Read Cat's Claw (A Pecan Springs Mystery) for Free Online Page A

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 themoney 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 veteranwith 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