She'll Never Tell

by Hunter Morgan

"I'll trade you. You let me go to the concert, and I'll redo the week's restriction." A sense of desperation cracked in the teen's voice. "I'll give you a full week and an extra day."

  Claire got up, taking her empty glass to the sink. This was obviously very important to Ashley, but at fifteen she just wasn't sure her daughter was mature enough to go so far for a night of entertainment, especially with a guy and one called Chain at that. Claire hated being a hard ass, but her gut instinct told her that her fifteen-year-old daughter didn't belong in a sleazy nightclub with a bunch of kids dressed in psycho funeral attire.

  She came back around the kitchen counter. Ashley was still planted between the family room and the hallway. "No, Ash. You can't go."

  Her daughter looked away, tears clouding her eyes. "I'll go anyway."

  "You pull a stunt like that and you'll be on restriction for a month. Two months." Claire pointed at her, something she had sworn as a teen that she would never do to her own child. Here she was, doing it anyway. "You know, your dad is making noise about you going to Utah to live with him. He thinks you'd get a better education."

  "What? At that church school Rochelle teaches at?" she sneered.

  Claire knew how angry Ashley was that her father had remarried and now had two more daughters. Daughters that, to Ashley, had to seem more important than she was to him.

  "Ashley—" The phone rang, interrupting Claire.

  Ashley dove for the cordless phone on the coffee table. "Drummond residence." She paused. She was obviously disappointed that it wasn't for her. She held the phone out. "For you," she said, not making eye contact. "Work."

  "Chief Drummond," Claire answered, getting a little rush of adrenaline. Marsh had the shift. This was the call she'd been dreading.

  "I'm sorry to ring you at home on your night off, Chief," he said grimly, "but I think you need to be here."

  Their conversation lasted less than a minute. Claire hung up the phone, tossed it on the counter, and hurried down the hallway. She didn't want to take the time to get dressed in her uniform. She stepped out of her shorts, grabbing a pair of jeans out of the bottom drawer of her dresser. "Ashley!"

  Claire hopped on one bare foot, then the other, pulling up her jeans. She grabbed the badge in a leather case, issued for these circumstances. "Ashley."

  "I'm coming," her daughter shouted from down the hall. "Sheesh!" She stuck her head through the doorway.

  Claire crouched in front of her closet to spin the lock on the safe where she kept her sidearm. It was a Cougar, a Beretta subcompact. A gift from her father the day she was sworn in as police chief of Albany Beach. "I have to go to a scene." The safe door clicked open. She glanced at her daughter as she grabbed the cool metal of the pistol grip, unsure of what to do about Ashley. Obviously she couldn't take her daughter. She could drop her off with the grandparents, but that would take more time. And she was fifteen. Old enough to watch other people's children.

  Ashley waited.

  "I might be gone a while."

  Still no response.

  "When I go out the door, I want you to—"

  "Lock it behind you, including the deadbolt, and set the security alarm," Ashley quoted from rote memory.

  "Exactly." Slinging her gun belt over one shoulder, Claire grabbed her sneakers off the floor and hurried past Ashley. As she did, she reached up to stroke her cheek. Despite the dyed hair and black eyeliner, she still had the smoothest skin. Still smelled the same as she had when she'd been a baby.

  Ashley followed her mother down the hall. "Hey, what's up?"

  Claire shook her head. She didn't want to say until she was sure. Right now a thousand thoughts were flying through her head. None complete. "I'll call you when I'm on my way home, but if you want to go to sleep before I get back, that's fine. I've got my keys."

  In the kitchen, Claire strapped on her holster, checked her sidearm's safety, and wiggled one foot into a sneaker without taking the time to untie it. "You'll be okay?"

  "I'll be fine," Ashley answered, sounding amazingly the way she had pre-Goth.

  "Good." Claire stepped into the other sneaker, forcing a smile. "I'll be back as soon as I can."

  Ashley let her out the front door into the dark yard. The security light clicked on as she crossed the driveway to her police cruiser and a lucent vapor glow illuminated the yard.

  "Be careful, Mom," Ashley called.

  Claire got into the car, smiling bittersweetly as she watched her daughter step back into the house and close the door safely behind her. It was nice to know Ashley still cared about her, even if it was just a little.

  Chapter 7

  Claire pulled up to a familiar scene that she never got used to and hoped she never would. Eerie blue flashing lights radiating from police cars. The outline of an ambulance parked crookedly alongside the road, an ominous gray ghost in the darkness.

  She parked the cruiser, cut the engine and, gripping the steering wheel, took a deep breath. Her heart was pounding in her chest, and her fingers were sticky with sweat. All the way here, she'd been praying this wasn't what it sounded like. But deep in the pit of her stomach, she already knew it was. On some level, she had known since the young woman disappeared almost two days ago.

  A tap on the window startled Claire.

  "Chief."

  Glancing at Sergeant Marsh through the glass, she swallowed her fear. She was the chief of police in this town. Everyone looked up to her. They took her lead. She had to stay calm and do her job. If she needed to fall apart, she could do it later, privately.

  The uniformed officer stepped back to allow her to climb out of the car.

  "Marsh." She nodded.

  "I hated to call you in, Chief," he apologized. He still looked like a Marine, with his buzzed gray hair, even in the tan and green Albany Beach police uniform.

  "You made the right call." She did her best to remove every trace of emotion from her voice. "Who was first on the scene?" Her hand slid instinctively to her side-arm on her hip, and she then ducked under the yellow crime scene tape that blocked off the wide alley. She wondered absently where her boys had found it. It was rarely needed in a quiet resort town like this, and they had already used a roll with Patti's murder.

  "McCormick."

  She halted, looking back at Marsh. "Again? He was first on the scene with the Lome girl."

  He shrugged. "His bad luck. He was working overtime." He hesitated, then seemed to become concerned that he was in trouble. "McCormick said when he came on shift that you okayed the extra hours."

  She started down the alley again, walking along the back of the cement block restaurant, trying to take in the crime scene as it unfolded in front of her. She was surrounded by confusion, which made it hard to focus. Lights flashing, cops, firemen, emergency medical technicians mulling around, talking quietly. She heard the station's only canine, Gus, barking wildly from the back of a unit. The stench of garbage assailed her nostrils. Seafood place. All summer, the garbage was picked up every morning; it still stank. But she had to look beyond the distractions and see the alley the way the killer had seen it. Recognize any evidence he might have left behind.

  She walked up to McCormick, who had his back to her; she couldn't miss his buffed profile accentuated by the uniform. She placed her hand on his shoulder. "You okay, Ryan?" she asked quietly. She didn't want to embarrass him in front of the other officers, but he was her responsibility, too. Finding the bodies of two young women in two weeks couldn't be easy for anyone, not even a tough guy like McCormick.

  He was stoic. "I'm fine."

  "You were riding alone?"

  He nodded.

  Claire preferred that even her more experienced officers rode with a partner, but there was never quite enough money to go around and so that wasn't always possible. She glanced in the direction of the dumpster. One of her only two detectives on the force, Robinson, took a picture, and the flash illuminated, for just a second, a body lying on the black pavement. Claire caught a glimpse of
a blue T-shirt and bare midriff where it had ridden up on the body. She focused on McCormick again, knowing she had to ask the question that had been burning in her mind since she got the call twenty minutes ago. "Give me your gut reaction. Same guy?"

  "Same guy," he whispered. Now he sounded a little spooked.

  She rubbed his arm, feeling hard the ripple of his biceps through his long-sleeved uniform shirt. It was no wonder he was popular with the ladies in town. "Who called it in?"

  "Dishwashers." He pointed to two scruffy, long-haired, college-age boys standing in a lit doorway that obviously led to the restaurant's kitchen. Both were wearing dirty white aprons. Both looked scared to death.

  "They just walked out of here, and there she was?"

  He nodded. "That's what they're saying."

  "And when was the last time someone was in the alley?" She looked beyond the dumpster into the darkness, then in the direction she'd just come. She raised her hand to shield her eyes. Someone had pulled one of the police cars closer, flipping on the headlights. It gave them more light, but the high beams were almost blinding.

  "Maybe an hour earlier. Another kid made a dumpster run. Said he tossed four Hefties in. She wasn't there, then. He swears it. And I checked—looks like four fresh bags of garbage in black bags on top."

  "What time was that?"

  "Between nine-thirty and ten. The call came into the station at eleven-ten. I arrived on the scene at eleven-fourteen and immediately called for backup."

  She nodded. "Get the kids' names, phone numbers, addresses, and send them home."

  "You don't want to talk to them?" he called after her.

  She had already walked away. "I think they've been through enough tonight, don't you?"

  Leaving McCormick behind, Claire approached the rectangular industrial-sized dumpster. One of her officers had found a battery-powered lamp like the kind she and her dad used to take camping when she was a kid. The officer clicked it on, and white light spilled across the pavement and the woman's body.

  Claire swallowed the bitter bile that rose in her throat. Fought the wave of dizziness. "You bastard," she whispered.

  She walked slowly around the body, taking in every detail, comparing it to Patti Lome's crime scene in her head. Next to a trash receptacle. Body simply dumped with no care taken to "arrange" the victim. It was obvious what the killer thought of these two women. Nothing but trash. "Anyone touch anything?"

  "Patrolman McCormick and then the paramedics checked for pulse, but nothing else," someone told her.

  She snapped on a pair of latex gloves she fished out of her pocket and crouched beside the dumpster to get a better look at the girl's deathly pale face. She, too, had obviously been bled. She appeared painfully thin, her skin nearly translucent. Wrists were slashed again... no, just one. She leaned closer and caught a faint whiff of perfume that startled her. You just didn't expect a dead woman to smell good. The scent was subtle, flowery. Claire recognized it as a designer fragrance from a sample she'd picked up in one of her rare trips to a department store.

  Claire felt her body tremble, and she laid her hand carefully on the pavement to steady herself. After a moment, she began her initial inspection again. One wrist slashed multiple times, with dried and congealed blood on the forearm; no puddle of blood beneath her.

  "You catch the ankle?" a voice questioned from behind her. It was one of the county's emergency medical technicians, Kevin James. Early to mid-thirties. Nice looking. Friendly. Knew his stuff.

  Claire's gaze shifted to a slender leg and saw a slash mark similar to the one on the victim's wrist. "Cut?" she asked.

  "Looks like it." Kevin nodded in the direction of the body. "What do you think he's doing?" He looked away, then back at Claire. "Experimenting?"

  Still crouching, she inched along the body to get a better look at the ankle. No blood puddle here, either.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, thinking. So if the blood wasn't here, where was it? What was he doing with it?

  Claire opened her eyes. "I need an evidence kit," she ordered to no one in particular. She didn't care who got it for her, so long as they did it now.

  While she waited, she stepped out of the ring of light and pulled her cell phone from the waistband of her jeans. She punched in the familiar numbers.

  "Mom?"

  Claire hadn't realized she had been holding her breath until she released it. "Where are you?"

  "In bed," Ashley answered incredulously. "Why?"

  "I need you to get up," Claire whispered.

  "What?"

  Claire glanced at the police milling around April Provost's body. Someone had set the evidence kit that looked like a plastic tackle box near the feet of the dead woman.Extra latex gloves, like the ones she wore now, lay on top, only they were blue.

  "Ashley, honey, listen to me," Claire whispered harshly into the phone. "I need you to get up and check every window. Every door." She took another rattling breath, trying to calm her pounding heart. "Be sure they're locked."

  "Mom—"

  "Just do what I say for once and don't argue with me, damn it!"

  "All right. All right. I'm going."

  "Good. That's good," Claire said more calmly. "Check all the doors and windows and then recheck the security alarm. Be sure it's set, all zones."

  "Mom, are you all right?"

  "I'm fine."

  "Chief Drummond," someone called. "A newspaper reporter is here. You want to handle it?"

  "How do they find out so quickly?" she barked. "We haven't even identified the victim yet." Then into the phone. "Ashley, I have to go. I'll probably be gone all night. You stay put until I get there. I don't care if it takes me two days, you do not leave the house."

  "Okay, okay," Ashley breathed.

  "'Night, baby. I love you." Claire hung up the phone and stepped into the bright light. "Tell the reporter to go home. We'll release a statement in the morning, once the body has been identified and next of kin have been notified," she ordered. "Now let's get this evidence collected and get this poor girl off the street."

  * * *

  "There you are."Jake slid onto the bench seat across from Marcy. It was Monday, noon. "I saw the car, so I knew you were here," he said. "I just didn't see you all the way back here when I came in."

  She smiled, surprised that she was so genuinely pleased to see him. "I ordered iced teas." She looked around at the diner filled with people, locals and tourists. Everyone seemed to be talking at once, the diner buzzing like a beehive. "The place is really hopping today. Loretta must be thrilled with all the business."

  "Pulling her hair, more likely. I still don't think she's replaced Patti yet, so she's short a waitress." Jake folded his hands. "How are you?"

  She nodded. "Pretty good. A little shaken like everyone else, I suppose. Who would have thought anything like this could happen here?"

  He grimaced. "You saw it on the morning news?"

  "I couldn't believe they were talking about our town. Another woman killed, this one thrown in an alley? I was just at that restaurant Friday night."

  "You mean The Seahorse?" he asked sharply.

  The minute Marcy said it, she'd known she'd made a mistake. Now she was caught. She didn't know what to say.

  "Marcy, I already know you were there with some guy."

  She glanced up, unsure how to read his tone of voice.

  "Now don't be angry," he went on, "but—"

  "Phoebe told you." She scowled and reached for a pack of sweetener from a Styrofoam coffee cup at the end of the table. "When she was informing on me, did she bother to tell you that it was a business dinner? He's a real estate agent?"

  "Real estate? You're not selling our house without discussing it with me."

  "I'm not selling the house. You think I'm nuts?" She glanced up. "Don't answer that until I tell you why I wanted to talk to you. Why I'm talking to the real estate agent. But first, I want to know what you think about the murder." She stirred her iced
tea and licked the spoon. "You think what they were saying on the news is true? A serial killer here in little old Albany Beach?"

  "I'll tell you what I think," Ralph cut in.

  Marcy glanced up to see the dishwasher carrying an order pad, a pencil tucked behind his ear. He was wearing a white apron stained with the morning's dirty breakfast dishes, a big splotch of ketchup from someone's scrambled eggs across his belly. It made her think of blood.

  "A probe," Ralph declared in a conspiratorial whisper. "That's what killed that lady walking her dog. A probe from another planet in another solar system sent here to do experiments on us. They been sendin' them down for years. Government covers it all up, though, lickety split. Don't want us to know the truth."

  Marcy looked at Jake across the table and knew he was hearing The XFiles tune in his head, the same as she was.

  "So what can I get you for?" Ralph asked, sliding his pencil from his ear.

  Jake gave a little laugh. "You been promoted?"

  "Nah. Dishes piled up to the ceiling in back. Just helpin' Loretta out. She thinks she hired a new girl, but she won't start 'til tomorrow."

  "Small chef salad," Marcy ordered. "And some crackers."

  "A turkey club for me."

  "You got it."

  Marcy wrinkled her nose as Ralph walked away. "Did you ever notice that sometimes he smells like—"

  "Cough syrup," Jake finished for her. "I guess he drinks it."

  She sipped her tea, watching him shuffle away. "That or bathes in it."

  Jake glanced in Ralph's direction and chuckled. "Oh, I don't think he's bathing all that often." He looked back at her. "So, you really want to know what I think about this dead woman?"

  She met his gaze. "What do you think?"

  "That we need to wait until the police complete their investigation to draw any conclusions. There's no need to panic."

  "I'm not panicking. I just wondered what you thought. No murders in Albany beach in more than fifty years and now two in the same month? I mean, obviously you have an opinion. Everyone does."

  "Again, I think we just sit tight and don't jump to conclusions." Jake tented his hands. "I have confidence that Chief Drummond will solve these crimes and the mystery surrounding them."