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“Eh. That looked a little suspicious to me anyway. ” Jay suddenly grinned. “Hell, you know a body just ain’t gonna sit there when someone jumps in the room with a gun.
And you know, between here and town, I’m sure I’ll consider the fact that something doesn’t look right about those wounds. They can’t naysay me like they can you. ”
Favor given, favor owed. “You got it, Jay. ” He clapped the other man on the shoulder.
“Let me know how I can return the favor. I’ll be waiting on your report. ”
“I’ll try to be quick about it,” Jay drawled. “Helps though when the city coroner happens to be your daughter, huh?”
“That doesn’t hurt a bit,” Zeke agreed with a small chuckle before turning his attention back to the mobile home.
He’d wait until forensics cleared out before going through it himself and feeling the area. Not just investigating it, but feeling it, just to be certain it was the work of the same man that had committed countless other murders in the county over the past twenty-odd years.
Maybe it was him more than the case that had him reluctant to leave and begin the investigation, he thought as the forensics team began to file out. This case meant going to Rogue when he hadn’t seen her in over a month, hell, nearly two months. Not since the warmer spring air had descended on the mountains and she had started riding the Harley to the restaurant. And he hated admitting that he missed those few nights a week he had been driving her back to the bar each night. Missed her teasing and her laughter when he had no right to it.
He wasn’t looking forward to telling her about Joe and Jaime. He didn’t like lying to Rogue, and he had no choice but to hide certain information from her. Information such as the fact that her cousins had been gathering information for him and Homeland Security special agent Timothy Cranston. Information such as the fact that he knew to the soles of his feet that the boys had been murdered by the same man that had killed Zeke’s wife and his father. The same man that Homeland Security has been searching for since the arrest and deaths of Dayle Mackay and Nadine Grace.
The man known only as the exterminator. The backbone of the Freedom League. A man that killed without conscience, without mercy, and without a trace.
TWO
Murder-suicide?
It wasn’t possible.
Rogue sat in a back corner of her bar, stared at the dancers, the drinkers, the bikers, and the good ole country boys and girls that filled the establishment she simply called the Bar. That was what it was. Just a bar. A dance hall. A place to drink. It was the place Nadine Grace and Dayle Mackay’s lackey had drugged her drink almost five years before.
The pieces she had put together over the years suggested the couple in the photos had helped her home. So nice of them. Then they proceeded to let Nadine and Dayle into her home where those pictures had been taken.
She had identified the couple within a year. Her father’s friend Jonesy had quietly taken care of making certain that particular couple never came to Somerset again. Something about a drug buy that the police had received a tip on, and a hell of a long sentence for both of them. But her father hadn’t found out, as far as Rogue knew. Of course, Jonesy, her father’s friend and then Rog
ue’s, had promised her he would make sure her father didn’t know. How he had managed it, she didn’t know. She was just thankful he had.
And the Bar was home now. She owned it. Her father had owned it before her, his last tie to the county that had seen him as nothing but white trash. They saw her as something even less, she sometimes thought. Like they saw the rest of the Walker clan, like Joe and Jaime.
Running a scarlet fingernail around the lip of the whisky glass in front of her, she tried to beat down the knowledge that here, in this county, the name Walker was, as her father had warned her, well less than sterling. Shiftless was one description. Thieves and gutter trash was another. But Rogue knew her family. Family like Joe and Jaime.
They had been filled with laughter, charm. They had a sense of fun inside them that didn’t correlate to the nine-to-five lifestyle others held so highly.
Jaime was steady in his friendships, his laughter. He liked to get drunk and raise a little hell on Saturday nights, and he loved women. Joe had been just like him. Neither of the two men had a cruel or mean bone in their bodies. They weren’t conniving and they had never stolen a thing in their lives.
And now, they were gone.
She had been at the hospital when their sister, Lisa, had told Grandmother Walker that the boys were dead. A light had gone out in the old woman’s eyes.
“Hey, Rogue. ”
Her head lifted at the sound of her bartender’s voice at her side. Lifting her gaze, she met Jonesy’s compassionate look.
Jonesy eased his burly body into the seat beside her, his hazel eyes somber as he watched her.
She liked Danny “Jonesy” Jones. A biker with a heart of gold, a mean-assed temper, and a head like a brick. An accident had cut back on his cycling and given him a limp, but he was still as tough and as no- nonsense as he had been when she first met him five years ago.
“Kent watching the bar?” She looked over to the long teak counter filled with customers.
“Kent and that new girl, Lea. She’s a good ’tender. ”
Rogue nodded. Lifting her shot glass she tossed back the aged whisky, let her lashes flutter at the burn, then placed the glass back on the scarred table.
