Contents

       Cover

       Introduction

       Title Page

       About the Author

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

       Chapter Six

       Chapter Seven

       Chapter Eight

       Chapter Nine

       Chapter Ten

       Chapter Eleven

       Chapter Twelve

       Chapter Thirteen

       Chapter Fourteen

       Chapter Fifteen

       Chapter Sixteen

       Chapter Seventeen

       Chapter Eighteen

       Chapter Nineteen

       Extract

       Copyright

       Chapter One

      I’m not dead.

      The voice mail message caused Deputy Jax Crockett to freeze. He stabbed the replay button on his phone and listened to it again. Three words. That was it.

      But it felt as if a stick of dynamite had just gone off in his chest.

      Paige.

      Oh, mercy. It was his ex-wife, Paige.

      That was her voice, all right. He was sure of it. But it couldn’t be her because he’d buried her a year ago.

      Jax listened to the message again. And again. Then, he checked the name and number of the caller.

      Unknown.

      Which meant the person might have blocked him from seeing it. But it’d come in a half hour earlier when he’d been on the back part of his ranch looking for a calf that’d strayed from the herd. No phone reception was back there, so the call had gone straight to voice mail.

      Was that fear he’d heard in her voice?

      Or maybe fear that someone else was pretending to feel?

      This had to be some kind of sick prank. That was it. Maybe someone who sounded like Paige.

      But his gut didn’t go along with that notion.

      He knew his ex-wife’s voice, and that’d been her on the other end of the line. Of course, that didn’t mean someone hadn’t used an old recording of her voice, perhaps piecing together words from other conversations to come up with that one sentence.

      I’m not dead.

      “You okay, boss?” he heard someone ask.

      Jax dragged his thoughts back to reality and noticed that one of his ranch hands, Buddy Martindale, was looking at him as if he’d lost his mind.

      Heck, maybe he had.

      After all, he was standing in the barn while he repeatedly punched the voice mail button on his phone.

      “Did anybody call the ranch in the past hour or so?” Jax asked him.

      Buddy lifted his cowboy hat enough to scratch his head, giving that some thought. “Not that I know of. Maybe you oughta check with Belinda, though.”

      Yes, Belinda Darby would know. His son’s nanny was inside the house, and since it was coming up on dinnertime, Belinda would be close to not only Jax’s son, Matthew, but also near the house phone. She would have been able to hear the line ringing in Jax’s home office, too, if someone had tried to reach him there.

      Someone like a dead woman.

      Get a grip.

      Paige had been murdered by the serial killer known as the Moonlight Strangler. And there had to be some reasonable explanation for the call.

      Jax handed off his horse’s reins to Buddy, something he wouldn’t normally do. Tending the horses was a task he enjoyed. Not today, though. Not after that message.

      There were a good thirty yards between the barn and the back porch, so while he made his way to the house, Jax listened to the recording again. Hearing