Читать книгу Confessions - JoAnn Ross - Страница 10

Chapter Three

Trace arrived at the hospital on Ponderosa Street just as the technician he’d requested from the Department of Public Safety was pulling into the parking lot.

They were forced to wait while the physician on call conducted a cursory examination of the wounded senator. After the exam, X rays were taken. Throughout it all, Alan Fletcher remained conscious and coherent.

“The wound isn’t life threatening,” the doctor advised Trace, “but I need to remove the bullet and stitch up any damage to internal organs.” He frowned. “Small caliber bullets have an unfortunate tendency to bounce around like pinballs once they’re inside the body.”

“Sounds as if you’ve spent some time on the front lines.”

“I worked ER for eight years at Oakland’s Highland Hospital.” The doctor shook his head. “I figured I put all that behind me when I moved here.”

“Join the club,” Trace said dryly.

“Getting back to the senator, there’s no way to tell how much damage was done until we open him up. And we’ll need to clean the wound to prevent peritonitis.”

“I know the drill, Doc.” Trace glanced over to where the senator was lying on the gurney. A pretty blond nurse in a white pantsuit was holding his hand and assuring him that he’d be all right. “But since the guy’s not critical, I’ll need to test for residue before you take him into surgery.”

The doctor, too, knew the drill. “Of course.”

Alan Fletcher didn’t. “You want to test me?” he asked unbelievingly. “Why?”

“It’s nothing to take personally, Senator,” Trace said, accustomed to such protestations. “It’s strictly policy.”

“It’s policy to harass shooting victims?”

“It’s policy to test everyone involved in a crime. Once we eliminate you as a suspect, Senator, we can get on to the business of apprehending the perpetrators.” Trace had switched to the tone he used in the old days whenever it became necessary to appease police department brass.

“Well, since you put it that way...” Beads of sweat glistened on the senator’s forehead and above his top lip. “Go ahead.” Alan Fletcher invited magnanimously. He held out his hands. “Do whatever you have to do.”

“Thank you, Senator,” Trace said politely. He watched as the DPS technician opened the kit and used a cotton swab to wipe a weak solution of nitric acid over the senator’s hands, concentrating heavily on the palm and the webbing between the thumb and first finger. Fletcher’s gold wedding band gleamed in the fluorescent overhead light.

After she was done, the technician peeled the protective seal from a piece of paper, pressed it against those same parts of his hands, then sealed the samples in an evidence jar.

“Thank you, Senator,” Trace said again, once the test was finished and he’d gotten the wounded man’s signature on a consent-to-search form. This case was too high profile not to be played strictly by the book. “Have you remembered anything else about the man who attacked you? Height, weight, clothing?”

Fletcher shook his head, then winced as if the gesture were painful. “Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. Perhaps after your surgery, when you’re feeling stronger, things might come back.”

“Do you think so?” The senator looked hopeful and sounded doubtful.

“Sure. It happens all the time,” Trace said, not quite truthfully. More often than not time only faded memory. He closed the notebook and returned it to his shirt pocket. “I’ll keep in touch.” The statement, spoken with a deliberate lack of inflection could have been a promise. Or a threat.

As he watched Alan Fletcher being wheeled off to surgery, Trace considered the fact that during the more than thirty minutes Senator Fletcher had been in the emergency room, he hadn’t again asked about his wife.

Trace recalled his own experience after the shooting that had ended his homicide career and almost his life. He remembered lying on a gurney, furious that the trauma team wasn’t working on Danny. His concern for his partner had been so strong he hadn’t even experienced pain from his own near-fatal wounds until much later.

Daniel Murphy had been his partner for five years. During that time they’d become closer than most brothers. But though they’d known almost everything there was to know about one another, their bond had still not been as intimate as a man and wife.

Trace had been divorced for ten years. But even during that last year of marriage, when his home had felt like an armed camp, if Ellen had been injured in any way—let alone shot in the head by masked intruders—a SWAT team wouldn’t have been able to stop him from being with her.

“Different strokes,” he murmured as he walked over to the nurses’ station. Trace also could not discount the possibility that the senator’s lack of curiosity regarding his wife’s condition was because he was guilty.

Worried that the shooting may have been some cockeyed attempted political assassination plot, he telephoned Ben Loftin at home, instructing him to get to the hospital and stand guard outside the senator’s door.

When he returned to the ranch, Trace saw that J.D. had followed his instructions, securing the crime area with yellow plastic police tape. The Evidence Technical Unit had arrived on the scene.

As primary investigator, Trace was in charge of supervising the meticulous search of the premises. Sticking to the old adage that a victim could only be killed once, but a crime scene could be murdered in countless ways, he kept the pace slow and methodical. He’d witnessed too many occasions when speed had resulted in the destruction of vital evidence.

Without a detailed description of the armed intruders, he put out an APB on anyone seen driving in the vicinity of the ranch that night. The mayors of the nearby communities of Pine, Payson and Strawberry had offered to send additional police to join in the search of Rim backroads and the sheriff from neighboring Coconino County had volunteered additional manpower.

The much appreciated cooperation allowed Trace to remain at the house with the ETU crew. He watched the photographer snap away on a 35 mm, then shoot a videotape record of the scene.

Eager to help, J.D. had donned a pair of surgical gloves and was on his hands and knees, combing the bedroom carpet for fibers.

“We need to contact Matthew Swann before he hears the news on the radio,” Trace said.

“Cora Mae called Swann’s ranch right after the 911 call came in,” J.D. revealed. “The housekeeper says he’s in Santa Fe. Some livestock convention or something.”

“Does she have the name of the hotel?”

“She did. She also called it. But the desk clerk said Swann got into some kind of argument with the night manager over room service hours so he checked out.... Bingo!”

The deputy happily plucked a blue thread from the carpet, dropped it into a plastic bag and carefully labeled it. Trace observed the action with mild amusement thinking how you never forgot your first homicide. Trace hoped like hell this would be J.D.’s last one for a very long time.

“The clerk didn’t know what hotel he moved to. But Cora Mae’s on the case,” J.D. assured him as he resumed his methodical carpet combing. “She’ll track him down.”

Of that, Trace had no doubt. The woman had a tongue like a razor blade, cursed like a lumberjack at spring thaw and guarded her precious records as if they were the Holy Grail.

But she was remarkably efficient. She also made the best cup of coffee west of the Pecos and could bluff at poker with the best of them.

Thinking he might be dealing with a sexual assault as well as a murder, Trace began going through the lingerie strewn over the floor, checking the frothy bits of silk and satin and lace a piece at a time to see if by chance any of the skimpy pairs of panties had been stripped off the victim.

“Jesus!” He picked up a garment so sheer he could see his hand through the diaphanous silk.

J.D. glanced up and couldn’t quite repress his grin. “It’s a teddy. I bought Jilly a red one for Valentine’s day. At Victoria’s Secret. She liked it a lot.” His grin widened. “I liked it even better.”

“I’ll bet.” Trace wondered why, if the senator’s wife was such a fan of sexy lingerie, she went to bed nude. Perhaps, he considered, thinking of what Fletcher had said about not wanting to wake his wife up, she didn’t bother dressing seductively when she knew she was going to be sleeping alone.

Ellen had always come to bed wearing his ratty old oversize police academy T-shirts. It crossed Trace’s mind that if she’d favored underwear like this, they might still be married.

Then again, probably not. Sex had never been their problem. At least, not in the beginning. By the time they finally called it quits, neither of them had felt like rolling around in the sheets.

Trace held up an ivory teddy. The early morning light streaming through the bedroom window rendered it nearly transparent.

“You actually walked right into a store, in a public mall, where anyone could see you and bought something like this?”

Shit, he’d been married nine months before he worked up the nerve to buy tampons at the 7-Eleven. For the second time today, Trace found himself feeling like an over-the-hill dinosaur.

“Actually,” J.D. admitted, “I ordered it from a catalog.”

Deciding that he’d love to get a look at J.D.’s catalog, Trace moved the teddies aside and found the letters, tied with a blue satin ribbon.

Love letters, he figured. So the lady had been a romantic. He could have guessed that from the fancy underwear and the romance novel on the nightstand. What Trace did find interesting was that the bold black script on the outside of the envelopes didn’t begin to resemble the precise cursive found on the pages of Alan Fletcher’s appointment book.

Holding one of the letters gingerly by the edges, Trace turned it over. It was signed simply Love always, C.

The postmark on one of the envelopes was stamped right here in Whiskey River a little over a week ago, which added an interesting twist to the murder. Although Trace never spent much time dwelling on why a crime was committed—humans were willing to kill for often ridiculously mundane reasons—sex often proved as strong a motive as greed.

Sometimes stronger.

“Where the hell is the M.E.?” he demanded impatiently. He’d placed the call to the county medical examiner over an hour ago.

“Someone looking for me?” a tobacco-roughened voice asked from the doorway.

“It’s about time you got here.”

“Don’t know what the hurry is,” Dr. Stanley Potter drawled around a fat cigar. “Looks like this little lady isn’t going anywhere.” He chuckled at his own bad joke.

It took an effort, but Trace reminded himself that back in Cook County, before he’d gone into semiretirement, Potter had performed more than fifteen hundred autopsies and observed thousands more. He’d also appeared as an expert witness in innumerable cases around the country, proving himself a valuable member of the prosecution team.

“Just call the death so we can get her out of here.”

The physician dutifully recorded the victim’s lack of pulse. “She’s dead, all right.” Next he took her temperature. “Ninety-four degrees.”

“Which would set the murder between two and three a.m.,” Trace calculated. The exact figures varied with environmental differences, but the rule of thumb was about one and a half degrees Fahrenheit temperature loss per hour.

“Close enough for government work,” the M.E. agreed. He turned over her hand. Her nails were unpainted. “No skin or signs of a struggle.”

“That could mean she was surprised,” J.D., who’d risen to his feet to watch the examination, offered.

“It could also mean she knew her killer,” Trace said.

After the doctor finished his initial examination, Trace stood by as the body was wrapped in a white sheet, slid into a thick bag, placed on a stretcher, and carried downstairs, where she was strapped onto a gurney in the M.E.’s wagon.

When the gunmetal gray van pulled away from the scene, Trace allowed himself a momentary feeling of frustration at a life cut too brutally and tragically short.

Then, shaking off the brief regret, he turned, intending to go back into the house, when he heard a voice calling his name.

“Sheriff Callahan!”

Trace glared at the man hurrying toward him, past the yellow tape barricade. Rudy Chavez was the sole reporter for the Rim Rock Weekly Record. The young reporter reminded Trace of Jimmy Olson. With just enough Bob Woodward thrown in to make him one helluva pest. Reporters were not Trace Callahan’s favorite people. He considered them akin to vultures, only lower down on the evolutionary scale.

“I caught the call on my police scanner.” Rudy whipped out a long narrow notebook and a transparent plastic pen. “Is it true? Was the senator shot?”

Knowing that there was no way he could avoid the publicity on this case, Trace said, “I’ll be holding a press conference in my office at noon. You’ll get a statement then.”

“But that’s six hours away.”

“You can tell time, too,” Trace said with mock admiration. “Congratulations.” He caught sight of his deputy out of the corner of his eye. “J.D., escort Mr. Chavez to his car.”

The reporter visibly bristled. “You can’t run me off the property!”

“Watch me,” Trace advised easily. But there was steel underlying his tone.

“Come on, Rudy,” coaxed J.D., who’d worked with his boss long enough to recognize when not to argue. “You know you can’t interfere with a crime scene.”

“So there was a murder?”

“I didn’t say that.” A red flush rose from the starched khaki collar of the deputy’s uniform. “Dammit, Rudy,” he muttered, practically dragging the reporter back to the Subaru Justy parked behind the phalanx of police vehicles. “You’re going to get us both in a world of hurt.”

“I’m just trying to do my job.”

“And I’m just doing mine,” J.D snapped. This was the most exciting day of his career—hell, his entire life so far—and he damn well didn’t want to waste a minute of it arguing.

“Haven’t you ever heard of freedom of the press? I just need one quote,” Rudy persisted.

“If you don’t get out of here, I’m going to run you in for interfering in a criminal investigation.” The young cop’s tone sounded like a copy of Trace’s earlier one.

Rudy looked inclined to argue. His dark brown gaze went from J.D. to Trace, who was watching the exchange with an unblinking gaze, back to J.D. again.

Apparently knowing when he was licked, he turned to leave just as another truck turned into the driveway.

“I’ll be damned,” the reporter breathed as he recognized the driver. “Talk about timing!” His belief in journalistic good fortune restored, Rudy Chavez headed in the direction of the muddy red Jeep.

J.D. watched as the driver’s door opened, revealing a pair of long legs clad in tight black jeans and red cowboy boots. The legs were followed by a female body which, while slender, had curves in all the right places. Her sunstreaked blond hair fell in loose soft waves to her shoulders. Her eyes were hidden behind a pair of oversize sunglasses.

As she marched toward them in a brisk, ground-eating stride, J.D. recalled how, in his boyhood, though many residents of Whiskey River had clucked their tongues over Mariah Swann’s outrageous behavior, he’d suffered a secret crush on the high-spirited girl who’d been his baby-sitter before she had run off to Hollywood like her mother.

During his hormone-driven adolescent days he’d raced home from school to watch her steamy love scenes on “All Our Tomorrows” and fantasized acting out those scenes with the woman who’d become locally known as the “Vixen of Whiskey River.”

“Who’s that?”

Trace’s deep voice, coming from just behind him, made J.D. jump. For such a big man, it was downright nerve-racking the way the sheriff could sneak up behind a guy without making a sound.

“That,” he answered, as a few of Mariah’s more infamous escapades came to mind, “is trouble. With a capital T.”

Mariah was stunned by the swarm of activity surrounding the ranch house. At the sight of that unmistakable yellow plastic tape, she cursed. Just last month her beach house had been broken into.

She jumped down from the driver’s seat and headed toward the two men standing in the driveway. One was of average height, with the slim-hipped build of the cowboys Mariah had grown up with. He was wearing a Smokey the Bear hat pulled down low over his forehead like a Marine drill instructor and the khaki uniform of the sheriff’s department. A silver star was pinned to his starched uniform blouse.

The other man was large enough to play offensive line for the Raiders. Even without the wedge-heeled cowboy boots Mariah would guess his height to be about six-four. Clad in a green-and-black plaid flannel shirt and jeans, he reminded her of Paul Bunyan. He radiated a palpable authority.

She directed her question to the larger man. “What’s going on here?”

“Good morning,” Trace said in his best Joe Friday, just-the-facts-ma’am voice. He raised two fingers to his black Stetson. “May I ask who you are?”

Although his greeting was unfailingly polite, Mariah knew instinctively that this was a man who could give her authoritative father a run for his money. His firm, unshaven square jaw suggested an equally unyielding nature. She noticed he hadn’t answered her question.

Refusing to be intimidated, she stopped close enough to him that the toes of their boots were nearly touching, and realized her mistake when she had to tilt her head back to look a long, long way up into his face.

“I’m Mariah Swann. Who are you?”

“Sheriff Trace Callahan.” Trace held out his hand.

“Sheriff?” A blond brow climbed her forehead as she absently extended her own hand in response. His palm was rough, calluses on top of calluses. “What happened to Walter Amos?”

“Amos retired six months ago.” Her skin was as soft as it was fragrant. “Last I heard he was spending his time telling lies about birdies and eagles on the golf course in Sun City. This is Deputy Brown.”

Mariah was momentarily sidetracked by the introduction. “J.D?” Pushing the sunglasses to the top of her head, she gave the younger man a longer, second look. “Is that really you?”

Trace watched in amazement as his deputy blushed scarlet. “It’s me,” he mumbled.

“Why, you’re all grown up.”

Unlike so many of her Hollywood peers, Mariah had never paid any heed to birthdays. Especially these days, since she had given up acting and turned to writing. Now her livelihood depended not on her looks but on her talent to craft a gripping television drama.

But seeing this boy she’d baby-sat all those years ago, dressed in the uniform of a deputy sheriff made her realize exactly how much time had gone by since she’d left Whiskey River in Laura’s powder blue Mustang convertible.

“I just graduated from U. of A.,” J.D. said, sounding as if he’d stuck a handful of marbles into his mouth. “In criminal justice.”

“Criminal justice.” Mariah mulled that one over, amazed that this was the same bratty little kid who, at age five, had seemed destined to grow up to be a world-class juvenile delinquent. “Your parents must be proud.”

J.D. mumbled something inarticulate that could have been agreement.

Christ, Trace thought, next J.D. would be rubbing the toe of his boot in the dirt like some tongue-tied sixth grader. Mariah folded her arms over her scarlet shirt. “So, which of you officers is going to tell me what the hell is going on here?”

“I’m afraid there’s been a shooting,” Trace said.

“A shooting?” It was as if he’d suddenly switched to Greek. Or Swahili. Mariah couldn’t comprehend his words. She turned and stared at the house as if hoping to find the explanation written on the double front doors. “Not a burglary?”

“It’s Laura,” J.D. blurted out.

“Laura?” Mariah blinked and looked at Trace. “My sister shot someone?”

The idea was incomprehensible. Laura was the gentlest person Mariah had ever known. Why, she’d never been willing to so much as step on a spider.

“I’m afraid your sister’s the one who was shot.” Trace kept his voice low and steady and watched her carefully.

This was a dream, Mariah decided. In a minute she’d wake up, find herself in the tacky motel, with its amateur seascape on the wall and the portable television bolted to the dresser.

She blinked again. Then she shook her head. Wake up, dammit, a frightened voice in her mind shouted.

Trace saw the confusion in her slanted turquoise eyes give way to fear. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Ms. Swann.” This time he took off his hat. “But your sister’s dead.”

“Dead,” she repeated blankly.

Trace didn’t think she’d grasped his meaning yet. He knew shock had a way of numbing such staggering blows. She glanced back at her Jeep, then beyond, down the serpentine road she’d just driven. Trace could practically see the wheels turning inside her head and knew she was thinking of the gray van she’d obviously passed on the way to the ranch.

“Oh, my God.” A ragged, involuntary keening sound escaped her lips. Then she swayed.

Catching her by the upper arms, Trace lowered her to one of the flat-topped red boulders lining the driveway. He squatted in front of her.

“Get rid of Chavez,” he instructed a stricken J.D. when he saw the reporter, who’d stayed to watch the drama, headed their way. “Then go back in the house and help the lab guys.”

“Yessir.” J.D. gave Mariah one last worried look, squared his shoulders and headed toward Rudy Chavez with a swagger that would have done John Wayne proud.

“Put your head between your knees,” Trace advised Mariah gruffly. He pressed his palm against the top of her head, urging it down. “That should help.”

She shook off his touch. “Help?” Her laugh was short and bitter. Her eyes were dull with the sheen of shock. “Help who? Laura?”

The question didn’t demand a response, but Trace answered her anyway. “I’m afraid it’s too late for your sister.”

“Too late.” She squeezed her hands together until her knuckles turned white and pressed them against her eyes. “It was the damn river.”

“The river?”

“It was flooding. Someone had put up a stupid barricade and I was afraid to try crossing it in the dark.” Her hands limply dropped to her sides. She lowered her forehead to her knees, not to keep from fainting, but because the pain shooting through her was so intense. “I spent the rest of the night in Camp Verde.”

A slow breath shuddered through her. She lifted her head again. “When was she killed?”

Trace knew where she was headed. He also knew second-guessing fate was asking for trouble. “We don’t know exactly,” he hedged. “Not yet.”

“Surely you have a ballpark estimate.”

“The coroner’s currently putting the time of death between two and three.”

“This morning.”

“Yes.”

“Dammit.” Trace recognized the expression in her bleak gaze. It was one he was personally familiar with. Guilt. “If I’d only gotten here on time, she’d still be alive.”

Something made him want to take both her soft hands in his and hold on tight until he could convince her that such thoughts were self-destructive. That they could eat away at your insides like battery acid. Cursing softly, he sat down beside her.

“You can’t know that,” he said, attempting to soothe the accusations running rampant in her head. He knew, all too well, exactly what those voices sounded like.

“I told her I’d be here by midnight. If I had—”

“The intruders might have killed you, too.”

“Intruders?” She looked at him in surprise.

“Right now it appears your sister woke up during a robbery.”

“A robbery.” She bit her lip, taking it in. “Then Alan wasn’t the one who killed her?”

“Why would you think the senator shot your sister?” he asked with a studied lack of inflection. Just the facts ma’am.

“Because Alan Fletcher is a son of a bitch who only married my sister for her money and her political connections.”

Her color had returned. Her eyes cleared. Scarlet flags waved in her cheeks. Trace watched her spine stiffen and knew she wasn’t going to faint.

“If that’s true, you’d think he’d want to keep her alive.”

“Not really,” Mariah argued. As she reached into her bag for her cigarettes, the mists began lifting from her mind. She was beginning to be able to think again.

On some distant level she knew there would still be pain to deal with. A horrendous amount of pain and remorse and regret. But at the moment, she found it easier to concentrate on the crime as if it were a new script she was writing.

“Since I doubt if Laura asked Alan to sign a prenuptial, he’d be first in line to inherit her money, not to mention a sizable trust fund. And this ranch.

“As for political support, our father handpicked the ambitious bastard to be his son-in-law.” She shook out a cigarette and went digging for the art test matches in the depths of the bag. “The only thing that would make the mighty Matthew Swann retract his political support would be if he discovered a Communist Party membership card lurking in Alan’s wallet.

“Of course, now that the Evil Empire is no longer a threat, he might even turn a blind eye to that.” She jammed the cigarette between her lips and was appalled to discover that her hands were trembling too badly to light it.

Her scorn, Trace noted, appeared to be evenly divided between her brother-in-law and her father. She was angry and bitter and didn’t bother to hide it.

As he took the matches and lit the cigarette, Trace also realized she hadn’t yet asked about the senator.

“Your brother-in-law was shot, too,” he told her.

“Is he dead?”

“No. He’s in surgery, but the doctor says he’s not in any danger.”

“Too bad.” She drew in the smoke and shook her head. “Hell. This will probably earn him another fifty thousand votes come election time.

“Has anyone notified my father?” Now that she thought about it, Mariah was surprised that he wasn’t here trying to control this scene and everyone in it.

“My dispatcher has been trying to reach him. Apparently he’s in New Mexico. No one seems to know how to get hold of your mother.”

“That’s probably because she left town when I was five.”

“I’m sorry.”

Mariah shrugged and exhaled a thin blue cloud. Her throat was raw from a night of cigarettes. She really was going to have to stop one of these days. “There’s no need to apologize.”

She looked back at the house, her gaze drifting to the upstairs window as if hoping to see her sister standing there.

Trace remembered how, when he’d finally gotten sprung from the hospital, he’d taken a cab to the police garage and sat in the driver’s seat of the unmarked cruiser, imagining Danny riding shotgun beside him.

At the time, he’d felt foolish and hoped like hell none of the other detectives would discover him there. They hadn’t, and oddly, for that brief time, he’d actually felt a little better. Not good. But better.

“My mother lives in Bel Air. I see her quite often.” Since it was obvious he didn’t know, Mariah decided she may as well be the one to tell him. “She’s Margaret McKenna.”

Mariah gave him credit for keeping the surprise from showing. Instead, his eyes narrowed and moved slowly over her face in a judicious appraisal.

Margaret McKenna had been an old-style, Hollywood bombshell. Her haughty, Ice Queen performances had radiated with the type of carnality often imitated but rarely equaled. Kathleen Turner had come close in Body Heat, Trace decided. Madonna? Sharon Stone? Forget it.

Her voice had been the kind of sultry, whiskey baritone that could make all of a man’s nerves stand on end. And when those huge one-of-a-kind emerald eyes bore down on you from the oversize movie screen, it was as if she were aiming down the barrel of a gun. As a bonus, she’d been a helluva good actress, too.

“Now that you mention it, I can see the resemblance,” Trace decided finally. It was in the unflinching directness of the eyes, the remarkable cheekbones, the pointed, argumentative chin. But mostly it was attitude.

“Actually, Laura looks more like our mother.”

He didn’t miss her use of the present tense. Death took getting used to. Murder took even longer.

Belatedly realizing what she’d said, Mariah sighed and stabbed the cigarette out on the rock. “This sucks.”

“Yes. It does.” He stopped being a concerned listener and went back to being a cop. “Look, I don’t know when we’re going to be able to track down your father and with the senator in surgery—”

“You need someone to identify my sister’s body,” Mariah guessed flatly.

“The sooner we get an ID, the sooner we can compile more evidence to help us apprehend her killer.”

Mariah realized that he was talking about an autopsy. Her lips pulled into a tight line. Her gaze drifted, once again, to the bedroom window.

He stood up and put the Stetson back on, adjusting the black felt brim so that a shadow fell over his face. “I’ll drive you into town.”

Mariah was not fond of men who issued orders. But at the moment, she didn’t feel up to driving back down that steep winding road, either.

“Let’s go.” She stood up and although he wouldn’t have thought it possible, given how tight those jeans were, managed to jam her hands into her back pockets. The gesture pulled the crimson shirt tight against her high, firm breasts.

They walked side by side to the Suburban. He opened the door and with a palm to her elbow, helped her up into the passenger seat.

“I’ll be right back. I want to tell J.D. where he can reach me and arrange to have your Jeep driven into town.”

“The keys are in the ignition.”

Mariah watched him enter the house that had smelled like gingerbread cookies, lemon oil and Pine Sol back in the days when it had belonged to her grandmother.

Experience had taught Mariah to trust her intuition about people, and that sixth sense was telling her that Trace Callahan was both intelligent and competent. Her sister was in good hands.

Laura.

Mariah felt the tears stinging at the back of her lids and resolutely blinked them away. There would be time for tears later. Right now she had work to do.

She lit another cigarette and began to compile a mental list.

First she had to identify Laura’s body. Then she had to call her mother and inform the woman she’d always known as Maggie—never Mama, or heaven forbid, Mom—that her firstborn daughter was dead.

She’d have to face her father’s unrelenting disapproval for the first time in more than a decade. She had to try to offer condolences to her wounded son-of-a-bitch brother-in-law without gagging.

And then, somehow, she was going to have to dig down deep enough to find the inner strength to get through the funeral.

In addition to all that, although he didn’t know it yet, Mariah had every intention of helping Whiskey River’s new sheriff apprehend her sister’s murderer.

Then, and only then, when the heartless monsters who’d shot Laura dead, cruelly cutting short a very special life, were behind bars, would she allow herself to cry.