Shotgun Daddy

by Harper Allen

  “Gabe!”

  At the sound of her voice he turned, his features drawn. He ran to her, catching her as her knees buckled.

  “Dammit, Caro, when I saw the fire—”

  He didn’t finish his muttered sentence, instead wrapping her in an embrace so tight it was almost bone-crushing. She could fall apart now, she told herself. She was in Gabe’s arms, her ordeal was over, and she could fall completely to pieces if that was what she wanted. Or she could just stand here and feel the tension trembling along his every muscle and listen to the rapid beat of his heart….

  She chose the latter, pressing her cheek to the solid wall of his chest and barely noticing the rain trickling down the bare nape of her—

  She stiffened in shock. The next moment she was pushing herself from Gabe, her movements clumsy with urgency. Her hands flew to her head, and tremblingly she smoothed her hair back past her temples, behind her ears, to her neck.

  And felt the hacked-off ends—not just the single strand that had been caught as she’d been exiting the four-by-four, but all of it.

  “He cut off my hair!” Horror rose in Caro, making it difficult to force the rest of her words out. “He took it with him, Gabe—as a memento!”

  “DEL’S GRETA WAS A SUPERMODEL before she quit ten years ago in her early thirties and began concentrating on painting.” Susannah, Tye’s wife, stepped back from a seated Caro, frowned and used the tips of the scissors to make one last careful snip. “Since you didn’t want to wait for her to do this when she returns home tomorrow from her Albuquerque gallery showing, I figured having her talk me through it on the phone was the next best thing. What do you think, Tess?”

  Connor’s wife looked thoughtful. “I think it might just suit you better this way, Caro. Have a look.”

  The Double B women were doing their best to raise her spirits, Caro thought, listlessly taking the hand mirror that Tess was holding out to her and allowing Susannah to swivel her chair around to face the big mirror over the dresser. Upon her return to the ranch an hour ago, after hearing a truncated version of her ordeal from a grim-faced Gabe, Susannah had whipped off the apron she’d been wearing to prepare supper and she and Tess had hustled Caro into the bedroom. While Susannah had been trying to contact Greta, who hadn’t been at the art gallery but whom Susannah had finally tracked down at her hotel, Tess had taken care of Emily’s evening bottle.

  Neither woman had asked for details about what had happened, and for that she was grateful. She was going to have to talk about it eventually, but right now it was all she could do to keep herself under some semblance of control—and what had left her most shaken wasn’t the accident, but the inexplicable action her rescuer had taken.

  Susannah and Tess understand that, Caro thought. Any woman would. What that man did to me was a violation.

  Her reaction had nothing to do with vanity, and everything to do with feeling powerless. It had been a type of rape. With little interest she looked in the dresser mirror and saw a stranger staring back at her.

  Caro Moore had had patrician good looks, she thought slowly. Pale hair had swept straight from an alabaster brow to fall in a smooth satin flow halfway down her back. Sometimes it had been twisted into a low chignon or held in place with a plain clasp, but it had always given an icily fragile, touch-me-not impression.

  The stranger in the mirror didn’t look fragile or princesslike at all. Edgy bangs skimmed arched eyebrows. Chunky layers swung freely inches above her shoulders. She looked as if she would be equally at ease whether in buttery black leather and slightly tight jeans or a designer suit and pearls.

  The stranger in the mirror didn’t look powerless. She looked sexy and tough and like a force to be reckoned with. She looked strong, Caro decided. Better than that, she felt strong. Strong and—

  “And damn mad,” she said, her voice low and determined. “Mad enough to stop letting everyone shunt her off to the sidelines and start taking an active part in this investigation. Mad enough to want to kick some Leo butt, darn it!”

  In the mirror she saw Susannah and Tess exchange looks.

  “Is this what they call girl power?” Susannah asked.

  Tess shook her head. “It’s what they call becoming a Double B bad babe, Suze. You and I went through it. Now it looks as though Caro here’s joined us—and you know what?”

  In the mirror her gaze met Caro’s, and a slow grin spread over her features. “I get the feeling that Emily’s mama just might prove to be the toughest of all us Double B females.”

  IT HAD BEEN HARD ENOUGH keeping his equilibrium around her when she’d been a snow princess, Gabe thought, casting a glance across the kitchen table at Caro as she lifted her coffee cup and nodded at something Connor was saying. But with that almost-platinum hair falling into her eyes and curving toward her lips, whatever equilibrium he’d once had where Caro Moore was concerned was all shot to hell.

  It wasn’t just the hair. He’d never seen her in anything more casual than tailored slacks and a bandbox-crisp blouse, but now she was wearing jeans, and with a sleeveless T-shirt, no less. The T-shirt showed off her arms and her arms showed off the honey glow her skin had taken on over the past few days at the ranch. But as unsettling as those details were, they were surface differences.

  The real change was in her attitude. Elbows planted on the table, she took a bite of one of the homemade peanut-butter cookies Susannah had set out with the after-supper coffee. She frowned, pointed the cookie at Connor and interrupted him in the middle of a sentence, her words muffled.

  “You’re wrong, Con. I didn’t get a good look at the jerk who ran me off the road, but he wasn’t the same person as the man who pulled me out of the car.” She swallowed and her words became clearer. “Before I lost control of the wheel, something struck me as familiar about the other driver. It’s making me crazy that I can’t remember what it was, darn it.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up about it, darlin’,” Del said dryly. “The vehicle you were in was rammed, you were trapped in a burning wreck, and your rescuer turned out to be a sicko. No one would blame you if you’d blanked out everything.”

  “Me blanking out won’t help us catch a killer, and that’s what I intend to do from now on—help,” Caro said. “Leo had Jess killed. He’s threatened my child’s life. I won’t stand idly by to let others handle this problem for me anymore.”

  “Yeah, you will.” Since no one else seemed to want to set her straight, Gabe thought, it looked as though the job had fallen to him by default. “Like I told you before, you’re out of this precisely because you are a target. Your recklessness today could have cost you your life, dammit—and if you’re too stubborn to see that, Del should have.”

  “Riggs is right. I put you in danger by getting you to drive me to Joanna’s,” Hawkins said gruffly. “It was a bone-headed play on my part.”

  It wasn’t the response Gabe had expected from the ex-marine, but before he could reply, Caro cut in, her tone sharp.

  “I insisted you get medical attention, Del, and I’d make the same decision again. What happened to me on the Dinetah was no one’s fault but my own, and I’ll thank both you and Gabe to let me take responsibility for my actions like the adult I am. I shouldn’t have driven off to find Alice Tahe’s hogan by myself, granted. That doesn’t mean I can’t—”

  “Alice Tahe?” Tess sounded startled. “I didn’t realize you were on your way to see her when the accident happened.”

  This conversation was getting away from the point he needed to make, Gabe told himself. He needed to bring it back on track, and fast.

  “When Con and I came back here after wasting the day looking at mug shots and learned about Del’s run-in with the dog, we went straight to Joanna’s clinic,” he said. “I already knew about Alice’s Skinwalker obsession, since she’s asked me to visit her, too, and Joanna told me that the old lady had wanted to talk to Caro about it. That’s when I left to go looking for her. But Skinwalker and Alice Tahe aren’t impor
tant. What is important is that someone came close to killing you today, Caro, and since I don’t buy your theory of a random speeder—”

  “I don’t buy it, either,” she said promptly. “I wasn’t thinking clearly immediately after the accident, but it’s obvious to me now that Steve was deliberately attempting to—”

  She stopped. He saw her eyes widen in excitement as she realized what she’d just said, and he heard an echo of the same tension in his voice as he prompted her.

  “Dixon? You’re saying he was the driver who ran you off the road?”

  “But you didn’t see his face,” Del said. “Did you recognize his vehicle?”

  “Not his vehicle, his ball cap,” Caro said slowly. “Steve’s hometown is Detroit. The driver was wearing a dark blue ball cap with a big white D. I don’t know how often in the past I’ve seen Steve wearing it and heard Jess razzing him about being a die-hard Tigers fan.”

  “I hate to rain on anyone’s parade, but a ball cap’s not exactly conclusive evidence.”

  John MacLeish had been silent up until now. Since Gabe had learned that he and Daniel Bird weren’t the type to talk unless they had something to say, Mac’s comment got his attention. The ex–Beta Beta Force member shrugged apologetically.

  “Especially when we have to assume that the driver who tried to kill Caro today was either Leo himself, or working for him. It’s unlikely there’s a second killer out there targeting her.”

  “Dixon can’t be Leo,” Gabe said flatly. “When the call came through from the man who called himself by that name, Steve was right there in the room with us. Besides, him being Leo would mean he’d arranged Jess’s kidnapping for some unknown reason, and I can’t buy that. He must have known his involvement would be in danger of being revealed as soon as Jess was released.”

  “But Jess wasn’t released, he was killed,” Caro pointed out. “His death warrant was signed when Steve gave Larry Kanin the go-ahead to barge in on a sensitive negotiation with guns blazing. Mac just said that if Ball Cap was Steve, then Steve has to be Leo or working for Leo, but there’s a possibility we’ve overlooked. What if Leo’s working for Steve?”

  He didn’t like any of this, Gabe thought suddenly. He didn’t like the way Caro was involving herself so wholeheartedly in this investigation, he didn’t like her bandying around a theory that implied Jess’s killer was someone close to her, and he didn’t like the way she’d seemingly dismissed what had happened to her today. Del’s assessment of her rescuer as a sicko was probably right: the man’s behavior had been dangerously strange. But his presence on the scene had been all that had saved her from certain death.

  The image that had flashed through his mind a dozen times in the past few hours seared across his imagination again—the rain-slick road, the blazing wreck coming into view, the terrible confirmation as he’d sped closer that the wreck was all that was left of the red four-by-four she’d been driving….

  At that moment he’d known with absolute certainty that she was dead, and it had seemed to him as if the world had suddenly stopped spinning. A heartbeat later it had started up again when he’d seen her stumbling toward him from across the road.

  None of which means you’re in love with the woman, he told himself harshly. Yeah, you fell for her, just a little, a long time ago. You even tried to convince yourself she’d fallen for you a little, too, until she made it damn clear she hadn’t. Maybe there’s something between you, on her side, as well as yours, but it doesn’t involve hearts and flowers, Riggs. If you think just because she’s wearing jeans she’s not a snow princess anymore, you’re heading for a second long fall where the lady’s concerned.

  Which didn’t change the fact that he’d taken on the job of keeping her and her baby safe. And if that meant playing the heavy, then that was what he’d have to do.

  “Leo works for Steve Dixon.” He didn’t keep the skepticism from his tone. “Okay, let’s run with that. Crawford Solutions’ vice president somehow found his own tame criminal—we’ll call him Leo, to keep this simple—and not only does Dixon give the orders to Leo, he trusts Leo won’t double-cross him and keep the ransom himself. Have I got it right?”

  “Not quite,” Caro said crisply. Blue eyes blazed at him from across the table. “Leo’s no criminal, he’s a puppet, coached by Steve on what to say during the phone calls so Steve would have exactly the alibi you just gave him—that he was in the room when the kidnapper called.”

  “You’re forgetting the scrambling device and the voice filter. You’re talking hard-core contraband, not something jerry-rigged out of components bought from a mall electronics store. Even if Dixon had the contacts to hire the thugs he sent to the handover, there’s no way he would have known who to go to for equipment like that.”

  He stood. “Your theory’s as improbable as Alice Tahe’s Skinwalker scenario, princess. Why don’t you leave the—”

  “Dixon couldn’t jerry-rig those things, no.” She returned his gaze. “But I know someone who could…and that someone would have jumped at the chance to get back at Jess.”

  He knew why he didn’t like any of this, Gabe realized. He’d known from the moment she’d walked into the kitchen, but he hadn’t wanted to own up to his reasons.

  Because those reasons don’t paint you in a real good light, do they, buddy? She needed you. If history’s anything to go by, she would have dumped you as soon as she’d gotten what she wanted from you, but for now she needed you—to handle the situation, to protect her, to keep Emily safe. This new Caro might just be tough enough not to need a burned-out case like Gabe Riggs.

  And that was his problem, not hers.

  He met her gaze. “Disgruntled computer genius, hired by Dixon and fired by Jess, then given an opportunity to hit back at his ex-boss—an opportunity he might not have realized included murder. Are you thinking of the same someone I’m thinking of?”

  “Andrew Scott,” Caro said. “Except—”

  He nodded. “Except, I didn’t investigate him when I first heard he’d disappeared. And now Scott’s probably sunk out of sight, thanks to my screwup.”

  Chapter Nine

  “Huge mistake,” Caro muttered under her breath as she padded down the hall in the dark and descended the shadowy stairs. “Huge, huge mistake. What was I thinking, letting Susannah take Emily for the night?”

  That question was easily answered, she admitted. When the after-dinner discussion had ended with Connor suggesting he use his former FBI contacts to locate Scott, and Gabe curtly informing the group that he would use some ex–Recoveries International comrades to post a twenty-four/seven watch on Steve Dixon in case the Crawford Solutions’ vice president intended to bolt, Susannah had drawn her aside.

  “Tess and I figure it’d do you a world of good to have a night by yourself, Caro,” she’d said, her soft West Virginia drawl uncharacteristically firm. “Being a mama myself and knowing how I fret when baby Danny’s not with me, I guess you’re goin’ to tell me you don’t need a girls’ night in, with nothing to do but relax. But I won’t take no for an answer. While Tye’s down in Mexico liasing with those federale police, me and Danny have been stayin’ with Tess and Con and their rapscallion, Joey, so one more little one won’t be a problem. And you’ve been through the wringer today.”

  It had been a generous and warmhearted offer, Caro thought now. She’d accepted—mostly because she’d worried that after the events of the day she would be out like a light as soon as her head hit the pillow and might not hear Emily if her baby daughter woke up in the night.

  “Out like a light,” she snorted softly now as she felt her way through the kitchen in the dark and grasped the refrigerator door handle. “Wired like a light’s more like it. I’m buzzing so much from that coffee I had after supper I doubt even a glass of milk’s going to—”

  The glow from the opened refrigerator illuminated the room. Out of the corner of her eye Caro saw a man sitting at the kitchen table, and she bit back a squeak.

&nb
sp; So much for your new tough image, she thought. Chagrin lent a note of testiness to her voice as she plunked the carton of milk on the table and fixed Gabe with a stare.

  “You really have to stop giving me heart attacks in the middle of the night, Riggs,” she told him. She nodded at the partially open door leading off the kitchen. “Your bedroom’s right there. Why come out here to sit in the dark?”

  As she spoke she flicked on the light and got a momentary glimpse of a bare chest and well-worn jeans riding low on lean hips. Gabe tipped back his chair, reached behind him and flicked it off again.

  “It’s not dark, your eyes just haven’t adjusted yet. I could ask you the same question. What are you doing, wandering around the house in the small hours in your underwear?”

  “Hardly my underwear.” She raised an eyebrow at him. “Shortie pj’s, and they cover everything they’re supposed to. I couldn’t sleep. What’s your excuse?”

  He was right, it wasn’t completely dark, she realized as she got a glass from the cupboard and sat down at the table. A small light burned at the porch entrance just past the screen door.

  “I was going over my options.”

  She glanced at him through her lashes. “Options? Have you changed your mind about putting a surveillance team on the Lazy J to watch Steve?”

  He shook his head. “I made the calls while you were getting Emily ready for Susannah. The team’s already in place, although I doubt Dixon will do anything to draw attention to himself right now. My guess is, he plans to wait until the initial excitement over Jess’s kidnapping and death subsides, quietly resign from Crawford Solutions with some excuse like his heart just isn’t in it anymore, and then just as quietly disappear. That would be the smart way to do it.”

  He frowned. “Although I could be giving him too much credit. Trying to eliminate you today wasn’t the action of a man who’s thinking clearly.”

  “It was the action of a man who was desperate,” she agreed. “The question is, why would I make Dixon feel desperate—so desperate he took the risk of trying to kill me himself?”