Cat's Claw (A Pecan Springs Mystery)

“Gotta grab hard and hold on tight when the going gets rough. Only way to get through the bad times. Grab hard, hold on, and don’t let go, no matter what.”
    “I’m glad we could come, too—by ourselves,” China said. “It was nice of Mom to invite the kids to the ranch for the weekend.” She glanced back at the kitchen. “Two more around that little table, and we’d be in one another’s laps. And to tell the truth, I wanted McQuaid to myself for a day or two. I don’t mind telling you that I was pretty spooked about that Mexico trip, especially when I heard that those two truckers were shot south of Juárez.”
    As things had turned out, of course, Blackie and McQuaid had not gone to Mexico. Blackie had gotten a tip that led them to a small house in the crowded Hispanic neighborhood of Segundo Barrio, where they had found the boy. His mother had heard that agents on both sides of the border were on the lookout for the child, who had been fingerprinted after the mom had made an earlier unsuccessful abduction attempt. If she tried to take him across at the official checkpoints, he would be easily identified and returned to his father.
    So the mother had left the child with a family friend and gone across the border alone. She was trying to make arrangements with a
coyote
—a man who smuggled undocumented immigrants from Mexico into the U.S.—to smuggle her son into Mexico, using a route that would avoid border checkpoints and nosy border agents. She would be taking a terrible risk, for the
coyotes
were notoriously unreliable, often leaving their charges to die alone in the desert.
    When Blackie and Mike had gone to the barrio, they had spotted the child playing outdoors. As sheriff of Adams County, Blackie had worked closely with the El Paso police on a couple of cases. Now, he telephoned the El Paso police chief, who sent a team to the house, along with an agent of the Texas Department of Family and Child Protective Services. The child was picked up without incident. The next morning Blackie and Mike and the little boy, in the custody of a female FCPS agent, flew back to Austin. The reunion of father and child at the airport, with Blackie and McQuaid as the boy’s “rescuers,” had headlined the six o’clock news on all three network channels in Austin that night. When the mother came to the friend’s house to pick up her son, she was arrested and charged with abduction.
    “I was scared, too, China,” Sheila replied soberly. “Actually, I’m glad I had a couple of investigations to work while that was going on. If I hadn’t been so busy, I’d have had more time to worry about what the guys might be doing.”
    On the lake below, Blackie was maneuvering his boat to the dock. McQuaid got out and tied the bow to a piling. China waved to them, then turned to Sheila. “Now that Jackie Harmon has been officially charged with Larry Kirk’s murder, are you going to tell me why she killed him? The story in last week’s
Enterprise
wasn’t terribly informative. Just the who, what, when, and where. Hark skipped the why.”
    “She had a pretty powerful motive, China. Harmon had a million dollars’ worth of insurance on him—one of those corporate-owned life insurance polices. COLIs, they’re called.”
    “A ‘dead peasant’ policy, you mean?” A look of disgust crossed China’s face. “I remember when the Texas legislature approved that practice. Pretty ugly business, seems to me. An open invitation to all kinds of corrupt practices.”
    “It was certainly ugly in this case. Kirk worked for Harmon before he and Dana were married, and apparently signed a consent form for the insurance without being aware of what he was doing. But he wasn’t just an employee there. He and Jackie Harmon were lovers before Dana came on the scene, and Harmon harbored plenty of resentment over being replaced in his affections.”
    “‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,’” China said softly.
    “Something like that. When I talked to Dana Kirk about this after Harmon’s arrest, she told me that Harmon threatened to ‘claw her eyes out’ for ‘stealing’ Kirk. Harmon even wrote a couple of threatening letters to her. Luckily, Dana had saved them. The prosecution can probably make good use of them. And Dana will be a strong witness.”
    “But their affair must have been several years ago,” China said. “You’d think Harmon would have gotten over the jealousy by now.”
    “You’d think,”