Max rose, buzzed Mabel, and sent the two children on up the hall to her. “I can’t force you to tell me what these scams are about, Debbie. But if this involves criminal activity, you’re better off coming to us with what you know, than to face a charge of withholding information, and perhaps as an accessory. You’re better off telling us what you know, than facing criminal charges yourself.”
Debbie looked at him uncertainly, coloring with a sudden hesitancy that made Joe wonder. Was she telling the truth? Or was she setting Erik up for her own purposes, for something he hadn’t done? As Max wrapped up the interview he asked Debbie about Hesmerra’s funeral.
“It’s just a graveside service,” she said. “Sunday morning at ten, at the Pacific Sea Cemetery. Esther arranged it. Just the family, I guess. But you can come, if you want.” Joe watched from the couch, and Dulcie from her shadowed lair, as Max escorted her out. The cats followed, could see from the hall out the glass door as Debbie hurried the children away to her car; her walk was quick and angry, as if she’d escaped a dominance she found hard to handle.
Why, Joe wondered, hadn’t Max questioned her more intensely about just when she had arrived in the village and what she was doing in Alain Bent’s house? Why had he let her sidestep so many questions? Still, though, Max had asked enough to see she was lying, that was clear enough.
Maybe he didn’t want to distress her so badly she’d slip back into Alain’s to set the house to rights, to clean off fingerprints and any other telltale evidence of her presence before the department had a chance to search the place? She’d have to clear the food out of the refrigerator, Joe thought, carry away the trash, get rid of the wet towels.
Out in front, Davis’s car pulled into the parking lot and up to the red curb before the station. The detective got out, gave Max a little crooked grin as she pushed in through the glass door. The scent of cinnamon drifted around her, from the small white bakery bag she carried.
“Just drove Emmylou back to her car,” she said. But clearly she had something more to tell him, and the two headed back to his office, Davis limping badly again. The cats followed, sniffing the aroma of cinnamon buns with an interest that would seem, to the two officers, as natural as if Juana had brought in a bag of live mice; neither officer would imagine the cats’ interest lay, rather, in police business, in whatever secrets Emmylou Warren had passed on to Juana Davis.
22
“What do you cats want?” Davis said, opening the bag of cinnamon buns she’d dropped on Max’s credenza, and pouring two mugs of coffee. Joe and Dulcie looked at her hopefully, drinking in the cinnamon smell. She broke apart one of the buns onto a napkin, laid it on the floor, put the bag, Max’s coffee, on the desk before him. “Emmylou didn’t much like being picked up, but nothing seemed off. She grumbled about being printed, but she settled in, and let me question her.” Carrying her coffee, she sat down in the leather chair that was still warm from little Tessa Kraft.
“Said she was up the valley at the time of the fire, had pulled off onto a side road, was sleeping in her car, said she heard the sirens. She described her friendship with Hesmerra pretty much as she told you. What made her nervous was when I asked her about breaking into Sammie Miller’s place. She claimed to be worried about Sammie but didn’t want to file a missing report, said she thought the woman would turn up soon. She sounded more worried about Sammie’s cats. I’d like to have a look at the place, but without a missing report we have no cause. I dropped her at her car, told her not to leave the village.”
“She’s living in her car,” Max said.
Juana nodded. “I didn’t press it. Said she had two cats herself and that John Firetti had taken them in.” Ever since Davis had adopted a kitten, courtesy of Joe and Dulcie, she’d been more aware of the cats that might suffer when she made an arrest or during a domestic dispute. Among all the officers, Davis was quickest to bring in the SPCA or CatFriends to care for the family pets. She had always been willing to help abused women, too, advise them on how to escape to safety. “I called three women’s shelters to find Emmylou a place but they’re all full. Called Chichi Barbi, they’re full, too, extra beds in all four rooms. Chichi has a PI running background checks on the women she’s taken in, he’s cleared five and they’re all working for her.”
Just before Christmas, Chichi and her housemate, Maria Rivas, had bought Charlie Harper’s cleaning service. Charlie had started the business with very little money, working out of an old, used VW van badly in need of repair. When she sold the business it included four new vans, a staff of sixteen cleaning women and two handymen. Now Charlie had the workday to herself, no more bookkeeping, no more scheduling and unforeseen disasters. She had time to finish the drawings for her second book, attend to the final editing of the manuscript, and complete five commissions for animal portraits, two of local Thoroughbred stallions, three of champion shorthair pointers. Max said, “What about the boxes in Hanni’s garage?”
“We lifted three sets of prints.” She grinned. “Matches for those from the meth house, including the Romero brother we picked up this morning, Raul. No ID yet on the others. Kathleen’s canvassing the local retailers, running the bar codes on the chemicals. A long shot, to find a clerk who remembers a Latino customer with a big purchase, but worth trying.”
Joe wondered how long it would take to get an ID on the other prints. Depended on what was in the system, on how backed up the lab was, and how complicated those particular prints were to identify. Licking the last cinnamon crumbs from his paws, he wondered if the hoods from the meth house had had some warning about the raid, giving them time to move their chemicals to Hanni’s garage. Hanni had left the house unattended for nearly two weeks while she finished up an extensive interior design installation, plenty of time for them to make the shift. He kept wondering, too, about a connection between the meth house, Alain Bent’s place, and Sammie Miller’s cottage—and, wondering why Emmylou had broken in.
Licking their cinnamon-flavored whiskers, the cats curled up on Max’s Persian rug and pretended to doze, as if lulled asleep by the monotonous drone of the officers’ voices. But when Davis left and Max headed for Dallas’s office, they hurried up the hall, their minds on those three neighborhood houses and on Sammie Miller’s jimmied front door.
Outside, the night was still. An icy cold radiated through the door, nearly frosting their noses. A green van stood in the red zone just outside, its back doors open and a courier in a green and white uniform emerging, carrying a brown manila envelope. As he ducked his head beneath the dripping oak, and pushed the glass door open, the cats slipped quickly out past his hard shoes. The parking lot was wet, reflecting the overhead vapor lamps in yellow pools. Scrambling up the wet trunk of the oak to the roof, they headed across the slick tiles, their paws already freezing. “Feels like snow,” Dulcie said.
“Oh, right,” he said, cutting her a look. How many years since the central coast had seen snow flurries? This was California. What felt like snow, and smelled like snow coming, was no more than a fanciful illusion.
“Do you think,” she said, “we should swing by Jolly’s alley? I’m more than starved, that cinnamon bun only made me hungrier. If we go by my house, Wilma will start asking questions—she’ll worry for sure if we head out again in this weather.”
“She’ll worry more if you don’t come home.”