The Sheriff of Heartbreak County Read online

  “What are you doing now?” Holbrook demanded as Roan stabbed at the numbers on the phone.

  Roan shot him a look, wishing he had the gumption to say the words that had popped into his mind. None of your damn business, Senator. Instead, he calmly explained, with only a slight touch of sarcasm, “I’m calling a lawyer. I doubt the woman knows anybody in town to call, and since she’s choosing to exercise her Constitutional rights, we can’t deal with her without one.”

  “Do you understand these rights as I’ve explained them to you?”

  Mary focused her eyes on the pair of hands that were loosely clasped together on the wooden tabletop just across from her. She nodded.

  “Would you mind answering out loud for the recorder, please?”

  That voice. Why had she ever thought it warm-sounding and pleasant? It reminded her now of the purr of a tiger.

  “Oh,” she said, “I’m sorry.” She cleared her throat lightly. “Yes. Of course I understand.” No, I don’t understand. Dear God, why is this happening to me?

  “All right, that’s it then, until your attorney gets here.” The sheriff turned off the recorder.

  Mary’s eyes followed him as he picked it up and rose from his chair. “May I-” She paused to take a breath; the rapid tapping of her heartbeat against her breastbone made it hard to speak, harder to keep her voice steady. “May I make a phone call?” The sheriff looked down at her, frowning in a rather remote, distracted way, and she felt her temper kindle. “I do get one phone call, don’t I?”

  He snorted softly. “You can have more than one, far as I’m concerned. But like I told you, your lawyer’s already on his way. You might even know him-he’s a neighbor of yours. Harry Klein-Andrews & Klein? They’re right next door to your shop.”

  She waved that aside with a gesture. “That’s not-I’d like to call someone else. If I’m allowed.”

  There was a long pause while the keen blue eyes studied her, their gaze no longer remote. Then, “Sure. Fine. I’ll have Lori bring you a phone. Do you need a phone book?”

  She shook her head, then added self-consciously, “No. Thank you.”

  He nodded and went out. Mary sat still, refusing to look toward the mirror she knew wasn’t really a mirror, listening to the relentless thumping of her heart, trying to summon enough moisture in her mouth to relieve her papery throat. I should have asked for a glass of water. Or he should have offered me one, she thought with a flash of resentment. But then I’d probably have to ask to use the restroom. And she felt a cold quivering deep in her stomach as the realization hit her: This is what it’s like to be arrested. You have to ask permission to do everything.

  A young deputy with dark hair and a suggestion of Native American heritage in her cheekbones came in carrying a cordless phone. She placed it on the table and turned to go, then paused, looked back and asked, “Want anything? A soda? Glass of water?”

  The unsolicited kindness caught Mary unawares, and she found herself fighting an unexpected urge to cry. And once again memory came, not déjà vu, just the past overtaking the present.

  Oh God-I hate these memories! But the room was so much like this one, although I hadn’t been arrested then, only placed in “protective custody.” I felt numb though, like I do now. It seemed like a bad dream, and I was too exhausted to make myself wake up.

  I can still hear the FBI agent’s voice. “You do realize that you must not contact anyone from your past life, ever?” His face…so grave it scared me. “If you do, we won’t be able to protect you. I need you to understand that.” He waited for my nod. “Do you have immediate family members you’d like included in the program with you?”

  I thought…but there was nobody. “Just…my friend, Joy,” I said, “and she’s not…” There was an aching tightness in my throat. I whispered, “Will I have a chance to say good-bye?”

  He shook his head and leaned toward me. His eyes seemed to bore into mine. “I’m sorry. There’s a U.S. Marshal waiting outside that door right now. His name’s Stillwell. He’ll explain in more detail, but basically he’s going to take you to a safe house tonight, and you’ll stay there until we get everything squared away. Once we have all the red tape taken care of, marshals will escort you to a remote location where you’ll stay until it’s time for you to testify, at which time you’ll be brought back to Jacksonville under the tightest security for the duration of the trial. When it’s all over, you’ll be taken to your final destination and set up with your new identity. Okay? Do you understand everything so far?”

  Do I understand? I wanted to shout at the man, scream at him, No! No, I don’t understand! How did this happen? All I wanted was to meet a handsome prince and live happily ever after, and now you tell me my life is over! How could this have happened to me?

  But I only whispered-I think I whispered, “Yes.”

  The FBI agent said brusquely, “It’s a lot to take in, I know.” I remember that he reached over and placed his hand on mine and gave it a squeeze. Then he stood up and as he did he looked back at me and I saw that his eyes were kind. “Can I get you something to drink?” he asked me. “Coffee? Some water?”

  That terrible aching tightness gripped my throat, just as it’s doing now, and just as I am now, I was fighting to hold back tears. How strange, I thought then, after everything I’d been through, the horrors I’d seen, the fear and disillusionment and despair I’d felt, to be undone by a small unexpected kindness…

  “Yes, thank you. I’d love some water,” Mary murmured, and the young female deputy nodded and went out.

  Mary counted slow deep breaths until the deputy came back in with a bottle of water. She thanked her and unscrewed the top of the bottle and drank thirstily while the deputy went away again. Only then, left alone and feeling much more in control, did Mary pick up the phone the deputy had left on the table. She shifted her chair around so that her back was turned toward the wall mirror and the unseen watchers behind it, then closed her eyes, huffed out one more breath, and with cold stiff fingers punched in a number she was surprised she still remembered.

  After only one ring an androgynous voice droned, “U.S. Marshal’s Office, Special Services.”

  “Deputy Marshal Stillwell, please. That’s in Witness Protection.” Oh, how her heart was pounding! She pressed her hand against her chest, which didn’t help at all. The hand that was holding the phone began to tremble, and she couldn’t stop that, either.

  After what seemed like a very long pause, but was probably no more than a minute, the voice was back. “Marshal Stillwell is no longer with the service, ma’am. Would you like to speak with someone else?”

  “I-are you sure? James Stillwell?”

  “Yes, ma’am, James Stillwell retired from the service two years ago.”

  “But he was my-” She stopped, unable to think. She felt a curious sensation of being adrift, or of falling, like someone who’d grabbed hold of her one lifeline only to discover there was nobody holding onto the other end.

  “Ma’am, if you’ll give me your I.D. number, I’ll see if I can find out who’s handling your case. It might take a while.” The voice had begun to sound testy and harassed. “We’re short-handed around here right now. Maybe you’d like to call back a little later?”

  “Yes…all right…thank you,” Mary whispered. Her throat ached terribly, and it wasn’t just her hand that was shaking now. She didn’t remember disconnecting the phone call; her mind seemed capable of processing only one thought: Oh God, I’m going to jail…for murder. How can this be happening? What’s going to happen to me now?

  On Sunday morning right after breakfast, Boyd announced his intention to ride up to the high pastures to see if the feed was high enough yet to turn the cattle out. Naturally, Susie Grace wanted to go along, so Roan decided they might as well all go and make a day of it.

  After the events of the last couple of days, he figured he needed a break, though he suspected it was going to take more than a pretty spring day and a horseback
ride with his daughter and father-in-law to cleanse his mind of the images of Mary Owen the way he’d seen her last. Looking…not like any murderer he’d ever seen before-not that he’d seen so many, but no murder suspect he’d ever encountered or imagined over the course of his career had ever seemed so…bewildered, he guessed was the best way to describe it. The expression on her face, the look in her eyes… The way those changeable eyes of hers had clung to his as she was being led away to lock-up, neither the flat gray-green that so effectively hid whatever she might be thinking nor that surprising golden shimmer of anger, but the deep slate of storm clouds, and the message in them plain and troubling as thunder: Help me. A plea her hopeless expression acknowledged was not likely to be answered that day.

  The day had started out cool, but by the time they reached the saddleback ridge the sun was hot on their shoulders. They paused there on the pretext of shedding their jackets, but in truth it was to do as they always did, turn and survey the vista spread out around them, which Roan considered to be 360 degrees of pure heaven on earth. From where they stood, on the crest of a wide-open space knee-deep to their horses in lupin and paintbrush, the world rolled away on one side in gentle waves of foothills carpeted with new green, speckled with buttercups and tiny blue forget-me-nots and dotted with clumps of juniper and sage, down, down, down to the ranch far below, looking like a child’s play toy with its cluster of red-and-white painted barns, stables, corrals and feed-storage silos, the main house barely visible in its copse of pines and cottonwoods, and beyond and a little way up a wooded draw, the foreman’s cottage where Boyd lived now, and beyond that, the sweep of hazy blue and purple mountains stretching all the way north to Glacier Park and Canada. On the other side, the high country began just beyond the thickets of pine and aspen that bordered the meadows, where snow lay in shady places until mid-summer, bald eagles nested and in the autumn the slopes rang with the shrill challenges of bull elk in rut. And above it all, the never-ending sky. It made a man feel small and unimportant, that sky, and damn lucky just to be alive underneath it.

  “Been a good rain year. Feed’s lookin’ good,” Boyd said, squinting into the sunlight and nodding to himself as he leaned on his saddlehorn. And Roan knew the old rancher was feeling much the same way he was.

  He clicked to his horse, a bay gelding named Springer for the habit he’d had when he was younger of shying at every little thing, tugging his nose out of the grass and clover he’d been sneaking mouthfuls of during the respite. Beside him, Boyd, mounted on Foxy, his favorite Appaloosa mare, did the same, and they went on at a walk, scaring up clouds of little yellow butterflies and an occasional meadowlark, which would fly, scolding, almost from underneath the horses’ hooves. Susie Grace, impatient with their leisurely pace, kicked up Tootsie, the little red-gold mare she’d picked for her own because, she said, it had hair the same color as hers, and went loping on ahead. To Roan she looked frighteningly small and precarious perched on top of that horse with her blue cowboy boots sticking straight out in their stirrups and her pigtails flapping under the brim of her blue cowboy hat.

  He hollered at her to take it easy and was about to take off in pursuit when Boyd looked over at him and said, “Let her be. She’d ain’t gonna fall offa that horse, and you know it. The kid rides like an Indian. Comes by it naturally-her mama was the same way. Erin used to scare her mother to death.”

  His tone was easygoing, but when Roan glanced over he saw that the rancher’s face wore the same bleak and aged look it always got when he spoke of his daughter. He shifted his gaze back to the little girl and her red-gold horse galloping blithely through a sea of wildflowers, her hat now blown off her head and bouncing against her back, caught by the cord around her neck. The sun struck red-gold fire into her hair the same way it had once done her mother’s, and Roan caught his breath, waiting for the stab of grief and pain to follow.

  It came…it would always come, but now it mostly came when he summoned it, rather than keeping him company every waking moment of every damn day and then haunting his dreams at night. Sometimes he even thought if he could just find the bastard who’d set the fire that killed her he might be able to move on. He knew he needed to; the years since Erin’s death had been damned lonely for him, and besides, a little girl needed a mother. He knew human beings weren’t supposed to be alone, and that it was supposed to be possible for them to fall in love more than once in a lifetime, in theory, at least. Maybe, he thought, it was coming time to put that theory to the test.

  Though…with Clifford Holbrook’s ravaged face fresh in his mind and the sadness he’d gotten used to seeing in Boyd’s, he thought it must be different for a parent losing a child. He didn’t think the pain of that ever did go away. He tried to imagine how it would be for him if Susie… But his mind refused to go there, and he shifted in his saddle, cold to his core in spite of the noonday sun beating down on his shoulders.

  “Heard you arrested somebody for the Holbrook kid’s murder,” Boyd said, as though his mind had been following the same trail.

  Roan threw him a look, half-surprised, half-ironic. “News travels fast.”

  “It’s a small town, what’d you expect?” Boyd let his horse plod on a few paces, then hitched a shoulder in an off-hand way. “Little bit and I stopped in at the one-stop on the way back from fishin’ last evenin’ to pick up some lemons and breadcrumbs to go with them trout we caught. Ran into that deputy of yours-what’s her name? Lori? Said you’d arrested the gal that took over the beauty shop when Queenie moved south last winter.” He glanced over at Roan, eyes squinted almost shut in the shadows of his hat brim. “You really think she did it? That little gal?”

  “Wouldn’t have arrested her if I didn’t,” Roan said in an even tone. He didn’t exactly feel comfortable discussing his case with a civilian, even if he was family. And he was even less comfortable with the nagging doubts that question kept stirring up in his own mind.

  Boyd lifted up in the stirrups and resettled his bony backside more comfortably in the saddle, a sure sign his arthritis was hurting him. “I don’t know, just can’t hardly believe she’d be capable of doin’ somethin’ like that.”

  “You know her? Mary Owen? How’d you manage that? You’ve never been inside a beauty parlor in your life.”

  Boyd snorted. “The hell I haven’t. Used to take my wife for her permanent wave every so often-Grace was a good customer of Queenie’s right up until just before she died.” He threw Roan another look, quick and oddly furtive. “Don’t really know the new gal, except to see her around, you know. Seems kinda meek and mild, though, like she wouldn’t hurt a fly. Sure don’t seem like the type to commit murder.”

  “There isn’t any ‘type’ when it comes to murder,” Roan said grimly. “Anybody’ll kill if you give ’em enough cause. Even meek, mild people you’d think would never hurt a fly.”

  “Well, I guess you’d know,” Boyd said.

  After an oddly unhappy little silence, by some unspoken accord both men nudged their horses to an easy gallop, heading down the gentle slope to where Susie Grace waited for them at the edge of the grove of aspens.

  Chapter 6

  The Hart County courthouse was a much grander edifice than the size of the town and county it served would seem to warrant, having been built during Hartsville’s boomtown days when the mines were still going strong. A massive and sturdy granite block with two-story concrete pillars flanking the arched front portico, it dwarfed all the other buildings in the downtown area. The citizens of Hart County were enormously proud of it.

  The first floor housed all the offices of county government except for the sheriff’s station and detention center, and emergency services. The courtroom, jury rooms and judge’s chambers were all on the second floor, reached either by a grand curving staircase or the stuffy creaking elevator that had been put in after the Citizens with Disabilities Act went into effect. In contrast to the rest of the building the courtroom itself was almost stark, having been renovated du
ring an era when simplicity was in vogue, with floors, paneling, judge’s bench, jury box, witness stand and spectators’ pews all done in some pale golden-brown wood, unembellished and naturally finished. It reminded Roan of the inside of a church, one of the more austere Protestant varieties. Which was maybe why he always felt an impulse to whisper when he was in it.

  It obviously didn’t have that effect on Senator Holbrook, who hadn’t stopped fuming and cussing like a bullwhacker since the moment the judge brought his gavel down. He kept it up while he and Roan waited for the other spectators to file out of the courtroom, and was still going at it as they made their way down the curving staircase together.

  “What the hell was the judge thinking, granting that woman bail?” Holbrook’s hoarse attempt at a whisper echoed down the courthouse’s wide ground-floor corridor, causing heads to turn.

  Roan, walking beside him, felt the tension and energy pulsing through the man’s body, and it reminded him of the geysers down in Yellowstone, the way they’d hiss and fume and rumble just before they blew.

  “You might want to keep your voice down,” he said mildly, nodding toward the crowd of reporters and photographers gathered on the courthouse steps just outside the double glass doors. The senator’s heated indictment of the circuit court judge had included some adjectives of the type usually bleeped by the media, just clumsily enough so it was impossible to mistake the true meaning. Roan imagined getting caught using language like that wouldn’t do a politician’s public image much good.

  Holbrook evidently didn’t share Roan’s concerns, because his comment on the media’s presence in Hartsville was more of the same-though he did deliver it with slightly lowered volume. At the bottom of the stairs he made an abrupt left turn and began to pace furiously back down the corridor away from the entrance, dragging a distraught hand through his hair.