Lady Killer

guess. Or the lion angle, maybe. Anyway, it sure is a shame. They had a kid, too, a little boy. I guess he’s been staying with the preacher at their church.”

Holt didn’t hear anything more. While the waitress had been talking, he’d unfolded the newspaper and spread it out next to his pie plate. There was the headline, pretty much the way she’d summed it up: Local Deputy Killed By Lion, Ex-wife Arrested, and under that a was photo of the deputy in his dress uniform, complete with Stetson. Holt had started skimming the article and had got as far as the name of the woman who’d been arrested and charged with murdering her ex-husband, Duncan Grant. The name jumped out at him, and it was about like having a rattlesnake coil up and strike right at his chest. Brooke Fallon Grant. Shirley’s voice faded into a soft roar, and hot coffee slopped out of the mug and burned his hand.

“Oh-my goodness. Here let me…” Shirley was there with a towel, mopping up. “Hope ya didn’t burn yourself. Coffee’s pretty hot. Just made a fresh pot…”

He frowned distractedly at her, then relinquished the coffee mug, and she whisked it away and brought him a new one while he tried to absorb the words printed on the newspaper page in front of him.

Mrs. Grant was arrested at her home Thursday morning after an autopsy revealed the presence of large amounts of a tranquilizer in the victim’s body. According to sources at the medical examiner’s office, the drug had evidently been administered by a tranquilizer dart gun, the type used to subdue large animals.

Deputy Grant’s body was discovered by his young son Wednesday afternoon in an animal enclosure on his ex-wife’s ranch. The enclosure had been used to house a mountain lion allegedly hand-raised by Mrs. Grant. The animal was found in close proximity to Deputy Grant’s body and was assumed to have killed him. However, in light of the new evidence revealed by the autopsy, it is not clear now what part the animal might have played in the deputy’s death.

According to information received by this reporter, Mr. and Mrs. Grant had recently been involved in a dispute over custody of the couple’s nine-year-old son.

Arraignment and bail hearing are set to take place Friday afternoon at the courthouse in Colton. A hearing to determine the fate of the mountain lion has not been scheduled, pending further investigation. As the county lacks facilities to house the animal, the mountain lion remains in its compound on Mrs. Grant’s ranch.

In the absence of any known relatives, the couple’s son is being cared for by the pastor of Mrs. Grant’s church pending the outcome of Friday’s hearing.

“Yeah, it sure is a shame.” Shirley was shaking her head. “I used to see Duncan in here now and again. All the deputies like to come in for the pie, you know. I didn’t know him all that well, though-I was a few years ahead of him in school. Never met his wife…I don’t know, though…seems like a pretty heartless thing to do, doesn’t it? I mean, raise a cougar from a cub-or whatever you call a baby one-and then try and blame it for killing somebody? And letting your little boy find his daddy’s body? Hard to imagine a mother doing something like that.”

“Sounds like the paper’s got her pretty much tried and convicted,” Holt said dryly as he slid off the stool and reached for his wallet.

Shirley made that sound again. “Yeah, well, this is kind of a small town, and the local law is real…visible, if you know what I mean. So…you’re not plannin’ on stayin’ around to see how it comes out?”

“Actually, I might stay around for a bit.” He laid some bills down on the counter and picked up the paper and tucked it under his arm. “S’pose you could recommend a nice, quiet motel for me? Or have all these media people got everything booked?”

“Seriously.” She gave him a wry smile as she scooped up the bills with one hand and the dishes with the other. “They’ve been pouring into town all day. I’d say you’d probably have to go a ways to find a room.”

“Yeah, I figured. Thanks, anyway. Great coffee, by the way. And the best peach pie I ever ate.” Holt gave her his nicest smile and turned to go.

“Wait.”

With one hand on the door, Holt turned. Shirley was gazing at him in a speculative way and chewing her lip.

“Okay, look, I don’t know why, but you strike me as a nice guy. There’s a motel just west of here, just off the main drag. It’s called the Cactus Country Inn-it’s not a chain or a Best Western, or anything, but it’s nice. My brother and his wife manage it. They usually keep the room next to their apartment empty, on account of the walls are kinda thin, if you know what I mean. But if you tell ’em I sent you, they’ll probably let you have it. Just don’t throw any wild parties, though, okay?”

“I think I can promise that,” Holt said.

An hour or so later, he sat on the edge of one of two neatly made-up twin-size beds in a fairly decent room-he couldn’t remember if he’d ever been in a motel room that had twin-size beds before-in the Cactus Country Inn. He punched a number on his cell phone speed dial and while he listened to it ring, imagined it ringing in a room far away, in South Carolina, on the shores of a small lake. It rang four times before a machine picked up.

“Hello. You’ve reached Sam and Cory’s place. We’re both away from home right now. Leave us a message, and we’ll get back to you…”

He disconnected and sat for a moment with the phone in his hand, thinking. Then he pulled the laptop that lay open on the bed closer to him, found the page he was looking for, scrolled down the list of phone numbers on it until he came to the one he wanted. Dialed it.

Several minutes and several different numbers later, he’d learned several things. One, his employer was on assignment in the Sudan, and there was no way in hell to reach him. Two, his employer’s wife was also on assignment; only God-and the CIA-knew where.

Three, he was on his own.

Holt Kincaid didn’t often feel frustrated, but he did now. Here he’d finally managed to get a line on one of his client’s missing twin sisters, and there wasn’t anybody he could break the news to.

News that wasn’t good.

And he was very much afraid that if he waited for the clients to return from their various assignments, it might be too late. So, he hesitated for another second, maybe, then scrolled on down to the bottom of the list of phone numbers on his computer screen, to the first one listed under the heading In Case of Emergency. He was pretty sure Sam and Cory would agree that finding the subject of their years-long search about to be locked up for murder would qualify as an emergency.

He punched the number into his cell phone and hit the call button.

Tony Whitehall was sitting on his mother’s patio, watching his numerous nieces and nephews engaged in mayhem disguised as a game of touch football. The game was probably more fraught with violence than it might have been, due to the fact that it was being played on hard bare dirt, since his mother, being more than half Apache and a native not only of America but the great desert Southwest, had better sense than to try to get a lawn to grow on it. His mother did like flowers, though, which she grew in pots near her front doorsteps, where she could water them with a plastic gallon jug. The rest of her landscaping consisted mostly of native plants-junipers and ocotillos and barrel cactus and tamarisks for windbreaks and some stubborn cottonwoods and willows along the creek bed, where for two months or so in the spring a trickle of water actually flowed.

For shade, there was the colorful striped fabric of the umbrellas and awnings, which mostly covered the patio that Tony was enjoying, along with a cold beer, when his cell phone rang. That surprised him, first, because cell phone service out here in the wilds of Arizona wasn’t all that reliable, and second, because most of the people who had his private cell number were already here.

He fumbled around and managed to get the phone out of his pocket and opened up and the right button pushed before the thing went to voice mail. “Yeah,” he said, then remembered to add, “Uh…Tony Whitehall.”

Then he had to stick a finger in his ear to hear the person on the other end, because a gaggle of his sisters were at that moment gathered around their mother on the other side of the patio and were exhorting her loudly and passionately about losing some weight. This was an argument they were bound to lose, since Rosetta Whitehall was quite content with herself just as she was and was countering her daughters’ concerns as she always did by pointing out certain facts: “The women in my family have always been big, and we’ve always been happy, and we make our men happy, too!”

At the moment, Tony was just happy to have his sisters’ attention focused for a few minutes on something else besides him and his persistent state of bachelorhood. The poking and prying and teasing and nagging was