The Sheriff of Heartbreak County

by Kathleen Creighton

  “Miss Ada’s workin’ on it. Said to meet her over at the courthouse and she’ll put me in touch with the judge. I’m about to head over there now.”

  “You say the senator’s coming in the front?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Roan picked up his sandwich again and made a face at it. “In that case, you might want to go out the back.”

  Of course, he knew the inevitable couldn’t be avoided forever. By mid-afternoon, with both state detectives, Ruger and Fry, and Roan’s deputy, Lori Thrasher, back from Helena, and Tom having reported in from the courthouse, Roan knew the inevitable had arrived. He was going to have to bring Senator Cliff Holbrook up to date on the investigation into his son’s murder. More specifically, the investigation into the background of the only viable suspect in the case so far, namely, the woman who called herself Mary Owen.

  The senator’s response was about what Roan expected.

  “What do you mean, she doesn’t exist?”

  Tom and Lori both winced, and Roger Fry shifted restlessly and looked over at his partner. All four lawmen looked as though they’d rather be anywhere but where they were.

  Roan folded his arms and carefully leaned back in his chair, just far enough so it wouldn’t squeak. “Well,” he drawled, “that’s maybe overstating things a bit. Mary Owen did exist, but unfortunately she died in 1971.” He paused, then added, “At the ripe old age of eighty-three.”

  “The hell you say!”

  “The woman we know as Mary Owen,” Roan went on calmly, ignoring the senator’s exclamation, “moved here from Coeur d’Alene last winter. Before that she lived in Cheney, that’s in Washington state. She’s moved around a lot, our Mary, but we’ve been able to trace her back about…what, Tom? Ten years? That’s when she showed up in St. George, Utah. Before that, nothing. Nada. According to all the records we’ve got, prior to ten years ago this woman did not exist. Anywhere.”

  He spoke calmly, but there was a slow burn in his belly. He had a bad feeling about where this was headed. What he felt like was a passenger on a fast train heading straight off a cliff, knowing there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to stop it.

  “Well, what are you waiting for?” The senator’s voice was a low, tense growl. “You said this woman was the last person to see my son alive, that she might have had reason to want to hurt him. Now you’re telling me she’s got a shady past? Why haven’t you got her in here? Why aren’t you questioning her?”

  “No, now, I never said she had a shady past. What I said was, she had no past. That means she’s got secrets, maybe even something to hide. It doesn’t make her a killer. Her fingerprints aren’t in the system.”

  “You said she had a gun.” The senator had that wolf-look in his eyes again-burning cold and hungry. He had his prey in his sights and wasn’t about to let her go.

  “Which isn’t the murder weapon,” Roger Fry pointed out, after a deferential cough.

  Holbrook threw him a look and made a dismissive gesture. “Of course it isn’t-I’m sure that’s why she gave it up so easily. Look, if the lady’s got one gun, she can have others. You haven’t found the gun-you said it was a Colt 45, right?-the one that shot Jason. Have you?”

  Tom Daggett jerked to attention. “No, sir, that’s right. Not yet, we haven’t.”

  “She could easily have gotten rid of it-hell, it could be anywhere out there.” The senator made a wide, furious sweep with his arm, then gripped the arms of his chair and leaned toward Roan. “Look-her blood was on Jason’s shirt, wasn’t it?”

  “Appears to be,” Roan said, with a glance at Detective Fry. “We won’t know that for certain until the DNA results come back. But look, she’s admitted Jason assaulted her that night. That’s not in question.”

  “And she went and got her gun and came back and shot him.” Holbrook thumped the chair arm. “She had motive, means and opportunity, for God’s sake. What more do you need?”

  “Evidence?” suggested Roan, and earned himself a steely, narrow-eyed glare.

  “I want that woman brought in for questioning,” the senator went on in a soft and dangerous voice. “If you’re not willing to do it, Roan, I’m sure these fellas here’ll be glad to.”

  Detective Fry coughed and looked down at his feet. Roan wasn’t sure he knew what hackles were, but if it was another word for temper, he could definitely feel his rising.

  However, he showed no outward signs of annoyance as he rocked gently in his chair and said with meticulous courtesy, “Sir, I have every intention of questioning Miss Owen further, particularly in light of what we’ve found out-or rather, what we haven’t found out-today. However, I’d prefer not to drag the lady out of her shop in the middle of a Saturday afternoon and leave a bunch of this town’s female citizens with their hair all gunked up with chemicals.” He peered pointedly at his watch. “I figure she ought to be closing up in…oh, about fifteen minutes, which is when I expect to be there. If that’s okay with you?”

  Roan brought his eyes back to Cliff Holbrook, and he wasn’t surprised to see the older man’s complexion had darkened considerably. It had grown unnaturally silent in the room, as though the other four people in it had faded into the woodwork, leaving him and the senator to face each other alone.

  “I want to go with you when you pick her up,” Holbrook growled, head lowered and eyes burning-more angry bull, now, than wolf.

  Roan shook his head and said firmly, “Sorry, Senator, I can’t let you do that.” He rose and reached for his hat. “This is my job. I’ll deal with Miss Mary Owen.”

  “Alone?” Holbrook’s voice sounded hoarse and strained. “Shouldn’t you at least take some backup?”

  Roan gave him a crooked smile. “Cliff, this isn’t Ma Barker we’re dealing with. Besides,” he added with pointed looks at his deputies, “these folks here have plenty else to do. Tom, Lori, don’t you have a murder weapon to find?” As the two deputies snapped to attention, he nodded at Ruger and Fry. “And if you gentlemen wouldn’t mind, I think maybe a trip to Coeur d’Alene might be in order.”

  He got their nods of agreement, settled his hat on his head and nodded at the senator, then briskly took his leave. Nobody was more surprised than Roan when Clifford Holbrook sat in his chair and let him go without another word of argument.

  Chapter 5

  Mary was sweeping up after her last client when the light seemed to dim around her, as though a cloud had passed in front of the sun. Then the glass front door to her shop slapped open and Sheriff Roan Harley stepped inside, politely removing his hat as he closed the door behind him.

  Her heart thumped like an alarmed rabbit and fear fisted in her stomach, but she gave no outward sign of that as she called out, “Be with you in a minute,” and went on carefully coaxing snowdrifts of crisp gray-white hair into a dustpan.

  Oh, but even without looking she could feel his presence, jarring and alien, too much rawboned masculinity for such a cozy, pink, feminine place. And she could feel him watching her. When she straightened, dustpan in one hand and broom in the other, awareness bloomed warm in her cheeks, and she touched an unsteady hand to smooth back the strands of hair that dangled limply around her face.

  Don’t be a fool…don’t let him get to you…he can’t hurt you. She sang the words silently to herself like a calming lullaby while she tilted the dustpan into the nearest wastebasket and propped the broom against the wall beside the work station. Then, jamming her hands into the pockets of her smock to stop their fidgeting, she turned resolutely to confront her visitor.

  And once again, as it had the night before when she’d first seen the sheriff of Hart County through her latched screen door, she was conscious of a strange sense…not of déjà vu, exactly, but more as if she were seeing a double exposure…the vibrant flesh-and-blood man standing before her, and the memory of a much different man, one from a life she’d put behind her long ago.

  Right now, today, this man, the real man, was turned sideways to her, leaning on one elb
ow against the glass display case that served as a reception counter, turning his hat around and around in his hands and watching her through the arrangement of white artificial tulips in a Blue Willow bowl.

  Against that image, blurring it like rain cascading down a windowpane, the memory: Dark, sultry Latino eyes laughed at me behind a single red rose, taunting me…daring me…seducing me into dancing the tango…

  Then the sheriff straightened and she moved toward him and the memory shimmered into nothingness.

  “Miss Owen,” he said in his soft, grumbly voice, nodding his head toward her in an awkwardly formal way that was oddly attractive in so self-assured and masculine a man.

  “Sheriff,” she said, returning the nod. And for some reason she found herself gazing, not at his face with its probably un-characteristic shadowing of beard stubble, but at his thick sunshot hair, with the imprint of a hatband molded into it. Her fingers tingled with the urge to plunge into it…burrow through it…fluff out and smooth away that telltale cowboy’s furrow. The hairdresser in her, she told herself. Except that hairdressers weren’t supposed to think of how that hair would feel, were they? Warm silk…vibrant and alive…

  She forced her lips into the shape of a smile, and the twinge of pain that action caused was an acute reminder of why this man was here. She touched her lip and asked, “Did you come to give me back my gun?” Knowing he hadn’t. Her heart was beating as if she’d been running hard uphill, beating so fast it made her chest hurt.

  He didn’t return her smile. “’Fraid we’re going to be needing it a while longer.” His sky-blue eyes studied her narrowly, and there was a hardness in them that hadn’t been there before. “I’m going to need to ask you a few more questions, too, if you wouldn’t mind coming down to the station with me.”

  “Would it make any difference if I do mind?” Mary asked, tilting her head slightly, still holding on to the smile. Surprised at how little emotion she felt, now that this moment-the moment she’d been dreading-had finally arrived.

  The sheriff kept his face impassive. He stood tall and arrow-straight now, a commanding presence, but completely relaxed, with his feet a little apart and his hat held casually in both hands. “No, ma’am,” he said, “I don’t believe it would. I guess it’s up to you whether you want to make it easy or hard on yourself.”

  “Are you arresting me?” And how was she able to ask it so calmly, while deep in the pockets of her smock her tightly clenched fists felt like chunks of ice?

  He made a small dismissive gesture with his hat. “Ma’am, like I told you, I’d just like to ask you a few questions.”

  “I can’t imagine what I could tell you that your deputy hasn’t found out already, over at the courthouse,” Mary said pointedly.

  The sheriff acknowledged that with a hint of an ironic smile. “News travels fast.”

  “It’s a small town,” Mary said. “And Miss Ada’s a good customer-and friend-of mine.” Anger was beginning to seep through her veil of calm. Anger and a bitter sense of irony. After all I’ve been through, everything I’ve sacrificed, to have it all undone by some small-town back-country sheriff with a great big murder to solve. “I’ve given you my gun and my blood-what else can you possibly want?”

  “Well, for starters,” the sheriff drawled as he folded his arms on his chest and seemed to take root and grow immoveable as a ponderosa pine, “I’d sure like to know your real name.”

  The world darkened. A rushing sound filled the inside of her head. Her voice caught, and then she said, “My…my name? I don’t know what on earth you mean.” But there was no real conviction in it. She’d waited just that critical heartbeat too long.

  She heard a soft hissing sound-an exhalation. The sheriff’s eyes narrowed and his features hardened…darkened…became the face of a man nobody in his right mind would care to cross. “Oh, sure you do,” he said in his soft, growly voice, and Mary marveled that a voice she’d thought so pleasing, even sexy, could sound so dangerous now. “We both know you’re not Mary Owen. For one thing, she’s dead-been dead for thirty-some years. So that brings me back to my question: Who the hell are you?”

  Mary did the only thing she could think to do. She drew her hands from the pockets of the smock, nudged her glasses more firmly onto her nose as if girding herself for battle, then folded her arms tightly across her waist and slowly shook her head. She made a small, throat-clearing sound and said, “Don’t I have a right to remain silent?”

  The sheriff’s chin jerked up a notch. For a moment or two he didn’t answer, and the space between them pulsed with the shimmering, vibrating silence. A muscle twitched in the side of his jaw-the only sign of any annoyance he might have felt. “If I place you under arrest,” he said finally.

  Then once more the silence waited, growing denser…harder to break. Mary’s throat and mouth were too dry to form words and swallowing didn’t help. In the end she had to whisper them. “Then I guess you’ll have to do that. Because I have nothing more to say to you.”

  The sheriff made that hissing sound again, and slowly shook his head. “Miss Mary,” he said as he settled his hat on his head, “you have no idea how sorry I am to hear you say that.”

  Roan closed the door to the interrogation room carefully behind him, resisting an unprofessional urge to slam it. Frustration tension gripped his neck and shoulders as he nodded brusquely at the man standing with folded arms in front of the observation window, then continued on down the hallway to his office without saying a word.

  After a moment, Senator Holbrook pivoted and followed, his steps hurried and heavy with anger. He fired point-blank as he pushed through the door behind Roan, almost on his heels. “You didn’t arrest her?”

  “No,” Roan snapped back without turning as he rounded his desk and jerked back his chair, “I did not.”

  Gripping the back of the chair closest to the desk, Holbrook leaned on his white-knuckled hands, hardened his already iron jaws and demanded tightly, “Why the hell not?”

  Instead of answering immediately, Roan stared down at his own hands and pictured his daughter’s face-for him the equivalent of counting to ten. The fact that the man standing before him huffing and snorting like an angry bull was a United States Senator didn’t have much bearing on Roan’s efforts to cut him some slack, but the fact that he was the murder victim’s father sure did. All Roan needed to keep his own temper under control was to remember what it had felt like to be in this man’s shoes.

  “The fact that she’s not willing to talk to us, aggravating as that may be, does not mean she’s guilty,” he said patiently, bringing his eyes up to meet Holbrook’s narrow and glittering glare. “I’d really like to have some evidence she is before I arrest her, and right now we don’t have any hard evidence connecting her with Jason’s murder. We know the gun she gave us isn’t the murder weapon, and we didn’t find any others when we searched her place. Her blood on Jason’s sleeve only proves he assaulted her, it doesn’t-”

  “It proves she had motive to kill him, dammit! I said it before: she had motive and opportunity. She was the last person to see my son alive-”

  “That we know of,” said Roan.

  “-and she knows how to shoot a gun,” the senator forged on as if Roan hadn’t spoken, stabbing the air like a stump speaker at a political rally. “You said she told you she’s a good shot, and if she has one gun she could just as well have had two. You didn’t find it because she got rid of it, obviously-hell, she’d have to be a dang fool to hang on to it after she’d shot somebody with it! She’s not who she claims to be, so that already makes her a liar. And she’s for damn sure a flight risk, given what little history you have for her. You let her walk out of here now, and what makes you think she’s gonna still be around when that evidence you’re looking for does turn up? Dammit, Roan, if you won’t arrest that woman, I’ll find somebody who will. Hell, I’ll get those state guys to do it. If I have to.”

  Roan closed his eyes and rubbed the lids with the finge
rs and thumb of one hand, and it occurred to him to wonder if Cliff Holbrook’s red-rimmed eyes felt as tired and sore as his did; he imagined neither one of them had gotten much sleep last night. And exhausted though they both might have been, he had to admit the senator was right about one thing: The woman calling herself Mary Owen was one hell of a flight risk.

  Projected against the backs of his eyelids he saw an image of her as he’d seen her last, sitting unnaturally still and upright in a straight-backed chair in the center of his interrogation room. And neither the ugly dark-rimmed glasses veiling her dull gray eyes nor the strings of dirt-brown hair drooping into the collar of her pink nylon smock could disguise the elegance of bone structure, the symmetry of features, the translucence of skin she tried so hard to hide. Now that he knew it was there he wondered how he ever could have missed it.

  Another image took the place of that one: a man he knew well, lying on his back with his arms flung wide, sightless eyes staring up at the sky and an ugly dark hole squarely in the center of his forehead. And try as he would, Roan could not make those two images come together in his mind.

  It just didn’t jell. Not that he had a whole lot of experience to judge by, but it didn’t feel right.

  On the other hand, there was no getting around the fact that the woman had been living under a false identity for the past ten years. And she was definitely a flight risk. And if there was one thing Roan was certain of right now, it was that he didn’t want Mary Owen-or whoever she was-to slip away from him before he got some answers to his questions.

  He let out a breath and the words he didn’t want to say came with it. “All right, dammit, I’ll arrest her.” But he still didn’t think it was going to solve his case. It just seemed like the only course open to him right then. His belly knotted and burned as he snatched his phone from its cradle, and it occurred to him that the way things were going, this case, the senator, that woman, were going to give him ulcers.