Diana Palmer - The Maverick / Magnate's Make-Believe Mistress

“You could tell him,” Harley began.

“Not the way you can. If I tell him, he’ll quit.” He grimaced. “Already lost one mechanic that way this year. Can’t afford to lose another. You do it.”

Harley laughed. “Okay. I’ll find a way.”

“You always do. Don’t know what I’d do without you, Harley. You’re an asset as a foreman.” He studied the younger man quietly. “I never asked where you came from. You said you knew cattle, but you really didn’t. You learned by watching, until I hooked you up with old Cal and let him tutor you. I always respected the effort you put in, to learn the cattle business. But you’re still as mysterious as you were the day you turned up.”

“Sometimes it’s better to look ahead, and not backward,” Harley replied.

Parks smiled. “Enough said. See you later.”

“Sure.”

He walked off toward the house where his young wife, Lisa, was waiting with one preschool-aged boy and one infant boy in her arms. Of all the people Harley would never have expected to marry, Mr. Parks was first on his list. The rancher had been reclusive, hard to get along with and, frankly, bad company. Lisa had changed him. Now, it was impossible to think of him as anything except a family man. Marriage had mellowed him.

Harley thought about what Parks had said, about how mysterious he was. Maybe Mr. Parks thought he was running from the law. That was a real joke. Harley was running from his family. He’d had it up to his neck with monied circles and important people and parents who thought position was everything. They’d argued heatedly one summer several years ago, when Harley was sixteen, about Harley’s place in the family and his lack of interest in their social life. He’d walked out.

He had a friend whose aunt and uncle owned a small ranch and had a mechanic’s shop in Floresville. He’d taken Harley down there and they’d invited him to move in. He’d had his school files transferred to the nearest high school and he’d started his life over. His parents had objected, but they hadn’t tried to force him to come back home. He graduated and went into the Army. But, just after he returned to Texas following his release from the Army, he went to see his parents and saw that nothing had changed at all. He was expected to do his part for the family by helping win friends and influencing the right people. Harley had left that very night, paid cash for a very old beat-up pickup truck and turned himself into a vagabond cowhand looking for work.

He’d gone by to see the elderly couple he’d lived with during his last year of high school, but the woman had died, the ranch had been sold and the mechanic had moved to Dallas. Discouraged, Harley had been driving through Jacobsville looking for a likely place to hire on when he’d seen cowboys working cattle beside the road. He’d talked to them and heard that Cy Parks was hiring. The rest was history.

He knew that people wondered about him. He kept his silence. It was new and pleasant to be accepted at face value, to have people look at him for who he was and what he knew how to do rather than at his background. He was happy in Jacobsville.

He did wonder sometimes if his people missed him. He read about them in the society columns. There had been a big political dustup just recently and a landslide victory for a friend of his father’s. That had caught his attention. But it hadn’t prompted him to try to mend fences. Years had passed since his sudden exodus from San Antonio, but it was still too soon for that. No, he liked being just plain Harley Fowler, cowboy. He wasn’t risking his hard-won place in Jacobsville for anything.

Alice waited for Hayes Carson in his office, frowning as she looked around. Wanted posters. Reams of paperwork. A computer that was obsolete, paired with a printer that was even more obsolete. An old IBM Selectric typewriter. A battered metal wastebasket that looked as if it got kicked fairly often. A CB unit. She shook her head. There wasn’t one photograph anywhere in the room, except for a framed one of Hayes’s father, Dallas, who’d been sheriff before him. Nothing personal.

Hayes walked in, reading a sheet of paper.

“You really travel light, don’t you?” Alice mused.

He looked up, surprised. “Why do you say that?”

“This is the most impersonal office I’ve ever walked into. Wait.” She held up a hand. “I take that back. Jon Blackhawk’s office is worse. He doesn’t even have a photograph in his.”

“My dad would haunt me if I removed his.” He chuckled, sitting down behind the desk.

“Heard anything from the feds?”

“Yes. They got a report back on the car. It was reported missing by a woman who works for a San Antonio politician yesterday. She has no idea who took it.”

“Damn.” She sighed and leaned back. “Well, Longfellow’s working on that piece of paper I found at the crime scene and we may get something from the cast I made of the footprint. We did find faint sole markings, from a sneaker. FBI lab has the cast. They’ll track down which company made the shoe and try to trace where it was sold.”

“That’s a damned long shot.”

“Hey, they’ve solved crimes from chips of paint.”

“I guess so.”

She was deep in thought. “Odd, how that paper was pushed into the dirt under his hand.”

“Somebody stepped on it,” Hayes reminded her.

“No.” Her eyes narrowed. “It was clenched in the victim’s hand and hidden under it.”

Hayes frowned. “Maybe the victim was keeping it hidden deliberately?”

She nodded. “Like, maybe he knew he was going to die and wanted to leave a clue that might bring his killer to justice.”

Hayes chuckled. “Jones, you watch too many crime dramas on TV.”

“Actually, to hear the clerk at the hardware tell it I don’t watch enough,” she sighed. “I got a ten-minute lecture on forensic entomology while he hunted up some supplies I needed.”

“Bug forensics?” he asked.

She nodded. “You can tell time of death by insect activity. I’ve actually taken courses on it. And I’ve solved at least one murder with the help of a bug expert.” She pushed back a stray wisp of dark hair. “But what’s really interesting, Carson, is teeth.”

He frowned. “Teeth?”

She nodded. “Dentition. You can tell so much about a DB from its teeth, especially if there are dental records available. For example, there’s Carabelli’s cusp, which is most frequently found in people of European ancestry. Then there’s the Uto-Aztecan upper premolar with a bulging buccal cusp which is found only in Native Americans. You can identify Asian ancestry in shovel-shaped incisors…Well, anyway, your ancestry, even the story of your life, is in your teeth. Your diet, your age…”

“Whether you got in bar fights,” he interrupted.

She laughed. “Missing some teeth, are we?”

“Only a couple,” he said easily. “I’ve calmed right down in my old age.”

“You and Kilraven,” she agreed dubiously.

He laughed. “Not that yahoo,” he corrected. “Kilraven will never calm down, and you can quote me.”

“He might, if he can ever slay his demons.” She frowned thoughtfully and narrowed her eyes. “We have a lot of law enforcement down here that works in San Antonio.” She was thinking out loud. “There’s Garon Grier, the assistant SAC in the San Antonio field office. There’s Rick Marquez, who works as a detective for San Antonio P.D. And then there’s Kilraven.”

“You trying to say something?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I’m linking unconnected facts. Sometimes it helps. Okay, here goes. A guy comes down here from San Antonio and gets whacked. He’s driving somebody else’s stolen car. He’s messed up so badly that his own mother couldn’t identify him. Whoever killed him didn’t want him ID’d.”