Cut and Run Read Free

down, studied Whit as though measuring his strength.
    ‘You may not like what you hear, Judge. This information gets out, could be you don’t get elected next time around.’ His voice
     lowered. ‘And I know the situation with your father is delicate, but …’
    ‘Harry,’ Whit said, ‘the doctors give my dad fourmonths. For years he’s wanted to know what he did to drive my mother away, to make her leave a good life and six sons who
     loved her. I want you to find her so I can drag her sorry ass home to face my dad before he dies. I want her to explain herself.
     I don’t care if she’s got a perfect life now and I mess it up.’
    They sat in a back corner at the Whitecap, a small seafood restaurant overlooking Corpus Christi Bay, and in the midafternoon
     of a February weekday, the restaurant was empty, the sky the color of burned charcoal. The bay lay empty before them, wind-whipped.
     The restaurant was a converted bright yellow house, the tables close together, but they were alone in the back, the lunch
     crowd evaporated back down Ocean Avenue to the small towers of downtown Corpus Christi or to the regal mansions that lined
     the street.
    Harry Chyme spread files on the restaurant booth’s table in a loose jumble. ‘Okay then,’ Harry said. ‘I know your father hired
     investigators to look for her for several months when she initially disappeared.’
    ‘Yes,’ Whit said. ‘Then he started drinking and stopped caring.’
    ‘The investigators weren’t terribly creative in their search.’
    ‘Harry’s got game.’ Claudia smiled. ‘You found her, you genius.’
    Harry ignored the compliment. ‘Your mother’s disappearance was treated, for the most part, as that of a woman who was simply
     tired of being married, tired of having six kids to raise.’ Harry folded his hands on a folder. ‘They looked at her as a woman
     who had packed a bag, hired a lawyer to end the marriage, and driven off. To have a calculated break from her life. But even
     a divorce meant she might want to see her kids again. And when she didn’t come back and she never got in touchagain, then something bad must’ve happened to her. That theory’s crap,’ Harry said. ‘Because she didn’t leave alone.’
    Whit shook his head. ‘No one else took off from Port Leo the same time she did, or from any other nearby town. She didn’t
     run off with a boyfriend.’
    ‘I looked at every person in Texas who went missing the same month your mother did. There were nineteen people, not counting
     Ellen Mosley. Fourteen turned up later, safe and sound. The other five didn’t turn up safe. Two were kids, kidnapped and killed,
     one in Fort Worth, the other in Houston. A third was a young woman in Texarkana, raped and killed and found on the banks of
     the Sabine River three months later. A fourth was an elderly man with senile dementia who wandered off from a nursing home
     in El Paso and was found dead in the desert from stroke. The fifth was James Powell.’
    ‘I don’t know that name,’ Whit said.
    ‘James Powell was a Dallas banker. He embezzled over a half million in cash from his bank and ran. He committed suicide three
     weeks later in Bozeman, Montana. He actually disappeared the week before your mother did.’ Harry Chyme opened a folder. ‘James
     Powell fished regularly in Port Leo.’
    ‘Lots of people do,’ Claudia said. ‘What proof of a connection do you have?’
    ‘The woman who was living with James Powell in a Bozeman motel and took off after he died matches your mother’s description,
     except for hair color.’
    Whit thumbed the base of his glass. ‘Really.’
    ‘So I started going back through the files, in Dallas and in Bozeman, about James Powell. He’d told a friend at the bank he’d
     gotten involved with a married woman. Said nothing about Port Leo. But he fished in Port Leo nearly every month.’
    ‘A woman with six young children hasn’t got the energy for an affair,’ Claudia