“Local…as in…”

“Personal.”

“Ah.” The senator’s mouth tightened. Then he rubbed a hand hard across his eyes, as though the fire in them burned even him. “I see,” he said heavily, and hauled in a breath. “Well…okay then, I don’t want to step on your toes, Roan. Just trying to help. You let me know if you need anything, now, you hear me? Anything at all. Just find this guy.”

“Oh,” Roan said softly, “I’ll do that.”

Instead of leaving then, the senator jerked out one of the chairs that faced Roan’s desk and perched himself on the edge of the seat, then leaned forward with shoulders hunched and hands clasped. “Okay, so tell me what you’ve got so far. Any leads? Any suspects?”

Getting down to brass tacks, thought Roan. The fact that he’d anticipated this didn’t make it any more welcome. He shifted warily. “Now, Cliff, you know I can’t-”

Holbrook silenced him with an impatient gesture and grimace. “Don’t give me that, Roan. You think I can’t get access to anything you or those state boys have got? Take me one phone call. I hope you’re not gonna make me do that. Lord, son, this is family.”

Family. Roan let out a breath, hating the jolt that had kicked inside him at the word. He doubted the senator, given his current frame of mind, even realized the implications of what he’d said. No sense making anything of it.

He shrugged. “We’ve got some ideas. Pretty good idea what happened, anyway. For starters, it looks like Jason most likely knew the person that shot him.”

The senator’s eyes narrowed. “That’s why you’re saying it was personal.”

Roan nodded. “He was shot at fairly close range, no sign of any struggle-in fact, it looks like Jase may not have known he was in serious danger, not until it was too late.”

Holbrook let out a groaning breath and leaned back in his chair, shaking his head.

“And,” Roan added reluctantly, “some of the forensic evidence suggests there may have been a woman involved.”

The senator’s grunt didn’t sound surprised by that information; the man knew his son as well as anybody did. He put a hand over his eyes and said tiredly as he rubbed, “So…you’re looking at, what, a jealous boyfriend? Husband?”

It was the moment and the question Roan had been dreading, but he didn’t see how he could avoid answering it. He couldn’t explain his reluctance, or the pulse tapping in his belly, as if he were about to betray a personal confidence. From a woman he’d just met, and a suspect to boot. Weird.

“Could be. Seems he had an altercation with a woman outside Buster’s last night.” He cleared his throat, but the words still came hard. “This woman seems to be the last person to have seen Jason alive.”

Holbrook’s head jerked up and his eyes sparked like coals coming to life. “So? Why isn’t she in here? Why aren’t you questioning her?” He paused, then did a double take and said incredulously, “Are you telling me a woman might have done this?”

Roan made a gesture of impatience that rocked his chair, making it squeak again. “I’m not saying that, no. At this point, anything’s possible.” He reined himself in, leaned forward and placed his clasped hands on his desktop. “Cliff, I’ve just come from questioning the woman. She’s voluntarily turned over her gun and a DNA sample, both of which will be on their way to the lab first thing in the morning. Meanwhile, we’re running a check on her-appears she’s new in town, hasn’t lived here more than a few months.” He paused, hating, for the senator’s sake, what he had to say now. Whatever else Jason Holbrook may have been, it didn’t change the fact that he was this man’s child. He coughed, then spat it out. “There’s something you need to know. There’s a good possibility Jason may have assaulted this woman. May even have raped her.”

“Lord.” Holbrook ran a hand over his eyes. Then he looked up at Roan and his eyes hardened, became splinters of cold steel. His voice, hushed to begin with, rose with anger to a muted roar. “Are you saying this was…what, some kind of self-defense?”

“No, I’m not saying that at all. I don’t think it was, not in the legal sense. I’m just-”

The senator’s clenched fist thumped the desktop. “She-or somebody-shot my son, dammit.” He pushed himself upright, leaning on that closed fist, until he loomed above Roan like a thunderhead. His voice grated harshly between clenched teeth. “Jason wasn’t any saint. Hell, I know that. But he was my son. I want whoever did this to pay for it. If this woman shot my boy-no matter what he did, she had no right to take his life. I want her arrested, prosecuted and locked up, you understand me?” He straightened, and his rugged face spasmed with grief as he turned to go. Then he paused, and his voice quivered slightly as he added, “You do this for me, son. I’m countin’ on you.”

Roan sat still while a storm raged inside him, gripping the arms of his chair to hold himself steady against the battering of the anger and too many other emotions he couldn’t name. Through a shimmering haze he watched the other man walk toward the door, the man he’d looked up to as a boy and young man and secretly believed-or perhaps wished-was his own biological father, seeing him suddenly stooped and old. He heard himself ask, in a hard, cracking voice, “Where are you staying? You realize your house is still being processed as a crime scene?”

Cliff Holbrook hesitated, then turned to look back at him. He seemed dazed. Almost…lost.

Vulnerable. Roan didn’t want to think it. Couldn’t help it.

“Tell you the truth, I…hadn’t really thought,” the senator said, smiling slightly.

Roan sure as hell didn’t want to feel sympathy for the man, not right now anyway. But he couldn’t help that, either. “Why don’t you go on out to the ranch?” he heard himself say in a voice like a washed-out gravel road. “You’re welcome to stay as long as you need to. I’ll call Boyd, tell him you’re coming.”

There was a moment…a flicker of something in the other man’s eyes, there too briefly to read…a softening, perhaps, or even…regret? Then Senator Clifford Holbrook seemed to gather himself and grow taller…stronger…harder. “Thank you,” he said crisply, more like himself again, “but I’ll make do with the local motel until my house is released. I want to make this understood right now, Roan-” he jabbed the air with a forefinger and his voice took on the timbre and conviction of a man making a campaign speech “-I am not leaving this town until the person who murdered my son is behind bars. Count on that.”

Roan watched the door thump shut behind the senator, then blew out a breath and leaned back in his chair, fingers laced behind his head. Half of him felt small and disappointed and rejected and wanted to kick something because of it. The other half wanted to laugh at himself for being so stupid. When was he going to stop thinking anything between him and Clifford Holbrook was ever going to change?

Time to go home, he thought, but a glance at his watch gave him a jolt of surprise and sent a squirt of guilt through him, too. Way past time. Susie Grace would be sound asleep by now, and Boyd most likely, too, snoring on the sofa in front of the television, which would be playing away on Mute, tuned to the History Channel. There’d be dinner left for Roan in the kitchen, but he didn’t relish the idea of eating microwaved leftovers alone, or going home to a cold silent house, for that matter, tiptoeing like a thief into his daughter’s room to kiss her good night, his belly sore with knowing he’d disappointed her again.

Then he thought about the man who’d just left his office to go alone into an empty motel room, knowing the son whose room he’d once tiptoed into for a goodnight kiss was lying cold and dead on a table at the morgue.

I’ve got a job to do, Roan thought.

He swiveled his chair around and punched the button that would bring his sleeping computer to life. Say what you would about the Internet, at least it never closed. If nothing else, he could still do some checking up on the lady named Mary Owen.

Mary lay shivering in a tumble of clammy sheets and watched daylight slowly wash color into the featureless gray of her bedroom. She’d been awake for hours, tossing and turning, afraid to go back to sleep, knowing she’d dream of Diego again. Not the Diego of last night’s unexpectedly awakened memory, smiling and sexy-eyed, handsome as sin. The Diego DelRey who waited for her in the shadowy darkness of her nightmares was the other Diego, the one who’d looked at her that last time with eyes that were filled with hate. The one who had stabbed the air with a finger like a dagger and vowed in words only she could hear that he would find her one day. Find her and make her pay.

Why is this happening to me now? Diego isn’t coming to kill me. He’ll never find me. I thought I was over the fear.

Was it because, for the first time in many years, she was without the comfort of a weapon? Or…was it something else entirely? He violated my space… got under my skin… inside my head. Made me vulnerable.

She wasn’t thinking of the man who’d tried to rape her.

She lay still, concentrating on breathing evenly and deeply, and once more closed her eyes. I won’t be afraid, she thought. I have nothing to be afraid of now.

Little by little she felt the tension ease from her muscles, and her body take on the heaviness of impending sleep. Cautiously, she released her mind, letting it drift through memories of happier times, like a boat floating down a river past pleasant scenes on its banks: the apartment in New York, the dear, dear face of her roommate, Joy. Diego again, leaning toward her across a table, his eyes flickering in the light of a guttering candle, the air soft with humidity and fragrant with the scent of tropical flowers…his hands so warm, holding hers, the sudden lovely coolness of the ring he placed on her finger.

“Marry me,” I remember he said to me in his husky, sexy voice, “and I will make all your dreams come true.” And I looked into his eyes, filled with so much love for me…and how could I not believe him?

But now…those eyes faded into shadows and another pair came to take their place, not the dark and smoky Latino eyes of Diego DelRey, not even the ones from later on, hard, now, with hate. These eyes were an intense and glittering blue, and squinted a little, as if from a lifetime of gazing at sunshot horizons. They seemed to look straight into Mary’s soul, down into the deepest darkest places where all her secrets slept.

She opened her eyes, shaking, as fear swept through her like a cold Montana wind.

Deputy Tom Daggett knocked on Roan’s office door at seven forty-five Saturday morning.

“Yeah?” Roan grunted, trying to look as if he hadn’t just been asleep with his head on a pile of expense reports.

Tom looked wary, but came on in anyway. “Sorry to bother you, Sheriff-thought you’d want to know. Just got a call from the crime lab in Helena. That evidence we sent over-too soon for DNA on that second blood sample, but the slug we dug outa the dashboard of Jase’s truck?” He paused, flushed with the import of the news he bore. “It’s from a Colt 45 revolver.”

“A Colt 45. No kidding.” Roan scrubbed a hand over his stubbly jaw and glowered at his deputy, who he considered had no business being this fresh and enthusiastic so early in the morning. His own mouth tasted like the bottom of a chicken coop, and even the station’s off-duty-room coffee was sounding good to him right now. “A damn six-shooter,” he muttered on an exhalation. The dispenser of so many doses of frontier justice. It seemed fitting, somehow.

And not a Ladysmith. Which should have made him feel better, but for some reason didn’t.

He leaned back in his chair, making it squawk, and dug the keys to his patrol vehicle out of his pocket. “There’s a couple of evidence bags in the back of my car,” he said as he lobbed the keys at Tom. “They need to get over to Helena right away. Like…yesterday. Lori can do it-I hate to keep using those state detectives for errand boys. Then I want you to get over to the courthouse-they ought to be opening up about now. Get on over there and look up the deed to that beauty shop Queenie Schultz sold when she left town last winter. Find out everything you can about the person who bought it. Her name’s Mary Owen. I want to know what address she gave Queenie and how she paid for that shop. Then I want her bank records, her social security number, her birth certificate, passport and driver’s license numbers. I want you to find out where she parks her car and get me the license plate and VIN off it. I want to know where that woman lived before she came here, where she went to school, what she did for a living, who she was married to, what childhood vaccinations she got. Anything and everything. You got that?”