8 Sweet Payback

by Connie Shelton

  A little encouragement and she went on. “I’d suggest the park, on Third Street. The gazebo there makes a good podium, gets you up above the crowd a little. I’ll get the school janitor to set up the PA equipment and test it.”

  “I think we should do this before dark tonight,” Beau said.

  “Yes. How about five o’clock? We’ll catch most people on their way home from work and we won’t interrupt their dinner hour.”

  Heaven forbid that dinner be late because of a crime spree. He withheld his smile, merely nodding. “I’d appreciate it if you will handle those details,” he said, standing. “I’m going to meet with the state police and coordinate a schedule. Even if the meeting goes well and we have everyone’s cooperation, I plan to keep heavy patrols throughout town tonight.”

  Mayor Brown swallowed hard, nodding but clearly still rattled.

  * * *

  Sam approached her task with a better attitude and a shot of energy from handling the magic box this morning. Finishing the floors in the massive great room took half the morning, then she started on the smaller rooms in the other wing, the two guest suites, plus ones she’d named the nursery, the sewing room and the library. By three o’clock she was able to stand back and survey her work. Not bad. The place had a fresh feeling to it and was nearly done. She would come back one more day and wash all the windows. If her energy held and the wind let up she could come back one final time and chop weeds, plus do some touch-up work on the exterior. That should please Delbert Crow and the taxation department.

  She filled out a line on the sign-in sheet, packed away her brooms and mops and locked the door, remembering as she was pulling out onto the highway that she had agreed to check in with Beau. He sounded busy, saying something about being in Taos at the moment, coordinating a schedule with some officers, and that he had to be back in Sembramos at five o’clock. A meeting of some kind. He would fill her in when he got home. She assured him that she would drive right on through.

  With a few hours of free time, she mentally reviewed the things she’d thought of last night. Buying some food would be tops on the list. She couldn’t really keep offering canned soup for dinner every night. She bypassed the turn to their driveway and continued straight into Taos.

  The newspaper office was another stop, and she would need to get there before they closed. She turned off near the county offices and pulled into the parking lot of the place, familiar from the times she’d come to place ads for her shop. Britney, the young woman at the desk, recognized her and seemed happy to take her to a room where back issues were tightly archived.

  “How far back does this story go?” she asked Sam.

  “Six to seven years.”

  “Ah. You’re in luck. Everything older than eight years goes to our storage building. Everything newer than three years is on the computer. You can find the middle stuff here in the microfiche.”

  Yeah, lucky, Sam thought as she followed instructions to thread the rolls of film into the machine. A computer search would have been so much easier.

  Left alone, she soon figured out the system; it helped that she and Beau had just been through the murder file and she knew the exact dates to look for. She scanned pages and enlarged every article that featured the names Cayne, Starkey, Rodarte or Sembramos. Pages printed out and she gathered them and went back to the desk to pay for the printouts. Britney made change for her, glancing at the sheet at the top of her stack.

  “Huh. That’s interesting,” she said, closing the drawer of her register.

  “What’s that?”

  “This article about a real estate deal near Sembramos. I had no idea big real estate deals ever happened up there. My dad used to know that guy, Linden Gisner,” Britney said, pointing to a name in one article. “He was well known in real estate here for awhile. Dad called him the wheeler-dealer of Taos county.”

  The name seemed vaguely familiar but Sam’s mind was already dashing ahead to the rest of her errands as she went back out to her truck. She glanced at her dashboard clock. It was almost five, traffic was picking up, and she didn’t really feel like driving to the bakery or checking back with Cora at the library. Her earlier burst of energy was gone. The supermarket posed challenge enough for the moment.

  Chapter 12

  The PA speakers squawked when Mayor Consuelo Brown handed the microphone to Beau. He held it a little way from his mouth and surveyed the crowd. A small group of Starkeys—minus Helen, he noticed—stood at the left-hand edge of the crowd. The men looked a bit the worse for wear after what had probably been an afternoon of heavy drinking. Sophie Garcia stood at the opposite side of the park, edging as far away from them as she could get, and two unfamiliar men in biker leathers stood near her. They looked enough like Lee Rodarte to be related, but Beau didn’t see Lee in the crowd. Between the two factions stood fifty or so of the townsfolk, by Beau’s estimate. Ringing the perimeter of the crowd, all of Beau’s deputies and six state officers—all uniformed and armed—kept watch.

  “Thank you for the introduction, Mayor Brown,” Beau said, “and thank you all for coming this afternoon.”

  He watched faces in the crowd. No one looked happy, no matter where their loyalties were.

  “There was trouble here in Sembramos last night. We were fortunate that no one got hurt. But it’s the kind of trouble none of us wants to see.”

  Low muttering came from the Starkey side. Losing two rooms from their house hadn’t exactly been painless.

  “You all can work out your differences however you see fit—it’s not really my business—as long as people don’t get hurt and property doesn’t get destroyed. When someone breaks the law, it becomes my business. I’ve been elected to keep the people of this county safe. So tonight, we’re asking for a voluntary curfew of nine p.m. Do your shopping, go out to dinner . . . but be home by nine o’clock. Please. I’m asking nicely. But just in case ‘nice’ doesn’t work, my department will be patrolling your streets, along with officers from the state police. And if things continue to get ugly around here, we can bring in more help to restore order. That’s really all I have to say. Obey the curfew for a night or two, calm down, and we won’t have to be in your backyard any more.”

  “By ‘more help’ you mean the National Guard?” someone shouted from the middle of the crowd.

  “Yes, sir, I do.” Beau stepped back and handed the microphone to the mayor.

  She cleared her throat a little nervously, but Beau was the only one who heard that part. When she brought the mike up, her voice came out clear and strong. “We all need to calm down, try to put old events and old feelings aside and let ourselves heal. Let the town get back to the way it used to be. Sheriff Cardwell is being very helpful. Let’s show that we can put our own house in order and get along like grownups.”

  She thanked the crowd again and turned off the microphone. Beau remained on the raised platform while the mayor stepped down to shake hands and speak softly with her constituents. At the back of the crowd, Beau spotted a white van from one of the Albuquerque TV stations. Great. How did they know about this and how long had they been here?

  Movement among the Starkey contingent caught his eye. Helen Starkey had joined her husband. Joe and Bobby glared toward Sophie Garcia’s little group. The two bikers glared right back. Sophie, he noticed, was speaking quietly to them. As if that would stop them if a brawl began. Beau took a stance and gave them a no-nonsense look. One of the bikers noticed, said something under his breath, and they both strolled toward their motorcycles.

  Bobby Starkey started to mouth off, but Helen aimed an elbow at his ribs and the verbal exchange turned into a battle of nasty staring. Eventually, Joe gave his brother a little punch to the shoulder and their group moved away. Within ten minutes the entire crowd had dispersed. Beau gathered his men and gave instructions. Any trouble, he was to be called on his cell. He hoped for an evening at home, strategically placed between the trouble in Sembramos and anything else that might happen in Taos.
He didn’t actually believe he would end up relaxing much.

  * * *

  As long as she was caught up in the bustle of the supermarket, Sam decided to really stock up. Who knew what the next week would bring? She picked up Beau’s favorites—steak, potatoes for baking, ice cream—along with a resupply of nearly everything for the pantry. As soon as he called to say he was on the way, she lit the gas grill, seasoned the steaks and opened a new bottle of wine.

  As it turned out, he declined the wine. He was still technically on duty, but he managed to put away all of his meal and a double serving of ice cream with caramel sauce. When the phone rang, both of them groaned in dismay. They had hoped the trouble wouldn’t flare up quite so soon. But the call was from Texas.

  “Samantha Jane, what on heaven’s earth is going on out there?”

  “Mother? What’s wrong?”

  “It’s on the news—CNN!. Beau standing up there telling the whole county he’s going to bring in the National Guard. The TV said somebody was killed and there’s nearly been a riot. I thought you lived in a quiet little town. Your daddy’s just fit to be tied.”

  “Mother, there hasn’t been a riot. And the National Guard—”

  Beau’s eyes widened and Sam shook her head, resigned to letting her mother finish saying whatever was on her mind.

  “I think you should just get yourself home, right now. It’s too dangerous there, with these two killers on the loose.”

  “Mother, they—”

  “I mean it. Things are safe here in Texas, not like that wild place where you are now.”

  Sam let her go on. Texas hadn’t been home for Sam in more than thirty-five years, and Taos so seldom had anything ‘wild’ happen that Nina Rae’s statement was ludicrous. But there was no way to get a word into the one-sided conversation. After ten minutes or so, her mother ran out of steam and began repeating.

  “Mother, we’re fine. Beau’s department has everything under control. There were some protests last night, that’s all.”

  Protests? Beau mouthed the word. That Albuquerque station must have sent their footage out to the major networks.

  Sam shrugged and signaled that she couldn’t get her mother to quit. Beau reached over and took the phone.

  “Nina Rae, hi.” He used his soothing voice, the one that he’d developed in training to stop prison riots, and eventually he began to talk more as Sam’s mother relinquished phone time. It took five minutes of re-explaining but finally he hung up.

  “Whew-ee,” he said, setting the phone down. “That woman is strong willed.”

  “Told you,” Sam said with a grin. The call seemed funny, now that her mother wasn’t actually harping in her ear. “I was smart to leave home at eighteen.”

  He picked up the empty ice cream bowls. “No comment. In the remote possibility that you ever repeat my words to your mother.”

  She laughed out loud as he went into the kitchen. When she heard him loading the dishwasher she turned to the dining table, where they’d left Angela Cayne’s case file spread out. At a glance, she knew she would need to write down a listing of the events—there was just too much material to keep it straight in her head. She found a yellow notepad.

  Beau came out of the kitchen with two cups of coffee. “I don’t know if you had much chance to look through this stuff yet. Basically, I’ve been grouping the pages by subject: Crime scene evidence; the Cayne family’s story; Jessie’s version of it; Lee’s version of it; anything other witnesses told us.”

  Sam retrieved the printouts she’d gotten at the newspaper office and told him about her idea for organizing the material. She picked up the Cayne family’s stack. “I assume the first event would have been the Caynes reporting that Angela was missing.”

  Beau nodded, looking up from the main file where he was still sorting. “There’s an initial report. The deputy who responded would have filled that out.”

  Sam paged through until she came to it. A hot summer night. Mr. and Mrs. Cayne had gone to a choral program at church. Angela stayed home with her grandmother who wasn’t feeling well. Sally Cayne said she had gone to bed very early and never heard another thing until Alan and Tracy came home and woke her to ask where Angela had gone. With the front door standing open and the living room in disarray the family’s conclusion was that the twenty-year-old had been kidnapped. They immediately called 9-1-1.

  Sheriff Padilla’s thoughts weren’t included, naturally, but Beau remembered that his boss hadn’t made a big deal of the girl’s disappearance at the time. He’d openly stated at the squad-room meetings that most likely Angela had run off with a boyfriend and would call her parents from Las Vegas in a few days to announce that they were married. Parents were often the last to have a clue that their kid was unhappy at home. Although Angela was hardly a child at that point, Padilla had assigned a deputy to canvass the neighbors and to question Angela’s friends; that was about the extent of it for the first forty-eight hours.

  But the Caynes had remained insistent. Fed up with the sheriff’s lack of answers, they called the state police and initiated a search and rescue operation. SAR members had been the ones who found Angela’s body lying out on open ground in a wooded area near a stream, a little over six miles from town.

  An embarrassed Sheriff Padilla had quickly backtracked on his earlier halfhearted measures, calling in everyone who could possibly be a suspect.

  “He grilled them relentlessly,” Beau said. “I remember poor old Roy Watson being dragged in there, having to question the same witnesses over and over again, even when he would tell Padilla that someone was clearly not their guy. This case was what pushed Watson to an early retirement.”

  Sam picked up the transcripts from Jessie Starkey’s interrogation. The gist of it was that Jessie ‘didn’t look right’ in the sheriff’s estimation. Someone had spotted him near the Cayne house that night—a long-haired, skinny guy with a lot of tattoos who was acting jumpy. The witness thought he’d seen Jessie approach the Cayne house—for sure the front door was open, with only the screen between Jessie and that poor, innocent girl. That statement was enough for Padilla to haul Jessie in. From the transcript, his tone and manner were third-degree.

  Jessie’s answers were all over the place—he’d gone to see Lee Rodarte; he’d gone for a long drive alone in his truck; he’d been in Taos at a bar, not in Sembramos at all; sure, he’d always thought Angela was pretty hot; he’d asked her out a few times but she was always busy; yes, he’d bought some cocaine that night; he didn’t remember how much of it he’d used—so before the end of the hours-long interrogation the man couldn’t seem to keep anything straight. By dawn he’d signed a confession to taking Angela Cayne from her home, with the help of Lee Rodarte. Jessie’s court-appointed lawyer didn’t meet him until two weeks before the start of the trial.

  Lee Rodarte’s interrogation was even more disturbing. He swore he’d been with his girlfriend, Sophie Garcia, in the early part of the evening. Sophie wouldn’t give him an answer about getting married and that had upset Lee. He’d left her house and gone for a ride on his motorcycle. He stayed consistent with this throughout, despite the so-called ‘facts’ that the sheriff kept throwing at him from Jessie Starkey’s confession. Lee had to admit that he dealt a few drugs now and then, that he’d sold Jessie both cocaine and pot at times, but not that night. Unfortunately, from the time Lee left Sophie’s company at around eight p.m., no one could vouch for his whereabouts the rest of the night. Except for Jessie Starkey. Lee was toast.

  Sam jotted all this on her timeline. From Deputy Watson’s canvass of the neighborhood, through the interviews at the department and interrogation of the suspects, more than two dozen people had offered information, but nothing she’d come across so far would have conclusively exonerated either man.

  “Maybe I should keep a separate list of everyone who was interviewed throughout this whole investigation,” she told Beau. “I’m getting them confused and I haven’t even been through a fraction
of this yet.”

  “Good idea.” He yawned and looked at his watch. “It’s after eleven. No calls from either front, so I’d say that’s good news. I better try for some sleep.” He set the file pages down.

  Sam was scribbling names as she came across them. “The minute I finish with this stack of neighbor interviews, I’ll be joining you.”

  But she soon gave up. Her brain felt dull after the hours of reading so she set her lists aside and turned off lights as she walked through the living room and made her way upstairs.

  “I’ll get back to the witness list in the morning,” she told Beau as they brushed their teeth at the double sinks. But at some point she needed to finish her caretaking project and submit a final report to Delbert Crow, and then there was the matter of keeping her bakery business alive too. She’d better put in some time there. She fell into a sound sleep until the tone of Beau’s phone woke them both.

  A hint of dawn showed at the windows and the clock said it was 5:47. Beau groaned and picked up the phone. Two seconds later he sat up, alert. “Shit!” He gave quick orders.

  Sam came fully awake. “What is it?”

  He set his phone on the night stand and stood up. “Lee Rodarte’s body was found in an alley a little while ago.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “I know. It feels like this just won’t end.” He grabbed the uniform he’d left on a chair last night and started pulling on pants and shirt. “I’ve ordered deputies back to town and we’ll have to wake up Lisa early, gather whatever evidence we can secure before the scene gets disturbed.”

  “Back to town? So it happened in Taos?”

  He nodded and was out the door. A minute later red and blue lights flashed across the ceiling and she heard gravel spin as he drove away. Sam ran her fingers through her hair, realizing that sleep would never come back now. She got up and tried to decide which of her many obligations to handle first.