by Lisa Jackson
“Some questions for your mom. You heard about the shooting on the sheriff?” he asked.
“Yeah, it’s like everywhere.” With more than a little impudence, she flipped her dark hair over one shoulder. “So why are you here, questioning my mom?” A pretty girl in jeans and a tight T-shirt, her inquisitive eyes fell on the detectives.
“All part of the investigation,” Pescoli answered. “We’re talking to anyone who knows the sheriff.”
“And Mom was married to him,” Alli said flatly.
Cara glanced from her husband to her daughter. “A long time ago, Alli.”
“Yeah, I know. Like ancient history.” She almost smirked as she finally deigned to clomp down the remaining steps in her boots.
“Exactly.” Cara was nodding, obviously happy that particular fact had been mentioned.
Pescoli wondered. Cara was almost too quick and too emphatic in her negations of any link to her ex.
“I thought you were Eric,” the girl said a little petulantly, and Pescoli noticed her jeans were ripped. By design. Allison’s boots, too, Pescoli knew, were expensive. Bianca wanted a pair just like them, and even the knockoffs were more than Pescoli wanted to pay.
“Eric’s coming over?” Cara asked with a disapproving tone.
“Yeah.” Allison shrugged. “I decided it would be okay.”
“You decided?” Nolan joined his wife’s concern. “That boy should get a job or go to school.”
“That boy has a job,” Allison threw back at them. “And he’s taking night classes. He got his GED, you know.”
“I mean a real job,” Nolan said. “Working as a busboy at Dino’s Pizza Parlor isn’t exactly a career path, and his night class is in tae kwon do.”
“So? What was your first job?” his daughter charged, eyes flaring. “Haven’t you bragged about, uh, what is it? Working your way up? And starting by shoveling shit for some rich guy’s horses? Herbert Long, or something.”
“Alli!” Cara admonished.
“Hubert,” Banks corrected. “Brady’s father. Herbert is his cousin . . . but that’s enough. The detectives don’t want to hear our argument.” He turned to Pescoli and Alvarez. “I’m sorry. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“No, for now, we’ve got all we need,” Pescoli said. She and Alvarez walked outside where the day was remarkably still and clouds were hugging the ground, sending wisping tendrils of fog through the thickets of snow-flocked mountain hemlock and spruce.
A damned winter wonderland, a perfect setting for Nolan Banks’s large, perfectly decorated home. Pescoli could just imagine what the imposing structure looked like at nightfall, when the thousands of tiny lights were illuminated, showing off the angles and pitches of the roofline in the forest. But appearances were often deceiving, smoke screens for what really occurred, and she wondered if the cracks within the foundation of the Banks family ran jagged and deep.
Once she and Alvarez were inside the Jeep and she was driving back down the curving lane on the Banks property, Pescoli asked, “What was your hit?”
“Did Cara Banks seem nervous to you?”
“Yep,” Pescoli agreed as she fiddled with the defroster so that air would warm the windshield where condensation had formed. “Maybe she’s hiding something. Or someone. Hey, hand me some tissues from the glove box, will you?” Alvarez complied, and while driving with one hand, Pescoli swiped the inside of the glass above the dashboard, giving her a modicum of visibility. “Better.”
“What’s the problem with the defroster?” Alvarez asked.
“Good question. Had it into the mechanics, but they can’t find anything. It’s an intermittent problem. Don’t get me started.” Stuffing the used tissues into an empty cup holder, she turned back to business. “The whole conversation with Cara seemed off. Stilted. Not right.”
“Think it had to do with Grayson?”
“Hard to say. Some people just react to the law showing up on their doorstep.”
“That wasn’t what this was,” Alvarez disagreed.
“Yeah . . .” They reached the end of the lane where Pescoli rolled to a near stop, then hit the accelerator to turn onto the county road. “What did you think of the daughter? I hate to say it, but she reminds me of Bianca with her attitude. They’re about the same age.”
“They’re in school together?”
“Oh, I don’t think so. Pretty sure the Banks kids all attended the private school in Missoula.”
“And you know this how?”
She shook her head. “Nolan has some older kids, boys, one was in Jeremy’s class in elementary school but transferred after fifth grade. Isaiah, I think. Has an older brother, Ezekiel.”
“Books of the Bible?”
“Maybe the first Mrs. Nolan was into the Old Testament.”
“Or just likes old-time, solid names,” Alvarez said. “She live around here?”
“Don’t know. Something we should look into.”
She was already fiddling with her cell phone, probably making some kind of note to herself as Pescoli continued driving. The surrounding landscape changed, forested hills giving way to snow-crusted fields stretched to the hills.
Alvarez took a few calls and the conversation was one-sided, and when she hung up the last one, she let out a disgusted puff of air.
“What?”
“Looks like Verdago skipped. Didn’t show up for work today, didn’t call in, according to his supervisor at the Chambers Apartments in Helena.”
“What about yesterday?”
“His day off.”
“Crap,” Pescoli said. “What time did he get off the day before, on Christmas Eve?”
“Don’t know.”
“It’s a three-and-a-half- to four-hour drive from Helena in decent weather, with no traffic, so let’s stay he would have had to get off work four-and-a-half to five hours before Grayson was hit because he’d have to have time to ditch the car, ski into position, and set up. If he worked until two-thirty or three in the morning, it’s an impossible feat.”
“But if he didn’t . . . ?” Alvarez posed, then said, “I’ll check.”
For the first time since seeing her boss cut down, Pescoli felt a ray of hope. Maybe, just maybe, they’d get this bastard. Verdago had sliced up his brother-in-law, but he was a marksman. And he hated Grayson. But what would have caused him to go after the sheriff now? He’d been out of prison for six months. Had something triggered his attack or was he just patient, this being his first real opportunity?
“Let’s find him.”
“Brewster’s already got two detectives on it.”
“Good.” Pescoli visualized the man, who, now around thirty-six, was short and muscular. The last time she’d seen Verdago, his head was shaved, a skull tattooed where once there’d been hair, and he sported a thick horseshoe mustache along his upper lip and cheeks. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“Maybe.” Alvarez was thoughtful, brows pulled together.
“In the meantime, onto Grayson’s second wife, Akina.” Pescoli threw her partner a look. “Might as well see what’s behind door number two, wife-wise.”
Chapter 12
“I just don’t like it, none of it,” Cade said as he turned off the faucet to the main trough in the stable. “Dan’s condition is still critical and the doctors aren’t really telling us what’s what.”
“Maybe they don’t know. It is his goddamned brain.” Zed tossed some oats into the manger as the horses, on the other side of a half wall, crowded around, burying their noses into the food.
The stable was usually a calming place for Cade. With its dimmed lights, smells of dust, dung, and leather, and sounds of hooves rustling in straw, this area of the ranch was where he felt most at home. Bridles hung from the rafters, saddles sat on sawhorses, hay filled the loft overhead, and all manner of tools and gear was displayed upon the wood walls. He couldn’t remember a time in his life where being near the horses didn’t have a calming effect on him.
Now, the place wasn’t quite as comforting.
“I’m going to the hospital.” He climbed up the ladder to the hayloft, his boots ringing on the metal rungs.
“Not that way, yer not.”
“Funny.” Hoisting himself onto the hundred-year-old floorboards, he waited for his eyes to adjust to the dim light, then grabbed a nearby bale and yelled, “Incoming!” then kicked it to the floor below. Lifting another bale from the stacks, he pushed it through the opening and it slammed to the floor below with a satisfying thump.
“That’s enough!” Zed hollered.
Cade started for the ladder again, but hesitated as he caught sight of the round window mounted high beneath the eaves. Glazed in ice, it was a shadowy portal to the dark day beyond. Dusk was riding low over the mountains, shadows chasing across the hills.
A memory cut behind his eyes in a brilliant flash, a quicksilver picture of a naked woman, lying facedown on a blanket, the slope of her back and rounded buttocks pale in the moonlight streaming through the window. The hayloft was warm, with a summer heat that, inside, wasn’t cooled by the wafting breeze.
The back of his throat caught as he remembered the smell of fresh hay and the buzz of insects, the sound of a coyote crying in the night, and her lying on the old blanket he kept in the back of his pickup. His senses were alive that night, sharpened by the sexual need running through his veins, the anticipation of passionate lovemaking, that special kind that had an edge to it because to some, it was forbidden.
That night, his brain had been disconnected from his soul, and any sense of integrity that could have stopped him had been left behind with the taste of her first, frightened kiss. Trembling lips, still red from a little too much wine, had transformed, turning warm, pliant, and oh so tempting.
She hadn’t resisted when he’d reached beneath her shirt, his fingers scaling her rib cage; then the two of them had ended up here, naked, stripped of their clothes by eager fingers and mutual assent.
Somewhere off in the distance, a rattling train rolled noisily on century-old tracks. The hay mow was hot, August heat sweltering, sweat breaking out on his skin. He leaned closer, smelling a whiff of perfume as he reached around her, touching her breasts, feeling her nipples harden under his fingertips.
His groin tightened and his cock, already hard, strained. Thunder rolled through his brain.
“We shouldn’t,” she whispered, the sound disturbing the horses below. One sent up a soft whinny.
“Too late.” He slid his naked body atop hers and she moaned and writhed slowly on the blanket, her hands curling into fists.
“Cade—”
“Shhh . . . no regrets.” Running his hardness along her spine, he felt her need, saw the raise of her hips. She wanted him, as desperately as he wanted her, with the same pounding need. “It’s all right.”
When she didn’t say anything, he squeezed his eyes shut and tried like hell to cool off, but his blood was running hot, his cock straining, the feel of her soft skin so damned intoxicating.
“You want me to stop?” he forced out. Hell, was that possible? His heart sounded as if it were pounding in his ears, his flesh on fire.
Hesitation. Then finally, “No.”
“I feel a ‘but’ coming.”
“This is wrong. You know it. I know it.”
Well, shitfire.
“I assure you, darlin’, there’s nothing wrong about this, about you and me, about feelin’ good.”
“It’s not about feeling good and you know it!” Oh, God, was she going to cry?
He wanted to argue with her, needed to argue with her, though he knew exactly what she meant. He just wasn’t going to think about the ramifications of what they were doing. Hell, tomorrow was another day. But tonight, she was here. Ready and warm and willing . . . well, almost willing.
“I could stop,” he admitted and twisted the end of her nipple just a bit, eliciting pleasure with just a hint of pain.
Her back arched and she was his again, he knew it, felt her resistance ebb.
“Tell me you don’t want me,” he said.
In response, she moaned softly and her buttocks rose a little higher, inviting him to the dance.
He slid closer. Pressed his weight into her. Reached around with his other arm so that he now had both her breasts in his palms, her nipples hard as he rubbed.
“Oooh,” she whispered as he touched her. “Cade . . .”
“What?” he asked into the shell of her ear.
She shuddered.
“What is it you want?”
“Everything.” It came out in a rush as she began to move. “I . . . want . . . everything.”
And he did too. Closing his eyes, he crossed the frail barrier that was loyalty, thrust himself inside her, and changed the course of his damned life forever.
Now, years later, standing in the cold hay mow, looking through a window covered in ice, he felt as empty as he had the next day when he’d left her.
Even so, his cock twitched at the memory, and he knew in a heartbeat that if he were given the chance to replay his life, he’d do it all again.
Shitfire, he was a bastard. Raking stiff, frustrated fingers through his hair, he tried to dispel the vibrant memory. It was over. Done. Lives changed. Lives lost. “Sweet Christ,” he muttered almost inaudibly.
“Hey, you leavin’ or what?” Zed called from below.
How long had he been up here, caught in the web of memories that always left him a little breathless and a lot mad at the world?
“On my way!” He jumped onto the ladder and holding on to the metal rails on either side of the steps, let his hands glide down the metal handles like he’d done as a kid and slid to the floor without touching the rungs. As his boots landed on the floor below, he saw that Zed was just finishing strewing the hay in the mangers.
“What the hell were you doin’ up there?” Zed demanded.
“Nothin’.”
“Sure, jack-off.”
Cade felt a corner of his mouth lift. Close enough, brother. Close enough.
“You got this handled?” Cade asked, motioning to the mangers where all the horses had plunged their noses.
“What do you think?” Zed snorted a laugh and the roan gelding, His Majesty, lifted his head to stare at Cade. God, he loved that gelding. At twenty, a lot of His Majesty’s good years were behind him, but the quarter horse still had a spark in his eye and was ready, when asked, to gallop wildly across the open fields with Cade riding bareback.
Cade grabbed his hat and squared it on his head. “In that case, I’m out.”
“Give the doctors hell and call me if there’s any news.” Zed settled the pitchfork onto the nail where it had hung as long as Cade could remember.
“Will do.” Slipping through the door into the frigid dusk, Cade watched his breath fog. Hands in his pockets, he jogged along the path of broken snow, through a rusted gate to the ranch house, where he snagged his keys from a hook near the back door and made his way to the garage.
He wondered if he’d see Hattie at the hospital again, then decided it didn’t matter. In fact, it would probably be better if he didn’t.
Akina Grayson Bellows didn’t know anything, Pescoli guessed. From the moment the detectives knocked on her front door, to the minute they left, Grayson’s petite, second ex-wife kept looking at her watch while holding her one-year-old daughter.
At least ten years younger than Grayson, with straight black hair knotted at her nape and almond-shaped eyes that seemed to miss nothing, Akina was as open about her relationship with Grayson as Cara had been closed.
Akina admitted to remarrying soon after she and Grayson
had divorced, and now she had a child. She seemed genuinely sorry that the sheriff had been attacked. “Oh, I read about it, I can’t imagine. Poor Dan. Come in, come in,” she said, waving them into a small duplex filled with baby toys, a playpen, a fake Christmas tree that was listing a little, and general chaos. Dishes littered the kitchen table visible through an archway, and the door to a back room was open, exposing two baskets overflowing with laundry and pet dishes on the floor.
While balancing her daughter on a hip, she’d shooed a white cat from the couch, cleared a spot for the detectives to sit, and said, “If there’s anything I can tell you, anything I can do, just let me know. This is horrible!”
Her phone chimed on the table, she glanced at it, smiled, and said, “Just a sec. My husband. I’ve been waiting for this text.” With flying fingers, she responded to him while her chubby baby cooed happily.
“There. Now, what can I tell you?” Smiling, she sat on the edge of a recliner.
“Let’s start with yesterday morning,” Alvarez suggested.
“Christmas. We were all here. My husband, me, and his son, Monty. Rick was married before, too, so Monty, he’s six, was over here too.” She seemed genuinely happy and the missing boy explained the Nerf gun boxes and toy trucks tucked into a floor-to-ceiling bookcase. “Anyway, this was our daughter’s first Christmas, so it was very special.” Akina’s eyes were bright with the pride that comes with a first child. Pescoli felt a little pang as she flashed to a memory twenty years old, when Jeremy was so tiny she and Joe stuck a big red bow on his bald head, laid him beneath the tree, and snapped dozens of pictures as he stared up at the lighted branches. And now . . . Joe was dead and she couldn’t even make the time to celebrate with her kids on Christmas morning. Extenuating circumstances, she reminded herself, but she still felt guilty.
Meanwhile, Akina, who had been an accountant before her maternity leave, was bubbling over about Sachi’s first Noel. She did stop herself once to say, “It’s just such a bummer about Dan,” but otherwise, Grayson’s attack almost seemed something in the abstract to her.
They spoke to her for nearly half an hour, but in the end she’d been able to tell them nothing that appeared to help. Her marriage to Grayson had been short-lived, the relationship a whirlwind that had occurred soon after her father had died. Akina flat out admitted that she’d been looking for a father figure, but Dan’s job and their age difference had come between them, and living in a cabin in the woods while her husband spent upward of sixteen hours of his days working as a cop just wasn’t her idea of a life.