“You don’t say. Why?”

“He liked to pass it around.”

“Pass it around?”

“It was a trait of his. An idiosyncrasy. He was a lavish tipper. He enjoyed leaving huge gratuities to waiters, hotel maids, the toll-booth attendant, anyone who did a service for him. Sometimes he would go out to the airport and hand out cash gifts to SunSouth ticket agents, baggage handlers, people who worked for him and were rarely thanked for the jobs they did. He did things like that often. Ask anybody.”

He raised his hands in surrender. “I believe you. It’s just a strange hobby. Never heard of such.”

“Foster didn’t advertise it. He did it for the pleasure he derived from doing it, not for self-aggrandizement.”

“Thank you for telling me,” Rodarte said, faking sincerity. “That could be one explanation for the box of cash. Except…”

“What?”

“Burkett’s prints were on the lid of the box. How do you explain that?”

“I can’t. But it proves that Griff Burkett isn’t a thief.”

He chuckled. “Well, the Department of Justice, gamblers nationwide, and the Cowboys organization would disagree. He took them for plenty every time he shaved points. I guess he didn’t need your husband’s half million.”

She pounced on his remark as though about to contradict it, then closed her mouth quickly and put her sunglasses back on. Whatever she had been about to say, she’d thought better of it. “If that’s all, I’d like to go in now and place that call to the funeral director.”

“Sure,” he said, waving her toward the steps. He walked along beside her as they crossed the expansive lawn. Whenever he got too close, she moved away, which amused him. “Oh, I forgot to tell you. We found two different blood types in Burkett’s Honda. One, of course, was your husband’s. Burkett must’ve had his blood all over him.”

The sunglasses weren’t large enough to conceal her grimace, but she didn’t address the issue of her husband’s blood being on her lover. “The other is probably his,” she said. “If there was tissue beneath Foster’s fingernails, he probably scratched him.”

Rodarte said, “I would think that, too, except we’ve already tested it. Doesn’t match Burkett’s blood type. So what I think is, it’s Manuelo Ruiz’s blood. Because it’s the same blood type as what we got off your library rug.”

“Implying what?”

“That Manuelo Ruiz was bleeding, too.” Rodarte tugged on his earlobe as though thinking it through. “The man’s vanished. I got in touch with Immigration to try to track him down. Guess what? Ruiz didn’t have papers. Your husband hired him illegally.”

“That’s academic now, isn’t it?”

This rich bitch was one cool broad, staring up at him through her dark sunglasses, her body language a dead giveaway to her contempt for him. He’d like to have done something to shake her up, something to crack that smooth mask she wore whenever she was talking to him. Twist her nipple, maybe. Push his hand between her legs. Something that would shock and frighten her.

“I guess it’s beside the point now.” He smiled amiably, even as he was thinking how much pleasure he would derive from humiliating her.

“Then what is the point, Detective?”

“Griff Burkett knocked off the wetback, too.”

Well, at least that elicited an honest reaction. He wasn’t sure if she flinched away from the racial slur or from his allegation that Burkett had committed double murder. It was hard not to look smug, but he kept his stoniest cop expression in place. “I don’t know if he got rid of Manuelo before or after he killed your husband, but it’s almost a certainty that he’s responsible for Ruiz’s unexplained disappearance.”

She wet her lips, pulled the lower one through her teeth, and he understood why Burkett liked fucking her enough to kill for it.

“Maybe Manuelo was frightened away by what he saw,” she said. “He ran.”

“Without taking any clothes or personal belongings? Without a car? Without the half million cash? Unlikely, Mrs. Speakman. But, on the outside chance that he ran from something that scared him out of his wits, I’ve had cops calling on every Ruiz in the Dallas phone book. Fort Worth, too.” He leaned forward and whispered, “Want to know something funny? We weren’t the first to call those folks today, asking did they know Manuelo.”

“No?”

“No. Come to find out, somebody beat us to the punch. A man has been calling the same people, looking for Manuelo Ruiz.”

“Griff Burkett?”

He spread his hands at his sides and smiled.

She removed her sunglasses, carefully folded down the stems, and studied them for several moments before lifting her head and looking up at him. “Well, which is it, Detective Rodarte?”

“Which is what?”

“If Griff Burkett killed Manuelo, as you allege, then why has he been calling people named Ruiz, looking for him?”

She held his gaze for several moments, then turned her back to him and started walking toward the house.

Rodarte stared after her, trying to control the anger pulsing through him. All right, she’d got him on that one, and he had no one to blame but himself for the blunder.

Truth be told, he hadn’t dwelled a lot on the fate of Manuelo Ruiz because he didn’t give a flying fuck what had happened to him. Whether Burkett had killed him or was trying to chase him down because he had witnessed a murder and needed to be silenced, it mattered not in the least to Rodarte.

He would either find the wetback’s body or run him down and get him to testify against Burkett. Whichever, he had Burkett for Foster Speakman’s murder. Burkett’s ass belonged to Stanley Rodarte.

And so does the widow’s.

Chuckling to himself, he thought of the payback he’d extract for her snooty condescension. After the funeral. After the folderol had died down. After Burkett was locked behind bars. Using the prison grapevine, he’d make sure Number Ten heard about his attentions to the lady. Every salacious detail.

Jesus, was that gonna be fun, or what?

CHAPTER 26

FOR THE REMAINDER OF THE AFTERNOON, GRIFF PACED THE dismal room, wondering how in hell he’d sunk so low. When had this unstoppable decline started? When he accepted Vista ’s first bribe? Or before that, when he began placing bets while at UT? Or had he been irreversibly ill-fated when his mother had abandoned him to run off with her boyfriend Ray?

Sometimes he thought he’d been doomed even before he was born.

During the weeks between his conviction and the day he reported to Big Spring to begin his sentence, he’d conducted a search for his parents. Wasn’t it natural for a child to turn to his parents when he was in trouble?

Thanks to the Internet and websites dedicated to linking lost relatives, it hadn’t taken him long to track down his father. After serving his jail sentence in Texas, he’d left the state, alighting several places but never staying anywhere for long, until he eventually wound up in Laramie, Wyoming. He died there in a local hospital at the age of forty-nine. Hospital records said he suffered from several maladies related to alcoholism.

It took more time to locate his mother. She had either committed bigamy and married men without first securing divorces or simply assumed the names of the various men she lived with.

As the day of Griff’s incarceration approached, he frequently asked himself why he was bothering to try to find her, why he was even curious about her life now, when she’d left him without a shred of remorse. To his knowledge she had never tried to learn what happened to him, so why was reconnecting with her so important?

He didn’t know what drove him. It was a compulsion he couldn’t explain, even to himself, so he gave up and just went with it.

His doggedness paid off. On the day before he was to begin serving his sentence, he found her in Omaha. He obtained an address and a telephone number. Before he could talk himself out of it, he called the number.