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There would still be problems. Problems with her autocratic father, with Alan, with the press. And there was no way this baby could ease her current troubles regarding the ranch.
But as she ran a bath in the ancient, lion-footed copper tub, for the first time in a very long while, Laura felt capable of sorting everything out. A heady, forgotten confidence flowed warmly through her veins. Dual feelings of joy and wonder bubbled up from some hidden wellspring deep inside her.
Sometimes miracles really did happen.
Laura was soaking in the perfumed water when the storm that had been threatening earlier arrived. The sharp staccato of rain sounded on the roof. Thunder rumbled. A bolt of lightning forked just outside the window.
Suddenly, a sound like a Klaxon blare echoed through the house.
“Dammit.” An irritating flaw in the security system was that the sensors on the windows couldn’t tell the difference between a storm rattling the glass or an intruder breaking in.
She rose from the water, wrapped a towel around herself and ran back downstairs, leaving a trail of wet footprints. After deactivating the blaring alarm, she placed a call to the sheriff’s office—which was automatically alerted each time the alarm went off—assuring the dispatcher it was a false alarm.
“Stupid thing,” she muttered, clutching the towel to her breasts as she glared at the computer control panel. Alan had been promising to change the system for months. After tonight, Laura vowed, she was just going to tear the damn thing out.
At the age of thirty-seven, Laura was determined to reclaim control of her life. Along with the house and the 20 thousand acres of prime Arizona ranch land her grandmother Ida Prescott had bequeathed her.
After years of unhappiness, she’d returned home to Whiskey River. Where she belonged. And where she had every intention of spending the rest of her life with the man who, for eight blissful hours, in what seemed another lifetime, had been her husband.
Laura returned back upstairs, traded her towel for a long seafoam silk nightgown, then climbed into the cedar log bed.
Knowing she’d never be able to fall asleep, she sat bolt upright and twisted her hands together atop the Sunshine and Shadows quilt she and Clint had unearthed in a quaint Shenandoah Valley antique shop during a clandestine, love-filled weekend. The same weekend their child had been conceived.
The storm stalled overhead, wrapping the house in its grip. Rain pounded against the windows. Thunder boomed like cannon fire; psychedelic flashes of lightning streaked across the sky. Wind wailed outside the bedroom window like a savage spirit.
It was going to be, Laura thought, a very long night.
Although she’d not considered it possible, Laura eventually fell asleep. She dreamed of Christmas, could actually smell the pungent scent of the pine tree taking up most of the living room. Beneath the tree were gaily wrapped presents. Enough toys to fill F.A.O. Scharwz spilled over the floor.
A fire blazed in the fireplace; fat white flakes drifted down like snowy feathers outside the window, creating a scene straight out of Currier and Ives.
Laura saw herself sitting on the couch in front of the fireplace, Clint sitting beside her. A little boy with her husband’s jet hair and solemn blue eyes sat on her lap, listening intently as his father read aloud from Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales.
It was an idyllic scene, born of Laura’s most private yearnings. One she was loathe to leave. Which was why, when the sound of the bedroom door opening filtered into her consciousness, she fought waking up.
The bedroom lamp, operated by a wall switch beside the door flashed on. Still struggling to hold on to her dream, which was rapidly disappearing like morning mist over the tops of the tall ponderosa pines outside the ranch house, she mumbled an inarticulate complaint.
The dream faded from view. Laura reluctantly roused, blinking against the blinding light.
Her sleepy mind recognized the familiar face. As her lips curved in a groggy, puzzled smile, a sound like an early Fourth of July firecracker shattered the nighttime stillness.
Startled, and unaware she’d been shot, Laura pressed her hand against the searing heat at her breast. Crimson blood flowed over her naked flesh, staining her fingertips.
Still uncomprehending, she stared up at her attacker, tried to ask Why? but discovered she’d gone mute. A mist covered her eyes.
Silvery rain snakes streaked down the bedroom window. Her wounded heart continued to beat.
Pumping out precious blood.
Laura’s last conscious thought was regret that she hadn’t told Clint about their baby.
And then, as a second sharp retort filtered through the fog clouding her mind, Laura Swann Fletcher surrendered to the darkness.
Chapter Two
“Well, this is another fine mess you’ve gotten yourself into,” Mariah Swann muttered.
Her fingers gripped the steering wheel of her new fire-engine red Jeep Grand Cherokee. A drenching downpour streamed across the windshield, as the ineffectual swish swish of the wipers added accompaniment to Travis Tritt singing on the CD player about the perils of falling in love with an unfaithful woman. The storm, which had stuck like glue overhead all the way from her Malibu beach house had her two hours behind schedule. The digital clock on the dashboard said two o’clock. In the morning. She still had another twenty miles to go before she reached Whiskey River. And then there was that death-defying drive up to her sister’s ranch.
“You’ve been gone ten years, dummy,” she scolded herself for her impatience. “What’s another two hours, more or less?”
It shouldn’t matter. But it did. Because recently she’d been thinking about Laura. A lot.
The time had come for making amends. For healing old wounds. And who better to begin with than the woman who, once, had been Mariah’s best friend?
Her thoughts in a turmoil as she relived the tempestuous day she’d left Whiskey River, Mariah almost didn’t see the white barricade blocking the roadway. She slammed the brake pedal to the floor, grateful for the antilock brakes that kept her from sliding through the barricade into the swirling, churning waters.
The rain had caused the river to flood its banks. Attempting a crossing, especially in the dark, would not only be foolhardy, but possibly deadly.
“Damn!”
Mariah glared out at the raging river, at the rain streaming down the windshield, at the stormy sky and considered her options. She could sit here, wait until dawn, and check out exactly how deep the water was running. Or she could turn around, head back the way she’d come, get a motel room in Camp Verde and wait the storm out.
Choosing caution for once, she managed, just barely, to make a U-turn. Fifteen minutes and thirty-five dollars later, she was sitting on a too soft mattress in the Pinewood Motel, telephone receiver in hand trying to get through to her sister, so she could advise Laura not to wait up.
Mariah frowned at the busy tone. “Who could she be talking to at nearly three in the morning?” She tried once more. Again, the line rang busy.
“Maybe she took the phone off the hook.” Mariah wondered if Laura was avoiding her. It wouldn’t be all that surprising, considering their rocky past. But during the past two years when they’d begun speaking again, she’d hoped that she and her sister had put those days behind them.
Perhaps the storm had knocked down the lines.
“Shit.”
Patience had never been Mariah Swann’s long suit. It wasn’t now. She dug through her purse, searching out the cigarettes she’d bought in Kingman, swearing, as always, they’d be her last. She located the already crumpled pack, shook a cigarette loose and picked up the matches from the tin ashtray on the bedside table. The matchbook cover suggested she was only a free test away from a career as a commercial artist.
As she lit the cigarette, drawing the acrid smoke into her lungs, she could almost hear Laura lecturing her, the same way she had the first time Mariah had gotten caught smoking in the girls’ bathroom at school.
Their mother, unable to stand the remoteness of ranch life, had fled Whiskey River—and her domineering husband. The same day Margaret McKenna Swann packed her Louis Vuitton suitcases and returned to Hollywood, Matthew Swann had filed for divorce.
Angry, unable to understand their mother’s defection, and chafing under her father’s iron hand, Mariah became the rebellious Swann daughter. Which left Laura, by default, the role of the solid, responsible daughter.
Only lately had Mariah begun to understand how having so much responsibility dumped on Laura’s shoulders at such a young age must have cost her older sister. Not that Laura had ever complained.
Except the time she’d shocked everyone by eloping with Clint Garvey. The ill-fated marriage had lasted less than a day.
After their father brought her home Laura never mentioned Clint again. A few years later, she married the man her father had chosen for her, and if the glowing articles Mariah read in all the magazines were any indication, her sister was happy.
But sometimes, when the camera lens was focused on the senator while Laura stood loyally in the background, a photographer would capture a candid, unpracticed expression on her face. An expression so filled with sadness that Mariah wanted to cry.
“I’ll make it up to you, Laurie.” Guilt and regret snaked through her. “I promise.”
Unable to sit still, Mariah began to pace and smoke. Waiting for morning.
* * *
Trace Callahan was dog tired. Throughout the night he’d driven the back roads, setting up barricades in the pouring rain, trying to keep idiot vacationers and drunk residents of Mogollon County from driving their four-wheelers into the raging Whiskey River.
When he’d first applied for the job of sheriff, he couldn’t help thinking of the old days when cowboys got drunk and smashed up Whiskey River’s saloons. These days, kids got drunk and smashed up their daddies’ pickups.
He hung his dripping poncho on the rack by the front door and tossed his hat onto a nearby table. Rotating his aching shoulder, which went stiff when it rained, he went into the kitchen, ignoring the trail of muddy footprints he left in his wake.
He opened the refrigerator and had just pulled out the beer he’d been thinking about for the last hour, when the phone rang. The caller I.D. screen announced the call was from his office.
“I told you I was going off duty, Cora Mae,” he barked into the mouthpiece. “This had better be important.”
“It is if you consider a possible one-eighty-seven in progress important, Sheriff,” Cora Mae Jackson shot back.
A wave of adrenaline rushed through his body. Fatigue was immediately forgotten. “A one-eighty-seven?”
A murder? In Whiskey River? Impossible. There hadn’t been a murder in the Arizona mountain town since 1957, when Jared Lawson got drunk at a family Thanksgiving dinner and shot his mother-in-law to death over a white meat–dark meat argument.
“A one-eighty-seven,” the night dispatcher repeated. “At Senator Fletcher’s ranch.”
Trace could feel his body relaxing again. He hunched his stiff shoulder, holding the receiver against his neck as he unscrewed the beer cap.
“You mean a possible burglary.” There’d been at least a half dozen false alarms at the ranch. Trace wished Fletcher would either get the damn system fixed, or tear it out.
“After thirty-five years I should know my codes, Sheriff,” Cora Mae sniffed. “I meant a murder. The senator just called in on 911. He’s been shot. He thinks his wife was shot, too.”
Trace’s pulse rate soared. “Is the gunman still in the house?”
“The senator said he heard them run out. He thinks there were two of them.”
Trace slammed the bottle down onto the counter. Foam ran over his hand. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”
“I believe I did, Sheriff.”
“Dispatch the county medical unit,” Trace instructed. “And get hold of J.D.”
“J.D. was here when the call came in. He’s on his way to the ranch now.”
“Radio him and let him know I’m on the way. Oh, and tell him not to touch anything.”
“Ten-four,” she said. Trace would have had to have been deaf to miss the smug satisfaction in the dispatcher’s voice.
As he marched back out into the stormy night, Trace remembered a time when he’d genuinely loved being a cop. When he’d been filled with an overwhelming need to help.
He’d especially enjoyed being a homicide detective—the murder police. The top of the rung, the cream of the crop. The goddamn best. He’d gotten off on the crime scenes, the countless cups of coffee, the chain smoking, the pursuit, the face-to-face confrontation with a killer. And that inimitable sound of handcuffs clicking around the wrists of the bad guys had never failed to give him an adolescent rush.
He woke up each morning juiced, ready to hit the streets and save the world. But that had been in what now seemed like another lifetime.
Unfortunately, justice had proven to be not only blindfolded, but deaf and dumb as well and Detective Sergeant Trace Callahan had learned the hard way that one man couldn’t save the world from itself.
Now all he wanted was a chance to build himself a quiet, uneventful life where he didn’t have to worry about some coked-up drug dealer pumping bullets into him. As he climbed into the black-and-white Suburban, Trace considered that he thought he’d found exactly that when he signed his contract six months ago.
Cursing whatever lowlifes had so rudely intruded on his peaceful existence, he gunned the engine and headed, emergency lights flashing, toward the Fletcher ranch.
Whiskey River was sleeping as Trace drove through the darkened streets. Even in the slanting rain, the town had a certain charm about it, a quaintness that had little in common with the dirty business of murder.
Whiskey River, Arizona, was home to 350 full-time residents and at least triple that many during the summer, when vacationers came streaming north to escape the desert heat. If it looked familiar to first-time visitors, it should. Whiskey River had served as a movie set on more than one occasion.
Gene Autry, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood had all ridden horseback down Main Street. So had Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp, but the make-believe cowboys had bigger displays in the local historical museum.
Originally settled more than fifteen hundred years ago by prehistoric people classified by archaeologists as the Mogollon Culture, the area had subsequently been home to Apaches, soldiers, prospectors, loggers and ranchers. While Tombstone residents were making headlines by shooting at each other, Whiskey River became known for its taverns and brothels.
Once upon a time, settlers had run into town for protection from marauding Indians. These days citizens tried to liven things up again by holding rodeos at the fairgrounds.
Five miles outside of town, Trace turned onto a narrow graded road that snaked its way in a breath-stealing ascension up the rocky escarpment of the Mogollon Rim.
He arrived at the ranch right behind the ambulance.
His deputy’s black-and-white was parked in front of the house. The bubble gum lights atop the cruiser were sending out flashing blue strobes. The driver’s door was open. As he passed the patrol car, Trace cursed and yanked the keys from the ignition. A recent graduate of University of Arizona, with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, J.D. Brown was intelligent, enthusiastic and showed a willingness to learn. He was also green as new grass and prone to the same mistakes made by rookies in jurisdictions everywhere.
The deputy was waiting at the door. “The senator’s in the den, just to the right of the front door,” he told the medical team. “He’s been shot in the side.”
“Is he conscious?” the female paramedic asked.
“In and out.”
“What about the wife?”
The deputy frowned. “She’s upstairs. But take care of the senator. It’s too late for her.”
“You sure?” Trace asked.
“She was ten-seven when I got here,” J.D. insisted.
Ten-seven. The police code for Out of Service. Crude, but applicable, Trace decided. “I spent summers working in the emergency room at Louis R. Pyle Memorial,” the younger officer, the son of a nurse, reminded Trace. “I sure as hell know a lost cause when I see it.”
Trace accompanied the trio into the book-lined den where he found a man clad in a pair of paisley silk boxer shorts sprawled on his back on the floor by the doorway. He was in his midforties, with the kind of firm, lean body that came from working out. His deep tan and sun-streaked hair suggested afternoons spent on a Georgetown tennis court. A small amount of blood was draining from what appeared to be a single wound in his side. He’d obviously been lying on the couch when he was shot. Blood spatters stained the fawn-colored leather.
Beside the couch was a table. Atop the table was an empty glass, an open briefcase and a telephone. The phone was off the hook. The desk drawers had been rifled through; papers were strewn across the floor. A black carry-on suitcase was beside the couch, unopened.
“Senator?” The female medic wrapped a blood pressure cuff around the man’s upper arm. The other paramedic slammed an oxygen mask over his face. “It’s okay. You’re going to be okay. We’re here to help.”
“My wife,” Alan Fletcher gasped, his words muffled by the plastic mask. “Help...Laura.”
Trace squatted down, bringing himself eye to eye with the injured man. “Can you tell me what happened, Senator?”
