The Ridge(48)

She picked up, and thirty seconds later, that snapping dismissal of her sister’s nightmare seemed a dangerous thing.

Wesley Harrington was dead.

Wes had been killed by one of the cats.

She made the drive to the preserve in a horrible déjà vu daze. Back to Blade Ridge Road, back to a place where a good man lay dead in his own blood.

The police were there when she arrived. Two cars, an ambulance, and somebody’s pickup truck. She asked to see Wesley, demanded it, but they said nobody but police and his family could see him.

“I am his family!”

It wasn’t true, though. The cats were his family.

There were three deputies standing around watching her, and two of them were the pair who’d been on hand yesterday. Kimble and Shipley. Shipley, who’d been so nervous around the cats, who’d worried about being out in the woods when the sun went down, seemed calmer today, his blue eyes meeting her gaze without difficulty. The new one was a balding guy with sharp eyes who looked as if he wanted to arrest everyone now and sort it out later. Or not. He introduced himself as Pete Wolverton.

“What happened?” she said. “What happened?”

“One of the cats got him.”

“Ira,” she said.

“Is Ira the name of a tiger?” Wolverton asked.

She blinked, refocused. “No. Wait, what? He was killed by a tiger?”

“It was Kino,” Dustin called, face pale, eyes ringed by dark, puffy bags. “It was Kino, Audrey.”

“He went in the cage with Kino in the middle of the night?” she said.

Kimble stepped forward then, took her gently by the arm, and guided her from the others. They walked along until they came to Jafar’s cage. The leopard rose at the sight of her and jogged over, just as he always did. Waited with his face close to the fence, wanting her to reach in and scratch his ears, just as she always did. This time she hesitated.

“Seems like something happened in the middle of the night,” Kimble was saying in a gentle voice. “He went into the cage with a syringe.”

Jafar growled, and Kimble pivoted away from the cage and moved his hand toward his gun.

“He just wants attention,” Audrey said, and then she reached in and scratched Jafar’s head, the big cat preening, delighted. Kimble watched apprehensively, and she had a feeling he was thinking about what he’d just seen in Kino’s cage. She was imagining it herself.

“He went in the cage barefoot,” Kimble said. “Seems to imply there was some sort of chaos or problem.”

Audrey slipped her hand back through the fencing, remembering the way Wes had talked about the place being different at night, remembering the way she’d chastised him for his dire warnings. She leaned against the fence, feeling sick, and Jafar reached up and braced his front legs on the fence so that he was standing with his head close to hers. He licked her ear.

“He was barefoot?” Audrey said. Wes always had his boots on. She would have sworn he slept in boots.

“Yes. And he entered the cage with a rifle and some sort of a pole with a needle on it. A syringe.”

Something had gone wrong. The cat had been sick, or injured. That would have explained the rush into the night. If something had been wrong with Kino, that would explain everything.

“Was the tiger hurt?”

“Beyond the gunshot wound?”

She closed her eyes, and he said, “Sorry. I know they’re very important to you. Beyond the gunshot wound, I see no sign of injury. Now, I’m not a vet. Obviously, the syringe suggests something was wrong with the cat. What it was, I can’t say. There’s no obvious injury, though. Could he have wanted to sedate the animal just from a behavioral standpoint?”

“Behavioral?” Audrey felt Jafar’s rough tongue on her neck, then opened her eyes and moved away from the fence.

“Yeah. If it was, you know, acting up. Really going wild, for whatever reason. Might he have tried to sedate it then?”

“Wes hated to sedate cats except under extraordinary circumstances.”

“Well,” Kimble said, “it seems there must have been something extraordinary going on last night. I’ve got to warn you, Mrs. Clark—I think you’re likely to have some trouble over this.”

“Trouble?”

His face was grave, but he nodded. “It’s an accidental death. We’ll be clear on that. I’m in charge of the report, and I promise you that we will be clear on that. But you have to take the long view—you’ve got a man dead on this property, killed by one of your cats, and you’ve got another cat missing. People are going to react to that situation. You’re going to need to be ready.”