Page 3 of Every Deadly Suspicion

While Gilly couldn’t figure how Buckley fit in the puzzle, his thoughts drifted back to his interview with Keyes the day before. He’d found him at the small one-bedroom cabin he and his wife shared. Surprisingly, neither Keyes nor his wife had the look of drug users. Keyes was tall and lanky with a bushy handlebar mustache. His eyes were clear and his teeth good. Meth often destroyed the teeth of users. Keyes’s hands were the only thing that gave him away. They were rough, stained, and scarred, most likely from the caustic chemicals he’d worked with.

Paula Keyes was easy on the eyes. A brown-haired classic beauty, almost elegant—until she opened her mouth. Then you saw the hardness in the woman. She’d be difficult to live with, Gilly thought. He concentrated on Joe, but Paula stayed in the room, arms folded, watching the interview while she leaned against the kitchen counter.

They both admitted they knew the area of the forest where the trailer fire had occurred, but that was all they would admit.

“Joe, you’ve been arrested with Carson, so don’t pretend like you don’t know the name.”

“He’s bad news.” Keyes looked away and gave a disinterested shrug. “I stay away from bad news.”

“He wasn’t in the forest hiking.”

“You know everything. What was he up there doing?” Keyes smirked.

Gilly looked him in the eye and knew that behind the bravado was fear, and guilt. Keyes was his man. If only there were enough evidence to get him in an interview room.

“Cooking meth with you.”

Keyes forced out a nervous chuckle. Then his wife stepped in.

“Joe was here with me. I just found out I’m pregnant. We were celebrating. If you had anything on him, you’d arrest him. But you don’t, so leave now. Please.”

Gilly didn’t believe the story of domestic bliss. He decided that Keyes would be his project. Heaven knew the DEA didn’t have the manpower to cover all the Northern California forest and meth cookers and marijuana growers therein, but he could cover one person he was certain was guilty.

He’d be all over Keyes, that was for sure.

CHAPTER 1

PRESENT DAY

Monday morning Chief Hanna Keyes was in her driveway, ready to climb into her police vehicle, when she heard the faltering plane. Her gaze shot up by reflex. It was flying awfully low. The motor sputtered and didn’t sound good, but Hanna didn’t know anything about small-plane motors. It was Scott Buckley’s plane; she did know that. When the weather was nice, he flew his plane around the area at least once a week. And today was a beautiful late-spring day.

Vroom, sputter, vroom, sputter...It almost sounded like a car when you accelerated, then took your foot off the gas, then accelerated again.

That couldn’t be right. Hanna stood with her door open, her eyes tracking the plane’s trajectory. The single-engine plane made a lazy circle, seemed to drop, then stabilize. The engine sounded normal now, yet the flight path was anything but.

Scott was losing altitude.

The closest airport was Columbia, about sixteen driving miles away, and he was headed that general direction.He’s way too farfrom the airport to land.She began to feel anxious for Scott. He was a prominent figure in Dry Oaks, a vocal supporter of police and financial supporter of many charities in town.

She got in her SUV and started the engine. As she backed out of her driveway, she leaned forward and looked up for another glimpse of the aircraft. She watched in horror as the plane pointed almost straight down, then looped up slightly and swung back down again. Scott would not make it to the airport.

He was going down.

Hanna activated her SUV’s light bar, then picked up her radio mike to contact dispatch as she accelerated down the street. “It’s Chief Keyes. I think there’s a plane going down. It’s headed toward the field at Pine and Baseline.”

“10-4, Chief. We’re getting calls on that as well. Fire is rolling.”

Hanna replaced the mike and concentrated on her driving. The plane dropped below the tree line, and her heart sank. She rounded the corner just in time to see it pull up slightly, then list to the left and come down at an angle so the left wing hit the ground hard, causing the plane to cartwheel across the field. It broke apart as it did so, pieces flying everywhere. The fuselage skidded to a violent stop in the middle of the grassy field. Smoke and dust swirled up, but Hanna didn’t see flames yet.

She jumped the curb and angled her SUV across the field from the north as a pickup truck crossed from the south. They met at the plane. Hanna jammed the vehicle into park and leapt from the front seat as the driver of the truck got out.

Jared Hodges. He was a firefighter-EMT, but he was obviously off duty. His presence set her back a bit. Their history together reared up in her thoughts like a wild stallion.

“You have a fire extinguisher?” he called out to Hanna.

She nodded, jolted from her memories, then hurried around her vehicle to the back hatch. She opened it and jerked the extinguisher from its clips.

Jared arrived at her elbow, grabbed it from her, and jogged to the plane, where tongues of flames started to lick at the dry grass underneath.

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