The Lawman Meets His Bride

“Yes, that’s the one.”

She hesitated, her surprise tinged by annoyance. The Mill Road cabin was her listing, all right. One of Hazel McCallum’s properties. And while it was a quaint, rustic hideaway in the mountains, it hardly represented a fat commission. It was a little too remote, a little too basic, for most of her clients. Still…she hadn’t exactly been swamped with offers.

“Well, Mr. Henning, it is rather late. I mean, it would take me some time to drive up into the mountains from here. May I ask—where are you right now?”

“In front of the cabin, actually. Saw your name on the sign. I called on my cell phone.”

“Oh, I see.”

A cell phone, she thought. Yes, maybe that explained the curious flattened sound to his voice. At any rate, she should have simply said no, not today. But something about his urgency compelled her to hesitate, and he allowed her no time to harden her resolve.

“I know it’s late, Miss Adams, and I do apologize for the inconvenience. But I really am pressed for time. This place looks fine from outside. A quick peek at the interior, and maybe we could reach terms today?”

She frowned slightly, and a skeptical dimple appeared at one corner of her thin, expressive lips. The caller sounded intelligent and well-spoken.

Yet, the urgency in his tone puzzled her—perhaps even worried her a bit.

Inexplicably, however, she found herself giving in.

“All right, Mr. Henning. Since you’re in a hurry. I’ll leave right now. I should be there in about forty minutes.”

The moment she hung up, however, Constance realized what a stupid thing she had just agreed to do: meet a stranger, as night came on, way up on a god-forsaken slope of the Rocky Mountains.

She almost called him back to cancel. But if he was catching a plane later, she reasoned, then maybe she was tossing a sale right down a rat hole. This cabin was no hot-ticket item, she reminded herself. The woman in her was nervous, but the business-woman in her won the brief debate.

She settled on a commonsense compromise. She quickly dialled her parents’ number. At twenty-eight, she was the oldest of eight brothers and sisters, five of whom still lived at home in the summer. So there was usually no problem catching someone.

“’Lo?” answered sixteen-year-old Beth Ann’s voice.

“Hi, it’s just me,” Constance told her kid sister. “How’s the home front?”

“Thanks to Pattie it’s a major suckout, that’s how it is,” Beth retorted, anger spiking her voice. “I’d rather just stay at school until bedtime. Least I’d be with my friends. I swear to God, Connie, if Mom ’n’ Dad don’t give me or her your old room, I am going to move into the basement. I am so sick of her spazoid mouth.”

“Look, don’t drag me into your feud. You two are a circus act. Is Mom home?”

“Uh-huh. She’s upstairs hanging curtains with Aunt Janet. Want me to get her?”

“Don’t bother,” Constance said.

In the background she heard an angry glissando of piano notes from the music room. Thirteen-year-old Pattie practicing—and no doubt in a pettish mood about it, if Constance remembered her own violin lessons accurately.

“Listen,” she told her sister. “I’m on my way to show someone that cabin on Old Mill Road. It’s kind of remote up there, so I’m just playing it safe. If you guys don’t hear from me in, mmm, two hours or so, give me a buzz. If there’s no answer at my place, try my cell phone, okay?”

“’Kay,” replied Beth Ann, who seemed to resent first syllables lately.

“Hey,” she added, her voice suddenly merciless in its teasing. “That’s the Eighth House, ’member?”

At first Constance only wrinkled her brow in puzzlement. Then, catching on, she felt her pulse leap.

“You still remember that silliness?” she asked her sister. “I almost forgot it.”

That was true, but Constance had to wonder why recalling such “silliness” made her pulse quicken. Last summer she had driven Beth Ann to Billings for a statewide cheerleading competition. Beth had talked her into visiting one of the many astrologers who set up stands in Freedom Park.

“Beware the Eighth House,” the psychic had repeated several times, frowning over her chart. Meaning, Constance had assumed then, the Eighth House of the Zodiac—Death.

It was Beth Ann who first suggested that, in her case, the Eighth House also pertained to the real-estate business. She insisted that Constance check the dates of her listings. Sure enough, Hazel’s cabin was indeed number eight on the list.

“Thank you for the cheery reminder,” Constance said drily. “Gotta get now. You remember—if you guys don’t hear from me in a couple hours, somebody call me.”

“Beware,” Beth Ann repeated in a ghoulish voice just before she hung up. “Beware the Eighth House!”

Only hours before he called Constance Adams, lying through his teeth, Assistant U.S. Attorney Quinn Loudon had not yet become a desperate fugitive from the very law he was sworn to uphold.

“Just take a few deep breaths and relax,” Lance Pollard advised his client as the two men ascended the marble steps of the old courthouse in Kalispell, Montana. “You’re a lawyer. You know the drill by now. This is just routine pretrial procedure today, I was promised. You’re still a free man.”

“Routine?” Quinn repeated, his smoke-colored eyes flashing anger. “All that time I was secretly assembling a case against Schrader and Whitaker, those two were laughing up their sleeves at me. They set me up, Lance. And you know damn well they killed Anders. We haven’t been able to find the guy in weeks. Sheriff Cody Anders could clear me. He saw everything like I saw it. But where is he? He’s dead, is what.”

Quinn’s jaw set in a deep knot of anger as he and his attorney moved through the magnificent hallway.

The courthouse building had been declared pompous when built at the twilight of the 19th century, but seemed impressive now at the dawn of the twenty-first. A cathedral-like vaulted ceiling topped a huge central lobby with frescoed floors.

However, the building’s quaint charm eluded Quinn today. Nothing could charm him lately. Without Sheriff Anders being found, he knew he had the same chance against his accusers as an icicle in hell.

“Remember,” Pollard coached him as the two men followed a stair railing of antique brass up to the private judicial chambers on the second floor. “The main focus today is the discovery process. The prosecution has to lay out whatever evidence they supposedly plan to enter against you. I’d bet some big money they haven’t got diddly. You know damn good and well it’s easy to get a grand-jury indictment. Barely one in five ends up in a conviction.”

“Yeah, well pardon me all to hell,” Quinn responded bitterly, “for not taking comfort in those odds. If I had a one in five chance of dying during an operation, would that be comforting?”

“You watch,” Pollard insisted, as confident and relaxed as Quinn was not. “Judge Winston will dismiss the whole mess.”

Quinn’s frown etched itself deeper, emphasizing his handsome Irish upper lip.

“Mess” didn’t even begin to describe what was happening to him. A mess could be cleaned up. But this false charge against him could become a death sentence. At best it would be a permanent stain on his record and reputation. He could also be disbarred, disgraced. Worst of all, an inner demon he had hoped was dead and buried in the past might be rearing its ugly head again.

The two men approached an elderly security guard manning a metal-detection station.

“Afternoon Mr. Pollard, Mr. Loudon,” Hank Ingman greeted them politely.

Pollard stepped through the detector’s beam. Quinn handed Hank his metallic briefcase, then opened his summer-weight topcoat to show him the .38 snubby in its armpit holster.

The U.S. Attorney’s office in Billings received enough threats annually to warrant arming its staff. Quinn offered the weapon, but as always the guard merely waved him around the detector.

“If their case is all smoke and mirrors like you claim,” Quinn resumed as they bore toward Judge Winston’s chambers, “then why was my bond set so high? Christ, Lance, don’t you realize Winston has the discretion to decide—today, right now—I’m a risk for flight? If he revokes my bond, the only way I’ll leave this place will be in handcuffs. With Cody Anders missing and me in jail, they’ll have won.”

“Quinn, you seem to think Schrader and Whitaker are little tin gods or something. One’s a borderline-senile judge, the other’s a paid dirt-worker for the road-construction lobby. They don’t own the legal system.”

Relax, Quinn thought scornfully as anger made his jaw muscles bunch tighter. Yeah, right. Here he was, a brand-spanking-new Assistant U.S. attorney only recently sent out west from D.C. No friends in high places, no good-old-boy support network, and he had to go into hock just to pay a bail bondsman. Yet here he was, up against men so rich they drilled oil wells as tax write-offs.

Again Quinn recalled that afternoon this past April. He and Sheriff Cody Anders were standing in the quiet hallway outside Schrader’s slanted-open door. Neither of them could miss the scene inside the door: Whitaker handing the thin Swiss briefcase to Schrader. Remember, Jerry, Whitaker’s suave baritone joked, it’s not the money that matters—it’s the amount. And then both men laughing as Schrader started counting the tightly banded bills….