by B. J Daniels
“Yes?” Bernard said when he came on the line a moment later. “What is this about?” He had only a touch of cultured Southern drawl, unlike his father. Bernard was Oxford educated, that probably explained it.
Cash had not talked to him in almost seven years. He cleared his throat. “This is Sheriff Cash McCall. I wanted to let you know that Jasmine’s car’s been found.”
Silence, then what sounded like Bernard pulling up a chair and sitting down. “Where?”
“Just a few miles from Antelope Flats. The car was discovered in an old abandoned barn on a deserted farm north of the lake. It had been covered with a tarp.”
“Was Jasmine…?”
“No.” Cash waited to hear relief in Bernard’s voice but heard nothing. “The investigators are searching the farm. They found blood and are treating the case as a homicide.”
“They aren’t letting you near the case I hope.”
Cash clamped down his jaw, then took a breath and let it out. “I wanted to be the one to call you.”
“Why is that?”
“Personal and professional courtesy. It’s often hard on family members to get this kind of news.”
Bernard made a rude sound. “I’ll fly out as soon as I can.” He hung up.
Cash stared at the phone in his hand. What had he expected? He wasn’t sure. There was no doubt that he’d hoped to rattle Bernard, shake him up a little, maybe even get him to make a mistake when it came to his story from seven years before.
Bernard had said he’d been hiking up in the Bridger Mountains the day Jasmine disappeared. His alibi was his friend and Jasmine’s former fiancée Kerrington Landow. Supposedly the two had been together, which provided them both with alibis.
Cash had always suspected that the man the clerk had seen with Jasmine at the gas station was Bernard. He fit the description—just like the man who’d been arrested for an attempted abduction in the same area. A man who had refused to confess to Jasmine’s abduction even when offered a deal.
As Cash hung up the phone, he knew Bernard would call Kerrington and tell him about Jasmine’s car being found. Cash had heard that Kerrington had married Jasmine’s best friend and former roommate, Sandra Perkins.
After seven years and marriage to another woman, what would Kerrington do? Come to Antelope Flats? Cash wouldn’t be surprised. Kerrington and Bernard were both so deep in Jasmine’s disappearance that neither would be able to stay away.
Somewhere south of Montana
MOLLY STOPPED at a computer store and used the Internet service to access everything she could find about Jasmine Wolfe and her disappearance. Because of her prominent old Southern family, the story had been in all the major newspapers.
Molly read every article she could find, becoming more excited as she did. This could definitely be the answer to her problems.
The sheriff was the drawback though. That and the fact that Molly hadn’t pulled any kind of “magic trick” since her father had died fifteen years before. She’d given up that way of life and had promised herself that she would never go back to it.
For years she’d never stayed in one place long, knowing that Vince and Angel could get out on parole at any time. At least that’s what she told herself. In truth, the one thing she hadn’t been able to cast off was the transient lifestyle of her childhood or the fear that Max had been right—that fraud was in her blood.
No matter how hard she tried, she found she got restless within weeks and would quit her job, move somewhere else and get another mediocre job. Fortunately she had an assortment of skills that lent themselves to quick employment and she’d never been looking for a “good” job since she’d be moving on soon anyway.
But Vince and Angel were out of prison now and after her. She hadn’t seen anything in the papers about Lanny Giliano. She could only assume he was dead and she was next. She had to do a disappearing act, and maybe Max was right. Maybe fraud was in her blood and just waiting to come out.
On a hunch, she found an online video of Jasmine giving a speech at some charity benefit. The father had put the video online at the time of Jasmine’s disappearance, saying he thought his daughter might be suffering from amnesia and hoped someone would recognize her and call.
Molly watched the video a half dozen times online until she could mimic Jasmine’s gestures, her way of speaking, her facial expressions. Mimicking was something Molly had learned at an early age, a gimmick she and her father used during his act when he pretended to read minds in the audience.
Molly would secretly pick someone from the audience while her father had his back turned. Then he would read her mind and point to the person she’d picked. It amazed the audience. But the trick had been quite simple. She would just mimic the expression and body language of the person and her father would spot it and match it with the right person. Magic!
It amazed her how quickly all that training came back. Her mind was already working out the details. Not that she wasn’t aware of the danger. Identity fraud. Fortunately, there was little record of her life the past fifteen years since her father’s death or, for that matter, the fourteen years before that.
All of her “jobs” with her father hadn’t involved paperwork, and few of her jobs had since. She preferred work where she was paid “off the books” in cash. Jobs where she didn’t have to provide a social security number or an address. Much safer.
And there were enough employers who wanted to avoid paying taxes that it hadn’t been hard to find menial work. She had pretty much remained invisible over those years, but she knew that wouldn’t protect her from Vince and Angel. They would turn over every rock to find her. And they wouldn’t stop until they did.
The way Molly saw it, only one person—the person who put Jasmine’s car in that barn—would know that she really wasn’t Jasmine. And that person was in prison serving time for his other crimes.
Which was good, since Molly already had two killers looking for her. That was sufficient.
Chapter Four
Atlanta, Georgia
Kerrington Landow never thought he’d be relieved to have the phone ring in the middle of a meal. But if he had to listen to one more of Sandra’s lies…
“Let the maid get it,” Sandra said with impatience.
He ignored her as he shoved back his chair and gave her one of his this-isn’t-over-by-a-long-shot glares. Throwing down his napkin, he turned and stalked out of the dining room to take the call on the hall phone.
“Hello,” he snapped, surprised how furious he was. In truth, he didn’t care if Sandra was cheating on him or not. No, what made him angry was that she seemed to think he was so stupid he didn’t know what she was up to.
“Jasmine’s car’s been found.”
He went rigid.
“Did you hear me?” Bernard Wolfe demanded.
“Yes. I heard you.” But still he couldn’t believe…“What about—?” He looked up. Sandra had followed him. She was watching him from the dining room doorway, frowning, definitely interested in whom he was talking to.
“They haven’t found Jasmine’s body. Not yet anyway,” Bernard was saying. He sounded upset.
The same way Sandra would be when she heard. He had purposely not said Jasmine’s name in front of her for that very reason. Sandra had thrown Jasmine up to him for years.
“I know I was your second choice,” she said whenever they had a fight. “Do you have any idea what it’s like living in that woman’s shadow? It was bad enough when Jasmine was alive. But now I have to contend with her ghost?”
He had tried to reassure Sandra but the truth was, he’d never gotten over Jasmine and doubted he ever would. And now her car had been found.
“What is it?” Sandra asked coming down the hall. She was looking at him as if she’d seen him pale, had noticed the tremor in his hand clutching the phone. Sweat broke out under his arms. He worried she could smell the fear on him.
“They found her car in an old barn near Antelope Flats,”
Bernard was saying on the other end of the line.
Kerrington said nothing. He’d checked out the town when Jasmine had told him her plans to marry the sheriff. He’d laughed in her face. He’d known she would never go through with it.
“What?” Sandra demanded. She was standing directly in front of him now, her eyes locked on his face as if she could see through him, always had been able to.
Sometimes he forgot that Sandra had known Jasmine probably as well as anyone. She and mousy little Patty Franklin had been Jasmine’s roommates at Montana State University in Bozeman. Jasmine had gone there on a whim after she’d already worked her way through all the men at several other universities, he thought bitterly.
Sandra had been the opposite of Jasmine, tall and slender, her hair dark like her eyes. She’d been available and he’d needed someone to use to make Jasmine jealous. Jasmine would never have believed it if he’d dated Patty the Pathetic, as Bernard called her.
“What?” Sandra demanded again, practically spitting in his face.
“They’ve found Jasmine’s car,” he said, knowing it would be impossible to keep something like this from her.
He’d expected the green-eyed monster to rear her ugly head. Instead, Sandra seemed stunned. She leaned against the wall, her face stony and remote.
“Sandra is there?” Bernard said with obvious disgust.
Where else had Bernard expected her to be? She was his wife, although Kerrington couldn’t even guess where she’d been spending a lot of her time lately. He was hit with the most ridiculous thought. That the man Sandra had been seeing behind his back was Bernard. The two deserved each other, no doubt about that. But they couldn’t stand to be in the same room together.
He rubbed a hand over his face and turned his back to Sandra to look in the hall mirror. He felt a need to assure himself and he’d always been reassured by what he saw in the mirror, as long as he didn’t look too deeply.
Jasmine used to say he was classically tall, dark and handsome. Only she’d made it sound as if he were a cliché. He’d even overheard her and her brother Bernard refer to him as her “mindless pretty boy.”
He shook off the memory, replacing it with a more pleasant one. Jasmine naked and in his arms begging for more.
“I’m flying out tonight,” Bernard was saying. “I think you and I should talk before I go, don’t you? The cops are going to be asking a lot more questions. I think we need to get our stories straight so we tell them the same thing we did seven years ago.”
Kerrington swore softly under his breath. It had been so long, he’d thought all of this was behind them. He should have known Jasmine’s car would eventually turn up. Wasn’t that what he’d hoped? Just not now, not after all this time.
“I’m going, too,” he whispered into the phone as he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. Sandra had gone into the living room and sat down, her sour hatred of Jasmine almost palpable.
“You should just stay home and take care of your wife,” Bernard said.
“Never mind what I should do,” Kerrington growled. Had Bernard heard something about Sandra? Is that why he was suggesting Kerrington take care of his wife? Or was that earlier thought of Bernard and Sandra closer to the truth than he’d wanted to admit? It would be just like Bernard.
“I’m flying to Montana as soon as I can get a flight,” Kerrington said, keeping his voice down, his back to Sandra and the living room. “We can talk there.”
“That’s not a smart thing to do.”
“She was my girlfriend,” Kerrington argued.
“The one who dumped you.”
“Who knows who she’d be married to now if she were still alive.”
Bernard made a scoffing sound on the other end of the line. “Assuming she’s dead.” He hung up.
Assuming she’s dead. Kerrington stood holding the phone. Did Bernard know something? It had been Bernard who’d come to him with the offer of an alibi.
“If you need to, you can say you were with me,” Bernard had said two days after Jasmine disappeared—just before the cops arrived to question them. “I was hiking in the Bridger Mountains. Took my gear and camped up there. Didn’t get back home until well after dark the second day.”
Kerrington had been so grateful to have an alibi at all that he’d gone along with Bernard’s. It wasn’t until later that he realized he’d also given Bernard an alibi.
He hung up the phone, then turned, bracing himself for the mother of all arguments he knew he was about to have with Sandra.
But Sandra was gone.
Antelope Flats, Montana
NEWS TRAVELED AT the speed of light, even in a county where there was little or no cell-phone service and ranches were miles apart.
The news about Jasmine’s car being found had given Shelby McCall’s return-from-the-dead story a rest. For hours Cash had been able to avoid his mother’s call, but when the phone rang shortly after he’d hung up from talking to Bernard Wolfe, he knew before he answered who was calling.
“Cash? Are you all right?”
He wanted to laugh. He was so far from all right…. “I’m fine.”
“I think you should move back home so you are close to your family during this time.”
That did make him laugh. This coming from a woman who’d been gone for thirty years? Where was his mother when he’d needed advice about Jasmine? Being raised in an all-male household had left him pretty clueless about women. Dusty hadn’t counted since she was just a kid. He really could have used a mother during those years.
“I’m sorry, Cash.”
Sorry that Jasmine’s car had been found and searchers expected to find her body in some shallow grave on the old farm at any time? Or sorry that she’d never been a mother to him and it was too late to start now?
“I know what you must be going through.”
“Do you?” he said, then could have kicked himself.
“Obviously you loved her or you wouldn’t have asked her to marry you.”
He said nothing, afraid of what would come out.
“Let me know if there is anything I can do.” She seemed to be waiting for him to say something. When he didn’t, she hung up. She didn’t mention dinner. Must have realized it would have been a bad time to ask for anything.
When he looked up, his brother J.T. was standing in his office doorway.
“Mother? She means well,” J.T. said, closing the door behind him as he came in.
Cash grunted.
J.T. stood, looking uncomfortable. That was the problem with being raised by a bad-tempered man like Asa and a disagreeable ranch foreman like Buck. The brothers had grown up believing that softness was a weakness. So they sure as hell knew nothing about comforting each other.
Even Dusty was more tomboy than girl.
But J.T.’s rough edges had been smoothed a lot since Regina Holland had come into his life last fall. Cash had seen the change in him and approved. Reggie, as J.T. called her, was perfect for his brother, strong and yet soft in all the right ways. She was like a ray of sunshine in J.T.’s life and it showed in his older brother’s face. Cash had never seen J.T. so happy.
“Is there anything I can do?” he asked now.
Cash shook his head, figuring Reggie had sent him. “The state investigators took over the search. I’m supposed to go fishing.”
J.T. nodded. “You’re not going to though, are you?”
Cash smiled. His brother knew him too well.
“Reggie said if you need someone to talk to…”
Cash laughed. He knew Reggie had sent J.T. His brother looked too uncomfortable for words. “Tell her thank you.”
J.T. nodded, looked down at his boots, then up at Cash. “I’m sorry.”
Cash nodded. “Maybe it will finally be over.” He knew that was what his family had hoped for, that he’d be able to move on once he knew what had happened to Jasmine. If they only knew the truth. He feared though that before this investigation was over, they wou
ld know. Everyone would.
After J.T. left, Cash picked up the phone and dialed the number for Jasmine’s car insurance company, which he’d found in her glove box. He knew Mathews would find out soon enough that he was doing some investigating on his own and all hell would break loose.
But all hell was going to break loose eventually anyway and he couldn’t just wait for the state boys to call and tell him they’d found Jasmine’s body and they had some questions for him.
Atlanta, Georgia
BERNARD WENT THROUGH the motions. He called to have the company jet readied, instructed George, his English butler, to pack for him, and told the chauffeur to stand by to take him to the private airstrip later tonight.
Bernard had held it together fairly well he thought. Even when he’d had to deal with that jackass Kerrington. It was just like the fool to fly to Montana.
But he’d wanted to be the one to tell him. He didn’t want Kerrington seeing it on the news and doing something stupid. And it would be hitting the news, if it hadn’t already. He seldom paid any attention to more than the financial news.
He thought about ringing George and having the bottle of champagne he’d asked to be chilled brought out and opened. But he could wait.
He’d waited seven years so he could have Jasmine declared legally dead. Before their father had died, Archie had put aside part of his estate for Jasmine, still holding onto the ridiculous hope that she would turn up one day.
Bernard deserved that money. He’d spent his life “watching out” for his stepsister. “Keep an eye on her, won’t you, Bernard,” Archibald Wolfe would say. “Take care of your sister.”
He wished he had a dollar for every time he’d heard his stepfather say those words.
His mother had married Archie when Bernard was four. Jasmine had been just a baby, her mother having died in childbirth.
Bernard had seen his stepfather struggle with trying to love him as much as he did Jasmine. There had been times when Bernard had felt loved, felt like he really was a Wolfe, not just adopted because his mother had married Archie.
