The Colton Ransom (6 page)

“Apparently she was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” the chief said, speaking up. His authoritative tone indicated that he had the floor now. “Looks like she tried to stop the kidnapping.”

“What kidnapping?” someone from the staff cried.

“There’s been a kidnapping?” Jethro’s question sounded more like an accusation that the chief had been withholding information from him.

Amanda all but went into shock. She covered her mouth with her hands to hold back the guttural cry that was clawing at her throat, seeking release.

“Oh, my God, my baby,” she cried, her eyes darting toward Gabby. She’d gone to the rodeo only because she trusted Gabby implicitly and Gabby was supposed to be babysitting.

But then she realized that her sister was holding a baby. That was
her
baby. Then what was the chief talking about?

Rushing over to take her baby from Gabby, Amanda scooped the infant into her arms, holding on to her as tightly as she dared. The sudden, terrified ache in her heart abated.

“No,” the chief said. “As you can see, your little lady wasn’t the victim. She stayed nice and safe and sound.” For emphasis he needlessly gestured toward Gabby just as Amanda took hold of her little girl.

It took Amanda more than a few seconds to reconcile the alternative waves of terror and exhilaration going through her, neutralizing the effects. All that mattered, she told herself, taking a deep breath and drawing in the baby’s sweet all-but-newborn scent, was that Cheyenne was safe.

“If these murderers didn’t get Cheyenne, who were they after?” Catherine asked.

“Oh, don’t fool yourselves—they were after your baby, all right, Ms. Amanda. But what they got was Avery Garth—his baby,” the chief concluded, pointing a finger at Trevor.

Amanda, who was still holding her daughter as if she never intended on letting the little girl go, struggled to establish a sense of peace.

Though for the most part it was still eluding her, she looked toward Trevor. “They kidnapped your baby girl?” she asked, utterly stunned.

Before he could acknowledge her question or tell her that, with all due respect, it was none of her business how anything involving his personal life went down, Gabby took the initiative—and the blame.

“I put Avery down for her nap in Cheyenne’s crib in the nursery.” Because both Mathilda—still sobbing—and Amanda looked at her as if she’d just turned feeble-minded, she felt compelled to explain herself. “Cheyenne had already taken her nap, and I thought the surroundings in the nursery might be nicer for Avery.”

“Well, that was a damn fool thought,” Jethro said sharply to his youngest.

“It’s an
infant.
” Darla Colton, Jethro’s ex-wife, felt compelled to add her two cents. Every time there was some sort of an argument Darla and/or one of her two less-than-savory adult children could be found at the heart of it, fanning the flames. “It can’t tell the difference between an embroidered pillow and a pile of hay,” the woman insisted as she looked at Gabby. “They barely know which end is up at that age. Now I—”

“You certainly know which end is up, don’t you, Mom?” Tawny interjected her two cents’ worth with a less-than-pleasant laugh. “You always made sure to keep that end up, too, didn’t you, Mom?” the young woman asked, taunting her.

A malevolent look slipped into Darla’s eyes. “That’s enough,” Darla snapped at her daughter. She clearly needed more information in order to figure out which side to successfully play.

Rather than answer her mother, Tawny merely inclined her head.

Dislike glowed in Gabby’s eyes. Why did her father insist on keeping this woman with her annoying offspring on the premises? Any promise he’d made to the gold digger was long since nullified by time. Someone needed to do a little housecleaning and get rid of annoyingly insidious people.

“It was a mistake,” Gabby spoke up, owning her error. “And I’m the one who made it. Because of me, Trevor’s daughter was kidnapped.”

“I know, I know, but we’ll get her back once the kidnappers realize they got the wrong baby. They just couldn’t be heartless enough to hurt her. In the meantime,” Amanda added, lowering her voice, “you did inadvertently save Cheyenne,” she said with gratitude shining in her eyes. She leaned over and kissed her sister’s cheek.

Gabby tried valiantly to muster a smile in response, but deep down, all she could think of was that, although she’d inadvertently kept Cheyenne out of harm’s way, by the same token, she had placed Avery in its direct path.

The one did
not
blot out or balance the other. There was still an infant out there in serious danger because of her.

Chapter 5

“W
ell, I don’t know about anyone else, but I think I need a drink,” Darla Colton announced to no one in particular as the mounting tension within the room became almost overwhelming. Turning, she began to head toward the liquor cabinet in the living room.

“You
always
think you need a drink,” Jethro bit off as he glared at his ex-wife. “Matter of fact, I never knew a time when you didn’t.”

Darla turned back to look at the man she’d spent one inglorious year with. She tossed her head indignantly. Her artificially vivid strawberry-blond hair swayed about her perfectly made-up face. It was said that she didn’t wear her sins upon her face, so the years appeared to have been kind to her. She was still an attractive woman.

“I don’t have to stay here and take this abuse,” she snapped at Jethro.

“No,” Jethro agreed wholeheartedly, his eyes shooting daggers at her, “you don’t. You can just pack up and leave anytime—and that goes for those two leeches of yours.” Since the first day of their divorce, it was what he’d been hoping for. But given she wouldn’t budge, he could make her life as miserable as possible. She almost seemed to enjoy their mutual disdain.

The expression on the woman’s face grew almost dangerously malicious even though her lips curved in a smile that never reached her eyes. It was the sort of expression that sent icy chills into the heart of the recipient. Most of the time, Jethro was immune.

“You
really
wouldn’t want me to do that, Jethro,” she warned “sweetly.” “Because I’ll be leaving one hell of a parting gift in my wake.”

It was a threat—not the first—and everyone within hearing range took note of it except for the chief. It wasn’t that Drucker hadn’t heard; it was a case of hearing the threat far too often, to the point of being anesthetized to it.

But whatever it was that Darla was rumored to have to hold over Jethro’s head, that problem existed between Jethro and his ex, and it was none of his concern right now. Faye’s murder and the subsequent kidnapping of the Garth baby was priority number one.

The chief glanced over toward the head housekeeper. Her gut-wrenching wails had toned down into something like pronounced sobs. His eyes met hers and he waited for a beat, until the sobs subsided as well.

Drucker inclined his head, indicating that enough was enough.

Taking in a few deep breaths, and barely covering up the glare she spared the chief, the woman looked toward the stairs. “I’ve got to go see her,” Mathilda told the person, a maid, closest to her.

“Can’t let you go up there just yet, Ma—Ms. Perkins,” the chief said, quickly correcting his slip of the tongue. He moved in front of the woman to block her path up the stairs. “The medical examiner hasn’t gotten here yet, and he needs to make his preliminary findings first.”

“After he does,
then
can I see her?” Mathilda asked.

The chief shook his head, looking just the slightest bit uncomfortable about refusing the woman’s request. “He’s got to take the body back to the morgue and do an autopsy on her first.”

“What autopsy?” Mathilda cried in disbelief. “Why is he going to be cutting her up like she was some giant jigsaw puzzle? Don’t you already know how she was murdered?”

Her question took the chief aback for a moment. “Well, it looks like she was shot, but we won’t know for sure until—”

Mathilda waved his words away impatiently. “Shot, stabbed, strangled, bludgeoned, what does it matter? Any way you look at it, Faye’s still dead.” She tried to duck under his arm to gain access to the stairs.

Drucker was quick to block her path to the stairs for a second time. She had better moves than the two who were part of his department’s team, the chief thought.

It looked to Trevor as if a power struggle was going on that seemed to go beyond the obvious. The chief, who had authority on his side, seemed to be hesitant about establishing that point with the distraught housekeeper. Mathilda did have an intimidating quality about her when she dealt with the staff, but Drucker, after all, was the chief of police. That was supposed to trump any sort of minor dictatorial power the housekeeper could exert.

“It might make a difference in finding her killer,” Trevor pointed out. “And the person or persons who took Avery.”

Mathilda hardly seemed to hear him. Her attention was on the man blocking her way up the stairs. She appeared entirely focused on her one goal: to get to see Faye one last time. She made it seem as if she needed closure.

“Faye was my best friend,” she cried. “I need to say goodbye.”

Drucker was somewhat frustrated, like a man at the end of his options who didn’t know which way to turn to minimize the coming confrontation.

“You can say goodbye after the autopsy. I’ll escort you to the morgue personally,” Drucker promised.

She opened her mouth as if she was about to say something terse about his offer just before she rejected it, but instead, Mathilda surprised everyone—including, apparently, the chief, by saying, “You’re right, of course. I didn’t mean to challenge you, Chief. This whole thing has just thrown me completely for a loop.”

Rather than take her apology in stride, the chief actually seemed relieved to Gabby as she looked on from the sidelines.

“That’s understandable,” he agreed. Moving back to the center of the room, he announced in a loud voice, “I know you all have other places to be and other things to be doing, but if you can all just be a little patient, this’ll be over before you know it.”

“Too late,” Trip quipped, a sneer all but consuming his thin, bony features. His complexion appeared that much pastier because of his dyed hair, which for all the world looked as if he’d used black shoe polish to achieve the color.

His sister, Tawny, perched on the arm of one of the sofas in the living room, snickered.

Gabby, whose nerves felt dangerously close to snapping, glared at the duo. “I’m glad you all find Faye’s murder such a chuckle.”

A born protector, Amanda put one arm comfortingly around her younger sister’s shoulders. The show of unity was clear. They might approach things differently, but at the bottom they were sisters—that meant being
there
for each other should the incident indicate the need.

“Hang in there, honey,” Amanda told her, her words loud enough for the two under discussion to hear. “Those two aren’t worth getting yourself worked up over even for a minute.”

“Maybe little Miss Goody Two-shoes would prefer to get herself worked up over a big, sweaty wrangler,” Tawny suggested, her implication abundantly clear. Her eyes washed over Trevor hungrily, with an air of entitlement that all but said that
she
should be the one receiving Trevor’s personal attention.

“That’s just about enough out of everybody!” Drucker declared in a loud voice. It earned him glares from Darla and her duo as well as from Jethro himself.

“How long you intend on standin’ there, playing big-city cop?” Jethro asked him. It was evident that he had lost his patience with this game and just wanted everyone to leave.

“Just need to ask everyone their whereabouts from approximately— What time did you say you put the other infant in the wrong crib?” Drucker asked, turning to Gabby for his information.

The other infant.

Gabby chafed at the chief’s unspoken implication, that Avery was “the other infant,” as in expendable—as in easily replaced.

Had that been the chief’s intention, or was it just a thoughtless oversight?

“Eleven,” she replied.

Drucker nodded, continuing. “Between eleven and— What time did you find the victim?” he asked.

“Faye—her name was Faye,” Gabby stressed, her voice cracking. The way the chief was referring to the dead woman—a woman who had obviously lost her life trying to save an infant—made it sound so clinical, so impersonal. She wasn’t just some faceless stranger or some robot that had been brought down; she had been a flesh-and-blood person Gabby had known for a good portion of her life. A person who would be greatly missed.

“No disrespect intended, little lady,” the chief said. “I know what her name was.” He paused for a moment, still waiting for his answer. “The time?” he prodded.

She thought for only a moment. If she lived to be a hundred, she was never going to forget the sight of Faye lying there on the floor, her life having ebbed away from her as quickly as her blood did.

“We found her at two,” she told Drucker.

The use of the pronoun confused him. “You went up there together?” Drucker asked, looking from Gabby to the man who had called him to come to the ranch.

“I was going up to check on Avery when I heard Ms. Colton scream,” Trevor recited dispassionately.

“So you found her first?” Drucker asked, looking at Gabby.

“Yes, I already told you that,” she insisted, trying very hard not to lose her temper. She didn’t care for what she took to be the chief’s patronizing tone.

“Just establishing the timeline for everyone,” Drucker told her, looking around at the other people who filled the foyer and the living room. “Now then, I’ll need to know where all of you were at that time.”

“Are you for real?” Jethro asked angrily. “We already told you—” he took a breath to center himself again and only half succeeded “—we were at the damn rodeo. You want me to paint you a picture?”

“Verbal answers will do, Mr. Colton,” the chief replied, clearly struggling to remain polite.

Jethro had only so much patience and it was long gone by now. He saw no need for extensive research.

“The woman’s still going to be dead, no matter what conclusions your little investigation get you. Looks to me that she got killed getting in the way and the killer got the wrong baby, so there goes his profit margin.” The smile on his lips was a cold one. “So it seems like he’s already paying for his crime.”

Trevor couldn’t see where his employer was going with this reasoning—other than making it rather clear that capturing the person responsible didn’t interest him. It had ceased to the second he realized that it wasn’t his granddaughter who had actually been kidnapped. Trevor had always known that the man was a coldhearted SOB, but the pay had been more than good, and he’d figured that he wasn’t a saint himself. However, this was a new low, even for Colton.

“And what’s to keep him from coming back and kidnapping the
right
baby the next time?” Trevor asked.

The question caused Jethro to bluster, but he had no answer to it. With a loud, exasperated sigh, he waved the chief on, a ruler giving a commoner permission to continue with his tiny, hopeless little task.

“I also need to know if any of you gave a copy of the house keys to anyone.” When more than a few hands went up in response to the question, Drucker glanced over toward Trevor. “You feel like giving me a hand here, Garth?” And then, because he wasn’t completely devoid of compassion, he asked, “Or would you rather sit this one out because it’s your—”

Drucker never got a chance to finish. Trevor pointed toward the group of people standing by the bay window, all of them too wound up to attempt to relax and try to pace themselves a little. “I’ll take this group—you take the others.”

It was exactly what he’d been thinking. “Sounds like a plan,” Drucker agreed.

Stepping up before the chief began talking to the first group, Gabby asked him, “What can I do?” She needed to find some way to help get Avery back. Only then would she be able to function like a person again. Until then, she was completely wrapped up in guilt and concern.

Overhearing, Trevor spared her a withering look. “You can go sit over there,” he said, indicating a chair on the far side of the living room.

She didn’t even have to look where he was pointing. She knew he wanted to banish her. She supposed she couldn’t exactly blame him.

“But I want to help,” she insisted.

Trevor had very little patience and none to spend on her. “Don’t you think that you’ve done enough?” he pointed out coldly.

Before she could attempt to answer him, there was a hard knock at the front door.

Because the doorknob gave under the pressure of his turning it, the man who had knocked pushed the door open slowly.

The medical examiner, along with his youthful aide, who looked as though he were barely old enough to shave and had only just now mastered the ability to push a gurney before him without managing to bump up against the medical examiner’s back.

“Someone said something about a body?” the M.E. asked cheerfully.

This, Gabby thought, was going to be a very rough, long day.

* * *

Trevor curled his fingers into his hands, clenching them at his sides in sheer frustration.

Two hours of questioning had yielded nothing.

Like it or not, everyone seemed to have an alibi for the time frame that had seen Faye’s demise. They were all at the rodeo—or claimed to be.

Several of the staff served as alibis for one another, but there were other alibis that still required verification, and that, Trevor knew, was going to require a bit of time—something that he felt they didn’t have and that they were steadily running out of in this case.

Most kidnapping victims died within the first thirty-six hours.

He had to find Avery!

It was the one driving thought—the
only
thought—that seemed to give him the will to go on. He needed to for Avery’s sake.

Having temporarily hit the wall at this point, he cast about for something that would recharge him before he returned to his search for Avery.

Toward that end, he acknowledged another chore that had just been laid at his feet. One, he was aware, he could easily get out of if he wanted to. The chief had already told him that he was willing to be the bearer of the news.

But shrugging off this particular duty was the coward’s way out, and painful or not, it was a responsibility Trevor felt he had a duty to shoulder. He was not, nor had he ever been, a man who passed the buck.

Dylan Frick deserved to hear about his mother’s death from someone who cared about Faye.

In a way, he supposed they were like brothers, he and Dylan. Not because of any bloodlines—Dylan was the governess’s son while he had been her ward, her foster son. But blood or not, he and Dylan had spent their adolescent years together, raised, cared for and looked after by the same woman, the one they both adored.