She came down on both elbows. “Do you?”
He patted the air, urging her to lie back down. “No, I guess it wasn’t.”
“Then don’t tax my strength with stupid questions.”
He ran a hand through his hair and swore. “When I told my old buddy Greg Harper that you’d have carte blanche, I didn’t know that you were going to wreak havoc in my county.”
Her patience with him snapped. “It’s my head that mountains are being slammed against, Mr. Chastain. Why are you whining?”
“Well, dammit, Alex. Judge Wallace, who didn’t like me much in the first place, is hotter than a pistol. I can’t win a single point in his courtroom these days. You’ve all but called three of the county’s leading citizens murderers. Pasty Hickam, a fixture in this town, turns up dead while you’re with him. You were at Nora Gail Burton’s whorehouse when a shooting took place. Goddamn it, why’d you have to open up that hornets’ nest?”
She pressed her hand to her throbbing forehead. “It wasn’t by choice. I was following a lead.” She lowered her hand and gave him a pointed look. “And don’t worry, your secret interest in Nora Gail’s is safe with me.”
He squirmed guiltily in his chair. “I tell you, Alex, you’ve got a bull by the horns here, and it almost got you killed tonight.”
“Which should prove that I’m getting closer to the truth. Someone’s trying to bump me off to protect himself.”
“I guess,” he said morosely. “What have you got that you didn’t have before you got here?”
“Firmly established motives, for one thing.”
“Anything else?”
“A shortage of concrete alibis. Reede Lambert says he was with Nora Gail. She admitted that she would perjure herself if necessary to corroborate that, which leads me to believe that he wasn’t with her all night. Junior hasn’t produced any kind of alibi.”
“What about Angus?”
“He claims he was at the ranch, but so was Celina. If Angus was there all night, he would have had ample opportunity.”
“So would Gooney Bud, if he’d followed her out there,” Pat said, “and that’s what a good defense attorney will tell the jury. No one gets life on probable cause. You’ve still got nothing that places one of them in that stable with a scalpel in his hand.”
“I was on my way to your office this afternoon to talk to you about that when I was run off the road.”
“Talk to me about what?”
“The vet’s scalpel. What happened to it?”
An expression of surprise came over his face. “You’re the second person this week to ask me that.”
Alex struggled to prop herself up on one elbow. “Who else asked you about it?”
“I did,” Reede Lambert said from the doorway.
Chapter 38
Alex’s insides lifted weightlessly. She had dreaded the moment she would see him again. It was inevitable, of course, but she had hoped to appear unscathed by what had happened between them.
Lying on a hospital examination table, her hair clotted with blood, her hands painted with pumpkin-color antiseptic, too weak and muzzy to sit up, didn’t exactly convey the impression of invincibility she had desired.
“Hello, Sheriff Lambert. You’ll be pleased to know that I took your advice and stopped looking over my shoulder for bogeymen.”
Ignoring her, he said, “Hi, Pat. I just got off the radio with the deputy.”
“Then you heard what happened?”
“My first thought was that Plummet was involved, but the deputy said her car was struck by an ME truck.”
“That’s right.”