Rachel Wolcott, Fact & Fiction

More on Sheriff Kendra. I like her, I’m going to work with her some more. Turns out she knows about the character from WAG 22—I’ve changed his name to Nelson Arnold. Here’s my take on the unexpected.

Paperwork, piles of it, formed precarious towers on her desk. So finely balanced, an unusually heavy fly, like one of those fat green ones, might send papers floating across the office if it landed on a sunny white spot to rest its wings and rub together its tiny black arms. There were quite a few flies around and Kendra noticed they were curiously large. She sipped a mug of sugary coffee and flipped through crime scene files related to the Arnold case, looking for something she might have missed the first time around. There was the trooper shooting, home and business break ins, a gun story robbery. Arnold was a one man crime wave and the more she looked at the photos, blood drops, broken windows, the trooper’s lifeless body, the more she believed it was going to take a bit of luck to catch him. He wasn’t a master criminal, but he was on the move and he knew the backwoods of Seneca County. He had friends and family all over. Kendra was certain they were helping him hide.

Nelson Arnold had been on the run since April when he broke out of jail in the next county over. Now it was mid-August and every cop in Western New York still was looking for him, but there were no real leads. Lots of reports came into the switchboard, but they were as credible as Sasquatch sightings—tall bearded creatures roaming through cornfields or disappearing into the woods. One farmer brought her into the middle of his soybean field to examine some footprints he believed to be Arnold’s. When Kendra looked down at his boots, they were about the same size. Turned out the farmer really wanted to talk. He was worried Arnold would steal his shotguns.

On this warm Saturday morning the Arnold crisis felt less immediate than it had in the days since the trooper was shot. Three days of rain had slowed the manhunt. A team of tracker dogs followed a trail down from the trooper crime scene through the gorge towards Westville, but they lost the scent near Lake Seneca. Arnold may have been a few steps in front of the pack, but no one saw him and he managed to slip away, if he’d really been there in the first place. It was impossible to know. Kendra tended the scratches and bruises she’d suffered during the chase through the undergrowth. There were countless insect bites on her legs and a poison ivy rash grew on her left hand and arm.

The weekend receptionist hollered back to Kendra, which she didn’t like, to let her know she had a visitor. Before she could stand up to see who it was, a large woman, bursting out of her tank top and blue jeans barged into Kendra’s office. It was Arnold’s daughter, by whom she wasn’t sure. Dealing with irate family members was usually easily done with a lot of shouting and threatening arrest. Taylor-Ann Phillips came at her in a rage not pausing to give Kendra the chance to deploy her usual tactics. Within seconds she was on top of the Sheriff pummelling her and screaming.

“You bitch!” Taylor-Ann’s sweat dripped into Kendra’s eyes. “You bitch. Gimme back my kids!”

By the time two deputies dragged the woman off to the cells, Kendra was in tears. She crawled behind her desk, opened the bottom drawer and searched for the ibuprofen.