Clancey got her composure back before his eyes fell on her face. “You still haven’t translated this for me,” she said pointedly, indicating the sheet.
He glared at her.
“Well, it’s not my fault you can’t write,” she said belligerently. “I’ll bet the teacher who tried to teach you cursive threw confetti on the last day of school and walked you all the way to the school bus.”
He glared harder. “I can write cursive just fine, thank you.”
“Then what does it say?” she persisted.
“I’ll take it under advisement and get back to you,” he said nonchalantly.
“You can’t read it,” she said, and grinned.
“I could read it if I wanted to,” he retorted.
“How am I supposed to type up this report if I don’t know what you’ve written?” she asked reasonably.
“If they question me about it, I’ll tell them you had a senior moment,” he said with a deadpan expression.
“I’m twenty-three, not eighty!” she huffed.
“I thought you were twenty-two.”
“I was, until last November, just after I came to work for you,” she said. “Birthdays come once a year. You don’t stay the same age forever.”
He didn’t react to the snarky comment. He slid his white Stetson over one eye. “If anyone calls, I’ll be out until tomorrow.”
“If they call, they’ll call you, not me,” she pointed out.
“You have the fixed phone, that antique thing that’s attached to the wall,” he pointed out.
“I have a cell phone,” she said defensively.
“Does it have anything except numbers on it?” he asked with a sarcastic smile.
She glared at him. “I’m going to get a really fancy smart phone as soon as I pay off my new yacht,” she said belligerently.
He turned away before she saw the smile. “Okay, nasturtium. Have a good night.”
“I am not a nasturtium!”
“A likely story,” he muttered on his way out. “I’ll bet my badge you don’t even know what a nasturtium is.”
“I do so!” she called after him.
When he was out of sight, she pulled the pocket dictionary out of her drawer and looked it up.
It was a flower. Well! Maybe he didn’t dislike her as much as he seemed to. She wondered at the irony, because the meaning of her real name was the same as that of the nickname he’d stuck her with. She doubted if he’d paid any attention to her name on the job application. It had been, after all, the department’s interviewer who’d hired her for this job.
She glanced at the sheet she still couldn’t read and put it in her desk drawer. Tomorrow, she promised herself, she’d pin him down and make him take a crack at it.
Meantime, she typed up the reports she could read.
SHE WORRIED ABOUT the cold case Banks was working on. He didn’t know, and she wouldn’t tell him, but the victim had been her grandfather, Dalton Reed. She didn’t want to share any of her private life with her bulldozer of a boss. Even in prison, her stepbrother, Morris Duffy, could have things done to her, or worse, to her little brother, Tad. He’d even threatened that when he went away. Keep your mouth shut, he’d said. Things could happen to the boy, even if he was in prison. He had friends. The threat was still enough to keep her silent.
She’d always suspected her stepbrother, Morris, of killing her grandfather, but the body had never been found. If there was a body. She grimaced. Her grandfather had always been punctual. If he said he’d be there at six, he’d be there at five forty-five. He would never have just gone away from his job and his family without telling anyone. Unless he was dead.
Dalton Reed was a former sheriff’s deputy. Even after retirement, he’d been a volunteer deputy. He could make a guitar sing. Clancey still had his precious guitar. She’d hidden it while Morris lived at home, for fear that he’d sell it. After all, he’d made frequent allusions to its value. He’d also been covetous of her grandfather’s antique Colt .45 in its equally antique hand-tooled holster. Odd thing, the gun and gun belt had vanished along with her grandfather. She’d thought at first that Morris might have sold them. But they were collectibles, and a lot of people in San Antonio—including many policemen and sheriff’s deputies—knew about them. Perhaps Morris had been too cautious to put them on the market.
Clancey had loved her grandfather. He was the only good in her miserable home life. Her stepfather, Ben, had coddled Morris, his son from a previous marriage, as if he’d invented bread. He protected the boy, got him out of trouble all the time, refused to believe his own son had ever done anything bad. Tad had never gotten the attention from Ben that Morris had. The child got his affection from his half sister, Clancey, who’d loved him from the day he was born. After the death of her mother, Diane, not long after Tad’s birth, Clancey and her grandfather had been Tad’s protectors, until her grandfather’s disappearance.
Tad had only been three at the time when her grandfather didn’t come home. But a few days before that, Morris had viciously attacked Tad for crying during his video game. The little boy was screaming as Morris slapped him around. When Clancey had come running at the sound of the child’s screams, she saw Morris, cursing, grab up a metal scoop that was used in the open fireplace. As she yelled, horrified, he swung it at the child and knocked him off the couch. Clancey ran to defend the little boy, and Morris swung the heavy scoop at her, breaking two ribs and bruising her as he swung it over and over again.
It had been a brutal act that still kindled nightmares. She’d had bruises and cuts on her face and arms, in addition to the broken ribs, and her back had suffered a torn muscle. There was a worse complication that sent her to the emergency room.
