Case File: Canyon Creek, Wyoming

“I’m still here in the room,” she said aloud, making the other men look at her as well. “Since I’m pretty sure you’re talking about me, why don’t y’all tell me what’s on your minds?”

Riley walked toward her slowly. “We were discussing what you do and don’t remember about the attack.”

“Not much,” she admitted, her voice apologetic. “I’d hoped that I’d remember more once the symptoms of the concussion passed, but I come back to the same thing. I didn’t get a good look at him when he pulled me over. I remember jeans and a silver belt buckle. He seemed fit—muscular, or at least that’s the impression I got before he sprayed me in the face with pepper spray. It happened so fast.”

Riley touched her shoulder again. “You told us he posed as a cop. That’s something we didn’t know before, and I think it could be important.” If nothing else, it suggested the man might have some law-enforcement experience, or at least more understanding of police work than the average citizen.

“What if it’s not enough?” Hannah asked. “What if I fly out of here tomorrow and nothing changes? What if he goes on killing people?”

Riley frowned, not following. “We keep looking for him anyway.”

She looked up at him suddenly, her green eyes bright with an emotion he couldn’t identify. “I’m the only living witness. If I leave—”

She didn’t finish the sentence, but Riley finally understood what she was getting at. “If you leave, it could hamper the investigation,” he admitted aloud.

Her head lowered, her back slumping as if it suddenly bore a terrible weight. Riley felt a rush of pity for her, for he had some idea of what she was feeling. It was a horrible thing, carrying the burden of six unsolved murders, knowing that it fell on you to bring them justice and closure.

“I can’t leave Wyoming, can I?” she asked softly.

He didn’t answer, knowing it was a question she had to answer herself.

Her tongue ran lightly over her lips and he saw her throat bob as she swallowed. When she looked up at him again, her gaze was solemn but direct. “I have five more days left of my vacation. I can’t stay forever, but I can give you those five days. Maybe it’ll be enough.”

“We can put you in protective custody,” Jim Tanner offered.

“She needs to go somewhere the killer doesn’t expect her to be.” Riley glanced at Joe.

“Somewhere small and off the beaten path?” Joe asked, his voice faintly dry.

Riley shrugged and turned back to Hannah. “Canyon Creek is about an hour and a half from here, in ranching country. I have a place there. Plenty of room. Great view.”

Hannah’s brow creased. “You want me to stay alone with you? I don’t even know you.”

“You don’t have to know me. You just have to trust me.”

The room fell silent as Hannah considered his words. The walls seemed to close in around them, every molecule, every atom focused on her words.

He wasn’t sure what he wanted her answer to be, now that he’d made the offer. He’d lived alone for three years, his home both a refuge and a prison since Emily’s death. He’d found a certain familiar comfort in his loneliness, Emily’s absence so powerful it became a tangible thing he could hold on to when the nights were dark and long. He hadn’t let anyone intrude on his solitude in a long time.

Hannah would change that. How could she not?

Hannah released a long, deep breath and looked up at them. “Okay.”

Riley felt as if the ground was crumbling beneath his feet.

“Let’s do it,” she said, her chin high. “Let’s go to Canyon Creek.”

Chapter Four

“Joe shouldn’t have dragged you out of bed to do this.” Hannah took the blanket Jane Garrison handed her, feeling terrible about putting a stranger—a pregnant stranger—through so much trouble.

“I wasn’t asleep. I’m not used to my husband being called to Jackson in the middle of the night.” Jane’s expression was a mixture of ruefulness and besottedness. Clearly, she was madly in love with Canyon Creek’s Chief of Police.

“I guess it’s usually quiet around here, huh?” Hannah had dozed a bit on the drive from Jackson, drained from the last eventful hours, but she’d awakened long enough to see that Riley Patterson’s small ranch house was located smack dab in the middle of Nowhere, Wyoming. He had assured her there was a town a few miles to the east, with stoplights and everything, but they were clearly in ranch country, where the closest neighbors—the Garrisons, as it turned out—were six miles down a narrow one-lane road.

“Quiet?” Jane’s lips quirked. “Mostly, yes. But we do have our moments, now and then.” She crossed to the corner, where an old-fashioned wood stove sat silent and cold, and started to pick up pieces of firewood from a nearby bin.

“Let me do that.” Hannah quickly intervened.

“You have a concussion,” Jane protested.

“And you’re pregnant,” Hannah countered firmly.

Jane gave her an exasperated look. “It’s not a disease.”

Hannah laughed. Jane’s lips curved and she finally gave into laughter as well.

“Joe treats me like I’m suddenly made of glass when he knows damned well I’m tough as old leather,” Jane complained as she opened the door to the stove so Hannah could throw some wood inside. “I’ve lived through the Wyoming winter for two years now. Having a baby’s nothing compared to that.”

“I wouldn’t say it’s nothing.” Hannah put the last piece of wood on the fire and stepped back. “How does this thing work? We’re more into air-conditioning where I live.”

Jane took over lighting the wood stove. “You’re from Alabama?”

Hannah sat on the end of the bed, watching Jane’s deft hands strike a match to the kindling she’d piled atop the stack of wood inside the iron stove’s belly. “Yeah. It’s a little town called Gossamer Ridge, up in northeast Alabama. It’s pretty small. My family owns a few hundred acres on Gossamer Lake. We run a marina and fishing camp there. Most of my brothers and I work there in some capacity.”

“You have a lot of brothers?” Jane stepped back from the stove, holding her hands out to warm them from the radiant heat.

“Six. I’m the youngest and the only girl.”

“Wow. Six brothers.” Jane settled carefully in a rocker next to the bed, rubbing her hand over her round belly. “I’m an only child. Joe had a brother, but he died.” For a second, Jane’s expression grew bleak, her eyes dark with pain. She took a deep breath and seemed to physically shake off the sadness. “Riley’s an only child, too. It can be lonely.”

“He seems lonely.” Hannah kicked herself mentally the second the words spilled from her lips. The last thing she should be doing was psychoanalyzing the man who’d made himself her guardian angel. She should just accept his offer of protection for what it was and try not to get any more involved.

She’d already made the mistake of falling for a guy who was hung up on another woman and lived to regret it. She had no intention of making the same mistake again.

But Jane wasn’t ready to drop the subject, apparently. “He’s a complicated guy.”

“I know about his wife’s death.” And understood his thirst for justice better than he might have imagined. Her own brother, J.D., whose wife had been murdered several years ago, was still waiting for justice as well.

She wondered if either man would get what they wanted.

Jane gave her a sidelong look. “I didn’t know Emily. She had died about a year before I met Joe. He tells me Riley used to be very different. Clowning around, always the one to crack a joke—” She stopped herself. “Like I said, complicated.”

Hannah resisted the temptation to push for more information. She was here for only a few more days, and her focus needed to be on remembering the lost details of her ordeal with the fake cop, not on Riley Patterson’s tragic past.

She quickly changed the subject. “Is this your first child?”

“Yeah.” Jane rubbed her belly. “Joe keeps talking about lots of kids. I told him he can carry the rest of them.”