Cold case sheriff, p.1
Cold Case Sheriff, page 1
“I’m on my way.”
Jackson headed toward the door.
“Wait,” Aimee said. “I’m not there. I got my stuff out. I just...don’t have anywhere to go. I was hoping you’d know someone who could put me up for the night. I’d gladly pay...”
“You can stay here. I’ve got an entire upstairs, two bedrooms and a bathroom that I don’t use. You’re welcome to the entire floor.”
“I can’t put you—”
“At least for tonight. Something is going on here. No one has so many seemingly natural disasters or mistakes befall them in a single twenty-four-hour period...”
“I could be a klutz, for all you know.”
“This isn’t you doing things. These are things happening to you, and frankly, I’d feel better knowing you were under protection until we have time to figure out what’s going on.”
“Okay, then thank you. Like you, I’ve kind of come to the conclusion that someone doesn’t want me here.”
“Stay put,” he told her, not liking the idea of her driving on dark mountain roads alone. “I’m coming in to get you and you can follow me home.”
Dear Reader,
I’m a little envious you’re just starting this book for the first time. I’ve been through it many times since I first experienced it, and I still love going back. It’s just one of those books that takes me inside and makes me want to stay. I hope it brings you the same feeling, the same escape!
The story was born, and grew, solely in my imagination, but the town, the landscape, the world, while fictitious, is based on a real Arizona town in which I was spending time when the idea first occurred to me. All of the descriptions, the buildings, the landscapes—they are all real. And our hero’s home—it’s the place I was staying in. While I’m an Arizona girl, the world of small-town Northern Arizona was entirely new to me, and I absorbed every nuance I could.
Beyond that, I often wonder about biology versus environment, how much contributes to who we are born to be and who we actually become. This story doesn’t answer that question. Rather, it made the question somewhat moot for me. Because ultimately we get to make choices every single day, and even one small one can bring happiness where there might not have been any. Happy reading! Happy escaping! And happy living and loving, too!
TTQ
COLD CASE SHERIFF
Tara Taylor Quinn
A USA TODAY bestselling author of over 105 novels in twenty languages, Tara Taylor Quinn has sold more than seven million copies. Known for her intense emotional fiction, Ms. Quinn’s novels have received critical acclaim in the UK and most recently from Harvard. She is the recipient of the Readers’ Choice Award and has appeared often on local and national TV, including CBS Sunday Morning.
For TTQ offers, news and contests, visit www.tarataylorquinn.com!
Books by Tara Taylor Quinn
Harlequin Romantic Suspense
Sierra’s Web
Tracking His Secret Child
Cold Case Sheriff
The Coltons of Colorado
Colton Countdown
Where Secrets are Safe
Her Detective’s Secret Intent
Shielded in the Shadows
Falling for His Suspect
The Coltons of Grave Gulch
Colton’s Killer Pursuit
The Coltons of New York
Protecting Colton’s Baby
Visit the Author Profile page at
Harlequin.com for more titles.
For Rachel. Because a mother’s love never dies.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Excerpt from Her K-9 Protector by Kimberly Van Meter
Chapter 1
The address was right. She’d checked the GPS four times. It insisted she’d arrived at her destination. She’d passed the number directly preceding the one she’d found in her aunt’s things.
And the one after, too, before turning around.
She’d arrived at her destination.
There was no house.
How could there be no house?
No sign of a house ever having been there. Not even a dirt driveway leading off the road. Just rocky dirt and semidesert grassland. Nothing at all familiar. She’d swear on all of her possessions, even the heart of her heart—the fine, one-of-a-kind-work-of-art store she’d inherited from her aunt—that she’d never been on that plot of land before.
Why would her aunt have kept this address for Aimee’s mother tucked away in her safe? Had the woman Aimee barely remembered, the woman who’d given birth to her in the small Arizona town, owned the land? Hoped to build on it someday?
Had she been robbed of the chance by the car accident that had taken both of her parents’ lives?
Or...with horrifying clarity she glanced around...was this the spot where the drunk driver had hit her parents head-on? Was she standing on the ground where they’d been killed?
That would explain why she had no memories of the place.
And the explanation would allow her to keep alive the hope that the nightmarish dreams she’d been having recently could still find resolution in Evergreen. Just not at the address she’d expected to elicit them.
Still, she couldn’t just leave. Not if that view was the last her parents had ever seen. No one knew where they’d been the day they’d been killed. Only that they’d said they’d had an appointment that Saturday afternoon they’d left her with a sitter. And that they’d be gone a couple of hours...
Hours that had turned into forever.
Had they kissed her goodbye before they’d departed for their mystery meeting? Or had she been too busy playing to notice their leaving for the last time?
Hugging her arms around herself as she glanced about, Aimee, shook her head. Ever since her aunt’s shockingly unexpected accidental death the previous month, she’d been living in a mental and emotional space that was surreal. As though she’d been transported out of life as she’d known it to be, and into some paranormal zone where nothing was as it seemed.
It kind of made sense that Aunt Bonnie’s tragic accident had brought forth buried memories from her past. The first section of her life had ended with a tragic accident. The time from birth to three when she’d been the adored daughter of two loving parents. Part of the stereotypical family dream.
Then had come section two. Growing up the adored niece of a loving perennially single artistic aunt. Which had also ended with tragedy.
Now came part three. In a travel-crumpled spandex midthigh-length black skirt, white T-shirt and glitzy flip-flops, she was standing on a Friday morning in early June beside a rental car on the side of a road in Evergreen, Arizona with no real plan of execution. Except some half-baked idea that her recent onslaught of nightmares could somehow be put to rest there.
Alongside another not quite rational notion that a part of her had been lost or left behind in the secluded little northern Arizona town and until she found it she’d never get to section four of her life. The part where she finally fell in love with an eligible bachelor—something she’d failed to do in the fourteen years she’d been dating—and got married. Had children of her own.
And became another statistic in the stereotypical family count.
Something that sounded a whole lot better than all alone in the world.
Something that had seemed like a far away magical dream even when she hadn’t been all alone.
A vehicle whizzed past. Black. Big. Expensive looking. The first she’d seen since she’d been out on the deserted side road, alone with nature as far as she could see.
The trees weren’t like the ones back home. She recognized some oak and aspen...but fewer of them than she was used to seeing. The leaves weren’t as big and lush and...
That tree...
Off to the left of her. A good two hundred yards in from where she was standing...heart pumping, she stared...
Slowly, her gaze swept upward and...
Aimee held on as tightly as she could, ’cept her fingers didn’t reach all around the ropes like he’d told her to do. He pushed from behind her and up she went, ’til she could see the branches way up in the sky. Curvy. Like...
“No!” A man’s voice. In front of them. Coming closer. “What are you doing?” She knew the voice. Was scared at the way it sounded. And...whee...she came back down with a flip-flop in her belly and up she went again.
And then...he was crying.
Her head was shaking. Back and forth. No. No. No!
Becoming aware of the movement, Aimee stopped it. Immediately. Raised her hand up to smooth her short shock of wild and windblown-looking, textured dark hair, and noticed that the rest of her was shaky
And her stomach...she was slightly nauseated. Which made no sense. She’d had her normal bagel for breakfast that morning in the Flagstaff airport before renting the car. She’d known she’d need to adjust to the new time zone and had purposely waited to sleep during the long flight and eat when she landed.
It wasn’t lunchtime yet.
Standing alone beside her parked rental car just outside Evergreen, Arizona, on this balmy June day, Aimee tried to draw in a long, deep, healing breath. And shuddered, instead.
She couldn’t possibly be remembering something real. She’d only been three when she’d left, she reminded herself. And the dreams...they’d had images, but hadn’t included anything even vaguely familiar to the plot of land on which she stood. Or to the little drama that had just assaulted her.
But that tree...the way the branches formed an outward vee and then circled inward, back toward each other...
She could fall! You’re going to hurt her!
I... I never...wouldn’t...hurt her...
Aimee blinked and was standing alone at the edge of an unfamiliar vacant lot. Just as she’d been for the past several minutes. Alone and scared.
What was wrong with her? What was happening?
Was she...like...on some kind of psychotic break? Having visions now, to go along with the nightmares?
Yeah, Aunt Bonnie’s death had been a shock. And the hardest thing she’d ever had to live through. But people lost loved ones. They didn’t generally lose their minds over it.
She certainly wasn’t going to do so. She was taking action. Taking control. That’s why she was in Evergreen.
The little pep talk helped still the shaking inside her for a second or two.
Helped her clamp down on the doubts. She was not having an emotional breakdown because she was all alone in the world. Trying to rediscover all that she’d lost as a means of not feeling so alone.
There was something there. Something in Evergreen.
There had to be.
Determined to prove it to herself, she ignored the clearly-posted no trespassing signs, stepped off the road and onto the land. One step. Then two. And kept walking. Toward the tree. Since it was calling to her, she’d start there. There was no thought about whose property she could be on. No care given to the possibility of trespassing. She had to take action.
To confront the strange seemingly realistic images that, until those last few minutes, had only been present in her dreams. They weren’t going to get the better of her. To rob her of the one thing she had left—herself. She’d made the decision to seek them out.
Walking more swiftly now, traversing the uneven ground as though it was blacktop and she was in tennis shoes, instead of bejeweled flip-flops, she dared herself to find something, anything, that would make sense of her presence in Evergreen.
Or of that particular address. After she checked into the little cabin-like summer home she’d rented for the month, she’d head to the courthouse. Find tax records for the property. She’d already tried to find them online, of course. Evergreen hadn’t converted to online public access.
And if that didn’t give her any answers she’d...
Crack! Crack!
Aimee dove for the ground, as something whizzed past her, close enough that she could see the trajectory. Lying flat on her belly, she sucked in to make herself as small as she could, praying that any more of the bullets she’d just heard would continue to miss her.
Lying there in the deafening silence that followed the two booms, she slowed her breathing, keeping it as inobtrusive as she could, awaiting her fate.
Seconds seemed like days. And then turned into minutes.
Rocks dug into her, bruising a hip bone; dirt held her face, and a piece of straw-like grass was making her lip itch. Growing more and more aware of her immediate discomfort, she continued to wait. Until so much time passed that she realized she was going to have to come up with another plan.
Running for her car seemed like the best bet. It was harder to hit moving targets. And the car was her only hope of a package deal of cover and escape.
Assuming someone was after her for trespassing. She was doing that.
Maybe whoever shot the gun thought she was dead. If she got up and ran, he’d know she wasn’t. But she’d have more of a chance of living if she was running, than if he came up to her, stood over her and found out she was alive...
Up and running like the wind on that last thought, Aimee darted back and forth, making a zigzagged line to her car, in case there were bullets to avoid.
None came.
On the road side of the car, she sank down for a second, on her haunches, trying to get her breath. To slow the shaking in her hands long enough to pull the rental key from the pocket of her skirt. To wait and see if there would be another shower of bullets.
When none were forthcoming, she climbed carefully into the car, keeping a low profile, started the engine and gunned it out of there, not stopping until she reached town.
With voice commands she gave GPS the address of the cabin she’d rented. Found the key in the magnet carrier stuck to the underside of a windowsill. Telling herself that maybe she needed to see a shrink. Maybe she really was imagining things that had no basis in reality.
Key in hand, she turned back to the silver sedan, intending to get her suitcase to wheel with her into the house so she didn’t have to come back outside again until she had herself under control—had a shower—and maybe slept a bit more—
And that’s when she saw it.
The bullet stuck just above the wheel well in the passenger side metal of her car.
* * *
Jackson Redmond didn’t usually make house calls. Not since he’d succeeded his father and taken over as Sheriff of Evergreen County, with jurisdiction over the town of Evergreen. But when Officer Lily Higley, the most junior of his sixteen law enforcement agents, had told him that a call had come in about a shooting on the Evergreen estate land, he’d thanked her for bringing it to him and grabbed his keys.
The last thing Boyd Evergreen needed was another hassle on his hands. The man had grown up serving the town and county named after his family. And had known more than his share of heartache. Lost his mother when he was still a kid, stood solid through his younger brother’s tragedy then his father died far too early. Boyd had taken up the reins of the Evergreen fortune with grace. He was a man Jackson’s father had respected. One Jackson had grown up respecting.
And most recently, the secluded mental institution Boyd’s younger brother had been in for almost thirty-five years had burned in a brush fire. Grayson, who was in his late forties, had been happy in the facility—set as it was in the Arizona wilderness—where he’d been able to hike and fish, every day. He was having some problems in the Phoenix facility to which the patients had been moved.
Boyd, his twenty-five-year-old son Matthew, who’d left Evergreen with his mother after his parent’s divorce, and Grayson, were the town’s founding family’s last living members.
So, yeah, he’d drop what he was doing to investigate the complaint himself.
In his usual dark blue uniform, short sleeved for the summer months, he rapped on the door of the rental cabin—one of six in the little cul-de-sac complex set off on a couple of acres of trees in front of one of the areas smaller lakes. Blooming Bridges was a newer such offering in a town whose population exploded during the summer months. So this newest visitor, Aimee Barker, was only one of the 25,000 tourists he and his deputies had to contend with that June morning.
Putting his Evergreen welcoming smile on his face as the door clicked open, he faltered a bit when he got a glimpse of the woman standing in front of him.
He’d been expecting someone much older. Blooming Bridges catered to the over fifty-five population giving the semblance of getting back to nature with none of the work that went along with really doing so. Each of the six cabins had wood-burning fireplaces, for Evergreen’s cool evenings, but she’d never have to haul a log or clean a grate, either. At Blooming Bridges that was all done for her. Daily.
She thought she’d been shot at as she’d driven her rental from the Flagstaff airport into town. More likely, there’d be some other explanation for the sound she’d heard. With her not being from around the area, a lot of things could seem strange at first.
