Cat's Claw (A Pecan Springs Mystery)

back—although if he’d given the matter some thought, he might have figured out that the extortionist could easily make a copy of the incriminating material. Or maybe they struck a deal, but the extortionist upped the ante, which pushed Charlie’s client into—
    “And for your information,” Charlie growled, “I am no longer representing George Timms. The man was due in my office at two thirty this afternoon, and the surrender was scheduled for two hours later. He didn’t show up here. Didn’t show at the station, either. Dawson has called in an APB.” His voice hardened. “Timms probably threw one of his famous parties last night and blew off his appointments today. Life is too short, China. Timms can find himself another attorney.”
    A
no-show
? “Uh-oh,” I said. My skin was prickling. “Kirk’s dead, your client is nowhere—sounds like trouble to me.” Of course, Charlie didn’t need me to tell him this. And he was right. I knew better than to ask him what he knew about the blackmail. That was privileged. And attorney-client privilege extends beyond the termination of the attorney-client relationship.
    “My
former
client,” Charlie reminded me. He made a low sound in his throat. “Timms may be one of Pecan Springs’ stalwarts, but the guy is a first-class jackass.”
    “And Kirk is dead,” I said again, more emphatically. “Are you making the same connections I’m making, Charlie? What if Timms—” I swallowed. “What if he decided it would be expeditious to simply kill the extortionist? What if—”
    I stopped. I was way out of line here. And anyway, what I was thinking didn’t make any sense. The cops had the goods on Timms—enough to arrest him, anyway. With charges already pending against him, it would have been stupid to go after Kirk. Unless, of course, Timms was so angry that he was past making sense of anything. That happens sometimes—more often than we might like to think. Many of the defendants I’d represented had done whatever they did in what’s called the “heat of passion”—more like a lightning storm of passion, if you ask me.
    “I don’t want to hear any more what-ifs,” Charlie said bleakly. “Officially, I don’t give a damn. I am done with Timms. I am off his case. Period. Paragraph. End of story.” The receiver went down, hard.
    I stared at my cell phone for a moment. I could imagine that Timms might have done one or two things that he shouldn’t, and that his bad judgment might have opened him to an extortion attempt. But it was still hard for me to believe that he had actually burgled a business. And as for killing Larry Kirk, that was even harder to believe. But somebody had broken into the computer shop. Larry thought somebody was stalking him. And now Larry was dead.
    But this was getting me nowhere, and there was something else I needed to do. I punched in Sheila’s cell number. I knew she’d still be at the scene, and she wouldn’t be thrilled by an interruption. By now, she undoubtedly knew that Timms was a no-show. But she probably wasn’t aware that Jessica Nelson knew that Timms was going to be charged in the break-in case. The arrest—when it finally happened—would take place in the glare of the media spotlight. Or as much spotlight as can be mustered in a small town like Pecan Springs.
    Chief Dawson wouldn’t be any happier about this than Charlie had been. But she ought to be prepared to meet the press.

Chapter Five

    When Sheila went through the gate into the Kirk backyard, Officer Kidder stepped out in front of her. “I need your name on the scene log-in sheet, Chief Dawson.” The rookie extended a clipboard.
    “Thank you, Officer.” Sheila wrote her name, badge number, and the time, and ran her finger down the names on the list—Sergeant Clarke and Officer Kidder, detectives Bartlett and Matheson, Judge Porterfield, the two-man county crime-scene unit, Dana Kirk, herself. The scene log-in sheet was one of the first things Sheila had instituted when she took over the chief’s job. Officers weren’t supposed to leave anything at the crime scene, especially contaminants such as footprints, fingerprints, and DNA. But it happened. People dropped hairs, they sneezed, they touched stair rails and doorknobs. What they left behind could wreck an otherwise solid case. It was important to know who had been on the scene in the event there were questions later. And there almost always were. In an investigation, nothing was