looked very much like an old bronc buster. Clyde had mellowed out smoother, but he was still in good shape. Strange, Joe thought, how things happened. When Charlie arrived in the village just over a year ago, to stay with her aunt Wilma, Clyde had at once started dating her. It wasn’t until much later, and, Joe thought, quite by accident, that Charlie and Max fell in love.

Tonight, none of Harper’s officers was in uniform and the chief himself was dressed in a pale suede sport coat, beige slacks, and a dark silk shirt-a perfect complement to Charlie’s gold lame. He stood across the room talking with two of his men, his tall, slim figure military straight; his tanned, lined face that could look so stern tonight was only proud and caring as he looked across at Charlie and moved in her direction, thrilled she was by her first one-man show; she was so excited her stomach was queasy. As she watched Max work his way through the crowd toward her, she watched Sicily Aronson, too. From the moment the doors had opened this evening, the flamboyant brunette had been everywhere, flitting from group to group, her diaphanous skirts and shawls floating around her, her tall figure set off by the usual collection of dangling jewelry, tonight an impressive mix of silver and topaz and onyx. Sicily had taken care of the party details personally, the invitations, the press releases, the hanging of the work, down to the selection of appetizers and wines.

“You’re gawking,” Max said, coming up behind Charlie. “You’re supposed to look sophisticated and cool.”

“I don’t feel sophisticatedorcool.” She grinned at him and took his hand, moving with him to a far corner where they could have a little space. “How can I not be excited, when everyone we know is here, and so many people I don’t know, have never seen before.”

“Maybe collectors, come to buy out the show.”

Laughing, she studied the long, lean lines of his face, her throat catching at the intimacy of his brown eyes on her.

“I’m glad I married you,” he said softly, “before you got so famous you wouldn’t look at me.”

She made a face at him.

“You will be famous. Of course, with me you’re already famous. Particularly in bed.”

She felt her face color, and she turned her back on him, studying the crush of viewers that was already overflowing onto the sidewalk. Max ran his hand down her arm in a way that made her catch her breath. Turning, she breathed a sigh of pure contentment.

“It’s a fine show,” he said seriously. “You know you have three prospective clients waiting to talk with you. That woman over by the desk, for one. The Doberman woman.”

She nodded. “Anne Roche. I’ll go sit with her in a minute.”

“And would you believe Marlin Dorriss is here? That he’s seriously eyeing three pieces of your work? Thatwouldbe a conquest, to be included in the Dorriss collection. He’s been looking at the gulls in flight.”

She nodded, grinning at him. Early in the evening Dorriss had spent some time looking at the drawings of seagulls winging over the Molena Point rooftops. They were not romantic renderings, but stark, the dark markings of the gulls repeated in the harshly angled shadows of the rooftops.

“That would be very nice,” she said softly, “to hang beside work by Elmer Bischoff and Diebenkorn.” She looked up at Max. “I still find it hard not warm to Dorriss, to his quiet, sincere manner. Find it hard not to like him, despite his unwelcome affair with Dillon’s mother.”

Dillon was Charlie and Max’s special friend; Max had taught her to ride, helping to build confidence and independence in the young teenager who, they had sometimes thought, might be a bit too sheltered.

She was not sheltered now. The sudden breakdown of her family had turned Dillon shockingly bad mannered and rude. Charlie hurt for her, but she grew angry at Dillon, too. An ugly turn in life didn’t give you license to chuck all civility and let rage rule-even when it was your mother who had betrayed you.

But Charlie hadn’t had a very good relationship with her own mother, so maybe she was missing something here. Certainly she hadn’t had anything like Dillon’s fourteen years of warmth and security. Maybe that made the present situation far worse. Until her mother went suddenly astray, Dillon never had to cope with a problem parent.

Surely Helen’s transgression with handsome Marlin Dorriss was understandable-plenty of women were after him. A well-built six-foot-four, he was a man whom women on the street turned to look at, a well-tanned, athletic-looking bachelor with compelling brown eyes, always quietly but expensively dressed, his voice and manner subdued, totally attentive to whomever he was speaking with. Busboy or beautiful model, Dorriss seemed to find each person of deep interest. He had an air of kindness about him as if he truly valued every human soul.

“Hard not to like the man,” Max said, giving Charlie a wry grin and putting his arm around her. Warm in each other’s company, they stood quietly watching the crowd. “Kate Osborne just came in,” he said. “There by the door talking with Dallas. She’ll be pleased that you’re wearing her hairclip.”

Charlie touched the heavy gold barrette that tied back her red hair. Set with emeralds and carved with the heads of two cats, it was a handsome and unusual piece, part of a collection of jewelry that Kate’s unknown parents, or perhaps her mysterious grandfather had left to her. She had stopped by the ranch that afternoon for a few moments to drop off the barrette; they had stood by the pasture fence petting the two Harper dogs and talking. Charlie hadn’t wanted to accept the gift. “I can’t take this, Kate, it has to be worth a fortune. It’s very beautiful.”

“It’s not worth a fortune, it’s only faux emeralds. I had the whole lot appraised the week after that attorney gave them to me. So strange� but I’ll tell you about it when we have more time.” Turning, her short blond bob catching the sunlight, she removed the plastic clip from Charlie’s hair and fastened on the gold-and-emerald confection.

“Oh yes,” Kate said, stepping back. “It’s beautiful on you, it will be smashing with that gold lame.”

“But�”

“Charlie, I’ll never wear this, I’ll never have long hair, long hair makes me crazy. Jewelry is meant to be used, to be worn.” Taking her compact from her purse, she held up the mirror so Charlie could see.

Charlie had been thrilled with the gift. “I still think it looks terribly valuable. Even if the jewels are paste, the gold work is truly fine.”

“If you like primitive,” Kate said. “As we both do. The appraiser-he’s top-notch, was recommended by several of my clients in the city-I don’t think he goes for this kind of work. He did say the pieces were unusual in style. When I pressed him for some date, some idea what the history of the pieces might be, he seemed uncertain. Said they didn’t really belong in any time or category, that he really couldn’t place them as to locale.”

“Strange, if he’s so knowledgeable.”

“Yes.” Kate had looked uneasy, as if she found the lack of any background for the jewelry somehow unsettling. “He assured me the jewels were paste. He said that wasn’t uncommon, and I knew from my art history that was true, that during the 1800s real gold and silver settings were made with great care, but often set with paste jewels.”

Kate gave the two dogs a parting pat. “I gave the other barrette to Wilma, the silver and onyx one for her silver hair.”

“But if there’s some clue to your parents here, if they were connected somehow to the jewelry�”

Again, that uneasy downward glance. “I have ten more pieces to solve the puzzle, if that’s why the jewelry was saved for me, if it does hold some clue.”

“But why else would they keep it all those years, if it isn’t of great monetary value? Do the other pieces have images of cats?”

“I� five do,” she said, frowning. “There’s� an emerald choker with cats.” Kate shook her head, seeming distressed. “If the stones were real, I’m sure it would be worth a fortune.”

So strange, Charlie thought now, that mysterious collection of jewelry waiting for Kate for over thirty years, tucked away in the back of a walk-in safe, in a hundred-year-old law firm. A firm that seemed, Kate had said, on its last legs, fast deteriorating. The jewelry had been put away in a small cardboard box to wait for an orphaned child to grow up, to come of age.

Standing on tiptoe to look over the crowd, Charlie waved to Kate. And a waiter by the door moved in Kate’s direction with a tray of champagne, rudely shouldering aside another server-the same waiter who, half an hour earlier, had watched Charlie herself so intently. What was he looking at? Kate’s choker? Charlie’s own barrette? Surely Sicily hadn’t hired a thief among the caterers.

My imagination,Charlie thought.Everyone’s looking at the jewelry, because it’s so different with its primitive designs.Even from across the room, Kate’s silver and topaz choker was striking against her pearly dress and her silky blond hair. Kate was so beautiful, with the gamin quality of a Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn, a perky, carefree perfection that Charlie greatly envied.

“What?” Max said. “What are you staring at? Kate? But you are the most beautiful woman in the room.”

“You, Captain Harper, are the biggest con artist in the room.” She smiled and touched his cheek. “I’m so glad Kate came. She drove clear down from the city for tonight-well, other errands, too. But she planned her time specially for tonight.”

“Maybe she plans to buy a drawing or two before her favorites are gone, or maybe to take back for some client-maybe she plans to do a whole interior around a group of your drawings.”

“You’re such a dreamer. I know she loves San Francisco, but I do hope she moves back to the village-that she rents the other side of our duplex.” Charlie had bought the rundown duplex last spring, before they were married, as an investment. Ryan Flannery, her tenant in one apartment, had done considerable repairs in lieu of rent.

“It’syourduplex,” Max said. “You’re grinning. What?”

“I still don’t feel like a landlord.”

“What does a landlord feel like? Does this take special training? You think you’re not mean enough, tough enough?”

She gave him a sly look.

“Tough as boots,” Max said. “You don’t mind having friends as tenants? With Ryan in the other unit�”

“I love having Ryan there. We haven’t disagreed yet. The few improvements� We settle the cost over a cup of coffee. Ryan does the work, I buy the materials. What could be simpler?”

“I married a sensible woman, to say nothing of her beauty.”

The biggest improvement so far to the duplex, after the initial painting and cleaning up, had been the backyard fence for Ryan’s lovely weimaraner, an addition well worth the money. It was a real plus to have a guard dog on the premises. Ryan’s side of the building had already been the scene of a kidnapping, and, just a month ago, the scene of a shocking murder. Such events were not all that common in their small quiet village, but Charlie and Max both hoped the big, well-trained dog would put a stop to any unsettling trend.

The other tenants, in the one-bedroom side, would be leaving in February, four months hence. Charlie wondered if Kate would want to wait that long. She watched Kate and Ryan, and Ryan’s sister Hanni, with their heads together laughing. Golden hair and dark, and Hanni’s premature and startling white hair. The three young women had started in her direction when they were sidetracked by Marlin Dorriss, who seemed to want to escort them all to the buffet table-Charlie guessed Dillon’s mother hadn’t accompanied him; the two did not overtly flaunt their relationship.

It was amazing to Charlie that since moving to the village, she had acquired three close woman friends her own age, trusted friends even besides her aunt Wilma. She had never had girlfriends in school, had always been a loner. She hadn’t known how comfortable and supportive female friends could be-if they were women who didn’t fuss and gossip, who liked to do outdoor things, who liked animals and liked to ride. Women, she thought amused, who preferred an afternoon at the shooting range to shopping. Though Charlie had even begun to enjoy shopping, when she had the spare time.

She could never get over the fact, either, of her sudden success as an animal artist. After giving up a commercial art career at which she had been only mediocre, and moving down to the village to open a cleaning-and-repair service, she had suddenly and without much effort on her part been approached by a gallery that loved her work. Her animal drawings and prints had been warmly accepted in the village and far beyond it, in a way almost too heady to live with. Even Detective Garza, that very discerning gun-dog man, had commissioned her to do his two pointers, and she considered that a true compliment. She watched Garza start through the crowd now, as if to speak to Max; she supposed the detective would take Max away from her.

The square-faced Latino looked very handsome in a pale silk sport coat, dark slacks, white shirt, and dark tie, particularly as she was used to seeing him in an old, worn tweed blazer and jeans. She could see a tiny line of pale skin between his short-trimmed dark hair and his tan.

Easing through the crowd to them, Garza gave her a brief hug and turned his attention to Max. As Max squeezed her hand and moved away with him, Charlie turned toward the curator’s desk where Anne Roche, the Doberman woman, had made herself comfortable in one of the two leather chairs.

Anne was a frail, fine-featured woman, cool to the point of austerity. Everything about her spelled money: her glossy auburn hair sleeked into a perfect shoulder-length bob, her creamy complexion and impeccable grooming. Her easy perfection made Charlie uncomfortably aware of her own freckles and kinky, carrot-red mane. Anne was interested in a portrait of her two champion Dobermans. Anne’s looks might be intimidating, but her love of animals and her shy smile put Charlie immediately at ease. She spent some time telling Charlie how much she loved her work, particularly the quick action pieces.

“And the cats,” Anne said, her brown eyes widening. “Some of your cats look so perceptive they make me shiver. And your foxes and deer and raccoons-so wild and free. Those aren’t zoo animals.”

Charlie laughed. “I watch them from our porch and from the kitchen windows. We live up in the hills above the village, so there’s open land around us. The fox comes almost every night, though we don’t feed him.”

“Well, he’s very fine. I have to say, your work is the best I’ve seen, and I’m quite familiar with the drawings of Pourtleviet, and of Alice Kitchen. Have you thought of producing a book? A coffee-table book?”

Charlie smiled. “I do have a small project in the works, not a coffee-table book, but with cat drawings.”

“I’m glad to hear that. I wish you well with it. When can we get together for some sketches of the dogs? I’d like you to do them on the move, at least for the first work, some of those wonderful quick sketches.”

They were discussing a time convenient to them both and were going over Charlie’s fees when the waiter who had approached Kate so rudely, and who had eyed Charlie’s barrette, started toward the desk with a tray. He was young, maybe thirty, dressed in white jacket, black slacks, and black bow tie. His stark blond hair topped a perfect tan, as if he surfed or played tennis. Maybe a sports bum working as a waiter to support his habit? His handsome, tanned face was closed of any expression, withdrawn and bland. But as he held out his tray of champagne, his look changed to one of surprise.

He crumpled and fell suddenly, dropping the tray, scattering glasses in a spray of champagne, landing hard across Charlie, hurting her leg as she fought to steady him and herself. It happened so fast she couldn’t hold him. His weight twisted them both as he slid from her grip to the floor, pulling her with him; she went down in a tangle of sprayed wine and breaking glass.

He lay white and still beneath her. He had made no sound as he fell, no cry of distress or pain. As Charlie untangled herself and felt for a pulse, Max was beside her pulling her away, his lean, lined cop’s face frightened, his demeanor stern and quick. “Get back, Charlie. Get away from him. Now.”

Charlie struggled up, her gold sheath soaked with wine, and she slid fast behind the desk as Max’s officers herded everyone back. Max knelt beside the tall, liveried man feeling for a pulse, feeling the carotid artery, turning back the man’s eyelids. Around them the din of voices had stopped as suddenly as if a tape had been turned off, the crowded room so still that the running footsteps of the two officers who had moved to secure the front of the building echoed like thunder. Detective Garza’s voice was a shout as he called on the police radio for paramedics. Charlie watched the scene numbly. The client she had been talking with had disappeared into the crowd. As sirens came screaming from a few blocks away, Max performed CPR, and his officers secured the front and back doors. The gallery windows blazed with whirling red lights. Sirens still screamed as two medics pushed through the crowd to crouch over the waiter. As Max rose, the look on his face told her the man was dead.

Anne Roche had been right there. Had she been involved, in some inexplicable manner? She stood now with the rest of the crowd waiting to be questioned.

After a long interval of feverish work with CPR, oxygen, and electric shock, the medics rose. Max nodded. The younger medic spoke into his radio, calling for the coroner. Max reached for Charlie, taking her hand. As she moved away with him, she felt cold, disoriented. Looking up at Max, she had to question the forces that were at work here.

This was the second disaster to occur during a ceremony of special meaning to her and Max. The first had been their wedding, when she and Max, along with most of the Molena Point PD and half the village had narrowly escaped being killed at the hands of a bomber.

Before that, Max had been set up as the prime suspect in a double murder, had been cleverly and almost successfully framed. And now� another calamity at a celebration involving Captain and Mrs. Max Harper.

Was there some pattern at work beyond her understanding?

Some mysterious force that invited such ugly occurrences? But that was rubbish, she didn’t believe in cosmic forces ruling one’s life; and certainly such an idea would anger Max. Free souls ruled their own lives. Both she and Max believed that. Despite what Max called her “artistic temperament,” she prided herself on being totally centered in fact and reality-except of course for the one fact in her life that was beyond reality, the one aspect of her life that was so strange that Max would never believe it. The one amazement that she could never share with him, the secret she could never reveal to the person she loved most in all the world.

Glancing above her to the balcony, she looked into the eyes of the three cats, their noses pressed out through the rail, chins resting on their paws. Joe’s sleek gray coat gleamed like polished pewter, marked with white paws, nose, and chest. Dulcie’s dark tabby stripes shone rich as chocolate. The kit’s fluffy black-and-brown fur was, as usual, every which way, her yellow eyes blazing with curiosity, her long fluffy tail lashing and twitching. The three cats watched Charlie knowingly, three serious feline gazes. And while Joe Grey stared boldly at her, and Dulcie narrowed her green eyes, the kit opened her pink mouth in a way that made Charlie’s heart stop, made her slap her hands over her own mouth in pantomime so the kit wouldn’t forget herself and speak.

But of course the kit didn’t speak. Slyly she looked down at Charlie, amused by her panic. And the cats turned to watch the newly arrived coroner at work, three pairs of eyes burning with conjecture, three wily feline minds where a hundred questions burned, where theories would be forming as to the cause of the waiter’s death.

Before the waiter fell, the three cats had seen no one very near to him except Charlie and her client. The moment he fell, the cats had searched the crowd for any action that might be missed from the floor below, a furtive movement, some sophisticated and silent weapon being hidden in purse or coat pocket. But it was already too late: by the time the man fell they would surely have missed some vital piece of evidence.

It deeply angered Joe that he had been looking directly at the victim and had seen nothing. As soon as the man dropped, Joe had studied him, seeking anything awry that might, the next instant, vanish. Had there been an ice pick in the ribs? A silenced shot? Or did the waiter die from some poison that did not cause last-minute pain or spasms? Apparently neither cops nor coroner had found any such indication. The guy had gone down like a rock,as ifhe’d been shot. But neither police or coroner had found a wound.

The man worked for George Jolly’s deli, which had catered the party; the cats had seen him in there serving behind the counter. They were well acquainted with the deli, and with the charming brick alley that ran behind its back door, where George Jolly set out his daily snacks for the local cats. Jolly’s alley was the most popular feline haunt in the village, although villagers and tourists as well enjoyed its potted trees and flowers, its cozy benches and little out-of-the way shops. Mr. Jolly wasn’t present to help serve tonight. The two other waiters had knelt over their coworker after he fell, until detectives ordered them away.

Joe glanced at the kit, who crouched beside him. The young tortoiseshell was leaning so far out between the rails that Dulcie grabbed a mouthful of black-and-brown fur and hauled her back to safety.

“You want to drop down in the middle of those cops and medics?”

The kit smiled at Dulcie and edged over again, watching everything at once. For a cat who had not so long ago been terrified of humanity, who had sought only to escape mankind, the kit had turned into a brazen little people-watching sleuth. If Kit had a fault, it was her excesses. Too much curiosity, too much passion in wanting to know everything all at once. As the three cats peered over, Max Harper looked up suddenly to the balcony. He looked surprised to see them, then frowned.

Joe turned away to hide a smile. Harper could look so suspicious. What weretheydoing? Just hanging out to watch the party. The whole gallery knew they were up there, they’d been camped on the balcony all evening. Wilma had brought them up a plate loaded with party food, and they had received dozens of admiring looks, to say nothing of typical remarks from the guests:Oh, the cute kitties� they look just like their portraits, aren’t they darling� That tomcat, he looks just as much a brute as in Charlie’s drawings, I wouldn’t want to cross that one�

Joe looked down at Max Harper as dully as he could manage, scratched an imaginary flea, and yawned. With effort he remained a dull blob until at last Harper turned away.

Only when all the guests had been questioned and names and addresses recorded and folks were allowed to leave, only then did the cats abandon the balcony and trot down the spiral stairs. While the police remained to finish their work, Charlie’s little group headed for the door, anticipating late-dinner reservations. Max would be along when he could. He and Detective Garza stood in the center of the gallery with a dozen officers, both quietly giving orders. It would be hours before anyone knew whether this had been a natural death or murder. Until that question was resolved, the department would treat the Aronson Gallery as the scene of a murder.

“If itwasmurder,” Dulcie said softly, “who knows how long the gallery will be locked down? And Charlie’s show has just opened.”

Joe Grey licked his paw. “The coroner should know by morning. Charlie’s already sold seven drawings and four prints. By morning, Garza should have photographed, fingerprinted, done the whole routine. Let’s go, before we miss supper.” They moved quickly to the front door, where the party was shrugging on coats and winding scarves against the late October chill. But as the three cats slipped diffidently around their friends’ ankles, preening and purring like pet kitties, Joe’s thoughts remained with the dead waiter. Allowing Clyde to pick him up, Joe purred and tried to act simple for the benefit of those who did not know his true nature; but as he snuggled against Clyde’s shoulder, his sleek gray head was filled with questions as sharply irritating as the buzz of swarming bees.

5 [��������: pic_6.jpg]

Joe lay across Clyde’s shoulder absorbing the warmth from his housemate’s tweed sport coat, which smelled of aftershave and of dog. Around them along the village streets, the wind hushed coldly, and above their heads the sheltering oaks rattled like live things; a few tourists lingered looking into the bright shop windows, but the shadows between the shops were dense and still, for no moon shone beneath the heavy clouds. Clyde’s tweed shoulder was rough against Joe’s nose. Dressed in his usual party attire, a sport coat over a white cashmere turtleneck and Levi’s, Clyde had had a haircut for the occasion. His dark hair was short and neat, with the obligatory little white line of non-tan-the general effect a clean, military look that Ryan liked. Ryan walked close beside them, Clyde and Ryan holding hands. Joe observed them with interest.

“What,” he had asked Clyde just last week, like some over-protective parent, “are your intentions? You’re dating Ryan, neither one of you seeing anyone else. I know it’s not all platonic, but where’s the wild abandon of passion? A couple of years ago, it was a different woman every week, in bed, cooking your supper, and in bed again. What happened to all the debauchery?”

Clyde had scowled at him, said nothing, and left the room. But Joe thought he knew. Clyde had had a sea change, a complete turnaround in the way he viewed his woman friends.

It had started with Kate, when she left her husband after he tried to kill her. She had been so very frightened, so distraught, had left the house in fear and come to Clyde for shelter and for comfort. Clyde had made up the guest bed and cooked a midnight supper for her, had tried to soothe and calm her, but when Kate exhibited her alarming feline nature, trying to make him understand the extent of her fears, when she took the form of a cat, she had put Clyde off royally.

After her move to San Francisco, there had been months when she’d been out of touch, when she wouldn’t answer his calls or return them. Then Clyde began dating Charlie. That had lasted until Charlie and Max, unplanned and unintentionally, had fallen madly in love. And Joe smiled. They had been so distressed that they had hurt Clyde, so relieved when Ryan came on the scene, moving down from the city, and the two hit it off.

But where this romance was headed, Joe wasn’t sure. Clyde had become far more circumspect in his relationships. No more one-week stands, no more wild partying-and Ryan, recovering from a miserable marriage, seemed just as reluctant to commit.

As they headed across the village to a late supper, strolling past the brightly lit shops, Wilma carried Dulcie wrapped in her red cloak, and Hanni carried the kit. Hanni had covered her jade-green sequined dress with a long cape made from a Guatemalan blanket-tacky on anyone else, smashing on Hanni Coon with her lean model’s figure and tousled white hair. Hanni, definitely a dog person, carried the tattercoat with considerable deference. Consorting with cats was new to her. The kit was so thoroughly enjoying herself looking over Hanni’s shoulder into the shop windows that Joe wanted to tell her not to stare. When passersby greeted them, Joe looked totally blank and mindless, but the kit was incredibly eager, accepting the petting of the locals and smiling at them in a far too intelligent manner. The few tourists they met stopped to stare at the bizarre little group carrying three cats, but then they smiled. Molena Point was famous for odd characters.

Ahead of Hanni and Wilma, Charlie walked with Kate, Charlie wrapped in a long, creamy stole over her wine-damp gold lame. Kate wore a black velvet ankle-length wrap. In the wake of the waiter’s death, the party of six was silent and subdued. Strange, Joe thought. When the waiter fell across Charlie’s lap, Kate had registered not only alarm but fear, a quick shock visible for only a moment before she took herself in hand.

Beside Joe, Ryan moved so close to Clyde that her dark, blowing hair tickled Joe’s nose. She was growing more used to him, more comfortable with Clyde taking his tomcat around the village, carrying a cat in the car just for the ride or allowing Joe into a restaurant. No matter that Ryan took her dog into restaurant patios, that was different. After nearly a year of dating Clyde she hadn’t quite decided what to make of Joe-Joe knew he shouldn’t tease her and set her up, but his jokes gave him such a high. Nothing so bizarre as to reveal the truth, nothing to imply that he understood Ryan’s every word and might have something to say in return.

But dog people were such suckers for the inexplicable behavior of cats, for the unfathomable mysteries of the feline persona. There was, in the minds of most dog addicts, not the faintest understanding of the logic of feline thought. And that made them ridiculously easy marks. The simplest ruse could bring incredulous stares:Inever saw a cat go round a garden smelling the roses, standing up on its hind paws like that. I never saw a cat sit up like a dog to beg, or fetch a ball like a dog.

Well of course ordinary cats did all those things, when they chose to; he had demonstrated for Ryan nothing extraordinary. But in that ailuro-challenged young woman, his little dramas had stirred amazed responses. Dulcie kept telling him to watch himself. “You’re going to blow it, Joe. Blow it big time. Ryan isn’t stupid. How do you think Charlie found out that we can talk, that we’re not ordinary? By watching us when we got careless, that’s how. Just as you’re getting careless with Ryan.”

“Don’t worry so much. I’m never careless, my jokes are totally harmless. And Ryan isn’t Charlie, Charlie’s the one with the imagination. Not everyone would come to the conclusion Charlie did. Ryan’s a cop’s kid, she likes a logical explanation for everything. Facts are facts. She would no more believe a cat could carry on a conversation than Max Harper would believe it. And you have to admit, we’re in Harper’s face all the time.”

“But�”

“There’s no way,” Joe had said, “that either Ryan or Harper would ever buy the truth about us-unless, of course, we sat down and had a little heart-to-heart with them.”

He looked up as they approached the restaurant’s brick patio, and he licked his muzzle, tasting the good smells of steak and lobster. The patio was crowded with diners at small tables beneath its sprawling oaks. The host was all smiles as he escorted them through the patio, through the main dining room, and up the stairs. The eyes of everyone were on them, not only because Charlie was an up-and-coming artist in the community and the wife of the chief of police, not only because of Hanni’s theatrical good looks and her status as a top interior designer, but because how many dinner parties, reserving the upstairs private dining room, included on the guest list three cats?

The smaller upstairs room with its paneling, high-peaked ceiling, and rafters, featured a long skylight along one slanting side, above which heavy clouds drifted, edged with light from the hidden moon. A fire was burning on the brick hearth. Bay windows formed three sides of the intimate dining room, looking down on the village’s bright shops and dark oaks. A long table filled the room, draped with a white cloth and set with heavy silver, flowered china, and a centerpiece of red pyracantha berries. On a window seat in one of the bays, among a tangle of flowered cushions, three linen napkins had been laid open beneath three small flowered plates. There, no silverware was required. As the cats settled into their own places and the human diners took their seats, Max Harper hurried up the stairs, giving Charlie a grin, the two as delighted to be together as if they’d been parted for days.

“Dallas is still at it,” Max said. “We just got the coroner’s prelim.”

“That was fast. What did he say?”

Harper’s thin, lined face was expressionless, a cop’s face that you had to know very well to decipher. He looked irritable, as if some vital question was still begging. Joe watched him so intently that Dulcie nudged him, pretending to nibble a flea. Immediately he stuck his nose in his supper, concentrating on his salmon mousse-the rich, creamy confection was far more delicious than any sweet dessert mousse that so delighted humans. Salmon mousse, in Joe’s opinion, was one of the great inventions of mankind.

“Could have been accidental death,” Harper said. “Could be manslaughter. No way to tell, yet. He died of blunt trauma, a blunt blow to the head.”

“But there wasn’t�” Charlie began. “No one�” She grew quiet, letting Max continue.

“As near as Dr. Bern can tell, so far, the blow occurred three or four days ago. There was slow bleeding within the skull where multiple small capillaries had ruptured. The pressure can build up slowly, over time.” He took a bite of salad. “Pressure pushing down around the spinal cord. Bern thinks that happened over several days. At the last, while he was serving drinks at the party, the increase of blood became rapid.

“When Bern called, he was still looking for the sudden rupture of an artery or vein, which would have been the final event in a long drawn-out trauma.” He spooned more dressing on his salad and took a sip of beer, a frustrated frown touching his face. Harper had quit smoking over a year before, but sometimes Joe saw him itching to reach for a cigarette, his fingers moving nervously, the creases along his cheeks deepening.

“The guy’s ID was faked,” Max said. “He’s been using the social security number of a man who died three years ago. Strangest thing, his prints are not on record in any of the western states. It’ll take us a week or two, maybe more, to get fingerprint information for the rest of the country. Department of Justice is always backed up.”

Charlie said, “He could have been hit in the head anywhere, then? Several days ago?”

Harper nodded. “There’s a rectangular bruise on the side of the head, the shape of a brick. It was already fading, but there were brick particles in the skin. Could have been an accident, maybe he stood up under a low flight of stairs, for instance, and cracked himself on the head. Or it could have happened in a fight, some guy bashed him with a brick. He was using the name Sammy Clarkman. He’s worked for George Jolly for three months, has done several catering jobs during that time.”

Ryan leaned forward, looking at Max. “Lucinda Greenlaw knows him.”

Max gave her his full attention.

“I knew I’d seen him in Jolly’s Deli,” Ryan said. “I’d forgotten, until just now, that last month when the Greenlaws were here, Lucinda and I were in there, and she knew the guy.”

Max listened quietly. The whole table was silent. Beside Joe, the kit was so alert and still that he kept an eye on her-he never knew when the kit would show too clearly her eager enthusiasm.

Lucinda and Pedric, a pair of tall, bone-thin eighty-year-olds, had married just a year before, after Lucinda’s husband Shamas died in an unfortunate manner for which one of his nephews went to prison. On the day of their wedding the Greenlaws had adopted the kit. They knew her special talents, they knew that she, like Joe Grey and Dulcie, was not in any way ordinary. The kit’s command of the English language, her off-the-wall ideas, and her opinion on almost every subject were, in the eyes of the Greenlaws, deserving of admiration and respect.

Setting out to travel at their leisure up and down the California coast, they had planned to have the kit with them, but she was so prone to car sickness that she had turned wan and miserable. For the kit, the pleasure of travel wasn’t worth the distress. The Greenlaws had arranged that she stay for a while with Dulcie and Wilma. Just at the end of September they had returned to the village for a short layover before the holidays, had stored their RV in Wilma Getz’s driveway, and, scooping up the kit in a delirium of pleasure, they had checked into a suite at the Otter Pine Inn, the nicest of several village hotels that catered to pets. The kit had spent a delirious week enjoying herself with her human family. And, to the kit’s great joy, the elderly newlyweds had decided it would soon be time to fold away their maps of the California coast and build their Molena Point house as they had promised the kit they would do. The tortoiseshell had been ecstatic, a whirlwind of anticipation. When she spoke of the house, her round yellow eyes shone like twin moons, her bushy tail lashed and switched. She was a wild thing filled with exploding dreams: Their own home, a real home, her beloved Lucinda and Pedric forevermore near to her.

But now, what was this? What was the connection between the footloose Greenlaws and the dead waiter? Glancing at Dulcie, Joe intently watched those at the table.

“We had ordered a picnic,” Ryan was saying. “We picked it up and spent the day on Hellhag Hill laying out their new house. Seeing how the sunlight falls, how to cut the prevailing winds. That hilltop house could be truly desolate and cold if it isn’t set right on the land.

“When Lucinda and I stopped at Jolly’s to get the picnic basket, that guy-Sammy-was behind the counter. You could tell he was new, didn’t know where things were, like the small plastic containers. I thought maybe he’d just been working in the kitchen, not at the counter, he had to dig around in the cupboard forever to find what he needed.

“Lucinda called him by name,” Ryan said. “He didn’t seem to recognize her until she reminded him that they’d met in Russian River, and then he seemed pleased to see her. She told me later he’d worked at the inn where she and Pedric stayed this past summer.

“I thought,” Ryan said, “that the guy wouldn’t have acknowledged Lucinda at all, if she hadn’t nudged him. That maybe he didn’t want to be recognized.”

Harper looked around the table, waiting to see if anyone else knew the man. No one did, and no one else had seen him at Jolly’s. Kate had been in the village at the same time that Lucinda and Pedric were, but she hadn’t been in Jolly’s. Clyde said, “I ordered takeout last weekend, but Jolly’s son made the delivery.” He glanced inadvertently across the room to Joe Grey, as if wondering if Joe knew Sammy. The tomcat stared, wondering at Clyde’s carelessness. The expression on Clyde’s face, when he realized what he’d done, was embarrassed and shocked. To cover Clyde’s social blunder Joe yawned hugely, pawed at his ear as if it itched, and belched.

That got a laugh. He’d have to talk to Clyde; his housemate was getting careless.

Harper studied Ryan. “Did Lucinda tell you anything about him?”

“She said he’d been interested in a locket she’d bought somewhere north of Russian River. That he’d wanted to know where she got it. She said she’d picked up several pieces of really nice costume jewelry in a little shop up around Coloma. She showed me the gold locket. It was set with topazes, and had a cat’s face in the center. Beautifully made, rich, heavy gold all carved in leaves and flowers.” She looked up at Kate. “It was, in fact, very like your choker. Same style, that heavy baroque look but� well, but different than baroque.”

Kate was very still.

Ryan said, “Could the pieces have come from the same place originally? Old jewelry, some of which found its way to San Francisco? Maybe from the same group, the same jeweler?”

“The appraiser thought my pieces were made in the last century,” Kate said. “He reminded me there were a lot of Italian immigrants along the coast then, and that some were fine jewelers.”

Max turned to Ryan. “Did Lucinda tell you anything else about Sammy? “

“Not that I remember,” Ryan said, pushing back her short, dark hair. Her resemblance to her uncle, Detective Garza, was most striking when she frowned, when she looked thoughtful and serious.

Rising, Harper moved out to the foyer, flipping open his cell phone. The cats could see him standing just at the head of the stairs, punching in a number. Joe counted ten digits. Maybe he was calling Lucinda and Pedric’s cell phone. He tried the number twice, waiting for quite a few rings each time, then spoke briefly, apparently leaving a message, and returned to the table.

“It’s midnight,” Charlie said. “Would they turn off the phone at night?”

Max said, “Maybe they leave the phone in the kitchen at night, and don’t hear it?”

“Maybe they checked into a nice inn somewhere,” Wilma said, “and left the phone in the RV. They stay at an inn or motel every few nights.”

On the window seat, the kit, always jumping to the worst conclusions, moved between Joe and Dulcie, nervously kneading her claws. It took stern stares from both cats to make her settle down again. Above them the sky brightened as the clouds blew past, revealing the thin moon.

“When I mailed the preliminary drawings to them last week,” Ryan said, “they were in Eugene.” She looked at Kate. “Aren’t they coming through San Francisco?”

“They are,” Kate said, “so I can show them the Cat Museum. It was nice they were here in the village the same time I was; Lucinda and I hit it right off. I’d never known her well when I lived in the village. Just to speak to. I had no idea she was so� that we’d have so much in common. We’re some forty years apart, but that doesn’t matter, I feel like I’ve know her forever.”

As you should, Joe Grey thought, exchanging a look with Dulcie. And Wilma glanced across at the cats, knowing exactly what they were thinking: that Kate and Lucinda, because they shared special knowledge, would naturally be friends.

Those who knew the cats’ secret had grown to a number that was sometimes alarming to Joe Grey. Secrecy was the only true protection he and Dulcie and Kit had against the wrong people knowing their true nature. They had learned that the hard way. Certainly, if ever the news media found out about talking cats, the fur would hit the fan big time.

Though as for their true friends, it was deeply satisfying to be surrounded by six staunch supporters, to have human allies who understood them. With Clyde and Wilma, Charlie and Kate, Lucinda and Pedric Greenlaw playing backup, as it were, they were not alone in the world.

As for the three criminal types who knew their secret, the cats tried not to think about that. If fate were truly to smile, not only convicted killer Lee Wark, but Jimmie Osborne, Kate’s ex-husband, would remain behind bars in San Quentin for the rest of their natural lives. And old Greeley Urzey, if indeed he had not accompanied Azrael back to the States, would stay in Central America for the rest ofhisevil days.

Well, Joe thought, he wasn’t going to ruin his supper thinking about those no-goods. The salmon mousse was far too delicious. Licking the creamy confection from his whiskers, he would, like Scarlett, think about his enemies tomorrow. He listened to Ryan, Charlie, and Wilma make plans for an early breakfast and had almost finished his large helping of mousse when a black shadow appeared on the window seat, cast down from the moonlit skylight, a pricked ear and feline profile striking across his plate. Staring up, Joe met the blazing yellow eyes of the black tomcat; the beast’s presence made Joe swallow his supper with a shocked snarl.

Beside him Dulcie hissed, crouching and looking up. And beside her the kit cringed low, staring up through the glass where the black tom poised predatory and still, intently watching them, his eyes blazing with the reflected glow of the restaurant’s soft lights. In the backlight of the moon Joe could not see the beast’s wicked face, only his broadly extended cheeks and flattened ears; surely a cold smile played across that evil countenance. As the three cats stared, rumbling low in their throats, the humans at the table looked up, too; and Charlie caught her breath; Wilma and Clyde half rose as if to chase the beast away, then glanced at each other and sat down again.

Max Harper put his hand on Charlie’s arm. “It’s only a cat, some cat wandering the rooftops.” He looked at her strangely. “What did you think?”

“I� I don’t know. It’s so big, it appeared so suddenly up there.”

The cats knew well that she was thinking the same as they; they could see her flash of shocked dismay that the black tom had returned, before she hid her true feelings and smiled at Max.

“Nerves, I guess,” she said softly. “More stressed over the show than I’d thought.”

Harper nodded. He did not look convinced. Glancing puzzled at Clyde, he hugged Charlie. She relaxed against him, smiling as if she had been flighty and silly.

Above them Azrael hadn’t moved. Joe imagined him highly amused by the stir he was causing-to Joe, and to those who understood Azrael, the presence of the black tom cut through the companionable evening like claws ripping velvet. Beside Joe, Dulcie’s green eyes glinted and her low growl was deep with rage, her angry rumble hiding a keen anxiety. But now that the kit’s first startled fear had passed, she looked from Joe to Dulcie wide eyed, and extended a soft paw to Dulcie, a silent question. Joe watched her uneasily.

The kit had been told about Azrael; but Kit did not like to take others’ word, she wanted to experience every new thing for herself. Joe glanced at Dulcie. The kit would need some talking to.

The delight of the evening, Charlie’s joy in her first one-man show, and the friends’ happy celebration, had, with the waiter’s death, turned chill and worrisome. Now with the dark presence of the half-wild beast who called himself the death angel, Joe Grey felt his skin crawl with an ugly portent of disaster.

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Charlie’s late supper party was long over, the guests departed and by now sleeping deeply, the predawn village deserted. The time was five A.M. The courthouse clock had just struck, as the black tom left the roof where he had slept.

Pacing the streets through the muted glow from the shop windows, he looked up with interest at interminable arrangements of holiday confection, leather coats displayed among autumn leaves, hand-knit sweaters and bright jewelry framed by golden pumpkins-every window so full of fall excess they made a cat retch. Swaggering as he approached the windows of the Aronson Gallery, he considered with disdain the seven pieces of Charlie’s work that hung facing the street, the large drawing of Joe Grey dangling a mouse from his teeth, the color print of Dulcie reclining on a paisley cushion like some 1940s girlie calendar.

These little cats were too high above themselves, they had grown far too vain with all this attention. It was time they were taken down.

At five o’clock on this dark fall morning the streets were still deserted, no lone gardener working along the sidewalk tending the shop-front flowers, not even a seagull careening and diving across the inky sky. The only living creatures in view besides Azrael himself were a couple of homeless men huddled in a doorway trying to keep warm, trying to maintain a low profile in this village where police did not encourage nonpaying overnight guests.

Azrael had slept quite comfortably on the roof of the Patio Cafe tucked between the steeply slanting shingles of a small penthouse and the restaurant’s chimney, which had held its warmth until long past midnight. The brick-and-shingle cave, conveniently out of the wind, had been scented pleasantly with aromas from the restaurant, with the heady smell of steak and lobster and fried onions.

He hadn’t slept hungry. Before he retired to the roofs he had taken a leisurely supper from the restaurant’s garbage bins, probably scrounging the leavings, he thought sourly, of Charlie Harper’s dinner party.

From the roof last night he had watched the party break up and emerge from the restaurant in twos and threes, Charlie and Captain Harper pausing to bid good night to Wilma and her houseguest. Very nice. Wilma had invited Charlie to an early breakfast, so that Charlie could then show Kate Osborne the duplex that Kate wanted to rent.

No one but these weird women would invite company for breakfast at six on a winter morning-all this human camaraderie made Azrael retch.

Now, swarming up an old, thick bougainvillea vine, he prowled the rooftops again. They were barely beginning to brighten. To the east, the first light of dawn smeared bloody fingers across the dark hills. Heading across the roofs for Wilma Getz’s cottage, he shivered in the cold wind that whipped in off the sea-felt like it came straight out of the Arctic. He never would get used to the damp chill in these northern regions, he could never shake the longing to sidle up to a sunny wall or to a rooftop heat vent. This part of the continent was fine for a short visit, for a brief session of snatch-and-grab with one human partner or another, but he would never want to live here.

He had tolerated the chill when he knew that he and Greeley would soon be taking off again for warmer climes, but this trip without Greeley was another matter. Having severed relations with the old drunk, he now had no sure promise of a return to that comfortable latitude; he didn’t in fact know just where he was headed.

But something would turn up, something always did. The longing for a place of one’s own, that senseless yearning that beset most cats and most people, had never troubled him. Meanwhile, his present situation was more than tolerable. Excellent food, excellent sleeping arrangements when he chose to take advantage, and some most interesting ventures.

Staring over the gutter where the two homeless men had left their lair to check out the trash cans, Azrael understood perfectly their wanderlust: those two might be scruffy and smelly but they had the right idea. Adventure was far more important than walls and a roof. The lure of what was out there around the next bend, the challenge of whatever lay beyond the shadows, of thrills yet untasted, that was the true quality of life.

He had parted from Greeley in Panama City to look for just such fresh vistas after a bellyful of Greeley’s newly wedded bliss, a sickening surfeit of Greeley’s prissy bride and her attempts to domesticate Greeley’s sweet little cat. Expecting him to drape himself around the house and purr on cue-he’d had enough of that in a hurry. Walking out for the last time, he’d taken up with that blond floozie in Panama City, had found her in a local bar, spent the evening winding around her ankles and had gone right on home with her to her poky little hotel room. By the time she headed stateside again, he’d not only revealed to her his conversational talents, he’d convinced her that he was the partner of a lifetime, that she couldn’t take full advantage of her light-fingered skills without him. Oh, Gail had had a lust to steal. He’d greatly admired her talents. He’d picked her out of the crowd at the bar, as sure of her nature as if he’d caught her in the act.

Traveling with Gail to the States, he’d endured the kitty carrier and the nine-hour plane ride only because of the challenges that lay ahead. In San Francisco, where Gail had a boyfriend, they’d burgled a few shops and pulled off some amusing shoplifting gigs. And he had discovered a colony of cats that deeply interested him-he’d learned a lot in the city before they hit the road again traveling south, to enjoy a few easy heists along the coast. The weather had been warm for that part of California. Settling for a while here in the village while Gail entered a contest for wouldbe starlets, they had hit the jewelry stores and the upscale shops smooth as butter-until the dumb broad killed a guy and got herself sent to prison.

Then he’d split again, making himself scarce. But he hadn’t gone far; this wealthy part of the coast was full of prospects. He’d remained on his own until he took up with his present associate, a partner far smoother than Gail or Greeley. Though both the blonde and the old man had been good for laughs.

His present colleague was much more talented than either of those two, a thief as cold as an Amazon boa. This partnership could, in fact, be the most interesting venture yet in his varied career. And now, concentrating his attention on Kate Osborne, he might really be onto something.

Leaping from a cafe balcony to the slanted roof of a bay window, he dropped down to a patio table, one of a dozen that the restaurant kept filled even in winter months. Tourists would freeze their figurative tails off to be seen eating al fresco in a sidewalk cafe as if they were in Europe. Thumping heavily to the brick paving, he headed up past the crowded shops, where cozy, close-set cottages took over.

Approaching Wilma Getz’s small stone house, he slipped in among the masses of flowers that forested the woman’s front yard beneath the oak trees. The old girl got up early; already the kitchen window was brightly lit, its glow reflecting blood-red from the bougainvillea flowers that framed the glass. The gaudy blooms stirred within the tomcat a painful longing for the hot streets of Panama.

Charlie Harper’s van was not yet in sight; but Kate’s car of course stood in the drive, the cream-colored Riviera silvered with dew. He found it interesting that she drove a seven-year-old vehicle. Maybe Clyde Damen kept it in running order for her. Azrael had learned a good deal last night about Kate Osborne.

Before the gallery opening, wandering in that direction to have a look, he’d been sidetracked by an appealing white Angora. She had insisted on leading him on a circuitous route of hide-and-seek, sickeningly coy. Why couldn’t females simply accept what was offered and forget the foreplay? When he followed her under the deck of the Bakery Cafe, he had recognized Kate and Wilma’s voices above him and caught a snatch of their conversation.

Promptly abandoning the Angora, driving her away when she returned to him coyly rolling over, he had listened with rising interest to the conversation above him. Kate was saying something about a cat museum, then mentioned some unusual pieces of jewelry carved with cats. That had brought his ears up.

The two women were apparently enjoying a light, early dinner on their way to the gallery opening. Lashing his tail with interest, he had settled under the deck just beneath their table.

The dining deck was crowded, all the tables were full, the tangle of conversations assaulting his ears like the dissonant caws of a flock of unruly crows. As he sought to isolate Kate and Wilma’s discussion, he was nearly overcome by the aroma of broiled salmon-one didn’t get fresh salmon in Panama, the waters were too warm, although the local fish and fresh prawns were quite superior. Pushing up between the supporting timbers of the deck, peering up through the cracks between the slats, he had studied Kate. The slim, blond young woman had an air about her that deeply interested him, that set her apart from other humans, that made him want to observe her closely. She was leaning across the table speaking softly, “Of course it’s foolish. Why do I relate the jewelry to such an idea? Why do I keep imagining the jewelry linked to some impossible lost world? Except,” she said uncertainly, “McCabe’s journals-the man I think was my grandfather-speak of such a world as if he believed in it. Strange remarks, Wilma. Why do I keep returning to those entries? Surely I misread them. What is it in my nature, that wants to believe such things?”

What, indeed?Azrael had thought, observing Kate and smiling.

Having been raised in Latin America where unusual tales were believed, where wild stories had substance, where myth was a powerful part of life, the tomcat was a strong believer in matters supernatural. And why not, given his own surreal nature.

“The gold work,” Kate was saying, “is so unlike anything else I’ve ever seen, like nothing I’ve found in any book on jewelry.” But she laughed. “I take one class in the history of jewelry, ten years ago, and I know it all.”

“But you did research it,” Wilma said. “You spent hours in the city libraries.”

Kate had leaned back, sipping her tea. “I’m being so silly. Those twelve pieces, even if they’re a couple of centuries old, were very likely made right here in California. And even if the jewels are paste, the appraiserwasinterested in them-as curiosities, he said.”

“Who was he? You had them appraised in San Francisco?”

“Yes. Emerson Bristol. He came highly recommended.”

The tomcat stiffened and remained still, watching Kate through the cracks.Emerson Bristol. Well doesn’t that win the gold cat dish.And as he considered this unlikely happenstance, some interesting pieces began to fall into place.

“I know who he is,” Wilma said. “Yes, he has an excellent reputation.”

“Bristol showed me some pictures from different periods. That, with what I remember from art school and then what I found on my own, made me see clearly what he meant. The style of my pieces is almost Art Deco, yet very different from that, much more primitive. Yet not medieval. Or baroque or Spanish, but a little of all of them. Not anything like nineteenth-century European work.”

She looked intently at Wilma. “Whoever made that jewelry had his own ideas. Maybe some lone jeweler emigrating from Europe, wanting to work alone, to do his arthisway. I can understand that, that he did not want to follow tradition.”

She broke a French roll, dropping a few crumbs down onto Azrael’s nose. “Maybe he produced a small body of work that found its way into private collections but never into any big collections or museums. And then it got scattered again when people died off, and was all but lost.”

“Did Bristol think that might be the case?”

“We didn’t discuss that. He simply said he found the work different and interesting.” Kate had leaned forward again, as if looking intently at Wilma, her face hidden above the table. “Could that lone jeweler have been my ancestor? And those twelve pieces stayed within his family? Then through their attorney, they found their way to me.”

“I’m no authority,” Wilma said, “but if others found it interesting, as your appraiser did, why was it ignored and forgotten? When the jewelry is so unique, whydidn’tsome collector search it out? You said Bristol wanted to buy it?”

“He said he has a small collection of oddities. He didn’t offer me much. After all, the jewels are paste.” Kate paused. “Well the gold, of course, is worth something. It’s lovely, but�”

“You have the other pieces safe, not lying around your apartment?”

“They’re in my bank box, because of the gold and the workmanship. Until I know what they’re all about.”

“You said five other pieces, besides the barrette you gave Charlie, are designed with the images of cats?”

“Yes. But lots of designers use cats, have done, all through history.” Kate sat very still at the table. The setting sun piercing down through the slats had warmed Azrael. Kate said, “Perhaps the piecesareolder, from some European village that was very fond of its cats. Or maybe the jewelry was made in some isolated community here, by talented immigrants who settled back in the mountains, a little enclave where cats were valued.”

She was, Azrael thought, denying the very world he sought, denying the very world from which she surely had descended.

“Folk who stayed together,” she said, “a little pocket of civilization that preferred to remain off by itself.”

“But why,” Wilma said, “when the pieces are so beautifully made, weren’t they set with real stones?”

“A common practice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and even today, I guess. It didn’t seem to make much difference whether the jeweler was working with real stones or imitation, the craftsmanship was equally fine.” Kate set down her teacup. “The most amazing part, to me, was to finally track down the legal firm that gave them to me. The firm that served my grandfather-if McCabe was my grandfather. It’s changed its name twice, and it looks to me like it won’t be around much longer. The one remaining attorney is ancient. I can’t imagine hiring him. I understand he does mostly grunt work now.

“But for him to simply give me the jewels, to haul out those old photographs of me as a child, and the names of the foster homes, and to feel that he had adequately identified me-” Kate shook her head. “Poor old thing. He must have been well over eighty, and had palsy, and�well I have to admit, when he gave me the box of jewels and said they were mine, I signed a release for them and got out of there as gracefully fast as I could manage. Before he changed his mind.

“And when I saw Bristol,” Kate said, “I didn’t give him my real name or phone number. I know that’s bizarre. I-This whole thing, that doddering attorney, the jewels hidden away like that, all of it has me edgy, but strangely excited.”

“It would have me edgy, too. And very interested. I think you were wise, keeping your identity to yourself until you know more.”

The Getz womanwouldsay that. She didn’t trust anyone, Azrael had thought, scowling. Now he knew why Bristol hadn’t been able to find his mysterious client after she left his office. The tomcat had licked his whiskers-his partner would be pleased to hear the answer to that little puzzle.

If,he had thought,if I choose to share what I know.

“Why,” Wilma was saying, “hadn’t the lawyer ever been in touch? Why had he never contacted you, when apparently the firm, in its better days, kept track of you as a child?”

“The instructions he read to me said I was not to be given the jewelry until I was eighteen. By that time there was only the one partner; he didn’t explain but I’m guessing he was already letting things slide, forgetting things. That walk-in safe-anything could be stashed in there, from the year one.

“When he opened its door and we went in, there were boxes of files in the back that looked like they’d been there since the place was built, in the eighteen hundreds.”

“Were there no papers for you, nothing besides the jewelry?”

“There were two yellowed newspaper clippings. Something about Marin County, about a large number of cats disappearing and a tide of cats racing away in the night through a garden. The other clipping was the same kind of thing, in the city. Both from the same year, half a century ago.” She was silent a moment, looking at Wilma. “Cats disappearing where? It gives me the shivers. And the strange thing is, ever since I saw the appraiser, I have this idea I’ve been followed.”

Beneath the table, Azrael was riven with interest.Cats racing away to where?To what mysterious place? To the netherworld that he felt certain lay deep beneath northern California? And couldBristolknow of such a world? Was this why he wanted the jewels? Or did he want the jewelry for its value?HadBristol hired someone to follow Kate? But how could he, when he didn’t know who she was? And that wasn’t Bristol’s style. The manwasan upscale appraiser, hewaswell accepted in the city, very proper and circumspect. His under-the-table ventures were always accomplished at arm’s length, by a man who knew far more intimately how to circumvent the law.

“The first time,” Kate said, “I was coming out of Macy’s, juggling some packages and trying to find my car keys. When I looked up, a man in the park was watching me. A thin, shabbily dressed man, very ordinary looking. Dull-colored hair, brown I guess. And a prominent nose, I remember that. I looked away and hurried the three blocks to my car. When I glanced back he had left the park and was half a block behind me. I was more curious than afraid. I stopped for a coffee so I could watch him; I wanted to see what he would do.

“He stood in a doorway looking away in the other direction, but when I left the coffee shop he followed me again. He was half a block away when I unlocked my car. By that time I was scared, I wanted to get away. Of course he would have seen the make and color of my car, the license. I was foolish to lead him to it, but I really didn’t think�”

“When you pulled away, did any car follow you?”

“No, no one followed. I did watch for that.”

“And the next time it happened?”

“Three days later. I was going into a fabric house, returning an armload of samples. When I turned into the door and glanced back, there he was half a block behind me.

“I dumped the samples inside, went back to approach him. But he slipped into a store and was gone. Just gone. I went all through the store. Apparently he went out the back through the stockroom. The three clerks were busy, and I was late so I went on.

“Maybe I’d have been foolish to confront him. Now, since I’ve glimpsed him twice more, the idea frightens me.”

Azrael didn’t know who this was. He didn’t know if the stalker was, indeed, connected to Bristol. When the two women left the Bakery, heading for the gallery, he had followed above them, trotting across the rooftops.

From the roofs he had observed the gathering at the gallery, the fancy clothes, the expensive cars pulling up. Then much later he had looked down through the skylight on the Harper party’s cozy little supper, and heard Kate and Charlie make their date for breakfast.

Turning away to pace the midnight rooftops, his black tail lashing, his nerves rippling under his skin like electrical shocks, the black tom had devised a plan so audacious, so perfect in its concept, that even when at last he settled down beside the brick chimney, mightily purring, he was so wired he found it hard to sleep. Stretched out against the warm bricks he lay for a long time perfecting the details, the tip of his tail flicking with challenge.

7 [��������: pic_8.jpg]

Dawn had not begun to bloody the sky when Azrael brushed through Wilma Getz’s daisies, trampling the white blooms, and paused beneath her lighted kitchen window. The front yard had no lawn, just stone and brick walks, which he avoided, and flower beds as tangled as a Panamanian jungle and so heavy with dew that immediately his fur was soaked. Scowling, he moved swiftly up the back steps.

Both the front and back doors of Wilma Getz’s stone cottage opened to the front garden. The house didn’t have any useful backyard, in human terms. The hill that rose nearly straight up behind it was wild with tall grass and heavily populated with small creatures: a serviceable hunting spot. He had seen Dulcie and the tortoiseshell up there just yesterday dragging out a fat rabbit.

Pausing on the back porch, he sniffed the plastic flap of Dulcie’s cat door, drinking in the sharp female scents-though he didn’t need that message to know that Dulcie and the tortoiseshell had already left the house. Coming down from the roofs he had seen them racing away, likely going to hunt. The tortoiseshell had been talking a mile a minute, making Dulcie drop her ears in annoyance then turn to hush the younger cat before they were overheard. The young tortoiseshell was so eager, so filled with curiosity. The black tom smiled evilly.

Slipping under the flap, he stopped its swinging with his nose and moved through the shadows of the small laundry room, pausing behind a cardboard box filled with newspapers. How civic-minded of the old woman to dutifully recycle her copies of the Molena PointGazette.

Though maybeold womanwasn’t the term for Wilma Getz, even if she did have white hair hanging down her back. Maybegun-toting granny,the way Greeley called her. The woman had taken no guff from Greeley, that time he came here to see his sister.

Greeley had been drunk as a boiled owl, stinking of booze and needing a bath. No wonder the woman had treated him like dirt. Though she hadn’t messed with him, with Azrael. It took more than some white-haired ex-parole officer to runhimout of a house.

From the shadows of the laundry, he looked through the open door to the kitchen. Wilma Getz stood at the sink, her back to him, mixing something in a bowl. He could smell raw eggs, and milk, and the sharp aroma of bacon sizzling in the skillet, sending tremors of greed through the tomcat. He licked away some drool. Wilma Getz’s long white hair was tied on top her head with a yellow scarf, her sweatshirt printed with yellow flowers; the woman was as wild for color as some Panamanian maid, wearing red and purple and dragging her ragged bouquets.

Padding silently across the blue-and-white linoleum behind her, he could hear a shower running from deeper in the cottage. Moving on past Wilma to the dining room, he slipped under the cherry buffet, where he stretched out on the thick Kerman rug, tucking his paws under trying to keep warm. Why the hell didn’t people turn up the heat?

He knew the layout of the house from his visit here with Greeley. That had been a year ago this last summer, when Greeley’s sister Mavity got herself hit on the head and had come here from the hospital to recover. Neither Greeley nor Azrael had had anything to do with that little caper. Greeley was drunk the whole time, the old man laying up in that storeroom among those stacked cases of liquor, drowning himself in Scotch and rum-though Greeleyhadcome to visit his sister that once, before they took off again for Panama.

But then Greeley had dragged that shopkeeper woman along on the plane and had married her down there. What a laugh. Couple of old farts playing at being newlyweds, trying to act like spring chickens.

Peering out from beneath the buffet past table and chair legs, he scanned the living room on his left, with its stone fireplace and blue velvet furniture and the painting of Molena Point rooftops over the mantel. Its dark green trees and bright red roofs reminded him of Panama. A wave of homesickness filled him, deeply angering him. He had no use for such sentiment.

Across the dining room from him, the door to the hall stood open, leading to Wilma’s bedroom on the left and the guest bedroom on his right. Wilma’s big room, where he and Greeley had gone to visit Mavity, was furnished in white wicker, flowered chintz, and a red metal woodstove. A room that, despite his disdain for human trappings, touched within him some regrettably cloying hunger, some weak aspect of his nature that made him want to curl up in there, purring.

He heard the shower stop.

In a minute the bathroom door opened; a cloud of scent reached him, as soft barefoot steps went down the hall. From the guest room came little rustling sounds as if Kate were getting dressed. He imagined her stepping out of her towel naked, beautiful Kate with her creamy skin and silky golden hair, and her golden eyes-unusual for a human. He imagined her as cat, golden and creamy, and again he smiled.

After dressing in pale jeans and a cream polo shirt, Kate pulled on her sandals and flipped a brush through her short hair. She needed to make a decision this morning on one of the three apartments-Charlie’s, or one of the other two she had already looked at. If she was really serious about moving, she needed to put down a deposit. In Molena Point, as in the city, nice rentals didn’t last.

The thought of moving again, of starting life over once more, though in a smaller way, wasn’t pleasant. Moving out of her pretty Molena Point house after Jimmie tried to kill her, hiding from him, then later selling the house and furniture, at the same time being involved in his trial and conviction, had been more than traumatic. She had thought that when she moved to the city that would be the last move.

But now again everything was changed. Now, when she returned to the city, she’d be followed once more, the strange man appearing in the shadows, in dark doorways, always with her like some incurable illness.

She had never really thought, until these last weeks, that when someone threatened you, they stole your freedom; that by following you they confined you, hindering your movements, limiting your options.

Heading down the hall for Wilma’s bright kitchen, badly wanting coffee, she paused in the dining room, startled.

Was someone here? Someone in the house besides Wilma and herself? What did she sense? What a strange feeling. A sense of something unwelcome, someone who did not belong here.

Stepping into the living room, she found it empty. She moved back down the hall to Wilma’s room. That room, too, was empty; the light, bright room with its red stove, its white wicker furniture and flowered chintz, seemed undisturbed. The bath and the open closet were empty. Yet the feeling of a foreign presence, of being watched, persisted.

This was not at all like when Dulcie or the kit watched her, not a friendly and amused little awareness, no sense of camaraderie.

Surely she was imagining this-yet the sensation was so real, she felt goose bumps. Strange that last night talking with Wilma over dinner she’d had the same uncomfortable idea that someone was watching them and listening-though the patrons at the surrounding tables had all been deep in their own conversations, paying no attention to them.

Taking herself in hand, she moved into the bright kitchen where Wilma stood at the stove making pancakes. The first pale light of dawn had begun to brighten the diamond-paned windows. Wilma’s homemade orange syrup was warming on the back burner, sending out a heavenly scent to mix with the aroma of pancakes and frying bacon. Wilma, in her yellow daisy-printed sweatshirt and her white hair pinned on top, looked as ragtag as a girl. Wilma moved like a girl, long and lithe despite her sixty-some years.

As Kate poured herself a cup of coffee, Charlie pulled up out front, driving her company van, the old blue Chevy that Clyde had rebuilt and made to look like new. He had fitted the inside of the van with specially designed storage for Charlie’s cleaning and repair equipment, all beautifully planned between the two of them, every shelf and cupboard secured so nothing would jar loose and fall as Charlie plied the steep Molena Point hills. Kate wondered, now that Charlie and Max were married, and Charlie’s career as an animal artist had taken off, whether Charlie would still run Charlie’s Fix-it, Clean-it. Maybe she’d keep the business but turn the management over to one of her employees. As Charlie swung out and headed for the back door, Kate reached for another cup.

Pouring coffee for Charlie as she came in through the laundry, Kate added milk and sugar. Charlie was wearing a pale blue sweatshirt over a thick white turtleneck and fleece pants. Setting a covered bowl that smelled of fresh oranges on the table, she hugged Wilma and Kate. “Cold out. I’m sure it’s going to snow.” She smelled of horses from having done the morning feeding and cleaning the stalls, chores that she and Max shared equally since they had returned from their honeymoon. One of them got breakfast, she’d told Kate, while the other did the stable work. “There were in fact a few flurries,” she said, “as I was getting in the van.”

Wilma laughed. “It might snow in the hills but it better not snow on my garden.” Snow in Molena Point might happen once every ten years, and then melted at once. Wilma dished the bacon onto a paper towel and handed plates of pancakes to Kate and Charlie, pouring another batch onto the griddle for herself. The two younger women settled at the table feeling cozy and pampered; yet even as they sat comfortably talking and enjoying Wilma’s good breakfast, Kate had the feeling of a foreign presence. She looked up at Wilma. “Where’s Dulcie? And how come the kit’s not out here with her face in the pancakes?” “They’re off hunting. Bolted out of here almost before daybreak-as if the mice and rats couldn’t wait to be slaughtered.” Wilma shrugged. “When I ask Dulcie her hunting secrets she just smiles, and sometimes pats my cheek with a soft paw.”

From beneath the buffet, Azrael’s view of the kitchen was primarily legs-chair and table legs and human legs: Kate’s slim, tanned ankles below her jeans, Charlie’s leather paddock boots that smelled of horse even at that distance, Wilma’s jogging shoes, scuffed and worn. He grew still and intent when Charlie asked about Kate’s search for her family.

He had no idea why being adopted was so traumatic for humans. What difference if your mother took off, and whoever sired you was long gone? Except he did wonder, sometimes, about those cats that had produced him. But Kate was saying, “Every time I go through McCabe’s papers, I grow uneasy.” The smell of pancakes and bacon was making him drool.

“He was a construction contractor in San Francisco?” Charlie asked.

“Yes, and something of a philosopher. He wrote a regular column for theChronicle,on all manner of subjects. McCabe and his wife-my grandmother, I guess-died in the 1939 earthquake. Apparently their baby survived, though I have found no birth certificate for her, nothing about her in the city records.”

“It must be hard, with your foster home records so incomplete,” Charlie offered. “But what led you to McCabe’s journals?”

“The adoption agency was finally willing to release what information they had. It wasn’t much, just the name McCabe who, they said, might have been my grandfather. I guess, with the earthquake, records were destroyed.

“TheChroniclearchives produced some of his columns on microfilm. I found no address for him, no social security number, though that wasn’t signed into law until 1935, no bank records, not even his contractor’s license, and that is so strange. There were city records destroyed in the earthquake, but� I don’t know. It’s discouraging.

“I found a few relatives of people who had run the foster homes, but no one could tell me much. TheChronicleoffices had nothing else, none of the vital information you’d think would be in their files. But I did find his connection to the San Francisco Cat Museum. Strange, I had visited the museum when I was in art school, studying the paintings and sculpture. Of course I hadn’t a clue that the man who designed and built the museum might be my grandfather.”

Kate broke a slice of bacon, eating it with her fingers. “It was in the museum that I found his journals, in their archives. And in the journals I found the name of his lawyer.

“The firm was still in the phone book-well you know the rest,” she told Charlie. “That old man, the shoddy old office, the box of jewelry at the back of that walk-in safe.”

Wilma rose to fill their coffee cups. Beneath the buffet, Azrael crouched, fitting the fragmented pieces together; not much yet, but he knew her parents were not of this world, and that deeply excited him. Then as the conversation turned from Kate’s search to the three apartments that she was considering, he began to yawn, his pink mouth gaping wide in his sleek black face. Even the death angel needed an occasional nap.

“There’s a big living room,” Charlie said, “with a high, beamed ceiling. A small kitchen, and one bedroom at the back. A double garage underneath each unit, a deck along the front with a view of the village and the ocean. And of course Ryan is next door in the studio unit, with her lovely big weimaraner-if you don’t mind occasional barking. Rock is a good standin for an alarm system, if that’s ever needed, and he’s a real love.”

Azrael yawned again, so hard he nearly dislocated his jaw. He was dozing when he heard the slap of Dulcie’s cat door. The sound jerked him to full attention. And before he could slip away, Joe Grey shot through the room, under the dining table, and past Azrael straight for the living room. Azrael heard him hit the top of the desk. Either the gray tom had fled by so fast that he didn’t smell Azrael-not likely-or he was too preoccupied to care. Azrael heard Joe knock the phone from the cradle, and heard from the kitchen Dulcie’s hastily whispered question and Wilma’s casual reply.

“Anyone else here?” Dulcie hissed.

“Just us three,” Wilma said. “What’s the matter?”

So,the black cat thought. Both Charlie and Kate Osborne knew that these little cats could speak. Interesting. Apparently Joe Grey and Dulcie hadn’t been very careful.

“Whatisit?” Wilma repeated.

“Gas leak,” Dulcie mewled. “A house up the street. Really strong, not like when you catch a sniff of it on the street.”

Azrael could hear Joe Grey talking into the phone, giving the location, most likely talking to a police dispatcher. Telling her how strong the gas stink was and from which side of the dwelling. The next moment, some blocks away, a siren began to scream, and a fire engine went rumbling through the narrow village. He could feel the tremors in his paws as it passed, sharp as the precursor to an earthquake.

Listening to the blasting horn and the siren’s final shrill scream just a few blocks away, Azrael flattened his ears. He could hear men shouting, then two more sirens, probably emergency vehicles in case there was an explosion. All these conscientious do-gooders flocking to help, so dedicated they made him gag. He imagined firemen searching for a gas cutoff, plying a wrench to stop the gas at the street. Imagined them gingerly pulling open front and back doors, ducking away and covering their faces in case the gas exploded. All that drama to save a few human lives, when the world was already overpopulated. In Azrael’s view, the human herd could stand some thinning.

He froze, closing his eyes when Joe Grey streaked past. The gray tom didn’t pause. Had Joe Grey caught his scent, even over the smell of fried bacon? Azrael heard Joe hit the kitchen and keep running. The plastic door flapped once, twice, and both cats were gone-and Wilma and Kate and Charlie were running out, humans and cats gripped by the urge torescue someone,tohelp people.Enough smarmy goodwill to sicken a crocodile.

Now, with the house to himself, he left the shadows with leisurely insolence, and strolled into Wilma’s kitchen. Leaping to the table, he polished off three pancakes and two slices of bacon. He licked the plates clean then licked the cube of butter and drank the cream from the pitcher, nearly getting his head caught. Why would anyone make a pitcher so ridiculously small? He sniffed at the cooling coffee but it smelled inferior, not the rich Colombian brand he preferred.

Dropping to the blue-and-white linoleum again, he sauntered back through the dining room and down the hall to the guest room. Likely both humans and cats would be up the street all morning preoccupied with helping their neighbors. The black tom smiled. Fate couldn’t have planned it better.

Alone in the guest room he set about a methodical search, pawing among Kate’s silk lingerie bags and rooting in the gathered elastic pockets that lined the sides of her suitcase, his agile black paws feeling carefully for a small metal object. For what could be his passport to a greatly elevated position in the eyes of his current partner. For what, possibly, might also be a source of information that could prove most interesting.

8 [��������: pic_9.jpg]

The yellow-and-white Victorian cottage stunk so powerfully of gas that the two cats thought it would go up any minute in an explosion of bricks and splintered wood and shingles. They’d seen such a disaster before. They didn’t want that experience again. But with typical feline curiosity, they were too interested to leave. Cops were on the scene now, and that generated more questions.

Once the fire crew had cut off the gas, having circled the house peering in, they had broken the lock and gone inside. Shortly thereafter a rescue vehicle pulled up in front, then two police cars came screaming.

The house belonged to James Quinn, a Realtor with Helen Thurwell’s firm. Quinn was, in fact, Helen’s partner, handling sales with her as a team. The air around the handsome Victorian cottage was, even from a block away, so heavy with gas it made the cats retch.

Scorching up a pine tree, they clung in the frail branches side by side, where a breeze helped clear the air. Watching the police evacuate the houses along the block, they were both alarmed and amused by people running out of their homes loaded with valuables and carrying their pets. A frazzled-looking young woman apparently forgetting something tried to run back inside, and pitched a fit when an officer stopped her. An old woman in a pink bathrobe hobbled out accompanied by an officer, her arms loaded with a two-foot high stack of what looked like photograph albums, the little tie cords at the spines flopping in her face. As if she was saving all the family pictures. A portly lady in a red-and-black sweat suit clutched three cats, the frightened animals clawing her as she hurried down the street. When Wilma and Charlie saw her, they took two of the cats and ran with her, carrying the cats three blocks to a neighbor and handing them inside. Neither Joe nor Dulcie had seen the kit. Scanning the street looking for her, Joe moved from paw to paw, growing so nervous and restless he seemed about to explode, himself.

“The kit’s all right,” Dulcie said. “She won’t�”

“You don’t know what she’ll do. And it isn’t only the kit�” Joe’s yellow eyes narrowed. “Coming through the dining room-I think I caught the scent of that black beast.”

“Azrael? In the house? Oh, but why would he�? Where, Joe? We have to go back.”

“As I passed the buffet. Just a faint whiff of scent-the whole house smelled of bacon.”

Her eyes wide, she crouched to leap down. But he reached a paw to stop her. “I’ll go back, Dulcie. Stay here, watch for the kit. Who knows where she’s gotten to. You know how she is, she’ll be in the middle somewhere�” He sounded truly worried, his frown deep and uneasy.

“I’ll watch, I’ll find her. But you� Be careful, Joe. Why did he go into Wilma’s house? What’s he up to?”

Joe’s eyes were filled with conflicting concerns. “Watch for the kit but don’t go near that house. Promise me!” He gave her a whisker rub and was gone, backing fast down the rough bark of the pine tree and streaking for Wilma’s house. Dulcie stared after him, her ears flat with frustration, then she turned to search the gathering crowd again and the surrounding rooftops for the dark small presence of the tortoiseshell kit; the kit could vanish like a shadow among shadows. And, by her very nature, she was powerfully drawn to any kind of village disaster.

Dulcie looked and looked for a long time, but didn’t see the kit. She saw no cat at all among the bushes or slipping between the feet of the thickening crowd or concealed in the branches of the surrounding trees. No cat hidden among the angles of the rooftops. Growing more and more worried, she left the safety of pine tree at last, and galloped across the roofs toward the gas-filled house.

Crouching on a shop roof just across the narrow street from the yellow Victorian house, she watched several officers in the front yard gathered around a paramedic’s van. Below her hung a striped awning that bore, along its front edge, the name of the antique store it sheltered. Dropping down into the sagging canvas, crouching belly to stripes like a sunbather in a giant-size hammock, she studied the windows of James Quinn’s yellow house.

All the windows were open to let out the gas, as was the front door, and still the air stunk of gas. She could see Captain Harper and Detective Garza inside. She could not see the medics, they were not around their van. Were they in there working on someone? Was Mr. Quinn in there? Dulcie’s skin rippled with dismay. If he was still there, if he had not run out�

Had he been asleep when the gas leak started, had he perhaps had not awakened? Was he dead in there?Dulcie thought, sickened.

James Quinn was an elderly man, though he still worked as a Realtor. He was a very nice single man living alone, with no one to wake him if he slept too soundly during such a disaster.

Or, she thought, had he already gone to work when the leak started? Maybe he didn’t even know about the leak, maybe he had left the house really early, to show a distant piece of property, maybe he had no idea what was happening here. James Quinn did not seem to Dulcie the kind of person to have carelessly left a gas jet on, to have not turned it off properly. According to Wilma, Quinn was if anything overly careful and precise.

Helen Thurwell’s real estate partner was a short, gentle, wiry man, thin and bald, with leathery skin from hours on the golf coarse. His tee time was dedicated as much to business as to pleasure. Though pushing seventy, Quinn was still a top salesman with the firm, low key, easy, never pushy. That was what Wilma said. A man to whom clients came, as they came to Helen, when they wanted to avoid the hard sell. Playing golf with his clients, Quinn made many a casual, million-dollar deal.

Where was the kit? She was always in the front row when anything happened in the village. Searching the block for Kit, from her high vantage where she could hardly miss another cat, Dulcie began to entertain a sick feeling. Was the kit in that house?

But why? Why would she be in there?

A crew from PG&E was working at the curb where, earlier, the fire crew had removed a concrete cover and turned off the gas. Most of the utility trucks and squad cars were parked down the block, safe in case of an explosion. The crime tape the police had strung was not enough to keep back onlookers without the officers who were politely but firmly directing them. She saw Wilma and Charlie and Kate standing with the crowd waiting for any opportunity to help. But where was the kit? Surely she had heard the sirens, there was nowhere in the village where she couldn’t have heard them.

The medics were bringing someone out on a stretcher. James Quinn lay unmoving, his face and hands strangely red. They set the stretcher down on the lawn and the medics knelt over him. But soon they rose again; they did not work on Quinn. He lay waiting for the coroner’s attention.

Dulcie knew that under other circumstances the body would not have been moved until a detective had photographed the scene and made sketches and notes. She supposed with the house full of gas, that hadn’t been an option. But to leave him lying here on the lawn seemed strange, even with a police guard around him. Maybe Detective Garza wanted to photograph the body and let the coroner have a look before they moved Quinn again. How could Quinn have died in there? How could he not have smelled the gas? Even in sleep, one would think the stink of gas would wake him. He wasn’t a drinker. Never touched liquor; so he had not slept in an alcoholic stupor too numbed to wake. And from what she had heard of Quinn’s careful nature, it would not have been like him to leave the gas on accidentally. She saw Dr. John Bern’s car being driven over the lowered police tape, coming slowly up the street; she glimpsed Bern’s bald head, the glint of his glasses.

Dulcie was watching Dr. Bern kneeling over the body when a thumping on the shingles above her jerked her up. The kit came galloping straight at her and, hardly pausing, dropped down onto the awning, rocking the canvas and digging her claws in. Dulcie was so glad to see her, she nuzzled against Kit, licking her ears and whiskers. The kit stunk of gas.

“You’ve been in there,” Dulcie hissed.

The kit looked at Dulcie, shivering. “He’s dead.” She stared across the street at the stretcher and the body. “I was in there when you came the first time, I looked out and saw you and Joe, I saw you sniff at the gas then turn and race away. I knew you’d call the station so I� but listen, Dulcie�”

The tattercoat’s round yellow eyes were wide with the news she had to tell. “The gas stunk so strong I went in through the back door-to see if he was in there, to wake him if he was still asleep, to�” The kit stared at her with distress.

“You could have died in there.”

“I pushed the back door open to get in, a little breeze came in. I wasn’t there long and I stayed low against the floor, but it choked me and I felt dizzy. He was lying on the kitchen floor. I stuck my nose at his nose and there was no breath and he was cold, so cold, and the gas was making me woozy so I got out of there fast and you and Joe were there, then running away up the street so I knew you’d call for help. Why was there gas in there?”

Dulcie sighed. “You didn’t paw at a knob, Kit? And make the gas come on?”

“No! I never! The gas was all in there. Why would I do that!” she said indignantly. “I smelled it from the street. That’s why I went in.” Her eyes darkened with pain. “But he was dead. Cold dead.”

Dulcie looked and looked at the kit. The kit settled down beside her, pushing very close. She was quiet for a long while. Then in a small voice Kit said, “Where’s Joe Grey?”

“He’s following someone.” Dulcie didn’t mean to tell the kit more. For once, the kit could keep her nose out. Below them, the coroner still knelt over James Quinn, Dr. Bern’s bald head and glasses reflecting the morning light.

Down the block within the growing crowd, the cats saw Marlin Dorriss pushing through. The tall, slim attorney was dressed in a pale blue polo shirt and khaki walking shorts that, despite the chilly weather, set off his winter tan. His muscled legs were lean and brown, his white hair trimmed short and neat. He was a man, Dulcie thought, that any human woman might fall for-except that Helen Thurwell had no business falling for anyone. In doing so she had royally screwed up her daughter’s life, had sent Dillon off on a tangent that deeply frightened Dulcie.

It was hard enough for a fourteen-year-old girl to grow up strong and happy. In Dulcie’s view, human teen years must be like walking on the thinnest span across a vast and falling chasm where, with a false step, you could lose your footing and go tumbling over-as the kit would say, falling down and down.

The cats didn’t want that to happen to Dillon.

Watching Marlin Dorriss approach the stretcher, seeing the concern and kindness in his face as he observed from some distance the body of James Quinn, it was hard for Dulcie to imagine him willfully destroying a close little family. The matter deeply puzzled her.

Dorriss had lived in Molena Point for maybe ten years, in an elegant oceanfront villa. A semiretired lawyer, Dorriss served only a few chosen clients, representing their financial interests. He was gone from the village much of the time, keeping a condo in San Francisco, a cabin at Tahoe, and condos in New York and Baton Rouge. He was a sometime collector of a few select painters, mostly those of the California action school, such as Bischoff, Diebenkorn, and David Park. He collected a few modern sculptors, and bought occasional pieces of antique furniture to blend into the contemporary setting of his home. Dorriss was charming, urbane, easy in his manners, but a man deeply frustrating to the local women. If he dated, the relationship never went far.

Certainly he had woman friends across the country if you could believe the photographs in the Molena PointGazette,the San FranciscoChronicle,and one or two slick arts magazines. Dulcie imagined Dorriss consorting, in other cities, with wealthy society women as sleek and expensively turned out as a bevy of New York fashion models.

So what was it about Helen Thurwell that so attracted him? The tall, slim brunette was nice enough looking, but she was not the polished, trophy-quality knockout that Marlin Dorriss seemed to prefer. And why was Helen ruining her own life and Dillon’s for a high-class roll in the hay when Dorriss had dozens of women?

As she crouched in the sagging awning studying the attorney, she saw Helen Thurwell approaching from the alley behind Jolly’s Deli. At the edge of the crowd Helen paused, standing on tiptoe trying to see. When she realized which house was surrounded, she began to force her way through the crowd.

She stopped when she saw Quinn’s body, then started forward again, her hand pressed to her mouth. At the same moment she saw Marlin Dorriss.

Even now, at this stressful moment, there was a spark between the two. They stood very still, as if joined by an invisible thread, both looking at Quinn but sharply aware of each other.

Then Dorriss turned away and headed up the street.

Helen remained looking, her face very white, her fist against her lips. Behind her, Detective Garza emerged from the house carrying a clipboard and a camera, his square, serious face and dark eyes filled with a stormy preoccupation, with an intensity that Dulcie knew well.

Pressing forward on the sagging canvas, Dulcie didn’t take her eyes from the detective. As she watched Garza, he in turn watched Helen Thurwell.

Not until Helen turned away from Quinn did Garza approach her. The two spoke only briefly, then they moved up the steps and inside the house.

Across the street, half a block away, Helen’s daughter stood watching them, pressed into the crowd with three of her school friends. Dillon’s look followed Helen with an anger that made Dulcie shiver. The same expression, the same hate-filled resentment with which, moments earlier, Dillon had observed Marlin Dorriss as he turned and left the scene.

Glancing at Kit, Dulcie dropped from the awning to a bench, then to the sidewalk. With the kit close behind her, they skirted through the bushes past the uniformed officers and the coroner and the body. Crossing the porch in shadow, within moments they were inside the house, silent and unseen. Following Detective Garza and Helen Thurwell through the house, Dulcie and Kit glanced at each other, their curiosity equally sharp, equally predatory and keen.

Joe Grey trotted fast up the four blocks to Wilma’s stone cottage and, avoiding the front garden, galloped around behind where the wild hill rose steeply at the back. Leaping up through the jungle of tall grass, its dry swords laced through with new green shoots, he spun around, standing tall on his hind paws and peered over the rustling jungle, in through the guest-room window.

He could see Kate’s tan wheeled suitcase lying open on a luggage stand. The only clothing not folded into it was her blue velvet robe, which was thrown across a chair. The black tom crouched just beside the bed. Even as Joe watched, Azrael slid up and into the open suitcase among her sweaters and silk lingerie bags, and began to paw through them, his black tail lashing as he prodded and poked with demanding paws. Joe watched him, frowning. Kate was all packed to head home, the hangers in the closet empty, the bedding turned back, the sheets and pillowslips removed and piled in a heap in the corner. That, Dulcie had told him, was the way Wilma liked her guests to leave a room. Neither Dulcie nor Wilma could understand why a house guest, on departing, would make up the bed with dirty sheets when his host would only have to strip them off again, to put on clean ones for the next round of company.

When the tom had finished patting and pawing at the sweaters and lingerie, he turned his attention to the side pockets of the suitcase, sliding his quick black paw into one pocket after another, searching as thoroughly as would any human thief.

But searching for what? Why would this feline thief waste his time with maybe a few hundred dollars in cash, say, when he was accustomed, working with a human partner, to robbing far more productive safes and cash registers? And why Kate?

Kate had told Wilma that the choker she wore last night was paste, fake jewels. So why would this black beast want it? And where was his human partner? Who was Azrael running with now, if old Greeley was out of the picture? Joe watched, fascinated and filled with questions as the tomcat rooted and dug.

When the cat had investigated nearly every inch of the suitcase and had slyly smoothed each item back as it had been, when he was rooting in the last small pocket, he paused.

With his paw deep in the smallest pocket, he remained very still. His mouth was open, panting, his ears shifting in every direction, seeking for the faintest sound.

The tip of his tail twitching with excitement, Azrael withdrew his paw, claws extended. Dangling from those curved rapiers was a round flashing key fob attached to a long silver key.

Dropping his prize on the carpet, he stood looking down at it. A very plain key and curiously flat, no little ridges as most keys had to fit into the mysterious depths of their given lock. This key did have little protrusions to code the tumblers, but each was precisely cut, at right angles. And Joe Grey smiled.

Clyde carried a key like that, struck from a flat sheet of metal, each straight cutout with only right angles and precise corners, a key that looked as if it would be easy to reproduce but, for reasons Joe didn’t understand, was apparently hard to duplicate-or maybe locksmiths did not keep that kind of blanks, in some universally agreed-upon deference to security.

Leaving the safe deposit key lying beside the suitcase, Azrael leaped to the dresser. Pawing through a sheaf of papers that were weighted down with a hairbrush, he was once more thorough and intent. He sorted carefully thought the stack but, not finding what he was seeking, he abandoned the papers at last and tackled a leather briefcase that stood leaning against the mirror.

Poking his black nose in, then all but climbing inside, the tom wiggled and shook the bag as if fighting some inner fastener. Pawing and nosing, he backed out after some minutes, gripping in his teeth a small blue folder. A checkbook? Joe was so fascinated that he stepped on a thistle hidden among the grass, the barbs stung like needles. Flinching at the pain, he watched Azrael open the folder and stare down at the pad of checks.

Was he reading the bank’s name and location? Joe watched him remove a check carbon with a careful paw and pat at it until he had folded it into quarters. Pressing the creases with his paw, he retrieved the key, laid it on the folded carbon and took them both clumsily in his teeth.

Holding his head high so as not to drag the key and maybe not drool on the carbon, Azrael left the room flaunting his prize as he might flaunt a pigeon he had captured on the wing.

Outside on the hill, Joe Grey moved fast, leaping down through the grass, heading for Dulcie’s cat door. He was around the house by the corner of the garage when he heard the cat door flap, and the black beast burst out and down the steps, flashing away through Wilma’s garden.

Silently Joe followed.

Metal and paper are not mouth-friendly, the one brutally hard, the other inclined to become soggy. But, heading across the village and keeping to the shadows, Azrael was on an incredible high. What he carried was practically an engraved invitation, a passport to jewels that, according to Emerson Bristol’strueaccount of the matter, were worth a hefty fortune. The scenario was quite different from what Kate Osborne believed. And that should lead to ridiculously easy pickings; as simple as snatching baby birds from a sparrow’s nest.

9 [��������: pic_10.jpg]

The body had been taken away. On the trampled front lawn of the yellow Victorian cottage, the coroner stood talking with Captain Harper. Inside the house could be seen, through a front window, Detective Dallas Garza and Helen Thurwell standing in a book-lined room, talking. In the same room, unobserved, Dulcie and the kit lay sprawled beneath a leather easy chair, peering out, watching and listening.

The cats weren’t sure whether Helen was some sort of witness, or a suspect. Though of course Garza would want to question her, she was Quinn’s sales partner. Dulcie looked around the study, mentally yawning. Quinn’s house was dullsville.

One would think a real-estate agent would have a lovely home, maybe small and modest but certainly designed with character and imagination. James Quinn’s residence looked as if Quinn, who was a widower, cared little about his surroundings. As if the living room were no more than a wide passageway to the bedroom or kitchen but otherwise of no use. The furniture was old and cheap, the colors faded almost to extinction; there were no pictures on the walls, no books or flowers or framed photographs on the end tables. She imagined Quinn bringing home a bag of takeout for his supper, eating it alone in the kitchen or on the couch as he watched TV on the relic set, imagined him coming into his study to do a little paperwork, then off to bed.

Maybe his social life and nice meals, whatever elegance he might enjoy, centered around the golf course. Certainly Quinn had nice clothes, certainly he dressed very well; she had seen him around the village. Whether dressed for work showing houses or for the one sport in which he indulged, he always looked well turned out.

Quinn’s study was just as dull as the rest of the house, furnished with scarred and mismatched furniture and cheap plywood bookshelves. Helen stood looking down at Quinn’s battered oak desk, which was strewn with folders and papers lying every which way atop a black leather briefcase.

“He never kept his papers like this, in such a mess. James might not be� have been much for a pretty house,” she said almost as if she’d read Dulcie’s thoughts, “but he was a neatnik when it came to work.”

Helen Thurwell was a few inches shorter than Garza. Her cropped, dark brown hair was straight and shining, her black suit neatly tailored. She wore flat black shoes, simple gold earrings, and she still wore her thick gold wedding band. Dulcie watched her cover that now, with the cotton gloves that Dallas Garza handed her.

“We’ve fingerprinted and photographed,” Garza said. “Even with the gloves, please handle the papers by the edges.

I’d like you to go through them, tell me if anything looks strange, or if you think anything is missing.”

Watching the detective, Helen was quiet for a long moment. “As if someone� As if this wasn’t an accident?”

“Until we learn otherwise,” Garza said shortly.

“I’ll have to sort them into some kind of order.”

Garza nodded.

Standing at the desk, Helen began sorting through Quinn’s papers, arranging them into stacks, each atop one of the empty file folders that were mixed in with loose sheets. “He was always so neat, he never made this kind of mess. Each sale has its file with several pockets for offers and counteroffers, for miscellaneous notes, for the inspection and related work. He� he used to tease me about my haphazard ways.” She compared several sheets, stood thinking a moment, then put the papers in their proper files. When she had finished, she moved away from the desk, turning toward the window. The cats could see her face now, her dark eyes filled with distress. Shelooked up at Garza.

“I see nothing missing, all the clients we were working with are here. Their files seem complete. His field book is here and doesn’t look tampered with. The only thing that’s strange, outside of the mess, is a notebook seems to be missing. Not part of our work but a small personal notebook. Maybe it’s somewhere else in the house. I don’t know what it was for, I’m sure it didn’t have to do with business. It wasn’t anything that the rest of us kept.”

Helen shook her head. “I didn’t see it often, and he never shared it with me. Occasionally I would see him making an entry, but it seemed a private thing. A small brown notebook maybe three by five inches. Sometimes he carried it in his coat pocket. Reddish brown covers� what do they call it?Deal?A slick mottled brown, sort of like dark brown parchment, but heavier. Black cloth tape binding. The kind of notebook you’d get in any drugstore or office supply.”

“Did you ever see the entries?”

“No. When I came in he was usually just putting it away. Not hiding it, but as if he’d finished whatever he wrote there. Possibly something to do with his clients’ personal likes and dislikes, that was my guess. Not about what they wanted in a house, that we kept in a mutual binder. But maybe for little gifts, you know? What kind of flowers or candy. We send a little gift when a sale is completed.

“And yet that does seem strange,” Helen said, “to take that much care with those routine presents. He usually let me handle that.”

She looked with desolation at Garza. “James was a very matter-of-fact guy, not a lot of imagination. Honest-a good person to work with.” But as she said this, her face colored and she turned away.

Watching from the shadows, the kit put out a paw as if to comfort her, then quickly drew it back out of sight. Dulcie considered Helen with interest. Had mentioning James Quinn’s honesty embarrassed her because of her own cheating? Why else would she blush like that?

When Detective Garza and Helen had left the house, the cats trotted to the far end of the living room and leaped to the sill of an open window, ready to follow them out. But, hitting the sill, they saw who was out there and dropped again to the floor. Dillon Thurwell stood in the shadows not six feet from them.

Unwilling to miss anything, the two cats hopped up onto an end table that stood behind the dusty draperies. Crowding together, they could just see out where Dillon and three of her girlfriends were giggling and whispering rude remarks-as if they had been there for some time watching the coroner and ogling the dead man, as if they had seen Quinn taken away to the morgue and found the tragedy highly amusing. In the morning light, Dillon’s red hair shone like copper against the dark hair of two companions, and against the long, pale locks of the one blonde. The girls were dressed in low-cut sleeveless Tshirts that showed their bellies. Their remarks about the pitiful dead man were filled with rude humor.

Dillon seemed so cold and hard, Dulcie thought sadly, compared to the young girl she knew. Last year, Dillon had been among the first to suspect the murders of those poor old people at Casa Capri Retirement Home. Acting with more compassion and more responsibility than most of the adults involved, and far more creatively, she had helped to uncover the crimes. Then this last winter during the Marner murders, when Dillon was kidnapped by the killer, she had again kept her head better than many adults would have, defying her captor, and quick to move when Charlie and the cats helped her escape.

Now Dillon seemed not at all in charge of herself, as if suddenly she was letting others totally rule her. She was no longer someone Dulcie wanted to be near, no longer a person whom a cat would love, whom a cat would go to. Dillon Thurwell seemed now ready to explode into an emotional hurricane.

And one of Dillon’s friends greatly puzzled Dulcie. Consuela Benton was not a classmate, but was several years older, a beautiful Latina, her long, black, curly hair rippling in a cloud around her slim face. She must be at least eighteen, to Dillon’s fourteen. In every way she seemed a world apart from the other three.

Consuela’s lipstick was nearly black. She wore such heavy eyeliner that she looked more like a vampire than a human girl. Why would an older girl like this bother with younger children? What did she gain from their company? Dillon and her friends, even with their attempts at sophisticated dress and cool makeup, compared to Consuela, were like scruffy kittens next to a battle-hardened alley cat.

These last months, Consuela had surely become a leader for the oldest junior high girls. Dulcie had seen her hanging around Dillon’s school or with a crowd of young girls in the shops, where they were loud and rude. Both Dulcie and Joe, following the girls casually, had seen them shoplifting.

The first time, Dulcie didn’t want to believe that Dillon was stealing. By the third time she followed them, she was trying to figure out where they were stashing the stolen items. At one of the girls’ homes? Neither she nor Joe wanted to call Captain Harper. As proud as they were of their impeccable record of solving local crimes, they didn’t want to tell Harper this. Dillon was Max Harper’s special friend. Harper had taught her to ride, on his own mare, Redwing. He had helped her to become a capable horsewoman, had tried to help Dillon move easily and surely through her teen years without falling.

But then the kit had followed the girls and, apparently, had seen something so upsetting the kit would not talk about it. Dulcie had found her at home curled up in a little ball beneath the blue wool afghan looking wan and forlorn.

Pawing at the knitted throw, Dulcie had nosed at her. “Are you sick, Kit? Are you hurt?”

“Fine. Not hurt.”

“Sick?”

“No.”

“Then what’s the matter?”

“I don’t want to tell.”

“You must tell me. I can help.”

“Must I? Can you?” That was all the kit would say.

“Did someone hurt you? Did someone do something to you?”

The kit had shaken her head. Dulcie, having seen Kit following the four girls earlier that morning, could only suspect that she was upset about something Dillon had done. But Kit refused to get Dillon in trouble or to dismay the captain.

Well, Dulcie had thought, no one could force her. Kit would have to decide in her own time. Now, as she glanced at the kit, the tall, broad-shouldered girl with the black braids laughed loudly. “I bet he killed himself. Turned on the gas and sucked it up and croaked.” She clutched her throat as if strangling, gagging and sticking out her tongue.Leah,Dulcie thought. The girl’s name was Leah. Dulcie wanted to claw her.

“IfI was that old and wrinkled,” Consuela said,“I’dkillmyself.”

The three younger girls doubled up with merriment, their giggles self-conscious and loud.

“The dead guy’s your mother’s partner,” said the blonde.

“I guess,” Dillon snapped. “It stinks here, let’s go.”

“And that was her lover.” Leah giggled. “That tall guy who left a while ago, that was your mother’s squeeze.”

“You have a big mouth,” Dillon told her. “A big cesspool mouth.”

“Soisn’the her lover?Yousaid�”

Dillon slapped the girl. Hit her so hard that Leah reeled. Catching herself Leah swung at Dillon.

Consuela stood leaning smugly against the side of the building, watching them, grinning slyly when Leah grabbed Dillon’s hair. As Dillon swung to hit her again, she was grabbed from behind.

Max Harper was quick and silent, holding Dillon’s arm. The captain’s thin sun-creased face was drawn into an unforgiving scowl. He stood, thin and muscled and tall, staring down at Dillon. “Go home, Dillon. Go home now. And go alone.”

“You can’t make me,” Dillon said tremulously, her face flushing.

Harper looked hard at her, and at the other three. “Leah and Candy, you get on to your own homes.Do it now.’”

Leah and Candy backed away from him, and left. Redheaded Dillon stood still, defying him. Consuela stood watching, still smirking.

Ignoring Dillon, Harper fixed on Consuela. “Miss Benton, I don’t want to see you around Dillon anymore. You have no business with these girls.”

“What I do is not your business!”

“It is my business if you are arrested for a crime.”

Consuela flipped Harper the bird, turned away, and sauntered insolently up the street. Max Harper stood looking after her, then looked down at Dillon. All the closeness between them, all the easy companionship, was gone. “Go now, Dillon.”

At last Dillon headed away in the direction of her own house, sullenly scuffing her feet like a young child. Harper, watching her, looked so sad that Dulcie wanted to reach out a paw and comfort him. He looked as if his own child had fallen in front of him and refused to get up.

The kit watched the captain, too, very still and frightened. Was there nothing she could do to make him feel better? She knew how to tease the captain, but she didn’t know what to do about his hurt. She watched the girls fade away through the village wondering why Dillon ran with those others. Did you call a group of human girls a clowder, like cats? Why were those girls so angry? Why had Dillon turned so mean? The kit was so full of questions she began to shiver-but part of her shivers were hunger, too. The deep-down belly-empty hunger she always felt when her head was too full of fear and questions.

Behind them, an officer had come into the house and started closing windows; soon the house would be secured and additional crime tape strung around it. Dulcie and Kit looked at each other, slipped through the drapery, leaped out the window and up the nearest tree-and they raced away across the rooftops and along sprawling oak branches until they reached Jolly’s alley.

On the roof of Jolly’s Delithey paused with their paws in the gutter, their pads sinking down into the mat of wet leaves, looking down into the pretty brick paved lane with its flowers and benches, anticipating the usual nice plate of treats that Mr. Jolly put out for the village cats; after the stressful morning, a cat needed comfort food.

Mr. Jolly himself was just coming out the back door, dressed in his white pants and white shirt, white shoes and white apron. Bending over with a grunt because his stomach got in the way, he set down a paper plate loaded with smoked salmon and shrimp salad and roast beef, all smelling so good the kit drooled. The cats were ready to scorch down the jasmine vine and enjoy the feast, when Dulcie nipped the kit’s shoulder and pulled her back quickly onto the shingles where they would not be seen.

Below them, Consuela was entering the alley pushing irritably past the flowering trees in their big clay pots. The black tomcat swaggered in beside her. Consuela, swiveling her hips, sat down on the little wooden bench. Azrael, glancing the length of the alley, crouched before the plate of deli scraps, and in seconds the food was gone. He scarfed it all, the smoked salmon and roast beef and the nice shrimp salad. The kit wanted to fly down there and cuff him away but he was pretty big. His purrs of gluttony filled the alley as loud and ragged as another cat’s growls. Behind the rudely slurping beast, Consuela sat impatiently waiting, tapping her booted toe and tossing a key in her hand. Each time she flipped the key, it clinked against its dangling metal fob. With her frowzy black hair and black lipstick and black-lined eyes, the two were as alike as human and cat could be. Watching them, the kit looked up when Dulcie nudged her; and she looked where Dulcie was looking.

Across the chasm of the alley on the opposite roof, among the leafy shadows of an acacia tree, Joe Grey stood so still that he seemed at first glance no more than a smear of gray shadows among the dark leaves.

Had he been there all the time? His yellow eyes gleamed intently, telling the kit to be still. Then his gaze dropped to the alley where the black tomcat was cleaning the paper plate with a rasping tongue, holding it down with his paw.

As the black tom turned and sauntered across the bricks and leaped onto the bench beside Consuela, Joe Grey came to the edge of the roof, listening.

“Well?” the black tom said, watching her.

Coldly Consuela studied him. “What do I get? What’s in it for me?”

“You’ll greatly impress our friend, I can guarantee that. I expect he’ll split with you.”

Jingling the key, she looked unconvinced.

“A blond wig, a little practice with the signature, you’re in and out and no one the wiser. Banks don’t bother to see if you have your checkbook or if you remember your account number. They just want you in there with your money. In this case they want you in and out fast. Opening the vault makes them edgy.”

“You’re an authority, you’ve cased a lot of banks.” She whipped out a little mirror and applied another layer of dark lipstick, then spit on her little finger and smoothed a perfect black eyebrow. “What if she misses the key?”

“What if she does? She’ll think she misplaced it. Who would come into her room there at the Getz house and know to look for a safe deposit key?”

“You did,” she said fluffing her hair.

The cat shrugged. “She’d never think of that.”

The two continued in this vein for nearly half an hour before Consuela agreed to pack a bag, gas up her car, and head for the city while Kate was still in the village. The three cats listened in amazement to Azrael’s persistent and artful barrage; but only Joe Grey had the full story. Dulcie and Kit glanced across at him, impatient for him to fill in the blanks. As Azrael painted for Consuela visions of her wearing mink and driving a Jaguar escorted around San Francisco by any man of her choosing, both Dulcie and Kit had to clench their teeth to keep from collapsing in fits of giggles. Whatever scam Azrael was pushing, they thought he ought to stick to robbing antique stores and stealing the savings of little old ladies. Banks were big time, out of his and Consuela’s league.

Or were they? By the time the two left the alley, Azrael was strutting beside Consuela lashing his tail with triumph.

10 [��������: pic_11.jpg]

Late September rains had turned the hills above Molena Point from summer gold to the clear bright green of winter. To visitors from the East Coast, where the summer hills are green and the winter hills brown, the reverse in color seems strange. Gold rules the California summers, green paints the colder months. High above the village rooftops the Harper pastures glowed as green as emerald.

Charlie stood at her kitchen window looking down the verdant slopes past their neat white pasture fences to the village and the far sea, waiting beside the bubbling coffeepot for Ryan Flannery’s red pickup to turn into the long drive, waiting to go over the blueprints so that Ryan could start the new addition.

Having moved to the ranch as a bride just a month earlier, to the home where Max had lived with his first wife until she died, Charlie had been reluctant at first to suggest any changes in the house. But when she did broach the subject, Max had been all for it. This home was their retreat, their safe place, their serene and private world. The new addition would make that haven even more perfect, a lovely new space in which they were together, and in which she could do her own work while Max was off locking up the bad guys.

Max’s wife, Millie, had been a cop. She hadn’t needed space to work at home, other than the small study that she and Max had shared. That marriage had been nearly perfect. Max’s friends, Clyde in particular, had thought Max would never marry again.

Charlie had no notion that she could take Millie’s place, nor would she want to. She had married not only Max, she had married the good and lasting presence of Millie, the woman who so deeply loved him and had so strongly shaped his life. That was not a matter over which to be jealous, she wanted only to treasure Max as Millie had done and to love him.

The house had been Max and Millie’s retreat. Now it was Max and hers; she thought the change would be positive and healthy.

There was Ryan’s red truck, right on time. Charlie watched the big Chevy king cab, with its built-in toolboxes and ladder rack, approach the house between the pasture fences, watched Ryan park and swing out of it carrying a roll of blueprints. The big silver weimaraner that rode beside her did not leave the cab until Ryan spoke to him; then he leaped out, all wags and smiles, dancing around her. Laughing, Charlie watched Ryan cross the yard to the pasture gate, and carefully open it. Pushing the two resident dogs back inside, she released the weimaraner; the three took off racing the pasture wild with joy, secure behind the dog-proofed pasture fence.

This small ranch was Charlie’s first real home since she’d left her childhood home. She’d lived in rented rooms while she was in art school, then in several small San Francisco apartments nattily furnished with a folding cot, a scarred old dinette set, and the cardboard grocery boxes that served in place of shelves and dressers.

At the pasture fence, Ryan stood a moment watching the three dogs race in circles, then turned toward the house. Coming in, she gave Charlie a hug and spread the blueprints out on the table, weighting the corners with the sugar bowl and cream pitcher, and with her purse. Ryan’s dark hair was freshly cut, a flyaway bob curling around her face. Her green eyes were startling beneath her black lashes, her vivid coloring complemented perfectly by a green sweatshirt that she wore over faded jeans. Ryan’s mix of Irish and Latino blood, from her Flannery father and her Garza mother, had produced great beauty, great strength, and vivaciousness.

“Anything more on the dead waiter?” Ryan asked, sitting down. “I haven’t talked to Dallas.”

“Nothing,” Charlie said. “Strange that Max hasn’t been able to reach Lucinda and Pedric, that they haven’t answered their cell phone messages.”

“That is strange. And what about James Quinn?”

Charlie had no hesitation in relaying information to Ryan. Max would do the same, as would Ryan’s uncle, Dallas. “There were no prints at all on the handle of the gas valve,” Charlie said. “The gas starter in the fireplace had been full open, apparently for some hours. When Sacks and Hendricks first arrived on the scene, the doors and windows were all locked. When Wilma and Kate and I got there, Sacks was very carefully working on the lock, and we were all afraid the place would blow. Just one spark� Well, when they got inside and opened up, when they were able to go through, there was no sign of forced entry.”

Ryan shook her head. “What a pity, if it was suicide-and more the pity if it wasn’t. This will keep Dallas and Max busy for a while.” She turned the blueprints to a page of elevations, and laid it out facing Charlie.

The new addition soared to a raftered peak with long expanses of glass looking down the hills to the sea and, at the back of the room flanking the stone fireplace, plain white walls for Charlie’s framed drawings and prints. Before they came down on a final design, Charlie and Max and Ryan had spent nearly an hour standing on ladders in the front yard seeing just how high the room should be raised, how it should be oriented for the best view.

From the new raised floor level they would see the village rooftops to the west with the wild rocky coast beyond. The old living room would become the new master bedroom, retaining the original stone fireplace and bay windows. Ryan would cut a new door to the existing master bath and closet, and those would need no change. The old master bedroom would become Max’s larger and more comfortable study. Ryan was, Charlie had learned, very skilled at saving what could be saved, but running free with what should be added.

Charlie greatly admired Ryan Flannery. Ryan had done something practical and exciting with her art degree, while Charlie’s own art education had certainly gone awry, or had seemed to until recently. Her attempt at a commercial art career had been a royal bust, had at last sent her scurrying to her only living relative, to her aunt Wilma-for moral support and for a roof over her head. She had been living with Wilma when she started Charlie’s Fix-it, Clean-it service. Not until much later did she have this surprising success with her animal drawings. Animals had always been her one great pleasure in the arts.

They sat studying the elevations, looking for any undiscovered problems. As Charlie watched Ryan red-pencil in a change they had agreed on, she could see, through the bay window, the three dogs playing in the pasture. The two young Great Dane mixes still acted like puppies. The presence of Ryan’s beautiful weimaraner with his devilish cleverness made the two mutts act far more juvenile. Rock was smarter than they were, a year older and far quicker, a handsome canine celebrity who had come to Ryan quite by accident-or maybe by providence, Charlie thought, if you believed in such matters. The dogs were chasing one another and chasing the sorrel mare, when she agreed to run from them.

Charlie studied the plans again but could find nothing to be improved upon. In her view the design was perfect, and she could hardly wait to get started. She had risen to fetch the coffeepot, glancing out at the lane, when someone on a bike turned in, heading for the house.

“Dillon,” Charlie said with curiosity. “She hasn’t been here in a while.”

“Surprised she’s here now, after Max scolded her this morning at the Quinn place. You heard about that?”

Charlie nodded. “Max wasn’t happy with her.” Charlie had stopped by the station after she showed Kate the apartment. Max had been glum and silent, hadn’t much wanted to talk about Dillon. Charlie watched the pretty redhead bike slowly up the lane, hardly peddling. Even at a distance, Dillon looked sour and unhappy.

“Sullen,” Ryan said. “I’m sorry to see that. Consuela Benton is not a good influence.”

Dillon walked her bike to the porch and leaned it against the porch rail. Slowly she slumped up the steps. Dillon was tall for fourteen. Her red hair was piled atop her head, tied with a purple scarf. Her tan windbreaker was tied by its sleeves around her waist, hiding her bare belly under the very tight T-shirt. She mounted the steps with a belligerent swagger. Charlie rose to let her in. No one used the front door. With the new addition, that, too, would change. Back and front entries would become one, with a large mud room for coats and dirty boots. Entering the kitchen, Dillon crossed in silence to Charlie’s side and plunked down at the table, staring at the blueprints that drooped over the edges. “What’s all this?”

“Plans for the new addition,” Charlie said. “You want coffee? Or make yourself some cocoa.”

Dillon rose, slouched to the counter, and poured herself a cup of coffee, dumping in milk and three spoons of sugar. Charlie was deeply thankful to have gotten past that age long ago-too old to be a child, too young to be a woman, caught in a world where you were expected to be both but were offered the challenges of neither. In ages past, at thirteen you werelearningto be a woman, learning the needed survival skills, the small simple skills involved in everyday living and in raising a family and, in the best of times, the urgent intellectual skills so necessary to human civility. Charlie found it hard to conceal her anger at the change in Dillon. Observing the girl’s attitude, she found it difficult to remember that only a few months ago she had considered Dillon Thurwell nearly perfect, had thought Dillon was working very hard at growing up. Training the horses under Max’s direction, Dillon had been mastering the skills of concentration and self-management, building confidence in her own strength-absorbing the building blocks that she would so badly need as a strong adult.

To see Dillon now, to see the change in her, to see the twisting of her strong early passions into self-destruction, angered Charlie to the point of rage.

All because of her mother-and yet that was so lame. Dillon was still her own master, she still had the luxury of choice in what she would make of herself, no matter how her mother behaved.

Sipping her coffee, Dillon stood by the table staring at the plans and elevations, then glanced down the hall toward the living room and three bedrooms. “What’s the point? This house is big enough already.” She stared at Charlie. “You starting a family? You pregnant?”

“I am not starting a family. Not that it would be any of your business. I need workspace. A studio.” Charlie couldn’t help feeling confrontational. She watched Ryan, who was studying Dillon, probably fighting the same impulse to paddle the child.

“So what was this murder last night?” Dillon said. “Some guy fell dead in your lap?”

Charlie managed a laugh. “That’s putting it crudely but accurately. You missed the excitement. I was hoping to see you at the opening.”

“I don’t go to art exhibits. I suppose my mother was there with what’s-his-name.”

“I saw Marlin Dorriss. I didn’t see your mother.”

“So who died? Some waiter? What, poison in the canapes?”

“He worked at Jolly’s. Sammy something. Blond, good-looking guy.” Charlie’s voice caught at Dillon’s expression. “You know him?”

“Why would I know some waiter?”

“Why not? Something wrong with waiters? You never go in Jolly’s? Who knows, he might be-have been, some college student working his way through. Not that it matters. Did you know him?”

Dillon stared at her.

“What?”

Dillon shrugged. “Maybe he hung out around the school. Some tall, blond guy hung around the high school.”

“Not around your school? Not around the junior high?”

Another shrug.

Charlie wanted to shake her. “He was a bit old to be hanging out with school kids. What was the attraction?”

“Maybe he has a younger brother.”

Charlie just looked at her. Ryan turned the blueprints around, laying the elevations of the new living room before Dillon. Dillon, in spite of herself, followed the sweep of the high ceiling and tall windows.

“This is what we’re doing,” Ryan said. “This will be the new living room. There,” she said pointing to where the new arch would be constructed, “off the kitchen and dining room.”

“That’s gonna cost a bundle.” Dillon had grown up knowing, from her mother’s business conversations, the price of real estate, and knowing what it cost to build. “I didn’t think a cop made that kind of money”

Charlie and Ryan stared at her.

“I guess it’s none of my business what you do with the captain’s money.”

“I’m spending my money,” Charlie said quietly. “Andthatis none of your business. However, for your information, we’re using money from the book I worked on after the author died. And from my gallery and commission sales.” She wanted to say, What’s with you? You think dumping on me is going to solveyourproblems? You think belittling me is going to make you feel better about your mother or yourself? With heroic effort, she said nothing.

Ryan said, “The two smaller bedrooms will be joined to make Charlie’s studio. Tear out this wall, here, we have a fifteen-by-thirty-foot room. Add a couple of skylights and voila, Charlie’s new workspace. You have a problem with that?”

Dillon looked at Ryan with interest. Charlie watched the two of them face-off, Dillon a defiant, angry young lady; Ryan both angry and amused. Charlie thought that Ryan was a far better match for Dillon Thurwell’s rage than she herself. She didn’t much like confrontation-but Ryan had grown up with cops, and she knew how to give back what she got.

Charlie would have liked to share with Dillon her excitement over the new studio as she shared it with her other friends, to relay her delight over simple details like the big adjustable shelves to hold drawings and prints and paper supplies, the new printing table, her anticipation over a new (used) desk, over a decent place for her computer.

She studied the girl, looking for a spark of the old Dillon. “I’ll be working on the building project as carpenter’s helper, under Ryan’s direction. I want to improve my carpentry skills. I’m already pretty good at Sheetrock, from helping with Clyde’s apartment building.” She wished she could hone her people skills as easily. She wished she could master the moves to make the world right again for Dillon.

Dillon looked at her and rose. “Can I ride Redwing?”

Charlie nodded. “Don’t let the dogs out of the pasture. You want company? We’re about through here.”

“Could I call my friend? Could my friend ride Bucky?”

Charlie stared at her. Bucky was Max’s big, spirited buckskin. The sun rose and set with that gelding, no one else rode Bucky. “What friend is that?” she said carefully.

“From school. My friend from school.”

“A girlfriend?”

Dillon said nothing. The child’s stare made Charlie very glad she didn’t have a teenager to raise. “You know that no one rides Bucky. Even I don’t ride Bucky, without a very special invitation.”

“I guess I’ll go home then.” Dillon turned on her heel, heading for the door.

Ryan rose, moving quickly around the table. She put her arm around Dillon. “Christmas vacation isn’t far off.”

“So?” Dillon turned a sour look on her. But she didn’t move away.

“You have a job for the two weeks of vacation?”

Dillon shrugged. “Who needs a job? Who wants to work during vacation?”

“You want to work for me?”

“Why would I want to work for you? Doing what?”

“Carpenter’s gofer. Fetching stuff. Sweeping up, cleaning up the trash. Maybe some nailing. Learn to lay out forms and mix cement. I can get a work-learning permit through the school. I’ll pay you minimum, which is likely more than you’re worth.”

Dillon stared at her. “Why would I want to do that kind of work?”

“Something wrong with it? It’s the way I started, when I was younger than you. At about the same time I began to learn to shoot a gun and to train the hunting dogs-carpentry skills might come in handy, whatever you do with your life.” Ryan looked hard at Dillon. “What you do right now-while you’re hurting-will shape the rest of your life. You want to spend it sneaking around shoplifting?”

Dillon pulled away. Ryan took her hand. “You are not your mom, Dillon. And she’s not you.” Ryan’s green eyes flashed. “You plan to mess up your life just to punish her? What do you get out of that? If you’re a survivor, as I hear you are, you’ll stop this shit. You’ll not let the dregs of the world plan your life for you, you’ll write yourownticket.”

She drew Dillon close and hugged her. “Charlie and Max love you. Clyde and Wilma love you. I don’t love you but I’d like to be your friend.” She tilted Dillon’s chin up, looking hard at her. “You come to work for me, you’ll have more fun with my carpenters than with your smarmy girlfriends-I bettheywouldn’t have the guts to tackle construction work.”

Dillon said nothing. She stared back at Ryan, her jaw set, deeply scowling.

But something was changed. Charlie could see it; deep down, something was different.

Ryan said no more. Dillon moved away and out the door, swung on her bike, and took off up the lane. Charlie watched her pedal away alone. But maybe her shoulders were less hunched, her back not quite so stiff. Ryan glanced at her watch and rolled up the plans. “I’ll leave one set. If you can go over them with Max tonight, if you’re happy with everything, call me and I’ll be at the building department first thing Monday morning.” She gave Charlie a twisted smile. “To start the permit process rolling.” They both knew that the county building department was hell to work with, that weeks of officiousness might be involved, enough unnecessary bureaucratic red tape to break the spirit of a marine sergeant.

Ryan shrugged. “I can only hope we get a good inspector, hope he doesn’t find some trumped-up excuse to trash the whole plan.” She grinned at Charlie. “It’ll be okay, I’ll sweet-talk him, as disgusted as that makes me. I can hardly wait to get started, I’m as excited as a kid-as enthusiastic as a kidshouldbe,” she said, glancing toward the lane. She slipped an elastic around the blueprints. Charlie unplugged the coffeepot, and they walked out to the pasture gate, discussing the work schedule and where the building materials should be stacked. At the gate, the three dogs came bounding. The big silver weimaraner weighed eighty pounds and stood over two feet at the shoulder, but he was dwarfed by the Harpers’ half-breed Great Danes. The three dogs charged the gate like wild mustangs, but Ryan and Charlie, with fast footwork and sharp commands, got them sorted out, got Rock through the gate without the pups following. Ryan loaded Rock into the passenger seat of her pickup. “You still planning on a groundbreaking party?”

“The minute we have the permit. Max needs some diversion.”

Ryan grinned, gave Charlie a thumbs-up, and took off up the lane. Charlie stood by the pasture gate petting the pups and scratching behind Redwing’s ears, thinking about Dillon, about the building project, about the several commissions she’d promised, including the Doberman studies; and about the two recent deaths in the village. All the fragments that touched her life, both bright and ugly, seemed muddled together like the contents of a grab bag: You pay your money and you take your chance. Or, as Joe Grey would put it, whatever crawls out of the mouse hole, that’s your catch of the day.

11 [��������: pic_12.jpg]

The only luggage the black tomcat required was a canvas tote containing a dozen assorted cans of albacore and white chicken, and a box of fish-flavored kibble. A little something to snack on, between room service. His traveling companion, by contrast, had packed three suitcases, effectively filling the entire trunk of her pale blue Corvette.

Consuela hadn’t been thrilled about him coming along on this little jaunt. He had prevailed, however, having more plans than he had mentioned to her-far more than cleaning out Kate Osborne’s safe deposit box.

Traveling north from Molena Point, Consuela preferred Highway 101 to the coast route, despite the heavy traffic and the preponderance of large tractor-trailers. She was a fast driver with flash-quick reactions and a competitive take on life. Azrael studied her with interest.

She no longer looked like the bawdy young woman who had hung out with those younger girls; her transformation was, as always, remarkable. She looked her true age now, of twenty-some. Without the frizzed-out hair and theatrical makeup, her sleek, fine-boned beauty was startling; and the transformation hadn’t taken long. She had scrubbed her face and now wore very little makeup, just a touch of pink lipstick. He had watched her dampen her dark hair, twist it tightly around her head, and cover it with the sassy blond wig that she had styled like Kate Osborne’s hair. She was wearing a tailored beige suit, much as Kate might wear. She looked serious and businesslike, and in fact far more interesting than the painted child who had run with Dillon and her friends. She had wanted to make reservations at the St. Francis, on Union Square, but Azrael had quashed that notion. The Garden House on Stockton was just a block from Kate Osborne’s apartment.

He slept during much of the two-hour drive, waking in San Jose, where Consuela stopped at a Burger King. She ordered orange juice and coffee for herself, and a double cheeseburger for him, hold the pickles. That would tide him over until they hit the city and had visited Kate’s bank-though as it turned out, their errand didn’t take long.

The branch that Kate frequented was old, with round marble pillars in front, its floors and walls done all in marble. Azrael, not trusting Consuela, rode into the bank in her carryall. No one questioned her when she presented the safe deposit box key, read off the number, and waited to sign in.

But when the clerk gave her the signature card, a hot rage hit Azrael, and Consuela went pale.

The card had been signed just an hour earlier by Kate herself.

“Forgot something,” Consuela told the clerk, smiling and shaking her head at her own pretended inefficiency. The bank clerk looked hard at her but accepted the signature card.

Playing dumb, Consuela followed the clerk into the vault.

This was apparently not the same teller who had helped Kate an hour earlier; that clerk would have remembered her, or at least remembered what Kate was wearing. Azrael watched the other clerks warily, looking for some trap; his paws began to sweat. These tellers might, for all he knew, know Kate personally. It was a small branch, and Kate did work right in the building. He’d considered that before but had thought, what were the odds? You couldn’t cover every contingent.

Moving into the vault, waiting for the teller to open up the little drawer, both Azrael and Consuela were strung with nerves. Before they were alone in the locked room he’d nearly smothered in the damn bag.

Opening the metal box, Consuela stared into the empty container. Not a scrap of paper, not a paperclip or a speck of dust.

“Nothing,” she said, having expected as much. “Nothing. What did you do! How did you tip her! This is your fault,” she hissed, her face close to his. “You stupid beast. You drag me all the way up here forthis,fornothing.Either you tipped her or� What did you hear last night, that made you think� You’d better start explaining.”

“Keep your voice down! You’re supposed to be alone in here! Katesaidthe jewels were here. Plain as day.”

She just looked at him.

He raised his paw, wanting to slash her. She might look like a refined lady now, but she was still little more than a streetwalker. “Are you calling me a liar?”

“If theywerehere, she’s cleared them out. An hour ago, you stupid beast. Did she burn rubber getting here before us? And why? Who tipped her? Is there another name on the box? Did she call someone here in the city?”

“Youwere looking at the card. I was inside the damn bag.”

“They don’t keep that information on the sign-in card. I looked.” She stared hard at him. “How the hell did sheknow!What did you do when you took that key, leave black cat hair all over her room? Paw prints on the dresser?”

He extended his claws until she backed away. She closed the box, and held the carryall open, looking at him until he hopped in.Well, screw her,he thought hunkering down in the dark bag. And they did not speak again until they hit the Garden House and Consuela turned into the parking lot.

The place was so typically San Francisco it made him retch, all this Victorian garbage to impress the tourists. And he was hungry again. A bad gig always made him hungry. He waited in the car while she signed the register, then rode in her carryall up the elevator. They did not learn until later that the hotel allowed pets, that he would have been welcome, that catering to domestic animals was their specialty. Though one might have known from the smell of the room. It stunk like poodle poop.

When the bellman departed, Azrael hassled Consuela until she phoned for takeout of cold boiled crab legs and sushi. Before he got down to the work at hand he wanted sustenance. Even now, despite Consuela blowing it with the safe deposit box, this little trip held promise.

Their room was on the south side of the building, a location for which Consuela had paid an extra ten bucks a night, as the manager had at first said those rooms were all taken. From this vantage, Azrael would have a perfect view down the block to Kate Osborne’s apartment. When the bellman left, Consuela dumped the carryall on the nearest chair, dropped his bag of food in the closet, picked up the phone, and ordered his takeout. Then, changing into jeans and a T-shirt, she turned on the TV and sprawled on the bed. She was still scowling. He got the feeling too often that the woman didn’t like him.

Well, she was going along with his plan all right, the mercenary little bitch. Maybe she just didn’t like cats. The times they’d worked together, he’d never bothered to ask. Now, after the bank fiasco, her mood was as dark as the murky worlds that filled his late-night longings.

Kate must have missed her key shortly after she returned to Wilma Getz’s house this morning, after she’d looked at that apartment.

Why didn’t she simply assume she’d misplaced it? What made her hustle on back to the city?

Right,he thought.That meddling gray tomcat.

Somehow those little cats had spied on him when he was in the Getz house or when he and Consuela were in the alley. When he finished with those three, they’d be dog meat.

Listening to the inanity of some late-afternoon sitcom, he clawed open the window and slipped out onto the fake balcony, crowding against the metal rails in the four-inch-wide space, looking across the flat roofs to Kate’s apartment building. Consuela had at least had the decency to slow the car as they passed, to make sure of the number. From Kate’s description to her friend Wilma, the apartment at the north front was hers. At least, that seemed to be the only one with a view of both Coit Tower and Russian Hill. The windows in that apartment were open, the white curtains blowing in and out, stirred by a rain-scented breeze. Above him, thick gray clouds were gathering.

He waited a long time jammed against the rail before he glimpsed Kate moving around inside, hurrying as if preparing to go out. He waited until she turned away, then dropped to a lower portion of the roof, and leaped to the flat roof of the next building. Fleeing across the hard black tar among air conditioner units and heat vents, he reached the wall of Kate’s building.

The window above him must open to the kitchen, he could smell bananas, and lemon-scented dish soap. Crouching out of sight, hidden by the blowing curtains, he was about to rear up and peer in when he dropped again fast and flattened himself against the roof.

Kate stood above him, looking out just where he would have appeared. He lay very still, his eyes slitted, a black shadow against the black tar.

12 [��������: pic_13.jpg]

Kate stood at the kitchen window waiting for her kettle to boil, looking out at the darkly striated cloud layer that was moving above the city rooftops, taking a moment to calm herself. She was still all nerves and anger. The hurried drive to reach the city before Consuela did, and rushing to her safe deposit box� The sense of invasion knowing that Consuela had her key had left her shaky with nerves and anger. And she felt watched again, too, as she had at Wilma’s house.

But Consuela wouldn’t have the nerve to follow her home. Surely the woman would think she’d be ready to call the police, or already had called them.

Through the trails of gray cloud the late-afternoon sun threw vivid glances of light onto the flat roofs, reflections so sharp they blurred Coit Tower and obscured her view of the Oakland hills. Selecting an English Breakfast tea bag, she poured the boiling water into her cup and, letting it steep, took the cup to the bedroom to sip while she unpacked her small bag.

An hour earlier, returning to San Francisco, she had headed straight for the design studio. Parking in her marked slot, she didn’t go upstairs to her office but hurried around the corner to the branch where she did her banking, praying she wasn’t too late. Having borrowed Wilma’s duplicate safe deposit box key, she had given it to the teller and signed in. She had shared her box with Wilma ever since she opened it, when she’d left Molena Point three years ago. Having no living relatives that she knew of, she had wanted someone to be able to take care of business if she were in an accident, if something unforeseen happened.

Following the overweight, pale-haired teller through the formidable iron gate of the vault, impatiently waiting for her to wield the pair of keys, she had pulled out the metal box, nearly collapsing with relief when she saw the thick brown envelope in which she kept her important papers and the small square cardboard carton that held the jewelry. Stripping the safe deposit drawer of its contents, dropping the box and papers in a leather carryall, she had debated about reporting that an imposter might try to open her box.

But there was nothing in it now for Consuela to steal. With the time and fuss such a report would take, she had decided not to do it. Surely the bank manager would be summoned, forms would have to be filled out, the police brought into the matter. The rest of the day would be shot when she had other things to do. Leaving the box empty, she had settled for the smug satisfaction that she had arrived before Consuela.

As she left the bank she had scanned the parking garage for Consuela’s blue Corvette, or for anyone who might be watching her as she hurried up the three interior flights to the design studio and her own office.

The lights were on in several offices but she saw no one.

Shutting her office door behind her, she slit the tape that sealed the little cardboard box to make sure the jewelry was still inside. Fingering the lovely, ornate pieces, she had longed to keep them out in the light where they could be admired, longed to wear and enjoy them. But at last she put them back and sealed them up again.

Opening the bottom drawer of her fireproof file, she tucked the little box at the back and locked the drawer. Not the safest place, but better than any SD box, if that woman was able to copy her signature. She really didn’t understand what this was all about, when the jewelry was paste. The whole matter made her feel so invaded and helpless. Was nothing secure anymore? Leaving the office and hurrying home, she had wanted only to tuck up safe in her apartment and shut out the world.

Kate’s apartment building was a stark, ancient structure with two units upstairs and three down, and a parking garage underneath, a tan stucco box so old that one wanted to sign a long-term lease hoping the landlord would be forced to honor it, would not give in to the sudden urge to level the building and go for a high-rise. Kate’s apartment was reached by a concrete stairwell that held smells she did not like to think about. The apartments themselves, though, were in prime shape, freshly painted and with new carpet. The large windows opened without sticking, the kitchen appliances were new, with granite countertops gracing the pale pickled cabinets.

Opening up her hot, close apartment, she had sorted through four days’ worth of mail and made a quick trip to the corner Chinese market for milk, eggs, some vegetables, and frozen dinners. She planned to spend the rest of the week wrapping up two interior design jobs and doing the preliminary house call for a couple who were moving out from the East Coast. That job, which she had committed to some weeks ago, was the last new work she meant to take. The Ealders had bought a lovely town house facing Golden Gate Park, and she was looking forward to that small but interesting installation.

She had been approached by two other prospective clients but had turned both over to other designers. She could take on nothing new. She wanted, when she left the San Francisco firm in March, to have all her work completed. She expected she would move back to the village. She had been offered an enticing position as head designer, if she would move to the firm’s new Seattle office; but that was so far from her friends.

In Molena Point, she had given Charlie a deposit on the duplex apartment and had made arrangements to start work for Hanni the first of March. That gave her four months to finish with all her clients. She didn’t want to hand over any last-minute items to her successor.

During the next busy months she would have little time for personal concerns, little time to follow the confusing leads to her family; and maybe that was just as well. Anyway, the most pressing matter at the moment was to clear her desk and calendar before Lucinda and Pedric arrived-and hope that whoever had followed her was gone, and that Consuela returned to Molena Point, out of her sight. She wondered if Lucinda and Pedric could shed some light on the jewelry, on its age and background. The fact that Lucinda had bought similar pieces in that small shop up the coast invited all manner of speculation.

Russian River was just a tiny vacation village, but it had a colorful past filled with strange stories from the Gold Rush. So many immigrants had ended up there, panning for placer gold or working the mines, people from dozens of countries and divergent cultures. She wanted to go up there later in the year if she had time, dig around and see what she could learn.

She chose her clothes for work the next morning, then straightened the apartment, picking up papers she’d left scattered and doing a little dusting. The cool serenity of the cream and beige rooms welcomed and calmed her, the simple white linen couch and chair and loveseat, her books and framed prints. She had brought nothing with her from the Molena Point house when she left Jimmie, had wanted nothing from that old life that had gone so sour, not a stick of the furniture she had taken such care to select. She’d had an estate dealer sell it all, the Baughman pieces, the handmade rugs, everything that had at one time meant so much to her.

Shehadwondered if Jimmie would like her to ship the furnishings up to San Quentin, for his new residence. If a convict had free access to large-screen cable TV and the latest computers, if he could make and receive all the phone calls he pleased, and could, in the prison library, study for a law degree with which later to sue the prison authorities, if he could place bets on the horses and professional sports and buy lottery tickets, maybe he’d like to customize his cell, redesign his personal environment in keeping with his new mode of living.

Clyde would say she was bitter.

Clyde would be right.

Filling her briefcase with the needed papers and work schedules for Tuesday, and setting aside a stack of sample books, she moved about the apartment with an increasingly uneasy sense of being watched again, even in her own rooms. Oh, she didn’t want that to start, that awful fear that had stopped her from taking the cable car or walking to work, that had made her cling to the comparative safety of her own locked vehicle whenever she left a building.

Finishing her housekeeping chores she fetched a favorite Loren Eiseley, a copy in which she had carefully marked the passages she loved most, and she curled up on the couch under a quilt.

But she couldn’t concentrate for long; she kept looking up from the pages toward the kitchen where the north window was open to the breeze.

Of course there could be no one there, she was on the second floor.

Except, the roofs were flat out there and, she supposed, easy enough to access if one knew where the fire escape or maintenance stairs were located.

Rising, she closed and locked the window, then got back under her quilt holding the book unopened, listening.

And later when she checked the window before she went to bed, the lock was not engaged. The closed window slid right open, though she was sure she’d locked it. She locked it now, testing it to make sure-it was not a very substantial device, just one of those little slide clips that sometimes didn’t catch, that she would have to press hard with her fingers while she slammed the window, to make it take hold properly.

That night she did not sleep well. And every night for a week, arriving home after dark, she checked the kitchen window first thing. It was always locked. But then on Friday evening, she discovered that her extra set of house and car keys, which she kept in her jewelry box, was missing.

She looked in the locked file drawer in her home office where she sometimes hid the extra keys and extra cash. The cash was there, but not the keys. She looked in the pockets of her suitcase-where that black tomcat had been poking around, hooking out her safe deposit key.

The pockets were all empty.

Well, she’d misplaced her extra keys before, and later they’d turned up. Only this time the loss frightened her. She felt chilled again, and uncertain

But what was Consuela going to do, let herself into the apartment and bludgeon her? How silly. Bone tired from the week’s intense work and late hours, but more than satisfied with the Ranscioni house, she gave up the search. The keys were somewhere. No one had been inside the apartment. If they didn’t turn up, she’d change the lock. Making herself a drink, she slipped out of her suit and heels and into a robe, thinking about the Ranscioni job.

The buffet installation and fireplace mantel and new interior doors were perfect. She was more than happy with the work the painters were doing. The furniture had been delivered on time, and today the draperies had been hung, right on schedule. Tomorrow, Saturday, she’d place the accessories herself. She did so enjoy doing the last details on a house by herself, wandering the rooms alone for a leisurely look at the finished product, uninterrupted even by her clients; a little moment to herself, to enjoy and assess what she had created.

A young woman, Nancy Westervelt, had come in just this morning wanting her to take an interesting small job. Kate had regretfully turned her down. The woman-handsome, dark-haired, and quiet-had wanted Kate to incorporate her South American furniture and art into a contemporary setting. Nancy was mannerly and soft-spoken and, given that their tastes were so similar, would have been fun to work with.

She had thought a lot that week about the safe deposit box incident. She had paid close attention to her office file drawer, often checking to see that the cardboard box was there in the bottom drawer at the back, and that the tape hadn’t been disturbed. She had gone back to her safe deposit box twice to see if Consuela had returned. After that once, just after she’d cleared the box herself, the girl had not been back. But the presence of that frowzy, thieving girl there in the city, presuming she was still there, bothered her more than she wanted to admit.

She had not glimpsed the man who had followed her before she left the city, and that was a plus, although she had not found her spare house and car keys yet. And then on Saturday morning, leaving the Ranscioni house, coming up the stairs with her grocery bags she opened the door-and paused, feeling cold. That prickly sensation as if her hair wanted to stand up. Had she heard a small, scraping sound? Had she felt some unnatural movement of air against her face?

She stood for a long moment trying to identify what was disturbing her, what held her so rigid and still. She sniffed for some strange scent, a hint of cologne perhaps. She listened for the faintest brushing, the tiniest shifting of weight on the wooden floors.

Silence.

But someone was there, she could feel the difference on her crawling skin. The way she had felt in Wilma’s house that morning when she had paused in the dining room, certain that someone was present.

Setting down her groceries on the hall table, she snatched the vial of pepper spray from her purse and walked slowly through the apartment opening each door, pushing back the two shower curtains, checking the window locks and looking in the closets. She even opened the wall bed in her office.

There was no one; the rooms were empty, the windows locked as she had left them. Quickly she put away her groceries, all the while listening.

Returning to her study where she’d left the wall bed down, she opened a package of new white sheets and made it up, although Lucinda and Pedric wouldn’t arrive until Sunday evening. Covering the taut sheets with a thick, flowered quilt, she cleared off her oversize wicker desk, stashing papers and samples in her bedroom. She always brought work home, room layouts, catalogs and price lists, and the heavy books of fabric and carpet samples.

In the living room she cleared away the week’s newspapers that she’d hardly had time to look at, then tossed the pillows from the window seat into the dryer for a good freshening. A few short, dark hairs clung to one of the pillows.

A friend had brought her poodle over a few weeks ago, a small black toy that had snuggled on the window seat. She hadn’t thought that poodles could shed, but maybe she was wrong. She removed the hairs with a damp sponge and tossed the pillow in with the others.

On her way to the trash with the papers, an article caught her attention. Pulling that section out to read later, she laid it on the kitchen counter-something about a jewel robbery. Shoving the rest of the papers in the trash and straightening up the kitchen, she thought how good it would be to see Lucinda and Pedric.

How excited the old couple had been, planning their tour through the Cat Museum’s gardens and galleries. Picking up the phone, she made lunch reservations for Monday at an elegant Chinese restaurant near the museum, a small place that she thought would please them. She was so looking forward to their visit, this elderly couple with their twinkling eyes and dry wit, this pair of eighty-year-old newlyweds with their Old-World knowledge about cats that made her want to know them better. And she had to smile. How thrilled the kit was that the Greenlaws would soon return to the village to stay. Lucinda and Pedric were the kit’s true family, and now at last she would have a home with them, in a brand-new house atop Hellhag Hill.

The cave within the hill that frightened Joe Grey seemed not to have dampened the resolve of the Greenlaws to live there. They connected that dark fissure in some way to the ancient Celtic tales they collected, to the myths that had been handed down from their ancestors. The day after they were married they had bought the entire hill, some twenty acres.

Kate had, when she first saw the cave, been as intrigued as the kit, wanting to go down into it. But then she had grown frightened, and had ended up leaving quickly. On later visits to the village she had stayed away from that part of the hills.

When she had the apartment in order for the Greenlaws, she made a cup of tea, then pulled on a warm sweater over her jeans and walked up Russian Hill to the Cat Museum, wanting one more look at her grandfather’s diaries. Maybe to winnow out some overlooked clue to her heritage. The afternoon was cool and sunny, with a brilliance one could find, she thought, only in San Francisco, the sky a clear deep blue behind a scattering of fast-running white clouds. When she looked down the hill behind her, the shadows of the crowded buildings angled crisply across the pale sidewalks; the dark bay was scattered with whitecaps, the bridges glinting with afternoon sun. The breeze off the bay tugged at her like a live thing. She kept thinking about the dark hairs on the cushion of her window seat; she had found, when she cleaned out the lint catcher of the dryer, a wad of straight, black hairs, not really like poodle hairs.

Had Consuela brought that cat to the city? Joe Grey had said only that Azrael had been the instigator of the bizarre effort-the dismally failed effort, she thought with satisfaction. Why would Consuela have brought the cat here?

Entering the wrought-iron gates of the Cat Museum, she stepped into a world that seemed totally removed from the city. Between the various gallery buildings, its gardens were as lush and mysterious as the secret garden of her favorite childhood book. The cats who lived there watched her from where they sunned themselves lying on the low walls or atop various pieces of cat sculpture. Today, she did not linger in the gardens, but went directly to the desk to sign out McCabe’s diaries.

She spent several hours in the reading room but found nothing she’d missed before. From his early years as a stevedore, then as a building contractor and newspaper columnist, through his marriage, to the weeks just before the earthquake in which he died, he had written what he observed of the city but offered no fact about himself. Kate could not even find his wife’s name. Several entries mentioned their baby girl, but nowhere did McCabe write her name. Had he had some superstition, some objection to setting down the names of those close to him? Or had there been deletions in the journals, pages removed? With such short entries, that might be easy to do, and sometimes the flow did seem disjointed. The passages to which she kept returning were vague: McCabe’s occasional offhand mentions ofthe other place,orthose grim kingdoms,andone day till I make that journey?These, and mentions of not liking to be shut in, not liking a low, heavy sky-and of dreams that disturbed him in the small hours when he prowled sleepless.

But thoseweredreams, perhaps nightmares. Not facts about his life.I dreamed last night of a granite sky lit by a green haze� Ihave dreamed of caverns falling, and of the echoing cries of beasts in a world I have never seen�

Kate left the museum frightened. She must give up the search. Whatever lay in the tangle of her heritage was not for her, she had learned nothing about her parents and she was only upsetting herself.

Arriving home, she meant to put on her robe, fix herself a drink, have a light supper, and tuck up on the couch with a book. When she turned into the kitchen, the newspaper she had left on the counter had slid to the floor. She picked it up, puzzled.

A stain of grease darkened the article that had interested her, grease smeared across the account of a downtown jewel robbery. Frowning, she wiped the counter more thoroughly where she had earlier prepared some chicken, and wiped the paper as best she could.

The robbery had occurred ten days ago as the owner was locking up to go home. When he stepped outside and turned to lock the door, two men pinned him against the building demanding to be let in. He grabbed one of them, and there was a fight. Apparently someone, perhaps a neighbor, called the police. The store owner, James Ruse, said it was just seconds until he heard sirens. He told reporters that as the cops belted out of their car, grabbing one man, the other seemed to go insane, jumping on Ruse and beating him. Ruse grabbed the brick he used to prop open the door on hot days and hit the man hard in the head. That didn’t stop the burglar; he beat Ruse again, injured one of the cops, and escaped. Police captain Norville said it was likely the man was on drugs, that he had been almost impossible to subdue.

The article unnerved her, the city was getting so violent. She didn’t understand why the police didn’t shoot the man, when he had almost killed an innocent shopkeeper, had been trying to kill him. She didn’t turn on the kitchen TV for the news as she usually did when she fixed her dinner, but put on a CD while she made her salad.

When she went to the refrigerator for the bowl of chicken, she saw that it was empty.

Someonehadbeen here. Had eaten the chicken, apparently while reading the newspaper.

Quietly she reached for the phone, meaning to dial 911, then to leave, to wait for the police on the street or in her locked car. She had started to phone when she saw the paw prints.

Greasy paw prints on the stove, catching the light when she stood at an angle. And when she examined the back of the newspaper, there were greasy prints there, as well.

Checking all the window locks, she angrily searched her apartment, looking in every tiniest niche, under every piece of furniture. In the living room she found the cat’s black hair matted on her white couch: a stark and insolent greeting. She imagined the huge black creature riding in the car beside Consuela, peering coldly out the front window-laying what kind of plans?

Because they had missed stealing the jewelry, he had come here into her apartment, had very likely searched the entire apartment looking for it. What next? Her office? And where had he been when Consuela entered the bank? Riding on her shoulder snarling at the tellers? Following her on a leash like some pet jungle cat, commanding irate or amused stares from tellers and customers? Although most likely he had kept out of sight.

If he had jimmied her window, he had probably let Consuela in through the front door, and Consuela had taken her extra keys. They had most likely locked the window and locked the door behind them when they left; and now they could enter at their pleasure.

Searching again, she could find nothing else disturbed. Whatever they had done in here, that black beast frightened her far more than that little snip Consuela could ever do.

Well, she couldn’t tell the cops that a cat had broken in, and she had no evidence that any human had been in here. Unplugging and removing her kitchen phone, and then her office extension, so that neither phone could be taken off the hook, she carried them into the bedroom, setting them down beside the nightstand where she left the third phone plugged in. Locking the bedroom door behind her, she checked every small hiding place once again, behind the boxes on the closet shelf, behind her clothes. She was thankful she’d had the bedroom lock installed; it gave her a sense of security after she’d been followed. She didn’t like surprises; she would not want to wake with someone in her room.

Certain that the cat was not in the room with her, she washed her face and brushed her teeth. She was tucked up in bed, reading, by 8:15, the dark winter evening shut away beyond the draperies-wanting to lose herself in a favorite book as she had done when she was a child in one foster home or another.

But, again, the book didn’t hold her. Putting out the light, turning over clutching her pillow, she wanted to sleep and didn’t think she could. Then when she did sleep, her dreams were filled with Azrael, and with phantom worlds that beckoned to her from the darkness. She woke at three and lay sleepless until dawn, her mind racing with unwanted questions.

13 [��������: pic_14.jpg]

Long after Kate slept, that Saturday night, down the coast in Molena Point, rain swept in torrents along the rocky shore, turning sodden the cottages and rooftops and, south of the village, bending double the wild grass on Hellhag Hill, drenching the two friends who climbed through the black, wet tangles, desperately searching.

Joe Grey heard it first, a lonely and mournful weeping as he reared up in the tangled wet grass. He and Clyde were halfway up the hill, Joe’s paws and fur were soaking. In the driving rain, he could see nothing. Leaping to Clyde’s shoulder, he stared up through the windy night toward the crest. The weeping came and went in the storm as unfocused as the cries of spirits; the gusts pummeled him so hard he had to dig his claws into Clyde’s shoulder. Clyde grunted but said nothing. Above them, the grieving lament increased: somewhere in the cold blackness the kit sobbed and bawled her distress. The time was three A.M. Scuds of rain hit their backs fitfully, then were gone again.

Of course no stars were visible, no moon touched the inky hill. Pressing a paw against Clyde’s head for balance, Joe prayed the kit hadn’t gone into the cave. Crouching to leap down, to race up to the crest, he peered down into Clyde’s face. “Can you see her? Can you see anything?”

“Can’t see a damned thing.You’rethe cat. What happened to night vision?”

“It takes alittlelight. I’m not an infrared camera!”

The yowl came again, louder, making Clyde pause. “You sure that’s the kit? Sounds like the ghost itself.” The ghost of Hellhag Hill was a treasured village myth, one Joe didn’t care for. Rising tall against Clyde’s head, Joe peered harder into the black night. Had he seen an inky smudge move briefly? Clyde stunk of sleep, a sour human smell.

“There,” Joe said. “Just to the left of the cave.”

Clyde moved to stare upward, clutching Joe tighter. The trouble had started an hour ago with the ringing phone in their dark bedroom. Burrowing beneath the covers, Joe heard Clyde answer, his voice understandably grouchy. “What?” Clyde had shouted into the phone. “It’s two in the morning. This better not be a wrong number.”

There was a long silence. Clyde said, “When?” Another silence, then, “Are you sure?” Then, “We’re on our way.” Joe had peered out as Clyde thudded out of bed and stood looking around the dark room, then staring toward the study and Joe’s aerial cat door. “Joe! Where the hell are you?Joe!Come down here!Now!Wilma just called. It’s the kit, she’s run away!”

Joe had crawled out from under the blanket yawning. “What do you mean, she’s run away? She’s probably out hunting. She doesn’t mind the rain. Where’s Dulcie? Isn’t she with Dulcie?” But the feeling in his gut was uneasy. The kit had disappeared last winter for several days-and had fallen, paws first, into trouble.

“What happened?” he said, stalking across the blankets. “Why suddenly so distressed? What else did Wilma say?”

Clyde was pulling on his pants and a sweatshirt. Joe leaped to the top of the dresser, waiting for an explanation.

“They’re dead,” Clyde said, staring back at him. “Lucinda and Pedric. There was an accident-somewhere north of Russian River. The minute the kit heard, she ran out of the house bawling and yowling. Dulcie raced after her, but apparently she lost her, couldn’t track her in the rain and wind. They don’t know where she went or what she’ll do. She was so upset, Dulcie thinks she’ll head for Hellhag Hill.” Clyde pulled on his jogging shoes. Hastily tying them, he grabbed his keys.

In the downstairs hall Clyde dug his parka from the closet, snatched Joe up in his arms, and headed for the car. Racing down the hall, they heard Rube huffing behind the kitchen door. Clyde double-timed it through the dark living room and out the front door, not bothering to lock it. Sliding into the old Buick sedan that he’d driven home that night-to avoid putting up the top in his yellow antique roadster-he dropped Joe on the passenger seat like a bag of flour, hit the starter, and fished a flashlight from the glove compartment.

Shining the light along the sidewalk, Clyde headed for the hills, man and cat watching every shadow, every smear of darkness. Joe, crouched on the dash where he could see the street, glanced over at Clyde.

“How could there have been a wreck? When did this happen? How could they have a wreck at night? Lucinda and Pedric don’t drive at night. Never. At eighty, that’s smart. So how-”

“Wilma didn’t give me details, she was frantic for the kit, I’ve never heard her so out-of-control. The Sonoma County coroner called her. A wreck, a tanker truck-gasoline. A nighttime wreck, a fire. My God, those two innocent people. The kit was wild, hysterical.”

“Watch your driving. I’ll do the looking. Why did Wilmatellher all that? Didn’t she know the kit would-”

“Kit had her ear stuck to the phone, you know how she is. She heard before Wilma could snatch her away. And even if she had-”

“There! Slow down.”

Clyde skidded to a stop.

“Is that her in the bushes?” Joe had been ready to leap out when he saw it was not Kit but a raccoon-and his concern for the kit escalated into a sharp fear. The car lights picked out raccoons’ masked eyes, an unwelcome gang of midnight predators.

Joe had shouted and shouted for the kit as they moved on between the close-crowding shops and houses. “I think she headed for Hellhag Hill,” he had said tightly, hoping she hadn’t bolted down into the caves that, as far as he knew, might go clear to the center of the earth. Because the kit could, in her volatile grief, mindlessly run and run and keep running. Even at best of times, the kit was all emotion-and Lucinda and Pedric were her family.

Trying to see out of the slow-moving car, Joe had been weak with nerves by the time they reached Hellhag Hill. Clyde parked along the dropping cliff where the waves slapped and churned below them, set the hand brake, and snatched Joe up again. The minute he opened the door, both man and cat were drenched. The hill humped above them like a bloated black beast. Impatient with human slowness, Joe had leaped from Clyde’s arms and raced blindly upward through the forest of wet, blowing grass.

But now, perched on Clyde’s shoulder again where he could see better, he tried to identify that faint smear of blackness.Was that the kit, rearing up for a better look down at them? But as he watched, the black speck disappeared, was gone. Now, not a sound from above. Only when Clyde paused again and stood still did they hear one tiny sob.

Rearing up taller against Clyde’s head, Joe shouted,“Come down, Kit. Come down now! Right now!I have something to tell you. Something about Lucinda and Pedric.” And he leaped down into the tall wet grass and raced ahead of Clyde up the black hill.

Only when they were very near the tumble of boulders on the crest did the kit peer out, crouching and shivering. This was not their fluff-coated, flag-tailed tortoiseshell, their sassy, brightly animated friend. This rain-soaked, forlorn little animal was dull and spent, a miserable ragged beast who, with her wet fur matted to her body, seemed far smaller, far more frail.

“Come here,” Joe said, shouldering through the wet grass. “Comenow.””

The kit came to Joe, with her head down, slow and grieving. She looked like the first time Joe had ever seen her, a terrified feral animal afraid of humans, afraid of other cats, afraid of the world, totally alone and without hope. She stood hunched in the grass before him.

Behind Joe, Clyde stood very still. Then in a moment, he took two careful steps toward her. She didn’t spin away. Two more steps, and another, and he knelt beside the kit, where she cowered with grief before Joe Grey.

Gently Clyde picked her up, gently he held her. The wind beating at them made her shiver. Unzipping his jacket, Clyde tucked her inside, then zipped it up again. Only her dark, lean little face could be seen. Pitifully the kit looked up at Clyde. “They never drive at night. They would never be driving at night. Why were they out at night on the highway?”

She stared into the wind and up at the stormy sky. “How could your strange human God cause Lucinda and Pedric to be dead? Why would he do that?” She looked at Clyde, and down at Joe Grey. Around them, the black hill rolled away, uncaring. Above them the black sky stormed uncaring and remote. To the vast and incomprehensible elements this small cat’s mourning went unheard, her pain unheeded. What possible power, so beyond mortal ken, would bother with this insignificant beast? What power in all the universe would care that she was hurting?

They had started down the hill, Clyde snuggling the kit close, Joe Grey shouldering through the wet grass beside him, when lights appeared on the highway below coming slowly around the curve.

When Clyde and Wilma, Kit and Joe and Dulcie, were all together, sitting in Wilma’s car, the kit crawled out from Clyde’s jacket. Obediently allowing Wilma to towel her, she was quiet, very still. As Wilma worked, her yellow slicker made crinkling sounds over her soaking pajamas, and her wet boots squelched with water. As the kit began to dry and grow warmer, when her small body wasn’t quite as rigid, Wilma said, “I don’t know much more than you heard. I can’t imagine why they were on the highway at that hour. It’s been storming all night up there.”

She looked at Clyde. “Sheriff’s office called me just before I called you. The accident happened on 101 somewhere north of Ukiah. They had been heading north. A gas truck� apparently hit them on a curve.” She looked desolately at Clyde. “Both vehicles rolled and burned. Justburned…” Wilma covered her face. “Exploded and burned.”

She was quiet for a long time, holding the kit, her face pushed against the little cat. Still the kit was silent. Wilma looked up at last. “There was nothing left. Nothing. The vehicle’s license was ripped off in the explosion, went flying with torn pieces of the RV. That’s how the sheriff knew who to call.” Since Lucinda had sold her house just after she and Pedric were married, the newlyweds had used Wilma’s address for all their business, for everything but interest income, which was handled by direct deposit. Wilma faxed their bank statements to them, and sent any urgent papers. Wilma’s address had been on the couple’s drivers’ licenses and on their vehicle registration.

As the five sat in the front seat, close together, dulcie nosed under the towel, into Wilma’s arms, snuggling close to the kit. Around the car, the wind eased off, and the rain turned from fitful gusts to a hard, steady downpour. It seemed to Dulcie that fate had, since early in the year, turned a hard and uncaring countenance on their little extended family. First Captain Harper had been set up as a suspected murderer. Then that terrible bomb that came close to killing everyone at Captain Harper and Charlie’s wedding. Then during Charlie’s gallery party, that man dying. And now this terrible, senseless accident to Kit’s human family. She felt lost and grim, she wanted only to be home with Kit, tucked up in Wilma’s bed with hot milk and kitty treats, where nothing more could happen.

When Clyde and Joe slid into their own car and headed home, Joe settled unashamedly against Clyde’s leg. He felt more like a pet cat tonight, needful of human caring. Not since his days as a stray kitten, sleeping in San Francisco’s alleys, had he felt quite so in need of security and a little petting-it was all very well to have a solid record of murder and burglary convictions to his credit, but sometimes a little mothering of the bachelor variety was a nice change. The thought of Lucinda and Pedric gone, forever and irrefutably gone, had left him feeling uncharacteristically vulnerable.

Glancing down at Joe, Clyde laid his hand on Joe’s shoulder and scratched his ear.

They’d been home for half an hour, Clyde had toweled Joe dry and used the hair dryer on him, and Joe was half asleep under the covers when Clyde came upstairs bringing with him an aroma that brought Joe straight up, staring.

Clyde set a tray on the bed, right in front of him. Imported sardines? He had to be dreaming. A whole bevy of those little pastramion-rye appetizers that Clyde kept stashed in the freezer, now warm from the microwave? He looked at Clyde and looked back at the brimming tray.

Clyde, who had showered and pulled on a robe, set his hot rum drink on the night table and slid into bed, propping the pillows behind him. “So tuck in. What? You’re not hungry?”

Joe laid a paw on Clyde’s hand. He gave Clyde a whisker rub, then tucked into the feast with a gusto and lack of manners that, tonight, Clyde didn’t mention. If Joe slopped on the covers, Clyde didn’t seem to care. With the wonder of Clyde’s offering, and with the bodily nourishment as well, a wave of well-being surged all through Joe Grey. He began to feel warm all over, feel safe again; began once more to feel strong and invulnerable.

14 [��������: pic_15.jpg]

In the Getz house, the kit slept safe and warm, tucked in the blankets between Wilma and Dulcie, worn out from her grief, escaping into exhausted oblivion. The bedroom smelled of hot milk and hot cocoa and shortbread cookies, and of the wood fire that had burned down now to a few glowing coals. Outside, the rain had abated, but at four a.m. the cold wind still found its fitful way along the wet streets; wind shook drumbeats of water from the oak trees onto rooftops and car hoods-and on the cold and windy streets, others were about, who cared nothing for the windy cold, who cared only for adventure.

A giggle cut the night, then soft but urgent whispers as three girls moved quickly down the narrow alley that opened to the backs of a dozen shops.

Most of Molena Point’s alleys were appealing lanes as charming as Jolly’s alley, brick-paved byways lined with potted flowers and with the leaded-or stained-glass doorways of tiny backstreet stores. This concrete alley, however, was only a passage hiding garbage cans and bales of collapsed cardboard cartons that awaited the arrival of a sanitation truck. It was closed to passersby with a solid-wood six-foot fence.

The gate wasn’t locked. Candy pushed it open and entered the long, trash-lined walkway, followed by Leah and Dillon. They were on their own tonight; Consuela did not shepherd them. Flipping back her blond hair, Candy fitted a key into the lock of Alice’s Mirror. The three slipped inside, Candy reaching quickly to cut off the alarm system, just as the shop’s owner would do upon entering.

The girls were gone only a few minutes. They emerged loaded down with velvet pants, cashmere sweaters, wool and leather jackets, with plastic bags of scarves and designer billfolds and necklaces. They had known the location and distribution of the stock as well as any store employee might know it. Dillon, swaggering out with the biggest armload of stolen clothes, glanced back as Candy locked the door. She was grinning.

Piling their loot into the trunk and filling the backseat of the car they had left parked at the curb, the three slid into the front seat, the blonde at the wheel, and moved quietly away. Watching the streets for cops, or for a stray and observant pedestrian, they saw no one.

“Cops are all home in bed,” Leah announced. “Or drinking coffee at the station.”

Dillon giggled. But as the car slid past Wilma Getz’s stone cottage and she smelled the smoke of a wood fire, she sobered, studying the house. The sight of that solid and inviting cottage where she had so often been made welcome filled her with a sharp jolt of shame, with a moment of clarity, an ugly look at what she was doing.

In the stone cottage, Wilma was not asleep. She lay in bed in the dark, between the two cats, thinking about Lucinda and Pedric. Whathadthey been doing out on the highway at night? Kit had spoken the truth, the old couple never drove at night. And there could be no emergency that would account for a late-night run. Lucinda had no family and none of Pedric’s relatives lived on the West Coast to take him racing to them.

Before the kit slept, she had looked up at Wilma suddenly, her round yellow eyes opening like twin moons, and had said decisively, “They can’t be dead! Pedric is so clever. Lucinda and Pedric call themselves survivors. Survivors like me, that’s what Lucinda says.”

Dulcie and Wilma had exchanged a look.

Yet what Kit had said held some truth-everything Wilma knew about the Greenlaws showed how resourceful they were. She lay thinking about their well-appointed RV, where they always carried extra food, warm clothing, medical supplies, and of course their cell phone. Pedric had fitted out the RV with all manner of innovations to make life easier for them, from a bucket with a tight lid in which they put their laundry and soap and water, letting it bounce and agitate as they traveled, to locked storage compartments that could be opened from either the inside or outside of the vehicle. Pedric had grown up traveling all over the country in similar vehicles, and he was almost obsessed with self-sufficiency.

That did not explain why they were out in the storm at night. It was not as if they had been traveling to a new campsite. They hadbeenat the one site for over a week and according to the registration had not checked out. The sheriff said they had left behind a folding camp table, two canvas chairs, and a large cooler. As she lay thinking, warm between the two cats, she heard a car slide past the house and wondered idly who was out at four in the morning. Maybe a police car.

And as Wilma drifted off again into a depressed and anxious sleep, across the village the hardtop sedan pulled into the garage of a small rental cottage that stood behind a brown-shingled house. The cottage had once been servants’ quarters.

The minute the ten-year-old Cadillac sedan entered through the automatic door, the door rolled down behind it. Inside, by the light from the door opener, the three girls unloaded the clothes. Most were still on their hangers, which Leah hung in the oversize metal storage lockers that lined the garage wall. She filled five lockers and snapped on padlocks. Four other units stood unlocked.

Leaving the car and letting themselves out the side door, which Candy locked behind them, the three girls headed away in separate directions, each to her own home. As Candy and Leah melted quickly into the night, Dillon, hurrying toward her own home, kept well away from the shadows. She didn’t like being out in the small hours alone, though she would never let the others know that. Her girlfriends were about the only family she had now that she could count on. Her mother was zilch, a zero. And her dad had caved. He didn’t fight back, he didn’t do anything. He was just very quiet, turning away even from her-so patient and tolerant with Helen that he made Dillon retch. If she’d been her dad, she’d have packed up and hauled out of there, the two of them. Leave Helen to ruin her life any way she wanted.

Or she’d have booted Helen out and changed the locks, let her move in with what’s-his-name.

But he wasn’t doing either; he wasn’t doing anything. Moving quickly along the dark streets, she was just a few blocks from home when she started thinking about that contractor, Ryan Flannery; when she saw suddenly a flash of green eyes and heard again the woman’s rude comments, there in the Harper kitchen.Bitch.

Except, hearing Ryan’s voice, for a moment Dillon was drawn beyond her anger. Ryan’s retort had been almost exactly the same as Captain Harper’s angry words.

And a small still voice down inside Dillon asked, what was she going to do about Ryan Flannery’s challenge?

15 [��������: pic_16.jpg]

Kate Osborne didn’t learn about Lucinda and Pedric’s deaths until Sunday evening as she waited for the elderly couple to arrive for their visit. Lucinda had called two nights before, to say they’d be there by late afternoon, that they would be driving down from somewhere near Russian River, some little out-of-the way campground. And Kate had to smile. She was sure Lucinda hadn’t had this much fun in all her adult life before she married Pedric. Her earlier marriage to Shamus, while busy with social functions and exciting for the first few years, had deteriorated as Lucinda aged, Lucinda staying home ignoring the truth while Shamus played fast and loose.

“I thought we’d eat in,” Kate had told her. “That you might be tired, so I’d planned a little something at home. I make a mean creole, if you’d like that.”

“That sounds like heaven,” Lucinda had said. “A hot shower and a good hot creole supper. Couldn’t be better. We’ll plan to take you out the next night.” Kate thought that maybe, with Lucinda and Pedric there, she could get her head on straight, maybe could look at her own problems more objectively. This last week had been so strange and unsettling.

She had actually grown reluctant to go out at all after dark, and that was so stupid. But of course she’d have to work late, if she were to finish with her present clients in a timely manner. The work week would have been satisfying if she hadn’t kept watching nervously for the man who had followed her to reappear.

At least she had found her extra keys in the drawer where she sometimes kept them; they had fallen down between the folds of her sweaters. That had eased her mind; and nothing in the apartment had, again, been disturbed. The windows had remained locked, and she saw no one lingering down in the street.

But still she was nervous. And then on Thursday evening, leaving work, she saw him. When she started out of the building, a man stood across the street, tucked into the darkness of an unlit doorway. She had stepped back inside her building.

She couldn’t tell if he was watching her, couldn’t tell if it was the same man. She had remained inside the glass door until he left the mosaic of shadows, ambling on down the street in plain view, a perfectly ordinary man wearing nondescript jeans and a brown windbreaker-but his face had been turned away. She wanted to see his face. And in spite of common sense, her fear escalated. The next day, did she imagine a shadow slipping away behind a building? Imagine that the man on the crowded sidewalk in broad daylight was keeping pace with her?

Then late last night she’d heard a series of thuds, either in the apartment or on the roof.

Taking her flashlight and her vial of pepper spray, she had made the rounds of her familiar rooms. Nothing had been amiss. But then this morning she’d noticed two desk drawers protruding, not pushed in all the way. And the couch and chair cushions were awry, and a kitchen cabinet door ajar. This had occurred after she had prowled at midnight. Then she found a wad of short black hair on the kitchen counter.

She had flushed it down the toilet and Cloroxed the countertop. She had no idea how the cat was getting in. No lock had been disturbed, and she had found her lost keys, though she supposed they could have been copied then returned to her. But what was the purpose? Consuela knew by now that the jewels were not here; she must have learned that the first time she searched the apartment.

Kate was not afraid of Consuela. And sheshouldnot be afraid of the black tomcat. On Sunday, with Lucinda and Pedric due to arrive, she hurried home from finishing a stack of orders at the office, showered, and dressed comfortably in a velour jogging suit and scuffs. She wanted dinner preparations finished early, as they would be there before dark. She boiled the shrimp and made the creole sauce and measured the rice to be cooked. She set the table in the little dining room with her new paisley place mats, and put together a salad with all but the two ripe avocados she’d selected from her hoard on the windowsill. She set an amaretto cheesecake out to thaw. The scent of the freshly boiled shrimp and of the creole sauce filled the apartment, stirring her hunger. She filled the coffeepot, using a specially ground decaf, and curled up on the couch near the phone with a book, waiting for Lucinda’s call that they were about to cross the Golden Gate. From the bridge, it was only ten minutes.

She read for some time Loren Eiseley’s keen observations of the world. Strange that they were so late; it was growing dusky. Traffic must be heavy; not a good time to come into the city, with people returning from the weekend. When it was nearly dark, she rose to pull the draperies. Before closing those on the east, she stood a moment looking out toward East Bay, watching the lights of Berkeley and Oakland smear and fade in the gathering fog. She hoped Lucinda and Pedric arrived before the fog grew thick. Making a weak drink, she returned to her book. Only belatedly did she pick up the phone to see if they had left a message on the service before she ever got home.

She no longer used an answering machine; three power outages with the resultant failure of the machine had prompted her to subscribe to the phone company’s uninterrupted reception even when the phones were out.

There was no beeping message signal. There was no sound at all from the receiver, no dial tone.

How long had the system been out? This happened every now and then, particularly in bad weather. As her apartment had not been disturbed, she didn’t think anyone had tampered with the line.

Lucinda didn’t have the number of her cell phone. Anyway, she realized suddenly, she’d left that phone in the car, plugged into the dash, the battery removed to keep it from turning to jelly She had meant to bring it up with her; now she did not want to go out in the night to get it. She was disgusted that she had forgotten it when all this last week she had carried the phone even when she walked.

It was nearly seven thirty when she poured herself another mild drink and decided to fix a plate of cheese and crackers to calm her rumbling stomach. Lucinda had said they’d been up around Fort Bragg, poking along the coast. They did love their rambling life. For a pair of eighty-year-olds, those two folks were remarkable. Slicing the cheese, she reached to turn on the little kitchen TV that had been a birthday present to herself. She didn’t watch much TV, but she liked to have the news on while she was getting dinner. Shaking out the crackers, she caught something about an accident in Sonoma County. An RV and a tanker truck. She glimpsed a brief shot of the wreck, the vehicles so badly burned you couldn’t tell what they had looked like. Fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances filled the screen. She stood at the kitchen counter unmoving.

When had this happened? This couldn’t be�

She relaxed when the newscaster said the collision had happened late last night. This had happened while Lucinda and Pedric were safely asleep in their RV, or in some cozy inn up the coast-not at a time when the Greenlaws would have been on the highway.

She didn’t like to look at the TV pictures. It was a terrible wreck, those poor people hadn’t had a chance. She had reached for the remote, to turn to another channel, when a cut of the newscaster came on, interviewing the Sonoma County sheriff. She paused, curious in spite of herself.

“Now that the nearest relatives have been notified, we are able to release the names of the deceased. The tanker driver, Ken Doyle of Concord, is survived by a wife and two young children.” There was a still shot of a dark-haired young woman holding a little boy and a fat baby. “The occupants of the RV were residents of Molena Point. Lucinda and Pedric Greenlaw had been�”

She couldn’t move. Suddenly she couldn’t breathe.

“� vacationing up the Northern California coast. The eighty-year-old newlyweds, who were married just last year in a Molena Point ceremony, were returning home to the central-coast village�”

She needed to sit down. She stood leaning against the counter, holding on to the counter, staring at the TV.

She had seen Lucinda and Pedric only a few weeks ago. She had spent the evening with them. She left the kitchen, making her way to the living room and the couch, which seemed miles.

Sat with her head down between her knees as she had been taught as a child, until the nausea passed.

Why would Lucinda and Pedric be on the road late at night?

A long time later she rose to put the shrimp and creole sauce and salad in the refrigerator. Standing in the kitchen with her back to the TV and the sound turned off, she made herself a double whiskey and took it into the living room.

But there, she couldn’t help it, she turned on the larger TV mindlessly changing channels looking for more news, though she did not want to see any more. The wreck had happened Saturday night while she lay sleeping. Today she had gone about her pointless affairs while Lucinda and Pedric lay dead. She had stopped at the grocery, buying shrimp, flowers for the table, imagining the thin, wrinkled couple tooling along in their nice RV, stopping at antique shops, stopping to eat cracked crab� Staring at the TV, she didn’t know what to do or what to think. She simply sat.

Did Wilma know? She ought to call Wilma. Should she call Clyde, ask Clyde to tell Wilma? Clyde was closer to Wilma than she was, they were like family. If they knew, why hadn’t they called her?

And she couldn’t call out; the line was dead.

She’d have to go down and get her cell phone. How stupid, to have left it in the car. Fetching her keys, she pulled on her coat, snatched up the pepper spray, locked the door behind her, and went down the stairs, hating this sense of fear. Reaching the garage she moved quickly, watching between other cars. Unlocking her Riviera she snatched up the phone, hit the lock, and slammed the door. She was up the stairs and in the apartment again before fear had immobilized her. This was crazy; she couldn’t live like this. On a hunch, she tried the apartment phone again-and got the insistent beeping of the message service.

Sitting down on the couch with the now functioning phone, she started to play back her messages, then decided first to call Clyde. She needed, very much, to hear his gruff and reassuring voice.

The downstairs rooms of the Damen cottage were dark, but upstairs behind the closed shutters the bedroom and study were bright, the desk lamp lit, a warming fire burning in the study where Clyde sat at his desk filling out parts orders. Or trying to, working around the prone body of the sleeping gray tomcat where he lay sprawled across the catalogs. Far be it from Joe to move. Far be it from Clyde, who found the tomcat as amusing as he was exasperating, to ask him.

Ryan had left half an hour ago, after an early supper in the big new kitchen: takeout from their favorite Mexican cafe. Impatiently waiting for the building permit for the Harper place, she had gone home to her blueprints, anxious to finish putting together a design proposal for a remodel at the north end of the village. “I want to get that wrapped up, so I can concentrate on the Harper job.”

“You are not,” Clyde had said, “going to get so busy that you keep pulling men off one job to work on another, like most contractors? Delaying all the jobs?”

“No fear.” She had grinned at him, flipping back her short dark hair. “I can manage my work better than that.” She had given him a warm, green-eyed smile and laid her hand over his; her closeness led him, more and more lately, to imagine her always there with him. He sat at his desk now thinking about Ryan sharing the house, comfortable and warm and exciting.

Clyde’s view of women had changed dramatically since the time, a few years back, when every conquest was exciting, when every new looker was a challenge even if he couldn’t stand her as a person. Joe Grey had chided him more than once about bringing home some airhead. Well, that life was not for him anymore; the idea of bringing home some bimbo now disgusted him.

The change had started when Kate left her husband and came to him for help. He had been so smitten with her, and for so long, but after that night when he had hidden her from Jimmie, he had been so confused by her bizarre nature.

He had mooned over Kate for a long time after that, but she had distanced herself. She had known better than he that with the difference between them a relationship would never work; she had seen too clearly his fear of her impossible talents.

The night she left Jimmie and came running here to him, he would not believe what she told him about her alternate self, although her feline nature was part of the reason Jimmie wanted to kill her. In order to prove to him what she could do, she had done it. Standing before him, whispering some unlikely spell, she had taken the form of a cat. A cream-colored cat, sleek and beautiful, with golden eyes like Kate’s and marmalade markings.

His fear had been considerable. He had charged into the bedroom and slammed the door and wouldn’t open it. He did not want to see her again in either form. The next day he’d been better, although the concept still shook him. He became civil once more; but he would never get over it.

And yet even after that shattering incident, he had longed for her, had tried every way to get her to come home again after she moved to San Francisco.

Neither Joe nor Dulcie could take human form. Nor did Joe Grey want to; the tomcat said he liked his life as it was, that the talents hehadwere plenty. Well, the upshot for Clyde was that he had begun to look at a woman as aperson.To want to know who she was and what she thought about life.

While pining over Kate, he had dated Charlie, a woman as honest and real as anyone he’d ever known. It was then he had let himself realize, as he had known deeply all along, what the real values were. It was then he put away his shallow philosophy and turned, as Max had done years before, to look at what a woman believed deep down, what she cared about in life.

Joe Grey would say, big sea change. The tomcat had ragged him plenty about his earlier lifestyle. Clyde stared down at Joe now. The tomcat seemed to make himself twice as big when he sprawled across a desk where a person was working. “You wouldn’t consider rolling over, so I can finish this order?”

Joe stared up at him, his yellow eyes wide and innocent. “You think you should try Kate again? The phone has to be out, it wouldn’t be busy all this time, even Kate can’t talk that long-but she has to be home, she’s expecting Lucinda and Pedric, she’ll be worried.”

They had been trying all evening to get her, calling both the house and her cell phone. Clyde wished he had started calling that morning. Both he and Wilma had been waiting for more information, for the sheriff to find the bodies, for some assurance the old couple had indeed been killed. Then when he tried to get Kate this evening, busy signal. “I left a dozen messages on her cell phone. Why the hell doesn’t she check her messages!”

Joe said, “Maybe by now she’s had the TV on. If it’s been on the news, she�”

Again Clyde hit the redial. If shehadseen the news, if she knew, maybe she was talking with Wilma.

He got another busy. Five minutes passed as he tried to work, patiently lifting Joe’s gray paw to check a price, peering under a gray ear to retrieve a parts number.

“Try again,” Joe said. “I’m worried about her.”

Clyde tried three more times before Kate’s phone rang. Just one ring, and she picked up. Clyde left the speaker on so Joe wouldn’t crowd him pressing against the phone. “Kate? You okay?”

“No, I’m not okay. Did you�”

“You heard the news.”

“This can’t have happened. It’s impossible to believe. What were they doing out on the highway in the middle of the night? If they’d had some emergency, say one of them got sick, they’d have called the medics. Or the sheriff. Or a cab. They’d been staying in a campground, they could have called the manager. Have you talked with anyone up there? The highway patrol? The Sonoma County sheriff? What have they found? Couldn’t it be some kind of mistake? The wrong RV. Or maybe they-”

Clyde said, “Wilma talked with the sheriff. They’ve had a crew there all day going through the wreckage.”

“And?”

“They-So far, no bodies. Nothing much at all left.” He glanced at Joe. “It was a terrible fire, Kate. Ashes, rubble. The truck driver� they did find his body, in his crashed truck. The truck wasn’t burned as badly as the RV.”

Kate was silent for a long time. When she spoke again, her voice was very small. “They were so happy together. Their late marriage was like a fairy tale, like one of their Old-World folktales. It isn’t fair. They were having such a good time traveling. And planning to build their dream house�”

Clyde stared at the phone.

“It’s all wrong,” Kate said. “Their campsite hadn’t been vacated, they left canvas chairs, a folding table set up under the pines. The late news said some towels were left hanging on a portable line, an expensive bear-proof garbage can.”

The fur along Joe Grey’s spine felt rigid. His paws were cold as he sorted through the facts-Lucinda and Pedric heading for San Francisco to stay with Kate, Lucinda with the same kind of jewelry that Consuela had gone to steal from Kate and that the appraiser had tried to buy.

Moving closer to the phone, Joe placed a paw on Clyde’s hand, staring at the speaker.

Clyde scowled and shoved the phone at him.

“In spite of this mess,” Joe said into the speaker, “one seemingly unrelated question. Did you get there in time?”

“I did,” she said sadly. “I moved it all, thanks to you. I wanted to call but I� Joe, that cat has been here. Inside my apartment.”

“The cat can’t hurt you, Kate.” He paused. He wasn’t sure of that. “But Consuela could,” he said staring at the phone. This whole gig made him edgy; this stuff was happening too far away, and there were too many loose pieces, events that didn’t add up. “Come home, Kate. Come back to the village now.” He glanced at Clyde. “You can stay with us.”

Clyde looked surprised, then nodded.

“And I’ve been followed,” Kate said.

“Followed where? When was this? Consuela? Who?”

“A man. I�”

Clyde nudged Joe away from the speaker. “Did you report it to the police? Do you know him?”

“I� No. And I didn’t report it, not yet.”

“Why not?“Clyde snapped. “Never mind. Kate, get a second appraisal on the jewelry. This is all too weird.”

“Emerson Bristol has an excellent reputation, Clyde. He’s a big name in the city.”

“You researched the subject,” Clyde said. “You know that such unusual work, made by a master craftsman, ought to be cataloged somewhere. Even if it is paste. You said you’ve been through all the catalogs, the books in San Francisco Public and in the museums. Don’t you think it’s strange that there’s absolutely no mention of it?”

“Yes,” she said in a small voice.

“I don’t like this. Joe’s right. Come home, Kate. Bring that stuff down here to someone in the village-someone Harper recommends.”

“I have so much work, installations�”

“Come home, Kate. Come now.”

“I� After tonight, I feel all in pieces. Will you call me when you know more about Lucinda and Pedric? More about what happened?”

Clyde sighed. “I’ll call you.”

“And� there’s something else,” she said. “I almost forgot. Likely it’s nothing, but� I threw out some newspapers when I was cleaning up, but I saved one. It was dated three days before Charlie’s gallery opening. There was a jewel robbery here, on Market Street. A cheap, touristy kind of place. It happened around six in the evening, just before the shop closed. The police got there before the three men could get away. They arrested two, but the third man got a cop down and escaped. The paper said he took a hard blow to the forehead, the store owner hit him with a brick. It’s probably coincidence,” Kate said, “but I�”

“Harper is checking the police records for fights,” Clyde said with interest. “For batterings, anything like that. He’s sure to catch it, but I’ll tell him. Save the paper, the date. And come home, Kate. Where it’s safe. We all miss you.”

“I’ll think about it, Clyde. Good-night, you guys.” Her voice was weepy. “Good-night,” she whispered. “I guess I feel better.”

When Clyde hung up, Joe dropped off the desk and leaped to Clyde’s new leather easy chair that sat before the fire. Clyde had brought the Molena PointGazetteupstairs with him. The Greenlaw accident filled the upper half of the front page. Scanning the article, he saw with disappointment that it gave no more information than the TV news had supplied.

The lower half of the page was devoted to Saturday night’s clothing store burglary. Alice’s Mirror had been relieved of its highest-priced stock. There was no sign of forced entry. The theft hadn’t been discovered until this morning when the owner opened the store for the usual Sunday tourists.

Joe sat staring into the fire, wondering how much he should tell Clyde. It was just this morning, the morning after the Greenlaw accident, that Kit had told Joe himself, and Dulcie, about the missing key.

After their night on Hellhag Hill, Joe had awakened very late, alone in the rumpled bed. The bedside clock said 8:15, half the day gone, from any cat’s point of view. Clyde would long ago have gone to work. Joe was crawling out from among the tangled sheets when the phone rang. He didn’t knock the bedside phone from its cradle, but trotted through to the study. Leaping to the desk, he listened as the machine answered.

Only one word was spoken.“Joe?“Dulcie hissed.

He hit the speaker.“Damen residence.”

“Jolly’s,“she said softly and immediately hung up.

He hit the erase button and was out of there, leaping to the rafter above the desk and up through his rooftop cat door.

Pausing in his private tower for a drink of water, he raced out across the shingles, then along an oak branch, across slanting and angled roofs until he was forced to descend to the sidewalk, at the divided lanes and grassy median of Ocean Avenue. Crossing Ocean among the feet of a group of tourists, he shied away from their reaching hands.What a smart cat, crossing the street with us� Cute kitty�Do you think he’s lost? We could�Dodging away, he headed for Jolly’s alley. Dulcie’s voice had sounded desperate. All manner of disasters, most of them involving the kit, had raced through his tomcat mind as he swerved along the sidewalks and at last into Jolly’s alley.

16 [��������: pic_17.jpg]

Belting into the alley, Joe found Dulcie and the kit crouched beneath the jasmine vine beside the deli’s back door, their ears down, their eyes filled with distress. Though it was midmorning, the alley was empty. No other cats, no tourists. George Jolly’s ever-present offering of delicacies stood untouched before the closed deli door. The kit had not even sampled the smoked salmon and egg custard. She sat staring listlessly down at her paws. Joe nudged at her, deeply distressed by her grieving for Lucinda and Pedric. Pushing in beneath the vine, he nosed at her. When she glanced up at him, the kit looked not only heartbroken, but ashamed.

“What?” Joe said. Dulcie, too, looked devastated.“What?“he repeated. “What’s with you two?”

“She took the key,” the kit said.

“Who did? What key?”

“Dillon. I should have told before but I thought� I didn’t want her to be in trouble.”

“Whatkey, Kit? Key to what?”

But he knew.

“The key to the back door of Alice’s Mirror,” Dulcie said. “The store that was burglarized last night. It was on the local news this morning.”

“I followed them,” the kit said. “The four girls. One afternoon weeks ago. Followed them into Alice’s Mirror. They were acting so� I just knew they were going to do something. I slipped inside behind a rack of satin and velvet and I watched them. Dillon looked so� sort of wandering pretending not to look all around. Like a bird when it’s busy pecking the ground but really watching you. She was wandering just beside the door to the shop’s office, admiring a rack of blouses, sliding them along-then she vanished.

“I could see her in the office where customers aren’t supposed to go, so I went in there behind her. She didn’t see me; I slid behind some boxes and watched.” The kit sighed. “She took a key from a hook beside the desk and slipped out again and left the shop. Her two friends picked out some clothes, asked a clerk some questions about them and took them to a fitting room. I went outside and saw Dillon down the street, handing something to Consuela. Consuela turned and hurried away. I went up an oak tree until she came back and gave it back to Dillon; it was a key. Dillon went back inside the shop. I followed and watched her put it back in the office, hang it on a little hook. Then in a minute, all three girls left and they met Consuela outside.

“And I ran home.

“But I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t want to tell Wilma or you or anyone. I knew I should call Captain Harper, but I didn’t want to get Dillon in trouble and make the captain feel worse about her, so I didn’t do anything. I curled up under the afghan and tried to sleep and pretend it didn’t happen.”

Joe Grey listened quietly. All along, Kit had carried this burden, wanting to protect Dillon. Kit looked up at him. “They copied it, didn’t they? In one of those key places. It was all over the news. The burglary.”

Joe nuzzled her and licked her ear, and the three cats looked at one another. What was happening to Dillon? And, more to the point, what were they to do about it?

Joe said, “It’s time to tell the captain.”

The kit’s eyes widened; but she didn’t argue. She just looked very sad.

“The closest key maker to Alice’s Mirror,” Joe said, “is Jarman’s, just down the street behind the fire station. Otherwise she’d have to go out on the highway.” Thoughtfully he licked his paw. “Mr. Jarman would remember her.”

Harry Jarman was an elderly, round-faced, gray-haired, gentle old man who had been making keys for the village ever since he was a young fellow. He knew everyone in Molena Point. Even though Consuela hadn’t been in the village long, the old man would know who she was, he didn’t miss a thing. If he had made a key for Consuela Benton, he would remember that.

Dulcie licked the kit’s ear. “Don’t grieve, Kit. You did just right to tell us. This is best for Dillon, she can’t go on like this, she’d have no life.” Dulcie looked at Joe. “You want to call the captain, or shall I?”

“I’ll call him. I can tell him Consuela took the key to be copied. I don’t have to mention Dillon.”

Dulcie’s eyes widened. The kit’s ears pricked up, and her tail lifted more cheerfully. But as the three cats headed for Dulcie’s house and the phone, Joe himself felt frustrated and sad. Even if he didn’t mention Dillon, Garza and Harper would know; they would quickly uncover the younger girl’s role in the matter. And, glancing at Dulcie, he knew she was thinking the same.

Before Max Harper had the interior of the building that housed Molena Point PD remodeled, his desk had occupied a six-by-six space at the back of the open squad room. He’d had no walls for privacy, no bookshelves, preferring, then, a work area where he could see and hear everything that went on among his officers: a sacrifice of privacy for control that Harper no longer needed. Now, since the remodeling, the captain enjoyed the luxury of real walls and a solid door, which he had quickly come to appreciate. Charlie said he’d lived a spartan life long enough. She had bought the leather couch as an anniversary present: one month married, time to celebrate. She had added two red leather easy chairs and a bright India rug from their own home. Three of Charlie’s drawings hung on the walls where Max could enjoy them, portraits of Max’s gelding, Bucky. Harper’s work calendar and charts stood in a rack to the right of his desk, at easy glance for the chief but not openly displayed to visitors-though that did not deter Joe Grey.

Joe entered Harper’s office this morning on the heels of Mabel Farthy, the blond and portly dispatcher, as she delivered Harper’s early lunch, her approach down the hall wafting the scent of garlic and pastrami like a long and diaphanous bridal veil behind her. As Mabel set the takeout bag on the desk, and Harper turned to slip some reports into the file drawer, a swift gray shadow slid behind the couch.

Charlie had carefully arranged the furniture with the cats in mind. The couch stood as near the door as she could manage, and she had chosen a style with legs high enough so Joe and Dulcie didn’t have to squeeze down like pancakes. Feline surveillance didn’t have to be an exercise in flattened spines and shallow breathing.

Joe, drinking in the heavy aroma of pastrami, watched two sets of shoes enter: Detective Garza’s tan leather loafers and Detective Juana Davis’s regulation black oxfords over black stockings. Garza settled into one of the red leather chairs, stretching out his long legs. His tan chinos were neatly pressed, his Dockers fashionably scuffed.

Beneath the couch, Joe made sure his paws were out of sight-he didn’t want to appear to be spying.

Dallas Garza had a deep fondness for fine hunting dogs, but until recently he had never understood, or given much thought to, cats-until Joe Grey came on the scene. Working judiciously on Garza’s attitude, Joe had seen the detective develop, over many months, an almost passable fondness for certain felines, at least for those cats who crossed his professional path.

Having spent a week freeloading in the Garza cottage closely observing the detective, Joe had decided that he could trust this new addition to the department. Of course Garza had no notion of the intimate telephone conversations and interdepartmental reports that he had shared that week with the gray tomcat.

As Joe pulled in his paws, Detective Davis sat down at the end of the couch just above him. As she slipped off her shoes and tucked her feet up under her, her shifting weight forced little squinching noises from the new leather. Protocol was not an issue with these three; you could take your shoes off if you liked. Only honesty and ethics mattered. Juana, Max, and Dallas played poker together, usually in Clyde and Joe’s kitchen.

As the three tucked into their deli lunch, Joe couldn’t help an occasional drool dampening Harper’s new carpet. Listening to paper rattling and the sounds of their satisfied munching amid small talk, he had a long and hungry wait before Harper laid down his sandwich and picked up a file of reports.

Covetously Joe eyed the sandwich, but told himself to forget it. He could see from his position beneath the couch a long reflection in the glass-fronted bookcase that gave him a view of Harper’s desk. This thoughtful touch, too, had been Charlie’s. She and Joe had tested it early one morning when Harper was downstairs on the indoor pistol range.

Harper looked up at Garza. “You have no indication that Quinn’s house had been broken into.”

“None,” Garza said. “And no other prints besides Quinn’s. Only Quinn’s prints on the handle of the gas jet, where of course his prints would be.”

Harper shuffled the stack of papers. “There seems nothing out of place here, among his real estate transactions. Both Helen and their broker have been over everything, found nothing out of the way, except for the missing notebook. You searched the real estate office?”

“Yes,” Davis said. “The broker, James Holland, helped Helen look for the notebook while I waited. They ransacked the entire office. We searched Quinn’s car again, took out the seats, everything short of dismantling the vehicle.”

“The notebook may be of no value,” Harper said, “but the case is open until it’s found.”

The three were silent, finishing their lunches. Harper asked Davis about two identity thefts that had been reported, both involving scams on local residents. These piqued Joe’s interest because this was the first he’d heard about them. Crimes like identity theft made him glad he was a cat without the encumbrance of a charge card, social security number, and other invitations to embezzlement.

“The victims are getting their papers together,” Davis said. “Paid bills, canceled checks. Both have retained attorneys. The one woman, Sheila James, is looking at a five-thousand-dollar-a-month mortgage on a house that is, in fact, completely paid for. The other folks, Ron and Sandy Bueller, moved here just a year ago. Six new credit card accounts in their name, some sixty thousand in debts outstanding, so far, plus payments on a two-million-dollar piece of land in the north part of the county that they didn’t buy and have never seen.”

Davis shifted her position on the couch; the leather creaked again. “All of that within the space of a week. And we have nothing so far. Zilch.”

That, Joe knew, was par for the course in these cases. The officers discussed every possible venue at their disposal to get a line on the guy; Davis and Garza were working on them all, and would keep digging; the loopholes, the lack of ways to nail these thieves was, Joe thought, like chasing mice through a metal grating: the chasee escapes, the chaser bangs his nose on the barrier.

“What about the Greenlaw accident?” Davis said. “Still no bodies?”

“Not so much as a scorched bone,” Harper told her. “Sheriff thinks, now, that neither of the Greenlaws was in the RV when it crashed. He’s searching the area, thinking they might have been murdered and dumped before the wreck.

“If they were alive,” Harper said, “someone would have heard from them. Wilma, certainly. She’s not only Lucinda’s friend, but her executor. She’s ready to drive up there, car gassed up, suitcase packed. She’d like to help the sheriff’s teams search but right now there’s nothing she can do that they’re not on top of. Sheriff has dogs out, the works.”

“They’re eighty years old,” Garza said. “There are some desolate stretches in those forests.”

“Eighty years old and tough as boots,” Harper replied. “Certainly Pedric is. And Lucinda, since they married, has become just about as strong mentally and emotionally. When Shamas was alive, Lucinda was little more than a wilting violet, acted like she was scared of her own shadow.”

Harper studied his two detectives. “I had a call this morning, about the burglary at Alice’s Mirror.

“Our favorite snitch,” Harper said, “suggested we ask Harry Jarman about a key he might have duplicated for Consuela Benton.” The captain smiled. “I picked up a key from Alice’s Mirror this morning, stopped by Jarman’s with it. He remembered Consuela coming in a couple of weeks ago. I laid seven keys on the counter, six from my own pocket.

“He picked it out right away. Remembered he’d used the last blank like that, and had to order more.”

Davis gave a little pleased”All right!“Dallas laughed softly.

“I have aBe-on-the-lookoutfor Consuela,” Harper said. “Soon as we can print her, if we get a match, maybe we can make a case and get a warrant for the cottage she’s renting up on Carpenter. I understand the garage is part of the rental deal.”

Beneath the couch, Joe Grey grinned.Right on, Kit,he thought, both saddened and relieved.You nailed her. And if the department can make Consuela for masterminding the burglary, maybe it will go easier for Dillon.And, Joe thought, the cops might need a warrant to toss Consuela’s rental. But a cat didn’t.

The three officers moved on to the rash of coastal burglaries, and for over an hour they discussed the various reports from up and down the California coast, comparing MOs. The information from some two dozen fences was all negative. None of the stolen items had been traced to any of the known fences. The burglaries covered the geographic area from Malibu in the south to Point Reyes in the north, and inland as far as Oakland and Berkeley and Thousand Oaks. Garza had prepared a chart on the computer, listing the dates of the burglaries, the time of day they were discovered, the length of time since the items had last been seen. In the case of jewelry kept in a home safe, the lapse of time might amount to several months, the piece in question might have disappeared at any time during that period. There had been no report at all on Clyde’s antique Packard.

Peering out from beneath the couch, Joe could barely see the chart without being seen himself, without his gray-and-white nose and whiskers protruding. As the three officers talked, Davis swung one stockinged foot over, twiddling her toes just inches from Joe’s nose. Her feet smelled of talcum powder. Dallas’s chart showed all social gatherings at each address within the last three years, with size and description of events, from dinner parties to charity functions. An addendum provided guest lists, and lists of household help and maintenance people for each event.

None of the houses had been for sale, none had been shown to buyers. Joe was awed at Garza’s thoroughness, and at the details possible when law enforcement from different cities shared information. Seven names surfaced as guests in more than two of the burgled residences. Joe grew so interested, pushing out farther and farther, that his whiskers brushed Juana’s ankle. She jerked her foot away and leaned over, peering under the couch to see what was there.

Joe Grey was gone, curled into a ball among the shadows of the far corner, hiding the white markings on his face and chest and paws, and squinching his eyes closed.

When Juana decided there was nothing under there and settled back, Joe crept out again where he could see. It was interesting that, of the list of guests, three had themselves been victims of that rash of bizarre thefts. The statistics were broken down further into a morass of facts, which, without the written information before him, left the tomcat’s head spinning.

He watched enviously as Garza printed it all out and stepped down the hall to the dispatcher’s desk to make copies. He would dearly love to have that printout. But even without a copy, two names on the list held Joe’s attention.

A woman up the coast in Marin County had attended four of the listed affairs, all charity events. And Molena Point’s own Marlin Dorriss had been a guest at five of those houses, at private dinner parties.

In no case had the two been guests at the same function.

“Dorriss knows everyone,” Detective Davis said. “He’s all over the state, on the board of a dozen museums and as many charities.” She laughed. “Until this business with Helen Thurwell, Dorriss appeared to be without flaw in his personal life. And that,” she said coolly, “is all the more reason to check him out.”

Dallas said, “Max, you talked with Susan Dorriss-Susan Brittain? Her husband was Marlin Dorriss’s brother? Why did she suddenly change back to her maiden name, all these years after her husband died?”

“She’s never been close to her brother-in-law,” Harper said. “Something to do with Dorriss’s two sons, her husband’s nephews. Bad apples, Susan says. She didn’t see much of Dorriss when they all lived in San Francisco. Said that not until after she moved down to the village to be with her daughter, did she know that Marlin had a place here.

“Then she had that accident and was in the nursing home, and she didn’t think much about him. But after she recovered and was back in her own place she ran into Marlin. That distressed her, that he was living here. That’s when she decided to drop the name, exhibit no more connection with him than necessary.”

“All because of his sons?” Juana asked.

“She said they were impossible as young boys and she’d heard they were no better now. She was very critical of the way Marlin raised them. I got the impression that if she’d known he had a home in the village part-time, she might not have moved to Molena Point at all.”

“Interesting,” Garza said. “Didn’t her daughter tell her?”

“No, she didn’t,” Max said. “Susan thinks that’s because her daughter wanted her to move down, to get out of the city. I’d give a month’s pay to see his phone and Visa bills, his gas station receipts. See if we could put him in those locations during the burglaries.”

“That’s stretching a bit,” Dallas said. “No way the judge would issue a search warrant on that kind of conjecture. And if we went directly to the phone company and to his credit card people, if we got into that gray area�”

“I don’t like to beat a dead horse,” Davis said, “but life was simpler twenty years ago.”

Garza grunted in agreement, then the three were silent. And beneath the couch, Joe Grey smiled. Marlin Dorriss might be as innocent and clean as driven snow, but the guy was worth checking out.

17 [��������: pic_18.jpg]

On a rocky point just at the south edge of the village, Marlin Dorriss’s villa rose among giant boulders that had been tumbled there eons before by the earth’s angry upheaval. Its montage of angles and converging planes reflected moving light from the sea’s crashing waves. The pale structure seemed, to some, harsh and ungiving. Others, including Dorriss himself, admired the play of light across its pristine surfaces, the shifting shadows always changing beneath swiftly blowing skies.

Few windows faced the street. Those slim openings, like gun slits, glinted now in the morning sun as Joe Grey slunk among the boulders. Studying the house, he prayed that he hadn’t left Dulcie in danger as she went to investigate Consuela’s rented house. He had made her promise that if she heard any noise from within, any small hint of a human presence, she’d get the hell out of there fast.

“What can happen? So I’m hunting mice. If a mouse ran in through an open window, why wouldn’t I follow?”

“Not everyone loves a prowling cat. Just be careful.”

“You’re feeling guilty because you suggested this gig and you’re not coming with me. I think it’s a blast. Who knows what I’ll find?”

“I had hoped the kit-”

Dulcie had flashed him a look of green-eyed impatience. “Idon’t know where she is. Andyouknow she’d only make trouble. She’d be into everything, and I’m always afraid she’ll start talking a mile a minute.”

But Joe had parted from Dulcie with an unaccustomed fear tickling along his spine, a taut wariness that almost made him turn back. Only the urgency of Marlin Dorriss’s personal papers led him on, calling to him like the sound of mice scurrying in the walls.

It would set him up big time to lay his claws on the precise evidence that Max Harper would so like to obtain, papers that Harper’s officers couldn’t legally search for, and without which they might never have the lead they needed-if indeed Dorrisswasinvolved in these high-class thefts.

And if Dorriss wasn’t the thief, nothing lost. A few hours’ adventure.

“You’re courting trouble,” Dulcie had told him. “Getting too bold. That place is huge, and built like a fort. Let me come�”

“We really need to know where the stolen clothes are hidden,” he’d said, and had bullied until he sent her away; and now he couldn’t stop worrying about her. She had left him, scowling, her ears back, her tail lashing, her parting words, “You’re going to trip on your own claws if you’re not careful,” ringing in his ears as he crossed the village.

But what was life for, if not to balance on the edge? He just didn’t want to put Dulcie in that danger. Consuela’s small house led itself to quicker escape. Anyway, he had not the faintest notion that he would fail. With sufficient tenacity and clever paw work, why should he fail? Every human had bills to pay; every human kept his paid bills stashed in some drawer or cubbyhole.

“And how,” Dulcie had said, “are you going to keep from implicating Detectives Garza and Davis? You daren’t make it look like one of them broke into Dorriss’s. They both were there in Harper’s office when he talked about the bills.”

Joe had been worrying about that. He’d told Dulcie, “No problem. I’ll think about that after the deed.” If he could find evidence that Dorriss had been in those towns at the time of the burglaries, Harper would have something to work on. It had to be frustrating to have a multimillion-dollar case like this and not a useful bit of evidence. Harper and Dallas Garza’s strong cop-sense that Dorriss could be involved was good enough, anytime, for Joe Grey.

A granite-paved parking area curved before the front of the house, between the huge pale boulders and the natural, informal gardens. Granite flagstones led to the heavily carved front door that was recessed beneath a white slab. Above the door at either side, surveillance cameras looked down on Joe. To a master of break-and-enter, the place looked like Fort Knox. He hoped to hell those cameras weren’t running at the moment, closely monitoring him. Even if he was only an innocent feline, electronic surveillance made him nervous-though Dorriss ought to be happy to have a stray cat wandering the property ridding the area of unwanted moles and gophers.

Passing the entry he trotted along the side of the house to the back, into a fine mist of sea spray. Crossing the stone patio he stood looking back at the house. Only here facing the sea were there wide expanses of glass looking out at the boulders and the crashing surf. The huge windows would, from within, afford an unbroken view of the Pacific.

The patio was protected from the wind by a six-foot glass wall, its panels skillfully fitted around the mountains of granite. From this sunny shelter a stone walk led down the cliff to the sea, doubling back and forth in comfortable angles until it reached the sand far below. For a few moments Joe crouched at the edge of the cliff rocked by the sea wind, caught in the timeless dance of the violent sea; then he turned away, approaching the house through the glassed patio.

He paused, startled.

Either luck was with him, or a trap had been laid.

Of the four pairs of sliding glass doors that opened to the seaward patio, the one at the far end stood open perhaps four inches, just wide enough for a cat to slip through.

Looking along the bottom of the glass he saw where it was locked in place so no one larger could enter. Higher up where the glass door joined the wall, he saw the tiny red lights of an activated security system, a strip of lights that rose from six inches above the floor to about six feet, a barrier impossible for a human to circumvent unless he was circus-thin and agile enough to slide in on his belly, or was a skilled high jumper. Sniffing all around the open glass he could catch no animal scent, cat or otherwise, could smell only salty residue from the sea spray. He could see no one inside the room beyond the glass, but the place was huge, with angles and niches that might conceal an army.

Slipping beneath the electronic barrier ready to spin and run, he eased beyond the beam. Once inside, he expected his every move to trigger an interior beam, but no alarm sounded. Uneasily he rose to his full height, his gray ears pricked, his short stub tail erect, his yellow eyes searching every angle of the furniture, dissecting every shadow. Still no alarm-and talk about architectural bravado!

The walls of the soaring, two-story great room were hung with large and vivid action paintings from the mid-1950s. Thanks to Dulcie’s coaching, he recognized several Diebenkorns, two Bischoffs, half a dozen Braden Wests. Opening from this soaring gallery were a dozen low, cavelike seating niches, cozy conversation alcoves that were tucked beneath the floor above. Each little retreat was furnished in a different style designed around some esoteric collection. One conversation area featured miniature landscapes. One was designed to set off a group of steel sculptures. In another, couch and chairs were tucked among huge six-foot-tall chess pieces. An array of carved wooden chests and small cupboards was arranged among soft velvet seating. Joe could imagine Dulcie and Kit prowling here for hours, riven with delight at every new discovery, rolling on every velvet settee and handwoven cushion.

Keeping to the shadows, scanning every niche to make sure he was alone, he expected any second to see someone sitting among the exhibits, silent and still, watching him. Or to come face to face with whatever animal, most likely a cat, enjoyed access through the open glass door. At the back of the room, behind a vast, two-sided fireplace, was a dining room with dark blue-gray walls. The huge carved table and chairs were rubbed with white, the chair seats upholstered in white. He would not have noticed these niceties if he had not spent so many hours with Dulcie. At every break-and-enter, she had to admire, examine, and comment upon the decor.

In the left-hand wall of the dining room, a door stood open to the kitchen. Far to the left of the kitchen an entry hall led to the carved front door, and here rose a broad and angled stairway. Was Dorriss’s office up there on the second floor, his desk and files? Or did Dorriss have a secretary hidden away in some village office to take care of business matters? Likely he relied on a broker in some large firm to tend to his investments, but he had to have letters, personal bills. Wouldn’t a house of this size and quality have a safe? Did Dorriss keep his stocks and bonds at home, along with the valuable pieces of antique silver and jewelry that he was known to collect?

Skilled as he was with his paws, Joe’s expertise did not, as yet, include safecracking. Anyway he was here for bills, not silver. Who kept their Visa bills in a locked safe? Contemplating the possible extent of Dorriss’s security arrangements, and his skin rippling with nerves, he made for the wide stairway.

Leaping up the carpeted stair, he gained the top step and stood listening, sniffing the soft flow of air from open windows somewhere on this floor, seeking any waft of human or cat scent. The house was meticulously clean; peering into a bedroom, he could see that the spaces under the chairs had all been freshly vacuumed. He could smell the faint afterbreath of the vacuum cleaner, that dusty aroma ejected through the dust bag even in the most expensive of models-though this dust-scented air was perfumed, as well, with cinnamon. Likely the housekeeper added powdered cinnamon to the fresh dust bags. Joe knew that trick-both Clyde and Wilma did it, to delicately perfume the house. Surely Clyde had learned the habit from Wilma, he’d never have thought of it on his own. The spice was far superior to air fresheners, which made Joe and Dulcie sneeze.

The wide upstairs hall was lit from above by a row of angled skylights. Paintings were spaced along both walls, again work by Diebenkorn, Bischoff, West, and James Weeks. Each piece had to be worth enough to keep Joe in caviar for ninety-nine cat lives. Five bedrooms opened from the hall. Each was handsomely designed, but none looked or smelled lived in. Only the last room, on his left, smelled of recent occupancy and looked as if it were regularly occupied; the shelves were cluttered with books and papers and several small pieces of sculpture, the smell of aftershave mixed with the scent of leather, and of charred wood from the fireplace. The fireplace was laid with fresh logs over a gas starter. The paneled wall on either side looked hand-carved, the oak slabs thick and heavy.

The master bedroom joined Dorriss’s study through an inner hall, which also opened to the master bath and dressing room. This suite occupied the entire south end of the second floor. Around Joe the house was silent, the only sound the dulled crashing of the sea and the whispering insistence of the sea wind. Intently listening he trotted into Dorriss’s office and leaped to the desk.

The desk faced a wall of glass; one of the three panels was cracked open a few inches. Crouching on the blotter with his nose to the window, Joe had the sensation of floating untethered above the cliff and the sea.

A fax machine stood beside a phone. Dorriss’s computer occupied an adjacent worktable of boldly carved African design. The monitor was the newest model, flat, slim of line, dark gray in color. There were no file cabinets, but the desk had one file drawer. How would all of Dorriss’s various business and charity pursuits be conducted with no more file space than that one drawer? At home, Clyde’s automotive interests overflowed four file cabinets and all the bookshelves, plus six more file cabinets at the automotive shop. Did Dorriss keep all his business records in the computer? For the first time Joe wished he’d brought Dulcie; she could get into that computer like a snatching paw into a mouse hole.

With her official position as Molena Point library cat, Dulcie’s access to the library computers, and her interest in such matters, had allowed her to become more than conversant with the daunting world of megabytes and hard drives. That, plus her female-feline stubbornness, assured that no computer program would outsmart this sweet tabby.

Joe stared at the computer wishing that he’d paid attention. Instead, he tackled the desk drawers, surprised to find them unlocked. Clawing the top drawer open, he wondered if, any second, he’d trigger a screaming alarm. Or a silent alarm that would alert some private security company? Because why would Dorriss leave his desk unlocked unless he had it cleverly wired?

Or unless he kept nothing of value here.

The smaller drawers contained only office supplies: pencils, pens, paperclips, various-size labels, and thick cream-colored stationery embossed with Dorriss’s elegant letterhead. Joe tackled the file drawer. As he clawed the drawer out, a noise above him brought him up rigid, ready to scorch out of there.

But it was only a bird careening against the window and gone, leaving a long smear of feathery dust. He scowled, annoyed at himself. He was a bundle of rigid fur, rotating ears, nervously twitching whiskers.

Why did he do this to himself? Why wasn’t he out napping in the sunshine like a sensible, normal cat?

The drawer was neatly arranged with a row of hanging files-and talk about luck. Dorriss’s paid bills were right there in front, in one of six color-coded files that were tucked into a hanging box folder. The packets of paid bills were each held together by a large clip: utility and phone, automotive and gas, Visa and American Express. Other receipts and documentation were filed behind these, the entire box folder marked “current year taxes.” When income tax time came, Dorriss had only to haul this stuff out and add up the numbers.

How strange that he would keep his credit card bills in plain sight. Or were these fake bills? Decoys meant for prowlers, and not the real thing?

But that was so dumb, that was really reaching. How would Dorriss even make that kind of fake bill?

Glancing over his shoulder toward the empty hall, he lifted out the packets with his teeth and spread them across the blotter. As he pawed carefully through, his ears went up and his whiskers stiffened-he was looking at hotel and restaurant charges in cities where the thefts had occurred.

He was pretty sure of the dates, though who could keep every burglary and every date in his head? The more he looked, the more he thought that the numbers did indeed match. The excitement made his skin ripple and his tomcat heart pound.

So what was he going to do now? Haul all the bills away with him, down the stairs, out the glass door, and around the house in the snatching wind, then drag them across the village in broad daylight?

Well, of course he was.

And of course Marlin Dorriss wouldn’t miss the contents of these files. Particularly when, the minute he opened the drawer, there would be the empty file folder sagging like an abandoned mouse skin.

He studied the fax machine that stood beside the phone. Could he fax the bills to Harper, then put them back in the file?

But that operation, if he faxed all of them, could take hours. And were faxed bills adequate evidence for the judge to issue a search warrant?

Digging deeper back in the drawer he found files for previous years’ taxes, each year carefully marked, each containing similar bills, credit card on top, phone bills at the back. Dorriss was so beautifully organized that Joe wanted to give him a medal.

Lifting a packet of paid bills from an earlier year, he dropped it into the front file in place of those he had removed. Voila. Who would know? Unless of course Dorriss had reason to refer to his recently paid bills. Digging a large brown envelope from the drawer of paper supplies, he pawed the bills into it, and worked the two-pronged fastener through its punched hole. Clawing the fastener closed, he tried not to think about possible tooth marks on envelope or bills. He was pushing the file drawer closed with his shoulder, bracing his claws in the carpet, when he heard a door open in the house below, and the breeze through the slightly open window accelerated as if in a wind tunnel.

Directly below, footsteps rang across the entry tiles, a man’s heavy and hurried tread. Joe heard no voice. Dorriss didn’t call out as if there was anyone else in the house-if it was Dorriss. The hard footsteps moved toward the stairs and started up, muffled suddenly by the thick runner to a faint brushing sound.

Gripping the heavy envelope in his teeth, lifting it free of the floor so as to make no sound, thus nearly dislocating his neck, he hiked the package across the hall to the nearest guest room. There on the thick antique rug he hastily dragged his burden under the bed; no dead rat or rabbit had ever been more cumbersome. Beneath the bed he paused, startled.

Now he smelled cat.

Tomcat?The scent of cinnamon was too strong to be certain. And the aroma was combined with the nose-twitching stink of a woman’s perfume.

Helen Thurwell’s perfume? But what kind of affair was this, if she occupied a guest room? Sniffing again at the expensive scent, he thought it was too heavy to be Helen’s. Whose, then? Another of Dorriss’s lovers, taking her turn when Helen wasn’t available? He could hear Dorriss coming softly up the carpeted stairs. He hoped to hell the window above the bed was open. He could feel no movement of air, no breeze slipping in fingering under the bed.

This room would look down to the front entry, over the angles and juttings that faced the street, over descending roofs and ledges that should give him a quick passage to freedom-if he could get out. Listening to the approaching footsteps, he caught, over the numbing perfume, a whiff of Marlin Dorriss’s distinctive aftershave, an aroma he had never smelled on any other human, that he had never encountered on the village streets; only those few times when he had happened on Dorriss in a patio or shop. Maybe Dorriss had it blended just for himself. The lawyer’s soft footsteps on the thick carpet turned into the master bedroom.

Joe was about to slip out and check the window above him, when the sounds from the bedroom gave him pause. Stone sliding across stone? Wood scraping stone and wood? Dorriss coughed once, then Joe heard the heavyclunkof thick metal.

A safe? Was that why the desk wasn’t locked? Whatever Dorriss wanted to keep private was locked away behind a wall of metal? Joe listened to papers being shuffled, then the scrape, again, of stone on wood. Then Dorriss moved into the dressing room; Joe heard the unmistakable snap of a briefcase or suitcase, then the slide of a zipper.

Leaving the brown envelope under the bed, he slipped out and padded down the hall into the master bedroom, watching the partially open door to the dressing room where papers still rattled. He could see, on a luggage stand, a black leather suitcase lying open. Dorriss stood over it, putting in folded clothes. On the stand beside the suitcase lay a sheaf of papers, and atop the papers a black automatic. A clip and a box of bullets lay beside it, the sight of which sent ripples of alarm through the tomcat.

He’d had enough of guns. His hearing hadn’t been the same since he and Dulcie played moving target in the attic above Clyde’s shop, chased and shot at by counterfeiting car thieves, and Clyde tried to rescue them. That was three years ago, part of that little caper during which he and Dulcie discovered their powers of speech, and their lives had so dramatically changed. The shock of seeing one human murder another had brought out latent talents in them that they had never suspected. One of those thieves had been Kate Osborne’s husband, Jimmie, who subsequently took up residence at San Quentin.

Now, looking at the gun, he considered leaving the Dorriss house at once, even without the evidence.

Oh, right. Marlin Dorriss was going to shoot an innocent cat that happened to wander in? Dorriss must like animals, if he’d left the glass door open for some household kitty.

The more specific implication of that open door Joe did not want to think about.

Worrying only briefly about his own gray hide, wondering only briefly which of his nine lives he was living at the moment, Joe waited until Dorriss turned away, then slipped past the dressing room door deeper into the bedroom.

Creamy, hand-rubbed walls greeted him; a pastel Persian rug over blackish stained hardwood floors; a seating alcove arranged with a charcoal leather love seat and chair before a dark marble coffee table.

At the other end of the room stood a king-size bed with a pale brocade spread and a dull, carved headboard and matching nightstands. On the wall opposite the fireplace, next to the double dresser, stood a huge armoire inlaid with ivory, an antique cupboard that would be large enough to hold both a small bar and a thirty-inch TV But it was the fireplace that held Joe’s attention.

A portion of its ornate paneling stood open and a steel safe loomed within, its steel door also wide open.

Rearing up, Joe could see nothing inside. Before he could leap up for a better look he heard Dorriss coming. Diving under the bed he watched Dorriss’s black oxfords cross the room, heard him slam the safe closed, heard the little clicks as he turned the dial to lock it.

Joe watched Dorriss return to the dressing room, then came out from under the bed again and began to check out the room.

The tops of the carved night tables were empty. These roughly made chests with their dull unpolished wood looked handmade and expensive, perhaps pieces that Dorriss had imported from South America.

Rearing up, he could see two dark, flat items on the dresser. Leaping up and miscalculating, he hit the small plastic folder, sliding so hard he nearly went over the edge. He froze, listening, sure that Dorriss had heard him.

When the sounds of packing continued, he guessed not. Examining the folder, he found it was a little loose-leaf booklet designed to hold a dozen or so photos of one’s dog or cat or baby, depending on the holder’s preference, each photo protected within a clear little pocket.

These pockets held credit cards.

Laying a silent paw on the slick plastic, Joe felt far more elated than if he’d discovered a warren of fat rabbits. Studying the cards, he found examples from half a dozen credit card companies, each card issued in a different name. Behind each card in the same little pocket was a white file card containing an address and phone number, social security number, birth dates, and a woman’s name. A mother’s maiden name, that universal code for certain identification? And, best of all, a driver’s license issued to the cardholder, each one bearing Marlin Dorriss’s photograph. Joe was so pumped he wanted to shout and yowl.

But even this prodigious find was not the most interesting.

Next to the credit card folder lay what might be the real kicker, the veritable gold mine. For a moment he just stared. Then he started to grin; he could feel his whiskers tickling his ears. Right here beneath his paw was the ringer. The first-prize trophy. He heard again Dulcie’s description: a small notebook with a mottled reddish-brown cover and a black cloth binding.

The notebook still smelled faintly of gas, of whatever substance PG&E put into their natural gas supplies so users would know if there was a leak in the line. Joe was reaching a paw to flip through the pages when he heard Dorriss coming back again, the scuff of his shoes on the dark hardwood. Joe had only time to leap from the dresser to the top of the armoire, where he crouched as flat as a pancake hoping he was out of sight. But then when Doris approached the dresser, he couldn’t resist, he slipped to the edge to watch.

Picking up the notebook, Dorriss flipped through it as if reading random passages; the expression on his face was one of deep rage. Glowering at the open notebook, he ripped it in half. Ripped it again, then tore each half straight through the offending pages.

Scooping up the stack of torn pages, he moved to the fireplace. From the top of the armoire Joe stared down at Dorriss, his heart doing flips.As sure as queens have kittens, he’s going to burn those pages.

Dropping to the bed behind Dorriss and slipping silently to the rug, Joe began to stalk the man. He wanted that notebook, he wanted those little mysterious pages that could be, that his cop-sense told him were, hard and valuable evidence to the death of James Quinn.

18 [��������: pic_19.jpg]

The five freshly cut oak logs in the fireplace were artfully crisscrossed over the gas jet. Marlin Dorriss, dropping the torn pieces of the notebook on the raised hearth, turned to find a match or, more likely, Joe thought, some sort of mechanical starter. As he reached into a small carved chest that stood at the other end of the hearth, Joe slipped silently behind him.

Closing his teeth on the wadded remains of the notebook he was gone, a gray streak disappearing under the leather love seat. It wasn’t the best place to hide but it was the closest. If Dorriss came poking, Joe hoped to slip out at the far end. Once concealed, he carefully spit out the pages so as not to drool on the evidence, and crept to the edge of the love seat where he could see his adversary. He hoped he had all the bits of paper. The notebook cover still lay on the hearth, the slick brown cardboard bent and twisted, victim of Dorriss’s rage.

Dorriss turned, reaching for the notebook. He stared at the hearth and searched the carpet and into the fireplace, frowning and puzzled. He stared around the room, then moved swiftly to the dressing room and bath, looking for an intruder. Joe could hear him banging the glass shower door and the closet doors. The next minute he flew into the study then out again and down the hall, Joe heard him swerve into the first bedroom.Not under the bed! Oh please God don’t let him look under the bed and find the bills! Cat God, human God, I don’t care. This is a bona fide feline supplication. Please, please, please don’t let him look under that bed.

But why would he look there? The guest beds sat low to the floor. The frames that held the box springs were no more than six inches high, not enough space for a burglar to hide-at least, not for the kind of burglar Dorriss would have in mind. Joe heard the closet in that room slide open, then Dorriss was in the hall again searching the other bedrooms, banging open closet doors. Immediately Joe fled for the guest room and under the bed.

Fighting open the metal clasp, he shoved the notebook pages in. Laboriously, with an impatient paw, he managed to fasten the flap again. Next time around, he’d like to have opposing thumbs. Down the hall, Dorriss was making more and more noise, searching, then pounding down the stairs apparently to search the rest of the house-but he’d be back. Slipping out from under the bed, leaving his burden for the moment, Joe scrambled up to the sill.

There was no breath of air behind the closed shutters; no window was open. Balanced on the sill, he challenged a shutter’s latch with frantic claws. But when he’d fought it open, the window behind it was not only closed, but locked. From the stairs, he heard Dorriss coming.

The lock was a paw-bruiser, invented by designers who had no respect for feline needs. He heard Dorriss turn into the study, heard him opening the desk drawers-maybe wondering what else the thief might have taken. Joe’s paws began to sweat, slipping on the metal lock-and he began to wonder.

If, as unlikely as it seemed, the downstairs glass door had been left open for one black tomcat, if against all odds the opportunistic Azrael had somehow partnered up with Marlin Dorriss, Dorriss might well be knowledgeable enough to be looking for more than a human thief. Frantic, Joe could hear him shuffling papers.

By the time he got the lock open and slid the glass back, he was a bundle of nerves, and his paw felt fractured. Dragging the heavy brown envelope up to the sill, he balanced it against the glass. As he pulled the shutter closed behind him, he heard Dorriss coming out of the study, heard Dorriss pause at the door as if looking in. Joe wondered if his gray fur made a dark smear behind the closed white louvers? Or if the shutter humped out of line where he crouched? He wondered if cats were subject to sudden coronary occlusion? He was ready to leap out into space clutching the envelope, calculating how best to negotiate the twisting angles to the lower roof, when the phone rang.

Thank you, great cat god or whoever.

Dorriss let it ring twice, but then he crossed the hall to answer. Joe knew he should jump at once, but for an instant he remained still, listening.

“I can’t talk now,” Dorriss was saying, “there’s someone in the house.” Joe heard a sharp metallic snap, as when a bullet is jacked into the chamber of an automatic.

“I can’ttalknow. You’re where?”

Pause. Against all good sense, Joe remained listening, gripping the envelope in his teeth.

“What the hell are you doing there? What the hell made you take off? Call me back, I can’ttalk.’”

Silence, then an intake of breath. Then, “You’re telling me the truth?”

Pause. Then, “All right, get on with it. That’s very nice indeed. Then you need to get back here. I told you not to play these games with your little friends.They’vemade a mess, and you’ll have to clean it up. I don’t want any more of your childish pranks, I can’t afford to deal with that stupidity, and I won’t have it rubbing off on me. Get back here fast, my dear, and take care of this.”

A soft click as Dorriss hung up. Joe crouched on the sill, his teeth dug into the envelope, adjusting his weight-and-trajectory ratio, eyeing a lower roof. With the extra baggage, if he missed his mark he’d drop like a rock, two stories to the stone terrace.

But he didn’t want to toss the envelope, let it fall and maybe split open, spill the evidence all over Dorriss’s front yard, to be snatched and sucked away in the sea wind.

He took a deep breath and was airborne-airborne but falling heavily, his usual buoyancy gone. His ability to twist in the air had deserted him. He felt like a rock, a flung boulder. Falling, he was falling�

He landed on the little roof scrabbling with frantic claws, five feet to the left of the window and five feet below, coming down with a thud that shook him clear to his ears.

But he was all in one piece and, more to the point, so was the envelope. He was poised to jump again when a sound to his right stopped him. Made his blood turn to ice, made him search the low roofs.

A dark little gargoyle stared up at him. Crouched on the edge of the tiles, Kit watched him wide eyed, but then stared suddenly past him at the window above, at the sill he had just abandoned. Her voice was a terrified hiss.“Jump, Joe! He’s coming! Jump! He’s opening the shutters! Jump now! Drop that thing and jump!”

Earlier that morning, the kit had seen Joe Grey heading for the police department as she prowled the roofs alone thinking about Lucinda and Pedric, mourning them, deeply missing them. Wandering the peaks and shingles feeling flat and sad, she had seen Joe Grey below, galloping up the sidewalk, headed somewhere in a hurry. Coming down, she had followed him and when he galloped through the courthouse gardens, of course she had followed. But then he turned and saw her, and instead of his usual friendly ear twitch, inviting her to join him, he’d given her a hiss, a leaveme-alone snarl, and had cruelly sent her away again. Or he thought he had.

Slinking away through the bushes hurt and angry, she had turned when he wasn’t looking, and followed him to the front door of the PD. Had watched him slip inside on the heels of the judge’s secretary. The tall blonde, delivering a sheaf of papers, took no notice of the gray tomcat padding in behind her. The kit wanted to follow, but he’d been so cross she daren’t. And then only a minute later a delivery boy hurried up the street carrying a big white bag of takeout that smelled of pastrami and made her lick her whiskers, and she had watched the dispatcher buzz the boy through.

Joe Grey had gone in there to share the captain’s lunch and had sent her away alone. Feeling incredibly hurt and sad, and mad too-all claws and hisses-she didn’t even want to beg lunch by charming some likely tourist in one of the sidewalk cafes as she so often did. She felt totally alone and abandoned. She had no one. Lucinda and Pedric were gone forever. And this morning, Dulcie had rudely slipped off without her. And now Joe Grey didn’t want her. How cruelly he had driven her away.

All alone, with no one to care about her, she climbed to the roof of the PD and hunched down in the oak tree. There she waited for nearly an hour angry and lonely, until Joe Grey came out again. But then, leaving the station, he was not licking his whiskers, he did not look happily fed. He looked so gaunt and hungry himself thatthatmade her feel better. Much better.

She watched him crouch in the geraniums drinking hungrily from an automatic bubbler that watered the courthouse gardens, then he took off fast, heading across the village. The kit followed. Joe was so interested in wherever he was going that he paid no attention now to who might be behind him. He was all hustle, dodging people’s feet and up trees and across roofs, his ears pricked, his stub tail straight out behind. She trailed him five blocks to Ocean and across Ocean among the feet of tourists and on again to the fine big house that looked like a museum from the front and was all glass at the back.

Sneaking low and carefully the kit had followed him around the side of the house and saw him go in through an open glass door. Hiding in the shadowy bushes that grew among the boulders, she watched him enter that big house through an open slider. Was that door open forhim}He sniffed the door, then went right on in, as bold as if he lived there. When he had gone inside she pressed her nose against the door, looking.

Joe had disappeared. She peered into the room, then she followed her nose. Joe’s scent led across the huge big room that had brightly colored caves all around, all elegantly furnished, so many places to play and to hide. She investigated one fascinating niche then another, rubbing and rolling, racing across the backs of the couches and trying her claws in the brocade. Sniffing leather and velvet, exploring every single object in every single room, she never did find Joe Grey. At last she approached the stairs.

But looking up that broad, angled flight, the kit stopped and backed away. What was up there? Joe had been up there a long time. What was he doing? She had heard no sound, no thump of paws, and she was frightened. She was standing undecided, looking up, when she heard a car park out in front, heard the car door open and close, then a man’s footsteps on the stone terrace. Quick she hid behind the closest chair, crouching against the thick, soft velvet.

The kit knew Marlin Dorriss. Didn’t everyone in the village know him? He was a philanthropist, whatever that meant, and a womanizer. She knew what that word meant. Wilma said he was usually circumspect in his personal life and that meant quiet and careful like a hunting cat. Except he wasn’t circumspect about Helen Thurwell. Marlin Dorriss was tall and slim, with a lovely tan, beautiful deep brown eyes, and short-clipped white hair. Handsome, and kind looking.

But as he crossed the big room and headed up the stairs where Joe Grey had gone, she felt afraid.

She couldn’t race up the stairs past him to warn Joe. But she could slip out, and around to the front, and maybe, if she could gain the angled roofs and ledges, she could get inside.

Scooting through the bushes to the front of the house she clawed and scrabbled her way up bits of wall and across slabs of roof, looking above her for an open window-and then suddenly above her, a windowslidopen.

And there was Joe Grey. She saw his white paw slide the glass back, saw him press between the glass and the shutter with a huge packet in his mouth. He remained so for some time, staring back into the room. Then he crouched as if someone was coming and leaped into space twisting to land on a roof below. Above him, Marlin Dorriss appeared; she could see him at the next window. She choked back a cry. Joe stared down at her.

“Jump,“she hissed.“He’s coming! Jump! He’s opening the shutters! Jump now! Drop that thing and jump!”

Then everything happened at once. Dorriss closed the shutters and turned away, and Joe leaped to the next angle with the brown paper bundle, then leaped again to the concrete. The bundle split open just at the edge of the bushes. In the wind, papers began to flap and dance. Kit had never seen Joe move so fast. Grabbing a mouthful of papers he pulled the package under the bushes and was back again snatching up more. The kit leaped.

And she was beside him snatching pieces of torn paper from the wind. Had Dorriss turned back? Was he looking? Had he seen the package fall before Joe snatched it away? The kit could not see Dorriss now, his silhouette was gone from the window-but then there he was standing at another window looking out.

Surely he couldn’t see them beneath the bushes. Had they caught all the papers? Like catching swooping birds from the rooftop. The kit stared at the papers under her paws. “What is all this?”

“Evidence,” Joe said, pushing little bits of paper back into the torn envelope, trying to fold it around the ragged mess. Kit helped him stuff papers in. Pressing the envelope into folds with their paws they gripped it between them, their teeth piercing the heavy paper as they tried to hold it together. And when Dorriss turned away, when the windows were clear once more, they dragged it out from the bushes and away.

Keeping to the shadows along the sidewalk, they tried to shelter their burden from the wind. It was a long way to Joe’s house, and already the package was heavy. Trying to find a rhythm together, falling into an unwieldy pace, eight paws attempting to move in harmony, they hauled their burden through an empty alley and along the less-frequented backstreets. Kit’s head was filled with questions which, with her mouth full, she couldn’t ask.

The envelope grew heavier with every step. The wind died as they left the shore, and that helped. But the day grew muggy hot. Kit wanted to stop and rest but Joe didn’t pause, pushing on from shadow to shadow and from bush to bush. When a human appeared far down the street they dragged their burden under a porch or behind a fence.

It seemed to take hours to cover those long blocks. When at last they neared Joe’s house, the kit’s entire being cried out for water, food, and a nap. A pair of tourists wandered past, and they slipped deeper among the bushes where they rested a moment, panting. Peering out at the house, the kitsolonged to be inside,solonged for a drink of cool water.

The Damen house looked not at all as it once had. When Kit first came there as a young cat, the house was a white cottage with only one story, what Wilma called a Cape Cod. Now with its new facade of heavy Mexican timbers and plastered walls, it was truly elegant. And the best part was Joe’s tower high atop the new upstairs. Kit loved Joe’s cat-size house with a view of the village rooftops-it was a cozy bit of cat heaven.

Lucinda and Pedric had planned to build a tower just like it. Atop their own new house. “You will have a tower,” Lucinda had said. “A fine tall cat tower looking out at all the world just like Joe Grey’s tower.”

Now Lucinda and Pedric would never build their dream home.

The kit would give all the towers in all the world to have them back. A tear slid down, spotting the brown envelope and its papers as they hauled their unwieldy burden through Joe Grey’s cat door.

Pulling the package through, the papers catching on the door, they dropped it on the African throw rug and lay beside it.

“Heavy as a dead raccoon,” Joe said. “Thank you, Kit. I guess you saved the day.”

“What did we save? What are those papers?”

Joe Grey smiled. “With luck, this could be the claw that snags the big one. A killing bite to the slickest burglar this village has ever seen.” He glanced toward the front door, listening. But the car he’d heard went on by. You never knew when Clyde might bring company, Max Harper or Dallas Garza or Ryan Flannery. “Come on, let’s get it upstairs before someone walks in.”

Dragging the envelope between them, they hauled it up the new stairway that had been built in half of the old guest room. The other half of that room was now a walk-in closet where Clyde kept all manner of oddments, from unused parts for his weight-lifting equipment to stacks of outdated automotive catalogs. At the top of the steps, in the new master bedroom, they dragged their burden across the new carpet to Clyde’s study.

Hauling it up onto Clyde’s desk, Joe pawed the papers out and carefully separated the various bills from the torn pages of the notebook. Fetching a rubber band from a box on the desk, he managed to secure the small bits of torn evidence. Watching him, Kit retrieved another rubber band, but he made her put it back. “Don’t chew that, Kit. It could kill you.”

“That little thing? How could it?”

“Just like string, Kit. You know about string. The barbs of your tongue hold it back, you can’t spit it out, it gets wrapped around the base of your tongue, you swallow the rest and you’re in trouble.”

She spit out the rubber band. She’d been told more than once about string, that if she should ever swallow a string not to pull it out with her paw, that she could cut her insides doing that. Joe studied the stack of bills. Who knew which were of value? No one would know until they were compared with the dates of the burglaries. Even then, there would be a lot of play in the machinery. The Tyler family in Ventura, for instance, had opened their safe in January and not again until October when they found the antique diamond necklace missing; the burglary could have happened anytime in those nine months. The Von Cleavers, in Montecito, were in Europe for five weeks. Got back to find a glass cabinet broken into and a silver pitcher missing, a museum piece signed by a famous craftsman from the 1600s, but nothing else was gone. Each burglary was the same, the rarest and most expensive item lifted, nothing else touched. Marlin Dorriss himself had been at his Florida condo when his favorite Diebenkorn painting vanished from his Molena Point house-if it vanished, if that was not a red herring.

But what kind of thief took only one piece and left a houseful of treasures?

Joe Grey smiled. Someone out for the thrills, for the rarity or historical value of the items stolen, someone who didn’t need the money. Who got all the money he wanted in other ways?

Impatient with the lack of solid answers to what he suspected, impatient for darkness so he could deliver the evidence to the law, Joe restlessly prowled the study.

But the kit had curled up in a corner of the love seat with her nose tucked under her paw, so sad and withdrawn that Joe paused, watching her. He stood worrying over her when a click from above made him stiffen.

The rooftop cat door made a slap, and Dulcie popped out of the hole in the ceiling, dropping daintily to the rafter beneath. Perched on the high, dark beam, she peered down at him-and her green eyes widened.

“You got the bills!” She dropped to the desk beside him with a delicate thud. “Tell me! Tell me how you did it. Dorriss didn’t see you? Why are you frowning?”

He glanced across to the love seat. She turned to look at the kit.

“So sad, Dulcie. She keeps falling back into sadness.”

Leaping to the love seat Dulcie nosed at the kit and washed her tortoiseshell face, washed her ears, nudged and loved her until at last the kit looked up and tried to smile. When the tattercoat had snuggled against Dulcie, Joe said, “Kit saved me from a bad trip, she warned me just in time.” He gave her a brief replay that made Dulcie shiver and laugh, then he asked, “What did you find at Consuela’s?”

“The cottage was locked. I tried everything. Finally balanced on the branch of an oak tree and clawed through a roof vent, in through a filthy attic and down through the crawl space. Had to claw away the plywood cover like we did when those raccoons chased us.” She sneezed. “All dust and cobwebs. I got the plywood aside and slipped down on the closet shelf.

“Closet was empty, just some empty hangers. But the door was open. I looked out into the room, ready to hit the attic again and vanish. That cottage is just one big room, like a studio apartment. No one was there, nada. I searched the whole place. Found exactly nothing. Checked the dinky bath and kitchen, fought open every cupboard and drawer. Not one stolen garment. Not much of anything else except mouse droppings. It’s just a crummy rental, no better than where a homeless would crash.

“I was so mad that I’d wasted my time. I could have been hunting, or could have been tossing Dorriss’s place with you-couldhave been prowling the village with Kit,” she said gently, glancing down at the tattercoat. “I was about to storm out when someone opened the garage door. Shook the whole house, rumbling up. I crouched, ready to leap back to the attic. The garage door closed again, and something metal clanged in there. When the door between the garage and the house opened, I whipped around and dove under the couch.

“I could hear them giggling before I got a look, Dillon and her two schoolmates. Consuela wasn’t with them. They got some soft drinks from the fridge, some chips from the cupboard that the mice hadn’t been at, and they began to drag in clothes-from their car, I thought then. New clothes, Joe. Beautiful clothes. Leather. Cashmere. Silk. Piling them on the couch and daybed and chairs.

“They pushed the closet door wide open-it has a mirror on the inside-and they began trying on clothes and giggling, vamping, hamming it up. All the clothes had tags, tags hanging down from the couch in my face, every one from Alice’s Mirror.

“The blond girl, Candy, said they shouldn’t take anything, the cops would recognize whatever they wore. Leah, the tall one, said that was stupid, how would the cops be able to tell. It ended up, Leah and Candy each took a couple of leather jackets and some sweaters. Dillon didn’t take anything. She tried on clothes but put them down again. They talked about another job tonight, only to do it really early, just after the stores close. A different MO, Candy said, to throw the cops off. What a dim brain. She thinks the law won’t expect another job so soon, won’t be watching.”

“Did they say what store?”

Dulcie sighed. “The Sport Shop. But� I really don’t want to�”

“Dulcie, it doesn’t do Dillon any good to get away with this stuff. She’s going to be in trouble sooner or later. Better she gets it over with, before it’s something worse.”

“I suppose. But there’s more. I saw more.” She rose and began to pace. From the love seat, the kit watched her quietly.

“I followed them into the garage and slipped under a workbench, watched them hang the clothes in metal lockers. That’s the clanging I heard. They snapped a padlock on the locker and left. Five were already locked, Joe. They filled and locked four more. I didn’t see if they had a car out front. Leah used the garage opener to get out, I saw her drop it in her pocket as the door came down behind them.

“When they’d left, I bumped against the lockers. Leaped and thumped at them. None sounded hollow, they all sounded dull, crammed full.”

Joe was quiet. Then, “Do you want to call the station? Or shall I?”

She sneezed. “The whole scene makes me sick.” Resignedly she moved to the phone, hit the speaker button, and pawed in the number of the station. And reluctantly she did the deed. When she had finished telling the dispatcher what she knew, she stretched out on the desk blotter next to the torn papers and ragged brown envelope, looking very sad.

“It’s best,” Joe said, his ears down, the white strip on his nose creased into a frown.

Dulcie studied the pile of bills and the torn pages. “It’s all right for you to talk. You didn’t betray a friend.”

19 [��������: pic_20.jpg]

The shadows of night seemed reluctant indeed to tuck themselves down around the village. In Joe Grey’s private tower the cats waited impatiently for darkness. Beneath Joe’s paws lay a new brown envelope containing a gallon plastic freezer bag. They had stuffed Marlin Dorriss’s bills and the torn notebook pages inside the clear container so that, when they delivered the evidence to the station, it would not cause a departmental panic. Would not trigger hasty emergency procedures to deal with a package that, at first touch, might blow the place sky high. Sealed with careful paws, and the excess air pressed out, the bag awaited only darkness to be hauled across the rooftops. Fidgeting, the messengers washed and groomed, willing night to hurry.

On the street below the Damen roof, a few tourists wandered in twos and threes and fours, and local residents hurried past heading home to hearth and supper. As the cats watched familiar cars turn up the side streets and disappear into carports or garages, Joe’s thoughts were on Marlin Dorriss, on what might happen when Dorriss opened his file drawer and found the bills missing, found the outdated substitutes in their place.

“So what’s he going to do?” Dulcie said. “If he finds the bills missing and reports the theft, then we’re staking out the wrong mouse hole. But if he’s guilty,” she said, smiling, “you won’t hear a word.” She gave Joe a long and appraising stare, her green eyes darkening in the slowly falling evening. “He reports it, you can write him off as a suspect. So what’s the big deal?” She touched his nose with a soft paw. “Relax, Joe. Relax and roll with it.”

But she gave him a narrow look. “You’re all fidgets and claws.Youknow this whole business is a gamble.” She leaned to nuzzle his whiskers. “I’ll bet my best wool blanket that you’ve nailed him, that you’ve got your thief.”

Joe looked at her and tried to shake off the edginess. As he licked the last grain of sand from the Dorriss front yard off his paw, dusk began to thicken slowly around them, a gentler light to soften the rooftops. He looked at Dulcie and Kit reclining on the new pillows in his tower and he had to smile at how much they enjoyed a bit of luxury. And soon beyond the arches of the tower the dark foliage of the pines and oaks began to blur. In the east the gibbous moon began to rise, a lopsided globe far brighter than they would have chosen for this particular trek. When at last darkness deepened across the rooftop shadows, the three cats rose and stretched.

Leaving Joe’s tower, Joe and Dulcie dragged the package between them. Hurrying across the roofs from concealing chimney to darkening overhang to sheltering branches, they skirted around second-floor windows where some apartment dweller or late office worker might be idly looking out. They remembered too well how Charlie had first glimpsed them on the rooftops and had heard Dulcie laugh, and how she began, then, to wonder.

Walking home from a later supper, Charlie had looked up to see the cats running along the peaks and had recognized against the bright night sky Joe Grey’s docked tail and white markings. Hearing a young, delighted laugh, she had been puzzled. That incident combined with several others had led Charlie to guess the truth about them-but Charlie was an exception. Most humans would not make that leap, would not be willing to entertain such an amazing concept.

Now, above the rooftops, above the hurrying cats the moon lifted higher, increasing its glow and diminishing the size of the shadows. The night wind blew colder. Their hard-won package grew heavier, pulling at neck and shoulder muscles, making their jaws ache. Joe and Dulcie pushed ahead, dodging patches of light, ducking beneath branches, their teeth deep in the heavy packet. The kit trailed behind, unusually quiet, not pressing to help them. Then just across the last street lay the long expanse of the courthouse roof and the roof of Molena Point PD, the rounded clay tiles gleaming in the moonlight.

The chasm of the street was wide. One ancient oak spanned above the concrete, its branches meeting the smaller branches of its counterpart that grew close to the opposite sidewalk. Dragging their burden across the thick, leafy limb, trying not to hang it up among the twigs or to drop it, Joe and Dulcie felt as graceful as a pair of clipped-wing pigeons flopping among the branches. The kit crossed on a branch above them, precarious and uncertain herself as she watched their unsteady progress.

Reaching the courthouse roof, the three cats together hauled their prize the long length of the courthouse, bumping on the round tiles and into the oak tree that stood beside the police department. Now they had three choices.

They could haul the envelope down to the front entry and prop it against the glass door. They could hike it around back, to the locked back door that opened on the police parking lot where Harper and the two detectives usually left their cars, where Harper himself would more likely find it. The time was seven P.M. Watch would change at eight. Most of the officers and the dispatcher would leave by the front door, heading for their personal cars that were parked in the front lot. The first officer out would see the package and retrieve it, and go back to log it in and alert the watch commander.Voila,mission accomplished.

Or, third choice, they could shove the plastic package through the high bars of the holding cell window. It would land behind the barred door, not ten feet from where the dispatcher ruled over the front of the station. Surely she would see it and take it into safe custody-if she didn’t hit the panic button.

Looking through the depths of the oak leaves to the cell window, Dulcie was in favor of that route. “We drop it down there, no one outside on the street is going to see it and pick it up.”

“Right,” Joe said, padding along the branch to the barred window and peering down inside. “Except that the cell’s occupied. Can’t you smell him?” He twitched his nose, flehming at the scent-but then, that cell never smelled like a flower garden.

Below them, stretched out on the bunk lay a rumpled, sleeping body, his arms flailed out, one hand resting on the floor. A tall, thin guy maybe in his late twenties, with long dirty hair, dirty ragged clothes, and a handlebar mustache. He did not look or smell like someone they wanted to trust with the evidence. Even if he was indeed asleep, the thud of the dropping package would very likely wake him.

“Maybe he’s just been arrested,” Dulcie said. “Maybe he’s waiting to be booked, then they’ll take him on back to the jail.”

“And maybe not,” Joe said. “Do you see anyone down there getting ready to book him?” Beyond the bars of the holding cell door, the area around the dispatcher’s counter and the booking counter was empty. They saw only the dispatcher herself in her open cubicle, talking on the radio, apparently to an officer who, somewhere in the village, was just leaving the scene of a settled domestic dispute-always a touchy call.

Dulcie watched the drunk sleeping below them. “I’lltakethe package in. I can drop down there with it, a lot quieter than we can toss it. I can haul it through the barred door without waking him, without anyone seeing me.”

“And what if he isn’t asleep? What a story he’d have to tell the cops, to trade for a quick release. ‘I know how that package got in here, officer. I saw a cat drop down in here carrying that thing in its mouth.’”

“He’s drunk, Joe. They’re going to believe him? I can be in there and down the hall to Harper’s office before his boozy head clears, before he figures out what he saw.”

“And even if no one sees you, Dulcie, when Harper finds the evidence deposited neatly on his desk, what then? He won’t ask how it got past the dispatcher? And past his new, state-of-the-art security system? He won’t start suspecting one of his own officers?” He stared at Dulcie. “He starts suspecting Garza or Davis, who both know he wants those bills.Thenit would hit the fan.”

“He’s going to ask questions anyway.”

“He isn’t going to ask questions if it isn’t found inside.”

“But�”

“Wait,” Joe said. “Someone’s coming.”

And, like Diana smiling on sainted lovers, good luck smiled on the two cats. They watched Officer Brennan coming down the hall, his uniform tight over his protruding stomach.

Below them, metal clanged against metal as Brennan opened the barred door, hustled the drunk awake, and marched him out of the cell. The guy half fell against the dispatcher’s counter, staggered against the booking counter, then stumbled away in front of Brennan, down the hall toward the back door and the jail.

The minute he was gone the cats hauled the package through the oak tree’s snatching foliage and over the sill and shoved it through the bars. It fell with a hushing, sliding thump just inside the cell door that brought the dispatcher to her feet, startled.

This particular dispatcher was a full-fledged officer. She was armed, and she approached the cell with her hand on her holstered weapon. Above her, the gun-shy cats backed away up the tree. They could just see her studying the packet then staring above her, searching the high, open window. Then she whirled away, back to her station. They heard her quick footsteps, then the building’s shrill alarm.

Officers came running from the back offices, and out the front door. Before the cats could leap across the moonlit roofs to freedom, cops were swarming out wielding handheld searchlights, shining them toward the roof and into the tree. They hunched down deep among the deepest leaves, their reflective eyes tight shut.

Beside Dulcie, the kit was not secretly smiling at the commotion, as she usually would be. Her tail was not twitching and dancing with excitement. She was deeply quiet. The kit’s grieving worried Dulcie.

When the torches swung away at last, to sweep on across the parking lot and gardens, within the prickly leaves the three cats peered out. Below them, patrol cars had swung around from the back of the building to angle across the driveways and along the street, blocking the escape of all other vehicles. And officers on foot surrounded the gardens, their searchlights leaping from bush to bush and into the parked cars. The lights shone across the moon-bright roofs behind the cats. They were trapped like three treed possums.

But whilethe cats crouched within the heavy oak leaves wishing the moonlight and searchlights would vanish, wishing mightily for absolute darkness, Kate Osborne was doing her best to avoid the dark.

She had left work a bit late, finishing up some ordering and some computer sketches. It was just six thirty, but she was so tired and so ravenously hungry that she hardly cared if tonight a whole battalion of strangers followed her. Going down the elevator from her office to the parking garage, slipping quickly into her car and pulling out into the lighted street, half of her wanted to go straight home, wolf down a sandwich, and fall into bed. The other half wanted a nice, warming dinner that she didn’t have to lift a hand over, wanted to sit at a cozy table and be waited on-wanted not to be alone for a while longer, but to remain safely among people.

For days after the Greenlaws’ deaths she didn’t think she was followed. She kept watch around her but didn’t see anyone; but then on Thursday when she looked out her apartment window she had seen the same man standing in a doorway across the street. She did not simply imagine it was the same man. His sloped shoulders and stance were the same. And this time she had gotten a good look at his pale muddy hair, his sloping forehead and large nose.

If he meant to harm her, why did he just stand there? She almost wished, with a perverse cold fear, that instead of following, hewouldapproach her, that he would come upstairs and knock on her door because she had grown more angry than afraid. Angry at this harassment, at this invasion of her privacy, at this hampering of her free, easy movement around the city.

Besides the pepper spray, she had begun to carry a pair of scissors in her purse, a decision that was probably incredibly stupid. She wished she weren’t such a wuss, that she’d learned karate or knew how to handle a gun, that she had some skill that would make her feel less vulnerable.

Both Hanni and Hanni’s sister, Ryan, were comfortable and competent with firearms. Having grown up in a police family they had been trained early and well. And Charlie, too, since she married Max, had learned the same careful, responsible skills. Such expertise and confidence would be comforting now.

She decided to stop for dinner, and to hell with being followed. Driving through the crowded, narrow streets, she turned north up Columbus toward a favorite small seafood cafe. Dolphin’s would be well lighted, and the sidewalk would be busy with pedestrians this time of evening. Just two blocks from the restaurant she was lucky to spot a car pulling out, and she swerved in.

Locking her car and hurrying up the street, she was half a block from Dolphin’s when she glanced back and saw the same man following her. She was so angry she almost approached him, pepper spray in hand

But then fear filled her, and she hurried on toward Dolphin’s, trying to stay among people, she did not like living this way. She thought, not for the first time, of how it would be when she chucked city life and moved home to Molena Point. Where she could indeed feel safe again. Crossing the street away from him as he followed, she hurried on-but when she glanced in the shop windows where she could see behind her, he had crossed, too. He was pacing her, his thin reflection moving jaggedly from one square of dark glass to the next. When she slowed, he slowed.

When she quickened her step, so did he. When she reached Dolphin’s she slipped quickly inside and pulled the door closed hard behind her. She’d have liked to lock it.

Her favorite waitress, Annette, looked up from clearing a table and smiled, and nodded toward her usual table. Annette was rotund, in her thirties, with a slender, fine-boned face that seemed to belong to a much thinner woman. She had lovely dark eyes and a beautiful complexion. As Kate crossed the restaurant between the crowded tables she kept her back to the window. But when she glanced around, the man stood outside looking in through the glass.

When she stared hard at him, he moved on. When he’d passed beyond her view she sat down at the table with her back to the wall, where she could see the street. Annette brought her usual pot of tea and paused, a question in her eyes. Kate said nothing. She ordered a bourbon and soda as well, and a shrimp melt on French and a salad. Annette stood a few minutes making small talk, as Kate continued to watch the window.

Annette and her husband, an army sergeant, had moved to San Francisco when he was transferred to the Presidio. She liked to tell Kate of the new places she had discovered in the city, and Kate loved to make suggestions. The absence of the man outside the glass did not ease Kate’s anxiety, he could be just down the street waiting for her, maybe standing against the next building just beyond the window. The early evening street did not, tonight, hold its usual charm. The cozy shops along this block presented, tonight, a more threatening aspect of North Beach. She felt safe only within the restaurant, she did not like to think about going out again. She thought, when she was ready to leave, she might call the police.

But what kind of complaint would she make? The man hadn’t confronted her, he hadn’t touched or spoken to her. She could only say she’d been followed. Very likely they would think she was a nut case, imagining things. She supposed she could go out through the kitchen, to the alley, slip around the block to her car. She closed her eyes, trying to slow her pounding heart.

When she opened her eyes she saw him directly across the street walking among a crowd of tourists. Same man, looking directly across to Dolphin’s windows, his slumped shoulders and rocking walk making him easy to recognize. When he’d passed beyond her view she rose and moved to the front window, standing to the side where she wouldn’t be seen.

He had crossed to her side of the street but was heading away; soon he disappeared. Had he followed her from her office? Followed her clear across town and somehow found a parking spot near where she parked? Or had he already known her favorite small restaurants? Had he simply swung by each, looking for her? Why hadn’t she gone somewhere different, someplace she seldom frequented? She was still at the window when a young woman burst in through the front door, turning to look back at the street.

She looked familiar, and Kate watched her with curiosity. She was looking around for someone. When she spotted Kate she nearly lunged at her.

“Kate? Yes, you are Kate Osborne?”

Kate had started to back away-but shedidknow this woman. Nancy something, the design client who had approached her at the office, whom she had turned over to another designer. She was a delicate, elegant person, maybe in her early thirties. Beautifully groomed with a flawless creamy complexion, her face scrubbed clean, her blue-black hair smoothed into a simple chignon. She had wanted to do her apartment with South American furnishings; Kate had been sorry to turn down the project. The woman was simply dressed in a cream skirt and creamy sweater and carried a pale silk raincoat. Her dark eyes were huge. “YouareKate Osborne?” she repeated. “We met�”

“Yes,” Kate said. “I remember. You-What’s wrong? You look distressed.”

“Could we step away from the window? There’s� I think� I know it sounds wild, but I think a man has been following you.”

Kate led her to the small corner table. The young woman sat down so that she, too, could see the street. “I’m Nancy Westervelt.”

“Yes. I hope you found a designer you will enjoy working with.”

“I have an appointment next week. Thank you.” The woman chafed her hands together lightly, as if she were cold. “Tonight when I saw you on the street I thought I recognized you. When I turned to look, my attention was caught by a man who seemed to be following you. I watched him. When you came in the restaurant he drew back out of sight but then in a minute he slipped forward and looked in the window. Then he went on past, crossed the street, came back along the other side, and kept watching. He so bothered me that I knew I must tell you.”

“I appreciate that. When did you first notice him?”

“I saw you get out of your car. He was in a cab right behind you, he got out as you were parking. He started right off following you, though I didn’t realize at first what he was doing.

“Maybe it’s nothing, but it frightened me.” Nancy’s voice was soft and well modulated. They sat a few minutes discussing her design project, waiting to see if he would return, both watching the window. Then, in the shadowed door of a T-shirt shop across the street the man appeared, as if perhaps he had been there for a while but had just stepped forward. Nervously Kate glanced toward the kitchen, where the back door opened to the alley.

The young woman’s eyes widened. “Can you go out the back? If you could slip out that way, and around to your car� you could take my raincoat, there’s a hat in the pocket, you could pull that down over your hair.”

Kate almost laughed, the idea of a disguise was so bizarre. And what if he caught her in the back alley? She would like to call the police, she was really tired of this. She wished she knew the names of the two detectives that Dallas Garza had worked with here in the city. If they knew that she was a friend of Garza’s, would they be more likely to help her? More likely to believe that she’d been followed, and to listen to her?

But she didn’t know their names, and anyway she would be embarrassed to call the busy San Francisco PD and ask them to send out a patrol car for something so� something that, when she repeated it back to herself, seemed so without substance.He has been following me for weeks, I see him standing in doorways�

If her car or her apartment had been broken into, the police would take her seriously. But this� Well, she had to do something. Glancing toward the kitchen, she rose.

Nancy rose with her, handing her the raincoat. “I’ll go out with you. He won’t expect to see two women.”

Sliding some money onto the table, Kate followed her toward the back. Watching Nancy, she tried not to warm to the woman’s gentle manner-but why did she have to be so suspicious? Nancy Westervelt was only trying to help her, was only concerned for her. As they paused by the door to the kitchen, Kate pulled on the raincoat, then the hat, tucking her blond hair up inside. She felt better doing something positive, even if this was melodramatic. Nancy looked hard at her. “I was followed once.” She was quiet a moment. “It wasn’t nice. It wasn’t something I’ll forget.”

A faint nausea touched Kate, a shaky sickness.

As they moved through the kitchen among the busy chefs, among hot, delicious dinners being prepared along the big stainless-steel tables, the workers frowned at them, puzzled. A round, dark-eyed chef appraised Kate so critically that she thought he would tell them to leave. But then Annette caught up with them, handing Kate a foil-wrapped package, Kate could smell the warm shrimp melt. And quickly Annette led them through the kitchen, shepherding them with authority. Between a stack of cans and boxes, and storage lockers, they approached the back screen door covered by a dark security grid.

“Wait here.” Annette’s thin, oval face was quietly serious. “Let me look out the back window.” She disappeared into a storeroom, but was gone only a moment. Returning, she didn’t ask questions. “There’s no one there that I can see, the alley looks empty.”

They slipped out through the screen door fast, Nancy going first, Kate staying close behind her shrouded in the cream raincoat, the slouch hat pulled down nearly to her eyebrows. She felt like Groucho Marx in drag; she wondered if the lame disguise would fool anyone. Hurrying beside Nancy along the faintly lit alley she headed for the side street that would take them to Columbus again and her car.

20 [��������: pic_21.jpg]

The roof of the courthouse reflected bright moonlight, offering no dark niche where a cat could hide. Along the edges of the tile roof, harsh searchlights scanned the night’s shadows bleeding up into the sky. Only within the gloom of the oak tree’s thick foliage, where the leaves caressed the roof of the MolenaPoint PD, was there safety. The three cats huddled down, blending as well as they could among the shadows, their paler parts carefully concealed from the dazzling beams. Joe Grey’s white chest, nose, and paws were tucked under him as neatly as if he were a rolled-up ball of gray yarn.

It might seem overkill to send the entire department out looking for whoever had dumped that clear plastic package in through the holding cell window. But these days, any object tossed into a police building had to be regarded with suspicion. Anything, any time, could be a bomb. For too many, law enforcement had become the enemy.

Just when searchlights ceased to scour the parking lot and progressed deeper into the village, a squad car pulled in from the street to park in the red zone facing the station. The cats watched warily.

Young Officer Rordan was behind the wheel. The thin, dark, more-seasoned Officer Sacks rode in the passenger seat. Had they picked up someone they thought had dumped the package, some unintended victim of feline subterfuge? But then the cats saw the three figures in the backseat.

All were female, slim, and young; one with pale hair piled on top of her head, one a tall girl with long dark hair tied back in a ponytail. And, a too-familiar figure with a sassy bob that, even in the glow of the vapor lights, gleamed as red as new rust.

Stepping from the vehicle, Officers Rordan and Sacks ordered the girls out. The three crawled out of the back, angry and disheveled, and were marched into the station, Candy and Leah scowling with rage. Dillon looked frightened and ashamed. Officer Sacks carried two large paper grocery bags crammed full of clothes; the cats could see bits of leather and velour, an expensive-looking running shoe. The officers and their prisoners disappeared inside, and the cats heard a metal door slam. Pushing through the oak’s thick leaves to the high barred window, they peered down into the holding cell.

The girls sat sprawled on the stained bunk, all three now sullen and defiant. In the style of fashion-conscious young teens, none was dressed warm enough for the chill evening. Candy wore tight faded jeans, a white tank top that hiked well above her middle, and goose bumps. She slouched at the far end of the bunk watching as Officer Sacks booked Leah and then Dillon: name and address, parents’ names, school, and any statement they cared to make. Leah’s answers were so rude the cats wondered if shewantedto be locked up for the night or perhaps longer. Her thin, sagging T-shirt looked no warmer than Candy’s tank top. Her lipstick was the color of raspberry jam. Only Dillon answered Sacks’s questions with any civility, as she glanced past him into the station. Was she looking for Captain Harper, perhaps hoping he wasn’t there? She was wearing red jeans and an old, creased leather jacket with nothing but a bra underneath. Her boots were thick and heavy, of the kind that, well aimed, could break a person’s leg. When Sacks finished with the girls, they lounged on the hard bunk, scowling and silent.

Max Harper arrived some twenty minutes later. He hardly glanced at the dispatcher’s counter but went directly to the cell, his expression tightly controlled, a look that the cats knew very well. A line in his cheek twitched with anger, with disappointment. Dillon Thurwell was, in many respects, as close to a daughter as Max Harper might ever have.

Opening the cell door, he summoned the two arresting officers and sent Leah and Candy back to the jail to be locked up there. Then he turned his attention to Dillon. Stepping into the cell and locking the door behind him, he stood looking down at her, studying the top of her head as she sat staring at the floor. Watching them, the cats crowded against the bars, their ears back, not liking the hurt they could see in Max Harper’s stern face. When Dillon wouldn’t look up at him, he sat down beside her.

“I called your parents.” He took her chin in his hand, turned her face so she had to look up at him. Her scowl was fierce, and frightened.

“I want to hear your version. I want to hear exactly what you three did tonight.”

“If you called my dad, why isn’t he here? How come he’s taking so long?”

“I called him on my way down to the station. It’s been only a few minutes. Tell me what happened, Dillon. Tell me now.”

“Iknow the drill!” she snapped. “It will go easier for me if I tell the truth. Everything will be cool if I tell you all about it. The truth and only the truth and that will make life just peachy.”

“Which one of you broke the lock?” Harper asked quietly.

No answer.

His expression didn’t change. “Who went in through the window?”

Nothing.

“You girls planned your other burglaries more smoothly than this one. I have to say, you accomplished some fancy footwork at Alice’s Mirror. Even if it was all going to go against you, in the end.”

She looked at him, surprised, then scowled harder. “I broke the lock.I went through the window.I handed the stuff out. Okay? So what? That’s some kind of federal offense?”

“If it were a federal offense I wouldn’t have to mess with you. I’d turn you over to the feds. Where’s the fourth member of your little club? Where’s Consuela? She slip out before my officers arrived? Leave you to take the heat?”

“She wasn’t there,” Dillon said. “She’s off somewhere.”

“Off where?”

“How would I know.”

“Did she set this burglary up before she left?”

Dillon didn’t answer.

“Or did you plan it yourselves, without her? You’ve been busy, haven’t you, teaching yourself how to steal.” He looked steadily at her. “Where do you plan to go with that?”

No response. She tapped her boot on the concrete in a steady and irritating rhythm.

“I don’t have to spell it out for you, Dillon. You know how to make your own choices. You’re building a life here. You don’t get to go back and try again, you don’t get to start over.”

Harper looked up when Officer Sacks came through the front door carrying two big paper drink containers with straws stuck in the lids. As Sacks handed them through the bars to Harper, the cats sniffed the sweet smell of chocolate. When Harper handed a container to Dillon, she looked like she wanted to throw it in his face. He watched her, amused, while he sipped on his own malt. From above them, the cats watched Dillon, equally amused. She refused to touch the malt, though she was probably thirsty and hungry, and much in need of a sugar fix, after her anger and fear. A chocolate malt, to a young girl, had to be like a nice juicy mouse to a cat who was hungry and in need.

Max Harper sat with Dillon for some time not talking, finishing his malt. Dillon tasted hers at last, glanced ashamedly at him, and ended up slurping the contents as if she was indeed starving. Sitting on the bunk beside her, Harper put his arm around her. Dillon, letting her guard down, looked now on the verge of tears. But she glanced up scowling again when the front door of the station opened.

Helen Thurwell entered. The cats were pleased to see that she had come, until they saw Marlin Dorriss behind her. Talk about bad taste, talk about thoughtless and rude.

The couple was dressed to the nines, Dorriss in a dinner jacket, Helen in a long slim black dress with a V-neck, a gem glittering against her throat, suspended on a platinum chain.

Moving to the barred cell door, Helen stood looking in at her daughter. Her frown of distaste included not only the jail cell, but Captain Harper himself. Behind her, Marlin Dorriss stood not five feet from the dispatcher’s desk, his back to the sealed freezer bag that lay in plain sight, displaying his paid Visa bills and the torn pages of the little notebook. The cats, watching the potentially explosive scene, were rigid, all three hearts pounding in double time. As Dorriss turned toward the counter, Joe Grey sucked in a breath ready to yowl, desperate to create a diversion-but at the same moment the dispatcher slid the packet underneath the counter out of sight. Both Joe and Dulcie went limp, and their pounding hearts slowed.

Officer Jennifer Keen was a rookie who filled the dispatcher position when the regular dispatchers took time off. She was a pretty brunette with a voice as hoarse as sandpaper. Having glanced at the contents of the plastic package, she had been adequately quick on the draw.

At the cell door, Helen looked from Harper to her daughter. “Which one of you wants to talk?” Her look at Harper seemed almost to imply that the break and enter had been his fault. The cats wondered where Dillon’s father was. John Thurwell was the nurturing one, the wronged parent who stayed home with Dillon while her mother played fast and loose. It was her father who should be with Dillon now.

Within the cell, Max Harper sat quietly beside Dillon waiting for her to explain to her mother what she had been unwilling to tell him. Dillon was silent, staring at the floor.

Harper opened the cell door and Helen, with an expression of extreme distaste, stepped inside. Closing the cell door behind her, he stood to the side, just below the cell window. Across the foyer, Marlin Dorriss’s expression where he stood beside the dispatcher’s desk was cool with disdain, as if his relationship with Helen Thurwell really ought not to include involvements with the police, or with her errant daughter.

Watching him, Joe Grey wondered. What was it about Dorriss’s expression? Filled with distaste, but something deep down, as well, seemed tense with apprehension. And as Helen tried to get Dillon to tell her what had happened, and Dillon remained silent and uncooperative, Dorriss began to fidget. At last Helen turned to him.

“I know you have to get to the airport, Marlin. I’ll walk the few blocks home; it’s a nice evening.” Summarily dismissing him, she reached through the bars of the closed door. He took her hand, pressed her hand in both of his, but did not offer to kiss her.

Not in front of her daughter? Or not in front of the captain? Or did he not want to get that close to the bars of a jail cell?

When Dorriss left the station the cats slipped to the edge of the roof and watched him swing into his black Mercedes. Heading for an evening flight, where? A trip that would remove him from the village for how long?

When Dorriss had gone and the cats looked again down into the cell, Harper was holding a police report, reading it to Helen in a gesture the cats thought was as much to shame her as to shame Dillon.

The burglary had occurred at the Sports Shop on Lincoln Street. The officers had found the lock on the back door broken, and the girls in possession of some five thousand dollars’ worth of imported sweaters, leather coats, and top-of-the-line running shoes.

“How doyouknow how much it was worth?” Helen challenged.

“My officers can add,” Harper told her. “They can read price tags. Mrs. Barker is on her way in.” He looked at Dillon, repeating his earlier questions. “Who took the stuff, Dillon? Who handled the breakin, and who stood watch?”

“I took it! I broke in, I told you! They stood watch. I took the stuff. Okay? How come we didn’t hear the alarm?”

“Silent alarm,” Harper said. “It alerts the security firm. I guess, this time, you didn’t do your homework.” According to the report, the two officers arrived on the scene as Dillon handed out the first bag. Apparently neither Candy nor Leah had seen the two officers approach them among the shadows of the alley.

Max Harper’s lecture to Dillon was short, to the point, and not appreciated by Helen Thurwell. “You are fourteen years old, Dillon. In four years you’ll be responsible for your own physical, financial, and emotional well-being. It takes some effort and thought to equip yourself for that, for the time when you’ll have no one but yourself to lean on.”

He put his hands on Dillon’s shoulders. He looked a long time at her, the kind of look as when she’d done something stupid that had endangered a good horse. He tilted her chin, again forcing her to look at him. “You’ve learned to handle a horse competently, under difficult conditions. Now it’s time to remember your lessons, to treat yourself with equal respect.

“You cannot,” he told her, “let someone else’s emotional baggage cripple you. Even if that someone is your mother.” He looked hard at her. “You cannot cripple yourself to teach your mother a lesson.”

Helen Thurwell looked mad enough to hit Harper, looked like she would grab him, jerk him around, and punch him. Dillon glared at him, but angry tears were running down. He put his arms around her and pulled her close. Above them, the cats hardly breathed. They were so caught by the drama, they hung halfway in between the window bars. The vicissitudes of humanity were sometimes so overwhelming, the scene they witnessed was so emotionally draining, that when Dillon’s father arrived to take his daughter home, the cats felt like three limp dishrags hung to dry in the branches.

21 [��������: pic_22.jpg]

Crossing the sidewalk quickly to the passenger side of her car, Kate unlocked the door meaning to slide across to the driver’s side; hoping she wouldn’t be noticed from across the street. Turning to thank Nancy, who had been more than kind to help her, Kate caught her breath:

Nancy came at her fast, pushed her hard across the console to the driver’s seat, bruising her leg, and swung in behind her. “Move it! He’s coming!”

Kate stared at the girl.

“He’s coming. Let me out in a block or two. Give me the coat, maybe I can mislead him.”

Kate started the car. For a second, the look in Nancy’s dark eyes iced her blood, but then she saw him; he came running from between two buildings. She revved the engine and burned rubber, skidding away from the curb. As he ran beneath a streetlight she saw his face, but at an angle that startled her.

He looked like the waiter who had died in the gallery.

Oh, but she must be wrong. Driving as fast as she dared, she was too busy dodging cars to look again. As she maneuvered past other traffic, the two faces shone in her mind like two portraits flashed on a screen. The same high sloping forehead, the same large nose and thin face.

When she had seen the waiter that night, his looks had startled her. She hadn’t known why. She even then must have seen his resemblance to the man who had followed her. Swerving around a corner heading home, she glanced at Nancy.

The woman was shrugging into the coat Kate had shed, pulling the hat down over her face. When Kate was some ten blocks from the restaurant, when she was sure that no car was following, she stopped at a well-lit corner beside an open grocery where Nancy might take shelter and call a cab. Kate had started to thank her when the girl shoved a gun in her ribs.

Her voice was less cultured now, quick and forceful. “He won’t follow you now. Move it. Get rolling.” The gun was a black automatic. Kate didn’t know much about guns. She had no idea whether the safety was on or off, no idea how to tell if it was loaded, though she thought that the clip was in place.

“Where’s the jewelry?”

“In� in my apartment.”

“Try again. We already tossed your apartment. If we go there now and you can’t produce the jewelry, I’ll kill you.”

“There’s a ruby choker in my apartment. I can give you that.”

“I have the choker. Where’s the rest, the other nine pieces?”

Kate studied the traffic, wanting to jam her foot hard on the gas and swerve into an oncoming car, to cause such a wreck the police would be called and a crowd would gather. Stopping at a signal, staring at the gun, she was afraid to jump out of the car and try to run, afraid the woman would shoot. Warily Kate watched her. What was it about her face, something strangely familiar and unsettling?

The day Nancy Westervelt came to her office, wanting a designer for her new apartment, she had been waiting for Kate not in the reception area but in Kate’s private office. Kate had come in to find her standing at the window looking out at the street, not four feet from Kate’s desk and file cabinet. Had she been searching the desk?

She looked over defiantly into the woman’s dark eyes, trying to imagine Nancy Westervelt’s smoothly coiffed hair frizzled in a black cloud, imagine her eyes heavily lined with black, and thick, nearly black lipstick. When the light changed, Kate nearly ran into the car ahead: she was looking at the young woman from the village, at the woman who had come here to rob her.

Turning onto Stockton, where she had to stop for a cable car, she looked over at her passenger, trying to ignore the gun pointed at her. Surely, above the gun barrel, Consuela Benton looked back at her.

She should have known. Kate remembered cloying perfume, heavy, cheap jewelry, a low-cut tank top tight across her breasts-she should have known at once, there in her office or certainly the minute the woman walked into the restaurant. But this woman was a master of change. From a frowzy teenager to this sophisticate. Who would guess? Moving belatedly ahead with the traffic, she felt as if she was in some sadistic fun house, felt so off balance she nearly did wreck the car, skidding sideways into the next lane.

“Watch your driving! Answer me! Are they in your office?” Her voice was shriller, harsh with impatience.

“I rented another safe deposit box. After you stole my key and check carbon. Do you think the bank doesn’t have your fingerprints? Do you think the police won’t-”

“I wore gloves. You did not rent a new deposit box, not in that bank or any bank in this city.”

Kate laughed. “That bank knows the story. You won’t learn where from them; you won’t get into that box.”

Consuela poked her hard with the gun. “I’ll ask you one last time. Where is the jewelry? You answer me or our friend will take over. He’s directly behind us, in the gray car. Are the jewels in your office?”

“You’re welcome to look if you like.” Ignoring honking horns and skidding brakes Kate swung a U-turn in the middle of the block and headed across town for her office. Her head was pounding. She felt ice cold, then the next moment hot and flushed. She wondered if she could swerve the car hard and wrest the gun away. She wished she knew more about firearms. Driving in silence, trying to think of a plan, then at last pulling up beside the darkened office building, she felt totally defeated. She knew nothing about how to defend herself. As the woman instructed, Kate turned down into the underground parking garage.

In the greasy yellow glow of the vapor bulbs, the garage was empty of all but a few cars. Consuela made her slide back across and get out the passenger side. The woman walked so close to her they could have been joined at the hip, the gun under her coat pressed against Kate like a scene from some gangster movie. Kate tried to imagine kneeing her in the groin, jabbing the heel of her hand to the girl’s chin or nose, hurting her bad enough to crumple her. Imagined herself grabbing the gun-imagined herself, untrained and uncertain, making a mess of it and ending up shot, maybe dead. Inadequate did not half describe her sense of frustration; she hated her ineptitude and cowardliness. Ringing for the elevator and moving inside it with Consuela, she punched the fifth floor.

Unlocking the outer office door and switching on the lights, Kate crossed the reception area, with its pale, deeply carved carpet and its mix of antique and contemporary furnishings, its handsome potted plants and rich oil paintings. When she didn’t move fast enough, the gun barrel poked her in the back. Unlocking the door to her office, she stepped directly to the file cabinet and unlocked that. There was no point in pretending the jewels weren’t there. Opening the bottom drawer, she reached to the back, drawing out the plain little cardboard box.

“Open it. Pull the tape off.”

Reaching for her desk scissors, Kate imagined stabbing Consuela more quickly than Consuela could pull the trigger, but instead, of course, she obeyed, cutting the tape and opening the lid, removing the little suede evening bag. Opening its clasp, she tipped out the nine pieces of jewelry onto the blotter. The silver and topaz choker she had worn to Charlie’s party. A ruby pendant, two diamond bracelets, a gold and onyx necklace, two rings, one set with diamonds, one with a sapphire, and an emerald bracelet and choker, the jewels and heavy gold settings flashing in the overhead lights, the strange medieval design fascinating Kate even now.

“Put them back in the box. Tape it up.”

Kate put the pieces back into the blue suede bag, lay that in the box, and fetched tape from her desk drawer. When it was sealed she watched the girl work the box into her raincoat pocket, never turning the gun or her gaze from Kate. Did Consuela mean to kill her now, and leave her body to be found by the janitor?

Consuela forced her back through the reception room and into the elevator, shoving her out again into the parking garage. “Unlock the car.”

Kate unlocked it.

“Give me the keys.”

Did she mean to shoot her here?

“The keys! And get in the driver’s seat.”

“You have the jewelry. What do you want now?”

“Give me the keys and get in the car.”

Kate did as she was told.

Consuela got in, slammed the door, then handed her the keys. “Drive directly to your apartment.”

Kate swallowed.

If she were shot at home, as if she had walked in on a burglar, she might lie there for a very long time before anyone thought to look for her. She often didn’t call in in the morning but went directly out on house calls.

Turning on Van Ness, she watched a gray hatchback staying close behind her. Turning onto Stockton, she glanced at Consuela. “Are you connected to Emerson Bristol?”

The girl just looked at her. “Who’s that?”

“The� an appraiser.”

Consuela gave her a blank look. Neither spoke again until they reached Kate’s parking garage, where Consuela gestured for her to pull in.

Parking, Kate had her hand on the door when Consuela stopped her. “Give me your keys.”

Kate’s heart sank.

Consuela opened the passenger side window and threw the keys as hard as she could among the darkest, farthest rows of parked cars.

“Stay here inside the car. You will sit here for ten minutes after I leave, facing straight ahead. If you look around or get out you will be shot.”

Kate glanced past her, to see the gray car waiting at the curb.

Getting out, Consuela moved quickly through the garage to the street and slid in beside the driver. Kate caught a quick glimpse of high forehead and prominent nose. And then they were gone, driving quietly up the dark street. The minute they were past her building Kate slid out, snatching her flashlight from the glove compartment, and moved into the blackness among the parked cars searching for her keys.

Why had Consuela left her alive? Because she didn’t want to face a murder charge in case they were caught? But why had she bothered to bring her home? Did the woman think she would be less likely to call the cops if she were returned to her own apartment? That maybe she would run upstairs, collapse in tears, and that would be the end of it? Or at least if she did call the cops, they had a little time while she retrieved her keys-maybe a lot of time, if the keys had gone down through one of the storm grates in the garage floor.

She found them at last; it took her nearly half an hour. They were lodged on the hood of a big Buick, where the black grid of air ducts met the windshield, the keys half hidden beneath the edge of the hood. Retrieving them and hurrying up the closed stairway to her apartment, she flinched at every imagined shifting of the shadows above her, at every hint of sound from the upper landing. At her own door she fumbled with her key, pushing nervously inside. Slamming and locking the door, she leaned against it, her heart pounding.

When she looked up at her apartment, she felt her heart skip, and she went sick.

It appeared as if a tornado had touched down, flinging and smashing furniture, spewing the contents of every drawer in its violent tantrum of destruction. The couch and chairs lay upside down, the upholstery ripped, cotton and foam stuffing pulled out in hunks, even the dust covers shredded off the bottoms, revealing springs and webbing.

Numbly she moved through the mess feeling physically bruised. Along nearly every wall the carpet and pad had been ripped away to reveal the old wooden floors beneath. The kitchen looked like a garbage dump. She stood looking in, and did not want to enter. Every cupboard had been flung open, the contents thrown to the floor, spilled food mixed with broken china. A cold draft hit her, though she had left no window open.

Certainly not the kitchen window, which now stood open, letting in the damp breeze.

She wanted to race for the front door, fling it wide, and run. Backing away from the kitchen, she crossed to the fireplace and picked up the poker that lay incising its black soot across a satin pillow. Clutching the poker, she moved again to the kitchen, shaking with shock and rage. She crossed to the sink and window, glancing behind her to watch the kitchen door, wading through debris that crunched under her shoes.

The window had been jimmied open four inches. That was as far as the second, newer lock would allow. Not wide enough for human entry. Examining the older lock, she could see where it was broken, the metal cracked through. Looking out at the adjoining rooftops, she shut the window and jammed a long carving knife between the end of the sliding glass and the wall.

She stood looking at the broken dishes and scattered rice and cereal. Every container had been emptied, flour and sugar bags lay atop the mess, along with a coffee can. Had the thieves thought she’d keep the jewels in such places? With every new example of their thoroughness, the monetary value of the jewels became more certain in her mind. They were not paste. Why her parents or grandfather would leave such a fortune, taped into a cardboard box at the back of a safe, for a child who might never see that fortune, was a mystery she might never solve.

Moving back through the grisly mess, clutching the poker, she ventured toward the rest of the apartment, turning first to her study.

The two file cabinets were open, the drawers gutted, files and papers flung everywhere. Books were toppled from their shelves and were lying open, the spines awry, pages ripped out as if in their search Consuela and her friend had had, as well, a high good time. This was not searching; this was destruction. Maybe with people like this, it took only opportunity. Time and place invited, they seized the moment as hungrily as an addict would seize drugs. She was so angry that if she had her hands on Consuela now, gun or not, she would lay her out cold or die trying.

Picking up her office phone, she heard no dial tone. She hit the button, listened. Nothing; again the line was dead. Why did the phone company have to string its wires up the side of the building, prey to every prowler?

She had dropped her purse on the table by the front door. During the time Consuela had the gun on her she had toyed with the thought of trying to slip the phone from her purse and dial 911, but there was never a second when Consuela glanced away.

Still carrying the poker, she fished the phone from her purse and dialed 911 now. She gave the dispatcher her address and described the breakin, trying to make clear the extent of the destruction. The dispatcher told her to get out of the apartment until officers could clear it.

“No. I feel safer here. I was� I was kidnapped tonight, as well. They could still be out there.” This sounded really weird, so strange that she felt embarrassed. The woman would think she was a nut.

“Can you go to a neighbor’s?”

“I don’t know my neighbors. I’ll stay here.”

“Where in the apartment are you?”

“By the front door, in the entry. I’ve searched part of the apartment, all but the bedroom.”

“Officers are on the way. Please stay on the line. When exactly were you kidnapped?” Was the woman patronizing her? Trying to assess her degree of sanity or insanity?

Well, she couldn’t blame her.

Or did she simply want to keep her talking until help arrived? She repeated as briefly and clearly as she could the events since she entered the restaurant until she arrived home. She told the dispatcher about giving Consuela the jewels. She explained Consuela’s change in appearance and gave her a description of her male partner, and of the car. That seemed to impress the dispatcher. She explained that Consuela had been in Molena Point and that the police there might possibly have some information on her.

Talking with the dispatcher, Kate pulled the foil-wrapped sandwich from her purse and moved into the kitchen. She was amazed that she could think of food, but she felt weak and faint, and knew she needed to eat something. Finding a saucepan among the rubble and an unbroken cup half buried in flour, she washed both thoroughly in hot soapy water, tucking the phone between her ear and shoulder. Filling the pan with water, she set it on a burner, brought up a gas flame, and searched among the debris for a tea bag.

Unwrapping the little bag of English Breakfast, she dropped it in the cup, poured boiling water over it, and carried teacup and sandwich into the little dining room, stepping over her nice place mats that were wadded on the floor. She needed to eat. She was weak; her diminished blood sugar dragged her courage even lower. She told the dispatcher where she now was in the apartment. She was pulling out her chair when a movement in the living room brought her up short. She turned, swallowing a cry of alarm.

A black cat sat on the overturned couch disdainfully watching her.

He was huge; his amber eyes blazed so fiercely they seemed filled with licking flames.

There could not be another like him, this cat who called himself the death angel, this cat who had stolen her safe deposit key and had stolen her signature; the same thieving cat that had arrived in the village last year with Greeley Urzey to steal from the village shopkeepers. The beast that, at supper after Charlie’s gallery opening, had looked down through the skylight watching them. She stood beside the table facing him, as ice cold as if all her blood had drained away. She looked down at the phone in her hand, and quietly broke the connection.

The cat smiled. “Little Kate Osborne. Pretty little Kate Osborne.”

“Why did you help Consuela? What do you get out of it? Why would a cat like you be interested in a handful of costume jewelry with paste stones? Your thieving partner could steal anything you want.”

“What partner would that be?”

“Old Greeley,” she said, sitting weakly down at the table, cupping her cold hands around the warm teacup.

“I don’t run withhimanymore. She is my partner now, sometimes. I see that you gave her the jewels.”

“How would you know what I gave her?”

“I saw her leave the parking garage. She would not have left unless she had the jewelry.”

“And is he your partner, too? The man with the big nose?” She sipped at her tea. Where were the police? What was taking so long? What would they do, now that she had hung up?

The cat’s eyes narrowed to slits and his ears laid close to his head. “If the jewels are only paste, why doyoutreasure those pieces so highly?” His crouch was so tense she thought he would leap on her, biting and clawing.

“The jewelry is part of my past. A past that has no meaning for you, or for Consuela and her friend.”

Again the cat smiled. “I could tell you about your past.” He looked at her sandwich, which lay untouched in the open foil wrap, the melted cheese turned to the consistency of rubber. “You were told at the orphanage that McCabe might be the name of your grandfather.”

“How would you know that?”

He rose and stretched, eyeing her dinner. “Is that shrimp I smell? Grilled shrimp?”

Defensively she picked up her sandwich. The cat leaped six feet to an overturned chair and leaped again onto the table. He stood on her dining table staring intently at her supper.

Removing half the sandwich from the open wrapper she shoved it across to him, leaving a greasy path on the nice oak. She’d have to have a cleaning crew in; she wasn’t going to deal with this alone.

Gobbling greedily, the black tom was as messy as a stray dog. The sandwich was gone in six gulps. Licking grease from his whiskers, he eyed her half. She ate quickly though it was cold and rubbery. If in her uneasy hunger she gulped as ravenously as the tom, she didn’t care.

“Ican tell you about McCabe,” the cat said.“Ican tell you about your grandfatherandyour parents, if you indeed want to know.”

“How wouldyouknow about my heritage?” The cat’s words deeply frightened her. Her search, which had started out nearly three years ago as a fledgling interest in her strange heritage, had turned into a nightmare of fear.

The black tom pricked his ears, watching her. “You’d be a pretty little cat, Kate Osborne. Oh, yes, all cream and silk. Maybe more willing than little Dulcie or that tortoiseshell. I do like a partner with my own talents.”

His audacity enraged her. And the feline part of her nature deeply upset her. The joy she had once taken in those talents had vanished-to be a cat, rolling in the garden, racing over rooftops. Those changes had occurred only those few days when her life was threatened; they had not remained a part of her life. She looked at the tomcat. “Tell me why Consuela wanted the jewels. Why she would want paste jewels?”

“Shall we say she collects oddities?”

“She’ll go to jail for robbing me, her fingerprints are on my safe deposit box, her forgery is on the bank records. That’s a big risk, for oddities.”

The cat’s eyes grew as large as moons; he stared at her, keening a wild hunting cry, creeping toward her-she imagined his teeth in her flesh. Palms sweating, her heart racing, she rose and backed away.

He sat down suddenly on the table and began casually washing his paws, his expression one of deep amusement.

Watching him, she didn’t know why she had launched herself into this search for her past, why she had opened this Pandora’s box of perplexing connections, seeking matters that any sensible person would leave alone.

The black cat looked deeply at her. His purr was ragged. “You have amazing talents, Kate Osborne.”

“Not anymore. That is past. I am no more than what you see.”

The cat smiled. “You were under great stress at that time. Your life was threatened, your marriage shattered, your fear that your husband would kill you shocked and sickened you. Perhaps that was why the changes occurred-but what a lovely white and marmalade cat you must have been. And now� Perhaps the stress of present events will-”

“No!” Kate flung her cup at him; he leaped out of its path and it shattered against the wall. He sat down again facing her, his yellow eyes filled with a mad light. The catwasmad. There was no reason that such a beast, with the sentient skills of a human, could not be as stark raving crazy as some poor, demented human.

But she did want to know how he had learned about her, and what else he might know.

Watching her, he smiled. “The Cat Museum, Kate Osborne. There is more information there than you have found.”

“I have been thoroughly through the archives.”

“The oral tradition, among our kind, is reliable and useful.” The cat’s eyes narrowed. “Nothing written. Much that can be told.”

She thought of the other cats prowling the museum gardens, and she shivered. She had wondered about those cats. But now� she would not, could not ever go there again, to that place she had loved so well.

“They do not like me there,” he said. “Those cats who are like us, they do not like me.” He looked deeply at her. “There is indeed a hidden world, Kate Osborne. That is the world I seek. That is your true home, the world where the jewels come from.”

“What, some commune hidden back in the mountains? Some colony of crazies with guards at the gate?“Where were the police?She wanted this cat out of there, she wanted this unpleasantness over with.

“A world lying deep beneath this city, Kate, a world cavernous and vast. That is the world that should have been McCabe’s. The world where I, too, belong.”

She was certain that when the law arrived the cat would vanish the way he had come, that she would be rid of him-he wouldn’t dare stay, he daren’t sit watching while she answered the officer’s questions, while she tried to skirt around the answers that she couldn’t offer. Hurrying to the kitchen she removed the carving knife and opened the window again, providing for him the same four-inch escape route by which he must have entered. Sickly, desperately, she wanted this cat gone. What did he want with her? Moving quickly back into the dining room Kate found the cat still on the table, nosing at her cell phone. Snatching it up, she dropped it in her pocket. She wanted to snatch up Azrael and shove him out the window, but she was too afraid of him.

Surely when the patrol car came, if it ever did, then he would leave. The uniforms would do their work and go away again, and she would be alone. If she could ignore her ruined apartment, she’d take a long hot shower, pull some bedding together, lock her bedroom door against all possible intruders, and go to sleep. Tomorrow she’d muster the strength to pack what was fit to keep, send everything else to the trash, and� What? Move out? Abandon the city now, at once? Give notice at the studio and move back to Molena Point immediately, where she’d be safe?

Or she could transfer to Seattle, far away from the Bay Area, to work in the firm’s new office there. She had not before seriously considered that option.

Watching her, the black cat yawned. “Thereissuch a world, Kate Osborne, a world where all cats speak, a world of subterranean valleys and caverns where jewels are dug from the walls. Diamonds, rubies� Where jewelsmiths are as common as dust. Where do you think that strange work comes from that no one can identify? You know the old Celtic tales, the Irish and Welsh sagas. Do you think that ancient history is all lies because it comes to us in the form of story? Do you reallynotbelieve in those worlds, told of again and again throughout history?”

“They areonlystories! Folktales! Flights of fancy, anyone knows that. Thereisno other world; such a thing is not possible.” She stared hard at the inky beast. His amber eyes blazed back at her, as hot as the flames of hell.

“The jewels can lead us there,” the cat said complacently. “If we can learn where they came from in this world, we can find the way down. A door, a passage down into that lost world.” He looked at her intently.

“You are mad,” she whispered. “There is no world but this.This world! Here! Now.” Snatching at the edge of the table, she tilted it so violently the black tomcat could only leap off. He landed on the buffet. She wanted to throw the table at him. “Leave me alone!Shehas the jewels! Go to Consuela. Take the jewels. Go find your mythical door. Get out of here. Go to that other world or wherever. But get the hell out ofhere,I have nothing for you!”

He stood atop the buffet glaring at her, panther-black and as powerful and sinewy as any jungle beast. “What bargain would it take, Kate Osborne, for you to help me find that world and enter it? You have talents that I do not. And the jewels themselves from that world are surely a badge of power�”

“Get out!” She swung around, grabbing the poker.

He stared at her unflinching. “There is a house, Kate Osborne. An old gray Victorian in Pacific Heights, an earthquake-damaged house, closed now and awaiting repairs. Cats live there, cats that do not fit into the dull gardens of the Cat Museum, beautiful, dark-souled cats who were driven out by their tame cousins. Those cats could lead us� or perhaps we will find the door there, in that wrecked dwelling, perhaps-”

“Then go there! Go to your rebel cats! Such beasts should welcomeyou.Go down to that world and leavemealone.” The cat was mad, he was indeed Poe’s black beast, as Joe Grey once had once observed. “Go tothem,“she repeated. “I can’t help you.”

“They do not want me there. Those cats fear me; they fear my power. They rise like a tide against me.”

“So what do you want from me?I can’t help you.”

“Those beasts come and go freely from that world. Perhaps indeed a portal is there, in that ruined place� I have seen them appear out of the darkness of that house, I have seen their eyes. I have smelled the scent of deep, dank earth on them.” His eyes burned with desire. “They drive me out, Kate Osborne. They do not want me in that world.”

She watched him, chilled by his words but not understanding.

“Even the dark souls, Kate Osborne, make war among themselves, battles of jealousy and power. If that world has turned dark as I think it has, if the hell beasts now rule there� then only a badge of power can have authority.” His yellow eyes gleamed. “I believe the jewels with their symbols of cats wield the power I want. A talisman of authority from that world�”

She shivered, drawing back. The cat was insane, driven by an ego bigger than any lost world-and yet despite her fear of him, his words and his cloying voice strangely quickened her heart. And a little voice deep inside her kept asking,Why are there no public records for McCabe, or for my grandmother or my parents? WhatareMcCabe’s oblique references in his journals to some other world?

She shook her head, turning away. She did not want to think about this; she did not want any of this.

But then she turned back, watching the tomcat. “Isshea part of this? Is Consuela part of this insanity? Does she believe in such a world?”

His laugh was cold, teeth bared with derision. “She knows nothing about my true purpose. She has taken the jewels for her lover.”

“The man who followed me?”

The cat laughed again, a snarling hiss that gave her goose bumps. “That man is not her lover. Her lover is her partner, as am I. We are three in our ventures. The man who followed you is a pawn, a simple lackey.” He watched her appraisingly. “If you want to know about her partner, you must help me.”

The cat jerked around as footsteps sounded outside the door in the stairwell.

“Go!” she hissed.

The cat sat unmoving, his smile evil.

Kate was so enraged, so at the end of her temper, that she snatched up the beast by the nape of his bullish neck and his thick black tail and, holding him away from her, she hiked him through to the kitchen. She was sure he’d twist around and slash her-he could shred her arm in an instant.

But he did nothing. He hung limp, watching her and laughing.Laughing.Enraged, she shoved him through the narrow opening, forcing him through with her hand on his rump then closing the window, wedging it again with the butcher knife. Then she went to open the front door. In her last view of Azrael, the tomcat sauntered boldly away into the black night of the rooftops.

22 [��������: pic_23.jpg]

In the presence of the two officers, Kate was foolishly embarrassed by the shambles of her apartment. Shaken by her encounter with the black tomcat, she felt dull and slow, as if her normal senses were muffled.

Of the two officers, the tall, thin one was young, maybe in his late twenties, with startling blue eyes. He stood in the open door, his smile reserved, appraising her and watchful.

“Mrs. Osborne? I’m Officer Harden. This is Officer Pardue.” Harden’s instant scan passed beyond her to the destroyed living room, seeming to record every small detail, every break and spill and tear, every gouge and stain.

Officer Pardue was shorter and older, perhaps in his fifties, the lines in his face sculpted into the look of someone with a perpetually sour stomach. His survey of the room seemed more wary, more attuned to watching for a hidden presence, for someone waiting out of sight. When she stepped back for them to enter, Officer Pardue began at once to move through the apartment to clear it, his hand on his gun. Officer Harden remained standing with her, asking questions but sharply alert until Officer Pardue returned. Only then did Harden begin to fill in his report, walking through the rooms with her, then sitting with her at the dining table, avoiding the grease.

As Pardue waited by the door, Kate told Officer Harden that before she got home she had been followed, and that she had been kidnapped for perhaps an hour and then released in her own parking garage. It all sounded so hokey, so made up. She gave him the detailed circumstances and described the jewelry the woman had taken. He interrupted her once to call the station, to speak with a detective. He did not want her to clean up the apartment or to move anything at all until the detective arrived. That he was concerned enough to bring in an investigator, made her feel better. Harden wanted to know what she had touched after she got home. When she told him she had made tea and eaten a sandwich he seemed amused.

“I felt faint; I had to have something. I sat here, at the table.” She did not, of course, mention her uninvited dinner guest. If, later, the detective found paw prints on the table, so be it. When Harden went to look at her phone line, he found that it had been cut just outside her kitchen window. He reported this for her through the dispatcher.

As he filled out his report, he made her repeat many answers. She did not like that he was testing her. He asked her three times whether she knew the man, and made her repeat that she wasn’t sure. Asked her twice to describe how she knew Consuela. She would have to answer all this again, for the detective. She hoped he would not be as heavy-handed. Explaining that in Molena Point Consuela had posed as a teenager, she was most uncomfortable at how addled that sounded. She was relieved when Detective Jared Reedie arrived some ten minutes later.

His quick arrival surprised her, implying to her that this particular burglary might be important. Reedie was a shockingly good-looking young man with dark brown hair and brown eyes, dressed in cords and a suede sport coat, a young man so handsome that Kate immediately found herself mistrusting him. When the two officers had left, Reedie walked through the house with her, taking photographs, then at last he came to sit with her at the table as Harden had done. She told her story over again knowing he would compare it with what she’d told Officer Harden-as if she were the one on trial. She understood why this was necessary, but that didn’t make her any more comfortable with the fact-finding process to which the law was committed.

Reedie said, “There was a report tonight of a woman being followed into a restaurant on Columbus.”

She nodded. “I think the waitress, Annette, might have called. She helped me leave-helped that woman and me go out the back.”

“You saw the car that followed you.”

“A gray hatchback. I don’t know what make. Fairly new, though.”

“And you got a look at the man?”

When, for the fourth time, she described the man, she caught a gleam of interest from Reedie. He spent quite some time going over her description of him, and of the waiter in Molena Point. He seemed equally interested in her two very different descriptions of Consuela.

“You think they were the same person, this sophisticated Nancy Westervelt, and the teenager you described from Molena Point?”

“Yes, I’m sure it’s the same woman.” This was such a tangle. She had to tell him about the theft of her safe deposit key. She was nervous not to, because she had reported it to the bank. The detective seemed to sense that she was leaving things out, though he did not accuse her of that. When he kept questioning her about Consuela she said, “Maybe it would help if you talked with Captain Harper in Molena Point, or spoke with one of his detectives, with Dallas Garza or Juana Davis. All three know Consuela, and maybe they could shed some light. They should know if she’s left the village.”

“What is your connection to Molena Point PD?”

“I worked for Dallas Garza’s niece, here in the city. While Dallas was still with your department. If I return to Molena Point to live, his niece wants me to join her again. She now has her own design studio there.” She studied his handsome face, his expressionless brown eyes. “Captain Harper is a personal friend, as well. He was very helpful and supportive when my husband�”

She faltered, then, “Do you remember a money-laundering and car-theft scheme in Molena Point three years ago? They killed the owner of the car dealership when he found out what they were doing.”

Reedie nodded. “I remember.”

“My husband, James Osborne, was part of it. When I found out, he arranged with his partner to kill me. It was Captain Harper who broke the case. The two are now in San Quentin.”

Her explanation seemed to put Detective Reedie somewhat at ease, and the remainder of his interview was less rigid. She described for him in as much detail as she could each piece of jewelry that Consuela had taken. She told him where she had had them appraised. By the time the detective rose to leave, he had a detailed account of her evening, had taken three rolls of photographs, and had a description of the man who had followed her. The detective seemed, in fact, so intent on the man that she wanted to mention the newspaper article she had read about the jewel robbery in the city and the escape of one of the thieves.

But he would know that; maybe that was why he was interested. When Reedie asked if she wanted to press charges against Consuela, she hesitated.

“If I press charges, and she’s caught and the jewelry is recovered-if she actually goes to trial, I won’t get the jewelry back until the trial’s finished. Is that right?”

“Yes. And then only if you can identify it.”

“I don’t have photographs. Would my fingerprints on the jewelry count for anything?”

Detective Reedie smiled. “I can see that it counts for something-if she doesn’t wipe them clean. Your descriptionofthe pieces will be taken into consideration. You might want to get a written description from the appraiser and a letter from the attorney who gave them to you.”

“Yes,” she said doubtfully. “If the attorney ever looked at them, if he ever opened that sealed box. But�” She looked up at Reedie. “I think I could draw them with some accuracy.”

“That might be helpful. It couldn’t hurt.”

“If I don’t press charges of theft, but report the jewelry taken, could I expect to get the jewelry back?” She didn’t want to wait months or maybe years for the overcrowded San Francisco court system to release the evidence. “If I did that, what could you hold her on? Would you have enough to hold her?”

Reedie smiled. “You can press charges for kidnapping, for breaking and entering, and for malicious damage. But the case would be stronger if you charge her with taking the jewelry as well.

“It’s not as if the jewelry went missing during the breakin,” he said. “You were forced to give her the box. It would make a far stronger case if you laid it all out as it happened.” He studied her. “But we have to keep that kind of evidence for the trial.

It’s not like, say, stolen merchandise where you can check the price tag, know the exact value, and return it to a store that has been robbed. The court would insist on holding it for actual consideration during the trial.”

“Do I need to come into the station to file charges?”

He removed a sheaf of forms from the back of his clipboard and handed her two, offering her a pen. Kate gave him a grateful look and began to fill in the required information. She did not take time to run her phone messages until half an hour after Detective Reedie left.

When the police had gone, she took a long hot shower, made herself a bourbon and water, and tucked up in bed, locking her bedroom door. With her cell phone she called the message service for her home phone. Detective Reedie had reported her phone line cut, but she could access the service from anywhere. She supposed the land line would be repaired in the morning.

Alone and safe in her bedroom, jotting down messages, punching erase or save, she was torn by the thoughts that the black tomcat had stirred.

Yet, when she faced her decision to abandon the search into her family, to forget the past and settle down to real life, an emptiness yawned, making her feel very alone. To cut those nebulous ties to her heritage, no matter how strange that past was, made her feel totally cut off from the world.

Huddled up in bed, frightened again and lonely, she felt a deep need for her friends, for Wilma and Charlie, for Clyde, for Hanni and Ryan. Unexpected tears started flowing, and before she finished listening to her messages she hung up and dialed Molena Point.

Clyde answered. His voice was muzzy with sleep. She glanced at her bedside clock. It was nearly ten.

“I was reading,” he lied.

“You were asleep.”

“In my study, reading. Foggy out, really socked. Guess I drifted off.”

“In your study with a fire burning,” she said longingly.

“A fire burning, a glass of bourbon. All I need is you, it couldn’t get any better.”

She laughed. “You’re such a philanderer. What about Ryan?”

“She’s at home working on blueprints.”

“And Joe is sprawled on your feet?” Kate wanted to keep him talking, keep hearing his voice so familiar and comforting. She wished she were there; she needed Clyde, needed a strong shoulder to lean on.

“Joe’s out hunting, waylaying innocent rabbits. Damn cat. I hate when he hunts in the fog; it’s the most dangerous time. But you can’t tell him one damn thing; might as well talk to the wall. How are you, Kate? You sound� what’s wrong?”

“I’m too tired to repeat it all again. The police have been here, and a detective. I had a breakin. I just� needed to hear your voice. I’ll explain it all later. Trashed my apartment. I’m fine now, apartment’s secure.”

“Tell me the rest.”

“Could I tell you tomorrow? I just� wanted to hear your voice. I felt so lonely.”

“Don’t leave me hanging. Talk to me.”

“I’m just so tired.”

“Try,” he said unsympathetically

“That girl from the village, that cheap girl running with Dillon? Consuela something?”

“Yes?”

She told him, starting with the theft of her safe deposit key.

Joe Grey, in his typical tomcat secrecy, had told Clyde none of that. She left the phone once to refill her drink, and they talked for nearly an hour. Clyde’s questions were endless. He said, “I’m coming up, Kate. First thing in the morning.”

“That isn’t necessary, I don’t want you to do that. I just wanted to hear your voice. I’m fine, Clyde. The police have it in hand.”

When she hung up, having convinced him at last not to come, she went to the kitchen and managed to find another tea bag. Taking a cup back to bed, she continued running her messages. That was when she got Lucinda.

She had erased the ninth message, from a client, having made the necessary notes. She had begun to play the next one when she sat straight up in bed. Holding the phone away from her, staring at it, she missed vital words.

She replayed it, unbelieving. At first, for an instant, she thought it was an old message that had somehow gotten saved.

“Kate, it’s Lucinda. We weren’t in that wreck, we’re all right. We wanted, for a while, to not tell anyone at all, not even the sheriff. We’ll explain it all when we see you, we’re heading for San Francisco�”

Alive? They were alive?She felt cold with shock, then delirious with relief. She wanted to jump up and down on the bed, to turn cartwheels. Punching save, she ran the message four more times.

“If you’re out late,” Lucinda said, “if you try to call me back and we’re asleep, leave a message. We’re at the Redwood, in Fort Bragg. We don’t want to come barging in tomorrow, if it’s not convenient. We just� It will take a while to tell you all that’s happened. But we’re fine. We got out of the RV long before the wreck; we weren’t anywhere near when it burned.” Lucinda’s voice sounded strong and happy.

“We’ll be in the city in the morning, I made reservations at that little hotel just down from you. Maybe, if you’re free, we can have breakfast?”

She listened. Played it again. Again.Alive! They were alive!Three days since the wreck and no word,and now they were alive!

This could not be a joke, she knew Lucinda’s voice. What had happened? Where had they been? Whyhadn’tthey been in touch?Why hadn’t they called her, or called Wilma? Why hadn’t they contacted the police?She sat holding the phone, staring at it, her hands trembling; she was grinning like an idiot.

When at last she called their hotel, she got the message service. Well, it was after eleven, likely they were asleep. She didn’t try their cell phone. She left a message, then tried to call Wilma but got a busy signal. Did Wilma know? Had Lucinda already called her? Were they talking right now? When she had talked with Clyde, he didn’t know.

And most important, did the kit know? Did Kit know that the family she loved so fiercely was safe, the family for whom she had been grieving?

Lucinda’s message had been left at 8:30 P.M., just about the time she had walked into her trashed apartment. She couldn’t stop thinking of the kit, of how excited the little tattercoat would be. She tried Wilma again but her line was still busy, and so was Clyde’s.

Before Wilma called to give Clyde the amazing news about Lucinda and Pedric, Clyde stood in his study wondering whether to throw some clothes in a duffel and take off at once, drive on up to the city, and give Kate some moral support, or whether to go sensibly to bed and take off at first light. Kate sounded in really bad shape, he had never heard her so weepy.

Not even during that bad time when Jimmie wanted her dead and when under stress Kate had experienced the feline side of her nature in a manner that he still found hard to deal with.

Moving into the bedroom, he had snatched his leather duffel from the shelf in the walk-in closet and was stuffing in a couple of pairs of shorts and socks when the phone rang. Picking up the bedside extension, he could hear a cat yowling in the background.

Within moments he knew they were alive; Lucinda and Pedric were alive. Wilma was laughing and crying. He could hear the kit in the background yowling and laughing; she sounded demented. He sat down on the bed.

He had to tell Joe. Why wasn’t he here? Where the hell was Joe Grey?

23 [��������: pic_24.jpg]

By ten that night, the fog had packed itself as tight as cotton wool into Molena Point, drowning the village trees and rooftops and gathering like an advancing sea along the sidewalks and against the faintly lit storefronts. The oaks that guarded Wilma Getz’s house stood shrouded as pale as ghosts above the mist-flooded flower beds. Not the faintest smear of light shone in Wilma’s front windows, but at the back of the house her bedroom bled golden light out onto the grassy hill.

Within the cozy room a lamp burned, and three small oak logs blazed in the red enamel stove. On Wilma’s bed, curled up on the thick, flowered quilt, Dulcie and Kit lay limp and relaxed as Wilma read to them.

Wilma would not have chosen for the night’s reading a volume of Celtic folklore, but the kit had begged for it. Those stories, so reminiscent of Lucinda and Pedric, made the kit incredibly sad, yet she demanded to hear them. The tale was deep into stone circles and underground kingdoms when the phone rang, its shrill sound jerking the three of them abruptly from those distant realms. The two half-dreaming cats started up wide eyed, visions from the story crumbling as Wilma reached for the phone.

Her hand paused in midair. Did she really want to answer? Could it be a sales pitch this late? If a salesman got the answering machine, he’d hang up-that’s what the machine was for. The last time the phone rang late at night, it had been terrible news: the deaths of two dear friends.

But then, ever curious, ever hopeful that something wonderful was happening in the world, Wilma picked up.

When she heard the voice at the other end she caught her breath, her heart started to thud-then she began to smile, then to laugh. “Hold on,” she said. “Hold one minute.”

Hitting record, she reached out to the kit. “Come here quick. You were right,” she whispered, gathering the kit in close to her. “Kit, you were right, they’re alive.” Cuddling the kit in her arms, she held the receiver so they both could listen. “They’re alive, Kit! Lucinda and Pedric are alive.” Then, remembering the speaker, she pressed the button. “Go on,” she said. “We’re all three listening.”

Lucinda’s voice sent the kit rigid. She stared at the phone that, she had thought a few months ago, was some kind of magic. She stared up at Wilma.

Lucinda was saying, “After I left a message on Kate’s phone, Pedric and I went out to dinner. We just got back. I expect Kate has already called you. Well, we’re fine, Wilma. We’re just fine. Is the kit there?”

The kit stared at the speaker and touched it with a hesitant paw. Pressing against Wilma, looking up into Wilma’s face, she tried to read the truth of what she was hearing. All her kittenhood suspicion of telephones and things electronic tumbled through her head, rendering her deeply uncertain. She couldn’t stop shivering.

But thatwasLucinda’s voice, she knew Luanda’s voice.

“Kit? Are you there? It’s really me, it’s Lucinda. We’re fine, Pedric is right here with me. We got out of the RV before the wreck. We’re coming home, Kit. Coming to stay, to build our house for the three of us.”

Kit shoved her nose at the speaker.“Lucinda, Lucinda�” And for once the kit abandoned all powers of speech and fell into mewling cries.

“We’re in Fort Bragg,” Lucinda said. “We’ll be in the city tomorrow morning. We’ve left a message for Kate. There’s so much more to tell her-so much to tell you. So much that I think we need to tell Captain Harper. Now. Tonight. Would he mind if we called him at home?”

“Of course he wouldn’t mind. He’ll be thrilled to hear your voices and so will Charlie. But what�?”

“The man who stole our RV, who probably intended to kill us-we think we know him. We think this could be connected somehow to events in the village.”

Wilma sat quietly listening to Lucinda’s story, seeing the old couple locked in their bedroom in the RV as the man pocketed their ignition keys, as he unhooked the gas and electric lines, the water and waste systems from the RV parking slot.

“What time was this?” Wilma asked. “Didn’t anyone in the campground see him and wonder?”

“It was early, just after dark. But no one could see our rig. We always choose a private space with just the woods around us.

“Well, when he started the engine and took off, we were locked in the bedroom. We crawled under the bed into the storage compartment and waited until he slowed to turn onto the highway, then went out the other side into the bushes, dragging a duffel with a few clothes and some money. And a blanket. No need to be cold; we slept all night in the woods.”

“But what did he want?” Wilma said. Not that anyone these days needed an excuse for cold-blooded behavior.

“The jewelry,” Lucinda told her. “That costume jewelry. Can you believe that? It’s lovely, but it’s only paste.”

“Are you sure that’s what he wanted?”

“It’s what he told us.”

“And you gave it to him?”

“We told him we’d put it in a safe deposit box in Eureka with some personal papers. He demanded our key and a sample of Pedric’s signature. We gave him both.”

Lucinda laughed. “The safe deposit key is not for a bank in Eureka. That’s where he was headed when we bailed out of the RV. The jewels were in the storage compartment of the RV, we got them out in the duffel. Pedric-”

“You had them� have them with you?”

“Of course. We took them when we crawled out.”

Wilma smiled at their resourcefulness, then shivered. “Do be careful, Lucinda. Why would he� Are you so sure they’re paste?”

“Kate had hers appraised. Ours are just like hers; same style, same kind of setting. We couldn’t have bought those pieces up in Russian River for the little we paid if the jewels were real.”

Wilma looked at Dulcie. They were both thinking the same thing. Wilma said, “Lucinda, it’s time for another appraisal. Meantime, please be careful. Even when you get to the Bay Area, miles from Russian River, you could still be in danger.”

When Lucinda hung up to call Max Harper, Wilma sat holding the two cats close, the kit purring so loudly that she drowned out the crackle of the fire and the distant pounding of the surf. Wilma said, “Can you imagine Max and Charlie’s delight when they find out the Greenlaws are alive?”

“I can imagine,” Dulcie said tersely, “Captain Harper asking more questions than you did. What man? How do they know him?Howis this connected to the village?”

“I didn’t want to grill her. She’ll tell all that to Max. Be patient, Dulcie. We’ll hear it all from him, or from Charlie.” Wilma straightened the flowered quilt, smoothed the sheet, and turned out the light. She and the cats were just settling down when again the phone rang. It was Kate.

They spent the next hour talking with her. The fire died down, the room grew chilly, and they wrapped themselves in the quilt. What an amazing night! Kate’s breakin, her ruined apartment, Azrael entering through her kitchen window to open the door for that woman, then staying to harass her. Wilma didn’t say it, but Kate sounded like a basket case.

“Consuela Benton,” Wilma said, amazed.

But of course the kit and Dulcie had known. They didn’t tell Wilma everything-not when that black tom had prowled her house so brazenly, not when Kate’s key had been stolen right here in Wilma’s own guest room, practically under Wilma’s nose. Though they might opt to tell her soon, if Consuela and that beast returned to the village.

“So smooth and sophisticated,” Kate said, “not a thing like Consuela. Hardly any makeup, her hair simple and clean, no ghoulish black eye makeup, no skintight jeans and bare belly button-”

“Kate, I’m going to call Charlie in the morning. See if I can pick up her barrette and take the two pieces to be appraised, here in the village. Maybe Lucinda would take her pieces to someone, maybe someone Dallas Garza could remember, in the city.”

“I’ll suggest it,” Kate said. “I’ll try.”

They hung up. Wilma and the cats snuggled down again, and the kit fell asleep at once. So much excitement, so much wonderment and joy Now she totally crashed, worn out, curled in a tangle of the quilt, dropping deep, deep under, exhausted clear down to her tortoiseshell paws.

24 [��������: pic_25.jpg]

Theringing phone woke Charlie. She was alone in bed, alone in the house. The time was 11:40. Muzzily she picked up the receiver dunking it was Max. The woman who spoke, her voice, her words, sent chills wriggling down Charlie’s spine.“Who?“She sat up in bed, switching on the lamp.“Who is this?”

“It’s Lucinda, my dear. Lucinda Greenlaw.”

Outside the bedroom window, the thick fog was smeared yellow by the two security lights that illuminated the yard and stable. Clutching the phone, Charlie didn’t speak.

“Oh dear, I don’t mean to shock everyone. I thought Kate might have called you. We weren’t in the RV when it crashed, Charlie. We’re alive. We�”

What kind of scam was this? Charlie listened warily. If the Greenlaws were alive, Max would have known right away, from the sheriff. And Lucinda would have called Wilma at once. Charlie sat holding the phone, trying to figure out what was going down.

“Charlie, thisisLucinda. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I just talked with Wilma. I need to talk with Max� You’re not on a cell phone?”

“No,” Charlie said. “It’s the be�” She caught her breath. She’d started to say the bedroom phone. She stared toward the hall, wondering if someone had gotten in the house, if someone was on one of the extensions, playing some insane trick. “Whoisthis?” She wished Max were there. There was no way this could be Lucinda. Max should be talking to this woman.

“It’s Lucinda, my dear. Is the captain there? I just talked with Wilma-and with Kit, Charlie. I talked with Kit.”

She pulled the covers up. “Lucinda?” She stuffed both pillows behind her.

“We weren’t in the RV when it crashed and burned, Charlie, we’d already gotten out, before it reached the highway.”

“But where have you been? Why didn’t you call? The whole village is grieving.”

As she listened to Lucinda’s explanation and imagined the elderly couple crawling into the storage compartment and out the other side, slipping and sliding down into the muddy drainage ditch, Charlie began to grin.

She knew that Pedric had completed some work on the new RV to customize it before they ever began to travel, but she hadn’t known how much.

“I didn’t know,” she said, laughing, “how sly Pedric could be. I didn’t know with what foresight he did those improvements.”

“Sometimes it pays,” Lucinda said, “to have grown up in a family of thieves. Pedric knows every way there is to get into-or get out of-a house or trailer or RV.”

“This is just� You two are incredible. Max will want to hear this. Call him now, Lucinda. At the station.”

“It’s all right to call there so late?”

“More than all right.” Charlie gave her the number. “We love you, Luanda.”

Hanging up, turning out the light, and pulling up the covers, Charlie snuggled down. This was indeed a gift of grace-for the Greenlaws, for the kit, for all their friends. A deep sense of protection filled her, as powerful as when, on her and Max’s wedding day, they had escaped that terrible explosion that had been set to kill them and most of the wedding party. Escaping that disaster, she had felt that all of them were blessed and watched over. She felt the same now, with this amazing reprieve.

Within the fog-shrouded police station, Max Harper and Detective Garza sat on either side of Harper’s desk with Marlin Dorriss’s phone and credit card bills spread out between them. Garza was busy recording pertinent motel stays or gas or restaurant purchases onto a chart, next to the corresponding burglaries. So far they had put Dorriss near the scene of seven thefts. Interestingly, during five of those, his motel bill showed double occupancy.

Harper said, “I hope to hell that wasn’t Helen Thurwell. That would tear it. You want to check Helen’s time off from the real estate firm?”

Garza nodded. The fact that Dorriss’s bills had come to them through the holding cell window did not dampen the intensity with which the officers sorted through them-though how their informant had gotten away so fast off the roof, with uniforms blasting the sky with searchlights, neither Harper nor Garza cared to speculate.

As they studied the information, preparing to petition the judge for a search warrant, the informant himself looked down on their heads from atop Max Harper’s bookcase. The tomcat appeared to be sleeping, his yellow eyes closed, his breathing slow and deep. Occasionally, one or the other of the officers would glance up at him, amused. No one knew why the cat was so attracted to cops.

The cat was good company, though, on a quiet late night. Probably he was addicted to the fried chicken and doughnuts that the dispatchers saved for him. Whatever reasons the cat might have, the nervy little freeloader had become a fixture around the station. As were his two lady pals, though the females didn’t sprawl all over a guy’s desk quite so boldly, nosing at papers and reports.

By the time Harper and Garza set the bills aside, they had eleven possible hits. Leaning back in his chair, Harper propped his feet on the desk, grinning at Dallas. “I think we’ve made Marlin Dorriss. We sure have enough for a warrant.”

“But why the hell,” Garza said, “if Dorriss also has a dozen false identities, with credit cards and drivers’ licenses as our informant claims he does, why didn’t he set up to use those for the thefts?” Their informant had, an hour after the Visa bill drop, called the station to relay the information about the false IDs to the captain.

Garza shrugged. “Guess he couldn’t though. In every one of those thefts, there was some affair or charity dinner, so he had a reason to be there. How would he receive phone calls? And in a small town, if he checked into a hotel under a false name, there would be too many possible leaks.”

Harper rose to refill their coffee cups. “This is some kind of game for the thief-some high-powered game. Steals one trophy piece from each residence, leaves a fortune untouched.”

Garza shrugged. “Takes all kinds.”

“I’ll see the judge first thing in the morning.”

Joe found it hard not to yowl with triumph, not to leap down and give the officers a high five. He listened, very still.

“You really think,” Dallas said, “there’s any point in searching his local residence? Why would he stash his take anywhere near the village?”

“Not likely, but we’ll have to cover it. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me to find it right here. I went through his Molena Point house when it was being built. Contractor is a friend of mine. Dorriss doesn’t know I was ever in there.”

Harper’s dry smile rearranged his lean, tanned wrinkles. “You know how the rich like to build with hiding places, foil the bad guys. That house has it in spades. All those different alcoves, it must have a dozen double walls, hidden dead spaces that no one would ever notice. Sealed up, no access you’d easily see.”

“What about the contractor? Dorriss trusted him?”

“I think Dorriss had a little something on the guy.” Harper set down his cup. “If the local search gives us nothing, maybe there’s rented storage space, though I doubt it. More likely his San Francisco condo, or even Tahoe. I’ll call Judge Brameir in the city, get him early in the morning, see if he’ll issue a warrant for the condo.”

Above the officers’ heads, Joe Grey smiled. That was his thinking exactly. And, if Azraelhadbeen in Dorriss’s house, as he suspected, if the cat was welcome there, and if Azrael ran with Consuela, then was she Dorriss’s partner? Had Consuela been Dorriss’s companion in those double occupancy rooms while Dorriss pulled off his burglaries?

If Dorriss’s stash was there at the condo, Joe thought, what about Clyde’s antique Packard? Was it there, as well, hidden in a garage? Wouldn’t that be a hoot. San Francisco PD goes out with a warrant, searches the place, and there’s Clyde’s valuable restored Packard sitting right there waiting for them. Joe’s head was so full of possibilities he thought he’d explode. He had risen, faking a yawn, burning to leap down and go tell Clyde his theory, when the phone buzzed.

Harper hit the speaker.

The dispatcher said, “Thought you’d want this one, Captain.”

When she’d put through the call and when Joe heard Lucinda’s voice, he nearly fell off the bookshelf.The Greenlaws were alive?Not in the hospital, not harmed in any way, but alive and heading for the city?

Joe listened with the two officers to Lucinda’s amazing story, watched the two men’s pleased smiles, and listened to Harper’s questions and Lucinda’s responses: no, they hadn’t yet talked with the sheriff, yes they were watching that they weren’t followed. When Harper had the whole story and had hung up, he and Dallas were both grinning. This time, even without the law, it looked like the bad guy had got what he deserved. The sense of satisfaction that filled the officers and filled Joe Grey was thick enough to cut with a knife.

As the tomcat dropped from the bookcase to the desk, hit the floor yawning, and padded lazily out of the room, he was so wired that he could barely keep from racing up the hall to the glass door shouting for the dispatcher to let him out-by this time Dulcie knew, the kit knew, and he could hardly wait to hear the little tattercoat’s excited yowls.

25 [��������: pic_26.jpg]

The Garden House Hotel had once been a pair of private residences, handsome Victorian homes each adorned with cupolas and round shingled towers, with diamond-paned bay windows and gingerbread trim along the intricate roof lines. To join the two houses, the architect had constructed a domed solarium, a large and handsome Victorian-style structure to accommodate the gardenlike lobby, the registration desk, and the patio portion of a casual restaurant. There were two elevators, one for each wing. Lucinda and Pedric Greenlaw parked in the small lot next door that was reserved for hotel guests. The time was 9 A.M. They had risen early, as was their custom, and had checked out of their Fort Bragg motel after only a quick snack for breakfast. Driving carefully in the dark predawn for a while, they hoped to hit the lull before the late morning traffic that would be moving into the city across the Golden Gate Bridge.

Arriving at the Garden House, parking in the lot next door, and locking their rented Olds Cutlass, they hurried into the hotel carrying their only luggage: two small duffels, one old and scarred that had rolled with them out of the RV on that fateful night, and a new red canvas bag that they had purchased in a drugstore in Fort Bragg along with extra sweatshirts, socks, underwear, canned fruit, snack food, and half a dozen bottles of water. The two bags contained most of their worldly possessions, except for their CDs and investments. Approaching the door to the hotel, they were both thinking hungrily of pancakes and bacon and coffee when Lucinda, glancing up at the third and top floor of the hotel, stopped, laughing.

“How nice! They allow pets. Or maybe they have a hotel cat.” A black cat sat in the window, staring down at them. They glimpsed the animal for only a moment before a woman picked it up, and both disappeared. Pedric looked at her, smiling. If Lucinda had a soft spot for anything in the world it was cats-though particularly their own tortoiseshell Kit, whom they had both missed very much during their travels.

Last night on the phone, the kit had nearly deafened them both, yowling and shouting with joy, so thrilled that they had survived the crash, demanding to know when they would be home and for how long. When Lucinda repeated to her, “For good, Kit. Forever and good,” the kit had, as Wilma said, bounced off the walls with excitement. Now Pedric stood holding Lucinda’s hand, both watching the high window thinking the cat might reappear, and admiring the hotel’s domes and gingerbread and the soaring solarium; and the tall, thin, handsome eighty-year-olds grinned at each other like children. How pleasant to be in the city for a few days before they headed home. For a few moments they stood watching passersby on the street, too, and seeing what shops were nearby and admiring the San Francisco skyline against the blue sky.

But then, turning to approach the solarium lobby, looking through the long, bright windows into the tiled garden room with its lush plants, Pedric drew Lucinda back suddenly.

“Come away quickly.” Turning and pulling her away, he hurried her down the street, into the first doorway they came to, into the entry to a used bookshop, a low-ceilinged, shadowed niche where the morning sun had not yet found access. “Give me your cell phone,” Pedric said.

“It’s in the car,” Lucinda said, peering out, pressing forward trying to see. But Pedric pulled her back and inside, through the open door of the bookshop.

The store was small and dim, its shelves arranged with unusual neatness for a used bookstore, and it smelled dust-free and clean. Most of the volumes had leather bindings and looked expensive and in fine condition. The gold lettering on the front window, when they read it slowly backward, informed them that the shop featured California History, for collectors. Frowning, Lucinda peered out through the glass, watching the street and the hotel entry.

“Didn’t you see him?” Pedric said. “Look there! Just shutting the trunk of that car! The man who stole the RV.”

“It can’t be.” Lucinda dropped her duffel bag by a stack of books, craning to see out through the crowded display window between the neatly arranged volumes.

On the curb before the hotel, a thin, sandy-haired man was just swinging in through the passenger door of a pale blue Corvette. They could see a woman driving, could see her profile and a tangle of curly black hair. As she pulled away, a dark shape blurred across the back window as if a small dog had jumped up on the ledge behind the seat. Then the car was gone, losing itself in the traffic.

Turning back, Pedric snatched a business card from the counter and noted down the license. Slipping this in his pocket and taking Lucinda’s hand, he moved with her deeper into the store, where the proprietor watched them-a short, thirtyish man with a round, smooth face, an unusually short haircut that let his scalp shine through, dark shirt and slacks, and a wrinkled corduroy jacket. When Pedric asked to use the phone, he passed the instrument over the counter at once with a gentle, almost Old World courtesy.

Within minutes, Pedric had called the police, had described the theft of their RV up in Humboldt County so the dispatcher could check police records, and had given them a description of the thief and the car, and its license number. The bookstore owner had turned back to shelving books, but was quietly listening.

A patrol car must have been in the neighborhood because by the time the elderly couple had walked back to the hotel and checked in, a squad car was pulling to the curb. They went out to join the two officers.

A young black woman officer emerged from the driver’s side. “I’m Officer Hart.” She looked like she was fresh out of college. The older officer, Sean Maconachy, was a ruddy-faced man with graying hair and a sour, closed expression.

“Let’s step inside,” Maconachy said. “Can you be certain that was the man who kidnapped you?”

“We are certain,” Pedric said. “Yesterday evening we filed a complaint with the Humboldt County sheriff. Will that allow you to pick up the car and arrest the man?”

“According to our information,” Maconachy said, “the accident happened last Sunday. Nearly a week ago. And you did not file the report until yesterday?”

“It’s a long story,” Pedric said. “We were afraid to file before. We had escaped the RV before the wreck, but afterward, when the thief wasn’t found, we assumed he had escaped too. We didn’t know where he might be. We holed up in a motel, afraid he might find us. Afraid, for a while, even to contact the sheriff.

“When the man didn’t show, when we felt sure no one was watching the motel, then we called the sheriff’s office.”

Maconachy nodded. Turning aside, he made a call to the station, putting the blue Corvette on wanted status and asking for a copy of the report. He glanced down the street as if he would like to go after the car himself. But the patrol units in the area would by now have been alerted. Maconachy nodded toward the hotel entry, and Lucinda and Pedric went on inside with the officers.

The interior garden areas were planted with ferns and with the bright blooms of cyclamens, the floor laid with pale travertine, the seating areas furnished with cushioned wicker chairs arranged on Turkish rugs. The clerk behind the desk was Asian and very tall. Lucinda and Pedric, standing with the two officers, gave him a description of the sandy-haired man with the high forehead and prominent nose.

“They checked out just before you came in,” the clerk said.. “He wasn’t registered but he has been staying with the woman. She registered for two. Clarice Hudson.”

The officers looked at Lucinda and Pedric.

“The name means nothing to us,” Pedric told them.

Officer Hart took Clarice Hudson’s credit card information and home address from the clerk, information that very possibly would turn out to be of no value.

“The woman had a cat,” the clerk said. “Big black cat. We welcome pets, it’s our specialty, but� well, the cat stayed in the room all right when the maid did it up, but she couldn’t work near it; it snarled at her several times. Really a brute. We need to take another look at the rules. Gave me the chills, that cat.”

Moving across the lobby with the two officers, Lucinda and Pedric sat with them around a low table in the comfortable wicker chairs, answering questions as the officers recorded what happened on the night their RV was stolen.

“He may have been staying at the same campground,” Pedric said. “We would see him walking through, but neither of us noticed him entering or leaving any vehicle. He’d say a distant good morning, or nod. Seemed pleasant enough but preoccupied.”

“The night he stole the RV,” Lucinda said, “we had gone out to dinner-we always pulled a ‘94 Saturn behind the rig, for transportation. We went into Russian River, to a place called Jimmie’s. We got back to the campground around seven, later than we’d planned. We don’t like to drive very far at night.”

“We locked the car,” Pedric said, “unlocked the RV. When we flipped on the lights there he was sitting at the dinette, a big black gun on the table pointed straight at us. An automatic, but I couldn’t see what make.

“He didn’t ask for money. He wanted, specifically, some pieces of jewelry that Lucinda had bought in Russian River on our last trip. That was more than strange, because it’s only costume jewelry. At least, a friend has some like it that she had appraised, and hers is of no special value, a few hundred dollars for the gold work. But that was what he wanted. When we said we didn’t have the jewelry with us, that Lucinda had left it in Molena Point, he didn’t believe us. He grew really angry, started shouting.”

“He began to search the RV,” Lucinda said. “Tore everything up, banging cupboards, making such a racket that we hoped someone would come to see what was happening.

“But we always park off to ourselves, choose the most private spot,” she said. “We like to look at the woods and wildlife, not at other campers. Well, no one came to help us and that was just as well, I guess, since the man was armed.”

Pedric said, “He shoved Lucinda in the bedroom. When I hit him from behind he turned and threw me in too.” The old man grimaced. “I’m not as strong as I once was. In my prime, I’d have taken that guy out. He demanded the jewels again, then demanded the ignition keys. When I didn’t hand them over, he roughed me up pretty bad, jerked the keys out of my pocket, and locked us in the bedroom.”

“Pedric still has bruises,” Lucinda said. “All along his side and back. A wonder he didn’t break something. Well, he didn’t get the jewelry.”

Officer Hart looked hard at them. “You had it all the time, and you didn’t hand it over, even though it was only paste?”

“We don’t like being told what to do,” Lucinda said, “and by that time we were both wondering if itwaspaste.” She smiled at the officers. “What he didn’t know was that Pedric had modified the RV.”

“I lived most of my life on the road,” Pedric said. “Traveling in trailers and all kinds of rigs.” He grinned at the officers. “The reason isn’t important, it doesn’t apply right now, but one thing I learned early, you need more than one or two ways out of a rig-in case of fire, in case of a wreck, in case the law comes down on you suddenly.”

Officer Maconachy grinned.

Pedric said, “That was a long time ago, but some habits don’t change easily. I built two storage compartments into the RV that opened from both the outside and from within. One was the mattress platform. I had to do quite a lot of adapting, and give over some of the space for functional equipment, but I made it work.”

“When he locked us in,” Lucinda said, “we packed a canvas duffel with a few clothes, some money we kept stashed, and the jewelry-it was with the money in one of Pedric’s special hiding places.”

“Took him a while to unhook the rig,” Pedric said. “Waste lines, water and gas and power. We just sat there on the bed, locked in. We didn’t want to hide in the compartment until he took off; we were afraid he’d come back there again, wanting to know how to find some latch, how to unhook something.

“Well, he had no trouble. Must have known how an RV works. The minute he started the engine and got moving, we slid into the compartment.”

Lucinda laughed. “We lay cramped in there bumping along as he drove out through the campground. We unlocked the outside door, and when he slowed to turn onto the highway, we dropped out of the rig and into the bushes dragging the duffel and our blanket-we didn’t see any point in sleeping cold.”

Both officers were smiling, with a gentle appreciation.

“We considered going to the camp manager,” Pedric said. “Spend the night there. But we decided that wasn’t smart. If this guy discovered us gone, if he’d stopped for something and opened the bedroom, that would be the first place he’d look.”

“So we took off hiking,” Lucinda said. “We went a good way from the grounds in the dark. When we were off alone by the river, we made ourselves a little camp in the bushes where we could see there wasn’t any poison oak.”

“We lay listening for a while,” Pedric said. “Then we curled up under the blanket like two spoons, and went to sleep.”

Officer Hart was laughing. Officer Maconachy sat grinning. “You did right well,” he said. “Very well, indeed.”

“According to the news accounts,” Pedric said, “he wrecked the rig about four hours later. We had no idea whether he searched the rig before that, whether he knew we were gone.”

Pedric looked at the officers. “I can’t say I’m pleased that he got out alive. Seems to me that would have been a nice turn of justice, if he had died instead of the tanker driver. We feel real bad about that.”

Lucinda said, “We left the Saturn there in the campground. We were afraid if we took it, that night or later, and he came back looking for us, we’d be easy to follow.”

“The next morning,” Pedric said, “we walked into Russian River. We were going to go to the sheriff, but then we decided that wasn’t smart, either. Decided to stay hidden for a while. We rented a car, drove over to Fort Bragg, and checked into the oldest and most inconspicuous tourist place we could find. Stayed there for several nights, and when no one came snooping around we headed down this way.”

“We have a friend here,” Lucinda said. “We’ll be here with her a day or two, then home to Molena Point.”

“Will you give me those addresses?” Maconachy asked.

She gave them Wilma’s address and phone number in the village; but when she told them Kate’s address just a block away on Stockton, both officers were suddenly keen with an unspoken watchfulness.

Officer Hart said, “When did you last speak with Ms. Osborne?”

“What is it?” Lucinda said. She leaned forward studying the two officers. “What’s happened? We called last night. I didn’t talk with her; I left a message on her machine. Oh my God. What’s happened?”

“She’s all right, she’s fine,” said Officer Hart quickly. “She had a breakin last night. Someone trashed her place.”

Both officers watched them intently.

“What time was this?” Pedric said.

“Late afternoon or early evening. She got home and found it around eight-thirty,” said Hart. “Totally destroyed the place, overturned and broke the furniture. They were after some jewelry.”

Lucinda looked quietly back at them then hurried out to the car. She returned carrying her cell phone, shaking her head. There were no messages.

“She surely would have told us,” Lucinda said. “Maybe she called our motel in Fort Bragg and left a message there. When we went to bed, we turned the ringer down. Maybe she left a message with the motel and somehow, checking out, we didn’t get it.”

The officers sat filling in their reports while Lucinda called Kate. Kate answered on the first ring.

“Kate? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, Lucinda. My line was out last night. I didn’t get your message until late. Where are you? I’m so eager to see you. The place is a terrible mess but I’ve straightened up the guest room-I think you’ll be comfortable. Have you had breakfast? You did get my message? Where are you?”

“We’re just down the street. No, we didn’t get your message, but we know what happened. I’ll explain when we see you. Do you know who broke in? Did you see anyone?”

“I know who she is,” Kate said.

“It wasn’t a man? You didn’t see a man?”

“A manhasbeen following me, Lucinda. Why? He stopped following for a while, and I’d hoped it was over. But now he’s back. How do you-Why do you ask?”

“What does he look like?”

“He� he looks like that waiter. In the village. At Charlie’s gallery opening. I told you about that. The waiter who-”

“The waiter who died,” Lucinda said. “Yes, Captain Harper called us. Sammy Clarkman. I told Harper his name, and where we met him, but I didn’t know anything more about him.” She glanced at the attentive officers. “Clarkman died in Molena Point, of a days-old trauma,” she told them. And, to Kate, “We’ll be there within the hour, see you then.”

“The man we saw this morning,” she told the officers, “the man who broke into our RV, he surely looked like that waiter. Clarkman died two weeks ago, while serving at a gallery opening. Kate says that would describe, as well, the man who followed her.

“We met Sammy in Russian River a few months ago, when he was waiting tables at the hotel. Then in Molena Point we saw him at Jolly’s Deli. Well, he helped cater the exhibit of a friend of ours there. He died while serving drinks, just fell over dead. The coroner said from a days-old blow to the head. He looked enough like the man who stole our RV to be his brother.”

Officer Maconachy said, “Can you tell me the date of the opening?”

Lucinda thought a minute. “October twenty-fourth. A Sunday night.”

He watched her thoughtfully. “Do you know anything about Clarkman, how long he lived in Russian River, or in Molena Point?”

“No, I’m sorry. Nor do I know what took him away from Russian River.”

“Do you know if he ever lived here in the city?”

“He didn’t mention living here. I don’t remember that he mentioned San Francisco at all.”

Maconachy rose. “After you’ve met your friend, would you come down to the station and talk with the detective who’s been in touch with Mendocino County? He’ll want to hear what you have to say.”

As the officers headed away, and the Greenlaws stepped to the desk to cancel their reservation, just a few miles south Clyde Damen approached the city driving a borrowed Cadillac sedan that was heavier and thus safer on the road than his antique roadster. On the seat beside him, Joe Grey stood with his paws on the dash, looking out at the approaching city with deep interest.

26 [��������: pic_27.jpg]

The time was 9:30, the morning sun burning off the last of the valley fog as Clyde and Joe Grey approached San Francisco. They had left the house at 7:30. The Cadillac still smelled new though it was a year old, a trade-in that Clyde had borrowed from the dealership with which his automotive shop shared space. A car more reliable on the freeway at high speed than Clyde’s dozen vintage antiques, most of which were tucked away in the back garage awaiting Clyde’s further attention in therapeutic engine mechanics, body smoothing, and, ultimately, cosmetic detailing and bright new paint. The sun, rising ahead of them, drenched the San Francisco skyline, offering, to Joe Grey, a far more inviting view of the city than the dim, garbage-strewn alleys of his kittenhood.

Peering out, Joe thought about the Greenlaws turning up alive, about Kate’s trashed apartment, and about Marlin Dorriss’s various enterprises. If these matters were connected, the thread that bound them was tangled enough to give anyone a headache. Quietly he glanced at Clyde-his housemate was in a better mood since he’d downed some caffeine; in San Jose they’d made a pit stop, picking up a cup of coffee, a cinnamon bun, and, for Joe, a quarter-pounder, hold the pickles and lettuce. Joe had taken care of his own pit stop under a tree behind the fast food emporium while Clyde kept an eye out for dogs, and they were on the road again. Their argument this early morning over whether Joe should accompany him had been stressful for them both.

Clyde said the San Francisco streets were dangerous for a cat. Had pointed out that Joe hadn’t survived those streets very well as a young cat, that Clyde had rescued him from the gutter, half dead. Joe said he’d gotten along just fine until his tail got broken, and that on this present junket he did not expect to be running the city’s back streets and alleys.

“You damn near died in that gutter.”

“I’m not going back to the gutter.”

Clyde had maintained there was nothing Joe could do in San Francisco to help Kate. Joe reminded him that Azrael was there harassing Kate and that Clyde, despite his many talents, was not skilled at getting up the sides of buildings or slipping through cat-size openings to chase a surly tomcat. But the fact remained that Clyde was deeply concerned about Kate. Joe watched his housemate with interest. His sense was that, no matter how much Clyde was put off by Kate’s unusual feline talents, no matter how she had distanced herself from him romantically, they needed each other very much as friends.

The two went back a long way. They had been good friends while Kate and Jimmie were married. The three were often together, though even then Clyde and Kate seemed close, laughing and having fun together and enjoying Clyde’s various pets, while Jimmie hated cats and had always seemed the odd man out. Jimmie had often been sarcastic and patronizing to Kate, and that hadn’t gone down well with Clyde.

It seemed to Joe that, when the beginning romance between Clyde and Kate went so quickly awry, the feelings that remained had slowly mellowed into a deep and needful friendship. And that was nice. Friendship between two of opposite sexes, without the need to crawl into bed, was one of the values of human civility and intelligence that Joe Grey had come to admire.

Joe did not reveal to Clyde hisreal reason for demanding to accompany him to the city, and that had deepened their early morning conflict. And of course Clyde had said, “What about Dulcie and the kit? Don’t you think they’ll be mad as hell when they find out we ran off to San Francisco without them? With all Dulcie’s dreams of spending a weekend at the St. Francis? Of shopping at Saks and I. Magnin? As Dulcie would put it, like a grand human lady?”

“So I’ll buy them a present from Magnin,” Joe had said irritably, and that had been the end of the matter. Clyde had only glared at him, so annoyed himself that he’d refused to call Kate to tell her he was on the way. He said she’d only fuss at him.

But now, as they pulled into the city and Clyde headed for Kate’s apartment-with no other destination intended-Joe’s thoughts were racing. He watched Clyde narrowly.

“I guess San Francisco PD should have a search warrant by now,” Joe said. “I guess they’ll be searching Dorriss’s condo-Harper said he’d call the judge early.” He watched Clyde appraisingly. “Maybe they’ve already found the Packard.”

Clyde turned to look at Joe. “We didn’t come up here to look for the Packard. That is so unrealistic, to think it’s in the city. We came to help Kate, to give Kate moral support. What makes you think my car would be hidden in San Francisco?”

Joe shrugged. A subtle twist of his gray shoulders, a flick of his ears. “Call it cat sense.”

“What?”

“That sixth sense the authorities talk about.”

“What authorities?”

“Cat authorities. People who study cats, who write about our ability to sense an earthquake before it happens, or a storm or hurricane. Same thing.”

Clyde glared at him, almost missing a red light, slamming on the brakes. “What’s so great about that? A weatherman can predict storms and hurricanes.”

“He can’t predict an earthquake. He can’t feel a storm in his paws like I can.”

“A weatherman doesn’thavepaws,” Clyde shouted.

“Same with the Packard,” Joe said. “I have this really strong sense that it’s here in the city. And I’m not the only one. Max Harper thinks it could be at the Dorriss condo. And Captain Harper is not given to what you call foolish notions.” Joe looked hard at Clyde. “It wouldn’t hurt to look. We could just-”

“We can’tjustanything. We’re here for Kate, not on some pointless chase. Not to get involved in some police investigation that is absolutely none of our business and where we’d be in the way. If there’s anything the cops hate, it’s civilians messing around a search, not to mention some nosy tomcat.”

“Dorriss’s condo has to have a garage. If Harper’s right, your precious Packard could be sitting there just waiting for you.” He looked intently at Clyde. “The cops get to it first and haul it away to their lockup, no telling what kind of damage they’ll inflict. What do they know about classic cars? Dent a fender, break one of those windows that you had such a hard time finding�”

“The police are trained to take care of valuable evidence.”

Joe Grey smiled.

Heading up Stockton, Clyde tried to call Kate. She didn’t answer her home phone or her cell phone. He hung up without leaving a message. “Maybe she’s meeting Lucinda and Pedric, or they’re out to breakfast.” He glanced at Joe. “You think, if the Packard was there in Dorriss’s garage, that some uninformed rookie might manhandle it? I’m not saying it is there, I’m�”

“The Dorriss condo isn’t far, just up Marina.”

Clyde tried Kate again. This time he left a message. “We’re headed for your place, Kate. Going to stop up on Marina. Be along shortly.” And again Joe Grey smiled.

As Clyde turned up toward Marina, his mind on his 1927 Packard roadster, just a few blocks ahead Kate and Lucinda and Pedric, in the Greenlaws’ rental car, were heading for breakfast at one of the intriguing restaurants in Ghirardelli Square. The Greenlaws were far too hungry to stop by the San Francisco PD before breakfast.

Canceling their hotel reservation but paying a one-night penalty, the Greenlaws had arrived at Kate’s apartment knowing that she’d had a breakin, but still shocked at the extent of the damage. Wading among the remains of what had been a handsome living room, stepping over lovely brocade cushions torn apart among broken pieces of cherry end tables, among upholstery stuffing scattered like snow, Lucinda shook her head. “Did they have to tear it up like this? What was the point?”

“Scum doesn’t need a reason,” Pedric said angrily. The old man seldom raised his voice. Now his words were filled with rage. Threading their way between Kate’s handthrown lamps that stood on the floor where she had righted them, stepping carefully around heaps of designer’s catalogs and fabric books tangled beneath the overturned couch and chairs, the couple made their way to the dining table, where Kate had coffee waiting.

She had cleared a space for them, had wiped off the chairs and table. Lucinda and Pedric sat down gratefully, breathing in the welcome scent of a good Colombian brew. Kate filled their mugs and passed a plate of shortbread and the cream and sugar. Lucinda considered the empty cardboard cartons heaped against the wall, and against the dining-room window, a collection of vodka, gin, tomato sauce, paper towel, and soup boxes.

“I just got back,” Kate said, “snatched them from the corner market before they broke them down. Made two trips and I’m still out of breath, hauling them up the stairs. I’m going to have to start working out.”

“That woman did all this?” Lucinda said. “Consuela, and that man? What kind of people are these?” She looked intently at Kate. “What do they want? Not a handful of fake jewels?”

“I don’t any longer believe that those jewels are paste,” Kate said. “But why would that appraiser� Emerson Bristol� He has such a good reputation. At least� I thought he did.” She studied their thin, lined faces. “Even if I’ve been overly casual in some ways, I did use some caution. I gave him a false address. On a hunch, I guess. I don’t really know why. Some little niggling feeling-notthat it did any good apparently, as he had me followed anyway. Or someone did.”

Kate sipped her coffee. “After being married to Jimmie, thinking it was a good marriage, I guess I lost faith in my own judgment. I sure lost faith in the apparent trustworthiness of other people.”

She shook her head. “With that attitude, you’d think I’d have checked out the appraiser. But I believed fully in the knowledge of those who recommended him. Then, too, it was hard to imagine that anything of great value would be tucked away in that old safe all those years, nearly thirty years.”

Lucinda nodded. Pedric looked as if he found nothing really surprising, only another interesting twist in the intricate fabric of the world. Pedric Greenlaw had seen a lot in his eighty-some years. He expected, before he died, to see a good deal more.

“I suppose,” Kate said, “every few years someone in the firm asked about the box in the safe, hauled it out and read the note again, checked whatever records they kept, then shoved the box back out of the way. Without the note tucked in the box, who knows what would have happened.”

Kate refilled their coffee cups. “I have the name of another appraiser. I called Detective Garza this morning. He said San Francisco PD uses this man, and so do the San Francisco courts. Garza has complete trust in him. Steve Tiernan. Too bad I don’t have the pieces now to take to him. Who knows if I’ll ever get them back. But I wondered if you might like to have your own jewelry appraised, since the work is so very similar.”

“We would like to do that,” Lucinda said.

Kate fetched her sweater, and as they headed out to breakfast in the Greenlaws’ rental car, Lucinda told her about the black cat that the young woman at the hotel had had with her.

“That has to be Consuela,” Kate said. “So that’s where she was staying. How convenient-the cat could come right across the roofs. I wonder where they’ve gone now. The cat was in here last night, it’s that beast from Molena Point. Azrael, the tomcat that ran with old Greeley Urzey.”

Lucinda shook her head. “Not just some ordinary cat.”

“The cat broke in, then let Consuela in. Long after she left to come and find me, Azrael stayed behind. When I got home, after Consuela left me, that animal was sitting right there on the overturned couch staring at me.”

“And what did he want?” Pedric said.

“He wanted me to help him. It was so� I’d think it funny, except that he terrifies me. He talked about some kind of hidden world that-”

The minute she said it, she was sorry. Both Lucinda and Pedric turned to stare at her. Lucinda drove in silence for some minutes, then Kate showed her where to turn into Ghirardelli Square. When she’d parked the car, Lucinda said, “Did the beast imply that thejewelrycame from some� hidden world? Did he say that, Kate?”

Before Kate could answer, Pedric said, “A world beneath the green hills.” His thin, lined face was so intent. His eyes never left hers. Kate had to remind herself that this old man had grown up on the ancient Celtic tales, that those myths were an important part of his heritage.

“A world entered through a cave,” Pedric said, “or through a door, or through a portal into a hill. A door that, in the old country, might be found hidden at the back of a root cellar.”

Kate wanted to say,Those are only stories, Pedric. Ancient, made-up stories.But she couldn’t say that to him. She glanced at Lucinda. The old woman touched her hand.

“Joe and Dulcie and Kit are real,” Lucinda said. “In their amazing talents of speech and understanding, they are very real. Yet most everyone in the world would say that such a thing is impossible, that such a cat can be no more than myth.”

The old lady cracked the windows so they could sit in comfort for a few minutes. Around them, the gardens and the lovely complex of shops and restaurants presented a sense of safety, a bit of the world where nothing bad could happen. The warm air was filled with the smell of chocolate mixed with the scent of flowers. All along the square, the shop windows presented wares beautifully wrought, delights meant to be enjoyed in a safe and ordered world. But within the car hung the hoary shadows of a chaotic environment, and it seemed to Kate that around her writhed dark myths, chill and threatening.

Looking at Kate, Pedric said gruffly, “The kit believes in another world than this. All her short life she has longed for that world.”

But then the old man smiled and shook his head. “Joe Grey wants nothing to do with such an idea. Joe says this world is quite enough for him. Let’s go have some breakfast.”

But, over breakfast, Kate could not leave such thoughts behind her. The Greenlaws had stirred anew her unease, mixed with the persistent small thread of interest. She thought about the black cat, about the old house he believed opened to that other world, thought how deftly the snarling tom had guided her unwilling thoughts. Last night after his visit to her apartment she had found herself, just at the edge of sleep, imagining such a world and falling into dreams where she wandered that exotic land-and she had awakened that morning lost and frightened.

Now, sitting comfortably at the little breakfast table between Lucinda and Pedric in the pretty cafe, she took Lucinda’s hand, holding fast to the old woman’s steadiness, holding fast to the real and solid world.

27 [��������: pic_28.jpg]

Marlin Dorriss’s condo was in the Marina District with a fine view of the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz Island, and the cold blue waters of San Francisco Bay. The complex was prime residential property and beautifully maintained. The sky to be seen from the condo’s wide, clean windows this morning was streaked with wisps of white cloud that lay so low they threaded through the tall orange towers of the great bridge. The occupants of the condo, at the moment, were not enjoying the view but were cursing the brightness of the day.

The prominent location of the sprawling third-floor apartment was not an element that pleased them. Cops cruised that street routinely; and twenty minutes ago a silver gray Cadillac had parked across the street but no one had gotten out. Under the shadows of the tree that half hid the vehicle, they couldn’t tell much about the man sitting in the driver’s seat, but he had to be watching their building.

“Marlin could have bought a place away from the main drag,” Hollis growled. “There’s another cop car.”

Consuela shrugged. “Maybe they’re watching the tourists, getting an eyeful of those short little skirts blowing up around their crotches, and no bras under their sweaters.”

“Cops seen all that stuff. And you had to park right in plain view. Might as well put up a sign.”

“They won’t spot the car; they have no make on the car.”

“She’s got a make on it. How many blue Corvettes do you see? You should’a done her.”

“That’s so childish. I don’t do things like that; that’s stupid. I’d rather spend a few years locked up with free meals, free phone, and laundry service, than to burn.”

“You don’t burn in California. Get a lawyer, you’re out before your clothes start to stink.”

“If you’d find the key to the garage, we could get the car out of sight.”

“Youshould know where he keeps the key, you spend enough time here. I’m surprised you stayed in that fancy hotel across town.”

“That place was perfect, a block from her apartment.” She glanced up to the top of the armoire. “Damn cat liked it fine. In and out of her window, and I didn’t even have to open the door for him.”

From atop the armoire, the damn cat fixed Consuela with a look that came close to doingher.If looks could kill, she would be squirming like a decapitated cockroach.

Hollis, picking up a cloisonne lamp that stood on a carved end table, put it roughly on the floor, and sat down on the table, straddle-legged, looking out the window to the street below. Munching on a quarter-pounder, he dripped an occasional slop of mustard and greasy meat juice onto the oriental rug. Consuela, sprawled in a leather chair beside the phone, munched French fries and chicken nuggets that she had dumped onto a porcelain tray and sipped a Coke, leaving rings on the burled maple. She had been dialing Marlin Dorriss’s cell phone for half an hour. They had dropped their jackets and canvas duffel and the takeout bags on the brocade couch.

The condo, which had smelled subtly of furniture polish and fine leather when they first entered, now smelled of fries and mustard, rancid grease and raw onions. Atop the tall, hand-decorated Belgian armoire, the black tomcat had already slurped up his burger. Digging his claws into the hundred-year-old cabinet, he studied Consuela and her disgusting friend, wondering how long he wanted to tolerate the pair. He didn’t mind working with Consuela, this randy master of shifting identities, as long as she was associated with Dorriss. Only under Dorriss’s influence-or because she wanted to influence Dorriss-did the little slut put on any class. She’d far rather dress like a streetwalker than make herself up for Kate Osborne, even if her turnout had been nearly flawless.

Hollis, on the other hand, was always scum. No one could clean up Hollis Dorriss or make him into anything more acceptable. No wonder Marlin had all but disowned his useless pair of sons. No wonder he preferred that they go by the name Clarkman.

Dorriss had used them whenever they came around, then paid them off and sent them packing. Now of course he had only one to deal with, and good riddance. That last fiasco, here in the city-Sammy teaming up with that cheap gang of third-rate jewel thieves and getting hit on the head-that had been the ultimate stupidity. Sure as hell it was Sammy’s ultimate stupidity; that little caper got him dead.

But then Hollis flubbed it even worse stealing that RV and hitting that tanker. Too bad the jerk got out alive. Well, it didn’t matter; Hollis was just marking time until some cop slapped the cuffs on him-jail meat waiting to happen.

You’d think, with the number of ventures the two had tried, they’d have put away some kind of stash. Instead, Hollis and Sammy had spent whatever they stole. Having done everything from residential break-and-enter to mugging old ladies, the two hadn’t learned much. He’d heard it all from Dorriss; the man did not seem the kind to go on about his personal life, particularly to a cat. But a few drinks, late at night, and Dorriss’s soft underbelly showed. The sophistication peeled away and he let it all out, his disappointments-and his grandiose and elaborate plans.

Well, you had to admit, those carefully thought-out burglary scenarios were not hot air. Marlin Dorriss could pull off the most bizarre operation without a flaw-thanks, in part, to yours truly. Azrael was quite aware that he had spectacularly increased the range and possibilities of Marlin Dorriss’s ventures.

Fixing his gaze on the display wall that so tastefully filled the north end of the living room, on Dorriss’s exhibition of rarities as he called it, Azrael studied Dorriss’s acquisitions from a year’s worth of inspired and masterful burglaries: a fortune in stolen treasures.

Each piece of jewelry was elegantly framed, behind unbreakable glass. Each larger item, the historic silver pitcher, the antique porcelain pieces, the contemporary sculpture, was appropriately set into a thick glass cubicle. A display so elegant, and of such value, that it might have graced the wall of Tiffany’s. The man was insane to keep the stuff here, even if the wall was normally hidden behind locked panels. He had been insane to give Consuela the combination of the panel locks-if he had given it to her. Maybe she’d filched it.

The four panels, each four feet wide, had been slid back into their pockets allowing Consuela to view the master’s work-not because she idolized Dorriss’s expertise, but because she’d had a hand in the thefts. Traveling with Dorriss and Azrael, performing various supportive chores, she had played backup as Azrael himself and then Dorriss entered the chosen residence. Between the tomcat and Dorriss, no security system was invulnerable.

Once inside the house, a diamond choker in a lady’s boudoir, for instance, required no more than the silent feline paw, the quick feline wit, while Dorriss kept watch. A locked safe? There Dorriss himself was the master. Consuela did the outside work, waiting with the car or SUV| keeping lookout with the cell phone, which would send a silent vibration to Dorriss’s phone.

Of course, if their target was a painting or a larger piece of sculpture, Dorriss did the removal. But he could not have functioned so flawlessly without Azrael’s unique talents.

The black cat yawned, licking his paw and purring with satisfaction. He liked this life of luxury. Since he had parted from drunken Greeley Urzey, and then from the insipid blonde he’d met in Panama, he had come into his true calling. Marlin Dorriss treated him royally, and Dorriss fully respected his erudite and resourceful talents. The man was quite cognizant that Azrael’s feline skills were far superior to the cleverest human thief. Trusting Azrael, Dorriss had no idea that his feline partner might harbor an agenda of his own.

Both Azrael and Dorriss had been intrigued with the photographs of Kate’s antique jewelry that had been forwarded by Emerson Bristol; Dorriss was certainly considering the jewels for a future project. He had no notion, at this moment, that the matter had already been taken care of.

While Consuela’s hunger to curry Dorriss’s increased favor was totally juvenile, her desire had made her useful. Her stealing these jewels for Dorriss rather than for herself had worked very well into his, Azrael’s, plans.

And after all, it was Consuela’s jealousy of Helen Thurwell-after Consuela played matchmaker between the two-that had driven her to this theft, that had made her so wild to impress him.

Suggesting that Dorriss use information he could gather by getting friendly with Helen Thurwell, Consuela herself had helped to launch Dorriss into this new operation. But then his resulting cozy affair with Helen had enraged Consuela. Humans could be so amusing.

Well, that series of capers, which had nothing to do with the recent jewel theft, was now ripe for harvest. In fact, this very morning Dorriss should be making his first moves.

Too bad the plan for the new project did not include feline assistance. However, the timing had worked out very well. While Dorriss was busy fleecing a flock of brand-new sheep, he, Azrael, was carrying out his own agenda. He might, a few days hence, be exercising his considerable talents in an environ far more fascinating than this poor world. Yawning again, he was considering a nap when Consuela and Hollis started bickering. So boring, so loud and childish.

Beyond them out the window he could see another cop car cruising. Didn’t the law have anything else to do? Bastards made him nervous. He was just curling up, despite the annoying argument, when the doorbell rang.

Alarmed, he dropped off the armoire and leaped to the windowsill where Consuela stood looking down, trying to conceal herself behind the shutter. A second cop car stood just below, in the red zone. The bell rang again. Consuela glanced at her purse where she’d stashed the jewels.

“The panels!” Azrael hissed at her. “Shut the panels.”

Hastily she and Hollis slid the wall panels in place and locked them, then she stood with her hand on the intercom, undecided.

“You better let them in and play dumb,” Azrael said. “Stash the jewels first.”

“What are they doing here?”

“Maybe they have a warrant,” Hollis said stupidly. “Maybe that woman made you, figured out who you are, linked you up with Dorriss-and that led them right here.”

“Linkedyouup with Dorriss,” Consuela snapped.“You’rehis son.”

The bell rang again. Consuela snatched up her purse, pulled out the small blue evening bag that held the jewels, and looked at Azrael. The tomcat looked back at her, jolted by a rush of adrenaline. This gig was working out just fine.

In the silver Cadillac, on the front seat beside Clyde, Joe Grey stood up on his hind paws peering through the windshield. The condo building was of Mediterranean design and was fairly new, with well-maintained gardens and fresh cream-toned paint. It was lent an air of hominess by the many roses blooming in raised planters against the building’s walls and in the entry foyer. He watched the two officers from San Francisco PD enter. The taller one, who was in uniform, reached to ring the bell. The other guy was in plainclothes, but he had cop written all over him. Detective, Joe thought, smiling. A moment after they rang, at a third-floor window, a black cat appeared beside the dark-haired woman who stood half concealed behind the shutters. The cat was huge, as black as cinders; the woman’s hair was curled in a cloud around her pale face. The way the morning light struck the window and shone down through a skylight, Joe could see clearly a portion of the high-ceilinged room behind them.

As the woman turned away, Joe watched her sliding some sort of wide panels across an elaborately decorated wall. He saw light hit the decorations glancing from them in a flash of brilliance, then they were hidden as the panels closed.

In the window, the cat moved as if trying to see better down into the street. When he pressed his face against the glass as if watching their car, Joe slid out of sight beneath the dash.

Beside him, Clyde had the phone to his ear, leaving another message for Kate. Hanging up, he studied the black cat in the window, then looked down at Joe. “You’re afraid of that clown?”

“Not at all,” Joe said testily. “I don’t want him to know I’m here. Whatever they’re up to, I’d rather not be made before I go snooping. Did Consuela let the cops in? What’s the cat doing, can you still see him?”

“You’re not going out there. You’re staying in the car.” But Clyde dug the binoculars from the glove compartment. “I came over here to look for my Packard, not to chauffeur some self-designated feline busybody bent on making trouble.”

Joe slid up on the seat again. The two cops had disappeared, presumably buzzed through to the stairs or elevator. The black cat had vanished, too. Stepping onto Clyde’s legs, Joe was prepared to leap out the open window, when Clyde grabbed the nape of his neck.

“Let go! I’m just listening!” With his head out the window, he tried to catch a word or two when Consuela opened the upstairs door to the officers, but he could hear nothing over the sound of a passing car. Glancing back at Clyde, he lifted a paw, claws out, until Clyde sensibly loosened his grip.

Having closed and locked the panels, Consuela shoved the blue suede evening bag at Azrael. “Get in the bedroom. If they start to search, take it up the trellis. Hide it on the roof.” “You better unlock the French doors.” Azrael lifted the bagful of jewelry, bowing his neck. Damn thing weighed a ton. She fled past him for the bedroom; he heard the French doors open. As he dragged the bag up the hall, she hurried out again.

“Get a move on,” she snapped over her shoulder. “If I don’t let them in, and if the bastards have a warrant, they’ll call the manager to unlock the damn door.”

Taking the bag in his teeth, he dragged it across the bedroom and onto the balcony. The weight of all that gold nearly dislocated his spine. How did she think he was going to get that thing up the trellis? Damn humans. As much as he wanted a few select pieces, he didn’t need to take it all, not for his purposes.

But there was no time to try to dig the bag open. Chomping down securely on the blue suede, he leaped onto the trellis and tried to climb.

The trellis was a frail thing, and the vine was just as thin, hardly strong enough to hold a good-size sparrow.

A sturdy enough pine tree stood beyond the window, its branches rising above the building, but the trunk was too far away for a leap, even without his burden. If the cops arrested Consuela and Hollis, he had two choices. He could secure the jewelry for Dorriss, and could pretty much write his own ticket: hide the bag on the roof and, when the law finished searching the condo and took away those two losers, call Dorriss. What could be easier?

Or he could choose the most impressive piece or two, a bracelet or choker that would fit around his neck perhaps. Dump the rest on the roof for the pigeons, then go on to follow is own plans.

Dragging his burden off the trellis onto the clay tiles, he could hear, below, businesslike voices from the living room as the cops questioned Consuela.

28 [��������: pic_29.jpg]

The binoculars had been Joe’s idea. Clyde had to admit, the 7X35 lenses gave him a sharp, almost intimate view through the third-floor window of the condo where Consuela and the uniformed officer stood talking. “I don’t see the plainclothes guy.”

“See the cat?”

“Not a sign of him.”

That made Joe nervous. “What are they doing in there? Wish you could lip read. Why don’t you call Harper, see if he got the warrant, see if that’s what thisisabout.”

Clyde lowered the binoculars, looking at Joe. “Harper doesn’t need to know I’m here. And how wouldI know about a warrant?”

“Just play dumb. Tell him you came up to the city because you were worried about Kate-tell him the truth, Clyde. He doesn’t need to know what else you’re interested in, or where you are at this particular moment.”

“So when I tell him I came up to see Kate, he’s going to offer gratis information about a search being conducted by San Francisco PD?”

“Feel him out, draw him out. You can do that. Maybe those guys are just fishing-that’s more thanwehad time to do.”

Their plan had been to walk through the complex trying to see into the garages that occupied the first floor beneath the apartments. They’d thought maybe there’d be windows in the back. But they hadn’t had time to look for the Packard before they saw Consuela and the black tomcat, and then the cops showed. Now, as the uniformed officer moved out of sight, Clyde’s cell phone rang.

“Damen,” he said softly. Then, “Where are you?”

Joe leaped to the back of the seat to press his ear to the phone. Kate was saying, “We’re at Ghirardelli Square for breakfast, waiting for our order. I’ve made an appointment with an appraiser, for Lucinda’s jewelry, just before noon. I just stepped outside to do that, and to check my messages; the gardens are so beautiful. What’s this about your car? Where are you?”

“Just up from you, opposite the yacht harbor. Do you-Hold on.”

Above them in the condo, Consuela had left the window. But the black cat had appeared at the other end of the condo on a balcony. Clyde felt Joe’s claws digging into his shoulder as together they watched Azrael climb up a bougainvillea vine, clawing his way toward the roof. The black cat moved slowly, dragging something heavy that was dangling from his clenched teeth. “What is that thing?” Clyde said. “Something blue. Looks like a woman’s purse.”

On the phone, Kate gasped, “That’s�”

But Joe was out the window, slashing Clyde’s hand when Clyde tried to grab him, dropping to the street behind a passing car. He could hear Kate shouting into the phone as Clyde bailed out behind him, swerving into the path of a cab. Joe was safely across when tires squealed, and then Clyde was across, yelling as Joe headed for the end of the building where a pine tree rose, as bare as a telephone pole, its high, faraway branches brushing the roof where Azrael had disappeared.

Storming up the tree, Joe leaped for the roof, his claws scrabbling and slipping on the slick, rounded tiles. Ahead of him among a maze of heating vents and chimneys a black tail flashed and was gone. Watching for the tomcat to show again, Joe studied the shadows among the rooftop machinery.

Joe waited for some time, then slipped in among the pipes and wire mesh boxes, sniffing the air. All he could detect was the smell of machine oil, ocean, and fish from the wharves.

But then, where the shadows of two chimneys converged, he saw a faint movement. He remained still, his heart pounding.

Azrael appeared suddenly, leaping to the top of a wire cage. Dropping the blue bag between his paws, he hunched low over it, watching Joe. Crouched in attack mode, his amber eyes were slitted, his teeth bared. At this moment, against the sky, he looked as huge and fierce as if the beast did, indeed, bear the blood of jaguars as he boasted.

Warily, Joe approached him. As he rounded on Azrael, he heard from the apartment below a crash that sounded like furniture breaking, heard Consuela swear, then a softer thud, and one of the cops shouted. At the same instant, Joe made a flying leap onto the mesh box and straight into Azrael’s claws. Burying his teeth in the tomcat’s shoulder, he bit and raked, ripping his hind claws down Azrael’s side. Azrael, twisting with the power of a thrashing boa, bit into Joe’s belly. Below them glass shattered, a cop barked an order, and then silence, sudden and complete.

Coming at Joe with all the screaming power of an enraged jaguar, Azrael slashed at Joe’s face; Joe tasted blood. Clawing at each other, the two toms slid across the tiles rolling and scrabbling. And as Joe leaped for the black cat’s throat, the pounding of hard shoes came running, sliding, and Clyde loomed over them, diving for Azrael. Azrael gave a violent surge that hurled Joe sideways, slashed Clyde’s arm, and twisted out of Clyde’s hands, snatching the bag where it had fallen among the shadows. Weighted by his burden, Azrael sailed off the roof into the overhanging branches of the pine and was gone, scorching down in a shower of pine bark. Joe streaked down after him, hitting the ground with a thud that knocked his wind out. Already Azrael was half a block away flashing through the condo gardens and up the hill at the back, his neck bowed sideways as he dragged the blue suede bag. As Joe leaped after him, he heard Clyde running across the roof above, and down wooden stairs somewhere at the back.

And as Joe fled after the black tom, intent on Kate’s vanishing jewels, down the coast in Molena Point, Dulcie and Kit lay quietly in Detective Juana Davis’s office observing a material witness to the death of James Quinn. Listening to the woman who, though in part responsible for the real estate agent’s demise, seemed without knowledge of that fact.

Dulcie lay curled in Juana’s in box as unmoving as a sleek toy cat. Across the desk from her, the kit lay sprawled across a stack of reports, belly up, fluffy tail dangling over the edge of the desk, her long fur tumbled in all directions like a ragged fur piece. Detective Davis sat at her desk between the two cats, apparently amused by the pair, making no effort to evict them. Across from her, settled at one end of the couch, Helen Thurwell looked up at Davis, calm, composed, and puzzled.

“I thought I’d told Detective Garza everything that might help,” Helen was saying. “It wasn’t much, but� you’re still thinking that it might not have been an accident? That someonekilledJames?”

Neither cat opened her eyes. Neither cat allowed her ears to rotate following the conversation. Both seemed deeply under, twitching occasionally as if wandering somewhere among mysterious feline dreams.

“I understand that this is painful,” Juana was saying. “But I believe you can help. Quinn was your partner for how many years?”

“Nearly ten years,” Helen said. “He was a good partner, always careful in his record keeping, always cordial and considerate of our clients, never impatient with them-never stepping on my toes in a transaction. You don’t work with someone that long, and that closely, and not grow to care for them.”

“No one is suggesting that there was any problem between you.”

Dulcie slitted her eyes open just enough to watch Davis. Juana Davis was a no-nonsense sort of woman in her fifties, squarely built, with dark hair and dark eyes. She was a steady, commonsense person, but along the way she hadn’t lost her sympathy for another human being. She was just very selective as to who deserved it. Dulcie thought that Juana was still making up her mind about Helen Thurwell.

On a hunch, Dulcie unwound herself from the in box, sat up yawning, and leaped to the couch to settle down beside Helen, curling up close to her, to see what she would do.

Davis’s couch was old, tweed-covered, and smelled of cocker spaniel from some past life before she bought it at the Pumpkin Coach Charity Shop. The city did not pay for items the city fathers considered luxury purchases. Dulcie didn’t see why a couch would be considered a luxury; but then, she wasn’t the city manager. On the coffee table before Helen lay a thick briefcase. Before she reached for her files, Helen turned to stroke Dulcie.

She seemed to know how to pet a cat, so gentle and reassuring that Dulcie began to purr. Interesting that Helen wasn’t this reassuring with her daughter-but then, maybe petting an animal helped to ease Helen’s tension. And dealing with her daughter did not?

When at last Helen opened the briefcase, she removed a large black ledger. “This was what you wanted? The record of my work days?” Rising, she passed the ledger across the desk.

Juana opened it, studied several pages, and nodded. “Do all real estate agents keep this kind of record?”

Helen shook her head. “The agent who trained me, the man I worked with when I first started out, he taught me to do that. He’d had a court case once where he had to testify about the specific circumstances of a sale. I guess it got pretty ugly. He couldn’t be sure of some of the times involved and, as it was a murder case, he felt he hadn’t been very helpful.

“Some of our documents are marked with the time of signing as well as dated; others are not. In a case like his, he’d had to go through them all, do the best he could to remember specifics. After that, he began to keep a log. He trained me to do that, and I’ve done it ever since.” Helen looked at Juana inquiringly.

Rising, Juana moved to the credenza. Turning over two clean cups, she poured fresh coffee from a Krups coffeemaker. “Cream and sugar?”

“Neither please. Just black.”

Setting one mug on the coffee table and the other on her desk, Juana picked up a sheaf of photocopies that lay on the blotter and stood looking down at Helen. “These are copies of the pages of a notebook.” Juana handed the papers to Helen. “The original pages had been ripped in quarters. We taped them together and made copies, then locked them in the evidence room. Do you recognize the handwriting?”

Helen examined the first few pages. “It’s James’s handwriting. But these entries� these are the names of my clients.” She looked up at Juana. “We both had our own clients. We simply worked backup for each other.” She examined several more pages.

“I think these are the dates that offers were made, or maybe that a client went into escrow. I’d have to check the ledger.” She looked up at Juana. “I don’t understand. Why would James keep this? This information is all recorded in my ledger. And in the various papers that are on file.”

“You notice the little symbols before each entry? What are those?”

Helen shook her head. “I don’t know. Asterisk. Pound sign. Circle. Repeated over and over. I haven’t any idea. I don’t understand why James would keep any kind of list of my clients.”

“Can you find any pattern? Remember any special circumstances about these particular meetings? Would the symbols indicate whether you met with the client in the office, or somewhere else? Whether anyone besides your office associates was present? Anything at all out of the ordinary?”

Helen studied the entries for some time, sipping her coffee. When she reached absently to pet Dulcie again, her hand had grown tense and cold. She sat a minute with her eyes closed, as if thinking. As if trying to remember, perhaps to make sure of something. When she looked up at Juana, her hand had grown very still on Dulcie’s fur. And her cheeks were flushed.

“I think� I’m pretty sure there was someone in the office during each of these transactions.”

Juana sat watching Helen, her square, tanned face impassive. Helen’s hand on Dulcie’s shoulder was so tense that under other circumstances Dulcie would have risen and moved away. Helen said, “Marlin Dorriss was� was in the office during each of these meetings. I’m sure of it. Waiting for me somewhere in the office.”

Juana continued to watch her, in silence.

“Sometimes, he’d be sitting reading in a client’s chair, beside some empty desk. Sometimes in one of the chairs against the wall just beyond my desk. You know how our office is, each desk with space enough to draw up chairs and sign papers, but no separate conference room for the signings.”

“Anyone besides Marlin Dorriss?”

“No.” Helen’s face colored. “Waiting for me to go to lunch or maybe dinner.”

Dulcie was pleased that Helen had the grace to feel ashamed.

“After your clients finished their business and left, did Marlin usually come on over to your desk?”

Helen looked surprised. “Yes, he did,” she said thoughtfully. She gripped Dulcie’s shoulder so hard that it was all Dulcie could do not to hiss. Dulcie watched Helen, fascinated.

Had Helen never once questioned Dorriss’s presence in her office? Had she never wondered if Dorriss would snoop on a client’s personal information that was all laid out on her desk? Dulcie imagined him retrieving bank names, memorizing street addresses, information from loan applications, social security numbers. Had he been able, as Helen turned away perhaps putting her papers in order, to jot down bank account numbers, business references, mother’s maiden name-a regular buffet of vital information?

“When the clients left,” Juana said, “and Dorriss came to your desk, their papers might be still lying there?”

“Yes,” Helen said shakily. “Sometimes.” She pressed a fist to her mouth. “But he wouldn’t� He wouldn’t have�” She realized she was clutching Dulcie, and took her hand away.

Juana said, “Do you have a restroom in the office?”

“Yes.”

“Did he usually use it before you left for� lunch or whatever?”

“Always. But he� he is very careful about germs, almost a fetish.”

Right,Dulcie thought. She could imagine Dorriss in the locked restroom busily recording all the vital information from Helen’s clients. This smooth snooping had to be the setup for identity theft. She licked her paw, thinking.

Identity theft could go on for many months before the victim had any clue. Who knew how soon the recipients of such attention would wake to find their houses mortgaged or sold, their CDs cashed, their bank accounts stripped, and their credit destroyed? How many people had he already swindled?

And Dorriss had left town last night, had caught a flight somewhere. Setting out to transfer other people’s funds, to collect cashier’s checks secured by other people’s real estate?

Dropping down from the couch she leaped to Juana’s desk where she prowled innocently among the detective’s stacked papers. Juana, watching her, moved her cup so as not to have cat hair or maybe a cat nose in her coffee. As Dulcie turned away she spotted it, lying on a stack of papers: The photocopy of a flight schedule, with the name of a local travel agency at the top, and Marlin Dorriss’s name beneath.

Pretending to play, gently pawing at the papers, she studied the schedule. Dorriss or the agency had thoughtfully typed a cover sheet, a condensation, on one page, giving seven destinations and dates. The pages stapled behind it would surely give departure and arrival times, airline, airport, flight number. Well, the cover sheet was all she needed. She couldn’t help it; she looked up at Davis, smiling and purring. Oh, the detective was on top of it; Detective Davis had run with her suspicions before ever interviewing Helen Thurwell. Dulcie could imagine Davis calling all the travel agents in town until she hit pay dirt.

Dorriss had flown out last night to LA. Two days in LA then to San Diego where he’d pick up a car. He must be driving back up the coast, because the next flight was out of San Francisco, heading north. The itinerary gave not only flights and car rentals, but hotel reservations in Laguna, La Jolla, then Santa Barbara, and Sacramento, before he caught the San Francisco flight. The entire trip would take just under two weeks.

It must be nice to enjoy such a long working vacation. Was this another string of strange burglaries? Or a chorus of well-planned securities sales or purchases and bank withdrawals, all in names other than Marlin Dorriss?

Lying down on the desk, Dulcie watched as Juana rose to see Helen out. Helen looked pleadingly at Juana; she was very quiet now, very subdued, understanding at last that she had been the unwitting collaborator in a high-powered criminal undertaking. The detective put her arm around Helen. “We’ll get to the bottom of this. You did nothing deliberately. Try not to worry.”

“I wasdeliberatelystupid,” Helen said. “So criminally stupid that I got my partner killed.” She looked miserably at Juana. “I have no doubt, now, that his death was not an accident.”

She shook her head. “James was not careless, he would not have left the gas on like that. He was not forgetful, not even in the smallest matters.” She found a tissue in her pocket and wiped her eyes. “I have been stupid for a very long time.” She was crying in earnest, her shoulders shaking.

The expression on Juana Davis’s face was a mixture of discomfort, sympathy, and a cop’s restrained look of triumph. Taking her arm from around Helen, Juana touched Helen’s shoulder, heading her into the hall.

And Dulcie, watching the two women, found it hard to muster much sympathy for Helen Thurwell. All the empathy in the tabby’s heart was for Juana Davis as the detective set out on what could be a difficult task, heartbreaking for many more people than Helen Thurwell.

Dulcie knew, from listening to Dallas Garza and Captain Harper, that the crime of identity theft might be uncovered and the culprit apprehended; the perp might even be prosecuted, but the damage done might never be undone, the victims’ money might never be recovered.

29 [��������: pic_30.jpg]

Streaking between the complex of condo buildings and up the hill behind, through the gardens of expensive estates, Joe drew nearer the black tom but then lost him again among a cluster of smaller homes. Racing past two houses that were still boarded up from the last earthquake, Joe paused in their neglected gardens seeking for Azrael’s scent.

There: the black beast appeared suddenly crossing the street while dragging his burden, leaping clear of a car. The cat was slowing and tiring. Swiftly Joe closed on him. He was about to leap and grab Azrael, when behind him a car slid across both lanes and screeched to the curb; Joe caught a glimpse of Lucinda bent over the wheel, and Pedric beside her. The back door opened and Kate slid out.

She caught Joe up, snatching him in mid-stride and kept running, chasing the black tom, clutching Joe to her so hard he could hardly breathe. Ahead of them Azrael was a smear of black swerving away from the street through the bushes and heavily over a fence. Kate, running along the fence, found a gate and fought it open. Crossing the yard clutching Joe, she lost minutes finding the way out.

“Let me go, Kate! You’ve lost him!”

“No! I can catch him!” She glanced down at him, her blond hair plastered with sweat, her eyes frightened.

“He has the jewels,” Joe coughed, half strangled. “Ease up, I can’t breathe.”

Tightening her grip on the back of his neck, she eased her hand on his chest. He gulped for air. “I didn’t know you could run like that. How did you find us? Where’s Clyde? Why are you�?”

She didn’t answer. Glimpsing Azrael swerving into an alley, she flew after him across someone’s patio and through another garden. Lucinda’s car was lost beyond the yards and fences. They passed a boarded-up house, then soon another, not derelicts but nice houses; Joe thought they were somewhere in Cow Hollow where there had been a lot of damage in the earthquake. Ahead on the sidewalk, the black tomcat appeared suddenly; he stood panting as if at the end of his strength, the blue bag at his feet. Joe tensed to leap down.

It was here that Lucinda found them and pulled to the curb. Azrael snatched up the bag and disappeared into the bushes, heading for a boarded-up house as Clyde’s car swerved in behind Lucinda. Kate dropped Joe and lunged through the bushes after the black tom. The beast bolted up the steps and through a broken window between crookedly nailed boards, dragging the blue evening bag.

The faded Victorian house listed to the left, supported by a scaffolding of rough lumber all along one side. All the windows were secured with boards over the dirty and broken glass. Two boards were nailed across the front door, and there was a chain barrier across the front steps. The trim on the three stories was splintered along one side, and shingles had fallen into the bushes.

Slipping under the chain barrier, Kate was working at the doorknob and pushing at the door. The house must once have been a comfortable home for a big family. Joe wondered why these houses had been let sit for so long. Through the broken window where the black tomcat had gone, Joe could see pale shadows moving. Kate put her shoulder to the door, sent it flying open, ducked under the boards, and disappeared inside.

Warily Joe followed her. He didn’t like the place; he didn’t like its deep hollow silence. It smelled of something dank and foreign. As he moved up the steps, Clyde thudded up behind him. They entered together, Clyde ducking beneath the boards.

Only a dull light seeped through the dirty, boarded-up windows. They stood for a moment in the gloom, then moved on in, the floor creaking beneath Clyde’s feet, the dry dust puffing up beneath Joe’s paws-dust that was marked all over with paw prints. Beyond the dim living room, in what appeared to be the dining room, Kate stood facing a tall china cabinet that towered in the darkest corner, a folded mattress leaning up against it amid a tangle of ragged lumber.

Kate stood looking up through the shadows at the black tom. Crouching atop the tall cabinet he stared down at her, his amber eyes narrowing as if waiting for her to speak. The blue suede bag lay between his paws; he loomed over it, fiercely possessive. A split second and he could leap down squarely into her face, clawing and biting; his eyes blazed and threatened, making her tremble.

Around her the house was silent. It stunk of cat. Heaps of trash were piled in the dark corners, papers, wine bottles, beer cans. She thought there would be hoards of mice to feed the pale cats she’d seen slipping away. To her left a broken stairway led partway up to the floor above, where a ragged hole gaped. A pale cat peered down, then was gone, a cat that looked as hard of body as a dog, and with a lean killer’s face. Beneath the stairs blackness loomed so dense, so complete that she felt as if the house floated in a void, as if the floor on which she stood had nothing but emptiness beneath. The room was cold, a coldness that went to the bone. Watching the cat, his hints of another world that had so stirred her dreams now filled her with fear. How could she have wanted any such world, how could she want any world to which this beast was drawn?

But she wanted her property back; she was not willing to turn away from what was hers. Moving closer in among the leaning boards, she thought that if she stood on the humped and folded mattress, she could reach the bag and snatch it away.

He watched as she began to climb, his smile slow and amused. And suddenly grabbing the bag in his mouth, he leaped directly past her face. She lunged, snatching the bag from his mouth-and felt claws like knives down her arm. The suede ripped open, too, under her spurting blood. The jewels spilled, falling away to vanish among the boards. Dropping down, she snatched at a bracelet, quickly kneeling among the boards reaching to catch the slithering chain of a locket. Snarling, the black tom came at her-and Joe Grey came flying, toppling boards and knocking Azrael among them. Jewelry scattered and fell between the fighting tomcats, lost in the rubble, hidden beneath falling boards.

Snatching up the emerald bracelet, Azrael spun and ran, leaping for the blackness beneath the stairs.

Kate rose to follow but Clyde grabbed her, drawing her back.

They stood at the edge of the hole staring down beneath the stairs into total blackness. They could see nothing, no hint of foundation, no broken timbers or tumbled earth. Only emptiness falling away, deep black space that seemed to go down and down as if it spread out beneath the house, black and endless, as if perhaps the quake had shifted the earth, leaving a cavern beneath that part of the house. Kate backed away, dizzy. Leaning against Clyde, she leaned against Joe Grey as well where Clyde had snatched him up, holding him safe from that abyss. In Clyde’s arms Joe met her stare with the same deep fear that filled Kate herself; and from somewhere within the blackness, Azrael spoke to her.

“You would do well to follow me, Kate Osborne. You would do well to come with me.” Was he crouched on some ledge or fallen timber that was invisible to her? She stared and stared but could see nothing, no glint of his yellow eyes. Then beside Kate something moved among the rubble, and from the shadows a pale cat leaped past her into the blackness, then another, another-and they too vanished. And from deep within that dank space, Azrael’s purr rumbled. “You will forever regret your cowardice, Kate Osborne, if you stay behind. You can see that they accept me now. Because I took the jewels. Because I bear the emerald choker. They will lead me now, down into that world.” The cat purred louder, his rumble echoing. “Come with me, Kate Osborne. Come now�”

Kate backed farther away.

“If you will follow me, I will lead you home, Kate, where hidden rivers run beneath the earth among green meadows, where you can dig jewels from the cavern walls, all the wealth you want, for the taking.” A cold breath touched Kate, a stink of damp sour earth as if stirred by movement somewhere deep within that void. And Azrael did not speak again.

She stared down into the empty dark that waited just beneath her feet, and she turned away sickened, leaning into Clyde’s steady grip. He pulled her away, putting his arm around her; she could feel Joe’s heart pounding fast between them. The relief on the tomcat’s face was comical.

Behind Clyde, Lucinda and Pedric stepped from the shadows. Whatever they felt, whatever they had seen, they did not speak. The four of them knelt, searching for Kate’s inheritance among the rubble and broken lumber, while Joe Grey sat washing blood from his paws.

Moving one splintered board at a time, they uncovered and retrieved nine pieces of the jewelry. When Pedric got a flashlight out of his car and shone it under the stairs, they could see only blackness, as if indeed, beneath the house, a vast area of landfill had shifted away, leaving the building on some earthquake-riven ledge. There was no sign of the choker, no answering flash of gold and green from those murky depths.

“Out,” Kate whispered, backing away, the true sense of danger coming home to her. They moved swiftly out beneath the door’s barrier, into the fresh air.

A police car was pulling to the curb. As Detective Reedie stepped out, Joe Grey slid from Clyde’s arms into Lucinda’s, and under her jacket, out of sight. And the old woman wandered away with him.

Kate, smoothing her disheveled hair, smiled at the detective and held out her folded sweater, in which she had wrapped the jewels and the shredded blue bag. “We have them!” she said breathlessly, trying to invent a plausible story that did not include a thieving black tomcat. “How did you find us?”

Reedie looked at the jewels and at her bleeding arm, at her dirty hands and streaked face. “I saw you running,” the detective said warily, “from the window of the condo. What was that you were chasing?A cat?It was carrying that blue bag?” The handsome young detective looked hard at her. “You want to tell me what happened?”

Kate didn’t know what to say. He watched her, waiting. His thatch of brown hair made that handsome face look even more boyish; his brown eyes looked half angry at being scammed, half filled with curiosity.

“I saw Consuela’s car,” she said, “we were coming back from breakfast. The blue Corvette? I pulled over, hoping it was hers, and saw something running-a big black cat-from under a pine tree at the end of the condo. I couldn’t believe� It was dragging something blue. My bag, I knew it was my bag. I just� jumped out of the car and ran.”

The detective turned, glancing toward Clyde. “And your friend in the silver Cadillac?”

He had obviously seen Clyde parked in front of the condo. Kate explained that Clyde had seen the Corvette, too, that he had been sitting in his car watching the building where it was parked, wondering if it belonged to Consuela. She was faltering when Clyde took over.

Clyde seemed truly amazed that the cat had grabbed the blue bag; he thought Consuela must have thrown it out the window when she knew the police were at the door. “I was turned away,” he said. “I thought I heard something hit the ground among the dead leaves. When I looked, I saw a snatch of blue. But why that cat would grab it up�” Clyde shook his head, at a loss to explain the black beast. “Cats do weird things. Well,” he said, grinning, “Kate got her jewels back.” He studied Reedie. “Was that Marlin Dorriss’s condo? I’d heard it’s in the Marina. Was Consuela connected with Dorriss?”

“It is Dorriss’s condo,” Reedie said stiffly. “What made you ask?”

“A hunch,” Clyde lied. “I saw them together once, in Molena Point, and wondered. Are you going back there now?”

“I am. You have some business there?”

“I would like to follow you back, talk with you.”

Reedie glanced at Kate, then nodded.

Kate just hoped Reedie wouldn’t go digging for more answers than he needed.

Well, her story sounded plausible to her. The best lie, sometimes, was the truth, with the incriminating parts left out.

After Reedie left, Lucinda dropped Clyde and Joe back at the condo. There, Joe quietly slipped into the Cadillac while Clyde talked with Reedie then went with him to look for the Packard-but only after Reedie called Molena Point PD and talked with Harper.

Clyde told Reedie that he had no proof of any misconduct on Dorriss’s part. Just a feeling, Clyde said. A hunch that Dorriss might be involved in the thefts. He lied to Reedie, and through Reedie he lied to Harper, and all to protect Joe Grey. He said to Reedie innocently that, if the officers had found any stolen items in the condo, then maybe Dorriss had the Packard as well. In short, Clyde wove a tangle in a way that he abhorred, all for the gray tomcat.

Kate said later that she wished Clyde didn’t have to stir up so many questions for Reedie, when the detective would be talking more than once with Harper and Garza about the case. But it couldn’t be helped, if Clyde wanted to look for his Packard-and Clyde loved that Packard.

She did wonder privately sometimes if any woman ever in Clyde’s life would stir the possessive emotions generated by those abused and neglected old cars that he made whole and new again.

Dropping Clyde off at the condo, Kate and Lucinda and Pedric, feeling suddenly nervous at carrying all the jewels with them, headed for the Greenlaws’ appointment with the appraiser, hoping he would see them though they were nearly an hour late. They agreed to meet for lunch either at Kate’s favorite sidewalk cafe, or across the street at I. Magnin where Clyde-after he found the Packard, he said, as if he was certain he’d find it-had a bit of shopping to do. Off Kate and Pedric and Lucinda went, carrying with them what might be a fortune wrapped in Kate’s sweater; and Clyde and Joe Grey went to shop, all as if this were a perfectly ordinary morning.

30 [��������: pic_31.jpg]

Thewomen’s accessory department of I. Magnin smelled subtly of expensive perfumes and, if one had a feline’s ability to detect fainter scents, of fine leather and silks and velvets and imported wools. Joe Grey was not visible, but the customer looking at cashmere scarves and evening stoles carried a large, apparently heavy backpack, one of those models with netting set into the sides.

Though the subject was clean-shaven and his short dark hair well cut, though he was neatly dressed in sport coat and slacks, a store detective watched him. The unobtrusive observer stood several counters away appearing to be selecting a woman’s sweater. His skilled surveillance was hardly noticeable as he waited for the guy to lift a hundred-dollar scarf and slip it in the backpack. If the prospective shoplifter seemed to be talking to himself, he could be a bit strange, or that could be a ploy, a weird but deliberate distraction. The detective watched him lift one scarf from the rack, hold it suspiciously up to the backpack, wait a minute, then lay it back over the rack. The customer had been perusing the merchandise thus for about ten minutes, one scarf or stole after another. The clerk waiting on him was patient, but she was not smiling; the man made her nervous.

But then a woman joined the customer, a striking blonde, and the subject’s solitary remarks became part of normal conversation. Now the blonde held up the scarves, one at a time, and she seemed almost to be talking to the backpack. The store dick moved closer.

Just as he decided to approach the pair, two elderly folk joined them. Their behavior, however, was equally bizarre. Sometimes he wished he’d stayed working warehouse security, where life had been simpler. Now the tall wrinkled woman held up scarves, going through the same routine as the other two; and the strange thing was, all four of them seemed to be losing patience. The detective glanced at his watch. This charade was cutting into his lunch hour. Moving away into women’s shoes but keeping an eye on the party, he saw to his great relief that the guy with the backpack had finally selected two cashmere stoles. One was ice blue, one amber. Making his purchases, he paid cash. If he was passing counterfeit money he wouldn’t have made such a spectacle, would have been in and out fast. Wanting his lunch, the detective turned away-if the backpack contained stolen merchandise, the electronic gate would pick it up and signal an alarm. It was an extremely touchy procedure to confront a customer for shoplifting while that person was still in the store. Abandoning the group, he headed out a side door and up the street for a quick hamburger.

The four people followed him out and headed down the block for their own lunch. Only the passenger in the backpack had paid any attention to the store dick. Watching him through the mesh, Joe was highly amused by the man’s frustration.

When the detective had disappeared, Joe nuzzled into the package that Clyde had dropped into the pack, sniffing deeply at the expensive wool. Dulcie would be thrilled; so would the kit. Ice blue for Dulcie, amber for Kit, both stoles softer than bird down. Joe had never before purchased a gift of any kind, certainly not a two-hundred-dollar stole for his lady.

He had, of course, not paid directly for the gifts. But as Clyde had offered a reward for information leading to recovery of the Packard, Joe figured he’d earned that amount, and more.

Swinging back by the condo after chasing Azrael, they had found Consuela and Hollis already removed to the city jail, and the uniforms still searching the apartment. The officers had found the hidden locks on Dorriss’s sliding wall panels, and were photographing the stolen items. They had called for, and had posted, a guard of five additional officers, and the street was crawling with police cars. The condo manager, who lived on the premises, had gone around with Clyde and Detective Reedie to open the doors of Dorriss’s three single garages.

They had found two empty. The third contained a vehicle lovingly protected by a thick waterproof cover made especially for a 1927 Packard roadster. Clyde might never know whether Dorriss had bought the cover some time before he stole the Packard, fully intending to possess that particular car, or whether he rashly ordered it from an automotive specialty shop after the deed was accomplished.

Leaving the garage and parting from Detective Reedie, Clyde had returned to the Cadillac grinning with success.

Joe Grey had said nothing. But with every line of his body, the angle of his ears and the slant of his whiskers, the look in his eyes, he had given back to Clyde a cool and judgmental I-told-you-so.

Now as Clyde and Kate and the Greenlaws took their seats at the sidewalk table, Clyde carefully set Joe’s pack on an empty chair beside him and opened the flap.

Yawning, Joe looked out as Clyde read several items from the menu. With a twitch of his ears at the right moment, he gave Clyde his lunch order, then curled down again on the soft I. Magnin package. He had almost shut out his friends’ small talk when Lucinda said, “It makes me feel very much easier with those people in jail, particularly now.”

Joe slitted open his eyes.Particularly now, what?What had he missed?The appraisal,he thought, coming up out of the backpack.

Lucinda leaned over to speak softly to Clyde, waiting until the waiter set down their onion rings and beer. Joe had thought the appraiser would keep the pieces for a day or so before returning them with his evaluation, but apparently not.

“They’re real,” Lucinda said softly to Clyde. “Our seven pieces, and Kate’s nine. All of fine quality, the appraiser said. Thank goodness we were able to rent safe deposit boxes, this time with more security we hope than Kate’s box had, and with some extra precautions.”

The idea of another safe deposit box alarmed Joe. But where else was there that would be more secure? Watching Kate, he expected her to be radiant with the news but she didn’t seem to be, she was very quiet as Clyde laid his hand on hers.

“What?” Clyde said.

“Just� reaction, I guess,” she said softly. “Yes, it’s wonderful, the appraisal, having that treasure to fall back on, to tuck away for some emergency. I just� need to get over all the rest of it.” She squeezed Clyde’s hand. She looked, Joe thought, deeply introspective. Maybe she’d celebrate her new fortune later, maybe wildly. But right now she needed some downtime, maybe to get used to the idea of what might be a fortune.

Well, he understood that. He had no idea what he would do with a large wad of cash-but then, Joe thought, there wasn’t much chance he’d ever need to worry about such matters.

He was surprised Clyde hadn’t asked how much the jewels were worth. Clyde hadn’t; not then, not there on the street. Joe was burning to know-not that it was any of his business, or Clyde’s either.

Watching Kate, he knew she needed to settle back into the real world, after the dark sorcery of the black tom, after the touch of a beast who would take great pleasure in destroying Kate’s natural joy of life, a beast who worshiped only destruction.

The waiter brought their sandwiches, and Kate’s salad and Joe’s shrimp cocktail sans sauce. Joe ate with greedy concentration, standing up in the backpack with his front paws on the table, lifting each shrimp out where he could chomp it more handily. If he garnered glances and smiles from nearby diners, he ignored them. Finishing the shrimp he had a little wash, then, yawning, he curled down inside the backpack again, against the soft package. It had been a busy morning. Drifting off, he wondered where Kate would go from here? Back to Molena Point, to work for Hanni? Or Seattle, as she’d told Clyde she might, to work there for her present firm?

But she’d be alone in Seattle, no friends around her. She’d told Clyde it was only a short flight down to the village, maybe two hours to San Francisco, then thirty minutes to Molena Point. But how often would she come, once she was caught up in that new life? How often would she return to the village to be among friends who were like family?

She’llbe all right,Joe told himself.No need to get protective and soft-minded over a self-sufficient, beautiful, and soon to be wealthy human. Kate will do just fine.And Joe Grey slept, the deep dreamless sleep of contentment, the untroubled sleep of one who had changed a life or two. He didn’t wake to say good-bye to Kate and the Greenlaws, but somewhere in sleep he heard Clyde and Kate as she lingered for a moment by the car.

“Back there in that old house,” Clyde said, “I was afraid you wanted to follow him.”

“Maybe, for a moment,” she said softly. “There are two drives in all of us, Clyde. One toward heaven, one toward hell. It’s our choice that matters. What I truly wanted, deep down, was to be done with the beast. With everything he believes in. If there ever was such a world, and if that beast is drawn there, then it must be dark and twisted and terrible. Maybe,” Kate said, “maybe it was different once, long ago, when McCabe wrote of such a place. When perhaps my parents wandered there. I don’t know, Clyde. But that is not my world;thisis my world. This world is full of more wonders than I can handle.” She was silent a moment, then, “Thank you, Clyde, for coming, for being here. Thank you, Joe Grey.” Joe felt her fingers caress his head and ears, then heard her turn and walk away.

Joe didn’t stir when Clyde tucked the backpack onto the passenger seat and fastened the seat belt around it. He didn’t wake in San Jose when Clyde stopped for a cup of coffee, didn’t wake until they passed Gilroy, when Clyde swerved hard and hit his horn. Yawning, Joe crawled out of the backpack looking blearily around. “What was that about?”

“Some drunk went over the line,” Clyde said angrily. “Damn near sideswiped me.” Then he smiled. “There’s a black and white behind us, they just pulled the guy over.” He glanced down at Joe. “You were out like a light.”

Joe yawned and didn’t answer. Settling down atop the backpack for another snooze, he didn’t wake again until they were pulling into their own drive. It was just dusk, the falling light among the trees and cottages soft and inviting, the smells of cooking along the street bringing Joe wide awake. He was starving. And what was this? Why was their house lighted up?

Every light must be on downstairs, bright behind the drawn curtains. Joe stared up at Clyde. “What did you do, rent out the house?”

Clyde looked back at him, then at the street where Charlie’s blue Chevy van was parked. “Something’s wrong.” He swung out of the car fast, but held the door open for Joe. Joe paused. Crouching on the seat ready to leap out, he saw Dulcie in the window, standing tall on the sill, looking.

She did not look distressed. In fact, her whiskers were straight out, her ears sharply alert-just glad to see them home. She disappeared as Joe leaped from the car; and when he hit his cat door Dulcie and the kit were there, pushing out to greet him.

It was a very small, very private party. At first, just Wilma and Charlie and Clyde, Joe and Dulcie and the kit. Dulcie and Kit licked his ears and whiskers as if he’d been gone for weeks, but then the kit was all over him demanding to know about Lucinda and Pedric. Where were they, why hadn’t they come back with Clyde, when were they coming home and did they really mean to stay this time? She wanted them here in the village safe and she didn’t want them to roam anymore.

The aroma of spaghetti sauce filled the house from where it was simmering on the stove. When they all moved into the kitchen, Charlie put the pasta on to boil, and got out the grated cheese and salad dressing. The table was set for six. A big basket of Jolly’s best French bread waited on the counter beside a huge salad. And in the middle of the round table stood a cake decorated with one candle and with red lettering on white icing. The sentiment portrayed in Wilma’s inimitable cake-decorating style said,

Well done, Joe Grey! You are a prince among cats.

Joe was just rearing up to blow out the candle, not an easy move for a cat, when the phone rang. Charlie hit the speaker.

It was Kate. “They get home okay?”

“Just got here,” Charlie said. “He’s blowing out his candle. We only have enough time for Joe to cut his cake and have a toast or two before Max and Dallas and Ryan get here.”

“Drink cheers for us,” Kate said. “Lucinda and Pedric are here, helping to clean up the apartment. Tell Clyde and Joe thank you. Lucinda and Pedric say thank you. We love you all.”

When they’d hung up, Charlie opened a bottle of champagne and they toasted Joe Grey for helping recover Kate’s jewels, for finding Clyde’s Packard, and for operations of a clandestine nature in the investigation that should soon break Marlin Dorriss’s identity theft scam. Then Clyde cut Joe’s cake, which was a delectable combination of goose liver and cream cheese. This was served on crackers with the champagne-and for the cats, warm milk. Dulcie and Kit’s cashmere stoles were presented by Joe himself, the tomcat hauling them out of the I. Magnin bag and laying them at the ladies’ feet: blue for Dulcie, amber for the kit. Dulcie’s green eyes caressed Joe lovingly. Clyde’s four hundred dollars could not have been better spent. The kit’s round yellow eyes were wide with excitement as she patted at the soft, folded cashmere then curled down to roll on it, loudly purring.

Before Max and Dallas and Ryan arrived, all evidence of the celebration had disappeared. The officers and Ryan came in laughing, Harper and Garza very high indeed with the way the Dorriss cases were shaping up. And Ryan too, hugging Clyde, was filled with excitement. An upbeat atmosphere at the station always put her in a happy mood-her uncle Dallas had helped raise her, she was practically a cop’s kid; the ongoing drama of his work was an important part of her life.

“You saw Kate,” Ryan said, taking Clyde’s hand. “Will she be all right? She got her jewels back!”

“She’ll be fine,” Clyde said. “I guess the jewels will make her a wealthy woman.” He searched Ryan’s eyes for a glint of jealousy, but he saw only concern. Ryan was Kate’s friend. Kate had worked a long time for Ryan’s sister, she was like part of the family. He put his arm around her, liking the smell of fresh sawdust that clung to her hair.

Ryan’s arm came around him bolder than Kate’s caress would be, and somehow steadier. When she looked at him, her green eyes beneath her dark lashes were filled with humor, and with challenge. Clyde liked that, he liked challenge, in the right woman.

As they took their places at the table, Max was still smiling. Clyde liked seeing his old friend happy; and it was not only the resolution of the three cases that made him grin. Since Max and Charlie married, Max had come back to life in a way Clyde had not seen since before he was widowed.

“Consuela and Hollis are in custody,” Max said, “and that bizarre display in Dorriss’s condo has been dismantled-San Francisco PD e-mailed us a copy of the video they took of Dorriss’s trophy wall.

“They’ve locked the stolen items in their evidence vault. Every piece that was reported missing-including a green Packard,” he said, grinning. “Reedie says they lifted that baby onto a flatbed,treatedit like a baby, and stored it in a safe corner of the police garage.” He looked at Clyde. “Not a chance of damage, Reedie staked his life on that.”

“On the stolen IDs,” Dallas said, “with Dorriss moving around the state right now making purchases, we’ve contacted every city on or near his itinerary. They’ve put out flyers to the escrow companies, contacted the banks. Soon as a complaint comes in, local detectives will be on the case, and we go to work with that jurisdiction.”

“A long, slow process,” Clyde said.

“But effective,” Dallas said. “We’re lucky to have this information; the snitch really put us onto this one. It’s a damn sight more than you ever expect to get on these cases.”

Garza looked at Max. “It would be nice to have an ID on this snitch. And to know how he operates, how he gets this stuff� how heknowsto get it.” The detective sipped his beer. “I’d give a lot to know what made him suspect Dorriss in the first place. Or maybe,” Garza said, leaning his elbows on the table, “Maybe none of uswantsto know. This guy is a gold mine. Sure as hell, no one wants to discourage him.”

“Whoever he is,” Harper said, “he was shrewd enough to substitute old credit card and gas bills in Dorriss’s file for the current ones. Not leave the empty file for Dorriss to spot the minute he opened the drawer.”

Lying on the kitchen counter, Joe Grey kept right on washing his paws, though he did allow himself a hidden smile and a glance at Dulcie.

Harper said, “When we went through the house this afternoon, we found five bits of torn paper as well, that match the torn pages of Quinn’s notebook. Found them near the hearth in the master bedroom. That,” Harper said, smiling, “makes Dorriss a prime candidate not only for the burglaries but for Quinn’s death.”

“The notebook,” Dallas said, “plus a partial fingerprint on Quinn’s back doorknob that has been identified as Dorriss’s. As if Dorriss may have slipped his glove off for a minute, working on the lock.”

“Found a set of lock picks in his dressing room,” Harper said, “taped inside a hollow tie rack.” The captain smiled. “We’ve got the evidence, and we’re hoping, when we get Consuela back down here, we can get her to talk as well.”

Dallas said, “I have a feeling she’ll talk, and Hollis, too, to save his neck. Hollis will be facing charges for kidnapping the Greenlaws, as well as vehicular theft. If he thinks it will go easier for him, I’m guessing he’ll tell us all he can about his father.” Joe Grey watched his human friends finish supper, then he raced with Dulcie and Kit upstairs, up to the rafters, and out to his private tower. The kit came last, dragging her cashmere stole up into the tower where she patted it into a little mound and lay down on it looking smug.

Clyde had replaced the cushions in Joe’s tower with new ones. There was no smell left of the black tomcat, and, through Joe’s cat door, the breeze off the sea was fresh and cool. Lying on the pillows looking out over the rooftops, Joe thought that the next weeks would be highly interesting, as the Molena Point PD worked on the multitude of charges against Dorriss, Consuela, and Hollis that the district attorney would ultimately prepare for the court.

“And what about Dillon?” the kit said sadly. The little tattercoat was painfully aware of her own part in Dillon’s arrest.

“She wasn’t booked,” Dulcie said. “Didn’t you know that, Kit? Leah and Candy were booked. Not Dillon. She was remanded over to the custody of her mother, under Captain Harper’s supervision.”

“Big deal,” Joe said, “if Helen keeps on as she has been.”

“I don’t think she will,” Dulcie said. “Dillon’s parents are going away for two weeks, on a cruise. They arranged for Dillon to stay with Max and Charlie. Before you got home, Charlie told us Dillon was up there today, and she and Charlie went riding. Dillon wanted to know if she could still go to work for Ryan. I think that maybe it will come out all right.”

Smiling, the kit curled down on her cashmere stole and was soon asleep; and Joe and Dulcie looked at each other contentedly. The next weeks would indeed be interesting, with all the action at the department, with indictments and hearings. But the best thing of all was to be together and to be among family. Dulcie said, “That black beast won’t be back?”

“We’ve seen the last of him,” Joe said. “I’d bet on it.” He imagined Azrael wandering among dank stone vaults beneath granite skies or maybe only among the cellars and ruined underpinnings of San Francisco, of that many-faceted city. And he looked intently at Dulcie.

“If he did come back here, he wouldn’t stay long, Dulcie. Not in our village. We’ve had enough of his kind.”