Ashes, Ashes, They All Fall Dead (7 page)

He coughed into his hand and sobered, but his smile was still there, in his eyes.

Tessa had never been particularly violent, but right now she wanted to punch Matthew Buchanan right in those sexy abs.

Lucky for him, he took a step back, out of reach of her fist.

He waved toward the hallway to his left. “Welcome to the Buchanan Scientific and Forensics Lab.”

M
ATT WATCHED
T
ESSA
press her hands against the glass wall in the long hallway, peering into the dust-free room where one of his scientists was examining the envelope and letter before conducting more invasive tests.

“Which letter did you take?” Tessa asked.

“The Sharon Johnson letter.”

“Mailed in Brunswick, Georgia,” she absently murmured.

She must have memorized all the names and postmarks.

“That’s the last letter we received. Is that why you chose it?” she asked.

“Nope. Opportunity. It was the closest letter on the table when you went into the bathroom.”

She let out a puff of laughter. “I bet it killed you not to come up with odds first about which letter might yield the best results so you could decide which one to take.”

He grinned. She was right. It
had
nearly killed him. But, in the end, random was probably better. He couldn’t have gotten her to agree to more than one letter, and if he had to choose, he would have been in a quandary over which to pick. He’d have wanted the first letter, the last letter, and probably a few in between, preferably ones with latent prints on them. It was only luck that the Sharon Johnson letter happened to be one with a latent.

“This place rivals the FBI Lab in Quantico.” Tessa didn’t sound happy about that, as if the admission had been wrenched out of her. “How long will it take to complete the tests and get results?”

Tessa’s excitement was obvious, even though she tried to hide it. She wanted to solve this case so badly she’d come over to the dark side with him.

When he’d switched that letter at his studio, he knew he was taking a huge risk. But he also knew if he’d asked her permission, she would have said no. He’d gambled that he could convince her not to turn him in by playing on her curiosity and intense desire to solve the case once he got her to the lab.

Thankfully his gamble had paid off.

“It’s not quite Quantico,” he said, in answer to her question. “I couldn’t afford anything near that scale. But I do pride myself on employing some of the best minds in the business, and having the best equipment available.”

“How long will it take?” she repeated. “When will we have results?”

The
we
in her statement reassured him even more. She wasn’t going to change her mind and have him arrested, or take the evidence back to the FBI. She was too invested to back out now. She was already thinking of herself as his partner in crime.

He winced. Hopefully his willingness to break the rules wouldn’t come back to harm her career. But sometimes the bureaucracy of law-enforcement agencies seemed more designed to help criminals than to help catch them. It had never made sense to Matt that cops had to follow a strict set of rules when the people they were after followed no rules at all.

His father, Alex, was an attorney, and Matt had inherited his thirst for justice. But Matt could never thrive under the strict guidelines of a law-enforcement career. That’s why he’d decided to fight for justice as a consultant. And if he occasionally bent a few rules to put murderers away and protect innocent people, he wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.

Tessa turned away from the glass. “Matt?” She was still waiting for his answer.

“Probably a few days.”

“Can you test a portion of the letter and leave the rest alone?”

“I could, but what if that portion was the one part that would give us the answers we need? Taking the evidence would have been for nothing.”

She turned back to the window, every line in her body tense. Was she having second thoughts?

If she was going to break the rules, it needed to be her decision, made with all the facts, so she wouldn’t hold it against him later. He rapped his knuckles on the glass, capturing Dr. Henry Beauchamp’s attention.

Matt held his hand up, signaling the doctor to stop his work with the letter.

“What are you doing?” Tessa asked.

“Making sure you know exactly what’s going to happen. Henry there is going to examine the letter and envelope. Then he’ll dissolve the sample in a liquid solution, which will basically destroy the evidence. I’m not a scientist, so I don’t know what exactly he’ll do at that point. But when he’s done, he’ll produce a report that will identify all the chemicals and particulates, from the exact type of fibers in the paper to the type of ink in the writing. And maybe, just maybe, that report will help us narrow down our search to one geographical area of the country, small enough to do us some good.”

Tessa narrowed her eyes. He wasn’t sure if that was good or bad, but he’d gone too far to stop now.

“If you’re not willing to completely destroy the evidence on the off chance that we can glean one small clue to help us,” he said, “I’ll stop this right now. I’ll go back with you to the FBI building, return the evidence, and accept the consequences. I’m not tricking you this time. It’s your decision. If you tell me yes, we’ll go ahead with the tests. If you say no, we go back into town.”

She crossed her arms. “Basically, you’re trying to put all of this back on me. Is that it?”

“I’m making sure you’re in this all the way, or it stops right here. I don’t want you to have any regrets.”

She didn’t even hesitate. “I made my decision when I walked through that front door. I’m all in. Run the tests.”

The certainty in her voice surprised him. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. It’s one letter out of twenty-three. What are the odds that one letter is the one that could convict the killer and we destroyed it? I’m not a mathematician like you, but I’m pretty sure those odds are astronomical.”

Not as astronomical as she thought, but he didn’t see the point of saying that right now.

He motioned to Henry, letting him know to proceed with the testing.

“I don’t think I can focus on anything else today,” Tessa said. “Let’s go back to your cabin so I can get my car.”

He took her hand in his, but she tugged it away, frowning at him.

In spite of that frown, the way her face flushed the moment he’d touched her was telling. Ever since she’d seen him at the construction site yesterday without his shirt on, she flustered easily around him. It was as if seeing his bare chest had finally made her notice that he was a man instead of the boy she’d once accused him of being. Maybe he should have taken off his shirt in front of her years ago.

It was nice to have the tables turned and have her just as affected by him as he was by her. And if he ruthlessly took advantage of their mutual attraction to throw her off-kilter, well, he wouldn’t lose any sleep over that either.

“We’ll go get your car, but there’s something else I want to take care of before we leave. If you don’t mind.” He started down the long hallway.

Tessa hurried to follow him. “Where are we going?”

“My office. Do you have that list of names and postmarks we printed back at the studio?”

She pulled her purse off her shoulder and dug inside. “Your office, huh? I thought you worked out of your house.” She handed him the printout.

“I said I prefer to work from home, not that I always work from home.”

They entered his office, and while he scanned the list into his computer, Tessa studied the paintings on the wall. She paused in front of his favorite painting, and the way her eyes lit up told him she liked it. He decided not to tell her that Madison had given it to him.

He started the special search algorithm on his computer and then uploaded a picture he’d taken at his studio of the little curlicue that appeared on the bottom of each letter. He initiated an image search even though he doubted it would yield anything useful.

“This will take a while, probably won’t be ready until morning. The program will e-mail me when it’s done. Are you hungry? I’ll take you to dinner. My treat.”

“I could eat.
What
will take a while?”

“The search I initiated. I grouped the data into five geographical areas. The program will search for crimes or deaths of anyone with names matching our list within each area. The program will crawl across the Internet looking for data, load that into a database, then perform the search. It could take hours or days, depending on the amount of data it has to load. It’s a long shot, and this is the first time I’ve used this particular program on a case, so it’s not proven yet. But it’s worth a try.”

“Why do you think your search will yield better results than mine did?”

“The FBI doesn’t use the same search methodology I use. The program I wrote doesn’t search law-enforcement databases. Mine scans local online data stores of newspapers and television station Web sites based on a target geographical range. Anyone within that area who puts their news online will have the information indexed and added to my database. While that’s being loaded, the name will be compared to each article, each story, looking for a match, all within a specific date range governed by the postmarks on the letters.”

“You’re hoping the news would have reported a crime but we wouldn’t have found it by talking to law-enforcement agencies? That seems unlikely.”

“Again, you’re assuming wherever the deaths occurred that those police have the equipment and hookup to make the data searchable by the FBI. That’s only true in larger urban areas and some of the larger rural incorporated areas. Many towns don’t have that kind of sophisticated network, even in this day and age. You’re also assuming the deaths were labeled as suspicious. If the killer masks the deaths as accidents, they’d never be reported by the cops in response to an FBI inquiry.”

“Maybe,” she allowed.

“One thing you can always count on,” he continued, “is that reporters are eager to blast stories about anything bad. So if someone died in any way that was out of the norm, you can count on the press to make a story out of it. Here in the South that’s especially true. Because everybody’s business is, well, everybody’s business.”

Tessa uncrossed her arms. “Sounds reasonable.”

“There’s one more advantage to my search algorithm. While it searches first within the geographical areas, pairing victim names to postmarks, if that doesn’t yield anything it will search across boundaries.”

“Like if he killed someone in one state but mailed the letter with their name on it from a different state?”

“Exactly.”

“Sounds like that kind of search could take a long time.”

“It all depends on how many stories the computer has to load and process. I keyed in a two-hundred-mile radius around each city on the postmarks and used a plus or minus six-month time frame. Unless we’re lucky enough to hit on something in one of the first few online sites the program searches, yeah, it could take a long time.”

He crossed to the door. “While I’m here, I’m going to check in with the lab administrator and see if she needs anything. When I get back, let me know where you want to eat.”

Tessa had wandered over behind his desk as he spoke. “Okay.” She plopped down in his chair and propped her chin on her palm. “What does it mean if a red balloon pops up?”

“Red balloon?”

She pointed to the screen. “A red circle is blinking on a map.”

Excitement pulsed through him. “That means we got a hit already. Click on the circle to see what name pops up.” He hurried toward the desk just as Tessa clicked the mouse.

Her eyes widened and she cursed. Without a word of explanation, she ran around him and out the door.

Matt looked at the name blinking on the screen. He cursed an equally foul word and ran after her, back toward the lab. The name the search engine had found, the only link they had to the killer, was the name written on the one letter his scientist was destroying right now.

Sharon Johnson.

A
LL THESE YEARS
he’d been so careful never to come back, never to risk that someone from his past would recognize him. But time was running out. He couldn’t wait any longer for his revenge.

Now that he was here, walking down the same cracked sidewalk where
she
had walked, breathing the same clover-scented air she had breathed, he wished he’d come back sooner. The fog of time, and betrayal, that had clouded his mind lifted. The memories were clear and fresh again—bittersweet—but mostly sweet.

There, across narrow, potholed Dogwood Street, just a block off Main, was the split-level ranch where she’d go after school to wait with her best friend’s family until her parents came home from work. Then she’d skip away, smiling and waving to her friend as she left. And to him. He knew she meant that smile for him, and that wave.

She just didn’t know it at the time.

Farther down, the playground. The bushes where he’d hidden, watching her and her friends. He couldn’t help but smile as he remembered how beautiful his girl was, the delicate little red-haired dancer who loved to whirl around, singing with the voice of an angel.

Ring around the rosie, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, they all fall down.

His smile faded. But she hadn’t sung for him. Never. No matter what kind of punishment she forced him to give her, she never sang.

Not for him.

He shuffled to a halt when he saw the corner up ahead. The drugstore was gone now, replaced by a modern gas station that squatted fat and ugly between the older buildings. But he could see the old store just as clearly as if it was still standing, with its faded red and yellow sign—Crawford’s Grocery & Drugs.

Every Sunday after church her mother took her inside that store to pick up a gallon of ice cream. Rocky Road. He’d tried it once, but he didn’t like all those gooey marshmallows. He liked mint chocolate chip, so he’d taught her to love it too. Later. Much later.

Yes, coming here brought back good memories, all those times he’d watched her, wanted her, when the future was rich and full of promise. He’d dedicated his life to her, had given her everything she could possibly want or need. He’d taught her how to dress, how to talk, how to keep him happy, and what had she done in return?