“You get out of this car, in this traffic and confusion, and get hurt or in trouble, and you’re going to blow the search. Did you think of that? I told you I plan to stay over, get a motel room. The stores we don’t cover tonight, we’ll hit in the morning.”
This might sound reasonable to a human. It made no sense to the one doing the tracking. “The scent is fresh now. By tomorrow morning the cleaning people with their vacuums and chemicals will have trashed every trace. Vacuuming compound, cleaning substances, to say nothing of the personal scents of dozens of assorted humans.”
“Five minutes, I’ll be back. Then we’ll hit the stores.” Clyde leaned over, his face close to Joe’s. “I have to open some windows or you’ll die in this heat. I expect you, on your tomcat honor, to stay inside this car.” He looked up again, scanning the parking area. “That could be Davis’s unit, over behind that truck. I’ll just see what she’s found, then we’ll get to work.” Another hard glare and he was gone, leaving the windows halfway down, locking the doors simply as a small deterrent to passersby.
Not that anyone with common sense, seeing the glaring eyes of the enraged tomcat, would stick his hand through. Joe watched Clyde enter the restaurant and wave, and glimpsed Davis, sitting in the back. The squarely built Latina was in uniform as usual, though the day was hot as hell and such formality was seldom expected of Harper’s detectives. She didn’t look happy to see Clyde.
Juana Davis was a good detective, she’d do a thorough search for Wilma-as good as a human could accomplish with no talent for scent detection. Sitting with Davis in the booth were two sheriff’s deputies. As Clyde sat down beside Juana, Joe considered the car’s open windows. He looked across the parking lot to Liz Claiborne’s, which was Wilma’s favorite store and had, most likely, been her first stop this morning-if she ever got this far, he thought, rearing up with his paws on the glass, wondering if the security alarm would go off.
It didn’t. He propelled himself over and out, and there was not a sound. In a nanosecond he was across the lot, between parked cars, slipping into Liz Claiborne’s, padding in on the heels of a hurrying shopper. Ducking behind a rack of dresses, immediately his nose filled with the smells of new cashmere sweaters and women’s perfume, unwelcome indeed as he sought the one scent of importance.
15
D ulcie and Kit left the Jones house running shoulder to shoulder, smug with information but deeply disappointed that none of it was about Wilma; they had found no scent of her, no hint that she’d ever been in Cage’s house. The only place they hadn’t been able to search was the attic; though after they left the basement, they’d tried. There was no way to get up into that under-roof space without going back in the house and trying to drag a chair under the trapdoor, which would have brought Lilly quicker than fleas to a stray hound. Leaving the attic without searching it worried Dulcie. A prisoner could die under that roof, it would be hot as blazes in there.
They had, before they approached the roof, thoroughly searched the jumbled basement, swinging open musty cupboards, peering behind tangles of old furniture and stacks of cardboard cartons. How many years of discards were dumped in that crowded space? Old clothes, a dressmaker’s dummy, a treadle sewing machine, a gigantic water-fall dresser, an abandoned refrigerator (with failing hearts, they looked inside; nothing but mold). Boxes of rusty tools: crowbar and wrenches, screwdrivers and hammers tossed in with cans of rusting nails.
In the garage, they had searched the old car, too. Looked like it had seldom been driven. Tires half flat, dust on every surface. They’d leaped in through its open windows, which, they supposed, Lilly left down to prevent the mildew that had taken hold anyway, along with a hidden nest of mice that smelled as rich as steak, and the thick gossamer homes of several generations of spiders. There was no human scent. Jumping out again, they had returned to the other end of the basement; they were crouched to escape through the basement window when Kit turned aside to paw at the loose linoleum in a closet they had earlier investigated, the one where the door wouldn’t close. Pawing and scrabbling, suddenly she lowered her ears and lashed her tail with excitement. Dulcie pushed close, to see.
Raking the linoleum up against the wall with surprising strength, Kit skinnied underneath. “Look here! And someone’s been here!” They could both smell it: The linoleum and concrete smelled of Cage Jones.
Sunk into the concrete floor beneath its grimy linoleum covering was a metal safe. A very old safe, rusting but sturdy and heavy. Cage had come down here recently, had surely pulled the linoleum back and handled the safe, and had probably opened it. The finger smears through its coat of dust smelled of Cage, and the dust around the dial was streaked, as if he had spun it; there were also smears along the edge of the lid, as if he had lifted it. What had he kept there? Was this what Greeley was looking for?
They had tried for a long time to open the safe, without luck; as superior as was a cat’s hearing, Dulcie and Kit were not artful at sorting out the tumbler sounds and then spinning the dial accordingly. That was Greeley Urzey’s forte, it was Greeley who was skilled at safecracking. For that old man, this would be the work of but a minute. They could catch no scent of what the safe might contain, or have contained, could smell nothing but the metal itself, and dust, and Cage’s stink. No odor of old musty money, nothing like the way bills smelled that had been hidden for a very long time-they knew that nose-twitching smell; some of Lucinda Greenlaw’s little fortune had once smelled like that from being hidden for many years.
Nor was there any hint of other musty paper in the safe, such as secreted bonds or stock certificates; aside from Cage’s scent, only the sharp metal smell. Turning away, they had let the linoleum spring back and were pressing it into place, wondering if they should try to paw dust over it, when a noise sent them out of the closet and streaking for the window. Even as they leaped to the sill, behind them the door to the stairs flew open.
They heard Lilly gasp as they exploded out onto a pine tree. Scrambling up its far side, claws digging into the bark, they climbed as fast as a pair of terrified squirrels. Behind them they heard Lilly’s footsteps cross the gritty floor.
They had peered around to see her approaching the open window, and had drawn back. For a long moment, she stood looking out. There was no sound. And then, as if perhaps fearful that a burglar had been there and might return, Lilly slammed the window shut. They heard her attempt to lock it.
“That,” Kit whispered, “doesn’t make any sense. If she thinks there was a person inside, how does she know he isn’t still there? How does she know he won’t step out of a cupboard and mug her?”
Lilly tried for some time to lock the window, then fetched the rusty hammer and jammed it in above the lower pane of the double-hung window so it wouldn’t open.
“What if she saw us?” Kit breathed.
“So? We’re cats! What if she did? Come on!”
Scrambling to the roof they had peered over, checking the vents again, but none was loose. Padding across the scorching shingles listening for sounds from the attic space below their paws, they called Wilma, called her name over and over, at first quietly and then louder than was safe. Only silence greeted them. If Wilma were gagged as well as bound, she could give no answer-unless she could knock, kick out with a bound foot, make some noise. They tried for a very long time but could detect no sound at all beneath the hot shingles. They gave up at last, licked their scorched paws, and abandoned the roof, praying Wilma wasn’t down there. Leaping into the pine they backed down its rough trunk and dropped to the ground, into thick dry pine needles. Dulcie, shaking needles from her fur, glanced toward the far end of the house-and there was Greeley, standing in the next yard watching them, looking straight at them, an evil smile on his wizened face, a leer as cruel as the devil masks upstairs. The cats fled straight down the steep wall of the canyon. Leaping down through tangled grass and weeds, tumbling and sliding to the canyon floor, they ran, their hearts pounding. Not until they were two blocks away and well concealed within the canyon’s bushes did they stop and look back to the cliff-side houses.