Paw Enforcement 02 - Paw and Order (11 page)

“You've failed the cognitive test miserably,” Clint said. “But we can't tell if that's because you're drunk or just plain stupid.”

The guy's face turned red with rage. “I'm not stupid!”

Clint raised a brow. “So you
are
admitting you're drunk, then?”

“No!” The guy looked from Clint to me. “No, I'm not!”

“Let's try a physical test.” I used my baton to gesture at his feet. “To the left.”

He took a step to the left.

“Take it back now, y'all.”

He took a step back.

“One hop this time.”

He hopped once.

“Right foot,” I said. “Stomp.”

He stomped his right foot.

“Left foot,” I said. “Let's stomp.”

He stomped again with his other foot.

“Now cha-cha. And do it real smooth.”

“Wait.” His brows angled in consternation. “Is this ‘Cha-Cha Slide'?”

Clint cut his eyes my way and offered a snicker.

Realizing we'd had as much fun with the guy as we could without crossing the line, I returned my baton to my belt, my penlight to my pocket, and retrieved my handcuffs. “Turn around,” I told the guy. “Put your hands behind your back.”

“Now wait just a minute.” Clint stepped up close, though his towering over me didn't so much intimidate me as excite me. “This collar is mine.”

“
My
partner took him down.”

“And
my
horse took a hit to the ass.”

Our gazes locked in a challenge, his eyes searing into me like lasers. Though I fought to control them, my breaths came hard and fast. But when Clint ran his tongue over his lips in overt seduction, a laugh escaped me and I acquiesced.

“All right.” I stepped back to allow Clint to cuff the guy. “If you need this collar that bad you can have him.”

The deputy pulled out his cuffs and slipped them onto the guy's wrists.
Click-click.

Before hauling the guy off, he gave me a sly smile. “Nice doing business with ya'.” A wink followed. “Don't think I've forgotten about that ride.”

Heck, I hadn't forgotten about it, either.

As Clint headed off with his horse on one side, his prisoner on the other, the crowd dispersed. A dispatcher's voice came over my shoulder-mounted radio. “Officer needed at the arena ladies' room.”

The male cops on site quickly deferred to me, their voices coming through loud and clear over the radio.

“Sounds like a job for you, Luz,” one said.

“Girl problems,” said another. “I'm out.”

Derek was even more direct. “Ain't no way in hell I'm going in a ladies' room.”

I rolled my eyes and pushed the mic button. “I'm on it.”

Minutes later, Brigit and I found a blond, fiftyish woman dressed in upscale western attire standing outside the ladies' room. Her skin bore a light flush, as if she'd had a glass or two of wine. Tipsy, but not drunk.

Brigit snuffled around for a moment on the floor around the woman's feet, then raised her head high, her nose wriggling. She looked off down the hall.

“Somebody stole my purse!” the woman cried. “It was hanging on the hook in the stall and then a hand reached over and”—she threw her hands into the air in a magical
poof
gesture—“it was gone!”

“Did you see the person who took it?”

“Only her hand.”

“Was there anything identifiable about her hand or arm that you noticed? A ring maybe? A tattoo or scar? The color of her sleeve?”

The woman squinted in concentration. “I think her sleeve was dark. Leather, maybe? And it seemed like maybe her nails were painted pink. But it happened so fast it's hard to say for sure.”

I nodded to let her know I understood. “When you exited the stall, was there anyone else in the bathroom?”

“Two girls,” she said. “I told them my purse had been stolen and asked if they'd seen the person who'd come out of the stall next to me. Both said no. They'd been washing their hands and hadn't gotten a good look. I'd called out when I saw the thief take my purse but I guess the girls couldn't hear me hollering over the sound of the running water.”

“Any chance one of them could have taken it? Maybe hidden it inside their coat?”

The woman shook her head again. “They were both in jeans and those fitted knit jackets the young ones wear these days. There wouldn't have been anywhere for them to hide my purse.”

“These girls,” I said. “How old were they? Teens? Younger?”

“No, not that young,” the woman said. “I'd say they were in their mid to late twenties.”

I supposed that would make them “girls” to a woman her age, though I was in my mid-twenties, too, and considered myself a full-fledged woman.
Hear me roar.
“What did you do then?”

“I tried to run after the thief. Took me a second or two to get around the girl with the crutches. By that time, whoever had taken my purse was long gone.”

“One of the girls had a broken leg?”

“I don't think so. There was no cast on her leg. I suppose she just had a sprained ankle or something like that. She had on the cutest pair of boots I've ever seen. Tan on the foot with bright pink on the upper part.”

The boots did indeed sound cute. They also sounded irrelevant. Maybe if this woman had paid as much attention to her purse as she had to the girl's boots, she'd still have her bag.

I unzipped my police-issue jacket and pulled my notepad and pen from the breast pocket of my shirt. After jotting down the woman's name—
Catherine Quimby
—and some notes—
Suspect: Pink nails/dark leather jacket. Witnesses: 2 women/ 20s/crutches no cast?/tan & pink boots
—I resumed my questioning. “Were the two women who were in the bathroom there together?”

Catherine's brows tipped inward as she thought. “I don't believe so. They were at opposite ends of the counter. Friends would have likely stood closer together.”

Unless they were pretending not to know each other.
After all, women often traveled in pairs or groups when going to the restroom.
Hmm
 …

“What did they look like?”

She looked up, as if trying to visualize them in her mind. “Unremarkable, really. Brown hair. Average height and build. Wearing jeans and jackets and boots, like I said.”

Just like virtually every other young woman at the stock show and rodeo tonight.

“What all was in your purse?” I asked.

“Hairbrush. Makeup. Tissue. Gum. My wallet, of course.”

“How much cash was in it?”

She looked up in thought. “Forty or fifty dollars maybe? I don't know the exact amount. Oh, and my pills were in my purse, too.”

“Pills?”

“My prescription arthritis pills. Vicodin.”

Painkillers, a mix of hydrocodone bitartrate and acetaminophen, a type of legal drug sometimes sold illegally on the streets.
Interesting.
“How many pills were in the bottle?”

Again she looked up in thought. “Maybe a hundred and ten pills? It was nearly full. I just had the prescription refilled.”

The gears of my mind began to turn.
Was it possible someone had targeted her for the Vicodin?
“When's the last time you took a pill?”

“This afternoon around three,” she said, “before I left the house.”

“So you haven't taken any here at the rodeo?”

“No.”

“Did you take the bottle out of your purse for some other reason while you were here?”

“I took it out and sat it on the counter when I stopped to buy a corn dog. I was digging through the bottom of my purse for change and it was getting in my way.”

Someone might have spotted the bottle and targeted her for the pills. Then again, she could just be a random victim, chosen because her outfit and purse indicated she was well off.

I motioned for Catherine to follow me and Brigit into the bathroom. Whipping my baton out once again, I used it to poke around in the trash cans. Nope. No sign of a discarded purse.

I looked back at the woman. “Which stall were you in?”

The woman pointed. “The one on the end.”

I stepped over and went inside to take a look around. Brigit took advantage of the opportunity to grab a drink from a toilet. I yanked back on her leash. “Stop it! That's disgusting.”

It was bad enough when she did it at home, but a public toilet?
Yick!

Nothing in the stall provided any clues, though writing on the wall in pink lipstick informed me that
Sophie
+
Clint McCutcheon
=
♥
.

Hmm.
I wasn't sure that math worked out.
If a rodeo groupie throws herself at a bareback rider at two hundred miles an hour, how long until their genitals meet?

I decided not to put any time into answering that word problem. Instead, I radioed my fellow officers. “If anybody sees a young woman in a leather jacket and pink nail polish or one with brown hair on crutches, hold them for questioning.”

 

FOURTEEN

EAU DE TOILET

Brigit

A public bathroom was the canine equivalent of happy hour. So many toilets to drink from!

Brigit got only three laps of water before Megan pulled her back from the commode and issued a cry of disgust. As if Megan were so clean. Right now she had pig poop on her shoe and wasn't even aware of it.

Humans can be so stupid.
And their noses were so useless. Brigit's far superior nose picked up all kinds of things. For instance, though she didn't know their names, she could make out the scents of two different colognes. One smelled like flowers, with a hint of those round fruits that Megan cut in half and twisted on her cheap plastic juicer. The other smelled like flowers, too, and vanilla. Why human beings wanted to smell like a garden or a cupcake was beyond Brigit. She much preferred the personal, natural scent of sweat socks discarded after a long run.

 

FIFTEEN

PAYROLL

Robin Hood

As she waited in the car for her sisters, she fingered through the woman's wallet.

She found photos of two smiling boys, probably the woman's grandchildren.

A coupon for some type of high-fiber cereal.
EW.

There was $53.87 in cash.
That's all? Damn.
She'd hoped for more.

Robin Hood slid the two twenties into the inside pocket of her jacket. What her sisters didn't know about she wouldn't have to share with them.

She continued to riffle through the purse. Hairbrush. Lipstick. Eyeglasses in a hard-sided case. A prescription bottle of Vicodin. Recently filled, too, not a pill missing that Robin Hood could tell. Surely the pills would be worth far more than the cash. According to the label, the prescription was for a Catherine Quimby, who suffered from arthritis.

I chose my victim well.
Of course she'd always been very careful when she stole things, too. That's why she'd never been caught.

She remembered the first time she'd stolen something. It hadn't been long after that humiliating day at the spelling bee. Her mother had dragged her and her sisters along one Saturday when she went to clean a house in the Colonial Country Club neighborhood. Normally her mother left them at home with their father when she had weekend jobs, but he'd been out that day, forced to paint over graffiti as community service, part of his sentence for passing a bad check at the grocery store. He hadn't meant to rip anyone off. He simply hadn't balanced the checkbook in a while and didn't realize just how dire their financial situation had become. When he'd been unable to repay the funds right away, the manager of the store turned the matter over to the district attorney. Because her father had no prior record, the DA let him plead out and offered him twenty hours of community service in lieu of a fine he couldn't afford.

The family who'd hired their mother to clean had only one daughter, a girl three months younger than Robin Hood. The girl had skin and hair so fair she was virtually colorless. What she lacked in pigment she did
not
make up for in personality. She was quiet and dull and annoyingly well behaved. It took less than three minutes for Robin Hood to decide she hated the girl.

The girl's mother had turned to Robin Hood's mom and said, “Your daughters are welcome to watch TV in the playroom with Hayley. Maybe they'll find some toys in there to keep them occupied while you work.”

Robin Hood felt her gut tighten. This little girl not only had a bedroom to herself, but an entire playroom, too?
It wasn't fair.

When Robin Hood, Crystal, and Heather stepped into Hayley's playroom, they might as well have been stepping into Oz or Willy Wonka's factory. The bright and airy room was lined floor to ceiling with shelves that held every toy and game imaginable. Hayley owned the Barbie Dreamhouse, the pink convertible, even a plastic play camper. She had clay and beads and paints and yarn in a dozen different colors. A large trunk contained clothes for dress-up, including a mermaid costume, a ballerina costume complete with soft pink shoes and a fluffy tutu, and assorted princess attire.

But what impressed Robin Hood most was Hayley's American Girl doll collection. Five of the pristine dolls, still in their original packaging. Robin Hood remembered counting them, memorizing their names.
Julie. Rebecca. Addy. Caroline. Josefina.
She couldn't imagine ignoring the beautiful dolls like this, leaving them in their boxes. Oh, how she'd wanted one for the longest time!

She knew her parents couldn't afford to get her one of the dolls. She'd looked on the Internet on the school library computer and learned that the dolls cost over a hundred dollars each. She'd asked Santa for an American Girl doll when she'd sat on his lap at the mall last December. He hadn't brought her one. Instead he'd filled her stocking with candy and crayons and Play-Doh. She'd decided then and there, on that fateful Christmas morning, that Santa was an asshole.