Cowboy Swagger

by Joanna Wayne

  “Probably inside and out. Everyone does these days, except me.” She’d remedy that soon. Mustang Run was not as safe as she’d believed.

  “I say we call your father and have him put someone on checking that footage.”

  “I doubt we have to wait on the sheriff’s department. If we explain the situation to Larry, he’ll probably hand over the disk to us, or at least let us view the footage. I’m sure he’s already heard about Eleanor’s attack, or at least some version of it.”

  “Then let’s do it,” Dylan said. “We can check out the rest of these numbers and dates later at the ranch.”

  At the ranch. So he assumed she was staying again. She’d vowed not to. But that was to keep him from getting involved with her problems, and he was already in neck deep. Besides, if she didn’t go back to Willow Creek Ranch, there would be no chance of a repeat visit from his mother’s ghost.

  Not that she believed in ghosts, but just in case she was wrong and the house at Willow Creek Ranch really was haunted… Helene might be the only one who had a clue what was behind the stalker’s madness.

  “Let me pack a few more things.”

  Picking up her drink and her planner, she went back to the bedroom. She tossed a small overnight bag onto the bed and unzipped it. The first panties she pulled from the bureau were a pair of white briefs. Impulsively, she dropped them back to the stack and chose a lacy red thong and a black lace bikini panty.

  She gathered some jeans and T-shirts and pulled out a pair of white shorts while she was at it. The weather was getting warmer, or at least she was.

  Once everything was in the overnighter including her appointment book, she zipped the bag, slung it over her shoulder and stepped over to close the closet door.

  She hesitated and then reached onto the top shelf of the closet and removed the plastic shoe box marked Personal. Opening the luggage again, she fit the box of letters inside. If she was already being haunted by ghosts, maybe it was time to let the secrets in her closet come out of hiding, too.

  “NICE HORSES AND thoughtful of Bob Adkins to let you use them. I guess you’ll find who your real friends are day by day.”

  “I suspect I can count them with the fingers of one hand.” Troy scratched the nose of the flaxen chestnut filly who’d come to the pasture fence to check them out. “I didn’t expect you to be among the number.”

  Ruthanne propped the heel of a stylish Western boot on the bottom rung of the recently repaired fence. “Helene was my best friend, Troy. I trusted you, as well. You know that. I was just too shocked and stunned by the murder to reason it all through back then.”

  “So you went with the tide of popular opinion and shunned me like the rest.”

  Which was why he’d been so surprised to see her at his door a few minutes earlier. He’d recognized her at once. In fact, she didn’t look all that different than she had almost two decades ago. Ruthanne Foley had always been beautiful. She still was. Money had a way of softening the edges of a woman and keeping the wrinkles at bay.

  She reached over and ran her fingers through the horse’s thick mane. “I wanted to testify to your character at the trial, but Riley was dead set against it. He thought I was too close to the situation to see it clearly.”

  “He thought your befriending me would cost him votes.” Troy had never been one to dance around the truth. “Does Riley know you’re here now?”

  “He doesn’t know or care where I am anymore. We separated last year. He stays in Austin full-time now. I moved back to the family ranch.”

  “Your choice or his?”

  “The divorce or the ranch?”

  “Either. Both.”

  “It was his choice to take a mistress, a blonde young enough to be his daughter, all very clandestine, of course. It was my choice to leave him and move back to the ranch.”

  “How are the kids?”

  “Marilyn’s teaching kindergarten and living at the ranch with me. Ellie is modeling in New York. She’s the one I worry about. I heard Dylan is here with you.”

  “For the time being.”

  “I also heard that he’s gotten mixed up in some trouble involving Collette McGuire.”

  Troy’s muscles grew taut. “He and Collette are old friends. He’s doing what he can to help her.”

  “That’s not the way Glenn sees it.”

  Glenn. He took that to mean they were close enough that her information had come straight from the sheriff’s mouth. “You got something on your mind, just say it, Ruthanne. If I ever had the knack for small talk, I lost it in prison.”

  “There’s no love lost between Glenn and you, Troy. You know that. You’d best warn Dylan to watch his step very carefully.”

  “Is that what you stopped by to tell me?”

  Ruthanne put her hand on his arm and leaned in so close he could see the rise of her breasts inside her white shirt and feel her silky black hair against his flesh.

  A slow burn crept though him. It had been eighteen years since he’d been with a woman, and he was human. Too human. But even if she was offering, he couldn’t be with Ruthanne without thinking of Helene.

  And the ache inside him for Helene would be too devastating to let him even go through the motions. He had to have some kind of closure first, had to get justice for Helene. Then maybe he could move on, but he would never stop loving her.

  “I need to get back to work,” he said.

  “Is that my signal to disappear?”

  “If you’ve finished saying what you came to say.”

  “I’ve finished. But take my warning seriously. If Glenn can find a way to run Dylan out of town and away from Collette, you can be sure he will.”

  “Right, and you can tell the sheriff for me that I will not stand by and let him railroad my son the way he did me.”

  “I’ll be sure he gets the word. If you want to talk some night, call me. I’d like that.”

  “I expect to be busy for a long time.”

  DYLAN WAS RELIEVED that Larry Knight had been eager to help. He not only provided the disks containing the security-camera footage for both days, but let them use his office and both his laptop and desktop computers to view them. His wife had even brought in bottles of water and cups of coffee.

  Dylan chose the footage for March 12. In the desktop he loaded the disk from the camera closest to the front door. He put the one that scanned aisles beyond the checkout counter into the laptop. He fast-forwarded both files to just before six o’clock, Larry’s usual closing time.

  One man checked out at five minutes before six. Other than Larry Knight, he appeared to be the only person in the shop. Kingsley was either not working or was in the back.

  “The man checking out is Skip Wakefield, the principal of the high school,” Collette noted. “He’s short and I can probably bench press more than him, so that pretty much rules him out as tall and muscled.”

  But Larry was both tall and muscled. Dylan decided not to mention that for now.

  At two minutes before six, the film showed Collette walking through the door.

  Larry smiled and motioned her to come in as she opened the door. Once she was inside, he took a key ring from his pocket and locked the front door.

  “I think I asked if he was ready to close,” she said.

  “Obviously, he didn’t want any additional customers.”

  “Probably not, though I have been in after the posted hours when he was still open for business. I think it all depends on what he has to do on a particular night.”

  “No sign of Kingsley tonight,” Dylan commented. He’d hoped to see what the guy looked like. He might not be able to judge a book by its cover, but he could tell a lot about a guy by looking at him, especially if he could look the guy in the eyes.

  Collette and Larry stepped out of view of one camera and into the view of the other. They were looking at small cans of paint.

  “I wanted to give the frames an aged look,” she said. “To do that, I distress the wood and
use an antiquing rub. Larry stocks lots of different colors.”

  But Dylan’s attention had moved to the other computer. A tall, muscled man wearing a T-shirt and faded jeans walked up to the door, tried it, but didn’t move away when he discovered it was locked.

  Instead he cupped his hand over his eyes and pressed his head to the glass as if he were trying to peer inside. He stayed a couple of minutes and then walked away. Dylan ran it back.

  “Do you recognize this man?”

  “No. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before. But that means nothing. New people are moving into the area all the time.”

  “The timing is right for him to get to the door if he was following a half block or so behind you. Ask Larry to take a look at the film to see if he recognizes the man.”

  Dylan blew up the image and printed out two copies on the laser printer while Collette went for Larry. The printed images were a bit grainy, but clear enough.

  Larry returned with Collette and studied the film. “I don’t know him, but he looks vaguely familiar. He may have been here before. Let me get my wife and have her take a look.”

  Unfortunately, Mrs. Knight didn’t recognize the man, either.

  Dylan switched files to March 18. At 11:43 in the morning, Collette entered the store and went straight to the shelf where nails were stocked.

  Exactly three minutes later, the man whose image he’d printed walked into the store. He stopped at the same aisle as Collette and looked—or pretended to look—at a display of electric screwdrivers. More than once his gaze scanned the aisle in Collette’s direction. At one point he looked directly into the nearby camera and then quickly moved out of view.

  Dylan got that buzz in his veins he used to get in Iraq when they were about to close in on the enemy. His gut instinct was that he was looking at Collette’s stalker.

  The film showed Collette leaving a few minutes later with her nails. Shortly thereafter, the guy walked out. He was not carrying a bag.

  Dylan hadn’t realized Collette had clued in on his suspicions until he felt her fingers digging into his arm.

  “You think that’s him, don’t you?” she asked.

  “I think it could be.”

  “If it is, then I don’t think this was ever about his lusting after me or thinking I was his soul mate.”

  “Why is that?”

  She shuddered. “The way he looked at me. Go back and run that part again. Only this time enlarge his face.”

  Dylan did. Even in black and white, the man’s stare was cold and calculating.

  “I think he’s planned to kill me all along.”

  COLLETTE CALLED her father’s cell-phone number on the way back to the ranch and left a message for him to call her. The sooner they got this picture in his hands, the sooner he could run a search and see if the man had a mug shot on record. She realized that could take a while. Everything seemed to take too long.

  “Do you think your father has been home alone all day?” Collette asked once they were inside the gate of Willow Creek Ranch.

  “Yes, but I don’t think he minds it. I think he may need the time alone to adjust to freedom and to come to grips with the past.”

  “It must be heartbreaking for him,” Collette said. “Before the murder, he had a working ranch, a beautiful wife and five young sons.”

  “Now he just has empty pastures, rundown outbuildings, worn equipment and me,” Dylan said, finishing her topic for her, though not in her words.

  “He’s lucky to have you, Dylan. And your brothers will come around. It just takes time.”

  “I know why I think he couldn’t kill Mom, but what makes you so convinced he’s innocent when a jury declared him guilty?”

  Because I’ve talked to Helene.

  Collette didn’t dare say that out loud. She knew that Dylan would think her ghostly encounter was a nightmare or a hallucination. She thought so herself. She just wasn’t as sure of it as she’d been before she’d seen and talked to Helene’s ghost.

  But that wasn’t the only thing that convinced her of Troy’s innocence. “When your father talked of your mother’s garden, I could hear the grief and melancholy in his voice. He loved your mother. You don’t destroy the person who holds your heart.”

  “My mother’s side of the family was convinced that he did.”

  “What about your dad’s family?”

  “There is none. His mother died when he was a baby. His biological father had cut out long before that. He was raised in a series of foster homes. That’s all I know about it. We were never encouraged to talk about our father once my grandparents had removed us from the ranch.”

  “They’d lost their daughter. Grief can instill the need for revenge at all costs.”

  Who knew that better than Collette? And Helene.

  They topped the last hill and the Ledger ranch house came into view. The sheriff’s vehicle and one additional squad car blocked the driveway. Her brother Bill’s car was parked behind them. They wouldn’t be out here for her, not after she’d refused to go with them last night.

  Panic struck like one of her lightning bolts. “They must be here about Eleanor. The stalker must have found a way to get to her.”

  Dylan reached for her hand and squeezed it. “You don’t know that.”

  “Why else would everyone be here except to deliver the bad news?”

  She jumped from the car the second Dylan stopped, and raced toward her father’s car. He was standing beside it when she reached him. The look on his face was grim. One hand rested on the mirror of the car, the other on the butt of the pistol at his waist.

  “Please tell me Eleanor is okay.”

  “Eleanor’s fine,” he sputtered. “Why wouldn’t she be? She’s under protective custody.”

  Dylan had walked up behind her, his presence calming her in spite of her father’s callous attitude.

  “Then why are you here?” Dylan asked.

  “To see you and to give you a ride down to my office.” He opened the back door of his squad car. “Get in.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Dylan needed a minute to think, but the situation was fast barreling out of control. Collette was livid and in the sheriff’s face letting him know about it. A horse neighed in the distance. There was no sign of his father, but Dylan was certain he’d show up and join the circus at any minute.

  “What reason do you have for taking Dylan in?” Collette protested. “He told you everything he knew right after the attack.”

  “He’s a person of interest. Now get your things and Bill will drive you to his house. This lamebrain game you’re playing with Dylan Ledger has gone on long enough.”

  “I’m not playing games. I’m as aware as anyone how serious this is. That doesn’t give you the right to harass Dylan.”

  “This is law business, Collette, and none of your affair.”

  “So let’s just get the show on the road,” Dylan said, not wanting to pit Collette against her father any longer. “Go with your brother, Collette. I’ll call you as soon as the sheriff finishes the law business.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be waiting right here when you return.”

  “No daughter of mine is staying alone in a house with a convicted killer.”

  The sheriff was pushing it now. Dylan had to fight the anger that swelled inside him. He might have to settle things with the sheriff one day, but right now his total focus had to be on keeping Collette safe, and he couldn’t do that from a jail cell.

  Dylan put an arm around Collette’s shoulders, knowing that would irritate her father even more, but he couldn’t leave her without some kind of assurance.

  “I’ll be fine. The sooner I talk to the sheriff about the evidence we discovered this afternoon, the sooner he can follow up on it.”

  The sheriff narrowed his eyes and glared at Dylan. “What evidence is that?”

  “We checked out security footage from the hardware store and we think we may have spotted Collette’s
stalker.”

  McGuire turned back to Collette. “Is he talking straight?”

  “Yes. The man on camera appeared to be following me on two different occasions on days that corresponded with the first two phone calls I received. We printed out his picture.”

  The situation was beginning to diffuse when Dylan spotted Troy walking back from the horse barn. Troy picked up his pace when he spotted the squad cars, his shoulders squared and his gaunt face looking as if he was about to climb in the ring with a killer.

  Dylan had no idea what his father was capable of when he was fighting mad, but he figured they were about to find out.

  “What’s going on here?” Troy demanded.

  “No problem, Dad,” Dylan said, hoping to keep Troy out of this. “The sheriff just wants me to come in and answer a few more questions about the attack.”

  Troy’s body clenched as if he was about to explode. “Do you have a warrant?”

  “No,” McGuire said. “He’s not under arrest. He’s just a person of interest.”

  Troy bristled. “Same as I was, Glenn, when you framed me?”

  “Don’t ride that road, Troy, not if you expect to come back and live in this town.”

  “You don’t own the town. And there’s nothing you can do to me that’s near as bad as what’s already been done. But I won’t sit back while you railroad my boy. He’ll talk when there’s an attorney present and not before. I’ve already hired one.”

  Dylan had the good sense to realize this was no longer about him. The enmity between Glenn McGuire and Troy Ledger was rooted in the past. Theirs was a fight that was probably long overdue.

  But Dylan was his own man. “I’m going with the sheriff. I have information he needs.”

  “Information that Dylan and I spent the day tracking down,” Collette threw in. “I’m staying here until Dylan returns. If you’re worried about my being here without him, Dad, then I suggest you make the questioning session short. And then get on with finding the stalker.”

  “Do as you please.” McGuire was so furious his mouth could barely form the words. He turned his back on his daughter and got into his squad car.