Buch lesen: «The Colton Sheriff»

Chapter 1

Aisha Allen took a slice of piping-hot pizza, folded it in half and bit in. Warm, gooey cheese blended with the tangy bite of tomato sauce, all wrapped up in a doughy pocket that was the very essence of life.

Which made it the perfect antidote to the increasingly gruesome pictures of the dead she’d stared at for the past three hours.

Six bodies. Or seven if you counted the body of Lucy Reese, aka Bianca Rouge, a Vegas prostitute inconveniently called to Roaring Springs, Colorado, the prior January to entertain a high-end client.

And Aisha was counting.

Technically, she didn’t have a right to the photos or the background details already collected by law enforcement. Her credentials as a psychologist extended only to the projects she was actually invited to consult on. But Trey needed help and since she was in a position to give it, she wasn’t going to back down.

Besides, it gave her an additional opportunity to keep an eye on him. He was her best friend and they hadn’t spent many days since the age of eight without talking. Even in the years she spent up in New York getting her “fancy Ivy League degree,” as he loved to tease her about, they’d remained close.

And if she’d like to be closer, well, that was on her. The man had his mind on other things, not his moony-eyed best friend. Their current sheriff and all-around most honorable citizen, Trey Colton, was the heartbeat of Bradford County. And he was in the fight of his life:

A serial killer on the loose dubbed by the press as the “Avalanche Killer.”

A battle brewing for reelection in November that was going to be horribly tight and already fraught with contention.

And an extended family that was...challenging on the very best of days.

No one would ever accuse the Colton family of being quiet, unobtrusive or unnoticeable. They collectively lived life large, and that would have been true in Roaring Springs even without the family legacy of a former US president who bore the Colton surname.

Having a legendary politician in the family only made the spotlight that much brighter.

Aisha knew Trey wasn’t above using the Colton name when he had to, but he hated depending on it. Just like he hated what was going on in his town right now.

Patting her lips with a napkin, she wiped lingering flour dust from her fingers and spread out several of the images. Six bodies, all in various stages of decomposition, from the more recent to practically nothing but bones. The two oldest bodies had also been discovered the farthest down in the shallow grave. Enough depth to hide them and protect them from the elements, but close enough to the surface that they’d been discovered with the impact of a late-spring avalanche.

Although all the victims would need to be identified and ultimately processed as individual crimes, the more recent bodies held Aisha’s focus. Especially the characteristics that appeared common. Eerily so, she thought as she pulled one of the photos closer. Sabrina Gilford, twenty-two, was identified as the most recent victim, her long, dyed dark hair and eyes two of her most distinctive features.

Along with the hair color match, she was roughly the same age as the other victims and she had the same physical build. Medium height. Slender. Petite frame. The sort of young woman who turned heads when she walked into a room.

A young woman was supposed to turn heads, Aisha thought, the frustration and anger for these unfortunate six rising up in her chest. You were supposed to be young and free and silly and sometimes a little stupid. You weren’t supposed to be dead.

And all these victims would still be missing if it weren’t for the overwhelming avalanche that still defied explanation. They’d had late snows before—Mother Nature was always unpredictable if nothing else—but this was something else. A large, prodigious disaster that had killed a ski guest at The Lodge as it did its destructive work.

A while later these six bodies were discovered during the clearing of brush and debris. Although two of the six had been identified, Sabrina Gilford and another young woman who’d gone missing in Roaring Springs the prior winter, April Thomas, Trey was working day and night to identify the others. It was maddeningly slow work and had kept Trey and his best deputy, Daria Bloom, in constant motion for months now.

And then, a few weeks ago, they had a new, potentially disturbing problem fall in their laps. Trey’s cousin Skye had gone missing. Marketing director for The Colton Empire—an enterprise that encompassed nearly half of Roaring Springs, including The Lodge, the town’s major ski resort—Skye was vivacious and always on the move. Aisha had met her off and on through the years at various events held by Trey’s parents and even now she could picture the once small redhead who used to race around Trey’s parents’ ranch with her quieter twin, Phoebe, in tow.

It was her busy, whirlwind personality that they were all counting on now. Skye rarely sat still and they’d all retained a stubborn hope that she was off on an adventure. Hopefully as far away from Roaring Springs as she could be. Only none of them could ward off the more disturbing idea that Skye had attracted the attention of the Avalanche Killer. Her vivid red hair didn’t fit the pattern, but beyond that, her slim frame and age were a direct match.

Thoughts of Skye were inevitably tied to The Lodge and the strange circumstances that had led to the discovery of the bodies. Even with his 24/7 work schedule running down leads, Trey had spoken more than once about the circumstances that caused the avalanche. He was so busy dealing with the voracious press as he tried to investigate the murders that any further investigation into Mother Nature’s vagaries had to wait.

Even as the freak incident clearly gnawed away at him.

The ski slopes were groomed regularly, specifically to avoid nature’s wrath in the form of an avalanche. Yet here was one, overpowering in scale and scope and late in the season, no less. It was odd. And it was one more thing on Trey’s overfull plate that Aisha knew bothered him.

She knew a lot of things about Trey. The broad shoulders that looked as impressive in his sheriff’s uniform as in a casual T-shirt while jogging around Roaring Springs. The firm cut of his jaw, lightly stubbled when he wasn’t on duty. Which was increasingly rare since he always seemed to be on the job. Or working on behalf of the role he’d sworn to uphold to the best of his abilities, even if that best had his delicious brown eyes bloodshot more often than not lately from lack of sleep.

Trey Colton was a man working off the very edge of his reserves and she was damned if she’d let him come up short. It was why she’d finished up a challenging afternoon session with one of her patients and raced over here. Back to the gruesome files and the endless clues that didn’t seem to go anywhere.

“Aw, jeez, Aish, don’t look at those.”

She turned at the rich, husky tones, unsurprised to see Trey standing just inside the conference room at the Bradford County Sheriff’s Office. She hadn’t let him know she was coming but had figured the scent of pizza would eventually give him an inkling that she was there. The fact she’d had three other pies delivered along with hers, for distribution around the office, would only smooth her way if anyone was bothered by her taking up space in one of their conference rooms.

“How am I supposed to help you catch a killer if I don’t look at the bastard’s handiwork?”

“Still.” Trey had already dived into the pizza, dragging out the half that was his—pepperoni and sausage with extra cheese. “Looking at that’ll make you lose your appetite. Not to mention any belief in humanity and basic decency.”

He took a large bite of pizza, momentary relief closing his eyelids to half-mast. “You ordered from Bruno’s.”

“Of course I did.” She reached for another slice of cheese, pleased to turn this time into a shared dinner. “Would I deign to order anywhere else?”

He grinned at that. “No. Of course not. That New York education was good for more than just a psychology degree.”

“Damn straight it was.”

She’d not only learned the ins and outs of the human psyche, as well as the proper ratio of toppings to sauce, while gathering an education in the Big Apple, but she’d learned a tremendous amount about her own heart, too. Despite what she’d always assumed about herself, it was shockingly fragile.

Breakable, even.

And she’d been unwilling to do much to risk it since. Pining over her best friend was about as far as she was going to go, that lingering hurt keeping her from making any moves to change the status quo between them.

“So what have we got here?” He polished off the end of his first slice and reached for another. “We’ve all been staring at the same photos for weeks now and nothing’s turned up. Other than time of death from the medical examiner and estimated ages and builds on all six women, there are very few lines to tug.”

“Sabrina appears to be the only local,” Aisha pointed out. “That’s a place to start.”

“Daria homed in on that, too. It would go a long way toward explaining why we haven’t focused on any missing persons in the search for these women at the point they were murdered. But they’re also unidentified, so that may be a false assumption.”

“But the few missing persons you ran don’t match the victims?” Aisha pressed him, well aware his trusty deputy would have been all over those runs in a New York minute.

“No.” Trey polished off the last of his crust. “But let’s play out your theory. The killer has been stalking victims elsewhere, then dragging them back to Roaring Springs like trophies. Why change patterns with Sabrina?”

“Serial killers do change pattern. It’s infrequent but it does happen. Maybe Sabrina was a replacement for the killer’s intended victim? Or maybe it’s a point of escalation.”

“There haven’t been any reports anywhere in the state of a young woman escaping a killer’s clutches. Isn’t it usually an incident like that when a killer scrambles to replace the victim, even if elements aren’t perfect?”

She and Trey had been over this already and Aisha knew she was grasping a bit. But everything in the details they’d found so far suggested things were escalating with this killer, who was growing even more dangerous than they had previously envisioned.

“Besides,” Trey spoke again, his attention on the photos spread across the table. “If you’re doing your dirty work somewhere else, why come back to the scene of your crimes?”

Trey’s insight matched hers, but Aisha hadn’t had a good answer for it. Was her theory about the killer escalating off track? The time between the fifth and sixth victims suggested her hunch was indeed correct, but it was far too big a leap to assume this was the killer’s only grave site, too. Colorado was a big, wide-open state and the vast, undeveloped expanses of mountain and forest would offer any number of places to hide bodies.

But... Selecting a local victim was still a break in pattern.

“The killer could be growing bolder. Hunting prey closer to home because the need is so great.” Aisha sighed and set down her pizza to pull the photo of Sabrina Gilford closer. “Which is the last thing you need the press to get a hold of. They’ll have everyone within a five-hundred-mile radius scared out of their minds.”

“One more thing Evigan can toss at me for all the ways my county is a public danger.”

“Barton Evigan is an idiot who doesn’t deserve to have gotten this far.”

“But he has.” Trey’s dark gaze met hers over the scarred office table and the sinister deeds it held. “He’s a true opponent for my reelection and I can’t afford to dismiss him.”

Barton Evigan had seemingly rose up out of the woodwork, a recent entrant into the race for county sheriff. With Trey’s stellar reputation and the endorsement of all the local businesses and local law enforcement agencies, it was a surprise—a disheartening one—to see how fast Evigan had amassed support against Trey.

At the heart of it all seemed to be the insistence that, as a Colton, Trey was in the pocket of his wealthy extended family. And on a singular occasion, Evigan had added in a subtly racist slur suggesting Trey didn’t have the smarts for the job.

Aisha had tried a few times to point out the man’s remark but Trey would have none of it, his only response that he was a Colton and they did have several unsolved crimes in his county. End of story.

Only it wasn’t.

She might be hopelessly infatuated with Trey Colton, but that hadn’t blinded her to his talents or his true nature. He was a good and honorable man and Bradford County was lucky to have him as sheriff. Trey ran a tight ship and, until the Avalanche Killer and all the ensuing madness surrounding the missing women, had actually reduced crime in the area. A fact the local tourism industry depended upon.

The Colton family wasn’t the only one to run a major resort in the area. The Colton Empire might be home to the largest, but it wasn’t the only place to ski or vacation. All local businesses that depended on the patronage of outside visitors had benefited from Trey’s steady hand and outstanding leadership.

Her gaze drifted over those horrible photos once more, the truth of the situation stamped in each one of them. No matter how much good Trey had done for the county, if they didn’t get a handle on this Avalanche Killer soon, his career was in jeopardy.

She’d be damned if she was going to let that happen.

* * *

Trey Colton rubbed a hand over the back of his head, the close-cropped hair against his fingers already too long. He’d needed a haircut for three days and hell if he’d had five minutes to breathe to even go get one.

“I wasn’t suggesting you dismiss Evigan,” Aisha said, her dark gaze serious. “But I think the people who know you and who’ve admired your work are going to continue to give you the leeway to do that work. If there is a serial killer on the loose, this isn’t something that gets solved in a matter of days.”

“We live in an on-demand world, Aish. People expect this is as easy as solving a crime in eight binged episodes.”

“Fact versus fiction,” she shot back.

“Or the skewed reality we all now live with.”

“Well, it’s a reality that sucks.”

A hard laugh escaped his chest. “That it does.”

And just like that, his best friend in the world managed to make him laugh and make the whole situation seem a little less dire.

People thought she was so serious, those dark brown eyes always focused a few feet beyond everyone else. He’d heard others call her aloof but he knew her to be anything but. Aisha Allen was an outstanding psychologist and a passionate advocate for her clients, always determined to find treatments to help them cope with their inner pain and struggles.

She was also his oldest friend in the world.

When they were together, he saw her less serious side. Silly, even, when she got going doing an imitation of one of his wacky Colton relatives or teasing him about a long-forgotten memory of one of the millions they’d shared together. And he truly appreciated her support during this whole Avalanche Killer crisis, as well as throughout the subsequent disappearance of his cousin Skye.

However, even with that support, he was in the midst of a firefight. That bastard Barton Evigan was a problem. Trey didn’t think himself above an opponent—the exact opposite actually. The people of Bradford County deserved a slate of qualified candidates for the role of sheriff. Just because he wanted the job didn’t mean he deserved it on a shoo-in.

But Evigan was something else. The man had little to no actual experience and when questioned on that fact he deflected and diverted the question, immediately going on the offensive on Trey’s record. Trey and his team had closed hundreds of cases over the past three and a half years since taking on the role of sheriff. A fact that was increasingly forgotten in the constant attention over a serial killer.

Which meant he had to work harder. Those poor women discovered on the side of a mountain deserved only his best, no matter what it took. Their focused search for his cousin, Skye, required the same.

Turning toward Aisha again, he tapped the closest photo. “Okay. Walk me through it again. What do we know from the bodies?”

“Assuming this was his only burial site, and that’s a mighty large if, the time between kills was significant. Nearly five years between the first two. Then several years between two, three and four.”

“And after?” he prodded.

“That’s where things pick up. Either the killer had a trigger of some sort or wasn’t able to slake his thirst.”

“Him?” Trey homed in.

“Figure of speech. Serial killing is predominantly done by males and should be your prioritization on suspects. But for the purposes of speaking to the press, no gender should be used.”

Trey didn’t miss the light wash of goose bumps that rose up over her dark skin. He laid a hand there, covering her forearm. “We don’t have to do this now. It’s late and this is hardly a topic that ensures a good night’s sleep.”

“We owe it to those women, Trey. And we owe it to Skye.”

“But—”

She laid a hand over his. “I’m fine. Let’s just push through.”

She was fine, of that he had no doubt. The woman understood the human psyche in ways he couldn’t fathom. A few summers back he caught her leisure-reading a biography of Jack the Ripper and when asked about it, she said the man fascinated her. That she enjoyed probing into the mind and trying to understand the mysteries there.

While he enjoyed it in his fiction, he wasn’t all that keen on having it in his real life.

Which made his next thought that much harder to say, yet somehow safe when voiced in a room with only his best friend for company. “Would you think less of me if I said I wasn’t fine?”

“No.”

“Because I’m not.” He pushed back his chair, the heavy scrape of metal legs over the linoleum tile a scratchy counterpoint to the drumming in his chest. “I want to be okay but all I can think about are those women. Worse, then I start imagining my cousin and what could have happened to her.”

Trey deliberately tamped down on that train of thought. They were all desperate to find Skye, but also determined to stay focused on the positive. She was missing but that didn’t mean she’d become the target of a serial killer. They had to believe her disappearance was the work of some other force. Something wild and crazy, just like Skye.

“I know.” Aisha nodded. “I know it’s hard.”

“I look around here and see all the beauty and wildness of Colorado. The mountains and the trees and all the wide-open spaces. I see it as a place to breathe. To find myself. And all those women found was death. Quite brutally, too, based on the forensics.”

“They did.” Aisha picked up the various photos and turned them over. “Classic serial killer behaviors of dominance and a deep desire to hurt another. To not only kill but to torture before doing so.”

“A coward who gets off on causing fear.”

“Yes,” she confirmed.

“Right here. Under our noses.”

He let out a sigh, his gaze drifting once more over the box of pizza. The hunger that had carried him into the room had vanished and now he was left with a strange emptiness roiling in his gut in its place.

All of it had happened right under his nose. And if he didn’t get a handle on it, it was going to happen again. Of that he had no doubt.