Bite the Moon: A Texas Hill Country Mystery

by Fanning, Diane

“Yes. He sent me flowers.”

  “Put an asterisk by his name, too.”

  “You must be kidding. I’m going to scratch him off the list.”

  “No, you can’t. Are you blinded by flowers? By lust? By love?”

  “No,” I snapped. I worried that there might be a bit of truth—a little, tiny, miniscule bit—in her judgment of my conclusions about Stan.

  “Put an asterisk,” she insisted again.

  “Lisa, he’s the only member of the band who approached me and talked to me. And he did it without a lawyer and without a hassle.”

  “Asterisk,” she said again with the stubbornness of a toddler.

  We compromised. Stan Crockett got a check mark next to his name.

  “Bobby Wiggins is not on your list?”

  “Bobby? No, of course not,” I said.

  “Have you really, really examined the possibility of his guilt?”

  “Aw, c’mon, Lisa. You know how I feel about Bobby.”

  “You must be objective, Mija. The key was, after all, in his pocket.”

  “Lisa,” I whined.

  “Write his name down. But you can give him a check mark, not an asterisk. So there you go. Two prime suspects—Trenton Wolfe and Fingers Waller. And two maybe suspects—Stan Crockett and Bobby Wiggins.”

  I winced when she said Bobby’s name.

  “What do you do now? What are your next steps?”

  “I don’t know, Lisa. I’m fresh out of ideas.”

  “No, you’re not. You’ve laid out clear priorities here. Number one: locate Waller. Number two: find out everything you can about Wolfe. Have you called his mother?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Why not?”

  “She won’t be objective.”

  “Of course not, but she might drop a tidbit of information you can use.”

  “I would just dig up her old pain.”

  “Think about calling her anyway. What is a few minutes of her pain compared to Bobby’s lifetime? Think about it, Mija. Priority three: find solid, concrete evidence to eliminate either Crockett or Bobby or both. If you can’t, you need to consider upgrading those checkmarks to asterisks.”

  I nodded in agreement.

  “And when you finish this case, por Dios, take the time to get that ugly thing off of your arm.”

  In response my hand flew up and landed on the sleeve over my tat. “How did you know about that?”

  “Mija, everybody—everybody—knows about that.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Hawkins has called you cow-pie behind your back for years.”

  “Oh, man.”

  “And everybody—everybody—knows he is talking about you.”

  Lisa had to get back to work, but I decided to walk around the park a bit before heading to my car. I was too deep in thought to realize trouble was heading my way until it ran into me.

  When it did, I landed butt-first in the wading pool. Sprays of water shot high up in the air, eliciting screams from the children gathered there, some in fear, some in delight. I heard hurried apologies punctuated by heavy panting. I brushed the wet hair out of my eyes.

  A spacey little woman in a flowery spring frock and heels—heels in the park?—switched her weight from one foot to another. A large, goofy-looking Great Dane strained and tugged at the end of the leash in her hand. I worried that any minute he would jettison her through the air, head over heels, and she’d land in my lap.

  More than anything, I just wanted her to go away. “No problem,” I said with a smile.

  No problem, my ass—literally. It’s hard to be inconspicuous walking through the park with wet jeans, straggling hair and a broad swath of mud across my rump.

  I’m an investigator, for Pete’s sake. Where, oh where, is the glamour?

  Chapter Forty-Four

  I took Lisa’s advice, plodding through the list of priorities but getting nowhere. Day followed day. Week followed week. If I wasn’t running in place, I was running in circles.

  The DNA test results on the T-shirt came in. It was no surprise that the DNA in the bloodstain matched Rodney Faver. I wasn’t sure, though, how they knew that at the lab. I told them I thought it was Rodney Faver’s DNA, but I didn’t give them a sample. They must have pursued some underground voodoo DNA network.

  They confirmed that they found Trenton Wolfe’s DNA in the sweat stain in the armpits. I expected that. They did have a surprise for me, though. Wolfe’s DNA was intermingled with an unknown DNA sample.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “It is consistent with the T-shirt having been worn by more than one perspiring individual.”

  Hunh. I was even more confused after that call than I was before it. The thought that more than one person wore that T-shirt that night didn’t make sense. Unless . . . unless what? I pulled the pinball lever in my head and let the ball fly. After ricocheting from one thought to another, it finally scored. Unless someone wore the shirt to implicate Wolfe. Then stuffed it in the kick drum where he knew it would be found. But he wasn’t as cool and calm as he thought. He was sweating, and that sweat left an undeniable ID card. And maybe that’s how Fingers Waller fit into the picture.

  Or maybe I’d got it all wrong again. Maybe Wolfe got someone else to wear the shirt first, knowing that person would leave trace evidence behind. Then he put it on to commit the murder, knowing an analysis of the shirt would lead to confusion instead of clarity. My head was spinning out of control. Too many what ifs. Too many maybes. Too little time.

  I called Sergeant Barrientos to check on the status of Jesse Kriewaldt’s case. He had run out of leads. I suggested Trenton Wolfe and Fingers Waller.

  “It’s like Waller fell off the face of the earth,” he said. “No credit card activity. No bank transactions. He did make a large and suspicious withdrawal the Friday before Faver’s murder, but since then nothing.

  “We had no trouble finding Wolfe, but his alibi is solid for the most likely time frame for Kriewaldt’s murder.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “It all checked out. The only thing we have to go on now is an unknown DNA sample from under Kriewaldt’s fingernails. A few skin cells were found there. We think they could belong to his killer. We ran it through the national data base, but got no hits.”

  I came very close to offering up my DNA results for comparison to his. A match might answer both of our questions. As much as I wanted to do that, though, I knew I had an obligation to wait until after Bobby’s trial.

  I called Mike Elliot to see if he’d picked up any useful gossip from the musicians who played at Solms Halle. Mostly he complained about the increasing difficulty in making new bookings and the suspicious looks that the performing artists gave to members of his staff.

  “Everyone is pretty much convinced of Bobby’s guilt,” he said.

  “What about you, Mike?”

  “No. I’ve tried. But I just can’t picture it. No matter how many arguments I hear from people who believe Bobby did it, I can’t picture the Bobby I know as a killer. But, then again, I have my doubts, too. Maybe I really don’t know Bobby as well as I thought I did.”

  Great. An old friend having doubts about Bobby did not bode well for the outcome of the trial.

  Every couple of days, Thelma Wiggins called. There was the lilt of hope in her voice when she said hello. But when I had nothing new to offer, she said goodbye in despair.

  I fended off four more dinner invitations from Stan Crockett. And hung up on Eddie Beacham at least three times—maybe more. Would he ever get the hint?

  I was discouraged—so discouraged. I still had not found Fingers Waller, dead or alive. Was his DNA the unknown profile on the T-shirt? Three people were dead. Was Fingers responsible? Or was it Trenton Wolfe? Or was it someone else altogether, who I was too dense to imagine. Every lead led to a dead end. And every dead end felt like failure.

  Unless Fingers was the killer, I had surely talked to the kille
r at one time or another. If it was not Wolfe, then women’s intuition was an illusion and my investigator’s sixth sense bankrupt.

  For better or worse, the end of Bobby’s legal ordeal was near. Jury selection started tomorrow. With his client behind bars, Dale Travis had pushed the trial through, accepting the first date the prosecution offered.

  I saw Dale early in the morning at the historic Faust Hotel, a couple of blocks from the courthouse, where he’d moved for the duration of the trial. I pleaded with him to get a postponement and give me more time to find the perpetrator. He told me to relax. My job was done and done well. He said I’d dug up enough reasonable doubt to bewilder a dozen panels of jurors. Dale Travis was satisfied. But I was not. I had to find more. The killer of Rodney Faver and Happy Parker and Jesse Kriewaldt had to pay. But what if I was wrong about that, too? What if I’d been searching for the one person complicit in all the crimes when they weren’t connected at all except by serendipity and coincidence? Killers instead of a killer? Had I not found an answer because I was asking the wrong question all along?

  Still, I had to do something. I’d make one last visit to Bobby—one more attempt to jog something useful out of his memory. The bloody key was in Bobby’s pocket. That meant he came in close contact with the killer for at least a fleeting moment in time. I needed him to remember that moment. I had to help him isolate it and extract it.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  “Bobby?” I asked holding a photo of Rodney Faver in front of me. “Did you kill this man?”

  “No, Molly. I didn’t. I swear.”

  I pressed the picture up to the glass. “Bobby did you tell the police you killed this man?”

  “No, Molly,” Bobby said hanging his head and swinging it back and forth.

  “Bobby, look at me.”

  He raised his winter-sky blue eyes to meet mine. “Yes, Molly?”

  “Mr. Travis told you about the tape, didn’t he, Bobby?”

  He nodded with vigor, but his eyes did not waver from my gaze.

  “You told them you killed this man, didn’t you, Bobby?”

  “No! No!” He shook his head in short jerks.

  “No?”

  “No. I told ’em I killed that man, but not this one. But I didn’t kill no man, I swear. I just told ’em I did ’cause I wanted to see Mama. ’Cause I wanted to go home.” His hands worried each other. He clutched his left hand with his right and then switched back again. “You gotta believe me, Molly.”

  “Wait a minute, Bobby.” I reached across the table and placed the palm of one hand flat against the glass, hoping to soothe and to help him concentrate. “I do believe you. I’m just confused. You did tell the police you killed a man?”

  “Yes, Molly. I told ’em, but I didn’t do it. Honest.”

  “I know, Bobby. I believe you. But this man,” I said, tapping my finger on the photograph, “this man is not the man you said you killed?”

  “No. It was the other man.”

  “What other man?”

  “That man that was messin’ in my closet.”

  Holy crap. “Who was that, Bobby?”

  “You know. The skinny man.”

  “Skinny man?”

  “Yeah, Molly. That one in the band. The one that plays the low-down guitar.”

  “Low-down guitar?”

  “Yeah, you know, he plays like this,” Bobby said, putting his arms in the classic bass guitar playing position. “Doh, doh, doh,” he sang in a descending scale.

  “The bass guitar player, Bobby?”

  “Bass guitar?” His eyes shot back and forth and then he smiled. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s what they call it. Bass guitar.”

  “Was it Stan Crockett you said you killed, Bobby?”

  “I’m not sure, Molly. I think he said his name was Stan. But they can let me go home, Molly, ’cause Stan ain’t killed. I know he ain’t killed.”

  “Because you didn’t kill him?”

  “Yes. No. I mean, I knowed I didn’t kill him, Molly. But I figured somebody killed him on account of they thought I killed him. But he ain’t killed. I know he ain’t killed,” Bobby said.

  “How do you know that, Bobby?”

  “He visited me.”

  “He did? Did you put him on your visitors’ list?”

  “No. He had a buddy that works here, so he got to visit me. And he told me how he was helpin’ you. He told me everything would be perfect. I told him to tell the police he ain’t killed.”

  Stan Crockett—that Godforsaken pig. “What else did he tell you, Bobby?”

  He hung his head and swung it side to side. “I don’t remember, Molly. I was so happy he wasn’t killed and all . . .”

  “That’s okay, Bobby.” I patted the glass with my open hand. “Hey. Bobby?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I saw a pair of fawns today in the woods across from the elementary school.”

  His eyes sparkled like those of a child on Christmas morning. “How many spots?”

  Melancholy washed over me like floodwaters. Bobby and I used to sit real still and try to count the spots on fawns when we were kids. If I didn’t find proof, Bobby might never see a fawn again. The trial started tomorrow. The rest of Bobby’s life hung as heavy as a waterlogged woolen blanket across my chest.

  “I don’t know, Bobby. I couldn’t get a good count without you.”

  I didn’t have Dale Travis’ faith in the power of reasonable doubt. I could see a Comal County jury viewing his whole presentation as smoke and mirrors, another sideshow from a fancy, big city attorney, created to obscure the truth, not reveal it.

  I sensed all along that somewhere in Bobby’s confession there had to be a truth we were all missing. I watched that tape so many times but never could find it. Now, I had it. Bobby caught Crockett making a dry run in the closet. That’s when Crockett finalized his plans. That’s when he decided to pin it all on hapless Bobby Wiggins. I knew the truth now. But what was I going to do with it?

  Chapter Forty-Six

  I went by the Faust Hotel on my way back from the jail. Stepping through the front doors was like stepping back in the past, a funky flashback to 1929. Designed and decorated in the ornate art nouveau Spanish renaissance style, it is filled with fine wood period furniture and adorned with the appropriate accessories for the time. The most impressive feature of the lobby is the tile floor. Its Persian rug pattern was designed for exclusive use in this hotel. It is rumored that the hotel’s first owner, Walter Faust, Jr., still rode the elevator and walked the halls, a blue aura outlining his every step.

  It was quaint and comfy, like an imaginary stroll through your great-grandmother’s life. I loved that hotel. I wish I could say the same for the reception I got from Dale Travis. I was excited about my conversation with Bobby. Dale was exasperated.

  “What can I do with this information, Molly? I can’t introduce it at trial unless I put Bobby on the stand. How do you think he’d hold up under cross?”

  “It’s not too late to get a postponement, Dale. I’ll take all the information I have to Barrientos at the Austin P.D. I think with what I have, he’ll be able to connect Stan Crockett to Jesse’s murder in no time. Then the prosecutor’s flimsy case will blow away in the wind.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you, Molly? I am not requesting a postponement. Both Bobby and Thelma die a little more every day Bobby is behind bars.”

  “I know,” I agreed with a sigh.

  “Listen, Molly, I admire your idealistic desire for perfect justice. But that is not my job. And it is not yours. Your job is done. I have what I need to get an acquittal for Bobby. If I were actually concerned about the outcome, I’d clutch at any straw you offered. But I am not. If I were paying you, I would have ordered you to stop pursuing this line of inquiry weeks ago. As it is, I cannot tell you what to do on your own time.

  “I do know what I would like you to do over the next couple of weeks. I want you to be in the courtroom. I could use your perspective
and knowledge of the prosecution witnesses. Your insight into them would be a valuable tool for me as I conduct my cross-examinations. So valuable, in fact, that I would like to pay you out of my pocket to serve as my consultant throughout the trial.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, of course. Just be there in the courtroom, listen intently and give me the feedback I need to ensure a win. Will you do it?”

  “Yes, Dale. I’d be glad to do anything I can.”

  “But do not distract me during the trial with any more raggedy-ass theories about who may or may not have killed Rodney Faver. Understood?”

  I nodded. I wasn’t happy with that raggedy-ass reference, but I let it slide.

  “I need to stay focused on one thing and one thing only: my client. Is that clear?”

  “Yes sir, it certainly is.”

  “Good. I’ll see you in the courtroom tomorrow morning.”

  Conflicting emotions tore at me like two birds over one scrap of bread. On the one hand, I was elated that Dale regarded my skills highly enough that he was willing to pay for them. I might have a future as an investigator after all.

  On the other hand, I despaired that he was indifferent to my quest to put the real killer behind bars. I wouldn’t have any help or support from him to make that happen. He wouldn’t even buy me a little time to do it all on my own.

  Maybe I was an idealistic fool, but I knew I would not rest easy until the deaths of Faver, Happy and Jesse were resolved—until Stan Crockett or whoever did it was arrested, convicted and serving time.

  There was one way to connect it all to Stan, or perhaps even clear him despite my suspicions. I needed a sample of Stan’s DNA.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  At home, I picked up the phone and dialed before I could change my mind. “Hey, Stan, Bobby Wiggins’ trial starts tomorrow. I’m all antsy and need some diversion.”

  “Just what did you have in mind?” he asked, seduction etched on every word.

  The sound of his voice had a different effect on me now. Instead of eliciting chills up and down my arms, every syllable formed a hard, cold lump in the center of my chest.