Erin Solomon Mysteries, Books 1 - 5

by Jen Blood

He didn’t answer. Instead, he pulled my jacket up around me more tightly and straightened my collar. His hands were warm. He ran his knuckles lightly against my neck and up along my jawline.

  “Impossible,” he said softly.

  He leaned down. I met him halfway, one hand resting on his chest. A full beat, maybe more, passed before he finally made his move. Once he did, I remembered why kissing Juarez was a memorable experience. There was no epic longing with him, no torturous denial. There was just Juarez, solid and strong and more present than anyone I had ever met before. His tongue pressed past my lips and his fingers twisted in my hair as the kiss deepened. By the time we parted, my head was a little light and my nethers a little moist and, if asked, I would have been hard pressed to remember my own name, let alone the names of all the ghosts I was chasing.

  It was the first time I’d kissed him since our farewell in Littlehope in the spring—regardless of what Diggs may have thought happened while we were all in Washington. I made a promise to myself not to let another three months pass before we did it again.

  A few years ago, making out with a man like Juarez under a full moon in the middle of nowhere would have led one place and one place only. But I was older now. Wiser. And there was that little matter of Erin Lincoln’s journal, burning a hole in the writing bag slung over my shoulder. Juarez walked Einstein and me to my room. I turned at the door.

  “We really do have an early morning tomorrow,” I said regretfully.

  “We do,” he agreed. He made no move to leave, though.

  “So, we should probably just…you know. Raincheck.”

  He nodded again. And stayed planted firmly behind me.

  I leaned up and gave him another long, lingering kiss. “So…goodnight.” I turned to unlock the door. And still, Juarez remained where he was. I turned to look at him one more time. “What are you doing?”

  He looked at me like I was hopeless. Or daft. “My job,” he said. “Someone broke into your room last night, leaving evidence that you’re being stalked and that they have intimate knowledge of Erin Lincoln’s murder—and quite possibly the deaths of at least half a dozen other girls. I can’t just leave you on the doorstep when there’s the possibility someone could be waiting inside to butcher you. That kind of thing tends to make a man look bad.”

  Right. That.

  What followed was Juarez’s impressive impersonation of every cop from every primetime police saga I’d ever seen, as he drew his gun (!) and checked every square inch of the motel room, from the bathroom to the closets, behind the drapes and under the bed. When he was satisfied that no one was lurking in the shadows, he kissed me again and then advised me to lock the door behind him when he left. Which I did.

  Diggs had returned to his own room now that Juarez was in town, which meant I had the place to myself. I washed my face and brushed my teeth, changed into my pajamas, and then curled up in bed. Einstein waited for my perfunctory invitation before he hopped up and lay down, stretched out with his head on the pillow beside me. I pulled Erin Lincoln’s ancient journal from my writing bag, dusted it off, and began with the first entry.

  Christmas 1969

  J. got this book for me—he says I need to write things down now, so when I’m famous people will be able to look back and see what I used to be like. He’s so weird sometimes. Anyway, it was Christmas today. Daddy barely spoke, and we just sat around looking at the spot where Mama would have been, but won’t ever be again. I asked J. if he believes she’s in heaven looking down on us, and he said that was stupid.

  “Dead is dead.” That’s what he told me.

  It made me cry later, but I didn’t let him see—it would just make him feel bad, and if Daddy saw me crying because of something he said, it would be all over but the shouting.

  I remember when we were little, how much we used to love Christmas back in Lynn. Mama made everything magic. I tried to do the same thing this year without her—decorating the house, making Christmas dinner, everything you’re supposed to do to make it perfect. It didn’t matter, though.

  From now on, I think Christmas will be the saddest day of the year in this house.

  Chapter Eleven

  The next morning, my alarm went off at five a.m. I stumbled into the shower and managed to get myself dressed and walk the dog without ever actually opening my eyes, and then at five-thirty on the dot, Juarez was at my door with coffee and that just-pressed grin he wore so well.

  “You ready?”

  I nodded, but still had no words—they don’t usually come until at least eight a.m.

  The next stop was Rosie’s, to drop off Einstein. It was barely six o’clock, but she looked fresh as a daisy when she answered the front door of her grandma’s double-wide. Oh, to be nineteen again.

  Stein greeted her like an old friend, dropping into a play bow before he tried to take off for a sprint around the yard. I convinced him that as long as he was still on leash—and it was still six a.m.—there would be no sprinting. Then, once I’d gotten him settled down, I gave Rosie his bag. At the doggy daycares Einstein frequented in Portland and Boston, this was standard procedure. Rosie just stared at it.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s his stuff,” I explained. “His treats, and his food. And his toys. He also has allergy meds, in case he starts scratching. And sometimes he gets a little lame in his hind leg, so just watch out for that when he’s playing. If it gets very bad, I’ve got a recipe and the ingredients for a poultice.”

  She and Juarez both looked at me like I was a crazy person. Clearly, they had no concept of the bond between a childless woman and her dog. Rosie at least had the decency to humor me, though. She took the bag and slung it over her shoulder, then took Einstein’s leash from me.

  “He’ll be fine. We’ll just hang out, maybe go for a swim.”

  “I’ll be back by tonight,” I assured her.

  “Take your time,” she said. “If you’re not back by the time it’s my shift at the bar, I’ll bring him with me. C’est bien. You’ll have Diggs with you when you come back though, oui?”

  “Definitely,” I promised. “And you have my phone number. If there are any problems, you can just call.”

  She nodded. I kissed Einstein’s head and told him when I’d be back. Then, I manned up and left the dog.

  ◊◊◊◊◊

  After that, Juarez pointed the car south along Route 1 and I tried to catch a little more sleep before the day got rolling. When we pulled into a tiny dirt parking lot beside a tiny dirt airstrip about an hour later, he woke me with his hand on my knee and his mouth at my ear.

  “Rise and shine, princess.” Princess. I opened one eye and glared at him, but he just laughed. “You really don’t like mornings.”

  “No sane person likes mornings.”

  He nipped my earlobe. “I bet I could make you like them,” he whispered. With the smoky accent and the deep dark eyes and the way his hand traveled up my thigh, I almost believed him. If anyone could make me embrace a new day, it would be Juarez.

  If I hadn’t had drool on my chin and there hadn’t been a gear shift between us and a plane waiting to take us to a world-renowned morgue to talk about young women being tortured and killed, things may have gotten sexy at that point. Instead, I kissed him very briefly on the mouth and we prepared to take to the friendly skies.

  A little twin-engine something-or-other was waiting for us in a dome-shaped hangar in the middle of nowhere. Curly’s Charters was written on a faded wooden sign just outside the building. Our pilot was a small, wiry man whose moniker was refreshingly free of irony. Besides an impressive head of dark curls, Curly was notable because he was missing two fingers on his left hand. He joked about losing them in a plane crash. Juarez didn’t look like he appreciated the humor.

  Once we took off, I read Erin Lincoln’s journals while Juarez looked out the window beside me.

  “It doesn’t make you sick to read in this thing?” he asked after we’d been in the air for a
bout half an hour.

  I shook my head. “Kat says motion sickness is all about mind over matter. She says nausea’s a sure sign of someone lacking character.” I hesitated. “Or someone lacking moral fortitude—I can’t remember, exactly. It’s one of those.”

  “Well, I must have no character at all then,” he said. Now that he mentioned it, he did look a little green.

  “You get airsick?”

  “It’s just the height,” he explained. “And the speed. I’m not actually that fond of the motion, either. I should be used to it by now. Perhaps I should talk to your mother.”

  “She’d cure you in no time,” I agreed. “She’ll fuck you up in sixteen other ways in the process, but you probably won’t get nauseous as much.”

  He tapped the journal in my lap. “So, have you learned anything? What did Erin Lincoln have to say about the world?”

  Quite a bit, as it turned out. She was a bright kid, but none of her entries were all that revealing. She talked about what they had for dinner, what kind of grades she was getting, where she passed her afternoons. She didn’t say anything about someone stalking her. Jeff was a pain in the ass who definitely pushed the limits sometimes, but so far she hadn’t said anything about him being a crazed sadist in the making, just waiting to torture and murder the town’s fairest daughters.

  I turned the pages until I found one of the more interesting entries so far, and read aloud.

  January 9, 1970

  J. says this house is haunted. He says he saw Mama at the top of the stairs last night, and he sees a little girl here sometimes who looks like me. Wednesday night, he said he thought it was me when we were going downstairs to meet Creepy Will and Hank Gendreau. But the ghost girl didn’t say anything to him, and then she just disappeared.

  He said she was crying.

  I don’t mind the idea of Mama being here, as long as she’s okay. It would be better if she was in heaven, I know, but maybe she just doesn’t want to leave us alone with Daddy. I could understand that. The little girl makes me nervous, though.

  I don’t like this house.

  I finished and looked at Juarez. “Creepy, right?”

  “Very,” he agreed. “Her brother could just be teasing her, though.”

  “My father believed in ghosts,” I said. “I remember that about him, at least. Everything Isaac Payson talked about in church services, he bought hook, line, and sinker. Maybe it was because he thought he really did see something in that house.”

  Diggs would have shot that down in a second. Juarez just nodded. “Anything’s possible, I suppose. What about the final entry? Don’t tell me you’re not the kind of woman who’ll skip to the end to see how everything turns out.”

  “Only when it’s merited.”

  That last entry was actually one of the first things I’d read the night before. It turned out to be disappointingly innocuous. I flipped to the entry again and read to Juarez.

  September 19, 1970

  Daddy went to Quebec for the weekend, leaving Jeff and me. Jeff says he does business up there, like he used to in Lynn. I told him he doesn’t know that for sure. Sarah and Luke came over, and I helped them with their homework. Luke gets so frustrated. Jeff came in and made fun of him, but I told him to get lost. He started in all over again about how Luke’s got a crush on me, and why did I want to spend time with those townie losers, anyway. He’s one to talk, with CW and H. trailing after him all the time. Talk about townie losers. Thank Gawd Mr. E’s in town a little while longer. I never would have made it through the summer without him.

  “Who’s Mystery?” Juarez asked.

  “Mister E,” I corrected him. “I don’t know. I think he stayed that summer with them—Erin mentions him a few times. She never calls him anything but that, though.”

  “According to the Sauciers, that previous spring was when Jeff shut Luke in the basement, wasn’t it? And that was when the whole incident with Sarah Saucier took place.”

  The ‘incident.’ I nodded, reluctant to talk about it. Or think about it.

  “Their mom died in the winter of 1968,” I said. “Erin writes in here that they moved to Black Falls in ’66. Considering that and the shitty way their father treated Jeff, it’s not surprising that he went off the rails. He was fighting in school. Drinking and staying out all night with Will and Hank.”

  “The next logical question,” Juarez said, “is whether all those incidents were really just him acting out against a home life turned upside down, or if this behavior started earlier. She doesn’t mention anything about that?”

  “You mean something like, ‘Got an A on my math test today; Jeff skinned Mister Whiskers and left him in the neighbor’s kiddie pool?’ ”

  He smiled. “Something like that, yes.”

  “Not a word. In fact, so far the only thing that sounds remotely like my father in all this is when Erin talks about how he was with animals. There are a couple of entries where she talks about him feeding the birds, and he refuses to go bear baiting with Will and Hank that summer. That doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who’d get his rocks off torturing teenage girls, does it?”

  Juarez considered that. “No, it doesn’t. I’m not ready to make up my mind one way or the other just yet, but that’s definitely a point in your father’s favor.”

  “Well, that’s something, at least. Right now, I’ll take any points I can get.”

  We touched down in Montreal at ten-thirty, and stepped off our little twin-engine straight into a hip, bustling European furnace. The temperature had to top ninety, and the humidity was enough to make even Juarez break a sweat. According to the GPS in our little rental car, it was supposedly a straight shot to drive from the airport to le Laboratoire de Médecine Légale, but in reality it was a harrowing thirty-minute drive, navigating through construction and detours and an unholy mess of one-way streets. When we finally did arrive, Juarez pulled into a lot reserved for staff, and we went inside a surprisingly modern facility to find a veritable ghost town.

  “They take weekends off here,” Juarez said to me as I joined him on the elevator. “Unlike we Americans.” He pressed the button for the basement. Once the doors were closed, he turned to face me.

  “So, you’re clear on the rules, right?”

  “Everything’s off the record,” I parroted back. During the car ride over, this had been our primary topic. “No touching anything. Only speak when spoken to. Chew with my mouth closed.”

  “The last two are just personal preferences,” he said. “The first two are critical, if you ever want to be invited back.”

  “I know,” I agreed. “I’ve got it, don’t worry.” I moved in a little closer. Juarez was in another of his standard-issue FBI suits. Despite the heat and the lack of sleep, he still managed to wear it well. “You’re cute when you’re official, you know.” I bumped my hip against his.

  “And you’re cute when you’re impossible,” he returned evenly. He returned the hip bump just as we reached the basement, then raised it with a light slap to my backside as he stepped out of the elevator. “Which is almost always.”

  I followed Juarez down a deserted, dimly lit corridor to a locked door marked Laboratoire de Pathologie. He was just about to hit the buzzer when a small, gray-haired woman in a lab coat appeared down the hall.

  She strode the rest of the way to us and met Juarez with a hug before greeting me with a perfunctory nod.

  “Dr. Sophie Laurent, this is Erin Solomon. That friend I was telling you about.”

  She looked me up and down with keen gray eyes, then responded in completely unintelligible French—or at least it was unintelligible to me. Apparently it wasn’t to Juarez, who surprised me by laughing and then launching into a lengthy dialogue of his own, also in French. I held up my hand.

  “Hey, no fair.”

  Juarez winked at the woman. “Sorry, Sophie. English, oui?”

  “English it is, then,” she agreed. There was only the slightest trace of an accent.

/>   She led us into the lab, a relatively small, overly bright room that smelled like bleach and chemicals. I waited for that stench of death writers are always talking about, but none came; no doubt an advantage to working with bones versus flesh. Four steel gurneys were lined up against one wall, each holding a different set of remains. The bones were clean, the skeletons completely disassembled. Dr. Laurent turned on a series of light boxes above each table, all holding x-rays.

  “Where are the other victims?” Juarez asked, indicating the four bodies present and accounted for.

  “I’m having a student run some tests. I’ll let you know what we find. We’ve identified all six girls now,” Dr. Laurent said. “You have the first five files?”

  Juarez nodded, pulling them from his briefcase.

  “The sixth victim was a transient from Boston: Kelsey Whitehart. Based on her history, it’s possible she’d been hitchhiking in Maine or New Hampshire when the killer picked her up.”

  “Can you run me through the details of the attacks?” Juarez asked. “You said you had some new information.”

  “Oui,” she agreed. “You’re free to do whatever exams and tests you want once we release the remains, of course, but these preliminary findings should give you a place to begin.”

  She opened her own file and began listing details that I assumed Juarez had already known, since he didn’t ask her to slow down. Juarez had already made me promise I wouldn’t take notes or record the session, but I was sorely tempted to renege on that promise when I realized just how much information Laurent was providing.

  “All six victims stabbed multiple times; based on the bone markers we found, it appears the attacks were centered around the abdomen, upper torso, and face.”

  I winced. Juarez caught me and raised an eyebrow. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, of course,” I said. “Go on.”

  “All six had nicks in the second, third, and fourth ribs consistent with a straight razor, which was used to carve what we believe was the letter J into each woman’s chest.” She paused when Juarez jotted something down, then looked at Laurent to indicate he was ready for her to continue. “There are a couple of other details I think you’ll find interesting.”