Dulcie sniffed with impatience. Tomcat logic was so pedestrian.“First he has to find the doll. Then we’ll take it from there. If he comes this way, he can’t miss it. If he doesn’t come into the grove, I’ll lead him here.”
“Fine. That’s a clever move.”
“I think-” She paused, looking past him. “He’s coming.” They watched Harper swinging toward them across the lawn. But at the same moment, two squad cars pulled down the front drive. The first black-and-white parked in front of the house. The other car moved on down the drive to the back, stopping beside Harper. The police captain stood leaning on the door. They couldn’t hear much of the conversation over the static of the radio. When the car pulled away, Harper turned back toward the house.
Dulcie wasn’t having that; she hadn’t planted the doll for nothing. Like a flash, she dropped out of the tree, fled for the tethered gelding. Puzzled, Joe watched her from the branch, then realized what she was up to. He tensed to charge down and defend her as she leaped at the gelding’s head, then raced around his hooves. Darting in, she slapped at his legs and spun away, harried him until he snorted and began to rear, jerking on his tie rope. When she jumped up at his neck, clawing him, the buckskin squealed and bucked.
Harper came running.
The horse jerked and squealed. When Dulcie saw Harper, she vanished. She was gone, behind headstones, behind trees.
Harper was totally intent on getting to the buckskin, he’d never see the doll. Joe let out a bloodcurdling yowl, a caterwaul that should stop a battalion of fast-moving cops.
Harper paused; he was not six feet from the doll. He stood looking.
Glancing away to the buckskin, seeing that the horse had begun to quiet, Harper knelt, studying the little seated lady, looking at her tiny hands tucked down into the seam between the squares of sod. His thin, lined face showed no emotion, not surprise, not incredulity. It was a cop’s face, stony and watchful.
But his fingers twitched as he carefully parted the grass, studying the line in the dark, rich soil.
He didn’t touch the doll. He moved to several positions, looking at the thin creases where sod met sod. The gelding was quiet now, was, Joe decided, a sensible horse not given to unnecessary histrionics. When the danger passed, he forgot it.
As Harper walked the excavation, following the nearly invisible lines, finding the cross seams, behind him, among the headstones, Dulcie slipped past, returning quietly, swarming up the tree without sound, not even a whisper of her claws gripping into the thick oak bark.
They crouched close together watching Harper step off the breadth and width of the excavation. When he lifted his radio from his belt, Dulcie crept out along the branch, flicking her tail with anticipation.
Harper called for two more squad cars. When he told the dispatcher to patch him through to Judge Sanderson, Dulcie grew so excited, waiting for the judge, shifting from paw to paw, that she nearly lost her grip on the branch. Joe nosed at her, pressing her back against the trunk to a more secure perch, glaring at her until she settled down.
By the time the two police units arrived, Harper had bagged the doll for evidence, had posted a guard beside the two-by-six sod-covered excavation, and had stationed another guard at the stables. The cats burned to know what was there. Harper had not mentioned, to the judge, anything about the stables, had told Judge Sanderson only that he needed to excavate further in the cemetery, and that he had new evidence about the string of burglaries. When Harper left the grove, so did Joe and Dulcie. Slipping along behind him, keeping to the cover of the headstones, they followed him toward the house.
Slinking from gravestone to gravestone in swift dashes, streaking across the lawn behind Harper, they gained the azalea bushes. Then under a chaise lounge, working their way across the terrace toward the kitchen, and past.
A tan Ford was parked by the back stairs. They slipped up the narrow steps, listening. Beside Renet’s door they scrambled up a support post to the roof.
Within moments they were prowling the warm tiles, the red clay expanse seeming as long as a city block. Below them, on the front drive, the two black-and-whites were parked, and four officers stood talking with Harper. The other squad cars, behind the house, had stopped beside the stable.
They watched the long front drive, as an unmarked car turned in. Approaching the house it pulled up in front. The driver handed Harper a white envelope.
“Search warrant,” Joe said softly.
“I hope Renet hasn’t already cleared out all the evidence, every necklace and bracelet. We could go down there, distract her. Give Harper a chance to search. We can just drop down onto her balcony and-”
“Yeah, right. We could do that.”
“But?”
“I’ve had enough of her. The woman’s a fiend.” Whatever bland, innocuous presence Renet managed to exude in the course of everyday living, she was a Jekyll and Hyde when it came to cats.
Dulcie nudged him, and he turned to look. Away behind them, across the upper hills, two more police cars were coming, making their way along a narrow, rutted back road. Behind them followed a dark, unmarked station wagon. The three vehicles turned downhill just above the grove, onto the dirt lane that bordered the cemetery on the far side, parking at the edge of the graves near the yellow police tape.
Four uniformed officers got out of the police units. The two men in dark suits who emerged from the station wagon each carried a backpack. Farther on, Harper’s buckskin gelding, still tied to his tree, looked toward the men with interest. He didn’t shy now; he was beautifully calm.
The six men stood talking beside the raw earth of Dolores Fernandez’s grave, then moved on across the grove toward the patch of nearly invisible sod squares where Harper had found the doll, where he had left a yellow tape tied.
The two men in suits set down their packs and walked around the sod rectangle, then knelt to carefully probe at its edges. They worked at this for some time before one of the men fished a camera from his pack, adjusted some lens attachment, and began to take pictures.
Dulcie smiled with satisfaction, and settled more comfortably on the warm roof tiles. Joe yawned and curled down against the chimney in a patch of sun. When the photographer finished shooting pictures, both men walked the area, bending to pick up minute bits of evidence, dropping each into a little transparent bag. After some time, they produced long slim knives, working carefully at the sod, slipping the blades down into the hairline cracks. The cats were distracted only when two more cars came down the long drive: a black Lincoln and Adelina’s pearl red Bentley, both vehicles squealing to a halt before the front door.
Car doors were flung open, two men in dark suits got out of the Lincoln, moving close to Adelina as she approached the house. At the same moment, as if she had been watching the drive, Renet slammed out the front door to join her sister. The cats could imagine phone calls from within, down to Casa Capri, could just picture Renet’s panicked phone summons to Adelina. The two men had to be Adelina’s attorneys.
From within the house, Max Harper appeared behind Renet. And as Renet and Adelina began to argue, the two men lit into Harper. They wanted to know what business he had bringing his police up here. They informed him that if he didn’t leave at once, they’d have him in court.
“Lawyers,” Joe said with disgust. “They’d better think again, if they plan to takeHarperinto court.” He might rag Max Harper, but no one else had better give him a hard time. Harper did not seem pleased with the attorneys’ abrasive attitudes. The cats had never before seen him really mad. They watched, highly entertained, kneading their claws against the clay tiles, as Harper worked the two attorneys over. They watched him back the lawyers toward their car, watched the two retreat inside the Lincoln and drive away, watched Harper herd Adelina and Renet into the house. That was thelast the cats saw of the Prior sisters until they were escorted out the front door an hour later to a patrol car, where they were locked in the back behind the wire barrier. “Like common drunks,” Dulcie said.