Trouble in Big Timber

by B. J Daniels

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It was for the best.” She glanced at him. “What are you really doing here?”

  “Same thing as you. I want to know the truth. I need to know the truth since Rachel dragged me into it. Now she wants me gone. I think it’s because she’s afraid I’m suspicious, and if I think she used me, I might be determined to discover the truth.”

  “Is she wrong?”

  “No,” he said.

  She stared at Ford. She’d been so sure he was a sheep and Rachel was a wolf leading him to slaughter. She realized she was going to have to reassess what she thought of him. Love could make you blind and stupid, she knew well. But the smart ones paid attention to the red flags. There were always red flags when a relationship wasn’t right.

  “So the driver of the pickup,” he said, looking through his binoculars again. “I figure he’s the boyfriend.”

  “What makes you think her accomplice is a boyfriend?” she asked, pretending that wasn’t exactly her thought.

  Ford chuckled. “For the same reason you do. If she orchestrated all of this, then she had to have someone she trusted to pull it off. It had to be someone she had wrapped around her little finger. That usually involves money or sex, in my experience. Sex is the cheapest.”

  She laughed. “You surprise me,” Hitch said, leveling her gaze on him.

  “I must look dumber than I am.”

  She shook her head. “Rachel thinks you’re still in love with her and will do anything for her.”

  He chuckled. “Not after my visit this evening,” he said with a grimace. “If she deliberately set Humphrey up to kill him...” Ford looked away for a moment, and she knew he was thinking of the consequences of Rachel’s actions if true.

  “You know what they say about secrets,” Hitch said. “Two people can keep them, as long as one of them is dead. Her accomplice made a mistake tonight by trying to run you off the road. He best watch his back, because I’m betting his days are numbered.”

  * * *

  FORD LOWERED THE binoculars and looked at Hitch in the dim light. She had raised her binoculars and was watching the ranch house again. The lights were still on even though it was after midnight. There was a sweet innocence about her face that was at odds with her career choice, he thought, and that determined strength that made her indomitable. “I’m curious. How did you get into this line of work?”

  “My dad was a cop. My mother was an attorney. They argued all the time because of their jobs, especially at the dinner table in the evening after work. My brother became a psychologist, my sister a schoolteacher, and I studied to become a medical examiner.” She shrugged. “I always liked dissecting frogs in school.”

  Ford couldn’t help but smile. “How does your family feel about it?”

  “It makes for interesting discussions on Thanksgiving,” she said with a laugh. “What about you?”

  “Me?” He shook his head. “Nothing interesting. During my parents’ divorce, Dad moved us to Montana. I was just a kid when he and his brothers opened a barbecue restaurant in Big Sky. My uncles, all of them, ended up moving to Montana. My dad’s cousin Dana Cardwell Savage lives on a ranch, so I spent a lot of time there growing up.”

  “You went into the military after college?”

  He nodded. “I’d majored in engineering. What I really wanted was to fly.”

  “And now?”

  “Not so much.” He picked up his binoculars and scanned the darkness around the house below them on the mountain, desperately wanting to change the subject.

  “Have you thought about ranching?” she asked. “It sounds like you enjoyed that.”

  He hadn’t thought about anything. For so long after the crash, the rehabilitation, the end of his military career, he had felt as if he was in a black hole. Rachel had yanked him out of it. He’d always be thankful for that even though he now suspected that she’d had her own reasons for reaching out to him.

  Ford thought of Cardwell Ranch and the position his aunt Dana had offered him. He’d thought he’d lost all his enthusiasm for life. He’d been so down, so depressed, so despondent. The doctor’s visits didn’t seem to be helping the PTSD. But maybe they’d been doing more good than he’d thought.

  Because he was beginning to realize that it had been more than Rachel’s phone call that had brought him back from the brink. He’d had to hit bottom before he could climb back out. Now here he was.

  “I might ranch.” Even as he said the words, they surprised him. But he realized they just happened to be true.

  * * *

  HITCH FELL SILENT, aware that something intimate had passed between them. She stared out into the darkness at the house down the mountainside for a few moments.

  “You know what bothers me?” Ford asked. “Rachel doesn’t seem that heartbroken about Humphrey being dead.”

  Hitch glanced over at him. “She wouldn’t be if she was telling the truth and her husband beat her until she feared for her life and had to protect herself. She also seems to believe that he was having an affair—which he wasn’t, according to the woman in question. But the alleged girlfriend did say that Humphrey seemed lonely. He was getting Rachel a horse for her birthday this coming week.” She waited for his reaction.

  “Doesn’t sound like a man who would beat his wife.”

  Hitch laughed. “The sheriff thinks it made Humphrey look guilty.”

  Ford lowered the binoculars and looked at her. “He could have been trying to assuage his guilt and make it up to her if he really was abusing her.”

  “All possible,” she agreed as she caught movement out of the corner of her eye and picked up her binoculars again. “Well, how about that? It appears someone is finally making a move.”

  Hitch pulled out her camera with the telephoto lens and aimed it at the man coming out of the house. Unfortunately, it was too dark to see his face. He’d walked out of the house and was now going around to the back.

  She lowered the camera and started the SUV. “I want to see what he’s driving.” She punched the gas before Ford could move, forcing him to hang on.

  “Do you always drive like this?”

  “Usually. Am I scaring you?”

  “I don’t scare that easily,” he said, and she sped up.

  As they came around the last curve, she spotted the lights of a vehicle racing up the ranch road. “I think I can cut him off down at the highway,” she said as she took a side dirt road and increased her speed. He’d asked earlier if there was a back road into the ranch. She’d already checked them all out online, so she had a pretty good idea where the pickup was heading.

  They were flying along, bouncing over ruts and bumps. She glanced over at Ford from the corner of her eye. He looked a little green around the gills. “If you’re going to throw up, please do it out the window.”

  “Throw up?” He scoffed. “I can take whatever you dish out.”

  She grinned at that. “I do love a challenge.”

  Not far down the road, she hung a right and came roaring up onto the paved highway before hitting her brakes. Looking both to her right and left, she saw no sign of vehicle lights.

  “He could have gone the other way,” Ford said just an instant before a set of headlights topped a rise and shot toward them.

  “Let’s see if we can get a make and model of this car,” she said as she pulled to the edge of the road and cut her engine and lights. “A license plate would be even better.”

  A dark-colored pickup sped past at the same time Hitch restarted the SUV and gunned the engine. Her vehicle jumped up onto the highway again, tires squealing as she went after the truck.

  * * *

  FORD FOUGHT BACK the nausea. He would rather die than prove Hitch right by vomiting. His stomach roiled, though. The wild ride was giving him flashbacks of his plane crash—as well as his
recent race to the end of a cliff. He felt disoriented and out of control. Sweat broke out on his back as he struggled to separate the events and fight off the anxiety attack.

  Taking deep breaths, he stared straight ahead at the two red taillights. The lights grew larger and larger as Hitch closed the distance. He saw that the back of the pickup was covered in mud, making it almost impossible to read the license plate.

  “It’s a Chevy half-ton pickup. Newer model. Dark blue or gray. Hard to tell with all the dust on it,” Ford said, concentrating on the truck rather than the flashbacks that flickered like an old-timey movie in his head. He could smell the smoke, feel the flames licking at him as he fought to get his men out before the plane’s gas tank blew.

  “Can you read the plates?” Hitch asked.

  “Starts with 40.”

  “Big Timber.”

  “I think it’s 19 after that, but I can’t read the rest,” he said.

  She turned on her blinker and passed the truck, getting the SUV up to over a hundred. “You might want to duck down. If he sees you and recognizes you—”

  “I’ll take my chances, thanks.” His head hurt and he still felt sick to his stomach. Given the vibration of the SUV, he estimated that she had to be pushing the SUV to over a hundred and thirty. They zoomed past the pickup.

  “Well?” she asked as she whipped back into the right lane and kept going.

  “He was wearing a cowboy hat, so I couldn’t see much of his face.” She shot him a look, making him more nervous. “The road,” he said. “Also, aren’t there deer out here at night?”

  “Was the man behind the wheel the one who had tried to run you off the road earlier?”

  He shook his head. Wrong pickup, he was pretty sure. His head ached. He could hardly think. But he was sure this wasn’t the same driver or the same pickup.

  “Well?” she asked.

  He rubbed his temples. “I don’t think so, but honestly, I don’t know.” He felt as if he had disappointed her.

  “We should go back and get your rig,” Hitch said, hitting her brakes and doing a highway patrol turn in the middle of the road. Once they were headed in the opposite direction again and slowed down, she said, “Tell me you can do better than that on a description of the man since you’re about to get another look at him.”

  He looked out the windshield as the pickup sped past. “Strong jaw, straight nose. Dark designer stubble. Nice looking. Are we assuming this is the boyfriend? The age looks about right. Maybe a little young for her.”

  She chuckled at that. “I guess I’ll find out once I know who he is.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  It didn’t take long for Hitch to match the make and model of the vehicle the man had been driving last night to the partial plate number.

  “Who is Lloyd Townsend?” she asked the sheriff when she walked into his office first thing the next morning.

  Charley didn’t look happy to see her. “Why are you asking about Lloyd?” She waited him out until he finally sighed and said, “He’s one of our most respected businessmen in town. You don’t want to go messing with Lloyd. Everyone in this town loves him. He’s always the first to donate to any cause. Salt of the earth.”

  “Got it,” Hitch said and turned to walk out.

  “Hold up there a minute,” the sheriff said. “Mr. Collinwood is on my back about his boy’s body being released.”

  “He can take him today,” Hitch said and saw Charley’s surprise. “I think I have everything I need.”

  “To convict that poor woman?” the sheriff demanded, an angry edge to his voice.

  “If she’s guilty, then hopefully yes,” Hitch said and left the sheriff’s department. As she headed out the front door, she spotted Ford leaning against his pickup as if waiting for someone. She smiled, realizing she was that someone.

  * * *

  “HAVE YOU HAD BREAKFAST?” Ford asked as he pushed off the side of the vehicle and stepped toward her.

  “As a matter of fact, I haven’t.”

  “Well, I’m hungry and I don’t like to eat alone. Hop in. I’ll drive.”

  He drove the few blocks to the café, neither of them saying anything. Once inside, they sat across from each other in a booth.

  “Why do I suspect you have something on your mind besides breakfast?”

  He nodded. “I had a lot of time to think last night. I’m not as convinced that Rachel had something to do with me being run off the road.” Hitch nodded as if she wasn’t surprised. “Did you find the man we saw last night coming out of her house?”

  “Might have.” She pulled out her phone, tapped in the name and came up with a photo of an elderly man with a thick head of gray hair. “How old would you guess the man was who you saw driving the pickup?”

  “Forties maybe. He could have been younger. As you know, I didn’t get a good look at him either time.”

  She turned her phone screen so he could see it. “Could he have been sixty-seven with gray hair and glasses?”

  Ford chuckled. “My eyesight is better than that. Who’s the man?”

  “Lloyd Townsend,” she said, putting her phone away. “Clearly not the one driving last night. But it was his truck.” The waitress brought them coffee, water and menus, and they both ordered quickly without hardly glancing at their menus.

  Ford’s mind was on the woman across the table and their surveillance adventure last night. He’d seen another side of Henrietta Roberts, one he rather liked. “I don’t think that pickup and driver was the same one that ran me off the road. The more I’ve thought about it, I think it was just a drunk driver and I was being paranoid.”

  “That it was a coincidence that this driver showed up shortly after you left Rachel Collinwood’s house? Like the coincidence of her pocket dialing you just before she killed her husband?”

  He met her gaze. “What if you’re wrong about her? What if we both are?”

  Hitch leaned her elbows on the table, giving his question some thought. “Then the lack of evidence will allow her to either walk or get a lighter sentence. She did kill a man. If she truly was an abused wife, she needed to leave him—or in this instance do what she could to get away from him. If she’d hit him with a frying pan, well, she would have had a better chance of getting off. Having the gun makes it look as if she was laying for him.”

  “What if she was afraid to leave Humphrey?” he asked. “I’ve looked into this a little, and from what I’ve read, the highest risk time for a homicide is not when she’s in the relationship but when she’s trying to leave it.”

  “In order to prove self-defense, she has to prove that she was or at least believed that she was in imminent danger. The problem is that she had the gun. Did she have other alternatives other than to use what could be seen as unreasonable force? That will be up to a jury to decide. Why did she have the loaded gun handy? If she feared they were going to have a knock-down, drag-out fight, why wouldn’t she get out of there?”

  “Because she felt safe. She had the gun if things got out of control,” Ford said. “If he’d beaten her up before, then this time she planned to stop him.”

  “We can’t know what was going through her mind at the moment she pulled the trigger. We might never know.”

  The waitress brought their breakfast orders and they ate in a companionable silence, until Hitch pushed her plate away and asked, “What do you know about Humphrey’s parents? Did he ever mention that they didn’t get along?”

  “You’re asking if Bart was abusive.” He frowned. “You found out something about Humphrey.” He could tell that she didn’t want to share the information with him.

  “Bart let it slip that his son had seen him hit his wife. A slap. Bart swore it was the only time and that Humphrey had been horrified and never forgave him.”

  Ford groaned as he raked a hand through his hair. “You’
re thinking father like son.”

  “It could be that Humphrey mentioned what he’d seen to Rachel. It could have given her the idea. Or he could have been so angry with her...”

  “This makes you have doubts,” he said, shaking his head. “So your mind isn’t completely made up after all.” He smiled at her, liking her even more. Not that he wanted it to be true of Humphrey.

  She looked at the time on her phone. “I have to go. Thanks for breakfast.”

  “My pleasure.” He watched her leave, wondering how Lloyd Townsend’s pickup played into all this.

  * * *

  LLOYD TOWNSEND OWNED a hobby ranch on the Yellowstone River just a few miles from town. As Hitch drove up into the ranch yard, she spotted the pickup she’d seen last night and parked beside it.

  Getting out, she walked over to the truck and looked inside, seeing nothing of interest.

  “Can I help you?” asked a male voice from the front porch of the house. She hadn’t heard anyone come out.

  Turning, she considered the elderly man for a moment, before she stepped to the house, stopping at the bottom of the stairs. “I’m Hitch Roberts, state medical examiner.” He seemed to be waiting for more. “I’m currently working on a local case. Were you driving this pickup last night sometime after midnight?” She waited, wondering what his answer would be. If he lied, he might be involved. If he didn’t—

  “No,” he said, frowning. “You’re sure it was my truck? After midnight?”

  She nodded. “It was this truck. Who else might have been driving it?”

  Lloyd Townsend rubbed his jaw for a moment before he said, “I suppose one of my sons could have taken it. What’s this about?”