Cat's Claw

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “More than friends?”

  “Maybe. But then we started going out together. He blew me away, too, you know, with all that energy. He was working his way through school—a master’s in computer science—and doing freelance stuff, too. Harmon wasn’t the only place he worked. He’d take jobs whenever they came along. I thought it was great that he could manage everything. His classes, consulting, all that stuff.” She flexed her fingers and Sheila noticed that she wasn’t wearing any rings. “But I guess it should have told me something.”

  “Told you what?”

  She hesitated, then looked up, holding the look almost defiantly. “That there wasn’t room in his life for anything or anyone else but work.” She took a deep breath. “If there had been, I never would’ve…” She ran out of steam, puffing out her breath. “Oh, never mind. Just never mind.”

  Sheila understood. When you loved your work, it was hard to find time for other things. For people, even the ones who mattered to you. She changed directions. “I need the names of the people you work with, who can verify your whereabouts today.”

  “But why? I don’t understand—”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Kirk. It’s necessary.”

  This list was shorter. On it was Donna Givens’ name, the woman that Dana Kirk was currently staying with.

  “That reminds me.” Sheila took out the card. “Ms. Givens wanted you to know that she was here. I’m sorry we couldn’t let her in.”

  Mrs. Kirk took the card. “Donna is so sweet. She’s been an angel through—” She waved her hand vaguely. “Through everything.”

  Sheila nodded. “Oh, and she also wanted me to tell you that Mr. Vance would like you to call as soon as you can.”

  “Oh, really?” Mrs. Kirk’s breath quickened. “I— Uh, thank you.”

  “Vance.” Sheila read the rising flush on the woman’s cheeks. She looked down at the list. “You seem to have left his name out. He’s the man you’ve been seeing?”

  Mrs. Kirk shook her head, chewed her lip, and looked away. Sheila waited. Finally, she said, “Yes. He’s— Yes.”

  “Thank you. Vance.” Sheila made a point of scribbling it down. “First name?”

  “Glen. He’s… the director of the library. My… boss.”

  Sheila remembered the man. Ingratiating, she thought, too quick with the flattery. The sort of man an affection-starved woman might be attracted to, when her husband was working nights and weekends.

  “You won’t have to… to talk to him, will you?” Mrs. Kirk asked. “It would just upset— I mean, Glen isn’t involved in any way.”

  “You said you returned from lunch with Mr. Vance at one forty-five,” Sheila said crisply. “Did he return to the library at that time?”

  “No. He… he had some errands to run. I don’t know what time he got back.” Her mouth twisted and she put out her hand in a pleading gesture. “Please. Please don’t bother him about this. It has nothing to do with him. It would be just awful.”

  “I understand the situation, Mrs. Kirk,” Sheila said, and tucked her notebook and pen into her shirt pocket without acknowledging the woman’s plea. She stood up. “Thank you—you’ve been very helpful. You can go now. Before you do, though, I’m going to ask one of our officers to take your fingerprints.”

  “My… fingerprints?” Dana Kirk asked, alarmed. “But I don’t understand. Why—”

  “It’s just one of the things we do,” Sheila said with a reassuring smile. “It’s part of our process of elimination. It’ll just take a minute.”

  “Well, I guess, if it’s necessary.” Dana Kirk got up. She smoothed her skirt and then her hair, glancing toward the house. “I was planning to pick up a few things today. Linens, mostly. From upstairs. Can I— May I go in and get them now?”

  Sheila shook her head. “The house is off-limits for the time being, maybe as long as a couple of days. We’ll let you know when you can have access.” She took out a card with her work number on it, added her cell number, and handed it to the woman. “I’d like you to call me if you think of anything I should know—or if something happens that’s in any way related to your husband’s death.”

  Mrs. Kirk’s fingers closed around the card. She looked toward the house, her eyes filling with tears. “I suppose… I suppose it’s my house now, isn’t it?” She sounded disbelieving, but there was also a note of something like relief in her voice. Sheila wasn’t surprised. The marriage was over, and without all the bother and expense of a divorce.

  “You’ll have to ask your lawyer about that,” she said. “Do you know if your husband left a will?” If this became a homicide investigation, they would need a copy.

  “Yes. We both have—had wills. I don’t think he changed his after we separated. Which means…” Her voice trailed off.

  Which means, Sheila thought, that the widow was now the owner of the house where her husband had died. And likely the business, as well. She wondered what kind of difference this was going to make in Dana Kirk’s life, and whether that difference might have been enough to tempt her.

  “Insurance policies?” Sheila asked.

  Mrs. Kirk frowned. “Yes,” she said reluctantly.

  “How much?”

  “Two hundred fifty thousand.” As if in explanation, she added, “I was working for an insurance agent when we got married.” Her tone was defensive. “Ms. Harmon wrote the policies for us. There’s one on my life, too. The same amount.”

  Sheila made a note. It sounded like the insurance had been in force long enough for the suicide exclusion to be lifted. “You’re the beneficiary of your husband’s policy?”

  Her “I am” was barely audible. Mrs. Kirk was putting two and two together, and realizing that she was about to come into a substantial sum of money. She might also be realizing that a quarter of a million dollars, plus the house and the business, might look to the police like a lot of incentive. It was. People killed for much less.

  Chapter Six

  Sheila stood at the open kitchen door, looking at the crime scene. Orlando always said that when you were investigating homicides, you had to remember that you’d never get to know the victims personally. They were dead. You were never going to know them the way they were when they were alive. So you had to get to know them in reverse. Backward, he’d say. From the way they lived and worked, from the people they knew, from what they left behind. That would never be enough, but it was all you were going to have. So you had to get what you needed backward, then work it forward, detail by detail, putting the picture together until you knew the victim as well as if he’d been your next-door neighbor, your friend.

  She had gotten a pair of latex gloves from the med techs who stood behind her, waiting to pick up the body as soon as she was finished with her preliminary walk-through. The county team—photographer and forensics specialist—had wrapped up their work, packed their gear, and departed, leaving a stack of a dozen Polaroids on the kitchen table. The videos and digitals would be emailed tomorrow. The forensic report would be sent as soon as the lab work was complete.

  The county crime-scene unit was only a year old, and the protocols were still being worked out. Before it was in place, PSPD had gotten by with whatever the detectives could handle on their own, or they’d brought the Travis County Medical Examiner’s Office into the case via a telephone consultation, which was never completely satisfactory by anybody’s reckoning. For Sheila, the county alternative had been a viable alternative, at least as long as Blackie was the county sheriff. They had worked comfortably together without having to spell out who was responsible for what or worry about whether they were trespassing on the other’s turf. The new sheriff, Curt Chambers, had been Blackie’s chosen successor and was elected with Blackie’s endorsement and support. But he didn’t have Blackie’s experience or confidence. Maybe he’d grow into the job, but for now, he was a by-the-book guy who seemed to need everything in triplicate. Sheila wasn’t sure just how that situation was going to work out.

 
; She gloved up and began her survey, working methodically from right to left around the small room. The door behind her, the white-painted knob smudged with dark fingerprint powder, open, so the cloying smell of blood and beer was probably less overpowering than it had been when Ruby Wilcox’s sister stumbled onto the body. The side-by-side fridge-freezer, a grocery list stuck to it with a teakettle magnet. The kitchen range with an egg-crusted skillet on one burner, a half-empty can of pork and beans beside it, a spoon stuck in the can, a fly on the end of the spoon. A bulletin board on the wall displaying a calendar with a flock of pasted-on yellow sticky notes. On the floor directly beneath it, a dark chalked circle with an arrow pointing to nothing—to the empty spot where Bartlett had spotted the cartridge casing.

  Another door opened onto a hallway and then onto what looked like a dining room, where she could see Jack Bartlett, his back to her, using his small digital camera to photograph a table filled with what looked like computer components. Then a space of empty wall with a wall phone, also smudged with dark powder. A kitchen counter with a microwave. The remains of a Chinese meal—a white take-out container beside a smaller empty box, a spill of cooked white rice, one wooden chopstick, a broken fortune cookie. The usual cupboards over and under the counter, doors hanging open, draped with dish towels. A dead geranium on the windowsill over the sink. The sink piled high with dirty dishes, several days’ worth, Sheila guessed. In the corner, a kitchen trashcan overflowing with cans, beer bottles, and plastic boxes that had once held cookies or pastry, now just crumbs. The kitchen of a guy who was eating alone and wasn’t watching his diet.

  In the center of the room, a round wooden table. Laptop on the table, beside the laptop, a wallet. A wooden chair on its side on the floor. A puddle of blood and spilled beer. Kirk was lying on his back on the floor next to the chair, head slightly turned to the left. The entry wound at the right temple was small, round, neat. No visible powder marks. No visible exit wound. He was unshaven, his brown hair a little long on the back of his neck and over his ears. He was dressed in a blue T-shirt with the name of his business across the front, jeans, no belt, Birkenstocks on bare, hairy feet. His fingertips were smudged with ink, so she knew he had been printed. He wore a digital wristwatch, nothing fancy, and no wedding ring. Larry Kirk looked the way dead people usually looked. Terribly human, frighteningly frail, terrifyingly vulnerable. Sheila was struck again by the irrefutable fact that a life was gone and with it decades of lived experience, successes, failures, celebrations, regrets. She remembered something else Orlando used to say: “Somebody’s gotta stick up for the dead, Dawson. They can’t do it—it’s gotta be you. You’re all they got.”

  She knelt beside the body for the space of a dozen breaths, looking, taking in as much as she could, letting herself feel the familiar sickening clench in her stomach, the sense of absolute finality that swept over her like a dark, chilly wave. No more laughter, no more love, no joy, no fear of the past or hope for the future. Just… nothing. Nothing but what was left to her and her partner: the task of seeking justice. Don’t forget what you’re there for, Dawson, Orlando had written to her. Barricaded behind the paperwork, bulwarked behind the desk, it was too easy to forget. But here in this room, she remembered. This was what she was here for. To stick up for the dead.

  After a few moments, she took a deep breath, got to her feet, and turned to the Polaroids on the table. The gun was already gone. So was the .32-millimeter cartridge casing, the beer bottle—all three items bagged by the tech and carried away to the lab, where they’d be printed. But the Polaroids, shot from several angles, showed what the forensic tech had taken.

  One photo showed the Llama loosely gripped in the victim’s right hand, his fingers lightly curled around the crosshatched wooden grip.

  Another photo, this one of the cartridge head-stamp, showed it to be an R-P 32 auto. The indentation in the primer was slightly off-center. The casing would be run through NIBIN, the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, a database imaging system that compared images of bullet cartridge cases, shell casings, and bullets. If the gun had been used in a previous crime and the casings entered in NIBIN, they’d get a match.

  Sheila looked at the photo of the man and the gun. She never liked to leapfrog over the evidence, but she had already seen and heard enough to feel pretty certain that Larry Kirk had not shot himself. They’d know a great deal more after the autopsy and the results of the testing on the hands and the entry wound. What was puzzling her right now, though, was the sound of the shooting. A .32 automatic wasn’t as loud as, say, a .357 Magnum, but it still produced a sharp report that, in this quiet neighborhood, somebody should have heard. Maybe Matheson would pick up something while he was canvassing—something to pinpoint the time of death more definitely than the autopsy surgeon was likely to do.

  Sheila put down the photographs. There were a couple of other things she needed to check out before the med techs came in to remove the body. She went to the fridge and looked closely at the grocery list, noticing that the usual items—bread, beer, sausage, hot dogs, pizza—were penciled in a crabbed, backward-slanting script. She turned to the calendar. It was topped by a large full-color photo of the Alamo, the months in fold-down pages below. The photo page was studded with five yellow sticky notes. They all said about the same thing, in the same backslant: Saw JH or sometimes just JH and the date. The first one was October 21, the last was the previous day, the intervals between were two or three days. Two were written with a pen, three with a pencil. She copied the text and the dates and surveyed the calendar, flipping up the pages for October and September and pulling down the page for December. There were a few other penciled notes—dentist, Mom’s birthday, climbing club meeting—but nothing else of consequence.

  She frowned. The cryptic Saw JH. “Saw” could mean one of several things. Kirk (assuming that he wrote the notes) could have seen a doctor. Or he could have spent the evening or had lunch with somebody, a woman, maybe, a date. Or he could have noticed JH, as in seeing him—or her—on the street, outside his house. Stalking him.

  She was turning to the laptop when her cell phone chirped. She flipped it open. China Bayles.

  “What’s up, China?” she asked.

  “Brace yourself, Chief,” China said. “I just got a call from Jessica Nelson, at the Enterprise. Somebody tipped her that George Timms is about to be arrested for breaking into Larry Kirk’s computing business. Jessica is planning to break the story, and she wanted my opinion as to whether there was any connection between Timms and Kirk.”

  “Aw, crap,” Sheila muttered.

  “Yeah.” China sighed. “My sentiment exactly.” She paused. “Has the arrest happened yet?”

  “No,” Sheila said shortly. Then she remembered that China had given her the lead on the stalking and helped her get information from Dana Kirk that would otherwise have been slow in coming. China was plugged into the Pecan Springs newswire—the gossip channel that was on and open pretty much twenty-four-seven. She softened her tone.

  “Timms was a no-show, China. We’ve got an APB out on him. Lipman is livid, naturally. Accused us of holding his client incommunicado.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet he did,” China said dryly. She was silent for a moment. “I hope I’m not jumping to conclusions, but I keep wondering if there’s a connection between Timms and Kirk.”

  “Yeah,” Sheila said. “I wonder, too. Thanks for the tip on Nelson.”

  She folded the phone and turned to the laptop that was open on the table. The computer was still on but the screen was blank, the monitor asleep. The keyboard hadn’t been dusted for prints. Why not? she wondered. Just overlooked? She used the tip of her pen to wake the computer. After a few seconds, the screen came to life and displayed Kirk’s email program, the last thing he had been viewing before he died. The most recent was from a client asking about a project, and had arrived about two hours before. The one above it was from China Bayles. Both were unread.

  She glan
ced through China’s message quickly and the original message from Kirk embedded within it. Then she used her pen to scroll upward through the inbox. Most of the emails appeared to be business-related, from clients or employees, with a scattering of casual notes from guys in a rock-climbing club. None from women, and none that looked ominous or suspicious, at least at a glance. And if there was anything from someone with the initials JH, she didn’t immediately see it.

  She opened the “sent” folder and immediately spotted it. An email to Dana Kirk, from her husband. It was time-stamped at 2:04 p.m. It read like a suicide note.

  Dana—I’m sorry. You can stop worrying about me. I’m tired and I just can’t go through with the divorce. It’s all yours, the house, the business, everything. Have a good life. Love, Larry

  Sheila read it again, frowning, then copied the sentences into her notebook. Was this what it sounded like? Or was it something else?

  She used her pen to scroll up to the next message, which had been sent at 1:42.

  Colin, your printer will be ready tomorrow. Stop by the shop about 2 to pick it up. No charge—it’s under warranty. Glad I could help.—Larry

  The skin prickled on the back of her neck. This message didn’t sound to her like it came from the same guy who—some twenty minutes later—wrote what purported to be a suicide note and then blew his brains out. She looked briefly at the other five emails that had been sent that day from this computer. They were all business-related, in the same tone as the email to Colin. One of them mentioned a lunch the following week.

  She brought up the final message again, then raised her voice. “Hey, Jack. You got a second?”

  Bartlett came back into the kitchen, pocketing a small tape recorder that he’d been using to take scene notes. “Yeah. Found something?”

  She pointed to the computer. He bent over and read the message, then straightened, glancing at her. “What do you think?”