Death on Heels (11 page)

He must hate wearing that
, she thought. Still, he didn’t look like a man defeated. His shoulders were straight, his gaze direct.

Tucker smiled at her, and memories rushed over her like Proust’s madeleine on speed. His grin brought back the times they’d shared: their first date, their first dance, the first time he saddled his favorite palomino for her to ride. And lots of kisses, but not that first kiss.

“It’s good to see you, Lacey. Why don’t you take a seat?” He waited for her, ever the gentleman. She sat down and he took a chair opposite her. She had forgotten the mellow timbre of his voice.

Get ahold of yourself, Lacey.
She shook her head to clear it. “You’re not wearing orange.”
Orange? I’m really asking him about his jumpsuit? Ten minutes, Lacey!

“Seems orange is for small-time offenders. They tell me brown is for the big, bad boys. But brown goes with my eyes, right?”

“Oh, Tucker.”

“Whatever are you doing here, Lacey? A special trip from Washington, D.C., just to see me? I’m honored, but I’m not at my best.” He shifted in his seat, and his handcuffs and waist chain rattled. “Why are you here? To write a story about this disaster? About me?”

It must seem like such a violation of his privacy, she realized. Especially from her. “No. I mean, I am going to have to write some kind of story. But— I needed to see you. I need to know, Cole. I just need—” Lacey wanted to say more, but she couldn’t seem to finish the sentence.

“Know what? If I’m a killer? You know me better than that,” he said, with a flash of emotion. “Don’t you?”

His brown eyes stared right through her, stirring feelings she thought she’d left behind years ago. “I’m one hundred percent sure you’re not a killer,” Lacey said. “But I want to be a hundred and fifty percent sure.”

He smiled. “You haven’t changed, have you?” He took a moment. “No, I didn’t kill anybody, and you can
be two hundred percent sure of that. Somebody’s been working their tail off to set me up. They’re railroading me, Chantilly Lace.”

Chantilly Lace? Oh, my.
She’d forgotten a few things about Cole Tucker after all. His pet name for her was one of them.

“Please don’t call me that.” It was the second time this morning she’d asked someone not to use an old nickname. Muldoon, because he was still an idiot and “Scoop” brought back only bad memories. Tucker, because he was still Tucker and “Chantilly Lace” brought back too many good memories.
“Your mama really named you Lacey? Like in the song?”
Tucker had said to her on one of their first dates, and he said it with a big smile and broke right into the old song, changing the words.
“Chantilly Lace…I like it. Such a pretty face…”

“Cole, I want the truth. That’s all.”

“Okay. Lacey.” He drew out her name, then settled back in his chair and gazed at her. His face was impassive, but his eyes were full of questions. “I guess this is not a reunion for us. It’s just a story, and you just want to get your facts right. Okay. I’m all for that. Ask me anything.”

“If you’re innocent—and you are—then why did they arrest you?”

Cole shook his head. “I’m still trying to sort that out. Seems the sheriff found Rae’s purse and things, buried down a hole out on my property. I thought they were saying it was some kind of fox hole or badger hole, but no, they say it was dug by hand. Said someone called in a tip about it. Somebody made that hole, and they went to a lot of trouble.”

“Framing you?”

“Looks like it.”

“Who?”

“I’ll let you know when I figure it out. But Chant— Lacey, why do you want to write about this? I thought wild horses couldn’t drag you back here. Don’t you have enough to write about in Washington, D.C.?”

“You’ve heard about my stories?”

“Couldn’t help hearing about them.” Tucker smiled. “Google ‘Lacey Smithsonian’ and all hell breaks loose.”

“I had to tell my editor something to get the time off to come here.”

“I hope you get along better with that one than you did with Muldoon.”

Lacey thought of Douglas MacArthur Jones. He was smarter than Muldoon, and Mac had a good heart, as opposed to Muldoon, who had no heart at all, but he could be just as stubborn. “A little.”

“What kind of story you gonna write? Something personal?”

“Not too personal, Cole.”

“No, I guess we wouldn’t want that, would we, Chantilly?”

“It’s Lacey. All I can do is ask questions and write about the answers. If there are answers.”

“And all this effort to make sure I’m not a killer? You could write that without seeing me, couldn’t you?” Tucker kept his gaze on her. Lacey tried not to break it, to show she could be just as tough.

“Maybe I can help somehow.”

“How? There’s me in here and three dead women out there and everything hanging in the balance,” Tucker said.

“It’s a horrible crime. And you were never horrible.” He was gentle with people and gentle with his animals.

“Well,
someone’s
planning to pin it on me like I’m some kind of dog that ought to be shot.” Tucker’s voice was low and slow. He seemed very sad, sadder than she had ever seen him. She had forgotten how deep his voice could be. Nearly as deep as Vic’s. “Doesn’t look like I’ll get bail.”

Yeah, bail is unlikely, to say the least
, Lacey thought.

“I want to write about those women. Find out more about them, take a look at Western justice.”

Tucker settled back in his chair and gazed at her. “Justice? Lacey, this is Sagebrush. Yampa County. Outlaw
country. Always been outlaw country and still is. Justice goes to the man with the most money, the most ammunition, and the fastest horse.”

She nodded. “How’s jail?”

“Not exactly the wide-open spaces. The company’s not so bad. I mean in the cell. Just some rowdy old boys in for drunk and disorderly. Then there’s the deputies. The ‘dope-uties,’ we call ’em. But come on, why are we talking about all this nonsense when we could be talking about us?”

“Us? Tucker, there is no
us
. There hasn’t been an
us
in years.”

“That’s what I thought, Chantilly. With you leaving Sagebrush in a huff the way you did. But I also thought you were never going to talk to me again, let alone come see me, let alone travel a couple thousand miles from back East to Sagebrush, just to see me. And here you are.”

“I didn’t leave in a huff.” Lacey glared at him.

He laughed out loud. “A huff and a puff and a cloud of dust! If I’d known how asking you to marry me would set you off, I’d have kept my damn mouth shut. Anything to keep you near.”

Lacey sat up straight. “You’re as bad as Muldoon! He thinks I’d still be here covering the frontier for him! And Cole Tucker, you said you would never leave Sagebrush, and then you did!”
Old hurts die hard.

“But I came right back. Missed the ranch. Missed my hometown. I was still missing you. Had to help out Kit anyway.” That would be Kit Carson Tucker, his little brother. “And Starr.” Belle Starr Tucker, his big sister.

“You married someone else! Six weeks after I left town! And on Valentine’s Day! You told me there’d never be anyone but me, and then there
was
! You told me you’d never leave this damn place, not even for me, and then you
did
! What the hell was I supposed to think?” She had promised herself a hundred times she would not bring all that up, not let it get to her, not throw it in his face. Tucker, on the other hand, seemed bemused, not angry.

“You have been thinking about me, Chantilly. It was
all kind of a big mistake. Not you, but all the rest of it. Live and learn, you know?”

“Las Vegas marriages are always a mistake.”
Like Vic’s marriage
, she thought. She slumped back in her chair. She’d gotten some of the bitterness out. She felt drained.

“That’s the truth. Mine sure didn’t take.” He paused. “You know, you’re still the prettiest woman I’ve ever seen.”

She didn’t want to smile, but she did. “You ought to get out of Sagebrush more often.” Tucker rattled his waist chain, and Lacey regretted her crack the moment she said it. But Tucker seemed to take no offense.

“You’re even prettier now,” Tucker said. “But more big city. I like those boots, by the way, but I’d sure love to see you in a pair of jeans again. You always looked pretty damn adorable in a pair of tight jeans, Chantilly.”

“It’s Lacey, not Chantilly. You’re not going to tell me anything, are you, Tucker?”

“I can’t tell you what I don’t know. But hey, I’m real glad to see you. Thanks for coming. Circumstances be damned.”

He leaned across the table toward her, but he couldn’t lift his hands to touch her.

“Tucker, listen to me. We only have a couple of minutes left. We have to talk about these murders, to figure out who set you up, if that’s what happened.”

A bewildered expression flitted across Tucker’s face. “What’re you gonna do, call up the cavalry, ride the range like John Wayne, hunt down whoever really killed those women? Like something out of the movies?”

“We don’t have to find out who killed those women, we only have to prove
you
didn’t kill them. Two different things. And don’t make fun of me.”

The door opened and Deputy Rush ducked his head in. “Two minutes, Cole.” He nodded. “Lacey. Court opens in a few.”

“Hey, Grady, why don’t you loosen these damn things for me.” Tucker lifted his hands as far as his waist chain would permit. It wasn’t very far. “Just for a minute.”

The big deputy paused, thinking. “Now, Cole, rules is rules.”

“Come on, Grady. You know me—you know I’m no killer. You know Lacey here, and you were always way more afraid of her than you were of me. With good reason too.”

It was true, Lacey reflected. Deputy Grady Rush was always scared he’d be quoted saying something stupid, which he did more often than not. And in Sagebrush, saying stupid things was the sheriff’s job, not the deputies’. Rush had once actually made undersheriff, for about a week, but that hadn’t worked out. He was more muscles than brains, and more beer gut than muscles.

The deputy grimaced, his duck face concentrating. If
The Daily Press
had ever had a cartoonist (and Muldoon never would have paid one), Deputy Rush would have been a favorite target.

Lacey could see Rush struggling with the idea. He and Cole were old friends, or sort-of friends; at least, they’d grown up in the same little town and gone to school together. Everyone in Sagebrush knew one another and counted one another as sort-of friends or sort-of enemies, sometimes both.

“You don’t want to get me in trouble now,” Deputy Rush said.

“Aw, come on, who’s ever gonna know?” Tucker asked. “Lacey came all this way just to see me and after all these years and I can’t even give her a big hug to say thank you. Just loosen my wrists a little. What do you say?”

Lacey didn’t say anything. She wasn’t sure what Tucker was up to. She didn’t want to ruin their last two minutes together. She held her breath.

The deputy rattled his keys. “If I was gonna do this, just this once, you’d owe me one, Cole, a big one, and no one could ever hear about it. It would have to be our little secret, you know?” He shut the door behind him.

“You’d just have to tell them I overpowered you, big guy, and got clean away,” Cole said, with a grin on his face. Deputy Rush grinned back. Tucker was trim and
well muscled, but the beefy deputy was nearly twice his bulk. He could block the entire door without even moving.

“You’re a hoot, Tucker, that’s what you are.” Deputy Rush was still laughing as he pulled out his keys and began unlocking Tucker’s handcuffs from his waist chain. “All right, you two take a minute for a big old hug and then I’ll cinch you back up and we’ll just march right on out of here into court. Mum’s the word. You owe me one now, Cole.”

Cole smiled and reached out his freed right hand for a brotherly handshake. The deputy took it, with that crazy duck-faced grin. It was a mistake.

Lacey wasn’t quite sure what happened next, even though it happened right in front of her. Tucker was so quick. In a flash he pulled the deputy into a headlock and did something to his neck that Lacey couldn’t see. The big man slid quietly to the floor. It was silent. Nobody came through the door, and Lacey was too startled to scream, or even speak. Instead she gasped.

“Little trick I learned out on the ranch,” Tucker said. He swiftly unlocked the rest of his shackles and let them drop. He rubbed his wrists where the cuffs had been. “Works with cows too.” He reached for her hand. “Let’s go.”

“No!” She flattened herself against the far wall. “Are you out of your mind? What were you thinking?” All she could think of were the three women who had been strangled, and now Tucker had done something mysterious to the deputy’s
neck
. “You
killed
him!”

“Nah. Don’t worry about Grady. He’s just taking a little nap.”

“Like hell he is! Get away from me, Tucker.” Lacey leaned down to make sure the deputy was still breathing. He was.

Tucker tossed her bag to her. “I’m not arguing with you, Chantilly. I’m telling you. You’re coming with me. My neck is in a noose and I need you.”

“Not on your life!” She clutched her bag to her chest and backed away into the corner. “You are out of your
freaking mind, Cole Tucker! This is just going to make things worse! They’re gonna be in here and drag you back to jail in
one minute
!”

Tucker gave her the saddest smile she’d ever seen. But he didn’t give Lacey any more time to protest. He picked her up, flung her over his shoulder like a sack full of Christmas presents, jerked open the door, and ran through it.

“Damn you, Cole Tucker! Put me down!”

“But Chantilly, you’re light as a feather! Not even as heavy as a little calf.” He held on to her legs, never slowing.

Lacey beat on his back, feeling as foolish as she ever had in her life. She was in the wrong position to try to disembark. It was hard to breathe and impossible to yell at him at the same time. She was mortified. From her viewpoint upside down over Tucker’s shoulder, her tote bag swinging in her face, all she could see were legs running from offices and courtrooms.