Cat's Claw (A Pecan Springs Mystery)

big-boned woman with silvery hair, a ready smile, and a cheerful expression—was committed to expanding it and getting the volunteer handlers and their dogs certified for air scent and cadaver search, trailing, and water search and rescue. Rambo had already proved his worth as a drug-sniffer, but there were plenty of other jobs to do. Martha was in charge of finding the dogs and handlers who could do them.
    The project was something that Sheila had been eager to support, and when Martha had come to her with the idea of creating a volunteerunit, she hadn’t hesitated. Finding the funding was difficult—the city council wasn’t sold on the idea of using volunteers, and Ben Graves had wanted to know what would happen if one of those dogs
attacked
somebody. Could the citizen sue the city? What if one of the volunteers got hurt? And who was going to pay for all that training? The citizens of Pecan Springs couldn’t be expected to pick up the tab, surely.
    Graves didn’t need to worry. The volunteers—most of them with experience in outdoor survival, navigation, and rescue work—were so dedicated that they had paid for their own specialized training and even raised the money to buy communications equipment. Their efforts were rewarded when they were called out to search for a four-year-old girl who had wandered away from her family’s campsite in a nearby state park. In fact, it was Martha and Opal who had found the child, earning the parents’ undying gratitude, not to mention some very good publicity for the program.
    Now, Rambo jumped joyfully into the passenger seat of the chief’s black Chevy Impala, leaned over the console, and gave Sheila’s cheek two slurpy kisses. Then he settled onto his haunches and fastened his gaze on the street ahead, to make sure that she drove home the usual way. That was his job—one of them, anyway. True to his Rottweiler nature, Rambo had a very strong sense of responsibility, and Sheila had learned that it was wise not to try to dissuade him from whatever assignments he might decide to undertake. Stubborn was his middle name.
    Rambo was also big and tough-looking and there had been a time when Sheila had been afraid of him, just as she had been half afraid of the big, hard man who once owned him. That was Dan Reid, who worked undercover narcotics for the Dallas PD’s Organized Crime Division while Sheila was an investigator with the department. She hadn’t seen him for over a year, until, under the name Colin Fowler, he had shown upin Pecan Springs and opened a shop on the town square. The next thing she knew, he was romancing Ruby, one of her two best friends.
    The situation got complicated in a hurry. Sheila felt she ought to warn Ruby about Dan’s freelance love-’em-and-leave-’em habits, which she understood all too well from their own intimate, intense, and brief love affair. But she suspected that Dan was in Pecan Springs on some sort of official undercover assignment, and she didn’t feel she could explain to Ruby how she had known him or reveal his real identity.
    Then, just as she was deciding that she had to come clean, she didn’t have to, because Dan had been murdered. It had taken some doing, but Sheila (with some help from China) had caught his killer and snagged the shipment of drugs that he’d been tracking. Ruby inherited the proceeds from Dan’s sizeable insurance policy and a hefty hazardous-duty payment. And Sheila inherited Dan’s Rottweiler, who turned out to be a well-mannered, well-trained drug-sniffing dog. In the long run, she thought, it was all for the best. Rambo liked to boss her around but he was far more devoted and loyal and uncritical than Dan Reid had ever been. And she always knew where he was when she needed him.
    As Sheila pulled out of the parking lot behind the police station, the radio on her dash crackled into life. It was Bartlett, saying that he’d reached the Pecan Street address and was setting up the scene. She turned right on Crockett and a couple of blocks later, stopped in front of Cavette’s Market, a small family-owned shop with wooden bins and wicker baskets of locally grown fruits and veggies lined up under the sidewalk awning. She rolled down the windows a couple of inches and left Rambo to guard the Impala (not that anybody would be stupid enough to mess with a police car with a Rottweiler in the front seat) and went into the store. She usually made it a point to stop in one or two shops every day. It was