The Colton Ransom Read online

  Trevor smiled to himself as he left his office and went toward the main wing of the house.

  Who knew, maybe some kind of a satisfactory arrangement could even be reached between him, Gabby and Faye regarding Avery. Then he wouldn’t have to give her up for adoption.

  Have to?

  The phrase he’d just used came echoing back to him in his head.

  Since when did he have to give the kid up for adoption? He wanted to give her up for adoption, he reminded himself.

  At least, that was what he thought he wanted.

  Damn it, the situation he was facing was getting him all jumbled up inside, he thought, annoyed with himself as well as the situation. He’d been spun around so many times, he didn’t know which way was up, which way was down anymore.

  That had to change.

  The kid was going up for adoption and that was that, he concluded. He couldn’t be a dad—who did he think he was kidding to even consider that? He never undertook anything unless he thought he had a chance of getting it right. There was no chance like that in this case. He had no example to follow, no fond memories to tap into. He certainly wasn’t about to emulate the father who’d dumped him on the Colton doorstep.

  Annoyed, Trevor blew out a breath as he came closer to the nursery. This whole thing was getting damn confusing and really way out of hand. He had to stop overthinking it. He was going to put Avery up for adoption and that was that.

  As Trevor drew closer to the closed door, nothing but a wall of silence greeted him. The corners of his mouth curved slightly.

  He assumed the kid was still asleep after all.

  That had to be a good sign. Maybe keeping her around wouldn’t be all that ba—

  His thoughts were abruptly shut down as a scream suddenly tore through the silence.

  The scream, followed by another, louder one, was coming from the nursery.

  Instantly, Trevor broke into a run before the full import of the scream and what it could mean had a chance to sink in.

  The door was unlocked and he yanked it open. The first thing he saw was Gabby on her knees in the middle of the nursery.

  Obviously struggling to regain control over herself, Gabby was staring at the body she was kneeling over. Blood pooled around the body’s upper torso and it was steadily leaching into Gabby’s jeans where she was kneeling.

  She didn’t seem to realize it.

  Drawing closer, Trevor looked at the victim’s face. His lunch swiftly rose in his throat, threatening to come out, and he felt as if someone had stuck a hot poker into his gut and was twisting it.

  The body on the floor was Faye. The short black hair she always kept so neatly was in complete disarray, a casualty of the physical struggle that had obviously taken place. Small-boned and slender, it was apparent that she had still fought like a tiger.

  And lost.

  There was no pulse when he felt for it in the woman’s neck. The expression on her lifeless face was a combination of anger and horror.

  The exact same emotions he was now feeling, multiplied by ten.

  Trevor realized that Gabby was desperately trying to stop the flow of blood from the woman’s chest with her hands. Both were covered with Faye’s blood. It was a futile undertaking.

  “She’s dead,” he told her, his tone harsher than it should have been in order to mask his own pain.

  “No, she’s not,” Gabby insisted frantically through her tears. “She’s alive.” Her tears fell, mingling with the dead woman’s blood. “We can keep her alive! Maybe if we—”

  Trevor didn’t let her finish. Instead, grasping the back of her collar, he physically pulled Gabby away from the lifeless body.

  “She’s dead,” he repeated a bit more gently this time, stepping back from his own grief and seeing the pain and tears that were in Gabby’s eyes. “There’s nothing you can do for her now,” he told her, drawing Gabby up to her feet.

  Gabby’s knees suddenly buckled, giving way. Reacting, Trevor caught her and pulled her against him without thinking. For an instant, Gabby broke down, sobbing and clutching on to him for support.

  “Who could have done this to her?” she asked between sobs. “Why would anyone want to hurt Faye? She was always so good to everyone.”

  “I don’t know,” he answered, seething. There was now an entire myriad of emotions rushing and flashing through him like so many fireworks on a collision course.

  As he stroked Gabby’s hair in an awkward attempt to comfort the sobbing woman, he looked around the rest of the room.

  And suddenly froze.

  This isn’t right.

  “Where’s the kid?” he asked Gabby sharply.

  Pulling herself together, Gabby drew her head back, blinked several times to clear her vision and then turned in the direction of the crib.

  Her brain muddled by grief and confusion, she wasn’t sure she’d heard his question correctly.

  “What?” she asked thickly.

  “The kid. My kid,” Trevor bit off with harsh emphasis. Dropping his arms from around Gabby as if he hadn’t just paused to give her comfort, he strode quickly over to the fancy, canopied crib. “Where’s my kid?” he demanded hotly.

  The crib was empty.

  Trevor swung around to glare at Gabby, waiting for her to offer some sort of an answer.

  “I thought you said that you put Avery down in this crib.” It came out sounding like an accusation, not a question.

  “I did,” she cried.

  Everything inside of her was shaking. Seeing Faye on the floor, bloodied and motionless, had blocked out everything else. She hadn’t even realized that the crib was empty or that the baby was missing.

  Oh, God, how could she have missed that?

  “I just came in to check on her when I saw Faye—when I saw Faye—”

  Gabby couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence. A sob threatened to break free in her throat and it took everything she had to get herself under control and push it back down.

  Like a man trapped in a nightmare not of his own making, Trevor moved back to the crib again. This time he realized that although there was no baby in it, the crib wasn’t completely empty. One of the knitting needles he recognized as belonging to Faye was stabbed into an embroidered pillow.

  The knitting needle was anchoring down a note.

  His first impulse was to rip the note away from the pillow, but he forced himself to refrain. He knew that the chief of police would need the note untouched, the better to dust the surface for any fingerprints, partial or otherwise. The slightest piece of evidence could eventually lead them to Faye’s killer.

  And he wanted to slowly fillet whoever that turned out to be.

  Very carefully, making sure not to touch anything and consequently add to the fingerprints he knew had to already be on the paper, Trevor leaned in over the crib and read what was written in block letters on the note: WAIT FOR RANSOM INSTRUCTIONS. ONE MISSTEP, THE KID’S DEAD.

  It wasn’t until he stepped back that he realized Gabby was right behind him. He wound up backing right into her. The imprint of her body against his back registered without warning.

  Swallowing a curse, he turned to glare at her. “Be careful,” he snapped. “I could have knocked you down or at the very least, crushed your foot.”

  Gabby waved away his words. Neither occurrence would have been of any consequence to her. She’d just read the note left in the crib and her heart had all but turned to lead at the implication.

  It made no sense to her. But then, evil never really did.

  “Why would they want to kidnap your daughter?” she asked, bewildered.

  “They wouldn’t,” he bit off, his tone emotionless. “They think they’ve got your niece.”

  The shock his words created almost undid her. Gabby covered her mouth to keep back another distressed cry. Her eyes widened with horror. “Oh, my God. They made a mistake.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed grimly.

  And the consequences of tha
t mistake echoed through his head, loud and clear. The moment the kidnappers realized that they’d made that mistake, Avery became worthless to them.

  Trevor refused to follow that train of thought to the end. It was far too awful to contemplate, even for a fleeting second.

  He needed to get Avery back.

  Suddenly, the child he hadn’t wanted less than an hour ago became very precious to him.

  Beside him, Gabby was struggling not to break down again. Hysteria wouldn’t help get Avery back. She drew in a long breath and then let it out slowly, repeating the process one more time.

  Somewhat more in control, she turned to Trevor. When she thought about it, she could see why the mistake had been made. “They’re the same age, the same coloring—”

  Was she making a case for the kidnapper’s mistake, or was she trying to convince him that the mistake wouldn’t come to light and then his daughter would stay safe indefinitely?

  “But not the same kid,” he all but ground out, pointing out the obvious.

  Not the same kid.

  And that was her fault. While she was grateful that Cheyenne was safely lying in the crib she had put into her own bedroom, Gabby felt beyond guilty that Trevor’s daughter had been mistakenly kidnapped in Cheyenne’s place.

  “What are we going to do?” she asked him breathlessly.

  We.

  As if they were in this thing together, Trevor thought with contempt. But they weren’t in this together. That was his daughter who had been kidnapped and the woman who had raised him who had been killed. It was in no way the same thing.

  Yes, Faye had taken care of Gabby and her sisters, but she’d been paid to do that. No one had paid her to take care of him. She’d done that out of the goodness of her heart, without expecting any sort of compensation from anyone—and getting none.

  He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d thanked Faye for anything—her, the woman to whom he’d owed so much.

  Anger—at the world and at himself—all but choked off his windpipe.

  It took Trevor a few moments to get himself under control again. When he did, he pulled his cell phone out of his rear pocket.

  “We’re going to call the police chief,” he told her, deliberately emphasizing the word we in a mocking tone—bravado and anger were all he had left right now, “and tell him what happened. He can take it from there once he gets here.”

  Gabby didn’t know which way to turn, what to do with herself.

  She didn’t want to just do nothing, didn’t want to just stand back and let someone else take over. This was her fault. She was the one who had left Avery in this room. It was all on her. There had to be something—some small contribution to the whole—that she could be doing right now.

  To do absolutely nothing felt as if she were just compounding her sin, making her feel more guilty for what had happened.

  She couldn’t handle it.

  Gabby looked at him, her expression bordering on frantic. “Isn’t there anything we—?”

  “No!” he snapped before she could finish. “There isn’t anything we can do right now except what I’m doing.” He punched the chief’s number on his keyboard.

  Nodding, numbed and at a loss, Gabby fell silent and backed off.

  Chapter 4

  Police chief Hank Drucker made the fifteen-mile trip from the town of Dead—located approximately forty miles northwest of Cheyenne—to the ranch in record time.

  He had moved quickly because the call had come from the Colton ranch—no one ever ignored the Coltons—and because there’d been a kidnapping. An infant was currently missing.

  Drucker liked kids, even though he and his wife, Harriet, had never had any of their own. Whatever other failings and flaws he might have had, Drucker believed that children—especially babies—should be protected at all cost.

  The chief, a big man whose out-of-shape body was a clear testimonial that his prime had long since past, looked as if he were born on the job. After thirty-two years on the Dead Police Department—working his way from the ground up, he might as well have been. Being a policeman was all he’d ever known, all he’d ever been. The life suited him.

  This was going to be messy, he thought as he came in. He knew he was going to have to tread very cautiously—for reasons that wouldn’t be apparent to anyone else but him and one other person.

  Walking into the nursery, Drucker didn’t stop to confer with either Trevor or Gabby. Instead, he went directly to Faye’s body. The chief crouched down as best he could, given that his knees were acting up and his expanding girth showed them no mercy.

  “Damn shame,” he muttered under his breath, shaking his head. He’d known the fifty-year-old governess for over two decades.

  With a barely suppressed groan, he got back up to his feet. “Looks like she must’ve surprised whoever it was in the act and tried to stop them from making off with the baby—and got killed for her trouble,” he concluded grimly. “My guess is that we’re dealing with one or more hotheaded kidnappers—always a bad combination.”

  Turning away for a second, the chief barked out a few orders to the two officers he’d brought with him, Karen Locke and Pierce DeLuca, and they began to secure the crime scene—as they had come to understand the term. Neither one looked as if he or she were capable of an independent thought.

  Drucker, meanwhile, decided that now was the time to ask a few preliminary questions. “You hear anything?” he asked Trevor.

  Trevor shook his head, silently cursing himself for allowing this to have happened on his watch. Aside from the victim being his daughter, this was his territory. He was responsible for everything that came or went at Dead River. Responsible for everything on it as well. There were no excuses for dropping the ball the way that he had.

  “I was in my office before I came up here. Before that, I took a turn around the property. And no, I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary,” Trevor answered, anticipating the chief’s next question.

  Drucker laughed shortly, although there was no humor in the sound. “I keep forgetting you were a big-city cop once upon a time.” There was a trace of mocking in the chief’s voice. His tone was definitely not warm and friendly. “Place seems pretty empty,” he noted. “Where is everybody? At the rodeo?” he asked and answered his own question.

  “Yes,” Gabby answered in a shaky voice. “I thought Faye was supposed to be there, too.” At least, that was what the woman had told her. Her son, Dylan, was working with some of the animals at the rodeo, and predominantly, she had gone to see him in action. It was no secret that Faye was very proud of her son.

  Gabby was still struggling to come to grips with what had happened. Finding Faye the way she had and the staggering weight of her guilt at accidentally having placed Avery in harm’s way were almost too much for her to bear.

  In the fifteen minutes that they had waited for Drucker to arrive, she had dashed to her room to reassure herself that Cheyenne was still there and still all right. Unwilling to leave the infant alone for a moment after all this had happened, she’d picked up her niece and brought her back to the scene of Avery’s abduction. She took painstaking care to keep Cheyenne from even so much as glancing in the direction of the gruesomely murdered governess.

  “Heard the rodeo was pretty good this year. Why didn’t you go, Ms. Colton?” Drucker asked mildly, as if he were just shooting the breeze with her.

  Gabby knew the chief well enough to know that he was not as entirely laid-back as he attempted to appear. He was taking in and measuring her every word. It made her feel like a suspect.

  The absurdity of that was beyond any words she had at her disposal.

  “I don’t much like rodeos,” she told the chief as calmly as possible.

  Drucker met her comment with a careless shrug, then glanced over toward Trevor. “Guess they’re not for everyone. How about you, Garth?” he asked abruptly, craning his neck to look at the ranch’s head of security. “Why didn’t you go to the rode
o? Or don’t you like them, either?”

  They were making small talk—he didn’t care how much Drucker thought he could use this useless line of questioning to lead them to the truth; it wasn’t anywhere near fast enough.

  “Don’t think much about them one way or another,” he said, answering the chief’s previous question. “I was here—at the ranch—because I had a brand-new kid on my hands and I had to take care of her.”

  Drucker listened quietly, and when Trevor paused, the chief asked rhetorically, “And she was the one who was kidnapped, right?”

  “Right,” Trevor ground out between clenched teeth. It was hard suppressing the desire to say a few choice words to the smaller man. He didn’t need the chief rubbing his nose in the fact that his daughter had been abducted under his watch.

  “Doesn’t seem like you had much luck taking care of her, does it?” The rhetorical question had the corners of Drucker’s mouth curving. “Anybody have it in for you, Garth? Some employee you fired or an unhappy maid you might have paid a little too much or too little attention to?” Drucker pressed.

  Gabby spoke up, interrupting the chief’s questions. “The kidnappers didn’t know they were taking his daughter.”

  Interest heightened in the chief’s dark-circled eyes. “Oh? And why’s that?”

  This was the hard part. It took everything she had not to just break down, or melt down, or whatever the current correct term for this sick feeling she presently had going on in the pit of her stomach.

  “Because I put Avery down for a nap in Cheyenne’s crib.”

  Drucker turned to look at her, a spark of fresh interest in the man’s tired eyes. “And why would you do something like that?” he asked.

  Another wave of frustration and helplessness washed over Gabby. If only she hadn’t done this, if only she’d put the baby in the crib Faye had found for her, Avery would still be safe, and Faye wouldn’t have had to sacrifice her life trying to save the infant.