told him. But instead he got angry. I never saw Mitch get angry before.”
“Everybody has buttons. Obviously Mitch and his brother have some issues.”
“You have to talk to him, Raleigh. Convince him to hire himself a lawyer and go to Coot’s Bayou and answer the questions.”
“I can try. But honestly…you’re the one who knows him better.”
“And you’re the lawyer. You know how to persuade juries and get witnesses to admit stuff.”
“We’ll talk to him together,” Raleigh said decisively.
Beth nodded. “Okay. Let’s do it now.”
They exited the bathroom, but in the hallway Raleigh paused as if something just occurred to her. “Why do you think the half brother showed up with the news?”
“He said he thought it would go down easier if Mitch saw a friendly face. But that guy’s face was far from friendly. He was loving every minute of the exchange. There is bad blood between those two.”
MITCHWASSOSTEAMED about his brother’s high-handed prank that he didn’t return to the bull pen. He needed quiet, not the controlled chaos of the large, open area, where the Project Justice junior investigators and interns worked. He headed upstairs to his private office, shut the door and collapsed into the leather chair behind his desk.
He didn’t want to see or talk to anyone.
He was supposed to be searching for a missing witness pertaining to another investigator’s case, but not even the prospect of losing himself in online research could distract him from his irritation.
Dwayne could have called. He could have emailed him or texted. He could have showed up at Mitch’s house. Walking into Mitch’s place of business and announcing to everyone within earshot that he was a murder suspect was the kind of cruelty Dwayne had always gone for.
He’d done it on purpose, of course—to humiliate Mitch as thoroughly as possible.
Mitch slammed his fist into his left palm. Hell, why was this happening now? He had a fight scheduled for Friday night, and he couldn’t afford to lose focus, not if he wanted to continue his winning streak.
He needed to sweat, to work out the anger and frustration. Beating the crap out of a punching bag, pushing his body until every muscle burned, was the only sane way he knew how to deal with stress. It sure as hell beat joyriding in stolen cars, or downing a case of beer.
After a futile hour, he decided concentrating was impossible. He closed his laptop and loaded it into his backpack. No one would notice if he cut out a couple of hours early, and he could put in a few more hours of research tonight at home. Right now, he had to get out of here.
He was heading for the door when someone knocked. Damn, no clean getaway. He yanked the door open.
Beth and Raleigh. Neither of them was smiling.
“Hey. I was just on my way out—”
“This will only take a few moments.” Raleigh pushed her way inside his office without invitation. Beth followed, and Mitch inhaled deeply as she brushed past him. Today’s scent was green-apple. She liked to wear all different kinds of perfumes, mostly botanical scents like kiwi and watermelon and vanilla. He’d made a game out of trying to guess the scent of the day.
But the stubborn expression on her pretty, feminine face told him this was not the time for games. He knew that expression. He was in for a fight.
Mitch smiled his best good-ol’-boy smile. “Ladies, I have a dentist appointment—”
“So you’ll be five minutes late,” Raleigh said. “As chief legal counsel for Project Justice, I have something to say. Now, you might not care if a posse of Louisiana cops shows up tomorrow with sirens and bullhorns and guns flashing, but I do. If you get arrested for so much as littering, it reflects badly on the foundation, and I can’t let that happen.”
“That won’t happen,” he assured her. At least, he didn’t think so. “My brother was just trying to piss me off. They don’t have any evidence.”
“They do have evidence,” Beth nearly exploded. “If you were the last person known to see the victim alive, that’s plenty of evidence to bring you in for questioning. You’re only making things worse. If you keep sticking your head in the sand—”
He held up one hand to stop the tirade. “I’ve got this under control, okay? I know how the local cops operate in Coot’s Bayou. I worked for them for a few years. They’re just shaking the bushes, hoping something will fall out.
“I’m not falling out. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He turned his back on them, daring them to try and stop him from exiting his own office. If he didn’t find a punching bag soon, he was going to lose it. But he heard no steps behind him, no clatter of high heels on the polished wood floor.
It was a fine spring day, cool and crisp in a way perpetually muggy Houston seldom saw. He’d ridden the Harley to work, and as he settled into his eight-mile commute home, he hoped the wind in his face would clear his mind. But when he pulled into his driveway, he was every bit as tense and angry as when he’d left work.
He didn’t bother putting his bike in the garage. He stepped inside his small ranch house long enough to shed his jeans and golf shirt and throw on shorts and a T-shirt with the arms ripped out. Barefoot, he headed outside again, straight through the backyard to the gate that led to the adjacent property.
Mitch lived next to a played-out oil field. He’d bought the little house out near Hobby Airport for a song because most people didn’t care for the sound of pumps and the occasional smell of raw petroleum. That was three years ago, and now the pumps were silent and still. The oil reserves were empty.
The quiet wouldn’t last forever. Even now, the oil company that owned the mineral rights to this two-hundred-acre chunk of land was in the process of acquiring more sophisticated drills and pumps that could go deeper into the ground. But for now the field was still and peaceful except for the breeze rustling through weeds that had reclaimed the ground and the occasional bird chirp.
Most of the old machinery had been removed, but one rusted grasshopper pump was left, abandoned, and Mitch had turned it into his private gym. It had just the ambiance he needed to train for a cage fight.
Mitch normally started his workout with some general fitness training—push-ups, jumping rope or agility drills with resistance bands wrapped around his thighs. But today he skipped all that. He tugged on a pair of four-ounce gloves, which offered minimal protection for his hand but left his fingers free, then went to work on the heavy punching bag he’d suspended from the pump.
Jab. Jab. Left hook. Right uppercut. Knee to the solar plexus. Head shot. Body shot. Like always, he imagined an opponent. Usually, he visualized the guy he was scheduled to fight. He would study any videos he could find of the guy, imprint his fighting style into his brain, then picture all the various ways he could beat him.
Today, his opponent was not Ricky “Quick Death” Marquita. Today, the face he saw was his brother’s.
Dwayne was the one who’d motivated him to learn to fight—not by encouraging him, but by beating him up a few times when they were kids. Bigger, older, Dwayne had had no trouble besting his little brother.
Mitch continued to rain punches and kicks onto the hapless bag filled with sand and gel, pausing only long enough to whip off his T-shirt after he’d gotten good and warmed up. Roundhouse kick to the head. Elbow to the chin. Inside crescent kick to the knee. He kept going long past exhaustion. Sometimes, the winner of a cage fight was simply the one who could stay upright the longest. Fighting through exhaustion was a key skill.
If he and Dwayne fought today, things would be different. Dwayne still outweighed Mitch by a good thirty pounds. But Mitch was sure that if they ever met in a chain-link cage—or in a back alley—he could smear the mat with his brother.