For Just Cause

“Possibly.”

Billy and Claudia quickly checked the rest of the house. Every room had been assaulted and vandalized.

“Let’s check out the backyard,” Claudia said. “I want to know why that woman was digging around.”

“Digging for buried treasure? Maybe she heard something about the missing coins.”

In the early summer heat, it wouldn’t take long for an unwatered garden to wither and die. The backyard looked as if it had once been lovingly cultivated with flowers and a vegetable patch. Now, most everything was dead or dying. Green had turned to yellow and beige. The tall weeds rattled in the light breeze.

“If Theresa ever comes home,” Claudia said, “she’ll be horrified by what’s happened to her yard.” She walked over to where the mystery woman had been turning up the earth. Several large holes had been dug up in one corner of the garden. “I wonder what that woman was looking for?”

Billy squatted down and examined the other plants in the vegetable patch. “Potatoes. And onions.”

“How can you tell?”

He gave her a pitying look. “I take it you don’t garden.”

“I have a landscaping service that does all that. Do you have a garden?”

“Sure. I grow all kinds of stuff in big pots on my patio—tomatoes, peppers, onions, squash. Growing up, if my mom hadn’t grown vegetables, we’d have gone hungry. Now I just do it ’cause there’s nothing quite like a home-grown tomato.”

She never would have pegged him as a gardener. But she was more surprised that he’d shared something from his personal life with her.

“Hey, you!”

Claudia jumped and looked for the source of the voice. The woman in pink, wearing a large brimmed hat and sunglasses, was peering at them over the privacy fence. Unless she was seven feet tall, she was on a ladder.

“You’re trespassing!” the woman screeched. “You better not be taking those vegetables.”

“No, ma’am,” Billy said. “We’re with the sheriff’s department, doing some follow-up on the crime that took place here. Did anyone talk to you about that?”

He lied with perfect assurance. If Claudia had been called upon to spot his lies, she would have failed miserably.

The woman, though obviously the suspicious type, didn’t even ask to see a badge.

“Of course they did,” the woman replied indignantly. “I live next door and I know everything that goes on in this neighborhood. We all watch out for each other here.”

“Did you see what happened that night?” Billy prompted.

“It was late at night. I was asleep.” She dared him to contradict her. “It’s all in the statement I gave. Patty Dorsey is my name.”

“We saw you stealing Theresa’s vegetables,” Billy said.

Patty whipped off her sunglasses. Her eyes narrowed dangerously. “Theresa wouldn’t want her vegetables to go to waste. We share all the time. I give her peaches from my trees. What did you say your name was?”

“Sergeant Billy Cantu. You wouldn’t happen to be digging around because you know something valuable is buried out here, would you?”

She shifted from angry to curious. “What kind of something valuable?”

“Coins, maybe?”

Her eyes widened with surprise and delight. “Her brother-in-law’s coins? Theresa told me he’d stolen a pirate’s treasure, gold doubloons or some nonsense. I didn’t believe it at the time.” She surveyed the backyard with new eyes, perhaps seeing something a lot more valuable than a few filched potatoes.

“Don’t be digging around here anymore,” Billy warned her. “I don’t want to bust you for trespassing, but I will.”

“Humph.”

“If you discover the location of any stolen pirate’s treasure, it’s your civic duty to turn it over to the police—or become an accessory. Have a nice day, Patty.” Billy tipped an imaginary hat and turned to head back inside.

Claudia followed, her heart pounding, until they were safely inside. “Lying to that woman goes against everything I believe in. Isn’t it a pretty serious crime, impersonating a police officer?”

“She doesn’t suspect. And even if she does, she’s too busy thinking about buried treasure to report me. Maybe we’ll luck out, and she’ll find the coins for us.”

“You just like playing games with people’s heads.” Another thought occurred to her. “You’re obviously a skilled investigator, good at teasing information out of people. How come you don’t like field work?”

He froze. “How do you know that about me?”

“During your original evaluation. You said you didn’t want to work in the field. You told me then you were tired of it. And because Daniel asked me if there was any reason, in my professional opinion, that I thought you weren’t fit for active duty, so to speak. At the time I didn’t know you were a lunatic, so I said no, no reason, that you were just ready for a change.”

“We almost got our heads blown off today, and you want to know why I don’t like field work?”

They ended up back in the living room. Claudia spotted a bloodstain on the carpet, probably from Theresa’s assault. Her stomach turned, and their earlier confrontation with a loaded gun barged back into her mind.

What she recalled most clearly was how Billy had again put himself between her and danger.

She wandered back to the fireplace and noticed something she hadn’t seen before. Lying on the bricks was a hunk of ceramic material, about the size of a poker chip but curved. It bore a bright blue glaze. She picked it up and studied it.

“Watcha got there?”

“A fragment of something. It doesn’t belong to anything in the vicinity.”

Billy studied the area where the fragment had lain. “Hey, look at this. There’s a spot here on the hearth that’s not as dusty as everything else.”

Now that she looked more closely, she realized the arrangement of statues was unbalanced. “You think another statue used to be here?”

“Could be.” He picked up the statue of St. Francis and flipped it upside down, examining the bottom. He did the same with the angel. “These statues are hollow inside.”

“A good place to hide coins?” Claudia ventured.

Billy nodded. “It’s an old drug-smuggler trick, hiding stuff inside statues.” He thought about it some more. “I like it. But why wouldn’t Mary-Francis just tell us that?”

“Maybe she didn’t know exactly where her sister put the coins. Or she doesn’t trust us. She’s still hoping to keep the coins for herself when—if—she gets out of prison.”

“And the robbers beat Theresa until she told them where the coins were hidden.”

Claudia shivered at the thought of what that poor woman must have gone through—the terror, the pain. “Let’s just get out of here, okay?”

“A woman’s life is at stake,” he reminded her. “We owe it to her to be thorough. Why are you so nervous? You told me you face down violent offenders in your work pretty often, right?” Billy checked the contents of two drawers in the coffee table that had been overlooked.