They thanked Crock for his help and walked toward the couple who would probably have nightmares tonight, and many nights after that. Finding a dead body was never a pleasant experience. He had many sleepless nights himself. But he couldn’t claim it was because of examining dead bodies. Only one thing kept him up at night.
And being this close to a lake wasn’t going to help him fall asleep tonight. At all. He’d be lucky if he even closed his eyes for a second.
They showed their badges to the couple, nodding to the officer they would take it from here.
“I’m Detective Dixson,” he pointed to his partner standing next to him, “and this is Detective Hawkins. What are your names? How did you find the body?”
The older man clung tightly to the woman as his expression turned grim. “I’m John Turner, and this is my wife Cathy. We were just … we were …”
“It’s okay, Mr. Turner. Take your time.” Jade smiled the friendliest smile she had in her arsenal. Carter found it amusing how many smiles she could produce for any situation. It helped them frequently, especially when he tended to get on the wrong side of most people. Not intentionally, of course. He just didn’t know how to control his patience at times.
John took a deep breath as his wife shivered, almost uncontrollably. “We were walking around the lake. We like to do that as soon as the weather gets nicer. The lake is still cold, but it looks so pretty. And the weather has been so nice lately, you know?”
Jade nodded reassuringly, her pleasant smile still holding strong. Carter couldn’t have been happier, because at the word lake, he wanted to run fast and hard away from the conversation.
“The weather has been wonderful. It’s nice not to have to pull your jacket out.” Jade lightly laughed. “Go on, Mr. Turner.”
“Well, we were walking … around the lake.”
“You already said that.”
Jade nudged him subtly in the side for his comment that he knew was rude, but he couldn’t stop it from escaping.
“It’s a great lake to walk around. I love coming here myself,” Jade said softly with that smile still on her face.
He knew why she kept smiling. To comfort the couple, to relax them, but it was starting to get on his nerves. Everything was. He needed to leave. Soon.
“Yes, my wife and I come all the time.” John didn’t even look at him as he continued. “We found her about halfway through our walk. We parked on the other side of the lake. We didn’t go near her or anything.”
“When was the last time you came here?” He asked the question as nicely as he possibly could.
“Uh, about a week ago, I think.” John looked at his wife for confirmation, who nodded at his estimation.
“Did you notice anything odd? Anything weird or unusual?” Jade asked.
“No. It was a normal day. Nothing like today. Not sure I want to come back here,” John said as he hugged his wife tighter.
Carter concurred. He didn’t want to come back either, and not because a dead body washed ashore.
They talked to the Turners a few more minutes, gaining nothing useful. They found the body. That’s it.
“Well, let’s get to work. Identify the woman.” Carter beelined it to the path that would take him far away from the lake. He didn’t wait to see if Jade followed or not. He couldn’t.
He maintained control as long as he could. No more.
He had to get away from the crystal blue water, the allure, the temptation that assailed people every day during the warm months.
He’d never fall into that trap again. He hadn’t in the longest time.
Because the fear always consumed him before the temptation could take control.
2
This felt like a dream.
A horrible, terrible nightmare.
It couldn’t be real.
Every fiber of her body wanted to refute the phone call she had received. She wanted it to be wrong, a mistake perhaps.
A mistake.
Maybe that was all this was.
She’d walk in there, look at the body, tell the cops it wasn't her friend, and then she’d walk out of here and go back to her life as though none of this had ever happened.
Rose Gowan wanted to believe that; she really did, but she knew it wasn't going to work out that way.
When she looked at the body, she was going to see her friend Evelyn.
She and Evie had been friends for a very long time, ever since they were little girls. They’d been nine the day they met, and already both their lives had been in shambles. With no family to care for them, they were both in the foster care system, and young as they had been they had both already bounced through a number of homes before they were delivered to the same family.
That was twenty years ago, and they were still friends.
Well, they had been up until two weeks ago.
She’d known something was wrong when Evie hadn't come home that night. Whenever her friend was between men she came to live at Rose’s apartment. She didn't mind. She enjoyed the company and Evelyn was always entertaining. Although they had grown up much the same way, they’d both turned into two very different adults. Rose was quiet and shy, preferring her own company to that of others. Evie was a whirlwind of noise and emotion and drama who inhaled men like they were water and she was trapped in the desert. It wasn't unusual for Evie to not come home because she’d hooked up with some random guy, usually someone she met at the bar where she worked, but if she wasn't going to come home she always called.
Always.
Until that night two weeks ago.
When she woke up the next morning to find her friend’s bed empty, Rose knew immediately that something was wrong.
She’d gone to the cops, but they had been dismissively unconcerned. Evelyn was a twenty-nine-year-old adult; she could come and go as she pleased. But Rose knew that Evie wouldn’t just go off without telling her where she was going. Her friend was the closest thing to family she had, and vice versa. Rose wasn't just going to abandon Evie when her friend needed her the most.
So she’d done what the cops wanted. She waited the mandatory forty-eight hours and then she filed a missing persons report. Well, she and another friend, Lincoln Tallont, had made the report together, but Lincoln hadn't been able to join her today, so she was going to have to do the identification alone.
She was going to have to face her friend’s body alone.
That terrified her.
It wouldn’t be the first dead body she’d ever seen, but that didn't make things any easier.
Her parents had been killed in a light plane crash when she was six. Her mom was a pilot who loved to restore old planes, and she'd just finished one and decided to take her and her dad on a late afternoon flight. Rose remembered being so excited. She had loved flying above the clouds, able to look down at them.
Unfortunately, what should have been a wonderful family afternoon had ended in disaster.
A bird had flown into one of the engines and the plane had crashed.
Both her parents had been killed instantly, but somehow she had survived without a scratch.
Well, without a physical mark, at least.
Rose still bore the psychological scars, though.
It had taken nearly six hours for rescuers to find the plane. Six hours that she spent trapped in the small plane with her parents’ dead bodies beside her. She still remembered how scared and alone she’d felt. She had tried to rouse her parents without success, and even as young as she was, she’d known it was because they’d been gone. She had been able to feel something different about them, they hadn't felt like her parents anymore, they’d just been two empty shells streaked with blood, with large empty eyes that stared at nothing.
She had cried herself to sleep in the back of the plane—as far away from her lifeless parents as she could get. The rescuers eventually found her there.
Now she had to face another dead body alone, one that she loved almost as much as she had loved he
r parents.
In a daze, she walked up the steps to the police precinct; apparently, the morgue was part of the same complex. The cop she had spoken to on the phone had told her that he and his partner would meet her just inside the doors and go with her to do the identification.
What she really wanted was Lincoln to be here with her. What comfort were two complete strangers going to be able to offer her?
“Ms. Gowan?”
A couple approached her as soon as she stepped through the doors. A man and a woman; it must be the cop and his partner. She tried to speak, but her throat was too clogged with emotion, so she simply nodded.
“This way.” The man gestured in a direction and began to walk. On autopilot, she followed. “Thank you so much for coming down to do this … we appreciate you dropping everything and coming straight here.”
Of course.
Where else would she be?
Evie was like her sister and she just wished that there had been something else she could have done so things hadn't come to this. She and Lincoln had tried. They’d spoken with some of the people who had been at the bar the night Evelyn disappeared; they had called up all three of her ex-husbands and a few of her other exes, and they had spoken with a couple of homeless people who lived in the area. No one had been able to tell them anything, and apparently this was why. Because Evie was dead.
The cops were saying something else to her, but she wasn't paying attention. All she could think about was what she was here to do.
How did you prepare yourself to identify a loved one?
Sure, you knew they were dead and they were going to look the same and yet different, but there was no way to truly prepare for the emotions that were about to wreak havoc on you.
Rose wished she could tell the detectives she was sorry but she couldn’t do this and that Lincoln would come down and do it. She almost did. Maybe if a sob wasn't already building in her throat, she would have.
Instead, she just moved one foot after the other and trailed along behind the cops.
“In here.” The female cop held open a door for her and she stepped through it.
This was it.
It was time.
She couldn’t do this.
She had to do this.
If their positions were reversed, then Evie would be here. She wouldn’t run away and hide. Rose wasn't a child anymore, and she couldn’t hide from the bad things in life. It was a pointless exercise anyway, those bad things existed whether you hid from them or not.
“Are you ready?” An older man—the medical examiner, she presumed—with a kind face was watching her closely. No doubt he had done this many times before and witnessed a variety of different reactions from the people who entered this room half in denial, and left it with devastating confirmation.
Rose drew in a long, slow breath through her nose.
Her hands curled into fists so tight her nails pierced the soft flesh of her palms and she welcomed the pain; it gave her something else to focus on.
“I'm ready.”
“I’ll pull back the sheet, and you just need to tell us if this is your friend,” the medical examiner explained.
She nodded.
She just wanted to get this over with.
The longer it took, the sicker she felt. If they waited much longer she would probably throw up all over the floor from nervous anticipation, and she was sure she wouldn’t have been the first to do so.
In what seemed like slow motion, the medical examiner pulled back the crisp, white sheet.
Rose could feel the color drain from her face.
Her hands convulsively squeezed tighter.
She felt both burning hot and freezing cold at the same time, and she broke out in a sweat.
The world felt like it was moving beneath her, like when you stood at the water’s edge at the beach and each wave stole the sand from beneath your feet, leaving you feeling wobbly with nothing stable to stand on.
“Ms. Gowan?” A voice rumbled close to her ear and a large hand closed around her shoulder, steadying her.
But she didn't want to be steadied. She didn't want to be touched. She didn't want to be comforted by some stranger who was just doing his job. She wanted to get out of here.
“It’s Evie,” she choked out, fighting desperately to hold back her tears but about to lose the battle.
“Evie?” the man repeated, confused.
“Evelyn,” she said. “It’s Evelyn.”
Then she turned and fled.
She didn't care where she was going, she just cared that she was getting as far away as possible from her friend’s bloated, distorted face.
Rose heard someone call out her name, but she ignored them and didn't stop.
Her tears were ready to burst out and she didn't want to cry until she was alone.
A sign pointing toward a bathroom caught her attention and she veered off toward it, rushing inside and slamming and locking the door behind her.
Then the tears came.
In a flood.
They flooded down her face and she sobbed and wheezed and curled up in a ball on the dirty floor.
Evie was dead.
Dead.
And not just dead.
Murdered.
Carter looked up and across his desk at his partner, who was concentrating very hard on her computer.
“Are you sure she was okay?”
Jade slowly met his gaze. “As well as can be, given the circumstances.” She cocked a brow. “Are you okay? First, you’re snippy with the couple who found the body, and now you’re overly concerned for the victim’s friend.”
Carter shrugged and glanced back at the picture of Evelyn Marshall, the latest victim in the long pile of cases they had on their desk. “We both know how the body looked. She tore out of that room so fast, I swore she was going to hurt herself.”
“Next time I’ll let you go into the women’s restroom and see how she’s doing.”
Looking back at Jade, he shook his head as she smiled wide in that smirky way that meant she was joking, with a side of seriousness. He almost wished she would’ve let him walk into the restroom.
Rose Gowan.
Just thinking her name sent a slight chill through his body.
Which was strange, because he didn’t get the chills over a woman, unless it was a suspect holding a gun in his face. He could still remember the crackhead who thought pointing a weapon at him would get her more drugs after they arrived to a scene where her boyfriend had just overdosed. That situation had definitely sent the shivers running through every vein in his body.
“So, what do we think? I’m not seeing any criminal record for Evelyn. Not even a speeding ticket.”
He couldn’t help but shrug again. There wasn’t much he could say. Based on their quick preliminary search of Evelyn’s life, she was squeaky clean. He was surprised how fast they were able to identify her with her body so badly deformed, but considering her friend put in a missing persons report for her a week ago, it helped the process a little faster.
Well, not just Rose, but also a man named Lincoln Tallont. They filed the report together.
Together.
Were Rose and this Lincoln guy together?
Shaking his mind clear of such silly thoughts, he gathered the papers in front of him, moving them around to help shift his thoughts into a different direction. The simple task wasn’t helping.
There was something about Rose. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it.
Attraction? Maybe.
He couldn’t deny she was a beautiful woman with her long black, curly hair and vivid blue eyes. Those eyes had been filled with so much sadness, his heart almost broke where he stood.
And there it was.
Her sadness.
He could relate. A little too much.
All he had wanted to do as she stared at her friend’s lifeless, bloated body was take her sadness away.
“I don’t like how this killer tried t
o hide the body. Putting rocks in her stomach …” Carter shook his head to get rid of the nasty image that popped up. “Do we think this is an isolated incident?”
“Or more victims?” Jade’s fingers clicked away at the keyboard as her eyes went back and forth over the computer screen. “Let’s keep our fingers crossed it’s an isolated incident. I’m seeing a pattern here with Evelyn. She’s been married. A lot.”
“So maybe we just have a very pissed off ex-husband.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time we’ve seen it.”
Carter stood up. “I need a break. We’ve been working all day. We’ll track down her ex-husbands tomorrow, and we still need to talk to Lincoln Tallont. He filed the missing persons report with Rose.”
Another shiver wracked his body at the sound of her name.
He still couldn’t determine if it was the good or bad kind.
“You go ahead. I need to finish a few more things.”
With a quick nod, he headed for the exit, not wanting to stick around any longer.
He needed some fresh air.
For the memories to disappear.
That was delusional thinking. The memories never went away.
As he jaunted down the few steps outside the precinct, his movements slowed as something caught his eye toward the right. Heart pounding, hands almost sweating, he approached the last person he expected to see sitting outside.
“Ms. Gowan? Is everything okay?”
Her head hung down, her beautiful black hair half covering her face. She didn’t move an inch at one word he said. Not that he said much. He honestly didn’t know what to say. Even as much as he wanted to take her sadness away, he was clueless. He couldn’t even make his own go away.
“Rose?” He reached out and touched her shoulder. A light tap.
Her head jerked in his direction.
Blue eyes, like the sky on a sunny day, pierced him with a heavy blow, almost staggering him off his feet.
Though sharp and bright, they held so much pain in their depths, he couldn’t stop himself. He took a seat right next to her, his thigh brushing hers.
Sweetest Obsessions - Anthology Page 189
