Page 24 of Killer on the Homestead
Copeland opened his mouth, no doubt to argue, but his eyes narrowed. He studied her. “You don’t.”
She lifted a shoulder. “Guess you’ll never know.”
His suspicious gaze turned to Duncan. “She doesn’t.”
But Duncan, clearly in the spirit of messing with Copeland, just shrugged.
“You don’t have a lead on the murder weapon,” Rosalie said, wanting to poke at him until he gave something up. Since she really didn’t have a gosh darn lead at the moment.
Copeland didn’t react. So she kept poking.
“You don’t have a hint of a suspect,” she said, ticking the points off on her fingers. “You don’t even know where to start looking for one.”
“The victim was messed up with some dangerous stuff back in North Dakota,” Copeland growled. “The most likely answer is something from his past caught up with him. We’re looking into it. Along with all other leads that have been brought to us, including a rash of missing cattle.”
But she saw it, in Copeland’s thinly veiled frustration. In that blank way he delivered the information. He wasn’thidinganything.
“You really have nothing.”
“We’re investigating,” he said stiffly.
But Rosalie felt deflated instead of victorious. She’d been certain Copeland would have caught wind of something she hadn’t. He had more resources than she did, even if she could bend the rules a little bit.
And if he had all those resources, all thesedetectives, and he had nothing… It made her chest tighten. Like she was failing everyone.
She whirled out of the office and started marching back outside. It was just a setback. The cops had nothing, which meant she had to find something. Shehadto.
“It seems like my dad was right,” Duncan said, following along easily enough.
“About what?”
“Some city detective doesn’t belong here. No leads? What the hell is this?”
He didn’tsoundmad, but the take was an interesting one. She didn’t blame Copeland’s background on no leads, but… “You just moved back after living the high life in LA and you think you know more than a detective?”
“No, but I grew up here. I know ranching. That Detective Beckett probably doesn’t know a bull from a cow. How would he know if anything Hunter was mixed up in had something to do with the ranch?”
Rosalie considered that. She didn’t fully agree, but there were little true points hidden in his not fully correct one. And the thing was, Thomas might be from Bent, even Detective Delaney-Carson wasfromhere, but they weren’t ranchers. They might have an idea about things just from proximity, but they didn’t have the full picture.
“You’re right,” she said, everything clicking into her head in the way she liked. In the way that prompted action, so she could follow one tiny little clue to the next.
“I am? Hey, say that again. I get the feeling I’m going to want to live off that admission for the next five years.”
She ignored him, focused on thepoint. “They’re detectives. They’re not ranchers. Hart might be from here, but there’s no ranching blood there. But me? I’m both. Sort of. Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“Back to your place, Ace.”
She had a plan.
Chapter Seven
She drove like a mad woman, and though Duncan’s heart leaped into his throat approximately four different times, he refused to show it. A woman like Rosalie would see clutching the door handle as a weakness.
Besides, he couldn’t clutch a damn thing with his bad arm anyway.
She took a side entrance on the Young side of the property line, but cut over closer to his cabin where there was no real road or path.
