The Long Paw of the Law

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The Long Paw of the Law Page 4

by Diane Kelly


  “The trail ran cold,” I said. “Whoever broke into your vehicle must have climbed into a car a couple of streets over. Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be security cameras on any of the houses along the way.”

  The man groaned. “Just my luck.”

  I pointed to their double garage doors. “Since the thief got your remote, I’d suggest manually locking your garage doors until you can have the system reprogrammed. We’ve seen this type of thing before. Often the culprit will come back another time and use the remote to sneak into the garage. Sometimes they’ll grab a few tools or a lawnmower. Other times they get into the house and go for other items.”

  The woman’s eyes shone with trepidation and she turned to her husband. “That’s it. We’re getting an alarm system.”

  I gave her a nod. “Not a bad idea.” I left them with my business card and instructions to call me if they had any further problems.

  Brigit and I returned to our cruiser and continued our patrol. The rest of the night was quiet. Well, other than Brigit snoring on her comfy cushion in the back of the car.

  We returned to the Western 1 station just as the sun was coming up. I hoped today would be a brighter day for the baby girl.

  SIX

  THE NOSE KNOWS

  Brigit

  Brigit was dozing in their bed, her head draped over Megan’s thigh, when her nose woke her, issuing an urgent all-points bulletin.

  Cheese! Someone’s got cheese!

  Brigit raised her head and pricked her ears. Sure enough, she heard the siren call of plastic wrap crinkling. She leaped off the bed and ran to answer the call, her paws sliding on the flooring as she careened around the corner into the kitchen. Their housemate Frankie stood at the counter, a slice of processed cheese in her hand.

  Frankie looked down at Brigit. “Can’t get anything past you, can I?”

  Brigit wasn’t sure what Frankie’s words meant, but she knew her odds of getting some cheese were better if she wagged her tail and sat down obediently. Humans were suckers. She plunked her hindquarters down on the floor. Cheese me! Now!

  Frankie pulled the refrigerator open, reached into the drawer, and snagged another slice of cheese, tearing it into strips for Brigit and hand-feeding them to her. When she finished, she gave Brigit’s ears a nice scratch.

  Yep. Humans are total suckers.

  SEVEN

  SILOTARY CONFINEMENT

  The Father

  The three men approached the old concrete silo, which sat in the field adjacent to the compound. The tall stone wall around the compound would obscure any view the church members might have of the farmland outside the refuge. The bottom of the silo was further hidden by the tall and thick red tip photinia bushes the Father had strategically ordered his men to plant around the tower. The structure leaned a degree or two to the left, like a leaning tower of Pisa on the Texas plains. The roof and the attached ladder were rusted, generating copper-colored streaks that ran like veins down the long sides, as if the aging silo were a marble tower. Of course the silo wasn’t the only thing around here that bore a deceptive façade.

  The Father hadn’t seen any value in the edifice when he’d bought the fifty-acre spread over three decades ago. He’d had no intentions of storing mass quantities of grain. But when he’d needed a place to safely and secretly stash someone, a place where sins could be contemplated and cries could be stifled, he’d soon realized the old structure provided the perfect spot. With the addition of a five-gallon water jug, a canvas cot, and a portable camping toilet, a person could be contained there for quite some time. For as long as it takes …

  “Careful, now,” he told Zeke and Jeb. “That girl’s likely to be unpredictable.”

  The men nodded. The Father stepped back as Zeke put the key in the padlock and popped it open. Before Zeke removed the lock, he put his mouth to the frame of the heavy metal door. “No funny business. Sit down on the cot and don’t get up until Jeb’s set your lunch down. Understand?”

  A meek voice came from the other side of the door. “I understand.”

  Zeke removed the lock and pulled the door open, the hinges emitting creaks of protest. As the opening widened, allowing sunlight into the dark space, the Father could make out the girl sitting on the cot inside. Her cheeks were streaked with tears, the front of her dress wet with milk that had leaked from her breasts. She blinked as her pretty blue eyes adjusted to the light.

  Jeb stepped forward with the metal bucket that contained her meal. A hard roll. A boiled egg. A small navel orange. Enough to keep her alive, but not enough to keep her strong. The Father knew from experience that her will would be easier to break if she were also feeling physically weak.

  As Jeb set the bucket down on the ground just inside the door, the girl sprang from the bed like a rabid jack-in-the-box and emitted a roar worthy of a caged tiger. She rushed the man, knocking him backward into the doorway. She tripped over his body as she attempted to escape, landing with one knee in Jeb’s gut, the other in his groin. As Jeb turned his head sideways and retched, the Father fought the urge to laugh. Good thing that moron hasn’t had his lunch yet.

  As Zeke grabbed the girl’s left arm, she screeched like a banshee, reached up with her right hand, and raked her nails over his face, leaving four deep, red gouges all the way from his temple to his mouth.

  She’s got even more fight in her than I thought.

  Still, he’d break her eventually. He’d always managed to break the others before, make them see the error of their ways, repent their sins. Well, most of them, anyway. The ones who hadn’t broken he’d had to handle in other ways. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that. It was too messy.

  Blood oozing from the claw marks, Zeke yanked the girl up from the ground and flung her back into the silo like a rag doll. She crashed into the cot, knocking it over, her hand-quilted blanket falling to the dusty floor. As the Father pulled Zeke out of the way, the girl scrambled to get to her feet. Just as the girl launched herself at it again, the Father slammed the door shut. Her body impacted the door with a dull thud.

  The Father pulled Jeb to his feet. Jeb put one hand on the silo and cupped the other around his crotch, still coughing and gagging.

  The Father gave his best men a simultaneous pat on the back. “The Lord appreciates your sacrifice.” As for himself, well, he appreciated both their loyalty and gullibility.

  EIGHT

  SKETCHY

  Megan

  I was still in bed when Detective Jackson phoned around two in the afternoon on Friday. I grabbed my phone and jabbed the talk button. “Hello, Detective.”

  “No luck on the camera footage from the businesses,” she said without preamble. “The guy moved quick. Couldn’t tell much about him.”

  “What about the vehicle he was driving? Did any cameras pick up the car?”

  “A camera down the block from the construction site picked up several cars shortly after the baby was left at the station. Most of them check out. But there was a dark pickup truck that passed eight minutes after the baby was left at the station. The license plates had been removed. All we could tell is that it’s a Ford F-150. Judging from the style of the grill, it’s a late nineties model.”

  The truck had to be the car the baby’s father was driving, right? “Which way was it headed?”

  “West,” Jackson said. “Of course that doesn’t tell us much. The truck didn’t show up on footage from a gas station west of Henderson or on cameras from a clinic to the south. My guess is they turned north up Henderson and headed to I-30. No telling which way they went once they got to the interstate.”

  “Where do we go from here?” It was her case, of course, but the fact that she’d called to give me an update told me she planned to involve me, or at least to let me shadow her for the experience.

  “I’ve searched the Fort Worth PD records to see if any of our officers pulled over a truck without plates last night. No luck. But I’ve put in inquiries with the sheriff’s depa
rtment and some of the surrounding cities to see if any of their people might’ve pulled the truck over. In the meantime, I’m heading over to the fire station with a sketch artist. We’ll see what Seth and Douglas Harrison come up with.”

  I was already slipping out of my sleepwear and into jeans and a T-shirt. “I’ll meet you there.”

  A good sketch of a suspect could make all the difference. After the horrific bombing in Oklahoma City, investigators tracked the Ryder truck, which had contained the explosive materials, to the rental location in Junction City, Kansas. People who’d interacted with Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrator of the heinous crime, provided descriptions used by the sketch artist to make a composite drawing. The sketch was released and widely publicized as the manhunt was under way. If not for that sketch, the officers who later pulled McVeigh over for traffic violations might not have realized he could be the man wanted for the senseless mass murder.

  When I finished dressing, I rounded up Brigit and we headed out to my metallic blue Smart Car. Given all the talk of climate change and in an attempt to reduce both my carbon footprint and my gasoline expenses, I’d bought the tiny two-seater a few years ago. Of course that was before Chief Garelik had partnered me with Brigit who, at nearly a hundred pounds, outweighed every other K-9 on the Fort Worth force and eighty-two percent of all supermodels. When Brigit sat in the seat, the tips of her ears brushed the top of the car, causing her to constantly twitch them as we rode along. Fortunately, our drive and her discomfort would be short.

  Jackson’s plain sedan was already parked in the fire station’s lot when I pulled in a few minutes later. I parked next to her and led Brigit inside. We found Seth, Harrison, and Detective Jackson gathered around a table in the station’s kitchen. Blast, who’d been lying at Seth’s feet, leaped to his paws and trotted over to greet us at the door.

  Seth glanced up and gave me a “hey,” while Jackson patted the seat next to her, indicating where she’d like me to sit.

  At the end of the table sat the sketch artist, a grizzled man who looked old enough to have once shared paintbrushes with Vincent van Gogh. His gray hair hung in a mass of curls and frizz around his shoulders. He even wore a black beret, though the artsy effect was somewhat offset by his denim shirt, jeans, and scuffed cowboy boots. Perhaps he wore it ironically? Seth and Harrison sat on either side of him. A sketchbook turned to a blank page lay on the table in front of the artist and he held a charcoal pencil aloft, ready to begin. While many departments had replaced their sketch artists with computer software, it would be far more interesting to see this guy go about the procedure old-school style.

  Once I’d sat down, Jackson made quick introductions and gestured to the artist. “He’s seen the video.”

  The guy clucked his tongue. “Didn’t help much, though. ’Course that’s why I’m here, isn’t it?” His question needing no answer, the artist launched into a series of questions directed at Seth and Harrison. “Let’s start with the feature that most stood out to you. What would you say that was?”

  Seth shrugged, his face tight and pensive. “Hard to say. Like you saw in the video, the guy’s ball cap made it hard to see his face.”

  Harrison likewise said, “Other than the fact that he needed a shave, nothing jumps out at me.” He shook his head and raised his palms. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t put too much pressure on yourselves,” the artist told the men, leaning back casually in his chair. “This sketch doesn’t have to be exact. Long as we get a reasonable resemblance, it’ll still help.”

  Seth’s shoulders relaxed a little and Harrison exhaled an audible breath of relief.

  “How ’bout we try another tack,” the artist said. “How’d you describe the shape of the man’s face?”

  “Long,” Harrison said without hesitation.

  “Yeah,” Seth agreed. “Sort of horsey.”

  Detective Jackson’s brows quirked and she jotted down a note. I pulled my notepad from the breast pocket of my T-shirt and did the same. Long, horsey face. As I’d learned in my criminal justice studies at Sam Houston State University, criminal anthropometry, identifying suspects by measurements, began with Alphonse Bertillon, who worked as a records clerk in a Paris police department back in the late 1800s. In addition to maintaining photographs of suspects both from the front and in profile, his identification system included measuring each suspect in five main regards: the length of the head, the width of the head, the length of the foot, the length of the forearm, and the length of the middle finger. My mind pictured long-ago suspects being asked to flip the proverbial bird while a fastidious Frenchman used a ruler to measure their middle digit. No doubt many willingly complied with the request to make the gesture: 8.7 centimètres. Merci beaucoup.

  The system proved quite useful back in those days, helping police catch and accurately identify repeat offenders. In the early 1900s, however, fingerprinting replaced Bertillon’s system when the former proved to be a more exact identification technique. Still, when a fingerprint could not be obtained, the fundamentals of anthropometry came into play in attempting to identify a suspect.

  The artist put his pencil to the paper, scrawling a loose, long shape. “That it?”

  “Not quite,” Seth said. “His cheeks were more sunken.”

  “Gotcha.” The guy flipped to a fresh page and made a second attempt, this time adding angular planes on the sides. “That more like it?”

  Seth nodded.

  The artist asked about the man’s mouth next. “Full lips? Thin lips? Wide mouth? Small?”

  Harrison said, “Thin and on the small side.”

  The artist continued to question them as he sketched the suspect’s mouth. “Anything distinguishable about his teeth? Straight? Crooked? Caps? Silver fillings? Any of them obviously chipped or missing?”

  “Not that I recall,” Harrison said.

  “Me, neither,” Seth concurred.

  “All righty,” the artist said. “I’m going to add the beard now. You two say ‘when.’”

  His pencil scritch-scritch-scritched on the page as he added whiskers to the man’s face. He glanced up occasionally, an eyebrow arched as if to ask, Are we there yet?

  When the artist had shaded the face to the appropriate degree, Seth said, “When.”

  Harrison nodded in agreement. “You might want to put some whiskers along his neck, too. His beard wasn’t groomed at all.”

  The artist scratched out a few more strokes along the neck of the suspect. When he was done with the beard, he asked, “How about his nose? Narrow? Wide? Long? Flat?”

  “Short,” Harrison added. “Seemed a little out of proportion to his face.”

  “Right,” Seth said. “It turned up a little, too.”

  “A snub nose.” The artist angled his head and again put his pencil to the page.

  Seth and Harrison leaned in to take a closer look.

  “Slightly longer,” Harrison said, “but not by much.”

  The artist added a few more strokes to elongate the nose on the as-yet-eyeless face. When everyone was satisfied, he asked, “What about his eyes? Were they deep set? Bug-eyed, maybe?”

  “Neither,” Seth said. “They were small and fairly close together.”

  The artist turned to Harrison. “You remember anything more? A shape maybe? Almond? Upturned? Downturned? Hooded?”

  “Round and kinda beady,” Harrison replied, “like Seth said.”

  The artist drew a pair of small, circular, close-set eyes before following up with another question. “How about his brows? Were they thick? Thin? Arched? Straight?”

  “Couldn’t tell ’cause of the cap,” Harrison said, to which Seth nodded in accord.

  “All right.” The artist twiddled his pencil between his fingers. “How about the ears? Were the lobes attached? Did his ears stick out? Did they hang low and wobble to and fro?”

  Harrison held a hand to his own ear, as if subconsciously comparing them to the suspect’s. “His ears were narrow but extra
long. The tops stuck up over the sides of his cap.”

  “That’s right,” Seth said. “And his lobes were long, too.”

  After drawing the ears to the witnesses’ satisfaction, the artist looked to them again, his eyes narrowed. “Tell me about the cap. Color, length of the bill, how it sat on his head.”

  “He wore the hat pulled low.” Seth mimicked putting on a cap and tugging it tight.

  “Yeah,” Harrison concurred. “And it was dark, like you saw on the video. Black or navy blue or deep green. Not sure. Had a long bill. It was dusty, too, like maybe the guy’d been doing some work outside. Or I suppose he could be a contractor. My wife and I had new tile installed at our house a few weeks ago and there was dust everywhere. Drove her crazy.”

  The detective and I jotted more notes. Mine read: Dusty hat. Works outside? Or indoors in a dusty environment? Maybe a contractor? Long ears.

  When the artist finished drawing the ball cap on the portrait, he held up the sketch pad. “How’s this?”

  “Wow.” Seth turned to Harrison and the two exchanged wide-eyed glances, as if surprised how well the artist had captured the suspect neither had thought they’d remembered well.

  Harrison whistled. “That’s as damn close as you could get.”

  Seth gave the man a pat on the back. “You sure know your stuff.”

  The man offered a humble lift of his shoulders. “You do something for forty-two years, you learn a few things.” The artist ripped the sheet from his sketch pad and handed it to Detective Jackson with a dip of his head. “Always a pleasure, ma’am.”

  “Likewise,” Jackson said. “Can’t thank you enough.”

  The man offered a sly grin. “You know the department’s getting a bill, right?”

  A few minutes later, Jackson, the sketch artist, and I parted ways in the parking lot. As Brigit and I climbed back into my car, I thought about the baby’s blanket, covered in the beautiful bluebonnets that someone had so painstakingly and lovingly stitched. Bluebonnets only bloomed in the spring, but fall flowers could brighten both the flower bed at home and my dark mood. Worrying about the baby girl not only had my gut in a twist, but it had my heart feeling hollow.

 

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