Secret of Deadman's Coulee Read online

  B.J. DANIELS

  SECRET OF DEADMAN’S COULEE

  TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON

  AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG

  STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID

  PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

  This is for Rob Myers, former coroner and always a

  mystery lover. Thanks, Rob, for all your help over the

  years. You are one of the few people I can call and ask

  about dead bodies, poisons and cool scary stuff.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  A grouse burst from the sagebrush in an explosion of wings. Eve Bailey brought her horse up short, heart jammed in her throat and, for the first time, was aware of just how far she’d ridden from the ranch.

  The wind had kicked up, the horizon to the west dark with thunderheads. She could smell the rain in the air.

  She’d ridden into the badlands, leaving behind the prairie with its deep grasses to ride through sage and cactus, to find herself in no-man’s-land with a storm coming.

  Below her lay a deep gorge the Missouri River had carved centuries ago through the harsh eastern Montana landscape. Erosion had left hundreds of ravines in the unstable soil, and the country was now badlands for miles, without a road, let alone another person in sight.

  Eve stared at the unforgiving land, her heart just as desolate. She should never have come home.

  The wind whirled dust around her, the horizon blackening with clouds that now swept toward her.

  She had to turn back. She’d been foolish to ride this far out so late in the day, let alone with a storm coming.

  Even if she took off now she would never reach the ranch before the weather hit. Yet she still didn’t move.

  She couldn’t get the image of what she’d seen out of her mind. Her mother and another man. She felt sick at the memory of the man she’d seen leaving her mother’s house by the back door.

  She shivered. The temperature was dropping rapidly. She had to turn back now. She’d been so upset that she’d ridden off dressed only in jeans and a T-shirt, and there was no shelter between here and the ranch.

  A storm this time of year could be deadly for anyone without shelter. Turning her horse, she bent her head against the wind as the rainstorm moved in.

  A low moan filled the air. She brought her horse up short again and listened. Another low, agonizing moan rose on the wind. She turned back to listen. The sound seemed to be coming from the ravine below her.

  A gust of wind kicked up dust, whirling it around her. She bent her head against the grit that burned her eyes as she swung down from her horse and stepped to the edge of the steep ravine.

  Shielding her eyes, she peered down. Far below, along a wide rocky ledge, stood a thick stand of giant junipers. As the wind whipped down the steep slope, the branches parted and—

  There was something there, deep in the trees. She saw the glint of metal in the dull light and what could have been a scrap of clothing.

  Goose bumps rose on her arms as she heard the low moan again. Someone was down there.

  The first few drops of rain slashed down, cold and wet as they soaked instantly into her clothing. She barely noticed as the air filled with another moan. She caught sight of movement. From behind the thick nest of junipers, a scrap of faded red fabric flapped in the wind.

  “Hello!” she called, the wind picking up her words and hurling them across the wide ravine.

  No answer.

  Common sense told her to head toward the ranch before the weather got any worse. Eve Bailey was no stranger to the risk of living in such an isolated, unpopulated part of the state. She’d been born and raised only miles from here. She knew how quickly a storm could come in.

  This part of Montana was famous for extreme temperature changes that could occur from within hours to a matter of minutes. It was hard country in which to survive. Five generations of Baileys would attest to that.

  But if there was someone down there, someone injured, she couldn’t just leave them.

  “Hello!” she called again, and was answered by that same low, agonizing moan. Below her, the scrap of red cloth fluttered in the wind and, beside it, what definitely appeared to be metal glittered. What was down there?

  A gust of wind howled past, and another low moan rose from the trees. She glanced back at the ominous clouds, then down into the vertical-sided ravine as she debated what to do.

  She was going to have to go down there—and on foot. It was one thing to risk her own neck, but there was no way she was going to risk her horse’s.

  The ravine was a sheer drop at the top, widening as it fell to the ledge and growing steeper again as it dropped to the old riverbed far below. This end of Fort Peck Reservoir was dry from years of drought, the water having receded miles down this canyon.

  Across the chasm the mountains were dark with pines. This side was nothing but eroded earth and a few stands of wind-warped junipers hanging on for dear life.

  Eve loosely tied her horse to a tall sage. If she didn’t get back before the storm hit, she didn’t want her mare being struck by lightning. Better to let the horse get to lower ground just in case, even though it meant she’d have to find the mare to get home.

  From experience she knew the soil into the ravine would be soft and unstable. But she hadn’t expected it to give under her weight the way it did. The top layer of dirt and shale began to avalanche downward, taking it with her from her first step off.

  She slid, descending too fast, first on her feet, then on her jean-clad bottom. She dug in her heels, but it didn’t slow her down, let alone stop her. As she barreled toward the ledge, she realized with growing concern that if the junipers didn’t stop her, then she was headed for the bottom of the ravine.

  The eerie sound again filled the air. The wind and rain chilled her to the bone as she slid at breakneck speed toward the sound. She swept past an outcropping of rock and grabbed hold of a jutting rock. But she couldn’t hold on.

  The rough rock scraped off her skin, now painful and bleeding, but the attempt had slowed her down a little. Now if the junipers would just stop her—

  That’s when she saw the break in the rock ledge. While the ledge ran across the ravine, a part of it had slid out and was now funnel shaped. Eve was heading right for the break in the rocks.

  Just before the ledge, she grabbed for the thickest juniper limb she could reach and hung on. The bark tore off more skin from her already bloody palm as her hand slid along it and finally caught. The pain was excruciating.

  Worse, her momentum swung her around the branch and smacked her hard into another thick trunk, but she was finally stopped. She took a ragged breath, exhaling on a sob of pain, relief and fear as she crouched on the ledge and tried to get herself under control.

  Trembling from the cold and the fall down the ravine, she pulled herself up by one of the branches. She’d banged her ankle on a loose rock at the base of the junipers. It ached, but she was just thankful that it wasn’t broken as she stood, clinging to the branch, and looked down.

  She’d never liked heights. She swayed, sick to her stomach as she saw how the ground
dropped vertically to a huge pile of rocks in the river bottom far below.

  Her legs were trembling, her body aching, hands bleeding and scraped, but her feet were on solid ground.

  A jagged flash of lightning split the sky overhead, followed quickly by a reverberating boom of thunder.

  Through the now-pouring rain, Eve looked back up the steep slope she’d just plunged down. No chance of getting out that way. She felt sick to her stomach because she had no idea how she was going to get herself out of here, let alone anyone else.

  “Hello?” she called out.

  No answer.

  “Is anyone down here?” she called again.

  She listened. Nothing but the sound of the rain on the rocks at her feet.

  She couldn’t see the scrap of red cloth. Nor whatever had appeared to glint like metal from the top of the ravine. The junipers grew so thick she couldn’t see into them or around them. Nor was she sure she could get past them the way they crowded the ledge.

  The wind howled down the ravine as the sky darkened and the brunt of the storm settled in, the rain turning to sleet. From deep in the trees came the eerie low moan.

  Chilled to the bone, Eve edged along the rock ledge, clinging to branches to keep from falling as she moved toward the sound. The sleet fell harder, the wind blowing it horizontally across the ravine.

  She hadn’t gone but a few yards when she heard a faint flapping sound—the cloth she’d seen from the top of the ravine! She moved toward the sound and saw the strap of faded red fabric, the edges frayed and ragged. Past the cloth, dented and dusty metal gleamed dully in the cloud-obscured light.

  Her mouth went dry, her pulse its own thunder in her ears, as she saw what was left of a small single-engine airplane. With a shock, she realized the crashed plane had to have been there for years. One wing was buried in the soft dirt of the ravine, the rest of the plane completely hidden by the junipers as if the trees had conspired to conceal it.

  The moan startled her as the wind rushed over the weathered metal surface of the plane.

  It had only been the wind.

  She clung to a juniper branch as the storm increased in intensity, lightning slicing down through the canyon, thunder echoing in earsplitting explosions over her head. Water streamed over the rock ledge, dark and slick with muddy soil.

  She let out a sob of despair. She wouldn’t be getting out of here anytime soon. Even if she could find a way off the rock ledge, it would be slippery now, the soil even more unstable.

  Holding a branch back out of her way, she moved to the edge of the cockpit and used her sleeve to wipe the dirty wet film from the side of the glass canopy.

  Cupping her hand over her eyes, she peered inside.

  Eve reared back, flailing to keep from falling off the ledge, as her startled shriek echoed across the ravine.

  She was shaking so hard she could hardly hold on to the juniper branch as rain and sleet thumped the canopy and the wind wailed over what was left of the plane.

  She closed her eyes, fighting to erase the image from her mind, the macabre scene inside the plane chilling her more than the storm.

  The pilot’s seat was empty, and the strip of torn red cloth caught in the canopy was now flapping in the growing wind. The seat next to it was also empty, but there was a dark stain on the fabric.

  The passenger in the back hadn’t been so lucky. Time and the elements had turned the corpse to little more than a mummified skeleton, the dried skin shrunken down over the facial bones, the eyes hollow sockets staring out at her.

  Not even that was as shocking as what she’d seen sticking out of the corpse’s chest—the handle of a hunting knife, grayed from the years, the blade wedged between the dead man’s ribs.

  Chapter Two

  Sheriff Carter Jackson had a theory about bad luck. He’d decided that some men attracted it like stink on a dog. At least that had been the case with him.

  His luck had gone straight south the day he found Deena Turner curled up and waiting for him in his bed. He’d been more than flattered. Hell, Deena had been the most popular girl in high school, sexy and beautiful, the girl every red-blooded male in Whitehorse, Montana, wanted to find waiting for him in his bed.

  So Carter had done what any dumb nineteen-year-old would do. He’d thanked his lucky stars, never suspecting that the woman was about to take him to hell and back.

  Finding Deena in his bed had only been the beginning of a string of mistakes over the next twelve years that culminated in Deena lying about being pregnant and the two of them running off and getting married.

  It had been hard at first to admit he’d made a mistake marrying her. He’d seen marriage as forever and divorce as failure. So he’d hung in. Right up until he caught Deena in bed with his best friend.

  That had been two years ago. Since then he’d gone through a long, drawn-out, painful divorce. Painful because he felt guilty that it hurt more losing his best friend than it did ending it for good with Deena.

  But that was the problem. It hadn’t ended for good with Deena. Two weeks ago, she’d decided she wanted him back and that she would do anything to make that happen.

  And she meant anything.

  He pulled up in front of the house he and Deena had shared during their marriage. It was too early in the morning for this, but he just wanted to get it over with. Weighed down with dread, he climbed out of his patrol car, trying to remember a time when he’d looked forward to seeing Deena in the morning.

  As he walked up the cracked sidewalk, he told himself this would be the last time. No matter what.

  He grimaced at the thought, remembering how many times he’d left during their twelve years of marriage only to go back out of guilt or a sense of obligation. No wonder Deena just assumed he would always come back to her. He always had.

  She opened the door to his knock almost as if she’d been expecting him. After what she’d left at his office for him, he didn’t doubt she was.

  She was wearing one of his old T-shirts and, from what he could tell, little else. His once-favorite scent floated around her. Her blond hair was pulled up, loose tendrils framing her pretty face.

  “Hello, Carter,” she said in that sultry voice, the one that had once been his undoing. “I had a feeling you’d be by this morning.” She shoved open the door a little wider and gave him “the look.” Boy, did he know that look.

  Without a word, he reached into his pocket and took out the plain white envelope with her name and address neatly typed on it and handed it to her.

  She took it, her smile slipping a little. “Something for me? You shouldn’t have.”

  No, he thought, you shouldn’t have. All the surprise visits at work and at his house, the presents, the constant phone calls, the urgent messages. The more he’d tried to get her to stop, the worse she had become.

  He waited as she opened the envelope, resting his hand on the butt of the weapon at his hip.

  Her eyes widened as she took out the legal form and read enough that, when she spoke, her sultry voice was long gone. “What the hell is this?”

  “It’s a restraining order. From this time forward you are not to contact me, send me any more letters or packages or come within one-hundred-and-fifty feet of me.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “We live in Whitehorse, Montana, you dumb bastard. The whole town is only a hundred and fifty feet long.”

  “If you break the restraining order you will be arrested,” he said, hating that it had come to this.

  He tipped his hat and turned his back to her as he headed for his vehicle, hoping she didn’t have a gun, because he was pretty sure she’d have no compunction about shooting him in the back.

  “You just made the biggest mistake of your life, Carter Jackson!” she yelled after him. “You’re going to regret this as long as you live, you smug son of a bitch. If you think you can just walk away from me—”

  The slamming of his patrol-car door thankfully cut off the rest of her words. This
was not the morning to tempt him into arresting her for threatening an officer of the law.

  It had taken him years, but he finally understood Deena. She only wanted what she couldn’t have. His allure was that he hadn’t been available. Just before he found her in his bed, he’d begun dating a neighboring ranch girl he’d known all his life, a girl he was getting serious with.

  And that, he knew now, was why Deena had thrown herself at him. Deena had always been jealous of Eve Bailey and became worse after he and Deena married. Even the mention of Eve’s name would set Deena off. He’d never understood her jealousy, especially since Eve had left the area right after high school and hadn’t come back.

  Until two weeks ago. Just about the time Deena decided she was going to get him back, come hell or high water.

  As Carter drove away, he didn’t look in his ex’s direction, although out of the corner of his eye he saw that she’d come down the sidewalk in her bare feet and was now waving the restraining order and yelling obscenities at him.

  “Good-bye, Deena,” he said, hoping his luck was about to change. Maybe she would meet an unavailable long-haul trucker who’d take her far, far away.

  As he drove back toward his office in the large three-story brick county courthouse, his radio squawked.

  “Lila Bailey just called,” the dispatcher told him. “She’s worried about her daughter. Says they had a big storm down that way last night. Her daughter apparently went for a horseback ride yesterday evening and didn’t return home last night.”

  “Which daughter?” Carter asked, his heart kicking up a beat.

  “Eve Bailey.”

  The way his luck was going, of course it would be Eve. He’d grown up around the Bailey girls. Eve was hands-down the most headstrong of the three. And that was saying a lot. But she was also the most capable. She knew that country south of town. If anyone could survive a night out there, even in a bad storm, it was Eve.