Denim Detective

by Adrianne Lee

  Heck hung in the doorway, as Beau had done earlier, keeping watch in both directions, his gun drawn, the barrel pointed at the floor. But Beau recognized the tense set of his shoulders. He was as alert as a bloodhound.

  “Beau,” Deedra called. “What’s that?”

  She was pointing to the baby cradle. An errant ray of sun bore through the dusty window like a spotlight, highlighting something poking out from under the blanket. He’d assumed earlier that it was the rubber doll. But he saw now it was fuzzy and pink with white grosgrain. It looked like…

  “Callie’s bunny!” Deedra sobbed and hurried to it. She dropped to her knees, scooped the toy from beneath the blankets and hugged it to her.

  Beau squatted beside her and pulled her into his arms. She trembled in his embrace, and the sense of danger increased, wrapping him as tightly as he enfolded her. They couldn’t stay here. “Dee, is there a note pinned to the bunny?”

  She pulled back and lowered the toy away from her chest. There was nothing there. Something niggled in the back of Beau’s mind. Last time he’d seen this stuffed toy was with the other things from the accident scene stored in the evidence room. “Was this bunny in your case file box the day you were looking at the crime-scene photos?”

  “No.”

  “How’d it get here?”

  “I put it there,” a voice behind them said.

  They lurched around toward the doorway. Heck held his gun trained on Deedra. “Drop your gun, Beau, or she’s dead.”

  He had Deedra directly in his sights. Beau could get off a shot, but so could Heck. He couldn’t risk it. He laid his gun by his foot, slowly rose and put Deedra behind him, shielding her. “Why would you—”

  “Merry Sue was my sister, and her baby was to be my niece.”

  Beau felt as if he’d been shot in the gut. He’d trusted this man. Trusted him with his life. With Deedra’s life. And all the while the bastard… Beau’s hands curled into fists. “You son of a bit—”

  “Uh, uh, uh.” Heck waved his gun. “The second I shoot you, I’ll go after yer missus. That whatcha want?”

  “You like shooting women, don’t you?” Deedra spat.

  “Always a crack shot. Ma taught me. And when some woman needs shuttin’ up, like Freddie Carter’s old lady and that mouthy shrink, I’m willin’ to step up.”

  “We thought a woman was doing this.” Confusion rang in Deedra’s voice. “Were you the one sending notes to Beau?”

  “Ma did that. She hates Beau real bad.”

  “Where’s my daughter, you bastard?” Beau felt his blood pressure spiking.

  “Where you’ll never find her.”

  Beau charged him. Heck fired the gun, missing him by inches. But as Beau ducked, Heck slammed the butt of the gun against his temple. Pain radiated from the contact point. Stars danced before his eyes. He felt himself toppling toward the cellar. He reached out to stop himself, but his hands met empty air. And as he dropped into the pit, blackness engulfing him, he heard Deedra scream his name.

  Then nothing.

  “BEAU!” DEEDRA RACED to the pit. “Beau! Answer me!”

  “There’s a ladder,” Heck said. “Find it and join your husband.”

  Deedra felt the barrel of the gun press against her temple. She gazed up into his cold eyes and knew he had no compassion. He would kill both her and Beau if she joined her husband in the cellar. She also knew that he would drop her where she knelt and kick her into the hole on top of Beau if she disobeyed. Hoping to buy some time and needing to help Beau, she groped for the ladder and hurried down, never taking her eyes from the man with the gun. Fear galloped in her chest. Dampness surrounded her like a shroud. She felt the ground for Beau.

  “Ain’t that sweet? Instead of running away, you’re finally running to yer hubby.” He kicked Callie’s bunny into the hole. “Now that it’s too late.”

  He began lowering the hatch cover. Deedra pleaded, “Please, don’t do this.”

  “Save your breath. It’s all but done.”

  “Just tell me, is Callie alive?” Deedra begged, “Please, I need to know.”

  Heck squatted down and peered at her, grinning viciously. “She’s alive, but she’ll never know she’s a Shanahan. An eye for an eye. A daughter for a daughter. A baby for a baby.”

  He slammed the hatch, casting her in utter darkness. She heard something scrape across the floor and figured it was the bed. She felt for and found Beau, and then she sat and gathered his head into her lap. “Beau?”

  He was breathing, but she couldn’t see him or tell how badly he was hurt.

  Her lower back began to ache. Then a sudden cramp slashed her belly. Oh, God, no. Not now. Not here. She needed to help Beau. Needed to get them out of this trap. Overhead, Heck’s footsteps retreated, then returned. Seconds later she made out the sound of something sloshing against the floor. The biting stench flared into her nose. Gasoline.

  “Beau! Beau!” She shook him, terror hot in her veins. “Oh, God, please, Beau, wake up!”

  A loud whoosh. A startling roar. Then the crackle of burning wood.

  Deedra couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Her limbs had gone limp with terror. Her lower body cramped, bending her double with the vicious pain. The first whiff of smoke seared through her, wiping out all else but the instinct to survive. She lowered Beau’s head to the packed dirt floor and laid Callie’s bunny on his chest.

  He gave a soft moan as she scrambled up the ladder. She found the bottom of the trap door. It felt warm. She levered her shoulder against it and shoved upward with all her might.

  It didn’t move. She pushed again. And again. Sucking in air. Smoke. She began to feel light-headed. Somewhere beyond the pain and dizziness, she caught the sound of gunfire. Help was coming.

  But she knew it would be too late.

  Chapter Twenty

  Beau screwed his eyes open. A band of light was bearing down on him from what looked like a tunnel. Was he dead, heading into that bright neon of eternity? The beam came closer and began to sting his eyes. He blinked and looked away. The air tasted thick. Smoky. Maybe he wasn’t headed for Heaven, but for hell.

  He coughed hard. Pain zinged across his skull and ricocheted around his head like a wizard’s pinball. God, what was wrong with him? Where was he? He thought he heard voices behind the light, but a horrible roaring from overhead drowned out the actual words. His eyes watered, blurring his vision. Now there were several lights. Bobbing toward him. He groaned and tried to sit up, but something had him pinned. A dead weight on his chest.

  “They’re here!”

  The shout startled him. The next second, the weight lifted off his chest and he saw it was Deedra. Hanging limp in the arms of a stranger. His heart chilled. “No! Dee!”

  The words choked out of his raspy throat and dissolved in a fit of coughs.

  “It’s okay,” said one the voices near his ear. Hands grasped under his armpits. “We’re FBI, Sheriff. You and your wife are lucky we found the back way into this cellar. It hasn’t been used in so long, we had a hell of a time getting it open.”

  Not Heaven. Not hell. The cellar in Mann’s cabin. Not dead. Just feeling like it.

  “We have to go now, Sheriff!” They hauled him to his feet. “Can you walk?”

  “I—” He retched on his shoes.

  The agents swore but pulled him ahead. Beau staggered along, feeling woozy—as drunk as a rodeo clown. Pain resonated in every molecule of his being, and fear for Deedra had a half nelson on his heart.

  The two agents, whose faces he couldn’t see, grunted under his weight. But they kept him moving. Behind him, a crackling whoosh sounded.

  “Hurry!” one of the agents hollered. “That floor’s about to collapse…and send the fire roaring through the tunnel after us!”

  Coughing and limping, his bad leg feeling shattered, Beau emerged into the night with the help of his saviors. “Dee—” he croaked. “Where—”

  “The lady’s on her way to the hospit
al!” one of the agents shouted above the roar to his back.

  Beau turned toward the unnatural light rebounding off the forest walls and his heart seized. The spot where Mann’s cabin had stood was now a bonfire gone bad. Kindling-dry wood crackled and snapped and collapsed in on itself, shooting sparks and tongues of fire lancing toward treetops. They were lucky to have gotten out alive. But until he knew Dee was safe…

  The FBI agents handed Beau over to a strapping EMT, a man surprisingly bigger than Beau.

  “Wife—” he asked the medical man, but the one word was all he got out as an oxygen mask snapped over his mouth and nose.

  “Breathe,” the EMT directed. He helped Beau into the ambulance, but as he tried strapping him onto a cot both of them noticed the blood on his jeans and shirt. “Oh, God, you’re bleeding!”

  “I am?” Beau hurt so much all over he couldn’t distinguish any one area of pain from another.

  The EMT cut off Beau’s clothes, but there were no open gashes or wounds. He handed him a blanket. “You’ve got a few contusions, but nothing to explain the blood.”

  Dee’s blood? Had Heck shot her? Oh, God, no! “My wife…is it her blood?” He wrapped the blanket around his waist.

  “Sir, please, breathe.” The EMT put the mask on Beau again.

  Beau wrenched it off. “Damn it! Find out!”

  “Your wife was conscious when she left, but that’s all I know. You’ll be at the hospital soon, and we’ll be able to check on her condition then. Okay?”

  “No. Call now.”

  “I’ll call as soon as you let me check your vitals.” The ambulance doors banged shut and the vehicle began moving. The EMT pressed him to sit.

  Beau glared at the man for a full five seconds, but in the end knew he was just wasting time. He lay down, accepted the mask and drew a deep breath of the rich oxygen, silently willing the man to hurry with his examination. He prayed for Dee, prayed she hadn’t been shot. But he kept seeing her limp body being carried out of the cellar, and his fear reached higher than the sparks in the night sky, pushing terror through him with the force of a backlash.

  “That’s a nasty bruise on your temple,” the EMT commented. “Are you seeing double?”

  Was he? His eyes stung and watered. A racking cough climbed his throat and exploded against the oxygen mask, pulsing pain through his head until he thought his skull would crack open. Oh, damn it. He was going to be sick again. He cursed, and his world went black.

  THE MOMENT BEAU OPENED his eyes, he threw up again. But he had arrived at the hospital. He refused treatment until he knew Deedra’s condition. Dr. Haynes informed him that Deedra appeared to have ingested an insubstantial amount of smoke. They were running a blood-gas test. She hadn’t been shot. The bleeding was a side effect of her pending condition. Once they knew whether or not her oxygen levels were normal, and as soon as her surgeon arrived, she would have that long-put-off hysterectomy.

  The news was better than he’d hoped and worse in some ways. He didn’t care that Dee could not bear him another child. He wanted her alive and well and beyond the pain she’d been putting up with for far too long. He just wanted her any way he could have her. But he recalled her distress over Sean’s statement that he should have “big scrappin’ sons” to carry on the Shanahan heritage. Deedra had let that bruise her soul.

  Once the surgeon had cut out that part of her that a lot of women considered to be what made them women, she might be devastated. If she was convinced he no longer wanted her for herself alone, she would reject him before he could reject her. For he knew she’d always held back a part of her heart. And he knew if she continued to do that, then they might have no future. Somehow he had to make her see that she was his other half, that without her he might as well be dead.

  With that unhappy thought, he drifted off.

  HE AWOKE AGAIN to find himself in a bed that felt too narrow and too short for his bulk and frame. He no longer wore the oxygen mask, and he could smell antiseptic without the lingering stench of smoke. His leg was wrapped tight and his head hurt like hell. Various other aches and pains remained unidentified.

  A nurse was fiddling with an IV. He recognized the thick golden braid against her back. “Cassidy, is that you?”

  “Ah, you’re awake. How’s your head feel?”

  “Like it was trampled by a wild bronc. How’s Dee?”

  “In surgery, but she should be out soon. As much as I could find out, it was textbook. So she should be fine, Beau.”

  “Thank you.” He eased back, his head pounding. But would they be fine?

  “You, on the other hand,” Cassidy said cheerily. “Have a really ugly bruise at your temple, one whale of a concussion, and a wrenched knee in the leg that was healing.”

  “At least I know why I feel this bad.”

  “The good news is, your blood gasses are normal now.”

  “You feeling up to company?” A woman’s voice brought his gaze to the door. He had to look twice before he realized it was the adoption attorney, the last person he would expect to show up in his hospital room. Though she appeared as unlike the person he’d met in her office as she could get.

  “I’ll go check on Deedra for you,” Cassidy said and left.

  “Thanks,” Beau called after her.

  As T.R. came toward him, Beau assessed her appearance. Instead of her usual designer suit, the beautiful brunette looked like what she’d claimed to be: a born-and-bred Montana girl. She wore cowboy boots beneath tight jeans, her hair in a ponytail. But it was the surprising blue windbreaker that had him rubbing at his eyes.

  She laughed. “You’re not seeing things, Sheriff Shanahan.”

  “You’re FBI?” His voice rasped.

  “Special Agent T. R. Rudway.” Soot and dirt smudged her cheeks and chin. “Sorry about the deception, but it was necessary. The bogus office was decorated upscale so it would be sure to discourage the locals from seeking my services.”

  “What about the pregnant teen and the Southern couple Deedra encountered who were adopting her baby?”

  “All three are agents working undercover with me.”

  “I thought your ‘history’ was too slick.” Beau frowned, then winced at the pain that small gesture brought banging through his skull. “In fact, I told Dee that. After calling the list of names you’d given me, I sensed something was wrong. That it was just too pat. But I never suspected this. Your act was convincing.”

  “The fear was easy. I figured you’d sniff me out in seconds if you got too close and I just used that fear to my best advantage. I couldn’t have you blowing my cover. I’ve been after Wanda Dillard for over a year now. The rumors of her snatching children and crossing state lines with them isn’t just rumor.”

  Hope spread through him, but he feared that hope. It might destroy him. “Did you get her?”

  Did you find Callie?

  “When Special Agent Anderson—I believe you know her as Nora Lee—informed me that you were headed to Mann’s cabin alone, you became a priority.”

  “Wait a minute. Nora Lee is FBI, too?” He supposed that made a certain sense, given her connection with the local FBI and her poise at murder scenes.

  “Sure is. She and I figured you were heading into a trap. We were at Mann’s cabin before you. You see, some time ago, we discovered Heck Long was actually Hank Dillard. We’ve been keeping tabs on him ever since.”

  “But Nora Lee suggested I bring him along as backup.”

  “We thought Wanda might be the one waiting to spring her trap on you and had hoped to catch her and Heck in one fell swoop.”

  But Wanda hadn’t been there. He lay back on his pillow and closed his eyes against the pain rolling behind his eyeballs, taking in all the new information.

  T.R. kept talking, filling the tense gaps in conversation. “Wanda’s cagey. Last time we had a lead on her, she disappeared. When she resurfaced, she’d disposed of the child.”

  “Dis—” Beau’s heart lurched, and his face
drained of heat. “Dead?”

  “No, no.” She held up her hands, trying to take the edge off his fear. “Put up for adoption. Illegal, of course. All the papers forged. Unfortunately, the adoptive parents didn’t know until they’d fallen in love with the child. Fortunately, the real parents have their little boy back now.”

  Beau’s chest loosened a bit, and he reached for that hope again. Hope that Callie could be, would be found. But he couldn’t bear to put that hope into words and have it dashed.

  “You should know that we were also keeping an eye on Luanne Pine.” She rubbed at her cheek, hitting a spot of soot and smearing it. “Her mother, Ivy, is Wanda Dillard’s sister.”

  The news dropped Beau’s jaw. He felt like an idiot. No one in his office was who or what they appeared. “Luanne was involved in Callie’s—”

  “That’s the interesting part. Ivy and Luanne are innocent dupes. Merry Sue was Luanne’s cousin and best friend. She’s taken Merry Sue’s death hard enough to need counseling to work through it. But she has never sought vengeance. Never blamed you. Had no idea what her aunt Wanda and cousin Heck were really up to. But she didn’t inform you they were related because Heck warned her not to. He told her you hated nepotism and you’d fire one of them if you knew they were cousins. And it wouldn’t be him. She needed the job so she kept his secret.”

  “What about her mother?”

  “Ivy runs a day care, but Wanda told Luanne and Ivy that she was taking in foster kids from time to time. They believed her.”

  His hope leaped with new legs. “You think one of those so-called foster kids may be Callie?”

  “We did.”

  Did. The word spread ice across his lungs, froze his hope and shattered it like ice crystals against stone. He couldn’t drag in a breath. “Then you’ve located Wanda Dillard?”

  “In custody.” Her face held no sunshine, just a weary darkness. He wanted to step back from the pain that was coming, knowing it would be worse than anything he’d already suffered. “Agents were going in at about the same time we were rescuing you and Mrs. Shanahan from that cellar. They found two children living in her home. Both boys. Not Callie.”