LITMIR.BIZ

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Miranda, I got those two-by-fours you ordered in the back,” the florid-cheeked man at the front counter called out. “Wanna meet me back there with your truck?”

      “Be right there, Dad,” she called before turning back to John. “I’m Miranda Duncan.” She grinned before adding, “Of the hardware Duncans.”

      He laughed. “John Blake. Of the accounting Blakes,” he said in return, wondering if she could tell he was speaking the truth.

      It had been a while since he’d used his real name. But Quinn had suggested it, since the people who might want to do him harm knew him by other names. Nobody he’d crossed recently would connect him to some guy named John Blake who lived in Cold Creek, Texas.

      Miranda cocked her head for the briefest moment before she smiled at him again. “Welcome to Cold Creek, John Blake. Hope you’ll like it here.” She headed back out the door, letting in another blast of icy wind that made his bones hurt.

      Damn shame, he thought, that he rather liked the red-haired deputy, because the last thing he needed to do while he was recuperating in Cold Creek was to make friends with a local cop.

      He was here to stay out of sight and let his bones and muscles mend.

      In that order.

      Gathering up the screws and bits he’d need to repair the wind-battered storm windows of the rental house, he paid at the front counter and headed out to the old Ford pickup Alexander Quinn had purchased for his time here in Texas. The plates were from Garza County, a couple of hours south, registered in the name of a construction company called Blanchard Building. It belonged to an old friend of Quinn’s, who apparently owed the man a favor. If anyone asked, John Blake’s name was on the payroll as a carpenter, and the repair work he was doing on the rental house was all part of the cover.

      Quinn was nothing if not thorough.

      The wind was strong and icy, hinting there was snow hiding behind the flat gray clouds that hung low over the ridgeline to the east. To the west, there was nothing but scrubland and sky as far as the eye could see.

      John tugged the collar of his jacket closed and hurried to climb into the truck, grimacing at the steady drumbeat of pain in his bones. Maybe he should have checked the weather report this morning before he planned a day of manual labor.

      The last thing his aching bones needed was snow.

      * * *

      LOOKED LIKE THE weatherman was right, Miranda thought as she gazed at the lowering gray sky overhead. They were getting snow this afternoon.

      She pulled the truck into the parking lot outside the Cold Creek Municipal Complex, suppressing a smile as usual when she read the building’s name on the large sign out front. The single-story rectangular brick building housed a small courtroom, the mayor’s tiny office and the four-room Barstow County Sheriff’s Department. There wasn’t anything complex about this little dot on the sprawling Texas map, and with more and more young people leaving for the bigger towns and cities, Cold Creek might not be a dot on the map much longer.

      Sheer stubbornness was all that had kept Miranda in the panhandle, herself. Stubbornness and a marrow-deep love of the land of her birth. She knew everyone in Cold Creek like old friends.

      Well, almost everybody.

      It was rare for Cold Creek to have new folks in town. Maybe in a bigger city, like Dallas or Houston, John Blake would blend into the crowd. He had that kind of face—pleasant features but nothing that made him stand out. His hair was neither long nor short, neither dark nor fair, and his skin tone was medium. He wasn’t short, but he wasn’t tall, either—only an inch or two taller than she was. He wasn’t heavy or thin, neither muscle-bound nor weak.

      He was simply average.

      But even average stood out in Cold Creek, Texas. Because he was a newcomer in a town that didn’t attract newcomers.

      Settling in at her desk in the sheriff’s department, she checked her messages in hopes of a new case to distract her from her inconvenient curious streak. But there was nothing waiting for her. There rarely was.

      She woke her computer and grabbed a notepad from the top desk drawer. John Blake, she wrote at the top of the pad. He was from Tennessee—east Tennessee, she added to the notepad as she searched her memory for everything he’d told her and a few things he hadn’t. His accent had definitely held a hint of the mountains.

      He’d been buying nails and screws, but nothing that pegged him as any sort of builder. And he’d told her he came from a family of accountants, hadn’t he?

      John Blake. Accountant. Eastern Tennessee.

      That should be a place to start.

      Ten minutes later, she knew a good bit more—and still, a whole lot of nothing. Jonathan Eric Blake, age thirty-six, six feet tall. Until just over a year ago, he’d worked at Blake and Blake, an accounting firm in Johnson City, Tennessee, owned by his father. Before that, he’d worked for a global marketing firm in Europe for about a year, fresh out of grad school.

      His current address was just off Route 7, the main north-south highway through Barstow County. He also showed up on the payroll of a construction company called Blanchard Building, Inc., in Garza County.

      Working as an off-site carpenter.

      What was an accountant doing working as a carpenter?

      As she reached for the computer keyboard again, the desk sergeant, Coy Taylor, stuck his head through the doorway. “Duncan, we’ve had a call. Anonymous. Someone thought he saw Delta McGraw hitchhiking down near the Bar W.”

      She stood and grabbed her jacket from the back of her chair. “Was he sure it was Delta?”

      “Claimed it was. You’ve got pictures of her plastered all over the county.” Taylor gave her a sympathetic look. “You might be about the only person left in these parts who gives a damn. That girl’s burned a lot of bridges in this town.”

      Miranda couldn’t argue otherwise, but Delta had lived a hard life and maybe she had earned some of the prickliness that set most people on edge. And while this wasn’t the first time Delta had gone missing for a few days, this time just felt different. She’d been gone too long, with no word to anyone, at a time when she’d seemed closer than ever to putting down permanent roots in Cold Creek.

      Miranda zipped up her jacket and headed out to the fleet parking lot. The small sheriff’s department had jurisdiction for the whole county, but most of the crime, such as it was, happened near the county seat of Cold Creek or along Route 7.

      She turned on the cruiser’s light bar but left the siren silent as she sped down Route 7 toward the sprawling Bar W Ranch, one of the largest cattle spreads in the panhandle. Despite the chilly temperatures, the Bar W Ranch kept their cattle grazing year-round through a strategic plan utilizing both warm-and cold-growth grasses. Some patches of grass were already green, despite the frigid temperatures, and several dozen head of cattle had gathered there to graze.

      She peered down the highway, looking for a hitchhiker. But with the threat of snow, even traffic on the highway was nearly nonexistent. Nor could she find any sign that a vehicle had pulled over on the dusty shoulder on either side to pick up anyone thumbing for a ride.

      Had it been a false report?

      She called it in. “Taylor, I’m seeing no sign of a hitchhiker on Route 7. Could the call have come from a hoaxer?”

      “Could have, I suppose.” Taylor’s gusty sigh roared through the radio. “Sorry about that, Duncan. I know you were hoping hard for some sign of the girl.”

      “I think while I’m down this way, I’m going to check in on Lizzie Dillard. She swears someone’s been stealing eggs from her henhouse.”

      “A lawman’s work is never done,” Taylor drawled, amusement thick in his gravelly voice.

      The narrow one-lane

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