“I knew that. I’m just nervous, I guess.”
Asher shifted his feet. The Coltons weren’t the only ones whose lives were in flux. Still, that didn’t make him want to talk about it. Or think about it. Good thing they’d finally reached the near side of the calving pasture, where several cows were nibbling grass and nursing their young.
“These are some of our newest arrivals.”
He leaned forward to rest his forearms on the six-inch-wide fence cap, and the other man followed his example.
“Wow, the calves are amazing.”
That was something they could agree on. If nothing else on the Triple R made sense to Asher lately, this land and the cattle were things he understood.
“See that calf closest to the fence?” He pointed to an animal with distinctive markings on its head and legs. It was pulling voraciously on its mother’s teat. “He just showed up last night. Thought he was never going to get up on his legs.”
“Looks like he made it.”
“Yeah.” His lips lifted. After a rocky start, the little guy was doing just fine. Asher had secretly been calling the calf “Lucky Boy,” but he couldn’t let it get out that the foreman was nicknaming new arrivals.
“What was wrong with him?” Jace asked.
“A healthy calf usually stands up and nurses in the first two hours. Those from difficult births, like him, sometimes take longer. It’s critical that calves nurse within the first four hours to benefit from the antibodies in colostrum. If they don’t, we’re forced to tube feed them.”
Jace made a sad face as he watched the animal several seconds longer.
“Poor little guy. What did you end up doing?”
“Just as we started to intervene to give him his best chance for survival, he popped up on his feet and went to his mom for breakfast.”
“Sounds like a lucky calf to be born on the Triple R. Are you calling him Lucky?”
“We don’t give them nicknames.”
“That’s not a rule, is it?”
Asher shifted his head so Jace wouldn’t see his grin. He still didn’t want to get ahead of himself, but he had a good feeling about Jace. It would be nice to have at least one sibling who cared about animals as much as he did. His cell buzzed in his back pocket, interrupting his thoughts. He pulled out the phone and checked the number to make sure it wasn’t Neda, one of the housekeepers, calling about Harper. Usually, he let business calls go to voice mail and answered them when he returned to his office at the back of the barn, but he froze at the words on the caller ID. Mustang Valley General Hospital? Had his dad’s condition changed? Or worse? Maybe Payne Colton wasn’t the kind of dad people wrote greeting cards about, but that didn’t mean Asher wanted him to...
“Sorry. I should take this.”
He stepped away and turned his back before tapping the button to answer the call. “Rattlesnake Ridge Ranch. May I help you?”
“Have I reached Asher Colton?” a female voice asked.
“This is Asher.” He squeezed the phone tighter and pressed it against his ear.
“My name is Anne Sewall. I am the administrator at Mustang Valley General Hospital.”
“Has something happened with my father?” he blurted before he could stop himself.
His heart thudding, he clamped his free arm to his side and waited for the worst news he could imagine.
“Oh. No.” The woman made a strange sound into the phone. “You’ll have to call the nurse’s station on the floor for specifics on your father’s condition. I’m sorry for causing you distress.”
“Then why are you calling?”
It was a testament to his superior restraint that he didn’t include the hell in his question. What had she thought he would assume? It wasn’t a secret in town that his dad was a patient at Mustang Valley General.
“There’s another, unrelated matter that we need to discuss. I was hoping that you could bring your infant daughter to my office today and—”
“What are you talking about? And what do you want with Harper? Was there something the pediatrician missed in her six-month checkup?”
“No.” Her nervous chuckle filtered through the connection. “It’s not that. Again, I apologize, Mr. Colton. I realize that this is unusual. But if you’ll just meet me in my office, I’ll explain the whole situation.”
“I would rather that you explain it right now.” His mother had always called him stubborn, and he was proving her right, but he couldn’t help it. This woman had already frightened him twice, and he wasn’t about to let her go for a hat trick.
“That would be highly irregular.” She cleared her throat again. “This is a delicate matter. We don’t customarily divulge this type of information over the phone.”
“Well, I would say that it’s not usual to phone a community member out of the blue and, in the space of two minutes, give him concerns about both his father and his child.” He didn’t care if he was the one jumping to those conclusions. She should have explained herself better.
“Fine.” She sighed. “Obviously, this information would be more appropriate if given in person.”
“Noted. So?”
“I’m sorry to inform you that there’s a possibility that your daughter, Harper Grace Colton, and another infant, also born on November 2, might have been accidentally switched in Mustang Valley General’s nursery.”
“Again?”
He didn’t care if his question came out as a yelp. Was this a joke? In what realm of possibility could there be two Colton babies—albeit forty years apart—who’d been switched at birth?
“How could you let this happen?”
“Now, we don’t know anything for certain, Mr. Colton. That is why we’re asking you and the other party to bring your infants in immediately for DNA tests.”
She prattled on about how sorry the hospital board was for this possible mix-up, but he wasn’t listening. All he could think about was his sweet little Harper, with her crop of light brown hair, those dimples like his and eyes as brown as Nora’s. How could there be a chance that she wasn’t his? Or Nora’s, if a mother who abandoned her baby could even count as one.
Harper was his. She looked just like him. Everyone said so. He shook his head to dismiss the unfathomable possibility that they weren’t even related.
“What kind of bumbling hospital are you guys running?”
“We deeply regret this possible mistake. Thankfully, we’ll be able to clear up the questions with a DNA test. It won’t hurt the infants. Just a cheek swab.”
She spoke about it as if it was only an inconvenience, like an online retailer mixing up two customers’ packages. As if the results of those tests wouldn’t have the power to destroy not one but two families.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
With that, he clicked off the call. He didn’t care if his tone was rude.
“Everything all right?”
Asher’s shoulder blades squeezed together. He’d forgotten that he wasn’t alone. He glanced at Jace. Concern etched in lines between the man’s brows. Jace’s shoulders were back, his arms pressed to his sides, as if he was preparing himself for bad news. The kind that could devastate a guy who thought he’d just found his father.
“It’s not about Dad,” Asher said automatically, not even bothering to include my. It was the decent thing not to worry the guy unnecessarily about Payne, like the hospital administrator had done to him.
Jace’s shoulders dropped forward. “Thought I’d never get the chance to meet him. If we find out he and Tessa really are my parents, then I already missed the chance to know one of them.”
Asher nodded, staring at the ground. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like for a guy to track down his possible biological parents, only to learn that one of them had passed away years before. He couldn’t think about that just th
en, either. One crisis at a time.
“Look, there’s something I need to take care of. Can you hang around the ranch until my sister picks you up? Our cook, Dulcie, will make you whatever you like for lunch if you stop by the main house kitchen.”
“I know my way around. I’ve met Dulcie, too.”
“Oh. Right.” He wasn’t thinking clearly.
“Don’t worry about me. I can find something to occupy my time.” Jace pulled his phone from his pocket. “Maybe I’ll even catch up with my friends back home. They probably think I’ve vanished by now.”
“Probably. Okay. Thanks.”
Asher started toward the house.
“And Asher?”
He looked back once more.
“Whatever it is? I’m sure it will be okay.”
He nodded, unable to trust his voice. Though he could have told their guest where he was going and why, he wasn’t ready to share it. Even if Jace might have understood the trauma of a switched-at-birth situation better than anyone. And even if they could have carpooled to Mustang Valley General since Jace was headed to the same lab. Heck, with Dad still there, they should have applied for a Colton bulk discount on their medical bills.
Asher continued up the path past the rows of white barns and outbuildings. He had to force himself not to run to the house and his own wing on the third floor, where Harper would be just waking up from her morning nap. Once inside his living quarters, he sprinted all the way to the nursery, unbuttoning his sweaty plaid shirt as he went. He would grab something clean on his way out the door.
In her room, Harper was already sitting up in her crib and making cute sounds for the video monitor that Dulcie watched from the kitchen. Wisps of the baby’s barely there hair stood up, punk-rocker style.
“Where’s my Harper girl?”
She squealed, her wide, toothless grin stretching even farther.
His possible big brother had said everything would be all right. But Jace couldn’t promise that. Just like no one could guarantee that Payne Colton would awaken from his coma and demand an accounting of the first-quarter books at Colton Oil. Depending on the outcome of today’s DNA test, Asher’s life and that of his sweet baby girl might never be okay again.
Copyright © 2020 by Harlequin Books S.A.
Keep reading for an excerpt from Ten Days Gone by Beverly Long.
Ten Days Gone
by Beverly Long
One
Tuesday, May 10
She’d been killed like all the others.
A.L. McKittridge squatted down to get a closer look at the body. The woman, already stiff, had likely been dead for hours. The coroner had not yet arrived, so there was no official cause of death. But a damn rookie could figure it out. And neither he nor his partner, Rena Morgan, had been rookies for a long time.
But they’d never seen anything like this, either. Four dead women in forty days, each killed ten days apart.
They’d started their shift over seven hours earlier, and as each hour had passed, they’d gotten more and more anxious, knowing the call was going to come, not having a clue what to do about it.
They’d had to wait until Jane Picus’s husband had gotten home from work and found his wife. Naked. Dead. And one pillow missing off their bed.
“He’s going to...” Rena’s voice trailed off. She likely did not want the photographer, the sketch artist and the evidence techs who were doing their thing to hear. She looked tired. They all were. “He’s going to make a mistake,” she said quietly.
The asshole hadn’t thus far. The three other victims, ranging in age from thirty-two to forty-eight, had all been found naked, with their clothes folded neatly in a pile next to them.
No signs of struggle, in their houses or on their persons. No robbery. No sexual assault.
No fucking physical evidence, not even a little skin or blood under their fingernails. Just some cotton fibers, as if their killer had made them wear gloves while he killed them. But those were never left at the scene. Nor was the pillow.
With so little to go on, they’d looked for connections between the three women. Had come up dry.
Now they’d dissect the life of this new victim and try to figure out what led to her ending up stone-cold dead on her kitchen floor. They’d hope like hell they could find something to link her to the other women. Then, just maybe, they’d catch the murderer.
If they didn’t, there’d be another dead woman ten days from now.
A.L. stood up when he heard the front door of the house open. Carrie Stack, the medical examiner, walked into the room, her cloud of perfume preceding her. She wore too much, but nobody ever complained. The smell of death was a worthy opponent. And most of the male detectives had a permanent hard-on when she was within fifty yards, so they weren’t about to bitch that their eyes were watering.
Carrie Stack was stacked. And beautiful. And he’d taken a ride on her merry-go-round more than once. It was an arrangement that suited them both.
“Detective Morgan. Detective McKittridge,” Carrie said, greeting them both. Her tone was neutral. She was a cat in bed, but on the job, she was always professional. And very good at her job. She stood in the doorway and carefully pulled on booties over her shiny black heels. “I was, unfortunately, waiting for the call. Where’s the husband?”
A.L. pointed outside. Terry Picus was in the back seat of a patrol car, his face partially turned away from the house. Five minutes earlier, he’d been bent double in the yard, losing his lunch on the rosebushes.
“Press is behind the line,” Carrie said. “Can’t wait to see the headline.”
The first murder had not gone unnoticed by the Bulletin. But it had been a reasonable four paragraphs—above the fold, of course, because, after all, murders were a rare occurrence in Baywood, Wisconsin. And if it had stopped after the first one, the victim would have been easily dismissed as that poor woman who was smothered in her own kitchen.
But then the second murder had occurred ten days later. It had been the lead story for three days running. The television folks in Madison, sixty miles southeast, had picked up the story.
The headline after the third murder had been expected. Baywood Serial Killer Strikes Again. So far they’d been able to keep most of the details under wraps, simply offering up the cause of death, the absence of any sexual assault and the location in the home where the bodies had been discovered.
But the press was getting antsy to find out why the police weren’t releasing any more information about the crime scenes. No one just lies down in their kitchen and waits to be smothered. That had come from James Adeva, the crime reporter at the Bulletin who was probably smarter than most.
He was right. Mostly. A victim might start off compliant. Yes, Mr. Bad Guy, I’ll be happy to take off my clothes and lie on this cold floor. Of course, she’d be hoping to get the upper hand at some point, or that her attacker would have a change of heart when he saw how accommodating she was. Maybe the killer had told the victim that it would be fast and painless if she didn’t struggle, but long and torturous if she did.
But no matter how it started, when it came right down to it, once the air supply got choked off, victims would instinctively put up a fight. The will to live was strong.
While Carrie did her thing, A.L. and Rena walked around, pointing at evidence that the techs needed to tag and bag. The clothes on the floor, the cell phone on the counter, the computer on the small desk in the kitchen.
After the second murder, they’d asked for resources from the state. A.L. had worried they might get in the way, but instead, they’d been helpful, especially with the computer and online activity analysis. The Picuses, like the other three families, would have no secrets by the time they were done.
The money trails they’d helped uncover had yielded a few coincidences, as one might expect. Baywood wasn’t that big, a
fter all. Didn’t have that many grocery stores or nail salons or gas stations that their three previous victims hadn’t overlapped at times. Now, they’d find out just how much in common Jane Picus had with any or all of the others. And regardless of how slight the connection might be, it would get followed up on.
He and Rena stood back while Carrie saw to the loading of the body into the ambulance. Then they followed her outside and watched as she walked over to Terry Picus. The two spoke briefly.
Carrie was good about remembering that while her focus was on the dead, the living couldn’t be ignored. It wasn’t possible to pretty up the indignity of an autopsy, but she would, at the very least, convey to Terry Picus that while his wife was in her custody, she would be handled with the utmost care.
She walked back to them. “I’ll call you as soon as I’m done,” she said. Then, looking at Rena, she asked, “What about Friday?”
Rena shook her head. “I’m pretty sure we’re canceling it. I’ll let you know. Nobody feels like celebrating these days. It’s not fair, but it just feels wrong.”
He waited until Carrie was gone before turning to his partner. “Another jewelry party?”
“Baby shower for Violet,” she said.
Maybe that was why Rena looked tired. Violet O’Brien was popping out her fourth kid in about as many years. And Rena and her husband had been trying for a while with no luck.
“She’s been on maternity leave more than she’s worked as the department’s secretary,” he said.
“I guess. We should talk to the husband again.”
“Yeah.” They’d exchanged basic information with him already. The guy had made the 911 call and had been waiting on the front steps when the first patrol car arrived. He and Rena had been just minutes behind. Mr. Picus had been pale and sweating, but he’d managed a few coherent sentences before his stomach had taken over.
Jane Picus had worked at the floral shop on Division. Today was her day off. She’d made him eggs and toast this morning before he’d left for work at the food plant at the edge of town. She’d still been in her pajamas. He had not talked to her or communicated with her in any way during the day. That wasn’t unusual. They’d been married for twenty-one years.
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