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 things bothered him right from the start, though. All the overdose victims were young and female, relatively well off, living with their families until they died. Many of them lived in Chance Creek, but their deaths occurred in Silver Falls.
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
