“Are you sure? You’re a defense attorney. Hasn’t anyone you’ve defended ever gone to prison? Maybe held a grudge against you that they intended to settle when they got out? Or what about an angry victim, or their family, who felt like you helped a bad guy go free?”
She blew out a sigh. “Of course I’ve been threatened a few times, blamed by one side or the other whether my client has been convicted or gone free. As a cop, I imagine you’ve been threatened, too. Most of the time it’s just somebody blowing off steam.”
“Sometimes those aren’t empty threats. Think about it and see if you can think of some names for me to check out.”
She nodded and tucked a few loose strands of hair behind her ear. It was still the same pale blond color it had been when she was a girl. Still very curly.
“Did the guy with the hammer say anything to you?” Levi asked.
“He told me to get out of town or get buried here.”
“Get buried here, on this property? Is that what he meant?” Had she stumbled across someone illicitly using the house, doing something on the property that they wanted to remain undiscovered? There’d been talk recently of turning the house into a museum. Could someone want to sabotage that for some reason? Make people afraid to come up here?
“I don’t know what exactly he meant by his stupid threat,” she said irritably.
“Could you have crossed paths with him recently? Maybe you’d had a disagreement?”
“I’ve spent the last couple of days up here on the mesa, stopping in stores and cafés and different places, asking people if they knew or ever heard rumors about what happened to my dad. Nobody knew anything. It was all such a long time ago.” She shook her head and winced again. “What happened tonight probably doesn’t have anything to do with that. Maybe he’s just some dealer cooking meth in the woods around here.”
“Why are you conducting an investigation into your dad’s murder now?” Levi asked, feeling his heart speed up a little at the thought that the case might finally be solved. “Do you have some new information?”
“No new information. This is just something I’ve thought about doing for a long time. And now I finally have the chance to do it.”
Levi’s cop instinct told him she wasn’t telling him the whole truth, but this wasn’t the time to press. He heard the ambulance pull up into the driveway and convinced her to let a medic take a look at her.
By the time she’d been cleared, his officers had completed their search of the house and hadn’t found anyone hiding in there. He had one of them stay behind to take down basic contact information from Vanessa and make sure she got home safely. Then he grabbed a couple of flashlights from his SUV and had the other officer go with him to look for signs of the chase she’d described and to search for whatever evidence they could find.
He didn’t know what he expected to find, especially in the dark, but he knew he wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving until he’d done everything he could. Levi had experienced a rocky return to the United States after his years spent fighting overseas. When he’d finally made his way back to Torchlight, he’d become a police officer to give something back to his hometown and do something to help heal his soul. Protecting Vanessa and capturing the sick assailant who’d attacked her would help him fulfill both of those goals.
Maybe this weird attack was related to Josh Ford’s murder all those years ago. Maybe not.
“You have to tell your grandfather what happened to you tonight.”
“Of course I will.” Vanessa glanced over at the woman riding in the pickup truck’s passenger seat, Rosa Sandoval. Her husband, Pablo, had worked as a ranch hand alongside Vanessa’s grandfather for years.
When Vanessa’s grandparents started looking into buying property and turning it into a guest ranch for their working retirement, it naturally followed that they’d invite their best friends to join in the venture. Pablo and Rosa had jumped at the chance.
“I’m not trying to deceive Grandpa. I would never do that.” Vanessa downshifted her grandfather’s old truck when she came to a steep drop in the road. “It’s just that he’s finally gotten back to his normal sleeping pattern. It’s been eight months since Grandma Katherine passed away and for most of that time, I don’t think he slept more than two or three hours a night.”
“For a while there, he really was looking like something the cat dragged home,” Rosa agreed.
“Now that he’s finally back to his usual routine of lights out at eight at night and coffee in his cup by four the next morning, I don’t want to mess that up by having him worry about me tonight. He needs his rest.”
Rosa sighed loudly. “You have to tell him as soon as you get up tomorrow morning.”
“Yes, ma’am, I will. And I’ll call my mom and let her know what happened, too.”
Vanessa glanced over and offered her a smile. Rosa was a retired parole officer, which meant she could be tough when she needed to be. Just the kind of person Vanessa wanted alongside her on the ride home tonight.
With a borrowed phone from a patrolman, Vanessa had called to have her car towed into town so the tires could be replaced and the battery checked out. Then she’d called Rosa, at the time telling her only that she’d had car trouble and needed a ride back to the ranch.
Vanessa shifted gears again when they reached the foot of the mesa and drove back onto flat land. She’d wanted to do the driving because she’d thought it would help her feel more in control. So far, it hadn’t worked. The stuff of nightmares had just happened to her. A masked lunatic had tried to kill her. With a hammer.
Thank You, Lord, for protecting me.
A cold chill passed over the surface of her skin and she drew in a quivering breath.
Rosa reached forward and turned on the heater.
After a few seconds, warm air blew out, relaxing Vanessa’s tense muscles. In a way, it made things worse. Physically relaxing made her emotions start to loosen up, and she became more conscious of them. That was the last thing she wanted right now.
What she needed to do was toughen up and pull herself together. She’d done that as a kid when her father was murdered. And again, when her mother had gotten remarried to an abusive man and it had seemed like life was just one terrible thing happening after another. She’d gone on to hone that skill of tamping down her true emotions when she became a lawyer and needed to appear confident every time she stepped into a courtroom.
“I saw Levi Hawk while I was sitting in the truck waiting for you,” Rosa said. “He’s a very determined and thorough investigator.” Despite her retirement, Rosa still kept active ties to the law enforcement community.
“Good to know,” Vanessa said. He was handsome, too. Military-cut black hair. Intelligent dark eyes. Bronze skin. And a capable, calm demeanor. Not that any of that mattered.
Vanessa tapped her thumbs on the steering wheel, directing her thoughts back to the man who’d chased her tonight, trying to think of any hint at who he was or what his motive might be. She’d been threatened a few times during the course of her career, but never anything like this. She couldn’t imagine it was connected to her work back in Vegas. Her attacker had seemed intent on getting her away from here, specifically. Why would a client with a grudge care where she went?
“What I’m wondering is whether that guy knew you were going to be up on the Heaton property and was waiting for you,” Rosa said. “Or if you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time and stumbled across some creep who was desperate to scare