Mitch Bolton, the Silver Falls sheriff, finally took him on and gave him the leeway to work the cases, but he’d always maintained finding the source of the drugs was Steel’s true mandate. He didn’t believe in a single killer as much as he thought all drugs were far too accessible. Steel was determined to work both sides of the case and hoped to get it done in a year.
He shook his head now at his own folly. He’d underestimated the job, and now he was paying for it. He hadn’t been able to let Stella know who he really was. Had managed to dance with her a time or two, and that was it. Now Eric was stealing her—
And it was his own damn fault.
He’d wasted a lot of time building relationships with petty dealers and criminals but couldn’t seem to get traction with anyone higher in the distribution chain. In desperation he finally repeated his father’s idea: he grew a crop of pot of his own to try to sell—a move he hoped signaled to other dealers he was ready to play ball, a small-time operator who wanted to move into bigger things. He’d planted it on the Ridley property, an abandoned ranch that bordered his family’s and the Turners’ land.
It had almost worked, too. He’d gotten some interest from an outfit in town to the point where they’d started feeling almost territorial about the crop. They’d started sending their own men out to patrol it, a couple of lackeys who’d first surprised his sister Tory, then her soon-to-be husband, on the Ridley property. Luckily, neither of those occasions had escalated to a serious confrontation. Steel had told them to lay off—and stay away from his crop—and inadvertently unleashed a firestorm.
Literally.
Steel assumed the men had complained around town about his high-handedness, and the killer, whoever he was, figured it was his chance to deal once and for all with him, a man asking too many questions about the overdoses. He had to hand it to the man. Sending goons to tie him up and burn down his crop had all the hallmarks of an attack those local dealers might have made in retaliation when he’d balked their supervision, and Sheriff Holden had certainly been convinced that’s exactly what happened.
Steel knew the sheriff was wrong. He’d seen the two men who’d come after him. They weren’t the same men who’d wanted to patrol his crop. In fact, they weren’t from around these parts at all. They were hired guns who’d infiltrated his property, disarmed and disposed of him so methodically he knew they’d done this dozens of times before. He had no idea where the killer had found them or how he’d gotten them to do his dirty work.
He was lucky he was alive today. His crop and most of the structures on the Ridley property had burned to the ground.
He’d filled in Mitch Bolton on what had happened. His attackers left town before anyone caught up to them, though, and Steel was none the wiser as to whom they worked for. No one else seemed to know either. He hadn’t blown his cover—everyone still thought he was a petty criminal. A not-very-savvy petty criminal, but he’d upped his cred a little.
“Maybe you aren’t such a homebody after all,” one of the other dealers had remarked a few days after the fire when he’d bumped into him on the outskirts of Silver Falls.
“Homebody? What the hell are you talking about?” he’d asked in some consternation. Hardly an adjective he wanted associated with him when he was acting undercover.
“Figured you were kind of a family man, living at Thorn Hill and all.”
“Fuck, no.” But he’d taken the comment to heart. Here he’d thought he’d been doing such a good job establishing his bad reputation, and he hadn’t been fooling anyone at all. No wonder he wasn’t getting anywhere.
Time to change things up.
If only he’d done so sooner.
Steel had rented a broken-down trailer in Silver Falls some months ago to use as a crash-pad when he didn’t want to go home, but now he moved there full time and stopped going back to Thorn Hill. He let his garbage pile up outside. Went out at all hours. Spent his time in dive bars. Let it be known he was available for whatever needed to be done.
Now he was at a loss about what to do next. He hated knowing someone out there held all the cards. The killer, whoever he was, could see the whole game board. All Steel had was bits and pieces of the puzzle. Who was luring these girls to their deaths?
And was he also responsible for the two violent homicides in Silver Falls in the past year that had shaken people up? Those murders had people whispering about a Chance Creek killer, but unlike the overdoses, which everyone thought of as accidents, both homicides had involved blunt force trauma. Those victims were male. Not the MO of the man he was hunting, and Steel didn’t think they were linked. Neither did Mitch Bolton, which meant he’d assigned those cases to other people.
He had to work harder. Figure out why kids like Rena Klein, a teenaged girl who’d died just a few days ago, and Cecilia Foster, who’d overdosed three months before Rena, kept ending up dead when they seemed to have everything to live for.
He needed to solve this investigation and get it tied off, or he would lose any chance he had with Stella.
If he hadn’t lost it already.
Voices sounded closer to him than was comfortable, and he pulled farther back into the shadows, tearing his gaze from Stella. Olivia was back, this time with his brother, Lance—and his aunt Virginia, a termagant of a woman with
