Кроха - Dedication

The three cats and Mary lingered for some time as John moved among the feral cats, petting those who were tame enough, talking to them all, making sure none was hurt or sick. The little party left the shore, heading home, in time for John’s first clinic appointment.

In the bedroom Mary tucked the frail cat up among his blankets and again Kit and Pan settled beside him. As Misto drifted off into a nap, Pan dozed, too, content to be close. But Kit was content for only a little while. Soon she began to feel squirmy. She wanted to roll over but didn’t want to wake anyone. She needed to move; she ached from doing nothing, from being still too long; she needed to run. At last, losing patience, she slipped silently out of the blankets and left the bedroom. She crossed the empty living room, swung on the knob of the front door, and kicked it open.

Outside in the fog she raced across the garden to the next cottage, scrambled up a vine, hit the roofs, and galloped north, bridging between cottages on twisted oak branches. She came down only to cross Ocean Avenue among the feet of wandering tourists, and then up again, up and down the peaks racing, working off steam. Part of her wildness was her very pain for Misto. Part was an explosion of longing for Lucinda and Pedric because she missed them terribly. Having talked with them on Wilma’s phone she knew they were safe, but she wanted them home. Running in wild circles and from peak to peak, she wanted Dulcie beside her, too, but Dulcie wasn’t up to chasing, not now. Leaping and gamboling and too full of herself, and then thinking again about the street attacks and wondering if there was new evidence and what Joe Grey might be finding, she headed for Molena Point PD.

Detective Ray’s office was small, just space for Kathleen’s desk, a visitor’s chair, a tall and crowded bookshelf. Her desk faced the door, as an officer’s desk always does. The walls were hung with groups of miniature paintings, sunny and unassuming. Watercolors were Kathleen’s one quiet diversion from the pressure of the job. Billy Young, entering with the detective, moved away from the entrance, looking at the miniatures, enjoying the small, bright details of Molena Point’s hills and woods and rocky shore.

Painting had eased Kathleen’s stress as she worked as a model, too, before she left that world for the more honest company of cops in the small-town department. Kathleen was dressed this morning in slim jeans and a faded tan sweatshirt, her dark hair tied back casually. Billy thought she would be beautiful even in rags. She was kind, too. Kind to Billy, to animals, to everyone. He stood beside her desk watching her lay out her equipment, watched her begin to lift fingerprints from Ben’s cell phone and then from Ben’s small, spiral-bound notebook.

“Looks like only Ben’s,” she said at last, glancing up at him. He was pleased that she’d allowed him to come on back and witness the procedure. “These will go on to the county lab, they might be able to bring up prints I can’t, they have more sophisticated techniques.”

Billy nodded, he knew that. Once she’d lifted the prints, he watched her plug a USB connection into the cell phone and into her computer and download Ben’s pictures. He bent over the screen beside her, looking. Most of the shots were of construction jobs, details of the Bleak cottage and of other projects before it. But some were of shoes, photos angled at the ground as if secretly and hastily captured. Kathleen paused over each of these, and enlarged and printed it. She lingered longest over those that showed a bit of tread mark in the earth beside the shoe itself. One grid in particular, with a scar across the waffle pattern, made her smile.

“This could get us somewhere,” she said happily, her smile eager and pleased.

Once she’d finished the photos and had fingerprinted the notebook, too, she leafed slowly through its pages, touching only the edges with her thin cotton gloves. “Notes and sketches of building details. Hardware, light fixtures. Make and model numbers.” Not until the back pages did she turn to the copy machine and make two sets of duplicates, five pages each. When Billy stepped up to look, she shook her head.

“I can’t officially share these. You know that. Maybe later,” she said, “maybe the chief will. Youare like his own kid.” And that made Billy blush.

Dropping the notebook and phone into evidence bags, she packed them up to be sent to the county lab. “The fingerprints, if they can sort out any others besides Ben’s, those will go to IAFIS.”

“The digital database,” Billy said. Cop work was interesting. This last year was the first time in his life he’d thought about some kind of profession. As a little kid and before Gram died, he’d been too busy working to put food on the table, too busy taking care of his drunken grandmother to think of much else. Any job was welcome. He concentrated on doing things right, on keeping the animals well and happy and safe, and didn’t think about his own future.

But now he was not only learning the building trade. Max had urged him into firearms training and self-defense, too, into the police cadet class the department had started for a few of the village boys. The precision, the quick thinking and keen analysis of police work interested him a lot.

“Come on,” Kathleen said, slipping the phone’s photo prints and her copies of the notebook pages into a file folder. “Let’s take these into the conference room, lay the photos out where we can compare them.” Reaching for her desk phone she punched in the key to call Max.

Kit caught Joe Grey’s scent on the walk of MPPD. Peering through the glass door, she slipped in on the heels of three young officers—she slid into the holding cell as another officer came in and two left walking with a clean-shaven civilian in a suit and tie. A lawyer? Yes, he had that cool, superior look. Beyond the counter Evijean’s faded hairdo was just visible beside the copy machine. Now, with the lobby empty, Kit flew to the base of the reception desk, slunk along beside it, and fled down the hall, keeping to the shadows, pressing against the molding where the chief’s door stood cracked open.

His office was empty. She could smell where Joe Grey had rubbed against the woodwork, and could detect the horsey scent of the chief’s boots, and the scents of Detectives Garza and Davis, but there was no one here now. When she heard voices across the hall she peered out; she watched Kathleen and Billy move up the hall to the conference room and inside, Kathleen carrying a brown envelope and some file folders. Padding in behind them, she watched Max and the three detectives and Billy folding the metal chairs and stacking them against the wall so they could move freely around the conference table. Dallas had shrugged off his corduroy jacket and laid it on the counter. Davis was making a pot of coffee. Joe Grey sat on the counter beside her. Joe was about to lie down on the folded corduroy coat when, catching Dallas’s look, he changed his mind and turned away. When he saw Kit he flicked an ear, watched her slip into the shadows behind the trash bin.

From there, she leaped to the counter beside him. She stopped, startled, almost mewled with surprise. She studied the photos laid out on the table, shots of crime scenes, of the victims lying on the ground, an overturned wheelchair. And footprints. Pasted-up pictures of part of a shoe, or part of a print. Kathleen was saying, “ . . . not one discarded shoe we collected matches up with the crime scene shots, and doesn’t match with any of these that Ben took.”

Shoes! Kit thought. They’ve been collecting . . . thrown-away shoes? Oh, my! The shoes that woman dropped in the Dumpster right by my house the night Pan and I got home! Does the department have those shoes?

Max had picked up two photographs and stood comparing them. These might be of the same shoe, one at an attack scene where an elderly woman sat leaning against a stone wall, the other just a fragment, beside a wooden porch. Might or might not be the same.

Kit stared at Max, curious and excited, then dropped from the counter and bolted out of the conference room. Racing past Evijean she barely skinned out the glass door as a civilian came in wheeling a baby. Shoes. Thrown in a Dumpster. Shoes . . .

With all those photographs, with all four officers looking at footprints, she only prayed those thrown-away shoes were still there, that the Dumpster had not been hauled away, that full-to-overflowing Dumpster full of dead leaves and branches—and shoes.

20

Kit’s racing departure from the conference room startled the four officers and Billy, and badly unsettled Joe Grey, who wondered why she would make such a scene. But Kit was Kit, addlebrained and flighty. The chief had turned back to the table, to the machine copies of Ben’s notebook pages, to Ben’s comments about the San Francisco trial. The court would frown on a written personal record by a juror. But no court official was present, the trial was over, and in Harper’s view, this was police business now. As Juana stepped to the conference room door and firmly closed it, Kathleen read the pages aloud.

Most of Ben’s entries regarded individual jurors, his personal observations of their attitudes and their perceptions: a diary such as one might make on an interesting journey. No one was identified by name. Ben had given each juror a nickname, some amusing, all to retain individual privacy.

Pink Lady thinks Gardner can be rehabilitated? He raped and killed this young woman and who knows how many others? Now, all he needs is a few months’ therapy and he’ll be cured?

Big Ears thinks Gardner’s suffered enough at his own cruelty, that he is filled with remorse, that now he needs our compassion.

Besides his wry comments about the jurors, Ben had made observations about others in the courtroom: the attorneys and those regulars who returned several times to the visitors’ gallery. For such a quiet young man, Ben had had his sharp side. One entry that drew Max and the detectives, and drew Joe Grey, regarded a woman who sat in the back row of the gallery. “Day four: She’s here again, here every day. Always so bundled up. Well, the courtroom is cold. Strange hair, you’d call it blond, I guess. Cheap dye job. But something more about her. Something odd and unnatural. Maybe just too much makeup, along with the dowdy clothes. She—”

Kathleen stopped reading when Max’s cell phone buzzed. At the same moment Kathleen’s radio crackled, but the wail of a medics’ van passing nearly drowned Officer Crowley’s canned radio voice.

“Another assault,” Crowley said as the emergency van headed north, then soon went silent, reaching its destination. “Man in a wheelchair overturned,” Crowley said, “medics just arrived.”

Kathleen turned off her radio and Max switched on the speaker of his cell phone. They could hear garbled conversation in the background, could hear arguing, then Crowley came on the line. “It’s Sam Bleak, Chief. Dark-hooded guy knocked him over and ran. Bleak says he doesn’t want to go to the hospital, says he’s only bruised.”

“Did he see the man? Did anyone?”

“Says he was alone, attacked from behind. But yes,” Crowley growled, “he says yes, he did see his face.”

“You got a description.”

“Yes,” Crowley said embarrassedly.

Max looked puzzled. “Does he know him? You get a name?”

“He doesn’t . . . he seems reluctant.” Crowley sounded both angry and uncertain. As if he didn’t want to give information even on the phone. Again there was discussion in the background, then Crowley came back on.