Saved By The Sheriff

“We were all in the back of the house, preparing dinner in the kitchen,” her father said.

“I’ll talk to the neighbors, see if any of them saw anything,” Travis said. “After the window shattered, did you hear anything—anyone running away, or a car driving away?”

“No,” her father said.

Both men looked at Lacy. “No,” she said. “I didn’t hear anything.”

“Who would do something like this?” her father asked. His face sagged with weariness, and he looked years older. Guilt made a knot in Lacy’s stomach. Even though she hadn’t thrown the rock, she was the target. She had brought this intrusion into her parents’ peaceful life. Maybe moving back home had been a bad idea.

“I don’t know,” Travis said. “There are mean people in the world. Obviously, someone doesn’t believe Lacy is innocent.”

“The paper has run articles,” her father said. “It’s been on all the television stations—I don’t know what else we can do.”

“You can help me find the real murderer.”

He was addressing Lacy, not her dad, his gaze pinning her. She remembered him looking at her that way the day he arrested her, the intensity of his stare making it clear she wasn’t going to get away with not answering his questions.

“Why should I help you?” she asked.

“You worked closely with Andy,” he said. “You knew his clients. You can walk me through his records. I’m convinced he knew his murderer.”

“What if you try to pin this on the wrong person again?”

He didn’t even flinch. “I won’t make that mistake again.”

“Honey, I think maybe Travis is right,” her father said. “You probably know more about Andy’s job than anyone.”

“What about Brenda?” Lacy asked. “She was his wife. He would have told her if someone was threatening him before he told me.”

“He never said anything like that to her,” Travis said. “And she doesn’t know anything about his law practice.”

“I’m pretty sure all the files from the business are still in storage,” she said. “You don’t need my help going through them.”

“I do if I’m going to figure out what any of it means. You can help me avoid wasting time on irrelevant files and focus on anything that might be important.”

His intense gaze pinned her, making her feel trapped. She wanted to say no, to avoid having anything to do with him. But what if he was right and he needed her help to solve the case? What if, by doing nothing, she was letting the real killer get away with murder? “All right,” she said. “I’ll help you.”

“Thank you. I’ll call you tomorrow or the next day and set up a time to get together.” He picked up the box with the rock, touched the brim of his hat again and left.

Lacy sank into a nearby arm chair. This wasn’t how she had envisioned her homecoming. She had hoped to be able to put the past behind her once and for all. Now she was volunteering to dive right back into it.

* * *

TRAVIS CRUISED EAGLE MOUNTAIN’S main street, surveying the groups of tourists waiting for tables at Kate’s Kitchen or Moe’s Pub, the men filling the park benches outside the row of boutiques, chatting while they waited for their wives. He waved to Paige Riddell as he passed her bed-and-breakfast, drove past the library and post office, then turned past the Episcopal Church, the fire station and the elementary school before he turned toward his office. The rock someone had hurled through Lacy’s front window sat in the box on the passenger seat, a very ordinary chunk of iron-ore-infused granite that could have come from almost any roadside or backyard in the area.

Who would hurl such a weapon—and its hateful message—through the window of a woman who had already endured too much because of mistakes made by Travis and others? Eagle Mountain wasn’t a perfect place, but it wasn’t known for violent dissension. Disagreements tended to play themselves out in the form of letters to the editor of the local paper or the occasional shouting match after a few too many beers at one of the local taverns.

When Travis had arrested Lacy for the murder of Andy Stenson, he had received more than one angry phone call, and a few people had refused to speak to him ever since. When he had issued a public statement declaring Lacy’s innocence, most people had responded positively, if not jubilantly, to the news. He couldn’t recall hearing even a whisper from anyone that a single person believed Lacy was still a murderer.

On impulse, he drove past the police station and two blocks north, to the former Eagle Mountain Hospital, now home to the county Historical Society and Museum. As he had hoped, Brenda Stenson was just locking up for the day when Travis parked and climbed out of his SUV. “Hello, Travis,” she said as she tucked the key into her purse. A slender blonde with delicate features and a smattering of freckles across her upturned nose, Brenda seemed to be regaining some of the vivacity that had all but vanished when her husband of only three years had been murdered. “What’s up?”

“Lacy came home today,” he said. “I was just over at her folks’ place.”

“How is she? I saw her mom yesterday and told her to tell Lacy I would stop by tomorrow—I thought maybe the family would like a little time alone before the crowds of well-wishers descend.”

“So you don’t have any problem with her being out?” Travis asked, watching her carefully.

She pushed a fall of long blond hair out of her eyes. “Lacy didn’t kill Andy,” she said. “I should have spoken on her behalf at the trial, but I was so torn up about Andy—it was all I could do to get out of bed in the morning. Later on...” She shrugged. “I didn’t know what to think. I’m glad she’s out.”

“Except that now we don’t know who is responsible for Andy’s death,” Travis said.

“No, we don’t. It makes it hard to move on, but sometimes these things never get solved, do they? I hate to think that, but I’m trying to be realistic.”

“I want to find the real murderer,” Travis said. “I feel like I owe it to you and Andy—and to Lacy.”

“You didn’t try and convict her all by yourself,” Brenda said. “And you fought harder than anyone to free her once you figured out the truth.”

“But I started the ball rolling,” he said. “And this isn’t really going to be over for any of us until we find out what really happened that day.”

She sighed. “So what’s the next move?”

“I know we’ve been over this before, but humor me. Do you know of anyone who was angry or upset with Andy—about anything? An angry husband whose wife Andy represented in a divorce? A drunk driving case he lost?”

“Andy hadn’t been practicing law long enough to make enemies,” Brenda said. “And Eagle Mountain is a small town—I know pretty much everyone who was ever a client of his. None of them seem like a murderer to me.”

“I think the odds that the killer was a random stranger are pretty low,” Travis said. “So one of those nice local people is likely the murderer.”

Brenda rubbed her hands up and down her arms, as if trying to warm herself. “It makes me sick to think about it,” she said.

“If I can convince Lacy to help me, would you mind if we go through Andy’s case files?” Travis asked. “I figure she would have known his clients almost as well as he did.”

“Of course I don’t mind. Everything is in storage. I haven’t had the heart to go through anything myself.”

“I don’t know if it will help, but it seems like a good place to start,” he said.

“Stop by whenever you’re ready and I’ll give you the key to my storage unit,” she said.

They said good-night and Travis returned to his SUV. He had just started the vehicle when his cell phone buzzed. “Hello?”

“Sheriff, Wade Tomlinson called to report a shoplifter at their store,” Adelaide said. “He said he saw you drive past a few minutes ago and wondered if you could swing by.”

“Tell him I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.” Travis ended the call and turned the SUV back toward Main, where Wade Tomlinson and Brock Ryan operated Eagle Mountain Outfitters, a hunting, fishing and climbing store that catered to locals and tourists alike. Technically, a call like this should have been routed through the countywide dispatch center. The dispatcher would then contact the appropriate department and the officer who was closest to the scene would respond. But locals were just as likely to call the sheriff department’s direct line and ask for Travis or Gage or one of the other officers by name.

Wade Tomlinson met Travis on the sidewalk in front of their store. “Thanks for stopping by, Sheriff,” he said. He crossed his arms over his beefy chest, the eagle tattoo on his biceps flexing. A vein pulsed in his shaved head. “Though I guess we wasted your time.”

“Adelaide said you had a shoplifter?”

“Yeah, but he got away, right after I called.” He led the way inside the shop, which smelled of canvas, leather and rope. Climbing rope in every color of the rainbow hung from hooks along the back wall, while everything from stainless-steel coffee mugs to ice axes and crampons filled the shelves.

Wade’s business partner, Brock Ryan, looked up from rearranging a display of T-shirts. The one in his hand, Travis noted, bore the legend Do It In the Outdoors. “Hey, Travis,” he said. “You didn’t pass a skinny teenager in a red beanie on your way over here, did you?”

“No,” Travis said. “Was that your shoplifter?”

“Yeah. I caught him red-handed shoving a hundred-dollar water filter down his pants. I sat him down up front by the register and told him we would wait until you got here before we decided whether or not to file charges.”

Unlike Wade, who was short and stocky, Brock was tall and lean, with the squinting gaze of a man who had spent long hours in the sun and wind.

“What happened after that?” Travis asked.

“I turned my back to get a tray of fishing flies out of the case for a customer and the kid took off,” Brock said, his face reddening.

“Did the kid give you a name?” Travis asked. “Did you recognize him?”

Both men shook their heads. “He wasn’t from around here,” Wade said. “He wouldn’t say anything to us, so we figured we’d let you see if you could get anything out of him.”

“Maybe you two scared him enough he won’t come back,” Travis said.

“Burns me up when somebody comes in here and tries to take what we’ve worked hard for,” Brock said. He punched his hand in his fist. “If that kid ever shows his face here again, I’ll make sure he never tries to steal from me again.”

Travis put a hand on the tall man’s shoulder. “Don’t let your temper get the best of you,” he said. “If the kid comes back, call the office and one of us will take care of it.”

Brock hesitated, then nodded. “Right.”

A third man emerged from a door at the back of the shop—a lean, broad-shouldered guy in a black knit beanie. He looked as if he had been carved from iron—all sharp angles and hard muscle. He scanned Travis from head to toe, lingering a moment on the badge on his chest, and Travis wouldn’t have called his expression friendly. “Do you have a new employee?” Travis asked, nodding toward the man.

Brock glanced over his shoulder. “That’s Ian,” he said. “A friend of mine.”

Ian nodded, but didn’t offer to shake hands. “I’ll wait in back,” he said to Brock, and exited the way he had come.

“Your friend got a problem with cops?” Travis asked.

“He’s not comfortable with new people,” Wade said. “He did four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has trouble sometimes with PTSD.”

Travis nodded. Maybe that explained the hostility he had felt from the guy. Or maybe Travis was more suspicious than most people. A hazard of the job, he supposed. “I doubt you’ll have any more trouble from your shoplifter,” he said to Wade and Brock. “You probably scared him off. But I’ll keep my eyes open.”

“Thanks.”

Travis returned to his SUV and climbed in. He started the vehicle and was about to pull out of his parking spot when he glanced over at the passenger seat and slammed on the brakes. The box and the rock that had been thrown through Lacy’s window were gone.

Chapter Three

“Why would someone steal the rock?” Lacy folded her arms over her chest and took a step back from Travis. He had shown up at her house this morning—supposedly to “check on” her and her family. But then he had come out with this crazy story about someone taking the rock that had been thrown through her window. “Do you think I took it or something?”

“No!” He put up his hands, as if he wanted to reach for her, then put them down. “I wanted you to know because you’re the victim in this case, and you have a right to know what’s going on.”

She unfolded her arms, relaxing a little. She had insisted on talking with him on the front porch—mainly so her parents wouldn’t overhear. Her mom and dad meant well, but they tended to hover now that she was back home. “So someone just opened the door of your sheriff’s department vehicle and took the evidence box?” she asked. “How does that happen? Wasn’t your door locked?”

“No one locks their car doors around here.” He looked sheepish—an endearing expression, really—and she didn’t want to feel anything like that for him. “Besides, it’s a cop car. Who breaks into a cop car? And to steal a rock?”

“Maybe they didn’t know what was in the box?” she said. “Or maybe somebody is pranking you—wants to give you a hard time.”

“Maybe.” He put one booted foot up on a metal footlocker her mom used as a side table on the porch, and she tried not to notice the way the khaki fabric stretched over his muscular thigh. She didn’t like being around Travis, but apparently her body couldn’t ignore the fact that he was the sexiest guy she’d been near in three years. “Or maybe whoever threw the rock took it because they thought I could use it somehow to link them to the crime,” he added.

She forced her mind away from ogling the sheriff’s hot body to what was surely a more important matter. “Can you do that?” she asked. “Would a rock have fingerprints on it or something?”

“The surface was too rough to give good latent prints, and it looked like a common enough rock.”

“What about DNA?” she asked.

He laughed. “No offense, but no one does DNA testing for an act of vandalism. It’s expensive, and the results take a while to come back.”

She lowered herself to the cushioned rattan love seat. Her mother had made the cushions out of flowered chintz, faded now by the summer sun, but all the more comfortable and homey for it. “If the person who threw the rock stole it out of your SUV, that means they knew you had it. They must have been watching and seen you come to the house to get it.”

Travis sat beside her, the cushion dipping under his weight. She caught the scent of soap and starch and clean man, and fought to keep from leaning toward him. “Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe they knew your family would call my office to report the threat, they saw my SUV and decided to take a look inside.”

“Either way, I’m completely creeped out.” She gripped the edge of the love seat. She had thought when she walked out of prison that she would feel free again, but she still felt trapped. Watched.

“I talked to Brenda Stenson yesterday,” Travis said. “She’s okay with us going through Andy’s files.”

Lacy nodded. “I’m not looking forward to that, you know.”

“I understand. But I’m hoping coming at the files cold after a few years away, you’ll spot something or remember something that didn’t seem relevant before.”

“What about the other evidence from the crime scene?” she asked. “Wasn’t there anything that pointed to someone besides me as the murderer? Or did you conveniently overlook that?” She didn’t even try to keep the sharp edge from her voice.

“I guess I deserved that,” Travis said. “But no—there wasn’t anything. Wade Tomlinson reported seeing a woman who looked like you near the office shortly before Andy would have died. Obviously, that wasn’t you. It might help if we could find this woman, but we don’t have much to go on—Wade admitted he only saw her from the back, and only for a few seconds, before she entered the office. I’ll question him again, but I doubt he’ll have anything useful to add.”

“Right. Who remembers anything very clearly that happened three years ago?” Lacy sighed.

“I think Andy’s files are the best place for us to start,” Travis said.

“Andy hadn’t been in practice very long,” Lacy said. “Still, he had a couple of big cabinets full of files. Everything was backed up on the computer, too, but he had been trained by a man who liked to keep paper copies of everything, and Andy was the same way. It will take a while to go through everything.”

“We can do a couple of boxes at a time. You could even bring them back here to look through.”

“Do you trust me to look through them by myself?” she asked.

“It would look better in court if we went through them together,” Travis said. “Otherwise, a good defense attorney would point out that you had a strong motive to make people believe someone else murdered Andy. They could suggest you planted evidence in the files.”

She fought against her inclination to bristle at what sounded to her ears like an accusation. After all, she knew all too well how attorneys could twist the most mundane events to make someone look guilty to a jury. “I guess you’re right,” she admitted. She stretched her legs out in front of her. “So how do you want to do this?”

“I’ll get together with Brenda this afternoon and go over to the storage unit with her. I’ll select a couple of boxes to go through first, seal them in her presence, get her to sign off on them, then bring them here. We’ll open them together and start going through the contents. Maybe I’ll even video everything, just in case there’s any question.”

“You’re very thorough.”

“I’m determined not to make any mistakes this time.”

And I’m determined not to let you, she thought.

* * *

ANDY STENSON’S STORAGE unit was located in a long metal shed at the end of Fireline Road on the edge of town. Weedy fields extended beyond the chain-link fence that surrounded the shed on all sides, the land sloping upward from there toward Dakota Ridge and the mountains beyond. With no traffic and no neighbors, the location was peaceful, even beautiful, with the first summer wildflowers blooming in the fields and a china blue sky arching overhead. But there wasn’t anything beautiful about Travis’s errand here today.

Brenda agreed to meet him, and when he pulled into the rutted drive, he found her waiting at the far end, key in hand. “You open it,” she said, pushing the key at him. “I haven’t been in here since before Andy died. I paid a cleaning company to move all his stuff out here.”

“Are you okay being here now?” Travis asked, studying her face. Tension lines fanned out from her mouth, but she didn’t look on the verge of a breakdown.

“I’m okay,” she said. “I just want to get this over with.”

He unfastened the padlock and rolled up the metal door of the unit. Sunlight illuminated jumbled stacks of file boxes. Furniture filled one corner of the unit—several filing cabinets and some chairs and Andy’s desk, scarred and dusty. The chair he had been sitting in when he died, stained with his blood, was in a police storage unit, logged as evidence.

Brenda traced a finger across the dust on the desktop. Was she thinking about her young husband, who had been taken from her when they were still practically newlyweds? She squared her shoulders and turned to study the file boxes. “There’s a lot of stuff here,” she said. “Do you know what you want?”

“I want to look at his case files.” Travis studied the labels on the boxes, then removed the lid from one with the notation Clients, A through C. “I know you said you didn’t know much about his work, but who would you say was his biggest client at the time he died?”

“That one’s easy enough. Hake Development.” She pointed to a box on the bottom of the pile, with the single word HAKE scrawled on the end. “Andy couldn’t believe his luck when Henry Hake hired him instead of one of the big-city firms. Mr. Hake said he wanted to support local business.” She chuckled. “He did that, all right. Hake Development accounted for a big percentage of Andy’s income that year.” Her voice trailed away at these last words, as if she was remembering once more the reason the good fortune had ended.

“All right, I’ll start with this one.” Travis moved aside the stack of boxes to retrieve the Hake files, and found a second box, also marked Hake, behind it.

He set the boxes on the desk, then went to his car and retrieved the evidence tape and seals. “You’re verifying that I haven’t opened the boxes or tampered with them in any way,” he said.

“I am.” He ran a strip of wide tape horizontally and vertically across each box, sealing the tops in place, then asked Brenda to write her name across each piece of tape.

“I’ll video opening the boxes,” he said. “With Lacy’s parents as witnesses. That ought to satisfy any court that we aren’t up to anything underhanded.”

Brenda watched him, arms folded across her chest. “I hope you find something useful in there,” she said. “Though I can’t imagine what.”

“What was Andy doing for Hake, do you know?” Travis asked.

“Just the legal paperwork for the mining claims Henry Hake had bought and planned to develop as a vacation resort. It wouldn’t have been a big deal, except that environmental group got an injunction against the development and Andy was fighting that.”

“I remember a little about that,” Travis said. “They had a Ute Indian chief speak at a council meeting or something like that?”

“He wasn’t a chief, just a tribal representative—a friend of Paige Riddell’s. She was president of the group, I believe.”

“Maybe someone who didn’t want the development thought taking out Hake’s lawyer would stop the threat of the injunction being overturned,” Travis said.

“If they thought that, they were wrong. Hake hired another firm to represent him—someone out of Denver this time. I don’t know what happened after that, though I guess he hasn’t done anything with the property yet.”

“Wouldn’t hurt to check it out,” Travis said.

He picked up the first box as his phone beeped. Setting it down, he answered the call. “A car just crashed through the front window of the Cake Walk Café.” Adelaide sounded out of breath with excitement. “Gage is headed there. Dwight and Roberta are in training today. I can call someone from another shift in if you want me to. The ambulance is en route from Junction.”

“I’ll handle it. I’m on my way.” Travis hung up the phone and studied the boxes. He could take them with him, but after what happened yesterday, he didn’t want to risk someone trying to get hold of them. He returned the keys to Brenda. “Lock up after I’ve left. I’ll have to send someone to retrieve these later.”

“Is everything okay?” she asked.

“Apparently, someone crashed into the café.”

Brenda covered her mouth with her hand. “I hope no one was hurt.”

“Me, too.”

In the car, he called Lacy. “I picked out two boxes of files from Andy’s storage and got them sealed, but now I have to go on a call. It will be a while before I can get back to them.”

“I can pick them up,” she said. “If they’re already sealed, it shouldn’t make any difference, should it?”

He debated as he guided his SUV down the rutted dirt road leading away from the storage facility. “Ride out here with Brenda and have her deliver you and the boxes back to your house.” Before she could protest, he added, “It’s not that I don’t trust you, but I don’t want to give any lawyers the opportunity to object.”

“All right. I’d like to visit with Brenda, anyway.”

“I’ll get back with you to set a time for the two of us to get together,” he said, and ended the call. As much as he wanted to find the person who had killed Andy Stenson, his job wouldn’t allow him to focus all his attention on one case. Right now he had a mess to clean up at the café.