get your butt over here and give me a hand with this freaking mess.”
The moment Geary stepped reluctantly forward, Matt moved out. He chose the roof of the barn so that if he slipped, the noise would go unnoticed. He circled around, far outside the perimeter of the yard lights.
At the west end of the barn he climbed onto the paddock fence and gripped the edge of the roof. He swung forward hard and jackknifed his body onto the rooftop, landing with a lot more noise than he’d hoped.
“What the hell was that?” he heard Crider shout.
“The horses, you ninny.” Hanifen’s voice. Wildly grateful for the sheriff’s preoccupied impatience, Matt nevertheless plastered himself to the roof. Scraped raw in the maneuver, his hands felt on fire, but he didn’t move, hardly breathed.
Matt heard Hanifen get on the radio and order in help to seal off, search out and protect the evidence. “And the horses are getting whacked out, so whatever you do, don’t put on the siren.”
Matt gauged his position on the roof and moved crabwise to situate himself before Fiona went back into the stables. He just glimpsed her entering below him as he molded himself to the asphalt shingles to watch what was going on.
Not another five minutes had passed before a second vehicle with the county sheriff’s logo pulled into the yard. If the killer had made any tracks, if the shell casing had been left on the ground, if any number of possible clues to the killer’s identity remained in the drive or yard, Matt thought the sheriff’s crew was doing one hell of a job laying waste to the evidence.
He stayed on the roof growing stiffer, colder and more irritated by the moment for nearly two hours. Photos were taken of Everly’s position when he fell over dead. Hanifen conducted a cursory search of the house and ruled out the necessity of bringing in crime-scene technicians.
The murder, after all, had taken place on the front stoop by a shooter outside the house.
One would think, if one didn’t know better, Matt thought, that the sheriff didn’t give a damn about preserving the integrity of the evidence. Matt had to wonder if there was any percentage at all in staying on the roof, observing, listening.
Then, just as he’d decided to move out, Matt got his payoff. Hanifen and Crider wound up virtually beneath Matt’s position, leaning in against the stable wall, lighting their smokes.
“I’ll bet you anything the princess killed him,” Hanifen’s underling was saying.
“Maybe,” the sheriff returned, “but I’m not taking her in tonight.”
“But—”
“But what?” A cloud of smoke chased the sheriff’s abrupt interruption, wafting upward toward Matt.
“Well, she’s a flight risk for one thing—”
“Oh, stifle it, Crider,” Hanifen snapped. “This is not New York and you are not on NYPD Blue. Fiona Halsey has motive up the ying-yang, she had opportunity, and—”
“And more than enough firepower to arm a small nation, let’s not forget…” Crider trailed off.
Matt could almost feel through his frozen senses the quiet wrath coming off Hanifen. His words dropped out like chunks of glacier. “What firepower would that be?”
Exactly, Matt thought. What firepower? Was Crider blabbing about an armory in existence on the Bar Naught? And one Fiona Halsey knew about?
But Crider cleared his throat and backpedaled like a demon. “You know. Just what’s stashed…in the inside. And Fiona’s gotta have a rifle herself.”
More glacier shedding. “You’re a fool.”
“I know when to keep my mouth shut,” Crider protested.
“Like now?”
“But, Dex, it’s just you and me out here—”
“I don’t ever want to hear a word that even rhymes with ‘firepower’ out of your mouth again. You got that?”
“Yeah,” Crider answered, sullen-voiced.
Hanifen went on. “I don’t want to hear any disrespect in regard to Fiona Halsey, either.”
“You gone all soft on her, Dex?”
“Shut your trap, Crider. That little girl and I go back a long way.”
“She’s not a little girl anymore.” The fool dug his hole deeper. “You gonna just let her get away with it?”
How, Matt thought, did the guy dare taunt Hanifen? But to his utter disbelief, Hanifen let the ridicule go.
“She’s not going to get away with anything.” He tossed his cigar butt into the yard. “Here’s what’s not going to happen. I am not gonna have the whole damned county down on my head for railroading the local princess.”
Chapter Two
The first time he met Fiona Halsey face-to-face, Matt found himself staring up the barrel of her cocked, .30-30 lever-action rifle. The Remington was a beauty, powerful enough to fell a moose from several hundred yards out. And it still had the faint acrid scent of burnt gunpowder.
“Back away from Soldier Boy,” she commanded, “and keep your arms in the air.”
He raised one arm but left the other on the scarred, discolored withers of the Arabian.
It was already some kind of natural miracle that Matt had survived the standoff with Soldier. He’d had about two seconds’ warning when, apparently for no real reason other than to amuse himself, Crider had elevated the searchlights attached to the sheriff’s second vehicle and started the beacon rolling.
Who knew? It was possible the fool still would not have caught sight of Matt even with the searchlight glaring full on. It was just as possible that even in the sweep of the beacon halfway up the mountain, Matt might not have been spotted.
He’d reacted as if his body weren’t stiff from the cold, crabbing his way back over the rooftop, expecting to hang out on the dark side of the roof for a while. The only trouble was, the floodlights on the paddock side of the barn had been turned on in the exhaustive search for clues, and now lit up not only his escape route, but the slant of the roof as well.
He had only one decent chance to escape detection and that was to duck into the stall of a killer horse named Soldier Boy. He estimated where he had to be to turn himself off the roof and into the stall and then he prayed for a second time in one night.
He positioned himself, gripped the icy edge of the roof and somersaulted off into space. His legs cleared the half door of Soldier Boy’s stall, but he’d thunked down so hard on his middle that every last molecule of air in his body was pounded out. He twisted in pain and landed on his butt, his back up against the stable door.
The stallion had wheeled around, his ears flattened, his hooves scraping with an incredible menace along the floor. If an animal could breathe fire, it was this one. Dropped to the floor,
