Lady Killer

Chapter 2

The last thing Holt Kincaid had expected to encounter when he drove into Colton, Texas, was a traffic jam. According to the information he’d gotten off the Internet, the population still hadn’t topped seven thousand, probably due to the fact that the town was just outside reasonable commuting distance from both Austin and San Antonio, and its residents hadn’t yet figured out how to capitalize on its Hill Country charm and local history to bring in the tourist trade. From what Holt could see, the town’s two main industries appeared to be peaches and rocks, and while there was still an apparently endless supply of the latter-in spite of the fact that nearly all the buildings on the main drag were constructed out of them-the season for the former was pretty much over. And it didn’t seem likely the excess of vehicular traffic was due to rush hour, either, since it was mid-morning and, anyway, in his experience in towns like this, what passed for “rush hour” usually coincided with the start and end of the school day.

Also, it didn’t seem likely that local traffic, no matter how heavy, could account for the high number of vans and panel trucks he was seeing, with satellite antennas sprouting out of their tops and news-station logos painted on their sides.

During his slow progress through the center of town, Holt was able to discern that the excitement seemed to be centered around the elaborate and somewhat oversized Gothic-style, stone-of course-courthouse, which was located a block off the highway, down the main cross street. A crowd had gathered on the grassy square in front of the courthouse, everyone sort of milling around in the shade of several big oak trees, the way people do when they’re bored to death but expecting something exciting to happen any minute.

The sense of anticipation-almost euphoria-with which he’d entered the town, certain he was almost at the end of what had been a long and often frustrating quest, was replaced now by a sense of caution, developed over his long years of experience as a private investigator with a specialty in finding people. While it didn’t seem likely this unexpected gathering of news media could have anything to do with his reason for being here in the town of Colton, he figured it wouldn’t hurt to know exactly what he was getting into the middle of.

A few blocks past the courthouse, the traffic thinned out considerably, and Holt pulled off onto a side street and found a parking spot across from a diner, the inauspicious kind frequented by locals rather than passing-through motorists looking for a familiar franchise.

On his way into the diner, he dropped a quarter into a box dispensing the local newspaper, which he folded in half and tucked under his arm as he made his way past empty booths to take a seat at the counter-also empty, except for a waitress taking her mid-morning coffee break. Holt had an idea the usual denizens of the place could probably be found among the crowd down at the courthouse.

As he was taking his seat on one of the cracked red vinyl and chrome stools, the waitress wiped her mouth with a paper napkin, slid off her stool and swept, with a flourish, around the end of the counter to present herself behind the section he’d just occupied.

“Hi,” she chirped. “My name is Shirley, and I’ll be your server today. How may I help you?” And then she gave a throaty chortle to show she was just putting him on, and said in what Holt imagined was her natural Texas twang, “What can I get for ya, hon?”

Shirley was a heavyset woman in her forties, probably, with Day-Glo red curls piled on top of her head and laugh lines radiating from the corners of her vivid blue eyes. She had a nice smile, so Holt smiled back and said, “Coffee, for starters.” He tilted his head toward the glass case behind the counter. “And maybe a piece of that pie there. Is that peach?”

“Sure is,” Shirley said, beaming. “Local, too. And the season’s ’bout over, so you hit it just right. Can I put a scoop of ice cream on that for ya?”

“No thanks-got to watch my waistline.” He patted himself in that general area, and Shirley gave him a severe look and what could only be described as a snort.

“Oh, sure, like you need to worry. Mister, you turn sideways, you’d just ’bout disappear.” While she was saying this, she was efficiently dishing up a slice of pie and placing it in front of him, with a fork and a spoon beside it.

Holt waited until a mug of steaming coffee had joined the pie, then picked up the fork and said, “Where is everybody?”

Shirley made that same inelegant noise as she leaned against the stainless-steel counter behind her and folded her arms across her ample bosom. “Down at the courthouse, probably. Along with just about ever’body else in this town. It’s where I’d be, too, if I wasn’t stuck holdin’ down the fort here.”

Holt dug into the pie, which was delicious, maybe the best fresh peach pie he’d ever eaten. “I saw the media trucks as I was coming through. What’s all the excitement about?”

Shirley tipped her head toward his left arm. “Well, you could read all about it in that paper you got propping up your elbow there. One of our local deputy sheriffs got killed a couple days ago-by a mountain lion, it looked like. And then they went and arrested his wife-ex-wife, I should say-for murder. Biggest thing to happen around here in a while, I’ll tell you. The whole state of Texas seems to have caught it now, too-because it was a cop that got killed, I guess. Or the lion angle, maybe. Anyway, it sure is a shame. They had a kid, too, a little boy. I guess he’s been staying with the preacher at their church.”

Holt didn’t hear anything more. While the waitress had been talking, he’d unfolded the newspaper and spread it out next to his pie plate. There was the headline, pretty much the way she’d summed it up: Local Deputy Killed By Lion, Ex-wife Arrested, and under that a was photo of the deputy in his dress uniform, complete with Stetson. Holt had started skimming the article and had got as far as the name of the woman who’d been arrested and charged with murdering her ex-husband, Duncan Grant. The name jumped out at him, and it was about like having a rattlesnake coil up and strike right at his chest. Brooke Fallon Grant. Shirley’s voice faded into a soft roar, and hot coffee slopped out of the mug and burned his hand.

“Oh-my goodness. Here let me…” Shirley was there with a towel, mopping up. “Hope ya didn’t burn yourself. Coffee’s pretty hot. Just made a fresh pot…”

He frowned distractedly at her, then relinquished the coffee mug, and she whisked it away and brought him a new one while he tried to absorb the words printed on the newspaper page in front of him.

Mrs. Grant was arrested at her home Thursday morning after an autopsy revealed the presence of large amounts of a tranquilizer in the victim’s body. According to sources at the medical examiner’s office, the drug had evidently been administered by a tranquilizer dart gun, the type used to subdue large animals.

Deputy Grant’s body was discovered by his young son Wednesday afternoon in an animal enclosure on his ex-wife’s ranch. The enclosure had been used to house a mountain lion allegedly hand-raised by Mrs. Grant. The animal was found in close proximity to Deputy Grant’s body and was assumed to have killed him. However, in light of the new evidence revealed by the autopsy, it is not clear now what part the animal might have played in the deputy’s death.

According to information received by this reporter, Mr. and Mrs. Grant had recently been involved in a dispute over custody of the couple’s nine-year-old son.

Arraignment and bail hearing are set to take place Friday afternoon at the courthouse in Colton. A hearing to determine the fate of the mountain lion has not been scheduled, pending further investigation. As the county lacks facilities to house the animal, the mountain lion remains in its compound on Mrs. Grant’s ranch.

In the absence of any known relatives, the couple’s son is being cared for by the pastor of Mrs. Grant’s church pending the outcome of Friday’s hearing.

“Yeah, it sure is a shame.” Shirley was shaking her head. “I used to see Duncan in here now and again. All the deputies like to come in for the pie, you know. I didn’t know him all that well, though-I was a few years ahead of him in school. Never met his wife…I don’t know, though…seems like a pretty heartless thing to do, doesn’t it? I mean, raise a cougar from a cub-or whatever you call a baby one-and then try and blame it for killing somebody? And letting your little boy find his daddy’s body? Hard to imagine a mother doing something like that.”

“Sounds like the paper’s got her pretty much tried and convicted,” Holt said dryly as he slid off the stool and reached for his wallet.

Shirley made that sound again. “Yeah, well, this is kind of a small town, and the local law is real…visible, if you know what I mean. So…you’re not plannin’ on stayin’ around to see how it comes out?”

“Actually, I might stay around for a bit.” He laid some bills down on the counter and picked up the paper and tucked it under his arm. “S’pose you could recommend a nice, quiet motel for me? Or have all these media people got everything booked?”

“Seriously.” She gave him a wry smile as she scooped up the bills with one hand and the dishes with the other. “They’ve been pouring into town all day. I’d say you’d probably have to go a ways to find a room.”

“Yeah, I figured. Thanks, anyway. Great coffee, by the way. And the best peach pie I ever ate.” Holt gave her his nicest smile and turned to go.

“Wait.”

With one hand on the door, Holt turned. Shirley was gazing at him in a speculative way and chewing her lip.

“Okay, look, I don’t know why, but you strike me as a nice guy. There’s a motel just west of here, just off the main drag. It’s called the Cactus Country Inn-it’s not a chain or a Best Western, or anything, but it’s nice. My brother and his wife manage it. They usually keep the room next to their apartment empty, on account of the walls are kinda thin, if you know what I mean. But if you tell ’em I sent you, they’ll probably let you have it. Just don’t throw any wild parties, though, okay?”

“I think I can promise that,” Holt said.

An hour or so later, he sat on the edge of one of two neatly made-up twin-size beds in a fairly decent room-he couldn’t remember if he’d ever been in a motel room that had twin-size beds before-in the Cactus Country Inn. He punched a number on his cell phone speed dial and while he listened to it ring, imagined it ringing in a room far away, in South Carolina, on the shores of a small lake. It rang four times before a machine picked up.

“Hello. You’ve reached Sam and Cory’s place. We’re both away from home right now. Leave us a message, and we’ll get back to you…”

He disconnected and sat for a moment with the phone in his hand, thinking. Then he pulled the laptop that lay open on the bed closer to him, found the page he was looking for, scrolled down the list of phone numbers on it until he came to the one he wanted. Dialed it.

Several minutes and several different numbers later, he’d learned several things. One, his employer was on assignment in the Sudan, and there was no way in hell to reach him. Two, his employer’s wife was also on assignment; only God-and the CIA-knew where.

Three, he was on his own.

Holt Kincaid didn’t often feel frustrated, but he did now. Here he’d finally managed to get a line on one of his client’s missing twin sisters, and there wasn’t anybody he could break the news to.

News that wasn’t good.

And he was very much afraid that if he waited for the clients to return from their various assignments, it might be too late. So, he hesitated for another second, maybe, then scrolled on down to the bottom of the list of phone numbers on his computer screen, to the first one listed under the heading In Case of Emergency. He was pretty sure Sam and Cory would agree that finding the subject of their years-long search about to be locked up for murder would qualify as an emergency.

He punched the number into his cell phone and hit the call button.

Tony Whitehall was sitting on his mother’s patio, watching his numerous nieces and nephews engaged in mayhem disguised as a game of touch football. The game was probably more fraught with violence than it might have been, due to the fact that it was being played on hard bare dirt, since his mother, being more than half Apache and a native not only of America but the great desert Southwest, had better sense than to try to get a lawn to grow on it. His mother did like flowers, though, which she grew in pots near her front doorsteps, where she could water them with a plastic gallon jug. The rest of her landscaping consisted mostly of native plants-junipers and ocotillos and barrel cactus and tamarisks for windbreaks and some stubborn cottonwoods and willows along the creek bed, where for two months or so in the spring a trickle of water actually flowed.

For shade, there was the colorful striped fabric of the umbrellas and awnings, which mostly covered the patio that Tony was enjoying, along with a cold beer, when his cell phone rang. That surprised him, first, because cell phone service out here in the wilds of Arizona wasn’t all that reliable, and second, because most of the people who had his private cell number were already here.

He fumbled around and managed to get the phone out of his pocket and opened up and the right button pushed before the thing went to voice mail. “Yeah,” he said, then remembered to add, “Uh…Tony Whitehall.”

Then he had to stick a finger in his ear to hear the person on the other end, because a gaggle of his sisters were at that moment gathered around their mother on the other side of the patio and were exhorting her loudly and passionately about losing some weight. This was an argument they were bound to lose, since Rosetta Whitehall was quite content with herself just as she was and was countering her daughters’ concerns as she always did by pointing out certain facts: “The women in my family have always been big, and we’ve always been happy, and we make our men happy, too!”

At the moment, Tony was just happy to have his sisters’ attention focused for a few minutes on something else besides him and his persistent state of bachelorhood. The poking and prying and teasing and nagging was something he’d been putting up with since he’d reached the age of puberty, but lately it had begun to grate on his nerves.

The voice in his ear was still an unintelligible mumble, so he said, “Hold on, I can’t hear you,” and got up and walked across the patio and made his way around the corner of the house, where he’d be out of vocal range of both the football game and the sisters. “Yeah…okay. So who did you say this is?”

“Sorry. My name is Holt Kincaid. I’m a private investigator. I’m working for a friend of yours-Cory Pearson-tracking down his brothers and sisters, who got separated from him when he was a kid.”

“Oh yeah…yeah, I knew about that. Found his brothers already, I heard. Fantastic. That’s great. So why are you-”

“Cory gave me your name and number, told me to call you if anything came up while he was on assignment and I couldn’t reach either him or Sam-his wife. So…they’re both on assignment, and…something’s come up. So, I’m calling.”

“Wow. So…what? You find the baby sisters?”

“Well, yeah, one of them, but-”

“Hey, no kidding? That’s great, man!”

“Yeah, well, maybe not. There’s…a problem.”

“Oh, yeah? What kind of problem?”

“It’s a little complicated to explain over the phone, and this is a terrible connection, anyway. How fast can you get to Colton, Texas?”

Gazing off across the dirt yard to where the football game was still in noisy progress, Tony could hear that the voices of his sisters around the corner on the patio had died to a frustrated mutter. Which meant they’d be turning their attention back to him the minute he showed his face again.

“Colton-whereabouts in Texas is that?”

“Uh…roughly southwest of Austin and northeast of nowhere. Hill Country.”

“Okay, how’s about tonight? Say around dinnertime.”

“What? Where in hell are you?”

“At the moment I’m in Arizona, at my mom’s. It’s her birthday. Talk about northeast of nowhere. Otherwise I’d be there sooner.”

“Are you crazy? That’s gotta be eight or nine hundred miles.”

“What? You think I’m gonna drive it? Across West Texas? Now, that would be crazy. Hey, do me a favor, okay? Check and see if this town you’re in has a general-aviation airfield. Failing that, any kind of level airstrip…piece of road-hell, even a cow pasture without too many rocks.”

“I can tell you right now, that’s not gonna happen,” the voice on the other end of the phone said dryly. “But I’ll look into the airfield and get back to you.”

“Cool. I’m on my way.”

Tony disconnected the phone and stuck it back in his pocket, then took a breath and summoned the courage to go and break the news to his mother that he was going to be leaving her birthday party a little sooner than expected.

Brooke’s lawyer was an old-school Texan, a grand-fatherly sort named Sam Houston Henderson, from her father’s old law firm in Austin. He drove her home after the bail hearing and left her surrounded by a welcoming committee consisting of Daniel; Pastor Steven Farley and his wife, Myra; Rocky and Isabel Miranda, her neighbors from across the road who’d been looking after the animals in her absence; and of course, Hilda, who almost knocked them all flat in her exuberant joy at having the missing members of her “flock” all together and back under her protection again. Brooke was glad to be back, too, of course, but her relief was tempered by what the lawyer had told her in the car on the way home.

“Now, Brooke, honey, you know just because the judge granted you bail doesn’t mean you’re out of the woods on this thing. You got bail because you’ve got sole responsibility for your boy and your animals, and because pretty much everything you own is tied up in your place and in that trust your daddy set up for you. So it’s not likely you’d be goin’ anywhere. And it’s also not likely you’d be a further danger to society, so there just wasn’t any justification in keepin’ you locked up. But that is a deputy sheriff and a local boy you’re accused of killin’, so we’ve got one hell of an uphill fight ahead of us. You know that, don’t you?”

“What about Lady?” Brooke had asked.

“Lady-oh, yeah, the cougar. Well, now…”

“Lonnie Doyle is going to do his best to have her put down.”

“I’m gonna be honest with you, Brooke. It’s gonna be tough to argue that lion isn’t a dangerous animal. She did maul your husband-”

“Ex-husband.”

“-and she did draw blood, whether that was what killed him or not. But for now I don’t want you to worry about that. We’ve got some time before they get around to a hearing about the cat, and right now you need to get yourself rested up so we can figure out how to fight this battle we’re in. Okay? Now, you go on and enjoy being with your boy, and have a quiet weekend, and I’ll talk to you next week.”

“Yes, sir,” Brooke had murmured, and now she stood safe in her own home, surrounded by the warmth and love of her son, her dog and her good friends the Farleys and the Mirandas.

“It’s gonna be okay, Mom,” Daniel whispered as he let her hug him longer than usual.

“I know. Of course, it is.” But as she watched Sam Houston Henderson’s taillights turn the corner at the end of the lane, inside she felt nothing but cold and hollow and scared to death.

“Must be nice, having your own plane,” Holt said to his passenger as they sped back to town on the two-lane FM road that connected it to its surprisingly busy airfield. He’d discovered airfields of the kind that served the town of Colton were pretty common in Texas, which made sense, seeing as how airplanes were probably the most practical means of bridging the enormous distances between anyplace and anyplace else in that part of the country.

“Yeah,” Tony said, “the kinds of places my job takes me, sometimes it’s about the only way to get there.” He looked over at Holt. “Matter of fact, it was your client’s wife-Sam-she’s the one that taught me to fly.”

“That right?”

“We had an…adventure, the three of us, a few years back. In the Philippines. Kind of got me hooked on vintage planes, I guess. She was flying a World War II Gooney Bird at the time. Mine’s a little later vintage than that, though-1979 Piper Cherokee. I’ve got her equipped for long-range flying-extra fuel tanks and all that. Places I go, refueling can be a problem.”

Holt glanced at the man taking up what seemed like more than his share of space in the car. From what little chance he’d had to take the man’s measure, Holt couldn’t in any way, shape or form call him overweight, so it must be something to do with charisma, he decided, that made Tony Whitehall seem larger than life. “So, you’re a photographer?”

“Photojournalist,” Tony corrected, but with a forgiving grin.

That was another thing Holt had noticed right away, the easygoing but straightforward manner that made a person both like and trust the man instinctively. He was beginning to see why Cory Pearson had put him at the top of his list of people to go to in an emergency.

“Well, you’re gonna fit right in, in Colton,” he said dryly. “The place is a zoo. Crawling with news media.”

“Yeah?” Tony shifted around to look at him. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with the ‘problem’ you mentioned, would it?”

“It would.” Holt stared at the road ahead and thought about where to begin. Finally, he said, “You said you knew we found the boys, right? Cory’s two brothers. Last summer. Found Wade-the oldest-first. He was a cop up in Portland. And since the two boys had been adopted by the same couple, he put us right in touch with Matt, down in LA.”

“Right, and now you say you found the girls?” Tony prompted, but not in an impatient way.

“One of the girls.” Holt let out a breath. “I thought it was gonna be a cakewalk once I found out they’d been adopted together, too. But turns out the parents were both killed a couple of years ago in a car wreck, along with their biological son-he was quite a bit older than the twins. I found out that this one-Brooke-had married and moved here to Colton. Married a cop, actually. Deputy sheriff. But there wasn’t a thing about the other twin-Brenna. Nothing from high school on. She just disappears at that point. So, anyway, I come here to Colton to get a line on Brooke. Scope out the lay of the land, you know? Like I did when I found Wade. Wanted to see how things were, get an idea who this person was before I went to Cory with it. So we’d know the best way to spring the news, you know?”

“I hear you,” Tony said, nodding. “You don’t just walk up to a stranger and say, ‘Hi, there. I’m the brother you didn’t know you had.’”

“Right. And it’s an even safer bet the twins wouldn’t have any idea about having three older brothers, since they were practically just babies when they all got separated. So anyway, I get to Colton, and I find the town in an uproar because one of their deputy sheriffs has just been killed. Originally, it was supposed to have been a mountain lion that killed him-”

“Oh, wow-I saw something about that. It was on CNN just the other night. The cougar was the guy’s ex-wife’s pet, right? And their little boy found his dad’s body. Supposedly an accident, I thought. I didn’t get a chance to see the news today-it was my mom’s birthday, and the festivities started pretty early. So now-oh, man, don’t tell me. This is the missing twin? The dead guy’s wife?”

“Ex-wife. And it’s not an accident anymore. Seems they found something in the autopsy that puts a whole new light on things. In any event, they’ve arrested my client’s baby sister for murder. First degree, premeditated. And in Texas, don’t forget, they still have the death penalty. And use it.”

Tony uttered a word his mother wouldn’t have approved of.

“My sentiments exactly,” Holt said.

“So what’s the plan?” Tony asked Holt over a club sandwich at a local diner not far from the Cactus Country Inn, where they were staying. A club sandwich was pretty much Tony’s standard order when he was in an unfamiliar eatery, since it was pretty hard to ruin one, but watching Holt chomp into his big, thick, juicy burger, he was beginning to regret his choice. “Somehow I don’t think me being a photographer is going to get me an in with this lady just now.”

The PI nodded as he chewed, then swallowed and said, “Yeah, I know. We’re going to have to come up with something-” He broke off, and Tony watched him in amusement as he coughed and tried not to make it too obvious what he was thinking. Something along the lines of, This guy looks like a bouncer in a mob hangout, and I’m supposed to get him close to a woman who right now is not likely to be trusting anybody short of Dr. Phil? But it didn’t bother him. He was used to it.

“How ’bout the lion?” he said, taking pity on the guy. “I can make it about the cat.”

Holt raised his eyebrows over his burger as he prepared to take another bite. “Hmm. Maybe.”

“No, seriously. I’ve done some wildlife pieces before. The reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone, poaching elephant ivory…stuff like that. Plus-” he grinned around the sandwich he was biting into “-I have a thing for mountain lions.”

Holt’s eyes narrowed. “A…thing.”

Tony thought, Me and my big mouth. He didn’t know what it was that had made him mention to this stranger something so personal he hadn’t even told his best friends, Cory and Sam, about it. But it had been the reason the CNN piece had caught his attention in the first place-the bit about the lion. Now he had to find some way to explain without giving up more personal information than he wanted to. “It’s an Indian thing. It’s my spirit animal. Or so my mama says.” He gave a self-deprecating half shrug.

“No kidding? ‘My brother, the lion’-that kind of thing?”

“A little more than that. Hey, it’s complicated, and to tell you the truth, I’m not sure my mama’s people-they’re Apache-were totally into that, anyway. I think she just told me that spirit messenger stuff when I was a little kid to make me get over being scared.”

“Of the bogeyman, you mean.”

“Something like that.” And that was as far as Tony was willing to go on the subject. “Anyway, let’s just say I can make a pretty good case for why she ought to let me do a piece on her cougar.”

“Sounds good to me,” Holt said as he polished off the last bite of his burger and reached for his coffee. “Let’s hope it’s good enough.”