by Anna Castle
Jake inspected some fascinating shrubbery, while I gazed at the Law Enforcement Center, wondering if Ty had gone to bed already. They probably didn’t have much to do in jail in the evening, other than watch sports on TV. Would he be in the same cell block as Hank? That wouldn’t be pleasant.
Would Hank really get out on bail in the morning? That would be even less pleasant. I should be careful about locking my doors, going in as well as going out.
“Come on, Jakey. Back to work.”
True to my new resolution, I locked the back door behind me as we went in. I let Jake off the leash and went up to lock the front door too. All secure. Back in the kitchen, I poured dog food into Jake’s bowl and sat down to eat my equally simple fare.
That took ten minutes. Then I made a pot of coffee, put on some loud music, and settled down at my computer.
Ben’s photos added a few pieces to the puzzle, enough that a picture finally began to emerge. Diana had been fooling around with a man who could tempt her into a relapse. I’d bet the relapsing was actually a big part of his appeal. Getting sober and finding the right balance for your life is hard. Sometimes it feels like a never-ending, joyless drag. Working with Marion and spending evenings with Dare gave Diana a daily double-whammy of earnest rectitude.
So when Mr. Good Butt came calling with his bottle of bubbly, she must have jumped off the wagon with a shriek of relief.
I had two good candidates for the man at the springs: Carson Cameron Caine, the boy next door and her teenage heartthrob. Everyone described him as a solid citizen, married with kids, but politicians and infidelity went together like cream and sugar. They could’ve been skinny-dipping at Leaping Springs ever since she was sixteen, for all anyone might know.
But Carson had the least motive of anyone in this situation. Say Diana was his little bit of extra-marital naughty. A man wouldn’t get into a fight to defend his mistress. And even if he did, he certainly wouldn’t set things up to frame himself for the crime. Besides, he had an alibi.
Roger Bainbridge made a better candidate for the secret lover. He had been new to Lost Hat, but had made a beeline for the county belle, who coincidentally happened to be co-owner of the second largest ranch in the area. I hadn’t liked him, but tastes differ. Diana, like her mother, might long for a taste of the fine life. Roger, with his upscale vehicle and his fancy boots, might have made her offers she couldn’t resist. Maybe he’d taken her to Mexico for a weekend of luxury, buying that silver heart charm as a secret reminder.
If Roger was Mr. Good Butt, then his killer was mostly likely Dare. He’d caught them hanky-pankying out at the springs and lost his temper. Then he’d sent Diana away and covered up the death, framing Ty with Carson as a backup story. Dare had the skills and the smarts and the tightly wound temperament. He had the best alibi, but also the strongest motive: good, old-fashioned jealousy.
Jealously could easily have lit Ben Jernigan’s fuse. I would never say it to Tillie, but those photographs gave him a stronger motive, rather than exonerating him. They proved he’d been stalking Diana. Maybe Roger had caught him sneaking around and put the screws on, or maybe Roger had pushed too hard and Diana had struck back. Then Ben and Diana did the covering up together.
That was the only story in which the bracelet made any sense. I could see Diana being sentimental enough to make that burial offering, but why would any of the men do it?
The boots had value; so did the car. Burying a guy on top of the hill might have made more sense in the moonlight. Then once you got started, you might as well frame somebody else: Ty, Carson, take your pick. But that bracelet…
I clicked open the folder with the crime scene photographs and found one that showed all the charms. I cropped it so I wouldn’t have to look at anything yucky and zoomed in to study the heart, the capital D, the Texas, and the horse. Nothing new struck me.
Then I remembered the silver archer I’d found in the road outside the old stone house. I opened that picture beside the one with the bracelet. It looked about the same size as the others and there seemed to be a gap between two charms where it might have hung.
Good enough for me. Now, what did it mean?
Diana had been a horsewoman in her younger days, but I’d never heard anyone talk about archery. Nor had I seen evidence of the sport anywhere on the Lazy H. No bows, no arrows, no straw targets left rotting in a field.
Didn’t astrology have an archer in it somewhere? I googled “significance of archer” and discovered that it represented Sagittarius. So I googled “Sagittarius” and learned that these people loved freedom and disdained routine, might suffer illnesses of the muscles and thighs, and had birthdays between November 22 and December 21.
I googled “Roger Bainbridge birthday” and got nothing useful. It must be Dare’s or Diana’s birthday or surely he would have asked her about it. I hadn’t been here last year, so I would’ve missed the party. Or it could represent Mr. Good Butt. If asked, Diana might have laughed and said it was Malibu’s birthday or something completely unrelated.
Alcoholics do keep secrets; it’s part of the disease. They’re supposed to come clean, but hey—one step at a time.
I poked around in my folders of photographs, avoiding the ones of the burial site, while I pondered the archer in the dirt. I wondered if it still lay unnoticed in the road. I hoped so and quickly scribbled a note to mention it to Deputy Penateka. At the very least, it proved Diana had been up there since the last time it rained. We could safely bet she hadn’t been delivering deer corn. She had a key to the gate too—the same key Ty supposedly used to hide the car.
The car! Something about that set up nagged at me. I opened the folder of photos from the car scene and studied the thumbnails. I’d gotten one good establishing shot from the road, with stacks of boulders on either side of the car lying nose down in the gully.
I opened up more folders and browsed the thumbnail images. I found a clear shot of yellow crime scene tape wound around the trees where the car had been, taken from Mt. Keno two days ago, when I’d been up there with Nick. Now the rock pile rising behind the trees set my spider sense tingling. When had I seen that configuration before?
A thrill of excitement shimmied along my spine as the connection clicked into place. I’d taken shots of that rockscape from Mt. Keno on the morning we found Roger’s body. I opened the folder of pictures from my sunrise shoot and there it was: a photograph of the antelope creature standing at the edge of the road in front of Rattlesnake Terrace, the very same spot now liberally decorated with yellow tape.
I positioned the two images side by side. Sure enough, they were nearly identical in terms of location, which did not surprise me. I tended to favor certain framing devices, like curves in roads and distinctive rocks. The antelope stood slightly east of the car, but the pictures had substantial overlap. Anyone, including a judge and a jury, would recognize the similarities.
Except in Photo A we had a four-legged animal with tall curving horns, whereas in Photo B we had a strew of yellow crime scene tape. Most significantly, no big red Cadillac gleamed behind the beautiful beast. The roof of the car had been exposed to the sky. Dare pointed out that a helicopter would have spotted it right off; so would a camera with a 50mm lens on the top of Mt. Keno.
If the car had been there, I couldn’t have missed it. That red metal stood out from the gray-green brush like a cardinal in a flock of sparrows. That car had not been there last Wednesday morning and I had the pictures to prove it. Somebody had moved it, sometime during the past week—a week during which Ty had been snugly locked up in the county jail.
Ty could not have moved that car. And if he didn’t do that part, he didn’t do any of it. My guy was innocent, provably so.
I got up to stretch, walking over to peer out the window at the darkened courthouse square and the glow of the Law Enforcement Center beyond. I could walk over there right now and present my evidence to whichever lowly deputy got stuck with the night shift. Or Deputy Dare, who m
ight be whiling away his nights without Diana at the office.
I wished Dad would call about that cyber-crimes seminar. Could Dare have done both? How long did it take to get from here to Georgia? The nearest airport was in Kerrville, but he’d have to change planes in Houston or Dallas and probably again in Atlanta, with hours of driving on both ends. That added up to the better part of a day each way, in the middle of the work week too. But maybe he’d never even gone. He’d had a week to set up an alibi. He’d taken so many of those seminars, he probably had a good buddy in the training center who would vouch for him on his word alone.
I looked at the clock over the kitchen door—a little after nine, making it four in the morning in Germany. Four hours before I could decently call Dad. Then he’d have to wait six hours before he could decently call anyone in D.C. Ten hours to get that ball rolling. By then, it’d be seven a.m. here. The sheriff probably got to work by nine.
I wouldn’t show these pictures to anyone other than Sheriff Hopper, to be on the safe side. So I might as well go home and catch a few Zs. Once I got Ty out, the rest was the sheriff’s problem anyway. I would not personally help to put Tillie’s husband in jail.
“One more night, Jakey. Then our guy will be back and you’ll be sleeping on the floor again.”
Chapter 26
I got to the studio early and called my father first thing. He promised to do what he could about Dare’s alibi and congratulated me for producing solid evidence in Ty’s favor. “It’s out of your hands now, honey.”
That might be true, in point of fact, but it didn’t feel right. I wanted to know who had killed Roger Bainbridge and set my boyfriend up to take the fall. I itched to go out to that old stone house to scout around for more clues, in case Hank made bail.
I drummed my fingers lightly on the keyboard, wondering if I dared to go or if it would even be worth the risk. Then the front door opened and Perline came in. She closed the door firmly behind her and leaned against it with her hand on the knob, thrusting her head forward to project her whisper across the room. “I know who killed Roger!”
Her eyes were early-morning puffy, but brightened by green shadow and she’d swept her hennaed hair into a snug chignon on the top of her head.
“Me too,” I said, walking up to the front counter.
“You do not!”
“I figured it out last night. It has to be either Dare or Ben Jernigan.”
She folded her arms across her chest and smirked at me. “No and no. I was right all along. Carson Caine did it.”
“He has an alibi.”
“Unlike your favorite, Dare? I knew it had to be Carson. Mr. Slippery Sly. I’ve never trusted him. So I called my friend Rhonda who works at the Riverhill Country Club. That one where Carson supposedly spent the night last Wednesday?”
“He wasn’t there?”
She snapped her mouth closed. “Do you want to hear it or don’t you?”
“I’m sorry. Please go on.”
“Well, I called Rhonda and she said she worked that Wednesday night and Mr. Big Shot was nowhere to be seen. She would’ve remembered him too. He’s a big tipper, which is good, but he always brings in an international crowd, if you know what I mean.”
I shook my head and she giggled. “Roman hands and Russian fingers?”
I groaned. I couldn’t take stale chestnuts this early in the morning.
She clucked her tongue at my lack of humor. “Anyway, Rhonda called a friend who works days, and she said he wasn’t there Thursday morning for breakfast either. So his alibi is a crock, which means he lied about it, which means he must be guilty.” She nodded once to rest her case.
“He could have been lying for some other reason,” I said, not believing it, but needing time to digest the news. “Surely Sheriff Hopper would have had someone check that alibi.”
“Nothing sure about it,” Perline said. “They probably called that San Antonio feller and asked him if he had dinner with Carson Caine. Those guys always stick up for each other. He would have said yes without even thinking.”
“I believe that. But what about the stuff in the car and the phone call? Why would Carson make it look like someone had tried to frame him?”
“Mr. Slippery Sly? He would think that was all kinds of funny, making it look like Ty was trying to make it look like he did it. That’s exactly Carson’s style.”
I remembered the toys in his office and the undercurrents in the conversation between him and Ty at the jail. It kind of made sense, in a twisted way.
“Okay. I can kind of see that. And I can believe he and Diana were having an affair. He was her oldest old flame, after all, and I have proof she had been up to that old stone house recently.” I told her about the archer charm, but not about Ben’s photos. I might as well send them to the Long County Communicator for everyone to enjoy as let Perline see them. “But why would he kill Roger?”
“Carson’s running for commissioner. An affair would ruin that little plan. Maybe Roger found out about it. What do you think a guy like that would do with such a tasty little tidbit?” She glanced up at the clock. “And now I got to get to work. There’s hungry people out there wanting their breakfasts.”
And people would soon be arriving at the courthouse for Hank’s arraignment. If they let him out on bail, he’d go flush that stone house out with a fire hose, destroying any evidence of what had happened to Roger along with his meth lab.
I needed to get out there with my camera while everyone involved was at court. I caught Perline’s arm as she opened the door. “Don’t tell anybody else about this yet. Let me talk to the sheriff first. We don’t want Carson to get a head start.”
She tossed her head. “I think I know when to hold my tongue.”
* * *
She wouldn’t be able to hold it for long. I needed to roll, to be back before Hank’s arraignment ended.
I went to the bathroom and braided my hair, good and tight so it wouldn’t get in my way. Then I went into the kitchen to fill Jake’s water bowl and make sure the coffeepot was off. I unlocked the equipment closet and got out my camera. Then the doorbell jangled again.
“Penny?”
Marion stood beside the reception counter, dressed for work in one of her sensible navy pantsuits. “You shouldn’t leave the front unattended like this.”
“I’m on my way out, Marion.” I got my wallet from my backpack and put it in the side pocket of my pants. I slung my camera around my neck. “What’s up? I’m in kind of a hurry.”
“Where are you going?”
Oops. “Nowhere. Outside, here and there. Morning light is best.”
She rolled her eyes at me, exasperated. “I just talked to Perline at the cafe. She told me about Carson.”
“No way! She said she wouldn’t tell anybody yet.”
“Of course that doesn’t mean me. You’re going out there right now, aren’t you? To snoop around that old house with your camera.”
I growled under my breath. She could not talk me out of this. “Somebody has to. The deputies need a warrant, which they’re not going to get, because Carson’s father and the judge are old fishing buddies.”
“I know. You should go.”
That stopped me cold. “You’re not going to scold me about minding my own business and letting the authorities do their jobs?”
“Sometimes the authorities need a little nudging. Hap’s a good man and a fine sheriff in the normal run of things, but he gives too much weight to family connections.”
“He won’t consider Carson because he’s one of the almighty Caines.”
“The Caines are a fixture around here, like the courthouse or the old bank building. Carson has an important position in this county.”
“Well, that’s the motive, isn’t it? Roger could have wrecked his marriage and destroyed his political career.” I explained the new theory, keeping it short.
When I finished, she shook her head. “It’s thin, but you know, the trickery sounds like C
arson. The Caines show a bright face in public, but behind those iron gates, they’ve never been a happy family. Carson’s grandfather was a mean old man. I didn’t know him well, but I always had the feeling he ruled with a heavy hand. When the penalties are severe, children learn to be evasive and to blame others before blame can fall on them.”
“Nick said meth can make people do all kinds of crazy stuff. Maybe that explains some of the parts that don’t make sense, like the bracelet.”
“Maybe so,” Marion said. “Maybe they had their own logic at the time. But to my mind, the archer charm clinches it. Carson was born on Thanksgiving Day, you know.”
“Are you sure?”
“Oh, yes. It’s part of his campaign. Didn’t you look at his website?”
I slapped myself on the forehead. I’d stopped too soon: one Google shy of the truth.
Marion rolled her eyes. “Well, there’s still time to set things right.” She glanced up at the clock. “Barely. Do you need me to watch your studio while you’re gone?”
She floored me again. That made twice in five minutes. I laughed and gave her a peck on the cheek. “Marion, you are my absolute very most favorite second cousin twice removed.”
She pushed me away, but with a big smile on her face. “Once, Penny. Once removed.”
I told her about the evidence in the photographs on my computer, patted Jake, went out the back door, and revved up the Hulk.
The race was on.
Chapter 27
I stopped by the house to put my boots on and then swung past the bank for a final check. The Land Rover with the 3C logo was parked right next to the back door.
All clear.
I drove out to Ty’s ranch, parked in front of the gate at the southeast pasture, and hiked across the grass. I climbed over the barbed wire fence at the post junction. It was easier without a bull snorting up my shorts.