Backing deeper into the drive, she looked up across the hill between the other houses, where she could see part of Alain Bent’s place. The windows were dark, the paler shades and curtains looked just as they had for weeks. Reaching under the seat, she fished out the crowbar she kept there, completed her turn, and headed over to the next block and up toward Alain’s.
Joe woke at dawn, the king-sized blankets bundled around him. By the silence, he knew the rest of the bed was empty, Ryan gone, finishing up the hole in Sammie’s basement, Clyde already up and gone. No sound of the shower pounding, no buzz of the electric shaver like a swarm of hornets loose in the bathroom. Why wasn’t he up on the roof, in his own tower? The bedside clock said 7:15. A lingering smell of coffee drifted up the stairs, but no smell of breakfast cooking or having been cooked. A pale white light filled the room. Through the open curtains a clear white glow streamed in across the walls, as weird as if he’d awakened in some alternate world—and then he remembered. Snow! It snowed last night! The bedroom even smelled different, and the air was so cold it burned his nose. Leaping off the bed he flew to Clyde’s desk, glancing down at Snowball asleep on the love seat bundled in a quilt. Snoring softly, she didn’t stir. Leaping up to the rafter, he bolted along it and out his cat door—into the blinding white light. The world was so bright he felt his pupils slitting closed, white roofs all around him, snow piled up six inches around his tower, hills of snow against the neighborhood chimneys, snow weighting down the pine and cypress branches. When he looked over the edge of the roof, the white yards and street were patterned with shoe prints where the neighbors had walked. One set of dark tire tracks snaked through between the white curbs. Children’s voices screamed as kids raced by pelting each other with snowballs. In his own yard was a trampling of big paw prints, the snow matted down where Rock had apparently performed a doggy snow dance. Clyde’s prints came out of the house to join Rock, and the two sets led away as if on an impromptu walk through the village, a walk in the incredible snow.
And left me asleep, he thought irritably. But in his own fascination at the snowy world, he raced away over the white roofs, swerving around chimney drifts and leaping weighted branches, running until his paws were so numb with cold that he had to stop and lick them.
In the center of the village he watched half a dozen early-rising locals cavorting in the snow, as excited as kids themselves. He watched several pairs of tourists, emerging from the motels, head for one or another of the village bakeries, stomping off snow in the doorways, pushing inside to warm up on coffee and strudel or cheese Danish. Dulcie would say, the village looked like a scene from Dickens. Where was she? Why wasn’t she out in this, racing through the frozen morning? Leaping away, he headed for her place, but on the pristine rooftops he saw not one paw print, not Dulcie’s, not Kit’s or Misto’s, not even a squirrel. Maybe Dulcie was already at the crime scene, maybe watching the early-arriving forensics team.
He thought of the techs driving two hours down from San Jose on the icy freeway, eating doughnuts and coffee in the cab of their warm van. Once they got to work, they’d bundle up, heavy sweaters under their lab coats, faces masked against the smell. Maybe they’d be warmed a little by heat from the high-powered spotlights shining beneath the beams and cobwebs as they brushed away earth from the first body. A pair of techs crouching low in the tight space, dropping bits of trace into evidence bags: fibers, hairs that might be other than the victim’s, maybe a button or a fragment of shoelace. He hoped not cat hairs. Maybe a broken fingernail, but not a broken claw. Maybe the forensics entomologist was there, as well, waiting for the second body to be exhumed, to diligently consult the colonies of insects that had created their own tiny worlds within and, in fact, might turn out to be the only living witnesses to the time of death.
Inside Sammie Miller’s house, Dallas finally had the lights on, after an earlier call to the power company. It was cold as hell in there. He’d left the furnace off, keeping the atmosphere in the house as he found it, and so as not to disturb the scene below where the old furnace, which had to be far from airtight, would suck and expel air and disturb all manner of evidence. The house and yard were cordoned off, and most of the overgrown lot, and they’d established a control center where Officer Brennan was handling the documenting. He’d told Davis to stay home, her knee was pretty bad. She’d said it was damn near as big as a basketball, and she was trying to wrap her mind around the upcoming surgery.
He had photographed the interior of the house, which, in this mess, had taken the better part of two hours, had done three rolls just of close-ups of the tangle of clothes and scattered household debris. What was a part of Sammie’s lifestyle, and what disarray the vandals had caused—raccoons or humans or both—was pretty much up for grabs. He had gathered trace evidence, including the intrusive raccoon fur, and begun lifting prints and scanning electronically for footprints, working one section at a time as he tried to figure out what might be out of place and how much of the mess Sammie had left herself. So far he had prints for what looked like four separate individuals, besides those of the damned raccoons. Talk about contaminating the scene. One set would be Sammie’s, one possibly Emmylou Warren’s. The stink of the raccoons, mixed with the smell of death and the smell of spoiled food from a refrigerator without power, made him sorry he’d eaten breakfast. No wonder Emmylou Warren, when she came in here, hadn’t smelled the body. Below him in the cellar, the forensics team should be pretty close to lifting the victim, sliding a stretcher under it and easing it out onto a gurney. The question was, what would they find underneath?
And the real question was, how the hell had the snitch found the damned grave? What was he doing snooping around underneath Sammie Miller’s house, in the middle of the night?
Or had this call not been from their regular snitch at all? Kathleen wasn’t as familiar with the snitch’s voice as he and Davis were. What if it was someone else?
Had that meth bunch broken in, thinking to hide more chemicals under there? Or to stash the meth itself, get it out of their possession where they thought no cop would look?
Or had someone broken in under there to get out of the cold, maybe meant to sleep safely hidden beneath the house? Maybe Emmylou Warren had returned but afraid to go back inside after they ran her off? She slips in underneath, maybe thinks the furnace is running and it will keep her warm. But then she smells the stink and makes a hasty retreat?
But she didn’t call the department, it was a man who called—unless she was pretty good at disguising her voice.
He thought about the snitch, this guy, and the gal, who were so unlike the usual informant with whom you maintained a quiet relationship; someone you knew and could talk to, a barkeep, a mechanic, city clerk, someone who had contact with a lot of people, and who liked the high of helping the law, liked to feel they were on the inside. And, he thought, smiling, liked seeing their marks go to jail.
They knew most of their snitches and nurtured the relationships, yet for some six years now they’d been getting anonymous calls from this man or the woman and they didn’t have a clue to either one. Yet not once had they been led astray, every tip was a good one, though too often perplexing in the things they turned up. Evidence no cop might have come up with, items lifted that no one could have gotten their hands on without a pretty elaborate break-in. Information that didn’t involve locked houses or cars but seemed to have been overheard under the most unlikely of circumstances. It was almost as if they had a ghost on the payroll, someone skilled beyond any normal ability to get their hands on all manner of evidence, someone almost uncanny at eavesdropping, and at slipping in and out of locked houses and offices unseen. An invisible snitch who left no smallest mark of jimmied lock or fingerprints, no trace of any kind.