The Night Serpent

Aggie and his daughter, Jenny, had adopted three cats from the shelter, two since she had worked there. Max, a red tabby, and Wilma, a calico shorthair. He had been the one to suggest her name when the department first needed a cat expert and had been her contact person ever since then. He knew more about her, simply through observation, than even members of her own family. He knew what he had asked her to do.

“Yeah. Me, too. Sorry, I mean.” Only she wasn’t sorry. She was angry. But without knowing where to direct that anger, it weighed her down and simply made her tired. And cold. The crisp night air seemed to cut into her bones. “It’s okay, Aggie.” No, it wasn’t. It was very much not okay. But it wasn’t Augustus Petrosian’s fault. “Let’s go.”

There were two police stations in Newfield, one uptown and one down. There was a substation, Lily knew, that was closer, but Petrosian took them to the uptown station instead. Agent Patrick excused himself the moment they arrived to make a phone call, and the detective handed her over to a sketch artist, a tall, rounded woman with a ready smile and ink stains on her fingers and a smudge on her freckled snub nose that made her look too young to be working in the police department. She introduced herself as Julia, and brought Lily to a square table in a small room off the main hallway, out of the flow of traffic. There wasn’t a door to the room, but the chatter, slams and creaks of station activity flowed around them, turning into a babble of white noise.

“All right. Detective Petrosian says you’ve got a scene for me?”

“I thought sketch artists did faces?” Lily didn’t really care, she felt too exhausted by what she had seen to worry about anything else, but it made for conversation. Conversation was easier than thinking. Kinder than thinking.

“Mostly, yeah. But we do whatever it takes to close a case, same as everyone else here. So. What’ve you got for me?”

So much for not thinking. Worse, they wanted her to remember.

Lily sat down at the table, in the chair Julia indicated, and closed her eyes. She had thought—had hoped—that once away from the site, the visual would fade. But the moment she shut out the distractions around her, it came back, and she began to describe it, slowly, trying to hit as many details as possible. Something stuck in her throat as she talked, and hurt, like it was hard-edged and heavy, and the more she talked, the worse it became.

“All right. I think I’ve got it.”

Julia’s voice seemed to come from far away, down a long tunnel. Lily opened her eyes, resurfacing into the noise and bustle of the police station. Julia was putting down her pencils and Agent Patrick was standing behind her, looking down at the sketch with a fascinated expression.

“This is what you saw?”

Lily frowned, confused by his question. He had been there, why was he so surprised? Julia turned the pad around and slid it across the table so that she could see. It was the cattery, but not abandoned now. Each cage was filled with four or five shadowy bodies: adult cats in some and kittens in others, almost all of them with dappled coats. Dishes overflowed with dried kibble, and water was slopped carelessly onto the counters. There was a figure in the middle of the room, but so roughly drawn that it was impossible to determine if it was male or female. Tall and lean: hunched over slightly as though expecting a blow.

“You saw this?” Agent Patrick asked again, his voice intent on the question. She responded almost unwillingly to the urgency in his voice.

“No. Not really. The room was empty.” He knew that. He had been there, too.

“But you described it. Every detail.” His voice wasn’t exactly doubting, but it was skeptical that she could have managed it without prior knowledge, something she wasn’t telling them.

Lily was too shocked to take offense. She looked at Julia, who nodded. “I don’t add anything the witness doesn’t tell me, not until we go to the next stage. Everything there’s what you told me to put down.”

Lily looked at the sheet again, and a sense of familiarity moved through her. Yes. This was what the room looked like. The cats, restless and calling each other. The figure moving among them, taking them away and—sometimes—bringing them back. The smells of food and urine against the stainless steel of the cages, the hint of antiseptic…

There was no way she could know any of that. But she did. As much as she knew anything that happened today. She could even pick out the shadowed forms of the cats that had been selected for death, there, in the far cage, segregated from the others.

“You psychic?” Agent Patrick’s voice had evened out, not making judgments in a way they had to teach in the academy. “Humor the crazy person, and then disarm them” would have been the motto of that class, no doubt. He probably got an A. It should have rankled, but looking at the sketches, Lily just felt tired. He was only doing his job, and part of that job was to doubt everything.

“No.” She looked at him, then down at the drawing again. “It was just how everything was laid out. This is the only way it could have been.”

That didn’t satisfy him, she could feel it in his gaze, in the way he looked at her, and then at the sketch, and then at her again. He didn’t accuse her of lying, but he didn’t quite believe her, either.

She couldn’t explain it. She couldn’t prove it was true, what she described. But it was.

“All spotted cats,” Julia noted.

“Yes.” She was certain of that, too.

“Tabbies, mostly. The slaughtered animals here had white paws. How common is that?” Patrick was staring intently at the drawing, clearly trying to work something out in his mind. He had put aside the question of her accuracy, and was working with the available evidence, no matter how dubious.

“What, mitting?” Lily said. “It’s pretty common, no matter what the coat’s color. Especially if he’d been breeding them—there weren’t that many queens in the room, so the gene pool was small.”

“Queens?” Julia asked.

“Breeding females,” Patrick said, surprising Lily with his knowledge. “A queen can breed every four months, anywhere from three to seven kittens in a litter.”

For a moment, Lily felt that spark running between the two of them again, a spark that had nothing to do with his dark eyes or undeniably masculine appeal—or his interest in her. A cat person. Or at least, one who had done his homework. That tied in to the feeling she had gotten from him at the scene: that he saw more than statistics and splatter.

Aggie had said the agent focused on animal abuse cases, something about him psychoanalyzing killers the way they did on TV shows. But that made her wonder—why was an FBI agent, a profiler, investigating something like this? What made cats important enough to interest a federal agency?

Suddenly Lily felt herself deflate. Of course he was interested in her, a cat person. It was part of his job. Well, that was what she was here for; to help him, however she could, to catch this guy.

“He—whoever was doing this—didn’t have more than three queens in the room, from the size of the cages. But a lot of kittens. You think he was trying to breed for a particular color?” Lily had never really thought about the genetic side of cats before; all she knew about different colors was what was more popular among adopters.

He shrugged. “I’m not ruling out any theories at this point.”

“And what is that point, exactly?” Why are you here? she meant.

Julia touched the sheet, the motion drawing their attention. “I’m sorry. I need to run this over to the detective. Lily, if you want to wait, I can make sure an officer—”

“I’ll make sure Ms. Malkin gets home safely,” Patrick said, cutting Julia off, and then smiling at her to soften his rudeness. “I’d like to ask her a few more questions first, if we can use this desk?”

“Yeah, sure.” Julia seemed flustered at being the focus of his attention, which Lily thought was odd, but then the artist gathered herself back into professional mode. “Will you want a copy of the sketch?”

“That would be wonderful, thank you.”

Lily watched Julia’s slender white hands gather up her pencils and the sketch, then disappear into the swirl of noise around them. Somehow, it seemed distant from her, even now. She had known about the queens, the female cats. How? How could she have known anything she had told Julia to draw? Extrapolation from a few cages and a smell could only go so far, but—

But, stop, she told herself, feeling the old, familiar, unwanted distress crawling back. Stop. Breathe, Lily. Breathe in through the mouth, out through the nose. Breathe, and be still. A lifetime of dealing with panic attacks—she might not need the technique on a daily basis anymore, but it still did the job. Her anxiety level dropped until she felt as if she could manage again.

“Why is the FBI investigating this?” she asked, once her breathing was under control.

“We have varied interests,” Patrick said, sliding into Julia’s seat with a grace that belonged to a more slender man. If he noticed her momentary distress, he didn’t mention it. “Why do they call you the cat talker?”

She shook her head, too worn-out to be either angry or amused at his evasion or the appearance of her hated nickname. “Who told you that?”

“One of the uniforms. Said you could talk to anything feline, get it to do what you wanted.”

“Anyone who said that knows nothing about cats.” Lily looked up finally, and in doing so was caught again by Agent Patrick’s gaze. Dark, yes, and intense, yes, and totally focused entirely on her, in a scary-nice sort of way. Oh. So that was what he’d done to the sketch artist. You could get lost in those eyes, just watching them watch you. It made her nervous. Something, hell everything about him was making her nervous. Like he thought she was one of his suspects, someone to be interrogated, bullied and pushed around.

“Oh?” His tone was smooth, inviting; much smoother than the look in his eyes. That voice was another thing the FBI probably issued its agents on their first day on the job, to go with the suits. And the guns, although she hadn’t seen Patrick’s yet. She didn’t doubt he carried one. There was something about him. That intensity, it had a purpose beyond getting answers. Or undressing women visually. She had seen it before; he was a man with a long-term goal, and Lord help the person who got in the way.

All right, maybe that was unfair. But she could practically smell the ambition in him, and it made her wary. Lily didn’t understand ambition. She had needs, desires, of course. Everyone did. But ambitious people carried a tension around inside them that made her tense up in return. She preferred the company of those who were comfortable where they were, who took days one at a time and who didn’t ask too much of life.

“There’s an old joke,” she said, shaking off her reaction and responding to his earlier question. “‘Dogs have owners, cats have staff.’ Or, ‘Dogs come when called. Cats have answering machines and might get back to you.’ All true. A cat will do something you ask of it because it chooses to do so. It won’t obey out of loyalty, or fear, or even love—merely choice.”

Cats couldn’t be used. Not that way. It was one of the reasons why she respected them.

Agent Patrick nodded, not laughing, or even smiling at her words. “And cats choose to listen to you?”