The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK ™: 20 Modern and Classic Tales of Female Detectives

by Catherine Louisa Pirkis

  When Pita arrived at his immaculate house in one of Rio Gordo’s failed housing developments, she promised herself she wouldn’t interview any more witnesses. Then Jessup pulled the door open. He smiled in recognition. So did she.

  She had talked with him in the hospital cafeteria during her mother’s final surgery. He’d been there for his brother, who’d been in a particularly horrendous accident, and who had somehow managed to survive.

  They hadn’t exchanged names.

  He was a small man with brown hair in need of a good trim. His house smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and aftershave. The living room had been modified—lowered furniture, and wide paths cut through what had once been wall-to-wall carpet.

  “Your brother moved in with you, huh?” she asked.

  “He needed somebody,” Jessup said with a finality that closed the subject.

  He led her into the kitchen. On the right side of the room, the cabinets had been pulled from the walls. A dishwasher peeked out of the debris. On the left were frames for lowered countertops. Only the sink, the stove and the refrigerator remained intact, like survivors in a war zone.

  He pulled a chair out for her at the kitchen table. The table was shorter than regulation height. An ashtray sat near the end of the table, but no chair. That had to be where his brother usually parked.

  Pita pulled out her tape recorder and a notebook. She explained again why she was there, and asked Jessup to state some information for the record. She implied, as she had with all the others, that this informal conversation was as good as being under oath.

  Jessup smiled as she went through her spiel. He seemed to know that his words would have no real bearing on the case unless he was giving a formal deposition.

  “I didn’t see the accident,” he said. “I got there after.”

  He’d missed the fender benders and the first wave of the injured cows. He’d pulled up just as the train stopped. He’d been the one to organize the scene. He’d sent two men east and two men west to slow traffic until the sheriff arrived.

  He’d made sure people in the various accidents exchanged insurance information, and he got the folks who’d suffered minor bumps and bruises to the side of the road. He directed a couple of teenagers to keep an eye on the injured animals, and make sure none of them made for the road again.

  Then he’d headed down the embankment toward the overturned truck.

  “It wasn’t on fire yet?”

  “No,” he said. “I have no idea how it got on fire.”

  She frowned. “It overturned. It was leaking diesel and the engine was on.”

  “So the fancy Dallas lawyers tell me,” he said.

  “You don’t believe them?”

  “First thing any good driver does after an accident is shut off his engine.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “If he’s not in shock. Or seriously injured. Or both.”

  “Ty had enough presence of mind to make that phone call.” Everyone in Rio Gordo knew about that call. Some even cursed it, thinking Nan could own the railroads if Ty hadn’t picked up his cell. “He would’ve shut off his engine.”

  Pita wasn’t so sure.

  “Besides, he wasn’t in the cab.”

  That caught her attention. “How do you know?”

  “I saw him. He was sitting on some debris halfway up the road. That’s why I was in no great hurry to get down there. He’d gotten himself out, and there wasn’t much I could do until the ambulance arrived.”

  Jessup had a construction worker’s knowledge of injuries. He knew how to treat bruises and he knew what to do for trauma. He’d talked with her about that in the cafeteria, when he’d told her how helpless he’d felt coming on his brother’s car wrapped around a utility pole. He hadn’t been able to get his brother out of the car—the ambulance crew later used the jaws of life—and he was afraid his brother would bleed out right there.

  “But you went to help Ty anyway,” Pita said.

  Jessup got up, walked to the stove, and lifted up the coffee pot. He’d been brewing the old-fashioned way, in a percolator, probably because he didn’t have any counter space.

  “Want some?” he asked.

  “Please,” she said, thinking it might get him to talk.

  He pulled two mugs out of the dishwasher, then set them on top of the stove. “I thought he was going to be fine.”

  “You’re not a doctor. You don’t know.” She wasn’t acting like a lawyer now. She was acting like a friend, and she knew it.

  He grabbed the pot, and poured coffee into both mugs. Then he brought them to the table.

  “I did know,” he said. “I knew there was trouble, and I left.”

  “Sounds like you did a lot before you left,” she said, trying to move him past this. She remembered long talks about his guilt over his brother’s accident. “Organizing the people, making sure Ty was okay. Seems to me that you did more than most.”

  He shook his head.

  “What else could you have done?” she asked.

  “I could’ve gone down there and helped him,” he said. “If nothing else, I could’ve defended him against those men with guns.”

  She went cold. Men with guns. She hadn’t heard about men with guns.

  “Who had guns?” she asked.

  He gave her a self-deprecating smile, apparently realizing how dramatic he had sounded. “Everyone has guns. This is the Texas-New Mexico border.”

  He’d said too much, and he clearly wanted to backtrack. She wouldn’t let him.

  “Not everyone uses them at the scene of an accident,” she said.

  “If they’d’ve been smart, they might have. That bull was mighty scary.”

  “Who had guns?” she asked.

  He sighed, clearly knowing she wouldn’t back down. “The engineers. They carried their rifles out of the train.”

  She raised her eyebrows, not sure what to say.

  He seemed to think she didn’t believe him, so he went on. “I figured they were carrying the guns to shoot any livestock that got in their way. Made me want my gun. I’d been thinking about the accident, not a bunch of injured animals that weighed eight times what I did.”

  “Why did you leave?” she asked.

  “It was a judgment call,” he said. “I was watching those engineers walk. With purpose.”

  As she listened to Jessup recount the story, she realized the purpose had nothing to do with cattle. These men carried their rifles like they intended to use them. They weren’t looking at the carnage. After they’d finished inspecting the train for damage, they didn’t look at the train either.

  Instead, they stared at Ty.

  “For the entire two-mile walk?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jessup said. “That’s when I decided not to stay. I thought Ty was going to be fine.”

  He paused. She waited, knowing if she pushed him, he might not say any more.

  Jessup ran a hand through his hair. “I knew that in situations like this tempers got out of hand. I couldn’t be the voice of reason. I might even get some of the blame.”

  He wrapped his hands around his coffee mug. He hadn’t touched the liquid.

  “Besides,” he said, “I could see Ty’s cowboys. They were riding around the train and heading toward the loose cattle near the highway. If things got ugly, they could help him. I headed back up the embankment, went to my truck, and drove on to Lubbock.”

  “Then I don’t understand why this is bothering you,” she said. “You did as much as you could, and then you left it to others, the ones who needed to handle the problem.”

  “Yeah,” he said softly. “I tell myself that.”

  “But?”

  He tilted his head, as if shaking some thoughts loose. “But a
couple of things don’t make sense. Like why did Ty go back into the cab of that truck? And how come no one smelled the diesel? Wouldn’t it bother them so close to the oil tankers?”

  She waited, watching him. He shrugged.

  “And then there’s the nightmares.”

  “Nightmares?” she asked.

  “I get into my truck, and as I slam the door, I hear a gunshot. It’s half a second behind the sound of the door slamming, but it’s clear.”

  “Did you really hear that?” she asked.

  “I like to think if I did, I would’ve gone back. But I didn’t. I just drove away, like nothing had happened. And a friend of mine died.”

  He didn’t say anything else. She took another sip of her coffee, careful not to set the mug to close to her recorder.

  “No one else reported gunshots,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “No one else saw Ty outside that cab,” she said.

  “He was in a gully. I was the only one who went down the embankment. You couldn’t see him from the road.”

  “And the truck? Could you see it?”

  He shook his head.

  “What do you think happened?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “and it’s driving me insane.”

  * * * *

  It bothered her too, but not in quite the same way.

  She found Jessup in DRS&C’s list of 911 nutcases. He’d been buried among the crazies, just like important information was probably hidden in the boxes that littered her office floor.

  No one else had seen the angry engineers or Ty out of the truck, but no one could quite figure out how he’d made that cell phone call either. If he’d been sitting on some debris outside the cab, that made more sense that calling from inside, while bleeding, with the engine running and diesel dripping.

  But Jessup was right. It raised some disturbing questions.

  They bothered her, enough so that she called Nan on her cell phone during the drive back to her office.

  “Do you have a copy of the autopsy report for Ty?” Pita asked.

  “There was no autopsy,” Nan said. “It’s pretty clear how he died.”

  Pita sighed. “What about the truck? What happened to it?”

  “Last I saw, it was in Digger’s Salvage Yard.”

  So Pita pulled into the salvage yard, and parked near a dented Toyota. Digger was a good ole boy who salvaged parts, and when he couldn’t, he used a crusher to demolish the vehicles into metal for scrap.

  But he still had the cab of that truck—insurance wouldn’t release it until the case was settled.

  For the first time, She looked at the cab herself, but couldn’t see anything except charred metal, a steel frame, and a ruined interior. She wasn’t an expert, and she needed one.

  It took only a moment to call an old friend in Albuquerque who knew a good freelance forensic examiner. The examiner wanted $500 plus expenses to travel to Rio Gordo and look at the truck.

  Pita hesitated. She could’ve—and should’ve—called Nan for the expense money.

  But the examiner’s presence would raise Nan’s hopes. And right now, Pita couldn’t do that. She was trusting a man she’d met late night at the hospital, a man who talked her through her mother’s last illness, a man she couldn’t quite get enough distance from to examine his veracity.

  She needed more than Jessup’s nightmares and speculations. She needed something that might pass for proof.

  * * * *

  “I can’t tell you when it got there,” said the examiner, Walter Shepard. He was a slender man with intense eyes. He wore a plaid shirt despite the heat and tan trousers that had pilled from too many washings.

  He was sitting in Pita’s office. She had moved some boxes aside so that the path into the office was wider. She’d also found a chair that had been buried since the case began.

  He pushed some photographs onto her desk. The photographs were close-ups of the truck’s cab. He’d thoughtfully drawn an arrow next to the tiny hole in the door on the driver’s side.

  “It’s definitely a bullet hole. It’s too smooth to be anything else,” he said. “And there’s another in the seat. I was able to recover part of a bullet.”

  He shifted the photos so that she could see a shattered metal fragment.

  “The problem is I can’t tell you anything else, except that the bullet holes predate the fire. I can’t tell you how long they were there or how they got there. They could be real old. Or brand new. I can’t tell.”

  “That’s all right.” A bullet hole, along with Jessup’s testimony, was enough to cast doubt on everything. She felt like she could go to DRS&C and ask for a settlement.

  She wasn’t even regretting that she hadn’t worked on contingency. This case was proving easier than she had thought it would be.

  “I know you asked me to look for evidence of shooting or a fight,” Shepard said, “but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I let it go at that. The anomaly here isn’t the bullets. It’s the fire itself.”

  She looked up from the photos, surprised. Shepard wasn’t watching her. He was still studying the photographs. He put a finger on one of them.

  “The diesel leaked. There’s runoff along the tank and a drip pattern that trails to the passenger side of the cab.”

  The cab had landed on its passenger side.

  “But the fire started here.” He was touching the photo of the interior of the cab. He pushed his finger against the image of the ruined seat. “See how the flames spread upwards. You can see the burn pattern. And fuel fed it. It burned around something—probably the body—so it looks to me like someone poured fuel onto the body itself and lit it on fire. I didn’t find a match, but I found the remains of a Bic lighter on the floor of the cab. It melted but it’s not burned the way everything else is. I think it was tossed in after the fire started.”

  Pita was having trouble wrapping her mind around what he was saying. “You’re saying someone deliberately started the fire? So close to oil tankers?”

  “I think that someone knew the truck wouldn’t explode. The fire was pretty contained.”

  “Some people from the highway had a fire extinguisher in their car. It was too late to save Ty.”

  “You’ll want your examiner to look at the body again,” Shepard said. “I have a hunch you’ll find that your client’s husband was dead before he burned, not after.”

  “Based on this pattern.”

  “A man doesn’t sit calmly and let himself burn to death,” Shepard said. “He was able to make a phone call. He was conscious. He would have tried to get out of that cab. He didn’t.”

  Pita was shaking. If this was true, then this case went way beyond a simple accident. If this was true, then those engineers shot Ty and tried to cover it up.

  Ballsy, considering how close to the road they had been.

  But the other drivers had been preoccupied with their own accidents and the injured cows and stopping traffic. No one except Jessup had even tried to come down the embankment.

  And the engineers, who drove the route a lot, would have known how hard that truck was to see from the road.

  They would have figured that the burning cab would get put out once someone saw the smoke. No wonder they’d lit the body. They didn’t want to risk catching the cab on fire, and leaving the bullet-ridden corpse untouched.

  “You’re sure?” Pita asked.

  “Positive.” Shepard gathered the photos. “If I were you, I’d take this to the state police. You don’t have an accident here. You have cold-blooded murder.”

  * * * *

  The next few weeks became a blur. DRS&C dropped the suit, becoming the friendliest big law firm that Pita had ever known. Which made her wonder when they’d real
ized that the engineers had committed murder.

  Either way, it didn’t matter. DRS&C was willing to work with her, to do whatever it took to “make Mrs. Hughes happy.”

  Nan wouldn’t be happy until her husband’s killers were brought to justice. She snapped into action the moment the state coroner confirmed Shepard’s hunches. Ty had been shot in the skull before he died, and then his body had been burned to cover up the crime.

  If Nan hadn’t worked so hard and believed in her husband so much, no one would have known.

  The story came out slowly. The train had been speeding when Ty crossed the tracks. Williams’ estimate of more than 100 miles per hour was probably correct—enough for the railroads to have liability right there.

  But the engineers, both frightened by the accident itself and terrified for their jobs, had walked the length of the train to Ty’s overturned truck and, finding him alive and relatively unhurt, let their anger explode.

  They’d threatened him with the loss of everything if he didn’t confess that he had failed to beat the train. He’d made the call to satisfy them. But it hadn’t worked. Somehow—and neither man was going to admit how (not even more than a year later at sentencing)—one of the rifles had gone off, killing him. Then they’d stuffed him in the cab—whose ignition was off—poured some diesel from the spill on him, and lit him on fire.

  They watched him burn for a few minutes before going up the embankment to see if anyone had a fire extinguisher in his car. Fortunately someone did. Otherwise, they planned to have someone drive them the two miles to the engine for the train’s fire extinguishers.

  The engineers were eventually convicted, Nan got to keep her ranch and her husband’s reputation, and the railroads kept trying to settle.

  But Pita insisted that Nan hire an attorney who specialized in cases against big companies. Pita helped with the hire, finding someone with a great reputation who wasn’t afraid of a thousand boxes of evidence and, more importantly, would work on contingency.