Page 14 of Killer on the Homestead (Bent County Protectors #2)

“You’re not taking anything before we get a lawyer,” Duncan said, or maybe he’d yelled it.

Panic was like a living thing inside of him, inside his parents’ cozy living room.

The front door was open, and two uniformed cops stood on the other side of the storm door on the porch behind Detective Whoever.

The one Rosalie wasn’t related to by marriage.

“We have a search warrant, Mr. Kirk,” the detective said with a disdainful look at Duncan, like he was falling into every rich-guy stereotype, and maybe he was.

He didn’t care.

When headlights cut across the drive, everyone turned to watch the approaching truck. Duncan didn’t miss the way the detective and deputies’ hands fell to their weapons. Then released them when Rosalie hopped out in the yellow glow of the porch light.

Detective Beckett looked back at Duncan with a hard expression. “Last time I checked, she wasn’t a lawyer.”

But Duncan didn’t have to respond, because Rosalie was shouldering her way past the two cops on the porch. She opened the storm door herself and stepped into the living room, glaring at the detective.

“Come on, Copeland. You can’t be serious.”

“Can. Am. Look, if everyone is innocent, then it doesn’t matter. The tests will prove it. We have a search warrant. I’m trying to be nice here, but I don’t have to be.”

“The ballistics report came back?”

“Isn’t that the kind of thing you should already illegally know, Rosalie?”

“There isn’t anything illegal about my investigations, Copeland. If there was, no doubt you’d arrest me. Now, you’ve gotten the report back, and matched it to a gun the Kirks own? Is that right? Because if you came out and told them what was going on, things would go a lot smoother.”

“I can have you removed, Rosalie.”

She ignored him and turned to face Duncan’s parents. Who looked pale and anxious.

“There’s nothing wrong with letting the police do their job,” she told them gently. “Even if it’s a waste of everyone’s time,” Rosalie continued, smiling at his parents.

She didn’t look at Detective Beckett, who was scowling at her, but Duncan figured she knew it was happening.

“I’ll get the key,” Mom said quietly.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to go with you, ma’am.”

“Like hell—”

“Stand down, boys,” Rosalie said cheerfully to both Duncan and Dad, because apparently they’d been saying the same thing. “You two sit. I’ll handle it.” She gave Duncan a pointed look, and realized she was putting on that cheerful, breezy demeanor for his parents’ sake.

And since she was, he nodded. Then he nudged his dad into a seat at the kitchen table while Rosalie, Mom, and the detective moved deeper in the house to get to the gun safe.

“What the hell is happening?” Dad muttered, looking at his hands. They suddenly looked old to Duncan, and his heart lurched. The amount of anxiety and stress this was putting on his parents was too much. It just wasn’t fair.

“I don’t know, Dad, but Rosalie will get to the bottom of it.”

Dad took in a deep breath, then let it out. “She’s a smart girl,” Dad said, squeezing his hands into fists then spreading his fingers wide. “I don’t trust that detective, but I trust Rosalie.”

Duncan nodded. On that, they agreed. But when Mom, Rosalie, and Detective Beckett reappeared, Duncan’s entire body went ice-cold.

The detective carried two guns. He wore gloves, and instructed one of the deputies on the porch to put his on before he handed the guns to him. Duncan could only stare in utter shock.

When he looked back at Rosalie, her expression was grave, but she immediately wiped that away into something more blank once she knew he was looking.

Which scared the hell out of him.

“Who has access to this gun cabinet, Mr. Kirk?” the detective asked.

“Myself.”

“And?”

Dad shrugged, looked away. Not because he wanted to lie, Duncan knew, but because he wanted to protect .

Since Duncan wasn’t about to let Dad take the fall for anything , he continued the list. “Me.”

“Duncan,” Mom said disgustedly. “You couldn’t find the key if I handed it to you on a silver platter.”

“I know where you keep the key,” he insisted. Lying, but he’d lie. He’d do whatever.

“Prove it, Ace,” Rosalie said. Why the hell was she putting him on the spot? Why wouldn’t anyone let him…protect? He remembered what Rosalie had said about letting the cops do their job.

It didn’t soothe him any, but he figured…

Well, like Dad said. Rosalie was smart. They trusted Rosalie.

He tried to breathe through the anxiety riding high in his chest, and though he was going to try to move forward with cooperation, he scowled at Rosalie, then his mother, for not letting him tell a little protective lie.

“Okay, I don’t know where it is, but I could have asked.

I could have found it. Anyone could have—”

“You didn’t,” Mom said firmly. Then she turned to the detective. “There are two keys. Norman and I keep one at the house, and only we know where. The second key is with Terry Boothe, our foreman.”

The detective looked at the uniformed officer behind him, the one without the guns, gave a nod. The guy took off. No doubt to round up Terry.

“Now, don’t go harassing my boys in the middle of the night,” Dad said, pushing to his feet and pointing at Detective Beckett. “That’s not how things are done around here.”

“That’s how they’re done in a murder investigation, Mr. Kirk.

Two guns registered to you could be the murder weapon.

We have a search warrant and the authority to confiscate them so tests can be done.

We’ll head down to talk to Mr. Boothe, then we’ll be on our way.

I know I don’t have to repeat myself, but it’d be in everyone’s best interest if they stayed put, if they cooperated with the deputies. We all want the same thing, don’t we?”

Duncan figured his answer was no , because at the moment, he wanted Copeland Beckett to rot in hell. But even he knew he shouldn’t voice that. Though it took biting his tongue not to.

“I’m going to be straight with you all. I could arrest you, Mr. Kirk, or Mrs. Kirk, or both, if I had any reason to believe you’d be behind something like this, even without the tests.

But I don’t see any motive, any reason. Yet .

So please, if you really want answers, forget that I’m an outsider, drop the small-town, circle-the-wagons, tight-lipped merry-go-round, and let me do my job . ”

His parents didn’t say anything to that, and Duncan couldn’t really either.

It didn’t endear the detective to him any, but the idea he could arrest his innocent parents, and wasn’t…

yet … It was some kind of relief. Some kind of hope that…

That no matter what anything looked like, the truth really was the goal.

But he still didn’t like the guy.

“We’ll be in touch,” the detective said before pushing out the door. He headed down to the bunkhouse to question Terry. And put the whole ranch up in arms.

But Duncan knew that if either of the guns they’d confiscated connected to the murder, it implicated someone on this ranch.

In the wake of the police leaving, the silence was a heavy weight that reminded Rosalie of times in her life she didn’t wish to revisit. Stress, worry, shock, and that horrible what do we do . So she took charge of the situation.

“Mr. Kirk, it would be quite a feat for someone to sneak into your house, steal your gun, kill that boy, then put it back,” Rosalie told him.

“Not impossible, but quite a feat. If it comes back that one of those guns is the murder weapon, I don’t think the suspicion would be on you. It’d be someone who works for you.”

“No one who works for me would do such a thing,” Norman said, offended.

But Rosalie watched as Duncan shared a look with his mother. Maybe they didn’t love the idea that one of the ranch hands could murder , but they both knew Norman was too kind when it came to all those troubled distant cousins.

Rosalie didn’t argue with him though. No point to it.

She had researched all of them. There weren’t any violent offenders, but she’d keep digging on each of them.

“You’ve got a detective bureau and an investigator looking into it.

I know I can’t tell you not to worry, but I’m determined to help get to the bottom of this.

Keep cooperating with Detective Beckett.

As much as his bedside demeanor leaves something to be desired, he’s right.

Shutting him out just because he doesn’t know us won’t help.

But I’m not going to let what he doesn’t know—about Bent County, about ranching, about you all—affect you. That’s a promise.”

Mrs. Kirk rose, walked over to her, and enveloped her into a warm, motherly hug that smelled like cinnamon and felt like an old memory Rosalie certainly wasn’t going to indulge in right now.

She awkwardly patted Mrs. Kirk’s back before the woman released her. “Thank you, Rosalie.” Her eyes were shiny, but she didn’t cry. She turned to her husband. “Come on, Norman. Let’s get some sleep. Duncan can lock up.”

Rosalie watched them go, wishing there was more she could do. Wishing she could see something in this case that Copeland and Bent County didn’t see. Wishing for faster, better answers, and maybe a time machine to just erase this.

But those were never useful thoughts or feelings.

“Thanks for coming,” Duncan said.

She should say “you’re welcome” and leave it at that, but… Well, sometimes she really couldn’t help herself. “You’ve got to stop trying to play hero, Duncan. We’re all on the same side.”

His expression hardened. She looked away before she cataloged too many things about the way his eyes darkened, or lines bracketed his mouth, or how her stomach did an entire gymnastics routine if she spent too long looking at him—whether he was smiling or scowling.

“Not if they let my parents think, for even a second, they might be implicated.”