Page 55 of Killer on the Homestead
“You have access to that bunkhouse, right?” Beckett asked, sounding somehow casual and deadly serious all at the same time.
Accusing him. Him. When he’d had his place trashed, his painkillers stolen. The detective was standing there throwing suspicion on him? “Yeah, I’ve got access,” Duncan replied, anger coursing through him.
Detective Beckett shrugged casually. “Seems to me you’re the new person in all this. You own any guns you haven’t told us about, Mr. Kirk?”
It was…absolutely ludicrous. Duncan had never been a guy with much of a temper. All his feelings, all his passion, had always been centered on baseball.
But something hot and dangerous erupted inside of him now. He took a step toward Beckett. “Seems to me—”
But Rosalie grabbed his arm—his bad arm—and squeezed. Hard enough he couldn’t get a word out because pain zinged through him.
“See if you can get some prints off that map,” she said, interrupting whatever else Duncan might have said.
“You don’t run this investigation, Rosalie. And you might consider your partner a liability until you know for sure…”
But Rosalie was dragging Duncan out of the office, and he didn’t hear the rest of the detective’s sentence.
“Look, I get that you’re pissed and you have every right to be,” she said in a low, seething voice, still pulling him along by his bad arm. “But if you assault an officer of the law, we’ll have big problems. Let’s cool off somewhere we’re not so likely to get arrested for assault.”
“We?” he demanded. Because she seemed a hell of a lot more in control of herself than he felt of himself.
“Yeah,we. Accusing you is a jerk move for no good reason except to get a rise. We won’t give him what he wants. So we walk away before we start swinging.”
The idea of her starting to swing, the picture of it in his head, was enough to soothe some of the roiling anger. But that didn’t make this something he could swallow.
“How do you do all this?” he asked as they strode out of the police department and into the sunny afternoon.
“All what?” she asked, still moving at a quick pace toward her truck.
“Deal with an ego like that?”
“You know what’s funny? I’d bet money on the fact that back in that little office of theirs, they’re having a conversation about how they handle dealing with me and my ego.”
Duncan didn’t have a quick retort to that, because he imagined it was true. He just didn’t happen to find Rosalie’s ego damn insulting.
They reached her truck, but Rosalie didn’t unlock the doors. She stood at the bed and sighed, squinting up at the sky. “Bottom line? We’re all good at our jobs. We all want the same things. But we have to go at it in different ways. Which means we butt heads and things get heated. Outside that heat, I can tell you, Copeland and I are a little too much alike and that’s probably half our problem.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’d have done the same in his position—needle you, see what came out. As little as I like to admit that we go about things the same way, we do.”
“That’s very diplomatic of you,” Duncan replied, because even if some of his anger had cooled, he didn’t feel like being fair or diplomatic when it came to Detective Beckett.
“Yeah, well, if I couldn’t find that diplomacy deep down on occasion, I’d have been arrested a long time ago.” She smiled at him, but it wasn’t her usual flash of personality. There was something sad behind it.
Because they could be annoyed at Beckett or the detectives, or any number of things, but it didn’t change the very clear facts of the matter.
“Someone on that ranch is the problem,” Duncan said quietly.
“Yeah.”
A problem. A murderer. Someone who had access to Owen’s room. Someone right under his parents’ nose had killed a man. And was trying to make Owen look responsible. It didn’t feel like trouble brought with them. It felt like trouble right there in his home.
“Whoever killed Hunter wants Owen to look guilty. Wants to tie the whole thing to these damn missing cows, or that map wouldn’t have been planted. But that was their first mistake.Planting that mapafterthe detectives means weknowthere’s a frame job happening.”
“No one knows you looked today,” Duncan said. “Not yet.”
Rosalie seemed to consider that. “So who were they hopingwouldlook? And when? Did they think the detectives were coming back?” She shook her head. “More questions and no more answers.”
“That isn’t true. We can cross Owen off any suspect list.”
“Except your burglary,” Rosalie said. “Unless… What if he didn’t steal those pills? What if he didn’t voluntarily take those pills?”
