Christmas at Cardwell Ranch. B.J. Daniels
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when the sun caught on an object off to his right. Tag saw what looked like a branch sticking up out of the snow. Only there was something very odd about the branch. It was blue.
As he stepped closer, his heart leapt to his throat. It wasn’t a branch.
A hand, frosty in the morning sun, stuck up out of the deep snow.
* * *
MARSHAL HUD SAVAGE arrived by snowmobile thirty minutes after he’d gotten the call from his wife. He found Dana and Tag standing half a dozen yards away from the body. It was the second time in the past six years that remains had been found on the ranch. Hud could see that Dana was upset and worried.
“It’s going to be all right,” he told her. “Go on down to the house and wait for the coroner. He’ll need directions up here.”
As soon as she left, he stooped down and brushed the snow off the victim’s face. Behind him, Tag let out a startled sound, making him turn.
“You know her?” he asked.
Tag nodded, but he seemed to need a minute to find his voice. “She works at the Canyon,” he said finally. “I think her name is Mia. I ran into her at the bar last night. Or more correctly, she ran into me. Was she...murdered?”
“Looks like she was strangled with the scarf around her neck,” Hud said. He could see where the scarf had cut into her throat. “But we’ll know more once the coroner and the lab does the autopsy.”
“I thought it might have been an accident,” Tag said.
Hud studied him. He seemed awfully shaken for a man who’d only just run into the woman the night before. “So, what exactly happened last night at the bar?”
He listened while Tag recounted the woman stumbling into him, apparently quite drunk, and how he’d gone out the back door after her to make sure she was all right. “I saw her getting into a pickup with a man.”
“And you think her name was Mia?” Hud asked. Could this be the missing Mia Duncan? He had a bad feeling it was.
Tag told him that all he knew was what another server at the Canyon had told him. “She had apparently left in the middle of her shift.”
“Do you know the name of the other server you talked to?”
“Lily. At least that’s what the bartender called her.”
Hud nodded. “Tell me about the man the victim left with behind the bar.”
“Cowboy hat, pickup. It was snowing so hard I can’t even swear what color the truck was. Dark blue or brown, maybe even black. That’s about it. I only got a glimpse of the man through the snow,” Tag said.
“But he got a good look at you?”
He saw that the question took Tag by surprise. “Yeah, I guess he did.”
“I might need a statement from you later,” Hud said. “If you think of anything else...”
“I’ll let you know,” Tag said as the coroner and another deputy arrived by snowmobile. The coroner’s had a sled behind his snowmobile.
“Dana will have a pot of coffee on when you reach the house,” Hud told him. He’d seen Tag’s rented SUV parked in front of the ranch house.
Tag nodded and turned to leave.
Hud watched him go, worrying. Dana had just been disappointed by one “cousin.” He didn’t want her disappointed again if he could help it. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that Tanner “Tag” Cardwell knew a lot more about the victim than he’d admitted.
He reminded himself that his instincts were off. He was probably just looking for guilt where there wasn’t any.
* * *
TAG WAS GLAD he didn’t have to talk to anyone on the walk down the mountain. His head was spinning.
He’d been shocked when he’d recognized the dead woman—even more shocked when he’d seen what she was wearing. A leather jacket like the one he’d seen lying over the arm of his father’s couch just yesterday.
Since discovering the body, he’d kept telling himself it couldn’t be the same woman. Just as his father couldn’t be involved in this.
That was why he hadn’t mentioned the jacket to the marshal, he told himself. He couldn’t be sure it was the same one. But both his father and the woman had been at the bar last night. Tag knew how some women were about cowboy guitar players—even old ones.
A chill had settled in his bones by the time he reached the ranch house. He liked the idea of a hot cup of coffee, but he didn’t want to talk to anyone—especially his cousin—about what he’d seen on the mountain.
As he climbed into his rented SUV, he told himself that the woman’s death had nothing to do with his father. And yet Tag couldn’t wait to reach the cabin. Harlan Cardwell had some explaining to do.
* * *
LILY TRIED NOT to roll her eyes at her brother. “Ace.”
“Don’t ‘Ace’ me. Lily, it’s time you got back on the horse. So to speak.”
She really didn’t want to talk about this and now regretted stopping by her brother’s tiny apartment over the bar this early in the morning. She’d come to talk about Mia Duncan—not her ex-fiancé, Gerald Humphrey.
“What chaps my behind is that Gerald was the wrong man for you in the first place,” Ace said as he refilled her coffee cup. “That man would have bored you to death in no time.”
She thought about how much she and Gerald had in common. Of course Ace thought him boring. Ace had never understood what she and Gerald had shared.
“But to pull what he did,” Ace continued. “If he hadn’t skipped the country when he did, I would have tracked him down and—”
“I really don’t want to have this discussion,” she said, picking up her mug and moving over to the window. The world was covered in cold white drifts this morning. The sun had come out, turning the fresh snow to a blinding carpet of diamonds.
“Sis, I love you and I hate to see you like this.”
Lily spun back around, almost spilling her coffee. She couldn’t help being annoyed with the older brother she’d idolized all her life. But this was a subject they had never agreed on.
“You hate to see me like this?” she demanded. “Ace, I’m happy. I have a great life, a rewarding career. I’m...content.”
He mugged a face. “Sis, you live like a nun except for the few times a year that I drag you out to help me with the bar.”
“We really should not have this conversation,” she warned him, wondering now if he had actually needed her help at the bar or if his asking her to work the holidays with him was part of some scheme to find her a man. If it was the latter... She said as much. “Ace, so help me—”
He held up his hands in surrender. “You know how much I need your help. And I didn’t mean to set you off this morning.”
But he had. “You should be more concerned about your other employees. If you had seen Mia’s condo...”
“I am concerned. I put in a call to the marshal’s office first thing this morning, but no one has called me back yet. I called the condo number Mia gave me, but not surprisingly, there was no answer there. I figure once she discovered the break-in, she probably stayed with a friend last night.”
Lily wasn’t so sure about that since she didn’t think Mia had made any friends in the weeks she’d been working at the Canyon. The only person Mia had spoken to at the bar was Teresa. Which had seemed odd because of the age difference.
Mia was in her late thirties, while Teresa was barely twenty-one. Neither was outgoing, so that could