The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (18)

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And in the monotony of the drive, she spent a while thinking about a thirtyish legislative aide who, she’d been told, was planning to head back to Ohio and run for Congress, and who should win if he could make it through the primary. He’d been coming around to chat with her, once a day at first, twice a day lately. He had brown eyes and an easy smile; one reason she’d kept going with her birth control pills. On the other hand, she thought, behind those gentle brown eyes, a politician lurked. Not that an appropriate brown-eyed politician couldn’t help you through some lonely Washington nights . . .

Letty’d had college romances during her six years at Stanford, sexual with two guys at long intervals, and a couple of flirtations that hadn’t gotten to sex.

She’d enjoyed the two sexual adventures—it had been the men who’d called them off. The second one had told her, during their final dinner together, “My biggest problem is that you’re going to do what you’re going to do. I’m not really a factor in that, am I?”

She’d argued that he was being unfair, that she was always open to compromises.

“Sure. About whether to have salmon or steak, or pizza or enchiladas. About serious stuff? Not so much. It’s your way or the highway, and, well . . . I’m sorry.”

She thought it but didn’t say it: “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass.”

For the last year, she hadn’t gotten near a bed except to sleep. Something, she thought, would have to be done about that.



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They crossed the Red River into Texas, the river about as damp as a kitchen sponge, and twenty minutes later rolled into Wichita Falls, a little short of two hours after they left OKC. She woke Kaiser, who’d been sleeping contentedly, and they got strawberry shakes and a restroom stop at a McDonald’s in downtown Wichita Falls.

On the road again, down Highway 277, then several shorter pieces of different highways, dust devils whirling ten stories high across dusty fields. They cut I-20 at Big Springs, rolling fast through country nearly as flat as Kansas, but drier, and browner, with huge pale blue skies hanging overhead.

And it was warm, but not bad, a mildly humid 87 at five o’clock.

After two hours of desultory conversation, Kaiser put himself to sleep again—saving his energy—and she kept her eyes on the highway, let her mind drift: getting on the highway to Midland had been a long and twisting journey . . .



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Letty and her mother had been abandoned by her father when she was a toddler, and as a twelve-year-old, she’d been at the center of a series of killings in the rural Red River valley of Minnesota.

The murders had been investigated by Lucas Davenport, at the time an agent for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Before the murders had begun, Letty had kept herself and her mother financially afloat, trapping muskrats and racoons and mink out of the local marshes during the winter months. She carried a piece-of-junk single-shot .22, for those times it was necessary to finish a trapped animal. That had taught her to kill without flinching.

Her mother, a sad, depressed alcoholic, had been one of those murdered, and Letty had been wounded herself. She rarely dreamt about it anymore, but sometimes she did, seeing herself in her nightmare, standing out in the dark, and the snow, the temperatures below zero, her hand not working right because of a deep gash caused by broken glass, fumbling to reload her .22 as she was stalked by the killer.

The cop Letty had shot was involved in the murders and deserved every bit of lead he’d gotten; though, as she told Kaiser, she hadn’t managed to actually kill him.

When it was all over, Davenport and his wife, Weather, had pulled some political strings and gotten appointed as her guardians, and eventually had adopted her. She never really understood why they did that, other than that she and Lucas Davenport had simply clicked. An odd psychic connection that perhaps couldn’t be explained; it simply was, and, she thought, always would be.

Though she was adopted, the Davenports were every bit her parents, the only ones she’d ever had. The memory of her natural mother had become increasingly one-dimensional. Letty had done more to take care of her mother than her mother had ever done to take care of her, except at the end, when her mother had given up her life to give Letty a chance to live.

Once with the Davenports, everything changed. For the first time there was somebody to take care of her, with all the love and growing-up teenage stresses that implied. In high school, connecting through one of Lucas Davenport’s friends, she’d worked as an unpaid intern at a TV station and even made it on-air occasionally. She’d realized then that she didn’t need the attention. What she liked about journalism was the research, not the talk; the action, the tension, the stress.



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And there was more to it.

Before she’d become Davenport’s ward and then adopted daughter, Letty had lost her crappy .22, which had been a personal symbol of her independence. He’d trusted her enough to buy her a new rifle, a pump that she loved even better, but then she’d lost that one, too, taken as evidence after she’d shot the murderous cop a second time.

In addition to all the complicated pieces of their relationship, she and Davenport had bonded over guns. She’d always relied on one, as a trapper out in the Minnesota winter. Davenport was an excellent shot with both handguns and long guns and had trained her in both until she might have been better than he was. Hold that: she was better than he was, with handguns, at punching paper, anyway.