LITMIR.BIZ

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to remember some small, salient clue she could offer him that would turn out to be the crucial piece of the puzzle and solve this awful crime, but she had come up with nothing. “Celia and I were alone in the bridal room. When I left the room, she was still fussing with her veil. When I came back a few minutes later, she was exactly the way you saw her—dead on the floor.”

      Zoe pressed her lips together, struggling to keep her voice from breaking again. Crying wasn’t going to do anyone any good, least of all Celia. “And you know the rest.”

      “You forgot a part,” Sam told her, his voice neither accusing, nor annoyed. He was merely calling her attention to a fact.

      She looked at Sam quizzically. She’d told him everything. “What?”

      He leaned in a little closer over the desk, creating a sense of intimacy. He was well aware of the fact that trust was grounded in intimacy. “You said you argued with Celia.”

      She’d forgotten about telling him that for a second. Or maybe she’d just pushed it out of her mind. Either way, it wasn’t something she was willing to bring out into the light of day. Besides, the argument had no bearing on her death.

      “Oh. Yes.” That whole episode came rushing back to her. “We did.”

      “What was the argument about?” he asked her pointedly, watching her carefully.

      Sam’s voice was even more authoritative than usual. Ordinarily, she would have already volunteered the subject matter of the argument. It had always been in her nature to be as helpful as possible. But in this particular instance, nothing had changed about the way she felt regarding the argument.

      She couldn’t tell Sam what Celia had told her. Knowing would only hurt Sam and it would serve no purpose to tell him now. It certainly had no bearing on Celia’s murder.

      Raising her head like someone defiantly guarding a secret, Zoe answered, “It’s private.”

      “There’s nothing private about a murder,” Sam informed her.

      She stared at the man she had loved for as long as she could remember, trying to make sense of what he had just told her. Holding stubbornly onto her convictions, she brazened it out.

      “The argument had nothing to do with Celia’s death. I didn’t kill my sister, if that’s what you’re leading up to. Why would I?” she challenged.

      This was an entirely different Zoe than he had ever seen before. He wondered if it was just the stress of the situation, or if there was another reason for the change in her behavior. Could it have something to do with the plain Jane suddenly coming out from beneath her far more vivacious sister’s shadow?

      “I don’t know,” Sam answered. “You tell me.”

      “I am telling you—I didn’t do it. I’ll do everything I can to help you find whoever murdered my sister—but it wasn’t me,” Zoe insisted.

      Sam said nothing for a long moment, choosing instead to study her in silence.

      After what seemed like an eternity to Zoe, he finally told her, “I believe you. But don’t leave town. I may have more questions for you.”

      “Where would I go?” she asked him simply. “Granite Gulch is my home.”

      Sam merely nodded in absent acknowledgment, his mind already elsewhere.

      Whether the red dot was off center or not, the red bull’s-eye on Celia’s forehead was too reminiscent of his father’s signature trademark not to have something to do with Matthew Colton in some way.

      But what?

      Since his father most definitely was in prison, this had to be the work of a copycat killer. But if so, to what end? Why would this killer choose to follow in the old man’s footsteps, but deliberately elect to ignore the fact that Matthew killed middle-aged men? Why had he killed a young woman in her twenties?

      “Zoe,” Sam said as she began to rise from her seat.

      Zoe was on her feet, but her hands remained on the armrests, as if she expected him to tell her to sit down again. “Yes?”

      “Did you see anyone hanging around the bridal room when you left or when you were coming back?” Maybe she had seen the killer and hadn’t realized it.

      But Zoe shook her head. She’d already asked herself the same question several times, trying to conjure up someone in the shadows. But she always came up empty. She hadn’t seen anyone.

      “Everyone was in the church, waiting for the ceremony to start,” she told Sam.

      “Well, there had to be someone,” he said, talking more to himself than to Zoe. “Celia didn’t just shoot herself—the angle’s wrong,” he added almost matter-of-factly, as if arguing the fact in front of a board of inquiry.

      Since he’d already dismissed her, Zoe left the shelter of the chair. But she felt she needed to say something before she walked out of the room. Celia’s motive for tricking Sam into marrying her had been clear. Celia had loved money and she’d wanted to live the high life. The Coltons, once pariahs because of their father, were once more a wealthy family and had been accepted back into the community’s good graces.

      As far as she could ascertain, Sam was marrying Celia to give the unborn child he thought was coming a name. But maybe somewhere within all that noble behavior, he had actually loved her sister. For that reason, she offered him her condolences, even though the words were somewhat hackneyed.

      “I’m sorry for your loss, Sam,” Zoe told him softly.

      Sam’s expression never changed. She might as well have said it looked like it might rain later. But he went through the obligatory motions and said, “Yeah, same here,” because, after all, she had lost a sister, and that loss undoubtedly meant more to her than his losing his wife-to-be did to him.

      What he did regret, far more than he’d ever thought he would, was that he had lost his unborn child in all of this.

      Zoe offered him a small, rather sad smile and said “Thank you,” just before she left the room.

      Sam rose to his feet a moment later. There was still a church full of people to question and he sincerely doubted the backup crew he’d called in had managed to make more than a small dent in that crowd.

      Leaving the reverend’s office, he started to go down the hall and back to the church, only to run into Trevor. His oldest brother had been invited to the wedding along with their other siblings and at first, Sam thought Trevor was looking for him to offer his condolences, just like Zoe had.

      But one look at the FBI profiler’s grim expression told him that wasn’t the reason why Trevor was looking for him.

      “Good. I found you. I just got a look at the victim,” Trevor said, not bothering to offer any perfunctory niceties first.

      His brother stopped directly in front of him, blocking his path back to the church. It was obvious Trevor wanted to talk to him away from the others, even though they were both law enforcement agents.

      This was, in part, a family matter and not a conversation either one of them would want overheard by just anyone.

      “And?” Sam asked, waiting for the rest of it, because there was obviously a “rest of it.”

      Trevor frowned, as if saying the words actually caused him pain. “Your fiancée fits a new emerging pattern.”

      For there to be a “new emerging pattern,” there had to be more. “Go on,” Sam urged quietly.

      Trevor gave him a quick summary of the details that he had. “In the past two months, two young women, both in their twenties with long dark hair, were found murdered in Blackthorn County. Each of them had a red bull’s-eye drawn on their forehead. And, in each case, the red dot was just slightly off center, same as your fiancée. Now here’s the really weird part—”

      “Right,

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