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 a sharp tongue and an even sharper-tipped umbrella she liked to carry even when it wasn’t raining.
“We need to win,” Virginia was saying, and Steel immediately knew the topic of conversation.
The Ridley property—otherwise known as Settler’s Ridge—the same piece of abandoned ranch land where he’d tried to grow his pot crop.
Virginia, and everyone else in town, had been obsessed with winning it since the Founder’s Prize was announced in the spring. She wanted to add its land to Thorn Hill—and more importantly in these dry times, she wanted control of Pittance Creek, the small stream that ran between the Cooper and Turner ranches. Of course, the Turners wanted it, too.
Whoever contributed the most to Chance Creek would win the long-abandoned ranch. The announcement of the prize had kicked off a hearty competition between his family, the Turners and others in town.
His family launched an improvement plan for Chance Creek High. The Turners countered by renovating the town library and saving the dialysis unit at the local hospital, which had been slated to be shut down. The Lowmans donated a building to house the town history museum, with suitably low rent for the non-profit organization. That left the Turners in the lead.
Virginia was on the warpath.
“At this point all we can do is tie up the contest, Virginia,” Lance pointed out. Not too long ago, Lance had been as riled up about beating the Turners as Virginia was. He’d mellowed out significantly after he’d married Maya Turner, and they had both secured scholarships to study history in the coming fall semester. Lance seemed happier than Steel had ever seen him, and Steel was proud of what his brother had made of his life.
“You can do better than that if you put your mind to it. We need to create something spectacular for this town. Something that sweeps the competition.”
“What we need is to help the kids around these parts,” Olivia countered. “Did you hear about Rena Klein? She overdosed. I think we should raise funds to expand the detox and stabilization units in town. They don’t even serve teenagers.”
Steel poked his head out, drawn by the content of their conversation, and saw that Jed Turner was heading their way. He pulled back into the shadows as Virginia snapped, “The last thing we need is to associate the Cooper name with anything related to drugs. So come up with a better project than that—fast. You hear me? We can’t let those Turners get their mitts on Settler’s Ridge.”
“Are you forgetting I’m a Turner now?” Olivia teased Virginia. She was married to Noah, after all.
“And so is my wife,” Lance pointed out.
“And I hope you don’t regret it half as much as I regret having to depend on a bunch of do-nothings to win that land!”
Steel withdrew even more, biting back a smile.
