Southern Lights

by Danielle Steel

  Savannah didn’t remember much about the divorce, but she knew it had been a bad time for her mother. Her father was from Charleston, South Carolina, and they had lived there until the divorce, and then she and her mother moved back to New York. Savannah hadn’t been to Charleston since, and didn’t really remember it anymore. Her father came to see her in New York two or three times a year, and when he had time, he took her on trips, although his schedule changed a lot. She loved seeing him, and tried not to feel like a traitor to her mother when she did. Her parents communicated by e-mail, and hadn’t spoken or seen each other since the divorce. It was a little Charlie’s Angels for Savannah’s taste, but that was just the way it was, and she knew it wasn’t going to change. It meant her father wouldn’t come to her high school graduation. Savannah was hoping to work on both of them in the four years before she graduated from college. She really wanted both of them there. But her mother was great, in spite of the animosity between her parents.

  “You know he’ll probably cancel at the last minute, don’t you?” Alexa said, looking irritated. She hated it when Tom disappointed their daughter, and he so often did. Savannah always forgave him, but Alexa didn’t. She loathed everything he did and was.

  “Mom,” Savannah scolded her, almost sounding like the mother and not the daughter. “You know I don’t like it when you do that. He can’t help it, he’s busy.” Doing what? Alexa wanted to ask, but didn’t. Going to lunch at his club, or playing golf? Visiting his mother between her United Daughters of the Confederacy meetings? Alexa pressed her lips tightly together, as the elevator stopped in the lobby and they got out.

  “I’m sorry,” Alexa said with a sigh and kissed her. It wasn’t so bad now, at seventeen, but Alexa had been furious when Savannah was little and he didn’t show up and her big blue eyes filled with tears and she tried so hard to be brave. It broke Alexa’s heart to see it, but Savannah could handle it better now. And Savannah excused her father for nearly everything he did. “If his plans change, we can always go to Miami for the weekend, or skiing. We’ll figure something out.”

  “We won’t have to. He promised he’d be there,” Savannah said firmly. Alexa nodded, they kissed each other goodbye quickly, and then Savannah ran for her bus, and Alexa walked through the freezing morning to the subway station. It was bitter cold outside and there was snow in the air. Savannah didn’t feel the cold as much as she did, and after a stop-and-start ride on the subway, Alexa was frozen to the bone when she got to work.

  She saw Jack, the detective, and one of his young assistants heading for Joe McCarthy’s office, just as she strode toward it herself.

  “Early meeting?” Jack asked easily. He had worked with her often over the past seven years, and he liked her a lot. He would have liked to ask her for a date, but she seemed too young to him. She knew her stuff, and was a no-nonsense kind of person, and he knew the DA thought the world of her. Jack had worked with her on the big rape case three months before. They had gotten a conviction. Alexa always did.

  “Yeah, Joe sent me a text last night. He’s probably just catching up on all the two-bit cases I’ve had lately. I’ve had every shoplifter in New York,” Alexa said with a grin.

  “Nice,” he laughed, and introduced her to Charlie, who said hello, but nothing after that. He looked distracted, as though he was thinking about something else. “Good holidays?” Jack asked as they reached the DA’s office, and he told Charlie to wait outside.

  “Quiet. My daughter and I stayed home, and I took a week off. College applications. This is her last year at home.” She said it sadly, and he smiled. She talked about her daughter frequently. He was divorced, but had no kids, and an ex-wife he would have been happy to forget. She had married his partner twenty years before, after cheating on him for two years. Jack never wanted to get married again. He always suspected that Alexa felt the same way. She wasn’t a bitter person, but she was all business, and he didn’t know a single soul in the police department who had ever dated her. He thought she had gone out with one of the assistant DAs five years before, but mostly she kept to herself and never talked about her personal life—except about her daughter.

  Alexa had noticed that the cop with him looked young and intense. The earnest look on his face made her smile. Young cops always looked like that to her.

  Jack and Alexa walked into Joe McCarthy’s office at the same time, while Charlie waited outside. The DA looked happy to see them both. He was a good-looking man, of Irish origins, with a thick mane of white hair that was always a little too long. He said he’d had white hair since he was in college. It suited him. He was wearing jeans and cowboy boots and a worn-out old tweed jacket and a cowboy shirt. He was known for wearing western gear, even at meetings with the mayor.

  “Did you two talk on the way in?” the DA asked, looking at Jack, who shook his head. He didn’t want to steal the DA’s thunder and knew better than that.

  “Do we have a new case?” Alexa asked with interest.

  “Yeah, I figured we’d keep it out of the paper for another day, until we get everything nailed down,” he said as they sat down. “It’ll probably leak by this afternoon, and then all hell will break loose.”

  “What kind of case?” Alexa’s face lit up as she asked him. “Not another shoplifter, I hope. I hate the holidays,” she said, looking disgusted. “I don’t know why they don’t just give them the stuff and forget it. It costs the taxpayers a hell of a lot more than it’s worth to prosecute.”

  “I think we’ll be putting the taxpayers’ money to good use on this one. Rape and murder one. Times four.” Joe McCarthy smiled at Jack as he said it.

  “Times four?” Alexa looked intrigued.

  “Serial killer. Young women. We had a tip. It didn’t seem like a good lead at first, and then bodies started showing up, and the info we had started making sense. There’s been a small task force following him from state to state for the last six months, but they could never catch him at it. All we had were victims and no way to link them to him. The snitch tipped us, from prison, but there was no evidence to support the tip for over a year. I guess our guy pissed someone off before he left the joint, so they gave us a call. The guy is very cool. We had nothing solid on him till last week, and now we’ve got him on two murders almost for sure, and probably two more. We’re going to try and make all four stick. That’s your job,” he said to both Jack and Alexa, as they listened with interest. And then he mentioned that Charlie McAvoy, the kid outside, was on the task force that had been following him around. He said the suspect crossed state lines, so the FBI got into it, but Jack and Charlie had made the collar last night. “All four victims are in New York, so the case is ours,” he explained.

  “What’s his name?” Alexa asked him. “Have we seen him before?” She never forgot a face or a name, not so far.

  “Luke Quentin. He got out of Attica prison two years ago. He pulled some robberies upstate. We’ve never had him in our court or on anything like this before. Apparently he told someone in Attica that he likes snuff films and watching women die during sex and wanted to give it a try when he got out. He’s a pretty scary guy.” He smiled at Alexa then. “He’s your boy.” Alexa’s eyes opened wide, and she smiled. She thrived on hard cases, and putting away the people who deserved to be segregated from society forever. But she’d never had one as bad as this. Four charges of rape and murder one was a major case.

  “Thank you, Joe.” She knew that it was a tribute to her that he had given her the case.

  “You deserve it. You’re good at what you do. You’ve never let me down. We’re going to get a lot of press on this one. We have to mind our p’s and q’s. We don’t want the guy getting a mistrial because we fucked up. The task force is working to collect data from the other states he’s been in. If he’s who we think he is, he’s been on a killing spree for the past two years. His MO is always pretty much the same. First his victims vanish into thin air. Then we find the bodies but have no way to link them to him.
We found two of them last week, and we got lucky. McAvoy got into his hotel room and got some dirt off his boots from the carpet. There was dried blood in it, and we’re waiting for a final DNA match. It’s a start. We had two other victims murdered in exactly the same way. Raped and strangled during sex. We found both of them in the East River, and two hairs off his carpet that match. That gives us four victims. Anyway, you two are going to have your hands full. I’m putting Jack in charge of the investigation, and you’ve got the case,” he said, looking at Alexa. “Arraignment is at four o’clock.”

  “We’d better get busy,” Alexa said, looking anxious. She was itching to bolt out of the office and start reading about the case. She wanted to be sure just how much they could charge him with that day, although they could always add more charges later on, as they got more information, more matches from forensic, and if more bodies turned up when they started checking unsolved crimes. All she wanted now was to put Luke Quentin away. This was what the taxpayers paid her to do. And she loved her job.

  They left the DA’s office after a few minutes, and he wished them luck. Charlie followed them out of the office, and Jack sent him back to work to check with the forensic lab for progress, and said he’d come back to him later on. Charlie nodded and disappeared.

  “He’s a quiet one,” Alexa commented.

  “He’s good at what he does,” Jack reassured her, and then decided to share some private information with her. “This is a tough case for him.”

  “How so?”

  “If this is the guy, he killed Charlie’s sister in Iowa a year ago. It was pretty ugly, and Charlie got himself on the task force after that. He had to do a lot of talking to get them to allow it, even though it’s a personal vendetta for him. But he’s a great cop, so they let him do it.”

  “Sometimes that’s not a good thing,” Alexa said, looking worried, as they walked back to her office. “If he’s going to help us, he needs to be clear-headed. I don’t want him misinterpreting information or being overzealous because he wants to nail him. It could blow our case.” She didn’t like what she had just heard at all. She wanted everything about this case to be picture perfect, so the guilty verdict she got couldn’t be overturned. And she knew she would get one. She was relentless in her prosecution and meticulous in her work. She had learned it from her mother, who was a lawyer too, and a good one. Alexa hadn’t gone to law school until after the divorce. She had been married right out of college to the first and only man she had ever loved. And she had been madly in love with him. Tom Beaumont was a handsome southerner who had gone to UVA and was working, more or less, at his father’s bank in Charleston, where the spirit of the Confederacy had been kept alive, in part by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, of which Tom’s mother was the head of the local branch, and a very grande dame. Tom was divorced and had two adorable little boys who were seven and eight at the time. She had fallen in love with them immediately, and Tom, and everything about the South. He was the most charming man she had ever known. Tom was six years older than she was, and much to their delight she had gotten pregnant on their wedding night, or maybe the day before. Everything had been idyllic for them for seven years, she had been the happiest woman alive and the perfect wife, and then Luisa, his ex-wife, came back, when the man she had left him for died in a car crash in Dallas. And the Civil War was fought again, and this time the North lost, and Luisa won. Tom’s mother turned out to be Luisa’s strongest ally, and Alexa never had a chance. To clinch the deal, Luisa got pregnant, while Tom sneaked off to see her, dazzled by her once again, as he had been when they met in college. Tom’s mother showed him where his duty lay, not just to the Confederacy, but to the woman who was carrying his child, the mother of his “boys.” Tom was torn between the two women and drank far too much while he tried to sort it out. In the end, Luisa was the mother of three of his children, Alexa only one. His mother kept reminding him of that and convinced him that Alexa had never really fit into their way of life.

  It all happened like a very bad movie—a real-life nightmare. Everyone in town was talking about it, and his affair with his first wife. Tom explained to Alexa that he had to divorce her and marry Luisa. He couldn’t let this child be illegitimate, after all, could he? He promised to work it out as soon as Luisa had the baby, but by then she was running his life again, and it seemed as though everyone had forgotten, including Tom, that there had ever been another wife—and child. Alexa had done everything she could to reason with him and talk him out of the insanity he was committing, but she couldn’t stem the tides. Tom was too determined, and insisted that marrying Luisa for the baby’s sake was the only option. It was the only one he saw.

  Alexa felt as though her heart was being torn out of her body when she left Charleston. Luisa was actually moving her things in while Alexa packed. She took Savannah and her broken heart, went back to New York, and stayed with her mother for a year. The divorce had come and gone by then, and Tom didn’t know how to explain it to her, but he said it just seemed better to leave things as they were. Better for him, Luisa, and his mother, and the little girl Luisa gave birth to. Alexa and Savannah had been banished, and went back to the North from whence they came, Yankees.

  Luisa forbade Tom to bring Savannah back to Charleston, even for visits. She was back in full control. Tom came to New York to see his daughter a few times a year, usually when he came on business. Alexa wrote to her stepsons for a while, who were fourteen and fifteen when she left, and she worried about them both. But they weren’t her children, and she could sense in their letters how torn they were between their two mothers. Their letters dwindled off within six months, and she let it happen. She started law school then, and tried to shut them all out of her heart. Everyone except her daughter. It was hard not sharing her anger with Savannah, and she tried not to, but even the six-year-old could sense how wounded her mother was. Her father was like a handsome prince whenever he came to see her, and sent her beautiful presents. But eventually even Savannah figured out that she wasn’t welcome in her father’s life. She didn’t resent him for it, but sometimes it made her sad. She loved the time she spent with him. He was so much fun to be with. The fatal weakness that had led him back into Luisa’s trap didn’t show when he visited his daughter in New York. All that showed was how good-looking and fun and polite and charming he was. He was the epitome of a southern gentleman with the looks of a movie star. Alexa had fallen for it too, and so did Savannah.

  “And the backbone of a worm,” Alexa would say to her mother when Savannah wasn’t around. “A man without a spine. Wasn’t that a movie?” Her mother felt sorry for her, but reminded her not to be bitter, it did no one any good and would hurt her child. “She has no father!” Alexa would lament for her.

  “Neither did you,” her mother reminded her practically. Alexa’s father had died of a heart attack on the tennis court when she was five, a congenital anomaly no one had known about or suspected. Her mother had been very brave about it, and went to law school, just as Alexa had. But it was no substitute for a good marriage, the one Alexa thought she had and didn’t. “And you turned out fine,” her mother reminded her often. Muriel Hamilton was proud of her daughter. She had made the best of a bad situation, but it had taken a toll on her, and her mother could see it. Alexa had a hard outer shell that no one could get through except her daughter, and her mother. She had only dated a few men since the divorce. Another assistant DA at one point, one of her investigators, and the brother of a college friend, and all of them briefly. Most of the time she didn’t want to date and focused her attention on Savannah. The rest didn’t matter to her, except her work, which she was passionate about.

  Alexa had made a vow when she left Charleston. No one was going to break her heart again. No one could find it. She had locked it away in a storage vault, except for her daughter. No man was ever going to get near her again and hurt her. There was a wall around Alexa a mile high, and the only one who had the key to the door was Savannah. Her da
ughter was the light of her life. That was no secret. Her office was full of photographs of her, and she spent every weekend and spare moment she had with her. She was home with her every night. The hard part was going to come when Savannah left for college in the fall. Alexa had cautiously suggested NYU or Barnard, but Savannah wanted to go away to school. So they had nine months left of living together and enjoying each other. Alexa tried not to think about what would happen after that. Her life would be empty. Savannah was all she had and all she wanted.

  Alexa carefully pored over the files that Jack had on Luke Quentin, his rap sheet, and the list of victims they were trying to match him up with sent by other states. They had been watching him for months, and a cop in Ohio had tied him to one of the killings, not conclusively or enough to book him, but enough to cause concern. There was no evidence to prove it, but he had been in the right place at the right time, as he had on several occasions since. The murder in Ohio was the first one that had made them think Quentin was their man. But they didn’t have enough for an arrest. They had brought him in for questioning, and again on another case in Pennsylvania, which had turned up nothing. And he had laughed in their faces. It was only in the past two weeks in New York that Charlie McAvoy had been sure it was him when they found the bodies of two young women and fished the other two out of the river after that. They were exactly Quentin’s type, and had all died in the same way, raped and strangled. There were no other signs of abuse. He didn’t stab them or beat them up. He raped them and killed them while he did it. The only wounds on his victims other than the bruises on their necks from strangulation were the cuts and scratches they had gotten after their deaths, when their assailant dragged them away. Those cuts and scratches had provided the blood the forensic lab needed for DNA.