The drive out from San Antonio was quiet. Kelly was absorbed in her own thoughts, and I tried to clear my head by focusing on the countryside. There were signs of fall everywhere. Central Texas didn’t get the dense fall color like New England. Here the signs were more subtle—barns full of hay, crops harvested, fields plowed under, and farmers selling pumpkins and gourds of all shapes and sizes along the highway. When I reached the turn to Helmut’s ranch, I unrolled my window. The smell of damp fresh-cut hay helped clear my head. The rain had stopped, and the sun was peeking through a line of clouds. The air felt cold and crisp like it always does after a norther blows through Central Texas, as if Mother Nature was apologizing for the damage created by the storm.
“You think he’s home?” Kelly asked when I stopped at the ranch gate and stared at the metal works. The repentant cowboy still knelt with his hat in his hand before the iron cross.
“Monday afternoon. If he’s not here, I don’t expect he’s gone very far. The livestock auction’s on Thursday. Sunday is church. Friday night’s the fish fry at the VFW. He might be at the grocery store, but other than that, where’s he gonna go?”
“Hard to believe people still live like that.”
“It’s not such a bad life when you think about it. You don’t have to worry about social media updates. All your friends and family already know where you are.”
Kelly laughed for the first time since our last polka dance on the Marktplatz. I didn’t know how many more times I would hear it. It wouldn’t be the first time a case had interfered with my love life.
I got out and opened the gate. Helmut’s pack of dogs started barking as soon as I rattled the chain. When I parked by the barn, they waited at the passenger door wagging their tails. Kelly had wrapped the uneaten half of her huge Chris Madrid’s cheeseburger in a napkin. The Lab mix took charge and pushed the two border collies out of the way.
“Sit,” she commanded when she got out. They obeyed immediately. She tore the burger into three equal parts and gave each dog a portion.
“You made three friends for life,” Helmut said as he came out of the barn.
I held out my hand. “Guten tag, Helmut.”
He shook hands with me then Kelly. There was apprehension on his grizzled face.
“We found Maya.”
His thin lips twitched.
“But she ran away again.”
He scratched the gray stubble on his chin with a leathery hand. His lips twitched again. He was like my grandpa and most of the Central Texas ranchers I knew. They took the good news and the bad with a stoic acceptance. It was something bred into the people in this part of the country, especially those families who had been here since the beginning when death and misfortune were constant companions.
“Want some coffee?” he said. “Elena’s gone to town. Won’t be back till suppertime. She’s does the grocery shopping on Monday and visits her sister to catch up on the gossip. Takes her six days to recover. You’re welcome to wait and have supper with us.”
We followed him inside and sat down at the hundred-year-old kitchen table while Helmut lit the gas burner on the stove and slid the metal coffee percolator over the flame.
“Just made this fresh for lunch,” he said.
“We found Maya staying at a house in San Antonio. We believe she was coerced into going there by a man named Russell Stevens, who she met at a party on the river.” I explained Russell’s connection with Mike Bauer and the events that had taken place so far.
Helmut absorbed the information. The only visible sign that he was upset was when he didn’t get up to get the percolator when it began to boil.
“I’ll get that,” Kelly said. She grabbed a dish towel and used it to pull the steaming pot off the fire, then poured black coffee into the three wide-mouth mugs. It smelled fresh and strong enough to float a horseshoe.
“She said y’all had a fight,” I said. “She doesn’t think you want her to come home.” I waited for him to respond.
Kelly put the cups of coffee in front of us, and we all sat staring at the steam rising to the ancient ceiling.
“Why would she say that, Helmut?”
“There’s milk in the icebox,” Helmut said. “Don’t use it myself. Never got the taste for it. Elena uses it because she says I make the coffee too strong.” After sixty years of marriage, they had worked out their differences. It was the same way when I was growing up. Grandpa made the coffee because he didn’t trust Grandma to make it strong enough. Grandma compromised and drank her coffee with milk.
Kelly found the small can of condensed milk in the refrigerator. She filled her cup to the brim and stirred until her beverage resembled chocolate milk.
“She eighteen, Helmut. If she doesn’t want to come home, there’s not much anybody can do about it,” I said.
The old man took a sip of coffee. His chair faced the front window, which looked out over the freshly mowed hayfield that stretched for a hundred acres down to the county road. He seemed to be looking beyond that, to Cross Mountain or Enchanted Rock. The country surrounding his ranch was as unchanging as he was.
“I told Maya that if she was going to live here with Elena and me, she had to abide by our rules. No smoking or drinking. No staying out after ten. And she had to go to church every Sunday. She also had a trunkload of clothes from California that made her look like a two-bit hussy.”
Kelly suppressed a smile. “She is a teenaged girl. The dress codes are different in California, Helmut.”
“That don’t mean she needs to show off her teats like a nanny goat for every young billy in the county to see. Excuse my language, but that’s how I see it.”
Helmut lived in the nineteenth century untouched by the modern world who obsessed over the Kardashians. Maya had grown up in Southern California, where nothing seemed real unless it showed up on Facebook or Instagram. I wasn’t sure they would ever get along.
“Did you tell her that?” I asked, trying to get to the bottom of Maya’s argument with her granddad.
“For her own good.” Helmut took another sip of coffee and turned his attention to me. “I raised one drunken daughter. I’ll not gonna do it again.”
“You told her to shape up or ship out?” I asked.
“That’s about the size of it.”
Kelly shook her head but didn’t say anything.
I had known and respected Helmut Geisler all my life. I remembered watching and listening to him tell stories about pioneer days in Gillespie County. But his tough love approach with Maya had backfired.
“Goddamnit, Helmut. What did you expect? She spent most of her life in Southern California doing whatever the hell she wanted. Did you think she was gonna settle down and live on a ranch ten miles from town just because you said so?”
Helmut raised both eyebrows. It was more facial expression than I’d ever seen him use. “Rules are rules,” he said.
“No, they aren’t. Not when it comes to your own family. Maya’s not a cowhand. You can’t toss her out of the bunkhouse because she don’t pull her own weight. Now she’s living with a damn drug dealer in a flophouse in San Antonio. Is that what you want?”
Helmut stood up and walked to the stove. His back was to us. I figured he would turn and point at the front door and tell us to leave. Ten years ago, he might have socked me in the jaw. Twenty years ago, he’d have whipped my butt with his belt for raising my voice to him. I wondered if I’d wasted my breath, if it was too late for the old man to change or accept any advice. He reminded me of the iron cowboy on his front gate, only his head wasn’t bowed and he wasn’t kneeling.
Then he took the percolator from the back burner and poured his cup full. He raised the cup to his lips and tested the temperature. Satisfied, he turned back to the kitchen table.
“Y’all want more coffee?” he said.
“I’m fine, thanks,” Kelly said.
A shaft of sunlight shot through the kitchen window, and dust
filtered through the light. One of the dogs barked.
“What have I done?” he asked. For the first time in his life he was completely unsure of his next move.
“Do you want her back?” I asked. “Even if it’s on her own terms?”
Helmut set his cup down and steadied himself with the back of the kitchen chair. “I’d give anything to have her back.”
Maybe it was his age or having to deal with his wife’s illness that had changed him, but the tough-as-nails rancher was willing to meet Maya halfway.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
We crossed the Palo Alto Creek and headed south toward Fredericksburg.
“What’re you thinking?” she asked.
“I was thinking about another kidnapped girl, not Maya or Anna Metzger, but Cynthia Ann Parker. She was the most famous. She was the model for that John Wayne movie.”
“The Searchers? I loved that movie,” she said.
“Her story happened like in the movie, only it took a lot longer to find her. Twenty-one years longer. Comanches slaughtered her family and took her captive when she was ten years old. She was adopted into the tribe and later bore three children. Her son became the last war chief of the Comanche tribe.”
“I never heard that.”
“When they did finally find her, she didn’t want to come home.”
“Did it happen near here?”
“It was closer to Dallas and thirty years before Anna Metzger’s ordeal.”
“In the movie, she seems happy to be home.”
“They kinda glossed that part over. When the real Cynthia Ann was reunited with her family, she no longer spoke their language. She tried to escape several times and return to her tribe and her two sons.”
We both looked out the window at the harsh Hill Country terrain full of cactus, mesquite, and live oak trees. If you avoided looking at the powerlines and barbed wire fences, it was easy to imagine Comanches riding on the horizon or cowboys chasing a herd of cattle up the limestone canyon. Not much had changed in a hundred and fifty years.
“Maybe living with her grandfather isn’t the best thing for Maya,” Kelly said.
“You’d rather have her stay with the Dragon?”
“She did make a choice.”
“You really think that?”
“You’re going after her, even if it means breaking the law?”
She knew my answer. I parked in front of the Fredericksburg police station. We had been to see Detective Ochoa and Helmut, and now I was going to extend an olive branch to local law enforcement. I knew it was a waste of time, but I was willing to make an effort. Besides, I was still waiting for Skeeter to gather the intel I needed to start plan B.
Kelly noticed that blood had seeped through the bandage on my chest and formed a red line under my shirt pocket. “You’re bleeding,” she said, alarmed. She reached across and unbuttoned my shirt. “Why didn’t you say something?” She found a paper towel in the console and wiped the blood from my skin.
“I didn’t notice,” I lied. All the activity the last two days was not good for the healing process. I couldn’t take sick leave. Maya was still out there. So was the Dragon.
“You should be home in bed,” she scolded. “When we’re finished here, I’m taking you back to the ranch. We can take the rest of the day off.”
We found Officer Zeller at this desk, busy with paperwork for a change. The remains of a barbecue sandwich rested in his inbox.
“Where do you get good barbecue in this town?” I asked.
“Frank’s,” he said. “It’s first rate.”
Kelly and I helped ourselves to a couple of folding chairs while Zeller finished his paperwork.
“Hear you been causin’ trouble,” he said, wiping his hands on a paper towel.
The good-ol’-boy law enforcement network was working overtime. I suspected Sergeant Vera might have spread the word. He was an old family friend, but he had ties to Fredericksburg, and he loved to gossip.
“I like to stir things up, especially when I’m on a case. Maya is still missing.”
“I heard you found her and let her go. We may not be as sophisticated as the SAPD, but we still follow the law. Maya is eighteen. She can do whatever she wants. The fact that she don’t wanna live with her granddaddy don’t surprise me in the least. Helmut is a cranky old bastard.”
“We just talked to Helmut. He agreed to work out a deal if Maya comes home,” Kelly said.
“Ha!” Zeller snorted a fake laugh. “I arrested his daughter Helen yesterday for public intoxication. She was wandering down Main Street cussing out the tourists after Oktoberfest. I called Geisler as a curtesy. You know what he told me?” He looked at Kelly and then me, waiting for an answer.
I shook my head and let him continue.
“He said he didn’t have a daughter. The drunk woman I had in jail could stay overnight and for the rest of the year for all he cared. Said that it would probably do her some good.”
“He might be right,” I said.
“The problem is, he told me the same thing before she left for California.”
“You arrested her ten years ago?”
“Several times. Not once did her father ever come bail her out.”
“Well, I think he realized his mistake with Maya. I just have to find her again and bring her home. That’s why I came down here. The person who took her works for Mike Bauer.”
“You’re talkin’ about Russell Stevens?”
“That’s right,” I said. “Maya was with him the night she disappeared. Lori Kostoch was going to tell me that right before she was killed.”
“If you’re accusing Russell of murder, you’re barking up the wrong tree. We have nothing to link him to the Kostoch girl. He’s got an alibi for the time of the killing.”
“Did Mike provide the alibi?”
“He’s an employee of Bauer Farms. We asked Mike about him. Our detectives interviewed him. Everything checks out.”
“Did you do a background check on Russell Stevens? The guy’s a gangster. Ask yourself why he’s in town? Why the hell does Mike need a gangster for head of security?”
“Trespassing is a problem,” Zeller said.
“Then what’s your theory on Lori’s murder?”
“We don’t have any leads yet. More than likely a drifter passing through town. We get our share of those. Or a migrant worker. We’ve had problems with them in the past. We’ll find him. You can be sure of that.”
I stood up. Kelly was watching me. I wanted to reach across the desk and grab Zeller by his greasy shirt collar, but I didn’t want to give him an excuse to toss me in a jail cell.
“Thanks for your help, Les.”
“We’ll catch Lori’s killer, and find Maya. Don’t y’all worry. If you get any specific info, be sure to let us know.”
“Sure thing, Les. I’ll give you a heads-up.”
Kelly followed me out to the parking lot. “That was different,” she said.
I opened the passenger side door for her. “What?” I pretended innocence.
“You know what.”
“Les isn’t a bad guy or a bad cop. He’s just a dumbass.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Kelly was quiet on the drive out to the ranch house. We both knew what was coming next. I had followed her advice and reached out to Detective Ochoa and Officer Zeller. Neither one was going to do Maya any good. The law enforcement arm of the legal system worked great once a crime had been committed. Every cop I knew had his favorite story of how he tracked down the bad guy and took him off the streets. I admired their hard work and dedication. I’d grown up listening to my dad tell the same kind of stories.
What they weren’t good at was preventing the crime before it happened. It wasn’t necessarily their fault. Once you joined the law enforcement community, you agreed to follow a set of strict rules. There was a science fiction mov
ie about a police division called pre-crime. The officers got information about a future crime from a trio of vegetative humans who lived in a pool of water in the basement of the headquarters building. The unit was shut down in the end because there was a flaw in the system. Humans have free will. We can choose to do something else besides commit a crime. That may be true on a theoretical level, and it made a good premise for a sci-fi movie, but Russell Stevens, aka the Dragon, was going to commit a crime. He was going to kill Maya or do something worse.
If Maya stayed with the Dragon, her life would be over before it had a chance to begin.
Kelly got out and opened the ranch gate. A pair of mallard ducks were enjoying the afternoon in the spring-fed pond before continuing their migration south for the winter.
“Why does it have to be you?” Kelly asked.
“Who else is gonna go after her, Helmut? Russell would kill him.”
“What if he kills you?”
We got out and made our way into the house. The evening temperature was forty-five and dropping quickly. It would get down to the low thirties by sunrise. I turned on the lights and took off my shirt. Blood had soaked through the bandage and the paper towel Kelly had tucked under my shirt.
“Will you at least give this hole in your chest a few more days to heal?” She helped me off with my shirt and guided me to a kitchen chair while she stripped the blood-crusted bandage from my chest.
“There’s no time. Russell knows we’re after Maya. He’ll move her. If that happens, we’ll never find her.”
She took a bottle of rubbing alcohol and used a dishtowel to clean my wound. The skin was red and felt hot and sore.
“You go up against the Dragon with this hole in your chest, you’ll lose.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“It’s the truth. Your mother could land a punch on your chest and you’d go down.” She tapped my chest, and I winced in pain. “You see,” she said, satisfied she’d made her point. She put the bloody towel in the sink and washed her hands with dish soap.
Second Chances Page 17