Swift Justice (22 page)

I tossed the words over my shoulder as I navigated the
uneven terrain between our yards, blundering into a low shrub in the dusk. It scratched my legs, and I cursed. The low murmur of voices followed me as I climbed the stairs to my deck. Damn. I couldn’t even soak in my hot tub since I didn’t want to eavesdrop, even accidentally, on Dan’s date. Feeling aggrieved, I yanked open the door and stomped into my kitchen. Still unmotivated to cook, I ate tuna from a can and munched an apple from the fridge. I went over my notes from the Lloyd case until my eyes started to blur, then went to bed, pretty sure I hadn’t heard Dan’s visitor drive away yet.

(Tuesday)

Seth Johnson, Elizabeth’s wannabe fiancé, owned a ranch—a large one—east of Colorado Springs on the Big Sandy River near a small town called Wild Horse. I’d called ahead when I woke up and been told he could spare me fifteen minutes that morning. Giving Gigi a call at the office to let her know where I’d be—and gritting my teeth at the necessity—I headed east on Woodmen Road into a blinding sunrise and a sky so clear I could see to the far side of Kansas. I happened to notice that no strange cars cluttered Dan’s driveway as I drove past.

I’d done a quick Internet search and made a couple of calls about Johnson before setting out and unearthed some interesting details. He was from a well-off ranching family in eastern Colorado and, through innovative breeding practices and good management, had turned the respectable family fortune into a large one. He’d picked up a master’s in agriculture science at Colorado State University and interned in a lab in Pennsylvania doing genetic engineering before returning to
Colorado to run the ranch when his father died. He’d gotten married for the first time at the age of thirty. His bride was only eighteen, I’d noted with interest, and they’d divorced three years later. No children. His second wife, also eighteen when they married, died in a hiking accident five years into the marriage. Also no children. His third wife, twenty to his forty, lasted less than two years before going the way of wife number one. Still no little Seths. Elizabeth would have been his fourth wife. In addition to marrying frequently, he made large contributions to political campaigns but, aside from one disastrous run for the state senate, he remained a behind-the-scenes power broker.

An hour of driving through increasingly flat vistas brought me to the entrance to Johnson’s spread. Ten minutes later, I arrived at the house and a grouping of barns, silos, sheds, and other ranch buildings I couldn’t identify. Three or four pickups and a Lincoln Town Car were parked outside a building with a neatly lettered sign reading
OFFICE
. I pulled up alongside the other vehicles and got out to the smells of dust, hay, and a whiff of cow dung. A stiff breeze stirred my hair and sent the dust spiraling in little eddies. Anxious to escape the wind, I pulled open the door and found myself in a room with an empty desk, a watercooler in one corner, a wall of photos of prizewinning bulls on my right, and a door leading to an inner office from which came male voices.

About to knock on that door, I started as a voice came from my left. “Help you?”

I whirled to see a middle-aged woman, her face stiff with suspicion, emerge from a small bathroom I hadn’t noticed earlier. Dressed in a denim skirt and a Western shirt with a yoke
and snaps instead of buttons, she dried her hands on a paper towel and sat behind the desk, obviously more comfortable with its bulk between us. Squirting lotion from a bottle into her hands, she massaged them together, her pale blue eyes looking a question at me.

“I’m Charlotte Swift. I have an appointment with Mr. Johnson.” I handed her one of my cards.

“I’m afraid he won’t have time to see you this morning after all,” the woman said, not sounding apologetic. “There was an emergency and he’s running behind schedule, and he’s got to be in Denver by noon. So—”

“Look,” I said, trying to repress my irritation, “I only need a couple of minutes. If you’ll just tell him—”

The door to the inner office opened as the word “no” formed on the secretary’s lips. A man I took to be Seth Johnson, tall and gangly and with gingery hair and mustache, wearing a well-cut suit and cowboy boots, shook hands with a shorter, squatter man in a sheriff’s uniform. “Thanks, Carl. I appreciate your taking care of it personally.”

“Of course, Mr. Johnson,” the sheriff said. “Rustlers are a plague on all of us.”

Tipping his hat to me and the secretary, he left, letting in a blast of wind that gleefully spun a stack of papers off the desk. As the secretary bent to retrieve them, I took advantage of her distraction. “Mr. Johnson? I’m Charlotte Swift.” I held out my hand, and he shook it, looking down at me with sharp eyes. Patricia Sprouse had been kind: I’d put his age at closer to fifty than forty. “Do you have a few minutes to talk about your fiancée?”

He looked at me blankly as the secretary gasped and
dropped the papers she’d just finished collecting. “Elizabeth Sprouse?” I prompted.

He forced a laugh. “I wasn’t engaged to Elizabeth. I don’t deny I had some discussion with her father, but it came to nothing. I was saddened to hear about her death, however.”

“Not sad enough to attend the funeral,” I said. I’d’ve noticed him if he’d been there. In addition to his height and coloring, he had an indefinable air of command that set him apart.

“I was out of state on business,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “Who did you say you were again?”

“Charlotte Swift. Call me Charlie.”

“Mr. Johnson, I’m so sorry! I told her—”

Johnson waved his secretary to silence. “It’s okay, Jean. I’ve got a few minutes before I need to leave for Denver. Walk down to the barn with me, Charlie.” He held the door, and I ducked out into the wind, resisting the urge to send a triumphant smirk Jean’s way.

“We lost fifteen head of cattle this week. We’re not sure exactly when,” Johnson said, speaking close to my ear to be heard over the wind. He put a hand to my elbow to steer me toward the large barn. “Rustlers.”

The word conjured images of the Old West, of greasy-haired desperados in black hats cutting cattle from a herd and hiding them in an arroyo or box canyon or some such feature of western geography. The theme music from
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
whistled in my head. “Is rustling still a problem for ranchers?”

“Hell, yeah. Rustling is high-tech now, with the thieves using ATVs to round up the cattle and load ’em into a semi. They
truck the cattle to market on the other side of the country before you even know they’re missing. Every rancher I know counts his rustling losses in the tens of thousands of dollars each year.”

Who knew? I wondered briefly if this might be a new line of work for me. I could expand the agency’s portfolio from finding missing persons to tracking missing cows. I could see it now: photos of cows’ faces on milk cartons. How apropos. Somehow—maybe because I suspected the victims ended up as hamburger before anyone could trace them—the idea didn’t resonate with me, and I didn’t pitch it to Johnson.

We crossed the threshold of a barn large enough to hangar a 747, and the ammonia smell of cow urine stung my nose and made me blink. Dust motes danced in the shafts of sunlight penetrating the dim space, and cows lowed from stalls marching horizontally across the barn. Grandy and Gramps had kept two cows for milk, and the feeling in this barn, though much larger and more modern, blasted me back to the time I first crossed the threshold of the shed housing Buttercup and Lulu. I couldn’t have been more than three or four, but I still remember Grandy solemnly introducing me to the cows and telling us how much we’d like each other. Not so different from what Delicia Furman had said to Gigi, now that I thought about it.

Seth Johnson didn’t offer to introduce me to any of the cattle currently inhabiting his barn. He read notes posted on clipboards on the front of each stall, cast an eye over the inmate, and moved on. All he needed was a white lab coat to impersonate a doctor on rounds. With no clue what he was looking at, and less interest, I felt my time with him slipping
away and decided to wrest his attention away from the bovine world.

“So, what are the chances you’re the father of Elizabeth’s baby?” I asked in the tone I’d use at a cocktail party to inquire about someone’s job or hobbies.

He didn’t turn a hair, or even look up from the clipboard he was studying. “Zero.”

“Really? I understand you got pretty cozy with her in a Sunday school classroom.”

That brought his head around to me, and his eyes were flinty as he said, “Your sources are ill-informed.”

I considered the possibility Elizabeth had lied to Linnea about the encounter, especially since she’d misrepresented the nature of her dealings with the Falstows. “Possibly,” I conceded. “Are you saying you never had sex with Elizabeth?”

“That would be illegal,” he said smoothly. “It’s called statutory rape.”

“So you’d be willing to give a DNA sample for comparison with the baby’s?”

“Get real,” he said. “My lawyer would have a coronary.”

“Otherwise, of course, you’d cooperate.”

“Of course,” he said with a smile as false as my own.

A caramel-colored cow stuck its head toward me, and I absently scratched her between the ears. She rewarded me with a slurp on my hand with her sticky tongue. Johnson laughed at my dilemma: wipe cow drool on my tan wool-blend slacks, or let my hands air dry with a film of spit.

“Here.” He handed me a handkerchief, which I took gratefully.

“Thanks. So, why is an obviously successful, attractive,
and
mature
man like yourself interested in marrying a sixteen-year-old? For that matter, why do you attend the Church of Jesus Christ the Righteous on Earth when, I’m sure, your generous donations would get you the front pew at any church between here and Denver?”

“Pastor Sprouse speaks God’s truth. His ministry is based on the Lord’s word. I know he can reach millions of sinners with the right backing.” Johnson shot back the cuff of his pin-striped suit. “I’ve got to go.”

He started for the barn door, and I trotted to keep up with his long strides. “So, you’re buying in? What do you get from your investment? Certainly not money.”

His profile was unrevealing, but a muscle jumped near the corner of his mouth. “The Lord has blessed me with an abundance of money,” Johnson said. “I am privileged to use it to do his work.”

A nearby cow snorted, and I felt like doing the same.

Johnson continued, “Some men give millions to see their names blazoned on a hospital wing, or an engineering school at their alma mater, or a library. I’ll leave a legacy of salvation, not a building of stone and sand that will crumble to dust.”

I took a shot in the dark. “If you’re so big into legacy, it must really piss you off that there’s no Seth Junior to carry on when you’re gone.”

He spun to face me, a white line rimming his lips. For a moment I thought he was going to strike me, but he breathed in twice through his nostrils, exhaling forcefully. “You don’t want to mock me, Charlotte Swift.” He leaned down until his
face was inches from mine, and I could see the flecks of amber in his hazel eyes, deep pores in the grooves of his nose, and a few gray brow hairs growing longer than the ginger ones. “I don’t take that kind of sass from U.S. senators, never mind third-rate private investigators or smart-ass teenagers.”

He held my gaze for another moment, to make sure I wouldn’t venture a reply, then turned on his heel and strode out of the barn, getting into the backseat of the Lincoln that was waiting to take him to Denver.

I let my breath out, not aware until then that I’d been holding it, and let Johnson’s crumpled hankie fall from my hand. The wind caught it before it hit the floor and chased it into a pile of straw and dung. Apparently I’d hit a sore spot. Maybe Johnson’s young wives were no more than brood mares and he discarded them when they didn’t produce offspring. Shades of Henry the Eighth. Hadn’t Henry’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, lost her head to the guillotine, when her princely hubby decided he stood a better chance of getting an heir from Jane Seymour? A dark thought wormed its way into my mind: I wondered if there’d been any witnesses to the second Mrs. Johnson’s hiking accident.