The Morning After (11 page)

He’d forgotten it was the yule season.

Not that it mattered.

Morrisette gunned the engine as they whipped by Colonial Cemetery. The graveyard looked barren and bleak with its ancient headstones and dry grass. And this was the return address for the missive he’d received yesterday morning. As if whoever had penned the note had been here. “We need to check with all the local cemeteries,” he said, eyeing the few leafless trees planted between the old grave markers. “See if any of the graves have been disturbed.”

“You think whoever planted the coffin up in the mountains got it from down here?” McFee asked.

“It’s possible,” he thought aloud, but then, anything was. Glancing through the back window he wondered if he was being followed. Had Bobbi’s killer been watching him? Seen him walk familiarly through the house? Or had he been hiding in the shadows, in a tiny nook or cranny, and Reed had walked right by him? Or was it someone else who had the key to Bobbi’s place and had come looking for her? What about her husband? Jerome Marx had still been paying her bills. As far as Reed knew, Bobbi’s part-time job wouldn’t pay her Visa bill.

Morrisette wheeled into the parking lot at the station. “I’ll start calling around, checking with everyone who knew Barbara Jean.” She stood on the brakes and the cruiser slid into its spot. McFee was staying on another couple of days, sending his reports by fax and E-mail to the Lumpkin County Sheriff’s Department and, in Reed’s opinion, generally getting in the way. He wanted to take the bull by the proverbial horns and run the investigation, but he couldn’t. Morrisette was right. He had to watch his step.

Outside, the night was cold and damp, the air thick with the feel of rain about to fall.

“Christ, it’s cold,” Morrisette muttered as she jabbed the rest of her cigarette into a canister of sand near the door.

“It’s winter,” McFee said.

“Yeah, but doesn’t Mother Nature know this is the South?”

Reed shouldered opened the door, held it for her and McFee, then walked with them up the stairs, their boots ringing on the steps as they made their way to the second floor. McFee peeled off at the temporary desk he’d been assigned while Morrisette followed Reed into his office. “I’ve got to get home,” she said, almost apologizing. “I haven’t seen much of the kids lately.”

Reed glanced at his watch. “Aren’t they in bed?”

“I forgot, you don’t have children. Lucky you…or maybe, lucky them.”

“Very funny,” he countered, taking off his jacket. The inside of the station was warm, over seventy, even though it was night and the offices were relatively deserted. Only a few diehards like himself, mostly those without families, were at their desks. He felt a sense of melancholy about his solitary state, but it was fleeting. He wasn’t the kind to settle down. All his relationships had failed, including the one that had mattered in San Francisco. Helen had been a schoolteacher and professed to love him, but it hadn’t been enough to keep him in the city after the tragedy. Nothing could have. So he’d returned to Savannah and the few relationships, if you could call them that, had been fleeting, including his short-lived affair with Bobbi Marx. “Go home to your kids.”

“I will,” she said, and walked out the door just as her pager went off. “See. The sitter’s tracking me down as we speak. I’ll see ya tomorrow.”

“Right,” he replied, but she’d already disappeared beyond the desks and down the stairs. He was left alone in his office. He skimmed his E-mail, didn’t see anything of interest and figured he could read through the messages in the morning. He was bone tired and the thought of his recliner, a hot shower and a cold beer was inviting.

Maybe he should just go home. Get a fresh start on everything in the morning. He reached for his jacket as his phone rang. He snagged the receiver before it could jingle again. “Detective Reed,” he said automatically.

“You’re still there. Thought I’d probably get your voice mail this late.”

Reed recognized the voice as belonging to Gerard St. Claire, the ME. “Look, I’ve got a preliminary report on the case up north. I’ve been on the horn with the examiner in Atlanta.”

“Already?” Reed’s exhaustion dissipated.

“As I said, preliminary. Very preliminary, but we were told to put a rush on it. We already called Lumpkin County. But I thought you’d like to hear what we’ve got.”

“What is it?”

“We don’t know too much. Yet. The unidentified woman looks like she had a heart attack. We haven’t come up with anything that suggests homicide, although if she was originally stuffed in that box and buried alive, she could have had a coronary. We’re still checking but decomposition has set in and from the state of it, we’re thinking she’s been dead close to ten weeks.”

Reed was taking notes. Listening.

“The other woman is easier.”

Reed’s gut tightened.

“Cause of death for the more recent victim, the one identified as Barbara Jean Marx, was probably asphyxiation, but we’re still checking her blood and body for other wounds. Nothing’s come up as yet. She probably just suffocated in that box. Rigor indicates she was dead less than twenty-four hours. The body wasn’t moved, which is consistent with her dying in the coffin. No visible wounds, no blood aside from scrapes on her fingers from trying to claw her way out. One tattoo of a rose climbing up her spine.”

Reed remembered. Had traced the body art with his fingers. Jesus.

“She has a few bruises as well—we’re checking those out. It’s still too early to tell if there was a struggle. We’re looking at what she had under her fingernails, but as I said, no visible wounds.” The ME hesitated, but Reed sensed there was something more.

“Anything else?”

“Yeah. There’s something I thought you should know about the Marx woman.”

“I’m listening.” Reed sensed bad news was coming. Real bad. His skin tightened over his muscles and his fingers clenched around the receiver.

“She was pregnant.”

Reed sucked in a breath. “Pregnant?”
No!

“Eleven, maybe twelve weeks along.”

Reed didn’t move. His breath stopped for a heartbeat.

“Could give you a motive.”

“Uh-huh,” he forced out, his pulse pounding in his brain. Bobbi? Pregnant?
Three months
pregnant? All the spit dried in his mouth. He remembered her in the hotel room on the island. Gauzy curtains fluttering on a breeze that smelled of the ocean. Her tousled dark hair, upturned nose, eyes smoldering with desire. “Was it good for you,” she’d cooed, her body still glistening with sweat. “Cuz, honey, if it wasn’t, we can try again.” She’d nibbled at his ear. Ever playful and blatantly sexual. She’d gotten to him. It had been early September…Labor Day weekend. He’d been able to look through the open window to the bay where sailboats skimmed the smooth water, their sails brilliant against an incredibly blue sky.

“We’ll x-ray the bodies and open ’em up while the lab work’s being done,” St. Claire was saying, cutting into the memory. “And we’ll try to get an ID on the other body.”

“Good.” Reed was barely listening. “Send me the report.”

“Will do.” St. Claire hung up and Reed dropped the receiver in its cradle. He swung his head around to look out the window where a street lamp glowed eerily and he noticed rain had begun to fall. The street glistened as a dark figure—little more than a shadow—darted across the street.

He ran a hand over his eyes and the shadow was gone. Maybe it had been his imagination. Or just someone outrunning the rain that was beginning to fall in fat drops. Damn it all, there was a good chance that Bobbi Marx’s unborn baby was his. Some sick son of a bitch had not only killed Bobbi, but the fetus as well.

Why?

Who?

Was she dead because of the pregnancy, or was that an accident?

Two in one, one and two.

Two in one
—Holy Jesus, is that what the killer meant? He’d killed two in one? The baby and Bobbi. Had the bastard
known
she was pregnant? Reed’s jaw clamped so hard it ached.

He glanced at the digital display on his watch. Red numbers glowed on his wrist.

Tick tock, on goes the clock.

A clue. It had to be. They were racing against time…and the rest…

One, two, the first few. Hear them cry, listen to them die.

The sick bastard had to be indicating the victims. That these two were only the first…the few…how many more? Would he know them?

Sick inside, he realized that this was a taunt, probably written while Bobbi was alive. The murderer had been proud, cocky. Wanted to show off. Reed wondered if there had been time to rescue Bobbi from that hellish death if Reed had only been smarter.

There was no way…he’d received the letter and she’d already been buried alive. His fists clenched impotently. The letter had been addressed to him. Whatever was happening, it was personal. Between the killer and him.

Suddenly, Reed needed a drink. A stiff one.

Two in one, one and two.

What the hell did that mean?

Whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

CHAPTER 5

Reed hadn’t answered her calls.

Nikki had left three voice mail messages in the span of four days at the police station. Detective Pierce Reed hadn’t seen fit to call her back. She’d gotten nothing. She’d even E-mailed, to no avail. The man was avoiding her, she decided as she finished her coffee and threw the dregs down her kitchen sink.

Things weren’t much better in Dahlonega. She’d driven back there, snooped around, talked to a sheriff who just plain stonewalled her and returned to Savannah with not much more than she’d started with. She’d figured that there was something important up by Blood Mountain, that Reed’s roots were the reason he’d been called up there to the killing ground…but so far, she’d been disappointed.

Her only consolation was that Norm Metzger, who had been rapid to be up in Lumpkin County, had come back pretty much empty-handed as well.

“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” she’d confided to Jennings as she dressed. The cat was curled in the folds of her duvet while the seldom-used heater rumbled noisily, vainly attempting to warm the cold morning air that had seeped through the old windows of her apartment. Shivering, Nikki pulled on a black skirt and khaki sweater, then stepped into suede boots. She topped the outfit off with a suede jacket and decided she looked as good as she was going to. “If Mohammed won’t come to the mountain,” she said to the cat, “then the mountain will come…I guess I’m using every one of the old adages today. Booorrring, right?”

Jennings didn’t seem to notice or care. He leapt off the four-poster and trotted, tail high, to his food dish in the kitchen.

“You know, a compliment or two wouldn’t hurt,” she admonished as she added some dry kiblets and a forkful of bargain brand canned food into his dish. The concoction smelled as bad as it looked but Jennings, verging on obese, relished it and ate noisily.

Nikki packed her laptop and purse, then wrapped a scarf around her neck. “No time to waste,” she muttered to the cat. “Opportunity knocks once at one man’s, or woman’s, door.” Hiking the strap of her computer over her shoulder, she said, “That’s another little pearl of wisdom my dad used to say all the time.”

The cat ignored her.

“Well, I believe it. Tom Fink isn’t known for his patience. If I can nail this story, then watch out. I’ll be up for a raise and you and I will tell old Fink to shove it. We’ll be moving to a big city with a major market.” She reached down and patted Jennings’s tawny head. “How would you like to move to New York? No? Dallas? Hmmm, what about L.A.? You know, I can see you on Sunset Boulevard. We’ll get a convertible and expensive shades and…” She glanced at her watch and realized she was stalling. “…and I gotta go.”

She was out the door and stepping into the wet morning before she could second-guess what she was about to do. It was still dark outside, but the moon, thankfully, was obscured, so she didn’t have to rearrange her body clock and remind herself it really was morning. The steps were slippery as she hurried down two flights to the fenced yard. No other windows in the apartment house showed any hint of illumination through their pulled shades. The other tenants seemed to realize that five-thirty in the morning was really the dead of night.

But then, the other tenants weren’t chasing Pierce Reed.

Probably because they’re sane.

She was tired, had been up half the night searching for information on Reed, including checking all public records. She’d discovered that he wasn’t married and never had been, and she knew about his trouble during his tenure at the SFPD. He’d had a steady girlfriend, but she’d ended up marrying someone else after the botched case.

Reed had returned to Savannah, the city where he’d started with the police force nearly fifteen years earlier.

Nikki hadn’t learned much more, but she’d only started scratching the surface. Sooner or later she’d figure out what made the elusive detective tick. She unlocked her hatchback and slid inside.

Her little car coughed and rattled before starting, but finally fired. Nikki sped out of the parking lot and drove the few blocks to Reed’s apartment building, another ancient home cut into smaller living units.

His El Dorado, a Cadillac nearly old enough to be considered a classic and beat up enough to ensure it never would be, was sitting in its usual space. Good. Nikki had been by before. During the Montgomery case when she was chasing the story, she’d cruised by. She’d even gone so far as to figure out which unit was Reed’s, though she’d never had the guts to knock on his door. Until today.

Sure enough, there was a light glowing through what she’d surmised was Reed’s frosted-glass bathroom window. Either he slept with a nightlight, or the detective was up and about, soon to start his day.

Circling the block, she found a parking space across an alley and pulled in. Her heart hammered at her own boldness—she’d never accosted a police officer in his home before. She had little doubt of Reed’s reaction—he’d be furious, probably. So what good would that do? Her fingers tapped nervously on the steering wheel as she waited, listening to the radio and the police band, her ears pricked for any information about the grave found in northern Georgia. She didn’t want to piss Reed off; she just needed information. A few other lights snapped on in the apartment building and within twenty minutes Reed appeared, his dark hair wet and pushed away from his face, a white shirt crisp beneath a sport coat as he crossed the small parking lot. Tall and lanky, with a jaw square enough to befit a Hollywood stunt man, he tossed a briefcase into the backseat of his boat of a car, slipped behind the wheel and eased the El Dorado out of its spot.