Joe hesitated, crouching lower.
“Those boxes could shift, Joe. I don’t want you hurt. I can drop you in the village if you’d rather.” She tried to stroke the tomcat, but his miserable glare made her pull her hand back. She picked up Dulcie, who pressed against her. When she took Kit in her arms, Kit pressed her face into Charlie’s shoulder. Carrying the two lady cats, she turned away toward the cab. “I’m not starting the truck, Joe, until you come up front.”
In the cab, she started the engine, turned on the heater, and left the door open for Joe. As Dulcie and Kit crowded against her, she thought of many things she might say to try to ease their pain, except anything she said would sound patronizing and insincere.
At last Joe appeared, slipping up into the cab beside Dulcie.
The cats snuggled together trying not to think of Theresa wrapped in the body bag and headed for the morgue, but able to think of nothing else. No one spoke as they moved down the hills on the narrow, winding road, they were silent all the way to the village. On Ocean, Ryan pulled to the curb, reached over, and opened the passenger door. “This okay?” she asked, trying to hide her worry over them.
“Fine,” Joe said. Dulcie and Kit nosed at her by way of thanks, and the cats leaped out to the sidewalk. She’d started to pull away when a portly man in a brown tank top banged on the truck door, shouting that her cats had escaped. Already the cats were gone, flowing up a bougainvillea vine to the rooftops, heading for MPPD. Behind the fat man, his frumpy wife stood staring up, shouting and pointing.
Ryan rolled down her window. “It’s all right,” she told the meaty tourists. “They do that all the time. They like to ride into town, then go off on their own. They’ll be home for supper.” They stared at her, shaking their heads in disbelief. She smiled and waved, and pulled away.
AT MOLENA POINT PD Detective Juana Davis sat before her computer typing up her field notes from the burglaries and from her interviews with eight of the neighbors. She had slipped off her uniform jacket, revealing a white shirt open at the collar. Beneath her desk she had loosened the laces of her regulation shoes and slipped them off, too. The divergent observations she’d collected were the usual tangle, from which she must try to separate facts from imagination. Civilian witnesses weren’t trained in accuracy. Too often their minds, at the moment in question, were half on other matters. Listening for the kids sleeping in their beds, hearing the TV or a ringing phone, wondering if they’d turned off the stove. Few folks remembered clearly what they’d seen and heard, particularly when they didn’t realize at the time that those moments would later be important.
Leaning back in her chair, she sipped her cold coffee, thinking about the burglar. He knew the neighborhood, knew it well enough to know exactly what he’d wanted to steal and, apparently, where it was in each house. He-or she-hadn’t rooted in the drawers or torn apart the closets, he’d gone right to his objectives. He had copies of all four garage door openers and access to the house keys. Whether keys had been kept hanging in some of the garages, or he’d had duplicates of them all, was yet to be determined.
Every one of her eight interviewees had said that, as far as they knew, none of the four couples kept extra garage door openers in the house, that there was just the usual button inside each garage, and an opener in each car, some of those programmed directly into the cars’ electronic systems. She thought it likely that the guy had one of those programming gadgets available online to your everyday thief. As she set her coffee cup down, a movement in the bookshelf along the far wall startled her.
She looked up, frowning at Joe Grey. “When did you slip in here? I’m no more observant than our witnesses.” That disturbed her, that she hadn’t seen an intruder cross her office, even if it was only a cat, that she’d been so focused she’d noticed nothing. “At least you’re not armed, you little bum,” she said, grinning companionably.
What she hadn’t seen was Dulcie and Kit melt behind the small easy chair that sat at an angle at the end of her desk. By stretching, standing on their hind legs, their claws in the back of the chair for support, the two lady cats could just see Juana’s computer screen, though at an angle that made it hard to read.
The interview she was typing was with a Raymond Atwater, who lived at the south end of the block. Atwater was a widower and lived alone. Sometime between his supper and his bedtime, he saw the lights of a car pulling into the Becker garage. He thought they might have delayed their vacation, and he didn’t question that. He didn’t recall the time. He said he tried not to mind the neighbors’ business. He’d gone on to bed, to read, and hadn’t seen the car leave. He’d been deep in his book when he heard the scream of a cat, said he’d assumed a couple of neighborhood cats were mating.
Well, he heard us yowling in the closet, Joe thought. Would he eventually have come to rescue us? Maybe, maybe not. We could have died within earshot, and some people wouldn’t care. In order to read the report, to avoid a glare on the screen that wiped out the message, the tomcat had to move along the bookcase and crane his neck. He was waiting for Juana to finish up with Atwater and get on to the next witness when the phone rang.
Juana glanced at it, and picked up. “Yes, Chief.” Juana Davis was old fashioned enough that she didn’t much care for a speakerphone, she was never sure who might be out in the hall listening, an arrestee on his way to an interview, a felon being escorted back to lockup.
Behind the chair, Dulcie was content to listen to the one-sided conversation, but Kit wanted to climb up on the desk where she could press her ear against the receiver. Dulcie’s look drew her back.
After a moment, Juana nodded. “I hope you can get an ID.” She paused, then, “I’m just getting to the last interview. A Mrs. Edmond Turner, four houses down from the Chapmans’…Nancy Turner, yes. She said she stopped by the Chapmans’ Saturday around noon to loan Theresa a book she’d wanted to read on vacation. She said Frances Becker was there, that Frances said she was on her way out for a quick walk, that she and her husband were leaving that afternoon. That before they left, she’d wanted to see the kittens. The two women were in the laundry with the kittens, she said Frances was making a real fuss over them. It surprised her, that Frances was down on the floor playing with them like a kid.”
Another pause, then, “Yes, she did. Said both women were wearing shorts and flip-flops, that only young women could dress like that in this weather. She said Frances walks a lot, usually on weekends.
“She said there was a rolled-up blue towel lying on the floor next to Frances, looked like a beach towel. Said the kittens were all over it, playing and clawing it.” Davis had a satisfied smile on her face. “Yesterday at the swimming pool, the threads I bagged? Some of them were blue. Blue threads stuck to the coping, some of them with blood.”
She listened for a few minutes, answered, “Yes,” then, “No. When Mrs. Turner left Theresa’s, Frances was still there.”
The cats could hardly be still. Dulcie and Kit were fidgeting with interest, and Joe Grey watched Juana intently. Had Frances stopped by Theresa’s on her way not to walk but headed for the abandoned pool? Carrying her beach towel, intending to strip and catch a little sun before leaving? Joe thought about the towels that Clyde had used as cat beds, how they quickly got matted with fur. He imagined Frances beside the empty pool, stripping off her shorts and shirt, lathering on suntan oil and stretching out on the blue towel-where every yellow cat hair would have clung to her oily skin.