Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(49)
“You think Cross was behind what happened here?”
“Don’t you, Ranger?” Paz eased closer to her, forcing Caitlin to turn her gaze even more upward. “People leave residue of themselves behind wherever they go,” he said. “Imprints of their actions as plain and recognizable as photographs. It’s why my mother almost never left the shack in the Venezuelan slum where I grew up; she couldn’t bear to be around the evil and ugliness so many left behind in their wake.” The colonel paused, seeming to need a moment to compose himself—a first, in Caitlin’s memory. “I recognized Daniel Cross inside that restaurant as soon as I entered. I might as well have been looking him in the face.”
Caitlin saw Jones addressing some uniformed officials who’d just arrived, and he approached her as soon as he sent them off.
“The colonel agrees Daniel Cross was behind this,” Caitlin told him. “If he’s really got something he wants to give to ISIS, we just found it.”
“You mean we found what it can do, Ranger.”
“Which still doesn’t provide even a hint about what he was doing outside that Indian reservation.”
Jones massaged his scalp through his high-and-tight haircut. “I can see why Captain Tepper finally hammered your ass to a chair.”
“As you can see, the nails didn’t hold. You suspected an ISIS plot in Texas, with Daniel Cross a primary part of it. Then he disappears and this happens. But, in between, he shows up to watch the Comanche protest from the peanut gallery. You telling me you don’t see a possible connection there?”
*
The air outside was hot and steamy, but still welcome. Being back in the fresh air left Caitlin grateful for the unseasonably hot sun and the sweat she was now free to wipe from her brow and cheeks with a bandanna lifted from her back pocket. It had been her father’s, and her grandfather’s before that, but neither had ever come up against anything like this.
Caitlin felt a vibration in the front pocket of her jeans and remembered her cell phone was still tucked there.
“I just got your message,” Cort Wesley greeted her. “Please tell me you’re not in Austin.”
“What do you think?”
“I’m headed there now. Give me a place to meet.”
“Not here, Cort Wesley. The Comanche reservation. You and me need to have a talk with Dylan.”
She could hear him sigh over the phone. “What’s he done now?”
Caitlin recalled the item in the evidence bag Doc Whatley was keeping tucked in his desk drawer for safekeeping. “Could be nothing.”
“And if it isn’t, Ranger?”
“I’ll explain when I see you, Cort Wesley.”
44
HOUSTON, TEXAS
“Jackson Whole Mineral,” Cray Rawls said, inside Sam Bob Jackson’s office. “You come up with that all on your own?”
“Like it?” Jackson asked him, swabbing the sweat from his forehead with a colored handkerchief.
“About as much as I like the rest of this state, Sam Bob. Somewhere between a colonoscopy and getting my prostate checked. How does anyone even live here?”
“You did, after that couple adopted you. Brought you all the way here from North Carolina.”
“Even gave me my own room: a windowless closet in the basement they kept locked to keep me from giving in to the devil’s temptation.”
“That wasn’t in your bio,” Jackson noted.
“Neither was the fact I was homeschooled, which in that particular household meant the Bible morning, noon, or night. You ever wonder why I haven’t set foot inside a church since?”
Rawls had his back to a set of finished oak bookshelves lined with framed photos of Sam Bob Jackson with Texas celebrities, most wearing cowboy hats. A wide-screen television was tuned to the local news with the sound muted.
“You want to explain to me why you had this high school boy kidnapped?” Rawls asked, while gazing out the window toward the Katy Freeway beyond.
Jackson’s reflection in the window glass grew so still even the fatty ripples on his face stopped moving. “There’s a lot at stake here. I felt I had to take the initiative, so I used the boy to send a message.”
Rawls nodded, hating the ridiculously low temperature in Sam Bob Jackson’s office, given the scorching temperature outside. He thought about how the environmentalists were always up his ass and figured they’d have a field day in a building like this, where the temperature left you bleeding icicles, in stark contrast to the blast furnace beyond.
“A message to the boy’s father, for sending four of our workers to the hospital.” Rawls nodded. “I get that. What I don’t get is you taking such a risk without knowing squat about the guy.”
Jackson didn’t look surprised at all. Instead, he looked at Rawls smugly. “He did a stretch in Huntsville. Worked as an enforcer for the Branca crime family out of New Orleans for a stretch. A thug, that’s all.”
“Really? He puts four guys in the hospital without suffering a scratch and all you can tell me about him is he used to be mobbed up and did some time?”
Jackson shrugged again. “So what do you want me to do?”
“Your job. What I’m fucking paying you for.”
“Hey, I’m the one who found this deal for you, Cray. What’s that short for, by the way?”