Hog Heaven (11 page)

“Boar or sow?” Red called out, but Armando was already through the door, which slammed behind him.

It was tempting to confront the tall redheaded man immediately, but Bobby Garza resisted, and simply watched as the three dog runners climbed into the big diesel truck and went south on Highway 281. Garza followed at a distance.

After less than a quarter-mile, the truck took a left into the lot for the Hill Country Inn. Garza went past, then turned left and parked in the lot for Ronnie’s Pit BBQ. If the diesel truck left the inn, he’d see it.

He scrolled through the contacts in his cell phone until he found the name he was looking for—Jerry Sharp, the sheriff of Jasper County for several decades.

“Bobby Garza! How the hell are ya?”

“Doing real good, Jerry, and you?”

“Quiet around here lately, and I think I have you to thank. I heard about the pig scramble going on in your neck of the woods. Anyone get the right pig yet?”

“Not so far.”

“Boy, if I had an extra fifty grand, I believe I could go ahead and retire, and damn, wouldn’t that be nice.”

Garza smiled. “Come on over and give it a shot.”

“Hell, I’m too old for that. Must be a madhouse over there.”

“Believe it or not, things haven’t been as crazy as you’d think. We figure most of these guys want the reward so bad, they don’t want to blow their chances by getting busted. So they’re staying out of trouble, for the most part. Plus, there’s no need to trespass, because the locals recognize a gold mine when they see it.”

“Meaning there’s some high-dollar day leasing going on?”

“Exactly. Some of these ranches haven’t been hunted in years, but now they’re open for business.”

“Well, something must’ve happened over there, or you wouldn’t be calling me.”

“Yeah, there’s something I’m hoping you can help me with.” Garza went on to describe Marlin’s run-in with the man across the ravine on the widow’s property.

“Your warden okay?” Sharp asked.

“He’s fine. Thinks maybe the guy was playing mind games.”

“Did he get a good look at the shooter?”

“Not so great, because the sun was in his eyes. But he knows the man was very tall. Six-four, six-five. Wearing an orange cap.”

“Blaze orange?”

“Darker. More like burnt orange.”

There was a slight pause. Then Sharp said, “Any chance the guy actually had orangish hair?”

Garza grinned. “I was hoping you’d ask that, but I didn’t want to lead you. You know someone who meets that description?”

“Oh, you bet I do. Gilbert Weems. One of my best customers. And I’m telling you right now to be careful with that one.”

“How so?”

“The man is about a full-on sociopath, if you want my opinion. Violent as hell. Gets in bar fights about once a month, usually beating up some poor son of a bitch pretty bad. His girlfriend filed a protective order against him last year for breaking her nose, but she dropped it later. He’s a cruel dude, and he gets off on being a bad boy. This whole deal—taunting your warden, and sending a couple shots in his direction—that sounds exactly like something Weems would do. Just a matter of time before he kills someone.”

“Sounds lovely. Who does he hang with?”

“That’s easy. He ain’t got but two friends—Dustin and Dylan Bryant. Twin brothers. They’re no angels, but they ain’t nearly as bad as Weems. Weems is always the instigator.”

“How are these Bryant brothers on loyalty?”

“Meaning would they flip on Weems? Hell, yeah, if they were facing serious charges. In a heartbeat.”

Roy Ballard, the legal videographer, considered it a bonus when the subject of his surveillance was a gorgeous woman. Was that sexist? Maybe. He could live with that. After all, if you were going to spend a lot of hours—if not days or even weeks—watching someone, it was undeniably a more enjoyable experience if the subject was female and easy on the eyes, like Leigh Anne Beech.

Right now, Roy was watching Leigh Anne’s tail end—well, her BMW’s tail end—as it cruised east on Highway 290 toward Austin. Ballard was about two hundred yards back. Barely a dot in her rearview mirror. A discreet distance. Didn’t matter if he lost her temporarily, because the GPS tracking device he’d installed on the BMW would lead him straight to her via real-time maps on Roy’s laptop or cell phone. It would also provide details if she went anywhere when Roy wasn’t following her. Helpful, because he couldn’t follow her 24 hours a day. Had to sleep sometime. And Grady Beech had agreed to alert Roy when he knew in advance that Leigh Anne was planning to leave the house.

“It’s not about Sammy,” Grady Beech had said the previous morning. “It’s about Leigh Anne. My wife.”

It was easy to predict what was coming after that, but Roy had asked anyway. “What’s up with your wife?”

Beech didn’t just spit it out right away. He had to work up to it. Hem and haw. Beat around the bush. Roy could understand that. He figured he’d do the same thing if he was in Beech’s position. Hard to say something like that out loud to another man. What Beech eventually said was, “Well, I could be wrong about this. I probably am, and this will give me some peace of mind. Maybe I’m crazy or imagining things, or maybe there’s an innocent explanation...”

“But...”

“Some things have happened in the past year or so that make me think Leigh Anne might be having an affair.”

“What kind of things?”

“She’s always been a big shopper, but now she’s going several times a week. Always going to Austin or San Antone. I know she does actually go shopping sometimes, because she comes home with bags of stuff. Other times, nothing. She says she was just looking.”

“Well, you know, women do that. They can shop for ten hours and come home with one item that cost three dollars.”

“Oh, I know. And that’s what I’ve been telling myself.”

“Maybe she’s just bored.”

“Could be. I hope so. She doesn’t answer the phone much when she’s shopping, and that makes me wonder, too. What’s she doing that she can’t answer the phone? Speaking of her phone—that’s something else that bothers me. She’s always texting. Way more than she used to. And one time—well, I’m not proud of this, but she was in the shower, so I snooped around on her phone. Learned that she doesn’t save any of her texts. Deletes them all.”

Roy didn’t say anything. It did sound a little fishy.

“And the last thing,” Beech said, “is that she isn’t much interested in sex lately. At least not with me.” He gave a pained grin. “How’s that for laying it all on the table?”

Roy said, “I don’t want to pry, but—”

“Pry all you need to.”

“Was she more interested in sex in the past?”

“Oh, yeah. Not like oversexed or anything, but she was interested. She’s not inhibited. She always had what I’d call a healthy appetite.”

“How long ago did her interest drop?”

Beech sort of shrugged. “It just slowly went away. Nothing abrupt.”

“Has she had any affairs before that you know about?”

Beech looked away for a minute, then simply shook his head. “None that I know of, and none that I suspected.”

So Roy had agreed to help Beech out. Roy’s partner was working on a case of her own—a case that required only one person—so Roy’s schedule was open. Roy had never conducted surveillance on a spouse suspected of cheating, but now, as he followed Leigh Anne Beech, he found himself hoping it was a misunderstanding on Grady’s part.

When Leigh Anne Beech reached the west side of Austin, she went north on Loop 1. Way north. Past Research Boulevard, past Braker Lane, to an upscale shopping center called The Domain. She went inside Neiman Marcus and met someone—another attractive woman about the same age—and the two of them proceeded to shop for the next three hours. After that, she got back into her BMW and drove home.

The first player Marlin spoke to was named Eric. A junior. Second-string halfback. After asking a few questions—friendly, casual, putting the boy at ease—Marlin took out the cropped photo.

“I’m just wondering if you’ve ever seen this woman.”

Eric leaned forward and looked at the picture. “Don’t think so.”

They were in Coach Milstead’s office, with the door open. The coach had already begun practice, but had offered to send several of the players in for short interviews. These were some of the boys Milstead had mentioned on Sunday—Sammy’s closest friends.

“She doesn’t look familiar at all?” Marlin said.

“No. Is she supposed to?”

The boy was trying to be helpful.
Wanting
to offer something useful. Marlin hadn’t told Eric where the photo had been found, and he wasn’t planning to. At least, not yet. He also wasn’t going to ask if Sammy was the type to have cheated on his girlfriend, Tracie. Better to see if one of Sammy’s friends might offer that sort of information on his own. Marlin and Garza had no solid reason to conclude that Sammy had any kind of romantic or sexual relationship with the woman in the photo, so Marlin wasn’t willing to ask questions that would start rumors spreading among the student body.

The next player was the placekicker. Name was Garrett. Marlin remembered him from the youth hunt on Phil Colby’s ranch a few years back. Good kid. Bright. Treated adults with respect. The first to volunteer for various chores and tasks during the hunt. Garrett looked at the photo and shook his head. “Don’t know her.”

“Well, thanks for taking a look.”

“That’s all you needed?”

“For now.”

“May I ask a question?”

“Sure.”

“Coach told us someone was chasing Sammy that night. Firing a gun at him. Does this woman have something to do with that?”

Marlin took a moment to formulate a reply. “We have no reason to think that. It’s just that we don’t know who she is, and we’d like to find out.”

“But where did the picture come from?”

“What I can tell you right now is that we think Sammy might’ve known her. We just need to identify her and ask her a few questions. Did you ever hear Sammy talking about any friends you didn’t know yourself?”

“No, but Sammy and I hadn’t been hanging out as much as we used to.”

“Why’s that?”

“Like I told the deputy yesterday—Sammy was partying too much. Not studying. He had all those scholarship offers and he didn’t even know how lucky he was. If I’d had half the talent he had, man, I would’ve been focused. I don’t mean to sound cold, talking about him like that.”

“No, I appreciate you being straight with me. Would you say his partying was out of control? You probably heard he had Ecstasy in his system.”

“I don’t think that was a regular thing. Mostly he just drank. And, no, I wouldn’t say he was out of control. I meant it more like he had this incredible opportunity that most kids don’t get, you know? Why risk screwing it up?”

A few more players echoed that same thought; Sammy took his skills, and his future, for granted, and they were all a little worried that he wasn’t committed enough to make it in college ball.

But nobody could identify the woman in the photo.

The last player Marlin talked to was an offensive tackle named Colton Spillar. The kid was huge—probably close to three hundred pounds, most of it muscle. In Marlin’s high school days, his largest teammate had weighed about fifty pounds less than that.

By now, practice had been going on for close to an hour, so Colton was sweaty and very red in the face. When Marlin put the photo down on the desk, Colton’s eyes got noticeably wider.

“You know her?” Marlin said.

“Uh-uh.”

“Oh. I thought I saw a reaction.”

Colton didn’t say anything.

“You looked surprised or something,” Marlin said. “Right when you looked at the photo.”

“No, she’s just kind of hot.”

“That’s why you reacted?”

“Yeah. And I’m tired from practice.”

“You need some water or something?”

“No, I’m okay. Just need to catch my breath.”

“So you don’t know who this woman is?”

“No.”

“Were you and Sammy good friends?”

“We hung out sometimes. We’re, you know, teammates.
Were
, I mean. I wasn’t his best friend or anything.”

Colton seemed ill at ease—not making eye contact—but some teenagers behaved that way around adults.

“Who did Sammy hang out with the most?”