Long, Tall Texans: Stanton ; Long, Tall Texans: Garon

by Diana Palmer

  The memory of their last meeting, when he’d humiliated her in Barbara’s crowded café, was still fresh in her mind. “Well, well, if it isn’t the Prince of Darkness,” she said coldly, and her gray eyes reflected the pain, indignation and outrage of the past few weeks. “I can’t think of a way you could cause me any more embarrassment on this planet. So, have you come for my soul?”

  He stopped just in front of her. If he’d hoped for a truce, he was disappointed. He stuck his hands in his pockets, eyeing the plain, old-fashioned fishing pole. “If you plan to catch anything, you’d have better luck with a spinning reel,” he advised.

  She moved to the side of the pier, bent and pulled up a string of bass. They were five to six pounds, each, and she had four of them. His surprise was visible.

  She held the string of fish at her side, and she was glaring. “I won the Jacobsville Bass Rodeo two summers in a row,” she informed him. “Which is why I spend every free minute at Jake’s Fish Pond in Jacobsville in early spring. Practicing. Sadly I’ve had to forego practice since you decided that I was chasing after you!”

  He felt the hot color flow into the skin over his high cheekbones. He’d accused her of following him to the fishing pond. She hadn’t been chasing him at all. At least, not that time.

  “Why are you here?” she asked, not moving.

  He stuck his hands in the pockets of his slacks and searched for inspiration. He hoped he didn’t look as uncomfortable as he felt.

  But he did. She cocked her head and studied him for a minute. “Oh. I see. Someone told you the truth about my past, is that it?” she asked with icy poise.

  The muscles in his jaw tautened. “Something like that.”

  She averted her eyes and moved to the foam cooler she’d brought to store her fish in. She opened the top and put the fish on top of the layer of ice inside. She closed it back, all without giving him a second glance.

  “You sent Marquez to El Paso,” he said without preamble.

  She looked at him. “I know things about the killer that you don’t. I tried to tell you, but you decided that I’d come to your house for, shall we say, other purposes, before I could get the words out.”

  His lips compressed tightly. “Listen,” he began.

  “No, you listen!” she shot back, eyes flashing like silver lightning in a face livid with bad temper. “I’ve spent my entire adult life backing away from men. I’ve never chased anyone in my life, and that goes double for you. Do you really think I have so little pride and self-respect that I’d go running wildly after a man who’d just told me he didn’t want anything else to do with me?”

  Now that he thought about it, no, he didn’t. But it was too late for that belated inspiration to save him. Grace was furious, and he was already on the defensive and not liking it.

  He drew in a short, angry breath. He rammed his hands deeper into his slacks pockets and scowled down at her. “What do you know about the killer that we don’t?” he asked.

  “For one thing, that he likes little girls with long blond hair and light-colored eyes,” she said, trying to sound calmer than she felt. “He also said that he’d been watching me at school. He knew that I lived with my grandmother and that she drank herself to sleep. It amused him to take me right out of her house and through the window in the middle of the night. He said that he’d dreamed of collecting blond girls just my age, with long hair, and that he would tie us up with red ribbons so that everyone would know we belonged to him. I believe that’s what your organization calls a killer’s ‘signature’?”

  “My degree is in criminal justice,” he countered. “I don’t do profiling. That’s up to the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico.”

  She gave him a smoldering look. “If there’s a dead child in San Antonio, and there were also dead children in Del Rio and Palo Verde,” she pointed out, “with a year or so in between, similar coloring and a similar killing style, then you’re looking for a serial killer.”

  “Perhaps you’d like to put that in writing and send it to Marquez’s lieutenant,” he suggested. “He still doesn’t consider it a serial crime.”

  “Or maybe he just doesn’t like the FBI,” she returned sweetly, “and is trying to keep you from taking over his case.”

  “Criminal cases aren’t property. Nobody owns them.”

  She picked up the cooler and her fishing pole.

  “Whatever you say.”

  She was walking away.

  “I saw the file,” he bit off. “And the photos.”

  She stopped in her tracks. Her spine stiffened. But she didn’t turn around.

  He moved to her side, turned and looked down at her pale, strained face. “You told me the scars were from an automobile accident.”

  She wouldn’t meet his gaze. “That’s what my grandmother taught me to say,” she replied simply. “I thought she was being evasive and old-fashioned. Then, when I was sixteen, one of the new boys at my high school asked me out on a date and I told him just a little of what happened to me.” She didn’t look at him as she drew the memory out of the past. “We went to a fast food place. I noticed that he was looking at me in a really strange way. I asked why. He wanted to know exactly what the man who abducted me did to me, how it felt and if I enjoyed it.”

  His indrawn breath was eloquent.

  “That’s right,” she said when she saw his face. “All the warped people aren’t in jail or seeing psychiatrists. I got sick. I wouldn’t even let him take me home. I phoned Barbara and she sent Rick to pick me up. He was all for laying my date out on the floor, but I thought it wouldn’t look good on his record.”

  So that was why Marquez was so protective of her. They had a history. It bothered him.

  “After that,” she continued, “I stopped going out at all. Unless you can call helping Barbara and Rick can vegetables every summer after harvest a social life. What do you want to know about it?” she asked bluntly.

  “Anything you remember,” he said, averting his face.

  “I don’t like remembering,” she said with quiet honesty, putting the ice chest down. “I still have nightmares.”

  He recalled the one she’d had at his house. It made him feel even more guilty, now that he knew the truth. “Cash said Chet told him that your abductor had you for three days, and that you’ve never talked about it.”

  “He’s right. I’ve never told a soul. Not even Chet Blake, right after it happened.” Her face closed up tight. “If you’re hoping to have me identify a subject in a lineup or in mug shots, you’re out of luck. He kept me blindfolded the whole time.”

  “He talked to you.”

  She swallowed. Nausea rose in her throat. “Yes.” She sounded as if the word choked her.

  “You can remember his voice.”

  She chewed on her lower lip. “He said I looked like his stepmother. He had a picture of her as a child.”

  “What?”

  “He said he wet the bed and she made him wear dresses and a red ribbon in his hair. He said she sent him to school like that when he started, and the teacher sent him home again. Everybody laughed. He tied my hair up with the ribbon, but later, just after he tried to strangle me, and he couldn’t, he tied it around my neck.” She swallowed down nausea. It was hard to remember this. “The ribbon wasn’t long enough. He had white hands, very white, and he couldn’t pull the ribbon tight enough to kill me. He said it was her fault his hands didn’t work right. He was furious. He pulled out his pocketknife and stabbed me, over and over…”

  “It’s all right,” he said, his voice quiet, reassuring.

  “Don’t force it.”

  She was shaking. She had to fight for control over herself.

  Garon watched her, concerned. He didn’t touch her. He knew that if he did, she’d connect it with what was done to her. He let her fight her demons.

  He pulled out his BlackBerry and his stylus, and started keying in notes. Suddenly he remembered how she’d almost collapsed at the police station
in Palo Verde when the chief there had mentioned red ribbon.

  “The child in Palo Verde was strangled with a red ribbon,” he murmured.

  “Yes,” she said after a minute. “That was when I started to suspect that it was the same man, when the police chief said he used a red ribbon.” She looked up at him, her face pale. “I never read anything about red ribbons in the other child murders.”

  “We always hold something back,” he reminded her, “to make sure we’ve got the killer and not some lunatic looking for dark fame. You said he mentioned his stepmother. Was that all?”

  “Yes,” she replied, looking up. “He was using a computer, though. I heard his fingers on the keyboard. He used it a lot.”

  That might be helpful. He noted it with the stylus. If the man still used computers, it might be a way to track him. If he was a pedophile, he must have access to the pornography Web sites. The FBI had cyber detectives who tracked down child pornographers and locked them up.

  “He said that he loved little children.” She said the words as if they were some huge, cosmic joke.

  “Three dead children in three years,” he was saying to himself. “Maybe as many as eleven, one a year since you were abducted. But you lived. Why did you live?”

  Her slender shoulders rose and fell. “The police came sooner than he expected. He taped my wrists and my ankles together with duct tape. Then he carried me out to a field somewhere and tried to choke me, but he couldn’t do it with his hands. He couldn’t do it with the ribbon, either. He had thin fingers, white fingers, and they were limp and cold. So he wrapped duct tape around my mouth and nose. Then he opened his pocketknife and started stabbing me. It hurt so much, and blood went everywhere…I tried to scream, but all I could do was mumble. I started kicking at him. That spooked him and he stopped. But I knew he’d finish me off if I kept struggling. So I kept very still, held my breath and played dead. The sirens came closer. He hesitated for just a minute, as if he wanted to make sure I was gone, but there wasn’t time. He took off running. With the duct tape over my nose and mouth, if the police hadn’t spotted me when they did, I wouldn’t have been able to tell them anything. I’ll never forget how good it felt when they took the duct tape off and I could get air in my lungs at last. But it really hurt. One of the knife wounds punctured my lung.”

  He was listening, forcing himself to concentrate on the details, not on the terror Grace must have felt. “Duct tape. He couldn’t strangle you, so he tried to smother you. He hadn’t killed before,” he said absently. “He didn’t realize how hard it is to strangle someone with bare hands.”

  “That’s what I thought,” she replied. “My grandmother talked Chief Blake into suppressing the story, so the newspapers wouldn’t get hold of it. Well, they did get hold of it,” she admitted, “but they printed that a mental patient hurt me, not seriously, and that I had amnesia and couldn’t remember a thing. They said my doctor said I’d never regain my memory. If the killer read the paper at all, he knew that I wasn’t a threat. But I was afraid he’d do it again, to some other child. I couldn’t make my grandmother understand that. She refused to ever let me talk about it again. I’ve lived with that, all these years. If they’d pursued him, maybe all those other little children would still be alive, too.”

  “It took a task force over twenty years to catch the Green River Killer in Washington State,” he reminded her. “They had clues and at least one living witness, too. It didn’t help them catch him. Ted Bundy killed college girls for years, and they couldn’t catch him, either. Even if you’d told the police everything you knew, chances are your attacker would still be killing. Serial killers, especially organized ones, are intelligent and cagey. They’re hard to find, even with all our modern tools.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “You should come home.”

  Home. She remembered all over again how he’d embarrassed her there. She glared at him. “My cousin Bob has offered me his guest room for as long as I want to stay with him. When my grandmother’s will is through probate, I can put the house on the market.”

  He hadn’t counted on that response. He felt terrible. “You have friends there who would miss you.”

  “Victoria isn’t that far to drive. They can come up here and visit.”

  “Then let me put it another way,” he persisted somberly. “No killer forgets his first victim. He knows who you are, and he can find out where you are. If for some reason your name is connected with the killer, and he starts worrying that your memory might have come back, he might decide to stack the odds in his favor. We found DNA on his last victim, but we didn’t publicize that. For all he knows, you’re the only living human being who might be able to identify him. He might decide to come full circle.”

  “He might come after me and kill me, you mean,” she said very calmly.

  His jaw tautened. “Yes.”

  Her lips curled down. “There’s an optimistic thought.”

  “Stop that. Life has its benefits. You might marry,” he added.

  Her gray eyes met his dark ones. “What would be the point?” she asked. “I can’t have a child.”

  He felt as if she’d hit him in the stomach. “Plenty of marriages succeed without children.”

  She laughed coldly. “Really? You were attracted to me at first,” she recalled. “You liked being with me, and taking me places. Then when you knew I couldn’t bear children, all of a sudden I became a one-night stand with disposability potential.”

  He was shocked at her perception of why he’d broken it off with her. “That’s not true,” he ground out.

  “Sure it isn’t.” She turned and picked up the ice chest again. She felt sick at her stomach and weak as a kitten. It must be the lost hours of sleep ruining her health. “If you’re through asking questions, could you leave?” she asked pleasantly. “I have a busy day ahead of me. Cousin Bob wants me to brush his cat.”

  The sarcasm brought a twinkle into his eyes that he tried not to let her see. “At least, think about what I’ve said.” He strained his mind for inspiration. He pursed his lips. “Your roses are starting to bud out. They’ll be eaten alive by bugs if they’re not sprayed, and without fertilizer you may not have one decent stem.”

  She glared at him. “I can transplant them up here.”

  “They won’t like it here.”

  “How would you know?” she asked indignantly. “Do you talk to roses?”

  His dark eyes actually twinkled. “Not when I think anyone might overhear me. I work for the FBI. Talking to roses might get me transferred to the Antarctic.”

  “The FBI doesn’t have an office there,” she returned.

  He shrugged. “They have offices all over the world,” he corrected. “They might decide to open one in a far away cold place if they catch me talking to a bush.”

  She rubbed at a spot of red mud on her cutoffs. “Actually scientific studies have been done on plants using audio pulses, such as classical and rock music. They actually react favorably. They do feel sensation. It’s not even surprising when you consider the structure of a single leaf,” she added absently, scrubbing at the red spot. “There are guard cells that protect the leaf from invasion by parasites…”

  His eyebrows arched. “I thought your education ended at high school,” he remarked, surprised by her knowledge of botany.

  She gave him a cool look. “I thought you knew better than to take anyone at face value.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Come home.”

  “No!”

  “Give me one good reason why you won’t.”

  “Because you live next door to me!” she said with pure venom.

  “I’ll have a fence put up so you can’t see me,” he promised.

  Involuntarily, a laugh tried to get out of her throat. She smothered it.

  “Your cousin is old and infirm, isn’t he?”

  “Well, yes,” she replied.

  “So what if this animal comes looking for you up here?”

&n
bsp; She drew in a small, quick breath. “I don’t know.”

  “I have a big gun,” he pointed out, pulling back his jacket to display it. “If he comes looking for you at home, I’ll shoot him with it.”

  She wanted to go home, but she had cold feet. She couldn’t bear to look at him, because it hurt too much. She’d gone headfirst into dreams of a shared future, and he’d encouraged her, only to shove her right out of his life in the cruelest way possible. People would pity her, all over again. She’d have to work at convincing the town that his lack of interest didn’t bother her. She’d have to see him with that Jaqui woman.

  He could almost see the pain and the apprehension on her face. He remembered too well the amount of damage he’d done to her. He knew he couldn’t make up for it all at once, but he could protect her, and he would. It was naïve to believe that the killer wouldn’t be curious about the child who lived. Especially since apparently he’d killed children all around Texas in the past three years. Garon felt that Grace was in danger.

  She knew she was walking a thin line. Enough people in Jacobsville knew something about her ordeal in the past. Nobody knew who the killer was. He could walk into town and order coffee at Barbara’s Café and just listen to people around him. Evidently he could blend right in. She recalled his voice. It was faintly cultured and he sounded to her like an educated man, not some backwoods idiot. His hands hadn’t been those of a laborer, either. They’d been scarred. He kept them covered with thin leather gloves most of the time he’d had her in his power.

  “His hands,” she murmured aloud. “They were scarred…”

  He put that down on his PDA. “You may not realize it, but even these small details you remember might be enough to help us catch him,” Garon added after a minute. “You’re the only witness, Grace. You might save lives.”

  She nodded solemnly. “I suppose so.”

  “Miss Turner has missed you.”