Blanco County 04 - Guilt Trip

by Rehder, Ben

  Now he heard the sound of the TV and opened his eyes. Billy Don was in the recliner, eating a bowl of Froot Loops, watching cartoons. Some moron shaped like a sponge was dancing around on the screen.

  Billy Don noticed that Red was awake. “Had me a big idea this morning,” he said, smacking away, multicolored bits of chewed slop in his teeth. “Huge idea. An idea so big, I’m surprised I had room for it in my brain.”

  Red knew what Billy Don wanted—for Red to ask what the idea was. So he didn’t. No sir, he wasn’t in the mood for any more stupid schemes. He’d fucked up his truck, his woman was acting uppity, and they weren’t any closer to getting hold of the cash in the safe.

  After five minutes, Billy Don relented. “All right, then, I’ll tell ya. Remember what you got out in your tackle box? From when we went fishing a couple years ago?”

  Red sat bolt upright.

  “Okay, folks, I appreciate all of you coming in,” Bobby Garza said.

  Nine o’clock Saturday morning in the conference room. All the deputies on the case were there, in street clothes, and Marlin felt a pleasant tingle when Nicole nodded a casual good morning to him, with a nice smile behind it.

  “I just got off the phone with Florida,” Garza continued. “I want to run through a few things, then you can get back to your day off.” He looked down at some notes on the table. “Here’s a surprise you’ll all enjoy. According to Stephanie Waring, Lucas Burnette was no longer living in his rent house in Blanco. He was living with her. But when we talked to the landlord last week, Lucas was still paying the rent.”

  “So he’d still have a place for the meth lab,” Bill Tatum interjected.

  “Apparently so,” Garza said. “Anyway, Stephanie had been dating Scofield, which we already knew, and we learned yesterday that she had also been seeing Lucas. They kept it hush-hush, she says, because she had a felony on her record and, according to the terms of Lucas’s parole, he wasn’t supposed to keep company with known criminals. His parole officer would never have allowed them to live together.

  “Now, here’s how it all unfolded. There are some holes here, but I think we can patch them up with the facts we have. Last Sunday morning, Stephanie calls Scofield and a woman answers. We all know what kind of woman-chaser Scofield was, and so did Stephanie, so she got angry and called Rita Sue, who tried to calm her down. Later, when Lucas came home, Stephanie told him about it, too. Lucas also got angry, and he went over to have a word with Scofield. According to what Lucas told Stephanie, Scofield was already injured and nearly dead when Lucas got there. This was about an hour after Stephanie talked to her mom, which gave Rita Sue plenty of time to whack Scofield over the head. So, as I was saying, Lucas found Scofield and put him in his car.”

  “Lucas’s car or Scofield’s?” Bill Tatum asked.

  “Lucas’s car. That old Toyota of his. But Scofield died before Lucas could even get out of the driveway. Lucas panicked and went to see Rita Sue. An odd place to go for advice—I think we’d all agree on that—but that’s what he says he did. I can just imagine what Rita Sue was thinking when Lucas showed up with the body in her driveway. In any case, Rita Sue convinced Lucas that we’d pin it on him and that he’d better get out of town.”

  “So he stole the Corvette,” Ernie Turpin said.

  “Not yet. First, he went back to Stephanie’s place—their place—and the two of them commenced to get very intoxicated. Stephanie, at this point, still doesn’t know that Scofield is dead. Later that afternoon, Lucas offers up a way for Stephanie to get a little revenge for the way Scofield had been treating her.”

  “Steal the Corvette,” Turpin said again.

  “Exactly. Stephanie agreed, so Lucas left and came back a while later with the car.”

  “So where’s Lucas’s car?” Marlin asked. It was one of the unanswered questions that had bothered him all along.

  Garza grinned. “I had a hunch about that. I went over to Rita Sue’s house this morning with a warrant for the freezer. Henry is working on it in his lab right now. While I was there, I had a peek inside the big metal shed on her property. Didn’t open the door or anything like that, mind you, because that wouldn’t have been legal. But Rita Sue, or maybe Lucas, had taped newspaper over the window, and one of the corners was sagging down—enough that I could see Lucas’s car sitting in there. I’ll get a warrant for the shed today.”

  “Where’s the Corvette now?” Brooks asked.

  “I’m glad you asked,” Garza said, “and we can thank our brothers—and sisters—in Miami for their quick work on this. Lucas sold it to a chop shop. Stephanie was able to tell them where it was, and Miami raided it this morning. Found the Vette, still untouched, in the back garage. David Pritchard will be thrilled to hear that, because now his precious raffle can proceed as planned. I’ve got a few forms for him to sign so he can get the car back.”

  “I’ll get them to him,” Brooks volunteered.

  “Great. At least well have one happy customer.”

  “So how is Lucas getting around?” Marlin asked. “How did they get to Key West?”

  “An old Honda. It was part of the deal at the chop shop. The Florida troopers have the plate number, but Lucas had a pretty good head start. Stephanie told them all of this last night, but he still had a couple of hours to get moving. Could be just about anywhere in Florida by now, or even Georgia or Alabama.”

  Garza dropped his notes onto the table. “Other questions?”

  “Did Stephanie say anything about the meth lab?” Tatum asked. “Were Lucas and Scofield working together? Did Lucas cop to torching the house?”

  “We haven’t even delved into that area yet,” Garza replied. “I asked the Florida troopers to take a statement on the murder, that’s all. We’ll do a full interview when we get her back here.”

  “When will that be?”

  “The charges they’re holding her on are ours, not theirs, so we can get her anytime we want. I’ll need a couple of you to fly down and get her, maybe as early as tomorrow morning. Let me get the paperwork in order and I’ll let you know.”

  Bill Tatum stopped Marlin in the hall and said, “We’ll get Colby’s truck back to him this afternoon. Will you tell him that if you see him?”

  “Yeah, no problem.”

  “I’ll drive it out there myself. I feel like I should talk to him…”

  Marlin nodded.

  He knew exactly how the senior deputy felt, so he told a quick story about a poaching incident several years back. Marlin had questioned a local who, according to a witness, had shot a trophy buck across a neighbor’s fence. Marlin went to the suspect’s house, found blood in the bed of his truck, and proceeded to rake the guy over the coals. The suspect was adamant that he had shot a wild hog on his own property. Marlin asked where it was now. The man said he had given it to his cousin, who had just left for home—in Amarillo. How convenient. So Marlin collected blood samples from the truck and from the neighbor’s oat field. He sent them to the department’s forensic lab in San Marcos—and was later surprised to learn that the man had indeed shot a hog. “Mistakes happen sometimes,” Marlin told Tatum. “Not much you can do about it.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Tatum replied, and turned to leave.

  Marlin called after him. “You might want to call first. Last I heard, Phil was at a cattle auction in Uvalde.”

  “Uvalde?” Now Tatum was frowning. “They don’t have an auction down there.”

  Marlin wondered, Didn’t Phil say Uvalde? It was one of those moments when, in hindsight, something should have clicked. Warning bells and flashing lights should’ve gone off in Marlin’s head: Absolutely nothing about Phil’s message makes any sense! But right then, a reserve deputy named Homer Griggs appeared in the hallway with a man named Bubba Parker. Speak of the devil, Marlin thought. Bubba was the man who had been cleared by the lab a few years ago. Marlin nodded to Bubba as he filed past with a somber expression on his face.

  Red woke Lucy up and asked her a ques
tion.

  “It’s dynamite, that’s what I think it is,” Lucy replied, immediately sitting up in bed. Something in her voice had changed, and Red liked what he heard. She was grinning at him, too, like a teacher at her best pupil. He could see the respect in her eyes. Red could feel it: The old Lucy was back.

  “Damn right,” Red replied, cradling the stick in his gloved hand. No telling how old the dynamite was. Three years, at least, because that’s when it had come into Red’s possession.

  “Where the hell did you get it?”

  “Broke into a trailer where they was building a road,” Red said truthfully. “Had to sneak past two armed security guards,” he lied.

  “Oh, this is great,” she said, without that sarcastic tone she’d been using the night before. “I knew you’d come up with something. Clever guy like you, I never lost faith.”

  “Only thing is, we gotta figure out where to set it off.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I figger we can’t do it here. Neighbors’d get all uptight and probably call it in. We gotta go somewhere insulated. I got an idea, though.”

  Lucy patted one hand on the mattress. “So do I. Why don’t you come back to bed for a few minutes and we’ll figure out how we’re gonna do it.”

  Marlin had told Bill Tatum the poaching story because it was something that had always stuck in his mind. Over the years, that incident and others like it had taught him a valuable lesson: Don’t believe it until you can prove it.

  Blood in the bed of a truck? Might be from a pig, just like the man said. The same thing with a matching set of tire tracks. Unless you saw the truck driving through the mud yourself, you’d better find something else to back it up with.

  Witnesses, too, had to be carefully scrutinized. They were prone to exaggeration, embellishment, or distortion of the facts—occasionally on purpose, but usually on accident. A blue truck becomes a green truck. A hunter in camo turns out to be a man in overalls. They’ll swear he’s six-two when he’s really five-nine. Blond hair? Nope, it’s brown.

  And suspects? Well, that was always a real crapshoot. Sometimes the person who was nervous and fidgety was being honest, while the one who was lying to your face came across as the most trustworthy person you’d met all day.

  So, for Marlin, it always boiled down to that one simple statement: Don’t believe it until you can prove it. The problem was, it didn’t always matter what you believed or what you thought you could prove. Sometimes the facts were incredibly misleading, and the truth was more elusive than a deer in a cedar break. Marlin had learned that the hard way a couple of times in his career. And he was about to experience a harsh reminder.

  He was in the break room, filling a thermos with coffee, preparing to make the rounds through the county, when Homer Griggs came in. Homer was a decent guy and a fairly competent deputy, though he was a bit overeager at times.

  Marlin was curious, so he asked, “Hey, Homer, what’s going on with Bubba?”

  Homer was pulling two soft drinks out of the refrigerator. “Aw, he’s been giving his ex-wife a hard time.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Marlin found that surprising. Bubba had come across as a gentle, quiet man, even when Marlin had been in his face, demanding the truth.

  “Doing some pretty weird stuff, too,” Homer said, cocking an eyebrow.

  Marlin asked the question Homer wanted him to ask. “Like what?”

  Homer stepped in closer and lowered his voice. “Left one of them dildos on her front porch.”

  All Marlin could think was Bubba? Bubba did that? He didn’t seem the type to behave that way.

  “Been stealing some of her panties, too,” Homer continued. “But here’s where it really gets gross.” Homer glanced over his shoulder to make sure they still had the break room to themselves. “Just the other night, he…well, he played with himself outside her house, and he left evidence of that fact on her front door.”

  For a good five seconds, Marlin was too stunned to respond.

  Homer appeared pleased with himself for eliciting that sort of reaction.

  Finally, Marlin asked, “When did this happen?”

  “Lessee, it was Thursday night, because she called it in on Friday morning. But Bubba was fishing all day, so I’m just now talking to him.”

  Homer continued to rattle on, but Marlin wasn’t listening. He didn’t have room for it in his head. He was too busy processing what he’d just learned—and the conclusion he came to was this: Vance Scofield had allegedly done the same thing outside of Jenny Geiger’s apartment. But Vance was long dead, so he couldn’t have been the one outside this other woman’s house on Thursday night. Assuming the same man was responsible for both incidents, that meant Vance Scofield was responsible for neither. Somebody else had done it. Somebody had been harassing a woman that Vance Scofield was dating.

  Why would a man do that? Marlin wondered. Jealousy? Anger? Some kind of sexual psychosis he would never understand?

  “You mind if I talk to Bubba?” Marlin asked. Homer said something in reply, but Marlin didn’t hear that, either. He went straight into the interview room and closed the door behind him. Bubba Parker was seated at the table, and he looked at Marlin with confusion, no doubt wondering why the deputy had gone out and the game warden had come in.

  Marlin took a deep breath and tried to slow himself down. This was too important to rush. He pulled out a chair and sat down. “You been doing all right, Bubba?”

  “Been better. I don’t know what the hell’s going on.”

  Marlin nodded sympathetically. “Homer just told me what’s been happening over at your ex-wife’s place,” he said, “and I want to see if I can help figure it out. You okay with that?”

  “Heck yeah.”

  “All right, then. Do you know if your ex-wife—”

  “She’s not my ex yet. Her name’s Donnelle.”

  “Right, Donnelle—do you know if she locks the house up when she’s gone?”

  “Every time.”

  “You have any idea who else might’ve been inside her house lately?” The Thursday night incident had happened outside, but the panties had been taken from inside the house.

  “I know she’s started dating again,” Bubba said. “But I don’t know who.”

  Marlin realized he might have to call Donnelle to get more information, but he had a few more questions. “Y’all still talk to each other, right?”

  “I talk, she usually yells.”

  Marlin smiled for him. “Has she mentioned any repairmen coming over lately? Deliverymen? Anything like that?”

  “Nope.”

  Marlin was getting discouraged. “Can you think of anyone else who would have reason to be in her home?”

  “No, like I said, just the guy she’s been seeing. Oh, and her lawyer.”

  “Her lawyer?”

  “Yeah, for the divorce. He’s been over to the house a couple of times.”

  A buzz went through Marlin’s brain as he finally figured it out. He knew what the answer would be, but he asked the question anyway. “Who’s Donnelle’s lawyer, Bubba?”

  “Guy named David Pritchard.”

  He knew he was unraveling. The pressure was too great. There was a word for it that the cops used about serial killers. De-something. Deconstructing?

  He had woken up that morning with a strange compulsion to shave every hair off of his body. He’d been fighting it, but his willpower was weak. Besides, nobody would ever know. Nobody ever touched his body but him. He wouldn’t shave his head, of course, because people would wonder about that. But he could do all of the other parts. Legs. Chest. Groin. If he shaved his arms, he’d have to wear long-sleeved shirts. He was okay with that.

  29

  ONE STEP AT A TIME, he said to himself. Don’t jump to conclusions. Marlin walked to the dispatcher’s cubicle in the back of the main room. “Darrell, I need you to run this guy through TCIC.”

  “When do you need it?”

  “Can you d
o it now?”

  Marlin returned to his office and waited. He picked up the phone to buzz Tatum but slipped it back into its cradle. This case had taken so many left turns, he wanted to see what he had first.

  Three minutes later Darrell dropped a single page on Marlin’s desk.

  “Son of a bitch,” Marlin said. He could feel the pace of his heart quickening. David Pritchard had one felony on his record. Stalking. The charge was nine years old, out of Beaumont. The complainant was a woman named Cheryl Moreland. Marlin gave Darrell the woman’s date of birth and driver’s license number; thirty seconds later he had her married name—Cheryl Cooper—along with her current address and phone number.

  When Marlin dialed, a man answered.

  “Cheryl Cooper, please.”

  “She’s not here right now. Can I take a message?”

  Marlin identified himself and asked, “Is this her husband?”

  “Yeah, it is. Uh, what’s this about?”

  “Mr. Cooper, I need to talk to your wife about a man named David Pritchard.”

  Marlin could’ve gotten frostbite from the silence that followed. Then: “What has that sicko done now?”

  Marlin found Bill Tatum in his office.

  “Has Nicole left already?”

  Tatum glanced up, saw Marlin’s face, and said, “Are you okay?”

  “Where is she, Bill?”

  “She left about fifteen minutes ago.”

  “To Pritchard’s house?”

  “Yeah, on her way home.”

  “We’ve gotta get her on the radio.”

  “She’s driving her personal car. No radio.”

  “Call her cell phone.”

  “John, what’s going on?”

  “Bill, please, just call her cell phone.”

  Tatum dialed the phone and let it ring. “No answer. You know how bad the coverage is down there. Now what—”

  “Come with me. I’ll explain on the way.”

  Red strutted into the living room feeling like the biggest, baddest buck of the woods. He’d made it through a Merle Haggard, a Pam Tillis, and most of a Kevin Fowler song. Getting better every time.