Читать книгу The Maverick: The Maverick / Magnate’s Make-Believe Mistress - Diana Palmer, Bronwyn Jameson - Страница 10

Harley went back to the ranch house with Bob racing beside his horse. He felt exhilarated for the first time in years. Usually he got emotionally involved with girls who were already crazy about some other man. He was the comforting shoulder, the listening ear. But Alice Jones seemed to really like him.

Of course, there was her profession. He felt cold when he thought about her hands working on dead tissue. That was a barrier he’d have to find some way to get past. Maybe by concentrating on what a cute woman she was.

Cy Parks was outside, looking over a bunch of young bulls in the corral. He looked up when Harley dismounted.

“What do you think, Harley?” he asked, nodding toward several very trim young Santa Gertrudis bulls.

“Nice,” he said. “These the ones you bought at the auction we went to back in October? Gosh, they’ve grown!”

He nodded. “They are. I brought them in to show to J. D. Langley. He’s looking for some young bulls for his own herd. I thought I’d sell him a couple of these. Good thing I didn’t have to send them back.”

Harley chuckled. “Good thing, for the seller. I remember the lot we sent back last year. I had to help you deliver them.”

“Yes, I remember,” Cy replied. “He slugged you and I slugged him.”

Harley resisted a flush. It made him feel good, that Mr. Parks liked him enough to defend him. He could hardly recall his father. It had been years since they’d had any contact at all. He felt a little funny recalling how he’d lied to his boss about his family, claiming that his mother could help brand cattle and his father was a mechanic. He’d gone to live with an older couple he knew after a fight with his real folks. It was a small ranch they owned, but only the wife lived on it. Harley had stayed in town with the husband at his mechanic’s shop most of the time. He hadn’t been interested in cattle at the time. Now, they were his life and Mr. Parks had taken the place of his father, although Harley had never put it into words. Someday, he guessed, he was going to have to tell his boss the truth about himself. But not today.

“Have any trouble settling the steers in their new pasture?” Cy asked.

“None at all. The forensic lady was out at the river.”

“Alice Jones?”

“Yes. She said sometimes she likes to look around crime scenes alone. She gets impressions.” He smiled. “I helped her with an idea about how the murder was committed.”

Parks looked at him and smiled. “You’ve got a good brain, Harley.”

He grinned. “Thanks.”

“So what was your idea?”

“Maybe the victim was here to see somebody and got ambushed.”

Parks’s expression became solemn. “That’s an interesting theory. If she doesn’t share it with Hayes Carson, you should. There may be somebody local involved in all this.”

“That’s not a comforting thought.”

“I know.” He frowned as he noted the gun and holster Harley was wearing. “Did we have a gunfight and I wasn’t invited?”

“This?” Harley fingered the butt of the gun. “Oh. No! There were some local boys trying to harass Alice. I strapped it on for effect and went to help her, but she’d already sent them running.”

“Threatened to call the cops, huh?” he asked pleasantly.

“She invited them to her van to look at bodies,” he said, chuckling. “They left tread marks on the highway.”

He grinned back. “Well! Sounds like she has a handle on taking care of herself.”

“Yes. But we all need a little backup, from time to time,” Harley said.

Cy put a hand on Harley’s shoulder. “You were mine, that night we had the shoot-out with the drug dealers. You’re a good man under fire.”

“Thanks,” Harley said, flushing a little with the praise. “You’ll never know how I felt, when you said that, after we got home.”

“Maybe I do. See about that cattle truck, will you? I think it’s misfiring again, and you’re the best mechanic we’ve got.”

“I’ll do it. Just don’t tell Buddy you meant it,” he pleaded. “He’s supposed to be the mechanic.”

“Supposed to be is right,” Cy huffed. “But I guess you’ve got a point. Try to tell him, in a nice way, that he needs to check the spark plugs.”

“You could tell him,” Harley began.

“Not the way you can. If I tell him, he’ll quit.” He grimaced. “Already lost one mechanic that way this year. Can’t afford to lose another. You do it.”

Harley laughed. “Okay. I’ll find a way.”

“You always do. Don’t know what I’d do without you, Harley. You’re an asset as a foreman.” He studied the younger man quietly. “I never asked where you came from. You said you knew cattle, but you really didn’t. You learned by watching, until I hooked you up with old Cal and let him tutor you. I always respected the effort you put in, to learn the cattle business. But you’re still as mysterious as you were the day you turned up.”

“Sometimes it’s better to look ahead, and not backward,” Harley replied.

Parks smiled. “Enough said. See you later.”

“Sure.”

He walked off toward the house where his young wife, Lisa, was waiting with one preschool-aged boy and one infant boy in her arms. Of all the people Harley would never have expected to marry, Mr. Parks was first on his list. The rancher had been reclusive, hard to get along with and, frankly, bad company. Lisa had changed him. Now, it was impossible to think of him as anything except a family man. Marriage had mellowed him.

Harley thought about what Parks had said, about how mysterious he was. Maybe Mr. Parks thought he was running from the law. That was a real joke. Harley was running from his family. He’d had it up to his neck with monied circles and important people and parents who thought position was everything. They’d argued heatedly one summer several years ago, when Harley was sixteen, about Harley’s place in the family and his lack of interest in their social life. He’d walked out.

He had a friend whose aunt and uncle owned a small ranch and had a mechanic’s shop in Floresville. He’d taken Harley down there and they’d invited him to move in. He’d had his school files transferred to the nearest high school and he’d started his life over. His parents had objected, but they hadn’t tried to force him to come back home. He graduated and went into the Army. But, just after he returned to Texas following his release from the Army, he went to see his parents and saw that nothing had changed at all. He was expected to do his part for the family by helping win friends and influencing the right people. Harley had left that very night, paid cash for a very old beat-up pickup truck and turned himself into a vagabond cowhand looking for work.

He’d gone by to see the elderly couple he’d lived with during his last year of high school, but the woman had died, the ranch had been sold and the mechanic had moved to Dallas. Discouraged, Harley had been driving through Jacobsville looking for a likely place to hire on when he’d seen cowboys working cattle beside the road. He’d talked to them and heard that Cy Parks was hiring. The rest was history.

He knew that people wondered about him. He kept his silence. It was new and pleasant to be accepted at face value, to have people look at him for who he was and what he knew how to do rather than at his background. He was happy in Jacobsville.

He did wonder sometimes if his people missed him. He read about them in the society columns. There had been a big political dustup just recently and a landslide victory for a friend of his father’s. That had caught his attention. But it hadn’t prompted him to try to mend fences. Years had passed since his sudden exodus from San Antonio, but it was still too soon for that. No, he liked being just plain Harley Fowler, cowboy. He wasn’t risking his hard-won place in Jacobsville for anything.

Alice waited for Hayes Carson in his office, frowning as she looked around. Wanted posters. Reams of paperwork. A computer that was obsolete, paired with a printer that was even more obsolete. An old IBM Selectric typewriter. A battered metal wastebasket that looked as if it got kicked fairly often. A CB unit. She shook her head. There wasn’t one photograph anywhere in the room, except for a framed one of Hayes’s father, Dallas, who’d been sheriff before him. Nothing personal.

Hayes walked in, reading a sheet of paper.

“You really travel light, don’t you?” Alice mused.

He looked up, surprised. “Why do you say that?”

“This is the most impersonal office I’ve ever walked into. Wait.” She held up a hand. “I take that back. Jon Blackhawk’s office is worse. He doesn’t even have a photograph in his.”

“My dad would haunt me if I removed his.” He chuckled, sitting down behind the desk.

“Heard anything from the feds?”

“Yes. They got a report back on the car. It was reported missing by a woman who works for a San Antonio politician yesterday. She has no idea who took it.”

“Damn.” She sighed and leaned back. “Well, Longfellow’s working on that piece of paper I found at the crime scene and we may get something from the cast I made of the footprint. We did find faint sole markings, from a sneaker. FBI lab has the cast. They’ll track down which company made the shoe and try to trace where it was sold.”

“That’s a damned long shot.”

“Hey, they’ve solved crimes from chips of paint.”

“I guess so.”

She was deep in thought. “Odd, how that paper was pushed into the dirt under his hand.”

“Somebody stepped on it,” Hayes reminded her.

“No.” Her eyes narrowed. “It was clenched in the victim’s hand and hidden under it.”

Hayes frowned. “Maybe the victim was keeping it hidden deliberately?”

She nodded. “Like, maybe he knew he was going to die and wanted to leave a clue that might bring his killer to justice.”

Hayes chuckled. “Jones, you watch too many crime dramas on TV.”

“Actually, to hear the clerk at the hardware tell it I don’t watch enough,” she sighed. “I got a ten-minute lecture on forensic entomology while he hunted up some supplies I needed.”

“Bug forensics?” he asked.

She nodded. “You can tell time of death by insect activity. I’ve actually taken courses on it. And I’ve solved at least one murder with the help of a bug expert.” She pushed back a stray wisp of dark hair. “But what’s really interesting, Carson, is teeth.”

He frowned. “Teeth?”

She nodded. “Dentition. You can tell so much about a DB from its teeth, especially if there are dental records available. For example, there’s Carabelli’s cusp, which is most frequently found in people of European ancestry. Then there’s the Uto-Aztecan upper premolar with a bulging buccal cusp which is found only in Native Americans. You can identify Asian ancestry in shovel-shaped incisors…Well, anyway, your ancestry, even the story of your life, is in your teeth. Your diet, your age…”

“Whether you got in bar fights,” he interrupted.

She laughed. “Missing some teeth, are we?”

“Only a couple,” he said easily. “I’ve calmed right down in my old age.”

“You and Kilraven,” she agreed dubiously.

He laughed. “Not that yahoo,” he corrected. “Kilraven will never calm down, and you can quote me.”

“He might, if he can ever slay his demons.” She frowned thoughtfully and narrowed her eyes. “We have a lot of law enforcement down here that works in San Antonio.” She was thinking out loud. “There’s Garon Grier, the assistant SAC in the San Antonio field office. There’s Rick Marquez, who works as a detective for San Antonio P.D. And then there’s Kilraven.”

“You trying to say something?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I’m linking unconnected facts. Sometimes it helps. Okay, here goes. A guy comes down here from San Antonio and gets whacked. He’s driving somebody else’s stolen car. He’s messed up so badly that his own mother couldn’t identify him. Whoever killed him didn’t want him ID’d.”

“Lots of reasons for that, maybe.”

“Maybe. Hear me out. I’m doing pattern associations.” She got up, locked her hands behind her waist, and started pacing, tossing out thoughts as they presented themselves. “Of all those law enforcement people, Kilraven’s been the most conspicuous in San Antonio lately. He was with his brother, Jon, when they tried to solve the kidnapping of Gracie Marsh, Jason Pendleton’s stepsister…”

“Pendleton’s wife, now,” he interrupted with a grin.

She returned it. “He was also connected with the rescue of Rodrigo Ramirez, the DEA agent kidnapping victim whose wife, Glory, was an assistant D.A. in San Antonio.”

Hayes leaned back in his chair. “That wasn’t made public, any of it.”

She nodded absently.

“Rick Marquez has been pretty visible, too,” he pointed out. He frowned. “Wasn’t Rick trying to convince Kilraven to let him reopen that murder case that involved his family?”

“Come to think of it, yes,” she replied, stopping in front of the desk. “Kilraven refused. He said it would only resurrect all the pain, and the media would dine out on it. He and Jon both refused. They figured it was a random crime and the perp was long gone.”

“But that wasn’t the end of it.”

“No,” she said. “Marquez refused to quit. He promised to do his work on the QT and not reveal a word of it to anybody except the detective he brought in to help him sort through the old files.” She grimaced. “But the investigation went nowhere. Less than a week into their project, Marquez and his fellow detective were told to drop the investigation.”

Hayes pursed his lips. “Now isn’t that interesting?”

“There’s more,” she said. “Marquez and the detective went to the D.A. and promised to get enough evidence to reopen the case if they were allowed to continue. The D.A. said to let him talk to a few people. The very next week, the detective who was working with Marquez on the case was suddenly pulled off Homicide and sent back to the uniformed division as a patrol sergeant. And Marquez was told politely to keep his nose out of the matter and not to pursue it any further.”

Hayes was frowning now. “You know, it sounds very much as if somebody high up doesn’t want that case reopened. And I have to ask why?”

She nodded. “Somebody is afraid the case may be solved. If I’m guessing right, somebody with an enormous amount of power in government.”

“And we both know what happens when power is abused,” Hayes said with a scowl. “Years ago, when I was still a deputy sheriff, one of my fellow deputies—a new recruit—decided on his own to investigate rumors of a house of prostitution being run out of a local motel. Like a lamb, he went to the county council and brought it up in an open meeting.”

Alice grimaced, because she knew from long experience what most likely happened after that. “Poor guy!”

“Well, after he was fired and run out of town,” Hayes said, “I was called in and told that I was not to involve myself in that case, if I wanted to continue as a deputy sheriff in this county. I’d made the comment that no law officer should be fired for doing his job, you see.”

“What did you do?” she asked, because she knew Hayes. He wasn’t the sort of person to take a threat like that lying down.

“Ran for sheriff and won,” he said simply. He grinned. “Turns out the head of the county council was getting kickbacks from the pimp. I found out, got the evidence and called a reporter I knew in San Antonio.”

“That reporter?” she exclaimed. “He got a Pulitzer Prize for the story! My gosh, Hayes, the head of the county council went to prison! But it was for more than corruption…”

“He and the pimp also ran a modest drug distribution ring,” he interrupted. “He’ll be going up before the parole board in a few months. I plan to attend the hearing.” He smiled. “I do so enjoy these little informal board meetings.”

“Ouch.”

“People who go through life making their money primarily through dishonest dealings don’t usually reform,” he said quietly. “It’s a basic character trait that no amount of well-meaning rehabilitation can reverse.”

“We live among some very unsavory people.”

“Yes. That’s why we have law enforcement. I might add, that the law enforcement on the county level here is exceptional.”

She snarled at him. He just grinned.

“What’s your next move?” she asked.

“I’m not making one until I know what’s in that note. Shouldn’t your assistant have something by now, even if it’s only the text of the message?”

“She should.” Alice pulled out her cell phone and called her office. “But I’m probably way off base about Kilraven’s involvement in this. Maybe the victim just ticked off the wrong people and paid for it. Maybe he had unpaid drug bills or something.”

“That’s always a possibility,” Hayes had to agree.

The phone rang and rang. Finally it was answered. “Crime lab, Longfellow speaking.”

“Did you know that you have the surname of a famous poet?” Alice teased.

The other woman was all business, all the time, and she didn’t get jokes. “Yes. I’m a far-removed distant cousin of the poet, in fact. You want to know about your scrap of paper, I suppose? It’s much too early for any analysis of the paper or ink…”

“The writing, Longfellow, the writing,” Alice interrupted.

“As I said, it’s too early in the analysis. We’d need a sample to compare, first, and then we’d need a handwriting expert…”

“But what does the message say?” Alice blurted out impatiently. Honest to God, the other woman was so ponderously slow sometimes!

“Oh, that. Just a minute.” There was a pause, some paper ruffling, a cough. Longfellow came back on the line. “It doesn’t say anything.”

“You can’t make out the letters? Is it waterlogged, or something?”

“It doesn’t have letters.”

“Then what does it have?” Alice said with the last of her patience straining at the leash. She was picturing Longfellow on the floor with herself standing over the lab tech with a large studded bat…

“It has numbers, Jones,” came the droll reply. “Just a few numbers. Nothing else.”

“An address?”

“Not likely.”

“Give me the numbers.”

“Only the last six are visible. The others apparently were obliterated by the man’s sweaty palms when he clenched it so tightly. Here goes.”

She read the series of numbers.

“Which ones were obliterated?” Alice asked.

“Looks like the ones at the beginning. If it’s a telephone number, the area code and the first of the exchange numbers is missing. We’ll probably be able to reconstruct those at the FBI lab, but not immediately. Sorry.”

“No, listen, you’ve been a world of help. If I controlled salaries, you’d get a raise.”

“Why, thank you, Jones,” came the astonished reply. “That’s very kind of you to say.”

“You’re very welcome. Let me know if you come up with anything else.”

“Of course I will.”

Alice hung up. She looked at the numbers and frowned.

“What have you got?” Hayes asked.

“I’m not sure. A telephone number, perhaps.”

He moved closer and peered at the paper where she’d written those numbers down. “Could that be the exchange?” he asked, noting some of the numbers.

“I don’t know. If it is, it could be a San Antonio number, but we’d need to have the area code to determine that, and it’s missing.”

“Get that lab busy.”

She glowered at him. “Like we sleep late, take two-hour coffee breaks, and wander into the crime lab about noon daily!”

“Sorry,” he said, and grinned.

She pursed her full lips and gave him a roguish look. “Hey, you law enforcement guys live at doughnut shops and lounge around in the office reading sports magazines and playing games on the computer, right?”

He glowered back.

She held out one hand, palm up. “Welcome to the stereotype club.”

“When will she have some more of those numbers?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. Has anybody spoken to the woman whose car was stolen to ask if someone she knew might have taken it? Or to pump her for information and find out if she really loaned it to him?” she added shrewdly.

“No, nobody’s talked to her. The feds in charge of the investigation wanted to wait until they had enough information to coax her into giving them something they needed,” he said.

“As we speak, they’re roping Jon Blackhawk to his desk chair and gagging him,” she pronounced with a grin. “His first reaction would be to drag her downtown and grill her.”

“He’s young and hotheaded. At least to hear his brother tell it.”

“Kilraven loves his brother,” Alice replied. “But he does know his failings.”

“I wouldn’t call rushing in headfirst a failing,” Hayes pointed out.

“That’s why you’ve been shot, Hayes,” she said.

“Anybody can get shot,” he said.

“Yes, but you’ve been shot twice,” she reminded him. “The word locally is that you’d have a better chance of being named king of some small country than you’d have getting a wife. Nobody around here is rushing to line up and become a widow.”

“I’ve calmed down,” he muttered defensively. “And who’s been saying that, anyway?”

“I heard that Minette Raynor was,” she replied without quite meeting his eyes.

His jaw tautened. “I have no desire to marry Miss Raynor, now or ever,” he returned coldly. “She helped kill my brother.”

“She didn’t, and you have proof, but suit yourself,” she said when he looked angry enough to say something unforgivable. “Now, do you have any idea how we can talk to that woman before somebody shuts her up? It looks like whoever killed that poor man on the river wouldn’t hesitate to give him company. I’d bet my reputation that he knew something that could bring down someone powerful, and he was stopped dead first. If the woman has any info at all, she’s on the endangered list.”

“Good point,” Hayes had to admit. “Do you have a plan?”

She shook her head. “I wish.”

“About that number, you might run it by the 911 operators,” he said. “They deal with a lot of telephone traffic. They might recognize it.”

“Now that’s constructive thinking,” she said with a grin. “But this isn’t my jurisdiction, you know.”

“The crime was committed in the county. That’s my jurisdiction. I’m giving you the authority to investigate.”

“Won’t your own investigator feel slighted?”

“He would if he was here,” he sighed. “He took his remaining days off and went to Wyoming for Christmas. He said he’d lose them if he didn’t use them by the end of the year. I couldn’t disagree and we didn’t have much going on when I let him go.” He shook his head. “He’ll punch me when he gets back and discovers that we had a real DB right here and he didn’t get to investigate it.”

“The way things look,” she said slowly, “he may still get to help. I don’t think we’re going to solve this one in a couple of days.”

“Hey, I saw a murder like this one on one of those CSI shows,” he said with pretended excitement. “They sent trace evidence out, got results in two hours and had the guy arrested and convicted and sent to jail just before the last commercial!”

She gave him a smile and a gesture that was universal before she picked up her purse, and the slip of paper, and left his office.

She was eating lunch at Barbara’s Café in town when the object of her most recent daydreams walked in, tall and handsome in real cowboy duds, complete with a shepherd’s coat, polished black boots and a real black Stetson cowboy hat with a brim that looked just like the one worn by Richard Boone in the television series Have Gun Will Travel that she used to watch videos of. It was cocked over his eyes and he looked as much like a desperado as he did a working cowboy.

He spotted Alice as he was paying for his meal at the counter and grinned at her. She turned over a cup of coffee and it spilled all over the table, which made his grin much bigger.

Barbara came running with a towel. “Don’t worry, it happens all the time,” she reassured Alice. She glanced at Harley, put some figures together and chuckled. “Ah, romance is in the air.”

“It is not,” Alice said firmly. “I offered to take him to a movie, but I’m broke, and he won’t go dutch treat,” she added in a soft wail.

“Aww,” Barbara sympathized.

“I don’t get paid until next Friday,” Alice said, dabbing at wet spots on her once-immaculate oyster-white wool slacks. “I’ll be miles away by then.”

“I get paid this Friday,” Harley said, straddling a chair opposite Alice with a huge steak and fries on a platter. “Are you having a salad for lunch?” he asked, aghast at the small bowl at her elbow. “You’ll never be able to do any real investigating on a diet like that. You need protein.” He indicated the juicy, rare steak on his own plate.

Alice groaned. He didn’t understand. She’d spent so many hours working in her lab that she couldn’t really eat a steak anymore. It was heresy here in Texas, so she tended to keep her opinions to herself. If she said anything like that, there would be a riot in Barbara’s Café.

So she just smiled. “Fancy seeing you here,” she teased.

He grinned. “I’ll bet it wasn’t a surprise,” he said as he began to carve his steak.

“Whatever do you mean?” she asked with pretended innocence.

“I was just talking to Hayes Carson out on the street and he happened to mention that you asked him where I ate lunch,” he replied.

She huffed. “Well, that’s the last personal question I’ll ever ask him, and you can take that to the bank!”

“Should I mention that I asked him where you ate lunch?” he added with a twinkle in his pale eyes.

Alice’s irritated expression vanished. She sighed. “Did you, really?” she asked.

“I did, really. But don’t take that as a marriage proposal,” he said. “I almost never propose to crime scene investigators over lunch.”

“Crime scene investigators?” a cowboy from one of the nearby ranches exclaimed, leaning toward them. “Listen, I watch those shows all the time. Did you know that they can tell time of death by…!”

“Oh, dear, I’m so sorry!” Alice exclaimed as the cowboy gaped at her. She’d “accidentally” poured a glass of iced tea all over him. “It’s a reflex,” she tried to explain as Barbara came running, again. “You see, every time somebody talks about the work I do, I just get all excited and start throwing things!” She picked up her salad bowl. “It’s a helpless reflex, I just can’t stop…”

“No problem!” the cowboy said at once, scrambling to his feet. “I had to get back to work anyway! Don’t think a thing about it!”

He rushed out the door, trailing tea and ice chips, leaving behind half a cup of coffee and a couple of bites of pie and an empty plate.

Harley was trying not to laugh, but he lost it completely. Barbara was chuckling as she motioned to one of her girls to get a broom and pail.

“I’m sorry,” Alice told her. “Really.”

Barbara gave her an amused glance. “You don’t like to talk shop at the table, do you?”

“No. I don’t,” she confessed.

“Don’t worry,” Barbara said as the broom and pail and a couple of paper towels were handed to her. “I’ll make sure word gets around. Before lunch tomorrow,” she added, still laughing.