Cowboy of Interest
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Carla Cassidy
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HarlequinChapter 1
Nick Coleman needed to get drunk. Not buzzed, not loopy, but brain-dead, blackout drunk. It was the only respite he might find from the vision burned into his head of seeing Wendy Bailey’s dead body stuffed under the floorboards of an old shed on the ranch where Nick worked.
He’d been responsible in his plan to drink himself into oblivion. He’d contacted his good friend Chad Bene from a neighboring ranch to pick him up, bring him here to the Watering Hole and then make sure Nick got back to his bunkhouse on the Holiday Ranch safe and sound.
Chad nursed a soda while Nick motioned to the waitress for a second beer. “You know, getting stupid drunk isn’t going to change things, except that tomorrow you’re going to wake up and feel as though you’ve wrestled with the biggest, meanest bull in the entire county,” Chad observed.
“But at least maybe tonight I’ll sleep without nightmares,” Nick replied. It had been three days since Wendy’s body had been found, along with six older skeletal remains. It had been three long nights of sleep haunted by the visions of the vivacious black-haired, blue-eyed twenty-three-year-old who had blown into town two months before and instantly attached herself to Nick like an affectionate little sister.
And now she was gone...dead. According to the coroner, she had been stabbed twice in the chest. She had been murdered. If that wasn’t horrific enough, Nick knew he was the prime suspect in her murder.
Janis Little, the waitress serving their small two-top table, brought Nick a fresh cold bottle of beer and gave him a quick, sympathetic pat on his shoulder before going back behind the bar to serve other awaiting customers.
At least Janis apparently didn’t see him as a murderer, he thought, but that didn’t take away any of the heartache and horror he’d lived with for the past couple of days. He couldn’t believe that Wendy was dead. She’d had a light too bright to be snuffed out. He couldn’t believe that anyone would have wanted to take her life.
“Dillon has the whole ranch basically shut down as a crime scene area,” Nick said. He opened the beer, took a deep swallow and then continued. “He’s actively working Wendy’s case but has called in a forensic anthropologist from Oklahoma City to help with the investigation into the seven skeletal remains. She’s supposed to arrive sometime next week.”
Chad shook his head. “I still can’t believe all those bodies were hidden under the shed. If they’re just skeletons, then their murders had to have happened some time ago. I wonder if Cass knew anything about them.”
“We’ll never know, since Cass is dead.” Nick took another drink, and for a few minutes the only sound was the raucous noise of the popular bar on a Friday night.
Thinking about Wendy was almost as painful as thinking about Cass Holiday. Nick had been a sixteen-year-old runaway when he’d been brought by a social worker to Cass Holiday’s sprawling ranch to work.
Over the past fourteen years, Cass had been his surrogate mother, his mentor and the best thing that had ever happened to him. Then, a little over two months ago, she’d been killed in a tornado that had ravaged the Oklahoma countryside.
She’d been hit in the head by a tree branch. Her body had been found between her big ranch house and the bunkhouse where her cowboys lived. They all believed she’d been on her way to warn them about the approaching vicious weather when she’d been struck down.
For the dozen cowboys Cass had nurtured from troubled teens to good, responsible ranch hands and upstanding, confident men, nothing had been the same after she was gone.
“Why don’t we go shoot a game of pool?” Chad suggested and gestured toward the back room, where three pool tables were located. Two were in use, but one was vacant.
“You’re not going to distract me from my mission of drunkenness,” Nick replied wryly. “Besides, shooting pool has never been my thing.”
“It’s a stupid mission, Nick,” Chad replied. “If you want a mission, then you should be spending your time helping to find out who killed Wendy.”
Nick frowned. “I’m not on the police force. I’m a person of interest in the case.”
“There’s no way I think that Dillon really believes you had anything to do with Wendy’s murder,” Chad protested. “He hasn’t even brought you in for questioning yet.”
“Yet being the key word in that sentence. He will. I’m sure I’m at the top of his list. The problem is Wendy and I spent a lot of time together, and as far as anyone can tell, I was probably the last person who saw her alive.”
Nick took another drink of his beer and wished he’d never met Wendy Bailey. If he hadn’t have met her then he wouldn’t be hurting over her loss right now.
“She was missing for almost a month,” Chad continued. “From what I’ve heard, they haven’t even been able to pinpoint the exact time of death. Everyone thought she’d just left town. Her motel room was empty and her car was gone.”
“I thought she’d left town,” Nick agreed. “I was surprised and a little hurt that she hadn’t told me goodbye, but she was an impulsive free spirit who I figured just heard the call of a new adventure and went for it. When they found her she was wearing her café work T-shirt, so she was probably killed on Friday night after her shift and after she visited me at the ranch.”
“Obviously somebody went to a lot of trouble to make us all believe she’d just moved on. Her car and personal items have never been found.” Chad frowned as Nick downed the last of his second beer and motioned to Janis for another.
“Stop giving me dirty looks,” Nick said. “I’m only just now starting to get a little bit of a buzz.”
“You’ve always been a lightweight drinker, and the way you’re slamming back the beers, I figure within a half an hour or so there will be at least three of us pulling you out from under the table and carrying you to my truck. And just so we’re clear, if you throw up in my truck, I’m beating the hell out of you tomorrow when you get sober.”
Nick was surprised by the small burst of laughter that escaped his lips. “You and what army?” he replied. Chad was half a foot shorter than Nick’s six-two and weighed at least twenty-five pounds less.
Janis arrived with the third beer and the two men once again fell silent. Nick brooded, drank and listened to the ancient jukebox where somebody had paid a quarter to hear an old sad George Jones song.
Nick had no idea why Wendy Bailey had glommed on to him in the initial days of her arrival in Bitterroot. They’d met at the café, where she’d gotten a job as a waitress, and before Nick knew it, they were sharing a pizza or going to a movie together or just sitting under the stars and talking.
Nick had never had siblings and found his role of surrogate big brother to her a surprisingly pleasing one. He’d known if she’d grown more comfortable with some of the younger crowd in town she would have drifted away from him, and that would have been okay, but she’d never gotten the chance.
In the first week of Wendy’s disappearance, Daisy, the owner of the café, had printed up posters indicating that Wendy was missing. She was adamant that Wendy wouldn’t have just left town without telling Daisy she was going. Even after chief of police Dillon Bowie had checked out Wendy’s motel room and found it empty, Daisy had been hard-pressed to believe that the waitress had just up and left town with no notice to anyone.
Daisy had been proved right. Wendy hadn’t left town. She’d been murdered. Like Cass’s death, Wendy’s murder was a tragedy on a hundred different levels, and for Nick it was a personal loss in a stream of losses that had begun in his dysfunctional youth.
“So what did you tell Penny you were doing tonight?” he asked Chad in an effort to stop his mood from plunging to new depths, if that were even possible.
“I told her the truth, that a friend needed me tonight and I’d talk to her sometime tomorrow.”
“She’s a keeper. You going to marry her?”
Chad grinned. “If she’ll have me. I’ve already bought an engagement ring, but I haven’t given it to her yet. I’ve got to figure out some amazing way to officially propose. Penny won’t settle for anything except amazing.”
“Then, why is she with you?” Nick replied with a forced lightness.
“Ha-ha,” Chad replied. His gaze went over Nick’s shoulder at the same time an unfamiliar female voice spoke Nick’s name.
“Yes, I’m Nick Coleman,” Nick replied.
He half rose from his chair and turned to see a petite woman with long chestnut-colored hair and blue-green eyes.
Before he could say another word, her arm reared back and her small fist connected with his left eye, a perfect center smash that drove him back into his chair.
“What the hel—” he sputtered.
She swung at him again, her eyes swimming with tears as her arms windmilled in an attempt to connect with him.
He jumped up out of his chair, vaguely aware that everyone in the crowded tavern had frozen, their attention on Nick and his pint-size attacker.
Nick had never seen the woman before. He had no idea what her problem was, but there was no way he intended to just stand there and get pummeled in public. Especially by a woman. He already felt the pressure of his eye swelling from the sucker punch she’d managed to land.
He grabbed her and trapped her arms at her sides, but she immediately started to use her feet as weapons. She kicked and thrust her knee upward in an attempt to make dangerous bodily contact with him.
Nick would never hit a woman, but he definitely needed to take control of the situation. He heard the low rumble of male laughter coming from the crowd, laughter that assured Nick he’d be fodder for the gossip mill the next day.
With Wendy’s murder, there was already enough gossip swirling around town with his name all over it. Nick drew a deep breath, dodged another knee to his groin, then finally managed to pick her up and throw her over his shoulder like a sack of squirming potatoes.
She smelled like lilacs and vanilla, he thought, even as she kicked and screamed and beat her fists on his back. He carried her through the bar and out the front door. He put her down on the sidewalk and then stepped back a safe distance from her.
“Lady, what in the hell is your problem?” he demanded.
For a long moment, she looked stunned, and tears streamed down her face. “It was you,” she finally said. “It was you who murdered my sister.”
It was only then that Nick realized the small firecracker standing before him, the pretty woman who had hit him hard enough to swell his eye almost shut, was Adrienne Bailey, Wendy’s older sister.
* * *
Adrienne stared up at the tall cowboy with his darkening eye and was appalled by her own actions. She’d never hit another person in her entire life. She’d just wanted to get a look at the man she believed had killed her sister, but the moment he’d turned to face her she’d completely lost her mind.
Anger and grief had taken control of her senses, and she’d reacted with raw, unbridled emotion, something she’d never done before in all of her thirty years.
Although still driven by rage and sorrow, a deep embarrassment now swept over her. She backed away from him and quickly swiped the tears from her eyes.
“I didn’t mean to... I’m sorry...” Those were the only words she got out before she turned and ran down the sidewalk.
“Adrienne, wait!” he called after her. “I didn’t kill Wendy. Do you hear me? I cared about her and had nothing to do with her death.”
Liar.
The derogatory name rang in her head as she headed for her car in the distance, cursing the heels that kept her from running all out. Tears started falling once again, but this time she didn’t bother trying to swipe them away, even as they trekked down her cheeks and blurred her vision.
Liar!
She glanced behind her only once to make sure he wasn’t following her. Seeing that the sidewalk behind her was empty, she slowed her pace, gulping in deep breaths in an effort to gain control of herself, but it didn’t work.
When she reached her car, she threw herself into the driver’s seat and locked the doors, then lowered her head to the steering wheel and allowed herself to cry until she couldn’t cry any longer.
When chief of police Dillon Bowie had contacted her the day before to tell her about Wendy’s death and that a positive identification had been made by Wendy’s boss at the café where she’d been working, Adrienne had gone through the first two stages of grief in the matter of an hour.
She started her car and pulled out of the parking space and headed for the Bitterroot Motel, where she’d checked in just an hour or so before. Wendy had been living at the motel at the time of her disappearance. Adrienne’s unit was two doors down from the one that now sported crime scene tape across the front.
Her initial reaction to Chief Bowie’s phone call had been immediate denial. Wendy couldn’t be dead. Murder happened to other people, but not to Wendy. She was too full of energy, too filled with the joy of life to be dead.
But she’d known that Wendy had been in Bitterroot, Oklahoma, and it had also been a month since she’d heard from her little sister.
Denial had transformed into a grief so all-consuming that she’d barely been able to think or do what needed to get done to leave her home and travel to the small town. It had been only this morning that she’d finally managed to pack up her car and make the drive from her home in Kansas City to Bitterroot.
She’d arrived much later than she had expected. By the time she had checked into her motel room and unloaded her things from the car, her grief had been overwhelmed with growing rage, a rage focused on the man she believed responsible for Wendy’s murder—Nick Coleman.
She pulled up in front of her motel unit and parked her car. She wiped at her eyes and grabbed her purse off the seat. As she walked to her door, she consciously kept her gaze away from the unit two doors down.
The sight of the crime scene tape would only make her cry again, and she’d rather feed her outrageous anger than her crippling grief.
Wendy hadn’t even been buried yet and Nick Coleman was in a bar having drinks with a friend. How cold could he be? How calculating? But, of course, wasn’t that what murderers did? They killed and destroyed lives and then went right back to their normal life as if nothing had happened.
That was how killers were able to hide in plain sight, but Nick Coleman couldn’t hide from her. She knew where he worked and where he lived, and she didn’t intend to leave this town until he was arrested for Wendy’s murder.
Every conversation, each text she’d received from Wendy had contained some little tidbit of information about Nick. It was obvious to Adrienne that the two were close.
Exhausted by the long drive and her overwhelming emotions, she changed out of her clothes and into her cotton, sleeveless nightgown. The motel unit came complete with a kitchenette, a small table and chairs, a television and a love seat. The bathroom was small, the bed was a double, and while everything looked worn and out-of-date, the unit also appeared to be spotlessly clean.
She shut off the light and got into the bed, the springs squeaking slightly beneath her. The only light in the room came from a slit between the curtains at the front windows, allowing in the faint neon red and yellow flashes from the motel sign advertising clean efficiency units.
Rolling over on her side, she squeezed her eyes tightly shut, afraid to sleep and suffer nightmares of Wendy, yet afraid to stay awake and wallow in thoughts of her sister.
Wild and wonderful Wendy. Impulsive and fearless Wendy. Who would have wanted to murder her other than the man she’d talked about in every phone call, in every text?
She must have fallen asleep, for when she opened her eyes again the light seeping into the room through the slight part in the curtains was sunshine.
She immediately jumped out of bed and got into the shower and then dressed in a pair of blue capris and a sleeveless white-and-blue patterned blouse.
She was disappointed when she got to the police station at one end of Main Street only to be told that Chief Dillon Bowie was out on a call and wasn’t expected back until afternoon. She left a message for Dillon that she was staying at the motel, and she left her cell phone number so he could call her as soon as he was available.
From the police station she went to the grocery store and filled her basket with everything she would need to make meals for at least a week. Surely it wouldn’t take any longer than that to get Nick Coleman behind bars.
She could scarcely believe how she’d reacted the night before at the sight of Nick Coleman.
Adrienne Bailey, control freak and always responsible, a stickler for rules and political correctness, had momentarily gone stark raving mad.
She didn’t intend to lose control again, but she had to admit that hitting and kicking Nick Coleman had been more than a little bit cathartic.
And she wasn’t done with him yet. Although she planned no further physical attacks on the man, she did intend to haunt him, to shadow his every move until, hopefully, he finally broke down and confessed to what he’d done.
She knew the who, but she needed to know the why. Wendy had been the kind of young woman who never met a stranger, who was curious and friendly about everyone she came into contact with. She’d been adventurous and high spirited, traits that often had the two sisters butting heads, but not traits that got a woman murdered.
Adrienne drank a quick cup of hot tea and then left the motel, this time headed in the direction of the Holiday Ranch. She had no intention of personally engaging Nick again, but she wanted him to know that she was watching him, waiting for him to make a mistake that would ensure him a future behind bars.
She made only one stop at the motel manager’s office, where a young man with oversize black-framed glasses and a name tag that read Lawrence gave her directions to the Holiday Ranch.
Early July in Oklahoma wasn’t so much different from in Kansas City. The cool of spring was gone, but the heat and humidity of late summer had yet to fully arrive.
She had no idea what to expect from Chief Bowie. While he’d been kind on the phone when he’d made the notification to her, she didn’t know how close-knit Bitterroot might be and if the chief of police would be willing to protect one of his own townspeople against a murder charge.
After all, Wendy had been an outsider who had no ties to the community. How hard would the chief of police work to solve her murder?
If she thought he was shirking his duty, she’d climb up the food chain until she found somebody to do the job right. In the meantime, she planned on being a tick on Nick Coleman’s rotten hide.
She slowed as she passed the entrance to what appeared to be a fairly large spread. The wooden entry declared it to be the Humes Ranch.
She drove on, nerves suddenly tingling inside her skin as she thought of seeing Nick Coleman again.
Slowing once again as she saw the entrance to another ranch ahead, she realized she’d made a conscious decision to become a stalker. Wendy’s murder had definitely turned her into a woman she scarcely recognized.
She pulled the car to a stop in front of the entrance with the black wrought iron entry that read Holiday Ranch. This was where Nick Coleman worked. This was where he lived. Her stomach twisted with nervous energy.
From her vantage point, she saw a large two-story house and in the far distance lots of outbuildings and men on horseback, but she was too far away for any of the ranch hands to pay attention to a silver sedan parked along the side of the road.
Knowing she was trespassing, she turned into the long driveway and followed the concrete drive and stopped just past the house. She turned off her engine and rolled down her window the rest of the way. She wouldn’t move unless somebody asked her to.
Now she could see a bright blue canopy tent in the distance and knew it probably covered the crime scene—the place where Wendy’s body had been found, along with six other potential victims.
Chief Bowie had told her that Wendy had been found there, but the skeletal remains of six other human beings had been there, as well. She wanted Wendy’s murderer in jail, but wondered what had happened to those other poor souls.
She’d been there only about ten minutes when a cowboy wearing a dusty brown hat walked up to the driver side of her car. “Cassie and Nicolette aren’t home right now. Is there something I can help you with?” he asked.
Adrienne had no idea who Cassie and Nicolette were, and in any case, they weren’t the reason she was here. “I’m just here to keep an eye on the man who murdered my sister.”
The cowboy’s sand-colored eyebrows pulled together in a frown. “There are no murderers here,” he said. “You’ve come to the wrong place.”
Of course he would say that, she thought. He was probably a good friend of Nick’s. “Are you asking me to leave?”
He shrugged broad shoulders. “It’s not my place to ask you to go. I don’t own the ranch.” He turned on the heels of his boots and headed away from the car.
Adrienne narrowed her eyes and tried to discern which of the men in the distance was Nick. She hadn’t really gotten a good look at him the night before. She’d just had a quick vision of blue eyes and slightly shaggy dark brown hair.
It was only when she saw the man who’d come to talk to her take off on horseback and approach another man on horseback that she assumed the second man was Nick Coleman.
The two spoke for a moment and then the second man began toward her. His hat was black, his shoulders broad and he rode a huge black horse that would have characterized him as a villain in any respectable Western.
She gripped her hands tightly together in her lap as he drew close enough that she could see the faint darkness of a black eye where she had hit him the night before.
Good.
She’d managed to mark him with her rage, with her grief.
He pulled his horse to a halt right outside her window, forcing her to lean out and look up at a handsome face with cold blue eyes and a mouth set in a grim line. He was an imposing figure.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Protecting all the other young, vulnerable women in town by keeping an eye on you,” she replied, pleased that her voice rang with steely determination.
“I did not kill your sister,” he said slowly and distinctly, as if speaking to a crazy person.
“I believe you did, and I’m here to make sure that you don’t get away with it.”
He sighed and pulled his hat off his head. His thick dark brown hair glistened in the sunshine, and he raked his hand through it as if she was a flake of dandruff he could easily dislodge with a sweep of his fingers.
“Look, I’m grieving over Wendy, too. I want her killer to be found, but I’m not him. Maybe instead of playing judge and jury, you and I need to sit down and talk and compare notes.”
He placed his hat back on his head. “If you’re looking for the truth in Wendy’s murder, then meet me at the café at noon and we can have a civilized conversation. If you’re looking for an innocent scapegoat, then you can follow me to the ends of the earth and we’ll never know who took Wendy’s life.”
A headache pounded at her temples as she considered his words. At least he’d offered to meet her in a public place where her personal safety would be ensured.
“Okay,” she finally said against her better judgment. “I’ll meet you at the café at noon.”
He nodded, flicked the reins and then took off galloping back to the pasture. She watched him go and realized she’d just agreed to meet a murderer for lunch.
