This had been a bad one, though. An IED had thrown him into the air and he’d landed poorly, breaking his femur on top of the damage done to his pelvis by the explosion. The doctor had suggested age might be an issue. A twenty-two-year old healed faster than a man closing in on forty, he’d said with a shrug. Gabe knew that, at thirty-six, he was close to aging out of active duty with his Army Ranger unit. But damn it, he wasn’t ready to hang it up yet!
He’d tightened his legs in a signal to his gelding and gripped the rope in a gloved hand to start swinging it, when his partner waved him over to the side of the temporary corral.
Boyd Chaney rested one booted foot on a lower bar and his forearms on the top one. “If you’re hurting, take a break.”
Gabe stared expressionlessly at his friend. “What makes you think I hurt?”
“I know you,” Boyd said with a shrug.
He did. They’d served together for a decade and become best friends. On recent deployments, Gabe had missed Boyd, who had been shot and crushed beneath his jeep when it rolled two years ago. He’d spent the next year in rehab and conditioning, trying to achieve the state of fitness required for their elite ranger unit, but had finally accepted that he’d never pass the physical. Unwilling to accept a desk or teaching job, he’d retired to the Oregon cattle and cutting horse ranch the two men had bought together with an eye to the future.
“I can manage,” Gabe said now, tersely, and reined his horse back into the melee. Even over the bellowing cattle, he heard Chaney call after him.
“Stubborn bastard.”
Yeah, so? Since that was the working definition of a man tough enough to make it as a spec-ops soldier, Gabe didn’t bother responding. He’d make it back. He told himself that every day. Two, three more months, tops. But right now he could contribute here on the ranch. A little pain had never stopped him before, and it wouldn’t now.
* * *
“I’LL BE THERE in ten minutes,” Detective Risvold said.
“No!” Trina was in her office, seizing the chance to make the call between patients. In the past week, Chloe had made enough progress that Trina felt obligated to report that there was hope she’d soon be able to talk about what she’d seen.
Trina was thankful she’d been careful not to tell either of the investigators who called her on a regular basis where she “stashed” Chloe during working hours. That had been Detective Deperro’s word. When he used it, Trina had almost said, Oh, when I’m not home, I keep her in the third drawer to the right of the sink but had managed to refrain. If either of the men possessed a sense of humor, she had yet to see it.
“What do you mean, no?” Risvold snapped. “She’s talking, and you know how much is riding on what she can tell us.”
“I wanted you to know she’s begun speaking.” Already regretting she’d made this call, Trina leaned on the word begun. “She’s not back to natural chattering, and if I even tiptoe toward asking about that morning, she goes silent again for hours. Anyway, how is a three-year-old’s description going to clinch anything for you? If I asked her to draw her father, it would be a stick figure. You do know that, don’t you? What little she can tell you would be useless.” She paused. “Unless you have a suspect?”
The answer was slow coming. “We’re looking at a possibility,” he said grudgingly. “Several 911 calls had come in from that neighborhood in the week before the attack on the Keifs. Someone may have been casing houses.”
“But you told me nothing was taken.”
“The guy may not have had robbery on his mind. He might have been a nutcase looking for the right opportunity.”
Making it a random crime. It happened, of course, but rarely. So rarely she had trouble buying it now. “Do you even have a good description of him?”
“One of the homes he wandered around had security cameras. We have footage. If we have confirmation from the girl about what he looks like...”
Her eyes narrowed. The girl? What was with these guys? Were they deliberately trying not to see Chloe as a real person? Maybe cops had to do that, because keeping an emotional distance was healthy for them, but she didn’t like it. “So you’d arrest him if she says the man had brown hair and brown eyes, and that matches the camera footage. Even though half the men in Sadler meet that description.”
More silence. There were undoubtedly things he wasn’t telling her, but...
“From what I understand, you didn’t recover any weapons or meaningful trace evidence.”
“No weapons, but we have a wealth of fingerprints and hairs we can match to the killer once we have him.”
Usually he said “or killers.” Had he become enamored of the idea of the wandering nutjob? And unless, say, they’d found a hair in the blood, she wasn’t convinced. The Keifs probably entertained. Chloe’s six-year-old brother had undoubtedly had friends in and out, the friends’ parents there to pick them up and drop them off. Maybe in the kitchen to have a cup of coffee. However tidy the house, there were bound to be hairs or fingerprints or whatever that didn’t belong to family members.
But investigating was up to the two detectives. Her obligation was to protect Chloe.
“I’m sorry,” she said firmly. “She’s not ready. I wanted you aware that she has begun to speak, that’s all. When I’m sure she can handle it, I’ll let you know.”
They sparred some more, with her the winner—although she wasn’t so sure she would have been if either investigator knew how to lay his hands on Chloe while Trina was tied up with her patients.
* * *
TRINA AWAKENED WITH a start. Her phone must be ringing, she thought blearily as she reached out to grope for it on the bedside table. If that annoying Detective Risvold was calling again—
Except...did she smell smoke? With returning consciousness, she realized the shrill scream wasn’t the phone. A fire alarm downstairs had been set off, and suddenly the one in the hall up here began to squeal, too.
Trina shot up to a sitting position, fear punching her in the belly. Her eyes watered, and when she inhaled again, she bent forward coughing. There was a sharp undertone to the smell that she knew she ought to recognize.
Chloe!
Trina grabbed her phone and dropped to the floor. She crawled faster than she’d known she could to the door and into the hall. Even in the dark, she could tell the smoke was thicker here, and she heard the roar of fire. Heat radiated from the staircase, and when she turned her head, she saw flame burning up the wall.
No escape that way.
She crawled into Chloe’s room and kicked the door shut behind her. Block the crack at the bottom. She’d read that advice before. A door could slow the flames.
Nothing she could use lay in easy reach. Like Trina, Chloe seemed to be obsessively tidy by nature, which meant no dirty clothes strewed the floor. Trina gave it up temporarily and pushed herself up. Heart beating wildly, she hit the light switch, but nothing happened. Then she ran to the bed and shook the small figure that formed a lump beneath the covers.
“Chloe! Wake up!”
A snuffling sound was her only answer—and if anything Chloe drew herself into a tighter ball.
Trina yanked back the bedcovers. “The house is on fire.” Somehow she kept her voice calm. “We have to get out.”
The three-year-old sat up. “I don’t know how to get out,” she whispered, and then jerked. “Look!”
Trina