Anywhere She Runs

by Webb, Debra

  PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF DEBRA WEBB

  Everywhere She Turns

  A Detective Adeline Cooper novel

  “Romantic suspense at its best.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Erica Spindler

  “Plenty of twists, turns, and surprises to keep the reader guessing until the very end.”

  —RomanceJunkieReviews.com

  “Ms. Webb brings us another edge-of-your-seat story. Just when you think you know the who, what, when, and why, something else pops up to change your mind. The amount of suspense and romance is a perfect balance…Be on the lookout for Detective Adeline Cooper.”

  —Night Owl Romance

  “Exhilarating…Fans will relish this one-sitting, chilling thriller.”

  —Harriet Klausner

  “Webb does a superb job of creating white-knuckle suspense [and] raw tension.”

  —ReadertoReader.com

  Traceless

  A Cosmopolitan “Red Hot Read” of the Month

  “Skillfully managing a big cast, Webb keeps the suspense teasingly taut, dropping clues and red herrings one after another on her way to a chilling conclusion.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  MORE …

  “Traceless is a riveting entanglement of intrigue, secrets, and passions that had me racing to its breathless end. I loved this book!”

  —Karen Rose, author of Die for Me

  “Traceless is a well-crafted and engrossing thriller. Debra Webb has crafted a fine, twisting thriller to be savored and enjoyed.”

  —Heather Graham, New York Times bestselling

  author of The Dead Room

  “The talented Webb has built a wide fan base that should be thrilled with her vengeful and chilling new tale.”

  —Romantic Times BOOKreviews

  “Betrayal, secrets, lies, and passion lead to murder in a small town… Traceless is breathtaking romantic suspense that grabs the reader from the beginning and doesn’t let up. Riveting.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Allison Brennan

  Nameless

  “A complex plot and an eerily compelling villain make this fast-paced chiller an outstanding read. Take a deep breath and enjoy!”

  —Romantic Times BOOKreviews (4.5 stars)

  Faceless

  “Webb’s tale reeks of corruption and deadly manipulation—an impressive brew!”

  —Romantic Times BOOKreviews

  ST. MARTIN’S PAPERBACKS TITLES

  BY DEBRA WEBB

  Everywhere She Turns

  Find Me

  Faceless

  Nameless

  Traceless

  ANYWHERE

  SHE RUNS

  Debra Webb

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  ANYWHERE SHE RUNS

  Copyright © 2010 by Debra Webb.

  All rights reserved.

  For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  ISBN: 978-0-312-53297-0

  Printed in the United States of America

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / May 2010

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Chapter One

  Laurel, Mississippi

  Sunday, December 17, 8:42 P.M.

  “Jingle bell . . . jingle bell . . . jingle bell rock.”

  Danny Jamison lay in bed and hummed the Christmas song. He didn’t know all the words, but he liked this one a lot.

  His mommy had told him at breakfast this morning that in just eight more days it would be Christmas. Another good thing about today was that it was the last day of school for two whole weeks. The paper ornament he had been working on at school was on the Christmas tree. Pretty soon his mom would put some presents with his name on them under the tree so he could try and guess what was inside.

  But the bestest part of all was the stories she told him every night. Some of the stories were about the elves and the reindeers. His favorite one was about how good little boys always got what they wished the hardest for at Christmas.

  But she hadn’t come to his room to tell him a story tonight.

  His dad was in one of his moods.

  More of the yelling made Danny put his hands over his ears. He didn’t like when his mommy and daddy had fights. Tonight was scarier than ever before. His daddy was screaming real loud. Saying the meanest things. Meaner than the other times when he yelled.

  “I told you not to let this happen! Goddamn you!”

  Danny pressed his hands harder against his ears, but he could still hear his mommy crying and his daddy yelling. His daddy didn’t like yelling. He told Danny so. It was always his mom’s fault. She messed up too much. Just like his grandparents. That was why Danny hid sometimes when he went to their house. Then he didn’t have to hear the yelling when they got mad at his daddy.

  He wished he had a place to hide now. But his dad had warned Danny never to hide from him . . . for any reason.

  “Now look what you’ve done! You’ve ruined everything!”

  Danny tried to block the bad words his dad kept yelling by singing along with the Christmaas music on the radio. “ ‘Jingle bell . . . jingle bell . . .’ ”

  His mommy screamed. Danny burrowed deeper under the covers but he could still hear her crying . . . crying and begging for his dad to please stop. Danny felt bad for her even if she had messed up again.

  “There will be no princess in this house!” his dad shouted.

  Something crashed. Sounded like glass. It was the same sound the kitchen window made when his baseball went through it last summer. His dad had been real mad about that, too.

  The screaming and the crying stopped.

  Danny dragged his hands from his ears. He lay still for a moment and listened to make sure it was really over.

  No more screaming. No more crying. Just the Christmas music.

  “Jingle bell time is a swell time . . .”

  Maybe if his mommy had fixed everything she would come tell him a story now.

  “. . . to rock the night away . . .”

  His bedroom door flew open, banged against the wall.

  “Danny!”

  Danny bit his lips together to keep from crying out as his daddy jerked the covers off him. He didn’t want his dad to be mad at him, too. He was supposed to be asleep.

  “You should be asleep by now, son.”

  His daddy sat down on the side of the bed. Danny tried not to shake or to cry for his mommy. That would only make his daddy more upset. Danny told his mouth to smile but his lips just kept shaking like he was cold.

  “Don’t be afraid, son.”

  His daddy smiled at him, but the smile looked funny with that red stuff smeared on his face. Why would his daddy have ketchup on his face?

  “You don’t have to worry about anything, son,” his daddy promised. “No princess will ever take your place.”

  Chapter Two

  Huntsville, Alabama

  Friday, December 23, 10:30 A.M.

  The Christmas tinsel tickled her breast.

  She shivered.

  The shiny silver strands slid down her sweat-dampened torso. Over her belly button. Along her inner thigh. The tip of a deliciously wicked ton
gue followed that same path.

  A sigh whispered from her lips. God, that felt good. But she was so ready to get on with it. This guy was evidently going for a foreplay record.

  Adeline Cooper propped up on her elbows and peered down her nude body at the red and white hat. She couldn’t believe she was about to say this. “Look, Santa, patience has never been one of my virtues.”

  Her lover lifted his attentive face from the task of tugging down her skimpy panties with his teeth. His brown eyes were glazed with the same anticipation currently throbbing in her veins.

  “I’d like my present now.” She crooked her finger. “Come on up here and show me what you’ve got besides that nifty hat.”

  His well-shaped mouth split into a grin as he crawled his way up her tingling body, all those gorgeous male muscles bunching and rippling with the effort. “Baby.” He nipped her lips with his teeth. “I got the package you’ve been waiting for all year.”

  “Oh yeah?” Adeline tilted her pelvis into that impressive package. Heat swelled between her thighs.

  “Yeah,” he growled as he nibbled her chin.

  Pounding on the front door dragged her attention from his hungry mouth. Damn. “I should get that.”

  “It’s your day off,” he muttered between kisses.

  “Yeah, well.” She reached for the cuffs on the table next to the bed. “That’s the thing about being a cop, there’s no such thing as a real day off.” She fastened one cuff around his wrist with a titillating click. “Now, don’t move, because I’ll be right back to interrogate you, mister.” While she plundered his mouth with her own, she attached the other bracelet to the iron headboard.

  Adeline scooted off the bed and grabbed his shirt. She poked her arms into the long sleeves and hugged the warm flannel around her. At her bedroom door, she paused, surveyed his long, lean frame stretched out on her bed, and made a sound of approval deep in her throat. Merry Christmas to me.

  He plucked the Santa hat from his head and settled it over his erect penis. “Hurry on back, now,” he teased, “and you can unwrap your present.”

  She would definitely hurry back.

  Another round of pounding echoed from the front door. “Hold your horses,” she shouted as she padded through the house. “I’m coming.” Or she would be if whoever was doing all the banging hadn’t interrupted.

  She yanked open the door. “What?”

  “Morning, Cooper.” The man in the FedEx uniform, Wesley McElroy, nudged his Ray-Bans down his nose and surveyed her from head to toe. “You look all relaxed this morning.”

  “It’s my day off,” she said. She sent a pointed look at the large padded envelope in his arm. “That for me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He held out his electronic clipboard. “You need to sign for it.”

  She put her signature where he indicated. McElroy passed the padded envelope to her. “You have a nice day now.”

  “You, too.” Distracted by the sender’s address, she bumped the door closed with her hip and leaned against it. Though she didn’t recognize the specific return address, the location surprised her. Besides her mother, there wasn’t a soul in Mississippi who would contact her. Not by mail anyway.

  Both Christmas and her birthday were coming up . . . maybe her scumbag uncle had finally decided to forgive her for doing her job nine years ago.

  “Yeah, right. And hell just froze over.” She stalked into the kitchen and placed the envelope on the counter.

  “Santa’s waiting!” her cuffed lover shouted from the bedroom.

  She ignored him. Her well-honed cop instincts were revving up, overriding all else. Getting anything from anywhere in Mississippi was too bizarre to ignore—even for great sex. She dug up a pair of latex gloves and scissors. Pulled on the gloves and then slowly cut the envelope’s flap free. Carefully parting the severed edges, she bent her head down and peeked inside.

  Adeline jerked back. Her heart bumped her sternum.

  “What the hell?” She tucked two fingers inside and pulled the item from the envelope. A white sheet of copy or printer paper.

  More of that pulse-pounding adrenaline seared through her as she read the cut-and-pasted words.

  Pretty, pretty princess. See her smile . . . see her die.

  “Shit. Shit. Shit.” Adeline dashed back to the living room, almost slipping on the slick hardwood, and searched through the stack of old mail on the table by the door. In her haste she sent junk mail and monthly statements fluttering to the floor.

  Where the hell was that other letter? Unlike this one, the first letter had been hand-delivered to her mailbox at home. No return address, no postage. And no fucking prints.

  She’d nagged the guys at work, thinking one of them had been playing a joke on her related to her birthday and the fact that she was about to be promoted to lieutenant. She’d brought the letter back home that same day. It had to be here.

  “Addy! What the hell are you doing?”

  “Gimme a minute.” She shoved a handful of hair behind her ear. The letter wasn’t in the stack. What about . . .? Hand shaking, she yanked open the drawer.

  There it was.

  She picked up the single sheet of plain white printer paper. Stared at the words that now carried entirely new significance.

  She was born a princess for all to see. Her light was so bright that they could no longer see me.

  Adeline returned to the kitchen to compare the two notes. Paper looked to be the same weight and shade of white. The way the words were pasted on the page, right side angled slightly upward, was the same. No continuity in the spacing.

  She set the two letters to the side and looked in the envelope to see what else it contained. A newspaper clipping. Big article. Front page. She pulled it out. Hattiesburg Press. She read the headline.

  CITY ATTORNEY CHERRY PRESCOTT MISSING

  Adeline skimmed the article. Prescott served as city attorney to Hattiesburg. Four years older than Adeline, Prescott was married with two kids. A photo accompanying the article was in black-and-white, but the woman’s smile was nothing less than dazzling—oozing self-confidence. Blond hair, pretty lady. According to the article she was a brilliant attorney with a great future in politics. Prescott had gone missing three days ago.

  Adeline braced her hands on the counter, analyzed the details a second time. The woman’s car had been discovered just outside Moss Point. Only a few miles from where Adeline had grown up.

  There were no suspects as of yet. No ransom demand. Just the abandoned vehicle. Prescott’s family was offering a sizable reward for any information that helped to find her and the person responsible for her abduction.

  Adeline threw up her hands. “What the fuck is this?” Why would some perv send her these stupid princess letters and an article about a woman who’d gone missing near her hometown? A woman Adeline didn’t know . . . had never even met? She shook her head. Didn’t make any kind of sense.

  And yet, there had to be a reason.

  Instinct prodded her.

  There must be some kind of connection here that she just couldn’t see. This was no joke about her thirty-first birthday.

  This was . . . a piece of some kind of creepy puzzle.

  After placing the newspaper clipping next to the letters, Adeline turned her attention back to the envelope and opened it wider to see if there was anything else she had missed.

  A postcard or photograph was tucked deep into a corner. She frowned, then shook the envelope until the final item fell free and fluttered to the counter.

  A Polaroid snapshot.

  Adeline picked it up by the edges. Same woman, Cherry Prescott, pictured in the article. Only in this color snapshot her eyes were closed and she definitely wasn’t smiling. No way to tell if she was dead or alive. No discernible injuries. Since only her upper torso and face were visible in the photo, there was no way to be certain of anything. Her makeup job was overdone, clownish, she wore a tiara and nothing else as far as Adeline could see.


  She read the words scrawled in tiny print across the bottom of the photo. As the ramifications of the statement filtered through her confusion, a new kind of tension ignited in Adeline’s veins.

  One dead princess, two to go.

  Chapter Three

  815 Wheeler Avenue

  Huntsville Police Department, 12:45 P.M.

  “The only prints are on the first letter and those are yours.”

  Adeline had expected that would be the case. “But it’s the same paper. Same type of glue as the first letter.”

  Chief Burton Spencer nodded. “No question. The clerk at the FedEx drop-off center in Hattiesburg doesn’t recall what the sender looked like, only that he was male. The street address doesn’t exist.”

  Adeline had called the chief en route. A lab tech had been standing by when she arrived downtown. Less than an hour later they had the results, not that she had needed a lab tech to tell her what she already knew. Both letters had been created and sent by the same individual. Both were void of prints, other than hers on the first one, or any other trace evidence beyond the glue. And neither one gave the slightest hint at what the message had to do with Adeline.

  “Cherry Prescott lives and works in Hattiesburg,” Adeline went on, “but her abandoned vehicle was found near Moss Point. My hometown. I don’t know her, but obviously the person who abducted her knows me.”

  The idea that this could have something to do with her family was almost ludicrous. Almost. Nine years had passed. Why the hell would that ancient history be coming up now? And what would the Prescott woman have to do with it? Why had she been in the area? Did she have family there? Was she investigating a case related to something going on in Hattiesburg?