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Miranda felt as if a vise were tightening over her lungs as footsteps rang through the hall and a man appeared: a tall, rangy man with wide shoulders, faded jeans, and a cocksure attitude that was evident in his walk. Beard stubble darkened his jaw and sharp cheekbones that hinted at some Native American ancestor slashed upward to eyes that were deep-set and eagle-sharp. In one swift glance, he had probably looked over the three women, sized them up, and pigeonholed each one.
“Denver!” Dutch rolled onto his feet, his hand outstretched.
The hint of a smile touched Styles’s lips as he clasped Dutch’s hand, but there was no warmth in his eyes. “’Bout time you showed up. I’d
like you to meet my daughters.” He motioned to the sisters. “Miranda, Claire, Tessa, this is the man I told you about. He’s going to ask you all some questions and you, girls, are going to tell him the truth.”
Four
Miranda sized the guy up. She’d seen more than her share of lowlifes in her years with the department, and could smell a con man within seconds. This guy, hard-edged and quietly condemning, didn’t have the usual odor, but there was something about him that smacked of insincerity and something else—something even more disturbing. She felt a touch of familiarity, as if she’d seen him before, but she couldn’t place his face, and the feeling disappeared like morning fog touched by the warmth of the sun.
“I think Dad brought you into this on false pretenses,” she said, crossing her legs and clasping her hands on her knee. His eyes flickered for a second to her calf, but his expression didn’t change a bit. So he wasn’t completely impervious. Good. “The story is—”
“I’m not interested in the story, Ms. Holland.” His smile was coldly patient as he leaned a shoulder against the dark timber of the mantel. “I just want the truth.”
Miranda matched his cool attitude with her own. “I’m sure you’ve already read the police reports and newspaper clippings or Dad wouldn’t have hired you.”
His black eyebrows rose a fraction.
A dark, numbing fear settled deep in the pit of her stomach as she repeated the story she’d told over and over again—to the deputies of the sheriff’s department, to the nosiest reporters, to her family and friends. It was forever branded in her memory even though it was a bald-faced lie. She glanced at her sisters; Tessa, blond and belligerent, insolently smoking another cigarette while Claire’s expression was hard to read, her skin pale. “The three of us”—she motioned to her sisters—“were on our way home from the drive-in movie on the other side of Chinook. We’d gone together to see a trilogy of old Clint Eastwood movies. It was late, after midnight. The movies hadn’t started until sunset, which was after nine o’clock, I think. We left before the last picture was over. I was driving and dead tired and . . . I guess I fell asleep at the wheel, I don’t remember skidding off the road, but the next thing I knew, the car was in the lake.” She stared straight into Styles’s disbelieving eyes. He wasn’t buying this—not for a second. Still, she plunged on, stepping deeper into the muck of half-truths and lies. “The impact woke me up and Tessa and Claire were screaming their heads off. Water was filling up the inside of the car and we all had to swim out in the pitch-black . . . it was . . .” She shuddered and her voice became a whisper. “We were lucky, I guess. My car went off the road in only six feet of water, so we were able to help each other out and swim to shore.”
Styles didn’t say a word.
“It’s not a mystery, Mr. Styles—”
“Denver. You’ll be seeing a lot of me. No reason to keep tripping over names.” A half smile, a false grin meant to disarm and encourage her to keep talking tugged at his lips, but those gray eyes never warmed to her, never so much as flickered with a touch of understanding. “I suppose your sisters would repeat, nearly word for word, the same story.”
“It’s not a story,” Tessa interjected with a toss of her head.
“No one saw you at the drive-in.” His dark eyebrows drew together, as if he were deep in thought. “Isn’t that strange considering that you three are pretty high-profile, what with being from one of the wealthiest families in the area?”
“We didn’t talk to anyone.”
“No? Not even in the snack bar?”
“There wasn’t a lot of people there. It was right before the drive-in theater closed for good.”
“We took our own sodas,” Claire said, her voice thin.
He rubbed his chin. “And you didn’t get out of the car for what? Three or four hours? Not even to use the ladies’ room?”
“I don’t think so,” Miranda replied before Claire could say anything else and get them all into bigger trouble.
“That’s pretty unbelievable, don’t you think?”
Her voice was calm, smooth as glass. “That’s the way it was. Obviously there were a lot of other cars there, families and teenagers, but none around us that I recognized. As I told the sheriff’s department a long time ago, there was a white station wagon with wood on the side—I don’t know the make—with a family of kids, parked next to us. The space on the other side of my car was empty. In front of us was a pickup—dark-colored with a bank of spotlights stretched across the cab, and other than that I don’t remember any other vehicle.”
“And you were driving a black Camaro.”
“That’s right. It was totaled later that night. Just because no one the police spoke with that night had seen us doesn’t mean there wasn’t someone there who had. They just didn’t look hard enough.”
“The guy who sold tickets didn’t remember your car.”
“He was probably stoned. His memory wasn’t all that great. If you read his deposition you’ll see that he hardly knew the names of the movies that were playing.” Her fists clenched and she had to force her fingers to straighten. If she’d learned anything in her years as a lawyer, it was how to hide emotion when necessary, how to bring it to the surface when needed. Right now the less knowledge Denver Styles scraped up about her and that hellish night, the better.
Dutch winced as he stood, then rubbed his knee. “The reason the police didn’t find out much that night is because I bought ’em off.”
“Dad, don’t,” she warned, incredulous even though he had already alluded to tampering with the investigation. To what lengths would her father go to get his way?
