Lindsay McKenna - Deadly Silence

“The housekeeper will have lunch waiting for us,” he growled, flipping his cell phone closed. The limo crawled along. The sky was cloudy and it looked like it was going to snow again. Carter hated going through town because he saw the fire station where Sinclaire worked. It always compounded the rage that was never far beneath the surface.

Pouting, Clarissa said, “All right then, drop me off at the Aspens restaurant on your way home. Bob can pick me up when I’m finished eating.”

Carter felt torn. He’d married Clarissa a year after Gloria’s death. As a senator, he needed a wife at his side. She was a tall, lissome woman who came from a rich banking and ranching family in Cheyenne. She was only twenty-nine to his thirty-five years of age, but astute and selfish as hell. Still, Clarissa was the ideal Washington, D.C., wife. She was cultured, a true political animal like him, and she desired power. Carter felt she had married him because he was a second-term senator for the state of Wyoming. She had her own agenda she wanted to pursue.

“All right,” he murmured. “I know you have quilting friends here you want to chat with over lunch,” he murmured. Tapping Bob on his thin shoulder, he asked his long-time driver to turn and drop his wife off at the Aspens. The driver nodded and turned down another street in the center of town.

Pleased, Clarissa gathered up the snakeskin purse that matched her heels. She was dressed in a black wool pantsuit, white silk blouse and red silk scarf. The red of the silk matched her shoulder-length hair. “Good. After lunch, I’m going to walk over to Quilter’s Haven. I want to see what new fabrics Gwen has gotten in for spring.”

He managed a wry smile. “I imagined you would do that.” In some ways, Carter thanked God for his wife’s passion for embroidery and for her cousin, Julie Neustedder, who was a famous quilting teacher over in Cheyenne. That was how they’d met: there was a quilting fest at the local high school, with two hundred quilts hung for the public to appreciate. Clarissa had been there with her famous cousin. Carter had come because, as a senator, he always went to big events where he could press the flesh and mingle. That was part of the political game. He had found Clarissa a beautiful jewel among the ranching and mining middle class at the quilt festival.

After dropping Clarissa off in front of a restaurant bedecked with a red-and-white-striped awning, Carter climbed back into the car. His wife was happy now. And so was he.

“Home, Bob.”

“Yes, sir,” the fifty-year-old balding, bespectacled man murmured.

Sitting back, Carter felt his stomach knot and unknot. When he was alone and there was nothing to do, the memories of what he’d done always came back to him. He blamed it on guilt. Carter didn’t feel he should feel guilt about a damned thing. The limo sped up as they left the plaza area and headed up the hill toward his home on Moose Road, near the Teton National Forest, and Carter sighed.

When he’d been able to get back from Cody to Jackson Hole, knowing his family had died in that fire, he’d gone straight to the fire chief, Doug Stanley, a forty-five-year-old of German-English descent. Carter had stormed into Stanley’s office to find out why his family had been left to burn alive, and the chief had defended the man at the tip of that spear: Matt Sinclaire.

Carter snorted softly. Firefighters, like lawmen, stuck together and were thick as thieves. Stanley had argued that Sinclaire had done everything humanly possible to save the lives of Carter’s family. There was the blizzard of the century howling through at the time, the roads were not plowed, the country trucks had been ordered to stay off them due to the danger. Snow was piling up so fast and furiously it was impossible to clear the roads. And then, because the spring thaw was underway, Carter’s muddy two-mile-long road was a mire. Sinclaire had ordered the two trucks up the hill and they had both got stuck a mile away from the burning home.

Smiling a little, Carter tapped his fingers on the leg of his expensive black pin-striped suit pants. He’d waited a year after his family’s deaths and then he’d gotten even. Everyone thought a senator was clean, but Carter wasn’t. He knew how to grease the wheels politically and how to manipulate to get whatever it was he wanted. Through Gerald Vern, his most trusted office staffer, Carter had hired a professional arsonist and hit man. Frank Benson, who lived in Driggs, Idaho, about fifty miles from Jackson Hole was paid a hundred thousand dollars and he’d partially fulfilled his contract.

Carter was unhappy when he found out Sinclaire’s daughter had managed to escape the flames; he was very pleased when he found out Megan Sinclaire had gone mute. That was some payback, but not enough.

Flexing his fist, Carter looked to his right to the elk range. The elk always came out of the mountains to be fed and to winter over near Jackson Hole in a range thousands of acres long and fenced. He saw that about half the thousands of animals had already gone back to the mountains. It was, after all, April. The snow wouldn’t melt until early June and the elk were going to the higher elevations to calve.

Rubbing his jaw, he thought about contacting Benson again. It had been two years since Bev Sinclaire had been shot in the head. Carter still wanted Megan dead. He wanted Sinclaire to feel all the anguish and loss he’d felt. Since the fire chief had staunchly defended his employee’s actions, Carter knew a civil trial to sue Sinclaire would do no good. Rubbing his hands together, Carter gloated over the surprise hit on Sinclaire’s family. He smiled a little. Benson was so good at his job that the police had never found the culprit. And he wanted it to stay that way.

“Soon…” he murmured to no one in particular. Peyton had found that timing was everything. Two years had passed and Sinclaire had moved into town and lived in a one-story ranch house a couple of blocks away from the fire station. Things had settled down in this backwater town. Most people now gossiped and talked about other things rather than Bev Sinclaire’s unsolved murder. It was time to strike again. One final, last time…

“I KNOW LIEUTENANT SINCLAIRE is going to be happy about all this,” Cat Edwin said, sitting at the table eating dinner with Casey.

Sighing, Casey shrugged. “I feel ambivalent about it, Cat.” She picked at the romaine and tomato salad Cat had made for them. She’d gotten home an hour earlier, climbed out of her ranger uniform and gotten into a pair of jeans and a green long-sleeved cotton pullover.

“Why?” Cat asked, eating hungrily. She’d been on duty for twelve hours and had the next two days off.

Casey really didn’t know Cat that well; they were new roommates. “It’s just me,” she murmured, chewing on a tomato. She liked the black-haired woman with intense blue eyes. Her square face went with her solid, large-boned build. Cat was no shrinking violet insofar as women went. She was five foot eleven inches tall, weighed a hundred and sixty pounds and was pure muscle. In one room of their large apartment was a complete gym where Cat worked out religiously for at least an hour a day. Casey knew that firefighting was physical and Cat had to be in top shape to work alongside her male compatriots.

“That guy,” Cat said between bites, “is a good dude. What happened to him is a crime—literally.” She wiped her mouth with the yellow linen napkin and settled it back onto her lap. “I’m not assigned to his watch, but all the guys talk favorably about Matt.” She grinned a little and said teasingly, “You know he’s single.”

Casey cringed inwardly; she wanted nothing to do with men. She was still working through the devastation of nearly being beaten to death by five potheads. “My focus isn’t on relationships right now, Cat. I just graduated and I need to do well here at my first assignment.”