With shaking legs and with his heart still pounding, Cam began to climb down. It took him longer than expected, and he checked the cat once more to make sure it was finished before making the final drop on all fours onto the ground. He extracted the gun and stayed down for a moment, gathering his wits and making sure that thing didn’t get up again. He finally came around the tree trunk and stopped. The cat’s body was no longer twitching, but White Eye was. Cam knelt down beside him, trying to ignore the mess the cat had made of the old man’s skull, which looked like a broken crock of Jell-O. There’s no way he’s going to survive this, Cam thought. He looked into Mitchell’s eyes, which, after a moment, focused on his. White Eye opened his mouth to speak, but then he choked on fluids rising in his throat. He turned his head sideways for a moment, coughed wetly, and then looked back at Cam.
“God damn you,” he gasped.
“You killed her, not me,” Cam said.
White Eye blinked, as if he didn’t understand.
“When you sent her after me,” Cam said
“Had your rounds,” he gasped. More blood welled out of his shattered head every time he spoke.
“Picked your pocket,” Cam said. “Don’t talk anymore.”
Mitchell tried to reach up and touch his head, but his arm wouldn’t work.
“How bad…” he whispered.
Cam shook his head. “Will you tell me who the cat dancers are?”
White Eye made another gargling noise in his throat, which was when Cam realized the cat had opened that up, too. Then he was looking back at Cam. One of his strange eyes rolled away for a second before it came back into focus. His right leg had begun to twitch uncontrollably. Brain shutting down, Cam thought.
“Don’t know,” he said, and Cam had to bend closer to hear him. “They’s all cops. Same as you. God damn your eyes.”
Then his eyes lost focus as he choked once and stopped breathing.
Cam sat back on his haunches and swallowed hard. The cat dancers were all cops. Finally, he thought he knew what was going on.
45
He tramped over a mile of hard-packed snow to find the Bronco, which started just fine, he discovered. He drove the vehicle back up to the edge of the oak grove and loaded Mitchell’s body. He’d tried to move the cat, but it was simply too heavy, so he found a hatchet in the Bronco, hacked off the cat’s head, and put that next to Mitchell’s body, covering the whole mess with a tarp as best he could for the trip back. Ordinarily, he’d have left the entire scene alone and called for the authorities, but nothing would be left once the scavengers found it, and there wasn’t exactly good cell-phone service up in these mountains. He drove back the way they’d come, getting stuck only once, which cost him a half hour of digging and shoving.
He drove directly to the Carrigan County Sheriff’s Office in Pineville, arriving bleary-eyed just after sunrise. The duty officer came out to the Bronco, pulled back the tarp, whistled once, and called the sheriff at home. Cam gave them a brief synopsis of what had happened, then said he needed to get back to the cabin, change, clean up, and get something to eat. He told them that he’d be back at ten o’clock for a detailed statement. That seemed to suit all concerned. After another, much longer interview, he put a call through to Bobby Lee to tell him that something had happened and that the locals wanted him to stay up there for a few more days.
“Something?’” the sheriff had asked.
“Office line,” Cam said, reminding Bobby Lee of his own orders. No phones, no e-mails. Cam asked him to call his cell phone from a more secure line.
“How’s this tie in with our problem?” Bobby Lee asked five minutes later.
“A small group of cops-revealed to us by a suspect, James Marlor-who are doing this pursuit of wild mountain lions as some sort of an initiation into-what?” Cam said.
“And you think these are our vigilantes?”
“It’s certainly possible, Sheriff,” Cam said. “Especially if they’re from all over the state. Not one sheriff’s office, but seven. A loose network of out-there cops who get together periodically to take care of unfinished business. They’d be strangers in Manceford County-like that guy who warned me to get out of town.”
“But you said Marlor admitted to doing the two minimart guys.”
“With the help of someone in law enforcement who told him where they could be picked up. And the bomb at Annie’s house? That wasn’t Marlor.”
“We only have his word for that.”
“There was the shooting incident prior to that-that took two people. Marlor was a lone wolf. I think these guys took advantage of what Marlor was doing to eliminate a judge they despised. Relate the two sets of incidents and we all looked at Marlor.”
The sheriff sighed audibly. “You’re saying we’ve got one of these guys in our house.”
“Either that or one of them had access to someone in our office who’s at least sympathetic to their program,” Cam said. “And that might be how this is working. This could be a small cell of doers with a much larger base of sympathizers, cops or admin types who are willing to answer a question without asking too many of their own. Guys who don’t want to know what’s going to be done with the information, but are willing to pass stuff along for the cause of achieving real justice, like when those two minmart assholes went free.”
“You’re talking accomplice to kidnap and murder, then,” the sheriff said. “Cops would know that.”
“I don’t know, Sheriff,” Cam said. “Yes, they should know that. But I can see some of the cops I know being able to make a distinction between executing somebody and leaking a little information. It’s not like they were putting cops or cases in danger; just giving an opinion as to where the likes of K-Dog and Flash hung out.”
“But legally-”
“Yes, sir, I know. But these might be new guys, easily influenced by older and more experienced cops.”
“So who are the doers?”
“Jaded cops. Senior hard-case guys with ten, fifteen, twenty years of pent-up frustration with the system. Not management types, but street supervisors. Maybe not just cops-maybe some Young Turk prosecutors. Probably they start out as sympathizers and then a select few graduate to actual doers. White Eye told me the group consisted of only seven guys-no more, no less. That’s a very small action cell, and you don’t get to play with those guys unless you’re man enough to do go do something like this cat-dancing shit.”
The sheriff went silent, long enough for Cam to wonder if he’d lost the connection.
“You get yourself back here ASAP,” Bobby Lee said finally. “I can’t move on this at all until I have you here.”
Cam said he would be trying to get the sheriff of Garrigan County to contain the incident as much as possible, restrict it to local consumption, but that he’d probably need some backup on that, sheriff to sheriff. Bobby Lee understood and took Sheriff Hanson’s office number.
“I have my dogs with me,” Cam said. “So I’ll need to go home first. Want to meet there? I have the inquest proceedings here tomorrow-that’s at two-and then I can be back in Triboro by seven, eight o’clock tomorrow night.”
“All right. And make sure you talk to that Bawa woman. She’s been calling all damned day.”
He got through to Jay-Kay an hour later. She revealed that her tigers had managed to penetrate the statewide records in her search for patterns involving prisoners, defendants, judges, and unsolved perp deaths.
“Penetrate,” Cam said. “As in covertly?”
“No, actually, as in freedom of information, with a little help from some federal resources. But here’s the interesting point: We were shut out after only three search sessions. I cannot find out why or by whom.”
“Shut out?”
“Access denied, across the board. And it looks like a machine is doing it, as opposed to, say, some sys op at a keyboard.”