Cat's Claw (A Pecan Springs Mystery)

Fredericksburg. It lay halfway between Austin and San Antonio. As far as Sheila was concerned, this meant that they got the spillover of the crime—mostly drug related—that lapped like a dirty wave along the I-35 corridor, as well as up from the border and north as far as Dallas. But a town didn’t have to be centrally located these days to feel the current of drug crime. It was everywhere, all the time. And that wasn’t just a cop’s paranoia talking. It was a fact.
    But this neighborhood had the look and feel of a safe and pleasant enclave, with genteel Victorian houses aging gracefully under arching live oak trees in large, well-kept yards bright with blooming crepe myrtle and roses. On the interstate to the east, the rush-hour traffic was as slow as molasses in January, road rage tempers hot as July firecrackers. But here, there were more people than cars on the street and everybody moved slowly: young moms pushing baby strollers on the sidewalk; a pair of girls walking arm-in-arm down the street; older people rocking on their porches, digging in their flower beds, deadheading their roses. One old gray-haired guy even paused, leaned on his rake, and waved cheerfully at the chief’s car as it cruised up the street.
    Sheila waved back, thinking what a pretty neighborhood this was. A genuinely residential neighborhood, too, where many folks actually livedfull-time in their houses and where “neighborhood watch” meant what it said: neighbors looking out for neighbors, not just for themselves. It wasn’t the kind of place where the residents left for work at dawn and smash-and-grab burglars pulled up in their vans, kicked in the back doors, and hauled out the loot, secure in the knowledge that there was nobody at home to see them.
    Not the kind of neighborhood where people killed themselves.
    Except.
    Except that Sheila saw the daily crime reports, and knew that the usual human passions—anger, hate, fear, greed, lust, jealousy, despair—lurked behind many of the well-kept gardens and cheerful wreaths and attractive facades. She knew that a fraud victim lived in the two-story house on the right, the one with the serious roof damage. A scam artist had agreed to repair the roof and made off with the owner’s thirty-five-hundred-dollar “deposit.” A couple of blocks away, an eighty-year-old woman had become the victim of repeated elder abuse: her abuser was her daughter, who lived with her. The old woman was now in a nursing home and the daughter was in prison. That pretty gray house on the corner, the one with the late-blooming roses in front and the autumn wreath on the door? The wife had reported two domestic violence incidents in one week there, and the husband was under a restraining order. And just a block down and a block over, in an upscale house with a pool in the backyard: an attempted teen suicide—a girl who had been bullied at school. Luckily, the mother had come home from work early. She’d found her daughter before it was too late. A pretty neighborhood, yes, if you only looked at the facades.
    Sheila made a left onto Pecan, suddenly conscious that she envied Detective Jack Bartlett. Of course, there probably wasn’t much involved in this investigation, since it was a suicide. But if there were, she would loveto join him, maybe even team up with him. It would be a pleasure to get out from behind the damned desk and do some serious fieldwork, instead of simply tending to the endless crop of memos and reports. And with the sudden envy came the recollection of the heady, almost joyful rush she always felt when she knew she had righted a wrong, when she apprehended someone who had broken the law. When she brought to justice a man or woman who had inflicted pain on a weaker, less powerful, more vulnerable person.
    Brought to justice
. For her, the phrase had never been empty, not just one of those things you tossed off without thinking what it meant. Those three words had always held a profound significance, always made her feel that what she was doing wasn’t an ordinary job. It was
important
. She was helping to preserve order in an otherwise disorderly and chaotic world. She was enforcing the laws that bound people together, that preserved their rights and upheld their obligations
—
although the law was never as simple and clear-cut out there in the world as it seemed in the criminal code.
    And on top of all that, there was the pleasure of collecting odd bits of seemingly unrelated