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.“Haven’t come across them.”An hour later, Sam’s eyelids felt like they had lead weights attached.“I’m not making sense of this anymore,” she said.“Nothing seems to be filed here in sequential order and my brain isn’t working.It’s been a long day.”Beau smiled up from his set of pages.“I know, darlin’.Go ahead upstairs—I’m right behind you.”He didn’t have to suggest it twice.Sam set her pages down and trudged to the kitchen with their coffee cups.She’d brushed her teeth and smoothed the sheets from their earlier visit, and was about to settle herself into sleepy bliss when she heard his footsteps on the stairs.“Well, this adds an interesting wrinkle,” Beau said, coming into the room.“At the time Jessie Starkey confessed, he tested positive for cocaine.”Sam gave a puzzled look.“That little fact never came up at the trial,” Beau said.“And the lab report was shoved between two other pages, in a spot completely unrelated to the confession.”“So you think someone tried to cover it up?”“That would be my guess.”Chapter 10The revelations in the Angela Cayne case file might have kept Sam awake but that didn’t turn out to be.Her head hit the pillow and she didn’t even roll over until gray dawn began to filter into the bedroom.When she reached out for Beau she discovered that he was not in bed.No light from the bathroom; he must be downstairs.She found him at the dining table with pages from the file spread out in stacks.“Morning, baby,” she said.“Did you actually settle into bed last night at all?”“Oh, yeah.A few hours.Kept waking up though.Finally, it made more sense to let you sleep without all my tossing and turning.”She kissed the top of his head.“Coffee?”Not waiting for his answer, she went into the kitchen and found that he’d already brewed some, just hadn’t remembered to pour it.She doctored two mugs and carried them to the table.“I’m trying to organize all this into a timeline,” he said.“It’s almost as if somebody took a dozen little folders and a hundred loose pages and just gathered them up any old which way and stuck them together with a cover over it all.There’s no sequence to it whatsoever.”“Glad you said that.Last night I was beginning to feel like it was my fuzzy head that wasn’t making sense of it.”“Wasn’t you.” He paused for a sip of his coffee.“You know, taking over this job, half the time I wonder how much of this stuff was Padilla’s incompetence and how often he might have been purposely covering up something.I find this kind of sloppy work all the time.If the defense lawyers were never given Jessie’s drug test results, that alone could have changed the outcome.”“If money were no object you could hire a staff just to go through files and organize them all.”He snorted.Money was always an object and he was lucky his current staff hadn’t been cut further.Two of his older deputies had retired within the last year and he’d been informed that he couldn’t replace them.Let the rest of the department pick up their duties.So, no.Finding someone to go through old case files wasn’t going to happen.“How can I help?” Sam offered.“Looks like you have a system going there.”“Yeah, kind of.Once I get each interview, report, evidence list, etcetera, put into one of these piles, we can both read through them.” He looked up and sent her one of his winning smiles.“Maybe something to eat?”“You got it.” Food wouldn’t be such a bad idea, Sam decided, thinking to clear her own cobwebby brain.She found that they were out of eggs, bacon and bread—when was the last time she’d stopped for groceries? But there was pancake mix and enough butter and syrup to make one of Beau’s favorite breakfasts.She heated the griddle and soon had two nicely browned stacks ready; it didn’t take a second call for Beau to show up and take his spot at the kitchen table.“I just wish I didn’t feel like I was starting so late in the game with this one,” he said halfway through his fourth pancake.“It’s like everyone in Sembramos was there from day one—they know all the history, and I’m the unsuspecting guy who’s just walked into the trap.They’ll tell me only what they want me to know.”“At least you can’t say that it’s one little town united against the lawman.Nobody in that place seems to agree on anything.” Sam swiped a wedge of pancake through her puddle of syrup.“You know, I remember reading about this in the papers, back when it happened.I wonder, if we had copies of those articles maybe we would get another angle on it?”“We couldn’t use news reports to build a legal case,” he said.“I know.But maybe the press talked to someone back then, somebody the sheriff didn’t formally interview.I could go down to the newspaper office and get copies of whatever is in their archives.”Beau looked a little skeptical but gave a knock-yourself-out approval to the plan.“Meanwhile, it’s late and I better get to the office and find out what new catastrophe is facing me today.”He carried the dishes to the sink, leaving Sam with her thoughts and her coffee.She ran through her own checklist for the day.Get out to the monster house and try to finish cleaning the windows and floors there—she’d sworn to Beau that she would drive straight through Sembramos without stopping.Go by the newspaper office; check in at Sweet’s Sweets and hope no new disasters had shown up.Upstairs, she put on the same jeans and work shirt she’d worn yesterday.Rummaging in her drawer for a pair of clean socks she touched the deputy’s badge Beau had given her once when she helped him with a case.At the time she’d suspected that the old piece of metal was hers more as a spoof, something to semi-officially give her access to evidence that she shouldn’t otherwise see.She didn’t actually work for his department.On the other hand.maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to have it with her now, as long as she had to drive through Sembramos a couple of times a day.She pinned it to the waistband of her jeans and let the shirttail cover it.Just in case.The April weather had taken another of its sudden turns, Sam discovered when she walked outside.Clouds scudded in from the west, driven by a brisk wind that whipped the tender buds on the apple tree by the barn.So typical of the Rocky Mountain climate—March winds, April showers, and May flowers, all at once, all competing.She buttoned her jacket and checked her truck and trailer for supplies.Since the big house had no landscaping or electricity, there really was no need for lawn mower, rakes or vacuum cleaner.She pulled brooms and her biggest mop and bucket from the trailer’s storage box, stashing them in the back of the truck.It would be far easier to maneuver the circular drive up there on the hill without the trailer.Taking a minute to consider the job, it occurred to her that without electricity up at that house, there would be no way to pump water from the well and that would mean taking water with her for mopping.She filled a couple of five-gallon buckets that had lids, checked the dogs’ water bowl while she had the hose uncoiled, then took a deep breath, climbed in the truck and headed out.Sembramos seemed quiet this morning [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]