GREEN COVE SPRINGS – The Clay County Sheriff’s Office is a fortress. It is buttoned-up, neatly pressed, orderly. In the atrium is a guard’s station with thick glass. Every door to elsewhere in the building, such as the jail, appears big and heavy, reinforced. The floors are sparkling. Signs with crossed-out pictures of guns reading, “NO FIREARMS!” line the windows. One woman comes in to report drug activity on her property.

A door opens and a friendly face appears, smiling.

“Hey, come on back and see the Sheriff,” said Denise Flak, executive staff assistant. She and Public Affairs Coordinator Mary Justino, who recently went on to another job, have been key people in making the Sheriff’s Office move day-to-day.

I follow her. Suddenly we’re in normal-looking offices, with desks and cubicles and Ficus plants. We walk toward the back, where the Sheriff’s private office is located. No armor here.

“Good to be on this side of the law,” I thought.

Rick Beseler is an “old cop.” That’s how the outgoing sheriff of Clay County describes himself. That’s how he got his start in law enforcement, after all, at age 18 as a dispatcher and then patrol officer right here in his hometown.

After serving as sheriff since 2004, he announced more than a year ago that he wouldn’t be seeking re-election to a fourth term.

“I’ve been a lame duck for 15 months,” he jokes after to standing to greet me when I walk in.

The old cop, long and rangy, is spreading his wings and stretching out these days. He is relaxed, smiling, energetic as he sits behind the large desk in his spacious office, the sun shining in behind him. The weight of the world is lifting off his shoulders.

“I knew when I got elected the very first time that this was not going to be a lifetime appointment,” Beseler, 62, said during a wide-ranging, one-on-one interview Nov. 28. “There are term limits for other jobs, but not this one. Arguably you can stay as long as the voters let you, but I believe in self-imposed term limits. If you stay too long, you can become comfortable in the job and just be a placeholder.”

Beseler – who likely will spend his retirement focusing on several tree farms he owns as well is a railroad-car hobbist – leaves a law-enforcement career that has spanned 43 years. Prior to becoming sheriff, he spent a more than two decades as chief investigator for the Fourth Circuit State Attorney’s Office, where he rose to chief investigator.

“We investigated cases that weren’t the normal, run of the mill type cases, things that fell through the cracks,” he said. “I arrested numerous public officials for misconduct. We did consumer fraud investigations. We were on national TV, on “20/20” and “Primetime Live,” multiple times for our innovative undercover investigations that we did on everything from environmental crimes to phone cloning to welfare fraud to the beginnings of cyber-crime.

“I followed leads all over the country and even out of the country,” he said. “I loved working those types of cases. It was an opportunity to do the best kind of law enforcement work I’ve ever done. Being a sheriff has nothing to do with crime-fighting. I haven’t made an arrest in 12 years. Being sheriff you focus on budgets, labor issues, personnel issues, policy making, dealing with the public. I was probably better at being an investigator than I was as sheriff – it was a lot more fun.”

Beseler loves talking about Green Cove Springs. He loves to talk, period, but especially about his early days as a cop.

“We only had 12 officers in the department at the time, so I gained a lot more experience than I would have at a large department,” he said. “If I had worked in a big city and went to a shooting scene, I might have been able to string up some tape and guard the perimeter while somebody else worked the actual case. In Green Cove Springs, as a rookie officer, I was a teenager investigating shootings, homicides, robberies, so I learned a lot in those five years.”

His time here as a young officer prepared him for the state attorney’s office, where he was hired at age 24 and quickly moved through the ranks. Around age 50, he decided he wanted to make a difference in a different way, so he ran for sheriff.

At the time, Clay County was the fastest growing county in the state and one of the fastest growing in the country. Beseler thought his biggest challenge would be the influx of people, because with more people comes more crime and filled-up jails.

“We were over capacity in our jail,” he said. “We had 500 inmates in a 482-bed jail. They were sleeping on the floor. We were struggling to keep up.”

But everything changed when the Great Recession hit during President George W. Bush’s final year in office. The economy tanked, the explosive influx of people to Clay County all but halted, the prison population plummeted. Now Beseler had a whole new problem – how to retain personnel and protect the county on a budget that grew ever tighter.

“I think I’m leaving things in better condition than when I found them,” Beseler said. “I think I was the right man for the job, because of my financial acumen. It took someone with that sort of background to guide this agency through years when we had budget cuts, jobs that we couldn’t replace when people left. Our tax revenues dropped precipitously.”

Beseler cut costs where he could, avoiding layoffs, and developed a volunteer program and a reserve deputy program. Now, the agency has come out on the other side. But there were challenges in his tenure.

A pall immediately comes over his face as he discusses Somer Thompson, a 7-year-old girl who was abducted while walking home from school in Orange Park. She was assaulted and murdered, her body found in a Georgia landfill.

“That’s every parent’s worst nightmare and every sheriff’s worst nightmare,” he said. “When I first came to office, my biggest fear was a child abduction. We began preparing right away. We formed a child abduction response team. We worked with national organizations on training. We found the individual and he’s in prison with no possibility of parole, so he can’t hurt anybody else. We worked with the FBI, U.S. Marshals and other law enforcement. We were successful in bringing the mother’s child back to her. I know it’s not a happy ending, but at least the mother could bury her daughter and know where she is now.”

Beseler is similarly solemn when discussing Detective David White, who was murdered in 2012 at age 35 while investigating a methamphetamine house on Alligator Boulevard in Middleburg.

“This was also every sheriff’s worst nightmare,” he said. “That is something you just never get over. You feel really responsible, even if you know there was nothing you could have done. It’s a horrible thing.”

The building houses the sheriff’s office named in honor of White – “David A. White Memorial Headquarters” – as a daily reminder of his life and service.

Another dark time was the case of Daniel Linsinbigler, 19, who suffered a mental break and died in custody of asphyxiation after allegedly being pepper-sprayed, taunted by officers and fitted with a spit max that restrained his breathing and body movements. His death was ruled a justifiable homicide. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement launched an investigation but filed no criminal charges. The Clay County Sheriff's Office reached a $2.2 million settlement in federal civil court with Linsinbigler’s family without admitting guilt.

“You don’t want any tragedies on your watch,” Beseler said. “Every sheriff has tragedies occur. I did, and the next sheriff may. I hope not.”

Darryl Daniels, a former jails chief in Jacksonville, will take over as sheriff in January. He beat fellow Republican Col. Craig Aldrich, who had been Beseler’s chief of staff, in an open primary Aug. 30.

“It’s just the right time in my life to retire,” Beseler said. “This is a 24-hour, seven day a week job. Even when you’re off, you’re still working, still worrying about your officers and the people of the county, still taking that emergency phone call. I have no real plans except for not having to get up and come to work every day. I wanted to retire while I still have some good years left. I don’t want to walk out of here and straight into a nursing home.”

Beseler won 82 percent of the vote in 2012, so his chances may have been favorable for securing a fourth term. Instead, he’ll be on one of his tree arms in Florida or Virginia. He just bought a second home in southeastern Virginia. Hunting is good there. He also may take an old rail-car across Canada – a 4,000-mile journey.

“I think about Jerry Seinfeld,” Beseler said. “He had the No. 1 TV show, and he walked away from it. People still think highly of him. That’s when you want to do in this office. You want to leave one term before the voters wish you had.”

Email Christiaan DeFranco at chris@opcfla.com. Follow him on Twitter @cdefranco.