скачать книгу бесплатно
She wiped at her tears, tears she shed not for herself but for Lanny. She hadn’t let herself think about her father’s best friend. Lanny had always been kind to her and had remained Max’s friend until her father’s death. That was what had gotten Lanny killed, Molly was sure.
Her stomach growled and she realized she hadn’t eaten. She pulled off the interstate in one of the tiny, dying towns north of St. George, Utah, and parked in the empty lot of the twenty-four-hour Mom’s Home-cooking Café.
A bell jingled over the door as she stepped inside. It was early, but Molly doubted the place was ever hopping. She slid into a cracked vinyl booth and rested her elbows on the cool, worn Formica tabletop.
A skinny gray-haired waitress who looked more tired than even Molly felt, slid a menu and a sweating glass of ice water onto the table. She took a pad and a stubby pencil out of her pocket, leaning on one varicose-veined leg as she waited.
“I’ll take the meat-loaf special with iced tea, please,” Molly said, closing the menu and handing it to her, noticing that the waitress took it without looking at her, pocketed the pad and pencil without writing anything down and left without a word.
Molly watched her go, thinking her own life could be worse. It was a game she and Max used to play.
“You think your situation is bad, kiddo, look at that guy,” he would say.
He called her kiddo. She called him Max and had since she was able to talk.
“Better no one knows we’re related,” he’d always said. “It will be our little secret.” He told everyone that he’d picked her up off the street and kept her with him because she made a good assistant for his magic act.
There was a time she’d actually believed he was just trying to protect her by denying their relationship because Maximilian Burke had always been outside the law.
He’d raised her, if a person could call that raising a child. He’d let her come along with him. He used to say, “You’re with me, kiddo, I’m not with you.” Which meant she didn’t get to complain, even when he didn’t feed her for several days because he had no money. He would hand her a couple of single-serving-size packets of peanuts and tell her they would be eating lobster before the week was out.
And they usually were. It had been feast or famine. A transient existence at best. Homeless and hungry at worst. Her father was a second-rate magician but turned out to be a first-class thief.
She glanced out the café window, remembering late nights in greasy-spoon cafés, lying with her head on her arms on the smooth, cool surface of the table, Max waking her when the food was served. Too tired to care, she ate by rote, knowing that tomorrow she might get nothing but peanuts.
“You have to learn to live off your wits,” Max used to say. “It’s the best thing I can teach you, kiddo. Some day it will save your life.” That day had arrived.
The waitress brought out a plate with a slice of gray-colored meat loaf, instant mashed potatoes with canned brown gravy over them, a large spoonful of canned peas and a stale roll with a pat of margarine.
Molly breathed in the smell first, closing her eyes. This was as close to a mother’s home-cooked meal as she’d ever come. What she loved was the familiarity of it. This was home for her, a greasy-spoon café in a forgotten town.
She opened her eyes, tears stinging, and picked up her fork, surprised that she still missed Max after all this time. Surprised that she missed him at all. But as much as he’d denied it, he was all the family she’d ever had.
She took a bite of the meat loaf. It was just as the meat loaf she’d known had always tasted, therefore wonderful.
After she’d finished, the waitress brought her a small metal dish with a scoop of ice cream drizzled with chocolate syrup as part of the meat-loaf special.
She got up to get the folded newspaper on the counter where the last patron had left it, opened it and read as she ate her ice cream, feeling better if not safer.
The article was on page eight. She wouldn’t have even seen it if the photograph of the woman hadn’t caught her eye. The spoon halfway to her mouth, the ice cream melting, she read the headline.
Missing Woman’s Car Found in Old Barn.
She put down the spoon as she stared at the woman’s photograph. The resemblance was uncanny. Looking at the photograph was like looking in a mirror. Or at a ghost. Molly could easily pass for the woman, they looked that much alike.
Heart pounding, Molly read the entire story twice, unable to believe it. Fate had just given her a way out. Her luck had definitely improved.
Las Vegas, Nevada
VINCE WINSLOW PULLED UP in front of the motel room and honked the horn of the large older-model car he’d bought when he’d gotten out of prison.
Vince thought of himself as a fair man. He’d been a mediator in his cell block at prison and everyone agreed he had a way with people. It was a gift. He would hear gripes and grievances, then he would settle them. One way or another. Sometimes he’d just bang a few heads together. Whatever it took.
The one thing he couldn’t stand was injustice. It made him violent and that was dangerous for a big, strong man who’d spent most of his fifteen-year stint in the weight room at the prison, planning what to do when he got out.
He honked again and Angel Edwards came out of the motel room scowling at him. Vince slid over to let Angel drive.
“What? Are your legs broken? You can’t get out of the car? You got to honk the damned horn?” Angel slid behind the wheel, cursing under his breath.
Compared to Angel, Vince was a saint. Angel was a hothead. Short, wiry, all energy with little brains.
“Haven’t you ever wondered why I put up with you?” Vince asked in his usual soft tone. Right now he was definitely wondering that very thing himself.
Angel snorted. “I’m the best getaway-car driver in the business and you know it.”
Vince couldn’t argue that. Angel had lightning-fast reflexes. But since that life was behind them, Vince didn’t need a getaway driver anymore.
“You also love me,” Angel said without looking at him.
Vince stared over at him, realizing that was the only reason he didn’t take Angel out into the desert and put a bullet through his brain. Angel was his half brother. Blood was everything, even if your mother had no taste when it came to men.
“Damn, it’s like a refrigerator in here,” Angel complained, reaching over to turn off the air-conditioning. “You tryin’ to kill me?”
All those years of being locked up in the same cell block had made Vince even more aware of his brother’s shortcomings. Not that it had ever taken much to set Angel off, but now, once angry, Angel was nearly impossible to control. That had proved to be a problem. On top of that, now that Angel was out of prison, he had unlimited access to sharp instruments and a fifteen-year fixation on getting what he had coming.
“We need to talk,” Vince said.
“What is there to talk about?” Angel demanded, glaring over at him. “We find the bitch. We get what’s coming to us. This ain’t brain surgery.”
“My fear is that when we find her, you will go berserk like you did with Lanny and kill her before she tells us what we want to know,” Vince pointed out calmly. “If I hadn’t gotten you out of there when I did last night, we would be on death row right now. We almost got caught because you can’t control your temper.”
“You were going too easy on Lanny. I had him talking. He was just about to tell us. If he had lived just another few seconds…”
Vince groaned. “When we find Molly, you have to refrain from that kind of…persuasion, or we will never get the diamonds.”
“If she hasn’t already fenced them,” Angel snapped.
“She hasn’t,” Vince said for at least the thousandth time. These particular diamonds couldn’t be easily fenced—they were too recognizable. And Vince had his sources on the outside watching for them. There was no way Molly could have tried to fence the uncut stones without him knowing about it.
Angel shifted in the seat, his left cheek twitching from a nervous tic. “Okay, okay. So why are we still sitting here? Let’s find the bitch.”
“I found her before I found Lanny. She’s working at a greasy spoon off the Strip,” Vince said.
“You’ve seen her?” Angel asked, his voice high with excitement and suspicion. “Why didn’t you take me with you?”
Vince raised a brow as if to say, “Isn’t it obvious?”
“You wouldn’t try to cut me out of my share, would you?” Angel asked, going mean on him. Angel didn’t trust anyone, but still Vince took it as an insult.
“You’re my brother.” As if that meant anything to Angel. Vince reached into the backseat and picked up the latest in laptop computers. Opening it, he booted it up.
“What? You going to check your email?” Angel snapped.
“Patience. She isn’t going to get away,” Vince told him calmly. “I put a global positioning device on her car.”
“What?” Angel swore. “You were close enough to her to put some damned gadget on her car but you didn’t grab her? Are you crazy?”
“Like a fox,” Vince said.
“So where is she, Mr. Smart Guy?”
Vince studied the screen and smiled. “She’s running for her life.”
CHAPTER THREE
Antelope Flats, Montana
WHEN CASH GOT back to his office, he found his sister Dusty sitting behind his desk. She leaped to her feet like the teenager she was and ran to him, throwing her arms around his neck.
“Did they find her?” she asked stepping back from the quick hug, a mixture of hope and fear in her expression.
He shook his head and stepped around behind his desk.
Dusty was dressed in her usual jeans, western shirt, boots and a straw cowboy hat pulled low. A single blond braid trailed down her slim back. She was a beauty, although she seemed to do everything possible to hide the fact that she was female. Cash wasn’t sure if it was because Dusty was raised pretty much in an all-male household or because she actually loved working on the ranch more than doing girl stuff.
“You’re going to keep looking though, aren’t you?” She sounded surprised he was here rather than out with the other officers searching the Trayton place.
“I’m off the case, Dusty,” he said dropping into his chair. His sister had been only eleven when Jasmine disappeared. He doubted she understood the implications of Jasmine’s car being found so close to town, but she would soon enough, once the Antelope Flats rumor mill kicked in. He wanted to be the one to tell her, but still the words came hard.
“I was her—” he paused, the word coming hard “—fiancé and with her car found near here, I’m a suspect in her homicide.” He waved a hand through the air, knowing there was more that would come out but no reason to open that can of worms until he had to.
“Homicide?”
“A sufficient amount of her blood type was found in the car to change her disappearance to a probable homicide,” he said.
“How could anyone think you would hurt her?” Dusty cried. “She was the love of your life—is the love of your life. She can’t be dead. She’s probably in Europe just like you thought. She’ll come back once she hears about her car being found and, when she sees you again, she’ll remember what you shared and she’ll be sorry she stayed away and she won’t ever leave again.”
He smiled up at her, surprised that his tomboy sister was such a romantic and touched that she cared so much. He didn’t have the heart to tell her how wrong she was. “What are you doing in town? I thought you were helping with branding?”
“Shelby sent me in to check on you and tell you that you’re expected at dinner tomorrow night.” Dusty rolled her eyes. “Who knows what big bombshell she’s planning to drop now.”
Shelby was their mother, but it was complicated as all hell. Just a few months ago, out of the blue, Shelby Ward McCall had shown up at the ranch. What made that unusual was that Cash thought his mother had died when he was just over a year old.
Shelby had not only announced that she was alive, but that she and their father Asa had cooked up her demise. It seemed they had thought it would be better for Cash and his three brothers to believe she had died rather than just left. Shelby and Asa couldn’t live with each other and didn’t want the children to have the stigma of divorce hanging over them.
At least that was their story and they were sticking to it. But to make matters worse, he and his brothers had always thought that their little sister Dusty was the result of an affair their father had nineteen years ago. Asa had brought Dusty home when she was a baby with some cock-and-bull story about her being orphaned. He’d legally adopted her and Cash guessed he thought his sons didn’t notice how much she looked like them.
Turned out that Dusty was the result of Asa and Shelby getting together years ago in secret to “discuss” things.
Well, now Shelby was back at the ranch and tongues were wagging in four counties. Cash was trying to keep both of his parents from going to prison for fraud and Dusty was hardly speaking to either parent.
His family had always been the talk of the town for one reason or another. Cash knew that was partly why he’d become sheriff. He was tired of being one of the wild McCall boys.
“Say you will come to dinner,” Dusty pleaded. Dusty had taken the betrayal the hardest. It didn’t help that she looked so much like her mother. She’d also been the closest to their father and felt betrayed by him. But she was especially angry with her mother. While Dusty could possibly understand how Shelby might walk away from four sons, she couldn’t forgive her mother for giving up a daughter.
Since Shelby’s astonishing reappearance, the family undercurrents were deadly. She never had explained why she’d returned to the living. But it was obvious a lot more was going on between her and Asa than either had let on. Cash had seen the looks that had passed between them, seen Shelby crying and Asa hadn’t been himself since she’d come back. Their father, a cantankerous, stubborn, almost seventy-year-old man who’d alienated all four of his sons on a regular basis, was actually trying to be nice.
It worried the hell out of Cash.
So it was no wonder that the last thing he wanted to do was attend one of the McCalls’ famous knock-down-drag-out family dinners—especially now.
But he knew that an invitation to a family dinner was really a summons to appear. If he sent word back that he wasn’t coming, Shelby herself would drive into town to try to change his mind. He didn’t need that.
“I’ll be there.” He hated to think what new surprises might be sprung at dinner tomorrow night.
Dusty sighed in relief at his acceptance. “I think the dinner is probably about Brandon. You know he’s been acting weird lately.”
Cash had noticed a change in his brother, but didn’t think it weird. Brandon, at thirty-three, seemed to have finally grown up. He’d taken on more responsibility out at the ranch, had really seemed to have settled down. He was talking about attending law school next fall and, according to their older brother J.T., had opened an account at the bank to save for it. “Isn’t it about time Brandon grew up?”
Dusty didn’t seem to be listening. “He comes in really late at night. I think he has a girlfriend, but he denies it.”
Cash laughed. “If you’re right, he’ll tell us when he’s ready.”
She made a face at the “if you’re right” part. It was a given that a McCall was always right, especially a female one. “Aren’t you even curious why he would try to keep a girlfriend secret?”
“No, we’re a family of secrets,” Cash said, realizing just how true that was. He thought of his own secret, pushed for years into some dark corner of his heart.
The problem with secrets was that they didn’t stay that way. It was only a matter of time, now that Jasmine’s car had been found, before his came out.
Somewhere outside St. George, Utah
AFTER LEAVING THE CAFÉ, Molly found a newspaper stand and bought a copy of the paper. She ripped out the article and sat behind the wheel of her car, studying the photograph of the missing woman.
On closer inspection, the woman didn’t look that much like her. The resemblance was in the shape of the face, the spacing and color of the eyes, the generous mouth. The hair was different, long, straight and white-blond compared to Molly’s curly, short, darker blond locks.
But with some makeup, a few highlights in her hair and the right clothes… The clincher was that the woman was close to her age—just a year and a half older—and about her height—an inch taller and ten pounds heavier.
As Molly looked into the woman’s face, she felt a chill at just the thought of what she was thinking of doing. Talk about bad karma.
According to the article, Jasmine Wolfe was last seen at a gas station on the outskirts of Bozeman seven years ago. The clerk at the station had noticed a man approach the blond woman driving the new red sports car. The man was about average height wearing a dark jacket, jeans and cap. The clerk didn’t see his face or note his hair color.
When the clerk had looked up again, the man was holding the woman’s arm and the two were getting into the car. They appeared to be arguing. The clerk hadn’t thought much about it, just assumed they were together, until she’d read about the search for the missing woman and remembered Jasmine, the new red sports car and witnessing the incident.
It was speculated that Jasmine had been abducted by an unknown assailant who had forced her into her car at possibly knife-or gunpoint. That theory was heightened a month later when a man was arrested outside of Bozeman trying to abduct a woman at another gas station in the same area.
The man was sent to prison and, while he never admitted to abducting Jasmine Wolfe, he was believed to have been involved in several other missing persons’ cases in the area, including hers. The man had committed a murder in prison and was still serving time there with little chance of parole.
That was good news. But not as good news as who Jasmine Wolfe was—the daughter of Archibald Wolfe, a furniture magnate from Atlanta, Georgia. Archie, as he was known to his friends and employees, had offered a sizable reward for any information about his daughter. The reward had never been collected.
