Tara Quinn - The Sheriff of Shelter Valley

His trained eye skimmed over the image of the nearly nude young woman found in the desert ten summers before. The carjackers had become rapists that time. Her car, a newer-model Buick, had turned up twenty miles farther down the road. Also smashed.

Greg frowned. Another front-end job.

“My instincts—” He paused. “My cop instincts are telling me there’s some connection here.”

“Why?” Culver asked, barely glancing at the photos. Of course, he’d seen them all before. Many times. As had Greg. “Why these two sets only? Why not look into the rash of heists down south?”

“Those cars were being put to use.”

“So?”

“Whoever’s doing this is taking brand-new or nearly new cars, expensive ones, and smashing them up.”

“Joyriders.”

Yeah. It happened. More often than Greg liked to admit.

And yet… “Look at these front ends,” Greg said, lining up a few of the photos on another part of the desk.

Burt looked. “They’re mangled.”

“They’re identical,” Greg insisted.

“They’re smashed, Greg.” Burt wasn’t impressed.

Hell, maybe he was letting it get personal. Maybe he should agree with his deputy and back away. Still…

“They all look like they hit the same thing at the same angle and speed,” he said slowly.

Pulling at his ear—something he only did when he was feeling uncomfortable—the deputy leaned his other hand on the desk and gave the photos more than the cursory glance he’d afforded them earlier. “Could be,” he said.

It would be pretty difficult, especially after the hard time he’d just given Greg, for the older man to admit he’d missed something that might be important. Greg had no desire to belabor the issue. His eyes moved to the table behind his deputy and the partially constructed jigsaw puzzle there, which gave Burt a moment to himself.

“Let’s not write off the past just yet” was all he said.

“I’ll order some blowups of these….”

Burt didn’t meet Greg’s eyes again as he left the room. Standing over the puzzle, pleased to fit in the first piece he chose, Greg sympathized with his friend and coworker. There was nothing a cop like Burt—or Greg—hated more than to have missed something important.

WHY HAD SHE THOUGHT this was a good idea? With her canvas bag clutched at her side, Beth stood in Bonnie Neilson’s sunny kitchen on the third Sunday in August, watching Ryan and Katie ignoring each other as they played quietly in the attached family room. She longed for the dingy but very organized interior of her rented duplex. Better the hardship you knew than one you didn’t.

The duplex wasn’t much, but for the time being, it was hers. She was in control there. Safe.

“Keith just went to town for more ice,” Bonnie was saying as she put the finishing touches on a delicious-looking fresh vegetable salad. Already in a basket on the table was a pile of homemade rolls. Really homemade, not the bread-machine kind she used to make…

Beth froze. She’d had a memory. A real one. She had no idea where that bread machine was, no picture of a kitchen, a home, a neighborhood, a town or state—but she knew she’d had a bread machine. And she’d used it.

And been chastised for it?

“Can I do something?” Beth asked, probably too suddenly, reacting to a familiar surge of panic. She needed something to occupy herself, calm herself.

Staying busy had worked for months. As far as she knew, it was the only thing that worked.

“You can—”

“Unca!” Katie’s squeal interrupted her mother.

The ensuing commotion as Katie tossed aside the magnetic writing board she’d had on her lap and jumped up to throw herself at her newly arrived uncle—and Ryan dropped the circular plastic shape he’d been attempting to shove into a square opening on the shape-sorter to make his way over to his mother’s leg—served to distract Beth. She was so relieved, she didn’t have nearly the problem she had anticipated with the arrival of Greg Richards.

Instead, she was almost thankful he’d come.

LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Beth had very mixed emotions about Greg’s presence at his sister’s house. Bonnie and Keith, her husband, had left to drive over to his grandmother’s. Katie was asleep in the new trundle bed in her room. Ryan was also asleep, his little body reassuring and warm against her. He’d climbed in her lap after lunch, when they’d all migrated to the sitting room before trying the new chocolate cream cheese dessert Bonnie had made that morning.

That was when Keith’s grandmother had called and Beth had suddenly found herself alone with a man who launched her right out of her element.

Not that she had any idea what her real element was. These days, all she had to go by was the Beth Allen Rules of Survival. A notebook with frighteningly few memories. Plus the perceptions she’d had, decisions she’d made, since waking up in that motel room.

He lounged on the leather couch, dressed in jeans and a cotton-knit pullover that emphasized the breadth of his chest. He was surveying her lazily, and appeared content to do so for some time to come. Beth didn’t think she could tolerate that.

“Bonnie said you’d explain about Grandma Neilson,” she reminded him. His younger sister had begged that Beth stay, insisting they’d only be gone a few minutes and she’d hate it if their day was ruined.

“She refuses Bonnie’s invitation to join us for dinner on a fairly regular basis, insisting she doesn’t want to impose, and then, inevitably, has some kind of mock crisis that’s far more of an imposition than her acceptance of the dinner invitation would’ve been.”

“Mock crisis?” Soothed into an unusual sense of security, Beth leaned back against the oversize leather chair she’d fallen into after lunch.

“Something that seems to need immediate attention, but that she could handle perfectly well by herself—or that turns out to be nothing at all. A toilet that might be clogged, for example. Or a strange noise in the attic, due to a loose shingle.” Greg was smiling.

“But today’s call—a seventy-five-year-old woman who’s lost electricity in half her house, including her refrigerator—sounds pretty legit to me.”

“Most likely a blown fuse.”

“Still, for a woman her age…”

“Baloney,” Greg exclaimed.

Ryan stirred, but settled back against her, his auburn curls growing sweaty where his head lay against her.

“She might be seventy-five years old, but she’s as feisty and as manipulative as they come—and I’ve loved her as long as I can remember.”

“You knew her before Bonnie and Keith got married?”

“She used to be the librarian at the elementary school. Every kid in town knew Mrs. Neilson. And loved her, too, I suppose. She’s been a widow since Keith’s dad was little. She’s also the strongest person I’ve ever met. She’d go to the wall for any one of us if she believed in our cause. Nothing as trivial as a blown fuse is going to get in her way. Lonna Neilson could rewire that whole house if she put her mind to it.”

“Then, why do Bonnie and Keith keep running over there?”

Greg’s shrug drew her attention to the width of his shoulders. Shoulders a woman could lay her head against…

If that woman wasn’t Beth Allen. Or Beth Whoever-she-was.

“In the first place,” he said, “because they never know whether she’s crying wolf or whether it might be the real thing.”

She liked that. A lot. That they didn’t give up on the old woman.

“And more importantly, because what’s really driving her to call is the need to know she’s loved. That’s why Bonnie always goes, as well. It takes both of them to either make her feel good enough to be happy at home, or to convince her to join them here.”