Cat Shining Bright

“Coming back down Ocean,” he told her, “we turned on my street to see how Ryan and Scotty were doing with the tree removal. The tree’s all down, and cut up. They were loading it in the truck. Ryan has plastic sheeting over the broken roof. The side street is still blocked, officers still going over the broken-in cars and talking to the residents. But the house on the corner?” Joe said, looking at Kit. “The house where you and Pan saw the BMW hidden? They’ve got crime tape around it, too. Harper’s truck is there and two squad cars. The swinging doors to the garage are open and the car is gone.”

“Oh my!” Kit said. “Did the officers break the lock and find the garage empty? Did the thief come back and drive it off before they ever got there? Or have the cops already returned the car to its owner or had it towed to the compound?”

“Maybe,” Wilma said, “the car thefts aren’t why Harper and Dallas are there.”

“Why, then?” Joe said. “They had to get a warrant to search the house, had to get the judge out of bed early . . .” He watched Charlie untangle her long hair from Striker’s bandaged paw.

“That house,” Charlie said, “is part of the murder scene.”

They all looked at her.

“Barbara Conley lived there, she rented it two or three months ago. Didn’t you know that? Her rent, where she’d been living, had nearly doubled.”

This embarrassed Joe. He lived only two blocks away, he thought he and Ryan and Clyde knew everything that went on in the neighborhood. They did know that someone had moved in, late one evening—a small rental truck, a few boxes, minimal furniture. A curvy blonde, a couple of guys helping her. Joe had watched idly from his tower, and thought little of it. What was there to think? The house was a rental. He didn’t know Barbara Conley—sweet-scented beauty salons were not his hangout of choice. And Ryan might not have known Barbara at all, Ryan cut her own dark, blow-away hair, cut it after she’d washed the sawdust out.

“You sure, last night, there was a car?” Joe asked Kit. “Maybe we should have called Harper. But it was so damned risky.”

“Maybe,” Kit said, “we should call him now.”

“He knows your voice,” Joe said. “He knows Dulcie’s voice, and he sure as hell knows mine.”

“I can disguise my voice,” Kit said. “I can . . .”

But Courtney had already leaped to the desk. “Captain Harper doesn’t know my voice.” Courtney’s voice was quite different from Kit’s and Dulcie’s, her higher tones were still that of a youngster, a tender human teenager.

“You’ve never done this,” Joe said. “You don’t—”

“She’s listened to you make a call or two,” Dulcie said, lashing her tail. “Take her in the bedroom, Joe, show her how to use Wilma’s cell phone, help her with what to say.”

But Courtney scowled and lashed her own tail, she didn’t need to be told what to say, she knew what to tell Captain Harper.

Wilma’s “safe” cell phone lay on the nightstand, the old phone with no GPS, that Clyde had doctored, like Joe Grey’s phone, with a false identification. Courtney, hopping on the bed, and with very little instruction from her father, pawed in the single dial for Max Harper.

She told Harper, in her little-girl voice, that she’d seen the police “investigating that house on Dolores Street. I saw something there last night that you might want to know about. In the wind, around four in the morning, a car pulled in that driveway. A man got out, unlocked the garage, pulled the car in, and padlocked the doors again.

“He stood by the house, where the bedroom is, then he went in the front door, he had a key for that, too. He was in there about five minutes then came out again, locked the door and went away. I thought maybe he was visiting, that lady has a lot of company, but then when I saw the police there . . .”

“Do you want to give me your name?” Max said. “Want to tell me where you live?”

“I’d rather not,” Courtney said. “My mother would say I was spying.”

Max was silent; he’d started to speak when Joe Grey reached out a paw and punched the disconnect.