Deadly Texas Summer

by Colleen Thompson

  Beau scoffed at that. “So one Mexican’s as good as the next, I take it? And never mind the legalities of hiring noncitizens, as long as he can save a buck.”

  “And take the health care from dependents, like my wife, and the retirement from men who’ve served this family their whole lives. He has been talking of big changes, of a return to the days when men shook when a Kingston’s boot heels were heard clicking on the tiles.”

  “You mean the days when we walked over our employees and ran roughshod over the wishes of everybody in these parts?” Beau snorted. “That isn’t what my father wanted, and I’m not about to let it stand. The ranch’s people, more than its cattle, its horses and its dogs or even the land itself, are its heart. And the vaqueros especially. I’ve worked at their sides, at your side, and I swear to you, no matter what it takes, you’ll be taken care of. All your people. Our people.”

  Fernando gaped at him, his unguarded reaction striking horror as Beau realized what he’d just said. And that Wallace had rekindled other rumors. Rumors involving Beau’s own heritage.

  “Whatever you think I meant...” Beau shook his head. “I didn’t. I’m not, whatever people say about me, about my mother and—”

  “You do not remember her, no?”

  “Not really, no,” Beau said, taken aback by the sadness in Fernando’s eyes, along with his bringing up a subject that had never been discussed. “I was only three when she died.” It had been a brief illness, a seemingly minor infection that spiraled into organ failure before the doctors could find the right antibiotics. A death that had sent shock waves through the ranch and had his father, already once divorced, swear that he was through with marriage forever.

  “She took you everywhere, your mother.” A wistful smile stretched out Fernando’s thick gray mustache. “So proud of you, she was. So eager to show off to everyone the newest little Kingston, to make your father see that you were every bit as special as his firstborn.”

  Beau tried to picture it, to imagine himself in those days before his father had hidden him away as if he were something tainted. Spoiled forever. To imagine the beautiful blonde he recalled only from a handful of surviving photos—preserved in a small album that included the faded image of Beau’s Sicilian great-grandfather—smiling over his small accomplishments, demanding that they be acknowledged.

  “She was a good woman and a loyal wife,” Fernando asserted, pushing himself up from the rocking chair and onto his unsteady feet. “And I swear to you, I will not work a day—not a single minute—for the man who has slandered her good name by painting her the harlot. And slandered every man whose sweat and blood has watered this soil and enriched men less de—”

  Abruptly cutting himself off, the older man turned away and raked a hand through his short, thick hair. “I should not say such things. This cerveza turns me foolish.” He kicked at one of the empty cans at his feet.

  “You’ve been here most of your life. You could run this operation on your own and blindfolded, if it came down to it,” Beau said, knowing that Fernando had meant to say deserving. And certain that, without the heady combination of today’s emotional upset and the unfamiliar alcohol, he would never have dared come anywhere close to voicing such blunt criticism of any of the Kingston clan. “You’ve more than earned the right to speak your mind. And to keep your job and take care of your wife and family no matter who is at the helm.”

  Fernando waved off the consolation. “Any fool may drink and cry about the unfairness of the world, of the way things were or will be. But when has that changed anything—or made not knowing what will come next any easier to bear?”

  Chapter 10

  Emma could have kicked herself, if she’d had two good legs to do it.

  She’d meant to immediately pull out her laptop, to review the data she had transferred from the memory card she had recovered, but one look at the guest suite’s plush king-size bed, with its fluffy white comforter and an inviting mound of pillows, had fatigue rising like a tide around her and her leg throbbing anew. Feeling safe here after Beau had pointed out the sturdy locks and glass breakage sensors on the windows, and in possession of a temporary access code that would let her in and out of both her room and the mansion’s digitally secured exterior doors, she arranged herself into a comfortable position, meaning only to take a short nap. Instead, she’d ended up sleeping through the remainder of the afternoon and evening. Sleeping hard enough that she must not have heard the bedside phone, whose flashing light prompted her to pick up a recorded message.

  Pushing the button to retrieve it, Emma couldn’t help but smile at the warmth she heard in Beau’s voice on the recording. “Hey, there, sleepy lady. Hope you’re feeling better. I stopped by earlier to see if you were up for dinner, but you were out cold. Hope you don’t mind, but when River started scratching at the door, I fed her and took her out for a little romp with Maverick before I brought her back inside.”

  As grateful as she was for his consideration, it hit her that if he could let himself inside her room to take the dog out, he could have just as easily done anything else while she was sleeping. Anxiety buzzing her pulse, she threw back the covers and hobbled to her laptop, hands shaking until she saw it remained closed where she had left it, with the files from the memory card safely copied to her password-protected hard drive. Her phone, too, remained charging nearby, also apparently untouched.

  “He’s no Jeremy. He’s not.” The Beau who’d helped her in her time of need, who’d been so generous toward her, would no more tamper with her belongings than he would lay a hand on her in anger.

  And yet her heart still beat hard as the memory of Sheriff Fleming’s warnings floated to the surface, along with the thought of how Jeremy had won her over at first, too, with his kindness, the sort of declarations and grand gestures that had once made her girlfriends sigh with envy and breathlessly urge her, If you don’t hurry up and marry that man, I’ve already got my gown picked.

  Emma shuddered, remembered herself in lace and white silk, the unspoiled sweetness of her expectations. Of a love untainted by life’s disappointments, and a man who’d snapped instead of bending after things began to go wrong. A man who’d shoved her on the first occasion when, around the same time, a drinking buddy of his had joked about Jeremy having to call her Doctor whenever he came to her in bed.

  As remorseful as he’d been, as tearful when he’d begged forgiveness, the brief calm that had followed that storm hadn’t lasted. Instead, he’d gotten into her phone and computer files repeatedly, as delusions of her affairs chewed through his trust like a plague of black moths.

  Easing herself through a series of deep breaths, she returned to bed, where she accessed her laptop’s hard drive and opened the folder she had previously copied to the desktop before sending a second copy to safekeeping to the online cloud. There, a series of tiny thumbnail images filled the screen—hundreds of them, at least.

  “Oh, boy,” she murmured, realizing that it could take her all night to go through every photo chronologically, beginning from the first, which had been shot a week prior to her assistant’s death, and moving to the last, taken the night she’d removed the card from the camera.

  But no matter how long it took, she had to know what was there and if there was anything that might convince the authorities that Russell’s death had been a murder.

  “Don’t get your hopes up too high,” she warned herself, recalling that the camera she’d found hadn’t been directed toward the turbine’s base. It was entirely possible that whoever had forced Russell through the access door and up the ladders could have remained entirely outside the device’s range.

  She settled into the work anyway, beginning with midnight on the date of her student’s death. The first images she opened were in black and white, since they had been taken in the hours before sunrise. In several, whitetail deer browsed; in another, a jackrabbit nibbled.

 
But one shot, taken at 3:24 that morning, had her gasping, for it captured the partial image of a person, so close to the camera that only a sliver of the head, turned from the camera, the grainy, overexposed arm and shoulder, and part of the lower leg were showing...

  Along with the pistol that he—she thought it was a male—held. The gun he must have used a short time later to force Russell to his death.

  She searched further, praying she’d find a better shot, one that would offer a better chance to identify the culprit...and choking back a sob when she came to a partial image—the last photo of a living Russell—taken the morning of his death, walking toward the turbine. He’d been caught in midstride, his hand reaching forward and his mouth partly open as if he’d been captured calling out to someone. Or maybe he’d been belting out one of those horrible headbanger anthems he loved so much. She wiped her eyes, longing to hear him sing again. Or to have the chance to demand to know what he’d been thinking, setting up those cameras without a word to her about them, or whom he might’ve told about the data he’d collected.

  The next image she came across showed River, and then Emma herself, taken after they’d arrived to look for Russell. Everything else before had clearly happened out of range of the camera she’d discovered. Could there still be more out there, waiting to be found and turned over to the Rangers?

  Forcing herself to move on, she continued going through those images she did have, focusing now on shots taken after the arrival of emergency workers, Green Horizons technicians, and she even caught a glimpse of Beau Kingston amid the photos captured that day. But none of the images jumped out as a match to that first bad shot of the armed individual from 3:24 a.m. None of them would help identify the man she felt certain had ended Russell’s life.

  As she continued poring over photos, her burning eyes eventually grew bleary. Her mind started playing tricks on her, assembling human faces out of blobs of light and shadow and possibly missing things as well. It was time to call it a night, she knew, glancing over at the clock on the night table and seeing that it was after four.

  But her gaze lingered on Beau’s number on the bedside table, and she remembered his invitation to call him day or night. She was tempted to reach out, to show him that single relevant partial image that she had found. To prove to him she was more than a paranoid troublemaker with a penchant for wandering into danger.

  Why does it matter so much what Beau thinks about you? Why does he?

  She tried to shake off the idea, telling herself she needed nothing more from the rancher than his help. Besides, he’d surely be asleep now. There was no reason to wake him.

  Unless you’re looking for an excuse to get the man alone here, in this private suite? A man whose gaze she’d felt roaming her body when he’d thought she wasn’t looking.

  Ridiculous, she told herself, her face heating with the thought. It was only her loneliness, her isolation from everyone and everything she knew, making her vulnerable to a handsome man’s attention.

  Eager to prove she was smarter than she’d been at sixteen, she flipped over the card with his phone number, determined to grab a few hours of shut-eye. She’d see him in the morning, she promised herself. In a room without a bed.

  * * *

  Beau was still in bed when he received a call a little after seven the next morning.

  “You sound like hell,” his former partner Tyler Phelps said, the distinctive rasp of his voice as good as any caller ID. “Hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “If I’d slept worth half a damn last night, I would’ve been up for hours already, tackling the backlog of work I’ve got piled up.” Instead, Beau had wasted hours worrying about the ranch’s future and the woman staying under his roof. Whenever he had dozed off, he was soon jerked awake by nightmares where Emma went missing from her bed and Wallace only laughed at him when he called 911 for help.

  “Remind me to steer clear of the farming life,” Ty said. “It’s too damned early as it is for my taste.”

  “Ranching life. I’ve told you a dozen times before I’m not a farmer.” Beau snarled at the phone before Ty’s laughter made him realize that his old friend was jerking his chain for pure entertainment value. Which, ever since they’d suffered through boot camp together back on Parris Island, had practically been an Olympics-level competition between the two of them.

  “Maybe you should go back to bed. Your sense of humor’s still asleep, Farmer Beau.”

  “You ever come up with something funny, I’ll go ahead and wake it on up, Pirate.” Crossing his bedroom, Beau smirked as he reached for a pair of jeans to pull on over his boxers. But considering everything Ty had gone through this past year—hell, in all the years since an IED had scarred his right side, damaged his voice and forced him to wear an eye patch—it was a relief to hear him dealing grief instead of stewing in it.

  “You might want to wake up yourself,” Ty said, sobering. “We really need to talk.”

  “About Jeremy Hansen? Have you found him?” Fully awake now, Beau raked his fingers through his hair.

  “I don’t know where he is, exactly, but I’ve got some information you need, and it isn’t just on him.”

  Fully awake now, he stopped halfway through the act of pulling a shirt off a hanger from the walk-in closet. “You dug into her, too, didn’t you?” He’d given Ty Emma’s name and address, after all, and his friend wasn’t the sort to allow such an opportunity to pass. Was there something she’d been hiding from him, or had Ty gleaned enough from hints he’d dropped during several recent check-ins—calls Beau made to help ensure that the black dog of his friend’s depression wasn’t back to nipping at his heels—to start investigating issues surrounding the inheritance and ranch finances?

  “Oh, I’ve looked into a lot of things,” Ty said, “so why don’t you meet me today in San Antonio if you can swing it? I’d come to you, but I’m afraid I’ve got a couple of obligations at this conference that I can’t get out of. Besides, it might be better,” he added darkly, “if we aren’t seen together.”

  “Come on, Ty. Don’t leave me hanging,” Beau said, feeling the coarse hairs along his arms rise. And feeling frustrated, too, to be asked to drop everything, to travel for hours, without even knowing the subject. “What do you have?”

  “I can’t get into it on the phone, but you’ve got trouble brewing on more than one front, brother, and it’s getting mighty tough to swallow that they’re all unrelated.”

  * * *

  When Emma finally woke and got up to take the dog out, it was already past noon and there was a note waiting for her. A note explaining that Beau had been abruptly called out of town to deal with “unavoidable ranch business.”

  After vowing to be back tomorrow, he’d urged her to use the time to concentrate on resting up and getting better. And whatever you do, promise me, you’ll still be here when I get back.

  “Where else would I go, with no way to drive and nowhere else to stay?” she grumbled, after pulling on a pair of lightweight khaki slacks to go with the navy tee she had chosen.

  But despite the kindness of Beau’s aunt, who personally brought her lunch after Emma politely declined her invitation to join the family, and his two boys, who sneaked down the hall later to gift her with the choicest shells and feathers from their personal collections, she couldn’t relax in her comfortable surroundings. Not with the urgency she felt to find something concrete, some proof that would convince the Texas Rangers to come investigate in person. And not with her growing suspicion that every moment she wasted napping, eating or waiting around idly for Beau was time she couldn’t spare.

  After leaving another message for Lieutenant Williams of the Texas Rangers and completing her review of the images that afternoon, Emma took River out through the guest wing’s side entrance. It was slow going on her crutches and hot as well, the air heavy with Gulf moisture, but by choosing a path close to the lushly l
andscaped area along the fountains bordering the mansion’s facade, with the butterflies and hummingbirds fluttering among bright, tropical blooms, Emma could at least cling to the illusion of refreshment. River, however, had been cooped up too long to be content with her clumsy amble, so Emma unclipped her leash, allowing the big dog to work off some energy jumping at some darting lizards and bounding after a roadrunner.

  “Stay close, girl,” Emma warned, shuddering at the terrifying memory of losing her that night when the pickup had come roaring at them.

  “It’s over now. We’re safe here,” she whispered, as a shift in the warm breeze brought her the sounds of the two boys’ voices, along with a distant splashing that brought to mind the pool she’d glimpsed through a window yesterday during her brief tour after lunch with Beau. Attentive as their aunt was, Emma would be willing to bet the older woman was personally supervising the pair, most likely from a comfortable lounge chair in the shade. And if Emma herself spotted any trouble—if any attacker dared to show his face around here—she had faith that any cry she raised would be heard and quickly heeded.

  Still, she felt unsettled with Beau away and with Lieutenant Williams failing to return her calls. Her anxiety only deepened at the sight of a big sedan, black-and-white beneath its film of road grime, pulling into the long semicircular driveway, its brakes squealing as it stopped beside her.

  “River,” Emma called, unable to see the driver with the sun’s glare on the windshield. The thrumming of her pulse sped as she thought of how angry Wallace Fleming had been after she’d informed him she had passed along evidence to the Texas Ranger. He certainly wouldn’t be bringing her any flowers this time.

  It wasn’t the sheriff, however, but instead Deputy Jim Kendall who unfolded himself from behind the wheel and removed a paired of mirrored sunglasses to regard her with equally unreadable gray eyes.