Linda Crowder - Jake and Emma 01 - Too Cute to Kill (9 page)

15

Emma was relieved when she finally turned off the highway onto the mountain road.  She flipped her car into four-wheel drive for the last leg and glanced over as a police cruiser past her, coming down. 

Startled, she saw what looked very much like Nick looking back at her from the back seat of the cruiser.  The man seated beside him she couldn’t make out but who else could it be except Jake.  She swung her car around when she reached the mailbox turnout, the first spot wide enough to turn around and followed the police vehicle. 

They had pulled onto the highway and were quite a bit ahead of her by the time she got onto the highway again.  She could just make out the police lights on the top of the cruiser a few cars ahead of her. 

Emma assumed they would be going to the county jail facility or maybe the sheriff’s office and was surprised when the cruiser just kept going.  As the vehicle passed out of Casper heading south toward Alcova Reservoir, she picked up her cell phone and called police dispatch.

“911, what is your emergency?” said a dispassionate voice.

Emma gave the dispatcher her name and location.  “I was following the police car so that I could find out why our houseguest was being arrested but the car left town and is headed south toward the lake.”

“Let me contact the sheriff’s department, ma’am,” said the dispatcher.  “Please stay on the line.”  The phone crackled and Emma heard the dispatcher talking to the sheriff’s office while she kept her eyes glued to the taillights ahead of her.  There were a few other cars on the road, so Emma hoped the driver hadn’t noticed her following him.

“Ma’am?” Emma jumped as the dispatcher came back on the line.

“Yes, I’m still here.”

“The sheriff’s office says they have no record of an arrest warrant for either your husband or Nick Carver.  They tried to reach Sheriff Newsome but he’s not answering his cell and his car radio is switched off.”

Emma started to panic, afraid of what that ominous information might mean.  “What should I do?” she asked the dispatcher.

“Keep them in sight if you can and let me know if they change course,” said the dispatcher.  Emma wondered how the man could sound so calm when she felt the world was coming apart.  “The sheriff’s office and the highway patrol have both dispatched officers to your location.”

“Oh thank God,” breathed Emma.

“Ma’am, I need you to understand that the officers may take some time to get there.  The nearest sheriff’s deputy is in Mills and the nearest highway patrol car is in Alcova.” 

Emma took a deep breath and tried to stay calm.  Mills wasn’t too far away.  The deputy would probably only be 10 or 15 miles behind her.  Alcova was twice as far in front of her but at least they were headed that direction.

“We’re turning,” said Emma, watching the police cruiser ahead of her.  “We’re turning left onto Antelope Ridge Road.”  The dispatcher did not answer and Emma spared a glace at the phone.  The “call lost” symbol blinked up at her. 

“Damn!” she said, pounding her hand on the steering wheel.  She made the turn then hit redial.  Nothing.  Glancing again at the screen her heart fell.  “Searching for signal” glowed the message on the phone’s screen.

Emma wondered when the line had gone dead.  She desperately hoped the dispatcher had heard the change in direction.  She pressed on, keeping a distance between her and the police vehicle since there were no other cars on this road.  She shivered despite the efficient work of the heater. 

“What’s happening?” she asked aloud but the darkness didn’t answer.  “What are we doing way out here?”

Jake hadn’t seen Emma and Nick couldn’t think of a way to tell him without alerting the sheriff to it too.  Nick hoped Emma was following them but he wasn’t sure in the brief moment their eyes met whether it had registered with her just who it was in the back of the sheriff’s cruiser.

When it became clear that they were heading out of town, Jake decided to try the hostage negotiation technique he’d learned a few years ago.  Get the captor talking to you, he thought, so he sees you as a person and therefore harder to kill.

“Where are we going, Reggie?” he asked, breaking the heavy silence in the vehicle.

“I know a place in the back country,” answered the sheriff.

That didn’t sound promising, thought Jake.  He plunged on, “Little dark for sightseeing.”  The sheriff snickered.  That had been the wrong thing to say, thought Jake.  Try again, he told himself.  “So why don’t you tell me what this is all about, Reggie?”

The sheriff changed lanes, going around a slow moving car.  “Won’t help, Jake.  I taught that hostage negotiation class, don’t you remember?”

Jake winced.  He had forgotten that.  Still, if he were going to die tonight, he wanted to know why.  “Then just skip to the chase and tell me what the hell is going on.”

Reggie drove in silence for a few miles.  “I suppose at this point there’s no harm in telling you.”  Jake didn’t like the sound of that either, but the sheriff continued talking as he drove.  “What do you want to know?

“Did you kill Sherry Thorne?”  Jake asked.  At this point frankly, he didn’t much care but if it kept the sheriff talking maybe he could think of a plan.

“I did,” replied the sheriff. 

Jake waited for more, but when Reggie didn’t elaborate he prodded, “Why?”

The car slowed for a turn.  Once they were on the new road, Reggie answered.  “She showed up in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Jake was puzzled but Nick piped in, “The argument she had with my dad at the ranch?”

The sheriff nodded, his head just visible by the dash lights.  “She was in town to meet with an investor and thought she’d go check on the ranch since she knew it was vacant.”  Jake congratulated himself silently on having guessed correctly.

“She found your dad there and hit the roof.”

“Because she caught him trespassing?” asked Nick.

“Because she caught him cooking Meth,” said the sheriff.  Nick started to deny this but Jake elbowed him and shook his head.  “She came storming into town full of righteous indignation about it.  All I could do to calm her down, get her out of my office before somebody heard her.”

“Why did she go to you?” Jake asked.  “Why wouldn’t she just have called the police?”

“Because I was the one who bought the ranch,” answered the sheriff. 

Jake heard Nick inhale in surprise and covered the sound with a question.  “Why would you want the ranch?”

Reggie didn’t answer.  “I sent her off to meet with her investors and told her I’d take care of things at the ranch.  I told her I’d meet her for dinner and we’d talk about the property she said she thought I might want to look at.”

Reggie chuckled to himself.  “That calmed her right down, thinking about another big commission.  I called Nate and told him he needed to clear out of there for a while.”

“How did you get Sherry Thorne to take a drug overdose,” asked Jake, “when she didn’t do drugs?”

“Spiked her drink,” answered the sheriff.  “She thought she just had a little too much so I told her to leave her car in the lot and I’d drive her to a motel where she could sleep it off.  She went to sleep in the car and I gave her a shot of heroin I’d borrowed from an old drug bust and kept in my safe for just such an occasion.”

“Why drop the body on my fence line,” asked Jake.

Reggie shrugged.  “I had meant to take her all the way up to the end of the road, dump her out on the state land up there.  Be spring before anyone found her out there.” 

He sighed.  “But the storm was bad and all I had was my cruiser, not my Trailblazer.  I saw the lights of your house and decided I’d driven far enough.  Didn’t know it was you and Emma who lived there, but you can’t swing a dead cat in Natrona without hitting someone you know.”

“Why did you kill my dad?” asked Nick quietly.

The car slowed for another turn and by the feel of the road they turned onto, they were off the paved roads now.  “Your dad got greedy,” said Reggie.  “He had a good cut from the Meth deal.  All he had to do was lay low for a few months and he could have gone back to it, but he didn’t want to wait.  Said he wanted to cash out, leave town.  Crazy fool, I don’t know what he was thinking.”

“I do,” said Nick to himself, so quietly only Jake heard.  Nate had wanted to go with his son to Sheridan and start a new life.

“He’d heard about Sherry Thorne turning up dead and would only agree to meet me somewhere public, so since I had to go to the event at the museum that night anyway, I told him to wait for me on the bridge.”

“How did you get him to let you tie him to the bridge?” asked Jake.  He’d always been bothered by that.

Reggie laughed.  “Damned fool tried to threaten me.  Told me he had a gun so I pulled my knife.  Then he hemmed and hawed and said how he didn’t really have a weapon so I told him ‘then you won’t mind my tying your hands to this post so I don’t get a belly full of some knife while I’m getting out your money.’”

“And then you killed him,” said Nick.  “It was you I saw.”

“Yes, and I don’t mind saying that gave me quite a scare you turning up saying you’d seen what happened that night.  Thank God it was too dark for you to see my face.”

“Which brings me back to my original question,” said Jake.  “Why kill us?  We had no evidence against you.  Hell, I didn’t even suspect you until you pulled that stunt at the house.”

“You called Cheyenne and talked to the registered agent,” said Reggie.  “How long would it have taken before you insisted someone get a court order to find the real owner of The Gerecht Group?”

Jake couldn’t deny it.  He’d spoken with Detective Joyner about that this afternoon in fact.  “That would have led to me and that would have started to unravel the whole thing.”

“Why did you buy the ranch?” asked Nick.

“Because it was a perfect place for a Meth lab.  You can’t cook Meth in town anymore, too many nosy neighbors.”

“How did my dad get involved?” asked Nick.  “I never heard of him cooking Meth before.”

“I caught him out there looking for that damned treasure your great grandfather supposedly buried.”  The sheriff laughed.  “I told him I’d throw him in jail for trespassing. That would have been a parole violation so he would have gone right back to prison.  He agreed to do a little job for me and I agreed to let him keep looking for treasure.”

“I guess I don’t have to ask why you wanted your own private Meth lab,” said Jake.

“Good money in Meth when you don’t have to worry about getting caught.”  Reggie laughed again. 

“If killing comes so easy to you,” said Jake, “Why do you seem so unwilling to kill us?” 

Reggie stopped laughing.  “I don’t like killing when I don’t have to,” he answered. “I didn’t want to kill you because I wasn’t convinced I had to yet.  Now that I’ve told you what you wanted to know, you’ve made my job that much easier.”  Reggie chuckled, “Guess I didn’t teach you that part in that hostage negotiation class.”

The sheriff stopped the car in front of a metal gate.  He climbed out, unlocked a padlock that held the chain that kept the gate shut and swung the gate open.  He got back into the car and drove through.  “Cold as hell out there,” he told them.  “My feet are ice already.”  He decided to leave the gate open.  He wouldn’t be inside for long.

16

Emma stopped her car and watched the officer get out of the police cruiser, open the gate, then return to the vehicle and drive through.  She felt relieved he had not relocked the gate.  At least she would be able to get in behind them.

As the lights of the cruiser passed out of sight behind some trees, she pulled onto the road again and drove to the gate.  She checked her cell phone again but there was still no signal. 

She turned in her seat and looked back the way she had come.  She thought she could see headlights behind her, but she couldn’t be sure.  She said a prayer and drove through the gate, following the path in the snow.

She was nervous following the police cruiser into the darkness.  She switched off her headlights, driving by the bright moon and keeping between the darkness of the trees.  She couldn’t hope the other driver would think her headlights were just some other car on the road here.

Still, she thought of Jake and pressed on.  She couldn’t be sure the police dispatcher had heard her say they were turning or the road they had turned onto.  She could well be the only hope Jake and Nick had of rescue.  Frightened or not, she had to keep moving.

“Why is this happening?” she asked herself for what seemed like the hundredth time.  The dispatcher had told her they had tried to raise the sheriff on his car radio but it had been switched off.  She hadn’t paid attention to the driver of the car when she passed it, she’d barely realized the passenger was Nick before the car was past her and gone.

“Please let this all be a mistake,” she said to the darkness.  She stopped the car suddenly, noting that the lights she was following had stopped moving.  She switched off her ignition and rolled down the window.  A blast of frigid aid took her breath away but the night was quiet.  The car in front of her had reached its destination.

“We’re here,” Reggie announced, sounding no more pleased than his passengers to have arrived in this lonely spot.  The sheriff got out of his cruiser and disappeared into the darkness.  Nick and Jake started frantically searching for a way out of the back seat but police vehicles are built to contain prisoners, not give them hope of escape.

A light came on somewhere in front of them and the sheriff could be seen returning to the car.  “I’m going to try to kick the door open when he comes to get us,” whispered Jake to Nick, who nodded.

Reggie had just gotten Jake’s door open a crack when Jake reared back and kicked hard at the door with both feet.  The door slammed into the sheriff, knocking him over into the snow.  Jake struggled out of the back seat, hindered by his handcuffs.  The sheriff was in fine physical condition however and managed to make it onto his feet again by the time Jake got out of the car.

“Good try counselor,” the sheriff said amiably.  “Can’t say as I blame you, but…” His words were cut off as his fist met Jake’s jaw.  It was Jake’s turn to tumble in the snow this time.

Nick scrambled to get out of the car to help Jake but Reggie had stepped back, out of range.  He drew his gun and trained it on Jake.  “That was careless of me,” he said.  “Rookie mistake, I ought to write myself up for that.” 

Sheriff Newsome laughed at his joke, pulling the hammer back on his revolver.  “But then I’d have to file a report on this and we both know that’s not gonna happen.”

Jake braced himself for the shot.  Time seemed to stand still.  His mind flashed to Emma, her smile, her voice, the feel of her body next to his.  He flinched at the sound of the gunfire, but there was no pain from the bullet.  He opened his eyes, not even realizing he’d closed them.

Sheriff Newsome’s body was laying face up in the snow, at a right angle to the patrol car.  Blood trickled from a small round hole in his temple and a look of surprise was slowly relaxing from his face.  His body twitched and was still.

Jake looked up at the building he hadn’t even noticed was there, so focused had he been on the confrontation with the sheriff.  The light he’d seen was a floodlight attached to the front of the building. 

The building looked like a metal storage building and Jake noticed a forest service logo painted on the door.  Had the sheriff managed to succeed in killing them there it would have been weeks, months maybe, before their bodies would have been found.

He heard footsteps running from around the side of the building and struggled to sit up in the snow.  He looked up and saw Emma, her head caressed in a glowing halo by the arc of the floodlight.

Emma stopped briefly at the sheriff’s body to kick the gun away from him in case he was only knocked down.  Then she stepped around him and threw herself down into the snow, her arms around her husband.