by Dana Marton
Chapter Two
“Anyone call from the lab?” Mo asked as he strode into the office, hating how the days ticked by without any serious progress. They needed a break and soon.
“None.” Shep was busy at work at his desk. “Found the damn fingers four days ago. You’d think we’d have something by now.” His face was stamped with frustration. “How was surveillance?”
“Hot.” He wiped his forehead, enjoying the icy blast of air-conditioning after the hundred-degree heat out there on the border.
The terrain was rough enough so he couldn’t drive his SUV up every ridge and down into every gully, which meant he spent half his time hiking, looking for footprints or any other sign of smuggling. He was hoping to catch some mules who could lead him to the man who handled all the dirty business on the U.S. side of the border. So far, he hadn’t succeeded.
“Didn’t see much. Busting Dylan Rogers slowed business to a trickle. I’m guessing his people are lying low. They figured out they’re being watched.”
“They’ll start up again. They won’t want to lose too much money.”
“We’ll be ready for them.” Still, it didn’t change the fact that the team was having a spectacularly unproductive week, chasing down leads that all came to dead ends.
They hadn’t been able to dig up anything new on Molly Rogers, either. They had no way to link the three chopped-off fingers to her. She claimed it had been months since she’d been out to the south border of her land. Mo hadn’t told her about the fingers. The details of their investigation were strictly on a need-to-know basis.
His instincts said she was innocent. But since images of her wearing that lavender silk nightgown kept popping into his head at every unguarded moment, he wasn’t about to trust his instincts on this one.
A small cardboard box sat on his desk. “What’s this?”
“New batch of gadgets for testing. More sensitive sensors, longer-radius listening device, long-distance trackers. Pretty cool, actually.”
He flipped open the box. Being able to test the latest spy gadgets was part of the perks of the job. But his phone rang before he could truly dig in. He picked it up as soon as he glanced at the display. He’d been waiting for this call all week.
“We have some matches for the prints you got off those slashed tires,” Doug, a lab tech from the main office in Washington, said on the other end. “Dylan Rogers, Molly Rogers and a set of unidentified kid prints.”
Logan’s, he thought as frustration swept through him. “Nothing else?” All he wanted was one small lead, dammit.
“The tire swab samples had human blood in them. Preliminary DNA test links the blood to a murder victim in San Antonio. Garcia Cruz.”
He shoved the box aside and sat up straighter. “Meaning the guy was killed with the same knife that slashed those tires?”
“Looks like it.”
Garcia Cruz. The name sounded familiar. He brought up the law-enforcement database and did a quick search. The muscles in his jaw tightened as he read.
The Cruz murder had been a gang slaying.
Exactly the wrong type of people for Molly Rogers to get tangled up with.
“And the fingers?” he asked.
“I ran the fingerprints. Another gangbanger. He has a prior record and a long list of aliases. I’ll write up a full report and send it over. Just thought I’d give you a heads-up.”
“I appreciate that.” Mo swore under his breath. Sounded as if it was time to visit Molly Rogers again.
* * *
THE DOGS WERE GOING MAD, barking and running around in the yard, then rushing up to her and pulling on her apron.
“I don’t have time to play, sorry, guys. I’m way behind.” Molly hustled on with her buckets.
Normally she fed the animals before she put Logan on the school bus in the morning, but they’d overslept. The power had gone out sometime in the night and reset the alarm clock. Thank God it was Friday. On Fridays she only had two deliveries, just a few boxes of produce to a local restaurant, and then the milk, both later in the day. She might catch up yet.
The horses were restless, too, snorting at her with reproach as she entered the stables.
“I know, I know. I’m late. Sorry.” And she was, even if she had needed the sleep.
She’d been way too stressed since her encounter with Moses Mann at the beginning of the week. He didn’t seem like the type of man who would just give up and go away. Every time a car drove by, she expected it to be him, coming to arrest her on some trumped-up charge.
She doled out the feed, then the water to the impatient horses. She patted Paulie, an old gelding. “There. See? Nobody starved.”
She moved on to her four cows next and milked them by hand before she let them out to pasture. She carried the five-gallon buckets into one of the outbuildings and got the milk ready for driving it into town. She milked morning and evening, sold the raw milk to an artisan cheese maker in Hullett.
Skipper, Max and Cocoa followed her everywhere, “helping.” She took turns pushing the dogs out of the way. “Remind me to schedule your shots.” Which brought Grace Cordero to mind. Her once best friend had recently left the army and opened up a vet practice down the road. The Cordero ranch was the closest house to her.
Except Molly hadn’t talked to Grace since before Dylan’s death.
Grace had been there when Dylan had been shot. She’d said Dylan had kidnapped her.... Why would she say that?
That terrible ache bubbled up in Molly’s heart again, so she pushed those thoughts away and refocused on her chores. She let out the chickens from the coop and fed them. The dogs weren’t allowed in the fenced-off area that protected her chickens from foxes and coyotes. She shooed them off. Dylan had some booby traps set up for anything that might go after her poultry. The dogs knew the traps and had been trained to stay away, but she didn’t like them back here.
“Go play.” She pushed them away, and they did run off.
Soon they were barking by the shed. What on earth was wrong with them today? Maybe they sensed a storm coming. She glanced up at the sky, but the clear blue dome stretched from horizon to horizon without a blemish. Looked as if the relentless heat would be staying. Wildfires were more of a threat than a storm at this point.
She collected the eggs into the empty bowl she’d brought the wheat in for the hens. Barely anything. The hens didn’t lay much in this kind of heat. She took the eggs into the house, then went back out to look in on her sizable vegetable garden. Weeds never took a break. She didn’t use pesticides or herbicides; all her fruits and vegetables were 100 percent organic, which got her top dollar at the local restaurants where she did weekly deliveries.
Since it hadn’t rained in forever, watering came first. She decided to use some compost tea as well, so she headed to the shed. The dogs were still scratching at the door. She shooed them away, but when she stepped inside, they rushed past her, nearly pushing her over.
They were growling and sniffing at everything.
“What’s up with you today?”
But then she caught it, too. Something was off. Okay, a lot of things were off, she realized suddenly, noticing that her buckets had been pushed around. A couple of the floorboards were damaged.
“All right. What got in this time?” She let the dogs investigate, stepping aside and leaving the door clear in case a wild animal was hiding in some corner and was about to make a dash for freedom.
Despite her best efforts and the dogs, wild critters had a way of getting into her garden and outbuildings from time to time. On the rare occasion, they’d done pretty spectacular damage in the past. Which didn’t seem to be the case here. Unless...
Her gaze caught on the top of a large antique feed box in the corner, the lid askew.
“Oh, God, not the corn.�
�
She kept her organic corn seeds in that box. She saved those seeds carefully year after year, since they were hard to come by. She always made sure the lid was closed tight so the occasional mouse couldn’t get in. That corn was one of her most prized possessions. If something ate that...
She hurried closer, even as she thought, A wild animal couldn’t have opened the lid. But she didn’t relax when she found the corn still in place. The lid had definitely been moved. The short hairs stood up at the back of her neck. A wild animal couldn’t lift the lid like that, she thought again.
A wild animal couldn’t have gotten in here in the first place. The door hadn’t been locked, but she did keep it barred. She turned in a slow circle, searching for holes in the floor and wall, the roof. She saw no hole that could have been an entry.
She squatted to examine the scratched floorboards, patting the dogs when they immediately came to lick her face. “I don’t like the look of this.”
The scratch marks were short and perfectly straight, not like what an animal would make.
“Crowbar,” she muttered, and Skipper gave a sharp bark, as if agreeing.
“Oh, yeah? Where were you when this was happening?”
But she knew the answer. The dogs had been out here, barking. She’d heard them in the night. And she’d ignored them, thinking nothing of it. They had plenty of wildlife around; the dogs were always barking at something or other.
She stood and grabbed a rusty old screwdriver from the windowsill, then pried one of the floorboards up, then another and another, until she had a gap wide enough for a good look. Nothing under there but a foot-deep gap to the ground, filled with spiderwebs, then packed dirt. She set the boards back into place and looked around, trying to see the place through fresh eyes.
“Why would anyone break into the shed? Nothing’s missing.” She definitely didn’t keep anything valuable here.
Had a drifter come by looking for food? Someone who’d come over the border in the night, stopping here for shelter? Maybe they’d tried to hide under the floor, then thought better of it on account of the rattlers that loved places like that. There was nobody down there now. She didn’t stick her head all the way down to look, but the dogs would have let her know.
She mulled over the odd business while filling two dozen boxes from her garden, then she drove into town for groceries and to drop off her freshly picked vegetables at the Italian restaurant, and the milk at the cheese shop.
Running a fully working ranch of this size was too big of a task for her alone, so she made money any way she could, with her cows and her organic garden, with boarding horses or whatever opportunities came her way.
“Thanks,” Ellie, the cheese maker, said. “I made this just for you.” She handed over an herbed roll of soft cheese, Logan’s favorite. “A gift. How are things at the ranch?”
What was she going to say? I’m a person of interest in smuggling? She forced a smile. “Everything is great.” Then she hurried out before Ellie could think of any more questions.
The new, shiny black tires on her pickup—courtesy of her credit card—drew her eye. She hated the thought of how long it was going to take to pay them off. Great, now she was adding credit-card debt to the bills, on top of the mortgage.
Then an uncomfortable thought struck her and she stopped midstride. Were her slashed tires and last night’s intruder connected? Could Moses Mann be right and some idiot was trying to send her a message?
On an impulse, she swung by the sheriff’s office to ask him about the weird shed business.
“I normally wouldn’t think anything of it, but someone slashed my tires in the driveway a couple of days ago,” she told Shane as they stood by the reception desk, the small office buzzing with activity around them. They’d had layoffs recently, so everybody who remained had to double up on work.
He looked more annoyed than interested, probably figured he had bigger problems. “Maybe them tires just deflated.”
“They had holes.”
The sheriff shrugged. “Could have run over some nails in the road without noticing.” He shuffled through a handful of pink phone-message slips.
“Will you come out to check the shed?”
He glanced up. The all-business look on his face was normally reserved for strangers. They’d known each other all their lives, but his features didn’t soften any as he asked, “Anything missing?”
“No.”
“You see anyone hanging around your place?”
“No.”
“I have two dozen cases that take priority.” He turned his back on her and walked away, toward his office.
“I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” Margie May, the receptionist, said, the only person at the station to show Molly any sympathy. “Probably some illegals passing through in the night.”
She nodded. That happened on occasion. She wasn’t scared of them. They never went up to the houses. They didn’t want trouble. All they wanted was to get up north unseen. One might have gone into the shed looking for food or water. But why would any of those people slash her tires? That didn’t make any sense.
Margie May looked after the sheriff. “He’ll come around. He’s embarrassed over your brother. They hung out at the bar on game nights. He’s gotten some flak for not realizing that one of his buddies was a criminal.”
Molly stiffened as cold disappointment spread through her. “Dylan was not a criminal. He was framed.” His exoneration could not come fast enough.
Margie May didn’t comment, just went back to her typing.
Molly strode out and headed off to the grocery store. Dylan so did not deserve the way people treated him.
Her brother had always been the only one she could truly count on. She wasn’t going to let him down. She was going to clear his name if it was the last thing she did.
She hurried through grocery shopping then went to the post office next. Missy Nasher, who’d always taken special pleasure in spreading rumors about her, stood at the end of the line.
If Missy saw her from the corner of her eye, she didn’t acknowledge her. Instead, she backed right into Molly and knocked the package from her hand.
“Oh,” she said as she turned around. Not sorry. Then put her nose in the air as she turned her back again, as if Molly was beneath her notice.
Missy struck up a conversation with the old woman in front of her about what a shame it was that the sheriff’s department was getting cut when crime was so obviously rampant in town. A direct dig at Dylan, no doubt.
Molly gritted her teeth, keeping her mouth shut. When the paper printed an apology, Missy and the rest of them would stand corrected.
Whatever people say about others, it always tells more about them than the person they’re speaking about. Wasn’t that what she always told Logan?
“How are you doing, Molly? I’m really sorry about your brother.”
She turned to the man behind her, feeling ridiculously grateful for the kind words. Her muscles relaxed a little as she smiled her gratitude at Kenny Davis, the Pebble Creek sheriff. “Thank you, Kenny.”
Kenny had gone to high school with Dylan. Good to see that he, at least, wasn’t turning his back on that friendship.
He gave her a warm smile. “How are things at the ranch?”
“All right.” She didn’t want to discuss her latest troubles with half a dozen people listening in.
“Old Woodward still renting?”
She didn’t work the whole ranch, couldn’t have handled it on her own. She had her gardens and a handful of animals. Most of her income came from what Henry Woodward paid her for renting her land as additional grazing ground for his steers. “He doesn’t get out much anymore. His sons have taken over,” she said.
“Any trouble with rustlers?”
“
Not that I heard of.” With the economy being what it was, rustling was coming back, like in the old days.
Missy gave two letters to the postmaster, paid and left with head held at a haughty angle.
Molly stepped up to the window at last and handed over her package, returning a pair of boots she’d ordered online that turned out to be too large.
She said goodbye to Kenny on her way out, but he caught up with her again in the parking lot. His police cruiser stood next to her old pickup.
“I was heading over to grab some coffee.” He gestured with his head toward the diner across the road. “How about it? I have a horse that needs to be boarded. I hoped we might be able to talk about that.”
She hesitated for a moment. The diner. Did she want to put herself through that? The speculative glances... If someone said something nasty about her brother, God help her—
Oh, to hell with it. She wasn’t going to run and hide. She had a life in this town. She was going to raise her son here. She had just as much right to be at the diner as anybody else did, regardless of what they all erroneously thought about her brother.
Nobody would accost her with the sheriff by her side, would they?
She forced a smile onto her face. “That would be nice.” And she kept that smile as they walked across the road together.
Kenny wasn’t overly tall, just a few inches taller than she. In high school, he’d been quite the heartthrob. He’d paid no attention to her back then, of course. None of her brother’s friends on the football team had. They had their eyes on the cheerleaders. She’d been just a scrawny kid to them.
Despite the years that had passed since, he was still handsome, more handsome in the traditional sense than Moses Mann. Two of Kenny could have fitted into Mo, who was built like a tank and had a nose that looked as if it had been the landing place for a number of well-aimed punches. And with that half-missing left eyebrow, Mo had some sort of warrior vibe that Kenny lacked. It probably drew women in droves. Not that she cared. She pushed the thought away. Why was she comparing the two men, anyway?
