"Dark Paradise" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoag Tami)

CHAPTER 3

IT WAS a joke. Lighten up, will you?”

J.D. didn’t say a word as he climbed into the cab of the battered Ford pickup. He nursed the engine to life carefully. The old truck had 153,000 hard miles on it. It needed to go a few more. There was no extra cash for buying new pickups. What money didn’t get eaten up this year by Will’s gambling or by the astronomical property taxes they had to pay because of the influx of elitists to the Eden valley would be sunk right back into the operation.

Fortify and strengthen. A siege mentality. Well, by God, if they weren’t in a war, he didn’t know what else to call it.

And in this war, Miz Marilee Jennings stood squarely on the other side of the DMZ.

“She’s a friend of Lucy MacAdam’s,” he said tightly, pronouncing the name macadam, like the pavement. She had been that hard, that abrasive. Even in bed she had had sharp edges.

He backed the pickup away from the curb and headed north on Main, automatically glancing in the rearview mirror to check the feed sacks. Zip, their black and white border collie, stood with his front paws on a stack of plump bags and surveyed the passing scenery with a big grin on his face. Behind them a maroon Jaguar purred impatiently. J.D. eased off on the gas.

“So she’s a friend of Lucy’s,” Will snapped irritably. “So what?”

The sun cutting through the clouds pierced his eyeballs and rejuvenated the hangover he had fought off with mass quantities of caffeine and food. He pulled a pair of mirrored sunglasses out of his shirt pocket and slid them on.

“So she’s one of them.”

“Jesus. She came to visit a friend who turns out to be dead. Give her a break.”

“Why? Because she’s pretty? Because she’s a woman?” Disgust bent J.D.’s mouth into a sneer. “I swear, if it wears a bra, it can lead you around by your dick and you’ll just go grinning like a jackass eating sawbriars.”

“Oh, Christ, will you lay off?” Will exploded, the volume of his own voice setting hammers swinging inside his temples. He fought off the need to rub the ache, not wanting to exhibit any sign of physical weakness in front of J.D. “You know what your problem is?”

“I’m sure you’ll tell me.”

“You live like a goddamn monk. Maybe if you went out and got a little every once in a while you wouldn’t begrudge the rest of us.”

“I get as much as I want. I just don’t go around shooting my mouth off about it.”

Behind his shades, Will’s gaze sharpened. “Or maybe you want her for yourself? Is that it, J.D.?” He hooted, wincing at the needles the laughter stabbed into his brain. “That’s it! Ha! She doesn’t seem like your type. More like mine. ’Course, damn near every type is my type.”

J.D. leveled a deadly stare at him as they idled at the town’s one and only stoplight. “You’d do well to keep your eyes in your head and your pants zipped. You’re married, ace.”

The words were both accusation and reminder. Will wanted neither the censure nor the guilt that rose at the prodding. He knew damn well he was married. The knowledge was like a yoke around his neck. He may not have remembered the ceremony. Even the drive to Reno was hazy-it had been a hell of a party that had led up to the event. But he was very much aware he had come back with a wife. Nearly a year after the fact, the idea still scared the hell out of him. A wife. A commitment. He didn’t want it, couldn’t handle it, wasn’t ready. The excuses piled up at the back of his throat in a sour wad.

In a soft, unguarded corner of his heart he wondered fleetingly how Samantha was faring without him.

“Shit,” he snarled half under his breath.

He fell back against the seat, jerked an old University of Montana baseball cap off the gun rack behind him, and pulled it on, settling the brim just above the rims of his sunglasses. As if he were in disguise. As if he thought he could hide his character flaws from his brother with a costume. Will Rafferty incognito as Everyman. Christ, as if J.D. couldn’t see through that in two seconds. J.D. could see through bullshit the way Superman could see through steel. He wondered how long it would take before J.D. found out about the sixty-five hundred and the busted flush of last night’s poker game in Little Purgatory. He figured he had maybe a day and a half to live.

J.D. studied his brother from the corner of his eye as they headed out into the rolling green velvet countryside. Half brother, really, though he had never been one to use the term. The only child of Tom Rafferty’s second marriage, Will was J.D.’s junior by four years. Twenty-eight going on seventeen. The joker, the charmer, this generation’s wild Rafferty. He had a natural disdain for responsibility that rubbed hard against J.D.’s grain. But then, Will was his mother’s son, and J.D. had never thought much of Sondra either. She had pampered and indulged Will in exchange for the kind of unconditional love and blind forgiveness J.D. had never been willing to give her.

He had seen Sondra for what she was early on-a spoiled city girl who had fallen in love with the idea of loving a cowboy but had quickly fallen out of love with the realities of ranch life. She had taken out her unhappiness on her husband, punishing Tom Rafferty for her own failings and miseries, and punishing his eldest son for seeing past her pretty golden façade. Will had been too young to know the difference. J.D. had never been that young.

He shoved the memories away, succeeding in shutting out all but the lingering, bitter aftertaste. That he very easily transferred onto outsiders as the maroon Jag roared past, all shiny new chrome and dark-tinted windows hiding the rich interior and the richer occupants.

There had been Raffertys on the Stars and Bars for more than a century. That heritage was something J.D. had been born proud of and would fight to the death to preserve. As a rancher, he had several enemies-capricious weather, capricious markets, and the bone-headed government. But as far as he was concerned, no threat loomed larger than that of outsiders buying up Montana.

Their pockets were bottomless, their bank accounts filled by obscene salaries for work that seemed a parody of the word. They paid the moon for land they didn’t need to make a wage off and drove the property values out of sight, taking the taxes along and leaving production values in the dust. Half the ranches around New Eden had sold out because they couldn’t afford not to, sold out to people who wanted their own private paradise and didn’t care who they stepped on to get it. People who had no respect for tradition or the honest workingman. Outsiders.

Lucy MacAdam had been one of those outsiders, camped on the very edge of Rafferty land like a vulture. Marilee Jennings was too. She was trouble. He had made up his mind to dislike her.

She thought he was a jerk.

You don’t have to like me, Mary Lee.

Lucy had been of the opinion that emotions just got in the way of great sex, an attitude J.D. had been more than happy to share. He would bed Marilee Jennings if he got the chance, but damned if he would like her. She was the last thing he needed in his life. She was an outsider.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” Sheriff Dan Quinn tried to sound nonchalant, but he couldn’t quite keep from raising his eyebrows a little as he took in the sight of Marilee Jennings. There were too many contradictions-the faded denim jacket two sizes too big, the feminine, silky dress, the shit-kicker boots and baggy socks. Dangling from her earlobes were two triangles of sheet metal dotted with irregular bits of colored glass. Her hair was a wheaten tangle with near-black roots. She scooped back a rope of it and tucked it behind her ear.

“No. I’m from California.”

The sheriff hummed a note that all but said it figures. He tried to look noncommittal. He had to deal with a lot of outsiders these days. Part of his job was to be diplomatic. With some of these big shots, that seemed harder than saying the right thing to his mother-in-law. As he looked down at Marilee Jennings, he worried a little that she might be someone famous and he was failing to recognize her. She looked as though she could have come off MTV.

“What can I do for you, Miz Jennings?”

“I was a friend of Lucy MacAdam’s,” Mari said, staring up a considerable distance to his rugged face.

He could have either been a boxer or gotten kicked in the face by a horse. His nose had a violent sideways bend in it, and small puckered scars tugged at his upper lip and the corner of his right eye. Another scar slashed an inch-long red line diagonally across his left cheek-bone. He was saved from ugliness by a pair of kind, warm green eyes and a shy, crooked, boyish smile.

He stood in the middle of the squad room with his hands on his hips. Around them, dotting the small sea of serviceable metal desks, several deputies were working, clacking out reports on manual typewriters, talking on the phone. Their eyes drifted occasionally toward their boss and his visitor.

“The shooting,” he said, nodding as the name clicked into place. “Did someone get a hold of you? We been trying to call since it happened. Your name and number were in her address book.”

They’d been trying to call a phone she had had disconnected as she had hurried to dump her life in Sacramento for something truer. Mari rubbed a hand across her eyes. Her shoulders slumped as a vague sense of guilt weighed her down. “No,” she said in a small voice. “I didn’t find out about Lucy until I got here.”

Quinn made a pained face. “I’m sorry. Must have been a terrible shock.”

“Yes.”

Two phones began to ring, out of sync with each other. Then a burly, bearded man with a face like a side of beef and lurid tattoos from shoulder to wrist came hurtling through the door. He wore biker basics-jeans riding down off his butt and a black leather vest with no shirt beneath it, a look that showcased a chest and beer gut carpeted with dense, curling dark hair. His hands were cuffed behind his back and he was dragging a red-faced, angry deputy in his wake.

They crashed into a desk, toppling a coffee cup on a stack of reports and sending the deputy at the desk bolting backward. The air turned blue with assorted curses from three different sources. Quinn scowled as he watched the fiasco. He slid a hand around Mari’s arm, ready to jerk her out of harm’s way. But the biker was finally wrestled into a chair by a pair of deputies and the excitement began to dissipate.

Satisfied that the worst was over, Quinn turned back to Mari. “Let’s go in my office.”

Keeping his hand on her arm solicitously, he guided her into a cubicle with one windowed wall that looked out on the squad room, and shut the door behind them. Mari sat down on a square black plastic chair that was designed neither for comfort nor aesthetics, her eyes scanning the white block walls, taking in the diplomas and certificates and framed photographs of rodeo events. One was of Quinn wrestling an enormous steer to the ground by its horns. That explained a lot.

The sheriff settled into the upholstered chair behind his desk and adopted the most official mien he could manage, considering he had unruly yellow hair that stood up in defiant tufts in a rogue crew cut.

“We were unable to locate any kin,” he said, taking up the threads of their conversation as if they had never been interrupted.

“Lucy didn’t have any family. She grew up in foster homes.”

He looked unhappy about that, but didn’t pursue it. “Well, the case is closed, if that gives you any peace. It was all pretty cut and dried. She went riding up on that mountain, got herself mistaken for an elk, and that was that.”

“Forgive me,” Mari said. “I don’t know a whole lot about it, but I thought most hunting seasons were in the fall. It’s June.”

Quinn nodded, his attention drifting through the windows to the biker, who was bellowing at Deputy Stack about his civil rights. “The guy was a guest of Evan Bryce. Bryce’s spread-most of it, anyway-lies to the north of the Rafferty place, north and east of Miz Mac-Adam’s land. Bryce breeds his own herds-elk, buffalo-so they’re considered livestock. Limited hunting seasons don’t apply. He lets his guests take a few head now and again for sport.”

“And this time they took a human life instead,” Mari said grimly.

He glanced back at her and shrugged a little, bulging shoulder muscles straining the seams of his khaki uniform shirt. “Happens now and again. ’Spect it’ll happen more and more with the increase in tourism and second-home owners coming up here out of big cities. Most of these people don’t know beans about handling firearms. They get all dudded up in their L.L. Bean safari jackets, sling a big ol’ elephant rifle over their shoulders, and off they go.

“The guy that shot your friend? He didn’t have a clue. Didn’t know he’d hit her. He didn’t even see her. Took two days before the body was found.”

“Who was he?” Mari asked numbly, needing a name, a face she could picture and attach guilt to. He hadn’t even known. Lucy had died up there all alone, had lain there for days while the jerk who killed her went on with his vacation, oblivious.

“Dr. J. Grafton Sheffield,” Quinn said, swiveling his chair toward a black file cabinet that took up the entire width of the room behind the desk. “There’s a trust-fund name for you,” he mumbled as his thick fingers flipped through the files. He pulled one out and checked the contents. “Plastic surgeon from Beverly Hills. When word got out what had happened, he came in and confessed he’d been up there hunting. He was sick about it. Really was. Cried the whole time in court. Cooperated fully.”

“The ballistics matched up, I take it?”

Quinn’s brows sketched upward.

“I was a court reporter for six years, Sheriff,” Mari explained. “I know the drill.”

He rubbed one corner of his mouth with a stubby forefinger as he studied her, considering. Finally he nodded, selected a thin sheaf of typed pages from the file, and handed them across the desk. She scanned the initial report, her eyes catching on familiar words and phrases.

“There wasn’t anything left of the bullet that nailed her,” Quinn said. “It passed through her body and hit a rock. We couldn’t test for a match. The shell casings in the area were consistent with the loads Sheffield had been using-7mm Remington. He confessed he’d been in the area, didn’t know he’d wandered off Bryce’s land. He pleaded no contest.”

“You mean it’s over already?” Mari said, stunned. “How can that be?”

Quinn shrugged again. “The wheels of justice move pretty quick out here. Our court dockets don’t see the same load yours do down in California. It didn’t hurt that Sheffield was a buddy of Bryce’s. Bryce swings a lot of weight in these parts.”

“Sheffield is in jail, then?” Mari said, sounding hopeful and knowing better. Plastic surgeons from Beverly Hills didn’t go to jail for accidents they readily owned up to.

“No, ma’am.” Quinn’s attention went to the squad room again. The biker was standing, the chair shackled to his wrists sticking out behind him like an avant garde bustle. Quinn started to rise slowly. “He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of negligent endangerment. One year suspended sentence and a one-thousand-dollar fine. Excuse me, ma’am.”

He was out the door and barreling toward the melee before Mari could react. She stared through the window at the surreal scene for a moment, Quinn and his deputies and the woolly mammoth tussling around the room in what looked like a rugby scrum. She dropped her gaze to the file in her lap. Surreal had been the theme of her vacation so far.

She glanced at the notes made by the deputy who had originally been assigned to the case, then at Quinn’s comments. The coroner’s report was appallingly brief. Cause of death: gunshot wound. There were scanty notes about entrance and exit wounds, contusions and abrasions. A broken nose, lacerations on the face, probably caused by the fall from her mount. It seemed pitiful that the cessation of a life could be boiled down to two words. Gunshot wound.

The battle raged on in the squad room, the biker smashing cups, coffeepots, computer screens with the chair attached to his butt. Good thing Quinn had experience wrestling enormous hairy animals to the ground.

Across the desk lay the file folder that held whatever other meager comments on Lucy’s death Quinn had not planned to make privy to her. Mari bit her lip and battled briefly with her conscience. What she held in her hands seemed so scant… Her friend was dead…

A roar that sounded like an enraged moose sounded beyond the door. The men went down in a heap of tangled arms and legs. Mari scooted up out of her chair and slipped around the desk to flip open the manila folder. Her heart stopped, wedged at the base of her throat just ahead of the breakfast she was still digesting.

The only things left in the case file were the crime scene Polaroids. Lucy’s body. Lifeless. Grotesque. She had lain there at the edge of that meadow for two days. Nothing about the corpse bore any resemblance to the vibrant woman Mari had known. The brassy blond hair was a dirty, tangled mat. The fingernails that had been meticulously manicured and lacquered at all times were dirty and broken. Features were unrecognizable, the body bloated out of shape like a Macy’s parade balloon. The bullet had hit her square in the back and exited through her chest, leaving massive destruction.

Hideous. God, she’s hideous. She would have hated to die this way.

Alone.

Ripped apart.

Left for the carrion feeders.

Tears spilled over her lashes. Chills raced down her from head to toe. Trembling, she dropped the reports on top of the pictures and ran out of the office, choking on the need to vomit and the necessity to breathe. The biker was being dragged off to a holding cell. Quinn dusted his pants off with his hands, glancing up from beneath his brows as Mari rushed into the squad room. She swept a fist beneath both eyes, trying in vain to erase the evidence of her tears. She gulped a deep lungful of air that was sour with the scent of male sweat and bad gas. Her stomach rolled over like a beached salmon.

“I-I-thank you for your help, Sheriff Quinn,” she said, her voice hitching. “I-I have to go now.”

The sympathy in his eyes nearly undid her. “Sorry about your friend, Miz Jennings.”

The images from the Polaroids burned into the backs of her eyes. Bile rose up in a tide. She managed to nod. “I-I have to go.”

“Stop by and see Miller Daggrepont,” he called as she hurried toward the door.

The name went in one ear and out the other. The only stop she had on her mind at the moment was the ladies’ room down the hall. Saliva pooled in her mouth. Lucy. Oh, Christ, Lucy. But she pulled up at the squad room door, the one question she had forgotten to ask stopping her short. Bracing one hand on the jamb to keep herself upright, she looked back at Quinn.

“Who found her body?”

“That’d be Del,” he said with a nod. “Del Rafferty.”