The Maverick

by Diana Palmer

  Instead, Alice pulled the sheet from a drowning victim who’d been in the water three days.

  She never saw the reporter again. Local cops who recounted the story, always with choked-back laughter, told her that he’d turned in his camera the same day and voiced an ambition to go into real estate.

  Just as well, she thought. The real thing was pretty unpleasant. Television didn’t give you the true picture, because there was no such thing as smell-o-vision. She could recall times when she’d gone through a whole jar of Vicks Salve trying to work on a drowning victim like the one she’d shown the critical member of the Fourth Estate.

  She rolled over again. She couldn’t get her mind to shut down long enough to allow for sleep. She was reviewing the meager facts she’d uncovered at the crime scene, trying to make some sort of sense out of it. Why would somebody drive a murder victim out of the city to kill him? Maybe because he didn’t know he was going to become a murder victim. Maybe he got in the car voluntarily.

  Good point, she thought. But it didn’t explain the crime. Heat of passion wouldn’t cover this one. It was too deliberate. The perp meant to hide evidence. And he had.

  She sighed. She wished she’d become a detective instead of a forensic specialist. It must be more fun solving crimes than being knee-deep in bodies. And prospective dates wouldn’t look at you from a safe distance with that expression of utter distaste, like that gardener in the hardware store this afternoon.

  What had Grier called him, Fowler? Harley Fowler, that was it. Not a bad-looking man. He had a familiar face. Alice wondered why. She was sure she’d never seen him before today. She was sure she’d remember somebody that disagreeable.

  Maybe he resembled somebody she knew. That was possible. Fowler. Fowler. No. It didn’t ring any bells. She’d have to let her mind brood on it for a couple of days. Sometimes that’s all it took to solve such puzzles—background working of the subconscious. She chuckled to herself. Background workings, she thought, will save me yet.

  After hours of almost-sleep, she got up, dressed and went back to the crime scene. It was quiet, now, without the presence of almost every uniformed officer in the county. The body was lying in the local funeral home, waiting for transport to the medical examiner’s office in San Antonio. Alice had driven her evidence up to San Antonio, to the crime lab, and turned it over to the trace evidence people, specifically Longfellow.

  She’d entrusted Longfellow with the precious piece of paper which might yield dramatic evidence, once unfolded. There had clearly been writing on it. The dead man had grasped it tight in his hand while he was being killed, and had managed to conceal it from his killer. It must have something on it that he was desperate to preserve. Amazing. She wanted to know what it was. Tomorrow, she promised herself, their best trace evidence specialist, Longfellow, would have that paper turned every which way but loose in her lab, and she’d find answers for Alice. She was one of the best CSI people Alice had ever worked with. When Alice drove right back down to Jacobsville, she knew she’d have answers from the lab soon.

  Restless, she looked around at the lonely landscape, bare in winter. The local police were canvassing the surrounding area for anyone who’d seen something unusual in the past few days, or who’d noticed an out-of-town car around the river.

  Alice paced the riverbank, a lonely figure in a neat white sweatshirt with blue jeans, staring out across the ripples of the water while her sneakers tried to sink into the damp sand. It was cooler today, in the fifties, about normal for a December day in south Texas.

  Sometimes she could think better when she was alone at the crime scene. Today wasn’t one of those days. She was acutely aware of her aloneness. It was worse now, after the death of her father a month ago. He was her last living relative. He’d been a banker back in Tennessee, where she’d taken courses in forensics. The family was from Floresville, just down the road from San Antonio. But her parents had moved away to Tennessee when she was in her last year of high school, and that had been a wrench. Alice had a crush on a boy in her class, but the move killed any hope of a relationship. She really had been a late bloomer, preferring to hang out in the biology lab rather than think about dating. Amoeba under the microscope were so much more interesting.

  Alice had left home soon after her mother’s death, the year she started college. Her mother had been a live wire, a happy and well-adjusted woman who could do almost anything around the house, especially cook. She despaired of Alice, her only child, who watched endless reruns of the old TV show Quincy, about a medical examiner, along with archaic Perry Mason episodes. Long before it was popular, Alice had dreamed of being a crime scene technician.

  She’d been an ace at biology in high school. Her science teachers had encouraged her, delighting in her bright enthusiasm. One of them had recommended her to a colleague at the University of Texas campus in San Antonio, who’d steered her into a science major and helped her find local scholarships to supplement the small amount her father could afford for her. It had been an uphill climb to get that degree, and to add to it with courses from far-flung universities when time and money permitted; one being courses in forensic anthropology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. In between, she’d slogged away with other techs at one crime scene after another, gaining experience.

  Once, in her haste to finish gathering evidence, due to a rare prospective date, she’d slipped up and mislabeled blood evidence. That had cost the prosecution staff a conviction. It had been a sobering experience for Alice, especially when the suspect went out and killed a young boy before being rearrested. Alice felt responsible for that boy’s death. She never forgot how haste had put the nails in his coffin, and she never slipped up again. She gained a reputation for being precise and meticulous in evidence-gathering. And she never went home early again. Alice was almost always the last person to leave the lab, or the crime scene, at the end of the day.

  A revved-up engine caught her attention. She turned as a carload of young boys pulled up beside her white van at the river’s edge.

  “Lookie there, a lonely lady!” one of them called. “Ain’t she purty?”

  “Shore is! Hey, pretty thing, you like younger men? We can make you happy!”

  “You bet!” Another one laughed.

  “Hey, lady, you feel like a party?!” another one catcalled.

  Alice glared. “No, I don’t feel like a party. Take a hike!” She turned back to her contemplation of the river, hoping they’d give up and leave.

  “Aww, that ain’t no way to treat prospective boyfriends!” one yelled back. “Come on up here and lie down, lady. We want to talk to you!”

  More raucous laughter echoed out of the car.

  So much for patience. She was in no mood for teenagers acting out. She pulled out the pad and pen she always carried in her back pocket and walked up the bank and around to the back of their car. She wrote down the license plate number without being obvious about it. She’d call in a harassment call and let local law enforcement help her out. But even as she thought about it, she hesitated. There had to be a better way to handle this bunch of loonies without involving the law. She was overreacting. They were just teenagers, after all. Inspiration struck as she reemerged at the driver’s side of the car.

  She ruffled her hair and moved closer to the towheaded young driver. She leaned down. “I like your tires,” she drawled with a wide grin. “They’re real nice. And wide. And they have treads. I like treads.” She wiggled her eyebrows at him. “You like treads?”

  He stared at her. The silly expression went into eclipse. “Treads?” His voice sounded squeaky. He tried again. “Tire…treads?”

  “Yeah. Tire treads.” She stuck her tongue in and out and grinned again. “I reeaaally like tire treads.”

  He was trying to pretend that he wasn’t talking to a lunatic. “Uh. You do. Really.”

  She was enjoying herself now. The other boys seemed even more confused than the driver did. They were all staring at her
. Nobody was laughing.

  She frowned. “No, you don’t like treads. You’re just humoring me. Okay. If you don’t like treads, you might like what I got in the truck,” she said, lowering her voice. She jerked her head toward the van.

  He cleared his throat. “I might like what you got in the truck,” he parroted.

  She nodded, grinning, widening her eyes until the whites almost gleamed. She leaned forward. “I got bodies in there!” she said in a stage whisper and levered her eyes wide-open. “Real dead bodies! Want to see?”

  The driver gaped at her. Then he exclaimed, “Dead…bod…. Oh, Good Lord, no!”

  He jerked back from her, slammed his foot down on the accelerator, and spun sand like dust as he roared back out onto the asphalt and left a rubber trail behind him.

  She shook her head. “Was it something I said?” she asked a nearby bush.

  She burst out laughing. She really did need a vacation, she told herself.

  Harley Fowler saw the van sitting on the side of the road as he moved a handful of steers from one pasture to another. With the help of Bob, Cy Parks’s veteran cattle dog, he put the little steers into their new area and closed the gate behind him. A carload of boys roared up beside the van and got noisy. They were obviously hassling the crime scene woman. Harley recognized her van.

  His pale blue eyes narrowed and began to glitter. He didn’t like a gang of boys trying to intimidate a lone woman. He reached into his saddlebag and pulled out his gunbelt, stepping down out of the saddle to strap it on. He tied the horse to a bar of the gate and motioned Bob to stay. Harley strolled off toward the van.

  He didn’t think he’d have to use the pistol, of course. The threat of it would be more than enough. But if any of the boys decided to have a go at him, he could put them down with his fists. He’d learned a lot from Eb Scott and the local mercs. He didn’t need a gun to enforce his authority. But if the sight of it made the gang of boys a little more likely to leave without trouble, that was all right, too.

  He moved into sight just at the back of Alice’s van. She was leaning over the driver’s side of the car. He couldn’t hear what she said, but he could certainly hear what the boy exclaimed as he roared out onto the highway and took off.

  Alice was talking to a bush.

  Harley stared at her with confusion.

  Alice sensed that she was no longer alone, and she turned. She blinked. “Have you been there long?” she asked hesitantly.

  “Just long enough to see the Happy Teenager Gang take a powder,” he replied. “Oh, and to hear you asking a bush about why they left.” His eyes twinkled. “Talk to bushes a lot in your line of work, do you?”

  She was studying him curiously, especially the low-slung pistol in its holster. “You on your way to a gunfight and just stopped by to say hello?”

  “I was moving steers,” he replied. “I heard the teenagers giving you a hard time and came to see if you needed any help. Obviously not.”

  “Were you going to offer to shoot them for me?” she asked.

  He chuckled. “Never had to shoot any kids,” he said with emphasis.

  “You’ve shot other sorts of people?”

  “One or two,” he said pleasantly, but this time he didn’t smile.

  She felt chills go down her spine. If her livelihood made him queasy, the way he looked wearing that sidearm made her feel the same way. He wasn’t the easygoing cowboy she’d met in town the day before. He reminded her oddly of Cash Grier, for reasons she couldn’t put into words. There was cold steel in this man. He had the self-confidence of a man who’d been tested under fire. It was unusual, in a modern man. Unless, she considered, he’d been in the military, or some paramilitary unit.

  “I don’t shoot women,” he said when she hesitated.

  “Good thing,” she replied absently. “I don’t have any bandages.”

  He moved closer. She seemed shaken. He scowled. “You okay?”

  She shifted uneasily. “I guess so.”

  “Mind telling me how you got them to leave so quickly?”

  “Oh. That. I just asked if they’d like to see the dead bodies in my van.”

  He blinked. He was sure he hadn’t heard her right. “You asked if…?” he prompted.

  She sighed. “I guess it was a little over the top. I was going to call Hayes Carson and have him come out and save me, but it seemed a bit much for a little catcalling.”

  He didn’t smile. “Let me tell you something. A little catcalling, if they get away with it, can lead to a little harassment, and if they get away with that, it can lead to a little assault, even if drugs or alcohol aren’t involved. Boys need limits, especially at that age. You should have called it in and let Hayes Carson come out here and scare the hell out of them.”

  “Well, aren’t you the voice of experience!”

  “I should be,” he replied. “When I was sixteen, an older boy hassled a girl in our class repeatedly on campus after school and made fun of me when I objected to it. A few weeks later, after she’d tried and failed to get somebody to do something about him, he assaulted her.”

  She let out a whistle. “Heavy stuff.”

  “Yes, and the teacher who thought I was overreacting when I told him was later disciplined for his lack of response,” he added coldly.

  “We live in difficult times,” she said.

  “Count on it.”

  She glanced in the direction the car had gone. “I still have the license plate number,” she murmured.

  “Give it to Hayes and tell him what happened,” he encouraged her. “Even if you don’t press charges, he’ll keep an eye on them. Just in case.”

  She studied his face. “You liked that girl.”

  “Yes. She was sweet and kind-natured. She…”

  She moved a little closer. “She…?”

  “She killed herself,” he said tightly. “She was very religious. She couldn’t live with what happened, especially after she had to testify to it in court and everyone knew.”

  “They seal those files…” she began.

  “Get real,” he shot back. “It happened in a small town just outside San Antonio, not much bigger than Jacobsville. I was living there temporarily with a nice older couple and going to school with her when it happened. The people who sat on the jury and in the courtroom were all local. They knew her.”

  “Oh,” she said softly. “I’m sorry.”

  He nodded.

  “How long did the boy get?”

  “He was a juvenile,” he said heavily. “He was under eighteen when it happened. He stayed in detention until he was twenty-one and they turned him loose.”

  “Pity.”

  “Yes.” He shook himself as if the memory had taken him over and he wanted to be free of it. “I never heard anything about him after that. I hope he didn’t prosper.”

  “Was he sorry, do you think?”

  He laughed coldly. “Sorry he got caught, yes.”

  “I’ve seen that sort in court,” she replied, her eyes darkening with the memory. “Cocky and self-centered, contemptuous of everybody around them. Especially people in power.”

  “Power corrupts,” he began.

  “And absolute power corrupts absolutely,” she finished for him. “Lord Acton,” she cited belatedly.

  “Smart gent.” He nodded toward the river. “Any new thoughts on the crime scene?”

  She shook her head. “I like to go there alone and think. Sometimes I get ideas. I still can’t figure how he died here, when he was from San Antonio, unless he came voluntarily with someone and didn’t know they were going to kill him when they arrived.”

  “Or he came down here to see somebody,” he returned, “and was ambushed.”

  “Wow,” she said softly, turning to face him. “You’re good.”

  There was a faint, ruddy color on his high cheekbones. “Thanks.”

  “No, I mean it,” she said when she saw his expression. “That wasn’t sarcasm.”

  He
relaxed a little.

  “We got off to a bad start, and it’s my fault,” Alice admitted. “Dead bodies make me nervous. I’m okay once I get started documenting things. It’s the first sight of it that upsets me. You caught me at a bad time, at the hardware store. I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

  “Nothing embarrasses me,” he said easily.

  “I’m sorry, just the same.”

  He relaxed a little more.

  She frowned as she studied his handsome face. He really was good-looking. “You look so familiar to me,” she said. “I can’t understand why. I’ve never met you before.”

  “They say we all have a doppelgänger,” he mused. “Someone who looks just like us.”

  “Maybe that’s it,” she agreed. “San Antonio is a big city, for all its small-town atmosphere. We’ve got a lot of people. You must resemble someone I’ve seen.”

  “Probably.”

  She looked again at the crime scene. “I hope I can get enough evidence to help convict somebody of this. It was a really brutal murder. I don’t like to think of people who can do things like that being loose in society.”

  He was watching her, adding up her nice figure and her odd personality. She was unique. He liked her. He wasn’t admitting it, of course.

  “How did you get into forensic work?” he asked. “Was it all those crime shows on TV?”

  “It was the Quincy series,” she confessed. “I watched reruns of it on TV when I was a kid. It fascinated me. I liked him, too, but it was the work that caught my attention. He was such an advocate for the victims.” Her eyes became soft with reminiscence. “I remember when evidence I collected solved a crime. It was my first real case. The parents of the victim came over and hugged me after the prosecutor pointed me out to them. I always went to the sentencing if I could get away, in cases I worked. That was the first time I realized how important my work was.” She grinned wickedly. “The convicted gave me the finger on his way out of the courtroom with a sheriff’s deputy. I grinned at him. Felt good. Really good.”

  He laughed. It was a new sound, and she liked it.