don’t really think he killed Kelly, do you?”
“I haven’t made up my mind about anything at this point. He said he was at the clinic all morning, and then at the Rotary Club luncheon.”
“How did she die?” Darcy asked. “You told me you found her up on Dixon Pass, but how?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“I have a very good imagination. If you don’t tell me, I’ll fill in too many horrid details of my own.” She took another sip of tea. “Besides, the papers will be full of the story soon.”
“She was in her car, over to the side, up against the rock face at the top of the pass. Her hands and feet were bound with duct tape and her throat had been cut.”
Darcy let out a ragged breath. “Had she been raped?”
“I don’t know. But her clothes weren’t torn or disarrayed. We’ll know more tomorrow.”
“So someone just killed her and left her up there? Why there?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he—or she—hoped what did happen would happen—an avalanche buried the car. We might not have found it for weeks if a delivery truck wasn’t buried in the same place. When we pulled out the delivery driver, we found Kelly’s car, too.”
“Did you talk to her parents?”
“Yes. They wanted to fly down right away. I told them they should wait until the road opens.”
“When will that be?”
“We don’t know. A storm system has settled in. They’re predicting up to four feet of new snow. Until it stops, no one is getting in or out of Eagle Mountain.”
“The sheriff and Lacy Milligan are supposed to get married in a few weeks,” she said.
“The road should be open by then,” he said. He hoped so. He wasn’t going to get far with this case without the information he could get outside town.
“When I moved here and people told me about the road being closed sometimes in winter, I thought it sounded exciting,” she said. “Kind of romantic, even—everyone relying on each other in true pioneer spirit. Then I think about our weekly order of supplies not getting through, and people who don’t live here being stuck in motels or doubling up with family—then it doesn’t sound like much fun.” She looked up at him. “What about you? Do you live here?”
“I do. I’m in a converted carriage house over on Elm.”
“No pets? Or are you a client of Dr. Nichols’s?”
Her teasing tone lifted his spirits. “No pets,” he said. “I like dogs, but my hours would mean leaving it alone too long.”
“Cats do better on their own.” She turned to watch Pumpkin facing off with Marianne. The two cats sniffed each other from nose to tail then, satisfied, moved toward the stairs and up into the loft.
“I should let you go,” she said. “Thank you for stopping by.”
“Is there someone you could stay with tonight?” he asked. “Or you could get a motel room, somewhere not so isolated.”
“No, I’ll be fine.” She looked around. “I don’t want to leave the cats. I have a gun and I know how to use it. Kelly and I took a class together. It helped me feel stronger.”
He was tempted to say he would stay here tonight, but he suspected she wouldn’t welcome the offer. He’d have to sleep sitting up on her little sofa, or freeze in his Tahoe. “Keep your phone with you and call 911 if you feel at all uneasy,” he said.
“I will. I guess I should have called them in the first place.”
“I wasn’t saying I minded coming out here. I didn’t. I don’t. If you feel better calling me, don’t hesitate.”
She nodded. “I guess I called you because I knew you. I’m not always comfortable with strangers.”
“I’m glad you trusted me enough to call me. And I meant it—don’t think twice about calling me again.”
“All right. And I’ll be fine.” Her smile was forced, but he admired the effort.
He glanced in the rearview mirror as he drove away, at the little house in the snowy clearing, golden light illuminating the windows, like a doll’s house in a fairy-tale illustration. Darcy Marsh wasn’t an enchanted princess but she had a rare self-possession that drew him.
He parked his Tahoe on the side of the road to enter his report about the vehicle she’d seen and the possible attempted break-in at her home. He was uploading the photos he’d taken when his phone rang with a call from the sheriff’s department.
Sheriff Travis Walker’s voice carried the strain of a long day. “Ryder, you probably want to get over here,” he said. “We’ve found another body.”
Christy O’Brien lay across the front seat of her wrecker, the front of her white parka stained crimson with blood, her hands and feet wrapped with silver duct tape. The wrecker itself was nose-down in a ditch at the far end of a gravel road on the outskirts of town, snow sifting down over it like icing drizzled on a macabre cake.
Ryder turned away, pushing aside the sickness and guilt that clawed at the back of his throat. Such emotions wouldn’t do anyone any good now. “I just saw her,” he said. “Less than an hour ago.”
“Where?” Sheriff Travis Walker, snow collecting on the brim of his Stetson and the shoulders of his black parka, scanned the empty roadside. Travis was one of the reasons Ryder had ended up in Eagle Mountain. He had visited his friend at the Walker ranch one summer and fallen in love with the place. When an opening in this division had opened up, he had put in for it.
“I was in the grocery store parking lot,” Ryder said. “She passed me. I figured she was on a call, headed to pull someone out of a ditch.”
“This probably happened not too long after that.” Travis played the beam of his flashlight over the wrecker. “Maybe the killer called her, pretended his car wouldn’t start—maybe a dead battery. When she gets out of the wrecker to take a look, he overpowers her, tapes her up, slits her throat.”
“Then shoves her into the wrecker and drives it into the ditch?”
“He may not have even had to drive it,” Travis said. “Just put it into gear and give it a good push in the right direction. Then he gets in his own car and drives away.”
“Who called it in?” Ryder asked.
“Nobody,” Travis said. “I was coming back from a call—an attempted break-in not far from here. I turned down this road, thinking the burglar might have ducked down here. When I saw the wrecker in the ditch, I knew something wasn’t right.”
“An attempted break-in?” Ryder
