Marlor finished his whiskey. “Obliterating those two was the least I could do,” he concluded.
All Cam could do was nod. This man had abducted those two petty thugs and then broiled them alive in their own juices. And after what he’d just heard, it all seemed perfectly justifiable. He knew this was all wrong, legally, but he was damned if he could marshal any good arguments just now.
“You seem pretty reasonable, for a cop,” Marlor said. He paused, as if trying to make up his mind. “I spent a lot of time up in the western Carolina mountains,” he continued. “My company gets blamed for a lot of tree damage from its coal plants. My job was to prove that plants in Tennessee and Kentucky were doing the damage, not Duke. The evidence for that is in the Smokies.”
“I’ve been there,” Cam said.
“You ever hear of the cat dancers?”
“The what?” Cam asked.
“The cat dancers.”
“Nope.”
“You should probably check that out. Start up in Haywood County, around the Cherokee reservation.”
“What’s a cat dancer?”
Marlor ignored the question. “Ask around for a man called White Eye Mitchell. Haywood County. Swain County. Out there on the eastern edge of the park.”
“What’s a cat dancer?” Cam asked again.
“The answer to some of your questions, I think,” Marlor said.
“That’s not an answer,” Cam replied.
“That’s your problem, Lieutenant,” Marlor said, looking pointedly at his watch. “Right now, I’m all out of time.”
It was obvious Marlor wasn’t going to tell him any more, and it was equally obvious that Cam had no real leverage on this man. “We going to find you?” Cam asked.
The sky was starting to get seriously dark. Cam could barely see Marlor’s eyes in the shadows of the porch. “I wouldn’t think so,” he said. “But, hell, I’ve been wrong before.”
“Haven’t we all,” Cam replied, standing up and retrieving his pack. The dogs got up immediately and bounded off the porch. “I still feel like I should try to talk you out of this.”
Marlor shook his head. “I want to go find my wife and daughter,” he said. “Have to make the big crossing to do that. If it works, good. If it doesn’t, what’s it matter? Keep this wind to your left as you head back.”
“Any critters I should watch out for?” Cam asked.
Marlor shook his head. “Bears and snakes are all denned up by now. Around here, anything else will be more scared of you than you are of them.”
Cam smiled in the gloom. “Funny how they know, isn’t it,” he said. And then he summoned his dogs and headed for the woods behind the cabin. The first snowflakes began drifting down as he reached the tree line. He looked back, but the cabin was already disappearing in a white curtain, along with James Marlor.
Halfway down the mountain, he heard the boom of a. 45. He stopped for a moment. Nightfall had come early to the cabin.
33
It was 4:30 in the morning when Cam got back to his house. What had been snow in the foothills had been freezing rain down in Triboro, and he’d been lucky to get home, given the mess out on the highways. He turned the dogs loose to run around the backyard and then went into the house. The alarm system was still on, and there were no signs of intrusion that he could see. He checked the Mercedes in the garage, but the small markers he’d left to detect intrusion were all in place. They’d told him to get out of town, so he had. Now that he was back, he wondered how long it would take for someone to know that. He retrieved the dogs and put them in the mudroom to dry off. Then he went into the kitchen and checked the phone. The dial tone was stuttering.
Think, he told himself. If, as a cop, you wanted to know whether or not a subject was at home, you’d have three choices: to go there and see, to maintain constant surveillance, or to tap his home phone. An actual phone tap took a court order, but if all they wanted to know was whether or not the phone was being used, the phone company might be willing to tell them that without the paper work. So don’t use the phone. He used his personal cell phone to retrieve the message. It was from Jaspreet, asking him to call her. He deleted the message, and then he had an idea. He accessed the menu for the mailbox and changed his greeting to indicate that he’d be away for the next month. Callers were invited to leave a message, which he could retrieve from the road.
What else might they check? The mail. He went back out front, holding a newspaper over his head, as the sleet had started up again. The mailbox was fairly full, although in the usual American proportions of one-quarter real mail to threequarters advertising. He sorted through it, returned most of the junk mail to the box, and hurried back into the house. His brain was getting fuzzy with fatigue and he decided to quit for the night. The dogs would tell him if anyone came around the house, and maybe daylight would suggest his next moves. At the very least, he had to tell the sheriff about Marlor. Then he realized he probably shouldn’t do that. Cam didn’t think the sheriff would understand his quasi-complicity in Marlor’s suicide.
At eleven o’clock the next morning, Cam pulled his new truck into the underground parking entrance of Jaspreet Kaur Bawa’s ten-story condominium building near downtown Charlotte. He entered the code she’d given him onto the keypad and the device buzzed, spat out a ticket, and raised the gates. The ticket told him he could park in any space that didn’t have a name and number. He parked, went into the building, found the elevators, and pressed the button for the ninth floor.
The fast elevator popped his ears. When the door opened, he found himself in an ultramodern glass and stainless-steel lobby. The gold lettering on a pair of double glass doors directly in front of him read TIGEREYE ANALYTICS, and a receptionist buzzed him through the glass doors. The doors to the office suites behind her were not glass, and each of them had large keypads in place of door handles, and a glowing redlighted box at eye level on the doorjamb. The receptionist confirmed his identification and then asked him to take a seat next to her desk. She then asked him to put the five fingers of his right hand into a small glove-shaped plastic box. The box beeped and she told him to remove his hand. Then she gave him what looked like a pair of opera glasses that had a wire attached. She asked him to look into them and open his eyes wide. He saw a green pattern materializing in front of his vision, which turned to bright red and then to a comforting golden color. He heard another beep as the retinal scan was recorded. Then she made some entries on her keyboard.
“You going to want some DNA, too?” he asked.
She smiled. “Not today, Lieutenant. Jay-Kay is expecting you upstairs in her living quarters. The stairs are right over there.”
Cam thanked her and headed for the stairs, which were wide and beautifully carpeted. He’d been joking about the DNA. The receptionist had not. At the landing halfway up the stairs, instruments were waiting to sample his fingerprints and retina, and then more doors clicked open. He turned and went up the rest of the way. Jaspreet was waiting for him at the top of the stairs. He was conscious of tiny video cameras tracking his every move as he approached.
Jay-Kay, in a silvery two-piece silk suit whose style was something between Indian and Italian, looked as dazzling as her surroundings. “Good morning, Just Cam,” she said in her delightful singsong voice. “You found it okay?”
“Piece of cake,” he said. He whistled when he took in the view of the city from her living room. It looked like her apartment covered the entire floor. “You own the building?”