J.D. turned the water off and straightened slowly, taking in all of those things, feeling a sharp pang of longing in his chest, as if they were already lost.

“We need to talk,” he said quietly.

Will regarded him from behind the one-way glass of his aviator lenses. There was no infamous grin, no joke, no dimples cutting into his cheeks. “Translate that for me, J.D. You want to talk with me or at me?”

“We need to talk about Samantha.”

He shook his head, turned, and looked out at the meadow where the dogs were chasing each other. “I don’t want to have this conversation.”

“Neither do I.”

The grin cut across his face then, as sharp as a scimitar. “Then let’s skip it.”

“And pretend nothing’s wrong? You don’t want to deal with it, so we should ignore it?” J.D. shook his head, struggling to hold his temper when what he wanted to do was wrap his hands around his brother’s throat and choke him until his eyes bugged out. “Do you have any idea how serious this could be-her falling in with Bryce’s crowd? Do you even have a clue, Will?”

“Yeah, I’ve got a clue,” Will sneered. “She’s my wife. How do you think I feel?”

“I can’t imagine. You act like you don’t give a damn what she does. You’re off to the Hell and Gone every night, trying to nail anything in a skirt. Am I supposed to think you’re heartbroken?”

“You don’t understand anything,” Will said bitterly, and started across the yard for his truck.

J.D. grabbed his arm and hauled him back around. “Don’t pull that act with me,” he growled, jabbing an accusatory finger in Will’s face. “You’re not the innocent victim here; you’re guilty as hell! You married that girl, then you dumped her. Now she’s in a position to cut all our throats, and all you do about it is get drunk and go dancing!”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Get her back. Face up to your responsibilities. Act like a man for once.”

“Why should I?” Will taunted, his own temper simmering in an oily mix of pain and inadequacy. “Why should I, when you’re man enough for the whole fucking state of Montana? I could never measure up in your eyes no matter what I did, so why should I bother?”

“Jesus. Is that all this is about for you? Who’s got the biggest dick? Some shithead case of sibling rivalry? I’m talking about our lives here, Will!”

“That is our life,” he spat back. “Haven’t you been paying attention for the last twenty-eight years?”

J.D. stepped back with his hands raised as if to ward off the entire conversation. “This is unbelievable,” he muttered more to himself than to Will. “We could lose the ranch and all you want to do is sulk over a whiskey because you were born second! Christ almighty, don’t you have any pride at all? Don’t you have an ounce of self-respect?”

Will stared at him long and hard from behind his disguise, sure that J.D. could see right through it, as he always did, always had. He stood there, feeling stripped bare. The eternal screwup, fooling everyone with a wink and a grin. Except J.D. Never once had he fooled J.D. Now the act was wearing thin all the way around. The curtain wasn’t just coming down, it was coming unraveled, and he was scared as hell that when it was over, there would be nothing left to hide behind and nothing left to hide.

“No,” he said quietly, stunned by the truth of it. “I don’t.”

This time when he started for his truck J.D. let him go. He stood there by the side of the barn, completely still, drained of everything but fear. Around him was the only life he had ever wanted. The ranch. The mountains. The horses and cattle. The coolness and the quiet that crept out from under the trees as the sunlight drained away. The squealing call of a bull elk. The eerie whirring sound of a nighthawk diving through the twilight for its prey.

This was all he had ever allowed himself to want, all he had ever loved. It hung now by a thread, swinging in the breeze.

MARI SAT on the glass-topped table, staring down at the valley bathed in the soft velvet tones of twilight. She sat there as the sun went down, staring, thinking, her fingers moving almost absently over the strings of her old guitar.

Quinn didn’t believe her. Did it matter? Lucy was dead. Dead was forever. Nothing could bring her back. If someone had killed her because she had been blackmailing that person, wouldn’t the story end there? No more Lucy, no more blackmail. End of plot. Mari didn’t know anything about Lucy’s schemes. She didn’t want to know.

But what if Kendall Morton had killed Lucy? He was still at large.

And if Del killed Lucy? He had motive, means, opportunity. God knew, he had the temperament for killing. The government had trained him to kill.

Oh, Del.

Oh, J.D…

He loved his uncle. He protected his family. A rough-edged knight on a big sorrel cow horse. The defender of his kingdom. The last man of honor. So tough, so impenetrable. So vulnerable.

Not smart, Marilee. He’s a lot harder than he is soft.

She didn’t know why she was even thinking about him. He didn’t want her around; he wanted her only in bed. She liked to think she was more liberated than to go for a man like that. She liked to think she would have become a nun before she went for a man like that.

What a shock that would have been to her mother, seeing as how the Jennings clan were devout followers of the show-up-Sunday-in-a-killer-outfit-no-one’s-ever-seen Episcopalian church.

She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, started a new song, a new train of thought.

Old train of thought.

Quinn didn’t believe her. The odd pieces of truth and suspicion she had collected over the last week didn’t add up to anything when he looked at them. Mari felt as if she were looking at an abstract painting and only she could see the zebra represented by the incongruous slashes of color. It stood out to her more and more, the lines of it becoming bolder, stronger, while everyone else saw only a jumble of unrelated brush marks. More bits of information floated up from the depths of her memory, adding detail and definition to the zebra.

Contusions, abrasions, broken bones. The notes from the brief coroner’s report flashed through her mind for the hundredth time that day. She had blocked it all out after reading it that first day, but now the details came back to her again and again. Cuts, bruises, a broken nose. Injuries that may have been incurred in the fall from Clyde, but Mari had taken that same fall and come away with nothing more than a few bruises.

She closed her eyes and visualized the grisly scene as it must have happened-the bullet striking Lucy in the back, pitching her forward, the mule bolting out from under her, Lucy falling headlong. Into a deep cushion of meadow grass. Where had the cuts come from? How had she broken her nose? She might have landed on a rock, but that still didn’t explain the cuts or the dirty, broken fingernails.

After a brief nap plagued by disturbing dark images, Mari had spent much of the afternoon tracking down the county coroner to see if he could answer any of her questions. As it turned out, he was a veterinarian who had never wanted to take the job of coroner. No one in the county wanted the job. It was traditionally passed down as a booby prize to the newest person in the county with medical training-which was, he had pointed out defensively, better than in some counties, where the coroner ran a filling station or feed store. The job didn’t require a diploma of any kind. It was an elected position no one ever wanted to run for. His job was to view corpses and fill out forms. He did not perform autopsies. If one seemed necessary, the unfortunate victim was shipped off to the medical examiner in Bozeman. He hadn’t found it necessary in Lucy’s case. A half-wit could have seen what killed her.