Texas Ranger

by James Patterson

“Did she get threats? Did she tutor this kid Jim?”

  Sara Beth says Patty never tutored anyone at the school. Occasionally, the district would call for her to sub for English classes. She was a technical writer, so she was good at teaching English—showing the kids what a dangling modifier is, showing them the correct usage of a semicolon. But she had no significant connection there. She didn’t tutor anyone and didn’t have any friends at the school—not besides Sara Beth and Anne, anyway.

  “Well, there’s some connection,” I say. “I’m a connection, for one. At first I thought it had to be that, but now I’m not so sure.”

  For the millionth time since Anne’s death, I wish I had access to all the information DeAndre Purvis has. He would have Patty’s phone records. He would know if she was getting threats. He would know what classes she covered and who her freelance technical writing clients were.

  If Purvis was a good cop, he’d be able to investigate every connection between Anne and Patty and create and narrow a viable suspect list accordingly. Adding Sara Beth to the equation should narrow the list even more.

  I tell Sara Beth to think about any connection that she, Anne, and Patty have—anyone who would be mad at them.

  “I don’t know, Rory,” she snaps. “Damn it. I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

  She storms into the kitchen and refills her glass.

  There’s been a tension between us all day. My probing questions. Her embarrassment. In fact, ever since we slept together, I’ve felt tense around her.

  I need to try a different tack. So I follow her into the kitchen and apologize. I put an arm around her—careful to do it in a friendly manner, not suggestive of something more.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m at my wits’ end. Yesterday I was ready to kick down Anne’s door and do an illegal search of the house. I’ve got to find out who the killer is before I fall apart completely.”

  She looks at me with sympathetic eyes.

  “I wish I could help,” she says, “but I don’t know how.”

  “Let’s not talk about it anymore,” I say. “You’re upset and I’m stressed out. Let’s just try to talk. As friends.”

  I mean what I say, but I also have ulterior motives. If I can get her to relax and open up a bit more, maybe I can get her to reveal some kind of connection she had with Anne and Patty that isn’t coming to either of us.

  She pours me a glass and we return to the couch. Now it seems like we have nothing to say. Sara Beth breaks the silence.

  “So tell me about your new girlfriend?” she says. Her hesitant voice makes it sound like a question.

  I swallow and my wine seems to go down the wrong pipe. I cough and collect myself. Just when I thought things couldn’t get more uncomfortable between us.

  I give Sara Beth a look that says, What girlfriend?

  “That singer at the bar,” Sara Beth says. “Willow What’s Her Name.”

  I explain that we’re not dating, nothing official. “I do like her, though,” I admit.

  “Of course you do.” Sara Beth sighs.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She doesn’t answer my question. Instead, she takes a sip of wine and shakes her head disapprovingly.

  “Anne is rolling over in her grave,” Sara Beth says.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” I say again, raising my voice this time.

  “Well, it’s just…You know Willow slept with Cal, don’t you?”

  Chapter 59

  “WHAT?”

  Sara Beth nods her head. “That’s the rumor, anyway.”

  “You of all people should know better than to listen to rumors,” I snap.

  “Well, Anne believed it.”

  Sara Beth is clearly pleased that she’s gotten to me. So much for relieving the tension between us. I stand up and pace across the room. Outside, the sun has set, and the windows are black.

  “Tell me what you know,” I say.

  “You didn’t even know her at the time.”

  “Just tell me.”

  She exhales deeply and then says, “Anne heard rumors that Cal was fooling around with Willow. She went down to the bar, found them out in the parking lot, flirting like teenagers. I wasn’t there, but Patty was with her. I guess Anne told Willow off, told her to stay away from her man.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then nothing,” Sara Beth says. “Cal walked the line for a while and then he broke up with Anne. She figured he was going to make a go for Willow.”

  “So you don’t actually know if they ever had a thing?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” she says. “It was all a bunch of rumors. Just like there are rumors about you and Willow. Maybe it’s some sort of weird karma thing. He was with Anne after you. Now you’re with Willow after him.”

  I feel sick. I sit back down on the couch and set my wine down. I can’t finish it.

  “You can’t be mad about something that happened before Willow even knew you,” Sara Beth says.

  I throw my head back and rub my scalp.

  “I don’t have to be happy about it,” I say.

  “Cal’s a lot like you, Rory. Girls are into him. He can have his pick. If you’re upset with him for that, take a look in the mirror.”

  “If he’s so great,” I snap, “how come you’ve never dated him?”

  Sara Beth makes a pffftt sound with her lips. “My daddy was a trucker,” she says. “I would never get involved in that lifestyle. Always on the road. No thank you.”

  “I’m not sure a cop is any better,” I say, although I make a mental note that at least Cal is able to leave his job at the door. I carried mine with me like a sickness—a cancer that spread throughout my home with Anne until it metastasized and there was no hope of our marriage surviving.

  “Yeah, well, I loved you before you were ever a cop.” Then Sara Beth’s voice goes quiet as she says, “And I can’t help it if I never stopped.”

  I don’t say a word. We’ve both known that what she said is true, but our conversations have only ever tiptoed around it.

  “You see that guitar over there?” Sara Beth says, gesturing to the decorative six-string I strummed the last time I was here.

  I remember wondering what Sara Beth was doing with a guitar.

  “I bought that back when we were dating,” she says. “I was going to give it to you as a graduation present. But then you dumped me and I never got the chance.”

  My heart breaks for Sara Beth. God, I must have hurt her.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to her.

  She shakes her head with an expression that says, Too little, too late.

  “You know that old song by the Judds called ‘Why Not Me’?” Sara Beth asks.

  I nod. The song is about a girl pining for a man who searches the world, looking for love, never noticing that the girl next door is still free.

  “That’s how I feel when I see you,” Sara Beth says. “The right girl’s been here all along, and you just don’t seem to notice.”

  “Sara Beth…” I say, trailing off because I’m not sure what to say next.

  Could she be right?

  After all the breakups and make ups, is Sara Beth actually the one for me? What am I doing chasing after Willow Dawes when someone wonderful is sitting right next to me?

  I open my mouth to say something, but I close it. I don’t know what to tell Sara Beth.

  Her phone starts to ring on the coffee table.

  Saved by the bell, I think.

  But then I look down at the screen.

  UNKNOWN CALLER

  “It’s him,” Sara Beth says, her voice a whisper. “The prank caller.”

  Chapter 60

  I PICK UP Sara Beth’s phone and slide my finger to unlock the screen.

  “Who is this?” I say.

  There is a pause and then a deep garbled voice says, “Who is this?”

  The voice—clearly disguised by some kind of computer application, as Anne described—soun
ds like a deep baritone with a mouthful of rocks.

  “I said, who is this?” the voice repeats. “Where’s that slutty schoolteacher? Are you her latest boy toy?”

  I’m quiet for a moment, trying to think of what I can say to keep the guy talking. I need him to reveal some sort of clue—anything—that will help me.

  “Why do you care who I am?” I ask.

  “I’m just wondering if that whore is fucking another little boy from the football team,” it says. “Or have your balls dropped?”

  “Have yours?”

  It might not be a good idea to antagonize the voice, but I want to keep him talking. Angry people often slip up and reveal too much.

  The voice doesn’t seem to know what to say, so I continue my attack.

  “Studies show that men who harass women often have big inferiority complexes.” I add, “And small penises.”

  It’s juvenile, I know, but I’m trying to press his buttons.

  Sara Beth stares at me, mortified. Her expression seems to say, What the hell are you doing, Rory?

  “What do the studies say about teachers who sleep with their students?” the voice asks.

  “That’s just a rumor,” I say. “Did you start it?”

  “Who is this?” the voice says again.

  “And even if it were true,” I say, “what did Anne Yates do? Did she have a threesome with Sara Beth and the kid?”

  The voice says, “Who said anything about Anne Yates?”

  “I did. Why did you kill her and Patty? It can’t be because of something Sara Beth did.”

  I wait for the voice to respond, and when I don’t hear anything, I look at the phone’s screen.

  CALL ENDED

  “What the hell?” I say, looking up at Sara Beth.

  Her expression is curious and scared.

  “What happened?” she says.

  “I think he hung up on me.”

  We talk for a few minutes on the couch, going over what was said. I know we should call DeAndre Purvis right away, but since Sara Beth told me she wanted to wait to report it in the morning, I don’t push it.

  Finally, Sara Beth rises from the couch and heads toward her bedroom door.

  “There are leftovers in the fridge if you’re hungry,” she says. “But I’ve had a long day. I’m going to bed. Good night, Rory. You can sleep on the couch.”

  She pauses before shutting her door. “Rory, I do appreciate you staying tonight. I know you don’t think of me like I think of you. But you are a good man.”

  With that, she shuts her door. My insides feel like jelly. Am I letting another good one slip through my fingers?

  I pick up her guitar and go out on her front porch. I play a few tunes, singing softly. I can hear insects talking in the darkness. Somewhere a bullfrog croaks.

  I keep thinking about the conversation with the voice.

  What did I learn?

  Nothing definitive, but I didn’t get the impression the voice knew who I was. If it was Cal, I would think he would recognize my voice. And I have a hard time seeing Cal play it so cool, knowing it was me on the other end of the line. The Cal I know would have been unable to keep himself from attacking me, just like I would have been unable to hold myself back if the roles were reversed.

  But then again, I have trouble seeing Cal murder Patty in the exact same way Anne was murdered. Cal is impulsive, temperamental, and reckless. I can see him killing his girlfriend in a fit of rage. But I have trouble seeing him murder someone in the exact same way a couple weeks later. Unless he liked the taste of murder so much he decided to try again.

  A crime of passion followed by an act of cold-blooded premeditation.

  I set the guitar down and stare out into the darkness of the night.

  Yesterday morning, I told my father I was 90 percent sure Cal was the killer.

  Tonight, I’m surprised to find myself less convinced.

  But if Cal didn’t do it, who the hell did?

  Chapter 61

  CAL SITS ON the bank of the Mississippi River. He is sitting on a rock the size of a coffee table, and wavelets lap at his feet. In one hand, he holds a half-full pint of Jack Daniel’s. In the other, he holds his cell phone.

  He made a phone call he shouldn’t have. At least he didn’t go too far before he had the presence of mind to hang up.

  It’s sometime around midnight in Saint Louis. An eerie fog floats over the water, illuminated by a nearly full moon that makes the sky and city glow. On the other side of the river, the silhouettes of the Gateway Arch and several downtown buildings loom in the mist like giant ghosts.

  There are a dozen missed calls now: from his employer, friends, DeAndre Purvis. The phone is full of messages that he hasn’t listened to, texts he hasn’t read.

  He assumes the barrage of calls can mean only one thing: the cops are after him. Maybe not to arrest him, but at the very least they want to talk to him pretty badly.

  He debates what to do. Listen to the messages? Make a run for it? Return home and face the music?

  For the past eighteen hours, he’s been avoiding the decision by doing something else: getting wasted. He doesn’t want to know what’s on his phone, so he chooses ignorance instead.

  By noon, he finished the Jim Beam he bought at the truck stop. Then he went into a bar and spent most of the day there, losing at pool and getting more and more drunk. Finally, after the bartender refused to serve him, he went and bought the Jack Daniel’s. He stumbled down to the bank of the river and drank about half the bottle before puking up a hot, frothy stream into the Mississippi River.

  Vomiting sobered him up, but not entirely. Whatever alcohol is left in his system mixes with his guilt and grief. Combine that with the fact that he hasn’t slept well since Anne’s death, and it all adds up to a strange dreamlike exhaustion. The fog keeps rolling in, and Cal feels as if he’s stepped into a surreal alternate dimension.

  Is he dead?

  Is he in limbo? Or purgatory?

  The place where he really is—drunk on the bank of the Mississippi River, mourning the loss of the only woman he ever loved—seems the most unbelievable of all possibilities.

  Surely what happened couldn’t be real.

  But it is.

  On his phone, he clicks away from the screen detailing his missed and dialed calls, and he finds his music library.

  He plays “Callin’ Baton Rouge.”

  Not plugged into his truck’s speakers, the sound comes out one-dimensional and tinny. The song sounds as if it’s being played on an old record.

  There’s a part when Garth Brooks is directly addressing the girl in the song, as if he’s picked up a pay phone and called. When he says that he misses her all the time, Cal can’t take it anymore.

  He jumps to his feet and hurls the phone out across the river. It disappears into the fog, and then, a second later, the river swallows it with a soft, distant splash.

  I guess that makes up my mind for me, he thinks.

  He can’t listen to the messages now. He can’t make any calls.

  He decides what to do. He will continue his route, make his stops in Detroit and New Jersey. If DeAndre Purvis has issued a warrant for his arrest, there will likely be cops waiting for him at either location. But if he makes his stops and is still a free man, he’ll drive back home and pretend he never knew any of the calls were there at all.

  Before he hits the road, however, he’ll need to crash in his truck and sleep off what’s left of the alcohol in his body.

  He decides to wait until dawn to make his way back to the truck. He wants to sit and watch the sun rise and burn off the ghostly fog that’s hanging over the river.

  But he passes out in the sand long before that.

  Chapter 62

  SARA BETH AND I have a peaceful breakfast. She calls in sick and we make omelets together, sharing the cooking duties.

  She appears happier this morning, and the tension between us seems to have evaporated.

  Per
haps since she was able to get those things off her chest last night, we can actually be friends. But as we make breakfast together, smiling and joking with each other, I can’t help but imagine a life where this would be an everyday occurrence.

  It seems like a good life: I’d get ready to go to work while Sara Beth got ready for school. We’d share a moment at the breakfast table before our careers intruded. I haven’t imagined this kind of domesticity with Willow. I’ve only been focused on my physical attraction to her, the connection we seem to have.

  But is there a future with her? The kind of future there would be with Sara Beth?

  As I’m sitting across from Sara Beth, it occurs to me that perhaps it’s too late. Maybe when Sara Beth finally came clean about her feelings it was just something that she needed to do in order to move on.

  Twenty-four hours ago, if I asked Sara Beth out on a date, she would have said yes in a heartbeat.

  But today?

  I bet she would say no.

  As much as I didn’t want to date her before, realizing that I probably no longer can makes me sad. Sometimes you don’t know what’s right in front of you.

  After our meal, I walk Sara Beth to her car. She asks if I want to accompany her to the police station, but I tell her it’s probably best if I don’t. My presence would just piss off DeAndre Purvis, possibly biasing his view of whatever information she gives him about the investigation.

  Besides, there’s somewhere else I want to go.

  As I’m driving, I telephone Freddy Hernandez and ask about any updates.

  “No one can get ahold of Cal,” Freddy says. “He hasn’t made his drop-off in Detroit, which is troubling because he seems to be behind schedule. Plus, he won’t return anyone’s calls.”

  “Is Purvis going to issue an arrest warrant?”

  “Not enough evidence yet,” Freddy says. “He wants to talk to him first.”

  “Christ,” I mutter. “He could be in Edmonton, Canada, for all anyone knows. We might never hear from him again.”

  Freddy is quiet for a minute. Then he says, “So, rumor has it you have a girlfriend.”

  “It’s nothing official,” I say. “I just met her the other night at the Pale Horse.”