The Texas Ranger (15 page)

“Jeffrey,” he sobbed. “I'm three years old.” He held up four fingers.

Marc and Josette exchanged amused smiles.

From the hotel's side entrance came the sound of excited voices. “But he was right here!” a woman sobbed. “I just turned my back for a second…!”

“You never pay him any attention!” a sharp male voice countered. “You couldn't even postpone a phone call long enough to watch our son.”

“Somebody miss a kid?” Marc raised his voice.

Two neat people, one in a business suit and one wearing ranch clothes, came quickly toward them. The man was irritated. The woman was blond and small and frantic.

“Jeffrey!” she sobbed, holding out her arms. “Oh, thank God! If he'd gone in the street…! Thank you, thank you!” She grasped her child tight in her arms and covered his wet face with kisses.

The man with her gave Marc a slow, quiet glance. “Thanks,” he said tersely. “We'll get him home now.”

“Children wander far, and they do it quick,” Marc told the woman flatly.

She swallowed. “Yes. I'm sorry. It won't happen
again.” She gave the dark man beside her a worried glance. “We'll go now.”

The man nodded politely and followed along beside her, but he looked like a storm about to break.

“There goes a marriage,” Marc mused, watching them. He shook his head. “Sometimes it's just too much distance.”

“And others, it's too little communication,” she replied.

He turned to her. “That's a fact. Especially with you and me. We should have been totally honest with each other. If we had, we might be friends now, instead of reluctant co-workers.”

She searched his eyes. “You really like children, don't you?” she asked.

He smiled. “Love them,” he admitted.

“Me, too.”

He slid his hand down to link with hers. Thrills of pleasure ran up and down her slender body.

“We'd better go,” she said.

He nodded, and he walked beside her. But he held her hand all the way to the SUV. She didn't try to pull it away. Maybe he could help her forget how cruel he'd been in the past, if he went slowly and carefully, and didn't rush her. He had to hope so. He felt alive again. It was a good feeling.

S
andra Gates was about Marc Brannon's age, with bleached blond hair and purple fingernails and the social graces of a small dog. Her trailer was jammed up against two equally sad-looking ones in a trailer park outside Floresville. She wasn't pleased to see Marc and Josette. She let them inside only when Marc threatened to get a search warrant.

They sat down gingerly on the sofa, which was covered with clothes and newspapers and discarded candy wrappers. While Marc was detailing the reason for the visit, Josette unobtrusively slipped one of the candy wrappers into her pocket, on a hunch.

Sandra sat back in her chair, her lower lip prominent. “I was just a friend of Dale's,” she said with cold emphasis, waving a languid hand. Josette noticed that she wore a diamond dinner ring on her
right hand. If it was a cheap ring, it certainly didn't look it. “I had nothing to do with his death,” she added. “Nothing at all!”

“We aren't accusing you of anything, Miss Gates,” Josette said quickly. “We only want to know if he wrote you anything about being transferred to the Wayne Correctional Institute.”

She eyed them warily for a minute and her gaze went to the window before she took a slow breath and, without looking directly at them, answered, “Sure, I knew he was being transferred. He wrote me about it.”

“Did he tell you how he managed it?” Brannon asked evenly, observing her responses with keen gray eyes.

She glanced at him, startled, and then averted her eyes again. “What…do you mean by that?”

“Wayne Correctional Institute is a state prison, Miss Gates,” Brannon replied. “Jennings was in federal prison in Austin until about a week or so before he was killed, when he managed to get transferred over here and assigned to an outside work detail.”

She folded her arms and gave him a cold glare. “He didn't say anything about that to me,” she said. “I only know that it was easier to go see him here. I mean, it would have been easier for me to go see him, if he hadn't got killed.”

Brannon looked at her meaningfully. “I know
that you knew him before he went to prison, Miss Gates, and that you visited him both in Austin and San Antonio.”

She looked irritable. “So I did. So what?” Now her legs were crossed and one foot started kicking impatiently.

He ignored the question and looked around, his pale eyes lighting on a very expensive computer and printer setup. Considering the poverty around her, that was odd. So was that diamond she was sporting.

“Do you like computers?” he asked pleasantly, changing the subject. “I'm barely computer literate myself, but we have to use them, like every other law enforcement office in the country.”

She seemed to relax a little. “Yes, I love computers. I took courses at the local vocational technical school in computer programming.” She pointed to a certificate on the wall over her computer. Brannon got up and sauntered over to look at it, leaning toward it with one big, lean hand on the desk. His eyes shot down to the computer. It was an expensive one, and she had several CD-ROM disks lying around it, one of which was a photo program. Another was a sophisticated spreadsheet program.

He stood up. “Impressive,” he said, and walked back to the chair. “How long did it take you to get through those courses?”

“A year and a half,” she said and smiled jerkily.
“My tips paid for that diploma. I was a waitress at a truck stop just outside San Antonio.”

“I used to be a busboy when I was in my middle teens,” Brannon told her easily, and with a smile. “You don't make much at those jobs without tips.”

“You don't make anything,” she muttered. “I was so damned tired of being poor…” She laughed nervously. “Not that I'm rich now, but I design game software. My new one won an award from one of the computer magazines,” she said, naming it with obvious pride. “I've come a long way.”

“Obviously,” he said. “That's an expensive computer. Top of the line.”

Now she was nervous and on her guard again. “I have to have good equipment or I couldn't make a living.” She uncrossed her legs and got to her feet. “I've got a lunch appointment,” she told them, quickly checking the watch on her wrist. “Sorry to rush you off, but I'm out of time.”

They got up. “No problem,” Brannon told her with a courteous smile. “Thanks for your help, Miss Gates.”

“I didn't know anything!” she protested.

“And I'm sorry about Jennings,” he added, noting the faint flicker of her eyelids. “For what it's worth, I don't think he killed Henry Garner.”

She colored. Her lower lip trembled before her teeth caught and stilled it. Her face tautened. “He
was such a loser,” she said huskily. “Such a stupid, trusting fool…!

“He wasn't all bad,” Josette ventured. “He had some wonderful qualities.”

“A lot of good they do him now,” she said coldly. “The world is full of people who use other people and get away with it.”

Josette started to ask a question, but Brannon caught her hand in his and pulled her out the door behind a pleasant goodbye to Miss Gates.

 

When they were in the sports utility vehicle and headed back to San Antonio, Josette asked Brannon why he'd pulled her out the door so abruptly.

“Because your next question would have been, who did she know that used other people and got away with it, and that would have been counterproductive,” he explained. “She's in this up to her neck. If she was making that much money, she wouldn't be living in a downscale trailer park, driving a rusting old car and wearing shoes that look three years old. Designing software wouldn't explain that two-carat diamond or the computer and the printer. And I saw some software on her desk that sells for six hundred a pop.”

“You think Dale Jennings bought her the ring?”

“If it's real—and it looks real—yes, I do,” Brannon said. “And I'd bet money she's the one who
hacked into the computer system and got Jennings sent down here.”

“That's what I thought, too, but we can't prove it.”

“Not yet, anyway.” He shook his head. “She's one cool lady. You need to get the local D.A.'s cybercrime specialist on this one, and that guy Phil at your own office, too. I'll just mention it to our resident expert as well. She's not going to be easy to catch, at that, no matter how many people we put on the job. I imagine she's had a lot of practice at erasing her electronic footsteps. But we might find out something.”

“Such as, who paid her to get Dale transferred,” Josette guessed. “Because she wouldn't have gone to that risk just for the pleasure of his company.”

“But she would have for a payoff,” he agreed at once. “I don't think she realized she was doing it so that he could get executed, though,” he added shrewdly. “And she did seem to care about him. But I don't think Jennings was the only person paying her off. She may have been played for a sucker as well.”

“Mrs. Jennings told me that Dale was going with some woman who liked expensive peppermint candy. So I took this,” she showed him a wrapper.

Brannon gave it a curious look. “This is imported. Expensive taste for a woman who lives in a used trailer.”

“Isn't it, though?”

“You said that Jennings's girlfriend liked expensive mints. Did Mrs. Jennings say anything else about her?”

“Not much. It was just a comment she made, that I remembered.”

“I'm glad. Every clue helps.”

“Why didn't you want her to get suspicious?” she asked curiously.

“Because I'm going to get a court order for a wiretap on her phone,” he said simply. “There's enough evidence, even circumstantial, to involve her in this case. Besides, if Sandra Gates really is mixed up in this, she's in danger. The murderer is not going to want her to tell what she knows to the police.”

“So she's expendable.”

“Exactly.”

Josette dug into the file in her briefcase and thumbed through it. “There's another person here we need to question. He's an associate of Jake Marsh's,” she said, frowning as she read over her notes. “This man, Johnny York, has an arrest record as long as my arm, but only one conviction. He was arrested on suspicion of murder last year, but he was released for lack of evidence. He's on probation for an assault conviction. According to what I've found out, he has one favorite haunt. He likes to play pool. So, we might stop by the pool hall on Mesquite Street and talk to him.”

“He won't be there at this hour of the day,” he assured her. He pulled over to the curb and used his onboard computer to input York's name.

“That's our state crime database,” she murmured with delight.

“Yes, it is, and I couldn't do my job without it, either.” A huge file of data came up on the screen. There was a photo. The man was ordinary-looking, with thinning hair and small eyes. Funny, how familiar he looked. He scrolled down to York's home address and smiled. “Isn't modern technology great?” he murmured with a grin. “We could have spent hours trying to run down this information by questioning people who know him.”

“It really does save time,” she replied. “Where does he live?”

“About six blocks from here. He's probably still asleep. We'll wake him up.”

It took less than five minutes, even in morning traffic, to get to the address on the screen. As Brannon and Josette got out of the car, a curtain was pulled back and then released at the front of the house. As they approached the steps, they heard a door slam.

“He's trying to make bush bond!” Brannon said shortly. “Stay back. He may be armed.” He drew his own pistol and started quickly around one side of the house.

Josette felt her heartbeat shaking her as she dis
obeyed Brannon's orders and went around the opposite side of the house. Brannon was trying to head off a criminal by himself. Josette was an office person, not a field agent. Nevertheless, she might be able to spook the man enough to run him back toward Brannon. And even if he had a gun, surely he wouldn't be so desperate as to shoot an unarmed—

As she thought that, a gunshot sang out. Brannon! She rushed around the corner of the house just in time to see a small, balding man who looked strangely familiar whirl at her approach. She felt a stinging pain in her upper arm and heard a firecracker pop half a second later. Funny, her arm felt very heavy.

There was another shot and the man spun around, dropping his gun. Brannon was on him seconds later, whipping him to the ground, jerking his hands behind him. He cuffed him and stood up, reminding Josette absently of the way he used to compete in bulldogging competition in rodeo; she'd seen him throw and bind the legs of calves just that quickly. She wondered why her mind was stuck on such an irrelevant thing, and why she felt so funny.

Brannon glanced toward Josette just to make sure she was okay. But there was a growing red spot on the beige jacket she was wearing, and she looked as if she were about to faint.

Muttering curses, he reholstered his pistol and rushed toward her, with his mobile phone already
out and activated. He phoned 911 as he ran, giving their location, their situation, and a demand for an ambulance and backup.

He caught Josette just as she started to fall. He whipped off his string tie before he eased her to the ground and unbuttoned her jacket, slipping it off her wounded arm.

She lay looking up at him blankly. She began to shake uncontrollably. She laughed. “I feel funny,” she said unsteadily.

“Lie still,” he replied, his expression set and grim as he tore the sleeve of her jacket to get a look at the damage. Thank God it wasn't through the bone, but it was a nasty wound just the same. It had entered and exited through the inside of the biceps, leaving blood pumping out from what had to be a torn artery. He made a tourniquet of his bolo and a retractable pen from his pocket to help stop the flow of blood while he put pressure on the wound to stop the profuse bleeding. “Come on, come on, damn it!” he cursed, looking around for the ambulance with furious pale eyes. He didn't hear a single siren yet.

Josette felt pain where his hands pressed. The driveway was gravel, and it was cold and uncomfortable under her back. She looked up at Brannon's dark, lean face with a sense that she was somewhere else seeing them together on the ground.

“It hit…an artery, didn't it?” she asked. Her
voice sounded strange. Her tongue was so thick, it was hard to talk at all.

“Yes, it did,” he said. He was still pressing down hard where the bullet had entered and exited. There was blood all over his hands, all over her jacket and blouse, all over the ground beside her. It ran into the soil and gravel and she could smell it. There was a metallic smell to blood, she thought, growing weaker by the moment.

“Of all the idiotic things you've ever done in your life…! Hold on, Josie,” he said softly. “Hold on.” He lifted his head again. “Where is that damned ambulance!” he raged, because his best efforts were barely suppressing any of the red flow. She could bleed to death if it wasn't stopped soon.