One Good Man(3)

“Or there’s a table and chairs on the back patio,” the Hispanic woman added, a stack of folders in her arms. “It’s a covered patio. With a ceiling fan.”

Kell looked at Jamie. Jamie looked at Kell. It was her call, but he had a feeling no place on the clinic grounds would qualify as private. To tell the truth, he mused as the air-conditioning kicked on and the building’s windows rattled, he had a feeling no place in Weldon would.

That was the thing about small towns. Folks liked to keep up with their neighbors’ business, even when that business was none of their concern. Since authorities had never had a suspect to arrest and bring to trial for the murders, witness protection hadn’t been an option for Stephanie Monroe. Her mother Ruth, now Kate Danby, had taken matters into her own hands, choosing to protect her daughter by changing their names and hiding in plain sight.

If anyone came after Jamie, the whole town would be waiting. Weldon’s eleven hundred residents didn’t need the details of her past spelled out before they’d come to her aid; she was one of their own and nothing else mattered—a fact Kell was sure Kate had counted on.

As plans went, it wasn’t a bad one, but Kell liked his better. He was here to put an end to any and all threats this case still posed to her as the only witness to the Sonora Nites Diner murders. He just needed Jamie to hear him out, and then to go along with his proposal. Now that he saw her as more than a name in a file, he figured he was in for a fight. She might be rattled, but she was not down for the count.

Without looking toward them, Jamie spoke to the women standing behind her. “Can you two manage the patients and the doctor and the phones for a while?”

At her question, they both nodded, the blonde adding, “They invented voice mail for a reason, Jamie. We’ll be fine. Go.”

“And don’t worry if you can’t get back. It’s a short appointment day anyway. We can handle the afternoon on our own.” This from the darker woman.

Jamie took them at their word, folding the newspaper into her purse hanging from her shoulder, then reaching for her coffee and what Kell assumed was her breakfast in a brown paper bag.

He followed as she headed for the front door, catching it once she’d shoved at the glass, and returning his hat to his head, his sunglasses to his face, as he stepped onto the front walk behind her.

She held up one hand to shade her eyes, looking first at his four-wheel-drive SUV, then off down the block. “Can you leave your truck here? And take a walk?”

He could. “How far?”

“The Cantus have a covered deck with picnic tables at their market. Have you had breakfast? Juan makes awesome burritos.”

Kell had poured himself a cup of coffee for the road when he’d left Midland before dawn, but that was it. “A burrito sounds great.”

Jamie set off toward the sidewalk. Kell fell into step at her side. He was six foot one; he judged her to be about five foot eight and a whole lot of that height to be leg. She matched him step for step as they silently hit the end of one block and crossed the street to the next.

From behind the sunglasses he wore, he studied her. Her determination—she never faltered. Her focus—she trained it ahead, but that didn’t keep her from paying attention to movement on all sides.

She was sharp, aware. She wasn’t going to fall apart at the first sign of trouble. No, if Kell was going to have trouble with this case, it would no doubt have to do with the way she filled out the flower-pink bottoms of her scrubs.

He’d always been an ass man, and he’d never seen a tighter one than Jamie Danby’s. Combine that with the rest of what she had going for her, and it was going to take a whole lot of discipline to keep his eye on the prize.

He pulled his lingering gaze away, catching the quirk of her mouth as they crossed one last intersection into the parking lot of the Cantu Corner Store. She didn’t admit to knowing he’d had his eye on her backside, but then she didn’t have to. That wicked half grin was her tell.

They stepped up onto the raised cedar deck; he let her take the lead and choose the table farthest from both the store and the street. She left her coffee and her bag behind and went inside. Again, that kind of town. One where she didn’t have to worry about purse snatchers or identity theft.

Instead, she had to worry about a killer following the media coverage of his handiwork discovering who and where she was and hunting her down.

While Jamie heated what turned out to be a muffin in the small store’s community microwave, Kell ordered two breakfast burritos and doctored a large coffee as they were being made. Once he and Jamie were back outside and settled at their table—and out of earshot of the curious onlookers inside the store—Jamie pounced.

“You’re here because finding Kass’s body reminded you that there’s still a killer out there. Is that right?”

Kell stopped with his first burrito halfway to his mouth. “I’ve never forgotten there’s a killer out there. Not once in ten years.”

She met his gaze, hers not so much disbelieving as challenging. He knew it would take more than words to dispel her feelings that she’d been alone all this time, on her own, abandoned.

“You know I don’t remember anything about the killer, so whatever you’re hoping to find out, you can stop.” She broke her muffin in half. Wisps of banana-scented steam rose, and she broke one of the halves again. “There’s nothing there. My noggin broke. It didn’t retain a thing about what he looked like, what he wore, nothing. You may have found Kass and solved the mystery of what happened to him, but the mystery of who’s responsible remains.” She paused, frowned, stared at the chunk of muffin she was ready to eat. “Unless that’s why you’re here. To tell me you have a suspect. To warn me you have a suspect, and that he knows where I am.”

“No suspect,” he said to set her at ease, biting off a quarter of his burrito while she calmed enough to eat the mangled muffin square. But she was wrong.

Just because she didn’t remember anything about the killer didn’t mean her noggin had broken, or that nothing was there. It was there. That much he knew, just as he knew it was hiding. He’d come here to get inside her head and coax it out.

She nodded thoughtfully as she ate, and he figured it was best to let her stew while he filled the hungry hole in his stomach. He was happy to answer any and all of her questions before getting to the reason he was here. But since he’d shown up unannounced, he didn’t imagine she had many ready and waiting on the tip of her tongue.

She surprised him by having one, and with the way she took him in, her gaze causing the hair at his nape to stir. “Why did no one let us know about the identification before it hit the papers? Did you people lose the list of contact numbers you’ve had for us all these years?”

He’d only been assigned the case after the ID had been made and the files had been transferred from storage to the UCIT. The case was one he’d been aware of at the time of the killings, but he’d been in training academy then, and not yet a state trooper, much less the Ranger he was now.

Until the UCIT had been put in charge, he’d had no authority over how things were handled. He did now, and she was right. Jamie and her mother should have been informed.

He pulled his BlackBerry from its holster at his waist, punched up her contact information and showed her the screen. “I have all of your numbers. You’re in the loop from here on. I promise.”

He hadn’t really answered her question, only guaranteed a similar lapse wouldn’t happen on his watch. Whether or not that satisfied her, he couldn’t say. She’d dropped her gaze and was back to picking at her muffin. It was hard not to watch her fingers at work, so precise, so nimble. So sure. “If you’d like to eat something besides crumbs, I’m happy to buy another round of burritos.”

She shook her head, her eyes coming up, searching, soft, a little bit sad. “Go ahead if you want. I don’t have much of an appetite.”

He breathed deeply, hurting because she did. “Another coffee then?”

“No thanks.” She pressed her fist to her sternum. “I think all that acid and caffeine was a mistake. It’s going to take an Alka-Seltzer or Tums to get me through the rest of the morning.”

Kell was pretty sure any stomach issues she was having had less to do with what she’d put in it than with what she’d had to swallow when she’d seen the paper’s front page. His showing up couldn’t have made the news go down any easier. And what had he done since but make everything worse.

He got up from the table, and returned to the store to refill his own coffee and get Jamie a roll of antacids. Seeing a stack of Reeves County News copies in a rack next to the door helped him decide how to resume the conversation.

Once outside, he handed her the Tums and settled across the table from her again, folding his sunglasses into his shirt pocket before asking, “What’s the first thing that went through your mind when you saw the headline?”

She peeled back the paper from the end of the roll. “There wasn’t a first thing. It was more like a tumble of one thing on top of another.”

Kell was good with going slowly, taking his time. “Such as?”