“As far as I know, it is,” Alex told them. “My investigation has nothing to do with the racing commission, or the granting of your horse-racing license.”
After a moment, when she didn’t elaborate, Chastain asked, “Well, then, what does it have to do with, Miss Gaither?”
Drawing herself up to her full height, she said, “I am reopening a twenty-five-year-old murder case. Greg Harper asked for your help, Mr. Chastain, since the crime was committed in Purcell County.”
She looked into Angus’s eyes, then into Junior’s. Finally, she stared down hard at the crown of Reede Lambert’s hat. “Before I’m finished, I’m going to know which one of you killed my mother.”
Chapter 2
Alex peeled off her suit jacket and tossed it onto the motel bed. Her underarms were damp and her knees were ready to buckle. She was nauseated. The scene in the D.A.’s office had shaken her more than she wanted to admit.
She had left Pat Chastain’s office with her head held high and her shoulders back. She hadn’t walked too fast, but she hadn’t dawdled. She had smiled good-bye to Imogene, who had obviously been eavesdropping through the door because she stared at Alex bug-eyed, her mouth agape.
Alex’s exit line had been well rehearsed, well timed and perfectly executed. The meeting had gone just as she had planned it, but she was vastly relieved that it was over.
Now, she peeled off one cloying piece of clothing after another. She would love to think that the worst was behind her, but she feared it was yet to come. The three men she had met today wouldn’t roll over and play dead. She would have to confront them again, and when she did, they wouldn’t be so overjoyed to see her.
Angus Minton seemed as full of goodwill as Santa Claus, but Alex knew that nobody in Angus’s position could be as harmless as he tried to pretend. He was the richest, most powerful man in the county. One didn’t achieve that status solely through benign leadership. He would fight to keep what he’d spent a lifetime cultivating.
Junior was a charmer who knew his way around women. The years had been kind to him. He’d changed little from the photographs Alex had seen of him as an adolescent. She also knew that he used his good looks to his advantage. It would be easy for her to like him. It would also be easy to suspect him of murder.
Reede Lambert was the toughest for her to pigeonhole because her impressions of him were the least specific. Unlike the others, she hadn’t been able to look him in the eye. Reede the man looked much harder and stronger than Reede the boy from her grandma’s picture box. Her first impression was that he was sullen, unfriendly, and dangerous.
She was certain that one of these men had killed her mother.
Celina Gaither had not been murdered by the accused, Buddy Hicks. Her grandmother, Merle Graham, had drummed that into little Alex’s head like a catechism all her life.
“It’ll be up to you, Alexandra, to set the record right,” Merle had told her almost daily. “That’s the least you can do for your mother.” At that point she usually glanced wistfully at one of the many framed photographs of her late daughter scattered throughout the house. Looking at the photographs would invariably make her cry, and nothing her granddaughter did could cheer her.
Until a few weeks ago, however, Alex hadn’t known who Merle suspected of killing Celina. Finding out had been the darkest hour of Alex’s life.
Responding to an urgent call from the nursing home doctor, she had sped up the interstate to Waco. The facility was quiet, immaculate, and staffed by caring professionals. Merle’s lifetime pension from the telephone company made it affordable. For all its amenities, it still had the gray smell of old age; despair and decay permeated its corridors.
When she had arrived that cold, dismal, rainy afternoon, Alex had been told that her grandmother was in critical condition. She entered the hushed private room and moved toward the hospital bed. Merle’s body had visibly deteriorated since Alex had visited only the week before. But her eyes were as alive as Fourth of July sparklers. Their glitter, however, was hostile.
“Don’t come in here,” Merle rasped on a shallow breath. “I don’t want to see you. It’s because of you!”
“What, Grandma?” Alex asked in dismay. “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t want you here.”
Embarrassed by the blatant rejection, Alex had glanced around at the attending physician and nurses. They shrugged their incomprehension. “Why don’t you want to see me? I’ve come all the way from Austin.”
“It’s your fault she died, you know. If it hadn’t been for you…” Merle moaned with pain and clutched her sheet with sticklike, bloodless fingers.
“Mother? You’re saying I’m responsible for Mother’s death?”
Merle’s eyes popped open. “Yes,” she hissed viciously.
“But I was just a baby, an infant,” Alex argued, desperately wetting her lips. “How could I—”
“Ask them.”
“Who, Grandma? Ask who?”
“The one who murdered her. Angus, Junior, Reede. But it was you… you… you…”
Alex had to be led from the room by the doctor several minutes after Merle lapsed into a deep coma. The ugly accusation had petrified her; it reverberated in her brain and assaulted her soul.