The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (19)

What she envied was his ability to make instant life-and-death decisions, never a doubt in his mind and rarely a wrong decision.

One of his investigations ended with a revenge invasion of his own home, while Davenport was away, with two insane drug enforcers kicking the door to kill his wife and children. Letty had shot and killed them both, without flinching and without mercy even when she could have given it, and with no regret whatever.

Lucas Davenport had a couple of other personal peculiarities that had also clicked with Letty. Athletics, for one thing. Davenport was a jock, and Letty enjoyed running with him at night, all over Saint Paul.

And then there was fashion.

Letty couldn’t remember actually having new clothes as a child: everything came from secondhand shops. Davenport, though, was a clotheshorse who studied men’s fashion magazines and bought tailored suits from Washington and custom shoes from London.

Letty had picked that up, which had amused her adoptive mother, Weather. Weather was a plastic and reconstructive surgeon with a tendency toward the academic. Because the Davenports had money, she also dressed in expensive clothing, but with little sense of style, or even a vague interest in it. She wore hospital scrubs around the house, borrowed, as she said, from the hospitals where she was on staff. Going off to work in the morning, she often looked like an advertisement for a wealthy woman’s garage sale.

Not Letty, after the meeting of the minds with Lucas. She liked good clothes, she liked good fabrics and perfect fits, Hanro underwear. She knew what worked with her eye color and dark hair because they’d talked about it. She’d once convinced Weather to buy Lucas a Brioni tie for his birthday, because it perfectly chimed with his eyes; he wore it once a week until Letty stole it as a headband, because it perfectly chimed with hers.

On every birthday from age thirteen to the autumn before, Lucas had given her a ridiculously expensive piece of gold jewelry.

Now, older, as a college graduate, she was sleek, young-womanish, fashionable, with a high-end wardrobe and five-hundred-dollar sunglasses. Maybe even a snowflake . . . unless you happened to catch her uncovered eyes, as Colles had, at her employment interview; the cool assessing crystalline eyes of a wolf, a predator with blood on its teeth.

At six o’clock, she pulled the Explorer into the parking lot of the Homewood Suites in Midland, Texas, and woke Kaiser.

“Good trip,” he said, yawning. “I feel great. I could use a snack.”





FIVE




The Hughes-Wright office in Midland opened at seven-thirty and was less than a mile from the hotel. Letty and Kaiser agreed that there was no good reason to get to the office before the employees had a chance to settle in, so they’d meet in the hotel lobby at seven o’clock and find a place to get breakfast before going over.

Letty got up at six o’clock, ran hard for twenty minutes, did a half-hour of yoga stretches and core work, got dressed, thought about it—thought about the hotel and maids—and put the Staccato in her briefcase with a box of nine-millimeter ammo and the Sig 938 in her front jeans pocket inside a Sticky Holster.

She and Kaiser found an IHOP in a strip mall, Letty had pancakes and Kaiser ate sirloin tips with eggs, with coffee for both, and they were out by eight o’clock.



* * *





The Hughes-Wright office was in a single-story blue-metal building off the I-20 frontage road, five acres of rusty pipe racks and the blue building, with an oil-tank field on three sides and the interstate highway on the fourth. A dozen pickups and SUVs squatted in the parking lot outside the building.

“Gonna be hot,” Kaiser said, as they crossed the cracked blacktop to the front door. Letty looked up at the sun-faded blue sky and nodded.

The building’s interior was cool, but not cold. Two heavyset women sat behind a reception counter studying computer screens, and they both turned when Letty and Kaiser came through the door. From the way they dressed and did their hair, the two women might have been twins, except that they didn’t look alike. One of them said, “Miz Davenport? Mr. Kaiser?”

“Letty and John,” Letty said. “Is Mr. Grimes in?”

“Yes, I believe he’s waiting to talk to you. Between you and me, he’s not in a good mood.”

“Maybe we should have brought him a cheesecake from IHOP,” Letty said, smiling at the two women.

“More like a yard-wide lemon sheet cake,” the woman said, returning Letty’s smile. She pointed at a hallway leading toward the rear of the building. “You go on back, hon. Last office on the left. Dick is skulking in there like an angry armadillo.”

Skulking like an angry armadillo, Letty thought, as she started down the hall. Whatever kind of man Grimes might turn out to be, he wasn’t the kind of boss who terrorized his employees.



* * *





All the offices down the hall had glass doors, three of them occupied by men in T-shirts with pockets or golf shirts; and the place had the same warm oil smell as the building in OKC, but thicker. The last door on the right had a nameplate that said boxie blackburn.

To her left, in a larger office, Grimes was sitting behind a wooden desk, talking into a cell phone. She knocked on the glass and he looked up, saw her, and crooked his finger to tell them to come in. They stepped inside and he pointed at two visitor chairs and said into the phone, “I really don’t want to hear any shit about it, Ed. You tell Marky I want it up and running by tomorrow morning, or I’ll know the reason why it isn’t. Yeah. Yeah . . . yeah.”