Stranger in Cold Creek (14 page)

“What did it say?” Miranda asked.

“It said the two years were up.”

“The suicide clause,” John murmured.

Angela nodded. “He took the policy out four years ago, when I was first diagnosed with liver failure. I'd contracted hepatitis B when I was working as a nurse at a clinic down on the border a few years ago. I got over it quickly enough and didn't really think anything more about it, until my liver started failing.” She shook her head. “Jasper went out and bought a life insurance policy that day. Until then, I guess we thought we were invincible.”

“His insurance will cover your bills, won't it?”

This time, Angela didn't stop the tears. “There'll even be some left over so I can keep the house until I'm recovered enough to go back to work.”

Miranda looked at John. He gave a slight nod, and she stood. “Mrs. Layton, I really am very sorry for your loss. And I'm sorry I had to bother you this way.”

Angela didn't rise to see them out, but she did speak as they were turning to go. “Did you find out what you wanted to know?”

Miranda turned back to look at her. “Yes. Your husband was a good man. Don't ever let anyone make you think otherwise.”

For the first time since they'd entered the room, Angela managed a faint smile. “I know.”

Back in the hot truck cab, Miranda leaned against the headrest and closed her eyes. “I wish we hadn't done that.”

“It answered a few questions.”

“At what price?” She opened her eyes and looked at John. “There's no way Jasper Layton killed Delta.”

“But we couldn't really know until we talked to her whether Angela Layton might have done it.”

“We're back to square one.”

John held up the bundle of copied pages he'd brought with them. “We still have these.”

“Well, then, you look through those pages and see what you can find while I hunt down a gas station.”

John flipped through the pages while she navigated the side streets until she found a gas station near the highway that would take them back to Barstow County. When Miranda got back into the truck after pumping the gas, he looked up at her with a slight smile.

“Does this mean anything to you?” he asked, looking down at the page he was holding. “‘Jarrod Whitmore. Trainor and 7,'” he said. “Why does the name Jarrod Whitmore sound familiar?”

“Ever heard of the Bar W Ranch?”

“Of course. It's just a couple of miles down the highway from where I'm staying. I pass the place all the time.”

“Bar W is owned by Cal Whitmore. Jarrod is his youngest son. He's always been a little on the wild side.”

“What about the rest of it? ‘Trainor and 7'?”

“I'm not sure. Trainor is a road that crosses Route 7 about five miles south of the ranch, but I don't know...” She froze in the middle of putting her key in the ignition as the answer hit her like a hammer blow. “Oh, my God. Trainor Road and Route 7.”

“What is it?” John asked.

She turned to look at John, hear stomach roiling. “Do you remember that lady you met at my dad's place the other day? Rose McAllen?”

He frowned. “You mean the one with the little girl?”

“Right, her granddaughter, Cassie. Rose's daughter, Lindy—Cassie's mother—was killed in a hit-and-run on Route 7. To be more specific, she was killed on Route 7 right at the Trainor Road crossing. About a year after Hal McGraw's death. She was walking on the highway and a vehicle struck her and kept going. We've never found the person responsible.”

John looked down at the page he was holding. “This is Delta's handwriting, isn't it?” He showed her the copy.

Miranda nodded.

“So Delta—”

“She knew,” Miranda interjected. “She knew that Jarrod Whitmore was the one who hit Lindy McAllen and left her to die. In fact, she was blackmailing him about it.”

“We
were
looking for a crime someone might be willing to kill for,” John murmured.

Miranda met his troubled gaze, her stomach in knots. “I think we just may have found it.”

Chapter Fourteen

By the time they arrived back in Cold Creek, the sun was already dipping well toward the western horizon. Miranda pulled into the parking lot of the hardware store and shut off the engine to make a phone call to the Bar W Ranch, while John ran into the store to pick up some paint he was going to need when he got back to the work on his own place.

By the time he returned to the truck with his purchase, Miranda was off the phone, sitting with both hands tightly gripping the steering wheel and a frustrated look in her gray eyes.

She turned her head to look at him as he climbed into the passenger seat. “Got Mr. Whitmore's housekeeper. She said the Whitmores are in Montana looking at a couple of bulls for sale and won't be back until Monday. And Jarrod's in Ireland.”

“Ireland?” John asked, surprised. “What's he doing in Ireland?”

“The housekeeper didn't offer any other information.”

“Well, at least we have an extradition treaty with Ireland.”

“First we have to figure out if he was the person driving the vehicle that killed Lindy McAllen.”

“You'd have access to the case files, wouldn't you?”

Miranda started the truck and pulled out of the parking lot. “Yeah. I should be able to access them from my laptop at home, though. I noticed Sheriff Randall's truck was still at the station when we drove by. I don't want him asking questions about why I keep showing up at the station when I'm supposed to be on medical leave.”

“So let's pick up dinner somewhere, go back to your place and try to relax a little,” John suggested. He was beginning to think she was overtaxing herself so soon after the crash. She'd been rubbing her head for most of the drive back to Cold Creek, as if she was trying to ward off a headache, and her pale face and the dark circles under her eyes were starting to concern him.

“We have so many more pages to work through,” she protested.

“And they can wait until tomorrow,” he told her firmly. “Right now, you need some food, a nice hot bath and a good night's sleep. In that order.”

She slanted a look at him but didn't say anything else until they reached the small roadside barbecue stand near her house. They picked up barbecue brisket, baked beans and tangy vinegar slaw to share and were back at Miranda's house by five thirty.

Rex and Ruthie both greeted them at the front door when they entered, as good a sign as they were likely to get that nobody had tried to break into the house while they were gone.

John fed the cats in the kitchen while Miranda pulled an old folding card table and two chairs onto the front porch. By the time John went outside, she'd already laid out their meal on the table and had kicked back, her feet propped on the porch railing, sipping iced tea through a straw while she watched the ruby sunset sinking into the western horizon.

“Every time I wonder why I haven't moved out of this little bitty town, I look at one of those sunsets, breathe in the clean air and listen to the killdeer calling and I remember why I'm still here.”

“It's very different than where I'm from.” He took a sip of his own tea and followed her gaze toward the sunset. “But just as beautiful in its own way.”

“Miss the mountains?” She dropped her feet to the porch floor and turned to spoon a couple of slabs of brisket onto her plate.

“Some. Not as much as I would've thought.” There was a wild beauty in the flat scrubby plains of the panhandle that spoke to something inside him he hadn't even realized existed, a hunger for wide open spaces and endless horizons that couldn't be found in the hills of home.

“I used to think of this place as untouchable.” She added beans and slaw to her plate and poked a fork into a piece of brisket. “Crime didn't really exist here, you know? Not like in the bigger cities. I could count on my hand the number of serious crimes in the past ten years. Until now.”

“Can't keep the world out forever.”

“No.” She dropped her fork. “Now we have a murder, and an unsolved hit-and-run and God knows what else we're going to find once we figure out what kind of code Delta was using—”

“You can't keep the world out forever,” he repeated, reaching across the table and closing his hand over hers. “But maybe we should try to keep it out for tonight?”

She looked at him for a long, tense moment, then turned her hand so that her palm touched his. “Do you think we can really do that?”

“We could try.”

She gave him a narrow-eyed look for a second, then smiled. “Okay. No shoptalk for the rest of the evening.”

They settled in to a comfortable silence as they ate, but soon, with their stomachs full, the leftovers put up in the refrigerator and the card table restored to the hall closet, Miranda sat on the sofa across from John and shot him a questioning look. “What now?”

“What do you usually do when you have men over?”

Her gaze skittered away. “I don't usually have men over.”

“Ever?”

“I don't have a lot of time to date these days,” she said, sounding mildly defensive. “And when I do, we generally drive in to Plainview or Lubbock for dinner and maybe a movie, and then it's late, so I have to come home so I can get a decent night's sleep before work in the morning.” She pressed her face into her hands. “God, that sounds pathetic.”

“Yeah, well, the last woman I went out with didn't even know my real name, so I don't exactly have room to judge.”

She managed a smile. “I don't think this is what you had in mind when we agreed to no shoptalk.”

“Relax. I don't have anything in particular in mind.” He joined her on the sofa, sitting close enough that he could touch her if he liked, but not so close he would send her nervously skittering into the next zip code.

“Maybe we could ask each other questions,” she suggested. “You know, getting-to-know-you kind of questions.”

“Sure. You want to start?”

“Okay.” Her smile was a little nervous, but she turned her body toward him, giving him a nice view of her long neck and the ripe curves of her breasts beneath her thin blue T-shirt.

Progress, he thought, trying not to stare too obviously.

He must have failed, he realized a moment later when a look of amusement lightened her gray eyes and her nerves seemed to settle in a heartbeat. “I've already done a background check on you, so no easy questions from me,” she warned with a widening smile. “Let's start with a hard one. Ever milked a cow?”

He laughed. “Yes, actually. On my granddaddy's farm. He had a place west of the mountains, where he raised chickens and pigs and he had a milk cow and a couple of swayback mares he'd let us ride until we got too heavy for them.”

“You and your brother and sister?”

“Yeah. Josh, Julie and me.”

“All your names started with
J
?”

“Not one of my parents' better decisions. My poor mom went through the whole list every time she was trying to call any one of us.”

Miranda laughed, the sound warm and inviting, drawing him closer despite his intention to keep his distance. “My dad just had me, but when he gets mad, he uses my full name.”

He leaned even closer. “Which is?”

“Miranda Crockett Duncan.”

“Crockett? As in Davy?”

“Remember the Alamo,” she said with a sheepish laugh. “My dad tells me it was a compromise. He wanted to name me after his mother, Geraldine, and my mother wanted to name me after her best friend in grammar school, Mercedes Gonzales.”

“Miranda Mercedes Duncan?” He couldn't hold back a wince. “Yeah, I think Crockett was definitely the way to go.”

“You'd think. But there was this one kid in summer camp who found out my middle name and kept singing the Davy Crockett TV show theme whenever he saw me.”

“Summer camp where?”

“Down near San Antonio. Of course.”

“And you went to college at Texas Tech.”

“Wreck 'em, Tech!” she said with a big grin.

“So, have you ever actually left Texas?”

“Of course. I drove across the state line into Oklahoma once. Quickly.” She shot him a big grin. “Seriously, of course I've been other places. I went to Spain for a semester my junior year of college. I've seen Notre Dame in Paris and once talked my way onto a sculling crew practicing on the Thames.”

“What did a girl from Cold Creek, Texas, know about sculling?”

“Not a damn thing.” She laughed. “But the guys thought I was cute, so they nearly capsized the boat trying to teach me how it worked.”

He could picture the scene all too easily. There was something about Miranda Crockett Duncan that made a man want to do things he never realized he could. Or should.

He touched her cheek because it was there, softly curved and tempting, within his reach. Her smile faded and her gray eyes grew large and luminous as she gazed back at him in breathless anticipation.

He kissed her. Her response was swift and fierce, her hands threading through his hair and drawing him closer. Her lips parted, inviting him in, and before he knew quite how they got there, she was lying on her back beneath him, her hands sliding under his shirt until they touched his skin, her fingertips leaving a shivery trail of need the farther they traveled.

Suddenly, her fingers pressed against a tender place above his shoulder, and he couldn't quite swallow the hiss of pain it evoked.

She went still, drawing her head back to look at him. “Did I hurt you?”

“No,” he lied, dipping his head toward her again.

But she wriggled out from beneath him, pushing him back into a sitting position. “That was a bullet-wound scar.”

“I told you about that.”

“You said they were hunting you, but I didn't realize they actually shot you. I thought maybe you just got assaulted or something.” She reached for the collar of his shirt, tugging it aside until she found the corresponding entry wound scar. “How many other scars like this do you have?”

He nudged the waistband of his jeans down to show her where he'd taken a bullet just above his hip. “That wasn't much more than a flesh wound.”

“Is that it?”

He let the jeans fall back into place and lifted the bottom of his shirt to bare his right side. The wound there was the worst of his scars because it had taken surgery to remove the bullet lodged a few inches away from his hepatic artery. It had nicked his liver, but the damage to that organ had been minimal and it had healed on its own, once the surgeon had removed the bullet from its dangerous hiding place.

“How much damage did it do?” she asked quietly, her eyes wide with dismay.

“Not as much as it could have.”

“What did you do that made the Blue Ridge Infantry put you on their most-wanted list?”

He frowned. The night wasn't going the way he'd hoped at all. “I thought we weren't going to talk shop.”

“I don't consider this talking shop,” she said with a frown. “What did you do to cross them, exactly?”

“Remember I told you about that tough lady named Nicki who helped bring down the Virginia branch of the militia?”

Miranda nodded.

“Nicki was deep undercover. She had no contact with our boss, Alexander Quinn, except through me. I guess you could say I was sort of her handler.”

“And the BRI found out what you were doing?”

“Not exactly. What put me on their radar was my part in helping Nicki sneak their top man's wife and kid out of their cabin in the woods.”

Miranda's eyes narrowed. “Were they being held hostage?”

“Not exactly.” He settled back against the sofa cushions with a sigh. “Nicki had been trying to get close enough to find out the identity of the militia leader. People talked about him in hushed, almost reverent tones, but they never called him by name. The only thing she'd learned was that he had a medical condition that needed nursing care, and she made it her goal to be chosen as his medical caretaker.”

“What kind of condition?”

“Diabetes. The story was, he was having trouble stabilizing his blood sugar and he didn't trust doctors or hospitals.”

“And Nicki was a nurse?”

“She had paramedic training.”

“So she managed to get them to trust her?”

“We thought they did. One day, they told her she was in and arranged for her to go meet the leader.” There were some fuzzy places in his memory of what had happened next, but one thing he'd never forgotten was the gutting fear that had come over him when he'd realized the Blue Ridge Infantry was on to Nicki's scheme. “It turned out, Nicki had been working for the leader of the Virginia BRI the whole time she was in River's End. He was her boss at the diner where she'd worked as a fry cook.”

“My God. And she never had a clue? What about the diabetes—if he was having so much trouble getting his blood sugar regulated, didn't he show signs of it?”

“That's the thing. It was never Trevor Colley who was sick. It was his little boy.”

Miranda lifted her hand to her mouth. “Juvenile diabetes?”

He nodded. “The kid was really sick, and Colley let his fear of doctors and hospitals put that kid in danger. They took Nicki hostage and made her try to help the little boy while they waited for Nicki's backup to arrive so they could take them out.”

“Which is where you and your bullet wounds come in.”

“More or less. Nicki had gotten involved with someone else, someone in nearly as much trouble as she was, and he helped me get to her once the operation went crossways. Nicki convinced Colley's wife that they needed to get the little boy to a real doctor. That if they didn't do something soon, he'd die. Nicki's friend, Dallas, helped her get the woman and the boy to safety.”

“While you were doing what, offering a diversion for Colley and his men?”

He didn't answer. He didn't have to.