Protector - Laurel Dewey [121]
She pulled out two stapled pages of typed information on the elusive Texas mob. The Texas mob. It always came back to them and it always ended there. Jane thought back to her father’s comment of “follow the protection money.” The Texas mob’s side ventures of offering “protection” to foreign businesses against drug entanglements in exchange for a slice of the store’s profit was textbook. It was that protection money that could steer Jane to a viable suspect in the case. It could turn out to be some lackey for the mob or it could hopefully turn out to be a heavy hitter.
The more Jane pondered the possibilities, the more she concluded that it had to involve more than one individual. The Stover house was on 24-hour guard. Except for the time when Stover stupidly took his family for ice cream and was accompanied by two patrol cars along the way, there was a fortress of protection around his house. The precise timing it took for the individual to come out of the shadows and plant the crude, C-4 bomb in the driveway—right in sight of Jane and Chris in their parked car—and then disappear into the night was nothing short of amazing.
“Fucking ice cream,” she mumbled under her breath. It was so typical of a druggie when he started “tweaking.” They always craved sugar and would do whatever it took to get their dose of the sweet stuff. “Screw the rules,” Jane could almost hear Stover saying to the cops as they tried to dissuade him from leaving the house. But Stover had been house-bound and in a forced state of detox for more than two weeks. It was insane to expect him to maintain any sense of mental stability. Jane knew that meth detox could take anywhere from three to six months. After just two weeks off the drug, Stover was most likely hearing voices and hallucinating, two common side effects of withdrawal. He was busting at the seams and would have probably offered to cut off his daughter’s big toe for a chance to get out of the house and taste sugar. Jane surmised he was still licking that ice cream cone when he drove his SUV into his driveway and tripped the wires that led to the C-4 explosive.
Her dad’s “follow the protection money” advice was sounding more plausible. In Jane’s mind, whoever organized the Stover hit was either desperate or cunning. Maybe, she thought, a little bit of both. With Stover set to testify the next morning against the mob, it was a last-ditch effort that had to go down without failing. Someone in their inner circle had to be persuaded to act fast, either to prove himself or save himself from the mob’s wrath.
The sound of the nightly coal train rumbled loudly through town, tooting its horn several times. As the train rattled and roared along the tracks, Jane heard the quickly approaching footsteps of Emily running down the hallway toward her closed door. With one large sweeping motion, Jane threw all the documents and newspapers into a pile and shoved them into her leather satchel. Emily pounded on