“Try to get a good clean close-up.” Her heart pounded when she spotted a big man in a cowboy hat emerging from the barn with a horse on a lead.
“Uh-oh.” The skinny photographer jerked back from the lens. “He spotted us, too.” He frowned as he refocused. “Man! That dude looks mean.”
“Lemme look.”
Dave held the camera steady while Jamie scanned the scene below.
“Where the hell is he?”
Dave adjusted the camera upward and the man came into focus. Jamie almost stumbled off her high heels at the sight of him.
He was mounting a big muscular paint, and as Jamie watched his movements, her throat went dry. He was long-legged, broad-shouldered, wearing tight jeans, a faded chambray shirt and a beatup black cowboy hat.
He pulled the horse’s head around and took off at a hard gallop toward a dirt road that disappeared into a stand of blackjacks. Jamie figured—feared—that the road led to this plateau.
And when he got here, he would run them off. Great.
“Dave, he’s coming. You have the red light disabled?”
“Always,” Dave said. He was already taking the camera off the tripod.
“Okay. Whatever he says, whatever he does, keep that camera rolling. Aimed at him.”
Dave made a face that said duh. “You really think I should film this guy?” he said, “I was thinking it’d be better to get a good clean close-up of these rocks.”
Jamie ignored him and chewed a nail, thinking. “And don’t be obvious about it.”
“Huh?” Dave’s sarcasm was replaced by genuine confusion. Normally the photographer rolled the camera openly while Jamie let fly a barrage of questions.
“We’re out here all alone,” Jamie explained.
Dave winced and tugged on his earring. “So I noticed.”
Shoving her misbehaving hair firmly behind one ear, Jamie took a deep breath and walked with Dave to the edge of the plateau where they stood in plain sight, looking like a couple of stranded motorists. Jamie checked behind her, down the sloping gravel road. “You’re sure he saw us?” she asked after a few uncomfortable minutes had passed with no sign of the rider.
“Yeah. Look, the wind’s picking up and the sun’s getting low. Wanna try to finish shooting the teaser?”
Jamie sighed. “Why not? At least we’ll look like we know what we’re doing.” She stood in her former spot, faced the camera and started to talk. “This is Jamie Evans, and behind me you see the Hart Ranch complex, home of Tulsa oil tycoon Nathan Hart Biddle—”
“Get off my land.” The voice—deep, powerful and sure—had come from above them. Jamie squinted up the wall of a rocky cliff on the other side of the road. With the sun behind him he stood out clearly, a striking silhouette among the black shapes of low cedars. The curves of his hat, the ragged tail of his hair blowing in the wind, the profile of the paint, all blended into a haunting image that made Jamie shudder.
The steely-eyed raven-haired man looking down at her seemed eerily familiar. Jamie chalked up the sensation to the fact that she had been studying archival news photos of the Biddles for the past couple of years. His face had surely been burned into her subconscious by now. But the Nathan Biddle staring down at her didn’t look anything like the sleek power-suited young oil-and-gas executive in those old news photos. The man up on that cliff looked…rough…wild, more like the aged sepia photographs she’d found of his Osage great-grandfather, Chief Black Wing.
She shaded her eyes with a shaky hand. “Hello. I’m Jamie Ev—”
“I know who you are. Isn’t this story getting a bit shopworn for your kind?”
Her kind? Well, she’d resent reporters, too, if she’d gone through what this man had. The media had insisted on going for the dramatic tear-jerker angle, focusing on the Biddles’ high-profile marriage—God, that must have been awful for him. Jamie began to feel sorry for the man.
“Could we talk to you, Mr. Biddle?”
“No. You are trespassing. Now leave.”
Jamie’s uneasiness intensified. He wasn’t acting like a man in shock, a man who’d just been given terrible news. But surely the authorities had already contacted him.
“Mr. Biddle, you really don’t know why we’re out here this afternoon?” She shot Dave a look and saw that the tape was rolling, though he had the camera braced casually under one arm.
The horse nickered in the answering silence. Then Biddle turned the animal and disappeared into the sun’s rays.
“What now?” Dave whispered.
“Just keep rolling.”
In no time horse and rider appeared around the base of the cliff. Man and animal seemed to move as one unit as they maneuvered expertly around leafless saplings and belly-high bluestem grass. In the saddle, Nathan Biddle looked relaxed, but his intense dark eyes remained fixed warily on Jamie as he rode toward her. Nobody said a word, so that as he reined the horse in, the squeak of leather and the crunch of gravel seemed magnified.
He stayed in the saddle, high above them. “Turn it off,” he said to Dave without looking at him. Dave made elaborate motions as if doing so.
“Talk,” Biddle said to Jamie while he gave her a once-over that made her want to run and crouch behind a limestone boulder. The close proximity of the massive horse didn’t help. Jamie had always been scared of horses.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Biddle,” she started, “we didn’t mean to disturb you. I work for Channel Six, as you know, and we’ve been following your story for some time—”
“I have my detectives, Ms. Evans. I know all about you.”
“Of course you do.” So how much do you know?
“Get to the point.”
Jamie swallowed and started again. “We’re shooting a teaser—I’m planning to do a package on the ten-o’clock news and—”
“A package? Why?”
It didn’t surprise her that he knew the terminology for a feature-length TV news story. “Why?” Jamie’s throat went dry.
His dark eyes narrowed at her hesitation. “The story of my wife’s disappearance is old, Ms. Evans. It’s…dead.”
“Well, uh, that’s just it. Something’s happened, I’m afraid. The authorities haven’t contacted you?”
“About what?”
“I don’t know how to tell you this.”
Biddle didn’t move.
“I don’t have any details, but…” Jamie, who could spew out lines for a snappy stand-up shot with no preparation,
