Dark Paradise

by Tami Hoag

  He shoved the memories away, succeeding in shutting out all but the lingering, bitter aftertaste. That he very easily transferred onto outsiders as the maroon Jag roared past, all shiny new chrome and dark-tinted windows hiding the rich interior and the richer occupants.

  There had been Raffertys on the Stars and Bars for more than a century. That heritage was something J.D. had been born proud of and would fight to the death to preserve. As a rancher, he had several enemies—capricious weather, capricious markets, and the bone-headed government. But as far as he was concerned, no threat loomed larger than that of outsiders buying up Montana.

  Their pockets were bottomless, their bank accounts filled by obscene salaries for work that seemed a parody of the word. They paid the moon for land they didn't need to make a wage off and drove the property values out of sight, taking the taxes along and leaving production values in the dust. Half the ranches around New Eden had sold out because they couldn't afford not to, sold out to people who wanted their own private paradise and didn't care who they stepped on to get it. People who had no respect for tradition or the honest workingman. Outsiders.

  Lucy MacAdam had been one of those outsiders, camped on the very edge of Rafferty land like a vulture. Marilee Jennings was too. She was trouble. He had made up his mind to dislike her.

  She thought he was a jerk.

  You don't have to like me, Mary Lee.

  Lucy had been of the opinion that emotions just got in the way of great sex, an attitude J.D. had been more than happy to share. He would bed Marilee Jennings if he got the chance, but damned if he would like her. She was the last thing he needed in his life. She was an outsider.

  “You're not from around here, are you?” Sheriff Dan Quinn tried to sound nonchalant, but he couldn't quite keep from raising his eyebrows a little as he took in the sight of Marilee Jennings. There were too many contradictions—the faded denim jacket two sizes too big, the feminine, silky dress, the shit-kicker boots and baggy socks. Dangling from her earlobes were two triangles of sheet metal dotted with irregular bits of colored glass. Her hair was a wheaten tangle with near-black roots. She scooped back a rope of it and tucked it behind her ear.

  “No. I'm from California.”

  The sheriff hummed a note that all but said it figures. He tried to look noncommittal. He had to deal with a lot of outsiders these days. Part of his job was to be diplomatic. With some of these big shots, that seemed harder than saying the right thing to his mother-in-law. As he looked down at Marilee Jennings, he worried a little that she might be someone famous and he was failing to recognize her. She looked as though she could have come off MTV.

  “What can I do for you, Miz Jennings?”

  “I was a friend of Lucy MacAdam's,” Mari said, staring up a considerable distance to his rugged face.

  He could have either been a boxer or gotten kicked in the face by a horse. His nose had a violent sideways bend in it, and small puckered scars tugged at his upper lip and the corner of his right eye. Another scar slashed an inch-long red line diagonally across his left cheek-bone. He was saved from ugliness by a pair of kind, warm green eyes and a shy, crooked, boyish smile.

  He stood in the middle of the squad room with his hands on his hips. Around them, dotting the small sea of serviceable metal desks, several deputies were working, clacking out reports on manual typewriters, talking on the phone. Their eyes drifted occasionally toward their boss and his visitor.

  “The shooting,” he said, nodding as the name clicked into place. “Did someone get a hold of you? We been trying to call since it happened. Your name and number were in her address book.”

  They'd been trying to call a phone she had had disconnected as she had hurried to dump her life in Sacramento for something truer. Mari rubbed a hand across her eyes. Her shoulders slumped as a vague sense of guilt weighed her down. “No,” she said in a small voice. “I didn't find out about Lucy until I got here.”

  Quinn made a pained face. “I'm sorry. Must have been a terrible shock.”

  “Yes.”

  Two phones began to ring, out of sync with each other. Then a burly, bearded man with a face like a side of beef and lurid tattoos from shoulder to wrist came hurtling through the door. He wore biker basics—jeans riding down off his butt and a black leather vest with no shirt beneath it, a look that showcased a chest and beer gut carpeted with dense, curling dark hair. His hands were cuffed behind his back and he was dragging a red-faced, angry deputy in his wake.

  They crashed into a desk, toppling a coffee cup on a stack of reports and sending the deputy at the desk bolting backward. The air turned blue with assorted curses from three different sources. Quinn scowled as he watched the fiasco. He slid a hand around Mari's arm, ready to jerk her out of harm's way. But the biker was finally wrestled into a chair by a pair of deputies and the excitement began to dissipate.

  Satisfied that the worst was over, Quinn turned back to Mari. “Let's go in my office.”

  Keeping his hand on her arm solicitously, he guided her into a cubicle with one windowed wall that looked out on the squad room, and shut the door behind them. Mari sat down on a square black plastic chair that was designed neither for comfort nor aesthetics, her eyes scanning the white block walls, taking in the diplomas and certificates and framed photographs of rodeo events. One was of Quinn wrestling an enormous steer to the ground by its horns. That explained a lot.

  The sheriff settled into the upholstered chair behind his desk and adopted the most official mien he could manage, considering he had unruly yellow hair that stood up in defiant tufts in a rogue crew cut.

  “We were unable to locate any kin,” he said, taking up the threads of their conversation as if they had never been interrupted.

  “Lucy didn't have any family. She grew up in foster homes.”

  He looked unhappy about that, but didn't pursue it. “Well, the case is closed, if that gives you any peace. It was all pretty cut and dried. She went riding up on that mountain, got herself mistaken for an elk, and that was that.”

  “Forgive me,” Mari said. “I don't know a whole lot about it, but I thought most hunting seasons were in the fall. It's June.”

  Quinn nodded, his attention drifting through the windows to the biker, who was bellowing at Deputy Stack about his civil rights. “The guy was a guest of Evan Bryce. Bryce's spread—most of it, anyway—lies to the north of the Rafferty place, north and east of Miz Mac-Adam's land. Bryce breeds his own herds—elk, buffalo—so they're considered livestock. Limited hunting seasons don't apply. He lets his guests take a few head now and again for sport.”

  “And this time they took a human life instead,” Mari said grimly.

  He glanced back at her and shrugged a little, bulging shoulder muscles straining the seams of his khaki uniform shirt. “Happens now and again. 'Spect it'll happen more and more with the increase in tourism and second-home owners coming up here out of big cities. Most of these people don't know beans about handling firearms. They get all dudded up in their L.L. Bean safari jackets, sling a big ol' elephant rifle over their shoulders, and off they go.

  “The guy that shot your friend? He didn't have a clue. Didn't know he'd hit her. He didn't even see her. Took two days before the body was found.”

  “Who was he?” Mari asked numbly, needing a name, a face she could picture and attach guilt to. He hadn't even known. Lucy had died up there all alone, had lain there for days while the jerk who killed her went on with his vacation, oblivious.

  “Dr. J. Grafton Sheffield,” Quinn said, swiveling his chair toward a black file cabinet that took up the entire width of the room behind the desk. “There's a trust-fund name for you,” he mumbled as his thick fingers flipped through the files. He pulled one out and checked the contents. “Plastic surgeon from Beverly Hills. When word got out what had happened, he came in and confessed he'd been up there hunting. He was sick about it. Really was. Cried the whole time in court. Cooperated fully.”

  “The ballistics ma
tched up, I take it?”

  Quinn's brows sketched upward.

  “I was a court reporter for six years, Sheriff,” Mari explained. “I know the drill.”

  He rubbed one corner of his mouth with a stubby forefinger as he studied her, considering. Finally he nodded, selected a thin sheaf of typed pages from the file, and handed them across the desk. She scanned the initial report, her eyes catching on familiar words and phrases.

  “There wasn't anything left of the bullet that nailed her,” Quinn said. “It passed through her body and hit a rock. We couldn't test for a match. The shell casings in the area were consistent with the loads Sheffield had been using—7mm Remington. He confessed he'd been in the area, didn't know he'd wandered off Bryce's land. He pleaded no contest.”

  “You mean it's over already?” Mari said, stunned. “How can that be?”

  Quinn shrugged again. “The wheels of justice move pretty quick out here. Our court dockets don't see the same load yours do down in California. It didn't hurt that Sheffield was a buddy of Bryce's. Bryce swings a lot of weight in these parts.”

  “Sheffield is in jail, then?” Mari said, sounding hopeful and knowing better. Plastic surgeons from Beverly Hills didn't go to jail for accidents they readily owned up to.

  “No, ma'am.” Quinn's attention went to the squad room again. The biker was standing, the chair shackled to his wrists sticking out behind him like an avant garde bustle. Quinn started to rise slowly. “He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of negligent endangerment. One year suspended sentence and a one-thousand-dollar fine. Excuse me, ma'am.”

  He was out the door and barreling toward the melee before Mari could react. She stared through the window at the surreal scene for a moment, Quinn and his deputies and the woolly mammoth tussling around the room in what looked like a rugby scrum. She dropped her gaze to the file in her lap. Surreal had been the theme of her vacation so far.

  She glanced at the notes made by the deputy who had originally been assigned to the case, then at Quinn's comments. The coroner's report was appallingly brief. Cause of death: gunshot wound. There were scanty notes about entrance and exit wounds, contusions and abrasions. A broken nose, lacerations on the face, probably caused by the fall from her mount. It seemed pitiful that the cessation of a life could be boiled down to two words. Gunshot wound.

  The battle raged on in the squad room, the biker smashing cups, coffeepots, computer screens with the chair attached to his butt. Good thing Quinn had experience wrestling enormous hairy animals to the ground.

  Across the desk lay the file folder that held whatever other meager comments on Lucy's death Quinn had not planned to make privy to her. Mari bit her lip and battled briefly with her conscience. What she held in her hands seemed so scant. . . . Her friend was dead. . . .

  A roar that sounded like an enraged moose sounded beyond the door. The men went down in a heap of tangled arms and legs. Mari scooted up out of her chair and slipped around the desk to flip open the manila folder. Her heart stopped, wedged at the base of her throat just ahead of the breakfast she was still digesting.

  The only things left in the case file were the crime scene Polaroids. Lucy's body. Lifeless. Grotesque. She had lain there at the edge of that meadow for two days. Nothing about the corpse bore any resemblance to the vibrant woman Mari had known. The brassy blond hair was a dirty, tangled mat. The fingernails that had been meticulously manicured and lacquered at all times were dirty and broken. Features were unrecognizable, the body bloated out of shape like a Macy's parade balloon. The bullet had hit her square in the back and exited through her chest, leaving massive destruction.

  Hideous. God, she's hideous. She would have hated to die this way.

  Alone.

  Ripped apart.

  Left for the carrion feeders.

  Tears spilled over her lashes. Chills raced down her from head to toe. Trembling, she dropped the reports on top of the pictures and ran out of the office, choking on the need to vomit and the necessity to breathe. The biker was being dragged off to a holding cell. Quinn dusted his pants off with his hands, glancing up from beneath his brows as Mari rushed into the squad room. She swept a fist beneath both eyes, trying in vain to erase the evidence of her tears. She gulped a deep lungful of air that was sour with the scent of male sweat and bad gas. Her stomach rolled over like a beached salmon.

  “I—I—thank you for your help, Sheriff Quinn,” she said, her voice hitching. “I—I have to go now.”

  The sympathy in his eyes nearly undid her. “Sorry about your friend, Miz Jennings.”

  The images from the Polaroids burned into the backs of her eyes. Bile rose up in a tide. She managed to nod. “I—I have to go.”

  “Stop by and see Miller Daggrepont,” he called as she hurried toward the door.

  The name went in one ear and out the other. The only stop she had on her mind at the moment was the ladies' room down the hall. Saliva pooled in her mouth. Lucy. Oh, Christ, Lucy. But she pulled up at the squad room door, the one question she had forgotten to ask stopping her short. Bracing one hand on the jamb to keep herself upright, she looked back at Quinn.

  “Who found her body?”

  “That'd be Del,” he said with a nod. “Del Rafferty.”

  CHAPTER

  4

  THE MYSTIC Moose had been the finest saloon, hotel, and house of ill repute for miles around during the days of the cattle barons. Of course, it wasn't called the Mystic Moose in those days, but the Golden Eagle—both for the majestic birds that hunted in the mountains around New Eden and for the gilded replica sent to the first proprietor of the hotel by Jay Gould in honor of the grand opening.

  Madam Belle Beauchamp had built the place with the considerable fortune she had accrued on her back beneath the richest of the robber barons and cattlemen, and on her knees peering through keyholes while those same gentlemen wheeled and dealed both above the tables and under them. Madam Belle had known all the great men of the day and had made a killing in the stock market. Even though she had traveled extensively, she had called New Eden home until her death because she loved the land, the mountains, and the hearty, hard-working, God-fearing, mostly honest people who had taken root there.

  No expense had been spared in the building of the hotel. Every room had been gaudy and grand. The chandeliers that hung in the main salon had been shipped west from New York City by train. The twenty-foot gilt-framed mirror behind the bar had reportedly come from a castle in Europe, courtesy of an adoring duke. Montana had never seen anything more extravagant than Madam Belle's Board and Brothel, as it had been called by some.

  Sadly, Madam Belle's popularity faded with her beauty, and her fortune trickled away into bad investments and worse lovers. As spectacular as the Golden Eagle was, New Eden was too far off the beaten path for any but the most curious to visit. The hotel fell into disrepair. Madam Belle fell to her death from the second floor gallery, a victim of dry rot in the balustrade. And so ended the flight of the Golden Eagle.

  Mari stood on the veranda of the renovated hotel, reading the story that was beautifully hand-lettered on yellowed parchment and displayed tastefully in a glass case on the wall beside the carved front doors. The details didn't even make a dent on her brain. She wasn't even sure how she had come to be standing at the doors to the Mystic Moose.

  After leaving the sheriff's office, she had just started walking, needing to clear those awful scenes from her memory—Lucy's body from a distance, Lucy's body up close, entry wound, exit wound. Her head pounded from the effort to eradicate those horrific images of blood, death, decay. She had walked the west side of Main Street clear out to the Paradise Motel, then crossed and walked back down the east side, oblivious of the sights and sounds and people around her.

  The contradictions of the town penetrated in only the most abstract of ways—the pickups that looked as though they had been gone after with tire irons and the luxury cars that cost more than most people's houses; the boarded-up, bankrupt st
ores and the windows displaying extravagant silver jewelry and custom-made sharkskin cowboy boots; the ruddy-faced cowboys and ranchers in town on errands and the faces of people who had graced the covers of People magazine. All of it seemed more dreamlike than real. In keeping with the theme of the day.

  She walked for hours, heedless of her surroundings, unaware of the curious and pensive looks she got from the locals; preoccupied by thoughts of death, fate, justice, injustice, coincidence, Raffertys. Fragments of thought hurtled through her mind like shrapnel, sharp-edged and painful. There were too many bits and pieces. She couldn't seem to grasp any one of them long enough to make sense of it. Caffeine and grief and exhaustion pulled at her sanity and shook her nerves like so many ragged threads, until she wanted to grab her hair with both hands and just hang on, screaming.

  She needed to sit down somewhere quiet and dark, have a drink to dull hypersensitive senses, smoke a cigarette to give herself something ordinary to focus on.

  The double doors of the Moose swung open, and a tall, handsome woman in a long denim jumper and expensive-looking suede boots strode out, her jaw set at a challenging angle, her eyes homing in on Mari from behind a pair of large glasses with blue and violet frames. Her face was a long oval with strong features and a slim, unpainted mouth. A dense, wild mane of red-gold hair bounced around her shoulders.

  Mari started to step out of her way, murmuring an apology, but the woman took hold of her shoulders with both beringed hands and looked her square in the face.

  “Dear girl,” she said dramatically, her expression dead serious. “You have a very fractured aura.”

  Mari's jaw fell open, but no words came out. A jumble of quartz crystals on sterling chains hung around the woman's neck. Opals the size and shape of sparrow eggs dangled from her elegant earlobes. “I—I'm sorry . . . I guess,” she mumbled, feeling more and more like Alice on the other side of the looking-glass.