Case File: Canyon Creek, Wyoming

Chapter Seven

Riley crossed to the window and gazed out, as if he could see the mountains instead of his own traitorous reflection there. His whole body was humming with awareness. He could even hear Hannah’s soft, quick respirations behind him.

“This is a break in the case, isn’t it?” she asked.

He took a deep, steadying breath. He could control himself, damn it. He’d become very good at self-discipline over the last few years.

He turned to look at her. “Her name was Cara Sandifer. A rancher found her body in an irrigation pond a few hours after she was killed.” He crossed to the bed, keeping his distance from her, and added the printout of the belt buckle to Cara’s file. “Because her body was found so quickly, the evidence in her case is probably the best we have at the moment.”

“We should tell someone. Joe. You should call Joe.”

Riley nodded. “He can fax a notice over to other law-enforcement agencies in the area. We’ll also track down the manufacturer and see how many belt buckles we’re looking at, what stores in Wyoming carry them, that kind of thing.”

He glanced at Hannah and found her sitting in the middle of the bed, her knees tucked up against her body protectively, the same way she’d sat in the hospital watching the crime-scene investigators go over her bed. Compassion trumped his uneasiness, and he crossed to her side, reaching out to squeeze her arm. “This is good news. You really came through for us.”

She lifted her chin, unfolding out of her self-protective tuck until she sat cross-legged. When she spoke, her voice was stronger. “I hope it helps you find him. That’s all I want, you know. To find this guy and go back home in one piece.”

Her tone didn’t change, but Riley couldn’t miss the warning in her words. She may have felt the same charge of electricity between them that he’d experienced, but she was no more interested in pursuing it than he was.

That should make things between them considerably less complicated, he thought with relief.

He should have known better.

“THERE ARE 450 STORES in 36 states that carry the Cal Reno brand buckles. Most of those have, at one time or another, carried the Rattler design. At least thirty of those stores are located in Wyoming, and God knows how many there are in the surrounding states.” Joe Garrison’s expression was grim.

Hannah stared at the police chief, her heart sinking. “That many?”

“We’ve put out a request to track the purchases, but if someone made the purchase with cash, there’s really no way to identify him. We can hope he paid with a credit card.” Joe looked apologetic.

“Well, maybe we’ll get lucky,” Hannah said, not ready to let go of optimism. She glanced at Riley. His expression was shuttered, but she was beginning to figure out how to read him. It was all in his eyes. He couldn’t hide his feelings in those expressive blue eyes.

Right now, he was feeling wary. Afraid to hope but, like her, not ready to give up yet. She felt an odd sense of camaraderie with him, as if the two of them were pitted against the rest of the doubting world.

Unfortunately, camaraderie with Riley Patterson wasn’t really what she wanted to feel. If last night’s restless attempt at slumber had proved anything, it was that all her good intentions, and all the hard lessons of her past, made poor preventatives against her attraction to the man.

Just the sound of his slow, steady breathing had been enough to fire her fantasies, and she’d tossed and turned all night, trying to fight their potent allure.

He wasn’t even that good-looking, she had tried to tell herself, even as her skin still remembered the feel of his body pressed so tightly against hers. His craggy features were too rough-hewn to be considered conventionally handsome, his rusty hair close-cropped, almost military style, and worthless for running one’s fingers through.

Except she kept finding herself imagining the crisp texture of his hair sliding beneath her fingertips, and the mere thought made her whole body tingle with anticipation.

An image of Craig’s face flashed through her mind. So handsome, so familiar. She hadn’t been able to keep her hands off him, either.

And hadn’t that worked out well?

“What about the personnel files from the hospital?” Riley asked Joe.

“Jim called this morning. He was having a little trouble working out the legal details, but he found a judge late last night who’d sign the court order for access to the records. Only he can’t share them outside his jurisdiction, so we’ll have to wait for his people to work through the list,” Joe said.

“That could take forever,” Riley protested, running his left hand over his jaw, clearly frustrated.

Morning sunlight slicing into the room between the kitchen window curtains reflected off the slim gold band on his ring finger, catching Hannah’s attention. She let her gaze linger on the ring as it provided a much-needed reality check.

Riley Patterson might be sexy. He might be the kind of rugged, masculine man that made ordinarily sane women consider moving to Wyoming and roughing it through long, harsh winters just to sleep at night in such a man’s arms.

But in the ways that mattered most, Riley Patterson was a married man. His love for his wife drove him, day in and day out, to find an elusive killer who’d left few clues to follow. His body might respond like a man when he was around a woman, just as he’d responded to being close to her last night. But his heart was strictly off-limits.

“I know it’s frustrating that we can’t get all the answers immediately,” Joe said, giving Hannah something to think about besides her alarming attraction to Riley. “But this is pretty significant movement on these cases. That’s good news.”

Riley nodded. “I know you’re right. It’s just-” He looked at Hannah.

“So maybe you should spend your time trying to concentrate on what else Hannah can remember,” Joe suggested.

Footsteps on the back porch heralded Jack Drummond’s return from the stable. Joe stuffed the files he’d been sharing with them in his briefcase and rose from the table as Jack walked into the kitchen. “Hi there, Jack.”

Jack shook hands with Joe. “Back so soon?”

As Joe responded, and their greeting turned into small talk, Riley leaned toward Hannah, his voice lowered. “I think Joe’s right. We need to concentrate on helping you remember more of what happened the day of the attack.”

“Every time I try to concentrate on it, I just become more confused,” she said softly. “I don’t even know what would help at this point.”

“I have some thoughts-”

Jack cleared his throat loudly. “Can’t even leave these lovebirds alone for five seconds before they’ve got their heads together, whispering sweet nothings, Joe. What am I gonna do with them?”

“Short of hosing them down?” Joe responded, shooting a wink at Hannah.

“Well, they’ll have themselves a little free time today, because I’m heading into town to see if I can stir up a little trouble.” Jack held his hands up toward Joe. “Strictly legal, of course.”

“Of course.” Joe patted Jack on the back and turned to Riley. “I’ll let you know if I hear anything about that case I was telling you about. Enjoy your time off.”

“Thanks.” Riley walked Joe out, while Jack settled into the chair his brother-in-law had vacated.

“You could ditch Riley and come to town with me, you know,” Jack said with a wicked grin. “I’d show you places in Canyon Creek Riley probably doesn’t even know about-”

“I heard that,” Riley shot over his shoulder as he closed the door behind Joe. “And you’d be surprised the places I know about in Canyon Creek, son.” He crossed to Jack’s side and clamped his hands on his brother-in-law’s shoulders. “Like where to bury a body so nobody can find it.”

“Okay, okay, I’m going!” Jack said, laughing. He headed down the hall toward his room.

“He’s right about one thing,” Riley said, holding out his hand to Hannah. “Let’s get out of this house.”

THE MORNING WAS TURNING out to be unseasonably mild for October in Wyoming, the bright, late-morning sun warming the cab of Riley’s pickup truck. Hannah laid her head back against the headrest and closed her eyes, enjoying the light on her face and the slow, bluesy strains of a Tim McGraw song playing on the truck’s radio.

If it weren’t for Riley’s steady stream of questions, she might even be able to pretend it was a carefree outing.

“What had you been doing before you headed west on 287?”

She opened her eyes, releasing a soft sigh. “I’d spent longer on the lake at my friends’ place than I’d intended. The trout were biting great, so we decided to eat some of our catch for lunch. I’d planned to be on the road before lunch, but I couldn’t pass up the fresh fish, so I didn’t get out of there as early as I’d hoped.”

“You were about twenty miles southwest of Grand Teton State Park when you were pulled over, right?”

“That’s what Sheriff Tanner said. I don’t know for sure.”

Riley’s brow creased. “Would you be able to recognize where you were pulled over if you saw it again?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I know it was fairly isolated, and there was no shoulder of the road to speak of. I pulled over just past a crossroad, because there was finally a little bit of a rocky shoulder to pull over on.” She turned to look at him, wincing a little as her seatbelt pressed against her still-sore body. “Would it help to find the place?”

“I suppose the Teton County Sheriff’s Department has already looked for it, but-yeah. I think it would help. Maybe it would jog your memory, if nothing else.”

“If we’re lucky,” she agreed, although the thought of recreating the nightmare of that day held little appeal. Still, if it helped Riley get closer to stopping a killer, she’d do it.

“Where do your friends live?”

“It’s a small ranch in the Pavillion area.”

He nodded. “I know the area. Do you think you could find it again?”

“You want us to go there? Today?”

“I want us to start where you started, when you started. The more directly we duplicate your drive, the better.” He reached into his pocket for his cell phone and dialed a number. “Hey, Joe, it’s Riley.”

As Riley outlined the plan over the phone with his boss, Hannah turned her gaze back toward the landscape unfolding ahead of them. They were driving east, toward Canyon Creek. The plan had originally been to stop for lunch in town, just to give Hannah a chance to get out of the house. The countryside outside of town was mostly ranch acreage, punctuated by scrub grass and the occasional small lake or winding creek. Horses and cattle dotted the grassy pastureland, although Riley had told her that the grazing season was mostly over for the year.

“Anything new from Jackson?” Riley asked. His lips pressed to a line as he listened to Joe’s response. “Yeah, I know I just talked to you a half hour ago. Yeah. Bye.”

“Still nothing?”

He shook his head. “Jackson has this stuff on rush, which is really all we could hope for, given we haven’t definitively made the connection between your attack and the murders.”

“But the belt buckle-”

“The state lab guys will look at what we sent them. But they have other cases.”

Hannah slumped against her seat, frustrated. It was a lot easier to be patient with the snail’s pace of forensic science when you weren’t the one whose life had been upended, she supposed. And she knew the Wyoming authorities were probably working as quickly as they could.

“So, are we still going into town?” she asked aloud.

“Yeah. You left your friend’s place in Pavillion when?”

“Around two in the afternoon.”

“Good. We’ve got time to grab lunch and a car and still get to your starting point by two.”

“A car?”

“You were driving a Pontiac G6. I can probably talk Lewis at the used-car place into letting us borrow something similar.”

They reached town within ten minutes. Other than a distinctive western feel to the town’s buildings, and the sprawling blue Wyoming sky spreading out for miles beyond the town’s small cluster of business and in-town residences, Canyon Creek, Wyoming, was not that different from her own hometown of Gossamer Ridge, Alabama. The friendly waves from pedestrians and drivers alike as they drove down Main Street were something she encountered daily at home. Everybody knew everybody else in a small town.

Which meant, of course, that she attracted plenty of curious looks as people realized that Riley Patterson wasn’t alone in his Chevy Silverado.

“Same story as we’re telling Jack?” she asked aloud as he pulled into the parking lot of a small used-car lot.

He looked at her, his brow furrowed. “Same story?”

“People will want to know who I am.”

His brow creased further. “Ah, damn. You’re right.”

“We can pretend I’m a cousin or something-”

“No, it’s okay. Now that Jack knows you’re here, it’s not like he’s going to keep quiet about it. People will probably be so thrilled to see me out with a woman, they’ll bend over backwards to leave us be.” There was a bitter edge to his voice that made Hannah’s stomach hurt.

Yet she understood what he was feeling, more than he knew. “Everyone keeps waiting for my brother, J.D., to fall in love again,” she said. “And it’s been almost eight years for him.”

He stopped with his hand on the door handle. “Eight years since what?”

“Since his wife was murdered.”

THE WORKSHOP in his mother’s root cellar was small but private, just as he required. She’d become too arthritic to handle the rough wooden stairs a few years before she died, making the cellar solely his domain for almost a decade now. Besides the house access, the cellar also had an outside entrance built into the ground. Its wide double doors accommodated easy loading and unloading from the Crown Vic parked in the side yard, and the extra insulation he’d added a few years back made the room virtually soundproof.

He sat on the work stool, polishing his tools and reviewing the last two days in his mind, determined to fix what had gone wrong not once but twice in the past forty-eight hours. There was no way to candy-coat the truth. The girl had caught him by surprise. She’d kept her head, despite the pepper-spray ambush, and managed to get away. She’d almost drawn blood, he thought, looking down at the light scrape on his pinky finger where the ring had been the day before.

Worse, she’d thwarted his careful plan to mop up his mess. He should’ve known she was awake. He should have heard her breath quicken, seen her furtive movements to undo the IV cannula. He’d gotten sloppy, and things were now worse than before. The cops were putting the pieces together, after all he’d done to spread out his kills in different jurisdictions and different years. He’d overheard the cops talking about the kills at the hospital. Three years of murders, they’d said.

He smiled with the first real satisfaction he’d felt in two days. Three years wasn’t even close.

His first kill had been almost ten years ago. A neighbor girl, not a half mile down the highway. She’d been seventeen. He’d been twenty.

It had been sweet. So very sweet.

He laid down his knife and reached across the worktable for the folder that he’d compiled after his earlier visit to the Teton County Sheriff’s Department. It had been so easy-stop by to see an old friend from his prison-guard days who’d made the move to real police work. He’d just kept his eyes open, grabbed the file when his friend wasn’t looking and stuck the folder under his coat. So easy. A quick trip to the copy shop down the street and a return trip to the sheriff’s station on pretense of leaving his cell phone behind, and he’d had everything he needed.

Nobody had suspected a thing. And now he had his own file on Hannah Jean Cooper of Gossamer Ridge, Alabama.

It didn’t do much to tell him where she was at the moment, but quick phone calls to her home number and work number had, at least, given him hope that she had not yet left Wyoming. He still had time to tie up that loose end.

Meanwhile, he thought, turning to look at the woman lying gagged and bound on the worktable, he had work to do.

“YOUR BROTHER’S WIFE WAS murdered?” Riley’s stomach muscles clenched.

She nodded, her expression grim. “Eight years ago next February. She was abducted from the trucking company where she worked-she’d worked late and her car battery had died, stranding her alone. By the time anyone realized she was missing, it was already too late.”

“I’m sorry.” The words seemed inadequate.

“My brother was devastated. In some ways, he still is.” Moisture sparkled on her eyelashes. She sniffed back the tears. “So, you see, I know it’s hard to deal with people who think you can just get over it and move on. I’ve watched my brother deal with it for years.”

“Did the police ever find out who killed her?” As soon as he asked the question, Riley realized he didn’t want to know the answer. Three years without answers had been a living horror. The idea of eight years of not knowing who’d upended his whole world was almost more than he could stand.

“J.D. hasn’t stopped searching, either,” Hannah said, her voice small and strangled.

“Then you understand,” he said grimly.

She nodded, sniffing again. She took a deep breath, squared her jaw and turned to look at him. “You do whatever makes you comfortable. Tell people whatever you want. I’ll go along with it.”

He wished it were that simple. But Jack’s arrival had complicated everything. Once Riley blurted the first thing that had come to his mind to explain Hannah’s presence, the die had been cast. He’d have to go on with the charade.

“We could tell Jack the truth,” Hannah said, as if reading his mind.

He shook his head. “No, we can’t.”

“Don’t you trust him?”

He rubbed his jaw, wishing he could say yes without hesitation. “Jack’s a good guy. He wouldn’t hurt you or me on purpose for the world. But he’s also the kind of guy who thinks Saturday nights are made for drinking himself under the table, and I know from experience that he can’t keep his tongue when he’s drinking.”

Her brow furrowed. “I see.”

“We have to go on with what we’ve started.” He began to open the truck’s driver-side door, but Hannah stayed him with a hand on his arm.

She tightened her grip on his forearm. “I’ll wait here in the truck.”

“That’s only delaying the questions. It won’t make them go away,” he warned.

“I know. But look at it this way-when I’m finally out of here, you can just pretend things between us didn’t work out, and then you’ll get a reprieve while you get over our failed romance.” She smiled at him, her eyes sparkling with amusement at figuring out a way to turn their uncomfortable charade into a plus.

Her humor was infectious. He felt his own lips starting to curve with a smile. “You’re devious. I like that.”

She laughed at that. “Six older brothers will do that for you.”

He smiled again, surprised how much he enjoyed having someone to conspire with again. It had been one of the things he’d enjoyed most about his marriage to Emily-someone to keep secrets with, to cocoon himself with against the often cold and indifferent world outside.

But as he entered the used-car lot’s office and answered the greetings of the staff, it occurred to him that getting comfortable around Hannah Cooper could turn out to be a very dangerous proposition.