Big Sky Lawman

by Marilyn Pappano

  She wouldn’t mind a nice, heavy snow, especially if she was stranded with the right person.

  They reached the point where the trail split and silently turned onto the other branch. By the time they’d gone twenty yards, she knew their theory was at least partly correct. In pain, dazed and burdened by overwhelming guilt, Christina had missed the trail and come this way the night she’d died. She hadn’t known she was walking into danger, hadn’t even realized she was going the wrong way.

  As Crystal’s steps quickened, Sloan caught up with her, taking hold of her elbow. “It’s not a race, darlin’,” he said quietly, forcing her to slow her pace.

  She brushed him away, veered to the side to avoid him when he reached for her again, then stopped suddenly, wrapping her arms around her middle. “She doesn’t have her baby,” she blurted, feeling the intensity of Christina’s pain.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She gave birth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did the baby die?”

  “I don’t know. She lost it, gave it away, abandoned it, I don’t know. But she doesn’t have it, and she’ll never have it again, and she’ll never be able to live with that.” She took as deep a breath as the tightness in her chest would allow. She felt so empty and, at the same time, so filled with sorrow, as she whispered, “She never got the chance to even try.”

  Her voice broke on the last word, and she started walking again, her pace faster than was comfortable.

  Sloan caught up with her, stopped her again, and she jerked free again. Trying not to notice the faint hurt in his eyes, she held up one hand warning him away. “I can’t handle her and you and me all at once. Please, let me do this my way. Later… I’ll need you later.”

  He backed off. “Maybe you shouldn’t be trying to handle her at all. Let me take you back to Winona’s. You’ve narrowed the search area quite a bit. I can go on from here.”

  “It could take you days, maybe weeks, to search even a narrower area, and you still might miss her.” She took another breath, then smiled shakily. “I’m all right.”

  “I don’t want to see you hurting.”

  “If I could tell you exactly what to expect, I would. But I don’t know myself. I’ll be all right.” She could see he wanted to question her, to doubt her, but, with a grim set to his features, he nodded once and gestured for her to go on.

  Unlike the other branch of the trail, open to the sky, this one wove through trees stretching overhead—hardwoods, some barren for the winter, others cloaked in dried brown leaves, and scraggly cedars and tall pines. The undergrowth was tangled, restricting easy passage to the trail in most places. Crystal couldn’t imagine deliberately walking through these woods alone at any time, but especially at night. What was merely oppressive during the day would terrify her in the dark. Just as she’d done the day they’d discovered the clearing, after five minutes out here in the dark, she would find herself running willy-nilly in a full-fledged panic.

  When the trail split again, she came to a stop. “She doesn’t remember this place. She wonders if she’s taken a wrong turn. She’s supposed to go right, but this doesn’t look right. But maybe it just looks different tonight. Hell, she just lost, left, gave up her baby. The whole damned world should look different tonight. She, who knows better than anyone, how much a child needs her mother, just walked away from her own child.”

  Christina’s indecision practically consumed Crystal, along with her desperate need to be out of this awful place. It was that desperation that had made her take the right-hand trail, Crystal knew, that had let her believe, in spite of what her own eyes had told her, that it was the correct trail.

  Crystal turned that way, too, but her steps were slower. Christina had been tired, weak, aware of the blood seeping down her legs. She’d begun to wonder how big a mistake she’d made, whether she would make it to her car, whether she should try to return to the clearing. She needed to sit, to catch her breath, to give the pain and the bleeding a chance to subside, but if she sat down, she was afraid she wouldn’t find the energy to get up again. She had to keep moving, keep going, and surely the end of the trail would be just ahead, just around the next curve….

  Around the next curve, the narrow trail suddenly opened into a clearing. Boulders were scattered about as if dropped by a careless giant, and pine needles covered the ground.

  Except where it had been scraped away and turned over by a ray-gun camouflaged as a shovel.

  Sloan brushed past Crystal when she stopped and left the trail to examine the digging. It was more extensive than at the site where Homer had confronted the alien—larger piles, deeper holes. Sloan crouched to examine one that was roughly the right size for a small adult, using a stick to judge the depth of the loosened dirt.

  “That’s not a grave,” she said emotionlessly. She walked straight ahead, feeling bone-weary and heartsick. Pine straw gave way to moss-covered rock, which, after ten feet, took a steep turn down, forming one side of a small, familiar canyon. Lifting her arm took more energy than she thought she possessed, but she managed to point to a shallow depression below, managed to flatly say, “But that is.”

  Then the last of her energy drained away and she sank to the ground in a heap.

  Sloan stood in the canyon and felt an overwhelming sense of regret. He’d long believed Christina Montgomery was dead, but some part of him had hoped… Now the hope was gone. He hadn’t touched the grave yet, but he was as convinced as Crystal was that he would find her body there. She hadn’t been wrong yet.

  He looked back at her, sitting on a rock some dozen feet away. He’d wanted her to wait up above, wanted to take her back to the truck, back to Winona’s, back far, far away from here, but she’d insisted on staying. She’d brought him this far. She wanted to see it through. Even though he’d given in and helped her down the narrow trail into the canyon, he wondered if he should have refused. She was so pale, so shaken. When she’d crumpled up above, his heart had damn near stopped beating in his chest. If she’d been hurt, if she’d fallen over the bluff’s edge…

  But she hadn’t. She was all right. She would be all right.

  The canyon floor was rocky in places, thick and heavy with clay elsewhere, and plain, Montana soil in still other places, and it had yielded the first clue. With all the rain preceding Christina’s disappearance, the ground had been muddy, and the stiff consistency of the clay had captured some excellent footprints. Two sets, to be exact, one wearing regular street shoes, the other in ridged-soled hiking boots, and neither anywhere near as big as his size elevens. That ought to help clear Homer, with his three-times-bigger giant clown feet.

  The street shoes, he assumed, belonged to Christina. The hiking boots, he’d bet, would have to belong to an adolescent boy…or a woman. He had to believe no adolescent boy around here could kill a woman in cold blood, bury her body and never let on to his family or friends that anything had happened. Hell, he knew all the kids who lived within ten miles of here and was related to plenty of them. Not one of them was that cold, that brutal or sick.

  Which left a woman. Christina had run wild after her mother’s death and had taken up with plenty of men. Maybe one of those men had had an angry wife or a jealous lover. Or maybe the woman had been connected to the baby’s disappearance. Maybe Christina had sold or given away the baby, and while someone else had taken off with the child, the woman had followed Christina to make certain that she never tried to renege on their deal.

  But that wouldn’t explain the digging up above. More likely, the woman had been searching for something and Christina had surprised her at it. Maybe her death had been an accident—for which the killer felt no remorse, according to Crystal. Maybe it had all been senseless, wasteful, a classic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Careful not to get close to the footprints, Sloan followed their trail. In only a few feet, the street shoe prints disappeared, giving way to two shallow gr
ooves. Drag marks.

  On a dark August night, Christina Montgomery, twenty-two, beautiful, privileged, with the brightest of futures ahead of her, had died in the mud where he stood.

  The drag marks and boot prints led to the depression. The killer had moved Christina some distance, across clay that sucked at her feet and would have been difficult to dig in to the softer soil at the canyon’s edge. Looking around, he found a piece of granite that fitted well in his hand, a curved piece with some heft to it and one edge that came to a vee. He knelt about at the middle of the depression, took a deep breath to steady himself, then began gently scraping away layers of soil. He’d gone down three, maybe four, inches when he found what he was looking for.

  Do you see Christina? he’d asked Crystal that Friday a lifetime ago, when they’d sat at the table between the shop and the trailer, and she’d answered yes. What is she wearing?

  A dress. Navy blue, pleated, too big for her. It’s covered with blood.

  The fabric his rock had revealed was navy blue and stained dark.

  He laid the granite aside, stood and turned to find Crystal watching him. Though he could see from her face that she already knew, he nodded once. The simple confirmation seemed to take something from her. She suddenly appeared smaller, weaker, insubstantial. She let her head fall forward into her hands, exquisitely sorrowful, then suddenly stiffened.

  “Sloan…” As he started toward her, she rose from the rock and bent to look down. She was reaching toward the crevice formed where the rock met another when he caught her hand and bent to see what was there.

  Tucked in the shelter of the stone was a gold locket, its chain broken and curling around it. He wrapped his fingers around hers. “Don’t touch it. It might have fingerprints.” Maybe Christina’s. Maybe her killer’s. “Come on.” He started pulling her toward the path that had brought them down from the bluff. When she tried to tug free, he simply held her tighter, pulled harder.

  “We can’t leave her there, Sloan. We can’t—”

  He turned and brought her into his arms. “She’s dead, Crystal,” he said gently. “Nothing’s going to hurt her. I have to get out of this canyon to pick up a signal on the cell phone.” He touched her face and felt how cold she’d become. “I have to get you out of this canyon. Christina’s beyond pain and fear now. You can’t do anything more for her.”

  For a long moment, she looked as if she wanted to argue, but instead she slowly nodded, then started up the trail.

  Within an hour, the site held more deputies and cops than it was ever meant for. After calling Rafe on the cell phone, Sloan had called Winona and asked her to come in from the reservation end to pick up Crystal and take her home, then had taken her back to the truck to wait. The cops had arrived first, forcing him to leave her there to await her aunt while he showed them to the canyon. He’d hated leaving Crystal like that, locked alone in his truck, but she’d assured him she would be all right. A call to the shop fifteen minutes ago had confirmed that she was home safe.

  Now he stood on the bluff, watching as the evidence techs, two from the sheriff’s department, two from the Whitehorn P.D., made casts of footprints, shot photographs from every angle and meticulously began to uncover the body. Rafe’s investigators and the P.D. detectives were down there, too, searching the site, and other officers had spread out into the nearby woods. He was the only one doing nothing. Truth be told, he thought he’d done enough. Now he only wanted to go home.

  To Crystal.

  Rafe came to stand beside him, the tagged-and-bagged locket in his hand and a curious expression on his face. “Pretty necklace.”

  Sloan glanced at it but didn’t respond.

  “The chain must have broken in the struggle. Takes a lot of force to break a chain like that.” Turning the bag over, Rafe studied the front of the locket, the back, the chain and its broken link. “Ellis doesn’t know if it belonged to Christina. Of course, he’s pretty broken up now, and men don’t pay that much attention to jewelry.”

  Some men, Sloan thought. Rafe was looking at that piece as if it might magically point them to the killer. Who knew? If the killer was a woman, as he suspected, it just might. “Maybe Christina’s sister will recognize it, or one of her friends.”

  “Maybe.” Rafe stared at it a moment longer, his eyes narrowed in a frown, then, with an abrupt shrug, he pocketed the bag. “You have any theories?”

  Wearily, Sloan told him what he knew, what he suspected, what Crystal knew.

  “What kind of treasure would someone hide in these woods?”

  “Anything. Nothing. I don’t know. It’s just a theory.”

  “So Crystal’s the genuine article, huh? A bona fide, certified, true-blue psychic.”

  Before Sloan could respond to that, an angry voice behind them cut in. “You think you’re a real hotshot, don’t you, Ravencrest?”

  He slowly turned to face the two detectives who’d been assigned the case. He’d never liked Terry Wilkins or Mark Blakely. There was nothing worse than a cop who cared more about his own glory than justice, and that description fit both men to a T. “I was just doing your job for you,” he said mildly. “Since you didn’t seem capable of doing it yourself.”

  “Seems real convenient that when we start making a case against crazy old Homer, your girlfriend suddenly, magically, leads you to Christina’s body.” Wilkins turned an innocent look on Blakely. “How do you suppose she did that? All these trained investigators working full-time on this case, and some civilian just walks into the woods and says, ‘There. That’s where Christina’s buried.’”

  “Unless what she really said was, ‘There. That’s where I buried Christina after I killed her,’” Blakely said before turning an accusing stare on Sloan. “But of course that can’t be how it happened, because that would put Deputy Ravencrest in quite a dilemma. Which would be more important? Arresting a murderer? Or getting laid every night by the hottest piece of—”

  Sloan didn’t wait to hear another word. He lunged toward Blakely, but connected instead with Rafe’s solid weight.

  The sheriff backed him away, warning, “Calm down, Sloan. They’re just pissed because you blew their sorry excuse for a case against Homer out of the water and made them look like fools.” Over his shoulder, he said sternly, “This is a crime scene. If you two don’t have a job to do, you can get the hell out.”

  “Oh, we’ve got a job,” Wilkins said, “and it looks like it just might be making a case against Ms. Crystal Cobbs. Think about it, Rawlings. How the hell did she know? How in the bloody hell did she know that Christina’s body was buried out here in the middle of nowhere?”

  “Unless she buried it there,” Blakely added. “Nobody had any reason to look out here. There wasn’t any evidence to suggest that Montgomery had ever set foot in these woods. And yet little Miss Crystal leads Ravencrest straight here. How?”

  “That’s a question I’ve been wondering myself,” the police chief said as he and the district attorney joined them. “Would you care to explain, Deputy?”

  Sloan looked at each of the men, then noticed for the first time the other officers watching from nearby and, behind them, the handful of reporters who had arrived to cover the story, and he felt sick at heart. He’d promised Crystal that he would try to protect her, try to keep any mention of her name and her psychic powers between him and Rafe.

  But he wasn’t going to be able to keep that promise any longer. There was no story that could conceivably explain how they’d found Christina’s grave, no investigative work so brilliant and thorough that it could have led him from the few clues he’d started with to this place. Any hedging he did to try to keep his promise would only serve to make the detectives more suspicious of Crystal. They would start harassing her, start looking into her background and her reasons for leaving Georgia, and they would find out James’s version of the truth, and Marabeth and Andrew Cobbs’s version. He had no doubt they would turn an already sordid story into something even uglier and
nastier, and they very well might destroy her.

  And so might he. No matter how desperately he wanted to protect her.

  “Well, Deputy?” the chief prodded.

  He looked at Rafe at last, who slowly released him, then nodded. They weren’t going to be satisfied until they had an answer, and he had only one answer to give.

  He opened his mouth, but the words didn’t want to come. He had to force them against his better judgment, had to give them voice despite his tremendous guilt. “Crystal…” He steeled himself against the rush of betrayal and stiffly continued. “Crystal is a psychic. She had a vision of Christina, and that’s what led us here.”

  For a moment there was utter silence, then reaction set in. Murmuring from the reporters, a skeptical laugh or two among the other officers, a disgusted curse from the D.A.

  “A ‘psychic?’” Blakely echoed, his voice loud enough to carry to everyone. “Hear that, folks? That’s how the Blue River County Sheriff’s Department solves crimes these days. With fortune-tellers. Kooks. Lunatics. Isn’t that a fine way to spend the taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars?”

  “At least the Blue River County Sheriff’s Department solves crimes,” Rafe said coldly. “They don’t try to frame innocent men.”

  That wiped the grin off Blakely’s face and brought back the hostility. “We don’t really know who’s innocent in this case, now, do we?”

  “We’ll find out,” Rafe replied. “We’ll have all kinds of evidence from this scene. We might even pass the reports on to you when we’re done.”

  “Now wait a minute,” the chief said. “This is a joint investigation. You can’t withhold evidence from us!”

  “This was a joint investigation because we didn’t know in whose jurisdiction the crime took place. Hell, we didn’t even know if there was a crime. Now we know. And this is Blue River County, boys. That makes it my department’s case.”