The Sheriff Of Heartbreak County

“Sheriff Roan Harley, ma’am. I’d like to talk to you, if you wouldn’t mind.” The voice was deep and growly, pleasant and even soft in pitch, but there was no mistaking the iron authority in it.

Mary closed her eyes briefly, then reached once more for the purse, this time picking it up, then bending over to tuck it under the table. She unlocked the door and opened it a cautious crack, leaving the screen door latched. And a moment later was clutching it for support as she felt herself tumbling headlong into a memory she thought she’d put away and forgotten long ago.

I thought Diego DelRey was the most handsome man I’d ever seen. Tall, dark and exotic, he was standing in the middle of that vast hotel lobby in a shaft of sunlight from the leaded-glass skylight, smiling at me through the cascading waters from a Moorish fountain.

“Throw a penny in the fountain and make a wish,” he said in a voice softly accented and exotic, sensual and dangerous as a tiger’s purr. “Tell me what it is and I’ll make it come true.”

And I thought, as I smiled back at him, Oh, but I think you already have.

Why do I remember this now? This man is nothing at all like Diego DelRey. If he reminds me of anyone it’s the Marlboro Man.

Still clutching the latched screen door, she said politely, “May I please see your I.D.?”

The man standing on the front porch seemed surprised by the request, as if it wasn’t one he was accustomed to getting. While he fumbled to pull the folder containing his badge from his shirt pocket with one hand—the other was full of a big light-colored cowboy hat—Mary had time for more analytical thoughts.

He was tall. She was tall herself, but he was taller by half a head, with hard, sinewy flesh arranged sparingly but well over big bones. His hair, sculpted in classic cowboy fashion by the press of the hat brim, gleamed like tarnished gold in the overhead porch light. His features were strong—maybe too strong to be called handsome, with high cheekbones and a square-cut jaw—but his mouth looked as though it might smile easily and well. There were depressions in his cheeks that lacked the benign cuteness of dimples, but rather lent his face a rakish kind of charm that seemed somehow at odds with the somberness of his profession. And even though it was coming on night and his eyes were in shadow, they seemed to squint a little, as if from a lifetime spent gazing at sunshot horizons.

He stepped forward into the light and handed over his identification. She took her time studying it, then deliberately met his eyes for a long unflinching moment as she gave it back to him. His eyes, a cool glittery blue, returned her appraisal for a time that seemed just a little too long.

He won’t miss much, she thought. No, there’s no resemblance to Diego at all. But…maybe it’s that supreme and unshakable self-assurance that’s the same.

A shiver found its way past her defenses and scurried away down her spine as she stepped back and held the door open, wordlessly inviting him in.

“Sorry to bother you so late, ma’am,” he said in his soft, rumbly voice, and shifted his feet as he moved past her, as if he would have liked to wipe them on a doormat that wasn’t there.

In the better light, she amended her thoughts about his eyes. They seemed tired, she thought. Or sad. Remembering Miss Ada’s tale of this man’s personal tragedies made her tone warmer than it might have been.

“That’s all right, I just got home myself, actually.” She closed the door and turned with a gesture, directing her visitor through the shadowy living room toward the lighted rectangle of the kitchen doorway.

And as she did that, she was aware of each of her movements as if a camera’s eye was scrutinizing her face and body in the finest detail. She was conscious of every expression, every muscle and nerve, in a way she hadn’t been even in those long-ago times she’d spent in front of a real camera.

And she was conscious, too, and even ashamed, of the room they were passing through. She tried not to see the comfortable but drab brown tweed sofa and worn beige fake leather rocking chair, or the faded green braided rug that could only have come from a long-extinct mail-order catalog. Even the attempts at decoration made her cringe: The mass-produced and overly sentimental prints of cats and dogs—or worse, houses with impossibly lovely gardens and lighted windows—that hung on the walls, the bowl of artificial daisies that shared the coffee table with a book of Life magazine photographs and a ceramic rooster, the basket of pine cones and the stuffed blue calico cat on the hearth in front of the unused fireplace. Nothing wrong with any of it, and the homey little knickknacks were pretty enough, she supposed, but so…alien to her. It felt like a set, and she walked through it like an actor on a stage.

But this is who I am, now. Shabby…ordinary. I should be used to it by now. And I must not forget it…ever.

“I was just having a bite to eat,” she said, touching her mouse-brown hair in a self-conscious way that was only partly artifice. “If you, um…wouldn’t mind talking in the kitchen? I’m sorry things are such a mess…as I said, I just got home.”

She’s nervous, Roan thought. He didn’t make too much of that, nervous being a pretty usual way for people to be around officers of the law, he’d found, even the ones who had no reason to be. Especially the ones who had no reason to be.

Like Buster had said, the woman fidgeting her way from table to sink to fridge as she cleared away the remains of her evening meal definitely wasn’t the head-turner type. Not the kind of woman to stand out in a crowd in spite of how tall she was. Not the type to stir a man’s juices to lust, either, not at first glance anyway. Though that may have been due in part to the fact that whatever figure she did have was all covered up by the loose-fitting pink nylon smock she wore.

All together, he decided, she wasn’t bad-looking or what he might call homely, just…plain. As in, ordinary. Her hair was kind of a neutral brown, neither curly nor straight, without much body or shine to it and no particular style either, just sort of twisted up on the back of her head. Which struck him as kind of odd for somebody who made her living fixing up other people’s hair. Her eyes were unremarkable, too, a flat greenish-gray in color, like old moss—though it was hard to tell much more about them, hidden as they were behind a pair of dark-rimmed glasses even he knew were both too big for her face and years out of style.

“Can I get you something to drink?” she asked as she brushed some imaginary crumbs off the tabletop. “Some… coffee?”

“Oh, no ma’am, thanks, I just had a cup over at the Last Stand.” He laid his hat on the tabletop she’d just cleared off and pretended not to notice the way she’d twitched when he mentioned the saloon. “I’ll try not to take up too much of your time. I just need to ask you a few questions….”

“Oh—of course.” She leaned her hip against the countertop and folded her arms in a way he didn’t have to be a student of body language to know was defensive.

He regarded her for a moment, watching her throat move as she swallowed, not intending to make her more nervous than she already was, but simply pondering the best way to proceed with this woman. He felt a little bit like a hunter stalking a doe, part of him not wanting to spook her, but a part of him secretly hoping she’d wake up to the danger she was in and get herself out of his gunsights while there was still time.

He quelled that notion and drawled with deceptive friendliness, “You can start by telling me your last name. All the folks over at the Last Stand know you by is Mary.”

A smile flicked over her lips and died. She cleared her throat, and one hand rose as if to touch her mouth before halting abruptly and diving back into the bend of her folded arms. “It’s, um, Owen. Mary…Owen.”

But he’d already noted the puffy swelling on her lower lip she’d remembered too late not to call his attention to. And the purple bruises on her jaw—he’d noticed them, too.

“Mary Owen…” He repeated it as he took a notebook and pencil from his shirt pocket and jotted it down. Then he looked up and casually asked, “Do you know Jason Holbrook, Mary?”

No twitch this time. She was expecting that.

She met his eyes calmly, poise restored, the nervousness apparently conquered. And during the long pause while she gazed at him without replying, something odd happened to him, something he couldn’t recall ever having happened before, at least not under those circumstances, questioning a suspect in the investigation of a crime. For no reason he could think of his pulse quickened and a strange little weight came to sit in the middle of his chest, one that made him feel as if he needed to catch a breath. A breath that was mysteriously hard to come by.

“I’ve met him, yes.” Then she added with a note of quiet reproach, “But sheriff, you know that, or you wouldn’t be here. I also know he was found shot dead this morning.” She paused again, and her mouth twitched briefly with a small, bitter smile. “This is a very small town.”

He acknowledged that with a nod and a wintery smile of his own. He glanced down, shifted the position of his hat on the table, then returned his gaze to her. “So…you mind telling me when the last time was you saw him?”

Her lips tightened again, impatiently, this time. “I’m sure you know that, too. I saw him last night, at the Last Stand. He…spoke to me while I was waiting to pick up my to-go order.”

“The way I heard it, he did a lot more than speak to you,” Roan drawled, and now for some reason he was noticing her skin, wondering why he hadn’t noticed before how clear and pale it was, almost translucent, not like most of the women he knew, whose skin, once they passed infancy, got to showing the effects of sun and wind and cold dry weather pretty quickly.

Noticing, too, the way hers changed color with her emotions, the same way his Susie Grace’s did. And when she shook her head and looked away, he didn’t miss the faint pink blush that washed across her cheeks.

“He came on to me. It wasn’t the first time. It wasn’t a big deal.” But she swallowed. He didn’t miss that, either.

“What about when he followed you out to the parking lot?”

Her eyes snapped back to him, the pink in her cheeks deepening to crimson as he watched, and he felt a stab of inappropriate delight that a woman her age could still blush.

“You mean you don’t know that, too?” Her voice was low, barely above a whisper, but he could almost see her body vibrating with emotions fiercely contained, and behind the unattractive glasses she wore, her eyes had come alive. They seemed to shimmer now with green-gold fire. “Didn’t your witnesses tell you?”

He leaned toward her, making his voice as soft as hers, just sort of friendly. “No, but I think I can guess what happened. I’ve known Jason Holbrook for a long time, so I know what a—pardon me, ma’am—what a sonofabitch he can be. And Jason had a laceration on his lip the coroner says is a bite mark. Buster, over at the Last Stand, says when Jase came back after seeing you outside, his mouth was bleeding and he was cussin’ mad. It doesn’t take a genius to figure things out, does it, Miss Mary?” He ducked his head, cajoling her with kind eyes and a wry smile. “So tell me—the truth, now—are you the one that bit him?”

She looked away, made a sound, cleared her throat and finally spat it out—and that was what she reminded him of—a cat spitting. “He…grabbed me as I was getting into my car.” Her folded arms tightened, and revulsion thickened her voice. “He…kissed me. He wouldn’t stop when I tried to push him away. So, yes…I bit him.” Again her eyes lashed back at him, as if to say she wasn’t one bit sorry about doing it, either. And this time he knew the green-gold fire in those eyes was defiance.

Ignoring another of those strange disturbances in his midsection, Roan leveled a gaze at her and waited. It had been his experience at times like this that silence was more apt to provoke further revelations than questions. It didn’t work in Miss Mary Owen’s case, though. She stared back at him and didn’t give an inch.

He leaned toward her once more, stooping down a little the way he normally did when he spoke to women—a habit he’d developed when he’d first shot up to where he was a good bit taller than most of the girls he knew. When he remembered this woman was darn near as tall as he was, he straightened up again. “And was that absolutely the last time you saw him?”

She didn’t answer, but the fire died out of her eyes as he watched, leaving them that dull and lifeless gray.

He persisted, his voice gentle again…persuading. “Mary? Did you see Jason after that? Did he come back a little later on…follow you home, maybe?”

She looked away, still not answering, though he could see her throat working. He stepped closer to her and reached toward but didn’t quite touch the bruise on her jaw. He felt a stab of almost physical pain when she flinched. It was either the pain or the surprise of it that made his voice harden. “Did Jason do this to you?”

She edged away from him and turned…picked up a perfectly clean dish from the countertop and put it in the sink. “No—nobody did it. I—it was just a stupid accident. I tripped on the steps—the porch light was burned out, and I…fell.”

That told him one thing: the lady was a terrible liar.

“A man’s dead, Mary. And lying to me isn’t going to do anything but get you in a whole lot of trouble.” He paused, waited again. And as he waited he thought about moving in on her, crowding her space, closing her in against that sink where she stood with her back to him, using the kind of subtle intimidation tactics he’d have used with any other suspect. But then he got a clear picture in his mind of that swollen lip and the bruise on her face, and of Jason doing the exact same thing but with a whole different purpose in mind, and he went cold and sick with shame at the thought.

He folded his arms across his chest and hitched in a breath. “Something else the coroner found, Mary. Jason had some blood on his shirt sleeve that wasn’t his. Appears it was a woman’s blood. And I’m guessing if I take a sample of your DNA—and I will have to ask you to let me do that—I’m about as certain as I can be it’s going to match that blood.”

Still she didn’t say anything…didn’t move a muscle. He could hear the tension humming inside her, like an overload of electricity. He could see the wisps of brown hair that lay on the back of her neck, escapees from the nondescript arrangement that was neither bun nor ponytail but something halfway between and that had already seen her through a hard day’s work.

He thought how vulnerable that part of her seemed. And that at the same time, oddly graceful, too.

“Mary?” Barely whispering… “Did Jason Holbrook rape you?”

Again her body jerked as if he’d struck her. She turned slowly, and he saw her face, not vulnerable, now, but white and still, like something carved in marble. Her voice was hard, too, and brittle with contempt. “No. He was too drunk. He tried. When he couldn’t, he…hit me instead.”

Roan swore colorfully, but only inside his mind. Aloud, he prompted in the same quiet, implacable way, “And then?”

“Then?” She shrugged, and he saw her scrape her teeth carefully across her swollen lower lip. “He left.” As she turned back to the sink she drew a breath, and it was the only thing that betrayed her body’s trembling.

He waited a moment, steeling himself. Then asked the question he hated to have to ask: “Mary, do you own a gun?”

Chapter 3

He waited patiently in the silence while she puttered around the sink, doing what looked to him were totally unnecessary cleaning chores, and it occurred to him only then how out of place this woman looked in that particular kitchen. He hadn’t known its former owner, Queenie Schultz, all that well, except to say hello to when he’d dropped off Erin or picked her up from her monthly trip to the beauty shop, but he sure did remember her big-toothed smile and big brassy laugh, and the pinkish-tinted platinum blond hair she wore teased up and lacquered into a bouffant the size of a basketball. That, and her short but big-busted shape she liked to squeeze into smocks that were just a wee bit too small, so she always put him in mind of a little strutting pigeon.

Her he could see in this kitchen, with its pink and yellow flowered wallpaper, ruffled curtains, potted sweet potato vine on the windowsill and potholders shaped like kitty-cat faces. Miss Mary Owen didn’t fit, like the one kid who hadn’t gotten the word it was supposed to be dress-up day, and he wondered if that might account for some of her awkwardness.

He felt a strange desire to reassure her…put her at ease. He’d almost forgotten the question he’d asked, when she gave him the answer he didn’t want to hear.

“Yes, I do own a gun.” She threw him a quick defiant look over one shoulder. “I have a license for it, too, in case you’re wondering.” Then she turned and leaned against the sink and folded her arms with an air of weary acceptance as if answering his questions was an unpleasant task she’d decided to get over with as quickly as possible. “I got it several years ago. For protection, since I live alone, and I often work late.”

“Mind if I ask what kind it is?”

“It’s a Ladysmith,” she replied without hesitation. “Thirty-eight caliber.”

Again, it wasn’t the answer he’d hoped for. He lifted his eyebrows. “That’s a lot of gun for a woman. Know how to use it?”

Her lips flirted with a smile that made him aware of how he’d sounded—like a bad John Wayne imitation. “Yes, Sheriff, I do. I practice at a firing range at least once a month.”

“So you’re a pretty good shot?”

Watching him, she hitched one shoulder in a wary shrug. “I usually hit what I’m aiming at.”

“How long’s it been since you went shooting?”

Behind the ugly glasses he saw her eyes kindle again as she countered softly, “I went this last weekend.”

Convenient alibi, Roan thought, in case a weapon turns out to have been fired recently.

“Where’s the gun now? Mind if I take a look at it?” He asked it in a friendly way, smiling. “Take it with me, run a few tests on it?”

The smile she gave him back was a lot less friendly than his. “Don’t you need a warrant for that?”

“I do if you make me get one,” Roan said, still showing his teeth, “or, you could agree to give me the gun of your own free will. Save us both some unpleasantness.”

While he waited for her reply, it struck him that it was an odd sort of conversation to be having with a murder suspect. More like a verbal fencing match than an interrogation—rapid and light in tone, almost playful, but with an underlying tenseness, each of them concentrating with laser-like focus on the other, both of them wary…poised to thrust or parry for real at an instant’s notice.

Excitement raced through him as she lifted her chin and threw at him in direct challenge, “I could…but you’d have to tell me why you want it.”

The tension rose again to a screaming pitch while he pondered his options…while he wondered what kind of a lawman he was to be playing this kind of game with a suspect in a murder investigation. Finally, he drawled, “Oh, I think you know why.”

She sighed and her lips curled, but not with a smile this time. “You think I shot Jason Holbrook with it.”

“Did you?”

“No.” It was a quiet but vehement explosion.

Roan narrowed his eyes. He wasn’t conscious of movement, but the distance between himself and the woman seemed to shrink. “But didn’t you say you got the gun for protection because you work late…protection, I’m assuming, against just the sort of thing that happened to you last night?”

She stared at him and didn’t answer…didn’t confirm it, or deny it, either. But he could see shadows of what might have been fear or pain, or maybe both, flit across her eyes.

“So, if you didn’t use the gun last night when Jason attacked you,” he went on, scratching his chin in a puzzled way, “my question would be, why not? It would make sense to me if you had shot him—might even be considered self-defense.” He knew damn well it hadn’t been, but handed it to her like a gift, just to see what she’d do with it.

Again she didn’t bite, just looked at him with eyes green and deep as the sea and quietly said, “Do I need a lawyer?”

He folded his arms and gave her an ambiguous little nod. “Not if your gun checks out.”

She let out a breath, then pushed abruptly away from the sink…stalked across the darkened living room with a long and panther-like stride. And as he picked up his hat and hurriedly followed, Roan was conscious once more of the woman’s unexpected grace. And something else. Something he couldn’t put his finger on, but that stirred up a prickly feeling on the back of his neck. Something about that walk…

When he caught up with her she was pulling out her purse from underneath a small table beside the front door. His stomach lurched when she opened it and took out a slim, lethal-looking handgun, but she merely handed it over to him, butt first.

“I’d like it back as soon as possible,” she said, and this time there was no mistaking the flicker of fear in her eyes.

So…I guess maybe she wasn’t lying when she said she needed this thing for protection, Roan thought as he carefully wrapped the weapon in his handkerchief. The lady was definitely afraid of something—or someone. Not for the first time, he wondered where she’d come from and what she was doing here, a couple of hundred miles from nowhere, and if it was the usual domestic abuse thing she was running from, or something more sinister.

One thing for sure, he was going to be running a check on Miss Mary Owen the minute he got back to the shop. Maybe he’d call in from his vehicle, get the ball rolling even before that.

“I guess you’ll be wanting something with my DNA.”

He looked up and found her gazing at him, head held high and bruised jaw set at a proud angle, eyes fathomless now, behind the glasses. Since he was juggling his hat and the gun, about all Roan could do was nod. He was doing that, getting ready to say the usual things he’d say to a viable suspect he wasn’t quite ready to arrest yet, when he came close to dropping everything in his hands and just about jumped out of his skin.

Something brushed across the back of his legs.

He did a clumsy sort of pivot, swearing under his breath, adrenaline hitting him like a blast of buckshot. Then, with an embarrassed snort, he bent and scooped up the big orange tomcat busily doing figure eights around his ankles. “Jeez, cat,” he muttered, “you damn near scared me out of my growth.” The animal’s only reply was a raspy purr as he butted his big head up underneath Roan’s chin hard enough to make him see stars.

He lifted his eyebrows and shifted his gaze back to Mary Owen. “This monster belong to you?”

But she seemed to be in some sort of trance, staring at the cat as if it had just sprung full-grown from his chest, like an alien birth. Roan had to repeat her name twice before she twitched her eyes back to his and words came gasping out of her already open mouth.

“No—I mean, yes—but…he’s Queenie’s—he came with the house. But he’s never let me get near him, much less pick him up. What on earth did you do?”

“Cats are funny about who they decide to like,” Roan said, and the cat’s purring was so loud and ratchety he had to raise his voice to make himself heard over it. He chuckled as he gave the cat a good scratch along the edge of his jaw and the purring rose to a snarl of pure ecstasy. “He’s sure a big ol’ boy—seems friendly enough now. Here, maybe he’ll—”

He was about to hand the cat over to her when the beast lunged out of his grasp and, hissing and spitting, vaulted off Mary’s unprepared arms and hit the floor with a heavy thud. From there he surged upward in one fluid leap to the back of the sofa where he crouched, eyes round and glowing, fur rippling, tail twitching, growls coming from low in his chest.