Kansas City Cowboy

by Julie Miller

  “I’ve been working on identifying the silver trace the M.E. found in Jane Harrison’s hair.”

  The folder finally made its way around to him. He remembered a few abbreviations from chemistry class, but he wasn’t seeing the familiar symbol for silver on the report. “The heirloom necklace Janie wore was sterling silver.”

  “Right.” Annie pointed to the photo of the tiny, round-cornered square of metal. “That’s not sterling. Or even low-grade silver. It’s stainless steel. So...” She reached into her bag and pulled out a molded piece of plaster sculpture. “This is the cast I made of the victim’s head wound. I’m not sure exactly what it is yet, but this is the weapon that killed your sister. And I believe whatever it is was made out of stainless steel.”

  Boone picked up the three-dimensional re-creation of the blunt object that had taken Janie’s life. It was two-pronged and cylindrical in shape, about the size of his fist. He remembered the M.E. saying it looked like the object had impaled Janie’s head when she’d been struck. The two curved prongs protruding at the end were certainly long enough to do that.

  “May I see that?” Kate held out her hand and Boone placed the odd-shaped object into her palm. She picked up the photo of the stainless shard and placed it at the end of the shorter prong.

  “It fits, doesn’t it,” Annie reported. “It’s a piece that broke off the tip of the weapon.”

  “Ideas on what it could be?” Montgomery asked.

  Kate’s shoulders sagged beside him while the others tossed out suggestions of tools and knickknacks. Her skin turned ashen, save for the bruise on her cheek. Boone ignored the decorum of the meeting and slipped his hand behind her back. “Are you all right?”

  She turned her eyes up to his, but the soft green irises were focused someplace far away.

  “Kate?” Boone’s weary muscles rejuvenated with concern. Meeting or not, he was taking her out of here to get some rest.

  But then she sat up straight and turned to Spencer Montgomery. “Did you get that list of motel guests from the night Janie called there?”

  “Yes.” He thumbed through his leather binder and pulled out the paper. “Here.”

  She snatched it from Montgomery’s hand and skimmed through the list. Everyone was watching her now. Her shoulders dipped again, but then her chin tilted up.

  Boone gripped the arm of his chair, waiting for the grim pronouncement stamped across her features. “My theory about a second unsub is still correct. I don’t know who our rapist is yet, but I know who killed Jane Harrison.” She set down the list in front of him and pointed to a name. “So do you.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “It matches.”

  Kate had never wanted to be more wrong about a thing in her life. She’d wanted to be wrong about her husband and good friend’s affair. She’d wanted to be wrong about Pete Estes and had almost hoped she had the real Rose Red Rapist stalking her instead of a young man so confused and angry about his world that he believed his only outlet was to terrorize her. For Boone’s sake, she’d wanted to be wrong about his sister being involved with a married man, repeating the same pattern that had once destroyed his life.

  She really wanted to be wrong about this.

  But her mind was too sharp. She remembered too many impressions about people. She could never quite shut off that always-thinking-always-evaluating brain of hers.

  Kate wrapped the collar of her brown trench coat higher around her neck and hunched down against the stiff wind whipping along Nichols Street, just off the courthouse square in Grangeport, Missouri. She held up the photograph of Annie Hermann’s two-pronged murder weapon beside the taillight of Flint Larson’s green pickup truck, parked in front of the Alton County Sheriff’s Department.

  The object in Annie’s photo was three-dimensional, but the design was the same.

  A rearing stallion. Handmade with love by an artist who enjoyed sculpting in metal. Long mane flying in the wind. Two shapely, slender front legs, curling out from its muscular body. The fragment of stainless steel that had caught in Janie Harrison’s hair was the tip of a hoof that had broken off when her head struck Flint’s truck.

  “I’m sorry, Boone.” Kate looked over at the broad-shouldered sheriff, pushing his Stetson more firmly onto his head to withstand the bleak promise of winter blowing through town. Her heart went out to him standing there in stoic silence, his brooding stare fixed on the back of his deputy and good friend’s truck.

  How did a man stand that kind of betrayal from a friend? From someone he trusted?

  Kate knew. And she didn’t wish that kind of pain on anyone.

  Spencer Montgomery was on his phone, ignorant or uncaring of what the evidence meant to the local sheriff. “I’ll get a search warrant for Larson’s truck, his home and his office. Looks like there’s a decorative ornament missing from the hitch. Let’s start snapping some pictures. Sheriff, do you have an address on this guy?”

  At last Boone spoke. “You’re in my jurisdiction now, Montgomery.” His world-weary gaze swept over Kate, too, giving a double meaning to his words. “We do this my way.”

  “Maybe there’s another explanation. Someone borrowed Flint’s truck or...” Kate took a step toward him, but Boone’s hard look kept her from taking another.

  “We’re not dragging this out. We’re not talking it through all day long. The evidence is there. I need to take care of this for Janie.”

  Spencer put his call on hold and turned around to face him. “You’re not talking about some kind of vigilante justice, are you?” He didn’t back off the way Kate had. “To flip a phrase you once threw in my face—I don’t know how you do things here in Grangeport, but in Kansas City we build a case against a suspect. Then we arrest him and make it stick.”

  “We do the same thing here in Grangeport, Detective.” Boone was moving now, checking the gun and badge and handcuffs on his belt, striding toward the office’s front door. “Flint’s probably out on a call in a departmental vehicle right now. You make your case. I’ll bring him in.”

  “Boone.” Kate caught his arm as he walked past. “You’re asking an awful lot of yourself. A good friend murdered your sister.”

  “And I want to know why. I want him to tell me to my face how he could do this to my Janie.”

  She shook her head. “You’re too close to this. Too angry. Let Spencer do it.”

  “No.”

  “Then at least let me come with you.”

  “Doc...”

  He looked her up and down, from the sweep of her bangs down to her jeans and high-heeled boots. And when she thought he was about to make some excuse about how she wasn’t dressed for traipsing around the countryside after a murder suspect, he slid his hand beneath the fringe of hair at her nape, angled her head back and kissed her. It was hard and deep and thorough and fast, and Kate latched on to his collar and stretched up to answer with the same raw need inside her.

  And then her heels were flat on the ground and Boone’s thumb gave a rough stroke over her bottom lip. “I nearly lost you yesterday to one man who was willing to kill the people I love. I’m not going to give anybody else the chance to do it again.

  “You stay.”

  * * *

  The people I love?

  Boone’s parting words fueled Kate’s steps as she paced circles around the wood-paneled lobby of the Alton County Sheriff’s Station. Boone loved her? Or had that been a generic statement about home territory and losing his sister and not being emotionally prepared to deal with another loss?

  He loved her?

  A good man. An honest man. A loyal, caring man. A man who could kiss her like she was the most precious, fragile thing on earth one minute, and then in the next minute make her feel like the sexiest, most desirable woman he’d ever met. He made her feel safe. He made her feel unsure. He made her feel...period.

  A man like that loved her?

  “Why would I say something if I didn’t mean it?”

  “Not everyone who
makes a promise keeps it.”

  “I do.”

  Kate stopped in her tracks. She stopped thinking.

  For once, she stood still and simply felt the truth.

  Boone Harrison loved her.

  And she... Let the past go. Embrace the woman you are now, the woman Boone sees. “Don’t think it, Kate,” she whispered. “Feel it.”

  She inhaled a deep, cleansing breath, ready to take a leap of faith. “I—”

  “Kate!” Spencer Montgomery ran out of Boone’s office with another deputy charging behind him. “We have to go.”

  “Go where?” She grabbed her coat off the bench beside the front door and shrugged her arms into it. “I thought we were meeting Boone here. That he was bringing Flint to us.”

  The deputy was already out the door, revving the throttle of his departmental SUV and peeling off down the street.

  “There’s been a change in plans.” Spencer opened the door and hurried her outside to his car. “I promised him I wouldn’t leave you alone here. Do you have your weapon?”

  “In my purse.”

  “I’d keep it closer than that.”

  A fist of dread punched her in the stomach. “You talked to Boone? What’s wrong?”

  “He just called.” Kate buckled her seat belt as Spencer mounted a magnetic siren on the roof of his car and took off after the deputy’s speeding SUV.

  “There’s been a situation with Larson.”

  “What?”

  “Do you know what a Mexican standoff is?”

  “Yes, when two people hold guns...” Kate’s stomach dropped to her feet. “Oh, my God.”

  “Yeah. Larson’s refusing to come in.”

  * * *

  “THAT’S CLOSE ENOUGH, Doc.”

  The Missouri River bluffs in the autumn really were beautiful, Boone thought obliquely, as he adjusted his stance behind a pile of dead pines that had been cut and stacked for burning. But the bluffs paled in comparison to Dr. Kate Kilpatrick picking her way through a stubble of cow pasture to reach the trees near the hunting blind where Flint Larson had holed up. She had burrs stuck to her jeans, dust on her once shiny boots and a Glock on her belt. A KCPD flak vest from Spencer Montgomery’s trunk weighed down the naturally erect posture of her body.

  “Not another step, Doc.” She might be armed, but she herself had said she didn’t carry a weapon regularly, and he wasn’t sure how well she’d be able to defend herself if her request to talk Flint Larson out of his suicidal threats went south. “Stick to the cover of the trees.”

  She glanced over her shoulder. “I don’t want to be shouting at him.”

  And he didn’t want her close enough where Flint could put his hands on her, either—or where she could take a tumble over the granite and limestone cliffs into the churning muddy water below their position.

  “Come on out, Flint,” Boone shouted, urging him once again to step out into the open and surrender himself. “KCPD’s here now. Please, buddy. Don’t make us come in there with our guns. I worry one of us won’t make it back out that way.”

  Flint shouted from inside the stacked lumber and canvas of the blind. “One of us won’t make it out, Boone. You know that.”

  “Flint? It’s Kate Kilpatrick. Remember that chat we had the day of Janie’s funeral?”

  “Get out of here, lady!” Flint warned. “I’m not in the mood to talk.”

  “I remember our conversation. You were quite charming.” Kate was some twenty yards ahead and to the west, about halfway between his Glock and Flint’s Smith & Wesson, but out of the direct crossfire should this request and refusal to come in and face the charges against him get any more screwed up than they already had.

  “That’s bull, and you know it.” A nearly empty whiskey bottle came hurtling out of the blind toward Kate’s position and Boone jerked inside his boots, fighting the instinct to go get her and bring her back out of harm’s way. “I’m not coming out, boss.”

  Perhaps sensing his impulse, Kate looked back to him and held up a placating hand, asking him to stay back. Stubborn woman. She wouldn’t be deterred from trying to talk Boone’s deputy out of his hidey-hole. She leaned up against the trunk of a crooked pin oak and tried again. “What if I talk for a minute, Flint, and you just listen?”

  When Flint didn’t answer, she darted up to hide behind the next tree. “Kate,” Boone warned.

  He knew she was good at this sort of thing—and that he wasn’t. But she was just too damn close.

  But knowing she was treading on dangerous ground with the Rose Red Rapist case and that crazy kid of a stalker hadn’t stopped her yet, the unpredictable danger of a drunken, suicidal man who was armed with at least one gun wouldn’t stop her, either. “We know Janie’s death was an accident, Flint.”

  “It wasn’t!” he argued, his voice growing more and more slurred by the alcohol he’d consumed. “I’m sorry, boss. I killed her. I got so damn mad. I pushed and...”

  And what? Could he stand here, hiding in the trees, and listen to how his innocent baby sister had fallen victim to someone she trusted? Boone’s breath stilled in his chest. But he found Kate’s eyes looking back at him, comforting him, calming him, and he found he could breathe again.

  “Tell us what happened, Flint.” As much as he hated putting her in harm’s way on purpose, Boone was praying that she could work another miracle and talk his longtime friend into surrendering his gun. But she was getting nothing but silence.

  “Kate, come on back.” He couldn’t take this. He was beat up inside with love and worry for that woman. He needed her back here where he could put his hands on her and keep her safe. “When night comes, the cold will chase him out.”

  “Flint?”

  Boone swore when he saw Kate inch up to another tree. Screw hanging back. Keeping low to the ground, Boone crept out from behind his cover and ducked into the same copse of oaks where she was positioned. If she wouldn’t come to him, then he was going after her. Again. “Doc, you’re scaring me. This was a bad idea. At least draw your weapon so you can defend yourself.”

  Thank God she at least followed that directive. She slowly unsnapped her holster and pulled the Glock into her hands while she kept talking in that calm, even tone of hers.

  “We’ve already matched your truck to the head wound that killed Janie.” But she wasn’t any more willing to give up on the idea of getting Flint out of here alive than he was. “There are KCPD criminologists and detectives at your house right now, Flint, searching for evidence that you were there that night with Janie.”

  “They won’t find anything.” Finally, an answer.

  Even Boone froze where he stood.

  “Why not?” Kate asked.

  “Because I have it here with me.” And with that, Flint stumbled out of the blind with his Smith & Wesson in his hand. Boone’s gun went up instantly. He closed one eye, getting a bead on the deputy. But Boone’s aim wavered slightly when Flint held up the other hand, dangling the silver heirloom necklace from his fingers.

  Ah, hell. Flint had killed Janie. There was no longer even a smidgen of hope left inside him that Kate and the task force and their evidence might be wrong. Boone could hear Montgomery and the deputies moving through the dry grass behind him. And every last man was armed, every bullet was aimed at Flint.

  “Drop your weapon, Flint,” Boone ordered. “As your friend. As your superior officer—”

  “I’ve washed my truck a dozen times since that night.” Boone peeked around the tree as Flint’s slurred voice came closer. “But I can’t get rid of the blood. It’s in my head and on my hands and in my heart. I can’t clean it all out of me.”

  “Kate, pull back,” Boone warned.

  She started to move, but Flint swung his gun around toward her.

  “Kate!”

  She jumped back and hugged her body close to the tree again.

  “You were right, Doctor.” She had Flint talking now. “I was Kate’s confidant. I’m the good friend she called
that night. I drove all the way to Kansas City to fix the problem for her.”

  “Fix the problem?” Boone swore. “She’d been raped. Why didn’t you take her to the police? Or a hospital? Why didn’t you call me?”

  “She didn’t want her brothers to know just how badly she’d screwed up. But she trusted me. She needed me!”

  “Being raped is an act of violence, not a mistake a woman makes. I know you loved her,” Kate said gently, urging Flint to quiet his temper. “You told me you went to help her whenever she asked. You were a good friend to her. Even after she broke off your engagement. Not many men have the character to do that.”

  Boone tried to move closer to Kate, to get her back to safety. But Flint swung the gun back toward him and fired three shots down into the ground, pinning him.

  “Flint, stop!” Kate shouted. “You’ll only make it worse. Put down your gun. I’ll talk with you for as long as you want. Just put down your gun.”

  Flint took a lurching step toward Kate’s position. “I loved her. And I thought...”

  Boone flattened his back against the tree. Montgomery and the others were too far back. He had to get to Kate before Flint did.

  “Keep him talking, Doc.”

  “You shut up!” Another pair of shots hit the bark beside Boone, throwing a chip of wood across his cheek and drawing blood.

  “Flint!”

  Boone peered around the tree. “I’m okay, Doc. Get back.”

  But the woman thought she could talk her way out of anything. She thought she could help a drunken lost soul like Flint. She thought she needed to protect him.

  She had her hands and gun up in the air and was walking into the clearing toward Flint. “Just talk to me, Flint. Okay? Look at me.” No, honey. No, no, no! She stooped and set her gun on the ground, turning herself into an easy target. “See? I’m not armed. I just want to talk. That’s it.”

  Boone caught Spencer Montgomery’s eye and silently gave him the order to circle around behind Flint’s blind side. Kate was still in the open. But if she hit the ground when he told her to, Montgomery would have a clear shot to take out Boone’s friend.