Colton's Lethal Reunion. Tara Taylor Quinn

      What in the hell had just happened? Shaken mentally as well as physically, Kerry had a hand on the dash, turning in her seat to watch ahead of them as well as behind him, as Rafe sped the rest of the way down the mountain. Neither one of them spoke. All focus had to be on getting down to safety.

      And when they’d reached the end of the drive, when Rafe had maneuvered them safely to the road leading into town, her brain started to shoot forward. The first thing she did was make a phone call, getting a specially trained rescue crew out to retrieve the ranger’s body. While it was too dangerous to drive up the mountain in the dark, Chief Barco was positioning a car at the base of the mountain to prevent anyone from leaving before daybreak.

      Of course, the perp could have already exited the drive, a minute or two after they did. With all of the turns in the road, she wouldn’t have known if the black SUV she’d seen was right behind them or not. He could have waited until her Jeep was out of sight and then turned in the opposite direction. Away from town. He could be long gone.

      Still, she’d intended to drop off Rafe and head back out there to explore at least the lower part of the mountain drive, but the chief had other ideas.

      For the moment, she’d been ordered to stand down. Worse, he was sending a patrol car to sit outside her home for the rest of the night.

      She’d been shot at. End of story.

      Except that it wasn’t.

      “Who’s out there?” she asked Rafe, completely frustrated as she hung up the phone. She wasn’t good at inactivity. “And why?” Her whole life, the way she’d dealt with stress was by taking action. Same for combatting fear. You met it head-on. Dealt with it. You didn’t hide in your home behind other officers at your front line.

      “And what in the hell is going on up that mountain?” she asked when her first question received no answer.

      “You asked him about guns and implied something about drugs,” Rafe said slowly, his gaze focused on the road in front of them, as though he wasn’t going to relax a muscle until they’d made the last five miles into town. “You really think that there’s something big going on,” he continued.

      “Big enough to warrant killing Tyler,” she said. “I know my brother wasn’t involved in anything illegal that last year, but before that?” She hated that the question even had to be out there.

      “It’s possible he just stumbled into something,” she continued, thinking out loud more than anything. “Tyler, I mean. But…you saw the photos from Tyler’s fall,” she said.

      What she was about to say was the fact most on her mind at the moment. And the one she left out of her verbal report to the chief. Someone else might notice. They might not. For the moment, until she could think, she was keeping silent.

      Rafe’s nod was short. Succinct.

      “Same way the head was bent back beneath the body…there’s no way two falls could end up with the body landing so closely the same.”

      “Unless the bodies were held, probably by the neck, and then pushed in exactly the same way,” Rafe said, earning her respect. He was right there with her.

      Just as she’d have expected her best friend from long ago to be.

      “I’m not getting why the ranger was killed,” she said, less than a minute later. The town’s lights were up ahead. Still another mile or so away. “He clearly wasn’t out there protecting us. To the contrary, he wanted us gone. Like he was protecting something else.”

      She was back to the drugs and guns. She couldn’t get off them, which told her that she was likely on the right path.

      One that led, somehow, to Odin Rogers.

      “Could be some kind of turf war and we drove into the middle of it.”

      “I need to get back up there and find the casings from the shots that were fired. To run ballistics on the guns.”

      Luckily they had a small crime lab right there in Mustang Valley, donated years ago by the Coltons.

      “From what I heard of your conversation, you’ve been told to stay home for the rest of the night.”

      “That doesn’t please me,” she said. But she knew better than to disobey the chief’s orders. He was chief for a reason. He knew the area. He knew his job. And she valued hers.

      “I wonder if whoever killed the ranger was with him when he approached us? He had to get up there somehow and we never heard or saw another vehicle. Alvin walked up to us, walked away. Maybe whoever was driving the black SUV had parked the vehicle farther down and then followed the ranger up. Could be that person heard me asking Alvin about Tyler’s death. But then he’d know that the guy was a jerk. Warned us off. Why would that get him killed?”

      Rafe’s shake of the head was brief. They’d entered Mustang Valley proper and he’d slowed to the speed limit.

      “Whatever is going on must be big since it was worth killing not one, but two men over it.”

      She glanced at him. “You believe Tyler was murdered.”

      His quick glance thawed a small piece of her heart. “I trusted your instincts to begin with, but after this…it’s clear you were right, Kerry. The problem is, how are we going to prove it?”

      There was that “we” again.

      The two of them. A team. Just as she’d once imagined they’d be.

      But it was only for a moment.

      Because, ultimately, nothing between them had changed. She couldn’t trust him to have her back when life returned to normal and the Colton money and power became an issue again. Couldn’t trust him to stick around.

      And Kerry didn’t like to think about the chances of her heart remaining intact if she gave it to him a second time and he crushed it in the dirt on his way out.