“Yes, missing persons.”
“Find Lizzie Meyers yet?”
She paused, narrowed her eyes. “For someone just passing through town, you sure seem to know a lot about Devil’s Den.”
A small, smug smile crossed his impossibly beautiful face.
Chuck delivered her drink, and took the empty glass from her hands.
“Thanks, Chuck.” She sipped, feeling Liam’s eyes on her. “Anyway, I’m sure the local PD will locate her soon enough.”
“Okay, keep your secrets Miss Knight, but you’re past the twenty-four-hour mark. Seems to me you could use all the help you could get.”
“Hey, Dixie girl.” Zander walked up and slung his arm around her shoulders—a not-so-subtle protective gesture aimed toward the stranger standing next to her. “Who’s this?”
Dixie swore she caught Liam tense before he stretched out his hand, and said, “Liam Cash.”
“Zander Stone, DDPD. Don’t recognize the name.” They shook hands.
“You wouldn’t.”
Dixie shrugged out of Zander’s hold. “He’s from Louisiana, here visiting family.”
Zander nodded—as if deciding whether to believe the information or not—as he looked the Marine up and down.
Liam straightened, staring right back at the officer.
You could cut the tension with a knife.
Dixie rolled her eyes—silly boys—and nodded toward the back of the room. “Everyone’s over by the fireplace if you want to say hi.”
Just then, Zander’s phone rang.
“Hang on.” He pulled the phone from his pocket. “Stone here… What?… You’re sure it’s her? Where?… Towering Pines?… Alright I’m on my way.” He clicked off the phone and turned to Dixie. “I gotta go.”
Her eyes rounded as she looked at Zander, and understanding her non-verbal question, he nodded—yes, it’s Lizzie.
“I gotta go.” He spun on his heel, but then stopped, and turned back around. “Stay here Dixie, I’m serious.”
She gave him an are you kidding me look.
“I’m serious, Dix. I’ll let you know when you can come by.” And with that, he turned and jogged out the front door.
Dixie met Liam’s gaze. She cleared her throat. “Well, it was nice meeting you.”
“They found Lizzie, huh?”
She took a deep gulp of her drink and waved to Chuck. “Put this—and his beer—on my tab.”
“You got it, Dixie girl.”
She turned to Liam and found herself hesitating. Hesitating for what? For him to ask her out? To ask for her number? For him to tell her that he’d fallen madly in love with her during their brief time together? Or, maybe for him to throw her on the bar, and rip her clothes off.
With his eyes locked on hers, he downed his beer and then said, “It was nice meeting you too, Miss Knight. Very nice.”
Outside, Zander’s police siren vibrated through the air, shaking her from her haze.
“I gotta go.”
He smiled and nodded as she turned and jogged out the front door.
CHAPTER 8
Dixie cranked the heater on high as she carefully navigated the tight corners of the icy mountain road.
The night was as black as coal, and slick as shit.
The unrelenting snow hampered visibility, making an already nerve-wracking drive even more difficult. She flicked the wipers on high and leaned forward, squinting to see through the streaks.
Note to self, get new windshield wipers immediately.
She glanced at the clock—almost ten—and then back at the road. The motel should be close, if her memory served her correctly… which was always a gamble.
What the hell was a girl like Lizzie Meyers doing at the Towering Pines Inn? Meeting John Blevins? Possibly… but a rich, prominent doctor like John Blevins didn’t seem the type to book an hour at the seedy motel.
Dixie had only been to the motel twice in her life—once while tailing a suspected jewelry thief, and the second time while investigating an anonymous tip about a national serial killer.
The Towering Pines Inn was not the place to go hang out. Ever.
She wiped the fog from the window as the motel’s blinking neon light came into view.
The place was buzzing with activity. Two squad cars, the chief’s truck and an ambulance, although, something told Dixie that an ambulance wouldn’t be needed… well, maybe for the body bag. A small group of people gathered around a white sports car—Lizzie’s, she presumed.
She slowed, contemplating where to park. She knew Zander would give her an ass chewing as soon as he saw her, so she needed to lay low and hang in the shadows for as long as possible.
She pulled into the parking lot and quickly hung a left to avoid being seen. She rolled to a stop under a mass of pine trees, turned off the engine, grabbed her bag, and got out.
Voices and shouts carried through the cold wind, and flashlights bounced off the trees, the snow glittering in the beams of light.
She slipped through the shadows to the building and crept around the corner.
The first thing she noticed were the dark woods surrounding the motel, just feet from the sidewalk. She shook her head—it was almost as though the motel was built to attract misfits.
Zander stood in the doorway of the room on the end, presumably where Lizzie had been found. Chief of Police Mason Moretti paced the sidewalk, barking orders into his cell phone, while another officer roped off the area with yellow police tape.
After taking a moment to consider her options, Dixie decided to jog around the far side of the building and approach the room from the opposite end.
She turned on her heel and took off, taking note of the ancient-looking security camera above the office—which did not point to the motel entry or the parking lot. So unless the killer was stupid enough to go into the office, chances were that he, or she, wasn’t on tape.
She counted nine rooms as she jogged around the building, only one with a dim light glowing through the window. Out of all the rooms, Lizzie was found in the very last one, tucked deep in the shadows, and Dixie had no doubt that the location was not a coincidence.
She slowed as she came up on the edge of the building, paused and listened.
“…manager said no one was booked in this room. He said that he usually doesn’t book the room because of the location. It’s not very popular, apparently. He gave me the printout of all the reservations over the last week. No one stayed in this room. Officially, anyway.”
“What was the maid doing in the room, then?”
“According to the manager, doing a weekly walk-through.”
“We need to find out who—and I mean every single person—that has keys to these rooms. I need their names.”
“Yes, sir.”
The voices faded and she took her chance.
She slid around the corner, squared her shoulders—confidently, as though she were supposed to be there—and walked to the doorway of the room.
She stopped in her tracks.
Her eyes widened as looked down at the pale, naked body of Lizzie Meyers.
Her stomach rolled.
Blood pooled around Lizzie’s head and face, which was an oozing mush of pulp. Splatters of blood dotted the walls, which were speckled with hair, skin and skull fragments.
Lizzie Meyers had been bludgeoned to death.
Dixie had seen plenty of gruesome murder scenes, but this one shook her. Maybe it was the sheer violence of it, or maybe it was because Lizzie was a young girl with her whole life ahead of her. Whatever the reason, Dixie had to take a second to swallow the lump in her throat.
An officer breezed past her, without even noticing her presence.
After taking a deep breath, she shoved her emotions aside, and switched to detective mode.
She yanked a pair of blue booties from her bag and slipped them over her boots, and stepped inside. She figured she had about thirty seconds before someone noticed her, so she quickly walked over to the body
, kneeled down and began analyzing the scene.
The main blows occurred on the top of Lizzie’s head, which meant her attacker had been above her. Her pale face—the side that wasn’t beaten to a pulp—was frozen in an unnerving grimace, and her body was squeezed with rigor-mortis, which meant she was, at the most, forty-eight hours deceased. And considering she’d only been declared missing for around twenty-four hours, Dixie guessed her time of death was sometime early in the evening, the night before.
She scanned her skinny, pasty body—no bruises or scratches, which meant no obvious defense wounds. This confirmed what Dixie had already suspected—Lizzie Meyers knew her attacker.
As Dixie’s eyes drifted back to the oozing wound on Lizzie’s head, she frowned and leaned closer—was something shimmering in her hair? Something sparkling?
Suddenly, noises from the bathroom. Dixie jumped up and quickly walked outside, pausing at the doorway to take one more look.
No one stayed in this room—those were the words she’d overheard minutes earlier.
If the manager didn’t assign the room to anyone, then one of two things happened—someone already had the key and obliged themselves to an evening of murder, or someone broke in.
She took a step back and looked at the cheap, wooden door.
She kneeled down and peered at the knob—a few scratches, but nothing recent. She looked at the latch on the doorframe, squinted, and leaned closer. After a quick glance over her shoulder, she quickly pulled out a cotton swab, swiped the metal, and slipped it into a plastic bag.
“Dammit, Dixie.”
She surged to her feet and looked at Zander, who was stepping out of the bathroom with a bag slung over his shoulder, latex gloves on his hands, and booties over his shoes.
“What the hell are you doing here?” He shook his head. “I should’ve known.”
“Not exactly the Four Seasons, is it?”
“No, the Four Seasons has more than one damn security camera.” He crossed the room, casually stepping over Lizzie’s pale legs. “You can’t be here right now. We’ll open it up to you later, alright?”
“Is that her car out front?”
He nodded and ushered her outside.
“Anything interesting inside?”
“Not so far. Her purse was in the room, with the wallet still inside.”
“So it definitely wasn’t a burglary gone wrong.”
“Exactly. And no cell phone.”
She nodded at the chief—who was very accustomed to the Black Rose team crashing his crimes scenes—and followed Zander to the edge of the woods.
“Murder weapon?”
“The iron lamp.”
“Ouch. And he left it?”
“Yep.”
“That’s bold—he’s cocky. Prints?”
“Looking now, but something tells me we aren’t that lucky.”
“You’re looking into the hotel staff?”
“They’ve already interviewed the manager and got the list of names. We’ll run everyone.”
“Did the manager, or anyone, know Lizzie?”
“Nope.”
She nodded and gazed at the room, which was a buzz of activity. “No defense wounds… and she was naked.”
Zander tensed. “Yes, we’re doing a rape kit.”
“If it were rape, she’d have defense wounds.”
“Unless she was drugged.”
“True. So either drugged, consensual sex, or, they didn’t have sex and maybe just messed around.”
He nodded.
She paused. “Have you verified John Blevins’s whereabouts for last night yet?”
“We just literally found her.”
“But you know about the alleged affair, right?”
“Yeah, I’d gotten wind about it.”
Nothing was a secret in Devil’s Den.
He continued, “We’ll be visiting John shortly, and his wife.”
“Heard the wife is nuts.”
“Nuts is an understatement. Jealous-type, too, or so I hear.”
“Interesting. Jealous people do crazy things, no doubt about that.” She paused. “I think Lizzie was getting ready for a date, though—before she left her apartment last night.”
“What makes you think that?”
She glanced down.
He put his hands on his hips. “You went to her place, didn’t you?”
She shrugged, and flashed her sweetest, most innocent smile.
“Dammit, Dix.” He shook his head. “Okay, what exactly makes you think she was getting ready for a date?”
“Her makeup, clothes, perfume, hair stuff… it was all laid out. I’m telling you, that girl was getting fancied up for something. A date, maybe. Maybe John.”
He frowned, in deep thought.
She patted his shoulder. “It’s okay, I wouldn’t expect a man to pick up on that little detail.”
He started to open his mouth—to deliver a few obscenities, no doubt—when his phone buzzed. “I gotta take this. I’ll call you when you can come back.”
“Hey, Zand?”
“What?”
She lowered her voice and stepped forward. “I’ll personally cover the cost if you take her body to Graves Laboratory, instead of sending her to the state crime lab.”
He narrowed his eyes. “So you can get the details from the autopsy first, and solve the case before we do?”
“Come on, you know they’ll do it quicker, and with more accuracy. It’s a messy case. John Blevins will have nasty lawyers.”
He stared at her for a moment, and she knew he was considering it. “I gotta take this call.”
She watched him walk away and glanced at her watch—just after eleven. She pulled her keys from her pocket and walked up the sidewalk—nodding as she passed the medical examiner—and stepped onto the parking lot.
She stopped. Apparently, she wasn’t the only person who had the idea to park under the shadows of the pine trees. Of all the open spots, someone parked right next to her. It was a black, jacked-up Chevy—brand new as far as she could tell.
She freed her right hand—ready to grab her gun if needed—and walked across the dark lot. As she cautiously stepped up to her truck, a chill ran up her spine. From the corner of her eye, she saw a dark figure emerge from the woods. She quickly slid her hand over her gun, spun on her heel, and faced the silhouette, ready for whatever was to come next.
“Sketchy place to park your truck.”
Relief washed over her, followed by butterflies tickling her stomach—she knew that voice.
Liam stepped out of the shadows, his tall, muscular body fitting in with the tall pine trees. Snowflakes speckled his dark hair.
She released the grip on her gun. “Good thing I’m not trigger happy.”
“Good thing I’m not a murderer—your parking spot says come get me.”
She relaxed her stance and tried to calm the rush of adrenaline flowing through her—her body’s response to simply being in his presence.
“You wouldn’t be the first murderer to hang out here in the last few days.”
“Found Lizzie, huh?”
She nodded.
“Bludgeoned to death.”
She narrowed her eyes and glanced toward the woods. “Doing a little snooping, huh?”
“I have my sources. Any suspects?”
“That’s confidential.”
He smirked.
She crossed her arms over her chest. “What are you doing out here?”
“Just taking the scenic route home.”
She glanced at the snow sliding down his windshield. “Not the best night for a leisurely drive.”
“My truck can handle the mountain roads better than yours.” He nodded toward her tires. “Your tires are bald, you need to get new ones.”
“Do you make it a habit of following women to murder scenes and assessing their vehicles?”
“Only the beautiful ones.”
She grinned.
He took a st
ep forward, closing the inches between them.
The butterflies tickling her stomach turned into a fluttering flock of birds as she looked up, into his dark eyes. He stared down at her with a gaze that sent her heart thudding in her chest. There was an intensity in his eyes that made her senses peak—an intensity that told her he had something on his mind.
“Let me take you to dinner.”
Her eyebrows shot up, her eyes rounded. “Are you serious?”
He nodded.
“Liam, I just saw the body of a woman who was beaten to death. I’m…” she shifted her weight, “I don’t have an appetite. And, it’s late anyway.”
Without missing a beat, he responded, “Tomorrow.”
She stared up at him, baffled. Baffled by the moment, his boldness, his confidence, and baffled that she couldn’t seem to find her words. She opened her mouth to say something—anything—but was silenced when he leaned down, and pressed his lips to hers.
Like a shot of lightning, tingles surged through her body, and her stomach fell to her feet. His lips were full, soft, and commanding as he kissed her—took her.
And left her completely breathless.
Just as her head began to spin, he pulled away, leaving her weak in the knees and bracing the truck behind her.
The snow swirled between them as he looked at her, his eyes rounded, his chest rising and falling heavily. The slight look of surprise on his face faded quickly as the corner of his lip curled up, into a cocky smirk. “Tomorrow, then?”
She blinked—dazed—and shook her head in disbelief of what had just happened.
He smiled. “Tomorrow, then.” He turned, got into his truck, and after sending her another smoldering glance, he started the engine and drove out of the parking lot.
She watched his taillights fade into the distance and took a deep breath to calm her racing heart.
What the hell just happened?
CHAPTER 9
Despite the frigid temperature outside, Liam rolled down his window. Tiny snowflakes blew inside as he inhaled the ice-cold air, and shook his head. He was hot as hell and knew it had nothing to do with the heater in his truck, and everything to do with the dark-haired, green-eyed enchantress that he’d just left.
Dixie Knight.
Dixie Knight, Private Investigator.
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