Death on Heels (13 page)

There were no cars on the road, and Lacey prayed that no wildlife would cross the highway while Tucker was at the wheel. Hitting an elk or a pronghorn at high speed could be fatal for all of them. Lacey had no desire to be intimately associated with venison smeared all over the highway.

“Why did you drag me along, Cole?”

“You came all this way just to see me, Chantilly.
Would have been rude to run out on our date and leave you all alone.”

“You’re so not funny. And stop calling me that.”

“You’ve been worried that I’ve always secretly been some kind of crazy homicidal maniac and you didn’t know about it.”

She gave him the evil eye. “I’m still worried. And Vic is going to freak out.” Lacey closed her eyes. She wished she could close off her thoughts as well.

“That’s another thing. You’re going with Vic Donovan, the cop? I heard a rumor. Couldn’t believe it. What happened to you?”

“None of your business.”

“You can’t be serious. I know he was sweet on you all those years ago. But he was married, to that blond man-eater. What’s her name? Montana?”

“Vic is divorced now. Montana’s in Steamboat. And he moved back to Virginia.”

“So he’s a stalker. He moved back after
you
. You should worry about him, not me.”

The car radio crackled. The Sagebrush country station covered the entire county, but the signal came and went depending on the landscape.
No satellite radio for this old Jeep.
Tucker twiddled the knobs and brought in the station. There was a special news bulletin on the escape of murder suspect Cole Tucker. “…
Last seen in a Petrus Bakery delivery Jeep, described by witnesses as blue and white with a rack of elk antlers on the grille.”

“You had to steal a car with antlers?”

“Maybe I can find us a herd of blue and white elk. We’ll blend right in.” Tucker switched the radio off. “And I
borrowed
it.”

In the silence the landscape was bleak, the snow blending into the sky, the gray green sagebrush poking out of the crusted snow as far as the eye could see. The Jeep raced past the small town of Cowbell, the crossroads to the west of Sagebrush, with not another vehicle in sight. Then a sign on the side of the road, full of bullet holes: N
O
S
ERVICES
N
EXT 50
M
ILES
.

This day is just not getting any better.

Lacey wondered how on earth she could ever explain this to anyone, let alone live it down. She switched the radio back on, but Tucker turned down the sound.

“Just ignore it. We’ll be out of this Jeep soon enough.” Tucker spun the Cherokee off the highway and headed down a side road in the general direction of Utah. “I just don’t see it, Chantilly. You and Donovan, I mean. He’s just not your type.”

“Oh, yeah? And how would you know that?” Lacey stared out the window. Cole Tucker might not have killed those women, but he was a desperate man in a stolen bakery Jeep.
No cell phone, no radio, nothing to eat but doughnuts. What next?
“He’s going to kick your ass, you know.”

Tucker grinned at her. “He’s got to find me first. How about another one of those doughnuts?”

“Oh, all right.” She reached in back for one of the boxes. She handed him a raised glazed.

“Mmmm. You know what I like.”

Yeah, Chantilly Lace and a pretty face.
She helped herself to a chocolate glazed. It was delicious. She decided the Petruses knew what they were doing.

Lacey gazed at Tucker’s profile against the snowy landscape racing past the window. Cole Younger Tucker was turning into an outlaw, she decided, just like his namesake. His rancher parents had found it amusing to name their kids after notorious figures in Western history: Cole Younger Tucker, his brother, Kit Carson Tucker, and his sister, Belle Starr Tucker.

“This doughnut box is marked for the police department. Cops take it amiss when you mess with their property,” Lacey said to fill the silence. “A kid in my high school stole a police helmet off the back of a cop’s motorcycle one night. Just a helmet. When the cops finally caught him—”

“No doubt using their crack police intelligence—”

“They made him wash police cars every Saturday for a month.”

He whistled. “So you’re telling me I could end up
washing cop cars if I don’t go straight? Damn, Lacey. Now you’re scaring me.”

“Oh, shut up.” Lacey sighed and covered her face with her hands.

“Hey, Chantilly Lace, what’s wrong?”

Her eyes nearly popped out of her head. “What’s wrong? Besides this absurd predicament we’re in? Isn’t that enough? Vic didn’t want me to come to Sagebrush. He asked me not to see you. He said it would be a mess. And it’s a disaster.”

Tucker pressed his lips together for a moment. “Well, I can’t say he was wrong. But I’m real glad you did come,” he said. “Else I’d be back in jail by now, waiting for a court date six months or more down the road. And whoever killed those girls would be home free.”

“Looks to me like he’s still home free, Cole.”

He swung the wheel without slowing down and pointed the Jeep down another gravel side road. “I heard you solved some murders back in D.C.”

“I got in the middle of a few.” She thought about those cases, and the clues that had sometimes led her to the right answers. Fashion clues, she usually called them, when she was needling Vic. “Sometimes I saw things other people didn’t. By ‘other people’ I mean mostly men. Like cops.”

“I heard. Seems you have fans all over the weird worldwide Web. Tell me about these killings you investigated, star reporter Lacey Smithsonian. These things you saw that other people didn’t see, so you could help nail the ones who did it. How would you go about proving someone
didn’t
do it? How would you prove
I
didn’t do it?”

“How would I prove that?” Lacey repeated.

“You seem to be the expert.” Tucker looked vulnerable at that moment, despite the jail jumpsuit and the badass elk-antlered Jeep Cherokee he was driving like an off-road racer.

“I’m no expert. Sometimes the obvious answer is the right one. That’s what the cops say. But—”

“But what?”

“There are different ways to look at a crime. Sometimes, especially in a cold case, the answers aren’t obvious.”
Clues are made of multiple threads,
Lacey thought.
Threads
that weave together to make a picture of the victim and the killer.
You pull a thread, you cause a ripple in the fabric.

“They think they’ve got me, Lacey. They got their fall guy.”

“Maybe not.” She pulled her collar up around her neck to ward off a draft of cool air from somewhere in the Jeep. “All I do is try to put together a picture, Cole. Reporters ask questions.”

“I know that.”

“I try to see where the picture doesn’t fit the way the killer wants it to. And don’t laugh. With me, it usually involves clothes. Something about what they wear reveals who they really are or what they’re trying to hide.”

“I read some of your stories on the Internet.”

“Really?”

“There’s this Web site. Did you ever hear of it? Conspiracy Clearinghouse.”

She growled. “I’ve heard of it.” Brooke’s boyfriend, Damon, and his accursed Web site were a thorn in her side, even here, in the back of beyond.

“Well, that’s what this has to be. A conspiracy to set me up.”

“Whether it’s one person alone or a whole town full of people, you still have to ask the same basic questions. Means and opportunity. And motive. But motive is murkier. Lots of people have motives but never act on them. Motive alone can point you in the wrong direction. After everything else, you go with your gut.”

“Go, then,” Tucker said. “Ask your questions. Ask me anything. Walk me through this.”

Tucker didn’t know he’d said just the right thing. He recognized that Lacey had a certain expertise. And a track record. It was different with Vic—Vic was born skeptical. He didn’t trust feelings and intuitions. And Lacey’s PI boyfriend had far more expertise with crime than she did. But Tucker trusted her with his freedom. She felt the compliment. Still, it didn’t make up for the rest of the morning.

“First tell me about your attorney, Karen Quilby. Is she any good?”

He shrugged and gave her an I-don’t-know look. “The guy who handles legal stuff for the ranch is the same old goat my dad used, and all he’s ever done is deeds and titles. So I got handed a public defender. Just out of law school. Needs a wet nurse.”

“She’s young,” Lacey agreed. “She seemed nice enough. But untried.”

Tucker smiled slightly. “Karen did arrange for me to see you. I’ll give her that.”

“Yeah. Thanks, Karen.” If Lacey didn’t watch it, sarcasm might creep in. “I guess it wasn’t her fault. I asked to see you, didn’t I?”

She gave herself a mental slap. Lacey wished fervently that none of this had happened. She wished she had waited until after the arraignment to see Cole. She
was way too far inside this story. Inside the story, and the getaway vehicle, and heading for parts unknown.

“Don’t frown like that, Chantilly Lace. Your pretty face will freeze.”

She glared at him. “I’m betting Karen Quilby won’t be in any mood to keep up your lawyer-client relationship after this little stunt of yours.”

“She wouldn’t anyway. They want to bleed me. Make me put up the ranch to pay a fancy attorney. And the ranch doesn’t just belong to me. It also belongs to Kit, and Starr and her husband. And bail would be too high to pay anyway.”

“There’s no chance of bail now,” Lacey pointed out.

Tucker shook his head. “There never was any chance of the judge letting me go. Three murders? If I had a million bucks in my hip pocket to make bail, they’d have set it at ten million. If I had ten, they’d have made it a hundred.”

For all his bravado, there was an air of wild despair about Tucker.

But what about the victims’ despair? Did they have the same air about them, the same hopelessness and fear when they knew they were trapped and they were never going to get out alive?
Lacey wondered what it was that made Ally, Rae, and Corazon vulnerable to the killer. And what made Tucker vulnerable to being framed. Lacey’s head hurt.

Tucker suddenly drove off the side road onto a deeply rutted dirt path, the Jeep bouncing from side to side in the ruts. Lacey held tight to her shoulder belt. After the first curve, he pulled off the path and parked the Cherokee behind a bluff where it couldn’t easily be seen from any road.

“Time to get out,” Tucker commanded.

Lacey glared at him and folded her arms. She made no move to leave. “Where the hell are we?”

He jumped out the driver’s side, taking the keys, and walked around to her door. She locked it and he unlocked it with the remote. “Please get out of the car, Lacey. We have to hike in some. Not very far.”

“Fine. You take a hike. I can just walk out to the highway and hitch a ride.” It couldn’t be that far, she thought.

“With who? Prince Charming? You have no idea when the big rescue squad will get here. They don’t even know where
here
is. You could die of hypothermia. No joke, Chantilly Lace, that N
O
SERVICES
sign wasn’t kidding. And we’re a good twenty-five or thirty miles from Sagebrush.” He yanked open her side door.

Reluctantly leaving the warm Cherokee, Lacey zipped her coat, put the hood up, and retrieved her gloves from the bottom of her bag. Tucker rummaged around in the back of the Jeep and pulled out a fleece jacket that must have belonged to Tasso Petrus.

The early spring weather was unpredictable in Yampa County. In a flash it could turn deadly cold and dump three feet of snow. People in this part of Colorado carried blankets and an extra jacket or two in the car. Tucker also fished out a couple of bottles of water and tossed one to her. Lacey opened it and drank greedily. Her throat was parched from the dry air. She had forgotten how dry it could get. She’d lost her tolerance for high altitude and low humidity.

“Slow down, you’re going to have to make that last,” Tucker said.

Lacey reluctantly capped the water and put it in her purse. “Where are you taking us?” She wished she had her cell phone. The landscape was lonely and she didn’t relish being outside in the wind.

“Not far. Kit’s pickup is probably no more than a hundred yards from here.”

“Your brother?” Lacey looked around, but she didn’t see any pickup. Nothing but sagebrush as far as the eye could see. She remembered Kit Carson Tucker as younger, skinnier, and not quite as handsome as his big brother, Cole. “Did you plan this whole escape? Has he been waiting for us all along?”

“Hell, no. Kit’s out here rounding up cattle for old Truman,” Tucker said. “Next ranch over from ours. He told me yesterday he’d be working strays out this end of the draw. I know where he leaves his truck.”

“Wasn’t he at the courthouse?”

“What could he do there? We got a ranch to run, and Kit— Well, he said it was too damn depressing anyhow. Can’t blame him. It depresses me too. Said he wanted to think about things. And you know Kit, he thinks better on a horse.”

“So do you. What’s he thinking about?”

“Same thing I’m thinking about, and what Starr is thinking about.” Tucker’s face looked grave. “Getting my neck out of this tangled rope.”

“So now you’re going to steal Kit’s truck? And leave him stuck out here?”

“
Borrow,
Lacey. He’s my brother. He’ll put two and two together when he gets back and sees the truck gone. And Tasso’s Jeep. Probably just ride on back to the neighbors’ place, get a lift home. Hey, I’m just winging it here, Chantilly.”

Tucker trudged around the other side of the little bluff while Lacey stomped behind him, angrier with each step. At one point she threw a snowball, glancing it off his shoulder.

“It’s all fun and games till you put somebody’s eye out, Chantilly. We got to move.” He grabbed her hand and pulled her along.

It wasn’t easy to walk in the deep snow over uneven ground, dodging the scruffy sagebrush poking through the icy crust. The wind kicked up and chapped her cheeks. But in a few minutes, she saw Kit’s dirty white pickup truck waiting for them behind the bluff among the sagebrush, where it blended with the snow. Tucker opened the cab door for Lacey.