Dang Near Dead (An Aggie Mundeen Mystery Book 2)

by Nancy G. West

I felt my face flush and looked down.

  “I care about you, Aggie. You know that. I understand you have this compulsion to learn about everything, but you can’t leap into dangerous situations without thinking. You’ll get hurt.”

  The “without thinking” part irritated me. He drew me into his arms. I smiled and closed my eyes.

  He held me tighter. “I didn’t think I could care about anyone else after losing Katy and Lee. Then you came along.” He seemed torn about that. He loosened his embrace.

  “You loved them, too,” he said. Then his voice cracked. Grief had returned. He released me and sank back against the seat.

  I felt my armor cracking and swallowed to regain control. “I did love them.”

  Being around Sam again, I realized I’d loved him from way back when he and Katy were married. But moving to Texas after Sam did might have been a bad idea. Losing Katy and Lee had broken both our hearts. I wasn’t sure two broken hearts could mend well enough to love again.

  He looked so miserable, I couldn’t help myself. I slid closer to him, reached over and patted his chest. He looked surprised and then suspicious. He put his arm around me, but our moment had passed.

  I twisted around to look into his eyes. “I’ll be careful, Sam. I was stupid to go out there alone. It’s just that I get so eager. I feel this urgency to know what happened, especially to someone I care about.”

  “I know.” He nodded, exhaled and seemed relieved.

  I relaxed into the curve of his arm. I’d loved him for so long. At eighteen, I’d thought I loved Lester. What did I know about love back then?

  The mere thought of falling in love again must terrify Sam. He’d worshipped Katy and Lee and lost them. He might fear that daring to love again would diminish their memory.

  What if something happened to yet another person he loved? How could he risk the pain of enduring more loss?

  That’s when it hit me.

  The reason he got so irritated when I thrust myself into investigations wasn’t merely because he thought I should keep quiet and stay out of his way. It was because he’d loved deeply before and couldn’t prevent Katy and Lee’s deaths. He was terrified it might happen again.

  There was still the secret from our lives back in Chicago that he must never know. If he found out, our chances of ever being together would be destroyed.

  I knew I’d eventually reveal to him what I’d done. Somehow, I’d find the courage to risk rejection. Someday, I’d find and deliver words that would either bind us together or rip us irrevocably apart.

  We couldn’t go on indefinitely as we were. We’d crossed a threshold. I didn’t possess enough backbone to risk disclosure, but I prayed courage would come. I had to believe that, at some point, our relationship would be strong enough for me to think he could love me in spite of the past.

  Meanwhile, for us to have any kind of relationship, I had to be helpful without making him fear for my safety. If he was able to love again, I’d be there. I was making progress.

  “Now that we’re working together,” I said, “if I find anything else, I’ll bring it to you. I promise.” I did not intend to lie. Why did my feet itch?

  He tightened his arm around my shoulder, like a pal. “I wish we weren’t always working to solve a crime,” he said. “We could enjoy some normal time together…if you didn’t have that aversion to normalcy.” He looked down at me and grinned.

  I smiled back. “You’d be bored.”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  He cranked the engine and veered the Caprice back onto the highway.

  Twenty-Six

  Sam steered the car higher through hills before the highway began a gradual descent back toward San Antonio. He and I weren’t having the quiet vacation I’d hoped for, but at least we were together. He was including me.

  Our methods might be different, but we shared a compulsion to find justice for victims.

  I relayed all I knew about Max and Billy Sue Vernons’ deaths near the drilling site. “Even though Herb was their son,” I said, “they left the ranch to their niece Bertha because she loved it so.”

  “I don’t imagine that sat well with Herb.”

  “No, it didn’t. He’s still furious with Bertha. When Bertha treated my poison ivy, I heard him arguing with her about the ranch.”

  “The Vernons were not elderly and died unexpectedly? Authorities would have autopsied their bodies,” he said.

  “Vicki said Bertha didn’t like to talk about it. She did say Billy Sue exercised constantly to stay thin and that walking back to the lodge shouldn’t have been difficult for her. According to Maria, they’d ridden around and hiked all day a couple of days earlier without incident. Maria made them sandwiches and Max wanted extra thermoses of water. The day after they spent roaming the ranch, they went to San Antonio on business and returned home late that afternoon. Their son Herb arrived at the ranch that same day, stayed overnight and left early the next morning. On the day they died.”

  “Did Vicki know if authorities did toxicology tests on the Vernons or their thermoses?” he asked.

  “We didn’t talk about that. But when I met Herb Vernon and his wife Bitsy at the lodge, I gathered Herb thought the ranch should be his. I heard him badger Bertha to let energy companies drill on the property. He owns half the mineral rights. Bertha owns the other half and the executive rights, so she’d be the one to lease the land to an oil company. She’s against drilling. Wants to keep the ranch as it is.”

  “Interesting. Especially since Bertha has to work so hard maintaining the place as a dude ranch.”

  I didn’t tell him how menacing Herb was when he accosted me outside the lodge. Now that Sam and I were working together, I didn’t want to give him another reason why we should leave.

  “I found the Vernons’ obituary online,” I said. “Herb and Bertha are their only living relatives. Herb apparently never liked living on the ranch. Once his parents sent him to school in San Antonio, he never came back much over the years. Maria told me that. Which makes it even stranger that he happened to come back the night before his parents died.”

  He rubbed his chin. “I’ll see what I can learn about the Vernons’ deaths at SAPD. Bandera doesn’t have a medical examiner, so the couple would have been sent to San Antonio for autopsy. Maybe I can see a copy of those reports. By the way, did you bring that map of the ranch?”

  “Sure did.”

  He stuck it in his pocket. His cell phone rang. “Yeah. Thanks, buddy, for the flight information.” Sam clicked a button to save the call.

  We drove straight to the airport and parked as close we could to the flight arrival terminal. At the baggage claim, we didn’t have long to wait. An attractive couple with pinched faces stood waiting for luggage. The woman had Vicki’s pretty features. She wore creamy, wrinkle-free linen that highlighted her smooth complexion, which had probably been enhanced with Retin-A and cosmetic peels. I hoped grief wasn’t about to diminish her beauty.

  A red silk power tie set off her husband’s lightweight wool-and-silk navy sport coat. He paced around luggage conveyer belts rubbing his hand across his chin like a man impatient with unpleasant surprises and interrupted schedules. This couple had to be Steve and Marcia Landsdale.

  Sam walked up and introduced himself as a San Antonio detective vacationing incognito at the ranch where Vicki worked. He introduced me as Vicki’s friend and a guest at the ranch. We expressed our condolences about Vicki’s accident. Sam said we questioned whether her fall was accidental and asked them to protect his cover so he could investigate.

  “Why would anyone want to hurt Vicki?” Steve asked.

  “We don’t know that they did. We’re just checking possibilities.”

  “Vicki has begun to enjoy herself at the ranch, hasn’t she?” Marcia asked.

  �
��Yes, I think she has,” I said. It was only a partial lie. “She does a good job and works hard to keep the guests happy. She’s grown to care about the place. She loves riding the horses.”

  Why should I tell them I knew about River Rat or about Vicki’s other conflicts? They clearly loved their daughter, even if they found unusual ways to protect her. There was no point adding to their concern.

  “Shouldn’t we be at the hospital?” Steve looked at his watch.

  “Yes,” Sam said. “We need just a few minutes to learn more about Vicki. She was going to college in Wisconsin?”

  “When she was younger,” Marcia said, “we took Vicki and her brother Trey to the horse fair in Madison. Trey never cared much about horses or college, but Vicki loved horses. She wanted to attend Wisconsin University in Wausheka. The town has a lot of horse farms and rodeos. It’s about nineteen miles west of Milwaukee on Highway 94. It’s only a little farther from our Bayview house on Lake Michigan, so we’d have her close by. She was taking general education requirements when she met a boy studying sociology.”

  “That hippie,” Steve fumed. “I never saw him wear anything but faded jeans, T-shirts with holes and flip-flops. Naturally, he had long hair and a beard. Nobody’s going to offer a good paying job to a guy who looks like that, unless he’s some kind of genius. This guy was no genius.”

  “Vicki told me that when his sociology class took veterans to rodeos in Milwaukee, her boyfriend took her along,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Marcia said. “It was a kind thing for the school to do, but that hippie’s classes had nothing to do with Vicki.”

  “Can’t make a living studying sociology,” Steve said. “The hippie called himself an artist, but so far as I knew, he never sold anything. We thought if Vicki did some real work for a while, she might appreciate the value of a good education. We’d heard about Texas dude ranches and found out about the BVSBar. The ranch in Bandera, Texas, was as far away from Wisconsin as we could send her without shipping her overseas.”

  “I see,” I said. I remembered my conversation with Vicki the first day she and I walked to the cabins. “If it’s any comfort,” I told them, “I don’t think she cares much about her Wisconsin boyfriend anymore.”

  “Thank goodness.” Marcia sighed. “She doesn’t communicate much. We didn’t know how she was doing. We sent her brother Trey down to keep an eye on her. Nobody at the ranch knows he’s her brother.”

  “All Trey knows how to do is swim and flirt,” Steve said. “We thought he’d fit right in.”

  Could the Landsdales be oblivious to Trey’s fondness for alcohol and drugs? What about his attempt to prey on Vicki?

  Marcia’s cell phone rang. She turned her back and scrambled through her purse.

  “About the veterans her boyfriend’s class took to the rodeo,” Sam said, “do you know which VA hospital they were from?”

  “It wasn’t something that interested us.”

  Marcia, her ear still to the phone, put her hand over her mouth and burst into tears.

  “Vicki lapsed into a coma,” she cried. “They said to hurry.”

  Her husband caught her before she collapsed and struggled to carry her to a chair. He blinked back tears.

  “Do whatever you need to do, detective,” he commanded. “Find the bastard who did this to Vicki.”

  Twenty-Seven

  Sam and I helped the distraught couple hail a cab to San Antonio University Hospital. We drove to SAPD Central on Nueva, stunned into silence from learning Vicki was in a coma.

  Since it was almost noon, we maneuvered through Jack in the Box’s drive-through on the way and got two bacon ultimate cheeseburgers with Cokes. Sam had scarfed down his burger before we arrived at SAPD’s parking lot.

  The air was fairly cool from the recent rain. I told Sam if he’d park in the shade, I’d finish my burger, fire up my laptop, and see what I could learn about Vicki’s college taking veterans to rodeos. I might also glean tidbits about wire used on ranches and horse behavior.

  “I need to know about clowning and clown makeup,” I said, “and about drilling for oil and gas in Texas,” I said. “I’ll enjoy surfing the net again.” Even though Meredith and I had only been out of classes since mid-May, I missed studying.

  “Why research drilling for oil and gas?” he said.

  “When I overheard Herb Vernon arguing with Bertha, Herb said he remembered that when he was growing up, an oil well was drilled somewhere on the ranch. He asked Bertha if she’d ever gone to check the site. He thought there might be oil all over the place. She told him if he wanted to go looking for a dry hole, go ahead. She wasn’t interested in having anybody drill holes in her land, never had been and never would be. But earlier, when Bertha was treating my poison ivy, I saw a piece of paper in her room that said something about a well.”

  My other reason for staying in the car was that I felt my face swelling. I’d definitely spread plant poison from my fingers to my face. When I crashed into Sam in the wilderness and planted those kisses on him, I might have transferred a tad of urushiol sap to his lips. I scrutinized his mouth and jaw line. One jowl looked puffy.

  He looked at me quizzically, but shrugged, turned and headed for the station. I looked in the vanity mirror. My cheeks looked balloonish. Puffiness around my eyes pulled them sideways. I resembled Wo Fat.

  Forty-eight hours had passed since I’d sat in the ivy, so the time for dangerous swelling was past. I wasn’t worried about my throat closing so I couldn’t breathe. A swollen face and itching feet apparently weren’t fatal.

  I had more curiosity than four search engines and powered up my laptop. I learned clowns used two types of paint: grease paint and common face paint. Amateur clowns generally used face paint, made of similar ingredients to those in women’s makeup. It was easier to apply and remove.

  Although it was trickier to apply, professionals used grease paint, available in pots and tubes, because it stayed on longer. Some clowns painted their faces with white or skin-colored paint before painting new features over the base paint. As a professional, Sunny probably used grease paint. Skin-toned grease paint would more effectively cover the scar running down his jaw line.

  Next, I researched Vicki’s college, Wisconsin University in Wausheka. Their sociology department frequently took patients from the local veteran’s hospital to rodeos and other events.

  As for who or what had spooked Vicki’s horse, I already knew horses spooked at sudden unexpected noises, smells, and movements. They could hear lower and higher frequencies than humans could, and had a superior sense of smell. With eyes set on the sides of its head, a horse had nearly a 350-degree range of vision. With about sixty-five percent of this range being binocular vision, the horse could quickly spot approaching predators. Any number of stimuli could have caused Vicki’s horse to pitch her off.

  I found general information about drilling for oil and gas in Texas. When about forty-three percent of US savings and loan associations failed in the 1980s and 1990s, banks grew squeamish about making loans. Energy companies found it nearly impossible to obtain financing for drilling operations. Many Texas companies abandoned drilling projects and sold non-producing wells to smaller companies that later made other efforts to drill. If those wells came up dry, smaller companies couldn’t afford to plug them. By the early 1990s, thousands of non-producing unplugged wells dotted Texas.

  Was that the type of well that lured Max and Billy Sue out on the ranch the day they died?

  Since information I found wasn’t shedding much light on our investigation, I decided to research anti-aging remedies for my Dear Aggie readers. It was cool in the car, and Sam was still inside the police station.

  I typed telomeres into WebCrawler, to see what I could find about these cap-like ends on our DNA strands. Scientists had linked longer telomeres to extended lif
e spans. If scientists could lengthen telomeres, I could have more time with Sam.

  Before I could Ask Jeeves about telomeres, Sam came walking toward the car. I saved my sites and shut down the laptop.

  When he slid into the car, I studied his face. He looked like a squirrel who’d stored a pecan in each jowl. Hopefully, that was the extent of his facial swelling caused by my kisses. Otherwise, he might be inclined to find me reprehensible. He started the engine.

  “I’m afraid I didn’t find much online to help us learn the details of Vicki’s attack,” I said.

  “It’s good that you tried,” he said. “I called Joaquin at the crime lab to see if he could obtain the Vernons’ autopsy reports without written authorization. He said pathologists are usually reluctant to release autopsy findings because of possible future litigation, but he knows one of the docs there pretty well. Since the deaths occurred five years ago, he thought the doc might let him see the reports. He’ll try to have them for us when we arrive.”

  Twenty-Eight

  We drove west on IH 10 toward the medical center. A string of buildings lined both sides of the highway. Freeway traffic was bumper-to-bumper. I began to miss open space at the ranch.

  The Bexar County Medical Examiner shared a building with the morgue and crime lab on Louis Pasteur. We walked in with our plastic bags concealed in Sam’s pockets.

  The building smelled of disinfectant.

  I put my hand on Sam’s arm. “I hope you get to review the Vernons’ autopsies,” I said, “but I’m not sure I want to hear the details.”

  “I understand. I’ll summarize what’s pertinent. Joaquin said he’s ready to look at the evidence you found.”

  Sam asked to see Forensic Scientist Joaquin Salazar. We were directed to Salazar’s lab, and Sam introduced him to me. Joaquin courteously pretended I looked normal and led us to a lab table. He didn’t seem to notice that Sam’s face looked puffy.