“I know that, Brandy. And I wish I could do something about that, but I can’t.”
Brandy stiffened and eased herself away. “Then what am I doing here?”
“I thought there might be another way you could help me get the man who hurt you.”
“What’s that?”
And Caitlin told her.
84
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
“I’m going to tell you the same thing I told Blockhead here,” Cray Rawls said, referring to Jones, as soon as Caitlin had closed the door behind her. “I got nothing to say until my lawyer arrives.”
“That’s your choice, sir,” Caitlin said, taking the chair next to him. “But it’s not one I recommend.”
Rawls smirked, shook his head. “Of course you wouldn’t.”
“To tell you the truth, Mr. Rawls, I’m a bit disappointed. You talk up a good game on the subject of patriotism, but now, when push comes to shove, you run for the hills.”
“And how’s that exactly, Ranger?”
Caitlin aimed her gaze briefly at Jones. “It’s like ‘Blockhead’ here undoubtedly told you. We’re looking at a situation we have strong reason to believe involves ISIS and the same Comanche Indian reservation you’ve got a big stake in. And we believe you and ISIS might be after the same thing.”
“Oil?”
“You want to lie to my face, Mr. Rawls, go ahead. But please don’t play me for a fool. You wouldn’t be waiting for your lawyer if this were about oil on that land,” Caitlin told him, suppressing a smile over the fact that Cray Rawls’s lawyer had been informed by Cort Wesley, downstairs, that his client had been transferred to the FBI’s regional office in Houston to await questioning. “We’re talking about something else. We’re talking about something that, unbeknownst to you, can be or already has been weaponized.”
That seemed to stoke Rawls’s curiosity. “What do you mean, weaponized?”
Caitlin glanced toward Jones again. “You didn’t tell him?”
“It’s classified,” Jones offered in explanation.
“You can arrest me later,” Caitlin said to Jones, then looked back toward Rawls. “You heard about what happened in Austin, at that restaurant two days back?”
Rawls nodded stiffly.
“Well, then, let me tell you something you haven’t heard: We’ve identified suspects connected to that Comanche land through a third party I spotted outside the premises myself. We know said third party was skulking around the reservation proper, and we believe he left with whatever killed those folks eating their lunch at Hoover’s Cooking. And we suspect that your construction crew is about to lay the groundwork for pulling whatever it is out of the ground. How am I doing so far?”
“No comment,” Rawls said, his smirk not able to hide the sudden wave of doubt and uncertainty that had claimed his features.
“Then allow me to continue. If you don’t help us, you’ll go down as an accessory to whatever ISIS is planning to do. You’ll be aiding and abetting a terrorist organization committed to our destruction, and you would’ve, unwittingly or otherwise, provided the means for them to stage an attack on the homeland. Anything you want to say now, sir?”
“I didn’t provide them with a goddamn thing.”
“And who’s going to believe you, given your lack of cooperation, Mr. Rawls?”
Caitlin backed off a bit, letting Rawls have his space, to provide a false sense of comfort.
True to form, he seemed to quickly recover his bravado. “Ranger, I know my way around the law well enough to be sure you haven’t got anything on me that’s actionable. So, you want to try shipping me off to Cuba or some other hellhole, have at it, and bear the wrath of my thousand-dollar-an-hour attorneys—a fate worse than death, believe me.”
Caitlin slid her chair in closer to his. “That may be true, sir. But you’ve got another problem, which I don’t think they’ll be able to help you out with. Something I don’t think you’d want even your high-priced shysters to hear about. Goes back a whole bunch of years, to when you raped that call girl before you fled Texas to return to North Carolina.”
“Allegedly,” Rawls was quick to point out.
“I’ve come up against more than my share of men like you, sir,” Caitlin continued. “Men who’ve risen to wealth and power on the backs of others, who feel they have a license to hurt people on account of them being hurt themselves. You’re all like characters out of Shakespeare. In your case, I know your own mother was a working girl herself, until she was killed by one of her johns, and growing up that way is surely call for a man to be angry. But that doesn’t entitle you to pay the world back for your pain by inflicting it on women just like your mother. I even heard that, a few days back, not far from that Wake County courthouse where your verdict came down, a prostitute claimed she was beaten with a sock full of motel soaps by a man she couldn’t identify. Then she disappeared.”