Lady Killer. Kathleen Creighton
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yeah, the cougar. Well, now…”
“Lonnie Doyle is going to do his best to have her put down.”
“I’m gonna be honest with you, Brooke. It’s gonna be tough to argue that lion isn’t a dangerous animal. She did maul your husband—”
“Ex-husband.”
“—and she did draw blood, whether that was what killed him or not. But for now I don’t want you to worry about that. We’ve got some time before they get around to a hearing about the cat, and right now you need to get yourself rested up so we can figure out how to fight this battle we’re in. Okay? Now, you go on and enjoy being with your boy, and have a quiet weekend, and I’ll talk to you next week.”
“Yes, sir,” Brooke had murmured, and now she stood safe in her own home, surrounded by the warmth and love of her son, her dog and her good friends the Farleys and the Mirandas.
“It’s gonna be okay, Mom,” Daniel whispered as he let her hug him longer than usual.
“I know. Of course, it is.” But as she watched Sam Houston Henderson’s taillights turn the corner at the end of the lane, inside she felt nothing but cold and hollow and scared to death.
“Must be nice, having your own plane,” Holt said to his passenger as they sped back to town on the two-lane FM road that connected it to its surprisingly busy airfield. He’d discovered airfields of the kind that served the town of Colton were pretty common in Texas, which made sense, seeing as how airplanes were probably the most practical means of bridging the enormous distances between anyplace and anyplace else in that part of the country.
“Yeah,” Tony said, “the kinds of places my job takes me, sometimes it’s about the only way to get there.” He looked over at Holt. “Matter of fact, it was your client’s wife—Sam—she’s the one that taught me to fly.”
“That right?”
“We had an…adventure, the three of us, a few years back. In the Philippines. Kind of got me hooked on vintage planes, I guess. She was flying a World War II Gooney Bird at the time. Mine’s a little later vintage than that, though—1979 Piper Cherokee. I’ve got her equipped for long-range flying—extra fuel tanks and all that. Places I go, refueling can be a problem.”
Holt glanced at the man taking up what seemed like more than his share of space in the car. From what little chance he’d had to take the man’s measure, Holt couldn’t in any way, shape or form call him overweight, so it must be something to do with charisma, he decided, that made Tony Whitehall seem larger than life. “So, you’re a photographer?”
“Photojournalist,” Tony corrected, but with a forgiving grin.
That was another thing Holt had noticed right away, the easygoing but straightforward manner that made a person both like and trust the man instinctively. He was beginning to see why Cory Pearson had put him at the top of his list of people to go to in an emergency.
“Well, you’re gonna fit right in, in Colton,” he said dryly. “The place is a zoo. Crawling with news media.”
“Yeah?” Tony shifted around to look at him. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with the ‘problem’ you mentioned, would it?”
“It would.” Holt stared at the road ahead and thought about where to begin. Finally, he said, “You said you knew we found the boys, right? Cory’s two brothers. Last summer. Found Wade—the oldest—first. He was a cop up in Portland. And since the two boys had been adopted by the same couple, he put us right in touch with Matt, down in LA.”
“Right, and now you say you found the girls?” Tony prompted, but not in an impatient way.
“One of the girls.” Holt let out a breath. “I thought it was gonna be a cakewalk once I found out they’d been adopted together, too. But turns out the parents were both killed a couple of years ago in a car wreck, along with their biological son—he was quite a bit older than the twins. I found out that this one—Brooke—had married and moved here to Colton. Married a cop, actually. Deputy sheriff. But there wasn’t a thing about the other twin—Brenna. Nothing from high school on. She just disappears at that point. So, anyway, I come here to Colton to get a line on Brooke. Scope out the lay of the land, you know? Like I did when I found Wade. Wanted to see how things were, get an idea who this person was before I went to Cory with it. So we’d know the best way to spring the news, you know?”
“I hear you,” Tony said, nodding. “You don’t just walk up to a stranger and say, ‘Hi, there. I’m the brother you didn’t know you had.’”
“Right. And it’s an even safer bet the twins wouldn’t have any idea about having three older brothers, since they were practically just babies when they all got separated. So anyway, I get to Colton, and I find the town in an uproar because one of their deputy sheriffs has just been killed. Originally, it was supposed to have been a mountain lion that killed him—”
“Oh, wow—I saw something about that. It was on CNN just the other night. The cougar was the guy’s ex-wife’s pet, right? And their little boy found his dad’s body. Supposedly an accident, I thought. I didn’t get a chance to see the news today—it was my mom’s birthday, and the festivities started pretty early. So now—oh, man, don’t tell me. This is the missing twin? The dead guy’s wife?”
“Ex-wife. And it’s not an accident anymore. Seems they found something in the autopsy that puts a whole new light on things. In any event, they’ve arrested my client’s baby sister for murder. First degree, premeditated. And in Texas, don’t forget, they still have the death penalty. And use it.”
Tony uttered a word his mother wouldn’t have approved of.
“My sentiments exactly,” Holt said.
“So what’s the plan?” Tony asked Holt over a club sandwich at a local diner not far from the Cactus Country Inn, where they were staying. A club sandwich was pretty much Tony’s standard order when he was in an unfamiliar eatery, since it was pretty hard to ruin one, but watching Holt chomp into his big, thick, juicy burger, he was beginning to regret his choice. “Somehow I don’t think me being a photographer is going to get me an in with this lady just now.”
The PI nodded as he chewed, then swallowed and said, “Yeah, I know. We’re going to have to come up with something—” He broke off, and Tony watched him in amusement as he coughed and tried not to make it too obvious what he was thinking. Something along the lines of, This guy looks like a bouncer in a mob hangout, and I’m supposed to get him close to a woman who right now is not likely to be trusting anybody short of Dr. Phil? But it didn’t bother him. He was used to it.
“How ’bout the lion?” he said, taking pity on the guy. “I can make it about the cat.”
Holt raised his eyebrows over his burger as he prepared to take another bite. “Hmm. Maybe.”
“No, seriously. I’ve done some wildlife pieces before. The reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone, poaching elephant ivory…stuff like that. Plus—” he grinned around the sandwich he was biting into “—I have a thing for mountain lions.”
Holt’s eyes narrowed. “A…thing.”
Tony thought, Me and my big mouth. He didn’t know what it was that had made him mention to this stranger something so personal he hadn’t even told his best friends, Cory and Sam, about it. But it had been the reason the CNN piece had caught his attention in the first place—the bit about the lion. Now he had to find some way to explain without giving up more personal information than he wanted to. “It’s an Indian thing. It’s my spirit animal. Or so my mama says.” He gave a self-deprecating half shrug.
“No kidding? ‘My brother, the lion’—that kind of thing?”
“A little more than that. Hey, it’s complicated, and to tell you the truth, I’m not sure my mama’s people—they’re Apache—were totally