Cam wasn’t sure what a sys op was. “So what do you do next?”
“Now we’re doing it my way,” she said brightly.
“I don’t think I want to hear this,” he said with a smile. “New subject: What do the jungle drums tell you about federal interest in me for the bombing?”
“Nothing. Which in itself says something-namely, that there is a stone wall in place. They know I’m working with you, and so no one tells me anything.”
“Can you do it your way with regard to that question, too?”
“It’s technically possible, but I wouldn’t want to. Unlike most state agency computer systems, the federal networks look back at intruders rather forcefully these days. When are you returning?”
“Very soon,” he said. “Things got messy up here, but productive in one sense. Tell me, have you had any interaction with Sergeant Cox?”
“Not directly. But shall we perhaps talk about that when you get back?” She replied, all but telling him, Not on an open line, dummy.
Exhausted, Cam went back to the cabin and took an allafternoon nap. He was awakened at sundown by the sound of someone knocking on the cabin door. The dogs were interested but not alerting him. Nonetheless, Cam still wasn’t ready to open the door and find one of Night-Night’s relatives wanting to have a word. He asked who was there.
“It’s Mary Ellen Goode,” a voice called. “I think we need to talk.”
Cam was standing behind the door in his long johns, still not quite awake.
“Um,” he said.
“I’m sorry. I woke you up, didn’t I?” Let’s do this: Meet me at the Sky Lodge in an hour.” She gave him directions and then drove away.
An hour later, Cam was seated by a window at the Sky Lodge, waiting for Mary Ellen. He’d wondered about the name when he first drove up, as the building was an unpretentious log lodge house from the front. When the hostess took him through the bar and down a flight of steps to the dining room, he saw the reason: A wall-length window looked out over a gorge that dropped at least five hundred feet below to a rushing stream. He ordered coffee and tried to wake up. Mary Ellen came in a few minutes later, and he woke right up. She’d changed out of her Park Service uniform into a dress, put on a little war paint, done something interesting with her hair, and was turning heads as she followed the hostess over to Cam’s table. Cam, wearing jeans and a lumberjack shirt, felt underdressed.
“Well, my goodness,” he said, getting up. “It’s a girl.”
She smiled as she sat down. “It’s a woman, actually,” she replied. “And she’s here to apologize for what happened to you up there in the woods.”
He sat back down slowly. “Apologize?”
She ordered a glass of wine from the waiter, who dropped two menus on the table.
“I haven’t been entirely honest with you about this cat-dancing business. I need to explain some things.”
The waiter brought her wine and she put a serious dent in it. “Okay,” she said. “Here goes. This concerns my late fiance, Joel Hatch.” She paused. “How do I describe Joel?”
“Lieutenant Grayson said he was a bit of a cowboy,” Cam offered. “A TV cop wanna-be, to be precise. Someone who liked the role of cop better than that of park ranger.”
She stared down at the table for a moment, not speaking, and Cam wondered if he’d been too blunt. “Did they tell you what happened that day?” he asked.
She nodded. “Not at first,” she said, “But then later, I talked to some of the cops involved. In fact, he and I’d had some words about the way he was acting, some of the stuff he was doing. And then, afterward…”
“Afterward, you felt guilty because now he was dead.”
“A little bit, yes, I did.”
“I can relate to that,” he said, and told her about the bombing incident and his own complicated relationship with Annie Bellamy. The waiter came back and they ordered.
“I guess I’ve become a fatalist,” she said once the waiter had departed. “I think that when you fail to put a proper value on the people you love, the gods take them away from you.”
“I think you take what life has to offer and make the best of it,” he responded. “We’re not in control. You were going to tell me something about cat dancers?”
She smiled. “Nothing wrong with your focus, is there? Okay, cat dancers. I first heard the term from Joel. He’d heard rumors that White Eye Mitchell was doing some weird stuff up in the backcountry and that it involved feral mountain lions.”
“Which do not exist,” Cam said.
“Right.”
“On the other hand, you never went looking, did you?” he asked.
“No, we have plenty enough to do. The station is undermanned, and the park visitors keep us quite busy. But Joel took off a couple of times in the year before he died, and I think he was looking. Then he stopped talking about it.”
“But he did use the term cat dancing?”
“Once. I remember it. He said it was the coolest thing he’d ever heard of. For Joel, cool was a word that usually involved extreme danger. But he didn’t say exactly what it was, other than it meant getting very close. Then it was as if he realized he’d been indiscreet, and he wouldn’t talk about it anymore.”
The waiter arrived with their food, and Cam used the distraction to think about how much he should tell her. He liked her and he trusted her, and she’d already figured out that there was an Internal Affairs angle to what he was doing up here.
“Okay,” he said. “Let me ask you one more thing: If you thought Joel was mixed up in something ‘weird’ involving wild panthers, why didn’t you report it?”
“You’re a career cop,” she said. “You know the answer to that.”
He thought for a moment. “Let’s see. Everyone knew the two of you were an item, and you were afraid that whatever it was he was doing, it might splatter your own career?”
“Not exactly admirable, is it, but that’s the gist of it, yes. You had to know Joel. I rationalized it by telling myself that there simply weren’t any more big cats up there in the mountains. Not wild ones, anyway. And even if there were, no one would be fool enough to track one into a face-to-face confrontation.”
He nodded. “I would probably have done the same thing,” he said. He decided to trust her, made her promise to keep it to herself, and then told her the whole story of why he had come up to the area.
“My God,” she said softly when he was finished. “An initiation? And one of them was killed?”
Cam looked around the dining room. It wasn’t full, but he still didn’t want to be overheard. “That’s what White Eye told me. And now that I’ve seen a supposedly tame one in action, I’m a believer.”
She shivered. “They want me to testify tomorrow-at the inquest-about how that could happen. With his own cat, I mean.”
“I may need you to testify for me,” he said. He stopped when he saw her expression. “ Testify ’s probably the wrong word. What I need is corroboration that I’m not making this up. And, of course, the much bigger issue is that we may have a statewide death squad working.”
She sat back in her chair, dinner forgotten, thinking about what he was asking.
“As you can imagine, this thing’s being run under a pretty damned tight wrap,” he went on. “You can’t talk about this. Hell, I can’t talk about this.” Even as he said it, he realized that he just had.
“Because you don’t know who’s who in the zoo,” she said.
“Precisely. I’m meeting tomorrow night with our sheriff and the DA.”
“What on earth would I tell my boss?” she asked.
“That you need a few days’ leave?”
“I’ll think about it,” she said. “But damn, Lieutenant!”
“You could call me Cam,” he said.
“Sure about that?” she asked sadly.
46
The dogs were in semidisgrace on the trip back. He had chided them about not following the Bronco and rescuing his sorry ass from the mountain lion. The looks on their faces said that no self-respecting, intelligent German shepherds would even mess with goddamned mountain lions, and besides, full food bowls on the porch had distracted them from doing their duty, no matter how wildly construed. He could see their point, but he still gave them a cold shoulder all the way back to Triboro. That seemed to bother them a lot, at least for the five minutes before they fell asleep in the backseat.