Purring for Mabel, he enjoyed a nice ear scratch as she went on about the kittens. “New babies, Joe Grey. Well, not so new anymore. Four months old already, and Charlie says they’re beautiful.” Charlie was often in and out of the station, her freckled, red-haired beauty always turning heads. Though Mabel had no notion the cats could answer her, she talked to them in a long and loving ramble as she fed them whatever treat she’d brought for the officers, and for the cats themselves.
“Two boy kittens as sleek as you,” Mabel said, “but pale as sand. And the girl kitten … a little calico. Charlie says she’s a beauty. So, Joe Grey, when do we get to see them? When will you bring your family to the station?”
Not any time soon, Joe thought, feeling a shiver of dismay. He lived in mortal fear of the kittens finding their way to MPPD, slipping in to prowl, all wild energy and curiosity and forgetting they were never to speak to a human or in front of a human, one of them blurting out a question before they realized the blunder they’d made. They can’t come here, Joe thought nervously. The department is used to Dulcie and me, and that’s fine. We keep our mouths shut. But wild, scatterbrained, half-grown kittens wanting to know everything? They don’t need to be anywhere near the station.
At that very moment two of the kittens peered out at their father and Mabel from deep beneath the bunk that occupied the holding cell, their buff coats blending well into the shadows. They were as motionless and silent as stuffed toys. They were thankful for the strong smell of cinnamon and chocolate and the stink of the holding cell itself that they hoped had hidden their own scent from their father as he’d passed by.
They had not come through the front door as Joe had, padding in behind the skirts of the woman detective.
Up on the department’s roof, they had found the open, barred window that looked down into the cell.
“Here we go,” Striker had said, slipping in through the bars. Buffin had looked with trepidation at the long leap down to the bunk’s thin mattress. Striker had gone first, had waited until Mabel was talking on the phone and then slipped in between the bars, hitting the mattress in a flying leap. Quickly Buffin followed. Now, in the far corner beneath the cot they were out of their father’s sight.
All the officers had vanished into the conference room where, even with the door pushed closed, the kittens could smell coffee and hear the mumble of voices. They watched Joe drop from Mabel’s counter, approach the door, and casually lie down beside it with his ear to the crack.
Max Harper didn’t waste much time at roll call. He went over the details of the stolen Jeep that was wrecked in front of the Damens’ house; that bit of news drew angry comments, both because it was the Damens’ house and because the perp had gotten away. Joe didn’t need to see into the room to know that the officers sat at the big table, papers and electronic notebooks scattered around them, and most with freshly poured coffee. The chief was quickly into the rest of the car thefts, but soon turned the meeting over to Detective Garza, for the numbers, models, and makes of the cars, which young Officer Bonner recorded on his laptop. They went over which cars belonged to tourists, how many were local vehicles. The square-faced Hispanic detective read off a list of what had been stolen from each car that wasn’t driven away, how each car was broken into, and the few that were able to be hot-wired and so actually stolen. Dallas hadn’t had much sleep, working the street during the predawn hours. He had cleaned up at Joe’s house, he was clean shaven, thanks to Clyde’s razor. He no longer looked as if he’d just rolled out of bed, as he had when Ryan served him a quick breakfast. Joe had to smile because he was wearing Clyde’s newest T-shirt.
“These guys are mostly amateurs,” Max was saying, “yet look at the number of cars they’ve stolen. Looks like three or four have the devices or phone apps, and the know-how to use them on the newer cars. Who knows how many others there are, just to do breakins or hot-wire older cars. We’ve got twelve older Jeeps reported missing, those are easy pickings—a few professionals and maybe a dozen or more to do breakins, and to drive the stolen cars out of the village. Question is, to where?”
Dallas looked over at Max. “An antiques dealer called in half an hour ago about a missing white BMW. Robert Teague?”
Several officers, who knew Teague, nodded.
Brennan said, “Teague was dating Barbara Conley.”
A few officers laughed. Dallas said, “Half the town was dating her.” He gave them the description and license of the BMW. “I went on over, talked with Teague, he was pretty upset. He lives in the area the thieves were working, said he left a valuable tea set, some kind of very old antique porcelain, in the back of the car.”
“Parked outside overnight?” Crowley said. “That was smart.”
“No. It was in the garage,” Dallas said. “He told me he drove up to the city yesterday to sell a few pieces of china for a friend. He spotted this tea set at the dealer’s, which Teague appraised at about thirty thousand but that he picked up for much less. Said he got home late, he was tired. Instead of carrying the box in the house he locked it in the car, locked the car in the garage. He thought it would be as safe there as in the house.
“He gets up in the morning, the car’s gone and the box with it. And no sign of a breakin.” No one had to say the thief, maybe at some earlier time, had used an electronic device to record the opening mechanism for the garage door.
“Apparently,” Dallas said, “the thief opened the car door all right, but his device wouldn’t start the car.” Dallas shook his head. “Teague, in a hurry last night, forgot about the concierge key he kept hidden on a wire under the seat.”
The concierge key, Joe thought, the key with no electronic signals. So when he pulls into a fancy restaurant he can give the attendant that key without electronic features that can be copied. He must have thought no one ever thinks to look for that. Last night, he goes on to bed, the key right there in his car. Human inventions are a wonder—until something goes wrong. Look at the world of computers … is nothing safe anymore?
But worst of all was the fact that Joe Grey knew where the BMW was and that information needed to reach the department. He still didn’t know how to report it without putting the sleuth within seconds of Joe’s own house at three in the morning on a stormy night when no human would be out on the streets except the thieves, or some nearby neighbor, like Clyde.
“So far,” Max said, “we’ve picked up three perps. And we have Ryan’s rough description of the guy driving the wrecked car. Some departments think there are more than a dozen members; but if they’re stashing the cars somewhere close, then moving them later, even three or four men could take down a dozen cars or more in one night. How many home garages have these people rented or made deals for? Given two or three days, as they’re doing up the coast, that many cars each night, that’s three dozen cars, some broken into and left, maybe a dozen stolen. Those are the numbers we’re getting from Watsonville, Santa Cruz, Sonoma.”