The Secrets We Bury

by Debra Webb

  “I realize what I did hurt you deeply.” She met his eyes. “I did the same thing to you that Mom did to me. I’m so very sorry, Daddy.”

  He took her hand in his. “As much as losing Raven and Norah hurt me, those losses hurt you far more. You were devastated and confused. You made a mistake. It took time for you to find your way again. I’m just glad you did—even if it brought you here, away from me.”

  “I swear I’m going to visit more often, Daddy.” She squeezed his hand, blinking rapidly to hold back the infernal tears she didn’t want him to see. The last thing she wanted was to have him worrying more than he already did. “I know I’ve said this before, but this time I will back up my words with action.”

  Her father tugged his hand free of hers and gently placed his arm around her shoulders. “You do the best you can, little girl, and I’ll be the happiest daddy on earth.”

  Rowan leaned into him, thankful she’d had the courage to have this conversation. As soon as she went to bed she was going to text Julian and tell him she’d done it. Julian would be happy for her, if a little surprised.

  “You know that Billy brags about you all the time.”

  Oh lord. Her father would likely go to his grave trying to pair her with Billy Brannigan. “He probably brags on his truck and his dog, too.”

  Speaking of dogs, Freud was curled up at her father’s feet. Whenever she visited her dad or he came here, Freud stuck to him like glue. Funny, she realized, he’d taken up with Billy, too.

  Or maybe Freud had simply smelled the scent of his daddy’s bluetick hound on Billy. He’d mentioned dropping by their house before coming to Nashville.

  “You’ll see,” her father argued. “One of these days the two of you will end up together. If I’m not around, you just remember I said it first.”

  “So you’re psychic now, are you?” she teased.

  “On some things.” He stood his ground.

  “I know one thing for certain.” She peered up at him. “You’re the best dad any little girl could ever hope for. Even when I didn’t show it, I have always been aware of how lucky I am. I really will visit more often from now on. I promise.”

  He smiled and quickly turned away. No matter that he tried to cover up the move, she saw him dab at his eyes. She wasn’t the only one feeling sentimental tonight.

  Before she could stop herself she thought of the Collette family. No amount of promises would give them any comfort tonight.

  * * *

  Rowan dreamed of her sister. Raven always came to her in the water. Rowan had gone many times to the lake where her sister drowned. She would stand on the bank and peer into the water. The last time she’d visited her father she’d gone back to that same place—not the backyard of the home where the party had taken place, but the bank in the wooded area where they’d found Raven’s body snagged on a tree that had fallen into the water years before.

  Rowan stood on that bank now. It was only a dream, her brain understood this, but it felt entirely real. The water was dark. Beneath the water, in the places where the lake was the deepest, there were old cars and no telling how many bodies. The lake was actually part of a reservoir and a damn. Parts of it had been used over the course of its fifty-plus-year history for a dumping ground. But it wasn’t those other bodies floating toward her in this dream.

  Deep in the water she could see her twin sister reaching for her, always reaching. “Come into the water with me, Rowan. I miss you.”

  Rowan gasped and sat straight up in her bed. She pushed back the covers tangled around her body and fought to slow her frantic breathing. No other dreams were as vivid as the ones she had of her sister. Strange that she’d never dreamed of her mother. Julian told her from the beginning that some losses were too deep and too painful even to dream of. Rowan supposed he was right. Maybe that was why she’d never once dreamed of her mother.

  Her cell hummed, the plastic case vibrating against her bedside table. She picked it up and squinted at the too bright screen. Wouldn’t be work. They would call.

  It was Julian.

  You always were headstrong.

  She looked at the time. 1:55 a.m.

  What was he doing awake at this hour? She’d sent him the text about the conversation with her father hours ago.

  Maybe he’d been jarred from sleep by a bad dream, as well. He’d told her often that he struggled with unpleasant dreams of his own. One would think with all their training they would never suffer such discomforts.

  Not true at all.

  She tapped a quick response. LOL we should both be sleeping.

  His answering text said: Dictating case notes. Sleep well.

  Rowan turned her cell facedown on the bedside table. The chances of her sleeping well were slim but she had to try.

  Dharma Collette was counting on the entire department—including Rowan—to find her before it was too late.

  If it wasn’t too late already.

  Two hours earlier...

  Dharma told her eyes to open but they refused.

  He’d put her into a bathtub. Washed her body...her hair. She’d lain there unable to move like someone paralyzed.

  Why wouldn’t her eyes open?

  The drug. She wasn’t sure what kind, but he’d kept her disabled since bringing her here. She’d bumped into him after her run on Monday night. He’d smiled and suggested they get coffee. She’d been only too happy to climb into his car. She liked him, felt comfortable with him. Wanted something better in her life.

  Why had she trusted him?

  He’d seemed so nice. Peter had been out of town again and she’d needed someone. This man understood how to talk to a woman. They’d never even kissed, yet he made her yearn to have his strong arms around her...to feel his lips on her body.

  Didn’t matter that he was far older than her...he made her feel things she had stopped feeling for Peter months ago.

  She should have known he was too good to be true. Men like that didn’t exist anymore outside romance novels. His kindness and attentiveness were only about luring in the next victim.

  She was the next victim. She was going to die.

  Tears seared down her skin. Though she couldn’t open her eyes or move a single part of her body, she could cry. Lying on her back, the hot, salty drops slid down her skin, disappearing into her freshly washed hair.

  “Now, now,” he murmured as he wiped the tears away with a soft cloth, “no need to cry. It will be over soon.”

  Open! Her mind screamed but her eyes refused to obey. Move! She ordered her right arm to move but it would not. Then her left. Still nothing.

  He lifted her head and placed something around her neck. She felt the rough texture press into the soft skin at her throat. Her brain struggled to identify the texture. Rug? Burlap? Rope.

  The realization formed in her foggy brain at the same time she felt the rope tighten around her throat.

  She told herself to struggle. She could not. Tried her best to suck more air into her lungs. Didn’t work. Then she felt herself being pulled upward.

  Tighter...tighter...the rope cut into her skin. Higher and higher, it pulled her upward until her feet dangled in the air.

  Until she could not breathe at all.

  She was dying.

  Seven

  Frederick Douglass Park

  Thursday, March 14, 10:00 a.m.

  Dharma Collette wore the same type of white cotton gown the other victims had worn. Red rose petals encircled her position in the grass beneath a copse of trees. Petals had fallen like crimson snowflakes over her posed body. Rowan concurred with the medical examiner’s estimation that she had been dead approximately ten hours.

  There was one glaring difference between Dharma and the others: she wore a noose fashioned from a braided rope around her neck. Lying alongside her was the length, approximately s
ix feet, of the rope. Just enough for the killer to loop over some object or structure and then to pull her into a hanging position. Based on the bruising beneath the noose and the subconjunctival hemorrhage in the eyes, the cause of death was unquestionably asphyxiation.

  Memories of finding her mother hanging from her neck at the funeral home, followed immediately by the long-buried images of the photos Rowan had discovered in a drawer in her father’s closet streamed through her brain like binge-watching a horror series. Her mother had been hanging from a rope that had been secured to the second-story banister. The detective who’d investigated her death had taken photos of every angle before allowing her body to be lowered from its dangling position. Blood had pooled in her feet and legs. The expression on her face had been twisted and grotesque.

  Rowan banished the terrible memories. She fought back the uncharacteristic emotions suddenly clawing at her. She never had this problem on the job, but this time the case was personal. This woman—like the other two—was dead because of her.

  Frustration, misery and anger coiled into one, tightening inside her as forcefully as the rope that had killed Dharma Collette.

  “She didn’t struggle,” Rowan said, strong-arming her attention back to her work. These women were counting on her to help find their killer. “The only bruise I see, beyond those around her neck and the ligature marks on her wrists and ankles where she was restrained at least part of the time, is one bruise on her left knee. It looks fairly old. At least three days. She may have fallen on her run Monday night. Nails are clean.” With a gloved hand, she inspected Collette’s fingers one by one. “She died in an upright position.” Rowan leaned closer to get a look at her neck and throat. “The rope isn’t only for show, he definitely hanged her.”

  Like your mother.

  The words echoed through her, sending the cold seeping deep into her bones.

  Jones crouched next to her. “If you need to step away from this,” she offered, “we’ll all understand.”

  Of course everyone knew her mother had died this way.

  The damned book. Fury roared through Rowan, the heat and fire of it chasing away the cold, obliterating any calm she had managed. She should never have discussed her private life that way. All she had accomplished was to hand this bastard fodder for his sick imagination.

  Pull it together, Rowan. Anger won’t help find this unsub.

  “It’s important that I do this.” Forcing all the certainty she possessed into her eyes she urged the other woman to see how desperately she needed to be a part of finding this killer.

  “All right.” Jones turned her attention back to the body. “What else do you see?”

  “He must have kept her drugged since there’s no indication she struggled to free herself. He held her approximately seventy-two hours before he killed her. Keeping her drugged is the only way she wouldn’t have fought her bindings and him. The marks around her wrists and ankles would be far more pronounced if she had struggled.” These victims were too much like Rowan to have given up without a fight.

  The killer knew this.

  Dear God. She had given him everything he needed in that damned book.

  All her secrets.

  Well, almost all of them. There were some things she could never tell anyone except Julian.

  “Jones.”

  At the sound of the detective answering her cell Rowan blinked away the disturbing thoughts. She could not allow her emotions to keep getting in the way. She focused on Dharma Collette. He’d hanged Collette and then he’d had to move her here but he’d waited to ensure lividity would confirm she’d been hanged by the neck.

  He wanted me to know...

  After being placed in this park on her back some amount of blood had shifted into the new position from the sheer pull of gravity, but it was paler and the amount was hardly significant. Collette died in an upright position, hanging from that noose.

  Just like Rowan’s mother.

  Rowan stepped away from the body. The medical examiner would confirm her conclusions but she didn’t need confirmation. What she needed was to find this bastard before another woman disappeared.

  * * *

  As they drove away from the crime scene, reporters waited outside the perimeter. They closed in on the car to try and get a usable shot of the people inside.

  “Someone leaked the theory that these murders are related to you.” Jones glanced at Rowan as she eased through the throng of reporters.

  Rowan turned her head away from the intrusions, ignoring the shouted questions. Her throat felt bone dry. “When did this happen? I haven’t seen anything on the news. There were no reporters at my house this morning or at headquarters.”

  “That was the call I got a few minutes ago. The chief is not a happy camper.”

  If he pulled her off the case... “He has to let me finish this.”

  Jones nodded as she sped away from the crowd that had finally been contained by the uniforms attempting to protect the perimeter. “Captain Doyle told him that you’re essential to this investigation. He’s given us forty-eight hours to get this case solved.” She glanced at Rowan. “He doesn’t want to see your face on the news at any point during that time.”

  “He’s not the only one.”

  Rowan thought of Julian. She had acknowledged his hard work in her book. He could be in danger, if nothing else from being hounded by reporters. Good lord, she should have thought of that already. “I need to make a stop.”

  Jones sent her a sidelong glance. “Your father is safe at headquarters.”

  Rowan shook her head. “Dr. Addington is mentioned in the book. I should make sure he’s okay.”

  “What’s his address?”

  Rowan provided Julian’s home/office address and Jones assigned a one-man security detail to Julian as they drove in his direction. Rowan was immensely grateful.

  Too many innocent people had died because of her already.

  Rosa L. Parks Boulevard, 12:45 p.m.

  Rows of Victorian town houses once lined what was now Nashville’s Central Business District. Dr. Julian Addington lived and worked in one of the few survivors of late-twentieth-century progress. He had inherited the impressive residence with its equally prestigious address from his grandmother. He’d received numerous offers on the property over the years but he refused to sell. Instead, he’d set up his practice on the ground floor more than thirty years ago and renovated the upstairs to his taste. During college this was where Rowan had come each week for her session with him. Though she hadn’t been his official patient for more than a decade, they were friends. Good friends.

  Julian’s home had been and still was like a second home to her.

  “I’ll just be a minute.”

  Jones nodded. “I’ll check in with Kendrick, see if he’s heard from his wife. That daughter of his should have had her baby by now. We need a damned break.”

  “A break would be a nice change of pace.”

  The detective’s cell phone rang as Rowan emerged from the car. Maybe that was Kendrick or, better yet, one of the other detectives in SCU with a lead that would help them find this killer before he took another victim. All they needed was one significant clue...just one thing, dammit!

  Fury swirled through Rowan. If the unsub wanted her, why didn’t he come after her in the first place? As if she didn’t know the answer.

  Games. Sick, disgusting games.

  Frustration dogging her every step, she made her way to the front entrance and reached for the door. It was locked.

  Frowning, she checked the time on her cell. Maybe Julian had taken a late lunch. No problem. She’d go on in and leave him a note. She walked across the postage-stamp-sized front lawn and went around to the back of the house. Under his favorite wrought-iron chair he kept one of those small metal key boxes folks often tucked into a wheel well on their ve
hicle. She crouched down and felt around under the chair. No key box. A frown pulling at her forehead, she moved the cushions to make sure he hadn’t relocated it on the chair. Then she checked the other three chairs that sat around the table. No key box. A quick look under the smoker’s station—something he provided for his patients who smoked—and no luck. She searched the patio until there was no place left to examine.

  Maybe he’d decided the key box was too much of a risk. The only thing the key had unlocked was the front entrance and this door from the back patio that led into the lobby. His office door and the door to the stairs that led into his private residence had separate locks—the kind with codes for locking and unlocking. It was possible there had been an incident he hadn’t told her about and he’d felt it necessary to remove the emergency key.

  She pulled out her phone and called him. The call went directly to voice mail. Now she was fairly convinced there had been an emergency with a patient. “Hey, Julian. I hope you’re okay. I stopped by but you’re not home. Call me. I need to know you’re okay.” She drew in a sharp breath. “The bastard left another victim.”

  She ended the call and tucked her phone away. Another victim...another woman dead because of her.

  Squaring her shoulders in spite of the worry and guilt crashing down on her, she walked back around front to find Jones rushing up the sidewalk. Rowan’s heart started to pound. Surely there wasn’t another missing woman this early. Was it possible their killer had finally made a mistake and some useful piece of evidence had been found?

  It would never be that easy.

  “Kendrick’s daughter had her baby. I spoke to the wife. She gave us a name. Greg Ames.” The detective’s lips quivered into a smile. “This could be the break we’ve been looking for.”