She glanced up at the heat-hazed sky and wiped her brow.
“Normally, a female panther’s territory is about seventy-miles and Grace had stopped moving,” she said. “I wasn’t worried because I thought she might be denning.”
“Denning?” Louis asked.
“When they’re getting ready to have kittens, they reduce their range,” Katy said. “But then the radio signal went dead.”
“That’s why you put out the BOLO?”
She nodded. “Sometimes the radios malfunction. We wanted the rural deputies to keep an eye out for her just in case she was hit by a car. This morning, while we were searching her last coordinates, we found her collar. When we saw it was cut off I knew something was wrong.”
“Poachers?” Louis asked.
“There’s only two poaching cases we know of,” she said. “One was a hunter who said he shot the panther because he was threatened. Which is ridiculous because panthers are shy. They stay away from humans.”
“And the other guy?”
“Some rich asshole who got drunk with his friends and decided he wanted a stuffed panther head mounted on his wall. One of his buddies turned him in. He’s doing five to ten up in Raiford.”
Louis peered at the collar through the plastic, fingering the cut in the heavy leather. It had been sawed off with a large blade.
“Did you find any blood here?” he asked.
“Blood?” Katy asked.
“From Grace.”
She shook her head. “We looked, in about a twenty-yard radius but we didn’t see anything to indicate she was hurt.”
“Then she had to have been tranquilized.”
Katy just nodded, still looking around the brush like she had maybe missed something.
“He wanted her alive,” Louis said. “What would someone do with a live panther?”
She looked up at him. “I don’t know.”
Louis walked away, eyes to the ground. Every crime scene was the same — the perp always left something of himself and always took something away. It could be a discarded cigarette butt or dirt picked up in the tread of a sneaker.
In this jungle, evidence was going to be hard to find. But not impossible. Lee County’s CSI team was one of the state’s best. It was just a matter of getting Mobley to cough up the money and manpower for a missing cat.
The squawk of a radio drew Louis’s attention back to Katy. He was too far away to hear the conversation. When Katy signed off, she waved him over.
“I got the lab work on Bruce,” she said. “They found acepromazine in his system.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a tranquilizer,” she said.
“I thought you tranquilized him on the patio?”
“No, acepromazine is a fucking horse tranquilizer,” she said. “The injection site was his chest. He was darted.”
Louis was confused. “So how’d he break his leg?”
She didn’t seem to hear him. She was staring at something in the distance, her jaw clenched.
“Katy? How’d he break his leg?”
“He must have climbed a tree,” she said, pointing to a towering tree. “They do that when they feel threatened. He was darted and fell.”
Louis shaded his eyes to look up at the spindly cypress tree. “How long do they stay out?”
“Half hour, maybe forty-five minutes.”
“Plenty of time for someone to load a panther into a cage in a truck and get away someplace isolated.”
Katy nodded.
“Grace went missing first, right?” Louis asked.
“Yeah.”
“Maybe he wanted two,” Louis said. “A male and a female.”
He wiped the sweat from his face and looked back at Katy.
“How many panthers are left in the wild?” he asked.
“Maybe thirty,” Katy said. She hesitated. "We’re losing them fast.”
“Well, maybe someone’s building an ark,” Louis said.
CHAPTER F IVE
All the way across town, he heard sirens. As he pulled into the parking lot of the Lee County Administration Building, he remembered something a female cop had once told him. The sudden swell of multiple sirens was like a baby’s cries — experience told you just how serious it was.
A couple sirens, combined with an ambulance or two, probably indicated a traffic accident on a major road. Sheriff’s cars streaming in one direction was likely a backup situation for an officer in trouble. Cruisers from every agency whizzing through every red light meant something big was going down.
And that’s what was happening now.
He parked his Mustang in the visitor’s lot and picked up the envelope Katy had given him. He knew he would need ammunition to convince Mobley this panther thing was worth his department’s time, and Katy had obligated with some stunning photographs.
“Maybe it will make it real for him,” she had said.
Louis wasn’t sure anything could warm Lance Mobley’s heart besides a double shot of Jack Daniels but it was worth a try.
Mobley’s office was down the first corridor, the double glass doors marked by the five-star county seal and Mobley’s name in large gold letters.
The secretary was on the phone, but her eyes darted up to Louis as he came in. Louis didn’t know her but she bore a stark resemblance to all the secretaries Louis had seen at this desk before her. A toned, sun-streaked blonde who wore a bright print blouse and a Slinky-like bunch of gold bracelets.
She finally hung up the phone and drawing a weary breath looked again to Louis. “Yes?”
“I’m Louis Kincaid. The sheriff is expecting me.”
He could see from the blank expression on her face she couldn’t place his name.
“I’m working with the Fish and Game — ”
“Oh, yeah. I’m sorry. Things are a little chaotic right now.”
“What’s going on? I heard the sirens.”
“Armed robbery in Estero,” she said. “Three wounded officers, one suspect was shot at the scene, two others fled in a green Monte Carlo. The entire county is in pursuit.”
Louis looked toward Mobley’s open office door. The high-backed leather chair was empty. Mobley would be tied up all day with a situation like this, especially if it was his department that eventually took down the robbers.
Which meant a missing panther was low priority for Mobley right now. Still, Louis had a crime scene waiting to be processed and each additional day left it open to contamination.
He looked back at the secretary. “Should I wait or — ”
Suddenly, the door behind him banged open and Mobley came in. He was in full green and white uniform and dripping in sweat. His eyes shot briefly to Louis then he walked to the secretary’s desk, snatched his messages from her outstretched hand and moved quickly into his office. He left the door open and Louis took it as a gesture to follow.
The first thing Mobley did was reach over to turn up the volume on the police radio near his desk. Red lights zipped back and forth on five channels. To anyone else, the radio traffic would have sounded like excited gibberish but Louis understood every word. The wounded officers had already been released from the hospital, Collier County S.O. had joined the pursuit and the fleeing suspects had caused a traffic accident on Tamiami but had managed to drive on, dragging a sparking fender behind them.
Mobley glanced at Louis. “I don’t have time right now for you and your dead cat,” he said.
“He wasn’t dead,” Louis said. “He was — ”
Mobley held up a hand to silence him as he leaned toward the radio. The suspects had entered I-75, heading south at a high speed. One of Mobley’s deputies radioed in for permission to continue the pursuit in what was suddenly far more dangerous conditions — a crowded freeway. The deputy sounded young, his strained voice nearly drowned out by the screaming siren in the background. A superior officer, also in the chase, gave him the okay to continue.
Mobley hadn’t sat down, hadn’t moved from his spot behind his desk. He reminded Louis of how Susan Outlaw looked a few years ago when she was waiting for news on her son Ben after he’d been kidnapped. It was a combination of emotions: fear for those you cared about and helplessness because you couldn’t be out there — wherever there was — to help.