Hot on the Trail. Vicki Tharp

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СКАЧАТЬ grabbed a shower before joining the others at the big house for dinner. There were three empty chairs at the table, since the ranch’s regular hands, Alby and Santos, had made other plans for dinner on their day off.

      The air was thick with the aroma of brisket and beans and jalapeño corn bread as everybody at the long trestle table served themselves.

      He’d missed Lottie’s home-cooked meals since he’d joined the Marines, and after fueling himself on gas station coffee and fast food on the trip up, his mouth watered and his stomach grumbled.

      Lottie jumped up and gave him a hug. Her husband, Dale, stepped over, clapped him on the back, and gave him a firm handshake.

      “Hey, Mac.” Quinn made his way to the table and leaned down to give her a hug. Of all the people he admired most in the world, she topped the list. And adding icing to the cake, she’d given him her grandfather’s Harley when he’d gone off to boot camp.

      He received a perfunctory handshake from Hank—her husband, and Jenna’s father. In Hank’s eyes, Quinn had never been good enough for Jenna.

      And there had been many times in the past years that Quinn had agreed with him.

      Boomer punched Quinn on the bicep before introducing him to his wife, Sidney. Quinn had met her briefly years before. Before his Permanent Change of Station, PCS, to Okinawa, and before he’d made the mistake of asking Jenna to marry him.

      There wasn’t much about that trip to the ranch that he wished to remember.

      Across from them, beside Jenna, was a young girl around fourteen, give or take.

      “I’m Pepita,” the girl said with a wave of her hand and a toothy smile. “I belong to Sidney and Boomer.”

      Quinn gave her a wave back, but his smile might have faltered a bit as he tried to puzzle out how Sidney and Boomer had a kid that old when neither one of them had been parents, as far as he knew, the last time he’d seen them.

      “Pull up a chair,” Lottie said, as she and Dale returned to their seats at either end of the table. “You must be starved.”

      Jenna pulled out the chair on the other side of her, the way she used to when he’d worked at the ranch. By rote, his feet nearly took him there, but he chose the empty seat next to Mac instead.

      If he sat beside Jenna, it would feel too much like nothing had changed, when, in fact, nothing was remotely the same.

      Between fighting to save his career and Kurt’s death, piling relationship issues on top would only add to his unneeded stress.

      But Jenna had always been a pretty girl, and even if he wasn’t the man for her, that didn’t mean he couldn’t appreciate the beautiful woman sitting across from him.

      He helped himself to a full serving of brisket, drizzled it with gravy, and eyed Jenna over the top of the gravy boat. Okay, so “beautiful” was too generic of a word to describe her.

      With her brown hair pulled back in a low ponytail and dirt smeared on the cheek of her makeup-free face, when she looked at him with those green eyes, she had a way of making him feel like he was the only one in the world who mattered.

      Well, at least it had seemed that way to him. But that was a long time ago. He’d been a different man back then.

      Mac ribbed him with her elbow. “Dale was talking to you.”

      Quinn glanced up, feeling the burn as his face flushed. “Sorry.”

      “I wanted to offer our condolences. Kurt wasn’t one to invite people in, but he seemed like a good man. We’re all sorry about his passing.”

      The bite of corn bread must have soaked up all of his saliva because the mouthful refused to go down. His throat bobbed painfully. Quinn stared at his plate, unable to meet Dale’s gaze and maintain his composure. “Thank you,” he muttered around the bite of food. When he managed to choke the morsel down, he added, “and you’re right. Kurt was one of the good guys.”

      The light outside had faded, and almost everybody’s plates had been scraped clean when he heard the crunch of gravel beneath tires.

      “Must be the sheriff,” Lottie said as she began clearing the table.

      Quinn stood, taking his and Mac’s empty plate to the sink and stepped out onto the porch. Jenna flipped on the outside light, and joined him.

      After introductions were made, the sheriff gathered a kit the size of a briefcase and followed them back to the hay barn to collect the evidence.

      Carefully, the sheriff cut the bloody hay free, placed it in a bag, and labeled it. “We can run tests, but unfortunately since the scene has already been released, the courts could consider the evidence tainted.”

      At that point, a trial was the farthest thing from Quinn’s mind. “How long will the results take?” Quinn asked.

      “I have to send this to the lab. Depends on how backed up they are. Could be a few days or so for blood type match. And weeks or months for any DNA results.”

      “Brilliant.” He fisted his hands at his sides to keep from wrapping them around the sheriff’s neck and shaking some sense of urgency in the man.

      “It’s out of my hands, son. This isn’t an episode of CSI. Real cases aren’t resolved in an hour.”

      “I don’t expect an hour, but sometime this century would be nice.”

      The sheriff gave him a hard, level look, but Quinn refused to back down.

      “We should climb down before we lose all of the light,” Jenna said, putting a hand on the back of Quinn’s elbow as she urged him ahead of her.

      By the time they’d made it out of the hay barn, the sun had set behind the Rockies, the ridges backlit in broad swatches of red and gold and fiery orange.

      Nearing the sheriff’s pickup, Jenna asked, “Did you find anything else with Kurt’s body?”

      Quinn stiffened, knowing where Jenna was going with the question, but he was at a loss to stop her without the sheriff noticing.

      “Like what?” St. John asked.

      “Like a g—”

      Desperate, Quinn kicked a boot out in front of her as she stepped, and caught her around her bicep with his hand to keep her from hitting the ground.

      “Gum,” Quinn filled in, as Jenna stumbled. Gum? Seriously, that’s the best you could come up with?

      Jenna cut him a look. Though the fading light masked the details of her expression, he figured it could freeze ice. In the Mojave Desert. At high noon.

      “What would gum have to do with anything?”

      Quinn’s brain scrambled for an answer that didn’t sound completely lame. His heart rate climbed. One beat. Two. Three.

      “Quinn was telling me Kurt chewed mint gum a lot when he was trying to stay away from the drugs,” Jenna said. “We just—”

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