The Red Scream (37 page)

Her whole body felt as if it were simmering over low heat now. She reached out and laid her hand on his chest, waiting until she felt the even thudding of his heart under her palm. “Grady, in”—she stopped to do the mental calculation—“in forty-five hours he’s going to be executed for something he didn’t do. I can’t stand that.”

He said quietly, “You’re going to have to stand it.”

“Can’t you do something?”

“What? This isn’t my case, Molly. But even if it had been, it’s been tried and appealed. You know that. There’s no recourse on this.”

“There’s the governor,” she said. “Last year she gave Tommy Stark a thirty-day stay and Julius Boulton in April.”

“Shit, Molly. With Stark the Bishop asked her to and with Boulton it was rock stars who asked. Even a she-wolf like our governor has one or two people who can get her attention. And Stark got executed anyway.”

“Yeah. I know. But thirty days might help.”

“How? How might it help?”

She shrugged. “I can work some more on the car issue. Convince someone. I don’t know.”

Grady sighed as if he knew he was in for a long evening now. “Molly, think this through. If you’re right that Bronk was never even there, then Alison McFarland and David Serrano were both mistaken about seeing the car. Or they lied under oath.”

“I think they lied. It had been in the paper, that police were looking for a car of that description in connection with the Greta Huff murder in San Marcos, that the Texas Scalper might be driving a car like that. I think they lied to make it look like the Scalper did it. To protect the real killer. And, goddammit to hell, it worked. It fooled the cops, and Stan Heffernan, and the jury, and it fooled me.”

“Are you toying with the idea that David Serrano killed her and got the kid to support his lie about the car?”

“It’s possible. I think Tiny and David were lovers. I’m sure of it. He was an exceptionally good-looking man and he was available, right over the garage. And she had a weakness. I think that’s why she was in the garage in her white dress with her fresh-cut flowers.”

“Well,” he rumbled, “you would know about that, Molly. After all, you’re the expert in—”

She put a hand over his mouth, hard, and shook her head to stop him from saying any more. “Don’t,” she said, and waited a few seconds before taking her hand away.

He took a long breath. “Okay. But consider this: what if her husband walked in on them?”

“Or someone else.”

He lifted his head off the pillow, doubled it over, and rested his head back on it. “You want to know what I think?”

She nodded.

“I think when we find the person who did my two murders, we’ll know who killed Tiny.”

“You think the same person did all three,” she said.

“Yes.”

“So does Louie. He says if you get away with killing once, you’ll do it again—eventually.”

Grady smiled. “Louie. An expert on homicide if there ever was one.”

Molly hugged her knees into her chest and rested her chin on them. “Are you still thinking that person’s Charlie McFarland?”

“Everything points to it, Molly. I really don’t know how you can pretend to be a reasonable woman and ignore the facts about McFarland. May I review just a few of them for you?”

Molly rolled her eyes upward. “Okay,” she said. “Shoot.”

He held up the index finger of his right hand. “One. He tried to bribe you not to interview his children and to let the Bronk case drop. Right?”

She didn’t respond, but he went on. “That’s because he was worried you might dig up something new, that one of his kids might spill some beans.”

He held up another finger. “Two. We suspect he used his financial clout with the publisher of
Lone Star Monthly
to get your boss to kill the Bronk story he’d already agreed to. Right?” He raised his head to see her expression.

“Yeah,” she muttered. “I can’t prove it, but I believe it.”

“Okay,” he said. “We come to three.” He added a third finger and shook them in the air. It was a gesture Molly loathed; she saw it
as an aggressive male gesture of intimidation. She reached out, took hold of the offending hand, and pressed it down to the bed.

“Three,” he said, lowering his voice. “Yesterday he tried to have you killed.”

Molly started to protest, but then she saw the three faces coming toward her in the dim light and Marcus Gandy’s gaping mouth, the tire iron raised over her head. It had been a damned close call. Her cheek began to pulse and she put her hand to it.

“Well,” Grady said, watching her face, “maybe their orders were just to discourage you forcefully. But he set them on you and you could easily have been killed. Now I would think, Molly, that any one of those would be enough to get you annoyed at McFarland.”

Molly shrugged.

Grady snorted, a bitter, angry sound. “Of course, he doesn’t know you like I do. He thought he’d be able to buy you off or scare you off, but he sure as hell made an error in judgment.” For the first time, his voice had taken on that cold tone she remembered from the past.

“What do you mean?” she asked, even though she knew it would be better to let it drop.

“Well, hell, Molly, you don’t ever let anything go. You’re the only person I know who’s still brooding over a twenty-six-year-old case.”

“Brooding? What makes you think I’m still brooding over it?”

“What makes me think it?” He scooted up on the bed so he could lean back against the headboard and use his hands to punctuate his words. “It’s what wakes you up sweating and shaking at 3
A.M.
; it’s what makes you a workaholic who doesn’t know when to stop; it’s what keeps you from having a stable relationship with a man; it’s what drives you further than rational people are willing to go.”

She turned her head away so she wouldn’t have to look at him. “None of those things are true anymore, Grady. If they ever were true. Maybe when I was twenty. But you don’t know me anymore.”

“I can see it in your eyes, Molly. I hear it in your voice. That old obsession is still there. You finally ran out of possibilities on your father and had to stop, so you find it difficult to let go of anything that even remotely reminds you of him. It’s crazy.”

Now she really didn’t like the direction the conversation was taking. “I don’t want to get into ancient history with you, Grady. We
were talking about Charlie McFarland and this has nothing to do with him.”

“The hell it doesn’t. The man even looks a little like your father. He walks and talks like him. He’s the same age, same West Texas type. And now he says he’s dying. This brings back all the old feelings about Vernon’s murder—if it was a murder.”

She was breathing hard. She squeezed a pillow against her chest. “Here I thought you were just a dumb cop who barely finished high school and it turns out you’re a shrink who’s qualified to label people crazy.”

His silence told her she’d hit home.

Finally he said in the tight, hard voice she recognized as runaway anger in him, “Well, you tell me then, Molly. Is it crazy to stay up night after night in the dark staring out a window? Is it crazy for a married woman with a baby to go out and screw some paunchy old tobacco-chewing county sheriff while her husband’s at work? Is it crazy for her to go into a fit of anger when he catches her—”

“Stop!” she yelled, putting her hands over her ears. “That’s enough. For God’s sake, isn’t there a statute of limitations on these things?” She moved over to the edge of the bed and tried to get up, but one ankle was caught in the twisted sheet. “You stop right there,” she said, trying to extricate herself from the sheet. “I knew you’d get around to this, Grady.” She tugged at the sheet but he was lying on it. “You just couldn’t let it rest, could you? I was very upset then. You knew it was a bad time for me, very bad. I was doing what I had to-do for my father and you—”

“Christ. The dutiful daughter! You’re still crazy.”

She felt the old anger rising like hot bile pumping from her stomach, gagging her, spilling a sour, metallic taste into her mouth. “No. You never even tried to understand. He knew something. Olin Crocker had information about my daddy’s murder, something he refused to tell me. I was prying it out of him—yes,
screwing
him. I would have done anything—anything!—to find out what he knew. Then you butted in. Into something that was none of your business. I was finally getting somewhere when you came home and threw your jealous husband tantrum. And the whole thing dead-ended right there.”

She was shouting. “Did you know that? Crocker never spoke to me again after that. The whole case just dried up and blew away.”
She finally extracted her ankle from the sheet with a violent jerk and stood up. “And you know something? If I had it to do over again and all it took was screwing that randy old bastard, I’d do it again and again and again.” Grabbing her T-shirt from the floor, she pulled it on over her head. “I’d do much more than screw him.”

“And you say you’re not obsessed. Listen to yourself, Molly. You were a married woman with a child and you—”

Her next words came out in a banshee shriek. “Stop it! Stop it right there. I said I didn’t want to talk about this, Grady. You promised you wouldn’t bring it up. Now stop it or get out.”

She heard the last shrill words echoing inside her head and she remembered the last time she’d screamed like that, twenty-two years ago. In a frenzy of anger and shame she’d screamed for him to get out and he had left, just walked out and left her.

He’d just walked out and left her.

The memory grabbed hold of her and shook her; it squeezed the breath from her and burned her eyes. Without warning it erupted through her eyes in a gush of burning tears. She tried to suck them back, but they were beyond control. She sat down on the edge of the bed with her back to Grady and let them come.

She had managed over the years to blot out huge chunks of the past, like her breakup with Grady Traynor and, before that, her wild, uncontrollable grief over her father. After he was killed, Molly had dropped out of high school, in spite of her Aunt Harriet’s protests and everyone else’s advice. None of them understood. She needed all her time and energy to concentrate on the problem of finding out who had killed her daddy. She had gone about it with a passionate intensity that recognized no limits.

A year after Vernon Cates was found in the waters of Lake Travis, she had walked into the Austin Police Department headquarters to try to extract some information on a new lead. There behind the desk stood Grady Traynor in his brandnew uniform. She was seventeen, he was twenty-four, and they couldn’t stop looking at one another. They had begun a mating dance right there in the lobby, using only their eyes. His were the palest aquamarine under thick black brows. Six months later she was pregnant. They got married, and for a while, it seemed to work. She loved him, everything about him, and when Jo Beth was born, she felt as if her sanity had been restored and she might, after all, be able to live like other people.

For the first two years they were married, she’d thought all that craziness was behind her. She’d felt grown-up, like a mature wife and mother. But she’d been dead wrong. It had simply been a lull in the storm because she had exhausted all her leads. The minute a fresh lead appeared, she was caught up again by gale-force winds. Those two years had been just a sweet respite from the power of her quest, which reclaimed her with a vengeance.

She left Jo Beth with her Aunt Harriet most of the time and picked up the investigation of her father’s death; when she ran out of leads again, she just brooded on it, sitting at the kitchen table night after night, staring at the dark window, waiting for something to happen.

Then, just when she thought she’d exhausted every possibility, Olin Crocker had come along. The Burnet County sheriff had interrogated a suspect in her father’s murder. Crocker had some vital information, she was sure of it, but he wouldn’t talk, even though she’d used everything at her disposal to persuade him.

It had ended in total defeat: Olin Crocker never told her what he knew and Grady Traynor had left her.

But she had weathered it, and after all, it was twenty-two years ago—a whole generation. No use weeping over it now. She drew in a few deep breaths and lowered her face to her shoulder to blot her wet cheek on her shirt. Grady was sitting up against the headboard with a puzzled expression, watching her. She turned away and wrapped her arms around herself to keep from crying again.

After a few minutes, she felt the bed move behind her. He was getting up to go. But then she felt his shoulder brush against her back. He rested his cheek against her shoulder. “Molly, Molly, I’m such a dumb shit. These old things have a way of sneaking up on me. I didn’t intend to say any of that; it just escaped. It was like I was possessed and had to say it, but it’s done now. I promise I won’t do it again. It’s over and done with, out of my system. Ancient history, as you say. I’m sorry.”

He reached his arms around her and hugged, rocking her slightly. “Come on, lie down here next to me, even though I am a bully.”

“Grady,” she said, twisting to face him, gasping for breath, “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I did what I felt I had to do. Maybe I was a little crazy.”

His pale eyes opened in surprise; it was the first time she had ever come that close to an admission of regret.

“I know, I know,” he soothed. He drew her back onto the bed. “There. It’s all over.” He tucked a pillow under her head and pulled Aunt Harriet’s quilt up over them.

Beginning to feel the mellow aftermath of a good cry, Molly relaxed back against him. After a few minutes of silence she heard his steady breathing and rolled over to see if he was sleeping. His eyes were still open but barely. She wanted to keep him awake. “Grady, I suppose you’ve considered that Charlie’s being so sick gives his kids a real motive to kill Georgia.”

“If it’s true he’s got terminal cancer,” he said groggily, “you’re right; they might want to knock her off so they wouldn’t have to share it when he dies. There are millions at stake. But I thought you said he hadn’t told them yet.”

“That’s true. But maybe they know anyway.” She yawned and looked over at him again. His lids were closing. “One last thing, Grady.”