Confessing to the Cowboy (18 page)

The sleet that Cameron had mentioned appeared just after seven, pinging against the café glass windows and shooting a restless energy through the place. People began to eat a little faster in order to get home before it got too slick outside.

By eight-thirty the last of the diners were preparing to pay up and leave and it looked like it was going to be another early closing night. She sent all of her waitresses home and then called Cameron on his cell phone and let him know that she’d be ready for him to pick her up anytime after nine.

He told her he was currently working a two-car accident and might be a few minutes late. She assured him she would be fine until he arrived.

At nine she went into the kitchen where Rusty had already shut down the grill and was seated on a stool drinking a cup of coffee. “You might as well head home, too,” she said as she pulled up a stool next to him. “I’ve put the Closed sign on the door and locked up for the night. The sleet is accumulating on the roads and I don’t expect anybody else to come in.”

“You sure Cameron will be able to come and get you?” Rusty asked.

“If he doesn’t I can always crash on my new sofa.” She shook her head. “I still can’t believe you all did that for me.”

“You have no idea what you mean to the people of this town,” Rusty replied.

She cocked her head and stared at him for a long moment. “Why aren’t you dating? Why don’t you have some nice woman in your life?”

He gave her his crooked half smile. “Who’d want to date somebody with such an ugly mug as mine?”

“Oh, Rusty, you have no idea how handsome you are. You can cook, you’ve got a soft heart and any woman would be proud to be with you.”

“I don’t know... I just don’t think about it much.” He took another sip of his coffee and stared off into the distance.

Mary guessed that he was probably thinking about the family he had lost in a home fire years ago. It had been an electrical fire that had taken place while Rusty was at work and it had killed his wife and son. It had also destroyed whoever Rusty had once been.

“They wouldn’t want you to grieve forever,” she said softly.

“I know. I’m working on it.” He got up from his stool and drained his mug. “You want me to hang around until Cameron does arrive?”

“Nah, I’ll be fine. I’ll just lock up everything tight and maybe make myself a quick cup of hot tea. You’d better get to the cabin before you have to ice-skate yourself there.”

Rusty gave her a flash of a smile. “I never was much good at skating. Oh, by the way, the kid left his cell phone here.” He pointed to Junior’s cell phone on the counter. “I imagine he’ll be in early in the morning to get it.”

“I’ll just lock it up in the register,” Mary replied.

“Then I guess I’ll see you in the morning.” He pulled on his big coat and disappeared out the back door. Mary locked up behind him and then placed a kettle on a burner to heat water for tea.

As she waited for the water to boil, she stood in the entry to the back living quarters. The new sofa was beautiful, made more so with the knowledge that her friends and customers had chipped in to buy it for her and Matt.

The walls were pristine and the smell of fresh paint permeated the air. One more night at Cameron’s and then she and Matt could resume their life here. She knew Cameron wanted them to stay with him until Jason was behind bars, but she couldn’t bunk in with him indefinitely. There was no indication that Cameron and his team would solve this case anytime soon.

The whistling kettle pulled her back into the kitchen where she fixed a cup of tea and carried it into the main café area. She placed Junior’s cell phone on the counter near the register to lock up before she left for the night and then sat at a table in the center of the dimly lit room and looked around.

Violet Grady had not only been a member of the founding family of Grady Gulch, but she’d also been Mary’s personal angel. The old woman had not only taken in Mary and Matt when Mary was destitute, but she’d also provided the means for Mary to give Matt a future.

She would dishonor Violet if she chose to run again. She would dishonor all the people who had worked here all day long today to give her back her home.

Where are you, Jason?
How she wished she had the answer. How she wished Cameron and his men had some kind of clue to get her ex-husband behind bars.

She wanted this over. She wanted to be able to move back into her rooms, run her café and throw herself back into the life she’d had before murder and a monster had stolen away the joy.

She took a sip of her tea and then frowned as she heard a sound coming from one of the bathrooms. Was the women’s restroom toilet running again? She set her cup down with a sigh of irritation. It had been a chronic problem over the past couple of months.

Remaining seated, she decided she’d finish her tea and then go in and jiggle the handle and if that didn’t work then first thing in the morning she’d call Steve Taggart, the local plumber to come in and fix the darned thing for good.

As she sipped her tea she tried to keep her mind empty of thoughts of murder or Cameron. Both topics made her anxious in completely different ways.

Thinking about the murders and Jason created a block of ice inside her stomach where thoughts of Cameron created a pit of fiery heat.

She was too tired to entertain thoughts of either emotions. She just wanted Cameron to pick her up and take her to his place where she would withdraw into his pretty and peaceful guest bedroom until morning.

Once again she heard a strange noise, a whirring noise that didn’t belong above the soft hum of the refrigerator unit or the rhythmic faint click of the large clock that hung on a nearby wall.

Shoving her chair back she stood as she tried to identify the sound that appeared to be drawing closer. She gasped in surprise as Brandon Williams wheeled around the corner from the bathrooms.

“Brandon! Oh, my gosh, I didn’t realize you were still here,” she said.

He rubbed his stomach and smiled ruefully. “Apparently something didn’t sit quite right with me.” He looked around with a frown. “Looks like you closed the place down for the night.”

“I did. It’s sleeting outside, Brandon. Maybe you need to sit with me and wait until Cameron picks me up and we’ll see if he can get your scooter in his trunk or something. I don’t know if you can go in the scooter on the ice that is accumulating.”

“That’s not going to be a problem, Samantha.”

Samantha?

Mary stared in horror as Brandon stood up from the scooter and pulled a long knife from the side pocket of his motorized chair. “I don’t think there’s going to be much of anything left here for Cameron to pick up.”

Chapter 16

T
he traffic accident was a nightmare of whirling cherry lights, stinging sleet and rescue workers and accident victims slipping and sliding on the icy road.

This particular sharp curve just outside of town was treacherous under the best of conditions. It had been here on a rainy night that Courtney Chambers had missed the curve and flown off the ridge and into the trees below. Of course, she’d been drugged at the time by somebody who had wanted to kidnap her baby.

He shoved aside thoughts of that particular crime, glad that at least it had been solved with a happy ending and the sick woman responsible for the accident was behind bars.

He needed to focus now on the two screaming men who had been the drivers of the two cars and were now each pointing fingers at the other with blame. Wilma Simpson sat sobbing in the front passenger seat of one of the cars. She refused to leave the vehicle even to allow the emergency workers to check her for injuries. “I just want to go home,” she sobbed over and over again.

Two people had already been taken from the scene, both injured but not anything life-threatening. The cars had hit almost head-on and surprisingly it had been the people in the backseat that had been injured.

Neither of them had been wearing seat belts and one’s head bounced off the front headrest while the other had banged knees against the front seat. Thankfully the people in the front seat had been wearing their seat belts. It was a damned miracle that nobody had been killed.

Each driver was accusing the other of being in the wrong lane, and unfortunately both had moved their cars from the point of impact and off to the side of the road before Cameron had arrived.

The sleet and freezing temperature were only adding to the issues as he silently cursed the weatherman for missing the forecast on this band of icy mix that had moved into the area. The forecast had said a brief icy shower, but there had been nothing brief about the sleet that had been ongoing and appeared to have parked overhead.

He stalked over to one of the raging drivers and pulled him away from the other before they began to take swings at each other. Ed Ganger and Blair Simpson were both hotheads, and Cameron knew it wouldn’t take much more before this escalated from a traffic accident into a brawling fistfight.

When he had Ed at a safe distance away from Blair he began a quick interview of his view of the event. Larry Brooks moved to Blair and began his own discussion with the irate man.

Cameron knew how this worked. They would both have different stories and someplace in the middle of those stories would be a semblance of the truth.

What he’d like to do was get out of the nasty weather and head to the café to pick up Mary. He’d like to be curled up on the sofa in front of a roaring blaze in the fire place at his house with her in his arms.

But it was just another one of his foolish fantasies. He couldn’t leave the scene of an accident and he had a feeling the last place in the world Mary wanted to be was in his arms again.

As Adam Benson took photos of what appeared to be the point of impact between the two cars, which initially indicated that both drivers were hugging the center line, Cameron took the two driver statements with him to his car and sank into the warmth of the blowing heater.

He gave each of the statements a cursory read to make sure they had all the information needed. The reports, along with the photos they had of both cars and the road, might allow them to be able to reenact the accident to see if blame needed to be placed. At this point he considered it a weather-related accident with no specific driver to blame. They could each contact their own insurance companies and figure it all out.

He got back out of the car, grateful that both vehicles remained drivable, thus negating the need for a tow truck.

With the sleet getting more intense, he sent both drivers on their way, one heading to the hospital to check on their passengers and the other, with the sobbing Wilma, home.

All the other men who were on traffic duty left to patrol the streets while Cameron headed back to the office. He’d write up a quick report and then head to the café to pick up Mary and get her back to his place.

A half an hour later he was seated at his desk, his report written, but his thoughts drifting into painful territory. He couldn’t be the son that his parents wanted. He couldn’t be the man for Mary and he couldn’t be the sheriff who caught the bad guy. Talk about feeling like a failure.

He tried to turn his thoughts around. He could twist and turn himself inside out and he would never be Bobby. It wasn’t his fault that his father was trapped in an abyss of grief even after two years. He could only hope that with more time his father would eventually come around and realize Cameron’s worth as a son...as a man.

Mary was a heartbreak that would take some time to heal. He’d entertained dreams of her for so long, and when his fantasy of making love to her had finally come true, it had been far beyond his best fantasy. But that didn’t mean he was the right man for her.

He should have never gotten intimately involved with her in the first place. It would have been much easier if she’d remained just a fantasy, a vision to fill his dreams at night.

He had to figure out a way to get her out of his heart. She’d become his addictive habit...thinking about her, dreaming about her and ending almost every night of the day sitting with her across the counter at the café.

She was definitely a habit he had to break and ultimately she was a citizen of his town who he had to protect from an unknown perpetrator.

Where in the hell was Jason McKnight? And if he wasn’t committing the murders himself, then who had he hired to do his dirty work? Although he’d managed to pull Denver Walton’s and Thomas Manning’s finances and background records based on probable cause, the judge had known that it was more of a fishing expedition and wouldn’t be so lenient the next time Cameron came to him.

As far as he was concerned Denver and Thomas were his best suspects and yet there was nothing concrete to tie either of them to the crimes.

He couldn’t help but feel as if he was missing something...overlooking something vital, but he’d gone over the reports a hundred times and nothing had popped out. He and his men had checked each person in town they thought the right height and weight to be the perpetrator and they’d all come up empty-handed.

He stood and grabbed his coat. Time to get Mary and get home before the roads became completely impassable. He was just about to leave his office when his cell phone rang.

“Cameron, it’s me,” his mother said.

“Mom, what’s up?”

“Your damn fool father decided he needed to go out to the barn in the middle of this weather and he was walking back from there when he slipped and fell. I can’t get him up and he’s just lying out in the yard. Please, can you get out here?” There was a wild panic in his mother’s voice.

“I’ll be there as quickly as I can,” he replied. A glance out the window let him know that the sleet still fell down from the sky.

He then dialed Mary’s cell phone number and frowned when it went directly to voice mail. Maybe she had a few customers show up despite the weather and was busy serving them.

“Mary, there’s an emergency out at my parents’ place. It shouldn’t take me too long, but I’ve got to get out there before I come to get you. Just sit tight, I’ll be there as soon as possible,” he said to her voice mail.

He’d head out to his parents’, see that his father was okay and then get to the café as quickly as possible. Hopefully by then whoever had decided to stop in and eat would be finished with their meals and he and Mary could get to his house and end this long, irritating night.

* * *

“You don’t look very happy to see me,” Brandon said as he advanced closer to where Mary stood, still stunned and half-breathless.

No, not Brandon. Jason. In a nanosecond her brain worked to process all the physical changes that had made her not recognize the man from her nightmares.

He’d gained at least thirty pounds since the last time she’d seen him and his brown eyes had obviously been turned blue with colored contacts. His bald head and missing eyebrows made it impossible to tell what his hair color might have been and the scars...the makeup she’d thought he’d used in an attempt to cover his scars had obviously been used to make them. He looked nothing like the man she’d run from so many years ago.

She backed up from him, aware of the knife’s sharp edge gleaming in the security lights overhead. “How... How did you find me?” She finally found her voice.

“You mean after you left me half-dead on the floor in our living room?” His eyes narrowed and despite the facade of Brandon Williams, war veteran, she saw Jason McKnight’s soul shining from the hatred in his miscolored eyes.

“It took me months in the hospital to recuperate from what you did to me.” He took another step closer and she retreated a step back, icy terror making her entire body feel wooden and difficult to move.

“You busted my spleen, left me with a compound fracture of my leg, busted four ribs and smashed my nose.” His voice was calm, the eerie calm before a storm erupted. “It was a year before I could even start to think about finding you, but in that year you never left my mind. In the past nine years you’ve been all I’ve thought about.” He cocked his head and smiled, Jason’s smile, not Brandon’s. “I guess you didn’t believe me when I told you that I’d make you pay, that I’d kill you if you ever left me.”

“Jason...please,” Mary started as her back hit the wall. Her gaze shot left and right, seeking something she could use as a weapon, something she could use for defense. But there was nothing.

“Jason please what? Please don’t hurt you? Please don’t kill you? You brought this all on yourself, Samantha. I haven’t spent all the money and time of the last nine years hunting you down not to make you pay.”

“Haven’t you done enough?” she cried. “You’ve already killed three innocent women.”

“And with each throat I slit I thought about you.”

Trapped.

She was trapped between the wall and the man who wanted her dead, and escape appeared impossible. Her terror gripped her by the throat not just now, but also in memory, a regurgitation of the sensations of fear she’d suffered while married to the man.

She was lost in those moments of his torment, the anxiety of never knowing when an attack might come or if the next one was the one that would kill her.

At that moment the back door opened and Junior rushed in, his coat covered with a fine layer of ice. “Mary, I forgot my phone,” he said and she raised a trembling finger to the phone on the counter next to the register.

“Thanks,” Junior said as he grabbed the phone. It was only then he focused on Jason. “Mr. Williams...you can walk. It’s like a miracle!” Junior’s childish smile quickly doused as he spied the knife in the man’s hand. “Mr. Williams...what are you doing with that knife?”

Before he could utter another word, Jason slammed his fist into Junior’s jaw. Junior whirled around with the force of the blow, bounced off the counter and fell to the floor, not moving again.

Mary screamed her outrage. “You didn’t have to hurt him. He liked you, he wouldn’t have said anything if you’d just played it cool.”

“I’m tired of playing it cool, besides, he’s not dead, he’s just unconscious. Once he’s conscious and I’m finished here he can tell anyone he wants that Brandon Williams killed Mary, because Brandon Williams doesn’t exist.” He smiled at her with pride. “The honorable injured vet will disappear forever after tonight.”

“You won’t get away. They know it’s you, Jason.”

His smile widened, the gesture not even beginning to warm the cold of his eyes. “
Knowing
and
proving
are two different things. I have dozens of people who will swear that I never left Switzerland, that I’ve been there every day in my offices for the last year.”

He seemed to be in no hurry to finish what he’d come here for, what he most wanted to do. “I spent a lot of money over the years trying to find you. It took seven private investigators and years before we finally hunted you down.”

“Just let me go,” she replied, hating the begging tone in her voice. “Like you said, nobody knows you were here. You could just walk away now and nobody would know what you’d done. Even if I told, it would be your word against mine and all of your alibi witnesses.”

Just like before, she thought. She’d been afraid to tell anyone about his abuse because it would have been his word against her own, and he’d held all the power, just like he did now.

He laughed, the deep sound clenching Mary’s stomach with dread. “And deny myself what I’ve dreamed about for all these years?” His eyes narrowed. “You’ve forgotten, Mary. I own you and I don’t let go of what’s mine.”

“You beat me.” She clenched her fists at her sides, remembering all the pain she’d experienced at his hands. “You choked and kicked me, you beat me black and blue.”

“It wasn’t my fault you couldn’t figure out how to be a good wife. You had to be taught. You needed to be taught to be exactly what I want you to be and I have to say, you were a very slow learner.”

She thanked the stars that Matt wasn’t here now, that she’d agreed to let him spend the night with his friend. She wanted Jason to forget he had a son, to kill her and then steal away in the night and never bother anyone else here in Grady Gulch again, including Matt.

“I can kill you, go back to Switzerland and take off the makeup, grow back my hair and lose a few pounds and then I figure I have two choices. I can either play the grieving ex-husband and come back here to claim my son. Or I can tell whoever makes contact with me that you and I were divorced a long time ago and I’d rather my son stay in the town where he’d grown up, that it would be too traumatic at his age to displace him from the people he knows and loves.”

As he spoke he turned the knife back and forth in his hand, the light catching the razor edge each time he turned it, but she knew he wasn’t ready to use it yet. Mary had always known the second that Jason was about to attack because his left eye twitched.