He would not allow that to happen to Cami now that he knew she was a target of what had to be a copycat killer. Someone determined to frame the Callahan cousins.
“She’ll be safe,” Rafe promised Archer. And he would make certain of it. Him, Logan, and Crowe. “Did you dust the house for prints?”
“Personally,” Archer told him. “I wasn’t trusting that to anyone else. I also called the FBI, Rafe. If Thomas had a partner, as the profile suggested twelve years ago, then he’s getting in the game again, and I want help on this.”
Rafe didn’t care who Archer called in as long as Cami was protected. The more the merrier as far as her safety was concerned.
“Look, Rafe, you know how this county is,” Archer began after a long moment’s silence.
“Yeah, everyone and his brother is going to be looking at us, believing the Callahan cousins did it. Because after all, there was no crime before we returned,” Rafe sneered.
He knew exactly how it worked.
“You’re being targeted, Rafe,” Archer snapped back at him. “The calls were a warning over you, and the attack was for the same reason, I believe. This isn’t something we can keep under our hats while we search for him. And it’s damned sure not because of whatever the hell you did in the military. This goes straight back to twelve years before.”
“I’m a fucking Marine, Archer; what the hell do you think I did?” he snarled. “For God’s sake, would you just pick up some speed here so I can get to her? Sometime this year would be exceptionally nice. You can question me later.”
If he didn’t get there soon, if he didn’t see for himself that Cami was safe and breathing on her own, then he was going to end up losing his sanity.
Rage was like an animal inside him, twisting and clawing in its desperation for freedom.
He shouldn’t have left her, he thought again. He should have heeded that warning itch at his back as he drove back to the ranch. The urge to turn back and slip into her house and into her bed had been nearly overwhelming.
He’d not ignore it again. Never again would he ignore that instinctive voice and blame it on his lust rather than that kernel of knowledge that something wasn’t just right. That his instincts had picked up something his conscious mind had missed.
Better yet, she was coming to the ranch, where he could make certain she was protected, ensure that no one ever got to her again, ever harmed her again.
“You were just a Marine, huh?” Archer snorted as Rafe flicked him a brooding look. “You know, Rafe, for ‘just a Marine’ your records are all but inaccessible.”
“And why would you want them to be accessible, Archer?” he asked smoothly.
“Let’s say there was a time or two the mayor was curious about your whereabouts,” Archer sighed. “I checked and all I could get was that you were a Marine. After that, forget it.”
The mayor was curious, his ass. Most likely, there was another crime they’d wanted to pin on Crowe and his cousins and they wanted to be certain where the cousins were.
“And you can forget it now,” Rafe assured the sheriff as he gripped the armrest of the door and all but tore it off in frustration. “Can’t you drive any faster?”
Rafe could have driven these mountain roads faster with a blindfold for a handicap.
“Rafe, I’m going to tell you now, you, Logan, and Crowe stay out of this,” Archer warned him as they neared the city limits and the hospital where Cami had been taken. “Take care of Cami and let me handle the rest.”
Yeah, that was what Archer’s father, Randal, had warned them of twelve years before, as the sheriff, when the first girl had been found in Corbin County at the base of Crowe Mountain.
Rafe, Logan, and Crowe had just so happened to have been in Denver with Ryan Calvert that week meeting several recruiting officers and staying on the military base there with Ryan’s family. If they hadn’t been, they would have been arrested then and they would have never been able to clear themselves.
Archer wasn’t stupid, though. The Callahan cousins weren’t little more than boys anymore. They were adult men, military trained, and they didn’t take orders worth shit from civilians.
It was one of their best traits, Crowe liked to say.
But even more, they knew how to protect themselves.
“Do you hear me, Rafe?” Archer snapped.
Rafe turned his head and stared back at Archer as determination flowed through him.
The determination to kill whoever had dared to touch Cami. Whoever had dared to bruise her, frighten her, or target her because of who her lover was.
Whoever did this would pay for it.
The bastard was a dead man walking; the Callahan cousins would see to it.
Cami listened from her hospital bed, dry-eyed, resigned, to the sound of her father’s high, shrill voice on the other end of her aunt’s phone.
She’d warned Ella, Eddy’s wife, not to call. Cami had warned Ella that Mark could be nasty and that since moving to Aspen he had rarely wanted to speak to his daughter, let alone see her. Unless he needed her for some reason, as he had the month before, to help get her mother settled in the nursing home.
That, or to pay her mother’s bills.
She stared up at the pristine white ceiling and wondered why that searing pain was no longer there. Once, it had broken her heart that he hadn’t cared, that he refused to allow her mother to care.
But perhaps, even more painful was the fact that her mother would opt to medicate rather than stand up for the child who needed her.
“I’ll not have that damned Callahan trash dirtying my home or endangering her mother. Poor Jaymi, she’d be turning over in her grave to know the sister she thought so much of was still fucking the man that raped and murdered her.”
Cami flinched.
There was such hatred, such bitterness in his voice. Did he truly hate her so desperately for not being the child that died? For surviving when his favorite hadn’t?
Parents weren’t supposed to acknowledge favorites. If they preferred one child over the other, it was supposed to be a carefully hidden secret.
Mark had no remorse at all showing his preference for the child that died, and his belief that the wrong child had died. That he believed Cami didn’t deserve to live when Jaymi had been taken away from him.
“Mark, you’re a bastard,” Ella snapped at that point. “How Margaret ever managed to stay with you all these years I don’t know.”
She flipped the phone closed.
Cami didn’t lift her head; she couldn’t. If she had to look at the pity in her aunt’s gaze then she might not be able to bear it.
“He always was a fool, Cami-girl.”
Her head did lift then. Eddy stood a few feet from the bed, his gaze gentle. She’d rarely seen Eddy with that expression. That was his funeral face and his new-baby face. And now, it was his feel-sorry-for-Cami face.
“Rafer didn’t hurt Jaymi,” Cami said, feeling numb, wooden. “He wouldn’t have called her and warned her against himself. Just like the calls I’m getting.”
Eddy sighed heavily as he shoved his large, scarred, and beaten hands into his pant pockets. “Well, a man gets suspicious and he gets paranoid,” he said. “I’m not going to say he did do it anymore. But I won’t say he didn’t. You’re our girl, Cam. Nothin’ ain’t gonna change that and nothin’ ain’t gonna make us stop worryin’ ’bout you. Especially now.” Somber and filled with brusque emotion, Eddy sniffed uncomfortably before glancing away from her.
“A benefit of a doubt then?” she asked wearily.