Buch lesen: «The Coltons of Oklahoma»

Chapter 1

“You’re wrong.”

Ryan Colton’s booming, resonant voice filled every available nook and cranny within the small, albeit state-of-the-art, Tulsa PD forensic lab.

“No, I’m not.”

Susie Howard, the lab’s chief forensic expert, refused to be intimidated and stood her ground, even though a part of her could understand why the homicide detective before her had balked. After all, she’d just told him that the person who had broken into and apparently vandalized one of the ranch’s stables—and was possibly responsible for the numerous vandalisms that had occurred prior to this latest one—was his sister, Greta.

But like it or not, Susie thought, evidence was evidence.

Doing her best to sound professional and remain removed—no easy feat in this case—Susie stated the obvious. “You asked me to put a rush on the DNA evidence, so I did. The sample from the Lucky C’s crime scene went to the head of the line and that’s your answer,” she told him, tapping the name that had been generated by her trusty machine after the test had been completed. Greta Colton’s prints and DNA were in the system because of the nature of her work.

Frowning, Susie withdrew her well-manicured finger. “I can’t help it if you don’t like the answer, but that’s it. The machine doesn’t lie—even if you think that I do,” she concluded, her hazel eyes narrowing as she tossed her head. A blond tendril came loose from the tightly wound bun she wore at the back of her neck as she looked up at the six-foot-two detective.

Ryan struggled to keep his temper in check. It had grown very frayed lately. Yelling wasn’t going to get him anywhere, he knew that. Especially not with Susie.

But she just couldn’t be right.

She couldn’t be.

His words were carefully measured as he spoke. “I didn’t say you were lying, but there’s always the possibility that there’s a margin of error.”

Which was what he was pinning all his hopes on now. He knew Greta, had watched her grow up. There was no reason he could come up with for why she would do something like this.

“Run the test again,” Ryan instructed, his voice leaving no room for argument. “I don’t want to tell you your job—”

“Then don’t!” Susie retorted.

Ryan continued on the subject as if she hadn’t said a single word. “But there was enough blood on that broken window to take several swabs. Run a second sample. And a third if you need to,” he added before the forensic expert could protest.

“How many do you want me to run before you accept the results?” Susie challenged.

“Just run the test again,” Ryan ordered, doing his best to remain removed from the discussion.

Fat chance of that. The woman who had just told him that the blood belonged to his sister, Greta, was the same woman he had once been seriously involved with. The same woman, after their relationship had become serious, he had deliberately cut off all ties with.

He’d been a Marine back then, home on leave, when their paths had first crossed. They had hit it off instantly—hot and heavy, and very, very serious. He spent every moment he could with her, and she with him. Neither of their families knew about their relationship because they never made time for anyone else. It was as if somehow, subconsciously, they both understood that they were on a timetable. When he received word that he was being deployed overseas again, Susie had naturally been upset, but she’d promised to wait for him no matter how long it took.

That had been the problem. The burden of having someone waiting for him, loving him and praying for his safe return, was just too much for him to carry into battle. The weight of that responsibility threatened to sap away his edge, to blur his focus, and survival depended heavily on focus.

Besides, if he didn’t make it back, he knew how that could affect the rest of Susie’s life—how it could destroy the rest of her life. He couldn’t do anything about the way his family reacted to news like that, but he could do something about Susie.

There was far too much guilt attached to their relationship for him, so he chose the simple way out. He broke things off between them—doing so in a letter rather than in person.

In effect, he had chosen the coward’s way out. He never found out how she felt about the breakup because Susie never wrote back. Eventually, he convinced himself that that was for the best and that this was the way things were meant to be. He was meant to be alone.

With that in mind, he struggled to move on, to move forward. After his honorable discharge, he wound up becoming a police detective. In the beginning, it all boiled down to a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. And somehow, while he wasn’t looking, six years managed to pass by.

He’d assumed he would never see Susie again. It got a little easier dealing with that with each year that went by.

The sight of Susie walking down the hall at the Tulsa police department one morning four years ago had completely knocked the air right out of him. But after a few seconds, he’d recovered and managed to push on.

For the past four years, they had politely but determinedly ignored one another, pretending not to be aware of the other person’s existence whenever they found themselves in the same general vicinity. His cases were such that he found he didn’t need any help from the forensic department.

But now, with the vandalism at the Lucky C amped up to a dangerous degree, Ryan resigned himself to the fact that he needed her help. Needed her training and her lab to help him solve this all-too-personal case he had taken on before things went from bad to fatal.

And now the attractive blonde who still sometimes turned up in his dreams had given him an answer that had all but left him numb and speechless. Was this her way of getting even with him for breaking up with her?

No, whatever else he might feel about Susie Howard, he knew that she had a great deal of integrity. He was allowing his imagination to run away with him, something that didn’t happen very often. He would be the first to admit that the situation had made him desperate.

He forced himself to remember that Susie wasn’t the kind of person who would let her feelings get in the way of her work—and she certainly wasn’t the type to frame an innocent person, no matter how much she might want to because she was in effect jilted by that person’s older brother.

That wasn’t the way Susie operated. Her sense of honor was something that he’d found admirable about her all those years ago.

Since he knew that Susie wasn’t responsible for the results that were damning his sister, that left Ryan clinging to the only possible excuse he had left—that somehow, the periodically calibrated forensic equipment had malfunctioned.

Susie looked as if she was going to continue staunchly refusing to rerun the test. He had to get her to reverse that position.

“Do it for me,” he requested, his voice as devoid of emotion as he could possibly render it. “Run the test again.”

“Oh, well, if it’s for you, sure, I’ll run it again.” There was more than a touch of sarcasm in Susie’s voice. “And if it wasn’t for you, I’d still run the test again, just because there seems to be some sort of doubt involved here,” she went on to add icily. “I can see why finding out that your sister vandalized the family stables might be upsetting to you, so yes, I’ll run the test again,” she informed him coldly. “Now, if you don’t mind getting out of my lab, I’ll get started on that second test.”

She turned her back on him, pretending that he was already gone.

She knew he wasn’t because she could see his distorted reflection on the surface of her mass spectrometer. The machine was facing her. Her parting words to Ryan were “I’ll have someone call you with the results once they’re in.”

When Ryan’s reflection continued to remain exactly where it was, she asked in as disinterested a voice as she could summon, “Is there anything else?”

This had to be said. He knew that. If the air wasn’t cleared between them, then she might be sorely tempted not to do her best job. He felt confident she wouldn’t manufacture evidence, but he wasn’t so sure that she’d bring her A game to the case.

“Yes,” he said after a long moment, addressing the words to the back of Susie’s head since she wasn’t turning around again, “there’s something else. I want to apologize for treating you so badly when I broke it off between us. But I did it for you, for your own good.”

She almost swung around then, almost fired at him with both barrels, calling him an idiot and a fool—and a liar. Calling him an egotist for using that pathetic excuse when the real reason he had pulled his emotional vanishing act on her was because he’d obviously been afraid of commitment.

Any first-year psychology student would have been able to tell him that.

But she didn’t swing around, didn’t give Ryan a tongue-lashing and didn’t tell him exactly what she thought. What would be the point? He had his lie, which he was holding on to for dear life, and she had moved on.

Or told herself she had.

So she remained facing her workbench, acting as if Ryan hadn’t said a single word to her about their past or its abrupt ending.

“I’ll have someone call you the minute the second results are in,” she repeated.

This time, she saw his reflection retreat and then disappear.

Heard the door to the lab close again.

Only then did she turn around on her stool. “You jerk,” Susie murmured, staring at the closed door. Her voice grew louder, more heated with every word she uttered. “You big, self-centered, blind, stupid, stupid jerk.”

“Two degrees, six years in college and that’s the best you can come up with?” Harold Gould marveled as the tall, thin lab assistant stepped out from the computer tech area where he had been working.

His white lab coat hung like a bland curtain about his all but emaciated frame, giving the impression that it would begin flapping wildly about that same frame at the first sign of a breeze.

Startled, Susie’s eyes met those of her junior assistant, who was also a lab intern. The brown eyes continued looking back at her, the assistant never flinching.

“I didn’t know anyone else was here,” Susie told the intern.

“Obviously. When I saw him walk in I was going to clear my throat in case something private was going to be said. But Colton started talking right away and it sounded kind of personal from the get-go.” The look he gave her was sympathetic. “I didn’t want to embarrass you.”

“You just wanted to eavesdrop, hoping to score some juicy gossip,” Susie countered.

She knew how the man operated. Harold Gould knew more about what was going on in the precinct after being here for a little more than three months than some of the twenty-year veterans did. It wasn’t only lab procedures that he absorbed faster than a sponge.

The painfully thin shoulders rose and fell quickly, indicating that Harold had no intention of even attempting to contest her take on the situation. They both knew he enjoyed being a font of information, both technical and private.

“Yeah, well, there’s that, too,” he agreed, and then he tried to set her mind at ease. “Don’t worry, I don’t have any time to talk to anyone so this isn’t going into the rumor mill. And besides, I might be had for a song when it comes to certain things, but don’t ever doubt my loyalty.”

She liked Harold and was fairly certain that his heart was in the right place. But she’d paid the price for blind faith before and that had made her leery. Harold could just be offering her pretty words to distract her, Susie thought. “If it does hit the rumor mill, I’ll know who to come after.”

A small, amused smile played across all but nonexistent lips. “Should I be shaking in my shoes now—or wait until later?” he asked her.

“Later,” she told him. “We have work to do now.” She glanced again at the closed door. “I’m going to have you run the DNA test on the blood this time.”

“Really run the test, or...?” He raised one eyebrow, leaving the rest of the sentence unspoken but definitely understood.

Susie wanted to make one thing perfectly clear even as she cut the intern some slack because he was, after all, still relatively new.

“We don’t do ‘or’ here, Harold. We don’t even think about ‘or.’ Just one tiny instance—or even the hint of that kind of impropriety—and everything we’ve ever done here is going to be viewed as suspect and called into question. The amount of work that would be generated by something like that would be astronomical. Have I made that clear enough for you?”

She didn’t want to come off as sounding belligerent, but there should be no question about how procedures were conducted.

“Just kidding, boss lady,” Harold told her, raising his hands as a sign of surrender.

“I know. But it doesn’t hurt to reiterate how we do things out loud every so often so that we don’t ever lose sight of our function here. Because it only has to happen once and suddenly, we’ll get our walking papers and be out on the street.”

“Understood,” Harold assured her. “But even so, you could stand to improve your vocabulary,” he told her. “I could work up a whole host of multiple-syllable expletives you could hurl at yon studly homicide detective the next time your paths cross. You don’t want to be caught unarmed, do you? Or worse, tongue-tied?” he concluded, pretending to shiver at the very thought of that happening.

“You miss the salient point. I don’t want our paths crossing, period,” she said, getting to the heart of the matter.

“For that even to be a remote possibility at this police precinct, one of you is going to have to put in for a transfer. Like, to a different city.” Harold’s shallow complexion seemed to brighten instantly as he thought over possibilities. “Do I get a vote as to which one of you should go?”

She wasn’t about to feed the intern any more straight lines. Given half a chance, the man could go on talking for hours, like a windup toy whose spring had somehow malfunctioned and while she liked him and felt he did have a great deal of potential, she definitely didn’t want to encourage him, especially not when there was work to do.

“Just do the test, Harold,” Susie requested.

The lab intern saluted her comically as he said, “I hear and obey, my liege.”

Susie rolled her eyes as she got back to her work.

* * *

Susie couldn’t be right, Ryan stubbornly thought as he got back into his car. Starting it up, he pulled out of his parking spot, turned the sedan around and headed back to the Lucky C.

The forensic team, obviously, had come and gone. They had a reputation for being very thorough. Although he had been the one to initially call them in to see if he had missed something, he wanted to go back and go over the latest crime scene one more time to see if perhaps they had missed something this time around.

It was worth a shot. What did he have to lose?

Especially when he stood to gain so much more if he was right and Susie wasn’t.

What he wanted to do with this latest return trip to the Lucky C was find something that would negate what Susie was claiming: that that was Greta’s blood at the crime scene. That it was Greta’s blood that was all over the jagged edges of the broken window.

What possible reason could Greta have for vandalizing the family ranch?

If his sister had a grievance—which would have been news to him—she would have gone to talk to whomever she had the issue with.

Talk to them, not deface their property. For heaven sakes, if anything, Greta had become even closer to the family—certainly closer to their mother—ever since she’d gotten engaged. Greta and their mother were busy planning Greta’s wedding. She wouldn’t just suddenly turn on her mother like that, despite any bizarre tales of hormonal bridezillas to the contrary.

Still, he knew how conscientious Susie was. She wouldn’t have just haphazardly conducted that DNA test, or allowed it to become contaminated.

Yet how could her findings be right?

Ryan felt a surge of anger flare up within his chest, anger where his heart was supposed to be.

Try as he might, he couldn’t come up with a way that both he and Susie could be right. One of them had to be wrong and he found the idea that it was him really upsetting. Not because he had any kind of a problem with his ego—he’d been wrong before, most notably when he’d deployed back overseas and cut Susie loose like that, as if she was some inconvenience instead of someone he had found himself caring for deeply—but because that would mean that there was something seriously bad going on with Greta.

He knew Greta. His sister wasn’t a criminal. And she didn’t harbor some dark side that none of them were aware of. That was just plain ridiculous.

Leaning over, Ryan switched on the radio. The car was instantly filled with the strains of music, instrumental music meant to promote and instill a sense of peace into what was usually a hectic day. He’d never needed it more than he did now.

If he couldn’t find evidence at the crime scene that could point him in another direction—the right direction—he was going to have to call his sister and question her about the events that had been transpiring here at the ranch. He wasn’t looking forward to that because, despite his attempts to keep to himself, he found that he was rather transparent when he was dealing with his family. And once he started questioning Greta about the strange events at the ranch and she realized what he was getting at, there would be a breach between them.

And most likely, between him and the rest of the family, as well. Greta was, after all, the baby of the family, as well as the only girl. Brothers tended to be protective of their little sisters.

Hell, he felt that way, too. But he was also a homicide detective and he had a job to do, a sworn duty to get to the bottom of things and to bring the guilty parties in as well as to protect the innocent ones.

“Damn it, Greta, I sure hope that you’re innocent—for both our sakes,” he murmured.

And then, because it wasn’t affecting him, he turned the music up louder, hoping to be in a better, calmer frame of mind by the time he got back to the Lucky C.

Hoping, but being realistic enough to know that hope alone didn’t change a damn thing no matter how much someone might want it to.