Clyde said nothing.
"The bridle. The saddle marks, Bucky's condition. The boot prints and hoofprints. And Gedding has received two anonymous phone calls-he thinks from the same man-that I was seen leaving the restaurant at noon riding Bucky up the mountain, in the opposite direction from my place. Following the Marners and Dillon.
"The day after the murder, Davis walked the trail that the Marners and Dillon rode. The first half mile above the restaurant, they rode on deep gravel. No prints of any value. But where you can see hoofprints, there's the same scar-marked print, coming along behind their three horses.
"Not a lot of people ride that trail, it's rough and steep. Davis said that deer trails crossed the hoofprints in two places, heading down to water and back again up toward the forest."
Joe tried to imagine a stranger riding up that mountain following the three riders. A stranger riding Harper's horse? A stranger who had taken Bucky after Harper left for work, and beat it down to the restaurant, to leave hoofprints following the Marners. Then followed them, killed them, and took out after Dillon. And then brought Bucky home, put him back in his stall.
"I've turned the department over to Brennan. Likely Davis and Ray will be off the case when Gedding's man gets here. Dallas Garza. San Francisco PD. I've moved the horses up to Campbell Ranch, and the pups, too. They'll be fine. I need a place to stay- where someone will know what I'm up to."
Clyde was silent for some time. When he spoke, his voice was low and angry. "You're quitting. Just quitting-stepping back like that. If that doesn't make you look guilty-"
"There's nothing else I can do. That's protocol, to do that. Nothing guilty about it. If I stayed in the department, I could manipulate my people, cook the papers, cook the evidence. It's not ethical, Clyde. You know that."
"I'll clean up the spare room. But what about during the day- I can't baby-sit you, Max, while I'm at work."
"I'll make myself visible in the village. And I'm not finished looking for Dillon. I can move around, be seen, keep my eyes open but stay out of the department's way. If I ride out with the searchers, I'll stay with a group. Some of them keep their horses up at Campbell's."
"The department's searched the old Pamillon place?"
"We were all over it that first night and the next day. The detectives have been back three times, have climbed down into every dark, musty cellar that ever existed on that land.
"This morning they had tracking dogs in there. One of them scented something; it started on a trail, then kept doubling back- sniffing around a puff of animal hair caught on the rocks. Dogs got all confused. I don't think they ever did get Dillon's scent, I think it was just a fox or something-maybe that cougar. The cougar's pad marks were back and forth through the old house- that's what has me worried."
From beneath the table, the cats couldn't see their faces. Nor did they need to.
Harper said, "If there was some trace of Dillon up there that the dogs couldn't find, it's beyond what any human could detect.
"Every department in California has her description and photo," Harper said. "The local TV channels will keep running her picture, along with a recording of her voice, that her mother gave us. Whatever son of a bitch has her, Clyde, whatever son of a bitch hurts her, I'll kill him."
10
MAX HARPER'S words kept ringing in Joe's head. If there was some trace of Dillon, that the dogs couldn't find, it's beyond what any human could detect.
Had Harper been unwittingly asking for other-than-human assistance?
Not likely. Not Max Harper.
But as the two cats emerged from the grass at the edge of the Pamillon estate and trotted beneath the chain barrier, Joe's mind was filled with questions. The scarred horseshoe, Harper's boot prints, the anonymous phone calls to Harper and then to Gedding.
Behind them down the hills, the red village rooftops and dark oaks shone in a bright patchwork against the blue sea-a chill winter day, clear and sharp and filled with potential.
Slipping in among the fallen walls, their whiskers sliding across broken bricks, threading between overgrown rosebushes whose thorns caught at their fur, they knew that something had drawn them here. A scent left undetected? Some small clue overlooked? Something that puzzled them and pulled them back.
Springing up the trunk of a broken oak tree, they studied the massy growth below them, the jungle of tall, wild broom and upturned tree roots. Vines woven across a rusted wheelbarrow. A wrought-iron gate standing alone, slowly being pulled down by vines. A world as impenetrably green and mysterious as Rima's haunted Green Mansions, in the book that Wilma and Dulcie liked to read.
Seeing nothing below them to draw their specific attention, they dropped down again among the foliage where the afternoon light filtered to jade.
Scenting along through the bushes, they could detect no human trail. Only wild green smells and animal smells, filling every pocket of air. They had to rear up, every few steps, to see their way.
Where the ancient adobe bricks had been dished out by fifty years of wear, rainwater was cupped, and the cats drank, lapping among the leaves. Down beneath crushed leaves and broken foliage, the earth was a mass of crisscrossed hoofprints, boot and shoe prints, small animal tracks and the tracks of the hounds that had come searching.
Hours before the police teams arrived, before anyone knew that the Marners were dead, the civilian search party had ridden here, trampling any amount of evidence, so that later when Harper's people went over the land, they could record only fragments.
Joe and Dulcie came out of the weeds onto a broken terrace so covered with rubble that it was impossible to tell where the rotting timbers of the veranda ended and the decaying floor of the house began.
Carved mantels stood half devoured by creeping vines. Fragments of torn and curling wallpaper hung from broken walls, as delicate as butterflies.
Prowling the parlor through forests of nettles that thrust between the rungs of broken chairs and curtained crippled bookcases, one wondered why the locals hadn't long ago taken every piece of furniture. Vines covered a capsized table to form a den that smelled of raccoon. Scraps of water-soaked, mouse-gnawed sofa cushions had moldered into mush beneath a mass of yellow flowers. All around them, they saw the old house being sucked back into the earth from which it had sprung.
They found no footprints small enough to belong to Dillon Thurwell. They could detect no scent of Dillon. But Joe smelled the cougar, and warily they watched the shadows. And then, near the stink where the lion had sprayed, they caught the scent of the child. Dillon's scent, leading across the parlor and up the broken stair to the nursery.
The morning glories had arrived upstairs long ago, to festoon a cane-backed rocking chair and to crawl up the faded wallpaper across cartoon rocking horses, the vine's heart-shaped leaves and tendrils fingering out through the broken windows. Morning glory crept across the nursery fireplace that stood alone where the walls had fallen into landslides of timbers and bricks.
The fireplace stank of wet ashes spilling out onto the floor. Across the ashes led a trail of small, neat pawprints that continued beneath the fallen wall.
The cats were scenting among the rubble when they heard voices, someone in the garden below.
Padding to the edge of the broken floor, they watched two young women approaching. "Kate," Joe said softly. "Kate Osborne."
"What's she doing here?" Dulcie gawked at the other young woman. "That beautiful white hair. I've seen her before, in the village."
"I think that's the woman Kate works for. Hanni something- this detective's niece. Maybe they came down with him. Detective Dallas Garza." Joe sat down, licking ashes from his paw. "Maybe it was Kate who called Clyde last night. He got all excited. Shouted, 'When did you get in town? Where are you?' I was half asleep. It's all right if he wakes me in the middle of the night. But let me scratch an itch or wash my face, jiggle the bed a little, and it's a federal case."