Page 89 of Mountain Man’s Mystic Touch

Chapter 16

Loralee

The road back to the festival feels longer in the dark. Rocco drives with one hand on the wheel and the other close to the phone mounted on his dash. Grant’s voice comes through the speakers in clipped updates about locked gates, camera angles, and a deputy checking the service road. I understand each individual word, but together they seem to belong to a world with rules I have never needed to learn.

Beside me, Rocco has become quiet and remote. The man who lay naked beneath my hand less than twenty minutes ago has disappeared behind the controlled demeanor of the security professional. Yet his hand strays from the wheel long enough to settle briefly on my thigh. The touch reassures both of us.

“Carver found a partial print outside the east side of the booth,” Grant says. “Large boot. Deep tread with a triangular section missing near the heel.”

“Photograph it and cover it until we get there,” Rocco says.

“Already done.”

Rocco disconnects as we reach the access road. Portable floodlights shine across the vendor area, stripping away the warmth of the festival and replacing it with harsh islands of white. The pumpkins, hay bales, and strands of unlit bulbs look like abandoned stage decorations after the audience has gone home.

During the day, this place smelled of apples, cinnamon, food cooking over open flames, and hundreds of people carrying hundreds of emotions. Now the grounds feel hollow. Not empty. Hollow.

Rocco parks beside a sheriff’s vehicle and turns toward me. “Stay in the truck until I come for you.”

“I thought I was supposed to stay beside you.”

“You are. After I know no one is waiting inside your booth.”

He is out before I can answer.

I watch him cross the lane toward Grant and Deputy Carver. They speak beneath the floodlight, their shadows extending across the ground in three different directions. Rocco listens without interrupting, then circles my booth slowly. He checks the neighboring tents, looks beneath the tables, and checks the dark spaces between the rear panels and the tree line.

Only after he has examined every possible hiding place does he return. He opens my door and offers his hand.

“Don’t touch anything.”

“That may make identifying the card difficult.”

“You can look.”

“I usually touch.”

His jaw tightens.

“I said usually,” I remind him. “I won’t disturb your evidence.”

He keeps my hand in his as we walk toward the booth. I would tease him about it under different circumstances. Rocco would insist he is guiding me over uneven ground, and I would pretend to believe him.

Tonight, his fingers feel less like possession and more like a promise that nothing will reach me without going through him first.

Deputy Carver stands several feet from the open side panel. “Ms. Tilsby.”

“Loralee is fine.”

He nods toward the booth. “I photographed everything before we moved closer. The card is on the reading table. There may be prints, but with the number of people who’ve been in and out today, we’ll be sorting through plenty that don’t belong to our intruder.”

“He was wearing gloves,” Rocco says.

Carver glances at him. “The video isn’t clear enough to establish that.”

“He opened the panel without leaving an obvious print on the metal support. He crossed damp ground, but the print you found begins several feet from the service road. He knew enough to avoid leaving evidence until he stepped where the gravel thins.”

Carver considers this, then nods. “Gloves are likely.”