Bitter Rain (Kate Fox Book 3)

by Shannon Baker

  Bitter Rain

  Shannon Baker

  BITTER RAIN

  Copyright © 2018 by Shannon Baker.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Severn River Publishing

  www.SevernRiverPublishing.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-64875-089-2 (Paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-64875-090-8 (Hardback)

  Contents

  Also by Shannon Baker

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Love Reading Mysteries & Thrillers?

  You Might Also Enjoy…

  Next in Series

  Read Easy Mark

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Shannon Baker

  The Kate Fox Mystery Series

  Stripped Bare

  Dark Signal

  Bitter Rain

  Easy Mark

  * * *

  Michaela Sanchez Southwest Crime Thrillers

  Echoes in the Sand

  The Desert’s Share

  * * *

  The Nora Abbott Mystery Series

  Height of Deception

  Skies of Fire

  Canyon of Lies

  * * *

  Standalone Thrillers

  The Desert Behind Me

  Never miss a new release! Sign up to receive exclusive updates from author Shannon Baker.

  * * *

  Shannon-Baker.com/Newsletter

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  As a thank you for signing up, you’ll receive a free copy of

  Close Enough: A Kate Fox Novella

  To Dave: The only person I want to isolate with.

  1

  Rebuilding your life is like remodeling an old house. You don’t know whether to knock down walls or put up more. I preferred old, trusted houses to new builds, but maybe I was due for a change. That’s what gnawed at me as I wrestled the sheets in the middle of the night.

  The sliver of moon cast shadows on my bedroom ceiling. An occasional ’yote howled and an answer bounced back across the hills, but mostly the cottony sound of isolated prairie floated through the open window, along with the pleasant, slightly damp smell of spring. The shadow of the old cottonwood two-stepped alone in the May breeze, the sway of its branches a reminder of my singlehood.

  Maybe the worst part of being single was my seven brothers’ and sisters’ determination to pair me up. Being alone wasn’t so bad and certainly not what kept me awake. My heart hurt for the loss of the family I once had. My husband, Ted, now anticipating the birth of his first baby with another woman, and my niece, Carly, gone.

  I rolled to my side battling the familiar frustration of not being able to help Carly. With both her parents dead, Carly had run away on my watch just over a year ago, on the cusp of her eighteenth birthday.

  After an eternity, sleep finally pulled a soft blanket over my head.

  A jangle wrenched it from my face. I gasped, disoriented. I didn’t know how long it had taken for the sound to burrow into my consciousness, but I grabbed for the phone, swiping the screen and smacking my lips to wet my mouth.

  I think I croaked, but it sounded nothing like “Grand County sheriff.” Probably more like, “Gphsh.”

  A young woman’s frantic voice slapped me awake. “Help me!”

  Lightning flashed behind my eyes. “Carly?” I saw her, tall and thin, long legs bare between her cutoffs and cowboy boots, blond hair flying in the summer breeze.

  The woman yelled, too panicked to speak coherently or even hear me. “Shit! Here he comes!”

  The image of Carly faded. It wasn’t Carly on the phone. Some other girl in trouble. “Wha—?” I kicked the down comforter off my legs.

  She screeched over my question. “I don’t know what he wants.”

  I swung my legs to the floor. My heart still believed this caller was Carly, and I so wanted to run to her. “Who—”

  The rumble in the background—maybe wind rushing through a car window—made it difficult to hear clearly. “Please help me. We need you!”

  I blinked Carly’s image away. “Where—”

  The caller couldn’t have heard me because she never stopped shrieking. “I’m on my way from the rez.”

  The voice sounded young. Before I asked another question, she gasped.

  She shouted and her voice cracked. “No!”

  A shard of panic splintered my heart. “What’s happening?”

  No voice. Only rushing wind.

  “Hello! Hello!” Come back. Let me help.

  Another intake of breath, a grunt. The roaring stopped. A fluttering on the other end. The line went dead.

  By this time, I stood beside my bed, reaching for the light switch, my bare feet absorbing the cold from the wood floor. “Who—?”

  Panting in the chilly air, my heart battering my ribs, I blinked in the bright room and tried to process the call.

  I’m on my way from the rez, she’d said. We need you.

  2

  It took less than five minutes to throw on my brown sheriff’s uniform, lace up my boots, grab my jacket and gun, and fly down the porch steps to my cruiser. The Lakota reservation of Antelope Ridge lay just over one hundred miles north of Hodgekiss. I had a head start because my cottage was nestled on a shallow lake seven miles north of town. It would take me over an hour, with my light bar dancing, to reach the reservation. But the caller said she’d left Antelope Ridge Reservation and was heading my way. Or at least, that’s what I decided she’d meant. In the darkness of predawn, I strained to see oncoming lights.

  My headlights and the swirl of the blue-and-red flashers cast garish light on the prairie as I sped down the empty highway. The sliver of moon had set and dawn wouldn’t put in an appearance for another couple of hours, so I had to strain to peer into the barrow ditches on either side of the highway for signs of a wreck. The caller wasn’t Carly, but I kept seeing her freckled face. My breath caught at the irrational image of Carly trapped in the mangled steel of a wrecked car.

  Antelope Ridge Reservation was well outside Grand County’s jurisdiction. As a sovereign nation of the Lakota Sioux, it had its own government and law enforcement. Grand County didn’t even share a border. We bumped up against the southern edge of Spinner County, and Spinner’s sixty-nine-mile length ended at the reservation’s doorstep, the line between Nebraska and South Dakota. It was a desolate stretch from Hodgekiss
to the rez. If someone had an accident, they could lay out here for unseen hours, maybe even a day.

  After nearly twenty minutes of squinting into the darkness along the road’s edge and spotting nothing but weeds, a prick of light caught my eye up ahead. I goosed my already speeding cruiser, and when I drove close enough to make out a vehicle on the side of the road, I braked, jerked to the left shoulder, and stopped.

  An old silver-and-red ranch pickup—looked like a twenty-year-old flatbed Ford F-150—idled on the roadside. Its headlights shone on the underside of a car one hundred feet away in the pasture. The car, upended like a turtle on its back, had taken out the three-strand barbed wire fence. Nothing moved near the wreck. In my short tenure as sheriff, I’d handled several wrecks, always fearful I’d see someone I knew, or find a grisly scene. So far, I’d been lucky that all injuries had been minor. I prayed tonight would be the same. I jumped out, leaving my car door open, and raced toward the rolled car.

  Diving to my knees, I squinted through the shattered driver’s window, my eyes adjusting and making out a few details in the shadowed interior. My sigh of relief sounded harsh in the dark silence. No body, no terrible carnage, just an empty, overturned car. I pushed myself up, surveying the nighttime prairie for a body that might have been thrown.

  The pickup driver’s hard voice came to me from the road above. “No sign of anyone.” A heavyset man in a black cowboy hat, wearing jeans, cowboy boots, and a brown jacket, stood next to the passenger side of the pickup, arms folded.

  Of all the people who might arrive on the scene, he was near the bottom of my choices. I tossed him a chin by way of acknowledgment.

  Rubbing my hands to warm them from the dewy ground, I hiked back to my cruiser and leaned inside. With a punch, the glove box flipped open, and I pulled out Big Dick, the flashlight long enough to pole-vault with and heavy enough to club a yeti. I grabbed my own brown coat and stepped from the car, ready to deal with the Spinner County sheriff. He made no effort to meet me, so I marched the few yards to his pickup.

  “Howdy, Lee.” I tried to sound, if not excited to see him, at least not disappointed. “What do you know about this wreck?”

  The hangdog face drooped lower in the jowls. “What’re you doing out here?”

  They say it’s coldest right before dawn, but Lee Barnett’s greeting made it even frostier.

  I zipped my coat, the one that matched his. “Heard there might be an accident. Came to check it out.”

  He seemed almost angry. “Dispatch? I never heard anything.”

  He wasn’t driving his sheriff’s Bronco, so how would he have heard a call over the radio?

  Since he wasn’t a well of information, I jogged down the barrow ditch and up the other side. With the bright beam of the flashlight, I again searched for someone thrown from the car and was thankful I didn’t see anyone. Back down on my knees, I studied the broken window and driver’s seat. No blood.

  Help me! The terror in her voice had sent ice through my veins. Here he comes!

  Who? Had he got here before Lee? Or had the girl run away? Did someone arrive to save her? I spun around, casting the light over the hills to the west, then back across the highway to the east, catching Barnett’s progress toward me.

  Big Dick’s light ran over the metal as I circled the car. Even if you didn’t count the crushed roof, this puppy wasn’t a showroom special. Mostly rust with a few patches of paint that might be a faded red in bright sunshine, enough dents that textured it like oatmeal, but the logo on the back told me this heap was a proud Mercury Marquis, plenty old enough to vote. No license plate. Not surprising.

  “What are you doing out here?” I asked when Barnett joined me.

  It took Barnett so long to answer I quit expecting his reply. “Out patrolling.”

  I raised an eyebrow at the beater pickup and his jeans. “Not officially?”

  He probably wanted to tell me it was none of my business; instead, he gave an impatient snort. “Saturday night off the rez, they run away if they see the cop car. This way, I can get a handle on who’s causing trouble.”

  Right. And in a rural county with a population in four digits, no one knows who drives that particular pickup. Not to mention the wrinkles on his cheek that looked suspiciously like pillow creases. Still, not my business what the Spinner County sheriff does on a Saturday night, or technically, Sunday morning.

  “How long have you been here?” I shimmied into a gap between the hood and the ground and pointed my beam to where the VIN tag ought to be, not shocked that it was AWOL.

  “Just got here.” He stood with his legs wide, arms crossed.

  “Wreck is pretty far off the road. Wondering how you happened to spot it in the dark.” Okay, yeah, I didn’t mind needling him.

  He sneered. “Lucky, I guess.”

  I wanted to ask him exactly what I’d done to make him act like I’d stolen all his crayons. But I knew the answer.

  It had started with running against my ex in the general election last fall. The four adjoining counties that made up the sheriff’s association were more a good ol’ boys club than a professional co-op. I fit in about as well as sauerkraut on a cupcake. The other two sheriffs were friendly, at least.

  Winning the election had been a long shot for me, since Ted was coming off two successful terms. But my family pulled out the stops campaigning, and with eight brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, nephews, and nieces, that’s a fair number of stops pulled. Ted’s affair with Roxy might have soured some folks, at least enough to outweigh my lack of experience and worse, being a woman.

  The driver’s side door had popped open several inches during the crash, and I lowered myself to my belly and snaked toward the Mercury for a close-up of the other place VINs are posted. Big Dick’s light showed where the number had been scratched out on the door edge. I played the light across the ripped seat and the cracked dash with yellow foam rubber squeezing out like pus from an infected scratch. No blood. The light revealed nothing under the seats. No purse, jacket, suitcase, or anything else strewn about.

  Barnett watched but didn’t offer conversation. I straightened and stepped back. My palm rested on the underside of the Grand Marquis, detecting warmth in the chilly air.

  We need you. Help me, please.

  What did she mean? Was the call intended for me? Or maybe she meant Ted, the previous sheriff?

  I retreated to the trunk, which had sprung open, but no trunk-trash littered the pasture. Dried mud clung to the chipped red paint outlining an absent plate, like maybe it had been removed not long ago.

  Barnett followed me and acted like I was a skunk in the grain bin. “No one is coming back for this piece of shit. There’s no identification on it anywhere.”

  Dawn crept on the eastern ridge with enough gray light that I made out Barnett’s sagging features. “You checked?”

  He didn’t look at me, but turned to the empty western pasture. “Of course I checked. No VIN, no registration.” Didn’t he say he just got here?

  Still surveying the scene, I trudged past Barnett, back across the ditch to the highway, and waited for him to climb to the road. “Did you pass anyone on your way here?”

  “Nope.”

  What a guy.

  I cast the flashlight in front of Barnett’s pickup on a dusty set of tire tracks. They swung out from the west side of the road, across the highway and faded quickly, but not before they traced a U-turn heading north. “’Cause there’s a track.”

  Barnett’s voice hardened like cement on a hot day. “Someone picked up the driver and took him back to the rez.” He brushed his hands together as if he’d solved a mystery.

  I don’t know what he wants. Jagged blades of fear in her voice.

  If Barnett was right, who picked up the driver? The man chasing her, or a savior? Kidnap or rescue?

  My cheeks tingled with cold as I followed the dusty tire tracks, flashlight like a hound’s nose, to where Barnett stood. He watched me with di
staste. “Ask Ted. He’ll tell you this is what Indians do.”

  I scanned the dark hills to the west. “If you didn’t pass anyone, whoever drove this car is still here.”

  Barnett ground his jaw. “Maybe I did pass someone heading north, now that I think of it.”

  Warm hood. Tracks leading north. Barnett completely unhelpful. There wasn’t much to go on here.

  Barnett spoke with the authority of a man who’d been sheriff since before I had my driver’s license. “I’ll get Schneiderman to tow this piece of shit. But no need to wake him. I’ll call after sunrise.”

  With Big Dick pointed to the ground, I surveyed the roadside. “Thanks. But I’ll get it.”

  He focused on me like a border collie on a sheep, waiting for me to step across the invisible line. “It’s closer to Potsville than Hodgekiss.”

  I edged next to Barnett, leaning over to study the ground with my flashlight. “But Potsville is the county seat of Spinner, and Hodgekiss is my county seat.”

  The hound dog face remained passive, but his eyes schooled me. “Ted and I always did the most logical thing.”

  There. A footprint. “Bingo!”

  Barnett planted his cowboy boot on the print and scraped his sole sideways, spraying gravel.