Cat's Claw (6 page)

She wasn’t one of the guys—Sheila knew she never would be
that
. She would always be an outsider, a woman in the biggest boys’ club in America, and like the other rookie women, the target of a barrage of immature, frat-boy hazing stunts involving dead rats, used sanitary napkins, and porn photos. Sheila wasn’t privy to everything that went on in the locker rooms at PSPD, but she suspected that Kidder and the three other women on the force were probably getting the same treatment. Or maybe not. The harassment was likely to be more subtle these days, after the civil suit that had cost the city a bundle, forced Bubba Harris into retirement, and resulted in her being hired away from her post as chief of security at CTSU to take charge of a department that was in serious trouble.

Anyway, over the years she’d been in police work, Sheila had learned to give as good as she got, and while she saw plenty of discrimination, she stopped feeling that she was being singled out. Orlando had become her mentor and her friend, as well as her partner. They’d made detective together, and for a couple of years in Homicide, they’d been partners, been a team. She had learned from him, and he had a lot to teach. She’d gotten bloody for him and when she was shot in a stakeout, he’d taken a bullet, too. For a while, their working relationship seemed to offer the promise of something more personal. But then Dan Reid had come along and pulled Sheila into his irresistible orbit. And a few months later, Orlando found the right woman.

But neither he nor Sheila had forgotten their time together. He had gone on to be chief of police in a rural Oklahoma town, and she was here in Pecan Springs. They traded Christmas cards, and he’d sent a note when she got the job as chief. “Don’t forget what you’re there for, Dawson,” he had written, in his sprawling script. “You’ve got a job to do, and it ain’t just the paperwork. Do whatever you can to keep yourself from getting stuck behind the desk. You hear me? Just
do
it.”

Stuck behind the desk
, Sheila thought uncomfortably. Well, she wasn’t totally stuck. There were other things in her life. Her glance went to the silver-framed photograph on the corner of the gray metal desk. She and Blackie, looking relaxed and happy in the easy, everyday outfits they’d decided on for their wedding—nothing like what her mother thought they should wear. If her mom had had her way, Blackie would have been trussed up in a tux and Sheila would have been on display in a white satin wedding dress with a six-foot train and her grandmother’s wedding veil, a couple of acres of floating tulle capped with a pearl tiara.

“Now that you’re past thirty-five, you’ll likely only be married once, dear,” her mother had said, with only a hint of her usual snarkiness. “It should be an occasion to remember. You’ll let me pick out your dress, won’t you, sweets? Pretty please?”

Well, she was nearly forty and old enough to plan her own wedding, thank you very much. It had been memorable without her grandmother’s wedding veil and the kind of dress her mother would choose. Memorable because officers from both their departments had been there. Memorable because Maude Porterfield had come down so hard on the words “’Til death do you part” that a titter ran through the audience. Memorable for the wonderful food and the warmth and affection of their friends, and for the idyllic three-day honeymoon they’d managed to steal at Blackie’s fishing cabin on Canyon Lake. They’d taken a couple of
other short trips together, of course—once, they’d even flown to Cozumel for a weekend. But they’d never been able to hang out all morning in bed together, swatting at mosquitoes while the sun climbed high over the live oak trees. Or fish for their breakfast together, and eat fresh-caught bass with fried eggs and ketchup-soaked hash browns and then tumble back into bed for as long as they liked, without a single peep from their pagers. Bliss. Sheer bliss. But both Sheila and Blackie were realists. They knew that bliss never lasts forever, which maybe just made it sweeter.

Sheila reached for another stack of papers, scrawled her name at the bottom (she’d gotten very good at that), then glanced at her watch. Nearly five o’clock. By this time, Blackie was landing in El Paso, which left her on her own for the evening. She looked around the office, seeing that everything was in place. She disliked personal clutter, so there was nothing but books, cop magazines, and stacks of computer printouts on the gray metal bookshelves; the map of Pecan Springs and the surrounding county on the wall; the computer and a plastic philodendron on the desk. No plants to water, no doodads to dust, only the minimum number of framed certificates and diplomas on the wall. It didn’t look like a woman’s office at all. Sheila had learned a long time ago that the officers in her command were more comfortable that way. Policing was a man’s world, and she had gotten into the habit of hiding her femininity as much as she could. It wasn’t always easy, because there was no changing her light voice or the way she looked, although the unisex uniform and clunky duty boots helped. She was glad she hadn’t gotten into law enforcement back in the days when policewomen were required to dress like airline attendants in tight skirts, three-inch heels, perky bow ties, and little caps—all designed to emphasize their femaleness.

Impatiently, she swept the rest of the papers into her briefcase and
snapped it shut. If Timms’ surrender had taken place as scheduled, she hadn’t gotten the word. But she didn’t have to hang around here and wait. Bartlett would call her cell phone when it happened. She was picking up her briefcase when the phone rang on the desk. She reached for it, expecting to hear about the arrest.

It wasn’t Bartlett. It was the dispatch supervisor, Mary Lou Parker, with a 10-87, a dead body report that had just come in on a 9-1-1 call. White male, apparent gun suicide, according to the patrol sergeant who was first at the scene. Detective Bartlett had been notified and was on his way.

The call from Dispatch was routine. Sheila had asked to be immediately notified on all 10-87s, but unless there was a special reason for her to be there, she didn’t usually go to the scene. That was Hardin’s job. She looked at her watch again, thinking that he had probably already left for Rockport.

“Is Deputy Chief Hardin still around?” she asked, just in case.

“He’s ten-seven,” Dispatch replied, “about fifteen minutes ago. Want me to ask him to come back, ma’am?”

“Negative.” No need to call Hardin back—he’d earned his time off. “Where’s this ten-eighty-seven, Mary Lou? I’ll take it.”

Dispatch read off the address. When Sheila heard it, she was startled. She jotted it down, although she didn’t have to. She knew exactly where it was.

“Let Detective Bartlett know I’m ten-seventy-six,” she said.

A 10-76 was the code for officer in route. The address was on Pecan, Ruby Wilcox’s street, and the 10-87 was three doors down from Ruby’s, at 1117 Pecan—and directly across the alley from the house where Sheila and Blackie had been living since they got married.

It seemed that one of her neighbors had killed himself.

Chapter Three

Pecan Springs was a small town, and nothing was very far away from anywhere else. Sheila could have been at the location on Pecan in five minutes, maybe less, if she’d put on both the lights and the siren. But there wasn’t any hurry on a suicide. She’d give Bartlett plenty of time to do his preliminary work. She’d just drop in and take a quick look, then head home—conveniently, right across the alley.

Sheila stopped at the small outbuilding where the K-9 Search and Rescue Unit was housed, and where Rambo, her Rottweiler, spent his day with a kennel mate, a white German shepherd named Opal that belonged to the SAR coordinator, Martha Meacham. The unit was new and still under development, but Martha—a tall, big-boned woman with silvery hair, a ready smile, and a cheerful expression—was committed to expanding it and getting the volunteer handlers and their dogs certified for air scent and cadaver search, trailing, and water search and rescue. Rambo had already proved his worth as a drug-sniffer, but there were plenty of other jobs to do. Martha was in charge of finding the dogs and handlers who could do them.

The project was something that Sheila had been eager to support, and when Martha had come to her with the idea of creating a volunteer
unit, she hadn’t hesitated. Finding the funding was difficult—the city council wasn’t sold on the idea of using volunteers, and Ben Graves had wanted to know what would happen if one of those dogs
attacked
somebody. Could the citizen sue the city? What if one of the volunteers got hurt? And who was going to pay for all that training? The citizens of Pecan Springs couldn’t be expected to pick up the tab, surely.

Graves didn’t need to worry. The volunteers—most of them with experience in outdoor survival, navigation, and rescue work—were so dedicated that they had paid for their own specialized training and even raised the money to buy communications equipment. Their efforts were rewarded when they were called out to search for a four-year-old girl who had wandered away from her family’s campsite in a nearby state park. In fact, it was Martha and Opal who had found the child, earning the parents’ undying gratitude, not to mention some very good publicity for the program.

Now, Rambo jumped joyfully into the passenger seat of the chief’s black Chevy Impala, leaned over the console, and gave Sheila’s cheek two slurpy kisses. Then he settled onto his haunches and fastened his gaze on the street ahead, to make sure that she drove home the usual way. That was his job—one of them, anyway. True to his Rottweiler nature, Rambo had a very strong sense of responsibility, and Sheila had learned that it was wise not to try to dissuade him from whatever assignments he might decide to undertake. Stubborn was his middle name.

Rambo was also big and tough-looking and there had been a time when Sheila had been afraid of him, just as she had been half afraid of the big, hard man who once owned him. That was Dan Reid, who worked undercover narcotics for the Dallas PD’s Organized Crime Division while Sheila was an investigator with the department. She hadn’t seen him for over a year, until, under the name Colin Fowler, he had shown up
in Pecan Springs and opened a shop on the town square. The next thing she knew, he was romancing Ruby, one of her two best friends.

The situation got complicated in a hurry. Sheila felt she ought to warn Ruby about Dan’s freelance love-’em-and-leave-’em habits, which she understood all too well from their own intimate, intense, and brief love affair. But she suspected that Dan was in Pecan Springs on some sort of official undercover assignment, and she didn’t feel she could explain to Ruby how she had known him or reveal his real identity.

Then, just as she was deciding that she had to come clean, she didn’t have to, because Dan had been murdered. It had taken some doing, but Sheila (with some help from China) had caught his killer and snagged the shipment of drugs that he’d been tracking. Ruby inherited the proceeds from Dan’s sizeable insurance policy and a hefty hazardous-duty payment. And Sheila inherited Dan’s Rottweiler, who turned out to be a well-mannered, well-trained drug-sniffing dog. In the long run, she thought, it was all for the best. Rambo liked to boss her around but he was far more devoted and loyal and uncritical than Dan Reid had ever been. And she always knew where he was when she needed him.

As Sheila pulled out of the parking lot behind the police station, the radio on her dash crackled into life. It was Bartlett, saying that he’d reached the Pecan Street address and was setting up the scene. She turned right on Crockett and a couple of blocks later, stopped in front of Cavette’s Market, a small family-owned shop with wooden bins and wicker baskets of locally grown fruits and veggies lined up under the sidewalk awning. She rolled down the windows a couple of inches and left Rambo to guard the Impala (not that anybody would be stupid enough to mess with a police car with a Rottweiler in the front seat) and went into the store. She usually made it a point to stop in one or two shops every day. It was good community relations—another part of her job. The more face
time she could put in with the community, the more trust was created. And trust was a valuable commodity.