“We’ll find him,” she said with more confidence than she felt. So far they hadn’t uncovered any clues. At least none they could yet recognize. Maybe the ME would find something.
“You find him, or I will.”
Whoa. She felt her first stirrings of sympathy sliding away into apprehension. “Let us do our job. You do realize that anything you find probably won’t be usable in court, because you won’t have a warrant. You certainly don’t want to get in our way or get yourself in trouble with the law.”
He didn’t answer immediately. When at last he spoke, his voice was clear, flat, hard. “I don’t care what happens to me. This is about my brother. He deserves justice. The dead should get that. Justice. That’s one of the things Larry believed.”
She saw pain pass over his face, quickly erased, and she sensed that this wasn’t about his brother’s death. Not exactly. Something else was going on here.
She also wondered what could be done about this man. He’d only said he wanted to find the murderer. He hadn’t said he was going to do anything illegal in the process. What were they to do to prevent him? Jail him without a charge?
Never. So they were stuck with this cannon. Whether it was a loose one or not, she had no idea. She did suspect that a Ranger could probably cause more trouble than a typical man on the street.
“You need to talk to the sheriff,” she said, ticking possibilities over in her mind. “If you coordinate your efforts with ours, there may be a way for you to satisfy yourself.”
“Is he here?”
“He’s at a county board meeting.” To discuss funding for expanding the department by a couple more cops, hoping to get funding for a better dispatch situation. Sticking communications over in the corner with the coffee machines was becoming a problem. They needed better equipment, a place to put dispatch out of the line of fire and noise in the front office. She’d been kind of startled when she began working here to realize that the department had been so small for so long they were stacking most duties all in one room. Time to move into the twenty-first century.
But that didn’t answer her immediate problem. She tried to lighten things a bit. “He said he’d be gone an hour nearly an hour ago. Given it’s the supervisors and it’s about money, it may become a longer wrangle.”
His nod was short, sharp. The cold steel in his gaze hadn’t lessened a bit. Okay, then...
“I’ll wait.”
She figured determination was bone-deep in this man. He had come here on a mission, one he considered righteous. Short of being given official orders, he wasn’t going to be derailed. She hoped the sheriff would be able to find a way to steer him. From her position, there was little she could do or say without her boss’s approval anyway.
“Larry,” she said finally.
Those eyes became even sharper. “What about him?”
“I knew him. Only for the couple of months he was here, but we met in Mahoney’s bar one night. He was enjoying a scotch, and I went in there to eat a ham sandwich, maybe have a beer. I sat at the bar near him, and we fell into conversation.”
He waited.
“I liked him immediately. Nice man, but I probably wouldn’t want to be the target of one of his investigative pieces.”
The faintest of frowns flickered over the major’s face. “No one would.”
“Anyway, we hit it off. He told me he was a journalist and that he was here on sabbatical to write a book. He even laughed, saying every reporter had a book in their bottom desk drawer. He never said what he was writing about. Did he tell you why he came to the back of beyond?”
“No.” His expression shut down again.
“I saw him a lot while he was here. He liked Mahoney’s—said it was his nod to Hemingway, whatever that meant. Do you know?”
He shook his head. “Probably a literary reference. A few years ago, he joked to me that you couldn’t drink your way into a novel.”
She felt a smile ease the tension in her face. “Well, he wasn’t trying to drink his way into anything. He appeared to like the atmosphere, even played darts with some of the regulars. Never a heavy drinker. We talked whenever we ran into each other, sometimes meeting at the diner for lunch. I’ve known a few reporters, and they’re never wallflowers. He’d started making friends around here.”
“That’s Larry, all right.”
She suspected this man didn’t find it easy to make friends. But maybe she was wrong. Too soon to know, except that while she wouldn’t like being the subject of Larry’s investigation, she would hate being the subject of this man’s ire.
“He started having card games at his place once a week,” she went on. “He invited me, but I’m not into cards, so I didn’t go. Maybe six or seven guys attended. Never any problem from our perspective. Which I suppose means they were reasonably quiet and didn’t get disorderly. Not much of an analysis on my part.” She tried another smile. “We’re looking into those friends.”
“Good.”
“You never know what kind of resentments might come out of a card game. Especially if they were gambling, but since Larry invited me, I doubt it.”
“He was never a gambler that I know of. At least not that way. He gambled a whole lot in other ways.”
Cat wondered if she’d just told him too much about the friends. About the card games. Dang, this man’s mere presence was making her talk too much, maybe reveal too much. Everything about him demanded answers.
She had just decided to pick up some paperwork in order to truncate this conversation by comparing written reports to digital. Gage hated the duplicate work, both on computer and paper, but like it or not, the duplication was useful. Papers couldn’t be manipulated as easily as a computer file, but
