Sandra Brown - Low Pressure

He nodded.

It was a copy of what appeared to be a page torn from a spiral notebook, covered with boldly scrawled annotations. Most had been written in a cryptic shorthand that only Moody would be able to decipher, but some of it was legible. A red pen had been used to underscore one of the notations: a name with a star beside it.

She scanned the page. “You wrote down the names of witnesses who mentioned Allen Strickland when you interviewed them?”

Moody nodded.

“At least some of them must’ve remembered seeing the way he and Susan were dancing together,” she said. “Why wasn’t he the prime suspect from the beginning?”

Obviously the question made Moody uneasy. Beneath his heavy, crinkled eyelids, his eyes shifted to several points in the room, including Dent, before returning to Bellamy. “He might’ve been, except that your folks were the first people I talked to. They gave me Dent’s name and told me about the argument he’d had with Susan that morning.”

“So I shot straight to the top of your list.”

“Yeah. I didn’t go back to Allen Strickland till you’d been eliminated.”

“Allen was another likely choice. But even then you didn’t think he’d committed the crime, did you?” Bellamy said. “Why not?”

He took a sip of his drink.

“Why not?” she repeated.

“First time I questioned him, he told me that Susan had turned him down flat and had made fun of him for trying.”

“And you believed that?” she asked.

“Usually a guy, especially a ladies’ man like him, doesn’t admit to being turned down, so I figured he was telling the truth. At least partially. Then there was his brother.”

She and Dent exchanged a look.

“What?” Moody asked.

“We’d like to hear this first,” she said. “Go on, please.”

He took a draw on his cigarette and blew the smoke toward the ceiling. “I questioned them separately. Allen’s brother—Ray was his name—told me that he knew what Allen had in mind when he left the pavilion with Susan. Wink, wink. Ray stayed behind, drank some more beer, flirted and tried to get lucky himself. But when the weather turned bad, he got worried. He was reluctant to interrupt anything that Allen had going, but…”

“Being his brother’s keeper,” Dent said.

Moody raised his glass as though saluting him. “Ray told us detectives that he went into the woods, but met Allen on the hiking path, making his way back.” He gestured to the file. “Notes on several interviews with him are in there. But in one, he told me that Allen was ‘fuckin’ furious.’”

“He admitted that?”

“He did. But he also said he didn’t blame his brother for being angry, because he could hear your sister’s laughter. She even called out, ‘Don’t go away mad, Allen.’ And then she told him to go home and jack off while thinking about her. Words to that effect.”

Bellamy felt Dent’s eyes on her, watching to see how she would respond. She tried to keep her expression schooled.

“Anyhow, both the brothers, during individual interviews, told me the same thing. That Allen had left Susan in the woods, laughing at him.”

“Why didn’t this testimony come out during the trial?” she asked. “Since the case was built on circumstantial evidence, it would have provided strong reasonable doubt.”

“It would have, yes. Allen’s court-appointed attorney was relying heavily on Ray’s testimony,” Dale said. “That’s why he was fit to be tied when Ray didn’t show up the morning he was scheduled to be on the stand. The lawyer couldn’t account for his witness’s whereabouts or provide a reason for his failure to appear.

“He threw himself on the mercy of the court and asked for a postponement in the proceedings, just until after lunch, so he could track down his witness. Rupe hit the ceiling. He put on a dog-and-pony show about the defense attorney’s attempt to annoy the jury into an acquittal.” Moody made a sound of derision. “It was one of his best performances.”

“I must not have been in court that day,” Bellamy said. “I don’t remember that scene.”

Dent said, “Let me guess. The judge denied the request.”

Moody nodded. “And Ray never got to testify.”

“Why wasn’t he in court that day?”

“Because he was in the hospital. He’d been seriously injured in a car wreck on his way to the courthouse. It was several days before he was stable enough to be deposed, and his deposition was read aloud in court, but it didn’t have quite the same punch as a live testimony would have had. By the time Ray was well enough to leave the hospital, it was too late. Allen had been convicted and transferred to Huntsville.”

“Jesus,” Dent whispered. “No wonder he’s gone mental.”

Moody sat forward. “What?”

“Ray Strickland hasn’t forgiven or forgotten.”

Moody was quick to catch his drift. He motioned toward Dent’s face. “He did that?”

“Show him your back,” Bellamy said.

Dent stood and raised his shirt. They told Moody about the events of the past few days that had led up to last night’s attack. “He doesn’t have the mustache anymore,” Dent said. “He looks like your basic skinhead.”

“Then how do you know it’s Ray?”

“We don’t. But whoever he is, he’s got a death wish for Bellamy and me, and the only thing she and I have in common is that Memorial Day.”

“And her book,” Moody said, not kindly.

“If it is Ray, maybe his grievance began when he was unable to testify at Allen’s trial,” she said. “He let his brother down. To this day, he must be haunted by that auto accident.”

“Wasn’t an accident.”

Moody spoke in such a low rumble that at first she wasn’t sure if she’d heard him correctly. She looked at Dent, but his focus was on the former detective and what he’d just said.

Moody lifted his bloodshot gaze to them and cleared his throat. “It wasn’t an accident. Rupe arranged for a guy to T-bone Ray at an intersection. This guy took his job seriously and rammed into him at a high rate of speed. I recall Rupe saying that it was not only a miracle that the crash hadn’t killed them both… it was also a damn shame.”

Ray spat a pulverized, half-masticated sunflower-seed shell out the open driver’s window of his pickup. On the seat beside him was a pair of binoculars, through which he’d watched Dent and Bellamy climb into the shiny blue and white plane with the unfurled Texas flag painted on its nose, and take off into the wild blue yonder.

He hated like heck that he hadn’t killed Dent when he’d had the chance last night. Not only was he still an obstacle to getting to Bellamy, but without her personal pilot, she couldn’t be flying off to God knew where, leaving Ray to wonder when they’d be back and he’d get another run at them.

But if he’d taken the time to finish Dent off last night, there was a good chance he’d have been caught, and that would have meant no vengeance for Allen. He needed to keep reminding himself of that and stop second-guessing his snap decision to run.

He’d gone home, gotten some shut-eye, and, over his morning cereal, had decided to keep watch on the airfield, where Dent eventually came to roost. He’d been staking it out for less than an hour, when, sure enough, they’d shown up. In her car, he noted.

Even viewed through the binoculars, last night’s handiwork on Dent had shown up bright and bloody. It did his heart good to see the damage he’d inflicted on the flyboy’s pretty face. He chuckled at the thought of how much that slice across his back must hurt.

But neither the injury or the scare he’d given them was enough. They had to die like Allen had.

He tossed the bag of sunflower seeds onto the dash and got out of the truck to stretch his legs and get the blood flowing again into his butt, which had gone numb hours ago. But he was gonna stick it out and stay here till they came back, no matter how boring it got.