8 Sweet Payback (22 page)

Chapter
27

Forever
turned out to be most of the night. With all the Starkeys
and the whole extended Rodarte family, Beau’s cramped offices couldn’t handle
the crowd. They put one from each team into their own interrogation rooms,
three of the Rodartes into the department’s single holding cell, and hauled the
rest of them to the county jail a few blocks away.

As stories were taken and warnings
issued about not starting fresh trouble, the list of suspects and witnesses
dwindled until finally only Joe Starkey and Bono Rodarte, the cousin who’d
yelled out about Starkey’s guilt, remained in the interrogation rooms. Helen
dozed on a bench in the vestibule, waiting to take her husband home.

“What proof do you have?” Beau
asked Bono Rodarte for at least the fourth time. The man had remained steadfast
in his claim that Joe Starkey had beat Lee to death.

He stole a glance at his watch and
saw that it was after two in the morning. His eyeballs felt raw, the lids lined
with sandpaper. At some point Sam had called to see what time he would be home,
but he’d had no answer for that. He told her to go home and lock things up
tight. He still had no idea how far some of these guys would take their lust
for revenge.

Bono pulled off his kerchief and
wiped his shaved head with it. “I tell you, man. I just know.”

“ ‘I just know’ isn’t an answer,
Bono. You know I can’t take that to court. How am I gonna convict him and make
him pay for the crime? I need something for the DA.”

Bono twisted the kerchief, playing
it into a knotted wad. “Okay, here’s the thing. You talked to the
bartender—Toby? He told me. Said he heard a ruckus out back and saw Joe kicking
a man down on the ground. He knows Joe and Bobby Starkey—they buy beer there
all the time. Knows what a temper Joe has. He said he just backed away, didn’t
want Joe turning on him.”

“And why wouldn’t he have told me
that?” Aside from being intimidated by the Starkeys, himself.

“Hell, man, I don’t know! Bring
him in, ask him again.”

Obstruction of justice—more
charges. Beau wished it was like on television where the guy confesses and it’s
all done in an hour. He blew out a breath.

“Okay, I will. I’ll get Toby’s
statement, again. But until then, you’re not leaving here.”

“
Man
, what’d I do? I got rights!”

“You pulled a knife on Bobby
Starkey. That’s a deadly weapon.”

Bono sputtered some more. Beau
could only hold him forty-eight hours and nearly twelve of that was gone, but
it might be enough time. He called Rico in and told him to put the man into the
holding cell.

In interrogation room two, Joe
Starkey sat back in his chair, one arm draped casually over the back of it,
looking for all the world like a guy who thought he was going home in the next five
minutes.

“Got it straightened out yet,
Sheriff?” he asked when Beau walked in.

“Almost, I think. Just a phone
call or two and a little more detective work. Meanwhile, we’re sending you over
to County for the night. Judging by his attitude, I don’t think it would be a
good idea to put you in the same cell here with Bono Rodarte.”

“What? You ain’t serious, Sheriff.
You got no proof whatsoever to hold me!” He started to rise and Beau kept a
little distance between them.

“Maybe, maybe not.”

Starkey’s face went red, his fists
clenching. Then he seemed to realize that his temper was showing and he dropped
back down. “Whatever,” he muttered.

“I’ll tell your wife she can go on
home. She’s been waiting. It’s late—maybe I better offer her a ride.”

Starkey’s eyes widened. Not much,
but enough that Beau knew he was on the right track. He called Withers in to
cuff Joe Starkey and drive him to his bed for the night. Jail would be Joe’s
home for the next few thousand nights, if this truly was their killer.

Once he’d seen the prisoner safely
out the back door and into
Withers’s
cruiser, Beau
went back inside. He found Helen Starkey seated crookedly on a bench in the
vestibule, snoring softly with her chin nearly touching her chest.

“Come on, Helen. Let me give you a
ride home,” he said gently.

She rose compliantly, still half
asleep. Too sleepy to remember that she’d driven down here in her own car. Beau
didn’t remind her.

About five miles outside
Sembramos, he woke her again and brought up the subject, the real reason for
his offer of the ride.

“Helen, was Joe the one who beat
Lee Rodarte? We have a witness.”

She had started to deny it but at
the mention of the witness, her face crumpled. Tears ran down her cheeks as he
brought the car to a stop in front of their still-charred home.

“Tell me about it,” he said.

Helen sniffed wetly and rubbed the
sleeve of her sweater across her face. “He come home real late. Drunk. That’s
nothin
’ new. But when he walked into the bedroom and I
smelt the blood, I sat up and turned on the light. His shirt had splatters, his
Levis and boots were so messy. I like to have had a fit. He was
cussin
’ about some dog that ran out into the road. Said he
stopped to pick it up and toss it aside when a police car came along. He was
afraid they’d get him for drunk driving. That’d be his last—he’s had some
already, and next time it’s jail. So he jumped into the truck and hightailed
it, said he managed to outrun the cop car.”

Beau pictured the beat up truck
and wondered at Helen’s naiveté.

“He told me we better wash the
clothes, in case they’d got his plate number and came around. The dog blood
would prove it was him behind the wheel. He said he’d talk to everybody the
next day, the family, that is. Tell them to stand by his story that he was
home. I don’t have to tell you that Bobby and some of the boys also have their
problems with DWIs so Joe knew they’d all back him up.” She wiped at her face
again. “I swear, Sheriff, I believed it. I threw all the clothes in the washer
and a whole bunch of soap. But then there was his boots. He scrubbed at ’em
with a brush but they didn’t look a whole lot better. We went to bed and the
next morning when he picked out another pair to wear, I stuck the old boots out
in the shed.”

Beau’s interest perked up.
Clothing that had been through the wash cycle might not give up enough evidence
for their needs—but the boots!

“Are they still there?” he asked,
hardly daring to get his hopes up. Especially in light of the fire and the
number of people who’d been around the place.

“Might be, unless Bobby’s been out
there
workin
’ or
somethin
’.”

Beau’s heart sank. Joe and Helen
had been staying at Bobby’s house since the fire. Helen had to be talking about
the other Starkey’s house, their washer, their shed. That many people with
access to the evidence. He started the cruiser and put it in gear.

“I want you to show me where you
put them,” he said, making the U-turn that would take them to the other house.

Pulling up in front of the
darkened house, he realized it was after three a.m. and they could rightfully
be shot for prowling around the property.

“I want you to go in, tell JoNell
it’s you, that you’ll be right back and not to worry.” At least Bobby was still
safely in a cell.

He pulled out the heavy flashlight
that was part of his standard gear and lit the way up the narrow sidewalk,
watching Helen go in. This could be the moment she would betray him and half
the clan could come out shooting. He keyed his shoulder mike and gave his
dispatcher a quick ‘20’ call with the address.

But he heard Helen call out,
saying just the words he’d told her. She came back a moment later and led the
way around the side of the house. The battered metal storage building—the kind
made from a kit, by the look of it at least twenty years ago—had a rusted hasp
but no padlock. Helen opened it and the door screamed open in its track. Thank
goodness he’d thought to warn the household. This thing was better than an
alarm system.

“Get some light in here, Sheriff,”
Helen said. “I’m afraid I’ll step on some old rusty rake or something.”

Sure enough, the place was
cluttered with tools that hadn’t seen the best of care. Beau shined the light
around, holding his breath about whether the boots would be there.

Helen walked right to the spot,
reaching beneath the edge of a wooden shelf that had been added as a workbench.
She pulled out a pair of steel-toed work boots. Even in the dimness of the
shed, Beau recognized blood and tissue on them. He pulled out the plastic bag
he’d jammed into his hip pocket and snapped it open with a shake.

“Set them in there,” he
instructed.

She did, another sob wracking her
shoulders as she let go of the boot tops.

“You’re doing the right thing,” he
said. “Go on inside and get some sleep.”

Asking the impossible, he knew,
but he watched Helen trudge toward the back door, a sad shell of the woman
who’d hurried to get her grandchildren to safety only twelve hours ago.

* *
*

Beau drove past the turnoff to his
place, sorely tempted to stop and try to grab a couple hours’ sleep before
dawn. But he could feel the adrenaline pumping and knew his eyes wouldn’t
close, and if they did his mind wouldn’t slow down. He had to see this thing
through.

Lisa, his technician, wouldn’t be
in until eight but Beau located her test kit and swabbed a bit of the blood
from Joe Starkey’s boot. He knew enough about the process to confirm that the
faint, light purple band on the plastic test meter meant the blood was human.
He picked up the plastic bag and told Rico to get Joe Starkey out of his cell,
bring him back to the station and to make sure they were recording what was
about to happen.

Looking through the small window
into the interrogation room where Joe had been questioned half the night, Beau
saw the weariness on Starkey’s lined, grizzled face. The nonchalant manner from
early evening had given way and the suspect now dozed with his head resting on
one arm that sprawled across the table. His eyes flickered open at the sound of
the doorknob. When Beau set down the bag containing the boots, mere inches from
Starkey’s nose, the man came fully awake.

“Recognize those?” Beau asked.

Starkey eyed him warily but didn’t
say a word.

“It’s not dog blood.”

Joe couldn’t take his eyes off the
bag. Clearly, he’d believed the boots were long gone.

Joe’s eyes flashed anger. “I told
her—”

“Helen didn’t do this, Joe. She
only tried to help you. You’re the one who did the crime.”

“Lee Rodarte killed my son!”

“He didn’t. We found no evidence
of that, and he had an alibi for that Sunday morning.”

“But, he—”

“Lee got sent to prison on your
son’s testimony. That was unfortunate. Neither of them deserved it. But they
got out, and that should have been the end of it. Keeping these grudges alive
won’t solve anything. Don’t you see that?” Beau pointed at the boots. “I’ve got
samples on the way to the state crime lab.” Fudging the truth just a little. “I
imagine that pretty soon now we’ll know that it’s Lee Rodarte’s blood. Won’t
we?”

Starkey’s jaw went tense.

“I’ll have to charge Helen as an
accessory,” Beau said. “Washing your clothes, hiding the boots.”

The man’s mouth went tight. “She
didn’t want to. She got real mad at me. Will she go to jail? She loves those
grandkids.”

“Depends. Joe, you need to tell me
what happened.”

 
“After Jessie’s funeral, I couldn’t stop
thinkin
’ about how Lee was
walkin
’
around, alive and free.” The rest of the story came out in a flood, the
microphones and camera getting it all.

When Joe was finished talking,
Beau handed him a pad of paper and pen and asked him to write out what had
happened the night he waited behind the bar for Lee Rodarte to come out. He
walked out of the interrogation room an hour after presenting the boots.

Bobby Starkey jumped up from one
of the chairs in the waiting area. Beau had hoped County Jail would hold him
until morning, delay this confrontation awhile.

Bobby stood less than a foot from
Beau. “Helen tells me you’re in there forcing a confession from Joe, just like
y’all did from Jessie!”

“Did she tell you that Joe killed
Lee Rodarte?”

Bobby apparently thought he could
bluff his way through with talk of getting a lawyer and swearing he would take
his brother home, right this minute. Beau let him rant for a minute before he
drew himself up to his full height and put on his no-nonsense face.

“Joe’s not leaving custody, not
unless a judge says he can, and I just don’t see that happening. I’d suggest
you calm down and accept the fact that your brother just confessed.” He waved
the yellow pad. “Bobby, like it or not, Joe did the crime. This time we have
evidence and witnesses.”

The younger Starkey brother
folded. After a couple minutes of pleading, hoping the system would go easy on
Joe, Bobby finally did as Beau suggested and left.

Chapter
28

Sam abruptly woke up at five
o’clock, startled to discover that Beau wasn’t home yet and she’d slept so soundly
she didn’t know it. A faint sound downstairs, and she heard his footsteps on
the stairs. The bedroom door opened.

“Hey, darlin’,” he said when she
called his name. “I was trying to be quiet.”

She rubbed her eyes. “I just woke
up. What took you so long?”

He started talking as he pulled
off his shirt and went to the bathroom to pick up his toothbrush. “We still
don’t know who shot Jessie, and I have a feeling the whole Starkey clan won’t
entirely calm down until we solve that question, but at least our caseload is
now ‘one down, two to go’. And me, I’m dead on my feet.”

He filled her in on the high
points of the night, including Helen’s turning over Joe’s boots and the taped
confession.

She turned down his side of the
bed and told him to sleep as long as he wanted.

Downstairs, she debated going to
the bakery but she’d left things in good shape there, with instructions to
Julio for the cake orders that would need to be addressed first. By now, he
would already be there and most likely would have half the daily breakfast
items in the oven. She went to the coat closet, pushed the clothing aside and
opened the hidden safe. Her wooden jewelry box seemed a little forlorn when she
took it out, and she realized she’d missed seeing and using it every day.

When Zenda the witch had shown up
a second time yesterday, she’d made Sam a little nervous at first. But the
young woman in her over-done magical ensemble had merely been inquisitive with her
questions about the ‘artifact’. Apparently Mary told her just enough about it
to whet her interest but since Mary knew nothing about the box’s actual powers,
Zenda really didn’t either.

“I did some research on the Internet,”
Zenda had said. “But the box Mary told me about wasn’t really described in any
of the writings.”

Sam merely shrugged. “I don’t know
what I can tell you, since I don’t have it anymore . . .”

Eventually, Zenda had given up and
left, Sam hoped once and for all. Despite the weedy black clothing, at least
she hadn’t done anything hocus-pocus-like. Sam gave the box a little pat but
decided it should go back into its hiding place until she was certain the
outside interest had gone away.

Now, she moved quietly around the
house, feeding the dogs and donning her warm jacket to go out and give the
horses their buckets of oats, a couple of chores that Beau normally did, but
he’d looked so tired, poor thing.

Back inside, she spotted her cell
phone on the coffee table, the readout showing that her mother had called once
again. She gave a sigh and hit the callback button, beginning the call with
reassurances that Beau’s department had solved the case and all was well once
again in Taos County, skipping over the fact that he hadn’t actually said as
much.

While Nina Rae basically ignored
what Sam had just told her, going on and on about how worried they’d been, Sam
neatened the stacks from the case file they’d dismantled. They still hadn’t
made a lot of progress on finding Angela Cayne’s killer and hadn’t pieced
together how it related to the shooting of Jessie Starkey. Beau had briefly
mentioned that he was still holding a Rodarte cousin, and it could turn out
that one of them had retaliated against Jessie for the original confession and
Lee’s prison time. They could still be a long way from knowing all the answers.
She thought of Althea Brooks again, the woman who’d lost her niece and didn’t
even have her sister nearby so the two of them could grieve together. The whole
situation was sad.

She took the first pause in her
mother’s narrative as an opportunity say she needed to go, setting the pages
back in place before she went to the kitchen. She’d just begun scouting through
the pantry and fridge in search of something to eat when she heard sounds
upstairs.

“Honey, you didn’t even get two
hours’ sleep,” she said when Beau came down.

His face looked a little haggard
and he was still in pajamas, but his eyes were alert.

“I think I catnapped but when I
rolled over I was wide awake again. Lots to do today. Once we release the
Rodarte cousins, I think I’d better be in Sembramos to make sure things stay
calm.”

“I fed the dogs and horses. Now let
me make you a decent breakfast.”

He smiled. “I was kind of hoping
for that.”

She reached into the fridge but it
was obvious she’d missed a vital item. “We’re out of eggs. Look, you go ahead
and shower and get dressed and I’ll run out and get some.”

There was a small market at their
end of town, pricier than the big stores but closer. She gave Beau a little
nudge toward the stairs, then went out to her truck. At the market she picked
up a dozen eggs and some fresh spinach. Omelets would be nice.

She walked to the checkout
stand—one cashier on duty and a line of five people. At least most of them were
like herself, grabbing one or two items early in the day. She joined the lineup
and recognized the man in front of her. Linden Gisner.

He said hello, with that expression
which says ‘you look familiar but I have no idea why.’ Sam introduced herself,
noting that he was buying Excedrin and margarita mix. By the look of him, he
needed the headache cure the most.

“I met your ex-wife’s sister the
other day,” she said. The thought struck her that his friend who had greeted
Althea as Heather might have said something to Linden. “Did you know she was in
town?”

“Althea? No. Haven’t heard from
her in years.”

Sam remembered that there was no
love lost between them.

“She’s been hoping to hear from
Heather all these years. She had the idea that Heather might have gone to
Kansas.”

He gave a short chuckle as they
moved up one space in the queue. “No idea why she would go there. But I guess
it’s possible.”

Sam chafed. Too bad. He might have
given them a lead. “Well, I’m nearly done with your house, just going back
today for a couple of last-minute things. It’s sure a magnificent place, but
did you ever notice cold spots? The wine cellar area always felt very chilly to
me.”

If she was hoping he would say
he’d taken care of the taxes, he didn’t. Apparently he didn’t give a whit about
the house that had once represented so many dreams for him. When a guy was rich
enough to build all the big houses he wanted, she supposed he could walk away
without regret. He
thunked
the bottle of margarita
mix down onto the conveyor and growled something at the cashier.

Okay
, Sam thought.
No sense
in small-talk before a man’s had his headache drugs.
She waited until he’d
finished his purchase before she set her items on the belt.

Back at home, Beau looked ready to
start the day, shaved and in a fresh uniform.

“How do you do that?” she teased.
“If I’d missed a night’s sleep I’d be looking like a hag for days.”

He laid places at the kitchen
table while she beat the eggs and heated the skillet, telling him of her
assignment to go out to the big house and pick up her signs.

“I’m glad this job is done,” she
said as they sat down with their spinach omelets. “The house is faintly creepy
and the guy who owns it is just weird—a super-young girlfriend, and I think
they start drinking really early in the day.” She related the grocery store
encounter.

“That’s not the strangest thing
you’ve come across with this job.”

True. Most empty houses were just
that, empty and a little sad, but Sam had come across worse than construction
dust and cold breezes in other places where she’d been required to break in.

Beau ate quickly and poured his
coffee into a travel mug. “I should—”

“No need. I’ll get the dishes and
then I’m on my way too.” She gathered things and headed to the kitchen.

Fifteen minutes later she walked
out to her truck and in another five was northbound on the familiar road. At
the big house, everything appeared normal. She parked, pulled up her yard sign
and tossed it into the back of the truck. The sign-in sheet she always left on
a kitchen counter was still there; she filled it out before deciding that she
really should do one final walk-through, just to be sure Delbert Crow wouldn’t
have any reason to nitpick her work or delay paying her invoice.

The master suite upstairs looked
fine and if no one focused on the window glass, even those would probably pass
muster. Down in the great room, same thing—a few bits of leaf debris that she’d
probably tracked in herself, but she picked those up and stuffed them into her
pockets. When she reached the wine cellar she realized that she’d never cleaned
this room much at all.

Without electricity, the dim room
didn’t look too bad but she really should have at least dusted the wine racks
and swept the floor. Back to the truck for a broom, dustpan and cloth, along
with her big flashlight. She left the door standing open when she entered the
chilly room and used her flashlight to get a sense of the amount of dust. The
wooden shelves that formed V-shaped racks for wine were thick with it. She
started in, resigned to the extra work, hurrying to get it done quickly.

Top to bottom, left to right—she
wiped each compartment, moved to the next. At the far right side, about
eye-level, her hand hit the edge and she heard a metallic
snick
. The shelf moved imperceptibly.

Oh, great, I’ve broken something.
She dropped her cloth and gripped
the edge of the shelf. Instead of a loose board that needed straightening, she
found that the entire shelving unit shifted. One more tug and it came outward,
leaving a gap of more than a foot from the wall.

Cold air rushed out of the space.
Sam backed away.

What the—

She grabbed her flashlight and
turned it on again, aimed it at the black space. A set of concrete steps led
downward.

To what, Sam wondered as she squeezed
through the opening and aimed the light downward. She’d never come across a
basement in a home here, and this one certainly wasn’t conveniently located to
serve as a rec room. Either the house had been designed with a basement in mind
from the start, or the wine shelves had been added later as a means of
concealing it. Ten concrete steps ended at a landing and a blank wall. She
gingerly took her first couple of steps downward.

At the landing, two more steps
were revealed and a small concrete-walled room, about ten feet by ten. She
aimed the light all around, probing the corners. No furnishings, no storage
boxes. Only one thing—leaning against one corner, resting on its stock, stood a
rifle. Okay, this was a bit of overkill for a hidden gun safe.

Goosebumps rose on Sam’s arms. The
cold? Or the discovery that the only item in this entire house was an expensive
rifle with a high-power scope?

There could be a logical
explanation but Sam wasn’t going to stick around to find out. She pulled out
her cell phone to call Beau. He could tell her whether she should touch it or
not. Surely the taxation department wouldn’t be especially happy when the
person who bought this house at auction discovered they’d received a gun as
part of the deal.

She looked at the lit readout on
her phone. No signal. Okay, she was pretty well surrounded by thick walls. She
started back up the steps. She’d just cleared the narrow opening back into the
wine room when a shadow crossed the doorway.

Out in the foyer stood Linden
Gisner.