Blue Jeans and a Badge (16 page)

Tossing her suitcase into the passenger seat of her Volvo, she revved up the motor and squealed out of the parking lot.

It was when she swerved to avoid mowing down the row of mailboxes across from the Shamrock Slipper that she realized she had no brakes.

 

For the twenty-seventh time since Luce had stormed out of his house, Philip started counting the knotholes in the cedar beams holding up his bedroom ceiling. So far he'd only made it to thirty-eight knots—about a third of the beams—before the thoughts and recriminations took over his consciousness, forcing him to start counting over.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Why hadn't he told her about the condom right away? He should listen to his own advice. Keeping secrets only led to disaster. Would he never learn the lesson of his father's example?

Now he'd lost her. The only woman he'd ever loved so much it made his very soul ache to contemplate a future without her.

He'd tried everything to make her love him back, but in the end his love hadn't been enough to tempt her to stay. And the thought of having a child with him had made her run like the devil for the hills.

The phone rang but he let the machine pick up in the kitchen, preferring to stay in bed and stare at the ceiling. He listened impassively to the barely audible drone of his own voice giving the usual instructions. Then a man came on the line, saying Philip's name. Ted maybe?

He didn't feel like talking to Ted.

He heard his name again, louder this time. Yeah, yeah. Hell, Ted probably wanted to talk to Luce, anyway. Let him
call her cell phone. Unless there was blood involved, the chief of police was taking the day off.

“Philip!” he heard Ted yell distinctly over the line all the way from the kitchen. “Pick up the goddamn phone!
Now!
”

“Jeez. All right, already,” he muttered. The man obviously had a bug up his nose about something he considered important. Philip grudgingly picked up the phone, just to get rid of the bastard. “What?” he growled in what he hoped were icy tones.

“I don't want you to get all upset or anything. Everything's fine,” Ted assured him. Great. Then he could hang up. He was just about to do so when Ted said, “But Luce has been in an accident.”

 

Philip desperately searched the kitchen table for his keys. They weren't there for some reason, and he had to find them fast.
Luce had been in an accident.
He plowed through the odds and ends on the counter, scattering them to the four corners of the room.

Damn!

He went for his spare keys in the bottom drawer and stormed out to the parking area, only to find the Jeep missing.

Damn!
Luce had taken it. She must have been in the Jeep for her accident. That was good. The Jeep had a roll bar that would protect her. If she'd had her seat belt on.

He sprinted to the garage and fired up the Harley, making it to town in about half his usual time.

The Slipper, Ted had said. She'd crashed into the Slipper's patio. How the hell could she have done that? She must have been really upset with him.
Really
upset.

He groaned, roaring around the final curve like a madman.

What he saw made his heart stall.

 

“About time the local constabulary showed up.”

Betsy sniffed at Philip and put a shielding hand on Luce's
shoulder. Luce was sitting at a back table, holding her head in her hands and ignoring him. Betsy glared at him as if he were a serial killer, not her old friend.

“What happened?” he demanded, with perhaps a bit too much vehemence. “Luce, talk to me.”

“I crashed,” she mumbled under her hands. “And I don't want to talk to you.”

“That's too damn bad,” he said, endeavoring to keep his temper under control. “Because I'm the law in this town, and you have no choice.”

“You can talk to me,” Betsy interjected. “I saw the whole thing.”

“Well?” he asked, planting his fists on his hips. “What happened?”

“She said you had a fight and she didn't notice her brakes weren't working right. She crashed into the patio. Luckily it was between breakfast and lunch rushes.”

“Her brakes weren't working right? Did you tell Ted?” Ted had been outside examining the wreckage of Luce's car and the remains of the Shamrock Slipper outdoor patio dining area when Philip had pulled up. He hadn't stopped to chat.

“I told him,” Luce muttered.

“What were you fighting about?” Betsy asked, condemnation dripping from her voice.

“She's pregnant,” he said evenly, making Betsy gasp and Luce finally drop her hands to glare at him.

“I am not,” she seethed.

“Prove it,” he dared. She just set her teeth.

“Well, that didn't take you long,” Betsy declared with a huff and marched away. No doubt to spread the word among the townsfolk drifting into the restaurant because of the excitement.

Ha. Suited him fine.
He
wasn't the one running away.

“How dare you tell everyone our personal business!”

“How dare you run away from me?”

“I wasn't running away.”

“You were doing a damn good imitation.”

Ted strode up, angrily wiping his hands on an oil-caked towel. “The brake line was punctured.”

“What?” he and Luce said in unison. Then Philip swore, and she muttered, “My insurance rates are going to go through the roof for this. Must have run over something really sharp.”

“No,” Ted said, a nasty look on his face. “You don't understand. It was
deliberately
punctured.”

Her face went whiter than a sheet. “You mean someone
wanted
me to crash?”

Philip let out another oath. “That's it.” He pointed a finger at her. “
You
are not going anywhere, do you understand me? You do not leave my sight. Not until all of this, and I do mean
all
of this, is straightened out.”

She jumped up, and for a second he thought she was going to take a swing at him. Then she turned green, slapped a hand over her mouth and ran for the bathroom.

He stalked after her, bracing his hands on the frame when she slammed the door in his face and locked it. “Luce, are you all right?” He could hear the stifled sounds of her being sick. “Luce, let me in.”

Her muffled answer made his brows hike.

“Sweetheart, I know you're mad, but—” He heard her throw up again. He rattled the handle. “Luce. Is this…morning sickness or are you scared? I know you're upset—”

The door flung open.

“Just. Shut. Up. Please,” she said through gritted teeth.

The door slammed again, and he stepped back to avoid a broken nose. Sticking his hands in his pockets, he turned to find Ted and Betsy standing there watching, along with about ten other customers behind them. None looked happy. In fact, the term lynch mob came to mind.

“Oh, stop it,” he said with a grimace. “
She's
the one who was leaving town.” He banded his arms over his chest and stared at them till they all went away. Except for Ted, who motioned him over to the nearest table.

“Leave her be for a few minutes,” he said. “We need to talk, anyway.”

Reluctantly, Philip left his post at the rest room door and went to straddle a chair at the table. Facing the bathroom.

“The brakes were deliberately tampered with?” he asked.

His friend nodded. “A hole poked in the line. Must have happened a few days back because most of the brake fluid had already leaked out. Good thing. Otherwise she'd probably gone over the side of the mountain farther down the road.”

Red-hot anger seared through him, then he got dead calm. Nobody messed with his woman. Nobody who wanted to live.

“Who?” he asked.

Ted searched his face. “Don't forget you're a cop, O'Donnaugh. Murder is frowned on in these parts. Even if the bastard deserves it.”

“Who?” he repeated.

Ted shook his head. “Don't know. My money is on the same person or persons who tossed her room at the Lakeview.”

“Ever get any prints off that?”

“Yeah, about five dozen. Still eliminating previous motel guests.”

“Any matching prints from the plane wreck yesterday? Or the military cache?”

“I've got a deputy coordinating that. We're dusting the car right now. By the way, we got the prelim back this morning from the M.E. on Clyde Tafota.”

“And?”

“Clyde was shot.”

Philip felt his blood stall in his veins.
“Shot?”

“Yep. And you'll never guess with what.”

Ah, hell. Hell and damn. “What?” he asked.

“The same gun that was used twenty-eight years ago to kill Peter Santander.”

Right in front of him he heard a gasp.

Luce! She started to fold like an accordion. He lurched from his chair and caught her just before she hit the floor.

“B
aby, wake up. Sweetheart, come on, now.”

The black muzziness slowly receded. Luce felt a gentle slap on her cheek. She opened her eyes to see Philip peering worriedly down at her.

“Hit me again, O'Donnaugh, and I'll be forced to take measures.”

Relief flooded his handsome features. “Thank God.”

“What happened?” She had a vague notion, but wanted it confirmed.

“You fainted.”

That's what she was afraid of. She snorted. “Try again, lawman. Bounty hunters don't faint.” If she didn't feel so lousy, she'd be embarrassed.

“I suppose they don't puke their guts out, either,” he said.

“You got it.” She shifted and realized he was sitting on the restaurant floor and she was sprawled across his lap, reclining in his arms.

He pushed a stray lock from her cheek. “You heard that last part? About the gun?”

“Yeah.” She sat up and he helped her, holding her in case she went down again. She raked her hands through her hair and held her temples, trying to stop the spinning in her head. “It's them, isn't it? Whoever killed Peter and Maria. They're after me now. Because they think…”

Ted elbowed through the crowd surrounding them. “They'd be right.” He hunkered down, his gaze flicking between hers and Philip's. “Just got a call from Albuquerque. The DNA test was a match.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, and Philip tightened his grip on her, pulling her to his chest. She felt his lips on her forehead. “Congratulations, honey,” he whispered.

Yeah. Right. This should be one of the best moments in her life, and all she wanted to do was cry. She'd finally found her lost parents, but they were dead and she'd never get to know them. She wrapped her arms around him, trying to quell the chaos in her mind. A hopeless task.

“Can you stand up?” he asked. She nodded. “Good. I'm taking you to the station. It's quiet there and we can talk through everything.” He turned to Ted. “Can you come over when you're done here?”

“Sure thing. I'll bring the paperwork.”

“Speaking of which, where's the Jeep?”

“The Lakeview,” she told him.

Ted tossed him his keys. “Take the cruiser. I'll walk.”

She hadn't been to the Piñon Lake Police Station before. She hadn't even realized there was one. The chief didn't seem to spend a lot of time there.

Five minutes later Luce was ensconced in one of four rocking chairs surrounding an old woodstove at the station. The cold snap from yesterday was still going strong, so she had a wool blanket on her lap and Philip was putting a match to the fire already laid in the black stove.

Desperate for something else to think about besides the
DNA results and the lecture she was about to get from Philip about running away, she looked around. Philip's police station was like something out of
Mayberry,
or the Old West. Ancient oak furniture, solid as the mountains outside the windows, giant desk and office chair, an old-fashioned, glassed-in bookcase and oak file cabinet. Oak gun rack. Oak paddle fan in the ceiling. Oak paneling. Probably oak spindles on the holding cell in back.

She smiled.

“What?” he asked, pulling one of the other rockers close to hers.

“Very Americana. All you need is a Norman Rockwell print.”

He glanced around with a wry grin. “Not exactly my style. But I do like it. Makes me feel very…”

“Wyatt Earp?”

He chuckled. “Yeah.”

“Suits you.”

He eyed her wryly. “Is this one of those conservative cracks again?”

She matched his smile. “It has its charms, as I recall.”

“Thank you. I think.” He took her hand, his expression turning somber. “Listen, Luce—”

She held up the other. “Wait.” She had a pretty good guess what was coming. “Before you yell at me, please let me say something first.”

“I wasn't going to yell at you.”

“Yes you were, and maybe I deserved it for running off like that earlier. But here's the thing, Philip. In the past few hours my whole life has gone to hell. First you inform me I may be pregnant, then someone tries to kill me, then I find out who my real parents were and—guess what—they were murdered.”

“Let me help you.”

“I'm not saying no. I just can't deal with this stuff all at once.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I just don't want to make a bad decision, or say something I'll regret, which is one of the reasons I left like I did this morning.”

He didn't look happy. But to his credit, he didn't argue. “You're saying you want to deal with things one at a time?”

“It's the only way I'll get through it.”

He let out a quiet sigh and leaned his elbows on his knees. “All right. I understand. But I want you to know one thing.”

“Okay.”

He met her gaze. “If you run away again, I'll hunt you down.”

He said it with his usual calm, but she could feel the blunt intensity of his words clear to her toes. She shivered. He meant it.

She couldn't help wondering whether it was her or his baby he wanted so much he'd track her to the ends of the earth—which she had no doubts he'd do.

Suddenly she got it. She understood what he'd been saying that morning. Why he'd delayed telling her about the ripped condom.

Her heart sang. It was
her
he wanted that badly.

She prayed she was right.

She turned to him, opened her mouth to ask, but just then Ted walked in.

“Forensics is at the Slipper. They said they were thinking about opening a branch in Piñon Lake, all the business you've been giving them lately.” Ted set a full carafe of coffee on the woodstove, a bag on one of the free rockers and tossed Philip a set of keys.

“Very funny.” Philip looked at the keys. “You got the Jeep from the Lakeview?”

“Figured you'd need it. I found the insurance card in the glove compartment and called your insurance company. They are sending a tow truck and an adjuster,” he said to Luce. “I told them you'd be here. Want some coffee? Betsy sent it. Decaf.”

She smiled gratefully. “I'd love some.” She'd have to remember to thank the woman for taking such good care of her through all this. It suddenly struck her a community like this would be a great place to raise a child.

No. She wasn't going there. Not yet.

Ted walked to a cupboard for mugs, and Philip said, “I'll be right back. I think I left those files in the Jeep. The ones from the plane yesterday.”

When he returned, they all sat around the woodstove sipping coffee and going through the stuff from the files. It was as good a place as any to start. And it felt a lot safer than thinking about…other things.

“I'm sure an accountant could decipher this stuff,” Philip said after glancing over his pile for a moment. “Looks like these were photocopied from a bookkeeping ledger book. But I can't make head nor tail of it. And I don't see how it could prove anyone's innocence. A ledger can be faked, can't it?”

“Maybe that's what they were trying to prove,” Luce said. “Look. Down here at the bottom of the page there is a P.S. It says ‘Terminate.' So, maybe Hidalgo Industries fired the accountant based on whatever was recorded in this ledger.”

“Possibly. But it doesn't explain why Clyde would risk breaking into Soffit and Dickson to steal it. He wasn't related to the accountant. And all this happened thirty years ago.”

“So the files must contain something else important. Something still relevant today.”

“What's in your file?” Philip asked her.

She fanned through the papers and quickly read the headings. “A pile of legalese stuff. The court papers—filings, motions, the original charges. What do you have, Ted?”

Ted looked thoughtful. “There's just one paper in this file. It's a memo from a Hidalgo vice president asking about some top-secret out-of-state shipment.”

“That's not unusual,” Philip pointed out. “Half the stuff Hidalgo Industries manufactures is top-secret military technology. And they ship to bases all over the country.”

“True. But I'm thinking something must have gone wrong with this shipment because there's also a P.S. on this memo. It says ‘Urgent. Terminate book immed.'”

“Hmm. Maybe the accountant thought this was proof of the real culprit, the one who faked the books.”

“Who wrote it?” Luce asked.

Ted glanced up at the memo header. “Well, well. Your friend Donald Hidalgo. He must have been VP while his father was still alive.”

Luce stared at him. “Donald Hidalgo?” As in her probable newfound uncle?

“I'll admit, lately he'd risen to the top of my list of suspects for Maria's death.”

Luce was floored. “Why?”

“Because he had the most to gain. He ended up with both their shares in the company. Enough for a majority on the board. It was Peter I couldn't figure out. And now Clyde.”

Nobody had to say why he'd be after Luce. If she was a long-lost heir…

Philip's expression went deadly. “Well, how's this for another coincidence…guess who owns a cabin that shares the airstrip where we found Clyde yesterday?”

“Donald Hidalgo?” she asked, more and more dismayed over where this was leading.

“The family summer house.”

Ted's forehead pleated. “Oh, my God. How could I have missed it? That's the cabin where—” He halted abruptly and snapped his gaze to Luce.

She put a hand over her mouth to prevent the sound of anguish that clawed at her throat. He didn't have to finish the sentence. It was obvious.

That was the cabin where her father had been shot and killed.

 

Donald Hidalgo.
Philip met Ted's gaze and knew exactly what Ted was thinking. Hidalgo Industries was at the heart
of all the crimes they'd been investigating, and Donald Hidalgo was at the heart of Hidalgo Industries.

“It's him, isn't it?” Luce said, her voice a thready whisper. “He's the one responsible for everything. For the missing chip shipment, the cache of stolen military hardware, for Clyde's murder and for my parents'…”

“Sweetheart, we don't know that,” he interrupted before she could say out loud what they were all thinking. “It's just conjecture at this point. Maria was his own sister, for crying out loud. He'd have to be a monster.”

“Can you get a search warrant?” she asked. “For the cabin?”

He swiped a hand over his mouth and glanced at Ted, who looked grim. “I don't see how. There's no hard evidence linking him to any of this.”

“What about the memo?”

“It's thirty years old,” he explained in frustration. “The statute of limitations has run out on any embezzling or theft it concerned. To be admissible it would have to prove a murder.”

Suddenly a thought struck him like thunder. And apparently the others, as well, because all at once, all three lunged for the file folder Luce had dropped onto the floor beside her rocker.

“Peter Santander was a bookkeeper at Hidalgo, right? What's the accountant's name?” Ted asked when Luce got to it first.

“It's not Peter Santander,” she said, voice still quavering. “I would have noticed.” She scanned over the papers. “No, they all say the defendant's name is…Jerome Gardner.” She passed a few sheets to Ted.

Philip frowned, plucking up the other files. There was something niggling his mind about the ledger pages. And the memo in Ted's file. “Maybe he worked under Gardner.”

“Yes! Here!” she exclaimed, reading one of the legal papers from her file more carefully. “It's a statement, in some
kind of a motion. It starts out, ‘According to a statement by bookkeeper Peter Santander, who was the person who discovered the discrepancies between shipments sent and shipments received—'” She looked up, eyes filled with pain. “I can't believe it. This is why they were killed, isn't it? It wasn't over Maria's affair at all. It was about the military thefts and…Donald Hidalgo's greed.”

And that easily, the puzzle pieces fell into place. Philip swore, gaping at the memo from Ted's file. There it was, plain as day. All the evidence they needed.

P.S. Urgent. Terminate book immed.

“This P.S. doesn't mean post script,” he said hoarsely, holding up the half sheet of paper. “And it doesn't refer to a financial ledger. This is a contract to terminate the bookkeeper, P.S.—
Peter Santander.
”

 

It didn't take long to arrange for a warrant to search the Hidalgo cabin. Rather than sit around waiting for it to arrive, Philip and Ted decided to drive up to the cabin and meet the messenger there.

Naturally Luce insisted on going. Short of locking her in the holding cell at the back of the station, there was nothing he could do to stop her. She would have hitchhiked if she'd had to, so he grudgingly relented.

They took Ted's cruiser. Philip was too wound up to drive. When they arrived, he knew better than to ask Luce to stay in the car.

“Just, please, be careful,” he said, his gaze dipping involuntarily to her belly. “If you feel faint, sit down.”

Her mouth parted slightly, then her hand went to the same spot. “I will,” she said.

“That's my girl.”

They all drew their weapons and crept the last dozen yards to the edge of the trees surrounding the log cabin. Well, log cabin was a slight understatement. The place was massive. Two rambling stories and probably a basement. Detached
two-car garage. He stopped assessing the impressive architecture to search for signs of life.

Everything seemed quiet.

Ted motioned them to fan out, him to the left, Luce to the right. Ted was going to knock on the front door. They all mounted the wraparound porch and took up their positions. Ted knocked. No one answered. He knocked again. Still nothing. Luce indicated she was going around to the back.