Erin Solomon Mysteries, Books 1 - 5

by Jen Blood

  Once he’d examined Bonnie Saucier’s body, Juarez refocused his attention on the immediate area around him. He stood and walked three paces, stopping when his feet hit an area where the earth was piled slightly higher than anywhere else. He set an evidence marker down beside the mound. Another six paces, and he found another. Ten paces more, and there was another. By the time he had carefully walked the entire area, he’d found four such mounds.

  “And Sarah Saucier says she knows nothing about these?” Juarez asked.

  Sheriff Cyr hurried over to stand beside him, now at the center of the circle. “They don’t usually come out this way—or at least she doesn’t.”

  “But Luke Saucier does?”

  “She claims she doesn’t know,” the sheriff said uncomfortably. “This land’s been in the Saucier family for a lot of years. They’re old timers around here—traditional. Superstitious.”

  It was cool here—colder than the surrounding woods, at least. The moon was low and white, the sky filled with clouds. Jack took it all in, listening for those things that might not be visible to the naked eye.

  “Is there a story attached to this land?” At the look on the sheriff’s face, he added, “I’ve studied these types of things before. It’s not to say we believe any of it is real, of course. Simply that legends and superstitions handed down over the years can influence behavior.”

  The sheriff scratched his chin. “From back at the turn of the century—around 1915, 1920, I think. About a local Indian girl who got killed out here.”

  “Who killed her?”

  “Supposedly, Luke and Sarah’s great great granddaddy,” the sheriff said, warming to the subject. “He had a bit of a reputation with the girls back then. Young girls. Apparently things got out of hand with this Indian, and he wound up killing her while he was trying to…well, you know. So, he tried to bury her out in this spot. Only she wouldn’t stay buried. According to the legend, her maman was a witch. Old Jason Saucier’d dream of her in the night and come back to make sure she was still here, and the grave would be half dug up. So he’d bury her again. Go back to bed. Come out the next day, and there she’d be, half out of the ground all over again.”

  Juarez studied the area, considering it with fresh eyes within the context of the story. “How did anyone find out about what he’d done?”

  “He finally admitted to it,” the sheriff said. “I guess he thought he’d go crazy if he didn’t. He brought his wife out here to show her what he’d done, but the body was gone. He dug up the first spot where he thought he buried her, but she wasn’t there. Then he dug up the whole rest of this plot, trying to find her.”

  Juarez felt a familiar chill wrap itself around his shoulders. He considered the story, imagining the white man desperately searching for the ghost he would never be rid of.

  “He never found her,” he guessed.

  “Not according to the story,” Cyr confirmed. “He started the cemetery out here after that, supposedly so he’d be able to keep track of his dead from then on. He was never the same, though. His grave is up there, too.” He gestured back toward the house. “Jason Saucier. He died in 1922. I don’t think he made it to forty.”

  Another young girl raped and murdered—this one a Native American with strong ties to the spirit world.

  “How did he die?” Juarez asked.

  “Suicide,” Cyr said. “He hung himself from a tree not far from here.”

  “And the girl? Any idea how she was killed?”

  Cyr looked uncomfortable. His gaze drifted to Bonnie Saucier’s inert form. “Strangled. That was his thing, I guess you could say. He liked to choke the girls while he was…in the middle of things, if you know what I mean. As far as I know that Indian was the only one he killed, though.”

  Juarez walked the area once more, while the sheriff remained beside the lifeless body of Bonnie Saucier. Based on what he’d seen thus far, he would guess that there were four bodies buried here, at least—possibly more. And now he had the story of an ancestor tormented after raping and killing a local Native American girl. Plus Erin Lincoln, Ashley Gendreau, and six other girls, kidnapped, hunted, and killed in pairs by an unnamed male who may or may not have been Jeff Lincoln.

  And now Bonnie Saucier. If Bonnie had been J.’s victim all those years ago, how had she survived? And why kill her now?

  Juarez rejoined the sheriff. “I’ll have a team out here from DC tomorrow—if it’s all right, I’d prefer if they handled the crime scene. If you could just cordon it off, I would appreciate it. Keep predators away, and make sure no one disturbs anything.”

  “Fine by me,” the sheriff said, clearly relieved. “I’ll get Teddy and a couple of the other boys to babysit out here overnight. Then it’s all yours. We should probably get back to Sarah now, don’t you think? Try to figure out what’s going on there?”

  “Just give me a minute, if you don’t mind,” Juarez said. “You can go on ahead. I’ll find my way back.”

  Cyr didn’t look very sure about that. “I can just stand by, if you want. Teddy’ll be back before too long to keep the scene secure till we can get the crime-scene boys out here. These woods can be hard to find your way out of sometimes, especially this time of night.”

  “I have my phone—I’ll call if I have any trouble. Just a few minutes please, Sheriff.” It wasn’t a request. The sheriff didn’t take it as such.

  When he was alone, Juarez took some time to view the scene again. Bonnie would have come down the same path he and the sheriff had traveled; he didn’t see any other way to get here, unless it was straight through dense forest. Or was she killed elsewhere, and brought here after the fact? Red Grivois received his phone call at three o’clock. Based on lividity, Juarez estimated that Bonnie had to have been dead at least a few hours. She planned on coming here to meet Red. Said she saw blood in her dreams…

  And now here she was.

  She hadn’t been buried, which was surprising considering the killer’s usual M.O. The way she’d been wrapped in the sheet suggested, once again, that J. had some respect for the dead. From the admittedly cursory exam Juarez had done, it didn’t appear she had struggled while being strangled; there were no immediately obvious bruises or lacerations like the other victims, so it didn’t even appear she had been tortured beforehand. She seemed utterly at peace.

  He thought of Lucia—something he did frequently at crime scenes. Lucia had not been at peace. The energy here felt much different than that Nicaraguan jungle had, but it still was not a place he’d willingly stay for long. He paced the clearing again, his eyes on the ground this time, and tried to push any dark thoughts aside. The spirits were restless here; he felt them reaching up from the ground with bony fingers, heard them whispering in low voices of their sad endings. If Erin knew the tumult of his subconscious, Juarez thought ruefully, he was certain she would run for the hills.

  And perhaps she should.

  He stopped at the center of the circle and turned the full three hundred and sixty degrees, trying to imagine the killer. What would he be thinking? Why carve the J. on his victims’ chests? When one marked something with one’s initials, it denoted property. This is mine—no one else’s. If it wasn’t an initial, however, it could be a message to others meant to say something about the victims. But then, why not just write the word out?

  No… It had to be an initial.

  The clearing got very quiet suddenly, as though all the voices of the forest—in this world and beyond—had been hushed. The bony fingers of the afterlife vanished. In their place was a familiar, much more tangible force. Behind him, he heard rustling in the undergrowth.

  Juarez turned, expecting to see a deer, or possibly a coyote or a fox—it was that kind of an energy. Someone accustomed to traveling in darkness, skirting in the shadows. Instead of a wild thing, however, a tall, lean, bearded man peered out from the trees. Juarez stood perfectly still. The man stared at him with clear, serious eyes. Years had passed since his last photo, but Juarez
recognized him regardless.

  “Jeff?” he said, as quietly as if it actually had been an animal that he’d heard.

  The man didn’t move. He held something in his hands, out in front of his body but too shrouded in darkness for Juarez to make out.

  “I’d like to talk to you about what’s been going on out here all these years,” Juarez said, his tone still gentling. “I don’t believe you did these things; murdered these girls. Other people may, but I have a feeling they’re wrong. Your daughter doesn’t believe it, either. I know she’d like to see you.”

  Erin’s father took a step forward. He looked solid and well cared for, not at all the shadow Juarez had imagined. When he emerged from the trees, Juarez could finally make out what it was that he held in his hands:

  A belt.

  Juarez’s certainty wavered.

  “Stay right there, if you would,” he said. He kept his tone as conversational as possible. “If you could just drop that belt.”

  The man did as directed. They were still dueling distance from one another—perhaps fifteen, twenty strides.

  “Good,” Juarez said. “Thank you, Jeff.”

  “I don’t go by that anymore,” the man said. His voice was quiet, almost musical in cadence. “I haven’t gone by that for a very long time.”

  Someone was coming up the path toward them—probably the deputy coming to keep watch. Juarez resisted the urge to turn and see who it was; maybe signal them back, even.

  “What would you like me to call you?” he asked, trying to cover the noise in the brush with his own voice.

  The man wasn’t fooled—he tilted his head slightly, listening to the approaching footsteps. Juarez could see his body tense as he weighed his options. “You can call me Adam,” he said. “I need to go now. Please don’t tell Erin you saw me. Not until this is over.”

  “Wait,” Juarez said. He eased his hand toward his gun. “I’d like your help. Do you know who did this?”

  “I can’t help you,” Adam said. He took a step backward, edging toward the trees once more. “When I help, people die. En masse.” He followed Juarez’s movement knowingly, nodding his head toward the gun still in its holster. “Please don’t do that; if you bring me in, I’ll be dead within the hour. I’ll stop this myself. You just keep my daughter safe.”

  Juarez drew his gun just as the deputy emerged from the path, turning to wave the officer back where he’d come from. In the same instant, his phone rang. When he turned back, Adam was gone—vanished like a ghost in the moonlit night. Juarez ignored the deputy, palming his gun in his left hand as he checked the phone with his right. The number on the display belonged to Erin. He made a snap decision and answered the phone as he was headed into the woods after Adam, his heart pounding.

  “Where the hell are you?” he demanded.

  All he got was static on the other end of the line. He stopped running a few feet in and swept his flashlight through the trees, searching for some indication of where Adam may have gone. There was nothing. He returned his attention to the phone call.

  “Erin?” he asked again, his anxiety ratcheting higher at the lack of response. There was static on the other end of the line, punctuated by a couple of barely decipherable phrases.

  “Erin? I can’t hear you. Where are you?”

  All he got was white noise before he heard Diggs shout something in the background. Erin screamed, and Juarez lost the signal. He called back immediately, but the call went straight to voicemail. He’d gone cold.

  “Trouble?” The deputy asked with obvious concern, when Juarez had returned to the clearing.

  He took a moment to order his thoughts. “I think so,” he said. He picked up the belt Adam had dropped and deposited it in an evidence bag. This was the point when he should be reporting to someone what he’d seen: Jeff Lincoln, in these very woods. Holding the belt that had killed Bonnie Saucier. It didn’t really get any clearer than that.

  If you bring me in, I’ll be dead within the hour.

  He thought of Matt Perkins, the closest thing he’d ever had to a father, dying in his arms. The church on Payson Isle. Jane Bellows. Noel Hammond. Joe and Rebecca Ashmont. And now these girls…

  There seemed no end to the bodies in Jeff Lincoln/Adam Solomon’s wake. “I need to get the park service and some officers out here,” he said finally. “I just spotted Jeff Lincoln.”

  The deputy couldn’t have looked more alarmed if Juarez had said he’d spotted Satan himself. “Where did he go?”

  Juarez shook his head. “I don’t know. That’s why we need the team.” He thought of Erin’s voice on the phone. Adam’s words: Just keep my daughter safe. Diggs’ panicked shout echoed in his mind.

  He dialed her again, but hung up in frustration when he got voicemail again. When he called Diggs, he got the same result.

  “Agent?” the deputy prompted.

  Juarez hung up his phone and focused on the deputy. Every cell in his body was screaming to get out of there; go find Erin. He ordered himself to stay calm. Do his job. “I don’t think he’s coming back here,” he said. “But I don’t want you alone out here, all right? Two guards on duty at all times throughout the night.”

  “You think we’re in danger?”

  Juarez shook his head as he headed back up the path toward the house, Erin’s desperate cry still ringing in his ears.

  “I wish I knew.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  For two hours, Diggs and I ran north through thick brush and brambles. There were no trails but the ones we forged, no light but the moon overhead, no sounds but the wild ones that hadn’t been part of my world since I was a kid: bats and deer and frogs whose low warbling voices sounded creepily human in the stillness. Diggs wouldn’t let me stop, even to tend the gash in his leg, still oozing blood. I held my arm as close to my body as possible, trying not to jar it—something that’s technically impossible when you’re running for your life in the dark woods, incidentally.

  We stopped when he tripped on a root and lay gasping on the forest floor. I knelt beside him.

  “I think this is the part where I tell you to go on without me,” he said. “Save yourself.” We’d been moving too fast for me to get a good look at the cut in his temple. Now that I had, my stomach turned. I shook my head.

  “We’re not there yet,” I said. “I’ll let you know. We need to find a place to stop, though.”

  “I know,” he agreed. He held up his hand to let me know he needed a second. He crawled away a few feet. I closed my eyes while he puked in the bushes, then stood and limped back to me. I handed him the water. He took a single gulp before he handed it back.

  “You can have more,” I said.

  “Not till we get to the river.”

  Based on sound alone, it couldn’t be far—somewhere to our right I heard rushing water. “How far behind us do you think he is?”

  Diggs shrugged. He leaned against a birch tree, his head against the trunk. I didn’t like the way his eyes looked: glassy, the pupils too large. I touched his forehead.

  “You think you can make it a little longer?”

  “I should be asking you that,” he said, nodding toward my mangled wrist. “What about your hand?”

  “It’s fine,” I lied.

  “It’s broken.”

  I glanced at it, bent at a weird angle and already about twice its normal size. So much for the stiff upper lip. “Well...yeah, I think so. But other than that, it’s fine.”

  He shook his head. “Sure. Other than that.” He took a SAM splint—a roll of soft aluminum I’d seen my mother use innumerable times when she was doctoring the locals of Littlehope—from his bag, then started to shape the splint.

  “A T-curve would probably be better out here,” I said.

  He glared at me. I shut up.

  He silently unrolled the aluminum, folded it over itself, strengthened it with a series of strategically placed curves, and then molded it to his own wrist. Then, he gently eased my wrist into
the finished split and secured it with a waterproof wrap. Even with that small amount of movement, the pain rocked me to the bone. The world swam. Diggs held my other hand, searching my face.

  “You still with me?”

  I pushed past the pain and nodded, resolute. “I’m okay. We need to get moving again.”

  “Just tell me if it gets too bad, or you don’t think you can keep going.”

  I didn’t know what he planned to do if that happened, but I assured him I would. Behind us, a branch snapped.

  We ran.

  Half an hour later, we found the river. The water was ice cold and running fast, the rocks slick under our feet. I wanted to stop to check Diggs out, but he insisted we keep moving. We waded in the shallows because it was easier to avoid leaving a trail behind us for J. to follow, but that meant we were more exposed than we would have been traveling in the woods, and progress was slower because now we were battling injuries, fatigue, and the current. Diggs walked behind me the whole way—picking me up when I stumbled, pushing me onward when I slowed. We didn’t talk. Diggs had his compass and seemed to have a destination—something I was admittedly lacking. I let him lead for a change, and kept my mouth shut.

  I don’t know how long we’d been moving when we reached a section of the river where the water moved slower and the moonlight shone pure white on the surface. However long it had been, we’d heard no sign of someone behind us—no snapping branches, no rustling through the brush… Nothing. Diggs and I had both slowed, and two or three times when I looked over my shoulder, it seemed he was having trouble keeping up. I stopped beside a fallen tree where the water was shallow and we were more concealed than we had been.

  “I want to take a look at your head,” I said to Diggs when he caught up. “Have a seat.”

  “We don’t have time.”

  “If you drop dead from blood loss or shock, I’m thinking that’ll slow me down a lot more. Just sit.”

  He sat. I searched through his industrial first aid kit until I found a cloth and soaked it with river water, then gently cleaned away the blood on his forehead.