Cat's Claw (A Pecan Springs Mystery)

marks. No visible exit wound. He was unshaven, his brown hair a little long on the back of his neck and over his ears. He was dressed in a blue T-shirt with the name of his business across the front, jeans, no belt, Birkenstocks on bare, hairy feet. His fingertips were smudged with ink, so she knew he had been printed. He wore a digital wristwatch, nothing fancy, and no wedding ring. Larry Kirk looked the way dead people usually looked. Terribly human, frighteningly frail, terrifyingly vulnerable. Sheila was struck again by the irrefutable fact that a life was gone and with it decades of lived experience, successes, failures, celebrations, regrets. She remembered something else Orlando used to say: “Somebody’s gotta stick up for the dead, Dawson. They can’t do it—it’s gotta be you. You’re all they got.”
    She knelt beside the body for the space of a dozen breaths, looking,taking in as much as she could, letting herself feel the familiar sickening clench in her stomach, the sense of absolute finality that swept over her like a dark, chilly wave. No more laughter, no more love, no joy, no fear of the past or hope for the future. Just… nothing. Nothing but what was left to her and her partner: the task of seeking justice.
Don’t forget what you’re there for, Dawson
, Orlando had written to her. Barricaded behind the paperwork, bulwarked behind the desk, it was too easy to forget. But here in this room, she remembered. This was what she was here for. To stick up for the dead.
    After a few moments, she took a deep breath, got to her feet, and turned to the Polaroids on the table. The gun was already gone. So was the .32-millimeter cartridge casing, the beer bottle—all three items bagged by the tech and carried away to the lab, where they’d be printed. But the Polaroids, shot from several angles, showed what the forensic tech had taken.
    One photo showed the Llama loosely gripped in the victim’s right hand, his fingers lightly curled around the crosshatched wooden grip.
    Another photo, this one of the cartridge head-stamp, showed it to be an R-P 32 auto. The indentation in the primer was slightly off-center. The casing would be run through NIBIN, the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, a database imaging system that compared images of bullet cartridge cases, shell casings, and bullets. If the gun had been used in a previous crime and the casings entered in NIBIN, they’d get a match.
    Sheila looked at the photo of the man and the gun. She never liked to leapfrog over the evidence, but she had already seen and heard enough to feel pretty certain that Larry Kirk had not shot himself. They’d know a great deal more after the autopsy and the results of the testing on the hands and the entry wound. What was puzzling her right now, though,was the sound of the shooting. A .32 automatic wasn’t as loud as, say, a .357 Magnum, but it still produced a sharp report that, in this quiet neighborhood, somebody should have heard. Maybe Matheson would pick up something while he was canvassing—something to pinpoint the time of death more definitely than the autopsy surgeon was likely to do.
    Sheila put down the photographs. There were a couple of other things she needed to check out before the med techs came in to remove the body. She went to the fridge and looked closely at the grocery list, noticing that the usual items—bread, beer, sausage, hot dogs, pizza—were penciled in a crabbed, backward-slanting script. She turned to the calendar. It was topped by a large full-color photo of the Alamo, the months in fold-down pages below. The photo page was studded with five yellow sticky notes. They all said about the same thing, in the same backslant:
Saw JH
or sometimes just
JH
and the date. The first one was October 21, the last was the previous day, the intervals between were two or three days. Two were written with a pen, three with a pencil. She copied the text and the dates and surveyed the calendar, flipping up the pages for October and September and pulling down the page for December. There were a few other penciled notes—dentist, Mom’s birthday, climbing club meeting—but nothing else of consequence.
    She frowned. The cryptic
Saw JH
. “Saw” could mean one of several things. Kirk (assuming that he wrote the notes) could have seen a doctor. Or he could have spent the evening or had lunch with somebody, a woman, maybe, a date. Or he could have noticed JH, as in seeing him—or