Third Degree by Greg Iles Page A

without his son, so she’d named Michael in the message. But then again…maybe things were worse than Danny was letting himself believe.
    He craned his neck over his shoulder and looked at the house. Worst case, what could be happening in there? Shields could be beating the hell out of his wife. He might even be threatening her with a weapon.
Truth be told,
Danny thought,
he could have killed her already.
But that was nuts. Warren Shields was no killer. Danny hated to make assumptions, but Shields wasn’t going to shoot the mother of his children—not for screwing somebody on the side. Maybe if he’d walked in on Danny doing her doggy-style in the conjugal bed…
maybe.
But certainly not based on hearsay evidence, which was all he could possibly have, barring a confession. Someone must have seen Danny and Laurel together somewhere. It could have been the hug they’d risked this morning. And that was easily deniable. Danny had coached Laurel on what to say in this type of situation; she knew to deny everything, no matter what.
    He didn’t envy her having to bluff it out with her husband. Warren Shields was smart, and not just regular-doctor smart. Danny had known doctors who couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with the instructions printed on the heel. But Shields wasn’t one of them. He was obsessive about everything he did. He had only been flying for a year, but he probably knew more aerodynamics than Danny did after thirty years in the cockpit. If Warren really suspected that Laurel was cheating on him, he’d tear at it like a bulldog until he was satisfied. On the other hand, he was like any other man. Deep down, he didn’t want to believe that his wife would open her legs for anyone but him. It just went against the grain of the masculine mind. If Laurel stuck to the plan and denied everything, she would be fine.
    Danny wondered if he should risk sending a reassuring text message. If Warren had possession of Laurel’s secret cell phone, it was all over anyway. He would already have seen Danny’s message about “Star” going to Baton Rouge for the day. From that alone he could figure out everything. Even if Laurel had deleted that message as soon as she read it, Warren could trace the phone to Danny’s obliging friend. So where was the additional risk in texting her? Another possibility was that Laurel’s clone phone was stashed safely in her car, as it should be. But Danny knew from experience that she sometimes risked taking it into the house with her. At least on those occasions she always set it to SILENT. His only other option—the only one that didn’t involve losing Michael—was reporting a Peeping Tom at the Shields house. Or better yet, a bomb threat. The Sheriff’s Department would have to go inside, then. But if Laurel had things under control, that kind of intrusion would only make things worse. Best to leave it at sending a reassuring text message.
    “Hey there!” called a scratchy male voice in the upper register. “You lost or something?”
    Danny looked across the passenger seat at the sunburned face of a bald man in his late seventies. “No, sir. Just sitting for a minute.”
    “You making a delivery out here?”
    “Nope.”
    “I thought you might be bringing me my crossties.”
    “Pardon?”
    The man spread his arms as far as they would go. “Railroad ties! To border my garden, shore up the bank.”
    Danny smiled. “No, sir. But I’ve used some of those myself, now and again.”
    The man stared at him as though awaiting an explanation of what Danny was doing on this street.
    “Well,” Danny said, grinding the truck into gear. “I guess—”
    “Do I know you?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Sure! I saw you in the newspaper. Something about the war. Iraq or somewhere. You won some medals over there, right?”
    Military fame is a funny thing. You can leave a town as a pimply faced teenager and not come back for anything but funerals, but as long as you have a living