The Perennial Killer: A Gardening Mystery (40 page)

She smiled. “He sure does.” It sounded so chummy for the three of them to be on location together up at the ranch. She hoped Bill and Pete would learn to like each other.

Once the cameraman had left, Bill came over and gently took her in his arms. Tipping her chin up to kiss her, he
paused in surprise, and smoothed his hand over her cheek. “Louise—your face—it’s soft again.”

She smiled. “I know. I’ve worked on it.” Despite his rough whiskers, she gave him a lingering kiss, then nestled her head on his shoulder while he continued to hold her. “Honey, do you know what I need right now?”

“Anything, baby.”

“Food.” She looked up at him.

“This may not be romantic, but I’m starved. I haven’t even had breakfast, and it must be noon. I only made breakfast for your pal Reingold, and then watched him eat.”

“And you slipped him those codeines.”

“You thought he was snakebit? I must say, Bill, I’m impressed with your western idioms. Never seen anybody pick them up so fast.”

He grinned at her. “It’s Texas. The idioms stick to you like flies on flypaper. A very funny place. Did you know why Texas cowboys wear pointed boots?”

“No, why?” she said, realizing he was feeling very good about himself.

He crinkled his blue eyes into a premature smile. “That’s to kill the roaches in the corners.” Then he straightened his face into a mock-grave expression. “A sample of Texas humor—though it isn’t too far from the truth, since roaches grow to the size of rats down there. Now, to get a little more serious, Louise. My part of this task force effort was on the receiving end, where they had a very intricate scheme planned to get the plutonium warheads across the border to Mexico—”

“Which is where Reingold’s plant is.”

“Hmm,” he said, surprised at how much she knew. “That’s right. Reingold had this scheme rigged all the way from Colorado to a getaway by sea to the Middle East. He
did it right under the nose of the Stony Flats plant manager—”

“You mean Spangler wasn’t involved?”

Bill pursed his lips, “I might have known you would have met Spangler. No—his assistant manager was the link with Reingold’s outfit. Spangler must feel damn lucky the thing didn’t come off. They had their plan in place, right down to paying off the man who runs the traffic light in the truck yard at the El Paso-Juarez border. That system is supposed to make a random determination of which trucks will be searched. But Reingold paid plenty to assure that the light was going to go green for
his
truck full of warheads.” He shook his head. “I have a lot to tell you, but let’s eat while we talk.”

“I know just the place. You’ll get a great piece of pie, and you’ll meet Ruthie Dunn. She was probably the first one to make me see that the old ranch woman could be a murderer.”

“How?” he asked.

“Ruthie helped me visualize the scene up there in that closed-in mountain community. The pregnant spinster. The young rancher next door, who charmed every lady he ever met. The rancher’s morose wife whose child had just died horribly of lockjaw. Then the mysterious deaths that followed. It made a kind of insane sense. Later, this hypothesis—as crazy as it was—was all corroborated by our neighbor down the road. He’s an expert on post-traumatic stress…”

Her husband looked confused. She caressed his whiskered cheek. “It’s complicated.”

They heard the sound of tires on the dirt driveway. A car door slammed, and footsteps sounded in the gravel. The voices were familiar—their daughter Janie, and her boyfriend, Chris Radebaugh. The glowing, sunburnt couple walked in, in shorts and hiking boots, carrying a load
of baggage—and looking, as far as Louise was concerned, much too comfortable with each other. Louise and Bill stood open-mouthed.

Janie said, “Aren’t you going to say hello to us?”

“Of course,” said Louise, and came over and embraced them. She looked up at the young man who was her daughter’s boyfriend; he seemed taller, blonder, and more virile than when she saw him last. “But how did
you
get here?”

“Well, Mrs. Eldridge, we might have seemed to deceive you a little, though we didn’t mean to,” said the tall young man, shoving a shock of hair away from his eyes. “You see, as soon as Janie left, I called the camp, and they just happened to have a vacancy on the counselor roster.”

Janie had one hand on his shoulder and was leaning against him, smiling. “Chris took over as a counselor.”

“You mean you’ve spent the whole time together up there in Estes Park—”

“Don’t worry, Ma,” said Janie, flipping back her blond hair, “we not only had chaperones, we
were
the chaperones.”

“Oh,” said Bill matter-of-factly, “no problem. So, what do you say the four of us go out and eat? Your ma and I have some exciting things to tell you young people. Of course, I can’t reveal too much, but some of it’s going to be public, anyway.” Louise hoped this assignment signaled the end of Bill’s covert work with the CIA—but it was a very small hope.

Janie came over to her father and put her slender arms around his neck. “Dad, you think
you
have stories to tell? Wait ’til Chris and I tell you what happened when we climbed Long’s Peak in a snowstorm!”

Louise smiled, basking in the comfort of having her family with her, even though she knew she wouldn’t get a word in edgewise. Too many exciting stories to tell—a
perilous climb on a four teen-thousand-footer, a thwarted hijacking of nuclear warheads. How could she possibly top those? After all, what was so exciting about a double murder? But maybe…

“Want to hear a story about a
lion?”