“Why’d you leave?” The question sounded impulsive. “I mean, you were good at your job.”
“Says who?”
“Well…everyone.”
“You’ve been asking?”
“It’s come up in conversation.” She paused to take a sip of her drink, and Ford found his gaze drawn to her lips pursing around the straw.
Idiot. Yeah, so he’d found her hot in high school. The bad girl, forbidden fruit. Always in trouble. Not someone he would have gotten involved with. But that hadn’t stopped him from getting a hard-on every time he saw her. Stupid how powerful adolescent memories were. He could suddenly remember every nuance of what it had been like for him back then, wanting something he knew would be bad for him, something that didn’t fit in with his ironclad plans for the future. Doing the right thing, but wishing he didn’t have to.
He took a gulp of his drink. “Any particular reason people have been talking about me?” he asked.
“Yes.”
The single word hung in the air, and he knew for sure that this was no chance encounter, not just curiosity on her part. She’d come here looking for him, and she had an agenda.
“I assume you know about me, right?” she asked, her gaze not meeting his. “You heard what happened?”
Had anyone in Harris County missed hearing about the tragedy that had struck Robyn Jasperson’s life? If they had, they’d been living under a rock. “Yes. I’m sorry.” He didn’t know what else to say. Stupid sentiment. Meaningless. But what could you say to a woman whose child had disappeared and was presumed dead? Nothing anyone said could make it better.
“Thank you.” The rejoinder was automatic, probably uttered thousands of times since the tragedy—what, seven or eight years ago? At least they’d caught the bastard who did it…
That was when a disturbing possibility occurred to him. Oh, surely not. But the silence between them stretched uncomfortably.
He looked at her, and she met his probing gaze unflinchingly.
“Do you know why I wanted to speak to you?”
“I’m slow, but I’m starting to get an idea.”
“You’re not slow. In fact, most people agree that you are extraordinarily intelligent.”
“You don’t think Eldon did it?” he asked, incredulous. The D.A.’s case against Eldon Jasperson had been circumstantial, but it had been convincing—convincing enough for twelve jurors.
“No,” Robyn said succinctly. “I do not believe my ex-husband murdered my son.”
Without comment, Ford settled his bill and paid for Robyn’s soft drink, too. “Let’s walk outside.” The stale-beer smell inside McGoo’s suddenly turned his stomach. Maybe it was just that he didn’t think some one as pretty and delicate looking as Robyn belonged in a place like this. McGoo’s was close enough to the Houston shipping lanes that it attracted a rough clientele.
Outside, the air could hardly be called fresh. Summer in South Texas was never fresh, but the ninety-degree heat from earlier that afternoon had abated to a tolerable eighty or so, muggy as hell but not so bad that your clothes became drenched the moment you stepped outside.
A worn footpath ran alongside the twisty road where the bar was located. Without asking her permission, he led Robyn there. They could talk with out being overheard. He realized too late she wasn’t wearing good walking shoes, just some teeny blue sandals with her jeans and silk T-shirt, but she didn’t complain.
“Why do you think that Eldon is innocent?” he asked point-blank. Project Justice, the charitable foundation he had worked for—until this afternoon—took on only cases with significant evidence to work with. The mere belief that someone was innocent, no matter how passionate, was not enough to get Project Justice to take on a case. There had to be new evidence, or perhaps a new way of scientifically testing old evidence, to meet the foundation’s criteria.
“I have three things,” Robyn said. Clearly she had prepared for this meeting. “First, a witness saw Eldon with Justin at the pizza parlor where he said Justin was taken from. Because the witness had drunk a beer—one beer—and hadn’t gotten every detail exactly right, the police dismissed him as a crank and never even provided his name to the defense. But you, as a former cop, know that memory is imperfect at best.”
“That’s a good point,” he said. “Any reason this witness wasn’t mentioned during Eldon’s appeals?”
“We’ve only just found him,” Robyn said.
“We?” Ford’s ears perked up. He wondered whom she was working with. “Are you teamed up with Eldon’s lawyer?”
“Frankly, I have no money to pay a lawyer. ‘We’ is myself and Trina Jasperson.”
“Trina—” It took a few moments for Ford to get it. “Eldon’s current wife?”
“The one who broke up my marriage, yes.” Robyn misstepped, and Ford grabbed her arm to keep her from falling.
“Maybe we should turn back,” he said. “I didn’t realize the footing was so bad on this path.” The mosquitoes were out, too. He waved away a couple that buzzed around his face.
“It’s okay. Let’s keep going.”
She probably wanted to prolong their meeting as long as possible to prevent him from walking away.
He took her arm again and firmly turned her around. “I won’t be responsible for you breaking your ankle. Don’t worry, I intend to hear you out. You’ve piqued my curiosity.” Robyn and Trina, allies? Ford knew Trina Jasperson only by reputation, but that wasn’t good. She’d been a party girl—possibly a call girl—before Eldon married her. “Frankly, I’m surprised Trina has stuck by him. She could have divorced him, gotten a huge settlement and moved on.”
“Not all women who marry rich men do so for the money,” Robyn said indignantly. “I didn’t.”
“Why did you marry Eldon?” Ford asked, then wished he hadn’t. That hardly had any bearing on the case, and it was none of his business. But a detective never loses his strong sense of curiosity. Had she sought respectability? A stable environment to raise children? Was it just the money?
“Hard as it is to believe, I loved him. He saw things about me that others missed, saw good qualities in me that I didn’t even know were there. He was good to me—well, to a point.”
She sounded comfortable with that answer—as if she’d defended her position many times. “Sorry. That was a rude question for me to ask.”
“I’ll answer any question you ask—anything—if it’ll help you free Eldon. He was hideously unfaithful, a serial cheater—that’s one of the things the prosecution used to tear down his character. But he was a terrific father, utterly devoted to Justin, and I love him for that. He grieved for his son, all the while having to go through that investigation, incarceration, the trial. To the public he looked stoic, perhaps even cold, but I knew him in a way most didn’t, and he was devastated by the loss of his son.”
Ford knew that even murderers sometimes grieved for their victims. “Is that point number two?”
“I’m sorry?”
“You said you had three reasons you believed Eldon is innocent. The first was the witness at the pizza parlor. Is the second the fact that Eldon grieved for Justin?”
“Oh. No, I understood Project Justice wanted facts, evidence, not feelings. I was just answering your question.”
“What are the other two points?”
Her heel caught on a rock and she stumbled again. This time she