Cowboy's Legacy

“I bought her a gun when...when she told me that her ex was harassing her,” Duma said. “I know now that it wasn’t true.” He sighed. “But I thought if it made Celeste feel safer...”

Mark asked about the make and model and if Celeste had taken it with her. Duma swore he had no idea if Celeste had taken the gun.

Who takes a gun to a spa? Flint thought.

“The DCI team out of Billings will want to take a look at your house after they finish with the crime scene,” Mark said. “I hope you’ll cooperate.”

Duma sighed. “I want to help in any way I can.”

Flint listened as Mark finished up with Duma, who promised to call him with the names of the spas that Celeste usually went to.

He hated the waiting. Worse, hated feeling so helpless. Hours had gone by. Where was Maggie? Unfortunately, he knew firsthand how investigations could take a wrong turn, how law enforcement could spend too much time suspecting the wrong person, how people died while the cops were barking up the wrong tree. He couldn’t let that happen. Once they found Celeste—

“Sheriff?” The dispatcher stuck her head into the small room adjacent to the interrogation room where he was standing. “We just got a call. I think you’ll want to take it.”

His heart took off like a wild horse in the wind. “About Maggie?”

The dispatcher looked embarrassed. “No. I’m sorry. The caller said it was about Jenna Holloway.”

* * *

JENNA HOLLOWAY HAD disappeared following an argument with her husband, Anvil, last March. Anvil admitted to striking her after she’d confessed to having an affair with another man, but swore she wasn’t hurt when she drove away.

What had sent up red flags were Anvil’s actions after she’d allegedly left. He’d destroyed a section of Sheetrock with his fist and then he’d cleaned up the kitchen, mopping the floor before washing the clothes he’d been wearing.

When Flint had arrived he’d noticed the freshly scrubbed kitchen, as well as Anvil’s bruised and bloodied knuckles. Anvil hadn’t been able to repair the section of Sheetrock before he’d called to report Jenna missing. But he’d certainly covered his tracks on everything else.

Over the weeks that followed with no word from Jenna, more facts had emerged. It seemed that Jenna had more secrets than just a lover. She’d become pen pals with some inmates at Montana State Prison, taken up shoplifting and stealing from the family grocery budget. She’d also begun wearing makeup and had bought herself some sexy undergarments—things apparently out of character.

When her car turned up in a gully, Flint had become more convinced that Anvil hadn’t just taken his temper out on a wall. The state crime investigators had been called in, but they’d found no evidence to prove that Anvil had killed her.

Since then Flint had been waiting for someone to stumble across her shallow grave. The DCI had gone over the Holloway farm with cadaver dogs and found nothing. Anvil had sworn that he didn’t kill her. Not that anyone in town believed him. But with four mountain ranges around the valley and miles and miles of wild country, Jenna could have been buried anywhere.

Flint suspected that someone had finally found her body when he took the call.

“I should have called you months ago,” a man said.

“You know something about Jenna Holloway’s disappearance? Who am I speaking to?”

Silence. A crank call?

“Kurt Reiner. Jenna’s been staying with me.”

Flint had to sit down. “Jenna Holloway is with you?”

“I know I should have called, but she was too afraid of him finding her if I told anyone where she was.”

“She was that afraid of her husband?”

“Her husband? No, man. It was some dude who was threatening her.”

He tried to get his head around this. Jenna was alive? Had been alive since the night she disappeared back in March? “Where has she been all this time?”

“Sheridan, Wyoming. We’ve been renting a place down here.”

Flint rubbed a hand over his face. “I’m confused. So why did you decide to call me now?”

“A little over a week ago, she saw the man who’d been harassing her back in Montana. He was in town. She’d been telling me that she’d felt as if someone had been watching her. I figured she was imagining things or getting tired of being with me, you know what I mean? Anyway, the next night she freaked. She saw him standing across the street, watching our second-floor apartment. I ran down, but by the time I reached the corner, he was gone, roaring away in his van. So the next day—”

“Wait. A van?” He thought of what Alma Ellison had told him. “What color van?”

It took Reiner a minute to answer after being interrupted in the middle of his story.

“A brown one. So, anyway, a couple days ago I came back to the apartment and...” His voice broke. “She was gone and the place was a mess as if there’d been a fight. And now she’s missing. Really missing this time.”

A brown van. What were the chances it was the same van his neighbor had seen earlier today driving by his house? Sheridan, Wyoming, was about six hours away, no big deal for those who lived in these large Western states. Still, it was a stretch to think it could have been the same van.

“You didn’t happen to get the plate number on that van, did you?”

“Naw. It was an older-model panel van.”

“Wyoming plates?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Montana plates?”

“I really didn’t notice since the back of the van was so dirty. But now that I think about it, they were some different colored plate, not Wyoming or Montana. That’s all I know.”

Flint raked a hand through his hair. Why did he think there might be a connection? He knew who had taken Maggie and she didn’t drive an old brown van. She drove the newest, largest black SUV they made.

Still, both women were from Gilt Edge. Jenna had her hair done at Maggie’s shop by the other stylist, Daisy Caulfield, but the two had known each other. He wouldn’t be a good lawman unless he checked this out.

“I need to talk to you more about this,” Flint said. “Can you come up to Gilt Edge?”

“Sorry, but I finally landed a pretty decent job. Even if I could afford to drive all the way up there—”

“Did you talk to the local police?”

“Couldn’t really do that under the circumstances, you know. I kept hoping she’d turn back up. That’s why I didn’t call until now. I didn’t want any trouble with the law.” Also, the local law probably wouldn’t have much interest since Jenna had pulled this disappearing act already up in Montana.

“I probably shouldn’t even have called you,” Reiner said.

Flint spoke quickly, afraid now that the man might hang up. “Did Jenna tell you anything more about this man?”

“No. Just said he scared her and wouldn’t leave her alone.”

Flint thought of the prison pen pals Jenna had been writing before she’d disappeared the first time. Something definitely had been going on with the woman.