Anne Marie Duquette Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Dear Reader

  Title Page

  Excerpt

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Copyright

  Dear Reader,

  As a native of the American Southwest’s “Four Corners” area (Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah) I love writing about my home turf.

  Tombstone, the location of this story, is a very real community, a delightful scenic town in southern Arizona. However, the characters and events that appear in She Caught the Sheriff are purely fictitious—although the references to Tombstone’s history are accurate. And while it’s true that this is an active tourist town, I have taken certain liberties. For the purposes of my story, the days and times certain tourist attractions are open to the public have been changed. I have also created public transportation that is much more extensive than actually exists. In reality, the residents of Tombstone are careful to preserve their town’s historic flavor, thereby saving an important part of this country’s past for us to appreciate—and enjoy.

  Also, please note that the law enforcement system in Tombstone, Cochise County, Arizona—a system that originated in Wyatt Earp’s day—can be a bit confusing to nonresidents. The sheriff is an elected official voted in for a term of three years. The marshal is an appointed official chosen by the town’s governing body. Deputies are usually appointed and hired by the town’s elected sheriff, and can work full-time or be “deputized” for part-time assistance as needed. These law officials are not members of the Arizona State Police, who concentrate on statewide law enforcement. Of course, local law enforcement organizations can call in assistance from state organizations.

  My characters, however, prefer to rely on themselves. And there’s a good historical precedent for this! Tombstone’s lawmen, the Earps, are still famous for bringing law and order to the Wild West— without help from outsiders. They dealt with their town’s problems their way. Sheriff Wyatt E. Bodine and his lady, Caro Hartlan, follow in this rugged Old West tradition. I hope you enjoy their adventures—and their romance. Welcome to Tombstone!

  Anne Marie Duquette

  She Caught The Sheriff

  Anne Marie Duquette

  A sad farewell to Romance Writers of America

  members Marta Fulgham, Barbara Faith and

  Emma Merritt.

  Wherever you are now, ladies,

  May the wind be always at your back,

  The sun and stars before your eyes.

  Rest in peace, good friends, and

  Think of us as we will think of you.

  Bon voyage from us all….

  We at the San Diego chapter

  Will miss you.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Wednesday morning

  TOMBSTONE’S JUNE WIND blew blistering hot and desert-dry over Boothill Cemetery, but the wind was the last thing on Caro Hartlan’s mind—or, she figured, on the minds of the tourists around her. Despite damp shirts and shiny foreheads, they all stared at the skeleton displayed at her feet.

  Everyone was, to say the least, surprised. Including Caro. She’d just finished teaching a forensics workshop at Tucson’s university and had decided to visit Tombstone in her spare time. She certainly hadn’t counted on tripping over a specimen!

  Nor had anyone else, she reminded herself. And most people weren’t as accustomed to sights like this. The adults gaped at one another, gawked at the skeleton, then at Caro. The children flitted daringly back and forth between the bones and their parents’ protective arms. They gawked at her, too.

  “Don’t look at me,” Caro said with a slight shrug. “Just because I found it doesn’t mean I know why it’s here.”

  “Is it real?” one red-faced, sunburned tourist asked, even as he busily clicked photos of the grim sight.

  “Can’t be. It’s just a recreation,” another tourist answered. “You know, like the mock shootout they do at the O.K. Corral every day.”

  The nervous crowd pressed closer to Caro to hear her response.

  “Well…” Caro knelt down next to the remains. Her knees made little puffs of dust in the sun-bleached cemetery soil. “I’d say it’s authentic. And definitely human.”

  Murmurs of disbelief, shock and excitement rippled through the crowd. The sunburned man with the camera wasn’t quite so willing to accept her judgment. “And just how would you know?” he asked belligerently.

  Caro stood up, brushed at her jeans, then brushed back the shoulder-length brunette hair from her face.

  “It’s my job to know. Forensics pays my rent. And I’d bet my last paycheck this skeleton is no joke.”

  The crowd gasped, and a few of the children squealed. So did a couple of adults.

  “I don’t get it,” Mr. Sunburn said with an indignant snort, rudely elbowing a pleasant-faced woman—no doubt his wife—out of his way for a better shot.

  “Neither do I,” Caro replied easily. “As I understand it, the dearly departed are supposed to be under the ground.”

  A few of the crowd frowned at her answer. Caro’s parents and younger policewoman sister, Desiree, back in Phoenix knew her glib tongue and black humor were coping mechanisms to help her deal with the terrible things she saw in her line of work. In truth, she was a compassionate woman with a big heart that bled for both the victims and their families when she worked a case. But of course these strangers couldn’t know that.

  She hunkered back down beside the skeleton. The ligaments and joints had long since disappeared, yet someone had carefully arranged the bones into their correct positions. Someone highly skilled in anatomy. There wasn’t a bone missing or out of place, not even in the twenty-seven bones composing the hands.

  That attention to detail bothered her. Someone had taken great care to place this poor soul smack-dab in the middle of a popular tourist attraction. But why?

  “Maybe one of you could walk back to the gift shop and get the manager to call for help?” Caro suggested.

  Mrs. Sunburn left to do just that.

  Caro continued to study the old bones with her trained eye. This was the desert, yet the bones weren’t as well preserved as she would have expected. There were unmistakable signs of damp rot on them, so they certainly weren’t from this cemetery. Caro was a Phoenix native, and she knew Arizona topography. Boothill sat atop a mile-high ledge of bedrock right in the middle of the Arizona desert. The cemetery sprawled among the cacti and aloe vera plants and rambled all the way down a steep, rocky hill—the final resting place of those buried with their boots on.

  Clearly, this skeleton—male, judging by the narrowness of the hips—came from someplace else. She’d already established that the soil on these bones didn’t match the soil in the cemetery. Not only that, the bones didn’t bear the visible clothing traces generally seen with a corpse that had been in a casket. Clothing was often as durable as bone in the desert; however, this skeleton was as unencumbered as a plastic Halloween version, save for the damp rot.

  And the trauma to the head… Caro got all the way down on her hands and knees and dipped low, her face only inches from the skull. She studied it carefully, examining the jagged fractures—almost certainly the evidence o
f assault. She closed her eyes for a brief moment Caro Lynn Hartlan, Ph.D., might be thirty-five years old and an expert in forensics, but what she was about to announce never got easier.

  “Stand back, people. I think we’ve got us a murder victim here.”

  That was the wrong thing to say. One thin young man turned white and fainted, an even younger teen screamed like a banshee—and all hell broke loose.

  Caro grabbed for the thin man before he hit the dirt. The screaming teen’s mother whacked Caro over the head with a tourist brochure for frightening her son, and Mr. Sunburn gleefully started snapping more pictures. All this amidst more screams, exclamations and hysteria.

  “Watch out!” Caro yelled as the fainting man narrowly missed falling face-first into the skeleton. Caro grunted and shoved just enough to save man, skeleton and herself from a three-way pileup.

  “Couldn’t you faint the other way?” She lowered the unconscious man to the ground and sank into a sitting position to rest his head on her lap. “You almost disturbed the crime scene.”

  “Is that all you’re worried about?” the fainting man’s girlfriend cried. “The crime scene?”

  “Of course not!” Caro replied. “I caught him, didn’t I?”

  “Did somebody call the cops?” another person interrupted.

  “Forget the cops. Just whistle for the sheriff!” came the anonymous suggestion. “There he is!”

  “Who…?” Caro asked, confused. She didn’t get to finish her sentence as one small visitor put fingers to his mouth and blew an ear-piercing whistle just inches from her head.

  Caro winced, transferred her patient’s head to his girlfriend’s lap and stood.

  “Here comes the sheriff!” someone yelled in her other ear. She winced a second time, both ears ringing. She decided to remove her backpack and retrieve the credentials that established her as a Phoenix-based, freelance bonded consultant and speaker on the subject of forensic science.

  Caro wasn’t sure how much a small-town sheriff was likely to know about her specialty. A forensic scientist could be a medical examiner, the specialist who did an autopsy on the body at the morgue. Or, like Caro, a forensic doctor could be a criminologist, someone with more field training in criminology and law than hospital experience.

  Whenever she was called in on a case, it was her job to examine the body at the crime scene, to provide information to the homicide detectives that would lead to an arrest and conviction.

  Forensic scientists dealt with the relation and application of medical facts to legal problems, nothing more, nothing less. Their expertise could set a suspect free—or send him to death row… Caro was always conscious of the responsibility she carried, although in this case the murderer was probably as dead as his victim. But whoever had moved the bones was guilty of a crime, too.

  An elderly gentleman wearing a gift-store smock caught Caro’s attention as he joined the group by the skeleton and pointed. “There’s the sheriff now!”

  Caro followed the finger’s direction. She gazed past the massive, head-high clumps of prickly pear and uneven wooden fence, which provided a protective barrier off to the side. Directly beyond that, the hilltop dropped a steep mile to the valley floor below. The desert mountains in the distance beneath a brilliant turquoise sky outlined a man….

  A man coming straight up the incline of Boothill’s dirt path on a horse!

  Caro forgot all about removing her backpack, forgot all about her earlier plans. She’d traveled south to Tucson on business, but she’d made a side trip to Tombstone to follow up on her personal hobby—researching early forensic work in the Old West. Instead, she’d walked right into an old skeleton, had a man faint in her arms, been hit on the head by an irate mother and nearly deafened by a whistling spectator. Now she was watching some sheriff barre up the hill on horseback. Up Tombstone’s Boothill Cemetery, no less!

  So much for her busman’s holiday. Still, it was necessary to have a sense of humor in her kind of work, and an easy flexibility, and neither failed her now. Caro’s lips curved in an ironic smile, then parted in awe at the sight of the approaching stallion.

  Arabians were very common in Arizona; they were a breed that did well in the Southwest’s desert heat. But this Arabian was a beauty, clearly an animal of show quality. He had a gleaming silver-white coat, a symmetrical body, a finely shaped head. Everything about him revealed generations of careful breeding.

  Caro couldn’t help smiling as horse and rider reached the top of the hill. The horse was magnificent. And the man— ah, the man. He was tall, perfectly balanced and leanly built. His expression seemed intelligent yet fully masculine—attractively masculine. Caro noticed curling, light brown hair beneath his Stetson. Jeans and boots like hers. Instead of a plaid western shirt like the one she wore, he had on a beige sheriff’s shirt with insignia and badge, plus the shoulder harness and gun that went with it.

  On the shirt’s right front pocket was a bright yellow embroidered star, a replica of the Old West sheriff’s star with circled points at the end and the whole thing set in a circle. A patch showing the Arizona flag adorned one shoulder.

  On his hip was a pearl-handled Colt .45. Caro knew this was an official law-enforcement firearm, but it didn’t look the part. This gun was a reminder of the wild Old West and the hard men who’d survived it.

  The gun was just like the man, she decided. The stallion he rode, the pearl-handled revolver, the bullets slung around his waist—all were throwbacks to an earlier time.

  The crowd parted as the Arabian drew closer. His rider slowed him to a prancing walk. Four silver legs were carefully guided around graves and cactus clusters with dressage accuracy, dressage grace. But it was the man who dominated the scene, just as he dominated the horse.

  Caro watched rider and mount pull to a halt. She hadn’t backed away as the others had. She stood her ground next to the skeleton, determined to preserve the crime scene. Even if it hadn’t been part of a crime scene, she would have done the same. The man kindled her interest. And she wanted to meet him as an equal. She saw him take in the skeleton, the gawking crowds, the fainting man and his girlfriend, all in one quick glance—while she took in his ringless left hand.

  I wonder if he’s single. Then, Not very professional, Caro. But considering the striking sight he made, certainly understandable. And yet Caro hardly ever found herself responding to a man in such an…immediate way. Such an unabashedly sexual way. Like she was doing right now as she watched the sheriff dismount in a lithe, smooth motion.

  Caro’s admiration changed from approval of his physical attractiveness to something more as the sheriff immediately removed his canteen from his saddle horn and passed it to the fainting man’s girlfriend, then asked, “Does he need an ambulance?”

  Not bad, she thought approvingly. His first words were concern for the living, not fascination with the dead. Or a male response to her outright female ogling.

  The girl murmured something to her boyfriend, who shook his head. He was already recovering. With the sheriff’s help, the two were back on their feet in moments. It wasn’t until the sheriff had checked over the boyfriend himself that he directed his attention to Caro.

  “And you are?” The lawman’s voice was deep and rich, yet quiet. But not so quiet that it didn’t impress her with its strength.

  “An out-of-town visitor who discovered this gentleman.” Caro gestured toward the skeleton behind her, hergaze still on his. “Tell me,” she asked, “are stray bodies in cemeteries a common occurrence in Tombstone?”

  “No, ma’am, they are not.”

  Caro noticed his eyes spark with anger. This was a man who took pride in both his town and his job. He didn’t like the skeleton, this situation or, she realized, her flippant question. She immediately regretted it, but he spoke before she had a chance to apologize.

  “Which is why I’m here.” He held the Arabian’s reins in his left hand, and touched his right thumb and forefinger to his hat brim, the characteristi
c mark of respect from a man to a woman in the Southwest. The gesture was polite, but his eyes didn’t warm.

  Too bad her little attempt to lighten the mood had failed. She knew from experience that anyone who worked for the law needed a sense of humor, black or otherwise. Forensic scientists or sheriffs who didn’t laugh now and then ended up sobbing, quitting or drowning job horrors in a bottle to save their sanity. But then, she doubted Tombstone had even a fraction of the crime Phoenix had. Her home had half a million people; Tombstone barely twelve hundred. Maybe the handsome sheriff didn’t need to take refuge in laughter.

  Introductions were made.

  “Sheriff Wyatt Earp Bodine, at your service.”

  Mrs. Sunburn had returned with the manager, and her husband tittered and elbowed her when the sheriff announced his name. Bodine dropped his hand from his hat and ignored them. Caro knew her Arizona history, knew the Earps had played a big part in Tombstone’s Old West days. She’d just never met anyone actually named after them before.

  However, the way he’d introduced himself made her positive that the name—like the skeleton—was no gimmick for tourists. He was too serious to be joking.

  “Caro Hartlan. I’m—”

  “A Phoenix professor and police consultant specializing in the high-tech end of forensics, especially facial recreations using computers and clay.”

  “So you’ve heard of me.” Caro felt a flash of pleasure. She’d worked hard to establish herself, both as a consultant in the field and on the lecture tour. Her clay recreations of skulls had identified a number of John and Jane Does, and put more than one criminal behind bars. Her Tucson university workshop had been sold out months in advance.

  “I read about your seminar in the newspaper,” Bodine said. He kept his eyes on her. “Don’t tell me you’re so bored you’ve decided to dig up business here,” he said with the barest smile.