For Just Cause

“I have…fond childhood memories. But if you’d rather eat someplace else—”

“No, this is fine.” Billy tried to picture what Claudia’s childhood might have been like. He assumed she’d come from wealth. She had an aristocratic bearing and a way of speaking that he associated with old money. No Texas twang, so he doubted she came from around here. Maybe she’d eaten at Tubby’s while on a family vacation?

He had a hard time picturing little Claudia with her upper-class family, dining on ribs or chicken-fried steak. The mental image wouldn’t gel.

“I thought you’d be more of an upscale-French-restaurant sort of person,” he said once they were inside and seated at a booth with a faded green Formica table between them. Out of habit, Billy had selected the table and placed his back toward the wall, where he had a good view of the front door and a plate-glass window into the parking lot.

“Mais oui, I love ze French food. But this place…they have the best banana splits here.” She opened one of the plastic menus the waitress had dropped in front of them and gravely looked over the offerings as if about to make a decision of importance.

After a minute or two she looked up at him. “What? Why are you smiling?”

“I just never expected a Tubby’s restaurant to delight you, of all people.”

She suddenly became self-conscious, and he wished he hadn’t ribbed her about her lunch choice. “I guess I needed something happy to focus on after being in that prison.” She shivered delicately. “What an awful place.”

“And Tubby’s is a happy place?”

She looked around, perhaps assessing it through her adult eyes. The restaurant was half-filled, mostly with men in work clothes and a couple of tables of boisterous teenagers.

“Yes, it’s happy,” she declared. “These men are so relieved to sit in the air-conditioning for a few minutes’ break from their construction jobs. And those kids—blowing their allowance money on burgers and ice cream, flirting, away from parental control—yeah, happy.”

But her smile was slightly bittersweet.

“You ready?” the waitress asked.

“Yes, I’ll have the chicken finger basket and a Diet Coke.”

Billy ordered a standard burger and fries and the waitress left.

“No banana split?”

“It probably wouldn’t be as good as I remember. Now. About Mary-Francis.”

“I think she’s a lying schemer. Please, can’t we write this one off? No way could her husband be alive.”

“Ah, sorry. She was telling the truth—about some things, anyway. The coins exist. She believes they’re worth a million dollars, and her daughter did visit. She believes Eduardo has been in contact with Angie. All that’s true. She was lying about one thing, though.”

“What?”

“She didn’t merely ‘forget’ to tell Eduardo about giving the coins to her sister. I think she deliberately kept the information from him. Their marriage was on the skids. But she couldn’t just divorce him—he was violent. She might have wanted to keep those coins for herself, so she could escape and make her own fresh start.”

“Forgive me for pointing this out, but a million-dollar coin collection is a nice motive for murder.”

“She believes he’s alive,” Claudia said flatly.

“Then she’s delusional. The blood evidence was clear-cut. Maybe she had some sort of psychotic break and she forgot she murdered him.”

“Give me some credit. I think I would notice if the subject was psychotic.”

Their food arrived, and for a time they didn’t speak, focusing on filling their empty stomachs. Once Billy had taken a few bites to dull the edge of his hunger, he sat back and observed Claudia as she devoured her chicken fingers, coating each one with a few dribbles of ranch dressing. She took small bites, closing her eyes to savor each one.

He again wondered why this place was special to her. He tried once more to picture her as a little girl. Long blond hair in pigtails, maybe. She had such a slight build now, she’d probably been thin as a child, all knees and elbows. Had she been a tomboy, or a Little Miss Priss? Probably the latter.

“You’re smiling again.”

Billy quickly schooled his features. Damn, that was careless of him, letting his musings show on his face. His life no longer depended on hiding his true self every waking minute. But he still preferred to keep his feelings out of public view, and the one person he ought to be more careful around was Claudia Ellison. He might not believe in her body-language junk science, but she was perceptive.

They finished and paid with a company Visa, then headed back into the sizzling hot afternoon. Claudia removed her pale blue suit jacket. Her blouse was damp, clinging to her breasts in a way that made Billy’s mouth go dry despite the huge soft drink he’d just sucked down.

“So you’re going to recommend Project Justice not take on this case?” Claudia asked.

“It’s kind of fantastical.”

“Yes…but don’t you think we should at least check a few things out? For example, let’s sic Mitch on Eduardo. If the guy is alive, he’s leaving signs of his presence somewhere in cyberspace. Mitch is so amazing when it comes to that, and we have that list of friends and associates Mary-Francis gave us.”

“I guess that would be okay, if Mitch doesn’t mind.” Mitch Delacroix was Project Justice’s resident computer geek and missing person locator. “I can put Daniel off about a decision for a few days.”

“And I want to visit Theresa and see what she has to say about this illustrious coin collection.”

“Yeah, I’ll admit I’m curious. If Theresa has some supervaluable artifacts in her home, we should advise her to take them to the bank and put ’em in a vault. Especially if her drug-addict niece wants them.”

As Claudia climbed into the passenger seat of Billy’s truck, she offered him a healthy flash of thigh, and his heart leaped into his throat…was that her panties he just saw? Then he realized she was wearing a lacy-edged slip.

How Victorian. How…intriguing.

“She was definitely concealing something,” Claudia said once they were back on the road. “She gave at least a dozen signs of it.”

“A dozen? Come on.” No one could give themselves away that thoroughly.

“You knew she was lying. How did you come to that conclusion?”

“’Cause she told a stupid story about a million-dollar treasure and a dead husband come back to life. Doesn’t take an expert to figure out it’s a crock.”

“My hunch is, you read all the body-language signals on a subconscious level—the direction of her feet, the angle of her body, voice inflection, how fast she talked, where she looked, what she did with her hands, nostrils, lips, whether she swallowed a lot—”

“It would take me a year to catalog all that. Isn’t it easier just to listen to what a suspect says?” Yet merely listening to the words someone spoke hadn’t always told him what he needed to know. He’d missed some vital clues during that last operation with Sheila.

Just thinking about Sheila filled him with a profound sadness. “Hey, Claudia, can you tell what I’m thinking now?”

“I read body language, not minds,” she said tartly.

“What’s my body language telling you?”

She actually took him seriously, studying him from head to toe in a slow perusal that made him hot—checking him out the way a woman does at a bar when she wants you to return the favor. If he was as good as he thought he was, though, Claudia would have no idea how badly he’d like to kiss those moist, full lips of hers and muss up that elegant blond hair.

“You’re bored,” she finally said. “You don’t like this assignment, you don’t like Mary-Francis, and you’d rather be working on something else.”

“Uncanny,” he said as relief washed through him. He still had it. He could still hide his true feelings.