Hot on the Trail

by Vicki Tharp

  Or pity.

  “Would you have answered?”

  He didn’t fight the thin smile. “Probably not.”

  She ran her fingernail along a dent in the tabletop, apparently at a loss for how to respond. The silence stretched out, except for the scrit-scrit of her fingernail on the wood.

  His knee started bouncing. “You really believe there’s nothing else to Kurt’s death? That it’s cut-and-dry?”

  Jenna took a sudden interest in making sure all the first-aid supplies were replaced in the box with exacting precision. You would think she was disarming a bomb.

  “Jenna?”

  She shrugged and said, “Why wouldn’t it be?” For some reason, she was now fascinated with a scratch on the edge of the table.

  “Jenna, look at me.”

  Glancing up, she met his eyes, and for the first time in a long time, he saw her. The fear. The uncertainty. The vulnerability—that had nothing to do with Kurt and everything to do with him.

  Maybe his heart wasn’t the only one that had been broken.

  He tried to suck in a deep breath, but his chest was too tight, and he might as well have tried to suck a thick milk shake through a thin straw for all the good it did him. But now was not the time to think about their past.

  “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “I don’t know. My head is saying suicide, and if not that, accidental overdose. Maybe he didn’t mean to die, maybe he’d gotten the dose wrong, or the stuff was bad, or, or…”

  “Or?”

  She thumped a fist to the center of her sternum. The sound rang hollow in the relative silence of the cabin. “There’s this feeling in my chest that I can’t describe. It’s like my heart—”

  Shaking her head, she thumped her chest again, only not so hard.

  “Doesn’t want to believe?”

  “More like can’t believe. But my head tells me it’s true. That I missed something, some sign, some warning. That if I’d only paid enough attention, I would have known something wasn’t right. But I wonder, do I think that because I just want to find someone else to blame besides myself?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t believe that.”

  He picked up her hand and laid her palm over his heart. Her hand was warm in his as he rubbed his thumb over the callus on her right index finger where her reins always lay. “This beat is as doubtful, as wary to believe, as yours is that the sheriff’s narrative is right.”

  She fisted his shirt in her fingers. “So, what do we do?”

  “Prove the sheriff wrong.”

  * * * *

  Reluctantly, Jenna released the grip she had on Quinn’s shirt. “So, how are we going to prove our hearts right, and our heads—and the sheriff—wrong?”

  She wiped the sweat from her upper lip with the shoulder of her T-shirt. Kurt’s cabin was stuffy. While waiting for Quinn’s answer, she opened both windows and propped the front door open with one of Kurt’s boots.

  “I don’t know yet,” Quinn said. The words came out slowly and thoughtfully, as if he were trying to come up with a viable plan on the spot.

  “Check Kurt’s footlocker.” He stepped to the bunk, booted Dink off the bed where the dog had curled up, and stripped the covers and sheets from the mattress. Dink lay back down on the pile of sheets on the floor.

  Opening the lid of the footlocker, Jenna said, “What am I looking for?”

  “Anything. A clue. Something that gives us insight into his state of mind near the end.”

  It didn’t seem right digging through a dead man’s belongings. Even if he wasn’t there to protest, it felt like she was violating a trust. But that didn’t keep her from scrounging around.

  To be sure she didn’t miss anything, she took the items out one by one. Checked pockets of jeans, and shirts. The insides of his running shoes. She went so far as to pull out the insoles. But there was nothing there that shouldn’t be.

  Quinn moved on from searching the bed, and started in on the kitchen drawers and cabinets. He checked the refrigerator and freezer, then grabbed the Mustang’s keys from a tiny hook by the door and continued the search outside. She moved on to the bathroom.

  When she’d finished, she met him by the car. Both doors were open, the hood, the trunk. She found him at the rear of the car, pulling out the spare tire and jack. Quinn threw the tire iron on the ground and bumped the meat of his fist against the rear fender over and over again.

  “I’m missing something.” Quinn leaned his hands on the quarter panel, his head drooping down between his shoulders as if the exhaustion had finally won out.

  His head popped up. “Ha, that’s it!” A light shone in his brown eyes that hadn’t been there since he’d arrived. “Where’s his weapon?”

  “Weapon?”

  “He has a Sig Sauer P229.”

  “One of the program’s rules is no knives over four inches, and no guns.”

  “The Sig was his baby. A man like Kurt wouldn’t leave his baby behind.”

  “All program participants have a form they sign—”

  Quinn barked out a laugh. Only a fraction of it was amusement. The other part, she decided, it was best she didn’t know. “Ink on a piece of paper isn’t going to separate him from his weapon.”

  “If he had one, I never saw it.”

  “He would have kept it on him. The sheriff didn’t find one with his body?”

  “Not that they’ve said, but I doubt they’d have told me.”

  Quinn glanced around. He jogged back to the cabin, taking the two steps in one leap. He snagged the boot that held the door open and reached a hand inside.

  His hand came out with a magazine loaded with hollow point bullets. With Mac and Boomer living on the ranch, she’d spent plenty of time on the shooting range, learning to handle weapons. Under the bed, Quinn found the other boot, but it was empty.

  “He has a holster stitched inside his boot,” Quinn said.

  “Son of a—”

  “Jenn, veterans and guns go together like peanut butter and jelly. Where there’s one, there’s likely the other.”

  “So, where is his?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Show me where you found his body.”

  * * * *

  With a flashlight, Quinn and Jenna walked to the front of the property, Dink leading the way. Past the big house, the barn, the trailer parking lot, and the “boneyard” where old tractors and implements went to die in the tall, flowering weeds.

  They stood in front of the hay barn; a single, three-foot strip of metal siding lay off to their left, one corner of it crushed where a vehicle had driven over it.

  “This is where you found him?”

  “Dink found him.” At the sound of his name, Dink glanced up from the gopher hole he was sniffing. “Kurt must have fallen off the top of the round bales. When we found him, he was caught between the hay and the wall. Head down, his hand in the dirt. That’s where they found the syringe.”

  “Did they try to revive him?”

  Jenna shook her head, the brim of her brown Stetson shading her eyes. “Too late.”

  Taking the flashlight from her hand, Quinn popped his head into the void in the building and shined the light up and down the line of round bales stacked three high. No footprints in the dirt as far as the light shone in the eighteen-inch air gap between the hay and the sides of the building.

  No gun, either.

  They walked to the front of the building, leaving Dink to his gopher hunt. Inside the hay barn, row after row of round bales were stacked on the right and stair-stepped stacks of square bales on the left. At the back of the barn, the stacks met.

  Quinn started climbing the square bales.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I want to see where he fell.”

  When he made i
t to the top, he grabbed on to one of the rafters above his head, leaned back over, and watched Jenna climb. She was nimble and quick, and wasn’t even breathing hard when she made it to the top.

  His own breath came faster than normal from the exertion. Apparently, he needed to up his cardio if he wanted to pass the physical in a month.

  At the top of the round bales, they leaped from one bale to the next and the next until they had made their way to the side where the panel had been removed.

  “What’s this?” Quinn stood on top of the six-foot-diameter round bale and shook the beam of the flashlight in the gap between the bale they were standing on and the next one over.

  The thin layer of green and white plastic netting that held the bale together was torn in the middle, clumps of loose hay gathering in the crevasse between the two bales.

  “Probably damaged when the bales were being moved inside.”

  Quinn grunted, not entirely convinced. He stepped to the edge of the bale, the one Kurt must have sat on before he fell. He shined the light down from there, but everything looked the same as it had from the ground.

  He sat, dangling his legs over the edge of the round bale, looking out through the gap in the siding and at the ranch beyond.

  “What was he doing up here?” Quinn said. “I don’t get it.”

  “Shooting up, from the looks of it.”

  He cast a look at her, but he was starting to believe it himself. “Then where’s his gun?”

  “Despite what you said, maybe he didn’t bring it. Or maybe he needed the cash. My program isn’t free. If he didn’t need the money for his fees, he could have pawned it to pay for the drugs.”

  “Plausible,” Quinn said, the word pregnant with doubt. “But knowing Kurt and how he was about that gun, not probable.”

  He glanced over his shoulder. Jenna stood behind him in deep thought, tugging at her bottom lip with her thumb and forefinger. He stood, the flashlight beam dancing around on the hay.

  “You bleeding again?” Jenna pointed at a spot near Quinn’s right boot.

  He aimed the light on the spot. Looked like blood. He checked his forearm; the bandage was clean. “Not mine.”

  “Don’t move,” she said. “Toss me the light.”

  She caught it with one hand, flipping the barrel to shine the light all around his feet. “I don’t see any more. Jump back one, so I can look closer.”

  He did, and she inspected where he’d been standing, then rechecked the face of the bale that faced the siding.

  “Anything?” he asked.

  “Nothing else.”

  “We should call the sheriff. Could be evidence of foul play.”

  “Most likely Kurt’s blood from shooting up.”

  “I don’t know,” Quinn said. With his hands on his hips, he glanced around the barn and at the narrow gap between bales and the metal sheeting.

  Jenna jumped to the bale where Quinn stood, careful to stay away from the spot of blood. “Now what’s wrong?”

  “How did he end up falling facedown?”

  “How should I know? He shoots up, gets dizzy, his balance is off, and he either falls off this side or the other.”

  “If I stepped off the end, I go down feet first. I stumble or fall between bales, I wind up in a ball in the crease, my hand hanging down or my leg, but in a gap that narrow, if you trip forward, your head’s going to hit the wall, but you aren’t going down headfirst.”

  “Unless you want to.”

  “You playing devil’s advocate, or do you believe that?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know what I believe. Besides the fact that we should listen to St. John and let the sheriff’s office do their job.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  By the time dinner rolled around, the sheriff still hadn’t shown up. Something about some trouble in Murdock that was keeping him.

  Rank from the long hours on the road, Quinn grabbed a shower before joining the others at the big house for dinner. There were three empty chairs at the table, since the ranch’s regular hands, Alby and Santos, had made other plans for dinner on their day off.

  The air was thick with the aroma of brisket and beans and jalapeño corn bread as everybody at the long trestle table served themselves.

  He’d missed Lottie’s home-cooked meals since he’d joined the Marines, and after fueling himself on gas station coffee and fast food on the trip up, his mouth watered and his stomach grumbled.

  Lottie jumped up and gave him a hug. Her husband, Dale, stepped over, clapped him on the back, and gave him a firm handshake.

  “Hey, Mac.” Quinn made his way to the table and leaned down to give her a hug. Of all the people he admired most in the world, she topped the list. And adding icing to the cake, she’d given him her grandfather’s Harley when he’d gone off to boot camp.

  He received a perfunctory handshake from Hank—her husband, and Jenna’s father. In Hank’s eyes, Quinn had never been good enough for Jenna.

  And there had been many times in the past years that Quinn had agreed with him.

  Boomer punched Quinn on the bicep before introducing him to his wife, Sidney. Quinn had met her briefly years before. Before his Permanent Change of Station, PCS, to Okinawa, and before he’d made the mistake of asking Jenna to marry him.

  There wasn’t much about that trip to the ranch that he wished to remember.

  Across from them, beside Jenna, was a young girl around fourteen, give or take.

  “I’m Pepita,” the girl said with a wave of her hand and a toothy smile. “I belong to Sidney and Boomer.”

  Quinn gave her a wave back, but his smile might have faltered a bit as he tried to puzzle out how Sidney and Boomer had a kid that old when neither one of them had been parents, as far as he knew, the last time he’d seen them.

  “Pull up a chair,” Lottie said, as she and Dale returned to their seats at either end of the table. “You must be starved.”

  Jenna pulled out the chair on the other side of her, the way she used to when he’d worked at the ranch. By rote, his feet nearly took him there, but he chose the empty seat next to Mac instead.

  If he sat beside Jenna, it would feel too much like nothing had changed, when, in fact, nothing was remotely the same.

  Between fighting to save his career and Kurt’s death, piling relationship issues on top would only add to his unneeded stress.

  But Jenna had always been a pretty girl, and even if he wasn’t the man for her, that didn’t mean he couldn’t appreciate the beautiful woman sitting across from him.

  He helped himself to a full serving of brisket, drizzled it with gravy, and eyed Jenna over the top of the gravy boat. Okay, so “beautiful” was too generic of a word to describe her.

  With her brown hair pulled back in a low ponytail and dirt smeared on the cheek of her makeup-free face, when she looked at him with those green eyes, she had a way of making him feel like he was the only one in the world who mattered.

  Well, at least it had seemed that way to him. But that was a long time ago. He’d been a different man back then.

  Mac ribbed him with her elbow. “Dale was talking to you.”

  Quinn glanced up, feeling the burn as his face flushed. “Sorry.”

  “I wanted to offer our condolences. Kurt wasn’t one to invite people in, but he seemed like a good man. We’re all sorry about his passing.”

  The bite of corn bread must have soaked up all of his saliva because the mouthful refused to go down. His throat bobbed painfully. Quinn stared at his plate, unable to meet Dale’s gaze and maintain his composure. “Thank you,” he muttered around the bite of food. When he managed to choke the morsel down, he added, “and you’re right. Kurt was one of the good guys.”

  The light outside had faded, and almost everybody’s plates had been scraped clean when he heard the crunch of gravel be
neath tires.

  “Must be the sheriff,” Lottie said as she began clearing the table.

  Quinn stood, taking his and Mac’s empty plate to the sink and stepped out onto the porch. Jenna flipped on the outside light, and joined him.

  After introductions were made, the sheriff gathered a kit the size of a briefcase and followed them back to the hay barn to collect the evidence.

  Carefully, the sheriff cut the bloody hay free, placed it in a bag, and labeled it. “We can run tests, but unfortunately since the scene has already been released, the courts could consider the evidence tainted.”

  At that point, a trial was the farthest thing from Quinn’s mind. “How long will the results take?” Quinn asked.

  “I have to send this to the lab. Depends on how backed up they are. Could be a few days or so for blood type match. And weeks or months for any DNA results.”

  “Brilliant.” He fisted his hands at his sides to keep from wrapping them around the sheriff’s neck and shaking some sense of urgency in the man.

  “It’s out of my hands, son. This isn’t an episode of CSI. Real cases aren’t resolved in an hour.”

  “I don’t expect an hour, but sometime this century would be nice.”

  The sheriff gave him a hard, level look, but Quinn refused to back down.

  “We should climb down before we lose all of the light,” Jenna said, putting a hand on the back of Quinn’s elbow as she urged him ahead of her.

  By the time they’d made it out of the hay barn, the sun had set behind the Rockies, the ridges backlit in broad swatches of red and gold and fiery orange.

  Nearing the sheriff’s pickup, Jenna asked, “Did you find anything else with Kurt’s body?”

  Quinn stiffened, knowing where Jenna was going with the question, but he was at a loss to stop her without the sheriff noticing.

  “Like what?” St. John asked.

  “Like a g—”

  Desperate, Quinn kicked a boot out in front of her as she stepped, and caught her around her bicep with his hand to keep her from hitting the ground.

  “Gum,” Quinn filled in, as Jenna stumbled. Gum? Seriously, that’s the best you could come up with?