SHATTERED

by Alice Sharpe

  Chapter Five

  Why had the gunman left?

  Nate pondered this question as he tramped through the snow, shining his light every which way, looking for blood or some sign the assailant had been injured and that was why he’d left.

  But there was another half inch of accumulated snowfall, and if there had been blood at some point, it was covered now. He found a gaggle of frosty trees, saplings, really, and by the look of them—bent, twisted, broken—he figured this must be where the gunman had turned when he ran away. A few depressions hinted at footsteps and there was a convenient outcropping of boulders nearby for cover.

  Nate fell to his knees near the boulder that afforded him the best view of the back of the house. Using his good hand and holding the flashlight between shoulder and chin, he cleared off the new snow. Just when the task was beginning to seem fruitless, his gloved hand passed over something dark that smeared on contact. Blood.

  Against all odds, Nate deduced he’d hit the gunman, and despite everything, he sat back on his heels and grinned. About time the good guys scored a point.

  Next he followed the trail through the saplings and around some larger trees to a spot with lingering parallel tracks. He recognized the silhouette of the rocks from which he’d leaped and there was a larger depression where he’d fallen. He shone the light over every square inch and caught glimmers of blood. The gunman appeared to have taken a bullet and retreated—at least for the time being. That probably meant he was hurt seriously enough to compromise his ability to fight but not so seriously he couldn’t handle a snowmobile.

  There was nothing to gain by following the faint tracks, so once again, Nate trudged through the snow, this time shadowing the leftovers of his own earlier trek. He veered off when he made out the looming shape of the barn. It was a relief to get inside out of the weather.

  Sarah’s rental was the obvious sore thumb in the open area of the structure. He flashed the light around the enclosure until the beam illuminated a switch and he hit it. The lights flickered on, but they were nothing to write home about. Better than burning up batteries, though.

  The old green vehicle squatted in front of the closed rolling barn doors. Had Sarah known there was a storm coming? Was that why she’d parked inside the barn? But if she’d only arrived just before he did, then why hadn’t he seen tracks on the road when he drove up hours ago? Hers should have still been there, and Mike’s murderer’s, too, unless he had come the way he’d apparently left, on the snowmobile.

  Nate carefully slid into the front seat and looked around. A small suitcase sat on the backseat, while oversize fuzzy pink dice hung from the rearview mirror. A bobblehead blackjack dealer figurine with a green visor leered from the dashboard. Both items seemed incongruous with the personality of the woman he knew as Sarah. They also looked entirely too personal to inhabit a rental car. The keys were lying in a tray between the seats and he took them to keep Sarah from doing something stupid—like trying to drive out of here.

  He checked the glove box next, propping his arm on the divider between the seats to take the pressure off his wound. It took him a few minutes to wade through cast-off makeup, brochures, maps, show ticket stubs and casino chips, but he hit pay dirt at the bottom when he came across the car’s registration.

  “Diana Sarah Donovan,” he read aloud, complete with a Reno address. He also found a five-year-old receipt for new tires for this car along with an oil-change schedule that had stopped over two years before, all with Diana Donovan’s name somewhere on the forms.

  So Sarah went by her middle name. Any way you looked at it, she’d lied about renting the car just like she’d lied about almost everything else.

  Nate crammed all the stuff back in the glove box before walking around to the trunk, where he inserted the key. Inside, he found work gloves, rubber boots and a shovel along with an empty cardboard box. Fresh dirt and what appeared to be bits of straw were stuck to the blade of the shovel.

  He slammed the lid and rested his right hand on his waist, head tilted, thinking. And as he thought, he began to notice details about the barn he’d missed before. Drawers had been pulled open on the workbench, for instance. Cabinet doors stood ajar. Tool racks had been emptied. Things had been moved away from the walls. He walked down a row of stalls, all empty except the first one, which housed a black horse with a white blaze who looked happy to see him. Skipjack, he presumed.

  Nate liked horses. He had four of his own that he rode on the national land that abutted his ranch north of Flagstaff. In fact, there just wasn’t anything better than saddling up before dawn and riding out to the river, casting a line and riding home a few hours later with fresh fish for dinner. He’d often wished he’d been a lawman back in the early 1800s, before cars, before automated weapons and incidents like the slaughter of kids at a mall or the most recent tragedy to hit the news, the killing of two sailors on a family beach in Hawaii.

  The horse made a friendly grumbling noise in his throat and Nate handed him an apple out of the small barrel outside the stall. He continued on, flashing his light into each successive cubicle. They’d been filled during the years of disuse by an amazing array of broken tools and outdated equipment, but here, too, there were signs an attempt had been made to search each one, at least in a haphazard manner. A shallow hole in one corner explained the shovel, though its purpose was as confusing as everything else.

  The horse whinnied, rousing Nate from increasingly troubled thoughts. He left the barn with a sour taste in his mouth, his eyes narrowed, surprised the snow didn’t melt in his wake.

  A minute later he opened the front door, which he noted Sarah had neglected to lock. It was almost as though she wasn’t really afraid, and yet she sure acted nervous. Was it an act or was she just careless?

  A third option presented itself when he found her right inside the door, back in her coat, waiting to greet him, the saddle rifle jammed against her right shoulder, the barrel pointed straight at him.

  * * *

  “CLOSE THE DOOR behind you,” she said, hating the quiver she detected in her voice.

  He did as she’d asked, then looked straight into her eyes. “Do you know how to use that weapon?” he demanded.

  “I’ll figure it out,” she said. “Stop right there.”

  To her astonishment, he stopped.

  “I have to leave,” she added for what seemed the twentieth time, glancing at her watch as she spoke, unable to stop herself from obsessing about the minutes ticking away. Behind Nate, she could see the snow still fell, but there was something about it that seemed less intense than it had an hour before. “Close the door and go into the living room,” she said.

  “Or you’ll shoot me?” he asked.

  “I’ll aim for your foot, but I’m not a marksman, so no promises.”

  “Not in the chest like your father?”

  “I didn’t shoot my father.”

  He looked straight into her eyes. “I know you didn’t, Sarah.”

  “How do you know that?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not sure. I guess there’s a little corner of my heart that isn’t as cynical as you thought. I guess you found your way into it.”

  She stared into his eyes while tears threatened her own. His comment constituted the one warm moment in this frozen hellhole.

  “Or should I call you Diana?” he added.

  She blinked. “How—”

  “I found the registration in your car.”

  “It’s not mine,” she said.

  Nate sighed deeply. “You have the upper hand now,” he said, closing the door and preceding her into the living room. “Where’s your dad’s body?” he said, stopping abruptly.

  “In the spare room.”

  “You moved him? Why?”

  “Because he deserved something better than getting st
epped around. Because I didn’t want to leave you tied up here with Dad lying dead at your feet.”

  He shook his head, but continued on when she motioned with the gun. “Sit down on that chair,” she said, gesturing with the rifle.

  He sat down on the straight-backed chair she’d set up by the fireplace and looked up at her. “Like I said, you’ve got the gun. You’re the boss. But why not spend five minutes clearing up a few things before you bolt?” Cradling his injured arm, he nodded at the roll of duct tape she’d found in the laundry room and added, “Then you can tape me to the chair and do whatever you have to do.”

  Could she really tape this poor guy to a chair, what with his wounded arm and everything else? Hell yes. If that was what she had to do, that was what she had to do. She heard herself say, “Five minutes?”

  “That’s not too much to ask for a guy who could have gotten himself killed trying to protect you, is it? Besides, what do you have waiting for you? A walk in a snowstorm?”

  “That’s better than sitting here and wondering what’s going on. I hate waiting. I’d rather die trying.”

  “Well, you may get your chance,” he said, imploring her with those sexy eyes. “Five minutes.”

  As she took a seat opposite him, she noticed the way his broad shoulders drooped, the dark shadows around his eyes. He looked tired, all right, but he didn’t look as scared as she figured a man facing a gun should look. She sat down, the rifle at the ready.

  “Suppose you could help me take off these gloves?” he asked.

  “Sure.” She kept the rifle close as she peeled the leather glove from his right hand.

  “I can get the other one,” he said and pulled gingerly on the fingers, obviously in pain when the motion jarred his injured arm. She couldn’t imagine how he was carrying on as though nothing had happened when it must hurt like hell.

  “Okay, now what?” she prompted.

  “Let me tell you what I know, and if you want to further enlighten me, that would be great.”

  “Okay,” she said hesitantly.

  “I know I wounded our gunman and he left on his snowmobile. I don’t know how badly he’s hurt, if he went to fix himself up or get reinforcements and is on his way back. I don’t know who it is, if the same person killed Mike, or why anyone would want to do any of this.”

  She nodded.

  “I also know you were here last fall. Don’t look so startled. There’s a relatively recent picture of you and Mike and Skipjack standing out in the yard. It’s on top of the mantel.”

  She glanced over, saw the photo and swore under her breath. How had she managed to overlook that? And yet, how touching that her father had cared enough to stick it up where he could see it once in a while.

  “I know you drove here earlier today and parked in the barn, out of sight,” Nate continued. “I also know it’s your car, that you were looking for something and that from the way you’re acting, you haven’t found it. How am I doing?”

  “Not perfect,” she said, but there was a flower of calm beginning to bud in her chest and that in itself should have been setting off alarms. Since getting to Reno two days ago, she’d been moving like a hamster on a wheel and making just about as much progress. Now Nate was close to figuring her out and she almost wanted to help him go the last distance. That was a horrible sign of weakness her mom couldn’t afford. Nate’s life was law enforcement; he was a man who liked order, who valued the truth. Sarah swallowed hard as her fingers twitched on the gun. “How did you know I got here earlier?”

  “There were no tracks on the road when I arrived. The weather must have gone downhill after you pulled into the barn.”

  She looked away from his intense gaze.

  “Your dad didn’t even know you were here while you searched the barn, did he?” he added.

  She thought before she spoke, weighing the wisdom of engaging in this conversation, deciding at last a little truth couldn’t hurt. He’d kind of gotten to her when he’d expressed that unwarranted—from his point of view—faith in her. She’d remain wary and on the defensive, but a little chat couldn’t hurt, could it? “He wasn’t home when I got here.”

  “Obviously, he returned.”

  “Obviously. I heard his truck. I knew he was planning on driving into Shatterhorn this afternoon, so I was surprised he’d come back to the ranch.”

  “You knew his plans?”

  “Yeah. I talked to him a couple of days ago.”

  “So you chose a time to visit when he’d be gone.”

  One of her shoulders lifted a little. Man, she sounded like a coldhearted bitch, even to her own ears. Of course, her dad hadn’t helped any.

  “Because you needed to find something that you didn’t want him to know you were looking for,” Nate added.

  “More or less. My plan was to search the house first, but he came home almost at once, so I started with the barn. After a while, I heard another car and looked outside again. A silver sedan had parked next to Dad’s old truck. A man was just going into the house.”

  Nate suddenly straightened in the chair, his gaze sharpening. “Who was it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But it might have been his killer.”

  “I know that now. If I’d run outside maybe I could have stopped Dad’s murder, but at the time, I just thought it was a friend or something.”

  “What kind of car was it?”

  She shrugged. “A newish one. I don’t know what model or make. I only saw it from the side, so I’m not sure if it had a Nevada plate. And before you ask, I never saw the man’s face. I didn’t really see anything except his legs disappearing into the house.”

  “What was he wearing?”

  “I don’t know. Wait. Black boots. A long coat.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “Put my stuff back in the trunk in case Dad came out here and found me and then just hung out with Skipjack, waiting for the other guy to leave. I wasn’t really anxious to see Dad, so I kind of hoped he’d just go away with the guy if I gave him time. For all I knew, his plans had changed and Dad had invited the man to the ranch.”

  “And then?”

  She started to speak, then paused, her eyes moist again. It was hard to get the words out.

  “Take your time,” Nate said softly, his voice tender in a way that further undid her. Tears threatened to roll down her cheeks and she sucked them back.

  “I fell asleep,” she said.

  “What?”

  She took a deep breath. “I just fell asleep. It had been a horrible forty-eight hours leading up to that point. I’d closed the door to the stall and it was relatively warm and there was fresh straw.... Dad must have done that earlier. The horse kind of snuffled around and I closed my eyes. The next thing I knew, Skipjack was blowing hot air on my face and it was darker inside the barn. I got up and peeked outside. The weather had really deteriorated since I’d last looked. A couple of hours or more must have passed.... The silver car was gone and Dad’s truck was still where he’d parked it. I didn’t know if Dad had left with the other guy or not, but I knew I needed to check.”

  “Why did you need to check all of a sudden?” Nate asked. “You’d been content to stay hidden up to that point.”

  “I had a dream,” she said, amazed with herself for sharing this. “In my dream someone...well, someone I feel responsible for was drowning and I couldn’t help. I was frozen in place. Powerless. When I woke up, I admitted to myself that I needed Dad’s help, and if he was still here, I had to go ask for it.” She didn’t tack on the word again, but it played in her mind.

  “Why would he have refused to help you?” Nate asked gently.

  She equivocated just a little. “You have to understand that we parted on a really sour note last fall. We both said thing
s— Well, it’s too late for regrets, but I still have them. Lately, we’d been talking by phone and he just started to get odder and odder.”

  “Like how?”

  She took a deep breath. “He talked about Pearl Harbor a lot. He was way too young to have ever been in World War II and I know he’s never been to Hawaii, so I didn’t get what he was going on about. Maybe he wanted to move. I don’t know. Then he started going on about Washington. I explained I had moved from there to Virginia, but he passed that off as though I hadn’t even spoken. He was impatient and scattered—I mean, he was all over the map. Talking about the newspaper articles written after the shooting and the mayor of Shatterhorn and how you and he and that other guy had been called patriots for what you did. I really began to think the shootings had unhinged him.”

  “I know what you mean,” Nate said softly. “His emails were getting bizarre.”

  “Exactly. He was obsessed with reading about terrorist groups and civilian militia movements and a whole bunch of other stuff. Like I said, I know he’d been hounding everybody. Then he went off on a group called People’s Liberation. He was sure they were behind some incident—”

  “The shooting in Hawaii last December,” Nate interjected. “Maybe that’s why he was talking about Pearl Harbor. The victims were off-duty sailors.”

  “Then you know about this group’s involvement?”

  “I’ve read things. Some believe their claims, some don’t. The Hawaiian shooter was an out-of-work malcontent who had been rejected by the navy. No one ever heard about any motive he might have had. But what did Mike think the newspaper editor of a small Nevada town could do about any of this?”

  “I don’t know, Nate. I have to admit I tuned him out after a while.”

  Nate nodded. The look in his eyes made her think that he, too, had occasionally tuned out her father’s ranting.

  “Okay, so you were going to go talk to him. Then what?”

  “I walked across the yard and found Dad’s front door open. That seemed really ominous because it was cold and snowing.” She paused again, catching her breath. “Dad was right where you found him. I’d never seen any dead person before, let alone someone I...I was close to, so I felt for a pulse, but I think I knew he was already gone. I also knew there was nothing I could do for him and that time was running out for me to save my— So, I...I started searching the house, you know, to see if he’d been robbed.”