Cowboy Behind the Badge (21 page)

Cain almost laughed. Quinn's whole life was lived smack-dab in the middle of an impervious cloud of secrecy and lies. Little of what Cain knew about his boss's life and history was reliable. Quinn had spent two decades in the CIA, fabricating an identity as impossible to penetrate as a Smoky Mountain midnight.

He sighed. “Okay, fine. But how am I supposed to investigate Renee Lindsey's murder when half the town still thinks I did it? Who's going to be willing to talk to me?”

“You had an alibi. There was never any evidence to implicate you. You weren't charged with anything.”

“Small-town gossip doesn't deal in evidence and legal outcomes.” Cain reached the summit of the hill, where a scenic overlook offered parking for a half dozen vehicles and an observation deck with a panoramic view of the Smoky Mountains. “People know what they know, the truth be damned.”

As he unlocked the cab of his Ford F-150, he spared a moment to gaze out across the spectacular mountain vista. The sight tugged at something deep inside him, something he'd have sworn died years ago when he'd shaken the dust of Purgatory, Tennessee, off his boots.

Yet, thanks to Alexander Quinn, here he was again, back in the hills he'd left behind, ready to face a past he'd long been determined to forget.

What the hell was he thinking?

“Don't you want to know who killed Renee Lindsey?”

If Cain didn't know better, he might have imagined a touch of sympathy in Quinn's soft question. But Cain
did
know better. If there was any emotion in Quinn's voice, it was carefully planted there for a reason. To disarm him, perhaps. To get him to spill his own secrets.

To prod him into doing whatever it was Quinn wanted for whatever reason he wanted it.

“Of course I do,” Cain answered, keeping his tone businesslike and free of the emotion that burned like a furnace in the center of his chest.

Of course he wanted to know who'd killed Renee Lindsey. In his own way, he'd loved her almost as much as her family had. And when he'd found her body at the base of Crybaby Falls, he'd felt so much rage he'd thought he'd combust. She'd been a sweet girl. A good girl, despite her foolish choices. She hadn't deserved to die for her mistakes.

“Keep me informed.” Quinn hung up without saying goodbye.

“Goodbye to you, too,” Cain muttered, shoving his phone into his pocket and climbing into the truck cab.

As he belted himself in, he stared through the windshield at the cool blue mountains spreading out in front of him as far as the eye could see. Just over the closest rise, he thought, was Crybaby Falls. He could be there in five minutes. Maybe less.

He tried to quell the thought. He'd spent too many hours haunting the falls all those years ago before he'd left Purgatory behind. Too many hours beating his head against an invisible wall of secrets and lies, grieving the loss of his friend and the colossal unfairness of a world where Renee Lindsey had to die while Cain's bastard of a father got to live. He'd buried the boy he'd been deep in the rocky soil of Mulberry Rise when he left Purgatory behind. He hadn't been back to the falls in years.

But when he reached the turnoff to Old Bridge Road, he took a right and headed down the narrow, rutted one-lane that would take him straight to the footbridge over the falls.

* * *

A
WOODEN
 
BRIDGE
 
crossed Warrior Creek mere yards from the top of Crybaby Falls, close enough to the water's surface that a strong rain could raise the creek high enough to swamp the rough wood slats that made up the floor of the bridge. But even though the afternoon sun had surrendered to clouds and a light shower, the rainfall never made it past a slow, steady drizzle, cooling air shrouding the woods in a misty fog that made the trees and rocks look like an alien landscape, full of mystery and danger.

Or maybe it was this landscape in particular. These rocks, these trees, these thundering falls.

Sara tucked her knees up closer to her chest as a rising breeze blew the rainfall under the rocky outcropping providing her with shelter. She wondered, not for the first time, if she and Donnie had stopped here at Crybaby Falls before heading up the mountain the night of the accident. Had they lingered here, Donnie stewing in a toxic blend of grief and obsession? Had she tried to coax him back to the present, to what he still had rather than what he'd lost so many years ago?

She'd tried to understand his driving need for answers. He and Renee had been close, despite the four-year difference in their ages. When Renee had died at eighteen, Donnie and Sara had been high-school freshman, just starting to transition from their innocent childhood flirtation to the complexity of a high-school romance. At fourteen, Sara hadn't known how to comfort her grief-stunned boyfriend.

At twenty-nine, she still hadn't known how to comfort Donnie. And she'd begun to fear what his intensifying obsession was doing not just to him but to their marriage, as well.

They'd both been Birmingham police officers. But while Donnie had been content in uniform, she'd been pushing her way up the ranks, making detective and settling into a professional life she'd loved, despite the pressures of the job.

Ironic, she supposed, that the strain on their marriage hadn't come from the stress of her work but from her husband's inability to get past that one, tragic moment from his past.

She'd wanted answers, too. But if she'd learned anything in her time as a Birmingham police detective, it was the awful truth that some murders never got solved. Some killers never saw justice.

And she'd had a sinking feeling that Renee Lindsey's murder was going to turn out to be one of those cases that went permanently cold.

“I won't accept that,” Donnie had told her as he'd packed his bags for a trip back to Purgatory the morning before the accident that took his life. It was the last moment of her life she could remember before waking up in a Knoxville hospital, drowning in bandages and a relentless tide of pain.

She rubbed her gritty eyes. They'd come here to Purgatory to follow a new lead. That much she knew.

But what new lead? Had Donnie told her? Or had he kept it to himself, the way he'd begun to hide all aspects of his investigation into his sister's murder from Sara, as if he no longer trusted her to listen to his theories with an open mind?

Had she forced him into such secrecy with her growing impatience? She didn't want to believe she'd made him feel he couldn't trust her with his thoughts, but if she was truthful with herself, she knew it was possible. The more she'd settled into her new life in Birmingham, the more distance had seemed to grow between her and Donnie. His mind, his heart, was still in Tennessee. It was as if the world had stopped turning for him fifteen years earlier, when the Ridge County sheriff had shown up at the Lindsey house to break the wretched news of Renee's death.

She had wanted to understand. But his grief wasn't hers, no matter how much she'd wanted to bear it for him.

Had they been arguing in the car? Had she let his anger, her growing impatience, distract her at the wrong moment?

Pressing the heel of her palm to her forehead as if she could somehow quell the throbbing ache behind her eyes, she tried to remember something, anything, from that night.

She'd been driving Donnie's Silverado. His baby. He'd bought the truck used when he'd turned eighteen with money he'd made working at a tourist trap in Sevierville. He'd pampered the old truck as if it were a beloved pet and rarely let Sara drive it, not because he didn't think she was a good driver but because he found such simple joy behind the wheel of the tough old Chevy.

So why had she been driving that night? Had he been impaired in some way? Donnie had never been much of a drinker, but he'd had a beer now and then if he was socializing with friends who drank. The police hadn't checked his blood-alcohol level, as far as she knew, since he hadn't been driving.

They'd checked hers in the hospital, of course, and found no alcohol in her system. She'd have been shocked if they had; she had avoided alcohol like the plague ever since one nightmarish teenage binge on prom night her senior year. When she'd vowed “never again,” she'd meant it.

The tox screen had come up clean, as well.

But something had caused her to veer off Black Creek Road, a road she'd traveled nearly every day of her life until she was eighteen. A road as familiar to her as her own face in the mirror. She knew every turn, every twist, every incline and straightaway of Black Creek Road, from the old marble quarry north of town to where the road ended ten miles past Bitterwood to the south. She wouldn't have missed the hairpin turn. Not even at midnight in a snowstorm.

But it hadn't been midnight. The crash had happened a little after nine. And the night had been clear and mild, according to reports.

She hadn't hit an animal. There weren't any signs that she'd swerved or braked to miss an animal, either. There hadn't even been any skid marks to indicate she'd tried to stop their plummet over the cliff.

How the hell could that be? If she hadn't been drunk or incapacitated, why wouldn't she have tried to stop the car from going over the edge?

Somewhere outside her hiding spot came a distinct snap of a twig, loud enough to make her nerves jangle. On instinct, she tugged her knees more tightly to her chest, like a child hiding from detection.

Was this how Renee Lindsey had felt? she wondered suddenly as her pulse sped up and her skin broke out in goose bumps. Had this been the last thing she felt before she'd died?

A man strode into view, moving in quick, powerful strides that exuded barely leashed anger. He was tall and lean, all sinew and muscle.

And dangerous, Sara thought, staring out from her hiding place with her heart in her throat.

This particular man was as dangerous as hell.

Copyright © 2014 by Paula Graves