Cat's Claw (5 page)

But desperate people did desperate things, and George Timms—who was about to find himself printed, mugged, and booked for criminal trespass and destruction of property—must have been very desperate. According to his attorney, Charlie Lipman, Timms was being blackmailed. He had broken into the business in an attempt to retrieve the incriminating evidence, then removed some of the shop’s items to cover up his purpose and make it look like a burglary. Lipman hadn’t yet said what the evidence was or who the blackmailer was, and that part of the investigation was still pending. The attorney was no doubt holding the information back as leverage for the plea deal he was expecting to work with the DA, who just happened to be a friend of Timms, and he wouldn’t want the police to have it until he was good and ready. Sheila knew and
respected Lipman, who was the best—and the busiest—lawyer in Pecan Springs. But he could also be damned frustrating. They’d get the information when he was done dealing with the district attorney and not a minute before.

But from Sheila’s point of view, getting this far with this particular case was not an insignificant victory. City council member Ben Graves had been making a crusade out of the unsolved minor burglaries. He had made up a three-by-four-foot chart and posted it prominently at every council meeting. It wasn’t that Graves cared for seeing justice done—if he did, he would stop opposing nearly every budget request she made for upgrades to police personnel and equipment. All he cared about was making himself look like a guardian of community safety and making her look as incompetent as possible, in the hope that Pecan Springs’ first female police chief would give up and turn in her resignation. She would be more than happy to rub his nose in the outcome of Bartlett’s investigation, especially since George Timms was a former business associate of Graves and a golfing buddy of the mayor’s. Timms owned the Chevy dealership, as well as several rental properties around town and some prime Hill Country real estate—which made him a very odd burglar, indeed.

And while Clint Hardin had been a thorn in her side ever since she’d been appointed chief, Sheila had to admit—grudgingly—that he had done a good job on this particular investigation. He’d given the detective unit the backup it needed and kept a tight lid on possible leaks after it became apparent that this wasn’t your ordinary, everyday break-in. That was crucial, considering who their suspect was and who his friends were. Hark Hibler had a nose for police news, especially when he thought there might be scandal in high places. The
Enterprise
would break this story big, once Hibler got his hands on it.

But Bartlett had done his job, Hardin had played the investigation close, Hibler hadn’t gotten even a whiff of anything rotten in Denmark, and the arrest would come as a shocking surprise. Not to Timms, of course. Bartlett had negotiated the man’s surrender with Charlie Lipman last night. And as soon as the arrest and booking were complete, Sheila would give Ben Graves a call.

“I thought you might appreciate a heads-up on this one, Mr. Graves,” she would say smoothly, sweetly, and maliciously. Then she would add, “Although I’m not sure it’s what you want to hear.”

Hardin cleared his throat assertively. “Don’t know if you saw the duty roster, Chief. I’m due to take the next ten days for vacation. Brother-in-law and I have rented a boat at Rockport. We’re supposed to leave this afternoon. Of course, when I put in for the time off, I didn’t know we’d be so shorthanded. If you want me to hang around—” He eyed her.

“Negative,” Sheila said firmly. Yes, she had seen the duty roster, and yes, they were even more short-staffed than usual, between court appearances, vacations, and a couple of guys out sick. But Hardin had the time coming. They’d manage.

“The Timms case is in the bucket,” she added. “So go, Clint. Get yourself some trophy redfish.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Hardin said it with a slight touch of insubordination, as he always did. Not heavy enough to call for anything like a reprimand or even an informal reproof, but noticeable. And definitely irritating. He headed for the door, adding over his shoulder, “I’ll remind Bartlett that he’s reporting directly to you while I’m gone.”

The door clicked shut behind Hardin, and Sheila sank back into the oversize chair, pushing out a long, weary breath. He had been one of the candidates for the chief’s job when she was appointed, and he never let her forget it. She ought to be glad that he was out of her hair for a few
days. It was one less conflict to manage, although their relationship was such a perpetual source of conflict that it more or less faded into the background and only came up when one of them felt like butting heads. She ought to be looking forward to the gotcha conversation with Graves, too. Opportunities like that were few and far between.

But right now, Sheila couldn’t whip up a lot of enthusiasm about anything. She had been up since before five for her morning run with Rambo, her drug-sniffing Rottweiler who worked the day shift in the K-9 Unit—nights, too, when he was called out. She was at the desk at six thirty, uniform sharply creased, tie neatly tied, duty belt fastened around her waist. She always came in before seven to get an early start on the stack of paperwork. Didn’t count for much, though, because there’d be an even bigger stack the next day.

The paperwork was all part of the job—just not the job that all those TV cop shows portrayed. She had never seen a single episode that showed the chief sitting behind a desk pushing papers, or logged onto a computer displaying the latest report. Unfortunately, the shows made everybody think that policing was a nonstop game of cops and robbers, every car chase ending up with three bad guys on the ground in an ankle-deep pool of blood, a detective standing over them with a smoking 40-caliber Smith & Wesson. But it wasn’t. At least, not her end of it. Her end of it was forms, memos, notices, and reports, more of them all the time. If she didn’t stay on top of things, she’d be overwhelmed.

And like it or not, the chief’s desk was the last stop for all that paperwork. Even though she might prefer to be out on an investigation— interviewing, following leads, connecting the dots—this was her job now. Bottom line, it was up to her to create a supportive environment in which every police officer could do his or her work. It was
her
job to get them the resources and tools and training they needed to do
their
jobs safely
and effectively. It was the job she had wanted and fought every day to keep—although there were plenty of days when she’d a heckuva lot rather be out on patrol or doing an investigation instead of sitting in this oversize, ill-fitting chair.

Which was ironic, wasn’t it? After hours and hours of discussion, she and Blackie had tossed a coin to see which one of them would stay, which of them would go. Heads she’d quit, tails he would. She sighed. The way she was feeling about the job at this moment, she wished she’d called it heads.

Today had been a typical desk day—a day like most of the others. Before she’d started on the morning’s stack of papers, she’d turned on the computer, pulled up the monthly incident stats, and scanned the columns. 9-1-1 calls were up about 12 percent for the year, which just about tracked Pecan Springs’ population growth. Traffic stops and accident reports, down slightly. Burglaries up from the previous month. DWIs up. Possession, drug dealing, both up—a trend that wasn’t going to change. Homicides, zip for the month (but November was still young), eight for the year, all either domestic or drug-related and all cleared within a week, which was a pretty good record. Cases cleared, by percentage, down a little but still acceptable. (Down a lot from when Bubba Harris was chief, but he had pumped the stats in order to make the department look good.) All in all, a decent report for a small town on a busy Interstate corridor between Dallas and the Mexican border.

She glanced at the large laminated map of Pecan Springs on her office wall, where pushpins marked the recent burglaries, noting that most had occurred within a twelve-block area. She printed out the computer report and circled some numbers to comment on at the briefing with her department heads, then went on to yesterday’s incident report, the personnel report, and the budget. She was still trying to squeeze out the
money for another couple of computers for Records, so they could clear out the data-entry backlog, and three more dash cams for patrol cars. She’d like to have computers in the patrol cars, too, but the dash cams were more important. Video was an unbiased record of what happened. It told the truth and helped build public trust in the police. Good cops wanted dash cams.

Paperwork caught up (temporarily), phone messages and emails answered, it had been time for the morning briefing with Hardin and the other department heads. Then she had gone over to the city building for the weekly council meeting, where she had been on the hot seat until just before noon, patiently answering questions about her budget request and looking Ben Graves and Mildred Wilbur straight in the eye when their questions were dumber (or more deliberately malicious) than usual.

The meeting had dragged on, making her late for lunch with Blackie, who was on his way to El Paso on a missing-child case that he and Mike McQuaid were working on. She was glad to see how eager he was to find the little boy whose photo he had shown her. His eagerness took a little of the edge off her guilt for winning that coin toss, but not quite enough. If she’d called heads, Blackie would be doing the job he loved, and she could have resigned and taken the next available detective slot. She hated to admit how tempting that sounded.

After lunch, Blackie had left for the airport and she headed back to the office for a meeting with Lieutenant Jim Sumner, who was also their media officer, about staffing turnovers in the Support Services Division, which employed mostly civilians. After that, an update meeting with Mark Quintana, of Internal Affairs, and Chuck Canady, the Operations Division sergeant in charge of the two night units. The subject: Quintana’s investigation into the arrest of one of Canady’s officers.

It was serious heartburn. The previous Friday, Harry Blake, a veteran
with an outstanding record and nearly twenty years at PSPD, was arrested by deputies in neighboring Travis County and charged with making a terroristic threat. Blake had gone to his ex-wife’s house and gotten into a shouting match with her current boyfriend. The officer would plead it out to disturbing the peace, likely. In the grand scheme of things, not a biggie—at least Blake hadn’t drawn his weapon. Even so, it was an embarrassment to the department. Ben Graves would bring it up in city council. Hark Hibler would get an editorial out of it.

And there were staffing consequences. Blake had been put on a desk while IA conducted a review, which meant that the night patrol unit was now short two officers, since one was already out on medical leave. Sheila had been fairly successful in beefing up the force to the point where they could cover court appearances and vacations, but illnesses and family emergencies were a different matter. Overtime was eating up the budget.

So yesterday, she and Canady had gone over the duty roster, juggled assignments, and come up with a solution of sorts. It involved shifting an officer from Jeraldine Clarke’s day patrol unit to Canady’s night unit, and moving a rookie officer, Rita Kidder, from her training stint in Records to the day unit, where Clarke would be her field training officer. Nobody in the unit was eager to FTO a woman—and Sheila had already heard (gossip traveled at warp speed in Pecan Springs) that the officers’ wives were even less eager for their husbands to ride with Rita, who was young, bright, and shapely, although her shape was not quite so evident when she was in uniform. Women had been policing since 1910 and patrolling with the boys since the 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Act required state and local governments to adopt the 1964 Title VII rules. You’d think the old macho attitudes would have come unglued by now, wouldn’t you? Maybe that was true in big-city departments. But
not in small-town Texas, where the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

Sitting behind her desk now, Sheila smiled faintly, remembering her own FTO in the Dallas PD some fifteen years before. The two of them worked out of the West Dallas station, which wasn’t a picnic in anybody’s book. Orlando had been a burly twelve-year veteran with hands like hams and a fighter’s nose, ugly as sin. They hadn’t been in the squad car for more than ten seconds before he turned to her, stuck out his chin, and growled, “I’m gonna tell you this just once, Dawson, so you listen hard. I don’t like it that you’re riding with me, but I got no choice, I’m stuck with you for the next four weeks. So this is the way it goes down. I get in a fight, I wanna see your nose bloody. I get shot up, you better take a bullet. You aim to be a cop, you act like a cop, not like a damn girl. You got that?”

She’d got it, knowing that it wasn’t just that she was a woman and slender, but that she was also blond and pretty. Being attractive, sexy, even, was something she had always viewed as an asset, like a fast-acting brain, the reflexes of an athlete, and good upper body strength. But she found out on her first day at the Police Academy that
pretty
definitely wasn’t an asset in police work. It gave her brother cadets (“brother”—that was a laugh) another reason not to take her seriously, and her sister cadets, the few there were, something to envy. By the time she graduated, she would have traded her looks for dark, stringy hair, sallow skin, and another three inches and twenty pounds.

That first night on patrol with Orlando had been ordinary, even boring. Nothing happened until they got a 10-10, code for a fight in progress. It was in a dark, dirty bar and had already turned into a pretty decent brawl when they arrived. By the time she and Orlando got the three drunk ringleaders cuffed, the pair of officers who had been called in as
backup were standing there with their mouths gaping. Orlando had a bloody nose and a bite on one hand. But Sheila hadn’t been black belt in karate for nothing. She was unscathed, even though she’d taken down the two biggest guys by herself. And she only had to do it once. From then on, the word was out. “Dawson gets the job done, whatever it takes,” they said. “She does what she has to. She hustles.”