Blanco County 04 - Guilt Trip (24 page)

“Lucas didn’t do nothing,” Rita Sue quickly insisted. “I don’t want him getting in trouble for what I done.”

“I can respect that.”

“He found the body and brung it to my house, but that’s it. I told him to run.”

“Okay.”

I like that boy.”

“I know you do.”

“I kept telling Stephanie he was the one she oughta go with, not that Vance, but she wouldn’t listen.”

Brooks was leaning forward, making good eye contact, showing as much polish in her approach as a twenty-year homicide detective. “What I need to know, Rita Sue, is what happened. What happened between you and Vance?”

The dog appeared to be napping in Rita Sue’s lap. “I stuck him in the freezer on my porch. Later, when the rains come, I put him in his truck and rolled it into the river. It’s dangerous, you know—driving through water like that.”

Next to Marlin, Tatum quietly said, “She’s ashamed of herself. Doesn’t want to tell how it happened.”

But in the interview room, Brooks wasn’t showing any frustration. “That’s what we thought,” she said. “But now that we know for sure, it clears up a lot of questions. I appreciate you telling me. I’m wondering—how did Vance behave when you got to his place on Sunday morning? What did he say?”

Marlin recognized that Brooks was altering her strategy, asking peripheral questions instead of directly addressing the moment of violence.

“He’d had another girl there,” Rita Sue said. “Musta picked her up the night before. Stephanie called and told me about it, and that’s what got me so mad. I hated to see my baby so sad. So I went over there to talk to him about it.”

It was the most important bit of information Rita Sue had shared so far. If she truly had gone to Scofield’s to talk, rather than to kill, she was looking at a lesser charge. Everyone, in both rooms, waited for Rita Sue to continue. She was simply shaking her head, staring at the tabletop.

Brooks prodded her, speaking softly. “What happened when you got there?”

Rita Sue raised her head. “You sure I ain’t supposed to have a lawyer?”

“As I’ve said, you are entitled to one, but at this point, I don’t think—”

“I wanna go ahead and get a lawyer. I think it’d be best if I had a lawyer.”

Brooks sat back. Garza reached forward and turned off the tape recorder.

Then Rita Sue asked the most heartbreaking question Marlin had ever heard: “They gonna let me take my dog with me to prison?”

MARLIN GOT HOME at around midnight, dead on his feet but feeling pretty good, considering. Henry Jameson, the forensic technician, would check Rita Sue’s freezer in the morning to confirm that portion of her story. By then, they’d have a full account of the Florida cops’ interrogation of Stephanie Waring. It should clear up a lot of things, including what role she had played in all of the events.

Marlin had called Phil Colby again an hour earlier, but he still wasn’t answering, and Marlin was starting to worry. After all, somebody had fired a shot at Colby—or
near
him, anyway—just yesterday. Marlin picked up the phone to try again but noticed the message light blinking on his answering machine. He hit the button.

Hey, Wade, it’s Phil. Listen, I can’t make it over to your place for dinner tonight. Got stuck down here at the auction in Uvalde. But hey, I’ll call you and we’ll get together soon. Talk to you later.

Marlin played the message a second time, thoroughly confused. Who was Wade? Colby must have meant to dial someone else. And how did Colby get to Uvalde without his truck? Had he ridden with someone else?

Odd, but at least Colby was okay.

Marlin shut the lights off and went to bed, planning to sleep as late as possible the next morning. Seven, maybe even seven-thirty.

Red was a big fan of late-night cable TV and cheap beer by the twelve-pack, a combination that gave him a whopper of an idea just after midnight. They were watching highlights from a tractor pull in Arkansas when it hit him. “That’s it!” he shouted, pointing at the screen. “We’ll use my truck! Just like that!”

“What’re you babbling about?” Billy Don asked.

Lucy was stretched out on the couch, a beer between her legs. She had shown no inclination whatsoever to retire to Red’s bedroom, and Red knew it was because she was thinking about that damn safe. He wouldn’t get any more loving until he found a way in. And now he had it.

“We’ll jerk the sumbitch open!” he said, rising unsteadily from the recliner, scooting out the door, not caring if anyone followed or not. He’d do this alone if he had to, and come out looking like a genius.

He went straight to the shed behind the trailer, and when he came out carrying a fifty-foot length of chain, Billy Don and Lucy were sitting on the front steps. The safe was still hunkered at one corner of the house under a floodlight. It wasn’t like anyone was going to walk off with it.

“You sure about this, Red?” Billy Don called.

Red ignored him. He was too focused. They were about sixty seconds away from getting their hands on some serious cash!

“Hell, let him give it a try,” Lucy said. “Neither of y’all have had any other brilliant ideas.”

Red staggered over to the safe and wrapped one end of the chain around the handle, securing it with a padlock. Then he climbed into his truck and backed it up to within three feet of the safe. Next, he wrapped the loose end of the chain around his trailer hitch. He snapped a second padlock into place, and now he was ready for action.

He went to his truck door, but changed his mind and walked over to the porch steps. “How ‘bout a kiss for good luck?”

“I ain’t in the mood,” Billy Don said.

Red shot him a scowl, then looked at Lucy.

She rolled her eyes, then leaned down and gave him a quick peck on the lips. It wasn’t much, but Red figured it would do for now. He went back to the truck and got in.

There were two ways he could go about this. Option number one: He could pull forward slowly and take the slack out of the chain, then just continue to pull. But he decided all that would do is tump the safe over and he’d end up dragging it through the weeds.

So he went with option number two. He gunned it, and he gunned it hard. He mashed the gas to the floor, popped the clutch, and took off down the driveway like a scalded dog.

It was a quarter second later, just as the truck reached the thirty-foot mark, when the realities of practical physics dawned on him.
If that door comes loose,
he thought,
it’s gonna be flying like a goose on steroids.

He suddenly had a sick feeling in his stomach.

And he ducked just in time.

He felt a tremendous
thump!
from the rear of the truck, followed by an ear-splitting crash, and the rear window exploded into thousands of tiny shards, which rained down on him.

Red sat up straight and immediately stomped the brakes, bringing the old Ford to a halt just before it hit a cedar tree.
Hell’s bells, I’ve done it!
he thought. The door of the safe had come right through his rear window, but who cared! He could buy a whole new truck!

He climbed out of the truck and screamed, “Did y’all see that? I mean, did y’all
see
that!”

But something was wrong. Lucy and Billy Don weren’t running up to him, clapping him on the back, congratulating him on his clever idea. In fact, Lucy had risen from the porch steps and was going back inside the trailer.

Billy Don was walking down the driveway, shaking his head. “Didn’t work,” he said, handing Red a beer. “Chain broke.”

“I’m serious, man,” Colby said. “If you don’t cut me loose soon, I’m gonna lose my arms. I can’t feel a damn thing. And I’m about to piss my pants.”

After a long moment, George rose to his feet in the darkness, walked over to Colby’s chair, and tested the duct tape with his skinny fingers. “I’m going over to your place. You try to get loose, I’m gonna know when I get back.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Damn right you’re not.”

MORNING CAME SLOWLY, with the light seeping through the dirty windows of Wade Morgan’s hunting shack.

Phil Colby wasn’t bound with duct tape anymore. Now he was lying on his back, arms spread, with a chain leading from each wrist to a heavy-duty eyebolt screwed into the plank floor on either side of him, five feet away. Not ideal, but a hell of a lot more comfortable than the chair. The feeling in his hands was back. He’d been allowed to take a leak when George had returned from the house with the supplies. Colby had even managed to sleep for an hour or two just before sunrise. George, on the other hand, had slept hard the entire night, snoring regularly while Colby tried to figure a way loose from the chains. Or closer to the empty gun cabinet. If he could talk George into unchaining one arm, Colby would have more maneuverability. He might have a chance.

Red woke up, hung over again, at eight-forty on the couch. Not because Lucy wouldn’t let him sleep with her (although he had noticed with despair that she had come to bed fully clothed), but because she was a flailer—the kind of gal who throws her arms and legs around at night, like some kind of puppet with a brain injury. At two o’clock, she nailed him with a solid jab to the ribs. At three-fifteen, she rattled his teeth with an elbow to the jaw. At four-twenty, when she brought a knee squarely into his family jewels, he’d had enough. He grabbed a spare pillow and camped out in the living room.

Now he heard the sound of the TV and opened his eyes. Billy Don was in the recliner, eating a bowl of Froot Loops, watching cartoons. Some moron shaped like a sponge was dancing around on the screen.

Billy Don noticed that Red was awake. “Had me a big idea this morning,” he said, smacking away, multicolored bits of chewed slop in his teeth. “Huge idea. An idea so big, I’m surprised I had room for it in my brain.”

Red knew what Billy Don wanted—for Red to ask what the idea was. So he didn’t. No sir, he wasn’t in the mood for any more stupid schemes. He’d fucked up his truck, his woman was acting uppity, and they weren’t any closer to getting hold of the cash in the safe.

After five minutes, Billy Don relented. “All right, then, I’ll tell ya. Remember what you got out in your tackle box? From when we went fishing a couple years ago?”

Red sat bolt upright.

“Okay, folks, I appreciate all of you coming in,” Bobby Garza said.

Nine o’clock Saturday morning in the conference room. All the deputies on the case were there, in street clothes, and Marlin felt a pleasant tingle when Nicole nodded a casual good morning to him, with a nice smile behind it.

“I just got off the phone with Florida,” Garza continued. “I want to run through a few things, then you can get back to your day off.” He looked down at some notes on the table. “Here’s a surprise you’ll all enjoy. According to Stephanie Waring, Lucas Burnette was no longer living in his rent house in Blanco. He was living with her. But when we talked to the landlord last week, Lucas was still paying the rent.”

“So he’d still have a place for the meth lab,” Bill Tatum interjected.

“Apparently so,” Garza said. “Anyway, Stephanie had been dating Scofield, which we already knew, and we learned yesterday that she had also been seeing Lucas. They kept it hush-hush, she says, because she had a felony on her record and, according to the terms of Lucas’s parole, he wasn’t supposed to keep company with known criminals. His parole officer would never have allowed them to live together.

“Now, here’s how it all unfolded. There are some holes here, but I think we can patch them up with the facts we have. Last Sunday morning, Stephanie calls Scofield and a woman answers. We all know what kind of woman-chaser Scofield was, and so did Stephanie, so she got angry and called Rita Sue, who tried to calm her down. Later, when Lucas came home, Stephanie told him about it, too. Lucas also got angry, and he went over to have a word with Scofield. According to what Lucas told Stephanie, Scofield was already injured and nearly dead when Lucas got there. This was about an hour after Stephanie talked to her mom, which gave Rita Sue plenty of time to whack Scofield over the head. So, as I was saying, Lucas found Scofield and put him in his car.”

“Lucas’s car or Scofield’s?” Bill Tatum asked.

“Lucas’s car. That old Toyota of his. But Scofield died before Lucas could even get out of the driveway. Lucas panicked and went to see Rita Sue. An odd place to go for advice—I think we’d all agree on that—but that’s what he says he did. I can just imagine what Rita Sue was thinking when Lucas showed up with the body in her driveway. In any case, Rita Sue convinced Lucas that we’d pin it on him and that he’d better get out of town.”

“So he stole the Corvette,” Ernie Turpin said.

“Not yet. First, he went back to Stephanie’s place—their place—and the two of them commenced to get very intoxicated. Stephanie, at this point, still doesn’t know that Scofield is dead. Later that afternoon, Lucas offers up a way for Stephanie to get a little revenge for the way Scofield had been treating her.”

“Steal the Corvette,” Turpin said again.

“Exactly. Stephanie agreed, so Lucas left and came back a while later with the car.”

“So where’s Lucas’s car?” Marlin asked. It was one of the unanswered questions that had bothered him all along.

Garza grinned. “I had a hunch about that. I went over to Rita Sue’s house this morning with a warrant for the freezer. Henry is working on it in his lab right now. While I was there, I had a peek inside the big metal shed on her property. Didn’t open the door or anything like that, mind you, because that wouldn’t have been legal. But Rita Sue, or maybe Lucas, had taped newspaper over the window, and one of the corners was sagging down—enough that I could see Lucas’s car sitting in there. I’ll get a warrant for the shed today.”

“Where’s the Corvette now?” Brooks asked.

“I’m glad you asked,” Garza said, “and we can thank our brothers—and sisters—in Miami for their quick work on this. Lucas sold it to a chop shop. Stephanie was able to tell them where it was, and Miami raided it this morning. Found the Vette, still untouched, in the back garage. David Pritchard will be thrilled to hear that, because now his precious raffle can proceed as planned. I’ve got a few forms for him to sign so he can get the car back.”

“I’ll get them to him,” Brooks volunteered.

“Great. At least well have one happy customer.”

“So how is Lucas getting around?” Marlin asked. “How did they get to Key West?”

“An old Honda. It was part of the deal at the chop shop. The Florida troopers have the plate number, but Lucas had a pretty good head start. Stephanie told them all of this last night, but he still had a couple of hours to get moving. Could be just about anywhere in Florida by now, or even Georgia or Alabama.”

Garza dropped his notes onto the table. “Other questions?”

“Did Stephanie say anything about the meth lab?” Tatum asked. “Were Lucas and Scofield working together? Did Lucas cop to torching the house?”

“We haven’t even delved into that area yet,” Garza replied. “I asked the Florida troopers to take a statement on the murder, that’s all. We’ll do a full interview when we get her back here.”

“When will that be?”

“The charges they’re holding her on are ours, not theirs, so we can get her anytime we want. I’ll need a couple of you to fly down and get her, maybe as early as tomorrow morning. Let me get the paperwork in order and I’ll let you know.”

Bill Tatum stopped Marlin in the hall and said, “We’ll get Colby’s truck back to him this afternoon. Will you tell him that if you see him?”

“Yeah, no problem.”

“I’ll drive it out there myself. I feel like I should talk to him…”

Marlin nodded.

He knew exactly how the senior deputy felt, so he told a quick story about a poaching incident several years back. Marlin had questioned a local who, according to a witness, had shot a trophy buck across a neighbor’s fence. Marlin went to the suspect’s house, found blood in the bed of his truck, and proceeded to rake the guy over the coals. The suspect was adamant that he had shot a wild hog on his own property. Marlin asked where it was now. The man said he had given it to his cousin, who had just left for home—in Amarillo. How convenient. So Marlin collected blood samples from the truck and from the neighbor’s oat field. He sent them to the department’s forensic lab in San Marcos—and was later surprised to learn that the man had indeed shot a hog. “Mistakes happen sometimes,” Marlin told Tatum. “Not much you can do about it.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Tatum replied, and turned to leave.

Marlin called after him. “You might want to call first. Last I heard, Phil was at a cattle auction in Uvalde.”

“Uvalde?” Now Tatum was frowning. “They don’t have an auction down there.”

Marlin wondered,
Didn’t Phil say Uvalde?
It was one of those moments when, in hindsight, something should have clicked. Warning bells and flashing lights should’ve gone off in Marlin’s head:
Absolutely nothing about Phil’s message makes any sense!
But right then, a reserve deputy named Homer Griggs appeared in the hallway with a man named Bubba Parker.
Speak of the devil,
Marlin thought. Bubba was the man who had been cleared by the lab a few years ago. Marlin nodded to Bubba as he filed past with a somber expression on his face.

Red woke Lucy up and asked her a question.

“It’s dynamite, that’s what I think it is,” Lucy replied, immediately sitting up in bed. Something in her voice had changed, and Red liked what he heard. She was grinning at him, too, like a teacher at her best pupil. He could see the respect in her eyes. Red could feel it: The old Lucy was back.

“Damn right,” Red replied, cradling the stick in his gloved hand. No telling how old the dynamite was. Three years, at least, because that’s when it had come into Red’s possession.

“Where the hell did you get it?”

“Broke into a trailer where they was building a road,” Red said truthfully. “Had to sneak past two armed security guards,” he lied.

“Oh, this is great,” she said, without that sarcastic tone she’d been using the night before. “I
knew
you’d come up with something. Clever guy like you, I never lost faith.”

“Only thing is, we gotta figure out where to set it off.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I figger we can’t do it here. Neighbors’d get all uptight and probably call it in. We gotta go somewhere insulated. I got an idea, though.”

Lucy patted one hand on the mattress. “So do I. Why don’t you come back to bed for a few minutes and we’ll figure out how we’re gonna do it.”

Marlin had told Bill Tatum the poaching story because it was something that had always stuck in his mind. Over the years, that incident and others like it had taught him a valuable lesson: Don’t believe it until you can prove it.

Blood in the bed of a truck? Might be from a pig, just like the man said. The same thing with a matching set of tire tracks. Unless you saw the truck driving through the mud yourself, you’d better find something else to back it up with.

Witnesses, too, had to be carefully scrutinized. They were prone to exaggeration, embellishment, or distortion of the facts—occasionally on purpose, but usually on accident. A blue truck becomes a green truck. A hunter in camo turns out to be a man in overalls. They’ll swear he’s six-two when he’s really five-nine. Blond hair? Nope, it’s brown.

And suspects? Well, that was always a real crapshoot. Sometimes the person who was nervous and fidgety was being honest, while the one who was lying to your face came across as the most trustworthy person you’d met all day.

So, for Marlin, it always boiled down to that one simple statement: Don’t believe it until you can prove it. The problem was, it didn’t always matter what you believed or what you thought you could prove. Sometimes the facts were incredibly misleading, and the truth was more elusive than a deer in a cedar break. Marlin had learned that the hard way a couple of times in his career. And he was about to experience a harsh reminder.

He was in the break room, filling a thermos with coffee, preparing to make the rounds through the county, when Homer Griggs came in. Homer was a decent guy and a fairly competent deputy, though he was a bit overeager at times.

Marlin was curious, so he asked, “Hey, Homer, what’s going on with Bubba?”

Homer was pulling two soft drinks out of the refrigerator. “Aw, he’s been giving his ex-wife a hard time.”

“Oh, yeah?” Marlin found that surprising. Bubba had come across as a gentle, quiet man, even when Marlin had been in his face, demanding the truth.

“Doing some pretty weird stuff, too,” Homer said, cocking an eyebrow.

Marlin asked the question Homer wanted him to ask. “Like what?”

Homer stepped in closer and lowered his voice. “Left one of them dildos on her front porch.”

All Marlin could think was
Bubba? Bubba did that?
He didn’t seem the type to behave that way.

“Been stealing some of her panties, too,” Homer continued. “But here’s where it really gets gross.” Homer glanced over his shoulder to make sure they still had the break room to themselves. “Just the other night, he…well, he played with himself outside her house, and he left evidence of that fact on her front door.”

For a good five seconds, Marlin was too stunned to respond.

Homer appeared pleased with himself for eliciting that sort of reaction.

Finally, Marlin asked, “When did this happen?”

“Lessee, it was Thursday night, because she called it in on Friday morning. But Bubba was fishing all day, so I’m just now talking to him.”

Homer continued to rattle on, but Marlin wasn’t listening. He didn’t have room for it in his head. He was too busy processing what he’d just learned—and the conclusion he came to was this: Vance Scofield had allegedly done the same thing outside of Jenny Geiger’s apartment. But Vance was long dead, so he couldn’t have been the one outside this other woman’s house on Thursday night. Assuming the same man was responsible for both incidents, that meant Vance Scofield was responsible for neither. Somebody else had done it. Somebody had been harassing a woman that Vance Scofield was dating.