Then she took a deep, rattling breath of the cemetery air.
“Then I guess I don’t have to worry about sweeping the porch,” she said.
A siren wailed in the distance—not from the airport, but from the south, coming up the interstate toward the cemetery gates.
Two white-and-blue Dallas squad cars turned into the narrow lane, tires crunching over the gravel, their light bars painting the granite angels in rhythmic flashes of crimson and cobalt.
Cobb lunged for the fence, but the elder gravedigger simply swung the heavy flat of his spade, catching the contractor across the shins.
Cobb went down with a wet, unglamorous grunt, clutching his leg in the grass.
“Stay down, mister,” the gravedigger muttered, leaning on his handle.
“Ground’s soft enough for three.”
The squad cars skidded to a halt by the hearse.
Four officers spilled out, their hands hovering over their holsters, their eyes darting from the open casket to the blood on Veronica’s face.
“Hold it right there!” the lead sergeant shouted, his radio squawking with frantic, garbled traffic from Love Field.
“*…all units at Atlantic Aviation, suspect vehicle breached the perimeter… repeat, private charter cleared runway 13-Left…*”
Clara didn’t wait for the officers to reach the plot.
She looked down at the dead man with the crooked collarbone.
“Cover him up,” she told the gravedigger gently.
“The wind’s picking up, and he’s caught enough grief for one day.”
***
The interrogation room at the Dallas Central Substation smelled of industrial floor stripper, cold french fries, and forty years of sweat.
Clara sat on the metal folding chair, her hands folded in her lap over her worn leather pocketbook.
On the table between her and Detective Marcus Miller was a paper cup of lukewarm tap water she hadn’t touched.
Miller was forty-five, with thinning red hair and the gray, papery complexion of a homicide cop who worked eighteen-hour shifts on bad coffee.
Across the glass partition in the adjacent observation room, Veronica was screaming through a box of tissues, flanked by two high-priced defense lawyers who had arrived in separate Mercedes within thirty minutes of her arrest.
“The Learjet didn’t stay on the ground, Mrs.
Vance,” Miller said, rubbing his thumbs over the bridge of his nose.
“He had an auxiliary fuel tank and a visual-flight clearance for Tampico.
By the time our airport detail reached the tarmac, the bird was already past Waco.
FAA lost him near the border around twelve-fifteen.
Transponder was cut.”
Clara watched the sweep of the second hand on the cheap electric wall clock. *Tick.
Tick.
Tick.*
“He always was scared of storms,” she remarked, her voice quiet.
“Used to hide under the quilt when the thunder came over the Brazos.
He won’t fly low in the hills.
He’ll take it out over the Gulf.”
“Mrs.
Vance, we have federal warrants out for insurance fraud, grand larceny, and desecration of a corpse,” Miller leaned forward, resting his thick forearms on the table.
“The man in the box… we pulled his prints from the state database.
His name was Roy Dale Hicks.
Fifty-two years old.
Born in Tyler.
Worked the oil fields until he lost three fingers in a rig chain seven years ago.
Been living out of the Austin Street Shelter for the last eighteen months.”
Clara’s jaw tightened.
“A veteran?”
Miller hesitated, then flipped through the manila folder.
“Three years in the 101st Airborne.
Discharged with an honorable after a mortar fragment caught him in the hip.
That’s where the crooked bone came from.”
Clara closed her eyes for a long moment.
When she opened them, the pale blue was as clear as spring water.
“My boy never served,” she said.
“He got three deferments for his knee.
His father had to sign for ’em because the construction company needed the extra hand on the road crews.”
She reached out and touched the rim of the paper cup.
“How did Roy die?”
Miller looked down at his yellow legal pad.
He didn’t answer right away.
“Detective,” Clara’s voice sharpened, the farm woman’s authority cutting through his bureaucratic silence.
“I looked at that man’s face.
His jaw was broken before they put him in the ice.
A mother knows what a punch looks like.
How did he die?”
“The coroner’s initial report from last Thursday was falsified,” Miller admitted, his voice dropping.
“We took the medical examiner into custody twenty minutes ago at his home in University Park.
He had four hundred thousand dollars in cash in a gym bag under his furnace.”
He took a breath.
“Hicks didn’t die in that pickup crash on Highway 67.
The pickup was pushed into the ravine and torched with twenty gallons of aviation kerosene *after* the body was placed in the driver’s seat.”
“The cause, Miller.”
“Lethal dose of chloral hydrate mixed into grain alcohol,” Miller said quietly.
“The same knockout drops they use on the skid row alleys.
Then someone fractured his larynx with a blunt instrument.
A pipe or an iron tire iron.
He was dead forty minutes before the gas went off.”
Clara didn’t flinch, but her fingers gripped the leather straps of her pocketbook until her knuckles turned the color of lard.
“Leonard couldn’t kill a hog,” she whispered, more to herself than to the detective.
“When he was fourteen, we had an old sow that went down with the rot.
He sat by the barn door with the twenty-two in his lap until sundown, crying like a nursing baby.
His daddy had to take the rifle from him.”
“People change when thirty million dollars is sitting on a ledger, Mrs.
Vance,” Miller said.
“No,” Clara said, her voice rising with an iron certainty that made the detective pause.
“People don’t change that much.
They rot, but they rot the way they grew.
Leonard was weak.
He was vain.
He wanted silk shirts and people to call him ‘Mister Vance’ at the bank.
But he was a coward, Detective.
He never had the stomach for blood on his own hands.
If Roy Hicks was murdered with an iron pipe, Leonard wasn’t the one swinging it.”
The door to the interrogation room clicked open.
A tall woman in an expensive gray flannel suit stepped inside.
She had dark hair pulled back into a severe chignon, cheekbones that looked like they had been chiseled out of flint, and eyes the color of stagnant river water.
