“Thanks, Penny,” Aria called out as Penny gathered her handbag and jacket from the hook beside the door. She sat up a little straighter, pushing her hair out of her eyes.
“Any time.” Penny turned and caught Jude’s eye. “Let me know if you need a hand tomorrow. Clayton and I both have the day off.”
Jude nodded. Most of the Stargazer staff only had one day a week off, and as the weekends were often busier than during the middle of the week, they were lucky to get a Saturday off. Naomi would make sure to schedule time off together for the two lovebirds, and Jude was touched that she would offer her alone time with Clayton to help Aria out. But then, he wouldn’t expect anything less. It was part of the community spirit that was Stargazer; everyone looked out for everyone else.
There was no way he was leaving Aria alone tonight; he’d already planned to sleep on the couch. There were too many unknowns still out there. Too many unanswered questions. The topmost in Jude’s mind being who had taken Iliana and why.
Brady didn’t agree that Aria might be a target, and he wasn’t so sure there was a link between the father and sister’s murder, either, unless that link was Aria, which was preposterous. Jude could hardly believe that Brady was still looking at Aria as a main suspect. The guy had a screw loose if he thought she could single-handedly have had anything to do with murdering two people, then dragging them up the mountain and burying them.
The door closed softly behind Penny, and the atmosphere in the room seemed to change.
Jude removed his jacket and gun belt and laid them carefully over the back of the armchair. This was the moment he’d been both dreading and waiting for. To be back by Aria’s side. She sat up and scooted to the end of the couch, tucking her hair behind her ear, watching him intensely.
“Sit,” she commanded when he hovered, undecided on the other side of the coffee table. He drew a deep breath, steeling himself for what was to come. He sat down, close, but not touching her.
“Tell me,” she demanded, her lips in a thin, firm line. “I need to know. Tell me right from the start.”
“Okay.” But before he began, he reached over and took one of Aria’s hands in his, needing the physical contact. Her fingers closed tightly around his, but she never let her gaze drop from his face. “I think I already told you, Dean reported two cattle missing a few days ago,” he began.
Aria gave a shrug that indicated she did, in fact, know that part.
“A few days ago, I asked Levi to go take a look up in the hinterland, to see if he could find traces of the missing cows,” Jude relayed quickly. She had asked him to start at the beginning, but this was for his benefit as much as for hers, to get things straight in his head.
“Mmm hmm,” she prompted.
“He reported back that he’d found signs of perhaps two or three people camping up there, but they were doing their utmost to keep their whereabouts hidden, which raised a few red flags for me.”
Aria tilted her head on the side, looking confused, but didn’t say anything. Jude couldn’t explain to her what’d led him to decide there might be a connection between the people hiding out in the hills and the goings on in town.
“I wanted to go back and re-examine the sites, see if we could discover anything more about their movements. Perhaps even see if they were still up there. So, this morning Levi and I borrowed a couple of ATVs from Dean and went back up the hill.”
“Mmm hmm,” Aria said again, leaning slightly forward so that her long hair dropped over her shoulder.
“Levi showed me the two campsites he’d found the other day. Both of them were old, perhaps weeks old. I half thought the campers might come back and reuse the same site, but that didn’t turn out to be the case. On a hunch, we followed a hiking trail higher up the mountain, and found where it connected with a fire trail. You know, the County Fire Services uses it to monitor the area, conduct burn offs, that kind of thing?”
Aria nodded.
“Levi had driven that trail a few times, but it’s very rough, you need a good truck to navigate it, and there’s a padlocked gate at the entry point. Anyway, we saw fresh tire tracks. Levi said those tracks hadn’t been there a few days ago. So we followed them. And to cut a long story short, we found a third campsite. This was the same as the first two, heavily concealed, and all traces of anyone being there had been carefully erased. But the act of erasing, in itself, leaves other signs that a good ranger, who’s been brought up hunting and living off the land on a Native American reservation, can perceive.”
“So, Levi found it, even though they tried to hide it?” Aria asked softly.
“Yes. He’s damn good at what he does, it was one of the reasons I sent him up there in the first place.”
“And you found the…” Aria swallowed tightly. “The grave?”
“Yes. It was around fifty feet outside the camp. We figured they must’ve brought Iliana and Craig up in a car. Up until that point, they were probably walking in and out. It’s about an hour and a half trek back to the main road.”
“How long had they been dead? Do you know how they died?” Her words were so soft he barely heard them.
“I don’t know.” He squeezed Aria’s hand. “I’m sorry, I’m not qualified to guess. And I really shouldn’t even be telling you this much.”
“How did you know? I mean, what made you suspect the missing cows were somehow connected to my father’s murder?”
“Call it intuition, that gut feeling you get sometimes when a clue doesn’t always seem to fit.”
“Did Brady send you up there?”
“God, no,” Jude scoffed.
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