Page 63 of Rescued By the Mountain Man

Rubbing my face, I nodded. “Okay, I’ll go see her.”

When I stepped into the office, I found Evie grim. Shit. What was happening now? Resting the bag with chocolates, I asked, “Want a beer?”

“No,” she sighed. “Last night, after the accident with Santos, we had to put that bull down. You know bulls as well as I do. You know mature bulls have between 1 to 4 nanograms per deciliter, but after they’ve been in the arena, it would be two or three nanograms higher. But when we assessed the blood from the bull last night, the levels were quadrupled.”

“By my estimation, it seems someone injected the animal with a full bottle of 20mL of testosterone, but it was a drug used on horses and dogs. All of it. It metabolized in seconds, and that is not the worst part of it,” she sank into a chair. “Warrick, we found cocaine in his body too.”

If I'd had a cup of coffee in hand, it would have crashed to the floor. “What the fuck?”

“It shocked me too,” Evie said, folding her hands under her chin. “We had to tranq the bull last night, Warrick, and when it went down, it was foaming at the mouth. We had to kill it. There was nothing Santos could have done to stop him from throwing him with how amped the bull was. I am just happy he was not so deathly injured.”

“Somebody drugged the damned bull,” I echoed.

“With enough drugs to kill him if we hadn’t done it for them,” she replied. “This is something I have never seen around here, Warrick. What the fuck is going on? Who could have done something like that?”

The stalker.

“Are we looking at those who were authorized to be in the pen?” I asked.

Her lips flattened. “We had over three hundred people in the fairgrounds last night, and security was nonexistent. It would be easy for anyone to slip inside, inject him, and slip away with no one being any the wiser.”

Zoe was nearly killed before she came to us.

The bull was injected to make Santos fall.

Zoe’s car was vandalized.

Common sense told me it was the same offender, this stalker guy—but none of these acts felt like it was the work of a stalker. This felt like…a death promise.

Someone wanted to kill Zoe—but why?

“I want to tell you what’s going on, but honestly, not only is it not my story to tell, but I am also still not sure how this all ties together,” I said. “I know that sounds shitty, but as soon as I know what is going on here, I’ll fill in the blanks for you.”

“It’s about Miss Harrington, isn’t it?” she asked, almost psychically. Standing, she added, “You don’t need to tell me now, but I trust you will soon. I don’t like people sitting on my mudheap, Donovan.”

“Neither do I,” I replied.

As she left, I spotted a box on top of my usual mail. It was wrapped in brown paper and addressed to Zoe—Zara. Taking it with me, I headed to her room, wondering if she had eaten or if she had slept, and what she was thinking. Knocking on the door, I waited until she let me in.

“You look like?—”

“Shit,” she sighed. “I know, I feel like it, too.”

“We’ll find who did that to your car,” I assured her, handing her the large chocolate bar and the box.

She turned the bar over. “It’s not that. It’s just…I heard from my handler that one of their men on my case was killed yesterday—” she set the bar aside and tore open the brown paper on the box. Inside was a small white box, and she was frowning. She opened it and screamed.

Frantic, I looked into the box. “Jesus H Christ.”

A severed ear, still bloody and showing a ragged knife mark from where it was separated from the body, showed stark against the white silk of the bedding it was laying on. On the lid of the box, I read, “Nothing is left of FBI agent Harding. You’re next.”

Zoe was huddled into the corner where the bed met the wall; she was a tiny little ball, shivering and shaking and white as a three-day-old corpse. I closed the box.

“Zoe…” I set it aside. “What is really going on? See, I just heard today that a prominent FBI agent in New York was killed because he was meddling in things he was not supposed to be meddling in.” I paused. “There is no stalker, is there, Zoe?”

I waited until she didn’t look as if she had seen her life flash before her eyes and then asked again, “There is no stalker, is there?”

“No,” she whispered.

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