by Tami Hoag
Any retort she might have made was lost as he hauled her up out of her chair and ushered her toward the front of the room. Heat rose in her cheeks as she heard her name ripple through the crowd. They stopped at the front row and Dane fixed a reporter from the Rochester Post-Bulletin with a steely glare.
“This seat is reserved,” he growled.
The man started to protest as he shuffled through his notes, but then he looked up and swallowed his words in one gulp. Murmuring apologetically, he slid from the seat and motioned Elizabeth into it. She gave him a wan smile, then shot a glare at Dane.
“Thank you so much for making a spectacle of me,” she hissed under her breath.
Dane flashed his teeth. “Oh, I can't take any credit for that,” he whispered. “Thank whoever dressed you.”
She plucked at a rhinestone button. “The way I see it, my being in Jolynn's best Christmas blouse is your fault.”
“Yeah, well, I'll be glad to help you out of it later if you ask me real nice.”
Elizabeth narrowed her eyes, not liking the warmth spreading through her any more than she liked the man who was causing it. “I'll ask you to go take a flying leap.”
“Sorry, no time.” He scanned the crowd, squinting as camera flashes went off around them, finally locking on Bret Yeager as the BCA agent trundled in a side door wearing his usual air of distraction and juggling an armload of papers. “Enjoy the show, Miss Stuart.” He flashed her one last mocking smile. “I'd say you've got the best seat in the house, but I wouldn't want you to get a big head.”
“Jerk,” Elizabeth grumbled as he walked away. She plunked down on the commandeered spot and dug her reporter's notebook out of her purse as Dane stepped up to the podium and addressed the crowd.
He read his statement with eloquence and authority, and Elizabeth caught herself thinking about the comment Jolynn had made earlier. There were plenty of professional athletes who made a beeline from the field of play to the silver screen—or at least the TV screen. She wondered why he hadn't. Lord knew he had the looks and the voice.
“Probably won't take direction,” she muttered to herself, doodling little footballs on her notepad.
Yeager moved to the mike as Dane finished. The agent carried a messy sheaf of papers, which he plunked down on the stand, then promptly ignored. He was six feet tall and stocky, and most resembled an unmade bed. His tie was crooked and a little spike of sandy hair stuck straight up from the crown of his head. He expanded on procedure for a few minutes, talked about lab techniques, then opened the floor for questions, but Elizabeth wasn't listening. She was too busy wondering about the wife who had dumped Dane after his career had ended. Had he left L.A. because of her or in spite of her?
“. . . Mrs. Stuart?”
The mention of her name snapped her back to the matter at hand. She looked around sharply, like a student in class who had been called on while daydreaming. It seemed as if every eye in the place were trained on her, waiting, watching, homing in with sharp scrutiny. She shifted in her chair, turning to the man next to her.
“I'm sorry,” she murmured. “Did someone say my name?”
The silence broke abruptly as another voice shouted out a question. “Is it true, Mrs. Stuart, that you not only found the body, but were personally involved with the deceased?”
Elizabeth swung around in confusion, looking to confront the face behind the voice. A burly, bearded man rose from his chair down the row and thrust a tape recorder at her, repeating the question, his voice booming to be heard above the sudden rise of sound. Then another man rose and a flash went off in her face. She shrank back from it, reaching back with a hand to find some support, only to have fingers close on her elbow. She swung around again and more faces loomed in on her, all of them looking wild, mouths moving, voices pouring out in a stream of babble.
Instantly she was back in Atlanta, in the Fulton County courthouse, reporters pressing in on her, shouting at her.
“Is it true you were sleeping with your son's best friend?”
“Is it true you seduced Mr. Stuart's business associates?”
“Can you produce any evidence to substantiate your claims of conspiracy?”
“What about the photographs?”
“What about the videotapes?”
“Mrs. Stuart—!”
“Mrs. Stuart—!”
The sound pounded on her ears as the crowd began to close around her. Elizabeth felt panic rise in her throat, and she jumped to her feet. She desperately needed to escape—anywhere, any way. She dropped her notebook and dove ahead, trying to cut a path between two photographers, shoving them in opposite directions, slapping at their cameras with her hands.
Then her eyes focused on one face in the blur—Dane's. His expression was furious as he shouted at the people around her. Elizabeth didn't hear a word he said. She grabbed the hand he held out to her and let him pull her away from the melee. She stumbled up the steps past the witness stand and into the judge's chambers. The door slammed behind her and she wheeled around, eyes wide, mouth tearing open as she tried to suck in a startled breath.
“Stay here,” he commanded. “I'll be right back.”
He went out into the courtroom before the look of terror on her face could persuade him otherwise. Anger burned through him as he scanned the crowd. The deputies had restored a certain amount of order, herding people back to their seats, but excitement still charged the air. The scent of the kill, he thought bitterly. Fucking reporters. Goddamn fucking reporters.
The noise level died abruptly as he grabbed the podium with both hands and roared a command for quiet into the microphones, his volume setting off a series of feedback shrieks in the amplifiers. One intrepid fool raised a hand to ask a question, but the arm fell like a wilting weed as Dane turned his full attention on the man.
“Miss Stuart has no statement for the media,” he said softly, his voice barely a whisper rasping out of the speakers. Still, it reached every corner of the room, fell on every ear, lifted every neck hair. “Is that understood, ladies and gentlemen of the esteemed press?”
Several seconds of silence passed before a reporter from the Tribune spoke up. “What about freedom of the press, Sheriff?”
Dane met the man's gaze evenly. “The first amendment doesn't give you the right to harass or coerce statements out of witnesses. If Miss Stuart has anything to say, she'll say it to me and no one else. She is a part of an ongoing murder investigation. Anyone bothering her will have to answer to me. Have I made myself perfectly clear?”
He glanced around the room to find most eyes on their steno pads or electronic equipment. At the table beside him, Kaufman was cracking his knuckles and sweating like a horse. Yeager slumped back in his chair, dark eyes glowing, rubbing a hand across his mouth to hide a grin of unabashed delight.
“This press conference is over,” Dane murmured.
Silence followed him into the judge's chambers. Elizabeth had retreated to a corner near a floor-to-ceiling bookcase that was crammed with dusty leather-bound tomes on jurisprudence. She stood with her back to the wall, one arm banded across her middle, the other fist pressed to her lips.
Dane crossed the shadowed room, head down, eyes on the woman before him. She was nothing but a bundle of trouble, but at the moment he couldn't direct any of his anger at her.
“I—I know you don't like me,” she stammered. “But I'll give you a dollar to forget about that for a minute and put your arms around me.”
He bit back a groan as compassion eclipsed his need to keep his distance from her. No matter what she'd done or who she'd done it with, he couldn't take the thought of her being emotionally hacked to pieces by media mongrels. He put his arms around her gingerly and patted her back, and blatantly ignored the warmth rising in him. Proximity, that's all it was. Proximity and basic human kindness.
“It's nothing personal,” Elizabeth assured him as his clean male scent filled her head. He was so strong and solid. She thought about doubling
her offer, to buy a little more time, but squashed the idea. She couldn't let herself weaken, couldn't rely on anyone to hold her up, especially Dane Jantzen, lone-wolf misogynist Jantzen with his ornery moods and his grudge against divorcees.
“I'm sorry I caused such a commotion,” she said, her voice hoarse with suppressed emotion as she pushed herself away from him.
Dane sat down on the corner of Judge Clauson's massive walnut desk and gave her a wry smile, shaking his head in wonder. “Lady, I sincerely doubt you could walk into a roomful of blind monks without causing a commotion.”
A chuckle managed to find its way past the knot in Elizabeth's chest. She sniffed hard and wiped the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand, glad she hadn't gotten time to put that mascara on after all. She would have looked like Rocky Raccoon by now.
“I'm gonna take that as a compliment,” she said. “Whether you meant for it or not.” He didn't say, but he didn't take it back either, which was better than nothing, she supposed. Feeling calmer now, she sniffed again and offered an apologetic little smile. “I'm sorry I overreacted out there. It's just that all those voices and cameras and . . . It brought back . . .”
She pulled in a deep breath and shook off the rest of what she had been about to say. She didn't have the energy for it, and she doubted Dane wanted to hear it anyway. “I just can't get attacked but once a day or I get skittish. Thanks for saving me—again.”
Dane shrugged lazily. “We protect and serve. Are you okay now?”
“Oh, sure.” She grinned, tossing her hair back over her shoulder. “I'm right as rain. I should be more used to that kind of thing by now, I suppose.”
“No one should have to get used to it. I never got used to it,” he admitted candidly, a wry smile flipping up one corner of his mouth as he recalled his own brushes with the press.
“I saw that look once,” Elizabeth said, sliding into the high-back leather swivel chair behind the desk. She crossed her legs and moved the chair side to side, pushing off with the toe of her sneaker. “It was on the face of a cat sitting next to an empty goldfish bowl. What'd you do? Cut up some poor shrimp from the L.A. Times and feed him to your pet tiger?”
“Not quite. I cultivated a reputation for having a short and violent temper. Not many people were willing to call me on it at the time.”
Or now, Elizabeth was willing to bet. He was a man who seemed to keep his control on a tight leash, yet an undercurrent of something wild and dangerous ran just beneath the surface. Something dangerous and exciting.
Dangerous thinking, Elizabeth.
“Well,” she said, springing up out of the chair to pace along the bookshelves. “I don't think anyone is liable to buy that routine from me unless I start waving a gun around or something. I think I'll just rely on the kindness of my local sheriff's department.”
“It's what you pay your taxes for.” He went to a door opposite the one they had come in through and held it open. “Come along, Miss Stuart. Agent Yeager has a few more questions for you.”
Elizabeth nibbled her bottom lip as she hitched her purse strap up on her shoulder. For a second there she had almost thought they were going to be friends. A dozen questions had sprung to mind. She had wanted to ask him about being an athlete in the spotlight and about his own divorce, wondering if a football star splitting with his wife engendered the kind of hoopla a media mogul did. But in the blink of an eye he was back to business and she was back to being a witness. As she passed him in the doorway and headed down a flight of service stairs, she couldn't quite decide if that made her happy or sad.
“THAT WENT WELL ENOUGH—EXCEPT FOR THAT LITTLE rhubarb at the end.” Bret Yeager sprawled in the visitor's chair with his Top-Siders propped on Dane's desk. “You just jumped right in there with both feet, didn't you?”
Amusement was in his voice, and Dane shot him a look intended to back him off. It had no effect. Yeager just grinned at him. He was the picture of rumpled relaxation, his tan chinos creased from too many wearings without washings in between, his plaid sport shirt looking as though it had been snatched out of the laundry basket without benefit of seeing an iron. His sun-streaked brown hair hadn't known a comb anytime recently.
“I told you, son,” he drawled with no thought to the fact that Dane was three years past his own thirty-six. “Throw 'em a bone. Give 'em a suspect. They'll gnaw on that for all it's worth and leave you alone for a while.”
Oklahoma twanged in his speech, though he hadn't lived there in years. Bret considered himself a vagabond of sorts, drifting across America in pursuit of justice. Sort of like Paladin or that Kung Fu character. Taking into account his penchant for philosophizing and his general dislike of violence, he thought the latter might be a more accurate comparison.
His career had taken him from Oklahoma City to St. Louis and up the Mississippi to Minneapolis, with a blessedly brief stopover in the hell that was the south side of Chicago. He had lost his taste for violent crime around the time he'd lost count of the bodies he'd seen and the bereaved he'd had to speak those awful words to—We regret to inform you . . . The position of BCA agent to this pretty little corner of the world had seemed just the thing to him. Tyler County was a sportsman's paradise with trout streams crisscrossing acres of woods and farmland that abounded with deer and game birds. The people were honest and hardworking. The pace was slow. There hadn't been a murder in Tyler County in thirty-three years. Until now.
On that grim reminder, he dragged his feet off the desk. He sat up and rubbed a hand back through his hair, watching as Dane paced the room like a caged tiger. “Relax a little, will you? I'm getting worn out watching you.”
The big yellow dog sprawled in a boneless heap beneath his chair lifted its head and whined in agreement.
“Hear that? You're wearing out my dog too.”
Dane glanced at the dog as the big Labrador groaned and dropped his head to his paws, falling into an instant sleep. “That wouldn't take much from what I've seen. Is he good for anything besides peeing on tires?”
“Ol' Boozer?” Yeager straightened in his chair, ready to defend his longtime companion. “Why, he's just a dynamo when duck season rolls around. You ought to see him. He'll swim a mile and he's got a mouth soft as butter. He's just saving his energy now, is all.”
Dane arched a brow as the dog rolled onto his side and belched.
“I don't think anybody is going to be satisfied for long with a suspect at large,” he said, turning his attention back to the matter at hand. “I know I'll be a lot happier once we've brought Carney Fox in and closed the case.”
“Yeah, you and the press too. You just wait. They'll be there shooting rolls of film like a pack of tourists at Disneyland when we haul Carney's sorry butt in, then they'll trot on home and we'll never see them again.”
“Fine by me,” Dane said. “The less I see of reporters, the better.”
He ignored the image of Elizabeth that quickly flashed through his mind and planted himself in front of the time line taped to his wall. He had made LeRoy Johnson open up the Piggly Wiggly at two in the morning so he could commandeer a roll of butcher paper for the purpose. A strip of the waxy white paper now stretched the length of the wall, notes made in his own neat hand chronicling everything that had happened the night before, as well as statements that had been made about the time leading up to Jarrold Jarvis's death. He homed in on his favorite tidbit, given by Eugene Harrison, who had been sitting in the Red Rooster spending his unemployment check on Old Milwaukee. 4:20—Carney Fox pays for a pack of cigarettes. Talks about going to Still Waters “on business.”
That all but put Fox at the scene of the crime. All they needed was a fingerprint, a strand of hair, a knife with his name on it, and they would have a closed case. Fox was a troublemaker. Had been since the day he'd rolled into town in his '81 Chevy with his hair greased back and a cocky sneer curling the corners of his lips. Dane couldn't say he'd be sad to put Fox behind bars for good. Then Still Creek could get bac
k to business as usual and the Miss Horse and Buggy Days pageant could go on without fear of being disrupted by something as unpleasant as a capital crime.
A sharp rap sounded on the door, then Lorraine poked her head into the office. She gave Yeager a scathing once-over, ironing his clothes with her gaze. He smiled lazily, rubbed a hand over his rumpled shirt, and scratched his belly.
“That Stuart woman is wondering if you're ready for her.”
Dane let out a long, controlled breath. He had needed a moment's respite after their little heart-to-heart in chambers and had left Elizabeth cooling her heels at Lorraine's desk. It seemed his moment was over.
“Send her in, Lorraine.”
Lorraine hesitated, pressing her thin lips into a line as she contemplated speaking her mind. Her eyes narrowed behind the lenses of her cat-eye glasses.
“Yes, Lorraine?” Dane prodded.
“It's not my place to criticize, but that woman is as brazen as they come,” she said, her cheeks coloring. “Calling the deputies ‘honey' and ‘sugar.' It's disgraceful.”
Yeager grinned up at her. “She's from down south. It's just her way, darlin',” he said in an exaggerated drawl. He winked at Dane as Lorraine lifted her bouffant to its full impressive height and gave an imperious sniff.
“I think she's sweet on me,” he said with a chuckle as the door thumped shut.
Dane laughed. “Not.”
“It's nice to see you boys are having such a good time while some of us are wasting the day away waiting on you.” Elizabeth slipped into the office and stood with her arms crossed and her back up against the wall.
Yeager straightened up out of his chair, the grin dropping off his face as he cleared his throat. “Agent Bret Yeager, ma'am,” he said politely, offering his hand. “I'm awful sorry we kept you waiting. Hope it didn't trouble you none.”
Elizabeth shook his hand, responding automatically to Yeager's down-home charm. She shot Dane a sideways look. “Well, it's nice to see some people have more manners than God gave a goat. It's a pleasure to meet you, Agent Yeager.”