Lady Killer (The Taken Book 3)

by Kathleen Creighton

  “I had it built when I knew Lady couldn’t ever be returned to the wild. Of course, I knew that when she got bigger, she’d become a danger to the other animals.”

  “Not to mention the people,” Tony said, glancing at her. She looked away, but not before he saw a flare of anger in her eyes.

  “You may not believe this, but as rough as she was with Daniel when she was little, that’s how gentle she is now that she’s grown. And with me, too. She’s so sweet natured…That’s why I can’t—” She broke off, shaking her head as she stared through the chain-link fence. After a moment she went on in a voice tight with strain. “Duncan never liked her. And she didn’t like him, either. I think they were both afraid of each other. As if…I always wondered if somehow Lady knew he was the one who’d killed her mother. And Duncan…” She paused. “Far-fetched, I know.”

  “Maybe not,” Tony said. “Maybe he had the scent of her mother on him when he first picked her up. Her blood.”

  Brooke drew a sharp, quivering breath. “Can you get her to come closer?” she asked Daniel.

  He shook his head as Tony crouched down beside him. “She doesn’t like strangers.”

  “That’s okay,” Tony said.

  And then there was silence. His pulse pounded in his ears as he stared across the open space between the fence and the oak tree, and from its shelter, the cougar stared back at him. He could hear the hum of insects and the far-off whistle of a hawk…the sound of a car or a tractor starting up somewhere…but, above it all, the beating of his own heart.

  And then the distance between him and the cougar seemed to shrink, and the animal’s distinctive dark mask grew larger, her vivid yellow eyes glowing like fire.

  He heard a soft gasp from close beside him, and an even softer “Sshh…” from somewhere above his head.

  He couldn’t take his eyes away from that mask…those eyes. And slowly, they came closer, and closer still, until they seemed to fill his entire world, his whole field of vision, the way they had once before, long, long ago.

  Chapter 4

  His father had been working cattle in the high country that summer—the high-altitude meadows of the Sierra Nevada. The cow camp had cabins for the hands, so his mother and the four youngest kids—the ones too young to have summer jobs—had joined him for a month toward the end of the roundup season. Branding time. Josie and Anita had been ten and twelve that year, and they liked to go watch the cowboys work the cattle, but Tony and Elena had been too young to be trusted to keep out of the way, so they had to stay in camp with Mama.

  Or they were supposed to.

  We’re bored, Elena and I, and Mama is busy in the cookhouse, helping the cook make biscuits for dinner, so we decide to go find our own adventures. We’ll stay well away from the meadow where the cowboys and the cattle and horses are, we tell each other, so we won’t get into trouble.

  We’re walking along, and we come around a big pile of rocks, and there it is, right in front of us. A mountain lion. We freeze, all three of us, and the lion seems as surprised as we are.

  I can’t seem to breathe. Everything inside me has frozen solid. All I can see is the lion’s face, with its black mask and big yellow eyes. It seems huge, taller than I am, and I can almost feel its breath on my face. Beside me, Elena whimpers.

  “Don’t move,” I whisper without moving my lips. But I feel my sister’s hand creep into mine.

  I don’t know how long we stand there, the three of us, staring into each other’s eyes. Then, suddenly, the lion twists its body and bounds away over the rocks and is gone.

  Elena gives a little gasp and looks at me. Her face is pale, and there is moisture on her cheeks. “Don’t tell Mama,” I say, and she shakes her head, quickly and hard. “We can’t tell anyone—ever,” I say as she wipes her cheeks with her hands. “If we do, they’ll come with guns and shoot it. You have to promise.”

  She nods, sniffs and says, “She didn’t hurt us.”

  But she takes my hand again as we walk back to the camp, and I feel a prickling on the back of my neck, as if yellow lion eyes are watching me all the way.

  “Wow,” Daniel said. “She’s never done that before. Look, Mom. She’s not even afraid.”

  Tony looked up at Brooke and shrugged. “Just got the knack, I guess,” he said, making light of it because his chest felt peppery inside and his world still shivered around its edges with the vividness of the memory flashback.

  He heard her take a shuddering breath. “Daniel, time for you to get started on your homework. You have some makeup work to do. Don’t even think about arguing.”

  Daniel hurriedly closed his mouth, evidently having been ready to do more than think about it. He let his drooping shoulders and hanging head show how unfair he thought it was, and lumbered off in the loose, disjointed way of disappointed children everywhere. Tony vividly recalled employing the same drama tactics, to roughly the same effect.

  “He sure does mind well,” he remarked, and she made a dry sound that might have been a laugh.

  “He’s been on his best behavior since…all this happened.” She said it without much expression in her voice but couldn’t keep the shadows of everything she’d been through in the recent past from flashing across her face.

  Couldn’t keep it from Tony, anyway, because he had an eye trained to notice such subtleties. The tension in her facial muscles made his own ache.

  Gently, not wanting to distress her more, he finally asked the question she’d already offered to answer. “What happened here?” When she didn’t reply immediately, he said, “I promised I wouldn’t write or photograph anything about it, and I won’t. But you’re right—I would like to know.”

  He’d meant to leave it there, but she finished for him as if he hadn’t. “Whether you’re in the company of a killer or not?”

  She crouched down beside him and put her face close to the wire and her fingers through it, and the cougar licked her fingers and butted her head up against the wire like a house cat wanting to be petted. Tony heard a peculiar rumbling sound, almost a vibration felt in his bones rather than heard, and with a small sense of wonder, he realized the animal was purring.

  With her eyes closed, Brooke fought to gain control of her emotions, wondering why it seemed so tempting to give in to them here, now, with this strangely charismatic and imposing man. She drew in a breath and began.

  “I was late getting home from town….”

  He listened intently, not interrupting, and when she was through with her story, she stood up, and so did he. She looked down at Lady, who, at some point during her narrative had flopped down at the base of the fence and was lying stretched out with her back to them, close enough to touch through the wire. She seemed completely relaxed except for the tip of her tail, which twitched now and then.

  “She seems to have accepted you completely,” she said with a small laugh, because she was in suspense, wanting to know how he was going to respond. Because she needed so badly to be believed. “For her to turn her back on you like this, it means she trusts you.”

  “What can I say?” he said, showing that incongruous dimple. Then he cleared his throat, and his voice was abrupt, almost harsh. “Mind if I ask you some questions?”

  She shrugged and spread her hands. Not saying the words, but thinking, What does it matter? Feeling gray and dismal and hopeless.

  “I guess what I don’t understand is how they think you could have done this when your—excuse me—when Duncan was already dead when you got here, and Daniel is your witness to that fact. What? Do they think he’s lying to protect you?”

  She threw him a look, feeling faint touches of warmth and light that were like the first rays of the rising sun on a frosty morning.

  “No, actually.” She tried to smile and couldn’t even manage irony. Fear was a cold chill in her belly and a brassy taste in her throat when she swallowed. “They think I set it all up before I left, before Daniel got home from school. They say I asked Duncan to meet me h
ere, somehow lured him into the compound, shot him with the tranq gun, let Lady out of her cage, then went to town to do my shopping. That I never meant for Daniel to be the one to find him, which only happened because the guy at the feed store had lost my order and I was late getting home.”

  He was frowning, his tawny eyes intent in a way that reminded her oddly of the cougar’s eyes.

  “So…do you have a tranq gun? The one you’re supposed to have used?”

  She hissed out a breath. “I do have a tranq gun. Did. And that’s weird, because it’s gone.”

  “Gone? What do you mean? Like—lost, stolen…”

  “All I know is, it’s missing. Duncan bought it for me when Lady got big. He was afraid she might attack Daniel—or me, I suppose. He kept it in the tack room, in the barn, so it would be handy in case…in case Lady ever went berserk, I guess.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and laughed thickly. “Ironic, huh?” She sniffed and, after a moment, went on. “Anyway, I told the police—uh, sheriff’s department detectives, you know—where it was, and they said it wasn’t there. They had a warrant and searched the whole place for it, and so far they haven’t found it. Which, as far as they’re concerned, only proves their theory, that I did it before I left for town, took the gun with me and disposed of it somewhere on the way.”

  “I don’t know,” Tony said in a slow and thoughtful way. “It all sounds pretty circumstantial.”

  “Yes. But don’t forget, I also have motive. Duncan was contesting our custody agreement. He wanted full custody of Daniel. And this being a county in which the good-ol’ boys system governs just about everything, he actually might have won.” She struggled again with the smile. “And don’t they always suspect the husband or wife first? Especially—” she drew a shivering breath “—when there’s nobody else to suspect. I mean, who else could it be, right?”

  She looked at him, and he looked back at her, not saying anything. She thought he looked shaken. Because he thinks I’m a murderer? Or because he sees, as I do, how hopeless it is…

  “So,” she said when the silence had stretched as far as it could, “do you still want to do your story when the odds are I really am a cold-blooded killer?” To her own ears her voice sounded as thin and brittle as she felt. As if the wrong word would shatter her into a million pieces. She watched him closely, waiting for it…

  But he only said, “Okay if I come back tomorrow? Looks like Lady’s okay with me, so I don’t see why I can’t start shooting.” He wasn’t smiling, but it seemed to her—she wasn’t imagining it?—that his eyes were kind.

  She let out the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. “Tomorrow’s fine,” she said, not smiling, either. But once again she felt it—that faint touch of warmth.

  “I don’t think she did it,” Tony said to Holt at the diner that evening. He had just put in his order for the deluxe Black Angus cheeseburger and was trying not to think about all the stuff his sisters had just been preaching to him about bad fats and red meat and cholesterol. He shook his head and reached for his beer. “But I’m not sure I’m gonna be able to stay objective on the subject.”

  Holt leaned back against the booth’s red plastic upholstery and draped one long arm along the top edge of it and gave him a narrow-eyed gaze that reminded Tony of Clint Eastwood—minus the stump of cigar. “Why’s that?”

  Tony shrugged. “Well, shoot, man, she’s my best friend’s baby sister. Of course, I want her to be innocent.”

  It was enough of a reason to give Holt, but in his heart he knew it wasn’t the only one.

  He didn’t know why, but he couldn’t get the lady out of his mind. Images kept flashing through his head like snapshots in a slide show: a work-worn hand resting on the head of a huge, shaggy fawn-and-white dog; laugh lines at the corners of smoky blue eyes filled with tears; a head with spiky blond hair shooting every which way out of a haphazard ponytail, leaning against one side of a chain-link fence, with a mountain lion’s head butting against it from the other; a pair of long, slim legs in blue jeans just inches away from his shoulder, folding up to lower a long, slim body down next to him, so close he could feel the heat of it.

  Okay, so he was aware of her as a woman. He liked women. Especially beautiful ones. But he’d never had one get into his head like this one had, not in so short a time.

  He drank beer, paused, then frowned and said, “The thing is, it doesn’t look like she could be. I mean, it all points to her being the only one who could have done it. Circumstantial, sure, but add to that a good motive and the fact that she’s the ex-spouse—I mean, hell, I’d have arrested her.”

  “But you don’t think she did it.”

  “No, I don’t. Call it a gut feeling, I guess.” At least he hoped it was his gut he was feeling, and not some other part of his anatomy, the one known to be considerably less reliable in its judgments.

  “Well, okay then,” said Holt, and then they both leaned back to allow the waitress—a buxom, fortyish woman with shocking red hair—to deliver their dinner plates.

  “Thanks, Shirley—looks great,” Holt told her with a wink and a smile, and she smiled back at him, gave her fanny a little wiggle, said, “Eat up, hon. You need some meat on your bones,” as she winked at Tony and sashayed off.

  “Okay, so let’s go from there.” Holt picked up a bottle of steak sauce and studied his plate for a moment before applying generous amounts to his burger and passing the bottle on to Tony. “Let’s assume she didn’t do it. So…who did?” He picked up his burger, bit into it, looked at Tony and raised his eyebrows as he chewed.

  Tony gave a bark of laughter without much amusement in it.

  Holt leaned toward him, and Tony thought again of Clint Eastwood. “No, look here. It’s a matter of logic. If she didn’t do it, someone else did. So, we have to think who could have done the things she’s supposed to have done. Take it one thing at a time.” He held up a finger. “One, the victim was inside the cougar’s cage. How did he get there? You said Brooke told you her ex was afraid of the lion. So, would he go in there by himself? Not likely. Not willingly, anyway. Which means somebody either had to put him in there after he was tranqed, or somehow enticed him in while he was still mobile.”

  “He was a big man, from what I understand,” Tony said, beginning to get into it now himself. “And there were no drag marks, at least that I could see or anyone mentioned. Brooke couldn’t have put him in the cage herself, I don’t think.”

  “So,” said Holt, with a shrug, after another bite and chew, “either it was somebody bigger than the victim, strong enough to carry him, or somebody he trusted enough to go into the cougar’s pen with. That’s not likely to be an ex-wife he’s in a custody battle with, seems to me.” He held up a hand. “Actually, that should have been point number two. Number one, what was he doing at his ex’s ranch in the first place? His vehicle was there, parked on a dirt road that ran around the back of Brooke’s property. A road that passes pretty close by where the cougar’s pen is. I’ve been doing some scouting of my own,” he explained when Tony started to ask how he knew that. “So, that’s a big question. Why was he there? If he was there to see Brooke, wouldn’t he just go up the driveway to the house? We have to assume he met someone there—the person who killed him, right? Who would he go there to meet? And why?”

  “You have to think they—whoever the other party or parties were—they were up to no good,” Tony said, chewing thoughtfully. “Otherwise, like you say, why not go on up to the house?”

  “Right. Then there’s the matter of the weapon.”

  “The tranquilizer gun.” Tony nodded. “Which Brooke says was kept in the tack room in the barn, a room that wasn’t locked. And now it’s missing.”

  “Okay,” said Holt, leaning back with beer bottle in hand. “Who knew about the gun? For starters, the man who bought it—Duncan Grant.”

  Tony was frowning. “Let’s get this straight. Duncan Grant comes to his ex-wife’s ranch when she’s not home
, parks where he won’t be seen, meets some person or persons unknown, most likely male, gets the tranquilizer gun from the tack room—or tells his partners where it is and they take it—and somehow he winds up shot with it and left inside a cougar’s compound to die. Then whoever the unknown killer is, he takes the gun and drives away, leaving a nine-year-old boy to discover his father’s body, and the lion and the ex to take the blame.”

  Holt nodded. “That about sums it up.”

  Tony pushed his plate away with about a third of his burger still on it, having pretty much lost his appetite. “And it explains the dog,” he said.

  “The dog?”

  “Yeah. Brooke’s got a giant dog—some kind of sheepdog, I think. Very protective. I don’t think she’d have allowed a stranger onto the place, but if it was Duncan and somebody he trusted—”

  “Like a friend.”

  “Right,” Tony said.

  Then both he and Holt went silent as the diner’s door whooshed open and a group of men wearing brown Stetsons and tan shirts came in together, bantering and laughing in the confident, swaggering manner of men who know they own their little corner of the universe.

  Tony watched them until they’d settled into a big corner booth near the front of the diner, then turned back to Holt. He felt chilled. “And Duncan’s friends are probably mostly gonna be…”

  “Cops,” said Holt.

  Brooke was finishing up the morning chores when she heard a car drive up to the house. She didn’t realize until she saw that it wasn’t Tony Whitehall’s sedan how much she’d been looking forward to his coming.

  But it was a sheriff’s department SUV. She stood in the big barn doorway and watched it come up the lane and stop beside her pickup, and she felt afraid. It was a cold, sick, queasy kind of fear, a fear that she hadn’t felt in a very long time and had hoped she’d forgotten.

  I’m afraid, because I know something bad is about to happen to me, and I know that I am powerless to do anything to stop it, and that there’s no one I can turn to for help. I feel dirty and small, and I’m trembling inside, but I know I have to be strong….