Glenn turned to face him and tapped the center of Hank’s chest for emphasis. “Listen to me, Hank. Trapper didn’t do anything to me. I did it all to myself.” He bobbed his head for emphasis, then put his hat on.

Hank watched through the screened door as his father climbed into his sheriff’s unit and backed down the drive. He didn’t turn on the light bar until he reached the road. Hank continued to watch until the flashing lights disappeared behind a rise.

As he returned to the living room, he took his cell phone from his pants pocket and placed a call. Jenks answered on the first ring.

Hank said, “Whatever you told him, he fell for. He’s on his way.”

“I’m here, ready and waiting.”

“I can send somebody to help if you feel like you need it.”

“I’m good.”

“I don’t want another debacle like Sunday.”

“Neither do I,” Jenks said. “I got this.”

Hank clicked off and lay back down on the sofa. He needed to catch some shut-eye before his mother woke up, discovered that Glenn wasn’t in bed with her, and came downstairs looking for him.

Chapter 32

Thomas reached for his cell phone on the bedside table before realizing that the chime was coming not from it but from the intercom panel. He threw off the covers and went over to the keypad on the wall. The blinking red light was labeled “Front Gate.” Parting the window drapes, he saw a pair of headlights shining through the iron pickets. Swearing under his breath, he returned to the keypad and pressed the button. “Jenks?”

“Wrong. But that’s an interesting guess.”

Trapper.

“What do you want?”

“Well, for one thing I want to know why you would assume I was Deputy Sheriff Jenks, dropping by in the middle of the night, when this isn’t even his county.” He waited, then taunted, “Nothing? Not even a plausible lie? We can’t be friends if you don’t open up to me, Tom.”

“I hope you have good news.”

“Matter of fact, I do. I’ve got such a tight grip on your balls they’re turning blue. Oh, you meant good news for you? No, sorry.” Changing his tone to one of no nonsense, he said, “Open the gate.”

Thomas pressed the button.

He pulled on the cashmere sweat suit he’d been lounging in before going to bed, slid his feet into leather slippers, and left his bedroom. He’d reached the top of the staircase before he thought to go back. He tiptoed to the closed door of Greta’s room and put his ear to it. He didn’t hear a sound, and no light shone beneath the door.

Stepping quickly but as quietly as possible, he retraced his steps, descended the stairs, disengaged the security alarm, and pulled open the front door just as Trapper was reaching for the bell.

“Please don’t. My wife’s asleep.”

Trapper said, “I was beginning to wonder if you’d rolled back over.”

Kerra Bailey was with him. Both looked untidy and tired, but Thomas was discomfited by the way Kerra was staring at him, with perplexed concentration, as though trying to discern what was behind his eyes.

“Did you know when I interviewed you last year that I was the girl in the Pegasus Hotel picture?”

Her question caught him off guard. Unprepared to answer just yet, he opened the door wider. “Come in.” The pair stepped into the foyer. Thomas reset the alarm system, then motioned them toward his study.

“I’m surprised you don’t have guards,” Trapper remarked. “Or do you, and they’re hiding in the bushes? Snipers on the roof? Dobermans on sentry?”

Thomas steeled himself against Trapper’s wisecracking. He wasn’t going to let it get to him tonight. “After Tiffany’s murder, although there hadn’t been a breach of our property, we did employ security guards for a time. But rather than giving Greta peace of mind, their ‘lurking,’ as she called it, only made her more nervous.”

“Security cameras?” Trapper asked.

“No.”

“Right. You wouldn’t. They could catch a corrupt cop paying you a call at an ungodly hour.”

As they entered the study, Kerra went directly to the fireplace and looked up at the portrait above it. “Your daughter was beautiful.”

“Inside and out.” Thomas gestured to the bar in the corner. “Can I get you something to drink?” They declined. “You don’t mind if I do?”

“It’s your liquor,” Trapper replied.

Thomas poured himself a neat scotch from the Baccarat decanter. When he turned back around, Trapper was twirling the madam’s pearl-handled pistol around his index finger like a gunslinger.

“Look what I found in your desk drawer, Tom. I’ll hold on to it for the time being. Not that there’s any mistrust between us.”

Thomas indicated an armchair to Kerra. She sat. He calmly walked over to the leather love seat and sat down. Trapper remained with his rear end propped against the edge of Thomas’s desk. He had put the pistol down but within his reach.

Thomas took a sip of single-malt. “Why would I shoot you when I’ve admitted to needing you?”

“About that.” Trapper crossed his arms and his ankles. “That’s why I’m here. Time to renegotiate, Tom. The power has shifted.”

“How can that be, when you were robbed of that flash drive?”

“I was robbed of a flash drive. The one taken out of the wall had porn on it.”

Well, that explained why Jenks hadn’t mentioned finding the buried treasure. The deputy had been made a fool of. More galling, Thomas had fallen for Trapper’s bluff as well. “Your inflection indicates that there’s another flash drive.”

“Sure is,” Trapper said. “And its contents are even juicier than the nasty movies.”

“What’s on it?”

“For starters, a video of Berkley Johnson, telling all. The time burn-in is dated two days before he was killed.”

“If I’m not mistaken, the authorities dismissed his allegations as sour grapes.”

“But his soul-searing video, plus this audio recording …” Trapper gave Kerra a silent signal. She took a cell phone from her handbag and went through the appropriate steps to engage it. Thomas’s voice came through the speaker.

Thomas listened to half a minute of the recording and then quietly asked Kerra to turn it off. “You would never use that,” he said. “It would violate your integrity as a journalist. You had agreed that we were off the record.”

“I don’t intend to publish or broadcast it,” she said coolly. “Besides, it was a unique circumstance. I was in fear of my life.”

“Are you recording this conversation?”

“No.”

“I’m to believe that?”

“Same as we’re to believe that you didn’t have Jenks put a tracking device on Kerra’s car,” Trapper said.

Wilcox turned back to him. “I didn’t.”

“See? Some things we just gotta take each other’s word for. Now answer Kerra’s question.”

“About knowing if she was the girl in the picture?” He looked her straight in the eye. “Of course I knew. Within a few weeks of the bombing, I knew your name and that you’d been shuttled off to Virginia by an aunt and uncle.”

Her lips parted.

“How can you be surprised?” he asked. “I had to know everything about every single survivor, where they were inside the building when the bombs were detonated, who or what they might have seen.”

“Even a child of five years old?”

“I don’t take chances. Since your identity had been so scrupulously protected, it took some ingenuity and money, but a wily individual on my payroll, the likes of Mr. Trapper here, identified and located you.

“I kept track. Years passed. You grew up, a normal little girl in every respect. Neither you nor your relatives ever referenced the bombing or drew the connection between it and yourself, not even as you pursued your profession when that level of notoriety would have been a boon to it. I believed I had nothing to fear from you. Until you moved to Dallas.”