Cowboy Under Fire

by Carla Cassidy

  Forest stared at her in shock. “Not everything in life is fact based, especially when it comes to matters of the heart. How do you explain people who stay married for years?”

  “A chemical attraction based on pheromones, evolution, need and hormones. In the lust and attraction stage dopamine and adrenaline play a big part. In the attachment stage the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin kick in. It’s science, Forest, not the nebulous emotion people call love.”

  Forest had never heard of half the words she’d spoken, but he got the gist of what she was communicating and it made him sad for her.

  “I don’t know anything about hormones and evolution, but until I was fifteen I was raised by my mother and father who not only loved each other but also loved me. I just don’t believe science had anything to do with it. It was an emotional, loving bond that was only broken by death.”

  “Your parents died?”

  “In a car accident when I was fifteen.” Even after all the years that had passed, a lump of loss rose in his throat. “What about you? Are your parents still alive and well?”

  “My mother also died in a car accident. It was five years after she walked out on me and my father. She left us when I was six and we never heard from her again. My father was contacted when she died by a distant relative of hers.”

  “I’m sorry,” he replied.

  “Don’t be. She was a drama queen, constantly wailing or crying, cursing and screaming. I think if she hadn’t left when she did, my father might have divorced her. He couldn’t abide the chaos of all of her emotions.” She spoke matter-of-factly, as if relating one of the stories in her tabloids about people she didn’t know well.

  “Do you have a good relationship with your father?” Forest was fascinated by this glimpse into her childhood.

  “We have a good working relationship,” she replied.

  Forest frowned. “What does that mean?”

  “My father is a scientist and we’ve never had a warm and fuzzy relationship. He was my mentor and set high standards for me. We speak occasionally on the phone, but he lectures a lot all over the country, so we don’t see each other very often.” She shifted positions in the chair, the movement sending her faint floral scent to Forest. “What happened to you after your parents’ deaths? Did you go into foster care?”

  “We lived in Oklahoma City and after my parents’ funeral I was taken back to my house by a social worker. I packed a duffel bag and crawled out of my bedroom window and took to the streets. I wasn’t going to go into foster care. I thought I was old enough, big enough to take care of myself. On the streets is where I first met Dusty.”

  “Dusty?”

  “Blond hair, deep dimples...the youngest of all of us here. He was a scrawny thirteen-year-old who was getting beat up and robbed on a regular basis by other street kids. I was already big enough that nobody messed with me. After I met Dusty I made sure nobody ever messed with him again.”

  “How did you come to be on a ranch an hour and a half from the city?”

  “A woman named Francine Rogers. She was a social worker who at night would check in with the lost boys...that’s what we called ourselves. At the time I met her, Cass had just lost her husband and this ranch was in near ruins. Hank, Cass’s husband, had been ill for some time and most of the men who worked the ranch had moved on and deserted her. Francine asked me if I wanted to come here and learn to be a cowboy. I agreed only if Dusty came with me, and here we are roughly fifteen years later. All of us were street kids when Cass took us in and turned us into men.”

  “You know the timing is right that it’s possible one of those street kids committed murder.”

  “I’ll never believe that,” he replied firmly. “I’ll definitely have to see cold, hard facts to believe that.”

  “See, I guess we’re more alike than you want to admit.” She stood. “And on that note, I’m going inside. Good night, Forest.”

  “’Night, Patience,” he replied.

  When she’d disappeared into her room, he leaned back in his chair, digesting everything they’d talked about. Forest had no idea who might have killed the people whose bones Patience was attempting to put together, but if he was to guess, it might have something to do with the feud between Raymond and Cass.

  He wasn’t a police officer and it wasn’t his job even to speculate on who might be responsible. What he’d found intriguing about his conversation with Patience was the glimpses into her childhood...a childhood that had made her into the woman she was today.

  Raised for six years by an over-emotional mother who had abandoned her and then brought up by what sounded like a cold and distant scientist father, was it any wonder she questioned the existence of real love?

  Was it any wonder her only emotion appeared to be a default to anger, the easiest of all emotions to attain and the best weapon to keep other people and more frightening emotions away?

  Forest knew the sounds, the scents and the feel of love. Love sounded like his mother and father laughing as they shared a private joke between them. Love smelled like pot roast on Sundays, and it felt like a proud pat on the back or a gentle kiss on the cheek just before falling asleep.

  He knew love and he hungered to have it in his life again. Unlike most of the other men who worked here, Forest hadn’t been beaten or abused by the people who were supposed to love him or damaged on the streets where he’d found himself.

  He wanted love and marriage, children and the kind of forever after he knew in his heart his mother and father would have shared if they hadn’t died prematurely.

  He rose from the chair and folded it and the second one where Patience had sat and carried them inside his room. He locked his door and tried not to imagine Patience in her bed just on the other side of the wall of his room.

  It was just his luck that the first woman who had captured his attention didn’t believe in love and had no interest in personal relationships.

  He shucked off his jeans and took off his shirt, leaving him clad only in a pair of navy boxers. He got into bed and wondered if it was even possible for him to change Patience’s mind about the most important things in life.

  Chapter 4

  Cassie greeted Dillon at the door of the large, two-story ranch house and led him into the kitchen where foreman Adam Benson sat at the table with a cup of coffee before him.

  “’Morning, Adam,” he said to the handsome, dark-haired man.

  “Same to you,” Adam replied.

  “Coffee?” Cassie asked.

  “Sounds good,” Dillon agreed. Cassie Peterson was a petite sexy blonde, who had attracted Dillon from the day he’d first met her when she’d arrived at the ranch after her aunt’s death.

  But it had become quickly obvious to him that Adam and Cassie were close and becoming closer with each day that passed, so he’d tamped down his initial interest in her.

  That didn’t stop him from admiring the way her designer jeans fit snug across her shapely butt and clung to her slender legs. It didn’t stop him from noticing how the light blue blouse she wore enhanced the sky color of her eyes.

  He sat at the table across from Adam, and she placed a cup of coffee before him and then sat between the two men. “I thought I’d give you an update and ask you a few questions.”

  She raised a perfectly formed blond eyebrow. “Questions for me? If it is about those skeletons, then I won’t have any answers for you. You know I’ve only been on the ranch a couple of months.”

  “I do, but let me tell you what we’ve learned and the theory I’m working with. Both of the skeletons that Dr. Forbes has managed to put together are of young males.” He looked at Adam. “They would have been about the same age all of you cowboys were when you first arrived at the ranch.”

  Adam frowned. “I was the first street kid that Cass took in. I
was here at the very beginning and I don’t remember anyone else being brought here except the twelve of us who have always been here.”

  Dillon looked back at Cassie. “Are there records from when Cass first began to bring the young men to the ranch?”

  Cassie glanced at Adam and then back at Dillon. “I wouldn’t even begin to know where to look.”

  “I might have something,” Adam said. “There are boxes of ranch bookkeeping records in one of the sheds. Of course now we keep computer records, but that didn’t happen until a couple of years ago. Cass was old-fashioned and didn’t like new technology. I had to practically beg her to let me start using a computer.”

  “Can you go through those old papers and see if you can locate employment records for the first two or three years that Cass hired on all of you?” Dillon asked.

  “Sure, but I doubt if you’ll find them too helpful. I’m not sure if every cowboy working here used their real legal names when they first started working for Cass. I’m definitely sure that none of us had addresses. Cass pretty much relied on Francine to bring her young men she thought would work well on the ranch. Have you contacted Francine?”

  “I’ve tried to. She retired several years ago and moved from Oklahoma City to Tulsa. I spoke to an old friend of hers who told me Francine is currently on a Mediterranean cruise and won’t be home for another two weeks.” Dillon took a big drink of his coffee.

  “And I’ve already checked on all of you working here. Everyone used their legal names and I ran background checks on all of you,” Dillon said.

  Adam raised an eyebrow. “I’m assuming those background checks came out clean.” Dillon nodded. “Are you doing the same kind of investigation into the men working the Humes ranch?”

  “In the process of doing so now,” Dillon replied.

  “Maybe by then Dr. Forbes will have all the skeletons put together and the scene here can be shut down,” Cassie said hopefully. “Seeing that blue tent on the property makes me sick to my stomach every time I look at it.”

  “We all feel that same way,” Adam replied. “Do you have any potential suspects? Any real clues that might lead you to who is responsible for such a thing?”

  “I really can’t give specific details about an ongoing investigation,” Dillon replied. He finished his coffee and stood. “If either of you could find me any kind of employment records from the time in question, let me know. Cassie, don’t get up. I can see myself out.”

  “Adam and I will see what we can find,” Cassie replied.

  Dillon nodded and then left the kitchen. He walked through the large great room and into a smaller formal parlor and then out the front door.

  He got into his patrol car and sat for a length of time before starting the engine. He’d love to be able to share specifics of leads with somebody, but the truth was he didn’t have any real leads.

  Dr. Forbes had indicated that her best guess about the wounds to each of the skulls was that the weapon used was a meat cleaver.

  Dillon had already had a discussion with Cookie, the cook for the Holiday cowboys, and asked him about his meat cleavers. Cookie, aka Cord Cully, was a curmudgeon to the nth degree and hadn’t been particularly pleasant to talk to, but he had been forthcoming in that over the years he’d thrown half a dozen meat cleavers away to get new, better ones.

  He’d shown Dillon what cleavers he possessed, each one clean and wickedly sharp and obviously not what was used so many years ago to kill six people.

  Dillon had run a background check on the man who had worked for Cass for twenty years. She’d hired him when he was thirty-five to cook for the ranch hands who had eventually abandoned the ranch when Cass’s husband had gotten ill. Cord had had a few run-ins with the law when he’d been younger, mostly bar fights and minor offenses, but nothing that had raised Dillon’s suspicions about him to a new level.

  Dillon finally started his car, turned around and headed down the long road leading to the highway that would take him back to his office in Bitterroot.

  He’d spoken at length with former Chief of Police Ralph McCrillis, who had been chief at the time that the murders might have occurred.

  Ralph had no information about missing young men, murder or anything else that had taken place on the Holiday Ranch so many years ago.

  It was a logical theory to work from that these young men had arrived at the Holiday Ranch the same way the other cowboys who worked there now had. But who had killed them? Who had sneaked up behind each one of them and hit them in the back of the skull with a meat cleaver?

  Who had buried them in the hole beneath the old shed? And why?

  He could only hope that when Francine Rogers got back from her cruise he could have a sit-down with her. He especially hoped she had kept some kind of records as to the identities of the young men she’d taken off the street and brought to her good friend Cass to help work the ranch. But it had been a long time ago, and he couldn’t help but feel pessimistic about the case.

  Memories would have faded and it was possible the dead would never be identified and the killer never found, and if that was the case, then he would be haunted for the rest of his life.

  * * *

  The third skeleton was coming together more easily than the first two, and Patience was pleased to discover that the skull held a gold crown, which meant that someplace there might be dental records for this particular victim.

  Although she was aware that because the murders had occurred about fifteen years or so ago, finding those dental records without a name to go with them would probably be fruitless. It was something new for Dillon to work with.

  The work was going smoothly, but she was irritated with herself for succumbing to Forest’s invitation to sit with him for a while the night before.

  She’d told him too much. She’d given away little pieces of her past that she had never shared with anyone. He just made it so easy to talk to him, to trust that anything she told him was safe.

  Time and time again today she’d fought the impulse to step out of the tent and watch his work in the corral with the horse, but so far she’d successfully fought her temptation.

  The big man appeared to have an easy way and a soft heart that made her brain scream that he was dangerous to her, and yet there was no question that she was drawn to him as she’d never been to a man before.

  Her one and only foray into romance had taken place in college. His name had been Jason and they’d only dated three times. It had been after their third date that she had given him her virginity only to find out later that she had been part of a bet between Jason and a bunch of his frat house buddies.

  The bet was that Jason couldn’t get the brainiac redhead into bed. Patience had lost her virginity and her trust in men and Jason had garnered a big pay day for his seduction success.

  Rationally she knew that all men weren’t Jasons, but she’d never dated after that. She’d focused solely on her studies, graduated from college almost two years early and wound up finishing her doctorate by the age of twenty-eight.

  Work she knew. She trusted in her intelligence and her job. Even though something about Forest touched her, she couldn’t lose sight of the fact that when she was finished here she would be returning to her apartment in Oklahoma City.

  The unidentified bones might haunt her, as might her fascination with a broad-shouldered cowboy, but there would be another job to work, more bones to process and her life would go on.

  It was after six when she told Devon he could knock off for the night. “Do you want to ride with me into town for dinner?” he asked.

  “No, I’m going to work a while longer here and then head to my room,” she replied.

  She knew Devon didn’t particularly enjoy dining with her and would much prefer sharing his dinner with some of the locals.

  Besides, she i
ntended to work to finish the third skeleton before bedtime and that would take several more hours. It had taken so long to prepare the scene and document everything before actually beginning the work of excavation. She was eager to continue the work of actually putting bones together again.

  Hopefully it would be late enough when she returned to her room that if Forest was waiting for her she could simply say she was exhausted.

  She’d never had a problem before talking sharply, being demanding and keeping people at bay. But for some reason she didn’t want to hurt Forest’s feelings.

  She shoved away all thoughts of Forest and her past and instead returned to the tedious work. The human skeleton contained two hundred and six bones, and at the moment, skeleton three had one hundred and ninety on the table. Finding and matching the final sixteen bones would take complete focus on her part.

  She worked for a couple of hours and then as twilight moved in she sat and drank a soda and dug into her stash of cheese puffs. She was still missing six bones to complete the skeleton.

  Devon had returned from town a little while before. He’d poked his head into the tent to see if she wanted his help, but she’d told him to relax in the trailer until morning. He’d also told her the guard had arrived for the night and had set up for duty on the side of the tent.

  While she munched, her thoughts returned to Forest and the conversation they’d shared the night before. With his size and muscular build, it was no wonder he hadn’t had problems living on the streets. The fact that he’d taken a vulnerable younger Dusty under his wing only spoke to the bigness of Forest’s heart.

  But he believed in the kind of nebulous things she didn’t, like love and fairy tales. He probably even believed in pixies and Santa Claus.

  With a frown she finished her soda and stashed her bag of cheese puffs back into the cooler and then returned to work. Discerning which bone went with each body was a challenge, but using length and color, weight and sameness of bones helped her figure out which belonged to the particular skeleton she was working on and which didn’t.