Cat's Claw (A Pecan Springs Mystery)

to be in on it.”
    She sat back in the seat, seeing the pieces of this thing suddenly snap together as if they were magnetized. Hatch and Palmer. Palmer and Hatch. Partners in a blackmail scheme. Not big blackmail, probably, just two-bit jobs, a couple of thousand here, another thousand there, enough to buy Hatch a truck and Palmer a Madone bicycle. Back last summer, Kirk had uncovered Hatch’s role in the game and given orders that he wasn’t to work any more jobs out of the shop. But he hadn’t suspected Palmer, who was his cousin, so Palmer and Hatch had slightly shifted their modus operandi and kept their game going. It had been a tidy little low-risk racket—until Timms had come along and refused to pay up. Maybe he didn’t trust them to keep the lid on his explosive secret. Or maybe he feared that once he gave in, their demands would escalate and he’d be paying through the nose for the rest of his life. So he had burgled the shop in an attempt to get his machine back, and the break-in had brought the police.
    Then what? Had Palmer called Hatch when he went home the previous night, and told him that Kirk was dead and the cops had a search warrant for the shop and were asking more questions about Timms’ machine? That they were printing everyone who worked at the shop, that they had his name, that they’d be looking for him?
    Or maybe it had gone another way, Sheila thought. Maybe Palmersuspected that Hatch might have killed Kirk. It was a logical assumption, after all—one that she and Bartlett had considered. Maybe he had even accused Hatch of the murder, and threatened to come clean to the cops about their little blackmail racket. At that point, Hatch might have decided that his partner couldn’t be trusted to keep his mouth shut. Palmer had to be taken out, and the safest way to do it was to arrange a bicycle accident.
    “Prints,” Sheila said. “We need to make sure that Clarke gets a set before Hatch’s body leaves the scene. Butch may be able to match them up with whatever he finds on Timms’ computer. That will tie it up for us—until Palmer can tell us what really happened between him and Hatch.”
If
Palmer could tell them, she thought. An important
if
. They needed Palmer. If he didn’t make it, there’d be nowhere to go with this.
    “Clarke took care of the prints already,” Bartlett said with an evident satisfaction. “The cards are on their way to the station now.” His voice darkened. “Whether we can tie Hatch to Kirk’s murder is a different question, though. Unless we turn up something when we search his Pecos Street address, I don’t see that we’ve got enough to make a case.”
    “Hatch didn’t kill Kirk.”
    “Hatch didn’t—?” He stopped, sounding incredulous. “Hey, you know that for sure?”
    “I know that for sure,” Sheila said. “Listen.”
    When she had finished telling what she had learned from her stop at Kirk’s house that morning and her just-finished talk with Tina Simpson, there was a long silence. Finally, Bartlett let out his breath with a swoosh.
    “Holy cow,” he said.
    Sheila chuckled. “No kidding. But what we have is entirely circumstantial. There’s motive, yes. We can trace the email she wrote to Kirkback to her machine, but we can’t prove that she herself sent it. And while the lipstick seems to put her in Kirk’s house—especially if her prints are on it—some smart defense attorney will argue that Kirk was carrying it around in his pocket, and that she was never within a mile of the place.” She frowned. “What we need is somebody who actually saw her there around the time of the murder. Did Matheson have any luck with those garbage guys?”
    “Dunno,” Bartlett replied. “He hasn’t reported back in. I’ll connect with him—see what he’s found. What’s your next move?”
    “
Our
next move,” Sheila said. “I need to talk to Harmon. And I don’t want to do it solo.” She gave him the address she had jotted in her notebook.
    “Got it,” he said, then, “Hold on a minute.” A moment later, he was back. “Somebody just handed me a message that was called in to the duty desk. Yesterday, you mentioned China Bayles—the woman Kirk emailed about the stalker. B-a-y-l-e-s. That the one? Your friend?”
    “Right. What about her?”
    “Well, she telephoned the station a couple of minutes ago. Seems that a bunch of the little old ladies who live around Kirk’s place have created a neighborhood watch, and