For Just Cause

As they approached Claudia’s silver-green Nissan Roadster, she used her remote to unlock the doors.

Billy whistled appreciatively. “Sweet ride.”

“Thanks.” She’d insisted on driving for two reasons. First, it gave her something to do with her hands, somewhere to focus her attention besides on Billy so she wouldn’t give away her roiling emotions. And second, she wanted—no, needed—to have control of something. Relinquishing the driving all day long yesterday to Billy had been a tough challenge, particularly since she hadn’t felt she’d had a strong grip on anything else, especially her own feelings.

She glanced over at him as he fastened his seat belt. A lot of men would balk at allowing a woman to drive them anyplace. But Billy was obviously secure enough in his masculinity that it didn’t bother him. Or maybe it bothered him and she wasn’t able to tell.

Why wouldn’t he be secure? Lord, he was handsome in a striped button shirt and a lightweight summer jacket, worn to disguise the fact that he carried a sidearm in a shoulder holster. A crisp pair of boot-cut Levi’s, the ostrich-skin boots to go with them and a white straw Stetson completed the picture.

He took his hat off and settled it on his lap, then donned reflective mirror sunglasses.

One reason cops wore mirrored sunglasses was so they wouldn’t telegraph their actions with their eyes. Was it possible he deliberately hid behind those opaque lenses to make it harder for her to read him? Did he really not want her to know who he was?

She supposed that was only fair. She didn’t exactly go out of her way to broadcast her true self, either. She punched Angie Torres’s address into her GPS, then slid her car smoothly into downtown morning traffic.

Angie Torres lived in a run-down area of Harrisburg Boulevard in Magnolia Park, a hundred-year-old neighborhood of Houston in the early stages of rehabilitation. But this block hadn’t yet been gentrified; the apartment was above a strip of white-brick stores, most of which were boarded up.

Mary-Francis had said her daughter worked in a medical office, leading Claudia to believe she was a functional addict, but this looked to be the sort of place where the near-homeless, prostitutes and other victims of society ended up.

Claudia and Billy climbed a dark staircase into an equally dim hallway, alive with roaches and smelling of urine. Billy placed his body between Claudia and the door as he rang the bell. Though it was a simple display of caveman machismo, it had an undeniable effect on her. His protectiveness made her skin tingle with warmth. Few people in her life had ever put her safety and well-being above their own, even casually.

No one answered. Billy knocked, then pressed his ear against the door and listened.

“I don’t think there’s anyone inside. I don’t hear voices or a TV, not even sounds of a pet. Let’s check around the back. There’s probably a fire escape or something.”

Once outside, Claudia was grateful for a breath of fresh air. She tried to follow Billy on his quest to find a back door, but the tangled, thorny brush behind the small, two-story building proved a bit much for her leather sandals and bare legs, so she waited for him in the shade of a tattered store awning, welcoming the small breather. Being around Billy was a lot of work.

She couldn’t even tell whether he was attracted to her. Normally she could discern in a heartbeat if a man was interested in her, at least on a physical level. The signs were so obvious—the covert studying of her body, the way an interested man leaned in when speaking to her, the length of eye contact, the way his gaze would move from face to breast to legs, then back, and that unique male shifting of weight to accommodate a burgeoning erection.

Billy had flirted with her, but flirting was automatic with him. He’d have probably flirted with Celeste if he hadn’t been so surprised by the javelina. But Claudia absolutely couldn’t tell if anything lurked behind the flirting.

With Billy, she was drowning in a sea of unknowns, confused about where she stood. For the first time in years, the ball of fear in her stomach just wouldn’t go away. Her built-in alarm system was warning her of Danger! in flashing red letters.

Unfortunately, the same thing that made Billy a mystery also made him undeniably exciting. What if he could read her attraction to him? How awful would that be?

She had some control over the physical signals she broadcast to the world, but she couldn’t do anything about the pheromones that were undoubtedly wafting from her body in waves.

As she waited for Billy, a young, skinny Hispanic man covered with tattoos exited from the door that led upstairs.

He noticed her as he walked toward a beat-up truck, and did a double take, this time perusing her up and down, his expression at first hostile, then more curious.

Claudia slid her hand into her pocket where she kept a small device that, with the push of a button, would emit a piercing siren. She never went anywhere without it.

“¿Qué pasa, mama?”

“Hola, señor.” Her Spanish was limited, but she knew enough to have a stilted conversation if necessary. “Do you speak English?”

“You want me to speak English, I speak English,” he said with almost no accent.

“My partner and I are looking for Angie Torres.” She hoped the use of the word partner would cause the man to think she was a cop.

He smiled slowly. “Police? You?” He laughed and shook his head. Then he continued in perfectly good English, “No cop I know dresses like that.”

“Do you know Angie?” she persisted.

The man leaned against a post and crossed his ankles as he lit a cigarette. The signs said he was flirting, not dangerous. She slipped her hand out of her pocket.

“Yeah, I know her.” And didn’t care for her, apparently, judging from the way he flashed a slight sneer. “She moved out. She inherited a house. Her mom murdered her dad and went to prison for it. She was a piece of work, that girl.” The man closed his eyes and shook his head.

“Why do you say that?”

“Always carping about how selfish her parents were, that they were rich and never gave her a dime. But who could blame them? Any money they gave her went up in smoke. I wouldn’t put it past her to kill her dad and blame it on her mama so she could get hold of their money.”

An alarming possibility, one they should probably look into, though Angie’s only criminal record consisted of a couple of misdemeanor possession charges.

“What kind of drugs did she use?”

The young man took a long drag on his cigarette and blew it out slowly—a classic move someone took to collect his thoughts before speaking. “Anything she could get her hands on. Got fired from her last job for stealing Vicodin.”

That would explain why she wasn’t working at the medical office anymore.

“Thanks. I appreciate the information.”

“No problem.” He flicked his ash into the breeze. “You busy later?”

Lord, she hoped so. She cast a glance toward the back of the building. “Um, my partner is really jealous. You probably don’t want him to see us talking.”

The man gave her a regretful look, then turned and sauntered away.

Billy reappeared around the corner. “No fire escape. This building is a code inspector’s nightmare. Who was that guy you were talking to?”

“A neighbor. He says we’ll find Angie at her parents’ house, which she now considers hers.”

“Probably at least half of it is. Mary-Francis wouldn’t have been allowed to keep the profits from her crime—in this case, her half of the community property. Was there a will?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let’s check out the house.” He paused just before getting into the Roadster. “There’s no reason you have to waste your whole day running around checking out leads. You can drop me at the office and get back to your work. I can do this on my own.”

“I want to meet Angie,” Claudia said firmly as she opened the car door. It had sat in the sun only a few minutes, but hot air wafted out, and she waited for it to cool off slightly before she climbed inside. “I want to see for myself how she acts when we bring up the coins…and her father.”

Billy’s eyebrows lifted. “You don’t trust me. You don’t think I can handle it.”

“Oh, no, Billy, it’s not that. I just…I feel so responsible for Mary-Francis ending up on death row. The prosecution used certain parts of my evaluation to make things worse for her. If there’s any chance of saving her…I just want to do my part, that’s all.”

“You did your part. You drew the case to our attention. We can take it—”

“Billy, don’t be difficult. I want to go with you to interview Angie.”