One Tough Texan

by MJ Rodgers

  “The woman he met out on the street. I saw him go out to her the second he left the house.”

  “Can you describe this woman?” Matt asked.

  “They were too far away. Dr. Berman was a slim, dark, good-looking man. It surprised me that he was so eager to get out to the woman. She seemed older, chunky and plain, at least from that distance.”

  . “The woman might have been some colleague of his whom he was eager to confer with on some scientific point,” Jamie offered.

  “I didn’t get that impression,” Priddy said. “Something about the close way they were standing together told me that their relationship was a more personal one.”

  “Did Dr. Berman come back inside?” Jamie asked.

  “No. The last I saw of him was when he was standing talking to the woman out on the sidewalk.”

  “Did you get the impression that Carney and Berman and this other scientist had arrived together to investigate the eruption?” Matt asked.

  “No, Dr. Carney told me they were from different institutions. Didn’t even know each other until they arrived. The foreign scientist was from some university in Italy. Berman was from MIT. And Carney-now where was he from?”

  Priddy paused to close her eyes, no doubt consulting that phenomenal memory of hers.

  “Princeton,” Andy said..

  Priddy opened her eyes and looked over at him in obvious surprise. “Yes, you’re right. Well done, Andy.”

  “I knew one of them was from Princeton,” he said beaming happily at the praise.

  “Do you remember anything else about Dr. Carney?” Jamie asked.

  “He was very young-looking to be a doctor,” Priddy said. “When I said as much to him, he explained that he’d just gotten his degree and the volcano was his first field assignment.”

  Priddy shifted a bit in the bed as though trying to get comfortable. She was so animated and informative, Jamie had forgotten the kind of pain she must be enduring.

  “Dr. Carney seemed most eager to educate me on the purpose of taking the ash samples and what he hoped to find. It was a most pleasant conversation until Dr. Berman got started on all his gloom-and-doom predictions.”

  “About the dangers of the gas cloud.”

  “I see Andy told you. What a fright that man gave me! Kept talking about how dangerous it was for Andy and me to be in town with all the gasses and such still spewing out. When I reminded him that there was no mandatory evacuation order, he said the government was being hopelessly incompetent and remiss not to have ordered one. He said that a poisonous gas cloud was on its way, and it was going to choke us to death.”

  “No wonder you left,” Jamie said. “I would have, too.”

  “Yes, I left. And lived to regret it. That’s when they came and robbed me.”

  “Robbed you?” Jamie repeated. “Who robbed you?”

  “Some looters swept through town one night, breaking in and stealing stuff from several unoccupied homes,” And) said.

  “What kind of stuff?” Matt asked.

  “Small pieces, some valuable, some possessing only sentimental value to their owners,” Andy continued. “The thieves were obviously amateurs.”

  “Amateurs?” Priddy said. “They took my gold-coin collection or have you forgotten?”

  Andy’s round head bowed contritely.

  “Gold coins?” Jamie said. “They must have been valuable.”

  “Very,” Priddy said. “And I never got them back.”

  “And they weren’t insured, either,” Andy added. “It was one of the last acquisitions that Priddy’s husband had made before his death. She couldn’t even claim it as a loss on her income tax.”

  “Andy!” Priddy looked at him with exasperation.

  “Sorry, Priddy. I just thought they should understand what a blow it was for you.”

  “Why couldn’t you at least claim the loss on your income tax?” Jamie asked.

  Priddy sighed hard, but she looked more tired of spirit than body to Jamie.

  “My husband believed politicians were puppets of specialinterest groups who were taking the money out of modestincome people’s pockets and putting it into the hands of the rich. He was determined to give them as little of our money as possible.”

  “He was right about the special interests,” Andy said. “Anyway,” Priddy went on, “he acquired the gold-coin collection as an investment and did not report it.”

  “You mean to the IRS?” Jamie asked.

  “Yes. This was nineteen years ago. At that time, the collectibles company he dealt with wasn’t required to report their transactions. My husband liked doing business with them for that reason.”

  “I see,” Jamie said. “You couldn’t claim the coins as a loss because he had never reported he owned them.”

  “Nor were they listed as part of his estate,” Priddy said. “He did it to protect me from taxes, but as it ended up. I lost far more than we would have had to pay in taxes. He had acquired that coin collection in trade for all our other valuables. The coins appreciated substantially over the next two years. They were worth half a million dollars when they were stolen.”

  “That must have been a devastating loss,” Jamie said.

  “What was the name of the trading firm that your husband dealt with?” Matt asked.

  “The Heritage Antiques and Collectibles Company.”

  “And the broker there?”

  “Rollo Lipicky. The company is located in Florida. It’s a very reputable firm. And Rollo has always been such a pleasant man to talk to over the telephone, always asking after family. My husband relied on his recommendations. They were excellent.”

  “Did Mr. Lipicky know your husband wasn’t reporting his capital gains on his income tax?”

  “Oh, no. Vernon kept that information strictly between us. Andy never even knew until I told him when the coins were stolen.”

  “The thieves were never apprehended?” Matt asked.

  “The sheriffs office figured it was probably some low-life opportunists taking advantage of someone else’s troubles,” Priddy answered.

  “Long as the world is spinning, there’ll always be some minds that spin that way,” Andy said with a shake of his head.

  “How many homes were robbed?” Matt asked.

  “Four,” Priddy said. “All unoccupied. The thieves broke in through windows after deactivating the security alarms. Cash and a couple of watches were all the valuables taken from the other three homes. They broke the glass in the display case my coin collection was in. Alarms, locks, nothing stopped them.”

  “They don’t sound. like amateurs,” Matt said. “Did the thieves take just your coin collection from your home?”

  “And the old locket I had put in the box with the coins.”

  Jamie felt a small jolt. “Excuse me, Priddy. Did you say old locket?”

  “My daughter had given it to me one Mother’s Day, Mrs. Bonner. She’d saved up her allowance. It was just cheap metal, but its sentimental value was priceless.”

  Jamie exchanged glances with Matt From the lack of surprise in his eyes, she realized that the focus of his recent questions hadn’t been idle curiosity.

  Still, this possibility was pretty far-fetched. Wasn’t it?

  Jamie turned back to face the elderly woman in the bed, determined to find out “Priddy, was there anything inside the locket?”

  “Two school pictures of my daughter. I used to wear the locket around my neck, but because it was just cheap metal, it turned my neck green. That’s why I placed it in the coincollection box for safekeeping.”

  “That’s all that was inside the locket?”

  “No, it also contained the ten-thousand-dollar note my husband had given me on our twenty-fifth anniversary.”

  Jamie’s heart was hammering as Priddy went on.

  “Vernon planned to take me on a cruise, but he’d come down with a bad flu and we couldn’t go. So he took this ten-thousand-dollar collector’s note he’d been holding on to
for years and wrote ‘P.S. I love you’ on it and gave it to me.”

  “’P.S.’ stands for Priddy Stowell,” Jamie said on a long exhalation of breath.

  “It was Vernon’s nickname for me. He ruined the collectible value of the bill when he wrote that note on it, of course. But his desire not to let our wedding anniversary go by without giving me something made that money so much more valuable to me. I tell you, Mrs. Bonner, losing that locket was a lot harder to take than losing that gold-coin collection.”

  Jamie reached into her handbag and pulled out the locket. She placed it in Priddy’s bony, blue-veined hands.

  Jamie watched as Priddy turned the locket over, fingering it as though she couldn’t believe what she held.

  “It’s…the locket? My locket?”

  She opened the regular portrait part first, as though she still expected to find the school pictures of her daughter inside.

  “I’m sorry, Priddy,” Jamie said. “The person who stole this from you must have thrown away the pictures. But he didn’t find the secret compartment with the present from your husband.”

  Jamie watched as Priddy turned the locket over and slipped her shaking, misshapen nail beneath the hidden spring. The secret compartment sprung open. She reached inside and took out the wadded-up money, gently and lovingly unrolling it as the tears leaked out of her eyes.

  “TONY WAS A THIEF,” Jamie said.

  Matt knew she was saying it deliberately, maybe needing to hear it herself before it could sink in. They were walking back to the rental car they’d left in front of the sheriffs office. The thick late-afternoon cloud cover that hung low in the sky like a shroud was now disgorging a dismal drizzle.

  “They were thieves,” Matt corrected. “The one who called himself Dr. Berman and the woman he went to meet on the sidewalk could have been Tony’s ‘folks’ in Sweetspring. Just as they posed as scientists in Woodpine, they probably donned different personas to fit into the places they traveled to to rob folks.”

  “A robbery ring.” Jamie spat out the words with disgust. “How did they determine where to go, who to rob?”

  “I strongly suspect that the connection here is the Heritage Antiques and Collectibles Company.”

  “Because of what Priddy said about it?”

  “And because when we were in Erline Lagarrigue’s living room in Louisiana, I saw a letter from that same company on her expensive antique coffee table.”

  “Erline Lagarrigue said nothing about having been burglarized.”

  “It’s not the fact that the Lagarrigues were burglarized, Jamie. It was the fact that someone knew them well enough so that they could be impersonated in Sweetspring. And my money’s on the friendly, talkative Rollo Lipicky from the Heritage Antiques and Collectibles Company. He knew Priddy had the gold-coin collection and came for it.”

  “Then the other houses that were broken into in Woodpine were just a smoke screen in order to throw suspicion on random looters,” Jamie said. “Could the Kleinmans have been dealing with that collectibles company, too?”

  “According to the Sweetspring Star, the only things that were being taking from the Kleinmans’ house were Kyle’s rare antique guns, which he had acquired recently from a collectibles company. I’d say that pretty well establishes the link.”

  “Matt, are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “That Tony and these two who were posing as his mama and daddy were the ones who attempted to rob and ended up killing Kyle Kleinman in Sweetspring? That it wasn’t your foster brother, Lester, after all.”

  Her eyes said she was considering it. But Matt could see she was still battling her reservations. “No, I was with Tony when the robbery and murder took place.”

  “You weren’t with that man and woman posing as his folks.”

  “But you heard Judd Sistern. He and his daddy got there right after the shotgun blast. It wasn’t until after they found Kleinman that Oscar Lagarrigue-or the man posing as himcame running in.”

  “Judd Sistern’s saying it doesn’t make it true, Jamie. What if Oscar didn’t come running as he pretended but was already in the room, hiding behind some furniture when the Sisterns came in?”

  “If he had been the one to slit Kyle’s throat, he would have had blood on him, Matt. And Judd would have seen it.”

  “Might’ve been the woman who killed Kleinman.”

  “A woman…doing that?”

  “Savagery is not gender specific.”

  “It’s not the emotional capacity I’m questioning, Matt. It’s the physical difficulty. Kyle Kleinman was a big man. How could a woman have slit his throat?”

  “If she came up behind him when he had his attention on Oscar, Kyle might never have realized what was happening until it was too late.”

  “You say Oscar was still in the room when the Sisterns came in. That would have to mean the woman posing as Erline Lagarrigue was still there, too, covered in Kleinman’s blood. Why didn’t Judd and his daddy see her?”

  “Oscar could have rushed forward and pretended to faint in order to draw Judd outside and give Erline a chance to escape.”

  “But Doc Sistern was still in the room. How could Erline escape without being seen by him?”

  “Sistern was working on Kyle. He wouldn’t have noticed someone sneaking out.”

  “They found the bloodied knife near where Lester was camping.”

  “Since Plotnik and the rest of the town had already made up their minds that Lester did it, Tony and them probably figured they’d plant it there to help matters along.”

  “This is right incredible to believe, Matt. But what’s even more incredible is that I’m beginning to believe it. Is there any way we can find out for sure?”

  “I can call Keele and start the ball rolling. Let’s get to the inn and out of this rain.”

  Matt asked for one room for the night and registered as Mr. and Mrs. Bonner. He’d given up pretending he was going to even try to stay away from Jamie. Now that he knew she wanted him with a passion that damn near matched his own, there was no way he could.

  He loved his brother. He would always love him. That hadn’t changed. He’d willingly give up his life to save Cade’s.

  But he wouldn’t-couldn’t-give up Jamie. She was a part of him now, as essential as the breath that poured into his lungs, as the blood that pumped through his arteries. For her, he’d sacrifice his soul.

  He had sacrificed his soul. His betrayal of his brother was complete. His estrangement from the rest of his family would follow. He had turned his back on everything his mama and daddy had taught him about family love and loyalty and honor.

  He could not save himself.

  As he dropped their bags on the floor of their room, he closed the door and locked it. He didn’t think they’d been followed, but he knew better than to take chances. And now he had to make those telephone calls.

  But when he turned around and saw Jamie standing near the bed, slipping out of her coat, all he could think about was that it had been nearly twenty-four hours since he’d made love to her. And that was way, way too long.

  He closed the distance between them. As always, she melted into his embrace and returned his kiss with the kind of sweet hunger that sent his senses spinning.

  The phone rang. He ignored it, but Jamie pulled back to pick it up. And then handed it to him. Matt kept his arm around her, holding her close, feeling her heart beating next to his.

  “We’ve got trouble, Matt,” Keele’s voice said on the other end of the telephone line.

  “I was just about to call you. What’s up?”

  “It’s hit the fan. Your boss ended up with egg on his face when he went to his boss about an attempt on someone in the witness-protection program only to find out there wasn’t one. He knows you’ve been using the system to pursue a case that doesn’t qualify. He wants your tail in D.C. and he wants it there now.”

  “How’d you find out?” “Some stool pigeon, name of Randy you got in your group
. He must’ve seen me talking to you out in the parking lot behind the studio. Took my license number. Called your boss and said we were meeting clandestinely on something you weren’t passing on to any of Nevelt’s staff. Nevelt checked me out and called my boss.”

  “You in trouble, Keele?”

  “Naw. My boss isn’t giving me any grief. He knows I went out on a limb for an FBI buddy. But that damn no-brainer you’re working for has no idea what end to wipe. He’s hopping mad and he’s out to get you. You realize this could be the end of your FBI service?”

  “I’m past worrying about it, Keele. How did your inquiries go?”

  “This is the final installment, Matt. My boss is understanding, but he’s not suicidal.”

  “I get your drift.”

  “Okay, first off, Timothy Palmer was another alias. The Timothy Palmer who matches the birth date on Tony’s license was killed in a private-plane crash in Florida fourteen years ago.”

  “A year before the Timothy Palmer who was also Tony Lagarrigue appeared in Reno,” Matt said.

  “Yep. I’ve had the fingerprints he used to get his driver’s license in Nevada run through every federal and state computer trying to come up with a match. There isn’t one.”

  “Not good news.”

  “And I’ve got more of the same. That explosion that just missed blowing up you and Jamie was no accident. Someone deliberately rigged that gas leak, first at the kitchen stove, then at the basement water heater. And number one on the Reno police’s suspect list are a man and woman seen leaving in a taxi right afterward.”

  “Have they found the taxi driver yet?”

  “They’ve figured out who it is, so it’s just a matter of time.”

  “Any other bombs you got to drop?” Matt asked, not expecting an answer. He got one anyway.

  “Just the coup de grace. Seems as though it wasn’t the explosion that killed this mystery man you’ve been chasing. Medical examiner says his skull was bashed in before the gas had a chance to do its deed. Buddy, you’d better watch your back.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “So his name wasn’t Timothy Palmer,” Jamie said. “Matt, did I lead someone to him after all? Someone with a grudge?”