Bending the Paw

by Diane Kelly

  Jackson lifted a weary shoulder. “Who knows? He might have even spent the cash on prostitutes. This clue could lead us to a motive, though. I’ll call the lab and have them test a blood sample for illegal drugs so we can either pursue that theory or rule it out. But for now, let’s go talk to Shelby.” She circled around the front of my cruiser, climbed into the passenger seat, and off we went.

  Minutes later, Brigit and Marseille were exchanging friendly sniffs on the rug while Detective Jackson and I sat on Shelby’s sofa. Jackson eyed me and raised her hand, inviting me to discuss the matter with Shelby. I was proud she trusted me to take the lead.

  “I came across something today,” I said, handing the receipts over to Shelby and watching her closely to gauge her reaction. “It turns out your husband made a number of small purchases at various stores around town and obtained cash back. Around five thousand dollars in all since you’ve moved to Fort Worth.”

  “He did?” She ran her eyes over the receipts. “I wonder what he did that for.”

  “You weren’t aware of the cash-back transactions?”

  “No,” she said. “I had no idea.”

  “This type of behavior can be indicative of illegal activity,” I said, “such as drug use or gambling.”

  Shelby sighed. “I told you all before. Greg didn’t do drugs or gamble. I would’ve known.”

  Maybe. Maybe not. But there was no point in arguing with her. “Another possibility is that he frequented strip clubs, or that he had a mistress and used the cash when taking her out on dates or buying things for her so that you wouldn’t find out.”

  “No! Absolutely not!” Shelby shook her head so emphatically it was a wonder she didn’t give herself a concussion. Once she stopped shaking her head, she pinned me with a pointed look. “I’m not one of those women who’s in denial. I hope you know that. Greg and I were close and very much in love. He wasn’t perfect, but he wasn’t into cheap titillation and he would never ever have cheated on me. Even if he’d wanted to, when would he have had the time? When he wasn’t at the theater, he was either at home or with me.”

  “Not on weekdays when he worked the later shift,” I pointed out. “He would have been home alone in the mornings.”

  “Who has affairs at nine a.m.?” she snapped.

  Jackson joined in. “Maybe Greg wasn’t always at the theater when he said he was.”

  Shelby closed her eyes and drew a deep breath to calm herself. “Look, I know you two are only doing your job and, like you said before, you don’t really know me or my husband so you’ve got to look at things from every possible angle. But here’s an angle you haven’t considered. What if Greg was taking out the cash bit by bit to surprise me with something? It’s been my lifelong dream to go to France. He could have been secretly setting money aside to surprise me with a trip.”

  “But you have enough money in your checking account to visit France already,” I said. “The money from the sale of your house in Oklahoma.”

  “That’s true,” Shelby said, “but Greg and I agreed that we were going to invest the profits into a new house here once we had a chance to look around. I didn’t think it would be smart to spend the profits on a vacation. I wanted to invest the savings we’d accumulated since we moved here into a new house, too. We were planning to start a family, and I wasn’t sure whether I would continue working if we had a baby. I felt that we had to be careful with our money. Greg agreed to the plan, but I could tell he thought I was being overly stringent. Maybe he figured he could set aside a few hundred dollars at a time and show me that we could afford both a new house and the trip.”

  Everything Shelby was saying made sense, but one question remained. “If he was stockpiling cash, do you have any idea where he might have hidden it?”

  “None,” she said. “I haven’t come across any in the house.” A moment later, her eyes went wide. “Do you think that money was why he was killed? Could someone have known he had a large amount of cash on hand?”

  I looked from Shelby to Detective Jackson. “Greg didn’t stop to get cash on his way home from the theater the night he disappeared. But it’s possible one of the store clerks obtained Greg’s name from his debit card or shopper’s card and used it to figure out where he lived.”

  Jackson raised a shoulder. “Or another customer could have seen him get cash back on an earlier date, followed him home to see where he lived, and then come back and lay in wait the night of Valentine’s.”

  While these new theories could explain why Greg Olsen had been killed, they gave us an enormous field of potential suspects to sift through. Ugh.

  We thanked Shelby for being forthcoming with us, and told her we’d be back in touch if this new information led anywhere. The cash-back lead seemed to be taking us in several possible directions. But was it taking us closer to the truth?

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  PUPPER PLAYTIME

  Brigit

  While Megan and the detective had talked to the woman at the house, Brigit had been having fun with the dog with the smushed-in face. She’d been afraid at first that Megan might get angry with her for playing around on duty, but Megan was so focused on talking to the other women that she wasn’t paying any attention to Brigit. She and the other dog had each taken an end of a rope toy in their teeth and engaged in a game of tug-of-war. Brigit thought she’d easily best the little beast, but the dog was surprisingly heavy for her small size. She got a good grip on the rope, too. She proved to be a much more formidable opponent than Brigit had expected.

  In the end, Brigit had dragged the other dog across the floor and claimed victory. Luckily, the dog wasn’t a sore loser. She’d wagged her tail, grabbed the rope, and run across the room with it, challenging Brigit to a second game. Brigit was just about to pick the rope up in her teeth again when Megan told her it was time to go. Brigit glanced back at the little dog from the front doorway and wagged her tail goodbye. See you later!

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE SMELL OF FREEDOM

  The Slasher

  On Wednesday evening, he ventured out of the hotel for the first time. He stopped in the parking lot, closed his eyes, and raised his head, inhaling deeply. Damn it felt good to breathe outdoor air again, even if that air was tainted with automobile exhaust from the nearby freeway.

  He’d debated whether to leave the cash in the room. It didn’t seem entirely safe to leave a big stash of bills in the room with the hotel management and housekeeping crew having access to the space, but it seemed even less safe to carry so much with him. He’d settled for tucking a hundred bucks into his wallet and hiding the rest of the roll under an inverted coffee mug in the kitchen cabinet while he was gone. If anyone entered the room with the intent of stealing from him, under the mug would hopefully be one of the last places they’d look for hidden valuables.

  He walked down to the dollar store, where he grabbed a couple of shirts, underwear, and socks, along with a small box of laundry detergent and some canned food items. He was careful to keep his head down and not look directly at any of the security cameras. He was in and out in mere minutes. Though he’d felt entirely conspicuous, neither the clerk who rang him up nor any of the other customers in the store had given him so much as a second glance. Before he knew it, he was back in his room at the hotel. After checking on the cash and moving it back to his backpack, he used a steak knife to cut the price tags off his new clothing. He chuckled to himself. I’ve become quite handy with knives.

  TWENTY-NINE

  ROOF OR SPOOF?

  Megan

  I swung by to check on Mrs. Nomikos Thursday afternoon. Tommy Perkins had delivered some shingles to her home that morning and told her the crew chief had confirmed that her crew should be out the following day to begin installing her new roof.

  I eyed the short plastic-wrapped stack of shingles on her porch. “That doesn’t look like nearly enough shingles to cover your roof.”

  “I said the same thing. Mr. Perkins told me he’d run ou
t of space on his truck and the crew would bring the rest of the materials with them when they come out tomorrow.”

  I stopped by to visit the other neighbors who had signed with Stormchaser Roofing. One wasn’t home, but a similarly small supply of shingles sat on the front stoop. The other said Perkins had given him the same story, that there hadn’t been room on his truck to carry all the shingles, but that the remaining shingles would arrive along with the crew in another couple of days. I hoped Perkins had delivered the supplies in good faith, and that this wasn’t merely a stalling tactic.

  * * *

  Jackson called me into the station late in the afternoon. The lab hadn’t yet completed their screen of Greg’s blood, so we didn’t yet know if he had illegal drugs in his system. But, since we’d spoken with Shelby the evening before, the detective had obtained lists of employees from the stores where Greg Olsen had completed his cashback transactions. Considering that Greg had received cash back in over a hundred transactions at more than a dozen stores, it would be a nearly insurmountable task to attempt to identify another shopper who might have followed Greg home. It would take an immense amount of time to review both the indoor and outdoor security camera footage for each transaction. We simply didn’t have the time and manpower for what could very likely be a futile task.

  Jackson noted that she’d asked the store managers whether they were aware of any recent incidents in which any of their customers had been followed home from the store or mugged in the parking lot. “There was a single incident at one of the grocery stores. A man attempted to grab a disabled woman’s purse from her scooter basket as she was loading her bags in her car.” She went on to tell me that, while the two wrangled with her handbag, the woman drove her scooter back and forth over the would-be thief’s foot until he finally gave up. The police nabbed him three blocks away, limping along the sidewalk. The suspect had a lengthy record and was still being held the night Greg Olsen had been attacked. “The mugger had skipped out once before, and no bondsman would post bail for him.” Because he’d been in jail on Valentine’s Day, he wasn’t a viable suspect.

  Given the difficulty of identifying shoppers, we focused our efforts on the stores’ staff. I spent some time helping Jackson run background checks on them. The vast majority were clean. Though we found a couple of employees who’d been caught with small amounts of recreational drugs and several who’d been charged with driving under the influence, we found none with theft charges or a violent record. Stores tended to shy away from hiring anyone with a theft conviction or violent charge, and they’d generally fire someone who committed a theft or violent offense after being hired—assuming they learned of the arrest. Of course, it was still possible that an employee of one of the stores was, in fact, one of the people who’d killed Greg Olsen and that they’d brought a fellow employee or someone else along with them. But if that was the case then it was either their first violent incident or they’d skirted the law on any previous acts of violence. Once again, the lead had petered out.

  When the detective had run her last report, she pushed away from her desk. Leaning her head back and closing her eyes, she groaned. “I’m getting damn tired of spinning our wheels on this case.”

  She wasn’t the only one. The investigation had been an exercise in futility and frustration. “Maybe the guys who killed Greg will screw up,” I said, “let something slip to a friend or family member who will turn them in.”

  She frowned at me. “Your optimism is annoying.”

  “It’s also false,” I admitted. “Honestly, I feel like kicking the wall.”

  “So do I,” the detective said. She grabbed her coat and stood. “I’m going to blow off some steam at the firing range, then I’m heading home to indulge in a glass of wine and a romance novel. Those stories always end happily, and the girl always gets her man.”

  “We’ll get ours, too.”

  “Dammit, Megan, I hope so.”

  We walked out to our cars together and bade each other goodbye in the parking lot. While she headed home, I headed back out on patrol, glad to have only one more night on the swing shift.

  * * *

  Late Friday afternoon, Jackson phoned me. “Got the latest lab results. There were no illegal drugs in Greg’s blood.”

  “So we can rule out the possibility that he might have been killed by a drug dealer?”

  “Not necessarily. Meth, heroin, cocaine, and MDMA stay in the system for only two to four days. Marijuana shows up for about a week. The only thing we know with full certainty is that he didn’t take illegal drugs in the days immediately before he died. He doesn’t appear to have been an addict, but he still could have been an occasional user. All this said, though, the probability that Greg Olsen was killed by a drug dealer seems remote. If he wasn’t a regular user, he was unlikely to rack up a large debt that went unpaid. Besides, if he had racked up a debt and thought he might be killed for it, my guess is he’d have withdrawn money from the checking account to cover it and risked Shelby’s wrath rather than his life.”

  We were left with the more viable theories that Greg had been targeted for the theater’s cash, his own stockpile of cash, or because he was having an affair. But there was no evidence of infidelity other than the unexplained cashback transactions. Would we ever get answers?

  * * *

  After leaving the station, I swung by Mrs. Nomikos’s house. To my dismay, the single package of shingles still sat unopened on her porch and no crew from Stormchaser was on site. I rang her bell. When she came to the door, I said, “Still waiting on your roof?”

  “I am.” She issued a derisive yet delicate snort. “Today’s excuse is that the crew that was supposed to work on my house ran into some trouble on their current job. Something about damaged decking that had to be replaced.”

  A reasonable explanation. But was it true, or was it another delaying tactic? “Did Mr. Perkins tell you when the crew would be coming here?”

  “‘As soon as they finish up at the other house’ he said. Whatever that means.” She rolled her eyes.

  I chewed my lip as I mulled over the situation. Was Tommy Perkins on the up-and-up? Or was he simply stringing these folks along while he signed more customers up for roofs that might not ever be installed? It could go either way. He seemed like a nice enough guy, and police work could make anyone cynical. Maybe I was being overly suspicious. Even so, Perkins had made repeated promises he hadn’t kept. I couldn’t simply let that go. “I’ll check back by next time I’m on duty.”

  “Why bother?” The woman crossed her arms over her chest and skewered me with a pointed look. “Doesn’t seem like you plan to do anything about the situation.”

  My face flamed. I couldn’t blame her for being frustrated, but I didn’t appreciate being badgered when I was trying to help. “Tell you what. I’ll make a stop by his place, see if he’s there, and let him know I’m keeping an eye on him. How’s that sound?”

  “I suppose it’s better than nothing.”

  “Better than nothing.” Talk about a thankless job.

  Before heading to the Airbnb where Perkins was staying, I stopped by the station to discuss the roofing issue with Captain Leone. The captain was a fortyish guy with springy dark hair and wiry eyebrows that would be right at home on a terrier.

  I rapped on his doorframe. “Got a second?”

  “No,” he said. “But for you, Megan, I’ll make one. Come on in.”

  I didn’t bother to sit, but rather launched right into the reason for my visit. “I’m not sure if this guy named Tommy Perkins is engaging in criminal activity or not.” I gave the captain the facts I’d gathered so far about Stormchaser Roofing and Mr. Perkins.

  “Could be a criminal, but seems more likely he’s just an experienced salesman who overpromises to land the deal. Sounds like a matter for the courts, not the cops. There’s not enough proof to bring him in. But keep an eye on him.”

  “Will do. Thanks, Captain.”

  I felt vindic
ated that the captain, who had far more years of policing under his belt, had reached the same conclusions I had. I climbed back into my cruiser and swung by the address Perkins had given me for his rental. The house sat a mile or so beyond the perimeter of my beat, but close enough that I could get back to my district quickly if needed. His truck sat in the driveway of the small wood-frame house. The place was painted dark blue with crisp white trim. Potted orange pansies flanked each side of the front door, providing a nice splash of color.

  I let Brigit out of her enclosure for a potty break and, after she’d completed her business in the dried grass and sniffed around a little, I led her to the front door. From inside came the sounds of a basketball game—the Dallas Mavericks versus the Phoenix Suns. With Frankie and me both on duty tonight, Seth and Zach had decided to have a guys’ night and had driven over to nearby Dallas to watch the game live. With Tommy Perkins’s permanent address being in New Mexico, which sat right between Texas and Arizona, I wondered which team he was rooting for. Rap-rap-rap.

  Perkins answered the door a moment later, opening it wide and treating me to a wide smile, too. “Hello, Officer Luz.” He looked down at my partner. “Hello to you, too, fluffy.”

  While Brigit often appreciated attention from people, she didn’t wag her tail tonight. She merely stood stiffly, staring up at him. It was as if she knew something I didn’t. Wouldn’t be the first time. She was a smart, intuitive dog. If not for her lack of opposable thumbs and English language capabilities, I’d be taking orders from her instead of the other way around. I wondered what kind of treats she’d give me when I did good. Tootsie Rolls? Jelly beans? Lollipops?