from The Widow’s Walk League by Nancy Lynn Jarvis.
Welcome, Officer Everett. Please tell us about yourself and your role with the Santa Cruz Police Department.
Well, I lost an eye in a shootout several years back--- dumb mistake, but there’s no point going into that. I convinced the Santa Cruz Police Department to keep me on in a desk job as the media interface, public relations guy for the force rather than just retiring me. I’m only in my mid-forties and too young to be completely sidelined. I didn’t like my job at first, too many cats up a tree and stuff like that, but I figured out ways to keep a finger in some crime pies.
Do you like your job now?
After a while I came up with my personal trademark Hawaiian shirt for TV interviews and realized how bad Santa Cruz, whose motto is "Keep Santa Cruz Weird" needed my interface between the force and the community. Eventually, I kind of started enjoying what I do.
You said you lost an eye in a shootout.
Oh, yeah, about my eye: we already have Jack O’Neill, the guy who invented wetsuits
as our local one-eyed-patch wearing celebrity, so my eye is a prosthetic. It matches my good eye perfectly, I’m told. I just can't wink very well because it mimics what my good eye does.
Officer Everett, can you tell us about this case?
We get some gang shootings and some one-shot personal murders, but this case, well,
Santa Cruz husbands started getting killed in some pretty public places. And then this little TV gal talked to some witnesses who said they saw somebody dressed like Death hanging around when the first guy bought it. The media went nuts. By the time of the second murder, everybody was seeing Death.
Did anyone outside of the police department help you solve this case?
You would ask that, wouldn’t you? See, I’ve got this gal-pal — my wife’s a friend of her husband’s, too, so that makes us kind of extra-tight — who’s become kind of a meddler. She’s a real estate agent, not exactly a job profile that makes her well-trained to solve murders, but she gets these ideas… It started a couple of years ago when a real estate buddy of hers was top of our list of suspects in a murder. We just didn’t have the personnel to pursue it instantly and she’s, well, she’s kind of nosey and impatient.
My train of thought is getting derailed here. Regan, that’s her name, Regan McHenry, well, she has a way of doing that to me; she gets me involved in the messes she makes with her amateur detecting. Sometimes she even gets me to tell her things about cases I probably shouldn’t. It’s irritating how she finds things out that she has no right to know. Ah, don't get me started. I worry about her, too. Like I said, she's a friend. She's gonna get herself seriously hurt one of these days even though I try to keep her out of trouble.
How did she help with this case?
Oh yeah, this case. All the widows of these dead guys started coming to her to sell their houses — and she realized they all knew one another because they belonged to this walking group called the Widow’s Walk League. She got all worked up, like she does, and thought the head of this group seemed suspicious, even had designs on her husband. The case got solved, not exactly because of her, but —don’t you dare tell her I said this because she already thinks she’s cleverer than she is — but because of some stuff she discovered and because she caught a few lucky breaks.
Thank you for being with us today. I wish you the best in helping to keep our streets safe and Regan out of messes.
Nancy Lynn Jarvis has been a Santa Cruz, California, Realtor® for more than twenty
years. She still owns a real estate company with her husband, but has been having so much fun killing people that she will probably never sell another house. The Widow’s Walk League, the fourth in her Regan McHenry Real Estate Mysteries, was released in July. For more information on her or her books visit her Amazon author page under Nancy Lynn Jarvis http://www.goodreadmysteries.com
and at http://www.facebook.com/ReganMcHenryRealEstateMysteries?ref=ts.
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