Cat's Claw

by Susan Wittig Albert

  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 borin
g. 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.”

  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 Ramb
o, 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.