Justice for None: Texas Justice Book #1 (27 page)

46

Victoria
had been to Herby Lubbock’s home twice before. Herby threw the biggest, swankiest lawyers-only Christmas bash in the city, but those two visits had been more than enough for her. Attorneys were the most blandly pretentious people on the face of the earth.

Jesus, she hated lawyers.

There was something Freudian there, but she didn’t stop to consider it as she parked in Herby’s driveway, under the portico of his brick and stone home. A home that was just a few rooms short of being a mansion. It fit right in with the other huge houses that lined Swiss Avenue, their front lawns large enough to hold a trio of suburban tract homes. This neighborhood was where the old money lived, the inheritors and the successors. Herby was neither; he was the snake in the garden.

Victoria stepped down from the Jeep and climbed the steps of a deep porch lined with wicker furniture that was covered in a thick layer of dust. The lead panes of the windows flanking the front door were dirty as well, and a collection of yellowing newspapers covered the doormat. Herby needed a new housekeeper. She hesitated in front of the door. What could she hope to get from Herby? Would he even talk to her? Probably not. And if he did, would he say anything that would prove that Valentine was not a murderer? What if he did just the opposite? What if he implicated Val even further? Her mind leapfrogged over those two questions, fearful of what the prosecutor in her would conclude, but she couldn’t turn around and go home. She’d face whatever lay behind the door and deal with it. There was no other option.

She pressed the doorbell but nothing happened. She cocked her ear and pressed the buzzer again but heard nothing. The doorbell obviously wasn’t working. Victoria raised her fist and knocked loud and long. A minute passed. She knocked again, using the side of her hand, pounding the door like she was driving nails. Still nothing. She did it again for twice as long, until her hand began to ache. More nothing. Herby wasn’t home. Or he was home and didn’t want to see her.

Victoria retraced her steps to the driveway, but instead of returning to the Jeep, she turned in the opposite direction, following the concrete drive as it paralleled the house, heading for the back yard. As she went, she chinned herself up at every window and peered inside. She saw nothing but dusty rooms, some empty and unused, some cluttered with antique furniture filmed with dust.

The driveway took a ninety-degree right turn behind the house, ending at a three-bay garage that was fronted by oversized French doors whose windows were hazy with grime. She peered through a dirty pane, cupping her hands to the glass. Herby had two identical Cadillac convertibles. Both were in the garage. She continued along the back of the house, climbing the steps of a brick terrace that bordered a pool filled with scummy-green water. Dead leaves floated on the surface and mosquitoes hovered in clouds above it. Beyond the pool, the back lawn was long and scraggly. Cicadas made their high-pitch chirring from shrubs and ornamental trees gone wild. Herby needed a new gardener as well.

Victoria walked the length of the terrace, doing more window snooping. Kitchen: dirty and empty. Library: ditto. Guest bedroom empty of furniture, dust-bunnies clustered in all four corners. She was finally rewarded when she pulled herself up to look through the fourth window in the row, into Herby’s office.

The window’s heavy brocade curtains were half closed and the overhead lights were off, but she could still see Herby seated in the darkness behind his oversized desk, facing away from her. Victoria considered pounding on the glass but that was just too undignified. She had to have the upper hand with Herby if she expected to get anything out of him. Instead, she dropped back to the terrace and retraced her steps to the front porch. This time she pounded on the door, hammering away until her fist went numb, but Herby never appeared. Victoria tried the doorknob. It turned. She didn’t hesitate; she stepped into the musty gloom of the front hall.

The air inside the house was still and hot, maybe ten degrees cooler than the outside temperature of one-hundred-and-two. The hallway leading back was dim. She flipped the light switch by the door but nothing happened. That’s when the silence struck her - there was no whir of ceiling fans or whine of refrigerator motors and air conditioners - all the normal noises that filled a house with an omnipresent background drone. The power had been turned off.

For the first time Victoria wondered if the unkempt home, pool, and lawn were more than just an expression of Herby’s slovenliness? No one in their right mind would live without power in Dallas in August. Was Herby broke? Was desperation for money what had driven him to set up Rankin for murder and herself for a criminal conspiracy charge? There was only one way to find out.

“Herby!” Victoria called out as she moved slowly down the hallway, letting her eyes adjust to the gloom. Everywhere she looked she saw dust and decay. Plaster was peeling and the wood floors were battered and scuffed. Cobwebs hung in the corners of the ceiling. It was like something out of a gothic novel: the crumbling mansion of a deranged aristocrat.

“Herby!” She heard nothing in reply but her own voice echoing down the corridor.

She followed the hall to the kitchen door. The smell of rotten meat came from an overflowing galvanized garbage can. She crossed the kitchen and entered a narrower corridor that paralleled the back of the house. Herby’s office was the fourth door on the left. It was only half-closed; she pushed through the door, already cursing.

“Damn it, Herby—” she began but the words got log-jammed in her throat as her eyes fell on what was left of Herby Lubbock’s face.

Herby was facing her, his head thrown back against the chair’s headrest. His left shoulder, the desktop and the carpet were clotted with blood - blood that still gleamed wetly in the light filtering through the dirty window behind him. His forehead had been cratered by a single gunshot wound that was ringed by a blue-black powder burn. On the desk, beside his out-flung hand, was a snub-nosed revolver.

Her stomach convulsed and her eyes veered away, falling to the floor on the right side of Herby’s desk. A pair of feet dressed in sober black shoes peeked out beyond the edge of the oversized desk, the toes pointed at the ceiling. A few inches of blue pants legs with a gold stripe were visible above the shoes, the rest of the body was hidden by the desk.

Victoria stared, her mouth dry, her stomach twisting, her pulse a deafening roar in her head. Hesitantly, she took a step to the right and looked around the corner of the desk. The pants legs ended in a blue County Deputy uniform blouse that was dark with blood. She took another step and found herself looking down on the slack features of Deputy Debbie Foster.

Foster’s eyes were open, her blonde hair hanging across her face, tendrils of it drooping down into the darkness of her open mouth. She had been shot in the chest at least three times at very close range.

Victoria had seen dozens of dead bodies on the job, many in far worse condition than Herby and Debbie Foster, and she had always managed to maintain a certain detachment, but she had
known
Herby and Foster. That made this far worse than an anonymous homicide scene. Far more real. Her brain locked up tight, the gears gnashing and knotting, all rational thought banished by the animal core of her brain. Only tactile impressions remained: the heat of the room, the metallic smell of spilled blood mingling with the garbage-bin odor drifting down from the filthy kitchen. Her stomach rolled again, Hector’s cheese enchiladas pushing up into her throat. She turned abruptly, her hand flying to her mouth, and ran out of the room, down the hallway, to the kitchen. She reached the sink just as her lunch reemerged. She heaved and heaved again, emptying her stomach into the deep porcelain basin, and then continued to dry heave for another two minutes until her stomach muscles were aching and her head was spinning.

Several minutes went by before the nausea and shaking finally passed. She turned on the sink’s cold-water tap and was rewarded with a blast of lukewarm water. She washed the mess down the drain then splashed her face repeatedly. It took her several more minutes of deep breathing to gather herself together as she stood over the sink, her head hanging, damp hair sticking to her sweat-wet skin.

What was Foster doing with Herby? That was an easy one; the deputy had come to the man who’d bribed her. Had she come here to confront Herby? To accuse him? To relieve her own guilt over Sandy’s death? Murder-suicide would certainly explain the scene back in the office. Still, Victoria didn’t buy it. Herby wouldn’t have put a gun to his head. He was a lawyer after all, and a damn good one, he would have counted on his ability to bluff a judge and a jury. Arrogance was not only his strong suit, it was his defining characteristic.

Victoria shook herself. What was she doing? Why was she just standing here playing a mental game of Nancy Drew? She was an officer of the court; she had a duty to call this in, to get the cops on the scene. She dug her phone out to call 9-1-1, but stopped short. She, Jack Birch, and Valentine were all under suspicion of murder thanks to the perjured testimony of Herby Lubbock, and here she was with Herby’s corpse. It didn’t take a large leap in logic to realize that if she called the cops she’d be leaving Herby’s in handcuffs.

She called Jack instead. He answered on the second ring.

“Herby’s dead,” she said without preamble. “Shot in the head in his office at home. Debbie Foster, the Sheriff’s deputy who was in the hallway when Rankin was killed, is in there with him. Multiple gunshots to the chest. Looks like Herby killed her then shot himself.”

Jack was silent for a moment then calmly asked, “Have you touched anything?”

Victoria looked at the sink then thought of all the window ledges she’d chinned herself up on. The front doorknob. The doorbell. The French doors to the garage. Jesus! She had touched everything!

Her hesitation was enough to answer Jack’s question.

“Have you touched anything around the
body?”
he asked.

“No,” she said. “But I touched a lot of other stuff. Windows and doors.”

“Well, then, you
are
in a pickle,” Jack said without inflection. He could be so maddeningly blasé!

“I can’t call 9-1-1,” Victoria said. “With all that’s going on I’d probably be arrested.”

“And you can’t go around clearing away fingerprints, either,” Jack warned her. “That’d just make you look guiltier.”

“Damn it, Jack,” Victoria exploded. Jack was pointing out the obvious while she was standing in a creepy old house with a pair of corpses three doors down. She dropped her voice. “I need solutions, not observations.”

Jack went silent again. “I’d say you should just back up out of there,” he finally said. “I know it cuts across the grain, but that’s what you got to do. We’ll deal with it later.”

Jack was right, but she wasn’t going to do that. She had come here for evidence of a crime and she had found it. She wasn’t leaving. Jack read her silence perfectly. He wasn’t the city’s best detective for nothing.

“Now, don’t you go getting foolish ideas,” he said, his bland tone shifting to concern. “Listen to me, now, Victoria. For all you know someone could have set that scene up. Wouldn’t be the first time, that’s for sure. The killer could still be in the house.”

That spooked her! Her shoulders hunched and she shrank back against the counter, her eyes spinning around the room, coming to rest on the doorway that led to the front hall. Her ears rang with the effort to hear footsteps creeping up on her; a gun being cocked, the snick of a knife blade.

“Thanks a lot, Jack,” she whispered then clicked off the phone. She stood there for several minutes listening to the whisper of traffic from the street out front and the creaks and sighs of the old home settling into soil dehydrated from months of drought. The quiet calmed her nerves. A little. She knew, rationally, that a murderer with any sense would be long gone by now, but most murderers didn’t have good sense. If they did, they wouldn’t be murderers.

But she wasn’t leaving. Not yet. She slung her purse over her shoulder and headed for the back hallway, back to Herby’s office.

What she was about to do could get her arrested.

Or worse.

47

The
memories rushed over Valentine like a torrent of sewage - memories he had dodged for four years. He hadn’t wanted to recall that day or the things that Lamar and Lemuel had done in the basement. But it wasn’t just what
Lamar and Lemuel
had done; it was what
he
had done himself. He had executed the Suttons. Murdered them. It was that simple. And it was that fact that had lurked in the periphery of his mind twenty-four-seven, a red-eyed monster leering from the shadows, a constant reminder of the violence that lay at the heart of who
he was - the same violence that had driven the killers he had once hunted.

Val had told the real story only once before, from his ICU bed two days after the incident, to the division captain, Jed Larkin. Jed’s complexion had faded to the color of ashes by the time Val had finished, but he hadn’t said anything in reply. Jed had clicked the digital recorder off, stood and left without a word. Two days later, a patrol woman had brought Val the transcribed report to sign. He had read it through while she waited. His description of Lamar and Lemuel’s last moments had been excised, replaced with a bullshit last stand, like something out of a novel. Valentine signed it anyway and agreed, tacitly, to pretend it was the truth.

Until now.

Val mentally shook himself. Self-loathing and self-pity would have to wait. He had come to the Suttons’ house with a purpose. He flicked on the flashlight and crossed the living room, picking his way through the debris of plaster and broken lathing. He continued down the hallway to the kitchen. It had received the same destructive treatment. The cabinets had been ripped down, the walls gutted, the linoleum peeled up in two long sheets. A dark stain blotted the exposed wood flooring near the kitchen doorway. Abby Sutton’s dried blood. It was a wonder she hadn’t died right there.

Val turned and crossed the hallway to the closed basement door. He had kicked that door off its hinges four years before, but someone had re-hung it, though the doorjamb was still broken, the lock mechanism and doorknob gone. A faded strip of yellow crime scene tape dangled from one side of the doorframe, the words POLICE barely legible. Val pushed the bottom of the door with the toe of his shoe and it swung inward with a dry sigh. The smell of damp, musty earth rose to his nose. The odor of blood had long faded, but he could still smell it there, under the damp and dry rot. He pointed the flashlight down the steps. Cobwebs hung in broken tendrils from the rafters above the stairs marking a path where someone had recently descended.

With the flashlight in one hand and the cocked .45 in the other, Val went down the stairs slowly, panning the light about the small room as he went, picking out places in the walls where the concrete had been hammered to bits. The dirt floor had been torn up with shovels; it was dotted with shallow holes and piles of loose earth. It must have taken hours to do this much damage and more hours to destroy the house above. Someone had been looking for the money.

He stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked around, the .45 tracking the flashlight’s beam. There was no evidence of the violence that had occurred here. No markers or flowers on the spot where the women had died, their bodies torn apart by a pair of raping murderers. Val’s eyes hit the spot where he had shot and killed the defenseless Lemuel. He stared at it for a long moment, reliving it one more time, but even here, in the basement where it had happened, he could muster no shame.

“You got better than you deserved,” he said aloud, a half-hearted defense for an unforgivable act. His hand squeezed down on the .45, the checkered grip digging into his palm. The cool air of the basement was suddenly chilly. He turned his back on the room and climbed the stairs.

There was nothing here for him.

He exited the Suttons’ house to find a DPD blue and white parked out front at the curb. Behind the wheel, his beefy arm propped on the open window, Gary Griggs was seated, staring across the overgrown yard at Val. He didn’t bother to climb out as Val approached.

“Taking a stroll down memory lane, Vicious?” Gary asked, squinting against the glare of the sun. Gary was sweating, despite the fact that the patrol car’s air-conditioner was going full blast with every vent aimed at the driver’s seat. His face was beaded with perspiration and the collar of his dark blue uniform was soaked.

Val looked over his shoulder at the house and shrugged.

“It all started here, Gary,” he said simply. Griggs nodded and for a moment both men were silent, reliving that day. Finally Val asked, “What brings you out here? This is still the Sheriff’s turf, isn’t it?”

Griggs nodded. “The Sheriff’s Department got a call about a suspicious car cruising the neighborhood,” he said. “They sent out an ‘any officer in the area.’ I was a couple miles away…” He shrugged and his eyes shifted to the house behind Val. For another long moment neither of them said anything.

Gary broke the silence. “I didn’t think you were going to make it,” he said and Val immediately knew what he was talking about. “I thought you were dead when I rolled up. All that blood…” Gary trailed off with a shake of his head. “The Suttons,” he said, grinding the words out. “Animals, every one of them.”

“I
would
have been dead if you hadn’t gotten here when you did.”

Gary made no reply to that. He put the patrol car in gear. “You have any more trouble out of Daddy Sutton?” he asked, his foot resting on the brake.

“No,” Val lied. Gary was still a cop. Val would not involve him in this. It would be asking too much, but he was sorely tempted.

“I got to roll, but call me if you need me,” Gary said as he pulled away from the curb, the driver’s side window already rising.

Val watched Gary until the patrol car had made the corner at the end of the block, then he retraced his steps across the Suttons’ lawn. He squeezed through the redbud hedge, ducked into the dilapidated carport and climbed into the Mustang, but he didn’t start the engine. He slouched behind the wheel, sweating in the stuffy heat. Thinking about the money. And the gold. For two days he had been thinking that if he could only find the gold all of this would be over. The irrationality of that plan was finally hitting home, but still he couldn’t shake it.

Right
. All he had to do was find a load of untraceable gold and cash that had eluded dozens of experienced police officers, insurance investigators and Treasury Agents. They had X-rayed the walls, seismically mapped the lawn and probed the basement’s concrete block walls with steel drilling rods. None of them had ever found a trace of the cash. Not one bill. Not a single coin. So, what chance did Val have?

But it
has
to be here, he thought. Close by. As Jasper Smith had said, Lamar wouldn’t have trusted anyone to hold that much cash. No one was more suspicious than a thief. The Sutton boys would have kept it in a location they could control and protect. Someplace they could watch 24/7. But where? Several million dollars in small bills was one hell of a lot of paper. And the gold coins that had been taken from Martinson’s Wholesale Gold had been estimated to weigh close to three hundred pounds. How much space would that much loot take up? Most of the currency had been stolen from drug dealer and other criminals. That meant it would be mainly small bills. If you assumed it was two or three million in cash, then you’d have a stack of bills maybe five feet square. And the gold coins? What did that much gold look like? He couldn’t even make a guesstimate, but he knew where he could get a precise answer.

Val started the car and backed down the driveway. He stopped with the rear of the Mustang blocking the southbound side of the street and looked at the Suttons’ old hideout one last time.

Everything had changed that day. His life as he knew it had ended, but he had rebuilt it. Refocused. Married and had children. But, he knew now, he would never escape that basement. He’d never be free of Lamar and Lemuel.

Their ghosts would haunt him for the rest of his life.