The Lady's Man

by Linda Turner

  And it didn’t stop there. Throughout the rest of the evening, he slipped in and out of her thoughts at will, teasing her, distracting her and making a general pest of himself. In self-defense, she turned to her work. She had a progress report on the wolves to write for her boss, but when she sat down at her computer, she couldn’t seem to think of anything but Zeke. By the time she organized her jumbled thoughts and finally got the thing written, it was going on midnight, and she was as disgusted with herself as she was with him.

  She would not, she promised herself, take the infuriating man to bed with her! There were limits to just how much she would let him bother her, and he had just reached it. Before she’d spend the night dreaming of him, she’d stay up all night reading a murder mystery!

  But when she finally crawled into bed, she’d hardly punched her pillow into a comfortable position when the phone rang, and all thoughts of Zeke flew right out of her head. Her heart pounding, she froze, dread welling in her throat. She didn’t try to fool herself into thinking the caller on the other end of the line was a friend. Like Tina and Peter, she’d gotten her share of nuisance calls in the early evening, but occasionally, over the course of the past week, there’d been others that she hadn’t told them about, ones that were vile and filthy and upsetting.

  Every time she got one, she thought about calling Nick and reporting it, but she’d been through this all before, and she knew from past experience that it wouldn’t do any good. The calls were short and nearly impossible to trace, and were made by a number of callers. If she called in the sheriff, word would get out that she was scared, and that was just what her detractors wanted. And she’d be damned if she’d give them the satisfaction.

  Still, she considered letting the answering machine take the call. But no one ever left an incriminating message on tape. Instead, they kept calling back throughout the night until she finally answered in person. Resigned, she reached for the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Well, if it isn’t the wolf lady herself,” a cold, ugly voice sneered in her ear. “Bitch! Why aren’t you up on Eagle Ridge with those killers of yours? You’re just like them, you know. You’re nothing but a...”

  His language abruptly turned even more obscene, and Elizabeth stopped listening. When she’d first moved to town and started getting hostile calls, she’d tried to reason with the callers and make them understand that they really had nothing to fear. But she’d quickly learned she was just wasting her breath. People didn’t want to be educated about wolves or hear how they could benefit the area. All they knew was that the wolves were a threat to them and they wanted them gone—and her along with them.

  She didn’t want to antagonize people, but giving up on the project wasn’t something she was willing to do. So she let the callers have their say even though she didn’t listen to it, assured them she would consider their opinion when policies were set, then hung up, dismissing them from her thoughts as quickly as she could.

  This caller, however, was particularly vile and not so easily ignored. When he threatened her personally, she recoiled in distaste. She didn’t, she told herself, get paid enough to tolérate this kind of verbal abuse. Not even bothering to defend herself, she started to hang up. Then he threatened the wolves.

  “Everybody knows where you’re hiding them,” he told her slyly. “Right up there on Eagle Ridge in that fancy cyclone fence corral you built with taxpayers’ money. You ever stand up there in the trees and look down on them?” he taunted. “They look just like ducks in a barrel. And everybody knows just how easy it is to pick off ducks in a barrel. You don’t even need a scope.”

  Elizabeth’s heart stopped dead in her chest. Ignore him! a voice cried in her head. He doesn’t mean it. He’d never have the guts to shoot them—he’s just a coward who gets off hiding behind a phone line and making threats. Don’t even give him the satisfaction of an answer. He’s just pushing your buttons.

  She knew that, but she couldn’t slam the phone down as she wanted to. Not when her wolves might be in jeopardy “If you harm so much as a hair on their heads, I swear I’ll make sure you spend the next twenty years behind bars,” she said fiercely. “Stay away from my wolves!”

  “Too late,” he said mockingly, and hung up.

  For what seemed like an eternity, Elizabeth just lay there, the dial tone echoing softly in her ear. With horrifying ease, she could see someone standing on the ridge that overlooked the holding pen, using the trapped wolves one by one for target practice.

  “No!”

  She didn’t remember rolling out of bed or grabbing her clothes, but within moments, she was racing in her car toward Eagle Ridge, breaking every speed limit she came to without even checking her speed. Terrified of what she would find when she got there, she prayed like she had never prayed in her life. And over and over again, the prayer was always the same. “God, please don’t let me be too late!”

  Chapter 3

  Half expecting the wolves to be lying in pools of their own blood, she raced into the holding pen’s parking area and braked to a screeching halt, not even bothering to cut the engine before she burst from the car with her flashlight clutched in her hand. An icy wind slapped her in the face, but she never even noticed. All her attention was focused on the holding pen and the wolves.

  Her heart slamming against her ribs, afraid of what she would find, she unconsciously held her breath as she swept the beam of her flashlight over the pen. She wouldn’t have been surprised to find the wolves injured or even dead, but at first glance they appeared perfectly fine. They weren’t used to seeing her at night, but they still greeted her with their usual mournful howling.

  Her knees turning to jelly at the sight of them, Elizabeth laughed weakly. “Good evening to you, too. I guess I came charging out here to the rescue for nothing. You guys look just fine.”

  Then she noticed Napoleon. He hadn’t come forward as he usually did to greet her, but instead paced agitatedly inside the pen’s western perimeter, his attention divided between her and something off in the trees outside the pen. Concerned, she turned her flashlight into the trees. “What is it, boy? What’s wrong?”

  Nothing moved in the night. Frowning, she swept the powerful beam of her flashlight back and forth among the lodgepole pines to the west of where the holding pen sat in the middle of the small mountain meadow. Then, just when she was convinced that she was imagining the wolfs agitation, she caught sight of something lying on the ground at the edge of the clearing. Bathed in shadows, it was impossible to tell what it was in the darkness, but the goose bumps that suddenly raced over Elizabeth’s skin told her whatever it was, she wasn’t going to like it.

  In the two and a half months that she’d been making nearly daily visits to the holding pen, the place had become as familiar to her as the lines on the palms of her hands. She’d been there at all hours of the day and night, and despite the animosity she’d had to deal with from the locals, she’d never been afraid.

  But as she started around the west side of the pen armed with nothing but a flashlight, she became aware for the first time of just how isolated the pen was. Set back from the highway and surrounded by trees, it was out of sight of the road and miles from the nearest neighbor. It was that very isolation that had made the meadow the perfect site for the holding pen, but that was hardly reassuring now. All she could think of was that if she had to scream for help, no one would hear her.

  Too late she realized that she never should have come out there alone, especially at that hour of the night. She wasn’t one of those paranoid women who was afraid of her own shadow—she didn’t scare easily. But right then her gut was telling her that there was something sinister on the edge of the woods, and all her instincts were urging her to run for the car and get the hell out of there. But by then, she was less than twenty feet away from the shadowy object lying on the ground on the edge of the clearing, and even as she started to turn away, it came into focus and she realized what it was. Something dead
.

  Alarmed, she rushed forward, afraid that one of the wolves had somehow gotten out of the pen and been shot by whoever had called her. But as she drew closer, it quickly became apparent that the animal wasn’t a wolf, but a coyote. And it hadn’t been shot. There was no blood, nothing from outward appearances to show what had killed it. It just looked as though it had fallen where it stood.

  Then she saw the meat.

  The coyote had collapsed on top of it, half concealing it from view, but from what she could see, it appeared to be a large slab of beef. Swallowing thickly, Elizabeth’s blood ran cold at the sight.of it. She didn’t have to have it analyzed by a lab to know that it was laced with poison.

  Just that quickly, she was furious. And scared for Napoleon and the others. This was just a warning, a threat left by someone with a sick mind. Whoever the bastard was, he wanted her to know that he could have killed every one of her wolves tonight if he’d wanted to simply by throwing the poisoned meat over the fence. And next time, he just might.

  No! she raged silently. It wasn’t going to happen. If the bastard thought she would stand around wringing her hands and let him get away with that, he could think again. Nobody terrorized her or her wolves.

  The light of battle shining in her green eyes, she stormed back to her car and retrieved her cell phone from her purse. Punching in the number of the sheriff’s office, she said, “Nick, this is Elizabeth Davis. We’ve got a problem.”

  The kitchen in Zeke’s mother’s house hadn’t changed for as long as he could remember. Big and open, with paneglassed cabinets and an old commercial stove that had cooked thousands of meals for family and ranch hands alike, it was full of sunlight and the smells of breakfast in the morning. Sitting at the old scarred table that had been in the family longer than anyone could remember, Zeke took his first sip of coffee of the day and savored it with a groan of appreciation.

  It was barely six o’clock and his mother was already cooking breakfast. Joe and Merry were out in the barn checking on an ailing mare, and Janey was upstairs getting ready for work at the nursing home in town. It would be at least another hour or longer before the sun even thought about putting in an appearance, but the day had already started. And he didn’t even have his eyes open yet.

  When the phone rang, his mother answered it without missing a beat as she turned pancakes on the grill. Recognizing the caller, she smiled broadly. “Well, good morning, Steve. And how are you today?”

  Setting his mug down with a thud at the mention of his boss’s name, Zeke frantically motioned that he wasn’t there. “Tell him I went fishing or to an auction. Anything!”

  Her blue eyes sparkling with laughter, his mother nodded, only to give him up without a whimper of protest. “Yes, he’s here,” she said. “And scowling at me like a three-year-old. You’re not going to call him back to work, are you? He just got here.”

  “Tell him to call somebody else,” Zeke said loudly enough that his friend and boss had to catch it. “I’m on vacation.”

  His mother, listening to the other man, grinned and held out the phone. “He says you’re right where he needs you to be. If he’s lying, he’ll sell you his ’65 Mustang.”

  Still suspicious, Zeke hesitated. The Mustang was one of the few things that Steve Haily didn’t joke about. He’d always claimed that he’d sell his soul before he’d sell that car, and Zeke didn’t doubt it for a minute. He loved the damn thing—even if it was turquoise.

  Frowning, he took the receiver from his mother and braced for atrick. “This better be good, Haily. I’m not due to punch in again for another week and a half.”

  “Did I ask you to punch in?” the other man asked with a feigned innocence Zeke saw right through. “I just thought you might want to look into something for me while you’re in that neck of the woods and get another two weeks vacation for it since you’d officially be on the job. But hey, if you’re not interested, I just may take this one myself. The big boys in. Washington are damn sensitive about this wolf project they’ve got going down there—”

  In the process of reaching for his coffee, Zeke almost spilled it. “Wolf project?” he repeated sharply, now wide awake. “Are you talking about Elizabeth Davis?”

  “Yeah,” he said, surprised. “You know the lady?”

  “Yeah. I sat in on a town meeting last week to bring the locals up to speed on the project. Things got kind of heated. Has something happened to her?”

  “Not yet,” his boss said grimly, “but I don’t like the sound of what’s going on down there. Apparently she’s been getting nuisance calls ever since she moved to town to set up the project, but she’s been handling that all right—until last night. Someone threatened the wolves, then left some poisoned meat outside the wolves’ holding pen to make a point. The lady herself went out there around midnight and found the meat next to a dead coyote.”

  Zeke swore. Little fool! What the hell did she think she was doing, traipsing around the woods at that hour of the night by herself? She should have called Nick, dammit, and let him check out the situation for her. She knew how people felt about the project—they’d certainly made no secret of it the other night at the town meeting. It was a powder keg, just waiting to explode. All it needed was a nut to light the match, and somebody was going to get hurt. Last night it could have been her.

  His gut clenching at the thought, he didn’t have to think twice about whether he wanted to give up his vacation to take a case someone else could have handled. That decision was made the second Steve mentioned Elizabeth’s name. “I’ll start checking it out first thing this morning,” he promised.

  “We’re going to have to install more squirrel equipment in the trees at the edge of the clearing,” Elizabeth told Peter and Tina grimly the next morning.

  Her eyes burning from too little sleep, she’d spent what was left of the night at the holding pen after Nick inspected the area and announced that whoever had been there was now gone. He’d tried to convince her to go home, and she’d promised she would after he left, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to leave. So she’d sat in her car, run the heater and made plans. And the first thing she’d decided was that security had to be increased at the holding pen.

  Peter agreed. “I’ll get on it right away.”

  The team’s security expert, he was in charge of the secret squirrel equipment that monitored activity around the perimeter of the holding pen. If anything so much as moved within fifteen feet of the pen, an alarm sounded on the beepers they all carried with them. Which was why no alarms had sounded last night. The poisoned meat that Nick had confiscated and sent to the lab in Colorado Springs had been planted thirty feet from the compound’s west boundary.

  “I hate to be the one to bring up the topic, but what about money?” Tina asked bluntly. “We’re working on a shoestring as it is...which is why we didn’t wire the trees around the meadow in the first place,” she reminded them. “Who’s going to pay for this?”

  “I’ll find a way to deal with it,” Elizabeth promised. “The whole purpose of the project is to release the wolves back into the wild. That’s not going to happen if we can’t keep them safe until their release date.”

  The phone rang then, drawing a groan from her. Despite the fact that Liberty Hill was so small it didn’t even have its own newspaper, the word had somehow already gotten out about the threat against the wolves the previous night, and calls about the episode had been coming in ever since she walked in the door ten minutes ago. Not surprisingly, reaction was mixed. Some expressed horror over the attempted poisoning, while still others called to warn her that this was no more than she should have expected when she brought those killing monsters into the county in the first place.

  “Go ahead and draw up an estimate of what this is going to cost us,” she told Peter as she reached for the phone. “I’ll call Irene just as soon as you have the numbers.”

  But her boss was already on the other end of the line, calling to get the particula
rs about last night. “It sounds like you had quite an evening,” Irene Johnson said dryly. “I guess I don’t have to ask where you spent the night. Did you get any sleep at all?”

  Tired, her body aching from sitting up all night, Elizabeth had to laugh. No one knew her like Irene. “Not much, but I couldn’t take a chance that whoever left that meat would come back during the night and finish his dirty work.”

  “Of course not,” the other woman agreed. “I’d have done the same thing. I’ll put in a requisition for security cameras.”

  Not surprised that their minds were on the same track, she told her about the numbers Peter was already working on. “I’ll fax them to you as soon as he’s finished. How did you hear about this, anyway? I didn’t tell anyone but the sheriff, and I’ve been getting calls from all over the county ever since I got in this morning.” -

  “Evidently, the good sheriff has been concerned about the situation for some time. He notified poison control and the state police, and that started the ball rolling. The powers that be in Washington have decided to send you some help.”

  “Help?” she echoed, frowning. “You mean with security?”

  “Not exactly. He’s a Ph.D.—”

  “A what?”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” the older woman said quickly, “but it’s not as bad as it sounds. Wolves aren’t exactly his specialty, but he is a wildlife biologist, so it’s not like he’s one of those crazy scientists who never steps out of the lab.”

  “But I don’t need help with the wolves, Irene,” Elizabeth said in frustration. “I’ve got that under control. It’s the threats against them that I’m worried about. Their release date is only days away. If whoever called me last night carries through on his threats, they could all be dead by then!”