Cat In A Leopard Spot

“I hunt killers myself,” Molina said suddenly, quietly, leaning closer. “There’s nothing worse than someone who violates another creature’s right to live. But I’ve never shot my firearm in tracking a killer. I let the laws levy justice. Did your group decide to levy justice for the law this time, in this case, for this man?”

“No! We protest. That’s what we do.”

“Who was to watch your protest, way out there? Those ‘security forces’ could have shot you all and buried your bodies hipbone-deep in sand for decades, eternity, and no one would have ever known. Just as no one would have ever known your group was out there to kill Van Burkleo if you hadn’t been spotted.”

“Who spotted us?” He was suddenly belligerent. “Not the security guys. They were looking for vehicles, and we hiked in. We’re good at subterfuge; have to be to spring ‘surprises’ on the killers. Who was it? That guy who claimed to be on his own out there?”

“Guy?”

“He dove into the same wash with us to avoid being spotted by a patrol. Somebody else must have mentioned him. You want a suspicious character, he was it.”

“I haven’t talked to the other suspects yet,” Molina said, “and I’m not interested in any lone wolf your imagination dreams up. I bet they don’t mention any such person when I get to them.”

“They will! He wasn’t one of us. We have no reason to protect him.”

“Glad to hear it. So tell me about this guy.”

“Well, he dives right on top of us. Broad daylight. Doesn’t want to be seen, all right, but he’s wearing black from head to tail. Foot, rather.”

“Black?”

“Yeah. Midday on the desert. Says there’s always a shadow so it’s a good cover. Black. He doesn’t know at first what we’re doing out there, but he figures it out real fast. Acted like he was sympathetic to the cause, but Alyce wasn’t buying any of it. We didn’t argue too much with him; any uproar would draw the patrols, but we never bought his lame story for being out there. And he got mad at us. Said we were fools and risking our lives. That the security forces would have us for barbecue. Well, they didn’t catch us. Your people did.”

“City slickers,” Molina said, pleased.

“That’s what this guy was. A city slicker. He had a lot of nerve to be out there with us.”

Molina was struck by the last sentence. A city slicker with a lot of nerve. All in black.

“What did he look like?” she asked blandly.

Sprague rolled his eyes as if the gesture would jump-start his memory. “Tall guy. I think. Lean as a whipsnake. Dark hair. Eyes…not sure. Thirty-four or -five maybe. Maybe younger. Acted…seasoned. We were kind of dazzled when he was there, and when he took off, we wondered what kind of line he was handing us.”

Molina leaned her head on her hand. Turned off the tape recorder. “Can you just sit here for a minute?’

Sprague looked startled to death at her question. What the heck else could he do until someone told him he could leave or bailed him out?

She left the room, peeked in on the detectives. “Hang on,” she told them. Then she did a straight-line dive back to her office and a certain manila folder in her bottom file drawer.

In four minutes she was back, sitting across from Evan Sprague and flipping open the folder.

“Look anything like this?” she wondered. Idly.

Sprague frowned at the single sheet of paper inside the open folder. “Bad hair. Worse jewelry.”

“Can’t argue with you.”

“I guess it could be him. Yeah. The face structure is the same, but the effect is…way different.”

“Can I call that a strong maybe?”

“Maybe.” He frowned at Janice Flanders’s sketch of Vince from Secrets. “Like the same person inside a way different skin, you know what I mean?”

“Oh, yes,” Molina said, spinning the sketch to face her. “I do.”

Snakes shed their skins all the time…. And at last one of them had done it on the scene of a crime in her jurisdiction.

Chapter 22

Likely Suspects

Max was waiting in Temple’s living room when she schlepped Midnight Louie up from the car in his carrier.

“Just in time,” she announced, not a bit startled to find Max arranged like an art deco print (Big Black Panther on Big White Sofa in a Big White Hollywood Set from the ’30s) in her locked condo. “Let the revels begin! Louie and I have triumphed in the courts of justice.”

Max sat up to watch Temple liberate the cat from his grille-front carrier. “I thought Louie the Wonder Cat was such a good traveler that he didn’t need a carrier.”

“He doesn’t. But courts of law require animals to be ‘contained,’ unlike even the worst human criminal, even just to show up to collect a judgment. It makes me boil. Did you know that animals are legal nonentities? Mere property! Like they didn’t have feelings, and we humans didn’t have feelings for them. Would you believe this magnificent cat has a courtroom value of thirty-two dollars?”

By now Louie had emerged from durance vile and was regarding the Max-occupied sofa with loathing, but definitely not fear.

Max regarded Louie in turn. “Thirty-two dollars seems generous.”