resented having this sprung on him out of nowhere, apparently for effect. “How long have you known this?” Zane wanted to know.
“Just today,” Watkins answered mildly. The sheriff continued watching him the way a cat watched a mouse hole, breathless, waiting to pounce.
A few choice words rose to Zane’s tongue, but he deliberately refrained from voicing any of them. It served no purpose telling the sheriff what he thought of his coming here, trying to bait him rather than being out in the field, looking for Eldridge.
Most of all, Zane was really growing tired of playing cat and mouse.
“Regular payments?” Zane questioned.
Watkins nodded his head. “Like clockwork.”
Zane felt as if he was getting information out of the man by dribbles and drabs. “For how long?”
“Three months.” Again, the gray eyes seemed to be burrowing right into him. “Why? What are you thinking?” he asked.
“Same thing you are,” Zane answered vaguely.
It was a lie. He had a feeling, from the way Watkins was looking at him, that the sheriff was thinking a great many more things than just the one thing that had immediately struck him. Watkins might like presenting himself as being nothing more than a simple country sheriff, but under that easygoing exterior was a shrewd man, Zane decided. A man who didn’t take kindly to being made to look foolish—and an unsolved crime of this magnitude, involving such a well-known citizen like Eldridge Colton, did just that.
Appearing to hang on his every word, Watkins cocked his head, looking right back at him, the very picture of innocence. “Which is?”
Why was Watkins waiting for him to spell it out? Was the man setting some sort of a trap for him, or was he just using him as a sounding board?
“Somebody was blackmailing my stepfather,” he said, careful to use the sheriff-approved label for the man he considered his father. “Maybe the same person who kidnapped him.”
Watkins scratched his head, as if that simple action helped him absorb the words a little better. “Now, why would he kidnap your stepdaddy if Mr. Colton was making regular payments to him?” Watkins asked.
Zane knew that Watkins knew the answer as well as he did, but again, he played along, answering the question as he wondered just exactly what the sheriff was really up to. In a nutshell, was the man trying to prove his innocence, or his guilt?
Or was he just casting about, hoping he—or whoever else Watkins went on to question—would somehow trip themselves up and say the wrong thing?
He couldn’t get a handle on it. All he knew was Watkins’s rather clumsy method definitely made him feel uncomfortable.
Zane did his best to continue playing along, but his temper was really growing short. It had been this way ever since Eldridge had been taken.
“Maybe my stepfather got tired of paying the blackmailer. Or maybe the blackmailer had decided to up the ante and my stepfather said no. Or maybe,” he speculated, coming up with a third reason, “whoever was blackmailing him just got too angry at my stepfather and decided to take it out on him. I don’t know,” Zane snapped. “That’s your job.”
“Getting a mite testy, aren’t you, son?” Watkins asked.
The man might be a couple of decades older than he was, but Zane wasn’t about to stand being talked down to like this.
“I don’t know. Am I?” he challenged. “What would you be like if it was your father who’d been kidnapped?”
“Stepfather,” Watkins corrected, a little of his folksy cadence slipping away.
Zane had had just about enough of this. “How about we just call him Eldridge?” he proposed in an exasperated tone. “Would that suit you?”
“Doesn’t matter what suits me, Mr. Colton,” Watkins replied calmly. “I’m just a lowly elected official of the county, trying to do his job.” His eyes narrowed ever so slightly as they pinned Zane in place. “You wouldn’t happen to know who was on the receiving end of these regular payments, now, would you?” he asked, his tone halfway between being solicitous and friendly.
“I haven’t a clue,” Zane responded tersely. And then he reversed the tables. “Do you?”
“Not yet,” Watkins replied honestly. “But I aim to find out. You hear anything, Mr. Colton, I expect you to let me know,” the sheriff said in a mild voice as he rose to his feet.
Zane knew he was being put on notice but he went out of his way to maintain a friendly tone. “Can I expect the same from you?”
Watkins inclined his head as if it was a wait-and-see situation.
“If I can,” the sheriff replied.
Which translated to a big, fat No, Zane realized. The sheriff was not in the business of sharing. The only reason Watkins had come to him with this business of regular bank account withdrawals was to see his reaction to the news.
The sheriff was on a fishing expedition and he was looking to catch himself a big fish whose last name was Colton, Zane thought. He obviously believed that someone within the family had abducted Eldridge.
But why?
It wasn’t as if there was a dearth of suspects outside of the family. Eldridge Colton had made his share of enemies in his youth.
Taking great pains to make sure none of his thoughts were registering on his face, Zane rose to his feet less than a beat after the sheriff had gained his. Then, rounding his desk, he walked the man to his office door.
“Thanks for stopping by, Sheriff,” he said in the friendliest voice he could muster, “and for keeping me in the loop.”
Watkins’s eyes met his. Again, the sheriff’s were unreadable. His lips spread just a little in what passed for a smile. An exceedingly shallow smile. “Count on it.”
Zane felt as if he was once again being put on notice. This wasn’t the first conversation he’d had with the sheriff, nor was it the first time he’d had the impression that Watkins would have been more than thrilled to pin this all on him—or at least on someone in his family.
All that meant, Zane thought as he shook the sheriff’s hand and then watched the man walk away, was that he was going to have to get really serious about doing some intense investigating of his own.
His priorities converged with the sheriff’s only insofar as wanting to solve the mystery of Eldridge’s disappearance. Their paths diverged immediately after that because the sheriff suspected him while he, of course, knew he wasn’t the one responsible for his father’s disappearance.
He might have been at the house the morning of the abduction—they’d all been at the house that morning, it was everyone’s customary starting point every Monday morning—but he hadn’t gone anywhere near his father’s room until after Moira had screamed because she’d found the blood.
He’d told Watkins as much, and the sheriff might have nodded when
