Texas Outlaw(13)

I expect the conference room to be converted into a makeshift investigation room, with boxes of paperwork, dry-erase boards, photographs taped to the wall.

Instead, Ariana pulls out a single, thin file folder.

The investigation hasn’t even begun.





Chapter 16



ARIANA EXPLAINS THAT Susan Snyder was found dead in her home a week ago. The councilwoman appeared to have had an allergic reaction after consuming peanuts. There was a discharged EpiPen on the scene, but it must not have worked. She shows me crime-scene photographs of a woman lying on the floor, her face swollen and purple. I ask for a picture of Susan Snyder before she died, and Ariana hands me a flyer from her election campaign. The woman I’m looking at is much younger than I expected. The four council members I met last night are all retirement age, but Susan Snyder was in her thirties. She certainly didn’t fit the mold.

She was pretty, too, with a vibrant smile.

Ariana explains that a medical examiner from El Paso did the autopsy since the county doesn’t have its own. He listed the cause of death as anaphylactic shock.

An accident.

Ariana seems slightly more at ease today. She’s still professional, still guarded, but she’s been asking for help on this case for days and is excited to finally have it. The conference room is hardly bigger than a king-sized mattress, and I can smell her perfume—just a hint of it—in the tight quarters.

I ask if they know what food she ate, where it came from. Ariana says there was nothing on scene that she could find. No suspicious wrappers. No crumbs. Susan Snyder had dinner that night at A Taste of Texas, but the owners said there’s no way it came from them. They were well aware of her allergy and were always very careful.

“Besides,” Ariana says, “Susan’s allergy was so severe that she wouldn’t have made it home if she’d eaten peanuts in the restaurant. She lives out of town. Whatever caused the reaction, she ate it at her house.”

I look through the autopsy report.

“Did they look in her stomach?” I ask. “I don’t see anything in here about that.”

She shakes her head and agrees that it seems like an oversight.

“Where’s the body now?” I ask.

“Cremated,” Ariana says.

I give her a hard stare. That seems like an oversight. On her part. It was a mistake to release the body to the family before a comprehensive autopsy was performed—and the report I’m looking at doesn’t seem comprehensive to me.

Ariana looks at the glass door to make sure no one is close enough to the conference room to hear us talking.

“I couldn’t get the chief to declare this a murder investigation,” she says. “She was already cremated before John Grady finally gave in and agreed to call you guys.”

I nod, letting her off the hook. Obviously she’s been alone in this from the start. I want her to know I’m here to help. And in a situation like this, with a seemingly obvious cause of death, it’s possible they would have skipped the autopsy entirely. So we should consider ourselves lucky to have any information at all.

“I think the examiner hung on to some blood samples,” she says.

“So why do you think this wasn’t an accidental death?” I say, sitting back in my chair and giving Ariana my full attention. “Aside from the fact that she never would have knowingly eaten anything with peanuts, what’s so suspicious?”

Again, she looks toward the door as if she’s afraid someone might be listening.

“Let’s drive out to the crime scene,” she says. “I’ll tell you on the way.”





Chapter 17



I OFFER TO drive, and we climb into my truck. For a second, I almost go around to the passenger side and open the door for Ariana. But I wouldn’t think to do that for a male cop, so I don’t do it for her.

She tells me where to turn, and within a minute of leaving the station, we’re heading out of town on a curvy back road. The landscape is quite pretty. Coming from Waco, which is much greener, I appreciate these rolling brown hills, rocky buttes, and zigzagging slot canyons. There is a beauty to the barrenness.

A few minutes out of town, Ariana says that she found Susan Snyder’s body the morning after she died.

“What were you doing at her house?” I ask. “Were you friends?”

“Not really.”

She seems nervous to go forward with what else she wants to say. Sometimes silence is the best motivator, so I remain quiet.

“I went to her house because she’d called me the day before,” Ariana says. “She said she had something important to tell me. She wanted to talk to me about a crime. I’m sure of it.”

“I see,” I say. “You get a call that says she’s got something important to tell you. Then she winds up dead. I’d be suspicious, too.”

Susan Snyder owned a nice ranch-style house that we can see from a long way off. We pull into the gravel driveway, and Ariana takes me inside and shows me around. She points to where the body was lying on the floor and where the used EpiPen had been left, but there isn’t much else she can tell me. If this had been declared a crime scene from the start, forensic investigators could have examined the house from top to bottom, looking for fingerprints, DNA, anything suspicious. But there have been dozens of people in and out of the house since then, obliterating the evidence. Her family came in from Florida and hosted a memorial service in the house.