It had been years since anyone had welcomed him home at the end of the day. As he thought back, Heather had usually been busy doing something else when he came in at night.

He lifted a russet curl off her cheek. “Long and exhausting, but better now that I’m home.” With you. But he didn’t say that. He was still trying to get a handle on the feelings that continued to grow inside him.

“You want a drink before supper?” she asked. “That seemed to help last night.”

“Sounds good. Let me go wash up first. I’ll meet you in the living room.”

He returned ten minutes later in fresh jeans and a dark gold thermal to find a cozy fire burning in the big rock fireplace. Ellie greeted him with a glass of the same whiskey he’d poured himself last night.

“A guy could get used to this.” He accepted the drink, took a swallow, and enjoyed the burn. They carried their glasses over and sat down on the sofa as they had before.

“I talked to the fire guys mopping up the blaze near the east pasture,” he said. “They should be done by tomorrow, latest.”

“They did a good job.”

“They’re good men.” He sipped his drink, leaned back on the sofa, and stretched his arm across the back. “Between moving cattle and working on that road we’re building up to the summer camp, I thought about your theory off and on all day. I couldn’t get it out of my head.”

“Come up with anything?”

“My mind keeps going back to Earl Dunstan. Before he died, Earl said Frank knew the guy who killed him was from the mine. Frank worked at the Red Hawk. The only three people we could find at Mountain Ore who knew Frank and could afford to pay him the twenty grand we know he got were Clive Murphy, Tony Russo, and Rick Egan.”

Ellie nodded. “The top execs make enough too, but Phillip Smithson said he didn’t know Keller, and Jane says she and the CEO don’t deal with employees at Frank’s level.”

“I can’t figure why Murphy, Russo, or Egan would have a beef with me, and none of them looked like a killer.”

“You can’t tell by a person’s looks, Kade.”

Amusement touched his lips. “I know, but it always seems to dead-end there.”

Ellie nodded. “I guess we were thinking alike, because I went online and made another run at the same three men.”

“And?”

“I didn’t find anything that raised an alarm. I’ve got Zoey looking at DMV records. If one of them owns a Hummer—”

“Sheriff Fischer is looking into that.”

“The sheriff doesn’t have any evidence that connects those three men to Keller.”

Kade took a drink of whiskey, and Ellie sipped her wine.