Page 31 of One in a Million
“That’s fine, Megan. Thanks. You can go.”
By the time Roper finished his reply, Lila had pulled away and stalked off.
* * *
Lila knew she was the most obvious suspect, and there was no one to verify that she hadn’t left the house, met her husband in the stable, and carried out a plan that might get her sentenced to life in prison.
Despite her resolve to remain strong, Lila was scared.
Sam Rafferty was anxious to wrap up the case. He had zeroed in on her as his prime suspect. With Frank’s family and friends closing in for the funeral and memorial, this was the last kind of trouble she needed.
As she neared the wrought-iron gate to the patio, she felt her phone vibrate in her pocket. Taking it out, she checked the display.
The caller was Jemma, her daughter.
She let the call go to voice mail. She would call back from the security of her bedroom upstairs.
Jemma was a nursing student at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. Lila had done her best to distance her twenty-year-old daughter from the messy situation brought on by Frank’s death. But Jemma watched the news. She would be concerned.
In her room, Lila closed the door, sank onto the edge of the bed, and returned the call.
“Mom?” Jemma’s fresh young voice was like a sip of water in the desert. “Are you all right? I haven’t heard from you since right after Frank died. I was getting worried.”
“I’m soldiering on as always, darling. Sorry I haven’t called. Just a lot to deal with, funeral arrangements and all. I didn’t want to disturb your studies.”
“Studies, schmudies. I’m your only blood family. I heard about the memorial service, and I’ll be coming to support you. Somebody has to.”
“No—please just stay away,” Lila protested. “That memorial will be a mob scene. And Madeleine will surely be coming. Things could get ugly. I don’t need the extra worry that you might get caught up in the mess.”
“Stop arguing, Mom. I’m not a little girl anymore. I’m coming, and I will be there for you.” The faint sound of background voices filtered over the phone. “Gotta go. I’ll call you later.”
The call ended. Slipping the phone back into her pocket, Lila rose and walked out through the French doors onto the balcony that overlooked the patio. She’d truly hoped to keep Jemma at school, away from the conflict and the vicious comments that the girl was bound to hear. But her daughter was stubborn. She would be here, and her presence would be just one more worry.
The moon was rising over the eastern hills, flooding the parched landscape with ghostly light. From the direction of Charlie Grishman’s game farm came the sound of rifle fire. Lila hated the thought of those poor, cruelly used animals, many of them overgrown pets, dying in terror and pain. Given her way, she would wipe Charlie and his kind from the earth and sentence them to their own special hell where animals with guns drove them through thickets of thorny mesquite and cholla.
But tonight, she only felt a sense of helplessness. It would be all she could do to save herself.
* * *
The tiger had been old and toothless, with half of a rear paw missing from a youthful encounter with a trap. Now it was dead, and Charlie’s client, a fifty-year-old female hedge fund manager from Austin, was over the moon.
“I got him!” she warbled to the girlfriend who’d come to watch the hunt. “That hide is going on my bed!”
Charlie stood back, mentally counting the small mountain of cash she’d given him. He could only be grateful that he’d managed to sell a hunt with that tiger before it passed on its own.
Before the hunt, the tiger had been prodded into a cage and hauled to a brushy, isolated area of the ranch surrounded by barbed wire. With the cage camouflaged by brush, local boys dressed as old-time African bearers accompanied the woman to the shooting site, where they made enough noise to scare the miserable creature out of the cage; it promptly fled and hid in a clump of mesquite. More shouts and the throwing of sticks and rocks chased the tiger back into the open where the woman was poised with Charlie’s .270 Winchester, waiting to shoot it.
Unfortunately, she had neither a cool head nor a good aim.
She’d fired twice, hitting the tiger once in the shoulder and once in the flank. The animal had gone down, badly injured but still alive. With the fake bearers covering them, Charlie had guided her closer, pointed the muzzle toward the animal’s head, and ordered her to pull the trigger. The last shot had done its work.
After that had come the celebratory whoops of jubilation and plenty of photos, which she would no doubt post on the Internet. After the traditional whiskey in the reception area, the woman and her friend had been escorted to their vehicle. The tiger’s carcass had been loaded behind a four-wheeler and hauled to the refrigerated shed, where the taxidermist would come by in the morning to skin it and collect the hide for tanning. The woman, whose name Charlie had already forgotten, would be notified when her bed rug was ready.
All in a night’s work.
Before turning in, Charlie performed his nightly ritual of walking the animal compounds, making sure the pens were locked and the animals secure. He had close to thirty of them, mostly African and Asian species, but all of them purchased or collected here in the U.S. from owners who needed the money or no longer wanted the creatures because they’d grown too big, too old, too expensive to keep, or too aggressive.
There were three giraffes in a pen—popular because they were easy to hunt and made spectacular trophies. There were zebras and a variety of antelopes. One pen held two chimpanzees, another a male gorilla, nearly full-grown and almost certainly illegal, but a prospective hunter had already put a claim on it. There was even a two-humped camel, though who might want to kill it was something Charlie could only imagine.