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He just didn’t know. She really couldn’t.
She watched him jogging off into the dark, up the hillside where Bar Naught land bordered the national forest. He was dressed all in black, as one might expect of a trespasser in the night, or a sniper.
He had never denied being the one who had pulled the trigger. Had he intended to leave open the possibility? Intended to keep her unsettled and uneasy in his presence? She didn’t believe he’d killed Everly, either. But someone had, and if he was right, her rifle would prove to be the murder weapon.
Shivering hard, she turned around and went back into the stable, securing the door behind her, and returned to the treatment room where she had left the Remington. Not bothering to turn on the light, she took the rifle from behind the door. The gun metal barrel felt cool in her hand.
She brought the end of the barrel to her nose. The scent, faint but unmistakable, put her doubts to rest. Her rifle had been fired tonight, and if there had been prints on it from the shooter, she’d obliterated them by handling the gun herself.
With the gun weighted perfectly in her hand, she walked down a hall to the gun rack.
There were spaces for half a dozen firearms, but since she’d returned to the Bar Naught, only her Remington had been kept there. Anyone could have taken her rifle, used it to kill Everly and then put it back.
She stood looking at the empty gun rack, trying to see in her mind’s eye the last time her rifle had been billeted there. She so rarely had reason to pick it up that it was possible she might not have missed the rifle if someone had taken it days ago. But no matter how long she stood there imagining the rack empty, she couldn’t believe it had happened that way. The gun hadn’t gone missing. She’d have known.
Whoever had taken her rifle had been in the stable some time in the hours before Everly was shot.
Her throat clutched tight and horror, the weight of the night’s events, Kyle’s murder, all that blood, settled in her chest. She couldn’t breathe. The mewling noise that came out of her shredded what was left of her nerves.
She’d seen two of her grandparents laid out in their coffins, and a high school boyfriend who’d shot himself after he rolled a Jeep and emerged from the accident paralyzed from the waist down.
She’d seen her share of horses put down, dying pets put to sleep, and butchered game. You didn’t grow up on a ranch in Wyoming, even if you were the great-granddaughter of English royalty, a revenue man, without being exposed to death. But she had never seen anything like Everly’s body collapsed in a pool of his own blood.
She shook her head to banish the images. Breathe, Fiona. Through the nose, deep. Breathe. She had to clear her head, decide what to do about the gun.
She didn’t believe Dex Hanifen would be back to arrest her for Kyle’s murder. He knew her. He’d known her all her life. But Dex would have to know about the gun.
How could they have missed it in their search if it had been put back after Kyle was shot?
It was two-thirty in the morning. Should she call the sheriff or wait until morning to call? Wait until he came back?
Would he even be back? Of course. A murder had been committed here. He’d be back. She could tell him then, explain everything then, how she’d—
No. Her breath felt stifled again. If she told Dex she’d only taken her gun down from the rack when she heard an intruder in the stable, when she’d known there was someone hiding out, after Kyle had been killed…Dex would demand an answer to the same question Matt Guiliani wouldn’t let go.
Even if Dex Hanifen never accused her of Kyle’s murder, how could he avoid the inference that the killer had been hiding in the stable all along and she’d let him get away?
Surely Dex wouldn’t believe her capable of that, either. But her uncertainty began feeding other doubts. A chill racked her body. She took hold of herself, stepped forward and replaced the rifle, then took it down again.
She would keep the rifle with her for protection, and in the morning hand it over to Dex.
She returned to her rooms and headed through the darkened, spartan quarters filled in every nook and cranny with all her old treasures, then stripped in the dark and stepped into a hot shower.
She got out only when the hot water ran cold. Bundled in a threadbare terry robe with the faded family crest embroidered in gold above her breast, her hair bound up in a towel, she sat down at her computer. She needed to relay the news of Everly’s murder to her father. She typed Guiliani’s name, then deleted it and sent the simple missive, short and to the point with no mention of his presence on the ranch after the murder.
She had to remind herself over and over again that she wasn’t guilty of anything. At least, nothing that could be prosecuted. She had to fight now, to salvage whatever she could. The Bar Naught was all she had ever wanted, the only place she wanted to be.
She thought of the complications of Matt Guiliani on the ranch. There must be no more slips. No more lapses in her vigilance over her self. He was just an ordinary man and he had no power over her. God help him if he got in her way.
But as she lay in her bed, willing herself to fall asleep, she realized that in the aftermath of Kyle’s murder, there would likely be no party of big game hunters from around the world, gathering on the Bar Naught next week.
She sat bolt upright in the dark, her fist held tight to her lips. Kyle’s murder changed everything, like a fire breaking out across the landscape of all her sacrifices and her dreams. It would all have been for nothing that she had come back, only a torment to wake up every morning on the ranch she could never have back.
MATT RODE UP to the small ramshackle barn at a quarter of three in the morning. His mount was in a nasty temper. He understood. He was in one himself. The pain that racked his body made him want to puke.
He didn’t have to urge the mare into the barn. He followed instead, pulled the saddle off her back and threw it over its resting place, drew off and folded the sweaty blanket, then freed the horse of the bit and reins. He forced himself to give the sorrel a quick brushing down. He doled out a coffee can’s worth of oats, then shouldered his duffel bag and let himself into the back door of the widow Aimee Carson’s cracker-box-size house.
His plan to reinvent himself and his assignment was going to take some fancy footwork. If Sheriff Hanifen lost interest in pinning Everly’s murder on Fiona Halsey, he’d start nosing around for other suspects. A stranger arriving in town within twenty-four hours of the murder would provide the sheriff an interesting alternative.
It could have been worse. In the early planning stages of Matt’s operation to bag Everly and ultimately to destroy The Fraternity, he had planned to book a suite at a fancy dude ranch resort in the area. The idea had been to send Everly the kind of arrogant, in-your-face message that, even as a rogue cop, Guiliani’s significant resources could not be easily discounted.
At the end, the use of a resort had been rejected. Instead, every resource had been used to find Matt a discreet and anonymous place to stay this first night.
Aimee Carson’s little spread fit the bill. She knew nothing and wanted to know nothing of what was going on. She couldn’t guess why anyone would pay her to put up a man for one night. Legendary in these parts for keeping to herself, she lived on a tiny homestead outside the town of Kaycee. Her niece was the best friend of Garrett’s wife, Kirsten.
Staying with the Widow Carson gave Matt room to maneuver. No one, save Fiona Halsey, would ever know he had been within five hundred miles of the murder.
Matt waited to see if the old woman would get up. After a few moments, he switched on a small tasseled lamp sitting atop a crocheted doily and stripped out of his clothes in the middle of her living room. He didn’t have room enough to turn around in Aimee’s bathroom. He would have preferred a shower, but all she had was a hose to attach to the faucet.
As he ran the claw-footed tub full of hot water, he caught sight of himself in the tiny mirror over her sink. Even in the dim light and patch of mirror he could see a massive, angry purple bruise stretching beyond the breadth of his lowest rib. But he’d been lucky. He could as easily have punctured a lung.
He soaked for an hour, listening to the water gurgling down the drain, adding hot water every ten minutes or so. When the dried blood had soaked off his hands, he saw that they were not quite as badly scraped up as he’d feared. It occurred to him that he should at least have washed his hands in the sink of the treatment room.
It occurred to him that Fiona Halsey might have offered to tend to his hands.
It occurred to him that his brain had unaccountably migrated south, and the thought didn’t sit well.
He got out of the tub onto a sweet pink throw rug and took himself off to the living room to towel dry. He pulled on a fresh pair of long underwear, then turned off the light and lowered his aching body onto Aimee’s sturdy baby-blue tweed sofa. He lay there, eyes wide open, thinking through his options until daylight broke.
The threat Matt Guiliani posed to Everly was as a renegade insider cop gone over to the other side, clever and resourceful enough to have fabricated evidence ruinous to Everly’s reputation among The Fraternity members. He believed it would still work. He had to do two things: first, convince Dex Hanifen that the deal Matt had planned to extort from Everly, to make Matt his partner and heir-apparent, was already signed, sealed and delivered. Second, he had to portray himself through the ether of electronic communications as the man who had eliminated the thieving traitor from the rarefied ranks of The Fraternity.
He would step fearlessly forward to usurp control of Everly’s empire.
A deal worth millions was imminent. The summit of international badasses Everly had himself called was set to take place on the Bar Naught in a few short days in the guise of a big-game hunting party. Matt had to act quickly to ensure the meeting came off as planned despite Everly’s sudden demise. The vacuum of power had to be filled, and Matt’s would be the preemptive claim.
He combed again through the possible suspects in Everly’s murder. He couldn’t entirely rule out random motives or a killer unrelated to Everly’s operations—the woman scorned, an old score now settled. But he still believed the odds were that some local pretender to Everly’s throne, a sharpshooter in his stable of killers, perhaps even Hanifen himself, had taken the shot.
His own odds of surviving had taken a dive. In seizing control, Matt made himself a far greater target than he would have been with Everly alive.
Sheriff Dexter F. Hanifen was the big unknown. Where Dennis Geary had served as manager of the Bar Naught and occasional bodyguard to Everly, Hanifen was believed to be Everly’s true lieutenant. The analogy had been drawn more than once to a Mafia don and his consigliere, but Hanifen was more of a functionary than adviser. Everly would never abide a lieutenant so powerful as the consigliere role implied.
The men expected to gather for the big-game hunting party were the ultimate targets of Matt’s operation. Even their true identities were at this point unknown or unconfirmed.
Matt believed they would still come, like the heads of all the Mafia families assembling to evaluate the threat and perform their damage control. More likely still, to stop cold the incursion of Matt Guiliani into their death-dealing consortium.
But behind all his careful planning, his thoughts returned over and over again to Fiona Halsey. He couldn’t displace her for long. She played into every scenario just by her presence on the Bar Naught.
But he was lucid enough in those sleepless hours to know that on a certain level, it didn’t matter to him where she fit into the mix or what her secrets were. He was caught. His attention was arrested. He wanted to follow the gleam in his own inner eye. He could imagine making love to her, not giving a solitary damn what else went on.
He would have to be very, very careful.
AT 5:00 A.M. HE CHECKED his e-mail on his handheld wireless device and found a message from his friend and partner, Garrett Weisz, who had headed up the TruthSayers task force in Seattle for the last five years. The message stated only that Fiona Halsey had e-mailed her father the news that Everly had been murdered. No mention of the fact that Matt had been there.
Garrett didn’t waste a lot of words, didn’t even ask for details. What he wanted to know he put into two words. Go? Abort?
Matt returned: Going live, arrival on Bar 0 by 0800. He knew Garrett and J.D. would know he planned to proceed as if his partnership with Everly had been long-since sealed.
At six-thirty he got up and ate the beefsteak and eggs Miss Aimee prepared for him. Afterward he shaved closely in front of the tiny bathroom mirror, splashed on a rich, wickedly scented and expensive aftershave and changed clothes. He chose clothes befitting his upgrade from rogue cop to Kyle Everly’s partner. Dark designer jeans, a very light green silk shirt requiring cuff links and a pricey black cashmere sport coat tailored to accommodate both his shoulders and shoulder holster. He added the cuff links and watch, and then, turned away from Miss Aimee’s reluctantly curious eyes, he shoved the ammunition clip into place in the butt of his automatic pistol, holstered the piece and threw on a tie.
He grabbed up his duffel bag and a leather suitcase, then flirted shamelessly a moment with the ancient, birdlike Miss Aimee while she played with the knot in his tie, and kissed her on her flowery-scented, powdered old cheek.
“Mmm. White Linen?”
“Go on,” she scolded. “You peeked.”
He shook his head solemnly. “My grandma wore White Linen. She had to make a tiny little bottle last a couple of years, and by then—” He broke off, having sucker punched himself with the memory of Anna Disorbio. “Thank you.”
She shooed him out. He went into the old toolshed, where he’d reorganized twenty-five or thirty years’ worth of newspapers and Harper’s Bazaar magazines in order to park the Ford Bronco out of sight. He reached I-25 from the country road and headed south to the Bar Naught. He got off the highway on the access road, drove another couple of miles. Beneath a gate that announced the ranch, he signaled his turn and waited for an oncoming vehicle to pass first.
Instead, the Johnson County sheriff’s vehicle, Hanifen’s, turned off in front of him. Matt made the turn as well. Hanifen pulled over and got out, leaving Crider in the passenger seat, and approached the driver’s window of Matt’s Bronco. He held down the button to roll the window down.
Hanifen tossed a butt on the ground. “You lost?”
Matt shifted his weight forward on the seat and slouched, his arm resting in the open window. “Nope.” He directed his focus toward the ranch house, on the other side of a couple of acres of spruce and lodge pole pine, wondering how long it would take Hanifen to remember him. “How’s it going, Dex?”
The sheriff frowned. “I know you?”
“We’ve never met face-to-face. But I’m sure you remember me. Name’s Matt Guiliani. I’m the one who rescued the kid your buddies in the TruthSayers framed for firebombing his parents’ house last winter.”
The sheriff’s expression turned stony. “That vigilante pack aren’t any friends of mine.”
“No? But you do remember.”
“Like I said—”
“Yeah, Dex. You’re as innocent as a newborn lamb. But see, here’s the deal. I know better. But don’t worry. I switched sides recently. I had no idea what a market there is for defectors. Kyle made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.” Matt watched a glint of fear give way to disbelief in the sheriff’s eyes. “In fact, Kyle was expecting me this morning.”
“Was? What do you know—”
“Save it, Dex. Kyle was murdered last night,” Matt stated flatly. “Or have I been misinformed?”
The sheriff scowled. “Where did you come by that information?”
“Sources. The important thing for you to know, Sheriff, is that with Everly dead, I’m the guy in charge.”
“Whoa, wait—” Hanifen thumped the brim of his hat up. The barely visible, threadlike veins crisscrossing his nose seemed to sprout crimson. “Just you wait a gol-darned minute. You think I’m buyin’ into that shine, you’ve got another think coming—”
Matt cut him off. “What do you say we drive on up to the house and sort this all out. I’m going to be wanting some answers, Sheriff.” He stepped on the gas, churning up dirt and chunks of gravel as he drove off down the road, missing Hanifen’s toes by no more than a couple of inches.
GARRETT WEISZ WOKE at the first light of dawn. It had always been his habit, but it was easier these days. In Kirsten’s bedroom in the house on Queen Anne Hill, their home now, the first rays of sunlight shot across the ninety-three million miles to nestle on their bed.
As it did every morning, gratitude filled his heart. Abed with the woman he loved, his very pregnant wife, he settled in closer to her and let his fingers stray close enough on the mattress that, as she slept, he could almost feel the weight of the babies in her belly without waking her.
Twin girls.
When they learned that, he and six-year-old Christo had made a secret pact. The boys would be outnumbered in the Weisz household when the babies were born, and the menfolk would have to stick together to keep their girls safe.
Picking the babies’ names now preoccupied their older brother. He’d allowed as how Hannah might be one of them, but couldn’t decide between Madeleine and Irene for the other.
Garrett smiled, deeply content, more comfortable in his skin and in his life than he had imagined he would ever have a right to be. Kirsten had been confined to bed for toxemia problems since last week. He’d joked that he finally had her where he wanted her, and the poignant part of it was that it was true. True in the sense that he pretty much had the care of Christo to himself.
The timing wasn’t the greatest. The day her doctor ordered Kirsten to bed was the day it had been decided Matt would go to Wyoming within the week. Garrett’s hours were crammed with planning sessions for Matt’s undercover operation with J.D. and half a dozen other interagency cops, including their new Interpol liaison. He’d taken Christo along several times, so his son didn’t wind up at day care too long after his kindergarten let out.
From Christo’s point of view, life was sweet. One swell adventure on top of another.
Kirsten turned a bit in her sleep. Garrett feasted his eyes on her swollen breasts as he heard wee feet tiptoeing into their room.
Christo was good, a chip off the old block, but the tiny squeak of a floorboard gave him away. Garrett knew exactly what Christo was after. The electronic pager-cell phone Garrett kept on the nightstand. Christo knew he could expect a message from his Uncle Matt, who was off in Wyoming doing his undercover agent thing.
This was too cool for Christo to bear. He wanted to be the one who got the message, the one to tell his dad the secret communiqué had been received. Garrett lay utterly still and let Christo take the device off to his room. There was not one chance that his son would let a message from Matt go wanting.
Stirring restlessly, Kirsten shifted the weight of her belly, brushing Garrett’s fingers. Her eyelids crept open, and she gave a soft smile tinged with her discomfort. “Copping a feel again, Daddy?”
God. His heart just flooded. He loved her to the ends of the universe, smart mouth and all. “Shh. The babies aren’t old enough to hear that kind of talk.”
“Naughty Mommy.” She slid her hand down over her belly toward Garrett and he knew what was coming. Knew she’d find him with his straining, telltale flesh. She stole his breath away and asked, “Have you heard from Matt?”
Though the pleasure of her touch spread through him like molten gold, he kept his eyes open, playing her game. How long could he keep up a normal conversation under the onslaught of her caress? “Not yet.” He paused, let a wave of pleasure sidle through him. “Christo was just in.”
Kirsten smiled. “Did he get away with your pager?”
“He did.” He moved his leg to trap her fingers in a particular place.
“Clever boy.”
“Who, me?”
“No. Christo. Are you sure—”
His lips tightened. His whole face. “I’m sure.”
She whispered, “Surrender, Weisz.”
“Uncle.” But he didn’t close his eyes, chose instead to let her see his naked emotion, the pleasure welling up inside him.
They lay together for nearly an hour. Her back ached, and she begged a massage. He kissed her nape after she had managed to roll over, then applied his hand to the task of easing the twinges in her lower back.
They must have looked asleep to Christo. From the door came his best shot at a whisper. “Dad! Dad!”
