“Dana.” He wanted to say more—wanted to pull her into a hard hug and stroke her sleek blond hair while he kissed away her grief. But the chances of that were right up there with the likelihood of snow in the day’s forecast. For one thing, Dana was staying in Pecos.
It hurt to remember her driving away last night, taking little more than her purse and the photocopy of her sister’s journal. He’d kept a second copy for himself before leaving the original in FBI hands, for whatever good they’d get out of it. He had called Dana later to make sure she’d gotten safely to the motel, but she’d seemed both guarded and distracted. Understandable, considering the circumstances.
Still, he hated the distance between them, as well as the chasm that had opened with their discovery in the cavern.
“Are you all right?” he asked her. “The reporters haven’t found you, have they?”
“It’s not that. It’s…Did you see the news this morning—that FBI press conference?”
“Yeah.” He grimaced. “Estelle dragged me over to her office. She keeps a TV over there to catch her soaps.”
It pissed him off that the damned feds couldn’t have given him a heads-up, though he had spoken personally with the pair of special agents who’d arrived just after dawn to stake their claim on his investigation. Tomlin had been a little on the officious side, but he and Petit had been polite enough—clearly well trained to minimize friction with the locals. Yet neither one had warned him that their boss, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Albuquerque field office, was about to publicly announce the arrest of two individuals involved in a scheme that bilked investors out of millions.
“Haz-Vestment was the outfit that got Angie so upset, right?” Dana asked. “The same people she was threatening to shut down.”
“I see where you’re heading with this”—as would any reporter worth his daily java—“and believe me, it’s an angle that’ll be fully investi—”
But Dana went on as if she hadn’t heard him. “What if those people killed her? That Roman Goldsmith and his wife? They still haven’t been caught, have they?”
“The FBI’s made finding them a top priority.” Not that they’d seen fit to confide in him, but along with the rest of the country, Jay had heard the announcement that Roman Goldsmith and his wife, whose most recently reported alias was Miriam Piper-Gold, remained at large. A substantial reward was offered for information leading to their arrest, and a poolside photo was flashed on screen of a leather-skinned, tanned fifty-something male wearing a man-thong below a slight paunch and a set of polar-white capped choppers. At his side was a much younger redhead looking hotter than the record high in a lime-green string bikini. Reporters had already caught onto the fact that Piper-Gold’s last known appearance was in Rimrock County, where a hazardous-waste-storage scheme was under way, and they were breaking their necks in the race to put together the connection to the body presumed to be that of the missing heiress.
“Listen, Dana,” he warned, “maybe you should think about going back to Houston. It’s only a matter of time before the media figures out your sister was the only real opposition to the salt-dome project—and then you’ll get no peace.” Already three network news vans had collected outside of the courthouse, and he’d had to tape a sign reading, absolutely no press—this means you! beneath the word sheriff on the smoked glass of his door, or he’d spend the whole of his day telling the idiots, “No comment.” He hoped to God the round of thunderstorms the weather people were predicting washed the streets clean of the pests and all their interruptions.
“You want me to go?” she asked, though they both knew she was gone already. The brief respite they’d shared was finished, never to be repeated.
“Hell, no,” he said honestly, for there was nothing he’d rather have than the privilege of one more chance, one more night to get to know her better. “But the last thing you need is to be stranded an hour away in Pecos, bein’ pecked to death by vultures.”
“I can handle a few reporters,” she said. “What I can’t handle is the idea of my sister’s killer or killers running around loose while she’s—”
“The FBI’s on this case. I’m on this case, and Wallace, too. With that reward and the nationwide publicity, we’re going to find them, Dana. It’s okay for you to trust us.”
She was silent for so long that he wondered if something had gone wrong with the connection. “Are you still there? Dana?”
From across the miles he heard tapping.
“Sorry,” she said. “There’s someone at the door. Probably the maid. I forgot to put out the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign.”
“Check the peephole,” he warned, unable to get the attempts on her life out of his mind. Though the incidents had occurred here in Rimrock County, Pecos was only an hour away. “You’ve got the chain on, don’t you?”
There was another pause, followed by the muffled sound of voices, as if she’d covered up the phone with her hand. Anxiety bored holes in him. “Dana. Dana?”
“Just housekeeping,” she reported. “I sent her away. Listen, Sheriff, just because we’ve been…been together, I’m not your responsibility. But Angie is, and she’s still mine, too. And that’s an obligation I mean to see through.”
A few minutes later he was still pondering their conversation—and stewing over the fact that she had called him Sheriff instead of using his name—when a sharp rap at the door made him jump. Probably some jackass reporter who hadn’t bothered to read his sign. Though he hadn’t peered out through his window lately, he suspected they were coming close to outnumbering the residents of Devil’s Claw.
He dreaded the moment when one showed up to confront him with his own recent history. More than likely, he’d be history once that happened and the leeches slimed him in the cesspool of insinuation. Rimrock County voters might be a fiercely independent lot, but they’d be looking for someone to hang for this debacle. Why not a long-absent prodigal who’d hidden psychiatric trouble in his past?
But when the door flew open it was Estelle Hooks, her face flushed rosy pink and an iron-gray escapee from her upswept hair bouncing girlishly about her shoulder. “You have to see this. Hurry, Sheriff. My boy’s on the television.”
Jay’s stomach plunged into his boot heels. Of all the harebrained…What the hell was Wallace doing yapping to reporters?
He followed Estelle back into her office, where the set usually devoted to Days of Our Lives instead showed Wallace Hooks on CNN. He looked happier than Jay had ever seen him, with his thumbs hooked in his gun belt and his broad-brimmed hat cocked rodeo-stud style. Clearly the deputy was making the most of his moment in the spotlight. But before Jay could catch much more than the word body, Estelle drowned out his voice.
“Doesn’t he look tall on TV?” she asked as she pressed her hands together. “Why, Wallace looks as tall as anybody.”
Instead of risking life and limb to shush her, Jay simply turned up the set’s volume. If he was going to put Mr. media’s ass in a sling, he needed proper ammunition.
“It was like half a mummy, dry and shriveled, with salt crystals sticking to the skin,” said Wallace, above a graphic that incorrectly identified him as the Rimrock County sheriff. “Long blond hair too, though it was comin’ out in big clumps.”
“Jesus,” Jay fumed. What if Dana was watching the live broadcast? What if her mother or the adoptive parents of Angie’s daughter saw it? When he had called her, Isabel Huffington had immediately seized on the sliver of hope that the remains belonged to some stranger. But if she heard Wallace’s description…
As the reporter, a serious young man wearing an early Dan Rather-style safari shirt with a panama fedora, began wrapping up the segment, Wallace—his face lighting—burst out, “It was kinda like that lady she was carrying on about at the town meeting. That Salt Maiden we was supposedly raping with our project.”
The reporter looked momentarily annoyed at the unexpected interruption, but, recovering quickly, he asked, “What do you mean, the Salt M
aiden?”
The Salt Woman, you moron, Jay thought. Bad enough Wallace had to spill his guts; he could at least be accurate. And grammatically correct, while he was at it.
Wallace nodded vigorously. “Some Indian thing, I guess. Maybe some kind of a spirit. Ms. Vanover started yelling during the Haz-Vestment meeting that using the salt domes to store hazardous wastes was defiling the Salt Maiden. And now she ends up getting turned t’one herself.”
“And he’s so well-spoken, too,” Estelle gushed as the reporter regained enough control to wrap up the segment. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if those casting people from Law & Order call the woman who used to be his agent.”
Too bad he couldn’t act, because once Jay got finished with him, Wallace was going to need a new job—perhaps something set up through the Witness Protection Program, to keep his former boss from hunting him down to wring his neck. “Wallace has no business insinuating that we have an ID on that body. Until the ME makes the call, we can’t—”
“She’s a Jew, that agent,” Estelle went on, “but perfectly nice. I talked to her once when she called for Wallace not long after he left New York City. She wanted him to read for a part on one of the soap operas. She was so disappointed I didn’t have a number for poor Wallace at the time. He was chasing around the country somewhere—looking for community theater work, I think. If he’d come straight home like he should have—or at least told me how to reach him—that could have been his big break, don’t you think?”
“I’ll give him a big break,” Jay growled, though his gaze was glued to the screen again, which had erupted with a news flash.
In the heart of Baghdad another suicide bomber had blown up twenty in a marketplace. Jay leaned in close to scan the littered street and the grieving faces of Iraqis. At the sound of gunfire somewhere offscreen he saw a soldier spin, his blue eyes ablaze with terror. The soldier looked exactly like PFC Mike Daugherty, who had been killed on his watch. And the smell…the smoke and burning flesh were—
“Sheriff…Sheriff—Jay.” The alarm in Estelle’s voice finally reached him where he crouched behind her metal desk. When he blinked in her direction she shook her head at him. “My goodness. Maybe you should go home and lie down with a cool washcloth for a while.”
What he really wanted was to crawl into a hole and die. “I’m sorry,” he said, rising. He wanted to say more, to explain away his actions somehow, but anything he could think of would sound ridiculous, even worse than cowering and shaking like a frightened child.
The sympathy in Estelle’s eyes somehow made it harder. “War’s a terrible thing, isn’t it? My father was in Normandy during the Second World War. Mercy, how that man suffered with his nightmares—disrupted the whole house with his shouting. He wanted to move us to a bigger city, somewhere there’d be more opportunity for my brothers and me. But any little thing could set him off—a car backfiring or a big crowd—”
“I can’t talk about this,” Jay said miserably, avoiding her gaze. “It’s just…it’s hard to watch the news, that’s all.”
As traumatic as he found the war coverage, the rest was equally disturbing. On nearly every channel, nearly all the time, Americans went in for entertainment as usual: chittering along with laugh tracks from old sitcoms, hawking gaudy jewelry, stalking vacuous celebrities like rare game, and advertising fat-soaked fast foods while, half a world away, children starved and bled as bombs blew apart their schools and parents. He’d put a foot through his TV set the week after he had come home, and he hadn’t yet bothered to replace it.
But he had dared to hope that he could, had dared to believe that he was getting better.
Estelle shook her head and told him, “I understand, dear. He couldn’t talk about it, either. But don’t worry. I won’t tell a soul about this.”
Since secrets were the highest form of currency in this town, he wasn’t sure how long her promise would hold. Yet Jay thanked her nonetheless before excusing himself to find her camera-hungry son—who was about to have another sort of worry altogether.
An El Paso meteorologist led the evening newscast with a warning that the moisture streaming across Mexico, where a Pacific tropical storm had landed, could spark not only thunderstorms but possible flash flooding. According to “Doppler Dave,” over three inches of rain were possible in some locations, and clips were played of last summer’s devastating mudslides.
Accustomed to coastal Houston’s legendary “toad stranglers,” Dana decided it was another example of TV hype gone wild. As was the story that followed on the latest developments in tiny Devil’s Claw.
“If I ever get my hands on you, Regina Lawler,” said Dana as she paced the narrow confines of her hotel room, “I’m going to suture your mouth shut.”
Oblivious to the threat, the reporter whose narrow face filled the TV screen went on speaking to the camera.
“I’ve been a close friend of Mrs. Smith-Vanover huffington for years.” Regina had plastered on her stoic look, with crocodile tears gleaming in her brown eyes. “It breaks my heart to see her family coping with this tragedy.”
“If you’re so damned concerned,” Dana demanded of the TV, “why the hell aren’t you in Houston with my mother, you ungrateful, bottom-feeding troll?”
Instead the woman had been appearing on every newscast that would have her—and generating enough media interest that Dana’s mother had hired security to keep reporters off her property. Dana, too, had started having problems after two reporters unearthed her cell phone number. Another somehow learned where she was staying and showed up at the door to her room. Though Dana had quickly gotten rid of them, she had the terrible feeling she had been too quick to dismiss Jay’s worry for her on that count. She pictured many more on their way—as endless and voracious as a column of army ants intent on stripping every scrap of flesh from her bones. Unwilling to barricade herself in this room, she had already decided to pile into her newly reclaimed convertible and retreat to Houston, where she could monitor the investigation as well as she could from here.
The screen shifted to a montage of Rimrock County footage, starting with the courthouse and ending with the hillside where the body had been found. All the while Regina went on talking, exploiting her relationship with Dana’s family for all that she was worth. She spoke of Angie’s troubled history, from protest arrests to rehab, and—just to sweeten the pot—threw in a bit about Dana having recently been “abandoned at the altar.”
The report concluded with an image of Nikki Harrison wearing a birthday hat and a look of pale exhaustion as her gloved and masked adoptive parents tried to interest her in cake. As the camera zoomed in on the child’s face, someone asked her what her wish was.
“To sleep in my own bed.” Wistful and translucent, a smile lit her brown eyes. “With my kitty, Goldie, and no more needles.”
“For this little girl”—on the voice-over, Regina Lawler’s words trembled with emotion—“this birthday wish, and all her wishes for the future, may hinge on one mystery: the identity of the body now known as the Salt Maiden.”
“That does it.” Dana angrily switched off the television and gathered the few belongings she had purchased for her stay. She’d be damned if she would hide out while that woman—the same basket case her mother had steadfastly supported through the worst months of her life—continued to make her family’s life into some made-for-the-masses melodrama.
Grabbing her purse and keys as well, Dana slammed out of the room and headed for her car. Though the additional distance would prevent her from making Houston by morning, as she’d planned, she was heading out to Devil’s Claw to have a few off-camera—and undoubtedly off-color—words with the reporter.
As she rolled into the tiny town past midnight, Dana began to realize how badly unsettled the stress of the past few weeks had left her. What had she thought to accomplish, arriving here so late at night? Except for the dimly lit windows of a few houses and the lights of the two news vans parked near the courthouse, the
place was black and silent as the deepest cavern. And the last thing she wanted to do was rouse the scavengers, then create a scene for them to film.
With thunder murmuring its disapproval, she turned the car around and cursed the angry impulse that had brought her back here. After checking her fuel gauge and seeing she could make it back to Pecos, she braced herself for yet another long drive.
But how could she leave Devil’s Claw, perhaps for the last time, without a word to Jay? She glanced at the dark courthouse, though she knew he must have gone home hours earlier. Probably he was sleeping. Had he moved into the house Angie had mentioned in her journal? Or was he still in the RV, lying in the same bed where they had made love only days before?
It’s history—just a one-night wonder. But the more Dana told herself not to think about it, the more overwhelmed she grew with memories of the only real emotional connection she had had since leaving home.
Since long before she’d left home, if she let herself admit it. Even before he’d checked out physically, Alex had long since left the building. She hadn’t allowed herself to see it, but her charming golden boy, a man who had almost effortlessly racked up achievement after achievement in his thirty-two years, had withdrawn from her the moment their planned “for better” lurched toward “worse.”
“I was sure we’d have the perfect life…the perfect family,” he’d told her once her hysterectomy was over. Though they should have been celebrating, or at least relieved, to learn that the mass in her uterus had turned out not to be malignant, the very idea of her imperfection left him as perplexed and hurt as a child who had been slapped.
As a glimmer on the horizon presaged a growl of thunder, Dana thought she shouldn’t have been all that surprised that he had left her. He was a man who’d traded in his new Mercedes after a parking-lot mishap had creased a fender. Though the dealership’s body shop had made it look like new, he had told her the idea of the accident had ruined the car for him. When a longtime friend came out of the closet, Alex had backed away, saying the whole thing made him feel “too weird.” If he had seen her family’s story on TV in New York, he was probably out congratulating himself for escaping an entanglement with such defectives. And Dana would bet the whole of her inheritance that his celebration would include a shiny new blonde on his arm.
The Salt Maiden (Leisure Romantic Suspense) Page 13