“Why has no one missed her?” Dulcie asked. “We’d have heard, if someone was looking for a lost child. When she slips outside, in the early morning before it’s light, sneaks out through the basement window, she makes sure no one is on the street or sitting in a car. Makes sure no police car’s parked around the corner.
“She’s really skittery; she startles if anything moves, stays in the shadows against the buildings. She must crave getting out. Every couple of days, she goes to walk the shore and drop her little bag of trash and wet paper towels in the public garbage cans.”
“And you follow her.”
Dulcie twitched her ear. “The child’s as clever as a cat herself.”
“The streets are lonely that time of morning, Dulcie. Have you thought about someone grabbing her? Even in Molena Point-”
“I’d rake and bite so hard he’d never grab another child.” Dulcie cut him a fierce green-eyed look. “The real problem is, Lori’s little stash of canned food won’t last much longer. Maybe another three or four days. I don’t know if she has any money to slip out and buy more, or if she’d dare go in the market in broad daylight. It’s so frustrating not to know who she’s hiding from, not to know what happened to her.”
“Maybe she has no one, maybe her parents are dead. A homeless child?”
“She doesn’t look homeless. There’ve been no reports of a homeless person found dead. And why suddenly move into the library? To get out of the cold and rain? But� I don’t know. It doesn’t add up. And if someone died recently in the village, a neighbor or school official would report that the child was alone. Everyone would be looking for her.”
“Maybe she ran away from home, and her parents think she’ll get over it and come back?”
“After nearly two weeks? What kind of parents wouldn’t report her missing?”
Joe shrugged. “The kind you know are out there. The no-good ones.” He looked hard at her. “So why didn’t you trust me enough to tell me?”
“I didn’t trust you not to go to the law.”
“That’s not saying much.”
“It’s saying a lot. It’s saying you think like a cop, Joe. That you’d start checking Captain Harper’s desk for fliers on a lost child, watching the computers, listening to every conversation.”
Joe shrugged. “The whole department will be looking now, with a body to identify. Checking the files for lost children.”
“They’ll be checking old cases, not recent ones.”
“And the kit? Why didn’t you tell the kit?”
She widened her eyes, and Joe grinned. Of course she wouldn’t tell the kit-Kit would be right down there in the basement making up to Lori, so fascinated that she would find it hard not to speak to the child. Or to blurt out Lori’s business to some trusted human.
“Anyway,” Dulcie said, “before Patty’s murder, Kit was too busy playing grand lady, living like a queen in her penthouse, letting Lucinda and Pedric spoil her. And now�,” she said, “now�”
“She’ll turn up, Dulcie. Kit always turns up.” But he leaped restlessly to the brick rail again, pacing, peering down at the moonlit streets for a small, dark feline shape hurrying along, and studying the darkly pooled treetops and shadows. Dulcie, leaping up to join him, wished with all her heart that Kit was at that moment safe in the penthouse, still being spoiled rotten, listening to Lucinda’s favorite Dixieland jazz records and ordering outrageous delicacies from room service.
“So what happens,” Joe said, “when Lori runs out of food? You plan to deliver takeout through the basement window?”
She looked at him bleakly.
“I’ll keep my mouth shut, Dulcie,” the tomcat said with unusual constraint. “I do promise. It’s your call. But where do we go from here?”
She smiled and nuzzled him, purring and loving him. “I don’t know where. Don’t know where to go from here.”
Joe licked his shoulder, then turned his yellow gaze on her. “You wouldn’t consider asking for help? Someone who won’t go to the law or to Harper.”
Dulcie drew away, alarmed. “Who? Not Charlie, she’s Harper’s wife, we can’t burden her. And Kate Osborne’s out of the picture, moving up to Seattle. And Clyde, besides being Harper’s best friend, really does think too much like a cop. And right now, Lucinda and Pedric are way too worried about the kit; I don’t feel like putting anything more on them. So who�?”
“But you’ve always trusted Wilma.”
She licked her paw. “I know. I’m ashamed not to trust her this time.”
“And it would be natural for her to discover Lori’s hiding place,” Joe said, “working in the library. Dulcie, Wilma won’t blow the whistle. Wilma raised you from a kitten, she’s your best friend.”
“You’re my best friend. Wilma’s second best.” She sat thinking. “But maybe you’re right. Maybe� she always does listen. Pays attention to me, to what I think.”
Joe studied again the angles and planes that tumbled below them, the jumble of rooftops and trees and balconies, and he dropped down to the parapet beside her. “You do what you think best. Meanwhile, I’ll just nose around the department, see if there are any recent fliers on runaway children.” And before she could reply, he was racing away down the tower’s spiraling stairs, heading for the PD.
She watched him from the rail. He was burning to get his teeth into the files on those old unsolved cases. He was a racing streak as he rounded each curve of the stairs, appearing, then vanishing until he burst out across the courthouse roof and into the oak tree above Molena Point PD. There she lost him as he scrabbled down the thick trunk; she glimpsed him for a second as he dropped to the sidewalk twisting in midair to crouch before the glass door. And even before the door was unlocked from within by the cat-friendly dispatcher, Dulcie herself was gone, racing down the brick steps to the icy sidewalk, heading out to search for Kit. As she watched the shadows and circled, peering into crevices, looking for the tattercoat, the courthouse clock struck midnight; she was glad they’d left the tower, the chimes were hellishly loud when you were right on top of them. In her search this time, she looked for silent little unmoving forms, and prayed she wouldn’t find one.
Turning to retrace an elusive scent, stopping to explore the blackness beneath steps and porches, she didn’t dare call the kit. Even in the middle of the night, who knew when some human might be out late, or standing sleepless at an open window? Or someone homeless asleep in a dark niche, who would wake to hear a cat shouting in his face. Her eyes burned into the night, searching silently, her ears rigid, the delicate antennae of her whiskers following every twist of air.
And as Dulcie fretted and worried, not four blocks away the kit lay curled up beneath the old rental house, sound asleep beside the hole she had dug. The hole to freedom that she had only half finished. Exhausted and thirsty, feeling weak from lack of supper, she slept deeply. She had no notion that both Joe and Dulcie were so near, Joe approaching Molena Point PD, and Dulcie just a few blocks away quietly looking for her.
14 [��������: pic_15.jpg]
Pawing at the heavy glass door of Molena Point PD, Joe pressed his nose against its cold surface, peering into the booking area. Except for the dispatcher, the small room was empty. To his left, the holding cell with its barred door was empty of prisoners, too. Behind the dispatcher’s U-shaped counter Mabel Farthy sat among her radios and phones and computers, half turned away from the door and busy with a call. He meowed loudly. Very likely she didn’t hear him through the thick bulletproof glass and over the noise of the phone and radio. Mabel was square, sturdy, blond, and in her mid-fifties. She must just have had her hair done because the color was brighter than usual, the short, layered cut neatly coiffed. She had a phone to her ear and was talking into the radio as well, apparently fielding a call and sending out a unit. Through the heavy glass, Joe couldn’t hear her words, but Mabel seemed well in control, keeping the caller on the line as she relayed information to a responding unit. From somewhere north of the village, a siren started to whoop, moving away fast into the hills. Mabel didn’t look up until the siren stopped, likely as the unit arrived.