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I turn my gaze to Parker to make sure he’s okay with it.
“Actually, I’ll be in town for a few days,” I say. “I was hoping I’d get to catch up with y’all a little bit. Make the trip businessandpleasure.”
“That would be fantastic,” Josie says, squeezing my arm.
Parker nods, and for the first time he seems more at ease with my presence. I decide he doesn’t like the idea of talking about anything related to law enforcement. But catching up with an old friend? He’s more than okay with that.
The kids have wandered up from the yard to the porch, and Parker introduces me. Their names are Leroy—they call him Leo, for short—and Etta.
“This is an old friend of mine,” Parker says to them.
“Are you a Texas Ranger?” Leo asks.
He looks a lot like his dad, and I know he’ll grow up to be just as tough and just as moral. The girl is as cute as could be, a younger version of Josie.
“I am,” I say, tapping the star pinned to my shirt.
“My daddy used to be a Texas Ranger,” Leo says.
“I know,” I say. “He was as good as they come.”
“Daddy,” says Etta, “why aren’t you a Texas Ranger anymore?”
All our eyes turn to Parker, who has an expression like he’s just been asked a question he doesn’t want to answer.
“Don’t ask,” he jokes. Then he adds, “Come on, Rory, let’s get this over with.”
CHAPTER 9
PARKER LEADS ME through the house. It’s a nice home, with wood-plank floors and a variety of pastel walls a different color in each room. I look for extravagantly expensive items, such as huge TVs or fancy decorations, but everything seems modest. There are some amazing watercolor landscapes hanging here and there in frames, but the initials of the artist are JL.
“Josie paint these?” I ask.
“Sure did,” he says. “These are the ones I couldn’t let her sell.”
I remember Josie sold paintings on the side. She was a dispatcher for the county police years ago, but I heard she quit when Parker did.
“What do y’all do for work these days, if you don’t mind me asking?”
Parker says he’s been building furniture and sells it on commission in various stores and markets throughout the state. He’s got a shop set up in the barn with everything he needs.
“There were a few lean years after I quit the Rangers,” he says. “But things have picked up and I make more now than I ever did as a cop. Josie still paints some, but mostly she can focus on homeschooling the kids.”
The house is big, with more rooms than a family of four probably needs, but I don’t see that as evidence that Parker’s been swimming in extra money. House prices in Middle of Nowhere, Texas, aren’t exactly sky high. He bought this place back when he was a Ranger.
Finally, he leads me to a little office near the back of the house. There’s a small wooden desk—maybe Parker made it?—with some invoices and furniture drawings scattered on top of it. He picks up a stack of books off a chair and invites me to sit. Then he plops next to me in his own rolling chair.
He takes a deep breath, like a man resigned to a fate he doesn’t want—not unlike my reaction when I thought I had to go to brunch with Megan’s colleagues.
“Okay,” he says. “Ask me whatever you want. But once we leave this room, no more talking about the case. We’re just old friends catching up.”
“Fair enough,” I say.
I ask him to summarize the case and his findings, and he does so with a certain amount of discomfort. Clearly, I’m asking him to dig through a part of his past that he doesn’t like to think about.
“Sometimes I feel like I really screwed up,” he says. “Like I was too quick to arrest that son of a bitch. Maybe if I’d been patient we could have come up with more evidence over time. But then I think about those people he killed, their bodies left out in the fields with their throats slit, and I know I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if he’d killed another person while we were sitting on our hands not making an arrest.”
He clears his throat, shaken by the memories.
