Page 21 of Killer on the Homestead (Bent County Protectors #2)

“Let’s go over this one more time. You don’t know if the door was locked or not?”

Duncan sighed. He was in all kinds of pain, but the cops wouldn’t let him into his cabin to grab a pill. Rosalie had somehow, after quite a while, convinced his parents to go back up to the house and try to get some sleep, so there was that .

He knew they wouldn’t sleep, but at least they wouldn’t stand out in the increasing cold and worry. They could worry comfortably and inside.

“I’ve told each and every one of you,” Duncan said, trying not to be irritable.

“I locked the door before I left. When I got back, I was distracted.” He’d settled on that word about the third time they’d asked this same damn question.

“I unlocked the door, but it’s not like I tested the knob.

I just jabbed my key in and twisted, and assumed that’s what unlocked the door. Until I stepped inside to all that.”

There were cops crawling around his cabin, all the lights on and blazing. He wanted to be grateful they were taking this seriously, but he was in some serious pain, and worried about his parents and what this meant .

Detective Beckett approached him and the uniformed deputy that had been asking the same damn questions.

“We’ve taken pictures. The guys are working on trying to lift some prints right now.

You’ll need to go through and see what’s missing, but as much as some of that stuff might be a gold mine, most of it is personalized and unique enough, selling would come back on the seller.

They were no doubt looking for easy items. Cash. Guns.”

“I don’t keep a gun down here.” His shoulder ached. A migraine had started drumming at his temples. Rosalie’s hand rubbed up and down his back, but he barely felt it. “If I had cash, it was nothing major.”

“Can’t one of the deputies bring him out one of his pain pills? Some water?” Rosalie demanded.

“Why are you here again?” Copeland asked her.

“To ruin your life,” she replied, and almost, almost made Duncan smile. “He’s in pain, Copeland.”

The detective huffed out a breath. “Where do you keep them?”

“Cabinet above the stove.”

Detective Beckett grunted, then stalked back to the cabin. Rosalie didn’t stop rubbing Duncan’s back.

“Getting prints is good. We saw the mess they left. They’d have touched something, and there’s no way they had the sense to wipe it all down with a mess like that.”

She was surprisingly comforting when she wanted to be. “And then what?”

“And then we see if it connects to the murder. If it does, this might be a real big break.”

God, he hoped so.

Detective Beckett came back a few minutes later, but there was nothing in his hands. His expression was grimmer than it had been.

“Well, I think we figured out what they were after, or at least what they took. Bottle’s empty. No chance it was empty, and you just forgot?”

Empty… Duncan shook his head. “No. No possible way.”

“How many do you think you had left?”

Duncan blew out a breath. “Most of the bottle. I only take them sporadically. I’m not sure I could give an exact count, but I could get close if I sit down and think about it.”

“You do that. Once we clear you to go in, you make a list of anything that’s missing in as much annoying detail as you can manage.” He glanced at Rosalie with a little sneer. “Have her help. She knows what we’re looking for.”

She smirked at Copeland. “Flatterer.”

He rolled his eyes and strode away, back into the cabin, which was swarming with deputies. Well, it wasn’t really a swarm, it just felt like that.

“How about some ibuprofen or something. Will that take the edge off?”

“If I take a whole bottle,” he muttered irritably. “Listen. Hell, it’s late, and I’m not fit to be around anyone. You should head on home. I’ll drive you—”

“Are you going to go up to your parents and sleep there if you drive me home?”

He surveyed the strange landscape in front of him. His cabin. His things. Cops everywhere. “No, I won’t be able to sleep until I go through everything. See what they took besides my damn pills.”

“Then I’m staying with. Detective’s orders, remember?”

“You don’t have to, Rosalie.”

“Who said anything about having to? I’ll have you know, I don’t do anything I have to. Except pay taxes maybe.”

It surprised a little laugh out of him, unbanded the tiniest bit of tension in his chest. He pulled her to him, rested his chin on the top of her head. “Thanks, Red.” For a minute, he was almost able to relax a little bit.

But then the detective came out of the cabin and walked over to them. “You can go in and clean up.”

Duncan watched as Copeland seemed to take notice of his arm around Rosalie.

“Get me that list as soon as you’re able.” Then he stalked away. Not angry, exactly. Just purposeful. The deputies were leaving the cabin too. Getting in cars, talking to each other as they did.

Duncan found that all of a sudden he didn’t want to go inside. Didn’t want to see or even begin to think about cleaning up or sorting through what he might still have, and what he might not.

So he focused on the little niggling thing that settled in his brain whenever Rosalie and Copeland were around each other.

“You ever have a thing with the detective?”

Rosalie looked up at him, and even in the dim light, he could see confusion on her face. Followed by amusement. “Define a thing ?”

He scowled at her. “The point is the lack of definition. Thing could be anything. That’s my point.”

“Does it matter?” she asked, her expression sober, even as amusement danced in her eyes. She liked making him uncomfortable, and that should be some kind of turnoff. But it wasn’t.

“It doesn’t matter ,” he replied, calmly if he did say so himself. “I’m just curious.”

“Curious or jealous?”

He looked down at her, matched her smug expression with one of his own. “Does that matter?”

She held his gaze for a minute, then shook her head on a sigh. “I don’t mind jealous. I don’t mind curious. Never looked in that direction. Actually kind of hated him until a few months ago.”

“What happened a few months ago?”

“He worked on a case involving my cousin, Vi. Hart’s wife.

She was kidnapped by her abusive ex.” Rosalie shuddered, and he found it was his turn to rub a comforting hand up and down her back.

“Anyway, Copeland worked his ass off to help us find Vi. Hard to keep hating the guy after that. Though he tries to make it easy.”

Duncan chuckled. But it died, because…

“We can keep avoiding it, Ace, but it’s still going to be there.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, stepping toward the cabin with her. Avoiding it wasn’t going to change anything. And at the very least, he had a we .

Rosalie was dragging , and she knew Duncan was too. She’d tried to clean up as they went along, particularly the shattered glass, and he tried to remember what he had packed away in boxes that might be missing.

She’d coaxed him into taking some ibuprofen as they worked, but even after hours had passed, he hadn’t come up with anything to add to the list of missing items to go along with his pain pills.

When he’d stood in the same place for a good two minutes, just staring at some fancy engraved plate in his hand, she crossed to him, took it out of his grasp, and placed it in a box. “Come on, Ace, you’re beat. Let’s take a break, get some rest.”

“I’m pissed,” he corrected. He flung his good arm toward the front of the cabin. “It would have taken someone who knew their way around to get back here without passing by the main house.”

“Maybe,” Rosalie said, considering the layout of the Kirk Ranch. “Or they could have turned off their headlights. Used Neutral to cruise down the drive to your place. They could have known about the cut-throughs because they’ve been ranching these parts for years. There’s a lot of explanations.”

“They would have to know this cabin was back here, and that there might be something valuable in it. Because I’m in it. It wasn’t random, or they’d burglarize Mom and Dad’s, which makes me sick to think about.”

She rubbed a hand up and down his arm. “It wouldn’t take much for someone to know all that, Duncan. I bet all of Bent County knows more of your business than you’d ever be comfortable with.”

He scowled at that. “Down to my pain pills?”

“Afraid so.” She could tell that really didn’t sit well with him, but it was true. Maybe Bent County was a big place geographically, but interesting tidbits spread through all the small towns like wildfire.

He sank onto the couch. “Maybe other things are gone, but if they are, they’re small, inconsequential things I don’t remember.

All my awards are here. I couldn’t tell you if they slipped out with a jersey, or ball or bat, or whatever the hell.

There’s just nothing of any value that’s gone, I don’t think. ”

She settled next to him on the couch. “Well, like Copeland said, the awards are too specific. No resale value. What about watches or… I don’t know, what do rich guys buy?” She was hoping to get a little bit of a smile out of him, but his scowl didn’t budge.

“Cars. Nice houses. All of which I got rid of when I moved home. I didn’t even bother to keep expensive suits or shoes. Why would I?”

“Okay, fair enough, but someone who knows you’re a professional baseball player wouldn’t necessarily know that. Maybe they came looking for cash, couldn’t find it, and bailed.”

“Just stumbled upon the pills?”

“Maybe.”

He looked over at her then. Shadows in his eyes, mouth downturned showing off grooves bracketing his lips.

Beat clean up. She wanted to reach out and smooth the tuft of hair that was sticking up where he’d raked his fingers through it, but it felt like an intimacy that bordered too close to a bunch of things she just wasn’t sure about yet.

“You don’t sound convinced,” he said, and because he sounded so damn distraught, she didn’t resist the urge. She reached out, smoothed her hand over his hair. And it felt good. To reach out and soothe.

“I would be convinced. If not for the murder,” she said gently.

She kept her arm around him. “Coincidences happen all the time, but this feels like a stretch to think they aren’t connected considering your parents haven’t had criminal issues at the ranch before, except the missing cows.

Which I still think might be connected.” A lot of connections, but no answers.

Still, that was an investigation. Steps, connections, and little threads, until you found the thing that bound them all together.

Connections, but not obvious ones. She looked around the trashed room. Silly just to do for some pain pills, but… “Maybe whoever did this was looking for something specific if they didn’t take anything.”

“They took the pills.”

“Yes, but surely someone capable of murder is capable of scoring their own drugs without creating this mess. What about weapons?”

“Like I told the cops, I don’t have guns down here.”

“Maybe they didn’t know that. Maybe they were looking for something else.”

“I thought everyone knew everything.”

She sighed, feeling nothing but sympathy for him. “You’re getting grumpy.”

“No shit.”

“Get some rest, huh? I’ll call Copeland and tell him you know how many pills you think were stolen and that’s all we found. If you think of anything else, we’ll let him know, but you need some rest.”

She started to get up, but he grabbed her arm. So she stood by the couch but couldn’t step away because he held her hand firmly.

“You’ve been up as long as I have.”

“Yeah, but I haven’t had my shoulder recently reattached, so I’m just a little tired, not exhausted and in pain.”

“I took some damn ibuprofen.”

“Yeah, it really helped. Come on, you big baby, I’ll tuck you in.”

He raised an eyebrow, and she laughed in spite of herself.

“Mind out of the gutter.” She pulled him up, making sure it was his good arm before she yanked. He got to his feet.

“My mind doesn’t have much juice left to find itself in the gutter, but I could work on it.”

She pushed him gently to the bedroom. “I’m sure you could, but not tonight. Or this morning, or whatever it is.” She nudged him into a sitting position on his unmade bed. There hadn’t been any broken glass in here, just upended drawers and a trashed closet. “Take off your shoes,” she told him.

He grunted, then toed off the shoes.

“Lay down,” she ordered, waiting for him to balk at being told what to do. But he really was tired, because he did as he was told. And he held out his good arm.

“Lay down with me, Rosalie,” he said, in the same kind of authoritative tone she’d used on him.

She didn’t like the idea of him sleeping alone in this place that didn’t have a security system. That had been violated in some way. Maybe it wouldn’t make sense for a burglar to come back, but none of this made much sense.

So she moved over to the opposite side of the bed. She didn’t pull any covers over her, but she lied down on her back, staring up at the ceiling.

But Duncan reached over, snuck his good arm under her, and pulled her close to him. She might have balked at it, but she could feel him relax. The tension leaked out of him as he exhaled.

Which somehow made her worry worse. Because this felt too good and there was nothing good about what was going on. “Once you’ve gotten some rest, we’re calling Cam Delaney and getting a security system for this place.”

“Are we?”

She could feel him falling asleep almost immediately, so she didn’t say anything else. Just lied there.

While she stayed awake, protecting them both.