Tres Leches Cupcakes (39 page)

She thought about Rex and Caro and wondered if anything would change between them now. Maybe this little “adventure” would be a new beginning. There was nothing like facing imminent death together to strengthen a relationship.

“He was able to give his statement? That’s a good sign, right?”

“He’ll be all right, but those air bags pack quite a punch.”

Sadie nodded. She knew from experience how aggressive air bags could be. “He saved my life,” she said, still visualizing those final moments.

Marcus was silent for a few beats. “Anything else you want to add?”

Sadie shook her head.

“Can I get you anything before I go?”

She shook her head again. There was nothing she needed or wanted right now that Marcus could help her find. She wanted to go home and go to bed. But where was home? Her hotel in Albuquerque which was being dusted for prints and fully inventoried since Horace and the Cowboy had searched it earlier? Or Rex and Caro’s house she’d been asked to leave? Had Rex bulldozing the trailer changed things enough that she could expect to be welcomed back?

“There’s someone else who’d like to talk to you,” Marcus said as he got to his feet. He glanced at his watch. “I’ll call Pete and see where he’s at. I expect he’ll be here within the hour. He should be in cell phone range by now.”

Sadie nodded, and a new kind of longing washed over her. She would be fine once Pete got there. He’d hold her and let her cry and assure her that everything would be okay. She’d do her best to believe him, and he’d help her find somewhere to sleep. She was so tired.

She pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders. It wasn’t that she was cold, rather she just needed the comfort and this was the closest thing to a hug she could get right now.

Marcus left, and Sadie’s eyes got heavier but she jolted awake when the door opened again. Blinking, she looked up, then jolted again when she recognized the person standing there, grinning at her with nice white teeth set in a round, brown, pockmarked face.

“Lily?” Sadie asked. But it couldn’t be Lily. This woman was dressed in a black suit, cut to accentuate her curvaceous figure, and she had
hair
—a sleek black bob that curled beneath her ears. The woman approached the table and held out her hand for Sadie to shake.

Sadie stared at the faded tattoos on the backs of the woman’s fingers, then up into the familiar and yet unfamiliar face of her former cellmate, Bald Lily, who wasn’t bald anymore. She also had eyebrows, though upon closer inspection, Sadie could see they were penciled in.

“Agent Lillian Shannon of the Bureau of Land Management, artifact recovery division,” she said, withdrawing her hand and sitting down across from Sadie. “I’m afraid we haven’t been officially introduced.”

She didn’t
sound
like Lily either. Lily had a propensity for using improperly conjugated verbs and dropping her consonants.

“Agent Shannon?” This was Sadie’s contact at the BLM? “What . . . ?” She couldn’t even formulate a question, but her eyes were drawn back to the woman’s hair. Lily had been bald. Could there be two of them? Perhaps identical twins with matching tattoos and very different ambitions in life?

Agent Shannon reached up with both hands and removed the wig from her head, revealing the completely hairless scalp Sadie remembered all too well. Sadie gasped but tried to cover it with a fake sneeze. It
was
Lily.

“Alopecia,” Agent Shannon said, rubbing one hand over her scalp. “It’s an autoimmune disease that kills off hair follicles. It also makes me look like an instant criminal when I’ve got the mind to play that part. And thanks to being a stupid eighteen-year-old with lots of school spirit, I’ve got the art to fit the part too.” She laced her fingers together and the tattooed letters spelled out “Go Lobos!”

Sadie looked from Agent Shannon’s large hands to her face. Art? Autoimmune diseases? What did any of that have to do with her having been in Sadie’s jail cell Monday night? “I don’t understand.”

Agent Shannon—Sadie couldn’t think of her as Lily anymore—smiled a little wider. “Your reports impressed me from the start, and the fact that you not only verified your subjects but had conversations with them was beyond what most of our
trained
informants do. After those bodies were found, our interest in the site was officially halted, but I pored over your reports and took note of a few details regarding Kyle Langley. We knew someone had sold artifacts from D&E sites, and he’d worked on three of them. A little more research piqued our interest in him even more, and then we found out you’d been arrested, which got me worried. I wondered who exactly I was dealing with, and so I called in a favor with a friend at the police department.”

“You were spying on me?” Sadie asked.

“I was making sure we could trust the information you’d given us, that’s all. I didn’t get to ask many of the questions I had, but the ones I tried you didn’t even begin to answer. It validated our trust in you.”

“Oh,” Sadie said, not sure how to feel about that. “Did Marcus know you’d done that?” She thought of how angry he’d been when he found out Sadie and Pete had kept her BLM connection a secret.

“Not until he had to, but he took it pretty well. We’ve been working hand in hand since then, combining our knowledge, and, in the process, finding Kyle Langley’s line.”

“Line?”

“A chain of brokers and traders, pothunters and experts. He had a pretty extensive ring of people, which made him the ideal contact for Mr. Benito Ojeda, who was looking for a buyer for the pipe that would take down Ethan Standage’s art career.”

Sadie frowned, thinking hard. “So how did Margo get the pipe?”

“We’re not sure just yet.” It was obvious the agent did not like not having all the answers.

“You should ask Horace. He wasn’t as committed to this plan like the others were, but he was still closely involved. Maybe he knows something that will help answer that question.”

Agent Shannon pulled a pen and a small notebook from her pocket and made some quick notes. “We’ll look into that. I understand he’s been cooperating pretty well. We have a lot of questions to ask.”

“He tipped off Ethan about the bodies, didn’t he?”

Agent Shannon nodded. “I’d vote him most-likely-to-make-sense-of-this. He seems to have been in the middle of most of the action. I’m heading to the station after I finish up with you to make sure the BLM’s interests are met during the questioning phase of this investigation, but I wanted to fill you in as soon as possible.”

“Horace said something about things getting out of control,” Sadie said. “That it was supposed to be simple. Do you know what he meant?”

“From what we’ve put together with the SFPD, Benny attempted to bribe Ethan’s assistant to smuggle an artifact back from an expedition, then they would release the item into the black market through a string of contacts who would find a way to make it public. That would undermine Ethan’s art career, but probably not to the extent that he’d serve prison time. Mr. Ojeda thought that would be enough to turn Ethan’s attention back to the ranch. I guess there’d been some talk about selling out, but then the economy crashed and selling was out of the question. It looked as though the ranch would simply fold if it didn’t get some more hands-on care.”

“But the first assistant refused the bribe,” Sadie said, thinking back to her own hypothesis.

Agent Shannon nodded. “They couldn’t risk him exposing their plan, so Benny contracted Mr. Deveroux, a hired gun, to get rid of assistant number one. We think Mr. Deveroux killed the second assistant—who did go along with their plan—on his own to keep him from talking, and then at some point the artifact ended up in Margo’s possession. She’d made contact with Tribal Preserve a few weeks before those two bodies were found, telling them she was on the trail of someone, but she had too many questions to ask before she felt she had enough information to get them involved. I’m assuming that, because of what happened to her daughter, she was uneasy about involving other people in whatever she herself was involved in, but we think she had the pipe at that time, though we don’t know how she got it.”

“So, when I went to her apartment asking questions, she decided to use that as a kind of cover for trying to find out who Crossbones was?”

“We think so,” Agent Shannon said with a nod. “Though we don’t know how she knew Langley’s cover or what her ultimate plan was. She knew the item was important, though, because she hid it in your apartment. As soon as Langley realized what she knew, she was a liability.”

“And then Langley became a liability for Benny and the Cowboy—Mr. Deveroux—too.” Sadie filled in. It was all mush in her brain, and she wasn’t sure she understood how everything had happened, but it was early in the investigation. More information would come to the surface in coming days to fit together what they had so far.

Agent Shannon nodded.

“Is Margo really . . . dead?”

“We don’t know. We’re trying to piece things together as best we can, and there’s always hope that Margo will show up.”

Sadie nodded, but she was thinking back to the mass grave she and Margo had uncovered a week and a half ago. Sadie had expressed how sad she was that the family had all died at the same time, while Margo had seemed to find comfort in the fact that they were together. Sadie believed in an existence after this one, and she believed a spiritual bond existed between families. Despite the horrible circumstances of what had happened, Sadie took comfort in believing that if in fact Margo were dead, she would at least be with her daughter again.

Agent Shannon stood up and straightened her jacket before putting her wig back on. “Is it straight?”

“Um, it’s a little twisted to the left.”

Agent Shannon adjusted it and raised her penciled-in eyebrows.

“That’s good,” Sadie said.

“Awesome. I only wear it so as not to freak people out. It’s horribly uncomfortable, especially in the heat—
ay, caramba
! Well, I think we’re done with you for tonight, or, well, this morning. How long will you be in town, in case we have some follow-up questions?”

“I have a court date on the fourteenth.”

“Perfect. I’ll make sure I’m there to explain things from my side.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

Agent Shannon headed toward the door, and Sadie followed her, not sure what to do now that the police didn’t need to talk to her. Her phone hadn’t been returned, and Marcus had been the one communicating with Pete on her behalf. She followed Agent Shannon to the main waiting area of the ER, then said good-bye as the woman swooshed through the automatic doors.

“Sadie?”

Sadie turned as Caro stepped out from behind one of the curtained areas. Her face was swollen, and she’d changed into a hospital gown that she totally rocked—the woman was in such excellent shape. They stared at one another for a few seconds, then Caro hurried toward her and threw her arms around Sadie’s neck, crying into her shoulder.

Sadie hugged her back but tried not to cry; once she got started, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to stop.

“I’m so sorry, Sadie,” Caro said, stepping back and wiping at her eyes. “Rex told me.”

“Told you what?” Sadie asked cautiously.

“He told me that he asked you not to talk to me about the investigation.”

Asked
seemed a little mild, but Sadie was in no mood to quibble.

“It was sweet of him to want to protect me, wasn’t it?”

Uhhh. Once again, Sadie was unsure what to say.

Caro didn’t wait for a response, however. “And then he ran over that trailer! I couldn’t believe that was my Rex. I mean, who does that, right?”

“It was impressive,” Sadie agreed.

“We had a good talk in the ambulance.” Caro shook her head. “That is a sentence I have never said in my whole life, but we did. He apologized for telling you not to talk to me and said how he hated how much time you and I spent together. We’re going to make some changes.” Tears came to her eyes again, and she smiled. “Maybe he’s not so different from that sexy linebacker I fell in love with.”

“I’m very glad to hear that,” Sadie said with complete sincerity.

“Mrs. Hoffmiller?”

Sadie looked over her shoulder to see an orderly coming toward her with a cordless phone.

Caro touched her shoulder. “I’ve got to get back to Rex. We’ll talk later, okay? I want to know
everything
that happened.”

Sadie nodded, then accepted the phone from the orderly.

“It’s a detective,” the woman said as Sadie lifted the phone to her ear.

“Hello?” Sadie said, wondering if Marcus had another question for her.

“Sadie?”

“Pete!” And then the tears came. She gripped the phone with both hands and sat down on one of the plastic chairs in the waiting area.

“Are you okay?” he asked, but the worry, the love, and the concern in his voice undid her even more.

“I’m okay,” she said, trying to get control of herself.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” she said, forcing herself to take a deep breath. “I’m sorry you’ve had to come to New Mexico in the middle of the night twice now because of me.”

“I don’t mind. Honest. I’m just glad you’re safe. Don’t leave the hospital until I get there, okay?”

“Where would I go?” She leaned back in the chair, still wiping her eyes.

Pete was quiet for several seconds, and Sadie didn’t try to fill the silence. Just knowing he was on the other end of the line was enough. He loved her; he was coming to her. What would happen then was anyone’s guess. She had a court date next week, and she really needed to visit a chiropractor. Did Lois still need her help at the Fiesta? She didn’t know where she’d go next or what her next move should be. So much had happened. Too much.

“Did you see the balloons, Sadie?”

In her mind’s eye, she pictured the sight of all those balloons rising up over the crowds last night. And how they had filled the valley earlier that morning. She’d watched them float easily on the breeze, carried everywhere and nowhere all at once. Just thinking about them made her feel lighter. She nodded, despite the fact that Pete couldn’t see her. “I saw the balloons. They were amazing.”