Dan nodded as if he understood Lloyd’s cryptic command, scooted off the stool and shot out the door. Lloyd turned back to her, his eyes flat, bleak, his face pale. “I’ve got to go. Hell, I...Celeste.” He leaned over the counter. “Honey, don’t say anything. Bev just called. They found another body.” He gave her upper arm an affectionate squeeze, then left.
Another body. Her head spun. The room tilted and closed in on her. She tried to steady herself against the counter then searched the restaurant for a lifeline.
Will stood in the hallway leading to the back rooms. He darted over to her and clasped her hand in his. “Keep it together,” he whispered. “Just hold on until I can get you away from the crowd.”
She tried to nod, but violent images blurred her mind. When they reached the stock room, she fell into his arms and sobbed. “Oh God, I hoped I was wrong, that they were bad dreams, that they’d stop.” She hiccupped and wiped at her tears, then looked into her brother’s comforting green eyes, a part of her wishing they were John’s chocolate brown. “But the nightmares are real...they’re so real.”
“Shhh, you don’t know that. It’s probably the same guy John came here to look for.”
She froze in his arms. “Lloyd told you?”
“Hell yeah he did. I go to my sister’s house and see a strange guy there, and you won’t give me an explanation? Why didn’t you tell me about all of this?”
She pulled away and rested her hand on a shelf. “I didn’t want you to worry.”
“Is that all? Or are you lumping me in with Eden?”
Sending him a wry smile, she shrugged. “Since Mom died, you’ve made it clear you didn’t want to hear about—”
“No, since mom died you’ve been coddling me. Making sure I’m okay, Dad’s okay, and running yourself ragged over the diner. You’ve been keeping yourself too busy, worrying about everyone else, you’ve forgotten about you.”
“Not true, and this isn’t—”
“Celeste, I’m not like Eden or Dad. I’ve always believed in you and your gift. Dad believed in Mom’s, too, but didn’t want you to have it.” He shrugged. “For whatever reason. You could have come to me about this. I would have stayed at the house, looked after you. The fact I had to hear about your visions from Lloyd pisses me off. I thought we were closer than that.”
“We are, but you don’t understand. I don’t understand.” She shook her head. “God, I wish Mom was around to help guide me on this.”
He touched her shoulder. “I do, too. But she’s not. Lloyd filled me in on everything, and it sounds like it’s the same guy who killed those other women. Don’t jump to conclusions. And quit shutting me out,” he finished, giving her shoulder a squeeze.
Wishing they’d had this conversation before, because he was dead right, she hugged him, then nodded into his shoulder. “I won’t.” She held onto her brother for a few more moments, then pulled away. “Thanks for believing in me.”
“I always have, just like you’ve been there for me. Now let’s get you cleaned up. We’ve got a full house out there. I’ll even throw on an apron and pour coffee.”
She rolled her eyes. “My hero.”
His smile wavered. “No matter what happens, I’ll be here for you.”
She nodded and squeezed his hand. “Thanks, I needed to hear that.” Wiping her eyes she started for the door, then stopped. “Did Lloyd mention where they’d found the body?”
Will was already tying an apron around his waist when he turned to her. “Yeah, Bev said Stu and Glen found the body when they were harvesting their cranberry bog.”
Air whooshed from her lungs, and her knees gave way.
Little red balls floating in her nose and mouth...she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t...
“Celeste?” Will grabbed her before she hit the floor. “What is it?”
She couldn’t see her brother’s face, her vision distorted by tiny, red orbs of light.
Chapter 10
AS JOHN CLIMBED out of the sheriff’s cruiser a warm breeze drifted over him, carrying the tainted smell of death. Drawing deep breaths in through his mouth, which didn’t lessen the odor, he glanced at Roy. The sheriff wore a frown, and winced when the wind blew again, likely from not only the putrid odor, but the knowledge that he’d soon face its source.
The girl in the bog.
Plunking his state-issued hat on his head, Roy met him at the front of the cruiser. “That’s Glen and Stu over there.” He nodded to two men sitting in the grass approximately fifty feet from a gentle slope that John assumed led to the bog.
One of the men stared off into the clear sky, the sun reflecting off his bald head ringed with gray hair. His lips moved, but John doubted anything coherent was uttered as he wrung his hands and rocked with the mild breeze. The other man, stocky, maybe a few years younger, held a faded red bandana to his forehead, while keeping a hand on the older man’s shoulder.
Looking away from the two men, John focused on the landscape. He could only view the opposite shore, lined thickly with trees, pines mostly. A gentle ripple, caused by the westerly wind, moved along the water, but no cranberries were visible. “Where are the berries?” he asked.
“They’re along the edge here,” Roy said, and pointed. “You just can’t see them from where we’re standing.”
“I assumed the entire bog would be filled with them.”
“No, this lake runs into a few other smaller ones and they all connect to the Chippewa River. The cranberry vines grow along the shore. When it’s time to harvest them, Glen and Stu flood the area with the lake water using an irrigation system.”
“How deep?”
“That’s a question for Glen and Stu.”
John pushed off the cruiser. “Along with a few others. How well do you know these two?” he asked, as they walked toward the cranberry farmers.
“Pretty well. They’re good men. Both happily married with kids. About eight or nine years ago, the owner of this cranberry farm…” He motioned to the bog. “David Leland passed on. Glen and Stu had been working for him for years. They pooled their money together and bought it off Leland’s widow and have been running it since.”
When they were a few feet from the men, the one with the bandana rose, then moved toward them. “Roy, I...” He covered his mouth with the bandana, then looked away, a tear trickling down his tanned cheek.
The sheriff laid a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Glen, this is John Kain. He’s here to help us sort this out.”
Tucking the bandana in his back pocket, he offered his hand. “Glen Anderson, and this is Stu Clemens,” he said, and jerked his head toward the man still sitting on the grass.
John shook his hand. “Tell me how you found the body?”
“Well, I was running Denise—”
“Denise?”
“Sounds dumb, but that’s what we call our harvester. Anyway, as Denise churned through the bog, I caught something...you know, in my peripheral vision, and that’s when I saw the girl. I radioed Stu, and he called Bev.” He blew out a deep breath, withdrew the bandana from his back pocket and wiped it across his face again. “I never saw anything like this in all my years.” Tears welled in his eyes. “And I hope to God I never do again.”
Car doors slammed behind them. John turned as Dan and the Viking approached from their vehicles. Two other cruisers pulled in, skidding to a halt on the gravel. Jesse stepped out of one and Ed out of the other.
CSU would be arriving any minute, and while they’d done a decent job at the last dump site, he worried about the investigation aspect. Roy’s deputies weren’t homicide detectives, and as each man neared, all pale, all wearing an acute sense of dread on their faces, he wondered if he shouldn’t call Ian for help.
Roy turned to him. “If it’s okay with you, I’m going to have one of my men take their official statements, and let the others wait for CSU.”
John nodded. Maybe Roy was psychic, too, because he’d been about to suggest the same thing. That t
hought trigged another. “Do you get much traffic along this road here?” he asked Glen, pointing to the narrow two lane road. “Big rigs in particular”.
“No big rigs,” Glen said. “We use our own flatbed trucks to deliver our product. Besides, this road doesn’t lead to much. Mostly, we get kids heading out to the lake for some necking or whatever they do these days.”
Stu remained silent. He continued to sit on the grass, his focus on the woods surrounding the clearing that led to the bog.
John looked to the woods then, and couldn’t help but think of Celeste’s trance. How she’d spoken of the trees, a clearing, hitting something metal before the killer had ended the life of the woman she’d become during the trance. He swiveled and leveled his gaze on Denise. Could the harvester have been what she’d referred to?
“The sheriff would know better,” Glen continued, nodding in Roy’s direction. “He sends his men out here to make sure no one is gettin’ into trouble.”
“This is usually Jesse and Lloyd’s territory, sometimes Dan, or even Gary who I don’t think you’ve met,” Roy said. “Kids like to come down here. Drink a six pack or two, smoke weed, have sex.”
John removed his sunglasses, and tucked them in his pocket, then looked toward the water. From this angle, red berries coated the surface along the shore. “Glen, how deep do you flood the area?”
“Twenty inches, give or take. Which made it easy to spot...” Glen cleared his throat. “To spot the woman. But the lake itself is about fifteen to twenty feet at its deepest point, depending on rainfall.”
The deputies who’d been dragging their feet finally approached. Roy ordered Dan to take the cranberry farmers back toward the cruisers to make their official statements, then told the others to hang tight until CSU arrived. He didn’t miss the relief on the men’s faces before pulling two pairs of shoe covers out of his back pocket. He handed Roy one pair, then used the other to cover his shoes.
“Is there another highway close enough where Winston could have parked his rig, then walked over here?” John asked, while waiting for the sheriff to cover his boots.
“The next main highway’s miles from here. Plus, he’d have to have walked through those woods.” He pointed west. “And that wouldn’t have been easy. That’s a rough patch, no trails. If he works during the night, it would have taken him hours to make it here, then back to his rig.”
“Maybe Winston isn’t our guy,” he said, as they approached the shore.
“Then why the quick confession?” Roy asked, then gasped. “Oh my God.” Turning away, he bent and rested his hands on his knees.
You’ll come back. You hear me? You fuckers need me. You’ll come back.
Winston’s parting words taunted him as John stared at their latest victim lying in the shallow water. Flies swarmed on and around her nude body. Her pale skin appeared stark white against the dark, red cranberries floating around her. Inky, long black hair drifted around her bruised face which had been sliced at least a half dozen times with either a razor or a knife.
The water slightly undulated. Cranberries moved over and around the torso which had been deeply cut from the pubic bone to the ribcage. The flesh surrounding that wound, along with those on her face, had shriveled and puckered. The ragged skin seemed to have been nibbled, likely from the fish in the bog. Even several feet away, insects he couldn’t name festered in her wounds.
He’d seen drowning victims in the past. Most had been bloated two to three times their normal weight, trapped gases causing the body to blow up like a balloon. This woman lacked that bloat, he assumed, due to the open wound on her torso.
Swallowing the bile rising in his throat, he finally turned away only to catch the sheer horror in Roy’s eyes. “This girl wasn’t killed like the others,” the sheriff said, his voice cracking.
He looked back to the victim, zeroing in on her neck. With the way her black hair and the cranberries shadowed her throat, he had a hard time finding any indication she’d been strangled with a thin cord like the other victims. “No, but we’ll know more once her body is removed and Carl takes a look at her.”
“Celeste was right then. There’s more than one killer, and now we’ve found one of his victims.”
“Roy, we don’t know—”
“She had four visions,” the sheriff continued as if he hadn’t said anything. “I’ll have to reread her notes, but I’m betting this one matches the first, which means there are three other bodies out there.”
“We won’t know anything until—”
Fury darkened Roy’s eyes. “Quit being so damned pigheaded.”
Before John could reply, more car doors slammed. Banking his own irritation, he looked away from Roy, and watched as Mitchell and his crime scene techs descended the area.
Then another van pulled up and came to an abrupt halt, the tires kicking gravel. Matt Boysen. “We have an uninvited guest.” He jerked his head toward the reporter.
“Shit,” Roy muttered. “That prick just won’t quit.”
John agreed. Boysen wasn’t going to back down until he had a story. If they had another killer on the loose, Celeste could be in danger if Boysen leaked her name. Heartburn kicked in again as he turned to the sheriff. “Give him something then, but only if he gives his word that Celeste’s name stays out of whatever story he runs.”
“Boysen doesn’t know Celeste’s involved.”
Releasing an exasperated sigh, John shook his head. “Does he know Celeste, that she’s a psychic?”
“Sure, everyone does.”
“Then don’t you think he might put two and two together? He might be a small time reporter, but I guarantee he didn’t miss her car parked outside of the Sheriff’s Department yesterday, after those four women were discovered. If he goes on a hunch and hints we’re using a psychic...”
“Damn it, Celeste could become a possible threat to the killer.” Roy wiped a shaky hand down his face. “That girl’s like a daughter to me. I couldn’t live with myself if something happened to her.”
Neither could he. In less than a day, she’d somehow managed to crawl under his skin, and weasel her way into his tarnished heart. He’d thought the unexplained emotions he’d been dealing with since meeting her had everything to do with lust, but knew himself better than that.
While he wanted her, every which way physically and sexually possible, he wanted her laughter, quick wit, even her sarcastic barbs more. So unlike any woman he’d ever encountered, she made him restless, made him want a life outside of the career and reputation he’d fought for. She had him longing for companionship, making love on rainy afternoons, or snuggling on the couch watching TV. While those thoughts scared the hell out of him because he’d never truly had a real relationship, the thought of Celeste being hurt or worse scared him even more. He might have no right to want what he did from her considering he didn’t have much to offer but a bunch of emotional, bullshit baggage. Still, he needed her safe.
“Then let’s make sure Boysen keeps her name out,” John said. “Dangle our suspect in his face. Tell him we’ve potentially apprehended the man responsible for the other murders. No name, just that the suspect is being detained and investigated. But only tell him that much if he promises to keep this murder and Celeste’s name out of his story. Then ensure him another exclusive later.”
“And the mayor? I didn’t tell him anything about Celeste, but he’s not a stupid man. He knows about her, hell he’s had her do a reading for him a few times. He’ll wonder—”
“Let him. Celeste name stays out of this, and make sure your deputies and even Bev keeps a lid on it. No one is to know about her. Period.”
As Mitchell and his team drew closer, Roy stomped off to deal with Boysen. Instead of focusing on the dead woman in the bog, John’s thoughts remained on Celeste. He’d never, in his life, his career, had thought that he would believe in a psychic, but he believed in her. She might hold the key to unlocking this murder, and help them find the other victims yet
to be discovered. She might also be in danger.
That thought didn’t settle well. The heartburn intensified and had him patting his pockets for antacids that weren’t there but left in his motel room. Clenching his jaw, he knew the slow burn in his chest wouldn’t have been eased by any medication. Making sure Celeste was safe, that she was in one piece—he glanced at the victim and zeroed in on the gaping wound running along her torso—in every sense of the word.
* * *
Celeste grabbed the remote and turned off the show she’d recorded earlier on her DVR, then paced her living room. Not even Rachel Ray could keep her attention. The only thing she could think about was the way John had sounded when he’d called a few hours ago.
She’d left the diner early. When the lunch rush had settled, Will insisted she should go home and rest. But after John had called, she couldn’t relax. His somber tone had worried her. He’d assured her he was okay, but she hadn’t believed him. How could anyone be okay after watching a body being dredged from a bog?
Her visions had displayed the torture women had been put through at the hands of a sadistic murderer. They’d created everlasting images which would not fade over time. Ever. Today, John had witnessed the end result of her nightmares and she wondered if it would be the same for him, a memory which would not fade.
The doorbell rang. Her heart skipped a beat. She drew in a deep breath and headed for the foyer. When she opened the front door, the aroma of spicy, Italian sausage wafted through the air.
Her mouth watered, nothing to do with the pizza John held in his hands, but the man himself. Not only was he heart stopping sexy as hell, beneath his rugged exterior she sensed so much more. A good man, strong, honest, dedicated, he’d never lied about his opinion regarding psychics, and while he hadn’t wanted her involved in the investigation, he’d included her anyway. He’d offered her comfort when she’d needed it. In his arms she’d known what it was like to truly feel protected, wanted, desired.
She leaned against the door jamb. “Hi. Thanks for bringing dinner.”
Dark Secrets: A Paranormal Romance Anthology Page 75
