Darlene Graham - The Man From Oklahoma

Again she watched the reaction that Dave had surreptitiously captured. The shocked realization that passed over the whole man when she told him Susan Biddle’s remains had been found. Nobody could fake that. Could they?

She froze the frame and her stomach tightened as she relived that first encounter. It had been so long since she’d been genuinely attracted to a man that she’d just about given up. Her big sister, Valerie, oh-so-happily married and busy making babies with a nice ordinary mechanical engineer in Kansas City, claimed Jamie had some kind of complex about bad boys. Valerie would never let Jamie forget her disastrous post-high-school fling with a motorcycle-riding wild guy named Ethan.

Could she help it, Jamie had argued the last time they’d talked about men, if she couldn’t imagine kissing ninety-nine percent of the nice guys she met, much less being married to one of them? But when she imagined kissing Nathan Biddle—as, unfortunately, she had—her insides thrummed. Maybe her sister had a point. Maybe she liked her men…complicated.

“You are going to end up all alone with a closet full of fancy suits,” Valerie had teased when Jamie passed her dateless twenty-fifth birthday.

So within a year Jamie had rekindled the thing with Donald, her tame college boyfriend. Stable, convenient and deadly dull, Donald was still living in Kansas City, practicing routine law. Living in Tulsa while Donald lived in KC hadn’t bothered her, because their relationship had always been long-distance. That should have been her first clue. But within six months they were going through the motions of being an engaged couple, and Donald suddenly became not-so-convenient. He started insisting that Jamie give up her career now that they were ready to “settle down” in Kansas City. Jamie came to the conclusion that going it alone was better than living a life she’d hate with a man she felt lukewarm about.

Even though she’d been relieved when she broke it off, extracting herself from that longstanding relationship had caused Donald, her family and herself considerable anguish. The next guy, she decided, was going to have to be well worth risking that kind of entanglement. He was going to have to absolutely knock her socks off.

But who would have guessed that the guy who would knock her socks off would turn out to be a reclusive murder suspect? She looked at the face on the screen, and suddenly that face, which she had seen in all kinds of poses, looked completely new to her. Studying old footage and photos of Nathan Biddle hadn’t been the same as meeting him in person.

“Somebody out there to see you.” Dave burst through the door, and Jamie jumped. He stood balancing a stack of older tapes and frowned at the handsome face on the screen. “He’s a different kinda guy, isn’t he?”

She hit the fast-forward button. “Who’s out there?”

“You ain’t gonna believe this. The DA.”

“Trent Van Horn? Here?”

“Yep.”

WHEN SHE SPOTTED Van Horn standing in the dimly lit reception area, Jamie’s first thought was, My, don’t we look pretty tonight. Apparently he was on his way to a “do,” dressed in a formal tux, with a red cummerbund to boot. His patent-leather shoes mirrored the low after-hours lighting, his longish hair shone silver where it was slicked back from his temples, and his pungent aftershave permeated the air. No one else was about. Even the receptionist had taken off for the day. Good. Maybe she could get Mr. Van Horn to speak candidly for a change.

“Trent. How are you?” Jamie put out her hand first.

“I’m fine, Jamie.” He gave her the standard handclasp. “I called and they told me you were still working at the station. I apologize for dropping by unannounced, but when I got your message, I figured you’d want a statement for the ten-o’clock broadcast.”

Jamie didn’t bother to respond to his self-serving apology. If Trent Van Horn wanted to stop by the station unannounced, he did it, no excuses needed. Jamie knew he wanted his face on the ten-o’clock news in the worst way. Shortly after taking this job in Tulsa, Jamie had figured out that Van Horn considered the media a handy extension of his campaign machine. Opportunistic didn’t even come close to describing the man. But normally she would be the one summoned to Trent’s door, like a serf before a landlord. So something deeper was at work tonight.

“What can I do for you?” Jamie wanted Van Horn to believe, always, that she was accommodating him.

“You were out at the Hart Ranch today?”

Uh-oh.

“Yeah. We went out there to shoot a teaser—from a distance—right after the body was found.”

“And?”

Jamie weighed the situation. Subpoena me if you want to know. “And nothing. Has the medical examiner told us the cause of death yet?”

Trent shook his head, apparently letting her evasion go.

“Can you give me a quick interview? Verify a few facts for me?” It would sure be helpful to make Van Horn her second source on this story.

Van Horn shrugged. “Of course. If it will help.”

She stepped up to the reception desk and reached over the counter for the phone. She buzzed the editing bay. “Dave. Studio One’s open, isn’t it? Mr. Van Horn has kindly agreed to give us a sound bite for our ten-o’clock package.”

It turned out to be a very disappointing piece of tape. Jamie had Dave shoot it as a stand-up, trying to create a feeling of immediacy, but the DA, as pompous and long-winded as ever, revealed absolutely nothing. When Van Horn got through talking at Jamie, she and Dave took the footage to the back and tried to make something interesting out of it.

“Another Trent Van Horn commercial.” Jamie sighed.

“From what he says, I gather it’s not his case, exactly,” Dave observed.

“Not exactly. The body was found over in Osage County. But, of course, Van Horn is maintaining that Susie Biddle was moved there after she was killed here in Tulsa.”

“Of course?”

“He wants to prosecute this on his turf, Dave. This is high-profile stuff. Susan Claremont Biddle was connected to half the big-oil-money families in northeastern Oklahoma.”

“Oh. So does he have a suspect?”

“If he does, he’s not saying, but my guess is it’ll be the husband.”

“Our big wild-looking dude, huh?”

Jamie nodded.

Dave whistled softly. “Heavy. At least we got that great footage of him out on the ranch today. You saving that for ten? Gonna weave it into this package or something?”

“No. We’re not using it.”

“Not—!” Dave’s head jutted forward on his skinny neck. “Lady, that’s some of the coolest footage I’ve ever shot. He looks like some kind of throwback brave, up on that horse with his eyes going all furious and misty and everything, and you aren’t even gonna use it?”

“Look, Dave, if you wanna work at the pound, you gotta gas a few puppies. I know it’s great footage. But I have my reasons for burying it.”

“Man! I bust my rear night and day to make you look good, and that ain’t easy, sister, keeping that hair out of the backlighting and keeping those chewed-up stubs off camera.” He pointed at her ragged nails. “And this is the thanks I get—you’re killing some of the greatest emotive footage I’ve shot since I started in this business. I zoomed right in on his eyes at just the right instant. Man!”

Jamie ignored Dave’s rant while the images on the screen flickered on. Her eyes were seeing Van Horn, but it was Nathan Biddle’s face that haunted her. Again she saw him in that moment of breathless silence after she told him about his wife. And Jamie, who could read a face as plainly as printed words on a page, knew what she had seen. For one instant his deep-set black eyes had blazed under the shadow of the cowboy hat as he fixed them on some point distant in time and space. Then tears pooled and were blinked back. She had noted the bitter set of his mouth. The painful swallow. It was great footage. The proverbial picture worth a thousand words. “Nathan Hart Biddle,” she whispered.