Confessing to the Cowboy
Lowering her face into her hands as she realized she had no control over her tears, she was vaguely aware of Cameron standing next to the sofa, awkwardly shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
Overwhelmed by the pain of loss, Mary began to weep in earnest. It wasn’t just the tragic death of Dorothy that caused her heart to swell with agony, but also the recent loss of two other waitresses, both of them murdered, as well.
She wasn’t sure how long she cried before she felt the weight of Cameron sitting down beside her, smelled the familiar spicy scent of his cologne, and in the very depths of her soul she wanted to throw herself into his arms, feel his strength surrounding her. For just a minute, for just an agonizing second, she wanted to be wrapped in his arms and feel his heart beating against her own.
But she couldn’t do that. She wouldn’t do that. Instead she drew a deep shuddery breath and sat back, summoning the inner strength that had gotten her through most of her entire life.
“Why? Why is somebody killing the women who work for me?” she asked miserably. Once again she caught her lower lip and reached up to twist a strand of her hair.
Cameron frowned, the gesture doing nothing to detract from his handsomeness. His face was all angles and planes that radiated strength. His warm hazel eyes were now deeper in hues of brown than usual. “I don’t know. But I can tell you that two dead waitresses was a coincidence, three is a definite pattern. There’s no question in my mind now that we have a serial killer targeting your waitresses.”
“But that’s crazy. What on earth could these women have done wrong that would warrant their deaths? Serve cold coffee?” A faint hysterical laughter attempted to escape her lips, but was instantly swallowed as she gazed at Cameron for answers.
“I wish I could tell you why, and I definitely wish I could tell you who.” His jaw clenched tight and, for a moment, his eyes were cold and hard. “I’m just hoping Dorothy’s murder can give us something, anything that might provide a lead. This guy has been so damned careful and so damned lucky.” Frustration drifted from him in waves.
Mary dropped her hand from her hair and instead placed it on him, able to feel the muscles in his forearm beneath the long-sleeved khaki shirt he wore. “You’ll get him. You’re an intelligent man, Cameron. You do your job well and you have good men working for you. It’s just a matter of time before you have him in custody.”
He smiled at her, that sexy uplift of his lips that warmed her like no other man’s had ever done. “There are days I feel like I should be digging ditches instead.”
“You know you love what you do, and hopefully you’ll catch this madman before another woman dies.” She stood from the sofa, finding his nearness slightly overwhelming. Escape. She needed to escape from him before she followed through on her impulse and leaned into him.
“And now I’ve got a dinner rush to attend to,” she said, attempting to focus on business and not on how much she wanted Cameron’s arms around her, not on the horror of Dorothy’s horrendous death.
“I intend to warn your waitresses again about locking up doors and windows, about safety issues before I leave the café. You might also tell them the same thing. Each and every one of them is a potential victim until I get this guy behind bars.”
“I’ll remind them.” Her heart pounded at the knowledge that simply by working for her, women she cared about were placing their lives in potential danger.
As the two of them reentered the main café area, Mary got to work helping expedite orders as Rusty went back to the kitchen to cook with his helper, Junior Lempke.
The dinner rush was always busy, but with the news of Dorothy’s murder making the rounds, the restaurant was unusually full. Mary worked, always conscious of Cameron’s tall, commanding presence as he pulled each waitress aside and spoke to each of them for a couple of minutes.
When he finally left, she focused solely on what needed to be done to keep the people in her café happy and well fed. At six o’clock Matt and Jimmy came in and sat at a small table for two near the counter. It was the usual place where Matt ate and most nights Jimmy was with him.
Mary had a feeling Liza Rosario wasn’t much of a cook, but she often had Matt over for playdates with her son. Jimmy was a bright, nice boy who was Matt’s best friend and Mary didn’t mind feeding the kid dinner each evening as she suspected dinner at home would be something frozen and heated or from a box.
If the boys had their way, they’d order burgers and fries every night, but Mary always ordered for them, insisting they eat real meals with real vegetables. Tonight was meatloaf, green beans and applesauce, along with two huge glasses of milk.
The evening rush seemed to last forever. Just when she thought things were starting to slow down, more people would arrive. It was always this way when tragedy struck...friends and neighbors gathered here to find solace or laughter or just simple conversation and connection.
Jimmy eventually went home and Matt went back to their living quarters to work on his homework before his bath and bedtime. Mary kept her mind emptied of everything but the basic minute-to-minute things she needed to do to keep the café running.
At ten o’clock she locked the door and turned the sign hanging there from Open to Closed. She’d tucked Matt into bed an hour before and normally this was the time that Cameron would show up for a quick cup of coffee before he headed home.
She didn’t expect him tonight. He had a murder to solve. Dorothy’s murder. Her heart crunched with pain as Rusty stepped up next to her. “Kitchen is clean, grill is ready for the morning. You want me to help you clean up out here?”
“No thanks. I’ll take care of it.” She’d sent the waitresses home at closing time rather than have them stick around to clean their stations and sweep and mop the floors, which was part of their usual jobs.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Rusty’s tough-guy features didn’t change, but his gruff voice was softer than usual.
Mary smiled at him with genuine affection. “I’m fine, or at least I will be fine. Cleaning up will help me decompress a little bit. Go home, Rusty.” Home for the big man was one of the cabins that Mary rented out located directly behind the café.
Three of the cabins were currently vacant. In one of them Candy Bailey, a young waitress, had been murdered. The other one had also been rented to another waitress who had moved out right after Candy’s murder. The third had been empty for a long time and the fourth was Rusty’s place.
“If you need me just call. You know I can be here in two minutes,” Rusty said.
She nodded. “Thanks. Really, I’ll be fine.”
Minutes later as she swept up the floor between the tables, her thoughts returned to the murders. She’d managed to keep her mind fairly numb until the café had closed and she was alone, but now the horror reached out to chill her to the bone.
Three murdered women. Three dead waitresses. Had each of the women somehow offended the killer when serving him? Was he somebody who visited the café regularly? She couldn’t imagine any of her customers being capable of such a thing. But she also knew how a pleasant face, a friendly smile could hide the soul of a monster.
She switched the broom for a mop and continued cleaning the floor while her head raced with thoughts. If the killer was a customer, then Cameron had a huge pool of potential suspects to investigate. Almost everyone in the small town of Grady Gulch, Oklahoma, came in to eat at one time or another. Many were regulars, others were occasional diners. There was also the possibility that the killer didn’t ever eat here at all.
Three waitresses...friends...women she had considered part of her extended family were now gone. Why? What would drive somebody to kill them? A piercing ache shot through her as she finished up the floor and began to wash down tables and chairs.
Did somebody have a grudge against the café? Against her personally? She couldn’t imagine either. The café was popular, and she and Matt had worked hard over the past eight years to fit in and become a part of the close-knit community.
This couldn’t be about her past. Her heart iced over at the very thought. No, that was impossible. This couldn’t be about her and the man she’d once married.
She emptied her mind of everything as she focused on finishing the chores. When the café was ready for opening the next morning she walked through the kitchen toward the door that led to her living quarters.
The navy blue ginger jar lamp set on the end table by the sofa created a soft glow of light around the living room. The first thing she did was move to stand in Matt’s bedroom doorway.
As she gazed at her sleeping son, her heart expanded with love, and for a moment all thoughts of murder left her mind. Matt was a well-adjusted, good boy, who rarely needed a stern word or a disapproving look.
Sometimes she worried that he was too accommodating, that in his eagerness to please he’d make mistakes and trust the wrong people. But they were normal motherly concerns and she had bigger worries plaguing her mind.
She walked through the living room and into the bathroom, needing a quick shower before going to bed. As she stood beneath the warm spray of water, her thoughts turned to Cameron.
In another lifetime, he might have been the man she’d invite into her heart, but she was living in this lifetime and had decided long ago that nobody, especially no man, would ever be allowed too close.
She couldn’t let any man close to her, there were too many secrets in her past, too much of herself she’d never be able to tell anyone. She feared that if she tried to have a relationship she’d slip up, make a mistake and all would be lost.
Still, there were times when she was in her bed alone that she longed for strong arms to reach out to her, when she wished for an intimacy that she’d never really experienced before with any man.
There were also times she wished she had somebody to talk to about Matt, someone to brag to when he did something amazing and to commiserate with when things went wrong.
Each time she tried to imagine who that man might have been, an image of Cameron filled her mind. Over the past several years he’d made it a habit to stop in at the café right at closing time.
He’d drink the last cup of coffee in the pot and they’d sit and talk. She’d been there for him when his younger brother had died two years ago in a tragic farming accident and his grief had not only shattered his heart, but also made him the sole child of his older parents.
He’d been there for her when Candy Bailey had been found murdered in one of the cabins she rented behind the café. They’d gone through bad times together and had also shared a lot of laughter.
She knew he was romantically interested in her, and although she enjoyed their evening conversations, she never allowed him to believe their relationship would be anything other than friendship.
The cost of developing anything meaningful with Cameron was too high. She might mess up, accidently share too much with him. He was a sheriff and as far as she knew, there was no statute of limitations on murder.
Chapter 2
Cameron sat in his office alone and sipped a cup of strong coffee, hoping for an adrenaline rush that would get him through the day. It was just after seven in the morning and he hadn’t gone to bed the night before until well after midnight.
He’d just collapsed onto the king-size bed when he heard a faint scratching on a door down the hallway and remembered he was now, at least temporarily, a pet owner.
He’d jumped out of bed and opened the laundry room door. Twinkie exploded out and raced to the front door, obviously in desperate need of a potty break.
Cameron opened the door, and watched the little mutt as she sniffed the grassy area until she found a place she liked. When she’d finished her business she came back inside and looked up at Cameron expectantly.
“Good girl,” Cameron had said, and Twinkie’s tail had wagged in response, then she raced straight to Cameron’s bedroom and placed her front paws on the edge of the mattress.
“Oh, no, little girl. That’s my bed.” Cameron got the four-poster bed from the laundry room and set it next to his. “This is Twinkie’s bed.”
The dog had looked at it as if she’d never seen it before in her life. Cameron ignored her, got into bed and turned out the bedside lamp. The whine began low in Twinkie’s throat as her front paws tap-danced on the side of the mattress.
After fifteen minutes of trying to be firm, Cameron had given in and pulled the pup on top of his bed. Twinkie immediately curled up at Cameron’s feet, her body warmth radiating through the blanket.
A spoiled tiny dog wasn’t exactly what he thought about when he considered bedmates, but for now the furry dog was all he had.
He’d awakened at dawn after a night filled with haunting visions of dead women, each of them pleading for justice. His nightmares had been a strobe-light event with the dead reaching out to him.
Now here he sat in his office, sipping coffee and waiting for it to be time for the staff meeting he’d called with all his deputies that would occur in another twenty minutes.
While the coffee sent a jolt of caffeine-driven adrenaline through him, it did nothing to make his thoughts any more clear as to solving these crimes. He didn’t expect his team to have anything to report to him to answer either of those questions. He reared back in his chair and released a sigh of weary frustration.
At some point today he needed to get out to his parents’ place. It had been a full week since he’d been there and he knew there would be things that needed to be done. Since his brother, Bobby’s, death, Cameron had been trying to help them around the ranch to fill in the shoes of the child they had lost.
The relationship between him and his father had become strained long ago when Cameron had decided to run for sheriff instead of staying home to help with the family ranch. With Bobby’s death the relationship had only become more difficult.
He sat for another fifteen minutes, then swallowed the last of his coffee and stood. Now wasn’t the time to think about family dynamics or anything else that didn’t pertain to murder. It was time to meet with his team and see if they could figure out how to stop this killer before he struck again.
Minutes later he stood at the head of a long table in the conference room, six deputies seated on each side of the table. They were an even dozen, all good men who made up the law in Grady Gulch and the surrounding area. Thankfully they were in charge of a small county.
“Morning, gentlemen,” he said. “Let’s get down to business.”
For the next hour the men reported what had been done so far in the investigation into Dorothy’s murder. The neighborhood had been canvassed, friends had been interviewed and, just as he’d suspected, they had little to report.
Her neighbors had heard nothing throughout the night, friends indicated that they couldn’t imagine Dorothy having any enemies. Yada-yada-yada, Cameron thought. It was the same song, just a different victim.
No forensic evidence had been left behind, no fingerprints to process, no dropped glove or footprints to cast, this killer was definitely smart enough to cover his tracks well.
“There’s no question now that this killer is targeting the waitresses at the Cowboy Café,” Cameron said when the others were finished with their meager reports. “That’s the only connection that’s obvious between the victims.” He instantly thought of Mary and wondered if she was in danger, as well.
In her capacity as owner of the café she rarely worked the floor, but she did work behind the counter often and could be considered a waitress.
“Adam, I want you to check and cross-check the personal lives of these women and see if there’s anyplace else they connect besides their work at the café. Maybe they go to the same hairdresser or use the same gym. I want to know anyplace these women’s lives might intersect besides the café.”
“Ben,” Cameron said, directly his attention to Deputy Ben Temple, who he considered his right-hand man. “I want you to spend the next couple of days hanging out at the café. See if you notice anyone acting strange, if you see anyone who appears to be focused in on a particular waitress. The rest of you divide up and I want every friend and every neighbor or acquaintance from the previous victims reinterviewed.”
It was work that had already been done, but Cameron was grateful and proud that nobody on the team complained. Half the men he dismissed to go home and sleep, the other half who worked the day shift he dismissed to begin their work.
Once the meeting was finished, Cameron went back into his office and pulled on his jacket and his hat. He knew that it was important for him to be seen around town this morning, to assure the public that he and his men were working overtime to catch the evil that was at work in their town.
It wasn’t something he was particularly looking forward to doing. People would want answers, and unfortunately he had none to give. He believed it was important to delegate the investigation work to his deputies, but he’d learn what they discovered every step of the way. He was a puzzle guy, he liked to gather pieces, and then attempt to put together the puzzle that would eventually solve the crime.
The last murder that had occurred in Grady Gulch had been two years before, when Jeff Davie had shot his wife, Cheryl, in a domestic dispute. It had been an open-and-shut case as Jeff had confessed to his crime.
Cameron had never had anything like this to take care of before...the murder of three women. He wanted to believe he and his team were up to the task, but if things got too dicey he’d have to request help from the FBI, thus undermining he and his team’s ability in the face of the people in town.
As he stepped outside, the blustery air half stole his breath away. Only early November and already he could smell winter in the air. Thankfully the cold wind had chased most people off the streets.
He walked alone down Main, waving into shop windows as he passed. Why now? Why in the last three months had the murders begun to occur? There had to be a trigger of some kind, either that or the murderer had moved here in the past couple of months. There had been several new families and single men who had moved to Grady Gulch in the past year or so. Cameron made a mental note to check each of them thoroughly.
What he’d like to do was head to the café and check on Mary. When he’d told her about Dorothy the night before and she’d fallen onto the sofa and began to weep, there had been nothing Cameron wanted to do more than pull her up into his arms, hold her tight against him in an effort to comfort.
But he wasn’t sure that she’d welcome his touch, his closeness. She definitely gave him mixed messages. Although she’d told him a dozen times that she didn’t need or want a man in her life, occasionally he caught a whisper of longing in her eyes as she looked at him, a yearning that made him want to believe her eyes and not her lush lips.
He steeled himself as George Wilton walked out of the hardware store and nearly bowled him over. Wearing a thick, long black coat and a hat with huge ear muffs that flapped against his gray whisker-grizzled cheeks, he looked prepared for the snowstorm of the century.
“Heard Dorothy Blake was murdered last night,” he said with a scowl, which wasn’t unusual. George always found something to scowl about.
“Heard right,” Cameron replied.
“Craziness, that’s what’s taken over this town. You gonna find this creep before he kills all the waitresses from the café?”
“That’s my plan, George.”
“Yeah, well, my plan is to marry some twenty-three-year-old hottie who thinks I hung the moon, but that ain’t happening anytime soon. Hope your plan works out better than mine. You know I take most of my meals at the café. What will I do, where will I eat if this creep manages to kill all the waitresses and Mary has to close down?”
Leave it to George to think about his own creature comforts rather than the loss of the three women. “Mary isn’t going to close down the café and we’re going to catch whoever is responsible for these crimes,” Cameron said with a confidence that didn’t quite make it into his heart.
George’s scowl deepened. “Well, you’d better hurry up about it,” he said as he moved past Cameron and headed in the opposite direction down the sidewalk.
Hurry up about it. How Cameron wished he could do just that. Snap his fingers, speak an ancient incantation, wiggle his nose and magically have the guilty party behind bars. But he knew from experience that it was going to take hours of pounding pavements, talking to people and seeking any minute detail that might have been overlooked that could break the case wide open.
As the day passed, Cameron found himself unable to get Mary out of his head. Outside of the families of the dead women, Mary would be the person most touched by their deaths. Not only because they worked for her, but because she considered the people who worked at the café her extended family.
In one of their late-night talks she’d told him she had no family, that Matt’s father had been killed in a car accident when Matt had been just a baby. She and her husband had both been only children of parents who had passed away. In her isolated grief over her husband’s death she’d taken Matt and left her hometown in California and wandered until the wind had blown her into Grady Gulch.
Somebody was killing the waitresses at the café. Was it possible that it wasn’t some enemy that the women shared, but rather somebody trying to hurt Mary? Maybe he was making too big a leap, but it was a possibility that had to be considered, along with a dozen others.
The day passed far too quickly, with far too many questions remaining unanswered. A noon meeting with his men yielded nothing worthwhile and a quick stop at his parents’ ranch reminded him that he’d never be the son his father had wanted, that the son he’d loved was gone and he wasn’t even a pale substitute in his eyes.
The weight of discouragement and frustration pressed heavily on his shoulders as he stopped by the house to let Twinkie out of the laundry room. The little dog danced with excitement at the sight of him and licked the underside of his jaw when Cameron picked her up his arms. Cameron suddenly understood why people had pets.
Twinkie didn’t care that he had no clues to the three murders, didn’t care that he couldn’t be the son his parents wanted. All Twinkie needed from him was food and water and love, and the love was returned unconditionally.
If only people were more like dogs, he thought as he watched the little pooch leaping through the grass like a tiny gazelle in the yard. He called the dog’s name, and she came running back to Cameron and followed him back through the front door.
He started to lock Twinkie back up in the laundry room and then changed his mind and decided to give her the run of the house. He almost felt guilty leaving the little pooch alone again, but his day was far from over.
Twinkie needed a home where somebody could spend time with her, he thought as he headed toward the café. She was definitely a social butterfly and would thrive where there were people to appreciate her friendly nature.
It was late, almost ten, and he knew that on Wednesday nights ten was closing time at the café. Mary would probably be waiting for him with a last cup of coffee ready to pour. She’d have questions he couldn’t answer and he had questions for her, as well.
With three Cowboy Café waitresses dead, he couldn’t help but believe in the possibility that Mary was somehow in the center of the storm.
* * *
Minutes before ten, with the café empty and Mary ready to call it a night, Cameron walked in the front door. He flipped the sign on the door to Closed and then hung his hat on a hook.