St Kilda Consulting 04 - Blue Smoke and Murder

thought, no one had bothered to follow them.
    Perfect.
    Or not.
    Time would tell.
    He reached back into the bench seat of the crew cab and fished out his laptop. He hadn’t had time to check for new files before he and Jill left the hotel this morning. Might as well do it now. Jill could show him around the burned ranch house when she woke up.
    No hurries, no worries.
    No one was going to sneak up on them out here.
    The Arizona Strip was a lonesome landscape. The only signs of civilization were distant jet contrails across the empty blue sky, and the singed line of old poplars that some long-ago Breck had planted as a windbreak next to the ranch house.
    The rest was pretty much ashes and wind.
    A bitter end to a pioneer family, Zach thought.
    Jill stirred, sighed, but didn’t wake up. Her hair burned copper and auburn in the sun coming through the closed window. Her breasts rose and fell beneath her dark T-shirt with every breath. Her lips were relaxed, pink, full.
    Tempting.
    No wonder Lane got himself a good case of puppy love. That’s one intriguing woman. Strong without being butch, smart without strutting about it, and determined. The kind of woman who walked next to her man, made homes and babies, and settled the West.
    He looked out at the blackened, skeletal remains of the barn, the old farm equipment scorched and rusting, the barbwire-fenced family graveyard near the pasture, and the bright run of springwater in the pasture ditches.
    She’s the last of the Brecks .
    Alive but surrounded by death .
    And I better keep her breathing, or Faroe will have my butt for kicking practice.
    Zach booted up the computer, saw that the battery was full—for once—and the signal strong. He typed in the code that would connect him via satellite to St. Kilda.
    His black eyebrows rose. While he’d slept and then driven to Jill’s ranch, St. Kilda had been busy. He downloaded files.
    And downloaded.
    And downloaded.
    Shawna must have worked all night.
    Now it was up to him to sort through all the facts and find the ones that might help him keep Jill alive. It was the sort of work he was used to. He was good at it. That’s why St. Kilda paid him a retainer plus flat fee per op, just to make sure he didn’t look at another employer.
    The first file Zach found was Jill’s. He opened it and began skimming documents with the speed of a man accustomed to sorting through mountains of information to find the few vital facts that could save lives.
    Then his skimming slammed to a halt. The biggest files were dense JPEGs of Jill’s paintings. Several of them hung in various rooms at Pomona College, a reminder to all fine arts students that talent could be honed, but it couldn’t be taught. You either had it or you didn’t.
    Zach didn’t.
    Jill did.
    The paintings were landscapes taken from her memory—cattle at the water tank, a horse with its butt to the snowy wind, a barbwire fence receding into nothingness against the wild immensity of the land. Zach could taste the snow, breathe the heady wind that had known only stone mountaintops, feel the thickness of the horse’s winter coat turned against the cold.
    Does Faroe know that she’s an artist?
    If he did, he hadn’t said anything.
    Zach finished skimming the files, then brooded over the JPEGs of Jill’s art, wishing he could see it more closely. But there was no time for a flying trip to Pomona and, hopefully, no need.
    Silently he looked through the windshield and digested the raw data, turning it over and around in his mind, connecting facts and speculations, scattering question marks across his mental landscape.When he was done, he was back where he started: Jill was an unusual woman descended from a long line of unusual women.
    Stubborn women.
    Determined women.
    Same thing, actually. Just viewed from another angle.
    He looked over and saw her watching him with eyes the color of spring grass. Her hair burned with a soft fire that made him want to touch it.
    “Morning,” he said. “Well, afternoon, actually.”
    She looked at her watch. “I can’t believe I slept while you were driving.”
    “I’m a good driver.”
    “You could be Jesus on wheels and I still wouldn’t sleep.”
    Zach thought of her file. “A control thing.”
    She shrugged, then stretched. “Why did you stop here?”
    “The road to the cabin looked rough enough to shake change out of my pockets.”
    Jill realized that he’d stopped so that she could keep on sleeping. The fact both