Serendipity

by Lisa Clark O'Neill

  “I’m sorry, I –”

  “No. No.” She laid her own hand over his. “Don’t apologize.”

  “It’s just, uh…” He stabbed his fingers through his hair, looked away. “The night I got the head injury, I was attacked. Pistol whipped, it looked like. Abducted, driven somewhere.”

  When he saw her hand tremble up to her mouth, he turned it over, kissed her palm. “I’m okay. I know it sounds frightening, but I’m okay.”

  Ava closed her eyes against the tears that threatened.

  Was this it? Dear God, had they somehow traced Jordan’s assault to her uncle?

  “I’m okay,” he repeated softly. “But there’s a woman I know. A woman I dated. And that night we bumped into each other after a symposium. We argued. She still wasn’t over the fact that we were no longer together. And…”

  He trailed off, and Ava saw his throat work. And felt her own gorge start to rise.

  “She must have followed me to my car, stumbled upon what was happening.”

  No. No. Please don’t let him say it…

  “She’s been missing since that night. But that was the detective. On the phone. The detective in charge of the investigation. It seems a construction crew just broke ground for a new development across the river. They, um, dug up a body that they’ve tentatively identified as Leslie. That was her name. Leslie Fitzsimmons.”

  Stunned, heartsick, Ava lowered herself to the wall.

  Her uncle’s men had killed that poor woman. Of that, she had no doubt. Which meant that she no longer just had firsthand knowledge of Jordan’s assault, but now of a murder as well. She had to tell him. Somehow, she had to tell him.

  “They’re expecting me at the scene.”

  “Jordan.” She lifted her eyes, felt the film of tears she had no right to. Why hadn’t she spoken up before now? For all her talk of backbone, she was a coward. “I’m so sorry –”

  “Shh.” Squatting down, Jordan brushed at the tear that spilled over. “Don’t cry for me, sweetheart. But… I do have a favor to ask. Two favors, actually.”

  “Sure.” She’d do anything. Anything to take away this guilt.

  “It’s likely to be a long night, and I was wondering if you’d be willing to check on Finn. Clay’s gone back to Virginia, so I’m short an extra dog walker.”

  “Of course.”

  “Thanks. And more importantly, can you promise me to be careful? I’m not going to press, just now, but we both know there’s more happening than what you’re telling me. This thing with Leslie – it’s tearing me up, Ava, and she hadn’t really meant anything to me for a while. If something happened to you –”

  “I’ll be careful.” She couldn’t let him finish that thought. He was right. There was so much he didn’t know, so much she needed to tell him. But she was afraid that once she had, she wouldn’t mean anything to him, either.

  “Good.” He slipped a key off his ring, passed it over. “My front door. You can just leave it under the big pot of Easter lilies when you’re finished.”

  With a final kiss, Ava watched him walk off into the gathering darkness.

  And sat there for long minutes after, listening to her heart break.

  THE billboard for Pine Bluff advertised it, in a nutshell, as unspoiled Lowcountry beauty meets upscale human development. Of course, in Jordan’s experience, humans tended to spoil things no matter how upscale they might be.

  He looked at the artist’s rendering of a smiling father pushing a smiling young boy on a tire swing, overlooking pristine marshland and ancient maritime forest, while a smiling mother stood drinking a glass of lemonade – fresh squeezed, no doubt – on the wide, covered veranda of an enormous wood frame house.

  In reality, the would-be development was a stretch of old cow pasture shaded by water oaks and loblolly pines, and dotted with giant earthmovers instead of houses. The marsh was back there somewhere, he was sure. Though this particular stretch tended to be smelly due to the nearly defunct paper mill across the river.

  Package it right, Jordan mused, and people would buy any damn thing.

  Turning into the gravel lane, he noted the billboard was faded, as the downturn in the housing industry had put the whole thing on the skids for the past couple years. But apparently the company had found some new backing, and started making tentative moves toward clearing the land a couple days ago.

  Of course, all that activity had ground to a halt with the discovery of Leslie’s remains.

  And the others. It seemed Leslie wasn’t the only one to have been buried there.

  Sick at heart, Jordan parked in front of the construction trailer, and then picked his way over the carnage of churned earth and fallen trees left in the bulldozer’s wake. Roots speared up, dirty fingers, and ruts deep as a grave threatened to swallow a man who wasn’t careful.

  Jordan fought off the vertigo that threatened to pitch him into the nearest one.

  The air hung still and heavy, as if too shocked by the scene to move. But in the stillness, other things walked, and droned.

  Jordan swatted at the insect biting his neck and followed the sound of human activity.

  The smell of freshly turned earth mingled with the odor of diesel, the punch of brine drifting in from the marsh. And as he drew closer to the scene, the unmistakable insult of decay.

  Taking a moment – just one more – to steady himself, Jordan pushed down the guilt, the rage that wanted to empty his stomach. And walked toward the klieg lights and crime scene tape, knowing that he owed Leslie at least that much.

  A uniformed patrolman stopped his progress, but waved him on after he showed his ID. Jordan spotted Chip Coleman, round face grim, along with a contingent of county deputies, some South Carolina state boys and what looked to be two different crime scene teams. Jordan didn’t even have to hear any of the conversation to know what was taking place.

  There was a disagreement over jurisdiction.

  As Coleman was otherwise occupied, Jordan approached one of the crime scene techs whom he recognized from SCMPD. “Denise.” He greeted the woman. “What do we have?”

  “What we have is a bona fide mess. That guy over there,” she pointed to a short, potbellied man in mud-stained work boots and a John Deere hat, “is the one who uncovered the remains. Mass grave sort of deal, and the bulldozer really screwed things up by scattering bones like pickup sticks. But judging by the skull count, there appears to be four, all basically skeletal except for the one that’s causing most of the fuss. No positive ID on any of them as of yet, but there’s a tag from the symposium where that councilwoman was last seen still attached to the jacket on the…”

  Jordan saw the moment it sank in. Color stained her cheeks even as she rolled her dark eyes. “Give me an F for sensitivity. I’m sorry, Jordan. I’d forgotten you were… involved.”

  “It’s okay.” He squeezed her shoulder.

  “Anyhoo.” She sucked in an embarrassed breath and gestured with a gloved hand. “John Deere over there, after upchucking all over his Timberlands, dialed nine-one-one like a good, responsible citizen should. County deputy responded, realized something of this magnitude might call for state resources, so in comes SLED. But then our good, responsible citizen decided to stand on the shoulders of the capitalism that’s made our country great, and called the eight hundred number Ms. Fitzsimmons mother set up so that he could be sure to claim the reward.”

  Jordan’s own tricky stomach heaved. “Don’t tell me –”

  “Oh yeah.” Knowing where he was going with that, Denise nodded toward a patrol car parked at the edge of the trees. “Eugenia Fitzsimmons, present, accounted for, and currently detained. She was, well, I’ll just try for sensitive this time and say she wasn’t doin’ anyone any good with her presence.”

  “Shit.” He rubbed a hand over his face. Leslie’s mother had been quite vocal in her opinions of him recently, none of which had been good.

  “She don’t like you much, seems like.”

  Rega
rdless, Jordan resolved to express his condolences to the woman in person, as soon as the storm died down. “This sucks even worse than I imagined.”

  “’Bout to get worse.” Denise whistled low as a pair of figures emerged from the shadows behind the lights. “The councilwoman was transported across state lines, and that means the feds. Unless my eyesight is playing tricks on me, I believe that’s your brother.”

  Jordan turned to see Jesse, followed closely by fellow agent Brian Parker. Spying Jordan, Jesse waved Brian off to intercede in the growing battle between Detective Coleman and the South Carolinians, while he himself picked his way across the uneven ground.

  “Denise, if you’ll excuse me.” Jordan caught the look on his brother’s face, and figured they’d both be happier without an audience. “I need to speak with my brother.”

  He stepped around the bright yellow tape, raised a hand in greeting. And then stuffed it into his pocket, because he was desperately afraid it might shake. “Jesse. Fancy meeting you here.”

  But his brother wasn’t buying the casual tone. “You shouldn’t be. You shouldn’t be here, Jordan.”

  Feeling the impact of that like an uppercut, Jordan’s head snapped to the side. And he fought the urge to slap back at his brother, knowing Jesse had his best interests at heart.

  “I had to come.”

  “It’s not your fault. I don’t care what that old bat’s been saying, you know you did not cause this.”

  “I know. Jesse, look at me,” he said when his brother turned to scowl. “She lost her daughter. She’s been worried sick, now she’s grieving, and I’ve been the easiest target for both. It’s normal, it’s expected, and I’m not going to hold it against her. And I had to come. For myself as much as for Leslie. You know me. You know I couldn’t stay away.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” But affection softened the words. “Yeah, I know you.” Jesse pushed his glasses up and sighed. “Since I do, and since you’re here, I might as well pump you for information. I understand they’ve uncovered four separate sets of remains?”

  “That’s the way it looks.” Jordan scanned the raw and ragged patch of ground, eyes helplessly drawn toward a snatch of dirty red hair. “Apparently this is somebody’s own personal burial ground.”

  And if things had gone another way, Jordan realized that he might have been interred there. “What do you think we have here, Jesse? I mean Christ, another serial killer?”

  “Either that, or a professional dumping ground.”

  “Professional, as in, hit man?”

  “Could be.” And the implication of that stained the already fetid air. “We’ll get a forensic anthropologist in here to see if we can identify the other bodies. If we know who’s buried here we might get a better handle on why they’re here, who we need to be looking for in connection to their deaths. It…”

  When his brother’s voice broke Jordan’s gaze flashed to him in surprise.

  “Okay, I’m sorry, but I have to get this out. It could have been you,” Jesse said. “I know you realize that, too, and it goes without saying. But I just can’t get past the fact that I could have been called to this scene, and stood by as other people argued over who had the right to dig up your grave.”

  “Jesse –”

  “Give me a second. Give me a second so I don’t embarrass us both. Okay,” he said after he pinched the bridge of his nose. “Okay.” And the look he turned on Jordan was fierce. “I want you to be careful. I know you have a license to carry concealed, and I realize you know most of the self-defense tricks in the book. But you have to be vigilant, damn it. They already took you down once.” He glanced away, laid a hand on the butt of his weapon. “If you want, I can see about arranging some protection.”

  Jordan snorted, more to cover the sting of emotion than from offense. “What? A body guard? Give me a break, Jesse.”

  Jesse’s lips quirked. “You could always move back in with Mom and Dad until this is resolved.”

  “Mom is pretty damn scary.”

  The smile faded as fast as it had come. “All jokes aside, Jordan, I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” He looked, as Jordan had, at that snarl of red hair. “Just promise me you’ll keep your eyes open.”

  “Believe me,” Jordan assured his older brother. “I’ve had my eyes open since I woke up in that hospital bed.”

  The night stretched out, interminably at times, but more productively now that the Bureau had stepped in to iron out the dispute over jurisdiction. Leslie’s mother was escorted home, to everyone’s quiet relief. Evidence was collected. Hair, fibers, soil samples. A beer bottle and a couple of cigarette butts. There were no useable tire tread marks or footprints because first the heavy equipment and then the workers had compromised the scene.

  Jordan was able to identify the clothing that Leslie was wearing the night of the symposium.

  Other than that, other than the red hair, the nametag, positive identification would have to wait on dental records for comparison.

  Cause of death was undetermined pending the autopsy results. But judging from the amount of blood staining the top of her silk blouse, the delicate pink of her fitted jacket, Jordan concluded for himself that her throat had been cut.

  And his own throat squeezed shut with the knowledge.

  There were few clues to the identity of the other victims. But when a cut-crystal rosary was unearthed amidst the delicate bones that comprised a hand, Jordan’s disgust was overwhelming.

  The woman – for surely it had been a woman – must have been praying, maybe for mercy, when she’d been killed.

  By the time dawn stretched its fingers of pink across the sky, he was gritty-eyed with exhaustion. Wired from too much convenience store coffee, disillusioned with the world, Jordan sweated out his frustration by taking Finn for a beach run.

  Seagulls swooped and shrieked as the dog gave chase with delighted barks, and Jordan pushed himself, punished himself, until he doubled over on the Tybee sand. He dropped to his knees, not coincidentally, in front of the hotel where he’d spent a weekend with Leslie.

  It seemed right to have to struggle to breathe.

  He’d seen plenty of crime scenes, prosecuted some heinous cases. The darker side of human nature was nearly as familiar as his own hand.

  But this was the first time a violent crime had struck quite so close to home.

  Things may not have ended well between them, but he’d cared about Leslie once. Spent time with her. Shared meals, conversations, a bed.

  And they’d nearly shared the same fate.

  Jordan started giving more credence to his father’s theory. Anyone who could so brutally murder an innocent woman would have no reason to spare him. A third party surely had to be responsible for intervening.

  But why hadn’t they stepped in to help Leslie?

  Wrapping his arm around Finn’s neck, Jordan watched the sun rise over the water. Daybreak, he thought. A new start.

  He’d get justice for her, he promised himself, in a way he hadn’t been able to for the three murdered women.

  It may not be enough to ease all the guilt, but it was the best he could do with what he had.

  “SO handsome.” Ava stroked her fingers along his spine. “Yes, you are. Jack’s a handsome boy. Now shoo.”

  Ava nudged the cat aside and picked up her coffee. Gripped it with hands that shook. Too much caffeine, too much what the hell am I going to do?

  It had been all over the news, she thought as she stared blindly at the paperwork before her. Dead bodies, a mass grave. The speculation that Savannah had another serial killer on their hands, or that Elijah Fuller had worked with a partner.

  Theories, gossip, paranoia ran thicker than pine sap.

  She hadn’t seen Jordan. Nearly two days, she thought, as she sipped coffee she didn’t want, didn’t need. Nearly two days since they’d sat at the edge of a fountain, talking of gray areas in matters of law.

  Ava snorted. She was in one hell of a gray area, wasn’t she? />
  She could continue to go on, go along as she had been, compromising not only her own integrity but Jordan’s.

  She could tell him what she knew. And in all likelihood sacrifice her freedom, certainly her livelihood, maybe her life.

  But a woman – people, she corrected. There’d been more than one in that grave. – were dead.

  Was she to stand by, say nothing? What kind of coward did that make her?

  And the man she was involved with, in love with, maybe. A good man had nearly been killed.

  She couldn’t let it slide any longer, Ava decided, and sat her mug aside to rub her tired eyes. Whatever the cost. She picked up her pen, frowned down at the paperwork. Whatever the cost, she would do the right thing.

  The cat bumped his head against her hand as Ava signed her name on a check. “Cut it out.” She nudged him again. “If I don’t get these bills paid, we’ll be operating out of a cardboard box in the alley.”

  “You always did have trouble managing money.”

  The pen slipped out of her hand.

  Later, she would curse herself for that little slip in her composure, but for now she simply picked it back up, placed it carefully in its holder.

  And looked into the eyes of her uncle.

  Her eyes, she admitted, and the thought of it left her cold. She had Carlos’s eyes. But she used the chill to her advantage.

  “Actually, I’m very capable. It’s just more challenging to handle funds when you have to acquire and disperse them through legal means.”

  He laughed, low and smooth. And the sound of it scraped her nerves.

  He was so handsome, she thought. Slim, well-dressed. Just a touch of gray to distinguish his temples. He’d shaved the mustache he’d always worn since the last time she’d seen him, and the cleanness of it suited his face.

  The deadliest snakes were often beautiful.

  Thank God, she could only think. Thank God Katie had gone home for the evening.

  “Nice place you have,” he commented as he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, pulled out one of the black clove cigarettes Ava knew he hadn’t purchased legally.