"Christ almighty. Chickens. If you tell me to think omelettes, I'll have to hit you."
"Understood." He walked up the pathway beside her. He knew her well enough to be certain her preoccupation with the local scene helped to keep her mind off her fears and worries. She'd yet to say anything about heading into Dallas itself, or what she could or would do there.
The doors were ten feet wide and crowned by the bleached-out horns of some sort of animal. Roarke pondered it, and the type of personality that enjoyed decorating with dead animals, while Eve rang the bell.
Moments later, the image of the old American West yanked open the door.
He was weathered as leather, tall as a mountain, wide as a river. He wore boots with toes sharp as stilettos and crusted with dirt. His jeans were dark indigo and looked stiff enough to stand tall without him while his shirt was a faded red-and-white check. His hair was a dull silver, slicked back from a hard and ruddy face, mapped with lines, toughened in a scowl.
When he spoke, his voice rattled like loose gravel in a very deep bucket. "You the city cops?"
"Lieutenant Dallas." Eve offered her badge. "This is my field assistant—"
"I know you." He pointed a finger, thick as a soy dog on his ham of a hand, at Roarke. "Roarke. You're Roarke, and you're no cop."
"Praise be," Roarke acknowledged. "I happen to be married to one."
"Yeah." He nodded as he considered Eve. "Recognize you now, too. Big city New York cop." He looked like he might spit, but restrained himself. "Jake T. Parker, and I don't have to talk to you. Fact is, my lawyers advise against it."
"You're not now under any legal obligation to speak with me, Mr. Parker. But you can be put under that legal obligation, and I'm sure your lawyers advised you of that as well."
He hooked his wide thumbs in the belt loops of his jeans. His scarred belt creaked at the movement. "Take you some little while to pull that off, wouldn't it?"
"Yes, sir, it would. I wonder how many more people Julianna can kill before the lawyers wrangle that out? You care to speculate?"
"I've got nothing to do with her, haven't in more than a dozen years. I made my peace there, and I don't need some city-girl cop from New York coming here and throwing that dirt in my face."
"I'm not here to throw dirt, Mr. Parker. I'm not here to judge you. I'm here to learn anything that might help me stop Julianna from taking more lives. One of them might be yours."
"Shit. Pardon my French," he added. "That girl's nothing but a ghost to me, and I'm less than that to her."
Eve pulled stills out of her field bag. "This is Walter Pettibone. He was nothing to her, either. And Henry Mouton. They had families, Mr. Parker. They had lives. She destroyed all that."
He looked at the stills, looked away. "Never should've let her out of prison."
"You won't get an argument there from me. I helped put her in a cage once before. I'm asking you to help me do it again."
"I got a life of my own. It took me a long time to get it back so I could wake up in the morning and look at myself in the mirror."
He took a dirt-brown Stetson hat from a stand with pegs just inside the door, fit it on his head. Then he stepped out, shut the door at his back. "I don't want this in my house. I'm sorry not to be hospitable, but I don't want her in my house. We'll talk outside. I want to take a look at the stock anyhow."
As a concession against the white glare of the sun, Eve dug out shaded glasses. "Has she been in contact with you at all?"
"I haven't heard a peep from that girl since she walked out the day she turned eighteen. The day she told her mama what had been going on. The day she laughed in my face."
"Do you know if she's been in contact with her mother?"
"Couldn't say. Lost track of Kara when she left me. Heard she'd taken a job off planet. Farming satellite. Far away from me, I'd say, as she could manage."
Eve nodded. She knew Kara Dunne Parker Rowan's location. She'd remarried four years earlier, and refused to speak to Eve regarding her daughter. Her daughter, she'd informed Eve during their brief transmission, was dead. Eve imagined Julianna had the same attitude toward the woman who'd birthed her.
"Did you rape Julianna, Mr. Parker?"
His face tightened, like old leather stretching over a frame. "If you mean did I force myself on her, I did not. I've done a lot of atoning for what I did, Lieutenant."
He paused at a paddock fence, propped one booted foot on a bottom rung, and stared out at his men and horses. "There was a time I put all the blame on her. Took me a long while before I could spread that out to myself and deal with it. She was fifteen, chronologically speaking anyways. Fifteen, and a man more than fifty has no right touching those kinda goods. A man married to a good woman, hell to any woman's got no right touching her daughter. No excuses."
"But you did touch her."