Blanco County 04 - Guilt Trip (25 page)

Why would a man do that?
Marlin wondered. Jealousy? Anger? Some kind of sexual psychosis he would never understand?

“You mind if I talk to Bubba?” Marlin asked. Homer said something in reply, but Marlin didn’t hear that, either. He went straight into the interview room and closed the door behind him. Bubba Parker was seated at the table, and he looked at Marlin with confusion, no doubt wondering why the deputy had gone out and the game warden had come in.

Marlin took a deep breath and tried to slow himself down. This was too important to rush. He pulled out a chair and sat down. “You been doing all right, Bubba?”

“Been better. I don’t know what the hell’s going on.”

Marlin nodded sympathetically. “Homer just told me what’s been happening over at your ex-wife’s place,” he said, “and I want to see if I can help figure it out. You okay with that?”

“Heck yeah.”

“All right, then. Do you know if your ex-wife—”

“She’s not my ex yet. Her name’s Donnelle.”

“Right, Donnelle—do you know if she locks the house up when she’s gone?”

“Every time.”

“You have any idea who else might’ve been inside her house lately?” The Thursday night incident had happened outside, but the panties had been taken from
inside
the house.

“I know she’s started dating again,” Bubba said. “But I don’t know who.”

Marlin realized he might have to call Donnelle to get more information, but he had a few more questions. “Y’all still talk to each other, right?”

“I talk, she usually yells.”

Marlin smiled for him. “Has she mentioned any repairmen coming over lately? Deliverymen? Anything like that?”

“Nope.”

Marlin was getting discouraged. “Can you think of anyone else who would have reason to be in her home?”

“No, like I said, just the guy she’s been seeing. Oh, and her lawyer.”

“Her lawyer?”

“Yeah, for the divorce. He’s been over to the house a couple of times.”

A buzz went through Marlin’s brain as he finally figured it out. He knew what the answer would be, but he asked the question anyway. “Who’s Donnelle’s lawyer, Bubba?”

“Guy named David Pritchard.”

He knew he was unraveling. The pressure was too great. There was a word for it that the cops used about serial killers. De-something. Deconstructing?

He had woken up that morning with a strange compulsion to shave every hair off of his body. He’d been fighting it, but his willpower was weak. Besides, nobody would ever know. Nobody ever touched his body but him. He wouldn’t shave his head, of course, because people would wonder about that. But he could do all of the other parts. Legs. Chest. Groin. If he shaved his arms, he’d have to wear long-sleeved shirts. He was okay with that.

ONE STEP AT A TIME,
he said to himself.
Don’t jump to conclusions.
Marlin walked to the dispatcher’s cubicle in the back of the main room. “Darrell, I need you to run this guy through TCIC.”

“When do you need it?”

“Can you do it now?”

Marlin returned to his office and waited. He picked up the phone to buzz Tatum but slipped it back into its cradle. This case had taken so many left turns, he wanted to see what he had first.

Three minutes later Darrell dropped a single page on Marlin’s desk.

“Son of a bitch,” Marlin said. He could feel the pace of his heart quickening. David Pritchard had one felony on his record.
Stalking.
The charge was nine years old, out of Beaumont. The complainant was a woman named Cheryl Moreland. Marlin gave Darrell the woman’s date of birth and driver’s license number; thirty seconds later he had her married name—Cheryl Cooper—along with her current address and phone number.

When Marlin dialed, a man answered.

“Cheryl Cooper, please.”

“She’s not here right now. Can I take a message?”

Marlin identified himself and asked, “Is this her husband?”

“Yeah, it is. Uh, what’s this about?”

“Mr. Cooper, I need to talk to your wife about a man named David Pritchard.”

Marlin could’ve gotten frostbite from the silence that followed. Then: “What has that sicko done now?”

Marlin found Bill Tatum in his office.

“Has Nicole left already?”

Tatum glanced up, saw Marlin’s face, and said, “Are you okay?”

“Where is she, Bill?”

“She left about fifteen minutes ago.”

“To Pritchard’s house?”

“Yeah, on her way home.”

“We’ve gotta get her on the radio.”

“She’s driving her personal car. No radio.”

“Call her cell phone.”

“John, what’s going on?”

“Bill, please, just call her cell phone.”

Tatum dialed the phone and let it ring. “No answer. You know how bad the coverage is down there. Now what—”

“Come with me. I’ll explain on the way.”

Red strutted into the living room feeling like the biggest, baddest buck of the woods. He’d made it through a Merle Haggard, a Pam Tillis, and most of a Kevin Fowler song. Getting better every time.

Billy Don was sitting in the recliner. “I guess her mood’s changed a little, huh?”

Red struck a pose and gestured at the length of his body with one hand. “Can you blame her?”

“Shee-yit.”

“She’s had a taste of Red O’Brien, my boy, and now she’s got the fever.”

“I’m gonna puke.”

“Poor woman cain’t get enough.”

Billy Don tapped his wristwatch. “I can understand why. Ain’t like you’re setting any records in there.”

“Funny man.”

“I can hear both of y’all,” Lucy called from the bedroom.

Billy Don giggled and covered his mouth with his hand.

Red plopped down on the couch. “Okay, remember that big ranch out on Sandy Road? I figure it’ll do the trick. People from Austin own it, so they ain’t hardly ever there.”

“How we gonna do it?”

“We’ll just blow the sumbitch open, grab what’s inside, and haul ass.”

“Just leave the safe there?”

“Yeah, why not? We won’t need it for nothing. Nobody will know where it come from.”

“Sounds kinda risky.”

“Hell, Billy Don, we’ll be in and out in five minutes.”

“You’re the expert on that.”

Marlin wheeled onto Highway 281 and had the speedometer past ninety, lights flashing, before he started talking. First he told Tatum about the incident at Donnelle Parker’s house on Thursday night and pointed out that David Pritchard was Parker’s divorce attorney, thereby having access to her home. Then he said, “Pritchard was convicted of stalking a woman in Beaumont nine years ago. I spoke to the woman’s husband, who was her boy friend at the time. Guy’s name is Craig Cooper. Cooper said he and Pritchard were good friends for several years, but Pritchard acted sort of odd at times. In Cooper’s words, Pritchard ‘fixated’ on the women Cooper dated.”

“Fixated how?”

“All kinds of ways. Sometimes he’d just call them on the phone repeatedly, or he’d send little notes in the mail. He sent one girl some flowers. Whenever Cooper would ask Pritchard about any of these things, he’d say he was just trying to be friendly.”

“Maybe that was the truth.”

“Hold on. Another time, one of the girls Cooper was seeing threw a party, and Pritchard was there. It was an outdoor party, around the pool. Cooper says his girlfriend’s panties disappeared from the changing room, but she figured she’d lost them somehow. A few days later, Cooper was at Pritchard’s apartment and he saw the panties on Pritchard’s nightstand.”

“What’d he do?”

“He asked Pritchard about it, and Pritchard said he’d had a girl over the night before and she must’ve left them. But Cooper said these were some kind of panties the girl had bought in France. The odds against that same brand showing up at Pritchard’s place…”

“This is just weird.”

“Tell me about it.”

“What happened with Cooper’s wife?”

“Cooper said that when they first started dating, he warned her that Pritchard was a little strange at times but he was harmless. Sure enough, Pritchard started pulling all his old tricks—calling her when Cooper was out of town, showing up at her doorstep at weird hours. Cheryl didn’t like Pritchard at all and wanted nothing to do with him, so Cooper started trying to distance himself from Pritchard. Pritchard got pissed off about it and started leaving some really angry and obscene messages on Cheryl’s answering machine. All kinds of threats on there. She saved them all.”

“Smart girl.”

“There’s more. Cooper decided to go over to Pritchard’s place and have a talk with him about all this mess. He gets there and Pritchard starts apologizing and saying it won’t happen again. Cooper says that’s fine, but he figures it’s best if they go their separate ways. Pritchard goes into the bedroom, comes out with a gun, and shoots Cooper in the gut.”

“Jesus.”

“Nicked his spine, and he had to go through ten months of rehab before he could walk again.”

“Did Pritchard get charged?”

“Yeah
,
but Pritchard claimed Cooper was threatening him, so he shot him in self-defense. Nobody could prove otherwise, so the DA dropped the charges.”

“But they nailed him for stalking?”

“Yeah, with those tapes, and plenty of witnesses to his bizarre behavior.”

“So you’re thinking Vance Scofield basically took the place of Craig Cooper.”

“That’s exactly what I’m thinking.”

“And Rita Sue? Is she lying just to keep Lucas out of trouble?”

“I think so. I’m betting the story Lucas told Stephanie is exactly what happened. But it was Pritchard, not Rita Sue, who killed Scofield.”

“But how does Donnelle Parker fit into it? Did she know Scofield?”

“I have no idea. Maybe they went out. Or maybe, with Scofield dead, Pritchard is just picking women at random now.”

A mile whipped past outside the window.

“Think Nicole’s in trouble?” Tatum asked.

Marlin thought it over. “I really doubt it, but I want to be sure.”

Nicole Brooks knocked on David Pritchard’s door at 9:43 A.M. When he answered, he was wearing a bathrobe. His feet were bare.

“Mr. Pritchard?”

“Yes?”

“I’m Deputy Nicole Brooks. We talked on the phone the other day.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Sorry to bother you this morning—”

“You’re, uh—you’re not in uniform.”

She was wearing jeans, a green blouse, and tennis shoes. “Well, it’s my day off. But we just had a meeting at the sheriff’s office, and I have some news about the car. The Corvette.”

“The Corvette?”

Nicole wondered,
Did this guy just wake up? He seems out of it.

“Yes, sir, we found it. May I come in? I have a couple of forms I need you to sign. So you can get the car back.”

“Yeah, sure.”

He swung the door wide, and Nicole walked into his living room. He closed the door behind her. “I guess I should offer you something to drink. Isn’t that what most people do?”

“No, that’s okay. This won’t take long.”

He was staring at her now, and she found it somehow unsettling. Something in his eyes…

“You don’t want coffee? I could make some.”

“No, thanks.”

He gestured toward a brown leather couch, and she sat. He lowered himself into an upholstered chair next to an end table.

“Okay, here’s the good news,” she said. “The Corvette has been recovered and it has not been damaged. Only problem is, it’s in Miami. Stephanie Waring turned herself in yesterday, and she has admitted that she and Lucas Burnette stole it.”

He looked at her as if he didn’t quite comprehend.

“Mr. Pritchard?”

“Yes?”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes, I’m fine. Why would you ask me that?”

Something wasn’t right. “If now isn’t a good time to talk—”

“No, it’s fine. Don’t go yet.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m positive. It’s just that I take medication, and sometimes it leaves me a little…foggy.”

“You sure you’re taking the proper dose?” Even from eight feet away, Nicole could see that his pupils were dilated. Maybe he had overmedicated. But that didn’t explain the staring—or what he said next.

“You have beautiful red hair. Auburn, really. Is it natural, or do you dye it?”

Okay, now she was starting to get the creeps. “Mr. Pritchard, I believe we’d better talk at another time.”

Slowly and deliberately, he reached over to the end table and picked up a gold-plated letter opener. Nicole suddenly realized how vulnerable she was without her .38 strapped to her hip.

Pritchard now had a twisted grimace on his face. “You’re a very pretty woman, do you know that? I bet you do.”

In the summer of 1976, a fifteen-year-old boy helped a forty-six-year-old man build a porch. The man paid the boy three dollars an hour, which, back then, was a fair rate. The boy would’ve done it for free, because it gave him something to do, but the man always slipped him some money at the end of each day.

“Working in this dang heat,” the man would say, “you deserve more’n that.”

The boy’s job was hauling long, heavy pieces of treated pine from a trailer, then measuring and marking each board to the correct length. The man did all the cutting with a circular saw. They both drove nails with a framing hammer, and the boy’s arms were soon as hard as a chunk of central Texas limestone.

They’d break at noon for lunch each day, and the man would drink beer and tell all kinds of stories about the history of Blanco County. Tales about shootouts in the hills. Moonshiners dodging the law. Cedar choppers who opened the country up for grazing and turned the soil into decent ranchland. “Most of this was told to me by my daddy, see,” the man would say. “He was the sheriff in the twenties and thirties. Boy like you should know this stuff.”

Before they’d get back to it, the boy would usually cross the road and jump into Miller Creek to cool off and prepare himself for the hot afternoon. One day, when the temperature reached 108, the man declared that it was too damn hot to work. “Come inside and cool off,” he said. “You ain’t seen the inside of the cabin yet, have you?”

So they went inside, and the boy marveled at what the man had built by himself the previous summer. The interior walls were lap-and-gap cedar. The floor was six-inch pine planks, stained a dark brown. Metal-framed bunk beds were stacked in two corners. “That’s for when my brother comes hunting with his boys,” the man said, pointing to the beds. “We get a couple of nice deer every year.”

On this particular day, the man had had quite a few beers, and he said, “Wanna know a secret?”

The boy nodded.

“Okay, lookee here.” The man crossed the room and knelt, pointing to a plank that ran parallel to the wall. “See this here nail?” The boy saw that the nail wasn’t fully seated into the board; it stuck out about a half inch. The man pulled on it, and the plank swung upward, as if it were hinged on one end. “Come have a look.”

The boy knelt beside the man and looked into the hole in the floor. He expected to see the floor joists, and beneath those the crawl space under the cabin—but he didn’t. The man had built a long, skinny box beneath that plank, and inside that box was a rifle resting on a strip of carpet.

“That’s my old Krag thirty-forty,” the man said. “Only rifle I ever owned. Hell, only one I need. It’ll knock a deer down right quick at two hundred yards.”

The boy was puzzled. Right next to the hole in the floor was a perfectly good gun cabinet.

The man explained. “Kids been breaking into this place. They done stole a few things, but nothing important. That gun cabinet’s just to fool ‘em. They see it empty and figure there ain’t no guns around. Now I don’t have to tote my rifle from the house every time I hunt.”

The man smiled, and the boy couldn’t help but smile with him.

Phil Colby remembered it like it was yesterday

Chained to the floor, his head no more than two feet from the wall, he wondered if there was still a surprise beneath that plank.

Marlin turned left on Loma Ranch Road, following the same path he had followed the evening before. “How do you want to handle it?”

Tatum said, “Let’s be cool for now. Just make sure Nicole’s okay, then we’ll do some more checking up on Pritchard. We’ll try to pull prints off the shoebox Donnelle Parker found on her doorstep.”

“And DNA off the semen on the door.”

“Definitely. We gotta prove this guy is still a sicko.”

Marlin shook his head. “It never even dawned on me.”

“Hell, it didn’t dawn on any of us. We had no reason to look at him.”

Nicole stood, and so did Pritchard, much more quickly than she anticipated. He pointed the letter opener at her like a dagger. “Sit back down.”

She remained standing. “Do you realize what a world of shit you’re getting yourself into?”

“Sit back down!”

As far as Nicole was concerned, David Pritchard had just leapt to the number-one position on the list of suspects, regardless of Rita Sue’s confession. The man was clearly unstable enough to resort to violence.