WINONA, Minn. – This police case began simply enough. The Occupational Rehabilitation Center on the Far East End called to report s scoop shovel missing. Value: $25. Not a big deal. Seemingly unrelated there had been a strange police encounter during night. An officer on patrol spotted a man walking down an East End street and crouching and ducking to, it appeared, avoid being seen. The officer stopped the man, who was carrying a saw: “What are you doing?” The man answered: “I just took a cat.” The man pointed in the dark to where the officer found the “cat” that the man had thrown in the snow when he realized the officer was on his tail. It was a catalytic converter — a device that filters car fumes in a vehicle’s exhaust system and which is a frequent target for thieves, who then sell the precious metal, usually platinum, that does the filtering. Jacob Lee Bullis, 31, of Winona, was arrested and booked for possessing burglary tools and tampering with a vehicle. Later came another call to police headquarters from the ORC. Not only was a scoop shovel missing, as reported earlier, but now three ORC shuttle vans weren’t working, apparently because their catalytic converters had been sawed off during the night. These are vans that transport disabled persons to training and jobs on a strict schedule every morning. It was true, police confirmed, that the vans’ catalytic converters had been heisted. So what does a scoop shovel have to do with the stolen catalytic converters? The thief, police summarized, had used the shovel to cover his bootprints in the snow. Clever, eh?