Blue Jeans and a Badge

by Nina Bruhns

  Chapter 16

  “Baby, wake up. Sweetheart, come on, now.”

  The black muzziness slowly receded. Luce felt a gentle slap on her cheek. She opened her eyes to see Philip peering worriedly down at her.

  “Hit me again, O’Donnaugh, and I’ll be forced to take measures.”

  Relief flooded his handsome features. “Thank God.”

  “What happened?” She had a vague notion, but wanted it confirmed.

  “You fainted.”

  That’s what she was afraid of. She snorted. “Try again, lawman. Bounty hunters don’t faint.” If she didn’t feel so lousy, she’d be embarrassed.

  “I suppose they don’t puke their guts out, either,” he said.

  “You got it.” She shifted and realized he was sitting on the restaurant floor and she was sprawled across his lap, reclining in his arms.

  He pushed a stray lock from her cheek. “You heard that last part? About the gun?”

  “Yeah.” She sat up and he helped her, holding her in case she went down again. She raked her hands through her hair and held her temples, trying to stop the spinning in her head. “It’s them, isn’t it? Whoever killed Peter and Maria. They’re after me now. Because they think…”

  Ted elbowed through the crowd surrounding them. “They’d be right.” He hunkered down, his gaze flicking between hers and Philip’s. “Just got a call from Albuquerque. The DNA test was a match.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut, and Philip tightened his grip on her, pulling her to his chest. She felt his lips on her forehead. “Congratulations, honey,” he whispered.

  Yeah. Right. This should be one of the best moments in her life, and all she wanted to do was cry. She’d finally found her lost parents, but they were dead and she’d never get to know them. She wrapped her arms around him, trying to quell the chaos in her mind. A hopeless task.

  “Can you stand up?” he asked. She nodded. “Good. I’m taking you to the station. It’s quiet there and we can talk through everything.” He turned to Ted. “Can you come over when you’re done here?”

  “Sure thing. I’ll bring the paperwork.”

  “Speaking of which, where’s the Jeep?”

  “The Lakeview,” she told him.

  Ted tossed him his keys. “Take the cruiser. I’ll walk.”

  She hadn’t been to the Piñon Lake Police Station before. She hadn’t even realized there was one. The chief didn’t seem to spend a lot of time there.

  Five minutes later Luce was ensconced in one of four rocking chairs surrounding an old woodstove at the station. The cold snap from yesterday was still going strong, so she had a wool blanket on her lap and Philip was putting a match to the fire already laid in the black stove.

  Desperate for something else to think about besides the DNA results and the lecture she was about to get from Philip about running away, she looked around. Philip’s police station was like something out of Mayberry, or the Old West. Ancient oak furniture, solid as the mountains outside the windows, giant desk and office chair, an old-fashioned, glassed-in bookcase and oak file cabinet. Oak gun rack. Oak paddle fan in the ceiling. Oak paneling. Probably oak spindles on the holding cell in back.

  She smiled.

  “What?” he asked, pulling one of the other rockers close to hers.

  “Very Americana. All you need is a Norman Rockwell print.”

  He glanced around with a wry grin. “Not exactly my style. But I do like it. Makes me feel very…”

  “Wyatt Earp?”

  He chuckled. “Yeah.”

  “Suits you.”

  He eyed her wryly. “Is this one of those conservative cracks again?”

  She matched his smile. “It has its charms, as I recall.”

  “Thank you. I think.” He took her hand, his expression turning somber. “Listen, Luce—”

  She held up the other. “Wait.” She had a pretty good guess what was coming. “Before you yell at me, please let me say something first.”

  “I wasn’t going to yell at you.”

  “Yes you were, and maybe I deserved it for running off like that earlier. But here’s the thing, Philip. In the past few hours my whole life has gone to hell. First you inform me I may be pregnant, then someone tries to kill me, then I find out who my real parents were and—guess what—they were murdered.”

  “Let me help you.”

  “I’m not saying no. I just can’t deal with this stuff all at once.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I just don’t want to make a bad decision, or say something I’ll regret, which is one of the reasons I left like I did this morning.”

  He didn’t look happy. But to his credit, he didn’t argue. “You’re saying you want to deal with things one at a time?”

  “It’s the only way I’ll get through it.”

  He let out a quiet sigh and leaned his elbows on his knees. “All right. I understand. But I want you to know one thing.”

  “Okay.”

  He met her gaze. “If you run away again, I’ll hunt you down.”

  He said it with his usual calm, but she could feel the blunt intensity of his words clear to her toes. She shivered. He meant it.

  She couldn’t help wondering whether it was her or his baby he wanted so much he’d track her to the ends of the earth—which she had no doubts he’d do.

  Suddenly she got it. She understood what he’d been saying that morning. Why he’d delayed telling her about the ripped condom.

  Her heart sang. It was her he wanted that badly.

  She prayed she was right.

  She turned to him, opened her mouth to ask, but just then Ted walked in.

  “Forensics is at the Slipper. They said they were thinking about opening a branch in Piñon Lake, all the business you’ve been giving them lately.” Ted set a full carafe of coffee on the woodstove, a bag on one of the free rockers and tossed Philip a set of keys.

  “Very funny.” Philip looked at the keys. “You got the Jeep from the Lakeview?”

  “Figured you’d need it. I found the insurance card in the glove compartment and called your insurance company. They are sending a tow truck and an adjuster,” he said to Luce. “I told them you’d be here. Want some coffee? Betsy sent it. Decaf.”

  She smiled gratefully. “I’d love some.” She’d have to remember to thank the woman for taking such good care of her through all this. It suddenly struck her a community like this would be a great place to raise a child.

  No. She wasn’t going there. Not yet.

  Ted walked to a cupboard for mugs, and Philip said, “I’ll be right back. I think I left those files in the Jeep. The ones from the plane yesterday.”

  When he returned, they all sat around the woodstove sipping coffee and going through the stuff from the files. It was as good a place as any to start. And it felt a lot safer than thinking about…other things.

  “I’m sure an accountant could decipher this stuff,” Philip said after glancing over his pile for a moment. “Looks like these were photocopied from a bookkeeping ledger book. But I can’t make head nor tail of it. And I don’t see how it could prove anyone’s innocence. A ledger can be faked, can’t it?”

  “Maybe that’s what they were trying to prove,” Luce said. “Look. Down here at the bottom of the page there is a P.S. It says ‘Terminate.’ So, maybe Hidalgo Industries fired the accountant based on whatever was recorded in this ledger.”

  “Possibly. But it doesn’t explain why Clyde would risk breaking into Soffit and Dickson to steal it. He wasn’t related to the accountant. And all this happened thirty years ago.”

  “So the files must contain something else important. Something still relevant today.”

  “What’s in your file?” Philip asked her.

  She fanned through the papers and quickly read the headings. “A pile of legalese stuff. The court papers—filings, motions, the original charges. What do you have, Ted?”

  Ted looked thoughtful. “There’s just one
paper in this file. It’s a memo from a Hidalgo vice president asking about some top-secret out-of-state shipment.”

  “That’s not unusual,” Philip pointed out. “Half the stuff Hidalgo Industries manufactures is top-secret military technology. And they ship to bases all over the country.”

  “True. But I’m thinking something must have gone wrong with this shipment because there’s also a P.S. on this memo. It says ‘Urgent. Terminate book immed.’”

  “Hmm. Maybe the accountant thought this was proof of the real culprit, the one who faked the books.”

  “Who wrote it?” Luce asked.

  Ted glanced up at the memo header. “Well, well. Your friend Donald Hidalgo. He must have been VP while his father was still alive.”

  Luce stared at him. “Donald Hidalgo?” As in her probable newfound uncle?

  “I’ll admit, lately he’d risen to the top of my list of suspects for Maria’s death.”

  Luce was floored. “Why?”

  “Because he had the most to gain. He ended up with both their shares in the company. Enough for a majority on the board. It was Peter I couldn’t figure out. And now Clyde.”

  Nobody had to say why he’d be after Luce. If she was a long-lost heir…

  Philip’s expression went deadly. “Well, how’s this for another coincidence…guess who owns a cabin that shares the airstrip where we found Clyde yesterday?”

  “Donald Hidalgo?” she asked, more and more dismayed over where this was leading.

  “The family summer house.”

  Ted’s forehead pleated. “Oh, my God. How could I have missed it? That’s the cabin where—” He halted abruptly and snapped his gaze to Luce.

  She put a hand over her mouth to prevent the sound of anguish that clawed at her throat. He didn’t have to finish the sentence. It was obvious.

  That was the cabin where her father had been shot and killed.

  Donald Hidalgo. Philip met Ted’s gaze and knew exactly what Ted was thinking. Hidalgo Industries was at the heart of all the crimes they’d been investigating, and Donald Hidalgo was at the heart of Hidalgo Industries.

  “It’s him, isn’t it?” Luce said, her voice a thready whisper. “He’s the one responsible for everything. For the missing chip shipment, the cache of stolen military hardware, for Clyde’s murder and for my parents’…”

  “Sweetheart, we don’t know that,” he interrupted before she could say out loud what they were all thinking. “It’s just conjecture at this point. Maria was his own sister, for crying out loud. He’d have to be a monster.”

  “Can you get a search warrant?” she asked. “For the cabin?”

  He swiped a hand over his mouth and glanced at Ted, who looked grim. “I don’t see how. There’s no hard evidence linking him to any of this.”

  “What about the memo?”

  “It’s thirty years old,” he explained in frustration. “The statute of limitations has run out on any embezzling or theft it concerned. To be admissible it would have to prove a murder.”

  Suddenly a thought struck him like thunder. And apparently the others, as well, because all at once, all three lunged for the file folder Luce had dropped onto the floor beside her rocker.

  “Peter Santander was a bookkeeper at Hidalgo, right? What’s the accountant’s name?” Ted asked when Luce got to it first.

  “It’s not Peter Santander,” she said, voice still quavering. “I would have noticed.” She scanned over the papers. “No, they all say the defendant’s name is…Jerome Gardner.” She passed a few sheets to Ted.

  Philip frowned, plucking up the other files. There was something niggling his mind about the ledger pages. And the memo in Ted’s file. “Maybe he worked under Gardner.”

  “Yes! Here!” she exclaimed, reading one of the legal papers from her file more carefully. “It’s a statement, in some kind of a motion. It starts out, ‘According to a statement by bookkeeper Peter Santander, who was the person who discovered the discrepancies between shipments sent and shipments received—’” She looked up, eyes filled with pain. “I can’t believe it. This is why they were killed, isn’t it? It wasn’t over Maria’s affair at all. It was about the military thefts and…Donald Hidalgo’s greed.”

  And that easily, the puzzle pieces fell into place. Philip swore, gaping at the memo from Ted’s file. There it was, plain as day. All the evidence they needed.

  P.S. Urgent. Terminate book immed.

  “This P.S. doesn’t mean post script,” he said hoarsely, holding up the half sheet of paper. “And it doesn’t refer to a financial ledger. This is a contract to terminate the bookkeeper, P.S.—Peter Santander.”

  It didn’t take long to arrange for a warrant to search the Hidalgo cabin. Rather than sit around waiting for it to arrive, Philip and Ted decided to drive up to the cabin and meet the messenger there.

  Naturally Luce insisted on going. Short of locking her in the holding cell at the back of the station, there was nothing he could do to stop her. She would have hitchhiked if she’d had to, so he grudgingly relented.

  They took Ted’s cruiser. Philip was too wound up to drive. When they arrived, he knew better than to ask Luce to stay in the car.

  “Just, please, be careful,” he said, his gaze dipping involuntarily to her belly. “If you feel faint, sit down.”

  Her mouth parted slightly, then her hand went to the same spot. “I will,” she said.

  “That’s my girl.”

  They all drew their weapons and crept the last dozen yards to the edge of the trees surrounding the log cabin. Well, log cabin was a slight understatement. The place was massive. Two rambling stories and probably a basement. Detached two-car garage. He stopped assessing the impressive architecture to search for signs of life.

  Everything seemed quiet.

  Ted motioned them to fan out, him to the left, Luce to the right. Ted was going to knock on the front door. They all mounted the wraparound porch and took up their positions. Ted knocked. No one answered. He knocked again. Still nothing. Luce indicated she was going around to the back.

  “No!” Philip mouthed, gesturing frantically for her to stay put. He watched as she disappeared around the corner, and swore under his breath. That woman would be the death of him yet.

  Ted grinned and tried the front doorknob. It turned easily, and the heavy wooden door swung open on silent hinges. Ted gave him a well-if-you-insist shrug and cautiously slunk inside, weapon first.

  Damn it, Ted!

  Again Philip cursed, torn between charging after Luce and covering his friend’s backside. His friend won, but only because he knew the inside of a structure was far more dangerous to clear than the perimeter. If anyone was hiding here, chances were it was inside the house.

  Gripping his Beretta with two hands, he ducked in after Ted. Moving carefully in tandem, it took them under five minutes to thoroughly check the whole cabin. They found no one.

  They did, however, find an office. It was in total disarray, things scattered everywhere, like someone had been searching for something.

  “Let’s see if they left anything interesting,” Ted suggested.

  “What about the warrant?”

  “It’ll be here any minute. Let’s get this bastard,” Ted said in deceptively soft tones. “I don’t like being made a fool of for twenty-eight years.”

  “If he’s the one who tried to hurt Luce…” Philip didn’t complete the thought, he was too angry. He didn’t have to.

  “I know, buddy. Let’s nail him. For good.”

  Luce slid along the cabin wall to the back of the house, ducking at the windows and scanning the yard for movement. Everything seemed deserted.

  But her inner radar was raising hairs on the back of her neck. There was something… She just had to pin down what was triggering her instincts.

  There! A dull thud. Barely discernible above the sounds of the birds and insects and the creaking and crackling of pine bark and needles in the afternoon sun. She stood still and listened for
several minutes before she heard it again. But there it was. Another soft thud.

  She scanned the edge of the forest behind the cabin, searching for a possible source.

  The noises seemed to be coming from behind the detached garage.

  Okay, she’d try there first.

  She had the fleeting thought to wait for Philip, but dismissed it. She was used to working without backup, and she wasn’t afraid. Hell, she’d faced down giant hulks with tattoos and gold teeth. This guy, if it was Donald Hidalgo, was a prissy old man.

  Besides, the weight of the Walther was balanced perfectly in her hand. Nobody with a brain went up against a gun.

  She flicked up the snap on the boot knife she’d worn for the occasion, checked the handcuffs tucked in her waistband, then noiselessly padded down the back porch steps and sprinted for the garage. Without giving herself a moment to stop and think, she rounded the corner and peeked behind the building for the source of the noise.

  And saw him. Donald Hidalgo. Pulling stones off a low, tumbledown garden wall.

  Anger surged through her and she had to take several deep breaths before she could even see straight. As she stood there grabbing for control, he picked up another large stone and set it carefully into a pile off to the side. What the hell was he doing?

  Her question was answered when he took a pistol from his coat pocket, wiped it down and stuck it into a crevice in the wall.

  The gun that killed Clyde…and her father.

  Pain razored through her as he picked up a stone from the pile and placed it on top of the pistol’s hiding place. She battled with herself, torn between blasting the bastard where he stood, and letting him pile a few more rocks on top of the weapon before she jumped him, beat him to a pulp and then blasted him with the Walther.

  Too bad she was shaking so badly she’d probably miss.

  She took one last cleansing breath while he piled on two more stones. Then stepped from her hiding place and aimed the Walther at his black heart.

  “Give me a reason, you bastard,” she growled.