The Sheriff of Heartbreak County

by Kathleen Creighton

  Back at the four-wheel-drive SUV that served as his patrol car, he got a couple of evidence bags out of the back and stowed the gun and the tissue with Mary Owen’s blood on it, then un-hooked his cell phone from his belt and climbed behind the wheel. He’d already hit the quick-dial button he used most when it came to him-the thing that had been bothering him about the woman he’d just left, the thing he hadn’t been able to put his finger on, the thing that just wasn’t right.

  It was her walk. More specifically, the way she’d walked when she’d left him standing in the kitchen and crossed through the living room on her way to the front door to get her gun. That one time when she’d been too upset, too ticked off to remember the role she was supposed to be playing.

  Like a panther.

  How was it that mousy Miss Mary should have a walk that was long-legged, strong, confident and graceful…the walk, not of a shy homely mouse, but of a beautiful woman?

  Yes…a tall, graceful woman with a panther’s walk and eyes that sparked with green-gold fire. It struck him, then, that Miss Mary Owen was anything but mousy. That she was, in fact, a very beautiful woman, though she seemed to be trying her level best to hide the fact. And he and everybody else in town had evidently been too damn blind to see beyond her disguise.

  Everybody…except for Jason Holbrook, who was now dead. Coincidence?

  Sitting there in his SUV on a quiet street in the town he’d lived in most all his life, Roan felt the Spirit Messenger stir once more across his skin.

  Inside the house that wasn’t and never would be her home, the woman who called herself Mary Owen leaned back against the door and closed her eyes. As she waited for the sound of the sheriff’s car starting up and driving away, she felt the fear creep over her…the hollow sense of dread that meant her life had just taken a hard left turn and was about to go careening off in an unexpected direction.

  It wasn’t a new feeling. She’d felt it for the first time almost twenty years ago, that fear, the day she’d run away to New York City to pursue a modeling career, never to return. Not exactly an original move for an unhappy young girl in a drab and miserable existence; a few decades earlier, she might have fled to Hollywood with dreams of becoming a movie star.

  A life of glamour, excitement and beauty…what young girl didn’t dream of such things? How many found the courage to risk everything, leave the security of the only life they’d ever known to follow the dream? Darn few, Mary thought, with a valiant lift of her head. Darn few. She didn’t regret leaving home, even if the dream she’d sought so long ago still fluttered like a rare and lovely butterfly, tantalizingly beyond reach.

  Not that she’d be all that sorry to leave this town, she thought, at least no more sorry than all the other times she’d had to pull up stakes and start over again someplace new. It had begun to seem natural to her always to be the new face in town. The shy, retiring stranger who keeps to herself and never lets anybody get too close…

  Hartsville, Montana-Heartbreak, she’d heard the oldtimers call it, the ones who remembered way back to when the mines went bust. She’d come to the town purely by chance. It had merely been the place she’d wound up in last winter when she’d pulled off the interstate in the middle of a snowstorm because a warning light had come on in her car and she’d needed to find a service station right quick. Waiting in the coffee shop across the highway from the Gas-n-Go Kwik Service for a new alternator to be installed in her elderly Ford Taurus, Mary had found herself in friendly conversation with Queenie Schultz, owner-operator of the town’s only beauty parlor. She’d learned that Queenie’s sister down in Phoenix had been after her to move down there, and that Queenie had about had her fill of the cold and the snow, but couldn’t bring herself to run off and leave her faithful customers with nobody to do their color and sets.

  Mary hadn’t expected to spend the rest of her life in Hartsville. But not even six months? That was a record, even for her.

  She opened her eyes and found the cat still crouched on the back of the sofa, watching her with an expression of profound disdain. The silence in the room crawled over her skin and pricked her scalp like a premonition.

  Why hasn’t his car started up yet? Why hasn’t he gone away?

  She crept to the front window, fingered back the brown plaid drape and its heavy insulated lining and peered out. The sheriff’s SUV was still parked in front of the house-across the bottom of the driveway, in fact. To keep her from escaping, she wondered? Her skin prickled again, and she shivered. What is he doing out there?

  “Daddy!”

  Roan felt his heart lift, the way it always did when he heard his daughter’s voice…which at the same time, oddly, also made his heart ache.

  In the darkness and privacy of his patrol vehicle, his mouth formed a grin. “Hey, peanut, how ya doin’? You and Grampa Boyd eatin’ supper?”

  “Yeah…Grampa made hot dogs and beans…again.” Roan chuckled; he could almost hear those eyes rolling. “We were gonna make cornbread, but Grampa said we should save that for when you’re home, ’cause we know how much you like cornbread. Dad…”

  “Yeah, peanut?” Roan pressed his thumb and forefinger against his forehead and rubbed, bracing for Susie Grace’s inevitable disappointment.

  “Grampa said you have to work because something bad happened and a man got killed and you have to find the person that did it. But when are you comin’ home?”

  He let out a gusty breath. “I’m gonna be pretty late, Susie-G. Most likely it’ll be past your bedtime, so don’t you try and wait up for me, now. You go to bed when Grampa Boyd tells you, you hear me?”

  He heard a noisy exhalation that was a pretty good imitation of his own. “Okay. But, Daddy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If I’m asleep when you get home, would you come and kiss me good night and tuck me in anyway?”

  “Don’t I always?”

  “Yeah, but promise me anyway.”

  Roan gave an exaggerated sigh. “I promise.”

  “Okay, then. G’night, Daddy. I love you bunches and bunches.”

  “Love you the same back atcha. G’night, now. Be good.”

  With the cell phone dead in his hand and the silence of night settling in, Roan realized his face was aching-most likely because he was still wearing that grin. He scrubbed a hand over his face to ease the muscles and was reaching for the ignition key when his radio crackled to life.

  He thumbed it on and ID’d himself. “Yeah, Donna-what’s up?”

  “Sheriff, uh…what’s your ETA back here at the shop?” The night dispatcher sounded uncharacteristically restrained.

  “Let me guess,” said Roan with a new and decidedly sardonic grin stretching his face muscles. “There’s a United States Senator sitting in my office right now, spittin’ bullets.”

  “Uh…that sums it up pretty well, only he’s not sittin’. More like…pacing. Think…a big old mountain lion in a cage.”

  He chuckled and reached for the ignition. “I’m on my way.”

  As the SUV’s lights came on he looked up at the house once more, in time to see the window curtain twitch back into place.

  At least, the sheriff thought as he drove away from the dark, quiet house and its puzzling, enigmatic and oddly disturbing occupant, I can tell the victim’s father we have a possible suspect.

  He wondered why that thought didn’t make him happier.

  Mary let the draperies fall back into place, laughing silently at her own foolishness. He’d only been checking in, or calling in, or whatever it was policemen did when they’d been absent from their radios for a time. She was being paranoid, worrying for nothing. Sheriff Harley had her gun, and if he was as competent and as good and decent a man as Miss Ada said he was, it shouldn’t take him long to conclude that she’d had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder of Jason Holbrook.

  But I could have. Maybe I would have…

  Revulsion rippled across her skin, and she fought down a wave of nausea as for a
terrible moment it all came rushing back-the smell of his breath, hot and thick with beer and tobacco and lust…the pressure of his arm across her throat, and the rising curtain of blackness and terror that threatened to suffocate her…the sharpness of his belt buckle cutting into the small of her back…the sound of his breathing, intent and determined…the sense of stark disbelief that curtained her mind from the thought that shrieked from some distant place: Oh God, I’m being raped.

  And perhaps most shockingly, she recalled the violence and brutality of her release, and the strange mixture of rage and relief that had shaken her then, to the very depths of her soul. Not raped… violated nonetheless. She had not been a well-loved child, nor had she lived a protected life up to then, but she had never been spat upon before. She had never been struck in the face. Even Diego had never struck her in the face.

  She could still taste the sickness that had risen into her throat after Jason had left her, in spite of all her efforts to prevent it.

  Oh, I wish I could have killed him.

  Would she have, she wondered now, if she had been able to reach the gun in her purse, the one she’d bought and practiced with so faithfully, then left sitting on the table beside the front door when she’d stepped onto the porch to check on the burned-out light bulb…only to realize a moment later, with a horrifying clutch of fear in her belly, that the bulb had been deliberately removed…and to know, with a cold sick sense of irony, that all her vigilance and preparation had been for nothing?

  For nothing. Because in the end, the boogieman had found her anyway. Not the boogieman she’d been expecting, true, but bad enough. Definitely bad enough.

  But the sheriff had taken her gun, and the forensics would prove she hadn’t shot Jason, no matter how much she might have wanted to. She had nothing to worry about.

  Well, maybe not nothing. The sheriff had struck her as a man to be reckoned with, a man who wouldn’t be easily fooled.

  Once again a little frisson stirred through her body as she recalled the cool blue glitter of those farseeing eyes, and it was followed by the surprised realization that, like the first time it had happened, when she’d first seen Roan Harley standing on her front porch, this wasn’t exactly an unpleasant sensation.

  “What are you looking at me like that for?” Mary said to Cat, who was still crouched on the back of the sofa, staring at her with what she could have sworn was a sneer of contempt. “Just because you took a fancy to him. You’re a cat-what do you know? The man’s dangerous, I’m telling you.”

  The cat gave her one of his slow-motion blinks and turned his face away.

  Mary shrugged. What had she expected? She was, as she had been for ten long years, utterly and completely alone.

  Taking a purposeful breath, she crossed the living room to the door that opened onto a short hallway and thus to the house’s two bedrooms and only bathroom. She went into the bathroom, turned on the light and closed the door.

  With only the briefest glance at her image in the medicine cabinet mirror above the sink, she pulled the clip from her hair, letting it fall to her shoulders, not in the vibrant tumble of curls that was its true nature but in limp straight strands. She scrubbed her scalp vigorously with her fingers for a few moments, then opened the cabinet below the sink and took out several plastic bottles with applicator tips, a small glass bowl and a number of odds and ends she’d become all too familiar with during the past ten years.

  Slipping disposable gloves onto her hands, she squeezed dollops from the plastic bottles into the glass bowl and mixed them thoroughly. Then, using a small soft brush, she began to dab the resulting jelly-like gunk onto the strip of flaming red at the roots of her dirt-brown hair.

  Roan entered the sheriff’s station through the front door, removing his Stetson as he nodded at the dispatcher ensconced in her cubbyhole behind a pane of bulletproof glass. At that hour, the business day and visiting hours at the detention center being long over, the lobby was empty. There were no washed-out women balancing babies on their hips waiting to visit their no-account husbands in the lock-up, no parolees keeping appointments with their parole officers, no unhappy teenagers and grim-faced parents waiting to pay traffic fines. The silence had a suspenseful, waiting quality, like a held breath.

  The blast of the buzzer announcing the unlocking of the door to the inner sanctum sounded raucously, making him wince as it always did. The combination sheriff’s station and county detention center was a relatively new facility, having been one of the first major promises Roan had made good on after getting himself elected sheriff. Considering that the one it replaced could have been taken straight off the set of a Hollywood Western movie, the effect had been to boost the county’s law-enforcement capabilities from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century in one giant leap, vaulting over the twentieth in the process. The facility had been all state-of-the-art at the time, with the latest security safeguards considered necessary in this age of terrorism. Roan had no objections to the protection, even if any terrorists to be found in the environs of Hart County, Montana, were likely to be of the homegrown drunk-and-disorderly-cowboy or disgruntled-hunter variety. He did wish that buzzer could have been toned down a bit, though.

  As the outer door closed behind him he paused to stick his head through the open top half of the dispatcher’s doorway and said in an undertone, “He still here?”

  Donna gave him a grim look and tilted her head toward the back of the building. “Down there in your office.”

  Roan nodded, slapped his hat against his thigh and continued on down the hallway. He didn’t hesitate at the door to his office; the way he saw it, postponing the moment wasn’t going to make it any easier. He took a firm grip on the doorknob and turned it.

  Chapter 4

  The man standing with his back to the door pretending to study the large topographical map of Hart County and its environs hanging on the wall behind the desk jerked around when Roan walked in, then pushed past the corner of the desk and came toward him.

  He was a tall man, similar to Roan in both height and build, but now he seemed to have folded in on himself, so that his buff-colored Western-style suede jacket hung from his broad shoulders like a coat on a rack. His normally strong-sculpted features appeared shrunken, too, and his skin, yellowed and darkened to the color of old parchment, draped across them in ill-fitting folds and hollows. Only his eyes seemed as sharp and intense as Roan remembered, their ice-blue glare glittering out of shadowed sockets like the eyes of a starving wolf homed in on his prey.

  He’s aged twenty years, Roan thought. But he wasn’t all that surprised. He’d seen the look before, on his father-in-law, Boyd Stuart’s face, right after Erin had died-the look of a man fixing to bury his child.

  “Good to see you, Senator,” he said as he clasped the big, rawboned hand. “Just wish it didn’t have to be for this. Can’t tell you how sorry I am.” He meant it sincerely. He hadn’t had much use for Jason Holbrook, but he wouldn’t wish the pain of losing a child on any man.

  Holbrook gripped Roan’s hand tightly in both of his-a politician’s handshake-then released it. “Hell of a thing,” he muttered as he swiped a hand over hair that was still luxuriant but more silver now than gold. “Just a hell of a thing.” He coughed loudly and abruptly, then narrowed his wolf’s stare at Roan. “Tell me you’re gonna find whoever did this. Tell me you’re gonna get the son of a bitch that shot my boy.”

  Roan met the older man’s gaze with an almost identical one and quietly replied, “I mean to. I believe I will.” He laid his Stetson on the top of his desk as he rounded its corner and pulled out his chair.

  Senator Holbrook was pacing again. He paused to frown distractedly at nothing. “You’ve called in the state boys-that’s good. That’s good. That detective that picked me up at the airport-seems like a good man. Seems to know his stuff.”

  Roan nodded and sat. “I think he does. Name’s Kurt Ruger. Partner’s name is Roger Fry-he’s not here right now. I sent him with
the forensics evidence to the lab in Helena. They’re both good men.”

  Holbrook aimed the scowl at him again. “Sure that’s going to be enough manpower? I can have the FBI in here by tomorrow morning. In fact, if this was in some way directed at me…”

  The chair creaked as Roan leaned back in it, deliberately adopting a casual attitude, masking the tension he felt with calm eyes and even tone. “At this point there’s nothing about the shooting that would indicate a national security connection. In fact, we’re pretty certain this was local.”

  “Local…as in…”

  “Personal.”

  “Ah.” The senator’s mouth tightened. Then he rubbed a hand hard across his eyes, as though the fire in them burned even him. “I see,” he said heavily, and hauled in a breath. “Well…okay then, I don’t want to step on your toes, Roan. Just trying to help. You let me know if you need anything, now, you hear me? Anything at all. Just find this guy.”

  “Oh,” Roan said softly, “I’ll do that.”

  Instead of leaving then, the senator jerked out one of the chairs that faced Roan’s desk and perched himself on the edge of the seat, then leaned forward with shoulders hunched and hands clasped. “Okay, so tell me what you’ve got so far. Any leads? Any suspects?”

  Getting down to brass tacks, thought Roan. The fact that he’d anticipated this didn’t make it any more welcome. He shifted warily. “Now, Cliff, you know I can’t-”

  Holbrook silenced him with an impatient gesture and grimace. “Don’t give me that, Roan. You think I can’t get access to anything you or those state boys have got? Take me one phone call. I hope you’re not gonna make me do that. Lord, son, this is family.”

  Family. Roan let out a breath, hating the jolt that had kicked inside him at the word. He doubted the senator, given his current frame of mind, even realized the implications of what he’d said. No sense making anything of it.

  He shrugged. “We’ve got some ideas. Pretty good idea what happened, anyway. For starters, it looks like Jason most likely knew the person that shot him.”