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watched people hurrying to their cars, or starting to walk home bundled up against the stormy cold. Rearing up on her hind paws trying to see through a forest of human legs, she looked and looked for the man—she could smell him close to her, he’d come here, all right, to mix with the crowd, as if this would be his alibi, that he was at Patty’s movie.
    There, she saw him—the small man who had watched Patty, and who carried the scent of the killer. Kit wanted to leap on him and claw him, hurt him as he had hurt Patty. Dulcie said, and even Joe said sometimes, that in the case of human crime it was better for human law to punish the killer. But right now it would be more satisfying to tear at the evil creature as she would at a rat, dismembering it. Racing between hard oxfords and women’s high-heeled boots, she slid into the bushes behind him.
    Phew. The scent of dog doo laid over geraniums and dirty socks. When the man turned and nearly stepped on her, she spun away. If she were a cop, she could stick a gun in his ribs. So frustrating sometimes, being only a cat. When he moved away through the crowd, she followed, dodging people’s feet and drawing surprised and interested looks. She followed him up the sidewalk, swerving and running, falling back behind people then hurrying ahead. After five blocks he got into a car, an old gray Honda parked at the curb a block from the library. Got in and took off, the smell of exhaust choking Kit. She followed the car, running down the middle of the street, until she had to streak for the curb or be crushed, landed pell-mell on the sidewalk, tumbling and scared out of her little cat wits.
    The car had vanished, its stink lost among other cars, among the smell of tires and asphalt and diesel. She crouched on the concrete, shivering at having been so close to being hurt, so foolishly close to moving cars, telling herself she must not do that again.
    But at last she shook herself and licked her cold paws, then started on in the direction the car had gone, looking ahead for any gray car, hunting stubbornly.
    As she searched hopelessly along the endless dark streets, rearing up, scanning the side streets, twice she heard, far behind her, Lucinda calling her. She did not turn back, she kept on even when her friend’s voice grew louder, closer. Lucinda would pick her up and hold her and make a fuss over her—and force her to go home. Later as she raced up to the roofs to better see the streets below, she heard Clyde, and then Pedric’s low, gruff voice calling and calling her. Obstinately she turned away and kept on searching.
    She had watched this man for nearly two weeks as he hung around the inn. She knew he was watching Patty but he’d never seemed threatening, such a small, frail man. Lucinda had seen him once, and they’d thought he might be a fan of Patty’s. Now he had turned suddenly into the most terrible of monsters. Kit felt guilty, deeply guilty that neither she nor Lucinda had told anyone about him, and that Lucinda had never asked Patty about him.
    Was this man the reason Patty had been distracted? Had she known he was watching her? And all the time, had he been waiting to kill Patty? And Patty herself had told no one. Had she not thought he would attack her? Never dreamed he would shoot her? A deep, terrible remorse filled the kit.
    She tried to remember if she had ever seen his car, before tonight. Tried to bring that car clear again, that gray Honda. It was old and battered. A two-door, she thought. She had been so focused on the man and on dodging people’s feet that she had not, as Joe or Dulcie would have done, set to memory its license number. Now that omission, too, was a matter of shame.
    But she knew that car. And once, coming from along the seashore where she’d been hunting alone in the weedy shoulder above the sand, she’d seen it, she was sure she had. That time, her mind had been so intent on breakfast