Bending the Paw

by Diane Kelly

  After paying for my order, I handed one of the cups to Jackson and held the tub of popcorn out to her. She grabbed a handful and shoved it into her mouth, moaning in bliss.

  “This is your breakfast, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “And lunch.” She shrugged. “I’ve had worse. I was on a stakeout at a drug house for a full week once. Survived on nothing but Diet Coke and Skittles.”

  So that’s what I have to look forward to when I make detective. I tossed pieces of popcorn to Brigit, and she caught each of them expertly, snapping them out of the air like a frog catching flies. Meanwhile, outside, my cruiser was taking quite a beating. I could only hope the windshield wouldn’t crack.

  When the popcorn was gone, I pulled my baton from my belt and extended it with a snap, spinning the nightstick in my fingers with a swish-swish-swish. The repetitive motion and soft sound comforted me, like a mantra. I’d been a twirler in my high school marching band and could handle a baton with finesse and flair. My gun? Not so much. Shooting hadn’t come naturally to me. I’d had to practice for hours on end to pass the marksman test.

  Fortunately, the hail let up after several minutes and we were able to scramble through the rain back to my squad car. I inadvertently kicked a few hailstones as we ran, sending them skittering across the parking lot. Brigit snatched one up in her teeth and crunched down on it, like a frozen treat. My patrol car sported a fresh ding or two, but all of the glass was intact.

  Jackson buckled her seatbelt and put a hand over her mouth to stifle a yawn. “Let’s go talk to Knapczyk.”

  She gave me the address listed on his driver’s license and in the DMV records for his motorcycle. I knew the street. It sat about halfway between the theater and the bank.

  As we headed down a short stretch of highway, my eyes spotted no less than three roofing company trucks. Jackson pointed at one as we drove past it. “They didn’t waste any time, did they?”

  Any time there was a hailstorm, roofing companies engaged in a mad scramble immediately afterward, hoping to lock down homeowners before they could sign with another company. The noise of hammers would be heard throughout the city for the next few months as new shingles were installed.

  We exited the freeway and turned onto Knapczyk’s street. The biker lived in the left side of a rundown brick duplex that slumped on its lot. Hailstones gathered in the dented gutters and littered the muddy front lawn. The motorcycle was parked out of harm’s way on the covered porch. A pack’s worth of cigarette butts littered the area around the bike.

  It took four times knocking and a full minute to bring Duke Knapczyk to the door, but he finally pulled it open. He held a lit cigarette and wore his signature scowl. His place smelled like corn chips, dirty laundry, and an unsuccessful pine-scented attempt to negate the other odors. When the man took in my uniform and the furry, fanged K-9 beside me, his face wriggled with a fresh mix of emotions, at least one of which was confusion. “What are y’all doing here?”

  Jackson introduced herself, me, and Brigit, and motioned for the man to step out onto the porch. It would be safer to have him out here, where we had a chance of escape if he pulled out a hidden weapon. Knapczyk hesitated a moment, but stepped outside. My gaze dropped to his feet. He appeared to be wearing the same dark boots he’d had on in the video footage from the bank, a type with smooth soles. If he’d been in the Olsens’ kitchen last night, it hadn’t been in these boots. The soles on the men’s shoes we’d seen last night had all been patterned rubber, typical of sneaker-type footwear.

  Jackson didn’t pussyfoot around. “Where were you yesterday evening?”

  “Here.” He waved his cigarette around like a kid waving a sparkler, using it to indicate the place.

  “All evening?” Jackson clarified.

  “Yeah.”

  “Was anyone with you?” Jackson asked.

  “Jack Daniel and Jose Cuervo.” He snorted in amusement. “Why?”

  “We’ll get to that, if necessary,” Jackson said. “For now, I want to talk about the deposit you made at the bank yesterday.”

  He took a long drag on the cigarette, released the smoke out through his nostrils, and narrowed his eyes in challenge. “I didn’t make a deposit.”

  “I’ve seen video footage that says otherwise.”

  “No, you haven’t.” His mouth spread in a smug grin. “What you saw was me paying NSF fees on an account they closed without my permission. Them banks are crooked. You screw up balancing your checkbook and they treat you like a criminal, charge you all kinds of penalties. It’s not like I did it on purpose. I’m just not good at math. Never was. Back when I was in school they diagnosed me with that math dyslexia.”

  “Math dyslexia” was a common nickname and misnomer for dyscalculia, a learning disability that left those who suffered from it struggling to accurately perform basic math computations. As a child, I’d suffered from a stutter. Because many children who stutter have associated learning disabilities, I’d been tested for a slew of issues, despite the fact that I earned good grades and showed no other symptoms. I’d later learned the terms for the conditions. Dyslexia. Dyscalculia. Dysgraphia.

  Knapczyk could have inadvertently overdrawn his account, or he could be up to his old theft-by-check tricks, intentionally bouncing checks like they were basketballs. His situation raised an interesting and complex issue for law enforcement, one my professors at Sam Houston State University had taught as part of my criminal justice curriculum. What crime a person should be charged with, or whether the person should be charged for a crime at all, was not necessarily determined by their actions and the results thereof, but was entirely dependent on their mens rea or mental state. For instance, a person who’d caused the death of another could be guilty of murder if the person had intended to cause the death, but they might only be guilty of manslaughter or assault if they intended to hurt the other person but not kill them.

  Knapczyk’s situation was even more complicated, straddling the divide between criminal and civil law. His mental state would determine whether a criminal act had been committed. If he’d intentionally written checks knowing there would be insufficient funds in the account to cover them, he could appropriately be charged with theft by check. If he’d simply made a math error and unintentionally bounced a check, the matter wouldn’t be one for criminal law enforcement, but rather one for the civil courts to handle. Of course, the distinction could be a fine line, and it was often impossible to truly know what a person’s intent was. I presumed the inability to prove intent might be the reason Knapczyk’s earlier charge for theft by check had been dropped. But in the relevant case, even if Knapczyk had purposely issued bad checks, it didn’t make him a killer.

  Jackson stared at the man, assessing him. “What about the man at the teller next to you?”

  Knapczyk’s expression didn’t change. “What about him?”

  “You were eying the money he deposited. Hundreds of dollars in cash.”

  “What if I was?” He lifted a shoulder. “Can’t blame me for wishing it was mine. Some guys get all the breaks. Then there’s guys like me that life craps on over and over again.”

  Jackson and I exchanged looks. If this guy had attacked Greg Olsen in hopes of stealing the theater’s money, it seemed he wouldn’t be so open. Instead, he’d try to deflect his guilt by lying, saying he was checking out the conversation hearts in the candy dish or something like that.

  He elaborated. “Anyways, the money wasn’t why I was looking at him. The phone in his pocket wouldn’t stop going off. It kept playing that ‘Popcorn’ song. Annoying as hell.”

  “Popcorn” seemed like an appropriate ringtone for a manager of a movie theater.

  Jackson pointed down at Knapczyk’s feet. “Could we see one of your boots?”

  “What for?”

  “Comparison.”

  It had been a vague answer at best, but nonetheless it seemed to satisfy him. He removed his left boot and handed it to the detective, standing like a
flamingo with the leg crooked up behind him. A claw-like toenail in desperate need of a trim protruded through a hole in the end of his dingy sock. Ew.

  Jackson turned the boot over, and the two of us took a look. The sole had worn evenly, no evidence of supination. When she turned the boot upright again, I tried not to gag at the musty food odor that emanated from it. She checked the tag sewn inside. “Size ten-and-a-half.”

  Unless Duke Knapcyk had been wearing someone else’s ill-fitting shoes in the Olsens’ kitchen last night, he wasn’t one of the guys we were looking for.

  Jackson dismissed him with “Stop bouncing checks.” She turned and headed back to the cruiser.

  “You going to at least tell me why you came by?” he hollered after her. When she didn’t answer, he turned to me.

  “Sorry,” I said. “It’s classified.”

  He muttered in irritation as Brigit and I returned to the cruiser.

  As we rode back to the station, Jackson’s cell phone rang. She pulled it from the pocket of her blazer and consulted the screen. “It’s the lab.” She tapped the screen and put the phone to her ear. “Got those results for me?” She listened intently, issuing one “Really?”, a couple of “Mm-hms” and “All rights,” and ending with “Thanks for turning this around so quickly.” She slid the phone back into her pocket. “All of the blood in the kitchen was Greg Olsen’s.”

  “Oh, no.” My heart sank. “He has to be dead then, doesn’t he?”

  “The lab ran the math,” the detective said. “There was three-quarters of a gallon of blood in the kitchen. No one can survive that kind of loss.”

  I knew from my forensics classes that the average adult body held between 1.2 to 1.5 gallons of blood. A person would feel fairly normal until they’d lost around thirty percent of their blood. Beyond thirty percent and they’d go into hemorrhagic shock, with their pulse rate and respiration rocketing to compensate as their blood pressure dropped. A person could not live if he or she lost more than forty percent of their blood or, on average, a little over half a gallon. Even assuming Greg’s blood supply ran on the higher end at 1.5 gallons, he’d lost fifty percent of his blood. Facts were facts, and we had to face them. Greg Olsen was dead. May he rest in peace.

  “What about fingerprints?” I asked. “Any luck there?”

  “Most of them belong to Greg and Shelby. None of the others matched anyone in the system.”

  Darn. “What are you going to do now?”

  “Review his computer and phone records. See what they tell me. I’ll call businesses in the area, see if anybody caught the Jetta on their security cameras. I already canvassed the Olsen’s immediate neighborhood. Quite a few of the houses are rentals, so there’s no security cameras on them. Neither the landlords nor the tenants wanted to make that kind of investment. One of the neighbors has an inexpensive doorbell system, but it only shows their front porch and walkway.”

  I knew from experience that even if the Jetta showed up on camera footage, the video was unlikely to be helpful given that the car was dark and it was nighttime when it had taken off, presumably with Greg inside. The quality of the video on most security cameras wasn’t very good, either. But even if the odds were stacked against us, we owed it to Shelby to perform a thorough investigation. We owed it to Greg, too. The dead deserve any justice we could provide.

  “Before I look at Greg’s phone and computer,” Jackson said, “we need to pay a visit to Shelby, give her the news.”

  We? A lump of dread clogged my throat and I had to gulp to force it down. I had to learn to face difficult tasks like this head on or I’d make a lousy detective.

  I drove the cruiser to Shelby’s house, half hoping we’d get into a fender bender along the way that would delay the heartbreaking task. But no sense putting off the inevitable. The crime scene tape had been removed from her yard, but a white van from the cleaning service sat in the driveway. The sides and back bore the biohazard symbol, a clear indication that something awful had happened here. Shelby’s car had been moved into the garage, which stood open. Shelby sat on a folding lawn chair inside the space with Marseille on her lap. Both the woman and the dog were wrapped up in a blanket. The front door of the house was open, too. Through it, we could see workers in hazmat suits moving about.

  Shelby stood when she saw my cruiser pull to the curb, but she didn’t move forward. She seemed to sense we came bearing bad news.

  Because we wouldn’t be going into the house, I left Brigit in her enclosure in the back of the cruiser with the windows cracked. She stood at the glass, fogging it with her breath and watching as the detective and I walked into the garage. Shelby looked as exhausted as the detective. Her eyes were bloodshot and rimmed in dark pink. She smelled faintly of mentholated ointment. All that crying had probably caused her sinuses to become stuffy. I recognized the scent right away. Cops carried small jars of the stuff in their pockets or cruisers. Between the stench of rotting corpses, the odiferous squalor of flop houses, and the funk of evidence tossed into garbage dumpsters, police officers often found themselves in stinky situations.

  “I’m afraid I’ve got some difficult news, Shelby,” Jackson said, preparing the woman for the blow she was about to deliver. “We heard from the lab. All of the blood was Greg’s.”

  “All of it?” Shelby’s tone was high-pitched and incredulous. “None of the blood spatter came from anyone else?”

  I noticed Shelby used the correct term, “spatter.” Many civilians inadvertently used the wrong but more familiar “splatter.” Perhaps she read crime novels or watched detective shows on television. Or maybe she’d learned it from one of the many movies in her husband’s DVD collection.

  “We’re as surprised as you are,” Jackson said. “I’d expected for the blood to have come from at least two sources, maybe three.”

  “Could he—” Shelby closed her eyes and shook her head, before forcing herself to ask the question. “Could he lose that much blood and still be alive?”

  “Honestly?” Jackson said on a sigh. “It would be a miracle.”

  Shelby stood stock-still for a moment before dropping into the chair, her shoulders shaking. She buried her face in the blanket. Jackson and I took up positions on either side of her, putting supportive hands on her back.

  “I’m so sorry, Shelby,” Jackson said.

  “Me too,” I added.

  We let her continue to cry for a minute or two, both of us dabbing at our eyes as well. The tough-cop cliché was just that, a cliché. Most cops cared about the people they served. Those who didn’t rarely lasted long in law enforcement.

  Finally, Shelby’s sobs eased up. She wiped her eyes on the blanket before looking up at us. “Do you have any suspects?”

  “Not yet,” the detective told her. “We’ve reviewed the security camera footage from the bank and spoken with another customer who was in the branch at the same time as your husband. He checked out.”

  “What about Greg’s car?” Shelby asked. “Has anyone seen it?”

  “No reports so far,” Jackson said. “We’ve spread the word. If law enforcement spots it or pulls anyone over in it, they’ll detain the occupants for questioning.”

  “So what now?” Shelby asked, her voice desperate. “I just wait?”

  “That’s really all you can do at this point,” the detective said gently. “I’m heading back to the station now to look over Greg’s phone and computer. I’ll let you know if it generates any new leads.” She eyed the woman. “Sure you don’t want to go somewhere else? Or get someone over here to sit with you?”

  Shelby wrapped her arms tighter around herself and Marseille and shook her head. “I can’t face people right now. I want to stay here in case Greg comes home.” She sniffled, blinked, and looked directly at the detective, her voice soft. “Miracles happen sometimes, don’t they?”

  Jackson didn’t respond to the question. If she answered honestly, it would seem cruel. And if she agreed with Shelby, gave the woman false hope, it
would be just as cruel. Besides, the question was likely rhetorical, and Jackson seemed to assume as much as well. She settled for saying, “I’ll be in touch.”

  Her lip quivering, Shelby nodded.

  As we drove off down the street, a news van from a local television station came around the corner. In the passenger seat sat Trish LeGrande, a brassy, bosomy reporter with hair the color of orange sherbet or circus peanuts. No doubt she’d come here in the hopes of interviewing Shelby Olsen about her husband’s disappearance. She was like a buzzard, searching for carcasses on which to feast. But we had no legal right to stop her from approaching the grief-stricken woman we’d just left behind and, in fact, there were times the media could be a police department’s best ally in identifying or tracking down suspects or people of interest. I only hoped her arrival wouldn’t send Shelby over an emotional edge.

  The heater whirred and warmed the car on our drive back to the station. Jackson’s eyes drifted closed and her head bobbed a couple of times as she nodded off only to jerk awake again. She groaned and shook herself alert as the cruiser rolled to a stop at the curb in front of the station. “Thanks for your help, Megan.”

  “Any time.”

  With that, she climbed out of my cruiser, and my partner and I set out on our beat. I had quite a bit of autonomy while out on patrol, and I decided to use that discretion today to see if I could locate Greg’s car. My guess was that Greg’s killers wouldn’t have risked traveling very far in his vehicle, especially once they realized they were transporting a dead body. They’d have likely ditched the Jetta, and Greg, too, within a short distance from the Olsens’ home.

  I drove to the more secluded areas of my beat to see if the Jetta had been abandoned in any of the out-of-the-way spots. The car wasn’t in any of the parking lots at Forest Park. It wasn’t hidden behind the bathhouse at the park’s pool. It wasn’t parked in the remote reaches of the TCU stadium’s parking lot. It wasn’t behind the dumpsters at a church or a shopping center. Damn.