In Death 14 - Reunion in Death

off, wouldn't it?"
    "Yes, sir, it would. I wonder how many more people Julianna can kill before the lawyers wrangle that out? You care to speculate?"
    "I've got nothing to do with her, haven't in more than a dozen years. I made my peace there, and I don't need some city-girl cop from New York coming here and throwing that dirt in my face."
    "I'm not here to throw dirt, Mr. Parker. I'm not here to judge you. I'm here to learn anything that might help me stop Julianna from taking more lives. One of them might be yours."
    "Shit. Pardon my French," he added. "That girl's nothing but a ghost to me, and I'm less than that to her."
    Eve pulled stills out of her field bag. "This is Walter Pettibone. He was nothing to her, either. And Henry Mouton. They had families, Mr. Parker. They had lives. She destroyed all that."
    He looked at the stills, looked away. "Never should've let her out of prison."
    "You won't get an argument there from me. I helped put her in a cage once before. I'm asking you to help me do it again."
    "I got a life of my own. It took me a long time to get it back so I could wake up in the morning and look at myself in the mirror."
    He took a dirt-brown Stetson hat from a stand with pegs just inside the door, fit it on his head. Then he stepped out, shut the door at his back. "I don't want this in my house. I'm sorry not to be hospitable, but I don't want her in my house. We'll talk outside. I want to take a look at the stock anyhow."
    As a concession against the white glare of the sun, Eve dug out shaded glasses. "Has she been in contact with you at all?"
    "I haven't heard a peep from that girl since she walked out the day she turned eighteen. The day she told her mama what had been going on. The day she laughed in my face."
    "Do you know if she's been in contact with her mother?"
    "Couldn't say. Lost track of Kara when she left me. Heard she'd taken a job off planet. Farming satellite. Far away from me, I'd say, as she could manage."
    Eve nodded. She knew Kara Dunne Parker Rowan's location. She'd remarried four years earlier, and refused to speak to Eve regarding her daughter. Her daughter, she'd informed Eve during their brief transmission, was dead. Eve imagined Julianna had the same attitude toward the woman who'd birthed her.
    "Did you rape Julianna, Mr. Parker?"
    His face tightened, like old leather stretching over a frame. "If you mean did I force myself on her, I did not. I've done a lot of atoning for what I did, Lieutenant."
    He paused at a paddock fence, propped one booted foot on a bottom rung, and stared out at his men and horses. "There was a time I put all the blame on her. Took me a long while before I could spread that out to myself and deal with it. She was fifteen, chronologically speaking anyways. Fifteen, and a man more than fifty has no right touching those kinda goods. A man married to a good woman, hell to any woman's got no right touching her daughter. No excuses."
    "But you did touch her."
    "I did." He straightened his massive shoulders as if taking on weight. "I'm gonna tell this my way, just saying up front I know what I did was as wrong as it gets, and I take the blame and responsibility for that."
    "All right, Mr. Parker. Tell me your way."
    "She'd slither around the house wearing next to nothing. Crawl in my lap and call me Daddy, but there wasn't anything daughterly in how she said it."
    He set his teeth, looked away from Eve, and out over his land. "Her own daddy was a man hard on women, but he next to worshipped that girl, so her mama told me. Julianna could do no wrong and when she did, he blamed her mama. I loved that woman. I loved my wife," he said, stepping back, flicking his gaze to Eve's face before he began to walk again. "She was a good woman, churchgoing, quiet-natured, sturdy. If she had a blind spot, it was that girl. She has a way of blinding people."
    "She behaved provocatively with you."
    "Shit. Pardon my French. Fifteen years old, and she knew just how to wrap a man around her finger, get whatever she wanted. She stirred up something in me that shouldn't've been stirred up. I shouldn't have let it happen. I started thinking about her, looking at her in a way that damned me straight to hell. But I couldn't stop. Maybe didn't want to, not then. I know right from wrong, Lieutenant. I know damn well where the line is."
    "And you crossed it."
    "I did. One night when her mama's out at one of her women's meetings, she came into the study, slid on my lap. I ain't