Of All Sad Words (8 page)

“How do you know that?”

“Because I found his body. You might still have a wrongful death suit, though.”

“And I hope you’re going to tell me why.”

“Because Terry Crawford was murdered,” Rhodes said.

Lawless hadn’t stayed around for long after Rhodes’s revelation. Although Rhodes had tried to get him to talk about when Crawford had engaged him and what time he’d left Lawless’s office, the lawyer was vague and unhelpful.

Rhodes had also asked where Crawford was staying, but Lawless claimed not to know that, either.

“Did he mention his cousin?” Rhodes asked. “Jamey Hamilton?”

“He may have,” Lawless said. “I don’t remember.”

Rhodes didn’t quite believe that. “The next time you see your client, you tell him I want to talk to him.”

“I don’t know when that might be,” Lawless said. “We don’t have a meeting set up.”

“You could give him a call.”

“I don’t have his cell number.”

Rhodes didn’t believe that, either, but he let Lawless leave without pushing him too far. When the lawyer was gone, Hack started in on Rhodes.

“What were you asking all those questions for?” he said. “And why’re you all scuffed up like you are? You been playin’ in a sandpile? Where’s Ruth? Is she all right?”

Rhodes would have answered him, but just then Lawton came in from the cell block.

“What we need,” Lawton said, “is a new jail, one of them modern ones where you can watch all the inmates on TV and don’t have to go check on ’em all the time.” He looked at Rhodes. “You been in a fight?”

“He won’t tell me,” Hack said. “He’s keepin’ it all to himself.”

“I’ll tell you all about it,” Rhodes said. “Just as soon as I get all that whiskey out of the county car.”

“Whiskey?” Hack said.

“What whiskey?” Lawton asked.

Rhodes just smiled.

Chapter 9

LAWTON HELPED RHODES PUT THE ’SHINE IN THE EVIDENCE room. Hack had to stay at his desk and answer the calls. Rhodes could tell that it was killing them not to ask any more questions, but they managed to keep quiet, because Rhodes had threatened not to tell them a thing if they didn’t.

When the evidence was secured and labeled, Rhodes sat down at his desk and went through the whole thing for them.

“So the Crawford boys were runnin’ ’shine,” Hack said. “I bet they had plenty of customers who’ll be gettin’ mighty nervous about now.”

“We won’t be arresting anybody on the Crawfords’ say-so,” Rhodes told him. “So nobody has anything to be nervous about—yet. Buying the booze isn’t the problem unless you’re caught in the act. Making it’s the problem. But not ours.”

“You gonna call in the TABC?”

The TABC was the Texas Alcoholic Beverages Commission, the agency assigned to deal with bootlegging, among other things, which included prostitution, gambling, weapons, and narcotics. They’d have been involved in the meth lab if the Crawfords had been running one.

“I’ll call them tomorrow,” Rhodes said.

“You didn’t mention any whiskey to Lawless.”

“Son of a gun. I must have forgotten.”

“Yeah,” Hack said. “I noticed your memory’s gettin’ bad lately. Won’t the TABC be ticked that you brought in the ’shine?”

“Can’t help it if they are,” Rhodes said. “It’s evidence, and somebody might have taken it off.”

“Somebody’s nervous all right,” Lawton said. “Prob‘ly lookin’ for that booze. Else they wouldn’t be tryin’ to run you and Ruth down.”

“We need to find out who owns that truck,” Rhodes said to Hack. “When Buddy comes in tomorrow, you tell him to talk to the Dodge dealers in all the counties around here and see if any of them remember that brush guard. Anyway, if that truck’s as old as it looked to me, that’s not a dealer-installed item.”

“Most likely somebody installed that himself,” Hack said. “On an old truck like that, it’s prob’ly a custom job.”

“Maybe got a welder to do it,” Lawton added.

“Have Buddy check around with welders, too, then.”

Rhodes didn’t think a pickup that distinctive could be hidden easily, not with a bullet hole through the windshield, but all the driver would have to do would be to remove the brush guard and go to a city like Houston and get the windshield replaced. So the best bet would be to find someone who remembered it and might know who owned it. Which reminded Rhodes to tell Hack to send a deputy to the courthouse first thing in the morning and find out what kind of vehicles were registered in Jamey Hamilton’s name.

The truck might not have been registered at all, but there was a chance the license plate had been removed. Rhodes wanted to be sure.

“I’ll send Buddy,” Hack said.

“You’d better have him check on stolen vehicles, too,” Rhodes said.

“You got any ideas who killed Terry?” Hack said after he wrote himself a note or two.

“Not yet.”

“What about Ruth? She gonna be all right?”

Hack hadn’t been fond of Ruth when she’d first come to work in the department. He hadn’t liked the idea of a woman deputy around the jail. Ruth had won him over quickly, however, and now they were friends..

“She’ll be fine. It’s just a sprained wrist.”

“Could be broke,” Lawton said. “Hard to tell sometimes.”

“She’ll get it taken care of. They’ll take X-rays if there’s any question. She’ll be in tomorrow. You tell her to fingerprint those whiskey jars. We might get lucky.”

“I’ll tell her,” Hack said. “What about you? You okay?”

“Nothing wrong with me that a bath and something to eat won’t take care of.”

“You better get on home, then. You got a big day comin’ up tomorrow.”

“I don’t think I’ll have time for anything tomorrow,” Rhodes said. “I have a murder investigation going on.”

“Be good publicity for the book,” Lawton said.

“I don’t think Terry would look at it that way.”

“Prob’ly not,” Hack said.

As Rhodes drove home, he thought about the big day Hack had mentioned. A few years earlier, Jan and Claudia, a couple of women from out of town, had attended a writers’ workshop that had been held on the old college campus out at Obert. They’d intended to write a true-crime book or something of the sort, and they’d come back to the county to do some research while Rhodes was working on another case.

It turned out that the material they collected was better suited to a novel, or maybe they were better suited to writing fiction than fact. At any rate, they’d written a novel about, as they put it, “a handsome crime-busting sherrif,” and it had been accepted and published. Jan and Claudia would be at the Clearview Wal-Mart the next day for their first book signing, and they’d asked Rhodes to be there, too.

Claudia and Jan were also the two “outside agitators” that Rhodes had thought of when he was talking to Judge Parry. When they’d heard about the Citizens’ Sheriff’s Academy, they’d applied, even though they didn’t live in the county. Rhodes had lobbied to get them in, even though there were some residents who then had to be left off the list to accommodate them.

Parry hadn’t been happy about that, but Rhodes had persuaded him it was a good idea. He’d argued that if the book was a success, the two women might write others and get the county some favorable national press.

All that had been before Rhodes had read the book. Actually, he still hadn’t read it, but he’d read the manuscript. The book was called
Blood Fever
, and sure enough, there was a handsome crime-busting sheriff.

But the character was nothing like Rhodes. His name was nothing so ordinary as Dan. It was Sage Barton. Sage was a bachelor who got up at five o’clock in the morning for a breakfast of Cheerios and fruit. He then spent some quality time with his cat, a black neutered tom named Satan, before he went out and jogged four miles through the quiet streets of the small town where he lived.

After that, and over the course of three hundred or so pages, Sage caught a bank robber after a running gun battle, discovered that a serial killer was at work in the county, had a steamy romance with a beautiful FBI profiler named Jennifer, uncovered the serial killer’s grisly secret, was captured, then rescued by the beautiful profiler, who was then nabbed by the killer, who fled with her to his underground lair, where, after a car chase that had covered several chapters, Sage Barton cornered the killer for a final battle that involved fists, knives, feet, teeth, and, unless Rhodes was misremembering, a pair of nunchucks.

According to Jan and Claudia, the sheriff was based on Rhodes and the book on their experiences in Blacklin County. Rhodes had a little trouble seeing the similarities. He did, he had to admit, have a cat, but that was about it. And he’d acquired the cat only recently. Jan and Claudia had never seen it and hadn’t even known about it when they were writing the book.

So while he supposed he was flattered to be the model for a character in a book, he didn’t see that the story had any connection to reality, and he was pretty sure the book wasn’t going to bring the county the kind of publicity the judge would approve of.

The truth was that Blacklin County, which covered around a thousand square miles, was a sparsely populated area. Rhodes figured there weren’t more than 25,000 people living there, and that was probably a high estimate. If a serial killer started working in the county, he’d halve the population in a few days. The last bank robbery Rhodes could recall had happened more than twenty years earlier, before he’d been elected sheriff.

As for gun battles, Rhodes hadn’t taken part in one in awhile, though he’d been in a pretty good firefight in a cemetery a few years ago. That probably didn’t count, since he hadn’t been moving around much. Most of the time, he’d been hiding behind the biggest tree he could find.

And steamy romance? Rhodes had married Ivy Daniel after his first wife had been dead for a number of years, but their courtship couldn’t have been described as steamy. Rhodes wasn’t the steamy sort.

When he’d mentioned these things to Jan and Claudia, they’d told him that they didn’t matter.

“What we wanted to do was tell a good story,” Jan said.

“One with a little action in it,” Claudia added. “The last time we were here, the major crime news was that a pizza parlor didn’t have a sneeze guard over the salad bar.”

That wasn’t true. They had been there when Rhodes had solved a murder that had occurred years before. He thought that was a pretty interesting case.

“It lacked car chases,” Jan said.

“And gunfights,” Claudia added.

“Not to mention a serial killer,” Rhodes said. “And romance.”

The women nodded. Claudia said, “We want to sell some books, so we exaggerated a little.”

“Poetic license,” Jan said. “You know.”

Rhodes didn’t know, but he got the idea. Now that the two women had been in the academy, their next book would probably feature a terrorist attack on rural Texas, so the sheriff could have a steamy romance with a beautiful member of Homeland Security.

Rhodes was glad he had a good excuse not to go to the book signing.

When Rhodes got home, Ivy gave him a look he’d become familiar with. It seemed to say, What on earth have you been up to?

So he told her. It had taken her awhile to get used to the fact that now and then he was going to be in dangerous situations, and she still didn’t like the idea.

“So someone murdered Terry Crawford,” she said when he’d finished.

She was a slim, pretty woman who wore her graying hair cut short. She worked in an insurance office in town and she still had on the skirt and blouse she’d worn to work that day. She’d kicked off her shoes, however.

“It looks like murder,” Rhodes said. “I don’t see how it could be anything else.”

“And someone tried to run you down with a monster truck while you were looking at a moonshine still.”

“It wasn’t a monster. Just a pickup. It wasn’t as bad as I made it sound.”

Ivy said, “Ha!”

“I’m fine,” Rhodes assured her. “Not a scratch on me. A quick bath and I’ll be clean as a whistle.”

“Did you say clean as a weasel?”

“That, too.”

They were in the kitchen, and Sam, the coal black cat, was rubbing against the leg of the chair where Rhodes sat while scratching the top of Sam’s head.

Rhodes sneezed a couple of times. Ivy had told him that he wasn’t really allergic to Sam, that his sneezing was some kind of psychological reaction. Rhodes couldn’t see that it made any difference. A sneeze was a sneeze.

Yancey, the Pomeranian, watched from the doorway. He didn’t like Sam in the least. For his part, Sam hardly deigned to notice the dog.

“I’d better take Yancey outside for a few minutes and let him play with Speedo,” Rhodes said. “He needs a little exercise to work off his hostility toward the cat.”

“Do it before you bathe,” Ivy said.

Rhodes called Yancey, who crossed the room warily, keeping a close eye on Sam all the way. Sam ignored him and went over to the refrigerator to lie down, so that the warm air venting from beneath it would blow on him.

Once the cat was out of his way, Yancey became more animated, yapping eagerly for Rhodes to open the door and let him outside.

Rhodes pushed the screen door open and Yancey bounded out. Speedo, the Border collie who lived outside and had his own Styrofoam igloo to stay in, barked a greeting.

While the two dogs, big and little, chased each other around the backyard, Rhodes sat on the steps. It wasn’t much cooler now that night had fallen than it had been during the day. Rhodes hoped it would cool off before morning. Then his thoughts turned to Terry Crawford’s death.

Rhodes didn’t think there was anything to Judge Parry’s theory about vigilantes. Anyone who’d gone to the mobile home looking for a meth lab wouldn’t have found one, and it was unlikely that anyone would have found the still. Besides, Rhodes just didn’t believe any of the academy members would have taken such a drastic step.

The explosion could have been an accident, and most likely was, but it certainly hadn’t killed Terry. So the big questions were who’d been with him, and why he had been shot. Rhodes also wanted to know how Terry had gotten out of the house, and why he’d left it. Not to mention how he’d ended up down the hill near the creek.