The Marshal's Hostage - By Delores Fossen Page 0,21

forty-eight hours to marry me, that’s all,” Owen insisted. “Then all hell will break loose, and I’ll tell Dallas everything.”

Chapter Seven

“You sure Kirby’s up to this?” Joelle asked again.

“Yeah,” Dallas lied.

Kirby was in no shape to be answering questions about Webb’s murder, the knife or anything else, but Dallas knew that his foster father would do it anyway. Kirby would do anything humanly possible to keep any of them from being arrested for the murder of a man who hadn’t deserved to live.

Joelle blew out a deep breath and continued leaning her head against the passenger’s window of his truck. It’s where she’d been leaning it since they’d started the drive from Maverick Springs to his family’s ranch. She’d moved briefly just to hurry inside her hotel room so she could collect her things and change into a skirt and a top.

Better than that peekaboo bathrobe.

She was clearly exhausted, probably hungover from the drugs and the adrenaline crash, but she was nervous, too. Nibbling on her bottom lip and mumbling something about Owen. There wasn’t time for her to rest or even compose herself. Dallas hated to admit it, but with time eating away, he needed all the help he could get.

Especially Joelle’s.

She’d already spent weeks looking into Webb’s murder, and it would waste time they didn’t have for him to go back and recreate what she’d managed to get done. They needed answers, and they needed them fast.

Dallas’s phone rang just as he took the final turn toward Blue Creek ranch. He saw on the screen that the caller was Clayton, probably with an update on what was happening, so he put the call on speaker since Joelle would no doubt want to hear.

“Please tell me you found the gunmen,” Dallas greeted. Because if they found them and tied them back to Owen, they could discredit Owen and the evidence that he’d turned over to Saul Warner.

“Still looking,” Clayton said. “But I thought you’d want to know that Lindsey Downing is here and claiming she had no part in drugging Joelle.”

“She’s lying,” Joelle immediately said.

“Probably,” Clayton continued, “but she’s saying that she merely poured you a drink from the bottle that was in the reception room at the church.”

“She claims there was a bottle of booze just lying around?” Dallas pressed.

“Yep.”

Hell. Dallas wanted to drive back to headquarters and question the woman himself. He could threaten the truth out of her. But he wouldn’t be able to get in the front door.

Saul’s orders.

Dallas couldn’t blame his boss for excluding not just him but all five of his foster brothers from this particular investigation. Having them involved was the textbook definition of conflict of interest. Still, that wouldn’t stop all of them from finding the truth on their own. Even Saul couldn’t fault them for that.

The family was at stake.

“What about the knife?” Dallas asked Clayton. “What did Saul do with it?”

“He’s arranged to have it couriered over to the lab in a few hours. And before you ask, he won’t delay it until tomorrow. He said everything’s got to be aboveboard on this and that with all the interviews he’s doing, two hours is a reasonable amount of time for him to do the lab paperwork.”

Yeah, it did have to be aboveboard because Owen would jump to report them to the governor, the rangers or the FBI if they did anything out of the ordinary. Of course, if Owen did that, he’d also have to explain why he’d withheld potential evidence even for this period of time.

“I figure we’ve got three days at most before the preliminary results are back,” Clayton continued.

Joelle groaned softly. Owen had only given her two days. Hardly enough time to even find a starting point for the rest of the investigation. And that’s why Dallas had had no choice but to turn to Kirby, and he prayed like the devil that his father had a reasonable explanation for that handkerchief wrapped around the knife. While he was praying, he needed to come up with his legal, plausible reason as to why his prints were on a possible murder weapon.

Yeah, they needed a boatload more time.

“Whatever Kirby tells us, we’ll go from there,” Dallas assured his brother. “And call me as soon as Joelle’s lab results are in.”

With that reminder, she glanced down at the crook of her arm, peeled off the bandage that the medic had put in place after drawing a blood sample and pinched the bandage into a little ball. Almost as