Cimarron Rose (Billy Bob Holland 1)

'I don't remember the details very well. I was more worried about the Mexican dirtbag, what's his name, Felix Ringo, the greaseball who fronts points for y'all, he tried to use the situation to cap Billy Bob. A great guy to have on a federal pad,' Temple said.

Mary Beth turned toward me. 'I didn't know that,' she said.

I pulled up the blinds loudly on a sky that swirled with storm clouds. The wind gusted under the trees on the courthouse lawn and blew leaves high in the air. 'Let's talk about our agenda today,' I said.

But agenda was the wrong word. The prosecution's case was not a complex one. Lucas Smothers was found passed out thirty feet from the homicide victim. He was sexually involved with her. He feared she carried his child. His semen, no one else's, was inside the victim's vagina. The pathologist would testify the damage to the genitalia indicated the assailant was probably driven by sexual rage. Lucas himself had told the arresting officers he had no memory of his actions after he had taken off his trousers in the pickup truck. Finally, Lucas had lied and denied even knowing Roseanne Hazlitt's last name.

But my problem was not with any evidence or possible testimony I had learned about in discovery. Instead, I had the brooding sense the loaded gun, the one pointed at Lucas's heart, was in my hand, not Marvin Pomroy's. But I didn't know what to do about it.

That afternoon Marvin rested his case, and while the rain drummed on the trees outside the window, I called Hugo Roberts to the stand.

His sheriff's uniform was freshly pressed, his brass name tag full of light on his pocket, an American flag sewn on the sleeve, but an odor of cigarettes and hair tonic and antiperspirant radiated from him as though it were sealed in his skin. He looked at the jury and spectators and at Marvin Pomroy and at the rain clicking on the windowsills, at virtually everything around him except me, as though I were of little consequence in his day.

'Your unit was the first one to arrive at the crime scene, sheriff?' I said.

'Yeah, I patrolled that area for the last couple of years. While I was a deputy, I mean.'

'Have you run a lot of kids out of there?'

'Yeah, after dark, when they don't have no business being there.'

I picked up a vinyl bag from the exhibit table and removed five Lone Star beer cans and two dirt-impacted wine bottles from it.

'Are these the cans and bottles you recovered at the crime scene, sir?' I asked.

'Yeah, that looks like them.'

'They are or they aren't?'

'Yeah, that's them.'

I introduced the cans and bottles into evidence, then walked back toward the stand.

'These were all you found?' I asked.

'That's what the report says. Five cans and two bottles.' He laughed to himself, as though he were tolerating the ritual of a fool.

'Since those bottles were probably there for years, I won't ask you about them. Whose fingerprints were on the beer cans?'

'Lucas Smothers's and the victim's.'

'Nobody else's?'

'No, sir.'

'Do teenage kids drink and smoke dope out there with some regularity?' I asked.

'I guess some do.'

'But you found no cans or bottles that would indicate anybody else had used that picnic ground recently besides Lucas Smothers and Roseanne Hazlitt?'

'I cain't find what ain't there. Street people pick up gunny sacks of that stuff. Maybe I should have stuck some used rubbers in there.'

Spectators and some of the jury laughed before the judge tapped her gavel. 'Lose the attitude in a hurry, sheriff,' she said.

'Sheriff, why do you think the prosecution didn't introduce the evidence you put in that vinyl bag?' I said.

'Objection, calls for speculation,' Marvin said.