That sounded like her man. McCall made a note to see if Sharon Turnquist could get her the serial number on her husband’s pickup. “What about the murdered man’s car?”
“Missing.” He rattled off the make and model and license plate number.
McCall was betting that RJ was now driving it.
After she hung up with the Billings police, she phoned the rest of the numbers that RJ had called. A few of the people who’d talked to him either hadn’t come in yet for their shifts or had the day off. She asked for their numbers and tracked them down.
“Sure, I remember talking to him,” the young male clerk at one of the motels told her. “He was trying to find his girlfriend. They’d gotten into a fight and she took off with some other guy. The guy did have a great car though. It was one of those Cadillacs with—”
“What kind of information did you give him?” McCall interrupted.
“Pretty much the same as the other guy—directions to the Winchester Ranch.”
“The other guy?”
“The cowboy driving the Cadillac convertible. He was getting gas at Packy’s the same time I was.”
“Was he traveling alone?”
The clerk laughed. “The second guy asked me the same thing. I told him about the woman I saw with the cowboy. Didn’t match the description he gave me of her, but he sounded like she was the one he was looking for.”
Didn’t match the description? “What did the woman look like?”
“Pretty with short, curly, dark hair.”
The same way her grandmother had described Jack’s wife, Josey.
Josey. Josephine. The moment McCall hung up, she dialed her grandmother’s number at the ranch. The phone rang and rang. Her grandmother didn’t have voice mail, but she had an old answering machine. When it didn’t pick up, McCall realized there could be only one reason why.
The phone line was out.
In the middle of winter it wouldn’t have been unusual for the phone line to be down. But this time of year?
It seemed odd. RJ could have reached the ranch by now, but would he cut the phone cord in broad daylight? It was more likely he would watch the place and hit it tonight.
Without cell phone service anywhere near the ranch, there was no way to reach her grandmother to warn her.
McCall feared it was too late to warn any of them as she jumped in her patrol car and, lights and siren blaring, headed for the Winchester Ranch.
RJ SHOULDN’T HAVE been surprised to find no spare tire in the trunk. He pulled out the tire iron and beat the trunk lid until it looked like the craters on the moon. He felt a little bit better after that.
Back in the car, he downed a half-dozen pills, then drove until there was no rubber left on the tire and the rim buried itself in a rut. The car wasn’t going any farther, he thought with a curse, then realized it was blocking the road to the ranch. With an embankment on one side and a ravine on the other, no one would be coming down this road tonight.
He studied the directions he’d been given under the dome light. If he was right, he could cut off some of the distance by going across country. He drank the last of the twelve-pack he’d bought in Billings. It was hot and tasted like crap, but he didn’t want to get dehydrated and it helped the buzz he had going.
There was just enough gas left in the can in the trunk to soak the front seat pretty good. He lit the car and, taking the map, dropped off the side of the road and headed what he believed was southwest. The night was cloudy, but earlier he’d seen the moon coming up in the east.
He heard the whoosh as the car caught fire, and he was glad there wasn’t much gas in the tank. Even if the car did explode, though, he doubted the sound would carry clear to the ranch. He’d hate for them to have even an inkling of what was coming.
As he topped a rise, he realized he couldn’t be that far from the ranch. Pleased that maybe things were turning out as they were supposed to for once, he counted the minutes before he’d see his stepsister again.
IT HAD GOTTEN dark out. All Josey wanted to do was finish the story so Jack would understand why she had to get out of there. It was getting later, and the breeze coming in through the French doors was almost cold. She feared another storm was brewing on the horizon, and she worried about the road out of the ranch if there was a thunderstorm. She’d heard Enid say that when it rained here, parts of the road became impassible.
“When Celeste heard that we were going to camp, it was the last straw,” she said. “We’d been eating fast food for thirty hours, sleeping in the car, and Celeste was ready for the good life RJ had been promising her. Also, he’d been popping a lot of pills so he could keep driving straight through, and he was acting oddly. When we reached the camp, RJ cut me free of the duct tape and tied me to a tree with part of the rope he’d brought along. I thought I might stand a chance since the rope was much less restricting than the tape.
“That night he and Celeste got into a huge argument. RJ demanded she give back the engagement ring. Celeste went ballistic and started hitting him. He grabbed her and tried to take the ring off her finger. The next thing, she was screaming that he’d broken her finger, howling with pain. He hit her and she went down.”
Josey stepped to the open French doors to look out into the darkness for a moment, hugging herself against the cold, against the thought of RJ and what he was capable of. “He’d
