8 Sweet Payback (11 page)

Unfortunately, he called at
six-thirty to say that there was no way he would get home for awhile. Someone
had set the Starkey house on fire.

Chapter
11

Beau came dragging in around
eleven. Soot clung to his uniform and outlined the wrinkles near his eyes.

“Lee Rodarte and four of his
cousins rode through town on their motorcycles, very noisy and visible, and
naturally they had words with several Starkey supporters,” he said as he hung
his jacket on the rack near the door. “The fire broke out shortly after,
although no one saw who threw the beer bottle full of gas through a back
window.”

“Oh my gosh, Beau. Was it bad?”

“Everyone got out okay but half
the house is in ruins. Helen and Joe had to move in with Bobby, Joe’s brother.
I give that about two days before everyone starts bickering.”

“Two whole days?” She wiped at the
black smudges on his face.

“The squabbling among the Starkeys
is the least of my worries. I couldn’t believe Lee came back and started
trouble. I thought Sophie had him convinced to stay away until things cooled
off.” Beau started up the stairs and Sam followed.

“Did you get anything to eat?” She
offered the remains of the chicken noodle soup and biscuits.

“The guy who owns the café sent
his wife over with burritos for us. I had the whole department out by this
time. For the night I’ve got State Police from Taos. This gets much worse I’ll
have to call them up from Espanola and Vegas too. At least for the moment I
think all the Starkeys are sleeping it off over at Bobby’s place.” He peeled
off his smoky clothes and tossed them into the laundry basket, then stepped
into the shower.

One whiff and Sam knew she
couldn’t sleep in the room with the dirty uniform. She carried the basket down
to the laundry room.

On the end table by the couch,
Beau’s cell phone rang. The readout said it was Rico so Sam answered it.

“When he gets out of the shower,
tell him we didn’t have any luck apprehending Lee Rodarte or any of his group.
The bikes cleared out. If the sheriff wants to release me to go back to Taos, I
can search for them there.”

Sam passed the message along as
Beau toweled himself off.

“Nah. Not tonight. I wouldn’t send
Rico after them alone anyway—too dangerous. We’ll let things cool off
overnight, get whatever evidence we can collect from the fire, and I’ll pursue
this in the morning.”

“Beau?” She made him meet her
gaze. “I don’t like it, you being in the middle of this.”

“Darlin’, it’s going to be fine. I
can take care of myself. We can’t just sit back and let anarchy take over.”

For every lawman killed in the
line of duty, she would bet most of them had uttered those words. She crawled
into bed and held him very close.

* *
*

Beau followed Sam’s red truck the
next morning, from their driveway all the way through to the northern end of
Sembramos. He didn’t like the look of the town. Windows were broken in more
than one shop, and signs of a small fire showed at the gas station. His body
tensed as he surveyed the damage. He needed to get Sam away from here and then
call a meeting of his men. He dialed Sam’s phone and cautioned her again to
lock herself into the house where she would be cleaning most of the day.

“Call me when you get ready to
leave. Depending on the situation, I can have an escort bring you back through
and get you home safely.”

She started to say she would be
fine, but he wished he’d taken some time to familiarize her with one of his
pistols and insist that she carry it. It was something they should address
soon. He watched the red truck until she went around a bend in the road, then
he U-turned and found Rico’s cruiser parked by the bank.

“Some things going on here that I
didn’t hear about?” he asked, approaching his deputy but keeping an eye on
everything around him.

“Sheriff, sorry. Every time I
stopped to call you something else happened. We were getting calls from
dispatch all night. Broken window over here, next thing it’s a B&E over
there. It felt like we were stomping out fires all night.”

“Literally. I saw the one by the
gas station.”

“Luckily, the volunteer fire
department had just come from the Starkey place early this morning. We don’t
know if the gas station fire was accidental or on purpose. A lady was filling
her tank and then started screaming. Station attendant got right on it and kept
it small. FD came along and checked it out. The woman could have been so
nervous that she messed up. We don’t really know.”

“We have anyone under arrest for
this?” He nodded toward broken shop windows across the street.

“No one. Every time something
happened we’d rush over, but whoever did it would be gone. It’s almost like
they were purposely running us around.”

“Any major incidents?”

“Mostly little stuff. And I’m not
sure we know all of it yet, boss. Calls were still coming in an hour ago,
someone waking up to find a car vandalized or lawn furniture all broken up.”

Seemed like everyone in town had
taken a side in this mess and was now causing grief for the others.

“I’m calling in some help,” Beau
said. “You guys need to go home and get some rest.”

Rico looked relieved at the
suggestion.

“Hang around another few minutes,”
Beau said. He keyed his radio and put in a call to the state police in Taos.
The chief agreed to send enough men for a day shift to relieve Beau’s deputies.
Once that was arranged, Beau told Rico he could leave.

He watched the deputy drive away,
then Beau made a slow cruise through town. Two other deputies reported the same
kind of news Rico had given. After speaking with each man he released him to go
home, told him to get some sleep and plan to be back by dark. If the violence
escalated he would call in the National Guard.

Belatedly, Beau decided he should
coordinate all this with the town bigwigs. He couldn’t recall ever having met
the mayor or town councilors. He checked the county telephone directory and
found the number for the town hall. A cautious female voice answered. As soon
as Beau explained who he was, the call went right to the mayor. Within a
minute, Beau had directions and an appointment.

“I just can’t believe this is
happening in our town,” said the short woman with the pageboy haircut and
lipstick that was a tad too bright. She’d introduced herself as Consuelo Brown
and ushered Beau into a room off the lobby of the so-called town hall.

The entire facility occupied one
section of a small strip shopping center, next to the ice cream parlor. Beau
couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it on his other passes through town, but that’s
how small it was. The governing offices consisted of a lobby with a desk, where
people probably came to pay their water bill or get a permit for something, and
the office where he now sat with the mayor. Across the room, a table with four
chairs crowded around it probably served as the town council’s meeting space.

When he mentioned the state of
lawlessness that had prevailed overnight, Ms. Brown became flustered. “I got
elected here, Sheriff, because nobody else ran for the office. Really, the most
complicated thing I’ve done in months is to give a speech at a boy’s Eagle
Scout induction. I have no idea how to handle this, and two of my three
councilors are out of town right now.”

He recapped what Rico and the
other deputies had told him, ending by telling her about calling in the state
police. Her hands fluttered above the surface of her desk and he swore her lip
trembled a little more with each thing he revealed.

“I suggest that we call a town
meeting,” he said. “See if we can’t calm things down. If that doesn’t work,
I’ll have to call in the National Guard to keep order.”

Her lip was definitely trembling
now.

“I’ll do the talking if you’d
like,” he said. “Now, how shall we get the word out about the meeting? Where
and when would you suggest we hold it?”

With something definite to think
about, Ms. Brown settled down a little. “Well, there’s the automated telephone
system we use to advise when we have weather closures for school. Every family
with a child in school gets called. When the trouble started last night we used
it to cancel school for today. We could telephone about the meeting and word our
message to suggest that they tell their neighbors. We would pretty well reach
everyone that way.”

“Good. That’s an excellent plan.”

A little encouragement and she
went on. “I’d suggest the park, on Third Street. The gazebo there makes a good
podium, gets you up above the crowd a little. I’ll get the school janitor to
set up the PA equipment and test it.”

“I think we should do this before
dark tonight,” Beau said.

“Yes. How about five o’clock?
We’ll catch most people on their way home from work and we won’t interrupt
their dinner hour.”

Heaven forbid that dinner be late
because of a crime spree. He withheld his smile, merely nodding. “I’d
appreciate it if you will handle those details,” he said, standing. “I’m going
to meet with the state police and coordinate a schedule. Even if the meeting
goes well and we have everyone’s cooperation, I plan to keep heavy patrols
throughout town tonight.”

Mayor Brown swallowed hard,
nodding but clearly still rattled.

* *
*

Sam approached her task with a
better attitude and a shot of energy from handling the magic box this morning.
Finishing the floors in the massive great room took half the morning, then she
started on the smaller rooms in the other wing, the two guest suites, plus ones
she’d named the nursery, the sewing room and the library. By three o’clock she
was able to stand back and survey her work. Not bad. The place had a fresh
feeling to it and was nearly done. She would come back one more day and wash
all the windows. If her energy held and the wind let up she could come back one
final time and chop weeds, plus do some touch-up work on the exterior. That
should please Delbert Crow and the taxation department.

She filled out a line on the
sign-in sheet, packed away her brooms and mops and locked the door, remembering
as she was pulling out onto the highway that she had agreed to check in with
Beau. He sounded busy, saying something about being in Taos at the moment,
coordinating a schedule with some officers, and that he had to be back in
Sembramos at five o’clock. A meeting of some kind. He would fill her in when he
got home. She assured him that she would drive right on through.

With a few hours of free time, she
mentally reviewed the things she’d thought of last night. Buying some food
would be tops on the list. She couldn’t really keep offering canned soup for
dinner every night. She bypassed the turn to their driveway and continued
straight into Taos.

The newspaper office was another
stop, and she would need to get there before they closed. She turned off near
the county offices and pulled into the parking lot of the place, familiar from
the times she’d come to place ads for her shop. Britney, the young woman at the
desk, recognized her and seemed happy to take her to a room where back issues
were tightly archived.

“How far back does this story go?”
she asked Sam.

“Six to seven years.”

“Ah. You’re in luck. Everything
older than eight years goes to our storage building. Everything newer than
three years is on the computer. You can find the middle stuff here in the
microfiche.”

Yeah, lucky, Sam thought as she
followed instructions to thread the rolls of film into the machine. A computer
search would have been so much easier.

Left alone, she soon figured out
the system; it helped that she and Beau had just been through the murder file
and she knew the exact dates to look for. She scanned pages and enlarged every
article that featured the names Cayne, Starkey, Rodarte or Sembramos. Pages
printed out and she gathered them and went back to the desk to pay for the
printouts. Britney made change for her, glancing at the sheet at the top of her
stack.

“Huh. That’s interesting,” she
said, closing the drawer of her register.

“What’s that?”

“This article about a real estate
deal near Sembramos. I had no idea big real estate deals ever happened up there.
My dad used to know that guy, Linden Gisner,” Britney said, pointing to a name
in one article. “He was well known in real estate here for awhile. Dad called
him the wheeler-dealer of Taos county.”

The name seemed vaguely familiar
but Sam’s mind was already dashing ahead to the rest of her errands as she went
back out to her truck. She glanced at her dashboard clock. It was almost five,
traffic was picking up, and she didn’t really feel like driving to the bakery
or checking back with Cora at the library. Her earlier burst of energy was
gone. The supermarket posed challenge enough for the moment.

Chapter
12

The PA speakers squawked when
Mayor Consuelo Brown handed the microphone to Beau. He held it a little way
from his mouth and surveyed the crowd. A small group of Starkeys—minus Helen,
he noticed—stood at the left-hand edge of the crowd. The men looked a bit the
worse for wear after what had probably been an afternoon of heavy drinking.
Sophie Garcia stood at the opposite side of the park, edging as far away from
them as she could get, and two unfamiliar men in biker leathers stood near her.
They looked enough like Lee Rodarte to be related, but Beau didn’t see Lee in
the crowd. Between the two factions stood fifty or so of the townsfolk, by
Beau’s estimate. Ringing the perimeter of the crowd, all of Beau’s deputies and
six state officers—all uniformed and armed—kept watch.

“Thank you for the introduction,
Mayor Brown,” Beau said, “and thank you all for coming this afternoon.”

He watched faces in the crowd. No
one looked happy, no matter where their loyalties were.

“There was trouble here in
Sembramos last night. We were fortunate that no one got hurt. But it’s the kind
of trouble none of us wants to see.”

Low muttering came from the
Starkey side. Losing two rooms from their house hadn’t exactly been painless.

“You all can work out your
differences however you see fit—it’s not really my business—as long as people
don’t get hurt and property doesn’t get destroyed. When someone breaks the law,
it becomes my business. I’ve been elected to keep the people of this county
safe. So tonight, we’re asking for a voluntary curfew of nine p.m. Do your
shopping, go out to dinner . . . but be home by nine o’clock. Please. I’m
asking nicely. But just in case ‘nice’ doesn’t work, my department will be
patrolling your streets, along with officers from the state police. And if
things continue to get ugly around here, we can bring in more help to restore
order. That’s really all I have to say. Obey the curfew for a night or two,
calm down, and we won’t have to be in your backyard any more.”

“By ‘more help’ you mean the
National Guard?” someone shouted from the middle of the crowd.

“Yes, sir, I do.” Beau stepped
back and handed the microphone to the mayor.

She cleared her throat a little
nervously, but Beau was the only one who heard that part. When she brought the
mike up, her voice came out clear and strong. “We all need to calm down, try to
put old events and old feelings aside and let ourselves heal. Let the town get
back to the way it used to be. Sheriff Cardwell is being very helpful. Let’s
show that we can put our own house in order and get along like grownups.”

She thanked the crowd again and
turned off the microphone. Beau remained on the raised platform while the mayor
stepped down to shake hands and speak softly with her constituents. At the back
of the crowd, Beau spotted a white van from one of the Albuquerque TV stations.
Great. How did they know about this and how long had they been here?

Movement among the Starkey contingent
caught his eye. Helen Starkey had joined her husband. Joe and Bobby glared
toward Sophie Garcia’s little group. The two bikers glared right back. Sophie,
he noticed, was speaking quietly to them. As if that would stop them if a brawl
began. Beau took a stance and gave them a no-nonsense look. One of the bikers
noticed, said something under his breath, and they both strolled toward their
motorcycles.

Bobby Starkey started to mouth
off, but Helen aimed an elbow at his ribs and the verbal exchange turned into a
battle of nasty staring. Eventually, Joe gave his brother a little punch to the
shoulder and their group moved away. Within ten minutes the entire crowd had
dispersed. Beau gathered his men and gave instructions. Any trouble, he was to
be called on his cell. He hoped for an evening at home, strategically placed
between the trouble in Sembramos and anything else that might happen in Taos.
He didn’t actually believe he would end up relaxing much.

* *
*

As long as she was caught up in
the bustle of the supermarket, Sam decided to really stock up. Who knew what
the next week would bring? She picked up Beau’s favorites—steak, potatoes for
baking, ice cream—along with a resupply of nearly everything for the pantry. As
soon as he called to say he was on the way, she lit the gas grill, seasoned the
steaks and opened a new bottle of wine.

As it turned out, he declined the
wine. He was still technically on duty, but he managed to put away all of his
meal and a double serving of ice cream with caramel sauce. When the phone rang,
both of them groaned in dismay. They had hoped the trouble wouldn’t flare up
quite so soon. But the call was from Texas.

“Samantha Jane,
what
on heaven’s earth is going on out
there?”

“Mother? What’s wrong?”

“It’s on the news—
CNN
!. Beau standing up there telling the
whole county he’s going to bring in the National Guard. The TV said somebody
was killed and there’s nearly been a riot. I thought you lived in a quiet
little town. Your daddy’s just fit to be tied.”

“Mother, there hasn’t been a riot.
And the National Guard—”

Beau’s eyes widened and Sam shook
her head, resigned to letting her mother finish saying whatever was on her
mind.

“I think you should just get
yourself home, right now. It’s too dangerous there, with these two killers on
the loose.”

“Mother, they—”

“I mean it. Things are safe here
in Texas, not like that
wild
place
where you are now.”

Sam let her go on. Texas hadn’t
been home for Sam in more than thirty-five years, and Taos so seldom had
anything ‘wild’ happen that Nina Rae’s statement was ludicrous. But there was
no way to get a word into the one-sided conversation. After ten minutes or so,
her mother ran out of steam and began repeating.

“Mother, we’re fine. Beau’s
department has everything under control. There were some protests last night,
that’s all.”

Protests?
Beau mouthed the word. That Albuquerque station must have
sent their footage out to the major networks.

Sam shrugged and signaled that she
couldn’t get her mother to quit. Beau reached over and took the phone.

“Nina Rae, hi.” He used his
soothing voice, the one that he’d developed in training to stop prison riots,
and eventually he began to talk more as Sam’s mother relinquished phone time.
It took five minutes of re-explaining but finally he hung up.

“Whew-
ee
,”
he said, setting the phone down. “That woman is strong willed.”

“Told you,” Sam said with a grin. The
call seemed funny, now that her mother wasn’t actually harping in
her
ear. “I was smart to leave home at
eighteen.”

He picked up the empty ice cream bowls.
“No comment. In the remote possibility that you ever repeat my words to your
mother.”

She laughed out loud as he went
into the kitchen. When she heard him loading the dishwasher she turned to the
dining table, where they’d left Angela Cayne’s case file spread out. At a
glance, she knew she would need to write down a listing of the events—there was
just too much material to keep it straight in her head. She found a yellow
notepad.

Beau came out of the kitchen with
two cups of coffee. “I don’t know if you had much chance to look through this
stuff yet. Basically, I’ve been grouping the pages by subject: Crime scene
evidence; the Cayne family’s story; Jessie’s version of it; Lee’s version of
it; anything other witnesses told us.”

Sam retrieved the printouts she’d
gotten at the newspaper office and told him about her idea for organizing the
material. She picked up the Cayne family’s stack. “I assume the first event
would have been the Caynes reporting that Angela was missing.”

Beau nodded, looking up from the
main file where he was still sorting. “There’s an initial report. The deputy
who responded would have filled that out.”

Sam paged through until she came
to it. A hot summer night. Mr. and Mrs. Cayne had gone to a choral program at
church. Angela stayed home with her grandmother who wasn’t feeling well. Sally
Cayne said she had gone to bed very early and never heard another thing until
Alan and Tracy came home and woke her to ask where Angela had gone. With the
front door standing open and the living room in disarray the family’s
conclusion was that the twenty-year-old had been kidnapped. They immediately
called 9-1-1.

Sheriff Padilla’s thoughts weren’t
included, naturally, but Beau remembered that his boss hadn’t made a big deal
of the girl’s disappearance at the time. He’d openly stated at the squad-room
meetings that most likely Angela had run off with a boyfriend and would call
her parents from Las Vegas in a few days to announce that they were married.
Parents were often the last to have a clue that their kid was unhappy at home.
Although Angela was hardly a child at that point, Padilla had assigned a deputy
to canvass the neighbors and to question Angela’s friends; that was about the
extent of it for the first forty-eight hours.

But the Caynes had remained
insistent. Fed up with the sheriff’s lack of answers, they called the state
police and initiated a search and rescue operation. SAR members had been the
ones who found Angela’s body lying out on open ground in a wooded area near a
stream, a little over six miles from town.

An embarrassed Sheriff Padilla had
quickly backtracked on his earlier halfhearted measures, calling in everyone
who could possibly be a suspect.

“He grilled them relentlessly,”
Beau said. “I remember poor old Roy Watson being dragged in there, having to
question the same witnesses over and over again, even when he would tell
Padilla that someone was clearly not their guy. This case was what pushed
Watson to an early retirement.”

Sam picked up the transcripts from
Jessie Starkey’s interrogation. The gist of it was that Jessie ‘didn’t look
right’ in the sheriff’s estimation. Someone had spotted him near the Cayne
house that night—a long-haired, skinny guy with a lot of tattoos who was acting
jumpy. The witness thought he’d seen Jessie approach the Cayne house—for sure
the front door was open, with only the screen between Jessie and that poor,
innocent girl. That statement was enough for Padilla to haul Jessie in. From
the transcript, his tone and manner were third-degree.

Jessie’s answers were all over the
place—he’d gone to see Lee Rodarte; he’d gone for a long drive alone in his
truck; he’d been in Taos at a bar, not in Sembramos at all; sure, he’d always
thought Angela was pretty hot; he’d asked her out a few times but she was
always busy; yes, he’d bought some cocaine that night; he didn’t remember how
much of it he’d used—so before the end of the hours-long interrogation the man
couldn’t seem to keep anything straight. By dawn he’d signed a confession to
taking Angela Cayne from her home, with the help of Lee Rodarte. Jessie’s
court-appointed lawyer didn’t meet him until two weeks before the start of the
trial.

Lee Rodarte’s interrogation was
even more disturbing. He swore he’d been with his girlfriend, Sophie Garcia, in
the early part of the evening. Sophie wouldn’t give him an answer about getting
married and that had upset Lee. He’d left her house and gone for a ride on his
motorcycle. He stayed consistent with this throughout, despite the so-called
‘facts’ that the sheriff kept throwing at him from Jessie Starkey’s confession.
Lee had to admit that he dealt a few drugs now and then, that he’d sold Jessie
both cocaine and pot at times, but not that night. Unfortunately, from the time
Lee left Sophie’s company at around eight p.m., no one could vouch for his
whereabouts the rest of the night. Except for Jessie Starkey. Lee was toast.

Sam jotted all this on her
timeline. From Deputy Watson’s canvass of the neighborhood, through the
interviews at the department and interrogation of the suspects, more than two
dozen people had offered information, but nothing she’d come across so far
would have conclusively exonerated either man.

“Maybe I should keep a separate
list of everyone who was interviewed throughout this whole investigation,” she told
Beau. “I’m getting them confused and I haven’t even been through a fraction of
this yet.”

“Good idea.” He yawned and looked
at his watch. “It’s after eleven. No calls from either front, so I’d say that’s
good news. I better try for some sleep.” He set the file pages down.

Sam was scribbling names as she
came across them. “The minute I finish with this stack of neighbor interviews,
I’ll be joining you.”

But she soon gave up. Her brain
felt dull after the hours of reading so she set her lists aside and turned off
lights as she walked through the living room and made her way upstairs.

“I’ll get back to the witness list
in the morning,” she told Beau as they brushed their teeth at the double sinks.
But at some point she needed to finish her caretaking project and submit a
final report to Delbert Crow, and then there was the matter of keeping her
bakery business alive too. She’d better put in some time there. She fell into a
sound sleep until the tone of Beau’s phone woke them both.

A hint of dawn showed at the
windows and the clock said it was 5:47. Beau groaned and picked up the phone.
Two seconds later he sat up, alert. “Shit!” He gave quick orders.

Sam came fully awake. “What is
it?”

He set his phone on the night
stand and stood up. “Lee Rodarte’s body was found in an alley a little while
ago.”

“Oh, no.”

“I know. It feels like this just
won’t end.” He grabbed the uniform he’d left on a chair last night and started
pulling on pants and shirt. “I’ve ordered deputies back to town and we’ll have
to wake up Lisa early, gather whatever evidence we can secure before the scene
gets disturbed.”