The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (40)

She pushed it back at him. “I will.”

Sawyer smiled and nodded. “Looking forward to it.”



* * *





The Monahans patrol car pulled over and a sunburned cop got out. He stepped over the body of the dead dog at the gate. “I understand there was a gun involved,” he said to Letty, while ignoring Sawyer.

Letty pointed her finger at the pistol still sitting on the burnt grass. The cop looked at it, then asked, “Will you be around?”

“I’m waiting for a ride,” Letty said.

“Could you wait until Casey gets back? I’d want her to take charge of the gun. I’ll take the subject here to the lockup.”

“Might check him for weapons—nobody’s done that yet, they didn’t have time,” Letty said.

“Bad bite?”

“Yeah, Tanner was bleeding hard,” Letty said. “Haven’t heard anything yet. He’s an investigator for Midland.”

“Oh, sure, I know him, Dan Tanner. Too bad.” He turned to Sawyer. “You gonna give me a hard time?”

“No, but I want to lock up my house and I want a receipt for the Gold Cup,” Sawyer said.

“You’ll get it. Where are your keys?” the cop asked.

“In the house, on the stove.”

Letty said, “I’ll get them.”

She picked up the chair Sawyer had been sitting on, carried it inside, saw the keys on the stove, picked them up, closed the front door as she left the house, made a show of locking it while not actually locking it. Sawyer was on his way to the backseat of the patrol car, his hands cuffed behind him, and she caught up and said, “I’ll slide the keys in your pocket.”

He turned his hip toward her and she slipped the keys into his pocket. “That 938 doesn’t print on your jeans at all,” Sawyer said.

“Got a Sticky Holster,” she said.

“I seen those at gun shows, never had one,” Sawyer said. “Maybe I’ll check them out. Don’t even print on skinny jeans.”

The cop said, “Watch your head,” and put him in the backseat of the patrol car. To Letty, he said, “I’ll call Casey and tell her you’re waiting, watching the gun.”



* * *





When he was out of sight, Letty called Kaiser. “Are you still at the hospital?”

“Yeah, it’s going to be a while. They’re prepping Tanner for surgery, but the surgeon isn’t here yet. They’ve slowed down the bleeding.”

“Well, I’ll be sitting on the stoop at Sawyer’s house.”

She got off the phone, walked up to the stoop, pushed through the unlocked door, and started picking through the place. Although the house was small, it did have two bedrooms, no more than ten by twelve feet each. Sawyer had been sleeping in one and using the other for storage. The storage room had a locked closet with a good heavy lock that appeared to be new; she couldn’t budge the door.

Sawyer had a laptop, an old Vaio. She turned it on, and it came up without a password. She went to the email: nothing in the inbox, outbox, or trash. Since that’s impossible, she understood that he’d wiped his mailboxes after each use. She checked Internet Explorer and found a list of gun blogs. Nothing useful.

She turned the computer off, wiped her prints with a paper towel, and began searching through drawers and boxes and jars; in a kitchen cupboard, she found a lidless Rubbermaid cooking container with miscellaneous detritus—pens, pencils, rubber bands, a garage door opener with no battery, and the house didn’t have a garage, anyway, and a half-dozen keys. There were two identical keys that fit the front door. She put one back in the box and kept the other.

A shiny brass key was mixed with the other junk, and when she tried it in the bedroom closet door, the lock gave way. Inside the closet she found four rifles and a combat shotgun in a gun rack. A half-dozen handguns sat on top of their cases, arranged on a plastic bookcase. Two range bags sat on the floor and held ammo, earmuffs, and cleaning equipment.

A cell phone was placed carefully on one of the bookcase shelves. She turned it on and it came up without a password. No texts, either incoming or outgoing, but she found four saved phone numbers under “contacts.” The contacts themselves were Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and Delta, which she suspected were not real names. She displayed them all, took a shot of them with her own iPhone camera, turned off the cell phone, and put it back on the bookcase shelf.

When she looked out the back door, she saw a tan Jeep parked in the backyard. She’d seen a jean jacket hanging on a hook by the front door, and when she checked the pockets, found a key fob for the Jeep. In the backyard, she climbed into the hot vehicle, started it up, cranked the air conditioner, called up the navigation system, and checked saved addresses and recent trips and photographed them with her phone. A search of the car turned up nothing but another pistol, a large-frame Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum, tucked under the front seat.

“Texas,” she said aloud. She’d been told that when a car with Texas plates approached the Canadian border, the Canadian border cops would disassemble it, searching for the handgun they knew must be in there somewhere.

Letty had been in the house or the Jeep for twenty minutes: fourteen minutes too long, by normal burglary standards. Back in the house, she looked out the window toward the street, saw nothing of interest except the Colt still lying on the grass where Sawyer had dropped it.