One Good Man(21)
With his SUV idling beside her, she stood watching his garage door slide closed, then climbed up in the passenger seat of the vehicle. He’d been sitting there waiting, the engine running. She’d had to talk herself into going home. Being here with Kell…she felt closer than she had in years to Stephanie Monroe.
And how weird was that? she mused, buckling her shoulder strap into place. She’d made her life in Weldon, had felt safe in Weldon, knew the lay of the land there, the people in town.
Was that the problem? As much as she loved her home, was it more the place she’d run to escape her past? More a prison instead of a harbor? Being with Kell made her feel safe, secure, as if she belonged, instead of as if she’d had to forge a good fit. This was strange, wrong, so very—
“Shit!” Kell slammed on his brakes, adding, “Sorry, sorry,” when she surged forward and choked on her shoulder strap. “I almost backed into that car. Across the street. I knew I’d cleared the mailbox, but…shit. Sorry. Guess the Feagans have guests.”
He shifted from Reverse into Drive and they traveled toward the intersection. There they stopped, and Kell readied to turn. Jamie checked her side mirror, and saw the car’s headlights come on before it pulled away from the curb.
Her nape tingled. “Would their guests be waiting for any reason for you to leave?”
“What?” Kell looked into his rearview and saw the car approach. “Hmm” was all he said as he made his turn, watching to see if the car followed. It didn’t, heading in the opposite direction. Still, Jamie couldn’t look away, staring until the car’s taillights vanished.
So much for feeling safe. Suddenly, the reason for her being in Midland to begin with came rushing back, and she wished they were returning to Weldon in broad daylight, not in the dark of night that made her think too much about the memories refreshed during hypnosis.
Maybe if she talked it out? “Once you drop me off and get back to work tomorrow, what’s your first step? On the case? Assuming you don’t have new evidence come in on another. Since I gave you nothing to work with on this one.”
He reached across the console and took hold of her hand. “I’m not writing off this case just because the hypnosis didn’t give us as much as I’d hoped.”
“As much? It didn’t give you anything.” A tattoo. A Nike swoop. Orders issued in Spanish, a language she had a better grasp of now than she did then, but not enough of one to make sense of what the killer had said.
There were more Hispanic men in this part of Texas than there were Caucasian, and all she’d seen of the killer was his wrist, the ragged hem of his jeans and the shoes that had left bloody footprints on the diner’s freshly mopped floor.
She closed her eyes, leaning her head back against the seat. “I wanted so badly to give you the answers you needed.”
“Jamie, listen to me. What you gave the investigation was exactly what it needed. You gave it the details of what you saw. You can’t be faulted for not seeing more than you did. God, woman.” He squeezed her fingers. “The fact that you had enough in the way of wits to see that much is nothing short of amazing.”
“You’re just being nice.” She wished she could believe him, but she felt like a failure. She’d failed Kell, herself, her friends who’d lost their lives that night.
“You’re right. I am nice, but that’s not what I’m doing.”
“What are you doing?” Because, if he had a magic answer, she wanted to know.
“I’m telling you how I really feel. About the outcome of the hypnosis. About how you’ve handled living with this all these years. I don’t think I’ve known another woman as brave as you are.”
“Is that ‘known’ in the biblical sense?”
“No,” he said, and laughed. “Though I’d include those in the total.”
“What about your mother? She raised three boys.” She paused, pictured Kell as the oldest of three adolescent males running through the Harding family home. It made her smile, and she bounced their joined hands on her thigh. “A woman would have to be brave to take on more than one like you.”
“My mother is brave, but trust me when I say I gave her and my dad less hell than my brothers combined.”
“What, were you the perfect son? Bossing your brothers around? Ruling the sibling roost with an iron fist?”
“Something like that,” he said, pulling his hand from hers to turn the steering wheel. She tried not to feel bereft, but the contact made such a difference, so she reached across and laid her hand on his thigh.
Kell went on. “I was six when Brennan was born, and Terry came along the next year. The two of them being so close in age was like having twin heathens running wild. As they got older, they looked to me, rather than to our parents, for answers, like having been there already, I would know what they could get away with before someone with real authority put down a foot.”
Cute. A mini Texas Ranger, ordering the younger two boys to stand at attention. She could imagine the respect and admiration shining in their eyes. “You were their role model.”
“I guess so,” he said, shrugging as he guided the SUV onto the highway that would take them back to Weldon.
The man was too modest, but then, she liked that about him, the way he saw no need for braggadocio, machismo. He was a man secure in who he was, the best sort. “What do you mean guess? A big brother who knew the lay of the land? Whose parents afforded him extra privileges and responsibility because he’d earned them?”
He chuckled. “Assuming a lot there, aren’t you?”
She was, but she knew she was right. “Am I wrong? Were you not a younger version back then of who you are now?”
“Yeah, I had a thing about rights and wrongs. I stood up for more than one bullied kid in school. Also lost some friends because I wouldn’t go along with their pranks. Papering houses was about as criminal as I ever got.” He checked his mirrors, changed lanes, set the cruise control and got comfortable. “I wanted to play ball, have the respect of my coaches and team, and not have my college admission threatened by the stupid stuff teens do. Not sure if that made me a wet blanket or a Goody Two-shoes.”
“I’d say it made you perfect for what you do.” Surely he saw that. “There are lots of people who like to straddle the line between right and wrong, to see what they can get away with, or pull off as long as no one gets hurt.”
“But that’s the thing,” he said, launching into something she could tell he felt passionately about. “Someone always gets hurt. Pranks, pyramid schemes, public intoxication, whatever. There’s always a victim. Even if it’s just the sanitation worker hosing away the drunk’s vomit. Or the guy who has to clean the damp toilet paper out of his yard the next morning.”
Huh. He’d kept that memory with him for a while. She shifted in her seat to better see him, the amber lights from the dash catching his jaw, his cheekbones. “You went back and helped, didn’t you?”
“Went back?”
“And helped him with the toilet paper. You drove by on your way to school or football practice, saw the unholy mess, and your conscience made you stop.”
He snorted. “Like I said. Goody-Two shoes.”
“No, Kell Harding. You’re a good man,” she said, and meant it more than he could ever know.
He, of course, had to share the credit for his becoming the man he was. “I had a couple of role models of my own.”
“Your father, and who else?” she asked, letting her eyes drift shut. She was beyond exhausted. The sex, the hypnosis, the identification of Kass’s body, her cold case once again hot…It was amazing she hadn’t fallen asleep while she and Kell ate their reheated food.
“Captain Warren Sheets,” he told her. “My first supervisor as a Ranger, and a longtime friend of my father’s. He convinced me to go into law enforcement just by being the man that he was. Respectful as well as respected. Upstanding and honest. A man you could count on.”
Warren Sheets. It sounded so familiar. “I know that name. Why do I know that name?”
Kell paused, letting the question hang several seconds before answering. “He was the original investigator on the Sonora Nites Diner case.”
Jamie’s eyes popped open. Her heart blipped, and she was suddenly wide, wide awake. “Oh my God. He was. But you didn’t work it then, did you? I don’t remember you being there at any of the interviews.”
Kell shook his head. “Not officially, though I spent a lot of late hours with Warren combing through evidence.”
“So when you said you were familiar with the case—”
“I wasn’t kidding. Finding the killer has been a personal crusade, I guess you could say. Warren swore to see the man behind bars if it was the last thing he did. The crime scene…it really got to him. All the years I knew him, he never could let it go. The department might’ve called the case cold, but Warren Kell shook his head “-he never did. He died with this case still haunting him.”
And Kell had sworn to finish his mentor’s work, Jamie realized, realizing, too, that he had his own stake in this case, one driving him that had nothing to do with her. For the first time she wondered how this thing between them would impact him doing his job.