Tara Quinn - Colton's Lethal Reunion

A boot that matched those the ranger had been wearing.

“Why would he leave without his boot?” Kerry asked. “If he was sitting there in his vehicle waiting for us, he wouldn’t have been taking off his boots.”

He knew she was right. Didn’t want to worry about it at the moment. “Maybe he had an itch,” he said, inanely, and then, “Come on, Kerry, we need to get down off this mountain before he comes back.”

She nodded. “I know.” And pushed the door forward enough that she could scoot around it, scraping against the mountain as she went, and then toward the boot.

Rafe followed her. He wasn’t leaving her out there in the growing night alone.

“Look,” she said, pointing toward tamped down underbrush. “Someone dragged something heavy…”

“Like a carton of ammunition.”

She’d moved forward again, toward another drop-off on that side of the road. He’d grown up in those mountains, knew that they were filled with gullies and valleys, with steep slopes and dangerous, unforeseen drops. He knew how easy it would be for someone to fall and get hurt, if she missed just one step out there…

“Kerry, please,” he said, heart pounding as he followed her.

“Or like a body,” she said, her voice changed, shaking, and it took him a second to realize that she was responding to his comment about a carton of ammunition—or something else heavy having been dragged.

The land was mostly in shadows, but the setting sun still shone clearly in parts, highlighting the twisted body lying at an obviously lethal angle thirty feet below.

“Come on, we have to go,” she said, swinging her gun from side to side, watching as they hurried back to the Jeep.

“That was the ranger.” What the hell had they gotten themselves into? Not much point now in the phone call he’d been going to make—requesting a transfer for Grant Alvin. The ranger had just been sent much further away than he’d anticipated.

“I know it was. And I also know there’s someone else out here. We have to go. To get help.” She bit out the words with every step she took, pulling her phone off the clip at her hip. “There’s no reception,” she said, looking down, and in that instant, a shot fired out, dinged off the mountain less than a foot away from them.

Pushing Kerry into the Jeep in front of him, Rafe climbed in behind her, started the vehicle and sped off. Another shot rang out, but he made it round the bend before it could hit the car. He was driving too fast, prayed to God another vehicle wasn’t coming up around a bend, but knew that he couldn’t slow down. He had to get them the hell out of there before the gun behind them caught up.

What in the hell had just happened? Shaken mentally as well as physically, Kerry had a hand on the dash, turning in her seat to watch ahead of them as well as behind him, as Rafe sped the rest of the way down the mountain. Neither one of them spoke. All focus had to be on getting down to safety.

And when they’d reached the end of the drive, when Rafe had maneuvered them safely to the road leading into town, her brain started to shoot forward. The first thing she did was make a phone call, getting a specially trained rescue crew out to retrieve the ranger’s body. While it was too dangerous to drive up the mountain in the dark, Chief Barco was positioning a car at the base of the mountain to prevent anyone from leaving before daybreak.

Of course, the perp could have already exited the drive, a minute or two after they did. With all of the turns in the road, she wouldn’t have known if the black SUV she’d seen was right behind them or not. He could have waited until her Jeep was out of sight and then turned in the opposite direction. Away from town. He could be long gone.

Still, she’d intended to drop off Rafe and head back out there to explore at least the lower part of the mountain drive, but the chief had other ideas.

For the moment, she’d been ordered to stand down. Worse, he was sending a patrol car to sit outside her home for the rest of the night.

She’d been shot at. End of story.

Except that it wasn’t.

“Who’s out there?” she asked Rafe, completely frustrated as she hung up the phone. She wasn’t good at inactivity. “And why?” Her whole life, the way she’d dealt with stress was by taking action. Same for combatting fear. You met it head-on. Dealt with it. You didn’t hide in your home behind other officers at your front line.

“And what in the hell is going on up that mountain?” she asked when her first question received no answer.

“You asked him about guns and implied something about drugs,” Rafe said slowly, his gaze focused on the road in front of them, as though he wasn’t going to relax a muscle until they’d made the last five miles into town. “You really think that there’s something big going on,” he continued.

“Big enough to warrant killing Tyler,” she said. “I know my brother wasn’t involved in anything illegal that last year, but before that?” She hated that the question even had to be out there.

“It’s possible he just stumbled into something,” she continued, thinking out loud more than anything. “Tyler, I mean. But…you saw the photos from Tyler’s fall,” she said.

What she was about to say was the fact most on her mind at the moment. And the one she left out of her verbal report to the chief. Someone else might notice. They might not. For the moment, until she could think, she was keeping silent.

Rafe’s nod was short. Succinct.

“Same way the head was bent back beneath the body…there’s no way two falls could end up with the body landing so closely the same.”

“Unless the bodies were held, probably by the neck, and then pushed in exactly the same way,” Rafe said, earning her respect. He was right there with her.

Just as she’d have expected her best friend from long ago to be.

“I’m not getting why the ranger was killed,” she said, less than a minute later. The town’s lights were up ahead. Still another mile or so away. “He clearly wasn’t out there protecting us. To the contrary, he wanted us gone. Like he was protecting something else.”

She was back to the drugs and guns. She couldn’t get off them, which told her that she was likely on the right path.

One that led, somehow, to Odin Rogers.

“Could be some kind of turf war and we drove into the middle of it.”

“I need to get back up there and find the casings from the shots that were fired. To run ballistics on the guns.”

Luckily they had a small crime lab right there in Mustang Valley, donated years ago by the Coltons.

“From what I heard of your conversation, you’ve been told to stay home for the rest of the night.”

“That doesn’t please me,” she said. But she knew better than to disobey the chief’s orders. He was chief for a reason. He knew the area. He knew his job. And she valued hers.

“I wonder if whoever killed the ranger was with him when he approached us? He had to get up there somehow and we never heard or saw another vehicle. Alvin walked up to us, walked away. Maybe whoever was driving the black SUV had parked the vehicle farther down and then followed the ranger up. Could be that person heard me asking Alvin about Tyler’s death. But then he’d know that the guy was a jerk. Warned us off. Why would that get him killed?”

Rafe’s shake of the head was brief. They’d entered Mustang Valley proper and he’d slowed to the speed limit.

“Whatever is going on must be big since it was worth killing not one, but two men over it.”

She glanced at him. “You believe Tyler was murdered.”