6 Killer Bodies

by Stephanie Bond

  He nodded. “Yeah, I’ll be there.”

  She walked to the door, then turned back. “Wes?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks for the flowers.” She bounced out of the coffee shop and into her electric car like a ball of sunshine. He was dismayed at how much he wanted to go after her. But he needed to drop by the morgue and fish around for answers to the questions in The Charmed Killer case he’d promised Carlotta he’d look into. And he needed to do it before the Oxy wore off and left him with another raging headache.

  He’d just wheeled into the morgue parking lot and was locking up his bike when his regular cell phone rang. He pulled it out and his stomach clenched at the sight of Liz Fischer’s name on the screen.

  He flipped up the phone. “Hi, Liz.”

  “Hi there, handsome. What are you doing tonight?”

  He closed his eyes tightly. He wanted to be with Meg…but Liz was a sure thing, and sex might help him deal with the lack of Oxy.

  But Meg was also his connection to Jett Logan, and he didn’t want to disappoint The Carver.

  “Uh, I have a commitment later, but I could come over earlier, around seven?”

  “See you then,” she said, then ended the call.

  Wesley closed the phone and moved toward the morgue, nursing unease. His involvement with Liz made him uncomfortable, especially when he was feeling a strange sense of momentum about his dad’s case. Randolph had shown himself to Carlotta twice in the past few months, and now they’d uncovered a bug in the townhouse. If their dad had planted the device, would their absence from the house make him wonder if something was wrong? Would he reappear soon? And if he did, would he reveal himself to Wesley this time?

  Wes glanced around the parking lot, alert for any signs of being followed. When he saw no one, he fought disappointment. Then he reminded himself that now would be a crummy time for Randolph to appear, when his name had been mentioned in connection with The Charmed Killer case. Remembering Carlotta’s comment about Randolph’s possible involvement with one of the victims, Wes hardened his jaw.

  He didn’t want to believe that Coop had anything to do with those murders. But what if proving Coop’s innocence made his father look guilty?

  9

  Peter looked up from his cereal and newspaper as Carlotta walked into the kitchen, eyeing her pantsuit. “I thought you were off today.”

  “Uh…Lindy asked me to come in for a trunk show,” she lied. Peter would be livid if he knew she’d planned to use her Saturday off to run down leads in The Charmed Killer case.

  Disappointment creased his face. “I was hoping we could hang out by the pool.”

  “Another day,” she promised with a smile, stopping at the fridge to pour a glass of orange juice.

  “Did you sleep well?”

  Her thoughts returned guiltily to Jack’s late night tuck-in. She’d slept soundly until the daylight had fallen across her face. “Yes, thank you. You?”

  He nodded absently, but the pinched look around his eyes betrayed him. She wondered how much her being in the house, as well as her father’s situation, were contributing to his insomnia. On top of her and Peter’s awkward attempts to repair their relationship, her father had dragged the poor guy into his mess by calling him a couple of months ago. Randolph had asked Peter for his help in clearing his name at the firm where Randolph had once been a partner and where Peter now worked. Of course Peter had agreed. He’d do anything to get back into her good graces, she realized.

  “You look tired,” she murmured, caressing his cheek.

  “Just a lot on my mind,” he said, folding his hand around her fingers and kissing the tips. Then he touched the charm bracelet she wore. “I heard these bracelets were supposed to foretell the future.”

  “Ha, ha,” she said nervously.

  “What kind of charms do you have?”

  She tried to pull away. “It doesn’t matter. It’s silly.”

  “Then show me,” he said, turning her wrist. “Does that one say ‘aloha’?”

  She nodded. “See? It makes no sense.”

  “I don’t know,” he murmured. “Hawaii sounds like a romantic place to visit. And the champagne glasses, well…” He grinned. “That could give a man hope.”

  She blushed.

  “And let’s see, is that a puzzle piece?”

  “I haven’t put together a puzzle since Wesley was a kid.”

  “But you’re a puzzle,” he said with a smile, then squinted. “Is that…three hearts?”

  From his sour expression she could tell he’d done the math and didn’t like the bottom line. “See, I told you it’s silly.” She gently pulled her wrist out of his grasp.

  “What’s the last charm?”

  She gave a wave. “A woman doing yoga. Maybe that’s a sign I should start exercising more.”

  “You look perfect to me.”

  She gave a little laugh, happy that she didn’t have to reveal the charm of the woman lying down with her arms crossed over her chest, corpselike. “Thank you, Peter.”

  “I do worry about you. Michael Lane is still out there.”

  “The store is still providing a security guard to watch over me. And everyone there knows Michael.”

  He sighed. “Then I guess if you can’t be here with me, being at work is the next safest place to be.”

  “Right,” she said with a forced smile. “I’d better get going. Do you have the keys to the rental car?”

  Peter pointed to the keyless remote and ignition key lying on the end of the table. “Have you given any more thought to setting a date for our Vegas trip?”

  “No, but I will.” She picked up the key, then dropped a good kiss on his mouth before walking toward the sliding glass door.

  “Can we do something tonight?” he called.

  “I’d like that,” she said. “I’ll call you later. Have a great day!” She waved and closed the door behind her, juggling the cup of juice. Her chest felt tight over the lies. Guilt always seemed to be close at hand when she was around Peter. But if she could help prove Coop wasn’t The Charmed Killer, her head would be clear enough to get on with her life. At least that was the story she was sticking with.

  To assuage her mind a tiny bit about lying to Peter, she swung by the mall, thinking if Michael Lane was watching her, she’d want to give him the chance to approach her in a public place. Inside the mall, she visited kiosks, jewelry shops, and department stores that sold charms, asking about the people who’d purchased them lately. She showed the sales clerks Michael Lane’s picture, hoping to trigger a memory.

  “Isn’t this the guy who jumped in the Chattahoochee River?” one woman asked.

  “Yes,” Carlotta admitted. That wasn’t the memory she’d been hoping for.

  “Haven’t seen him, except on TV. Why are you asking questions?”

  “I knew one of the victims,” Carlotta said, thinking of the prostitute Pepper and the cheeky conversation they’d had only days before the woman had been found stabbed. “I’m simply making my own inquiries. And I knew Michael Lane.”

  “You think Michael Lane is The Charmed Killer instead of the guy they arrested?” the woman pressed.

  “All I know is that with recent budget cuts, the police department is shorthanded,” Carlotta offered. “I’m just trying to do some legwork for them.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  She knew she could get in a world of trouble for making it sound as if she was working with the APD, but she was desperate. She also knew there were about a thousand places in Atlanta alone that sold charms, not counting the Internet. Add to the mix the fact that some stores had removed their charms from display in deference to the highly publicized rash of killings, while other stores had added them to take advantage of heightened interest, and it was difficult to tell which stores had been selling charms before the serial killer had made the trinkets infamous. The police and the GBI were no doubt working those leads, but she suspected they were taking the angle of p
roving their prime suspect—Coop—guilty.

  As she moved through the mall, she kept looking over her shoulder for Michael, but she didn’t notice anything suspicious. After checking all the possibilities and coming up empty, she returned to the rental car, standing back in the parking lot and making sure no one else was around before she depressed the button on the keyless remote.

  When the doors unlocked with a chirp instead of an explosion, she sighed in relief. Jack said he was still trying to find out who had put the bomb underneath her Monte Carlo, but with the device in so many pieces, his investigation to this point had yielded no leads.

  After she slid behind the wheel of the Civic, Carlotta reached into her bag for the notebook containing her notes and clippings about the murders. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution had featured profiles on each victim. The first victim, Shawna Whitt, had worked at a chain bookstore in midtown, which also doubled as a textbook store to nearby Georgia Tech. Carlotta drove the rental car there next.

  The bookstore was relatively empty due to the summer break. Carlotta walked around, jingling her charm bracelet loudly and feigning interest in it every time she got close to a female employee, giving them an opening to make conversation about The Charmed Killer case. No one took the bait. Finally she bought a coffee at the café, allowing her charm bracelet to jangle noisily on the counter while she waited.

  “I like your bracelet,” the server commented. She wore a name tag that read “Monica.”

  Carlotta smiled. “Thank you. I stopped wearing it for a while when that serial killer was on the loose.”

  The woman’s face clouded, then she leaned in and whispered. “A girl who used to work here, Shawna, was one of the victims.”

  Carlotta gasped. “How awful. Did you know her?”

  Monica nodded and handed over the coffee. “Shawna had a bracelet like that one.”

  Carlotta extended money for the drink and dropped a bill in the tip jar. “Do you know where she got it?”

  “She bought it as a birthday gift for herself.”

  “These bracelets are supposed to be unique. Do you remember the charms that were on your friend’s bracelet?”

  The woman squinted. “I remember a little phone, and a pair of hands that were locked, like a couple.”

  Shawna Whitt had mentioned the intertwined hands charm in an entry on The Charmers online community forum that Carlotta had come across after the murder. The site had since been taken down. “What other charms do you remember?”

  The woman stopped and looked Carlotta over. “Are you a cop or something?”

  “Heavens, no. I work at Neiman’s and we sold a lot of these bracelets.” She fingered the charms. “The rumor is that the charms tell a person’s future. I just wondered if there was anything on your friend’s bracelet that…I don’t know—spooked her?”

  The woman scratched behind her ear. “Let’s see, there was a bird of some kind—a chicken, I think.”

  Carlotta’s pulse leaped. The fact that the killer had taken a charm from Shawna’s bracelet and put it in her mouth was huge. It proved Coop hadn’t added the charm to Shawna Whitt’s mouth when he arrived on the scene to move the body. It was all Carlotta could do not to whip out her phone and call Jack on the spot.

  “And there was a question-mark charm,” Monica continued, “which seemed to fit Shawna because she usually worked the information desk.” She snapped her fingers. “Wait. There was a charm that freaked Shawna out a little. It was a woman asleep or something, with her arms crossed over her chest.”

  Carlotta’s mouth went dry. She picked up the corpselike charm from her own bracelet. “Like this one?”

  “That’s it! Wow, how creepy that the two of you have the same charm.”

  “I’m sure there were lots of duplicates,” Carlotta murmured, then took a sip from her coffee cup. “The intertwined-hands charm sounds interesting. Did Shawna have a boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure? Maybe someone she knew from online?”

  “Not Shawna. She was thinking about joining an online dating service, but she didn’t have the chance.”

  Carlotta poured a packet of creamer into her cup. “I suppose the police came by and asked all kinds of questions.”

  Monica shrugged. “I heard a detective came in on one of my days off, but I didn’t talk to him. I didn’t know anything, and I was just so sad, I had to get away from here for a few days.”

  “Did Shawna mention if any customers made her feel uncomfortable?”

  Monica laughed. “If you work retail long enough, you meet your share of weirdos. But I don’t remember her saying anyone in particular was bothering her.”

  Carlotta smiled. “Being a bookstore, you probably get lots of loners.”

  “Oh, yeah. The guys who can’t get a date on weekends put on their toupees and cruise the aisles ogling the help.” Monica offered a wry smile, then glanced down the counter to see another customer waiting in front of the pastry case. “Excuse me.”

  Carlotta nodded and walked away sipping her coffee, thrilled with the information she’d gleaned—information that apparently Jack had missed out on due to bad timing. She walked back through the bookstore to study the information desk—a tall, curved counter with a phone and computer. It was unmanned at the moment. Carlotta imagined the plain, slender woman standing behind the counter, offering up shy smiles to customers. Had she gotten too chatty with a psychopath? Inadvertently ticked him off in some way?

  The last two victims, the Georgia State coeds, had been found with book charms in their mouths. Maybe the charms were clues to the murderer’s identity. Maybe he was an intellectual, or fancied himself to be. If so, it made sense The Charmed Killer would hang out in a bookstore.

  But Michael Lane certainly didn’t fit that profile.

  “May I help you?” a young man asked, stepping up to the information counter.

  Carlotta gave him a big smile. “Does your store specialize in a certain type of book? Or is there a unique section that would bring in a particular customer?”

  “We sell more textbooks than anything else, mostly to students, of course. But we have lots of professionals come in to buy reference books, too.”

  “What type of professionals?”

  He shrugged. “Engineers, doctors, architects, you name it.”

  Any one of whom might have latched on to Shawna Whitt. Carlotta pulled out a picture of Michael Lane. “Have you seen this man in here?”

  The man squinted. “He looks familiar, but…I don’t think so.”

  Eager to further exonerate Coop by proving he didn’t know Shawna Whitt, she pulled out a picture of him taken on their road trip to Florida. In it, Coop looked tanned and happy, a far cry from his disheveled appearance being flashed on television and in newspapers. “How about this man? Have you ever seen him in here?”

  The clerk bit his lip, then nodded. “Yeah, that’s the white-van guy. He’s in here a couple of times a week, checking out the medical books. I figure he’s a med student or something.”

  The breath stalled in her lungs. “How…how do you know he drives a white van?”

  “Hard to miss, it’s so big. He parks it across the street.” The man turned and pointed out the window at the metered street parking. “Are you looking for him?”

  She nodded, but the effort was painful. Tears pushed on the backs of her eyeballs. “He’s a long-lost friend. Thank you for your time.”

  She stumbled to a comfortable chair in a seating area to gather herself. So what if Coop came into the store often? It didn’t mean he’d known Shawna Whitt.

  But if he was a regular customer, wouldn’t he have seen her at some point? If so, why hadn’t Coop mentioned when they’d arrived to pick up the woman’s body that she seemed familiar?

  Her palms were sweating against the paper cup of coffee. She opened the notebook and forced herself to write down the details about Shawna and her charm bracelet, but her handwriting was shaky. Carlot
ta ached to call Hannah or Wesley for support, but she was afraid to give voice to the questions and doubts revolving in her head.

  Telling herself that more information about Shawna Whitt might reveal another direction she could follow, Carlotta left the bookstore and drove to the woman’s home. She kept an eye on the side mirror, but didn’t notice anyone tailing her. Maybe she was all wrong about Michael following her into the ladies’ room at Moody’s Cigar Bar…or perhaps he’d simply lost interest.

  She didn’t remember the exact address of Shawna Whitt’s Berkley Heights home, so she drove through the older neighborhood until she spotted the little house. Except for the overgrown yard, it was a dream cottage for a single woman—neat and picturesque. Carlotta parked on the street and got out to stretch her legs. She glanced at the neighboring houses. A curtain moved in the window of a bungalow across the street.

  Carlotta smiled and headed in that direction. Nosy neighbors could be a treasure trove of information. She cringed, thinking of all the things her neighbor Mrs. Winningham would spill about the Wrens, if given the opportunity.

  From the looks of the bungalow, the occupant had lived there for a while. The houses on either side looked updated. Carlotta strode up to the door and knocked. When she didn’t get a response, she knocked again. Finally the door opened a few inches to reveal a woman’s wrinkled, wary face. “Yes?”

  “Hi,” Carlotta said with a smile. “My name is Carlotta Wren. I was wondering if you could answer some questions for me about the lady who lived across the street.”

  “The one who got murdered?”

  “Yes, Shawna Whitt.”

  “Didn’t know her,” the woman said.

  “That’s okay,” Carlotta said. “I’ll bet you’ve lived in this neighborhood for a while.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you have a nice vantage point to be able to look out for your neighbors. You probably notice things that other people don’t.”

  “Sometimes,” the woman admitted.

  “Did you see anything strange the day that Shawna Whitt was found in her home?”

  The woman’s eyes narrowed. “Who are you?”