“Hank Maddern told me.”
“Hank!” Diana echoed. “He’s been retired for years. How did he find out?”
“One of the deputies—Hank wouldn’t say which one—went to him with it and asked for advice as to what he should do about it. The deputy evidently thought
“Considering the well-known history of graft and corruption during Sheriff DuShane’s watch, you can hardly blame the guy for thinking that. Thankfully, Hank and I go back a long way. He came straight to me with it.”
“What are you going to do?”
Brandon sighed. “I already did it,” he said. “I went straight to Internal Affairs and told them to check it out on the off chance that some of my officers are involved. I told them I’ll cooperate in any way necessary, and that they should do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of it.”
“What’ll happen to Quentin?” Diana asked.
Brandon shook his head. “We’re talking felonious activity, Diana. If the prosecutor gets a conviction, he’ll spend a couple more years in prison. And when you’re already in the slammer, what’s another year or two? He won’t give a damn, but it’s going to be hell for us. Our lives will have to be an open book. We’ll have to turn over all our bank records. The investigators will want to know just exactly how much money came in, where it came from, and where it’s gone. I told them to have a ball. We’ve got nothing to hide.”
In the bleak silence that followed that last statement, Brandon Walker slipped lower in his chair, leaning his weight against an arm that had dropped onto the table. “No matter what we did for that kid, it was never enough.”
Diana reached out and put one hand over her husband’s. “I’m sorry,” she said.
He nodded. “I know,” he murmured. “Me, too.”
“It’s not your fault, Brandon,” Diana said. “You did everything you could.”
He looked up at her then, his eyes full of hurt and outrage. And tears. “But he’s my son, for Chrissakes!” he croaked. “How the hell could my own son do this to me? How could he go against everything I’ve ever stood for and believed in?”
“Quentin isn’t you,” she said. “He made his own choices . . .”
“All of them bad,” Brandon interjected.
“. . . and once again, he’s going to have to suffer the consequences.”
Even as Diana uttered the too pat words, she knew they were a cop-out. She was hurt, too, but the real agony belonged solely to Brandon. After all, Quentin was his son. With Tommy evidently out of the picture for good, Quentin was the only “real” son Brandon Walker had left, which made the betrayal that much worse.
For years they had listened while Janie, Brandon’s ex-wife, made one excuse after another about why Quentin and Tommy were the way they were. In Janie’s opinion, the critical missing ingredient had always been Brandon’s fault and responsibility, one way or the other, although whenever Brandon had tried to exert any influence on the kids, Janie had continually run interference. Any attempt on Brandon’s part to discipline the boys had met with implacable resistance from their mother. Diana had seen from the beginning that it was a lose/lose situation all the way around.
“Can you imagine what Janie’s going to say when she gets wind of this? She’s going to blame me totally, just like she did with the accident.”
“You’re the sheriff,” Diana had said. “You have to do your job. Remember, Quentin’s a big boy now—a grown- up. If he’s turned himself into a criminal, then it’s on his head, not yours.”
But that wasn’t entirely true. Quentin was the one who was prosecuted for his part in the extortion scheme, and a slick lawyer got him off but when the next election came around, Brandon Walker lost. His opponent, Bill Forsythe, managed to imply that there had to be some connection between Quentin’s illegal but unproven activities and his father, the sheriff.
Diana thought that Brandon could have and should have fought back harder against the Forsythe campaign of character assassination, but somehow his heart wasn’t in it. When the fight ended in defeat, he retreated into the Gates Pass house and lived in virtual seclusion while focusing all his energies and frustration on cutting and stacking wood.
Monty Lazarus returned to Diana trailed by a waitress bearing a tray laden with glasses of iced tea as well as a bowl of salsa and a basket of chips.
“I thought I’d order a little food—something to keep up our strength.” He grinned. “Now where were we? Oh, that’s right. You were telling me about your daughter. University High School. That’s a prep school of some kind, isn’t it?”
Diana nodded.
“So she must be smart.”
“Yes. She hopes to study medicine someday.”
“And pretty?”
Once again she felt that vague sense of unease, but she shook it off.
“I suppose some people would say so,” Diana said dismissively. “But aren’t we getting a little off track?”
“You’re right,” Monty Lazarus said. “Have some chips and salsa. When I’m hungry, my mind tends to wander.”
Buying the car had been fun for Quentin Walker. Early on he had settled on a faded orange, ’79 Ford Bronco 4-by-4 XLT, with alloy wheels, a cassette deck, towing package, a newly rebuilt 302 engine, and a slight lift. He’d had to go through the usual car-buying bullshit with that cocky bastard of a salesman who acted like he was working for a Cadillac dealership instead of hawking beaters at a South Tucson joint called Can Do Deals Used Cars.
Winston Morris, in his smooth, double-breasted khaki-colored suit and tie, had taken one look at Quentin’s mud-spattered boots and figured him for some kind of low-life without a penny to his name. Quentin had willingly put up with all the crap, waiting for the inevitable moment when Winston would finally get around to saying,
