Czytaj książkę: «Royal Protector»

Chapter One

Lulled by the rhythmic motions of her well-trained mount and the pristine beauty of a perfect mountain afternoon, Lexie’s mind only half-registered the soft popping sound. But with the next heartbeat, her mind made the deadly connection and Lexie knew what she’d heard: a gunshot muffled by a silencer. Someone had fired on them!

“Hugh!” She called out to her companion as she jerked the reins to the right and wheeled around. As Lexie watched in horror, Hugh Miller fell backward in slow motion from the saddle.

Icy fingers of terror closed around her heart as she dug her heels into the mare’s sides and raced back to Hugh. Fighting her unbridled fear, she prayed he wasn’t dead.

Dismounting at a run, she flung herself to the earth beside him. He lay facedown, and she struggled to turn him over. The grass beneath his head was sticky and wet. Please don’t let him die! Please!

She rolled him over onto his back. His eyes stared blankly and Lexie gasped. Crimson blood poured from a wound directly in the center of his forehead.

“No!” she sobbed. But even as she denied the awful truth, she knew the worst had happened.

Again.

Stumbling, she rose to her feet and groped for her horse’s reins. Instinct told her to mount up and outrun the danger that made the skin at the back of her neck tingle. But it was too late.

By the time she saw the man wearing the black ski mask, he was already upon her. Numbed by the suddenness of the attack, her arms and legs, and even her mind, seemed temporarily paralyzed. With a hold that was viciously unbreakable, he held her from behind, pinning her arms against her sides. The cloth he pressed over her nose and mouth smothered her cries for help and choked off her airways.

As the acrid smell of some unknown chemical burned her nostrils and blazed a path to her lungs, stinging tears filled her eyes. Her heart convulsed in terror.

Oh God, I don’t want to die! Not like this.

With suddenly awakened resolve, Lexie fought for survival with a determination she hadn’t known she possessed. Kicking and jerking she battled against the faceless, nameless foe.

When her elbow connected with her attacker’s stomach, she heard the sound of his startled gasp and she seized the momentary advantage. Twisting with all her might, she tried again to drive her elbow into his midsection. But this time he anticipated the move and caught her arm and wrenched it painfully behind her back. Lexie’s heart sank as the slim opening for possible escape disappeared.

“Help me! Somebody, please help me!” Her pleas were hopelessly muffled as her tormentor pressed the chemically-soaked cloth even harder over her mouth and nose. The acrid-smelling fumes were rapidly working their lethal magic. Every cell in Lexie’s body screamed for oxygen.

Sprawled, facedown on the rocky ground beside Hugh Miller, she felt the weight of her attacker’s knee in the middle of her back. Helplessly pinned and suffocating, Lexie felt her tenuous hold on consciousness slipping.

She could do nothing as he tied her wrists and secured the gag even tighter across her nose and mouth. With what little strength she had left, Lexie arched her back and tried to free herself of her attacker’s crushing weight.

“Settle down,” a cold, hard voice hissed just behind her ear. “Just let it happen. It’ll all be over soon.”

Lexie’s head ached, and her heart beat frantically. The stark reality of her helplessness brought fresh tears to her eyes as she slipped nearer the edge of unconsciousness.

From a distance, she thought she heard someone calling her name. An engine raced. A dog barked. Obviously, the chemical’s vapors were not only stealing her strength, but robbing her ability to think straight.

When the world began to spin, she thought she might be sick. Her eyelids fluttered closed and, try as she might, she could not reopen them.

The ensuing darkness that closed over her brought with it a strange mix of stark fear and blessed relief. The worst was over, she told herself. She felt herself sinking slowly, slowly down into a place where there was no light and no sensation, except for the achingly familiar sound of a child crying out from the depths of her darkest memories.

ATTENTION ALL UNITS in the vicinity of mile marker 391 and Destiny Canyon Ranch Road. Reports of a shooting. One unconfirmed fatality. Other injuries reported, but also unconfirmed. Shooter’s identity unknown. Officers advised to approach the area with extreme caution.

Even before the dispatcher finished her call, Sheriff Lucas Garrett cranked the steering wheel hard to the left and sent the white SUV with the Bluff County sheriff’s seal emblazoned on the doors into a skidding U-turn.

With his free hand he reached for the handheld radio on the seat beside him. “Sylvia, this is Sheriff Garrett. I’m less than five minutes from the scene. Fill me in.”

Despite the early summer air rushing through the open window, it chilled him to think of his family’s high-country ranch as a crime scene.

“It happened in the hills, Sheriff. Five miles out on Summit Trail.”

Immediately, an image of the narrow, winding trail that led to the summit of Mount Destiny formed in Lucas’s mind. He’d ridden that trail on horseback and hiked it on foot countless times, but it had never seemed ominous in any way until now.

“Who made the call?” he asked. “Was it Cal?” Or had it been his older sister, Maureen—or Mo, as everyone had always called her.

“No, sir. It was Virgil.”

Virgil Blackburn had been the foreman at Destiny Canyon Ranch for as long as Lucas could remember. “Did Virgil say what had happened? Do you have any idea who was…hurt?”

“No, sir,” Sylvia came back quickly. “He just said a man had been shot. Killed. And that a woman had been injured. He said he was calling from an extension in the barn. He hung up while I was dispatching emergency medical.”

“Try calling the house,” Lucas ordered.

“I already did, Sheriff. Right after Virgil hung up. But no one answered. I’ll try again and get back to you.”

Lucas thanked his dispatcher and with a mounting feeling of dread, he tossed the radio onto the seat beside him and tried to concentrate on his driving.

As the speedometer inched past ninety, his eyes remained riveted on the road. His thoughts, however, were firmly fixed on his family, on Pop and Cal and Mo. The loved ones who still resided on the ranch where he’d grown into manhood, where some of his sweetest memories lived on, as well.

Despite the lawman’s logic that told him not to jump to conclusions, Lucas couldn’t shake the words fatality and injuries from his mind.

Why hadn’t Cal made the call? Where was Mo? And why hadn’t anyone picked up the phone when Sylvia called back? Those questions and a dozen more, equally disconcerting, nagged him as he raced down the highway toward the unknown.

When he was within a mile of the ranch turnoff, he grabbed his radio again. “Unit 4, come in.”

Deputy Eli Ferguson responded immediately.

“What’s your location, Eli?” Lucas asked.

“Westbound at 376.”

“Any sign of an ambulance?”

“They’re right behind me, Lucas.” His usually calm west Texas twang sounded tight and tense. “I’ll stay with them and escort them all the way in.”

Eli signed off and two more deputies checked in. Lucas could hear the edge in his men’s voices. He knew they were all thinking the same thing: The call to Destiny Canyon Ranch could mean one of his own family members had been shot. A call that involved a loved one was every cop’s worst nightmare.

And Sheriff Lucas Garrett was no exception.

IN A CLOUD OF DUST, Lucas roared up in front of the sprawling ranch house where various members of the Garrett clan had lived for going on fifty years.

Cal was waiting at the edge of the yard, and Lucas couldn’t remember ever being more pleased to see anyone than he was to see the man who had always been more like a brother than a nephew. Like all the Garrett men, Cal was a big man, tall and broad-shouldered. He crossed the gravel driveway in four long strides and met Lucas as he was getting out of the SUV.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Cal said.

“Where’s Mo? Is she all right?”

“She’s inside.”

“What about Pop? Where is he? Are you sure Mo’s okay?” Lucas fired off his questions in rapid succession as he charged across the drive, with Cal close beside him.

“They’re fine. Everyone’s fine,” Cal said. At the gate that opened into the yard, he put a hand to Lucas’s shoulder. “Slow down and listen to me, will you? Everyone’s fine. The family wasn’t involved.”

Lucas stood staring at his nephew, almost afraid to allow himself the relief that flooded him. “Thank God.” He felt the gentle pressure as Cal squeezed his shoulder in agreement. “So, what did happen? Sylvia said a man had been shot.”

“He was one of Mo’s guests.” Cal pulled his battered straw Stetson from his head, ran a hand through his dark hair and sighed. “And he’s dead. Poor bastard never knew what hit him. The woman was riding with him. She was attacked and hogtied. Somebody tried to drug her, but she seems to be all right, now.”

Both men turned to see Eli Ferguson and the ambulance pulling into the drive. Cal motioned the paramedics through the gate and across the yard toward the front door.

“Tell us what you know, Cal,” Lucas said when Eli had joined them on the porch.

“They were about five miles out on Summit Trail, on their way back after spending the night camped out on the mountain.”

“Any sign of the shooter?”

Cal shook his head. “No. He was long gone by the time I got up there. I left a couple of my ranch hands to stay with the body until you could get here.” Cal went on to address Lucas’s concerns before he could voice them. “Don’t worry. They’re both armed and I told them to watch their backs and not to disturb any tracks that might still be there.”

“I’ll need horses for half a dozen men,” Lucas said. It wouldn’t be easy tracking the killer through the miles of National Forest that bordered the ranch, but it would be nearly impossible on foot.

Cal nodded. “No problem.”

Lucas started back toward his vehicle and both men followed. As he walked, he gave Deputy Ferguson his orders. “Stay here and get a preliminary statement from the woman. I’ll want to question her myself, later. But right now I need to get up on the mountain. Call the officer at the Mount Destiny ranger station and apprise him of the situation. Tell him to keep his eyes open and his back covered.”

Once Lucas got to the crime scene, he’d set a perimeter and establish a command post. Afterward, he’d send his deputies—six, not counting the man he planned to assign to guard duty at the ranch house—into the mountains to try to track the killer. If they were lucky, they’d pick up a trail before nightfall.

“Helluva deal,” Cal said as he followed Lucas back to his vehicle. “A man comes here for a vacation and gets shot out of the saddle in broad damn daylight.” He sighed and shook his head. “Who’d have thought something like this could happen here?”

“What can you tell me about the dead man, Cal?”

“Name’s Miller. Hugh Miller. He checked in on Tuesday after booking a cabin for a month.”

“What about his wife? Have you talked to her?”

“No. And she’s not his wife. Her name’s Lexie Dale. She checked in on Tuesday, as well, but she’s staying in her own separate cabin.”

“Miller’s significant other?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Cal said.

Lucas wasn’t surprised that his cousin had so little information about the couple. Cal had given Mo’s guest operation a wide berth from day one. As long as the tourists who stayed in the four small hunting cabins at the edge of the ranch property stayed clear of his cattle and his hay fields, Cal could almost tolerate them.

“There’s a good chance Mo knows more about both of them,” Cal said. “You know how she is.”

Lucas had to smile. Yes, he knew exactly how his older sister went out of her way to make each guest feel as if they were a member of the Garrett family. And when it came to singles, she could be a shameless matchmaker. Although never married, Mo considered herself an expert on relationships. If anyone could give Lucas the lowdown on the relationship between Hugh Miller and Lexie Dale, it was Mo.

“Cal, what do you make of this shooting?” Lucas asked as he pulled open the door and slid behind the wheel. “Do you think it could have been an accident?”

“Doubtful. There’s a bullet hole between the man’s eyes that looks damn deliberate to me.”

“Sounds like our shooter is better than a fair marksman.”

Cal frowned. “God only knows what he had planned for Miss Dale. She was unconscious when Mo found her.”

A single fact stuck in Lucas’s mind and chilled his blood. “Are you telling me Mo was there?”

Cal nodded. “And lucky for Miss Dale, she was. That worthless pup of Mo’s wandered off again this morning. She and Tucker Oates were driving around in the Jeep, looking for the dog when they heard somebody yelling for help.”

Cal and Lucas exchanged a resigned glance. Both of them wished Mo would be more cautious, but they knew she had a heart as big as all outdoors and would never turn her back on a stray of either the two-legged or four-legged variety.

“Then what?”

“The noise from the Jeep must have scared off the attacker,” Cal went on. “They found Hugh Miller dead at the side of the trail. Not far from his body, Lexie Dale was tied up and unconscious.”

“She was drugged?”

“Looks like whoever killed Hugh Miller meant to carry her off with him,” Cal said.

“And Mo interrupted him right in the middle of his crime.” His own sister could have easily become the killer’s next victim, Lucas thought grimly. If he’d needed further incentive to bring the killer in, he’d just found it.

He put the SUV in gear. “Did you see anything that might give us an idea who did it?”

“No. But, then, I didn’t do much looking around. I didn’t want to destroy any evidence.”

Lucas nodded and started to pull away when an afterthought struck him. “Tell Mo not to worry. If she needs me to help out with Pop, I’ll be around later.” It had been six months since Will Garrett’s stroke. During that time, the family had formed a protective circle around the ailing patriarch, hoping to make his recovery as peaceful and complete as possible.

Cal said he would deliver the message and Lucas gunned the engine and raced out of the ranch yard and past the stables toward the trail that wound seven miles to the summit of Mt. Destiny.

Despite the disturbing reality that a man had been murdered on Garrett property, Lucas experienced immeasurable relief knowing his family was safe. As he bumped along the trail headed for the crime scene, however, the reality of what had happened took shape in his lawman’s brain: A man had been shot to death and a woman attacked. A killer was still on the loose.

It was the kind of crime he might have expected on the city streets where he’d spent five years becoming the kind of lawman qualified to become Bluff County Sheriff.

At age thirty-two, with nearly ten years law enforcement experience under his belt, Lucas Garrett could hardly be called naive, and yet the crime that had taken place today—a seemingly cold-blooded and calculated murder and an attempted abduction—still shocked him. Not because of its brutality, but because it had happened here, on the land that had been his family’s home for a generation.

His family and this ranch meant the world to him. Weaned on high-country air and the Garrett heritage of hard work, self-respect and dedication to duty, Lucas took seriously his role as Will Garrett’s son. His place within the family defined him as surely as his badge, and protecting those closest to him was even more important than his career.

For a man like Lucas Garrett, the crime that had occurred this morning was almost a personal affront. Things like this just did not happen in Bluff County. Not on his watch, anyway. And sure as hell not on his own doorstep.

THREE HOURS LATER, the effects of the chemical that had rendered Lexie senseless seemed to have finally dissipated. Except for a small bruise over her eye and a metallic taste at the back of her throat that not even Mo Garrett’s coffee could dispel, Lexie felt almost human again.

Bit by bit, with Mo’s help, she’d been able to piece together the bizarre events of the afternoon, events that had cost a man his life and landed her flat on her back on a couch in the main house at the ranch where she’d rented a cabin for what she’d hoped would be a peaceful month-long vacation.

So much for that fantasy, she thought.

While the paramedics were checking her out, tending to her minor cuts and bruises, a deputy sheriff had taken her statement and then asked Lexie to remain where she was until the sheriff could interview her himself. He also informed her that she was not to leave the main house, where uniformed deputies had been placed on guard.

Lexie had listened politely to the deputy and assured him of her cooperation. But even as she’d given her statement, Lexie knew talking to the local authorities was a waste of everyone’s time.

What happened this morning went way beyond anything the Bluff County sheriff’s department had the resources or the ability to handle—not that she didn’t wish they could. If only it could be so easy….

But Lexie knew better than to even hope. Nothing in her life had ever been that easy, that simple. Or even normal, for that matter. And now, in light of this latest tragedy, it seemed it never would.

If a killer had found her here, in this remote corner of the Colorado Rockies, then there was no safety anywhere. No normalcy. No hope for the peaceful anonymity she’d tried so long to attain. After all her efforts to prove her father wrong, in the end it seemed that maybe he was right. Maybe a simple day-to-day existence really was impossible for someone born to a family whose mere existence made headlines.

As it had countless times over the course of her twenty-eight years, the unfairness of her situation frustrated and angered her. If she lived to be one hundred and two she’d never understand why an accident of birth should hold such power over one’s life. Or why the lives of everyone with whom she came in contact seemed to be so negatively impacted. It all seemed so unfair—unfair and obscene—to think a man’s life counted for nothing.

Once the wheels of her father’s publicity machine started grinding, the events of today would no longer be a matter of who had been murdered this afternoon on that mountain trail, but why. The humanity of Hugh Miller would be lost in the gears of political damage control, sensationalism and spin.

Shuddering at the thought of the turmoil the next few days and weeks would inevitably bring, Lexie realized the time had come to get herself together and make some decisions. And the most immediate decision had to do with how she was going to handle the local sheriff, what she would and would not tell him about what she suspected was the motive for Miller’s murder and the attempt to abduct her. It had been a kidnapping attempt. Of that, she was certain.

But before she could decide anything, she had to get to a phone. And fast. If news of Hugh Miller’s murder reached her father secondhand there would be hell to pay. Of course, there would be hell to pay, anyway, she thought grimly.

For as far back as she could remember, her longing for independence and her determination to live her own life her way had put her at direct odds with her powerful father. An incident like this would only refuel that conflict and reinforce her father’s position that she should be brought back immediately into the family fold, under his control. And coming as it had on the heels of the debacle at Marycrest Prep, Lexie didn’t know if she had the strength to stand up to him again.

Although she dreaded making the call and facing the inevitable confrontation, Lexie knew she couldn’t put it off any longer. With a resigned sigh, she swung her legs over the edge of the couch and sat up. Immediately a wave of dizziness pushed her back down.

The middle-aged woman in the chair across from Lexie set aside the book she’d been reading. A frown pulled her pale mouth downward.

“I wouldn’t try to get up too fast, Lexie. You know what the paramedics said, that the effects of the drug might still be working their way out of your system.” She refilled a water glass from the pitcher on the table beside her and handed it to the grateful Lexie.

“You know, I still think it would have been a good idea to let the paramedics take you to the hospital to be thoroughly checked out.”

There was no way Lexie could tell Mo Garrett that in all probability she would be examined by the world’s foremost physicians some time in the next twenty-four hours. A woman like Mo would, no doubt, find that claim incredible. Everything about Lexie’s hostess and unlikely rescuer, from the silver-gray braid that hung down the middle of her back to her well-worn moccasins and faded blue jeans, reflected her utter lack of pretense.

“The paramedics said my vital signs were normal,” Lexie reminded Mo. “And I am feeling much better. Really,” she reiterated, hoping to make up for the lack of conviction in her voice.

The older woman tipped her head to one side and studied Lexie skeptically. “Well…maybe so. But I’ll still feel better once Doc Rogers gets here.” Mo rose from her chair to pace across the room and stand peering out one of the two large bay windows that dominated the west wall. “He ought to have arrived by now. I left the message with his secretary an hour ago.”

“I’m surprised he makes house calls,” Lexie said.

“Doc Rogers spends more time running around than in his office. He not only has a general practice, but he’s the county coroner. I guess he got tied up at the crime scene.”

Lexie filed away that piece of information. She needed to be careful what she said around the doctor. It bothered her that she had to watch her every word. But such was the reality of her life—a life she’d spent shunning the spotlight and yet despite all her precautions, all the scheming and planning, here she was center stage again.