A Song to Die For (9 page)

The examiner pointed to the victim's left hip. “It's just a flesh wound, but it looks for all the world like a bullet hole to me. Small caliber, probably a twenty-two. She was hit from behind. The exit wound is in front.”

Hooley took his Stetson off and scratched his head. “That doesn't fit the scenario of a boating accident.”

“It's troubling. Especially considering who she is.
Was
.”

“Niece of a mob kingpin,” the ranger said, mostly to himself. “There's no other explanation? Something else struck her?”

Doc Brewster shook his head. “I've seen a lot of bullet wounds.”

Hooley nodded. “Did she chew gum?”

“Pardon?”

“You know … bubble gum, chewin' gum. Can you tell if she was a gum chewer?”

“Sorry, Hooley. I'm pretty sure she didn't dip snuff, but I can't tell if she liked to chew gum. Why?”

“In her car, there was a bag from one of them drive-through burger joints—the one where you talk to the clown.”

“McDonald's?”

“No, the one that jumps out of the box.”

“Jack in the Box?”

“That's it. The bag had a piece torn off of it, and I thought maybe she put her gum in it, but I didn't find any chewed gum in the car anywhere. So … Maybe she used that scrap of paper for something else. Maybe she wrote something down on it.”

“You don't have much to go on with this one, do you?”

“Not yet,” Hooley admitted. He slapped the hat back on his head as he looked down on Rosa's body one last time. He made her a silent promise, then said, “Close her up, Doc. She's gone anyway.”

“Where do you even start?” the examiner asked.

The ranger tugged at his gun belt. “Well, Doc, I guess I'll go fishin'.”

Brewster gave the ranger a slap on the shoulder. “Good luck.”

*   *   *

As he walked to his pickup truck in the parking lot outside of the medical examiner's office, Hooley spotted the KVUE news van turning in off the street. He ducked behind a car and let the van drive by, assuming the reporters were probably searching for information on the dead girl. The press knew Hooley avoided cameras, but always provided colorful footage when cornered. He was an old-school, no-nonsense ranger, and used old Texas vernacular. That's just the way things came out when he spoke, but the press ate it up.

Satisfied that he had given the newshounds the slip, he hightailed it out of the parking lot. It helped that he drove his own Ford pickup more often than whatever vehicle D.P.S. was issuing to Rangers on any given year. The reporters had not caught on to that detail yet.

Two hours later, after having swung by his house in Liberty Hill to hook his bass boat trailer to the back of his pickup, Hooley found himself backing down the boat ramp where Rosa's car had been found. He floated the boat off the trailer, climbed aboard, started the outboard, and motored to the dock where he tied the boat to a cleat. Then he strolled back down the dock and got back in his Ford to pull the empty boat trailer out of the water. He parked in the adjacent lot, taking his gun belt off to leave locked in the truck.

Walking back to the dock, he saw a man and a small boy approaching, the boy wearing cheap, plastic, inflatable flotation devices around his upper arms. The boy was maybe five or six.

“Excuse me, sir,” the man said, seeming unnecessarily nervous, “but are you Hooley Johnson, the Texas Ranger?”

Hooley paused, standing hip-cocked like a horse. “Yep.”

The man offered his hand, so Hooley had to shake it. “I recognized you from the TV, when you were talking about that antiwar riot in Houston a couple of years ago.”

Hooley nodded and looked at his boat.

“I don't want to keep you, but do you mind signing an autograph for my son? Jimmy, shake his hand, he's a Texas Ranger.”

Hooley shook the tike's little hand and took the ballpoint pin and piece of paper from the dad.

“Are you here investigating that girl's death?”

Hooley looked over the top of his sunglasses at the dad. “What do
you
know about that?”

“Me? Nothin'. I just heard about it.”

He handed the autograph back to the man. “You know those little arm floaters don't work. Do me a favor and get Jimmy a real life jacket. Don't use an adult one, either. They slip off. Get him a kid's life jacket.”

“Oh, yes, sir. Okay. I didn't know they didn't work.”

“Have a fine day.” As he turned away, he heard little Jimmy ask:

“Is he a real Texas Ranger?”

“Yes, siree.”

“He looks too old. What position does he play?”

“Not a baseball Ranger,” the dad said, laughing.

Thankfully, they faded out of earshot about that time. Hooley found himself alone on the dock. His bass boat thumped against the pier, waiting for him to board, but he lingered for a bit there on the weathered wooden planks, getting a feel for the crime scene. He had stopped by briefly on Saturday, two days ago, when the call first came in for help from the Texas Rangers. He had been on his way to bust some cattle rustlers, so he had taken just enough time to look over Rosa's car before it was hauled off to the D.P.S. crime lab for processing.

Rosa's car had been abandoned in the parking lot, so it was reasonable to assume that she had boarded a boat here that had taken her out onto the lake, where her body had been found. The pier stood between the boat ramp and a sandy beach that stretched out in front of a little lakeside beer joint. Doc Brewster had found no alcohol in Rosa's bloodstream, but the presence of the bar, called The Crew's Inn, increased the possibility that she had boarded a boat with someone who had been drinking.

“What did you get yourself into, Rosa?” he asked, thinking about the bullet wound to her left hip. Maybe one guy had taken Rosa on a boat ride, making some other guy jealous. Maybe the jealous guy had shot at them as they cruised away. That might spook the boat driver into a high-speed getaway, leading to an accident that threw Rosa through the windshield. Hooley imagined where a shooter might have stood to take such a shot. He strolled down to the end of the pier, looking for shell casings, or whatever. He found nothing of import, but that didn't prove or disprove anything. A semiautomatic handgun might have ejected the shell casing into the water. Or, if the shooter had used a revolver, the empty brass shell wouldn't have been ejected at all.

He took out his tally book and wrote: “divers & metal detector.” Then he waved a big hand at the lake, dismissing it as if fed up with it.

He walked back to his bass boat, got in, cast off, and throttled up the 140-horse Mercury to motor out past the end of the pier. He then killed the outboard and let the boat coast forward. He went to the swivel seat in the front of the boat and lowered the prop of his electric trolling motor into the water at the bow. He picked up his rod and reel, which already had a crank-bait tied onto the five-pound test monofilament line, and made a cast toward a boat dock at someone's lake house. The lure was a Hellbender—one of Hooley's favorites. He could feel it diving and wiggling underwater as he reeled it back in, bumping it off dock pilings and other submerged structures.

He could control the boat with the trolling motor, which he worked with foot pedals. He continued to cast as he looked the crime scene over from different angles. Suddenly—bang! He got a strike from a big bass. He set the hook and began to fight the fish, working it close enough to grab within a couple minutes.

“Good one,” he said to himself, smiling as he reached over the side of the boat to seize the lower jaw of the lunker and lift it aboard. Fried bass fillets would sure make a nice supper, but he wasn't sure he'd have time to mess with the cleaning and filleting of the fish, so he let it swim free. “You lucky bastard,” he said.

He continued to fish his way out of the cove where The Crew's Inn did business.
The Crew's Inn,
he thought, as he fished farther away from the bar.
Clever. Good place to ask questions later.
“Y'all cruise in to The Crew's Inn,” he said aloud, as if cutting a radio ad for the place.

Leaving the cove, the lake widened. He knew Rosa's body had been found floating somewhere in this wider part of the lake, but the sheriff's deputies had not thought to mark the exact spot with a float. These rural counties didn't see enough murders to warrant the training of full-time homicide detectives and sometimes investigations suffered because of it.

Rounding a bend to the left, he saw a small, weathered buoy sticking out of the water ahead, probably marking some hazard just under the surface of the water. He hoped so, because underwater structures made good bass habitat. Trolling and casting, he approached the buoy and found it bobbing over a large sunken tree—probably a big bald cypress that had washed down into the lake on some fence-lifter of a flood. The tree actually broke the surface of the water, but only by half an inch or so, making it a serious boating hazard. Hence the buoy.

“I'll bet there's a big ol' bass under that snag,” he growled. Working the Hellbender low, he felt the hard strike of the fish and jerked back on the rod with gunfighter reflexes to set the hook. This one was even bigger than the first, judging by the fight in the fish. “Get out of there, you…” He held his rod trip high, trying to horse the wise old fish out from under the tree, but it dove deep, making the drag sing on the reel. Then the fish wrapped Hooley's line around a root or something and broke off.

“Goddamnit!” Hooley roared. “That was a two-dollar lure!”

Looking into the water, he realized he was close enough to the sunken deadfall to get a really good look at it now. He could tell from the huge trunk that it was indeed a cypress tree. There was a missing chunk knocked out of it just below the surface. Some boat, in spite of the marker buoy, must have slammed into the thing. The missing chunk indicated a hard hit at high speed. “Damn thing would have launched sky-high like a skippin' stone,” he muttered.

Looking closer, he saw a piece of wood that didn't match the waterlogged grain of the sunken cypress. It was just a splinter that had become lodged in the cypress wood, presumably left behind when some unlucky boater hit the tree. He got down on his belly on the front deck of the bass boat, reached into the water, and plucked the sample from the underwater hazard. “Wooden boat…” he muttered, remembering Doc Brewster's description of antique windshield glass.

For some reason, he thought about little Jimmy's inflatable water wings, then realized what his mind was trying to tell him. A lot of newer boats had flotation devices built in. You could blast a hole in them with a shotgun and they wouldn't sink. But an old wooden boat with a hole in it could easily take on water and sink under the weight of an inboard engine block. Maybe the boat that took Rosa for her last ride had sunk. But if so, how far had it gotten from the crime scene before sinking? It could be anywhere in Lake L.B.J., and the reservoir covered over six thousand acres.

Hooley stowed his fishing rod, and started the Mercury outboard again. Before motoring back to the boat ramp, he took out his tally book and wrote a note only he would understand: “Talk to the clown.”

 

9

CHAPTER

Creed found the guitar-chord gate waiting open at Luster Burnett's Onion Creek Ranch. He pulled his van through, then put his foot on the brake to collect himself. Butterflies swarmed in his stomach. He took a couple deep breaths, nodded his head, then pulled forward on the gravel ranch road. Swinging around a curve, he saw the ranch gate disappear in the rearview mirror. As he drove on, the cedars and mesquites began to thin out, and he knew that had not happened by accident. Luster had left just enough brush along the paved road to provide a visual barrier for seclusion, and to make the ranch look like just another overgrown spread. But farther into the ranch, the cedars and mesquites had been cut down or uprooted, giving way to an open pasture dotted with mature live oaks, native pecan trees, and elms.

All this spoke to Creed. The other gentlemen's ranches along this stretch of back road had fancy gates, new board fences, and cleared pastures along the blacktop—like a bunch of beauty pageant girls screaming “look at me!” while they competed for attention from passersby. Luster, it seemed, just wanted to be left alone behind his veil, though his ranch was perhaps the real beauty among them all.

Continuing his slow drive, mindful of kicking up too much dust, Creed saw seven or eight well-muscled quarter horses behind a cross-fence. A windmill pumped a trickle of water out of a galvanized pipe, into a large stone water tank. The tail fin of the windmill was painted like the Texas flag. The gravel trace continued to wind gracefully among the native oaks, and then straightened through a manicured pecan orchard, the scores of trees standing in soldierly ranks. Coming out of the orchard, Creed saw the house—a rambling two-story limestone structure crowded with some of the biggest live oaks he had seen in Central Texas. Behind the home, a row of tall bald cypress trees reached even higher than the metal roof, just leafing out with green shoots this time of year.

He shut the driver's-side door and listened to his boots crunch the gravel as he walked to the back of the van. He could hear water rushing, wind sighing through treetops, birds singing. The quietude was welcome, compared to the clamorous marina where he lived. He opened the back of the van and grabbed two guitar cases, one holding his electric Fender and the other his acoustic Martin D-28.

Passing through a nicely landscaped entryway, lush with leafy flora, Creed marched up to the door, put one case down, and pushed the electric doorbell. He heard it ring, then heard a voice shout:

“Come on in!”

Creed opened the door, carried his guitars in, and kicked the door shut behind him. “Mr. Burnett?”