“Fat chance I can find anything forensics missed. They’ve sifted the crime scene as finely as an ancient burial mound. But I still want to go down there and take a look.”
“Can I come?”
Two shades of blue eyes met, and held. “Tomorrow’s a work day,” Brad countered, “or have you given Phil notice?”
Claire ignored his lack of enthusiasm. “So we’ll go after work.” She was certain she heard his teeth grind.
“Fine. Tomorrow, five o’clock. I’ll pick you up at T & T.”
Much later, as Claire floated up the ramp to her grandmother’s house, she realized her sense of well-being wasn’t solely due to great sex. She had stood up to the macho manipulator and he hadn’t yelled, balked or even said no.
Claire was back to clutching the pickup’s shoulder harness the next afternoon as they made the ten-mile trip to Pine Grove in what she was certain was record time. After all the stories she’d heard about Pine Grove’s abandoned streets, its ghost town atmosphere, her first glimpse of the cluster of unpretentious storefront businesses along the Tamiami Trail was disappointing. A wide place on the Trail, pretending to be a town. Nothing eerie about it.At the town’s sole stoplight Brad turned right, driving over a broad canal, and suddenly they were in an area of stuccoed ranch-style homes that would not have looked out of place among their more affluent neighbors in Golden Beach. So where were Pine Grove’s spooky roads to nowhere?
Another mile, another canal, and then . . . nothing but wilderness. Not even other cars. Stretched out at right angles on either side of the narrow road were long-abandoned streets, each two or three blocks long, leading straight as an arrow into the heart of the Florida wilderness. Clumps of grass sprouted between cracks in the pavement. Jungle greenery had crept back, overhanging the macadam slashes into its heart. Incredibly, each of these overgrown straight lines to nowhere had its own street sign, neat white letters on a green background, as if the streets planned by the long-defunct developers were thriving areas of Pine Grove suburbia. Beyond eerie, Claire thought. Almost other worldly.
“More than eighty thousand lots,” Brad said, following Claire’s fascinated gaze. “Less than ten percent have houses.”
“It’s awesome,” Claire admitted. “And spooky. It’s as if we hung a right and dropped off the world.”
“Great place to dump a body.”
Claire shivered and did not reply.
In the wild grass along the edge of the road, masses of yellow flowers were interspersed with the delicate red of bleeding heart, backed by tall feathery fronds of pampas grass. Beyond that, the Florida jungle—towering slash pines, cabbage palms, live oak, scrub oak, willow and carrotwood, much of it covered in dangling gray swirls of Spanish moss and massive overhangs of wild grape and poison ivy. A seemingly impenetrable wall of green. As Brad said, a great place to hide a body.
The pickup bucked and shuddered as Brad turned onto one of the perfectly straight dead-end streets, encountering resistance from the grass thrusting up through the cracked pavement. They were almost at the end of the short street when he braked to a stop. “Somewhere in there,” he said, nodding to the right. After a glance at Claire’s feet to make sure she was wearing her boots, he said, “Okay, let’s see what we can find.”
It didn’t take long. The yellow crime scene tape was gone, but too many feet had tramped through the area for an old Florida hand like Brad Blue not to locate the site, which was less than thirty feet off the road. A disturbed mound of sandy soil glared up at them from a surrounding bed of brown pine needles. Gnarled roots thrust their way up, giving ample evidence why the grave had been so shallow.
There was absolute silence, not a car on the main road, not so much as the call of a bird. The hair rose on Claire’s arms, the back of her neck prickled. Not waiting for Brad to tell her not to tromp on the grave site, she turned her back and moved away. Someday, perhaps a generation hence, someone would build a home here, never knowing . . . Or would it always be as haunted as it seemed today? Lingering in the folklore of Pine Grove, land destined to be abandoned forever?
Wary of snakes and other insidious Florida creatures, Claire walked only as far as the edge of a cluster of pines whose thick mulch of brown pineneedles kept most of the jungle back. She kicked at a wild mushroom, brushed her hand across the soft green of a young pine scarcely three feet high, spotted an air plant hanging temptingly low on a oak branch stretched above the pineneedle carpet.
Teetering on her tiptoes, Claire stretched her hand up and plucked the small gray-green plant off the branch so she could take it home to Jamie. She’d tried to explain how air plants grew without hurting their host tree, but the lesson would be much stronger if Jamie could hold one in his hand.
She glanced back toward the grave site. Brad was down on his knees, head bent, as if he actually believed there was something left to see. Or was he simply soaking up the atmosphere? The aura of evil. Claire shuddered. There was a darkness here that had nothing to do with the trees that towered over the grave site. A miasma of madness she couldn’t ignore. She wanted to believe the body in the shallow grave was a case of domestic violence or a drug bust gone wrong, but now . . . somehow she didn’t think so. She could feel the evil. Not just violence, but insanity.
Stupid! She couldn’t possibly know that. Not really.
As Claire started back toward Brad, her foot struck something hidden beneath the carpet of pineneedles. She almost didn’t look down. If it was a snake she didn’t want to know.
Okay, she had to look.
A whoosh of relief escaped her lungs. Just a branch. A small broken branch. She started forward again. Stopped. Stepped carefully back and looked again. Her scalp prickled as she took a longer look at what her boot had scuffed into view. Not a single branch, but two small branches. Tied together in the shape of a cross.
Claire knelt and studied the crude cross. No sense getting excited over nothing. Gingerly, she moved the sticks out from under the carpet of pineneedles. Definitely man-made, definitely a cross. Part of the grave site? If so, what was it doing twenty feet away, hidden by pineneedles and the overhang of an elderberry bush?
The dog, of course. Playing his own version of Fetch, growing bored, dropping the sticks where they gradually became obscured by falling pineneedles.
“Brad?” Claire called. Softly, because a loud noise would have been as sacrilegious as shouting in church. Her tone was enough to bring him running.
Brad hunched over the two cross-shaped sticks, the intensity of his concentration radiating from the set of his shoulders. He placed his index fingers on each end of the shorter crosspiece and carefully turned the object over. Picking up a fistful of pineneedles, he gently brushed dirt from the rough bark. With a toneless whistle through his teeth, he sat back on his heels, uttering a cryptic, “We can scratch Ken Millard as a suspect.”
“Why?”
“There’s carving on the wood, rough but still legible.”
Claire dropped to her knees beside Brad, staring at the marks. Crudely scratched into the bark were three letters: MOM. “Dear God, that’s sick,” Claire breathed. “I suppose,” she added, struggling to stay cool and detached, “you mean that Ken would have done a neater job of it.”
“That’s it,” Brad nodded. “Old Ken would have scraped off the bark and carved the letters in Old English Script.”
“Even if he’d just killed his mother?” Claire challenged.
“Right.”
“It could still fit Vicky’s theory, except a mother died instead of a wife,” she pointed out. “Loss of a Social Security check puts a big dent in the monthly income. This wasn’t necessarily murder, was it? Didn’t you say there was no sign of trauma on the skeleton?”
“Suffocation wouldn’t show,” Brad countered shortly, “and that’s what our killer likes to do to his women. First,” he added so softly Claire almost missed it.
Goosebumps rose on her arms. Claire had to struggle to maintain her role a
s sounding board. “All right, let’s say she was done in by our serial killer. Isn’t it rather strange he made a cross for this victim and not for the others?”
“Not with someone as sick as this guy is.” Once again Brad bent his head to the cross, examining the still viable vine that bound the two sticks together. He shook his head. “How in the hell did you find this?”
“I tripped over it.”
Brad swore. “The best crime scene team in Calusa County went over this site with a fine tooth comb, and you come wandering out here and trip over something they didn’t find. I suppose you’re going to call it female intuition,” he added with disgust.
“Just dumb luck,” Claire responded modestly. “But speaking of intuition, there’s something really wrong about this place. There’s evil here, I can feel it. I don’t think this is just someone’s private burial ground.”
“Well, shee-it, Ms. Langdon,” Brad drawled. “I thought it was Massachusetts that had all the witches.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” Claire snapped back, “but if you macho types are too thick-skinned to feel it, too bad! That’s why the phrase is ‘women’s intuition.’”
“Okay, okay,” Brad grumbled. He handed her the cross. “Put this back exactly where you found it and stand guard while I get my camera and an evidence bag.”
Suddenly, she was alone with evil. Brad was just a few short steps away, yet Claire’s heart was in her throat. Fading light filtered down through the canopy of pines above, illuming the crudely etched letters.
MOM. Oh, God, what was she doing here? What was she doing taking a job sitting a model home in the middle of nowhere with a madman on the loose.
MOM. He’d killed his mother. He’d made her a cross. He wasn’t going to like Claire finding it. And he would know. Oh, yes, somehow he’d find out. There were too many people interested in this case. Too many mouths.
And when he found out? When he found out, he might be very angry. Logic, reason were irrelevant. He was a madman, and he was going to kill her.
“Claire. Claire!”
Startled, Claire blinked at Brad who was standing in front of her, the cross already safely stowed in the plastic bag in his hand. “I can hardly say I’m sorry I brought you,” he admitted as he took her firmly by the arm and steered her toward the car, “but I am sorry you had to pick up the feel of this place. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“In a way, I did,” Claire said as they left the pines and walked out into the sunshine and a carpet of wildflowers. “I had a horrible vision that the killer was going to hold me personally responsible for disturbing his mother’s grave.”
“Claire, half the sheriff’s department has tromped through these woods.”
“I know it’s silly,” she admitted as Brad boosted her into the truck, “but for a moment there it seemed so real.”
“That’s the trouble with brainy women,” Brad muttered. “Jet-propelled imagination.”
Claire made a weak attempt at a laugh.
After Brad maneuvered the pickup into a U-turn on the narrow overgrown road and headed back toward civilization, the gloom seemed to lift with each mile they drove. By the time they reached Golden Beach, Claire had almost convinced herself her fears were groundless. She had helped. She had actually found something of significance. Brad was pleased.
The sheriff was going to have a fit.
“Witch, am I?” Claire teased later that night, as she dangled the tip of a long blond lock of Brad’s hair a half inch above his nose. Propped on her elbow, she was lying full length along Brad’s side, one bare breast brushing enticingly, erotically, against the blond mat of his chest.
“Fully licensed, card-carrying candidate for the stake . . . and I’m the guy who’s going to make you burn.”
Before Claire could come up with a good retort, their positions reversed. She found herself on her back with a pair of brilliant blue eyes laughing down at her. Somehow her arms, as bare as the rest of her, were pinned beneath the top sheet.
With his hands flat on either side of her head, Brad shook out his hair until a long strand fell precisely above Claire’s nose. Then, like a bull about to charge, he began swinging his head back and forth, taking his revenge in kind. Claire giggled, squirmed, threw her head to one side. “Enough, enough!” she choked, acknowledging the exquisite agony of the torture.
“So when are you going to make an honest man of me?” Brad demanded, cupping her head back into place and ruthlessly continuing his pendulum-like torture of her nose. He ducked his head still lower, swishing half a head of blond hair in her face. “When’s the wedding?” he demanded.
Claire dragged a hand out from under the sheet and yanked at a tempting strand of gold-streaked blond. A satisfyingly hard tug. With a roar that was half laughter Brad rolled away, his head falling back against the pillow next to hers. He stretched out a hand and trailed it lightly across her stomach before resting it, palm up, against her abdomen. “Want to have another try at baby-making?” he inquired huskily.
Claire squeezed her eyes shut—want, guilt, need, and love at war with New England pragmatism. Refusing to play Russian Roulette with her life, she’d gone back on the pill. But not without a twinge of regret
Except for her nightly drive home, it was as if they were already married. Learning each other. Sometimes tender and loving, sometimes hot and fierce. Quarreling, laughing. Spending long, lazy, glowing moments together between bouts of passion that drove her to heights she had never even imagined.
And yet . . . she was still afraid. Afraid of her own judgment. Afraid she was once again blind to reason, caution, good sense. Who was this man, this admittedly dangerous man, who wanted to father her children? Who wanted to live with her for all the days of their lives?
So chicken out, girl. It’s so much easier to make love than to think. Claire tugged on Brad’s hand. Slowly, it slid down over her belly, until his fingers tangled in her short soft curls. The fingers stilled, lying with tantalizing warmth along her most sensitive flesh, Brad’s iron will very much in control. “When, Claire?” he demanded. “How long do we have to play these games?”
With a wiggle of her hips Claire turned toward him, dislodging his possessive touch. She trailed the tips of her fingers down his chest, tracing each scar with loving tenderness. So much easier to feel, to lose herself in love. Seize the moment, forget tomorrow.
Chicken, chicken, chicken.
Claire’s fingers wandered lower, bypassing his vibrant erection to butterfly his inner thighs. He sucked in his breath. “Damn you, woman, you are a witch.” With excruciating slowness her hand drifted toward his penis. Hard as iron. She squeezed and stroked, rubbing her index finger around the swollen tip, smugly secure in the knowledge she had put a period to all conversation.
In one broad sweep of Brad’s callused hand the top sheet joined the cotton blanket and bedspread that had hit the floor an hour earlier. The next instant he was inside her, filling her, taking control with a vengeance. Just a little plain old-fashioned Slam-Bam-and-Thank-you-Ma’am. Except that he kept it up until Claire joined his driving need, losing her schemes and fears, losing herself more completely than she ever had before, plunging with every stroke into some mindless cauldron of sensation. Knowing only that she could never go back. Never be the person she had been before. That she didn’t want to go back. She only wanted to be. To be like this. Forever.
The world fell away. As she convulsed, with a cry of triumph Brad let himself go, joining her in their journey into oblivion.
What seemed like hours later Claire gathered enough strength to crawl out of bed. She tripped over Brad’s shirt, idly slipped it on over her nakedness, then opened the balcony door and walked out into the seabreeze that cooled the star-filled night.
The smell of damp earth, tropical flowers, salt water, the faint tang of chlorine from the pool permeated the cool night air. Quiet, beautiful, peaceful. Palm Court—one of the more idyllic spots on earth.
�
�Nice,” Brad murmured against her hair, his arms encircling her, one hand coming to rest over her breast, the other flat against her abdomen. He was not, Claire knew, referring to the view across the bay. When he pressed against her from behind, she could feel his arousal growing even as he spoke. “How about marrying me for my house?” he inquired blandly.
“Don’t be silly!”
“Well, wealthy, good looking, and good in bed don’t seem to be enough.”
“You are the most spoiled, arrogant . . .” Words failing her, Claire jerked out of his grasp, moving to the edge of the balcony. “I have to go,” she said briskly. “I’ll fall asleep over my computer as it is.”
“Give notice.”
Claire swallowed hard. “I’ve been thinking about it,” she admitted.
“Tomorrow.” He was behind her again, fingers closing possessively on the back of her neck, lips moving against her ear. “Give Phil a week, two if she insists. Then you’re mine. Do it, Claire, it’s time.”
She murmured something, anything. He was right. It was time. She wasn’t saying yes to marriage. Just a job.
A risky job.
This time Claire’s drive home wasn’t lonely. It was peopled with ghosts and fraught with whispered words. Jim Langdon, the ultimate pragmatist, was first and loudest. Go for it, Claire. You’ll never get a better offer.
. . . But I like him, Mom!
. . . Claire Hilliard Langdon, you’re a fool if you let that man get away . . .
. . .Your husband’s colleagues are desperate, Mrs. Langdon. They’re not going to let the boy go . . .
. . . Mrs. Langdon . . . Claire, I’m sorry, really sorry. Your husband’s plane went down . . .
A voice crackling over the radio. We’ve got him! The boy’s okay. He’s alive. Ms. Langdon, are you listening? We’ve got him . . .
. . . Look, Mrs. Langdon, we don’t go for this innocent act . . . you must have met Anton Schawabe . . .
Shadowed Paradise Page 21
