Texas Outlaw (Rory Yates #2) - James Patterson Page 0,59

send two text messages from my burner phone. One to Tom Aaron. One to Ariana Delgado. With those two texts, I’m now breaking the law.

It’s official.

I’m an outlaw.

Even if no one knows it yet.

Chapter 64

I WALK INTO his office without a word. He doesn’t tell me the results, just hands the papers to me so I can see for myself. I scan the reports without sitting down.

There’s no equivocation about what the tests revealed, nothing inconclusive.

Everything points to Ariana.

The 30-06 round that passed through Skip Barnes’s head was fired from Ariana’s M1 Garand. The hair strand I took from the top of the oil derrick is also a genetic match for Ariana. With her fingerprints on the shell casing, that makes three significant pieces of forensic evidence that all point to Ariana as the shooter who killed Skip Barnes.

I set the papers down on Harris’s desk. He stares at me. I know he’s ready for me to argue. He’s known since we found the gun that this moment would come, and I’d argue until I was blue in the face that this is a setup.

Instead, I take a different tactic.

“Do you really think she did it?” I say, my voice as calm and submissive as I can make it.

The tension in his posture seems to lessen.

“I don’t know,” he says. “But what would you do if this wasn’t Ariana? If this was someone you didn’t know?”

I act like I’m thinking about his question. I sit down in the chair across from his desk, and he does the same on the other side.

“Under ordinary circumstances,” I say, “I would arrest her. This is enough evidence to keep her in jail while we try to fill in the gaps in the investigation.”

If Ariana is arrested, it’s not as if the work on the case would be finished. We would need to look for witnesses, conduct interviews, continue looking for evidence. Ariana said she went for a run that morning. We would need to find witnesses who could contradict her statement—or verify it. This is a small town. Someone probably saw her running. Or, if she did drive out to McCormack’s ranch, then someone probably saw her in a vehicle.

If this was anyone but Ariana, I would assume the person is guilty based on the evidence we already have. I would continue to work to make sure the case is as solid as possible. But I would like to think that if I found holes in the case, if witnesses did claim to see her running on the arroyo, I wouldn’t ignore the possibility that Ariana might be innocent. I wouldn’t cherry-pick my facts and use only the ones that support a case against a suspect.

I explain all this to Harris as clearly as I can, how I would ordinarily arrest the suspect at this point because I would be confident that our continued investigation would not weaken our case, only make it stronger.

“In this case,” I say to Harris, “I feel certain that once we really dig into this thing, we’ll find holes. We’ll find problems. We’ll get to the bottom of the setup. We’re going to end up letting her go. So let’s just skip the part where we look like jackasses a week from now or a month from now. Let’s refrain from making a bad arrest.”

To Harris’s credit, he doesn’t get angry with me. We talk about this like two professionals, weighing the pros and cons, discussing what the best next step is. In the end, he finds the flaw in my argument. Essentially, I’m saying that if this was anyone else, I would arrest the person, and the only reason I don’t want to arrest Ariana is that I know, in my heart, that she didn’t do it, despite all evidence to the contrary.

“Do you hear yourself, Rory?” he says. “We can’t just ignore the facts and say, ‘Oh, but I know her. She would never do this.’ I don’t like the idea of arresting her any more than you do. She’s my detective, for Christ’s sake. But we can’t let her walk around free when everything points to her being a murderer.”

“All right,” I say. “But before we go arrest her, Chief, let me make a promise to you. I know this is a setup. You’re either a pawn or a participant. If it turns out you’re a pawn, that’s forgivable, I guess, but it means you’re inept as a police chief. If it turns out she’s