Tough Customer (30 page)

It was decided that they would take Caroline's car, which had a roomier and more comfortable interior than his rental. Knowing he couldn't smoke in it, he inhaled as many cigarettes as he could while waiting for the two women to gather up what they would take with them.

Berry was the first to join him outside. As she came down the back steps carrying a large leather portfolio and a small suitcase, she eyed the cigarette butts he had extinguished in the pot of caladiums. "Do you think those will sustain you till we get there?"

"Do I have a choice?"

His querulousness caused her to smile. Together they stashed her things in the trunk. She was about to get into the backseat when she hesitated. "I know you consider this assignment glorified babysitting. You'd much rather be in on the action. But, for what it's worth, I'm glad you have my back, Dodge." She reached out and touched his hand. "Thanks."

He had ridiculed people who got mushy over their kids. He'd believed them to be goddamn fools, bores, and probably liars. But when Berry smiled at him, touched his hand, he understood the absurd, inexplicable, boundless scope of parental love.

It was several minutes before he recovered his breath and the tightness in his chest relaxed.

Once they were under way, he tried to reach Ski but got his voice mail. He left a message, briefly apprising him of their plans. There was no response until they were halfway to Houston and had stopped to take a break at a large service station. Dodge was standing guard outside the ladies' room when his cell phone rang.

He checked the caller ID, sighed, and braced himself for what he knew was coming. "I swear I tried." He let Ski rant profanely for a full thirty seconds before butting in. "She's damned and determined to make that meeting tomorrow."

Ski expelled his breath, and along with it another series of swearwords. "I want her back in Merritt as soon as it's over."

"I hear you. What's going on at your end?"

Ski talked for several minutes, then asked, "How's Berry? I mean besides being a massive pain in the ass."

"Abnormally quiet."

"Scared?"

"Yeah. And she doesn't even know about those pictures."

"You haven't told her or Caroline?"

"No."

"Good." He paused before continuing. "I had a deputy return Amanda Lofland's cell phone to her. Let's not pretend that you didn't dig into it."

"You saw Sally Buckland's numbers?"

"Hard to miss."

"Berry wasn't aware the two women even knew each other."

"You asked?"

"Yeah, and she looked surprised to learn they'd been in contact. What do you suppose they had to talk about?"

Ski refrained from answering. Tersely he said, "Drive safely," and clicked off.

Caroline and Berry came out of the restroom as Dodge was replacing his phone in the holster on his belt.

"Who was that?" Berry asked.

"Ski."

"Any news?"

"We'll talk about it in the car." He waited until they were back on the road before passing along Ski's update. "He's outside Buckland's house, waiting for a search warrant so he can go in, but this is Sunday. They're having to track down a judge."

He glanced at Berry in the rearview mirror. "He also asked me what the
expletive deleted
you think you're doing running off to Houston. He wasn't happy about it, let me tell you. He thought you were tucked in safe and sound at the lake house with his heavily armed guys, including me, guarding you."

"I didn't need his permission."

"I'll buy a ticket to watch when you tell him that. But between now and then, he's nixed us staying at your place overnight. Even with HPD officers posted as guards, which he thinks he could get, he's not comfortable with you being where Starks could so easily find you."

"So where are we staying?" Caroline asked.

"Ski's gonna book us rooms at a hotel. Says since you and Sheriff Drummond are such close personal, social friends, he's sure he can get him to approve the expense." Ski had said nothing of the sort regarding Caroline and the sheriff, but Dodge threw it in out of jealous spite.

"Soon as Ski's got the rooms reserved, he'll let us know where to go. He'll try to get a hotel close to Delray. And, Berry, he wants your, uh,

rear end
back in Merritt tomorrow as soon as your meeting is over. I promised to get you there. No argument. Understood?"

"Loud and clear. And I can see the advisability of staying in a hotel, but I've got to stop at my house first."

"How come?"

"I've got to pick up something to wear."

"What's wrong with what you've got on?"

She and Caroline both looked at him like he was an imbecile.

Resigned, he said, "Five minutes tops. Deal?"

"Deal," Berry said.

"Tell me how to get there."

Traffic increased as they approached the city. Seemingly half the population of Houston was pouring back into town after being away on weekend excursions. Dodge was itching to smoke and was relieved when Berry finally told him to take the next exit off the clogged freeway.

The neighborhood into which she directed him was well tended and bespoke affluence, and, when she pointed out her house to him, he was even more impressed. He could never have provided his daughter anything as grand as what she had acquired on her own. Of course, Caroline could have finagled a good deal for her on the house, but still.

He felt humbled, intimidated, and inadequate as he followed the two of them up the walkway to the front door. Needing to reassert himself, he slid his handgun from the holster at the small of his back. "I'll go in first."

"I need to disengage the alarm."

"Remember what happened to Davis Coldare."

Without further argument, Berry gave him the code, then she and Caroline waited on the porch while he went in, disengaged the alarm, and, following his nose from room to room, flipped on switches and flooded the one-story house with light. Satisfied that Starks wasn't lying in wait for Berry's return, he replaced his pistol in its holster and gave them the all clear to come inside.

"Make yourselves at home." Berry headed down the hall toward her bedroom.

"Five minutes," Dodge called after her.

If circumstances had been different, he would have liked to explore his daughter's home. You could tell a lot about a person--things he would like to know about Berry--by the stuff in her house, how it was maintained, how it was arranged. Just this brief exposure to her place indicated that, when it came to neatness and home decor, she took after Caroline a whole lot more than she did him.

He was about to remark on that to Caroline when Berry screamed.

IN THE STREET IN FRONT OF BERRY'S HOUSE, SEVERAL EMERGENCY vehicles were causing other cars to detour. The lawn had been cordoned off with yellow tape. Onlookers were standing in groups outside the barricade, speculating on the nature of the emergency.

Ski waded through it all, showed his ID to the uniformed cop standing sentinel at the front door, and was told to go on in, that Detective Rodney Allen of the Houston PD was expecting him.

He stepped into a foyer that had a limestone tile floor and a tall, healthy ficus tree in the corner. Ordinarily it would have been an inviting entry. But now, with the discovery of Sally Buckland's body in the master bedroom closet, the house had become a crime scene, its warm domesticity destroyed by everything the term entailed.

CSU personnel and a photographer were milling around in the living area. Upon seeing Ski, one of the men wearing latex gloves asked, "You looking for Detective Allen?" and when Ski nodded, he hitched his head. "In the kitchen."

"What are you doing?"

"Waiting for the coroner to finish in the bedroom so we can have it."

Ski glanced down a short hallway from which came the murmur of voices, then went in the direction the man had indicated and found his way to the kitchen. Dodge was standing with his back propped against the granite countertop. Beside him was a good-looking black guy with a shaved head and well-defined pectorals, a bodybuilding type.

Alert, every muscle in his compact body contracted, the black guy looked ready for anything.

Dodge looked ready to kill somebody.

Caroline and Berry were seated on one side of a rectangular dining table with a rustic finish, making it look like it had been salvaged from a French farmhouse after World War I. Caroline's arm was protectively draped over Berry's shoulders.

Sitting across the table from them was another man. When Ski entered the room, he looked at him from over his shoulder, then scraped back his chair and stood up, extending his right hand.

He was tall and middle-aged. His slight paunch was the only soft thing about him. He had the world-weary eyes and toughened bearing of a large-city homicide detective. Years of seeing the worst of mankind's handiwork had left an indelible stamp on his face. His handshake was strong and dry, his palm as hard as a hoof. The white squint lines extending from the corners of sharp blue eyes contrasted with his sunburn, which Ski figured was perpetual.

"Rodney Allen."

"Ski Nyland."

"That's Detective Somerville."

The black guy bobbed his sleek head to acknowledge the introduction but didn't say anything.

"Have a seat," Allen said.

As Ski sat down, Berry met his gaze only momentarily before lowering her head. To the detective he said, "Thank you for inviting me to sit in."

"He was your guy before he was ours. If in fact the individual who killed Ms. Buckland was the same man who shot the kid in Merritt last night."

Ski said, "Oren Starks certainly should be a person of interest to you."

"Person of interest, my ass," Dodge muttered. "He's a fucking woman killer and kid killer."

He had called Ski immediately after notifying 911 of the gruesome discovery in Berry's closet. Ski had been waiting for a judge to grant a search warrant for Sally Buckland's house, which was on the other side of Houston from Berry's place. Despite the flashing emergency lights on his SUV, and the speed at which he'd driven, it had taken him over half an hour to get here.

During that time, Allen and Somerville had arrived to investigate the apparent homicide of Sally Buckland. During preliminary questioning, Dodge had apprised them of Ski's investigation in Merritt. Allen hadn't invited him here strictly out of professional courtesy. The detective was after information about the suspect he and Ski had in common.

Ski knew to be concise. He recapped the shooting at the lake house on Friday night. "He was facing felony charges for that. But after last night, he's in much deeper."

"The kid," Allen said brusquely.

"Davis Coldare was fatally shot at a motel. Oren Starks has been identified by an eyewitness. He fled the scene, then abandoned his car several miles away and went on foot to a Walmart store. We've got him on security cameras." He explained the shoe purchase and the reason for it.

Allen asked, "What time was he in the store?"

Ski told him. "But from there, he vanished. It's like he was raptured off that parking lot, so he must've been picked up and driven back to Houston, possibly by Ms. Buckland."

"What makes you think that?"

"Because he used her cell phone to call Ms. Malone this afternoon, around four o'clock. The call originated near Minute Maid Park. Local officers were dispatched. But Starks knew to turn off the phone, the baseball game was just letting out, there was lots of traffic, and we don't know what he's driving. Could be Sally Buckland's car, or not. The trail's gone cold again." He paused to take a breath. "That's where we are."

Allen said, "Well, it wasn't Sally Buckland who picked him up from the Walmart and drove him back to Houston, because at three-something this morning she was long dead. Coroner's best guess, she's been dead at least twenty-four hours, probably longer."

Ski's mind backtracked with the speed of a rewinding video recording. "I talked to her by phone yesterday afternoon."

"So did I," Dodge said.

"Then she must have been killed shortly following those conversations," Allen said. "The autopsy might help nail down the time of death more precisely, but the guy in there now is a competent man, been in the ME's office for years, sees bodies all the time. He estimated she died sometime yesterday afternoon."

Dodge cursed under his breath. "She sounded edgy, nervous, in defense of Starks. I thought she was standing up for him because they were working together. I realize now she was scared." He locked gazes with Ski. "Starks was with her when I called."

Berry hunched her shoulders and hugged her arms closer to her body.

"You're guessing," the Houston detective said.

"I think he's right," Ski said. "My conversation with her was off somehow. I couldn't put my finger on it before, but now I get it. Either Sally Buckland was being coerced or she was saying what she knew Starks wanted to hear. She was trying to save her life."

"She was shot in the left temple," the Houston detective said. "Practically at point-blank range. But not here. She was killed in another location and her body brought here."

"How'd he get the body in here without setting off the house alarm?"

"We were getting to that when you arrived," Allen said.

They all turned to Berry.

Speaking in a thready voice, she said, "Oren had a habit of being here when I got home from work or after an evening out. I'd come in and turn off the alarm. He was always ... close. Hovering. Maybe he saw the sequence of numbers. I kept meaning to change the code, but then I moved to Merritt, and it seemed pointless."

"He took a chance of being discovered by transporting the body here," Ski remarked.