by Diana Palmer
“Does that make me less spooky?” she asked, moving a step closer.
“Yes, it does.”
“You think I’m, you know, normal?”
“Nobody’s really normal. But I know what you mean,” he said, and he smiled at her, a genuine smile. “Yes, I think you’re okay.”
She cocked her head up at him and her blue eyes twinkled. “Would you believe that extraordinarily handsome Hollywood movie stars actually call me up for dates?”
“Do they, really?” he drawled.
“No, but doesn’t it sound exciting?”
He laughed again.
She moved another step closer. “What I said, about not purchasing you if you were on sale in a groom shop…I didn’t really mean it. There’s a nice ring in that jewelry shop in Jacobsville,” she said dreamily. “A man’s wedding ring.” She peered up through her lashes. “I could buy it for you.”
He pursed his lips. “You could?”
“Yes. And I noticed that there’s a minister at that Methodist Church. Are you Methodist?”
“Not really.”
“Neither am I. Well, there’s a justice of the peace in the courthouse. She marries people.”
He was just listening now. His eyes were wide.
“If you liked the ring, and if it fit, we could talk to the justice of the peace. They also have licenses.”
He pursed his lips again. “Whoa,” he said after a minute. “I only met you yesterday.”
“I know.” She blinked. “What does that have to do with getting married?”
“I don’t know you.”
“Oh. Okay. I’m twenty-six. I still have most of my own teeth.” She displayed them. “I’m healthy and athletic, I like to knit but I can hunt, too, and I have guns. I don’t like spinach, but I love liver and onions. Oh, and I’m a virgin.” She smiled broadly.
He was breathless by this time. He stared at her intently.
“It’s true,” she added when he didn’t comment. She scowled. “Well, I don’t like diseases and you can’t look at a man and tell if he has one.” She hesitated. Frowned worriedly. “You don’t have any…?”
“No, I don’t have any diseases,” he said shortly. “I’m fastidious about women.”
“What a relief!” she said with a huge sigh. “Well, that covers all the basics.” Her blue eyes smiled up at him and she batted her long black eyelashes. “So when do we see the justice of the peace?”
“Not today,” he replied. “I’m washing Bob.”
“Bob?”
He pointed toward the cattle dog, who was still sitting at the pasture gate. He whistled. Bob came running up to him, wagging her long, silky tail and hassling. She looked as if she was always smiling.
“Hi, Bob,” Alice said softly, and bent to offer a hand, which Bob smelled. Then Alice stroked the silky head. “Nice boy.”
“Girl,” he corrected. “Bob’s a girl.”
She blinked at him.
“Mr. Parks said if Johnny Cash could have a boy named Sue, he could have a girl dog named Bob.”
“He’s got a point,” she agreed. She ruffled Bob’s fur affectionately. “You’re a beaut, Bob,” she told the dog.
“She really is. Best cattle dog in the business, and she can get into places in the brush that we can’t, on horseback, to flush out strays.”
“Do you come from a ranching family?” she asked absently as she stroked the dog.
“Actually I didn’t know much about cattle when I went to work for Mr. Parks. He had one of his men train me.”
“Wow. Nice guy.”
“He is. Dangerous, but nice.”
She lifted her head at the use of the word and frowned slightly. “Dangerous?”
“Do you know anything about Eb Scott and his outfit?”
“The mercenary.” She nodded. “We all know about his training camp down here. A couple of our officers use his firing range. He made it available to everyone in law enforcement. He’s got friends in our department.”
“Well, he and Mr. Parks and Dr. Micah Steele were part of a group who used to make their living as mercenaries.”
“I remember now,” she exclaimed. “There was a shoot-out with some of that drug lord Lopez’s men a few years ago!”
“Yes. I was in it.”
She let out a breath. “Brave man, to go up against those bozos. They carry automatic weapons.”
“I noticed.” That was said with a droll expression worth a hundred words.
She searched his eyes with quiet respect. “Now, I really want to see the justice of the peace. I’d be safe anywhere.”
He laughed. “I’m not that easy. You haven’t even brought me flowers, or asked me out to a nice restaurant.”
“Oh, dear.”
“What?”
“I don’t get paid until Friday, and I’m broke,” she said sorrowfully. She made a face. “Well, maybe next week? Or we could go dutch…”
He chuckled with pure delight. “I’m broke, too.”
“So, next week?”
“We’ll talk about it.”
She grinned. “Okay.”
“Better get your van going,” he said, holding out a palm-up hand and looking up. “We’re going to get a rain shower. You could be stuck in that soft sand when it gets wet.”
“I could. See you.”
“See you.”
She took off running for the van. Life was looking up, she thought happily.
Three
Harley went back to the ranch house with Bob racing beside his horse. He felt exhilarated for the first time in years. Usually he got emotionally involved with girls who were already crazy about some other man. He was the comforting shoulder, the listening ear. But Alice Jones seemed to really like him.
Of course, there was her profession. He felt cold when he thought about her hands working on dead tissue. That was a barrier he’d have to find some way to get past. Maybe by concentrating on what a cute woman she was.
Cy Parks was outside, looking over a bunch of young bulls in the corral. He looked up when Harley dismounted.
“What do you think, Harley?” he asked, nodding toward several very trim young Santa Gertrudis bulls.
“Nice,” he said. “These the ones you bought at the auction we went to back in October? Gosh, they’ve grown!”
He nodded. “They are. I brought them in to show to J. D. Langley. He’s looking for some young bulls for his own herd. I thought I’d sell him a couple of these. Good thing I didn’t have to send them back.”
Harley chuckled. “Good thing, for the seller. I remember the lot we sent back last year. I had to help you deliver them.”
“Yes, I remember,” Cy replied. “He slugged you and I slugged him.”
Harley resisted a flush. It made him feel good, that Mr. Parks liked him enough to defend him. He could hardly recall his father. It had been years since they’d had any contact at all. He felt a little funny recalling how he’d lied to his boss about his family, claiming that his mother could help brand cattle and his father was a mechanic. He’d gone to live with an older couple he knew after a fight with his real folks. It was a small ranch they owned, but only the wife lived on it. Harley had stayed in town with the husband at his mechanic’s shop most of the time. He hadn’t been interested in cattle at the time. Now, they were his life and Mr. Parks had taken the place of his father, although Harley had never put it into words. Someday, he guessed, he was going to have to tell his boss the truth about himself. But not today.
“Have any trouble settling the steers in their new pasture?” Cy asked.
“None at all. The forensic lady was out at the river.”
“Alice Jones?”
“Yes. She said sometimes she likes to look around crime scenes alone. She gets impressions.” He smiled. “I helped her with an idea about how the murder was committed.”
Parks looked at him and smiled. “You’ve got a good brain, Harley.”
He grinned. “Thanks.”
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“So what was your idea?”
“Maybe the victim was here to see somebody and got ambushed.”
Parks’s expression became solemn. “That’s an interesting theory. If she doesn’t share it with Hayes Carson, you should. There may be somebody local involved in all this.”
“That’s not a comforting thought.”
“I know.” He frowned as he noted the gun and holster Harley was wearing. “Did we have a gunfight and I wasn’t invited?”
“This?” Harley fingered the butt of the gun. “Oh. No! There were some local boys trying to harass Alice. I strapped it on for effect and went to help her, but she’d already sent them running.”
“Threatened to call the cops, huh?” he asked pleasantly.
“She invited them to her van to look at bodies,” he said, chuckling. “They left tread marks on the highway.”
He grinned back. “Well! Sounds like she has a handle on taking care of herself.”
“Yes. But we all need a little backup, from time to time,” Harley said.
Cy put a hand on Harley’s shoulder. “You were mine, that night we had the shoot-out with the drug dealers. You’re a good man under fire.”
“Thanks,” Harley said, flushing a little with the praise. “You’ll never know how I felt, when you said that, after we got home.”
“Maybe I do. See about that cattle truck, will you? I think it’s misfiring again, and you’re the best mechanic we’ve got.”
“I’ll do it. Just don’t tell Buddy you meant it,” he pleaded. “He’s supposed to be the mechanic.”
“Supposed to be is right,” Cy huffed. “But I guess you’ve got a point. Try to tell him, in a nice way, that he needs to check the spark plugs.”
“You could tell him,” Harley began.
“Not the way you can. If I tell him, he’ll quit.” He grimaced. “Already lost one mechanic that way this year. Can’t afford to lose another. You do it.”
Harley laughed. “Okay. I’ll find a way.”
“You always do. Don’t know what I’d do without you, Harley. You’re an asset as a foreman.” He studied the younger man quietly. “I never asked where you came from. You said you knew cattle, but you really didn’t. You learned by watching, until I hooked you up with old Cal and let him tutor you. I always respected the effort you put in, to learn the cattle business. But you’re still as mysterious as you were the day you turned up.”
“Sometimes it’s better to look ahead, and not backward,” Harley replied.
Parks smiled. “Enough said. See you later.”
“Sure.”
He walked off toward the house where his young wife, Lisa, was waiting with one preschool-aged boy and one infant boy in her arms. Of all the people Harley would never have expected to marry, Mr. Parks was first on his list. The rancher had been reclusive, hard to get along with and, frankly, bad company. Lisa had changed him. Now, it was impossible to think of him as anything except a family man. Marriage had mellowed him.
Harley thought about what Parks had said, about how mysterious he was. Maybe Mr. Parks thought he was running from the law. That was a real joke. Harley was running from his family. He’d had it up to his neck with monied circles and important people and parents who thought position was everything. They’d argued heatedly one summer several years ago, when Harley was sixteen, about Harley’s place in the family and his lack of interest in their social life. He’d walked out.
He had a friend whose aunt and uncle owned a small ranch and had a mechanic’s shop in Floresville. He’d taken Harley down there and they’d invited him to move in. He’d had his school files transferred to the nearest high school and he’d started his life over. His parents had objected, but they hadn’t tried to force him to come back home. He graduated and went into the Army. But, just after he returned to Texas following his release from the Army, he went to see his parents and saw that nothing had changed at all. He was expected to do his part for the family by helping win friends and influencing the right people. Harley had left that very night, paid cash for a very old beat-up pickup truck and turned himself into a vagabond cowhand looking for work.
He’d gone by to see the elderly couple he’d lived with during his last year of high school, but the woman had died, the ranch had been sold and the mechanic had moved to Dallas. Discouraged, Harley had been driving through Jacobsville looking for a likely place to hire on when he’d seen cowboys working cattle beside the road. He’d talked to them and heard that Cy Parks was hiring. The rest was history.
He knew that people wondered about him. He kept his silence. It was new and pleasant to be accepted at face value, to have people look at him for who he was and what he knew how to do rather than at his background. He was happy in Jacobsville.
He did wonder sometimes if his people missed him. He read about them in the society columns. There had been a big political dustup just recently and a landslide victory for a friend of his father’s. That had caught his attention. But it hadn’t prompted him to try to mend fences. Years had passed since his sudden exodus from San Antonio, but it was still too soon for that. No, he liked being just plain Harley Fowler, cowboy. He wasn’t risking his hard-won place in Jacobsville for anything.
Alice waited for Hayes Carson in his office, frowning as she looked around. Wanted posters. Reams of paperwork. A computer that was obsolete, paired with a printer that was even more obsolete. An old IBM Selectric typewriter. A battered metal wastebasket that looked as if it got kicked fairly often. A CB unit. She shook her head. There wasn’t one photograph anywhere in the room, except for a framed one of Hayes’s father, Dallas, who’d been sheriff before him. Nothing personal.
Hayes walked in, reading a sheet of paper.
“You really travel light, don’t you?” Alice mused.
He looked up, surprised. “Why do you say that?”
“This is the most impersonal office I’ve ever walked into. Wait.” She held up a hand. “I take that back. Jon Blackhawk’s office is worse. He doesn’t even have a photograph in his.”
“My dad would haunt me if I removed his.” He chuckled, sitting down behind the desk.
“Heard anything from the feds?”
“Yes. They got a report back on the car. It was reported missing by a woman who works for a San Antonio politician yesterday. She has no idea who took it.”
“Damn.” She sighed and leaned back. “Well, Longfellow’s working on that piece of paper I found at the crime scene and we may get something from the cast I made of the footprint. We did find faint sole markings, from a sneaker. FBI lab has the cast. They’ll track down which company made the shoe and try to trace where it was sold.”
“That’s a damned long shot.”
“Hey, they’ve solved crimes from chips of paint.”
“I guess so.”
She was deep in thought. “Odd, how that paper was pushed into the dirt under his hand.”
“Somebody stepped on it,” Hayes reminded her.
“No.” Her eyes narrowed. “It was clenched in the victim’s hand and hidden under it.”
Hayes frowned. “Maybe the victim was keeping it hidden deliberately?”
She nodded. “Like, maybe he knew he was going to die and wanted to leave a clue that might bring his killer to justice.”
Hayes chuckled. “Jones, you watch too many crime dramas on TV.”
“Actually, to hear the clerk at the hardware tell it I don’t watch enough,” she sighed. “I got a ten-minute lecture on forensic entomology while he hunted up some supplies I needed.”
“Bug forensics?” he asked.
She nodded. “You can tell time of death by insect activity. I’ve actually taken courses on it. And I’ve solved at least one murder with the help of a bug expert.” She pushed back a stray wisp of dark hair. “But what’s really interesting, Carson, is teeth.”
He frowned. “Teeth?”
She nodded. “Dentition. You can tell so much about a DB from its teeth, esp
ecially if there are dental records available. For example, there’s Carabelli’s cusp, which is most frequently found in people of European ancestry. Then there’s the Uto-Aztecan upper premolar with a bulging buccal cusp which is found only in Native Americans. You can identify Asian ancestry in shovel-shaped incisors…Well, anyway, your ancestry, even the story of your life, is in your teeth. Your diet, your age…”
“Whether you got in bar fights,” he interrupted.
She laughed. “Missing some teeth, are we?”
“Only a couple,” he said easily. “I’ve calmed right down in my old age.”
“You and Kilraven,” she agreed dubiously.
He laughed. “Not that yahoo,” he corrected. “Kilraven will never calm down, and you can quote me.”
“He might, if he can ever slay his demons.” She frowned thoughtfully and narrowed her eyes. “We have a lot of law enforcement down here that works in San Antonio.” She was thinking out loud. “There’s Garon Grier, the assistant SAC in the San Antonio field office. There’s Rick Marquez, who works as a detective for San Antonio P.D. And then there’s Kilraven.”
“You trying to say something?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I’m linking unconnected facts. Sometimes it helps. Okay, here goes. A guy comes down here from San Antonio and gets whacked. He’s driving somebody else’s stolen car. He’s messed up so badly that his own mother couldn’t identify him. Whoever killed him didn’t want him ID’d.”
“Lots of reasons for that, maybe.”
“Maybe. Hear me out. I’m doing pattern associations.” She got up, locked her hands behind her waist, and started pacing, tossing out thoughts as they presented themselves. “Of all those law enforcement people, Kilraven’s been the most conspicuous in San Antonio lately. He was with his brother, Jon, when they tried to solve the kidnapping of Gracie Marsh, Jason Pendleton’s stepsister…”
“Pendleton’s wife, now,” he interrupted with a grin.
She returned it. “He was also connected with the rescue of Rodrigo Ramirez, the DEA agent kidnapping victim whose wife, Glory, was an assistant D.A. in San Antonio.”
Hayes leaned back in his chair. “That wasn’t made public, any of it.”