02.A.Warrant.To.Kill.2000 by Casey Kathryn

Author:Casey, Kathryn [Casey, Kathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

18

She couldn’t have known of Mike Shaffer’s plot to entrap her son as a way of appeasing McGowen’s appetite for a big bust, but that summer, Susan White was obsessed with the young deputy, his name never far from her lips.

“He’s getting worse all the time, pushy,” she told David LaBelle, APM’s director.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she admitted.

Yet with Susan’s relationship with Valentine blooming, her fear took a backseat to the excitement of making plans for the future.

“It was always ‘Ray this’ and ‘Ray that,’” says Helen. “Susan looked happier than I’d seen her since Ron.”

To Gloria, she cooed about Ray and his money. “He’ll be good to me, I can tell,” she said. “We can follow the circus with Jason and Ray’s two boys. Jason will love seeing the world. He won’t have to go to school—they have tutors.”

Still, Valentine and Susan’s relationship was far from idyllic. They argued often, usually about his continued frustration with her insistence that some young contract deputy named Kent McGowen planned to hurt her. She claimed McGowen had followed her to a shopping center, that he stopped his squad car in front of her on the street and stared at her as she drove around him.

“He’s trying to scare me,” she said. “He’s crazy and I can’t get rid of him.”

“You’ve got to stop saying this cop is going to kill you,” he countered, his anger rising. “Enough is enough. If Jason gets arrested, if anything happens to him, it’s because he’s got himself a problem. He’s a teenager and he’s getting into trouble.”

The 1992 Republican convention opened in Houston on August 17, and Ray hired a limo and took Susan and Helen to a political bash at the Ritz-Carlton. Susan wore a sequined dress and rhinestone earrings. She sparkled as brightly as the red, white, and blue centerpieces on the tables. On the dance floor, she and Ray swayed as the room reverberated with music.

“Everything was great until she brought up McGowen again,” remembers Valentine, who stalked out of the event and took a cab home alone. “I was tired of hearing it. It was a party. I told her, ‘Enough is enough, for God’s sake.’”

Their relationship took a second hit a few days later, when Ray’s ex-wife appeared at his doorstep.

Susan interpreted the intrusion of a woman out of Ray’s past as a threat. Would he abandon her, like L.J. had, like Ron? One night she sat in her bedroom, toying with a yellow legal pad. As a teenager, she’d written an awkward poem to an unrequited love. Now, a middle-aged woman, mourning the loss of her marriage and fearing the loss of new love, she scrawled:

HOW DO I GET IN THESE MESSES. I HAVE ONE WOMAN WANTING MY EX-HUSBAND FOR HIS MONEY. I HAVE ONE EX-WIFE WANTING MY LOVER FOR HIS MONEY. AND I, LIKE AN IDIOT, I’M ALLOWING BOTH MEN TO TRAUMATIZE ME IN VERY SIMILAR WAYS. I’M IN CENTER STAGE OF THIS FIASCO.

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