by Liliana Hart
A DIRTY SHAME
By Liliana Hart
Copyright 2012 by Liliana Hart
Kobo Edition
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Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
And I looked, and behold a pale horse:
and his name that sat on him was Death.
~Revelation 6:8
Chapter One
There was something about the dark.
The way it surrounded completely—a gentle embrace that comforted with a soft sigh and a delicate touch. The way it could intimidate and threaten, so the blackness was almost debilitating.
The dark wielded power.
But to me, the darkness was a place to hide—a place to bury my face when it was covered with tears, and a place to huddle protectively when the nightmares came lurking. And they always lurked. The darkness was a place to escape when life invariably turned to shit.
My name is J.J. Graves, and the darkness had become my friend over the past months. So it seemed fitting that I wait until that blackest time of the night to slink my way back home—to the place that had left a bitter taste in my mouth and sweat coating the palms of my hands. To sneak back into the town that had raised me and gossiped about me with equal fervor.
I jerked at the wheel of the old Suburban and pulled to the side of the road on the outskirts of Bloody Mary, Virginia. I lowered my head to the steering wheel and took a few desperate breaths that did nothing to relieve the tightness in my chest. The windows steamed slightly and the sound of harsh breathing echoed in my ears. I tried to ignore the pounding inside my skull and the way the heater couldn’t quite chase away the chills that racked my body, but it was no use.
“Come on, Jaye. You can do this.”
My voice was still hoarse and low, though the pain had been gone for several weeks. The doctors said to be patient. That things would return to normal the more I let myself heal. But I wondered how anything would ever be normal again when all I could think about was the blood coating the floors of my childhood home—violent splatters that gleamed like the black center of a Burmese ruby as death tried to claim me. I still heard the deafening sound of the gunshot and felt the blood that rained down on my skin like scalding tears in my dreams. It was easy to forget how hot fresh blood was. It was always cold by the time I had my hands in a body on my table.
Jeremy Mooney had taken something from me that day, when he’d had his hands wrapped around my throat. I couldn’t say exactly what it was he’d taken. I only knew I was different now. I’d watched him murder a man I’d been intimate with—a man I’d told myself I could love if I only allowed it. Guilt and self-loathing ate at me because I hadn’t known if I could really be in love with Brody, while feelings I couldn’t put into words were forming for Jack—the man I called my best friend. The guilt still ate at me. And I’d been avoiding Jack because of it.
I didn’t love easy, and honestly I wasn’t even sure I knew what love was. I’d thought my parents had loved me. But I’d been wrong there too.
Terror had crippled me after my brush with death. And I hated that about myself. I’d never been a coward. Had never been one to hide from a scandal or the terrible things life seemed hell-bent on throwing in my path. Lord knows I’d faced enough of them in my thirty years. But I guess everyone has a breaking point, and I’d finally met mine.
I was broken. And I had no idea how to fix myself.
I took another deep breath and slowly straightened my spine, wiping the inside of the windshield with the back of my sleeve to clear away the steam. I put the car in drive and checked my mirror for any traffic before I pulled back onto the road. It was habit. There would never be any traffic on these back roads at this time of night.
Bloody Mary, Virginia was like a throwback to another century. It was one of the four towns within King George County and it was full of just shy of 3,000 of the most contrary people I’d ever met. My mother always said it was because there was nothing to do in town except drink or procreate. My mother, come to find out, had been a consummate liar, but I was pretty sure she was right about that one thing.
It was a postcard of a town—towering trees and clapboard houses with American flags flying from the porches. The main roads were bricked and the sidewalks were cracked. It was a town that boasted family values and the American Dream. The shops closed before dark and everything was shut down on Sundays. People got up early and worked hard, and they went home to their families and home-cooked meals.
King George wasn’t a rich county, for the most part. There were pockets where the wealthy lived, of course, because the scenery lent itself well to the monstrous homes those with money tended to own. But most people in King George County were solid, blue-collar working class. It was a good place to raise a family and settle down to a comfortable life.
Maybe that was the reason driving back home made me feel out of place. A family and a comfortable life didn’t seem to be in the cards for me. I was fourth generation mortician. First generation law-abiding citizen. And I was all that was left of the Graves family legacy. By all accounts, I should have been buried next to my parents in the Bloody Mary Cemetery. But for some inexplicable reason, I was still breathing. The blood was still pumping through my body and causing my heart to pound erratically in my chest. I had no idea why God had chosen to spare me. It was just another thing to feel guilty for, wondering if He’d made the right decision.
My headlights slashed across the old playground equipment on the opposite side of the country road—rusted seesaws and metal slides that would blister the backs of some poor kids’ legs in the heat of the summer. There were patches of dirt where grass should have been and scarred picnic tables strategically placed under the towering oaks. It was a park well tended, but in an area that couldn’t afford anything better.
The crunch of gravel beneath my tires seemed unusually loud over the whirr of the car heater, and my head turned automatically in surprise when a gust of wind had the seesaw moving up and down on its own, giving a ride to what I imagined to be the ghosts of two invisible children. My skin chilled and my flesh pebbled as I got the sense I wasn’t alone.
But it wasn’t ghosts I had to worry about. It was flesh and blood. Human. At least what was left of him. His skin was pale in the glare of my headlights, and now that I’d seen him I wondered how I ever could have missed him.
“Oh, shit.”
I made a hard left with the wheel and drove onto the playground, so the bright yellow of my headlights gave center stage to the man chained to the tree. His naked body was mangled and so bloody I couldn’t pinpoint the mortal wound. Heavy chains w
rapped around his chest—I got the impression they were there to hold him up instead of restraining him. His dark hair hung down and his hands were limp at his sides, though from the looks of his misshapen fingers they would have been useless anyway.
I felt the initial rush of fear even as my training kicked in.
In a former life that seemed like an eternity ago, I’d been a medical doctor doing rounds in the ER at Augusta General. After my parents had died amidst lies and scandal, I’d had no choice but to pack up and move back to Bloody Mary and take over the family mortuary business. Mostly because it was damned hard to do rounds while the FBI was trying to question me about my parents’ illegal activities. It didn’t put patients at ease when they found out my parents had been using their funeral home to hide and transport smuggled goods. Sins of the fathers, and all that. Go figure.
Once I’d moved back home and taken over the business (or what was left of it), I’d somehow gotten roped into acting as coroner for the whole county. Fortunately, we didn’t get a lot of suspicious deaths in this part of the country, unless you counted the serial killer who’d murdered three people last winter. Almost four.
I took a long look around the area and shoved my cell phone in my pocket before flinging the door of the Suburban open and stepping to the ground. The piercing cold of a March wind slapped at my face and sliced through my long wool coat, past the threadbare lining and straight to my bones. I didn’t bother with gloves. I stuck my hand inside my coat pocket and pulled out the small Beretta that had become like an appendage since my incident.
The wind blew the door of the Suburban shut almost before I could get out, and I looked around slowly, trying to see beyond the thick copse of trees and past the shadows that resembled grotesque pictures of my darkest nightmares.
Guilt was a vicious and cruel emotion. In the past I would have rushed straight to the victim, searching for that one last hope that he might have a chance for survival. But I learned the hard way that survival is something you have to fight for, and sometimes you have to be selfish when it comes down to your life or a stranger’s.
I breathed out slowly and put the Beretta back in my pocket, focusing my full attention on the man. If I’d had my wits about me sooner, I would have realized at first glance that hope for his survival had run out a long time ago.
Whoever had done this to the man had made a mess out of him. It looked like his hands and feet had both been crushed, as well as his knees. There were small wounds all over his body, but most of the blood loss came from the area of his genitals. Someone had decided to castrate the victim and remove all signs of his manhood. Blood loss and shock would have been enough to kill him.
I fought back the urge to start an examination. I didn’t have my kit or any gloves, and technically I wasn’t coroner since I’d taken leave after my own brush with death.
But something stirred inside me that I hadn’t felt over the last few months. A spark of life. Of purpose. Lying in a hospital bed gave a person too much time to think—to question how much worth one really had. And I wanted this case. I wanted to keep my mind and my hands busy so I wouldn’t think of other things.
I needed to call into the station and report the scene, but even the thought had my breath hitching and sweat trickling down my spine in cold rivulets. I wasn’t sure I was ready to face them all. My friends. My acquaintances. My enemies. Being back in town would almost be as big news as the body. But mostly I wasn’t ready to face Jack.
There wasn’t a choice. The universe had decided it wasn’t through with me yet, even though I’d started to wonder. I’d have to face everyone sooner or later, so I pulled the phone from my pocket and dialed before I could second-guess myself.
“Dispatch,” a woman answered.
“This is Doctor Graves. I’ve got a body.”
Chapter Two
I moved the Suburban and parked a little further down the lane to let the official vehicles get through, and I sat there in the dark with my coat wrapped around me until the first squad car arrived on the scene. I’d only had to wait about fifteen minutes. That had given him long enough to roll out of bed, throw on some clothes and make the drive across town. Not bad.
The eerie yellow of headlights cast shadows around the sharp bends in the road as the black and white came to a stop in front of me. He hadn’t bothered with flashing lights or blaring sirens. It wasn’t Jack’s way. He was a good cop. Too good of a cop to be stuck in Bloody Mary writing traffic tickets and settling petty disputes. But he had his own demons to deal with, and I knew better than anyone that sometimes you just needed a refuge. Maybe I’d never really understood the demons he faced until now.
My lungs started to burn, and I realized I was holding my breath. It had been twelve weeks and four days since I’d last seen him, and I hadn’t even been able to say goodbye or tell him I was running away for a while. I couldn’t face him. Not after everything we’d been through.
He’d have understood my reasons for leaving, and he would have helped me pack and make the arrangements with more ease than I’d managed on my own, but things were off between us. Jack Lawson was the best friend I’d ever had. He was still the best friend I ever had. But something had changed in those days before my near death, and we looked at each other differently now. Or maybe it was just me looking at the world differently, and it wasn’t him at all. That would almost be worse somehow.
Jack’s deputies wouldn’t be far behind him, and part of me wanted to stay hidden inside the Suburban until there was a crowd surrounding us. That cowardice was the exact reason I pushed open the door and put my shaky legs on the ground. I left my headlights on, and I leaned against the hood of the car, trying to look casual, and then I watched as he reached into his cruiser and grabbed two silver travel mugs of steaming coffee and a high powered flashlight.
I tried to look at him as a stranger would. We’d been in and out of each other’s pockets our whole lives, and it was easy to take someone for granted when they’d always just been there. I’d forgotten how big he was—six-feet-five-inches of solid muscle—broad shoulders and lean hips. He’d been S.W.A.T. in D.C. before he’d taken the job of sheriff here, and he still kept the same rigorous exercise regimen.
His dark hair was cropped close to his head and a five o’clock shadow peppered with the occasional hint of silver covered his face, though he was only a couple years over thirty. His buckskin colored shearling coat was unzipped so I caught a glimpse of his green flannel shirt and shoulder holster as he walked with easy strides towards me. He was backlit by the glare of his own headlights, and even in the shadows, he made an impressive picture. He’d always been too handsome for his own good, but I’d never thought of him as such until recently. He’d just been Jack.
“Your hair’s longer,” he said, handing me one of the mugs.
I tried not to flinch at his nearness. I’d had a little trouble with people being close enough to touch me after my incident. He pretended not to notice when I scooted over a little, and he leaned against the hood next to me as we sipped our coffee in silence for a few minutes.
I’d never been one to think on my appearance overly much. I’d spent too many years in med school and living on an hour’s worth of sleep to have time to care. But part of me wondered what exactly Jack saw when he looked at me. I hardly ever wore makeup, but I had good skin, nice grey eyes, and high-cheekbones I’d inherited from someone. I was mostly average in every way—average height, average weight, average breasts. Not like the women he was normally attracted to. And I knew, because I’d seen legions on his arm over the years.
“I wasn’t expecting you until sometime tomorrow,” he said, breaking the silence.
I looked up sharply so my eyes rested on his chin. I didn’t quite have the courage to look him in the eye yet. I hadn’t told anyone of my plans to leave my parents’ cabin in the Poconos. I hadn’t even decided I was leaving myself until twelve hours ago. Some of the things I’d found out about my parents while stay
ing there hadn’t made it a place of rest. And the FBI had managed to find me there as well. Almost two years after their drive over a cliff and there were still unanswered questions. I knew some of the answers now. But I wished I didn’t.
Jack’s fingers barely touched my chin and he tilted my face up until our eyes met. I tried not to jerk out of his grasp, but it was difficult. The only thing that kept me still was the fact that I knew he’d be hurt if he knew I no longer liked to be touched. Even by him.
“You didn’t think you were staying up there all alone without someone keeping tabs on you, did you? What if you’d gotten into trouble or had a relapse?” He raised a brow in question and I could see the censure in his gaze, letting me know without words that he’d been hurt I’d left without saying goodbye.
I could have gotten angry at his overprotective nature, but I just didn’t have it in me. I think somewhere inside, I’d known he wouldn’t just let me go away on my own. He’d probably alerted every cop in the area to keep an eye out for me. I turned my head away, and he dropped his hand so it curled back around his cup.
“Backup will be here soon,” I said to change the subject.
“We’ve got a few minutes. I told them to take their time.”
“Why would you tell them that?”
He dug into his coat pocket and pulled out a pair of thin latex gloves. He held them up in front of my face so I had no choice but to stare at them.
“Because I thought I’d need the extra time talking you into coming back,” he said, smiling sheepishly. “But I can tell by the gleam in your eye I might have overestimated my time frame a bit. I’ve got a job opening for a new coroner. What do you say, Doctor Graves? The hours are lousy and the pay is even worse.”
