That gentleness was worth more to him than any passion. He tamed his kiss, caressing her lips with his rather than plundering. Sliding his tongue softly into her mouth to show her the delights he could offer there. To bring her along at her own pace, without overwhelming her.
It was a new experience for him, this freshness and inexperience. He feared damaging her in some way, making her afraid.
So he let her murmurs and the soft pliancy of her body against his guide him. As she grew ever softer against him, he was encouraged.
And increasingly wary. No more than this. Maybe not ever, but certainly not tonight. He didn’t want her to feel he had taken advantage of her. Not even a little.
Slowly he lifted his head. A little mew of protest escaped her, but he resisted his own desire to kiss her again.
There were limits to self-control, and he was perilously near the edge of his own. He waited, cradling her, until her eyes fluttered open. Deep violet pools that called to him. Then she smiled.
Relief washed through him. Carefully, allowing his reluctance to be evident, he released her. Then he touched her cheek with his fingertips.
“You’re so sweet,” he said.
Her smile widened a shade. “You’re so hot.”
He couldn’t help it. He was sure his grin was sappy, but there it was. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “Before the neighbors talk too much.”
“I said I didn’t care.”
“Maybe not right now. You could later.” He drew his fingers away. “We just met,” he reminded her. “Passion may be a great kick start, but it doesn’t guarantee anything you’d be happy about later.”
She nodded with clear reluctance. “You’re right.”
He slipped out just a moment later, then hit a dead run as he headed back to the motel and truck stop. It had grown truly chilly outside, and it was dark beneath the big old trees. His body still hummed with the needs she had evoked in him, and his muscles still felt her in his arms, tucked against him.
There was something about Haley. Something special. It wasn’t just violet eyes and a nice figure, or a pretty face. The world was full of lovely women of all shapes, sizes and colorations. He’d never had a type, to judge by his history, and if he had, it certainly hadn’t included many blondes.
Thoughts of what he might have done swirled through his brain as he ran. He could have swept her right off her feet, carried her into her bedroom and allowed them both to be washed away on a tide of madness. He would have loved that. But didn’t she deserve something more?
Ah, cut it out
, he told himself as his booted feet pounded the pavement and pounded away the hunger. He had more important things to think about, a job to do. He twisted his attention back to the shipment problem.
What exactly did he know? Not much, obviously. One driver dead, one load exchange in the parking lot that shouldn’t have happened, and Claire.
He focused his attention on Claire, considering her potential involvement. She might have glimpsed the other driver’s face when he came in with Ray for coffee. It was equally possible that she had recognized him in the restaurant. She had been there when Haley mentioned the crate transfer to the cops, but the cops had dismissed it as irrelevant.
So the question became why Claire had asked the driver about it. Maybe because she was curious herself? That seemed far more likely than that she was involved in the operation. If she was, she wouldn’t have told Haley that she’d spoken to the driver, especially since he had every reason to believe that Haley hadn’t mentioned the crates to anyone else.
Why? Just because he’d warned her not to? How often did that work? Maybe she had told Claire about his warning, and Claire had been disturbed enough to question the other driver to put her concerns to rest.
It was possible. He needed to find out.
Either way, if Claire was involved in whatever was going on, it was highly unlikely she’d have mentioned anything about it to Haley. Even a near idiot would see that it was wiser to just let the whole thing drop than bring it up again.
So Claire had probably asked an innocent question out of curiosity, gotten an answer that satisfied her, and now the whole damn operation was on alert because a question had been asked.
Crap. So now he had to wonder if they’d shift loads somewhere else, or if they’d cool their heels until they felt the heat was off.
Not that a single question from a waitress constituted much heat. The perps, whoever they were, certainly wouldn’t know about him or why he was here. Whether Haley had ignored his injunction not to mention the crates again, he was sure that not until last night had she known anything about his mission here. He honestly didn’t think she would have gossiped about it. After all, she could have called the cops, but hadn’t. If she had, they wouldn’t have had to ask him what he was doing. No, they’d have brought him in and started by telling him not to step on their toes.
Unless they were involved, but he didn’t get that read on either Parish or Dalton. No way, and he trusted his instincts, especially when they
could
have sent him packing and told him to stop snooping in their county. They hadn’t and they’d seen his record. Neither of them seemed to feel the least bit nervous about the situation, other than to tell him to stay inside the law.
Well, he was getting the measure of this town, and either nobody in town knew a damn thing about the shipments, or damn near everybody was involved. For sure, every right hand seemed to know what every left hand was doing around here.
He reached a corner and saw a car coming, so he paused, running in place, waiting for it to pass.
It didn’t pass. It pulled up right in front of him and Gage Dalton’s face appeared as the window rolled down.
“You sure know how to upset folks,” Gage remarked.
“What now?”
“Strangers running hell-for-leather along these streets at a late hour won’t go unnoticed. Hop in so everyone can get back to bed.”
He rounded the car and climbed into the front passenger seat. It wasn’t a patrol car, but a private vehicle, so he asked, “Did I get you out of bed?”
“A nice warm bed with my lovely wife.”
“Why didn’t someone else come? You’re the sheriff, you shouldn’t be answering calls like this.”
“Just how many people do you want to know what you’re up to here? Micah lives miles out. Either I answer or one of my other deputies gets inquisitive. Do me a favor. If you have to run at night, head out of town along the highway.”
“That strikes me as a dangerous place to run at night.”
Gage glanced his way. “Very true. So I don’t recommend it. I don’t need to be cleaning up any more bodies. How’s Haley?”
He wondered if that was a warning. Okay, so someone had already hit the drums about his visit to her apartment. God, this place had a grapevine. “In the same condition she was when I met her, okay?”
“Okay.”
He noted that they didn’t head straight for the highway, but took a detour down Main Street. “You bringing me in?”
“Coffee and some friendly talk. I have a report you might want to see. I got it earlier.”
“I don’t want to seem too chummy with you guys.”
“Folks will think I brought you in for more questioning about why you were running like a madman in the middle of the night.”
“My profile is getting too high.”
“You’re kind of adding to it.”
Buck couldn’t deny that. He guessed he needed some more work on the whole civilian thing.
A different deputy sat at the dispatch desk, a woman of about thirty who looked at once sleepy but alert. She straightened and eyed Buck.
“Nothing important,” Gage said. “I just need a talk with this gentleman about how it bothers people to have someone running through our streets at this hour.”
The deputy, Waycross by her name badge, smiled faintly and nodded. “It certainly would.”
Gage stopped near the desk. “How’s the coffee?”
“I don’t drink it, so I wouldn’t know. Beau made it a couple of hours ago.”
“Probably safe then.” Gage filled two clean mugs and led the way to his back office.
When they were seated behind a closed door, Gage reached for a folder on the top of the stack on one side of his desk. “Came in this morning. Ray’s autopsy. You’ll see proximate cause of death is head trauma. He must have rapped the hell out of it when the truck rolled.”
Buck flipped the folder open and read the pathologist’s summary.
“You’ll also note,” Gage said, “we don’t have toxicology yet. Probably not until some time next week.”
Buck looked up. “But?”
“Not exactly a but. More like, I don’t believe he rolled that truck accidentally. Not unless he’d really unbalanced his load, and how likely is that?”
“Not very,” Buck agreed. “High winds could do it, but as I recall there weren’t any.”
“My thought. So that still leaves this unexplained. Death didn’t involve natural causes. He didn’t have a heart attack, or an aneurysm, or anything like that. So.” Gage exhaled long and slow, not quite a sigh. “Would a driver with a truck that size wrench the wheel sharply to avoid a deer?”
Buck shook his head. “We’d run over it rather than jackknife.”
“Also what I thought, and anyway it wasn’t any jackknife. Those wind up rolled across the road, not straight on in a ditch. My hunch is someone drugged him with something.”
“What are you trying to tell me, Gage?”
“That I may now have a criminal investigation. We’ll find out when the toxicology comes in. But this affects what I have to do. I can hold off investigating for a while, depending on the tox report. If it looks like something he could have taken himself, there’s no rush. If not, I can’t ignore it. So whether you like it or not, you may have me on top of you.”
Buck regarded him thoughtfully. “Do you ever feel claustrophobic?”
The unscarred side of Gage’s face lifted in a smile. “All the time when I was undercover. I never much appreciated it when other agents would get too close.”
“Exactly. Right now I have cover. How long have I got?”
“As long as I can give you. At least until next week some time. Somebody’s not too bright in this operation, Buck. Changing crates in a public lot, maybe killing a driver when he’s only ten miles away from the scene.”
“They’ve been getting away with it for four months now.”
“Something made them a little more desperate, apparently. The question is what.”
“Ray talking about coming into money. At least that’s my guess. That would have gotten all over town fast.”
“Faster than the speed of light,” Gage agreed. “And given this community, it’s hard to believe I wouldn’t have heard
something
if it was going on inside the town.”
“I think you’re right. This stuff may be changing trucks here, but it’s going somewhere else. Somewhere a whole lot more private.”
“There’s a lot of ranch and farmland out there. Millions of acres. How are you going to check it out? My guys have enough trouble keeping their eyes on things out there.”
“Anybody who wants to hide something is going to make sure you and your deputies don’t see it. That leaves me. I can go where you can’t, and nobody will think anything about it. So how about a list of all the box trucks registered in the surrounding area?”
“A description would be useful.”
“I’ll ask Haley about the color. I doubt she can give me any more than that. And one other thing, complicating matters.”
“What’s that?”
“Claire—you know Claire?”
“Of course. You mean Claire Bertram, the waitress.”
“Right. She told Haley last night she’d seen the other driver who came in with Ray the night of the accident. And that she’d asked him what they were doing shifting crates in the parking lot.”
Gage gave a low whistle. “Damn.”
“Exactly. He said it was a crate intended for Gillette. My boss said no way, anything for Gillette would have gone a different route out of Seattle.”
“Of course it would have, that’s too far north. Nothing would come through here on its way to Gillette from Seattle. Hell.” Gage rubbed his chin. “Life just got harder.”
“By a mile,” Buck agreed. “So, Sheriff, what made you change your mind about sharing this report with me? You could have told me earlier. You knew where to find me.”
“I did,” Gage admitted. “But I still had questions about you.”
“What answered them?”
“Old contacts in the federal government. You could say I got a deeper background on you.”
“So you know I’m a loose cannon.”
“In one instance. I also know that a loose cannon may be what I need right now.”
Chapter 5
H
aley would have enjoyed sleeping in the following morning. Not only was she tired after her final the previous day and the play, but she’d tossed and turned for hours last night, replaying that kiss in her mind.
She had dated a little in high school before her mother grew sick, and she had been kissed before, but she’d never had an experienced kiss like this one.
While it had started hard, he had gentled it quickly, and she had blushed repeatedly when she realized he must have recognized her inexperience. That was kind of embarrassing to her.
But he hadn’t stopped. Instead he had taught her that her mouth was a finely tuned instrument that could be played to elicit a hunger that had plunged to her very center. His kiss had exceeded even the exploratory gropings of past boyfriends, and she had thought
they
were the height of excitement. How little she had known.
She had fallen asleep touching her lips with her fingers, smiling and remembering. When the knock came on her door, the first thought that popped into her head as she struggled awake was that kiss.
She wanted to roll over and return to dreamland with the memory of Buck’s kiss, but the knock came again. Groaning, she rose, pulled on her robe and slippers and went to answer it.
The chain was in place, so even though there was no peephole, she wasn’t worried about opening her door a crack. Not that she’d ever worried about opening her door in Conard City.
Through the crack, she saw Buck Devlin. He smiled and held up a paper bag. “Breakfast.”
All of a sudden she didn’t mind being wakened early. She slipped the chain off and opened the door the rest of the way.
He stepped in, carrying not only a paper bag but two tall cups of coffee. “I guess I woke you. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. It’s high time I was up anyway.” Eight o’clock. Right.
He laughed and carried the food to her tiny table with its two chairs. “Nice of you to say so, anyway. What are your plans for the day, other than the play tonight? Are you working?”
“No. Hasty gave me three days off because of the play.”
“You
were
good last night, you know.”
She felt her cheeks warm. “Thank you. Do we need plates?”
“I tried to bring everything. I didn’t want to make any work for you.” He motioned her to a seat and then sat across from her, slipping off his jacket and letting it hang over the back of his chair. Today he was dressed in jeans and a white shirt with sleeves rolled up halfway to his elbows.
He pulled large containers out of the bag and gave her a choice of omelets, toast, potatoes, sausage, ham and pastries. She looked at the huge quantity of food and her stomach rumbled.
He laughed. “I’m hungry, too.”
“I skipped dinner last night because I was so nervous about the play.”
“So dig in. Are you as nervous about tonight?”
“No, not really. Last night I was in a state of near panic. I couldn’t remember my lines at all before I walked onto the stage, then there they were, coming out of my mouth.”
“That’s comforting.”
She smiled, tucking her hair behind her ear, then reaching for a plastic fork. “It was,” she admitted.
Eating breakfast this way struck her as intimate, sharing from the containers like family, or old friends. It was a nice intimacy, one she had been missing for a long time without realizing it. Too many of the intimacies she had shared with her mother, especially later in her illness, weren’t ones she wanted to remember. This was in a different category and she liked it.
“How old are you, Buck?” she asked, hoping to learn something more about him. That seemed like a safe enough place to start.
“Thirty-four. Closer to thirty-five. You?”
“Twenty-four.” She hoped that didn’t sound too young to him, but she supposed it was impossible to be anything but what she was, a small-town girl with very little experience in anything except caring for an ill mother.
“You grew up here? Do you have any family in the area?”
“I’ve spent my whole life here. I thought I mentioned that. My only family was my mother, and she died of cancer just a little over a year ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
She looked up from the ham she was slicing into bite-size pieces. “What about you? You live in Seattle? Your family?”
“I’ve got a sister who works for the State Department. She’s in India right now. Other than that, nobody. And I don’t live in Seattle. I don’t exactly live anywhere right now, except my truck.”
She studied his face, noticing again how every line of it seemed to appeal to her. It was a strong face, with a square jaw and little sun lines around the eyes. No laugh lines. She wondered if he didn’t laugh or smile much. “How do you stand that?”
He shrugged. “After years of going where I was told and doing what I was told to do, it feels kind of free. Nothing ties me down.”
Those words might as well have come in flashing neon, she thought, lowering her gaze to the food. Rolling stone. No wish to be tied down. She knew the price of losing someone you loved all too intimately.
Do not go there.
Disappointment swamped her, but she forced it down and kept her guard up.
“So Claire spoke to that driver, huh?”
Her head snapped up and the first words that occurred to her popped out. “You’re very single-minded, aren’t you?”
One corner of his mouth lifted. “Sometimes to my own detriment. I’ve been called a bulldog.”
“I can see why.” He said very little about himself, but kept on coming right back to the mystery he wanted to solve. So much for a casual “getting to know you” conversation over breakfast. Probably safer for her, she thought. “I told you what Claire told me. She recognized the guy and asked him about off-loading the crate or whatever they were doing. And I told you what she said he said.”
“Would she have mentioned you?”
“Like I told you, she said she didn’t. I’ve never known her to lie. We didn’t talk about it after that night.”
“Can you remember anything about the truck?”
She almost put her fork down, feeling as if she was being grilled. She probably was, she thought with a sudden spark of amusement. What did she expect from a former cop who was on a case? Besides, she had agreed to be his cover.
“I couldn’t see all that clearly. You’ve looked out those windows at night, and the trucks were parked at the far end of the lot. Let me think.” She closed her eyes, trying to summon as vivid a memory as she could.
“It wasn’t new,” she said after a moment. “It looked a little dirty. I don’t even know if I described it right when I called it a box truck. It was one of those trucks where the cab is separated from the container on back, but it’s all one piece.”
“I know what you mean.”
“What else?” she wondered. “It had one of those stubby noses that don’t stick out, kind of like the driver is sitting over the engine. I saw it from the side, but just briefly.” She sighed. “It was white, I think. Maybe. I can’t be one hundred percent certain, because of the lighting in the parking lot, and it was mostly in the dark. I suppose it could have been a very light yellow?” She paused then shook her head. “I get the feeling it was white.”
“How dirty?”
“I seem to recall some mud splash. Not unusual around here. I didn’t see a company name on the side. Overall it didn’t look very clean.” She shook her head and resumed eating. “Take it from me, there was nothing to make it stand out. If it had looked new, that’s something I would have noticed. Basically, it was the kind of truck that we see around here making local deliveries sometimes.”
“Thanks. That’s very helpful.”
She pursed her lips. “I don’t see how. Could I have been any vaguer?”
“You limited the models of truck I need to be looking out for. You limited the colors and condition and even age. You even said it looked as if it drove dirt roads. The field just got narrowed.”
“Not by much,” she said, but smiled. “I don’t think I remember anything else, though.”
“After breakfast want to take a ride with me?”
Her heart leaped, then reason reasserted, much to her own dismay. “Sorry, but my car is old and I try not to put too many miles on it. I can’t afford major repairs right now.”
“That’s okay. I managed to rent one. It looks like it might be able to do a few hundred miles.”
She almost laughed at the description, but then said, “Rented one? Where? Our only car-rental place shut down after the semiconductor plant had the big layoff.”
“There’s a used-car dealer on the edge of town who was glad of some money.”
He was definitely resourceful, she thought. That never would have occurred to her. “Where would we go?”
“I want to take a look at where Ray went off the road. And then I’d like to do some dirt-driving around the county.”
She perked up with excitement. “Really? We’re going to investigate?”
“Call it recon. I want to know the lay of the land.”
* * *
An hour later, after she had showered and dressed in jeans and a blue T-shirt with a gold-embossed butterfly on it, they set out in his rental. It was more than a few years old but spotless inside and out—to be expected of a dealership. She glanced at the odometer and saw what he meant: this car had rolled over a hundred thousand miles some time ago.
Buck looked amused when she checked. “Trust me, the guy sells them with a ninety-day warranty. It’s got to be good enough to make a few hundred more miles.”
She giggled and settled in, fastening her seat belt.
“It also,” he remarked, “won’t stick out around here like my truck cab would.”
“I take it you don’t want to be noticed?”
“I’ve already been noticed entirely too much.” He told her about being picked up by Gage the night before. “Imagine, a ticket for speeding on foot.”
That made her laugh again. “People notice things around here. It’s actually kind of comforting.”
“Then I guess you’ve never gotten out of line in your life.”
“I really haven’t had the opportunity,” she replied truthfully.
“Until me,” he remarked in a low voice.
That stopped the conversation until they were ten miles out of town and he spied where Ray’s rig had gone off the road. It would have been hard to miss. The roadside grasses hadn’t been mowed in a while, and in the ditch running alongside the road they were deeper, though not taller, because the mower swiped it all down to the same level. It was easy to see where they had been flattened.
The road itself was elevated above the surrounding land, most likely, Haley had always believed, to help snow blow off the road surface and make sure water drained away, as well. But that elevation made the ditches to either side pretty deep, and the bank down to them steep.
Buck pulled onto the shoulder and flipped the flashers on before climbing out. She hesitated, then followed him. The road seemed completely deserted right now but that wouldn’t last. It usually carried a fair amount of traffic toward Laramie and the interstate.
The imprint of the truck was still visible, although tramping feet and the subsequent recovery of the rig had churned the area quite a bit. Buck pointed to a dark-brown blotch in the grass.
“Diesel,” he said. “Burned the grass out. He must have been going at nearly full speed when he went off.”
“How can you know that?”
“Those diesel tanks are built to be tough. It would take some force to puncture or rupture one, especially against the ground.”
He turned and looked back at the road surface. “No skid marks, and absolutely no damn reason for him to go off this road unless he was totally out of it.”
“He seemed fine when I saw him at the truck stop,” she insisted. “Wide awake, coherent. Buck, he didn’t look remotely sleepy.”
“I believe you. Besides, I have his check points. He was only halfway into his eleven-hour shift. He’d stopped to sleep earlier in the day.”
“Then...” She didn’t want to say it. She knew what Buck suspected, she had known it all along, but somehow standing beside this road at the spot where Ray had died made it all the more real. She nearly shivered.
“Let’s go,” Buck said abruptly. “If there’s anything else I need to know from here, I’m sure I can get it from the sheriff.”
They waited in the car while several other vehicles passed, then pulled a U-turn and headed back toward town.
“He eased into that ditch,” Buck said. “Going nearly straight ahead. There were lots of outcomes from going off the road, but only one of them would have rolled the truck that way.”
There was nothing she could say to that. It made her feel sick in the pit of her stomach to face the unquestionable fact that Ray had probably been murdered. Until this moment, she wasn’t sure she had believed it.
“If someone was willing to kill Ray...” She didn’t finish the thought.
He reached out and covered her hand, squeezing gently. “Just don’t talk about it at all. Act like you’ve forgotten all about what happened in the parking lot. That’s the safest thing to do. And I’ll keep an eye on you.”
“You and what army?” she asked, knowing that he couldn’t be with her every minute. It was impossible. But the touch of his hand was somehow comforting, and equally electric. She fought the urge to turn her hand over and clasp his tightly.
Distance,
she reminded herself.
Keep a safe distance.
But she didn’t withdraw from his touch.
He didn’t take them all the way back into town, turning instead onto a northbound county road. They drove a few miles and then he pulled over at an access gate, the kind ranchers and farmers had so they could use the roads to get to outlying areas of their land. He pulled onto the level bit of ground leading to the gate, a mixture of grass and dirt, and parked.
“What are we doing?” Haley asked.
“Recon. I want you to think for me, since you know the people and the area, and then we’re going to explore some dirt roads.”
“What do you want to know?”
He waved to the wide-open spaces that seemed to go on forever except to the west, where they bumped into the mountains. “There’s nothing out here.”