Vengeance is Blind: Three Scott Drayco Short Mysteries Read Online Free PDF Page A

suffer?”
    Wyse’s voice turned soft, chiding. “I think
you’ve suffered already.” He smiled a smile that on someone else
might be called beatific. “I want you to remember. To think of me.
Every day, as I remember you.”
    Drayco rubbed his temples, reminding himself
it was the game of a serial killer, nothing more. He was so deep in
the fog and lacking his usual situational awareness, the door that
opened to reveal the returning sergeant startled him.
    “Thirty minutes. Time’s up.”
    The officer unlocked the table handcuffs
constraining Wyse. As the sergeant led his shuffling prisoner out
of the room, Wyse turned around briefly. “I hope to see you at the
trial, Scott. When I’m released, I’ll come find you. Something for
both of us to look forward to, yes?”
    Drayco rubbed his temples some more, trying
to ease his growing headache. As he waited for the agents to join
him, he mumbled to himself in the empty room. “You want me to
remember, Wyse? How could I forget the two-way looking glass of
death you’ve left me?” He shivered and hoped the agents would think
to bring a cup of very dark, very hot coffee. Preferably with a
shot of bourbon.
     

Valley of the Shadow of Death
    Ordinarily he’d admire the unusual
layered patterns in the rainbow sandstone of Antelope Canyon—if
only he weren’t clinging to handholds above the fragile rock
platform, which by some miracle he and his companions had banged
into when flood waters swept the three of them downstream. Instead,
Scott Drayco glanced over at his fellow clingees who were looking
like a pair of partially drowned prairie dogs.
    This wasn’t what he’d had in mind when
rancher Will Pichford hired him to find out who was laming his
cattle. Not Drayco’s kind of case anyway, he would have turned it
down if he hadn’t promised a mutual friend of theirs to take it on
as a favor.
    He remembered when he first saw the poor
beasts in pain from corium abscesses caused by the lacerations. It
hadn’t been pretty, but the damage was minor enough to prevent the
animals from being culled early. Just enough to add expensive
veterinary fees to the ranch’s bottom line and cause Pichford
himself to go nearly apoplectic. “It’s a warning. Has to be,” he’d
argued, to everyone he knew.
    Drayco had pressed him further, “What kind
of warning?” Pichford might be a little too fond of the local
“cactus wine,” made from a mix of tequila and peyote tea, and would
bet on everything from llama races to boxing. But among friends and
other members of the Cattlemen’s Association whom Drayco
interviewed in nearby Page, the man didn’t seem to have an enemy in
the world.
    Pichford had looked over in annoyance at
Drayco’s question. “If I knew that, I wouldn’t have hired you.”
    Fair enough. But after a week of
investigating the case from every angle, Drayco hadn’t found any
evidence to link someone to the crime. Even the local veterinarian
wasn’t any help, saying the wounds could have been inflicted by any
small instrument, as long as it was sharp enough. Drayco’s sense of
failure was eased only slightly by the warm welcome Pichford and
his wife Natalie gave him, insisting he stay at the ranch.
    As Drayco had learned, Pichford was the
quintessential self-made millionaire, from a broken family whose
mother had cheated on his father and left the two boys in his care,
never to return. After a stint in Vietnam, he’d settled in northern
Arizona and built up his cattle ranch from scratch to over five
hundred head of cattle, one of the first to breed Gelbvieh and
Balancers. He managed his spread with the help of a Navajo foreman
John Kinlichee, two full-time ranch hands and a few seasonal
part-timers.
    But the bright spot in his life was the
charming Natalie, who’d been open and helpful to Drayco from the
start, not seeming to mind his prying questions. “How’d the two of
you meet?” Drayco had asked, having heard whispers from one of the
neighbors