8 Sweet Payback (13 page)

Chapter
14

Discouragement settled over Beau
like a heavy garment as he watched the bag containing Lee Rodarte’s lifeless
body slide into the medical investigator’s vehicle. There would be an autopsy
but it seemed pretty clear that the man had been beaten to death. Dammit—just
when he thought things might cool down.

Lee had followed instruction, come
here away from Sembramos. Seemingly, the curfew had held; his men had reported
no trouble. So why this? Why now?

He hoped to have the answers to
those questions soon. He’d sent his deputies to round up all of the Starkeys
and anyone else in Sembramos with attitude. The department would be
pandemonium; Beau wasn’t looking forward to wading into it. He watched Lisa,
his crime scene tech, as she packed up her kit full of samples and snapped a
couple of final pictures.

“Anything else, Sheriff?” she
asked, opening her SUV’s door.

“Just process it quickly. I’ll be
in after I question some folks here.” He would also need to find out where
Lee’s parents had moved and contact the authorities there to notify them, then
get up to Sembramos and inform Sophie Garcia. Her son was Lee’s closest kin
around here. Poor little kid—meeting and losing his father too many times.

The bartender sat inside at the
bar, nursing a cup of coffee and not looking happy about it. Beau didn’t blame
him. The guy probably hadn’t gone home until the wee hours and had been called
back at six. Daylight coming in the front windows and overhead lights glaring
down revealed every beer stain, every dingy patch on the thin carpet, the fact
that the walls hadn’t seen fresh paint in years, everything easily concealed by
neon and soft lighting at night. At least the wood surface of the bar itself
was gleaming and the glassware on the shelves behind was spotless.

Toby Quintana introduced himself
and offered Beau some of the coffee. It was actually quite good.

“I can’t believe this,” Toby said,
wiping a droplet off the bar. “We’ve never had trouble here. My place is a
family hangout. We don’t get the rough crowd or the druggies. Mostly it’s, you
know, guys who’ll stop by for a beer after work. They go home for dinner, maybe
bring the wife by later for some dancing. Saturday nights we got a local
Western band that plays and everybody lets loose a little. Most nights we’re
empty by eleven, I clean up, get home at a reasonable hour.

“Last night. Do you remember this
guy?” Beau pulled out Lee’s official mug shot. The crime scene photos were too
gruesome to show around.

“Sure,” said Quintana. “First time
here, as far as I know. He sat at that end of the bar, alone, looking sad. Had
a beer. Added a shot of tequila, then another.”

“Was he drunk when he left?”

“Didn’t seem like it. I mean, he
was walking okay. Exchanged a few quiet words with me when he paid his tab.”

“Did he talk to anyone else? Start
up a conversation?”

“Nah. Just sat there. Well, wait a
second. At one point, two guys came in. They wore leathers, ’do-rags. Walked
right over to your guy and talked a minute. Seemed like they were all friends.
By the time I got around to them, asked if they wanted anything, the conversation
seemed to be over. They said no, thanks, to the offer of a drink and walked
back out.” He seemed more surprised by the ‘thanks’ than any other part of it.

“What time was this?”

“Oh, gosh. I lose track, you know,
get busy. I’m guessing maybe around ten? Could have been earlier.”

Beau glanced toward the small
front windows. “Did you see what they were driving?”

“Nah, man. After dark, I hardly
get a chance to look up. Way they were dressed, I would guess bikes.”

“And the victim—what time did he
leave?”

Toby blew out a puff of air.
“Maybe half-hour after the others were here?”

Beau thanked him, handed over a
business card, and asked Toby to call him if he remembered anyone else who
might have talked to Lee Rodarte or followed him out of the bar. He walked out
into the bright sunshine and surveyed the area for a minute. There was a
residential neighborhood one street over, but it seemed pretty far away for
anyone inside their home to hear a beating taking place. Especially what had
happened to Lee.

The MI had surmised that Lee had
gone down with one blow to the back of the head. After that, they’d kicked him
repeatedly, all over his body. The whole thing could have happened fairly
quietly, especially with traffic noises less than a block away. And Beau didn’t
yet know whether this was one assailant or many. He would try to get the word
out, ask citizens to come forward if they’d seen anything. You never
knew—sometimes a guy was out late, walking the dog or something.

He climbed into his cruiser and
drove toward his office, parking in the department lot at the back of the
building. Two deputies who’d been on patrol in Sembramos last night were
sitting at desks in the squad room. Beau signaled them to come into his office
and close the door.

“What’ve we got?” He settled into
his chair and shuffled the little stack of phone messages that awaited him.

“We pulled Joe Starkey and Bobby
Starkey out of bed this morning. They’re in the interrogation rooms. They both
swear they were at home all night. A couple more cousins are in a cell, held
for questioning at this point but we haven’t gotten around to them.”

Since the fire at Joe and Helen’s
home, the couple had been staying at Bobby’s house a few blocks away. It would
make sense that the family members would alibi each other. Beau didn’t remember
the bartender saying whether the men who’d talked to Lee where Anglo or
Hispanic, but he didn’t see biker leathers as being the style of anyone in the
Starkey clan. They went more for the mountain-man look. More telling was the
fact that the two men had been polite and had spoken to Lee as friends. That
definitely didn’t sound Starkey.

On the other hand, nothing really
pointed to the two men in the bar being the same who’d beaten Lee. Which left
all of the Starkeys right up there on the suspect list.

* *
*

The idea of tracking down the
owner of the big house wouldn’t leave Sam alone, and the county courthouse
wasn’t out of her way. She pulled into the parking area of the big, new complex
and spent a few minutes finding her way to the records division. A clerk helped
her find the information she wanted, based on the legal description and a plot
map of the county.

“LG Properties, Inc., is all it
shows?” Sam asked when they came up with the name on the deed. “There’s not a person’s
name listed?”

The clerk gave a shrug. Sure,
businesses could own property. Did it matter? The physical address of record
was the rural address of the house. Billing and communication went to a post
office box in Taos. Sam could have gotten that much from Delbert Crow. She
wrote it all down anyway. The post office was also on the way home so she
stopped and posed her question to the clerk at the window.

“We can’t give out box-holder
information,” he said in his best postal-worker voice.

“Let me talk to the postmaster.”
Sam raised her shirt-tail to reveal her deputy badge.

She was shown into a side office
where she shook hands with a man in Taos’s version of a business suit—dark
slacks, white shirt, string tie.

“All I really need to know is
whether LG Properties, Inc., still holds this post office box and if the mail
is being picked up regularly.”

Between the badge and the fact
that she knew the company’s name, Sam got him to turn to his computer and do a
search.

“Sorry. LG Properties relinquished
the box a few years ago. It’s registered to someone else now. And no, LG didn’t
rent a different box. If they gave a forwarding address it expired after six
months.”

“So it’s been too long ago to get
anything current on them?”

“That’s right.” He seemed almost happy
to deliver that news.

She drove toward home, feeling
that she hadn’t come very far in either of her searches—the ownership of the
mansion or further information on her wooden box. She wondered if Beau was doing
any better with his investigation. She needed to get out to the big house and
finish the windows, but didn’t relish the idea of any type of confrontation in
Sembramos—with the residents or with her husband.

There was one way to find out if
the coast was clear, she decided as she set the library materials on the coffee
table in the living room. She dialed Beau’s phone. Not surprisingly, it went to
voice mail. Was this entire day going to consist of frustrations and
non-answers?
Screw it
, she decided,
I’ll go anyway.

Gathering her supplies she loaded
window cleaner, squeegee and clean rags into the truck and set off with a
somewhat fatalistic attitude. Washing windows this time of year was a useless
task anyway; sporadic rains and whiffs of dust from the roads usually turned any
sparkling glass or a clean vehicle into a spotted mess within a few days. But
this way she could tell Delbert Crow that she had completed the job and submit
her invoice to be paid.

The two-lane highway into
Sembramos had little traffic and Sam noticed two state police vehicles parked
strategically where they could see who came and went. In town, it looked as if
normal life had resumed. Two women stood chatting in front of the variety store
and a number of cars were moving about, coming and going from the bank and gas
station. Sam drove through slowly, remembering Beau’s warnings about stopping.
No one seemed to notice her red truck, and she had cleared the town’s northern
limit within five minutes.

A woman walking an Australian
shepherd paused and called the dog to sit as Sam approached the turn for the
driveway to the LG property. With her side window down, she heard the lady say
hello as she turned. Might not hurt to ask . . .

“Hi there,” Sam said. “Pretty
dog.”

“Thanks.” The woman beamed and
sneaked the dog a little treat for sitting so quietly. “Um, if you’re going up
to see someone, well, nobody lives there.”

“Yeah, I discovered that.” Sam
gave the one-sentence version of why she was there. “I’ve been trying to locate
the owner but I can’t seem to find out his name or how to reach him. The
property is listed in a business name.”

“Oh, odd. There used to be a man
who came around all the time, back when they started construction. I’d see him
talking with the builder and his crew. But, you know, it’s been years since
then and I haven’t seen him recently.”

“Do you know his name?”

“No, never met him. I heard it
once, something kind of funny. I thought he lived in Sembramos, but I haven’t
seen him around there in ages either.”

Sam chewed at her lip.

“You know, there are rumors the place
is haunted,” the lady said with a crooked little smile.

“Seriously?” Sam thought of the
unusual hot and cold spots in the house.

“My daughter and her friends claim
they’ve seen lights in there at night, like candles or firelight.” She chuckled.
“Of course, don’t all twelve-year-old girls like to believe in haunted-house
stories?”

Sam laughed along with her but
Cora Abernathy’s words came back, the parts about witches finding places with
the right ambiance for their indoor festivities. An elegant, abandoned house
might be just the ticket. She rubbed at the goose bumps that rose on her arms,
said goodbye and continued up the long drive.

Staring at the huge windows that
overlooked the valley and the highway, Sam could almost imagine a coven of
young witches, dancing by candlelight on a winter solstice night. Almost. Any
number of people could have keys, from construction workers to the owners. But
she’d noticed no sign of anyone being in the house, certainly not a burned
candle or evidence that the fireplace had been used. The local kids were just
having a good time with ghost stories, that was all.

Chapter
15

A string of swear words erupted
from Interrogation Room 1, just before Beau put his hand on the doorknob and
walked in.

“Joe. The colorful language isn’t
going to get you out of here any quicker,” he said, motioning to his suspect
who was pacing the small room. “Take a seat. Let’s talk.”

“I already talked all I’m
wantin
’ to.” Joe Starkey seemed more unkempt than ever, his
beard stained with tobacco and his hair sticking out at odd angles. He must
have dressed quickly when the deputies came for him in the wee hours; his shirt
was
mis
-buttoned and the jeans looked like they’d been
in a wad on some floor. “I want to quit
talkin
’ and
get my brother and go home.”

“A man is dead, Joe, and your
family had threatened him. I have to ask the questions.”

“My Jessie’s dead, too, Sheriff.
And nobody’s found out who did that. My family wants answers too. Did you ever
stop to think that maybe the same person killed that Lee Rodarte is who killed
my boy?”

Beau actually had considered that
very possibility.

“Any ideas who that would be?” he
asked.

Starkey’s bluster dimmed a little.
“Well, somebody who didn’t want to see ’em leave the pen. Somebody who was
happy about their trial going the way it did. That prosecutor who sent ’em
away, for instance.”

Beau gave him a steady stare.

“Okay, so maybe that prosecutor
got better things to do, wouldn’t want to risk his fancy-pants career. What
about somebody else in town?”

“Again, who?”

“Well, I don’t know. But why
aren’t you up there asking questions?”

This was about to start going in
circles, Beau realized. He was almost relieved when the desk officer tapped at
the door and told him there was a phone call he would probably want to take.

Beau stopped Rico on the way to
his desk. “Go ahead and release Joe and Bobby Starkey, but warn
them—strongly—that there better not be any more trouble and that they can’t
leave the area. Radio the guys patrolling Sembramos, tell them to make frequent
passes by the Starkey house.”

Rico nodded. Beau stepped into his
office and picked up the phone.

“We’ve received the body you just
sent down,” said the medical investigator in Albuquerque. “and there’s one
thing I thought you might like to know right away. We found a note stuffed into
the victim’s waistband. Don’t know how our man at the scene missed it, but it
was probably left by the killer. I’ll fax you a copy of it and send the
original by courier.”

“Thanks, appreciate it.” Beau hung
up and stepped out to the fax machine in the squad room. Within a minute, a
page rolled out.

They
deserved to Die. You support these two scumbags, you Die too!!!!

It was handwritten in shaky
lettering. A nervous hand, or someone trying to disguise handwriting? Beau couldn’t
tell. Once he received the original he might be able to get a handwriting
expert’s opinion. Or, he could leave that to the lawyers who would have to
build a case around the evidence his department managed to gather. He walked
into the hallway, where Rico was herding Joe and Bobby Starkey toward the front
desk.

“Just a second,” Beau said,
catching up. He held out the facsimile of the note, watching the two faces as
they saw it.

Joe Starkey’s face went a little
pale; he looked at his brother.

“This look familiar?” Beau asked.

They both shook their heads. He
wasn’t sure whether to believe them. He raised two fingers to his eyes, then
pointed to the men.
I’m watching you
.
He nodded to Rico to see them out.

His intercom line was ringing when
he got back to his office.

“Sorry, Sheriff, there’s an Alan
Cayne on line one.”

Beau punched the red button and
picked up the handset. “Sheriff Cardwell.”

“Sheriff, my wife and I are
very
upset.” The male voice was shaky
with emotion. “We just heard that Angela’s killers were freed from prison. How
could they do that? How can those two be running free now?”

Clearly, the family had not been
monitoring television news. Beau gave him the condensed version of the reasons
for the release, ending with the fact that both men were, in fact, not running
free anymore.

The air seemed to go out of Alan
Cayne. Beau could hear small background sounds, as if Cayne were rubbing a calloused
hand over a days’ growth of beard. “I’m glad to hear it,” he finally said. “I’m
happy, actually. Happy those two scumbags are—dead. They deserved to die!”

Beau’s gaze fell to the fax on his
desk. Almost identical to Cayne’s words. A chill went up the back of his neck.
Could a vengeful father have come back here and done both murders, covering his
deeds with this phone call and pretending he knew nothing of it?

Alan Cayne thanked Beau
enthusiastically and hung up before Beau could formulate a question. He sat
there with the receiver dangling from his fingers until the line began to beep
at him. He set it down and looked up the number for the Houston PD, placed a
call. With a short explanation that Alan Cayne might be implicated in something
in New Mexico, he asked that the man be questioned for alibis on Easter Sunday
morning and again for last night.

Beau sat back in his chair,
thinking. This rapid turn might provide a huge break in the case. After all,
who would be more upset about the two convicts being released than the family
of their victim? And who more likely to come looking for revenge than the young
lady’s father?

He thought of the only Cayne
member still living in Sembramos, the grandmother, Sally. It was ludicrous to
think of an old woman of Sally’s size and build beating a man like Lee Rodarte
to death, but it didn’t mean that Sally couldn’t have been reporting all along
to her son in Houston. And certainly either of them could have recruited
someone for both the beating and the shooting in the forest.

* *
*

Sam never wanted to see another
big plate-glass window in her life. As she moved through the rooms, she thought
about the dog-lady’s story of strange lights in the house at night. Witches? Or
maybe just the home’s owner, coming back now and then to check things over? The
latter seemed far more likely, except that there were still so many unanswered
questions. Why, if he’d paid in full for the home, had he not moved in? Or, if
he never planned to use it, why not sell it? Why let the taxes lapse after
paying them for a number of years? Why, why, why . . . it was driving her
crazy.

She rubbed at her aching
shoulders, wishing she’d broken her resolve about not using the powers of the
magic box. C’mon, surely all rules were off when one was faced with washing a
million windows.

Finished with the ground floor,
she decided to take a break before starting on the equally big second story.
She ate two cookies and called Beau again. Once more, his cell phone went to
voice mail. She gazed around the now-spotless kitchen, her thoughts drifting
back to the deed she’d seen at the county records department. How could she
find out who the person was behind LG Properties? She fiddled with the phone in
her hand and decided that, if she couldn’t reach Beau, maybe Rupert could point
her in the right direction. He answered on the first ring.

“It’s a corporation?” he asked
after she posed the question. “Well, have you tried the corporations department
in Santa Fe?”

How did a guy who wrote steamy
romantic books know about this stuff?

“The information might be on their
website . . . wait a second . . . What’s the full name of the business again?”

Sam could hear computer keys
clicking in the background, punctuated by a couple of mild oaths.

“Okay, Sam, got it. Now, what did
you need to know about this corporation?”

“Who owns it, how to contact
them.”

“The registered agent’s name is
Linden Gisner.” He spelled it for her and she fished in her pocket for a pen.
“No phone number but the legal mailing address is 12489 County Road 12, Sembramos,
New Mexico.”

The address matched the property
where she was standing at the moment. No help.

“Is there any alternate address?”

“Sorry, no.”

At least she had a name, which was
further than she’d gotten yet. She thanked Rupert and told him his next cupcake
fix was on the house. When she’d clicked off the call, she stared at the inked
note on her left hand. Gisner. That sounded vaguely familiar—but in what
context?

She stared at the stairway leading
to the second floor, feeling no enthusiasm for more windows today. Let Delbert
Crow scream, she decided. She would finish the job tomorrow. She locked up and
got into her truck, sending a silent plea to the cloudy sky that no rain come
along and mess up all those newly cleaned glass panes.

Miles of familiar-feeling highway
rolled past, bordered by the same old orchards and tilled fields. Sam slowed
her speed at the northern edge of Sembramos, staying watchful. Nothing seemed
much different until she spotted Beau’s vehicle at the side of the road. He was
stopped beside another department cruiser, chatting with the deputy inside. Sam
pulled in behind, and Rico waved at her as he drove away.

“Hey, darlin’,” Beau said, getting
out of the SUV and walking over to her window. “I saw your calls, just didn’t
have a minute until right now.”

“I know. I didn’t really expect
you to call me right back. So . . . bad morning?”

“Yeah. I feel like I’ve been
asking questions all day and getting no answers. We had the Starkey men in for
questioning about Lee’s beating but they go all wide-eyed and claim their
innocence. Then an angry call from Angela Cayne’s father, furious about Lee and
Jessie being released. If he weren’t in Houston, I’d pin him for both deaths.
As it is, I’m having it verified that he really is
in
Houston. Can’t discount the possibility that he heard the news
and came out here.”

“I saw the two state police cars
on my way through this morning.”

“It’s going to stay that way for
awhile. If there was trouble from the Starkeys yesterday, I have a feeling
tonight every buddy of Lee’s could show up asking for more of the same. His
cousin, Bono Rodarte, is one rough dude. I don’t dare leave the town unguarded,
so it’s all of my men plus the state patrols. I’ll need to be here with them.”

“Really?” Her anxiety ramped up a
notch.

“Afraid so.” He stared up the road
for a few seconds. “Look, you go home, lock yourself in. Relax.”

She had to chuckle. “Lock myself
in, but relax?”

A battered white pickup cruised by
slowly, the grizzled man at the wheel staring hard at Beau.

“President of my fan club,” he
said with a wry smile. “Joe Starkey.”

“Beau—be careful.”

“I am. They won’t try anything
against a lawman, darlin’. I’m just worried about what they’ll do to each
other.”

“Don’t these people have jobs?
Something to do all day besides cruise around and give you the evil eye?”

“I suppose I could suggest that
they get out and pull weeds in their fields or something.”

He was trying to keep it light,
Sam knew, to keep her from worrying. But it really wasn’t working. He patted
the side of her truck, sending her on her way. She kept a watchful eye all the
way through town but didn’t see Joe Starkey’s truck again.

At the ranch, Ranger and Nellie
came off the porch to greet her and she invited them inside. Maybe Beau was
right. Her truck had been seen in town several times now—big and red, it wasn’t
exactly inconspicuous. She’d parked at the side of the house, out of view from
the road, but still—having two large dogs at her side felt comforting.

The upside of Beau’s working
tonight was that Sam had the whole evening to pursue her own interests. She
booted up her computer and prepared a small salad. An Internet search for
Linden Gisner didn’t net much. Who on the face of the earth wasn’t on Facebook
these days? She found one piece, a reprint of a five-year-old article where
he’d bought a big commercial property outside Santa Fe and signed a deal with a
developer who wanted to create yet another shopping mall. In it, Gisner was
referred to as “a prominent northern New Mexico land developer” which didn’t
exactly tell her anything she didn’t already know. And it didn’t include any
possible leads on where to find him now.

She was about to turn her
attention to the books on witchcraft when her phone rang.

“Hey, Mom. Everything okay?
Haven’t seen you in a few days.”

With Sam’s bakery right next door
to Kelly’s job at Puppy Chic, it was rare that they didn’t touch base almost
daily.

“I guess you’ve heard on the news
about Beau’s current case, the killings related to those two Sembramos men?
That’s eating up most of his time. Me, I’m just trying to locate the owner of
one of my properties.” She briefly described the huge house.

“You gotta get a smarter phone,
Mom. There’s an app for that.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“I don’t know. What’s the name?”

Sam told her.

“And he’s in New Mexico?”

“That, I’m not sure about.”

“Hang on, let’s see.” Kelly’s
voice went into musing mode, with a couple of da-
dum
,
da-
dums
while she did something. “There’s a Linden
Gisner right in Taos.”

“Seriously? It was that easy? I
checked online and the phone book.”

“He probably doesn’t have a land
line, but maybe this info comes from his cell phone contract or something. I
don’t know.”

Or some sneaky government agency
out to track the moves of everyone on the planet. Sheesh, Sam wondered. How
much do they know about
me
?