Josey didn’t dare speak into the dense silence that fell between them.
Jack seemed to be waiting for her to explain. When she didn’t, he let out a curse.
She watched him grab one of the pillows and a quilt that had been folded up on the end of the bed. He brushed past her and dropped both the pillow and quilt onto the chair before leaving the room.
It was much later that she heard him return to the dark room and curl up in the chair across from her. She could hear him breathing softly and feel his gaze on her. She closed her eyes tight and told herself she didn’t give a damn what Jack Winchester thought of her. It wasn’t the first night she’d gone to sleep lying to herself.
She woke up just after two in the morning to find Jack gone.
Chapter Six
It was late by the time McCall reached her office in Whitehorse. She had brought evidence from the crime scene that needed to be sent to the lab in Missoula first thing in the morning.
Deputies had discovered a bullet on the outside of the car pulled from the river and in the headrest on the driver’s side. Both were .38 slugs. Someone in camp had been armed. Deputies would continue their search in the morning for the weapon—and any more victims.
But McCall wasn’t ruling out that at least one person had gotten away—possibly armed—from the crime scene.
“Any chance you’ll be coming down to my place later?” Luke had asked as he rubbed the tension from her shoulders before she’d left the crime scene.
McCall had leaned into his strong hands, wanting nothing more than to spend the night with Luke in his small trailer curled against him. He was staying in the trailer out on his property until he completed their house. He planned to have it done before their Christmas wedding so they could move in together.
She couldn’t believe how lucky she was that Luke had come back into her life.
“I’m sorry,” she’d told him. “I’d better stay at my place near town tonight. This case—”
“I know.” He’d turned her to smile at her, then kissed her.
He did know. He knew how much this job meant to her even though she’d fought taking the acting sheriff position. He’d encouraged her to run for sheriff when the time came.
“You sound like my grandmother,” she’d said.
“Yeah? Well, we both know you aren’t finished with your father’s death, don’t we?”
It was the first time he’d mentioned what he’d overheard the night he’d saved her life at her cabin. She hadn’t had to answer, since there was no point. He was right. She wasn’t finished, and she had a bad feeling her grandmother wasn’t, either.
McCall pushed aside thoughts of her fiancé as she went to work.
George had assisted with taking their Jane Doe’s prints. McCall entered them now into the system and waited. The chance of getting a match was slim at best. The Jane Doe would have had to been arrested, served in the military or had a job where her prints were required for security reasons.
That was why McCall was amazed when she got a match.
Her prints had come up from a prostitution charge. She’d served eight months and had only recently been released. Her name was Celeste Leigh of Palm City, California. No known address or place of employment. She was twenty-two and believed to be living on the streets.
McCall put in a call to Detective Diaz in Palm City and wasn’t surprised to find him still at work. Apparently he was getting a lot of pressure on the Ray Allan Evans Sr. murder because Evans had been the husband of Ella Vanderliner.
“I’ve got an ID on our Jane Doe,” she said and proceeded to tell him about Celeste Leigh.
“Prostitution? I’m not surprised. From what we’ve discovered investigating his father’s homicide, RJ was involved in a string of shady ventures that lost money, and his daddy had to bail him out. He was also known to frequent the lower end of town.”
“Celeste was wearing a diamond engagement ring with a big rock on it. We found the receipt for it in the glove box of the car. It set RJ back a large chunk of change. Which might explain why her ring finger appeared to have been broken. I think RJ changed his mind about any upcoming nuptials.”
Diaz swore. “The bastard broke her finger trying to take back the wedding ring? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised given that he later hung her from a tree.”
“Apparently, he’d been abusing her for some time.”
“That fits with what we know about him. He’d been accused by other prostitutes of abuse, but they always dropped the charges. So what about the other noose?”
“We found Josephine Vanderliner’s purse downriver from where RJ and Celeste were believed to have been camped. We’ll continue dragging the river in the morning. Given the three sets of tracks, the two nooses and her purse, we’re fairly certain Vanderliner was there with them.”
“Keep me updated. I’ll see if I can find some next of kin that need to be notified of Celeste Leigh’s death.”
McCall hung up and studied the photograph of Ray Allan Evans Jr. again. He was blond, blue-eyed, movie-star handsome, but there was something about him that unnerved her, and would have even if she hadn’t known anything about him.
It was in the eyes, she thought, as she pushed away the photograph and looked instead at the copy she’d made of Josephine Vanderliner’s photo.
Vanderliner was pretty in a startling way. In the photo, she had her long, ginger-colored hair pulled back and wound in a loose braid. Her eyes were aquamarine, and she was smiling into the camera as if she didn’t have a care in the world.
That had apparently changed, McCall thought, as she sighed and made another copy of the photographs to take to the Milk River Courier office come morning.
If there was even a chance
