by Jane Graves
“Must have been the date his divorce was final.”
“And I’ll bet you anything that Reichert knew about him, and that’s why he had me follow Shannon.” Then Val had another thought. “Wait a minute. If Shannon was so hot after this guy, then why did she pick you up the night of the murder?”
“I don’t know. Either the relationship fizzled quickly, or she was cheating on him, too.”
“Huh?”
“I doubt one man was enough for Shannon. To tell you the truth, I doubt five men would have been enough for her.”
Val scanned the rest of the file names. “I don’t see any more drink names that are suspect.”
Well, nothing sexually suspect, anyway. But she had to wonder about any drink called Mexican Death Wish. She clicked. Equal parts tequila and Southern Comfort. Shake and swallow. Yuck.
Alex shifted in his seat, clearly feeling as stiff as she was after four hours in the car. “Okay. This is good. We know for a fact that Shannon was having an affair, and that she wanted a divorce, and that she was going to be fighting with Reichert over the settlement. That’s a pretty strong motive for murder on his part.”
Val clicked around for a few more minutes, seeing nothing but program files. Then she saw “My Pictures.” She clicked it, and her heart skipped when she saw three file names: AD1, AD2, and AD3.
“Here’s something,” Val said. “She has some image files.” She clicked the first one, and she couldn’t believe what came on the screen.
“My God,” Val said.
“What?”
“Pull over.”
Alex pulled over onto the shoulder of the road and put the van in park. Val turned the computer around so he could see the screen. His eyes widened with surprise.
“A picture of me?” he said.
Val couldn’t believe it. That was exactly what it was.
She clicked the other two. More shots of Alex. They all looked candid, as if he didn’t even know they were being taken. When she looked closer, she could see where he’d been at the time—in the parking lot of the Blue Onion.
“I don’t get this,” Val said. “Why would Shannon have pictures of you?”
“I have no idea.”
“She knew your name, too. AD1, AD2, and AD3.” Val shook her head. “This is so weird. Do you hang out at the Blue Onion a lot?”
“More than I should.” He continued to stare at the picture on the screen. “Looks like it was no accident that Shannon picked me up that night.”
“I don’t think so, either. She was there for a good hour and a half before you showed up. She turned down every other man who tried to buy her a drink and came straight for you.” Val flipped back and forth from one picture to another. “It’s almost like she was stalking you. Took pictures of you on the sly, then decided to go after you that night.”
“Shannon was a little sex-crazed. Obsessive. I wouldn’t put that past her.”
“I don’t know. Shannon didn’t strike me as the type who’d obsess over a man before she went after him. She seemed like the type who would just walk right over and throw herself at the first one who looked good to her.”
“I can’t imagine what else it would be,” Alex said.
“Well, keep thinking. We have letters that say she was obsessing over a guy who’s on the verge of divorce, and photos that say she was obsessing over you. There has to be some connection we’re missing.”
Alex pulled the van back onto the state highway and they traveled for two more hours, swinging north around San Antonio, passing through Kerrville, then heading farther west. They stopped again for gas at a station similar to the first one they’d gone to. Val gave him a dirty look before getting out and heading to the bathroom. When she returned a few minutes later, that dirty look had morphed into one of total disgust.
“That’s it,” she said, slamming the door. “Next time I’m peeing in the bushes.”
“What’s the matter?” Alex asked.
“Damn roaches,” she muttered. “I’ve seen creatures in horror movies that weren’t as grotesque as what I just saw in that bathroom.”
He shook his head. “You and my sister Sandy. She used to flip out over bugs, too.”
“So did you squash them for her?”
“Hell, no,” he said, pulling the van back out onto the highway. “I terrorized her with them.”
“That’s awful!”
“Actually, when you’re about thirteen years old, it’s pretty damn funny.”
“Yeah, right.” Then Val’s eyes widened, as if a truly unspeakable thought had just occurred to her. “I’m warning you, Alex. If you ever come near me with one of those disgusting things, forget shooting the bug. I’m shooting you.”
He grinned. “You’re giving me all kinds of ideas.”
“Alex!”
“Come on, Val. You’ve got nothing to worry about. I quit scaring girls with bugs … what? Two or three years ago?”
Val rolled her eyes. “You told me how much crap your family gives you. Sounds like you dish out plenty yourself.”
“Only in self-defense. Or retaliation.” He paused. “Okay. Sometimes just for the hell of it.”
“From what Dave said, you must have lots of relatives to choose from.”
“Two brothers and a sister. Aunts, uncles, a couple of cousins. Grandparents. My parents are both dead.”
“I’m sorry. Recently?”
“It’s been a while. My mother died from cancer when I was ten. My father was killed in the line of duty.”
“Your father was a cop?”
“Yeah. Shot during a routine traffic stop about ten years ago.”
“That’s terrible.”
“It’s the chance a cop takes every day. The Tolosa Police Department lost one of its best, believe me.”
“So you and Dave followed in Dad’s footsteps.”
“John, too. All three of us are cops. So is my cousin’s wife, Brenda.”
“I sense a family tradition.”
“You don’t know the half of it. It’s what my father was, and my father’s father. I can’t imagine anything else.”
“So you’ve lived in Tolosa all your life?”
“Yeah.”
“Where did you go to high school?”
“Tolosa South.”
“Let’s see … captain of the football team. Am I right?”
Alex gave her a wry look. “How’d you know?”
“Come on, Alex. It’s written all over you. What position did you play?”
“Running back.”
“Bet you played basketball, too.”
“Yeah. My team won the state championship my senior year.”
“Baseball, too, I’m sure. I’ll bet you could jack a ball right out of the park.”
“I think I still hold the single-season home-run record.”
“Track?”
“Decathlon. Silver medal, Junior Olympics.”
“Wow. What happened to the gold?”
“I had an off day.”
“Swimming?”
“Nope. No swim team.”
“Or you’d have probably mastered that, too.”
He smiled a little. “Probably.”
“The ultimate jock. Gee, who would have thought it?”
“What about you, Val? Who were you in high school?”
“Me? Let’s see. I was the smart but weird girl in the back of the class with the extremely bad attitude who wanted to be anywhere else, and very often was.” She gave him a humorless laugh. “I spent a lot of time looking at guys like you, wondering what you saw in those brainless, big-breasted cheerleaders.”
“You just summed it up. Big breasts, no brains. Easy score. This is going to come as a shock to you, but teenage boys think about sex a whole lot more than they think about having meaningful conversations.”
“But they sure didn’t think about doing it with girls with orange hair.”
“You had orange hair?”
“Whe
n it wasn’t blue. My mother and stepfather hated it.”
“Which is why you did it.”
“Oh, yeah. It was why I did a lot of stupid things.”
“So your home life wasn’t the best.”
She shrugged. “It was the same old story you’ve heard a million times. My mother married a man I hated. I rebelled; they flipped out. And so it goes.”
“Where was your real father?”
“He left when I was two. Never came back.”
“Why did you hate your stepfather?”
“It came with the job.” She looked away. “Aren’t all stepfathers evil?”
He was on the verge of asking her to elaborate on that, because clearly there was more to the story than what she was telling him. Then he decided that he really didn’t want to know. The last thing he needed was to get emotionally tangled up with Val when he had a murder accusation hanging over his own head.
Still, he was curious.
He glanced over at her to see her staring out the passenger window, and he couldn’t help wondering what she was thinking. Maybe someday he’d find out. But for now, he needed to focus his attention on keeping himself out of prison.
Where Val was concerned, though, he knew that was going to be easier said than done.
The landscape grew drearier the farther west they went, and Val swore she’d never seen so much of nothing in her entire life. The two-lane highway was practically deserted. The searing Texas sun seemed to melt the drab landscape into a dreary conglomerate of scraggly trees, sparse grass, and rocky hillsides. Most of the barbed-wire fences were so dilapidated that cattle seemed to be staying within their boundaries by general consent alone.
“We’re getting close,” Alex said. “We’re only about thirty miles from the ranch.”
Val checked her watch. It was nearly six o’clock. “Can we pick up a bite of real food somewhere?”
“Maybe. If we can find a place. But it doesn’t look like there’s much out here.”
Val grabbed the map. “Look,” she said. “We’re only a few miles from Tinsdale. Maybe there will be someplace to eat there.”
Alex glanced over at the map. “I wouldn’t hold out a lot of hope. It seems to be a pretty tiny town.”
“Alex! Look out!”
He jerked his gaze back to the road, immediately swerving hard to the right. He missed the armadillo that had wandered across their path, but when he tried to yank the steering wheel back, he wasn’t fast enough. The van plowed over a cluster of rocks on the shoulder of the road, bouncing Val hard against her shoulder belt.
Alex hit the brakes, slowing the van, and Val cringed when she felt the telltale kathump, kathump of a blown-out tire. He brought the van to a halt on the shoulder, yanked the door open, and walked around to the right front tire of the vehicle. Val did the same. She didn’t even have to look at the tire, though. The angle the van was sitting at told the whole story.
Alex turned his gaze to meet hers. “Why did you yell at me while I was driving?”
“Because you were going to hit that armadillo.”
“Val? Which would you rather have? One more armadillo as roadkill, or this van as roadkill?”
She got the point. “Okay. I’m sorry. I didn’t think. I just—”
He held up his palm. “Never mind. It’s okay.”
“It is?”
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Yes. Of course. Everything is going to be just fine.” He turned and walked toward the rear of the van. “I’ll just get the spare, change the tire, and then we’ll be back on the road again.”
Spare?
Val felt her stomach drop all the way down to the parched red earth. “Uh … Alex …”
He turned back.
“There’s a little problem.”
He walked slowly back toward her, his calm, cool demeanor shifting toward tense, tight, and angry.
“What problem?”
“I had a flat a couple of years ago. It ruined the tire, and I put the spare on, but as far as replacing it—”
His eyebrows flew up. “Are you telling me you don’t have a spare tire?”
She shrugged helplessly.
Alex ran his hand through his hair. “I don’t believe this,” he said, his voice escalating. “I just don’t believe—”
“Before you get all wound up to chew me out, it’s not going to do you any good. It’s not going to make a spare tire magically appear, so do me a favor and save your breath.”
“Okay, Val. Fine. I’ll stay calm, providing you have some brilliant suggestion that’s going to get us out of this mess.”
“I don’t know. Maybe a car will come along.”
“We’re out in the middle of nowhere! We haven’t seen another car for the past twenty minutes! And people don’t stop for strangers, particularly out on a deserted road like this one.”
“Sure they do.”
“Oh, yeah? What universe have you been living in for the past twenty years?”
“The one where cars like that one stop for people in trouble.”
Alex spun around to look at the car she was pointing at down the road, the one that was slowing down, looking as if it was going to pull over.
She crossed her arms over her chest, feeling pretty darned smug. Alex’s life was so structured that any deviation from dead center made him crazy. She imagined he probably had a spare tire for his spare tire. An extra bottle of catsup at all times. A month’s supply of dehydrated food and bottled water in case of disaster. Not only could he not go with the flow, he got all pissed off that there was even a flow in the first place, trying to carry him someplace he didn’t want to go.
Unfortunately, all the smugness she was enjoying seeped right out of her when she realized the car that was stopping was black-and-white with a siren on top.
“Uh-oh,” Alex said under his breath. “We’ve got trouble.”
chapter thirteen
As the police car pulled up behind the van on the shoulder of the road, Alex immediately went on high alert.
“Oh, boy,” Val said. “What do we do now?”
“Just play it cool. He’s a local guy. The only reason he’s stopping is because it looks like we’ve got car trouble.”
Alex knew that if Henderson had put out an APB of some kind on them, and this guy had seen it, they might have a problem. It would take some fast talking, and maybe some fast acting, too, to get them out of the situation. Alex tried not to think about what that might entail, or just how far he’d go to ensure that they kept moving down the road. He’d just have to play it by ear and hope the guy had no idea who they were.
The officer got out of the car, a skinny little guy wearing a khaki uniform and a cowboy hat that looked a size too big for him.
“What seems to be the problem here?” he asked.
“Flat tire.”
The guy stopped and gave his belt an upward tug, jostling his sidearm. He barely had the body to fill out the belt to hold the damned thing in place.
“Need some help changing it?” he asked.
“We don’t have a spare.”
“Hmm,” he said, crossing his arms over his nearly nonexistent chest. “Y’all aren’t from around here, are you?”
No, Alex thought, I’m not. Nor would I ever want to be.
“See, I can tell because everybody who lives out here knows it’s not smart to go gallivanting around inhospitable countryside like this without a spare tire. And a couple gallons of water and a full tank of gas, too.” He sniffed. “And a snakebite kit wouldn’t do any harm, either.”
He talked as if this were a remote part of the Sahara accessible only by camel and a Bedouin guide. And he also talked as if he had no idea who they were.
“Yeah, well, right now, I’d settle for the spare,” Alex said.
“We can pull the tire off and I’ll give you a lift back into town. Cletus’s station will be open for another half hour or so. He can get you a new tire.”
F
ortunately, Val at least had a jack. In minutes Alex had the tire off. He heaved it into the trunk of the patrol car.
“Y’all hop in,” the deputy said, “and we’ll head on back to town.”
A quick glance told Alex that the car was standard-issue, with a hard plastic seat in the back to simplify cleanup after messy arrests, such as driving while intoxicated. It also had a cage between the front and back seats and no interior door handles. Alex knew if he rode back there and the deputy got smart about their real identities, he’d be trapped.
Before he could say anything to Val, though, she opened the back door and got inside the car, motioning him to the front seat. At the same time, she gave him a knowing look that said she saw the danger as clearly as he did. One thing about Val—she might be hardheaded, but she was quick on the uptake.
A few minutes later they passed a sign stating that they’d entered the city limits of Tinsdale, Texas. Cedar Street, the main drag, was home to a row of storefronts that looked as if they hadn’t been updated since the 1950s.
“What a charming little town,” Val said, and Alex thought at first that she was just being nice. Then he thought about her neighborhood and realized that she probably meant every word.
As they approached the service station, they passed under a big red-and-white banner stretched across the street.
“You’re having a celebration?” Val asked.
“Yeah. Tonight. This is Founder’s Day. It’s bigger than the Fourth of July around here.”
The deputy pulled up to the service station, which sat right next to a motel called the Bluebonnet Inn. It consisted of a row of eight rooms constructed of cinder block and painted a screamy shade of blue. Alex opened the back door for Val, then pulled the tire from the trunk, and they all went inside.
“Hey, Cletus,” Stanley said to the man behind the counter. “Picked these folks up out on the highway east of town. Flat tire. Told them you could fix them right up.”
“Sure thing,” he said.
“I’ll leave you to it, then. I’ve got to get on over to the celebration.”
A woman came through the door from the garage who was maybe in her forties. She was about to pop the buttons on the western-style shirt she wore, and her hair was a color of red that Alex couldn’t imagine occurring in nature. Ever.