Six-Gun Investigation

by Mallory Kane

  Anna complied. “My fingerprints are on file,” she said. “They were taken when my mother died.”

  He didn’t answer that. “Hold out your hands.”

  She did, noticing that they trembled.

  “It’s okay, Annie. We’ll be done here soon.”

  There was that smooth, low voice again. She was going to have to watch herself around him. Something about that voice and those eyes made her want to trust him, put all the burden on his strong, capable shoulders. But she didn’t dare. Not until she knew more.

  As he took her fingers one by one and pressed them onto the sticky paper, she studied him.

  She remembered him from high school. Who wouldn’t? He’d been the best-looking boy in Justice. During his senior year, he’d ruled the school. Valedictorian, Mr. JHS, quarterback for the district championship football team—and who knew what else. He’d always been too good for such a small town.

  His deep golden-brown hair was a little long for a Ranger, at least the Rangers she’d come in contact with in Dallas. The years had been good to him—very good. He looked more like his father than he had at eighteen. Age and experience had given his pretty-boy face character. There was no doubt he’d still hold his own as the best-looking guy in town.

  “What exactly did Sarah say to you about information?”

  His question startled her. She’d almost been lulled into thinking he was done. She should have known better.

  “She told me she was sorry she’d left me alone. Said she wanted to start a new life, and that she had some information I might find useful.”

  He finished with the fingerprints and lifted his head. “What kind of information?”

  “I don’t know.” It was all she could do not to look away from his intense smoky gaze.

  “Why didn’t she tell you on the phone?”

  He still held her left hand. She pulled it away. “She said she wanted to see me.” Tears stung her eyes but she blinked them away.

  He carefully replaced the backing on the fingerprint paper and labeled it.

  “Was that it, or was it because the information she had she couldn’t just tell you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe she wanted to see you, not to tell you something, but to give you something.”

  Anna shook her head. “I don’t know why you’d think that.”

  “Why the same room?” he asked again.

  “I told you. I don’t know. She called yesterday, around five o’clock. She asked me to meet her here this evening at seven.”

  Zane took a PDA from his shirt pocket and made a note.

  “I got caught in traffic, so I was late—” Her breath caught.

  Concentrate, she lectured herself, clenching her fists. She was a journalist. She knew better than to allow her emotions to overtake her objectivity. She had to treat this as just another story. She couldn’t get caught up in grief or regret. There was too much at stake.

  She’d tried to resist her sister’s urgent plea, tried to make herself believe that Sarah was exaggerating when she said she had proof of who’d killed their mother.

  In fact, she’d almost talked herself into not coming at all. That’s why she’d been late. And her indecision had cost her sister her life.

  Tears pricked her eyelids as she looked up at Zane. He was watching her carefully. “If I’d gotten here earlier, Sarah might still be alive.”

  He lifted a hand as if to reach for hers, but checked the movement and rested it on the table instead. His sharp gaze bored through her. He took a deep breath.

  “If you’d gotten here earlier, you’d have died, too.”

  Chapter Two

  Zane watched with a mixture of satisfaction and guilt as the last bit of color drained from Anna’s face.

  Good. At least he’d broken through that thick barrier of self-control for a second. He needed to retain the upper hand.

  Anna Wallace was hiding something behind those olive-green eyes. Maybe it was just the depth of her shock at finding her sister dead in the same room and in the same manner as her mother. But she’d been too evasive about Sarah’s information.

  She wasn’t telling him everything.

  “You were the first one to find her, right?”

  Anna nodded, looking at her fingertips.

  “Don’t worry, your fingers won’t turn black, but you might want to wash the sticky residue off once we’re done here.” He paused, watching her. Most people, especially people with something to hide, couldn’t stand to let the silence stretch for more than a few seconds.

  While he waited, he compared her to her sister and her mother. A wave of disgust hit him when he thought of Lou Ann Wallace. She’d been married to Leland Hendricks, but she’d ended up as a notch on Jim McKinney’s belt. She’d been just one of the women his lothario father had wooed and won. He’d never been indiscreet, but in a small town, there were no secrets.

  From what he’d seen, Sarah hadn’t changed since high school. Her hair was a garish shade of blond with dark roots. Her makeup had been applied with a heavy hand. And her tight skirt and revealing blouse made her the spitting image of her mother.

  How had Anna turned out so differently? It didn’t matter, he told himself. She was still LouAnn’s daughter. And because of that, he had a built-in aversion to her.

  She moistened her lips and looked up at him. “When I came in downstairs, the desk clerk gave me a key and pointed the way to the room. The door was locked. So I knocked, but when she didn’t answer, I used the key and went on in.”

  Anna’s green eyes turned dark. “She was just lying there—on the floor. Her face was—” she cleared her throat “—discolored. Her hair was matted on the right—no, the left side of her head, and there was blood on the floor.”

  “The door was locked?”

  As she nodded, Zane took her hands in his and looked at the palms, then turned them over and examined the backs. “Did you touch her?”

  “No. I rushed over and knelt down. I was going to—” she paused for a second, looking confused “—take her hand, check for a pulse. I’m not sure what I was going to do. But her eyes were so dull. I knew she was dead.”

  “Annie?” Zane tightened his grip on her hands and bent his head to meet her gaze. “Are you absolutely certain she was dead when you got here?”

  She nodded, her eyes glistening with tears.

  “How? If you didn’t touch her.”

  “I’m a journalist. I’ve covered homicides, suicides, accidents.” Her shoulders tightened visibly. “I’ve seen my share of death. It’s in the eyes.”

  She was right about that. “What time did you get here?”

  “It was seven thirty-three when I knocked on the door. I looked at my watch and thought about how late I was.”

  “Good. That’ll help pinpoint the time of death. Now did you see anyone? Anyone at all?”

  “No one but the desk clerk.”

  “What about him? What did he say? Did he indicate that anyone else had been around asking about your sister?”

  “No. He was fiddling with his audio player. He hardly even acknowledged me. I suppose anyone could have asked for the key—” She stopped. “Is that what happened?” Her eyes widened and her generous lips parted in a little O.

  Zane forced himself to take his eyes off her generous mouth. He looked her up and down, cataloging her, assessing her. It appeared that she worked hard at not drawing attention to herself. Her careless hair, the lack of makeup and the plain clothes ought to make her as mousy and unnoticeable as she’d been back in school. Yet somehow, they all pulled together into a fascinating whole.

  It was probably just the anomaly. She was the polar opposite of her sister and mother. At least in appearance.

  He watched her face as he asked his next question. “Did you move anything? Touch anything? Take anything?”

  “No.” She pulled her hands out of his grasp and rubbed her fingers together.

  Her answer was
too quick. She was lying. “Are you sure? We’ll know from the fingerprints.”

  She raised her gaze to his. “I’m sure. I touched the doorknob. That’s all. I may have put my hand on the wall or the table to steady myself when I first saw her.”

  “Okay. Then what did you do?” He retrieved swabs from the kit and swabbed her palms. It was just a precaution. But if she had touched the body, had gotten blood on her hands, even if she’d washed them, it would show up.

  “Like I told you, I knelt down beside her, but it was obvious from her face and her eyes that she was dead.”

  She clasped her hands together in her lap and Zane saw her shoulders relax slightly. Her color was getting better, too. She was beginning to recover from the initial shock.

  “So I called 9-1-1.”

  “On the room phone?”

  “Yes.” Her eyes widened. “I touched the desk and the phone. How did I forget that?”

  “It’s not unusual. You were in shock. What else did you touch?”

  Her gaze flickered. “I don’t think I touched anything else.”

  “What did you do while you waited for the sheriff?”

  She looked away. She was about to lie—or at the very least leave something out.

  “I opened the door to the hall and sat down on the chair to wait.”

  “You didn’t see or hear anything?”

  “Not until the deputy came running in. Then all of a sudden the room was full of people.”

  Yeah. And his crime scene was thoroughly contaminated.

  “When did your stepfather arrive?”

  “My—” For an instant she looked confused. “Leland? I guess he and the mayor got there about the same time, right behind the doctor.”

  “What’s the problem between you and Leland Hendricks?”

  Her eyes widened. “There’s no problem. It’s just—I don’t think of him as my stepfather.”

  “You were pretty young when your mother married him.”

  “Is this pertinent?”

  Zane gazed at her evenly until she blinked and looked back at her hands.

  “I was fifteen. We’d been here about a year when my mother was killed.”

  “So you were sixteen when your sister left you with Leland Hendricks and went to Vegas.”

  “I lived in his house until I graduated from high school. He was essentially bankrupt, but he took care of my portion of my mother’s life insurance for me, and gave it to me when I graduated.”

  “Who took out the policy?”

  She looked puzzled. “I guess Leland did. I doubt my mother would put out that kind of money for insurance.”

  “What kind of money? How much did the policy pay?”

  “Sarah and I each got a hundred thousand. I don’t know what Leland got.”

  Zane made a note to check on the insurance. By rights, it should have been hard as hell for Leland to get his portion of the insurance. As the husband of the murdered woman, he’d have been investigated thoroughly by the insurance company before they released the first dime.

  “What did you do after you graduated from high school? Did you spend summers with Leland?”

  She lowered her gaze to her hands. “I went to college in Dallas. Once I moved, we didn’t keep in touch.”

  She was alone. The compassion that had lurked just under the surface ever since he’d seen her sitting staring at her sister’s body rose again. She’d lost her mother and her sister when she was sixteen. Zane felt another layer of respect and admiration for her.

  “So Leland was never like a father to you.”

  She smiled wryly. “No. He was more like a business manager. But in his defense, his wife had been murdered and his little boy had disappeared.”

  “Justin. Donna’s child.”

  She nodded. “Poor Justin. He was so cute, but he was like a little pawn, being pulled back and forth between Donna and Leland.”

  “Then there was Joey.”

  “At least Joey was old enough to think for herself. She was a couple of years younger than me. We never got to be friends, but from what I saw, Joey hated everybody—Donna, Leland and Lou Ann. Especially Donna. She told me once that she suspected her mother of hiding Justin away, just to keep him from Leland.”

  “Could that have been true?”

  Anna rubbed her eyes and pushed her hair back wearily. “I don’t think so. I remember Donna screaming that my mother had stolen Justin. But back then Donna was a lush and a druggie. She barely made sense most of the time.”

  “Do you think your mother stole the boy?”

  Anna’s clear green eyes met Zane’s. She shrugged. “I don’t know. Mom couldn’t stand little kids. She used to beg Leland to give custody back to Donna. She said she was too old to have a screaming kid around.”

  She paused, and her green eyes turned sharp as a shard of glass. “Do you think your father killed my mother?”

  Zane steeled himself not to show any reaction to her question. “I don’t ‘think’ anybody did. My job is to find the facts.”

  He glanced at his watch. Anna had given him a lot to think about. He was more and more convinced that Sarah Wallace’s murder was connected to Lou Ann’s death sixteen years ago.

  But right now he needed to get back downstairs. He quickly finished labeling the swabs and loaded everything back into the case and stood.

  “I need your clothes.”

  She tensed. “My clothes? Why?” She waved a hand. “Never mind. I know. You’ll either eliminate my fingerprints and any trace evidence on my clothes or you’ll use it to prove I touched her. I’d tell you it’s a waste of time and effort, but you won’t believe me and I’ll just end up more frustrated. I assume I can have something to change into?”

  Zane suppressed a smile at her frosty words. She was definitely over the worst of the shock of finding her sister. He was glad. She’d been positively green around the gills. He didn’t need a fainting key witness. He had too many loose ends already.

  He decided not to remind her that there was a third possibility for use of trace evidence from her clothes. Not that he believed for a moment that she’d killed her sister, but the presence or absence of any evidence that Anna had touched Sarah’s body could tie up at least one of his loose ends.

  “Did you bring a bag?”

  “Just an overnighter. It’s still in my car.”

  “Is the door unlocked?”

  “Yes. I parked in front of the inn. I didn’t expect to be here long.” Her face threatened to crumple and her eyes welled with tears.

  Zane turned away, giving her the illusion of privacy, and pulled out his cell phone. He pressed the front desk’s number. “Bring up Ms. Wallace’s bag. It’s in her car, right out front.”

  He pocketed his phone and angled his head at her as she wiped the dampness from her cheeks. “I thought you and your sister weren’t close.”

  Anna shot him a withering look. “So I shouldn’t be upset that she’s dead?” Her voice cracked just a bit on the word “dead.”

  He kept his expression carefully bland.

  “She was my sister, my family. The last of my family. And family means a lot to me.”

  Family. A splinter of regret lodged under his breastbone. Family meant a lot to him, too—or it had once. Up until sixteen years ago. Until the night his father, who’d never been able to keep it in his pants, had killed LouAnn.

  It didn’t matter that Jim McKinney had beaten the rap because of a technicality. He’d succeeded in destroying his own life and the lives of his wife and sons. Zane hated him for that.

  “What about your dad?”

  Anna’s jaw muscles twisted. “We don’t know who he is. Mom would never tell us.”

  Zane heard the creaky elevator doors, then footsteps approaching. He opened the door. The desk clerk stepped a few inches into the room and held out a pilot’s bag.

  Zane took it and leveled a look at him. “Did you get me that master key?”

  “Ain’t but o
ne.”

  “One’s enough for me.”

  The clerk shuffled, his too long jeans swishing on the burnished hardwood floors. “Mr. Matheson left me in charge.”

  Zane didn’t even bother answering, he just held out his hand. After more shuffling, the clerk took a large key out of his pocket and handed it over.

  “What time do you get off work?” Zane asked as he slipped the key onto his key ring.

  “Why?”

  Zane narrowed his gaze.

  “Midnight.”

  “Don’t go anywhere. I need you to make a statement.”

  “But I was—” He stopped. “No problem.” He stuck one hand in his pocket and eyed Anna, but didn’t move. He obviously expected a tip.

  Zane took a step toward him. “Get back to the desk,” he said, and slammed the door.

  He set the bag on the bed. “Open it.”

  “I guess you’re just in the habit of ordering everyone around,” Anna said shortly as she got up and unzipped the bag.

  “It’s one of the perks of my job. I assume you don’t mind if I have a look inside.”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “You’ve already opened it voluntarily.”

  She shrugged.

  He quickly went through the contents, ticking off each item as he removed it. A pair of slip-on tennis shoes. Pants. A blouse. A little tank top with skinny shoulder straps.

  Then his fingers touched something soft and silky— panties. He swallowed. They were tiny bikinis, several pair in a rainbow of colors, including a sort of beige he had a feeling would blend perfectly with Anna’s skin.

  There was an unopened package of stockings and a small makeup bag. He checked the zippered compartment. A miniature digital camera, a pocketknife and a key-ring-size can of pepper spray were tucked between a hand mirror and a clear plastic bag containing a toothbrush and toothpaste.

  “I thought you didn’t decide to come until the last minute?” He looked at her from under his brows. “It looks to me like you put a lot of thought into packing this case.”

  “I keep it in my car. I’m an investigative journalist. Sometimes I have last-minute, out-of-town assignments.”

  He put everything back into her bag and zipped it closed. Stepping over to the closet he retrieved the plastic bag the inn provided for laundry and handed it to her. “I need everything you have on,” he said.