Camelback Falls (David Mapstone Mystery 2)

“So tell us what really happened,” I prodded.

“They told me they’d kill me if I said a word!” She looked at me straight on, fear in her eyes.

“Tonight?”

“No.” She shook her head vehemently. “No, damn it. Twenty years ago…” She tried to slow her breathing. “You don’t know anything, do you?”

We just sat and watched her. The room smelled of winter heat. Beth wrapped her arms around her legs and talked in a slow voice. “That night in 1979, when the shooting happened. It wasn’t what you think. Billy and Troyce had a deal with those old cops. They stole twenty pounds of cocaine from the evidence room, and Billy and Troyce were going to break it down and sell it. They were going to split the profits.”

My head felt heavy from the swelling around my eye, and from Beth’s words. I said, “Beth, these were decorated deputies, killed in the line of duty on a traffic stop.”

“Yeah, right.” She laughed. “I was there, OK? I saw what happened.”

Lindsey asked, “How did all this come about? How did Billy and Troyce know the deputies?”

“I don’t know,” she said, too quickly. “They knew a lot of bad people.”

“How did you get there?” Lindsey wanted to know.

“They picked up Leo and me, to go riding,” she said. “We didn’t know what the hell was going on. And once we realized, it was too late to bail out. So we were just supposed to meet these cops in Guadalupe, take the stuff and go. That was it.”

I said into the pause, “What went wrong?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know for certain. We stayed in the car. But I could see Billy and Troyce start shouting. It got really heavy. Then Billy ran back and got this rifle, and started shooting. We ducked down in the back seat. I just knew we were dead.”

She readjusted the ice on her jaw and went on. “Don’t you get it? The cops were dealing drugs. There was twenty pounds of cocaine in that cop’s car that night.”

“But you said you were threatened about talking,” I said. “Who threatened you?”

“After we were put in jail, this detective talked to me. He said if I ever talked about what I’d seen that night, they’d find me and kill me. He told me what I was supposed to say, and gave me a statement to sign. The statement said we’d been stopped for speeding, and Billy and Troyce opened fire on the cops for no reason. That’s not at all what happened.”

“Did you tell your lawyers any of this?” Lindsey asked.

“Are you nuts?” Beth said. “This guy said they’d kill me, and I believed him. I always hated having a rich father, but that time I let him rescue me, and I never talked about what happened.”

I asked, “What did this detective look like?”

“I don’t know,” she said, flustered. “A white guy. Average. Dark hair.”

“What happened to the cocaine that night?”

She sighed and stretched out her legs. “You got anything to drink?”

There was a bottle of Glenlivet on the dresser. I rounded up three glasses and poured everybody two fingers. Beth bolted down the scotch in one slug. Then we sat in silence, listening for God knows what coming down the hallway. A soft murmur of downtown traffic penetrated the window.

Finally, Beth said, “Another cop took the coke.”

We didn’t say a word, so she went on. “He was big. Hispanic.”

Every one of my aches throbbed deeper, but I just sat there and nursed the Glenlivet. I wished for the more expensive scotch I had enjoyed earlier in the evening, when my overly complicated life was a little less complicated than it had since become.

“Why don’t you walk us through what you remember,” Lindsey suggested.

“I was in the back of a squad car, handcuffed,” Beth said. “But I had a good view. This Hispanic cop walked to the trunk of the first cop car. The trunk was already open. And he took out the coke, and put it in his car.”

“How do you know it was the cocaine?” Lindsey asked.

“I saw it,” Beth said. “The old cops had pulled it out and showed it to Billy and Troyce before things turned bad. It was in this grocery bag. And after…well, this big Hispanic cop took it.”