Stranger in Cold Creek (15 page)

“My God, you let them shoot at you so the others could get to safety?”

“I didn't know what else to do. I'd had one job—keeping Nicki as safe as possible while she did her very dangerous job. I had to see it through.”

She just stared at him for a moment, her heart in her eyes. Then she reached out and caught his face between her long-fingered hands. “You crazy, amazing man.” Bending, she kissed him firmly, not resisting when he pulled her into his arms.

The kiss deepened, but only so far. He didn't know if he was the one keeping things in check or if it was Miranda, but in the end, he didn't suppose it mattered. They ended up holding each other quietly, the fire of desired tamped down beneath an odd sort of survivor's communion.

“I was serious when I said you should take a hot bath and get a good night's sleep,” he said a while later, long after the lingering light of day had disappeared into cool, blue night.

“But then I'd have to move,” she grumbled against his throat. “And I'm so comfortable.”

“I might be persuaded to give you a back rub once you got out of the bath.”

She leaned her head back and looked up at him. “You're playing with my emotions now.”

As he opened his mouth to respond, her cell phone rang, the sound muted where her hip pressed against his side. She wriggled out of his grasp and pulled out the phone. “It's a local number,” she murmured, pushing the button to answer. “Miranda Duncan.”

He saw her brow furrow as she listened to whoever was on the other end of the line. “I see,” she said finally. “Okay, I understand.” She hung up the phone, her expression still troubled.

“Who was that?” John asked when she didn't say anything else.

“It was Rose McAllen.” She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “She told me to stop looking into her daughter's death.”

“Why?” he asked.

She turned her head to look at him. “She didn't say, but I could tell she was worried. Maybe even scared.”

“Do you think someone's threatened her?”

“I don't know.” She rubbed her chin with her fingertips before she turned to look at him. “It's odd, don't you think, that I make a call to the Bar W Ranch, wanting to talk to Jarrod Whitmore about Lindy McAllen's death, and a couple of hours later, Rose calls and asks me to stop looking into her daughter's case?”

“You think Whitmore threatened her?”

She frowned, as if giving the question real thought. “I don't know. Honestly, it doesn't sound like Cal Whitmore's style.”

“He's a wealthy, ruthless cattleman, and you don't think threats seem like his style?”

“He's a wealthy, successful cattleman,” she amended. “And most people around here like him. They don't fear him.”

“Maybe because they've never had to cross him.”

“He tends to grease the skids with money, not threats.” She looked at him, still frowning. “Do you remember when we saw Rose and Cassie the other day at the hardware store? I told her then that we'd never stop looking for the person who killed Lindy. And she gave me the strangest look, as if she wanted to say something. But then she just turned away.”

“And you think it's because she doesn't want you to keep looking?”

“I think she already knows that Jarrod Whitmore was the one who did it. And I think Cal Whitmore has paid her for her silence.”

“But how could she have known it was Jarrod? Did she witness it?”

“No,” Miranda answered, an odd look in her eyes.

“Then how?”

Miranda pushed to her feet, pacing toward the fireplace. The afternoon had been warm, so they hadn't bothered with a fire, but now that night had fallen, there was a definite chill in the air, and John could see her looking with almost wistful longing at the cold hearth before she turned to face him, wrapping her arms around herself.

“Remember earlier today, when Angela Layton told us that after Jasper met with Delta, he decided to pay the money back to the charity?”

“Yes.”

“Doesn't that seem like a strange thing for someone to do in response to a blackmailer's demands?”

“It could have been the only way to make her go away.”

“Or maybe it's what she wanted from him all along.” She rubbed her hands up and down her arms as if fighting off a chill. “Maybe it's what she demanded from Jarrod Whitmore, too.”

He stood up to face her, finally understanding what she was getting at. “You think Delta—”

“Wasn't blackmailing people for money,” she elaborated. “I think she was trying to make them do the right thing.”

Chapter Fifteen

Miranda's cell phone rang shortly after six the next morning. She grabbed it from the bedside table, rubbed her eyes and checked the display. It was the station. “Duncan,” she answered, her voice hoarse with sleep.

It was Sheriff Randall. “Waller and Mendoza are both in the hospital in Lubbock. They took their wives into town for dinner and got broadsided by a dump truck on the way home.”

She sat up quickly, her stomach knotting with anxiety. “How bad?”

“Broken bones, shaken up, but everybody's going to recover.”

“Thank God.”

“But we're shorthanded now.”

“No worries. I'll be right in.” She hung up the phone, grabbed her robe and headed for the bathroom to shower.

By the time she finished dressing, she could smell bacon frying in the kitchen. She secured her hair in a ponytail and followed the aroma down the hall, where John stood at the stove, flipping strips of bacon. “You're up early.”

He looked at her. “And you're dressed for work.”

“Two of our deputies were in a car accident last night. They're going to be all right, but they're still in the hospital, which means we're shorthanded at the station. So I'm going in this morning.” She eyed the bacon. “Once I eat, that is.”

While she poured orange juice for both of them, he whipped up a quick batch of scrambled eggs, added them to the bacon and buttered toast on a couple of plates and joined her at the table. “You sure you're ready to go back to work?”

“I was ready two days ago,” she said, dismissing his worries with a wave of her hand. “But that means you're on your own with Delta's journal. I can't be caught with my copy of the pages at work.”

“I was already planning to try to figure out what kind of cipher she used on the last few pages of the book,” he told her. “So I'll work on that and maybe by the time you get home, I'll have figured some of it out.”

“That would be great.” She smiled at him over her glass of orange juice, keeping her tone light. “You know, John Blake, if you're not careful, I could really get used to having you around.”

“Would that be a bad thing?” He sounded serious.

She set the glass on the table, considering the question. “If you were going to stick around long-term, maybe not. But if you're just some stranger passing through—”

He didn't say anything, looking down at his plate of food. “I don't know what happens next,” he admitted.

She swallowed an unexpected rush of disappointment. “Then maybe we should just keep things casual. No strings, no expectations. No taking things too far.”

He followed her to the door when she started to leave, catching her hand as she was about to step through the doorway. “Does kissing count as taking things too far?”

She turned to look at him, torn between amusement at the hopeful look on his face and uncertainty about the wisdom of continuing to tempt fate when neither of them could make any promises. But amusement, and the delectable memory of his kisses, won out. “Kisses are okay.”

“Good.” He leaned forward and pressed a sweet, hot kiss against her lips. “I'll try to have a breakthrough on the code by the time you get home.”

“You do that.” She gave him another swift kiss and headed out to her truck.

All the talk at the station was about Wallace and Mendoza, with photos of the horrific crash scene already floating around from deputy to deputy. “Amazing they survived at all,” Tim Robertson told Miranda as he passed her the photos the Lubbock Police Department had emailed over.

The twisted, crumpled metal that had been Mendoza's SUV looked as if it couldn't possibly have protected the occupants from mortal injuries, but when Randall stopped by the bullpen around midmorning, he told them that both Wallace and Mendoza were expected to be released from the hospital the next day. “They'll both be out a while until their broken bones heal, but everybody's going to recover sooner or later. Thank God.”

He stopped by Miranda's desk on his way out. “Sorry I had to call you in. I know you could have used a little more recovery time yourself.”

“I'm fine,” she assured him. But after he left, she took another look at the crash photo and felt a little shudder run through her.

Her cruiser hadn't looked nearly as bad as Mendoza's SUV, but something about the photo triggered a brief memory of the day of the crash, an image of a dark blue sedan coming up quickly behind her cruiser as she was heading back to the station.

She'd tried to see through the windows, but they were darkly tinted, only the reflection of the snowfall and her own cruiser, with its flashing blue and cherry lights, visible in the opaque glass.

She handed the photo back to Tim Robertson and rubbed her gritty eyes. In some ways, the wreck seemed as fresh in her mind as the kiss John had planted on her lips that morning as she headed out to work.

But in other ways, it seemed more like some misty, mysterious dream.

By ten that morning, most of the other deputies were out on calls that Bill Chambers seemed to make sure went through to any phone but hers. Only Tim Robertson remained, poring over some photos spread out on his desk. He looked up briefly from the photos and smiled at her. She managed to smile back, but she wasn't sure if she had been able to cover her growing sense of annoyance.

She was on glorified desk duty, it appeared. The orders had probably come straight from Miles Randall himself. She might as well have stayed home and helped John with the ciphers.

“What're you looking at?” she asked Robertson.

“Photos from Delta McGraw's trailer.”

She got up and crossed to his desk, looking over his shoulder. “And what are you looking for?”

Robertson gave her a doubtful look. “I thought the sheriff took you off this case.”

“What's it going to hurt for me to take a look? I knew Delta. I might see something in those photos that you wouldn't even notice.” She leaned closer to look at the photo he held. It was a close-up of Delta's bed, which was slightly rumpled but clearly not slept in. One edge of the bedside table was also in the photo, the round base of a lamp and the corner of a book just visible near the image edge. She couldn't make out much about the book cover, except the little triangle she could see appeared to have what looked like a series of numbers and letters on it.

“Do you have a full shot of the bedside table?” she asked.

Robertson flipped through the photos until he came across a close-up of the bedside table. The book cover was indeed covered by numbers and letters. The title
Ciphers and Code Made Easy
filled the top half of the book in bright blue letters.

Robertson looked up at her, his eyes slightly narrowed. She could tell he understood the significance of the book, but he wasn't going to share what he knew with her, thanks to Randall's insistence that she not be involved in the investigation.

“Hmm,” she said. “Not what I thought.” She handed the photo back to Robertson and returned to her desk. She pulled up a search engine and typed in the name of the book. It came up in several links, including an online bookstore that included a preview of the book's table of contents. As she hoped, the chapter listings were essentially the names of the codes included in the book. One of them, surely, would be the code or cipher Delta had used to encrypt the last few pages of the journal.

But she didn't have a copy of the pages with her, not wanting to risk getting caught with them at the station.

She grabbed her cell phone and called John.

He answered on the second ring. “Miss me already?”

“Maybe a little,” she said with a smile. “I may have a shortcut for you and your deciphering.” She told him about the book and gave him the website address for the online bookstore. “You can probably look up the types of ciphers and codes listed in the table of contents and compare them to what Delta was using in the journal.”

“It's really killing you that you can't do this for yourself, isn't it?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I'll figure it out for you. Promise.” He lowered his voice, even though there was nobody else to hear him. “I miss you already, too.”

“You're just trying to torment me,” she murmured.

“How's the first day back at the station?”

“Boring.” Almost as soon as the words escaped her mouth, the phone on her desk rang. “But maybe it's about to pick up. Talk to you later.” Pocketing her cell phone, she picked up the desk phone receiver, wondering who'd call her direct number. “Deputy Duncan.”

“Deputy, it's Phil Neiman from the old Westlake Refinery. You helped me out a few months ago when I had some break-ins, remember?”

“I do. How are you?” The refinery had long since ceased operation, but it was something of a historic site from the early Texas oil boom days and Phil Neiman had bought the place to keep it from being bulldozed, determined to keep it viable as a tourist attraction.

“I've been better. There's been another break-in. I was hoping you could come on out here and write me up a report for my insurance.”

“Of course,” she said. “I'll be there in a few minutes.”

She grabbed her jacket and headed for the fleet parking lot to grab a cruiser, telling Bill Chambers at the front desk where she was going. It wasn't exactly an exciting call, she thought as she drove up the highway toward the Westlake Refinery, but it was good to be in the saddle again.

* * *

J
OHN
HIT
PAY
dirt on Chapter Seven of
Cyphers and Code Made Easy
, titled “Vigenère.” He was familiar with Vigenère, a fairly simple cipher built off a keyword. Delta McGraw's scribblings looked as if they might be encrypted using a Vigenère table.

The hard part would be figuring out the keyword. He knew next to nothing about Delta McGraw's life, except that her father had been a con man. He supposed that was a place to start.

He had actually been trained how to decrypt Vigenère ciphers algebraically, but he had a hunch that there was probably somewhere on the internet where he could simply enter the cipher and try decrypting it automatically by guessing at the keyword.

He found just such a page on the first page of his search list. Starting with the last entry in the journal, he typed in the cipher:

Oicl Tlrx ulrqhr, Btriayiqe. Eoihmnmi 3. Cbb Tmgcoe ln Btriayiqe jazh dmg. Tayo Guzc's suiqvus fdip rfha zae i toc.

Now to figure out the keyword.

He started with the most obvious:
HalMcGraw.
The result was more gibberish. He then tried variations on the name—first name, last name, Harold spelled out, on the assumption that Hal was short for Harold, and the last name, McGraw by itself, as well. All to no avail.

He was pondering other options when his cell phone rang. It was Miranda.

“I'm out on a call, but I thought I'd see if you've had any luck.”

“Maybe.” He told her his theory about the cipher being a Vigenère cipher. “But I don't know much about Delta, so it's hard to guess at her keyword.”

“I'm not sure I knew her well enough for that,” Miranda admitted ruefully. “Like I told you, Delta didn't have friends. I was probably as close as she got.” Her last few words crackled through the phone line, as if she was driving through an area where the cell service was spotty.

“You're breaking up,” John told her.

“I...can't... I'll call...back.” The call ended abruptly.

John laid his phone on the table and went back to his laptop. She hadn't used her father's name. He didn't know her birth date or where she'd been born. He didn't even know her mother's name, although he supposed he could do a search of her name and see if there was any sort of internet trail he could follow.

He sat back in the kitchen chair, his gaze wandering to the doorway to the unfinished room, where he'd found the journal in the first place.

Why had she left the book here? She obviously hadn't wanted it found, but why leave it here in Miranda's house? Had she felt threatened in some way? Was Miranda the only person she felt she could trust?

Miranda.

He scratched his chin and looked at the blank box for the keyword. With a little shrug, he typed in the word
Miranda.

A readable set of words appeared in the decryption box. With a flood of satisfaction, he read Delta McGraw's last journal entry.

Call Girl murder, Plainview. November 3. Coy Taylor in Plainview same day. Call Girl's friends said john was a cop.

Coy Taylor. A niggle of recognition tickled his brain.

Why did the name Coy Taylor sound so familiar?

* * *

T
HE
W
ESTLAKE
R
EFINERY
was a shell of its former self, little more than a long, rectangular corrugated steel building surrounded by the rusting remains of tanks. Miranda pulled up in front of the main building, surprised not to see Phil Neiman's old yellow Cadillac convertible parked near the door. She pulled out her cell phone to give him another call, but once again, she had no signal.

Frowning, she gazed down the highway at the tall cell tower only a mile away. Why didn't she have a signal?

She radioed to the station as she approached the silent building. “I'm at Westlake Refinery,” she told Bill Chambers when he responded. “Can't see Neiman anywhere, but I'm heading inside.”

She tried the door, half expecting to find it locked. But the handle turned easily in her hand.

“Mr. Neiman?”

There was no answer.

Frowning, she eased inside the open door and looked around. The place was quiet and still, though she spotted smudges in the dust on the floor that might have been footprints. No sign of tread marks, though. She started to crouch to take a closer look when she heard footsteps behind her.