“WPRA?” So many acronyms.
“Women’s Professional Rodeo Association. You have to be a member to participate in barrel racing at pro rodeos,” she smiled, trying not to be condescending at my lack of knowledge.
“It’s okay, I’m not going to be following the sport any time soon. I’m not a big fan of things with fur that weigh more than I do, but I’m interested in your life, and your story.” I forgot why I was listening to her blabber on about her life.
I mean really, I hadn’t been listening that long, and I was already bored. Maybe not bored, but distracted. I’d hoped to hear something from Max this morning, but nothing. I sure wasn’t going to be the first to reach out.
“When I finally got serious about pro rodeo, my dad slowed down. He became more interested in politics, and so my mom and I traveled without him. I couldn’t believe how much nicer it was.” She smiled. It was a faraway smile at a distant memory.
“Didn’t you and Bucky get along?”
She looked directly at me now. “I’m not sure anyone, except possibly Skinner, who is just like him in so many ways, actually got along with my dad. He’s a difficult man, unless you’re doing exactly what he wants, exactly the way he wants it.”
“And here I thought he was ‘my man.’” I threw his campaign words out, having no idea what else to say.
“What a load of bullshit that slogan was,” she laughed, and it went all the way to her eyes. “Mom came up with that one, and Dad loved it. Mostly because it was a load of bullshit, and he knew it.”
“How did your mom feel about the politics?” Here was the real meat of the situation.
“She hated having to be the perfect wife, but she was good at it. But she loved that it kept Dad busy, so he couldn’t travel with us. And when you’re going for the gold, you’re on the road more than you’re home. She never really said much, though. Mom never said anything bad about my dad; she just never said much about him at all. When he wasn’t with us, it was like he didn’t exist.”
How strange. Out of sight, out of mind? Happy to pretend he didn’t exist for a while?
“Did they fight a lot?”
“Never,” she said, a bit too fast for my taste.
“Really?” I prodded.
“Not fight, exactly, at least not until this last campaign. This was the biggest yet for him, and it was costing us a lot of money out of our own pocket. Dad said his campaign contributions would pay for most everything, but it hasn’t turned out that way. Without asking, he sold off trophy saddles, bridles, and lots of other tack. We used to have three really nice gooseneck trailers, so we could all travel separately, and now we just have the one.” She looked around, as if to see if anyone might be in earshot. “I heard them arguing about a second mortgage on the house. She refused to sign the papers. Said he could take everything else, but he wasn’t taking the roof from over her head.” She looked around again.
Mimi texted me back that she’d dropped Cortnie off at the office and was on her way to pick me up.
“So they argued about money.”
“But not like other couples do. My mom was afraid of my dad. Hell, everyone was afraid of my dad. I’ll bet you even the cops in there were afraid of my dad when he was alive,” she shivered.
“Was he violent?”
“Only with his words.” Galynn squeezed her eyes shut and didn’t say anything for almost a minute. “That man could kill a person with his words.”
“Did you love him?”
Her head jerked up, and she frowned at me. “What kind of question is that? Of course I loved him. He’s my dad.”
“I only ask because you don’t seem too sad about his passing, or worked up about the murder.” Calling a spade a spade.
“I shed my tears. I have to be strong for my mom. Does she look like she needs a daughter who is going to break down any minute? No. And I have to be there for her, like she’s been here for me all these years.” Galynn stood. “I have to go check on my mom. I hope your ride comes soon, or maybe those cops can get you home.”
She walked into the house and left me on the porch with my thoughts. And my thoughts led me to the bank, and how I was going to get into that damned deposit box. I got up and walked back into the house. I didn’t knock, figuring the cops were there anyway. Galynn would either kick me out, or she wouldn’t even notice I was there at all.
Damn, if the stars were aligned in my favor. I grabbed one of the pre-signed photos of Bucky Cox and put it with my photo of Galynn. Now I had his signature. I could practice it on my way back to town. They probably wouldn’t ask me for I.D., just my signature on the card, and if it matched close enough, I was in.
Chapter 15
MIMI
I was about sick of driving all over the county and it wasn’t even noon yet, or maybe it was. Fine, it was after noon. When I turned off Highway 101, onto Pesante Road, a cop car came flying up behind me. Damn it, I thought, I’d only been going seven miles per hour over the speed limit. Charles regularly ran at least fifteen over and never got pulled over. And I was coming to pick him up. He’d be paying this ticket.
Relief flooded me when the cop went around me and sped off around the first turn. I found it a bit strange that a Salinas Police Department vehicle was so far out of the city corporate limits. I’d have figured this to be sheriff’s territory, but then it was still Salinas. Sort of.
I stayed right at the speed limit all the way to the end of Pesante Road. I didn’t want a ticket, and that was too close for comfort.
When I arrived to pick up Charles, the car that had passed me was up at the house. Nick, Gabe, and Charles stood in the yard in front of the Cox home. Rayna was being put into the cop car, hands cuffed behind her back.
I drove up and got out of the car. “What’s going on?”
“Rayna has been arrested for the murder of Bucky Cox,” Charles said. “They are taking her to the pokey.”
Nick glared at Charles.
Galynn stormed out of the house. “I’ve called our lawyer. You have no right to do this. My mother didn’t do anything. She couldn’t have done anything. This is crazy.”
“Miss Cox, I need you to sit down and be quiet before I have another car come take you in.” Nick spoke softlyand evenly. He kept his arms at his sides, and his body language loose.
She pointed at me and Charles. “It’s you people, you crazy people, and that son of a bitch Skinner. You’ve all made our lives hell. If you’d have just stayed away, we could have handled this by ourselves.” Now she was screaming at the top of her lungs, tears pouring from her eyes.
“Handled what, Galynn?” Charles took on the same demeanor as Nick.
“Stay out of this, Charles,” Nick warned. “You don’t know everything.”
“Everything? You mean like that fact that Bucky wasn’t even my fucking father?”
Oh shit!
Gabe’s face softened. “You knew?”
“You know?” she screamed at him. She turned to go in the house.
“Galynn, I need you to stay out here. You can’t go in the house unaccompanied.” Nick reached for her arm, but she jerked it away.
“Or what, you’re going to shoot me?”
Gabe said, “Yes.”
“I don’t really give a damn, shoot me. My life is over anyway. I don’t want to be a bastard. The whole world will know my life has been a lie.” She slammed her head against the door frame. “How did you know? Did she tell you?”
“The life insurance papers.” Nick handed her the folded up papers he had in his left hand.
The fight left her. “That’s how he found out, too.”
She leaned against the house and slid to the ground.
“Found out what?” Good gracious, I’d missed out on a lot while I was in town with Cortnie.
“The blood tests,” she whispered.
Charles filled in the blanks. “So Bucky had life insurance taken out on the family?”
“He said it was just in case
something happened. He’d taken the second mortgage on the house.” She looked at Charles. “I know my mom said no, but he forged her signature and did it anyway. No one said no to my dad, or not my dad, and got away with it. He did what he wanted to do. And afterward, he got scared. What if something happened to him? He didn’t want me and my mom to lose the ranch.”
Well, wasn’t that nice of him? Asshole had a heart, sort of.
“No one thought anything of it. What was done was done, only when the blood tests were done and the papers came back, there was something not right. Bucky was O, Mom was A, and I was AB. See the problem?”
Oh, shit. I saw the problem. It was impossible for a parent with O blood, either positive or negative to have a child with AB blood type.
“And Bucky found out?” I asked.
“Bucky went ballistic. He demanded to know who my mom had cheated with. But he knew, and it was only once. It didn’t matter that it was only once; he wanted nothing to do with my mom from that moment forward.” Galynn shook like a leaf in the breeze.
“But they were still together,” I said. After twenty-five years of marriage, there had to be something left.
“My mom reminded him of all of the times he cheated on her, and then she said something about rape.” I thought Galynn was going to vomit.
“Emmet Hollister,” I said. Everyone looked at me.
I volunteered the story. I told them everything, how she’d come to Rayna, and how Rayna denied it, and refused to help Emmet.
“That doesn’t sound like my mom. I would have been twelve when that happened. I would have known. Wouldn’t I?” She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands.
“I don’t think that’s something you’d have known.” Nick assured her.
“Well, when my mom mentioned the rape, my dad, I mean, Bucky, went apeshit on her.”
I had to know, “When was this?”
“He’d gotten the mortgage papers back last week, and then he purchased the life insurance. I’m not sure when he got the paperwork, but he saw the opened envelope on the dining room table yesterday morning, before we went out to get Mojo ready.”
“Did you know your mom was going to go down to the bucking chutes and kill your dad?” Gabe asked.
Galynn didn’t say anything for a moment. She rubbed her eyes again, then started to get up. Stopped. Got up. “She didn’t kill him.”
“But our evidence shows that she did.” Nick said. He opened the file in his hand, the one he’d had the insurance papers on top of.
“She’d have reasoned with him, like she has for twenty-five years. Somehow she always reasoned with him. But this time, he said she’d ruined everything. He’d planned to go to town and file for divorce as soon as the horses were finished yesterday. He was going to leave me and my mom with nothing. There was an iron clad prenup. We talked about it many times when we were on the road. Everything belonged to Bucky; my mom just married into it. And he’d sold off most everything anyway, so she’d be fifty-five years old, starting all over. I couldn’t let that happen.”
I shook my head. What had she just said?
“He’d been treating me like trash all morning. Lower than trash. Saying, ‘Bastard, get this, bastard, get that,’ and at the time, I didn’t even know what happened. I went into the house to get him a cup of coffee and asked my mom. She told me everything.”
“Did she tell you who your dad was?”
“No, but only because Bucky called on the cell phone wanting to know where his coffee was. I’d thought she wasn’t down there helping because she felt sick, but it was because he said he couldn’t stand the sight of her. He could deal with me because he’d never stuck his dick in me.”
Pleasant. I liked Bucky more and more. Not!
“When I went back, I threw the hot coffee in his face, and I confronted him.” She got in our faces, walking in front of each and every one of us. “He unbuckled his belt and pulled down his pants, and he said, well, you ain’t mine now, are you? Maybe I should put my dick in you. How would your momma like that?”
The collective gasp was audible.
“That’s when I couldn’t take it anymore. I picked up the nearest thing I could find and I swung as fast and hard as I could as he came at me.” She closed her eyes as the memories flooded into her head. “I jumped to the side as he came at me, and I swung. And when he went down, I kept swinging, for my mom, for Skinner, for everyone he’d ever been mean to.”
I realized I’d been clenching every muscle in my body as I listened to her. My neck hurt. Hell, every joint in my body hurt, I was so tense. And I realized that everyone was silent. No one spoke, it was as if they were afraid to respond.
Even Charles was quietly seething. I could see the corded muscles in his neck. He stepped forward and grabbed Galynn. He pulled her in tight and hugged her. He held her like he was never going to let her go. He wrapped his arms around her, and held her to him, enveloping her in his body, letting her know that someone understood, someone had been there, someone cared. And finally, she softened against him. Sobbing, she wrapped her arms around him, and cried into his chest. She held him so tight, it would have cut off the breath of a lesser man. But Charles held tight, and kissed her hair. He let her cry, let her melt, break down, lose it, and not have to look at anyone as she did it.
“No father, real or step, should ever treat their child that way. If you don’t have the money for an attorney, I’ll find you one.” He held her tight.
I was standing close enough to hear her, and I hoped that Nick and Gabe weren’t.
“I might have killed him anyway,” she said into Charles’ chest.
He leaned down and whispered, “That’s between you and me. Don’t ever say that again.”
I wanted to un-hear that exchange. I hoped that Nick never asked, so I’d never have to tell him the truth. But a relationship isn’t built on lies, and if needed, I’d tell him.
Nick said to Gabe, “We’re going to have to arrest her.”
Gabe said, “You do it.”
Nick said, “I’m the senior detective, and I say arrest her. We’ll have to let a jury decide this one.”
Dragging his feet, literally, Gabe inched up to Galynn and loosened her grip on Charles. “Honey, I’m sorry, but you’re under arrest for the murder of Bucky Cox.”
She didn’t resist, and Charles held onto her until he could no longer touch her flesh. Gabe wrapped the cuffs gently, but tightly, around her wrists, and escorted her to his Crown Vic.
Charles and I stood, watching, and Charles put his arm around my shoulder. In a low voice, he said, “I knew it was her.”
I shook my head. “Oh, really?”
As Gabe gently placed Galynn in the car, Nick stepped up beside us.
Charles asked,“Why did you take Raynaaway?”
“We had the kid dead to rights. We’d matched her fingerprint in the blood on Bucky’s belt buckle to her prints on the glass of water she brought to Gabe. But that was all circumstantial, you know? If we pinned it on her mom, I thought maybe we’d get her to break down and start talking. A confession is easier than a trial.”
“But will it hold up? I mean, she’d easily be able to turn this around and call it self-defense. I wasn’t kidding when I said I’d pay for her attorney.” Charles puffed out his chest, making it clear to Nick whose side he was on.
“Look, Charles, I don’t care if you pay for the girl’s attorney or not, but I wouldn’t let her sob story and sad tale sway you too much. She’s no dummy, and I’d bet a lot of this went down long before yesterday. These don’t seem like stupid women to me. As a matter of fact, they’ve been traveling down the road together, across the country, for years. Who knows what they may have cooked up along the way?”
Charles’ face turned scarlet. He didn’t like being played for a fool. But I could see he was on the fence, not sure who to believe.
“You’ll be keeping the mother and daughter away from each other, right? So they can’t concoct
a crazy defense?” Charles asked.
“Tell you what, Charles, you let me do my job, and I’ll let you get back to yours.” Nick was ready to be done with us.
“I’m just here to pick him up,” I said.“I got lucky and arrived just in time for the good stuff.”
“And now you can be even luckier, and hit the road before you get arrested for interfering with an investigation.” He winked, but I knew he was serious. About me hitting the road, not about the getting arrested part.
As we walked to my car, Charles handed Nick something. It was so small, I couldn’t see what it was, but I heard him say,“I don’t know if this will help you, but I found it on the floor right before you two arrived.”
Chapter 16
MIMI
Back at the agency, I had a visitor waiting in my office when I arrived.
“Can we talk?” Jackie asked.
Charles had walked in the door with me. He looked at me, then at Jackie, and walked toward his office. I swear I heard him mutter something nasty under his breath.
I walked into my office and sat down at my desk, really not ready for the confrontation. This day had been exhausting.
“What can I do for you?” I tried to keep the edge out of my voice.
“We’ve been best friends forever, and I didn’t want to leave things the way I left them.”
She couldn’t even look me directly. Her gaze shifted around the room, never quite landing on my face, though I did try to maintain eye contact.
“And…” Now I didn’t care about any damn edge.
“This marriage thing is scary for me. It didn’t work out so well last time, and I jumped in with two feet this time, like a teenager.”
I wanted to say, “Like last time?” but I didn’t say anything.
“The kids are happy, I think I’m happy, but I’m always on edge. And I don’t know, I feel like you pushed me out while I was gone. So I gained a husband, but I lost a chance at being a business partner.” She let go of the arms of the chair and shook her hands out. “There, I said it.”
“So, you think, if you hadn’t left and eloped, that I’d have taken you on as a business partner, instead of Charles?” Edges were smoothing.
Electile Dysfunction (Gotcha Detective Agency Mystery Book 6) Page 16