“A lot of my friends had it worse,” she told him. “One had an alcoholic father who beat her, another was diabetic and her family argued all the time. She ended up in the emergency room time after time until finally she died of it. Stress can kill. I’ve seen it done.” She hesitated. “Listen, can you meet me at your office in about ten minutes? I’ll lie to Raines and tell him I have to check in with you before I can leave the ranch.”
“Yes, I can. He’ll bring you?”
“I can promise you that he will, or I’ll have hysterics all over him.”
He chuckled. “Okay. Ten minutes.”
When Raines came by to pick her up, she told him he had to run her by the sheriff’s office on the way to the airport to check in.
“I haven’t done it today. If I don’t, he may try to come after me and arrest me. I don’t want to go to jail!” she said, sounding alarmed.
He bit his lip. “Okay, okay. We’ve got a little time. But don’t be long!”
“I won’t. I promise.” She tried not to sound as relieved as she felt.
He stopped at the detention center and let her out with a reminder to hurry.
“Well, that went easier than I expected it to,” she told Marlowe in his office. “I expected to have to do some persuading.”
Marlowe’s eyes became far away. She knew the look; she’d seen it in agents that she worked with, who’d been in combat in the military. They called it the thousand-yard stare. It was men looking into nothing and seeing things so horrible that they could never even talk about them.
She moved just a step closer and looked up at him with her pale eyes. “I have comrades who’ve been in combat,” she said. “Some drink. One committed suicide. Nights get very long when you’re trapped with your nightmares. When this is all over, I’ll give you my number on my cell phone. I don’t sleep much, either, so I’m usually awake at two or three in the morning. You won’t wake me up if you text me. There is one strange thing,” she added. “I won’t talk on the phone. I hate it. I like texts. I’ll answer those.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’m eccentric.”
“That makes two of us,” he said. “I feed stray cats, and I have a bobcat who comes to the back door and scratches to be fed periodically. I saved it after it was hit by a car.” His dark eyebrows drew together. “Apparently, someone hit it and just kept going. I picked it up, put it on the passenger seat and took it to the vet. Fortunately, he’s affiliated with the national people, so he’s listed and qualified to deal with wild animals. Most vets aren’t allowed to touch them.”
“But that’s wrong,” she said. “It’s just wrong!”
“Ohh, that’s only the beginning,” he said. “You have no idea what laws are in place concerning wild animals. If you trap one like a raccoon or a groundhog, they’re compelled to euthanize it if they have it in a trap. They can’t turn it loose again.”
“But that’s barbaric!” she said. “What kind of lunatic makes such a law?”
“Gets even better,” he told her. “If you pick up a feather inyour yard, you better have a scavengers’ license. And if you get an eagle feather, and you’re not certifiably Native American, you can go to prison.”
“I’m living in an asylum,” she said, looking up at him.
He shrugged. He smiled sadly. “Welcome to the world.”
She shook her head. “Why doesn’t the government do something besides trying to kill things that we should be trying to save?”
“You work for it,” he reminded her. “Tell them.”
“You’re law enforcement,” she said. “You could tell them, too.”
His eyes had that faraway look again. “I try to keep away from Washington as much as possible,” he said. “I tend to cause trouble when I go up there. Big trouble.”
This was fascinating. “What do you do?” she wanted to know.
“Well, once there was a broken window,” he said.
“How did it get broken?” she asked.
He rammed his hands into the pockets of his jeans and just smiled. “I demonstrated the defenestration of Prague with a representative from my district. He was trying to get through a law that would have wrecked the cattle industry here. The authorities seemed to feel that I overreacted. I didn’t feel that way at all.”
She broke out laughing. She remembered the infamous defenestration of Prague from her Western Civilization classes in college. “You threw a representative through a window? Did he live?”
“Oh, they made a big deal out of it,” he said. “Lawsuits threatened, one of the policemen tried to arrest me.”
“What did you do then?” she asked, fascinated.
