Still Waters Read Free Page A

off.
    “Dammit!”
    “Shit!”
    “Yours or mine?” Ann asked, all business in the blink of an eye. Dane disengaged, and she scrambled out from under him and rose up on her knees, scraping her tumbled bangs out of her eyes as she reached toward the stand.
    “Mine,” Dane barked. He swung his long legs over the side of the bed and reached for the phone. “This had better be nothing short of murder.”
    Ann chuckled. “Murder in Tyler County. That'll be the day. People down there die of boredom, not mayhem.”
    Dane growled in reply, a sound that might have been either agreement or rebuttal, but was in any event unpleasant.
    “Lorraine, this is my night off.” He snarled into the mouthpiece through gritted teeth, annoyance ringing in his every word.
    The woman on the other end of the line completely disregarded his tone of voice and the threat implicit in it and rushed eagerly into her news, as breathless as if she'd just run a mile to get to the phone. “Dane, you're not going to believe this. Someone's gone and killed Jarrold Jarvis. They found him out at Still Waters.”
    “Killed?” Dane murmured, his annoyance jelling into a cold lump in his stomach. He straightened his spine and squared his broad shoulders, coming unconsciously to attention. He drove a hand into his hair, slicking it back from his forehead. “You mean he died. He had a heart attack or something.”
    “Oh, no. I wish that was what I meant, but Mark was very clear. He said killed.”
    Killed. Murdered. Christ. There hadn't been a murder in Tyler County in decades. The idea stunned him, numbed him like a blow between the eyes. With an effort he cut a narrow line through the haze in his brain and forced his mind to function in its official capacity.
    “How?”
    The dispatcher hummed a note of anxiety. Dane could picture Lorraine Worth's penciled-in eyebrows drawing together above the rims of her rhinestone-studded glasses. When she finally spit it out, her voice had dropped to the near whisper people of her generation reserved for tragedy and scandal. “His throat was cut. Mark said his throat had been cut . . . from ear to ear.”

THREE
    D ANE TURNED HIS BLACK-AND-WHITE BRONCO IN at the drive to the Still Waters resort and gunned the engine. A crowd had already gathered, and he had to swerve off onto the rutted, hard-packed dirt to find a place to park among the cars and TV station news vans. He swore as he climbed down out of the truck and strode across the uneven ground of the construction site, pain biting into his bum left knee with every step, telling him better than any meteorologist that there was a storm brewing. He ignored the pain and glared at the people who had come to catch a glimpse of death.
    Someone had killed Jarrold Jarvis. No matter how many times he replayed the message in his head, it still didn't seem real to him. He hadn't particularly liked the man—no one had—but he wouldn't have wished him dead, and he couldn't think of anyone who would have—not sincerely enough to carry it through. Jarvis was—had been—a blowhard and a bully, a man who liked to throw his considerable weight around and bask in the limelight like a beached walrus in the sun, but those weren't reasons enough to kill him.
    The fact remained, someone had not only wished him dead, but had taken the necessary steps to make that wish become a reality.
    Already the scene of the crime had taken on a ghoulish, circus atmosphere. Every rube in the county with a police scanner had come to gawk. Three black-and-white Tyler County cruisers were parked at haphazard angles around Jarvis's Lincoln, like covered wagons circled around the pioneers to protect them from Indian attacks, only the worst attack had already taken place. Death had been dealt. Their job now was to protect the body from the vultures. The deputies stood guard around the fringes of the scene, nervously discouraging onlookers from getting too close. Floodlights on the cars combined with