Run Wild (11 page)

Trent was still looking through his papers. Natasha wondered if he had a dispatcher and, if so, had he given them the afternoon off so he could speak with Natasha privately? It appeared all there was to the sheriff’s office was this outer room, Trent’s office, and the short hallway that led to closed doors past his office. Maybe there were holding cells back there, or actual jail cells. If there was anyone in those cells either the walls were very thick or they were being quiet. She was pretty sure she and Trent were the only two in the office.

“When did he call?” He sounded distracted. “Would you know his voice if you heard it again? Did he sound old or young? What about an accent or anything about his vocal inflection that you’d remember?”

Natasha stared at the square tiles on the floor. The first phone call had annoyed her. She hadn’t given her father a thought in ages. Work had been her life. Even after hiring Patty, she had to train her and there still hadn’t been enough hours in the day for much else. After that first phone call, thoughts of her dad, where he might have been or what he might have been doing, had distracted her. She remembered Uncle Greg snapping at her to get the phone when Trent had called her. No one had ever needed to remind her to get the phone. She could, and had many times, answer the damn thing in her sleep.

“I wouldn’t swear to being able to recognize his voice if I heard it again. I answer the phone to way too many callers. But he was older.” She looked up and Trent was watching her, his expression fierce with clarity. “He sounded older than you do on the phone,” she explained, and worked to hear his voice again in her head. “There was a slight accent.”

“An accent?”

“Like a drawl. Maybe someone who lives in a rural area.”

“A rural area where? This part of the country? Or did he sound Southern? From the Midwest?”

It dawned on her she was offering him his next clue in this case. Whoever called her could have been the murderer. Maybe they wanted to know where her father was so they could continue to frame him. She sucked in a breath, hearing the man’s voice in her head.

“Not Southern. Not the Midwest. I’d say he sounded more like some of the people in the diner last night. It was a relaxed, softer drawl than other parts of the country.”

Trent shifted gears and the subject without a blink of the eye. “If you were to guess, where would you say your father is right now?”

Natasha watched as he scribbled something on a pad while keeping his attention on her. Trent might be a small-town man, but he was an investigator. He just didn’t look like the type of lawmen she was used to seeing. That didn’t mean she couldn’t switch gears right along with him.

“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head.

“What’s his current address?” Trent asked, giving her all of his attention now.

“I don’t know,” she repeated.

“So prior to me, or this other person, contacting you, you’d had absolutely no contact with your father in any way?”

“You’re quick, darling,” she said with a sardonic tone. “He might not be Father of the Year, but he’s my dad. That’s how he’s always been,” she added and her voice trailed off. She’d given Trent enough information for him to get the picture.

Trent left his pile of papers and came around his desk, tapping his finger against his lips as he focused on the floor and approached slowly. “There is caller ID at your office, right?”

“Yes.” She watched him come closer, but when he began circling her as he continued tapping his finger Natasha stared ahead, only moving her eyes to zone in on him the moment he entered her peripheral vision from behind. “The number was blocked, Trent. We would have traced it and located the caller if it hadn’t been.”

“So you weren’t incredibly bothered that someone called and asked about your father?”

She spun around and glared at him. “Yes, it bothered me having someone call and ask about my father. Just as it bothers me now that I don’t know where he is. But from what I’ve gathered so far, that first caller could have been any number of people calling from this area code. You’ve already named him as the murderer.”

Trent stopped circling her. He lowered his hand and returned her stare. “It was on the news, remember?” he said, his low baritone matching the dangerous look he gave her. “Reporters were on the scene. And I didn’t invite them out there.”

“We aren’t accomplishing a thing,” she snapped, turning and reaching for the door.

But she spun around again and stabbed her finger into his chest. It was as hard as steel and bent her fingernail backward. She ignored the quick jolt of desire that shot through her. “You think my father murdered that man,” she accused, her heart pounding in her chest as she watched turbulence swarm in Trent’s eyes. “You’ve already convicted him. Nothing I say is going to change that.”

She spun around again, grabbed the door handle, and pulled open the door. Natasha half-expected Trent to grab her shoulder. She anticipated his touch and when it didn’t come she hesitated before walking into the chilly afternoon weather. Then looking over her shoulder, she only half-turned, keeping her hand on the door. “Tell me you think my father is innocent until proven guilty.”

She waited. Although she didn’t expect him to respond, it still stung a bit when he didn’t.

“Looks to me like the law in this land is rather jaded.” This time she embraced the cold breeze when she stormed to her car. Getting aroused and getting pissed off at the same time never made for a good mix. Natasha knew men, though. She was smart to just go with pissed.

*   *   *

The following morning she checked out of the nice bed-and-breakfast. Her every move there was being logged and reported to the sheriff. In spite of not knowing why he’d really wanted her to come to Weaverville, she did know it wasn’t to help clear her father’s name. Natasha had to find a place to stay that wasn’t under Trent’s scrutiny.

Natasha dropped her luggage on the worn-out carpet of the seedy motel. The small roadside motel looked like the kind of place that rented its rooms out by the hour. The heavyset man at the counter never made eye contact but didn’t turn her away when she offered cash for two nights.

Acorn, the unincorporated community just outside Weaverville, could also be described as locked in time. There weren’t more than a couple thousand people living there. She’d been informed at the front desk that the closest shopping was in Weaverville, as well as the movie theatre and hospital.

More than likely the closest law enforcement was also in Weaverville. Natasha didn’t ask and the guy at the front desk didn’t offer. She stared at the lumpy-looking bed, the stiff armchair in the corner of the room, and the sticky-looking table in front of the window with heavy, lopsided closed curtains. Pearl’s Bed-and-Breakfast had been a lot nicer.

And she’d been watched every minute she’d been there.

Why?

What had he hoped to learn by having Matilda spy on her?

After she unpacked her bathroom items she decided that although very little money had been put into the place, it was at least clean. The one towel in the bathroom was stiff, rough against her skin, and smelled strongly of bleach. But the bathtub was clean and the housekeeper had taken the time to wipe down the faucets so they shone.

Natasha opted against hanging her clothes in the very small closet. Besides, there were no hangers. Instead, she left her suitcase open to air out her clothes and tested out the bed. It could be worse. She wasn’t in a sleeping bag on the hard ground. Memories of camping as a child with her cousins, aunt, and uncle popped into Natasha’s head and she grinned.

“Where are you, Dad?” she whispered, and pulled her cell phone out of her purse. How many times over the years had she asked that question? For years during her childhood, some time after her mother took off, Natasha always believed her father being gone was a temporary thing. For a while she even fantasized about him searching the world for the perfect mother for her. He would return, with perfect mommy holding his hand, they would swoop her up, and the three of them would make the perfect family in a perfect house somewhere.

“Wow. I’d forgotten about that,” she muttered, letting the childhood fantasy sink back where it had come from.

There weren’t any complaints. Her father could appear out of the blue, make her promises, and break her heart when he left and didn’t keep any of them. Even into her early adulthood he’d had that grip on her. Natasha would tell herself she understood her father, accepted his free spirit and complete inability to grasp how a parent should be. Then George King would saunter into her world, wrap his huge arms around her, and hold her close, as if he’d missed her more than she’d missed him. Maybe as soon as he had her under his spell he had taken off because so much unconditional love was more than he could handle.

George King was about as flawed as a man, and father, could be. But murderer?

“No way,” she said adamantly. Then pushing the number 1 speed dial, she listened as the phone rang on the other end. She recognized the change in rings when it rolled over to the office phone number.

“King Fugitive Apprehension,” a woman’s voice purred on the other end of the line.

Natasha rolled her eyes. “It’s ‘KFA,’” she informed Patty, and enjoyed the moment of silence when she threw Patty off guard. “I need to speak with my uncle, please.”

“Greg King isn’t available right now.” Patty regained her soft purr.

Lord, she sounded as if she were working for a phone-sex business.

“Is there a message?”

“Yes. Tell him to call me immediately.”

“May I take your name?”

“Patty,” Natasha growled, not in the mood. “It’s Natasha and you knew that.”

Patty’s vocal inflection didn’t change. “I’ll give him the message.”

“Do that.” Natasha sighed, picturing her uncle standing nearby oblivious to her needing to talk to him. She she said good-bye, hung up, and left her phone on the bed as she stood and stretched.

She’d been up since 5:00
A.M.
, had headed out before the sun was up and with frost on her windows. She had driven south for two hours, just in case Trent was obsessive and compulsive enough to have her followed. Then pulling off to gas up the truck, she’d annoyed the tar out of her GPS as she wound along back roads, working her way north again, until she found Acorn. She wanted to be close to Trinity Ranch. Her father was definitely cut from a different cloth than the rest of his family, but nonetheless he was still a King. He was blood. And if Natasha had been in his shoes, accused wrongly of a grotesque crime, she’d go into deep hiding but not so far away she couldn’t keep an eye on the developments of the investigation. In fact, if the tables were turned and it was her ass on the line, Natasha would do anything in her power to learn who the real killer was.

She stretched, twisted her torso a few times, flexed and unflexed her arms, then walked to the window, draped with the heavy curtain. The rod to pull the curtain back wasn’t set right and got stuck in its tracking. Natasha pushed part of the curtain to the side and stared out of the fogged-over window. She squinted out at the highway and the occasional car zipping by.

Some kind of antique shop was across the street next to a gas station that desperately needed to update its pumps. The sign indicating its gas prices was the only indication given that the station was still open for business. Tall weeds grew up around the side of the building, and there were deep potholes at the entrance to the parking lot. A man left the station and walked to where his car was parked.

Natasha stared harder, trying desperately to capture details through a window that probably hadn’t been cleaned in ages. Finally giving up, she moved to the motel room door and opened it far enough to see him before he reached his car.

He wore clothing that would be hard to describe, dark blue jeans and a pullover sweater that was a darker shade of blue. He was clean-cut, his most noticeable feature being his height. The man had to be close to six and a half feet tall, which was what grabbed her attention in the first place. It was a dead giveaway with all King men.

“Dad?” she whispered, her heart immediately swelling into her throat.

There was no way. It couldn’t be this easy.

The man slid into his car, a Buick, dark gray. Natasha didn’t catch the tag number, but she would. Racing for her purse, then the key to the room, which she’d left on the bathroom counter, she was out the door in the next minute, pulling it closed and waiting until she heard it click. Then she jumped into the Avalanche, and the tires spun over the gravel when she gunned it to keep up with the Buick that already had a decent lead on her.

“Is it you?” she asked out loud, gripping the steering wheel with both hands and dealing with sudden tunnel vision as she focused only on the rear of the car ahead of her.

It had been four years, but her dad had looked the same the last few times he’d swept into her life and out again. His hair was short, not quite a buzz but shorter than Uncle Greg’s. It always had been. Her dad had told her once it was because Greg was the true rebel, not him.

He wasn’t thin but definitely was not fat. Natasha had always thought him good-looking. She could see how any lady would fall for his King charm. He hadn’t appeared concerned at the gas station. She hadn’t noticed him checking out his surroundings. Certainly a man wanted for murder would be cautious about being spotted. They weren’t that far from Weaverville.