For Just Cause

“Can we get her arrested?”

Billy thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Doubtful. If we’d seen any obvious evidence of drugs sitting around, we could call the cops and have her hauled in. But we didn’t.”

“She’s stealing from her father’s estate.”

“Unless Theresa really did give her permission to sell the stuff. If she’s mad at her sister, she might have.”

“She didn’t. I’d bet my career on it.”

Billy wasn’t so sure, and the police wouldn’t take Claudia’s word for it.

“Let’s go talk to Theresa and see what she knows about the estate, or old coins, or whatever.” Claudia seemed recovered now from her fright. The pink had returned to her cheeks, and she had the gleam of excitement in her eyes. Billy knew that gleam. She was on the hunt.

He glanced at his watch. “I should get back to the office.”

Her shoulders slumped with disappointment. “It’s your call.”

He grinned. “I’m kidding. I am dying to find those coins now.”

“Damn it, Billy.”

“What? Why are you mad?”

They were still in the Pecan Grove subdivision; Claudia had been turning on streets randomly. Now she pulled over to the curb again and reached for her Day-Timer, flipping pages of her notes. “I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at me for not catching on that you were teasing. It should be child’s play. Ah, here it is, Theresa’s address.” She plugged it into the GPS. “It’s not far, only a couple of miles.”

“It really bugs you that you can’t read me like a book, doesn’t it?”

“Frankly, yes.”

“Did it ever occur to you that some people don’t like to be read?”

“Only people who have things to hide.”

Maybe he did have things to hide. Or at least, things he didn’t want every random stranger to know about. Was that so wrong?

“So no one is allowed to have a secret?” he argued. “Everyone has to be completely up-front about every single part of their past, every single thought that goes through their heads?”

“I believe in honesty,” she said.

“You don’t have any secrets, then.”

She hesitated a beat. “No.”

“Nothing in your past that you’d prefer people didn’t know about.”

“I’m not ashamed about anything I’ve done.”

“How many men have you slept with?”

“Billy! Good God, that is none of your business.”

“Wow, must be a lot.”

“I don’t believe you! How could you even— That is so inappropriate—” She sputtered to a stop.

“I’m just trying to prove a point! Everyone is allowed privacy—in their homes and inside their heads.”

“And I say if it’s on their face or in their gestures or their posture, and I’m adept at figuring it out, then the information is fair game. Everyone reads expression and body language. I just happen to be better at it than most people.”

“And I’m better at not being read than most people. So that means I’m dishonest? Lady, where do you get off?”

“There, right there. That is the first honest emotion I’ve seen from you. You’re in perfect congruence—chest thrust forward, arms splayed to take up as much room as possible in a classic male territorial display—”

“Stop reading me!”

“And you just crossed the line from irritated to really angry.”

“Ya think? And yet you don’t stop.”

“I can’t help it.” Her eyes inexplicably filled with tears.

“Here,” he said gruffly. “Read this.” He leaned across the gear shift, pulled up the parking brake and kissed her.

* * *

CLAUDIA’S SENSES SWAM as she leaned in to the kiss. Billy might have thought he was unreadable, but she’d seen the kiss coming a split second before he’d carried through with his intention.

And she’d welcomed it.

That was just crazy; she was mad at Billy. They were having an argument. And yet she’d felt this insane need to connect with him. He’d shown her only a tiny sliver of his true self just then, the self he wanted to protect from her prying eyes, and all at once she’d felt simultaneously guilty and turned on.

She believed very few people had seen what she’d just seen—the real Billy Cantu. And she wanted more.

He reached up to tunnel his fingers through her hair, settling his hand on the back of her head so he could hold her a willing prisoner.

She inhaled sharply as his tongue invaded her mouth. Of course his kiss would not be tentative. Billy didn’t have a tentative bone in his body.

Or maybe he did; what the hell did she know? He was a mystery she desperately needed to unravel. How could she feel such a profound attraction to someone she didn’t even know?

Though she would have been happy to make out in the front seat of her car for the rest of the morning, Billy gradually pulled away, ending the kiss with a series of gentle nibbles. They separated, but only by an inch or two, and she studied his eyes, trying to figure out his motive here.

Was this a display of dominance? Or had he really wanted to kiss her?

His pupils were dilated. She thought she saw desire there, but maybe she was seeing only what she wanted to see.

“Can you read me now?” he demanded.

“No.” The word came out a whisper.

He released her and sat back in his seat, and she almost whimpered at the loss of his touch. “Good. ’Cause you’d probably slap me.”

“Are you going to tell me what that was about?”

“No. You need to be off balance once in a while. For your own good.”

He was wrong about that. She’d spent the first half of her life off center, shuffled into the care of one ambivalent adult after another, never sure if the new place would be a safe haven or a house of horrors.

Off balance wasn’t where she cared to be.

And yet…the excitement generated by her uncertainty felt good in a deeply visceral way.

She pulled herself together, straightened her hair, blotted away the smeared lipstick with a tissue and added fresh. Finally she got back to the business of driving, following the instructions of the by-now-impatient GPS.

“Destination on the left,” the bland voice informed them as Claudia cruised slowly past.

Theresa Esteve obviously hadn’t achieved the level of wealth her sister had. This nameless neighborhood wasn’t nearly as grand as Pecan Grove. The small ranch houses had probably been built in the 1960s, and the residents here likely mowed their own grass and trimmed their own bushes.

But there was something wildly askew about Theresa’s house. The front window was boarded up with plywood.

Claudia double-checked her Day-Timer. “That’s the house, 1642 Baxter Avenue. What do you suppose happened here?” She turned the car around, pulled up to the curb and stopped.

“Stay in the car.” Billy manually unlocked his door. “I’ll check it out.”

Claudia ignored him. “It’s a vacant house. I doubt we’ll face any gunmen here.”

As they approached the front porch, Billy took a detour to examine a flash of yellow he saw on the picket fence that separated the house from the one next door. “Hey, Claudia, look at this. Crime scene tape.”

“Oh, my God. This might explain why Theresa won’t answer Mary-Francis’s calls.”

“I’m going to call a buddy of mine that works for the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department. Maybe he can tell us what happened here.”

Claudia nodded and sat down on the edge of a brick planter filled with thirsty-looking azaleas. What was going on here? What had started as a simple request from a condemned woman had turned into a crazy scavenger hunt featuring a drug addict, her gun-toting boyfriend and a lost million-dollar coin collection. And now another possible crime victim.

She did not envy Billy his job right now.

Maybe it was time for her to wash her hands of this mess. She had dutifully turned over the information she had to Project Justice. She could write up her final report tonight, including data from both interviews. Once she finished that, the ball was in their court.

Except…except she was still the only person who was sure Mary-Francis didn’t kill her husband or know of his current whereabouts. The poor woman had no one to fight for her now. Certainly not her daughter, and now it appeared something had happened to her sister.

Antsy, Claudia stood again. She walked to the driveway, which was empty except for a few oil spots. The garage door had no windows, so she couldn’t look to see if there was a car. She ambled to the side of the house, where a short section of weathered wooden privacy fence guarded the backyard. But one of the slats was broken, and she peeked in.

A woman dressed in a bright pink track suit was busy digging around in a parched, overgrown garden. Could that be Theresa? It would explain why no one had answered the door.

“Hello, there!” Claudia called out.

The woman froze, then hightailed it to a back corner of the yard and disappeared through a gate.

Claudia rejoined Billy just as he was finishing his call. “You’re not gonna like this.”

“What?”

“We’re too late to warn Theresa. She was the victim of a home invasion. Someone broke in, roughed her up, then tore the house up, but no one knows what they took because the only person who could tell them—Theresa—is in a coma.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“THERE WERE NO PRINTS left behind, no trace evidence at all,” Billy continued. “The cops don’t have a clue.”

Claudia felt sick to her stomach. “When did this happen?”

“A few days ago.”

This crime couldn’t be unrelated, could it? Theresa’s neighborhood wasn’t top drawer, but neither was it a hotbed of violent crime.

“There was someone in the backyard just now, digging around in the dirt,” she said. “I called out, but whoever it was ran off, scared.”

Billy’s eyebrows raised in obvious interest. He turned and climbed the stairs to the front porch to have a closer look at the plywood patch covering the window. He pushed on a corner, which gave slightly.

“Billy, that would be breaking and entering.”

“No one will care. The police are done with the crime scene. We’re just going to look around.” With a quick glance left and right to be sure no one was watching, he heaved his shoulder into the plywood.

With a shriek of nails pulling free, the board came loose.

Billy knocked it all the way to the floor inside, then climbed in. “I’ll let you in through the front door.”

Claudia considered going to sit in her car. An arrest for B & E could jeopardize her entire practice and cause Project Justice considerable embarrassment. But probably no one would care if they looked around, and she couldn’t contain her own curiosity, so when Billy opened the front door, she stepped across the threshold.

It was like a brick oven inside; Claudia’s skin immediately dampened with perspiration. Her dress stuck to her, clinging to her thighs and breasts.

She wasn’t sure whether to be grateful or miffed when Billy ignored her, flipping on some lights, first in the entry way, then the living room, and going into search mode.

The place was a wreck—furniture overturned or ripped open, drawers and cabinets emptied. Here and there, black fingerprint powder marred surfaces.

Theresa was obviously a devout woman. Pictures of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and several saints adorned the walls. Over the red plaid sofa hung a huge print of da Vinci’s The Last Supper. And on the brick hearth was a statue of Jesus as well as an angel, a monk—maybe St. Francis—and a couple of other saints Claudia couldn’t identify.

“Whoever did this trashed the place to make it look like a random crime,” Billy said. “But I worked in property crimes on the Dallas P.D. for a while. Burglars don’t just destroy stuff for the hell of it. They take what they want and leave. This much damage is overkill.”

“As if the perpetrator had an emotional connection to the victim?”

“Possibly.”

Billy and Claudia quickly checked the rest of the house. Every room had been assaulted and vandalized.

“Let’s check out the backyard,” Claudia said. “I want to know why that woman was digging around.”

“Digging for buried treasure? Maybe she heard something about the missing coins.”

In the early summer heat, it wouldn’t take long for an unwatered garden to wither and die. The backyard looked as if it had once been lovingly cultivated with flowers and a vegetable patch. Now, most everything was dead or dying. Green had turned to yellow and beige. The tall weeds rattled in the light breeze.

“If Theresa ever comes home,” Claudia said, “she’ll be horrified by what’s happened to her yard.” She walked over to where the mystery woman had been turning up the earth. Several large holes had been dug up in one corner of the garden. “I wonder what that woman was looking for?”

Billy squatted down and examined the other plants in the vegetable patch. “Potatoes. And onions.”

“How can you tell?”

He gave her a pitying look. “I take it you don’t garden.”

“I have a landscaping service that does all that. Do you have a garden?”

“Sure. I grow all kinds of stuff in big pots on my patio—tomatoes, peppers, onions, squash. Growing up, if my mom hadn’t grown vegetables, we’d have gone hungry. Now I just do it ’cause there’s nothing quite like a home-grown tomato.”

She never would have pegged him as a gardener. But she was more surprised that he’d shared something from his personal life with her.

“Hey, you!”

Claudia jumped and looked for the source of the voice. The woman in pink, wearing a large brimmed hat and sunglasses, was peering at them over the privacy fence. Unless she was seven feet tall, she was on a ladder.

“You’re trespassing!” the woman screeched. “You better not be taking those vegetables.”

“No, ma’am,” Billy said. “We’re with the sheriff’s department, doing some follow-up on the crime that took place here. Did anyone talk to you about that?”

He lied with perfect assurance. If Claudia had been called upon to spot his lies, she would have failed miserably.

The woman, though obviously the suspicious type, didn’t even ask to see a badge.

“Of course they did,” the woman replied indignantly. “I live next door and I know everything that goes on in this neighborhood. We all watch out for each other here.”

“Did you see what happened that night?” Billy prompted.

“It was late at night. I was asleep.” She dared him to contradict her. “It’s all in the statement I gave. Patty Dorsey is my name.”

“We saw you stealing Theresa’s vegetables,” Billy said.

Patty whipped off her sunglasses. Her eyes narrowed dangerously. “Theresa wouldn’t want her vegetables to go to waste. We share all the time. I give her peaches from my trees. What did you say your name was?”

“Sergeant Billy Cantu. You wouldn’t happen to be digging around because you know something valuable is buried out here, would you?”

She shifted from angry to curious. “What kind of something valuable?”

“Coins, maybe?”

Her eyes widened with surprise and delight. “Her brother-in-law’s coins? Theresa told me he’d stolen a pirate’s treasure, gold doubloons or some nonsense. I didn’t believe it at the time.” She surveyed the backyard with new eyes, perhaps seeing something a lot more valuable than a few filched potatoes.

“Don’t be digging around here anymore,” Billy warned her. “I don’t want to bust you for trespassing, but I will.”

“Humph.”

“If you discover the location of any stolen pirate’s treasure, it’s your civic duty to turn it over to the police—or become an accessory. Have a nice day, Patty.” Billy tipped an imaginary hat and turned to head back inside.

Claudia followed, her heart pounding, until they were safely inside. “Lying to that woman goes against everything I believe in. Isn’t it a pretty serious crime, impersonating a police officer?”

“She doesn’t suspect. And even if she does, she’s too busy thinking about buried treasure to report me. Maybe we’ll luck out, and she’ll find the coins for us.”

“You just like playing games with people’s heads.” Another thought occurred to her. “You’re obviously a skilled investigator, good at teasing information out of people. How come you don’t like field work?”

He froze. “How do you know that about me?”

“During your original evaluation. You said you didn’t want to work in the field. You told me then you were tired of it. And because Daniel asked me if there was any reason, in my professional opinion, that I thought you weren’t fit for active duty, so to speak. At the time I didn’t know you were a lunatic, so I said no, no reason, that you were just ready for a change.”

“We almost got our heads blown off today, and you want to know why I don’t like field work?”

They ended up back in the living room. Claudia spotted a bloodstain on the carpet, probably from Theresa’s assault. Her stomach turned, and their earlier confrontation with a loaded gun barged back into her mind.

What she recalled most clearly was how Billy had again put himself between her and danger.

She wandered back to the fireplace and noticed something she hadn’t seen before. Lying on the bricks was a hunk of ceramic material, about the size of a poker chip but curved. It bore a bright blue glaze. She picked it up and studied it.

“Watcha got there?”

“A fragment of something. It doesn’t belong to anything in the vicinity.”

Billy studied the area where the fragment had lain. “Hey, look at this. There’s a spot here on the hearth that’s not as dusty as everything else.”

Now that she looked more closely, she realized the arrangement of statues was unbalanced. “You think another statue used to be here?”

“Could be.” He picked up the statue of St. Francis and flipped it upside down, examining the bottom. He did the same with the angel. “These statues are hollow inside.”

“A good place to hide coins?” Claudia ventured.

Billy nodded. “It’s an old drug-smuggler trick, hiding stuff inside statues.” He thought about it some more. “I like it. But why wouldn’t Mary-Francis just tell us that?”

“Maybe she didn’t know exactly where her sister put the coins. Or she doesn’t trust us. She’s still hoping to keep the coins for herself when—if—she gets out of prison.”

“And the robbers beat Theresa until she told them where the coins were hidden.”

Claudia shivered at the thought of what that poor woman must have gone through—the terror, the pain. “Let’s just get out of here, okay?”

“A woman’s life is at stake,” he reminded her. “We owe it to her to be thorough. Why are you so nervous? You told me you face down violent offenders in your work pretty often, right?” Billy checked the contents of two drawers in the coffee table that had been overlooked.

“That’s different. That’s in a controlled setting, when I’m squarely on the right side of the law. This is breaking and entering, and I for one don’t relish explaining to Daniel how we got ourselves arrested.”

Billy didn’t seem bothered by their straying into unlawfulness. “Hey, Claudia, check this out.” He held up a small white box that she at first thought was a pack of cigarettes or a deck of cards.

Claudia looked longingly toward the front door. “Billy, please.”

His face softened, probably sensing her distress. She didn’t make any attempt to hide it. “Okay.” He tucked the item into his pocket.

Claudia didn’t take a full breath until they were back in her car. She started the engine, again turning on the A/C full blast.

“You okay?”

She waved away his concern. “I’m fine, considering I just committed my first felony.”

“Misdemeanor trespassing, tops.”

“How comforting. What was that thing you found in the drawer?”

“Probably nothing important. It was one of those Flip video cameras. You ready for some lunch?”

How could he act so normal after all they’d been through? After seeing the visceral evidence of a violent crime? Then again, he was a former cop. She knew some homicide cops could literally eat a sandwich while standing over a bloody corpse.

“I could at least use something cold to drink,” she said.

She hadn’t planned on sharing another meal with Billy. Last time, she’d spotted Tubby’s and gotten all sentimental, probably revealing more about herself than she’d intended. But Tubby’s did make her think about one of the happier times in her life. At age thirteen she’d been placed in a foster home with another girl close to her age, and they’d become inseparable. One of their hangouts had been Tubby’s. Marlene, who’d been pretty and popular, had shared her clothes and makeup and had made sure Claudia was accepted into her “in” group of kids.

For the first time in her life Claudia had felt like an accepted member of a peer group. She had belonged.

After about six months, Marlene’s real mother had regained custody, and the friendship had ended abruptly—along with Claudia’s acceptance. It turned out her “peer group” had only been putting up with Claudia for Marlene’s sake.

“You like Mexican food?” Billy asked. “I saw an El Fenix on the way over here.”

“Sure, that’s fine.”

Billy gave her directions, and five minutes later she was pulling into the parking lot, the lunch crowd thinning out by now.

Once they were seated in the blessedly well air-conditioned restaurant with a basket of chips and hot sauce between them, Billy took the tiny video camera from his pocket.

Claudia couldn’t bring herself to order an actual meal, so she requested an iced tea. Billy gave her a disapproving frown, ordered a plate of beef enchiladas, then returned his attention to the camera, fiddling with the buttons.

“Theresa took quite a few movies. Does she have kids, grandkids?” He looked at the screen and grinned. “Aw, cute baby.”

“I saw some family photos at the house, so, yes, I’m sure she has children. Mary-Francis said her sister was a widow.”

A baby’s laughter issued from the camera’s tiny speaker. Billy pushed more buttons. “Now we have what looks like a Little League baseball game. And this one…an elderly lady’s birthday party and…someone who apparently just got a new car.”

“Sounds riveting. Will the Academy of Motion Pictures be calling?”

“Same baby again. This time he’s walking.” Billy smiled a really sweet, unguarded smile, and her heart swelled. He continually surprised her. Sure, she could tell herself the kiss they’d shared earlier was an isolated incident, that it would never happen again. But the desire she felt for him wasn’t going away.

Not until she figured him out.

Claudia was great at coaching her clients on relationship matters, but the fact was, she’d never had a successful romantic relationship, just a few spectacular failures—like Raymond Bass.

He’d been executed last year.

It seemed every man she met had an angle in wanting to date her, and she always figured it out much too easily. If they were interested in sex and nothing else, she always knew it, no matter what they told her or how sweet they appeared to be. They were so painfully transparent.

Then there were the ones who wanted free therapy. Pass.

Her abysmal love life was a failing on her part. She couldn’t put the blame on anyone else. Because part of her strained to learn every detail about a potential boyfriend so that she could feel safe; then she lost interest when no mystery remained.

Billy’s motives for kissing her were impossible to read. He was mysterious…exciting…dangerous…and she ought to be running as far and fast as she could in the opposite direction. Instead, she was intrigued.

“Oh, now here’s something interesting.”

“What?”

He studied the tiny screen intently for a few moments. “Claudia. I think this is a memorial service for Eduardo.”

“Let me see.”

He turned the camera partway in her direction, but as they both leaned across the table to look, neither of them could see very well. Without thinking much about it, Claudia slid out of her side of the booth and into his.