Body Heat (17 page)

“Forgive me for not being more sensitive to your discomfort, but I'm here until I leave.” Since she didn't have the sense to pass through the door he held open for her, he let it swing shut and walked inside. But instead of going out, she marched after him.

“He already has two sons,” she cried. “He doesn't need you!”

Turning, Rod forced her, with a steely look, to back up. “You're right. And I don't need him. Or you.”

Quickly recovering her nerve, she poked a finger into his chest. “How I wish you'd never been born.”

She'd lowered her voice, no doubt to avoid being overheard, but Rod caught every venomous word. “You've made that clear from the beginning.”

“He was
married,
” she said, scrambling to justify herself.

“So? It's not my fault you couldn't keep your husband satisfied.”

At this, she nearly choked. She hadn't expected him to go on the offensive. As a child, he'd been cautious whenever he encountered her. He hadn't wanted to incite her anger for fear she'd have his mother kicked off the farm. Or that she might do something even worse to Carolina. She'd been the only Dunlap who truly frightened him, the only one who was more mean than stupid. But she didn't frighten him anymore. His mother was gone. There was no way Edna could hurt Carolina now.

“You think you've climbed so far above the lettuce patch that you're too good for
us?
”

“Anyone with a heart or a conscience would fit that description.”

Her eyes nearly bulged out of her head. “I don't care what you've become. You'll always be a dirty
Mexican
to me and anyone else who matters!”

“It's not my
Mexican
blood I'm ashamed of.” Leaving her standing where she was, he strode off in search of the recorder he'd come to buy. He wished the fact that he'd let loose and said what he wanted made him feel better, but it didn't. He'd long since learned that he could find no peace where the Dunlaps were concerned. He could cover the wound, hide it from the curious, but it would always fester….

By the time he left the store, Edna was gone and so was Sophia. He spent the rest of the late afternoon and evening visiting the farmers, ranchers and homeowners who lived in the area he'd been assigned. All the while, he tried to put his encounter with Edna out of his mind. It required some effort, but he was determined not to let the Dunlaps get under his skin the way they had when he was growing up.

His last interview ended at close to ten, but he'd finished what he'd hoped to do and headed back to the motel, eager to check his e-mail and get some sleep, since he couldn't visit that safe house for a number of hours yet. But there was no longer a parking space available. After circling the lot twice, he eventually wedged the Hummer into a corner spot next to a van with ABC News on the side and walked to his room from clear over by the ice machines.

Since he was still analyzing his interviews, he didn't notice anything amiss until he drew close. Then he could see that his door, the one the manager had fixed
after Sophia had taken a battering ram to it, was standing open.

Problem was, he'd closed and locked it when he left.

I
t was Leland Jennings, the motel manager, who called Sophia shortly after she reported for work. She wasn't sure Rod would've bothered. When she arrived, Leland stood in the doorway while Rod sat on one of the beds, arms and legs spread wide as he leaned back on his hands, frowning at the destruction around him. Someone had emptied his clothes out of his duffel bag and cut them up, presumably with the knife sticking out of his pillow. Even the bag had been slashed. Writing covered the walls and the place smelled like gasoline. But if the person who'd broken in had meant to torch the room, something had stopped him.

“Wild night?” she said as Leland moved to admit her.

Rod glanced up. “Someone had fun. But it wasn't me.”

“He's a trouble magnet,” Leland complained with a shake of his head. “I just replaced the lock on this door last night. You remember. I took it from the laundry room. And look, it's broken again.”

“Good thing the city's going to replace it for you, right?”

He gestured for her to follow him into the bathroom. “And that's not all the damage.”

A giant penis had been spray-painted on the mirror. Below that, Sophia read the words,
Go home, Mexican cocksucker.

“Anyone see who did this?” She withdrew a notepad from the breast pocket of her uniform as they returned to the room.

Rod nudged his laptop with his foot. It had been thrown to the floor and lay there broken. “No. I roused the ABC camera crew, a few of whom are staying on either side of me, but they said they didn't notice anyone coming or going.”

“They didn't hear anything, either?” she asked in surprise.

“In one room the TV was on so loud the two people staying there could barely hear me pounding on their door. It's just one woman on the other side, but I woke her out of a dead sleep. I figure I'll have to wait till morning to canvass the rest.”

“I don't know what to do,” Leland said. “My mom's not going to like this. It'll really upset her. She had a cow when Hillary Hawthorne set up shop in room six and pasted a nine behind it.” He added, as an aside to himself, “Something I actually found sort of titillating.”

Sophia held up a hand. “Keep your sexual fantasies to yourself, Leland.”

“What?” he said in a desultory tone. “You guys are in your sexual prime, right? I'm a single man in my forties who lives with my widowed mother. Knowing Hillary was putting out a few doors down was the highlight of my whole year. If my love life doesn't improve soon, it
might be the highlight of my whole decade. But that isn't what I'm trying to tell you.”

“Then you'd better get to the point,” she said.

“I don't have another room for you. I never did make it over to the hardware store today so I can't steal the lock from the laundry like I did before. I'm afraid Mr. Guerrero will have to find another place until I can get this room repaired.”

Leland made it sound as though he wouldn't mind if Rod stayed away indefinitely. What with the damage that seemed to follow him, his brand of trouble wasn't nearly as “titillating” as Hillary Hawthorne's.

A V formed between Rod's eyebrows. “So where do you suggest I go?”

Choosing to stare at the carpet rather than brave Rod's displeasure, Leland rocked back and forth, and Sophia understood why. Rod could be intimidating when he was angry. She knew that from when she'd used her Taser on him. His expression then, and now, brought new meaning to the saying, “If looks could kill.”

“There's the Sundowner on the other side of town…” Leland said.

Rod glared at him for several seconds more, then finally responded. “Which has, what,
eight
rooms?”

“That's about right.” He nodded. “Yeah. Eight. I'm sure of it.”

“You don't think that, owing to the recent influx of reporters, they'll be full over there, too?”

Leland shrank back a step or two, out of the doorway. “You could try getting a room in Douglas or Sierra Vista….”

“I'm not leaving town.”

Sophia decided this might be a good place to break in. “Any of your stuff missing?” she asked Rod.

“No.”

“You've checked?”

“I've checked.”

“So…whoever did this just meant to send you a message.”

“Whoever did this hates my guts and wanted me to know it.”

“Who do you think it was?”

His beard rasped as he rubbed a hand over his face. “The same person you think it was.”

“Stuart.”

“Who else?”

It had to be his half brother. One of them, anyway. As far as Sophia knew, no one else in Bordertown felt strongly enough about Rod to do something like
this.

She unclipped her radio from her belt. “I'll call my officer, have him dust for prints.”

After getting off the bed, Rod grabbed the keys he'd tossed on the dresser. “You don't want to do that yourself?”

“And let you confront Stuart on your own? No way,” she said. “I've had to see the M.E. enough for one summer.” She didn't specify which man she believed would be left standing but, in her opinion, there was no contest. Maybe Stuart could hold his own against a regular guy.

But Rod was no regular guy.

 

“This has been a really shitty day, you know that?”

Rod had insisted on driving his Hummer. They'd already been to the Dunlap ranch but were unable to rouse anyone at Stuart's place, so they'd gone next door, where
Patrick had answered as soon as they knocked. Once he got over his initial surprise at finding Rod on his doorstep, he said he didn't know a thing about the trashed motel room. He also claimed he hadn't seen his brother since they got off work at dinnertime.

Sophia believed him. Rod must've believed him, too, because he'd stalked back to the Hummer without taking Patrick up on his offer to have his wife come to the door and vouch for his presence at home.

They'd left the ranch without stopping at the main house. All the windows had been dark, suggesting that the older Dunlaps were already in bed. Now they were on their way to the Firelight, Stuart's favorite bar.

Rod's bad mood translated into a lead foot, but Sophia let his speeding slide. It was late, there wasn't much traffic on the road and she could understand why he might be a little eager to get ahold of Stuart.

“I can't say today's been too stellar for me, either,” she said. After leaving her father's feed store, and fending off reporters who'd tried every possible tactic to get her to say more than she should about the UDA killings, she'd holed up in her house. She'd been trying to get some rest before working graveyard. Tonight, she planned to patrol the ranches, see if she could spot anything that might help solve the UDA murders or at least discourage a fourth incident. But her attempt at sleep had been a wasted effort. Instead, she'd lain on her bed, wide-awake, pondering whether or not to approach her mother with Leonard Taylor's story.

If Anne had gone to the police, it meant her mother had believed her and yet had done nothing to protect her. And if she hadn't, Sophia would've dragged their most
horrifying skeleton out of the closet for nothing. They'd struggled so hard to get beyond what Gary had done….

Sophia didn't want to have that awkward conversation. She preferred to let her mother keep pretending, so they could have
some
semblance of a relationship. As contemptible as Sophia found Anne's actions regarding Gary's behavior, Anne was trying to make up for her shortcomings in other ways. She brought over produce from her garden, had just quilted Sophia a blanket, saved magazines and news clippings she thought Sophia might find of interest. As imperfect as Anne was, she was really the only family member Sophia had left. Her brother visited occasionally but work demands kept him on the East Coast, where he was busy raising a family.

In any case, Gary didn't have a nude photograph of her, at least not in his wallet, so it was reasonable to assume that Leonard had been lying about Anne, too.

But if he
was
lying, how had he guessed that there was any impropriety in her relationship with her stepfather?

“Sophia, you still with me?”

Bringing her mind back to the present, she shifted her eyes away from the steady beam of their headlights on the asphalt in front of them. “What?”

“I said, what was so rotten about your day?”

Where did she start? With the call she'd received from Councilman Fedorko informing her that her time was running out? With the embarrassment of flashing Rod, only to have him immediately withdraw? With the outright hostility she'd faced from Detective Lindstrom during their meeting with the FBI? Or the confrontation she'd had with her stepfather, in which he'd basically denied everything she knew to be true?

Choosing not to go into any of it, she shrugged and kept her answer vague. “A lot of things.”

“Like…”

Apparently, he wouldn't let it go, so she decided to tell him a portion of the truth. “After I left your motel last night, I caught Leonard Taylor speeding.”

“And you pulled him over.”

“That's right.”

Rod startled her by cursing.

“What?”

“You couldn't have turned a blind eye for once? Shit, Sophia, are you
trying
to get yourself killed? He could be responsible for twelve murders!”

“What are you talking about? I'm the chief of police around here—at least, for now,” she added under her breath. “It's my job to enforce the traffic laws.”

“Your safety comes before the damn traffic laws!”

She straightened in her seat. “Slow down.”

He didn't change his speed but he seemed to realize he was out of line and stopped harassing her for doing her job. “What did Leonard have to say?”

She didn't really want to continue the conversation. His flare of temper didn't sit well.

“Are you going to tell me or not?” he prodded.

“He didn't say much.”

Draping an arm over the steering wheel, he took a moment to study her. “You brought it up for a reason.”

She took a deep breath. “I just wanted to tell you that he was openly belligerent, threatened me, that sort of thing.” She'd also wanted to tell Rod what Leonard had said about her stepfather having a nude picture of her, but she'd already told him too much about her personal life. He was only in town for a short while. She wasn't sure why she
felt this urge to lean on him, why she was curious to hear what he'd have to say about Leonard and where Leonard could've gotten his information.

Maybe she was latching onto the first person to come along because she didn't feel she could count on anyone else. Which was pathetic. She had to stand on her own two feet.

“If you see him in town again, leave him alone,” he said.

“Even if he's breaking the law?” she snapped.

“Unless someone's life is at stake, you can wait until you have help.”

She folded her arms. “You don't think I can do this job any more than anyone else does.”

Scowling, he hesitated, then blew out a sigh. “I didn't mean it that way. I just… Some men, men like Leonard, don't seem to care how they deal with people. It's not necessary to put your life at risk to give out a speeding ticket, that's all.”

She didn't have the opportunity to respond. They'd reached the Firelight, and he was already getting out.

 

Rod was looking for a fight. He didn't kid himself that he wasn't. He supposed he'd been hoping Stuart or Patrick would provoke him enough to justify a reaction like that ever since he'd returned to Bordertown.

The damage done to his belongings at the motel certainly gave him the excuse he'd been looking for. But he couldn't find Stuart.

He and Sophia walked through the Firelight, asking the men huddled on stools or sitting around tables if anyone had seen him, but every response was the same—he hadn't been in tonight.

“Where could the little prick have gone?” Rod muttered.

Sophia stood with him at the back of the bar, surveying the scene. “I don't know. It's nearly midnight on a weeknight, and he works early in the morning. Everything else in town is closed up. He should be here if he's not at home. Unless…” She nibbled at her bottom lip as she considered whatever had occurred to her.

He leaned close to compensate for the loud, thumping music coming from an old-fashioned jukebox. “Unless what?”

“Unless he's with a prostitute or someone else for the night. I suspect Trudy Dilspeth does a bit more than cut hair for quite a few guys.”

That meant they might not find him till morning. It wasn't what Rod wanted to hear, but…he couldn't think of any other place to look. “If that's the case, we're wasting our time.”

“We could drive by Trudy's house, see if we spot his truck.”

“And what, wait for him to come out? Drag him from her bed? We'll go about our business and take care of this later.” Rod hated to delay his gratification. But he still needed to visit the safe house Sophia had mentioned in their meeting with the FBI. By this time of night there should be some activity.

“You're willing to do that?” she asked.

He managed a shrug despite the anger knotting his muscles. “Murder is worse than a few slashed clothes.”

“He destroyed your laptop, too.”

“Thanks for reminding me.”

Her grin told him she was being a smart-ass on purpose.

“Anyway, the laptop and the clothes can be replaced. I'm ready to head over to the safe house.”

“Then let's go.”

He was about to tell her that he planned to drop her off at her car. There was no point in taking her to the safe house. In his view, that was another example of unnecessary risk. But just as he opened his mouth to say she wasn't going with him, a tall thin man with sandy-blond hair approached, his gaze fixed on Sophia.