The Lonesome Lawmen Trilogy

by Pauline Baird Jones

  “So, little darlin’, would you like to take a turn around the floor?” He leaned close, his breath puffing warm and beery into her face.

  “I don’t really know the steps.” Dani spared a brief, longing look at the milling dancers, the brisk music promising an appealingly, thoughtless motion. “Is that a problem?”

  “Not to me, darlin’. I’m a good teacher and you look like a fast learner.” He held out his hand with a wide, good ole’ boy grin.

  Dani set her drink down, let him lead her onto the sawdust strewn floor. His arm hooked strongly around her waist, pulling her against a chest that was country hard and scented with Zest soap and Brut after shave. She had forgotten how nice it felt to be held by a man.

  “Just follow my lead,” he said.

  She nodded, hoping he was right about her being a fast learner. She needed light feet for more than pushing her tush if she was going to dodge the Marshals Service and Dark Lord until she got her day in court.

  Step…kick…step…days…cross and kick…nights…step and push that tush.

  One step at a time, it would eventually be over. No problem, she told herself, then stepped on her partner’s toes.

  * * * *

  Matt had so much coffee in him, he was surprised he wasn’t buzzing the room. He had finally managed to catch a few Z’s, all of them taken in his chair. He tossed back a couple of ibuprofen to take the edge off his stiff neck, chased it down his throat with more coffee, and turned his restless impatience back to his study of Gwynne’s paper trail.

  According to Sebastian’s report, Gwynne had been in touch with her agent about some chapters she still owed on her book. The contact had occurred during her stay in the hotel, so it didn’t mean she was still alive. If she was, they might be able to trace her when she sent the chapters over the Internet.

  His headache tightened its grip on the sides of his head. He gritted his teeth and kept reading.

  It was progress of a sort, but Matt didn’t want to know where she’d been. He needed to know where Dani Gwynne was right now. If she was still alive. He was halfway down the stack of morning reports when Riggs slouched in.

  A yawn that looked like a leftover from yesterday twisted his face. He held a fist full of papers as if they were a security blanket he wanted to curl around. When he had assumed his usual slouch in the chair in front of Matt’s desk, he deposited the papers, then helped himself to some of Matt’s coffee.

  “I should have been a romance writer.”

  Matt blinked. “What?”

  “You wanted to know how much walking around money she has?” He looked at a computer sheet with a look as close to awe as he could get from his hang dog face. “How about fifteen thousand?”

  It wasn’t an easy figure to bend his tired brain around. Matt dug his thumbs into a knotted pain spot. “Dollars?”

  “She ain’t toting pennies.”

  Matt considered some more. “How come we didn’t know about it before now?”

  Riggs shrugged. “Seems Neuman didn’t know. The agent slipped it to her a couple of months ago, layered in some galleys for her new book that Gwynne had to proof. Asked her why Gwynne asked for the moolah, but she didn’t know.”

  “You believe her?” Riggs shrugged and Matt frowned. What had prompted her to ask for money? Had she been planning to bolt before Hayes struck? “What’s she going to do with it? Where’s she going?”

  “I don’t know where she’s going.” Alice had approached unnoticed. “But I know where she’s been.”

  “So?” Matt asked, impatient when she didn’t continue. “Where’s she been?”

  “You aren’t going to like it.” Alice propped a hip on the edge of her desk and crossed her arms, her Cheshire cat grin back in place.

  Matt scowled. “I don’t like much anyway. What you got?”

  “A cop saw our APB this morning. Swears he was with our girl last night at a country dance club on the south side. Seems he taught her to tush push.”

  Riggs choked. Matt didn’t blame him. Alice wasn’t trying near hard enough not to control her grin. Matt didn’t give her the satisfaction of hearing him choke, too, but it wasn’t easy.

  “Dancing?”

  “That’s right.”

  “The tush push?”

  “So he says.”

  Matt rubbed his forehead. It didn’t help. “I’ll never understand women.”

  “Good.” Alice’s grin broke free of minor restraint.

  “Don’t—just enlighten me. What is she doing?”

  Alice sighed. “If she’d gotten drunk, would you be surprised?”

  “No.” Matt looked at Riggs. He shrugged, shook his head. “So what? This is the female equivalent of a bender?”

  “Sort of. Though the parallel is weak because women don’t consider insensibility a viable route to problem solving.”

  Matt stared at her from under lowered brows. “I have so much to thank affirmative action for. Just think what I would’ve missed if I’d never met you?”

  “Don’t.” Alice gave a mock shudder. “It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  “Then don’t think. Find out who she went to that club with.”

  “Already on it.” She dropped behind her desk. “My guy at the PD thinks he’s knows someone who knows one of the women she was with, so it shouldn’t take long. He’s gonna call me back.”

  “Good.” The back of his neck prickled. He felt like a hound dog picking up the scent. Too bad Dani was acting like a fox. He wasn’t the enemy. He wished he could tell her a few home truths… “Son of a bitch!”

  He could tell her anything he wanted to.

  Riggs lifted his head from his chest. Alice looked at him in surprise. “What?”

  Matt grinned. “Email. Instant communication.”

  Alice got it before Riggs, but then Riggs hadn’t finished Matt’s coffee yet. She smiled. “Tell her how much I liked her book.”

  * * * *

  Dani slept restlessly, woke early with tears on her cheeks, the grim remains of yet another nightmare digging into her emotional reserves. The tears were easy to brush away. Exhaustion dug in its heels, refusing to be dislodged by mere will power. What had possessed her to think she could take on the forces of law and disorder for who knew how long? Rosebud had asked the same question quite forcefully last night when her gentle question had loosed the brakes on Dani’s tongue. It had helped to talk about it and Rosebud did have a point. But Rosebud hadn’t stared into Peg’s dead eyes, hadn’t fled a burning house that was supposed to be safe. She hadn’t seen a killer at work on a friend that was supposed to be her.

  If Dani went back, she would be back to square one, wondering where and when Dark Lord would strike.

  And who would lead him to her.

  Dani rubbed her face. “I need my soda.” It wasn’t a cure, but it was better than nothing.

  She carried the cold can into the bathroom to get the morning washed away. It took her half way through a second soda before the caffeine level in her blood got high enough to fuel something besides an inclination to whine.

  Dani sat down at the kitchen table with a pencil and her trusty idea notebook. She flipped through the pages, looking for a blank one. A couple of sentences on one page caught her eye.

  A wish before…

  Dani remembered the night she had made it. A dark one. Heavily laced with foreboding. She bit her lip, then with conscious intent, filled in the blank.

  A wish before dying.

  There, she had faced it. Honesty was always the best policy. She couldn’t compute the odds of surviving, not while she was sleep deprived. She did know they weren’t good—though still better than the odds of getting her wish. She looked at the wish, her mouth twisting in a bitter smile.

  Fall in love again.

  The romance writer dreaming of romance. She had a better chance of being taken hostage by terrorists and not just because she was over thirty. She tore the sheet out and deposited it in Rosebud’s
circular file. Thoughts were not so easily tossed away. A romance writer with no hero was not grounds for expulsion from the league of romance writers.

  It was a pity.

  With a sigh, she connected her computer to Caro’s telephone line and logged onto the Net as an anonymous user. Once inside, she began threading her call across the world-wide network as carefully as she had once placed stitches in a baby quilt.

  “Oh yet we trust that somehow good,” she muttered, as she typed in commands, “Will be the final goal of ill!”

  When she realized what she was doing, she grinned. Spook, the online spy, had a lot to answer for. He had started a veritable epidemic of quoting across the boards. What was it he’d said, that a good quote was almost as good as a swift kick if properly applied? He sure knew where to apply them. Let’s hope he’d come through with the information she needed.

  She saw Spook’s email address come up. With a file attached. Bless the boy. She might have to look him up and thank him for his help in person. What was it he said about friends? Some people go to priests. I go to my friends. Something like that. She couldn’t nail quotes like Spook.

  When she finished her thanks to Spook and sent it on its way, she re-logged on as Blossom, hoping for something from her agent. The missive waiting for her wasn’t from Pat. She had knocked around the Internet long enough to recognize the address was from the Justice Department.

  Well, well, they had found out faster than she expected. If they had this email address, they could be tracing it to her real time address while she sat marveling at the obvious. She picked up the letter and cut the connection the quick way, by pulling her line out of the wall plug. They could not have traced her in that brief instant, but she fought the urge to look over her shoulder as she pulled the letter up onto her screen. Her gaze went first to his name at the bottom of the note.

  Matt Kirby.

  At least it wasn’t Neuman or McBride. She scanned the missive quickly, her eyebrows and blood pressure inching higher with each word.

  “…stupid to stay away. He was in your hotel room and killed a maid. Get your ass back in protective custody and help us stop Hayes permanently…”

  Hayes? Did he mean Dark Lord?

  “…and do what you came here to do.” He ended his terse summons with a business and home address, several telephone numbers, and no emotional shorthand. Not that he needed smileys or frowns to get his point across.

  She was stupid. He was smart.

  She hoped he was smart and not just arrogant. Smart meant he could still be taught a few things.

  Like when to tell someone where to take their ass.

  And when not to.

  SIX

  “We got an address on Gwynne’s friend yet?” Matt asked. He stopped in front of Alice’s desk and tossed a couple of folders onto her in box.

  “I’m on hold for it.” Alice lowered the telephone to answer Matt. “You finished your peerless prose already?”

  He arched his brows. “How long does it take to tell someone to get her ass back in here?”

  “And I was afraid you wouldn’t take the diplomatic approach.” She shook her head and almost dropped the telephone.

  Feet planted and arms crossed, Matt looked at her derisively. “We don’t have time to be diplomatic. Besides, thought you women wanted to be treated like equals?”

  Alice arched her brows. “Your concept of equal treatment needs some fine tuning—yeah, I’m still here,” she spoke into the phone, then straightened and grabbed a pen so she could scribble an address across the file cover. “Got it.” She tossed the telephone in the cradle. “Let’s saddle up. We got an address.”

  “About time.” Matt grabbed his suit jacket off his chair and shrugged it on as he followed her out the door. This time he knew better than to let confidence run ahead of him.

  Good thing, too, he thought, when they were seated across from Caroline Ryan. First they had to connect the dots between Dani and “Blossom.” Then she told them they had missed Dani by thirty minutes. When Ryan told him where Dani had gone, he choked. Hayes on her ass, she takes time to go to— “Church?”

  “People do,” Ryan, an attractive brunette with a slim silhouette starting to smudge with age, looked amused.

  “People do a lot of things they shouldn’t,” Matt shot back.

  “Like betraying a witness they were supposed to protect?”

  Matt opened his mouth to deliver a blistering rebuttal, but Alice grabbed his arm and held on. He gave a grunt that was part disgusted and part “ouch.” Alice had long nails.

  “If our people had been guarding Ms. Gwynne, we wouldn’t be here, Ms. Ryan.” Alice slipped smoothly into her “good cop” role to ask, as if they were friends sharing a cup of coffee, “How long have you known Dani?”

  Ryan shrugged. “I didn’t know Dani. I met Blossom on line eight or nine months ago. Wish I’d known. I’ve been reading Dani Gwynne’s books for several years now.”

  “Is she as funny as her books?”

  Ryan nodded warily. “You read her books?”

  “I just finished Can’t Call It Loving. I swear, I cried at the end.”

  Matt gave a strangled protest, but Alice’s gambit worked. Ryan’s face softened. “Caroline and Daniel were great lovers—” She stopped, was quiet for a bit, then said, “I’m afraid she’s set on doing this without your help.”

  Matt gritted his teeth, said through them, “I’m sure Ms Gwynne has this romantic idea of beating the odds.”

  “Murder isn’t very romantic, Inspector. Or have you forgotten that Blossom saw Dark Lord kill that woman who looked like her?”

  He hadn’t forgotten because he hadn’t stopped to think what Dani had seen that night. Abruptly he was back in that room looking down at a brown blood stain with splatters all around. Where had she been while Hayes slit Peg Oliver’s throat?

  He realized he had lost the thread of the conversation and gave himself a shake.

  “…from Lord of the Rings. It’s her favorite book,” Ryan was saying. “You’d have to read it to understand.”

  He fought back a burst of frustration. He didn’t want to understand. He just wanted to find her and stop Hayes. End of story. “Did she tell you where she was going? What she was going to do after church?” he cut in to ask.

  Ryan’s feline smile held a warning of what was coming. He didn’t say anything to Ryan. He had his pride. Three minutes later, Matt slammed the car door shut and ground out, “The zoo?”

  “Even Ryan didn’t think she meant it.”

  “We still have to check it out.”

  “At least it’s a nice day for it.”

  The firing of the engine drowned out the substance of Matt’s growled response.

  * * * *

  Dani was glad she had taken time for church, not just because she had a surfeit of time on her hands, but because she so desperately needed an infusion of peace. Lead Kindly Light, the closing hymn had been her favorite since Richard’s wife, Liz, sang it at Meggie’s funeral. Now the music lingered, a balm for her bruised heart.

  Lead kindly light amid the encircling gloom.

  Lead thou me on.

  The night is cold and I am far from home.

  Lead thou, me on.

  Keep thou my feet.

  I do not ask to see, the distant scene.

  One step enough for me.

  She dug a hand into the peanut sack and tossed it to the waiting elephant. She hadn’t meant to go to the zoo when she made her offhand remark to Caro, but she had finished her business at the flea market early. It wasn’t like she had a lot of options. She had too much time to kill—pass—time to pass.

  She needed to work on her word choice if she was going to get through this reasonably sane. With his leathery, flexible trunk, the elephant reached for more. She dug into the nearly empty bag and tossed him a handful. I should be depressed, she thought, with a sigh, but how could she be? The sun hung high in a sky too blue to be real. The air
she inhaled so crisply clear she felt a guilty euphoria.

  Must be John Denver’s Rocky Mountain High. Apparently a modest dose of altitude could be beneficial, even to those with acrophobia. Or maybe she was just tired of being down and out.

  She tossed the last handful to the begging pachyderm, then tipped the empty bag to show him she really was out. To escape the gentle reproach in his eyes, she stood to leave.

  A small girl darted around the corner of a side path, trailing an irate echo of her mother’s voice. Before Dani could brace body or heart, she wrapped herself around Dani’s legs.

  Even as Dani knelt to hold the small escapee, an older version of her appeared, followed in short order by the harried mother, holding another small, struggling boy body.

  The young mother’s face lightened into a smile when she saw Dani holding the truant.

  “Thanks.”

  The little girl smelled of powder and baby lotion. Her tiny body was soft and strong, and determined to impose her will on the big people in her life. So like Meggie.

  Her arms full, her heart empty, Dani said carefully, “Sometimes you need another hand.”

  “Not just sometimes,” the young mother said, ruefully. “I don’t know what made me think I could handle them all, but it was such a lovely day, anything seemed possible.”

  Maybe it was this echo of her own thoughts that prompted her next words. She usually avoided the painful pleasure of getting too close to other people’s children. “I was just heading the same way and I’ve got two free hands—”

  The woman hesitated, her eyes assessing Dani’s worthiness. Dani’s “grandma” get up, purchased at the flea market, helped tip the scales and the woman said with real gratitude, “Thanks.”

  Dani turned with them, the little ones held firmly between the two adults. The older girl, Jenny, walked by Dani, sharing the family secrets in breathless bursts. Her mother looked embarrassed and apologetic. Dani found she could chuckle.

  At the lion cage, Jenny told Dani she was ten years old. The age Meggie would be, Dani realized. Looking at Jenny’s face, Meggie’s baby face blurred, then turned older. Would she have been like Jenny? Dark hair instead of light bouncing with each skipped step? So eager to see the world, not afraid to meet it head on?