The Colton Ransom by Marie Ferrarella Read Free Book Online

barked out a few orders to the two officers he’d brought with him, Karen Locke and Pierce DeLuca, and they began to secure the crime scene—as they had come to understand the term. Neither one looked as if he or she were capable of an independent thought.
    Drucker, meanwhile, decided that now was the time to ask a few preliminary questions. “You hear anything?” he asked Trevor.
    Trevor shook his head, silently cursing himself for allowing this to have happened on his watch. Aside from the victim being his daughter, this was his territory. He was responsible for everything that came or went at Dead River. Responsible for everything on it as well. There were no excuses for dropping the ball the way that he had.
    “I was in my office before I came up here. Before that, I took a turn around the property. And no, I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary,” Trevor answered, anticipating the chief’s next question.
    Drucker laughed shortly, although there was no humor in the sound. “I keep forgetting you were a big-city cop once upon a time.” There was a trace of mocking in the chief’s voice. His tone was definitely not warm and friendly. “Place seems pretty empty,” he noted. “Where is everybody? At the rodeo?” he asked and answered his own question.
    “Yes,” Gabby answered in a shaky voice. “I thought Faye was supposed to be there, too.” At least, that was what the woman had told her. Her son, Dylan, was working with some of the animals at the rodeo, and predominantly, she had gone to see him in action. It was no secret that Faye was very proud of her son.
    Gabby was still struggling to come to grips with what had happened. Finding Faye the way she had and the staggering weight of her guilt at accidentally having placed Avery in harm’s way were almost too much for her to bear.
    In the fifteen minutes that they had waited for Drucker to arrive, she had dashed to her room to reassure herself that Cheyenne was still there and still all right. Unwilling to leave the infant alone for a moment after all this had happened, she’d picked up her niece and brought her back to the scene of Avery’s abduction. She took painstaking care to keep Cheyenne from even so much as glancing in the direction of the gruesomely murdered governess.
    “Heard the rodeo was pretty good this year. Why didn’t you go, Ms. Colton?” Drucker asked mildly, as if he were just shooting the breeze with her.
    Gabby knew the chief well enough to know that he was not as entirely laid-back as he attempted to appear. He was taking in and measuring her every word. It made her feel like a suspect.
    The absurdity of that was beyond any words she had at her disposal.
    “I don’t much like rodeos,” she told the chief as calmly as possible.
    Drucker met her comment with a careless shrug, then glanced over toward Trevor. “Guess they’re not for everyone. How about you, Garth?” he asked abruptly, craning his neck to look at the ranch’s head of security. “Why didn’t you go to the rodeo? Or don’t you like them, either?”
    They were making small talk—he didn’t care how much Drucker thought he could use this useless line of questioning to lead them to the truth; it wasn’t anywhere near fast enough.
    “Don’t think much about them one way or another,” he said, answering the chief’s previous question. “I was here—at the ranch—because I had a brand-new kid on my hands and I had to take care of her.”
    Drucker listened quietly, and when Trevor paused, the chief asked rhetorically, “And she was the one who was kidnapped, right?”
    “Right,” Trevor ground out between clenched teeth. It was hard suppressing the desire to say a few choice words to the smaller man. He didn’t need the chief rubbing his nose in the fact that his daughter had been abducted under his watch.
    “Doesn’t seem like you had much luck taking care of her, does it?” The rhetorical question had the corners of Drucker’s mouth