The cats watched Hyden and Anderson place the bones, one by one, in a long wooden box like a coffin, carefully packing each in folds of clean, soft paper. As horrifying as was this child's grave, Dulcie was heartened by the care with which the doctors handled the little skeleton, exhibiting not only skill and precision but respect for this little human who had so violently lost its life. She looked with distaste at the head wound that had possibly killed the child, though there could have been any number of soft flesh wounds that the doctors would never find. They watched as four officers erected two long tents over the site, and two more officers set up the spotlights on tall poles, running a hundred-foot drop cord into the lower apartment of the seniors' house. Dulcie looked at Joe and laid her paw on his.

"I have to talk to you. I couldn't tell you before. But now… with that little grave… Now I have to tell you." Her mutter was so low that no human could hear. Joe looked at her and twitched an ear, and for nearly the first time in two weeks, the two cats were easy with each other. Moving close together, they left the bushes and made their way up the garden, through the falling dark. And as they padded away from the seniors' house, they watched every shadow, listened to every tiniest sound, searching for the kit. They glanced back only once, down at the lower garden where the spotlights shone bright within the tents.

"Will they work all night?" Dulcie asked.

"Maybe. There could be more bodies, those guys are feverish to find out."

"What kind of person would murder a little child?"

"Maybe there is just the one child, maybe it wasn't a murder, maybe an accident, and whoever caused it panicked. Buried the child and ran."

"Maybe," Dulcie said doubtfully. And she took off through the tangled neighborhood gardens, then scrambled up a vine to the rooftops, Joe racing close beside her. And they headed, without discussing the matter, for the courthouse tower, where, from its high platform, they could see nearly all of the village.

12

Galloping across the peaks and shingles, swerving to the edges of the roofs, the cats peered over, searching the darkening streets for the kit. Dodging between stone chimneys and roof gardens, they scanned the alleys and the courtyards below them. They saw no cats at all, not one. Skirting third-floor penthouses with their tiled stairways and jutting dormers, they peered into windows blinded by drawn curtains or revealing empty rooms. They gained the narrow steps that spiraled up the courthouse tower, raced up thinking that they might, from the tower's high parapet, see Kit, a small speck on the streets or roofs below.

In this California village where occasional earthquakes were a given, only a few buildings rose over two stories. The taller clock tower was a singular exception; it provided for the cats, and for space-loving villagers and bold tourists, a dramatic view of the small village. Who knew how safe the tower was, how well it could withstand a really hard temblor? Such matters did not bother a feline; a cat could usually detect a shake some minutes before it hit, long enough to race down to solid earth again.

Now, circling ever higher through the deepening evening, Joe glanced back at Dulcie and looked down longingly at the red tile roof of Molena Point PD, almost directly below them. In the brightening light of the early half-moon, the department beckoned to Joe, distracted him from Dulcie's problem and even from searching for the kit. Fixed on Max Harper's domain, he wondered if the fax machine was already spitting out electronic information, or if the dispatcher's computer was feeding her data from long-dead files, buried intelligence that would provide Max Harper and Dallas Garza, and Joe himself, access to the lives of missing children-and perhaps of that one dead child.

Gaining the parapet, the two cats leaped from its open piazza to the top of the brick rail, five stories above the streets. Crouched on the rail, they watched the moon-washed clouds above them, and the car lights below flicking in and out beneath the pine and cypress trees. Scanning the ever-changing shadows of the rooftops, their gazes sought any small, dark shape racing or lurking, but half Joe's attention remained on Molena Point PD. On the files from across the western states and from archived FBI records that, combined with information the forensics team would develop, was all they would have to identify the small victim. Though Dulcie didn't see how, in this very old case, she and Joe could be of help. Even if the department was able to identify the child, this wasn't the kind of murder where a cat could track a suspect or toss his house. This killer was years gone, could be dead himself.

But, she thought, Lori was not an old, unsolved case. And she looked with speculation at Joe. She felt so strongly that Lori needed them now, needed their help now-if they knew how to help her, without stirring up trouble for the child.

Stretching along the top of the brick rail, in the slanting moonlight, she studied Joe, then studied the stark shadows below among the peaks and chimneys, the pale rivers of the streets, the dark pools of the crowding trees. The world below seemed totally empty of cats. From the other side of the parapet, Joe looked across at her, his gray coat gleaming silver in the moonlight, the white strip down his nose squeezed into a frown, his yellow eyes narrowed with impatience. "So, spill it, Dulcie. You've been as closemouthed as a crooked cop."

Dulcie looked at him, her tail twitching with nerves. "If I tell you, this is our secret. You won't tell anyone? Not Clyde, not Wilma or Charlie?" She wished with all her heart that the kit was there, so she could tell her, too.

"This can't be about the grave," Joe said, "about the dead child. So is it about Patty Rose? But why…?"

Dropping down to the parapet, Dulcie stared up at him as he began to pace the rail, spinning back and forth on the thin barrier five stories above the roofs, his white paws seeming at every step to slide away into the night. He knew she hated that, hated when he indulged in fancy footwork on the edge of space.

"Come down and I'll tell you. Come down now."

Smiling, Joe paused on the edge, moonlight catching along his muscled shoulder.

"Come down, please. I promise I'll tell you if you won't grandstand."

He glared at her, but then he dropped to the bricks, a whiskery leer on his face.

"But you have to promise not-"

"I don't have to promise anything. Don't play games, Dulcie!" He crouched to leap up again.

She moved in front of him, stood nose to nose with him, her body drawn up tall, her paw lifted and her claws out, as sharp as razors. "If you want to hear, you'll promise not to bring Harper or the detectives into this, or any human. Not until we know the whole story."

Joe waited, his ears back, his whiskers tight to his tomcat cheeks, his yellow eyes wide with challenge.

"Promise?"

"Tentatively," he snarled, more a predatory growl than consent.

"I found a child, Joe. A little girl hiding in the library basement, in a walled-off part like a cave. She's around twelve, and so determined to keep herself hidden. She has food, a blanket, everything. But so alone."

"So why couldn't you tell me that? Where did she come from? How long has she been there? If she's run away, we'll have to-"

"That's why I didn't tell you. Because you'd say we have to tell Harper, that we have to drag in the law. Harper will only call county welfare to take care of her. That's what the law has to do. And I think that's part of the problem, I think she's afraid of someone in child welfare."