Texas Outlaw (Rory Yates #2) - James Patterson Page 0,55

Public Safety lab in El Paso have given us their word that our requests will bypass the backlog and move to the top of the queue.

As early as tomorrow, a technician will fire Ariana’s grandfather’s rifle into a special water tank and then use a microscope to compare the undamaged bullet to the slug found in the tree. At the same time, technicians will be looking at the DNA of the hair strand, comparing it to the DNA obtained from the cheek swabs of Ariana and Gareth.

This time tomorrow, Ariana could be exonerated.

Or in jail.

Which is why I need to talk to her tonight.

Ariana opens the door before I knock. Her big beautiful eyes look terrified.

She leads me into her living room and asks if I want anything to drink. I tell her I’ll take a beer if she has one, and she disappears into her kitchen. I wait, lingering in her living room. She has a nice home. Small. Nothing too fancy. But she takes good care of what she has.

In one corner is a record player that’s probably older than I am next to a rustic wooden shelf holding an impressive collection of vinyl albums. I browse through the bands. Guns N’ Roses. Led Zeppelin. Pearl Jam. The occasional classic country artist is present—Emmylou Harris, Kenny Rogers, Hank Williams—but the rock albums outnumber country ten to one.

On one shelf are framed photographs of a Mexican man and woman I assume are her parents.

Ariana comes back with two bottles of Bud Light, and we sit at opposite ends of the couch. I take my hat off—I still don’t like the way it fits on my head—and set it on the floor. I set the pharmacy bag beside it. I run my hands through my hair, damp with sweat, and point to the pictures on the shelf.

“Are those your parents?” I say.

She nods and takes a drink.

“Do they still live in Rio Lobo?”

“My dad’s in prison over in Fort Stockton,” she says. “My mom moved back to Mexico after I graduated from high school. Said she couldn’t stand to be here anymore after my dad was arrested.”

I ask what he did, and she explains that he was a janitor at the high school and one day the principal found a stash of marijuana hidden in his supply closet. The amount was enough that they believed he was selling drugs to kids, and a few of them testified to that effect.

“He always claimed he was innocent,” she says. “I believed him for a while. That’s one reason I became a cop. I thought I could help him somehow. But by the time I was out in the world, working as a cop, I started to think differently. I wasn’t so naïve anymore.”

“The former police chief, the one who hired you, was he the one who arrested your dad?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I think that’s why he wanted to give me a chance. He saw that I was trying to be a better person. And once I saw him on the job, doing everything by the book, I knew Dad was guilty.”

She blinks back tears and adds, “Now I might end up in prison just like my old man. Makes me wonder if he was telling the truth all along. Maybe he was framed just like I’m being framed.”

She turns to me, her eyes hardening. “You know it’s a setup,” she says. “Right?”

I do…except there’s a small seed of doubt in my mind. The videotapes of Gareth show him off camera long enough to have committed the crime, but nowhere near long enough that he could have driven to town and stolen Ariana’s gun, made the shot, and then driven back to replace it.

If it was Gareth, someone was helping him.

And if it wasn’t Gareth, then could it have been Ariana?

“I need you to tell me something,” I say, hating myself for asking the question. “Why were you late to work yesterday?”

Chapter 60

ARIANA GLARES AT me, feelings of betrayal evident across her strained features.

“I have to ask,” I say. “You’re never late. But on that day, of all days, you were.”

“You think I drove out there and shot Skip Barnes before coming into work?” she asks. “That’s outrageous.”

“We don’t have a firm time of death yet,” I say.

She shakes her head in disbelief and then answers. “I went for a run. We’ve been working on this case day and night. I thought I deserved a break.” She says she ran on the arroyo