"I think that's indicated, don't you?"
"I guess so," Lisey said, wondering what, if anything, Castle County's acting Sheriff could get out of Woodbody that she hadn't been able to pry loose. She supposed there might be something - she'd been pretty mad. She also realized that wasn't what was bothering her. "Will he be arrested?"
"On the basis of what you've told me? Not even close. You might have grounds for a civil action - you'd have to ask your lawyer - but in court I'm sure he'd say that as far as he knew, all this guy Dooley meant to do was show up on your doorstep and try a little high-pressure sales routine. He'd claim not to know anything about dead cats in mailboxes and threats of personal injury...and he'd be telling the truth, based on what you've just said. Right?"
Lisey agreed, rather dispiritedly, that it was right.
"I'm going to want the letter this stalker left," Clutterbuck said, "and I'm going to want the cat. What did you do with the remains?"
"We have a wooden box-thingy attached to the house," Lisey said. She picked up a cigarette, considered it, put it back down again. "My husband had a word for it - my husband had a word for just about everything - but I can't remember for the life of me what it was. Anyway, it keeps the raccoons out of the swill. I put the cat's body in a garbage bag and put the bag in the orlop." Now that she wasn't struggling to find it, Scott's word came effortlessly to mind.
"Uh-huh, uh-huh, do you have a freezer?"
"Yes..." Already dreading what he was going to tell her to do next.
"I want you to put the cat in your freezer, Mrs. Landon. It's perfectly okay to leave it in the bag. Someone will pick it up tomorrow and take it over to Kendall and Jepperson. They're the vets we have our county account with. They'll try to determine a cause of death - "
"It shouldn't be hard," Lisey said. "The mailbox was full of blood."
"Uh-huh. Too bad you didn't take a few Polaroids before you wiped it all up."
"Well excuse me all to hell and gone!" Lisey cried, stung.
"Calm down," Clutterbuck said. Calmly. "I understand that you were upset. Anybody would have been."
Not you, Lisey thought resentfully. You would have been as cool as...as a dead cat in a freezer.
She said, "That takes care of Professor Woodbody and the dead cat; now what about me?"
Clutterbuck told her he would send a deputy at once - Deputy Boeckman or Deputy Alston, whichever was closer - to take charge of the letter. Now that he thought of it, he said, the deputy who visited her could take a few Polaroid snaps of the dead cat, too. All the deputies carried Polaroid cameras in their cars. Then the deputy (and, later on, his eleven PM relief) would take up station on Route 19 within view of her house. Unless, of course, there was an emergency call - an accident or something of that nature. If Dooley "checked by"
(Clutterbuck's oddly delicate way of putting it), he'd see the County cruiser and move along.
Lisey hoped Clutterbuck was right about that.
Guys like this Dooley, Clutterbuck continued, were usually more show than go. If they couldn't scare someone into giving them what they wanted, they had a tendency to forget the whole deal. "My guess is you'll never see him again." Lisey hoped he was right about that, too. She herself had her doubts. What she kept coming back to was the way "Zack" had set things up. How he'd done it so he couldn't be called off, at least not by the man who had hired him.