Cat's Claw (A Pecan Springs Mystery)

with Rambo, her drug-sniffing Rottweiler who worked the day shift in the K-9 Unit—nights, too, when he was called out. She was at the desk at six thirty, uniform sharply creased, tie neatly tied, duty belt fastened around her waist. She always came in before seven to get an early start on the stack of paperwork. Didn’t count for much, though, because there’d be an even bigger stack the next day.
    The paperwork was all part of the job—just not the job that all those TV cop shows portrayed. She had never seen a single episode that showed the chief sitting behind a desk pushing papers, or logged onto a computer displaying the latest report. Unfortunately, the shows made everybody think that policing was a nonstop game of cops and robbers, every car chase ending up with three bad guys on the ground in an ankle-deep pool of blood, a detective standing over them with a smoking 40-caliber Smith & Wesson. But it wasn’t. At least, not her end of it. Her end of it was forms, memos, notices, and reports, more of them all the time. If she didn’t stay on top of things, she’d be overwhelmed.
    And like it or not, the chief’s desk was the last stop for all that paperwork. Even though she might prefer to be out on an investigation— interviewing, following leads, connecting the dots—this was her job now. Bottom line, it was up to her to create a supportive environment in which every police officer could do his or her work. It was
her
job to get them the resources and tools and training they needed to do
their
jobs safelyand effectively. It was the job she had wanted and fought every day to keep—although there were plenty of days when she’d a heckuva lot rather be out on patrol or doing an investigation instead of sitting in this oversize, ill-fitting chair.
    Which was ironic, wasn’t it? After hours and hours of discussion, she and Blackie had tossed a coin to see which one of them would stay, which of them would go. Heads she’d quit, tails he would. She sighed. The way she was feeling about the job at this moment, she wished she’d called it heads.
    Today had been a typical desk day—a day like most of the others. Before she’d started on the morning’s stack of papers, she’d turned on the computer, pulled up the monthly incident stats, and scanned the columns. 9-1-1 calls were up about 12 percent for the year, which just about tracked Pecan Springs’ population growth. Traffic stops and accident reports, down slightly. Burglaries up from the previous month. DWIs up. Possession, drug dealing, both up—a trend that wasn’t going to change. Homicides, zip for the month (but November was still young), eight for the year, all either domestic or drug-related and all cleared within a week, which was a pretty good record. Cases cleared, by percentage, down a little but still acceptable. (Down a lot from when Bubba Harris was chief, but he had pumped the stats in order to make the department look good.) All in all, a decent report for a small town on a busy Interstate corridor between Dallas and the Mexican border.
    She glanced at the large laminated map of Pecan Springs on her office wall, where pushpins marked the recent burglaries, noting that most had occurred within a twelve-block area. She printed out the computer report and circled some numbers to comment on at the briefing with her department heads, then went on to yesterday’s incident report, the personnel report, and the budget. She was still trying to squeeze out themoney for another couple of computers for Records, so they could clear out the data-entry backlog, and three more dash cams for patrol cars. She’d like to have computers in the patrol cars, too, but the dash cams were more important. Video was an unbiased record of what happened. It told the truth and helped build public trust in the police. Good cops wanted dash cams.
    Paperwork caught up (temporarily), phone messages and emails answered, it had been time for the morning briefing with Hardin and the other department heads. Then she had gone over to the city building for the weekly council meeting, where she had been on the hot seat until just before noon, patiently answering questions about her budget request and looking Ben Graves and Mildred Wilbur straight in the eye when their questions were dumber (or more deliberately malicious) than usual.
    The meeting had dragged on, making her late for lunch with Blackie, who was on his way to El Paso on a missing-child case that he and