Her Texas Lawman

by Stella Bagwell

  Smiling at the principal, she said, “Don’t worry. A couple of days of rest and I’ll be like new.”

  With a final wave, Lucita moved on down the wide corridor leading to the front exit of the building. At this time of the day the halls of the Catholic high school were eerily quiet. Normally, Lucita loved being around groups of energetic teenagers. From the first day she’d entered the fourth-grade classroom where Mrs. Baldwin made learning an exciting venture for the whole class, Lucita had set her heart on being just like the feisty teacher. And that decision hadn’t wavered as she’d grown into adulthood.

  Even marrying Derek at twenty-two and giving birth to Marti three years later hadn’t deterred her determination to get a degree in mathematics and her Texas teaching certificate. For the past twelve years she’d been teaching in a private school in Corpus Christi. The other teachers there had become like family to her. She’d hated to leave, but Matt had convinced her that with Derek gone and out of her life, there was no reason left for her and Marti to stay on the coast. Now she was starting over at St. Francis, trying to build new friendships and a new life and wondering if she’d done the right thing by coming home to the Sandbur.

  Since her smashed car had gone to the graveyard at Santee’s Salvage she’d been driving one of the ranch’s work trucks. Matt and Cordero had tried to insist that she take one of their family cars, but she’d refused, reminding her brothers that she’d come home to the Sandbur to be with her family, not to use them. The brown Ford she’d collected from the ranch yard was several years old with ripped upholstery and a bed full of hay hooks, horse halters and fencing tools. Black decals of the S/S brand were plastered on both doors, leaving no doubt as to which teacher was driving the banged-up vehicle, but Lucita could care less about keeping up appearances. As long as she had transportation to and from work, she was content. As soon as her insurance policy settled, she’d find herself some little economical car that could make the sixty-plus-mile round-trip every day on a few dollars of gas.

  This morning she’d managed to find a parking slot beneath one of the flowering pear trees growing at the edge of the school parking lot. Now as she opened the door and threw her tote bag and purse inside, she was glad for the shade. At least she could slide beneath the steering wheel without blistering her rear.

  She’d started the engine and was about to jerk the floor shift into Reverse when she noticed a piece of folded notebook paper beneath her windshield wiper.

  Probably a student who couldn’t face her with some sort of request, she thought, or one who needed a second chance at a flunked test.

  Sighing, she thrust the floor gearshift into Neutral and left the engine running while she stepped down to retrieve the paper. Once she was back in the truck, she started to toss the note into her purse and go on her way, but curiosity got the better of her at the last second and she unfolded the square.

  The typed words in front of her were so unexpected and strange that for a moment she couldn’t assimilate what she was reading. Then she began to shake.

  Deposit one million dollars into this account by Wednesday noon. If you don’t comply, you’ll wish like hell you had. Derek

  After the word account there was a row of numbers and the name of a nearby bank. As for the signature, since it was also typed, there was no absolute way to tell if her ex-husband had actually written it.

  Oh, God. Oh, God. What was she supposed to do now?

  Deputy McCleod. The tall, lanky lawman was the first image to come to Lucita’s frantically racing mind. Ripp had to know about this. Not just because he was the deputy working her case, but also because she trusted him. His solid presence would make her feel safe, something she desperately needed at the moment.

  Lucita drove the twenty-six miles from Victoria to Goliad with her cell phone next to her on the seat and one eye on the rearview mirror. By the time she parked in front of the sheriff’s department, she was still shaking, but she’d managed to gather her senses together. She walked into the building with gritty determination on her face.

  “Can I help you?”

  The question came from a female officer sitting behind a waist-high counter. She was much younger than Lucita, on the curvy side, with pale blond hair pulled into a ponytail.

  “I’d like to speak with Deputy McCleod if he’s here,” Lucita told her.

  The young officer’s brows lifted marginally. “He’s here. Just a minute.”

  The woman left the area behind the counter and disappeared down a corridor.

  Lucita barely had time to glance around her surroundings before she heard returning footsteps. She looked around just as Deputy McCleod stepped into the foyer. From the look on his face, she was the last person he’d expected to see waiting on him.

  “Lucita!”

  Stepping forward, she offered him her hand. “Hello, Deputy.”

  Ripp took her hand, but rather than shaking it he found himself holding on to it tightly as he searched her face. Something was wrong, he decided. Her features were pinched and pale, her brown eyes glazed as though tears were close to the surface.

  “Has something happened?”

  “I—uh—sorta. I need to talk to you.” She glanced at the other officer who was back behind the counter and watching the two of them with open curiosity. “Do you have a minute?”

  Picking up on Lucita’s wish to keep her issue private, he nodded. “Sure. I was on my way out anyway.”

  With his hand still holding hers, he led her out of the building and around to a side lawn where blooming crepe myrtle trees shaded two wrought-iron benches.

  After he helped her onto one of the seats, he joined her. “We could have talked in my office. But with the jail being in the back of the building you sometimes hear things being yelled that you don’t want to hear. This is more private. That was what you wanted, right?”

  A faint blush crept across her cheeks and Ripp found himself smitten with the sight of her. She was wearing a sandy pink shirt with the collar flipped jauntily upward beneath a curtain of light brown hair. A matching straight skirt covered her slim hips and stopped just a fraction below her knees. When she crossed her shapely legs it was all Ripp could do to keep his eyes on her face.

  “Actually, yes. I—something has happened and I figured you would want to know about it as quickly as possible.”

  Surprised, he stared at her. He’d talked to Matt earlier this morning and from what his friend had told him, there’d been no incidents regarding Lucita. Apparently, whatever this was had occurred in the past few hours. “What happened?”

  Nodding, she reached for the handbag she’d placed at her feet. Ripp’s gaze followed her movements, down the smooth line of her calf to the pointed black heels on her dainty feet. She was soft and petite and, for some reason that he didn’t quite understand, made him extremely aware of his own masculinity.

  Her expression sober, she answered. “I found this stuck beneath my windshield this evening when I was about to leave the school campus.”

  She handed him a piece of folded paper. Bemused, he opened it and scanned the brief sentences. The message left Ripp chilled to the center of his being.

  Looking up at her, he stated the obvious. “Your ex-husband’s name is Derek Campbell. This might not have anything to do with what’s been going on, but just for clarification, did you drop his name?”

  “While we were married I went by Lucita Sanchez Campbell. I dropped his name after the divorce. My son, Marti, goes by Sanchez and Campbell.”

  He glanced down at the paper in his hand and then back up to her face. Her deep brown eyes were dark pools reflecting fears and doubts that cut at him, filled him with a need to reach out to her.

  “Do you think he wrote this? Is this something he might do to you?”

  She looked frantic. “I—I don’t know. I honestly don’t think so. Not the man I married—though I suppose he could have changed. Still, anyone could have typed his name to that thing!”

  She
was right, of course. They needed more to go on than a piece of paper with typed words.

  Hearing a thread of panic in her voice, he reached over and curled his fingers around her forearm. “Don’t panic, Lucita,” he said gently. “We’re going to figure this out and catch whoever is threatening you.”

  “But what if this—this person tries to harm me or my son? And the money—I’m not a rich person. I mean, yes, the Saddler and the Sanchez families are rich—the ranch is rich—but personally I’m not. I—” Groaning helplessly, she shook her head. “Maybe I had better tell you everything.”

  Guardedly, he watched a cloud of shame wash over her face, an expression that surprised him almost as much as the note. He couldn’t imagine a woman of her stature being ashamed of anything. “All right. Maybe you’d better,” he said.

  Those brown eyes turned to his again and the pleading light that flickered back at him had Ripp’s fingers unconsciously tightening around her arm.

  She sighed. “You were right the other night, Ripp. I was holding something back from you. Not about the accident—but it might have been pertinent information. I’m just not sure.”

  She’d called him Ripp, as though they actually knew each other, as though she considered him more than just a deputy. The notion filled him with a sense of importance, which was downright silly. It didn’t matter what this woman thought of him personally. All he needed to concentrate on was helping her.

  “Okay. So you didn’t tell me everything. I’m listening now.”

  Behind them on a nearby street, light traffic was passing by. Above their heads, among the white blooms of the crepe myrtles, mockingbirds were squawking the announcement of sunset, yet the sounds hardly registered with Ripp. Everything inside him was waiting for her to speak.

  “I have no idea where my ex-husband is,” she said quietly. “He simply left three years ago—abandoned me without warning or a clue where he was going.”

  In Ripp’s business he heard all sorts of stories, every imaginable kind of excuse and tale. Still, even though Matt had implied that Lucita’s husband had disappeared, what he was hearing from her now totally stunned him. She wasn’t the sort of woman that a man would simply abandon. She was a soft, beautiful lady. She was educated with an admirable career; she was someone with a prestigious family and rich heritage. What kind of man would walk away from that?

  “I’ve got to admit I’m a little confused here, Lucita. When Matt spoke to me about his ex-brother-in-law, he didn’t say anything about him abandoning you. You didn’t know he was going to leave? Had you had arguments, threats, anything of that sort going on between the two of you?”

  Her head bent, she muttered, “Nothing like that. Oh, we had arguments from time to time. Mostly over financial issues, but they were never violent. Just disagreements—like most married couples have. At the time I believed our marriage was solid. Then one evening Derek just never came home. I called the chemical company where he worked as an engineer—they hadn’t seen him all day.” She glanced up, her expression a picture of wry acceptance. “That was just the beginning. Shortly afterward I discovered he’d taken all my inheritance—the money that my parents had divided equally between us children. It was over a million dollars. Derek knew I rarely looked at that account, so he took advantage and withdrew it slowly so as not to alert me or the bank’s attention.”

  This past week Ripp had learned from the Corpus police department that Derek Campbell was wanted for robbery. But he’d not realized the man had stolen a fortune—Lucita’s fortune. “A hell of a thing,” he murmured to himself as much as to her.

  Her lips twisted into a bitter line. “He’d been my husband for ten years. I thought I knew him. I thought I could trust him. I had his name on all my savings accounts. That’s the way a normal married couple does things, isn’t it?”

  She didn’t wait for him to answer. Maybe she thought he couldn’t answer such a question. Either way, she went on, her voice so tight it was hardly more than a reedy whisper.

  “Since that day he vanished I haven’t seen him. And I’ve only heard from him once, through the mail. About three months after he’d left, a letter arrived in the mail. It was postmarked from a little town in Southern Mexico.”

  Although Lucita had turned the letter over to the police as evidence, she’d not forgotten the contents. Derek had admitted he’d grown bored being a husband and father and was tired of pretending to be a happy family man. He’d wanted excitement in his life and said he understood that she and Marti needed love and security, something he was no longer capable of giving them. He apologized for taking the money, but he didn’t feel guilty about it. After all, her family was wealthy; she could get more.

  “So that was the only word you ever got from him? How did you acquire a divorce?”

  She grimaced. “Along with the letter he’d sent a set of divorce papers, drawn up by a Corpus lawyer that he had used over the years. He’d already signed the document. All I had to do was take it to my personal lawyer to put the filing in motion.” She paused and glanced away from him. “Putting my name at the bottom of the page was merely a formality. My marriage had been over long before that. I just hadn’t known it.”

  Ripp wanted to tell her that she’d gotten rid of bad rubbish, but he kept the comment to himself. She’d already suffered enough without him reminding her that she’d made the mistake of marrying a loser.

  Instead, he told her, “I talked with a detective from the Corpus Christi police. He said that Derek was wanted for robbery and that they’d tracked him as far as Laredo then lost his trail as he slipped over into Mexico. He says they have no current information indicating that the man might be back in the States.”

  “I’m not sure anyone is bothering to look,” she said glumly. “My case is cold now. Besides, it wasn’t a violent crime. Lawmen have more important cases to solve than a man disappearing with his wife’s inheritance.”

  Ripp had to admit that what she was saying was true. Still, the idea that any man could have done something so heinous to this woman and her child left him sick.

  “Lucita—before this happened—are you certain that this creep didn’t give you some sort of clue to his intentions? I understand I’m getting pretty personal, but if Derek Campbell wrote this note, I need some clues to get into the guy’s head before, God forbid, he makes his next move.”

  He watched her swallow hard. A part of him wanted to move closer, to put his arm around her shoulder and comfort her. But she wasn’t here seeking the comfort of a man, he reminded himself. She was here seeking the help of the law.

  “We—uh, like I said before, our marriage had its ups and downs, but nothing out of the ordinary. Derek liked to have a good time and spend money. We sometimes quarreled about that. But he wasn’t an abusive man. This threatening note—it seems totally out of character for him. But then I would have never guessed that the man was a greedy thief. If I had any inkling I would have safeguarded my Sandbur inheritance.”

  For any man to choose money over this woman was beyond Ripp’s comprehension. But being a lawman, he knew firsthand that most crimes were centered on greed. It was a sad fact of life. “What about your son? Does he know about his father—about the money?”

  She breathed deeply and he could see she was trying to collect herself. “I tried to keep most of the brutal facts from Marti, but after we came home to the Sandbur, he overheard Dad talking to me about the money. God, it was awful. Even though I’d warned him that Derek was never coming home, I think up to that point Marti wanted to believe that something had happened to his dad—that he was dead and couldn’t return to us. You see, I’d never told my son about Derek’s letter—how he’d written that he didn’t want to be a husband or father anymore. But after that—well, Marti’s had to face the fact that his own father didn’t care about him or me. I worry about what that has done to him.”

  And what about her? Ripp wondered. After what this Campbell had done to her, how could she ever lo
ok at another man and trust him?

  But she came to you, Ripp. She’s putting her trust in you to help her. You can’t let her down.

  Emotions such as Ripp hadn’t felt in a long time filled his throat and made his voice just a bit husky when he finally spoke.

  “Maybe this note is the work of your husband, Lucita. Could be that he’s back for more money. Right now we can only speculate. But I swear to you one way or the other, I’m going to find out who and what is behind this.”

  Something like hope flickered in her eyes and he was amazed at how special the sight of it made him feel.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  He stood and pulled her up by the hand. “First we’re going to hand this over to Sheriff Travers. If we’re lucky, the crime lab will find prints on this paper that belong to someone other than you or me. Along with that we have a bank name and an account number. More than likely it was opened under a false identity, but even that might lead to someone. And then, after we see the sheriff, I’m going to follow you to the Sandbur and we’re going to talk to your family about this.”

  She suddenly stuck her heels in the ground. “Wait, Ripp! I don’t—I’d rather keep this mess from them. It will only worry everybody, and Marti is already upset.”

  Amazed that she still wanted to be so independent even in light of actual threats, he shook his head at her. “Marti won’t have to hear about any of this. But the rest of your family deserves to know. The Sandbur has a prominent reputation. It’s no secret that your family is rich. The person or persons behind this note are obviously after money. As far as we know, anyone close to you could be in danger, too.”