“Antonio looked around but didn’t see her,” Fernando told him, “and the turbine remains padlocked. Should I take him out there with me again, maybe gather some other men as well to find her?”
“No. Tell Tony thanks,” Beau said, “and thank you for calling to let me know about it, but when it comes to Dr. Copley, I prefer to go and set her straight myself.”
It was still pitch-dark, at least two hours before sunrise, when Beau left the house after letting his aunt know he’d been called out on ranch business. Before pulling out of the drive, he had loaded his truck with a rechargeable lantern, a larger first aid kit, water and blankets...because in the time it had taken him to pull on jeans and boots and button up a work shirt, his fury with Emma’s stubbornness had given way to raw anxiety.
What if she’d hurt herself out there, traipsing around in the dark? Would she have brought bolt cutters and tried climbing the locked turbine? Or what if there’d been any truth to those theories she’d been spouting and someone had followed her onto his land, seeing the late hour and remote location as the perfect opportunity to rid himself of a nagging problem?
It had been this last thought that had moved him to unlock the gun safe that had been his father’s. And that sense of protectiveness he felt whenever he recalled that moment when he’d found her shaken, her blouse torn and her face bloody, that explained the rifle he had riding next to him.
Beau told himself this wasn’t personal, that he would do the same for anybody, especially any woman. But as aggravating as it was to have Emma ignore what he had told her, he couldn’t help admiring the way that she’d stood up to Wallace, even if he did suspect that she’d lost all perspective. Coming out here in the dead of night, all alone, especially after she’d told both him and Wallace that she feared someone might be out to kill her, proved it.
By the time he found her Jeep, Beau wasn’t sure whether he wanted more to shake the woman or to hug her. But the first step was to figure out if she was somewhere nearby.
“Emma?” he called quietly, not wanting to startle her. Raising the LED lantern, he kept the rifle tucked beneath his right arm pointed at the ground. “Emma, it’s Beau Kingston. I’ve come to check on you.”
With the turbine still shut down pending the completion of the safety investigation, he heard a light breeze sifting through dried grasses and the rhythmic chirruping of insects. Other than that, nothing. Not a whisper of a human voice, not a single footfall.
“Emma, you all right?” He raised his voice a little. “There’s no need to hide from me. I just need to know you’re okay.”
He strained his ears, but once more, there came no answer. Only the faint hooting of some kind of owl from somewhere in the distance.
Stepping forward, Beau felt the Jeep’s hood, found it cool to the touch. It’s been parked here for hours, maybe all night long.
The hood was unlatched, too, sitting slightly ajar. Leaning the rifle against the front bumper, he raised the hood, holding the lantern over the engine as he ran his gaze over—
“What the hell?” he blurted out, feeling the pumping of his own heart, the heated tightness of his skin. Because the slack serpentine belt he spotted looked as if it had been sliced, not broken, as if someone had deliberately disabled the vehicle.
Allowing the hood to fall, he grabbed his gun, turned his steps toward the turbine’s base, and at first jogged, then flat-out ran in the direction of the door there. Because he couldn’t get past the suspicion that if, unlike Tony, he took the time to rattle the chain on it, he would find it unlocked or cut through—and Emma lifeless high above.
He was sweating bullets by the time he reached the entry door. Pulling at the chain, he sighed, relieved beyond measure to find it padlocked tightly, just as he’d been assured.
“Come out now, Emma, please. It’s Beau,” he shouted, praying she was capable of responding. “You’ve got me pretty worried.”
As the echo of his shout died, he heard a whine, followed by the scrabble of approaching footsteps. With the lantern’s wire bail over his left forearm, he raised the barrel of the rifle.
“Identify yourself,” he ordered.
A split second later, he realized the individual was incapable of speech.
“River?” he asked as the dog entered the circle of light, her head lowered and her tail tucked between her legs. “It’s okay, River. Here, girl.”
Crouching, he laid the rifle on the dusty ground and reached out, his arms wide and welcoming. When he spotted the leash that she was trailing, his gut clenched. The dog surely hadn’t simply wandered off on her own.
His lowered voice and body language quickly drew her to him, and within seconds he was stroking the silky golden coat, running his hands over her trembling body.
Turning over his palms, he moved them closer to the light and found them sticky with a rusty darkness. Blood—his racing pulse redoubled.
And it didn’t take him long to determine it wasn’t from the dog.
Chapter 7
Six hours earlier
After hours of fruitlessly searching the bird strike zone, where Emma was certain Russell would have focused any cameras, she could hear nothing but the sheriff’s voice in her mind, infuriatingly smug and condescending. I’ll tell you what. From here on in, why don’t you leave the policin’ work to me and just stick with all your nature nonsense. Because it’s pretty clear you aren’t cut out for sleuthin’.
Leave it all to him, and go back home to teach Professor Paulsen’s soul-killing classes. Maybe everyone was right and that was what she needed.
Or maybe I’m just scared out here, afraid of Jeremy lurking somewhere nearby, waiting for the moment I let my guard down.
Frowning, she shook off her fear, aggravated beyond measure that he still held the power to shake her up with what she was almost certain had been nothing but a cruel bluff. After all, she’d been beyond careful to make certain that no one had followed her this evening. And Jeremy especially would’ve had no way to predict that she would have ventured here tonight.
It’s only the exhaustion talking, that’s all, she thought as she stumbled over a jutting tussock. She went down on one knee, only to feel sweet River pressing close beside her, reaching up to lick her face and whining softly.
“I know, girl,” Emma said, smiling at the way the retriever, in her obvious confusion over their presence out here so late, kept attempting to lead her back to the vehicle that would get them to a cozy bed in a comfortable room, where the dog was certain they belonged. “I’m about ready to call it a night.”
They might as well, since this was hopeless, continuing to search for the proverbial needle in the haystack in the darkness. Though Emma had a reasonable idea of the right area to look if Russell had wanted to capture any unscheduled bird collections, the little cameras would be all too easy to miss and were impossible to track electronically without specific tags keyed to her phone.
Lacking such guidance, the only things of interest she’d come across so far were a large band of feral hogs, which prompted her to leash River more for the dog’s safety than her own, and enough scorpions to make her skin crawl.
With a defeated sigh, Emma stood again, coming to her feet more slowly than usual, since her body had stiffened up from the attack the night before. As she started toward the Jeep, out of the corner of her eye, she caught a flash of light. Pointing her beam in that direction, she cried out at the glint that reflected off a tiny lens.
“Finally!” She dug excitedly among the narrow-leafed branches of a tough and thorny shrub, beyond caring about the scratches when she uncovered the camouflage-patterned camera that had been secured there using zip ties. Unable to remove the camera without a sharp knife, she opened the front and popped out its memory card, which she zipped inside a pocket for safekeeping.
Excited to get back to her computer to review the images, s
he rearranged leaves to hide the camera again, grabbed River’s leash and hurried back to her Jeep with a fresh energy hastening her steps.
Inside the Jeep, Emma’s mood changed quickly when the engine wouldn’t start. As she retried the ignition, her heart sank as the weak whirring died completely. “Oh, no,” she said, unable to fathom why her normally reliable vehicle would do this here and now. While the issue might be minor, she had no way of dealing with it without assistance.
When she checked her phone, her heart fell further when she saw the battery had died—her own fault, since she’d forgotten to charge it after the sheriff had returned the missing cell. But with no way to call anyone, she had little choice but to hike out in order to get help. She blew out a breath, knowing it could take at least an hour to reach the gate on the rough road in the darkness. And she might wait outside it all night before anyone came by—if they even stopped to offer assistance.
“I’m afraid this is going to be one long night,” she told River, wondering if the two of them would be better off sleeping in the Jeep until daylight. But even then, with the turbine shut down, there was no guarantee that help would come, and no one had any idea she was out here. Plus, once the late-August sun rose, temperatures would quickly grow unbearable.
As she sat considering, she recalled a Green Horizons engineer giving her a tour of the area before she’d embarked on her study. They’d been close to this spot when he’d waved to a dirt road leading westward. “If you or your assistant ever run into any issues,” he’d said, “you’ll find the main ranch headquarters about three miles up the way there. About a mile past the mansion, you’ll see the barns and then a little office building, where you should ask for the ranch manager.”
But she didn’t know the ranch manager. The only person she knew, the only one she trusted to help her out of this jam, was the man living in the closer Kingston mansion—the same man who’d be furious to know she’d defied his order.
“Well, he’s bound to find out anyway,” she told River as she climbed out of the Jeep with her flashlight and the day pack containing drinking water and Russell’s gun. “I might as well face him head-on.”
Beau, too, would understand what her discovery at Turbine Number 43 might mean. And he seemed too reasonable a man to turn his back on a chance to get an actual look at Russell’s killer.
As she walked, coyotes’ yips and howls chorused in the distance. Pulling River closer, Emma ignored them and instead imagined herself bringing Beau around to her way of thinking. Imagined convincing him to help her ensure that any evidence turned over to the sheriff wouldn’t simply disappear without another witness to corroborate its existence.
It was a good plan, she decided, using her flashlight’s steady beam and the crescent moon above to guide her steps. A plan that eased some of the gnawing tension in her belly and warmed her with the faintest flickerings of hope.
Except it wasn’t hope, but headlights, that unexpectedly crested the low hill about fifty yards ahead. Crested and accelerated when she waved her arms at the grill of a large vehicle barreling toward her.
* * *
A few minutes after reporting the abandoned Jeep, Beau received a call back from the sheriff himself.
“So I hear you want my help now,” Wallace said, his voice rough as if he’d just been awakened. “Imagine that.”
“You are the sheriff, aren’t you?” Beau challenged, pushing past his anger over the alleged new will to focus on what most mattered at the moment. “Looks to me like there might’ve been a crime here. Trespassing, at the very least, since I warned Emma Copley to stay off my land, but I’m a hell of a lot more worried about her safety than I am about that right now. Looks like her vehicle’s been intentionally disabled, out here by Turbine Number 43, and I found her dog, wandering alone. Shaking like a leaf, with blood on her fur.”
“Dog injured? Shot or cut up?”
“Not that I can find,” Beau said. “I’m worried the blood’s not hers. And no one’s responding when I call out.”
“What makes you think Dr. Copley’s car’s been tampered with?”
“Hood was ajar and the drive belt looks like it’s been sliced to me. No wear, no fraying.”
“Sometimes they can go like that,” Wallace said. “And maybe she raised the hood herself to see if she could figure out what was goin’ on. Or she could’ve cut herself somehow tryin’ To play mechanic.”
Beau had to admit it was a possibility. The amount of blood on River had seemed fairly modest.
“You look for her along the road back to the gate?” Wallace asked. “Maybe she’s on foot, thinkin’ she can thumb a ride back into town.”
“Not yet. Thought I’d better call this in first, given the circumstances. But I did check out the turbine. Found it still locked up tight.”
“Then I’m sure you and a couple of your kinfolk—I mean those overpaid vaqueros you’ve got working for you—can find her wanderin’ around lost out there.”
“Damn it, Wallace, can’t you put aside your self-serving trash talk for thirty seconds and do your job? Or at least send out a couple of deputies who will?”
“You know what? The voters in this county think I do my job just fine, and I’m sick as hell of you and that woman goin’ around sayin’ otherwise. So go find her your own damned self if you can—if you aren’t too busy running my ranch into the ground to bother.”
Beau wasn’t sure which of them hung up first, only that he’d never wanted to thrash a man so badly in his life. But with the dog shaking against his legs and dawn staining the horizon, he roughly thrust aside his anger, wanting only to find Emma. And when he did, he swore, if she was alive to do the telling, he would damned well listen to her this time—after giving her one hell of a hug, out of sheer relief.
The idea of touching her like that, of having an excuse to wrap her in his arms again, held a powerful appeal. One he shoved from his mind, focusing on the task at hand.
“Where is she, River?” he asked. “Where’s Emma?”
The dog whined up at him, her dark brown eyes beseeching. But if she had any answers, she didn’t volunteer them.
At least Wallace’s suggestion about looking along the roadside leading toward the ranch gate made sense to Beau. Before calling Fernando to organize a search team, who might inadvertently destroy any evidence of foul play, however, Beau decided to drive the route on his own.
He took River to his truck, where he lifted her onto the passenger seat beside him. With his high-beam headlights turned on and his windows partly open, he headed for the ranch gate but spotted no sign of Emma. A few times, he paused to shout her name, honking his horn and bellowing that he was here to help her, but the only thing that gained him were a few moos from curious cattle, who lifted their heads to search his truck’s bed for signs of hay.
Turning around, he headed back, and on a whim passed both her Jeep and the turbine, figuring she might’ve decided to risk his wrath by hiking toward ranch headquarters—and his home—in the hope of finding someone quickly.
He didn’t get a third of a mile before River turned abruptly toward the window and barked several times, tail wagging. In her excited scrabbling, one of her paws landed on the toggle switch, lowering the glass completely.
“No, girl! Stay!” he said, hitting the brakes as the dog started through the open window. He reached too late to close it, seeing her leap down and scramble away. He cursed and put the truck in Park. Taking the lantern and the rifle, he followed the path River had taken, one leading roughly in the same direction from which he’d just come.
He lost sight of the dog a couple of times, but the dawn’s pearly glow allowed him to safely jog in the general direction she had taken. He hoped like hell that he was right following his hunch that River had heard or smelled something that might lead them both to Emma instead of frightening an already-spooked dog into running w
ild to escape.
Trotting down into a deep draw, he caught sight again of the looming turbine—and a light-colored form sniffing at the ground not far ahead.
“Hey there, River.” Breathing hard by now, he crept closer, edging toward where he saw that the end of her leash had snagged on a jutting stone. If she panicked, she’d most likely pull free, giving him no choice but to get out of this ravine to find enough of a cell signal to call Fernando. Certainly, an organized group could cover far more ground, more quickly, and the vaqueros knew this land better than anyone.
Finally in range, Beau crouched down, reaching ahead of him to free the leash—
And flinching at a crack like thunder and a spray of dirt erupting from the gravel a couple of feet to his right.
Military training kicking in, his body reacted even as his mind screamed Gun! He sprinted for the nearest outcrop, dragging the struggling dog toward cover before whoever was out here managed to kill them both.
No second shot followed, let alone the fusillade he more than half expected, but adrenaline had his heartbeat thundering in his ears. That and River’s panicked yips and the scrabbling of her nails on gravel made it impossible to make out the shouted words—
But he still recognized the voice echoing through the tight draw.
It was Emma, yelling something, her words a desperate shriek. It took an additional split second for the anger in them to cut through his surprise, along with the suspicion that she had been the person who’d damned near shot him dead.
* * *
“Let go of her right now!” Emma shouted, shaking so hard she could barely aim the gun from where she lay propped up on her elbows, with her lower body hidden beneath the shelf of rock where she’d spent hours hiding.
Deadly Texas Summer Page 9