Scooting through the bushes to the front of the house she clawed and scrabbled her way up bits of wall and across slabs of roof, looking above her for an open window-and then suddenly above her, a window slid open.

And there was Joe Grey. She saw his white paw slide the glass back, saw him press between the glass and the shutter with a huge packet in his mouth. He remained so for some time, staring back into the room. Then he crouched as if someone was coming and leaped into space twisting to land on a roof below. Above him, Marlin Dorriss appeared; she could see him at the next window. She choked back a cry. Joe stared down at her.

"Jump," she hissed. "He's coming! Jump! He's opening the shutters! Jump now! Drop that thing and jump!"

Then everything happened at once. Dorriss closed the shutters and turned away, and Joe leaped to the next angle with the brown paper bundle, then leaped again to the concrete. The bundle split open just at the edge of the bushes. In the wind, papers began to flap and dance. Kit had never seen Joe move so fast. Grabbing a mouthful of papers he pulled the package under the bushes and was back again snatching up more. The kit leaped.

And she was beside him snatching pieces of torn paper from the wind. Had Dorriss turned back? Was he looking? Had he seen the package fall before Joe snatched it away? The kit could not see Dorriss now, his silhouette was gone from the window-but then there he was standing at another window looking out.

Surely he couldn't see them beneath the bushes. Had they caught all the papers? Like catching swooping birds from the rooftop. The kit stared at the papers under her paws. "What is all this?"

"Evidence," Joe said, pushing little bits of paper back into the torn envelope, trying to fold it around the ragged mess. Kit helped him stuff papers in. Pressing the envelope into folds with their paws they gripped it between them, their teeth piercing the heavy paper as they tried to hold it together. And when Dorriss turned away, when the windows were clear once more, they dragged it out from the bushes and away.

Keeping to the shadows along the sidewalk, they tried to shelter their burden from the wind. It was a long way to Joe's house, and already the package was heavy. Trying to find a rhythm together, falling into an unwieldy pace, eight paws attempting to move in harmony, they hauled their burden through an empty alley and along the less-frequented backstreets. Kit's head was filled with questions which, with her mouth full, she couldn't ask.

The envelope grew heavier with every step. The wind died as they left the shore, and that helped. But the day grew muggy hot. Kit wanted to stop and rest but Joe didn't pause, pushing on from shadow to shadow and from bush to bush. When a human appeared far down the street they dragged their burden under a porch or behind a fence.

It seemed to take hours to cover those long blocks. When at last they neared Joe's house, the kit's entire being cried out for water, food, and a nap. A pair of tourists wandered past, and they slipped deeper among the bushes where they rested a moment, panting. Peering out at the house, the kit so longed to be inside, so longed for a drink of cool water.

The Damen house looked not at all as it once had. When Kit first came there as a young cat, the house was a white cottage with only one story, what Wilma called a Cape Cod. Now with its new facade of heavy Mexican timbers and plastered walls, it was truly elegant. And the best part was Joe's tower high atop the new upstairs. Kit loved Joe's cat-size house with a view of the village rooftops-it was a cozy bit of cat heaven.

Lucinda and Pedric had planned to build a tower just like it. Atop their own new house. "You will have a tower," Lucinda had said. "A fine tall cat tower looking out at all the world just like Joe Grey's tower."

Now Lucinda and Pedric would never build their dream home.

The kit would give all the towers in all the world to have them back. A tear slid down, spotting the brown envelope and its papers as they hauled their unwieldy burden through Joe Grey's cat door.

Pulling the package through, the papers catching on the door, they dropped it on the African throw rug and lay beside it.

"Heavy as a dead raccoon," Joe said. "Thank you, Kit. I guess you saved the day."

"What did we save? What are those papers?"

Joe Grey smiled. "With luck, this could be the claw that snags the big one. A killing bite to the slickest burglar this village has ever seen." He glanced toward the front door, listening. But the car he'd heard went on by. You never knew when Clyde might bring company, Max Harper or Dallas Garza or Ryan Flannery. "Come on, let's get it upstairs before someone walks in."

Dragging the envelope between them, they hauled it up the new stairway that had been built in half of the old guest room. The other half of that room was now a walk-in closet where Clyde kept all manner of oddments, from unused parts for his weight-lifting equipment to stacks of outdated automotive catalogs. At the top of the steps, in the new master bedroom, they dragged their burden across the new carpet to Clyde's study.

Hauling it up onto Clyde's desk, Joe pawed the papers out and carefully separated the various bills from the torn pages of the notebook. Fetching a rubber band from a box on the desk, he managed to secure the small bits of torn evidence. Watching him, Kit retrieved another rubber band, but he made her put it back. "Don't chew that, Kit. It could kill you."

"That little thing? How could it?"

"Just like string, Kit. You know about string. The barbs of your tongue hold it back, you can't spit it out, it gets wrapped around the base of your tongue, you swallow the rest and you're in trouble."

She spit out the rubber band. She'd been told more than once about string, that if she should ever swallow a string not to pull it out with her paw, that she could cut her insides doing that. Joe studied the stack of bills. Who knew which were of value? No one would know until they were compared with the dates of the burglaries. Even then, there would be a lot of play in the machinery. The Tyler family in Ventura, for instance, had opened their safe in January and not again until October when they found the antique diamond necklace missing; the burglary could have happened anytime in those nine months. The Von Cleavers, in Montecito, were in Europe for five weeks. Got back to find a glass cabinet broken into and a silver pitcher missing, a museum piece signed by a famous craftsman from the 1600s, but nothing else was gone. Each burglary was the same, the rarest and most expensive item lifted, nothing else touched. Marlin Dorriss himself had been at his Florida condo when his favorite Diebenkorn painting vanished from his Molena Point house-if it vanished, if that was not a red herring.

But what kind of thief took only one piece and left a houseful of treasures?

Joe Grey smiled. Someone out for the thrills, for the rarity or historical value of the items stolen, someone who didn't need the money. Who got all the money he wanted in other ways?

Impatient with the lack of solid answers to what he suspected, impatient for darkness so he could deliver the evidence to the law, Joe restlessly prowled the study.

But the kit had curled up in a corner of the love seat with her nose tucked under her paw, so sad and withdrawn that Joe paused, watching her. He stood worrying over her when a click from above made him stiffen.

The rooftop cat door made a slap, and Dulcie popped out of the hole in the ceiling, dropping daintily to the rafter beneath. Perched on the high, dark beam, she peered down at him-and her green eyes widened.

"You got the bills!" She dropped to the desk beside him with a delicate thud. "Tell me! Tell me how you did it. Dorriss didn't see you? Why are you frowning?"