Page 43 of Killer on the Homestead
“Do I even want to know why you’re calling my personal number and not Bent County?” he answered, as she tried to push away from Duncan.
Who held on to her. Tightly.
“There was a break-in at Duncan’s cabin,” Rosalie said without sounding panicked. She hoped. “Someone broke in and trashed his place.”
He grunted. “Call the emergency line then.”
“Copeland.”
The long, world-weary sigh on the other end was dramatic. “Yeah, yeah, I’m coming. I’ll handle it.”
The line went dead, and Rosalie put the phone back in her pocket. She surveyed the room again. “Duncan…” She felt helpless and strange, and that wasn’ther, so she dug deep for some kind of control. “We should wait outside,” she decided. No contaminating a crime scene. “We should… Duncan, you’re going to have to tell your parents. When the police come up the drive, they’ll see.”
“Call the detective back. Have him cut through. I’ll…” Then he cursed and took off, back out the door and into the dark night. She realized, only a second or two after he did, what he might be worried about. So she took off after him.
She ran after him—he was a quick shadow in the dark—across fields. She even had to hop a fence and wondered how he’d done it with his bad arm. The main house was fully dark in the distance. His long legs, and maybe the whole being-a-professional-athlete thing, meant he made it to the front of the house before her. He was peering into the window on the front door when she caught up, lungs burning and eyes watering.
“Everything looks fine from here. The security system is set.” He was breathing heavily. She could tell he was in pain, but he didn’t reach up and grip his shoulder.
She hated to say it, but she knew she had to. “You’re still going to have to wake them up,” she said around panting breaths. “You don’t want them to wake up to cops coming up the drive. They’ll think something worse happened.”
He inhaled deeply, let it out slowly, evening his breathing quicker than she was able to. “Yeah. Why don’t you call Audra. Have her pick you up?”
She was surprised that the words landed like little stabs of pain. That damn bramble being yanked out of her heart. But she managed to keep her tone even, light. “Is that what you want?”
He stared at her there in the dim glow of the ranch’s security light. “No,” he said, and with enough heft and weight that those little brambles dug right back into her heart.
She swallowed it all down. “Then I’ll stay.”
Chapter Thirteen
“Let’s go over this one more time. You don’t know if the door was locked or not?”
Duncan sighed. He was in all kinds of pain, but the cops wouldn’t let him into his cabin to grab a pill. Rosalie had somehow, after quite a while, convinced his parents to go back up to the house and try to get some sleep, so there wasthat.
He knew they wouldn’t sleep, but at least they wouldn’t stand out in the increasing cold and worry. They could worry comfortably and inside.
“I’ve told each and every one of you,” Duncan said, trying not to be irritable. “I locked the door before I left. When I got back, I was distracted.” He’d settled on that word about the third time they’d asked this same damn question. “I unlocked the door, but it’s not like I tested the knob. I just jabbed my key in and twisted, and assumed that’s what unlocked the door. Until I stepped inside to all that.”
There were cops crawling around his cabin, all the lights on and blazing. He wanted to be grateful they were taking this seriously, but he was in some serious pain, and worried about his parents and what thismeant.
Detective Beckett approached him and the uniformed deputy that had been asking thesame damn questions.
“We’ve taken pictures. The guys are working on trying to lift some prints right now. You’ll need to go through and see what’smissing, but as much as some of that stuff might be a gold mine, most of it is personalized and unique enough, selling would come back on the seller. They were no doubt looking for easy items. Cash. Guns.”
“I don’t keep a gun down here.” His shoulder ached. A migraine had started drumming at his temples. Rosalie’s hand rubbed up and down his back, but he barely felt it. “If I had cash, it was nothing major.”
“Can’t one of the deputies bring him out one of his pain pills? Some water?” Rosalie demanded.
“Why are you here again?” Copeland asked her.
“To ruin your life,” she replied, and almost,almostmade Duncan smile. “He’s in pain, Copeland.”
The detective huffed out a breath. “Where do you keep them?”
“Cabinet above the stove.”
Detective Beckett grunted, then stalked back to the cabin. Rosalie didn’t stop rubbing Duncan’s back.
