He’d just made it, before the sirens blasted, had dragged the body into the car, keeping to the walk so as not to step in the soft garden dirt. Pulling the heavy man along, sweating from nerves. But he’d made it, got the body out of there. And now, a little while longer and he’d have disposed of it. Then to take care of the girl. Not likely she’d ever ID him, kid that age and all, but even so it might be better not to push his luck.

T HE SCREAM OF sirens had awakened Joe Grey’s tabby lady; Dulcie slipped out from beneath the flowered comforter and sat up in bed beside her human housemate and lifted one dark striped paw, listening to the high woo woo of an ambulance followed by the urgent wail of the police units. Lashing her tail, her sharp ears forward, she was as alert as any ambulance-chasing lawyer. Though her intentions were less greedy, she was just as hot for the excitement of the hunt. The screaming stopped somewhere on Ocean at the north end of the village. Somewhere, she thought, near Joe Grey’s house. Shaking free of the quilt, trying not to disturb Wilma, she was off the bed and up the hall, a dark tabby streak heading for the kitchen and her cat door, when she heard Wilma stir behind her, heard the mattress give as she sat up in bed.

“You don’t have to chase every ambulance and cop car that leaves the station, Dulcie.” Wilma’s voice was hoarse from sleep, but alert enough to give her hell. Her annoyance brought Dulcie padding dutifully back to the bedroom, her ears back, tail lashing.

Her housemate sat clutching the quilt around her. The woodstove’s cozy fire was long dead, and their bright bedroom was bone-chillingly cold.

“I just…” Dulcie began. “It sounds like it’s near Clyde and Joe’s house. I have to go and see,” she said reasonably.

“Feline hearing is amazing. There are dozens and dozens of houses and shops near Clyde ’s house. Can you tell me the exact address?”

“You don’t need to be sarcastic,” Dulcie hissed. “You’re getting as testy as Clyde.”

Wilma smiled. “I’m sorry. I guess that was rude.”

“I guess.”

Wilma’s long silver hair hung loose from its usual ponytail, flowing down over her flowered flannel nightgown. She looked a long time at Dulcie. “Guess I still have a case of nerves, after the kidnapping.”

“I know,” Dulcie said gently, jumping up on the bed to rub against her. When Wilma had been kidnapped a few months earlier, it had seemed the end of the world to Dulcie. The dark-striped tabby stared into Wilma’s face. “Why don’t you buy another police scanner? That was the only thing missing, when Cage Jones broke in here. If we had one now, we wouldn’t have these arguments. We’d know what’s happening on the street!”

“What difference would it make? You’d go anyway. You know Max seemed suspicious when I bought that one. As if, why did I really want it? You know that’s why…”

But before Wilma finished, Dulcie had escaped, racing away up the hall and through the kitchen, and plunging out her cat door.

Behind her, Wilma sighed and lay down, pulling the quilt close around her. No point in trying to stop the hardheaded tabby; Dulcie would have her way, and they both knew it.

Fleeing across the yard through Wilma’s lush winter flowers, Dulcie sped across the empty street and up a pine tree to the rooftops, then ran like a streak for the village, hitting little more than the high spots. She guessed she couldn’t fault Wilma for worrying. Wilma, as a retired probation officer, could not be fooled about the dangers the cats faced when snooping into police matters-she understood very well the compulsion that drew the three cats to the scene of a crime and also drew them, with stubborn commitment, to track the thief or killer, to join with law enforcement using their own special talents of scent detection and anonymity. Wilma understood but that didn’t keep her from worrying.

Leaping up a steep, shingled peak and down into a gust of cold wind, Dulcie had no doubt that Joe Grey and the kit were already at the scene, summoned by the siren’s wails-she had no notion that it was Kit who had started the action when she called 911, but she wouldn’t have been surprised. She just prayed the problem was not at Joe’s house.

She came down from the roofs at the divided expanse of Ocean Avenue, raced across behind three parked police units making sure there was no approaching vehicle, and up a bottlebrush tree to the roof of the plaza. There, crouched on the cold, rounded tiles, she looked down on the whirling red lights. Cop cars all over the place, and the rescue vehicle was backed up onto the little walk that led between the first shops, two of its wheels in a flower bed crushing the bright cyclamens, its siren silent now, its rear door open.

Trotting across the roof of the one-story wing at the front, to where she could look down into the gardens, she was below the top of the village Christmas tree; its colored lights mingled now with the whirling red emergency lights. Directly below her, the paramedics and officers stood well back from the Christmas tree as Detective Dallas Garza photographed the scene. She saw and smelled blood, smelled death, but there was no body. She peered down into the emergency vehicle, and found it empty, and she flicked her ears, puzzled. No one would move a body until the coroner and detectives were finished with it.

Hunched at the edge of the roof, she could see no damage to the surrounding shops, as from vandalism; no shop window broken, no benches or small tables overturned. The Christmas tree didn’t seem to have been damaged. The oversize wooden toys were disarranged, but nothing looked broken or missing. Yet the stink of human death rose up to her sharply, making her flehmen and shiver. No clearer message was needed of what had come down here. But, where was the body?

And where were Joe Grey and Kit? They couldn’t have missed hearing sirens.

She watched Detective Garza taking pictures, moving carefully around the tree and then the surrounding area. As he stepped aside from where he’d been blocking her view, Dulcie studied the blood on the blue drop cloth. Bloodstains on the toys, too, on the rocking horse and on an oversize baby doll. Flehming at the stink, she listened to the cops’ shorthand remarks until, piece by piece, she put together some idea of what had happened here.

A disappearing dead man? And a live, frightened child who had also vanished? And then on the roof tiles she found the scent of Joe and Kit, where they had leaped into a tree, heading down into the gardens. They’d be down there now, the tabby thought, searching for the child just as were half a dozen officers, the beams of their flashlights swinging in and out among the shrubbery and tall flowers as the officers themselves kept carefully to the brick walks so as not to leave footprints or destroy evidence.

Peering over the edge of the roof, she watched Detective Garza begin to bag fibers and bits of bloody leaves. The bloody rocking horse was bagged along with the two bloodied, oversize toys and locked in a squad car. Dallas had already photographed half a dozen partial shoe prints and a clear tire mark in the dirt of the garden, and now he nodded to Eleanor Sand, to begin pouring plaster casts of these. There were three sets of footprints in the earth, and all appeared to be men’s shoes. So far, no prints of a child.

“If there really was a child,” Sand was saying, looking up at Garza from where she knelt, preparing a cast.

“This better not be a hoax,” Garza said. “If that analysis comes back as animal blood…”

“Was it the same informant?” Sand said.

Dallas nodded.

Sand just looked at him. “She wouldn’t do that, she wouldn’t lie to us. You know she wouldn’t.”

Dallas nodded and turned away. But he was still scowling, his square, Latino face drawn with anger, surely thinking of the cost of such a hoax, cost to the city for trained personnel coming out on such a call, to say nothing of the diversion of Molena Point’s police and rescue units from some other crime or serious incident. On this stormy December night, a diversion of their forces could, at the very worst, prove life threatening.