Casing the Copycat
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Nicole Helm
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HarlequinChapter One
Quinn Peterson was no stranger to injury. Growing up the way she had—raised in off-the-grid compounds run by what could only be termed “sociopathic, murderous psychopaths”—she’d been beaten, bruised, stabbed, twice, and shot, once, though just a flesh wound in the arm.
Her current gunshot wound had been in the upper thigh, and though a few weeks had passed since the night she’d stepped in front of a gunman to save her sister’s life, it still hurt like hell.
She hated it.
Everyone kept telling her she was lucky. The bullet had missed her femur and wasn’t that a miracle?
It hadn’t felt like one—then or now.
She hated physical therapy almost as much as she hated an eleven-year-old teaching her how to read—because she was almost thirty years old and she’d never had an opportunity to learn.
Somehow, Sarabeth—her wily little niece—had figured out Quinn’s embarrassing secret, and instead of blabbing to everyone, she’d set out to teach Quinn on the down low.
God, Quinn loved that little girl. She even loved her sister, who she’d only just really gotten to know these past few weeks. She’d never admit it, but this was the family she’d been searching for her entire life.
She didn’t belong in it of course. Not really. She should be dead or in jail like all the men who’d “raised” her, but she’d taken a bullet for Jessie. Based on how everyone around the ranch acted, that meant she’d earned a get-into-the-family-free card.
Quinn Peterson had never been stupid enough to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Except maybe the one standing before her in the shape of a tall, built ex-soldier who had a blank expression on his objectively beautiful face.
Dunne Thompson always had a blank expression.
The problem with Dunne, former combat medic and current rancher, was that nothing riled him. Literally nothing. When she’d spent a lifetime learning how to rile everyone around her so they didn’t get too close.
Dunne never reacted—not to her jokes, her barbs, her insults, her outrageous innuendo. He kept that blank-faced calm in every situation.
It made her bound and determined to find a crack in that very impressive, and handsome, armor.
“Am I going to have a limp forever, like you?” she asked, resolutely not doing the exercise he’d just instructed her to do in his little torture chamber of a room. The room in the back of the Thompson ranch house was big and had likely once acted as some kind of parlor, but had recently been adapted into Dunne’s bedroom.
Which also served as his medical facility. She supposed you could take the combat medic out of combat, but the medic part of him still survived.
“If you don’t do your physical therapy,” Dunne said, not at all affected by her quip about his limp.
One of these days... One of these days, she was going to find that Achilles’ heel. But for right now, she had to find a way out of the exercise, which hurt and made her feel weak and stupid.
She hated looking weak in front of anyone, but Dunne always somehow made it into a kind of contest. He, of course, had suffered a femur break, so he didn’t appreciate her whining. He’d had to be airlifted out of a war zone. She’d only ridden in an ambulance to a nice hospital.
“Lift your leg, Quinn.”
“I don’t get it. I’m shot. I should be resting. Healing. Doesn’t everyone say rest is part of healing?”
“Only people who don’t know what they’re talking about. I was running a mile this long after my injury, and mine was far worse.”
“You know, I find this whole manly pissing match over the size of our war wounds fun and all, but you always win.”
“That I do. Lift your leg.”
She groaned, poked at him a few times, but eventually lifted her damn leg. She’d never met a thicker, harder-headed brick wall than Dunne.
It was infuriating.
When they were done, he didn’t give her a “good job.” Didn’t say much of anything except that he expected her back for their evening session after dinner.
She had a million obnoxious retorts to that, but the less he reacted, the less she used them.
When she figured out how to get past his icy veneer, it was going to be good.
So she left him in his stupid little room and tried to think of ways to really get under his skin while she hunted Sarabeth down for their next reading lesson.
She needed to find something out about him. Something personal. Something he wouldn’t expect her to know.
Usually Sarabeth was back from the stables by now, but the girl did love those animals, so Quinn decided to go sit on the side porch off the kitchen and wait for Sarabeth to appear.
Wyoming was starting to ease its way into summer, and this little corner of it—the Thompson Ranch—was pretty as a picture, with the small cabin across the yard and the mountains in the distance, beyond all the pasture dotted with cows. The only thing that marred the visual was the stables, which were being rebuilt after suffering severe fire damage a few weeks back.
Quinn rubbed at her leg where the bullet had gone. She considered it something like a penance. She’d done plenty of bad in her life. But she’d saved Jessie’s life, and for that, she could be proud.
She blew out a breath. Proud. A bit of a stretch.
Bitterness wanted to spread, but she refused to let it. She turned to head back inside. She’d let Sarabeth find her. She’d go do something productive. Something...
Quinn stopped at the screen door. She heard lowered voices and it was something like a habit to eavesdrop. Men huddling together whispering? A smart woman stopped, hid and listened so she didn’t end up dead in a ditch somewhere.
Quinn stood where she was hidden enough by the screen door so they wouldn’t see her, but she could hear everything.
Henry moved into her sight line first, opening the door down to the basement. As far as Quinn knew, there wasn’t much down there. It wasn’t finished. It was just storage.
But Dunne came into view, his normal stoic expression just a little...different. Tighter, somehow. She watched him with great interest as he nodded at Henry and then took the first, careful step down the stairs.
Dunne tended to avoid stairs if he could. They were hard on his leg. So what were the Thompson brothers doing sneaking around somewhere one of them didn’t like to go?
Quinn stayed where she was, still hidden, watching the now closed basement door. Maybe when they came back up—
“Oh, there you are.”
Quinn nearly jumped a foot, which caused a searing pain to shoot through her leg. She looked over her shoulder at Sarabeth, who was cradling a little black kitten at the bottom of the side porch stairs.
“My chores are done. Want to do your next lesson?” Sarabeth asked, clearly unaware she’d startled Quinn.
“Shh. It’s supposed to be a secret, remember?”
Sarabeth bit her lip and wrinkled her nose. “About that...”
Jessie swept into the kitchen from the living room, a stack of books in her arms. “Come and sit at the table,” she instructed, waving Quinn and Sarabeth inside as she put the books down. “I didn’t keep a lot of Sarabeth’s old books since we moved around a bunch, but Hazeleigh said there were some things in the attic. These should work.”
Quinn glared at Sarabeth even as she held the door open for her. “You told?”
“I didn’t mean to.” Sarabeth slipped past her and into the kitchen.
“Uh-uh,” Jessie said, waving her finger at Sarabeth and the cat. “Henrietta is not allowed in the kitchen, and you know that, young lady.”
Sarabeth pouted, but she walked through the kitchen, speaking in low tones to the cat as she likely went to secret the cat away in her room.
Quinn stayed where she was on the porch, though she still held the door open. Too many complex emotions were worming around in her stomach. She hated that Jessie knew she couldn’t read.
Jessie’d had it rough too, but she’d had a somewhat normal childhood for a little bit, living with their grandmother rather than at their father’s compound. At least until she’d been a teenager.
Jessie smiled at her through the screen. “She tried to lie. Really, she did.”
Quinn grunted and stepped inside. The more she acted like it was a big deal, the more Jessie would make her feel like an embarrassed idiot. Better to pretend it didn’t matter.
She flopped into the chair but then looked around the kitchen, which was so often the center for everything. A million people coming and going because the Thompsons had a little compound of their own among the six of them plus four of those six shacking up with someone. One of those someones coming with an eleven-year-old daughter.
No one seemed to mind the tight quarters. Everyone seemed to enjoy it.
And likely, someone would come waltzing in and wonder why the hell she was looking at kids’ books.
“I don’t want anyone knowing about this,” she muttered, slumping in her chair.
“No one would—” Quinn made a move to get up because she didn’t want placating baloney, but Jessie grabbed her hand. “Okay, no one else will know. I promise. I’ll go put the books away and we’ll work on it after dinner. In your room.”
“You’re going to tell Henry.” Because Quinn might not know how love worked, but she knew Jessie wasn’t going to lie to the man she loved.
“I’ll be vague.” She smiled reassuringly. “I’ll just say I’m helping you with catching up on some things.”
Quinn knew it was only because she’d taken the bullet meant for Jessie that Jessie was so nice to her. It was the only reason anyone was nice to her. But Jessie sometimes made her wish that it could be...more. Like a real sister thing instead of just guilt or gratitude.
Sarabeth clamored back into the kitchen. She frowned at Jessie and Quinn’s clasped hands.
“When can I get a sister?” Sarabeth asked gustily.
Jessie nearly choked.
Quinn grinned, glad to have the attention off herself. She looked at Jessie. “Yeah, all this shacking up together. Shouldn’t there be a ring and a baby on the way?”
“Thanks a lot,” Jessie muttered under her breath.
Quinn chuckled, but since Jessie was being nice, Quinn figured she could be too. She changed the subject from sisters and rings before Sarabeth grabbed on to the topic too tightly “What do the guys do downstairs?”
“Downstairs?” Jessie returned. She seemed surprised, but if Quinn had to guess, it wasn’t about them being downstairs, but about Quinn knowing they were downstairs.
“Yeah, in that creepy old basement. They’re down there right now.”
“Who is?”
“Dunne and Henry.”
“Hmm. Well.” Jessie glanced up as the screen door screeched open. “Oh no, Zara. What happened?”
Zara Hart—ranch hand to the Thompson brothers and engaged to one of them—came in, holding a dirty rag to her arm. The rag was covered in dirt, grease and blood. “A fight with barbed wire. The barbed wire won.”
Jessie moved to help clean Zara up and Quinn had no doubt the conversation about the basement was deemed over.
But that only made Quinn determined to get to the bottom of it.
DUNNE THOMPSON LOOKED at the makeshift mission board he’d put together with facts and information he’d been gathering for years. He’d meant to always keep it to himself. A morbid kind of fascination in what he’d come from.
But the past few months, things had changed, because while his grandfather was dead, someone out there was killing people just like his grandfather had done back in the 1950s and ’60s.
It didn’t have anything to do with Dunne. So his grandfather had been a serial killer? Shit happened. But somehow this copycat killer...got under his skin. Made him feel like he had to do something to stop it.
So, he’d brought in Cal. Then Henry. And now all five of his military brothers knew about the copycat Eye Socket Killer—known for taking the eyeballs of his victims.
Dunne knew it wasn’t his responsibility per se, but it haunted him. He wanted to find a way to put an end to it. Whether it was finding something he could send off to the police investigating or whether it was handling it himself.
“The case is getting more high-profile now,” Henry said, sounding grim. “News outlets are starting to surmise he’s out to kill someone in every state.”
“There’s only been seven,” Jake pointed out, frowning at one of Dunne’s many binders of news coverage over the first wave of Eye Socket murders. “They really think there’s forty-plus more to go?”
“Or there’s a handful they haven’t found yet,” Dunne said flatly.
“I know we’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. This isn’t your responsibility, Dunne.”
Dunne didn’t look at Cal. They had all said it to him at one point or another, and Dunne knew they were right. But knowing and feelings were two very different things. “It’s not a responsibility. It’s more...” An ingrained need. “It’s something to do, anyway.”
“Not exactly the lying low we’re supposed to be doing,” Cal continued, but it wasn’t with the same irritable disgust he’d had in their first few months here.
Dunne had never pictured himself as a rancher in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming. A military brat didn’t know what to do with a town with roots so tangled and deep you couldn’t walk down the street without tripping over them.
Of course, he’d never pictured himself fighting terrorists and taking down entire organizations, or having to die—on paper—and become someone else.
Well, truth be told, ever since he’d found out about his grandfather in the ninth grade, he’d definitely dreamed about being someone else.
Now he got to be, so why was he obsessing over this? Like Cal said, it wasn’t his responsibility.
“I’ll look into what the police have and the media don’t on this new one,” Landon offered since he was an expert with computers and hacking into systems without being traced.
“Thanks.”
They went over the new details and added them to the board, then his brothers started making their excuses. Henry had promised to take Sarabeth on a ride. Jake had promised to go check the north fences with Zara. Hazeleigh was making Landon lunch, and Brody made some lame excuse about barn chores, which sounded to Dunne a lot like a reason to sneak off to spend time with Kate—though they shared a room and a life so Dunne didn’t see why he’d need to.
Cal was the only one who stayed down with him, because Cal was the only one who didn’t have anything pressing to do that involved other people.
“Think we’re going to hold out?” Dunne asked, desperate to think about anything unrelated to murder.
“Hold out what?”
“The whole love bug. I wasn’t worried until Henry fell. Next thing you know, you’ll have a wife, two kids and a dog.”
Cal didn’t snort derisively like Dunne had expected him to, but he did scowl. “We’ll hold out just fine.” He slid Dunne a look. “And maybe even stop a serial killer while we do.”
Dunne managed a smile.
What else was there to do?
