The Red Scream by Mary Willis Walker Page A

been on the verge of saying it wouldn’t matter if she took a day or a month; she was going to write the article on Louie Bronk and if he didn’t want to print it, well, hell, she’d find another publication that would. But she stopped the words before they escaped. She had a sudden vision of herself unemployed, out pounding the pavements for a new job, maybe having to go back to the grind of a police beat on some daily rag—a hard job at her age. As jobs went, hers was a great one; she couldn’t afford to lose it.
    As she approached the Stokes Building at the corner of Guadalupe and Eleventh, her sweat was flowing. In other parts of the country September might be fall, but in Austin it was often the hottest month. Today it felt like living inside a blast furnace.
    The two flags—U.S. and Texas—that flanked the entrance of the Stokes Building hung limp in the still air. Across Guadalupe the white limestone of the county courthouse shimmered in the heat and gasoline fumes.
    Molly took the elevator to the second floor. When she gave her name at the reception desk, the woman there checked her list and said, “Mr. Heffernan said he’d be in by twelve-thirty and he could see you then if you don’t mind him eating his lunch while you talk. He said for you to wait on him in his office.”
    The receptionist buzzed the glass door open and Molly wended her way through the warren of cubicles toward the DA’s office. Inside, she shut the door and settled down on his big red leather sofa. She let her head drop to the back of the sofa and closed her eyes.
    Charlie McFarland had said he needed to talk to her—privately, not over the phone—today. Could she meet him at his house again, at five-thirty when he got back to town? It would be worth her while, he said. She agreed. Her curiosity was piqued, and anyway, it was on her way home.
    Yes, things certainly were on the move, but try as she might, she couldn’t figure out where they were going.
    Head still resting on the sofa back, she opened her eyes and let them roam around Stan Heffernan’s office. Except for this sofa, it was pretty Spartan—an institutional metal desk and two imitation wood bookcases, old maps of Civil War battle sites on the wall. Not really the sort of office a boy growing up poor in South Texas would fantasize about having when he made it big.
    When she had researched Stan’s background for Sweating Blood , she had been intrigued to find his early life not all that different from Louie Bronk’s: both came from extreme poverty in small South Texas towns, both had alcoholic, absent fathers and domineering, often abusive mothers. But the similarities ended there. Stan Heffernan’s rotten childhood had propelled him out into the world determined to work hard and succeed. Louie Bronk’s rotten childhood sent him forth determined to kill and rape. One of the questions she had tried to answer in the book was why.
    Stan Heffernan had grown up in George West, one of those dusty, dying towns where the local Dairy Queen was the only place to eat and the high school football game on Friday night the only entertainment. An all-state tackle and a solid student, he had gotten a football scholarship to the University of Texas. A serious knee injury his senior year left him free to pursue what he really wanted: law school.
    Right out of school, he joined District Attorney Warren Stappleton’s staff as an assistant and immediately acquired the reputation for taking on and winning tough cases. Ten years ago, when he was still an assistant DA, he had prosecuted Louie Bronk for capital murder in the robbery-slaying of Tiny McFarland and gotten a death sentence. The following year, when his boss retired, he ran for DA and won. He was one of the most tenacious and steady people Molly had ever met.
    When she heard his heavy tread approaching down the hall, she felt a twinge of apprehension: she hadn’t seen him since the book came out and she wondered how he felt about