Rough Rider

Sometimes we’re all a person has, he used to tell her. They need help and everyone else has turned them down.

So how was it that he’d gotten himself killed?

Exhausted, still grief stricken and feeling as if she was in over her head, she wandered into the bedroom to drop onto the bed. She desperately needed sleep, but she picked up her laptop because she had a feeling she hadn’t seen the last of Boone McGraw.

Within minutes she was caught up on the latest information that had been released to the press about the twenty-five-year-old kidnapping as well as what she could find out about Boone. The more she read about the kidnapping, the more she worried that he was right and Hank had discovered something about the case that had gotten him killed.

She didn’t want to believe it. What could he have found out that had put him in such danger? She recalled something Boone had said and dug her cell phone out of the back pocket of her jeans.

“Can’t sleep?” Boone said in answer to her call.

“You said something earlier about this Vance Elliot turning out not to be Oakley McGraw. He must have had some kind of proof to make you think he was the missing son.”

“He had my little brother’s stuffed horse.”

She lay back on the bed. “What made you think it was the same horse?”

“It had a blue ribbon tied around it and some of the stitching was missing. Oakley never slept without it in his crib.”

“So how did he just happen to have this horse, if he wasn’t the real Oakley McGraw?”

“It’s a long story, but basically, someone had picked up the horse as a souvenir at the crime scene and later decided to use it to get money out of my father.”

“So you have no idea who in the house helped the kidnapper take the twins? What about the nanny who became your stepmother? She seems the perfect suspect. I just read that she might be released from jail until her trial for attempted murder.”

“Suspect, yes. But for trying to kill my father, not for the kidnapping.”

Exhaustion pulled at her. She could hardly keep her eyes open. “So they were fraternal twins, right? Six months old.” She was thinking of what Hank had written in the file. “I’m assuming your sister also had a stuffed horse toy in her crib that was taken that night? One with a pink ribbon.”

“Yes.”

She closed her eyes, seeing the yellow lined paper and the words pink ribbon written in Hank’s even script. Pink grosgrain ribbon. “Was there anything about the ribbon around its neck released to the media?”

“No. There was nothing about it being a pink grosgrain ribbon.”

“That’s the kind that has the ridges, right? The lawyer must have mentioned it to Hank—”

“I’m sure he provided information about the kidnapping to Knight Investigations, but not that,” Boone said. “Hank knew something before he made the call. Otherwise why would he have contacted our family lawyer with questions about Jesse Rose?”

Good question. Unfortunately, C.J. had no idea. But her gut instinct told her that Boone was right. Hank had already known all about the kidnapping twenty-five years ago. For some reason, he had followed the case closely all these years.

But if he’d kept anything in writing, she hadn’t found it. Yet.

“I’m going to the police station in the morning to find out more about Hank’s death,” Boone said.

“Good luck with that.” She hung up and rolled over, too tired to get undressed. And yet her thoughts refused to let her sleep.

Was there more information Hank had hidden somewhere? Why wasn’t the information in the file? Because he knew enough to know he was in danger?

If this was about the McGraw kidnapping, had Hank gotten too close to the truth? But wouldn’t that mean that he had inside knowledge? Wasn’t the fear that Hank had inside information and that was what had her running scared now?

She rolled over on her back and stared up at the ceiling, her mind racing. Had Hank already known about the pink ribbon? Or had the attorney told him? Either way, Hank had written it down. He’d also told the attorney that he had to go out of town. But he hadn’t. Or had he?

She thought of Boone McGraw. He’d seen the words pink grosgrain ribbon in Hank’s scrawl. He’d known then that Hank knew more than he had told the lawyer. Why hadn’t the cowboy said something then?

Because he was holding out on her. Just like she was on him.

She felt a shiver and pulled the quilt over her. If Hank had known where to find Jesse Rose, then he would have told the McGraw lawyer, she told herself. Unless...unless he had something to hide.

Her eyes felt as if someone had kicked sand into them. She closed them and dropped like a stone into a bottomless well of dark, troubled sleep.

* * *

THE NEXT MORNING, Boone stopped by the police station and after waiting twenty minutes, was led to a Detective Branson’s desk. The man sitting behind it could have been a banker. He wore a suit, tie and wire-rimmed glasses. He looked nothing like a cop, let alone a detective.

As Boone took a seat, he said, “I’m Boone—”

“McGraw. Son of Travers McGraw. I know. You told my desk clerk. That’s why you’re sitting where you are when I’m so busy.”

He was used to his father’s name opening doors. “I’m inquiring about a private investigator by the name of—”

“Hank Knight. He’s dead.” He looked back at the stack of papers on his desk, then up again. He seemed surprised Boone was still sitting there.

“Can you tell me under what circumstance—”

“Hit-and-run. Given the time of night, not that surprising, and in front of a bar.” The cop shrugged as if it happened all the time.

Boone could see why C.J. hadn’t been happy after talking to the cops. “So you think it was an accident?”

Branson leaned back in his chair, his expression one of tired impatience even this early in the morning. “What else?”

“Murder.”

The detective laughed. “Obviously you didn’t know Hank or you wouldn’t even ask that question. Hit-and-run accident. Case closed.”

“Surely you’re investigating it.”

“Of course,” Branson said. “Right along with all the other crimes that go on in this city. Why the interest?”

Boone could see that the hit-and-run was low priority. He thought about mentioning the kidnapping case. For twenty-five years anyone who heard the name would instantly tie it to the kidnapping. It had been a noose around his neck from the age of five.

“His partner believes it was murder.”

“C.J. West?” He sneered as if that also answered his earlier question. The detective thought this was about him and the private eye?

“She has reason to believe it wasn’t an accident,” he said.

“PIs,” Branson said and shook his head. “They just want to be cops. Trust me, it was an accident. So unless you know different, I have to be in court in twenty minutes...”

The detective went back to his paperwork. Boone rose. On his way out the door, he called C.J. on the number she’d called him from last night. “You were right about the cops.”

“You doubted me?”

“My mistake.” He could hear traffic sounds in the background on her end of the line.

“Think you can find the Greasy Spoon Café around the corner from the cop shop?” she asked.

Chapter Six

“You call this breakfast?” Boone McGraw said as he looked down at his plate thirty minutes later.

He’d had no trouble finding the small hole-in-the-wall café. This part of uptown Butte hung onto the side of a mountain with steep streets and over hundred-year-old brick buildings, many of them empty. The town’s heyday had been in the early 1920s when it was the largest city west of the Mississippi. It had rivaled New York and Chicago. But those days were only a distant memory except for the ornate architecture.

“They’re pasties,” C.J. said of the meat turnover smothered with gravy congealing on his plate. “Butte is famous for them.” She took another bite, chewing with obvious enjoyment. “Back when Butte mining was booming, workers came from around the world. Immigrants from Cornwall needed something easy to eat in the mines.” She pointed at the pasty with her fork. “The other delicacy Butte takes credit for is the boneless deep-fat-fried pork chop sandwich.”

“Butte residents don’t live long, I would imagine,” he quipped. “When in Butte, Montana...” He poked at the pasty lying under the gravy. It appeared to have meat and small pieces of potato inside. He took a tentative bite. It wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t what he considered breakfast.

He watched her put away hers. The woman had a good appetite, not that it showed on her figure. She was slightly built and slim but nicely rounded in all the right places, he couldn’t help but notice. She ate with enthusiasm, something he found refreshing.

As he took another bite of his pasty, he studied her, trying to get a handle on who he was dealing with. There was something completely unpretentious about her, from her lack of makeup to the simple jean skirt, leggings, sweater and calf-high boots she wore. Her copper-red hair was pulled back in a loose braid that trailed down her back.

She looked more like an elementary school teacher than a private investigator. Because she was so slight in stature it was almost deceiving. But her confidence and determination would have made any man think twice before taking her on. Not to mention the gun he suspected was weighing down the shoulder bag she had on the chair next to her.

“What does the ‘C.J.’ stand for?” he asked between bites.

She wrinkled her nose and, for a moment, he thought she wasn’t going to tell him. “Calamity Jane,” she said with a sigh. “My father was a huge fan of Western history apparently.”

“You never knew him?”

With a shake of her head, she said, “He died when I was two.”

“Is your mother still...?”

“She passed away years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Hank was my family.” Her voice broke. Eyes shiny with tears, she looked away for a moment before returning to her breakfast. He did the same.

A few minutes later, she scraped the last bite of gravy and crust up, ate it and pushed her plate away. Elbows on the table, she leaned toward him and dropped her voice, even though the café was so noisy, he doubted anyone could hear their conversation where they sat near the doorway.

Her brown eyes, he noticed, were wide and flecked with gold. A faint sprinkling of freckles dotted her nose and her cheekbones. He had the urge to count them for no good reason other than to avoid the intensity of those brown eyes. It was as if she could see into him a lot deeper than he let anyone go, especially a woman.

“Tell me more about the kidnapping case,” she said, giving him her full attention. “Don’t leave anything out.”

He took a drink of his coffee to collect his errant thoughts and carefully set down the mug. Last night she’d been so sure that the kidnapping case couldn’t be what had gotten her partner killed. He wondered what had changed her mind—if that was the case.

“We all lived on the Sundown Stallion Station ranch, where my father raised horses. I was five. My older brother, Cull, was seven, Ledger was three. We had a nanny—”

“Patricia Owen, later McGraw after she became your father’s second wife and allegedly tried to kill him,” she said.

He nodded. “Patty stayed across the hall from the nursery. She heard a noise or something woke her. Anyway, according to her, she went to check on the twins and found them missing. When she saw the window open and a ladder leaning against the outside of the house, she started screaming and woke everyone up. The sheriff was called, then the FBI. A day later there was a ransom demand made. My father sold our prized colt to raise the money.”

“Why wasn’t the kidnapper caught when the ransom was paid?” she asked.

“The drop was made in a public place, but a fire broke out in a building close by. Suddenly the street was filled with fire trucks. In the confusion, somehow the kidnapper got away with the money without being seen.”

She shook her head. “Who made the drop?”

“The family attorney, Jim Waters.”

C.J. raised a brow. “Isn’t he the one who was also arrested trying to leave the country with a bunch of money and has also been implicated in your father’s poisoning?”

Boone nodded, seeing that she knew a lot more than she was letting on. “But so far no charges have been filed against him in the poisoning and there is no proof he was involved in the kidnapping. We now know that Harold Cline, a boyfriend of our cook, climbed the ladder that night and got away with the twins. The person who hasn’t been found is the one who it is believed administered codeine cough syrup to the twins to keep them quiet during the ordeal and passed them out the window to the first kidnapper.”

“What about the broken rung on the ladder?” she asked.

“It was speculated that the kidnapper might have fallen or dropped the babies, but we now know that didn’t happen. The babies were alive and fine when they were found by our family cook and taken to—”

“The Whitehorse Sewing Circle member Pearl Cavanaugh. Wasn’t she or her mother the one who started the illegal adoptions through this quilt group years ago?”

C.J. had definitely done her homework. He figured she must have been up before daylight. Either that or she had known more about the case than she’d led him to believe last night.

“That’s right. Unfortunately, they’re pretty much all dead, including Pearl.”

“So there is no record of what happened to the twins,” she said and picked up her coffee mug, holding it in both hands as she slowly took a sip.

“In light of what we learned from our family cook before she died, the babies probably went to parents who couldn’t have children and were desperate,” he said.

“I can’t imagine how they couldn’t have known about the kidnapping. So in their desperation, they pretended not to know that the child they were adopting was a McGraw baby? Didn’t Oakley’s and Jesse Rose’s photos run nationally? So no one could have missed seeing them.”

He nodded. “It makes sense that whoever got each of the twins knew. We’ve been led to believe that the adoptive parents were told the twins weren’t safe in our house.”

She put down her cup, her brown-eyed gaze lifting to his. “Because of your mother’s condition.”

He thought of his mother in the mental ward, the vacant stare in her green eyes as she rocked with two dolls clutched in her arms. “We now believe that her condition was the result of arsenic poisoning. It causes—”

“Confusion, memory loss, depression... The same symptoms your father was experiencing before his heart attack. Patty’s doing is the assumption? So you’re saying your mother probably wasn’t involved.”

He met her gaze and shrugged. “In her state of mind at the time of the kidnapping, who knows? But she definitely didn’t run down your partner. She’s still in the mental ward. And neither did Patty, who is still behind bars.”

C.J. bit at her lower lip for a moment. He couldn’t help noticing her mouth, the full bow-shaped lips, the even white teeth, just the teasing tip of her pink tongue before he dragged his gaze away. This snip of a woman could be damned distracting.

“You said Oakley has been found?”

That wasn’t information she could have found on the internet. “He has refused to take a DNA test, but my father is convinced that the cowboy is Oakley. He owns a ranch in the area. Apparently he’s known the truth for years, but didn’t want to get his folks into trouble. They’ve passed now, but he still isn’t interested in coming out as the infamous missing twin. Nor does he have an interest in being a McGraw.”

She raised a brow. “That must be both surprising and disappointing if it’s true and he’s your brother.”

“It’s harder on my father than the rest of us. He’s been through so much. All he wants is his family together.”

She said nothing, but her eyes filled before she looked down as the waitress came over to refill their coffee cups.

* * *

C.J. STUDIED BOONE while he was distracted with the waitress refilling his cup. She’d known her share of cowboys since this was Montana—Butte to be exact. Cowboys were always wandering in off the range—and usually getting into trouble and needing either a private investigator or a bail bondsman. She and Hank had been both.

But this cowboy seemed different. He’d been through a lot because of the kidnapping. He wasn’t the kind of man a person could get close to. Last night she’d noticed that he didn’t wear a wedding ring. This morning online, she’d discovered that only one of the McGraw sons, Ledger, the youngest one, had made the walk to the altar.

“You drove a long way yesterday,” she said after a few moments. “Seems strange if all you had to go on was Hank asking a few questions about the kidnapping and Jesse Rose.”

He pushed away his plate, his pasty only half-eaten. “I quizzed the attorney when he told me about the private investigator calling. Truthfully, I figured this whole trip would turn out to be a wild-goose chase.”

“So why are you here?”

“Because my father asked me and because our attorney said that Hank Knight sounded...worried.”

Her pulse quickened. “Worried?”

Boone met her gaze with his ice-blue one. “I think he knew something. I think that’s why he’s dead.” When she didn’t argue the point, he continued. “From what you found last night, we know that he knew more about the ribbon on the stuffed toy horse than has been released.”

“Why would he keep that information to himself?” she asked more to herself than to him.

“Good question. He told our attorney that he had to take a trip and would be out of town,” Boone reminded her. “Makes sense he’d want to verify what he was worried about, doesn’t it?”

It did. “Except I don’t think he left town.”

“Or maybe he had a good reason not to want me following up on it.”

She bristled. “Hank was the most honest man I’ve ever known. If he knew where Jesse Rose was, he would have told your family.”

“Maybe. Unless someone stopped him first.”

Chapter Seven

After he paid the bill, they stepped outside the café. The morning air had a bite to it although the sky was a cloudless blue overhead. He was glad he’d grabbed his sheepskin-lined leather coat before he’d left home. Plowed dirty snow melted in the gutters from the last storm. Christmas wasn’t that far off. There was no way Butte wouldn’t have a white Christmas.

“What do you know about Butte?” C.J. asked as she started to walk up the steep sidewalk.

He shook his head as he followed her, wondering why she’d called him. Was she going to help him find out the truth? Or was she just stringing him along?

“What most Montanans know, I guess. It’s an old copper mining boomtown and we’re standing on what became known as the Richest Hill on Earth,” he said. “It is now home to the Berkeley Pit, the most costly of the largest Superfund sites and a huge hole full of deadly water.”

He saw that she didn’t like him talking negatively about her hometown and realized he would have taken exception if she’d said anything negative about Whitehorse, too.

“Why are you asking me about Butte? What does this have to do with Hank or—”

“Butte was one of the largest and most notorious copper boomtowns in the West with hundreds of saloons and a famous red-light district.”

Butte hadn’t lived down its reputation as a rough, wide-open town. He’d heard stories about the city’s famous red-light and saloon district called the Copper Block on Mercury Street. Many of the buildings that had once housed the elegant bordellos still stood.

“The first mines here were gold and silver—and underground,” she continued. “They say there is a network of old mine tunnels like a honeycomb under the city.”

“Where are you going with this, C.J.?”

“Hank loved this town and he knew it like the back of his hand.”

Boone often wondered how many people actually knew the back of their hand well, but he didn’t say so. “Your point?”

“He believed in helping people. Often those people couldn’t pay for his services, but that never stopped him. You’ve seen his office. He wouldn’t have been interested in your family kidnapping case. It wasn’t something he would have taken on.”

“Then how do you explain the fact that he knew about the ribbon?”

“Maybe the attorney told him. Look, there was only one sheet of paper in the file. Hank might have been curious given the latest information that’s come out about the kidnapping. But he wouldn’t have pursued it. Which means if not an older case, then one of his more recent ones has to be what got him killed. I need to investigate those. I’m sure you have better things to do—”

He didn’t believe her. All his instincts told him that she wanted him to believe Hank hadn’t known anything about the kidnapping. She was scared that he had. And maybe even more afraid because he hadn’t told her.

So she was going to chase a few of Hank’s last cases? He’d seen her take three files last night. “Fine, but you aren’t getting rid of me, because once you exhaust your theory, we’re going to get serious and find out what Hank knew about the McGraw kidnapping and Jesse Rose.”

“Fine, suit yourself. I’m going to visit Mabel Cross and see if her brooch has turned up.”

Boone shook his head. “Seriously?”

“As Hank used to say, there are no unimportant cases.” She headed for her VW van. He cursed under his breath, but followed and climbed in the passenger side. She was wasting her time and his. But he needed her help and antagonizing her wasn’t going to get him anywhere, he told himself as he climbed into the passenger seat of her van.

“So we’re going to pay a visit to these people?” he asked, picking up the three case files she’d taken from Hank’s office last night as she slid behind the wheel. “Tell me we aren’t going underground.” He didn’t want to admit that one of his fears was being trapped underground. The idea of some old mine shaft turned his blood to ice.

She laughed. “I’m afraid we are. So to speak,” C.J. said and started the engine.

The buildings they passed were old, most of them made of brick or stone with lots of gingerbread ornamentation. He recalled that German bricklayers had rushed to Butte during its heyday from the late 1800s to the early 1920s.

Nothing about Butte, Montana, let you forget it had been a famous mining town—and still was, he thought as they passed streets with names like Granite, Quartz, Aluminum, Copper—and Caledonia.

As she drove C.J. waved or nodded to people they passed. He couldn’t tell if she was just friendly or knew everyone in town. On Iron Street, she pulled to the curb, cut the engine and climbed out. As she headed for an old pink-and-purple Victorian, he decided he might as well go with her.

Glancing around the neighborhood, he took in the historical homes and tried to imagine this city back in 1920. From photos he’d seen, the streets had swarmed with elegantly dressed residents. Quite a contrast to the homeless he’d seen now in doorways.

C.J. was already to the door and had knocked by the time he climbed the steps to the porch. The door opened and he looked up to find an elderly woman leaning on a cane. “Mrs. Cross,” C.J. said. “I’m Hank Knight’s associate.”

“Hank.” The woman’s free hand went to her mouth. “So tragic. If you’re here about his funeral—”

“No, I’m inquiring about your brooch. I wanted to be sure Hank had found it before—”

“Oh yes, dear,” she said and touched an ugly lion studded with rhinestones pinned to her sweater. “Silly me. I feel so badly now to have thought my niece or my daughter’s husband might have taken it and all the time it was on this sweater in the closet. I told Hank. I suppose he didn’t get a chance to tell you before... He was so loved.” She sniffed. “You’ll be at his funeral, I assume.”