Smooth-Talking Texan

by Candace Camp

  “Hey, Quinn,” he said as he drew near the truck. “Sorry you got called out today. It’s your brother’s wedding, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. But it was over anyway.” Quinn spoke casually, but his eyes never left the other man, and he opened the door and stepped out of the truck to meet him.

  “Hell of a thing to find,” the other man said. Now that he was close, Lisa could see that his face was pale under his rancher’s tan, almost a greenish hue. “I figured I had a dead cow when I saw those buzzards circling, so I drove over to see.” He shook his head, obviously remembering the moment when he had seen that the dead body had not been a cow. “I been sittin’ here shootin’ off the gun every once in a while to keep the birds off it.”

  “Thanks, Red.” Quinn glanced toward the vultures, still drifting through the air. “I guess with all the people that’ll be here soon, they won’t be lighting any more.”

  “Yeah.” The other man glanced into the cab of Quinn’s pickup and saw Lisa. “Oh. Hello, ma’am.” He politely doffed his hat to her. “I didn’t realize you were there. Sorry.”

  Lisa smiled at him, relieved to have learned the reason he was carrying a gun. “Hello.”

  “Did you recognize him, Red?” Quinn asked now.

  The rancher grimaced, looking sick. “Lord, no, I couldn’t even stomach gettin’ close enough to look in his face. There’s a fearsome stench. It was clear he was dead. Looks like a Mexican, that’s all I could tell.”

  “Male?”

  “Yeah. Looked like.”

  “Well, I guess I better go look at it,” Quinn said.

  “You want me to show you?” Red asked unenthusiastically.

  “Nah, I can find it easy enough with those birds. As soon as one of my deputies gets here, he can take your statement, and you can go on home.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Quinn opened the door of the truck and leaned in to say to Lisa, “You stay here, okay? I want to keep the scene as clear as possible.”

  “Are you kidding?” Lisa looked at him with horror. “I have no intention of going anywhere near it.”

  He gave her a faint smile. “Wish I didn’t have to.”

  She watched as Quinn turned and walked away, past Klingman’s dusty green pickup and on toward the spot the vultures circled. He reached in his back pocket and pulled out a handkerchief as he went and held it to his nose. Lisa looked away, feeling slightly sick.

  “Hell of a job,” Red Klingman commented, watching Quinn, too.

  “It must have been a shock, finding it.”

  The man nodded. “Yeah. I was sure glad Melanie wasn’t with me. That’s the missus.”

  They began to talk, more to distract their minds from the thought of what Quinn was examining than from any desire to have a conversation. Before long, a tan sheriff’s car pulled up beside them, and a young deputy got out. He spoke to Klingman, then walked off to join Quinn.

  When he and Quinn returned a few minutes later, the deputy looked considerably paler than he had when he arrived, and the freckles across the bridge of his nose stood out in stark contrast. By this time, another deputy had pulled up in a patrol car, and a Suburban had arrived, containing a man with a medical bag, who Lisa presumed must be the county coroner. The men shook hands all around, and Quinn set Deputy Padilla to taking Red Klingman’s statement. Then he walked over to her side of the car, his face set in grim lines.

  “Lisa, I’m sorry. It looks like I’m going to be here awhile. Will it be all right if Phil drives you home? I need to stay and oversee everything.”

  “Sure. I understand,” Lisa reassured him.

  So the young deputy drove her home in the patrol car, doing his best to appear less shaken by the crime scene than he obviously was. Lisa was glad to be away from the scene, even though she had not witnessed the obviously gruesome sight of the body. Just the knowledge of it was more than enough for her imagination.

  Lisa showered as soon as she got home, as if she could somehow wash away the experience, then curled up in an old robe on the couch and spent the evening watching television. Most of the time it served well enough to take her mind off what had happened, but she found her thoughts still straying now and again to the empty field and the chilling circling of the buzzards overhead. It must have been awful for that poor rancher to have stumbled upon it. She wondered if it had in fact been a homicide victim or if it was just some poor soul who had had an accident out in the middle of nowhere. That thought was disturbing enough; in fact, none of the options were good—suicide was a terrible end, as well.

  She tried to turn her thoughts in another direction, going back to this afternoon and the happiness of the wedding and reception. That was something of a mental minefield, as well, though, for she kept remembering how wonderful it had felt to be in Quinn’s arms and how uncertain she was about what to do about it.

  It was after eleven when she finally got up to turn out the lights and go to bed. Just as she clicked off the remote, there was a knock on the front door. She jumped, clamping her teeth shut on a little shriek. Willing herself to be calm and mature, she went to the door and looked out the peephole. Quinn Sutton stood outside.

  She opened the door quickly. “Quinn!”

  “I’m sorry. I know it’s late. I just, ah, wanted to make sure you got home okay. That you were all right.”

  He had obviously gone home and showered. He was wearing jeans and an old T-shirt, and his short hair curled damply. He smiled a little and added candidly, “Actually, I mostly wanted to see you.”

  “Sure. Come on in.” Lisa stepped back so that he could enter the apartment.

  “Sorry. I hope it’s not too late.”

  “No, it’s fine.” Lisa refrained from adding that she was far more delighted than she probably should be to see him. “You want a beer?”

  “That’d be great.” Quinn flopped down on the sofa with a sigh and leaned back. Lisa went to the refrigerator and returned with a bottle of beer and a glass.

  “Bottle’s fine,” he said, taking it and twisting off the cap. “Man! I’m sorry you had to see that.”

  “I didn’t really see anything,” Lisa pointed out and sat down at the other end of the couch. “Have you been out there all evening?”

  He nodded. “Most of it. I went home and changed afterward. Figured you sure wouldn’t want to see me the way I was.” He let out a long breath, closing his eyes. “I hate this stuff.”

  “Death?”

  “Yeah. Especially useless death.”

  “Was he murdered?”

  “I don’t know. Dr. Drachman couldn’t tell from examining the corpse. It wasn’t anything immediately apparent. We’ve sent the body to the state M.E.’s office in Austin.”

  “Do you know who it was?”

  He shook his head. “No idea. He definitely looked Hispanic. Usually, you find a corpse like that, no ID, out in the middle of nowhere, Hispanic, you figure it’s probably an illegal.”

  “An alien?”

  “Yeah. It happens a lot. They pay money to some guy, a ‘coyote,’ to get them across the border, and then he’ll abandon them, just leave them in the desert to make it or die. Just a few weeks ago there was a story like that in Arizona, fifteen or twenty Mexican nationals dying out in the desert. Or they’ll stuff some huge number in a truck, and a bunch of them die of the heat and dehydration.”

  “How awful.”

  “It’s an awful business. I mean, what kind of person would take money from people like that, people who are so desperate they’re paying him their last peso to get across the border, and then just leave them to die?”

  “I don’t know.” Lisa moved closer to him, drawn by the pain in his voice, and took his hand. He intertwined his fingers through hers and gave her a small smile.

  “Aren’t you glad I came here to dump that on you?”

  “I don’t mind. I’m glad you came,” Lisa answered honestly. Charming as Quinn normally was, there was something even more appealing to him
now, raw and honest, vulnerable to the pain of his job.

  “So you think that’s what happened to this man? He was an illegal alien that got abandoned by his guide?”

  “Could be. It has the markings of it. Only thing is, we’re pretty far from the border for it. Things like this usually happen in the Valley. This is a pretty long way to have walked from the Rio Grande. Odds are he would already have succumbed to the heat and dehydration long before he got here. So…maybe it’s something else. Maybe he’s not an illegal. Maybe he’s just a guy who somehow got lost out in the country. I’ve heard of people dying from exposure and being not all that far from a road, but they got so turned around, they never realized how close they were.”

  “But it’s odd, not having any ID,” Lisa mused.

  “Yeah. It’s real odd. A woman maybe has hers in her purse and loses that as she’s getting dehydrated and delirious, stumbling around. But most guys carry their ID in a wallet in their pants. This guy had nothing in his pockets but lint.”

  “So you’re suspicious.”

  “Yeah. I mean, it could turn out that he left it in his car or something, that his car broke down and for some stupid reason he decided to strike out across the open country instead of sticking to the road. But I think it’s unlikely. Nor does it look like suicide—no ID, no note, no wound. Who kills himself by hiking out in the semi-desert and waiting to die? I won’t know anything until we get the M.E.’s report, but I’m assuming murder.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s a nasty way to end your brother’s wedding day.”

  “It’s a nasty way to end any day. Damn.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his legs, beer bottle dangling from one hand. “I was hoping I’d gotten away from that smell forever. I came back here to Angel Eye to get rid of it. Now here it is, cropping up in a little place like this.”

  “I guess evil can happen anywhere.”

  “I was a cop in San Antonio for seven years. I can’t tell you how many dead people I had to deal with. Car wrecks, suicides, accidents, shootings, stabbings. It affects you—the way you think, the way you look at people, the way you live. I saw things that would turn my stomach. Women—children—killed by the person who was supposed to love them.” He looked over at her. “You don’t want to hear this stuff.”

  “I do if you need to talk about it,” Lisa replied.

  He smiled faintly. “That’s good of you. But…that’s the thing, see. You see all this misery and hatred and lying. And you can’t even tell anybody else about it. You have to tough it out on the job. You can’t let the other guys think you’re a wuss. You have to pretend that you can stand there and look at a dead body and not want to…” He broke off and sighed. “What’s really bad is after a while you get to where you can look at it and not feel much of anything. Then when you go home, it’s not like telling your wife or your girlfriend about your bad day at the office or your problems with the boss. Nobody should have to listen to this kind of thing. So you keep it all inside you.”

  “I would think…even if it’s bad, if someone cared for you, they’d want to hear what troubled you.”

  “In theory, I guess. But in reality—who can stand to hear gruesome stories or even just constant tales about avarice and greed and people’s inhumanity to each other? So all you do is go to the bar after you get off shift and have a few beers with the other guys and joke around and hope that you don’t turn into a bitter shell like some of the older ones.”

  “Is that always what happens?”

  “I don’t know. It happens a lot. Cops get very cynical. You don’t trust anybody. You’re always looking for the lies people are telling. You could see somebody giving away money, and you’d think, ‘What’s his con?”

  “I can see you would.”

  “You start to think that everyone in the world is bad. And it seems hopeless. Like there’s nothing you can do about it—it’s all just going to go on and on, and what you do doesn’t help a bit.”

  “Is that why you quit the police force?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t like the person it was turning me into.” He frowned, tired lines settling on his face in a way that made Lisa want to lean forward and smooth them away with her fingertips.

  He took another swig of beer, then set the bottle on the low table in front of the couch and sat back. He looked over at Lisa.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to come over here and bring you down like this. I should have stayed at home.”

  “No. I’m glad you came.” Lisa smiled. “I like you when you’re joking and having fun. But this is who you are, too. It’s—I like to see the person who’s inside you, the serious one. I’m glad that you’re affected by things like that…and that you trust me enough to tell me.”

  His mouth quirked up wryly. “It’s not something I normally do with attorneys.”

  Lisa made a face. “We aren’t talking legal issues here. We’re talking about emotions.”

  “Yeah…”

  “So…did you have a wife that you couldn’t tell those things to?”

  “No.” He paused for a moment, then added quietly, “I did have a girlfriend, the last year or so I was in San Antonio. But that was—ah, hell, she was part of the whole meltdown.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He glanced at Lisa, then shrugged. “I met her at a bar. She was there with a bunch of people that I knew. She wasn’t connected with the law, and I liked that. I’d dated some women who were cops or prosecutors.” He cast her a teasing glance. “Even a defense attorney. And it’s nice ’cause you know the same world, sort of, but on the other hand, you’re always in that world. It’s like there’s nothing else out there, no normal life. You know?”

  Lisa nodded.

  Quinn picked up the beer and took another swallow. He began to talk, looking at the beer bottle and picking at the label. “Her name was Jennifer. She was a smart lady, ambitious, hardworking. I guess I’m attracted to women like that. Anyway, I fell for her pretty hard.”

  Lisa’s stomach knotted at his words, and she realized, with some surprise that what she was feeling was jealousy—the same little itching, nasty feeling that had prompted her to ask whether he’d had a wife. Firmly she pushed the feeling away and concentrated on Quinn’s words.

  “She worked for a major company there, and she had risen through the ranks quickly. She was in marketing, and she worked for the vice president in charge of the department. He reported right to the CEO. So she was in a good position, young for the job, on the fast track to success.”

  “You sound like that was a problem.”

  “I didn’t think it was. I mean, it meant I didn’t get to see her as much as I’d like. She had a busy schedule, and it didn’t always fit with a cop’s hours. But I could live with that. I admired her for her abilities, her determination.”

  “What happened?”

  “My partner and I were working a case. Well, it got bigger and bigger, and pretty soon there was a whole task force of us. It started out in Robbery—we were investigating a certain fence, and pretty soon we realized that there was a ring of them, and when we tried to trace who owned the shops, we found ourselves coming on this whole network. There were tentacles everywhere, going to prostitution, extortion, gambling. We had to bring in financial experts. They were trying to follow the paper trails, sift through the dummy corporations. It was a big operation. And the thing was, eventually, it led back to the corporation that Jennifer worked for.”

  “What?” Lisa’s eyes opened wide. “You mean she was involved in it?”

  “No. No, nothing like that. The company she worked for was legitimate, except we had the suspicion that they might have been laundering money through it. Several of the companies were legit. But not the CEO. He was the head of the crime ring. We were sure of it. The hard part, of course, was proving it—because of the tangle of corporations.

  “Well, I was torn. I couldn’t tell her about our operation—I mean, we were working in the utmost secrecy by that poin
t. We couldn’t risk anything getting back to the main guy. So I kept my mouth shut. But I was worried. I hated her working for somebody like that. I was afraid she would be mad at me for not telling her and letting her continue to work for a crook. And even though what she did was legit, there was always the chance that there would be some stain attached to anybody who worked for him—if and when we caught him, of course. That was beginning to look pretty iffy. We knew he was the man, but we couldn’t show a clear, direct link. Then we got a big break. We turned his accountant. He was able to link the man directly to all the crimes. We had our case. We started making arrests.”

  “Was Jennifer mad at you?”

  “No. She understood why I couldn’t tell her. She was shocked, of course, to find out about the boss. All the people who worked for him were. She had had a fair amount of dealings with him, working as she did for the head of marketing. I figured she would quit, look for another job, but she didn’t. She had a big marketing campaign going—it was her baby. She said it would fall apart if she left. Her immediate boss needed her. I understood that, and anyway, she worked for the corporation, not him. When he went to jail, I guessed the legitimate business would go on, free of him. Only he didn’t go to jail. The accountant, the one who could make all the connections, mysteriously disappeared.”

  “They had him killed?” Lisa asked, caught up in the story.

  “I imagine. Only we couldn’t find a body. It was barely possible that he had decided to split and not testify—maybe his former boss paid him a big bundle of money to disappear. But I don’t think so. We were giving him immunity. If he didn’t have our protection, he knew he would be in serious danger, even if they did pay him off. Death’s the only way to be sure he wouldn’t ever talk. Besides, he had betrayed the guy. We were sure he’d had the accountant killed. We looked for the body, but they had done a good job of covering it up. There was nothing. Our case was also nothing. We knew he did it. We had enough proof to close down a bunch of the illegal operations. But we couldn’t get him. Without the accountant’s testimony, we didn’t have a case against him.”