Hot on the Trail

by Vicki Tharp

  St. John raised a mildly curious brow.

  “If he was left-handed, it should have been his right sleeve that had been rolled up. Not his left.”

  Beside him, Jenna sucked in a breath through her teeth. The space around her irises flashed white as she realized that Quinn might not have been paranoid, or full of wishful thinking. It was worse than that.

  Quinn might be right.

  He gave her a slight nod. St. John sat back, his expression shifting from mild interest to everyone-thinks-they’re-a-detective. Quinn could practically hear the man mentally curse every cop show on television.

  “Junkies are good at using whatever vein works with whatever hand works. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Maybe,” Quinn conceded, though he’d rather hit the never-exceed speed in his helo than admit that.

  “Doesn’t explain why no one found a tourniquet,” Jenna said.

  That’s my girl. Well, Jenna wasn’t a girl anymore, and not his anything, but Quinn gave her a wink.

  “He could have used his belt,” St. John said.

  Holding up the photo in which Kurt lay facedown in the dirt, Quinn pointed at Kurt’s waist. “His belt is through the loops. When you’re getting high, restringing your belt isn’t your top priority.”

  If Quinn kept going, he’d run the sheriff out of excuses. Out of reasons to believe Kurt’s death was anything but a homicide.

  Coming out from behind his desk, St. John took the file from Quinn, placing the photographs back inside. “We done here?”

  He’d phrased it like a question, but Quinn understood that the only acceptable answer was yes.

  Quinn stood. Lost in her thoughts, however, Jenna remained seated. “Jenn,” he said, getting her attention. “Time to go.”

  She stared at him as if he’d spoken Klingon and her brain was trying to translate. He encouraged her to stand with a light hand on her elbow.

  “Do you know when they’ll release the body?” she asked St. John.

  “Still working on that.”

  Jenna nodded, and Quinn ushered her toward the door. At the threshold, he turned back and asked, “If the ME hasn’t done it, will you ask for a hair analysis for drugs to determine whether or not he’d been clean the last few months?”

  “Even if he’d been clean, doesn’t mean he didn’t start up again of his own free will. What does it matter?”

  “It would matter to me. And to his mother.”

  The sheriff spared him a curt nod, then to Jenna asked, “You have any more thoughts on whose car lights you saw at the S Friday night?”

  Quinn froze, and Jenna refused to look at him. “No, not yet.”

  * * * *

  The drive back to the S took twice as long as the drive to town. Multitasking—i.e., grilling Jenna about the car lights the sheriff had referred to, and pressing his foot down on the accelerator—seemed beyond Quinn’s skill set. How had he ever managed to pilot a helicopter?

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Nothing to tell. I saw lights. Once around ten thirty, again around midnight. At least one of those times it was Kurt, because his car was there in the morning. I don’t know whether it was him both times or whether someone followed him home. Alby, Santos, Hank, and Mac had all spent the night out on the range. Sidney, Boomer, and Pepita didn’t go out that night, and Grandma and Grandpa had turned in early. So if there was a second car, it wasn’t one of ours. But that’s a big ‘if’.”

  Quinn pulled into the Lazy S and slowed. If Jenna walked back, she could make better time. She gripped the door handle and contemplated stepping out. It wasn’t like he was going fast enough for her to get hurt.

  But she knew Quinn. Rolling out of the car and walking away would only prolong the interrogation. She laid the seat back a couple of notches. The urge to sleep and hope that when she awoke she’d find that Kurt’s death was just some fantastically abysmal nightmare was too overwhelming to ignore.

  “Think back—”

  “What do you think I’ve been trying to do?” She kept the snarl off her lip, but not out of her voice.

  On the steering wheel, Quinn’s knuckles whitened, and the edges of his healing scars reddened. “Humor me. Close your eyes.”

  Gladly. With the Mustang’s old shocks, Jenna felt every rock, every ripple, every blade of grass the Mustang rolled over, while the engine purred like a pride of lions after an impala lunch, the vibration lulling her deeper, and deep—

  “Holy cowboy!” Jenna bolted upright. “It wasn’t Kurt. The second set of lights wasn’t Kurt.”

  “What?” Quinn slammed on the brakes, the lap belt caught her around the hips, and even though they weren’t going very fast, Jenna braced her hand against the dashboard to keep from knocking her head.

  “The Mustang, when it goes by the house, the reverberation from its muffler rattles the old windows in their frames. The second set of lights—no vibration. That time it wasn’t him. It was someone else.”

  “Speaking of someone else…”

  What? Following Quinn’s gaze toward the barn, Jenna saw a white Chevy Caprice, with some official-looking emblem painted on the door. “Uh-oh.”

  Before the Mustang came to a complete stop, Jenna popped her door open.

  “Who is it?” Quinn asked.

  Already halfway out, Jenna leaned back into the car. “If I’m right, someone from the state agency overseeing the program. That they would send someone in person can’t be good, though.”

  “Hold on a sec, and I’ll go with you.”

  He cut the engine, popped his seat belt, and opened his door before she could say, “No, you go on.”

  “You don’t have to do this alone.”

  “Better this way. I know how you hate to see a grown girl cry.”

  “Jenn—”

  “Kidding,” she managed before the lump forming in her throat cut the word in two.

  Quinn hesitated, then closed the door, his face falling a little, like a kid whose mom had only given him one scoop of ice cream when he’d expected two. He restarted the engine. She closed her door and waited for him to pass before stepping toward her office in the barn, her stomach climbing higher and higher until it threatened to choke her.

  A shadowed figure from inside the barn stepped out the sliding front doors. A man. Wait, no, a woman. Tall enough, broad enough, to be mistaken for a man at a distance.

  “Jenna Nash?” the woman said, her voice leaning more toward baritone, probably the cigarettes talking.

  “You can’t smoke here,” Jenna said by way of greeting.

  The woman stepped out from the overhang and into the sun, which had finally decided to show up for the day. She crushed the cigarette beneath a sensible shoe, then, after three seconds of Jenna’s pointed look, picked up her butt and pocketed it.

  If Jenna was politically savvy, she’d hold her tongue—and her cutting looks—and do her best to butter up the bureaucrat who held the power to butcher her dreams.

  “Joan Rivers.” The lady held out a large, blunt-fingered hand. It went without saying this person was the government official and not the comedian. This woman wasn’t old, funny, or dead.

  “Jenna.” Jenna shook the offered hand, disappointed by the limp-wristed shake.

  “Somewhere we can talk?” Rivers asked. Not wasting a moment on pleasantries or other such apparent nonsense.

  “My office.” Jenna pointed back toward the barn, and Rivers fell into lockstep behind her.

  Jenna had taken over the caretaker’s room for her office. It had a single window that overlooked the birthing stall. A refrigerator and a sink with a short run of cabinets were situated along the back wall, as they had been in the old barn before it had burned down. Under the window, Jenna had moved her old school desk from her bedroom. A laptop sat on the corner.


  Without apology, Jenna retrieved a folded camp chair for her uninvited guest and claimed the wood chair behind the desk. “What can I help you with?”

  “In light of the death of one of your program’s participants, the state has suspended your license application until further notice.”

  Jenna snatched a pencil out of the cup on her desk and tapped it against her thigh. “Which in English means…?”

  “Until there’s an official ruling on the cause of death and any findings of negligence on your part have been cleared, we can’t proceed to full licensure.”

  “Our application expires in three weeks. If we don’t have a cause of death by then…” Jenna didn’t want her fears creeping into her words. Tap, tap, tap went the pencil.

  “Then you’ll have to start the whole program proposal and certification all over again.” Rivers’s expression remained as bland as cottage cheese—no emotion, no spice. Maybe she was dead after all.

  “Over. Again.” The steady tapping stopped. “It has taken me eighteen months to get this far. Eighteen months of proposals and supporting documents and jumping through hoops of fire like the government’s own treat-trained dog. The veterans who want my help, who need my help, some of them might not make it another eighteen months without this program. Effectively, canceling my program could amount to a death sentence for them.”

  “Or,” Rivers said, “your client might be alive today if we hadn’t granted a provisionary license.”

  “Kurt’s death is not my fault.” Jenna said it as if she meant it. Even if the declaration hit her like a lie.

  “We’ll see about that. You might want to give your other program participants due notice.”

  “What happens if Kurt’s death is ruled a homicide?”

  “If you’re not found at fault for his death, there is no reason the state won’t grant your license.” Rivers stood. “I’ll find my way out.”

  Jenna tossed the pencil onto the desk and followed the woman out as far as the barn doors to make sure she was well and gone.

  Dink trotted in from the pasture, his tongue lolling, his eyes bright, as if he had a terrific joke he wanted to tell her. As she scrubbed her fingers through his scruff, the distinct smell of something dead wafted off his coat, making Jenna’s eyes water. Breathing through her mouth, she led him over to the wash rack and leashed him to the tie ring.

  “Seriously?” Jenna said to her dog as she took the hose and wet his coat.

  Dink didn’t reply. He didn’t even look contrite.

  From outside came the slow, rhythmic thump of an ax as it split log after log. She emptied half a bottle of shampoo over Dink’s back, working it into a lather while trying to come up with what she would say to the three veterans who were ready to come to the S in less than a month.

  How could she take hope away from someone who possessed so little hope to begin with?

  She lingered over the dog, washing his coat far longer than she needed to, but she never came up with an answer. In the end, Jenna decided the veterans didn’t need practiced speeches or dull, well-meaning platitudes.

  They needed the truth from her heart.

  She toweled off Dink, and when she couldn’t procrastinate any longer, she trudged back to her office, found their contact numbers, and started dialing.

  * * * *

  Sweat ran down Quinn’s back, his chest, his forehead, and into his eyes. The muscles in his back burned, the grip in his right hand had almost lost all strength, and an elephant-sized blister had formed in the web between his right thumb and index finger. He raised the ax over his shoulder and took aim at another log.

  In his peripheral vision, movement flashed, and as he focused on Jenna leaning against the back side of the barn, he knew he’d made a terrible mistake. The ax handle slipped from his loose grip, and the sharp head glanced off the log, then off the stump beneath.

  Too much weight, too much momentum.

  Quinn had no hope of stopping the downward arc with only his left hand on the end of the handle. At the last second, he scooted his foot a couple of inches to the side. The blade landed in the soft dirt, the sharp edge buried three inches into the ground, leaving a nick on the side of his boot.

  Quinn sucked in a breath, waiting for the pain, for the blood. Nothing came.

  Jenna ran over. “You okay?”

  Heat ran up his face. I am a freaking idiot. He looked away, imagining what his CO would have said if he’d had to call her and tell her he’d managed to amputate his own toes. “Fine.”

  “You’ve been chopping all this time?”

  He didn’t know how long it had been, so he shrugged. He dropped the ax and started tossing the split logs onto a flatbed trailer attached to the back of the tractor.

  “You don’t have to do this,” she said. “Alby and Santos have a bunch of wood stacked from a month or so ago.”

  “If I’m going to be staying here, I figured I should pitch in. Besides, without a weight room or gym equipment, I have to find some way to continue my rehab while I’m here.”

  “Stay? Here?”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Aren’t your parents anxious to see you? And don’t you have to be back before they think you’ve gone AWOL or something?”

  “UA,” Quinn corrected. “The Marines call it Unauthorized Absence.” Quinn stopped and gave her his full attention. “I have the time off saved up. And my parents…” There was no real way to finish that sentence without either lying or saying more than he wanted to. He bent down and started loading the trailer again.

  For the longest time, Jenna didn’t say anything. She began tossing logs into the cart. Dink ran over, jumping up and leaving dirty paw prints on his bare chest. Quinn tried to brush the dirt away, but as sweaty as he was, he only ground it in deeper. He ruffled Dink’s ears, his hand coming away with a bunch of damp fur.

  “What happened to him?” Quinn said.

  “Trust me. You don’t want to know.”

  Taking her at her word, he continued loading.

  She stopped. “Your parents don’t know you’re back, do they?”

  He glanced up at her. Her head cocked to the side, like a puppy trying to figure out the strange human.

  “Quinn?”

  The log fell from his fingers, hitting his boot. He bit back the curse, his big toe throbbing. “No. I didn’t tell them.”

  She blew out a half laugh, empty of humor and full of incredulity. “Why the heck not?”

  He picked the log back up and restarted the mindless loading. “What did the state of Wyoming want with you?”

  “Seriously? You’re just going to ignore the question.”

  Meeting her eye, he said, “Leave it be, Jenn.”

  There was more she wanted to say, apparent in her eyes, in the way her mouth opened and closed. She settled on, “Basically, if Kurt died by any means other than homicide, my program is screwed, either for good or until I can reapply. A year and a half of work wasted. Not sure I have it in me to go through that process again. And I know Dad won’t want to keep the cabins vacant for that long. Either this program runs, or he’s going to use them for some sort of dude ranch.”

  Quinn sat on the edge of the trailer. “Doesn’t seem right to wish Kurt’s death was a homicide.”

  “Who would want him dead? He wasn’t here long enough to piss anyone off enough to want to kill him.”

  “You obviously didn’t know Kurt all that well.” That got him a tight laugh.

  Dink came running back, then took off again after something only he saw or heard or smelled.

  Quinn said, “If Kurt had gotten involved in drugs again, he could have been caught up in something he shouldn’t be involved in, or he owed the wrong person money.”

  “Besides him dying of an overdose, there were no other indications that he’d starte
d using again. No positive drug tests, he hadn’t shown up to work high. I know in the movies people are killed for owing money, but in real life, that isn’t a solid long-term business model,” Jenna said. “How can someone pay you back if they are dead?”

  “And with his left arm being used to shoot up, the missing tourniquet, the headlights from the second car the night he died, I think there’s enough circumstantial evidence pointing toward the possibility of murder. If the sheriff doesn’t want to investigate, someone has to.”

  Jenna shuddered and sat down heavily on the trailer next to him. The brim of her cowboy hat shielded her eyes but didn’t hide the worry lines radiating from the corners of them. “Is that the reason you’re staying?”

  She turned her head and looked up at him. A deep melancholy had settled in her eyes, one that went far beyond dealing with the death of his friend and the questionable viability of her veteran program. That scabbed-over wound of his—that emptiness that had settled in his heart, that dark maw of regret he’d had since the moment the words “will you marry me” had dropped like poison from his lips—rent open. He knew what she wanted, knew she wanted to know if he wanted to stay for her.

  Emotions bled out into his chest—a hot combination of anger, passion, arrogance, and guilt—making it hard for him to draw a deep breath. He didn’t—no, couldn’t—allow himself to love her again. “Yes,” he lied.

  The disappointment in her eyes dimmed her fake smile by a few watts. “Great. I could use the help.”

  Out of her back pocket, she pulled a semi-clean red bandana and held it out to him. With a tip of her chin, she indicated the patches of smeared dirt on his chest. He caught her wrist, and her pulse kicked against his finger.

  “Jenna, I—” There was so much he wanted to say, wanted to take back. He stared at the soft curve of her bottom lip.

  But what he wanted most was to kiss her.

  * * * *

  A light breeze cooled the skin on the back of Jenna’s neck. Beneath her feet, the ground shook with the canter strides of one of the newer mustangs, as Sidney worked it in the nearby round pen. Quinn leaned against the trailer they’d filled with freshly split logs, her wrist in his hand, his eyes on her lips, her heart on her sleeve.