Kara Lennox - For Just Cause

Theresa Esteve obviously hadn’t achieved the level of wealth her sister had. This nameless neighborhood wasn’t nearly as grand as Pecan Grove. The small ranch houses had probably been built in the 1960s, and the residents here likely mowed their own grass and trimmed their own bushes.

But there was something wildly askew about Theresa’s house. The front window was boarded up with plywood.

Claudia double-checked her Day-Timer. “That’s the house, 1642 Baxter Avenue. What do you suppose happened here?” She turned the car around, pulled up to the curb and stopped.

“Stay in the car.” Billy manually unlocked his door. “I’ll check it out.”

Claudia ignored him. “It’s a vacant house. I doubt we’ll face any gunmen here.”

As they approached the front porch, Billy took a detour to examine a flash of yellow he saw on the picket fence that separated the house from the one next door. “Hey, Claudia, look at this. Crime scene tape.”

“Oh, my God. This might explain why Theresa won’t answer Mary-Francis’s calls.”

“I’m going to call a buddy of mine that works for the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department. Maybe he can tell us what happened here.”

Claudia nodded and sat down on the edge of a brick planter filled with thirsty-looking azaleas. What was going on here? What had started as a simple request from a condemned woman had turned into a crazy scavenger hunt featuring a drug addict, her gun-toting boyfriend and a lost million-dollar coin collection. And now another possible crime victim.

She did not envy Billy his job right now.

Maybe it was time for her to wash her hands of this mess. She had dutifully turned over the information she had to Project Justice. She could write up her final report tonight, including data from both interviews. Once she finished that, the ball was in their court.

Except…except she was still the only person who was sure Mary-Francis didn’t kill her husband or know of his current whereabouts. The poor woman had no one to fight for her now. Certainly not her daughter, and now it appeared something had happened to her sister.

Antsy, Claudia stood again. She walked to the driveway, which was empty except for a few oil spots. The garage door had no windows, so she couldn’t look to see if there was a car. She ambled to the side of the house, where a short section of weathered wooden privacy fence guarded the backyard. But one of the slats was broken, and she peeked in.

A woman dressed in a bright pink track suit was busy digging around in a parched, overgrown garden. Could that be Theresa? It would explain why no one had answered the door.

“Hello, there!” Claudia called out.

The woman froze, then hightailed it to a back corner of the yard and disappeared through a gate.

Claudia rejoined Billy just as he was finishing his call. “You’re not gonna like this.”

“What?”

“We’re too late to warn Theresa. She was the victim of a home invasion. Someone broke in, roughed her up, then tore the house up, but no one knows what they took because the only person who could tell them—Theresa—is in a coma.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“THERE WERE NO PRINTS left behind, no trace evidence at all,” Billy continued. “The cops don’t have a clue.”

Claudia felt sick to her stomach. “When did this happen?”

“A few days ago.”

This crime couldn’t be unrelated, could it? Theresa’s neighborhood wasn’t top drawer, but neither was it a hotbed of violent crime.

“There was someone in the backyard just now, digging around in the dirt,” she said. “I called out, but whoever it was ran off, scared.”

Billy’s eyebrows raised in obvious interest. He turned and climbed the stairs to the front porch to have a closer look at the plywood patch covering the window. He pushed on a corner, which gave slightly.

“Billy, that would be breaking and entering.”

“No one will care. The police are done with the crime scene. We’re just going to look around.” With a quick glance left and right to be sure no one was watching, he heaved his shoulder into the plywood.

With a shriek of nails pulling free, the board came loose.

Billy knocked it all the way to the floor inside, then climbed in. “I’ll let you in through the front door.”

Claudia considered going to sit in her car. An arrest for B & E could jeopardize her entire practice and cause Project Justice considerable embarrassment. But probably no one would care if they looked around, and she couldn’t contain her own curiosity, so when Billy opened the front door, she stepped across the threshold.

It was like a brick oven inside; Claudia’s skin immediately dampened with perspiration. Her dress stuck to her, clinging to her thighs and breasts.

She wasn’t sure whether to be grateful or miffed when Billy ignored her, flipping on some lights, first in the entry way, then the living room, and going into search mode.

The place was a wreck—furniture overturned or ripped open, drawers and cabinets emptied. Here and there, black fingerprint powder marred surfaces.

Theresa was obviously a devout woman. Pictures of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and several saints adorned the walls. Over the red plaid sofa hung a huge print of da Vinci’s The Last Supper. And on the brick hearth was a statue of Jesus as well as an angel, a monk—maybe St. Francis—and a couple of other saints Claudia couldn’t identify.

“Whoever did this trashed the place to make it look like a random crime,” Billy said. “But I worked in property crimes on the Dallas P.D. for a while. Burglars don’t just destroy stuff for the hell of it. They take what they want and leave. This much damage is overkill.”

“As if the perpetrator had an emotional connection to the victim?”

“Possibly.”

Billy and Claudia quickly checked the rest of the house. Every room had been assaulted and vandalized.

“Let’s check out the backyard,” Claudia said. “I want to know why that woman was digging around.”

“Digging for buried treasure? Maybe she heard something about the missing coins.”

In the early summer heat, it wouldn’t take long for an unwatered garden to wither and die. The backyard looked as if it had once been lovingly cultivated with flowers and a vegetable patch. Now, most everything was dead or dying. Green had turned to yellow and beige. The tall weeds rattled in the light breeze.

“If Theresa ever comes home,” Claudia said, “she’ll be horrified by what’s happened to her yard.” She walked over to where the mystery woman had been turning up the earth. Several large holes had been dug up in one corner of the garden. “I wonder what that woman was looking for?”

Billy squatted down and examined the other plants in the vegetable patch. “Potatoes. And onions.”

“How can you tell?”

He gave her a pitying look. “I take it you don’t garden.”

“I have a landscaping service that does all that. Do you have a garden?”

“Sure. I grow all kinds of stuff in big pots on my patio—tomatoes, peppers, onions, squash. Growing up, if my mom hadn’t grown vegetables, we’d have gone hungry. Now I just do it ’cause there’s nothing quite like a home-grown tomato.”

She never would have pegged him as a gardener. But she was more surprised that he’d shared something from his personal life with her.

“Hey, you!”

Claudia jumped and looked for the source of the voice. The woman in pink, wearing a large brimmed hat and sunglasses, was peering at them over the privacy fence. Unless she was seven feet tall, she was on a ladder.

“You’re trespassing!” the woman screeched. “You better not be taking those vegetables.”

“No, ma’am,” Billy said. “We’re with the sheriff’s department, doing some follow-up on the crime that took place here. Did anyone talk to you about that?”