Chapter Seventeen #2
“What aren’t you telling me?” Sam demanded, bracing for more bad news.
“It’s nothing,” Jill said at the same time Cal said, “Just a theory.”
“Well, which one is it?” Aly demanded.
“Cal just had me run through it like I was plotting a book. Not because that’d be real answers, but just because it might give us a different angle to approach different suspects from.”
Sam looked at Cal dubiously. Sounded a bit like he was trying to get in Jill’s pants if anyone asked her, but he looked so serious.
Okay, so if she took this seriously … a fictional version of events.
It irritated her because she couldn’t put Nate into fictional terms. But when Jill explained where she’d take the story, and tied it into what she’d found out from the Bozeman and Livingston police departments, Sam found herself getting a little caught up in it.
Nate was innocent, and they had nothing to go on. So why not entertain some fiction?
“Obviously, this is just supposition and … hell, fiction,” Jill finished, a little desperately.
“But you came up here to tell us,” Aly said. “So you think someone at the police department could be involved in, like, framing Nate? On purpose?”
It sounded like everything Sam had hoped for when it came to her father’s case, but it hadn’t been true for him.
It hadn’t been some purposeful campaign to frame her father.
In a lot of ways, he’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Benjamin Bennet had used that, as he so often did, to manipulate everyone around him into seeing truth where there wasn’t any.
Farfetched as it seemed for Nate to be a direct target, it also seemed impossible there was any real evidence against him.
So, if someone had produced something that allowed a judge to sign off on a warrant …
well, an inside job made sense. And she did believe someone in the police department knew something.
Olivia’s depiction of what Jules had done all but proved it.
Sam pondered what Jill had recounted. Put it together with the facts. “If Jules was directed to a detective, more than likely that would be…” Sam’s brows drew together. “Surely if Jake took Jules’s report and took it seriously, he would have…” But Sam trailed off.
Red hazed her vision, fury and violence taking up residence in her chest. “I’ll kill the fucking bastard myself.”
*
“Looks like you’ve got company, boss.” One of the ranch hands approached Landon, where he was preparing his horse to head out to do a round of checks on the calving.
“Your brother and Jill,” Skinny explained. He gestured to the horse. “I can take this over if you were wanting to head up to the house.”
Landon glanced at Skinny. He took a lot of the extra work when Landon was wrapped up in family stuff, and so he’d taken on a lot over the past year. It weighed on Landon with a guilt he didn’t love, but he’d tried to repay Skinny with a raise and a promotion.
It just never felt like enough. But, yeah, Cal and Jill seemed like something he should probably head inside for.
“I’m sorry I keep getting pulled away.”
Skinny shrugged. “’S life.”
Landon thought that over as he strode from the stables to the house. Was it just life to constantly be surrounded by murder and threats and ghosts of a past that couldn’t quite unwrap its vines from the fabric of the Bennets?
Maybe.
Normally, he’d go in through the back, but the front was quicker, and hopefully this wouldn’t require sitting and staying awhile. He could just poke his head in, make sure everything was all right, then head back to work.
But even from the porch, Landon could hear yelling, and when he pushed into the house, he found his living room resembling something more like a war zone.
Cal and Sam were locked in some kind of physical altercation, while Aly and Jill flitted around them in a circle, shouting at them both to stop and calm down.
Landon tried to raise his own voice above the din, but no one was listening. So he did the only thing he could think to do. Put his fingers in his mouth and blew.
At the piercing whistle, Sam and Cal looked up. Cal loosened his grip on Sam, but she took her chance and bolted from Cal’s grasp.
Landon didn’t know what the hell they were fighting about, but he figured he should take it upon himself to stop Sam. Since she was a tiny thing, and he was blocking the door anyway, it didn’t take much to reach out and grab her.
Until she kicked him in the shin.
“Hey!” It hurt like a bitch, but he still held her in his grip. “What the hell, Sam?”
“Let me go,” she hissed. “I’ve got someone to kill.”
“I think we’ve all had enough murder,” Landon said evenly. “Now why don’t we sit down and work through this calmly?”
Sam glared up at him, but when he gave her a gentle push back toward the couch and the people instead of the door, she didn’t fight him. She took a step back and then another.
“Fine,” she muttered.
She stalked over to a chair and plopped herself into it. Cal was already sitting on the couch, while Jill and Aly stood to the side looking worried and upset.
Cal looked down at his arm, then glared at Sam. “You bit me.”
Sam didn’t even spare him a glance. “You were in my way, and you deserved it.” Her foot was tapping, her hair tousled, eyes still murderous.
“Explain,” Landon ordered, because of all the things he’d considered he might stumble upon, a physical fight between Cal and Sam wasn’t it.
It was Jill who did the explaining, standing next to Aly with her hands clutched together. But her words were calm and concise as she went through the theories she and Cal had been working through. She kept saying they were fictional, but Landon saw them as something reasonable.
Which meant it was certainly possible they were true. Landon regretted stopping Sam as Jill finished her explanation, and he understood what the implication was.
“Landon.”
It took something to tamp down his own violent reaction. Mostly his wife, he figured. She was looking at him with concern, so he could hardly stalk off and track down Hayes himself.
He didn’t plan on murdering anybody, but a few punches couldn’t hurt.
“It’s just a thought. Just a fiction,” Jill was saying a little desperately. “We don’t really think Jake Hayes killed this woman.” She looked around the room like everyone would jump to agree with her.
Landon ran his tongue over his teeth in an attempt not to say what he was feeling. Why shouldn’t we think Jake Hayes killed that woman? More likely than Nate.
“I don’t think he murdered anyone. Not really,” Cal said, sounding exhausted. He cradled his face in his hands and looked at the floor. “But if he spoke to Jules Hyatt a month ago, I think there are some questions we need to ask.”
Landon surveyed Cal, then Sam. It seemed clear to him. “So, let’s go ask them.”
Cal shook his head, lifting his head. He hadn’t slept, that much was clear. “We can’t head down there as a group and all jump down Hayes’s throat. Literally or metaphorically. We need to be smart about this.” He glared at Sam.
“That’s why I was going to go down there. On my own,” Sam said.
“No, you were going to go down there to attack him. Which would get you arrested. Which, fine enough, but I’m not posting bail or representing you. So keep that in mind.”
Sam rolled her eyes, but she didn’t contradict Cal.
“First, someone should request the report. If someone took a report, it has to be on file, and anyone can have access. That will tell us who Jules talked to.”
“And if it is Hayes?” Sam demanded.
“And if it’s not?” Cal shot right back.
“That’ll take days,” Sam countered, not answering Cal’s question any more than he’d answered hers.
“Yeah, it will. And, hopefully, we’re in discovery by then, and I can see whatever trumped-up evidence they’ve got going on. I’ll have information. Not just supposition and anger.”
“Okay, so someone requests the report. That doesn’t mean someone couldn’t also talk to Jake. They’re not mutually exclusive endeavors,” Aly pointed out, the calm peacemaker in all this. “Though I’m not sure Cal or Sam should be the ones talking to Jake.”
There was a moment of silence. Landon didn’t want to get involved, but beyond that, he didn’t trust himself. If there was even a hint Hayes knew something and was keeping it from the court to make Nate look guilty…
Yeah, his reaction would be a lot like Sam’s.
To his way of thinking, there was only one choice, and since Cal and Sam had looked in her direction, too, Landon figured they were unanimous in their answer.
Jill’s eyes widened. “Oh. Surely not … me.”
“You’re the least likely to commit a crime,” Cal muttered.
“And the only one we have a chance in hell of Hayes actually talking to.” Sam sighed. “And that’s a big fucking if.”