Lyn Gala

Texas Charm, chapters 13 and 14 (Patreon)

Published:

2018-06-04 18:05:02

Imported:

2026-06

Tags:

Aberrant Magic

Content

Chapter Thirteen

Zach held the conference room door open for Daniel Minton. “Thank you for coming down here.” Zach pulled a chair around to sit next to Minton.

He nodded. “Do you have any leads on who killed my son?” The pain was so raw that Zach ached for him. Zach was grateful that Art had never developed any sort of magical empathy because Minton’s pain would have knocked him on his ass. Art might have most people fooled into thinking he wasn’t an emotional man, but Zach knew better. Art felt every emotion too deeply.

“We’re still in the investigative phase.”

Minton pressed his lips together before saying in a tight voice. “The press. They’re outside my house. They act like my son deserved to die.” His voice cracked and he took a deep breath. “What my son did, that wasn’t who he was. He was sick. The boy I raised never would have hurt those girls.”

Zach spoke softly. “Everyone here understands. You’ve suffered a horrible loss.”

Minton stared at the ceiling, his eyes shining with unshed tears. “I want my little boy back,” he said in the most miserable voice Zach had ever heard another human being use.

“I’m so sorry.” It was all Zach could offer, but maybe it was enough because Mr. Minton finally looked Zach in the eye.

“None of those reporters understand. He couldn’t control it any more than someone can control cancer. You wouldn’t blame a cancer victim would you? So why do people blame my son for getting a tumor? He didn’t deserve to die.”

“Of course he didn’t. My goal here is to find out who hurt him. But I need your help.”

Minton made a shuddering gasp before he seemed to gather up his reserves. When his spoke, he had a brittle calmness. “What do you need? I’ll do anything I can to help.”

“I need to get a timeline for when your son left the house and who might’ve been with him.” Zach waited until Minton nodded before he asked, “When was the last time you saw your son?”

“The night before you came to the house to tell me that he was—” Minton stopped.

“What time did you see him?”

Minton frowned for a second. “The news had just ended when he stuck his head in my door. He said good night, and asked if we could go to that new movie the next day, you know the new superhero movie that just came out.” He gave a poignant smile. “Jon always loved superhero movies. I mean, all little boys love them, but he never grew out of it.” His gaze dropped to the table top. “I don’t know why he left the house.”

“Would you call yourself a heavy or a light sleeper?” Zach jotted down a couple of notes.

“Somewhere in the middle. I don’t wake up often at night, but if there’s a loud noise, I will. I called the police on my neighbors when they had a screaming match in the back yard, so I’m not the sort to sleep through anything.”

“And how far apart are your bedrooms? Do you think you could give me a quick sketch of the house?” Zach tore a page out of the back of his legal pad and slid it and a pencil across the scarred table to Minton.

He stared down for several seconds before picking up the pencil. “Both floors or just the bedrooms?”

“The second floor bedrooms would be most helpful, but if you could mark where that lines up with exits on the first floor, that would be perfect.

Daniel Minton started drawing long, sure lines. Minton quickly added the locations of beds and windows. “Jon chose the bedroom at the far end of the hall, so there was a guest room between us, and my door was closed.”

Zach watched the man draw for another minute or so. “Could he have gone out the window?”

“He wouldn’t have. His arm was weak. Before the surgery he was an athlete, but after….”

Zach changed the topic. “Did you hear anything after he said good night?”

He shook his head. “No. Nothing.”

“Was he in the habit of going out at night? Was there a friend he would’ve called to give him a ride?” Zach kept his voice steady even though he desperately hoped to verify one of their theories of the crime.

“I don’t think he had any friends. He was having so much trouble connecting with anyone. Sometimes his physical therapist would take him to the coffee shop after one of their sessions, but I don’t think he would’ve met John in the middle of the night.”

“How about girls?” Zach asked. Minton tensed, and Zach quickly explained his thinking. “A lot of times girls are very sympathetic with someone who is physically disabled. Were there any girls who came around that John might’ve asked to give him a ride somewhere?”

“Absolutely not. No. No, I would not have him get involved with girls,” Minton said firmly. “Everything ended so badly. I wouldn’t allow it.”

“It’s okay Mr. Minton,” Zach reassured him. That reaction did suggest that Minton knew his son was being inappropriate, even if he didn’t know the details of what Jon Minton had said to the girls in his neighborhood. “I’m just trying to figure out if someone gave Jon a ride or if he had any reason to be in that neighborhood.”

“No. He didn’t know anyone down there.”

“How about the computer? Did Jon have friends through the Internet?”

“I don’t know.” Minton grimaced. “I try to give him his privacy. He was a grown man, and he didn’t like it when I hovered over him. He said I made him feel like a child.”

Given that Mr. Minton had just finished saying he wouldn’t have allowed Jon to spend time alone with a woman, father and son must have had a difficult relationship. That could have driven the younger Minton to seek support from an online community. “Did he spend a lot of time on the computer?”

“I don’t know. He had his phone with him all the time, and I know he would watch movies or television on it, but I don’t know if he was talking to people.” Minton shrugged. “Kids do it all through texting these days, so I wouldn’t have heard him.”

“That’s true enough,” Zach reassured him. “They do tend to live their whole lives on the computer, don’t they?”

Despite Zach’s attempt to sympathize, Minton just seemed to grow more despondent. “John never did before the surgery. But everything was different after that. I thought it would be better for him here, but the longer he was here, the more people knew who he was. He was talking about wanting to leave.”

This was new. “Leave and go where?” Zach asked.

Again, Minton shrugged. “I don’t know. I kept encouraging him to get job training and to make something out of his life, but all he could think about was….” Minton threw his hands up as though unable to find the right word. Zach waited, and eventually Minton added. “He thought about escaping. All the time, he wanted to escape.”

That sounded like a man on the edge of suicide, but Zach might be misunderstanding. “Escape what?”

“Escape me. Escape his past. Escape all these people who would look at him like he was a monster,” Mr. Minton shouted, his words blurred by the tears that finally fell. Then his voice fell to a whisper as he said, “Escape his own broken body. Oh Christ. Do you think Jon could’ve gone down there looking for trouble? Looking for something like this to happen?”

“Do you think that would’ve been in character for your son?” Zach asked. If this had been a suicide, it was the strangest one in history. Zach had heard of suicide by cop, but as far as he knew, no one had ever committed suicide by bad neighborhood.

“I don’t know.” Minton covered his eyes, although that did little to conceal his tears.

Zach changed the subject. “How is his mother handling this?”

Minton snorted. “With large doses of medication. That’s how she handled the trial too.” He traced a crack in the table with one finger—up and down and up again. Questioning this man felt too much like kicking someone who was not only down, but curled in a fetal position.

“Let’s go back to the last night you saw your son. Before he came into your room to say goodnight, where had he been?”

“Downstairs maybe?”

“Do you have a phone down there?” They hadn’t run Minton, senior’s phone records, and that might be their next step.

“Um, yeah, but Jon never used it. He had his own phone. The house phone was for my business. I work from home half-time.”

“Did he have his phone when he came in your room?”

Minton slowly nodded. “I think so. He usually did.”

“Did anyone come to the door or honk? Did his phone vibrate? Were there any signs that someone was trying to get in touch with him?”

“I was dozing off when Jon came in, and the news uses those traffic sound effects, so I might have heard a car horn, but I might have imagined it. And I know I no one came to the house. I have a security app attached to the doorbell. It would have sent an image to my phone.”

Zach tapped his pencil on the legal pad where he was taking notes. “The next morning, did you think it strange that Jon was gone?”

Mr. Minton shook his head. “He likes to take walks at sunrise. He said it makes him feel like something new is starting, even if he’s stuck in the same rut.”

Zach offered the father a wan smile and kindly didn’t point out that Minton’s son was leaving the house at the same time that kids were walking to school. That explained how Minton got away from his father long enough to harass thirteen and fourteen year old girls.

“Has anyone from Dallas kept in contact with Jon?”

Minton stood up so fast that his chair skidded backward and hit the wall. “I’m sorry. I can’t—” Minton’s whole face twisted rictus of pain. “Bathroom?” he finally blurted out.

“Out the door to your left,” Zach offered.

Minton ripped the door open so hard that it bounced off the wall and slammed shut behind him. When Zach got up to open it again, he found Art leaning against the wall near the speaker that was hooked to the room’s audio. “Hey, you’re back from…” Zach hand waved the rest of his sentence away. Zach hated feeling like he was hurting Art, but sometimes the man hid ever wound so well that Zach did a fair amount of damage before he noticed.

Art rolled his eyes, which was usually a good sign. If he was making fun of Zach, then he wasn’t tangled up in his own shit. “I got here right after you started with Minton, so I decided to listen from out here. So, is the interview over?”

“He’s an emotional train wreck,” Zach said. He assumed Minton senior was in the bathroom, but he wasn’t in a hurry to track him down. A man should be able to cry in private—Zach had very firm feelings about that.

Art nodded. “Yeah, I called the chaplain.”

That was a good call. Minton clearly needed help. Serious professional help. Zach wanted to talk about Art’s sudden need to talk to a shaman, but he wondered how far he could push this good mood of Art’s. He didn’t want to hurt his lover, but that didn’t mean he was willing to stand back while Art let his own anger and fears fester. “So, is your business taken care of?”

Art headed for the squad room, but his voice stayed steady as he said, “I suggested Dohosan talk to his tribe’s religious leaders—warn them that there’s a potential problem on the horizon.”

For a second, Zach could only blink in shock. Art had talked about Native shamanism. About the potential for an ifrit war. About the very subject that had, yesterday, left him nearly mute with pain. Zach was breathless with wonder.

When Zach didn’t follow or answer, Art turned and glared at him defensively. “What?”

Zach said reverently, “I adore you so much.”

“Excuse me?” Art’s eyebrows went up.

Sometimes Art wasn’t the best at taking a compliment, so Zach repeated himself. He would repeat himself forever if that’s what it took to get the point through Art’s thick skull. “I fucking love the hell out of you.”

“Because I talked to Dohosan Moreno?” Art sounded genuinely confused.

Zach walked up to Art and grabbed his shoulders. Art quirked an eyebrow but didn’t comment as Zach leaned closer. Zach kept his touch almost teasingly light. He kissed and ran his tongue across Art’s lower lip and pressed his hand against Art’s chest.

After a brief hesitation, Art grabbed Zach’s waist hard enough to leave a bruise, and kissed Zach with a hunger that made Zach wished they could go home and spend the day in bed. However, someone was going to come down the hall eventually. Zach slowly leaned back and studied Art. His lips were red and swollen, and Zach suspected his own lips looked the same.

After blinking a couple of time, Art said wryly. “You may want to schedule an appointment with the department psychiatrist. If my conversation with Moreno got you that excited, your judgment is questionable. Enjoyable, but questionable.” And then he grinned.

Zach punched him in the arm. “Ass.”

“I often am. Hell, the office gossip calls me much worse.” Art rested his hand on the small of Zach’s back and encouraged him to head for the squad room.

“Yeah, but all those guys would have refused to talk to Dohosan. They would have dug in their heels, even after getting evidence that they needed to change. You value doing the right thing over protecting your own ego. That’s a rare trait, Arturo Lammas.”

“You’re either underestimating most people or overestimating me.” Art clearly had his normal attitude going. Sometimes he acted like the world would end if he just took a compliment. Even now the red crept up his neck as he came dangerously close to blushing.

“No, I’m not, and you know it. You’re an unusually good man.” Zach poked Art in the arm.

“Can we focus on the case?” Art practically begged.

“You’re also a giant dork,” Zach added.

Art raised his voice. “Case!”

Zach shouted back. “Fine! Case! Grouchy asshole.” Zach grinned at Art, but then he cleared his throat and did return his attention to Minton and his father. “The father knew his son was morally backsliding.”

“You picked that up, huh?”

“I’m not blind and deaf. The father wanted to keep his son away from women, and there’s really only one reason for doing that.”

“It sounds like the father and son had a few conflicts. I don’t think everything in that home was flowers and rainbows.”

“The elder Minton paid for his son’s lawyer on the Dallas case and he invited his son to move into his house. He was trying to support his son.” Zach had a lot of respect for the fact that he hadn’t walked away, even when his son made life difficult.

“But if he son perceived him as hovering, that might have driven Minton away even faster. We need to get Minton to sign off on us pulling all his phone records.”

“Do you think the younger Minton used the house phone to call someone?” Zach asked. Landlines rarely came with the same sort of detailed records that accompanied a cell phone bill, and if his father was paying his bills, Minton would have avoided calling someone his father disliked using a cell phone. Ten years earlier, Minton could have gone to a pay phone, but Zach didn’t even know where to find one anymore. His father’s landline may have been the best option.

“Maybe. I think Daniel Minton is emotionally compromised enough that I don’t trust anything he says. He wanted to stop his son, yet Jon Minton was out there saying some fairly unforgivable things to young girls, and his father didn’t know.”

“He’s going to feel guilty about that,” Zach said. He wished he could shield Daniel Minton from the knowledge of what his son had done, but there were too many witnesses, and too many reporters, to keep that secret.

“Oh, hell yes,” Art said. “Which is why one of us needs to warn him. He needs to be ready before reporters confront him.”

Zach hated the idea of wading into that emotional quicksand, but Minton didn’t deserve to have his shock and pain memorialized on the five o’clock news.

“I’ll handle it,” Art said after Zach hesitated too long.

“What? You don’t need to. I have it.” Zach didn’t want Art anywhere near this emotional minefield.

“He fell apart the second you gave him a sympathetic smile. I think Mr. Minton would appreciate a less emotional approach. It’s hard to bury your feelings when someone is sympathizing with you.”

“Are you calling me too nice?” Zach asked.

“Yes. Go review the interview tape and work the timeline. I’ll take care of Minton.”

Zach wrapped his hand around Art’s arm. “I am still endlessly impressed by your ability to be a good man.”

Art snorted. “I’m glad you spent so many years hanging out with lawyers. It lowered your standards and made you easy to impress.” Art leaned in and gave Zach an almost chaste kiss—a ghost brush of lips against lips. “Go. Find us some more leads. I have this.”

Chapter Fourteen

Zach was working on reviewing the audio from the interview when he finally spotted Art a good hour later. When Art had offered to go see to Mr. Minton, Zach hadn’t expected it to take so long. He raised his finger to get Art’s attention. As Art crossed the room, Zach could see the aggravation etched into his face. He was going to end up with an ulcer if he wasn’t careful. Art dropped a manilla envelope down on his desk.

“The press showed up,” Art said. Well that explained his aggravation. “I tried to get Mr. Minton to sign a release for his landline phone records, but he took one look at the reporters and bolted.”

“We might want to get a judge to sign off instead of trying to get Minton’s cooperation,” Zach said. Maybe he was being paranoid—in fact he hoped he was—but something was definitely wrong in the Minton statement.

Art immediately turned all his attention on Zach. “Why?”

“Come around.” Zach held up the headphones he had plugged in to his computer.

Art pulled his chair around and sat next to Zach. Zach hit replay on the audio clip. He’d queued up to the point where Minton had said, “The news had just ended when he stuck his head in my door. He said good night, and asked if we could go to that new movie the next day, you know the new superhero movie that just came out.”

Without giving Art time to think about what he’d heard, Zach clicked on a second bookmark. In this one, Mr. Minton said, “I was dozing off when Jon came in, and the news uses those traffic sound effects, so I might have heard a car horn, but I might have imagined it.”

Art leaned back in the chair and stared at the computer. “Oh, that’s not good. How far apart are these two clips?”

“About six minutes. Tell me that’s not suspicious.” Zach was not going to accuse Mr. Minton of any specific crime, not without more evidence, but if he couldn’t keep his own story straight, that was not a good sign.

“He could be talking about two different news programs,” Art said, but then he chewed his upper lip in a gesture that usually meant he was grasping at straws and he knew it. This was the sort of small detail that people who lied often screwed up. They would remember that their alibi had included a birthday party, but they wouldn’t remember if the party started at noon or 2 o’clock. People who actually went to the party tended to remember.

“Okay, so let’s talk this through. Why would his father kill him?” Art asked.

“Are you really jumping straight to murder? Maybe he followed his son and found him raping a girl.” The second Zach said that out loud, he knew it wasn’t plausible. Mr. Minton would have called the police if he found his son hurting someone. While Zach didn’t have magical powers that allowed him to read a person’s intentions, he had a cop’s instincts. His gut said Mr. Minton was a good man. He couldn’t erase the memory of Mr. Minton’s face twisted into a rictus of pain; that was not the sort of man to commit murder.

“His father had a motive to get rid of the girls’ underwear, and if he was backed into a corner where he felt like he had to pull the trigger, that could explain the wild firing.”

“What if the shooting was accidental?” Zach asked.

Art gave Zach an incredulous look. “So he accidentally shot his son in the back multiple times?”

“Just brainstorming.” Zach stared at the computer. “He was clearly involved somehow. We need to know if he left the house,” Zach said.

“Yep, I’m on it.” Art rolled his chair back to his computer and started typing. “The Devil’s Triangle might not have many traffic cameras, but Minton’s neighborhood does. He’s not an experienced criminal, so if he left his house, I’ll bet you money he drove that fancy SUV of his right past a traffic cam.”

Zach got that familiar flutter in his stomach that told him they were close. There was still a chance that this might be a wild goose chase, but this was the first theory of the crime worth chasing. “So we check the major intersections for Minton’s vehicle.”

“If we can find a video of him driving around after he told us in a sworn statement that he was at home in bed, that’s going to break his alibi and force him to talk to us.”

Zach thought back to their notification interview. “I am wondering about something the father said the first time we talked to him.”

“What?”

“He asked what his son had done.”

Art closed his eyes for a second before he nodded. “But he insisted that his son was totally recovered from the tumor-induced impulsivity, so asking what Jon had done doesn’t fit the father’s story about his son as an innocent victim. We need those phone records.”

“What do you think we’re going to find?” Zach asked.

“I have no idea, but Minton didn’t sign a consent form. And when I chased him out into the parking lot, he took off pretty fast. I thought the reporter scared him away, but if he doesn’t want me to have his phone records, that’s my best reason for wanting them.”

“Let’s hope a judge agrees,” Zach said as he pulled up the request for warrant paperwork.

Chapter 1: https://www.patreon.com/posts/texas-charm-6-19034447

Chapter 2: https://www.patreon.com/posts/texas-charm-2-19050307

Chapter 3: https://www.patreon.com/posts/texas-charm-3-19066252

Chapter 4: https://www.patreon.com/posts/texas-charm-4-19087127

Chapter 5: https://www.patreon.com/posts/texas-charm-5-19132901

Chapter 6: https://www.patreon.com/posts/texas-charm-six-19159661

Chapter 7: https://www.patreon.com/posts/texas-charm-7-19179823

Chapter 8: https://www.patreon.com/posts/texas-charm-8-19190078

Chapter 9: https://www.patreon.com/posts/texas-charm-9-19201497

Chapter 10: https://www.patreon.com/posts/texas-charm-10-19220764

Chapter 11, 12: https://www.patreon.com/posts/texas-charm-11-19228890