Cat's Claw (A Pecan Springs Mystery)

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 council. Hark Hibler would get an editorial out of it.
    And there were staffing consequences. Blake had been put on a desk while IA conducted a review, which meant that the night patrol unit was now short two officers, since one was already out on medical leave. Sheila had been fairly successful in beefing up the force to the point where they could cover court appearances and vacations, but illnesses and family emergencies were a different matter. Overtime was eating up the budget.
    So yesterday, she and Canady had gone over the duty roster, juggled assignments, and come up with a solution of sorts. It involved shifting an officer from Jeraldine Clarke’s day patrol unit to Canady’s night unit, and moving a rookie officer, Rita Kidder, from her training stint in Records to the day unit, where Clarke would be her field training officer. Nobody in the unit was eager to FTO a woman—and Sheila had already heard (gossip traveled at warp speed in Pecan Springs) that the officers’ wives were even less eager for their husbands to ride with Rita, who was young, bright, and shapely, although her shape was not quite so evident when she was in uniform. Women had been policing since 1910 and patrolling with the boys since the 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Act required state and local governments to adopt the 1964 Title VII rules. You’d think the old macho attitudes would have come unglued by now, wouldn’t you? Maybe that was true in big-city departments. Butnot in small-town Texas, where the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.
    Sitting behind her desk now, Sheila smiled faintly, remembering her own FTO in the Dallas PD some fifteen years before. The two of them worked out of the West Dallas station, which wasn’t a picnic in anybody’s book. Orlando had been a burly twelve-year veteran with hands like hams and a fighter’s nose, ugly as sin. They hadn’t been in the squad car for more than ten seconds before he turned to her, stuck out his chin, and growled, “I’m gonna tell you this just once, Dawson, so you listen hard. I don’t like it that you’re riding with me, but I got no choice, I’m stuck with you for the next four weeks. So this is the way it goes down. I get in a fight, I wanna see your nose bloody. I get shot up, you better take a bullet. You aim to be a cop, you act like a cop, not like a damn girl. You got that?”
    She’d got it, knowing that it wasn’t just that she was a woman and slender, but that she was also blond and pretty. Being attractive, sexy, even, was something she had always viewed as an asset, like a fast-acting brain, the reflexes of an athlete, and good upper body strength. But she found out on her first day at the Police Academy that
pretty
definitely wasn’t an asset in police work. It gave her brother cadets (“brother”—that was a laugh) another reason not to take her seriously, and her sister cadets, the few there were, something to envy. By the time she graduated, she would have traded her looks for