Free The Cat Dancers by P.T. Deutermann Page A

the computer. Kenny gave Cam a sly wink, which made him feel even more superfluous. “No,” she said. “The last electronic transaction was five years ago, when he ordered up fifty thousand for a wire transfer.”
    Kenny stopped flirting. “Wired to whom?”
    “A bank up in Surry County.”
    “Could someone there tell us who cashed it?” Cam asked.
    “Good luck with that. It’s a privately held bank—on the edge of the mountain country. People up there really value their privacy, if you know what I mean.”
    She gave them the bank’s name and address, and Cam thanked her for her help. He and Kenny went out to the car, where Cam dialed the number for Tony Martinelli’s cell phone. Tony reported that K-Dog hadn’t been seen at his regular hangouts for a week to ten days. They were on their way to an old girlfriend’s trailer. “Don’t get any on you,” Cam said, and switched off.
    “Marlor’s gone, and K-Dog’s not to be found,” Kenny mused. “So two and two make …”

    “We’ve got a ways to go before we jump to any conclusions,” Cam said, even though he, too, had already jumped to that very conclusion. “K-Dog may hole up once word gets out on Punk Street that the cops are really asking around. He’s going to think that we’re coming back about the minimart. Plus, I want to know what that fifty K was for. I’m thinking a cabin or mountain property.”
    Cam’s cell phone rang. It was the bank manager.
    “I just saw something you might want to know,” she said.
    “Okay?”
    “Mr. Marlor withdrew thirty-five thousand dollars in cash a few days before he set up the new signature cards. I would have noticed it earlier, except that you were asking about electronic transactions. This was done in person, at the counter.”
    “Thirty-five thousand cash—that’s fairly unusual.”
    “He had it to withdraw, so it wasn’t as if we could say no.”
    “Thanks very much,” Cam said. He hung up and told Kenny.
    “Walking-around money?” Kenny said.
    “More like off-the-grid money,” Cam said.

12
    AT 8:30 THAT NIGHT, Cam sat watching the electrocution scene again on his desktop in the office. The other detectives had all gone for the day. There’d been nonstop meetings with the sheriff and the public relations staff late that afternoon, the district attorney’s office, and with the MCAT detectives. They’d put the superstar of the month on ice in order to work this execution thing, so the team was spending a lot more time in the office than usual.
    The bottom line was that K-Dog was not to be found. Tony and Horace had looked under all the usual rocks, and a consistent story emerged that no one had seen his sorry ass for about ten days. He’d been living with two women in a trailer outside of Triboro, and they were emphatically glad to be rid of him. His replacement, a Texan with one glaring eye, was firmly in residence and threatening to “slap an entire can of whup-ass on that punk” if he ever came back. The nature of K-Dog’s transgressions against the females had not been determined, although Tony allowed, having seen the two aforementioned women, they were probably deserved.
    Billy and Pardee had had better luck. They’d tracked down Flash in about two hours. He was holed up at a crack whore’s squat one block back of Lee Street in south Triboro, sustaining his various addictions. Said crack whore did not know any ghost named K-Dog, so it appeared the dynamic duo had finally split up. Kenny got the Sheriff’s Office’s PR division to obtain a tape of the talk show starring K-Dog, and then they ran it and the execution scene side by side to make sure they were looking at the same guy. Everyone agreed that it certainly looked like the same guy. Horace was happily philosophical about it, saying, “Brag about getting away with
murder in North Carolina, someone’s going to rise up and take care of business.” Cam landed pretty hard on him for the comment. “You can think it,”