“I still can’t believe he did that,” she says. “Still can’t believe I was ever married to him.”
“You weren’t married to him,” I say. “Not that person. Even if the seeds of self-destruction were in him back then, they were just seeds. Took a lot of nurturing and watering and weeding of them for him to become what he has.”
“It’s . . . just so humiliating—all of it, the affairs, the deceit, the deterioration. It’s really done a number on my self-esteem,” she says.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I hate that it has. Want to do anything I can to help with that.”
“You do,” she says. “Every second of every day.”
“He is no reflection on you,” I say.
“Like I say, I don’t think he’s going to be an issue anymore.”
Before I can say anything else, my phone vibrates and lights up on the nightstand. It’s Reggie, which at three-thirty-seven in the morning can’t be good.
“Hey,” I say.
“You back?” she asks.
“I am.”
“How long you been?”
“Twenty minutes maybe. Why? What’s up?”
“Randa is still in custody,” she says. “I just checked. Has been since you arrested her three nights ago. So it can’t have been her.”
“What can’t?”
“We’ve just found Chris,” she says. “He’s been murdered.”
Start Blood Stone now!
Blood Stone Chapter 1
I was sitting on a barstool in Scarlett’s trying to act less drunk than I was when Frank Morgan walked in.
It was 1988, the one hundredth anniversary of the Jack the Ripper case, and my third year in Atlanta.
A small crowd of regulars were spread around the bar. George Michael’s Father Figure was on the jukebox, but I seemed to be the only one listening. A chilly October wind whistled outside and found cracks and crevices to enter Scarlett’s and make her cold and drafty.
Behind me on a small table in the back corner were textbooks I was supposed to be studying, but I was finding it difficult to focus.
I had stepped over to the bar to ask Susan for a kiss and another vodka cranberry, which she was busy making because she didn’t know about the two I had before I arrived, or the one her Aunt Margaret slipped me when she wasn’t looking.
Margaret, like me, was a functioning alcoholic—though I wasn’t sure how well either of us was actually functioning. Of course, functioning is a relative term, and addicts like us love few things as much as equivocation.
Margaret used not to drink as much as she does now. At least that’s what I’d been told. But that was back before—before she’d lost the reasons not to. Before Laney Mitchell, the love of her life, died and left her alone with the Gone with the Wind-themed bar they had started together during happier times.
Like Margaret herself, Scarlett’s had fallen on hard times, the faded and dust-covered book-and-movie memorabilia more sad than anything else.
Susan handed me my drink and before taking so much as the first sip I knew it would be heavy on the cranberry and light on the vodka.
“Thanks,” I said, adding, “Wait” when she turned away to open a bottle of Bud for the old gray regular across the way.
“What?”
“You forgot my kiss.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
She bounced back over, and placing both palms on the bar, pushed herself up and kissed me.
When I tried to respond with a similar energy and enthusiasm I turned my glass over, splashing its contents all over the wooden bar top.
“Man down,” I said. “Damn it, man.”
A flush of embarrassment and self-consciousness joined the vodka blush I already had going.
I never felt as weak or pathetic as when I was drinking—and never practiced as much self-loathing—neither in volume nor vitriol.
“I’ll get it,” she said. “Just go sit down and I’ll bring you and Frank a drink.”
I turned toward Frank who was walking up.
“What’re you drinkin’, Frank?” I said. “Let me buy you a drink.”
He held his hands up, palms out. “I’m good. Thanks though.”
“Come on, man. Don’t make me—don’t be like that.”
He nodded and gave a little frown of resignation. “A beer. I’ll have a beer.”
“Any particular kind?” I asked.
“Ah,” he said, looking around, his eyes coming to rest on the Budweiser pendants hanging above the bar. “I’ll have a Budweiser.”
“The king of beers,” I said. “Excellent choice. Draft or bottle? Margaret runs a full service drinkery here. She’s no slouch.”
Frank looked at Susan, who had drifted back over in our direction after passing out a few bottles and collecting the cash payments from guys who would become belligerent about their bills later.
There were no tabs at Scarlett’s.
“Surprise me,” he said. “No, you know what. I’ll take a draft.”
“You got it. How are you, Frank?”
“I’ve been better, but it’s good to see y’all.”
“You too,” she said. “Always.”
“Mind if I borrow your young man for a few minutes?” he asked.
“He’s all yours. I’ll be over in a minute with your drinks.”
“Step into my office,” I said, and stumbled back over toward what had come to be known as my table.
“How are you?” he asked as he sat down.
I nodded emphatically. “Really good. Things are great. You?”
I sounded like I was trying to convince myself as much or more than him, but neither of us was.
“Not so good.”
“What’s—”
“What’re you—”
“You first,” I said.
He looked down at my books. “What’re you taking this semester?”
“Hebrew. Hebrew Prophets. And Biblical Interpretation. Have an exam on the prophets tomorrow.”
He nodded. “That’s good. Glad you got back in school and are doing so well. I’m proud of you.”
“Why are things not so good for you?” I asked. “You working the three missing girls?”
He nodded again. “It’s four now. Another went missing last night. But how’d you know they were connected? Nothing in the papers to suggest we think they’re—”
“Just read the accounts and connected the dots,” I said.
“What dots? There were no dots.”
Susan arrived with our drinks. A Bud draft for Frank. A cup of coffee for me.
“Ah, Miss, this isn’t what I ordered,” I said.
“It’s the only drink we have for underage drinkers,” she said and moved away before I could argue with her about it. Glancing over her shoulder she added, “Especially when our favorite GBI agent is on the premises.”
“Cheers,” Frank said and held out his glass.
“Cheers,” I said, white porcelain clinking shaker glass.
I took a sip of the strong, black, unsweetened liquid and had the urge to spit it back into the cup, but swallowed it instead. “That is truly horrific,” I said and turned up the cup and quickly downed the rest of the tepid drink as if it were a shot, trying not to taste it as I did.
“How’d you know the three women were connected?” he asked.
“They were all runners or—”
He shook his head. “Reports didn’t say that and they’re—”
“Paper said the first one was a runner,” I said. “The subtexts of the other stories along with the pictures included indicated the other two were athletic, in shape. I assume all three either ran or walked and were abducted while they were out doing it. All three are of similar age, body type, backgrounds. All have a similar look. Is the same true of the fourth?”
He nodded and sighed. “Yeah. And you’re right. They’re runners. Went missing while out for a run. The doer’s got to be in great shape. We’re talkin’ seriously athletic
women.”
“That’s probably part of what does it for him,” I said. “The challenge. The risk. Hunting what he considers a worthy prey. Plus he likes hard bodies. He has a type. Definitely got a serial on your hands.”
“But a serial what?” he said. “What’s he doing with them? Raping? Collecting? Killing? If he’s killing ’em where’re the bodies? If he’s collecting them . . . where’s he keepin’ them?”
“He’s got his own place,” I said. “With plenty of room to work and or cage them. Or you just haven’t found his dumping ground yet.”
“How would you like to help us find them—and him?”
Frank had always been supportive of my interest in investigative technique. He had facilitated my work on the Atlanta Child Murders, even though to him and the other members of the task force the case was closed. He had helped me more than I could even calculate on the LaMarcus Williams and Cedric Porter cases. He had allowed me to work on a few of his cases with him and had even made it so I could take the training and get certified in law enforcement. Perhaps best of all, he had made it possible for me to attend some of the special FBI training at a few of their road school programs at various agencies in the area.
He was also the closest thing I had to a dad in Atlanta—maybe anywhere since my fractured relationship with my own father was still strained.
“How?” I asked, a jangle of electricity humming through me.
“Join the task force. You’d actually become an officer with one of the little towns around here—whoever has an opening. I’m still working out all the details. The job itself won’t be anything special. You’ll start out as a uniform, but you’d be on special assignment, working this case. You could stay in school, but you’d have to quit your job.”
My jobs—janitorial work at the college and delivering Domino’s pizza—were an embarrassment, and if he didn’t know what they were I wasn’t about to tell him.
“You’ve got a gift—think about how you connected the cases. We could really use it on this thing. Plus you’re in shape. You still running?”
I nodded. Since I had stopped playing basketball because of what happened to Martin, I had started running.
“If this thing comes down to a footrace maybe you could actually catch the bastard. I’m not sure anyone else on the task force could.”
“What happens when this thing ends?” I asked. “What if we catch him tomorrow?”
“You’d still be an officer with whichever PD we get you on with. Put in your time there and then you can transfer to Atlanta PD, one of the county sheriff’s departments, or join me at GBI. It’s all already arranged. All you have to say is yes.”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Hell yes.”
“You don’t need to talk to Susan first?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“When can you start?”
“How about now?”
Blood Stone Chapter 2
I let myself into Cheryl Carver’s apartment off of Wesley Chapel with the key Frank had given me, one of Frank’s .45s in a holster on my hip, a penlight in one hand, the case file in the other.
What I didn’t have was any kind of official ID, so I was hoping not to have any encounters with family, friends, nosy neighbors, or a zealous superintendent investigating suspicious activity in a missing woman’s apartment.
The small, dark dwelling smelled stale, as if the still air trapped inside it hadn’t been stirred in several days.
Beneath the staleness, the smells of everyone who had ever lived here lingered—layered, pungent, contradicting, steeped in the carpet, baked into the sheetrock, soaked into the linoleum.
Barely bigger than a studio, the tiny one-bedroom unit consisted of a small living room, a tiny kitchen and eating area, a prison-cell-sized bathroom, and a bedroom not large enough to accommodate even a queen-size bed.
And though there wasn’t room for much furniture in the sad, desperate little quarters, there was room for far more than she had.
A single, old couch with a bunched and gathered slipcover on it was the only object in the living room. No TV. No coffee table. No chairs. No end tables.
A single framed photograph hung on the wall—a dime store or church directory family portrait portraying Cheryl and her younger brother with her folks, all of them dressed up, each coordinating with the other.
According to the file, Cheryl was from a small farming community in South Georgia and had moved to Atlanta for school, her track scholarship providing just enough to cover her classes, textbooks, and this minuscule off-campus apartment. A part-time job at Burger King provided both food and money for food.
A small folding card table with a single folding chair at it was in the dining area that fronted the one-cook kitchen.
The hallway leading to the bathroom and bedroom was lined with running ribbons and medals—marathons, half-marathons, track and field competitions, 5Ks, 10Ks, 20Ks, gold, silver, and bronze medals, blue, red, and green ribbons, but mostly blue ribbons and gold medals.
Cheryl had been raised in poverty, but was running away from it as fast as her long legs would carry her.
The small bedroom at the end of the short hall held a little girl’s white pressboard twin bed with a juvenile pink bedspread, which I suspected had come from Cheryl’s childhood bedroom, probably packed in the back of her dad’s pickup truck and driven up from South Georgia with her mom’s promise to replace it just as soon as she could save up enough to do so.
A small matching dresser close by held her bras and panties and socks and t-shirts and pajamas, its bottom drawer reserved for newspaper clippings of her races, random pictures of family and friends, and various cards and letters—mostly from her mom.
Unlike the rest of the apartment, Cheryl’s bedroom still had the hint of fragrant flowers in it. Perhaps it was her perfume or body lotion lingering from where it wafted around her before she left, or the homemade lavender sachets in her closet and dresser drawers.
Very few clothes hung in the closet, mostly faded Sears and K-Mart shirts and well-worn off-brand blue jeans, jogging suits, and athletic attire, the floor beneath them littered with tennis shoes and track cleats that had traveled many, many miles.
I searched the room, looking beneath the bed, behind the dresser, under and around and in everything. There was nothing hidden. Cheryl Carver had nothing to hide.
From every indication she was living a Spartan existence, partly because she had no other choice, but partly because she was a disciplined dogged athlete, a dedicated and determined student.
Unbidden, thoughts of my own excesses floated to the surface of my still not completely sober mind.
Cheryl Carver had nearly all of her adult life ahead of her, and she was investing toward making it a good one.
And then she had encountered a madman.
A sadistic, heartless, heretic of humanity who derived pleasure from pain.
And for some reason she had not been able to outrun him. Was it because of the nature of his attack? Did he surprise her? Did he pounce before she even had the chance to run? Or, like her, did he too run like he was designed to?
I sat on the edge of Cheryl’s small bed and took in more of her room.
The small boombox beside her bed, the many cassettes and few CDs surrounding it. The stacks of textbooks on the floor, the smattering of romance novels mixed in. The Chariots of Fire one-sheet thumbtacked to an otherwise empty wall.
The sadness pressing down on me was overwhelming.
Why did the world have to be this way?
Why couldn’t a gifted student and athlete go for a run without running into brutality and depravity?
“Where are you?” I asked, my voice sounding small and out of place in the quiet, feminine apartment. “Are you still in the land of the living? Are you his prisoner? Or in what wound in the earth are you buried?”
No response.
“I will find you,” I said. “Either way. I
promise you that. I’m gonna find the madman who did this to you too. I wish I could undo what he’s done . . . but . . . it won’t go . . . unpunished. You have my word.”
Blood Stone Chapter 3
Susan and I were living together in an old farmhouse off of Flakes Mill Road near Ellenwood.
Though most of the farm had been divided up and sold, the house still sat on ten acres and had a huge multi-car garage in the back, which the owner’s son had built and filled with various sport cars in differing stages of restoration when he had lived here.
The house was small and drafty and had neither central air conditioning nor heat, but the rent was cheap, the rural feel refreshing, and it was less than five miles from the college I attended.
When I pulled into the small semicircle gravel drive, I could see that the lights were off in our bedroom, which meant Susan had already gone to bed.
I could feel the familiar agitation rising inside me, the tension gathering in my shoulders.
Most days this time of night when we both got home was our first and often only opportunity to spend time together and make love and she knew it. She not only knew that but knew how important it was to me. I was growing frustrated and more than a little angry at her take-it-or-leave-it, nonchalance approach to both our time alone together and lovemaking.
Instead of going to all four victim’s homes, I had only gone to one—the one that was the closest to our home—so I could get here around the time she did. And she knew it. I had told her what I was going to do and why, and still she had gone to bed.
And once she had gone to bed, that was it. She wouldn’t be getting up again. She wouldn’t welcome a visit from me into our room. She was sending a message.
I wanted her every night, but tonight, after experiencing the overwhelming sadness and loss of Cheryl Carver, I needed her, needed the warmth, affection, and connection of human interaction and intimacy, needed to feel her live heart beating beneath her bare breasts.
Blood Ties (John Jordan Mysteries Book 16) Page 21
