Sheriff’s Runaway Witness

where the baby had nestled felt cold now.

At the kitchen doorway he paused to look back. Giving full credit to his vigilant Better Angel, who must have been perched on his shoulder just then, he cleared his throat and said, “Oh-you might think about giving your husband a break, too. Maybe the man loved you as much as he knew how to. Given the kind of upbringing he had.”

Whether that was true or not, he didn’t know. Maybe it would give her some comfort. Hell, he could do that for her, at least.

He went through the door and down the hallway to his room. To bed, but probably not to sleep.

“I saw her, yesterday. Down by the creek. Talked to her.”

It was early morning. Sam was leaning against a stack of alfalfa hay, watching Sage milk.

The kid looked sideways at him without stopping the rhythmic thrum-thrum of milk into the foam-filled bucket. “Yeah? Funny she didn’t mention meeting you.”

“She didn’t know it was me, and I didn’t enlighten her.”

“Why not?”

He laughed silently. “Well, I’ve been told I’m a coward.”

“A coward?” Sage threw him another look, eyebrows raised. “Who told you that?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Sam moved restlessly. It was warm in the barn, but he didn’t take off the fleece-lined jacket he wore. The older he got, he noticed, the harder it was to keep the old bones warm. “Truth is, I liked talking with her. Found out how she feels about me, too. Her not knowing who I was, she didn’t mince words.” He cackled a laugh. “Sure did remind me of her grandmother. Not her looks, of course. But she does have a way about her.”

He watched Sage kick back the milking stool and stand up, envying the kid his thirty-year-old’s agility. Waited while the kid carried the bucketful of milk to the milk room, poured it through the strainer, then into stainless steel cans. Watched him put the cans in the walk-in, then come back to release the cow from the stanchion, give her a slap on her bony rump to send her ambling back out to pasture. Pick up a push broom that was leaning against the wall, then finally come back to him.

“When you planning on telling her who you are?” Sam shrugged and didn’t reply. Sage made a couple of passes with the broom, then paused to look at him. “Still planning to wait till they all get here? Tell everybody at the same time?”

Sam plucked an alfalfa stem from a bale of hay and chewed on it. “I don’t know, I’m thinking of playing dead awhile longer. They think I’m already dead, maybe I’ll find out how they really feel about me. Find out why they’re really here.”

Sage snorted. “You know why they’re here.”

“The money, you mean.”

“That letter you sent said, come and claim your inheritance. You could have said, come and meet your grandpa, but you didn’t. What did you expect them to do?”

Sam made a scoffing sound. “If I’d said come meet grandpa, you think they’d come? Only way I could be sure they’d show up was to offer money.”

Sage gave him one of his inscrutable Indian looks. “Maybe. But now you’re never gonna know, are you? You didn’t give them a chance to show you whether or not they care about meeting you for you.”

Damn kid, Sam thought. He hated it when Sage was right.

He shoved himself away from the haystack and picked up his hat. “So, that’s why I’m gonna play dead,” he muttered. “Give ’em the chance to say what they really think about old Sierra Sam Malone.” He jammed the hat on his head, picked up the reins of his paint horse and made for the door.

“You going back up to the cabin?”

“Figure I better, if I’m playin’ dead. Can’t play the crotchety old neighbor too many more times. That little gal is no fool. And neither is that lawman she brought with her.”

“No, they’re not,” Sage agreed. There was silence. Sam kept walking. Sage said, “You want a leg up on that horse, or not?”

Sam eyeballed the height of the stirrup, then reluctantly halted and waited, hands on the saddle horn, for Sage to come up beside him. “Damnation, I hate bein’ old,” he grumbled as he planted his boot in the cradle Sage made of his interlaced fingers.

“You rather die young?” Sage said, and lifted him effortlessly into the saddle.

The next morning, Sage took Rachel to show her the farm and the old original adobe farmhouse where he now lived. J.J. was all set to go with them when Katie called him on his cell phone with information he’d asked her to get for him and for which he knew he was going to need to refer to his computer. Since he couldn’t think of a good reason to ask Sage and Rachel to wait for him, he had no choice but to wave them on without him.

It wasn’t that he really thought Sage might present some kind of danger to his potential eyewitness, or that Carlos’s thugs were lurking out there in the barn waiting to grab her. It was more of an indefinable uneasiness he felt-like an itch in a place he couldn’t reach to scratch. An itch brought on by that image that kept drifting into his mind of the two of them, Sage and Rachel, galloping side by side on horseback, both with similar long black hair flowing in the wind…

Funny, he thought, how much those two looked alike. Like a matched set.

And none of his business, when he got right down to it. None whatsoever.

Back in the study, with the house quiet around him, J.J. squinted at the computer screen and picked up his cell phone.

“Okay, I’ve got it. Talk to me, Katie. What am I looking at, here?”

“Well, first of all, you were right, Sam Malone did pay for Rachel’s college education, including medical school. Deposits had been made regularly to a trust fund set up by Rachel’s grandmother, Elizabeth Doyle Malone. The trust fund itself has no connection to Sam Malone, but the deposits came from one of his more obscure holdings, a pharmaceutical company headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. Obscure, but easily traceable to Malone.”

“What’s the status of the trust fund now?”

“Inactive since the death of Elizabeth Malone, currently being administered by a law firm in Beverly Hills. Presumably, since the trust is supposed to be for the costs of Rachel’s education, once she dropped out, the payments stopped. If she completes her education, then funds remaining in the trust are to be given to Rachel.”

“Huh. Did Rachel know about the trust?”

“Who knows? It doesn’t seem to be a big secret, but if she does know, based on what you told me about her attitude toward Grandpa, I’m guessing she thinks it was established and funded by her grandmother.”

“So,” J.J. said grimly, “if it’s no big secret, anybody trying to figure out where a runaway eyewitness might go, anybody looking for family connections, say…”

“Could easily find out about the trust and who funded it,” Katie finished for him.

He let out a breath, counted ten, then said, as he bookmarked the page and logged off, “Any developments in the case of the two dead federal agents?”

“Nothing I’ve been able to find. Also, no word on whether Carlos Delacorte is under surveillance.”

J.J. snorted. “I think it’s a pretty safe bet the feds have been watching the entire Delacorte organization for a while now. Which I’m thinking is probably what led to the attempted takedown outside that nightclub to begin with.”

“Probably,” said Katie, “but even if that’s true, the feds aren’t likely to be sharing their information with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department.”

“Not with a lowly deputy from an armpit of a desert outpost out in the middle of nowhere, anyway,” J.J. said sourly. He let out another gust of frustration, thanked Katie for her efforts, told her to keep trying to get a line on Carlos’s activities and signed off.

With the computer screen blank, the cell phone silent and Josie evidently occupied in some distant quarter, the house seemed silent as a tomb. Since there was still no sign of Rachel and Sage, J.J. figured he’d go to his room and get his hat, then maybe take a walk down to the farm…see if he could meet up with them. He started across the courtyard to his room, then at the last moment, found himself taking a slight detour to Rachel’s room next door