Colby Law

by Debra Webb

  The distinct thwack of a shotgun being racked stopped Lyle dead in his tracks. The threat came from behind him, beyond the row of shrubs.

  “I’ve already called the police.”

  The voice was female. Older. Steady. No fear. Gave new meaning to the concept of neighborhood watch.

  “I don’t want any trouble, ma’am.” He raised his hands. “I’m going to turn around now.”

  “You do anything I don’t like and I’m shooting,” she warned.

  Lyle didn’t doubt it for a second. “I can guarantee I won’t do that, ma’am,” he offered. “I grew up in the Cove. Worked as a sheriff’s deputy for two years right out of high school.”

  The elderly woman’s gray hair hung over her shoulders. A patchwork robe swaddled her slight body. The shotgun was as big as she was. The streetlamp five or so yards away provided sufficient light for him to see that the lady meant business. Folks in Texas didn’t play with guns. If they owned one, they were well versed in how to use it.

  “My neighbor was murdered this morning.” Her gaze narrowed as she blatantly sized him up. “You got no business prowling around out here in the dark unless you’re an officer of the law.” She looked him up and down, concluding what she would about his well-worn jeans and tee sporting the Texas Longhorns logo. “You don’t look like no cop to me.”

  “You a friend of Ms. Tolliver’s?” He decided not to refer to the victim in the past tense.

  “Maybe. What’s it to you?”

  Well, there was a question he hadn’t anticipated.

  “I came all the way from Houston to talk to her.” He jerked his head toward the crime scene. “I wasn’t expecting this. You mind telling me what happened?”

  She kept a perfect bead on the center of his chest. “You got a name?”

  “Lyle McCaleb.”

  She considered his name a moment, then shook her head. “I know all Janet’s friends, and I’ve met her niece and her husband. And you ain’t none of the above.” The lady adjusted her steady hold on the small-gauge shotgun. “Now, what’re you really doing here, and who sent you?”

  There was nothing to be gained by hedging the question. She’d called the police. No point avoiding the inevitable. For now there was no confirmed connection between the Barkers and Tolliver, no reason to provide a cover to protect his agenda for now. “I was sent by the Colby Agency, a private investigations firm in Houston.”

  Something like recognition kicked aside the suspicion in the neighbor’s expression and in her posture. She relaxed just a fraction. “Let’s see some ID.”

  Her reaction was something else he hadn’t anticipated. There had been a lot of that on this case, and he’d barely scratched the surface of step one. He reached for his wallet.

  “My finger’s on the trigger, Mr. McCaleb,” she warned, “don’t make me shoot you.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He removed his wallet from his back pocket and held it up for her inspection, then opened it and displayed his Colby Agency identification.

  She studied the picture ID a moment then lowered the weapon. “Well, all right then. Come on in. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  Lyle mentally wrestled back the astonishment that wanted to make an appearance on his face and gave the lady a nod. “Yes, ma’am. After you.”

  It looked as if surprises were the theme for the night. He parted the shrubs and followed the lady to her front steps and across the porch. At the front door he hesitated. This was beyond strange. She had been waiting for him?

  “Come on,” she urged, obviously waiting to close the door behind him.

  Lyle played along. Why not? A lit lamp on an end table and the discarded newspaper on the sofa suggested she had been up watching television or watching for someone. Seemed a reasonable conclusion that she would be, since after seeing his ID she announced she had been expecting him. Though he couldn’t fathom how that was possible.

  “Have a seat, Mr. McCaleb.” She gestured to the well-used sofa. “I have something for you.” And just like that, she disappeared into the darkness around the corner from the dining room.

  Not about to put the lady off by ignoring her hospitality, Lyle settled on the sofa. A couple of retirement magazines lay on the coffee table. He picked up one and read the address label. Rhoda Strong. Since this was her address, he assumed his hostess and the subscription recipient were one and the same. Her demeanor certainly matched the surname. To say it was a little out of the ordinary to invite a complete stranger into one’s home in the middle of the night after the murder of a neighbor would be a monumental understatement. But then, Ms. Rhoda Strong appeared fully capable of protecting herself.

  Still toting her shotgun, the lady of the house returned with an armload of what looked like photo albums.

  “You have me at a disadvantage.” Lyle stood as she approached the sofa. “I don’t know your name.”

  “Rhoda.” She plopped down on the sofa, leaned the shotgun against her right knee and settled the albums in her lap. “Rhoda Strong. Now, sit back down.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Lyle couldn’t wait. Whatever the lady was about to reveal, he didn’t want to miss a word. The possibility that she was a brick or two shy of a load poked into the lump of perplexing conclusions taking shape in his head.

  “Okay.” She huffed as if the whole effort of reaching this point had proved taxing then rested her attention on him. “Don’t bother asking me any questions because I have no answers. All I can tell you is that I’ve known Janet her whole life. She came here from Austin every summer as a kid to spend time at her aunt’s house. Janet never married or had any children of her own. She never got into any trouble I know about, but—” she stared down at the albums “—a week ago she said she needed me to keep these three picture books safe for her. She didn’t offer any explanations and I didn’t ask any questions. I promised her I would and that was that.” Her expression turned troubled and distant. “Until yesterday. She come over here and asked if I’d be home all day. Said she might be coming over to get the albums if the company she was expecting arrived. I told her I reckoned I’d be here. Before she left she got this funny look on her face and made me promise one more thing.”

  Lyle searched the elderly woman’s eyes, saw the understanding there that the items she now held had cost her friend her life.

  “She made me swear that if anything happened to her I wouldn’t go to the police with these pictures or even to her niece. I was to stay right here and be on the lookout for someone. When that someone arrived I was to give these books to that person and that person only.”

  Before Lyle could assimilate a reasonable response, Rhoda thrust the stack of photo albums at him. He accepted the load that carried far more weight than could be measured in mere pounds and ounces.

  “There. I’ve done what she asked.”

  Lyle shook his head. “Ms. Strong, I’m confused. There is no way your friend could have known my name.”

  The older woman shrugged. “Don’t suppose she did. She just said someone from the Colby Agency would be coming.” She stared straight into his eyes with a certainty that twisted through his chest. “And here you are.”

  Not ashamed to admit he was rattled, Lyle opened the first of the three albums. Page one displayed a birth certificate for Elizabeth Barker. Parents: Raymond and Clare Barker. His heart pounding, he turned to the next page. A new birth certificate, this one for an Olivia Westfield. There were newspaper clippings and photos, obviously taken without the subject’s knowledge, from around kindergarten age to the present. The woman, Olivia, according to her birth certificate was twenty-seven—the oldest of the three missing Barker girls. The second album was the same, Lisa Barker aka Laney Seagers, age twenty-six.

  “These are…” Incredible, shocking. No word that came to mind adequately conveyed what he wanted to say. He had to call Simon and Victoria. They had held out some hope of finding Rafe Barker’s daughters alive, but this was…mind-blowing.

  “I know w
ho they are, Mr. McCaleb,” Rhoda said to him, dragging his attention from the carefully detailed history of the Barker children—women. “My friend is dead because she kept this secret all these years. You do whatever you have to do to make sure she didn’t die for nothing, and I’ll do the same.”

  “You have my word, ma’am.” Adrenaline searing through his blood vessels, Lyle shuffled to the final album. Selma Barker aka Sadie Gilmore.

  His heart stopped. No. Not possible.

  “Yes,” Rhoda countered.

  Lyle hadn’t realized he’d uttered the word aloud until the woman still sitting next to him spoke.

  “That one lives right here in Copperas Cove.” She tapped the photo of the young woman touted in the newspaper clipping as an animal rights activist. “Do you know her?”

  Lyle stared at the face he hadn’t seen in seven years, except in his dreams, his gut twisting into knot after knot. “Yes, ma’am. I know her.” If he lived a hundred lifetimes, he couldn’t forget this woman.

  Chapter Three

  May 21, Second Chance Ranch, 6:30 a.m.

  “Get off my ranch.” Sadie Gilmore held her ground, feet spread wide apart, the business end of her shotgun leveled on that no-good Billy Sizemore’s black heart. Maybe he thought just because he played straw boss for her equally no-good daddy that he could tell her what to do. Not in this lifetime.

  Sizemore laughed. Threw his head back so far if he hadn’t been holding his designer cowboy hat it would have hit the dirt for sure, and he hooted. This wasn’t the first time Sadie had been blazing mad at her daddy’s henchmen, especially this knucklehead. Well, she’d had enough. She poked him in the chest with the muzzle of her twenty-gauge best friend. The echo of his laughter died an instant death. A razor-sharp gaze sliced clean through her. She gritted her teeth to conquer a flinch. “Three seconds,” she warned, “or I swear I’ll risk prison just to see the look on your sorry face when this ball of lead blasts a great big hole in your chest.”

  “You stole that horse,” he accused. “Don’t even try denying it.”

  Sadie was the one who laughed this time. “Prove it.”

  The standoff lasted another couple of seconds before he surrendered a step. “You’ll regret this,” he warned, then turned his back to her. It took every speck of self-control she possessed not to shoot him before he reached his dually. But then that would make her the same kind of cheating sneak Gus Gilmore was.

  Sadie lowered the barrel of the shotgun she’d inherited from her Grandma Gilmore and let go the breath that had been trapped in her lungs for the past half a minute or so. Sizemore spun away, the tires of his truck sending gravel and dirt spewing through the air and the horse trailer hitched to it bouncing precariously.

  “Lying bastard.” Billy Sizemore might be a champion when it came to bronc riding, but as a human he scarcely hung on the first link of the food chain, in her opinion. Cow flies had more compassion. Could damn sure be trusted more.

  Sadie swiped the perspiration from her brow with the sleeve of her cotton blouse and worked at slowing her heart rate. Usually she didn’t let guys like Sizemore get to her, but this time was different. This time the stakes were extra high. No way was she allowing her father to get his way. She’d bought old Dare Devil fair and square. The gelding was done with his rodeo career. Too old to perform for the bronc riders and too riddled with arthritis for chuck wagon races or anything else. Just because Gus claimed the former competition star had been shipped off to the auction by mistake was no concern of hers. Sadie knew exactly what happened to those horses in far too many cases, and she couldn’t bear it. Gus didn’t need to know that she still had a friend or two on his side of the five-foot barbed wire fence that divided their properties.

  “What you don’t know won’t hurt you, old man,” she proclaimed with a hard look to the west before visually tracking Sizemore’s big old truck and trailer roaring down the last leg of her half-mile-long drive.

  When the dust had settled and the dually was long gone, Sadie walked back to the house. Three furry heads peeked out from under the front porch, big soulful eyes peering up at her hopefully.

  “Worthless.” She shook her head at the mutts. “That’s what you three are.”

  Gator, the Lab, Frisco, an Australian shepherd mix, and Abigail, a Chihuahua, scurried from their hiding place and padded into the house behind her. That first cup of coffee was long gone, and the lingering scent of the seasoned scrambled eggs she’d turned off fifteen minutes ago had her stomach rumbling. The enemy’s arrival had interrupted her peaceful morning.

  With her shotgun propped in the corner near the kitchen table, she adjusted the flame beneath the skillet to warm up the eggs. Another more pungent odor sifted through her preoccupation with the sharp gnawing pains in her belly. Smelled like something scorched…

  “My biscuits!” Sadie grabbed a mitt and yanked the oven door open. “Well, hell.” Not exactly burned but definitely well done and probably as hard as rocks. She plopped the hot tray on the stove top and tossed the mitt aside. How could a grown woman screw up a can of ready-to-bake biscuits? “One who’s spent her whole life in the barn,” she muttered.

  Her mother had passed away before Sadie was old enough to sit still long enough to learn any culinary skills. The rodeo was all her father had bothered to teach her, and most of the lessons she’d gleaned were ones she wanted to forget. Gus Gilmore was heartless. But then, she’d understood that by the time she was fifteen. He’d tried to keep her away from her grandparents when she was a kid, but she always found a way to sneak in a visit. He had worked overtime to keep her away from everything she loved until she was twenty-one. That date had been more than a significant birthday; it had been her personal independence day. Prevented from taking anything from her childhood home other than the clothes on her back, she’d walked into the lawyer’s office and claimed the inheritance her grandparents had left for her—despite Gus’s every attempt to overturn their will—and hadn’t looked back.

  Nineteen months later she had created the life she wanted, just outside her father’s reach yet right under his nose. They had been at all-out war since. Fact was, they had been immersed in battle most of her life. The stakes had merely been upped with her inheritance. Gus, being an only child, had assumed he would inherit the small five-hundred-acre ranch that adjoined his massive property. But life had a way of taking a man down a notch or two when he got too big for his breeches.

  Sadie poured a second cup of morning-survival liquid and savored the one thing in the kitchen she was pretty good at—rich, strong coffee. She divided up the eggs and biscuits with her worthless guard dogs and collapsed at the table. Mercy, she was running behind this morning. If that low-down Sizemore hadn’t shown up, she would be feeding the horses already instead of stuffing her face.

  First things first. She had to calm down. The animals sensed when she was anxious. And fueling her body was necessary. Gus’s pals had intimidated the last of her ranch hands until they’d all quit, leaving Sadie on her own to take care of the place. She didn’t mind doing the work, but there was only so much one woman could do between daylight and dark. She’d narrowed her focus to the animals and the necessary property areas, such as the barn and smaller pasture. Everything else that required attention would just have to wait. Things would turn around eventually. As long as she was careful, her finances would hold out. Between the small trust her grandparents had left and donations for taking care of her rescues from generous folks, she would be okay in spite of her daddy’s determined efforts to ensure otherwise.

  Gator and Frisco stared up at her from their empty bowls. Abigail stared, too, but she hadn’t touched her biscuit. Not that Sadie could blame her. Maybe her ranch hands had fled for parts unknown to escape her cooking. Sadie didn’t like to waste anything, unlike Gus, so the dogs were stuck with her cooking until she figured out how to prepare smaller portions.

  Before she could shovel in the final bite of breakfast, all three dogs s
uddenly stilled, ears perked, then the whole pack made a dash for the front door. Sadie pushed back her chair, her head shaking in disgust. If Gus had decided to show up in person and add his two cents’ worth, he might just leave with more than he bargained for. Or maybe less, depending upon how well her trigger-finger self-control held out.

  Shotgun in hand, she marched to the door and peeked out around the curtains her grandmother had made when Sadie was a little girl. The black truck wasn’t one she recognized. Too shiny and new to belong to any of the ranchers around here, at least the ones who actually worked for a living. Ten or so seconds passed and the driver didn’t get out. The way the sun hit the windshield, it was impossible to tell if the driver was male or female, friend or foe.

  She opened the door and the dogs raced toward the truck, barking and yapping as if they were a force to be reckoned with. If the driver said a harsh word, the three would be under the porch in a heartbeat. Sadie couldn’t really hold it against them. All three were rescues. After what they’d gone through, they had a right to be people shy.

  With the shotgun hanging at her side, she made it as far as the porch steps when the driver’s door opened. Sadie knew the deputies in Coryell County. Her visitor wasn’t any of them. A boot hit the ground, stirring the dust. Something deep inside her braced for a new kind of trouble. As the driver emerged her gaze moved upward, over the gleaming black door and the tinted window to a black Stetson and dark sunglasses. She couldn’t quite make out the details of the man’s face, but some extra sense that had nothing to do with what she could see set her on edge.

  Another boot hit the ground and the door closed. Her visual inspection swept over long legs cinched in comfortably worn denim, a lean waist and broad shoulders testing the seams of a shirt that hadn’t come off the rack at any store where she shopped, finally zeroing in on the man’s face just as he removed the dark glasses.