Saddle Up for Murder Read online

  “Well, let’s hope so,” Annie said fervently.

  “No kidding. The other scenario isn’t as pretty. If she was conscious, it might have taken her ten, twenty minutes to actually die. I’d hate to be awake for that.”

  Annie felt a bit sick.

  “Although, if the rope had been longer, she might’ve broke her neck, and death would be virtually instantaneous,” Leif prattled on.

  “LEIF!” Dan Stetson’s stentorian voice bellowed out, and the sheriff angrily strode toward them.

  “Leif, you don’t know what the Sam Hill you’re talking about. You haven’t seen the body, you don’t know the victim, and you sure as hell don’t know forensic science. So quite scaring Ms. Carson here and get back to your job.”

  Leif looked sheepishly at Dan.

  “Sorry, Sheriff. Annie was just asking if I knew anything about what happened when people hung themselves.. . .”

  “I find that highly unlikely. More likely you were just shooting off your mouth to make yourself look smart. If you want to pass that exam next month, I suggest you go back to your truck and pick up your law enforcement manual. You won’t be the first to flunk just because you think you already know everything.”

  Leif slunk away, avoiding Annie’s eyes.

  But Annie wasn’t looking at Leif. She wasn’t looking at anyone. She was looking inside her own mind, going over the scene she’d memorized of Ashley hanging motionless and silent in her cavernous barn. Something Leif had said was troubling her.

  “Sorry, Annie.” Dan put one of his massive paws on Annie’s arm. “Leif just gets carried away sometimes with his own so-called book smarts.”

  She shook it off. “Dan,” she said urgently. “Let’s go someplace private where we can talk.” She motioned to the tack room, off the stables. It was as peaceful a place as any on her ranch right now. Once inside, she dusted off a chair and motioned for Dan to sit down. She sat on the only other chair in the room. Annie didn’t often have human visitors here.

  Dan’s cell phone squealed. He gave a short curse and jabbed a button on the screen with one of his large fingers.

  “Stetson.”

  He listened intently for a minute, gave a curt “Thanks,” and put the phone away.

  “What was that?”

  Dan sighed. “I’m telling you this because Ashley’s death occurred on your property, understand? It is not for public consumption, which includes Leif, and most important Lavender. No one is to know what I’m about to tell you. Understood?”

  Annie nodded meekly. Dan had been a lot more circumspect about sharing information about ongoing cases with her since the last homicide. She was grateful to get any tidbit at all.

  “The autopsy results are in on Eloise Carr. Coroner suspects a drug overdose. He’s sending off for a tox report now.”

  “So . . . suicide or homicide?”

  “We don’t know yet. But it’s looking more like the latter, based on what we found today. That’s why I need you to tell me everything you remember when you walked into the barn this morning.”

  Annie looked directly at Dan. She took a deep breath.

  “I needed to stock more hay in the tack room. The barn doors weren’t locked; they never are.”

  “They were when we got here.”

  “That was to make sure no one went in without me knowing it. Normally, they’re always unlocked. When I need hay when it’s dark out, I don’t want to fiddle with any locks. Besides, no one steals hay.”

  “You’d be surprised. But go on.”

  “I had a dolly with me for transport, but I put it to one side so I could use both hands to open the doors. Then I flipped on the light switch on the left. I immediately saw Ashley’s body. It was absolutely still. She was just hanging there. There was no question that she was dead, probably for quite a few hours, so I didn’t bother checking for a pulse.”

  Which was the last thing I wanted to do, anyway, she thought.

  “I won’t deny that I was upset, but I knew you’d be asking me questions later, so I tried to take in the scene as best as I could before calling 911. I didn’t touch anything—honest—beyond the barn door handles and a hay bale I sat on for about ten seconds. Besides, I had gloves on the whole time I was in the barn.”

  Dan slowly nodded.

  “I looked for a suicide note, or anything she might have left behind. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And that’s what’s bothering me now. I’ve just assumed that Ashley committed suicide. But, Dan, now it just doesn’t make sense. Sure, her feet were just three feet off the ground, but no one can jump three feet in the air, grab a noose, and put it around their neck. Can they? I mean, wouldn’t you expect to find a bale of hay nearby, or something that she would have used to get her neck into the noose?”

  “You nailed it, Annie.” Dan’s voice was grim. “I just wanted to make sure you hadn’t moved anything that would have fit the other scenario. Tony’s tried to do exactly what you’ve described—he can’t do it, and he’s one of our fittest officers. The absence of a stool, plus scratch marks on both her hands and neck, make it pretty clear that Ashley Lawton was murdered. And fighting for her life to the bitter end.”

  CHAPTER 8

  THURSDAY EVENING, MAY 5

  By five o’clock, everyone had finally packed up their gear and left. Dan and Tony were the last to go, and their final act of the day was to silently transfer ten bales of Timothy from the hay barn to Annie’s tack room. They did it without asking. Annie was impressed.

  The barn had lost all semblance of a neat and tidy receptacle for sweet-smelling hay. The “accident scene” tape that had been tacked up upon arrival had been replaced with tape proclaiming CRIME SCENE: DO NOT CROSS. It would remain there, Dan reminded Annie, until the Suwana County Sheriff’s Office told her otherwise. This did not impress Annie.

  “I have no intention of entering that structure until Lavender’s given it a good smudging,” she told the sheriff. She was joking, of course. Her half sister had once smudged her own home, and it had taken weeks to get the cornmeal out of the corner crevices. She could well imagine the rat infestation if she repeated the Native American ceremony in her barn.

  “Nothing personal, Annie, just standard police procedure,” Dan replied. “We just want to make sure that no one goes in until we’re sure we didn’t leave some key piece of evidence behind.”

  “Speaking of keys,” Tony interrupted, “we found a couple on the body. I don’t suppose either looks familiar to you?” He pulled on a pair of latex gloves as he spoke, then reached into a thick paper evidence bag, pulling out a plastic bag that held the items. One looked like an ordinary door key, with wispy green yarn tied to the top. The other was more mysterious. It had a black plastic covering and unusual markings. Annie peered at both.

  “Nope,” she said. “Never seen them before.”

  Tony nodded, and sealed the bag with tape.

  “And, just for the record, what size shoes do you wear?”

  “Jeez, Tony! We’re getting a bit personal, aren’t we?”

  “We found traces of a couple of different shoe prints inside. As well as fingerprints. We’ve got your prints on file from the last case, but it would help us eliminate you from our long list of suspects if you’d tell us this detail.”

  This was Tony being droll.

  “Eight and a half. Anything else?”

  “Who else has been in your hay barn recently?”

  “Aside from half the deputies from the Sheriff’s Office today? No one. ’Cept me, of course.” Although she said nothing, Annie felt uneasy about the realization that unknown people had been traipsing through her farm structure. Obviously, Ashley had been there. But others? As in Ashley’s killer? It was downright creepy.

  “So what do you think at this juncture? Should I be concerned that the killer might return?”

  Dan and Tony looked at each other. Dan cleared his throat.

  “I think the chances are pretty close to nil. But it wouldn’t
hurt for you to take that .30-.30 out of your truck and lug it into your house.”

  For once, Annie decided to take the sheriff’s advice.

  * * *

  At ten o’clock that night, she was aiming the shotgun straight into her sheep pasture.

  Watching the deputies, EMTs, and paramedics swarm around her farm all day had exhausted Annie. After she’d fed the horses, she’d obediently unbolted her Winchester from the gun rack in her Ford and taken it inside, where she’d cleaned and loaded it. One restorative glass of Glenlivet after that had done her in. She’d tumbled into bed without having eaten dinner, still fully clothed. A few hours later, Trotter’s frantic hee-hawing brought her instantly to her senses. Grabbing her parka and her shotgun, she’d raced to her truck, heaved it into reverse, and barreled down the back road to her sheep pasture. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her horses in the paddock, ears forward, uneasily at attention. She noticed Wolf beside her in the cab only when she pulled up to the pasture gate.

  She jumped out, Wolf instantly following her, and trained her eyes on the dark landscape in front of her. Trotter was still braying, although not as urgently. A cluster of sheep huddled around the donkey, plaintively baaing. The ones who couldn’t get close enough to their savior were jumbled in the rain shelter in the pasture. From her vantage point, they looked like one indistinct mass of white. Wolf bounded away; she had no doubt he was in hot pursuit of a predator’s scent. She brought the Winchester to her shoulder and slowly scanned the interior, and then the perimeter of the fence line. She saw and heard nothing except the sonorous drip of dew falling from heavy leaves to the mossy earth.

  Finally, she put down the gun, opened the pasture gate—still firmly locked—and walked inside, threading her way through the mass of ewes and lambs. She reached into her parka, then pulled out a dusty carrot and a couple of horse treats and handed them to the sheep’s protector.

  “Good job, Trotter. Good job.” Trotter stopped braying long enough to eat his reward.

  Once Annie was sure that the predator was truly gone, she called for Wolf, who took a full minute to reappear. He came jogging out from the forest, near the area where Annie had found the makeshift campsite a few days before. Hell’s bells! How could she have forgotten to tell Dan and Tony about that? For all she knew, it might be the hideout for Ashley’s killer. He might be there now.

  Scrambling back into her truck and calling for Wolf, she placed the shotgun by her side and maneuvered the vehicle down the old logging road. If someone was on her property, she was damn well going to know about it. As she rounded the corner leading to the site, she dimmed her headlights. Anyone who was in the vicinity undoubtedly was already aware of her presence, but she wanted to give them as little help as possible. All was quiet and immensely dark in the area where she’d first seen the fire pit and frayed army bedroll. She reached into her glove compartment, pulled out a flashlight, and turned it on. The batteries were dead. And the replacement batteries were back in her home. She breathed softly for a minute, straining to hear any noise outside. Again, the forest was silent. Well, either her visitor was a trained sniper who knew how to keep every muscle tightly coiled, or no one was there. She didn’t feel like taking any more time to find out. She put the truck in reverse and eased back along the logging road, hoping that the ring of a weapon firing wouldn’t pierce the night air as she did so. When she found a small clearing, she made a neat three-point turn and headed back to the farm. The house was dark; she hadn’t taken the time to switch on her outside light. What a crack detective she was turning out to be.

  But the motion detector light by the paddock area was shining brightly. This was hardly alarming, as Annie closed her stall doors only while the horses were eating their dinners. This was merely to ensure that everyone ate the right supplements and there was no fussing over whose dinner mash was bigger or who got more hay. The rest of the time, the horses could come and go from their stalls as they pleased. If someone wanted to take a constitutional in the paddock at three o’clock in the morning, they were free to do so, but under the light of several motion detector bulbs strategically placed in the stall beams.

  She parked her truck by the light. A chorus of low nickers greeted Annie as she approached the paddock. Murmuring to her horses, she ducked into the tack room and grabbed a flashlight that still had juice. Outside, she could see the forms of all her horses along the back fencing. No one appeared upset, so Annie merely rubbed the necks of Baby and Sam, who happened to be closest to her, and headed back up to her home. She swept the walkway with the flashlight as she trudged up the hill. Once inside, she heaved a long shudder of stored anxiety. Wolf was the only one who seemed refreshed from the outing; he looked at her, tail wagging, as if to thank her for enlivening his usual boring evening with a late-night truck ride and romp through the forest.

  Glancing at her phone, she noticed the red message light was flashing. Marcus. She’d forgotten all about their now-ritual nightly chat. Well, it probably was for the best. She’d endured more than her share of horrors today, but all she needed now, she told herself, was a good night’s sleep. Then her life could start again.

  Her cell phone buzzed from the inside of her parka, where it had lain all day. Pulling it out, she recognized the California area code. She reluctantly punched the accept button.

  “Annie, it’s Marcus. I’ve been trying to reach you all day. Are you all right?”

  He was the first person to ask. She burst into tears.

  CHAPTER 9

  FRIDAY, MAY 6

  “You have got to stop taking foolish chances.”

  “Excuse me, Dan? Do I not have a right to protect my property from unwanted squatters?”

  “You do. Try calling 911 next time.”

  “Well, I would have, if I’d seen the guy. But my flashlight was dead.”

  “That is exactly what I’m talking about! Let us do the investigating, not you!”

  “What, and have a couple of your big lugs thrashing around the forest? Compared to my skills at stealth and sneakiness?”

  “What stealth? I thought you drove your rig down here.”

  “Well, I’m not entirely stupid.”

  “Not entirely.”

  Dan and Annie glared at each other while Tony and two other deputies resolutely sifted through the detritus left in the now-deserted campsite. According to Tony, whoever had been staying here probably had vacated before Annie made her late-night drive-by. The fire had long been extinguished, he said, and Annie couldn’t imagine anyone huddling out here without its warmth.

  “Maybe,” Tony said when Annie suggested this theory. “But we’ve uncovered two empty fifths of Old Crow, so liquid warmth was in ample supply.”

  That was less than reassuring.

  Fortunately, Dan had not berated her for failing to tell him about the transient’s site the day before. He’d saved all his criticism for her decision to check out the space, alone, in the dead of night, even if she did have her shotgun and faithful hound by her.

  “Would the two of you quit bickering for one second? I found something.” Kim Williams strode toward them, holding an evidence bag in her latex-gloved hand. It was an unusually warm day for May, almost seventy degrees under a near-cloudless sky, and a thin line of perspiration creased Kim’s upper lip. Her uniform could not hide the well-toned muscles of her arms and legs. She should have been a bodybuilder, Annie thought, instead of a lowly deputy who had to take Dan’s orders.

  Dan peered inside the bag and sniffed.

  “Well, that’s consistent with what I saw last night.”

  “What?” Annie said the word crossly. She was unduly irritated that she was being left out of the look-what-I-found game.

  Kim closed the bag carefully. “It’s remnants of meth, Annie. I hate to tell you this, but I think that fire was used as a makeshift chemical lab, not for keeping warm. We found empty Sudafed packets back there”—she nodded to the dense forest beyond—“and an empty blowtor
ch just off the road.”

  “Great. My innocent little lambs were within spitting distance of crazed druggies who could have blown up the place. Did they leave their business card, by any chance?”

  “Not in so many words. But we’ll test the bedroll and the blowtorch for DNA and fingerprints. And anything else we find.”

  “Is the place contaminated? Do I need to don a hazmat suit just to feed my sheep?”

  “This was a small-time operation, in the open air. My guess is whoever stayed here was making enough for personal consumption but not enough to sell on the street. We’ll clean up the place thoroughly before we leave. You and the sheep shouldn’t suffer any ill effects.”

  “Well, thank god for that. What do you make of the lamb?”

  Annie was referring to the dirty little toy lamb that she’d discovered on her first trip here. It was still wedged in the tree where Annie had left it when the Sheriff’s Office had arrived this morning. It now resided in yet another brown paper evidence bag.

  “Hard to say. One of the camp occupants could have been a female, maybe Ashley. We’ll be testing the stuffed animal, too.”

  As Kim walked away, Annie turned to Dan. “What did you mean, the meth was ‘consistent with what I saw last night’?”

  “Well, that’s a bit of a story.” Dan walked over to the bed of Annie’s truck, where he refilled his Styrofoam cup with more steaming coffee from the thermos Annie had brought with her. He took a sip and leaned back on the bumper. As always, Annie felt a bit jealous whenever she saw Dan drink black coffee. She needed the caffeine but couldn’t stomach it unless it was fully loaded with milk and sugar, and preferably cream.

  “I met Ashley’s mother last night,” he said grimly. “Interesting encounter. You’d think the mom might be a bit broken up about the tragic death of her twenty-year-old daughter. Not this lady. ’Course, she was stoned out of her mind. The news might just now be sinking in. Couldn’t tell me a thing about her daughter—where she had last worked, where she lived, who her friends were, or even the name of her boyfriend. All she wanted to know was whether she could sue you, since you provided the barn in which Ashley died.”