by Ben Rehder
It was exciting to think about it. Five o’clock couldn’t come fast enough.
It was a beautiful morning: temperature in the mid-seventies, low humidity, a light southerly breeze, and not a cloud in the sky. Marlin rode in the passenger seat of Garza’s cruiser with the windows down. Bill Tatum was in the back. All three men remained quiet, simply enjoying the silence.
Marlin had slept for less than three hours, but he’d found upon waking that his lower back was tight. Not sore, but tight—from dragging Weems away from the burning truck. Weems had initially been charged with attempted assault of a peace officer, evading arrest, auto theft, and driving while intoxicated. Then, late last night, the Bryant brothers had surprised everyone by spilling their stories—about Weems shooting at Marlin, and then assaulting Armando Salazar—and now Weems was facing a veritable tidal wave of legal trouble. He was looking at multiple convictions on a range of charges, and if Salazar could identify Weems in a lineup, that would be the icing on the cake. Nicole said victims often gained some measure of closure by playing a direct role in sending the perpetrator to prison. It gave them a sense of control. Regardless, Marlin was thrilled that Weems wouldn’t be walking the streets anytime soon.
Something else that had tickled Marlin to no end. Weems had told some wild tales once he arrived in cuffs at the station. First he said that Phil Colby had assaulted him in the parking lot of El Charro late yesterday afternoon. Said Colby punched him in the nose for no reason at all. Then Weems claimed he and the Bryant brothers had shot the bounty pig yesterday evening, and that two men—whose descriptions matched a couple of local rednecks named Red O’Brien and Billy Don Craddock—had assaulted Weems and stolen the pig from the bed of Bryant’s GMC truck.
Funny thing is, the Bryant brothers denied that any of those events had taken place. Both of them said Weems was a pathological liar. Marlin sensed it was the Bryants who were lying in this case—probably simply because they had grown sick and tired of Weems. Good enough. Nobody would, or could, take Weems’s word for any of it. Weems insisted that Marlin could find pig blood in the back of the GMC but, well, now it was nothing but a burned-up shell. If there had been any blood back there, it was long gone.
Garza took a right on a residential street, then another right, followed by a left, and now they could see Milstead’s house, with the white truck parked out front—just as one of the reserve deputies had said it was when he’d driven past in his personal vehicle ten minutes earlier. Not surprising. Where was Milstead going to go? Probably too ashamed—or afraid—to show his face anywhere.
Deputy Ernie Turpin sat across the conference room table from Armando Salazar and Nicole Marlin. He had a manila folder in front of him.
Turpin said, “I’m going to show you a series of photographs, one after the other. If you see anyone you recognize, please tell me.”
Salazar nodded.
Turpin opened the folder and removed a single photo of a redheaded man. Was it the suspect? Turpin himself didn’t know, which prevented him from giving any unintentional nonverbal cues to Salazar. This was known as a sequential, double-blind lineup, which helped eliminate cases of mistaken identity.
Salazar studied the photo and shook his head. Turpin placed a second photo on the table.
“That’s him,” Salazar said immediately. “Without a doubt.”
“Where do you recognize him from?”
“That’s the man who assaulted me outside the convenience store.”
When Kurt Milstead opened his front door, Bobby Garza said, “Coach, don’t worry—we’re not here to ask you any questions. You’ve already made it clear you don’t want to talk. But we have a search warrant for your truck, and in about five minutes, a flatbed trailer is going to show up and haul it away. See, what nobody outside of my staff knows is that Sammy Beech used his phone to shoot video of the vehicle that chased him. It’s not a great video—you can’t make out the vehicle itself—but Sammy dropped his phone, and it captured the sound of the vehicle passing by. I’ll be happy to show you that video if you’re interested in seeing it. But here’s the point. That audio—the sound of the vehicle passing by—is very useful to us. What we can do is make a similar recording of your vehicle passing by, then get an audio expert to compare the two clips. The software they have nowadays for audio pattern matching and signal analysis is incredible. It’s just like matching two voice recordings to see if it’s the same person. You see what I’m getting at?”
Garza finally paused. Milstead remained silent. His expression was a total blank, but Marlin noticed that the blood had drained from the coach’s face.
Everything Garza had just told Milstead was a gamble. It was true that one audio recording of a passing vehicle might very well be matched to a second recording—if all the conditions were right. But the audio from Sammy’s phone almost certainly wasn’t good enough to allow any conclusive findings.
Now Garza said, “We also have a shell casing with a fingerprint on it that we can’t identify. It came from a nine-millimeter handgun, and it turns out you have a concealed-carry permit for a nine-millimeter. That’s why we also have a search warrant for your home.”
Milstead was visibly trembling, and Marlin almost felt sorry for him.
Garza said, “Now, at this point, it wouldn’t surprise me if we don’t find that handgun in your house. But we don’t need it, really. All we need is your fingerprints, and that will—”
“Stop,” Milstead said.
Garza went quiet.
What the sheriff and Marlin and Tatum wanted—what they needed—was a confession. A good defense attorney could explain away a shell casing found on the side of a rural county road. Maybe it bounced out of the bed of the coach’s truck. Maybe Milstead couldn’t resist shooting at a speed-limit sign. There were all sorts of possibilities that could be offered up. And since the audio from Sammy’s phone wasn’t nearly as valuable as Garza made it out to be, and since Grady Beech’s recording of Milstead’s confession almost certainly wouldn’t be admissible in court, that didn’t leave much on which to build a case. Yes, Grady’s recording had humiliated Milstead, and it would hound him for the rest of his life, but it wouldn’t convict him.
Milstead was beginning to shake his head ever so slightly, but he didn’t say anything. He needed one more nudge.
So Garza, in a soft voice, said, “Kurt, we understand you didn’t intend for Sammy to get hurt. Everybody knows that. It was a tragedy. But you need to own up to what happened, or people will always wonder whether you have any remorse at all. Do the right thing. Your players are counting on you. Show them how a man handles adversity. It doesn’t have to wreck your life forever. You can set things right.”
A tear ran down Milstead’s cheek. After a very long moment, he nodded. “I’ve been carrying this damn thing around inside me for two months. I can’t do it anymore.”
CHAPTER 41
Eight hours later, after a long nap, Marlin changed into civvies and took a drive out to the Double Eagle Vineyards. He found Grady Beech’s Chevy Avalanche parked outside the visitors center, with a few vehicles parked near it. No BMW.
Marlin went inside and saw that Grady was conducting business as usual—pouring wine samples for two different couples. If friends or family members had stopped by to offer Grady their emotional support—he’d been through a lot in the past few days—they’d since departed.
Marlin gave Grady a wave and took a seat at a table. He had a few minutes to himself, and he realized it was enjoyable to simply sit quietly.
He thought about Kurt Milstead and the full confession he had given. Everything had happened exactly as he had told it to Grady. He’d lost his temper with Sammy and the chase had turned into a life-changing mistake. Milstead hadn’t tried to rationalize or justify his own actions. He’d owned up, exactly as Bobby Garza had urged him to do.
Marlin thought about Aleksandra Babikova. Her testimony wouldn’t be necessary, and at this point—assuming she’d seen the
news about Milstead’s confession and knew she wasn’t needed as a witness—she’d probably refuse to tell anyone what she had told Marlin in her loft. Would she be hounded by NCAA investigators? Marlin didn’t know and didn’t care.
He thought about Gilbert Weems, and he wondered how anyone could develop into such a sociopath. How do you change a man like that? And what about the Bryant brothers? What had made them decide to do the right thing?
His train of thought was broken as one couple left the visitors center, followed a few minutes later by the other couple.
Grady came to Marlin’s table with two glasses and an opened bottle of wine. He sat down and let out a deep sigh. “Been a hell of a week.”
Marlin laughed. “I’m glad you were able to post bond so quickly.”
“I assume this is an unofficial visit?”
“It is. Just wanted to see how you’re holding up.”
“My lawyer would probably want me to ask you to leave. He’d say you’re here to milk information out of me.”
“You want me to leave?” Marlin wasn’t going to share it, because it wasn’t set in stone, but he’d heard from Garza that the county prosecutor was likely to offer a short probation term for Grady. A slap on the wrist, essentially, but Grady had to pay some penance for carrying a firearm onto school grounds. Grady would be wise to accept it and move on.
“Nah,” Grady said. “I’ll take my chances.” He poured each glass half full with white wine from the bottle, then placed one glass in front of Marlin. “Another Viognier,” he said. “You’ll like it.”
Marlin took a sip. “That’s really good.”
Grady drank from his own glass.
Marlin said, “I don’t mean to pry, but I don’t see Leigh Anne...”
Grady let out a sad laugh. “I haven’t either. Doubt I will, and that’s the way I want it.”
Marlin left it at that.
Grady said, “Can I tell you something?”
“Sure.”
“I need to get it off my chest. Everything else is out in the open now, so I need to share this with somebody, too.”
Marlin waited. He hoped Grady wasn’t about to say something stupid.
“I first started suspecting that Leigh Anne was having an affair about a year ago. She’d been acting distant, and, well, I just knew something was going on. Anyway, I came home one day—a Saturday—and she was out in the pool with Sammy. They were out there horsing around, splashing water at each other, and then they started to wrestle a little bit. It was innocent—they were just having fun—but that’s not how I saw it at the time. I started to wonder if Leigh Anne was sleeping with my son. I realized pretty quickly that it was total nonsense, but what kind of father distrusts his son to that degree for even a minute?”
Marlin didn’t know what to say.
“I feel so much guilt about that,” Grady continued. “Especially now that I know the truth.”
“Sammy was a good kid,” Marlin said. “And you were a good father. He was lucky.”
“I appreciate that, but I just don’t know.”
Marlin took another drink of his wine. Then he grabbed a paper napkin and pulled a pen from his pocket. He wrote Nicole’s cell phone number down, then slid the napkin across the table to Grady, who looked at it and raised a questioning eyebrow.
“You should call her sometime,” Marlin said. “Just to talk. She has a way of looking at things that can make you feel better about facing the world every morning.”
Grady slipped the napkin into his shirt pocket. “I’ll do it. That means a lot and—”
Grady was interrupted by the sound of somebody urgently honking a horn. The honking was from a distance, but it grew louder.
“Of course, you’ve all heard by now that Kurt Milstead, that football coach in Texas, has been charged with manslaughter in connection with the death of one of his players, Sammy Beech, two months ago.”
“Tragic. That’s the only word for it.”
“And you’ve heard that Dexter Crabtree had some indirect involvement in the form of a very serious recruiting violation.”
“He allegedly paid big bucks to Milstead to steer Beech toward UMT.”
“There’s also been a rumor that Crabtree was rushed to the emergency room yesterday evening as a result of some sort of drug overdose, although—”
“That is unconfirmed. The overdose part. We do know that he was in the hospital overnight.”
“You can probably tell I’m laying the groundwork for the latest twist in this bizarre tale. Just minutes ago, an NCAA investigator, speaking on condition of anonymity, revealed that Crabtree is implicated in another recruiting violation—”
“Here we go.”
“—and this one involves a player’s parent. Allegedly, Crabtree approached the parent directly and offered cash for this player to commit to the University of Middle Texas, Crabtree’s alma mater.”
“And that, alone, is pretty stupid...”
“And the parent—oh, I love this—she immediately told investigators. Moments after he contacted her—in person—at her place of employment, she got in touch with the authorities. And what they did was have her play along, like she was eager to make a deal, and Crabtree ended up sending her a box of cash by way of UPS.”
“And that is monumentally stupid.”
“We should repeat that all of this is alleged.”
“Well, sure, alleged.”
“We’ll discuss this in detail after the break. Also, are today’s basketball players too tall for the good of the sport?”
“Back in three. Stay with us.”
Marlin and Grady Beech stepped outside the visitors pavilion and saw an old red Ford truck coming up the hill, the driver still honking the horn.
“Red O’Brien,” Grady said.
Marlin knew what was about to happen, but he stayed quiet. As the truck got closer, he could see that Billy Don Craddock was in the passenger seat. O’Brien gave the horn one last blast as he entered the parking lot, then pulled at an angle into a parking spot. Both men immediately hopped out. It was obvious they were excited—or pretending to be.
“We got ’im!” O’Brien shouted. “We got the pig!”
“I’ll be,” said Grady quietly. He was smiling.
Billy Don Craddock was now standing beside the bed of the truck, and he hoisted a small pig carcass, as if to say, Don’t believe me? Here it is!
Grady stepped forward and Marlin followed.
O’Brien, grinning, said, “I’ll admit this is the first time I’ve ever been glad to see the game warden.” He reached out to shake Marlin’s hand. “This way everybody’ll know it’s on the up and up.”
“Why would anyone think it’s not on the up and up?” Marlin couldn’t resist asking.
“Well, you know, I’ve been known to stretch a few game laws on occasion.”
Grady was standing beside the truck, looking at the pig carcass. He reached down and lifted the pig’s right ear, to inspect the inside. “Yep. This is the pig. Congratulations, boys.” Grady was plainly excited that his contest had reached a successful conclusion. Maybe Nicole had been right—that the contest had provided Grady with some sense of closure about Sammy’s death.
O’Brien and Craddock both let out howls of celebration and gave each other a high five.
“Fifty grand, baby!” O’Brien shouted.
“I feel like we should have a news crew here,” Grady said. “But I hadn’t really planned that far ahead.”
“We’re happy to hang around for a press conference,” O’Brien said. “If you want to set something up.”
“That would be great,” Grady said, and he pulled out his cell phone. “Let me make some calls.” He moved a few yards away.
Marlin stepped closer and rested his forearms on the bed of the truck, looking down at the pig. He grabbed one leg and felt the stiffness. “Which one of y’all got him?” he asked Craddock.
It was almost comical the way the big redneck glance
d quickly at O’Brien, revealing that they hadn’t even discussed the answer to that question. Marlin waited.
“I got ’im,” Craddock finally announced proudly. “’Bout an hour ago.”
“Nice, clean shot,” O’Brien added.
“Money sure will come in handy,” Craddock said. “I’m getting married in a few months.”
“And I’m his best man,” O’Brien said.
Marlin could think of several questions worth asking.
You shot it an hour ago? Then why is it in rigor mortis? Why is the blood so coagulated? Sure you didn’t steal it from the back of Dustin Bryant’s truck?
He had no doubt that he could separate them and pick their story apart. Make them reveal the truth. End up filing charges against them.
But he glanced over at Grady, who was apparently chatting with somebody at one of the Austin TV stations. Sounded like a camera crew would be on the way soon. Grady looked so genuinely happy.
Marlin couldn’t do it.
He turned back to Craddock and O’Brien and said, “Congratulations to you both.” Then, more quietly, he said, “Y’all might want to rehearse your answers before the reporters get here.”
Craddock opened his mouth, but O’Brien elbowed him in the gut.
Marlin gave Grady a farewell wave and Grady waved back. Then Marlin climbed into his truck and cranked the engine.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edgar Award-nominated author Ben Rehder's Blanco County comic mysteries have made best-of-the-year lists in Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, and Field & Stream.