It was a good thing Mitch Bolton, the sheriff in Silver Falls, knew how to keep a tight lid on the workings of the department. To Steel’s knowledge, no one had slipped and exposed him.
He wondered how much longer that could last. Wondered how long it would take to finish the job his father had started. Not just because he’d like to be the one out there dancing with Stella, but because he’d like to be a bigger part of everything his family did. His siblings needed his help with the ranch. The wedding he was watching was beautiful, but beneath the festive set dressing he knew Thorn Hill was barely holding together, like many ranches in Chance Creek.
Steel could see the strain in many of the celebrants’ faces. Everyone was trying to relax tonight, allowing themselves to enjoy the reception, but there was wear and fatigue behind each smile.
It had been a hard summer for everyone.
Steel ducked behind a tree as a couple wandered close to his hiding place—his sister Olivia and her husband, Noah Turner.
They spoke softly and laughed, and Steel smiled to hear them. He respected Noah, even if he had never been able to show it due to the feud that had until recently defined their families’ relationship. Noah was a parole officer who worked for the Chance Creek sheriff’s department, so Steel had been surprised when his sister, who’d had her own brushes with the law, had ended up with him.
But she seemed happy, and that was the important thing.
Olivia was working at the library now, putting away money so she could go to school, get her degree and one day take over as head librarian. Noah worked on both their families’ ranches, and his parole officer salary helped make ends meet.
Steel wondered how Noah felt about having a supposed criminal as his brother-in-law; since Noah worked for Chance Creek rather than Silver Falls, he wasn’t in the loop about Steel’s undercover activities, and as a parole officer, he probably wouldn’t have known even if they had worked in the same county, but as it was, Steel figured it had to bother the law-abiding man to think his brother-in-law was making bad choices.
But then Noah had managed to overlook Olivia’s past. Sometimes people surprised you.
Maybe Stella would overlook his past—if he could ever finish the job he was working on.
Just about everyone Steel knew would get a surprise then. If only it wasn’t taking so damn long.
The killer was a patient man. Thirteen years ago a spate of overdose deaths among young women on the fringes of Chance Creek society had alerted William Turner, Stella’s father, who had also been a sheriff’s deputy, that something more sinister than a series of accidents was taking place in his town. He couldn’t convince anyone else to take his theory seriously, so he’d enlisted Dale’s help and run a side investigation.
When William and Dale came too close to exposing him, the killer dropped out of sight, and no other deaths that fit the profile occurred—until recently.
When Dale knew his health was failing, he’d called Steel to visit him in prison one last time. “The investigation is yours now,” he’d rasped from his position on the other side of the plexiglass. “The killer will be back. I know it.”
If Steel hadn’t been watching the Chance Creek crime blotter avidly all these years, he doubted anyone would have made the connection when the overdoses started in Silver Falls. At first Steel had burned with the desire to avenge his father, who might not have been caught in his own criminal enterprises if he hadn’t been working to uncover the killer. Dale had filled him in on all of it, given him a series of orders to cover up his and William’s off-the-books investigation, then had pulled strings through William to help Steel get into the sheriff’s department in Washington. Once he’d become a deputy there, he’d continued with undercover work, honing his skills. As the years passed, and there was no sign of trouble in Chance Creek, Steel figured maybe William had been wrong from the start. Maybe there’d never been a killer at all. In truth he’d come to want to shuck off the responsibility Dale had laid on his shoulders before he died. Steel had been busy creating a new life in Washington. He could have stayed there—stepped away from undercover work—
But then the killings started again.
Steel swallowed as he watched Eric bend close to Stella and say something in her ear. What kind of sweet nothings was the man telling her? Steel itched to be holding her himself, telling her all about his life, his past—and the future he wanted to build.
It had taken several deaths in Silver Falls before he’d spotted the pattern, and it was only because Silver Falls’ crime reporting was lumped in with Chance Creek’s in the online version of the local paper that he’d seen it at all. It had been easy enough to join his siblings when they came back to take possession of the ranch. It was harder to convince the Silver Falls sheriff to take him on to work the case.
For one thing, the killer’s habits had shifted enough to make it difficult to prove it was the same person. Thirteen years ago the victims were young women who were already in trouble: sex workers or petty criminals estranged from their families and known to use drugs.
This time around the killer had changed his way of doing things, and Steel wondered if he’d upped the ante for himself to make his murders more exciting. Now he seemed to be luring women to him. The kind of women—or rather, teenage girls—who should know better.
When Steel had first noticed the surge of overdoses in Silver Falls, he’d wondered if it was the same fentanyl scourge that was hitting everywhere. Several
