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The look she gave him said, You’re not the boss of me! But by the time Sky pulled up next to his truck, she’d finished the coffee. “Will you be all right?” he asked as he climbed out of her car and offered her the keys.
“I’ll be fine.” She snatched them out of his hand. “And don’t you dare follow me.”
Sky said he wouldn’t, but he did trail her at a distance for the first couple of miles to make sure she could keep the car on the road and that she wasn’t going back to the bar to try her luck with another cowboy.
Whoever she was, he’d grown strangely protective of the blasted woman.
Once he was satisfied she’d be all right, he slowed the truck, letting the taillights of the Corvette fade into the night. Then he swung the truck off the main road and took a shortcut back to the ranch.
The coffee had been strong enough to jolt Lauren back to full awareness. She drove the lonely road with the headlights on high beam and her eyes wide open. She was headed home, but only because she had no place else to go.
So much for her walk on the wild side.
Tonight’s blowup with her father, exacerbated by the fact that it was the one-year anniversary of her fiancé’s death, had pushed her over the edge. She’d been fool enough to believe she finally had her life under control after the bouts of drinking and promiscuity that had followed Mike’s suicide. But all it had taken was Congressman Garn Prescott, screaming at her and calling her a tramp like her mother, to send her tumbling back into the pit.
She’d driven into town and downed enough beer to lower her inhibitions, but there were no likely prospects among the men in the bar. Deciding to leave, she’d gone to the restroom and returned to find the handsomest cowboy she’d ever seen sitting in her booth—dark as sin, with lean looks and stunning cobalt eyes. It was like the devil had dropped her off an anniversary present.
Things had started out pretty much the way she’d expected, with his kisses pushing all the right buttons. She’d been on fire with the need to lose herself in sexual release. But when everything had fallen apart, the wretched man had turned noble on her—noble being the last thing she’d needed tonight. His rejection had hurt more than she’d let on. Driving away from him, she’d blinked back scalding tears.
But by now the coffee was doing its work, easing her back into reality. Tomorrow was a new day, Lauren reminded herself. She would focus on her accounting job, avoiding any encounters with her father. If things got too uncomfortable at home, maybe Beau Tyler could use her help. He’d offered her work, and he’d have a lot on his mind with that ridiculous murder charge to contend with.
Meanwhile she would steer clear of the Blue Coyote. With luck, if she stuck close to home, that scrumptiously maddening cowboy would remain a memory, and nothing more.
The web of back roads led Sky to the edge of the bog where Slade Haskell’s murder had taken place. Beau, Will, and Jasper had kept him up to date on the investigation, but until now, he’d been too busy to visit the place himself.
Stopping the truck, he found a small but powerful LED flashlight in the glove compartment. The waning moon was bright enough to light his way, but he wanted to see details. Maybe a fresh pair of eyes could spot something others had missed.
On the far side of the bog, the dead cottonwood gleamed bone-white against the darkness. As Sky swung out of the cab, the rank odors of decay and stagnation filled his nostrils. He didn’t consider himself superstitious, but traces of the old beliefs were bred into his Comanche blood. Even before two bodies were found here, he’d sensed that this was a place of death and evil—a place he wanted nothing to do with.
Remnants of yellow crime scene tape fluttered from the stakes. There’d been no rain since the discovery of Slade Haskell’s body, but the wind had done its own work to erase the signs. In the glow of the flashlight, Sky could make out the twisted, half-buried string that had been used to mark the position of the body. He could no longer see where the 30.30 bullets had been collected from the soil, but a patch of dried, stained mud marked the spot where Slade Haskell’s head might have lain.
Beau and Will had told him their theory about how the bullets from Jasper’s rifle had been fired from straight above the body. Sky wouldn’t put it past Lute to fire a few shots into a recent kill in order to frame a man he hated.
But how the devil had Lute known where and when to find Slade’s body?
And if Slade had been killed before being shot with Jasper’s rifle, where was the fatal bullet?
The local deputies weren’t trained crime scene investigators. They could easily have missed it—especially given that the victim had been shot full of holes with a deer rifle. It probably hadn’t occurred to them, or even to the local doctor who served as part-time medical examiner, to look for another cause of death.
Stepping back, Sky moved the light beam over the ground. If Slade had taken a single rifle shot through the head while standing, the bullet would have fallen some distance behind him. But Beau and Will had combed the area for it and found nothing. So maybe it was time to consider other possibilities.
If the weapon that killed Slade had been a high-caliber military-type sniper gun, accurate at more than a thousand yards, the bullet could’ve retained enough force to penetrate the chassis of the truck that had been parked behind him. There’d been no mention of damage to the heavy-duty vehicle, which had been seized as evidence. But there was also a chance the exiting bullet could have passed over the flatbed and traveled another couple hundred yards into the mesquite before losing momentum. Such a bullet would be hard to find, though not impossible with a metal detector. Jasper owned one of those devices. Maybe they could come back with it tomorrow and make a search.
Sky switched off the flashlight and studied the landscape, weighing another idea. What if the shot had been fired from a distance at a downward angle? It might have gone under the truck, into the ground.
Half a mile to the east, a brushy hill, dotted with junipers, rose above the pastureland. From the top of that hill, moonlight could have given the shooter a clear view of this spot, within easy range of a high-powered rifle.
Spurred by a hunch, he climbed back into his truck, shifted into four-wheel drive, and rumbled across the half mile of rough, open ground to the base of the hill. Switching on the flashlight, he picked an easy route and began to climb. His long strides carried him swiftly upward.
The hill was crowned by a flat outcrop of rock. There would be no tracks to find, but from here, even in the waning moonlight, Sky could see all the way to the place where Slade had died. With a good scope and a high-powered rifle, a man with a steady aim would have no difficulty picking off his target from here.
A careful shooter—a professional—would have left no proof behind. But Sky’s instincts told him to look anyway.
It took him only a few minutes to find the shiny brass shell casing. It was lying in the open, almost as if the shooter had wanted it to be discovered. Using the flashlight and his cell phone, he snapped several photos of the object in place. Then, using the narrow blade of his pocketknife, he picked it up and studied it. He recognized it as a Browning .50 machine-gun round, the type commonly used by military snipers in semiautomatic assault rifles.
Maybe that skinhead bartender had a military background.
Moving carefully, he carried his prize back to the truck and transferred it to a leftover sandwich bag, which he’d turned inside out. Tomorrow he’d bring Jasper out here with his metal detector and search for the bullet.
