Bitter Rain (Kate Fox Book 3) Page 2

  I stopped short of shoving him. “What the hell are you doing? That was a footprint!”

  He glanced down between his feet. “I don’t think so.” He pulled his phone from his shirt pocket inside his jacket. “I’ll call Schneiderman now.”

  If I winged Big Dick, would it hit Barnett’s head before he ducked? Probably not, and I didn’t want to damage my buddy Dick. I swung the light up and lit the back of a billboard. Not exactly a billboard, but a seven-by-seven-foot piece of plywood nailed to plank scaffolding. The front side of that sign showed a hand-painted picture of a cow and the background of grassy hills. In white letters, it said, “Welcome to Grand County, Best Cow Country in the World.” To the bottom right of the cow, in bold black, it read, “This Is No Bull.”

  “Looks like we’re in Grand County,” I said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Barnett didn’t hide the irritation in his gravelly voice. “There’s nothing to handle here.”

  Please help me.

  Her words ricocheted in my head, sending a jolt through me.

  Not sure why I didn’t tell Barnett about the phone call. Well, yeah, I was sure. He wanted to make me look bad so Ted could get elected next time. He’d find a way to sabotage the investigation to make me look like a fool, and this girl might need help. The less Barnett knew about my business, the better.

  He had a point, though. This looked to be nothing more than an abandoned car with no sign of foul play. Except I heard Carly’s voice in the other girl’s words, pleading with me to help her this time.

  I didn’t talk to Barnett. No sense in pretending we were friends.

  He followed me while I leaned close to the ground. “What is it you’re looking for?”

  I mumbled to make it clear I didn’t need or want his help. “A clue about the driver.”

  “The only clue you’re gonna find is a Budweiser can or some coyote-eaten puke. No telling how long this car’s been here. Maybe a couple of days. I haven’t been out this way since last Saturday night’s patrol.”

  That didn’t account for the still-warm hood. “Maybe so, but it won’t hurt to check things out while I wait for the sun to come up.”

  Barnett’s voice ground like sand on a shovel. “Like I said, rez car. They abandoned it for us to clean up—like they do everything. We tow it, sell it for scrap. I’ll make sure Grand County gets its share of the proceeds.”

  Too bad I hadn’t brought some gloves or a cap. It might smell all fresh and growy, like spring, but before the sun got around to its job, it felt more like winter out here.

  Please help me.

  Was she safe or in danger? The dusty tracks held no answers.

  The first birdsongs floated on the air. Barnett leaned against his pickup, arms folded, the annoyed set of his face clearer as the sun bloomed in the east.

  Enough of his silent disapproval. “Feel free to head back to Potsville.”

  He faked a breezy tone we both knew was full of crap. “Nope. It’s bad practice to leave one officer alone.”

  Since all the Sandhills sheriffs were the lone law officers in counties the size of small states, that was a bogus remark.

  “Suit yourself.” By now the sun shed just enough light so I could expand my search. I walked across the highway to the east, shutting off Big Dick and stowing him in my utility belt. Damn. I hadn’t slipped my gun into my holster. I often forgot to carry it. Honestly, I hated it.

  I didn’t want to go back to the car and get it now because it would look amateurish in front of Barnett. Why didn’t he just go home and leave me to it?

  Because he wanted to be a jerk. He was pretty good at it.

  I searched the ditch along the road, really hoping not to find a body. When my phone chirped I jumped and pulled it out of my coat pocket all in one move.

  “Hi, Sarah.” My sister-in-law and best friend.

  She sounded like a bowl of cold manure. “I’ve been throwing up for two hours. I know I’m probably waking you up, but I’m miserable. Tell me about the date you went on last week.”

  Coming on to five months pregnant, Sarah had morning sickness daily, along with noon and night sickness. I turned my back on Barnett and hunched over to talk to Sarah. “I’d love to distract you with my latest failure, but you laughed so hard when I told you the first time, you peed your pants and made me promise not to tell you again.”

  Sarah sounded more pathetic than I’d ever heard her. “I changed my mind.”

  At least I had a good excuse to save me from a humiliating memory. “I can’t. I’m on a call.”

  “Oh. Th-th-th-that’s okay.” She suddenly burst into tears.

  Whoa. Sarah hated tears, sympathy, all that squishy girl stuff. It’s something we had in common. “Sarah. Jeez, stop. I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.”

  “Damn it.” She sniffed and cried again. “I hate this fricking hormonal rollercoaster. I cry all the time.”

  A stabbing ray of sunshine burst over the hill. The pasture came alive in green, and the birds increased their volume. The air stilled, hovering in a lull before the day started in earnest.

  But right now, I was letting down my best friend, ticking off a coworker, not helping someone who’d asked for my help, and generally not living up to any great potential. So I compounded my loser streak by offering stupid comfort. “You’re about to enter your last trimester. It won’t be long before you have your baby.”

  That elicited another bout of tears. “What the hell was I thinking? I can’t be a mother.”

  I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “Get some perspective. You and Robert will be the best parents ever. I’ve really got to go.

  She sniffed a final time. “Okay. I’ll eat a saltine and think about your miserable love life to cheer me up.”

  When I put my phone in my pocket, I was surprised to see Barnett had crossed the road and was standing by me.

  He eyed the pocket where I’d deposited my phone. “First thing Sally does every morning is call her girlfriends. They can chatter on for hours, like hens, you know.”

  Since I couldn’t hit him, I stared at him with as much disdain as I could muster. “Maybe you don’t understand loyalty to friends.”

  He raised his lip in a snarl. “I know about friends. But you women have to talk it all out. Men, we do what needs doing.”

  Growing up in the middle of nine kids, I’d learned how to keep my mouth shut when I’d rather punch someone in the face. I turned from Barnett.

  The dawn vanished when I thought of the anguish in the girl’s voice. No!

  I put my head down and walked north on the highway.

  Barnett snarled at me, “Now what are you doing?”

  Ignoring him might feel good but wouldn’t be right. “Going to walk out this way for a bit and see if she left some clue.”

  He followed me. “What makes you think it’s a she?”

  I walked with my head down. “Just a guess.”

  He caught up with me. “I’m telling you—”

  I flipped my head up and glared at him with Dad’s Look. The one he gave us right before he put us on prison rations.

  Barnett stopped talking.

  We staged a standoff. I kept walking because I knew he wanted me to quit, and he stayed with me because he knew I wanted him to leave. What a pair.

  After a quarter mile Barnett stopped, panting at the exercise. “This is bull.” He spun around and stomped past the Grand County sign, never acknowledging the irony of “This Is No Bull” painted in the corner, and launched himself into his beater pickup.

  Smiling with grim satisfaction, I kept walking north until he’d sped over two or three hills.

  Then I jogged back to my cruiser, fired her up, and did a U-turn too. I headed back toward Hodgekiss.

  I didn’t want to give up searching for the girl, but Barnett was right. I wasn’t a TV Indian scout who could put an ear to the ground and hear hoofbeats. It wasn’t as if—

  I slammed on my brakes.

>   3

  Hurray for dewy May mornings, fresh grass, and damp sand. I pulled to the roadside, jumped out of the cruiser, and trotted a few feet ahead. The sandy tread of two-inch-wide tires laid a track across the highway.

  To the west, the track curved across the wet pasture. To the east, it ribboned over the highway to a gravel road. From there, it slipped off the gravel road and wound on top of a crest of hills across an empty pasture. Seemed awfully early for someone to be zipping cross-country on a dirt bike.

  If the bike had been coming from the abandoned car, its destination lay over those eastern hills. I hadn’t heard an engine while at the accident site, but whoever drove this bike might have used Barnett’s exit to mask his getaway. I hurried after the trail cut through the dew.

  The pasture opened up before me with a tall ridge about two hundred yards away. No cattle dotted the meadow, only grass, purple spiderwort, and yellow coneflowers.

  Green, wet, and high enough to cover my ankles, the grass had a good start on summer’s forage. Dew soaked my boots before I made it halfway to the hills, while the birds provided an ever-more boisterous soundtrack. There was nothing as beautiful as sunrise in the spring and summer on a grass-covered hill, the air coming alive with growth, the sky blue enough to taste.

  I trudged up the hill as the early morning sun brushed back the night’s chill. If memory served, the old Olson Ranch headquarters hunkered on the other side of this hill. No one had lived there for ten or fifteen years, and I’d only been there once as a high school freshman, when Danny Duncan had hijacked me, driven me to the crumbling buildings, and threatened to leave me there if I didn’t kiss him. I didn’t tell him he hadn’t needed to waste the gas. I’d have kissed him without the drive.

  I picked up my pace and, before long, reached the top of the hill and paused before starting down the other side. The ancient barn stood alongside decrepit wooden corrals. The old one-story farmhouse still had chipped and peeling paint. I hadn’t remembered the other giant pole barn and what looked like a cookhouse. Actually, there were quite a few things I hadn’t remembered, including an open structure that resembled a huge carport, the roof covered in military-type camo covering, with two pickups and a shiny green tractor parked underneath.

  I inhaled in surprise. “Would you look at that.”

  The more my eyes adjusted, the more I understood. What appeared to be old and abandoned was repaired, renewed, and disguised. Below me, a whole ranch headquarters stretched out. A ranch I knew nothing about. Way up here, snugged against the county line, over a half hour’s drive from even the smallest town, someone had set up a ranch headquarters.

  The Nebraska Sandhills are like a grass-covered Sahara Desert. The region takes up one-fourth of the state but boasts fewer than five thousand people. That’s .95 people per square mile. A surprisingly abundant bird population, despite a dearth of trees. Groundwater bubbles to the surface, creating multitudes of shallow lakes that wax and wane through wet and dry years. If you aren’t comfortable with your own self for company, you probably ought to keep driving on through.

  My county, Grand, accounted for about fifteen hundred of those good folks, and I was related to more of those than is seemly. With the cow-to-people ratio of about sixty to one, we knew a whole lot about everyone else. Or, at least we believed we did.

  If someone was determined to keep this construction project under wraps, it would take a lot of stealth, but it could be done. For instance, Barnett and I had been hanging around the car and walking the road for quite a spell and hadn’t seen hide nor hair of a vehicle.

  You’d need to arrange for materials and equipment to be delivered at night, when no one would notice. But even then, it seemed strange that word hadn’t spread about who bought this ranch. Usually, if an outsider poked his head around here, someone would end up talking to him and find out his story.

  The Olsons, the last owners, were old before I’d even been a thought, so I didn’t actually know them. My knowledge about this ranch could fit in a shot glass: The once mighty Olson ranch had been reduced to a bunch of smaller ranches. The last Olson, Oscar, passed away with no children of his own. I’d heard a distant nephew inherited the place.

  Apparently, that nephew had been busy.

  From my vantage on the hill, the sun highlighted rolling hills far into the distance. Nothing but sky so blue it hurt my eyes and empty pasture, except for the ranch below me. I started down the hill, picking my way through the clump grass and sand on the eastern slope. My breaths, boots swishing through the grass, and the birds broke the heavy silence of the morning.

  Two newish, if dirty, white Ford F-250 pickups were parked under the carport, and a spectacular old muscle car nestled between them, along with the shiny John Deere. Not many Sandhillers sprang for a tractor this extravagant. I could retire on what that baby cost. I rested my hand on the car, suspecting it was an expensive classic. Not being a classic car expert, I couldn’t tell the year, but it sported a Roadrunner decal and Plymouth logo. It had less dust on it than the dresser in my bedroom.

  There was no movement on the ranch. No cattle or horses in the corrals. No rooster crowing or chickens clucking. Not even a dog barked. Could be no one lived here. Maybe the nephew built this place from a fortune he had stashed. Might be he wanted a romantic Western homestead to visit on long weekends. Except it looked more like a movie set for the Dust Bowl than a weekend getaway. A curious contrast between expensive vehicles and purposeful dowdiness.

  The buildings huddled between two ridges of rolling hills. A windmill with solar panels attached stretched above the barn, waiting for the first morning breeze. On the eastern ridge, immediately above one of the houses, a brown camouflage-painted tank, probably a water cistern, perched like a gargoyle overlooking the compound. It probably held about three thousand gallons, and the only reason I knew that was because I’d had to replace the cistern at Frog Creek a few years back. Course, I’d positioned that one well away from the house and corrals in case it sprung a leak. It’s easier to lay some pipe than it is to repair flood damage.

  The tracks led across the compound to a dirt bike resting against the big house.

  It felt eerie walking into the ranch yard with no signs of life, like a ghost town. My boots ground on the dirt of the central compound. Greening weeds with a smattering of grass, what was probably the previous Mrs. Olson’s lawn, surrounded the house. All of the buildings, including the cookhouse and a few others with new construction made to look aged, were arranged in a merry-go-round formation along with the barn, like a modern version of circling the wagons. One of the smaller buildings might have been a chicken house with a small fence encircling it. But if any fowl lived there, they were oddly silent for daybreak.

  I walked to the dirt bike resting against the house. Heat radiated from the engine. The single-story ranch house was nothing fancy, but it had a new coat of beige paint with white splotches smeared on top to look like peeling paint from a distance. A concrete slab porch led to what looked like a solid metal door with a small window for a peephole. Maybe, since the nephew didn’t live here full time, he wanted the house secure. Most homes in the Sandhills didn’t even have locks, but a city dweller wouldn’t be comfortable with that. I knocked on the door.

  I didn’t wait for an answer but instead wandered to the side of the concrete porch to peer into a window. I leaned close, put my hands around my eyes, and squinted inside the dark house.

  Yikes! A pair of eyes stared back at me.

  I jumped away from the window and to the side of the house. Instinctively, I reached for my gun before remembering I wasn’t carrying it. But I’d reached for it. Maybe I would get used to it, after all.

  Since I had no weapon, I lowered my voice to the tough-girl range. “Grand County sheriff. Just want to talk to you.”

  Hot air close to my ear leaked a whisper. “Then talk.”

  How I didn’t scream was a mystery, but I did jump and spin around. A thin man, maybe fifty,
in a fluffy camo bathrobe stood with his hand in his pocket. The bulge could easily be a gun. He wore leather moccasins, looking new from Lands’ End, and his dark hair plastered to one side of his head and shot up straight on the other. A thick dust of black whiskers covered a pointy chin. He must have seen me coming and hid for the ambush. “What do you want?”

  I lifted my eyebrows and indicated his hand, trying to act way cooler than I felt. My heart banged against my ribs. “Got something in your pocket?”

  He studied me with skepticism. “No.”

  This was going well. “I’m Kate Fox, Grand County sheriff,” I repeated.

  “Yeah, so?” This guy wasn’t easily intimidated. Not that I had much intimidation potential right then.

  He could shoot me, bury me behind the cistern, and no one would know. I held up my hand in an “easy” gesture, and he tensed the arm that led to the hand in his pocket. I made steady eye contact. It might be cliché to say he had the beady eyes of a rat, but that’s what struck me. I kept my voice slow. “There’s an abandoned car on the highway, and I followed dirt bike tracks here. I wondered if someone picked up the driver.”

  “No.” He glared as if I were an idiot. “Now leave.”

  I cocked my head and smiled with deliberate falseness. “The tracks are fresh.”

  He mimicked my fake expression. “I went for a ride.”

  “You look like you just woke up.”

  He glanced at his robe. “Do I?”

  A bolt slid on the front door and it opened inward, followed by a woman’s voice sounding low and sleepy. “Marty? What’s going on?”

  I wasn’t buying her clueless, confused tone, betting she’d been the eyes behind the window.

  Marty’s voice didn’t soften. “Nothing, baby. Go back to bed.” Marty made his way to the doorway as if to defend the homestead. The door opened to a room hidden in shadows. I couldn’t see anything beyond a scratched round table near the door, the kind used for keys and mail.

  A blond woman, maybe forty-five, with a good inch of dark roots at her scalp and hair as attractively arranged as her husband’s—assuming she and Marty were married—appeared behind him. She wore a cotton nightgown that hit below her knees and didn’t leave me guessing about her pudgy form underneath it.