Melissa Cutler - Cowboy Justice

He gave Rachel a terse nod, then let his eyes rove over her body, his expression morphing to one of concern, like he expected to find her harmed. “Ms. Sorentino.”

She nodded, too rattled to speak.

His focus shifted past her, to Stratis. “What’s going on here?”

Rachel shifted, positioning her body to keep both men in her line of sight.

Stratis stiffened defensively at Vaughn’s question. “Ms. Sorentino stopped by with a plate of cookies for you”—he gestured to the table—“along with a flash drive of photographs from the vandalism incidents she failed to report initially. It seemed a prime opportunity to ask her some of the questions I had about Monday’s incident.”

She ground her molars together. Wouldn’t do her any good to get defensive about his phrasing like she was tempted to. “Scones,” she bit out, not meeting Vaughn’s eye. “From my sister.”

Just like that, she’d never eat another scone for the remainder of her days.

Vaughn barely glanced at the plate. His boots clomped on the floor as he made his way around the table toward Stratis. “I’ll take over from here, Stratis.”

With his narrowed eyes on Rachel, Stratis rolled his tongue along the inside of his lower lip. “Fine with me, Sheriff, but the thing of it is, I still don’t understand why Ms. Sorentino didn’t sit tight after she called you for help. She was outnumbered and outarmed.” He stopped and leveled his gaze at Rachel. “What made you do it?”

“Stand down, Stratis.” Vaughn’s tone was tight with warning.

If Stratis hadn’t already insinuated that he knew something was going on between her and Vaughn, he sure would now, with Vaughn springing to her defense like that.

Determined to prove otherwise, she raised her hand to quiet Vaughn. “No, that’s okay. It’s a valid question. What made me take action, you want to know?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Stratis answered.

“Because if they’d started firing again, and landed another lucky shot, they might’ve killed me. They might’ve gone after my family next. We may never know what their plan was. So instead of sitting there, hoping on high that they wouldn’t kill me or my family, I decided to make sure they couldn’t. By wounding them.”

Stratis’s brow raised. His lips twitched. “Good answer.”

Asshole.

She shifted her gaze to Vaughn. “I’m done here. You have the flash drive and folder. We can set up an interview for another time if you have questions about the contents.”

Vaughn looked like he wanted to ask her another question. Too bad. She was getting the hell out of the building. She fast walked down the hall. Irene looked at her like she hadn’t missed a word of the conversation. Her Bible was open on her desk, her finger pressed to the words on the page as though holding her place while she watched Rachel. Rachel glared at her until she looked away.

“Ms. Sorentino. Rachel,” Vaughn called. She heard a jangle of keys and gear that meant he was hustling to catch up. “I’ll walk you to your truck.”

“No, thanks,” she tossed over her shoulder, rounding the corner to the waiting area between the welcome desk and the door. She pushed the door open and angled her footfalls toward her truck. Let him chase her down if he had anything to say.

Chase her down, he did. Before she could get her key out of her pocket, his hand closed on her elbow.

“Rachel, stop for a second. Please.”

Like she had a choice with the near-painful grip he had on her. She ground to a stop and yanked her arm away. “What?”

He wiped the hand he’d touched her with on his pants, then shoved both hands in his pockets. “Stratis was out of line. I’m sorry.”

“I can handle myself around Stratis.” It’s only you I fall to pieces around. She opened her truck door.

Vaughn’s hand clamped onto the door. His body heat and energy snuck up against her back, his nearness a palpable force between them. “What did he say to you?”

His breath puffed against her neck, calling forth the memory of his hands and lips on her, and she shivered. Goddamn, she was a hot mess. Of all three sisters, who would’ve thought she’d be the one to completely unravel in the presence of an attractive man? Pathetic.

She pulled her body up into the driver’s seat. “Ask Irene. She heard it all.”

Cursing under his breath, he released the door.

Rachel tugged the door closed and started the truck. Despite the pull Vaughn had on her, she managed to navigate her way out of the lot and down the road without once searching him out.

The shrill beep of the treadmill grated on Vaughn’s nerves like it always did as he ramped his speed up to a hell-for-leather sprint. A sports newscaster prattled with his co-host on the television in the corner. He’d stopped listening more than two miles earlier, his attention fixed on the map of the Sorentinos’ farm taped to the wall in front of him.

After a mile sprint, his lungs screamed. Not bad. Two years ago, he would’ve stopped jogging after five miles, and he never would’ve attempted a sprint. Since he quit smoking, he relished his daily runs as an opportunity to give nicotine the big Fuck You first thing in the morning. He scaled down the speed to a comfortable jog, then focused on the map again, this time on the black dot he’d added at the location of the first vandalism incident, on one of the property’s newly installed oil derricks.

The day before, after Rachel dropped the flash drive off at the station, he’d been too pissed off to talk to Stratis rationally. Instead, he’d taken the flash drive home and fired up his computer. The photographs of the vandalism left his blood cold as ice. Graffitied messages that all threatened the same thing. Someone wanted Rachel and her sisters to leave town. What a preposterous demand, even if folks were peeved about their new dude ranch venture. Vaughn checked, and the Sorentino family had owned that land since 1952.

According to Rachel’s records, the first time the vandals hit was the week Gulf Coast Petroleum broke ground on the wells. The graffiti message was scribbled on a leg of the derrick, as it waited near a large hole to be installed. The second message was on another derrick two weeks later. Intrigued by the possible connection between the vandalism and the discovery of oil on the property, he’d dug through his work files for a map of the county and made an enlarged copy of the Sorentino property on his printer.

With a black Sharpie, he’d spent the next hour mapping the locations of the vandalism incidents. If he included Wallace Meyer Jr.’s vandalism, there were six occurrences all together, spread in a line that reached from the southwest corner of the acreage to the southeast, in the Parillas Valley. Catcher Creek cut through the eastern corner of the line. With fatigued, midnight logic, he’d been absolutely convinced he was on to something. He would’ve bet his house that the vandalism trail followed the bed of oil underground.

He went to bed pretty damn proud of his detective skills. And woke up just as proud—right up until he stepped on the treadmill and asked himself, what does the son of a police chief and his gang of ingrates care about the Sorentino family’s oil?

He didn’t have an answer to that. Epiphanies on open investigations often came to him while he ran, so he’d taped the map to the wall in front of him. Ten miles later, he had nothing. He punched the stop button on the treadmill and caught his breath, swabbing his sweat-drenched neck and forehead with a towel. The sky outside his workout room’s curtained window was lighter. In another few minutes, the sun would pierce the morning haze.

Maybe Wallace Jr. wasn’t the key. Maybe it was one of the other guys. Jimmy de Luca and Shawn Henigin were local boys, like Junior. But Elias Baltierra was a convicted criminal. He was most likely the leader of the group, despite Wallace Jr.’s money and connections.

He glanced at his watch. Binderman would be on shift by now, until midafternoon. As soon as Vaughn’s breathing returned to normal, he dialed Binderman’s number.

“Hey, Cooper here. What’s the rundown for the night?”

“Quiet,” Binderman answered. “A domestic in Devil’s Furnace that Molina took, and Reyes made a routine traffic stop for speeding, which turned up a man with a warrant for his arrest in Tucumcari. We transferred him to the Tucumcari police’s custody an hour ago.”

The domestic wasn’t surprising. Devil’s Furnace, on the north side of Highway 40, was Quay County’s only real slum. The site of a massive, sprawling new home development project two decades earlier, the entire five-mile area had gone up in flames before the owners had the chance to pay their first mortgage bills.

Vaughn had been fifteen at the time and still recalled the eerie orange-gray smog that settled over the county during the week of the fires. The rubble of the burned homes had only partially been cleared, to make way for trailer parks and low-income housing. The perfect petri dish for breeding druggies and criminals.

“Any news on Baltierra or Henigin?”

“Two anonymous tips came in to Lea County. Molina worked the graveyard shift, so I passed them on to Kirby. She’s on the swing shift with me today.”

“Good. Thanks. Listen, I’ve got some crime scenes that need processing. Do you have much of anything on your plate today, or could you meet me at the Sorentino house at, say, eleven o’clock? I want to run forensics at the sites of the other vandalism incidents, see if we turn up any evidence. Maybe someone left a fingerprint we can salvage.”

“Roger that. Happy to help.”