Page 33 of Engaging the Deputy (Silver Stars of Montana #3)

Jaden stepped to her, taking her in his arms. “This is what it is going to be like married to a deputy. You can still get out of it.”

She sighed and shook her head. “Not this time. I’m in it for the long haul. But please don’t make me have to rehearse my wedding alone.”

He kissed her. “I’ll be back in plenty of time. But it might help if you had the dinner first, then the rehearsal,” he said sheepishly. “This is probably just a wild-goose chase, but I’ve got to check it out.”

She gave him the side-eye. “Just be careful.”

“I always am.”

* * *

All the way on the drive, he kept trying to put the pieces together. He hadn’t told Livie, but the investigation had felt unfinished, as if he’d missed something important.

When she’d told him about Dean, he’d known at least why he’d been feeling that way. Everything about Dean Marsh’s story had felt off. But then, the entire Halloween night and the days after the tornado had made it hard to pin it down. So many relationships, so many lies.

He kept thinking about the one question that had bothered him. What if they were all lying?

It had begun to snow by the time Jaden reached the barn property. There was no sign of anyone around. The crime scene tape had been removed, except for a small piece that flapped in the wind by the front door.

He reminded himself that this could end up being all for naught.

Yet his instincts told him there was something here to find.

He parked and pulled on his coat, drawing up the hood and reaching for his bolt cutters as he stepped out into the weather.

These kinds of days were the worst. Wet snow hit his jacket and ran in rivulets.

As he walked toward the barn, he felt the hair rise on his neck.

Dean wasn’t there, but he’d been here. Not that he’d left tracks in the freezing earth.

A new padlock had been placed on the door.

It took a little longer to snap this one since it was thicker than the last. It finally gave with a loud snap.

Putting down the bolt cutters, he opened the door. No alarm went off. The crime team had disconnected it so it no longer alerted Cody Ryan of a break-in.

The electricity had been cut off, the barn abandoned, until Angie Marsh could be found and arrested.

He pulled out his flashlight and shone it around the room.

He wasn’t sure what he expected to find.

The interior looked as it had the last time he’d seen it before the crime team had closed up the place.

Dean hadn’t been in here, he realized. He wouldn’t have been able to get past the large padlock on the door.

Still, he’d had to look. Dean could have forced a window.

But why would he? He had to have known that the investigators would have found anything of interest to the drug operation.

What would Dean have been looking for? The DCI would have taken any drugs, any money, so what else was there?

Maybe he’d just wanted to look around, though that seemed unlikely.

Stepping back out into the storm, Jaden closed the door. He still couldn’t shake off the eerie feeling Marsh had been out here. Something was wrong. Livie had seen Dean headed this way with a shovel in the back of his pickup.

The wind whirled the snow around him, giving him glimpses of the mountains. It felt too quiet, but then, snow did that. At the sound of flapping of wings, he looked up to see a bald eagle fly past. He followed its flight path with his eyes as it disappeared behind the barn.

He felt an icy chill rush up his spine as another eagle flew by, headed in the same direction. Moving toward the back of the barn, he told himself whatever the birds were feeding on could be the carcass of an animal that had died back there.

But he knew better. His stomach lurched at the scent of rotting flesh as he came around the corner. One of the eagles took flight. The other kept picking at the flesh of the body now only partially buried.

He shooed away the eagle and stepped closer to the body. It appeared a burrowing animal had dug up what had been buried in the shallow grave before the ground had frozen solid. He could see where someone had tried in vain to dig up the body with a shovel with no success.

It would have been impossible to identify the woman’s body as Angie Marsh’s except for her dark hair.

She’d had it pulled up in a ponytail the day she’d been frantically packing to leave her husband.

Jaden recognized what was left of the T-shirt she’d been wearing that day.

Turning away, he fought the nausea that rose in his throat.

Nothing about this case had been easy. He had wanted to believe it was over, everything explained, all the loose ends tied up.

But that nagging feeling that he’d missed something had continued to haunt him.

Pulling out his phone, he made the call. He would have loved to have arrested Dean himself, but there was somewhere he had to be.

“Going to also need Dean Marsh picked up for questioning in the murder of his wife.”

“Aren’t you getting married soon?” the officer asked after Jaden told him what he’d found.

“I sure hope so.” He thought of Livie waiting for him back in Fortune Creek. No way was he standing her up. “Send a state trooper as quickly as possible to secure the scene. I have a rehearsal dinner to get to.”

Jaden remembered the surveillance camera that had picked up a woman abandoning Angie Marsh’s vehicle in Spokane. Dark hair, pulled back in a ponytail, sweatshirt, dark glasses, same build as Angie Marsh.

Then he thought about the rotting corpse. Angie Marsh had never left the valley. Dean had made sure of that.

“Also, you need to pick up Jenny Lee for aiding and abetting a criminal,” he said. “She’s possibly an accomplice in Angie Marsh’s murder. I’ll write up my report after I get married.”

If he got married, he thought, looking at the time. He was calling it close.