Desperado Lawman Page 8

  She’s the one. The thought came to him so clearly that for a moment he wondered if he’d spoken it. You’re going to let her get away, but she’s the one, and you’re always going to regret it. Right down to the last minute of the last hour of the last day of your life. She’s the one.

  He blinked. She was still watching him. He lifted his uninjured shoulder in a faint shrug.

  “…but thank you.” It was still inadequate, but anything would be. Her straight mouth curved fractionally.

  “That’s good Dineh blood you’ve got in you now—almost enough to make you an honorary member of the People.” She shook her head. “But not enough so that you can bleed it all out again. You’ve nicked yourself.”

  Belatedly Connor looked down at the razor in his hand, and it suddenly struck him what he must look like. “My mind wasn’t on the job at hand,” he said with an attempt at casualness. “I’ll finish up more carefully.”

  “I’d better go.”

  Her reply was swift, and he realized that she’d taken his statement as a hint that he wanted to be alone. A few minutes ago he had, Connor admitted. But, hell, now that she was here it was probably a good idea to tell her what he’d decided to do about the Jansen situation.

  “No, stay.” He stepped back in front of the mirror and rinsed the razor. “That is, if you’re okay talking to a man with half his face lathered and the other half bleeding.”

  “I’m okay with that, and I’ve got a few minutes. Daniel and Del are teaching Joey how to throw a lasso.” Tess sat on the edge of the bed and looked with interest around the room. “This is nice. I guess the bunkhouse for the bad boys doesn’t have as many comfortable touches as the main house, though.”

  Connor came close to nicking himself again. “Del’s been blabbing, I see,” he said. “What exactly did he tell you?”

  “Everything,” Tess said promptly. “About the Double B taking in a crop of teenage tearaways every year and giving them a chance to turn their lives around, about the fact that for most of them it’s this or juvenile detention, about you and Tyler Adams and Jess somebody-or-other and Gabe Riggs being best buddies here fifteen years ago.”

  “Jess Crawford.” Connor pressed the ball of his thumb to his jugular and scraped cautiously around it. “Thank God Del takes a much-needed breather in the summer months, or there’d be a dozen or so teenage tough guys here right now. Did he tell you about Tye and Susannah, Daniel’s daughter?”

  “A little.” She sounded uncertain. “Tye ran a security firm out in California and when some threatening incidents started happening at the ranch, Del asked him to look into things here. The incidents were tied up with a man Susannah Bird had been running from for over a year, and when it was all over Tye asked Susannah if she’d marry him and let him be a father to her baby boy, Danny.”

  Her voice had a smile in it. “Of course she said yes. When Tye finishes winding up his business in California, they’re going to build a house on Double B land, and he’s going to help Del run the ranch. Del told me he wants to start having more time for himself and his own new wife.” She raised her eyebrows. “Is she the Greta Hassell who used to be a top model and is now a world-famous artist, Connor? Her work’s amazing.”

  “It is, isn’t it? I told Hawkins at his wedding a few weeks ago that he got way luckier than he deserved when Greta tied the knot with him. Too bad she had an obligation she couldn’t get out of this week at a gallery in New York,” Connor said. “Sounds like Del filled you in on everything.”

  Something in his tone must have given him away, because out of the corner of his eye he saw her raise her head at him. He turned and met her gaze.

  “Including the fact that Daniel just got out of prison last month for killing the man who raped and killed his wife years ago,” she said steadily. “It doesn’t change my opinion of Daniel, Connor.”

  “Which is?” This wasn’t the conversation he’d intended to have with her, Connor thought, but he was interested in hearing her opinion, not only on Daniel Bird but on Del Hawkins.

  And also you just like to hear her talk, right? That husky voice of hers could be reciting the multiplication table and you’d be perfectly happy to stand here and listen.

  With a flicker of irritation he dismissed the notion. Turning on the taps with more force than was needed, he rinsed the razor and replaced it in the medicine cabinet.

  “Why, I’d trust him with my life, of course.” Her tone was tinged with faint surprise. “Del, too. They and Van Zane all served in Vietnam together, right?”

  Seemingly Hawkins’s confidences had stopped short of revealing too many details of his own background, Connor thought cynically. He reached for the towel behind him, and wiped a last fleck of shave foam from his jawline.

  “Del and Daniel were in the same outfit,” he confirmed. “Van was the first medic to attend to Del after the injury that cost him his legs, and Del’s always credited his medical skill with saving his life.” He slung the towel onto the rack and stepped out of the bathroom. “I’d trust Del and Daniel, too. I’d never met Van before yesterday but if Hawkins says he’s true blue, that’s good enough for me.”

  “He won’t report the gunshot wound, Connor,” Tess said quietly. “He knows that could lead Jansen right to us.”

  “Jansen, Leroy and MacLeish,” Connor supplemented. He strode to the bed and picked up a sweatshirt. “The three of them have to be allied. It doesn’t make sense otherwise.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  Now it was her tone that alerted him. Her amber-brown eyes met his reluctantly as he shoved the sweatshirt’s wrists halfway up his forearms, realizing as he did so that the gesture stemmed from a need to ready himself for action.

  “Hit me with it,” he said flatly. “You’ve learned something that’s changed the equation, haven’t you?”

  “I’ve learned something that’s changed everything.” Her voice took on an extra edge of huskiness. “I haven’t told Del or Daniel yet. I thought you should hear it first.”

  It could only be one thing. Connor narrowed his gaze. “He’s got his memory back,” he guessed. “Joey’s got his memory back, and he remembers how the hit in the alleyway went down, am I right?”

  “Right about that,” Tess said somberly. “But wrong about the way you and everyone else read the physical evidence at the murder scene.” She shook her head. “Quayle showed up at that alleyway with the intention of killing MacLeish, Connor. And Mac only attacked Quayle when the retired agent realized there’d been a witness to the whole thing and tried to kill Joey.”

  Chapter Eight

  “Maybe the John MacLeish you knew was a hero, Del,” Connor said, pushing himself away from the verandah railing as if he needed a physical outlet for the frustration simmering just below the surface of his words. “But that was a long time ago. Something obviously snapped in the man during those five years he spent as a prisoner of war.”

  He shook his head. “Joey’s story doesn’t tally with the evidence. I don’t think he’s consciously lying, just that his imagination’s gone into overtime.”

  She’d predicted this, Tess told herself tightly. Even during those few terrible minutes after the accident when she’d thought Connor was dead, she’d known with agonized honesty that he and she could never have been on the same side of any issue for long. This afternoon, after she’d told him what Joey had remembered, it had taken him all of two seconds to come up with an explanation that fit his rigid facts. And in the hours since, he’d stuck to it like glue.

  He’d hidden his rampant disbelief from Joey while he was questioning him, though, and she was grateful for that. Not until the nine-year-old was in bed and the adults had taken their after-dinner coffee to the wraparound verandah had he resumed his objections, his attitude so antagonistic that it seemed almost as if—

  “Sounds like you’ve got an agenda of your own here, Connor. A reason why you need to keep believing Mac’s guilty.”

  Del had put her tenuou
s suspicion into words, she thought. His carved features made even stronger by the flicker of the citronella candle on the table beside him, he went on with a frown.

  “Last time I looked we were still in the good old U.S. of A., and I always thought the rule was a man was innocent until a judge and jury said different.”

  “I don’t have an agenda or a motive.” Connor sounded impatient. “I leave that for you and Daniel. I just want to—”

  “Back up there, Virge.” Del’s voice made it an order. “What the hell do you mean by that crack? What motive do you see us as having?”

  “For God’s sake, Del.” The tension suddenly seeping from his posture, Connor slumped back against the railing, raking a hand through his hair. “Roll up your sleeve and take a look at those two bees fighting to the death you’ve got tattooed on your biceps. MacLeish was a comrade in arms, one of the original Double B’s. You’ve never wanted to believe he could turn cold-blooded killer.”

  “I’m just a West Virginia mountain boy who spent the past fifteen years in prison, so maybe I got about as much right to give an opinion as Daisy here.”

  Soft as it was, Daniel Bird’s drawl commanded attention. Tess glanced at him, seated a few feet away near the heeler hound bitch with her sleeping pups, but his head was bent. A small silvery blade glinted against the ball of his thumb as he continued whittling the chunk of pine he’d been working on since the conversation had started.

  “But the way I see it, if the lieutenant here held with shielding a man just because he’d been a Double B, why would he have gone into the jungle after the fourth member of Beta Beta Force all those years ago? Why did he nearly give his own life to make sure Zeke Harmon never got the chance to kill again?”

  Tess’s patience came to an end.

  “Fighting bees, someone named Harmon, tattoos—can anybody tell me what we’re talking about?” She set down her mug of coffee. “I’d already guessed from the way Del was talking that he knew something of MacLeish’s war record. Now it sounds to me like the connection was a whole lot stronger.”

  “As strong as it gets,” Daniel said, glancing sideways at a silent Hawkins. “As strong as brothers. All four of us were, at the beginning.”

  “Until Harmon broke the bond, and destroyed Beta Beta Force,” Connor said. “If it happened once it could happen again, Del, and you know it.”

  “Harmon didn’t break the bond,” Del said. “There never was one, as far as he was concerned.” He looked away from Connor and toward Tess, his expression softening. “It’s an old story, sweetheart. You sure you want to hear it?”

  “I’m Dineh,” she said evenly. “We like our stories. What was Beta Beta Force?”

  “A four-man covert operations group.” Del leaned forward in his chair and laced his fingers together loosely. “We took on the jobs that no one else wanted, went deeper in-country than the regular forces could. It seems a lifetime ago now.”

  “It seems like yesterday.”

  Daniel’s tone was low. Glancing at him, she saw the darkly gleaming line on the ball of his thumb before he quickly wiped it on his jeans and resumed his whittling. Del’s gaze sharpened in concern for his old friend before he went on.

  “The four members were me, Daniel, Mac and Harmon. And Daniel’s right—at first we were as close as brothers. Any one of us knew that the man beside him would fight to the death for him, which was what the tattoos were supposed to symbolize.”

  Against the railing Connor shifted. Tess caught the compassion that crossed his features before they became remote again.

  “At some point rumors began to circulate about a rogue killer who was murdering for his own pleasure, right?” he said. “Civilians, the enemy, your own soldiers—it didn’t matter who, and the murders were performed as sadistically as possible. The Double B’s were assigned to track down the killer.”

  “We were assigned to track down the killer,” Del agreed. His laced fingers tightened. “And we found he was one of us.”

  Del had said it seemed a lifetime ago, but it was obvious from the raw betrayal in his voice that the events he was recounting were still fresh in his mind. A man he’d trusted had proven to be a monster. It was hard to imagine the pain that revelation had caused him.

  But she didn’t have to imagine it. She knew exactly how that kind of pain felt, she thought numbly.

  “We turned Zeke in to the authorities.” Daniel closed the blade of the jackknife and slipped it into his pocket. “Day after, they up and shipped me home. Said they were disbanding us on account of the war coming to an end, but I knew that weren’t why. They wanted to pretend we never existed.”

  He lifted his shoulders. “When they found they needed Beta Beta Force one last time, it was just Del and Mac.”

  “Harmon had escaped custody.” Del’s grin was mirthless. “Since he could melt into the jungle like a ghost, the brass knew only a Double B stood a chance of finding him, so they sent Mac and me after him. We split up, I found Harmon first, and I shot him. A second later the world blew up around me.”

  He shrugged. “He’d rigged a booby trap. When his body was recovered the official report was that my bullet had taken him in the heart, so I guess he was dead before my foot sprung the bomb. That’s not important. What is important is that John found me and carried me back to base camp and that crazy miracle worker Van Zane, twenty-five miles on his back.”

  The gaze he directed at Connor was hard. “So tell me again why I should believe the man who saved my life is a stone killer? I’m still having trouble wrapping my mind around that one.”

  “Because two days after that trek through the jungle, John MacLeish got captured by the enemy. Because he spent five years in what they called a tiger cage—a bamboo cage not big enough for a man to stand up or lie down in—while the outside world didn’t know if he was dead or alive.” Connor took a breath. “Yeah, he was finally released and came back a hero, Del, and yeah, for a while it seemed as if he’d put what had happened behind him. He married a Vietnamese woman. From all accounts they were very much in love. About ten years ago he decided to enter politics, and with his war record he probably would have been a shoo-in as his party’s candidate in the next senatorial race. But then he snapped.”

  “I thought the name sounded familiar, but I didn’t make the connection,” Tess said slowly. “It was a big news story, wasn’t it? He killed his wife, and then supposedly committed suicide by throwing himself into the Rio Grande.”

  “But his body was never recovered, and now we know why.” Connor rubbed his jaw wearily. “Dammit, Del, they dumped this case in my lap because I’d been looking into that ten-year-old case before Quayle was killed and the murderer’s prints came back as MacLeish’s—a man who had been presumed to be dead. And I’d been looking into it at your request, remember?”

  “Because of that Scudder business and Daniel turning up again after all these years.” Del nodded grudgingly. “I figured if one old friend I’d always been told had died was really alive, Mac might be, too. But even then I made no secret of the fact that I didn’t believe he’d killed Huong, his wife. You weren’t completely convinced he had, either.”

  “My initial look at the police file raised some doubts,” Connor agreed. “But there’s no doubt now that MacLeish killed both Huong and Quayle—and despite what Joey says about his pal, that second murder couldn’t have been self-defense. I still don’t know what Quayle was doing in that alleyway, but I do know that he showed up unarmed, Del.”

  “Quayle was shot,” Tess interjected. “You told me that yourself. It’s more likely that an ex-FBI agent would be equipped with a gun than to assume the weapon belonged to a man who took his meals at soup kitchens. Mac might have had a knife with him, but not something he could sell for a decent street price, like a gun. It had to be Quayle’s. It couldn’t have been—”

  “You told me I let myself be boxed in by facts and logic,” Connor said. “I guess I do, at that. One of the facts that makes up this
particular box is a ballistics test, dammit. Quayle was shot with the same gun that killed Huong MacLeish ten years ago—a gun that was registered as belonging to Mac.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us this at the start?” Del’s posture was rigid as he spoke, and Tess saw the sinews in his neck standing out like cords. Beside her she was aware of Daniel getting to his feet. A tremor ran through the big West Virginian’s body before he turned on his heel and walked into the house, the screen door slamming shut behind him.

  “Because I didn’t want to be the son of a bitch who totally destroyed your faith in a man who used to be a hero,” Connor said hoarsely. “I know how much the Double B bond means to you and Daniel. I’d hoped the two of you would come to see there was a possibility MacLeish wasn’t the person you remembered, but this evening I realized that wasn’t going to happen—not after Joey’s version of events bolstered your hopes that your old buddy had no choice but to kill Quayle in order to save a child’s life.”

  He exhaled. Watching him, Tess knew with sudden certainty that there was something more he’d been keeping from them, and cold anger flashed through her.

  Connor might have meant well, but he’d handled this all wrong. How could he not have mishandled it? she thought. The wall he kept around himself not only ensured that others couldn’t get close to him, it made it impossible for Virgil Connor to reach out successfully to anyone else—even the man who had given him back his life not once, but twice now.

  And if he can’t let Del in, it’s no use hoping he could ever open himself to you. Yes, he kissed you, and yes, you’ve caught him looking at you once or twice. You were looking, too, this afternoon when he was standing there in a pair of pants and not much else. But that’s just physical, and as good as physical might be between the two of you, don’t let yourself believe there could be anything more. Not with Connor.