The Last King of Texas - Rick Riordan Read Online Free PDF Page B

thirty-ninth
birthday. He had no police record of any kind. His wife's name was
Ines, age twenty-four, maiden name Garcia, born in Del Rio, also no
police record. They had a five-year-old boy named Michael — older
than Jem by two months.
    The curriculum vitae Aaron Brandon had submitted to
UTSA looked mediocre — a minimum of articles, published in
lesser-known journals, a course load that was ninety percent freshman
English and ten percent medieval, references that were no more than
confirmations of his past employment status. The only violent edge in
Brandon's life seemed to be the works he studied. He had an affinity
for the more disturbing texts — Crucifixion plays, Crusade accounts
of the Jewish massacres, some bloodier stories from Chaucer and Marie
de France. The theses he'd written looked adequate if not brilliant.
It made me feel just dandy to have been offered the same job as he.
    Kelly's search for the name Brandon in the
Express-News archives had yielded nothing about Aaron but some about
his family.
    A business section interview from '67 featured one
Jeremiah Brandon, founder of a company called RideWorks. Kelly had
highlighted the last paragraph of the story. This mentioned that
Jeremiah had two sons he was raising by himself — Del and Aaron.
    According to the article, Jeremiah Brandon was a
former printing-press repairman who had made a small fortune
repairing and building amusement rides for the many carnivals that
passed through South Texas. Now with a permanent workshop and fifty
employees, Jeremiah was increasing his profits yearly, and had
invented such child-pleasing rides as the Super-Whirl and the Texas
Tilt. I studied the 1967 photo of Jeremiah Brandon.
    He looked like a turkey buzzard in a suit — thin,
hardened, decidedly ugly. The fierce hunger in his eyes animated his
whole frame. I could imagine him descending on a broken amusement
ride like so much delicious roadkill, stripping it to its frame and
wrenching out the offending gears with his bare hands and teeth.
    The next article, dated April 1993, announced
Jeremiah Brandon's murder. The details were sketchy. Jeremiah had
been socializing with his workers at a West Side bar on a Friday
night. An unknown assailant had entered the bar, walked up to
Jeremiah Brandon, and fired multiple rounds from a large-caliber
handgun into the old man's chest. The assailant had fled. Despite
numerous eyewitnesses, the police had no positive ID to work with.
Not even a sketch. The witnesses at the Poco Mas Cantina on Zarzamora
had apparently been less than model citizens when it came to
exercising their memories.
    There were three follow-up articles, each shorter
than the one before it, each pushed farther away from page Al. They
all said the same thing. Police were without leads. The investigation
had failed to produce a suspect, at least none that the police wanted
to share with the press.
    I flipped through a few other pieces of paperwork —
Aaron Brandon's driving records, insurance policies. The lease for
Aaron and Ines' Alamo Heights home was made out in the name of
RideWorks, Inc.
    I was still thinking about the murdered father and
son when Deputy Ozzie Gerson knocked on my front-door frame.
    "Can't believe it," he said. "You
still live in this dump."
    "Good to see you too. Come on in."
    He inspected the living room disdainfully.
    Ozzie was the kind of cop other cops would like you
to believe doesn't exist. He had a fat ring the size of a manatee
slung around his midsection, powdered sugar stains on his uniform. He
wore silver jewelry with a gold Rolex and his greasy buzz cut covered
his scalp as thinly as boar's whiskers. His face was pale, enormous,
brutishly sculpted so that even in his kinder moments he looked like
a man who'd just attended a very satisfactory lynching.
    "You call this an apartment?"
    "I tried calling it a love cave," I
admitted, "but it scared the women away."
    "This isn't an apartment, kid. This is a holding
cell. You've got