Читать книгу Second Chance Colton - Marie Ferrarella, Marie Ferrarella - Страница 10

Chapter 3

Ryan knew that as an investigating detective with the Tulsa PD, even if he was questioning his own sister, because he was doing it in reference to a current active case he was working on, it was in everyone’s best interest to keep things businesslike and official. Among other things, that meant that he should be making this call from the phone on his desk at the precinct, not from his personal cell phone while he was sitting in his car.

He supposed that he could argue that he was doing it for the quiet, because the precinct was usually almost too noisy to allow anyone to hear themselves think. But the truth of the matter was that his real reason for making the call from inside his vehicle was that he didn’t want to be overheard.

It was bad enough that he had to ask his sister painful, probing questions like this without having everyone within a ten-foot radius hearing him asking. He was a Colton. One of the Coltons. The family that had, through absolutely no fault of their own, their very own serial killer in their family tree, thanks to his father’s brother, Matthew.

Granted, it all had happened a long time ago and his uncle had been locked away in prison for a while now, but he was well aware of the fact that people loved to point an accusing finger and watch people of prominence come tumbling down. They loved watching their fallen-from-grace sinners every bit as much as they loved cheering on their saints and heroes.

Sometimes even more so.

He wanted no part in supplying those people with any sort of ammunition, especially if there did actually turn out to be a reasonable excuse for all this.

He supposed a tiny part of him hadn’t turned cynical yet and still believed in miracles.

So he sat in his vehicle, trying not to notice how stuffy it seemed with the windows rolled up and his doors locked, and he called his sister’s number.

After a short delay, he heard the cell phone start to ring. Waiting for Greta to answer her phone, Ryan counted off the number of times her cell rang. After four, her voice mail kicked in. Impatient, he was about to terminate the call and try again in a couple of minutes when he heard Greta’s breathless voice as she came on the line.

“Hello?”

Rather than relax, he felt his shoulders stiffen. “Greta? It’s me. Ryan.”

“Hi.” And then he heard her ask guardedly, “What’s up?”

Was that just his imagination—or her guilty conscience stepping up? “I’m coming up to the ranch to see you.”

He heard her laugh softly. “Well, you can come up to the ranch, but you won’t see me.”

Was he tipping her off with this call? Was she planning on taking off? He needed more to work with. “Why?” he asked.

“Why do you think?” Not waiting for him to respond, she gave him the answer to her own question. “Because I’m not at the ranch. I’m not in Tulsa at all. I’m back in Oklahoma City.”

Ryan frowned to himself. Ever since Greta had gotten engaged, she’d spent more and more of her time in Oklahoma City, where her fiancé lived. She’d even taken on horse training jobs there.

“I thought you’d stick around the ranch for a while, you know, because of Mother.”

There was silence on the other end of the line and for a moment, he thought that the call had been dropped. But then Greta said, “Yes, well, I wasn’t really doing her any good just hanging around the house. Especially since she kept looking at me as if she was afraid of me. As if she thought I was going to do something to her. I don’t know what’s with that,” Greta complained, sounding as if she was at a complete loss.

“Did you ask her about it?” Ryan asked.

“Yes. But when I asked her why she was looking at me like that,” Greta went on, obviously upset about the matter, “she denied it.”

“So what’s the problem?”

He heard Greta sigh. “I got the feeling she denied it because she was afraid if she didn’t, I’d do something to her.”

He couldn’t believe that things between his mother and sister had actually degenerated down to this, but then Abra was prone to mood swings. “You’re imagining things, Greta.”

He heard Greta sigh. “I suppose that maybe I am, but just the other day she asked me if I was doing any recreational drugs. Me, who’s never taken anything stronger than an aspirin. I think that beating Mother took might have been even more serious than any of us suspected.”

It was Ryan’s turn to sigh. No one was more frustrated about not being able to find whoever had hurt his mother than he was. But right now, he had the break-in to deal with.

The break-in with the evidence mounting against Greta. There had to be an explanation for all this, he thought, but he needed to talk to her in person to get at the truth.

Growing up, Greta had been a tomboy almost in self-defense. She’d been outnumbered by her brothers five to one and had learned to hold her own at a very early age. At five-nine she was tall and willowy, and at first glance, very feminine.

But she was also tough to the point that he was certain no one could easily push her around. As far as he knew, his sister didn’t really have much of a temper, but then he supposed everyone could be pushed to their limit. What was Greta’s limit? he couldn’t help wondering.

Was there something that could push Greta over the edge?

His thought process suddenly took him in a very new direction, almost against his will. What if, for some reason, their mother had suddenly taken exception to Greta’s pending marriage to Mark Stanton? Handsome and glibly charming, it was no secret that the younger brother of the president of Stanton Oil got by on his looks, not his work ethic. Maybe, despite the fact that she had been instrumental in throwing Greta and Mark an engagement party—their father always left such things to his wife—Abra had told Greta to slow down and think things through and Greta had balked. One thing could have had led to another and—

And what? Ryan silently demanded. Greta had had a complete reversal in personality and gone ballistic on their mother? That account just didn’t fly for him.

None of this was making any sense to him—and he was getting one hell of a headache just reviewing all the various details over and over again in his head.

“Ryan? Are you still there?” The stress in Greta’s voice broke through his thoughts.

“What?” Embarrassed, he flushed. Luckily there was no one to see him. “Yeah, I’m still here, Greta. How long have you been in Oklahoma City?” he asked her abruptly, changing direction.

He heard her hesitate. Was she thinking, or...?

“A couple of weeks or so,” Greta finally answered. “Why?”

Ryan suppressed his sigh. “Which is it? A couple of weeks? Or ‘so’?”

“Three weeks,” she replied more specifically, irritation evident in her voice. “Just what’s this all about, Ryan?”

He didn’t address her question. Instead, he asked her another one of his own. “So you weren’t there—at the ranch—yesterday morning? Or the night before?”

“No, I already told you,” she replied, annoyed. “I was here, working. Why are you asking me all these weird questions?” she asked. And then, as if she had a premonition about what was happening, she asked, “Ryan, what’s going on?”

He gave her the unvarnished details. “Someone broke into the stables early yesterday morning.”

“That’s awful,” she cried, upset. And then realization entered her voice, as did abject horror. “Wait, why would you think that it was me?”

Maybe he should have refrained from telling her this until later, but Greta was his sister and he had to give her every benefit of the doubt. “Because one of the windows had been deliberately broken and there was blood on the jagged edges.”

Even as she said the words, she couldn’t really get herself to believe it. It was there in her voice as she asked in stunned disbelief, “My blood?”

He had never hated sharing a piece of information more than this. “Yes.”

She felt as if she had slipped into some sort of parallel universe, one that was not bound by the laws of reason—or reality for that matter.

Stunned, she protested, “That’s not possible,” because she couldn’t see how it could be. “What reason would I have to break into the stable, going through a window for heaven’s sake?” she demanded.

“I don’t know, Greta. That’s what I’m trying to find out,” he told her wearily. “The DNA test that came back from the lab was conclusive.”

“Then you need better equipment—or better people doing the test—because the results they came up with are wrong. I wasn’t there,” Greta insisted heatedly one more time. “I was here, in Oklahoma City, working with the horses.”

Ryan paused for a moment, hating what he had to ask. But this was protocol, not something personal—even though he knew that Greta would take it that way. And in her place, he would have felt the same way. “Can anyone vouch for you?”

“The horses aren’t talking,” she snapped at him in exasperation.

“I didn’t think so,” he replied, hoping to inject a tiny trace of humor into the extremely awkward exchange. “How about the rancher who hired you?”

“Sorry, no help in that quarter,” she informed her brother coldly. “He’s away on business. Apparently he trusts me because I’ve got free access to his ranch while he’s away so I can come and go at will.”

Ryan took no offense at the attitude that had slipped into his sister’s voice. If someone had been listening to their exchange, it would sound as if he was trying to break Greta down.

“How about Mark?” he asked hopefully. Personally, he didn’t care for his sister’s intended, but maybe the man could prove good for something. Maybe he could provide the alibi that Greta needed. “Is he—”

Greta cut him off. “Mark’s just away. I don’t know where he is.”

What she didn’t say was that her fiancé had been rather flaky of late, not showing up when he said he would, being secretive whenever he did show up. She had a very uneasy feeling that the second she had agreed to marry him, Mark had decided he no longer had to be on his best behavior.

But none of this was something she wanted to share with her family, especially since someone had almost killed her mother, and apparently her police detective brother thought that she might be the one who was responsible for that.

Ryan jumped on the last thing she’d said like a hungry dog on his first bone after suffering a week of deprivation. “What do you mean you don’t know where he is?”

Greta’s tone became entirely defensive. It was obvious that she was tired of having to defend herself. “Just what I said. He’s my fiancé, Ryan, not my pet. I don’t keep track of him when he’s ‘off leash,’” she informed her brother heatedly.

Ryan felt he would have had to have been deaf to have missed her hostility. Not that he could blame her. Again, he supposed he’d feel the same way in her place if she’d all but accused him of hurting their mother and then began questioning him about vandalizing the family ranch.

The Lucky C was their father’s pride and joy. Big J treated the ranch as if it was actually an entity unto itself, as human as the rest of them—at times, maybe even more so.

Much as he hated to admit it, he had lost control of this conversation. All he’d wanted to do was arrange to get together with Greta to have this discussion face-to-face and it had veered completely off track. He had no idea how to smooth things over, only that he had to do it in order to get something to work with.

Pausing, he searched for words. But before they could come to him, his cell buzzed, announcing a second call was attempting to come in.

The phrase “saved by the bell” suddenly occurred to him.

“Hold on a minute, Greta, I’ve got another call coming in.”

He could almost hear her sign of relief. “Take your call, Ryan. I’ve got to go,” she told him a beat before the line went dead.

Frustrated, Ryan blew out a breath. He’d just been about to tell her to remain on the line but she had hung up before he had the chance.

He tried not to read anything incriminating into Greta’s quick and abrupt withdrawal. If need be, he’d get Susie’s rather annoying intern to pinpoint Greta’s exact location to make doubly sure that his sister was actually where she said she was. Armed with that information, he could determine just where she was staying so he could drive to Oklahoma City and bring his sister back if he needed to.

He hated this.

What he hated even more was that he had a very strong hunch that “needed to” was going to turn out to be a reality, and soon.

Very soon.

“Colton,” he announced as he took the incoming call.

“You better get out here, boy,” a shaken voice instructed him.

For one isolated moment, Ryan didn’t recognize the voice. But he could be forgiven for that since he had never heard his father sounding this way. Stunned. Numb. And battling complete disbelief—as well as sounding just the tiniest bit fearful.

“Dad?” Ryan asked, still only half-certain that he was right.

“Yeah, it’s me.” His father’s voice, usually so bombastic and full of life, sounded incredibly old. “Get out here as quick as you can, Ryan. And come alone,” his father added, emphasizing the last word.

“More vandalism?” Ryan asked wearily. He’d had just about enough drama to last for a while.

“No,” his father snapped, dismissing the question as inconsequential. “It’s bad.”

Okay, Ryan thought. This sounded serious. And personal. He could only think of one thing that would prompt his father to evaluate the situation this way. “Is it Mother?” he asked, even as he prayed—something he hadn’t done in more years than he could remember—that it wasn’t.

“No. No, it’s not Abra,” his father was quick to say. “But you have to get out here.”

The urgency in his father’s voice was unnerving. There was a time when their father had them all intimidated. John Colton was a big man who cast a large shadow and had a voice like gravel.

“Then what is it?” Ryan asked. Now that he thought about it, his father almost sounded spooked. If this didn’t involve his mother, why did his father sound like he was frightened?

“Damn it, Ryan, I can’t talk about this over the phone. What good is it having a police detective in the family if I have to argue with you every time I need you to handle something for me? Just get out here, Ryan,” his father ordered. “Now.”

He knew better than to think that his father was playing games. Something else had happened on the ranch and rather than wasting time trying to get his father to tell him what was going on, he needed to see this for himself.

“Where’s ‘here,’ Dad?” he asked.

“The ranch, of course,” Big J retorted. “You suddenly gone dumb on me?”

Ryan didn’t bother answering that. “It’s big ranch, Dad. Where on the ranch? The main house, the Cabin, what?”

The main house was where his parents lived, along with Brett, his wife and Greta when she was in Tulsa. Jack, his wife and his son lived in what had once been the main house until the new one had been built, while Daniel and Megan lived in what everyone just referred to as “the Cabin.” That, too, was located on the ranch.

“Come to the bunkhouse,” his father instructed in a voice that was almost eerily still.

After terminating the call, Ryan tossed his cell phone onto the passenger seat and started up his vehicle.

Given the situation, the logical thing would have been to bring backup with him, especially since his father had sounded so shaken up, an unusual state of affairs when it came to Big J.

But since his father had also been adamant no one else come to the ranch to see this—whatever “this” was—except for him, Ryan felt as if he had to go with his father’s instincts.

Besides, his instincts told him to play this very close to his vest—at least until he knew what the hell was going on.

Ryan paused only long enough to reach into his glove compartment to take out his vehicle’s emergency-light attachment. Switching it on, he placed the whirling red and yellow lights onto his roof, securing it. Once he had, he hit the gas and took off.

* * *

Ryan did between eighty and ninety all the way to the ranch, something he would have loved to have done as a teenager. He would have enjoyed it a lot more then than now.

Once he reached the ranch, he took the long way around to the bunkhouse, passing all the other buildings just in case his father had been addled when he’d told him where to go. Ryan assumed that if that was the case, he would see his father standing in front of whatever structure he’d actually meant to direct him toward.

But Big J was not out in front of the main house.

Or the old main house.

Or the Cabin.

The process of elimination told him that his father had really meant to direct him to the bunkhouse.

Why was his father being so melodramatic? Was this actually just another break-in, complete with its own acts of vandalism?

This was definitely getting old, Ryan thought as he headed toward the bunkhouse.

His father was waiting for him out front.

Ryan could make out the lines etched in his father’s face. They were evident even at this distance.

After pulling up in front of the bunkhouse, Ryan got out of his vehicle. Maybe this wouldn’t be as bad as his father was making it sound.

“Okay, what’s the big emergency?” Ryan asked his father as he approached.

“This way,” was all his father said as he gestured for Ryan to follow him into the bunkhouse.

“What the hell is all this mystery about?” Ryan asked impatiently.

“You’ll see,” Big J told him grimly.

Walking behind his father as they entered the building, Ryan thought that he was pretty much prepared for anything.

But he was wrong.