“What are you getting at, Ranger?” Rawls asked, the slight distance between them suddenly seeming like a dark chasm.
“It’s like I said, sir. I know the life you came from, that brought you to Texas as a boy, and how you saw fit to pay the world back by beating up call girls, starting with Brandy Darnell. That name ring a bell?”
“No.”
“That’s right,” Caitlin remembered, “back then she went by the name Brandy Wine. You fled Texas after you raped her, never responded to any of her letters or messages about leaving her pregnant.”
Rawls had grown stiffer than the wooden chair in which he was seated. “She was after money, Ranger. She tell you that? And she didn’t even raise the kid herself.”
“No, sir. But she tracked him down when he turned eighteen, learned everything she could about him. That’s why you’re going to cooperate with us, Mr. Rawls. That’s why you’re going to tell us everything we want to know, without your lawyers present. Save yourself a boatload of money.”
Rawls looked genuinely befuddled. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you don’t, so let me spell it out for you, sir. That suspect I mentioned goes by the name of Daniel Cross. He’s a brilliant but troubled kid, and a genius when it comes to chemical engineering. Any of this ringing a bell?”
“No.”
“Cross was part of the original analytical team retained by Jackson Whole Mineral,” Caitlin explained, a fact that she had discovered during her scrutiny of Sam Bob Jackson’s personnel records, provided by Jones. “He spent six months on that land, trying to pinpoint whatever it was you were looking for, but he found something else entirely, which he decided to put to his own use. That’s what ISIS will soon have in hand, if they don’t already. That’s why somebody put a bullet in Sam Bob’s head this morning and would’ve put one in yours, too, if Cort Wesley Masters hadn’t been there. They’re tying up loose ends, eliminating anybody else who might have knowledge of what’s on that land.”
“Well, then, by all means thank Mr. Masters for me,” Rawls said, his tone laced with enough smarmy sanctimony to turn Caitlin’s stomach. “But none of that, in any way, shape, or form, links me directly to this Daniel Cross or makes me somehow culpable for this potential attack ISIS may be about to launch. You have any more shit you want to throw at the wall to see if it sticks, Ranger?”
“Just this: Daniel Cross is your son, Mr. Rawls.”
85
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
Rawls didn’t respond, didn’t speak. The air in the cramped office, which was overstuffed with storage boxes, felt thick, the way air outside did when foreshadowing a thunderstorm. Soupy, heavy, moist—all of it seemed to radiate off Cray Rawls, whose expression was that of a man who had just relived the last twenty-five years of his life in slow motion.
Jones dropped a file folder into the man’s lap, fanning the still air a bit. “Everything we’ve got on Daniel Cross. I was going to share it with you for different reasons entirely,” he added, eyes straying to Caitlin, “until the Ranger here shocked the shit out of both of us.”
Rawls started to open the folder, then stopped. He looked up to find Caitlin staring at him, her face utterly blank.
“I met your boy myself, when he was fourteen,” she said, “a gangly, bullied freshman who’d threatened on MySpace to blow up his high school. I couldn’t help but feel bad for him, the kid being so smart and all, and being tortured by bullies. I got him out of that scrape, gave him a second chance, thought I could make a difference in his life. But then things took a bad turn for me. I left the Rangers for a time and lost track of him, and for the past few days I’ve been blaming myself for his involvement in all this. But now that I know he’s got your blood pumping through his veins, I guess nothing I did would’ve mattered, would it, Mr. Rawls? I never had a chance, and neither did he.”
Rawls clutched the folder in his lap tighter.
“Here’s what’s going to happen, sir,” Caitlin said, rising from her chair and standing over him. “You’re going to tell us everything you know about that land. You’re not going to wait for your lawyer, you’re not going to pass Go and collect two hundred dollars, you’re going to talk. And if you don’t, the whole world is going to find out that you fathered a child who’s planning a terrorist attack that’ll make nine eleven look like a drill. Have I got your attention?”
Rawls looked up at Caitlin in painfully deliberate fashion, as if he had to wait for some puppet master to pull on his strings. “That’s blackmail.”
“No, sir, it’s the truth.”
“You don’t understand.”
Caitlin leaned forward and grasped the arms of Rawls’s chair, forcing him to twist himself tight and small, further exaggerating her advantage. “Then make me understand.”
“Tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars … That’s what it’s worth.”