But that wasn’t the case, Dulcie knew. Kit placed the call, she thought, her predatory fires stirring. Where is Kit? Where’s Joe? She peered down again into the dark gardens.

Apparently the body had been taken away in the vehicle that had left its tire tracks in the garden. If that was so, it hadn’t been very smart. Didn’t the killer know the kind of evidence he was leaving? Or maybe he thought he’d gotten away clean. Dulcie was crouched to slip down into the gardens and sniff at the edges of the crime scene, see what kind of scent she could pick out, when Garza’s radio came to life: Officer Brennan’s voice. She paused, listening.

“I have the little girl. She seems all right. Hiding in that little pump house behind the dog fountain…I don’t want to drag her out, she’s scared as hell…You got a woman out there?”

Garza glanced at Eleanor, who was busy with pouring casts, then looked up toward the street, where Detective Davis was just coming around the corner. “Juana’s on her way,” he said shortly.

“Get a blanket,” the detective told Juana, nodding toward the rescue unit, which was closer than her squad car, “and hike on back to the fountain-the pump house-we’ve got a scared little girl hiding back there, apparently a witness.”

An EMT handed Juana a folded blanket; she tucked it under her arm and headed swiftly back between the plaza gardens. The square, dark-haired detective was in uniform, unlike Dallas, who was dressed in jeans and a wrinkled sweatshirt. Dulcie was crouched to race after her when, out front, a Chevy pickup pulled up and Chief Harper swung out, and again Dulcie waited, listening.

Max Harper was long and lean and hard-muscled, his thin leathery face sun-lined, his brown eyes watchful now, a cop’s eyes-but eyes that could laugh and look loving, particularly when he looked at his redheaded bride. He and Charlie had married when Charlie was in her thirties, Max the other side of forty. Charlie was Wilma Getz’s niece, and was just about the only family Wilma had left.

“Call to dispatch came from our snitch, from the woman,” Dallas told Max. “How the hell do they do that? This stuff gives me the creeps. How is one or the other always on the scene?”

Max said nothing. Dulcie knew their calls upset and worried the chief, whether from Joe or from her or Kit. And despite the fact that she often felt guilty for deceiving him, Dulcie had to smile at their delicious deception. The mystique for which cats were most admired was, for them, a fine and satisfying source of entertainment.

As far as the cats knew, Dulcie and Kit’s telephone voices were enough alike so that Harper and his two detectives, and the dispatchers, thought there was only one female snitch, along with the one male-but Joe Grey’s gravelly telephone voice was well known to a good many in the department, and Dulcie wondered sometimes if Joe’s harsh meow didn’t match the tomcat’s human words too closely.

Still, no cop seemed ever to have caught on. To believe in a talking cat would be just too far out for a fact-oriented law enforcement officer-unless they spoke directly with the cat, unless they confronted in-your-face proof.

Harper and Dallas had moved up the walk beyond the Christmas tree, Dallas filling him in on what had gone down, when Davis ’s voice came on the radio. She had the little girl, and was on her way to the hospital.

“She seems fine,” Juana said. “Cold and scared, but she doesn’t seem hurt. She hasn’t said a word. I’ll go straight to the children’s wing, and stay with her. She doesn’t need to be left with strangers. If she’s okay, how about I take her home with me for the night? She is so scared, Max.”

“Do it,” Max said. “Make sure the dispatcher knows. Tell Mabel to double the officers on the patrol around your condo.” Juana’s apartment was directly across the street from the station, which would contribute somewhat to the child’s security. Juana had bought the condo just last year, a small one-bedroom unit with a view of the village, and a deck large enough for a chaise, a comfortable wicker chair, and a few pots of flowers, and from which Juana could see the station.

Now, as the radio went silent, Dulcie leaped across the roof to where she could look down on the side street, where Juana’s police unit was pulling away from the plaza. Peering over, she saw Joe and Kit just below, half hidden in the bushes. They looked up at her, and scrambled up a bottlebrush tree to the roof. They smelled of little girl. All three cats, in an unaccustomed breach of vigilance, had missed the movement of the dark shadow in the shop across the street.

On the roof they settled down near the Christmas tree, their paws in the leafy gutter, watching Garza finish bagging evidence. And now with the bloodied toys removed, he retrieved his camera for some close-ups of the disturbance in the blue plastic dropcloth where it was rumpled and stained.

When he finished photographing, he began to lift additional particles from the plastic, tilting them into a clear bag, sealing that in an evidence bag and dropping it into the deep pocket of his sweatshirt with the bags of fiber and hair samples. The cats, looking beyond Garza, watched uniformed officers cordoning off the plaza with yellow crime-scene tape; and they looked at one another with a sudden sense of amazement.

It was daunting to see the officers of Molena Point PD doing a full crime-scene investigation without a victim, doing it on their word alone, on the word of a tortoiseshell cat.

But the evidence was there, and the blood was on its way to the lab. And now they had found the child who, if she would speak, was surely further proof of the snitch’s veracity.

When Garza had finished with the immediate scene, he and tall blond Eleanor Sand moved on into the gardens looking for footprints among the flower beds and bushes. The cats watched him photograph the child’s small footprints that led to the pump house, then photograph that refuge inside and out. Then Eleanor, who was slimmer, pushed as far as she could through the little door, to collect samples from where the child had hidden.

“We could collect samples for them,” Dulcie said wistfully, “if we had opposing thumbs.” The tabby imagined, not for the first time, the endless possibilities available when one had clever human hands.

“At least,” Joe said, “if they lift cat hairs in there, they’re legit.” The cats worried, often, about cat hairs at a crime scene where none should be found; cat hairs duly bagged could royally confuse a police investigation. Dulcie sometimes had nightmares of Max Harper confronting her, shaking a handful of tabby hairs in her face, demanding that she explain. She would wake mewling and clawing at the quilt, waking Wilma, who would hug her tight and tell her not to worry-but Wilma, herself, could offer no solution to the problem. She could only repeat that no cop would ever believe such a wild phenomenon as talking cats. Telephone-literate cat snitches. Cats addicted to the same adrenaline-high challenge of law enforcement that the cops themselves experienced.

When Eleanor backed out of the pump house, placing several small bags of evidence in her pocket, the two officers walked the length of the dark plaza using their lights to examine windows and doors, moving slowly along beside the small shops though Dallas had already walked the scene. The cats watched Garza post guards around the plaza and send the few remaining men back to their patrols, watched him leave in his own unit, heading for the department. When chief Harper left, the cats, with the scene cleared of human disturbance, spent more than an hour prowling the gardens, walking the scene themselves, in their own way, sorting through hundreds of scents-trying to identify them all, and to isolate the one fresh scent they didn’t recognize, trying against heavy odds to sort out the smell of the killer.