Page 1 of Outlaw Ridge: Shaw (Hard Justice: Outlaw Ridge #5)

Let’s play a game .

It felt like a heavyweight’s punch to the gut when Deputy Shaw Brodie read the text he’d just gotten. Most folks wouldn’t have had that kind of reaction to something that sounded, well, potentially fun. But these were no ordinary words.

And this sure as hell was not an invitation to anything enjoyable.

Or at least it hadn’t been seven years ago when that identical worded text had been sent to him. That game had ended up with four people dead and a shitload of nightmarish memories for those who’d been targeted by a killer.

But that killer had been caught and was in jail.

Wasn’t he?

Shaw quickly thumbed through his contacts and located the number for Reed Winston, one of his fellow deputies in the Outlaw Ridge, Texas, police department.

Reed wasn’t his brother by blood, but he was in every way that mattered.

They’d served together in the military, worked missions together in the elite security agency, Strike Force, and now Reed was the keeper of Sentry, the mega database that could give Shaw some answers.

Well, one big-assed one anyway.

It was Reed’s day off, but Shaw knew he’d have Sentry at his fingertips. Or rather his phone. And it would be faster going through him than Shaw trying to access the info himself.

“Please tell me that Dell Corbin is still in jail,” Shaw said the moment that he had Reed on the line.

Reed hesitated for a heartbeat, and Shaw heard the tapping of a keyboard. “Yes,” Reed verified a handful of seconds later.

Shaw took a breath. Then, another. And he forced some of the muscles in his chest to relax. It was damn hard to breathe when his own body was trying to strangle him.

The flashbacks came. Of course, they did.

They were hellish little demons that could hitch rides on pretty much anything.

Or on s omething in this case since there was that blasted text.

He’d never been able to erase the flashbacks.

Then again, nothing about Dell Corbin was erasable.

The man—AKA the Riddle Killer—had managed to leave a lasting impression.

“Why do you ask? What’s wrong?” Reed pressed.

“Not sure.” That was the truth, but Shaw wanted this to be nothing. A hoax. A really sick joke from some unknown dickhead who thought this was a fun way to waste his time.

“Did you get a text?” Reed pressed.

Since Reed knew all the ins and out of the Riddle Killer investigation, he was well aware that each murder had started with that Let’s Play a Game text.

“Yeah,” Shaw verified. “Unknown name, Unknown number. It came in about a minute ago.”

“Shit,” Reed muttered.

“Yeah, shit,” Shaw repeated. “I’ll call the prison and find out if Dell has been a naughty boy and managed to get access to a phone.” Something that wasn’t allowed for death row inmates. “Or if he’s had a visitor who might have done this for him.”

“I can help with that,” Reed offered.

Shaw was about to decline and say that was something he could do himself, but the front door to the police station flew open. From his desk in the bullpen, he had no trouble seeing the tall brunette woman who rushed inside.

Ava Satterly.

Hell.

He recognized that wild look of terror in her dark brown eyes. Saw, too, when her gaze speared his. Their eyes met, held, and a whole bunch of things passed them. Silent, unspoken things but crystal clear.

Ava was in the throes of that mental hellfire as well.

More of those shitty flashbacks came roaring through him. Of the last time he’d seen her. Seven years ago when he’d hacked his way through a concrete drainage pipe to save her. She been seconds away from death.

Seconds.

Way too close for Shaw to know that it hadn’t been him who’d saved her but rather luck. He hated that luck played into anything so important as life and death.

“Shaw?” Reed said, snapping his attention back to the call.

“Yeah,” Shaw acknowledged. “Go ahead and check on Dell’s visitors and try to find out if he got his hands on a phone. Ava’s here at the police station,” he tacked onto that.

Reed cursed because he no doubt knew what her presence meant. Ava had been a key player in Dell’s game they’d been forced to play. A survivor. And like Shaw, Ava had no doubt thought the game was over and done.

Shaw ended the call with Reed and went closer to Ava as she made her way through the metal detector. She didn’t take her eyes off him, and the moment she stepped through security and into the bullpen, she held up her phone. He didn’t need to read the words to know what was there.

“Did you get one?” she asked, and her voice sounded just as strained and rattled as she looked.

He nodded. “A couple of minutes ago. But I’m guessing you got yours sooner since you’re already here?”

“Ten minutes ago,” Ava explained. “It’s my grandmother’s birthday, and I was on my way to take some flowers to her grave.”

He certainly hadn’t forgotten that her grandmother was buried in Outlaw Ridge where the woman had been born and raised.

Even though Ava had never actually lived here, it was one of those connections that Shaw and she had had even before they’d worked together on a case.

Outlaw Ridge was basically a dot on the map, and yet Ava and he had managed to not only cross paths but become involved.

Sometimes, that felt like fate.

Other times, like cursed, star-crossed lovers who should do everything humanly possible to stay the hell away from each other.

Ava moved her phone closer to him to show him the text, and hers had an addition that his hadn’t. Shaw is at the Outlaw Ridge police station. Get to him fast .

So, the game maker, or the hoaxer, wanted them in on this together. Again. That required a couple of deep breaths and some steeling up.

“Are you hurt? Has he done anything to you?” Ava blurted.

“No and no.” Well, the texter had done nothing physical today anyway, but there was a whole lot of mental crap going on right now.

For both of them.

“You? Have you been hurt?” he asked though he couldn’t see any injuries.

Just the opposite.

Even now, with the nightmare barreling down on them, Ava looked amazing. Beautiful even. Though beautiful wasn’t much of a stretch, not with that face, those eyes. That everything.

Yeah, star-crossed lovers, all right.

“I’m not hurt,” she verified. “Just…gutted,” she managed to say.

Yep. They were on the same page.

“This could be nothing,” he reminded her. “It could be some kind of sick copycat.” And that was about the best they could hope for. “Reed’s checking to see if Dell could have sent the messages. Or if he had someone do them for him.”

He didn’t need to spell out that Dell could have also sent someone to carry out his bidding.

That’s why he took hold of Ava’s arm and moved her out of the line of sight from the front windows.

If someone was spying on them, then it was best not to give the asshole an easy visual. Or an easy chance to kill them.

Shaw led her toward the office of Sheriff Owen Striker, his boss here in Outlaw Ridge PD and when Shaw had worked for him at Strike Force. Owen who was at his desk, immediately looked up and seemed to do a mental doubletake before he slowly got to his feet.

“What’s wrong?” Owen asked. “Ava, why are you here?”

Obviously, Owen recognized her which wasn’t that much of a surprise. Yes, seven years had passed, but there was that part about the Riddle Killer case having been memorable for just about everyone who’d gotten involved with it. And Strike Force had definitely gotten involved.

Shaw held up his phone. “We both got a Let’s Play a Game text.”

There shot some alarm through Owen’s eyes, but he quickly tamped it down. “Maybe a hoax.”

“Maybe,” Shaw agreed, but damn it all to hell and back, it didn’t feel like one.

Apparently, Ava thought the same because he was pretty sure he heard her try to swallow a sob. “I haven’t gotten any communication like this since…back then,” she said.

“Same,” Shaw agreed.

But he couldn’t say this was an out of sight, out of mind kind of thing. He often thought of the Riddle Killer. He thought of Ava even more. Then again, they had been lovers, and the sex had been great.

The aftermath had been hell.

Still was.

“Reed’s checking to see what this could mean,” Shaw let Owen know.

“Good.” Owen nodded and repeated that nod a couple more times as if trying to think this through. “All right. So, it could be nothing.” He didn’t sound convinced of that either. “Refresh my memory. Seven years ago, did you each get a text about the game?”

“We did,” Ava verified. “Less than an hour later, Dell would text the riddle.”

“And the riddle led you to some specific place, right?” Owen asked.

This time it was Shaw who answered. “More or less. Ava, the cops, and I had to piece together what the riddle meant and go from there. I got pulled into the case when the parents of the first two victims hired Strike Force to assist the cops in finding them.” He paused.

Had to. “After that, Dell said only Ava and I were players in the game, and he only sent texts to the two of us. He claimed all the victims would die if he spotted a cop or anyone else from Strike Force on the scene.”

Owen took a moment, obviously processing that. “Did you ever find out why Dell targeted the two of you?”

“I think it was because of me,” Ava spoke up. “I was a rookie profiler, just twenty-five, and I volunteered my services to San Antonio PD. I believe I caught Dell’s attention. Maybe because he thought it’d be fun to outwit a profiler, especially one that he believed he could beat.”

Shaw believed all of that was true. But it was the tip of the proverbial iceberg. In case this turned out to be the real deal, Shaw wanted to give his boss what was beneath that tip so they’d all be prepared.

Well, as prepared as they could be for a first-class shitstorm.

“Ava and I were dating at the time the murders began,” Shaw admitted. “I’d just gotten out of the military and had started working for you at Strike Force, and we hadn’t been seeing each other that long,” he spelled out. “Somehow, Dell got pictures of us.”

Intimate, bare assed naked pictures of Ava and Shaw in the hotel bed where they’d landed shortly after they’d failed at the first riddle. Drowning their sorrows. Trying to tamp down the guilt.

Trying to live with rock bottom failure.

But the failure had just kept on coming with two murders added to that first one. Four dead. And three survivors. Not exactly a stellar track record.

Owen slid a glance at both of them. “But you’re not together now?”

“No,” Ava and Shaw answered at the same time.

“No,” she repeated, under her breath this time.

Shaw figured Owen could connect the dots on this one.

Ava and he had split after Dell was caught because simply put, it was too damn hard to be together.

They were each other’s triggers for the memories, and while Shaw had mostly managed his, mostly , he knew that Ava suffered from some serious panic attacks.

In fact, he wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t have one now.

And that made him want to find the asshole who’d sent that text and make him pay hard for rattling her like this.

“Were the details of the riddles released to the press?” Owen asked a moment later.

Shaw sighed, nodded. “Not by us or the cops but by Dell. He gave lots of interviews after he was caught and convicted.”

That meant a copycat would essentially have a blueprint to continue what Dell had started.”

“All right,” Owen said after a couple of seconds of thought. “I’ll request the case files on all the other riddles and murders. Have either of you been in contact with the killer, the other survivors or anyone else connected to the original investigation?”

Shaw shook his head to all three. He’d made a point of not dipping his toes back in those proverbial waters. Even though he hated that had meant staying away from Ava. Still, he had managed to keep his distance because it’d been what she needed.

“No contact with Dell,” Ava explained, “but I saw Lorelei Kane about six months. I ran into her at a restaurant on the Riverwalk in San Antonio.”

“Lorelei Kane,” Owen said as if trying to jog his memory.

Shaw did the recap. “The riddle was Two sisters we are, one is dark and one is fair. We walk together, though we’re seldom a pair.

What are we? The answer was night and day, and that led us to a storage room of an art exhibit with that particular name.

The sisters, Lorelei and Melissa, had been encased in plaster like human statues.

Melissa was dead by the time we got her out. Lorelei survived.”

Oh, yeah. The flashbacks rolled right through him. Of Melissa, pale as ash spilling out onto the floor when the plaster had finally given way. Lorelei hadn’t looked much better, but at least she’d been alive.

“I have to ask,” Owen continued. “Did Lorelei show any resentment for the two of you not saving her sister?”

“Some,” Shaw admitted, and Ava made a sound of agreement.

“Lorelei wasn’t especially friendly when she saw me at the restaurant,” Ava added. “But she wasn’t hostile either.”

“And you think it was a chance meeting with her and not something she arranged?” Owen pressed.

It was an intriguing question, and Shaw would have liked to have heard Ava’s take on that, but before he could even open his mouth, both Ava’s and his phones sounded with a text.

Hell.

That felt like another punch to the gut, but he forced himself to look at the screen. And there it was. The words he hadn’t wanted to see.

“A game for Ava and Shaw only,” he read aloud. “No other cops or Strike Force guys, or you’ll have another death on your hands. Wouldn’t want that, now would you?”

It definitely had Dell’s smug assed tone. But Shaw reminded himself that Dell was behind bars. He wasn’t doing this. Someone else could be though. This might not be a hoax, and at this very moment, someone might be dying.

Or already dead.

Ava’s and his phones dinged again, and Shaw saw the riddle. “I am the beginning of the end and the end of every place,” he read. “I am the start of eternity and the end of time and space. What am I?”

Shaw immediately did an internet search for the answer and came up with one. “It’s the Letter E,” he let Ava and Owen know.

“The beginning and the end,” Ava repeated. “I know this.”

“What does it mean?” Shaw couldn’t ask fast enough.

“The beginning and the end,” she said again, already turning toward the door. “That’s the epitaph on my grandmother’s grave.”