Guzman pretended to think about this. "Yeah, right. Darden and Weeks come out of prison, score a bunch of money somewhere, and someone kills them for it, then stashes one body outside a house in Twin Sisters, where Emmie and her friend happened to spend a few weeks this summer. Then the other guy shows up at Espejo Verde. Pure coincidence. By the way, how close did you get, Miss Monaghan? Did you get a good look?"
"Not very."
"You see something kind of orange on the table? More red than orange, I guess, but it started out gold?"
The T-shirt, the goddamn T-shirt.
"It happens to be a shirt from someplace called Cafe Hon in a place called Bal-tee-more, Maryland." He put a lot of Latin spin on those last two words, as if it were a ridiculous-sounding place for anyone to be from. "You know anyone with a T-shirt like that?"
"I do, for one. Lots of people have Cafe Hon T-shirts," Tess replied. "They put them in local hotel rooms, like Bibles or terry-cloth robes. It's practically a city ordinance that you're not allowed to leave without one."
But to her knowledge, there was only one the color of a mango.
"Do you know how Frank Conyers died?" Guzman asked. The question sounded random and sudden, but Tess doubted the detective ever said or did anything without having a reason.
"Everyone knows about the triple murders, Guzman," Rick said in a bored voice. "He was killed with Lollie and the cook that night."
"Not when, how. You see, Lollie and the cook, Pilar Rodriguez, they died nice and neatly, as these things go. Bullets in the back of the head. Frank Conyers was carved up as if someone was trying to make menudo out of him."
"Menudo?" asked Tess.
"Tripe stew," Rick said.
"They disemboweled him," Guzman said helpfully. "See, I was trying to be nice, but Trejo here made me spell it out. Conyers's throat was slit. So was Weeks's. Conyers was disemboweled-"
"So was Weeks," Tess finished for him.
"You saw?"
"I guessed. What about the fingers, though? Does that correspond, too?"
Guzman frowned. "No, that's a new touch. But it's the other stuff that intrigues me. We never made the details of Conyers's death public, yet someone knows. Someone who Darden and Weeks were going to lead us to this summer."
"A third person?" Rick asked.
"Three bodies, three killers. It has a nice symmetry to it, doesn't it? Or, at least-no, that's all I'm going to tell you right now. You already got more than you ever gave. I'm not telling you another thing until you tell me where to find Ed Ransorne and Emmie Sterne."
Tess said dully, "Crow's gone, God knows where. If I knew where Emmie was, I'd have been there already. And you'd have been right behind me. Unless you were right in front of me. From what I can tell, the cops have been surrounding me like bookends all week. I go someplace, you've been there. I look behind me, and you're there. If I stopped suddenly, one of your guys would step on my heel."
Guzman sighed and-finally-moved away from her. Not by much, but at least she no longer felt as if he were all but sitting in her lap.
"I don't know what to do with you, Theresa Monaghan," he said. "Maybe I should lock you up, maybe I should have you under surveillance. It all depends on if you're crazy like a fox, or just stupid like a, like a-like a hamster." He continued to scrutinize her, as if her animal orientation might be found in her face.
"And?" she said at last, losing the stare-down.
"Go home," he said. "Don't wear yourself out on your little exercise wheel."
Chapter 23
Thursday morning. Tess had been in Texas nine days. She sat in the garden at the Alamo with a Peanut Buster Parfait and thought about everything she had accomplished.
She had found Crow, only to lose him again.
She had found two dead men, both so ripe they might have forever changed her relationship with soft cheeses.
She had learned to say "Good morning," "Good dog," and "You are the father of my baby" in Vietnamese. (People were always saying that last bit in Mrs. Nguyen's private telenovela, and she was kind enough to translate.)
She had experienced coitus interruptus by SWAT team.
She had stumbled on a Dairy Queen in a downtown San Antonio mall and convinced the vacant-eyed adolescent at the counter that she had a medical condition requiring her to consume soft ice cream, hot fudge, and peanuts at eleven in the morning.
Yes, travel was broadening. She'd have to do it again sometime, perhaps at the end of the next millennium.
She saw a flash of blond hair and dared to hope-but no, Emmie wouldn't come here. Emmie was on the run, a trail of dead men in her wake, their ill-gotten gains now her iller-gotten gains. Crow was on the run, looking for Emmie. Or on the run from Emmie, because he had the fifty thousand dollars and she wanted it. That was another one of Guzman's theories. If Emmie and Crow weren't in this together, then they were at each other's throats. Emmie and Crow had conspired to kill her mother's suspected murderers, then fallen out over the unexpected cash bonus. Tess wasn't satisfied. Why would a girl with a trust fund bother to fight over a sum less than the yearly payout on a million-dollar lottery ticket? What did Emmie know about the night her mother died, if anything? What did someone think she knew?
And how could Crow kill anyone, under any circumstance? No one changed that much in five months.
But he would keep quiet to protect someone. Especially if he thought the act was morally defensible.
Especially if he was in love.
Oh, sure, he had been convincing enough in his thwarted seduction of her the other night. But you could sleep with someone while you were still in love with someone else. You could do it quite enthusiastically, even. Tess knew this from firsthand experience. What had Crow said? He had accused her of using him as a bookmark, a way of keeping her place while she tried to figure out how she felt about watching the death of a man who didn't quite belong to her, and never would. A man she didn't quite love, and never would. Just because Emmie was through with Crow didn't mean Crow was through with Emmie. Lovers seldom finished at the same time.
"You're thinking too much," Rick had said when she tried to break down Guzman's theories on the way home from the police station. Happy to be a lawyer still, all he wanted to do was find Crow and turn him over to the authorities, then start preparing his case. But Rick's method of finding Crow was to sit back in his office, doing his other work, waiting for the phone to ring. Sure, they were still going to see that detective this afternoon, the one who had been involved in the original bust of Darden and Weeks. But what did it matter, now that Weeks was a corpse, too? Tess wanted to do something, go somewhere, ask some questions. Unfortunately, her inherent bias toward action was proving less than constructive, except as a way of drumming up business for local mortuaries. She felt as if she were flooring a car in snow and ice. The tires spun, the snow melted, taking you down to the ice, where there was no traction, so you went nowhere. So you floored it again, and the tires spun, and the snow melted, and you went nowhere.
Again she thought she saw a blond head, the same white blond as Emmie. It couldn't be.
It wasn't. It was Clay Sterne, disappointment naked in his face.
"She's not here," Tess said.
"I didn't come to see her," he shot back.
"You don't have to worry, Clay. I won't tell your father you were here."
"I do what I want to do, not what my father tells me."
Tess nodded. "Is that why you're living at home, preparing to take over a business you can't stand, instead of going for the advanced degree you want?"