Cowboy's Legacy. B.J. Daniels
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to how many months had gone by.
He’d asked her once when she was going to start showing. “Guess you’ll be looking like you stole a basketball soon enough. Does that mean we aren’t going to be able to do it?”
She’d assured him that they could have sex—the one thing that seemed to make him happy—almost to the end. “But only if you are more gentle.”
That had cheered him up. Nothing else about living together had. True, she wasn’t much of a cook. Often she was bored and just watched television all day. She missed working at the café, but she couldn’t very well go back there without admitting that she’d had a miscarriage early on in her pregnancy.
What was she going to do? she thought as she doubled over again with a cramp. And how was she going to keep this from Harp? She couldn’t pretend to have the flu every month for five days. Even Harp would figure that out after a while.
She had to get pregnant again. Otherwise...
Vicki felt the pills she’d taken begin to work on her cramps. Without the pain, her thoughts cleared some. She considered what Harp had told her had happened the night that man had come looking for Mariah Ayers, now Cahill, and had almost killed both Mariah and Darby. Harp had admitted to her that he wasn’t the hero everyone thought he was. He’d lied and she was the only one he’d ever told about it.
Now with the sheriff’s girlfriend missing and him being put on leave, maybe Harp really did have a shot at becoming the next sheriff. But only if no one ever knew the truth about that night.
She placed a hand over her stomach. Maybe she didn’t need a baby to keep Harp after all.
* * *
“I CAN ASSURE you that Celeste had nothing to do with Maggie Thompson being missing,” Duma said from a chair in the interrogation room at the sheriff’s department thirty minutes later. He was a big man, distinguished, gray at the temples.
“How can you be so confident of that?” the undersheriff asked.
Flint watched through the glass window that acted as a mirror on the other side. Harp had stayed at the house to make sure nothing was disturbed until the state crime team arrived out of Billings. Flint desperately wanted to be the one questioning Duma.
“I need you to let me handle this,” Mark had said. “You know you’re too emotionally involved.”
Swearing under his breath, he’d nodded. “You’re right. I’ll do whatever you suggest. I trust you, Mark.”
“You’d do the same thing in my shoes. The DCI will want to talk to you. After that, you’ll need to find somewhere to stay since your house is now a crime scene.”
Flint had felt as if his heart would burst when Mark had gotten the call from Harp. “What did Harp find over there? Please, Mark, you have to tell me.”
“Nothing to indicate that Celeste had anything to do with Maggie going missing. But she’s left town and she was apparently upset before she left. Flint, I told you—”
His heart had started pounding the moment Mark had answered his phone and said, “Bring Duma down to the sheriff’s department for questioning.”
Panic had made his knees go weak. “Celeste?”
“No—Wayne Duma. He says Celeste left town to go to a spa.”
“She’s lying. You have to—”
“Flint, he’s coming downtown. We’ll find out what he knows.”
“She picked today to leave town? Mark—”
“I know. We have to find Maggie. That’s what we’re doing.”
Flint had nodded, but his heart had been racing. Celeste had done something with Maggie. This had been building for some time.
“I know you’re right, Mark, but I need to know what’s going on or I’ll go crazy. Starting with what Duma has to say.”
Mark had suggested he watch the interrogation. Flint had agreed, although he could feel the clock ticking like a time bomb in his chest. Maggie had been missing for at least several hours now. Statistically, the sooner they found her, the better chance they would find her alive. He feared she’d been taken on impulse. He envisioned the scene back at his house. The two women arguing, maybe getting into a shoving match, and then Maggie getting hurt.
If she was badly hurt, things would have gone downhill from there. Celeste would be scared. She’d do something stupid, like abduct Maggie to keep what had happened from coming out. Things would only get worse from there. Celeste would be running scared. She would realize how hard it was to hide someone. How desperate would she get, all the time not realizing that she was getting in deeper and deeper?
He stared through the glass, wanting to shake the truth out of Wayne Duma.
“How do you explain the condition your bedroom was in?” Mark asked.
Duma rubbed the back of his neck, looking uncomfortable. “Celeste and I had a fight last night. She was still upset this morning.”
“What did you fight over?”
“I don’t even know. With Celeste...” The man looked away. “We haven’t been getting along for some time now. This morning, after another rough night, I suggested we might want to take a break.”
“Divorce?”
“I didn’t say that, but I think that’s the way she took it. I told her we would talk about it later when we were both calmer.”
Flint felt his stomach roil. Celeste would have been beside herself, he thought. She might not like the choice she’d made in hooking up with Duma, but she wouldn’t want to give up the luxury, the name or the perceived power that came with it. Given the kind of mood she must have been in, anything could have happened.
“I went to work,” Duma continued. “I knew she had some meeting she was going to. I almost didn’t take her call later that morning when my assistant said she was on the line. I didn’t want to continue the argument, especially at work and on the phone.”
“But you did take the call.”
He nodded. “She was still upset. She sounded hysterical. I honestly thought she might do something to herself if I didn’t stay on the line. So I let her talk. She went on about the two of us, the same stuff I’ve heard before. I don’t give her enough attention, that sort of thing.” He sighed.
“Did she mention Maggie Thompson?”
Duma looked away for a moment. “She told me that she’d run into Maggie at the grocery store and that her ex and Maggie were moving in together.” He cleared his voice. “She was calmer then, I thought. She said she was having trouble dealing with it, that she had some unresolved feelings for Flint and that part of our problem was that she blamed me for their divorce. If she hadn’t met me...
“But that she loved me and just needed some time away. She said she was sorry she’d put me through so much. She sounded as if she was accepting that her ex was going to find happiness with someone else. She promised that when she came back everything would be much better.”
Much better because Maggie would be out of the picture. Cursing, Flint couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He wanted to put his fist through the glass. He’d been married to Celeste. He knew what extremes she went to when she felt she was about to lose something she wanted. There was no telling what she would have done.
“Did she tell you where she was going?” Mark asked.
“No, just that she was packing to go to a spa. She sounded...calm.”
According to Harp, Celeste had been anything but calm given the shape of the bedroom where she was packing, Flint thought. Had she gone from there over to his house the two of them had shared and confronted Maggie?
Celeste