“Up you go, girl,” he said, grabbing her by her hair and yanking her to her feet, holding the small blanket in place. He pressed in behind her, and she almost gagged. The cloth over her head wasn’t thick enough to block the sweaty reek of his body or his sour breath—the same smells she’d forever associate with being startled awake in the night.
Forever? Please, God, let there be more than just tonight.
“Looks like your Mama and Daddy ain’t sick’a you yet. They’re paying over a lot of money to get you back.”
“You’re going to let me go?” she managed to whisper, hope blossoming.
“Sure I am, sugar,” he said with a hoarse, ugly laugh.
Olivia forced herself to ignore that mean laugh and allowed relief and happiness to flood through her. She breathed deeply, then mumbled, “Thank God. Oh, thank you, God.”
Ignoring her, he kicked at her bare feet so she’d start moving. She stumbled on numb legs, and he had to support her as they trudged out of the stall—her shuffling because of the rope. His grip on her hair and a thick arm around her waist kept her upright as they walked outside into the hot Georgia night.
At least, she thought she was still in Georgia. It smelled like home, anyway. Not even the musky odor of the fabric and her attacker’s stench could block the scent of the night air, damp and thick and ripe like the woods outside of Savannah after the rain.
Maybe she was still in Savannah. Close to her own house, close to her family. Minutes away from her father’s strong arms and her mother’s loving kiss.
Despite everything—her fears, the boy’s claims—she was going to see them again.
Suddenly, he stopped. “Where you been at?”
A furtive movement came from nearby. Jack had apparently scurried out of his hiding place. “Watchin’ the road.”
Suddenly, Olivia was overwhelmed with anger at the boy, fury that he’d scared her, even more that he hadn’t helped her escape. Over the past few days, there had been any number of times when he could have released her, but he hadn’t done it.
Then, remembering the blank, dazed expression, the robotic voice, she forced the anger away. He was a little kid who’d been in this monster’s grip for a whole lot longer than three days. She couldn’t imagine what he had endured. Once she got home, she was going to do what she could for him. Help him get free, find out who his people were. She had to; otherwise that blank, haunted stare and bruised face would torment her for the rest of her life.
“Good. I’m gonna need your help in a li’l while. Once I take care of this, I want you to get some plastic and roll her up good and tight to bury her. You know what to do.”
And just like that, her fantasy popped. He wasn’t hauling her outside to let her go. Jack had been right all along. Olivia shuddered, her weak legs giving out beneath her as the world began to spin and the faces of her parents and little sister flashed in her mind.
“Get me my hunting knife.”
Her every muscle went rigid with terror. A scream rose in her throat and burst from her mouth. He clapped a hand over it, shoving the fabric between her split lips. “Shut up, girl, or it’ll go worse for ya.” Then, to the boy, he snapped, “Well? Get goin’!”
“Knife’s broke,” Jack mumbled. “I was usin’ it to tighten up the hinges on the barn door, and the blade snapped.”
Her kidnapper moved suddenly, the hand releasing her mouth. A sudden thwack said he’d backhanded the boy. Jack didn’t cry out, didn’t stagger away, as far as she could hear.
“What am I supposed to do now?” the man snapped.
Jack cleared his throat. For a second, she thought he had worked up the courage to beg for her freedom, that he would try, however futilely, to stand up for her.
Instead, in that same brainwashed voice, he made another suggestion. And her last hope died.
“Why don’t you drown her?”
Chapter 1
Present day
Pulling into the gravel parking lot of a burned-out honky-tonk on Ogeechee Road, Detective Gabe Cooper eyed his watch, then the temperature gauge on the dash of his unmarked sedan. Six twenty-five a.m., eighty-two degrees. Humidity about eighty percent.
It was gonna be a hell of a day. Or a day in hell. With any summer in Savannah, there wasn’t much difference, and this August heat wave had already been one for the record books. Not just for the high temps but also for the crime rate. Because with heat came anger; with anger, violence. And, more than anybody on the Savannah-Chatham Metro PD would like to admit, that violence ended in death. Which was why he was here, outside what had once been Fast Eddie’s Bar and was now one giant hunk of burnt.
Killing the engine, Gabe pushed his dark sunglasses firmly over his eyes, then glanced out the window at a car that had just pulled in beside him. His partner, Ty Wallace, had gotten the call on his way in to the central precinct, too, and had detoured to meet him on the scene.
Theirs weren’t the only vehicles present. The fire department had reportedly gotten the call at around three a.m., and it had taken crews from two stations to beat the flames into submission. Now, the smoldering ruins of a once troublesome hangout were ringed by a handful of trucks, a squad car, a fire chief vehicle, and a crime scene van that said forensics was already on the job. From up the block, an early-bird crew from one of the local news stations ogled everything, hungry for a story to lead off the seven a.m. broadcast.
Fortunately, the few sad, ramshackle houses nearby remained quiet, either abandoned, or their occupants were sound asleep, tired out after the middle-of-thenight fire excitement. The only close neighbors likely to be attracted to the action now would be watching from the afterlife: The North Laurel Grove Cemetery cast its shadow of eerie-genteel Southern death over the entire area from directly across the street.
From what he’d heard on dispatch, the initial call had sounded like just another random fire, possibly an arson case. The kind where some roughneck got mad about being cut off, then flicked a match on a tank of propane and roared away into the night. Then they’d found the body.
Too early to say who it was, how they’d died, or who’d lit the match. But things had definitely gotten a lot stickier.
Stepping out of the car, he braced himself against an assault of pure heat against his air-conditioned skin. A sheen of sweat immediately broke out on his brow. The scorched air was sharp in his nose, the smoky embers leaving a haze that rose to meet the one falling from the humid sky. But even that didn’t quite cover up the smell of old paper and damp cellar that seemed to permeate the state in August.
The keening screech of a million cicadas deafened him for a moment. Oblivious to man’s drama, the insects drowned out the chatter of the on-site responders and the rumble of a city waking up to another steamy morning.
Summertime in Georgia. You had to love it ’cause you’d just go crazy hating it. Never having lived anywhere else—he’d been raised on a farm less than a hundred miles from here and had gone to community college, and then the state university, SSU, right here in Savannah—he didn’t know how he’d react if a summer day didn’t include sweat and haze and hot air in his lungs. And bugs . . . Lord knows, you couldn’t forget the bugs.
“Beats some Northern city with ten feet of snow in the winter,” he reminded himself. Besides, while Savannah might have cockroaches as big as his hand, he wouldn’t trade them for dog-sized rats in someplace like New York.
Eyeing the smoke still rising from the charred, blackened remains, he found himself hoping this was an openand-shut kind of case—arson as revenge, owner caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. He didn’t know if his boiling brain was ready for much more than that this early, especially with no coffee.
“Hey there, partner,” said Ty, who’d hopped out of his car with his typical jaunty air. His freshly shaved head gleamed, and his light-colored suit was crisp and fresh. As usual, the guy looked like he’d stepped off the cover of GQ.
Gabe, on the other hand, could maybe pose fo
r Field & Stream on his very best day. A suit-and-tie kinda guy he wasn’t, though, of course, he’d made the tie concession since earning his shield three years ago.
“Lucky us—getting to work in the great outdoors this fine morning,” his partner added. “One of the best parts of the job, isn’t it?”
“Cheery SOB,” Gabe muttered, knowing the man was trying to get a laugh out of him.
“Broughtcha somethin’,” Ty said, lifting his hand to reveal a large, plastic cup containing some beige Slurpeelike confection topped with whipped cream and chocolate syrup that wouldn’t be consumed by any selfrespecting coffee drinker.
He grimaced. “No, thank you.”
“That’s mine.” Ty placed the drink on the car roof and bent back inside. When he stood, he held a foam cup, the steam rising out of the tiny sippy hole at the top.
Ahh. Perfect. His partner might have peacock genes, but he did know Gabe well. Didn’t matter if the heat index was two below molten lava, he needed his coffee hot and dark to start the day. “Thanks. You’re forgiven for sticking me with the report on the liquor store holdup so you could go out with that tranny you met at the racetrack.”
Always good-humored, Ty grinned. “She was all woman, partner. Just big and fierce.”
Gabe knew that; he’d just been giving his partner shit. Ty was purely straight. The younger man loved women, probably a little too much, considering how many different ones seemed to drift in and out of his life. Gabe had been warning him that one day he was either gonna get the Bobbitt treatment, or else he’d fall crazy in love, for real, with a woman who wouldn’t let him touch a hair on her head.
Watching him take a sip, Ty gave him a sly look and asked, “So, whaddya say? Is it strong enough to float an anvil?”
Gabe chuckled. One thing he had to say for his young partner, he sure was tenacious. Ty had picked up some book of Southern expressions and was forever trying them out. He had moved here from Florida, which any Georgian would tell you was about as much a part of the true Deep South as New York City. Tired of losing the argument that south of the Mason-Dixon Line meant Southern—which it didn’t—the man was blasted determined to fit in like a born-and-bred Georgian, one colloquialism at a time.
“Y’all just about got that ’un right,” Gabe said with a grin, letting his own Deep South accent, which he usually kept under control, slip out. “But remember, it’s pronounced ‘tuh’ not ‘to.’”
The younger man saluted. “Got it.”
Leaving their cars, the two of them approached the scene and were greeted by a sweating firefighter wearing about forty pounds of gear. The red-faced man eyed Ty’s froufrou drink, and without a second’s hesitation his partner wordlessly handed it over. “For you.”
Pain-in-the-ass clothes-and-women hound or not, Ty was one hell of a nice guy. In the year that they’d been partnered up, Gabe had come not only to respect him but also to like him more than just about anybody else he knew. Of course, that didn’t stop him from giving the rookie detective shit just as often as he felt like it.
“Thanks,” the firefighter said, sounding truly grateful. His soot-smeared hand shook a little with visible exhaustion as he lifted the icy drink to his mouth and gulped.
“So whadda we got?” Gabe asked after the exhausted firefighter had sipped deeply.
“Remains were found hidden inside a wall. Looks like they’d been there a long time.”
Taken by surprise, since he’d expected an arson victim who’d gotten trapped by the flames or smoke mere hours ago, Gabe frowned. “How long?”
“Skeleton long,” the main replied with a shrug.
Meaning years. Talk about a cold case turned very hot.
“The body musta been wrapped up in plastic or something, which pretty much melted under the flames. But there wasn’t much corpse left to melt from what I could see. Just bones.”
“You found the remains yourself?” Ty asked, jotting a few notes in a small notebook.
“Uh-huh,” the firefighter said. Offering his name and badge number, he added, “We were walking down the site, just to check for any hot spots. Didn’t think there were any victims—the owner lives nearby and came in right away. Said the bar had been closed for an hour and nobody shoulda been here.”
Gabe glanced around the parking lot and spied a dejected-looking older man with long, graying hair. His loose shorts, T-shirt and flip-flops said he’d dressed and gotten here in a hurry. “He the owner?”
“Yeah, that’s him, Fast Eddie himself. He’s been wailing’bout some cracker who was hassling a waitress the other night.”
Gabe couldn’t prevent a tiny, reflexive stiffening of his spine at the casual, derogatory slang. Pure product of his upbringing, he knew. He was long past being bothered about the fact that he’d been labeled a cracker, a redneck, or just a white-trash bastard as a kid, having grown up on a dirt-poor farm with his racist asshole of a grandfather.
Huh. He couldn’t even imagine what the old man would say if he knew Gabe’s new partner was a black man. If Gabe had actually spoken to his only living relative once in the past seven years, he might be tempted now to call him up, just to tell him that.
“Fast Eddie suspects the guy came back tonight and set the blaze for revenge,” the firefighter added.
Maybe. But judging by what they’d heard so far, this “cracker” probably hadn’t been the one who’d left a plastic-wrapped skeleton on-site, unless he had a twisted sense of humor and a liking for dramatic calling cards. “Okay, we’ll talk to him, get a description of the guy.”
The firefighter finished the drink Ty had given him and mumbled, “Thanks, man. I owe you one.”
“No problem.”
“Next one’s on me, I swear,” he said with a grin. But it quickly faded. “Hell of a thing, finding something like that. Never seen anything like it. Who’d expect to stumble over a bunch of old bones stuffed inside a wall?”
The big man looked shaken. Working homicide, dealing with bodies had become an unpleasant habit for Gabe, but this guy might never have seen human remains before. Firefighters went into their field to save lives, while cops like Gabe eventually got used to the fact that they spent more time helping victims after crimes were committed than before.
The old adage said an ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure. But in this day and age, with budgets stretched so thin that states were sending IOUs instead of tax refunds, cops were badly outmanned and often outequipped. Playing solve instead of prevent seemed to be the name of the game everywhere, including Savannah.
“Where exactly did you find ’em?” Gabe asked.
“The masonry was still intact in the corner of what was once a storage room, but, fortunately, not the liquor storage room, or we might not’a found anything at all. We got this wicked bitch under control right before she made contact with about fifty cases of beer and dozens of bottles of Jack, Johnnie and Wild Turkey.”
That would have been bad. Real bad. The dead over at Laurel Grove Cemetery might have been rattled out of their graves if that room had gone up.
“Looks like the body had been wedged up against the wall between two studs, then closed in with drywall. Once the wall came down, the bones did, too.”
“You’d think they’d have noticed the smell,” Ty muttered.
Maybe. But in a bar filled with the smell of beer and sweaty bodies, maybe a nasty odor coming from a packed storage room wouldn’t have stood out too much.
Thanking the firefighter, Gabe nodded to a man who’d just exited the ruin—Wright, one of the crime scene investigators. Good. In fact, he was probably the best. Wright wasn’t a grandstander or a typical science geek. He was friendly, though methodical and thorough, never missing a thing. Every cop in homicide hoped he’d be the one they drew on a case.
“Mornin’, detectives,” he said, heading straight to his van and talking over his shoulder. “I don’t have anything yet.”
“You’re losing your touch then; figured you�
�d have the vic’s name and driver’s license number by now,” Ty said with a grin.
Wright, usually good-natured, didn’t laugh in response. Instead, he shook his head in disgust. “This poor kid was too young to have one.”
A kid.
“Damn,” Ty mumbled, rubbing a hand against his jaw.
Wright reached into the van and hauled out a sizable equipment case—he’d apparently gotten here just ahead of them and hadn’t done much more than walk into the building and take a look. “He’s been there a long time—years probably. Judging by the size of the skeleton, I’d say he was around ten, maybe twelve when he died. Somewhere in that range.”
Gabe steeled himself against the instinctive mental rebellion that went with the idea of a little kid being murdered and stuffed into a wall and focused on doing his job: finding out who’d done it. “Male?”
“Pretty sure, not one hundred percent yet because of the soot and the melted plastic, but it looks that way. Coroner’ll be able to confirm it.”
“Any sign of trauma?”
Wright shrugged. “Like I said, I can’t see much yet. The skull is intact; so’s the rib cage. If there was any remaining flesh or organ matter, the fire burned it away, along with whatever clothes he’d been wearing.” He shrugged. “Just have to wait and see what the coroner can find regarding cause of death. I sure hope he can find something.”
“You’n me both,” said Gabe, preparing mentally to walk into the ruins to see the crime scene for himself. In any old murder case, finding evidence after a number of years was tough. But after a fire? Talk about finding your needle in a stack’a needles.
Whether the bar had actually been the place of the murder was still very much in question, though he tended to doubt it. What would a young kid be doing inside a rowdy hangout? More likely the boy had run afoul of somebody connected with the place, somebody who’d done a little creative construction work to hide evidence of his crime.
He glanced across the parking lot toward the owner, noting Ty was doing the same thing.
Cold Touch Page 2
