40
W
ill spun around, his hand instinc
tively going to his sidearm.
“Christ, Desiree,” he said on an exasperated breath. “You should know better than to sneak up on someone that way! I could’ve shot you.”
“Which would’ve been the least of our problems. We need to talk.”
Will knew that she hadn’t approved of the way he’d driven away from the lodge crime scene without checking on Faith.
“Look, if this is about Faith—”
“No. I just got a call from someone about the Gallagher girl. A potential witness the night she died.”
Her face was as grim as he’d ever seen it. “And that’s not a good thing why?”
“It’s Sam.”
Puzzled, Will glanced up at the office window. “Sam called?”
“No.” She dragged a hand through her dark curls. “Sam’s our new suspect.”
* * *
* *
“
I
was with her.” They were alone in Will’s office. No way was he going to put Sam in the box. The deputy closed his eyes for a brief, painful moment. “The night she died.”
“What do you mean you were with her? Christ,” Will said, as the answer hit like a bullet between his eyes. “Are you saying you had sex with her?”
“No. She was just a kid, Will. There was no way I had any sexual feelings toward her.” Sam let out a long, tired sigh. “She had this thing. About older men. Like that complex about girls and their fathers.”
“The Electra complex?”
“Yeah. That’s what Dr. Hayworth called it when I talked to him about it.”
“You discussed Erin Gallagher with Hayworth?”
“I didn’t know what else to do,” Sam exploded uncharacteristically. “She worked for him. He’s a shrink. I figured maybe he’d have a handle on what I should do.
Will, the girl wouldn’t leave me alone. Every time I turned around, there she was. Smiling. Flirting. It was like she’d decided to go hunting and I was in her crosshairs and she wouldn’t give up until she bagged me.”
And there were a lot of women, Will thought, who’d consider Sam a trophy animal.
“What did Hayworth suggest you do?”
“At first he suggested avoiding her. But that only made things worse. Then he suggested talking it out. He’s big on talk,” Sam said drily.
“I take it that didn’t work.”
“I guess the fuck it didn’t. Considering I came home that night and found her naked in my bed.”
Could his night get any worse? The woman he was actually contemplating a future with turned out to have a husband, and the man who’d become the closest thing Will had to a friend since returning to Hazard had managed to put himself smack in the middle of a high-profile murder investigation.
“Tell me you didn’t fuck her.”
“That’s exactly what I’m trying to do.” Sam was obviously offended, but Will was too exhausted and too pissed off to care. “She said she’d made a big mistake and needed to move past it.”
“Move past it by having sex with you?”
“Apparently.”
“What kind of mistake?”
“I didn’t have any idea at the time. But given that her coach was in town, and from what she’d told me about him—”
“This wasn’t the first time you were together?”
“I pulled her over for drunk driving when she first came to town.”
“I don't remember a ticket.”
“That’s because I didn’t issue her one. I figured everyone deserves a cha
nce, and besides, any other col
lege kid can have a few too many beers at a kegger and get away with it. The minute Erin Gallagher’s name showed up on a police blotter, the press would be crawling all over the story.”
Will couldn’t argue with that.
“So, I confiscated her keys, to keep her from having a wreck, then drove her home to her apartment. When she had trouble standing up, I helped her upstairs to her apartment, put her into bed—fully dressed,” he added, in case Will might think the worst, “then left.
“The next day she tracked me down in The Branding Iron, looking for her keys. I bought her breakfast. We talked. Not about anything personal. Just school, Indian stuff. She seemed really interested in the Shoshone culture.”
“I’ll bet.”
“I may just be a rural county deputy, but I believe I just detected a bit of sarcasm.”
“Ever think you were the flavor of the month?”
“Of course. Which was one reason I never gave in to her feminine wiles. Another one was, I was nearly old enough to be her father.”
“That may have been the point.”
Sam shrugged. “That’s pretty much what Hayworth said. She didn’t exactly confirm it, but she’d been at the lodge that afternoon, and from what you said about the different pubic hairs found on her body, I’d bet the mistake she was trying to forget with me was fucking that Russian coach.”
Will ran the matrix through his mind. “Makes sense,” he agreed. “So, how come you
didn’t tell me ear
lier? Like in the beginning.”
“Because I was hoping it was a slam dunk. That the big-city detective—”
“Which would be me.”
“Which would be you,” Sam agreed, “would be able to nab the bad guy and put him behind bars before anything got out.”
“So much for that idea.”
“I did try to talk with you earlier,” Sam reminded him. “Then you got that call about the Gallagher woman being killed and we had to go out to the lodge.”
Will cursed. “You realize I’m going to have to take an official statement on this?”
“Yeah. But there’s another problem.”
“Of course there is.” Will cast a quick, frustrated glance upward, wondering what the hell he’d done to deserve all this.
“The reason I didn’t mention anything about Erin stopping by is that I knew it would trigger an investigation into where I was later that night.”
“Okay. So, where were you?”
Will figured the only thing that could have his deputy looking so uncomfortable would be if he’d been spending his paycheck at the so-called massage parlor outside the county line.
“On the rez.”
“Okay. Alone?”
“No.”
Sam was, like most Native Americans, not all that loquacious on a good day. Which this was not.
“Want to tell me who you were with?”
“No. But obviously now that the shit’s hit the fan, I’m
going to have to.” Sam s
ucked in a breath. “Leon Ducett.
”
“The kid from the college? Who works at KWIND?”
“The ‘kid’ is twenty-three years old,” Sam said with uncharacteristic defensiveness.
“Okay. But this is the same guy who wasn’t available to work the news? Because he was supposedly spending the night with his girlfriend?”
“Yeah. And before you ask the next question, about why we kept our mouths shut for the past twenty-four hours, maybe you ought to ask yourself how eager you’d be to come out of the closet if you were a Native American homosexual in northwest Wyoming. The state where two heterosexual men brutally beat a gay college student, lashed him to a fence, and left him to die out on the remote prairie.”
“That case changed a lot of minds,” Will argued. “And look at all the people who went to that gay cowboy movie. Attitudes are changing. Maybe not as fast as we’d like, but they are changing.”
Sam tilted his head. His eyes were typically expressionless, but Will could feel the skepticism radiating from him. “And you’d be willing to let someone you loved risk that?”
When Will’s mind immediately turned to Faith, he knew that, however angry at her he was, it didn’t change the way he felt, deep down. That she had a husband complicated things. Fortunately, he’d always thrived on complication.
“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “But the fact remains that a deputy of the Hazard Sheriff’s Department may have information regarding a double homicide. We may be friends, but I can’t overlook that.”
“I didn’t expect you to. I just wanted to give you a heads-up.”
“I appreciate that,” Will said, feeling more exhausted than he’d ever before felt in his life. “I’m going to need you to fill out a statement.”
“Yeah, I’m already on that.”
“No.” Will hated what he was about to say. But knew he had no choice. “Tell Desiree what you told me. Have her put it in an official report. If you want to lawyer up—”
“I don’t need a damn lawyer.”
Since they both belonged to a group of people who’d routinely been screwed over by attorneys who’d eagerly take their money, promising to help them gain access to the white government who’d screwed them in the first place, Will understood.
“I’ll instruct Desiree to hold off filing the report for another twenty-four hours.”
“That could get you in a world of hurt with the AG’s office and the DCI if things go south.”
Right now, Will didn’t give a flying fuck what the suits in the Department of Criminal Investigation might think. Sam was his deputy. Hazard was his town. And he damn well intended to handle things his way.
“We’ll jump off that bridge when we come to it,” he said. “Meanwhile, let’s get your statement on the record.”
Clouds had been rolling in from the west all day. A storm warning had been issued for western Wyoming, and after a flurry of shopping, residents seemed to have hunkered down for the duration.
As he drove through the dark and empty streets, listening to Drew Hayworth advising parents to monitor their children’s computer use to protect them from sexual predators, Will couldn’t help thinking of his own child.
He still knew, all the way to the marrow of his bones, that Josh had nothing to do with Erin Gallagher’s death. But how the hell was it going to look when the two individuals who were the last to see her, to be with her, were the sheriff’s son and the deputy who’d interrogated him?
41
T
he man r
aised by wolves was disap
pointed. He’d tried a new murder technique, but it hadn’t been the same. Oh, it had done the job, all right. Hadn’t he left his prey lying in a lovely pool of blood? The problem was, he’d had, by necessity, been too far away, which had left the killing feeling too remote.
Although he had no intention of ever getting caught, the man raised by wolves had begun to feel that something was missing. He wasn’t receiving the pleasure he usually did from taking a life.
Strangely, even slashing pretty Erin Gallagher’s throat hadn’t been nearly as exciting as he’d hoped. In fact, it had been the first time since he’d killed Snowball, the unlucky kitten, that he’d been able to wait until he returned home from the hunt to satisfy the throbbing erection that had always come with killing.
Of course, the stone-cold bitch of a mother didn’t count. That kill h
ad been for utility, and a well-
deserved punishment, after all. Not for enjoyment.
He had hopes for this new murder. But it hadn’t lifted his spirits. Hadn’t made his blood sing.
He was so
…
well, fucking bored.
What he needed was something to jump-start the pleasure again. Something big. Even outrageous. Something that would have people talking for months. Perhaps even years.
Something the good citizens of Hazard could be afraid of even while they were in the supposed safety of their own homes.
This need to escalate wasn’t surprising. He had been upping the ante for years. Which was why, in the early years, as he’d practiced his technique, he’d remained so far below the radar no one had ever noticed a serial killer was living among them.
And hadn’t Ted Bundy spoken eloquently to the problem of desensitization?
Bundy—who certainly belonged in the pantheon of killers—had stated that each time he’d killed someone, he’d suffered an enormous amount of guilt, horror, and pain. But then, that would wear off and the impulse to kill again would return. Even stronger than ever.
That’s obviously what was happening here. While his bloodthirst increased exponentially with each hunt, the joy he’d experience was diminishing in an equal percentage.
Perhaps there was some merit to that three- cornered-stone image. Perhaps he had a killing stone in his breast that had, after all these years, begun to wear smooth.
No. That was negative thinking, something he would not allow.
The problem, as he was beginning to see it, was that there was no point in being the world’s most deadly hunter of Man if no one ever knew about it. If you couldn’t enjoy the process. Bask in the terror of the victim.
Play with the kill. Like a clever cat playing with a plump mouse before ripping it to pieces, then devouring it.
The man who was once the boy raised by wolves smiled.
He knew just how to reclaim his bliss.