Sweet Hearts (29 page)

Sam stared over the top of her
spoon.

“Some of your brownies . . . the
ones with chocolate buttercream and nuts . . .”

Sam looked at her, trying to
convey
If you think I’m starting to bake at this point on Sunday evening,
think again
. But what came out was, “Dark ganache frosting, no nuts, and
you’ve got it.” She’d remembered that there was an extra half-pan of them in
the fridge at the bakery.

“I’ll do dishes . . .”

“Okay, I’ll go get the dessert.”
Sam gathered their bowls and set them in the kitchen sink on the way out.

She pulled her Silverado pickup
into the alley. The street light was still out and she located her key by the
bakery’s porch light, which she’d begun leaving on.. The brownies were in the
fridge, protected from drying out by a foil cover and she picked up the entire
pan.

When she locked the back door and
turned around, a man stood beside her truck.

Sam let out a small yelp and
nearly dropped the pan.

“Hello, Ms Sweet.”

“Deputy Waters? What are you
doing here?”
Did Beau send him over?

He wore black jeans and T-shirt
and a black jacket with the sleeves pushed up. The porch light showed that his
normally neat hair hung limply across his forehead and he held a nightstick,
rhythmically slapping it against the palm of his left hand. A circular tattoo
on his forearm flexed with each swing of the stick.

“I saw your truck. Thought the
sheriff might be here with you,” he said. He seemed agitated. His eyes darted
up and down the alley. Sam’s gaze followed. She didn’t see another vehicle.

“No, I haven’t seen him since
this morning,” Sam said. She’d locked the door already, and her mind zipped
through the possibilities. Her keys were in her coat pocket, her cell phone at
home. All help was out of reach. “Did you try calling him?”

“He’s not at the office.” Waters
stepped forward. “I heard that a bunch of arrests went down this afternoon.”

Sam kept her expression neutral.
“He’s probably busy with that, then.” She walked down the two steps to the
surface of the alley. “You could call his cell phone.”

His face screwed up in a scowl.
“I’m not gonna handle this on the phone,” he said. “He’s got a friend of mine.
I can’t ignore that.”

What? You’re an officer of the
law. Why would you side against your boss?

But what she said was, “Really?
Who’s your friend?” As she talked she moved subtly, keeping her distance from
the crazy deputy and his nightstick, trying to get closer to her truck without
being obvious about it. Beau and Jonathan must have worked all afternoon,
setting up the arrests in Taos and Albuquerque quickly.

“Javier. We go way back, to
school.”

For the first time, Sam saw the
hard edge to the deputy, the tough punk he might have been, or wanted to be.

“Why did you choose law
enforcement, Denny?”

“What do you mean?”

“With friends like Javier it just
doesn’t seem like something you’d be interested in, you know.”

“I
always
wanted to do
this!” he shouted. “Tito and Jimmy and those guys. I wanted them to be
my
friends.”

Sam froze in place. His outburst
startled her.
Go carefully here. This guy is unbalanced
. “You all knew
each other in school?”

“Yeah. Me and Jimmy and Tito.
Javier, even. He was in the group for awhile.”

She saw the history of these guys
unfolding. Young kids, elementary school, all buddies. By high school there’d
been some rifts, a little fighting. Javier and some of the others would start
getting caught up in gangs and drugs. Tito and Jimmy went the straight path—did
their military service, stayed on the right side of the law. And there was
Denny Waters, stuck in the middle, not really fitting with either group. And
instead of leaving his small hometown for an education and a new start
somewhere else he hung around, resenting the others’ successes. Never quite a
bad guy, but never really reaching the echelons of the good guys either.

“So, I’m curious about your
tattoo,” Sam said, tilting her head toward his arm.

He lowered the nightstick and
held out the arm with the emblem. The second his attention went to the inked
piece of art, Sam swung the baking pan toward his head. The edge of it caught
him squarely in the temple and he staggered back a few steps, dropping the
nightstick. She ran for her truck, fumbling in her pocket for the keyfob
opener.

She pressed the button and
reached for the door handle at the same time. Waters had recovered and was
circling the back of the pickup. She yanked the door open, dove inside and
groped for the lock, finding it just as he got his hand on the handle. She
scrambled across the center console and thrust the key into the ignition. His
nightstick came up, ready to bash her window. Sam landed in her seat, cranked
the key and the truck roared to life. She jammed it in gear and screeched away,
leaving the deputy staggering.

Her heartbeat had slowed a little
by the time she got home. She blew out a shaky breath and dashed inside. She
had to let Beau know about this.

“About time,” Kelly called out
from the living room. “I’m dying for those brownies.”

“Well, there’s been a little
problem with that.” Sam heard the tremor in her own voice as she picked up the
phone to call Beau.

“Mom? You okay?” Kelly peeked
around the edge of the wall.

Sam nodded. “Beau. I’m glad I
found you. Denny Waters just threatened me.”

“
What?
” Kelly and Beau
said it at the same time, a stereo moment in Sam’s ears.

“At the bakery. Five minutes ago.
I don’t know where he is now, but you need to get him off the streets. The guy
is unbalanced.” She knew that she sounded like a shrew, demanding of him that
way, but the words came anyway.

“Darlin’, where are you now?”
When she told him, he said, “Calm down. I have to wind down something here but
I can be there in fifteen minutes. Lock yourselves in and I’ll deal with this.”

Kelly was staring at her from the
living room doorway, but Sam shook her head. “I’ll have to repeat it all for
Beau anyway. You can hear the story then.” She turned on the tap and filled a
glass with water.

An hour later she’d recounted the
incident, along with everything Waters had told her about his ties with both
Tito and Espinosa. Beau made some calls, got his other deputies who’d been
called in along with a group of State Police officers to make the earlier
arrests, and told them to find Waters and bring him in.

“I’ll need for you to make a
statement at the office,” he told Sam. “Either tonight or in the morning.”

“I’ll come now,” she said. “It
will be fresher in my mind, plus I doubt I’ll sleep. Repetition will help get
it out of my system.”

She turned to Kelly. “Keep the
doors locked, in case he comes here looking for me.”

Kelly’s eyes went wide.

“Maybe you better go somewhere
else. Zoë’s house maybe? Or Jen’s?”

But Beau’s radio squawked just
then and one of the deputies said he had Waters in custody.

“I’ll be fine here,” Kelly said.
She looked comfy in her flannel pajamas, unwilling to get dressed and go
elsewhere.

“Keep the doors locked,” Beau
said. “We’re pretty sure we just caught everyone involved in this thing, but
just in case.”

You didn’t know Waters was
involved
, Sam thought. “I’d rather you went to Jen’s,” she told Kelly.

With a little huff but no
argument, Kelly called her friend and changed clothes. They left the house in a
little procession, with Beau tailing in his cruiser to be sure they got to
their destinations.

*

Sam’s statement went
quickly—she’d run through every harrowing second in her mind at least a dozen
times already. While she talked in Beau’s office with deputy Joe Gonzales, Beau
was in the squad room with Denny Waters cuffed to a bench.

“I need to see if you can pick out
the man who threatened you outside your shop,” Joe said. “I’ve got a lineup
ready in the interrogation room.”

“I’m ready,” she said. Anything
to get this wrapped up. Four men stood side-by-side and she stared at them
through the two-way glass. “Three of them were at the cemetery after Tito’s
funeral. The first one, on the left, he’s the guy from the alley. Can they turn
sideways?”

When they did, she recognized the
row of tattoos up his neck, the profile which had flashed past her in the red
low-rider on that other occasion. “Is that Espinosa?”

Joe nodded. “Thanks, Sam. You’re
free to go.”

“I’d like to wait for Beau, if
that’s okay.” Joe ushered her back into Beau’s office where she found herself
impatiently wanting to talk to him, to find out all that had happened during
the afternoon.

Two hours dragged by, during
which Javier Espinosa was taken away by the State Police, and when Beau came in
Sam thought he looked tired.

“I can’t believe Denny’s
connections with Espinosa didn’t come up on his background check,” Beau said.

He’d dismissed Joe Gonzales, and
Waters was sitting in a holding cell now. Beau sat at his desk where Sam had
occupied herself by doodling sketches of the symbols she remembered from Tito’s
code book.

“Espinosa’s unsavory past has
been known to us for a long time, but it was all petty stuff,” he said. “He’d
do a little time, get out, start over. One of those guys who’s always going to
be in the system. At least now, with Tito’s evidence, I think we have a strong
enough connection now to put him away forever. The more we question these guys,
plus with the evidence from Tito, we think Rick Wells actually pulled the
trigger. He knew Tito was on to him. He was beginning to panic, knew he would
lose his job. Figured a random shooting in a DC park would just be chalked up
as normal and would get lost in the mountains of such cases they have out
there.”

“It nearly did,” Sam pointed out.

“Of course, Wells will lawyer up
and we may never know the whole truth, although Tito’s book is already revealing
the depth of Wells’s involvement—bribes, corruption, private deals with the
cartel. Plenty of motive for him to kill Tito.”

“Denny Waters told me that the
local guys were all friends when they were kids—he and Javier and Tito and
Jimmy McMichael. I got the feeling he was jealous that all the others formed
solid friendships and left him on the outside.”

“It’s true. We found that they
were all within a year or two of each other in school. We know that Waters was
the one who tipped Espinosa that Tito was in town the weekend he disappeared.
Of course, Rick Wells knew that Tito had made a lot of connections between the
cartels in Mexico and the gangs in northern New Mexico. Once Tito had confirmed
Espinosa and the Taos connection, Rick Wells knew it was a matter of time
before his own involvement with kickbacks and bribes would come to light. That
activity went way back, from the years when Wells started with the Border
Patrol and then went into DEA in Arizona. He’d long ago figured out that taking
money to pave the way for these guys was a lot more profitable and less
dangerous than actually touching the drugs or cash shipments himself.”

Beau tapped a pencil against the
desk blotter, his brows pulled together hard in the middle.

“Don’t beat yourself up over this,
Beau,” Sam said. “A background check will reveal a lot, but not everything.
Denny’s connections to his childhood friends could have gotten by anyone.”

He leaned forward and lowered his
voice. “It’s just that sometimes I feel so
new
at this. Like I’m really
out of the whole loop of connections and political savvy in this town.”

“You are new at it. But look at
what your predecessor’s record was like. He had all the connections and
political savvy in the world. And it corrupted him.” She met his gaze. “Stay
new and fresh and open to all the possibilities. It’s better than falling into
the system and becoming hardened to it.”

“I guess.”

She stood up and walked around to
his side of the desk. “It’s late and I’m fading fast. I’ll talk to you
tomorrow?”

She kissed him on top of the head
and walked out to her truck. The parking area around the county offices was
well lit, but Sam didn’t entirely relax until she’d made it home and locked
everything up tight.

Sam rushed through Monday
morning’s baking, getting everything started so Becky could take over when she
came in at eight. Last night’s session at Beau’s office had gone on too late to
call Marla, and she didn’t dare wake her early this morning, but Sam was
anxious about her friend and worried that she’d not touched base as promised on
Sunday.

Once she had the first batch of
breakfast items out in the displays, Sam sat at her desk and dialed Marla’s
number. When there was no answer, Sam looked up Diane Milton’s number.

“Marla is back in the hospital,”
the neighbor said. “I’m afraid it doesn’t look good.”

Sam’s heart sank.

“The past week was a lot for her
to handle,” Diane went on. “She collapsed shortly after everyone left on
Saturday afternoon. We called the ambulance. I’m so sorry that I didn’t think
to call you right then.”

It didn’t matter. What was done,
was done. “I’ll go by to see her now,” Sam said.

Something told her not to wait.
She gave Jen and Becky some quick assignments and left her baker’s jacket on
its hook.

Marla looked more ghostlike than
ever, her hair lying lank and wispy against her skull, her skin showing the
pallor of death. Sam gulped and pasted on a smile.

“Hey, Marla,” she said softly.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come by sooner.”

“Sam. I’m so happy to see you.”
Her voice came out thin, reedy. “I have news.”