Bounty Hunter Ransom

by Kara Lennox

  In twill trousers and a cream-colored silk shirt, he was a sharp contrast walking next to Beau, who wore his ubiquitous black T-shirt, black jeans and motorcycle boots.

  She waved to them as they approached. “Hi, Craig, it’s nice to see you again.”

  “Hey, Aubrey, you look good.”

  That was a gift, she thought. She looked like something the cat dragged in, wearing denim shorts and an oversize Play Golf or Die T-shirt she’d borrowed from David. She hadn’t thought about the irony of the slogan till it was too late to change her clothes.

  “How’s Deena?” she asked Craig, having earlier dredged up the name of his wife.

  “She says she’s doing a lot better since the divorce.”

  Aubrey winced. “Sorry. Foot-in-mouth disease. How about the girls?”

  He smiled. “They’re good.”

  “So.” She looked down at her hands. “You came to deliver the news in person?”

  Beau spoke up for the first time. “I thought you’d do better hearing it from Craig than me.”

  “What?” She leaned forward eagerly. “Is there news about Sara?”

  Craig laid a hand on her arm. “No, no. It’s just about the autopsy. The M.E. is calling it suicide. Cause of death, asphyxiation from carbon monoxide. No sign of violence, no unusual bruises. Plus, she had a ton of alcohol in her bloodstream.”

  “Alcohol?” Aubrey shook her head. “That’s impossible. Patti didn’t drink.”

  Craig and Beau exchanged a look. “Aubrey,” Beau said gently, “I know you want to believe the best of the people you love. But you didn’t think Patti was using drugs, either. Or working at a topless bar.”

  Aubrey started to object, but Craig set a folder in front of her. “This is Patti’s rap sheet,” he said. “I know this isn’t pleasant for you, but you might want to see what’s in there.”

  Aubrey’s hand trembled as she opened the folder. And there were all Patti’s arrests, listed neatly on a computer printout. Only there were more, far more, than Aubrey had known about.

  “Drunk and disorderly? Misdemeanor Possession of an Illegal Substance? Criminal Mischief?” Most of the arrests had occurred more than a year ago, before Sara. But there’d been a couple more recently.

  Aubrey read the most recent police reports more closely. Patti had been caught throwing rocks at the windows of a mobile home. Charlie Soffit’s trailer. She’d been either drunk or high on drugs, the report said. They’d thrown her in the drunk tank and let her come down. Charlie had declined to press charges.

  “The charge is drunk and disorderly,” Aubrey said. “But it says here they let her come down. She wasn’t drunk, she was high on methamphetamines. That was her drug of choice. She never smoked grass, she never snorted coke. She smoked crystal meth.”

  “She might have gotten drunk to give herself false courage before she killed herself,” Beau said. “Maybe she couldn’t get her hands on the drug she preferred.”

  “She was allergic to alcohol,” Aubrey insisted. “A few sips of a wine cooler, and five minutes later she was throwing up uncontrollably. There is no way in hell she would willingly drink alcohol. Someone was forcing her.”

  Craig and Beau exchanged another look.

  “There was no sign of—”

  “Whoever did this wouldn’t need violence!” Aubrey exploded. “They had Sara. No matter what this computer printout says, she loved her daughter. She’d have died for her baby. And apparently that’s what she did.”

  Craig’s cell phone rang, as if punctuating Aubrey’s proclamation. He answered it, then walked a few feet away for privacy. Beau said nothing.

  “You know what I’m saying makes sense,” she said, trying to calm herself. No one listened to hysterical females. “Maybe I had blinders on where Patti’s concerned. Maybe I did want to believe the best about her. But she would not have gotten drunk. Whoever staged that little scene at the roadside park obviously didn’t know she had the allergy.

  “And even if she did kill herself, she would have seen to Sara’s safety first. If you’re thinking she left Sara in a garbage can or something horrible like that, just stop thinking it. She would have given Sara to me.”

  “She did call you and beg you to come home.”

  “She would have left a note. At the very least, she would have implicated Cory before she died. It’s not like Patti to just quietly kill herself in some anonymous park.”

  “People do strange things—”

  “Beau, you can’t say anything that will make me accept this ruling.”

  “I know. You’re nothing, Aubrey, if not blindly loyal. There are worse qualities,” he added, as if that made it better that he didn’t believe her.

  She started to object, then clamped her mouth shut. He was right. She’d refused to believe her brother did anything wrong, despite lots of evidence to the contrary. And now she was doing it again.

  Craig returned, sticking his cell phone in his pants pocket. “Bad news. They’ve released Charlie Soffit.”

  “What?” Beau and Aubrey said together.

  “The swabs on his hands came back negative, and his gun didn’t match up to the bullet or the shell casings. He didn’t fire that shot at you.”

  “What about the bite mark on his arm?”

  “They had a doctor examine the wound. He couldn’t say whether it was a dog or human bite.”

  “But Charlie threatened to kill me!”

  “People say crazy things when they’re drunk, and in the throes of grief. They did charge him with drunk driving, but he posted a bond for that.”

  “Grief? Oh, come on.”

  “We’ve been checking around with his friends and family,” Craig said, “It seems he really did want to marry Patti. She’s the one who left him, and she wanted him out of her life. Also, before this incident, he was never even arrested.”

  Aubrey put her head in her hands. She couldn’t continue to argue with the avalanche of evidence in her face. “Did I know Patti at all? Was she just using me because I put a free roof over her head and I was a handy baby-sitter? She told me Charlie was an ex-con. I must be the most gullible person on earth.”

  Beau moved around the picnic table to sit beside her. “I don’t think your instincts about Patti were all wrong. She was trying to turn her life around, for Sara’s sake. She had a legitimate job. She was trying to pay off her drug debt so she could put that part of her life behind her. She was trying to be a responsible mother. But people don’t change a hundred-and-eighty degrees overnight. She backslid a little, that’s all. And if she lied to you, it was probably to protect you. Don’t automatically assume she didn’t love you.”

  She reached over and squeezed his hand. “Thank you, Beau. I guess I tend to see things in black and white, and Patti was definitely shades of gray. If we could just find Sara,” she added, “I’d handle the rest of this a lot better.”

  Beau squeezed back. “We’ll find her.”

  But it was getting harder and harder for Aubrey to believe that.

  PATTI’S FUNERAL WAS the following day. David had made the arrangements as quickly as possible after her body was released from the county medical examiner’s office. “Best to get it over with,” he’d said. “For Dad’s sake. He insists on attending, though I can’t imagine the heat will be good for him.”

  There had been no more significant leads as to Sara’s whereabouts, and Aubrey sensed an air of pessimism drifting over the cops she talked to, including Lyle. Sara had been missing for three days now. If a kidnapper wanted to ransom her, he’d have made contact by now. They had no fresh leads. Charlie Soffit was still a suspect, because he didn’t have a solid alibi for the afternoon Sara had disappeared. Then again, the time of her disappearance was so foggy, almost no one could come up with an alibi. She could have been taken any time between Patti’s phone call to Aubrey on Tuesday morning and her death late that afternoon, though even her time of death couldn’t be accurately pinpointed.

  But the
police had investigated Charlie pretty thoroughly. They’d searched his trailer, talked to his friends and relatives, and they hadn’t found a shred of evidence indicating his involvement.

  Cory was still missing, and he was considered a “person of interest,” since Patti was apparently fleeing from him the day she died. His disappearance was suspicious, to say the least. But Patti wouldn’t have willingly given Sara to such a creep. And if he’d taken Sara forcibly, Patti would have gone to the cops, never mind that she hated cops. She wouldn’t have just meekly driven off to a park and killed herself.

  The prevailing theory was still that Patti had left her baby somewhere, or with someone, she thought would be safe. And whoever had her now, for whatever reason, was afraid to come forward.

  Aubrey hoped that was the truth.

  Since Aubrey had no clothes with her suitable for a funeral, she had to go home. So Beau picked her up at her uncle’s house the morning of the funeral, took her to get her car, then followed her back to her house.

  Beau went in first. With his gun in hand, he checked every room and every closet to make sure it was safe. Only then did he allow Aubrey inside. A few days ago she would have considered this excessive caution. Not now.

  Aubrey took her small duffel bag upstairs, emptied her dirty clothes into the hamper, then pulled clothes haphazardly out of her drawers and repacked—enough to last three or four days. She intended to stay at her uncle’s house as long as he wanted her there, as long as she was serving some half-useful function in the search for Sara. Beau agreed her home wouldn’t be safe until both Sara and Cory were found and the mystery unraveled. The perpetrator obviously thought Aubrey either knew something or had seen something that could implicate him, and that was why she’d become a target.

  But Aubrey had gone over and over in her mind everything she knew about Patti’s life, and Patti had told her precious little that would implicate anyone. Nothing about Cory, nothing about Greg Holmes’s shady insurance practices or his extramarital activities. Who else hadn’t she told Aubrey about?

  Aubrey put on the only clothes she owned appropriate for a funeral, a navy skirt and a subdued gray silk shell. She managed to locate some serviceable navy pumps and one good pair of panty hose. She hated the thought of wearing stockings in this heat, but her parents had come up from South Padre for the funeral, and her mother would lecture her for years if she went bare-legged to a funeral.

  She pulled her unruly hair back into a twist, secured with a silver comb, then added a minimum of makeup. She stopped herself before she could spritz on perfume. She was primping for Beau.

  “I’m sorry, Patti,” she murmured. She was ashamed for letting her hormones dictate her behavior at a time like this. Then again, Patti probably would have been amused. She always thought Aubrey was a dud when it came to men, that if only she’d try a little harder, wear sexier clothes and walk with her chest out, she’d have all the boyfriends she wanted.

  “Well, Patti, I’ve got a live one now,” she said, changing her mind and putting just a tiny bit of scent on her wrists. But she wasn’t quite sure what to do with him. The idea of putting aside the past and exploring a relationship with Beau seemed insane. How could she possibly get involved with the man who’d shot her brother? She imagined introducing him to friends and colleagues. This is my boyfriend, Beau Maddox. Yes, that’s right. The one who shot Gavin. Even worse, how would she explain it to her parents? Or to Gavin himself?

  But deep down, she knew she’d been holding on to an idealized version of her brother’s crime, his flight to avoid prosecution, and his capture. The testimony Beau had given in court had made perfect sense. All she had to do was allow herself to believe it, and the barriers between her and Beau would melt away. Was she ready for that?

  When she came downstairs and saw the purely male appreciation in his eyes, she wanted nothing better than to let him take her upstairs and peel off all the clothes she’d just put on.

  He didn’t look half-bad himself, she realized. Though he still wore black jeans, he’d traded the black pocket T-shirt for a gray one. The biker vest and boots were gone, replaced by a black leather blazer and black dress boots.

  “That jacket is going to be hot,” she said.

  “I have to wear something to conceal the gun.”

  She should be used to that by now, considering how long she’d been around cops. But it still startled her.

  Beau drove her back to her uncle’s house. He insisted on following the limousine to the cemetery, where they would have a simple graveside service. Besides wanting to see who showed up at the funeral, which could be very illuminating, he wanted to stay close to Aubrey in case of trouble.

  The limousine was actually chilly inside. Aubrey’s uncle sat across from her. His dark suit, once expertly tailored to his robust form, now hung on him like laundry on a clothesline. She was worried about him, but Mary, the hospice nurse, had paid him a visit this morning and had declared him well enough to make it through the funeral.

  David sat next to Uncle Wayne, dashing in a navy suit. He had a small shaving nick on his chin, which made him seem very young all of a sudden, younger than her. His face was grim, his mouth set in a thin line. But he tapped his fingers on his knee in a nervous rhythm, and he couldn’t seem to sit still.

  He’d brought a briefcase with him, which he’d slid under the seat. “What the hell is that for?” Wayne asked.

  “Some papers for Jim. I’ve been doing a little work at home.” Jim was one of the partners at the law firm.

  “You don’t do business during a funeral.” Wayne sounded outraged.

  “I’m not doing business. I’m just giving him the papers. The client needs them, and the reputation of the firm shouldn’t suffer because of our personal crises.”

  “Jim’s coming to the house later,” Wayne grumbled. He didn’t like to be contradicted. “You could have done it then.”

  David gave his dad a rueful grin. “You’re right. My brain hasn’t been working straight lately.”

  Aubrey’s parents sat next to her. They’d arrived late last night and had said little. They hadn’t been terribly pleased when Aubrey had taken Patti in. Her mother, Ginger, had feared Patti would bring trouble with her—and, boy, had she been right. To Ginger’s credit, though, she’d been nothing but supportive since her arrival.

  “I never expected Patti to kill herself,” Wayne said suddenly. David’s nervous finger-tapping stopped. “She was wild and melodramatic,” Wayne continued, “but if someone had pushed her to the end of her tether, I’d have expected her to commit murder, not suicide.”

  “I don’t imagine she wanted to go to jail,” David said. “She didn’t like it much the first time she was there.”

  “Well, she wouldn’t plan on getting caught,” Wayne said, almost smiling. “She always thought she could get away with things. And if she were going to kill herself,” he continued, “don’t you think she’d make a big production out of it? Shoot herself on the evening news, perhaps? But she did it in a roadside park, where perhaps she wouldn’t have been found for days. It’s not like her.”

  Aubrey had been troubled by the same thoughts. But no one would listen to what she had to say. Patti’s allergy to alcohol hadn’t impressed Lyle at all. “If she was going to die anyway,” he’d said a trifle impatiently, “do you think she’d care about a little nausea?”

  Aubrey had thought Lyle’s attitude callous. Earlier he’d said he felt guilty for not launching a more energetic investigation from the beginning, but sometimes he didn’t act guilty at all. He acted mean. When the funeral was over, she decided she would see if she could get Lyle removed from the case. Her uncle probably had enough clout to do it. That meant a new investigator would have to start all over, but maybe he’d be more competent than Lyle Palmer.

  The service started at ten, so it wasn’t too awfully hot yet. And the Clarendon family plot, in the old part of the city cemetery, was shaded by huge black oak trees. Aubrey was amaz
ed at the number of people there. Some of them were reporters, she realized. She wanted to scream at them that they shouldn’t intrude on this private time. But the media vultures were her allies for the moment, keeping the story of Sara’s disappearance in the public consciousness, so she had to be nice to them.

  Some of the people standing around were undoubtedly curiosity seekers, too. Wayne Clarendon was as close to a public figure as Payton, Texas, had, and the suicide-kidnapping intrigued the townspeople.

  As the family got out of the limousine, Beau was instantly beside them. He said hello to Aubrey’s parents. Aubrey tensed, praying there wouldn’t be a scene. Her parents had been furious with Beau after Gavin’s shooting, almost as mad as Aubrey. But they were polite now, and Aubrey’s mother even gave Beau a little shoulder squeeze.

  Beau stuck close to Aubrey as they all sat down in the white folding chairs on the row reserved for family. He sat next to her without apology.

  “The person who wants to hurt you is still out there somewhere,” he murmured. She hadn’t told her parents everything, so she was glad they couldn’t overhear. “A funeral might be a good opportunity for a sniper.” He looked around again. “Who are all these people?”

  Aubrey identified the ones she could. “Those three older men over there? They’re the partners in Wayne’s law firm. Jim Thomason is the older one. Not sure of the names of the other two.

  “That family, the man and woman and two teenage boys, are distant cousins on my mother’s side. I haven’t talked to them in years, but Patti used to babysit for them. The woman—” She stopped, her attention snagged by a man and woman climbing out of a red Cadillac.

  “Greg Holmes,” Beau said, apparently having spotted them at the same time. “And Summer. Guess it’s only appropriate Patti’s employer put in an appearance.”

  “He’s been wearing long sleeves every time we’ve seen him,” Aubrey said, just realizing it. “I’d love to look at his right arm.”