OUTLAW LAWMAN Read online

  Harlan didn’t recognize the name, but within an hour or two, he’d know everything there was to know about this P.I., who was either incompetent, stupid or an out-and-out liar. None of those possibilities sat well with him.

  He glanced up the road, spotted her car right where she said it would be, and he cursed both it and the August heat. There was a breeze, but it was muggy and still hot despite the late hour.

  “What exactly did you think you’d find in my house?” he pressed.

  She shook her head. “I wasn’t sure. An email, maybe. Or a paper trail to prove you hired someone. I wanted something in your own handwriting or from your personal computer.”

  Something she wouldn’t find, because he hadn’t done anything to set this crazy visit into motion. “I guess it didn’t occur to you that if I was really a rogue marshal you should go to the cops?”

  “Wasn’t sure I could trust them.” Ahead of him her steps slowed, and she wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. “I wasn’t sure I could trust anyone. Like I said, someone’s trying to scare me...or something.”

  “Considering your job, is that much of a surprise? You’ve riled a boatload of people, including me.”

  She turned, and in the moonlight he got a glimpse of her expression. Not the fake bravery she’d tried to sport in the hall. Not the emotions from their past. But something else. Something Harlan couldn’t quite put his finger on.

  “Some people do hate me,” she said, as if choosing her words carefully. “But this isn’t about that. The threatening notes had, well, personal details in them.”

  “Personal?” Harlan caught up with her, and even though they were still yards from her car, he stopped her. He whirled her back around to face him.

  Not the brightest idea he’d ever had.

  That whirl put them too darn close, and the breeze hit just right so that her scent washed over him. Through him, actually. Yeah, not a bright idea.

  “Personal,” Caitlyn verified. She took a deep breath. “The notes were typed, and they warned if I said anything about the investigation into Jonah Webb’s murder, I’d be sorry. Your name was on them.”

  It didn’t take Harlan long to figure out what this might be. “So? Anyone could have typed them.”

  “No. Not anyone.” She didn’t say anything for several moments. “Remember when we were together that night at Rocky Creek?”

  Even though they’d had a lot of nights at that hellhole, Harlan figured he knew which one she meant.

  “Jonah Webb went missing that night,” she continued. “And we heard they were closing the place, that we’d all be split up and sent to other facilities. Well, except for Kirby Granger’s boys. Kirby was getting all of you and some of the others out of there.”

  “He couldn’t get you out,” Harlan reminded her. “He couldn’t locate your next of kin to get permission to request guardianship of you.”

  She gave that a dismissive nod and started walking again. “And that night we met down in the laundry room.”

  Their usual meeting place, where they’d talked, and kissed, for hours. They’d been barely sixteen then, but the making out had started a month earlier. It had escalated that night, and they’d had sex.

  With a surprise ending.

  Caitlyn had had one of the worst reputations at Rocky Creek, but Harlan had found out unexpectedly that she’d been a virgin.

  “Remember what you said to me?” Caitlyn asked. “Afterward,” she clarified.

  Yeah, he did. After sixteen years, he still did.

  It had been Caitlyn’s first time. Not his, though. He’d gotten lucky a few other times with girls who’d found him attractive. Sometimes he regretted that and had regretted even more that Caitlyn had given him something special—her virginity.

  You’ll always be my first, Caitlyn, he’d said to her. And in his crazy sixteen-year-old mind, that meant something, even though he’d omitted the critical word—love.

  That was probably for the best, considering how things had turned out between them.

  Caitlyn got to the car and threw open the passenger door. “Did you ever tell anyone else what you said to me that night?”

  Harlan didn’t have to think about that answer. “No. It’s not the sort of thing a teenage boy chats about with his friends.”

  Caitlyn made a sound of agreement, fished her keys from the front pocket of her jeans and unlocked the glove compartment. She pulled out a manila folder and used her phone as a flashlight on the pages.

  Harlan thumbed through the pages and saw that the first three were all typewritten and were just a few lines long.

  Each had his name typed at the bottom.

  But it was the threats that caught his attention.

  Talk to the Rangers about Kirby and you’ll be sorry, the first one read.

  The second escalated. Talk to the Rangers, and you’ll die.

  He flipped the page, and he felt the knot tighten in his stomach.

  Don’t make me kill you had been typed in bold letters. And beneath it, You’ll always be my first, Caitlyn.

  “Hell.” And that was all Harlan could manage to say for several seconds. “Believe me, I didn’t send you these. If I’d wanted to warn you to keep quiet, I would have said it to your face.”

  She studied him, as if trying to decide if he was telling the truth, and then huffed. “There’s more. Look at the next page.”

  He looked at the next page, but saw only a list of names and contact information.

  “I’m sure you recognize them,” Caitlyn said.

  Harlan did. There were three names, including Caitlyn’s. The two others were girls who’d lived in her dorm at the Rocky Creek Children’s Facility.

  Sherry Summers and Tiffany Brock.

  “The three of us lived in the room nearest Jonah Webb’s family quarters,” Caitlyn supplied. “We were all questioned at length when Webb disappeared.”

  Harlan shook his head. “You think one of them sent you the threatening notes?”

  “No. Tiffany’s dead, killed in a car accident about two weeks ago near San Antonio.” Caitlyn drew in a breath, blew it out slowly. “Her fiancé said before she died, she was getting threatening letters, warning her to stay quiet about the Webb investigation. Maybe the threats came from you. Maybe from one of your foster brothers or Kirby.”

  “Not a chance,” Harlan jumped to answer. “Did those have my typed name on them, too?”

  “No,” she repeated. “And until I talked to her fiancé, he had no idea who might have sent them.”

  “How kind of you to fill in the blanks for him. I just wish you’d filled them in with a little truth and not some stupid speculation.” He glanced at the other names. “What about Sherry?”

  Another deep breath. “She’s missing—for nearly three weeks now. I’m the only one left on the list, and earlier tonight I found this on my car windshield.” Caitlyn turned to the next page.

  It was two typewritten lines. Just a handful of words, but they caused Harlan’s heart to slam against his chest.

  Hell, what was going on?

  Time’s up, Caitlyn. Tomorrow you die.

  Chapter Two

  Time’s up, Caitlyn. Tomorrow you die.

  Caitlyn had read the latest threat so many times that she didn’t need to look at it again. It was branded into her memory now, but Harlan kept his attention fixed on it for several long moments.

  “I got that before midnight, which means tomorrow is already here,” she added, though he no doubt had figured that out. Now what Caitlyn had to figure out was if Harlan had anything to do with it.

  Judging from his reaction, the answer was no. But there was still the likelihood that someone very close to him was responsible.

  He cursed and scanned the a
rea as an experienced marshal would do to make sure they were safe. A moment later Harlan held up the note for her.

  “You didn’t report this to the local cops?” he demanded.

  Caitlyn huffed. “If I couldn’t trust you, how could I trust them?”

  He cursed again. “Hell’s bells, Caitlyn. According to you, a woman’s dead. Another’s missing, and the whack job behind all of this has clearly got you in his crosshairs.” Harlan added a few more words of profanity. “How the devil could you think I’d do this to you?”

  “Partly because of our last phone conversation.” She gave him a moment to recall the call in question, but judging from his instant smirk he remembered it readily.

  “You’d trashed the Marshals Service and me in one of your so-called pieces of journalism,” he said. “And I told you what you could do with your story.”

  Exactly.

  Caitlyn had only reported the facts of the case in question, but they had clashed with Harlan’s version of events. Yet a dangerous criminal managed to escape while in custody of federal marshals, and that was what had happened.

  Too bad it’d been on Harlan’s watch.

  She’d felt duty bound to report it and equally duty bound to do a follow-up piece when Harlan had been cleared of any wrongdoing. However, the follow-up hadn’t soothed Harlan much.

  “That phone conversation wasn’t a threat,” he insisted. “I was riled because you didn’t wait for the whole truth before you got on TV and blabbed about it.”

  “It wasn’t just that conversation.” Caitlyn tapped the pages to remind him of something else, and in doing so her hand brushed against his. The jolt was instant.

  She silently cursed it.

  How could she possibly still be attracted to Harlan?

  She wasn’t a starry-eyed teenager anymore. She was thirty-two. Yet her hormones were zinging with just a simple touch. She blamed that on his hot cowboy looks. That black hair. Those gray eyes. Oh, and those jeans. No one should look that good in such basic clothing.

  Well, it ended now. She couldn’t be one of those women attracted to dangerous men.

  Or potentially dangerous anyway.

  Her obsession with bad boys was over, even if once she’d been proud of her own bad-girl reputation.

  “It wasn’t just that conversation,” Caitlyn repeated after she cleared her throat. “There’s the part about what you said to me that night in the laundry room at Rocky Creek. We’re the only two people who knew about that.” She paused. “Weren’t we?”

  “I thought we were.” He groaned. “But obviously not. Unless you told someone.”

  “No.” And she couldn’t answer it quickly enough. “Before you ask, I didn’t keep a diary. I said nothing about it in a down-memory-lane blog post. Didn’t mention it in a drunken stupor either.”

  But yes, Caitlyn had gone through all those possibilities before she’d decided it was Harlan.

  Or someone Harlan knew well.

  “Maybe one of your foster brothers overheard us?” she suggested.

  “And wrote the threats sixteen years later?” he finished for her, after he glared at her. “Not a chance.”

  “Harlan, none of you is a bloomin’ Boy Scout. Kirby and all of you have reputations for bending justice now and then.”

  “Never justice, just the law. Something you know all about.” He stared at her, practically daring her to disagree. She couldn’t, especially since she’d just broken into his house.

  Caitlyn did know the difference between the law and justice, but at the moment she would settle for just knowing the truth.

  “How about Kirby, then?” Caitlyn tried for a slightly different angle. “Maybe he wrote the threats to keep me from talking to the Rangers?”

  “No way. He’s too sick. And besides, he’d rather implicate himself than me or the others.”

  Yes, that was exactly what she’d thought. Kirby wouldn’t sell out any of them. And if Harlan had wanted to threaten her, he wouldn’t have used typed notes with his name at the bottom. Still, she’d had to rule him out because of that one intimate line added to the threat.

  Harlan looked at the third threat again. “The wording is exact, so it means someone overheard us. And watched us.”

  Caitlyn had already considered that possibility, but hearing it confirmed made her a little queasy.

  Mercy.

  She’d been butt naked. Harlan, too. And someone had perhaps not only watched them have sex, they’d also remembered verbatim what Harlan had said to her.

  Now it was her turn to curse. “This would have been a lot easier if you’d written the notes.”

  He gave her a look, as if she’d sprouted a third eyeball or something.

  “Easier because I’d know who was behind this,” she clarified.

  “Maybe, but it’s obvious that someone’s trying to set me up. Someone who would have been at Rocky Creek that night.” Harlan looked around again. That quick, edgy sweep of the road and the pasture on both sides. “Come on. If this nut job is planning to try to kill you today, you shouldn’t be out in the open like this.”

  That reminder unnerved her even further. She felt as if she was walking barefoot on razor blades. But she wasn’t stupid, and she had taken precautions.

  “That’s why I brought the gun. And besides, no one followed me,” she insisted.

  “No one that you saw,” Harlan growled. He tucked the folder under his arm, shut her car door and took her by the shoulder again.

  Caitlyn wanted to argue with that. Heck, at this point she wanted to argue with anything and anybody. She was exhausted, scared, and she’d been forced to come to the last man on earth who wanted to see her.

  “Let’s go back to my house so I can check some things on the computer,” he added, and he got her moving in that direction. “Other than the threatening notes, has anything else happened?”

  “A while back. But that had nothing to do with this.”

  He smirked at her again. “You got more than one person threatening you?”

  “Lots of people threaten me.” Caitlyn returned the smirk. “I don’t exactly make a lot of friends in my job.”

  “That’s not hard to believe,” Harlan mumbled. “Anyone specific?”

  She lifted her shoulder. “I had a stalker named Jay Farris. He’d leave me marriage proposals stuffed into bouquets of roses. When I turned him down, the roses became bunches of dead rats and death threats.”

  That required a deep breath. Caitlyn still had nightmares about him. Always would.

  “The rats escalated to an attempt to strangle me one night after he’d seen me on a date with another man,” she explained, not easily. Nothing was easy when it came to talking about Farris. “He wanted to kill me to prove how much he loved me.”

  “A real charmer, huh?” But there seemed to be more anger than sarcasm in his voice. “What happened to him?”

  “He was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and placed in a mental institution. Haven’t heard from him in nearly a year.”

  But what she left out was that Farris still had mentally haunted her all these months later. Haunted her to the point that she’d moved five times and had rarely gone into the office. She’d done most of her work from home.

  “You’re sure you haven’t heard from Farris?” Harlan asked. “He could have sent you those notes.”

  Caitlyn shook her head. “No way would he have known what you said to me that night. He’s seven years younger than we are, and that would have made him only nine when we were together. There weren’t any kids that young in Rocky Creek.”

  Besides, she would have recognized an all-grown-up Farris if he’d been a fellow Rocky Creek resident. Those hard times had created bonds. Not necessarily good ones. But Caitlyn had no trouble remembering
each face.

  Including those of the dead and missing women.

  They’d been her friends. One, Tiffany, had been her bunk mate. They’d shared every secret but one—Caitlyn hadn’t told Tiff about losing her virginity to Harlan. No time for that, since both Tiff and she had been removed from Rocky Creek the following day and sent to different facilities. Caitlyn to Austin and Tiffany to San Antonio.

  “Maybe Farris wasn’t at Rocky Creek,” Harlan said a moment later. “But he could have found out from the person who did see and hear us.”

  True. And despite the balmy night, that sent a chill through her.

  Judas priest.

  Farris had money from his family’s hugely successful computer software business and could have hired someone to do his dirty work.

  But why would Farris tell her not to talk to the Rangers?

  He wouldn’t.

  Farris had no connection to what had gone on at Rocky Creek and Jonah Webb. At least, she was reasonably sure of that, but Caitlyn made a mental note to do more checking.

  “How did you find out about Tiffany’s car accident and that Sherry was missing?” Harlan did another of those glances around, and it made her consider running to his house. Thankfully, it wasn’t far away, and she could see the light he’d left on in the hall.

  “Tiff’s fiancé called to let me know about her death. He asked me to get in touch with anyone from Rocky Creek who might want to know. I haven’t stayed in touch with anyone, but I tried to track down Sherry. She runs an investment firm in Houston, and her business partner, Curtis Newell, said she left without giving him any notice.”

  “Maybe Sherry doesn’t want to be found.” Harlan shrugged. “Could be she just needs some downtime.”

  Caitlyn had already considered that and more. “None of her friends knows where she is. None. That’s suspicious to me, and there doesn’t appear to be any crisis going on in her life that would make her disappear. Also, she didn’t actually tell anyone in person that she was leaving.”

  Harlan made a hmm sound to indicate he was thinking about that. “I’ll call around, see what I can find. It could turn out to be nothing.” He led her through the yard and to the porch. “Still, it’s suspicious, especially when you consider everything else.”