Texas Outlaw

by James Patterson

  Ariana looks at the glass door to make sure no one is close enough to the conference room to hear us talking.

  “I couldn’t get the chief to declare this a murder investigation,” she says. “She was already cremated before John Grady finally gave in and agreed to call you guys.”

  I nod, letting her off the hook. Obviously she’s been alone in this from the start. I want her to know I’m here to help. And in a situation like this, with a seemingly obvious cause of death, it’s possible they would have skipped the autopsy entirely. So we should consider ourselves lucky to have any information at all.

  “I think the examiner hung on to some blood samples,” she says.

  “So why do you think this wasn’t an accidental death?” I say, sitting back in my chair and giving Ariana my full attention. “Aside from the fact that she never would have knowingly eaten anything with peanuts, what’s so suspicious?”

  Again, she looks toward the door as if she’s afraid someone might be listening.

  “Let’s drive out to the crime scene,” she says. “I’ll tell you on the way.”

  Chapter 17

  I OFFER TO drive, and we climb into my truck. For a second, I almost go around to the passenger side and open the door for Ariana. But I wouldn’t think to do that for a male cop, so I don’t do it for her.

  She tells me where to turn, and within a minute of leaving the station, we’re heading out of town on a curvy back road. The landscape is quite pretty. Coming from Waco, which is much greener, I appreciate these rolling brown hills, rocky buttes, and zigzagging slot canyons. There is a beauty to the barrenness.

  A few minutes out of town, Ariana says that she found Susan Snyder’s body the morning after she died.

  “What were you doing at her house?” I ask. “Were you friends?”

  “Not really.”

  She seems nervous to go forward with what else she wants to say. Sometimes silence is the best motivator, so I remain quiet.

  “I went to her house because she’d called me the day before,” Ariana says. “She said she had something important to tell me. She wanted to talk to me about a crime. I’m sure of it.”

  “I see,” I say. “You get a call that says she’s got something important to tell you. Then she winds up dead. I’d be suspicious, too.”

  Susan Snyder owned a nice ranch-style house that we can see from a long way off. We pull into the gravel driveway, and Ariana takes me inside and shows me around. She points to where the body was lying on the floor and where the used EpiPen had been left, but there isn’t much else she can tell me. If this had been declared a crime scene from the start, forensic investigators could have examined the house from top to bottom, looking for fingerprints, DNA, anything suspicious. But there have been dozens of people in and out of the house since then, obliterating the evidence. Her family came in from Florida and hosted a memorial service in the house.

  Ordinarily in a murder case you look at the evidence on the scene first. And it can usually tell you a lot. But we’ve got nothing to go on this time.

  “The family said they’d return in a few weeks to take care of the house,” Ariana says. “Clear out all the stuff. Put it on the market. They were upset, as you might imagine. I don’t think they were in any shape to go through her things.”

  We look in Susan Snyder’s office, which contains a desk with two large-screen computer monitors. Inside a filing cabinet are loads of paperwork—town council agendas, news clippings, various reports from county agencies. There are also files and files of work-related information: invoices for clients, folders full of graphic design samples, notes about design projects, etc. And that’s just what’s been printed—I’m sure the computer itself has a whole world of information on it.

  “It will take forever to go through all this stuff,” she says.

  “Box it up,” I say. “We don’t know what’s going to be relevant.”

  We fill file boxes and evidence bags with anything that seems like it might be useful later. I have a feeling that most of what we’re doing is a waste of time, but this is part of the job. You have to be thorough.

  When we’re finished, we sit on the tailgate of my truck under the shade of a mesquite tree. The temperature is blazing hot, but the air lacks the oppressive humidity I’m used to in Central Texas. I take a couple of warm bottles of Ozarka spring water from the cab, and we each drink one. Ariana’s demeanor seems friendlier now. More relaxed. I think she’s just happy to be doing something on this investigation. Anything at all.

  “What I don’t get is why the chief wouldn’t declare this a murder investigation,” I say to her. “Or at least take a good close look before ruling that out. The phone call she made to you seems like enough cause to raise suspicions.”

  Ariana fixes me with her big brown eyes. She looks vulnerable right now, scared.

  “There’s something else,” she says.

  I can tell she’s deliberating whether to trust me. Again, I let silence do its magic.

  “The truth is,” she says finally, “I never told the chief she called me. He doesn’t know that part.”

  “What?”

  “That was the other part of what Susan told me,” Ariana says. “She said she had something important she needed to talk to me about. And she said don’t tell the chief. Her exact words were ‘I’m not sure he can be trusted.’”

  Chapter 18

  WHEN WE GET back to the police station, I can feel Ariana’s nervousness. Am I going to tell Harris? Am I going to report him to my higher-ups?

  A big part of what the Texas Ranger Division does is investigate instances of suspected corruption of public officials. Ariana could have contacted us and asked us to look into Harris, but instead she gave him the benefit of the doubt and asked him to be the one to call for help. That suggests to me that she still believes—or wants to believe—that Harris is trustworthy. So I want to tread carefully here. I don’t want to let him know I’m suspicious of him, but it’s also too soon to open a full-fledged investigation of him.

  “Got the case solved yet?” the chief says, smirking at the evidence boxes we’re bringing into the station.

  “Looks like it’s probably just an accidental allergic reaction,” I say, taking a suggestive tone. “We’re just going to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s. I should be out of here in a couple of days. You’ve got a zealous detective over there.” I nod toward Ariana. “She wants to be thorough.”

  He laughs, enjoying the condescending way I’m talking about Ariana. This seems to satisfy him, and he heads out the door.

  Ariana looks at me and mouths the words, Thank you.

  I give her a nod, and then I catch Harris walking back into the station.

  “I forgot to tell you,” he says, “I told the local newspaper guy you’re helping us out with something. I didn’t want to say what until I okayed it with you.”

  I appreciate the chief deferring to me. He might not have wanted me here—and maybe he can’t be trusted—but so far he hasn’t given me any resistance.

  “Can you put him off for a while?” I say. “I don’t want to talk to him if I can help it.”

  “Will do,” Harris says. “But I know this guy—he’s going to keep calling and calling until he’s able to interview you.”

  “If you can stall him for a few days,” I say, “maybe we’ll have this whole thing wrapped up by then.”

  I’m stalling, too. It might not hurt to do an interview with the local newsman—the media could be used to our advantage—but I still need to learn more before I say anything.

  When the chief is gone, Ariana and I discuss our plan of attack for the next day. Susan Snyder had recently gone on dates with two men—Ariana had asked around enough to find this out—and one date was on the same night she died. We’ll try to interview both men tomorrow.

  Before we call it a day, I ask Ariana why the chief finally gave in and agreed to call the Rangers.

  “Did you threaten to quit
?”

  She says she did, but that isn’t what made the difference.

  “He wouldn’t have cared if I’d resigned,” she says. “I threatened to go before the town council and tell everyone why I was resigning. Then I’d go straight to Tom Aaron, the editor of the paper, and I’d tell him. He thought about it for about twenty-four hours and then decided to call the Rangers.”

  “We’ll figure this thing out,” I tell her, but truthfully I don’t feel any closer to understanding what’s going on than I did yesterday. “Good work today,” I add as we head to the door.

  I want her to know the condescension I used in front of Harris was just an act.

  “Thanks for your discretion,” she says.

  I think about asking Ariana to join me for dinner at one of the restaurants in town—not a date, just two colleagues who both have to eat. But I figure it’s probably best not to blur any lines in our relationship. Besides, I’m not sure she would accept the invitation.

  We can work together without being friends, her demeanor says.

  Maybe that’s a good thing. I do have a girlfriend, after all.

  Chapter 19

  AFTER I EAT a quick plate of tacos at Rosalia’s, I head back to the motel as the sun is going down. I try to call Willow but don’t get an answer. I grab my guitar and sit on the porch outside my room and start plucking at the strings. I place on a chair in front of me a little notebook of songs, with lyrics and chords. I know a lot of songs by heart, but this helps me practice new ones.

  My guitar is a Fender acoustic-electric, which lets me practice quietly by myself, but it can also be plugged into an amp if I ever have the occasion to play on a stage, which hasn’t happened since high school. It’s a nice intermediate guitar, a step up from a beginner’s instrument but not quite what a pro would use. Willow has offered to buy me a fancier, more expensive guitar, but this one suits my needs. And it’s a pretty instrument, with a body made of laminated spruce and basswood, and a neck of mahogany.

  One of the great things about being with Willow is playing together. I sang and played guitar in a band in high school, but I wasn’t ever good enough to take a shot at making a career of it. It was just fun. Willow and I will sit on the porch of the house and play and sing duets. Her talent blows me out of the water, but she humors me and seems to have a good time. Playing tonight makes me miss Willow even more.

  I practice playing the Kenny Chesney song “Better Boat.” It’s a mellow song—just an acoustic guitar and vocals—about a guy riding the waves of life, with a guitar part that’s just tricky enough to be a challenge for an amateur like me. On Kenny Chesney’s version, Mindy Smith sings backing vocals, so it’s a fun song for me to do with Willow.

  Tonight, though, the lyrics make my mood worsen. The words suggest the narrator is starting over after a significant loss. He has friends, but he’s mostly alone. I can’t help but think of myself, starting over after Anne’s death and all the events surrounding it. I’ve got friends and even a girlfriend, but here I am, alone on the porch of an empty motel in a town where I have no friends.

  I try to switch gears and play Cole Swindell’s “Breakup in the End.” This is another slow song, another combination of vocals and acoustic guitar. But this one’s about a guy ruminating about the girl who got away. He’d go back and do it all over again, even though he knows they break up in the end.

  I can’t help but think of Willow. Are we going to break up in the end?

  When I’ve managed to put myself in a thoroughly bad mood, I set down the guitar and sit back in the silence. The sun has gone down, and I watch the cars pass under the streetlights and let my mind wander.

  I notice a black truck with white lettering painted on the door pass by the motel. I swear the same truck passed a few minutes ago. I pick up my guitar and play, but this time I only pretend to look at my notebook. Really, I’ve got my eyes on the street. Someone is watching me.

  A few minutes later, the truck passes again from the other direction. It slows down in front of the motel. Because I took the room farthest from the road, I can’t make out the words on the door. The reflection of a streetlight makes it impossible to see in the window.

  When it passes a third time, I’m ready. I pretend to be looking at my phone, like I’m sending a text, and I snap a series of photos. Once the truck is gone, I scroll through the images, trying to find the best one, and when I do, I use my fingers to zoom in on the words on the door.

  McCormack Oil

  Next to the stenciled words is an illustration of an oil derrick.

  I already solved the mystery of who Carson McCormack is, but now I’ve got a new question.

  Why does he have someone keeping an eye on me?

  Chapter 20

  “DID YOU EVER have sex with Susan Snyder?”

  The guy sitting in front of me, Alex Hartley, looks stunned at my question. We’ve been interviewing him for an hour, and so far we’ve played pretty nice, but now I want to make him uncomfortable.

  “Do I really have to answer that?”

  “The more clearly we understand your relationship with Susan,” Ariana says, “the easier it will be to clear you from our investigation.”

  Alex told us that he dated Susan on and off for the better part of six months. Nothing serious. Nothing exclusive. Sometimes they’d go a month or six weeks without seeing each other. To me, that doesn’t sound like two people who want to be dating. It sounds like two people who hook up every once in a while.

  Still, he seems genuinely upset by her death. She wasn’t his girlfriend, but he liked her. He came into the office today willingly. At one point, describing how he heard the news of her death, his voice became choked and I thought he might cry.

  Alex is the football coach at the high school, where he teaches woodworking. He’s a good-looking guy, forty years old. He has a solid alibi for the night Susan Snyder died. He was in El Paso at a convention for football coaches and gave us about a dozen names of people who could verify he was there. But in a case like this, that doesn’t free him from suspicion. Someone could have given her food with peanuts in it before going out of town.

  “All right, look,” the coach says. “I’ll tell you if you turn that off.” He gestures to the camera we’ve set up to record the interviews.

  I give Ariana a nod, and she turns off the recorder.

  “I don’t want a wife. Susan didn’t want a husband. We both liked being single. But we both liked having sex every now and then. We’re human. This town’s too small to use Tinder. We had a nice little arrangement. Nothing serious.”

  He says that people don’t care if the football coach sleeps around, but a town councilwoman?

  “If it gets out and people call her a slut, I’m going to feel bad. I don’t want to smear anyone’s name.”

  We question him for a while longer, with the camera back on, but he honestly doesn’t seem like our guy. I can’t figure out what he’d gain by poisoning Susan Snyder. He’s right—it wouldn’t hurt his reputation one bit if people found out he was sleeping with her. In fact, I suspect everyone already knew.

  As we’re walking Alex Hartley out the door, I spot a black truck in the parking lot with the same lettering on the door as the one I saw last night.

  A man in jeans and a blue work shirt steps out and heads our way.

  “I’m Skip Barnes,” he says to us. “Chief said you wanted to talk to me.”

  Skip Barnes—the other name on our suspects list. He’d been dating Susan Snyder on and off, too. He’s the one who went out with her the night before she died.

  We bring him into the conference room, the closest thing this police station has to an interrogation room. We ask if we can record the interview, and he consents.

  He looks nervous, a sharp contrast to the football coach. Skip fidgets and asks if he can smoke a cigarette. When we tell him he can’t, he squirms in his seat even more. We go through some softball questions—how did they meet, how long had they been da
ting—and we get pretty much the same impression as we did from Alex Hartley. They’d dated for a few months, going out every couple of weeks.

  “Did you ask her out or did she ask you?” I say.

  “I asked her,” he says. “Look, she’s got a reputation. She don’t go out with every guy who asks. But if she thinks you’re cute or whatever, she’ll go out with you. I figured it was worth a shot, and lo and behold, she said yes.”

  Skip is more forthcoming with information about their sex life.

  “Hell yeah, we had sex,” he says. “That was the point. She didn’t want nothing serious. She just wanted a good fuck every now and then.”

  It’s hard to understand what Susan Snyder would have seen in the guy. He wasn’t the good-looking jock type that Alex was. He was wiry, with a ruddy complexion and greasy hair. His teeth were yellow from smoking.

  “Most of the time,” he says, “we just skipped dinner and met up at her house.”

  He seems looser now, bragging about his sexual exploits.

  “But you went out to dinner the night she died,” I say. “Her treat.”

  “Was it?”

  “We got the receipt from the restaurant.”

  “Yeah, I guess she paid.”

  “And did you go back to her house that night?”

  “No.”

  “But you said that was the whole point. ‘She just wanted a good fuck every now and then.’ That’s what you said. But on this night, you had a romantic dinner—crab legs, steak, wine, a nice dessert. All that and no sex afterward?”

  Skip twists in his seat like a fish at the end of a hook. I can’t tell exactly what he’s hiding, but there’s something he doesn’t want us to know.

  Chapter 21

  “I DIDN’T FEEL like it,” Skip says.

  “You didn’t feel like it?” I say. “What man doesn’t want to have sex with an attractive woman?”