Midnight Rider Read online

  But Melanie already hated Brit so she’d be coming into this ready for a fight.

  Melanie looked straight at Brit, her eyes shooting daggers. “So nice of you to come by and chat this morning, Detective.”

  “I am just here to talk, Melanie. I’m sorry we got off to such a bad start last night, but sarcasm isn’t going to help.”

  “Sorry. I must have forgotten my manners. Prison does that to a lady. So let’s get down to business. Exactly what crime are you trying to pin on me this time?”

  “You mean other than you pulling a gun on me last night and threatening to kill me?”

  “You were stalking me in the dark, behind my own house. I feared for my life.”

  “I wasn’t stalking you. I simply checked to see if a woman roaming around a cemetery at night was in trouble.”

  “You were there because you know I should keep my word and come after you. You turned that jury against me with all your talk of my options. Well, let me set the record straight, Detective. When you live with a man as rich and powerful as Richard Crouch, there are no options.”

  “You mean no options that wouldn’t leave you broke.”

  “You have no idea what it was like married to a man like Richard. Cross him in any way and you pay. Verbal abuse. Psychological abuse. Mental abuse. There’s no end to the ways he could torment you.”

  All of which Melanie had detailed to the jury from the stand.

  “You’re right, Melanie. I can only imagine what he put you through. Flaunting the fact that he was involved with a much younger woman. Knowing it was only a matter of time before he divorced you. A lot of women would break under that kind of pressure.”

  “There were always other women.”

  “He must have promised that would never happen again when he left his second wife for you.”

  “Lies. Every word out of his mouth was a lie. He twisted things around, put words in my mouth, just the way you do, Detective. He deserved to die.” Her voice rose with rage, but the venom in her eyes suggested the fury was directed at Brit and not her murdered husband.

  “I didn’t convict you, Melanie. All I did was give the evidence to the prosecution. I had nothing to do with the trial.”

  “You had everything to do with it. Your testimony was the one that swayed the jury. I had them in my hands before that. They believed my desperation, understood that Richard had made me an emotional prisoner. They would have known I needed counseling, not a prison sentence.”

  “If you really feel that way, I can see why you wanted me dead.”

  “I wanted you dead all right. More than anything in the world I wanted to see you dead. I lay awake night after night thinking of how I’d kill you when I was free.”

  “I’m sorry you felt that way. I was only doing my job. I can’t believe you wanted me dead so badly that you’re willing to go back to prison.”

  “I don’t. And that’s the only reason you’re still alive, Brit Garner. I would rather die than live behind bars. So stay away from me. I paid my debt to this hypocritical society and I’m moving on, leaving you and Texas and every memory of Richard far behind.”

  “Is that what you told Clive Austin before you killed him?”

  Melanie’s muscles visibly tensed, the veins in her neck and forehead cording and turning a vivid blue. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know a Clive Austin.”

  “I think you do, Melanie, and it would go much better for you if you tell the truth. Were you in Houston this week?”

  Melanie jumped from her chair and repeatedly beat her fist against the table. “I know what you’re doing, Detective. I want a lawyer. I’m not saying another word until I get one.”

  Garcia stepped back into the room. “That’s enough, Melanie. You can hire a lawyer, but the only charge against you right now is for breaking your probation by carrying a firearm. If you have anything else to confess, you’d be wise to do it now and hope for leniency.”

  “Go to hell, both of you. And when you get there, Brit, say hello to Richard for me.”

  * * *

  CANNON STOPPED IN front of the old cemetery where they’d encountered Melanie last night. It looked more deteriorated than spooky in the bright light of day.

  Not that he’d been scared of ghosts since the Halloween he was five and one had jumped out at him from behind a tree. Even then, he’d kicked the older kid in the shins before he’d run away.

  Actually, he’d never been afraid of much in his life, though he had a healthy respect for what a bull could do to a body given half a chance.

  But he’d had a crash course in fear the past few days. One truth he’d learned firsthand was that it didn’t always come from the outside. Some of it spewed up straight from the gut.

  Like the fear of becoming a father when you had no idea how to begin and no time to prepare. The anxiety wasn’t just about him but also for Kimmie.

  Talk about getting a raw deal from the get-go. The infant’s mother had been murdered. Her father might turn out to the worst choice of dad ever. Well, the second-worst candidate. Surely R.J. would top the list.

  But the most pressing terror centered on Brit. It bucked around inside Cannon with such force that he hated having her out of his sight for a second. Even now, when he knew she was with Sheriff Garcia, he worried.

  All it took was one second of opportunity to slit someone’s throat, the way someone had killed Clive. The way someone had attempted to kill Brit.

  The fact that she was a trained police officer and insisted she could protect herself did little to lessen his apprehension. He’d been going crazy uselessly sitting around the Dry Gulch. That’s why he’d driven out to the cemetery. He figured the police had already acted on information from Brit and checked out the freshly dug mound of dirt, but he might as well make sure.

  This time instead of walking around the church, he walked through it, sidestepping broken hunks of concrete and a chunk of the decaying outer walls. The roof was completely gone. The lonely spire was all that was left to beckon visitors to a deserted graveyard.

  He stooped to pick up a small broken piece of pottery. He had no idea what it had been, but the remaining shape would work for scooping up loose dirt.

  Not as good as a shovel, but it would do. He slipped it into his pocket and made his way to the overgrown graveyard.

  It took him ten minutes to find the freshly dug plot in the maze of cracked and crumbling headstones and aged monuments. He kicked most of the dirt away with the heel of his boot then stooped over and scooped until he reached what he thought was a small box.

  When his fingers felt the edges, he realized it wasn’t a box but a large book. He freed it from the mound and brushed off the remaining dirt with his hand. He was holding a photograph album.

  Odd that Melanie Crouch would come to a deserted graveyard at night to bury pictures—unless they were more of the sickening photos Clive Austin had taken of Sylvie after he’d stabbed and killed her.

  Cannon opened the book and skimmed the pages. It was a wedding album.

  He recognized the bride at once, though Melanie was years younger. By anyone’s standards, she’d been beautiful. Young. Shapely.

  The bridal gown looked like one of those extravagant concoctions that you saw on the covers of gossip magazines. But the necklace was the real showstopper. A man cold buy a small plane for what that must have cost.

  The marriage between Melanie and Richard Crouch had had obviously started off with a bang. It had ended with his murder by the bride looking at him in the picture like he was Greek god that had sprung to life in Armani clothing.

  “Police. Put your hands over your head. Try anything funny and you can have your own grave.”

  Cannon did as ordered. The album fell to the ground, bounced off the pottery chunk and landed facedown. He spun around and looked into the barrel of a .45.

  “Stand still and keep your hands above your head.”

  The man giving the order had a de
puty sheriff patch sewed onto the arm of his khaki shirt. He stooped down and picked up the album.

  “This is a wedding album,” the deputy said, as if this were some kind of joke. “You’re robbing graves for someone else’s wedding pictures. What kind of freak are you?”

  “I didn’t rob a grave. I just unearthed the album from that mound of dirt.”

  “Are you the one who buried it there?”

  “No. I’m Cannon Dalton. I was here with Detective Brittany Garner from the Houston Police Department last night and we spotted the fresh-dug mound.”

  “And you came back to dig it up?”

  “Right. I thought it might contain evidence in a murder case. This is a complicated story.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “You can call Sheriff Garcia now. He’ll verify what I’m saying.”

  “You got some ID on you?”

  “If you’ll let me get my wallet without shooting me.”

  “Let’s see it.” He finally retuned his automatic to his holster.

  Cannon showed him his Texas driver’s license. The deputy took only a second to check it out.

  “You must be R.J.’s son—the bull rider.”

  Cannon nodded.

  “I saw you ride once at the Dallas Rodeo. You won first place and you stayed on a bone-buster of a bull to do it.”

  “Thanks.” So now they were old friends. Cannon looked around. “How did you get out here, anyway? I don’t see a vehicle.”

  The deputy spit a stream of brown tobacco into the grass. “My horse is tethered over at the old Stanton spread. I live down the road so decided to ride over when the sheriff asked me to keep an eye on the house today.

  “I saw you poking through the church and the graveyard and figured you were up to no good. It was quiet, but you still would have heard me if you hadn’t been so engrossed in that album.”

  “Probably so.”

  “You say you were here with a Houston detective last night.”

  “That’s right.”

  “That album wouldn’t have anything to do with Melanie Crouch, would it? You know she was a Stanton before she married that rich Houston doctor.”

  “Did you know her when she was Melanie Stanton?”

  “Nope. Her parents were both dead and she was long gone before I moved to Oak Grove. My wife and I bought a little land and built us a house out here after she retired from teaching school. Got tired of city life.”

  “Then you haven’t seen Melanie since she got out of prison?”

  “I’ve seen her coming and going. That’s it. Just as well. Didn’t take her long to get back into trouble.”

  “Did you hear that from the sheriff?”

  “No, but I’m supposed to keep everyone away from the house until he can get a search warrant to go in and look for evidence. That spells trouble to me.”

  “Guess it does.

  “If you’re going to call the sheriff, I’d appreciate your doing it now,” Cannon said. “I need to get back to town. In fact, I can take the album to him.”

  “That’s okay. You can go anytime, but I think I’d best hold on to the album and give it to Sheriff Garcia myself.”

  “Whatever you think best.”

  Cannon had done what he came for, verified that Melanie had not been out there to bury evidence last night but her wedding pictures. He understood the act considering how the marriage turned out.

  But that still left them with no solid evidence against Melanie Crouch. Clive Austin might be dead, but the world was full of lowlifes who’d do anything for a buck—even murder.

  Cannon’s phone rang. He checked the caller ID. It was Brit.

  “All finished here,” Brit said. “If you still want to drive to Plano, you can pick me up at the sheriff’s office in Oak Grove.”

  “Works for me. How did the interrogation go?”

  “Well enough that I still think Melanie Crouch is a very strong suspect. I’ll fill you in when I see you.”

  “I’m on my way.” And he was not letting Brit out of his sight again until he was sure she was safe.

  But she’d never really be out of danger. She was a cop. She’d walk right back into danger again. And again. And again.

  * * *

  “YOU’LL NEED THIS,” Cannon said. He held Brit’s jacket for her as she slipped into it. Then he reached to the backseat and grabbed the sandwiches they’d bought at an Oak Grove coffee shop. Brit could have skipped lunch, but Cannon had insisted on food.

  They’d decided to get the sandwiches to go. The place was entirely too crowded and noisy for private conversation. A small park two blocks from the sheriff’s office seemed ideal.

  They trekked up a slight incline and chose a picnic table in the shade of a giant oak. The only other people in the park were a young mother and her two children and they were yards away playing on a bright red tubular slide.

  “Turkey-and-avocado wrap. This has to be yours,” Cannon said as he pulled out her wrapped sandwich and handed it to her. “Real men eat real sandwiches.”

  Brit took one look at his oversize sub and shuddered. “You won’t even be able to get your mouth around that.”

  “Watch me.”

  He took a huge bite out of the sandwich, proving her wrong. She lifted their covered cups of hot coffee from the bag and set them on the table next to them.

  Cannon delved into the rest of his sandwich like a starving man. She enjoyed watching him eat. Not that there was a lot about Cannon she didn’t like. A definite contrast to the way she’d felt about him before they’d met.

  That had only been three days ago and yet she felt more attached to him than anyone she knew. It wasn’t just the kiss or the way he made her senses strum with awareness. It was the way he’d looked holding Kimmie this morning—nervous, awkward, fatherly. The way he’d come to her rescue at the hospital with no questions asked. The way he’d gone tramping through a dark graveyard with her. The way he’d saved her life.

  “I’m all but convinced Melanie is the one who paid Clive to kill me and then killed him when he failed,” she said, determined to get her mind off her growing attraction for Cannon.

  “So you said when I picked you up. How about some details?”

  Brit went over Melanie’s response to the questions and then described her reactions when the subject of Clive Austin came up.

  “She claimed she’d never heard of him, but her actions and facial expressions said differently. And when I asked her about being in Houston, she demanded a lawyer. It’s not the solid evidence we’ll need to hold her in jail, but hopefully we’ll have that soon. Sheriff Garcia has already requested a warrant to search that old house she’s staying in.”

  “I heard.”

  “From whom?”

  “A very interesting tobacco-chewing deputy who caught me digging up our mysterious mound in the graveyard.”

  “When were you there?”

  “When you called me to come and pick you up.”

  “You are a constant surprise, Cannon Dalton. You should think about becoming a detective.”

  “No, I’ll take mad bulls over crazy criminals any day.”

  She listened as he told about finding the buried wedding album.

  “Not the evidence I was hoping for,” Brit admitted, “but it is very interesting.”

  Cannon sipped his coffee. “Seems like a lot of trouble to go to when she could have just tossed it in the trash.”

  “But burying is more symbolic,” Brit said. “It gives closure, a way of putting that part of your life behind you forever.”

  “I’d say the closure part is not working if Melanie’s still out to kill you.”

  “It does seem a bit odd when you think of it like that, but no one has ever accused Melanie of being rational.”

  “How much evidence do you need to keep her in jail with no chance of bail?”

  “A murder weapon. An explicit connection to Clive. An eye witness. A confession. Any of those would go a long
way.”

  “They don’t make this easy, do they?”

  “Innocent until proven guilty.” Brit dropped the remainder of her sandwich into the empty bag along with both their napkins. “Let’s not talk about Melanie or Clive or my attack for the next five minutes. I only want pleasant conversation and a walk down that bike trail that cuts through the trees while I finish my coffee.”

  “Okay.” Cannon stood and tugged her to a standing position. “You pick the topic.”

  “Let’s talk about you.”

  “Where shall we start?”

  Brit dropped their trash into a nearby container as they started toward the trail. “How about when you were a kid?”

  “I thought you wanted pleasant.”

  “Did you have a terrible childhood?”

  “Not in the beginning.”

  “Then let’s start there. How old were you when you left the Dry Gulch Ranch?”

  “I’m not sure I ever made it to the Dry Gulch, at least not once I was out of my mother’s womb.”

  “Your mother divorced R.J. that quickly.”

  “That’s the way she tells it.”

  “What happened?”

  “She went into labor early. R.J. was off on a drunk and no one could find him. She decided that she didn’t want to be married to an alcoholic so she called an attorney from the hospital and started divorce proceedings. At least, that’s the way she told it. And if you’d ever met my mother, you’d know she was impulsive enough to do just that.”

  “That must have been terrible for her. A single parent with a new baby.”

  “Looking back, I’m sure she didn’t let it get her down. My mother was the most upbeat, outgoing, optimistic woman I’ve ever met. Our house was always full of friends. Men and women. Mom loved music and dancing and had boundless energy. The other kids always liked to hang out at my house to just to be around her.”

  “Who wouldn’t?”

  “Did I mention that she was also good-looking—kind of a young Meg Ryan only her hair was red instead of blond. I didn’t realize how cute she was at the time, of course. She was just Mom then. Luckily I have pictures of the two of us together going back to the time I was a baby.”