“If it comes sooner?” I asked.
“Let’s hope that doesn’t happen,” Mom said, shaking her head. “Doc gave the mare oral meds, but said we should get ready, just in case, and have the shed set up for birthing. Bring in a heating lamp and double the straw matting, make sure it’s clean.”
Feeling helpless to do anything else, I sighed and said, “Okay, let’s go.”
A good sport, David helped out, taking off his suit jacket and putting a pair of old rubber boots over his dress shoes. When Maggie walked up from the school bus, we didn’t have to tell her the bad news. She took one look at what we were up to and knew. She didn’t even say hello to David, acting as if she didn’t notice him pitchforking the shed straw.
“How long?” she asked.
“Soon,” I answered.
S
omebody named Mike Davis called for you, and the captain wants you in his office ASAP,” Sheila said the next morning, Thursday. Then she whispered, “He’s agitated about something.”
I decided to postpone calling Mike and find out what had the captain in a flap. When I walked in his office, he was visibly uptight. “I told them you couldn’t do this, Sarah,” he muttered, his face flushed. “We’re just getting you back after that mess last year, and the last thing I want is to throw you into the middle of this thing, send you off to Dallas.”
“Dallas? I don’t know, Captain. Emma Lou is getting ready to deliver, and there’s a good chance the foal won’t make it,” I said. “Maggie will be devastated. And I’m still walking on eggshells at home, trying to convince everyone, including myself, that I won’t be sucked into another situation like that Lucas mess.”
“I know, and I wouldn’t ask you. But this is coming directly from the governor,” the captain said. “Cassidy Collins’s people called Austin and asked for added security at her concert in Dallas.”
“The local guys can cover that,” I said. “I’m more valuable
here. I thought I’d have that Justin Peterson, their prime suspect, staked out.”
“We can take care of Peterson. Doesn’t appear it’s him anyway. Collins requested you by name, said she’s not doing the concert if you’re not there,” he said, shaking his head, as if confronted with a bizarre turn of events. “She seems to think you can help her, Sarah, and the kid’s plumb scared. She wants you with her, as kind of a personal bodyguard throughout the evening.”
“How long will I have to be gone?” I asked. “I do feel sorry for the kid, but if Emma Lou gives birth while I’m away and there are complications, Maggie may never forgive me.”
“Now there, I pulled rank,” the captain answered, offering up a small wink and a self-satisfied nod. “I’ve got a DPS helicopter lined up to fly you to Dallas Saturday afternoon, about one, in time for Collins’s rehearsal, and it’ll fly you home as soon as Collins gets on her private jet after the concert. You should be at the ranch a little after one a.m. on Sunday morning. Until then, you can coordinate security from here. In addition to Dallas P.D. and the arena’s security force, the governor is bringing in state troopers as backup, and I talked to David Garrity. He’s going along.”
“Why David?” I asked.
“Because he offered,” he said, shooting me an exasperated glance. “And I wasn’t about to turn down any help. Sarah, if we lose that girl, if that stalker manages to carry out his threats, we’ll be second-guessed forever. This isn’t one where we want to take any unnecessary chances.” The captain narrowed his eyes and sized me up. “Why don’t you want Garrity along on this? I thought you two got pretty tight last year.”
“No matter,” I said, with a shrug. “That’s fine. Like you said, we can use the help.”
“Okay, then,” he said. “It’s all set? I can tell the governor you’re on this?”
“It’s all set,” I agreed. “I’ll be there.”
The morning evaporated on the telephone. I talked with Rick Barron about Collins’s usual security measures. She had a staff of four regular bodyguards who accompanied her on the road. All were former police officers and licensed to carry concealed weapons. Afterward, I called the American Airlines Center in Dallas, where Collins was scheduled to perform. I brought the facility’s head of security, a guy named Mack McDougall, up to speed on the situation. By the time we hung up, I had McDougall bringing in every security guard the arena employed, a third more than usual, for Saturday night’s concert, and he’d agreed to forward us a schematic of the complete stadium.
“There’s no way anyone can infiltrate our system from outside the arena,” McDougall insisted. “Collins’s people will plug their sound equipment directly into ours. To break in, your stalker will have to do the same or hack into the frequency. Either way, he has to be on-site to do it.”
That, of course, left no room for what had happened in San Diego, where Argus’s voice fed directly into Cassidy Collins’s earpiece. San Diego P.D. hadn’t found an explanation for the breach in what is supposed to be a closed system, other than to surmise that Argus was in the arena and used some type of new high-tech equipment to tap into the frequency.
Once I had McDougall preparing, I reached out to Dallas P.D. They were aware of the situation and promised to add a second layer of protection outside of the arena, along with additional officers near all the entrances and exits. Metal scanners would be in
place at all the doors, and an officer would be assigned to stand by each, watching the screen and searching anyone who looked suspicious. With some prompting, they also agreed to bring in dogs two hours before the concert, to comb the arena and the backstage area, looking for anyone hiding in the shadows, behind a curtain or in the rafters.
Despite his solid alibis, I e-mailed Justin Peterson’s driver’s license photo to Dallas P.D., Rick Barron, and McDougall. It never hurts to be prepared.
It promised to be a grueling couple of days, organizing what would most likely be a strange evening. Since I preferred a Carrie Underwood or Tim McGraw concert, I briefly wondered if I could get away with earplugs. Instead, I asked Barron to have in-ear monitors for David and me, so that during the concert, we could hear what Collins heard, and to set up a recorder to tape everything that came through her earpieces. If they’d taken that step in San Diego, we would have had Argus’s voice recorded.
With so much to do to prepare for Saturday night, I’d forgotten about Mike Davis’s phone call until Sheila buzzed me about one that afternoon and said he was on the line again. I picked up, and before even saying hello, Davis blurted out, “Listen, there’s no way that Cox woman wrote this suicide letter. Absolutely no way.”
“I take it you’re certain about that?” I said, not surprised by Mike’s vehemence. One of the things I liked about the guy was that he spoke his mind. “You want to tell me what you really think?”
Mike chuckled. “Listen Sarah, you’re right, this is my field, but I wouldn’t have to be an expert to tell you that Elizabeth Cox didn’t write this suicide note.”
“Print or fonts don’t match?” I asked. “What’s the problem?”
“No, it could have come off her printer, all right,” he said.
“Then what are we discussing?”
“Everything,” Davis said. “There are the small details. Like
everything we know for sure that this woman typed had two spaces between sentences, after the periods. The suicide note has one. That’s an automatic thing, not the type of detail people change.”
“Interesting,” I said. “Tell me more.”
“I’ve got plenty more,” Davis said. “Cox’s letters have a totally different syntax, no fragments, no random capitalization, clearly more refined. She was a careful woman, and the random capitalization is not consistent with her personality.”
“Okay,” I said. “But maybe she was just upset? Maybe she wasn’t as careful as usual because she was about to shatter her skull with a bullet?”
“I can tell you this,” Davis said. “I’ve been analyzing suicide notes for forty years. Yes, planning to end one’s life can cause a person to write differently. Most suicides are frightened and in a lot of mental anguish, that’s true. But they don’t become a totally different person. This note wasn’t written by Cox. It was written by someone else.”
Well, now, that was interesting.
“Any thoughts about the author?” I asked. “Any hints that might help me zero in on the right suspect?”
“Based on the note, I suspect you’re looking for a man,” he said. “This reads like a man writing the way he thinks a woman would write, overly emotional and fragmented. That’s the opposite of the facts, since women’s notes are usually more carefully written than men’s. When they reach this point, most men just want to go off into the woods with a gun and do the deed, while women more often take their time and write something to soften the blow for the family and friends they leave behind. They almost always mention loved ones by name, telling them that they love them. You don’t have any of that in here.”
“Okay, Mike,” I said. “I’m going to talk to the captain about getting payment for you on this. Can you put this in writing, just a
few pages? I’d like to share it with the folks in my office and H.P.D. homicide.”
“Sure, I’ll get to it this afternoon and have it to you tomorrow morning,” Mike said, chuckling again. “Glad this turned out to be a paying job. My government pension gets a little tight. Told the wife, I’m going to have to start freelancing to keep up.”
“I’m sure with your resume you don’t need references,” I said. “But if you decide you want a few, be sure to include me.”
“Will do,” Mike said. “And good luck with this. I don’t know anything else about Ms. Cox’s death, but I don’t think there’s much doubt that you’re looking at a homicide.”
I hung up, thought about what Mike had just told me, then picked up the receiver again and dialed the Harris County morgue. The ever-jolly Dr. Joe took awhile to get to the telephone. “I’m busy, Lieutenant,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
“I was wondering about the GSR test on Billie Cox’s right palm,” I said. “You must have results by now.”
“I phoned that in to H.P.D. the morning after you were here,” the physician said, sounding irritated as usual. “Haven’t they told you?”
“No. I gather you talked with Detective Brad Walker?”
“The same,” he said with a sigh. “You know, I’ve got bodies waiting for me. Now it’s true they don’t complain, but I’d like to tell you people things once and be done with it, so I can get out of here at a reasonable hour at least once a week. I told that detective you’d requested the test and asked him to make sure you heard about the results. Why didn’t he tell you?”
I knew better than to interrupt when Dr. Joe expounded on the shortcomings of law enforcement. But once he finished, I still needed to know the test results. “I’ll be sure to convey your disappointment to Detective Walker,” I said. “Now Dr. Joe, if for no other reason than to get me off the telephone, what did you find?”
“GSR,” he said.
“You found gunshot residue on the palm that held the gun,” I said. “That shouldn’t have been there.”
“Exactly what I told that detective,” Dr. Joe said. “There should have been gunshot residue on the back of the hand, because that was exposed. But the palm was closed around the grip. I shouldn’t have found GSR on it.”
“So what are we thinking now?”
“I don’t know what you think, Lieutenant,” he said, grudgingly. “But my best guess is that Cox wasn’t holding the gun at all. I figure she had her hands out, palms up, maybe in a defensive position, trying to stop the killer.”
Faith Roberts and Mike Davis were right. Cox was murdered. “I gather you’ll change the manner of death in the autopsy?”
“If I ever get off this telephone and find a free moment,” he growled. “Elizabeth Cox’s death is now officially a homicide.”
S
omething wasn’t right. Walker should have called me. It was only professional courtesy. I’d never worked with the detective, but another ranger in the office had, Sergeant George Fields, more commonly known as “Buckshot.” Fields had investigated a murder case with Walker the previous year. I’d heard through office chatter that it hadn’t gone well. Maybe it was Walker’s reputed tendency to see every case as black or white? Maybe not.
Figuring it was time to find out, I walked three doors down to Buckshot’s office. A large, square man with a thick mustache, the sergeant was on the telephone, and he motioned for me to sit. I moved his Stetson off the extra chair and did as instructed. A wire frame on his desk held a small glass vial containing a dozen or so round lead pellets, buckshot recovered out of the rear end of a thief. A decade ago while working a case in north Texas, the sergeant decided to do a little deer hunting. Shotgun in hand, Fields happened upon a rustler pilfering someone else’s prize-winning bull. The guy kept running after Fields warned him to stop. That was a mistake. When he took the rustler to the local emergency room, supervised
the removal of the pellets, and then put them on his desk as a souvenir, Sergeant Fields became forever known as “Buckshot.”
“What can you tell me about Detective Brad Walker?” I asked, when I had the sergeant’s full attention.
“Guy’s a malcontent,” he sneered. “He’s up for retirement in about a year, I think. Just lazy.”
I told him about the case and Buckshot nodded, as if he understood.
“So with all the great homicide detectives at H.P.D., and they’ve got a bunch, I get somebody who’s just putting in time?” I said.
“I’m afraid so,” the sergeant growled, impatiently tapping his pen on his desk, as if annoyed by the memory of old frustrations. My guess? Buckshot’s short tenure with Walker had left the sergeant irritated. “If that case is in Walker’s closed file and you reopen it, I guaran-damn-tee that he’s not going to be happy. Based on my experience, I suggest you sidestep him and work it on your own. Walker won’t object, and he wouldn’t be any help anyway. I’ll guaran-damn-tee that, too.”
Most investigators hover over their cases like momma birds guard their chicks, so I had my doubts. But I put in a call to Walker as soon as I got back to my desk. Since we’d never officially met, I introduced myself and then asked if he’d heard from Dr. Joe.