Chapter 22
The dirt track was slick with mud by the time they emerged from the tree line. The cruiser’s tires spun and fishtailed as Avery coaxed the car up the slope to the buffalo-skull archway.
Once on the road, Colly turned in her seat. “Well?”
Hoyer stared out of the window. “It’s a long story.”
“Start with Monday night. Why’d you lie about where you were?”
“You woulda slapped me in cuffs if I didn’t.”
Behind the wheel, Avery snorted. “You’re in cuffs now, genius.”
Hoyer said nothing for a minute. “I drove to the ranch Monday night, but I didn’t do nothin’.”
“What was your plan? To talk to Lowell, try to get your job back?” Colly asked. “Or did you think you’d have better luck with Iris?”
“That old hag? Not likely.”
“Then why were you there?”
Hoyer’s shoulders hunched. “Jolene and me was watching San Antonio wipe the floor with the Mavs, which was pissing me off. And—” He swallowed. “And Carmen come by earlier, saying she heard y’all was up at the clinic that afternoon, asking questions. Like I said, I figured I was being set up. More I thought about it, the madder I got.”
Avery glowered at him in the rearview mirror. “So you figured, ‘What the hell, I’ll put a dead snake in Brenda Newland’s car’?”
“I told you, I never done that. I didn’t have no plan, really. Jolene fell asleep, so I just thought I’d drive up to the ranch, maybe piss in the pool.”
“We’re supposed to believe that?” Colly asked.
“Believe what you want. I’d had a few beers by then.”
Colly considered. “When you got to the ranch, where’d you park?”
“Bottom of the hill, below the Mollison place. I walked up the drive and seen somebody standing by a van messing with something in the front passenger seat.”
“Know who it was?”
Hoyer shook his head. “Too dark. I saw the beam of a flashlight moving around. I must’ve stepped on a stick, because all of a sudden, the guy swung the light my way—”
“The guy? It was a man?”
“Just saw the silhouette. Thought it was Lowell, at first. Dude was kinda short, wearing a Stetson and one of them square-looking field jackets. Lowell’s got a coat like that. Didn’t act like Lowell, though.”
“What do you mean?”
“Lowell’d never abide strangers wandering up to his mama’s place in the dark. He would’ve come after me. Shouted, at least.”
Unless he had reason to keep things quiet , Colly thought. “What did he do?”
“Never made a peep. Just swept the flashlight back and forth in my direction, slow and methodical, like he was hunting for me. Gimme the willies.”
“Did he see you?”
“Dunno. I dove behind one of them big junipers by the drive and hightailed it back to my truck.”
“And then—?”
“Then nothin’. I went home. Jolene was still asleep. Never knew I left.”
“That’s the whole story?”
“Yup.”
Colly studied his face. He seemed to be telling the truth. As she contemplated her next question, she felt a vibration in her pocket and heard a faint mechanical chirp.
“Must be back in range,” Avery said.
Colly pulled out her phone. There was a text from Russ: At hospital. Will call soon.
She had also missed a call from Brenda. School had been out for nearly thirty minutes. In the excitement of the past two hours, she’d lost track of time. Cursing softly, she hit redial.
When Brenda answered, Colly apologized and explained. Could Brenda possibly watch Satchel till Colly got back to town? Brenda hesitated. She had to get her own kids to baseball and ballet, but she’d take Satchel with her. He could hang out at the clinic while she did paperwork, and Colly could pick him up there.
“Is he upset?” Colly asked.
Another hesitation. In the background, Colly could hear children’s voices.
“A little. Let’s talk later.”
Colly thanked her and hung up. “ Shit .”
Avery looked at her questioningly, but Colly shook her head.
“Any news on Jolene?” Jace was leaning forward, his face lined with worry.
“Not yet. When our interview’s finished, I’ll call the hospital.”
“I told you everything.”
“I want to hear the real reason you were fired.”
Jace sat back and crossed his arms. His earlier mood of eager capitulation had vanished. “I bet you do.”
Colly sighed. “I know you think I’m part of some plot to frame you. But honestly, I don’t give a crap about clearing Willis’s name. He may be family, but he was a pedophile.”
“Then why’re you here?”
Colly stiffened defensively but forced herself to relax. Vulnerability with a suspect was sometimes more effective than confrontation. But it was much more difficult.
“Because of guilt, if I’m honest,” she said after a moment.
“That business in Houston?”
Colly nodded. “I cut some corners, and Russ lost his brother. When he asked me to review Denny’s case, I thought I owed him that much. But I’m not here to play along with any Newland PR campaign.”
Jace was watching her through narrowed eyes. “If I incriminate myself, do I get immunity?”
“That’s not my call. But I promise things will go better for you if you cooperate.”
Jace stared down at his cuffed wrists. “Okay. But you gotta drive me to Abilene—not maybe , not we’ll see about it . Drive me there now.”
“I’ve got to get back to Crescent Bluff. Tell us your story, and I’ll have an officer drive you to see Jolene as soon as we’ve booked you at the station. That’s the best you’re going to get, Jace. Take it or leave it.”
He shifted in his seat and finally shrugged. “You talked about cutting corners. I reckon I did, too. But it ain’t my fault. Like I said, Lowell’s good at making a mess for other folks to clean up.”
“What kind of mess?”
“Embezzlement.”
Colly and Avery looked at each other. “From his own company?” Colly asked.
“His old man was grooming him to take over. After Bryant’s first stroke, Lowell was running the show pretty much unsupervised. That’s when it started.”
“He’s been embezzling for fifteen years?”
Jace hunched his shoulders. “Lowell gambles, but he ain’t no good at it. He got himself in a hole, so he raided the piggy bank.”
“He never got caught?”
“Who’s gonna catch him? Bryant was half-gaga by then, and Lowell was in charge of the business accounts. Newland Wind Industries is a decent-sized company, but the old man was a control freak—never took the thing public ’cause he didn’t want no shareholders breathing down his neck.” Jace smiled grimly. “Came back to bite him in the end. As long as Lowell made payroll and kept the place humming, he had nothing to worry about.”
“Sweet deal,” Avery muttered.
“It took a toll. Not at first, ’cause Lowell convinced himself he was just borrowing. Whenever he’d have a winning streak, he’d put the money back. But you know how that goes. The wins got fewer, and his drinking started getting out of hand.”
“If no one knew about it, how’d you find out?” Colly asked.
“Got to be too much for him. Ain’t easy, juggling two sets of books. He needed help. Lowell had the final say on everything, but by the time his old man croaked, he had me overseeing production, purchasing, the whole shebang. I was in it up to my neck—but he made it worth my while.”
Avery was glowering skeptically at Jace in the rearview. Colly leaned back in her seat and gazed thoughtfully out of the window. The storm had moved on. A black wall of flickering cumulus still towered behind them, while in the sky ahead, long streaks of sunlight streamed through the ragged shreds of cloud, turning puddles into patches of dazzling gold.
Colly reached for her sunglasses. “I don’t buy it, Jace. If you had so much dirt on Lowell, why would he fire you? He’s not that stupid.”
Jace snorted. “Wanna bet?”
“Explain.”
“I gotta take a leak first.”
Avery shook her head. “We’ll be at the station in half an hour.”
“I ain’t pissed since last night. You want a mess back here?”
Avery glanced at Colly, who checked the time. “Make it fast.”
Outside, the air was now clear and cool. Red-winged blackbirds squabbled in the reedy ditch along the roadside, and the gravel crunched wetly beneath Colly’s shoes as she rounded the front of the cruiser. Avery was opening Jace’s door.
He emerged and looked around. “Gimme some privacy, will ya?”
“Don’t push your luck.” Avery planted a palm between his shoulder blades and propelled him towards the ditch. “And don’t ask me to take the cuffs off, either. You can unzip yourself just fine.”
When he was finished, Avery spun him around. “Let’s go.”
At the car door, Jace stopped. “I’d remember better with a smoke.”
Avery hesitated, chewing her lip.
She wants one, too , Colly thought. Maybe it’ll keep Jace talking . She checked her watch again. “Fine, but not in the car.”
Avery lit two cigarettes and handed one to Jace.
“Explain why Lowell would fire you if you could send him to prison with one phone call,” Colly said.
“I couldn’t. He woulda taken me down with him. Not just for embezzlement.”
“Meaning?”
Jace leaned against the car door and exhaled white smoke. “Manslaughter, maybe negligent homicide.”
Colly and Avery stared.
“You did kill Denny,” Avery said.
“I ain’t talking about Denny.”
“Who, then?”
Jace tapped his cigarette to dislodge the ashes. “Gimme another one of them coffin nails.”
Colly snatched the pack from Avery and shook out a cigarette. Tucking it behind his ear, Jace stared out across the rain-drenched scrubland. “To understand, you gotta put yourself in Lowell’s shoes,” he said slowly. Lowell’s biggest fear, after his father’s first stroke, had been that the old man would get well and discover the embezzlement before Lowell had time to pay back the money. Bryant would’ve disowned him, maybe even pressed charges. So when Bryant had his second stroke and died, Lowell thought his troubles were over—or at least postponed. Though everything went to Iris, Lowell thought she’d leave him to run the business. But Iris had other plans. A few weeks after the funeral, she called a family meeting. She intended to play a hands-on role in the company moving forward. She asked Lowell for copies of all the business records so she could get up to speed. Lowell panicked. He gave her copies of the dummy books, not the real ones.
Bryant had been a miser. He’d always resisted putting money into development, preferring to keep overhead down and profits high. But Iris turned out to have a shrewd business sense of her own, and she did her homework. Longer blades were the industry standard now, she said. The business couldn’t stay profitable unless they kept up with the times. According to the records Lowell gave her, the company appeared to be sitting on a mountain of capital, and Iris decided to invest a large part of it in upgrades.
“We’re talking a major retooling, millions of dollars,” Jace said. “Problem was, a big chunk of that money wasn’t really there. Lowell was fit to be tied.”
“What’d he do?” Avery demanded.
Jace squinted up at the sky, where a red-tailed hawk circled lazily. “He was in too deep by then. I was, too. I thought we should come clean and hope Iris’s motherly instincts kept her from doing anything too rash. But Lowell wouldn’t hear of it. Too much pride, I reckon. So he started scrambling.”
Lowell had taken out a second mortgage on his house without telling Brenda; sold his hunting cabin, his boat, his ski lodge in Colorado. He ordered Jace to lay off dozens of workers, paring back to a skeleton crew and slashing benefits to the bone. But it wasn’t enough.
“Then one day, Lowell called me into his office,” Jace said. “He looked bad—sweating Scotch, white as a ghost. Told me if I didn’t find a way to cut the cost of Iris’s upgrade by twenty percent, we was both going to prison. I said, ‘How the hell am I supposed to do that?’ But he didn’t want to hear it. Said he didn’t know and he didn’t wanna know—just get it done.” Jace spat out a loose bit of tobacco. “So, I did.”
Colly pursed her lips. “How?”
“Called in some favors, leaned on suppliers that were hungry for our business. But we was still short by a good bit. Then I had my bright idea.” Jace scowled and kicked at the gravel. “When you make turbine blades longer, you gotta use a stronger, more expensive kind of epoxy, see? Which meant we was gonna have to throw out a couple hundred grand worth of the old stuff we had on hand, or sell it at a huge loss—ain’t much market for it nowadays. I figured if I mixed the new stuff with our existing stock—not diluting it much, mind you, just a little—I could make it stretch without really weakening the blades.”
Avery looked pale. “Christ.”
Jace removed the second cigarette from behind his ear and lit it with the butt of the first. “They over-engineer materials for them longer blades to hold up in extreme environments—tundra, open ocean, you name it. I figured West Texas weather ain’t near as harsh as them places.”
“A woman died, Jace,” Colly said.
“Yeah, been eating me up—it gimme a damn ulcer.” He jabbed a thumb at his gut. “But how was I supposed to know? I had my guys run months of stress tests on the prototype blades. Everything held up fine. Till we had that crazy winter. Once-in-a-century fluke, they called it. With weather like that, stuff goes haywire.”
“Did Lowell sign off on all this?”
Jace glanced sidelong at Colly. “Damn straight. I wasn’t gonna be left twisting in the wind if things went sideways. But Lowell didn’t really know what he was signing. His marriage was cracking up, and he was drunk most of the time. I’d copy him on everything and try to explain what I was doing, but he’d wave me off.”
Then came the turbine accident. Jace was terrified that the PUC would uncover what he’d done; but by some miracle, they missed it. He’d thought he was out of danger until last March. When Lowell started talking about suing materials manufacturers, Jace was forced to come clean.
“I explained everything, showed Lowell his signature on the purchase orders. He hit the roof, said I tricked him. Told me to clear out my locker and get off the property. That was my reward for saving his ass.”
Avery flicked her cigarette butt into a puddle. “That explains the first fight. What about the second?”
“Huh?”
“Someone said you and Lowell had another fight later, at a job site.”
“Oh, that.” Jace looked annoyed. “I went to talk to him when I found out he was bad-mouthing me around town. But he wouldn’t listen.”
“I heard you sucker-punched him.”
“He made threats. I got a right to defend my family.”
“What kind of threats?” Colly asked.
“I told him I’d go public about the embezzlement unless he stopped spreading lies about me. It was right after Denny got arrested for that school fire. Lowell said he was buddies with the judge, and he’d pull strings to get Denny locked up if I didn’t watch out. Denny was a punk, but I’m damned if I’ll let someone like Lowell Newland blackmail me.”
“Seems like the blackmail worked,” Colly said. “You kept quiet, and Denny got probation with mandated therapy.”
“I kept quiet for Jolene.” Jace laughed suddenly. “And Brenda Newland ended up being Denny’s shrink. Lowell must’ve been shittin’ himself.”
“Why?”
“Brenda would have him by the short hairs if Denny told her about the embezzlement.”
“Denny knew about that?”
Jace shrugged. “I didn’t tell him, but he could’ve overheard me and Jolene arguing about it. She was pretty pissed off.”
This angle had not occurred to Colly before. It opened up a new set of possibilities.
Avery’s mind was apparently on a similar track. “That’s why Jolene thinks Lowell’s involved in Denny’s murder?”
Jace nodded. “She don’t reckon he done it himself, but he coulda paid someone.”
“You must’ve been just as worried as Lowell about Denny blabbing,” Colly said. “Maybe you teamed up to kill him. Innocent men don’t run—and they don’t need burner phones. We found the receipt for one in your house.”
She expected an explosive reaction to this, but Jace seemed amused. “Sure, I got a burner—I run an off-license meat store out of my garage, for Chrissakes.”
“Where’s the phone now?”
“In my truck.” Jace jerked his head eastward. “Y’all won’t find nothin’ more interesting on it than the price of pork tenderloin.”
Colly and Avery exchanged looks.
“Suppose Lowell says you embezzled, and he didn’t find out till after the fact,” Colly said. “Can you prove any of this?”
“Hell, yes. I knew Lowell would scrub the records, so I printed hard copies. They’re hidden someplace safe.”
“Where?” Avery demanded.
Jace folded his arms. “Someplace safe. Y’all can have ’em after I see Jolene.”
Colly opened the car door and rummaged in her purse. She pulled out the plastic evidence bag containing the torn manila envelope. “Hiding stuff in a freezer’s the oldest trick in the book, Jace.”
“If you found that, you know I’m telling the truth.”
“It’s empty.” Colly shook the bag to illustrate.
Jace’s expression of annoyance morphed into one of almost comical astonishment. “What the fuck ?”
“You didn’t take the papers?”
Jace shook his head. He was still staring at the evidence bag. “Thought if I got collared and Russ Newland found them on me, he might burn ’em. Figured they was safer where they was.”
“Who else knew this was in the freezer?”
“Just Jolene. I told her where to find it in case I ever got arrested.”
A shrill ring interrupted the conversation. Colly pulled out her phone and checked caller ID. “Hey, Russ. Any news?”
From two counties away, she heard him exhale heavily. His voice was flat and weary. “Jolene didn’t make it. I’m heading home.”