Justice for None: Texas Justice Book #1 (28 page)

48

Victoria
retraced her steps down the dark hallway to Herby’s office, the journey twice as sinister as the first time she had made the trip. This time she knew what awaited her. Her empty stomach knotted itself into a chilly ball and her breath came faster as the sweat on her brow went frigid despite the stuffy heat.

She could smell Herby and Foster long before she reached the half-open door, the thick, metallic odor of a slaughterhouse. She swallowed hard, fighting the gag reflex, and began to breathe through her mouth. She stepped into the darkened office and stopped just inside, her eyes on Herby’s slumped silhouette.

Paperwork splattered with blood lay spread out across the desk before Herby. She approached the desk, but she couldn’t read them upside down. Carefully, she circled the desk, watching for blood splatter. She had to step over Debbie Foster. Victoria was unable to avert her eyes from the deputy’s pasty, lifeless features. Foster had said she was getting married next week. The opening strains of the wedding march echoed in Victoria’s head. She jerked her gaze away. She couldn’t afford to get sentimental. She couldn’t break down. She continued behind the desk, circling wide around the trail of wreckage left by the bullet that had blasted through Herby’s forehead at three thousand feet per second.

The hole in the back of Herby’s head was massive. Half his skull was gone. Gray brain matter speckled the dark leather of his chair. Victoria’s gorge rose again, her empty stomach clutching and lunging, but she choked it down. She averted her eyes as she sidled up close behind Herby and peered over his right shoulder.

The papers piled and scattered across the desk were all lawyerly documentation, briefs and motions, witness lists and printouts of case law. Victoria leaned in closer, not really sure what she was hoping to find, just scanning the documents for familiar names. A pair of dope cases, a DUI and an assault and battery was all she saw. Nothing about Rankin or the Suttons. Nothing that helped her. That left the desk drawers.

Victoria eased around the chair and reached for the top drawer on the right side of Herby’s desk, accidentally bumping Herby’s chair with her hip in the process. The chair shifted a fraction of an inch, just enough to unbalance Herby. He toppled forward, his weight shifting slowly, like a potato sack falling off a truck. Victoria instinctively made a grab for his shoulder, but he was far too heavy. He slipped right through her grasp. His head thumped down on the desk calendar and blood rushed from his broken skull like wine from a spilled cup.

The smell of all that blood clogged Victoria’s throat. She spun away, retching, buckling at the waist, though her stomach was already empty. She stayed that way for a long, shaky moment, bent at the waist, her head close to her knees, as nausea washed over her in waves. Finally, her stomach settled back to a seasick roll and she could stand again. She turned back to the desk and shuddered. Suddenly, all she wanted to do was get out of there. Away from the gore and the blood. She couldn’t take it. She’d leave this to Jack.

Victoria backed away, but stopped when her eyes fell on a green folder peeking out from under Herby’s left buttock.

Why would Herby have put the file under his butt when he had an acre of desk in front of him? To hide it from Foster? Or from the killer who had murdered both Herby and Foster? Victoria had already thoroughly implicated herself beyond explanation; her fingerprints were everywhere and her DNA was in the sink. She didn’t have anything left to lose. She reached down, grabbed the corner of the folder and tugged, grimacing with distaste when it refused to budge. She pulled harder and jerked it free.

She opened the folder. It wasn’t more than a dozen pages. She didn’t want to read it there with two corpses for company, but she had to. She couldn’t take it with her. She had already deeply compromised the crime scene, but stealing evidence was a step too far. She turned toward the weak light coming through the dingy window behind Herby’s desk, and started to read. It took her less than ten seconds to identify what she was looking at, but it only confused her more.

The first pages in the bundle were the appointment papers for a Political Action Committee called Citizens for Law and Order. The paperwork was a copy of the County filing documents. That meant the CLO PAC was a specific use PAC, supporting a single candidate or issue. She scanned down the page and saw who the PAC’s beneficiary was: Sheriff Nolan Swisher.

Her heart fell. This was no smoking gun; every candidate had a PAC or was supported by a PAC, sometimes more than one. She flipped the page and found the paperwork for an electronic filing exemption. That stirred her suspicion. A PAC could only file for that kind of exemption if it could prove that it had no access to computers or the internet, an unbelievable assertion in this technological age. She could think of only one reason to avoid electronic filing: fear of leaving a digital trail. The next two pages deepened her suspicion. One was the Pre-Election Contribution Report required by the County electoral commission. It had been filed just three weeks before the election and listed two-thousand-seventy dollars as the total assets of the PAC, less than a pittance in political terms. The second page was a post-election contribution summary that showed a balance of close to five million dollars. The Sheriff had managed to collect all that cash in a little less than three weeks? She’d call bullshit on that; something was definitely fishy. The next two pages were lists of expenditures, withdrawals and receipts. Local TV ads made up the bulk of the expenses, almost four million dollars. Victoria remembered the attack ads Sheriff Swisher had ran, advertisements that had helped the aging lawman landslide his way into another term. But there was a problem with all the paperwork: none of it had been signed or notarized.

Victoria flipped to the last page, her eyes freezing on the final line, where the treasurer had signed. Herby Lubbock’s flourish of a signature took up half the width of the page. A defense counsel as treasurer of the Sheriff’s PAC? That wasn’t possible; the conflict of interest would have been enough to draw outrage from every quarter. Swisher must be—

A sound from the front of the house broke her concentration and made her head jerk up. The front door opened and closed followed by the drone of a pair of voices. Two men locked in a whispered conversation. A whispered conversation that reached her thanks to the echoing quality of the main hallway.

For a moment, Victoria forgot to breathe. It had to be Herby’s and Foster’s killers. Jack had been right: this wasn’t a shootout, it was a double homicide!

She folded the sheaf of paperwork into a fat square and stuffed it into her back pocket, no longer concerned about tampering with evidence. She ditched the empty folder on the corner of Herby’s desk, circled the desk and crossed quickly to the hallway door. She ducked her head out to peer down the corridor and could hear the voices more clearly, but she still couldn’t make out the words. It was two men arguing, their voices low but intense. It sounded as if they were still in the front hallway.

Victoria slipped out the door and crept down the dim corridor, keeping close to the wall, moving as fast as she dared, her sandals whispering across the dusty wood parquet. If she could make the kitchen door…

The voices suddenly stopped and so did she, halfway through a step, her left foot raised off the floor.

The two men’s footsteps echoed hollowly off the front hall’s wooden floor as they moved toward the kitchen, coming closer. They started talking again, their words coming clearer with every step.

“—I don’t know,” one of the men said. His voice was deep with an East Texas twang. Pure peckerwood. “Could be anywhere. I told you we should have opened the safe before we killed him.”

“I didn’t think he’d lie,” the other man said defensively, and Victoria’s mouth dropped open. She almost said ‘no’ out loud before her hand leapt to her mouth, clamping icy fingers over her lips.

“He knew we’d kill him if he lied,” Laroy Hockley continued. There was no mistake, it was him.

Jesus. Laroy Hockley a murderer. Despite her dislike for Laroy, it still felt like having a part of her childhood put to the torch.

“Hell, he knew you’d kill him if he told the
truth.
Christ, you had already shot Foster. Herby was just buying a little more air for his self, that’s all.” The peckerwood paused, but just for a moment. “Wasn’t no need for that, you know. Killing him, that is. Doesn’t make good business sense. Having an attorney in your hip pocket was a pretty good deal.”

“He was falling apart. He would have taken us down with him,” Laroy replied defensively.

As the men came nearer, Victoria faded back toward Herby’s office, looking for an escape route that she knew wasn’t there. The corridor was a dead end, Herby’s door the last one in the row. With nowhere else to go, she ducked back into the office, eased the door back to its half-closed position then turned and looked wildly around the room. Her eyes stopped on the window behind the desk. She could hear Laroy and his partner coming down the back hallway, now. There was no way she’d get the window open, climb out and get gone before they arrived. That left only one option. A really bad one. The closet to the left of Herby’s desk.

She quickly circled the desk and opened the closet door to find a narrow space stuffed with coats and sweaters on hangers. The floor was a snarl of rundown boots and dirty old shoes. The smell of cedar was almost overwhelming as she slithered through the curtain of coats and into the far corner of the closet, pulling the door softly closed behind her.

By then the men were right outside the office door.

“You hear that?” the peckerwood asked.

A moment of silence passed before Hockley replied. “No. I didn’t hear anything. You going pussy on me?”

“Just listen,” the peckerwood replied, his tone carrying a warning edge.

The two stopped talking. Another long moment of silence.

“I said I don’t hear anything,” Hockley said impatiently. “Let’s just get this done with.”

“The closet,” the peckerwood said in a stage whisper.

For a moment there was silence and then booted feet thumped across the room’s bare floorboards accompanied by the sound of something being dragged along the floor. The boots circled Herby’s desk and came straight at the closet.

Victoria stopped breathing.

“What the hell are you doing?” Laroy asked. “I already went through the closet, there’s nothing in there but winter clothes.”

“Little insurance,” the peckerwood said. The closet doorknob jiggled, but the doorknob didn’t turn and the door didn’t open, it was merely pressed inward, tighter to the frame. The boots turned away and clomped back around the desk.

“You’re crazy old man,” Hockley said. “If you’re that worried about it, open the door and check it out.”

The peckerwood snorted at that. “I didn’t get this old by sticking my head in snake-holes,” he said. “Give it here.”

The two men fell silent. Victoria’s ears strained for any sound that might indicate what they were doing.

The sound of metal grating on metal was followed by a sloshing sound like water slopping out of a mop bucket. It took another moment for the smell to hit her.

Gasoline! The odor grew rapidly, mixing with the woodsy-wooly smell of the cedar closet. Her head spun. She knew what was coming, could almost feel the flames.

Laroy spoke. “Hurry up” he said. “Douse the desk and the bodies so we can get out of here.”

“Don’t flap your jaws at me,” the redneck replied. “We’d already be long gone if you’d have thought this through. You got me heading out to the Quick-Stop for a can of gasoline just ten minutes before we commit an arson.”

“Just get on with it,” Laroy snapped. “Keep bullshitting around and we’ll both end up in Huntsville.”

The peckerwood chuckled. “You afraid of prison?” he asked, the sloshing sounds coming closer to the closet as he spoke. “Pretty as you is, I don’t blame you. Them muscles won’t do much good against five or six bull queers looking for a fresh poke.”

The smell of gasoline grew chokingly thick. A trickle of fluid crept under the door, forming a small puddle on the threshold.

“That’ll never happen, old man,” Laroy said. “I’d kill you and ten more just like you. Let’s go!”

“Well, shee-it,” the peckerwood said, drawing out the word to two syllables. “Who’s going all pussy now?” His boot heels retreated across the office again.

A moment passed in silence before Laroy said, “Give me the rest of that gas, I’m heading upstairs. Get this done and meet me at the back door.”

The peckerwood made no reply to that.

Victoria pulled a coat sleeve over her mouth and nose and took a slow breath, sucking air through the musty cloth. The fumes were making her lightheaded. She pressed the coat sleeve tighter to her mouth, but it didn’t help. Her head was reeling. The darkness in front of her eyes filled with red spots and her knees went shaky.

“Maybe I’m just talking to myself,” the peckerwood said conversationally. “And maybe I ain’t. If I ain’t, well then, welcome to the barbecue!”

Victoria heard a match scrape.

If there had been any air left in her lungs, she would have screamed.

49

Martinson’s
Wholesale Gold looked closed when Valentine rolled into a parking space out front. The parking lot of the Bed Bath & Beyond next door was packed, but only a single car sat in front of Martinson’s iron-barred, plate glass door: an old Mercedes with a sun-faded Jack in the Box head mounted on the radio antenna. The building, with its single door set into windowless walls of red brick, looked more like a fallout shelter or an electrical substation than a business. The only exterior decorations were two closed-circuit TV cameras that were mounted on metal brackets at the corners of the building and aimed down at the front door. There were no signs, no neon, no sale ads taped to the door’s glass. The Martinson’s didn’t need to advertise. They weren’t a retail jeweler selling engagement rings and wristwatches; they were a supplier of minted gold coins to the retail traders.

Once again, Val was sucked back in time. To the fire and the bodies. He could smell them again and his throat clenched tight. The little girl had been the worst. She had been found under the body of her mother, both burned so badly, so contorted and twisted by the heat, that it had been impossible to separate them for burial. They—

“Jesus,” Val said aloud, his hands throttling the steering wheel. At that moment, he almost threw the car in reverse and backed away. But he had come here for a reason. He killed the engine, climbed out into the heat and crossed to the building’s front door.

An Allied Armed Security warning sticker was the front door’s only adornment. Beside the door was the stainless steel grill of an intercom, but there was no call button to push. With the sun hanging low in the west, the glare coming off the door’s glass forced Val to cup his hands and press his face against the glass to see inside. He was half expecting to see an empty office closed for the day, but was startled to find a woman, pushing sixty, staring back at him across a narrow counter that bisected the front of the store. She was wearing pink cat’s-eye glasses, a low-neck red blouse and a suspicious frown. Behind her was a closed door that Val remembered led back to the offices and the safes where the coins were stored.

Val waved, but the woman just kept staring. But she must have done something because the door behind her suddenly opened and a pair of uniformed guards came out, one blond, one redheaded, both built like sides of beef.

The guards were as wide as the office door and almost as tall with flat faces and hard eyes. They looked like professional soldiers in their starched uniforms, their hair clipped so tight to their skulls that it looked painful. They acted professionally as well. They split left and right at the counter. The blond came around to the door while the redhead positioned himself in the far corner, overlooking the room, his hand on the pistol holstered to his hip.

The blond had the heavy grace of a football linebacker. His eyes never left Val’s face as he leaned down and pushed a button beside the door and spoke into the intercom.

“Help you?”

“I’m here to see Earl,” Valentine said, leaning close to the speaker. “My name’s Valentine Justice.”

“Appointment?” the guard asked.

Val shook his head.

The guard turned toward the old woman and said something that Val couldn’t hear. She picked up a phone, dialed an extension and spoke a few words. She listened for a moment then hung up and nodded at the guard. He shook a key ring loose from his belt and started working locks. There were five of them in all. Finally, he pushed the door open a crack then stepped back ten feet, his hand on his pistol.

Val stepped through and pulled the door closed behind him.

There was no evidence of the fire that had gutted the store four years ago. No smoke damage, no smell, but Val could still see the corpses. The bodies twisted into blackened pretzels.

The old woman spoke, jarring him out of it. “Take him back,” she said. “Earl’s in the sorting room.”

The blond grunted and pointed Val at the door behind the counter. Val led the way through it, the guard keeping a good four feet behind Val at all times, his hand never far from his pistol. Val was impressed. Security was tight at Martinson’s. That had not been the case four years ago when Lamar and Lemuel had crashed through the front door and started shooting.

The back of the shop was clean and unremarkable. The hallway floor was covered in blue Astroturf. Heavy-gauge steel filing cabinets lined the walls, all padlocked. Fluorescent lights provided a flat glow that gave the place the air of a doctor’s office.

“There,” the guard said as Val neared a door on the left. Val went through it without knocking.

The room was carpeted in more Astroturf, this time red. The wall on the left was dominated by a large wall safe with brass work that glittered in the fluorescents. To the right was a table covered in green baize and bracketed by four chairs. A huge old brass scale sat at the table’s center. Behind the scale sat Earl Martinson. The tabletop in front of him was littered with gold coins, bunched into groups of five or six.

Earl looked up over eye glasses that hung precariously low on his nose. He leaned back, his big belly moving forward and out, tenting the rumpled shirt he was wearing. A broad smile stretched the deep wrinkles of his melon-shaped face, knocking ten years off his appearance. He stuck out his hand without rising.

“Detective Justice,” he said, “Damned good to see you.” Despite the pleasant greeting, there was a questioning note in his tone, but he didn’t voice it outright. He looked over at the guard who was standing in the doorway behind Val.

“That’ll do it, Gene. Tell Margie she can close it up out front.”

“Yes, sir,” the guard said and exited. He pulled the door closed behind him.

Earl Martinson waved Val at a chair. “Grading these coins,” he said. “Collector stuff,” he made a face. “Volatile market. Gotta move them fast.”

“I thought gold was always on the rise,” Val replied, just to have something to say, as he took a seat.

Earl nodded, and his glasses slipped even lower, barely hanging on the bulbous tip of his nose. “Gold is, sure. Lately. But these are worth more than their gold weight.” He made a face, “Supposedly.” He shrugged. “That was really Virgil’s side of things,” he added, mentioning his dead brother. “I stick to newly minted bullion coins. Nothing subjective about that, they weigh what they weigh, and gold is worth whatever Wall Street says it’s worth. All you got to do is add our commission to the stock ticker price and you got the value. Easy. This is a favor for an old friend.”

Val nodded. He wasn’t really interested.

“You all right?” Martinson asked, frowning. “You don’t look so good.”

Val tried on a smile but it didn’t fit. He let it go and got to the point. “Have the coins that were stolen by the Suttons ever turned up?”

That got Earl’s interest. He shoved his glasses back up his nose and looked intently at Val for a moment. Finally he shrugged.

“Who knows? Coins don’t have serial numbers. No way of telling one from another. You could sell them just about anywhere by the handful. Offloading the whole load would be a bit more complicated.”

“Why?”

Another shrug. “They were a single lot. An order I placed with the Canadian Mint. No one but a dealer would have that many coins from the same mint in the same issuing year, and the robbery was big news,” Earl paused, frowning down at the tabletop, his eyes distant. He shook himself, his hard belly shivering under the rumpled white shirt, and continued. “Every dealer in the country heard about what happened here. And only a dealer would buy that amount of coins for a fair price,” he shrugged again and shook his head. “But there are plenty of crooks out there. Especially when you’re talking over eight million dollars.”

“I understand the insurance company settled with you for a little more than half that amount,” Val said, not bothering to be delicate.

“Damned vultures.” Earl flushed, his jowls turning an unhealthy red. “I had four funerals to plan. My whole family was dead. Those bastards…” He caught himself and shook it off. “I wasn’t up to a court fight. I took what they offered, and I’ve regretted it ever since.”

Val asked what he had come there to ask. “How much room would they have taken up? The coins?”

Earl settled back in his chair and dropped his hands on the armrests. His lips drew down as he considered the question.

“I’d say a little smaller than a half-bushel basket. They were mixed coins, quarter, half and full Troy ounce Maple Leafs.”

That wasn’t as large as Val had thought. That meant that the gold, added to the bulkier cash Lamar and Lemuel had stolen, would probably fit into the average coat closet.

“Why do you ask?” Earl leaned across the table. “Has something turned up?”

Val shook his head. “No,” he said, hesitating to say more, but he couldn’t leave it at that. He wasn’t a cop anymore. He couldn’t ask blind questions then hide behind the badge and the old ‘open investigation’ line. Besides, he didn’t want Earl thinking he was running some kind of scam. “Garland Sutton has the idea that I know where they are,” Val said. “He and some friends of his have been making my life…a little difficult.”

Again, Earl went silent. When he finally spoke, his words were spaced, his tone cautious.
“Do
you know where they are?”

Val stared woodenly across the table. He wasn’t going to reply to that. To hell with Earl Martinson and everyone else who thought he was a thief.

Earl didn’t like the look in Val’s eyes. The old man’s face went the color of wet cement. He threw up his hands.

“I didn’t mean to imply anything,” he said hurriedly. “Lord knows I owe you for putting those murdering, rednecks in their graves,” his gaze shifted away from Val and he let a beat or two pass before he looked back, “But, if someone
did
find them, I’d pay a ten percent fee for their return.”

“The insurance paid you off,” Valentine said. “They’d claim ownership.”

Earl shook his head. “I’d give them their cash back and take the gold,” he said. “Bastards screwed me sideways. And gold has been on the rise. The coins would be worth more than ten million now.”

Val was all out of questions. He rose and stuck out his hand. As Earl took it, one more question came to Val’s mind.

“Didn’t you use cops for security when you first opened? DPD and Sheriff’s men?” he asked, still considering the possibility of a dirty cop working with the Suttons.

Earl grimaced. “Yes, but not for years now,” he said. “Lots of our customers are dodgy when it comes to cops. And, no offense, cops are hard to deal with. They never turn it off. You might pay their salary, but you’re not their
boss.
And God help you if an attractive lady comes in. Every one of you guys is a horn-dog,” Earl broke out in hoarse laughter, “I had one guy, a big fat DPD sergeant, that hit on everything in a skirt from seventeen to seventy.” Earl shook his head and the laughter died. “Bonded security is the way to go. Not that it helped my brother or his family.”

Val nodded. The two security guards on duty that day had died right alongside the Martinsons. He turned for the door, but Earl wasn’t done talking.

“Those Sutton boys deserved to be shot down like dogs. I thank you for that.”

Val didn’t say anything. He didn’t even turn around to acknowledge the comment, he opened the door and stepped through.

“And if you
do
find those coins…” Earl said, trailing off wistfully. “My offer stands.”