Cold Case at Cardwell Ranch
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B.J. Daniels
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Buried secrets threaten a lawman and a woman with everything to lose in this thrilling Montana suspense. A grisly discovery at the bottom of an abandoned well leads cold-case detective Waco Johnson to Cardwell Ranch — and a thirty-year-old unsolved homicide. When evidence points to Ella Cardwell's missing mother as the murderer, Waco knows he'll need the Montana rancher's help to find the vanished woman. Ella's desperate search for answers uncovers family secrets that could break the case wide open…and thrust Ella and Waco into a killer's sights.
Chapter One
The wind whipped around him, kicking up dust and threatening to send his Stetson flying. Cold-case detective Waco Johnson cautiously approached the weatherworn boards that had blown off the opening of the old abandoned well.
The Montana landscape was riddled with places like this one, abandoned homesteads slowly disappearing along with those who had worked this land.
He hesitated a few feet from the hole, feeling a chill even on this warm Montana summer afternoon. Nearby, overgrown weeds and bushes enveloped the original homestead dwelling, choking off any light. Only one blank dusty window peered out at him from the dark gloom inside. Closer, pine trees swayed, boughs emitting a lonely moan as they cast long, jittery shadows over the century-old cemetery with its sun-bleached stone markers on the rise next to the house. A rusted metal gate creaked restlessly in the wind, a grating sound that made his teeth ache.
It added to his anxiety about what he was about to find. Or why being here nudged at a memory he couldn’t quite grasp.
He glanced toward the shadowed gaping hole of the old well for a moment before pulling his flashlight from his coat pocket and edging closer.
The weathered boards that had once covered the opening had rotted away over time. Weeds had grown up around the base. He could see where someone had trampled the growth at one edge to look inside. The anonymous caller who’d reported seeing something at the bottom of the well? That begged the question: How had the caller even seen the abandoned well’s opening, given the overgrowth?
Waco knelt at the rim and peered into the blackness below. As the beam of his flashlight swept across the dust-dried well bottom, his pulse kicked up a beat. Bones. Animals, he knew, frequently fell into wells on abandoned homesteads. More often than not, it was their bones that dotted the rocky dry bottom.
Shielding his eyes from the swirling dust storm, Waco leaned farther over the opening. The wind howled around him, but he hardly heard or felt it as his flashlight’s beam moved slowly over the bottom of the well—and stopped short.
A human skull.
He rocked back on his haunches, pulled out his phone and made the call. The bones were definitely human, just as the anonymous caller had said. How long had the remains been down there? No way to tell until he could get the coroner involved. He made another call, this one to the state medical examiner’s office, as a dust devil whirled across the desolate landscape toward him.
He tugged the brim of his Stetson down against the blowing dirt, and Waco’s gaze skimmed the wind-scoured hillside as his mind raced. That darn memory teased at him until it finally wedged its way into his thoughts.
He felt a chill as he remembered. His grandfather, an old-timey marshal, had told him a story about remains being found in an abandoned well on a homestead in the Gallatin Canyon near Big Sky. Waco couldn’t remember specifics, except that it had been a murder and it had been on the Cardwell property, one of the more well-known ranches in the canyon.
While more than fifty miles from where Waco was now standing, and a good fifteen years ago, he found it interesting that another body had gone into a well. He rubbed the back of his neck. There was always something eerie about abandoned homesteads—even when there weren’t human remains lying at the bottom of an old well. But right now, he felt a little spooked even as he told himself there couldn’t be any connection between the two cases.
Standing, he walked back to his patrol SUV and slipped in behind the wheel and out of the wind. Taking out his phone again, he called up the Cardwell Ranch case. The story had gone national, so there was an abundance of information online. As he read through the stories, he felt a familiar prickling at the nape of his neck.
Waco didn’t know how much time had passed when he looked up to see a Division of Criminal Investigation van tear up the dirt road toward him. Behind it, storm clouds blackened the horizon. This part of Montana felt as far away from civilization as he could get. But in truth, it was only a few miles north of the Gallatin Valley and the city of Bozeman, one of the fastest-growing areas of the state.
He liked that there were still places that time seemed to have forgotten in Montana. Places where a person could spend a day without seeing another person. Places developers hadn’t yet discovered. Waco often found himself in those places because that was where a person could get rid of a body.
As the DCI van pulled up next to his SUV, he climbed out and felt that familiar prickling again.
His instincts told him that the person in the bottom of this particular well hadn’t accidentally fallen in. If he didn’t have an old murder case on his hands, then his name wasn’t Waco Johnson.
