The Texas Ranger

Brannon stuck his hands into the pockets of his khaki slacks. They clenched as he recalled Josette’s face in another courtroom, years ago, when she was only fifteen and trying to convince a hostile jury that she’d been drugged and nearly raped by the son of a wealthy Jacobsville resident. Josette’s life had been a hard one. But it wounded him that she could have accused Bib Webb, his best friend, of something as heinous as murdering a helpless old man for money. It was so obvious that Jennings had done it. He even had the murder weapon in his car, blatantly in sight on the front passenger seat, still bearing minute traces of blood and tissue, and hair, from poor old Garner’s head. The medical examiner positively identified the blackjack as the weapon used to stun the old man before he was pushed into the water.

“You know the Langley woman, who works in Simon Hart’s office, don’t you?” Garcia asked suddenly, dragging Brannon back to the present. The two men had known each other since Garcia was a patrolman and Brannon a fledgling Texas Ranger.

Brannon nodded curtly. “We both come from Jacobsville. Josette and her mother and father moved to San Antonio some years ago. I heard that her parents were dead. I haven’t seen her in two years, not since she moved to Austin,” he added, reminded unwillingly that he’d broken off their relationship the week before Garner had died.

“No reason to, I imagine,” the officer said carelessly.

Brannon’s eyes went back to the body on the ground. “This does look like a professional hit,” Brannon said out of the blue, studying Dale Jennings’s body, with his hands bagged and his white, still face vanishing under the zip of the dark body bag. “One downward-angled gunshot to the back of the head at point-blank range. His knees were covered in red mud, just like this.” He moved the dirt caked on the pavement with the toe of his boot. “He was probably kneeling at the time.”

“That was my first thought, too. And it’s a pretty big coincidence that Marsh’s nightclub is only two doors that way,” the detective agreed, nodding toward the street that fronted the alley.

“If Marsh is involved here, I’ll find a way to prove it,” Brannon said bitingly. “He’s walked away from murder and attempted murder, drug-dealing, prostitution and illegal betting on sports for years. It’s time we made him pay for the misery he’s caused.”

“I’ll drink to that. But we can’t just walk in and arrest him without probable cause. Not that I don’t wish I could,” Garcia confessed ruefully.

“Well, there’s no time like the present to get started. I’m only in the way here as it is. I’ll go back to my office and fill Simon Hart in on what we know.” He pursed his lips. “He’s going to be madder than a teased rattlesnake.”

Garcia chuckled. “That he is.” He looked toward the body. “Did the guy have any family?”

“A mother, I think. Did they find the slug?”

“They found a slug. Ballistics will have to tell us if it’s the right one. I’d bet on a nine millimeter handgun myself, but that’s why we have the Bexar County Forensic Science Center.”

“And the department of public safety’s own lab,” Brannon felt obliged to mention.

“Which is a very good one,” Garcia agreed, smiling. “Say, wasn’t Jennings convicted of murder a couple of years ago?” he added suddenly.

“Yes. In a trial that almost implicated our brand-new lieutenant governor, too,” Brannon told him. “It almost cost him the election. Both contenders were first-time state office seekers. But the other guy dropped out a week before the election, and Bib won. He’s a good man.”

“Yes. So he is.”

“I had a nice, easy month all planned,” Brannon sighed. “Now here I am up to my armpits in a dead body and a two-year-old murder case that the press will resurrect and use to embarrass Bib Webb. It couldn’t be worse timing. He’s just won his party’s nomination for that senate seat that the incumbent resigned from because of a heart attack. The publicity could kill Bib’s chances.”

“Life, they say, is what happens when you have other plans,” Garcia said with a grim smile.

“Amen,” Brannon agreed heavily.

He went back to his office and phoned Simon Hart with the news. An hour later, he was on a plane to Austin.

Simon Hart listened to Brannon’s report in his spacious office in Austin. He’d requested the Ranger’s help on the case as soon as he knew who the victim was. Brannon had a good track record with homicides and the Texas Ranger post in San Antonio was where he was stationed, anyway. Brannon had legal authority to investigate in multiple jurisdictions, and that complication existed. Jennings was killed in Bexar County, but he’d been in a correctional facility in Wilson County. Simon was certain that the murder was going to make national headlines. There was a sad lack of sensational news lately and the media had to fill those twenty-four-hour news channels with something. Sure enough, the murder had led the noon news on local channels. The body was barely in the morgue before the wire services and national television broadcast the story that the victim was tied to a murder case two years ago in Austin, Texas, that had involved the state’s lieutenant governor, Bib Webb. God knew, the media loved political scandal. But with luck, they just might get Jake Marsh for murder at last.

Simon had asked Brannon to fly to Austin and fill him in on the preliminaries. “I had Bib Webb on the line early this morning,” Simon told Brannon while he sipped coffee. “Not only is he running for the U.S. Senate, but his construction company is involved in a major project outside San Antonio, a prototype agricultural complex with self-contained irrigation and warehousing. He’s invested millions of his own money in an effort to help the drought-ridden ranchers. This case is already affecting him, and this is a bad time. Wally’s worried,” he added, mentioning the governor, who was a close friend. “Campaigning is seriously underway for the November election. Wally’s been stumping for Bib.”

“Yes, I know. I had lunch with Bib last week.” His gray eyes narrowed. “Could this rehash of the case be engineered to hurt him in the polls?”

“Of course it could,” Simon said with a grin. “You know how dirty politics is. But I don’t think sane people commit murder to cause a scandal.”

“There are a lot of insane people running loose in the world,” Brannon reminded him amusedly.

Simon shifted, moving the prosthesis he wore in place of his left arm onto the desk while he lifted his coffee cup with the right. He and Brannon were distantly related, both with ties in Jacobsville. Simon’s four brothers lived there. Brannon had grown up there, and he still had a ranch in Jacobsville where his sister, Gretchen, had lived until her marriage to the ruling Sheikh of Qawi in the Middle East. She and the sheikh had a son now, and they were becoming well-known in international circles.

“Have you heard from your sister, Gretchen, lately?”

Brannon nodded. “She phones me every month to make sure I’m eating properly. She doesn’t think much of my cooking,” he added with a fond smile at the thought of his baby sister.

“Does she miss Texas?” Simon asked.

“Not visibly. She’s too crazy about her little boy and Philippe,” he murmured, naming her husband. “I have to admit, he’s unique.”

“Why did you leave the FBI?” Simon asked abruptly, something that had bothered him lately.

“I got tired of living out of a suitcase,” Brannon said evasively. “Two years was enough.”

“I never could understand why you left the Rangers to begin with,” Simon replied, sipping black coffee. “You had seniority, you were in line for promotion. You tossed all that to go haring off to Washington. And then you only stayed there for two years.”

Brannon averted his eyes. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“And it didn’t have anything to do with the Jennings murder trial or Josette Langley?”

Brannon’s jaw clenched so hard that his teeth ached. “Nothing.”

“You work out of San Antonio, and she works here in Austin.” Simon persisted. “Under ordinary circumstances, you won’t have to see her, if you don’t want to. At least, not after she investigates this murder for me.”

The odd wording of the remark went right by him. “I’ll do my job, regardless of the people I have to do it with,” Brannon said finally, and his pale eyes dared his cousin to pursue the conversation.

“Okay, I give up. But you’d better know that I’m sending Josette to San Antonio tomorrow.”

Brannon’s eyes glittered. “What?”

“She’s the only freelance investigator I have who’s cognizant of all the facts. Wayne Correctional Institute is near there, where Jennings was located before he managed to get released…”

“She was involved in the case!” Brannon burst out, rising to his feet. “Two years ago, she did her best to get Bib arrested for old Garner’s murder!”

“Sit down.” Simon stared at him with steady, cold silver eyes.

Brannon sat, but angrily.

“There are other people who maintain to this day that Jennings was nothing more than the fall guy in that murder,” Simon told Brannon. He held up a hand when Brannon started to speak. “Jennings and Josette had been invited to a party on Garner Lake with Bib Webb and Silvia and Henry Garner the night Garner died. Jennings was a nobody, but he had ties to the local San Antonio mob headed by Jake Marsh, and he’d threatened Garner over money. Recreational drugs were ingested at the party, the punch was spiked—even Bib admitted that—and I know Webb’s your friend. It might have passed off as a simple drowning except for Josette’s accusations and the knot on Garner’s head that was first thought to have occurred when he fell. Josette was the one who insisted that Garner hadn’t been drinking and didn’t accidentally fall off the pier.”

“She accused Bib because she didn’t like him or his wife,” Brannon insisted. “She was angry at me, to boot. Accusing Bib was one way of getting back at me.”

“Marc,” Simon said quietly, “you know what sort of upbringing she had. Her father was the youth minister of their church and her mother taught Sunday school. They were devout. She was raised strictly. She doesn’t tell lies.”

“Plenty of girls go wild when they get away from home,” Brannon pointed out stubbornly. “And I’ll remind you that she slipped out of her house to go to that wild party when she was fifteen, and accused a boy of trying to rape her. The emergency room physician testified that there was no rape,” he added, and was visibly uncomfortable talking about it. “She was almost completely intact.”

“Yes, I know,” Simon said with a sigh. “Presumably her assailant was too drunk to force her.” He glanced at Brannon, whose face was strained. “We have to solve this murder as quickly and efficiently as possible, for Webb’s own sake.”

“Bib is a good man with a bright political future ahead of him,” Brannon said, relieved at the change of subject. “He’s already ahead in the polls in the senate race, and it’s just September.”