Broken Toys Read online

  “Some old guy complaining about Travelers who booby-trapped his driveway. I think he’s German. He’s kind of hard to understand.”

  Noah slid both palms up and down the side seam of his jeans to ease the sudden itch in his hands. His chest tightened and his stomach churned. “Uh—Travelers, you said?”

  Brooke, already walking out the door, glanced back over her shoulder at Noah. “Traveler, Gypsy, Paver, whatever name they’re using these days. We’ve had a sharp increase in complaints against them over the past few weeks for scamming the elderly, although this is the first call accusing them of out-and-out sabotage. I guess it’s that time of year again.” She turned back to the hallway, her blonde ponytail flipping flirtatiously as she headed back to the Communications Office.

  Rhyden stood and grabbed his hat from the deer’s antlers. “You got anything going on right now? I know it’s not in your region, but I wouldn’t mind the company. A little testosterone to combat all the estrogen I’m dealing with at home. Wanna ride along?”

  Dread threatened to overwhelm Noah. He ground his teeth but said nothing.

  Hat in hand, Rhyden tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey, are you coming?”

  Noah started. “What?”

  “Do. You. Want. To. Come. Along?”

  Needing to know what was going on, while at the same time wanting to be a million miles from here, he aimed for nonchalant. “Sure. Why not?”

  Chapter Three

  While heading to the nuisance call in Rhyden’s unmarked truck, Noah’s thoughts whirled like a red sand dust devil. He tried inhaling and exhaling to ease the churning in his gut, took slow deep breaths like the hypnotherapy app on his phone taught him. No results.

  Panic built in fast increments inside his chest at the same rate acid burned a fiery trail up his esophagus. He adjusted the air conditioning vent to direct a stronger airflow at his face and wished he had a peppermint candy to settle his stomach. Reaching into his pocket, he fingered his lucky talisman, a fouled spark plug.

  “Hey, you okay over there? You’re awfully quiet.”

  “Me? I’m fine.” Noah shot Rhyden a wicked expression. “Just wondering when you’ll ask her out.”

  “Ask who out?”

  “Don’t play dumb. You know who. Brooke.”

  “Brooke?” Rhyden flipped on his left turn signal. “From dispatch?”

  Noah cocked his head to the right and grinned. “No, Sister Sally Brooke from the convent.”

  “Aren’t there rules against dating in-house?”

  “I’m sure there probably are. Even if the sheriff’s office has rules against fraternization, they don’t apply to you. We don’t work for the sheriff.” Noah tapped the silver badge on his chest. “Rangers, remember?”

  “Funny, ha-ha…not.” Pulling up on the street in front of the two-story white limestone house on Sage Drive, Rhyden placed the vehicle in park and stepped out. “Why would she want to go out with me?”

  Noah unfolded himself from the passenger side of the pickup. He stretched and studied Rhyden from across the hood. “Dude, you have got to get over the number Cara did on you.”

  “For your information, I happen to have a date with the reports clerk this weekend, the brunette.”

  Noah raised both hands in mock surrender. “Just saying. And good for you.”

  Together, the two men advanced up the gravel pathway toward the house. Before they reached it, the front door, fashioned out of rustic cedar, slowly swung inward. An elderly man dressed in faded denim overalls stepped out. Short and stout, the guy resembled a cranky St. Bernard with bushy whiskers framing deep jowls and a professional drinker’s red bulbous nose.

  Directing his comments over one shoulder and back into the house, he barked, “Ja, ja. Sie sind hier. I said I would handle it.” He slammed the door and limped out to meet the men as they approached.

  “Good afternoon, sir. I’m Ranger Trammell. This is Ranger Morgan.”

  “Rangers, huh?” The old guy leaned heavily on his mesquite cane and inspected them before shaking their hands. “They sent the big guns this time. ’Bout time. Didn’t think that girl would ever get me help. Had to call a dozen times.”

  “What can we do for you, Mr.…?” Rhyden asked.

  “Schmidt, Gunter Schmidt. I’ll tell you what you can do for me. You can arrest those damn Gypsies is what you can do for me. Or better yet just shoot ’em.”

  Swallowing a chuckle, Noah asked, “Could you give us a little more information, Mr. Schmidt?”

  The man gestured for them to follow him. “I told my wife not to hire those men. I knew they were no good. Shifty-eyed sons of bitches. Smooth talking used car salesmen if you ask me. But no, the wife, she knows better. She always knows better. Married sixty years and the damn woman knows everything. Just ask her.”

  Schmidt yanked a blue and white bandana from the front pocket of his overalls and mopped the sweat from his face. “I should have known better. I never should have married the old battle ax. We were dating—she was cute as a button and tiny, too—curves in all the right places. I asked her for a glass of iced tea. She went to the kitchen, came back, and handed me a glass. I took a long sip and damn near choked. Told her ‘there’s no sugar in this tea.’ She looked me square in the eye and said, ‘No, there’s not.’ No sugar, can you believe it? Damned if I ain’t been drinking unsweetened iced tea ever since. Do you have any idea what it’s like to go sixty-plus years without a single drop of sweet tea except for the ones I can sneak in when she goes to Fredericksburg to visit her sister?”

  Rhyden and Noah exchanged glances, faces reddening from suppressed laughter. Rhyden cut into Mr. Schmidt’s monologue. “Sir, as much as I can sympathize with you for the loss of sweet tea, it’s downright criminal, but I don’t think you want us to arrest your wife. Can you tell us why we’re here?”

  The old man shoved the bandanna back in his pocket. “Sure, go ahead, laugh. Hardy-har-har.”

  “Mr. Schmidt?”

  “What? Oh, yeah, sorry. Damned woman just gets under my skin. See, right here.” He pointed to a flat tire on the rear driver's side of an older model Caddy.

  “Um, Mr. Schmidt,” Rhyden began.

  “Nein, nein, not the tire.” Using the cane, the old man gestured to a spot behind the tire. “Damn Gypsies booby-trapped my driveway. Just because I’m German doesn’t mean I had anything to do with Hitler. Hell, my grossvater immigrated to the United States in 1888, the year of the three fat ladies. I ain’t no damned Nazi. Never sent no one to one of those horrible camps, neither. Those mistück men charged me a small fortune to refinish my driveway, which was perfectly fine to begin with and didn’t need refinishing in the first place, but my wife…anyway, they charged me a fortune and did a half-assed job. See? They left a piece of metal sticking up. Ruined my tire.”

  Both rangers moved to the sedan and squatted on their boot heels. Noah slid a black pocketknife from his front jeans pocket and used it to pry at the sharp piece of metal embedded in the hot asphalt.

  Rhyden came to a standing position and stepped to the edge of the driveway where Mr. Schmidt waited, watching. “Sir, I’m sorry, but there’s not much we can do for you. Shoddy work isn’t a crime. Should be, granted, but it’s not. You need to go down to the office of the local Justice of the Peace and file a civil suit in small claims court.”

  Out came the blue and white bandanna again. Mr. Schmidt mopped his forehead. He gestured angrily with his cane. “What about my frickin’ tire?”

  “Mr. Schmidt, do you have a spare?”

  “Of course, I do. What fool kind of question is that? First, you tell me you can’t help me, then you ask me stupid questions. I thought rangers were the top dogs. What kind of idiot question is that?”

  Over by the back of the Schmidts’ vehicle, Noah tucked his head to hide a chuckle. Rhyden took a deep breath before responding. “I’m sorry, sir. Let me reword the question. Where is your spare tire? Ranger Morgan and I will be happy to change i
t for you.”

  “Bah! I pay Triple A enough every year. About damned time they earned some of it. They can damn well come out and change the tire. What I want to know is who will pay for the damn thing? It’s ruined. Can’t be fixed.”

  Rhyden reached for his wallet. “I have Judge Nelson’s card…”

  Noah interrupted him. “Hold up, Rhy. There’s something over here you need to see.”

  Puzzled, his partner said, “Excuse me, Mr. Schmidt.” He stepped back over to where Noah still squatted behind the flat tire.

  With the tar-covered tip of his knife, Noah pointed to the oddly shaped piece of metal he had pried from the driveway. With a rounded, mushroom-shaped head on one end, the object angled outward and down to form a sharp point on the other end. This point had punctured the vehicle’s tire. “Do you recognize this? Or those?” he asked, pointing at small, weird shaped rocks also covered in tar.

  “No. Can’t say I do. Do you?”

  Noah winced as he rubbed a hand over one hip. “Unfortunately, I do.” He tugged his cell phone from his shirt pocket and typed a few words into the browser. When the website he was searching for finished loading, he turned the screen to face his partner.

  Rhyden studied the piece of metal on the ground, comparing it to the image on the phone. His gaze wandered to Mr. Schmidt and back to the metal again. “You sure?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “Well, hell.”

  “Exactly.” A heavy sigh slipped from Noah’s lips. “Do you want me to tell him, or do you want to do it?”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “I’ll call Martin over at the jail and ask him to haul the halogen lights and generators out here before the sun goes down. Maybe have him grab water and pizzas, too. It’s gonna be a long night. Better get the crime scene crew headed over from Austin as well.”

  Rhyden pulled on his earlobe. “Do you think we should call over to Southwest Texas University for their forensic anthropology team?”

  Noah shrugged. “And show them what? A piece of metal and a handful of potential bone fragments? I think it would be a waste of time. Don’t they need a skeleton or at least a partial skeleton to work with? I think our best bet will be tracing down the serial number on the hip replacement, but we’ll wait and see what the crime scene crew thinks. They can decide if they need more help or not.”

  “All right. Crap, I promised Bree I would be home in time for her to go to Jenn’s house tonight. I need to call the girls and let them know I won’t be home for dinner. Again.”

  “Go ahead,” Noah said. “Call the girls. Whoever finishes first deals with Mr. Schmidt.”

  After ending his calls, Noah returned to where the elderly man still fumed, carrying a consent-to-search form. He held up a placating hand before the man could start in on him. In a grim tone, he informed Mr. Schmidt things were more complicated than a shoddy driveway repair and a flat tire.

  “You found a what in my driveway?” he bellowed, staggering against his cane.

  “Mr. Schmidt, would you like to sit down?” Concern tinged Noah’s voice. Please do not pass out. “Can I help you inside where it’s cooler?”

  With the temps running in the low triple digits and the humidity hovering around ninety percent, Noah could count the rivulets of sweat trickling down his back causing his shirt to stick to his skin. The smell of melting tar in the driveway burned his nose. He could just imagine how the combination of the acrid odor of asphalt, the stifling heat, and the shocking news must affect the elderly man. He grasped Mr. Schmidt by the elbow to lead him into the house.

  The grumpy old geezer jerked his arm from Noah’s grasp. “Mein Gott in Heaven. I don’t need your mollycoddling. I’m old, not stupid. I need you to tell me one more time exactly what you found and what it means. What happens next?”

  Noah removed his hat and ran his sleeve across his forehead and down his face before returning the hat to his head. Why do I work for a department that demands a cowboy hat be worn as part of our uniform any time we are outdoors, regardless of the weather?

  He brushed his dress code thought aside. “Sir, are you sure you don’t want to go inside? Maybe sit down? Cool off?”

  Schmidt waved the suggestion aside, irritation clear in the motion. “Just spit it out.”

  “All right. The piece of metal we pried from your driveway appears to be a surgical implant device, the kind used in hip replacement surgery. We suspect some of the rocks we found may be pieces of bone, teeth even. We’ve called in the necessary people to take care of identifying these things.

  “While we wait for the mobile crime scene lab from the Texas Department of Public Safety to arrive from Austin, I need you to sign this consent-to-search form. Next, Ranger Trammell and I will photograph the scene to preserve it in situ—as it currently is.”

  “Now you wait one cotton-picking minute,” the old man growled. “How long will all that take? What if I don’t want to sign your verdammt form? I need my car. The old lady has several doctors’ appointments in San Antonio this afternoon.”

  Noah lifted his hat again and brushed sweat off his forehead before it rolled into his eyes. “Tell you what. Sign this piece of paper giving us permission to search your driveway, and as soon as we finish the photography, Ranger Trammell and I will change your tire. Then you can pull your car out of the driveway. If you don’t sign it, we will have to find a judge and get a warrant. Going the warrant route will delay things considerably.”

  Noah shrugged. “The choice is yours. Either way it goes, you won’t be able to pull back in for some time. We’re going to have to tape off your driveway and process it as a crime scene. Is there maybe somewhere you could stay for a few days?”

  “Crime scene?” Mr. Schmidt crumpled as if he’d been kicked in the solar plexus. Bewilderment flooded his features. For the first time since the rangers arrived, the man looked old. “My driveway is a crime scene?”

  “I’m afraid so, sir,” Noah said, using the tone he reserved for scared kids, grieving family members and sagging old men who hadn’t tasted sweet tea in more than sixty years. “Hip implants, bits of bone and teeth are not normally used for road base. It looks like someone may have disposed of a body in your driveway.”

  Chapter Four

  Bree shimmied out of her wet blue jeans while balancing a cell phone between her chin and shoulder. “If I’d known swats with a board over wet jeans stung so much, I might not have jumped off the cliff. Archaic custom—corporal punishment. Why do I have to go to the only school in the state of Texas that still beats students for showing a bit of spirit, a bit of independence?”

  “Who are you talking to?”

  Bree jumped. Samantha, stood in the doorway. “Not you.” She stalked to the door and slammed it in her sister’s face.

  Sam slammed her fist against the closed door and yelled, “How rude!”

  Bree’s cell phone chirped, showing she had a new text message. The alert had sounded nonstop since she left school. Her phone was blowing up as her friends told her how many hits her video had gotten on Facebook and YouTube.

  Going viral! Her chest puffed up with pride after reading the number of videos confirming the popularity of the stunt at the bluff. Told him I could be spontaneous. Can’t wait till he sees the video.

  She imagined the expression of pride her new boyfriend would bestow on her. Her thoughts darkened as they drifted to her father. He definitely would not be proud. I hope the school doesn’t call him. Can’t believe I actually jumped.

  After a soothing, hot soak in her claw-foot bathtub filled with lavender-scented bubbles and surrounded with vanilla candles, she dried off with a fluffy, purple towel, then sprinkled baby powder on her legs. The powder helped as she wriggled into her favorite pair of super-soft, faded, skin-tight jeans.

  Flopping down on her back on top of her turquoise and empire blue duvet, she lay back to fasten her jeans. She sucked in her stomach as tight as possible and fastened the button at the waistband. Fig
hting with the zipper came next. She grabbed a wire coat hanger and fed the hook into the hole at the end of the zipper tab. Using the hangar for leverage, she wrestled the zipper all the way up. There. At last.

  She struggled to her feet and dropped into a couple of grand pliés to stretch the jeans enough to allow her to breathe. She slipped into her favorite blingy tank top. Before she forgot, she threw a loose, button-up denim shirt over it. Carefully buttoning up the shirt, she left it untucked just in case her dad came home before she left. “Yeah, right. Like that’s ever going to happen.”

  She was supposed to be spending the evening at Jenn’s house. “Dad may not be the brightest crayon in the box when it came to his daughters, but even he would question why I’m so dressed up to hang out and watch movies at my bestie’s house.” Excitement sizzled through her insides. I can’t wait to see Prince Charming!

  A flash of apprehension dampened the excitement. She had never lied to her father before. She hated lying now, but she didn’t know what else to do. Dad would never let her date PC. He’d say her boyfriend was too old. He’d also say she couldn’t go out with anyone who wasn’t in high school. She was afraid to even think her sweetie’s real name. Sometimes she believed her dad was psychic and could read her mind.

  Her old man would interrogate him faster than a duck on a June bug. Just like the last one he scared off. And the one before that one. “Not my fault PC was homeschooled and graduated two years early. Besides, I’ll be eighteen soon. Age is all in your head, anyway. You are only as old as you feel.”

  Bree yanked her closet door open and dropped to her knees as she rummaged through the piles of stuff on the closet floor. It’s not fair. I make straight As. I go to school. I come home from school. I cook. I clean. I take care of my sisters.

  She grabbed her left cowboy boot from the bottom of one stack and tossed it onto the floor near her bed. She kept rummaging for the right boot. Just thinking about all the things she did raised her temper. “I don’t skip school. I don’t sleep around. I don’t do drugs.” She snagged the right boot and scooted over toward her bed. It was too hard to stand up yet in the tight jeans.