Hawk’s emotions were still all in a jumble and he was at a loss how to sort everything all out.

“I thought that Grayson … I was afraid that you—”

None of this was coming out right.

“Damn it, Carly,” he all but exploded, thinking of what might have happened to her. “I don’t like you taking these kinds of chances.”

“You don’t have the right to tell me not to do this, you know,” she reminded him.

“I know,” he answered “but just thinking that something could have happened to you—”

Hawk couldn’t bring himself to finish his sentence. Instead, he abruptly pulled her into his arms and kissed her. Kissed her hard, as if there was no tomorrow because, for all he knew, there wasn’t one.

Dear Reader,

Come with me to a little town called Cold Plains, Wyoming, where everything is perfect … or is it? Beneath this gleaming exterior are dark secrets and an even darker heart at work to turn this one-time rough-and-tumble town into a gleaming metropolis. But to what end?

This question is what brings FBI special agent Hawk Bledsoe reluctantly back to the town he’d left behind ten years ago. Left behind because Carly Finn, the girl he’d loved, suddenly told him she didn’t love him. Through a strange twist of fate, they have to join forces to unlock the secrets holding this town prisoner and save her younger sister. All this while trying not to fall in love again.

I hope you enjoy this first installment of PERFECT, WYOMING. As ever, I thank you for reading, and from the bottom of my heart, I wish you someone to love who loves you back.

Marie Ferrarella

About the Author

USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award-winning author MARIE FERRARELLA has written more than two hundred books, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide. Visit her website at www.marieferrarella.com.

Special Agent’s Perfect Cover

Marie Ferrarella

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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To

all the wonderful readers,

who give me

such a great audience

to write for.

You make it fun.

Prologue

Micah Grayson wasn’t sure what had possessed him to turn on the TV in the pristine, upscale hotel room that he was occupying for the day. He wasn’t exactly the kind of man who craved company or needed to fill the silence.

Hell, in his particular chosen “line of work,” silence and stealth were two of his best tools. He had no desire to listen to music or watch anything that might be on the big screen TV that came with the price of the first-class room. For that matter, he only kept up on world affairs insofar as to learn about what region of the world he’d most likely be going to next.

But after methodically going through his own mental checklist and making sure that the room was clear of bugs—not the kind with legs but the kind that could get a man killed—he’d absently switched on the set and sank down on the bed, thinking about his next move.

The grim voice of the newscaster didn’t even penetrate his consciousness.

Not until her picture was flashed on the screen.

Very little caught Micah off guard these days. His life was literally riding on this fact, that he was always prepared for any and all contingencies and could act accordingly.

But seeing her face knocked the wind out of him. More than that, it was as if he’d just been on the receiving end of an iron fist aimed straight for his gut.

Because according to the newscaster, the woman in the photograph was dead. And when he had last seen her, a million years ago, before life had gotten so immensely complicated and they had gone their separate ways, Johanna had been very much alive.

Alive, but no longer his.

“In keeping with what seems to have become a bizarre ritual, the body of Johanna Tate was found yesterday outside of Eden, Wyoming. The victim suffered a single gunshot wound. The coroner has concluded that that was the cause of death. This is the fifth such female body found in as many years. Police are asking anyone with any information about this latest murder victim to please step forward. Any informant’s identity will be kept strictly confidential. Rumor has it that this young woman was a resident of Cold Plains, a town located some eighty miles away, but this has not been confirmed yet.”

A resident of Cold Plains.

Yes, she was from there, Micah thought, bitterness filling his mouth like bile.

As had he once been.

Johanna had been the reason he’d remained in that godforsaken blot on the map for as long as he had. And ultimately, she’d been the reason why he had abruptly left without so much as a backward glance. Because after being his, after planning to share all her tomorrows with him, she’d allowed herself to be charmed away from his side by the very devil himself.

Charmed away by Samuel Grayson.

Never mind that Samuel was his twin brother. He and that underhanded, despicable excuse for a human being were as different as night and day. He had never pretended to be anything but what he was, never made any excuses for himself. While Samuel wove elaborate tapestries made of intricate lies to ensnare those he wanted to own, to control for his own unstated purposes.

Crossing to the TV monitor, Micah Grayson turned up the volume.

But the story was over. The dark-haired newscaster had gone on to talk about the unseasonably warm April weather, exchanging inane banter with an overly ripe, barely legal-looking weather girl sporting a torrent of blond hair that appeared to be almost longer than her dress.

Johanna had been allocated less than a sound bite.

Micah hit the off button. The screen on the wall went instantly dark as it fell into silence.

“Damn it, Johanna, I told you he was trouble. I told you you’d regret picking him over me,” Micah said in frustrated anger.

That had been the extent of his fight to keep her. Telling her that she’d regret her choice. He’d felt that if he had to convince Johanna to stay with him, then he’d already lost her, and it hadn’t been worth his breath to argue with her.

Taking out his worn, creased wallet, the one that carried his current ID stamped with his current name—one of many he’d assumed since he’d left Johanna and Cold Plains behind—he opened it. Beneath the handful of bills he always kept in it and the false ID was a tiny close-up of a sweet-faced girl with pale brown eyes and long, straight black hair.

Johanna’s high school picture.

The same picture that was embossed in his brain. He couldn’t say that it was embossed on his heart because he no longer had one. One of the hazards of his job. A heart only got in the way, slowed a man down, kept him from a laser-like focus on his assignment.

A wave of fury flared through his veins, and Micah crumpled the faded photo in his hand. He drew back his arm, about to pitch the tiny paper ball across the room, then changed his mind.

Exhaling a long, slow breath, he opened his hand, letting the small wad fall onto the bed. He carefully flattened it out again, then slipped the now-creased photograph back into his wallet.

Samuel couldn’t be allowed to get away with this, Micah swore vehemently. He didn’t know any of the particulars, but Samuel had to be behind Johanna’s death. His twin brother’s prints were all over this. He’d bet his soul on it.

The corners of Micah’s mouth curved in a humorless smile.

If he had a soul, he corrected silently.

Micah knew someone who could look into things. Someone who could take Samuel’s so-called paradise, strip it of all its gingerbread facade and expose it for what it was: hell on earth. Someone who he’d known all those years ago and had himself left for greener pastures, so to speak.

Someone, Micah thought as he tapped the numbers lodged in his memory out onto the cell phone’s key pad, who still had a soul. And who knew, maybe even a heart, too.

The cell phone on the other end rang a total of six times. Micah decided to give it to the count of ten and then try again later.

A man in his profession didn’t leave messages.

But then he heard someone picking up on the other end and a deep voice say, “Special Agent Bledsoe.”

A glimmer of a smile passed over Micah’s lips.

His brother was going down. It might take a while, but he was going down. And he would pay for what had happened to Johanna.

“Hawk, this is Micah. Grayson,” he added in case the agent was having trouble remembering him. It had been a while. “I need to see you.” He paused and then said cryptically, “I’ve got a not-so-anonymous tip for you about those murdered women on the news.”

Chapter 1

Okay, so where is he?

Special Agent Hawk Bledsoe paced about the hotel room, which grew progressively smaller by the moment. His frown deepened significantly as impatience drummed through him.

He had a really bad feeling about this.

About all of this.

To say that he had been surprised to hear from Micah Grayson out of the blue yesterday after so many years gave new meaning to the term “understatement.” Micah and he both had the very same connection between them that had just recently come to light about the five murder victims: they came from the same region in Wyoming. Micah was born in Horn’s Gulf, while he had the misfortune of actually growing up in Cold Plains.

A great place to be from, Hawk thought cynically, the heels of his boots sinking into the light gray carpet. He made yet another complete trip around the room. Nothing good had ever come from that town. Except for—

No! He wasn’t going to let himself go there. Those thoughts belonged in his past, buried deeper than the unearthed five victims apparently had been.

The victims, he’d already decided after reviewing the notes made by past agents, had all been buried as if the killer had expected them to be discovered. Eventually, if not immediately.

Why? What was the sense in that? What did these women have in common other than having the bad luck of being from Cold Plains? And of course, other than the fact that they had all been murdered, execution style, with a single bullet to the back of the head. Their sins—whatever they were—had obviously been unpardonable to someone.

But who?

And why?

And where the hell was Micah, anyway? He was supposed to be here. The urgency in Micah’s voice was the reason why he’d driven straight through the night to get here.

It wasn’t as if he’d called the man—a man who he knew through various sources made his living by hiring out to do things that others either could not or would not do—or were just unable to do. Be that as it may, it was Micah who had called him, not the other way around.

Called him and had said just enough to get him hooked. That he needed to talk to him about the five murdered women who had been found scattered through isolated areas in Wyoming.

Did that mean Micah knew who was responsible? Or that he at least had a viable theory? He wished he could have gotten Micah to say more, but the man had been deliberately closemouthed, saying he’d tell him “everything” when he got here.

So where was he?

Hawk knew that Micah Grayson had once dated Johanna Tate. Was that why the man had gone out of his way to call him? Had he called in reinforcements? As far as he knew, that wasn’t Micah’s style.

Either way, it looked as if he wasn’t about to find out now. He’d gotten no more out of his one-time friend than that: to come meet him in this off-the-beaten-path hotel. Room 705. Micah didn’t believe in saying much over the phone, even one that most likely was one of those disposable models, which could be discarded—and rendered untraceable—at a moment’s notice.

So rather than clear anything up, Micah’s call had merely added to the mystery that was already so tightly wound around the dead women it reminded Hawk of a skein of yarn whose beginning was so well hidden, it defied discovery—or unraveling.

Yarn.

Where the hell had that come from?

And then he remembered.

She had liked to knit. He’d teased her about it, saying things like it was an old-lady hobby. Carly, in turn, had sniffed dismissively and informed him that it suited her just fine, thank you very much. He recalled being fascinated, watching her fingers manage the needles like a master, creating articles of clothing out of straight lines of color.

As he recalled, she had professed to absolutely love creating things.

Again, he banished the thoughts—the all-too-vivid memories—out of his head. But not quite as forcefully this time as he had initially. Hawk supposed that it was inevitable. After all this time, he was about to be dragged back to the little pimple of a town he’d once left behind in his rearview mirror.

He recalled driving away as fast as he could all those years ago. At the time, he’d thought he was leaving permanently. Obviously not.

He was making too much out of this. The thoughts he was having about Carly just went to prove that he was human, just like everyone else. Nothing more.

The problem was, he didn’t want to be human. Especially not now of all times. If nothing else, being human, reacting emotionally, got in the way of efficiency. Being human was a distraction, and he had a case to unravel and a murderer—or murderers—to track down. That had to come first. He couldn’t afford to be distracted, not even a little.

Memories and thoughts of what could have been—and hadn’t been—had no place here. Or anywhere in his life.

Though his expression gave no evidence of his emotional turmoil, Hawk was too tense to sit down. So he went on pacing about the small hotel room where Micah had said he would meet him.

He’d been waiting for over an hour.

To the best of his recollection, Micah was never late. It was one of the things they’d had in common. Because of the directions that life had taken them, they both believed that time was a tool to be used, not frivolously ignored or disregarded.

Micah wouldn’t be late. If the mercenary wasn’t here it was because he couldn’t be here.

Which meant that something was wrong.

Which in turn meant that he, as the special agent who had recently been put in charge of this case, couldn’t put off the inevitable for very much longer.

The only thing that Micah had confirmed over the phone was what he’d already just learned: that all the victims were women from Cold Plains. In order to conduct the investigation properly, he would have to go up to Cold Plains, Wyoming, himself.

Looks like the prodigal son is coming home, he thought wryly.

Except that, in this case, he hadn’t been prodigal so much as smart. Leaving Cold Plains had been the smartest thing he’d ever done. By the same token, returning might turn out to be the stupidest.

Hawk looked at his watch again. When he’d gotten here—and found the room empty—he’d mentally promised himself to give Micah approximately ninety minutes to show up. But right now, he was feeling way too antsy to wait for sixty more minutes to slip beyond his reach.

With a sigh, he crossed back to the hotel room door that had been deliberately left unlocked for him.

Damn it, Micah, I hope you haven’t gotten yourself killed, he thought irritably. Because he was fairly certain that nothing short of death would have kept Micah Grayson from keeping an appointment that he himself had set up.

He needed to see the county coroner before he made his way to Cold Plains, but a visit to Cold Plains was definitely in his immediate future.

Biting off a curse, Hawk let himself out of the room and closed the door behind him.

It seemed rather incredible to Carly Finn that the two times she made up her mind to finally, finally leave Cold Plains, something came up to stop her.

And not some mild, inconsequential “something” but a major, pull-out-all-the-stops “something.”

The first time she’d been ready to test her wings and fly, leaving this soul-draining speck of a town behind her and eagerly begin a fresh, new chapter of her life with the man she knew deep down in her soul she was meant to be with, her infinite sense of obligation as well as her never-ending sense of responsibility to her family had added lead to her wings and grounded her with a bone-jarring thud.

The problem then was that her father had been a drunk, a dyed-in-the-wool, leave-no-drink-untouched, hopeless alcoholic, and while there were many men—and women—with that shortcoming who could be considered by the rest of the world to be functioning alcoholics, her father hadn’t fallen into that category. He hadn’t been even close to a functioning alcoholic, and she knew that if she left with Hawk, if she accompanied the man she loved so much that it hurt so he could follow his dreams, she would be abandoning not just her father but her baby sister to a very cruel, inevitable life of poverty and, eventually, to homelessness. The baby sister she had promised her dying mother to look after all those years ago.

So she knew that in all good conscience, she had to remain. And remain she did. She remained in order to run the family farm and somehow juggle a job as a waitress, as well, the latter she undertook in order to bring in some extra, much-needed money into the household.

She remained while sending Hawk Bledsoe on his way with a lie ringing in his ears.

There was no other choice. She knew that the only way she could get Hawk to leave Cold Plains—and her—so that he could follow his dreams was to tell him that she didn’t love him anymore. That she had actually never loved him and had decided that she just couldn’t go on pretending anymore.

Because she knew that if she didn’t, if she let him know how much she really loved him, Hawk would stay in Cold Plains with her. He would marry her, and eventually, he would become very bitter as he entertained thoughts of what “could have been but wasn’t.”

She couldn’t do that to him. Couldn’t allow him to do that to himself.

Loving someone meant making sacrifices. So she’d made the ultimate sacrifice: she’d lied to him and sent him on his way, while she had stayed behind to do what she had to do. And struggled not to die by inches with each passing day.

But the day finally came when she had had enough. When she had silently declared her independence, not just from the farm but from the town, which had become downright frightening in a short period. Cold Plains had gone from a dead-end town to a sleek, picture-perfect one that had sold its soul to the devil.

She’d reached the conclusion that she had a right to live her own life. That went for Mia, the baby sister she had always doted on, as well.

She didn’t even want to pack, content to leave everything behind just so that she and Mia could get a brand-new start. But she was in for a startling surprise. Somehow, while she was doing all that juggling to keep the farm—and them—afloat, Mia had grown up and formed opinions of her own—or rather, as it turned out, had them formed for her.

When she had told Mia that the day had finally come, that she’d had enough and that they were leaving Cold Plains for good, her beautiful, talented baby sister had knocked her for a loop by telling her flatly that she was staying.

It got worse.

Mia was not just staying, but she was “planning” on marrying Brice Carrington, a wealthy widower more than twice her age.

“But you don’t love him,” Carly had protested when she had finally recovered from the shock.

The expression on Mia’s face had turned nasty. “Yes, I do,” her sister had insisted. “Besides, how would you know if I did or didn’t? You’re always so busy working, you don’t have time to notice anything. You certainly don’t have any time for me. Not like Samuel does,” she’d added proudly, with the air of one who had been singled out and smiled down upon by some higher power.

The accusation had stung, especially since the only reason she had been working so hard was to provide for Mia in the first place. But the sudden realization that while she’d been busy trying to make a life for them, trying to save money so that they could finally get away from here, her sister had been brainwashed.

There was no other term for it. What Samuel Grayson did, with his silver tongue, his charm and his exceedingly handsome face was pull people into his growing circle of followers. Pull them in and mesmerize them with rhetoric. Make them believe that whatever he suggested they do was really their idea in the first place.

Why else would Mia believe that she was actually in love with a man who was old enough to be her father. Older. Brice Carrington was as bland as a bowl of unsalted, white rice. He was also, in the hierarchy of things, currently very high up in Samuel Grayson’s social structure.

Maybe Brice represented the father they’d never really had, Carly guessed. Or maybe, since their dad was dead, Mia was looking for someone to serve as a substitute?

In any case, if Mia was supposed to marry Brice Carrington, it was because the match suited Grayson’s grand plan.

The very thought of Grayson made her angry. But at the moment, it was an anger that had no suitable outlet. She couldn’t just go railing against the man as if she was some kind of a lunatic. For one thing, most of the people who still lived in town thought Samuel Grayson was nothing short of the Second Coming.

Somehow, in the past five years, while no one was paying attention, Samuel Grayson and a few of his handpicked associates had managed to buy up all the property in Cold Plains. At first, moving stealthily but always steadily, he’d wound up arranging everything up to and possibly including the rising and setting of the sun to suit his own specifications and purposes.

These days, it seemed as if nothing took place in Cold Plains without his say-so or close scrutiny. He had eyes and ears everywhere. Anyone who opposed him was either asked to leave or, and this seemed to be more and more the case, they just disappeared.

At first glance, it appeared as if the man had done a great deal for the town. Old buildings had been renovated, and new buildings had gone up, as well. There was now a new town hall, a brand-new school, which he oversaw and for which he only hired teachers who were devoted to his ideology. And most important of all, he’d built a bright, spanking, brand-new church, one he professed was concerned strictly with the well-being of its parishioners’ souls—and that, he had not been shy about saying, was the purview of the leader of the flock: Grayson himself.

To a stranger from the outside, it looked like a pretty little, idyllic town.

To her, Cold Plains had become a town filled with puppets—and Samuel Grayson was the smiling, grand puppeteer. A puppeteer whose every dictate was slavishly followed. His call for modesty had all the women who belonged to his sect wearing dresses that would have been more at home on the bodies of performers reenacting the late 1950s.

Maybe her skepticism was because she’d grown up listening to her late father’s promises, none of which he’d ever kept. Promises that, for the most part, he didn’t even recall making once a little time had gone by.

Whatever the reason, she didn’t trust Samuel Grayson any further than she could throw him. And he was a large, powerful-looking man.

Her sense of survival was urgently prompting her to leave before something went wrong—before she couldn’t leave.

But no matter what she felt about Cold Plains’s transformation and no matter what her sense of survival dictated, she was not about to leave town without her sister. And Mia had flatly refused to budge, declaring instead her intentions of staying.

She was, Carly caught herself thinking again, between the proverbial rock and hard place.

Common sense might prod her to make a run for it, but she had never put her own well-being above someone else’s, especially that of a loved one.

That was why she’d lied to Hawk to make him leave Cold Plains and why she was still here now, doing her best to pretend to be one of Samuel’s most recent converts even though the very thought made her sick to her stomach.

In her opinion, Samuel Grayson, once merely a very slick motivational speaker, was now orchestrating a utopian-like environment where allegiance to him was the prime directive and where, by instituting a society of blindly obedient, non-thinking robots, he was setting the cause of civilization back over fifty years.

Women in Samuel’s society were nothing more than subservient, second-class citizens whose main function, Carly strongly suspected, was to bear children and populate Grayson’s new world.

She’d heard, although hadn’t quite managed to confirm, that Samuel was even having these devoted women “branded.” Horrified, she’d looked into it and discovered that they were being tattooed with the small letter D, for devotee, on their right hips. That alone made the man a crazed megalomaniac.

Although it sickened her, Carly knew she had to play up to Samuel in order to get her sister to trust her enough so that she could eventually abduct her and get her away from this awful place. Nothing short of that was going to work—and even that might not—but she had no other options open to her.

Hoping that Samuel would eventually grow tired of his little game—or that someone would get sick of his playing the not-so-benevolent dictator—and send him on his way was akin to waiting for Godot. It just wasn’t going to happen.

So she’d gone to Samuel and insisted that she was qualified to fill the teaching position that had suddenly opened up at the Cold Plains Day Care Center. A smile that she could only describe as reptilian had spread over Samuel’s handsome, tanned face. Steepling his long, aristocratic fingers together, he fixed his gaze intently on her face.

He paused dramatically for effect as the moment sank in, then said, “Yes, my dear, I am sure that you are more than qualified to fill that position, and may I say how very happy I am that you have come around and decided to come join us.” He’d taken her hand between his and though his smile had never wavered, it had sent chills through her. Chills she wasn’t quite sure how to dodge. She’d never felt more of a sense of imprisonment than she had at that moment.

“You will be a most welcomed addition,” he had assured her.

She remembered thinking, Over my dead body, and she had meant it.

The problem was she was fairly certain that the coda, although silently said, would not be a deterrent to Grayson. He was a man who allowed nothing to stand in the way of his plans. To that end, he was perfectly capable of cutting out a person’s heart without missing a beat.

She had to get Mia away from here. And she would, even if it wound up being the last thing she ever did.

Chapter 2

“Hi, Doc. This is going to have to be quick. I’ve only got a few minutes to spare,” Hawk said by way of a greeting as he walked into the county coroner’s office.

In reality, since Micah hadn’t shown up for their appointed meeting, he should have skipped coming here altogether and gone on straight to Cold Plains. But the coroner had called, saying there was something that he needed to tell him. And if he was being honest and had his choice in the matter, he would have gladly stalled and remained here indefinitely, at this temporary FBI outpost. But he didn’t have a choice, and he could only spare a few minutes.

At this point, he would have welcomed being sidetracked by anything, and this included an earthquake, a tornado or a tsunami, none of which ever occurred in this rough-and-tumble region of Wyoming. But although he would rather do anything than go on to Cold Plains to investigate exactly how these five murdered women were connected, Hawk was first and foremost a dedicated FBI agent, and he wasn’t about to let any of his past personal feelings get in the way of his trying to solve this case.

Not bothering to shrug out of his jacket, Hawk crossed over to the coroner. He’d only met the man a few days before but the coroner took his job very seriously.

“Why did you call me?” Hawk asked. “Did you find out anything new?”

“Not exactly,” Dr. Hermann Keegan replied, measuring his words out slowly, as if he wanted to be sure they were absolutely right before he uttered them. He looked at Hawk over the tops of his rimless reading glasses. “Actually, what I found was something old.”

His mind on the ordeal that lay ahead of him, Hawk had very little patience with what sounded like a riddle. “Come again?”

“Once the fact that they were all connected came to light, I pulled the autopsy records of the other four victims,” he explained. “Were you aware of the fact that the ‘tattoo’ the deputy coroner found on victim number two’s right hip washed off when he was cleaning the body?”

Victim number two was the only female they hadn’t been able to identify yet. All the others had names, but this one was still referred to as Jane Doe four years after she’d been discovered. The woman’s DNA and fingerprints turned out not to be a match for anyone currently in any of the FBI databases.

“Tattoos don’t wash off,” Hawk pointed out.

Doc Keegan smiled, making his spherical, moonlike face appear even rounder. “Exactly. According to the notes, the letter, a d, appeared to have been drawn in with some kind of permanent, black laundry marker or maybe a Sharpie.” He raised his eyes to Hawk’s. “You know what that means, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Hawk answered crisply. “Either this woman had a penchant for marking up her body—or she wasn’t really one of the cult’s followers but was pretending to be for some reason.” Being a law enforcement agent, the first thing that struck him was that Jane Doe might have been one, as well. “She might have been undercover,” he concluded.

Keegan’s head bobbed up and down. “My money’s on that.”

Hawk looked at the five manila folders that were fanned out on top of the coroner’s extremely cluttered desk. Each was labeled with the name of a different victim. Besides Jane Doe, there was Shelby Jackson who had been found first in Gulley, Wyoming, five years ago, Laurel Pierce, found in Cheyenne three years ago, Abby Michaels, discovered in the woods outside of Laramie last year and Johanna Tate, found in Eden last week.

Johanna Tate.

Micah’s former girlfriend, Hawk suddenly remembered. The name had been nagging at him ever since he’d heard the news. Was that why Micah had called him? Because of Johanna?

Did Micah know more than he’d alluded to? Had he decided to take matters into his own hands? Going outside the law had become a way of life for him, and he would have thought nothing of avenging Johanna’s murder. Had it backfired on him because he’d let his emotions get in the way?

Damn it, he needed answers, Hawk thought, frustrated. Nodding toward the folders, he asked, “Mind if I take those with me?”

Stepping away from Joanna Tate’s lifeless body he’d finished sewing together, Keegan scrubbed and then pushed the files together into one pile. “Be my guest,” he told Hawk. “I’ve already made copies of them for you.”

Hawk scooped up the files. Already familiar with all the victims, he wanted to review the files in depth and was grateful to the coroner for making copies for him. Still stumped, he needed all the input he could get his hands on.

“You’re pretty thorough,” Hawk commented.

Keegan raised his slopping shoulders and let them fall again. “I’ve got the time to be. This is the most amount of action this office has seen in a very long while.”

“What do you do the rest of the time?” Hawk asked, curious what occupied the man’s time when he wasn’t conducting an autopsy. He sincerely doubted that Wyoming was a hotbed of homicides.

Keegan’s answer surprised him.

“I’m a vet,” the older man replied. “Technically,” he explained as a look of disbelief came over the special agent’s face, “I don’t even have to be a doctor of any kind in order to become a coroner. I just have to be unusually observant and display a high tolerance when it comes to the dissection of dead bodies. Like this one.” He nodded at the draped body on his steel table.

“Good to know,” Hawk quipped. Holding the files to his chest, he crossed to the door. “Thanks again for these.”

“My pleasure,” Keegan answered, adding, “so to speak.”

Closing the door behind him, Hawk blew out a breath. “Yeah,” he muttered to himself in a low voice. “So to speak,” he echoed.

He squared his shoulders and made his way out of the building and back to his car. He was all out of excuses and reasons to delay his departure. He’d already gotten in contact with his team and told them to temporarily set up a “satellite FBI office” in a cabin several miles out of town.

They were probably already there, he thought. Now it was his turn. Hawk turned his key in the ignition and listened to his car come to life.

Next up: Cold Plains.

Ready or not, here I come.

Carly was standing outside the school where she had so recently taken a position, supervising the children as they made the most of their afternoon recess.

That was where she was when she first saw him. First saw the ghost from her past.

That was what she initially thought she was seeing, a ghost, a figment of her wandering imagination. A momentary hallucination on her part, brought on by a combination of stress and anger and the overwhelming need to have someone to lean on—just for a little while.

For her, the only one she had ever had to lean on had been Hawk, but that had been a very long time ago. At least ten years in her past, she judged.

Maybe even more.

The bottom line was that there was absolutely no reason for her to see Hawk Bledsoe getting out of a relatively new, black sedan. The vehicle had just pulled up before the pristine edifice which housed The Grayson Community Center as well as the living quarters of several of Samuel Grayson’s top people.

Or, as she was wont to think of them in the privacy of her own mind, Grayson’s henchmen.

Her mind was playing tricks on her, Carly silently insisted. Any second now, this person she had conjured up would fade away or take on the features of someone else, someone who she knew from town. Someone she was accustomed to seeing day in, day out.

She waited, not daring to breathe.

He wasn’t fading. Wasn’t changing.

Suddenly feeling very light-headed, Carly sucked a huge breath into her lungs.

Ordinarily, fresh air helped clear her head. But it wasn’t her head that needed clearing, it was her eyes, because she was still seeing him.

Or at least a version of him.

The boyish look she’d known—and loved—was gone, replaced by a face that, aside from being incredibly handsome, was thinner and far more somber looking. Otherwise, it was still him, still Hawk. He was still tall, still muscular—the navy windbreaker he wore did nothing to hide that fact. And he still had sandy-blond hair, even though it was cut shorter now than it had been the last time she had laid eyes on him.

And when he made eye contact with her from across the street, she saw that the apparition with Hawk’s face had the same deep, warm, brown eyes that Hawk had had.

Eyes that could melt her soul.

She felt her pulse accelerating, her heart hammering as if it was recreating a refrain from The Anvil Chorus in double time.

Why wasn’t this image, this apparition, this ghost from the depths of her mind fading? Why was it coming toward her?

Carly’s breath caught in her throat, all but solidifying and threatening to choke her. Even so, for the life of her, Carly just couldn’t make herself look away.

She was still waiting for the image to break up—or for the world to end, whichever was more doable—as the distance between them continued to lessen.

When Hawk had first driven slowly through the town, heading for its center, its “heart,” Hawk had to admit that he was rather stunned. The town appeared to have gone through an incredible amount of changes.

When he had left, Cold Plains looked to be on the verge of simply drying up and blowing away, a dying town abandoned by all but the very hopeless. Those who were devoid of ambition and who couldn’t make a go of it anywhere else had chosen to remain here and die along with the town.

There was no sign of that town here.

This was more of a town that could take center stage in a children’s storybook. All around him, there were new buildings. The ones that looked remotely familiar had all been restored, revitalized, given not just a new coat of paint but a new purpose.

The streets were repaired and clean. Actually clean, he marveled, remembering how filthy everything had appeared to be when he was growing up here.

The smell of fertilizer was missing, he suddenly realized. Cold Plains now seemed like a town on its way to becoming a city rather than a hovel disintegrating into a ghost town.

For a moment he thought that he was in the wrong place, that he had somehow gotten turned around while coming here and had managed to drive to another town. A brighter, newer town.

But then he saw a few faces he recognized, people he’d known growing up. That told him that this was Cold Plains. At the same time, he began to take note of not just the newly constructed buildings but the people, as well. Briskly moving people. People who seemed to have a purpose.

He saw several parents holding on to their children’s hands, heading for what appeared to be a playground.

He did a mental double take. A playground? Since when was that part of the landscape? Or an ice cream parlor, for that matter?

“Excuse me, young man, didn’t mean to almost walk into you.” An older man laughed, sidestepping around him at the last moment. Hawk couldn’t help staring at the white-haired man. He wore color-coordinated sweats, fancy, high-end sneakers—running shoes?—and he was holding navy-blue-colored weights in his hand that looked to be about a pound each.

He was power walking, Hawk realized.

Had everyone lost their minds?

He looked around again. All the people who were out and about appeared to be smiling. Every last one of them. It was almost eerie. And then he looked closer at the women who were passing him. Smiling, as well, they were all modestly dressed. No jeans, no scruffy cutoffs or overalls. Each and every one of them, young or old, children or adults, they were all wearing dresses.

Dresses that came down past the middle of their calves.

Hell, they all looked like extras from a movie about Amish life, Hawk thought. All that was missing were those hats or bonnets or whatever those things that all but hid their hair were called—

Hawk froze.

A second ago, he’d been busy scanning the immediate area, trying to reconcile what he was seeing with the Cold Plains citizens he remembered from his past. Lost in thought, he’d forgotten to get himself prepared, and so he wasn’t.

Wasn’t prepared to have the sight of her, wearing one of those ridiculous, sexless dresses, slam into him like a runaway freight train sliding down a steep embankment. Plowing straight into his gut.

He had to concentrate in order to draw in half a breath.

Carly.

Carly Finn.

The woman who had led him on, then skewered his insides and left him without so much as a backward glance. Left him to live or die, no matter to her.

Why the hell hadn’t he realized that she would probably still be here? Still be living on the outskirts of Cold Plains?

This was where that stupid farm was, the one that meant so much more to her than he did, so of course she was still going to be here.

Still here and, despite the unbecoming, shapeless brown sack she wore, still as beautiful as she’d ever been.

More, he amended.

Even at this distance, he could see that Carly, with her long, blond hair pulled back into a ponytail, was even more beautiful than he remembered. Maybe that was because he’d been trying so hard to bury her image, to scrape it from his mind.

His hands were clenched at his sides. Fury raged through him, but there was no outlet. He couldn’t afford to allow himself one.

Damn it, he wished he could just walk away. This minute. Wished he could get into his car and just drive until he ran out of gas or purged her image from his mind, whichever happened first.

But he couldn’t, and he knew it, so there was no sense in wishing. He owed it to the Bureau to see this through, and he owed it to those five dead women to find their killer or killers. He wasn’t a kid anymore who could just think of himself. He had responsibilities, even if he no longer possessed a viable heart.

Incensed, stunned, angry and a whole vanguard of other emotions he couldn’t even begin to catalog yet, Hawk found himself striding straight for the woman clad in the unflattering brown dress.

When she saw him heading for her, Carly’s very first reaction was to want to bolt and run.

But she didn’t.

She had never run away from anything in her life and she was not about to start now—no matter how much she wanted to and how much easier it would have been than to wait for him to reach her.

Leaning for support against the white picket fence, which ran along the length of the school yard, Carly raised her chin, said a silent prayer that she wasn’t losing her mind and waited for the approaching man to turn into someone else.

He didn’t.

So much for the power of positive thinking.

Her thoughts did a complete one-eighty. Okay, so it was Hawk. What was he doing here? Of all the times she’d yearned for him to return, this was the worst possible one.

She couldn’t allow herself to forget what she was still doing here. She had to remember why she’d taken this job at the day care center and why she forced herself to smile at Samuel Grayson when she would rather just drive a stake through his heart, grab her sister’s hand and run.

“Carly?”

The second she heard his voice, a wave of heat, then cold, then heat again washed over her. For the tiniest split second, the world shrank down to a pinprick. Only sheer willpower on her part caused it to widen again, chasing away the blackness that threatened to swallow her up whole.

Taking another deep, calming breath, she responded, “Yes?”

“Carly,” Hawk repeated, his voice more somber this time, more forceful. His dark brown eyes all but bore into her. “It’s Hawk.”

She hadn’t wanted to run her tongue along her lips in order to moisten them, but if she didn’t, she wouldn’t have been able to utter another sound.

“Yes,” she answered quietly, praying he wouldn’t hear her heart pounding. “I know.”

A sixth sense she’d developed these past five years warned her that she was being observed. Observed by someone whose loyalty was strictly to Samuel and who in all likelihood reported everything he saw directly to the man. She had to be careful. Everything was riding on making Samuel believe that she, like all the other women in the sect, was under his spell as well as firmly under his thumb. It went against everything she was, everything she had ever stood for, but to save Mia, she was willing to play this part.

That meant that she had to seem almost indifferent to the man she’d once loved above all else.

A man she still loved.

Carly swallowed as unobtrusively as she could and then forced a bright, mindless smile to her lips as she asked cheerfully, “So what brings you back to Cold Plains after all this time?”

Chapter 3

It looked like Carly. Even in that ridiculous, shapeless sack of a dress, it still looked like a slightly older, but definitely a heart-stoppingly beautiful version of Carly.

But it didn’t sound like Carly.

Oh, it was her voice all right. He would have recognized her voice anywhere, under any circumstances. There were times he still heard her voice in his dreams, dreams that had their roots in a different, far less complicated time. And then, when he’d wake up in the dark and alone, he would upbraid himself for being so weak as to yearn for her. An emptiness would come over him, hollowing out what had once been his heart.

Yes, it was her voice all right. But there was a decided lack of spirit evident in it, a lack of the feisty, independent essence that made Carly who she was. That made her Carly.

The bright, chipper, vapid question she’d just asked sounded as if it had come from a Carly who had been lobotomized.

Which was, he now realized, exactly the way he could have described the expressions on the faces of several of the men and women he’d just watched walk by. It really looked to him as if nothing was behind the smiles on their faces. Granted they were moving about with what appeared to be a sense of purpose, but they all came across as being only two-dimensional—as if they had been cut out of cardboard and mounted on sticks.

Damn it, talk, Hawk, Carly thought. Say something so I can go on with this charade. You will never, never know how much I’ve missed you, how many times I’d lie awake, wondering where you were and what you were doing. Wondering if you missed me even just a little.

Carly had never allowed herself to regret sending him away. It had been the right thing to do. The right thing for him. But oh, how she regretted not being with Hawk when he had left town.

And now he was here, standing before her, larger than life—and she couldn’t tell him anything. Not how she felt, not why she was going through the motions of being one of Samuel Grayson’s devoted followers.

“So?” Carly prodded, still keeping the same wide, vacant smile on her lips. Her facial muscles began to cramp up. Playing mindless was a lot harder than it looked. “What brings you back?” she asked him again.

Carly knew it couldn’t be a family matter that had caused him to return. His mother was dead—she had been the only thing keeping him here in the first place—and he never got along with his father who, although kinder in spirit than hers, had the very same romance going with any bottle of liquor he could find, just as her late father had had.

“You’re about the very last person I would have ever expected to see coming back to Cold Plains.” That much, at least, was truthful.

He laughed shortly as he shook his head. The sound had no humor in it. “Funny, and I figured you had enough sense to leave here,” he replied, his tone sounding edgier than he’d meant it to.

Carly shrugged, momentarily looking away. But the children were all playing nicely. No squabbles that needed refereeing on her part. She had no excuse to leave.

She tried to tell herself that Hawk’s words didn’t sting, but it was a lie. Even after all this time, his opinion still meant a great deal to her. It probably always would.

“Something came up,” she said by way of an excuse—and, again, she was being truthful. Something had come up to keep her here. Her sister’s marriage bombshell.

Hawk’s eyes skimmed over the dress she wore. He tried to do his best not to imagine the slender, firm body beneath the fabric or to remember that one night that she had been his. He hadn’t realized then that he was merely on borrowed time.

“Yeah,” he said curtly. “I can see that.”

She sincerely doubted that he hated the dress she had on as much as she did, but wearing it was necessary. It was all part of convincing that hideous megalomaniac that she was as brainwashed as everyone else who had joined his so-called “flock.”

“You still haven’t answered my question,” Carly prodded gently, her curiosity mounting. “Why are you back in Cold Plains?”

He minced no words. The days when he had wanted to shield her were gone. “I’m trying to find out who killed five young women and left their bodies to rot in five different, remote locations in Wyoming.”

She looked at him sharply. Had he struck a chord? Did she actually know something about these women who had been cut down so ruthlessly? But then the look vanished, and her expression became completely unreadable. He swore inwardly.

The next moment, a strange smile curved her lips. “So you did it,” she concluded, nodding her head with approval.

Hawk narrowed his eyes in annoyed confusion. “Did what?”

He’d told her that he wanted to do something adventurous, something that mattered. He wanted to leave the world a better place than when he found it. It was why she’d made him leave. Someone like that couldn’t be happy in a town the size of a shoe box.

“You became a law enforcement agent. A U.S. Marshal?” she asked, guessing which branch he had ultimately joined. It had to be something along those lines in order to give him the authority and jurisdiction to investigate a crime like the one he had just mentioned.

Hawk shook his head. Then because she was obviously waiting for a clarification, he said, “I’m with the FBI.”

“Even more impressive.”

Working for the FBI wasn’t impressive as far as he was concerned. It was a job, something that allowed him to move about, to keep from being tempted to put down roots in any one place for long. And it allowed him to keep the rest of the world at bay. For that, he had her to thank. After she had broken his heart, telling him that she had never loved him, he’d decided that he would never subject himself to that kind of pain again. The only way to do that was not to allow anyone in. Not to form any attachments.

Ever.

So what was he doing, standing here, feeling as if he’d just walked through a portal and gone back in time again? What the hell was he doing feeling again? It seemed that no matter what his resolve, all it took to undo everything he’d built up in the last decade or so was to be in Carly’s presence again for a few minutes.

It just didn’t seem right, but there it was, anyway.

“It’s a job,” he told her, shrugging off her compliment.

She heard the indifference, the callousness, even if he wasn’t aware of expressing them. A wave of concern came over her. Maybe she shouldn’t have turned him away. Not if it had turned out all wrong.

“Then you’re disappointed?” she asked.

The thought that he was disillusioned sliced away at her heart. She had made what to her was the ultimate sacrifice, sending Hawk away so that he could follow his dream. If his dream had turned out not to be what he really wanted, then all these lost years had been for nothing.

“Yes,” he answered coldly as his eyes skimmed over her again.

He wasn’t talking about his job, she realized. Hawk was talking about how he felt about her. More than anything in the world, she would have loved to have set him straight, to tell him what she was really still doing here, but if she did that, she would wind up instantly throwing away everything she’d done up until now. It would mean sacrificing all the work she’d put into making Samuel believe that she was one of the faithful. One of the “devotees” he took such relish in collecting and adding to his number.

“Why are you dressed like that?” Hawk demanded, frowning. He looked around as he asked the question, adding, “Why are all the women out here dressed like that?”

“Not all,” Carly pointed out, doing her best not to let her relief over that little fact show through. “There are still holdouts.”

Thank God, she added silently.

“‘Holdouts,’“ he echoed her words. “As in, not having found the ‘right path’?”

She widened the forced smile on her lips, hating this charade that circumstances had forced her to play. “I see you do understand.”

He felt contempt. Had she always been this weak and he hadn’t noticed, blinded by the so-called sacrifices she’d made to keep her father’s farm running?

“Not by a long shot,” he answered, disgusted. Again, he looked around. From all indications, they were standing in the center of town. And yet, it was all wrong, conflicting with his memories. The town he had left behind had been a rough-and-tumble place, a place where people existed without the promise of a future. A place where grizzled, weathered men came in to wash the taste of stagnation and failure from their parched throats at the local bar.

The bar was conspicuously missing as were other establishments that he remembered having once occupied the streets of Cold Plains.

“Where’s the hardware store?” he asked. There was a health club—a damn health club of all things!—standing where he could have sworn the hardware store had once been.

Since when did the people who lived here have time to idle away, lifting weights and sitting in saunas? Health clubs were for the pampered with time on their hands. Nobody he knew in Cold Plains was like that. They had livings to scratch out from an unforgiving earth.

Or, at least, nobody had been like that when he’d left all those years ago.

Obviously things had changed.

“The owner had to relocate to Bryson,” she told him, mentioning the name of a neighboring town. “He couldn’t afford the rent here anymore.” She saw confusion in Hawk’s sharp eyes as he cocked his head. It took everything she had not to raise her hand and run her fingers along his cheek, the way she used to when he would look at her like that.

With effort, she blocked the memory. “New people came in and started buying up the land—investing in Cold Plains,” she explained, quoting the official story that had been given out about the changes. Changes, everyone had been told over and over, that were all “for the better.”

“And the diner?” Hawk asked, nodding toward a place down the block. The diner was clearly gone, replaced by another, far more modern-looking restaurant with a pretentious name. “Exactly what the hell is a ‘Vegetarian Café’?”

“Just what the name suggests it is,” she replied, then added, “They serve much healthier food than the diner ever did.”

The name indicated that no meat was served on the premises. From where he stood, that just didn’t compute. “This is cattle country,” Hawk protested. “Men like their steaks, their meat, not some funny-looking, wilted green things.” As he spoke, it struck him that the people who continued to walk by him all seemed to have the same eerie, neat and tidy and completely-devoid-of-any-character appearance as the new buildings did. “Speaking of which, where the hell are all the men?” he asked.

She knew what he meant, but of necessity, she pretended to be confused by his question. “They’re all around you,” she answered, indicating the ones who were out with their families or just briskly walking from one destination to another.

“No, they’re not,” he bit off. He’d grown up here, had lived among them. The men who had lived in Cold Plains when he was a teenager spent their days wrestling with the elements, fighting the land as they struggled to make a living, to provide for their families and themselves. The men he saw now looked too soft for that. Too fake. “These guys look like they’re all about to audition for a remake of The Stepford Wives.’’

“Lower your voice,” Carly said, using a more forceful tone than he’d heard coming from her up until now. That was the Carly he remembered, he thought.

But it bothered him that she was looking around, appearing concerned. As if she was afraid that someone would overhear them.

What the hell had happened to Cold Plains?

To her?

“Or what?” he challenged. “Whatever great power turned all these guys into drones will strike me dead for blaspheming?” he demanded angrily. “Who did all this?” he asked. “Who made everyone so damn fake?” But before Carly had a chance to answer him, Hawk shot another question at her. “You can’t tell me that you actually like living this way, like some mindless preprogrammed robot.”

Though his tone was angry, he was all but pleading with her to contradict his initial impression, to let him know somehow that she was here looking like some 1950s housewife against her will. That she didn’t want to be like this.

Carly forced herself to spout the party line. “Samuel Grayson has generously done a great deal for this town,” she began, the words all but burning a hole through her tongue.

“Grayson?” Hawk repeated. She was talking about Micah’s twin brother. The smooth talker of the pair. He remembered thinking that the man could have easily been a snake oil salesman in the Old West. Last he’d heard, Grayson had hit the trail, spouting nonsense. They called that being a “motivational speaker” these days. Still a snake oil salesman in his book. “Samuel Grayson did all this?”

She nodded, forcing herself to look both enthusiastic and respectful at the mere mention of the man’s name. “He and the investors he brought with him,” she told him.

She hated the look of disbelief and disappointment she saw in Hawk’s eyes, but she knew she couldn’t risk telling him the way she actually felt. Couldn’t tell him that she knew Grayson, charming though he might seem at first, was guilty of brainwashing the more gullible, the more desperate of the town’s citizens. These were people who had tried to eke out a living for so long that when they had been given comforts for the very first time in their lives, they’d willingly fallen under the man’s spell. They had given their allegiance to Grayson gladly, never realizing that they were also trading in their souls. Samuel Grayson accepted nothing less than complete submission. He fed on the power he had over the growing population of the so-called, little utopian world he had created.

So the rumors and his first impression were right, Hawk thought grimly. This was what Micah had vaguely alluded to when he’d asked to meet with him. Samuel Grayson had established a cult out here, preying on the vulnerable, the desperate, the easily swayed. He’d used all that against them to establish a beachhead for his particular brand of lunatic fringe.

“And where is Samuel Grayson right now?” he asked.

Again, the words all but scalded Carly’s tongue, but she had no choice. She’d seen one of Samuel’s henchmen come around the back of the school yard. The man didn’t even bother pretending that he wasn’t watching her. It was enough to make a person deeply paranoid.

“Samuel is wherever he is needed the most,” she replied.

Without fully realizing what he was doing, Hawk took hold of her shoulders, fighting the very strong urge to shake her, return her to the clearheaded, intelligent woman he’d once known—or at least believed he’d once known.

Exasperation filled his veins as he cried, “Oh God, Carly, you can’t possibly really believe what you just spouted.”

Carly forced herself to raise her chin the way she always used to when she was bracing for a fight. “Of course I believe what I just said. And I’m not ‘spouting,’ I’m repeating the truth.”

Hawk rolled his eyes, battling disgust.

“There a problem here?” someone asked directly behind him.

The low, gravelly voice belonged to the town’s chief of police, one Bo Fargo. It was a job title that Fargo had apparently bestowed upon himself. The title elevated him from the lowly position of sheriff, a job he had just narrowly been elected to in the first place. But he did Grayson’s bidding and, as such, was assured of a job for life, no matter what.

Carly’s eyes widened.

“No, no problem,” she declared quickly, hoping to avert this from turning into something ugly, given half a chance. She knew how Fargo operated. The stocky man didn’t believe in just throwing his weight around but in using his fists and the butt of his gun to do his “convincing,” as well. She didn’t want to see Hawk hurt. “I’m just telling Hawk here about all the changes that have been introduced to Cold Plains—thanks to Samuel—since he left here.”

The name obviously struck a chord. Fargo squinted as he peered up into Hawk’s face.

In his fifties, the tall, husky man was accustomed to having both men and women alike cowering before him whenever he scowled. He enjoyed watching the spineless citizens being intimidated by him. He went so far as to relish it.

“Hawk?” Fargo echoed as he stared at the outsider through watery blue eyes.

“Hawk Bledsoe,” Carly prompted by way of a reminder. “You remember Hawk, don’t you, Chief?” she prodded, watching the man’s round face for some sign of recognition.

“Tall, skinny kid,” Fargo said, deliberately taking a derogatory tone.

Hawk gave no indication that he was about to back away. “I filled out some.”

There was another moment of silence, as if Fargo was debating which way to play this. Hawk was not easily intimidated, and Fargo clearly didn’t want to get into a contest where he might wind up being the loser. So for now, he laughed and patted his own gut.

“Haven’t we all?” he asked rhetorically. “So what brings you back, Bledsoe? You thinking of resettling here in Cold Plains now that it’s finally got something to offer?” he asked.

Hawk’s eyes never left Fargo’s. “No, I’m here to investigate the murders of five of your town’s female citizens.”

To back up his statement, Hawk took out his wallet and held up his ID for the chief to see.

If he didn’t know better, Hawk thought, he would have sworn that Fargo turned pale beneath his deeply tanned face.

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