The caller may have given up the trip because of the heavy snow, he thought. And if it had been a setup of some kind, the baby blizzard going on outside would make that sort of thing pretty difficult. He decided to give it another half hour and then go back to his heated cabin. He checked out the back windows of the cabin, but the falling snow obscured the ravine and hills behind the cabins. He went back to the front windows-no change: heavy snowfall, everything out front losing definition. And then Frick started growling, a deep belly growl that woke Frack right up. He got up and went to the door and sniffed it, then looked back at Frick, who was still lying on the floor, ears up and growling.
“What’s out there, killer?” Cam said, and she got up and went to one of the front windows. Whatever it was, Frack hadn’t heard it, and Cam certainly hadn’t heard it, but he’d learned not to ignore the dogs when they sensed that something wasn’t right. He palmed the Colt and began to go from window to window in the dark cabin, taking care not to silhouette himself. Although there was no moon visible, the snow brightened up the night and he could see pretty well in the immediate area around the cabin. Frick continued to growl quietly, although less frequently now. She lay down by the front door. He thought about letting her out, but if it was just a deer, she might get lost in the ensuing chase. A bear prowling for garbage would be another possibility, except they should be hibernating. He’d heard no vehicle noises, so it probably was wildlife.
He did another circuit of the windows-nothing. He thought about going back to his cabin, getting the cell phone, and dialing that number again, but something told him not to go outside. He watched the dogs. Frick had her head down on the floor, eyes watchful. Frack, as usual, watched her, ready to take his cue from his more aggressive partner. Neither dog seemed very anxious to go outside, which told Cam that they just might be afraid of whatever was out there.
Then Frick went on alert at the front door, getting up and staring at the door but making no sound, her hackles up and her body rigid in that position of readiness from which she would launch an attack. Frack moved behind her, also staring at the crack at the bottom of the front door. Cam moved to the back corner of the room, standing in relative shadow, and watched windows. There wasn’t a sound from outside-no wind, no crunch of footsteps in the snow, no engine noises. His breath formed little puffs of vapor in the frigid air. Then he thought he heard something out front, but it was a very subtle sound: a soft pressure on the porch floorboards, a muffled creaking noise. Cam crouched down in the corner of the room, pointed the Colt at the door, and watched the front windows very carefully, looking for shapes or shadows against the snow glare. The dogs suddenly went down on the floor, their eyes still locked on the front door but their bodies no longer poised for an attack. In fact, Frick was assuming what was almost a submissive posture, while Frack lay there, his head cocked sideways, listening to something. Cam thought he, too, sensed something out front, but knew he was just reacting to the dogs.
The three of them remained motionless in the cabin for another minute, and then the dogs slowly relaxed. There were no more sounds out front, which made Cam turn slowly on his haunches and watch the back windows and door. He snapped his fingers quietly and Frick scuttled over, followed by Frack. He sat them down next to him in the corner. They nuzzled his hands, their tails sweeping the floor, their relief palpable. Whatever it had been, it was gone, and since their senses were a whole lot better than his, he stood up and walked to the front windows. The shepherds went with him, plastered to his legs. He studied the front yard and the road but saw nothing but more snow. Then he looked down at the porch floorboards and saw a line of large soup plate-size prints in the shallow snow that had accumulated there.
The prints stretched across the full length of the porch and looked a lot like what he’d seen on the hood of his truck that morning. There was a shiny film of ice already forming in the depressions. His breath started to fog the glass, so he could not make out details, such as which way the animal had gone or whether or not there were claw marks, but now he had a pretty good idea of what had come calling, and why the shepherds had been scared.
He checked all the windows again, but there was nothing moving out front. He gathered up the dogs and went out the back door, gun in hand, in case they’d all guessed wrong. He stood for a moment on the back deck, the snow tickling his face. It was coming down hard enough that he could hear it sleeting through the trees. The dogs stayed right by his side, and they were no longer relaxed. He went back over to his cabin and walked around it to see if there were any tracks, but the snow looked undisturbed until he got to the front porch, where there were shapeless indentations in the snow out in front of the cabin. He tried to trace them out to the street, but the snow was too deep. They did seem to go from the front of his cabin over to the front of the other cabin, so the cat had been able to tell where he’d been hiding. But where had it gone?
He told the dogs to go find it, and they reluctantly moved away from him, sniffing the rapidly disappearing indentations, circling close by, but clearly unwilling to go romping off into the dark woods. It’s definitely colder out here in the falling snow, he thought as he scanned the shadows in the trees and listened for any sign of wildlife. The dogs were back, looking at him as if to say, Was that good enough? The security light up at the office was barely visible now, and he looked hard at the road to see if there were any signs of a vehicle. Then there was movement in the tops of the trees and he felt a sudden draft of colder air come down from the slopes above him and blow through the line of cabins. The snow went sideways for a moment and both dogs put their noses up to scan the moving air. Frick made that low, rumbling growl again, and Cam felt the hair rising on the back of his neck. He backed toward the porch of his cabin, the dogs going with him while he kept the gun pointed out into the whirling darkness. The wind made a slow moaning noise, and somewhere off to his right a pine top cracked and then fell to the ground with a thump. He kept backing until he felt the steps against his heels; then he stepped up and reached for the door handle.
It didn’t move. It was locked. He thought for a moment, and then he remembered he had locked it before going out the back door.
He moved sideways off the porch, still watching the lane and the surrounding cabins. The shepherds were both staring at something in the direction of the office. Cam reached the corner of the building and looked around it into the darkness. He studied the snow, but there were no indentations. He stepped around the corner and, keeping his back to the wall of the cabin, slid sideways along the rough boards until he reached the back corner. Then he realized he didn’t have the dogs with him. He called them as quietly as he could, but they didn’t come. He swore and edged his way back to the front of the cabin, feeling very exposed in the weird twilight created by the falling snow. He peered around the corner.
The dogs were gone.
He looked around and thought he saw their tracks headed up the lane toward the cabin office. The wind groaned again, and the snow wheeled in response. Something else cracked out in the woods. Get inside, a little voice in his mind told him. Get inside now.
He did. Not trying to be quiet anymore, he crunched through the snow to the back deck and let himself into the cabin. The sudden warmth from the woodstove was very welcome. He closed the back door and then went to the front windows to see if the dogs were visible, but they weren’t. He flipped on the porch light, unlocked and opened the door, and called them. No dogs. He closed the door. If they’d gone after a deer, they could be in real trouble, because a deer could run them to death in these hills. If they’d gone after a goddamned mountain lion, they could be in real trouble, period. The wind outside was blowing steadily, rattling the damper in the woodstove’s chimney. He threw another log into the firebox and stirred the coals. He knew there was no point in going out there on foot to look for the shepherds. He could easily get himself lost in all this snow, and he was neither dressed nor equipped for that kind of adventure. Then something ban
ged against the back door and he heard the skittering of anxious claws. He unlocked the door and let them in. They ran around the cabin excitedly, panting hard, as if they’d just had great fun with a good chase. He was tempted to yell at them, but then he realized he was very grateful that they were back.
He checked that all the doors were locked and then got ready for bed. Tomorrow, he’d get a trace on that cell number and see if he could track down the mysterious caller. The wind outside blew harder and sleet rattled against the roof. He turned off all the lights, took another look out all the windows, set the Colt on the nightstand, and climbed into the heavily quilted bed. The dogs dropped down near the woodstove and curled up. As he drifted off to sleep, he thought he heard a distant prolonged shriek above the wind coming down from the ravines, but he assured himself that it was just the snowstorm. Of course it was.
40
Mary Ellen Goode was still smiling when Cam walked into the ranger station the next morning. The day had dawned bright and clear with about a foot and a half of snow on the ground and the temperature at a sinus-clearing ten degrees. The county roads had been scraped and sanded, so he’d made decent time getting over to the ranger station. He’d put on his old deputy’s hat and mirrored sunglasses against all the glare, and Mary Ellen told him with a perfectly straight face that no one would ever make him for a cop.
She offered coffee, which he accepted gratefully. He explained the note and the phone number, and her eyebrows went up.
“That’s the number for my Park Service cell phone,” she said. “But it’s right over-” She started looking around her desk. “Well, it was right here. This is the charger for it.”
“Whoever left the note knew who owned the phone, then,” he said. He wondered if it was someone in this office. He explained about the initials on the note.
“I don’t like the sound of that at all,” she said, frowning.
“Let me ask you this: If tracks were made by a large animal in the snow, and then there was more snow, and then a crust of sleet froze over all of that, could someone still excavate those tracks?”
She stared at him for a moment. “I couldn’t, but we have a ranger on staff who maybe could.”
An hour later, they were back at Cam’s cabin. A long, tall, gaunt ranger who looked uncannily like Abraham Lincoln was down on hands and knees on Cam’s front porch, scraping gently at the snow with a woodworker’s two-handled draw knife. Cam and Mary Ellen, trying to ignore the cold, watched from the doorway.
“Normally,” the ranger said, “the prints would simply fill up, but you said you saw an ice film. That’s what I’m looking for. How deep would you say the snow was when the prints were made?”
“A dusting of blown snow,” Cam said. “Maybe half an inch deep, max.” Everyone’s breath was making puffs of condensation in the frigid air, and now the ranger shifted to a paintbrush as he continued to mine his way down through the snow along a three-foot-long stretch outside of the area where Cam and the dogs had trampled the snow. Two pairs of German shepherd ears were silhouetted in one of the front windows.
“Well, this may all be for nothing if that layer of ice-wait one. Here we go. Here we go.”
The ranger shifted from the big paintbrush to a much smaller and finer brush and began to remove snow across the line of his original shallow trench. As he did so, the outline of a paw print began to emerge.
Mary Ellen looked over his shoulder and whistled quietly. “That’s a big bastard,” she said.
“Yeah, I’d say so,” the ranger replied, clearing away the remaining snow almost grain by grain until he had the entire print revealed. Then he brought out a spray can from his field kit and sprayed the entire depression. “It’s a silicone-based compound,” he said. “Solidifies on cold contact.” The material was barely tinted yellow, but it held enough color that the print was thrown into clear relief. This time, Cam could see the tops of claw marks, and it wasn’t a happy sight. The ranger sat back on his haunches. “Now that,” he declared, “is a large cat. Panther, from the size of it.” He laid down another coat of varnish, waited a moment, and did it again.
“And not declawed,” Mary Ellen commented.
“Yeah,” the ranger said, getting a camera out of his pack. He fired off several pictures from different angles, then swore, fished out a ruler, laid it down by the track, and did it all again. The print looked to Cam to be about ten inches across.
“Are there more?” the ranger asked.
“There was a line all the way across this porch,” Cam said. “The dogs came in here by the door and messed stuff up, which is why I had you start in the middle of the porch. There’s more on that porch over there.”
The ranger nodded and began to extend his trench in the snow. “I need one, preferably two more to get an estimate of stride length. This’ll take awhile.”
The dogs were getting antsy inside the cabin, so Cam went back in, and Mary Ellen followed. She greeted both dogs affectionately and they returned her favor.
“Great shepherds,” she said. “Let me guess: This one’s business and this one’s pleasure?”
“Right you are,” Cam said. “Although the black one can do business if he has to. Mostly, he just scares people by looking at them.”
“Works for me,” she said. “How’d they react to that thing being out there on the front porch?”
“Not bravely,” he replied.
“Smart dogs,” she said, shaking off her coat now she was inside the warm cabin. She had a field belt on under her bulky Park Service coat, complete with what looked like a Glock. She saw him looking. “I don’t leave home or the office without it,” she said. “Ever since…”
“Copy that,” he said. He went into the kitchen to crank up the coffeepot.
“So tell me, Lieutenant, what’s really brought you out here to our neck of the woods? You show up, telling tall tales about cat dancers, somebody steals my phone, makes an appointment he doesn’t keep, and now we have the first real sign of a mountain lion in thirty years.”
He pulled over a kitchen chair and sat down to wait for the coffee to percolate. She stayed over by the woodstove, nonchalantly trying to warm her buns and her hands at the same time. They both heard the ranger out front say “Yes!” as he found another track.
Cam stared down at the table for a long moment while he tried to figure out how much to tell her. She didn’t bug him. “Did you guys hear about those executions that showed up on the Web?” he asked her.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “That was all over the LE networks. I saw one of the videos.”
“That happened in our neck of the woods, and I’m working the whodunit.”
“All by yourself?”
He smiled. Smart girl, he thought. “For the moment,” he said. “We might have a wee bit of federal help.”
“Ah,” she said. “So there’s one game for your federal friends and another one for the sheriff’s edification?”
“Something like that,” he said. He wasn’t willing to broach the possibility that there were vigilantes involved.
“And didn’t you have a judge get herself blown up down there in Triboro recently?” she asked. “Was that related?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Truth is, we really don’t know, but we’re keeping our options open. She was the judge who let the two fryees loose on a technicality.”
She gave him a shrewd look from the other side of the room. “Liberal judge lets them go, they get rounded up by a person or persons unknown and end up in an electric chair?” she said.
“They killed the wife and daughter of a Duke Energy scientist in a holdup. They walked because of a police screwup. Then said scientist goes off the grid, followed by the two mopes doing a star turn in the chair. He’d been a Ranger back in the army. So…”
“And you guys think he did the judge, too?”
He shrugged uncomfortably. She was getting too close to figuring out what he was really investigating. “Like I said, it’s early da
ys, and the feds have their own theories-as usual.”
“Lest we forget, Park Service is federal, too,” she said. “And that’s not an answer. We’re not necessarily the enemy, Lieutenant.”
He was saved by the percolator, which started making gasping noises. He got up and poured coffee into three cups. He handed one to her and then took one out to the ranger, who had uncovered a second track and was beginning to dust a third. She joined him in the doorway, stirring some sugar into her coffee. “How big, Larry?”
“Two meters plus,” the ranger said, sitting back on his haunches and blowing on the hot coffee between sips. “Can’t estimate weight on wooden floorboards like this, but at that stride length, it has to be seventy, eighty kilos. Big effing cat. This third impression is not very good, so I’m going to work the dirt just off the porch.”
“And what the hell was that thing doing here?” Cam asked.
“You let those dogs run around?” Mary Ellen asked.
Cam nodded.
“Then that’s probably what it was hunting,” she said. “A panther this big would definitely not be afraid of a couple of dogs. Slap, slap, chow time.”
Larry had moved off the porch and was excavating the snow at the end of the building. All scrunched up down in the snow, he looked like a grounded stork. Cam went back inside. “So maybe there is something to your cat dancer story,” she said. “But what’s the tie to what you’re investigating?”
He smiled at her. “I’m not sure there is one. Just something some guy mentioned in the course of our asking questions, so here I am. Basic follow-up. It’s what we do when we’re clueless. There probably is no tie.”
She gave him a skeptical look. “My doctorate’s in animal science,” she said. “My specialty happens to be bears, not big cats. These prints will make for some interesting discussions down at the tavern. But then we’re going to have to prove you didn’t fake them, of course. You know, Bigfoot Two. Sasquatch comes to the Smokies.”
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