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The Secret Lives of Cats
by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Art by Mark Evan Walker
Nominated for the 2009 Anthony Award [link]
Winner of the 2008 EQMM Readers Award
 Homer
Ziff didn't believe in adages, but after his long and eventful spring,
he couldn't help but think that whoever put the words "curiosity,"
"cat," and "kill" in the same sentence had to be onto something.
It
all began with his own curiosity—about his cats. Homer Ziff lived alone
with two indoor cats and six outdoor cats. Well, six he could pet and
hold; there were others—the friends, neighbors, and hangers-on, he
called them—who visited at meal time or for a rest on the back forty in
the midafternoon sun.
Not that he had a real back forty. But his
backyard was an impressive three acres, complete with woods and stream.
One of the reasons he'd bought the house was that it had the best of
both worlds: In the front, he had a small lawn that led to a quiet
residential street; in the back, he had acres of property that covered
a protected wetland. No one would ever build behind him, the lots next
to him were full, and the houses across the street had reached their
maximum size according to code.
He
knew his neighbors by sight (rather like he knew their cats) and he
would nod at them whenever he saw them, but didn't engage in
conversation. He couldn't bring himself to talk to them, not after his
first attempt, when he'd stuttered at a man several doors down, and the
man had rolled his eyes and walked away.
Homer would like to
have blamed his surly neighbor for his own lack of congeniality, but
that wouldn't be fair or accurate. Homer didn't engage most people in
conversation. He had a stutter that got worse when he was nervous.
Over the years, he'd learned to prefer his own company. He liked being alone with his thoughts and his cats and his property.
And
it was his thoughts that made being alone possible. Not that his
thoughts were original—sadly, they weren't—but they were organized, and
that had given him an edge. Once upon a time, he had been a professor
of physics at Oregon State University. A rising star when he was hired,
he'd become a stalled star by mid career—a man for whom the great
things expected never materialized.
Which would have been well
and good except that stalled stars had to be stellar teachers and he
was not. He was pathologically shy, and his stutter got worse in front
of large groups. He was ¬better one on one, but stalled stars weren't
allowed to teach the smaller classes. He had to teach some large
sections as well, and he dreaded them the way he dreaded a visit to the
dentist.
But he did have one valuable skill. He could explain
things clearly. His gift of clarity had gotten him through graduate
school and into an important teaching position. And it made him into
something of a rebel.
Because of his gift, he threw out the
suggested text for 101 Physics (a more confusing book he'd never seen)
and wrote a series of notes that sold in the campus bookstore—not just
to his students, but to students from other physics classes. The
bookstore owner called him one day to ask whether students at the
nearby University of Oregon could purchase the notes. Then students
from some of the private colleges made the drive from McMinn-ville and
Portland to get his notes, and finally, the chairman of his department
said, "Y'know, Ziff, you could make a fortune on those notes if you
just turned them into a book."
So he did. It became the
number-one 101 Physics text in the country, which led his publisher to
ask if he would write a simple physics book for the masses, which he
did, and another for children, which he did, and suddenly Homer Ziff no
longer needed to worry about being a stalled star. He had become a
rising star again—or maybe even an established one—and could have his
pick of the courseload within his department.
Only the books had
given him another gift. Financial independence. He no longer had to
teach. And since standing in front of students made him so nervous that
he sometimes spent the hour before class in the restroom, he decided
that the prudent move would be to quit.
He bought his marvelous
house, made sure his finances were in order, and then retired to write
a half-dozen more popular science books, with more under contract.
Some
days, the cats were his only companions. He didn't mind, really. He
never stuttered when he spoke to cats, and they didn't care that he
lacked original thought.
They were happy that he provided food and shelter and a bit of companionship.
He was happy to have them purr.
Because of them, he had become a little cat-obsessed.
He
had been surfing the Net one night when he discovered a Web site
designed by a man in Germany. The man sounded like a kindred spirit. He
lived with a cat to whom he devoted an inordinate amount of time. That
cat was an indoor-outdoor cat, and the German man wondered how his cat
spent his time outside the house.
So the man, who appeared to be
some kind of engineer, modified a digital camera, put it around his
cat's neck, set it up to take pictures every minute and a half, and
sent the cat on its way. The resulting photographs were charming and
inspiring.
Homer found himself staring at his outdoor friends,
wondering how their days went. One cat's routine illuminated the life
of one cat. Six cats' routines might actually be the beginning of some
kind of scientific study.
At least, that was what he told
himself as he used the instructions on the German man's Web site to
build six "catcams." After some struggle, Homer managed to attach them
to five of his outdoor favorites (he gave up on the wily old tom—who
not only drew blood, but managed to slice him up badly enough to
require fifteen stitches on his left hand).
Then he sent the five on their mission, hoping to discover the secret lives of cats.
#
And he did. He discovered all sorts of marvelous things.
He
saw the same feline faces in his yard, in his neighbor's yard, at the
century-old schoolhouse down the street. He realized that each cat had
not only its own routine, but shared a neighborhood routine as well.
Mornings
began at his house, with a treat of kibble and soft food, followed by a
trek to the dumpster behind the local Burger King, then a long rest
under the bleachers at the old school.
The ground beneath his
neighbors' cars and his own Ford pickup served as sites for daily
conferences. A house three blocks away provided an afternoon snack,
usually followed by dumpster diving at a local fish market and the
nearby Dairy Queen.
On warm days, the cats tromped down to the
wetlands for drinks from the springs that prevented anyone from
building behind Homer's property.
He would have blessed those springs, if he hadn't seen something curious.
On
the earliest photos the springs looked like a primeval swampland. Cats,
due to their low-to-the-ground perspective, took the most amazing
photographs. Apparently the wetlands at dawn (or was it dusk?) had
ground fog, which made everything opaque and surreal.
The swamp
(he didn't know what else to call it) had tree limbs and branches and
sticks rising from the muck, all hidden by the ghostlike grayness of
the fog. To his surprise, the cats didn't drink from the water here.
They sat in front of it—all five of them—as if they were watching
something.
Subsequent photos on different days showed something
that resembled an elephants' graveyard. What he'd initially thought
were tree branches were bones sticking out of the mud. Some of the
bones were covered in moss. Others had ivy growing around them like
large green cobwebs.
The ivy gave him some perspective, but not
enough. He couldn't tell what kind of bones these were. Cats are small
creatures and the cameras took photographs from that small perspective.
Bones which seemed huge in some photographs seemed tiny in others.
Those
others, he soon realized, were taken from some kind of height. Either
that particular feline photographer had climbed a tree or it sat on a
bank or it watched from a stump.
Homer found it curious that
the cats never got close to the elephants' graveyard. They always sat
back. But as the weeks went on and the photographs accumulated, Homer
realized that the graveyard was a spring haunt, just like the school
had been in the winter.
The cats weren't interested in food; they were observing something.
And that intrigued him.
Because cats, like humans, had a scientific turn of mind.
#
He
had noticed that scientific frame of mind from the day he brought home
his first kitten. Cats not only studied things, they made a study of
things. One of his cats decided to probe the mysteries of ice cubes—how
they turned into water, whether they could be carried, why they
sometimes shattered. Another spent an entire week learning how the
front doorknob turned. Eventually that cat learned how to turn the knob
herself; fortunately she never did figure out the necessity of pulling
the door open.
Or maybe opening the door didn't interest her.
The front door was the only one with a cut-glass doorknob. It refracted
light. The cat may have been more interested in the prisms inside the
knob than in using that knob to go outside.
Homer never
mentioned these thoughts to anyone else. He often felt as if he put too
much time into his cats. And then he discovered that German man's Web
site, and realized he was not alone in his obsession with cat thought.
But,
Homer would have wagered, the German man did not have an entire second
computer devoted to the photographs that the cats created. Nor, Homer
suspected, did the German man spend as much time trying to figure out
what his cats were thinking as they stared—not just at the elephants'
graveyard, but also from underneath cars or beside dumpsters.
The cats seemed involved in a part of life that Homer had somehow missed.
As
the spring went on, he realized the cats were studying the elephants'
graveyard the same way that his indoor cat had studied that doorknob.
They just hadn't gotten to the touching stage yet.
He would know
when they did. Daily, he got a series of photos of the backs of pink
tongues, lapping water from a puddle or a stream or a bowl that someone
had placed outside. He would get photographs of near-dead prey
wriggling out of a mouth.
But he saw nothing like that near the bones.
Only cats, watching the swampy water as if it held the secret of the universe.
Then, one Sunday afternoon, everything changed.
A
little white female he called Mata Hari, because of her attractiveness
to the males (even after she was fixed) and her tendency to wander off
on dangerous and secretive missions of her own, brought home a defining
photograph.
Every day, she sat in the same spot near the swamp.
The little camera around her neck took a variation of the same
photograph—a bone fragment sticking out of the primordial ooze.
Sometimes the fragment was brown with mud and sometimes it looked
almost white. But over time, he realized it was the same fragment,
which meant she sat in the same spot daily, studying something that she
felt was important.
Only that Sunday, the fragment was covered by a human hand.
The hand loomed in the photograph, the fingers dominating the scene.
They
rose upward toward the sky, the ridges of the knuckles visible against
the blackness of the muck. Dried cuts marred the flesh along the back,
and the fingernails—clipped short—had dirt embedded all the way down to
the skin.
Mata Hari had brought home ten pictures of the hand,
which meant she spent fifteen minutes contemplating it, twice as long
as she usually spent at that spot. The cat had managed to get several
different angles, and oddly, each was farther away than the previous
one.
The hand put the other bones in perspective. He returned to
his photo files, opened the relevant pictures next to the photo of the
hand, and compared.
His breath caught. What had seemed like
animal bones—small and fragile, old, abandoned, like elephants in their
graveyard—were not. They were too large. He had been more accurate with
the foggy photos when he'd thought of the bones as branches and logs.
These
bones were large. No domesticated animal, except maybe a Husky or a
Rottweiler, would have bones like that. Nor would most of the wild
animals around here. This area was too populated for bears, even with
the wetlands below. Maybe a deer or two had died down there, but
certainly not a bunch of them. The coyotes were the size of raccoons,
and barely larger than the cats, and there were no wolves here.
Which left only one other creature that could have provided the bones.
Humans.
And the latest victim had just arrived.
#
He needed to know if any of the other cats had photographs of the hand.
He got up and peered out his window. Two of the other cats had returned.
He
stepped outside and removed the memory card from both cameras, careful
to put in a new card before he shut the cameras off. He'd tried night
photos before, but the flash had scared the cat so badly that it had
run in circles, screaming.
He hadn't known cats could scream.
He gave each cat some pets and a small treat, then went back inside and downloaded the photographs.
In
every bunch, a handful were duds—blurs, unrecognizable objects, a paw
in front of the lens. These two batches were no different. But he set
aside the blurs and unrecognizable objects this time, deciding they
might be useful.
Then he scanned the images until he got to the swamp.
These
cats had come to the graveyard as well, and at about the same time as
Mata Hari. In fact, one of the unrecognizable objects might have been
her haunch as the other cat sniffed her in greeting.
These cats
stayed even farther away. He found photographs of an entire arm,
covered in bruises, and a bit of shoulder. His hands were shaking as he
magnified the images.
The arm and hand had clearly come from the
same place. He could see the bone fragment, the moss-covered bones, the
ivy-¬covered bones, and the brackish water. Now he knew why the cats
didn't drink here.
He wasn't even sure why they came—they were
well fed, so they didn't need to eat decaying flesh. Were they watching
something decompose? Or were they hunting the rats or some other
creature that frequented the wetlands?
For the first time since he started this experiment, he felt frustrated that he couldn't ask.
And then he found the money shot.
Or
what would have been a money shot had he been a photographer along the
lines of Weegee—the man who photographed corpses at crime scenes.
This
shot was worthy of Weegee as well: a naked woman, her back arched, arms
and legs splayed over what he had once thought were branches, her face
turned toward the camera.
His shaking grew worse as he magnified
this image. Her face had no real expression. The mouth was open,
battered and bloody, the nose flattened, the cheeks covered in either
blood or dirt.
But the eyes got to him. The eyes didn't look
human. They looked like something out of a bad horror movie—filmed over
with white, unfocused, and empty. It wasn't even fair to say that they
were staring, because they weren't. There was no intelligence behind
them, no thought, no anything.
He leaned away from the computer
and frowned. Something about the image was familiar. At first he
thought it was simply the way the woman had fallen, and then he
realized what it was.
She had come to his door. Four days ago.
She'd parked her SUV against the curb, the windows open, her
daughter—who was ten, maybe eleven—crying inside.
The woman had
knocked, and he almost didn't answer because she looked so angry. But
when he pulled the door open, she smiled at him.
"My daughter is
selling candy so that her band can go to the regional tournaments." She
opened the box. "Would you like to buy something?"
He didn't
look at the candy. He looked at the crying girl in the SUV, wondering
what her story was. He could probably guess. She didn't want to sell
the candy, but her mother had tried to force her. And when that hadn't
worked, the mother decided to do it herself.
"She's shy," her mother said, as if confirming his thoughts.
He
couldn't condone this kind of behavior, not from an adult. He hated
bullying in all its forms, having been a victim of it when he was young
and skinny and too nerdy for his own good.
But the woman made
him nervous, and he couldn't say what he wanted to, which was, Let your
daughter be herself. Not everyone is a good salesperson. Or good with
people. Or even good one-on-one.
Instead, he struggled with, "N-N-No th-th-thanks."
And shut the door.
The
woman remained on the porch for a moment, as if she couldn't believe
he'd been that rude, and then she'd walked back to the SUV. She'd
tossed the box of candy at her poor daughter before getting inside and
driving away.
If she was here, in this swamp, somewhere in the neighborhood, where was the little girl?
He
was reaching for the phone before he even realized what he was doing,
and dialed 911. When the operator answered, he said, "I think there's a
dead body in my neighborhood."
And that brought the detectives to his door.
#
They were in plain clothes, but they showed him badges. He recognized both detectives from the local paper.
They
had been working on some kind of task force, and they had their
pictures in the Metro section often enough that he could almost
remember their names.
Fortunately for him, he didn't need to. They introduced themselves.
The
man with the silver hair trimmed so close to his neck that it looked
like whiskers was Detective DeCarovich. His partner, a woman who looked
like she could bench-press Homer without any effort, was Detective
Ortiz.
They came inside Homer's house without invitation, and
wanted to know where he had seen the body. He brought them the
photograph, which he'd printed out on his laser printer, and they asked
again where he had seen her.
So he had to explain—slowly because
his stutter acted up—about the cat cameras and the experiment. The
detectives stared at him as if he were crazy, so he finally waved them
over to the computer and showed them the German man's home page,
complete with instructions on how to build the camera.
Ortiz was
the one who finally realized that Homer was serious. She turned to him,
her dark eyes wide and stunned. "You did this with your own cats?"
Then
she turned toward Princess, his pampered white Persian, who looked like
she had starred in the Fancy Feast commercials. Princess was lying on
top of the red satin pillow he had placed on his couch as a joke, and
she looked about as indolent as a cat could get.
"Not her," he said. "The outdoor cats. The more or less feral ones."
DeCarovich
crossed his arms. He clearly didn't believe Homer and might even think
Homer had something to do with the woman's death.
Homer crooked a finger. "Come with me," he said. "But quietly."
He
led them into the kitchen, which overlooked the back forty.
Fortunately, Mata Hari was in her afternoon spot, on top of a rock near
an overgrown rhododendron, stretched out and sound asleep.
"See that box around her neck?" he said. "It has her camera in it. There are four other cats with cameras as well."
"Forgodsake,"
DeCarovich said and shook his head. He clearly wasn't impressed. He
acted more like a man who had thought he'd seen it all, only to be
surprised by something this weird. "Why would you do that?"
"Curiosity," Homer said. "I wondered what they do all day."
"Eat and sleep," Ortiz said.
"Actually, no," Homer said. "They're quite active . . ."
And
then he let his voice trail off. The detectives weren't interested in
his cats. They were interested in the photographs. DeCarovich was
looking at the dead woman again.
"You really don't know where this is," DeCarovich said.
"No," Homer said. "And I'm not even sure it's on my property. It could be anywhere in the neighborhood."
"Or farther," Ortiz said. "Cats can have a territory of twenty acres or more."
DeCarovich turned toward her as if she had suddenly gone as crazy as Homer.
She shrugged. "I grew up around cats."
DeCarovich
let out a small laugh, the kind a person used when he discovered he was
among people he thought beneath him. Homer had heard that laugh a lot
as a kid, and he didn't miss it.
His face heated, and his throat
tightened. The stutter would get even worse. He knew the symptoms. He
had to struggle just to start his next sentence, but he knew the
tricks: Don't get stuck on one word. Instead, recast your sentence into
something else.
"M-M-Maybe I can reconstruct where they go," he
said. He led the detectives back into his study so that he could open
the computer photo files. "I have d-d-days' worth of photos. Maybe
th-th-there are l-l-landmarks."
He called up the files and
started with the swamp and elephant-graveyard photos, working backwards
through each cat's imagery file. He wished now he hadn't thrown out
most of the blurred and unfocused photos. They might tell him something.
Ortiz
was leaning over his shoulder as he worked. DeCarovich walked through
the room, studying Homer's books and his framed awards.
"You wrote these?" he asked after a moment.
"Y-Y-Yes," Homer said.
"Science guy, huh?"
He wanted to go for a self-deprecating "kinda" but the "k" would give him trouble. He had to settle for another stammered "yes."
"I guess guys like you would do stuff like this. Experiments, huh?"
But
Homer was careful not to answer that vague a question. He still had the
sense DeCarovich believed he was involved in that woman's death.
"Th-Th-The p-p-pictures?"
"Yeah." DeCarovich looked at him.
Homer nodded. His throat had tightened so badly he knew he wouldn't be able to get out another sentence easily.
"Damn," Ortiz said beside him. "These cats go underneath everything."
They
did, too. Under leaves, between bushes, under rocks. There was no clear
trail, nothing recognizable, at least to human eyes.
"You actually think this guy's onto something?" DeCarovich asked, no longer trying to hide his contempt.
"I think we finally found the boneyard," Ortiz said, and Homer was the one who shuddered.
He
remembered the articles now. These detectives had just formed a task
force to investigate a series of missing-persons cases, all women in
their thirties who disappeared in broad daylight.
"Except we
didn't find it, not yet," Ortiz was saying. "These cats can't tell us
where it is and if we try to follow them, we'll make sure they never go
there again."
"We'll have to do a grid search," DeCarovich said.
"And destroy a lot of physical evidence along the way." Ortiz sighed. "At least now we know what happened to Ann Kemmel."
"Th-Th-That's the woman?" Homer asked.
Ortiz nodded.
"Wh-Wh-What about her daughter?"
Both
detectives stared at him as if he had just confessed. He swallowed and
forced himself to tell them about the incident with the candy bars and
the SUV.
"F-F-Four days ago," he said.
"That's when she disappeared," DeCarovich said. "Only her kid wasn't with her. Her kid was at home the whole time."
Homer shook his head. "I saw her. She was in th-th-the c-c-car."
"How would you know?" DeCarovich asked.
"She was c-c-crying real hard." He felt his face get even redder. "I th-th-thought her mother was b-b-being mean."
DeCarovich's eyes narrowed, but Ortiz didn't seem to notice. She turned toward him.
He raised his eyebrows. "I thought we were too easy on her."
"I can't believe she was lying," Ortiz said. "She must have seen something. I'll bet she was scared."
DeCarovich shook his head. "She was just another—"
He waved his hand at Homer, and Homer wondered what word DeCarovich left out.
"She st-st-st . . ." Homer couldn't say the word. He never could under stress. "She has a speech d-d-defect?"
"Like you," DeCarovich said.
Homer
nodded. He had been right, then. The mother had been treating her like
his mother had treated him, believing that he could overcome his
problems with just a little more hard work.
"She was in the car," Ortiz said. "She was lying."
"Lying,"
Homer said slowly so that he wouldn't stutter anymore, "makes a speech
problem worse. Any stress, even small stress, will make the problem
worse."
He got it out without a single mistake. His cheeks grew even hotter.
DeCarovich frowned at him, but it was no longer the frown of the impatient.
It was a frown of consideration.
"You think the kid saw something?" he asked Homer, and Homer got that sense again that DeCarovich still suspected him.
Homer's throat tightened, so he shrugged.
"I'll bet she did," Ortiz said. "We need to reinterview."
"With the photographic evidence." DeCarovich picked up the printout. "Can we keep this?"
Homer nodded.
"She's going to be just as afraid of us as she was the last time," Ortiz sighed.
Homer knew what she was imagining. Trying to interview a child whose mouth continually betrayed her would be difficult at best.
Ortiz
took the photograph from DeCarovich. "Too bad you can't put a video
camera on those cats. Then we could just find the body and the
evidence. There's bound to be some if he's been using that spot for the
past five years."
Five years. Homer started. They were
investigating five years' worth of disappearances? Five years of
dumping dead women into a primeval swamp?
"It c-c-can't be t-t-too cl-cl-close," Homer said. "We'd smell it. Me and the neighbors. Bodies . . ."
He didn't have to finish his sentence. Ortiz was nodding.
"You're right," she said. "We need a topo map."
"You want wind charts too?" DeCarovich was being sarcastic.
"I'm serious," Ortiz said. "If we can find the body without talking to that kid—"
"We have to talk to her," DeCarovich said. "We have to know why she lied."
Homer knew DeCarovich was right. But the two thoughts—the video camera and that little girl—gave him an idea.
"D-D-Don't show her the photograph," he said. "She won't be able t-t-to t-t-talk after th-th-that."
"Listen, buddy," DeCarovich said, but Ortiz put a hand on his arm.
Homer
made himself take a deep breath. "What I meant was I might b-b-be able
t-t-to modify the c-c-cameras. Instead of every ninety seconds, I might
be able t-t-to have images every five."
"Which would just show
us more leaves and trees and rocks," DeCarovich said. "Nice try, but
that's going to give us more of the same."
"No," Ortiz said. "It won't. It might show us where the cats go into the woods. Can you set up a time stamp too?"
"Yes," Homer said. "If we know where they go in, the angle of the sun might tell us what direction they're going."
He realized after he spoke that he was no longer nervous. He liked the female detective. She didn't intimidate him.
"These cats aren't looking up," DeCarovich said. "We can't see sunlight."
"Through the leaves, on the ground, we'll get some stuff. C'mon, Rick," Ortiz said. "You've done similar things with shadow."
"I still think we do a grid."
"Let's give Mr. Ziff a chance," Ortiz said. "His cats might help us."
DeCarovich snorted. "Like they can do that."
"They already have," Ortiz said. "They gave us Ann Kemmel, and a reason to reinterview her daughter."
DeCarovich glared at Homer. "You get one day for this nonsense. One day. After that, we do a grid."
As
if Homer had a stake in not having a grid search. He just wanted them
to find this poor woman's body. And figure out what else was down in
that swamp.
Near his house.
Someone had been dumping bodies near his house. Near the safest place he knew.
He shuddered.
"Would you like a c-c-copy of th-th-the photo files?" he asked Ortiz.
"Yeah,"
she said. "We have some computer whizzes who might find some answers
here. And give me the URL for that German Web site, so they know this
is legit."
He nodded, made copies onto a CD, and wrote down the Web address for her.
She
tapped him on the arm as a thank-you. "This is kinda cool," she said,
holding up the CD in the jewel case he'd given her. "Who knew that cats
did such interesting things?"
"Yeah," DeCarovich said as he led her out the door. "Like staring at dead bodies. Who knew?"
#
Homer
couldn't let DeCarovich's sarcasm and attitude get to him, even though
it brought back not only Homer's high-school days, but his teaching
days as well. More than once, he'd caught his students in the hall,
making fun of his stutter. Often they were the students from his 101
Physics class, and it was right after the unit on particles.
He
had no trouble discussing electrons and protons or baryons and mesons.
But quarks. Quarks caught him every time. That "ka" sound tripped him
up and it got worse the longer he taught. The closer he got to the
discussion of elementary particles, the more difficulty he would have.
Just
like that little girl. He wished he could interview her. His stutter
would put her at ease. She would be able to tell him what she saw or
didn't see. She would be able to tell him how she survived when her
mother hadn't.
He sighed and turned to the project at hand. He
was glad he still had that sixth camera, the one the old tom had fought
off. Homer was able to experiment with it. He couldn't set the timer
for five seconds—it simply didn't work—but it could go off every ten
seconds.
The problem was that it used a lot of energy when it
took that many pictures. He found some larger memory cards, but he
didn't have adequate batteries, and it was too late to buy any new ones.
So he would have to pick his times, hoping he got the right part of the day.
Then
he checked his cupboards. He had a lot of canned salmon and tuna. He
would need it. He would have to catch each of his feral photographers,
remove their cameras, modify them, and ¬reattach them. Then he'd have
to catch the group again tomorrow and remove the memory card.
Twenty-four hours really wasn't enough.
But it was all he had.
#
By dawn, he had replaced the cameras on all of the cats.
Mata
Hari was the first to return. She brought him a lovely series of
photographs of the undercarriage of every car on the street. Just as
the memory of the camera filled, she had crawled under a fence near the
school.
He wondered if that was where she would go to get to the swamp, but he had no way of knowing.
He removed the camera, reset its automatic timer to begin shooting later the following day, but knew it would do no good.
DeCarovich
would hold to the twenty-four-hour rule. The man probably still
suspected Homer. Homer knew that by now, his fingerprints would have
been removed from the jewel case to see if he had a criminal record (he
did not) and the computer-crimes unit would make sure that he hadn't
dummied up the German Web site. They would find that he hadn't faked
the Web site and that his cats had been taking pictures now for more
than a month.
DeCarovich would also check Homer's work history,
his phone usage (which was almost nil), and his bank records, which
would probably surprise the detective. Popular science books made
money—even if men like DeCarovich weren't interested.
Although
Homer didn't know how someone like DeCarovich couldn't be interested.
His job was all about science. Just on this case alone, they'd be using
topographic maps and sunlight angles; they'd be removing fingerprints
and studying computer records; they'd probably be using DNA to identify
what was left of the other bodies.
Just by that quick reckoning,
Homer figured their work would touch on geography, physics, computer
science, biology, and chemistry. And all of it—even the deductive
reasoning that DeCarovich was probably using to continue to blame
Homer—required a meticulousness that only the best scientists could
achieve.
So Homer had to hope that the other cats would bring him something, something recognizable.
Something good.
#
The
answers he sought came, surprisingly, from Einstein—a small, shy male
with a shock of white hair over his tiny furrowed brow. Einstein had
been difficult to conquer: It had taken weeks to catch him to neuter
him, and weeks after that to regain his trust. That he wore a camera at
all was amazing; that he actually showed
Homer the trail to the body was a shock.
Homer
thought Einstein was one of the few cats who didn't make a daily
pilgrimage to the swamp. Apparently he did go, just didn't stay as long
as the others, and so sometimes he didn't get a good photograph. Also,
Einstein was the cat whose photos were most likely to blur because he
ran almost everywhere.
But on this morning he meandered toward
the swamp through the hole in the fence that Mata Hari had found,
around a stone with the year 1908 carved into the top, and then down an
embankment into a copse of trees.
Einstein actually followed a
tiny trail. Homer hadn't noticed it on the previous shots because it
looked like a bare line in the earth, nothing spectacular. But on the
ten-second shots, it was clear that the bare line was connected to
other bare lines—a rabbit path that wound around the 1908 rock and into
the trees.
There he saw a moss-covered old-growth stump from
some ancient logging, and several late-blooming irises in front of a
ruined log that Einstein crawled on top of to peer into the swamp.
The
body looked worse today; less like the woman Homer had met and more
like a corpse. Einstein had gotten several good pictures of it, and
Homer didn't study any of them.
Instead, he copied the entire memory card onto a CD, printed the files, and called Ortiz.
She wasn't at the station. The dispatch patched him into her cell. She answered on the fourth ring, sounding annoyed.
Homer identified himself, then said, "I think I know where the path is."
"Thank God," she said. "We'll be right there."
And
they were. Within fifteen minutes, they had parked in front of his
house. DeCarovich looked less dyspeptic today, but Ortiz seemed
frustrated.
They had been talking to the little Kemmel girl when
Homer called, although "talking," DeCarovich said, "isn't really the
word for it."
Homer didn't ask about it. He figured they'd tell
him if they wanted to. It wasn't his investigation, after all. He was
just helping with one small part.
He put the printed photographs
in a line, with little gaps between them. Next to them, he put a map of
this section of the neighborhood.
"See this?" he said, pointing to the fence. "That's part of this house."
He pointed to a house not far from the school.
"And
this rock?" he said. "It's behind the school. They christened it last
year as part of a rededication. It's been there since the school was
built."
He had highlighted what he believed to be the path leading into the trees.
"I figure you can use the landmarks—the irises, the old-growth stump, the log—to find her."
"You didn't look?" DeCarovich asked.
Homer
frowned at him. No one in his right mind would investigate this on his
own, not when he understood the science of trace and the importance of
keeping a crime scene uncontaminated.
"No," Homer said. "I figure th-th-that's your job."
The
stutter surprised him. He thought he was confident enough in his map
not to tighten up. But that hint of a threat in DeCarovich's voice had
been enough to bring back the stutter.
"We need to go down there," DeCarovich said.
"Let's send a team," Ortiz said, studying the photos.
"Let's not waste taxpayer dollars until we know we're in the right place."
For
once, Homer agreed with DeCarovich. They didn't say much more to him.
They took the printed photographs, the map, and the CD, and then they
left.
He felt at loose ends. Despite his sensible thoughts about
the crime scene, he did want to investigate it himself. He wished he
were more involved.
After all, his cats had been the ones to
discover what Ortiz had called the body dump. If only they were trained
cats. He could send them down the path to the swamp with cameras around
their neck and watch as the detectives officially found Ann Kemmel's
body.
But he couldn't assign the cats anything, and he could
only view what they wanted to look at. Mostly, all they cared about was
the undercarriage of cars.
Then he frowned and headed toward his
computer. The cats loved the undercarriages of SUVs more than actual
cars. SUVs had big tires and a wider frame, but a lower undercarriage
than a truck. That gave the cat a lot of places to hide and even more
places to visit with little feline friends, all in the comfort of a
shady spot on the street.
But one photo had come to mind. A
photo taken by yet another cat—Galileo—somewhere around the time of the
candy-selling incident. It had been a blur photo, and Homer had tossed
it, but he hadn't yet cleared off the memory card.
He grabbed
all the cards that needed clearing and started cycling through them one
by one. He didn't find any more images of the path to the swamp—he knew
he wouldn't—but he did find several of a parked SUV with unfamiliar
tires.
And then he found the photograph he was looking for. Two
photographs, actually. One of a skinny leg with a single pink girl's
tennis shoe about to touch the pavement—and another of a pink-and-blue
blur disappearing behind a bench across the street.
He closed
his eyes, trying to remember what that crying girl had been wearing
that afternoon. He just remembered her face, splotchy and humiliated,
her eyes swollen from all the tears she'd shed. He could also remember
the SUV, with its blue and silver metallic sides.
Silver, like the side where the pants leg brushed.
He
opened his eyes and studied the next two frames. He didn't see any more
pink-and-blue blurs, but he did know where that bench was. It was
several doors down from his house, right across the street from his
surly neighbor, the man who had rolled his eyes when he'd heard the
ferocity of Homer's stutter.
Homer went cold.
He wondered if he should call Ortiz. He didn't want to bother her, not when she was looking at the crime scene.
Instead, he opened a file on his computer, looked at the neighborhood map he'd downloaded earlier, and studied the wetlands.
They
not only ran behind his house, they ran the entire length of this side
of the street, ending (or beginning, depending on your point of view)
at the century-old schoolhouse.
Anyone who wanted to could
carry a body across their own personal back forty into the wetlands and
walk through the overgrown wooded area to the swamp without being seen.
No
wonder DeCarovich had suspected Homer. Homer fit all kinds of profiles.
He was reclusive. He lived alone. He had access to the so-called body
dump. He even inserted himself in the investigation.
His hands
were shaking again. He wasn't sure if he had important information or
not. The two detectives were still having trouble talking to the
daughter. But Homer had evidence she left the SUV on her own and ran
away.
Before or after her mother had disappeared?
He
logged onto the Internet and looked up what he could find on the
disappearance of Ann Kemmel. She only rated a few paragraphs in the
paper on the day after her disappearance. But those few paragraphs were
enough.
She and the SUV were missing.
She was last seen
here on his quiet block in the middle of the afternoon on the day she
disappeared, selling band candy for her daughter.
Just like he'd said.
He
sank deeper into his chair. His mouth was dry. He was innocent. Ortiz
knew that or she would have confiscated his computer. They would have
come into his house with a warrant.
Or maybe they were waiting to find the body.
Maybe they needed just a little more for probable cause.
#
A
knock on the door snapped him out of his reverie. His heart was
pounding and his face was already flushed. He knew he looked guilty.
For all his caution, he had done so much wrong.
It would only be a matter of time before someone would come to arrest him.
He managed to leave his study, walk across his living room, and peer through the glass in the door.
Ortiz stood there, arms folded behind her back. There was no sign of DeCarovich.
When she saw Homer, she nodded. She didn't smile.
Here
it was: fair warning. She had come to ask if she could search his
house. He would tell her to get a warrant. He would use his small
fortune to hire the best criminal defense attorney in the state. He
might even get his publisher's publicist to get him some interviews on
his good Samaritan deed gone wrong.
He pulled open the door.
"We found her." Ortiz sounded tired. "And the others, most likely. I just wanted you to know. Your cats were right."
He waited for her to say the next part, the part about searching his house or getting a warrant. But she didn't.
She seemed to be done.
"Wow," he said. "The photos worked?"
"There
was a cat path," she said. "The lab techs are down there now. It's a
mess. But no one would have smelled it. Too far from houses. Too far
from that school."
"The cats had to know."
"The cats must have smelled something decaying, but it didn't interest them. None of them are starving."
He smiled in spite of himself. Her comment had echoed his thoughts.
And besides, she'd seen his outdoor cats. They clearly weren't starving.
"Um," he said. "I was wondering one other thing. Th-th-that girl? Did she run away from her mother?"
Ortiz frowned at him. "How did you know?"
"I th-th-think I found some more pictures."
She
came inside without asking, but she did take off her shoes. They had a
swampy smell—or maybe she did—the beginnings of decay.
Princess and his other indoor cat, King, came out of the bedroom, sniffing the air. So that smell did attract them.
"I
think I found pictures of the SUV," he said, and told her about the
underbellies of cars, how cats socialized there, and how much they
seemed to like a shady spot on the road.
"We were talking to her when you called," Ortiz said. "Poor kid. She's going to need therapy for the rest of her life."
He looked at the detective. She was already peering at the photographs on his computer.
"Why?"
"She
says her mother went inside a house to sell band candy, and she ran
away. She went to her grandmother's, but her grandmother brought her
home."
"And no one saw the mother again."
"That's right,"
Ortiz said. "Missing Persons wasn't even that interested since the SUV
was gone too. They figured the mother had run off."
He pointed out the skinny leg, the pink shoes, the blur of blue-and-pink across the street.
"And you know where this is, don't you?" Ortiz said.
He nodded.
She grinned at him. "Too bad we can't put those cats of yours on payroll."
"You wouldn't like them as employees," he said. "They go their own way."
And
it wasn't until after she left, with more printed photographs and more
files on CD, that he realized he had had an entire conversation with a
woman he liked and hadn't stammered.
At least, not much.
He thought of it as a victory.
He didn't realize it was also the beginning of an odyssey.
#
Ortiz
and DeCarovich got a search warrant for the surly neighbor's house and
found blood in the basement, and all sorts of other grisly things. The
man had done exactly what Homer had hypothesized: killed the women
(after abusing them sexually), then waited until dark and carried their
bodies through the wetlands to the wider swampy area, dumping them
there. Sometimes he would move their cars before he killed them,
sometimes afterwards.
DeCarovich believed that there was a car dump like there was a body dump, but so far, no one had found it.
Ortiz
kept Homer apprised of all of it. She even visited him a few times,
always asking about his cats. Finally she told him she wanted to go to
dinner with him, but she couldn't, not until the trial was over.
The trial. He hadn't thought of it. The grand jury, the testimony. The cross-examination.
He could already see what was coming:
He
was a central part of the case—actually, his cats were—and he would
feel like a failing professor all over again. Stammering his way
through his stories, wishing that he could find a way to mitigate the
talking part, and still explain—meticulously—his role in the arrest.
He
decided to write out his testimony, to plan it, detail by detail. And
as he did, he threaded the photographs through the text.
It only took him a week to figure out what he had.
A true-crime book.
An unusual true-crime book.
No one else had ever written anything like it.
He
summoned up his courage and showed it to his agent. She loved it. She
proposed a few other books as well—one just a book of photography by
his cats. She showed him a curious coffee-table book from several years
before of cats painting (actually just sweeping their paint-covered
paws over walls and floors) and told him it had been a bestseller.
He
agreed to do it all, but prosecutors wanted him to wait until his
testimony was finished so that he wouldn't be accused of helping the
police for money.
He wondered how anyone would think he had
rigged his cameras to his feral cats for money, but he knew that people
could believe anything.
So he waited. And he testified. And he did feel humiliated.
Until
Detective Ortiz—her first name was Susan—took him out for a celebratory
steak dinner. She had praised him, called him brilliant, and even said
he was interesting.
He didn't feel interesting.
But he liked her attention.
He liked her.
He
was so glad that the case had wrapped up quickly. He had been a star
witness—not the star witness, though. That proved to be the little
girl, with her father at her side, pointing out the man she'd last seen
with her mother.
The surly neighbor, who no longer rolled his eyes at people who stuttered.
They had convicted him, two of the people he held in contempt. They had ended his life on the outside.
Two stammerers—two momentary stars—and five wandering cats, reluctantly sharing their secret lives bit by tiny bit.
###
© 2008 Kristine Kathryn Rusch
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