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I’m lying about that.”
    “The marshal figures she’s telling the truth,” Wyatt countered. “About that anyway.” He looked at her for the rest of the explanation. “Those bullets were real, and I don’t believe you’d put the baby at risk by hiring idiot gunmen to shoot at or near you.”
    “I wouldn’t.” Her chin came up. Her voice was strong. “This baby is my life, and...” She snapped away from him.
    Wyatt could finish that for her. This baby is my life, and you have nothing to do with it.
    Or something along those lines.
    She’d already said she didn’t want a baby daddy. Wyatt had to make sure that was the truth. Then he’d figure out what to do with that truth and everything else that seemed to be hitting him at once.
    “Call ahead,” Wyatt instructed the deputy, “and arrange for Lyla to be checked out by a doctor. Just in case.”
    He expected her to argue with that, too, and maybe it was on her mind when she opened her mouth. But then she just slid her hand over her stomach.
    “Thanks,” she said under her breath, and the deputy made the call.
    While he did that, Wyatt checked his own phone. He finally had service, so he made a call and asked one of his foster brothers, Marshal Declan O’Malley, to find out if the utility company had sent someone to Lyla’s house. With one thing down, he mentally went through the long list of other calls he had to make.
    But the ringing of Lyla’s phone stopped him.
    “Mr. Mobley,” she greeted the caller. Her boss. “I might not be in this morning. I’m on my way to the Bulverde sheriff’s office....Oh, you heard about the shooting.” She paused. “No, I’m fine.”
    Lyla opened her mouth to say more, but Wyatt heard the chatter on the other end of the line. He couldn’t tell what her boss was saying, but it had captured her complete attention.
    “What?” she finally said, quickly followed by “Why?”
    More chatter, and Wyatt still couldn’t make out enough of it to tell what was going on, but he hoped like the devil it wasn’t more bad news. He’d had enough of that already.
    “We’ll talk when I get to the office,” Lyla snapped, and she ended the call. It took several moments, though, for her to look at Wyatt. “Mobley excused himself from the Jonah Webb investigation, and the Rangers want me to take over.”
    Not exactly a surprise. “I hate to say I told you so, but I did.”
    “It could mean nothing,” she concluded, but the worry in her voice said it was a whole lot of something. “Mobley got another job. A civilian company with much higher pay. They want him to work with a legal watchdog group that’s retesting evidence from old criminal cases.”
    “The timing’s suspicious, but it gives me another lead. The person who offered Mobley the new job could be behind the rest of this.”
    She swiveled around to face him. “What exactly is the rest of this? ” She glanced uneasily at the deputy and moved closer to Wyatt. “If this is some kind of plan to get me to falsify evidence, it won’t work,” she whispered.
    “It might be that.” But he just didn’t know.
    “The in vitro could have been just an honest mistake,” she whispered a moment later. “Mobley’s new job could be a coincidence.”
    “And the gunmen? The camera?” Wyatt pressed. “More coincidences? Because when there are that many of them, we call that a pattern.”
    He almost told her about the information trail that had led him to her, but his phone buzzed. Declan.
    “First of all, the utility company didn’t send someone to Lyla Pearson’s house,” Declan said the second Wyatt answered. “And second, what the hell’s going on?”
    Considering that Wyatt had been about to ask his brother the same thing, this wasn’t a good start to what he needed to be a good conversation. “Are you referring to something specific? Because there’s a lot going on.”
    “The Rangers got an anonymous tip that you’re trying to influence the Webb murder