Stranger in Cold Creek

by Paula Graves

  “Here.” John handed her the canvas shopping tote she’d brought with her to conceal the copied pages. She shoved the bound pages inside, and John tucked the whole thing under one arm.

  They headed out the back door to the employee parking area, where she’d parked her truck.

  “Do you think the sheriff will suspect you’ve kept a copy?” John asked as he buckled his seat belt.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t think he’s going to make a stink about it, though, unless I get in the way of his investigation.”

  “And will you? Get in the way, I mean.”

  “I’ll do my best not to.”

  She could see suspicion in Miles Randall’s eyes when she handed over the two bags of evidence, but he didn’t comment as she told him where the book had been hidden and how she’d done her best to maintain any potential evidence. “I’m not sure you’ll be able to get any prints off the journal. And even if you could, I’m pretty sure the prints will be either Hal McGraw’s or Delta’s. I think Delta must have hidden the book when she was staying at my place for a couple of weeks.”

  “The room was already up that soon?”

  “Oh, yeah. We had the builders reframe everything and get the siding and roof up as soon as we could after the tornado. We’ve just been taking our time with the rest of it, working when we could. But Dad’s been swamped with all the orders from other people trying to rebuild, and you know you’ve been keeping me busy here at the station.”

  Randall was silent for another moment. Miranda realized she was holding her breath and let it go in a quiet sigh.

  “Okay,” Randall said finally. “But you’re still off this case, Duncan. Understood?”

  “Understood.”

  Randall frowned at the plastic-encased journal. “We’ll dust the outside for prints. Nobody touched this at all?”

  “John Blake found it, but he was wearing gloves because it was hidden in fiberglass insulation. I wore latex gloves when I held the book. Nobody touched it without a glove.”

  “But you looked through it?”

  “Of course.”

  “What’s inside?”

  She described what she’d read, being as truthful and complete as she could.

  Randall was a good man. A smart man. He knew as soon as she began talking what they were dealing with. The disappointment in his eyes echoed the sadness in her own heart. “She’d taken up her father’s work.”

  “Looks like it.” Miranda had hoped after Hal’s death, Delta would finally be free of his legacy.

  Instead, it looked as if she’d chosen to embrace it.

  “Guess that explains that ten grand you found at her house this morning.” Randall rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Is there anything in that book that’s actionable?”

  “I don’t know. She made notes about things she believed to be true. But if she had any actual evidence hidden anywhere, I don’t know where she hid it. All that’s in there right now are leads to go on but nothing we could take to court.”

  “Well, we’ll see what we can track down from it.” As Miranda rose to go, the sheriff asked, “How’re you feeling?”

  “A little tired. But improving.” She could probably go to work right now and be fine, but since the sheriff wasn’t going to let her anywhere near the Delta McGraw case while she was wearing the uniform, it had occurred to her that having the next few days free to work the case informally might be in her favor. “I’ll be fine by Monday.”

  “Take care to get some rest, Deputy.” Randall softened the stern tone of his voice with a slight smile.

  “Thanks. I’ll do that.” She left the sheriff’s office and headed for the front exit.

  Coy Taylor was just coming on duty when she passed the sergeant’s desk. He flashed her a smile. “You back yet?”

  “Not until Monday,” she said with an exaggerated sigh. “You’re on afternoon duty this week?”

  “Yeah. Chambers is covering mornings for the next couple of weeks. His kid starts his first varsity spring practice at the high school this week, and I guess Chambers wanted to be there to watch.” Taylor settled behind the desk. “Heard you went to Delta’s place this morning. Find anything?”

  “You know I can’t say, Sarge. But I’m hopeful we’ll get a break in the case soon, and then you’ll know all the details.” As a desk sergeant, Taylor wasn’t given details on every case they worked, only the parts that had been released to the press. Everything else stayed strictly between the deputies investigating the case.

  In fact, she shouldn’t be sharing any of the stuff she’d learned with John Blake at all. But since he’d almost been a victim of the same mystery gunman who had gone after her the other day, she figured she owed him the chance to get in on the investigation.

  And she could use his help, since the sheriff had more or less banned her from her own case.

  “Real shame about Delta.” Taylor shook his head. “She had a real rough life.”

  Miranda nodded. “Yes, she did.”

  The phone rang, and Taylor shot her a look of apology as he answered. Miranda continued out the door to where John was waiting patiently in the passenger seat of her truck.

  “How did it go?” he asked as she belted herself in behind the steering wheel.

  “If he knew I was not only investigating this case on my own, but bringing a civilian in on it as well, I think I’d be in serious trouble.”

  “So don’t let him find out.”

  Easy to say, she thought. But maybe not so easy to do.

  * * *

  “I THINK WE can probably set aside anything that wasn’t from the last couple of years.” Miranda looked up from one set of the journal pages she’d copied at her father’s store. She looked tired, John thought. Probably should be getting some rest rather than diving headfirst into the blackmail journal. But she’d rebuffed the suggestion when he brought it up.

  “I don’t know—Delta might have kept up some of her father’s blackmail schemes.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not seeing anything in Hal’s notes that would be worth ten thousand dollars in hush money. Are you?”

  John looked at the notes he’d taken from the early set of pages. Most of the crimes Hal McGraw had chronicled in his journal might be worth a couple of thousand dollars to keep them from coming out, but ten grand?

  “Of course, I suppose it’s possible that money I found came from multiple sources,” Miranda added.

  John shook his head. “I don’t think so. Not the way you described those packets of bills. It seems as if it all came from the same place.”

  “True.” She rested her chin on her folded hands and looked at him across the kitchen table. “So what kind of crime would be worth paying a blackmailer ten grand to cover it up?”

  He dropped his pen and mimicked her position. “More to the point, what kind of crime would be worth killing for?”

  “Very good point.” Miranda picked up her pen and started marking through a few of the listings in her notes. “By the way, did you notice that a few of Delta’s last entries looked as if they were written in code?”

  “I did.” He looked down at his own notes and marked through a few that didn’t seem likely to stir up a murderous rage. “It looks like some sort of cipher. Did Delta like things like puzzles and ciphers?”

  Miranda frowned. “I don’t know. She never let me that far into her life, you know?”

  “Well, if her father was a con man, she probably had at least a passing knowledge of ciphers and tricks. I’m surprised Hal didn’t keep his own book in code.”

  “I’m surprised he kept a book at all,” Miranda said. “He never seemed to be the organized sort.”

  “Does the first entry date mean anything?” John flipped back to the first page of his copy of the jour
nal. “Looks like the first entry was about eleven years ago. January 12. Does that mean anything?”

  “That’s Delta’s birthday. She would have turned sixteen that year.”

  “Sweet sixteen.”

  “Actually, on her sixteenth birthday, she was declared an emancipated minor by the courts. I don’t remember much about it—I was in my senior year of high school and Delta McGraw wasn’t really on my mind at the time. I do know that Hal McGraw didn’t try to stop her. I think he knew he wasn’t exactly a great dad.”

  John tried to put himself in Hal McGraw’s shoes. His wife long gone, his own life a series of scams and cons, the law dogging his heels and his daughter officially declaring her independence from him—would that situation make him do a little soul-searching?

  Not a guy like Hal McGraw. He’d try to do something to win back his daughter.

  “What if that’s why he started keeping this journal?” he asked. “What if this was meant to lure Delta back all along?”

  “Lure her back?”

  “She declared her independence from him right about the time these entries started. Maybe he tried to buy her affection and loyalty. Made a big push to earn more money, give her a reason to stick around.”

  Miranda frowned thoughtfully. “Maybe. I do remember some of the girls at school talking about how she was suddenly dressing nicer and wondered how come she suddenly had money after ditching her daddy.”

  “He might have been trying to impress her.”

  “Could she have known all along what Hal was doing?”

  “You tell me. You knew Delta. Do you think she knew?”

  “I don’t know. But clearly she knew what that book meant, and rather than destroy it, she tried to protect it.” Miranda rose from the table, revealing in her restless movements the troubled state of her mind. She paced to the window and looked outside at a landscape bathed in the ruby glow of the setting sun. “She must have hidden it here when she was staying with me. She was here alone a lot.”

  “You said her father had made her his accomplice, right?”

  She nodded, still looking out the window.

  “So she’d know how to run an extortion scheme.”

  “Yes. She would.” Miranda turned slowly to face him. “I just wanted to believe she’d put that kind of life behind her.”

  “She didn’t have a job, did she?”

  “Not recently.” Miranda closed her eyes. “I should have spent a little more time trying to figure out where she was getting the money to live on if she wasn’t working a job.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  She shook her head. “I can be as much a loner as Delta was. I get really wrapped up in what I’m doing in my own life and I sometimes forget to touch base with people.”

  He could sympathize. “You can’t fix what you didn’t do. Not at this point. But you can find justice for her. Right?”

  “Right.” She pushed her fingers through her hair like a comb, shoving the mass of auburn waves away from her face. “We had some leftovers from yesterday’s barbecue. Want me to heat them up for us for dinner?”

  “You sit. I’ll get the leftovers.”

  She didn’t argue, sliding back into the chair she’d vacated a few minutes earlier, then straightening the scattered pages before her into a neat stack. John retrieved the leftover steaks and baked potatoes from the refrigerator and piled them onto plates to heat in the microwave. He also grabbed the remaining salad and placed it on the table.

  “Hmm,” Miranda murmured as he pulled glasses from the cabinet.

  “Hmm what?”

  “This entry. It’s in Delta’s handwriting, and I don’t think this notation is code, but I’m not quite sure what it means.” She turned the page around so he could read it, pointing to the note in question.

  Hef. Co. clerk—Rem. Alamo Fund. 50K missing?

  “Heflin County is the next county over,” Miranda explained. “And there’s a Texas-based charity for wounded Texas soldiers called the Remember the Alamo Fund. But I haven’t heard anything about missing money.”

  “Maybe it hasn’t been discovered yet. Or someone managed to pay it all back after getting a note from Delta.”

  “So her blackmail was altruistic?” He tried not to scoff, but there had been several packets of hundred-dollar bills hidden in Delta’s kitchen counter that would suggest otherwise.

  “No, of course not.” Miranda sighed. “I just mean, maybe that was the response to Delta’s blackmail rather than paying the money to her.”

  “Paying it back would have been about covering his tracks.”

  “Or hers. I don’t know who the Heflin county clerk is.”

  “Or hers,” John conceded. “But if he or she was willing to go to the lengths of coming up with fifty thousand to pay back the charity—”

  “He or she might have gone even further.”

  “Having that hanging over your head would be a nightmare. Even if the money was refunded, you’d have to worry that what you did would come out. Forget about your position with the charity. Even being accused of that sort of transgression could put your job in jeopardy.”

  “Especially in Texas. County clerks here oversee elections. Imagine the kind of election shenanigans a blackmailer could cause holding something over the head of the county clerk. And you know, if something like that came out and your spouse didn’t know about it, it could wreak havoc on your personal life, too.”

  John nodded. “A person might be willing to kill to make it all go away.”

  “So we need to find out who the Heflin county clerk is and if he or she has any connection to the Remember the Alamo Fund.” She pushed away from the table and headed down the hall to her bedroom.

  John followed, stopping in the doorway while she grabbed her laptop computer from a drawer beside her bed. She plugged it in and sat on the edge of her bed, glancing at him over her shoulder. “You can come in.”

  He sat on the bed beside her, trying to ignore the little shiver of animal awareness that rippled through him. So many other things he’d like to do in this room besides surf the internet...

  “Here we go. Jasper Layton is the Heflin county clerk.” She pulled up a search engine page and entered the name. Several links came up, most of them connected to his position as county clerk.

  She made a sound, and he found himself edging closer to read the screen over her shoulder.

  She clicked a link and a page came up, an article from the Heflin County newspaper. “‘Liver transplant miracle not without its downside—recipient and family find themselves deep in debt.’”

  “His wife needed a liver transplant,” John murmured, scanning the article. “Guess that might explain why he was willing to risk everything to skim money out of the charity fund.”

  “But how did he pay it back?”

  “Good question.”

  Miranda picked up her cell phone and brought up the previous tab from the Heflin County website. She punched in a number. “Jasper Layton, please.” Listening for a second, she frowned. “Oh. I’m sorry to hear that. Thank you.”

  “Sorry to hear what?” John asked as she ended the call and set the phone on the bed beside her.

  She turned her head to look at him, her expression troubled. “Jasper Layton is dead.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “He ran his car off Wildcat Ridge. There was no evidence that he hit the brakes.” Sheriff Paul Leonardi leaned back in his chair, steepling his hands over his flat stomach as he looked across the desk at Miranda and John. “What’s your interest in Jasper Layton, if I may ask, Deputy Duncan?”

  Miranda had anticipated the question, and she had her answer ready. “We’re investigating a murder in Barstow County, and Mr. Layton’s name showed up in some of the victim’s persona
l effects. When we learned that Mr. Layton was deceased—”

  “You thought you’d come talk to me.”

  “You said there was no evidence he hit the brakes,” John said. “Do you think he intentionally ran his car off the road?”

  Leonardi gave John a long, narrow-eyed look of speculation. “You’re not a deputy.”

  “No, sir.”

  The sheriff flicked his gaze toward Miranda. “You bring a civilian along to all your meetings with fellow law enforcement agents?”

  “Mr. Blake is a consultant,” she said, as if dismissing the question. “Do you think Mr. Layton’s accident was intentional?”

  “Let’s put it this way. The autopsy determined that cause of death was blunt-force trauma to the head. Layton went through the windshield and landed under the car. There were no signs of alcohol or drugs in his system. It was in the middle of the afternoon, so it’s not likely he fell asleep at the wheel.”

  “But you seem reluctant to call it suicide.”

  “I didn’t see the point of multiplying the tragedies Mrs. Layton and her children had to face.” Leonardi shrugged. “It wouldn’t have made any difference. He was past the two-year exception in his life insurance. They were going to get the money regardless.”

  Miranda glanced at John. He looked back at her, his dark eyebrows twitching upward in response.

  “The article I read said this happened three weeks ago?”

  “Yes.”

  So, she thought, soon after Delta disappeared. But quite possibly before she had died and definitely before her body was dumped on Lizzie Dillard’s farm. And that meant even if Jasper Layton had been one of Delta’s blackmail victims, he wasn’t likely to have been her killer.

  “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

  “Just one thing, and I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

  Leonardi sat forward, leaning his forearms on his desk blotter. “You want to talk to Angela, don’t you?”

  “I do.”

  Leonardi’s lips pressed to a thin line. “Is that really necessary?”