One Good Man(2)
She lifted her bag by the shoulder strap, grabbed her coffee with the same hand, and reached with the other for the newspaper Roni still held captive.
Roni, having sat again, remained as silent and smiling as long-faced Laurel. Jamie turned to the Hardy of the duo. “I need my morning news. You know how I am without my morning news.”
Honoria nodded, not a strand of her short wavy hair moving. Neither did her lips, not right away, and her eyes had gone flat. For the first time since walking into the comedy routine, Jamie was not amused. “What’s going on, guys?”
“You don’t want to see the newspaper today, mija.” Honoria pulled a copy of the latest O Magazine from her stack of files. She worshipped Oprah like she would a goddess. “Read Oprah instead. She has good, positive, cheery things to say.”
Meaning whatever was in the Reeves County News was a bad, negative downer. Jamie thought quickly. Her mother was fine. She had yet to see Dr. Griñon today, but if something had happened to the clinic’s pediatrician, Laurel and Hardy here wouldn’t be hiding it. And they were both here, so there was nothing going on with their families.
Families. Jamie’s father. He hadn’t been a part of her life for ten years. Not since she’d been nineteen, attending Texas Tech University at Junction, living with her parents on their struggling ranch between Junction and Sonora, and working on Interstate 10 as a waitress at the Sonora Nites Diner. It had been his choice to walk out of her life, to leave her and her mother to deal with the things he hadn’t been strong enough to handle. That didn’t mean bad news wouldn’t hurt.
“Is it my dad?” She knew it wasn’t. Her mother would have told her had something happened to Steven Monroe. Which left only…that other thing.
Once more, Jamie set down her belongings and waited for the paper. This time, she wasn’t taking no for an answer. Sharing a sad look with Honoria, Roni placed the folded and wrinkled sheets into Jamie’s shaking hand.
There was only one thing that could have happened. Only one thing her friends would keep from her. Not because they didn’t want her to know—she would find out eventually no matter what—but because of the wounds the news would reopen.
What her friends didn’t understand was that the wounds had never really closed.
She crushed the paper, looked from Roni to Honoria, tears filling her eyes and blurring her vision, emotion lodged in her throat like a red rubber ball. “They found the last body, didn’t they?”
Both pairs of brown eyes held distress and sympathy and fear. Jamie felt only one of the three. Her hands continued to tremble, her stomach twisted and gripped. Her friends nodded, first one, then the other, tears rolling down Honoria’s cheeks as Roni choked back a sob.
Neither woman had known Jamie at the time of the murders—she and her mother had moved to Weldon not long after—and no one other than Jamie’s parents and the authorities involved knew the details of that night.
Not even the families of the other victims—the victims who had died, and the one who had been dragged from the diner against his will. Jamie had been a victim, too, but that fact seemed lost on those left behind.
They’d demanded answers, had called her a liar, a coward, when the truth was she’d had no answers to give. She knew their lashing out was a coping mechanism; it gave them something to do when they felt so helpless. They wanted to know why she had been the one to live instead of their children, their siblings, their spouse. But most of all they wanted to know why she couldn’t remember enough of that night to help authorities catch the person who’d destroyed so many lives.
She breathed deeply, tasted bile at the back of her throat and spread the newspaper open to the headline on the front page.
FIFTH VICTIM OF SONORA NITES DINER MURDERS IDENTIFIEDRemains discovered in the Davis Mountains State Park this past March have, through dental records, been positively identified as belonging to Kass Duren, the hostage taken at gunpoint from the Sonora Nites Diner ten years ago following the after-hours robbery and shooting spree that left all but one employee dead.
Jamie had been that one employee. She stopped reading and thought back, trying to remember what she’d heard about the discovery of a body. Nothing came to mind. Either she’d blocked it out, or she’d read nothing about the find. The former seemed likely, but still…Kass Duren. The cook. His wife’s name was Helen. He’d been what he’d called peasant stock. Sturdy and solid. Descended from potato farmers from the old country. Jamie, at nineteen, had never asked which one.
“I remember so little about it.” Her voice came out soft, words she heard in her mind more than with her ears. “Colors, sounds. Flashes of light. It’s all one big mess. Like sharp bursts or abstract pieces.” She closed her eyes, felt the tingle of perspiration bite at her skin. “They had to tell me that Kass had been taken away.”
She looked back at her closest friends, the only two people with whom she had trusted her story when she could no longer hold it in, knowing they would never betray her, or reveal the truth of her past. Both were silent, pale. And when her cell phone played like a country-western band in her bag, they both jumped along with her. She dug it out, glancing at the number on the screen.
“I’m fine,” she told her mother without waiting for Kate to speak. “Go to work. There’s nothing you can do here.”
“Jamie. I’m so sorry.”
Jamie found herself shaking her head. “Don’t be. Kass’s wife needs this closure. It’s taken way too long.”
“I know, sweetie, but there’s going to be so much press, and so many reporters digging into that night. You’ve been safe here. Goddammit.” There was a pause while Kate made a turn; Jamie heard the signal click on and off. “I should’ve moved you across the country, or at least across the state.”
“We’re in Texas, Mom. Half the state is almost half the country.” Jamie forced a laugh, hoping it sounded better on the other end of the call because she was not buying the humor here.
“We need to talk about this. If your name shows up in the paper…”
Panicked, Jamie stopped listening. She hadn’t read the whole article, and skimmed it quickly, finding no mention of who she was now, or who she’d been then. “It’s not there. My name’s not there.”
“Not in this article, no, but what about the next, because you know this will renew interest in the case. They’ll reopen the investigation. They’ll figure out that Stephanie Monroe fell off the face of the earth and go looking. And someone with the right connections, or a big-enough gun, can find out that Dr. Kate Danby used to be Dr. Ruth Monroe.”
Another pause and her mother was talking again. “I’m coming back. We need to talk to the authorities. And how the hell did the news make it into the paper without someone in law enforcement giving us a call?”
At the sound of the clinic door opening, Jamie turned, one arm hugged tightly around her middle that was roiling and surging in advance of the oncoming tidal wave she feared would sweep her away. “Oh my God.”
“What is it? Jamie? What’s happening?”
“They’re calling now, Mom. In person,” she added as the door swooshed closed, leaving Jamie face-to-face with the long arm of the law.
2
A SERGEANT with Company E in Midland, and assigned to the Unsolved Crimes Investigation Team, Texas Ranger Kellen Harding felt like a bull inside the china shop of Weldon Pediatrics—though the way the three women in front of him were staring, he might be well on his way to becoming a steer.
“I’ll have to call you back, Mom,” said the one Kell had already pegged as Jamie Danby, the one who had lived the first nineteen years of her life as Stephanie Monroe. The Hispanic woman was too short and, well, Hispanic. The blonde was the right height, and hair was easily colored, but she didn’t have the same snap as the brunette—the brunette who was giving him a hell of an evil eye.He stayed where he was, just inside the door, removed his white Stetson and sunglasses, and held her gaze. “Jamie Danby?”
Her face blanched, but color quickly returned to her cheekbones, and her mouth barely trembled when she asked, “And you are?”
“Ranger Sergeant Kellen Harding, ma’am, of Unsolved Crimes.” He added the extra to break the ice that was taking too long to thaw. It was time he didn’t want to waste, and she might not have.
“Can we help you with something, Sergeant Harding?” She faced him squarely, her chin up, her gaze direct. She didn’t even bother looking around for a sick child. She knew he was here for her, and because of the recent break in the Sonora Nites Diner case.
He wondered if she was aware of the crumpled newspaper she held. He gave a nod toward it. “You’ve seen the story?”
“Of Kass being found?” she asked, her hand tightening around the strap of her bag, her knuckles turning white.
It was a rhetorical question, but it answered his, and he nodded again just the same. “Is there somewhere we can talk? Privately?”
“You can use the break room,” the blonde hurried to offer, straightening the headset slipping down one side of her neck.