The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (26)

Letty said, “Yes.”

And she looked at him and thought, “Hmm.”

Tanner was a sun-and-sand-blasted thirtysomething, with reddish-blond hair worn long enough to cover the tips of his ears. Not conventionally handsome, he had blue eyes, a narrow nose, and a square chin; he could have been a baseball player, she thought, too bony for football, and at six feet or so, probably not tall enough for Texas basketball.

And he caught her eyes for a second and showed the hint of a smile.

Down the street, two more patrol cars were coming fast. The detective ignored them and asked Kaiser, “You two were together when you found the bodies?”

Kaiser nodded and said, “Yes. We found them together. I’m a security officer with the Department of Homeland Security in Washington, D.C., and Ms. Davenport is a researcher for the U.S. Senate, and assigned to DHS.”

Letty dug her new ID case out of her hip pocket and held it open, and Kaiser did the same thing. The detective’s eyelids flickered as he realized the situation might be more complicated than he’d at first understood. He said, “I’m Dan Tanner. I’m with the city’s Investigative Services. I’ll be running the investigation here.”

He turned to Frisch and said, “Ari, no need to be abrupt about it, but just for form’s sake, we don’t want Ms. Davenport or . . .”

Kaiser said, “John Kaiser . . .”

Tanner nodded. “. . . Mr. Kaiser chatting about this until we have time to interview them. So just . . .”

Frisch nodded, smiled at Letty, and said, “I’ll keep an eye on them.”

Tanner said, “Thank you,” and swung an index finger between Kaiser and Letty and asked, “Which one of you is in charge?”

“We’re actually associates, neither one of us outranks the other,” Letty said. “But I’ve been asked to coordinate the investigation down here.”

Tanner frowned. “Investigation? Into what?”

“Hughes-Wright, and we believe some other oil companies, are missing quite a lot of oil. That’s not really our concern, so much as the question of what is happening with the money the stolen oil may be generating. We’d just begun our research when we heard about Mr. Blackburn’s disappearance. Your department has a report.”

“I’m not aware of that,” Tanner said.

“Well, you do. Have a report. This is the fifth day that Mr. Blackburn has been missing. On the second day, Hughes-Wright employees called your department to file a missing-person report, though I understand that it didn’t get as far as a formal report. One of your patrol cars checked the house, found both of the Blackburns’ cars were missing . . . and your police officers apparently concluded that the Blackburns had left voluntarily.”

Tanner: “Huh. You got here last night?” His eyes again snagged on Letty’s.

Letty said, “Yes. We got here in the evening, driving down from Oklahoma City after we interviewed Vermilion Wright about the missing oil. This morning we went to Hughes-Wright headquarters, and eventually came here.”

“You sound like you’re giving dictation,” Tanner said.

“I want to be clear,” Letty said.

Tanner nodded. “So . . . Ms. Davenport, why don’t you show me where the bodies are. Mr. Kaiser, why don’t you wait here . . . or you could get in your Explorer and turn on the air-conditioning.”

Kaiser said, “Okay. By the way, we called the office manager, Dick Grimes. He’s on his way over. He should be here any minute.”



* * *





Letty followed Tanner to the front stoop; he smelled lightly of clean Texas sweat. When they got to the door, he asked, “You touched the doorknob, right? Going in?”

“I went in the garage door. I thought maybe . . . if something had happened to the Blackburns, maybe the people who did it came and left from the front door. I didn’t want to mess with it. I did go out through the door, when I didn’t see anything that looked like a crime scene when I went in.”

“So you touched the inside knob?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll want to print you, then.”

“The FBI has my prints. You can get them through the FBI,” Letty said.

Tanner’s eyebrows went up. “How’d that happen?”

“We can talk about it later,” Letty said. “Right now, why don’t I show you the bodies?”

The FBI had her prints. Letty paused, and remembered, in a half-second:



* * *





She could hear the gunman pounding up the stairs and she ran toward him, heard him coming down the hallway, lifted the pistol eye-high, stepped sideways, and saw him.

Right there.

Eight feet and coming fast, but his gun pointed sideways toward the bloody wall. He wouldn’t have done it that way if he’d believed that her father was upstairs. He would have moved more slowly with the pistol up.

As it was, he had just tensed his diaphragm for what would have been a grunt of surprise, but he never got it out. Tres never had a chance to talk to his saints, to see that their prediction of his early death would be correct. Before he could begin any of that, Letty, shooting for the white spot in his left eye, pulled the shot a bit and sent the .45 slug through the bridge of his nose. As she stepped past his dead, falling body, she shot him a second and third time in the heart.