One Scream Away (43 page)

She beat a path toward the bushes, Tifton following. “Hey, Dani, hold on. It’s ugly back there. It’s—”

The smell hit her and Dani hesitated, reminded herself to breathe through her mouth. She moved toward the body. She couldn’t see the face, but the legs looked as if the woman had simply crumpled, like an accordion that suddenly lost air. She stepped around to look at the face, and her heart stopped.

“Oh, Jesus,” she said, emotion clogging her throat. She turned her back. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

Tifton had a hand on her shoulder. “It’s her, right? Rosie?”

Dani couldn’t breathe. She braced her hands on her knees and tried to get her lungs to function, the sight stirring up her stomach. “Rose McNamara.”

“Okay,” Tifton said, then called to another investigator over Dani’s back: “I was right, Wilson, it’s Rose McNamara. A hooker down in Deer Park.”

“No,” Dani said, and Tifton raised his eyebrows. Dani got control of her breathing, then forced her gaze back to the body. “She wasn’t hooking anymore. She got off the streets over a year ago. Was working at the Big Lots on South Grimby Street, a cashier.” Going to counseling, paying rent on her own apartment, getting her life together.
God. Rosie, Rosie.
She was just starting to get somewhere with her life.

The grief came in a flood.
Tough it out. Don’t be a baby.
She swallowed back the lump in her throat and walked back to the body, summoning the cool detachment the job required. The victim’s eyes were frozen in a moment of shock and pain, her throat sporting what may have been as many as three bullet holes, her face a mish-mash of blood and torn tissue. The bugs had gotten to her: Maggots speckled her wounds like wiggling grains of rice, flies battling the medical examiner for access. She was fully clothed. A cell phone sat in her right hand, fingers lax. Rigor mortis had come and gone.

“Thirty-eight?” Dani asked the ME, who was writing in a small notebook.

“Probably,” he said. “But they haven’t found any shells, so we can’t be sure yet.”

Dani moved slowly around the body. “Are any of these facial wounds postmortem?”

“Won’t know until she’s cleaned up,” the ME answered. “Too messy to see what’s what.”

Tifton bent down beside her. “So, what’s the theory? You’re the shrink.”

“I’m not a shrink.”

“You’ve got a degree in psychology. That makes you more of a shrink than the rest of us. Why did you ask about postmortem wounds?”

“It’s not anonymous, that’s all,” she said. “There’s a lot of anger there. It’s personal. Or sexual. You don’t get this kind of overkill for nothing.”

Tifton cocked his head. “You’re saying she knew him, or at least he knew her. That might explain why she came back here in the woods, anyway.”

“Got some hairs here,” the ME said.

Tifton walked over and looked. “Boo-yah,” he said. Hair was good.

The dance got under way, the steps rehearsed a couple of dozen times a year in peaceful bedroom communities like Lancaster, two or three hundred times a year in bigger cities like Baltimore or D.C. or Philadelphia. Techies, uniforms, and detectives all went quietly about their jobs: studying the body, canvassing for onlookers, searching the woods and parking lot with rubber gloves and plastic bags, collecting items that would ultimately prove there had been a carnival. Dani hung with Tifton until those all-important words finally came from the ME: “We’re ready to flip her,” he called out.

Dani worked her way over and stood next to Tifton. The ME and one of his assistants flanked the body.

“Let me have the phone,” Dani said.

The ME slid it from Rosie’s fingers. Wearing fresh rubber gloves, Dani took it, then watched while Rosie’s body was ceremoniously flipped. Nothing. No new wounds on her backside. No murder weapon or Dear John letter conveniently left beneath her body, no signed note saying, “I did it.”

Dani walked to the parking lot with the phone, where she could breathe more freely. She pressed Power, bent over the hood of Tifton’s car like a desk, and copied down numbers from recent calls, incoming calls, missed calls. When she finished, she took out her own phone and climbed onto Tifton’s hood, propping her feet on the bumper. She dialed, then spelled each name and number to Dispatch.

Thirty minutes later, the dispatcher recited back the names and addresses of people who matched the phone numbers. Dani recognized several of them—friends, coworkers, a hairdresser, the landlord of Rosie’s apartment complex, her mom. No one identifiable as a boyfriend or lover. No one unusual at all, at least not that Dani could tell, until the last name on the list:
JMS Foundation for Photography Art.

She frowned and checked the time of the call. Sunday, 8:07 p.m. It had lasted just eighteen seconds.

“Careful, your brow is gonna stay that way.” Tifton had stepped over to her, pressing his thumb to the frown line above her nose.

She brushed his hand away, already dialing. Voice mail picked up.
“You’ve reached the office of Russell Sanders at the JMS Foundation for Photography Art. Please leave a message…”
She disconnected and looked up at Tifton. “What would a hooker-turned-cashier have to do with an upscale art guild like the Sheridan Foundation?”

“Developing an interest in photography, maybe?”

She ignored the pun. “This is Russ Sanders’s direct line. And it’s the last call Rosie made.”

“Who’s Russ Sanders?”

“The director of the J. M. Sheridan Foundation.”

“Open eyes, open hearts.
That
Sheridan?”

Like there was another. “Russ Sanders was Sheridan’s mentor,” she explained. “He runs Sheridan’s Foundation.”

“Pretty posh circle of friends for an ex-hooker,” Tifton speculated. He arched one black brow. “Which begs the question, how do you know about him? You got a love for photography or philanthropy you’ve kept hidden all these years?”

She fished her keys from her pocket and started toward her car. “I met him once—Sheridan. Back when he was just getting started.”

“Oh, yeah? What was the occasion?”

Getting disowned by my family, Dani thought before she could halt the memory. She bullied it down. “It was no big deal,” she lied. “Are we almost done here?”

“Yeah,” Tifton answered, watching the coroner’s wagon pull away with Rosie’s body. The crime scene unit was packing it in. “What’s on your mind?”

“I wanna go talk to Sanders.” She continued walking, then turned back to Tifton. “You coming, Ace, or are you gonna go sit behind your desk and wait for forensics to figure out who dunnit?”

Tifton scoffed, patting the last of the CSI guys on the shoulder as he passed. “When did forensics ever solve a case?”

“Last night,” the guy answered. “On CBS.”

Dani gunned into traffic, with Tifton following in his own car. In keeping with Murphy’s Law, she made a wrong turn and did a U-turn across a bed of flowers in a median. Tifton laid on his horn behind her—Tifton liked flowers—and her phone rang thirty seconds later.

“Aw, shut up,” she said before Tifton could speak. “They’ll grow back.”

“They won’t, but that’s not why I’m calling. The squad sergeant just called. Russell Sanders’s son is at the precinct, hysterical.”

“Why?”

“He’s filing a missing persons report. Russell Sanders disappeared.”

Where authors give you the inside scoop!

From the desk of Kate Brady

Dear Reader,

One of the first things people want to know when they find out the nature of the books I write is, “What’s
wrong
with you?” I confess, for anyone acquainted with Chevy Bankes in ONE SCREAM AWAY (on sale now), it’s a valid question. Here we have a villain with serious mother issues, bizarre sister issues, and a folk song driving him to kill. Forget the fact that he stockpiles screams and travels all the way across the country to obtain the final entry in his collection.

So please, folks, allow me to go on record: I am generally a nice person. I am not prone to violence. I don’t have any deeply buried hatred toward my parents, nor do I have any deeply buried skeletons in my gardens. I have basically healthy relationships with my husband, children, sibling, in-laws, colleagues, friends, and neighbors. To be frank, my life is pretty darn dull.

I love it that way—heaven knows I wouldn’t want to face the type of excitement my characters face on every page. But maybe my basic normalcy is the reason I spin tales about larger-than-life characters. In most cases, they are people I would never want to meet, doing things I would never want to do. (Except for those Sheridan men… I admit it would be nice to meet one of them but, alas, they’re engaged with heroines far more beautiful and exciting than I.) When you write about people who don’t exist, the possibilities for perilous physical exploits and heartrending emotional journeys are infinite, and far more exciting than shopping for groceries or weeding those gardens.

So when I started writing ONE SCREAM AWAY, I knew I wanted three things: (1) a smart villain who would hunt down a heroine in some really creepy way for some really twisted reason, (2) a smart heroine with a secret past too horrific to contemplate and chutzpah from here to the moon, and (3) a smart hero so drop-dead gorgeous and profoundly tortured that you couldn’t help but cheer for him, even when he was being a jerk. Beyond that, I didn’t know much of anything and decided simply to follow the hero, Neil Sheridan, step by step, as he tried to solve a murder. I didn’t know so many innocent people would die before he succeeded, or that he’d unravel the truth about his own tragic past along the way. That’s one of the many joys of writing: discovery!

I hope you’ll enjoy the first of the Sheridan stories as Neil tracks down Chevy Bankes in ONE SCREAM AWAY. And I hope you’ll be inspired to come back for more when his brother Mitch makes his debut in the next book!

Please feel free to visit my Web site at
www.katebrady.net
.

Happy reading,

From the desk of Margaret Mallory

Dear Readers,

While writing KNIGHT OF DESIRE (on sale now), I discovered how much I enjoy writing part of my story from the hero’s perspective. After years of guessing what men are thinking, I found it profoundly satisfying to
know
what was in my hero’s head and heart. I loved being able to show the reader why William does the things he does. (Men do have their reasons.)

The more surprising thing I learned about myself as a writer is that I like tortured love scenes. The hero and heroine’s misunderstandings and conflicts can be revealed with such high drama in the bedroom. (My parents and children will miss these scenes of wrenching emotion, since I am razor-blading them out of their copies.) Of course, the hero and heroine eventually are rewarded for their suffering!

Speaking of heroes and tortured love… Stephen, the younger brother in KNIGHT OF DESIRE, is the hero of my second book, KNIGHT OF PLEASURE (December 2009). Stephen is in Normandy fighting with King Henry (Prince Harry in book one), when he crosses swords (literally) with Isobel, a woman he wants but cannot have. Although we know Stephen has a hero’s heart beneath all that charm, our serious-minded heroine dismisses him as a knight of pleasure.