Deputy Defender

by Cindi Myers

  “No.”

  “Let us know if they do,” Travis said.

  “I don’t see how this relates to Mr. Carstairs’s death,” Rizzo said.

  “You don’t? You demanded and got bail for Eddie, which put him in a position where the killer could get to him.”

  Rizzo was silent for a long moment. “I hope you’re wrong,” he said. “And I have to go now.”

  The call ended. Travis put away his phone. “Want to bet we’ll never hear from him again?” Dwight asked.

  “I doubt B or whoever set this up will contact him,” Travis said. “They knew when they paid him this case wasn’t going to go to trial. They only needed Rizzo to get Eddie released on bail so that they could get a shot at him.”

  “It had to be a professional hit,” Dwight said. “A military sniper couldn’t have made a better shot, and the killer didn’t leave a shred of evidence.”

  “Maybe it was a military sniper,” Travis said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Travis shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m not ruling anything out right now.”

  “What’s next?” Dwight asked.

  “Let’s go through Eddie’s apartment and try to figure out what he was involved in. So far, B has been very careful. I don’t think we’re going to find much.”

  The first item of interest in Eddie’s apartment was a box of yellow stationery, a row of cartoon flowers dancing across the bottom of each sheet. “We already knew he sent those threats to Brenda, but it’s good to have confirmation,” Dwight said.

  Dwight flipped through the rest of the contents of the desk in Eddie’s bedroom. He pulled a folder from the bottom drawer and looked inside. “Check this out,” he said, and handed the folder to Travis.

  The sheriff scanned the half dozen photocopies in the folder—all crime scene photos from sheriff’s department case files. “Now we know where the photo on that note Eddie sent to Brenda came from,” he said.

  “That’s sick,” Dwight said. “It’s a good thing you fired him when you did.”

  The rest of the apartment was full of used furniture, take-out cartons and dirty clothes. Dwight was grateful to leave it and head to his own comfortable home—and the woman waiting for him there.

  Brenda smiled up at him when he entered. She was settled on the sofa, her injured arm propped on a pile of pillows. She had dressed and combed her hair and though she was still pale, the tension had faded from her face. Dwight sat beside her. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “Better,” she said. “Much better now.” She turned his face toward hers and kissed him, long and hard. Not breaking contact, he slid one arm under her thighs and scooped her onto his lap, being careful not to jostle her injured shoulder.

  When they did finally come up for breath, her eyes sparkled. “Tomorrow is my birthday,” she said.

  “I hadn’t forgotten.” He tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “Not a very fun way to spend it.”

  “I don’t know about that. I’m alive. I’m with you. It’s funny—before all this happened, I was a little depressed about turning thirty. I felt as if I had reached a milestone in my life and I had nothing to show for it. I don’t feel that way anymore.”

  “Do you think it’s because you faced down death and lived?”

  “Partly. But I also think it’s because I had reached a point where I had lost everything—I was a widow, my job was in jeopardy, my house had burned down, and then my car was wrecked. I had nothing, but instead of all that making me feel defeated, it was incredibly freeing. I had nothing left to lose. I could do anything. I could be with whoever I wanted to be with.” She stroked his cheek. “I don’t have anywhere to go from here but up.”

  “As long as you go there with me.”

  “I’ve been thinking about my house,” she said.

  “What about it?”

  “I want to rebuild it.”

  “Sure. We can live wherever you want to live.” He would miss the ranch, but there were probably advantages to living in town. And he wanted her to be happy—she deserved that so much.

  “I want to stay on the ranch, here with you,” she said. “It’s beautiful and peaceful here. I love it.”

  He hoped the relief he felt didn’t show on his face. “Then what will you do with the house—rent it out?”

  “Something like that. I don’t want to build just one house. I want to build a triplex or a fourplex, and make it affordable housing—something Eagle Mountain really needs.”

  “That sounds like a great idea.”

  “I’m full of great ideas. I have all kinds of things I want to do at the museum with the money from the Falmont Foundation, and of course, we have a wedding to plan.”

  “I like the sound of that one. What other ideas do you have?”

  “This one.” She kissed him again. “And this one.” She began unbuttoning his shirt.

  “Hey.” He wrapped his hand around hers. “You’re supposed to be taking it easy. You’re recovering from surgery.”

  “Oh, we can take it easy.” She leaned forward and nipped at his jaw. “Slow and easy. Doesn’t that sound good?” She leaned back, grinning at him. “Or if you’d rather, you can get a head start on all that paperwork.”

  “What paperwork?” He hugged her more firmly against him, then leaned over and switched off the lamp, so that the room was lit only by the glow of moonlight through the front windows. Then he pulled her close in a kiss once more. Paperwork could wait—but he didn’t have to wait for Brenda anymore.

  * * * * *

  Look for the next book in Cindi Myers’s

  Eagle Mountain Murder Mystery miniseries,

  Danger on Dakota Ridge, next month.

  And don’t miss the previous books in the series:

  Saved by the Sheriff

  Avalanche of Trouble

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  The Negotiation

  by Tyler Anne Snell

  Prologue

  Dane heard the call the same time Rachel did.

  Both were sitting in the belly of the sheriff’s department. They were two of several who heard what the men had to say.

  “These men are sinners,” the man shouted, voice slightly distorted over the speakerphone. “Plain and
true! Just like this town. Just like this county. Just like this state. Sinners, all sinners!”

  Dane’s fists had already been balled. Now his fingers were eating into his palms. It wasn’t until Rachel silently covered one hand with her own that he loosened the tension. Her wedding band was cold against his skin.

  “Then why take them? They were on their way to the prison,” Sheriff Rockwell said. “You’re the one who kept them from facing justice.”

  The man on the other end of the phone call was fast to answer, like he’d rehearsed the whole thing beforehand.

  “They represent corruption. A corruption that has taken over,” he said, voice still high and filled with unmistakable self-reverence. “And we, the Saviors of the South, represent the consequence to that corruption! The answer! We will show this town that this corruption will no longer be tolerated. These sinners will be the first of many demonstrations on how we will cleanse this place!”

  Rachel’s hand tightened over Dane’s while he shared a look with the sheriff. Rockwell was a solid man who Dane had felt privileged to work alongside as his chief deputy for the past few years. He was fair, to the point and levelheaded. He was also a mean shot, and that didn’t count for nothing.

  “But you didn’t just take prisoners,” the sheriff pointed out, “you also took two guards. Two good men through and through. What’s your plan with them?”

  Dane held his breath. He knew Rachel was doing the same. One of those men was David Roberts. And he was one of the best of them.

  That’s why Rachel had married him.

  That’s why Dane was his best friend.

  That’s why both were willing to do whatever it took to get him back.

  “The men who protect sinners are no better than the sinners themselves,” the man answered.

  Anger swelled in Dane’s chest but he kept his mouth closed. Popping off at an obviously unstable man wasn’t going to save David or the other guard. It wasn’t going to save the inmates they had been transporting, either. Good or bad, they’d undergone trials and received a sentence by their peers. Neither Dane, the sheriff nor the Saviors of the South had any room to change those sentences. Certainly not to make the decision of whether they should live or die.

  And that’s really what the man on the phone was saying without saying it.

  They aimed to kill the seven men they’d kidnapped that morning.

  Dane knew it. The sheriff knew it. Even Rachel knew it.

  She’d rushed to the department the moment she’d heard the transport van had been hit, ready to help in any way she could.

  “I have money,” she’d told him. “Not a lot, but maybe we can exchange it.”

  That had been before the call had come in. Before they’d realized the men didn’t want money at all. They wanted to be heard. They wanted attention. They wanted fame.

  “I can’t just let you do what you want with them, no matter who they are,” Sheriff Rockwell said, stern. “So let’s find us a way to work this out where no one gets hurt.”

  The man, who would later be known as Marcus the Martyr by his followers who found themselves in prison, laughed. Without realizing it, Dane locked that sound in his memory for life. It was cold and callous. It didn’t care about corruption, no matter how falsely perceived, and it didn’t care about justice. It, like the man, only cared about being louder than everyone else.

  Marcus wanted violence.

  Dane knew it the moment he heard the man laugh and then hang up the phone.

  He’d later realize it was in that moment that he knew his best friend might not make it to see the next day, but at the time all he could feel was the deep need to do something.

  So when the sheriff was done cursing at the dial tone, Dane straightened and felt his world settle on his shoulders.

  “I have a plan.”

  Chapter One

  Seven years later Rachel Roberts surveyed the blacktop ahead of her with a pang of annoyance. It was an early Saturday morning and the Darby Middle School building was absolutely teasing her in the background. Between her and it stood the two reasons why she was sweating in her jeans instead of lounging in her pajamas, catching up on the backlog of television shows burning a hole in her DVR.

  “Now, I know none of us want to be here, but we are and that’s that,” she started, making sure she split her narrowed stare between both boys equally. “I guess the two of you are at that age where you don’t know how ridiculous it is to call each other names in the school hallways or during class presentations, so instead of making you write long essays about compassion and being polite...”

  Rachel motioned to the two buckets of chalk she’d found in the closet filled with art supplies in her classroom and the rectangle outlined in painter’s tape in the middle of the blacktop. The one she’d made right before spilling her coffee onto the grass next to it. The one she’d said a few harsh words over in the silence of the school’s empty front lawn.

  Lonnie Hughes was the first to voice his concern. His scowl had only deepened since he’d hopped off his bike.

  Lonnie was a thin twelve-year-old with tightly coiled black hair, dark, always-questioning eyes and a mouth more than ready to voice one of his many opinions. The latter was one of several reasons he was at the bottom of the school’s popularity totem pole. He talked too much, listened too little and had almost no filter. This, plus an ingrained aversion to authority figures, had earned him dismissive attitudes from most of the teachers. Rachel wasn’t one of them, though most of the staff had assured her that if she had more than one art class with the boy she’d think differently.

  The boy standing next to him, however, was completely opposite in that respect. Teachers and students alike seemed to love Jude Carrington. Even for a seventh-grader, he had charm and was clever enough to know when to speak, what to say and how to hide all the devious things most kids that age did. His hair was a shock of red, his skin was covered in freckles, and he wore thick-framed glasses. Yet, according to Mrs. Fletcher, who had him in her homeroom, he seemed to be the leader of the seventh-grade class. Instead of being the stereotypical outcast from an ’80s movie, he was Mr. Popular. With a side of bully when it came to Lonnie.

  Which was why Rachel wasn’t shocked to see the two of them there, though she was surprised their guardians had opted for Saturday detention instead of after school. Darby Middle rarely implemented what she called the Breakfast Club punishment. Yet here they all were.

  “You want us to draw for detention?”

  What I want to do is to find out what’s going on with Jon Snow from Game of Thrones, she wanted to say. Instead she decided to go with a more stern response.

  “Unless you really do want to write a five-page essay about why you’re so sorry about what you did, I suggest you show a little enthusiasm. It wasn’t exactly easy to convince Principal Martin that doing art projects was punishments for you two.”

  “It is when it’s on a Saturday,” Jude interjected.

  Rachel nodded and grabbed one of the buckets.

  “That’s what I told him.” She took out a thick piece of white chalk and sat in the middle of the empty rectangle. The blacktop was warm but nowhere near as hot as it would be by midday. If they didn’t get it going now, the heat would force them inside and she’d be the one coming back in the morning to finish it alone. Rachel loved her job, but she wanted at least one day off before having to go back to it.

  “This is our fall-themed mural, but I was thinking we could make it more Halloween-y. Do a bigger collage of doodles like we did in class last week to help make this slab look a bit more fun. Then, after we’re done here, we’re going to go inside and cut out a few hundred leaves, pumpkins and maybe some bats from construction paper. Then we’re going to go hang them.”

  Despite his constant need to charm the adults, Jude actually groaned. Lonnie kept scowling. Rachel
adopted a look caught between the two.

  “Unless you want me to go inside and tell Principal Martin that you actually want to write an essay explaining why you two said what you did and how you two are going to work together in the future?” She shrugged. “I could always do this later.”

  For a second Rachel was afraid they would decide to go for the essays. It was fall, but in South Alabama that didn’t mean much. They’d all be sweating after a few minutes. The air-conditioning inside might be enough of a draw to sway the boys from the manual labor of arts and crafts to tackling papers. Though she hoped that wasn’t the case. Gaven, the principal, had mostly agreed to her suggested punishment activities because they were projects she had volunteered to do out of the goodness of her heart.

  No sooner had she thought that than Rachel acknowledged it was a lie.

  It hadn’t just been something she’d felt she needed to do to better the school or to help raise the spirits of those who attended it. No. She had needed a distraction.

  One that would keep her mind away from the one place it had been traveling recently. A place she didn’t like to visit often.

  “Whatever,” Lonnie finally said. Rachel breathed an internal sigh of relief as he took a seat on the bottom line of the taped-off empty mural. Jude followed suit but as far away from Lonnie as was possible while staying near the chalk.

  Rachel tried to clear her head as it started to fill with sorrow. She smirked. “Glad to see we’re on the same page.”

  Despite Rachel’s not wanting to be at school on a Saturday, the next half hour that went by did so with little fuss. The boys drew white, orange and red bats and spiders and skeletons with surprising skill. Rachel had seen both of their drawings before in class, but there was more precision and focus in their actions today. After Lonnie made a jab at Jude and then Jude returned that jab before Rachel could step in, she realized their new passion to do a good job on the mural was probably because they were trying to outdo each other. Meanwhile she filled the center of the blacktop with a giant spider web. It was oddly soothing.

  “Why don’t we see what Principal Martin thinks about it before we start on the inside work?” Rachel said, stretching out her long limbs when they were done.