Written in Blood Volume 4
Blood Cries, Blood Oath, and Blood Work, 3 complete John Jordan Mystery novels
Michael Lister
Pulpwood Press
Copyright © 2013 by Michael Lister
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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(Remington James Novels)
Double Exposure
(includes intro by Michael Connelly)
Separation Anxiety
Blood Shot
(John Jordan Novels)
Power in the Blood
Blood of the Lamb
Flesh and Blood
(Special Introduction by Margaret Coel)
The Body and the Blood
Double Exposure
Blood Sacrifice
Rivers to Blood
Burnt Offerings
Innocent Blood
(Special Introduction by Michael Connelly)
Separation Anxiety
Blood Money Blood Moon
Thunder Beach
Blood Cries
A Certain Retribution
Blood Oath
Blood Work
Cold Blood
Blood Betrayal
Blood Shot
Blood Ties
Blood Stone
Blood Trail
(Jimmy “Soldier” Riley Novels)
The Big Goodbye
The Big Beyond
The Big Hello
The Big Bout
The Big Blast
In a Spider’s Web (short story)
The Big Book of Noir
(Merrick McKnight / Reggie Summers Novels)
Thunder Beach
A Certain Retribution
Blood Oath
Blood Shot
(Sam Michaels / Daniel Davis Novels)
Burnt Offerings
Blood Oath
Cold Blood
Blood Shot
(Love Stories)
Carrie’s Gift
(Short Story Collections)
North Florida Noir
Florida Heat Wave
Delta Blues
Another Quiet Night in Desperation
(The Meaning Series)
Meaning Every Moment
The Meaning of Life in Movies
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Created with Vellum
Contents
How to read the John Jordan Blood Series
Blood Cries
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Blood Oath
Author’s Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Blood Work
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
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Also By The Author
How to read the John Jordan Blood Series
The Blood Series
This New York Times bestselling and award-winning series fea
tures a conflicted detective—a cop with ties to Atlanta who also works as a prison chaplain in Florida. He’s a man of mercy and justice, compassion, open-mindedness. He’s also a smart, relentless detective.
The John Jordan mystery series is character-driven and realistic—thoughtful mystery thrillers involving the hero’s journey of a good man trying to be even better, as he helps others along the way.
Like John Jordan, the author, Michael Lister, was a prison chaplain with the state of Florida before leaving to write full-time.
If you’re new to the John Jordan series, you can begin with any book, but we recommend one of these 3: Power in the Blood, Innocent Blood, or Blood Oath.
Power in the Blood, the first fiction the author ever wrote, was published over 20 years ago, and though it’s recommended, the books in the John Jordan series don’t have to be read in order.
All the books in the series are novels—mystery, thrillers, whodunits—except for the 3rd book in the series, Flesh and Blood, which is a collection of short stories featuring temporal and metaphysical mysteries. If you don’t care for short stories, feel free to skip Flesh and Blood and continue with the fourth novel The Body and the Blood.
If you decided to skip the short stories and continue on with the novels, we recommend that you read the short story “A Taint in the Blood” in the book Flesh and Blood to find out what happened to Laura Matthers from Power in the Blood.
The 7th book in the series, Innocent Blood, is a prequel going back to John’s very first investigation. Though the 7th in the series, it can be read 1st or 7th since it’s a prequel.
The 10th book in the series, Blood Cries, is the second in the “Atlanta Years” series within a series following the 7th book Innocent Blood. It can be read 2nd or 10th.
The 17th book in the seres, Blood Stone, is the 3rd book in the “Atlanta Years” series within the series following the 10th book Blood Cries. It can be read 3rd or 17th.
John Jordan is an ex-cop in books 1-10, but once again carries a gun and a badge beginning with book 11, Blood Oath.
All of the John Jordan novels are available in high quality hardback, paperback, ebook, and audio editions.
Interspersed throughout the “Blood” books there are other related books that are part of the John Jordan universe. These books are extremely important to the series and provide essential backstory for characters, connections, and locations of series regulars. Most of all they answer the questions most readers want to know. They include Double Exposure, Burnt Offerings, Separation Anxiety, Thunder Beach, and A Certain Retribution. These are “Blood Series” books without being John Jordan Mysteries.
We hope you will enjoy all the books in the John Jordan series and eagerly await each new entry.
Be sure to join Michael Lister's Readers' Group for news, updates, and special deals on the John Jordan series.
Blood Cries
a John Jordan Mystery, Book 10
by Michael Lister
1
From the summer of ’79 until the spring of ’81, a serial killer stalked the African-American children of the city of Atlanta.
The Atlanta Child Murders, as they came to be known, was a two-year nightmare the city couldn’t wake itself up from.
During this terrible reign of terror, twenty-eight children, adolescents, and adults were murdered.
It began on July 21, 1979, when Edward Hope Smith went missing, and ended on May 24, 1981, when the body of twenty-seven-year-old Nathaniel Cater was fished from the Chattahoochee River.
Between these two murders, some twenty-six others were committed, as many as one a week near the end.
Of course, these weren’t the only murder victims in Atlanta during the time. They weren’t even the only black children to be murdered. They were the only ones who made it onto the task force’s ill-advised and incomplete list.
Wayne Bertram Williams, a twenty-three-year-old music promoter, was arrested on June 21, 1981.
Just a few short months before—during a family trip to Atlanta over the last weekend of November in 1980—I had come face-to-face with Williams in the arcade of the Omni Hotel.
He was there passing out his flyers, and I had intervened when I saw him harassing one of the other kids.
I had been obsessed with him and the case ever since.
On February 27, 1982, he was convicted of the murders of Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy Payne, two of only a few adults on the list.
He was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences.
Labeled the Atlanta Child Murderer, Williams was never charged with, tried for, or convicted of killing a single child—an irony and injustice I had never been able to get over.
Following his trial, officials claimed Williams could be linked to some twenty-five of the twenty-eight names on the list through trace evidence—specifically, green trilobal carpet fibers found in Williams’s bedroom and on the victims—and closed those cases.
Those same officials claimed the murders stopped.
Officials stopped counting them.
Reporters stopped reporting them.
The world stopped watching.
The list stopped.
The murders did not.
And like Abel of old, their blood cries out—tortured, mournful, inconsolable cries I couldn’t help but hear, couldn’t help but be haunted by.
2
I was sitting on an uncomfortable barstool in a dive on Memorial Drive, trying to find the sweet spot.
It was early in November of ’86, less than a month since I had buried Jordan and Martin, and some four years after Wayne Williams was convicted.
The storefront bar was named Scarlet’s and it was in the end of a tin-building strip mall with a cluttered video store, a passable pizza place, and a consignment shop with a meager amount of merchandise.
The bartender-owner was a middle-aged lesbian lush named Margaret.
She had of late become one of my closest companions and the nearest thing to a mother I had in Atlanta.
“What’s your sweet spot?” I asked.
“I’m old and dried up,” she said. “Got no sweet spot no more. But my niece . . .”
Always trying to set me up with her niece—for Margaret, all roads led to Susan Daniels. But she was wasting her breath. I wasn’t interested in Susan or anyone else.
A thin forty-something woman with shoulder-length wavy brown hair and big blue eyes, Margaret looked like a former tennis pro. Nothing about her looked old or dried up.
I was only interested in finding my sweet spot in, at, or near the bottom of my next glass—the one that would cause the specters of Jordan Moore and Martin Fisher to fade.
“I didn’t say G-spot. I said sweet spot.”
I could hear the slightest of slurs in the words tumbling out of my mouth a little too freely. But even if I hadn’t, I could tell I was drunk by the way I felt my center wasn’t holding.
That thought led to a line or two of unbidden verse. Turning and turning in the widening gyre . . . Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
“Things fall apart,” I said.
“Never a truer statement uttered,” she said.
“‘Anarchy is loosed upon the world,’” I said. “‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere . . . The ceremony of innocence is drowned.’”
Meeting Jordan the first time made its way into my mind.
I’m Jordan Moore, she said, extending her small, cold hand.
I smiled. Really? I’m John Jordan.
She smiled back but looked a bit embarrassed, her face and neck blushing crimson.
“Is that biblical?” Margaret asked.
“Might as well be,” I said. “Yeats.”
Blood Cries; Blood Oath; Blood Work Page 1
