When Justice Rides, page 2
Well, he was worried now. He wasn’t the only one. “Why would Jaxson lie about something that is so easily proven to be false?” she said more to herself than her father. It was obvious. He would have never expected her to check. And he would have been right. If it hadn’t been for her father and his insatiable need to protect her...
“Maybe more worrisome, Luna, is why he turned down several other more lucrative deputy jobs to take the one he has now in your county. Also, he’s never been married that I can find. If you want, I can dig deeper—”
“No, thanks, I can handle it from here.” One way or another, she thought. She disconnected and called up the first photo in the text from her dad, telling herself it wouldn’t be Jaxson.
* * *
DEPUTY KENNETH YARROW shouldn’t have been surprised to get the call from Buckhorn. The small Western town in the middle of nowhere seemed to attract trouble. He’d barely taken over as acting marshal in Leroy Baggins’s absence and now there was a call about a murder in Buckhorn?
Baggins, who was on his honeymoon, had left him in charge of the county—at least temporarily. Not that Ken shouldn’t have had the marshal job in the first place, he internally groused as he took the call. At fifty-two and having spent most of his adult life in law enforcement, he knew that he’d been the better candidate for the job. Being passed over for marshal was still a burr under his saddle.
“Acting Marshal Kenneth Yarrow,” he said when the call was forwarded to him by the dispatcher.
“Someone killed her.” The young male voice, high and thin, was barely audible over the blare of music. “She was dead when I got here. I didn’t see her until—”
“Can you please turn that down?” Ken snapped. “Who’s dead?”
“Sorry.” The music had stopped abruptly. But was he also chewing gum? How old was this person? “Vi. Someone killed her.”
“Vi Mullen?” Ken felt a start. He was familiar with Buckhorn’s temperamental matriarch and had heard his share of horror stories about her. But that wasn’t what had his heart pounding. A few weeks ago, he’d asked Vi out on a date. He’d been thinking about it for a long time and had finally decided to do it. Call him delusional but there had been something about her that appealed to him. They were the same age, had gone to school together, and he’d thought... He didn’t know what he’d been thinking.
When she’d turned him down rudely, he’d lost his cool and said some things that he shouldn’t have. Now he wondered if he’d been overheard that day in the store. It wasn’t like he’d threatened her, he told himself as his mind raced. And now she was dead?
“You’re sure she’s dead?” he asked, his throat dry. The last thing he needed was to be a suspect in a murder case right now.
“Checked for a pulse. Dead.”
“What makes you think it was murder?”
“She has a friggin’ ice fishing spear sticking out of her chest!”
Holy shit. That could do it, Ken thought. “And you are?”
“Johnny. Johnny Berg. I deliver packages. You know, all over the county but also for the general store in Buckhorn.”
“Where are you now?” Ken asked and Johnny told him he was parked in the alley, the back door of the store open like he’d found it. “Stay right there. Don’t go back in and don’t let anyone else go in. I’m on my way.” He disconnected and swore. Buckhorn. It never failed. What was it about that town? And now, of all people, Vivian “Vi” Mullen had been murdered?
“Deputy Gray,” he said into the radio. “Where are you?”
The new young deputy came on the radio. “Just passed mile marker 111.”
“Saddle up and get to Buckhorn. Meet me behind the general store in the alley. There’s been a murder.”
* * *
MURDER? DEPUTY JAXSON GRAY felt his pulse jump as he pressed down hard on the patrol SUV’s gas pedal and raced toward Buckhorn. He told himself it could be anyone. A vagrant passing through town. Didn’t mean that it was a local. Didn’t mean it had anything to do with anyone he knew.
His phone chimed. He checked and felt immediately guilty when he saw that it was a text from Luna. After the night at the bar, the dance, the kiss, he’d realized that he was ready to move on with his life. He was looking forward to their date tonight and was disappointed when he read the text from her.
He read her text twice in surprise. She was going out of town? She hadn’t mentioned going out of town.
Had something happened? He hoped it wasn’t bad news regarding her father. Jaxson knew how close they were.
As he raced toward Buckhorn, he’d have to answer the text later. He just hoped her leaving so unexpectedly wasn’t something seriously wrong. Meeting Luna had been the best thing that had happened to him in a long time. Besides being distractingly attractive, she was intelligent, witty and fun with an insatiable curiosity. She had a way of seeing below the surface when it came to people. She said it was because her father had been an investigator, now retired, and that she’d worked with him for a while on a few cases.
The closer he’d gotten to her, the more he’d worried that she would see through him and his lies. After that kiss the other night, he knew he had to tell her the truth. He couldn’t keep holding her at arm’s length because it was the last thing he wanted to do. He pocketed his phone as he saw the small Western town appear on the horizon ahead.
He’d tried to keep Luna at a safe distance. But it had been getting harder and harder as he’d gotten to know her. How was he to know that he would end up caring this much for her? Probably because he’d never met anyone quite like her.
He tried to put her, and worry about why she’d left town, out of his mind. There’d been a murder. That’s all the information Yarrow had given him. No surprise there. The older deputy, now acting marshal, had been a jerk to him the moment he’d taken the job. Yarrow had told him that he had little respect for deputies who he said were green behind the ears.
Jaxson had wanted to correct him and say that the expression was wet behind the ears, but out of the corner of his eye he’d seen the dispatcher shake her head in warning, and he’d held his tongue. He didn’t need to arouse any more disdain from Yarrow.
Unfortunately, Yarrow only thought he was a lot better at his job than he was. Otherwise, the man would have gotten the marshal job instead of the much younger, much less experienced, Leroy Baggins. So now Yarrow carried around a chip on his shoulder the size of a redwood.
Get to Buckhorn. Meet me behind the general store in the alley. Jaxson braced himself for what might be waiting for him. It felt too early in the morning to see a dead body. The thought made him let out a bitter chuckle. He often wondered if he had the stomach for this job.
Slowing, he drove into Buckhorn. An hour from the nearest other town, the tiny burg’s roots ran deep in the Montana soil. How it had survived to celebrate its 125th birthday was a mystery to anyone who had blown through and not even realized they’d passed it. Yet recently, it had begun to draw people looking for an escape from the larger cities, from the traffic, from the rat race. It had drawn Jaxson, even before he’d met Luna Declan.
But as he headed for the alley behind the general store, he did wonder. There were a surprising number of murders for such a small town in the middle of Montana, in the middle of nowhere.
CHAPTER THREE
AS KEN PULLED UP behind the delivery truck, he saw the new deputy pull in right behind him. He would have preferred any other deputy than Jaxson Gray, who didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.
But Gray had been close by, and if Ken were being honest with himself, he preferred the deputy over the other cocky cops who thought they knew it all. At least Gray was smart enough that he seemed aware that he didn’t know squat. With Deputy Gray, he didn’t have to worry about the young man getting in his way.
This was going to be his show, Ken told himself, and no one else’s. When he solved this murder, it would prove to everyone that the county had made a mistake making Leroy Baggins marshal. Not that Ken felt he should have to prove himself, but he needed a win. Lately, he’d been feeling like life was repeatedly kicking him in the teeth.
Picking up his Stetson, he climbed out of his patrol SUV, well aware of what kind of day it was going to be even before the deputy walked toward him asking, “Who’s been murdered?”
Ken should have known those would be the first words out of the deputy’s mouth. This was Gray’s first murder while on the payroll. Ken wondered if the green deputy had ever even seen a dead body before? He chuckled to himself at the thought of how the deputy would react to what was waiting for them inside.
“You’re ambitious, aren’t you, Gray?” he asked in lieu of an answer.
“Yes, sir,” the young man agreed as he joined him.
“Thinking you could be marshal of this county one day, right?”
“No, sir.”
Ken shot him a surprised look.
“I hope to be a US marshal.”
The acting marshal couldn’t hold back his laugh. “Then I’d suggest you stay out of my way and not screw up your first murder.” Turning his back, he walked toward the delivery truck parked in the alley, chuckling to himself. US marshal, ha! Over his shoulder, he said, “The murder victim is Vivian Mullen, the store owner.”
“Vi?” Gray sounded surprised.
Ignoring the interruption, Ken continued, “Her family pretty much started this town and she’s been running it ever since. Well, until today apparently.”
He could see the driver in the side mirror of the delivery truck as they approached the rear entrance into the general store. The driver, feet up on the dash, earbuds in, head bobbing, looked young and trying hard to hide he’d been shaken earlier on his call. Or was he trying to hide something more?
“Get a statement from the kid in the truck,” he told Gray as he started toward the open back door of the store. He stopped when he noticed the way the young deputy was staring at the ground as he approached the truck. What did the deputy find so interesting?
He stepped over to look and swore under his breath. There was a faint trail of dried blood smeared on the back steps as well as some in the gravel next to the truck’s driver’s side door. “Don’t let him go anywhere. I want his prints when the crime techs get here and I might want to talk to him,” he said and followed the bloody smeared footprints up the back steps, swearing as he went.
Entering the store, the smell hit him first. He’d gotten used to the scent of fresh warm blood growing up on a ranch where something was always being butchered. As a deputy, he felt as if he’d seen it all.
He’d only taken a few steps when he was blinded by a bright arrow of sunlight that shot across the worn floor directly at him. He blinked and swore some more. The store’s front door was standing wide open?
“What the hell?” he said to himself. Anyone could have come in and out of the store in the forty minutes it had taken him to get to the scene. He’d told the deliveryman to make sure no one entered. True it wasn’t the kid’s job, but without a lawman in Buckhorn, he’d depended on the caller to contain the crime scene.
He’d taken only a few steps, still avoiding the bloody prints, when he saw the victim. She lay off to the side in the storage area. Her blood had run from her body across the uneven floor to puddle in the middle where the boards were more worn. Which would explain how the delivery kid hadn’t only just tracked through the blood but also spread it all over.
With yet another curse, Yarrow took off his Stetson and ran a hand through his hair. He was now in charge of solving the murder of a prominent Buckhorn business owner and he had a compromised crime scene. Too bad Marshal Leroy Baggins hadn’t delayed his honeymoon so he could have gotten this one.
Pulling on disposable gloves, Ken carefully avoided disturbing the scene further as he worked his way to the front of the store. He closed the door and locked it before returning to the body. For a moment, he merely stared at the woman lying there. Vi had been larger than life, a spitfire of a woman. But that had been when she was alive, he realized. Now she looked insignificant, harmless, just a shadow of her former self, a small woman who’d never reached sixty.
As he crouched down, he considered what had killed her. She did indeed have a friggin’ ice fishing spear sticking out of her chest. The broomstick-like handle of the spear stood straight up from the wound as if the nine barbed stainless steel sharp prongs weren’t just embedded in her body, but possibly in the old pine floor under her as well.
Hearing a sound behind him, he rose to find the deputy standing at the back door. “The kid still out there?” he demanded. “Find out if the front door was open when he came in.”
“It wasn’t,” the deputy said, looking down at his notebook in his hand. “Johnny Berg remembered that the front door was definitely shut, locked and the Closed sign hanging on it—just as it is now. He said Vi kept it locked until it was time to open the store at nine, and from the looks of the amount of smeared fresh blood, she couldn’t have been dead long before he arrived.”
Ken glanced toward the front door, then at Gray as the impact of that news struck him. Someone had gone out that door after the kid had found the body? Looking past the deputy, he saw the teenager at the back door behind Gray. He had those stupid headphones on a cord hanging around his neck, a godawful sound coming out of them. “Shut that racket off!” Ken demanded, pointing at them.
In the deathly silence that followed, he said, “You’re sure the front door wasn’t open?” The kid nodded, wide-eyed as he looked from the door to the dead body.
“If the door had been locked, then the killer must have gone out the front door when Berg exited through the back to make the 911 call,” Gray said—just as Ken had already surmised.
He wanted to tell the rookie deputy to keep his theories to himself, but if the kid was telling the truth, then that appeared to be exactly what had happened. “Yeah, I figured that out all by myself.”
“What? Wait.” Berg’s voice was even higher and thinner than when he’d made the initial 911 call. “Are you saying the killer was still in here when I brought in the packages?” He looked from Ken to Gray, all the color draining from his face.
“You sure you didn’t see anyone?” Ken demanded. He started to ask if the kid had heard anyone but knew that was a wasted question since Berg would have had that infernal noise blaring in his ears.
With an even more stunned look, the kid shook his head adamantly. “I didn’t see anything.” His voice broke. “I swear. But what if the killer thinks I did?”
* * *
BEFORE LOOKING AT the photos her father had sent her, Luna found herself making excuses for why Jaxson hadn’t told her about his real family history. He was ashamed, embarrassed, didn’t want her sympathy?
Fabricating the perfect family was one thing, but how did she explain the dead wife he didn’t have? She swallowed, wishing she didn’t also wonder why as part of his lie he had said Amy was dead. Because he knew she was?
She shuddered and told herself whatever had happened to his old girlfriend, Jaxson hadn’t had anything to do with it. He’d been questioned and released her father had said. As if she didn’t know that being questioned and released didn’t mean he was innocent. But her gut-level instincts told her that he wasn’t a killer.
He was, however, a liar. Therefore, she couldn’t trust anything he’d told her. But could she even trust her instincts when it came to him?
Taking a calming breath, she let it out and finally looked at the first photo her father had sent her. The young man in the button-down white shirt and tie with the short buzz cut looked nothing like the man who’d walked into her salon a few months ago wearing a Stetson, jeans, boots and a deputy uniform jacket, looking for a haircut. Yet, it was the same Jaxson Gray—just a whole lot younger.
Luna moved the cursor down to the next photograph. Senior photo. Then random shots of Jaxson, one in his football uniform, holding a trophy and smiling. He did have a great smile. A team photo. Another of him in class, looking bored. The last was a photo of him and his mother? Luna looked closely at it. The woman had been pretty, slightly built. There was something haunting in her eyes as she stared at the photographer while her son looked over at her with...concern?
The question was why lie about a mother he’d obviously cared about?
She knew from working with her father that one of the problems with knowledge was what to do with it, especially when that new information concerned someone in your life who you’d come to care about.
Except Deputy Jaxson Gray wasn’t really in her life, she reminded herself. Not as in as she’d thought anyway, so what would she do when she had the truth? Confront him? Give him the opportunity to come clean? Or open herself up to even more lies? Or simply walk away without a word?
That was just it. She couldn’t walk away. She was in too deep. She was falling for this complicated cowboy. There was no way she wasn’t going to confront him. Just as there was no way she wasn’t going to find out the truth. Her father wasn’t the only one who was good at research. She needed to know who Deputy Jaxson Gray really was. The clean-cut cowboy cop he appeared to be or someone responsible for a young woman’s disappearance back in high school.
Luna looked again at the pictures her father had sent. The name of the high school was on the wall in the one photo. No question about it, Jaxson had been a good-looking teenager in high school. It was no wonder that he’d grown into a drop-dead gorgeous man. While her father hadn’t sent a photo of Jaxson with a girlfriend—maybe because he didn’t have one or was trying to protect her—Luna knew there had to be girlfriends or friends who would remember Jaxson.
