by Rehder, Ben
Billy Don was sitting in the recliner. “I guess her mood’s changed a little, huh?”
Red struck a pose and gestured at the length of his body with one hand. “Can you blame her?”
“Shee-yit.”
“She’s had a taste of Red O’Brien, my boy, and now she’s got the fever.”
“I’m gonna puke.”
“Poor woman cain’t get enough.”
Billy Don tapped his wristwatch. “I can understand why. Ain’t like you’re setting any records in there.”
“Funny man.”
“I can hear both of y’all,” Lucy called from the bedroom.
Billy Don giggled and covered his mouth with his hand.
Red plopped down on the couch. “Okay, remember that big ranch out on Sandy Road? I figure it’ll do the trick. People from Austin own it, so they ain’t hardly ever there.”
“How we gonna do it?”
“We’ll just blow the sumbitch open, grab what’s inside, and haul ass.”
“Just leave the safe there?”
“Yeah, why not? We won’t need it for nothing. Nobody will know where it come from.”
“Sounds kinda risky.”
“Hell, Billy Don, we’ll be in and out in five minutes.”
“You’re the expert on that.”
Marlin wheeled onto Highway 281 and had the speedometer past ninety, lights flashing, before he started talking. First he told Tatum about the incident at Donnelle Parker’s house on Thursday night and pointed out that David Pritchard was Parker’s divorce attorney, thereby having access to her home. Then he said, “Pritchard was convicted of stalking a woman in Beaumont nine years ago. I spoke to the woman’s husband, who was her boy friend at the time. Guy’s name is Craig Cooper. Cooper said he and Pritchard were good friends for several years, but Pritchard acted sort of odd at times. In Cooper’s words, Pritchard ‘fixated’ on the women Cooper dated.”
“Fixated how?”
“All kinds of ways. Sometimes he’d just call them on the phone repeatedly, or he’d send little notes in the mail. He sent one girl some flowers. Whenever Cooper would ask Pritchard about any of these things, he’d say he was just trying to be friendly.”
“Maybe that was the truth.”
“Hold on. Another time, one of the girls Cooper was seeing threw a party, and Pritchard was there. It was an outdoor party, around the pool. Cooper says his girlfriend’s panties disappeared from the changing room, but she figured she’d lost them somehow. A few days later, Cooper was at Pritchard’s apartment and he saw the panties on Pritchard’s nightstand.”
“What’d he do?”
“He asked Pritchard about it, and Pritchard said he’d had a girl over the night before and she must’ve left them. But Cooper said these were some kind of panties the girl had bought in France. The odds against that same brand showing up at Pritchard’s place…”
“This is just weird.”
“Tell me about it.”
“What happened with Cooper’s wife?”
“Cooper said that when they first started dating, he warned her that Pritchard was a little strange at times but he was harmless. Sure enough, Pritchard started pulling all his old tricks—calling her when Cooper was out of town, showing up at her doorstep at weird hours. Cheryl didn’t like Pritchard at all and wanted nothing to do with him, so Cooper started trying to distance himself from Pritchard. Pritchard got pissed off about it and started leaving some really angry and obscene messages on Cheryl’s answering machine. All kinds of threats on there. She saved them all.”
“Smart girl.”
“There’s more. Cooper decided to go over to Pritchard’s place and have a talk with him about all this mess. He gets there and Pritchard starts apologizing and saying it won’t happen again. Cooper says that’s fine, but he figures it’s best if they go their separate ways. Pritchard goes into the bedroom, comes out with a gun, and shoots Cooper in the gut.”
“Jesus.”
“Nicked his spine, and he had to go through ten months of rehab before he could walk again.”
“Did Pritchard get charged?”
“Yeah, but Pritchard claimed Cooper was threatening him, so he shot him in self-defense. Nobody could prove otherwise, so the DA dropped the charges.”
“But they nailed him for stalking?”
“Yeah, with those tapes, and plenty of witnesses to his bizarre behavior.”
“So you’re thinking Vance Scofield basically took the place of Craig Cooper.”
“That’s exactly what I’m thinking.”
“And Rita Sue? Is she lying just to keep Lucas out of trouble?”
“I think so. I’m betting the story Lucas told Stephanie is exactly what happened. But it was Pritchard, not Rita Sue, who killed Scofield.”
“But how does Donnelle Parker fit into it? Did she know Scofield?”
“I have no idea. Maybe they went out. Or maybe, with Scofield dead, Pritchard is just picking women at random now.”
A mile whipped past outside the window.
“Think Nicole’s in trouble?” Tatum asked.
Marlin thought it over. “I really doubt it, but I want to be sure.”
Nicole Brooks knocked on David Pritchard’s door at 9:43 A.M. When he answered, he was wearing a bathrobe. His feet were bare.
“Mr. Pritchard?”
“Yes?”
“I’m Deputy Nicole Brooks. We talked on the phone the other day.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Sorry to bother you this morning—”
“You’re, uh—you’re not in uniform.”
She was wearing jeans, a green blouse, and tennis shoes. “Well, it’s my day off. But we just had a meeting at the sheriff’s office, and I have some news about the car. The Corvette.”
“The Corvette?”
Nicole wondered, Did this guy just wake up? He seems out of it.
“Yes, sir, we found it. May I come in? I have a couple of forms I need you to sign. So you can get the car back.”
“Yeah, sure.”
He swung the door wide, and Nicole walked into his living room. He closed the door behind her. “I guess I should offer you something to drink. Isn’t that what most people do?”
“No, that’s okay. This won’t take long.”
He was staring at her now, and she found it somehow unsettling. Something in his eyes…
“You don’t want coffee? I could make some.”
“No, thanks.”
He gestured toward a brown leather couch, and she sat. He lowered himself into an upholstered chair next to an end table.
“Okay, here’s the good news,” she said. “The Corvette has been recovered and it has not been damaged. Only problem is, it’s in Miami. Stephanie Waring turned herself in yesterday, and she has admitted that she and Lucas Burnette stole it.”
He looked at her as if he didn’t quite comprehend.
“Mr. Pritchard?”
“Yes?”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes, I’m fine. Why would you ask me that?”
Something wasn’t right. “If now isn’t a good time to talk—”
“No, it’s fine. Don’t go yet.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m positive. It’s just that I take medication, and sometimes it leaves me a little…foggy.”
“You sure you’re taking the proper dose?” Even from eight feet away, Nicole could see that his pupils were dilated. Maybe he had overmedicated. But that didn’t explain the staring—or what he said next.
“You have beautiful red hair. Auburn, really. Is it natural, or do you dye it?”
Okay, now she was starting to get the creeps. “Mr. Pritchard, I believe we’d better talk at another time.”
Slowly and deliberately, he reached over to the end table and picked up a gold-plated letter opener. Nicole suddenly realized how vulnerable she was without her .38 strapped to her hip.
Pritchard now had a twisted grimace on hi
s face. “You’re a very pretty woman, do you know that? I bet you do.”
In the summer of 1976, a fifteen-year-old boy helped a forty-six-year-old man build a porch. The man paid the boy three dollars an hour, which, back then, was a fair rate. The boy would’ve done it for free, because it gave him something to do, but the man always slipped him some money at the end of each day.
“Working in this dang heat,” the man would say, “you deserve more’n that.”
The boy’s job was hauling long, heavy pieces of treated pine from a trailer, then measuring and marking each board to the correct length. The man did all the cutting with a circular saw. They both drove nails with a framing hammer, and the boy’s arms were soon as hard as a chunk of central Texas limestone.
They’d break at noon for lunch each day, and the man would drink beer and tell all kinds of stories about the history of Blanco County. Tales about shootouts in the hills. Moonshiners dodging the law. Cedar choppers who opened the country up for grazing and turned the soil into decent ranchland. “Most of this was told to me by my daddy, see,” the man would say. “He was the sheriff in the twenties and thirties. Boy like you should know this stuff.”
Before they’d get back to it, the boy would usually cross the road and jump into Miller Creek to cool off and prepare himself for the hot afternoon. One day, when the temperature reached 108, the man declared that it was too damn hot to work. “Come inside and cool off,” he said. “You ain’t seen the inside of the cabin yet, have you?”
So they went inside, and the boy marveled at what the man had built by himself the previous summer. The interior walls were lap-and-gap cedar. The floor was six-inch pine planks, stained a dark brown. Metal-framed bunk beds were stacked in two corners. “That’s for when my brother comes hunting with his boys,” the man said, pointing to the beds. “We get a couple of nice deer every year.”
On this particular day, the man had had quite a few beers, and he said, “Wanna know a secret?”
The boy nodded.
“Okay, lookee here.” The man crossed the room and knelt, pointing to a plank that ran parallel to the wall. “See this here nail?” The boy saw that the nail wasn’t fully seated into the board; it stuck out about a half inch. The man pulled on it, and the plank swung upward, as if it were hinged on one end. “Come have a look.”
The boy knelt beside the man and looked into the hole in the floor. He expected to see the floor joists, and beneath those the crawl space under the cabin—but he didn’t. The man had built a long, skinny box beneath that plank, and inside that box was a rifle resting on a strip of carpet.
“That’s my old Krag thirty-forty,” the man said. “Only rifle I ever owned. Hell, only one I need. It’ll knock a deer down right quick at two hundred yards.”
The boy was puzzled. Right next to the hole in the floor was a perfectly good gun cabinet.
The man explained. “Kids been breaking into this place. They done stole a few things, but nothing important. That gun cabinet’s just to fool ‘em. They see it empty and figure there ain’t no guns around. Now I don’t have to tote my rifle from the house every time I hunt.”
The man smiled, and the boy couldn’t help but smile with him.
Phil Colby remembered it like it was yesterday
Chained to the floor, his head no more than two feet from the wall, he wondered if there was still a surprise beneath that plank.
Marlin turned left on Loma Ranch Road, following the same path he had followed the evening before. “How do you want to handle it?”
Tatum said, “Let’s be cool for now. Just make sure Nicole’s okay, then we’ll do some more checking up on Pritchard. We’ll try to pull prints off the shoebox Donnelle Parker found on her doorstep.”
“And DNA off the semen on the door.”
“Definitely. We gotta prove this guy is still a sicko.”
Marlin shook his head. “It never even dawned on me.”
“Hell, it didn’t dawn on any of us. We had no reason to look at him.”
Nicole stood, and so did Pritchard, much more quickly than she anticipated. He pointed the letter opener at her like a dagger. “Sit back down.”
She remained standing. “Do you realize what a world of shit you’re getting yourself into?”
“Sit back down!”
As far as Nicole was concerned, David Pritchard had just leapt to the number-one position on the list of suspects, regardless of Rita Sue’s confession. The man was clearly unstable enough to resort to violence.
She eased herself back onto the edge of the sofa cushion, her weight forward, ready to spring to her feet if she had to move suddenly. He had her boxed in; she’d have to get past him to get to the front door.
He made no move toward her. He simply stood in place, his eyes roaming the length of her body. “What kind of panties are you wearing?”
Oh, no.
“Something pretty, but not too wild, I’m guessing. Not a thong. Maybe silk, with a little bit of lace. Am I right?”
How do I respond to something like that? she wondered. Deflect the question? Change the subject? Put him on the defensive? So she said, “Why did you kill Vance Scofield?”
His expression clouded over.
Red went outside and vacuumed most of the glass out of his truck. Then they loaded the safe in the bed.
Lucy said, “We oughta call and make sure they ain’t home.”
“Yeah, I think she’s right,” Billy Don added.
“That’s fine,” Red said. “But even if they was there, the house is a long ways from the road, like maybe a mile. We could do it on the front part of the property and be gone before they even knew what was going on.”
Lucy didn’t appear too keen on that idea. “Let’s not screw this thing up now. I don’t wanna take no chances. We’ve all worked too hard.”
So they went back inside, where Red recited the number out of the phone book and Lucy dialed. A few seconds passed and Red thought they were home free—but then he could tell from Lucy’s expression that someone had answered. “Why the hell ain’t you people in Austin?” she asked, then hung up. “That won’t work.”
“All right,” Red said. “Okay. Let me think of someplace else.”
Her intuition told her to keep pressing, so Nicole said, “You did it, right?”
Pritchard seemed to be having some sort of internal struggle. He was gazing at the wall, fidgeting, bouncing the fist that held the letter opener off of his thigh.
But he nodded. “I called him Sunday morning. There was a woman there that shouldn’t have been there. Vance was a crummy partner, and an even worse friend.”
Partner? Partner in what?
Pritchard continued, “He was a liar, in case you didn’t know that. He was supposed to be sharing the profits with me, but he never did. He was horrible with money.”
She sensed that she was about to learn it all. The murder. The drug lab. Everything. “Profits from what?”
He didn’t answer.
“The profits from what? Selling speed?”
Still no response.
“When did you put Vance in the river?”
His eyes came back to her. “I didn’t. I have no idea how he got there.”
“You didn’t put him in the river?”
He smiled. “Stalling. You’re a clever girl, but I haven’t forgotten. I want to add your panties to my collection.”
30
“I GOTTA GO to the bathroom again,” Phil Colby said.
George Jones was in his usual spot, on the couch, eating a can of beans cold. “You’re worse than a woman. Gotta pee every ten minutes.”
“It’s been more like three hours.”
“I ain’t lettin’ you outside again. I’ll turn one arm loose and you can piss out the window.”
“Hey, whatever. As long as I can go.”
George finished his beans first, rattling the spoon around the bottom to get every last one. Colby’s mouth was watering. “You gonna share a
ny of that stuff?”
Piled on one of the bunk beds was an assortment of canned goods George had brought back from Colby’s house the night before.
“Wasn’t planning on it.”
“You know, proper nutrition is the cornerstone of good health.”
George tossed the empty can into one corner of the room. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Just making conversation.”
“Well, stop it. I don’t need to hear any of your weird fucking comments.”
“You gonna let me piss or what?”
George rose from the couch and produced a ring of keys from his pants pocket. He bent down and popped the lock that secured one of the chains to one of the eyebolts in the floor. Colby could now stand, and he had a loose five-foot length of chain attached to one arm. It would make a hell of a weapon—except George was wise enough to remain out of reach.
Colby turned and faced the window. He was standing on the hinged plank, and it moved slightly under his feet. As he relieved himself, Colby casually glanced downward. There were no new nails in the hinged end of the plank, which meant that Wade Morgan had never sealed up his secret hiding spot.
But was the rifle still in there? Even if it was, Colby couldn’t possibly bend down, raise the plank, and remove the rifle before George stopped him.
Colby zipped up and said, “There’s no reason you gotta chain both arms. I damn sure can’t get away. It’d be a lot easier for you that way. Wouldn’t have to unlock me every time I need to take a leak.”
George eyeballed him for a moment, and Colby did his best to appear as unthreatening and docile as possible.
George held up the handgun he’d been carrying all along. “See this?”
“Yeah. You won’t get any problem from me. I just want to give you those negatives on Monday and be done with it.”
“All right, then.” George stretched out on the couch and began reading a magazine.
“What kinds of things did Vance lie about?”
“Uh-uh. Don’t try to change the subject.”
“No, I’m really interested. I want to know why you did what you did. Sounds like you had a good reason.”
Pritchard squinted at her, skeptical. “You don’t care. Women like you don’t care.”