“I’ll get to it next,” I said. “Kate, also known as Katie, is not as smart as her sister. She flunked out of Texas A&M, after majoring in partying, sounds like. In her teens, she had a couple of arrests for driving under the influence, and she smashed the windows on a boyfriend’s car when they broke up. Since then, she’s grown up a little, apparently. She works on the small ranch set up for the disabled children, she organizes fund-raisers for that ranch, and she shops. Oh, she did a stint as a volunteer at the zoo.”

That just sounded boring.

Chip Moseley was more interesting. He’d come up from the rank and file. His parents had died when he was little, and he’d gone into a foster home, which happened to be on a working ranch. He’d learned to rodeo and made a name for himself. Right out of high school, he’d gotten a job on the Joyce ranch. He’d gotten through one marriage and fell in with Lizzie. He’d worked his way up and taken night courses, and now he managed the cattle operations at the ranch and he’d been “dating” Lizzie for six years. Aside from a minor brush with the law when he was in his twenties, he was clean. He’d been arrested in a bar brawl in a dive in Texarkana. To my surprise, I recognized the name of the place. My mother and stepfather had gone there from time to time.

I was tired of reading by then. I flopped back on my pillow. Tolliver told me what was in Victoria’s file on Drex, though I had surmised most of it after ten minutes in Drex’s company. The only male Joyce had been a disappointment all the way around. He’d gotten his high school girlfriend pregnant and they’d had a runaway marriage, followed by a divorce in six months. Drex supported the baby and its mother. Drex had joined the Marines right after he’d turned eighteen (take that, Dad!) and he’d made it through basic until he’d developed ulcers. Or maybe the ulcers he’d already had had gotten worse. Anyway, he’d left the service honorably, and gone on to drift around, doing this and that on his father’s big ranch. He’d also worked with the disabled kids from time to time, and he’d worked in one of his dad’s friend’s businesses for a couple of years in an office job. It wasn’t clear exactly what he’d done there.

“Probably not much, and probably not well,” Tolliver said. “I don’t think he’s ever gone to college.”

“I feel sorry for him,” I said. I yawned. “I wonder how old Victoria’s mom is. I wonder if she can bring the kid up on her own. Who’s the dad? Did Victoria ever say?”