Cowboy Under Fire
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Lena Diaz
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Chapter One
Hayley’s cold-numbed fingers cramped around the pistol tucked inside her coat pocket as she struggled toward the castle-like house up ahead. Thick mud sucked at her boots like knobby fingers trying to rip them from her feet. Freezing rain slashed her face and hands, seeking out every exposed piece of flesh as if to punish her for what she was doing.
If she’d been looking for a celestial sign about her self-appointed quest, this morning’s winter storm was glowing neon orange with bright yellow flashers, warning her to turn back. But retreating to the relative safety of her battered ancient Blazer wasn’t an option. It was parked on the shoulder a quarter mile down the road so that anyone driving by wouldn’t associate it with this property. She didn’t have the strength to make it all the way back to her SUV. She’d end up an icicle in the mud. The lure of the relative shelter of the covered stone porch thirty yards ahead was the only thing that kept her going.
And wasn’t that insane—to think of a killer’s home as a place of refuge?
Lightning cracked across the sky, whitewashing the hulking two-story structure and its twin turrets. The snowcapped Smoky Mountains of Tennessee framed it like a picture. It really was beautiful, if one preferred a castle over the traditional log cabins that dotted the mountains above Gatlinburg. If she hadn’t known who lived here, she would have admired the juxtaposition of ancient and modern, the acres of rolling hills surrounded by miles of uneven, stacked-stone fences that were designed more for rustic beauty than to keep a determined intruder from climbing over them as she had.
She might even fantasize that it was the castle of her childhood dreams, that she was a fairy princess and that a handsome chivalrous knight waited inside to rescue her—at least until he realized she was perfectly capable of rescuing herself. Hayley Nash was no damsel in distress. And Dalton Lynch would never be a chivalrous knight on a white steed. He was the villain of her story, and she was the badass heroine who was going to put him away for a very long time.
If she survived this vicious storm.
She kept slogging forward, but each step was a struggle. The only good thing was that this bone-chilling deluge had forced Lynch to lock his normally free-roaming pack of dogs in the barn—or was it an armory in castle terminology?—before he’d driven farther up the mountain to go to work.
In the months since she’d begun her surveillance of him, he’d predictably gone from home to work with only the occasional trip into town. But the dogs, which seemed more like wolves on steroids than simple canines, were always running around his property, until today. This weather was a gift, a rare chance to breach his personal domain and search for evidence without being mauled. Coming here was still a huge risk. But it was one that she was willing to take.
Because of her best friend since high school, Bethany Miller.
Proving that Lynch had murdered her was far more difficult than she’d imagined when she’d taken leave from her corporate job as a computer programmer. Even temporarily moving from nearby Pigeon Forge to Gatlinburg so she could focus on her friend’s case didn’t seem to have helped all that much. The police had grown weary of her pleas and refused to discuss Lynch anymore. Maybe because he’d been a police officer in Bozeman, Montana, before divorcing and relocating to Tennessee. That whole brother-in-arms, crossing the thin blue line sort of thing.
She’d initially thought they wouldn’t protect him. After all, he’d had some kind of dustup at his job and had been forced to resign from law enforcement. But even knowing that Bethany was a freelance investigative journalist didn’t seem to make them wonder whether Lynch had killed her to stop whatever story she was working on.
Without any family to press for justice for Bethany, Hayley felt she had no choice but to start her own investigation. To drum up local interest, she’d created a website and posted blogs about the case.
She’d expected immediate outrage from the citizens of Gatlinburg once they read her posts. After all, Bethany was a local, and her bullet-riddled body had been found here, on Lynch’s property. And there was plenty of circumstantial evidence pointing to him as the killer. But the reception had been mixed. There were even a handful of cyberspace crazies who’d treated her words like a manifesto, ready to go vigilante after Lynch.
It had galled her to publish a post defending him in an effort to calm them down. But it was the right thing to do. She’d turned over the metadata from her site to the police so they could investigate the worst of the threats. Then she’d erased the rants from her page and turned off the comment feature altogether. But she still posted at least once a week, trying to keep Bethany’s case from being forgotten. She’d just toned down her rhetoric.
Another burst of frigid rain shook her from her thoughts and pushed her faster, desperate for shelter. When she finally stepped onto the fieldstone walkway, she drew a ragged breath. Soon she’d be inside, hopefully gathering a mother lode of evidence that the police couldn’t ignore.
If he stuck to his routine, he wouldn’t be home until dinner time. That was hours from now, but she wasn’t taking unnecessary chances. She’d spend no more than one hour inside.
Struggling against water-logged jeans tugging against her legs, she climbed the steps to his porch. She drew a few more deep breaths, then peered into the front windows. Since she’d seen Lynch leave for work earlier, no one should be inside. But she wanted to double-check.
The room that she was looking into was the main living area. Stairs hugged the right wall, a kitchen was to the left, and there was an opening to a hallway in the back wall. But other than her own bedraggled reflection in the glass, she didn’t see anyone, certainly not Lynch.
She tried to imagine his appearance after trudging through an acre of mud and freezing rain as she’d just done. No doubt he’d look fantastic under any circumstances. That was one of the reasons it was so hard to convince anyone that he was a killer. The man was gorgeous.
The black trench coat he typically wore and that black Stetson that she’d never seen him without would have looked ridiculous on anyone else in this part of the country where baseball caps were the norm. But on him they looked really, really good. Even though, to Hayley’s way of thinking, the black coat and hat marked him as the bad guy, like in those old Spaghetti Westerns.
He’d been wearing that coat, that hat, this morning as he’d climbed up into his truck. The coat had stretched across his broad shoulders, flipping back in the wind to reveal his long legs. Other women turned into ogling fools when they caught sight of his muscular body, his chiseled features. And Hayley admitted, only to herself, that his carefully groomed stubble and barely-there mustache sometimes made her fingers itch to trace them. Which only went to prove what was obvious to her, and what everyone else missed.
Dalton Lynch was dangerous.
He was the quintessential fallen angel; his physical beauty and easy, sexy smile were the perfect weapons that disarmed those around him. At least, everyone except Hayley. She was immune to his charm. And she was going to bring him down.
She took a quick look around. The rain had eased considerably. The wind was no longer howling. It was as if the storm’s sole purpose had been to hinder her efforts. Now that she’d reached the house, the angry weather system was moving on to harass someone else farther down the mountain.
Stupid, fickle storm.
The chances that Lynch might decide to go home for lunch, maybe to check his property for wind damage, had just gone up exponentially.
Plan A, taking an hour to search this place, was no longer viable. Plan B was to search for thirty minutes, at the most. Even that was pushing her luck since his work was about fifteen minutes away. But she’d come too far, worked too hard, to leave without at least trying to find something incriminating. She was going to pray that if he did decide to leave work, he’d be delayed a few minutes before he could head home. She needed every one of those thirty minutes.
She took out the picklock set that she’d bought from one of the spy shops in Pigeon Forge. Intended as a novelty store for tourists, they had a limited inventory of equipment that could actually be used for surveillance. And without being an experienced investigator, she wasn’t sure what was worth getting. Grabbing the picklock set had been an impulse decision at the register. Now she was grateful she had it.
Tutorial videos on the internet and weeks of practicing on the locks at the cabin that she’d been renting for several months had her feeling confident that she could handle any lock Lynch might have.
A frustrating few minutes later, she realized she shouldn’t have been so confident. The dead bolt had proven impervious to her novice attempts.
She checked her phone. Twenty-five minutes left. Now what?
She eyed the front window. Could she get into the house that way? It was a lattice of small glass squares that she couldn’t climb through even if she broke every one of them. The spring locks visible behind the glass would have to both be pulled back at opposite ends of the window, at the same time, in order to lift it. Lynch, no doubt, could do it. But she wasn’t a runway model and had the short arms and legs to prove it. There was no way she was getting this window open.
But there was more than one way into a castle.
After trudging through the mud again to the back of the house, she tried her luck with the kitchen door. The picklock made short work of the doorknob lock. But this door had a deadbolt too. And it proved just as ornery as the other one. It refused to budge.
There was another way to get the door open, though. Like the front window, this door had little glass panes. All she had to do was break one of them and reach in to flip the lock.
Guilt had her hesitating. It wasn’t like she’d ever broken into someone’s house before, or purposely damaged their property. Bethany. Do it for Bethany. Quickly, before her guilt could wear her down, she raised the butt of her pistol, then slammed it against one of the panes.
The glass shattered, raining shards all over the hard wood floor. After carefully flipping the dead bolt, she rushed inside. Thunder rumbled in the distance, as if in warning. She checked her phone.
Twenty minutes.
Adrenaline gave her tired limbs renewed strength to race through the kitchen. She ran past the built-ins in the living room and zipped down the back hall. Even though Lynch lived alone, she’d watched him through her binoculars enough to know that he sometimes had friends or coworkers over. If he had anything incriminating, it would be hidden in a private office, or a bedroom, not left in a kitchen drawer or on his coffee table for others to see.
The back hall led to a half bath and a laundry room. No office, at least not downstairs. She sprinted to the staircase, belatedly realizing she was leaving a muddy trail through his otherwise pristine home. Another flash of guilt shot through her, but she ruthlessly tamped it down.
She ran up the stairs as fast as she could go. At the top, she checked her phone again.
Seventeen minutes.
Good grief. How was she supposed to search this big place that quickly? The turrets alone would take a while, once she figured out where their entrances were. She shoved her phone into her pocket and yanked out her gun, just in case her calculations—or wishful thinking—were off and he came in unexpectedly.
First door, top of stairs. A bedroom with an attached bath. Not the office, not the master. She checked the next few doors. Closet, bedroom, closet. Another bath was at the far end. Then she tried the last door.
The master bedroom.
A quick glance told her there was a closet and bathroom off to the right. Both doors were open but she didn’t bother to check inside. She didn’t need to. She’d found what she was looking for. The entire left wall of the bedroom was a home office. A large black desk was flanked by two enormous bookshelves and a row of cabinets mounted above it. The desk had three drawers on each side, and stacks of papers on top.
Jackpot.
This was where he did his work at home, whatever work he did. That was one of the mysteries she’d yet to figure out, exactly what he did for a living. All she knew was that he drove up the mountain to an enormous cabin every day, parked in the paved parking lot out front that often had close to a dozen vehicles, then came home every evening. Perhaps today she’d get the answer to where his money came from and what a disgraced former cop actually did to earn a paycheck.
She raced to the desk and plopped down on the rolling chair. Her mental clock told her she was almost out of time, so she didn’t waste the few precious seconds it would take to check her phone. Instead, she discarded the pistol on top of one of the piles of papers. Then she yanked open the nearest drawer, and froze.
Behind her there’d been a solid thump, as if something heavy had echoed against the floor. A killer’s shoe?
She glanced longingly at the pistol. Why had she set it so far away?
Why wasn’t Lynch yelling at her?
Click, tap, click.
Very slowly, she looked over her shoulder. It wasn’t Lynch who was staring at her. An enormous grayish-white wolf-dog stood ten feet away.
Growling, it took a menacing step toward her, its long claws scraping against the floor. Click, tap, click. A low growl rumbled in its throat. Ice-blue eyes watched her as it lifted its snout, testing the air.
She inched her hands toward the pistol. “G-good dog. It’s okay. Good dog.”
The growls grew louder. Hackles raised. Muscles bunched.
Hayley lunged for her gun.
The dog launched itself at her like a missile.
