The Marshal's Hostage - By Delores Fossen Page 0,69
looking at them but rather the reports.
“Yeah,” Dallas confirmed. “And she also confessed to trying to kidnap Joelle so she could force me to tamper with the evidence that the CSIs found. She thought there was something incriminating in the safe.”
“There wasn’t,” Wyatt confirmed. “Not for her, anyway, but I’m sure Sarah did some other things to try to cover her tracks. Like setting up those trash cans so they’d spew smoke in the building where Joelle and you were conducting an investigation.”
“An unauthorized one on your part,” Saul said, coming to the doorway. Thankfully, he didn’t elaborate on that.
“Sarah was going to have Kirby kidnapped, too,” Joelle volunteered.
Yet another reason for him not to regret shooting Sarah. What a twisted woman to use a sick man to cover up her crimes.
Dallas looked around the room at the others to see if they were going to offer anything else. None of them said anything to Saul about what might have been a confession from Sarah before she collapsed.
I had help.
Hell, the woman had been bleeding out at the time she’d muttered those words so she might not have had a clue what she was saying. Judging from the others’ silence, they were taking the same stance.
Wyatt put the one report aside and picked up another. “Owen was picked up the airport in San Antonio. He was trying to get on a flight to Mexico because he figured that was better than going to jail once Joelle testified against him.”
“Which I would have done. And I’ll still do it,” she insisted.
Good. That would put Owen behind bars for a while. “You need to add charges for him drugging Joelle and trying to shoot us in the woods.”
Wyatt shook his head. “That was Lindsey who did the drugging. Owen’s not saying much, but she’s been a regular little chatterbox. Can’t shut her up, in fact. She wanted to stop the wedding, and that’s why she drugged Joelle.”
“And Lindsey sent those men after us?” Joelle asked.
“Nope. That was Sarah’s doing. One of her hired guns—the one who Harlan nabbed outside the ranch house—is talking, too. Sarah hired the three guys to kidnap Joelle because she wanted to make sure Joelle married Owen.”
“Owen?” Clayton and Dallas asked in unison.
Wyatt nodded, then shrugged. “It appears that Sarah was running scared when she thought Joelle’s inquiry might lead to her arrest, and she wanted to help Owen force Joelle to marry him so that Owen in turn would help clear her name. If you hadn’t carried Joelle out of the church when you did, then Sarah’s men would have forced her to walk down the aisle.”
His boss cocked his head and stared at Dallas over the top of his reading glasses. “Just to clarify—you did take Joelle out of that church because you were concerned about her safety, right?”
That was part of it, yeah. But he’d also done it so that she wouldn’t release the report that he thought would incriminate Kirby.
“Yes,” Joelle answered for him. “Dallas was protecting me.”
“Good.” Saul sounded a little skeptical. He cleared his throat and motioned for Wyatt to continue.
Wyatt went to the next report. “Owen agreed to turn over the real knife, the one that Sarah sent him, as part of a plea bargain his lawyers are trying to work out.”
“It’ll have my prints on it,” Dallas reminded him.
“Figured that, but we have Rudy’s statement that you picked up the knife in Webb’s office. Then we have Sarah’s confession that she used the same knife to kill her husband. That ties it up in a nice little package.”
It did, and it was one less thing for Dallas to worry about. But the knife wasn’t all that Owen had hidden away. “And what about the handkerchief with Kirby’s DNA?”
Saul shrugged. “That could have come from anywhere at any time. No chain of custody to make it credible to link Kirby to a crime. Especially considering that Sarah was more than willing to try to set up a marshal for a murder that she committed. It’s not much of a stretch for her to try to frame Kirby, too, with his own handkerchief.”
No. It wasn’t a stretch, and Dallas wanted to keep it that way.
“Going back to the first attack in the woods,” Joelle spoke up. “One of the gunmen said something, well, personal about me.”
Dirty little secret. Dallas remembered that, and now he realized the gunman might have been referring to Joelle’s pregnancy.
“Owen could have passed on any info that he