“Why are you trying to kill me?” Kyle asked without preamble. “What did I ever do to you?”
“You’ve done plenty to Cindy,” Jeremiah said sarcastically.
Kyle shook his head. “I don’t buy it. Sure, we see things differently and we don’t get along, but that’s no reason for you to try and kill me.”
Jeremiah knew he had to maintain his cover. There was no telling if anyone else could hear them. Besides, letting Kyle in on the plan was not going to happen. So, Jeremiah leaned forward and dropped his voice slightly so that it was rougher sounding.
“The real question is, why weren’t you man enough to admit up front what type of trip this was and that you would be filming the whole thing?”
“I was afraid Cindy wouldn’t come, obviously. She’s not exactly the on-camera type of personality. But, honestly, why should that even matter? She’s handling it just fine, like I knew she would.”
“Not everyone wants their face plastered across television sets all over the country and computer screens all over the world,” Jeremiah growled.
“Come on, what possible harm could there be?”
“Think real hard about why someone wouldn’t want their face seen that way,” Jeremiah said, his voice even lower and dripping with menace.
“I would imagine only a criminal wouldn’t-” Kyle stopped talking abruptly, his eyes growing round. “What did you do?” he asked.
Jeremiah smirked. “Take a wild guess.”
Kyle took a step back, nearly tripping over some of the boxes stacked behind him. “Why, why didn’t you just back out of the trip when you realized what was happening?”
“And tell Cindy what exactly about my reasons for doing so?”
Kyle lifted a shaking hand. “You, you stay away from my sister.”
“Look who decided to play the loving brother role. You know, Kyle, it doesn’t really suit you.”
“I’m serious, don’t you touch her.”
“You mean, more than I already have?” Jeremiah pushed. “She’s so sweet and soft and trusting. You want to know what it feels like when she’s in my arms, whispering all her secrets to me?”
“I won’t hear another word!” Kyle shouted as he left.
Jeremiah smiled to himself. He had agitated Kyle enough that the other would no longer question his guilt at all.
Cindy had just finished rolling up her sleeping bag and securing it when Kyle came over to her, face flushed.
“You need to stay away from him, he’s trouble,” Kyle said, voice shaking.
“Who, Jeremiah?” Cindy asked, wondering who else he could possibly be referencing.
“Yes, he’s bad news.”
“I think you and Mark are wrong about him being the killer,” Cindy said. “You don’t know Jeremiah like I do.”
“No, you don’t know him at all. Trust me, I just got a glimpse of the real him and it’s terrible. He’s a criminal, Cindy, and you need to get as far away from him as fast as possible.”
“I’ll do no such thing,” Cindy said, lifting her chin defiantly. “I believe in him. He’s a good man.”
“Why are women always so blinded by love?” Kyle ranted. “None of you can ever see straight when it comes to looking at the guy you’ve given your heart to.”
“I’m not in love with him! He’s my friend, and I’m going to stand by him because that’s what friends do. And if you ever had a true friend in your life and not just coworkers and schmoozers you would understand that,” she lashed back.
“That’s enough!” Traci snapped. “Both of you. Bickering among ourselves won’t help anything. Now I have a hard time believing Jeremiah did this, but it looks bad, and we have to be objective about this and brace ourselves for the worst. If he didn’t do it, though, then we need to remain focused and remember that whoever did could strike again at any time. So, just lay off each other, okay?”
Kyle turned and stormed away.
“Thanks,” Cindy muttered.
“I meant it. It does look bad, you have to be prepared in case he did do this.”
Cindy shook her head. “Not Jeremiah.”
Traci rolled her eyes. “Please, if half of what Mark said really is true then what you should be asking is ‘Why not Jeremiah?’ You know I’m right.”
Cindy bit her tongue. It would do no good to antagonize Traci, too, particularly when she could use her help finding the real killer.
Twenty minutes later everyone was packed up and gear was stowed with Jeremiah in the back of the chuck wagon. Mark handled putting everything away, insisting that the prisoner was too dangerous for others to go near. That just infuriated Cindy more, but she still managed to hold her tongue.
Zack approached her a minute later, his face worried. “How’s your ankle?” he asked without preamble.
“It just twinges now, but I’m not looking forward to getting on a horse,” she admitted.
“Well, you might not have to. See, we do have a bit of a problem. We need someone to take over driving the wagon.”
“I don’t know how,” she said.
“No, but you watched Brent do it for a day and a half and it only took me a couple of hours to teach him. Neither Curly nor I can do it because we need to stick with the herd and the others. So, if I sit with you for the first hour or so, do you think you can try to take it over?”
“I’ll try,” she said, her nervousness actually overshadowed by her excitement. It could prove to be her chance to help Jeremiah.
“Great. Everyone else is getting ready, so I think we should go ahead and get started.”
Cindy climbed up into the wagon eagerly and took her place in the driver’s seat. Zack got up beside her and handed her the reins.
“Okay, show me what to do,” she said doggedly.
Mark was a little surprised that Cindy had agreed to learn how to drive the team of horses pulling the wagon. He knew she wasn’t eager to get back up on a horse, but he suspected that her willingness to drive the wagon actually had everything to do with being close to Jeremiah.
Whatever the reason at least he was reasonably certain the two of them were out of harm’s way. He just wished he could say so for the rest of them. With Zack’s help he had wrapped Brent’s body in a tarp and stored it in the wagon. He hated to make Jeremiah ride with a dead man, but there was no way around it.
Curly held his horse for him while he mounted up. Soon the rest of them were on horseback as well.
He urged his mount into a trot, and headed out toward the herd. This was ridiculous. They should leave the herd behind, but hopefully opportunities would abound to catch the real killer.
Half the herd was laying down resting when they reached it. After a couple of minutes they had the animals up and moving. It was going to be another long day of stress and dust. He tried to hold back slightly so that he could keep an eye out for everyone else. Unfortunately, that meant eating even more of the herd’s dust.
Tahiti. That’s where he and Traci were going when all of this was over. Nothing bad ever happened there, he was sure of it.
Curly and Wayne were toward the front of the herd with Junior and Liz behind them a little ways. Right in front of him on the flanks were Hank and Norman, both dutifully filming while also trying to control their horses. Hank was doing a much better job of that than Norman whom Mark was certain was about to fall off his animal on more than one occasion. Traci was to his right, also clearly trying to keep everyone else in her sight.
They had been in motion for about a minute when there was a sudden commotion up ahead. He heard a high-pitched scream and Liz’s horse reared up. Cattle scattered every which way and Curly turned back, racing his horse toward the source of the problem.
The hair on the back of Mark’s neck stood on end. Something was very wrong. He saw Zack leap off the chuck wagon and hastily untie his horse from the back of the wagon and a moment later he, too, was racing toward Liz.
He heard shouts as Curly reached her first. Almost as
though in a trance Mark kicked his horse forward. Something was happening and as much as he knew he wanted to steer clear he also knew that somehow it was going to be important to see what was going on.
Liz was still struggling to get her horse under control. She managed to bring the animal to a standstill just as Mark reached her. She, on the other hand, looked like she was going to be ill.
He turned and saw what had caused all the stir.
In the midst of the cattle, on the ground, was a pile of bloody rags. He blinked, struggling to comprehend what he was seeing. Then it finally hit him. He wasn’t looking at a pile of clothes. He was looking at a mangled corpse.
They had finally found Roddy.
16
Cindy felt a thrill of victory as she managed to bring the horses and wagon to a stop all by herself after Zack leapt off. She swiveled in her seat, trying to see what was causing all the commotion.
“What’s going on?” Jeremiah called from inside the wagon.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Liz’s horse is freaking out or at least he was a second ago. Everyone’s staring at something on the ground.”
“I wonder what they found.”
She stood up, trying to get a better view. “I just can’t see.”
“Someone should let us know soon enough.”
This was her opportunity, Cindy realized. Everyone else was preoccupied. The extra horses were tied to the back of the wagon. She could cut Jeremiah loose and send him on his way while noone was looking.
You could go with him.
She flushed as the thought ambushed her. She firmly dismissed it from her mind, though. Someone had to stay behind to find the real killer and prove Jeremiah’s innocence. If they both ran there would be noone to do that.
She quickly tied the reins so that the horses wouldn’t move and she’d be able to easily retrieve them again. Then she climbed into the back.
“It doesn’t sound good out there,” Jeremiah commented.
She shook her head. She could hear shouting, but she couldn’t make out what anyone was saying. She looked quickly around for one of the knives Brent must have had with him.
“What are you doing?” Jeremiah asked softly.
“I’m going to cut you free. This is your chance to escape.”
“I’m not going to run,” he said.
She looked up at him. He was staring at her, a half smile on his face.
“Why, those people out there, some of them are crazy. I don’t know what they might try to do to you before we can get to a town.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not,” she said, fear rushing through her. There was something wrong in his entire demeanor. He seemed too calm.
Too resigned, she realized.
“Listen to me,” she said, grabbing his shoulders and shaking him. “You can’t give up. You have to fight. We’ve been in lots of worse places than this. I’m not going to let anything happen to you, but you have to help me out.”
“I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but I think everything is going to work out just fine,” he said earnestly.
She stared at him, wondering what had happened in the last little while to make him change his mind about running.
“Someone’s coming,” he said.
She turned and scrambled back out onto the wagon seat, grabbing for the reins as she looked back toward the herd.
Traci was riding up. She pulled her horse to a halt. “Did you hear?”
“No, I can’t tell what’s going on,” Cindy said, struggling to control her agitation.
“They found Roddy, dead.”
“Dead?” Cindy asked, sitting up straighter. He had been the one unknown, the one suspect she couldn’t keep an eye on, and she felt completely terrible as she felt a twinge of relief to know that there wasn’t someone unseen stalking them. “What happened?”
“Zack and Mark are trying to figure that out. He was trampled by the cattle, that’s probably why noone could find him. I got a glimpse, it’s really bad...not a whole lot left.”
“So, did the cattle kill him or did a person?”
Traci blinked. “You think one of the animals could have killed him?”
“Well, I know there is a rather nasty steer in the group who attacked Curly. Or he could have tripped, been injured, and just stepped on one too many times.”
“Okay, I’m no longer sure which scenario freaks me out more, killed by a person or killed by the animals,” Traci said, her face turning ashen.
“Sorry,” Cindy muttered. A moment later, though, she lit up. “If he was killed by the killer, then Jeremiah is innocent.”
“How do you figure that?” Traci asked.
“Jeremiah was working on Brent when Kyle sent Roddy to find Zack.”
“True, but we know that Roddy never found Zack. We also know that Jeremiah went out looking for Roddy. Maybe he found him and killed him while Roddy was still trying to figure out where the doctor was.”
Cindy felt as though she had been slapped. “You can’t possibly believe Jeremiah did this.”
Traci shook her head grimly. “I don’t want to believe it, but frankly at the moment I’m just scared and confused about the whole thing.”
“You don’t have to be scared. We’ll find the real killer and we’ll make it out of this okay, you’ll see.”
“That’s easy for you to say.”
Cindy shook her head in amazement. “It’s not easy for me to say. It comes from experience, lots of it, with finding killers with Jeremiah and Mark. I know that it’s going to work out alright, I feel it.” She took a deep breath. “Besides, God’s not going to let me die on a cattle drive with my brother. It would just be wrong.”
“Wrong? It would be wrong?” Traci asked incredulously. “Because everything else that’s happened so far hasn’t been wrong?”
“It’s not that, it’s just...complicated,” Cindy said. “I just don’t believe this is the end God has in store for us.”
“It must be nice to be that confident,” Traci said with a sigh. She turned and looked back over her shoulder. “I wonder how long it’s going to take them to try and figure out what happened to him?” she said.
“I don’t know. Crime scene units normally take forever, but that’s in a house or a building or something. Out here? Plus it’s not like they can dust for fingerprints or anything like that.”
What Cindy didn’t say was that she was hoping they would be on the move again shortly. Every hour delayed was an hour they were all trapped together in the middle of nowhere. She was becoming more convinced that reaching civilization in one piece was going to be harder than any of them thought.
She stood up and craned her neck. She still couldn’t see the body, and from Traci’s description, she was glad. Zack and Mark appeared to be off their horses while Curly and Hank were busy pushing cattle away from where they were, probably trying to give them as much room to work as possible.
She felt her stomach churn just at the thought of what they were looking at. At the same time she wished she could remember exactly who might have had the opportunity to kill Roddy while the rest of them were all gathered around Brent and Jeremiah. The only ones she knew for sure hadn’t been present were the cowboys.
She swung around in her seat and poked her head through the canvas. “They found Roddy’s body,” she told Jeremiah.
“I heard. Sounds gruesome.”
“What do you think of the three cowboys?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“They’re the only ones I know for a fact weren’t there when the rest of us were gathered around Brent’s body. One of them could easily have killed Roddy.”
“I don’t think it could have been Zack,” Traci spoke up.
Cindy turned to look at her. Traci had moved her horse in closer to participate in the conversation.
“Why not?” Jeremiah called out.
“There simply wasn’t enough time between Roddy bei
ng sent out to find him and him arriving, especially if Roddy was killed in the middle of the herd and that’s why noone could find him. Zack ran up on foot just a minute or so after Roddy left. Not enough time.”
“She’s right,” Jeremiah said.
“Which leaves Tex and Curly,” Cindy said.
“One of whom is dead,” Traci noted.
“At least, we assume he is. We don’t know for a fact that it was his blood. It could have even been an animal’s blood, used to make us think he was dead,” Jeremiah pointed out.
Cindy shuddered. Once again they were back to the possibility that the killer was out there, unseen. She didn’t like it, but she had to admit that at this point without a body they had no proof that Tex was actually dead.
“Why would Tex want Kyle dead, though? Or Curly either, for that matter?” Traci asked.
Cindy snorted. “I think you’re the only one here who actually likes my brother.”
Traci’s eyes narrowed. “He’s a nice guy, you should get to know him more.”
“We can argue my brother’s merits later,” Cindy said impatiently. “You’re right, though, there’s no obvious reason for either of them to want him dead whereas some of his coworkers have much more obvious motives.”
“How about money?” Jeremiah spoke up.
“What about money?” Cindy asked.
“It’s possible that whoever the killer is, one of the cowboys, one of the crew, that they’re just the hired help so to speak and they’re just doing it because someone else is paying them.”
Cindy felt a headache coming on. “You mean, I might need to ask Kyle if anyone anywhere hates him enough to have him killed?”
“It’s either that or continue to try to figure out who had the opportunity to commit each of the crimes,” Traci said.
“Well, for Brent, I think it could have actually been anyone. Just about everyone was in the wagon at some point grabbing gear or putting stuff away. And since we have no idea when they actually poisoned the truffle salt, it will be impossible to narrow that one down,” Cindy said.
“I’ve been thinking about Martin from the bunkhouse,” Traci said, visibly shuddering. “Anyone in there could have killed him if it was truly murder and not just an accident.”