Cat's Claw (A Pecan Springs Mystery)

into some deep place, far away, where it couldn’t reach her heart. Blackie and Mike McQuaid were smart, experienced, confident. They could take care of themselves better than any two guys she knew.
    And she knew how important it was to find the boy. This was another one of those heartbreaking parental kidnappings, made even more complicated by the fact that the mother had taken her son over the border. The United States and Mexico had a treaty that permitted courts in both countries to enforce the international convention on cross-border child abduction, but that was on paper. In reality and on the ground, and especially in Mexico, it was a much different matter.
    “How was your day?” he asked. She could hear his long sigh as he stretched out on the motel bed and the sound of the TV as he clicked it on with the remote. “Anything new going on there?” He muted the TV.
    “You wouldn’t believe.” Sheila gave him a quick summary of the events that had transpired since Clint Hardin had left her office on his way to Rockport. As she spoke, she was surprised by how much had happened in a few hours, and by the rapid pace of developments. But that was normal for investigations into shooting deaths. She and Bartlett had moved from suicide to homicide, and—with Timms’ disappearance—to the strong suspicion of a connection between Timms and Kirk.
    But she didn’t get very far in her story before she was interrupted.
    “You skipped over a deputy chief to partner with a detective?” Blackie asked incredulously. “And you gave the lead in the case to the
detective
?”
    “Well, yeah,” Sheila said, surprised by his reaction and almostimmediately defensive. “But I didn’t ‘skip over’ the deputy chief. Hardin was the one who skipped. He’s out for vacation—fishing, on the Gulf. Anyway, I’ve been wanting to get out of the office and do some serious fieldwork.” That part wasn’t news to Blackie—she had talked about it often enough in the past few months. “I’m sure you know how good it feels to get away from the desk,” she added. In Blackie’s new career as a private investigator, he didn’t have to manage a department, fill out forms, sign papers, write memos. He could do as much fieldwork as he wanted. “Porterfield’s ruling is still open, but it’s more than likely she’ll call it a homicide as soon as the autopsy and forensic reports are in. Left-handers don’t shoot themselves in the right temple, and that email to the wife is more than a little suspicious. The date stamp on the email does give us the approximate time of death, though, whoever sent it. I—”
    “I’m not talking about the investigation,” Blackie interrupted. “Bubba Harris took an investigation every now and then. He’d rather stay in the office and out of the line of fire, but he thought it was good practice to get out in the community, let people see that the chief did something besides push papers around.”
    “Then what—”
    “I’m talking about command structure. I’m talking about you and Bartlett. You didn’t stop to think about the political implications of letting that kid take the lead?”
    “Political implications?” Sheila rubbed her forehead, her defensiveness beginning to smolder into irritation. “To tell the truth, mostly I thought about finding out how Larry Kirk died and who’s responsible. I thought about getting out from behind the desk for a few hours and doing some real-time, serious fieldwork. I thought about backstopping a bright young detective, who is a first-rate investigator, even if Hardin does take most of the credit for—”
    “Listen to me, Sheila.” Blackie broke in. “I don’t want to tell you how to run your shop, but I have worked in Adams County law enforcement for a lot longer than you have. As a matter of fact, I probably know your department even better than you do. Bartlett, I don’t know very well, except that I’ve heard he’s quite the young Romeo. It’s a departmental joke that he’s got girls fighting over him. Teaming up with that guy is a bad idea. And giving him the lead is worse. It’s going to look to everybody like you’ve gone out of your way to pick a favorite. Hardin will be furious.”
    Sheila’s irritation flamed into anger. Her jaw felt tight and her head was beginning to pound.
Let him
, she thought viciously.
Let Hardin be furious
. And what did Bartlett’s being a local Romeo have to do with anything?
    Aloud, she said,