“Don’t leave town, Gareth,” I said as we were leaving.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll stick around so you can give my guns back with a big fat apology.”
We also swabbed Carson and all of his men for gunshot residue, including Dale Peters and Mr. Broken Nose. But we ran out of time before we were able to properly collect statements from everyone. When I had a moment alone with Dale, I gave him a good hard stare and said, with just a touch of anger in my voice, “You still think we’re barking up the wrong tree?”
He lowered his eyes, his skin pale. He’d just lost a friend to murder—but if he was hiding something, I wanted him to feel guilty for it.
We’ll have the fingerprint results soon, and through the Rangers I can get the DNA testing fast-tracked. But there’s still loads of work to do. We need to have the ballistics tested on Gareth’s guns. We need to properly interview every one of McCormack’s men, setting up a timeline of where people were, what they heard, what they saw. We need to search Skip’s residence and see if there’s any clue why someone would want to kill him. And we need to find and notify Skip Barnes’s next of kin.
And even if this isn’t related to the death of Susan Snyder—which I think it is—we can’t stop looking into that case. We need to interview Alex Hartley when he gets back to town. We need to continue combing through Susan Snyder’s background.
The one thing the murders have in common is that both victims were planning to talk to the police soon. Susan Snyder wanted to talk to the police. Skip Barnes was being compelled to talk to us. But both of them ended up dead before they could.
Sitting by Jessica’s garden in the dark, I feel overwhelmed. This thing is getting too big for Ariana and me to handle ourselves. We need help. And there’s only one place to get it. I pull out my phone to call the last person I want to talk to right now.
The lieutenant who banished me to this little town in the first place.
Chapter 53
“WELL, IF IT ain’t everybody’s favorite Texas Ranger,” Kyle says upon answering. “Rory ‘Guns Blazing’ Yates, as I live and breathe.”
With that one sentence, I can tell he’s been drinking. By the sound of the background, I bet he’s in a bar right now.
“Sorry to bother you so late,” I say. “I can call back tomorrow.”
I’m dreading this conversation as it is. I definitely don’t want to have it while he’s drunk.
“No, no,” he says. “I’m glad you called. I’m celebrating. We made an arrest today in a big case—no thanks to you,” he adds.
He tells me that the Rangers continued to investigate what happened at the bank robbery I stopped. Just because the two robbers were dead didn’t mean the case was closed. It turns out one of the bank tellers was in cahoots with the men. That’s how they knew to rob the bank at the precise moment when the time lock on the safe would open. They arrested the teller today.
“That’s great news,” I say, impressed. “Good job, Kyle.”
“I do know how to do my job, you know.”
“I know,” I say.
It’s true. Kyle and I were never friends, but he’s always been a good Ranger. I feel a swell of respect, and I think maybe this conversation won’t go so badly after all.
“So you got the case solved in that little town yet or what?” he asks.
“Not even close,” I say. “In fact, there’s been another murder.”
I explain what evidence we obtained and who the chief suspect is, but I also tell him how much work is ahead of us. All the interviews we need to do. If the fingerprints or DNA link to Gareth but the guns don’t match, we’ll need to get a search warrant and take a look at every inch of McCormack’s property. And it’s a big property.
“We need help, Kyle,” I say. “Can you spare us a couple of Rangers? Maybe the El Paso office has a few guys they can free up.”
“You want help?” Kyle says, exaggerating his disgust. “Hell, Rory, there ain’t but a hundred sixty-six Rangers in the whole damn state. You are the help.”
He starts on a rant about how we don’t even know if Susan Snyder was murdered, and in the case of Skip Barnes, it seems like there is plenty of evidence to make an arrest.
“For someone who shoots first and asks questions later,” he says, “you sure are taking your sweet time.”
I’m burning up inside. Kyle is way out of line. He could deny my request—I figured it was about a fifty-fifty chance he would—but there’s no need for him to be an asshole about it.
“I’ve spoken to the chief down there,” Kyle says. “He says you’re working with a pretty little chica. Is something going on with her? I wonder if you’re taking your time on this thing so you can cozy up to her. What would Willow think, Rory?”
I’m up and out of my chair, as if Kyle is in front of me and not on the phone talking from a bar five hundred miles away.
“Listen here, you son of a bitch. You have no right to talk like that to me. You’re a lieutenant in the Texas Ranger Division. Act like it.”
I could get in big trouble for talking to my lieutenant that way, but he’s behaving unprofessionally, too. I prepare myself for a fight. He just laughs at me from the other end of the phone.
“Looks like I pressed the right button,” he says. “Sounds like you’ve got a guilty conscience, Rory.”
He hangs up on me before I can say anything else. I take a deep breath and flop back in the chair, trying to calm down in the silence. After a while, I head to the side of the garage to climb the stairs to my room. Jessica pruned back the berry bushes like she promised, so the path is easy to navigate in the dark.
Once I’ve showered and climbed into bed, I pull out my phone and consider calling Willow. But I don’t want to worry her—Another murder! she would say—and she’s probably busy anyway, hanging out at the Grand Ole Opry or going to a dinner party at Kacey Musgraves’s house.
If I’m honest with myself, I don’t really feel like talking to her right now anyway.
The person I want to call is Ariana.
But I don’t. I turn out the light and try to sleep. It’s been a long day. Any day you see a dead body is a long day, but this one seemed especially long. The open space, the oil derrick, the shit show at the crime scene, the tension with the chief and later with Kyle. My mind should be reeling. But really I’m only thinking about one thing.
I can’t get the image out of my head of Ariana, treading water, her hair slicked back, smiling for just a moment like she didn’t have a worry in the world.
Chapter 54
THE NEXT DAY, Ariana and I are sitting in the conference room, going over everything we know. The tiny room, which was empty when I arrived, has since been transformed into our investigation center. We have boxes and boxes of paperwork, maps, and poster-sized diagrams on the walls, plus a dry-erase board that we’re constantly writing on and wiping clean.
As of right now, the medical examiner hasn’t given us a precise time of death. The heat of the day made the temperature of the body an unreliable indicator. As for eye dilation, the bullet that traveled through Skip Barnes’s brain filled his eye sockets full of blood. The examiner said some of the other determining factors—skin condition, settling of the blood, contents of the stomach—had to wait until the body was in his lab.
We can be sure the death was yesterday morning, but beyond that, we don’t have any more specifics.
McCormack provided us with some security footage from over in his tank yard that shows Gareth being there most of the morning. But he disappears from the cameras late in the morning. This is the time period he claims to have been at the house and heard the gunshot, but it’s plausible that he could have gone to the derrick, taken the shot, and then pretended to discover the body.
There are enough people who live and work on the ranch that someone certainly would have seen him drive over there on an ATV. If we had a team of Rangers, we could have people interviewing McCormack’s men right now. But it’
s just the two of us, and we’re hoping to get some more information before we really start interrogating. The tests of gunshot residue and DNA, as well as the ballistics comparisons on the gun, will take a while. But, at the very least, we should find out soon if there’s a match on the fingerprints found on the shell casing.
I feel nervous as we wait, and I’m not sure why. I tell myself it’s just anxiety—I want to get on with this. But there’s something else to it, some growing sense of dread I can’t quite put my finger on.
Then it hits me: we have too much evidence.
We were lucky enough to find the bullet, the casing, and a strand of hair. Any one of those by itself would be a fortunate discovery, but I found all three without even looking that hard. I’ve been assuming Gareth is the shooter, but I haven’t focused on the unlikely carelessness. It’s conceivable his hair could get snagged without him knowing, and it could just be his bad luck that the bullet hit a tree after passing through Skip Barnes. But military shooters are trained to police their brass. Collecting his shell casings would be second nature to a sniper like Gareth.
I remember Gareth’s smug expression. I originally took it for ego, but now I think it might be something else. Did he want us to find the shell?
The chief comes in, looking grim, and my heart sinks. I’ve been waiting for bad news, and here it comes.
“Got the fingerprint results,” Harris says.
His eyes are locked on Ariana.
“Is there something you want to tell us?” he says to her.
“What do you mean?” she says, clearly confused.
He looks at me and says, “You collected the shell casing. Before you fingerprinted it, was the shell ever compromised?”
“I wore gloves on the scene,” I say. “And when I fingerprinted it. I never touched it.”
“Did Ariana touch it?”
“No,” she says. “Never.”
He stares at Ariana, his expression unreadable.
“The fingerprints are yours, Ariana.”
Chapter 55
I SHOOT TO my feet.
“This is a setup, Chief.”
I explain how I was afraid of something like this. The abundance of evidence felt like a trap.
“That may be,” Harris admits, “but we have to take this seriously.”
I say nothing. I can’t argue with that.
Ariana looks pale. I’ve seen the same expression before on people I knew to be guilty, but I’m sure she’s feeling something else.
Defeat.
We’ve been working on this case, fighting against some faceless opponent, and she’s just realized how outmatched we are. We’ve underestimated our adversary, whoever he is—or whoever they are—and now the score is so imbalanced there’s no way we’re going to climb back in this game. At least not Ariana. She’s out, as of right now. For Ariana, the best-case scenario is that she gets pulled off this case.
The worst is that she goes to prison.
Actually, the worst is that she gets the death penalty, but I won’t even let my mind go that far.
“You still have your granddaddy’s rifle, don’t you?” Harris asks Ariana.
She nods her head gravely.
“What am I missing?” I say.
Ariana opens her mouth to speak, and her voice comes out in a hoarse croak. Seeing she can barely talk, Harris answers for her. He says that Ariana owns an M1 Garand, a semiautomatic rifle used during World War II. Her grandfather used it in the Pacific and later gave it to her as a college graduation present.
I nod my head in understanding. The Garand fires a 30-06 round.
And as a semiautomatic, the Garand ejects its shells automatically. The shell could easily have gone tumbling down from the tower without the shooter being able to grab it.
I don’t say any of this to Harris, even though he’s probably thinking the same thing.
The three of us ride in Harris’s patrol car over to Ariana’s house. I ride in back because I don’t want Ariana to have to do it. I don’t want her to feel like a criminal. When we get to her place, she unlocks the door and takes us to her bedroom.
“It’s under there,” she says, pointing to her bed.
The chief puts on rubber gloves and kneels down to retrieve it. The gun is probably eighty years old but looks in good condition, the wooden stock oiled and the iron barrel polished. The rifle has no telescopic sight, just the original rear-aperture sight that adjusts for distance based on hundred-yard increments.
The head shot that killed Skip Barnes would not have been easy with this gun. It would take a good shooter.
“Do you keep it loaded?” Harris asks Ariana.
“Yes,” she says, her voice still dry. “There’s an eight-shot clip, and I keep it full.”
Harris ejects the clip, and we all count the 30-06 rounds inside.
Seven.
Chapter 56
“CHIEF,” I SAY, “she’s obviously being framed. If Ariana shot Skip Barnes, she wouldn’t have come home and put the gun back under her bed—and then led us here right to it.” I tell him that someone obviously came, stole the gun, and then replaced it, all while Ariana and I were at the open space. I say we need to conduct interviews of people in the neighborhood and see if there were any witnesses who saw someone coming in or out of the house.
“We’ll do all that,” he says. “But first we need to check the ballistics on this gun. See if it matches the bullet fired. We’ve got a bullet and a shell casing from the scene. We’ll be able to tell if this rifle fired the shot or not.”
I don’t object. He’s right. But I already know what we’ll find. The bullet and shell casing will have similar marks.
This is the gun.
And I suddenly realize that the hair we found is probably Ariana’s as well. Gareth, or whoever set her up, could have easily stolen a strand when he was in her house taking the gun.
Harris seems to think this as well because he says to Ariana, “If one more piece of evidence comes in linking you to the murder—the ballistics test, the DNA results, anything—I’m going to have to arrest you.”
Harris takes a cheek swab for DNA evidence, and he swabs Ariana’s arm for gunshot residue. Even though it’s been a day since the shooting, he’s trying to be thorough. He also asks for the clothes she was wearing yesterday.
“You shouldn’t be handling that evidence,” I say to the chief. “You could be compromised.”
“Bullshit,” he snaps, losing his cool.
“It’s no coincidence all this happened while Ariana and I were out at the open space,” I say, also getting angry. “You were one of the few people who knew we’d be gone.”
“I’m not going to listen to this shit,” he says, practically yelling. “You could be compromised.”
“Me?” I say.
“Yeah, you,” he snarls. “You claim to have been with Ariana at the time of the shooting. You could have been in on this.”
“That makes no sense,” I say, but he’s caught me off guard. The anger in my voice subsides as I try to defend myself. “I’m not from around here. What motivation would I have to kill Skip Barnes?”
“I’m not saying you had anything to do with it,” Harris says, his voice also calming slightly. “I’m saying your loyalty to Ariana might be clouding your judgment.”
I smirk to indicate my disbelief in what he’s saying, but he has planted a seed of doubt in my mind. Is my affection for Ariana obscuring my thinking? How would I handle this if it weren’t her?
“Were you two really out at the open space that whole time?” the chief asks. “You were gone longer than you needed to be. What were you doing?”
I open my mouth to give him an honest explanation of our whereabouts, including our time eating lunch together and swimming in the river, but Ariana stands up and says, “You don’t need to defend me, Rory. I’m sure this is all some big mistake.”
In my opinion, there’s no use hiding what we did, not when there’s so much at
stake, but I can tell Ariana doesn’t want it to get out that we were splashing around in our underwear. No one would believe that’s all we were doing. And this is a small town. She doesn’t want the reputation of being some badge bunny sleeping with the visiting Texas Ranger when she should have been investigating a murder.
“You don’t trust me,” Harris says to me, “and I don’t trust you. So that means we’re both going to keep a close eye on this evidence and make sure it gets handled on the up and up. Got it?”
I nod, not sure what else to do. If my lieutenant was supportive, I’d call him to bring in the cavalry, let the Texas Rangers come in and take over the whole damn investigation. But the way things went with Kyle last night, I’m on my own here.
We’re all quiet for a moment, and then Ariana asks, “Can I stay on the Susan Snyder case until the results come in?”
Harris stares at her, shocked that Ariana doesn’t fully realize the level of danger she’s in.
“As of this moment, you’re on paid leave,” he says. “I need your badge and your gun. And I’m going to put a patrol officer outside your house to make sure you don’t try to run.”
“You’re putting me on house arrest?”
“Not officially,” Harris says. “I’d need a court order for that. But effectively speaking, yes. I don’t want you leaving this house. If you so much as set one foot out your door, I’ll have you arrested, and you’ll stay in our little jail until we get all this sorted out. Understand me?”
She unfastens her holster from her belt. Then she pulls out her badge. She stares at the gun and the badge—her hands trembling, her eyes brimming with tears—and hands them over to the chief.
“As of this moment,” Harris says to Ariana, “you’re no longer a cop.”
Which means, as of this moment, I’m on my own to find out who killed Susan Snyder and Skip Barnes.
Part Two
Chapter 57
Texas Outlaw Page 13
