Free Roan by Jennifer Blake Page A

toomuch of the legal system and it had turned on her. She had been, he thought, a lot like his Donna Doe.
    Roan gave a snort of disgust, then pinned his star to his shirt with a practiced move. He was doing it again, grasping at every angle that might bolster Donna’s kidnapping story. He wanted to believe her. That was the trouble.
    He’d run her prints. Nothing. He’d compared the pictures from the surveillance tape against mug shots. Nada. He’d contacted the Florida Highway Patrol and Dade County Sheriff’s Department where the old van had been stolen. Zilch. He’d even contacted the FBI for reported kidnappings, but they had no one approaching her description on file. The last hadn’t exactly made him cry. All he needed was a swarm of uptight government types in button-downs crawling over his territory.
    Regardless, Donna, if that was her name, was keeping something from him; he knew it. She had dragged just enough information from her tainted memory to keep him guessing, but nothing concrete to help nail the men with her. Was it the need to keep her lover out of jail or fear that held her back? Either way, Roan wanted answers, like an explanation for why Big Ears and Zits were so determined to get to her that they risked crashing the hospital. That was the first question on his agenda as soon as he saw Miss Donna Doe.
    On his way out of the house, he looked in on Jake. His son enjoyed the heavy sleep of a teenager; the telephone hadn’t disturbed him and Roan didn’t wake him. He dropped a note on the kitchen table in case he wasn’t back by morning, then left by the front door. Old Beauregard, lying near the edge of the high outside steps that descended from the second-floor living area to the ground, raised his head and turned up his dolorous bloodhound face as if ininquiry about the early exit. Roan bent to give him a scratch or two behind the ears, then ran lightly down the steps.
    With one foot in the floorboard of his tan police unit, he hesitated while he patted his shirt pocket, making certain he had his cell phone with him. At the same time, he looked back at the house that was silvered by moonlight to a ghostly shade of gray. Built in the 1850s, Dog Trot, as the house was called for the carriage way cut through the center of the lower floor, was a bastard blend of Georgian and French West Indies styles. Four square and solid, two and a half stories tall with deep, sheltering porches, it had withstood searing summer sun, cold winter rain, the violent storms that sometimes spun across the heart of Louisiana, and hordes of kids as destructive as locusts. It had sheltered Benedicts since the day the last wooden peg was driven into the last hole, and it now protected Roan’s son who slept so peacefully upstairs.
    A few of his relatives, mostly female, made a fuss about Roan leaving a fourteen-year-old boy alone at night when duty called. He didn’t much like it himself, but there was no other choice now that his dad, who’d lived with them when the boy was younger, was off on his great motor home adventure. Jake didn’t want to be hauled out of bed several times a week to go to one of the neighbors’ house, nor was he afraid of staying alone. Besides, Dog Trot was probably the safest place in the parish, much more so than the hospital, even without an armed guard. Few people wanted to risk the swift retaliation an attack on a sheriff or his family would bring, especially if the offence occurred on the official’s home grounds. On top of that was the Benedict habit of protecting their own. This was their land, their home, their castle. Jake had once said when he was ten years old and into knights and dragons: Here, they were kings. Damned if his son wasn’t right.
    Roan grinned with a quick shake of his head, then settled into the driver’s seat and started the engine.
    He saw the broken glass first, the remnants of what had been the automatic