by Leigh Hearon
“Hop into my truck.”
She hoped Mary would not be upset by the sight of her Winchester .30-.30 in the gun rack. She’d returned it to its usual place last Sunday after Dan had officially called her off the case. Now, she was glad she had.
* * *
Annie bumped along the rough road that flanked the ten-acre horse pasture and had been carved out not by road machines but by use and time. Although both of Annie’s hands were firmly on the wheel, her eyes were glued to the great expanse beyond. Something had frightened the horses, and it had to be more than the average coyote that made his way, sometimes with a band of brothers, across the grass. The horses would notice these intruders onto their territory but seldom made a fuss, at least during the day. Coyotes were not going to bother a herd of healthy horses that could and would kick them into oblivion if given the chance.
A cougar, on the other hand, could move with lightning speed and rip out a horse’s underbelly before the rest of the herd knew what was happening. This was what worried Annie now.
“What about the sheep?” Mary shouted above the sound of the truck’s tires pounding over the uneven dirt.
“We’d have heard them if they were in trouble,” Annie yelled back. “And Trotter would be braying his head off. But we’ll check them, just to make sure.”
Mary gave a half scream. Annie slammed on the brakes, and both women rocked forward from the sudden halt. Mary held a trembling arm out in front of her.
“Back there! In the woods. I saw something move. I’m sure I did.”
“Good eyes,” Annie told her as she yanked open the truck door with her left hand while fumbling for her Winchester in her right. “Stay here for now. I might need you to move the truck.”
Crouching down, she trotted forward several yards and took cover behind a small grove of alders. She brought the Winchester to her shoulder and sighted it. All was quiet for a moment. Annie heard only the sound of her own ragged breath. Then she saw a flicker among the trees, beyond the neat white fence line that marked the end of the pasture, from somewhere within the forest beyond. She pushed the cross-bolt safety off with her thumb, levered one round into the long chamber, and waited. A half minute later, another flicker appeared from the far-off wood. It was metallic and glinted in the sunlight.
Annie slowly lowered her rifle. She heard the sound of running behind her and turned. Mary was nearly upon her. Clasping Annie’s arm, she repeated nearly word for word what Hannah had told her more than two weeks earlier.
“Annie! It’s a man! I saw him running behind the trees. And I think he has a gun!”
CHAPTER 20
WEDNESDAY, MAY 18
“I can’t understand how Wolf materialized by the sheep pasture,” Annie told Marcus the next morning. “I swear he was locked in the farmhouse when I left to work with Layla. How could he have gotten out?”
“The ability to evaporate and reappear at will is a well-known trait among Blue Heelers,” Marcus solemnly told her. “Especially when they’re concerned for their mistress’s safety. I’m just glad the sheep were untouched by this human predator.”
As soon as Annie had seen the glint of metal within the forest, she knew her only course of action was to call 911. She hardly wanted to provoke a shoot-out with a stranger, even though he was trespassing. What if the figure turned out to be a kid with a toy gun? But here, she’d been completely stymied. Yesterday had been one of Esther’s rare days off, and once Annie had uttered the word “trespass” to the substitute operator, she’d been told to enter her 911 report using the appropriate link on the Sheriff’s Office website. Annie had fumed but done as she’d been told. So far, no deputy had responded.
“Do you know I had to send an e-mail to report the trespasser? 911 is now reserved only for ‘crimes in progress.’”
“How infuriating. I assume you’ll share your feelings about this new response system with Dan?”
Annie appreciated Marcus’s solidarity more than she could say.
“You know I will. Not that it will do any good.”
Marcus cleared his throat.
“Annie, I have a rather awkward request to ask of you.”
“That sounds intriguing.” She was more than ready to change the subject.
“Not really. And I hate to ask, but I don’t know who else to turn to. I’ve had all of Hilda’s belongings that survived the fire boxed and ready for storage. The moving company will take them to your local storage unit, but they can’t open up an account on my behalf, and apparently I can’t set up an account over the phone. Would you mind terribly renting a couple of large units and making sure the boxes get in there safely? I’d like to have everything out of the house by the time Travis takes possession.”
“Of course, Marcus. I’d be happy to help.”
* * *
In truth, Annie was not particularly happy about Marcus’s politely worded request. She would do anything to help Marcus, of course—but the attendant pleasurable feeling from knowing that one has done a good thing was conspicuously absent.
Annie had never met Hilda; she’d known her only by reputation, and what she’d heard was not particularly complimentary. Hilda was known as the rich, stuck-up horse owner who browbeat people and horses with equal opportunity. Anyone or anything that displeased her had received her quick condemnation and often, ferocious wrath. When Hilda was brutally murdered last winter, Annie suspected that everyone around her silently heaved one collective sigh of relief. How Marcus, her husband of twenty years, had withstood her fits of temper and irrational rage was beyond Annie’s ken. On the plus side, Hilda had set the bar ridiculously low for anyone who came in her wake. Annie had simply been her usual lively and agreeable self around Hilda’s widower and he’d promptly placed her on a pedestal. For a woman who secretly suspected few men would tolerate her solitary, horse-driven lifestyle, this was extremely reassuring.
So of course she would do what Marcus had so nicely asked her to do.
But first she had an ax to grind that was legitimately within her purview—to give Dan a piece of her mind regarding his so-called modernized response system.
To her relief, Esther picked up the back line at the Sheriff’s Office. The dispatch operator was as unhappy as Annie about the change in emergency responses, and the two women spent a good five minutes disparaging the faulty wisdom of the county heads who’d agreed to implement, admittedly on a trial basis, a computerized method of tracking nonurgent 911 calls.
“And who decides at the end of this trial period whether, in fact, this was a good idea?” Annie asked, scorn lacing her words.
“Who do you think, Annie? The same people who approved it in the first place.”
“Who are not likely to admit that they made a mistake.”
“Exactly.”
“So complaining to Dan won’t make any difference?”
“Believe it or not, Dan’s on the side of the righteous this time. He did everything but beg the commissioners at their last meeting not to downsize my job. When they refused to budge, he warned them that horrendous crimes would go unsolved if the system was implemented for even a single day.”
Annie felt a small surge of affection for the sheriff. He might irritate the daylights out of her practically every time they spoke about the case, but at least he saw sense once in a while. Esther went on.
“And as far as I’m concerned, Annie, your call should have been routed immediately to a deputy. You reported a man possibly with a weapon trespassing on your property. Those facts alone were enough to warrant sending out a deputy or two. Why didn’t you insist on an immediate response?”
“It was the word ‘trespass.’ It’s listed on the website as one of the nonurgent crimes that don’t need immediate attention. I felt I had to play by the new rules.”
“Anytime a weapon is involved, it demands our urgent attention. It’s precisely the reason this system is doomed to fail. And that’s exactly what I’m going to tell Dan as soon as he come
s in.”
Annie felt as if she couldn’t have chosen a more competent or articulate messenger of her feelings.
* * *
Tony arrived a half hour later, just as Annie was preparing to drive in to the local storage company. She gave the deputy her statement in short order, provided him with Mary Trueblood’s phone number, and was about to step into her truck when Hannah Clare came skipping up to the farmhouse door.
Hell’s bells! Annie had forgotten that the child’s riding lesson had been postponed until today—Hannah’s mother had reluctantly concluded that a competing orthodontic appointment made the usual Monday session too unwieldy. Hannah had recently graduated from riding in the round pen to trail rides around Annie’s property, but today Annie was less than thrilled with continuing their game of discovering new trails off the tried-and-true paths—not when an unknown, possibly armed man was lurking on the ranch again.
She sent the young girl off to the stables to collect her saddle and turned to Tony.
“What am I going to do?” she asked in consternation. “Hannah already came dangerously close to the site where Pete had been staying before, and as far as I know, Pete’s back here now because somehow he knew I tailed him on Monday and he’s out to get me. But Hannah’s got her heart set on riding. What can I possibly do or say that won’t upset her?”
“Let’s give her a lesson in police work on horseback. Give me a horse to ride and we’ll all go together and sniff out clues. We won’t go very far, and nowhere near Pete’s old camping grounds, but we’ll make it fun. She’ll be with me, and I doubt anyone will approach us with my Glock in plain view. Besides, I haven’t been on a horse in ages. You hardly ever share them with others.” Tony managed to look hurt for two seconds before Annie broke into laughter.
“Well, Tony, this is your lucky day. I’m going to let you ride Trooper. Just be aware that Hannah will be insanely jealous.”
For the next hour, the three riders traversed the horse pasture with exceptional care. Annie had caved in and let Hannah ride in front of Tony on Trooper, which sent the little girl into near paroxysms of joy. Annie had saddled up on Baby, her Saddlebred who’d just started under saddle and needed the experience of being away from the rest of the herd. Annie did not tolerate herd-bound horses, and it was easier to break a horse of the annoying habit of having a hissy fit whenever she was separated from her pasture-mates by giving the horse a new adventure of her own.
Their careful scrutiny of the pasture did not turn up any weapons, but it did reveal several items that Annie had been missing for years, as well as a few that she hadn’t even known were lost. A work glove, an old string halter that was past repair, and a few rusty tools had emerged from the ground following the spring rains, and Hannah whooped with delight every time a new treasure was discovered. Judging by the decibel level of Hannah’s cries, Annie was sure that any trespasser was fully alerted to their presence and therefore nowhere in sight.
Later, as they unsaddled their horses, Tony quietly said to Annie, “I’m going to return with a metal detector and a lot more help. If it was Pete you saw yesterday, he’s probably hanging out somewhere close. We need to do a thorough search of your property and the ones around it.”
“Do you think he’d be stupid enough to return to his old haunting grounds near the logging trail?” Annie asked in a low voice. “The sheep didn’t seem affected, which makes me think he has at least enough brain cells to avoid returning there.”
“You never know. And remember that we don’t know for a fact that it was Pete you saw. It just seems more likely since he’s on the run and we know he’s been on your property before.”
Annie didn’t like being reminded. “Do what you need to do, and take as much time as you need,” was her prompt response. The truth was, she hoped it was Pete. She was as anxious as Dan and Tony to round him up and put him in a place where he could be found any hour of the day or night—the county jail.
* * *
As Annie drove Hannah home, they saw three Suwana County vehicles glide by them, all headed in the direction of her ranch. From the back, Hannah, who’d been rambling on about why Trooper was the most wonderful horse in the world and how Annie really should let her ride him all by herself next week, did her best to turn around in her booster seat.
“Wow, three police cars! I wonder where they’re going.” Hannah had an insatiable curiosity about big persons’ lives.
“Off to catch the bad guys, Hannah,” was Annie’s breezy reply. She hoped they succeeded.
* * *
Procuring two large storage units proved a more cumbersome process than Annie had envisioned. There was paperwork—lots of it—and the owner insisted that every scrap had to be meticulously filled out and then copied on an antiquated computer that churned out duplicates about as fast as Annie could have written them. The owner’s skills in addition and subtraction also proved less than stellar, and it took Annie a half hour to convince the proprietor that the prorated figure she’d figured out in her head was, in fact, the correct amount.
More than an hour after she’d walked into the tiny office, she wearily accepted the signed and dated stacks of paper from the owner. He’d done his best to convince her that buying his locks would cost her less than if she purchased them in the local hardware store. Annie wasn’t so sure, and she couldn’t waste any more time on this lengthening errand. One thing was certain, she grumbled silently to herself—the owner obviously didn’t have horses to care for, or they’d all have starved to death by the time he’d calculated their grain rations.
Turning toward the door, she saw a man in perhaps his midthirties seated quietly on one of the plastic chairs in the tiny office foyer. He smiled at her, and Annie realized she knew his face, although his name did not come readily to mind.
“I’m the next victim,” he whispered to her. “I’m not sure I’ll be as patient as you were.”
Then Annie remembered—it was Trey, Ron Carr’s son, whom she’d briefly met at his grandmother’s memorial service nearly a week ago. What was he doing here?
As if he anticipated her question, he said, “My wife and I have just cleaned out my grandmother’s home. It’s tempting to toss most everything or give it away, but we thought it might be better to store it now and go through it later, when we’ve built up our strength.”
Annie looked at Trey and realized why she didn’t immediately recognize him. At the Episcopalian church, he’d been dressed in a suit and tie. Now he was dressed in sweats and an old T-shirt, and looked positively grubby.
“I don’t envy you,” she said. “I had the same job when my mother died. I had no idea that she’d kept every one of her wall calendars for the past twenty years. You’d think I could have thrown them away, but she’d jotted down every single social engagement, school function, and riding lesson I’d ever had. They were a microcosm of our family’s life. I still have them somewhere in a box.”
“I knew we were doing the right thing,” Trey said with some relief.
“Definitely. The trick is to remember to go through all those boxes someday. I have yet to learn that one.”
Trey grinned. “If we’re smart, we’ll leave that to our children. Speaking of which, I should see how Marta and the baby are doing. I didn’t realize that the, er, application process took so long.”
“It’s not so bad. You should be done by the summer equinox.”
Trey looked over at the proprietor, who was still laboriously filing Annie’s papers.
“I’ll be right back,” he called over to him. His comment seemed to go unnoticed. Trey shrugged, and both he and Annie stepped out of the stuffy office. The sunlight was farther west than when Annie had arrived but still relatively high in the sky, and she felt refreshed just feeling its warm glow on her face.
Trey’s car was parked in front, and Annie recognized the emaciated woman she’d seen at the funeral, now seated in the front passenger seat. As then, she was holding a baby in her arms. At the ch
urch, the infant had been the picture of tranquil repose. Now he was displaying his distinct personality in the “baby awake” mode. He squirmed and twisted in his mother’s arms, obviously unhappy at being in a dormant car for so long.
“Are we done?” Marta asked anxiously as Trey approached the car.
“Sorry, honey, we’re just beginning. The man who runs the place isn’t exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer. It could be another half hour yet. How’s Marky doing?”
Marta groaned softly. “He’s cranky. I’ve fed him but he still won’t settle down.”
“Maybe you should take him for a drive,” Trey suggested. Annie thought that an odd suggestion, but then recalled reading somewhere that babies who refused to sleep in their cribs miraculously succumbed to slumber when taken for a leisurely spin in the family car.
Marta sighed and started the elaborate process of transferring Marky to the backseat and into his infant car seat.
“While you’re out, why don’t you pick up some hamburgers? Then we won’t have to cook dinner tonight.”
Marta shot her husband a dirty look. “You know I don’t eat hamburgers.”
The disdainful tone of her voice had an immediate effect on Trey’s mood.
“Well, whatever. I still like to eat, and so does Becka. At least get us a couple and don’t forget the fries. Add a chocolate milkshake to mine. One of us has to have strength to take care of this family.”
Annie was shocked at the instant tension between the couple, which had arisen over a few simple words.
“I should go,” Annie mumbled to Trey, and started to walk toward her truck, parked a few feet away.
“Sorry, Ms. Carson. It is Ms. Carson, isn’t it? It really is nice to see you again. My wife and I don’t always rip each other’s throats out like this. It’s just that Marky has some developmental issues that we’re trying to sort through, and we’re a bit on edge at the moment.”
Annie paused. “I’m so sorry to hear that,” she told Trey, looking at him with sympathy.