She went on for a full minute, Kaiser listening intently, nodding, as they walked around to the front of the house. Letty had Kaiser lock his sidearm in the truck’s glove compartment, and she put her Sig in her briefcase on the floor of the backseat.
“You know, we’re allowed to carry these—” Kaiser began.
Letty interrupted. “Cops don’t like other people to have guns. What they don’t know won’t hurt either them or us.”
Then she called 911, and told the woman who answered about the bodies under the bed. Five minutes later, the first cop car turned a corner a couple of blocks away.
* * *
The Midland cops had gotten there in a hurry, two white SUVs, sirens, flashing lights. One car turned into the driveway, while the other stopped in the street. The first cop out, name tag Frisch, a short man with a brush haircut, hurried up to Kaiser and Letty and asked, “You made the report?”
Kaiser looked at Letty, who said, “Yes. We both work with the Department of Homeland Security. Mr. Blackburn worked for Hughes-Wright Petroleum. When he didn’t show up for two days, Hughes-Wright notified you folks. Your officers checked the house but didn’t go inside.” She nodded at Kaiser. “John and I are doing research that may involve Hughes-Wright. We arrived in Midland last night, and this morning discussed the situation with the local vice president for Hughes-Wright. He permitted us to check Mr. Blackburn’s office, where Mr. Blackburn had left a key to his house along with the alarm code for his security system, in case of emergency. We decided to come out and look at the house. We found two bodies under the beds in the guest room. We believe they are Mr. Blackburn and his wife, Marcia. We don’t know them personally, so we’re not sure.”
A brown sedan was coming fast down the street, showing flashing lights on the grille, and the two cops turned to it and one of them said, “Danny.” To Letty and Kaiser he said, “Sergeant Tanner—he’ll be running the show. Crime scene’ll be next . . .”
The sedan turned into the driveway and stopped next to the patrol car, and a plainclothes cop got out. He nodded at Frisch and asked Letty, “You’re the woman who made the report?”
Letty said, “Yes.”
And she looked at him and thought, “Hmm.”
Tanner was a sun-and-sand-blasted thirtysomething, with reddish-blond hair worn long enough to cover the tips of his ears. Not conventionally handsome, he had blue eyes, a narrow nose, and a square chin; he could have been a baseball player, she thought, too bony for football, and at six feet or so, probably not tall enough for Texas basketball.
And he caught her eyes for a second and showed the hint of a smile.
Down the street, two more patrol cars were coming fast. The detective ignored them and asked Kaiser, “You two were together when you found the bodies?”
Kaiser nodded and said, “Yes. We found them together. I’m a security officer with the Department of Homeland Security in Washington, D.C., and Ms. Davenport is a researcher for the U.S. Senate, and assigned to DHS.”
Letty dug her new ID case out of her hip pocket and held it open, and Kaiser did the same thing. The detective’s eyelids flickered as he realized the situation might be more complicated than he’d at first understood. He said, “I’m Dan Tanner. I’m with the city’s Investigative Services. I’ll be running the investigation here.”
He turned to Frisch and said, “Ari, no need to be abrupt about it, but just for form’s sake, we don’t want Ms. Davenport or . . .”
Kaiser said, “John Kaiser . . .”
Tanner nodded. “。 . . Mr. Kaiser chatting about this until we have time to interview them. So just . . .”
Frisch nodded, smiled at Letty, and said, “I’ll keep an eye on them.”