Acquired Motives (Dr. Sylvia Strange Book 2) (3 page)

     
"You knew Randall would be a high-profile case—"

     
"So what? I take low-profile cases, too. It's my job."

     
"I have a small problem with the fact Randall's out again. And he'll hurt another girl just like he hurt Flora Escudero."

     
Sylvia stared at him. "You think I don't know that? Randall could be meeting his next victim as we speak. And I'll make you a bet: next time, he'll kill." Her voice hardened. "But maybe next time, the state police will get a valid confession, and someone like Tulley won't have the chance to recant. And maybe the sadistic sonofabitch will be caged in North Facility, which is the only place in this world for Anthony Randall."

     
Matt swallowed the last of his iced tea, and then he crumpled the waxed cup. "You still haven't answered my first question. Why didn't you let this one go?"

     
When she didn't respond, Matt pressed. "Every time a scumbag rapes some poor kid like Flora Escudero, you've got to be there. Why?"

     
She gathered up the food wrappers on the table and then raised her eyes to his. "Today, in that courtroom . . . that was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do."

     
"So why not walk away?" Matt stood and followed her toward the car.

     
When Sylvia reached the Caprice, she turned to face him, then stood stock still. "You shouldn't have to ask that." She took a deep breath and shook her head. "Not everybody can do what I do. Most people can't stomach working with these guys. But I'm good at it. At my best, I help people. At my best, I make sure someone like Anthony Randall doesn't get the chance to hurt another human being."

     
A sudden gust of wind blew her hair back from her face. The branches of an old cottonwood rustled. Paper and other debris skittered across asphalt. She stepped toward Matt and touched his cheek. "Now, can we go? I've got to be back at my office in five minutes . . . and it's been a shitty day."

     
Instead of a verbal response, he pushed her against the Caprice and kissed her. His mouth was rough, needy, and she let him suck the air from her throat and lungs. His hand crumpled silk as his fingers found her breast.

     
She was caught off guard; heat traveled along her thighs, up her belly. They kissed until the teenagers began to honk the Buick's horn in appreciation.

     
Inside the Caprice, the fight started again.

     
He said, "I think you should lighten your caseload. We could spend more time together—"

     
"My schedule's no worse than yours. You want me to stay at home with an apron on?"

     
Matt just rolled his eyes.

     
They'd been over this territory before: a familiar trail where the traveler was smart to avoid a misstep. Neither of them was ready for marriage. They loved each other, but they weren't good at sharing territory.

     
"We're both happy with the way things are, right?" Sylvia didn't like the strident tone of her voice.

     
To her surprise, Matt blushed. He turned crimson from neck to ears. Then, to cover his embarrassment and frustration, he turned the key in the ignition, revved the engine.

     
He dropped her off outside the building that housed her office. As he drove away, she was left with the beginnings of panic; she wanted to call him back. She couldn't shake the feeling Matt was withholding something. But then, so was she. She'd never been able to relax with the idea of commitment. Her brief and unsuccessful marriage was evidence of that fact. So was her more recent affair with Malcolm Treisman. Before his death from cancer, Malcolm had been her mentor, her associate, her surrogate father—and the man she loved.

     
Desertion, divorce, death. She had a bad track record when it came to men.

     
It took her a moment to calm herself. She stood on the hot sidewalk and listened to a dog barking frantically in a nearby yard. Thirty thousand feet overhead, a jet left a shaving-cream trail in the sky. The usual summer thunderheads were nowhere to be seen; instead, the firmament was smeared with smoke from the Dark Canyon fire that burned in the Jemez Mountains to the northwest. Closer to earth, the blue-gray foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains set the northeast boundary of Santa Fe; above eighty-five hundred feet the air would be noticeably cooler.

     
Sylvia tucked her briefcase under one arm and began the short walk to her office. She tried to focus on her upcoming session with Kevin the Terrible, but her mind replayed the recent scene in the courtroom—Flora Escudero's mother crying out, "You're a bad woman!"

     
Matt was right, she should have walked away from Anthony Randall.

     
Each day she dealt with men who had psyches as twisted as shrapnel. She probed, explored, contained their darkness. She had the ego strength and the endurance to commit herself completely to her work. But because she had come so close to evil, Sylvia knew her immunity to it was less than perfect.

CHAPTER THREE

A
NTHONY
R
ANDALL
SLOUCHED
across the intake desk at the Santa Fe County Detention Center and licked his lips. The female clerk scowled and slid the release form across the counter.

     
"Sign it."

     
"
Bitch
." He mouthed the word when she glanced away. Then he smiled and scrawled his name at the bottom of the form. Overlooking the desk, glassed-in detention cells housed offenders and indigents taken into custody the night before, or those inmates awaiting transport to other facilities. Vapid faces pressed against the reinforced glass; they were the witnesses to Anthony Randall's release. At 1:55
P.M
. on July 5, he was officially a free man. He pocketed his thirty-two bucks and change, took the paper bag with his few possessions, and turned his back on the prisoners, the orange linoleum, the intake clerk. He walked out the rear door, the same way he'd entered three months earlier.

     
Outside the detention center there were no cops, no reporters, there was no crowd Randall's lawyer, Tony Klavin, had encouraged interviews in front of the courthouse after the hearing. Anthony had given his statement: "In my case, justice won out, and I want to thank God for His help. I offer my sincerest condolences to the Escudero family because somewhere out there—the real rapist is free."

     
Klavin had filled in the rest: "Law enforcement should be concentrating on finding the real perpetrator instead of destroying the life of an innocent man."

     
Randall figured "law enforcement" would be on him like ugly on a frog. But he didn't see any cops as he walked past storage sheds, trailer parks, and minimart gas-ups. It was a three-block stretch to the intersection of Rodeo and Cerrillos roads, where the Villa Linda Mall occupied eighty acres. Here and there, clusters of poplars and juniper had escaped bulldozers. For those who had been in the area long enough, the trees touched a memory of high-desert prairie, of ranches, meadowlarks, and Spanish land grants. But Randall had no such memory; he, his mother, and his younger brother had drifted from Van Nuys, California, three years earlier.

     
No, the cops hadn't shown, and neither had his mother. He didn't expect to see her for days. She was keeping a safe, alcohol-dulled distance from her bad seed.

     
He turned north, thumb out, cocky smile.
My lucky day
. It took him only minutes to hitch a ride on the back of a Honda 750. The biker cruised him the twelve miles out to Pojoaque—past the Santa Fe Opera, past piñon-studded hills, past Pueblo bingo parlors and Camel Rock—to his final destination: the Cock 'n' Bull. He would be hammered before the sun even began to set beyond Nambe Valley.

     
It was a roadside bar, weathered and faded, with a cracked billboard. The dusty parking lot was filled with pickup trucks, gas guzzlers, and enough Harleys for a biker convention. On the fifth of July, the holiday weekend was still a party at the Bull.

     
The Honda skidded to a stop behind a turquoise pickup, and the engine throbbed while Randall nodded thanks for the ride. A fat and very drunk man wearing a leather Harley vest stumbled out the bar's saloon-style swinging doors. Randall slapped road dirt from his Levi's and strutted into the Cock 'n' Bull.

     
Instant noise and irritation. His regular bartender was gone; he didn't recognize the black-haired witch who was setting up draft beers by the dozen. In fact, it was hard to see anyone in the dim, crowded room. Nobody looked familiar, although he'd been gone barely three months. Anthony Randall didn't expect a hero's welcome—he wasn't a man who had friends. But he did expect somebody to pay some attention when he entered a room.

     
I beat the fucking system
.

     
He shouldered his way to the bar, yelled, "When's Kiki working?"—and got smoke in his face. He paid for a double shot of Herradura Gold and a Bud chaser. The only empty table was wedged into a corner at the back of the large room. Randall pushed his way past revelers and serious drinkers. The air was stale with sweat and alcohol, the noise level was harsh. He sat down, did the shot, and slammed the glass on varnished wood just as a string of firecrackers exploded across the room.

     
A girl in skintight black pants had jumped up on the bar. Surrounded by a crowd of onlookers, she was chugging a pitcher of draft. Randall shook his head in disgust. The bitch was looking for a good time.

     
He finished off his Bud just as the girl drained her pitcher. Beer had soaked her face and neck, and her T-shirt stuck to her skin.

     
Above laughter and applause for the chugger, a voice sounded in Anthony Randall's ear: "It's cool, what you did."

     
Randall glanced up and found himself staring into a face obscured by black sunglasses. The guy from the Honda 750.

     
The biker set four double shots of tequila on the table. He straddled the chair opposite Randall.

     
Anthony Randall grunted. The guy wasn't a cop; he'd smell that shit a mile away. One-handed, he slipped a pack of smokes from his shirt pocket, shook one out, and slid it between his full lips.

     
Broad-shouldered, pumped up, sporting a three-day growth of beard, the biker was wearing a brown leather jacket even though it was hot His skin was chapped by sun and wind. He jerked his head in disgust "Nobody else understands about what you did. You stuck it right up the ass of the cops, the judge, the whole stinking system." He held up a glass, raised it to Randall in salute. "To you, man."

     
Anthony Randall took the second double shot and poured oily tequila down his throat Heat streaked through his belly; his muscles began to loosen up. He wanted to get drunk. He wanted to get blind. He had it coming after all that time inside. Maybe this motor-dude could do him a favor.

     
"Baby Did a Bad Thing" blasted from the jukebox.

     
Randall gripped another glass, and tequila slopped onto the table. "You got any smoke to go with this?" He did the shot.

     
The biker's face slowly transformed behind a stupid grin. "Outside."

     
In the parking lot, a sudden gust of wind shot Randall's hair with static and left grit in his eyes. An empty beer can clattered across gravel until it lodged behind a tire. Randall followed the guy to the edge of the dirt where the 750 was parked next to a white panel truck under a stand of elms and cottonwoods. The groaning tree branches leaned into the wind. Two cars pulled out of the lot and turned onto the frontage road.

     
Randall slapped his new friend on the back and stumbled toward the biggest cottonwood. The cords on the thick tree trunk stood out like veins. He reached down and unzipped his fly with unsteady hands. He had to take a piss. Beer and tequila always did it to him, made him piss like a faucet. His urine spattered off a handmade wooden cross planted at the base of the tree.

     
What did they call them, the crosses that marked where somebody died on the highway? There was some word in Spanish he never could remember.

     
This cross was made of rough pine stakes, maybe twenty inches by twelve, nailed together and planted deep in earth. The ribbon had faded from sun and dust, the plastic flowers looked new. So who the fuck got wasted?

     
His urine cut a yellow rainbow through space, and Randall flashed on the girl gazing up at him, legs splayed out, face all bloody. The way he left her to die. But the stupid bitch had stayed alive, almost got him a long vacation. Almost. It was his lawyer's job to keep him out of the joint And the shrink's. Other guys got caught, did hard time, not Anthony Randall. He had plans.

     
He heard footsteps—the motor-dude back with the weed—and he didn't look over his shoulder. Instead, he bent forward to read the name burned in the cross.

     
That was the last thing he did. One slam to the back of his head, the letters scrambled, his mind jammed into free fall, and he fell forward.

A
NTHONY
R
ANDALL COULDN'T
breathe. It was hot and dark, and he had lost all sense of time. Maybe hours had gone by since the bar . . . maybe minutes. His mouth had been taped, he was blindfolded, his hands had gone numb. The acid taste of bile filled the back of his mouth; tequila and dread.

     
His body rolled to one side, then back again. He was in a moving truck or van. Who was driving? His mind dissolved into shiny fragments.