Page 74 of Backtrack

“Who else is in there with you?”

“No … no … one,” Moffit whispered. He coughed again. “I am quite alone.”

Cutter trotted forward, half expecting to be shot from the window at any moment. He had questions, and this guy was bleeding out fast.

Moffit had told the truth. He was alone. He breathed his last pitiful breath before Cutter could get to him.

Cutter slid away the gun with the toe of his boot. Far too many friends had been killed by so-called dead men.

“A Browning Hi-Power,” he said under his breath. Gary Ewell, the Jack County deputy, had been murdered with a nine-millimeter. “Well, I do declare …”

Cutter barely got his revolver back in the holster before two Weatherford PD Plymouths fishtailed off Zion Hill Road and spedup the gravel driveway, red and blues flashing, sirens blaring. He stepped to the side of the house and waved his hat to get their attention. Two unmarked sedans followed hot on the tail of the patrol cars. Cutter didn’t know the patrol officers but recognized a city detective named Dee Laufer and Chief of Police Helmond Fritsch, a potbellied man with wire-framed glasses that looked much too small for his wide face. The five-shot revolver on a thin leather dress belt all but disappeared against the man’s bulk. Lafayette Johnson and Chief Deputy Smith were just a few seconds behind.

Less than five minutes from the time Cutter pulled the trigger, seven lawmen stood around Gerald Moffit’s corpse. To Cutter, the air still smelled like gunfire, but that could have been his imagination.

“Did that asshole get a shot off?” Chief Smith asked, taking Cutter by the shoulders. Smith had been a rancher all his life and a lawman long enough to know people under stress often walked around wounded without knowing.

“He did,” Cutter said. “But I’m untouched.”

The chief spun him around anyway, giving his body a methodical boot-to-hat search—a blood sweep. “You still got the right number of holes in your body.” He stepped away. “What do you make of this? A TexSafe boss coming here?”

“We’ve known there was an inside man,” Cutter said. “Moffit is that man, or one of them at least. He was the supervisor, the guy who could have assigned a particular driver to the Sunday run from Eastland.”

Johnson stepped forward, holding up his handheld radio. “I never was able to get ahold of Trina Foster,” he said. “Garza’s on his way out there now.”

“It’s worrisome,” Cutter said. “Moffit told her TexSafe was going to provide some goodwill money until her benefits came through. Likely wanted to make sure she was home.” He resisted the urge to walk over and kick Moffit in the ear.

“This asshole may have orchestrated the job,” Smith said. “But if he’s here, he’s likely looking for the diamonds. And if he’s looking for the diamonds, that means somebody double-crossed him. There’s some justice in that.”

“Maybe so,” Cutter said. “But people are going to keep dying until we find those diamonds.” He glanced at Johnson. “Do me a favor and stand by with Moffit’s body for a second. I want to take a walk through the house, see if I can find out what Moffit was looking for.”

“Hold up,” Chief Smith said. “LJ, weren’t you heading over to talk to Mrs. Odom?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Head on, then,” Smith said. “I’m not handy at much in this old world, but I expect I can muster the good sense to sit with a dead body. You boys know Sheriff Langford isn’t one to let an election get in the way of a good investigation. Fact is, I do believe the man would be every bit as happy to go back to ranching full time if he loses—but he’s a damned good sheriff. It would go a long way to keeping him in office if you could put as much daylight as possible between this shitstorm and the election.”

“And find the killers,” Cutter said.

“That, too,” Smith said.

CHAPTER 30

Cutter had always associated the odor of mildew with his elderly relatives’ homes in the humid piney woods of East Texas. Holly Odom’s sandstone house had a leaky roof that gave it plenty of that. Worse yet, the place wreaked with the sour stench of filthy laundry and unwashed dishes, the felony smell that Cutter knew well but never got used to. He’d been in dozens of such houses over the course of his career. As bad as it smelled, Cutter took his time, working from room to room the way he worked a track—step by deliberate step.

The lingering odor of stale cigarettes in the bedroom provided welcome relief. Ricky Pink—or someone—had been here. A stack of girlie magazines formed a makeshift lamp table next to a grimy mattress covered with rumpled bedding on the floor. There was nothing to identify Pink or anyone else. Cutter suspected the next bedroom belonged to Aunt Holly. There was an actual bed and a chest of drawers there, both of which turned out to be empty. On the bedside table beside a dusty Robert Penn Warren paperback was a tattered and well-used notepad from the Cow Pasture Bank just up the road in Rio Vista. And of course more girlie magazines. The boss of the team slept here—and Cutter doubted that was Pink. The top page of the notepad was blank, but Cutter held the Kel-Lite at an angle over the paper, revealing telltale lines. It looked to be some kind of list. Closer inspection revealed the Fosters’ address off Farm Road 920, toward Peaster. Cutter angled the flashlight, bringing more names into focus. He wasn’t sure but … a little shading with a pencil from his pocket brought the rest ofthe list into view. Ray Gene Bryant was on the list, along with the names and addresses of virtually everyone who’d spent any time at all at the scene of the robbery—including Chief Smith, Johnson—and Cutter. These bastards were going house-to-house.

“Lucy!” Cutter whispered. He stuffed the Kel-Lite in his belt and drew the radio, forcing himself not to panic. “Six-Two, Parker County …” He ticked off a list of addresses where he wanted the dispatcher to send units—including his own. “Have them run code 3.”

Code 3—lights and sirens—made it clear to everyone within earshot that the cops were coming. And that was exactly what Cutter intended. As much as he wanted to capture these outlaws, when the home front was in jeopardy, it was better to scare them away than try to sneak up on them.

Cutter flung open the back door and ran headlong into Chief Smith as he hit the porch.

Smith began talking before Cutter could say anything.

“Why are you sending someone to my house? What the hell did you find in there?”

“It’s a list of anyone who had access to the scene of the armored car robbery,” Cutter said. “Ray Gene Bryant’s name is at the top.” Unwilling to waste any more time, he keyed the handheld and finished explaining the names on the list to the chief and Dispatch at the same time.