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Of course, the perp could have already exited the drive, a minute or two after they did. With all of the turns in the road, she wouldn’t have known if the black SUV she’d seen was right behind them or not. He could have waited until her Jeep was out of sight and then turned in the opposite direction. Away from town. He could be long gone.
Still, she’d intended to drop off Rafe and head back out there to explore at least the lower part of the mountain drive, but the chief had other ideas.
For the moment, she’d been ordered to stand down. Worse, he was sending a patrol car to sit outside her home for the rest of the night.
She’d been shot at. End of story.
Except that it wasn’t.
“Who’s out there?” she asked Rafe, completely frustrated as she hung up the phone. She wasn’t good at inactivity. “And why?” Her whole life, the way she’d dealt with stress was by taking action. Same for combatting fear. You met it head-on. Dealt with it. You didn’t hide in your home behind other officers at your front line.
“And what in the hell is going on up that mountain?” she asked when her first question received no answer.
“You asked him about guns and implied something about drugs,” Rafe said slowly, his gaze focused on the road in front of them, as though he wasn’t going to relax a muscle until they’d made the last five miles into town. “You really think that there’s something big going on,” he continued.
“Big enough to warrant killing Tyler,” she said. “I know my brother wasn’t involved in anything illegal that last year, but before that?” She hated that the question even had to be out there.
“It’s possible he just stumbled into something,” she continued, thinking out loud more than anything. “Tyler, I mean. But…you saw the photos from Tyler’s fall,” she said.
What she was about to say was the fact most on her mind at the moment. And the one she left out of her verbal report to the chief. Someone else might notice. They might not. For the moment, until she could think, she was keeping silent.
Rafe’s nod was short. Succinct.
“Same way the head was bent back beneath the body…there’s no way two falls could end up with the body landing so closely the same.”
“Unless the bodies were held, probably by the neck, and then pushed in exactly the same way,” Rafe said, earning her respect. He was right there with her.
Just as she’d have expected her best friend from long ago to be.
“I’m not getting why the ranger was killed,” she said, less than a minute later. The town’s lights were up ahead. Still another mile or so away. “He clearly wasn’t out there protecting us. To the contrary, he wanted us gone. Like he was protecting something else.”
She was back to the drugs and guns. She couldn’t get off them, which told her that she was likely on the right path.
One that led, somehow, to Odin Rogers.
“Could be some kind of turf war and we drove into the middle of it.”
“I need to get back up there and find the casings from the shots that were fired. To run ballistics on the guns.”
Luckily they had a small crime lab right there in Mustang Valley, donated years ago by the Coltons.
“From what I heard of your conversation, you’ve been told to stay home for the rest of the night.”
“That doesn’t please me,” she said. But she knew better than to disobey the chief’s orders. He was chief for a reason. He knew the area. He knew his job. And she valued hers.
“I wonder if whoever killed the ranger was with him when he approached us? He had to get up there somehow and we never heard or saw another vehicle. Alvin walked up to us, walked away. Maybe whoever was driving the black SUV had parked the vehicle farther down and then followed the ranger up. Could be that person heard me asking Alvin about Tyler’s death. But then he’d know that the guy was a jerk. Warned us off. Why would that get him killed?”
Rafe’s shake of the head was brief. They’d entered Mustang Valley proper and he’d slowed to the speed limit.
“Whatever is going on must be big since it was worth killing not one, but two men over it.”
She glanced at him. “You believe Tyler was murdered.”
His quick glance thawed a small piece of her heart. “I trusted your instincts to begin with, but after this…it’s clear you were right, Kerry. The problem is, how are we going to prove it?”
There was that “we” again.
The two of them. A team. Just as she’d once imagined they’d be.
But it was only for a moment.
Because, ultimately, nothing between them had changed. She couldn’t trust him to have her back when life returned to normal and the Colton money and power became an issue again. Couldn’t trust him to stick around.
And Kerry didn’t like to think about the chances of her heart remaining intact if she gave it to him a second time and he crushed it in the dirt on his way out.
Chapter 5 (#u77d6010c-28a7-581c-bd9d-514e726300e5)
The patrol car wasn’t outside Kerry’s house yet when Rafe pulled into her drive. Pushing the garage remote control, he parked in her garage, turned off the Jeep and handed her the keys. Then pushed the remote to close the garage door behind them, with his truck outside at the curb.
When those blue eyes of her turned on him, brows raised like she was questioning him, yet with a hint of their connection of old, he said, “I’m not leaving you here alone. I know, you’re the trained cop with a gun and I’m just a numbers guy in expensive dress clothes, but two bodies, two sets of ears and eyes, are better than one.”
“I wasn’t going to argue with you sticking around for a bit,” she told him, reaching for the door handle. “I was going to thank you.”
She got out and led the way into the house, leaving him with his heart threatening to clog up his throat.
And then she offered him dinner. Leftover meat loaf, mashed potatoes and peas, a meal he’d have had as a young kid eating in the bunkhouse kitchen with his dad and the other cowboys, or a meal his dad might have prepared for him. Not anything he’d see on the Colton dinner table. Not unless it was hidden beneath garnishes and sauces that distinguished between cooking at home and having a chef. Or so he’d been told by Selina, Payne’s second wife, who’d never made a secret of the fact that Rafe, as an adopted Colton, was merely a fly at her picnic.
Over the years, he’d grown accustomed to the wide variety of flavors, the combinations of spices that made eating a physical pleasure, rather than something one did to stay alive. He’d grown into those tastes. To seek them out, no matter the cost, when he traveled.
But to sit at Kerry’s table with her—those leftovers were just fine. They’d taken their seats—his perpendicular to hers on two sides of her little four-seat table off to the right of her galley kitchen—when her doorbell rang. He hadn’t been particularly worried about her safety at home in her neighborhood in the middle of town. Not many would try to kill a cop in front of other Mustang Valley citizens—who were known to watch each other’s comings and goings—most particularly not in their little remote part of the Arizona desert. A lot of people carried guns for their own protection against whatever wildlife might venture into town looking for water. Most wouldn’t hesitate to pull a weapon and use it to protect one of their own.
But when the bell rang, he was right behind her as she passed through the dining room to the living room and then the tiled area before the front door.
“I’m fine, Kay,” she said, turning with a grin on her face that was quickly swept away.
He’d forgotten just how great he’d found the sound of his last name rolling off her lips as she jested with him. Said with just that same intonation.
Apparently she’d forgotten, for a second there at least, that he was a Colton now.
The knock came again, more urgently, and Kerry, with her hand at the gun she’d failed to remove when they’d returned home, looked through the peephole and then quickly opened the door.
“Lizzie, James,” she said, stepping back to let the two blue uniformed officers into her home. “Don’t tell me, the two of you are assigned to guard duty tonight?”
Lizzie shook her head. “James drew that straw,” she said, with a wry glance at her partner.
“I volunteered for it,” James corrected, his light red hair and the kind look in his hazel eyes giving the appearance of a man who could be a pushover. Rafe wasn’t so sure he liked that this would be the guy in charge of Kerry’s safety for the night until the man’s gaze turned on him and he felt the full force of the steely stare.
“Aren’t you one of the Coltons? Some kind of cousin to Spence?” the man asked. “You’re the finance wizard, right?”
“Rafe,” he said, holding out his hand, and feeling strangely self-conscious of his dust-covered expensive leather shoes as the man glanced down at his feet. “Kerry and I used to be friends, a long time ago,” he heard himself explaining. And then wondering what in the hell had compelled him to answer a question this guy hadn’t even asked.
“I knew her brother and when she told me that she thought maybe his death wasn’t an accident, I wanted to hear more.”
The man’s look hadn’t wavered from Rafe’s face and it took him a second to realize that the other two law enforcement personnel in the room were standing there, watching the exchange.
“She’s been saying that for a couple of years,” the woman Kerry had called Lizzie said. With her long dark hair, back in a ponytail at the moment, and brown eyes, she was quite pretty, even in uniform. He hoped she was stronger than she looked. “Why you just taking an interest now?” Her gaze locked on his, as well.
Kerry could jump in anytime. Save his ass. Give whatever explanation she wanted them to have.
Or he’d give his own…
“We just reconnected, since Payne’s shooting,” he said. “I had no idea Tyler’s death wasn’t an accident.”
“Until tonight, it was,” the man, James, said.
And then Lizzie piped in, “The case was closed, but now, who knows?” She shrugged. “With two bodies found dead in kind of the same manner, someone might have some questions.” When she turned to Kerry, Rafe felt like he might be off whatever hook they’d impaled him on, at least for the moment.
He listened intently as Lizzie told Kerry, “The chief and I headed straight up there as soon as you called it in. The rescue crew is still in the gully, getting the ranger out, but we went up the drive and couldn’t find anything, Kerry. No shell casings. No sign of anyone around. Just a broken agave arm and the boot you saw. Again, it looks like he could have jumped. But there’s a little bit stronger evidence at this point that he might have been pushed. With that boot there. We’re looking for fingerprints but don’t expect to get anything.”
“The boot obviously came off while he was being dragged,” Kerry said. “He’d have been digging his foot into the ground, trying to get a hold, to stop himself from going over, but whoever dragged him was a helluva lot stronger than he was and dragged him right out of his boot.”
“That’s what it looks like.” Lizzie’s attention was only on Kerry at that point. As if the women were friends who spoke their own language in between the words they said. The type who understood the nuances and emotions not being expressed.
“The heel of the boot was caught on a root.”
So Kerry’s hunch had been right.
Again. He wasn’t surprised. She’d always impressed him with her intuitive observations. Even as a kid.
“We’ll be going back up in the morning,” Lizzie continued. “Maybe when it’s light, we’ll see more, but for now the only thing we have is the wider tire tracks of the SUV, just as you described. We drove all the way up the hill, by the way. There was no sign of the vehicle up there, so either the guy has a hiding place where he parks it up there someplace…”
“Or he’s long gone,” Kerry finished for her. “Someone shot at us as we were leaving, which means someone was close by. He could easily have just followed us down the hill and took off as we came back to town.”
He’d already entertained the same uneasy thought. His family’s ranch was on the opposite side of town, but still out there. He didn’t like knowing there were ranch hands with families in little cabins with a crazy killer free.
“Which is why I’m going to be right outside until dawn, and people are up and about and it’s less likely that someone would get into town undetected,” James said.
“And I need to get back to the station,” Lizzie said, and then both officers looked at Rafe, as if Rafe had just been given his cue to leave.
“I’m going to hang around here,” he said, without looking at Kerry. Her friends were right there. If she wanted him out of there, he’d be gone in an instant.
“We were just sitting down to dinner,” she told the two in uniform. And then asked James, “Have you had something to eat?”
“I’ve got a cooler full out in the car,” he told her. “And a pee bottle, too.”
Rafe could have done without that piece of information.
But then the two were gone, leaving him and Kerry all alone in the watched cocoon that was her house. The awareness of what had just happened—the two of them acknowledging, in front of others, that they wanted to spend more time together that evening—simmered between them and they just stood there, on that small area of tile, looking at each other.
Kerry broke the eye contact first, heading back through the dining area and kitchen to the food gone cold. She sat anyway, as though eating a cold dinner didn’t faze her at all.
“James might look like an easygoing nice guy,” she said, scooping up mashed potatoes and then meat on the same bite. “And he is nice. He’s perfectly compliant on any occasion that warrants it, but he’s as tough as they come when he perceives a wrongdoing. Or a threat to any townspeople.”
He nodded, not sure if she was reassuring him as to their safety, or warning him in regard to hers. Should he try to make a move on her.
Despite needing her to know that as much as he longed to grab his Kerry into his arms and never let her go, he had no intention of touching her. Not when even a chaste kiss in the past had been red-hot. So he sat. Forked cold food. And ate it.
While they ate, Rafe loosened his tie, talked about all the exotic foods he’d eaten, most of which he’d enjoyed. If he’d set out to remind Kerry of the vast differences between them, he needn’t have bothered. His being a Colton was something she was never, ever going to forget.
And while he did the dishes he insisted on taking care of, she went to the restroom. She’d been holding it for a while, and hadn’t wanted to go with him in the house. Seemed way too…personal, too intimate, for what she needed him to be. Everyone peed. She just didn’t want to go do it with him there.
“You should call the hospital, check on your father,” she told him as she came back down the hall and found him standing in the dining room, glancing at her wall. She’d deliberately used the parental designation rather than Payne’s name.
“I just did,” he told her. “No change.”
She wondered who he talked to… Ace? Another sibling? Payne’s third wife, Genevieve? The spouse was always the first suspect when someone was shot, but both Genevieve and Payne’s second wife, Selina Barnes Colton, had airtight alibis: security footage from the RRR during the time of the shooting. Genevieve in the mansion, Selina walking from her car to her smaller house on the property, carrying in bags of shopping from someplace farther than Mustang Valley, based on the bags’ logos.
Weird that Selina would have gone shopping while the rest of the family dealt with the shock of Ace Colton’s surprise heritage, the knowledge that the eldest heir had been switched at birth and subsequently been stripped of his position as CEO of Colton Oil…
Her mental switch to her current case was a coping mechanism, she knew. Recognized it. Anytime things started to rattle her emotional ground, she focused on a case. Made her great at her job. And still single at thirty-six.
“I made another call, too,” Rafe said, still facing the wall plastered with the last ten years of Tyler’s life. “To a government attorney who works with the Forest Service. I asked for a fast track on any warrant or request that may come through for Grant Alvin’s employment record, or for anything else pertaining to anyone working that mountain.”
To show her how powerful he was? To push his weight around?
He turned and her gaze hooked up with the depth of emotion in those so-familiar blue eyes of his. He’d called because he cared.
Because he was committed to helping her find out what had happened to Tyler. She got the message. He was going to help and then he’d be going back to his real life—the one where he could pick up the phone and call a US attorney after eight o’clock at night.
She made a note of that, too.
“I had no idea it was going to be so hard, seeing you again.” The longing in his words, barely above a whisper, shot through her with the force of a blast.
She couldn’t go down that road again. “It’s a little weird, yeah, but fine, too,” she said, arranging folders on the table.
“I used to watch you.” He’d put his hands in his pockets and was standing there not bothering to hide the glistening in his eyes. “After you’d get home from school, you’d get on Annabelle and ride out to our hill. Every day, when you’d disappear out of sight, I’d pretend I was out there with you…”
“Don’t, Rafe.” He’d watched her? It could be creepy. But it was Rafe. Needing her.
Just as she’d needed him.
Even in their separation they’d been together? The idea soothed her.
And nothing had changed.
“I’d sit up in my room and picture you out there with someone else. Someone who would love you as much as I did, and not leave you…”
Picturing the thirteen-year-old man-child he’d been, all alone in his room at the mansion—she even knew which window to picture since she’d looked up to it often enough over the years—she didn’t want to care.
