Desperado Lawman Read online

  Ridiculously, it was the last straw.

  “Everything,” she repeated flatly. “Nothing. What’s with you? You know, if I did believe in aliens I’d find it entirely possible that one of these days you’d be returning to your mothership. You screwed up tonight with Del and Daniel. Your partner has to bite her tongue to keep from losing her patience with you. Every so often I find myself starting to like you, and then you do or say something so incredibly wrong that I wonder if you’ve got any inkling of how to deal with people.”

  She took a breath. “And that undershirt’s insane, especially with the damn shoulder holster.”

  Not her most coherent few moments, she thought as she sputtered into silence. But he’d gotten the point.

  “I know I screw up.” His bandaged shoulder lifted and fell. “I know I don’t interact well. When I was a kid I used to solve that problem with my fists, but my year at the Double B taught me fighting wasn’t the answer.”

  He took a swallow of the liquid in his glass. “Van Zane told me no liquor,” he said thoughtfully. “You think that includes a watered-down shot of rum?”

  “Probably.” She shook her head. “I was right that night in the motel, wasn’t I? About the kind of life you lead, I mean.”

  “No real friends, married to the job, empty apartment?” He glanced sideways at her. “I have friends. I keep in touch with Tyler and Gabe. Jess Crawford and I always rubbed each other the wrong way, but I saw him just last month.”

  “You saw him last month when that Scudder business was taking place here,” Tess said. “And although you saw Tye then, too, before that you hadn’t seen or heard from him for years. As for Gabriel Riggs, Del says that ever since last year when a kidnap recovery assignment he was handling went bad and the hostage was killed, Gabe’s dropped out of sight.”

  “And just how did this conversation with Del come about?” Connor set his glass down. “Were you pumping him for information about me?”

  “No.” She let her one-word answer lie there. After a moment she heard him exhale.

  “Sorry.” He frowned. “I felt like a damned heel tonight, Tess. I owe Del a lot. I wanted to tell him I thought Mac was still the hero he used to be, but I couldn’t lie to him.”

  He tossed back the remainder of the rum and went on, his voice roughened by the liquor. “I owe you, too. Hell, I’ve got your blood in my veins, and if that doesn’t put me in your debt I don’t know what does. But I can’t believe Joey’s story.”

  “Why not?” She saw him open his mouth to answer her, and she forestalled him with an impatient movement of her hand. “Don’t give me the ballistics angle, Connor. Your area director is up to his neck in this—he was in touch with Leroy after the safe house hit, which means he wanted Joey silenced. But since he didn’t silence him in time he’s now going after you as well, just to make sure whatever it is he’s afraid Joey saw in that alleyway never comes to light. I’m probably a secondary target, since with my dubious journalistic reputation Jansen doesn’t have to worry much about me being believed.”

  “Dubious rep—” Connor stopped. “The Eye-Opener byline. Bigfoot. Hangar 61.”

  “That’ll do for starters.” She bit her lip. “But I’m not the key player here, Joey is. Suspend your disbelief long enough to ask yourself what it would mean if Quayle really attacked MacLeish first, and Mac was forced to kill him to save a nine-year-old child. What if—again, let the ballistics report go for a minute—what if Quayle himself brought the gun that eventually killed him in the alleyway? If all that were true, how would you be approaching this case?”

  “Dammit, the gun was registered to MacLeish. He shot his wife to death with it ten years ago. How do I disregard that?”

  “The same way I disregard that undershirt you’re wearing,” Tess snapped. “With great difficulty, but I’m trying.”

  “And I’m trying to overlook the fact that you’re wearing a T-shirt that doesn’t leave much to the imagination and a female version of boxer shorts,” Connor ground out. He rubbed his jaw. “All right. If all that were true, I guess I’d be approaching this case as—”

  He stopped. Tess crossed her arms over her chest, annoyed with herself for letting his remarks about her attire throw her.

  “As what?”

  “As the attempted murder of John MacLeish,” he said slowly. “And I’d be looking into the circumstances of his supposed suicide ten years ago, just in case this was the second time someone had tried to kill him.”

  He was silent for a second, and then he grunted dismissively. “You’re hanging all this on Joey’s story, and I won’t buy Joey’s story. I can’t.”

  “You never say you don’t buy his story,” Tess retorted, stung to frustration. “You say you can’t or you won’t. That sounds like you’re not allowing yourself to. That sounds like you’re afraid to.”

  “Damn straight I’m not allowing myself to buy it.” His voice was even sharper than hers had been. “Kids are unreliable witnesses. I know that from firsthand experience. I know that because twenty-one years ago I—”

  Abruptly he got to his feet. Turning away from her, he stared out into the night, the set of his shoulders tense. Faint starlight picked out the gleam of oiled leather cutting the whiteness of the bandage on his upper arm and delineated the heavy swell of his biceps.

  Tess stood. She took a step toward him. “You were in Joey’s position once? You were a child witness to a crime?”

  “Of the death of my father.” His voice was a low rasp. “And I was convinced I’d seen something that never happened. It was years before the real memory came back.”

  “How did he die?”

  Somehow she’d guessed Virgil Connor didn’t have parents still living, Tess thought. From the first he’d given the impression of being a man alone, a man who, if he’d ever known the reassurance of a core family unit, had had it taken from him long ago.

  I don’t interact well… How could he? she thought. He’d never learned how. The nearest thing Connor had to a family was the Double B, but even Del couldn’t take the place of a father and a mother.

  “He was a cop. He was shot while trying to prevent a bank robbery one day when he was off duty. I was with him at the time and I saw the whole thing.” His back still to her, Connor took a deep breath. “When I was questioned about what I’d witnessed, I insisted I’d seen my father put his own gun to his temple and pull the trigger. I said he’d committed suicide.”

  “Why?” The shocked question came from her in a gasp. She took a step closer, and he turned his head to look at her.

  “Because that’s how I remembered it,” he said harshly. “My memories of everything else that happened gibed with the other witnesses, but when it came to the part where my father pulled his gun to take down one of the robbers as they were racing out of the bank, my story suddenly became pure fantasy. Everyone else saw him take down one of the fleeing robbers and then get shot in his turn by the second robber. I saw him pull his gun and kill himself.”

  He looked away again. “My mother had died in a car accident about a year before, and her death had torn him apart. I probably came up with that particular scenario because I’d become convinced in the months since she died that my father didn’t want to live without her.”

  “You’d been afraid he might kill himself. So when he was shot in front of your eyes, some part of you thought your worst fears had come true,” Tess said softly. “But eventually you remembered what had actually happened in the bank that day?”

  “Oh, yeah, it came back eventually. Just like one of these days Joey’ll probably remember what really happened in the alleyway.” Connor shook his head. “He’ll remember that MacLeish shot Quayle in cold blood and forget his fantasies about Skinwalker. Looking back now, I recall every detail.”

  “You don’t have to talk about it.”

  No matter that his father’s death had occurred so long ago, she thought sadly, there were some things that never got easy. He’d convinced h
er. She had no choice but to accept that it was possible Joey’s version of what had happened the day Quayle had been killed had sprung from his imagination.

  “I haven’t talked about it.” Connor pushed himself away from the railing. “Not since the real memory came back. I probably should have told someone, just to prove to myself I could. We were heading out to Fenway Park to catch a ball game, but first my father needed to stop at the bank to cash a check.”

  “Fenway?” Tess wrinkled her brow. “Boston, right?”

  “Boston’s where I’m from, originally. After my father’s death I was sent to live with my aunt and uncle in New Mexico, but when my year at the Double B was up I didn’t go back to them.” Connor shrugged. “Nice enough people, but I never fit in. I didn’t return here until I was posted to the Albuquerque field office a year or so ago.”

  Which explained why he hadn’t known much about her culture, Tess thought. She listened as he went on.

  “We’d barely walked into the bank when the holdup started. One of the robbers ordered everyone to hit the floor. My father shoved me down and then he got down, too. Like I say, I remember every detail. The floor was terrazzo, and I can still see the flecks of stone in the tiles. We were a few feet away from the loan manager’s desk, and I recall seeing her staring at us from underneath it. She knew my father was a cop, and I saw him give her a reassuring nod of his head while we were lying there.”

  He fell silent for a moment. From farther along the verandah Tess heard a faint snuffling noise as one of Daisy’s pups moved closer to the comfort of his mama.

  “There’s not much else to tell.” Connor sighed. “The robbers released the teller and began backing toward the bank’s doors. That’s when my father got to his feet and went for his gun—I guess with everyone else still flat on the ground at that point, he realized there was no chance of an innocent bystander getting caught in the crossfire. He killed one of the robbers, and the one who killed him was taken down by the police as he burst out of the doors onto the street.”

  “The police?” Tess blinked. “How did they know a robbery was in progress?”

  “What?” Connor frowned, and then his brow cleared. “Oh. Because of the silent alarm.” He saw her confusion and elaborated. “The one by the leg of the loan officer’s desk. When my father gave her that nod, she pushed it.”

  He had no idea what he’d just said, Tess thought in shock. Virgil Connor had seen his father commit suicide—maybe not commit it consciously, maybe with no clear intent of doing so when he’d risen from the floor and pulled a gun on two desperate men—but whatever had been in the man’s mind at the time, he’d taken the one course of action that had been almost certain to result in his own death.

  His own unnecessary death, she thought. Connor’s father had been well aware that the men racing out of the bank would run straight into the arms of the police.

  The boy Connor had once been had known all that. That knowledge had made such a devastating impact on him at the time that he’d translated it into a vision of a man putting a gun to his own head, and when that vision had proven too much for him to endure he’d told himself it had been a complete lie.

  Which was why he couldn’t allow himself to buy Joey’s story. Because if he bought Joey’s, he would no longer be able to reject his own.

  So what are you waiting for? It’s only been possible for him to avoid the truth all these years because he hasn’t spoken about it, but Connor’s not blind. Ask him if he realizes that he’s blanked out the detail about the alarm. Force him to face what it means, for heaven’s sake.

  The voice in her head was firm and decisive…but the voice in her head was wrong, Tess thought heavily. He needed to come to the truth by himself for it to release him.

  “Paula’s heading back to Albuquerque early tomorrow.” His tone held enough briskness to indicate that the previous discussion had ended. “I think you and Del should sit in on the meeting I intend to have with her before she leaves. We need to clear the air over this MacLeish matter.”

  Maybe Paula could convince him to give Joey’s story the benefit of the doubt. It was worth a shot.

  “A meeting’s probably a good idea.” She forced a small smile. “I’d better get some sleep, I suppose.”

  “Yeah, I should be turning in soon, too.” He gestured toward the holstered gun he was wearing. “Before I do I might take a run up to the gate, give Joseph Tahe a break for a while. ’Night, Tess.”

  “Good night, Connor.”

  She was halfway down the length of the verandah before he called out her name. She turned to see him still standing by the railing, a faint frown on his features.

  “Why did you swerve the night of the accident, Tess? I could tell you didn’t want to talk about it earlier, but now it’s just you and me. What did you see?”

  “I saw Skinwalker.” She met his gaze without flinching. “I know you don’t believe me, Connor. In spite of what I’ve said about keeping an open mind, when it came right down to it I didn’t want to believe it, either. But I saw Skinwalker. I saw him as plain as I’m seeing you now.”

  “Oh, for God’s—” He crossed the space between them, his brows drawing swiftly together. “What do you mean, you didn’t want to believe in Skinwalker? Of course you wanted to. Maybe you see that belief as a way of connecting to a heritage you never had the chance to know, maybe you think you’d be letting Joey down if you didn’t accept his story about a monster. But you wanted to believe. And now you’ve convinced yourself, dammit.”

  His gaze narrowed. “Tell me, in those conversations you’ve had with Del the past couple of days, did he mention Alice Tahe? Is that part of all this—the fact that Matt and Joanna’s great-grandmother warned Del something evil was threatening the ranch, an evil she says goes by the name of Skinwalker?”

  “Del told me Matt and Joanna had a great-grandmother named Alice Tahe,” Tess replied, her tone flat. “He didn’t tell me she’d warned him that Skinwalker’s evil threatened the Double B. That’s something else I wish I hadn’t learned.”

  Tipping her head to one side, she surveyed him with a quizzical look. “You want to know why I work for the Eye-Opener, Connor? It’s because I decided that if I wasn’t going to be believed when I told the truth, I might as well make up the most outrageous lies I can think of and get paid for them. But I don’t lie to myself. Whatever your logic and reason say, I didn’t convince myself I saw something on that road two nights ago that wasn’t really there.”

  She stepped away from him. “I’m going to bed.”

  This time her hand was on the latch of the screen door when he spoke, his voice so low she had to strain to hear his words.

  “I don’t know how I kept missing it. He saw her push it, didn’t he? Hell, he gave her the signal. He knew there wasn’t any damn need for him to—”

  Slowly Tess turned. Crystal-gray eyes met hers across a distance of a few yards, but even the distance and the darkness and the faint starlight weren’t enough to obscure the glittering pain in Connor’s shattered gaze.

  “I did see him kill himself, didn’t I?” he whispered hoarsely. “God help me, I saw exactly what I said I did, all those years ago.”

  Chapter Ten

  “You realize this spins our investigation off into a whole different direction?” Paula asked. “I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, Connor,” she added. “Maybe looking at this from a new perspective will give us a handle on Jansen’s motives.”

  Connor’s partner was handling his surprising about-face from the evening before with aplomb, Tess thought. Del’s eyebrows had risen in disbelief when the planned morning meeting between the four of them had started with Connor’s announcement that he’d reconsidered Joey’s story about Mac’s actions in the alleyway.

  She would have to come up with an explanation if Del asked her about Connor’s change of heart, she told herself. She’d seen a man come to some hard truths last night—truths not only about himself, but about the man w
ho had fathered him and loved him…and who had made a spur-of-the-moment decision that had left his young son alone and devastated.

  “You’ll never know everything that went through his mind when he stood up to take that shot, Connor,” she’d said softly last night. “Maybe right at the last moment he thought he could take them both down. Maybe he thought a confrontation with the police outside posed more risk to civilians.”

  His expression had been bleak. “I do know my mother was the light of his life, and when he lost her all the lights went out for him. They went out for me, too, for a while.”

  He’d held the screen door open for her. “The ballistics report is hard evidence. But I’m willing to admit Joey’s evidence could be just as valid. I’ll ask Paula to check into Huong MacLeish’s murder, see if she can spot any loose ends.”

  She’d nodded, not trusting herself to speak. Connor had brought his hand to her face, his palm to her cheek and his thumb brushing the corner of her mouth.

  “You saw what I’d been missing right away, didn’t you? Why didn’t you point it out? Why run the risk I’d go on insisting that Joey was as unreliable a witness as I’d once been?”

  “Maybe I should have said something,” she’d answered shakily, all too aware of his touch on her mouth and the sudden lack of distance between them. “But I thought there was a bigger risk that you wouldn’t be able to move past the pain if you didn’t come to terms with it in your own way.”

  “And that was important to you?” He’d looked disconcerted, and then, as if he’d felt suddenly restless, he had let his hand fall. “I’d better get up to the gate if I’m going. I told Joseph I’d give him a break around midnight.”