Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Warrick
W alking into the sheriff’s office, I spotted Tom right away. In this one-horse town, the most Tom and his two deputies did was coax Mrs. Applewhite’s fifteen cats from trees and stymie Rory and his teen friends from coaxing gullible adults to buy beer for them.
I knew he would never expect something like this.
“Sheriff,” I called to get his attention. “I need your help. Don’t say anything until I finish, okay?”
His thick brows lowered, and his old Tennessee drawl rumbled over me. “Okay, sure. What do you have for me?”
Drawing up a chair, I told him all that’d been uncovered in the last twenty-four hours, and while his eyes widened with increasing unbelief, I laid out the full situation. “I need to know if anyone in this town has any connection with New York or a criminal background.”
He sat back and rubbed his face. “I don’t know about that, Donovan. I know no one is squeaky clean, but I doubt any of our good guys have a connection with criminals or anyone who might have a reason to direct bad people our way.”
Rubbing the back of his neck, Tom said, “It sounds disjointed to me, Warrick. I mean, what are the odds of someone knowing who Miss Harrington is, knowing who her stalker is, and sending that stalker information about her? Isn’t that one in a million? Or trillion?”
He was right—that didn’t make sense. Unless that stalker had eyes in every state, in every city and every town, this wasn’t possible. Even more, only the police in New York knew where she had gone, so either the leak came from them or there was some other variable I wasn’t seeing.
“There must be something,” I told Tom. “Can you look into it for me? Any reason someone might have a reason to stab someone in the back? A huge debt, a drug problem, family ties to criminals, hell, jaywalking. Ask if anyone has seen any strange guys around the place, or if anyone was asking questions they shouldn’t be asking, okay?”
“Sure,” Tom replied.
We shook hands, and I left to go check on Santos—unfortunately, I got there as they had him in the MRI machine, and he was slated to be doing a lot of tests after, so I returned to Silver Ridge and got to Riverbend Café, needing a pick-me-up.
“Donovan.” I looked up to see Carl Benson walking into the shop. “Nice seeing you here.”
Benson was a local businessman and a member of the Town Council. He was about six feet three inches tall and had dark brown hair that curled up at the edge of his collar. He wore a suit, not as expensive as Drayton's, but with some zeros behind it.
“Same to you. Treeve said you were in New Jersey?”
“New York,” he replied. “Got family up there and I was looking into starting a new business with my sister. The man she married is a bum, so I needed to set her up to be self-sufficient.”
New York, huh.
“Oh,” I said as my coffee and sandwich were delivered. “What does your family do?”
“A little bit of this, a little bit of that,” he said, shrugging. “We’re sommeliers, so the business, hopefully, will be wines.”
It felt like a stretch, but anyone and anything with a connection to New York had my back up. “How is the big city?”
“Hectic, as usual.” He shrugged, while my waiter set my coffee and sandwich down. He ordered from the same waiter, then added, “It’s a mess in the city. Last night, some high-profile FBI agent was killed, and no one knows who did it.”
My hands went still. “What?”
“Yeah,” he shrugged. “Some money laundering case or something. I hadn’t really listened closely.”
“Oh,” I nodded. “I heard you voted to give Drayton Jr. his father's spot on the council. Don’t you think someone who lives here and knows the town would be better than some rich prick with no connections here?”
Benson looked mulish. “I can see your point, but the Draytons have connections everywhere, in the States and around the world, Donovan. I was the one who invited them here because I know the connections we can get out of them.”
How far is your nose up their butt?
“I see,” I replied. “You’ve got to tell me what use the Draytons are in this town because I honestly don’t see it.”
Benson took it as an opportunity to go on a spiel about the benefits the Drayton family had done for the town: funding a proper waste disposal system, investing in the Silver Spur, furnishing some fishermen with equipment and boats…
I listened in as he spoke, but something caught my attention, “What? O’Hara’s debt? What debt?”
His brows lowered. “You don’t know? I thought it was common knowledge by this time. A couple of years ago, Jake was in the weeds after a freak storm affected his ranch. Drayton senior loaned him about a million dollars to refurbish his place, and he used it. So yes, he is in Drayton's debt.”
Did that make a difference about…anything?
“Oh, I see,” I replied, dusting my hands off. “Maybe I can give the Draytons the benefit of the doubt.”
Nodding, I left the shop and decided to head back to the ranch. But before I did, I stopped at Hank’s store and got some chocolates for Zoe. It was midday, and by the time I got back to the ranch, all I wanted to do was go and see her—but Marie stopped me.
“Sorry, boss, but Evie is in your office, waiting to talk to you,” Marie said, while wiping her hands. “She didn’t tell me what it was about but she insisted that she had to talk to you.”
Rubbing my face, I nodded. “Okay, I’ll go see her.”
When I stepped into the office, I found Evie grim. Shit. What was happening now? Resting the bag with chocolates, I asked, “Want a beer?”
“No,” she sighed. “Last night, after the accident with Santos, we had to put that bull down. You know bulls as well as I do. You know mature bulls have between 1 to 4 nanograms per deciliter, but after they’ve been in the arena, it would be two or three nanograms higher. But when we assessed the blood from the bull last night, the levels were quadrupled.”
“By my estimation, it seems someone injected the animal with a full bottle of 20mL of testosterone, but it was a drug used on horses and dogs. All of it. It metabolized in seconds, and that is not the worst part of it,” she sank into a chair. “Warrick, we found cocaine in his body too.”
If I'd had a cup of coffee in hand, it would have crashed to the floor. “What the fuck ?”
“It shocked me too,” Evie said, folding her hands under her chin. “We had to tranq the bull last night, Warrick, and when it went down, it was foaming at the mouth. We had to kill it. There was nothing Santos could have done to stop him from throwing him with how amped the bull was. I am just happy he was not so deathly injured.”
“Somebody drugged the damned bull,” I echoed.
“With enough drugs to kill him if we hadn’t done it for them,” she replied. “This is something I have never seen around here, Warrick. What the fuck is going on? Who could have done something like that?”
The stalker.
“Are we looking at those who were authorized to be in the pen?” I asked.
Her lips flattened. “We had over three hundred people in the fairgrounds last night, and security was nonexistent. It would be easy for anyone to slip inside, inject him, and slip away with no one being any the wiser.”
Zoe was nearly killed before she came to us.
The bull was injected to make Santos fall.
Zoe’s car was vandalized.
Common sense told me it was the same offender, this stalker guy—but none of these acts felt like it was the work of a stalker. This felt like…a death promise.
Someone wanted to kill Zoe—but why?
“I want to tell you what’s going on, but honestly, not only is it not my story to tell, but I am also still not sure how this all ties together,” I said. “I know that sounds shitty, but as soon as I know what is going on here, I’ll fill in the blanks for you.”
“It’s about Miss Harrington, isn’t it?” she asked, almost psychically. Standing, she added, “You don’t need to tell me now, but I trust you will soon. I don’t like people sitting on my mudheap, Donovan.”
“Neither do I,” I replied.
As she left, I spotted a box on top of my usual mail. It was wrapped in brown paper and addressed to Zoe—Zara. Taking it with me, I headed to her room, wondering if she had eaten or if she had slept, and what she was thinking. Knocking on the door, I waited until she let me in.
“You look like?—”
“Shit,” she sighed. “I know, I feel like it, too.”
“We’ll find who did that to your car,” I assured her, handing her the large chocolate bar and the box.
She turned the bar over. “It’s not that. It’s just…I heard from my handler that one of their men on my case was killed yesterday—” she set the bar aside and tore open the brown paper on the box. Inside was a small white box, and she was frowning. She opened it and screamed .
Frantic, I looked into the box. “Jesus H Christ.”
A severed ear, still bloody and showing a ragged knife mark from where it was separated from the body, showed stark against the white silk of the bedding it was laying on. On the lid of the box, I read, “Nothing is left of FBI agent Harding. You’re next.”
Zoe was huddled into the corner where the bed met the wall; she was a tiny little ball, shivering and shaking and white as a three-day-old corpse. I closed the box.
“Zoe…” I set it aside. “What is really going on? See, I just heard today that a prominent FBI agent in New York was killed because he was meddling in things he was not supposed to be meddling in.” I paused. “There is no stalker, is there, Zoe?”
I waited until she didn’t look as if she had seen her life flash before her eyes and then asked again, “There is no stalker, is there?”
“No,” she whispered.
“Who is coming after you, Zoe?” I asked calmly. “Who would kill an FBI agent as a warning?”
“It’s not just one,” she said emptily. “They killed my editor too.”
“Editor—” I paused, “Were you a journalist?”
“Investigative journalist,” she replied. “That night I got sick in the bar was because my editor had been killed,” she swallowed, staring at her knees. “In her house?—”
“Execution style,” I said, my brows lowered. “I remember hearing it. Didn’t think much of it, though.”
“She’d warned me to let it go, but I didn’t,” Zoe admitted, her gaze now turned to the window. “And what did she get from my stubbornness? She’s dead, and so is this guy, and who knows how many others are going to die because I was stupid and proud and na?ve.”
She began to speak and told me about stumbling into this case while writing up a fluff piece about clinics in New York doing good jobs for the people. “When I went to interview one of the women who managed to get fibroid surgery because of the clinic—I found she didn’t exist. That started the snowball.
“I dug too deep, and when my editor flatly refused to run the story, I did what I thought best and went to the FBI…they took it on. They found out it probably had ties to one of the mob families in the tri-state area or even the crooked governor. And then, someone broke into my house and strangled me.”
“You tried to do the right thing, and sometimes it backfires, but the good thing is you tried to do right, something many other people would have ignored,” I told her. “What do you plan on doing now?”
“Warrick…” she looked away, fingers tight on her lap. “Maybe it’s best if I leave. I don’t want to be a threat to your family.”
I stared at her, dumbfounded that she thought that. “Zoe, I just met with the vet. She told me that the bull Santos was riding was drugged with enough stuff to kill him, and we had to do it for them. Whoever is after you is after my people, too, and believe me, I don’t let this shit go easily.”
“Which is precisely why I should leave,” she said.
I scowled, “And do what? Keep running from pillar to post? What happens when you have nowhere else to run to, Zoe? What then? They’ll keep coming after you, and chances are, one day, you won’t be able to outrun, outthink, outmaneuver, or overcome them.”
I reached out and slid my fingers into her hair. “You’re not going anywhere. Do you hear? Don’t fucking say that.”
“I…okay,” she gasped. “I don’t really understand what…”
I put my forehead against hers, wishing I knew how to say everything without fucking up what we had in progress. “We’ll figure it out, Zoe. We’ll find a way out of this.”
She swallowed and nodded to the box with the ear. “What are we going to do about that?”
I looked at it. “Take a picture of it and send it to whoever is your handler. Then, ask them to dig into Jake O’Hara. I want to know what his financials look like.”
“Why?”
“Remember when I said that the Draytons have their sticky fingers into every town from New York to California?” I said. “I learned today he owes the Draytons money, and since they were in New York when he got the loan, I am wondering who else he might owe money to. He might be in bed with these people who want to kill you.”
Zoe shook her head. “Warrick, that is a very big leap. It sounds insane.”
“Insane is what we have to go on now,” I replied. “I know it’s a long shot, but nothing is too little to try. So, text your handler about the ear and ask them to look into their people too. We don’t know where the leak is coming from.”
I held the box while she took out her phone, took the picture, and sent it in with the message I told her to write.
Ten seconds later, a text came back in, A team is coming to you by tomorrow night. We’ll look into the men too.
Dropping the phone, she leaned onto me and pressed her face onto my shoulder. “I just want this to be over, Warrick.”
“Give it time, baby.” I held her. “It will.”