Smoky Ridge Curse. Paula Graves

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      Brand sighed, pushing his mug of coffee away from him. “That’s a long story. And, as these things do, it started with a woman.”

      “HER NAME WAS Elizabeth Vaughn. U.S. Attorney out of Abingdon, Virginia. I met her at a University of Virginia alumni function, and it turned out we had a lot in common.” Brand watched Delilah’s face, trying to gauge her reaction. But her features were as inscrutable as a mask. “We started seeing each other whenever she was in D.C. on business. She’s how I came to learn the name Wayne Cortland.”

      “It was one of her cases?”

      “Peripherally. She’d been investigating militias in the Appalachians and discovered that most of them had connections to meth dealers in the area. And most of both groups—militia and drug dealers—had done business with Wayne Cortland at some point.”

      “So you think Cortland’s part of the redneck mafia?”

      “A little less redneck, a little more mafia. He actually runs a legitimate lumber mill in a town called Travisville, near the Virginia/Tennessee border.”

      “I’ve heard of Travisville,” Delilah said. “They have a bluegrass festival. My father used to take us there. At least, that’s why we went. He went to score drugs until he figured out how to make his own.”

      She always seemed so clinical when she talked about her father and his drug problems. Even when she’d described escaping the burning rubble of the house her father had blown up in a meth-cooking accident, she’d stuck to the facts, never talking about how she’d felt, at the tender age of seventeen, to lose her father and her home to his criminal stupidity.

      How had she coped with her homelessness? With her injured brother and her drunk of a mother? How had she come through unscathed to earn a scholarship to a good college and forge a whole new life for herself?

      Had she come through unscathed? He didn’t see how it was possible. There had always been dark places in Delilah he’d never been able to reach.

      Or maybe he just hadn’t tried hard enough.

      “Cortland’s lumber business is legit,” he said. “But Liz was sure he laundered drug money through it. She just hadn’t figured a way to prove it.”

      “So she brought you in on it?”

      “Peripherally. She suspected he might be funding some meth mechanics in the mountains who then funded the white-power militia groups that gave the meth dealers their own army. She wanted me to see if I could get the domestic-terrorism task force involved in trying to tie those militias—and the meth cookers—to Cortland and his business.”

      “Is he running the meth labs or just laundering the money?”

      “I think he’s running them. Liz and I were able to talk to a few people who’d defied Cortland. They live in terror because apparently Cortland’s built this network of cookers and militia, and he keeps them in line with lethal threats. He’s already shown he’s willing to kill anyone who tries to cross him. We just can’t come up with the proof, because even the people who dared to talk to us are too terrified to testify against him.”

      “Why didn’t you go to Liz for help instead of coming here?”

      “Liz is dead.”

      His flat pronouncement elicited the first emotion he’d seen out of Delilah—a visible recoil. “I’m sorry. Was it Cortland?”

      “The FBI thinks it was me.”

      Her brow furrowed. “You? They think you killed someone you were involved with? Why?”

      “We weren’t involved anymore. Not romantically.” He shook his head, closing his fingers around the coffee mug to warm them. “The relationship never got very far—we were better suited as friends than lovers. But that didn’t keep me from being the prime suspect when she was murdered. See, I was the one who found her.”

      “Oh, no.”

      “I was in Abingdon to meet with her about some new information she’d gotten from an informant. When I got to her house, I found the door unlocked. She wasn’t answering the door, so I let myself in.”

      “And you found her?”

      He nodded, trying to put the scene out of his head. So much blood—

      “You didn’t have an alibi?”

      “She was still alive. The shooting must have just happened. I tried to stop the bleeding—” He swallowed hard, remembering the desperate fight to keep Liz alive. “There was just too much damage. But see, it had just happened. The timeline was too close. How could I prove I wasn’t the one who’d done it?”

      “Surely they checked you for gunshot residue. Checked your gun.”

      “She was shot with her own gun. And the killer wore gloves—they were lying next to the gun. No way to prove they didn’t belong to me, although they can’t prove they did, either.”

      “This is crazy.”

      “Tell me about it.”

      “All I heard was that you were suspected of espionage. Nobody talked about murder.”

      “The police haven’t charged me with murder yet. Their focus was on what they’d found on Liz’s computer.”

      Tension drew lines in Delilah’s brow. “Which was what?”

      “Emails from me, detailing our plan to frame Wayne Cortland for theft of nuclear material from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.”

      Delilah sat back in her chair with a thump. “Emails from you?”

      “Well, clearly, not from me. But whoever faked them knew what he was doing. I’d suspect me, too.”

      “Let me guess. Some of the militias had hooked up with anarchists?” Delilah didn’t sound surprised. Maybe she’d come across something similar in some of her work with Cooper Security.

      “We’d suspected all along that might be the case. When you’re determined to bring down all civil government, you don’t always care about the motives of your fellow travelers.” Brand shook his head. “I thought I’d taken all the necessary precautions to protect myself from being targeted. I wasn’t even working this case with Liz in an official capacity. But somehow Cortland figured it out.”

      “Liz must have known she was a target.”

      “Of course she did. She trusted the wrong person.”

      “You think someone betrayed her?”

      “I know someone did. There was no sign of a struggle in her apartment. The alarm wasn’t engaged. No sign of a break-in.”

      “So she let her killer into her apartment willingly.”

      Brand’s side was beginning to ache. He tried to ignore the pain but he couldn’t stop СКАЧАТЬ