Guzman sighed and-finally-moved away from her. Not by much, but at least she no longer felt as if he were all but sitting in her lap.

"I don't know what to do with you, Theresa Monaghan," he said. "Maybe I should lock you up, maybe I should have you under surveillance. It all depends on if you're crazy like a fox, or just stupid like a, like a-like a hamster." He continued to scrutinize her, as if her animal orientation might be found in her face.

"And?" she said at last, losing the stare-down.

"Go home," he said. "Don't wear yourself out on your little exercise wheel."

Chapter 23

Thursday morning. Tess had been in Texas nine days. She sat in the garden at the Alamo with a Peanut Buster Parfait and thought about everything she had accomplished.

She had found Crow, only to lose him again.

She had found two dead men, both so ripe they might have forever changed her relationship with soft cheeses.

She had learned to say "Good morning," "Good dog," and "You are the father of my baby" in Vietnamese. (People were always saying that last bit in Mrs. Nguyen's private telenovela, and she was kind enough to translate.)

She had experienced coitus interruptus by SWAT team.

She had stumbled on a Dairy Queen in a downtown San Antonio mall and convinced the vacant-eyed adolescent at the counter that she had a medical condition requiring her to consume soft ice cream, hot fudge, and peanuts at eleven in the morning.

Yes, travel was broadening. She'd have to do it again sometime, perhaps at the end of the next millennium.

She saw a flash of blond hair and dared to hope-but no, Emmie wouldn't come here. Emmie was on the run, a trail of dead men in her wake, their ill-gotten gains now her iller-gotten gains. Crow was on the run, looking for Emmie. Or on the run from Emmie, because he had the fifty thousand dollars and she wanted it. That was another one of Guzman's theories. If Emmie and Crow weren't in this together, then they were at each other's throats. Emmie and Crow had conspired to kill her mother's suspected murderers, then fallen out over the unexpected cash bonus. Tess wasn't satisfied. Why would a girl with a trust fund bother to fight over a sum less than the yearly payout on a million-dollar lottery ticket? What did Emmie know about the night her mother died, if anything? What did someone think she knew?

And how could Crow kill anyone, under any circumstance? No one changed that much in five months.

But he would keep quiet to protect someone. Especially if he thought the act was morally defensible.

Especially if he was in love.

Oh, sure, he had been convincing enough in his thwarted seduction of her the other night. But you could sleep with someone while you were still in love with someone else. You could do it quite enthusiastically, even. Tess knew this from firsthand experience. What had Crow said? He had accused her of using him as a bookmark, a way of keeping her place while she tried to figure out how she felt about watching the death of a man who didn't quite belong to her, and never would. A man she didn't quite love, and never would. Just because Emmie was through with Crow didn't mean Crow was through with Emmie. Lovers seldom finished at the same time.

"You're thinking too much," Rick had said when she tried to break down Guzman's theories on the way home from the police station. Happy to be a lawyer still, all he wanted to do was find Crow and turn him over to the authorities, then start preparing his case. But Rick's method of finding Crow was to sit back in his office, doing his other work, waiting for the phone to ring. Sure, they were still going to see that detective this afternoon, the one who had been involved in the original bust of Darden and Weeks. But what did it matter, now that Weeks was a corpse, too? Tess wanted to do something, go somewhere, ask some questions. Unfortunately, her inherent bias toward action was proving less than constructive, except as a way of drumming up business for local mortuaries. She felt as if she were flooring a car in snow and ice. The tires spun, the snow melted, taking you down to the ice, where there was no traction, so you went nowhere. So you floored it again, and the tires spun, and the snow melted, and you went nowhere.

Again she thought she saw a blond head, the same white blond as Emmie. It couldn't be.

It wasn't. It was Clay Sterne, disappointment naked in his face.

"She's not here," Tess said.

"I didn't come to see her," he shot back.

"You don't have to worry, Clay. I won't tell your father you were here."

"I do what I want to do, not what my father tells me."

Tess nodded. "Is that why you're living at home, preparing to take over a business you can't stand, instead of going for the advanced degree you want?"

He sat on her bench, keeping as much distance between them as possible. "I'd think you were an extraordinarily good detective if I didn't know Javier had such a big mouth. Okay, sure, it's no big secret. I'd rather be getting a Ph.D. in history, but someone has to run the business, and I'm it. The last of the Sternes."

"You and Emmie."

"She's not a Sterne. And she's not here."

"Not a Sterne?"

"My father never adopted her. He took her in, she used the family name, but she's still Emily Morgan on her birth certificate and driver's license. Bad joke on her mother's part, naming her that."

Tess must have looked blank, for he added, "Emily Morgan was the so-called Yellow Rose of Texas, the beautiful ‘mulatto' slave with whom Santa Anna was supposed to have dallied before the battle of San Jacinto. Serious scholarship doesn't really support the story-Emily Morgan was more likely a free black woman who didn't ‘dally' with anyone-but never mind. You couldn't have a song called ‘The Free Black Woman of Texas.'"

"Still, she is a Sterne. She's Lollie's daughter."

"My dad made the business what it is, anyway," Clay said, his tone argumentative, almost aggressive.

"Yes. Although it was faltering, right, twenty years ago?"

The question surprised him, but only for a moment. "If you're going to read Texas history, you might want to try something with a little more depth than The Green Glass. May I suggest T. R. Fehrenbach? Not politically correct, of course, but still a good place to start. By the way, the Mexicans were on the outside here, the Texans on the inside."

"Fine, mock me, if that makes you feel better. Besides, not all the Mexicans were on the outside."

"What?"

"I went through the exhibit here. You think I was going to come all this way, sit in the garden at the Alamo, and not walk through the place? Some of the defenders were Mexican. There were women and children here, too. I never knew that. Some scholars have questioned whether the battle really was important, while others say it provided Sam Houston the opportunity he needed at San Jacinto. The legend has William Barrett Travis drawing the line that separated the men from the boys, and Davy Crockett going down swinging Old Betsy. But it's been suggested by one historian that Crockett begged for his life, tried to pretend he was just passing by, and was executed on the spot."

Clay gave her a suspicious look. "You didn't learn all that here. The Daughters aren't big on some of the, um, newer theories."

"I went to the library. I didn't read Fehrenbach, but I did manage to skim a few books on the subject. Not because I care if Jim Bowie had a broken leg or venereal disease-"

"Typhus, more likely."

"Not because I care," Tess repeated, "about anything that happened in 1836. But because I want to know where your cousin is, and I thought the answer might be in where she used to come, and history was all I had. Breakfast at the Alamo, Clay. What was that all about?"