Lucinda and Pedric came in behind Flannery, the kit snuggled in Pedric’s arms. The thin old man was dressed in jeans, an open shirt, and a lightweight cotton sport coat. Lucinda wore a long cotton jumper over a light blouse. As people moved on through the kitchen in a tangle and out the back door, a dozen officers crowded in the front door, laughing. There was not a uniform among them, not even Detective Davis who, like blond Eleanor Sand, was wearing a long denim skirt and a T-shirt.
Ryan stopped to put a six-pack of beer in the crowded refrigerator in the space Clyde had left beside the bowls of deli salads. She handed her heavy cooler to Clyde, to carry down the back steps. Pedric came out behind her. As he passed the patio table where the crab and shrimp were bedded in ice, the tattercoat peered down, licking her whiskers.
Joe smiled at the look of satisfaction on Ryan’s face as she looked around Clyde’s patio, now as crowded and noisy and full of life as Ryan had intended when she designed it. She always seemed so pleased to see something she had designed and built put to its full use. Clyde, standing with his arm around her, pulled her close. The cats thought they made a warm, handsome couple.
But Joe had thought that about other women. He’d thought that about Charlie, had thought for sure Charlie and Clyde would marry-and she’d ended up falling in love with Max.
And as Dulcie had pointed out, when Clyde did get married, Joe himself would be evicted from the master suite; he was, after all, not an ordinary cat, and newlyweds did need some privacy.
No more king-size bed, no more waking Clyde in the middle of the night just for the pleasure of hearing him complain. No more direct route from bed to the rafters and out the cat door to his rooftop tower.
But, Joe thought, watching his friends celebrating, he’d think about that when the problem arose. He watched Eleanor Sand and Charlie, sitting off in a corner of the patio, on the bench beneath the maple tree. Eleanor’s arm was around Charlie, and Charlie looked weepy, very still and quiet-that shooting had upset her more than she’d let on to her friends.
Of course Max knew how deeply Charlie felt, as did Dallas and Davis. But Officer Sand had recently been through the same thing and, being young and not on the job too long, she, too, had had a bad reaction. Joe wanted to slip closer and listen, but when he caught Dulcie’s eye, he hastily turned away and leaped to the top of the wall beside her and the tortoiseshell kit. Across the patio, the three non-speaking household cats were up on the porch, close to the doggy door that would admit them quickly to their lair in the laundry if the party got too noisy. Two of the cats were growing elderly, and the young white cat had always been skittery and shy.
Everyone toasted Mandell, and then toasted Wilma and Charlie and made jokes at their expense. Mandell looked at Wilma. “Have to admit, this is a weird set of circumstances. Devil masks, ancient treasure…and I’m sure I haven’t heard the half of it.” He looked across at Max. “What was the outcome of Eddie Sears’s arraignment, wasn’t that yesterday? I was really out of the loop, in that hospital. What about Jones? Will he live to be arraigned?”
“Sears is up for two counts of kidnapping,” Max said. “Jones, hard to tell. He’s still in intensive care, and the prognosis is shaky.”
The three cats glanced at one another. They were not all of one mind on their preferences as to Jones’s fate. Joe was for a slow and painful death, before Jones cost the courts a bundle of money, trying and convicting, and then incarcerating him. Dulcie wanted Jones to face charges and endure a long, tedious, painful battle in court. Kit looked from Joe to Dulcie and wasn’t sure what she wanted. Just, she thought, whatever would cause Jones the most misery. A cat is not big on forgiveness. These two men had no compassion for human lives, and in their humble feline opinions the world would be safer without them.
“We have several interesting communications from Interpol,” Max said, “on thefts of pre-Columbian artifacts. When Wilma found some of that information on the Internet, we started making contacts.
“There were three burglaries from the Panamanian National Institute of Culture. At least one, early in 2003, was an inside job. A big haul of gold huacas and clay pots that could date back farther than two thousand years. The pieces were taken from the institute’s Reina Torres de Arauz Museum of Anthropology, from locked display cases. Nothing broken, not a lock damaged.”
Joe tried to think how long ago two thousand years really was, how many generations of ordinary cats that would be, but the magnitude of that many lifetimes made his head feel woozy. He knew that Dulcie could think in those terms more easily, at least when it had to do with their own mythical history. And the kit…She had grown up on ancient tales. Kit looked at ancient history as just yesterday. Joe watched the tortoiseshell as she peered down from a low branch of the maple behind Max, studying the pictures that had been faxed to him by Interpol. And Joe dropped to the bench beside Clyde where he, too, could see.
One picture seemed identical to the gold pendant he had hidden on the roof. There was a handwritten note in the margin, placing its value at over four thousand dollars. That little bit of gold…If Cage had stolen as much as would fill the floor safe in his basement, the value would be considerable. No wonder he’d been in a swivet when the pieces vanished.
He watched Kit, staring down from the branch at the pictures. Was she thinking that those gold huacas were very like ancient Celtic relics? Like the primitive gold jewelry and shields from Ireland and Wales that were so entwined with the myths about their own strange race of cats? But that stuff made Joe shiver; their own strange, mythical past made him unbearably nervous.
“The 2003 theft,” Max said, “had to be an inside job. No employee was supposed to have both the key and the combination, to any single display case. Obviously someone, or several people, did have them. One guard who had recently been employed, had a long record. He was out on bail when they hired him, waiting on appeal for an earlier job.”
“And they hired him?” Charlie said.
“This is Central America,” Max said. “Interesting that the theft occurred a month before they were to install a new security system.
“The museum had been hit a year earlier, and there was a theft in 1982. And that’s where we think this haul may have come from.” Max reached for another O’Doul’s. “Cage was in Panama in the eighties, as well as more recently.” He looked across at Wilma. “And Greeley Urzey was there in the eighties.”
Wilma said, “I don’t think Greeley, alone, has the skill to pull off that kind of job. But he and Cage might.”
Max nodded. “There were several illegal collections of pre-Columbian artifacts in Panama, held by wealthy individuals. Ownership is legal only for the museums. Interpol thinks those collectors bought huacas stolen from the museums, and that then, over the years, some of those collections were burglarized. That kind of theft, Cage and Greeley might have pulled off. And those thefts, of course, would never be reported.”
“How would they get them out of the country?” Lucinda asked.
“A lot of ways,” Max said. “Customs can’t check everything. They might have been sealed in moving containers, in those big overseas crates. Packed up by a mover in Panama or the Canal Zone and put on shipboard for transport to the U.S. Before 9/11, it would have been far easier to slip contraband through. But,” Max continued, “there’s a kicker to this. Late last night, we had a call from Seattle PD.
“Five stolen huacas have turned up there, sold by a San Francisco fence about a month ago.” He settled back, sipping his beer. “They were sold three days after Greeley’s flight got in from Panama-the day after Cage Jones was released from Terminal Island. We’re guessing Greeley flew into SFO, maybe under an assumed name. Cage meets him there, or maybe Greeley rents a car and picks Cage up at T.I. And Cage takes him to the San Francisco fence.”