BIG HORN: A Jenn Herrington Wyoming Mystery (The Jenn Herrington Wyoming Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  BIG HORN

  A JENN HERRINGTON WYOMING MYSTERY

  PAMELA FAGAN HUTCHINS

  SKIPJACK PUBLISHING

  CONTENTS

  Free PFH eBooks

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Pre-order Bonus! Buckle Bunny (Maggie Killian Prequel #1)

  Part I

  Part II

  Part III

  Part IV

  Patrick Flint: SWITCHBACK

  Maggie Killian: LIVE WIRE

  Acknowledgments

  Books by the Author

  About the Author

  Books from SkipJack Publishing

  Foreword

  FREE PFH EBOOKS

  Before you begin reading, you can snag a free Pamela Fagan Hutchins ebook starter library by joining her mailing list at https://www.subscribepage.com/PFHSuperstars.

  PROLOGUE

  Big Horn, Wyoming

  The clouds drifted in front of the sliver of a moon, blocking Jennifer Herrington’s view of the snowscape behind the house. Deck boards creaked, and the cold against her bare feet shocked her fully awake. What am I doing outside in the middle of the night, barefoot and without a robe, much less a coat? She wasn’t sleepwalking, per se. Something had woken her from a deep, warm slumber, and she’d responded on autopilot, like a reluctant protagonist from a Mary Higgins Clark novel.

  She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. In the distance, muffled by the wind, she heard sounds that didn’t belong. Maybe that was what had lured her from bed. Is it a voice? The only people onsite at The Big Horn Lodge were Jennifer, her husband Aaron, and the proprietor and her client, George Nichols . . . and she’d left Aaron snoring in bed. Unless George was yelling at himself—not an impossibility, if he were drinking again—then either her ears were playing tricks on her, or the sound was coming from somewhere else.

  Only there was no one else around.

  Their location was remote and isolated, at the base of the Bighorn Mountains. Still, sound did carry like crazy out there. Sometimes, when the wind was just right, Jennifer could hear distinct conversations at the nearest neighbor’s place, over a mile away. Or she assumed it was them and not the ghosts of Native Americans roaming the foothills, as the locals claimed.

  The wind swept the voices to her again. Male, maybe more than one. Agitated. Angry.

  “. . . your fault . . .”

  “. . . can’t . . . sorry . . .”

  Light shining from a window of George’s cottage caught her eye. She grabbed the porch railing and peered more closely at the little house, wondering if that’s where the sound was coming from. She heard it again. Definitely coming from another direction. But she paused. Something seemed off about the cottage, and she squinted. What is it? Then it clicked for her. His front door was ajar, a thin line of light crossing the porch. In the middle of the night when it’s thirty-degrees outside? If he were passed out near the door, he might die of exposure before morning. She couldn’t let that happen.

  For a split second, she thought about waking Aaron. But as she turned back toward the lodge, she saw a pair of men’s muck boots by the doormat. It would only take her a minute to check on George. She’d left her phone in the bedroom, but, if she needed Aaron’s help, she could call him from George’s phone. She slipped her feet into the too-big boots and clomped off the deck. Goose flesh pimpled her arms and legs. Her Texas fall sleepwear of silky pants and a baby doll tee wasn’t cutting it in Wyoming, certainly not outdoors in this onslaught of early cold and snow. In her sleepy state—made worse by nightmares and insomnia that had plagued her since their arrival—the dry air had tricked her into thinking she didn’t need a coat, but she wished she had one now. She broke into a trot, and her heels rode up in the boots. She caught a toe on a hidden rock and tripped, crashing onto her hands and knees.

  “Ow!” The snow had an icy bite to it. She scrambled to her feet, brushed off her hands, and ran faster, lifting her knees as high as she could while still moving forward. Her quads and butt felt the weight of the boots almost immediately.

  At George’s front door, she poked her head inside. The light she’d seen was from the kitchen. “George?” she called. She knocked for good measure. Her eyes swept the floor. She was relieved not to see him crumpled around a bottle. “George?”

  Best to do a quick bed check.

  She walked in. A musty smell hit her. She’d only been in the ramshackle building once before. The sparse furniture was thrift-store and threadbare. The place was sorely in need of Lysol, multi-purpose cleaner, and elbow grease, not to mention an overall facelift. She made her way to the only bedroom and stopped at the open door. The drapes were drawn, and it was dark inside.

  “George?”

  The silence mocked her.

  “George?”

  This time, there was a noise, but not from his room. It was from somewhere outside again. The same man sounds, elevated. Her pulse quickened. Dread rooted her in place, but she forced herself to break its grip and enter the room.

  The bed was empty.

  Her eyes adjusted, and she hurried through. No George, anywhere.

  Moonlight returned and shone through the window. For a moment, Jennifer imagined she saw something outside. She clutched the collar of her pajama tee. Should she call Aaron? But she didn’t see a phone on the TV tray that was serving as a bedside table. She ran into the kitchen. No phone on the wall, the counter, or the table. In the living room—nothing, save an empty bottle of Wyoming Whiskey on the coffee table. She put her hand on the wooden surface and felt a few dribbles of liquid. Darn it. He’d found the liquor she’d hidden from him.

  No phone anywhere.

  The voices grew louder outside. One of them rose to a roar. Or was it really a voice? On the front range, it could be a mountain lion. Or a bear. She went out onto the porch and lifted her hair from her ear. The roar came from the barn, where a faint light glimmered. Only it wasn’t a roar. It wasn’t even a voice. She recognized the noise.

  It was the log splitter.

  Panic gripped her. George’s pride and joy, a conical drill bit powered by a tractor engine, capable of rending thick sections of tree into split logs with the slightest pressure against its tip. Capable of doing the same and worse to a careless or drunk human operator. George is out there after drinking so much whiskey that he left his door open in the middle of the night? She’d told him earlier that day
that the lodge was low on logs, and now she regretted it.

  Jennifer would have preferred to have her big husband with her, but she didn’t have time to go after him. She had to get George away from the splitter, without delay. She took off at a sprint for the barn, slipping and tripping but somehow managing to stay upright. It was only twenty yards away, but at nearly seven thousand feet in altitude, her chest heaved, and frigid air seared her lungs like she was sucking on a blow torch. A few feet from the hanging barn doors, she tried to slow down. She lost traction and caught herself on one side of the doors.

  A person barreled out and past her, knocking her aside. Light from the barn revealed someone of medium-to-tall height, with a ball cap covering the hair and pulled low over the face, and layers of bulky clothing hiding body type. Except for the shoulder, where the clothing was ripped away, exposing skin. Not just skin. Skin and a dark patch. The brief glimpse slammed into her brain like a battering ram. A tattoo of a snake coiled in rocks with D-T-O-M below it.

  She’d seen it before. It was a recurring image in her nightmares. For a fraction of a second, she was frozen in place, speechless. The tattoo was real. Did that mean the man in her nightmares was real, too—a memory instead of a phantom? That it was George, who she’d let into her inner circle? It was too horrible to contemplate. Because that man pulled out an AR-15 and opened fire on a schoolyard. On her and other children. But it was just a bad dream. Easily explainable based on events like Sandy Hook and Columbine and her own recent case in Houston. Wasn’t it?

  She pushed the thoughts away. The ripped clothing. The log splitter. Those weren’t good things. She had to stay in the present.

  “George?” she cried.

  The person didn’t stop. Didn’t answer her. George. It has to be.

  Inside the barn, the roar hadn’t stopped either. Why did George leave the log splitter on? Was the exposed shoulder a sign he’d been injured? He’d moved like he was okay. Okay enough, anyway. She’d just go turn the machine off, then she’d follow him back to his cottage and make sure he was all right.

  She stepped into the barn. A single caged bulb hung from the ceiling, illuminating the interior in meager light that was mostly shadows. Jennifer frowned, inhaling the scents of sawdust and motor oil. It was spooky, but warmer. She rubbed her prickly arms and strode past the big orange tractor that George used outside to get to the red tractor carcass that housed the engine powering his contraption. As she drew closer, hair rose on her neck like hackles. Something felt wrong. Instead of turning off the key, she kept going, intuition drawing her toward the splitter on the back of the tractor.

  When she reached the rear corner, she looked around it toward the evil-looking cone. What she saw, she wouldn’t be able to wash from her memory with a gallon of bleach and a stiff bristle brush.

  Bloody boots. Red-splashed legs. A torso drenched in blood. A note on its chest. I AM A MURDERER. A photo by a hand of two men and a woman picnicking beside snowmobiles.

  And an arm, ripped and thrown two feet away from the rest of the body.

  She had to do something. Behind her, she heard a grating noise as the barn doors slid further open, then the distinctive action of a shell chambering into a shotgun.

  ONE

  Houston, Texas

  (Eleven days earlier…)

  Aaron Herrington re-arranged a vase of gerbera daisies for the third time. He smoothed the front of his fresh shirt, untucked from his Paige jeans, which he wore for the extra thigh room. He cocked his head and frowned, then repositioned one of the nodding blooms. Finally satisfied, he stood back from the dining room table and surveyed his preparations. A bottle of his wife’s favorite pinot noir uncorked and poured, breathing in two glasses on the granite bar top. A low carb, gluten free veggie lasagna bubbling in the oven, emitting a tomato-and-herb aroma. The Houston skyline twinkling outside the high-rise condo with Sheryl Crow singing in surround. The framed picture of him in a football uniform with his wife in her cheerleading outfit on the sidelines of their last University of Tennessee home game, dusted and moved onto the table beside the daisies. He’d even picked his dirty clothes and wet towel up off the floor and thrown them in the hamper.

  He was ready for Jennifer.

  He took a sip of the wine, letting it linger on his tongue while the flavors revealed themselves. Cherry, followed by something leathery. He preferred a good craft beer, but the wine was nice after a grueling day. He’d packed in ten hours at River Oaks Pet Care, the veterinary clinic he co-owned with two partners. It had started with a before-hours emergency call from a crazy woman insisting her poodle was dangerously depressed. He’d dispensed a low dose antidepressant. It would help the dog more if the owner took it, honestly. He’d be plenty anxious and depressed, too, if he were in that dog’s shoes. Or paws.

  How did I end up in this life?

  After his NFL career had ended before it had barely begun thanks to head injuries, he’d planned to be a country vet, à la James Herriot. It was the next best thing to inheriting the family farm he grew up on, which would never happen since he was the youngest of five brothers. Instead, here he was, living the high life, literally—prescribing poochie Prozac. He shook his head. Well, it pays the bills. There were times he wondered whether the injuries and his unfulfilled dreams were punishment for the mistakes he’d made in his late teens. That’s not something I want to think about now or ever. Yet somehow, the secrets of his past stuck with him, like the hot black tar on his bare young feet the time he’d run across a country road one sweltering August afternoon.

  Not now. Not when Jennifer was due home any minute.

  He forced his mind back to more pleasant thoughts. He’d finished up his workday coaching middle school club football. He loved coaching and ninety percent of the people involved, young and old, but he didn’t love the parents who hovered, obsessed, demanded, and excuse-made, or the behavior of their offspring. I’d be anxious and depressed if I were in the shoes of some of those kids, too. He’d always imagined he and Jennifer would be parents by now, but not those kinds of parents. They’d be the kind that threw the ball around with their kids in the yard and cheered them on but kept it light—because youth sports was just fun and games. But Jennifer had begged off parenthood, so far, because of the demands of her job. Or so she said. They weren’t getting any younger. If they didn’t take the plunge soon, their kids could call him Grandpa instead of Dad.

  But tonight, he was putting all that aside, because he’d gotten a text from Jennifer in the early afternoon. The message read: Guilty!!!

  The trial that had delayed their Wyoming trip two days was finally over. It was a huge victory for Jennifer in a career that was already becoming legendary in the Harris County District Attorney’s office. One less murderer out there victimizing children—in this case, school kids from the Third Ward, a neighborhood in strong contention for poorest and roughest in Houston. Only one of them had died, but that was one too many. The case had been challenging for his wife. The defendant was an identical twin, which meant standard DNA tests yielded identical results for him and his twin brother. In the end, she’d produced a witness who placed the other brother elsewhere at the time of the murder. That had been enough, luckily.

  He was happy for her. Even more, he hoped the end of this trial and beginning of the trip would be like the push of a reset button for them.

  A key rattled in the lock. He pulled a lighter from a drawer in the kitchen and lit a candle, then grabbed Jennifer’s glass of wine. The door opened, and the grown-up version of his blonde-haired, blue-eyed dream girl walked through it. All five feet two inches of her, plus three-or-so more of fancy heels. She carried a briefcase on one arm, and a Neiman Marcus bag dangled from the other. As always, the sight of her put a little squeeze on his heart, to remind him what it was there for.

  He smiled at her, holding out the wine glass. “Congratulations.”

  Jennifer kicked off her shoes. They fell over on the wide plank hardwood floors.
Is it my imagination or is she weaving? “Thanks. One for the good guys today.” She didn’t seem to notice the flowers on the table, but she took the wine.

  “You’re home late.”

  “Sorry. I went golfing and shopping with Alayah.” She waggled the bag, then dropped it to the floor.

  He should have expected that, he supposed. Jennifer and her best friend celebrated their wins and commiserated their losses with golf outings followed by retail splurges. His wife was a shockingly good golfer, with a handicap of five. The tiny woman could drive a ball farther than he could, and she wasn’t even the best golfer in her family. That honor belonged to her twin brother Justin, who was a pro at a golf course in Tennessee. Jennifer had turned down golf scholarships at smaller schools to attend the University of Tennessee, where she’d walked on and made the team, but quit after she decided to cheer. Alayah? Well, she mostly caddied and refilled the drinks.

  He said, “I made a special dinner for you. Veggie lasagna.”

  “Oh, you’re so sweet. But I grabbed something to eat when we had drinks.”