Кроха - Dedication

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.

“He refuses to come in, Chief. Says he’s done nothing, why should he come into the station like a common criminal?”

“Just hold him,” Max said, frowning. “I’m on my way.” And he was out the door, double-timing through the lobby. He didn’t see Joe Grey slip out behind him and leap into the truck bed. The chief swung away from the station unaware of the extra pair of eyes and ears that rode with him beneath a folded tarp.

Kit, racing up across the rooftops to the vacant lot, looked down on the Dumpster parked in front, and swallowed back a yowl of dismay. They were finishing up, were about to haul out of there. The lot had been cleaned off. No more dead trees, only stumps. No long, heavy tree trunks. They had been cut up and hauled away, probably on a big flatbed. At the curb, the Dumpster stood overloaded with rubble and branches, waiting to be hitched up and pulled off. Were the shoes still there, maybe way down, underneath?

Angled behind the Dumpster, three workmen sat in their pickup eating lunch—as if, having wrapped up the job, they meant to leave when they’d finished their noon meal. Maybe they were waiting for the tractor that would retrieve the Dumpster?

She had to get the shoes out before any tractor or heavy truck made an appearance and the shoes would be gone forever.

Maybe she’d better call the chief. Get the cops out here to stop them.

But in the time it took to gallop home, even if it was only half a block, the tractor might arrive, hitch up, and move out.

No, she had to do this now. Scrambling down an oak tree, she slipped across the street beneath the pickup, then under the Dumpster on the far side. Nearly hidden from the men, she leaped up, hung from the Dumpster by her front paws, then scrambled up on the thin metal rim.

The piled-up branches were thick with twigs and leaves crisscrossed and tangled together. Carefully poking in between them she could see, deep down, the toe of a tan running shoe. The whole load smelled of pine and willow sap. She didn’t want sap in her fur, she’d have to chew it out. Easing down between the branches, willing them not to slip and fall on her, she reached deep with a careful paw. She stretched farther down and down until she snagged the shoe with two claws.

Gingerly she hauled it out. Sliding it up between the branches, hoping she wasn’t smearing fingerprints, she pulled it onto the edge of the Dumpster. Balancing it there she took it in her mouth, her teeth clamped on the very edge. Don’t smear the prints, she kept telling herself. She glanced up to the pickup, praying no one would notice her.

She saw no movement in the truck, just the dark silhouettes of the three men, two of them wearing baseball caps. Dropping down with the shoe, holding her head high, she hauled it across the street beneath tree shadows. There she laid it under the lacy leaves of a low-hanging pepper tree and went back for the next one.

It took her a long time to find five shoes among the tangled branches, to back out hauling each one, without toppling limbs on herself. She dug and wriggled, searching, but couldn’t find any more. The sun was well past noon. Watching the three men, she thought, Eat slow, eat more! Talk and laugh, take your time!

Did the shoes hold fingerprints? Maybe not the canvas, but the plastic or leather parts? She prayed they did, and hoped again that she hadn’t smeared them. And what about DNA? Could that be inside a shoe, or would sport socks have soaked it all up?

Not that it made much difference. The county lab was so far behind it would take maybe a year to get DNA evidence back to the department. By then, who knew what else might happen?

When she had the five shoes hidden under the pepper tree, she hauled them one at a time across the neighbors’ yards, staying to the shadows and beneath bushes. She dragged each one to her own yard, four houses down from the Dumpster, and nosed it under the front steps. When at last she’d hidden them all, she scrambled up the oak to her tree house. She lay down for a little rest, and to work the sawdust and leaves out of her long coat. There was tree sap; she’d deal with that later. She rested only a few moments, then crossed the oak branch to her cat door and slipped inside.

Max Harper’s cell phone number was on the Greenlaws’ speed dial. She hit the single digit, listened to the ring, was coughing from sawdust when Max answered.

“Shoes,” she said, swallowing. “Are you looking for shoes, maybe evidence to the assaults?”

“Yes,” Max said. “What have you got?” He didn’t ask who this was. Those days were long past when anyone in the department, except Evijean, would be so gauche as to question one of their prime snitches.

“Shoes thrown away in a Dumpster,” Kit said.

“Recently?”

“Yes. While they were clearing this lot. Looks like they’re all done, like maybe they’re just ready to leave now, but I have the shoes.”

“Yes, we’d like a look,” Max said. “The Dumpster’s where? Can you identify the person who dropped them?”

“No. I saw only their backs for a minute.” She didn’t want to say when she learned the shoes were of value, or when she saw them dumped. “I hauled five shoes out, hid them under a porch across the street.” She gave him the address where the Dumpster stood. Then, shivering, she gave him the address where the shoes were hidden, the address of her own house.

“Under that front porch,” she said. “That tall house with the children’s tree house in the back.”

She felt sick, taking a more than foolish chance, leading him to a hiding place so close to the truth. But her own front porch was the only one near that had a hollow beneath it; all the others were just a couple of concrete steps, solid and impenetrable. And if she hid the shoes among scattered bushes, neighbors’ dogs might find and chew up the evidence.

No, her porch was the safest. No neighbors’ kids poked around there, and it had been a long time since any unruly dog, facing her own claws and teeth, had invaded her yard.