Cat's Claw

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “Look at this one, too,” she said, and brought up the earlier message. “Written twenty minutes earlier.”

  “Huh.” Bartlett grunted. “Doesn’t match, if you ask me.” He glanced down at the keyboard. “Looks like the tech didn’t dust this. In too much of a hurry, maybe. I’ll get an evidence bag. Let’s take the laptop to the station and get Butch to print it.”

  Butch Bedford was PSPD’s in-house fingerprint technician, a young black officer who had recently finished a two-week training course in print analysis run by the Texas Department of Public Safety. When Sheila took the chief’s job, the department’s fingerprint work had been sent to Austin, a turnaround of four or five days, sometimes a week—just not fast enough. Then Blackie beefed up the county’s forensic capabilities and Sheila sent the print work there, which was faster, at least in the beginning. Now, with more work to do, even the county lab was frequently backlogged, which could mean a couple days’ wait.

  And then Bedford had come along, a new hire with four years of college and a major in forensic science from Sam Houston State. He had already completed a basic course in fingerprint analysis as part of his major, but she sent him off for further training and purchased some minimal equipment—not enough to do the job the way it should be done, but enough to get a preliminary report done quickly, when they needed it. The confirmation analysis, if necessary, could be done at the county lab or in Austin, where there was better equipment.

  Bartlett glanced around. “If you’re finished in here, the med techs can take the body. I’ve let Dr. Morse know that we’re sending her an autopsy. She said she’d get on it as soon as she could.”

  The techs bagged Kirk’s hands and head and then removed the body. Sheila and Bartlett watched, paying attention. Sometimes things turned up when the victim was being moved and readied for transport. But there was nothing this time. Bartlett bagged the computer, Sheila picked up the Polaroids, and they went outside, where Jack lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply. Sheila had given up smoking when she left Dallas Homicide, but she inhaled the secondhand smoke with more than a little longing. A cigarette would taste good right now.

  “The widow give you anything useful?” Bartlett asked.

  “A couple of things. Kirk hated guns—wouldn’t have one in the house. In fact, he was an anti-gun activist. Campaigned against the campus concealed carry.”

  “Good for him,” Bartlett grunted. He eyed her, as if he were testing. “This ain’t no suicide, at least that’s my feeling. How much do you want to bet?”

  “Not one red cent,” Sheila said. She opened her notebook and began to scan her notes. “Okay, here we go. Kirk had lots of friends, no enemies, according to Mrs. Kirk. She doesn’t know anything about a stalker, doesn’t want her boyfriend bothered, etcetera. She was at work all day, at the library—except for an hour when she was supposedly having lunch at the Nueces Street Diner. With her boyfriend. From one to two. Oh, and there’s insurance. Two hundred fifty thou. Plus she gets the house—and the business.”

  Bartlett whistled. “That’s enough motive.”

  “Agreed.” Sheila hesitated, thinking about the woman she had interviewed. “But she’s a softie. Motive, yes, but no starch. Not saying she didn’t kill him or that she doesn’t know who did. But if she’s involved, she’s a damn good actress.” She cocked her head, listening. There was a flare of lightning in the dark sky to the north, and in the distance, thunder rumbled. She thought of the email to Dana Kirk, time-stamped at 2:04.

  “Any idea of the time of death?”

  Bartlett blew a stream of blue smoke from his nostrils. Instead of answering, he said, “I just got a call from that kid reporter at the Enterprise. Jessica Nelson.”

  “That one,” Sheila said darkly. “She got a tip on Timms’ arrest, according to China Bayles. When we finally book the guy, she’ll no doubt be there. With a camera.”

  Bartlett chuckled. “Yeah, that one. But she did pick up on something, Sheila. She was looking for human interest and talked to a neighbor two doors east, a Mrs. Wauer. The woman says she might’ve heard a gunshot around two o’clock. She remembers thinking it was a backfire. And Matheson located a guy across the street and a couple of houses down, who claimed to have heard the same thing, about the same time. He told Mattie he thought it was the garbage truck.”

  “Garbage truck,” Sheila said thoughtfully, and thought again of the email. Somebody sent it at 2:04—if not Kirk, then the killer.

  “The garbage guys are pretty noisy,” Bartlett was saying. “That’s what the neighbor said, anyway. They like to bang the cans around, make as much racket as possible, hoping to wake up the taxpayers.” He pulled on his cigarette. “Nothing else—at least so far. No one saw a suspicious vehicle, or anybody leaving the scene on foot. I’ll have Mattie follow up with the Wauer woman.”

  Sheila made a note. “I wonder if that garbage truck always shows up at the same time.”

  Bartlett pursed his lips. “Let’s check that out. You’re thinking that maybe—”

  “Right. If this is a homicide, and if the shooter knew the neighborhood well enough to know what day and time the garbage truck picks up, it would be an easy thing to time the job for when the truck was on the street. I’ll give the garbage company a call, find out who was on today’s route. Maybe the garbage guys saw something.”

  Bartlett was frowning. “I was thinking how this would’ve gone down. No sign of a struggle, nothing out of place except for the chair and the beer on the floor. Seems to me that it had to be somebody Kirk knew—somebody who could come in, maybe talk a little, then step forward, pull a gun, and fire when he wasn’t expecting it. When he was still seated at the table.”

  “And if Dana Kirk didn’t write that email to herself, it had to be written by somebody who knew about the divorce,” Sheila said. “Who knew the wife’s name and email address or knew that it was in the address book on Kirk’s computer.” She glanced at Bartlett. “So what’s next?”

  Bartlett gave her that slanted grin of his, and she thought again of his reputation as a dangerous man. “You’re really gonna do this, aren’t you?” he asked. “Let me have the lead.”

  “Yep,” Sheila said, straight-faced. “Really gonna do it.” She liked this guy. Orlando would have liked this guy.

  “Okay.” He was brisk. “Okay, here’s what we do next. We take the computer for printing. We get a search warrant for the business, then we go to the shop, have a look around. Pull the names of the employees, talk to them, see what they know about this stalker Kirk mentioned.”

  “Timms’ computer,” Sheila put in. “Where is it?”

  “In the evidence locker at the station. Timms didn’t find it when he broke into the shop. Somebody had stuck it in one of the file cabinets.”

  “Might be a good idea to ask Annetta Blount to take a look at the data files on Timms’ machine,” Sheila said. Blount was one of the detectives who worked under Bartlett, specializing in fraud and financial crime. She had taken a couple of courses in forensic computing at the academy. “See if she can find whatever it was Timms didn’t want anybody to see. That is, if there is such a thing, which we don’t know.”

  “Yeah. I’ll put her on it.” Bartlett glanced at his watch. “After I leave here, I’ll stop by the station, leave Kirk’s laptop, and punch up the warrant request. I’ll get the warrant signed and meet you at the computer shop—say, maybe forty minutes.” He paused, thinking. “Hey. We haven’t cleared the break-in yet. We might not need a new warrant.”

  “Uh-uh. We’re both thinking homicide, Jack. New case. May be connected to the break-in, but maybe not. Let’s do it by the book, so we don’t get any crap from anybody when we go to trial.”

  “Especially crap from the chief.” Bartlett grinned.

  This time, Sheila returned the grin. “Right. I’ll phone the judge and let her know you’re bringing the warrant.” She paused. “Okay if I take the Polaroids? I didn’t get a chance to look at them.”

 
; “Yeah, sure.”

  There was another clap of thunder, closer. Sheila looked up. The sky was gray and dark. “Maybe we ought to get something to eat before we do the shop. You think?”

  Bartlett put out his cigarette and bagged the butt. “Sounds good. There’s a fast-food joint across the street from the computer shop. Meet you there.”

  Chapter Seven

  If you have ever tangled with the greenbrier vine [Smilax bona-nox, aka catbrier, blaspheme-vine], you can appreciate its common names. The thorns cling like the claws of a cat and have induced more than one blasphemous response from this explorer.

  Edible and Useful Plants of Texas and the Southwest

  by Delena Tull

  The name bona-nox means “good night” in Latin. Why did Linnaeus give [the catbrier] this unusual name? Perhaps bona-nox was a curse in Latin—the species certainly causes lots of cursing by field biologists when they get stuck by its prickles!

  Charles Wilson Cook

  McQuaid and the kids and I live off Limekiln Road, twelve miles outside Pecan Springs, at the western edge of the developed part of the Hill Country. A couple of miles east of us, back toward town, a gated community of half-million-dollar homes is under construction behind an outpost palisade, the houses thrusting into the sky like medieval stone castles. To the west, the wilderness begins: rocky, thin-soiled uplands thickly blanketed with nearly impenetrable brakes of cedar, elbow bush, and catbrier; grassy clearings studded with spiny prickly pear; and swaths of open valleys braided with clear creeks. That’s what you can see, and it’s beautiful. But there’s more that you can’t, and it’s beautiful, too. Underground, the folded hills are honeycombed with labyrinthine limestone caves, carved by eons of seeping, dripping, trickling water.

  This wilderness is home to whitetail deer and armadillos, rangy coyotes and feral pigs, wild turkeys, turkey vultures, the endangered golden-cheeked warblers, and—in the underground caves and the open night skies—the Mexican free-tail bats. For over a century, cattle ranchers scrabbled a hard living from these hills and valleys. That era has come to an end, for in the past decade, factory-farmed cattle have swamped the market. Range-fed cattle are no longer profitable. Now, few people have the know-how and the stamina it takes to live off the land.

  It was warm for early November, and it had been looking like rain all afternoon, a thunderstorm to the north offering a brief, glittering show of lightning. It had been full dark when I left Ruby’s house, and the rain was just beginning to fall. I was heading home down Limekiln Road, not far from the turnoff to our house, when I caught a quick movement out of the corner of my eye. Before I knew what was happening, a ghostly apparition sprinted out of the thick underbrush and across the road at the moving edge of my headlights. A mountain lion—a splendid wild cat, lithe and lean, its tail more than half the length of its body, its gray fur glistening like liquid silver in the rain.

  I jammed on the brakes, clenching the steering wheel, my heart pounding. This was the first big cat I had ever seen, and I couldn’t help wishing he had stopped so I could get a better look. Of course, I was safely in the car—I’m sure I would have felt differently if I’d been on foot. But the sight was a reminder that I live at the edge of the wild lands, and this glimpse of real wildness left me as breathless as if I’d been within reach of those razor-sharp claws.

  I took a deep breath and drove on, still enthralled by the magic of what I had seen. But it was frightening, too, and as I made the left turn off the highway and onto our narrow gravel lane, I was glad to be coming home.

  We live in a large two-story Victorian, painted white with green shutters, a porch on three sides, a turret in the front corner. It was built in the interval between the world wars, when Central Texas State was still a teachers’ college and Pecan Springs was still a very small town. When our house was new, there were no near neighbors and the land all around was largely unsettled.

  Our closest neighbors are the Banners, who have a maroon mailbox shaped like a Texas A&M football helmet bearing the words banners for aggies! in large gold letters. Tom and Sylvia are both employed in Pecan Springs, Tom at the university, Sylvia at Ranchers State Bank. In addition to their town jobs, they share the work of a big vegetable garden, Tom maintains a small peach orchard, and Sylvia tends a flock of ten Gulf Coast native sheep, brought to Texas in the late 1500s by the Spanish and bred over the centuries for their fine wool. The best thing about the breed, Sylvia says, is their tolerance for our Texas heat and humidity. She is a talented spinner and weaver and dyes her own fiber from plants she grows or gathers: goldenrod, madder, burdock, clematis, coreopsis, and yarrow—even bark from the osage orange trees and the cochineal bugs she picks off the prickly pear. She’s raised her sheep from lambs and loves them as if they were her children.

  I parked my Toyota on the gravel area beside the fence and ducked through the drizzle to the porch. The house was dark, which meant that McQuaid and the kids weren’t yet back from Seguin. However, our elderly basset—Howard Cosell—was on guard as usual, stationed just inside the kitchen door to make sure that his house was not invaded by burglars, skunks, rats, or other unapproved intruders from the wilderness beyond the stone fence. (I’m sure he would also do his best to defend against mountain lions.) Howard was irritated because his dinner was three hours late, and he told me about it in no uncertain tones. If you’ve ever had an aggravated basset lecture you about his delayed dinner, you know what I’m talking about.

  Pumpkin, Caitie’s orange tabby cat, isn’t as vocal as Howard, but he let me know that he wasn’t at all happy with the way his household was being managed. This scruffy, battle-scarred, down-at-the-heels character showed up on our doorstep earlier this year, having already deployed eight of his nine lives in search of a forever home. The fellow immediately clawed his way into Caitie’s soft heart. She adopted him without hesitation—never mind that what I had in mind when she asked for a kitty had been something on the order of a cute, cuddly kitten.

  “He’s like me when I came to live here,” she said. “He doesn’t have any family. He doesn’t have a home. He’s lonesome. He needs somebody to take care of him. He needs me.” And since this guy had been around the block a time or two and knew an outstanding opportunity when he saw it, he unpacked his bags, powered up his purr, and took up residence on Caitie’s pillow.

  The gang showed up as I finished feeding the animals and was brewing myself a cup of tea. Brian thudded into the kitchen, whirled me around twice, announced that he had won the game with a bases-loaded single in the ninth, and then did a celebratory dance around the kitchen table, followed by another bone-crushing hug.

  Brian came permanently into my life when he was just ten, and now I have to bend over to give him a hug. Not quite seventeen, he’s two-plus inches taller than I am and outweighs me by twenty-plus pounds. His craggy face is still unformed, but he has McQuaid’s dark hair and steel-blue eyes. He also has his dad’s interest in sports, although (happily, in my opinion) he doesn’t care much about football. I was delighted when he joined the baseball team. Baseball (again, in my opinion) is a civilized sport, a game of skill and timing. And the players do not try to kill one another.

  “You rock,” I said, gasping for air, and then pointed out that it was now past nine o’clock and that he’d better rock on upstairs and do his homework.

  McQuaid came in, kissed me briefly, reported that Brian had been named the game’s most valuable player, grabbed two ponchos, and went out to help Caitie shut up the chicken coop. Her chickens—three red hens and three white hens—are the dearest loves of her life, next to Pumpkin and the violin my mother gave her. (The rest of us bring up the rear.) Using money that she earned helping me at the shop, Caitie bought the chickens in early summer. She decided to get teenaged pullets rather than baby chicks because she wanted to launch her egg business as soon as possible. Her “girls,” as she calls them, live in the chicken palace that McQuaid constructed.

  And I do mean palace.
The sizeable chicken yard is fenced and covered with wire netting in order to foil enterprising skunks, raccoons, and Pumpkin. The coop has a main floor and a chicken ladder to the loft and the three nest boxes. Caitie requested a box for each girl (with her name on it), but we pointed out that all six girls would not be laying eggs at exactly the same moment and that they ought to be willing to share the nests. So far, though, we haven’t seen any evidence of sharing. We haven’t seen any eggs yet, either. Until—

  “It’s an egg!” Caitie cried ecstatically, bursting through the kitchen door, her poncho wet with rain. “Somebody laid an egg, Mom! A real egg! And in a nest, too!”

  “An egg?” I asked, in an incredulous tone. “I don’t believe it! Come on, Caitie—you’re foolin’. A really truly egg? In a nest?”

  “Really truly! The very first one!” She opened her hand and we looked down at the small egg cupped in her palm. It was a little bigger than a golf ball. “Isn’t it awesome?” she whispered. Her tone was as hushed as if we were admiring the Hope Diamond.

  “I have never seen a more beautiful beginner’s egg in my life,” I said truthfully. “Who laid it? Was it a red hen or a white hen?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, stroking it with her fingers. “It’s brown, Mom. Why is it brown? I don’t have any brown chickens.”

  I know next to nothing about the egg production habits of chickens, but I remembered reading some information that had come with the birds. “The Rhode Island Reds are supposed to lay brown eggs. The other chickens are Leghorns. Their eggs are white. The chicken that laid this egg must have been a Red.”

  She looked confused. “Well, okay.” She carefully put the egg in a saucer in the middle of the kitchen table. “I’m going to get my camera and take its picture. And then I’m going to cook it and eat it.”

  “Or maybe save it for breakfast?” I suggested. “You had supper with Grandma and Grandpa McQuaid, and I know how Grandma loves to cook. Bet you had cake for dessert, didn’t you? You’re probably full right up to here.” I put my hand on the top of her head. She giggled, that sweet little-girl giggle that never fails to pull at my heart.