Black Canyon Conspiracy

by Cindi Myers

Sophie didn’t say anything for a long while, taking it in. Lauren closed her eyes again.

  “I’m glad Marco was with you,” Sophie said. “The guy doesn’t say much, but he’s deep. And any bad guy would think twice before tangling with him.”

  That was true enough. Beyond his physical strength, Marco had perfected an intimidating attitude. Which made his gentleness with her all the more touching.

  “Hey, I thought you were going to stay with him,” Sophie said.

  “I was, but we’ve had a change of plans. He needs to devote himself to the investigation. And now that Richard has gotten the charges against him dropped, I’m no longer a threat.”

  “Aren’t you?” Sophie asked. “You aren’t going to give up because of one grand jury’s mistakes, are you?”

  “I don’t know.” She was just so tired—of always fighting, of having to be strong when she felt so weak.

  “You can’t give up,” Sophie said. “Giving up means he wins—that the lies he’s told about you are true.”

  She opened her eyes again and forced herself to sit up straight and look at her sister. “Then, what do we do?”

  “We do what we can to help with the investigation,” Sophie said. “We talk to people, find out what they know.”

  “Who do we talk to?” Her one contact on the case, Alan Milbanks, was dead.

  “Why don’t we start with Phil? We’ll find out if Prentice paid him to tell the press those lies about you.”

  The last person Lauren wanted to see was her ex-husband, but Sophie’s reasoning made sense. Talking to Phil was a smart and relatively safe place to start. “All right,” she said. “We’ll talk to him.”

  “Do you know where he’s staying?”

  She took out her phone and scrolled through her list of contacts until she found the address of the rehab facility in Grand Junction where Phil was staying. She read it off to Sophie.

  “Great. We can be there in an hour.” She punched the address into her GPS. “Why don’t you take a nap while I drive? I’ll wake you when we get there.”

  Lauren closed her eyes again and tried to get more comfortable in her seat. If only she’d wake up from her nap to find the past few months had been nothing but a nightmare—not the awful reality she had to keep surviving.

  * * *

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON Marco trained the high-powered binoculars on Richard Prentice’s mansion. The gray stone castle, complete with crenellated towers and a fake drawbridge, was the billionaire’s way of giving the finger to the county officials who had thwarted his plans to sell the park in-holding to them at inflated prices. The castle blocked a park visitor’s best view of the Curecanti Needle, a famous rock formation. Now, instead of marveling at the beauty of nature, visitors standing at the Pioneer Point overlook in the park saw this monstrosity.

  “See anything?” Rand asked, crouched next to Marco on a rocky outcropping of land just across the boundary line from Prentice’s ranch.

  “Nope.” He swung the binoculars to the left and focused on two muscular men in desert camo, who lounged against a tricked-out black Jeep. One of the men had an AR-15 casually slung over one shoulder. “The troops are taking it easy,” Marco said.

  Rand grunted. “Their boss is probably feeling pretty secure since the grand jury let him off the hook.”

  “Something tells me insecurity isn’t one of Prentice’s problems, ever.” He shifted the binoculars farther to the left, to the pile of rubble that marked the entrance to the mine where Lauren had been held. No telling what other illegal booty had been stored in the maze of tunnels. Prentice had been worried enough to order his men to set off explosives and collapse the mine, almost trapping Lauren and her rescuers inside.

  Rand must have been thinking about that night, too. “Why didn’t the grand jury believe Lauren when she told them what he’d done to her?” he asked.

  “People are afraid of mental illness. Prentice and his experts played on that fear.”

  “What about you?”

  Marco lowered the binoculars and stared at his friend. “Are you asking if I’m afraid of Lauren?”

  “Not afraid, but do you worry about getting involved with someone who’s dealing with something like this?”

  He shifted his backpack from his shoulder and stowed the binoculars. “I don’t lose sleep worrying about it.”

  “Sophie told me you volunteered to be her bodyguard. I thought maybe it was because you were interested in her. You know, romantically.”

  Marco zipped up the pack and shrugged back into it. “She needs protecting. I can protect her. That’s all.” That was all there could ever be between him and Lauren Starling.

  “So you’re just above all those messy emotions the rest of us mortals have to deal with,” Rand said.

  “I don’t have time for them.” Those “messy emotions” brought complications and distractions he didn’t want or need. He turned back to the view of Prentice’s castle. “We have a job to do.”

  Rand stiffened and put a hand on the pistol at his side. “What’s that noise?”

  The low whine, like the humming of a large mosquito, grew louder. Marco looked around, then up, and spotted what at first looked like a toy plane or one of those radio-controlled aircraft hobbyists flew. “I think it’s a drone,” he said as the craft hovered over them.

  Rand scowled at the intruder. “Is it armed?”

  “No, but I think it’s spotted us.”

  “The captain said Prentice had one of these. What do you think it’s doing?”

  Marco trained the binoculars on the craft. “It looks as if there’s a camera attached to the underside, so I’d say it’s taking pictures.”

  “Pictures of what?”

  “Of us. Evidence that we’re harassing the poor little rich guy.”

  “Nothing wrong with being rich.” Rand gave a big, cheesy smile and waved up at the drone.

  Marco lowered the binoculars, resisting the urge to make an obscene gesture at the camera. “No, but there’s a lot wrong with being a jerk.” And a jerk who used a beautiful, vulnerable woman in his sick games had to be stopped.

  Chapter Five

  The low-slung cedar and stone buildings of the Dayspring Wellness Center looked more like an exclusive vacation resort than a medical facility. Fountains and flowers dotted the lavish landscaping, and the few people Lauren and Sophie saw once they’d left their car in the parking lot were tanned and casually dressed as if on their way to a tennis game or setting out to hike in the nearby hills.

  “Maybe we should look into checking in here,” Sophie said as they made their way up a paved walkway lined with brilliant blooming flowers. “This is way nicer than our apartment. And we wouldn’t have to cook or clean.”

  Lauren stopped before a signpost with markers pointing toward the dining room, gym, pool and treatment rooms. “This all must cost a fortune.”

  “Then, how is Phil paying for it? Wasn’t he hassling you for money before you disappeared?”

  “He wanted me to increase his support payments.” Because Lauren had earned more money than Phil, an actor with a small theater company, the court had ordered her to pay him support after their divorce. “But I haven’t given him any money in months.” While Prentice had held her captive, she hadn’t had access to her bank accounts, then she hadn’t been working, recovering from her ordeal. Now that she’d been fired, no telling when she’d be able to pay him.

  Then again, not having access to her money had forced him to admit that his drug habit had gotten out of hand, and he had to seek help. When the Rangers had questioned him about her disappearance, he’d been living in a fleabag motel on the edge of town. “Maybe his girlfriend came into money.” When they’d divorced, Phil had been seeing an actress he worked with.

  “Maybe Richard Prentice is footing the bill,” Sophie said. “In exchange for a few ‘favors.’”

  “I don’t know.”

  They headed to a building marked Welcome Center. “We’r
e here to see Phillip Starling,” Lauren said.

  The receptionist consulted her computer. “He’s in Pod A.” She indicated a map on the desk in front of her. “Follow this walkway around back and you’ll see the groups of cottages are labeled. He’s probably in the courtyard. We encourage our guests to spend as much time as possible out of doors, enjoying nature.”

  Lauren thanked her and they headed down the walk she’d indicated. “What’s the difference between a patient and a guest?” Lauren asked.

  “Maybe a couple thousand dollars a day?” Sophie guessed.

  They found Pod A and walked under a stone archway into a courtyard with padded loungers and shaded tables arranged around a gurgling fountain. Phil, his back to them, sat at one of the tables, talking with a young woman who stood beside a cart next to the table.

  As Lauren and Sophie drew nearer, the woman laughed and playfully swatted Phil’s shoulder. “You are so bad,” she chided.

  “Come back after you get off and I’ll show you how bad—and how good—I can be,” he said.

  She laughed again, then saw the two women. “I’d better go,” she said, and rolled her cart away.

  “Hello, Phil,” Lauren said.

  He turned toward her and arched one eyebrow. “You’re about the last person I expected to see here.”

  Hair cut, clean shaven and wearing a polo shirt and pressed khakis, he looked much better than the last time she’d seen him. He had a tan and had put on a few pounds. Her ex-husband was definitely handsome. She waited for the catch in her throat that always happened when she saw him again after time apart, and was relieved when it didn’t come. Maybe she was finally getting over him. “You’re looking good,” she said.

  “You, too.” He stood and kissed her cheek, and nodded to her sister. “Hello, Sophie.”

  “Hello, Phil.” Her greeting was cool; Sophie had never liked Phil, and when he’d left Lauren for another woman she’d stopped trying to hide her disdain.

  “What brings you two here?” he asked. “Did you miss me?”

  “We wanted to talk to you about Richard Prentice,” Lauren said. No sense being coy.

  Some of the cheerfulness went out of his eyes, replaced by edgy caution. “What about him?”

  “The grand jury refused to indict him on charges of kidnapping,” Sophie said.

  Phil’s surprise seemed genuine. “They think he didn’t do it?”

  “Apparently, he persuaded them I made up the whole story,” Lauren said.

  “That’s too bad,” he said. “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “Oh, please.” Sophie folded her arms across her chest and glared at him. “Your comments in the paper—calling Prentice your good friend and practically accusing Lauren of being delusional—didn’t help matters any.”

  “You know how the press can be,” he said. “Always taking things out of context.”

  “Did Prentice pay you to say those things about me?” Lauren asked.

  “Is that what you think?” He put his hand on her shoulder. She resisted the urge to shrug him off. “Lauren, honey, I know this is hard for you to hear, but you have to admit that the last few months we were together, you were pretty out there. Not yourself.”

  “Neither of us was at our best then,” she said.

  “Maybe so. But at least I didn’t suddenly decide to redecorate the whole condo and stay up for two nights in a row ripping out tile and moving furniture, only to abandon the project half-done two days later and start looking at new places instead. And what about the time you bought all that expensive cookware and enrolled in an Italian cooking course? You gave one dinner party, then almost never went into the kitchen again.”

  Lauren did move away from him then. “None of those things hurt anyone,” she said.

  “They’re not normal, Lauren. All I wanted was a normal marriage. A normal life.”

  “So that’s why you became a drug addict,” Sophie said. “So things would be ‘normal.’”

  He took a step toward her, but Lauren stepped between them. “Back to Richard Prentice. Why did you tell the paper he was such a good friend? You hardly knew him.”

  “I figured it wouldn’t hurt my reputation to be associated with a billionaire, you know?”

  “How does Prentice feel, being associated with you?” Sophie asked.

  Phil shot her a look and turned back to Lauren. “Maybe you shouldn’t be going around asking questions about Richard Prentice,” he said. “I mean, haven’t you had enough trouble from him?”

  “Have you talked to him?” she asked. “Did he say anything about me?”

  “I didn’t have to talk to him,” he said. “All I had to do was look him in the eye. There are dark things going on in that brain of his.” He took her arm. “Let’s take a walk.” He glanced at Sophie. “Just the two of us.”

  She hesitated.

  “Please. We need to talk.”

  “Go on.” Sophie sat at the table. “I’ll wait here.”

  He led Lauren down a path, out of the courtyard into an open area at the back of the compound. Beyond the center’s manicured grounds stretched open prairie, the mountains blue shadows in the distance. “It’s very peaceful here,” Lauren said.

  “Yeah.” He let go of her and hugged his arms across his chest, squinting in the bright sun. “All this openness makes me nervous, though. A lot of times I feel as if people are watching me.” He laughed, a hollow sound. “I think paranoia is one of the side effects of withdrawal, or maybe of some of the medication I’m on.” He laughed again. “I guess you and me have more in common than I thought.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re both messed up in the head.”

  “Phil, I—”

  He shook his head. “Let’s not argue. I brought you back here because I just wanted to say I’m sorry things didn’t work out between us. I believe we really did love each other and I hope we can be friends going forward.”

  “What about your girlfriend?” she asked.

  He grimaced. “She didn’t stick around.” He shoved both hands into his pockets and stared out toward the mountains. “Things are going to be better now. This is a good program and I’m getting it together. My agent has some feelers out. I’m thinking of getting into the movies, or maybe television. I could do really well there.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” she said. “How did you find this place?”

  “A friend pulled some strings and got me in.”

  “Richard Prentice.”

  He turned to her. “I’m beginning to think the papers are right and you are obsessed with the guy. Let it go, Lauren.”

  “I won’t let it go. Did Richard pay you off to say bad things about me?”

  He glanced from side to side, then leaned toward her, his voice low. “He might have shot a little money my way. But I didn’t say anything to that reporter that wasn’t true. I just maybe exaggerated.”

  “What do you know about him and Alan Milbanks?” she asked.

  He blinked, and for a moment his face went slack. But he recovered, his expression wary. “What about Milbanks?”

  “You bought drugs from him.”

  “What are you now, a cop?” He stepped back. “Yeah, I made a few buys from him.”

  “Did you ever see him with Richard Prentice?”

  “No. He mentioned Prentice to me once. I don’t remember how the subject came up—mutual friends or something like that.”

  Goose bumps prickled her skin in spite of the sun’s heat. “Did you tell the police this?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Why would I? Anyway, it was no big deal.”

  “It could be a very big deal. It’s another way to link Milbanks and Prentice. It’s the kind of evidence that could help bring him to trial for his crimes.”

  “I told you. You need to let it go.” He took another step back. “Get out of it while you can. Move on with your life.”

  “I can’t move on. Not while he goes unpunished for all
the wrong he’s done. Please. Come back inside with me and we’ll make some calls.”

  He shook his head and put more distance between them. “No way. I’ve said too much already I—”

  Whatever he was going to say was cut off by the whine of a bullet and a dull thud as it slammed into his body. He dropped to his knees and looked up at her, mouth open and eyes wide in surprise as blood bloomed on his chest. Lauren screamed, then turned and ran, her heart pounding in terror.

  Chapter Six

  The sign over the entrance to Dayspring Wellness Center welcomed visitors to “a dayspring of new beginnings.” But Phil Starling had met his end there.

  “A single shot from a high-powered rifle. Looks as if it got him right through the heart.” The Grand Junction police detective squinted across the empty prairie behind the lot where crime scene personnel swarmed around Starling’s slumped body. “There’s a shooting range over there. We sent some officers to interview people.”

  “This wasn’t random,” Marco said. Sophie had called him as soon as she’d heard what happened. Rand and Lotte had been summoned to assist with the search for a child who’d wandered away from her family’s campsite in the park, but Marco had come as soon as he could.

  The detective’s expression didn’t change. “Do you know someone who wanted this guy dead?”

  Richard Prentice. Sophie had told him the sisters had come to the drug treatment center to question Phil about his relationship with the billionaire. But that wasn’t enough basis to accuse a man of murder. “Who was footing the bill for Starling’s stay here?” Marco asked. “Maybe they were tired of paying.”

  The detective nodded. “We’ll find out. And he was an addict—maybe someone he knew from when he was doing drugs had it in for him. But you see a lot of random things in this job. We’ll check the shooting range. We’ll also follow any leads we get about suspicious persons.”

  “Let me know what you find,” Marco said. He left the detective and made his way to the secluded courtyard where Sophie and Lauren waited. They sat together on an iron bench, Lauren folded in on herself, huddled with her arms around her waist, her hair falling forward to obscure her face.