Full Circle (27 page)

When her phone rang, she picked up and was surprised to hear Agent Coulter on the line.

"Is this a secure line, Sheriff Raintree?"

"We don't have secure lines, Agent Coulter. Small-town Sheriff's offices don't budget for that kind of equipment. If you want to speak to me privately, call my cell number."

"I will," the Agent snapped and the phone went dead.

She pulled out her cell as it rang. "What's the problem, Agent Coulter?"

"Will you be overheard?"

Josie had already shut her office door and was looking at her grid board with the photographs of murdered women.

"No, we're private. What is it?"

"Another woman is missing," Agent Coulter said bluntly. "Same profile as the other women."

"From where," Josie demanded.

"Holbart," the Agent snapped. "Miranda Thompson, age 33, five-foot-six, long dark hair, slim build, mother of two, wife of Buddy Thompson, owner of Buddy's Brakes and Tires.

Josie glanced at her chart. "That doesn't fit the profile. Yes, the physical description fits, but none of the other women were local, married, or had children. The killer also waited years between some of the known murders. If the killer has struck again, this fast, something has escalated."

"Yeah, he's been found out and now his need to kill has escalated. I'm sending someone out to check the Rawlings' site, if nothing else the killer has been consistent about dumping the bodies there. Keep your eyes and ears alert, Sheriff," Agent Coulter ordered.

"I will," Josie said, as she disconnected. She should have told him she was not the sheriff any longer. She stepped out of her office and hailed Georgina. "We're expecting a missing person's alert to come through at any time. Get me a copy of the photo, please, before you distribute it. Also, find out when Tyrone is going to get over here and get this computer connected up to the network. Tell him to get his butt in gear, because I still have arrest privileges, and I'm running out of my already limited amount of patience. I need to start training you guys on this new database!"

Not more than ten minutes later, Georgina knocked and breezed through the door.

"Tyrone said he's sorry, but he forgot. He'll be over this afternoon. He's been busy setting up something at the high school, and he got involved with it.

"This lady isn't the only person missing," Georgina said as she handed over the copy of the report. "The mayor has flown the coop again and the town council is mad. He's not answering his cell phone. What do you think he's up to? Do you reckon he's looking for another job? 'Cause, Lord knows he's not going to serve another term as Mayor."

Little alarm bells went off in Josie's head. She waited until Georgina was back at her desk before calling Agent Coulter from her cell.

"What, Sheriff?" the Agent snapped out.

"A hunch or a good guess," Josie said. "Send someone out to the Indigo Hotel in Holbart and the surrounding hotels. Check for the registration of an Aiden Roland or a man fitting his description, five-foot-ten inches, maybe 165 pounds, light brown hair, wire-rimmed glasses. He's near forty but looks thirty. I think there's a picture of him on the Rawlings' homepage."

"What's the hunch?" Agent Coulter demanded. "Isn't that your mayor?"

"Yes it is, but I thought I saw him last week heading into the Indigo Hotel with a dark-haired woman. Aiden has been missing a lot of work lately. He's not been where he's supposed to be, when he's supposed to be there."

"You think he might be our killer?"

Josie laughed. "No, I think our too-handsome-for-his-own-good mayor might be having an affair with a woman with two children and a husband. I think they may have gotten carried away and not being as discrete or as conscientious about their clandestine get-togethers as they should have been. I could be way off base, but it makes sense to me. Will you check it out?"

"You think this is about the mayor screwing around with someone's wife?" Agent Coulter demanded.

"It's worth the time to check it out. If she's missing and not dead, I will be elated. She can work out her affairs herself. I'll be quite happy if she isn't another victim."

"I'll check it out and get back with you," Agent Coulter snapped and disconnected the call.

Josie put her cell back in her pocket and shook her head. Diplomacy was not the FBI Agent's best asset, but it wasn't hers, either. She looked up at her chart again and still could not shake the feeling she was missing something.

Forty minutes later Josie received another phone call from Agent Coulter. Miranda Thompson was safe and sound, found and identified in the Indigo Hotel with Aiden Roland. Both were in a state of undress, but that wasn't against the law. Mrs. Thompson was none too happy about being found in a hotel room with a man or about being questioned by the FBI. An argument ensued that was loud and angry, and the senior agent suspected the affair between the mayor and Miranda Thompson was over.

Josie smiled and removed the missing report from the files, relieved that the woman was not another victim. She went back to her paperwork only to have another interruption, this time from Alex. The boy was upset as one of his friends had snapped a photograph of her bruised and swollen face, and sent it to him. He wanted to come home and did not care if he had to give up the remaining weeks of baseball camp. He wanted to come home to protect her.

Josie sat back in her chair and grinned. Both of her guys seemed to think she couldn't take care of herself, which she found endearing because she'd been taking care of herself for a long time. It was nice though and gave her a warm fuzzy feeling to know they cared. She talked Alex down as best she could, relaying to him that she wasn't in any danger as she was no longer the sheriff and instead was doing a very boring job of paperwork. When she hung up the phone with her twelve-year-old, she dialed County to inquire about his mother. Several phone calls later, and she tracked Marcy Carter to a 30-day alcohol rehabilitation program. A phone call to Alex's child advocate attorney, Mrs. Eileen Foster, confirmed that the court date for the termination of Marcy Carter's parental rights over Alex had been rescheduled. Mrs. Foster said she would do her best to see that the court didn't delay the hearing again.

Pushing her paperwork aside and feeling frustrated with the system and restless, Josie headed home for lunch. Jack wouldn't be there, but the leftover barbecued chicken from the previous evening was and would do nicely since she had skipped breakfast. She parked her truck and jumped out, hungrier by the second as she thought of the leftovers in the refrigerator. She went to the side door and stopped as Jimmy Richards was trying to insert a key in her door.

He turned and smiled. "Hi, I was going to leave a note for Jack," Jimmy said with a grin. "I had a question about some of the plumbing changes he wanted in the bathroom in his new office. My key doesn't work anymore."

"No," Josie said, unlocking the door and inviting him into the kitchen as she disarmed the security panel. "It works for the carriage house, but not the main house. I changed the house locks after all the inside construction was completed, and I put in the security system. I'd given out too many keys to many construction people. If I decide on any more work that needs to be done, I'll get you a key made. Right now, Jack and Buck are acting as my repairmen. Do you want some lunch? Jack makes great barbecued chicken."

"No, but if you've got a piece of paper, I'll leave that note for Jack," Jimmy said. "It's a shame your house is done. I miss seeing you around, Josie—as a friend, I mean. I'm real pleased you've hooked up with Jack."

"I get it," Josie said with a grin. "You're happily married with five kids and another in the oven. Is it another boy?"

Jimmy shook his head. "Mary Anne said she doesn't want to know in advance. I know she's hoping for a girl this time, but so far we've specialized in boys. I already got me a basketball team, maybe we'll be trying for a baseball team next. Well, I've got to go down to Snyder and pick up a special order of bathroom fixtures." Jimmy scribbled a note, folded it and left it on the kitchen counter with Jack's name on it.

"Be careful, the weather service has been warning of high winds and storm warnings all over this sector of the state. Do you want some coffee or soda to go?" Josie asked.

"Naw, I've got some in my cooler in the truck. Be careful yourself. We reinforced that storm shelter of yours but never got around to refitting it with a power generator. That's something to keep in mind and not forget. I'll see you later, kido."

Josie absentmindedly headed to the refrigerator after Jimmy left. It bothered her a little that Jimmy thought he could still let himself into her house without calling her in advance, but she knew he meant no harm. Jimmy's key ring was massive, and he probably had keys for half the homes in town. When something went wrong in your house, you called Jimmy and he fixed it—fast. A lot of the services in town came and went into homes as repairs needed to be completed, or appliances needed to be delivered. It wasn't necessary to take a day off work and wait around for someone to show up; you left your door unlocked for their entry. Rawlings had always been a friendly, trustworthy kind of town. Most of the citizens still didn't lock their doors, and she only did because she'd been city trained never to leave a door unlocked.

She finished her lunch and was heading out the door when the house phone rang, but of course, she couldn't find it because she never remembered to return it to the docking station. Her cell quickly followed. Jack warned her that a tornado had touched down outside Mangum and was tracking northeast toward Rawlings.

Josie called into the sheriff's office. They had already received notification. Schools and businesses in town were preparing. After the Moore F-5 tornado, Oklahomans didn't ignore warnings or second-guess threats anymore. People would bring their outside displays inside, and drag patio furniture inside along with anything else that could fly. Josie got busy dragging patio furniture off the deck and storing them inside the garage and the closed in back porch. The winds were picking up steadily, and she could see the storm clouds building. She was carrying some potted plants from the front porch to the garage when she heard the first loud crack. She instinctively ducked and looked around for falling or swinging branches, but she didn't see any. She closed the outside shutters on the downstairs windows and headed inside, and she heard a second crack and felt the entire back of the house shake. She ran out to investigate and saw that a large tree limb had fallen down on the second-floor balcony, broken through the railing, ripped down the trellis and landed on the back porch roof.

The winds were getting stronger, but Josie knew what she had to do. She headed for the garage and dragged out a ladder and chain saw. If a branch that size crashed down on the deck, it would take out a large section of it along with the hot tub, and she had only used that hot tub a few times. She'd debated having the tree removed from her backyard and now she decided she'd made the wrong decision to keep it.

She climbed up onto the porch roof and trimmed all the smaller branches off the big limb, tossing them over the edge. She was nearly finished cutting the largest part of a large limb into manageable pieces when there was another crack. She ducked as a smaller limb fell, smashed into the ladder and knocked it down on the deck. Shutting the chainsaw off, she surveyed her predicament. One end of the porch below was brick steps; the other end was a flat concrete driveway. The entire back of the closed-in porch was attached to the extensive deck surrounded by railings with built-in seating areas and the hot tub. The heavy ladder had missed the Jacuzzi by only a few feet. Unfortunately, there were no windows accessible from the porch roof, and it was a good sixteen or more feet to ground level, all of which were hard surfaces or obstructed surfaces with things that she didn't particularly want to fall into and break a leg or worse.

There was no way down, and she had left her cell phone on the kitchen counter. She was stranded. She looked over at her neighbor's property, but that was three acres away, and neither of their vehicles was in the carport. She'd have to wait until someone came home to yell for help.

Pragmatic about her choices, Josie cranked on the chain saw and finished cutting up the limb, rolling the larger chunks off the roof edge and let them hit the concrete below. When she was finished, she hunkered down as close to the edge of the house as she could get to shelter herself from the whipping winds, but the situation got worse. Rain began pelting down in large drops, and the wind was moving with such speed that it gave hard water a new definition. The rain hurtled down painfully as the temperature dropped thirty degrees in less than a half hour. She knew if it started sleeting or dropping hailstones, she was in deep trouble, and might have to make the decision to jump. Hail was a sure sign of an impending funnel touchdown.

Jack was driving as fast as he could while dodging missiles of trashcans, signs, flimsy patio furniture and whatever else flew into his path. He wasn't chasing the storm. The storm was chasing him. The sky was darkening, and the clouds were heavy and rotating dangerously. The air pressure was so low it made Jack's ears hurt. He had seen a funnel snake out of the clouds, but as he held his breath, it disappeared back up into the cloud formation. He'd grown up in tornado alley; he knew the signs and the danger. He had called Josie once, but after that, he had not been able to contact her. He tried the sheriff's office. She'd called in but had not returned yet. Josie was rarely without her cell phone, and that scared him.

He broke every speed limit on the country roads, driving the thirty miles back to Rawlings. He screeched to a stop after sliding his Jeep into the open garage next to Josie's truck, quickly punched the button to lower the door and ran for the house. He shouted for Josie several times, but there was no answer. He went to the basement door shouting for her, but again, there was no answer. Looking out the kitchen door, he saw that the deck chairs, grill and other items were missing, that meant she had been putting things inside. He stepped out into the blasting winds and nearly tripped over large chunks of newly cut tree limbs. He saw the ladder lying across the deck.

"Josie!"

"Jack!" At the sound of her answering response, he looked upward to see her on her hands and knees up on the porch roof hanging on for dear life against the powerful winds.

Jack lifted the ladder, slammed it up against the roofline of the porch and saw her leg go over the edge of the roof. "No!" he shouted. "Your weight won't hold the ladder against these winds. I'm coming up!" He climbed the ladder fighting against the strength of the gale force winds. He was five feet from the roofline when he yelled for Josie to come down. Her legs came over the top, and she found her position in front of him as he held her steady until they were five or six feet from the ground. The wind caught the top of the ladder, and it began to move on its own.

Grabbing Josie firmly by the shoulders, Jack shouted, "Jump right!"

Josie did not hesitate, and they tumbled to the deck. Jack covered her with his body as the heavy ladder crashed, bounced and missed his head by mere inches. He was on his feet in seconds, grabbing her by the waist of her jeans, hauling her to her feet with a vice-like grip around her waist. He heaved her inside the house and slammed the door shut behind him. Something smashed a window somewhere in the house, and when Josie turned, he grabbed her by the back of her shirt and pushed her toward the basement door.

"Down, now!" he shouted as something heavy hit the side of the house. They scrambled down the steps as the electricity flickered.

Josie opened a cabinet at the bottom of the stairs and pulled out two flashlights, handing one to Jack. "This way," she said calmly, leading the way through a maze of rooms until they came to a heavy wooden door. They opened it and followed a narrow bricked hallway to another door, which she opened, and they went inside the storm shelter. "Better light a lantern in case the electricity goes off. It usually does for a while."

Jack followed her instructions, turning the wick down to conserve the oil until the power did go off.

Josie rummaged through a plastic storage container and pulled out a flannel shirt and a pair of jeans for her, and a large man's shirt she handed over to Jack. "This will be too big for you. It was my uncle's. I should have changed out all this emergency stuff, but I never got around to it. I brought some clothes down for Alex and myself a while back. I'm sorry, but I never thought to add some of yours. The water is fresh, and the food in the plastic tubs isn't that old." As Josie was explaining, she was drying off on a towel and shivering.

"How long were you stuck up on that roof?" Jack demanded.

She checked her watch. "A little more than an hour." She pulled off her jeans and shirt.

Jack took the towel and briskly rubbed her down from head to toe. When he finished, she took off her wet bra and panties, and pulled on the dry jeans and shirt. The storm door entrance leading down from the backyard banged and rattled, so Jack took one of the flashlights to check the fastening lock. When he came back, Josie was pulling out an old hot plate and plugging it in, making coffee in an old-fashioned campfire coffee pot. She got the coffee going, but she was still rubbing her arms and shivering with cold. He found another towel in the clothes box and wrapped it around her tightly, holding the two ends together. He turned her to face him.

"Why were you on the roof?" he demanded.

"Because a branch came down, and I didn't want it to blow off onto the deck and ruin it. It would have smashed through the deck and the hot tub," Josie admitted.

"You were raised in tornado alley the same as me. Why the hell would you go on a roof in tornado conditions? I called and told you to head for the basement. Why didn't you get your ass down here?"

Josie heard the fury in Jack's voice, but so far, he was controlling it. "For the same reason you were on the highway instead of going into a shelter in Mangum. You said there was a touchdown there. You were in a lot more danger than I was, but that didn't stop you from driving back here."

"Don't try to deflect this onto me."

"I'm not," Josie insisted. "Jack, we're both responders. We don't run, and we don't hide. We take action. My action was to cut up the tree branch before it did any more damage. Your action was to head back here."

"Only because I knew you'd be too much of an idiot to take shelter," he interrupted.

"I'm an idiot because I do the same thing as you? How does that work?" Josie demanded her temper rising. "I'm an adult and I make adult decisions. If you disagree, tough!"

"Tough!" Jack repeated. "What would you have done if I hadn't shown up? Damn it, you were stuck up on the roof 16 to 18 feet off the ground without a way to get down. When I got here, the winds had to be at least fifty miles an hour."

"The winds weren't that strong when I went up," Josie exclaimed, pulling loose from him and pouring them both a cup of coffee. "In the worse-case scenario, I would have dangled from the porch roof and dropped about eleven feet."

Jack set his cup of coffee aside. "At best you would have broken a lot of bones, at worse—I don't even want to think about it."

"Well, I didn't have a lot of choices. It didn't happen, so don't think about it," Josie snapped.

"It doesn't work that way," Jack said, taking her coffee cup and setting it aside. "I know you don't think there's a difference between men and women, but there is. Men should be strong enough or macho enough, whatever the hell you want to call it, to protect their women. I told you to go to the basement for your protection." He pushed his fingers into the waistband of her jeans and pulled her to him, unbuttoning and pushing the jeans down, gripping her buttocks one in each hand. Josie leaned into him thinking it was a prelude to sex, but he had a different idea. With one quick movement, he put his foot up on a footlocker and yanked her over his knee. Two more yanks and her jeans were to her knees, and she was bare butt naked.

"No!" Josie screamed and began to fight, but it was not going to do her any good.

That first crack on her bare ass was painful and nearly had Josie toppling over on her head.

"You don't listen, and you don't think ahead," Jack complained. "You jump in not considering the consequences. The consequence this time is getting your ass set on fire because you were irresponsible and put your life in danger—again!"

Jack punctuated several of his words with hard smacks. His last word was said with anger and with a spank hard enough to make Josie yelp, and he was not finished. He took his time making sure he covered every inch of her trim backside. Jack had been trying to get the idea of consequences across to Josie since she was eight years old. He had not succeeded, and she obviously had not learned on her own. That didn't mean he had given up the battle. He did not stop whacking her bottom until he was satisfied with its warm red color.

His hand, which Josie concluded had to be bionic and made of steel, laid into her again and again, landing each spank exactly where he wanted it to land. Josie determined he would not see he was hurting her. She was thirty-three years old, not a child. If he saw she would not buckle, maybe he would get it through his thick head she was not going to conform to his macho domestic crap. That idea lasted about two minutes as her bottom started to heat up. It felt like it was on fire. Before long, she was grabbing for anything that would help her escape from his hand. She gritted her teeth and clenched her fists, but it was no good. After the first cry had escaped from her throat, there was no stopping the torrent. After the first tear had fallen, there was no stopping the flood.

The continuous whacks of his hand were painful, and she had to get him to stop!

"Stop, Jack! Stop! Please. I swear I will not do it again. I swear I won't!"

Jack stopped, but he did not release her as she tried to wiggle free. "You say that Josie, but I don't believe you. This is so you remember." He shifted her position and applied a dozen or more smacks to her already reddened backside before he loosened his grip.

"This time you will remember, and you'd better not forget again," Jack warned. "I know you haven't had anyone in your life to care what happens to you, Josie, but I care! Get that through your thick skull. Your life is important and damn it, you can't keep taking risks."

"I won't. I promise," Josie sobbed, as he released her and pulled her into his chest to cry.

Jack rubbed her shoulders, leaned over to give her jeans a yank.

"No, don't!" Josie's hands went around to prevent him from pulling up the jeans over her sore backside.

They stood together for a while as her cries quieted. There was a loud crash over their heads, and they both ducked and looked up although there was nothing to see except a low-beamed ceiling with newly installed steel beams. The electricity flickered and went out.

Jack let go of Josie and turned the oil lamp up, then lit another.

Josie went to the box of clothes and found a pair of old fleece pajama bottoms, removed her jeans completely and pulled the soft pajamas up over her tender parts.

Jack lifted one eyebrow. "Hello Kitty?"

Josie smiled weakly. "I'm surprised you even know that cartoon character." There was another loud crash.

"Does this shelter have a hatch or someway we can look outside?" Jack asked.

She nodded. "It has a homemade periscope my grandfather built in when he constructed the shelter. He was a Navy man during the Korean War. I played with it when I was a kid, but I don't know if it still works or not. It's funny how we never think of these shelters until we need them and when we need them it's too late to check everything out." She showed him the periscope, and Jack worked the levers to raise it above ground level.

"Ingenious," Jack commented, "but I can't see much. Vertical rain and its dark outside, which means we're in the thick of it. The winds are whipping things around. We could be on the edge of a tornado or inside one for all we know."

"I should probably install hi-tech cameras with battery back-ups," Josie said, shivering. "That's a project I'll definitely complete, provided the house is still standing when this is over."

Jack rummaged through the boxes, found some blankets and wrapped one around her. He tossed some old patio cushions on the floor. "We'll sit it out," he said.  He sat down and patted the cushion beside him.

"You sit, I'll lie here on my stomach," Josie muttered.

Jack smiled. "You're not going to make me feel guilty."

"I wouldn't dream of it," Josie snapped. "Jack, why do you have to spank me?"

"Because you matter to me, and I can't stand the idea that you never think of your safety first. You can't take chances like that, Josie. I won't let you, and I will keep repeating this lesson until I get it through your thick head or, in your case, through your tender bottom."

"It's not right, Jack!"

"If you want a metrosexual man in tune with his female side, you picked the wrong guy, sweetheart," Jack said. "I know that, for the last fifty years, society has preached there are no differences between the sexes, but I don't buy it. The guys I know have a built-in instinct to protect women and families. In the military, that instinct carries over to the innocent victims, and we bring it back with us.

"I won't allow you to put yourself into dangerous situations. I've lost enough in my life. I can't lose you now that we're back together. We've both given up dangerous jobs. We need to work harder on creating some nice, normal boring lifestyles. Christ, Josie how many times have you been hurt since I've been back?"

"Normal and boring sounds good to me, it's what I was trying for when I moved back, but it hasn't happened yet," Josie insisted. "Jack, I'm not walking around trying to get hurt, and I'm not particularly accident prone. I got thrown from my horse! How many times have you been thrown in your lifetime? If you ride, that's part of the risk you take. The situation with Jolene was the first time that I've ever been hurt in the line of duty."

"Would you like to try recounting again," Jack snapped.

Josie gave a sigh. "I'm not talking about what went wrong with the sting operation. I'm talking about being a cop. I was a cop for two and half years in Oklahoma City, and I never got hurt. I've been a cop here for over a year, and it was a black eye, not a bullet."