by Tami Hoag
“How do you want it?” he whispered against her lips, easing himself just barely inside her.
“Hard and fast,” she gasped, her eyes glittering with reckless excitement as she stared up at him. “Really hard.”
Dane groaned as he settled his mouth over hers. He was in for one hell of an evening.
Ann was as hot and unrestrained in bed as she was cool and reserved in her professional world. The contrast never failed to give Dane a little extra rush when he was inside her. When he wasn't, it only made him acutely aware that she was a consummate actress and a hypocrite, playing whatever role she needed to play to get what she wanted. Typical woman. But at the moment he didn't give a damn. He heaved against her one final time and came in a hot rush of satisfaction.
The satisfaction would be short-lived. It always was. There was that burst, that instant when his body reached its climax, that was sweet and good, but it always fell short of what some other part of him wanted. He would be physically sated. Ann never failed him that way. His body never failed him that way. And he told himself that was all he wanted—the physical release. But as he eased himself down on top of her, he couldn't quite escape the faint hollow feeling in his gut. In that single unguarded moment when a man was at his weakest, he couldn't quite deny the need. He wouldn't name it, wouldn't make a move to do anything about it, wouldn't see it as anything other than a weakness, but he couldn't deny it was there.
“You screw good for a country boy.” Ann's voice, still breathless in the afterglow, cut through Dane's moment of introspection like a razor.
He flashed her a grin that was just short of being cold. “Aw, shucks, ma'am, it's all that practice we get on sheep at an early age,” he drawled with biting sarcasm.
Ann gave a throaty chuckle. She enjoyed prodding him about being a hick from the sticks. She knew it hit a nerve. He'd caught the feral gleam of satisfaction in her eyes more than once when a barb had stuck and spiked his temper. He suspected it was a calculated defense, a way of keeping an emotional buffer between them. The buffer he appreciated, the method pissed him off.
“You baaad boy,” she said, snickering.
“Better sheep than city bitches.”
She reached a hand up and stroked his head the way she might pet a favorite dog. “Now, don't get nasty, darling.”
“I thought that was what we came here for.”
She laughed again. Her perfectly manicured fingers skated down Dane's back to his buttocks. She squeezed his ass and arched up beneath him, her body tightening around his cock, enticing him to hardness again.
“That's right, Sheriff Jantzen,” Ann murmured, her eyelids drooping to half-mast as she savored the sensation of him swelling inside her. “So let's get down to business.”
Dane moved against her, his eyes narrowed, mouth set in a grim line. No, he didn't like Ann Markham much, but he liked what she did for him. She kept him sexually appeased and emotionally on guard, and that, he insisted, was all he really wanted from any woman.
On the chrome-and-glass stand beside the bed a pager went off.
“Dammit!”
“Shit!”
“Yours or mine?” Ann asked, all business in the blink of an eye. Dane disengaged, and she scrambled out from under him and rose up on her knees, scraping her tumbled bangs out of her eyes as she reached toward the stand.
“Mine,” Dane barked. He swung his long legs over the side of the bed and reached for the phone. “This had better be nothing short of murder.”
Ann chuckled. “Murder in Tyler County. That'll be the day. People down there die of boredom, not mayhem.”
Dane growled in reply, a sound that might have been either agreement or rebuttal, but was in any event unpleasant.
“Lorraine, this is my night off.” He snarled into the mouthpiece through gritted teeth, annoyance ringing in his every word.
The woman on the other end of the line completely disregarded his tone of voice and the threat implicit in it and rushed eagerly into her news, as breathless as if she'd just run a mile to get to the phone. “Dane, you're not going to believe this. Someone's gone and killed Jarrold Jarvis. They found him out at Still Waters.”
“Killed?” Dane murmured, his annoyance jelling into a cold lump in his stomach. He straightened his spine and squared his broad shoulders, coming unconsciously to attention. He drove a hand into his hair, slicking it back from his forehead. “You mean he died. He had a heart attack or something.”
“Oh, no. I wish that was what I meant, but Mark was very clear. He said killed.”
Killed. Murdered. Christ. There hadn't been a murder in Tyler County in decades. The idea stunned him, numbed him like a blow between the eyes. With an effort he cut a narrow line through the haze in his brain and forced his mind to function in its official capacity.
“How?”
The dispatcher hummed a note of anxiety. Dane could picture Lorraine Worth's penciled-in eyebrows drawing together above the rims of her rhinestone-studded glasses. When she finally spit it out, her voice had dropped to the near whisper people of her generation reserved for tragedy and scandal. “His throat was cut. Mark said his throat had been cut . . . from ear to ear.”
THREE
DANE TURNED HIS BLACK-AND-WHITE BRONCO IN at the drive to the Still Waters resort and gunned the engine. A crowd had already gathered, and he had to swerve off onto the rutted, hard-packed dirt to find a place to park among the cars and TV station news vans. He swore as he climbed down out of the truck and strode across the uneven ground of the construction site, pain biting into his bum left knee with every step, telling him better than any meteorologist that there was a storm brewing. He ignored the pain and glared at the people who had come to catch a glimpse of death.
Someone had killed Jarrold Jarvis. No matter how many times he replayed the message in his head, it still didn't seem real to him. He hadn't particularly liked the man—no one had—but he wouldn't have wished him dead, and he couldn't think of anyone who would have—not sincerely enough to carry it through. Jarvis was—had been—a blowhard and a bully, a man who liked to throw his considerable weight around and bask in the limelight like a beached walrus in the sun, but those weren't reasons enough to kill him.
The fact remained, someone had not only wished him dead, but had taken the necessary steps to make that wish become a reality.
Already the scene of the crime had taken on a ghoulish, circus atmosphere. Every rube in the county with a police scanner had come to gawk. Three black-and-white Tyler County cruisers were parked at haphazard angles around Jarvis's Lincoln, like covered wagons circled around the pioneers to protect them from Indian attacks, only the worst attack had already taken place. Death had been dealt. Their job now was to protect the body from the vultures. The deputies stood guard around the fringes of the scene, nervously discouraging onlookers from getting too close. Floodlights on the cars combined with utility lights strung up on the naked skeleton of the resort building to illuminate the tableau with a constant harsh white light that was punctuated by the flashing blue and red of the cruiser beacons. Above it all, Mother Nature added to the display with strobes of lightning.
At a glance, Dane estimated nearly fifty people in attendance and about half of them were headed his way with bright eyes, raised voices, and cameras. Reporters. Christ. As a life-form, he ranked them slightly above child molesters. They would ask stupid, obvious questions and expect answers he couldn't possibly give. They would dog his heels like a pack of rabid mongrels, slavering shamelessly over every scrap he tossed them. One of the reasons he had left L.A. after his retirement from football had been to shake the damn press that had crowded in on his personal life and the three-ring circus of his divorce. Now they were here too, invading his county, sniffing around for blood and dirt. He looked down at the ground as hand-held lights threatened to blind him.
“Sheriff Jantzen, does this come as a shock?”
“Sheriff, did he have any enemies?”
�
��Do you have any suspects?”
“Were there any witnesses?”
Dane ignored the questions being hurled at him from all sides, knowing that if he paused, if he offered one sentence in answer and gave them an opening, they would pounce. Chief Deputy Mark Kaufman shouldered aside two of the reporters and reached him first. Kaufman was a short, stocky man of thirty-five with a receding line of coffee-brown hair and perpetually worried eyes. His khaki uniform shirt was sweat-stained, and dust streaked his black trousers. He cracked his knuckles one at a time as he fell into step with Dane. “Jeez, we thought you'd never get here.”
“Who found him?” Dane demanded in a low voice.
“Elizabeth Stuart. She's that gal that bought the Clarion. Moved into the old Drewes place.” He shook his head like a man who'd been dazed. “Brother, she's a looker, let me tell you.”
Dane's steps faltered at the sound of helicopter blades beating the air. As he glanced up, a spotlight poured down on them. Squinting, he managed to catch a glimpse of the call letters of a Twin Cities television station emblazoned across the side of the chopper. The machine hovered above them, another vulture looking for its share of the victim.
“Judas Priest,” he snapped. “Don't they have enough crime of their own to report on?”
He didn't wait for an answer from his deputy, but pushed his way past another half-dozen people, all barking for his attention. Kenny Spencer, the young deputy trying to hold his section of the throng at bay, was clearly relieved to see him and eagerly stepped back to let him into the circle of calm that had been established around the crime scene. The eye of the storm.
“Evening, Sheriff,” he said, nodding and swallowing nervously, his Adam's apple bobbing in his throat as his gaze darted from Dane to the reporters. His long, thin face was chalky-white and gleaming with sweat.
“Hell of a way to spend the evening, huh, Kenny?”
Kenny couldn't quite muster a smile. At twenty-three, death was something he had seen rarely. The car accident that had claimed Milo Thornson last winter. Edith Baines after her heart attack at the Sons of Norway dance. But this was an entirely different kind of thing. This death had been deliberate and vicious. Someone had literally ripped the life from Jarrold Jarvis, had cut his throat and drained it out of him in a torrent of blood. Kenny shuddered at the thought as his supper threatened a return trip from his stomach. He swallowed hard and turned a grayer shade of pale.
Dane gave his deputy a pat on the shoulder and forced himself to take another step toward the Lincoln. He didn't blame the kid for being rattled. He wasn't exactly looking forward to this himself. Death was never pretty and it was never pleasant. He'd been a deputy for seven years and a sheriff for two, but somehow he had never really believed he would have to face death in its most brutal form. Not here.
Murder had no business in Still Creek. It had been a fact of life he had grown almost blasé about during his years in Oakland and L.A. The headlines had been so commonplace in the newspaper, he hadn't bothered to do much more than scan the stories on his way to the comics. But murder didn't belong here. People in Still Creek didn't lock their doors. They left their keys in their cars. They never hesitated to stop to help a stranger. Murder wasn't something that happened in Tyler County. It was something to read about in the city papers. It was something that occasionally shocked everyone in Rochester, the nearest “big” town of sixty thousand people. It was a fact on the nightly news that everyone frowned about and worried over in the most abstract of ways, something that happened out in the big world, where everything was going to hell in a hand basket. But it didn't directly touch the lives of the residents of Tyler County. Until now.
Dane's broad shoulders rose and fell as he planted his hands at his waist and heaved a sigh. He tried to take in the scene with the eyes of a police officer—objective, observant. But he couldn't fend off the initial shock of seeing a man lying dead and knowing another human being had caused that death. The tremors reached the very bedrock of his life. His face, however, remained impassive as he squatted down beside the body.
Jarvis lay bellydown on the gravel like a fat dead seal, his arms at his sides. His feet were still inside the car. With one hand he gingerly lifted the man's right shoulder and took a look. The wound was obvious and ugly, a deep slash across the throat that revealed more of the inner workings of the human body than Dane cared to see. The fine layers of skin at the edges of the gash had curled back slightly, giving the impression of a macabre smile on hideously distorted lips, lips painted with dark maroon congealed blood.
He had died quickly, too quickly to have reconciled himself to his fate, Dane thought, tearing his gaze away from the wound and taking in the dazed expression in the dark eyes, the mouth open in shock, as if he had started to cry out, only to find it too late.
Jarvis hadn't been a handsome man alive. Somewhere around fifty, he had a jowly, mushed-in face, thick lips that were perpetually curved into a horseshoe-shaped frown. He had worn his carrot-red hair slicked back with Vitalis in a modified pompadour that looked as incongruous on his big head as a beanie would have. Death had not improved him any. His skin had begun to lose the chalky-white cast of recent death, taking on a faint pink tint instead, a shade that clashed ghoulishly with his blood, the blood that had begun to harden on the front of his yellow dress shirt, stiffening the sodden fabric like an overdose of starch.
For just a second Dane could see in his mind's eye what must have happened the instant the blade had sliced across the man's throat. His stomach tightened at the sea of blood flowing in his imagination.
“Jesus,” he murmured, letting go of Jarvis's shoulder. Rigor mortis had yet to set in, and the body slumped back into place limply, two hundred sixty pounds of lifeless flesh and fat. Dane sat back on his heels and raked his hands back through his hair.
“I guess Jarrold won't be cheating at poker anymore.”
Boyd Ellstrom leaned against the back door of the Lincoln, his arms folded across his chest. The beginnings of a paunch strained the buttons of his uniform shirt and spilled over the waistband of his black trousers. At forty-two he had finally outgrown the baby face that had plagued him most of his life. Now he simply looked petulant, his full lips perpetually turned down in a pout that suddenly made Dane think of Jarvis.
“Good job, Ellstrom,” he drawled sardonically as he rose. “Dust the car for prints with your butt. The BCA boys will love you.”
The deputy made a sour face as he pushed himself away from the Lincoln. “You called the BCA? This is our case, Dane. We don't need them.”
“Yeah, I can see how professionally you're handling it,” Dane said dryly.
“Well, I sure as hell wouldn't have called in outsiders.”
“It wasn't your choice, was it?”
“Not this time.”
Dane ground his teeth, biting back a retort. He didn't need to get into a fight with one of his own deputies in front of the press. He merely stared at Ellstrom. A flicker of uneasiness crossed Ellstrom's fleshy face, then he turned and swaggered away with his thumbs hooked into his belt.
Tamping down his temper, Dane moved away from the car; ostensibly looking for clues, all the while wondering why Boyd Ellstrom had remained on the Tyler County force after he'd lost the race for the sheriff's office. The man had fifteen years experience; he could have gone anywhere in the state and gotten a better job than the one he had here.
“Boyd says you called in the BCA.”
“They're the experts,” Dane said, his voice soft and deadly. He turned his scowl on his chief deputy and ticked his reasons off on his fingers one by one. “We've got no lab, we've got no forensics team, we've got no one who has seen a murder anywhere but on television. I don't think anyone here has picked up enough from watching Columbo to do this right.”
The state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension had been designed for just such circumstances as these. Comprised of specialists who had at their central lab all the latest technology for ana
lyzing evidence, the bureau was at the disposal of every law enforcement center in the state. It was a sheriff's decision whether to call them in or not. As far as Dane could see, a country cop would have to have shit for brains to leave the BCA out of a murder investigation.
“We've never handled a murder. I don't want this fucked up.”
Kaufman shrugged and strived to look innocent, raising his hands in surrender. “Hey, me neither. I'll be glad to have them.”
Dane's jaw hardened and his eyes narrowed as he stared over at Ellstrom, who was barking at the reporters like an ineffectual guard dog. “We don't all seem to be in agreement on that point.”
“Yeah . . . well . . .” Kaufman cracked his knuckles and shuffled his feet. “You know Boyd.”
“Yeah, I know Boyd. He couldn't find shit in a cow barn but he thinks he can solve a murder on his own.”
Kaufman cleared his throat nervously and stepped a little to one side, diplomatically drawing Dane's eyes away from Boyd Ellstrom. “What do we do until the BCA boys get here?”
“Pray it doesn't rain,” Dane said as thunder rumbled overhead and pain bit into his knee. “Don't touch anything. Don't let anybody else touch anything. They'll take care of all the photography, the fingerprinting, physical evidence. We just have to stay out of their way and do whatever they ask. Yeager will be here within the hour. So will the lab.”
“Right.”
“Where's the Stuart woman?”
Kaufman motioned toward the mob of reporters and gawkers that were pressing in on the scene. “Tough lady. She made me take her back to her car so she could get her camera.”
Dane snorted. “Compassionate, huh? Bring her over here.”
As the deputy went off toward the crowd, Dane called to mind what facts he knew about Elizabeth Stuart, the new publisher of the Still Creek Clarion. Like most everyone in the country, he had heard about her divorce from Atlanta media mogul Brock Stuart. It had been impossible to escape the story. The headlines had been plastered across every sleazy tabloid, told and retold by the radio and television newspeople, detailed in every major paper.
