Sandra Brown - Lethal

“I understand what you’re saying, but…” She gave a small shake of her head. “I’m sorry, Tom. I don’t know how to respond because I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

“What I’m getting at is that Lee Coburn isn’t your textbook mass murderer.”

“Is there such a thing?”

“Of course there are exceptions, but he doesn’t fit the accepted profile.” He hesitated, then added, “Even Hamilton picked up on it.”

“Clint Hamilton? I thought he was in Washington now.”

“He is. But he called me today, wanted to know what the hell is going on down here and what I’m doing about it.”

Janice made a small sound of dismay. “He was checking up on you?”

“Essentially.”

“He’s got his nerve.” She pushed back her chair and indicated his untouched plate. “Are you going to eat that?”

“Sorry, no. It looks good, but…” He ended on a helpless shrug.

She carried his plate to the counter, cursing his predecessor under her breath. “If he didn’t think you were up to handling the job, why did he appoint you to the position?”

What Tom believed to be the answer to that was too humiliating to speak aloud, especially to Janice. She abhorred defeatism. She particularly abhorred it in her husband.

He said, “I don’t know where Hamilton got his information, probably from other agents in the office, but he must have noticed the same discrepancies in Coburn’s M.O. that I did. He even asked me if Coburn was an agent from my office working undercover at the trucking company.”

She sputtered a laugh, then sobered so quickly it was comical. “Was he?”

Tom gave her a crooked smile. “No. At least I didn’t place him there.” His smile slipped. “Someone in New Orleans who outranked me could have, I suppose. Or someone from another agency.”

“Without informing you?”

He merely shrugged, again not wanting to admit that he was inconsequential. Or at least was regarded so by coworkers.

She rejoined him at the table. “Hamilton has no right to interfere. Of course the man has an outrageous ego.”

“You’ve never even met him.”

“Based on everything you’ve told me about him, I doubt he could get his head through that door. It makes me mad as hell that he’s monitoring you.”

He decided against telling her that he wasn’t the only one in his office who had heard from Hamilton today. Many agents had disapproved of his appointment and had made no secret of it. But there were some who, either by word or general attitude, had demonstrated their support.

One of those agents, a data analyst, had confided in him today that others in the office had received calls from Hamilton. “For some reason,” she’d told Tom behind closed doors, “this case has showed up on Hamilton’s radar. He’s following it closely and asking questions about you.”

“What kind of questions?”

She had held up her hands, palms out. “I won’t get involved in office politics, Tom. I need this job. But I thought you should know that you’re being scrutinized.”

Tom had thanked her. For the rest of the day, he sensed whispering behind his back. Which may only have been his paranoia, but he didn’t think so. He resented Hamilton’s intrusion. Whatever the reason for it, it was insulting and worrisome.

He pushed back his chair and stood up. “I’d better get back.”

He left the kitchen before the troubling conversation could continue. He washed up in the powder room and retrieved his briefcase from the den. Janice met him at the back door with a sack lunch. “Emergency relief in case you need it. Peanut butter crackers and an apple.”

“Thanks.”

She didn’t kiss him this time, and he didn’t kiss her. But before he could turn away, she placed her hand on his arm. “You’re doing a good job, Tom. Don’t let Hamilton or anyone else browbeat you into thinking otherwise.”

He gave her a weak smile. “I won’t. The hell of it is, Hamilton’s right.”

“In what way?”

“Any fool following this case would realize that it’s no ordinary kidnapping. In all likelihood, Mrs. Gillette witnessed Coburn shooting Fred Hawkins. Murderers don’t leave eyewitnesses. Coburn has a reason for keeping her alive.”

Doral paid a dutiful visit to his mama.

As expected, she was prostrate with grief. Female relatives hovered around her, pressing her hands and applying damp cloths to her forehead. Rosary beads clacked as they prayed for Fred’s soul and petitioned for comfort for the loved ones he’d left behind.

There was no more room in the kitchen for all the food that had been brought by friends, family, and neighbors. The air-conditioning fought a losing battle against an approaching storm, which had lowered the barometric pressure and raised the humidity.

The male faction, to escape the drama inside the house, carried their overloaded plates out into the yard. They sat in lawn chairs, stroking the rifles and shotguns that lay across their laps, which was as second nature to them as scratching the ears of their hunting dogs. They passed around bottles of cheap whiskey and, in low voices, plotted revenge against Fred’s killer.

“He’d better hope the law catches up to him before I do,” said one uncle, a mean son of a bitch who’d lost an eye in Vietnam but could still outshoot most anybody, except possibly Doral.

“By this time tomorrow, I’ll have this Coburn’s balls in a Mason jar. See if I don’t,” vowed one cousin who was below the legal drinking age but was so drunk he was nearly falling off the tree stump on which he sat.

One of Doral’s younger brothers yelled at his rowdy kids, who were chasing each other in the yard. “Show some fucking respect!” he shouted, then pledged not to rest until Coburn was dead. “I don’t take kindly to people messin’ with our fam’ly.”

As soon as they’d eaten their fill and drunk the bottles dry, they piled into pickup trucks and set out to assigned territories to resume the search for their kinsman’s killer.

Doral said goodbye to his weeping mother, pulled himself free of her clammy, clutching hands, and left along with the rest, except that he went alone. Despite being half drunk, he easily navigated the winding back roads at a high rate of speed. He’d traveled these roads all his life and knew them intimately. He’d driven them a lot drunker than he was tonight. He and Fred. He and Eddie.

Thoughts of Eddie called to mind that fishing trip that had been captured in the framed photo that Crawford had bagged as evidence. Doral remembered that excursion as one of the best times the four of them had had together.

From thoughts of that day, his mind drifted to his fishing boat and his pre-Bookkeeper years. He and Fred had been born poor, and it had been an uphill struggle all their lives to make ends meet. Fred had sought financial stability by signing on with the police department. But wearing a uniform, working a shift, wasn’t for Doral. He enjoyed flexibility.

He’d bought his boat on credit extended to him by a banker so tight-assed he squeaked when he walked. The rate of interest had been usurious, but Doral had never even been late on a payment.

Then for years he had run charters into the Gulf, putting up with groups of rich, drunken sons of bitches-doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers, and such-who thought of themselves as far above a fishing guide with callused hands and a Cajun accent. He had endured their verbal abuse, and their vomiting up their expensive booze, and their griping about the heat and the sun, rough seas, and uncooperative fish. He’d tolerated their crap because his livelihood had depended on it.