Pacing the house, he worried until dawn, prowling in and out of bedrooms, making the round of partly open, locked windows both on the main level and downstairs. Twice he imagined he could smell Wark, but the next instant could smell nothing but pine trees and the lingering stink of raccoons.
If that was Wark, had he come here looking for Kate? Joe began to worry about Dulcie and the kit; he wondered if they were out hunting, in the night alone. At 5:00, pacing and fretting, he leaped to Garza’s desk, pushed the phone off its cradle onto Garza’s blotter, and made a whispered call, watching Garza’s closed bedroom door.
Wilma answered sleepily, a curt and irritable“Yes?”
“I think Lee Wark may be in the neighborhood, prowling around the Garza place, but now he’s gone. Watch out for him. Are they there? Tell Dulcie she needs to be careful.”
“They’re here. I’ll see to it.” Wilma asked no questions, wasted no time getting up to speed. Thank God for a few sensible humans.
Beyond the closed bedroom door, he heard the detective stir. Pawing the phone into its cradle, he fled for the window seat, had just curled up when the bedroom door creaked open and light spilled out-and Joe was gently snoring.
Maybe he’d been wrong, maybe it wasn’t Wark out there. Could it have been Stubby Baker? Could Baker be interested in Garza’s notes and tapes? Baker was tall and slim like Wark, and about the same height. He was straighter and broader of shoulder, but in the shadows, might he have appeared hunched?
By 5:20 Garza had showered, made coffee, and was frying eggs and bacon. Joe, strolling through the kitchen, yowled loudly at the back door.
“At least you’re housebroken.” The detective gave him a noncommittal cop stare and opened the kitchen door.
From the garden, Joe glanced up at the window, expecting to see Garza’s dark Latin eyes looking out, watching him, but the lighted glass remained blank. He found, beneath the window, the waffle prints of a man’s jogging shoes incised into the damp earth; large shoes, certainly larger than Clyde’s size 10s. Carefully prowling, he studied each area of bare soil,tracking the prints clear around the house, pausing where the man had stood looking into the downstairs bedroom windows.
Surely neither Kate nor Hanni had been awakened and seen him. They’d have called the department-or come upstairs to wake Dallas. Presumably, Dallas was the only one with a firearm. Heading around the house again, he pawed at the kitchen door, bellowing a deep yowl.
Kate opened the door. He stepped in, sniffing the aromas of breakfast. Kate and Hanni were showered and dressed, all polished and smelling of Ivory soap. Hanni sat at the kitchen table across from Garza, drinking coffee as Garza ate his fried eggs and bacon and sourdough toast. The detective glanced down at Joe absently but didn’t offer to share.
Evidently no one had pointed out to Garza, and he probably didn’t know, that any ordinary cat, moved to a new house, would be kept in for a couple of weeks so he would become oriented and not run away.
When no one offered him a fried egg, Joe fixed his gaze on Kate, licking his whiskers.
Kate fetched a can of cat food.
He looked at her, amazed.Cat food?
“Cat food,” she said, shaking the can at him. “I’m not cooking eggs for you. Dinner was one thing-you can share our dinner, but I’m not laying out caviar and kippers at six in the morning like Clyde does. Besides, you’re getting fat.”
He hated when someone threw insults and he couldn’t talk back.Fat?Kate didn’t know muscle when she saw it. Under his gray velvet fur he was as solid as coiled steel. Studying the can Kate had flipped open, and taking a good sniff, he was relieved to know it was the fancy kind, the brand that, the commercials implied, should be served on a linen tablecloth from a crystal sherbet dish.
He guessed Kate hadn’t seen the commercials, because she plopped the fish concoction into a cracked earthenware crock and plunked it unceremoniously on the floor.
So much for early-morning amenities.
Grinning with sadistic pleasure, she turned her back on him.
Garza, finishing his breakfast, rose and stepped to his desk. Joe heard him lift the phone and punch in a number-it was local, seven digits.
“Max? Right. You want to come down to the station? I’ll want another statement. Then I want to go up to your place, have a look at the house and stable, then on up to the scene. That fit with your plans?”
All very friendly and low-key.
And Joe was stonewalled. He considered hiding in Garza’s car, riding up to Harper’s with the detective, then following the two men up the mountain-but he knew that wasn’t smart.
Garza, pulling on a suede sport coat over his jeans and shirt, headed for his Chevy coupe. When he had gone, Joe looked with meaning at Kate.
She opened the door and followed him out, leaving Hanni deep in the arts section of the morning paper.
Joe’s whisper was hasty. “Someone came prowling last night. Stood outside your bedroom. Did you see him?”
Kate turned pale.“No. Not a thing. Who…?”
“Tall and thin. It could have been Wark.”
She went completely white.
“There are footprints. Good ones. Garza needs to see them.”
“I-what’ll I do?” She was clearly shaken.
“Call the station. Tell them you just found the prints-that they seem fresh to you. That they go to the kitchen window, then on around the house. They’ll send someone.”
“Shall I call Dallas? I have the number of his cell phone.”
“I-let the department handle it,” Joe said, not certain himself what to do. “And walk around the house yourself first. So they’ll believe you. Don’t step on his prints.” And he hurried away to make sure that Dulcie and the kit were safe, despite Wilma’s promise. Racing down the sidewalks dodging early-morning shadows, he kept seeing that brief, muddy gleam of the man’s eyes, looking in through the kitchen window.
17 [????????: pic_18.jpg]
IT WAS STILL DARK when Dulcie set out to find the kit. Prowling the village among the blackest pools of night, it wasn’t hard to follow the tattercoat’s smell, which had taken on a potpourri of eau de bath powder from Wilma’s dressing table.
Awakened by Joe’s predawn phone call, she had galloped into the living room to make sure the kit was safe in her basket, and found her gone. With her mind on Lee Wark, she had stormed out her cat door, tracking the kit’s boudoir scent over the roofs and across gardens and streets until she found herself doubling back to her own street some five blocks above Wilma’s house.
The kit’s trail led to a neglected duplex built over a pair of double garages, a property unusual in the village for its shabbiness, the yard overgrown with weeds, the clapboard walls badly in need of paint. The stairs led up to a deck that ran the length of the building, dark at the far end but light beneath the windows of the nearer unit; she could see a lamp burning within, but no movement. The kit’s scent led up the stairs to the deck, where an unlatched screen had been pulled out a few inches; Dulcie spotted a hunk of dark fur clinging. She was about to leap up when Joe Grey appeared from the shadows.
She turned a slow green gaze on him.“You following me or the kit?”
“Both of you.” He was all claws and nerves. “I have a bad feeling about Wark.”
Above them, the sky was the color of Joe’s coat, heavy gray without any promise of sun, though the time must be nearly seven.
Joe looked the building over.“Shoddy. Why would the kit come here?”
“Who knows what’s in that wild little head?”
Leaping to the sill, he tried to see through the muslin curtains. There was a screen, but the glass was open a few inches. Dulcie followed, the two cats balancing awkwardly on the slanted, narrow ledge. They were looking into the kitchen and could see one big room to their right, apparently a studio apartment. It was sparsely and cheaply furnished. Pushing in under the screen, they stepped onto the old, cracked tiles of the counter, icy beneath their paws. Dropping silently down, they followed the kit’s scent across the battered linoleum, beneath the scarred breakfast table and into the studio. They heard the courthouse clock striking seven. The room contained a decrepit metal chair meant for outdoors, a scarred coffee table littered with clothes, and a pullout couch made up into a bed. The bed was occupied, the woman’s tawny hair spilling over the pillow. Crystal slept soundly.