Christmas at Cardwell Ranch. B.J. Daniels

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      Chapter Two

      The hair stood up on the back of Lily’s neck as she got out of her SUV and walked toward the gaping front door.

      “Mia?” she called as she carefully peered in. She could hear music playing inside the condo. Mia’s unit was on the end, and it appeared that whoever was staying in the adjacent one wasn’t home.

      Lily touched the door. It creaked the rest of the way open. From the doorway, she had a view of the stairs. One set went up, the other down.

      “Mia?” she called over the music. No answer as she carefully stepped in.

      She’d only gone a few steps up the stairs when she saw what appeared to be a fist-size ball of cotton roll across the floor on the breeze coming in the open door behind her.

      One more step and she saw dozens of white balls of cotton. Her heart began to pound. Another step and she saw what was left of the living room sofa cushions.

      The condo looked as if it had been hit by a storm that had wreaked havoc on the room. The sofa cushions had been shredded, the stuffing now moving haphazardly around the room. Lamps lay broken in pieces of jagged glass shards on the wooden floor. A chair had been turned over, the bottom ripped out. Nothing in the room looked as if it had weathered the storm that had blown through here.

      Who would do such a thing? Why would they? Lily fumbled out her cell phone as she backed down the stairs, her heart hammering against her rib cage. What if whoever had done this was still in the condo?

      “I need to report a break-in,” she said the moment she reached her SUV and was safely inside. She kept her eyes on the open doorway. When the dispatcher at the local marshal’s office answered, she hurriedly gave her name and the address.

      “Is the intruder still there?”

      “I don’t know. I only went just inside the door.”

      “Where are you now?”

      “I’m outside. I don’t know where the owner of the condo is. I’m worried about her.”

      “Can you wait in a warm place?”

      “Yes. I’m in my vehicle and watching the condo.”

      “Please stay there until law enforcement arrives.”

      * * *

      MARSHAL HUD SAVAGE was on duty when the call came in. He’d just been up on the mountain on a disturbance call. All day he’d felt as if he were moving in a fog. A cop friend of his from the academy had been killed two nights ago. He was still in shock.

      Paul Brown’s death, on top of what had happened to Hud’s family last spring, had left him shaken. In April, he’d let a dangerous woman come into his home. Hud’s wife and children had almost been killed.

      He was a marshal. He should have seen what was right in front of his eyes. He would never forgive himself. Worse, the incident really had him questioning if he had the instincts anymore for this job.

      When he’d heard that his friend Paul had been murdered just forty miles away in Bozeman, he’d been ready to throw in the towel.

      “I’m running scared,” he’d told his wife, Dana.

      She’d hugged him and tried to persuade him that none of what had happened to their family was his fault. “I was the one who was so excited to have a cousin I’d never met come stay with us. You saw that I was happy and ignored things you wouldn’t have under any other circumstances.”

      “I’m a marshal, Dana. There is no excuse for what happened last April. None.”

      Now as he turned into the condo subdivision in the pines, he tried to push everything but this latest call out of his mind. More and more, though, he wasn’t sure he deserved to be wearing this star.

      As he pulled up, a young brunette got out of her SUV and stood hugging herself against the cold snowy night. A break-in this time of year was unusual. Normally this sort of thing happened during off-season when there were fewer people around.

      “Are you the one who made the call?” he asked as he got out of his patrol pickup.

      She introduced herself as Lily McCabe.

      “Ace’s sister,” he said with a nod.

      “Sometimes I forget how small a community Big Sky is,” she said, not looking in the least bit happy about the prospect that everyone knew her business.

      Gossip traveled fast in the canyon. Hud had heard something about Ace’s sister being left at the altar. He couldn’t imagine any sane man leaving this woman.

      “Wait in your vehicle while I take a look inside,” he told her. But as he headed for the open front door, he saw that she was still standing outside as if too nervous to sit and wait.

      At the door, he pulled his weapon and stepped in, even though he doubted the burglar was still inside. The condo had been ransacked in a way that surprised him. This was no normal break-in. Nor was it a simple case of vandalism. Whoever had done this was looking for something and was determined to destroy everything in his path if he didn’t find it.

      He moved carefully through the upper floor, then the lower one, before he returned to the woman waiting outside.

      “Is she...”

      He shook his head. “No sign of anyone. I’ve called for backup. Until they get here, can we talk in your vehicle?”

      She nodded and climbed behind the wheel. She’d left the SUV running, so it was warm inside. He couldn’t help noticing how neat and clean the interior was as he pulled out his notebook. “Whose condo is it?”

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