Cat Cross Their Graves Read Online Free Page A

their penthouse, the tall elderly couple pulling on their jackets. Softly, Lucinda was calling the kit. Both she and Pedric looked worried.
    The stairwell was mobbed now with uniforms, the flash of police torches reflecting up from below projecting gigantic shadows up along the stucco walls. The lights beside the descending steps, which marched down to the garage, and the garage lights below, had been extinguished. Joe wondered if the killer had disconnected them, or if perhaps a gunshot had shorted them out.
    Was Kit down there in the stairwell, below the crowd of officers? Or maybe above them, peering over from the deep shadows of the balcony that ranabove the stairs? Looking along the balcony, Joe searched for her but saw no gleam of yellow eyes. He glanced at Dulcie, and his look softened. For a moment the two cats were close again, of one mind, their noses filled with the smell of death. Sliding into the bushes at the top of the steps, staring down among the flashing torch lights, both cats froze.
    Patty Rose lay below them, her white satin robe bloodstained, her face brutally torn. Dulcie was so shocked she felt her supper come up, her mouth fill with bile. Joe’s ears were back flat to his head, his whiskers laid flat, his eyes burning like yellow fire.
    Detective Garza knelt beside Patty, feeling for a pulse. The cats knew there could be no pulse. When at last Garza rose and backed off, the medics knelt over her trying for a pulse, too, trying to stop the bleeding, trying to start her heart beating again. They worked for a long time before they rose and turned away. Beside Dulcie, Joe’s face seemed suddenly thinner, his whole body smaller and limp. Shivering, the tomcat nosed at her. She looked at him helplessly, read in his eyes exactly what he felt—as if all that was good in life had vanished, as if the negative forces of the world had suddenly won. Never had either cat imagined Patty Rose murdered. Such wanton violence to someone so good, so innocent of malice, filled them with defeat. Crouching with Joe above the stairs, Dulcie watched Detective Garza unpack his cameras.
    Peering from behind several uniforms’ dark trouser legs, shuttering their eyes against the bright strobe lights, the two cats watched Dallas Garza begin to shoot the scene. The big, square-faced Latinowas dressed in soft jeans and a wrinkled blue T-shirt, as if he had grabbed the first clothes at hand. He wore scuffed tennis shoes but no socks. His short, dark hair was uncombed. His tanned jaw was darkened by a day’s growth of shadowy whiskers, and set with a cop’s controlled anger at this death of a good friend. As he stood above the body, Garza’s dark, solemn eyes searched every inch of the stairwell as he decided where to shoot, making sure he missed nothing. Some of his close-ups were made more difficult by the steep flight of steps, some were assisted by the dropping angles. When he had shot a roll of film, he began to set up additional lights to eliminate shadows, to do it all again. The two cats fled to the concrete walkway above the stairwell.
    Crouching there on the cold cement, tasting the smell of death, they tried not to look down directly at Patty, but the lights brutally illuminated her. Sickened, Dulcie couldn’t help but imagine a grisly film shoot, macabre and shocking. A horrifying farewell for a great star, a surreal and disgusting final drama too much like the sickest of human culture.
    She watched Captain Harper and the coroner approach the stairs through the crowd of officers. At the top of the steps, the two men paused, waiting for Garza to finish so Dr. Bern could examine the body before taking it to the morgue. There, the final bits of fiber and debris would be removed from Patty’s clothes and body. She would be examined for all manner of trauma and of course for bullets. Samples would be taken before her body was tagged and locked away in a cold metal drawer. The cats knewthe