In Big Trouble

Chapter 22

"Obstruction of justice," Al Guzman said, as if reading from a mental grocery list. "Accessory after the fact. Criminal trespassing. What else? There's gotta be more. Maybe I'll have your car towed down to a garage, make sure it meets our safety standards, check your dog's license, impound it if you don't have your rabies certificate number. Then again, if there was a felony charge for being estupida, I'd have you on a dozen counts of that."

Tess regretted not following Crow out the window. She was persona non grata at SAPD, the city's most unwelcome visitor since Santa Anna, to hear Guzman tell it. Rick was sulking, convinced that she had put him at risk for possible disbarment. A. J. Sheppard, who had sat a long, lonely vigil at Espejo Verde, only to be picked up by the cops, no longer wanted to be her new best friend. As for Steve Villanueve, who glimpsed her in the hallway, he just shook his head sadly.

"So what do you think?" Guzman demanded. "Would your boyfriend come back for you if I lock you up? Or is he running toward the border with Emmie Sterne? I guess what I'm really asking is if you were a willing accomplice or a dupe."

"C'mon, Guzman," Rick said, rousing himself from his funk. "She was trying to help. She kept the story out of the media for the short term, no easy trick when one of the most aggressive reporters in town is on the scene. By calling me and asking me to meet her at Ed Ransome's apartment, she was trying to ensure he turned himself in. I was on the line with you when he went out the back window. What do you think, I was calling you to chat? Besides, how far could he get? He left his car and, according to him, he was low on funds."

"Low on funds? I think not. He's got his trust fund money, if my hunch is right. If not, then maybe he's got fifty thousand dollars that he took from Tom Darden and Laylan Weeks. Which makes their deaths capital crimes, by the way. Death penalty crimes, which isn't something we take lightly here in Texas, Miss Monaghan. We put more prisoners to death last year than any other state in the union. Year before last, half of the death row prisoners executed in the United States were executed right here in Texas."

"You must be very proud," Tess said.

"Go back to the fifty thousand dollars," Rick said, giving her a will-you-shut-up look.

Guzman had a chair, but he preferred to sit on the edge of the table, well into Tess's personal space. He was astute, he had figured out that such closeness made Tess feel nervous. And when she felt nervous, Tess was inclined to blurt out whatever occurred to her, as she had just demonstrated.

"We've had Darden and Weeks under surveillance since they got out of prison two months ago," Guzman began.

"Not very close surveillance, apparently," Tess said. She really couldn't stop herself. If only Guzman would move even an inch away from her, she might be able to have an unexpressed thought.

"I'm not talking day in, day out. They weren't the smartest two ex-felons around, but they'd know if we were on their ass, and they'd have gotten some slick little defense attorney to come after us for messing with their constitutional rights. After all, they paid their debt to society. Ran up a bigger debt while they did it, but that's how it works."

"As a professional devil's advocate, I have to point out that they did their time-twenty years," Rick put in. "If you ask me, the person who represented them ought to be in prison."

"Hey, I got no problem locking up lawyers," Guzman said meaningfully. "Anyway, they were always talking over at Huntsville how they had this money coming to them. The usual brag. Someone owes us fifty thousand dollars for this thing we pulled, we'll get paid when we get out, going to buy us some new motorcycles. But, lo and behold, they come out, and pretty soon they're flashing money all over this town, paying cash for all sorts of things. New Harleys, hundred-dollar tabs at Hector's."

Tess and Rick exchanged a look.

"Yeah, Hector's," Guzman said. "Biker bar south of the city, where a girl named Emmie Sterne and a guy named Ed Ransome happen to play in an after-hours band."

"If they were making a big show of how much money they had, anyone could have killed them for it," Tess offered. "They probably didn't have the sweetest friends in the world."

Guzman pretended to think about this. "Yeah, right. Darden and Weeks come out of prison, score a bunch of money somewhere, and someone kills them for it, then stashes one body outside a house in Twin Sisters, where Emmie and her friend happened to spend a few weeks this summer. Then the other guy shows up at Espejo Verde. Pure coincidence. By the way, how close did you get, Miss Monaghan? Did you get a good look?"

"Not very."

"You see something kind of orange on the table? More red than orange, I guess, but it started out gold?"

The T-shirt, the goddamn T-shirt.

"It happens to be a shirt from someplace called Cafe Hon in a place called Bal-tee-more, Maryland." He put a lot of Latin spin on those last two words, as if it were a ridiculous-sounding place for anyone to be from. "You know anyone with a T-shirt like that?"

"I do, for one. Lots of people have Cafe Hon T-shirts," Tess replied. "They put them in local hotel rooms, like Bibles or terry-cloth robes. It's practically a city ordinance that you're not allowed to leave without one."

But to her knowledge, there was only one the color of a mango.

"Do you know how Frank Conyers died?" Guzman asked. The question sounded random and sudden, but Tess doubted the detective ever said or did anything without having a reason.

"Everyone knows about the triple murders, Guzman," Rick said in a bored voice. "He was killed with Lollie and the cook that night."

"Not when, how. You see, Lollie and the cook, Pilar Rodriguez, they died nice and neatly, as these things go. Bullets in the back of the head. Frank Conyers was carved up as if someone was trying to make menudo out of him."

"Menudo?" asked Tess.

"Tripe stew," Rick said.

"They disemboweled him," Guzman said helpfully. "See, I was trying to be nice, but Trejo here made me spell it out. Conyers's throat was slit. So was Weeks's. Conyers was disemboweled-"

"So was Weeks," Tess finished for him.

"You saw?"

"I guessed. What about the fingers, though? Does that correspond, too?"

Guzman frowned. "No, that's a new touch. But it's the other stuff that intrigues me. We never made the details of Conyers's death public, yet someone knows. Someone who Darden and Weeks were going to lead us to this summer."

"A third person?" Rick asked.

"Three bodies, three killers. It has a nice symmetry to it, doesn't it? Or, at least-no, that's all I'm going to tell you right now. You already got more than you ever gave. I'm not telling you another thing until you tell me where to find Ed Ransorne and Emmie Sterne."

Tess said dully, "Crow's gone, God knows where. If I knew where Emmie was, I'd have been there already. And you'd have been right behind me. Unless you were right in front of me. From what I can tell, the cops have been surrounding me like bookends all week. I go someplace, you've been there. I look behind me, and you're there. If I stopped suddenly, one of your guys would step on my heel."

Guzman sighed and-finally-moved away from her. Not by much, but at least she no longer felt as if he were all but sitting in her lap.

"I don't know what to do with you, Theresa Monaghan," he said. "Maybe I should lock you up, maybe I should have you under surveillance. It all depends on if you're crazy like a fox, or just stupid like a, like a-like a hamster." He continued to scrutinize her, as if her animal orientation might be found in her face.

"And?" she said at last, losing the stare-down.

"Go home," he said. "Don't wear yourself out on your little exercise wheel."