Lost in Tennessee (16 page)

Tom turned the laptop toward Kate. “Haven’t seen it. Maybe it’s in Butch’s room. Look, I found it.”

“Found what?” She bent over to see the screen without the glare.

“The Grand Ole Opry. It’s a live radio show with different acts. Every Friday and Saturday night.”

The webpage contained images of happy people with guitars and cowboy hats. “What kind of music? Opera? He hasn’t played any opera since I’ve been here. When did cowboy hats become an opera thing?”

“Not opera. Country music.” Tom clicked a link and a tinny, twangy song rang out.

“Oh. Okay. That makes more sense.” Kate straightened up. “Do you think we have to wear something? You know, like cowboy hats or boots?”

Tom stopped the sample and gaped up at her. “God, I hope not. Look at all these sparkly things they’re wearing—and those are the guys.”

“What are y’all looking at?”

At the sound of Jeb’s voice, Kate stepped in front of the computer. She heard the click behind her back as Tom hastily closed it. “Progress schedule. Work. Nothing interesting.”

Tom poked her in the back, and Kate shut up.

Jeb poured a cup of coffee and leaned against the counter. “Are you working today?”

Kate nodded. “Light duty. Nothing too heavy or too loud.”

“And no driving, just to be safe”

“Yes, Sheriff. No driving.”

Kate kept her day light. She would have lied to anyone who asked and said it was because she promised to take it easy. The truth was she wasn’t one hundred percent. She knew it when she didn’t mind sitting at her desk and catching up on paperwork. Paperwork was a necessary evil—emphasis on the evil. Kate poured through the daily reports, submittals, invoices, and emails, and by early afternoon could see the top of her desk.

Paula rapped twice on the doorway as she poked her head in. “Kate, the sheriff is here to see you.”

Kate met Jeb in the middle of the trailer. “What happened? Did you find something?”

His face an iron mask, Jeb gave no indication of his agenda. “Is there somewhere we could talk?”

“Hold my calls, Paula. All of them.” Kate led Jeb into her office where she shut the door and both the windows.

Jeb paced back and forth in the small space, like a rat caught in the maze. Kate stood behind her desk, facing him with crossed arms. The anxiety he radiated tripped her own radar. She shifted her weight between her feet, waiting for Jeb to talk.

“I found her cell phone. The last call came from Butch’s house.”

All the color drained from Kate’s face. “You don’t think that… No, of course you don’t.”

“Someone is setting my brother up. That’s what I think, and I’m so…I’m not thinking straight. I needed to talk to someone. I’m getting in my own way, and I know it.”

“You can’t talk to your staff, can you? Sheriff McCormick, brother of the leading suspect.”

“I have to preserve some semblance of objectivity if I’m going to stay on the case, but I’m not in the least bit objective.”

Katie took a step back at the fierce look in his eye. Something dangerous lived inside Jebediah McCormick, something he did a damned good job of keeping under wraps. A man like Jeb didn’t ask for help lightly. Butch needed Jeb to survive his ex-wife’s death, and it looked like Jeb needed Katie to beat back his own monster.

“What’s bothering you the most? Let’s just get it out in the open.”

Chapter Eight

T
hose cold, gray eyes settled on her face. “Someone went into that goddamned house while he was asleep. Asleep! When I think about what they could have done.” Jeb struck at the desk that stood between them.

Angry men didn’t faze Kate. Twenty-nine years of living with it desensitized her to the raw emotion that was a symptom, not a cause. She ratcheted down her own response, leaning casually against the file cabinet behind her. “It’s a Steelcase desk. It’s been kicked more than a few times and has never dented. Have at it.”

His mouth curled into an ugly sneer, his eyes focusing on the desk as though it was his mortal enemy. Jeb reeled back and kicked the desk again. Thunder roared in the small room, giving voice to Jeb’s hostility.

“Is it helping?”

Jeb didn’t look at her but kicked the desk again. “No. Damn it, no.”

Despite bragging about her desk, Kate wasn’t sure it could take this kind of punishment. Fortunately, a construction site offered options. “Come with me.”

Outfitted with a hard hat and safety glasses, a bewildered Jeb followed Kate out into the yard a short distance away from the productive construction. She stopped at an equipment trailer and selected a twelve-pound sledgehammer before continuing to a pile of excavated rock.

“Take off your shirt, you don’t want to get it sweaty.”

Jeb scowled and crossed his arms. “This isn’t going to help.”

“It will if you do it right. Do you know how to swing a sledge? I’ve been doing it since I was fifteen. Do you need a lesson?”

Jeb stripped his shirt, muttering under his breath. “I don’t need a lesson in swinging a sledge.”

Kate swallowed a smile when he ripped the buttons open on his uniform and stood in his T-shirt. Men were so easy.

She set the hammer on the ground at his feet and stepped a safe distance away. Jeb picked up the hammer and brought it down on a thick slab of concrete. He adjusted his grip. He adjusted his stance, looking for a rhythm.

Each stroke of the hammer was a shot to her head but Kate pushed it away. Pain was temporary. “Smooth, easy, downward. There ya go.” She eased him into conversation to help focus his thoughts. “How come you and Butch call each other Clyde? Was Clyde a favorite uncle or something?”

Jeb found a rhythm that suited him and started talking in small bursts between each fall of the hammer. “Trudy’s family owns the farm next to ours. Her old man had an ass, Clyde, which was as mean and stubborn as he was. If you came to close to him, he’d bite and kick.”

“Her father or the ass?”

“Both, but I was talking about the ass.”

“I only have experience with the two-legged kind of ass. Is that normal for the four-legged kind?”

“Clyde was the most unreasonable animal I’ve ever met.” Jeb fell into a steady rhythm. “Mama hated it. She would chase it away from her garden. Sometimes with a shotgun.”

“She shot it?” Kate asked in both surprise and admiration. She noticed Jeb start to sweat, and the knot between his brows loosened, the set of his mouth eased.

“No. Wanted to, no doubt. One day, Butch and I were arguing, the way brothers do. She got a hold of us and said if we were going to act like Clyde, she was going to treat us like Clyde, and she tossed us out of the house. We started calling each other Clyde while we rolled on the ground, fighting over whose fault the whole thing was.”

Kate wanted to crawl into a bottle of codeine, close her eyes, and just float. Instead, she kept her gaze on Jeb. “That’s it, Clyde. You found the rhythm. You got it. Now talk to me.”

Jeb heaved and smashed. “Angie’s car was spotted in an abandoned lot outside of town.” Heave, smash. “It was unlocked, no damage.” Heave, smash. “Her phone was wedged between the driver’s seat and the center console.” Heave, smash.

“Her purse?”

Heave, smash. “Haven’t found it.” Heave, smash. “Yet.”

Kate watched the weight of blinding fury that came with hostility fade as the confident, hard-ass she knew to be Jebediah McCormick re-emerged. She saw it in his eyes, heard it in the challenge of the word “yet.”

Heave, smash. “She called Butch’s house Sunday night. Nine forty-eight. The call lasted two minutes and six seconds.”

Kate shook her head. “That’s not right, Jeb. The phone didn’t ring. I didn’t go to bed until ten. I was with Butch, listening to him play until then. The phone didn’t ring.”

Heave, smash. “Are you sure you just didn’t hear it?”

“That’s possible, but I absolutely know neither of us answered it, even if it did ring.”

Heave, smash. “Butch called her at eight thirty-three Monday morning. This time the call was shorter. Just a minute and a half.”

“Somebody called her Monday morning. I wouldn’t assume it was Butch. All he wanted to do was go back to bed after dropping me at work.”

Heave, smash. “Somebody called her.”

“That somebody wasn’t there when he got home from dropping me off at the job site. He would have told you.”

Heave, smash. “Somebody came in after he was home.”

Kate furrowed her brow. “That’s scary. He’s upstairs asleep, and someone is creeping through his house. Maybe they didn’t know he was home.”

Heave, smash. “His truck was in the garage.”

“What if he woke up?”

Heave, smash. “Either they would have hurt him, or—”

“He knows them,” they said in unison.

Jeb dropped the hammer and picked up his shirt. “Damn it. Damn it. I need to get into the house.”

“Come back to the trailer, I’ll get you a towel. Butch is in Nashville today, so the house is empty.”

Jeb quickly lifted the hammer to his shoulder when Kate would have picked it up. He put it back in the tool shed and walked with her back to her office. There, she dug into a black gym bag and tossed him a thick towel. He wiped the sweat from his face and neck. “I have to think this through. I have to do it right, or I’ll make it worse.”

“I want to help but don’t know the rules. Tell me what to do…or what not to do.” As she stood from bending over, her office spun in time with the pounding of her head.

“I’m going to need to go through the house and figure out who’s been there.” Jeb shrugged on his shirt, quickly buttoning it.

“Besides you, me, Tom, and your parents?”

“Yeah.” Jeb pulled his shirt back on. “It’s been Grand Central Station lately. You all right?”

“My head is killing me. Is it okay if I go back to the house with you? I need to lie down. I won’t touch anything.”

“I’m glad you’re taking care of yourself.” Jeb handed her the safety glasses. “I was going say you look like shit, but I didn’t think you’d take too kindly to it.”

Kate tossed the glasses on her desk, powered down her computer, and texted Tom her plans. A nap, just an hour, and she’d be back on her feet. “I take great care of myself whenever the men in my life stay out of the way.”

B
utch took the back roads out of Nashville. His stomach had turned through the entire meeting. He’d sat opposite Fawn, faced off against a woman he once thought he loved. The dispassion with which they discussed the details—sometimes intimate details—of their short life together sickened him. Butch said little throughout the meeting, letting Finch do the talking. Fawn, on the other hand, alternately spewed venom and nonsense while her attorney, present on speakerphone, failed to contain the damage. Finch made mincemeat out of Fawn Jordan. Being right, having the moral upper hand, should have made Butch feel good. But it didn’t.

Butch saw shadows of the girl he married in the woman sitting across from him in her designer dress and camera-ready hair. She wasn’t as innocent as she had been, but she was still in over her head. Butch didn’t want blood. He just wanted out.

The powerful engine of the truck vibrated under his feet as Butch raced through the back roads. He’d taken the long way home, needing the quiet and the sweet country air just to be able to breathe. How had he been able to breathe in Los Angeles for those few years? Well, he hadn’t really. He spent more time in his cabin in the mountains than he had at their home. He could breathe there. He needed more than concrete and steel.

Butch turned onto his road. Jeb waited at the stop sign, and Butch pulled up next to his brother. “What are you doing out this way?”

“Driving your Kate around. That is one helluva woman you’ve got there. I wouldn’t do anything stupid when you get home.”

Butch noticed a change in Jeb’s attitude toward Kate. The chronic distrust in his voice had changed to something that sounded like respect. When had that happened? Why was Jeb driving Kate anywhere? “What’s going on?”

“I’m going to get Mama and Dad. We’ll be back with dinner shortly.”

Butch drove the quarter mile to the house, puzzling out what happened while he’d been in Nashville. With a half-smile teasing his mouth, he realized anything could have happened. Damn near anything. “What’re you up to, Katie?” He never wondered what any of his wives were doing when he was away from home. He always knew. Angie was about her crusades, Tessa “created,” and Fawn spent money and networked. Katie? Lord only knew what she was doing.

Well, maybe not the Lord.

Butch pulled up the drive and watched the redhead pace the length of the porch in long, thundering strides. She pushed at the flaming hair that swirled around her in matted disarray. Everything about her stance, everything about her movement, said if she came after you, she was bringing the fires of hell with her.

Butch left the truck in the driveway and walked toward her. He didn’t notice his stomach had stopped turning. He didn’t notice he felt like he was home. He only noticed the woman with the clear blue eyes locked on his.

Kate threw her hands in the air and shouted to him. “The world is full of idiots.”

Butch stood at the base of the porch, putting his eyes on level with her chest. “I believe I can agree with you on that.”

She planted her boots squarely in front of him. “You have your stupid idiots, your dumb-ass idiots, and your garden-variety idiots. I just got a call from Tom that a stupid idiot decided the site was a NASCAR test track and tried to lay down some rubber. The stupid idiot lost control and nearly put the car in a twenty-foot pit. That’s one less stupid idiot I have to pay. Before that, a dumb-ass idiot nearly fried himself by not cutting the power to the circuit he was tapping. Let workman’s comp pay for that one. And then we have your garden-variety idiots.”

Butch scratched his head, hiding his grin. “I’m not your garden-variety idiot, am I?”

She narrowed her eyes challengingly. “Did you agree to anything today without your shark?”

He laid his right hand over his heart. “No, ma’am. My shark did all the talking.”

Kate nodded sharply and then restarted the rant. “Then you’re not a garden-variety idiot, or at least you’re a smart enough idiot not to admit it. The thing about idiocy? You can’t do anything about it. You can’t beat it out of a man. You can’t cure it. There’s no shot for it, no pills to pop, no surgery to take that part out. Oh, sure, once in a while you can get lucky and vote it out of office, but usually you’re just hosed until it dies.”