But the new female officer, Davis, was thorough. Joe had watched these uniforms work a crime scene so often that he felt like part of the force.

The trouble was, they didn't know this was a crime scene. It looked like an accident that could too easily have happened in this early, foggy dawn.

Now, with the road quiet again, the pups left him, racing down the hill and glancing worriedly behind them.

"Get back up here, get off the road. The ambulance will be coming back. What's with you two? What are you afraid of?"

They stared up at him, whining.

"Come on, dummies. Get up here. There's nothing here to scare you, nothing but maybe a stray cat in the grass." Nothing but a few rats and ground squirrels, and the half dozen stray cats that had taken up residence some days before, following the quakes, appearing suddenly, a clowder of thin, wild beasts so fearful they would run from a bird shadow swooping overhead. No pup could be afraid of them. Dulcie said humans who abandoned cats ought to be stripped naked and dropped without food-without money and credit cards-in the icy wilds of Tierra del Fuego, and see how they liked being abandoned.

Joe thought those cats had probably come from the trailer park, a transient human community of the less-affluent snowbirds who trekked out to California in the winter to escape the blizzards of the Midwest. Usually those people, if they brought pets along, took care of their animals, but once in a while you got some lowlifes.

But Dulcie said these cats were too terrified of humans to have ever lived with people. She thought they were feral cats, the products of several generations of strays, gone as wild as foxes.

He wondered what Dulcie would say about his dragging home the pups.

He could just see her green eyes blazing with amazement. Puppies, Joe? These aren't puppies, they're monsters.

Dulcie was not afraid of dogs-she could intimidate any dog in Molena Point and often did-but after their recent encounter with the black voodoo cat, she'd had enough of involvement with any fellow creature. And just then, having appropriated Clyde's backyard for her own purposes, she'd take a dim view of two giant puppies plunging around barking and whining and getting in her way.

For two weeks she had spent every daylight hour-it seemed to Joe-and most of her evenings, crouched atop Clyde's back fence within a mass of concealing maple leaves, peering into the windows of the Greenlaw mansion, which stood on the big double lot behind Clyde's cottage. Clyde called Dulcie's preoccupation, eavesdropping; he told her she'd grown unspeakably nosy even for a cat. But Dulcie, staring in through Lucinda Greenlaw's lace curtains, was convinced that something in the old Victorian house wasn't right.

"Of course something isn't right," Clyde had snapped at her. "Lucinda's husband just died. Lucinda's suddenly a widow. Of course life isn't right-don't you think she's grieving! Cats can be so unfeeling!"

"Why would she grieve?" Dulcie had hissed, her ears tight to her head, her green eyes fiery. "Shamas Greenlaw was nothing but a womanizer. Going off for weeks, leaving Lucinda with practically no money while he took his expensive trips, and every time with a different bimbo. Why would she grieve! She's lucky to be rid of him."

Dulcie didn't hold with the shades-of-gray school of moral behavior. Shamas Greenlaw had been sampling the herd, and Dulcie called it like it was.

Shamas had been dead for two weeks, drowned in a boating accident off Seattle-leaving his current squeeze on the boat with Shamas's nephew, Newlon Greenlaw; Shamas's cousin, Samuel Fulman; and Winnie and George Chambers, an older Molena Point couple. Probably, Dulcie said, leaving the girlfriend deeply grieving as she contemplated an end to the money Shamas had lavished upon her.

"Anyway," she'd told Clyde, "Lucinda is doing more than grieving. Something else is the matter."

"And how did you arrive at this very perceptive conclusion?"

"You don't need to be sarcastic," the little cat had hissed. "And I don't need to listen! If you're not interested in my opinion, Clyde Damen, then stuff it. I don't need to come in here and be insulted. I have my own home, which is far nicer and more pleasant than this bachelor horror." And she had stormed out through Joe's cat door and up the street, her striped tail lashing.

Joe had looked after her, grinning. But Clyde had sat at the kitchen table cradling his cold coffee, scowling and hurt; looking, that early morning, like a particularly unfortunate example of homelessness, a soul in need of extensive assistance, his short, dark hair sticking up every which way, his ancient jogging shorts threadbare and wrinkled, his sweatshirt sporting three holes where it had gotten caught in the washer. His expression, as he stared after Dulcie, was one of deep puzzlement.

Clyde could mouth off at Joe, and get just what he gave, and that was okay. But he didn't know how to respond when sweet little Dulcie snapped back at him.

It had taken Dulcie a long time, after she and Joe found they could speak, before she would talk to Clyde. Then, there had been a far longer interval of mutual good manners between cat and human, before Dulcie had the chutzpah to return Clyde's smart-mouthed remarks in kind.

Now, leaving the jungle-tall grass of Hellhag Hill, Joe called the pups to him for the last time as he crossed a narrow residential street, heading back among humans. He would not raise his voice again to give them a command until he was sheltered within his own walls. The pups bolted up to him, wagging and panting, happy to leave the wild slope.

"Idiots," he muttered. But maybe he understood their fear; sometimes when he crossed Hellhag Hill, the fur along his own back stood up as rigid as a punk haircut.

Joe didn't know what caused his unease, but once when he was hunting high atop Hellhag Hill, he'd imagined he heard voices beneath the earth, and that same night he'd dreamed that Hellhag Hill vanished from under his paws, the earth falling away suddenly into a black and bottomless cavern.

He had awakened mewling with fear, as frightened as a helpless kitten.

Ahead of him, one of the puppies stopped, sat down on the sidewalk, and began to scratch. The other pup copied him, nibbling at an itchy tail-causing Joe to itch all over, to imagine himself already flea-ridden, covered with hungry little freeloaders glad to move to fatter environs, parent and grandparent and baby fleas burrowing deep into his clean silver fur.

Hurrying through the village beside the pups, he saw the coroner's car heading out toward Highway One, and he wondered what the slim, bespectacled Dr. Bern would find. Around him, the village seemed very welcoming suddenly, very safe, the familiar little cottages tucked in among their old, twisted oaks and tall pines. Over the smell of sun-warmed geraniums came the lingering scents of bacon and pancakes and syrup.

Trotting past Molena Point's bright, tangled gardens and crowded shops, Joe was suddenly very thankful for this village. He would never admit that to Clyde, would never hint to Clyde how much he cherished Molena Point. Would never confess how glad he was to be away from the mean streets of San Francisco-an ignorant kitten trying to cadge a few bites of garbage, hiding from the bigger cats, always afraid, and cold, and mad at the world.

Suddenly, right now, Joe needed to be home. In his own safe, warm home.

Galloping eagerly in the direction of his cozy pad, he dodged the pups, who ran along grinning and panting as if their own salvation were surely near. Joe, racing up the sidewalk through blowing leaves and flashes of sunlight, wondered again: had those uniforms, up at Hellhag Canyon, seen the cut brake line?

Police Captain Max Harper needed to know about it, to know that that wreck had been no accident.