Cavanaugh Cowboy Read online

  “We would have made an appointment for yesterday, but your partner told us that you were out of town for the day,” Sully told the lawyer.

  “Well, I’m here now.” Shifting his briefcase to his other hand, Cash pushed open his front door and gestured for Sully and Rae to follow him inside. “Alma’s still asleep,” he explained. “This pregnancy is really wiping her out.”

  “We won’t wake her up,” Rae promised as she and Sully entered behind Cash.

  He led them to the table in the dining room and took a seat. “What can I do for you?” he asked as they followed suit.

  “We’re asking everyone who was at Murphy’s for your party if they could remember seeing what time John Warren left,” Rae told Cash.

  Since they didn’t know if Miss Joan had said anything to her grandson about what had happened or if he even knew that Warren was an alias, she decided it might be simpler to just refer to the dead man by the name he’d used when he’d first arrived.

  “John Warren,” Cash repeated. They could see by his expression that he was drawing a blank. And then suddenly the light seemed to dawn. “You’re talking about that man who Miss Joan had working on the ranch she and my grandfather own, right?” Cash asked, looking from Sully to Rae. “The one who was found dead?”

  “Right,” Sully responded. Well, it seemed that Cash knew that much, he thought, but then, the gossip mill had been happily at work, so it stood to reason he would know about the man being found dead. He still proceeded with caution. “When we questioned one of the brothers running the Healing Ranch, he mentioned that he thought Warren looked a little nervous when he saw you there.” Sully watched the lawyer’s face closely, looking for any sort of a reaction. “Would he have had any reason to be?”

  Cash looked genuinely baffled. “I didn’t know the man,” he told them. “To be honest, I wouldn’t have been able to pick him out of a crowd. I’m not involved in that part of my grandfather and Miss Joan’s business. I just handle their legal papers.”

  “If you don’t mind my saying so, there can’t be much money to be made registering deeds and filing wills in a small town like Forever,” Sully commented.

  It was obvious that he was asking Cash how he managed to make a living doing that.

  “You’re right,” Cash answered. “That’s why I also do consulting work for a few out-of-state firms, as well.” Then, before the detective could ask him, Cash summarized what he did for those firms. “I set up their 401(k)s, make sure all the legal filings are done correctly, things of that nature. Mostly deal with the red tape they don’t want to bother with.”

  “Do you do that for a lot of firms?” Rae asked.

  “I’d say there’s a dozen or so right now. I’ve got all the firms listed at the office.” He looked at the duo, his curiosity aroused. “Why? How does this tie in with our dead man?”

  “We’re just fishing,” Sully admitted. “For all we know, it wasn’t even you that Warren was looking at.”

  Since he didn’t know the man, that made sense to Cash. “You’re probably right, but if there’s anything I can do to help you push this investigation along, all you have to do is tell me.”

  Rae looked at Sully, waiting for him to ask the logical question. When he didn’t, she did it herself. “Would you mind giving us that list you mentioned, the one with the names of all the companies you consult for?” Rae asked.

  “Sure,” he responded. “It’s public knowledge, so I wouldn’t be giving away any secrets. I’ll get to it first thing,” he promised, rising. “Now if you don’t have any more questions, I’ve got a lot of catching up to do at the office. The owners of one of the companies I service are all redoing their wills and want to get them signed, recorded and filed as soon as possible. I’ll be flying out again tomorrow,” he interjected in case they needed to talk to him then.

  Cash had caught his attention. Sully wouldn’t have been able to say exactly what suddenly made an alarm go off in his head. He supposed he could just point to the old standby, that his Cavanaugh gut had alerted him.

  Whatever the reason, he looked at Cash and asked, “What’s the name of that company?”

  “Hathaway, Montgomery and Finch.” It was a twenty-three-year-old company with an excellent reputation—until recently. “Why do you ask?”

  “Let me guess,” Sully said, easing into the scenario. “The owners are restructuring everything that has to do with their business because half a million dollars was embezzled from their funds. They don’t want it to be public knowledge yet because they’re looking to contain the situation. But they’re not all that hopeful about it.”

  Cash’s jaw dropped open. “How did you—?” Stunned speechless for a second, Cash couldn’t complete his sentence.

  Sully exchanged looks with Rae and made a judgment call. No one else beside the sheriff and his deputies—and Miss Joan—knew the details surrounding Wynters’s case. He decided that it was time to let one more person into the exclusive club.

  “John Warren was actually Jefferson Wynters,” he told Cash. “He was working on your grandparents’ ranch, pretending to be a wrangler, because he was hiding out.”

  “Hiding?” Cash echoed, still very lost. None of this was making any sense to him. “Hiding from who?”

  That question was easy to answer. It was all the other questions that baffled them. “The people he had embezzled half a million dollars from.”

  “Half a million dollars?” Cash echoed. He was having trouble absorbing the information. “You’re not saying what I think you’re saying, are you?”

  “That Jefferson Wynters was an accountant at Hathaway, Montgomery and Finch, the company that ran an assisted-living facility in Prescott, Arizona. And that it’s believed that he somehow embezzled half a million dollars from the company and took off.”

  Cash was still having trouble wrapping his mind around the information that the detective was telling him. “If Warren was actually this accountant named Wynters who stole all that money, where’s the money right now?”

  “A very good question,” Rae answered. “From the looks of it, someone killed him for it.”

  “Or killed him trying to find out where he hid it,” Sully said, raising the other viable possibility.

  “Which brings us back to trying to find out when Wynters left and if he was alone when he did,” Rae told the lawyer.

  “Even if he did leave with someone, that someone might not have been the one to kill him,” Cash said, trying to look at the situation from all angles.

  “You’re right,” Sully agreed. “But that person might have seen someone following Wynters and that person was the one who ultimately killed him. We’ll follow you to the office and get that list just in case there’s something we’re overlooking,” he told Cash.

  The other man nodded. “Anything I can do to help out,” he said.

  They all filed out to his driveway. Cash got into his car. Rae and Sully followed in her truck.

  It felt as if they were going around and around with all these theories, but Sully wanted to lay everything out—and then start eliminating them one by one.

  “What we have here is a whole bunch of conjecture,” Rae lamented as she drove to the law office.

  “Maybe,” Sully agreed, “but it seems clear that Wynters must have recognized Cash and that spooked him enough to get him to leave.” The theory was evolving as he talked it out. “Maybe he even decided that it wasn’t safe in Forever anymore.”

  Rae nodded. “So he packed up and left,” she agreed. “One question, though.”

  “Go ahead,” Sully said.

  “Why would Wynters even come to Forever?” It seemed like too much of a coincidence to her. “It’s not as if everyone knows about it. Other than the Healing Ranch, it’s not known for anything.”

  “That’s just the point,” Sully told her. “The lawyer
the firm has coming out to do their legal papers comes from Forever. One of the owners probably talked about Forever being a postage stamp–size town where nothing ever happens and Wynters overhears them saying that.

  “The name sticks in the back of his head, and when he finally decides it’s time to make off with the money he embezzled, he assumes that no one would ever think to look for him in a place like Forever. He probably didn’t realize that the company’s lawyer actually lives here. Not until he sees Cash and puts two and two together,” Sully concluded.

  “So you’re thinking that was what made him take off with the money,” Rae guessed.

  “That’s the only thing that makes sense,” Sully replied.

  She tended to agree. “Then where is the money?”

  “With whoever killed and buried him.” That, too, was the only thing that made sense, Sully thought. And then something hit him. “We went about this all wrong. We shouldn’t be talking to everyone who attended the party at Murphy’s. We should be talking to the people in the area who didn’t attend.”

  Rae’s eyes widened. “Because the people at the party are each other’s alibis,” she concluded.

  “Exactly.”

  * * *

  They went back to Miss Joan.

  “Well, you two didn’t swallow a canary yet, but you look like you’re definitely closing in on one,” the older woman said when she saw them walking into the diner. Hazel eyes quickly assessed the duo. “What do you need from me?”

  Sully laughed softly. “You have definitely made second-guessing into an art form,” he marveled.

  Miss Joan’s eyes rose to his. “I never guess,” she informed him in her no-nonsense voice.

  “My mistake,” Sully said, managing to keep a smile from his lips.

  Miss Joan nodded, but just barely. “You’re entitled, boy,” she told him magnanimously. “Now what is it you need from me?”

  “The guest list from the party you threw for Cash and Alma,” Sully told her.

  That way, he could focus on the people who weren’t on the list.

  “There was no list,” Miss Joan told him. “It was an open invitation to everyone.”

  The information surprised Sully. The similarities between Miss Joan and his uncle Andrew astonished him. Miss Joan had a sharp tongue while his uncle was soft-spoken, but both were highly respected by the people they dealt with.

  “There had to be some people you excluded,” Sully insisted.

  “I didn’t do the excluding,” Miss Joan told him. “Those who didn’t attend excluded themselves. It was completely their choice, not mine.”

  Sully sighed. “We’re back to having to interview everyone.”

  “Not everyone,” Miss Joan corrected. “Just the ones you haven’t interviewed yet.”

  Sully inclined his head. The woman was right—as always. He struggled not to allow his frustration to get the better of him.

  “We need to tell the sheriff and his deputies about what you found,” Rae told Sully as they walked out of the diner.

  He realized that with everything that they had been rethinking, he had almost forgotten about sharing all this with the police.

  “You mean what we found,” Sully corrected.

  Rae was surprised at the way he’d put it. “You mean that you’re not going to be territorial about this?”

  He laughed. That was not the way he’d been raised. He’d cut his teeth on team effort, not on being a glory hound.

  “When this is all behind us, Mulcahy, I have got to take you with me to Aurora to meet my family. There is no such thing as being territorial when you’re a Cavanaugh. It’s all a joint effort no matter what the puzzle turns out to be.”

  She thought of how he had come up with the information they were using. “You mean like when you called your cousin Valri and your cousin’s wife, that medical examiner.” The woman’s name escaped her at the moment.

  Sully smiled at her as they cut across the street to get to the sheriff’s office. “You’re catching on,” he told her.

  He sounded pleased, she thought. Why, she had no idea. The man was definitely an enigma.

  Neither the sheriff nor any of his deputies were in the office when they walked in. The only person who was there was Alvin Hayes.

  Alvin was a recent high school graduate who was still attempting to figure out what he wanted to do with his life. In the interim, in order to earn some money, he worked part-time for the sheriff’s office, answering the phones. Most of the time, since the phones were usually silent, Alvin fixed coffee, filed reports and occasionally swept up.

  At the moment, he was sitting at his desk, staring off into space and whistling some tuneless song.

  “Where is everyone?” Sully asked him.

  Alvin instantly snapped to attention when he realized who had walked in. He looked uneasy in Sully’s presence and mumbled his answer so low, it wasn’t even remotely audible.

  “Try again,” Sully told him patiently.

  Alvin cleared his throat. This time, his words were audible, if somewhat shaky.

  “They’re all out questioning people who were at Miss Joan’s party. If you check on Murphy’s and Mick’s Garage, you might see a couple of them,” Alvin said, his Adam’s apple bobbing prominently up and down his rather long throat.

  Alvin was probably right, but that would involve talking to the deputies and Rick one at a time, Sully thought, and he wanted to see them all together. He didn’t feel like having to repeat this newest briefing a total of four times. It would be wasting time.

  “Can you call them and ask them to come back to the office?” Sully requested.

  On his feet, Alvin looked even more gangly. “You mean all of them?” he asked uncertainly. He was accustomed to getting his orders from the sheriff and looked undecided about just what to do since Sully was giving him the order.

  “That would work, yes,” Sully answered, cutting the teenager some slack.

  “Well, I guess I can do that, but—” Alvin’s voice trailed off and his uncertainty seemed to rise in startling proportions.

  He had no intentions of debating this with Alvin. “Do it,” Sully instructed.

  “They won’t get mad at you,” Rae promised, taking a guess at the reason behind Alvin’s reticence to call the sheriff. “You’re only following the detective’s instructions, and the sheriff would want you to do that.”

  Still looking somewhat hesitant, Alvin got on the radio, pushed a button and then hit the com line. The last step enabled him to get in touch with all four men who were part of the sheriff’s department at once.

  It was the first time he’d ever used the radio for that purpose, and he looked rather startled when he heard the com line come to life.

  “Um, Sheriff?” Alvin began nervously, his voice all but cracking. “Over,” he added belatedly.

  “What did I tell you about the radio, Alvin, over?” Rick asked patiently.

  “To stay off it.” Alvin’s voice cracked. He waited until he felt he could confidently utter, “Over.”

  “That’s right. So why are you on it, over?”

  Alvin swallowed, slanting a look in Rae’s direction, silently asking for backup. “Because Miss Rae said you wouldn’t be mad at me. Over.”

  “Is she there with you, Alvin. Over?” Rick asked.

  “Yes, sir, over.”

  “Put her on, over,” Rick told him in a patient voice that sounded as if it was nearing its end.

  Alvin turned around only to almost bump into Rae. “He wants me to put you on.”

  “I heard, Alvin,” she assured him. “Sheriff, this is Rae. I think you and the deputies all need to come in. Over.”

  “You have the killer, over?” There was no missing the hopeful note in his voice.

  “No, but we have another piece of the puzzle,
over,” she informed him.

  “A large piece,” Sully said, temporarily taking the radio from her to relay the message to Rick. “Over.”

  “We’ll be there in ten, over and out,” Rick told them.

  Rae handed the radio receiver back to Alvin. The latter took it and looked at her with huge eyes that seemed as if they were about to fall out at any second. “He didn’t sound mad, did he?” he asked, seeking reassurance.

  “No,” Rae answered, trying to calm the nervous teen. “He didn’t, Alvin.”

  She just hoped the sheriff wouldn’t be disappointed when he learned about this newest development.

  Chapter 19

  Rick and his deputies arrived back at the office almost at the same time.

  They all pooled their information, with Sully and Rae going first, telling the others that in all likelihood Wynters recognized Cash Taylor as the lawyer who consulted for the firm where he worked. He’d taken off before Cash could recognize him and possibly make the connection between Wynters and the missing money.

  “Billy Tanner said he saw Wynters leaving. Nobody was with him,” Gabe told them.

  “Liam Murphy told me the same thing when I questioned him,” Daniel said to the group, adding, “Liam also said he saw Wynters slipping out through the back doors where the saloon’s deliveries are made. It was around the time when he and his band finished their second set.”

  Rae tried to think back to that evening, pinning down a time. “I’d say that would have been around seven, give or take a few minutes.”

  “Sounds about right,” Sully recalled. He looked at the others for confirmation. The sheriff nodded, as did his senior deputy.

  “That means that Wynters had to have gotten a ride from somebody that night,” Rae said. “He couldn’t have just walked back to the ranch. It was much too far from town, especially since Wynters was in a hurry to leave.”

  “Okay,” Rick said, turning toward his deputies, “new question. Who gave Wynters, or as most of the people in town still think of him, Warren a ride back to the ranch—or at least saw someone who gave him a ride?”