Page 56 of Mile High Mystery

“What’s wrong?” Shelby asked.

“The key won’t go in. It’s like something is jamming the lock.” He leaned down for a closer look but was unable to make out anything in the dim light.

A gasp from Shelby made him look up.

Janie—or rather Janelle Chalk—smiled at him. She held a pistol pressed to Shelby’s side. “Don’t try anything,” Janelle said. “Or I’ll kill her, then finish you off.”

SHELBYTRIEDTOremember the self-defense training she had received earlier in her career: How to overpower an opponent. How to evade capture. How to use your opponent’s weaknesses against them. But none of those lessons applied here, with the barrel of a pistol pressed hard against her ribs and Zach standing across from her, his face bleached of color and eyes filled with horror.

Janelle patted her down and found Shelby’s pistol and pocketed it. “Get back in your car,” she ordered, grabbing Shelby’s arm and marching her forward, the gun between them. She wore black pants and a black hoodie, the hood pulled up to hide her blond hair. She had a small black daypack on her back. Anyone seeing her would describe a tall, slim figure—the same description the camper had given the sheriff of the “man” he had seen running from Camille’s campsite the day she died. “You drive, Zach,” Janelle said. “But remember what will happen if you start thinking you’re smarter than I am.”

“Where are we going?” Zach asked as he opened the driver’s door of his truck.

Janelle led Shelby to the passenger side and shoved her in. Shelby was grateful for Zach’s bulk beside her, somehow comforting. Of course, it also meant that if Janelle decided to fire the pistol in these close quarters, both she and Zach were likely to be hurt. “Where do you want me to drive?” Zach asked again as Janelle shut the door behind her.

“Go to the Piñon Creek campground. I think it’s fitting, don’t you, that we end everything there.”

The small town of Eagle Mountain was so much darker than Houston at night, without thousands of streetlights, traffic lights and the glow from homes and towering office buildings shutting out the night. But away from town, on the Forest Service road, they were plunged into a new kind of darkness. The headlights of Zach’s truck cut a narrow wedge out of the inky blackness, revealing nothing but closely growing trees and the narrow strip of red dirt road directly in front of them.

Zach drove slowly, clutching the steering wheel in both hands as if he might rip it from the column. He stared straight ahead, and Shelby wondered what he was thinking. Her own mind raced, searching for some avenue of escape. But shaping a coherent thought was liking extracting bolts from a vat of molasses. The effort drained her, and nothing she could assemble made sense.

“What are you doing here in Eagle Mountain?” Zach asked, breaking the silence and making Shelby jump. “Did you come with your brother?”

“I followed him here because I knew he was going to screw up,” Janelle said. “Not that he minded me being here. I’ve always been the only one of us with any real backbone. He just went along with Uncle Charlie and Uncle Christopher because he was afraid of them.”

“What was he doing here, then?” Zach asked. “Was he really writing a book about the Chalk brothers?”

Janelle laughed. “No, he wasn’t writing a book! That was just a story he made up to get close to you. He had this idea that we should find out what you really knew about what happened that night at the pub before we killed you. I told him it didn’t matter what you knew because the uncles wanted you dead, but Thomas felt he had to know if the killing was justified. He actually said that. As if it matters.”

The casual way she spoke, as if murder was a mundane topic of conversation, sent an icy chill through Shelby. “I saw your brother, Martin, running away from the pub that night,” Zach said.

“I knew it!” Janelle looked around Shelby to smile at him. “Martin told us there was a truck parked in front of the restaurant that night. He thought it was empty, but I was sure you were there, waiting on your sister. Of course, no one would listen to me for the longest time. After all, I’m just a girl.” The smile turned to a sneer. “My uncles wasted so much time focused on Martin and Thomas, even though I was right there—the only one with guts enough to have a real role in the family organization. But because I’m female, I have to work so much harder to prove I’m capable. All my brothers had to do was stand around looking the part, when neither one of them had the nerve to actually do the work necessary.”

“Martin looked really afraid the night I saw him,” Zach asked. “What was he doing at the pub?”

“He was terrified,” Janelle said. “All he had to do was show up, fire one shot into that worthless judge and Charlie and Christopher were going to hand over a whole chunk of their empire. Legitimate businesses, most of them. He would have been rich. Instead, as soon as he shot the judge, he fell apart. He ran away like the coward he was, all the way back to Wyoming. He told my uncles he had changed his mind and wanted to stay on the ranch. He promised not to say anything about what happened that night, but they couldn’t trust him. How could they? He was liable to fall apart the first time anyone came to question him.” She turned to Shelby. “But you never did. The FBI never figured out there was someone else in the pub that night, even when Charlie and Christopher’s attorneys kept insisting my uncles never fired a shot. They told the truth.”

“Why didn’t your uncles tell the authorities that Martin killed the judge?” Zach said. “Especially if he wasn’t around to implicate them?”

“Family loyalty and the family name are everything to them,” Janelle said. “It’s why they were so keen on getting my brothers involved. The two of them only have daughters. One of them has never married, and the other is a lesbian. They figured if they were going to find a man to run things when they decided to retire, my brothers were the best candidates. They couldn’t see that I was the one they really needed.”

Silence wrapped around them, broken only by the crunch of the truck’s tires on the dirt road. Shelby watched Janelle out of the corner of her eye. The other woman was smiling slightly. She looked so pleased with herself.

“Who killed Thomas?” Zach asked after a moment.

“He couldn’t follow through on the job he was sent here to do, and he was becoming a liability,” Janelle said.

“So you shot him?” Shelby asked.

Janelle’s look was withering. “I did what I had to do,” she said.

“Did you kill Camille, too?” Zach asked.

“I did. But I promise, she didn’t suffer. She wasn’t even supposed to be here, but she must have found out what Thomas and I had planned and came here to warn you. Under different circumstances, the two of us might have been friends. I always felt she was a strong woman, like me.” She leaned forward a little. “Your turn should be coming up soon. The sign can be hard to see.”

A few minutes later, the headlights illuminated the brown Forest Service sign that identified the campground. “Turn in and drive to the back,” Janelle ordered. “Stop at number 47.”

The campsite where Camille had been killed. “Is this where you killed Thomas, too?” Shelby asked.

---