Tough Customer (16 page)

Dodge's heart felt like it was in a goddamn vise, but he had to ask, had to know. "Why'd you marry him?"

"Dodge--"

"Tell me. Why?"

"Because I wanted to!"

"To spite me?"

"Don't flatter yourself."

"Did you love him?"

"Yes."

"You loved him."

"After me, after
us,
was it that easy--"

He broke off when suddenly her eyes darted to a point behind him. He whipped around. Berry was standing in the open doorway, her gaze bouncing between them. "What's going on?"

Caroline was the first to speak. "As it turns out, our guest is very opinionated about how long spaghetti should boil." She smiled at Dodge, who forced a similar expression. Or tried. Caroline continued the charade. "In any case, it won't be long now. If you'd like to wash up, Dodge, there's a powder room, just..."

She motioned, and he mumbled, "Yeah, sure, thanks," and excused himself as he moved past Berry out of the steamy kitchen.

Through dinner, Caroline carried the conversation. He followed as well as he could, trying not to stumble, mindful that Berry was quiet but keenly observant. She watched him even when she was pretending not to.

Physically, she looked like Caroline, thank God. But she was his kid, too. If she'd inherited any of his deduction skills, this charade wasn't going to last long. He thought that he and Caroline were probably trying too hard to act normal, and that the effort was transparent. Or maybe he was just being paranoid.

Caroline pressed him into talking about some of the interesting cases he had worked on. He gave them a more detailed account of Derek and Julie Mitchell's romance.

"Wasn't conventional," he said. "Not by a long shot. The stakes were high for both of them, but they fell hard for each other, and that was all she wrote. Now, with the baby on the way, they're positively nauseating. Derek, a former man-about-town, has gone domestic. Uses fringed cloth napkins, for godsake! I'd accuse Julie of emasculating him, but I think she's rather partial to his balls."

Berry blurted a laugh. Caroline blinked with shock, then she, too, laughed. The sound of their laughter made his throat grow tight with emotion.

But the specter of his conversation with Amanda Lofland served as a centerpiece on the dining table. It loomed large. He was glad when the meal finally came to an end and he could excuse himself to go outside and smoke.

On his way out, he said to Berry, "One cigarette. Then we gotta talk about you and Lofland."

SKI WAS ALMOST UPON THE MAN WHEN HE SPUN AROUND, PISTOL in hand, aimed straight at Ski's head. "Whoa!"

"Son of a bitch!"
Dodge dropped his gun hand and gave the deputy a baleful look. "I almost shot you."

"That would have been bad for both of us."

"Worse for you." Dodge returned his revolver to its holster at the small of his back.

Ski asked, "Do you have a concealed handgun license?"

"In Georgia."

"This is Texas."

Dodge shrugged. "Doesn't GA have reciprocity with the Lone Star State?"

"Didn't you bother to check?"

"No. Does it?"

"Yes."

"Then what's the problem?"

Ski brushed past a sapling and closed the distance between himself and the tree stump where Dodge had been sitting when he came up behind him. The woods were noisy with the soprano choir of insects and the bass tones of bullfrogs on the lakeshore, which had helped cover the sound of his approach through the woods.

The night was hot, there was no breeze. The surrounding trees were stolid and still. Light spilling from the windows of Caroline King's house provided an ambient glow. The two men could see each other but little else.

Dodge returned to his seat on the stump and lit a cigarette. As he fanned out his match, he eyed Ski up and down. "You an Indian, or what? One of those Coushatta from around here?"

"Do I look like an Indian?"

"I didn't hear you till you were only a few yards away from me. Barely had time to get my pistol."

Ski crouched down at the base of a pine, sitting on the heels of his boots and putting his back to the rough bark. "Army. Special Forces. Covert missions."

"You're good."

"If I was good, I'd have slit your throat before you knew I was here."

"Did you think I might be Starks returning to the scene of the crime?"

Ski shook his head. "I smelled your tobacco smoke. He isn't a smoker."

The older man considered him for a moment. "How come you left the Army?"

"I got wounded."

"Iraq?"

"Afghanistan. Before it became the place to be," he said drily. "I got shot. Spent months recovering. By the time I was released from the hospital, my stint was almost over. I didn't re-up."

Dodge kept smoking, saying nothing. For reasons Ski couldn't explain, he would like to win this man's approval. Short of that, he'd like to alleviate the contempt with which Dodge Hanley seemed to regard him.

"I already had my degree, but I went back to UT, took courses in criminology, then brought my advanced degree back here to my hometown."

"Why this pissant burg? Why not a metropolitan department?"

"I like to ski."

Dodge's expression went blank. "I don't follow."

"Waterski. Boat. Fish. Hike. Big cities don't allow for much of that."

Dodge harrumphed. "Or, could be you're lazy and lack ambition."

"That's been said." He stated it frankly, without apology or contradiction.

Dodge kept his eyes on the deputy as he ground out his cigarette against the stump. "You like to ski. Is that how you got your nickname?"

Ski picked a chunk of pine bark off the ground and bounced it in his palm. "One summer night--I think between ninth and tenth grades--me and some buddies got a few bottles of rotgut whiskey, sneaked out a motorboat belonging to one of the guys' dads. I took a dare. Broke my arm, a few ribs, and my collarbone. From then on I was called Ski."

"What was the dare?"

"To slalom a half mile barefoot and blindfolded."

Dodge gurgled a laugh. "Jesus."

"I might have been sober enough to pull it off, but the guy driving the boat was wasted. Pulled me right into the shallows and a grove of cypresses." He caught himself chuckling over the reckless stunt, then sobered and assumed his professional demeanor. "Now, if I catch somebody driving a boat while drinking, I haul him to jail. No leniency, no excuses."

Dodge lit another cigarette.

After a time, Ski said, "Who are you? And don't tell me a friend of the family, because you've got cop written all over you."

"Former cop. Currently, an investigator for a law firm in Atlanta."

"Okay."

"What?"

"What are you doing here?"

"Freelance work."

"You came to Ms. King's aid on real short notice."

"I'd done some work for one of her friends in Houston, years back. She recommended me."

"You just dropped everything and came flying down here?"

"I was told Caroline King has lots of money, and I need the extra income. I've got two greedy, bloodsucking ex-wives."

Ski wondered what he'd done to make Dodge Hanley think he was stupid enough to swallow that bullshit. He considered revealing what he'd learned after making some fact-finding calls today, but, for the time being, he decided to play along and pretend to be as ignorant as the stump Dodge was sitting on.

Ski said, "Besides smoking, what were you doing out here?"

Angling the smoke away from Ski, Dodge exhaled and pointed toward the lake. "I thought maybe Starks came by boat. But I nosed around the dock and shoreline and didn't see any evidence of that." He came back to Ski with an arch look. "Nothing as solid as those fresh tire tracks you found."

Ski smiled wryly. "Who'd you torture?"

"No waterboarding necessary. You hang out at a county courthouse long enough, you hear things. Never knew one of them that didn't leak like a rusty pipe."

Ski considered the older man for a long moment, then, making a decision, stood up and angled his head back toward the woods. "Want to take a walk?"

Dodge came to his feet. "Lead on."

"Put out the cigarette. I don't want you burning down our forest."

Dodge sucked in a lungful of smoke and muttered a string of grousing swearwords as he exhaled. He ground out the cigarette, then fell in behind as Ski plowed through the underbrush, pushing aside tree limbs and adroitly sidestepping natural obstacles, retracing the way he'd come but without worrying about how much noise he was making. "I left my flashlight up here a ways. Can you see okay?"

"Don't worry about me," Dodge grumbled.

Ski ducked under a tree branch and hoped Dodge saw it in time to do the same. He hadn't planned to share any aspects of the case but found himself inviting the former cop's input. "The three-way stop where Lake Road dead-ends? The bait shop?"

"Yeah?"

"I talked to a guy who was there about midnight last night, pumping gas." Pride prevented him from telling the veteran investigator that a civilian had actually tracked down the bass fisherman.

"Kinda late to be pumping gas."

"He was getting his boat ready to take out first thing this morning. Wanted to have that chore done so he could get on the lake by daylight."

"That's one of the reasons I never fished. It starts too early."

"So," Ski continued, "he's at the pump filling his gas can when this guy pulls a Toyota up to the side of the building. Time roughly coincides with Ms. Malone's 911 call."

"Did the vehicle come from this direction?"

"It did."

"The fisherman is sure it was a Toyota?"

"Positive. His daughter has one like it. He said the driver got out and stumbled into the men's room."

"Exterior entrance?"

"Right."

"Stumbled?"

"He demonstrated it to me. Looked like limping. When the gas can is full, the fisherman thinks maybe he ought to check on the guy. So he moseys over to the men's room, knocks on the door, and says to the guy inside that he couldn't help but notice that he was limping and asks if everything's all right, does he need some help. The guy hollers through the door--"

"He doesn't open it?"

"No. He tells the fisherman that he's fine. He just came in to 'take a piss.' Those words. The fisherman is a die-hard evangelical and wanted to hear no more of--I quote--'that kind of filthy language.'"

"He sounds like a barrel of laughs."

Ski stopped to retrieve his flashlight from the crotch of a tree where he'd left it. He clicked it on and turned to check on Dodge, who'd been keeping up, but barely. The older man was huffing. "Are you all right?"

"I've got on city shoes."

His shoes weren't to blame for his wheezing like a malfunctioning bagpipe. "You need to lose the cigarettes."

"Walk."

Ski directed the beam of light to the ground, which made the trekking much easier. "The fisherman went on his way and didn't think any more about it."

"Not even when he heard there'd been a shooting in the vicinity around that time of night?"

"He was out on the lake all day. Didn't learn about the incident until he got home this afternoon, and by then we were contacting him."

"Did he describe the guy?"

"He got a fairly good look because there's a light above the restroom door. Oren Starks's general height, weight, and age. Receding hairline. The guy was wearing khaki slacks and a dark golf shirt. Ms. Malone said Starks had on khaki slacks and a navy golf shirt."

"No one coached the fisherman? He hadn't heard that description on TV or from his wife when he got home from his fishing trip?"

"He says no, and I don't think this guy would lie."

Dodge hawked up a wad of phlegm and spat. "Fuck no. Not if he takes exception to the word
piss.
"

Ski chuckled. "Plus, I showed him a faxed photo of Starks that I got from the marketing firm's employment records. Fisherman said he was ninety-five percent sure that was the guy."

"Not one hundred?"

"On account of it was dark and he was twenty or so yards away." Ski motioned forward. "It's just ahead."

The flashlight beam picked up the yellow tape that had been strung around a small area that appeared to be the cul-de-sac of an overgrown track. "My guess," Ski said, "is that when the house was being built, the construction crew pulled some of their vehicles off the road and parked them in here where it was shady, and to keep from cluttering up the area in front of the house.

"When the house was completed, the track and clearing became overgrown with disuse." He shone the light down on the tire tracks in the dirt. "Fresh. And they weren't made by heavy equipment. I discovered them just after daylight this morning, got a man out here pronto. He's no expert, mind you, but he made a pretty good cast."

"Lucky it didn't rain last night."

Ski nodded. "I'm rushing up the match, but I'm betting the tires will be standard-issue Toyota."

"Find anything besides the tracks?"

"Scuffed footprints." Ski shone the light onto the ground. "Unfortunately, nothing we could imprint."

"Candy wrapper, bottle cap, piece of cloth?"

"Nope. I've combed the area twice myself and had two other deputies do the same. Nothing. But, if you know what to look for, Starks left a clear trail to the house."

He showed Dodge a skinny branch that had recently been broken and was hanging limply from the trunk of the tree, also a patch of grass that had been trampled on. "Ms. Malone said he was no outdoorsman."

Dodge studied several broken limbs that Ski spotlighted. "He doesn't have your pathfinder skills, that's for sure."