Sylvie spotted her friend in a white down coat and matching hat and scarf, her long red hair whipped a bit in the cold wind. She wore a headset that had to be connected to Jaxon. Sylvie headed Roni’s way, but as she approached, she noticed out of the corner of her eye someone else approaching Roni.
The stranger!
He had no business being behind the fence.
His ice-blue eyes targeting Roni dead-on said otherwise.
The race became immediately forgotten. Sylvie reached for her weapon. “Stop right there!” She raised her voice to be heard over the motors.
The unidentified man came to an abrupt halt.
Sylvie took three determined steps, her hand curled around her gun’s handle. A bang from the track echoed through the valley, bouncing off the surrounding White Mountains and back again.
The man flew forward at her and fell to his knees. Sylvie withdrew her gun and took aim. The crowds in the grandstand inhaled and shouted at the same time. Had they all seen her draw her weapon?
Or was something else going down on the track that claimed their attention?
A quick glance showed a mass of cars piling up and flipping. Number eleven’s wheels were overturned.
Jaxon!
Sylvie wanted to run to him but the stranger now lay facedown on the snow, blood spatter around him, stark in its rich contrast of dark on light, like the man himself.
He was injured.
But how?
Torn between him and her son, Sylvie holstered her weapon and dropped to the stranger’s side. A hole in the arm of his leather coat showed where an object had entered his body. Something flying off the track?
She inspected at a closer range.
No. A bullet.
Sylvie took in the perimeter in short, jerky perusals for a shooter in the area.
No time. She had to first take care of the victim.
She lifted the man under his arms and dragged him behind a snow pile. A groan told her he was conscious.
“Sir, I’m Chief Sylvie Laurent. Can you tell me your name?” she yelled over the ensuing chaos around her.
“Ian Stone,” the man groaned and moved to turn.
“Stay still, Mr. Stone. I’m calling for help.” Sylvie reached for her radio.
“No!” The man raised his good hand. “No help.” He pushed himself to his knees. Blood seeped from his left shoulder, his other hand stretched across his wide chest to staunch the flow.
“Ian, I need to get you to the hospital. And you need to stay down. The shooter is still out there.”
He shook away from her grasp. “Help the drivers. Not me.” He stood up and mumbled, “I should have known they would take me out. I should have known this was too good to be true.” He half ran, half staggered to the fence exit. The alarmed crowd of spectators behind it swallowed him whole.
A war waged in Sylvie. She had to go after him. What if he bled out and died? She couldn’t have a murder in Norcastle. And a murder it would be. She knew a gunshot when she saw one. The crash had muffled the sound, and the mountains...
Sylvie looked to the lofty peaks overlooking the racetrack.
The mountains were hiding a killer. The marksman could be out there somewhere on Mount Randolph. He could go after Ian Stone again.
Sylvie hit her radio to call her team, but all emergency personnel were flooding the track to help the drivers, the kids.
The place she needed to be, too.
Jaxon.
Sylvie zeroed in on her son being lifted from his car, awake but limping, his pale blond hair that matched her own shielded his eyes, but he was talking. Her heart lodged in her throat as she watched him enter one of the ambulances opened and ready to whisk him off to the hospital. The police and paramedics had everything under control, and he was in good hands.
Sylvie stepped in the direction Ian Stone had staggered off in, the direction she was needed most.
Her conflicted steps turned to a full, determined run.
She’d known Ian Stone was trouble the second she’d laid eyes on him.
But apparently, someone else did, too.
* * *
Ian slammed the door of the studio apartment he’d rented the day before. Carrying a pharmacy bag, he put it between his teeth as he tore off his coat and dropped it to the wood floor of the old factory mill, now turned into living quarters. The brick building was one of many along the river in this old New England mill town—a place he supposedly had been born in thirty years ago, but hadn’t known existed until two weeks ago.
The bullet hole in his arm said someone wasn’t happy about him finding out.
Pain from his shoulder seared like an unrelenting burn. Of course it had to be his already injured arm. Two weeks ago he’d had surgery on his shoulder for a bad rotator cuff, an injury he’d had for years but left unrepaired for lack of funds. Working construction these past two years for Alex Sarno had finally given him enough to check himself into a hospital for the procedure.
But how would he pay for a gunshot wound?
The Spencer money perhaps? And not because he’d taken a bullet on their property. According to the guy who’d shown up in his hospital room after the surgery, their money was also his money.
All these years he had an inheritance to claim and never knew.
Thirty years ago, a car was pushed over the side of a mountain. The crash left two very rich parents dead and their three children orphans. Except when the smoke cleared and the blaze was extinguished, only two children were accounted for. Little eighteen-month-old Luke Spencer’s body had never been recovered.
Instead, he grew up across the country in a cabin in the Washington mountains, playing the unwanted son to Phil and Cecilia Stone.
Ian bit hard as he ripped off his green T-shirt, the words Sarno Construction scrawled across the front. His wound seeped blood, but not at an alarming rate. He would live to collect his inheritance and soon the T-shirts would read Sarno and Stone. Alex had already offered him a partnership. The idea of being a business owner was more than a dream come true. Things like this didn’t happen to Ian Stone, or Ian the Idiot as his father called him too many times to count.
But he wasn’t Ian Stone, if he believed the guy in his hospital room. He was the missing sibling, Luke Spencer.
Judging by the poor welcome home, however, his brother and sister didn’t want to share the wealth. But would they take another shot at him to see they didn’t have to?
Ian bounded around the sofa bed and pulled the blinds closed just in case. With his teeth he ripped the package of cleansing wipes open.
A bang on his door jerked him alert.
“Now’s not a good time!” he shouted. He hoped it was just the landlady, Mrs. Wilson or Wilton, or whatever. A busybody was what she was. So many questions. Where are you from, Mr. Stone? Do you have family in Norcastle, Mr. Stone? Perhaps I know them. What are their names?
“But at least she didn’t shoot me,” he muttered, then seethed when the alcohol splashed over his wound.
The door knocked again, harder.
“Go away!” he yelled, biting through the pain.
“Ian Stone, this is Police Chief Sylvie Laurent. I need you to open this door.”
The cop