A Rendezvous to Die For (32 page)

I froze and kept my eyes focused
on Virgil, who was visibly angry for my failure to follow orders. A
lariat silently snaked through the air and settled over his chest. It
was yanked taut. The pistol aimed at me discharged harmlessly into
the air. The other one dropped to the ground. Virgil was jerked off
his feet and dragged backward.

I dashed forward and snatched the
weapon from the grass, aiming it at my assailant. My hand shook
violently, and I used my other one to hold it steady. “Don’t move
a muscle,” I said, my voice strong and filled with anger. “I
won’t hesitate to use this thing.”

Jack dropped from the balcony in
a flying leap and secured Virgil to a balcony support post. “There.”
He pushed the black Stetson off his forehead, wiped his brow with the
back of a hand, and surveyed his handiwork. “You’re not going
anywhere until someone comes to take you away.”

I rushed to his side. “How did
you—”

“
I picked up your message on my
cell phone while I was at the feed store,” he said. “Since your
place was on the way, I decided to stop and see what was so
important. You weren’t home, but your vehicle was. I figured you
might be at Marty’s, so I went looking for you. When I saw what was
happening, I called the sheriff on my cell phone.”

“
Did you hear the whole thing?”

“
Most of it. Enough to know the
sheriff wouldn’t get here in time. I was afraid to distract Virgil,
when I didn’t have a gun to back me up. I went back for the only
weapon I had in the truck. My rope.”

Two deputies, guns drawn, rounded
the corner of the house. Quickly sizing up the situation, they
secured Virgil in cuffs, then untied the shaken Deputy Shaw. “DeWitt
intercepted me when I arrived to question Mr. Madigan,” he said,
rubbing his wrists where the ropes had dug into his flesh. “He
forced me to drive my squad car into the garage, where it would be
hidden from view. His vehicle is in there, too. Or, Guy Strothers’
vehicle, according to his own confession.”

Shaw turned to Marty and me. “I
apologize for keeping the two of you on my short list. My deputies
and I completely screwed up this investigation. We’re not used to
situations like this in Clayton County. We’re regrettably rusty.
I’ll get back to you tomorrow for your testimonies. Again, you have
my profound apologies.”

I watched him march an exhausted
and cheerless Virgil DeWitt across the lawn. It was at that precise
moment reality hit me. They were hauling away the man who had taken
out his unresolved suffering and need for revenge on three Colton
Mills men. The same man who had been one lucky lasso toss away from
the last of his murderous plans. Plans that would have ended my life,
too.

Chapter
29

Friday—Week
Four

Four weeks of my life had passed
by in a blur. Four weeks, when I hadn’t known from one day to the
next whether I would be spending the rest of my life in prison. I
owed Jack big time. But he owed me some answers. When I finally got
through the telephone gauntlet of reporters calling him, I invited
him to meet me at the only place I could think of where we could
clear the air.

He rang my doorbell right on
time. “Good news, Cass,” he said by way of greeting. “Looks
like you’ll get your horse. Virgil requested that his attorney turn
Midnight over to you. He knew you had been riding him on a regular
basis.”

“
That’s big of him. I’m
surprised, aren’t you? Especially since we’re the ones who foiled
his plans.” I grinned. “That news is the only good thing to come
out of this mess, as far as I’m concerned.” I ushered him into
the kitchen where I’d prepared one of my gourmet meals—a frozen
pepperoni and sausage pizza heated in a 500-degree oven, accompanied
by a cold six-pack of Coors.

“
You turned into a pretty good
detective,” Jack said, grinning as he popped open a can.

“
Better than you know,” I
said in a tense voice, between bites of pizza.

“
What do you mean?”

“
What I mean, Jack Gardner, is
that all the while you were supposedly helping me, you were lying
through your teeth.”

“
What the hell are you talking
about?”

“
For starters, you neglected to
let me in on the not insubstantial fact that you knew Eric
Hartfield.” My gaze bored into his eyes.

“
Where’d you get the idea
that I knew Eric?” Jack looked sincerely baffled.

“
Deputy Shaw told me you got
Eric’s sister pregnant years ago, when you were working at the
Evening Star Stables, then skipped town. He said Eric was gunning for
you when you showed up in Colton Mills.”

“
Never happened, Cass.” He
shook his head in stupefaction. “Never happened. None of it. Nada.
It was a case of mistaken identity. The sheriff took my DNA, saying
they were investigating whether or not a child was mine. They didn’t
say whose child they were talking about. I found out just last week
they were talking about Hartfield’s sister. I’d taken her out a
few times, but the results of the tests last week cleared me of being
a father of her child. It wasn’t mine. Couldn’t be mine.”

“
Are you telling me Shaw used
information he didn’t know was even true to— ”

“
Happens all the time. You know
that.”

“
Okay,” I said. “That’s
not all. Why didn’t you tell me you were at the Rendezvous on the
day of the murder?”

“
At the Rendezvous?” His
mouth dropped open. “I’ve never been at that Rendezvous in my
life!”

“
Are you telling me that you
did
not
trailer some horses to the Rendezvous for the use of a couple
participants?”

“
Yeah, I’m saying I wasn’t
there. Where’d you hear that fabrication?”

“
From Willis—Virgil—whatever
his name is. He said you told him you were going to the Rendezvous
and he could follow you up there, since he didn’t know the way.”

“
Oh, that. I think I know what
you’re talking about now.” Jack finished the beer in his can and
reached for a second one. “Virgil asked me directions to the
reservation
casino
and I told him I was heading up that way and he could follow me, if
he wanted. Obviously, the man had an agenda and part of it was to
bamboozle folks like you and me.” He grabbed a napkin and wiped his
fingers of pizza sauce. “Cass, if you believed that shit, does that
mean you suspected me of being a mass murderer?”

“
Well, it made sense, didn’t
it? I hear you were at the Rendezvous and you hadn’t mentioned it.
You told me to visit Randy at his house and then I find him murdered.
You decide to ride out on the stables property to find Jim, protest
about heading in the direction I suggest, and then we find him
hanging from a tree.”

Jack placed his hand over his
heart. “I’m devastated that you would allow such a thing to even
enter your mind. Shocked you’d actually believe it!” He reached
for my hand across the table, but I was quicker. I might be grateful
to him and I might have misjudged his connections to the three
murdered men, but I wasn’t about to show him my gratitude by
getting any closer to him than I’d been in the past months.

Media
outlets outdid themselves covering the story of how three murders
were solved in one dramatic bust. Always hungry for heroes, they were
lionizing the latest one. And he was in his element. When I turned on
the late-night news, there was Jack, decked out in his full cowboy
regalia. “Mr. Gardner, where did you develop your amazing roping
skills?” asked one of the TV reporters.

He tipped his Stetson off his
brow and assumed an “aw shucks” manner and tone of voice. “I
wrangled steers and horses in west Texas for a few years,” he
drawled, flirtatiously eying the twenty-something interviewer. “It’s
a skill you gotta know, if you’re gonna cowboy for a livin’.”

“
Mr. Gardner is going to
demonstrate his skill with a rope,” continued Ms. Interviewer.

The camera panned over to Jack,
who was already astride his horse in one of the stable’s corrals.
From the other end of the enclosure, someone opened a gate and about
half a dozen calves dashed in, bunched together and heading for
nowhere in particular. Jack expertly roped a calf his horse cut from
the group. The calf hit the end of the rope and flipped to the
ground. Jack jumped off and tied up the calf’s legs, while the
horse held the roped calf taut. The camera pulled in for a close-up
of the cowboy, who doffed his hat. His wide smile flooded my living
room. It had taken him an impressive six seconds. Jack was on his way
to a whole new career, and I predicted his newfound celebrity would
project him far beyond the confines of Patriot Stables.

The interviewer was wrapping up
her story. “Jack Gardner,” she said. “Today’s cowboy, made in
the image of hundreds who went before him. With one important twist.
His roping skills snagged the only serial killer Colton Mills has
ever experienced . . . a killer who took the lives of three innocent
citizens and would have added three more notches to his belt.”

I groaned and changed the
channel.

The
sheriff was basking in the limelight during this broadcast. Even
though he hadn’t done a darned thing, three murders had been solved
in his jurisdiction in one fell swoop. Tight-lipped about how it all
occurred, he explained only Jack’s role in the capture. “Virgil
DeWitt has been arrested and charged for the murders of all three
men. He is incarcerated and will await his trial

Epilogue

Saturday—Week
Four

Colton Mills was breathing a
collective sigh of relief. Anna had called me several times and I
finally agreed to a celebration dinner at her house. Marty and Nick
had also been invited. “Okay, who wants to begin?” she said,
plopping into a comfy chair, after pouring the wine.

I sipped from my goblet. “If I
had stopped to answer the phone, before dashing over to Marty’s
house, things would have turned out differently,” I said, sighing.
“But, as usual, I was in a big hurry to talk to Marty about the
news article relating to Kathleen DeWitt’s car accident.”

She reached for the cheese and
cracker plate on the coffee table and passed it to me. “You’ve
probably listened to the voice mail message I left for you, but I’ll
tell Nick and Marty about it. The craftsman in Pipestone remembered
that Virgil was the one who bought the boots we saw in the Rendezvous
parking lot photo. When I think of how close you came to—”

“
Even if he’d been successful
in killing Shaw, Marty and me, that information you doggedly acquired
would have identified him and the police could have conducted a
statewide search, Anna.” I blew her a kiss.

“
That’s small comfort,” she
said, wagging a well-manicured finger at me. “You put yourself in
danger.”

“
I know you didn’t trust me,
Cassandra,” Marty said. “You weren’t sure if I was involved in
killing Eric or not. I don’t blame you. Virgil masterfully hid his
identity, posing as the Willis I had grown to admire and befriend.
For a businessman from Wisconsin, he had skills in hatchet throwing
and could talk reenactment with the best of us. I had no clue as to
his real identity.” He swirled the wine in his glass. “No one in
our Rendezvous Society had reason to suspect him of being a killer.
We wholeheartedly accepted him.”

“
Now that we all know the
murderer was Virgil, I wonder why we couldn’t put two and two
together,” I said, washing down the cheese and crackers in my
mouth. “The first murder involved a tomahawk, the second, a
frontier knife, and the third, a handmade rope.”

Marty shrugged. “Those clues
could have applied to anyone who was into Rendezvous reenacting. If I
hadn’t been so concerned about my own defense, I should have
thought of him. He was big on justice and how it was served up in the
old days. Some of the men in our group were uncomfortable with his
conversations about on an eye for an eye. Hindsight certainly makes
it easier to understand.”

I reached for the wine bottle and
refilled all our glasses. “According to the newspaper article, he
quit attending the Wisconsin group’s meetings after his daughter
was killed. He must have devoted full time to plotting his vengeance
on Eric, Randy, Jim, and Marty.”

“
He seemed to understand all of
us and how we were likely to explain events. It was a masterful plan
to kill Eric with my tomahawk.” Marty rose from his chair and paced
the floor. “He had easy access to my tomahawk and knew where I kept
it, but he’s the last person I’d have suspected stealing it from
me. I had no witnesses to confirm my innocence.” He scratched his
head and peered directly at me. “One big problem law enforcement
had was the lack of evidence at the crime scene. No fingerprints. No
footprints. A lot of blood, but no blood of a second person. No
bloody clothing. All they had was Frank’s hat, which he swore he
had left there the night before. Deputy Shaw couldn’t even figure
out how the crime was accomplished.”

I nodded. “As time passed, I
was convinced Strothers was responsible.”

“
When did you first suspect
him?” Marty came to sit beside me on the couch.