One-Click Buy: December 2009 Silhouette Desire

by Susan Mallery

  She grinned. “That would be lovely.”

  “Meanwhile, I’ve got more cattle to feed,” he said on a weary sigh. “It was a nice break, though.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  He looked at the smears of mud on her once-pristine shirt and winced. “Sorry,” he said.

  She looked down at the smears and just laughed. “It’ll wash,” she said with a shy smile.

  He beamed. He loved a woman who didn’t mind a little dirt. He opened her van door and she climbed up into it. “Drive carefully,” he told her.

  She smiled. “I always do.”

  “See you.”

  “See you.”

  She was halfway back to the motel before she realized that she hadn’t mentioned his connection to Senator Fowler. Of course, that might be just as well, considering that the newest murder victim had ties to the senator, and the original murder victim did, too, in a roundabout way.

  On her way to see Hayes Carson at the sheriff’s office, Alice phoned Marquez at home—well, it was a holiday, so she thought he might be at home with his foster mother, Barbara. She found out that Marquez had been called back to San Antonio on a case. She grimaced. She was never going to get in touch with him, she supposed.

  She walked into Carson’s office. He was sitting at his desk. He lifted both eyebrows. “It’s December twenty-fifth,” he pointed out.

  She lifted both eyebrows. “Ho, ho, ho?” she said.

  He chuckled. “So I’m not the only person who works holidays. I had started to wonder.” He indicated the empty desks around his office in the county detention center.

  “My office looked that way last night, too,” she confessed. She sat down by his desk. “I questioned a woman who worked for Senator Fowler about the man who drove her car down here and got killed next to the river.”

  “Find out much?” he asked, suddenly serious.

  “That I shouldn’t have been so obvious about questioning her. She died of an apparent suicide, but I pestered the attending pathologist to put ‘probable’ before ‘suicide’ on the death certificate. She shot herself through the heart with the wrong hand and the bullet was angled down.” She waited for a reaction.

  He leaned back in his chair. “Wonders will never cease.”

  “I went to see her minister, who spoke to the man we found dead by the river. The minister was an art student. He drew me this.” She pulled out a folded sheet of paper from her purse and handed it to him.

  “Hallelujah!” he burst out. “Alice, you’re a wonder! You should be promoted!”

  “No, thanks, I like fieldwork too much,” she told him, grinning. “It’s good, isn’t it? That’s what your murder victim looks like.” Her smile faded. “I’m just sorry I got the woman killed who was trying to help him restart his life.”

  He looked up with piercing eyes. “You didn’t. Life happens. We don’t control how it happens.”

  “You’re good for my self-esteem. I was going to show that to Rick Marquez, but he’s become rather elusive.”

  “Something happened in San Antonio. I don’t know what. They called in a lot of off-duty people.”

  “Was Kilraven one of them, or do you know?” she asked.

  “I don’t, but I can find out.” He called the dispatch center and gave Kilraven’s badge number and asked if Kilraven was on duty.

  “Yes, he is. Do you want me to ask him to place you a twenty-one?” she asked, referring to a phone call.

  “Yes, thanks, Winnie,” he said, a smile in his voice as he recognized dispatcher Winnie Sinclair.

  “No problem. Dispatch out at thirteen hundred hours.”

  He hung up. “She’ll have him call me,” he told Alice. “What did the minister tell you about the murdered man?” he asked while they waited.

  “Not much. He said the guy told him he’d been a bad man, but he wanted to change, that he was going to speak to somebody about an old case and that he’d talk to the minister again after he did it. It’s a real shame. Apparently he’d just discovered that there was more to life than dodging the law. He had a good woman friend, he was starting to go to church—now he’s lying in the morgue, unidentifiable.”

  “Not anymore,” Hayes told her, waving the drawing.

  “Yes, but he could be anybody,” she replied.

  “If he has a criminal background, he’s got fingerprints on file and a mug shot. I have access to face recognition software.”

  “You do? How?” she asked, fascinated.

  “Tell you what,” he said, leaning forward. “I’ll give you my source if you’ll tell me how you got hold of that computer chip emplacement tech for tagging bodies.”

  She caught her breath. “Well! You do get around, don’t you? That’s cutting-edge and we don’t advertise it.”

  “My source doesn’t advertise, either.”

  “We’ll trade,” she promised. “Now, tell me…”

  The phone rang. Hayes picked it up. He gave Alice a sardonic look. “Yes, the sheriff’s office is open on Christmas. I just put away my reindeer and took off my red suit… Yes, Alice Jones is here with an artist’s sketch of the murdered man… Hello? Hello?” He hung up with a sigh. “Kilraven,” he said, answering the unasked question.

  Alice sighed. “I get that a lot, too. People hanging up on me, I mean. I’ll bet he’s burning rubber, trying to get here at light speed.”

  “I wouldn’t doubt it.” He chuckled.

  Sure enough, just a minute or two later, they heard squealing tires turning into the parking lot outside the window. A squad car with flashing blue lights slammed to a stop just at the front door and the engine went dead. Seconds later, Kilraven stormed into the office.

  “Let’s see it,” he said without preamble.

  Hayes handed him the drawing.

  Kilraven looked at it for a long time, frowning.

  “Recognize him?” Alice asked.

  He grimaced. “No,” he said gruffly. “Damn! I thought it might be somebody I knew.”

  “Why?” Hayes asked.

  “I work out of San Antonio as a rule,” he said. “And I was a patrol officer, and then a detective, on the police force there for some years. If the guy had a record in San Antonio, I might have had dealings with him. But I don’t recognize this guy.”

  Hayes took the sketch back. “If I make a copy, could you show it to Jon and see if he looks familiar to him?”

  “Sure.” He glanced at Alice. “How’d you get a sketch of the dead man? Reconstructive artist?”

  “No. That woman I talked to about him killed herself…”

  “Like hell she did,” Kilraven exclaimed. “That’s too pat!”

  “Just what I thought. I talked to the forensic pathologist who did the autopsy,” she added. “He said she was right-handed, but shot herself through the heart with her left hand. Good trick, too, because she had carpal tunnel syndrome, plus surgery, and the gun was a big, heavy .45 Colt ACP. He said she’d have had hell just cocking it.”

  “He labeled it a suicide?”

  She shook her head. “He’s trying not to get caught up in political fallout. She worked for the senator, you know, and he’s not going to want to be a media snack over a possible homicide that happened on his own property.”

  “The pathologist didn’t label it a suicide?” he persisted.

  “I got him to add ‘probable’ to the report.”

  “Well, that’s something, I guess. Damned shame, about the woman. She might have been able to tell us more, in time.” He smiled at Alice. “I’m glad you went to see her, anyway. What we have is thanks to you.” He frowned. “But how did you get the sketch?”

  “The woman’s minister,” she said simply. “He’d talked to the man who was killed and before he became a minister, he was an artist. He didn’t add much to what the woman had already told me. He did say that the guy had a guilty conscience and he was going to talk to somebody about an old case.”

  Kilraven was frowning again. “An old case.
Who was he going to talk to? People in law enforcement, maybe?”

  “Very possibly,” Alice agreed. “I’m not through digging. But I need to identify this man. I thought I might go to the motel where he was staying and start interviewing residents. It’s a start.”

  “Not for you,” Kilraven said sternly. “You’ve put yourself in enough danger already. You leave this to me and Jon. We get paid for people to shoot at us. You don’t.”

  “My hero,” Alice sighed, batting her eyelashes at him and smiling. “If I wasn’t so keen to marry Harley Fowler, I swear I’d be sending you candy and flowers.”

  “I hate sweets and I’m allergic to flowers,” he pointed out.

  She wrinkled her nose. “Just as well, then, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll copy this for you,” Hayes said, moving to the copy machine in the corner. “We’re low on toner, though, so don’t expect anything as good as the original drawing.”

  “Why don’t you get more toner?” Alice asked.

  Hayes glowered. “I have to have a purchase order from the county commission, and they’re still yelling at me about the last several I asked for.”

  “Which was for…?” Kilraven prompted.

  Hayes made the copy, examined it and handed it to Kilraven. “A cat, and an electrician, and an exterminator.”

  Alice and Kilraven stared at him.

  He moved self-consciously back to his desk and sat down. “I bought this cheap cat,” he emphasized. “It only cost fifteen bucks at the pet store. It wasn’t purebred or anything.”

  “Why did you buy a cat?” Alice asked.

  He sighed. “Do you remember the mouse that lived in Tira Hart’s house before she became Simon Hart’s wife?”

  “Well, I heard about it,” Kilraven admitted.

  “One of my deputies caught two field mice and was going to take them home to his kids for a science project. He put them in a wood box and when he went to get them out, they weren’t there.” Hayes sighed. “They chewed their way out of the box, they chewed up the baseboards and two electrical wires, and did about three hundred dollars worth of damage to county property. I called an electrician for that. Then I tried traps and they wouldn’t work, so I bought a cat.”

  “Did the cat get the mice?” Alice asked.

  Hayes shook his head. “Actually,” he replied, “the mice lay in wait for the cat, chomped down on both his paws at the same time, and darted back into the hole in the wall they came out of. Last time I saw the cat, he was headed out of town by way of the city park. The mice are still here, though,” he added philosophically. “Which is why I had to have authorization to pay for an exterminator. The chairman of our county commission found one of the mice sitting in his coffee cup.” He sighed. “Would you believe, I got blamed for that, too?”

  “Well, that explains why the commission got mad at you,” Alice said. “I mean, for the cat and the electrician.”

  “No, that’s not why they got mad.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  He looked sheepish. “It was the engine for a 1996 Ford pickup truck.”

  Alice stared at him. “Okay, now I’m confused.”

  “I had to call an exterminator. While he was looking for the mice, they got under the hood of his truck and did something—God knows what, but it was catastrophic. When he started the truck, the engine caught fire. It was a total loss.”

  “How do you know the mice did it?” Kilraven wanted to know.

  “One of my deputies—the same one who brought the damned rodents in here in the first place—saw them coming down the wheel well of the truck just before the exterminator got in and started it.”

  Alice laughed. She got to her feet. “Hayes, if I were you, I’d find whoever bought Cag Hart’s big albino python and borrow him.”

  “If these mice are anything like Tira’s mouse, fat chance a snake will do what a cat can’t.”

  As he spoke, the lights started dimming. He shook his head. “They’re back,” he said with sad resignation.

  “Better hide your firearms,” Kilraven advised as he and Alice started for the door.

  “With my luck, they’re better shots than I am.” Hayes laughed. “I’m going to show this drawing around town and see if anybody recognizes the subject. If either of you find out anything else about the murdered man, let me know.”

  “Will do,” Alice promised.

  Eight

  Alice followed Kilraven out the door. He stood on the steps of the detention center, deep in thought.

  “Why did you think you might know the murder victim?” Alice asked him.

  “I told you…”

  “You lied.”

  He looked down at her with arched eyebrows.

  “Oh, I’m psychic,” she said easily. “You know all those shows about people with ESP who solve murders, well, I get mistaken for that dishy one all the time…”

  “You’re not psychic, Alice,” he said impatiently.

  “No sense of humor,” she scoffed. “I wonder how you stay sane on the job! Okay, okay—” she held up both hands when he glowered “—I’ll talk. It was the way you rushed over here to look at the drawing. Come on, give me a break. Nobody gets in that sort of hurry without a pretty sturdy reason.”

  He rested his hand on the holstered butt of his pistol. His eyes held that “thousand-yard stare” that was so remarked on in combat stories. “I’ve encouraged a former San Antonio detective to do some digging into the files on my cold case,” he said quietly. “And you aren’t to mention that to Marquez. He’s in enough trouble. We’re not going to tell him.”

  She wouldn’t have dared mention that she already knew about the detective working on the case, and so did Marquez. “Have you got a lead?” she asked.

  “I thought this case might be one,” he said quietly. “A guy comes down here from San Antonio, and gets killed. It’s eerie, but I had a feeling that he might have been looking for me. Stupid, I know…”

  “There are dozens of reasons he might have driven down here,” she replied. “And he might have been passing through. The perp might have followed him and ambushed him.”

  “You’re right, of course.” He managed a smile. “I keep hoping I’ll get lucky one day.” The smile faded into cold steel. “I want to know who it was. I want to make him pay for the past seven miserable years of my life.”

  She cocked her head, frowning. “Nothing will make up for that,” she said quietly. “You can’t take two lives out of someone. There’s no punishment on earth that will take away the pain, or the loss. You know that.”

  “Consciously, I do,” he said. He drew in a sharp breath. “I worked somebody else’s shift as a favor that night. If I hadn’t, I’d have been with them…”

  “Stop that!” she said in a tone short enough to shock him. “Lives have been destroyed with that one, stupid word. If! Listen to me, Kilraven, you can’t appropriate the power of life and death. You can’t control the world. Sometimes people die in horrible ways. It’s not right, but it’s just the way things are. You have to go forward. Living in regret is only another way the perp scores off you.”

  He didn’t seem to take offense. He was actually listening.

  “I hear it from victims’ families all the time,” she continued. “They grieve, they hate, they live for vengeance. They can’t wait for the case to go to trial so they can watch the guilty person burn. But, guess what, juries don’t convict, or perps make deals, or sometimes the case even gets thrown out of court because of a break in the chain of evidence. And all that anger has no place to go, except in sound bites for the six-o’clock news. Then the families go home and the hatred grows, and they end up with empty lives full of nothing. Nothing at all. Hate takes the place that healing should occupy.”

  He stared down at her for a long moment. “I guess I’ve been there.”

  “For about seven years,” she guessed. “Are you going to devote your life to all that hatred? You’ll grow old with nothing to show for those
wasted years except bitter memories.”

  “If my daughter had lived,” he said in a harsh tone, “she’d be ten years old next week.”

  She didn’t know how to answer him. The anguish he felt was in every word.

  “He got away with it, Jones,” he said harshly.

  “No, he didn’t,” she replied. “Someone knows what happened, and who did it. One day, a telephone will ring in a detective’s office, and a jilted girlfriend or boyfriend will give up the perp out of hurt or revenge or greed.”

  He relaxed a little. “You really think so?”

  “I’ve seen it happen. So have you.”

  “I guess I have.”

  “Try to stop living in the past,” she counseled gently. “It’s a waste of a good man.”

  He lifted an eyebrow, and the black mood seemed to drop away. His silver eyes twinkled. “Flirting with me?”

  “Don’t go there,” she warned. “I’ve seen too many wives sitting up watching the late show, hoping their husbands would come home. That’s not going to be me. I’m going to marry a cattle rancher and sleep nights.”

  He grinned. “That’s no guarantee of sleep. Baby bulls and cows almost always get born in the wee hours of the morning.”

  “You’d know,” she agreed, smiling. “You and Jon have that huge black Angus ranch in Oklahoma, don’t you?”

  He nodded. “Pity neither of us wants to sit around and babysit cattle. We’re too career conscious.”

  “When you get older, it might appeal.”

  “It might,” he said, but not with any enthusiasm. “We hold on to it because Jon’s mother likes to have company there.” He grimaced. “She’s got a new prospect for Jon.”

  “I heard.” Alice chuckled. “He had her arrested in his own office for sexual harassment. I understand Joceline Perry is still making him suffer for it.”

  “It really was sexual harassment,” Kilraven corrected. “The woman is a call girl. We both tried to tell my stepmom, but her best friend is the woman’s mother. She won’t believe us. Mom keeps trying to get her to the ranch, with the idea that Jon will like her better if he sees her in blue jeans.”

  “Fat chance,” Alice said. “Jon should tell Joceline the truth.”