“Tessa might be a quiet little thing,” Max said, “but not this morning. This morning she had her back up. I guess when she wants to let you see it, she does have a mind of her own.”
Maybe with Pan’s coaching, Kit thought, listening unseen, her whiskers curved in a satisfied smile.
“When Tessa said her momma gave the man her car, she pointed away across the neighborhood. ‘Drove down to that house,’ she said, pointing straight in the direction of the gray house where we found the Lincoln. Dallas could see she wanted to say more, but Debbie pulled her off his lap and hauled her back into the bedroom.”
From outside in the hall they could hear the clink of metal on metal as the dinner trays were delivered, and the smell of boiled beef and overcooked vegetables seeped in under the door.
“If they pick Victor up,” Pedric said, “you have proof enough to hold him, proof he killed Birely?” Pedric rubbed gently at his knee, as if it were beginning to hurt now that the local anesthetic had worn off.
“We have Vic’s fingerprints from the rubber-glove dispenser in the adjoining room,” Max said. “Particles of cinnamon and sugar icing on the edge of the dispenser and on the floor under it. Sugar and cinnamon scattered across Birely’s blanket, where Vic punched him in the belly. Vic might have been wearing gloves, but he didn’t think to brush off his clothes, to get rid of the crumbs down his front.
“Dallas talked with the volunteers who work in the cafeteria. Two of the women remembered Amson, from our description. When Dallas took them the mug shots, once we’d run the prints and got photos, they gave us a positive ID. They said they don’t serve anything there with cinnamon icing except for their cinnamon buns. They had a couple of stale ones from the day before, and forensics has those.
“And that fits in with the phone tip,” Max said. “That’s not admissible evidence in court, and we don’t know who she is, but—”
“A phone call?” Kate said innocently. Maybe, she thought, if no one asked, Max would wonder why they didn’t. Beside her, Lucinda and Pedric had stiffened only a little.
Max said, “The woman described Victor, said she saw him punch Birely. Said before he hit him, he was fiddling with the IV tube, bending it, that he had a syringe, looked as if he meant to pierce the tube, plunge the needle in. Said suddenly he dropped the needle as if something had changed his mind. Instead he pulled back his fist, landed Birely a real hard one in the stomach, and ran. She said the dials went flat, alarms went off, he passed the nurses yelling at them to help the patient, ran straight through the crowding nurses shouting for someone to help Birely, and not one of them thought to nail him.”
It was just another anonymous call, Kit thought, no different than any other, and we do have ID blocking, Pedric checks it every week to make sure it’s working. Just another phantom tip, she thought nervously, even if I was still shaky and mad, after jumping Vic, and even if I did almost yowl into the phone! Well, not exactly a yowl.
“And we have one witness,” Max said, “who was in the parking garage, who saw Vic burst out through the glass doors, running. After she got home, she caught the murder on the local TV, and she called in. Said she and her kids were just going inside, into the ER to see her sister, when a man ran out, nearly ran over them. She described Vic, described Debbie’s station wagon, saw him pile into it and take off. Dispatcher who took the call, she said the woman seemed to have more to say, but then she changed her mind. She was reluctant to leave her name and number, but Mabel talked her into it.” Max shook his head. “People afraid to get involved. Can’t say I blame them, sometimes.”
On the windowsill, Kit breathed easier. She’d gone rigid, thinking that woman would have described the whole chase. She guessed the great cat god was watching, to stop her from mentioning the cat or her kids’ excited shouts. Maybe that upset her, to see an angry cat chasing a running man. Maybe she didn’t want to talk about that and come out sounding like a nutcase, Kit thought, smiling. And maybe the great cat god was smiling, too.
33
IT WAS FULL night when two hobos, dressed in dark clothes and bearing heavy backpacks, had come walking down the winding grade that cut through from Highway 68 down onto Molena Valley Road. As they turned right onto the shoulder of the dark two-lane, the light of a half-moon illuminated the surrounding bushes and trees as if ragged and ghostly figures were watching them in the night. Heading west along the dirt shoulder, moving in the direction of the ocean some twelve miles beyond, they watched for a deserted side road, somewhere to get off the highway and camp for the night, maybe a denser woods than these scraggly, stunted oaks, or maybe some deserted old house or barn where sheriff’s deputies wouldn’t come nosing around to hassle them.
They’d parted from the slat-sided farm truck they’d hitched a ride in, up at the top of the grade, the driver hauling crates of chickens, coming over from Salinas. Truck stunk real bad of caged chickens, the smell still clung to them—or maybe it was the dead chicken they carried, dangling by its feet. Riding in the back in the truck bed, they’d slid open the nearest crate, hauled out an old brown hen and wrung her scrawny neck, her squawks hidden by the rattle of the truck’s old engine and loose body. Now, by the time they’d hoofed it down the grade, they had their dinner already bled, cleaned, and plucked.
The narrow road was dark as hell, no car lights streaming by, no houselights off to the sides, and none of them fancy overhead vapor lights out here in the boonies to pick them out moving along the blacktop. In their dark old clothes, they were part of the night itself, blending into the hill that rose steeply on their right. Half a mile down, they crossed the two-lane and stepped off into the shadows of the berm, moving along beneath another stand of scraggly trees. When they came on a battered station wagon sitting there on the berm, they stopped to look it over, watching for movement within.
Nothing stirred beyond the dark, partially covered windows. They approached warily, with a keen and predatory interest. The oddly shaped curtains blocked their view through the windshield and through the driver’s window. They tried the doors but they were locked. Cupping their hands to peer into the back, they couldn’t make out much more than a long, dark lump in the darkness, a bundle of some kind, but then they snickered and pressed their ears to the glass.
“Guy asleep in there, snoring. Dead to the world.”
“Here, hold the chicken. Hell, don’t lay it down, you want gravel in our supper?” Slinging off his pack, the taller man reached down into it and fished out a long, heavy wire that he kept in the side pocket, a carefully recycled coat hanger fashioned for just such emergencies. Hauling a flashlight from his coat pocket, he shielded its light, moved to the driver’s window, peered down where the beam led, and got to work.
DEEPLY ASLEEP IN the car, Vic’s dreams carried him through scattered stirrings from a bumbling childhood, as his father moved them all from one small town to another, one sorry job to another, one miserable grammar school to another. His father was sometimes absent altogether, while he did a short stint in some two-bit jail, but mostly he was traveling, dragging the nine kids and wife behind him like cans tied to a stray dog. The dreams were always the same, of a sorry and muddled past without shape and without hope. Maybe it was the scuff of footsteps in the gravel outside the Suzuki or maybe the faint scrape of the coat hanger as it slid in through the crack in the window that stirred him, that sent his dreams careening down into the dark nightmare chasm where one twitches and moans and cries out, where one would try to pry himself awake again, if he’d known he was asleep.