A Killing in the Valley (54 page)

Some nervous laughter broke out. Martindale gaveled for silence.

“And of course, I know about guns,” Juanita went on. “I’ve been shooting since I was a girl. In fact, I had killed a feral boar earlier that very morning,” she said proudly. “He was tearing my garden up something fierce, and I wasn’t going to tolerate that.”

Luke smiled. What a character, he thought. He looked at the jurors. They were eating out of her hand. “What happened then?” he prompted her.

“A car drove up.”

“Did you recognize it?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“So what did you do?”

“I watched from inside the house to see who it was. I must confess, I was a tad scared.”

“And who was it?”

“My grandson. Steven McCoy.” She pointed to the defense table and smiled broadly. “Him. And his friend, Tyler Woodruff.”

Steven smiled back at her.

“Aha,” Luke exclaimed, watching this touching display of familial love. “So then what did you do?”

“I threw the gun down and ran outside.”

“You just tossed it aside.”

“I put it down,” she corrected him primly. “I didn’t actually throw it.”

This was going well. He waited a few seconds for the good feeling to sink in, then began again. “Were you expecting him?”

She shook her head. “Not at all. I was totally surprised. And delighted. He’s a wonderful young man.” She grinned, almost shyly. “Don’t tell my other grandchildren, but he’s my favorite,” she confided.

Now she was starting to lay it on too thick. Better rein her in. “Did you ask him how he had gotten in through a locked gate? I assume it was locked, and not left open accidentally.”

She nodded in agreement. “Yes, I asked him. He told me his father had given him the combination when they had been out the previous Christmas holiday, and he’d remembered it.”

“You were satisfied with that explanation?”

“Of course,” she answered staunchly. “He’s family.”

One issue down. “What happened then?”

“We talked for a few minutes. They told me what they’d been doing that summer. They were going to spend the day and evening in Santa Barbara, and return later that night. They wanted to spend the night camping outside the old house, for nostalgic reasons, which was fine with me. We made plans to have breakfast together the following morning.”

“Then they left? Before you did?”

“Yes. I stayed there and worked on my photography project.”

“Before they left, did you remind Steven to lock the security gate behind him?” Luke asked.

He glimpsed toward the jury. They were listening carefully.

“Yes.”

“And he told you he would?”

A nod. “Yes, he did.”

Luke paused again for a second. “Now when you left there and returned to your own house at another section of your property, did you leave by that road? The one that has the security gate?”

“No,” she answered. “I went back the way I came.”

“So you never saw if Steven had locked the gate, or not.”

“No, I didn’t.”

So far so great. “You were in the old ranch house by yourself for a spell before you went home.” It was a statement, not a question. He wanted that detail to be firmly lodged in the jury’s collective mind.

“Yes. I was by myself.”

“Did you remember to put the revolver back in the gun case? The one you took out when you thought Steven might be an intruder?”

“No. I forgot to,” she told him.

“Did you also forget to lock the gun case back up?”

“Yes,” she answered again. “I completely forgot about all that.”

“So you never put the gun back, and you never relocked the case.”

“No, I didn’t,” she confirmed. Her voice started quivering. “It was a terrible mistake. That poor girl might be alive today if I hadn’t forgotten.”

“It’s not your fault,” he assured her. “Nobody thinks that.” Another look at the jury. They were totally sympathetic to this poor old woman. Just the way he wanted it.

“The house itself,” he said. “Do you keep it locked up?”

“Of course we do. We have many valuable collections in it. Not just the guns,” she said, with another look at the jurors, then up to Martindale. “Art. Books. Furniture. It’s irreplaceable, much of it. Not only our family’s history, but that of the county, and the state. It goes back almost two hundred and fifty years,” she added proudly.

“I’ve been there. It’s a beautiful and unique place,” Luke agreed. “So when you left later that day, you locked the house up behind you, I assume.”

She shook her head. “No, I didn’t.”

He feigned surprise. “You didn’t? Why not?”

“Because Steven was coming back that night. I wanted him to be able to go inside, if he wanted to.”

“You weren’t worried about it being left open, with all that valuable stuff inside?”

She stared at him as if he were the slowest kid in the class. “Of course not.”

“Why?”

“Because I had reminded Steven to lock the gate behind him when he left,” she explained patiently. “Nobody would be able to get in, because they wouldn’t have access to the property.”

“Of course,” he agreed. He shuffled through some notes to let that permeate. Then he asked her, “When did you next go there?”

“The morning after. To make Steven and Tyler breakfast, as we had planned.”

“And then?”

“We talked for a little while. They didn’t have much time, they had to get on the road. They were driving straight through to Tucson, to register for their fall classes at the university.”

“You returned to your house then.”

“Yes.”

“You locked the old house up.”

“Most definitely I did.”

Luke waited a moment before introducing his next topic. “At any time when he was there, did Steven tell you he had forgotten to lock the security gate behind him when he went to Santa Barbara earlier?”

A strong head-shake. “He certainly did not,” she said reproachfully.

“He was afraid you’d be mad?”

“He
knew
I’d be mad.”

Luke chuckled. He looked over at Steven, who was hanging his head with just the right amount of sheepishness. “I want to get back to the historic nature of that house for a moment,” he told her. “Do you always keep it closed to the public?”

“No,” she answered.

“When do you open it? How often?”

“A few times a year. I’m on several boards—art, music, nonprofits, the university. We also have some open houses for our valley neighbors, other ranchers. The county rodeo association.”

“How many people attend these events?”

“It varies,” she replied. “Sometimes a dozen or less, sometimes as many as a hundred or more.”

“So every year, a couple or three hundred outsiders come onto your property. Do those numbers sound right?”

“About right,” she agreed.

“Do you know all these people?”

“No, I don’t. In many cases, I hardly know any of them.”

“There have been hundreds of people you don’t know and have never met, except for on whatever particular occasion they’re there for?”

“Yes. I know the organizers, of course. And we have someone in the house during those times, to keep an eye on things.”

“When you host these events, Mrs. McCoy, do you leave the security gate open and unlocked?” he asked.

“Yes, we do,” she answered, “because it’s the only way in. We used to post one of our ranch people there to open it as guests arrived, but that was too cumbersome. So now we leave it open.”

“For the duration of the event only?” he led her.

She nodded forcefully. “Absolutely. As soon as they’re out…” She clapped her hands together in a dismissive motion, “…it’s locked back up.”

“Any other occasions when the gate would be opened?” Luke asked.

“During spring roundup, friends come to the ranch to help out. It’s a valley thing, neighbors helping neighbors.” She smiled. “And it’s fun. You get to be a cowboy for a day. We leave the gate open then, for convenience.”

“How many people participate in that?” Luke asked.

“It depends on how large a herd we have in any particular year,” she told him. “But dozens. We often have more help than we need. Afterwards, I cook for them, a big barbeque. It’s one of my favorite events of the year,” she said, looking over at the jurors and smiling.

“Of those neighbors,” Luke continued, “how many are men?”

“Most of them,” she replied. “More women now than in the old days, but it’s still a man’s thing. Although that’s changing, like everything in society.”

Luke gathered up his notes. He was almost finished; only a couple more questions. “What was your reaction when you were told a body had been found on your property?” he asked.

Juanita shuddered. “I was horrified.”

“How did you think it had gotten there?”

She shook her head. “I had no idea.”

“Weren’t you surprised, since you keep the ranch locked up and off-limits from intruders?”

“Yes,” she agreed. “I was very surprised.”

Elise handled Juanita’s cross-examination. There wasn’t much she could do to poke holes in it. Juanita hadn’t said anything that could be turned around against the defense. More importantly, a blind man could see that the old lady had won the jury over about thirty seconds after she sat down in the witness chair. Anybody dumb enough to screw around with a seventy-six-year-old grandmotherly icon should never have been admitted to the bar. Elise wasn’t nearly that stupid.

At a quarter to five in the afternoon, court was adjourned for the day.

It was well past midnight, but Kate couldn’t sleep. Worrying about the trial wasn’t keeping her awake; it was Sophia. It had finally hit her this morning, when she saw how Sophia reacted when Steven McCoy came into the courthouse. Her baby was hung up on him, badly. She might as well have stamped the news on her forehead, it was so obvious. She had fallen right down into the well; Kate had realized that as soon as she’d seen that look on her face.

No wonder Sophia was spending all her free time at the ranch. Horseback riding couldn’t be that compelling. She was sleeping with Steven. She had to be, you can’t hold back hormones that are raging that fiercely.

By now, having discovered Peter Baumgartner, she was convinced that Steven hadn’t killed Maria Estrada, so the issue wasn’t that Sophia was involved with a murderer. Steven was the grandson of one of the finest people she had ever known, which had to rub off, even if his parents were cut from lesser cloth: genes often skipped a generation. He was bright, with a good future; he was going to be a doctor, like Wanda. And in many ways, he was a good person. Look how he had gone out and rescued that couple during the fire. He could have been caught in a backdraft and killed. They had been lucky, but it was Steven’s grit that had gotten them through. A heroic act, and selfless. There were many checkmarks on the positive side of Steven McCoy’s ledger.

The problem was, some of those strong qualities were the very things a mother feared for her daughter. Steven was a man, and Sophia, despite her maturity, was still a girl. She hadn’t even graduated from high school. And regardless of how much Steven liked her, whatever was happening between them couldn’t last. In a couple of weeks the trial would be over, and he’d be going back to Arizona, to the real life he’d had to suspend for over half a year.

She knew that Sophia had to be on edge about her affair, but she also had to be happy, out of her mind with rapture. She remembered the feeling from when she was that age. It was like no emotion could ever be that powerful again. And maybe it never was. A woman never forgot her first love, even if it turned out to be less than the real thing—how many of those were there?

Well, there was nothing she could do about it. It was time for this to happen. She hoped that when Sophia crashed, she wouldn’t break. What she did know was that she’d be there to pick up the pieces. But maybe that wouldn’t happen. Sophia was strong. She had to be; it had been forced on her.

Sophia would be all right. She was the one who was going to suffer. September, when Sophia would leave home for college, was coming in the blink of an eye. She would be alone again. She had forgotten, over these months, what it was like to be alone. Before, it had been bearable, often comfortable. It wouldn’t be like that this time.

She thought, again, as she halfheartedly fingered herself, about Warren Baumgartner. They had talked on the phone a couple of times, but she hadn’t seen him. Ethically she couldn’t, until the trial was over. But that wasn’t the real reason. They were on opposite sides of what could turn out to be a wall too high to climb. She wondered if he would show up in the courtroom, now that his son was going to be a principal in the case. She wanted him to, and at the same time, she didn’t. She didn’t want to be distracted, and his presence would do that. But she wanted to see him, anyway.

If he showed up, she’d deal with it. Right now, all her energy was centered on her daughter.

J
EREMY MUSGROVE, STIFF AS
a marionette, was sworn in and took his seat in the witness chair. He blinked nervously as he looked up at Luke. The courtroom was humid from the recent rains. He could feel sweat starting to form in his armpits.

As Luke greeted Jeremy, the rear door to the courtroom opened and a man quietly slipped in. Kate, sitting in her customary seat in the first row behind the defendant’s table, glanced behind her. Warren Baumgartner, at the back of the room, saw her staring at him, and stared back without expression.

She closed her eyes, then opened them. He was still there. She started to smile—partly in greeting, partly in recognition, partly in welcome, and most urgently, partly with desire—but her mind overrode her emotions, and her lips didn’t turn up, for which she was very glad. She had to bury her feelings toward him. To open herself to emotion, even a crack, could be awful, both personally and professionally.

If Warren picked up on the distress his showing up caused her, he didn’t show any sign of it. He turned away, scanned the room for a moment, then took a seat in the last row.

Luke was oblivious to the emotional psychodrama that was playing behind his back. He greeted Jeremy, and after a mumbled “hello” in return, asked his first question: “Where and when did you first meet Maria Estrada?”