Soft skin.
Wet.
Slick.
Red.
3
Wednesday, October 8
COMING BACK TO Venture, Georgia, a relatively small town not far outside Atlanta, was not something Dani had wanted to do, so she hadn’t exactly planned for it. Her apartment was still in Atlanta, along with most of her clothes and other belongings; she had packed as if for a weeklong vacation somewhere.
That had been nearly a month ago.
Not that clothing was a problem, given that she was living with her twin sister. But she and Paris had both worked very hard to have separate lives as adults, and living in the same house again wasn’t really helping sustain that determination.
In fact, it made it all too easy to slip back into girlhood habits and routines. Like this weekly trip to Smith’s Pharmacy downtown, because it was the only place in Venture that sold honest-to-God homemade ice cream from the lunch counter, which still did brisk business, and the twins had a lifetime habit of ice cream before bed every night.
Dani had missed this in Atlanta. Not that she hadn’t continued the habit; she literally couldn’t sleep without at least a small bowl of ice cream at night. But she’d had to substitute brand names for the homemade stuff, and there was simply no comparison in her mind.
Jeez.
Ice cream.
Thirty-one years old, and the treat she looked forward to all day long was ice cream shared with her twin sister before bedtime.
Bedtime at eleven o’clock most nights.
“I’m pathetic,” she muttered, and dropped two of the bags she was juggling while trying to dig her car keys from the bottom of her purse.
“Let me.”
Dani froze, watching a pair of very male hands pick up the dropped bags. Her gaze tracked upward slowly, following as he straightened to note that he was still whipcord-lean, that his shoulders were still wide and powerful, that he was still the sort of good-looking they wrote about in romance novels.
His dark hair was just beginning to gray at the temples, and there might have been a few more laugh lines at the corners of his steady blue eyes, but he still had the face of a heartbreaker.
Marcus Purcell.
Venture was a small-enough town that she had expected to run into him sooner or later. She had hoped for later.
Much later.
“Hey, Dani. How’s tricks?”
The old childhood greeting brought an unexpected lump to her throat, but she thought her voice was calm enough to hide that when she replied as she always had.
“The rabbit ran away, but I still have the top hat. How’re things in your magic show?”
“Not much of an act these days, I’m afraid. The beautiful assistant got a better offer, and after that there didn’t seem to be much point.”
And there it was.
Trust Marc not to pussyfoot around a subject she would have avoided as long as necessary.
Avoidance was her defense mechanism, but hardly his.
“It wasn’t a better offer,” she heard herself say. “It was just…a change I needed. We both needed. You wanted to stay here, and I didn’t.”
“You never asked, Dani.”
That shook her, but only for a moment. “Your roots were always here. I didn’t have to ask. And you knew once Paris decided to stay here, I—”
“Wouldn’t.” He shrugged. “And yet here you are.”
“Visiting. Because Paris needs me.”
“Yeah, who’s getting divorced is always a hot topic around here, so I heard. Tough on her. But she’s better off without him.”
“Oh? And why is that?” She was willing to talk about anything else, even her sister’s painful divorce. Which told her something unsettling about her own feelings.
“Because there are just some things a man shouldn’t say about his wife. Not even when he’s drunk. Maybe especially not when he’s drunk. And never to another man.”
Dani couldn’t bring herself to ask out loud but knew the question showed.
“Not much I’m willing to repeat, Dani. But he talked a lot, and probably in bars up and down the East Coast since he traveled so much. He said she was a literal ball and chain. Holding him down. Said he couldn’t have anything to himself. Not his thoughts, not even his dreams. No private space she couldn’t get into. He said she made his skin crawl sometimes.”
“I knew he had trouble handling it, but…”
“There was no handling, believe me. Not for Dan. It was something he never accepted, never even got used to. Something he hated. Which is bad enough, considering he married Paris anyway. Telling strangers in bars that your wife really does know what you’re thinking and dreaming and it makes you sick to your stomach is stepping way over the line.” Marc shrugged. “Whether anybody ever listened to him or just chalked it up to drunken ramblings doesn’t mitigate the fact that he acted like a jerk. He was drunk a lot toward the end. Spent more than one night in my jail, sobering up.”
Paris had told her that Marc was sheriff now, but Dani felt the need to comment. And to change the subject. “I never thought you’d end up in law enforcement.”
“Yeah, well, things change.”
Not everything changed, Dani thought, but she felt unnerved and uncertain and was very aware that they were standing on the sidewalk in front of the pharmacy in downtown Venture, in full view of God and half the town’s citizens, and that everybody south of God was taking it all in with interest.
“I should be going,” she said abruptly. “My ice cream is melting.”
To her utter relief, he didn’t respond to that lame comment as it probably deserved, but merely said, “You were digging for your keys, I think. Find them?”
Dani produced the keys, used the remote to unlock the Jeep parked only a few yards away, and, as its headlights flashed in acknowledgment, accepted the bags he held out to her.
“Take care, Dani.”
It held the sound of finality, something she should have accepted gratefully, but he hadn’t moved more than a few steps away from her when she heard herself speak. And even as she did, she was aware of a fatalistic certainty that she was turning a critical corner in her life.
And had no idea what lay ahead.
“Marc?”
He paused and looked back at her, eyebrows lifting but otherwise expressionless.
“Has anything…bad happened in Venture lately? In the county? I mean, anything really bad? I read the paper, but—”
“Are you talking about a crime?”
“Yeah.”
He was frowning now. “Nothing really out of the ordinary. A few robberies, domestic disturbances, possession, a couple of meth labs busted.”
“Nothing else?”
Slowly, he replied, “Two missing persons I’ve been uneasy about.”
“Women?”
“One teenage girl; her parents believe she ran away a couple of weeks ago. One wife whose very scared husband insists would never have left him of her own free will.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Last week. And no sign of her yet. What do you know, Dani?”
“Nothing. I don’t…know…anything. Just…be careful, that’s all.”
He took a step back toward her and kept his voice low even though nobody else was near. “What have you dreamed, Dani?”
She couldn’t look away from him. And she couldn’t lie.
Not to Marc.
“There’s nothing concrete. No name or face. Not even a crime I can be sure of, except…except that it’s bad.” She thought of a missing teenager, a missing wife, and felt cold despite the warm early-afternoon October sun. “I know that it’s bad, that it’s a poison here. Somebody evil, I don’t know who.”
“Dani, we both know evil doesn’t wear horns and a tail to signal that it’s with us. If there’s anything else you can tell me—”
“There isn’t. Not yet, at least.”
Marc’s frown deepened, and he took ano
ther step toward her. “You’ve had this dream more than once?”
She nodded, unwilling to admit that it was pretty much a nightly occurrence now.
“Okay. Tonight, come get me. Take me in with you.”
Dani realized only later that she wasn’t nearly as shocked by the idea as she should have been. In that moment, however, she just shook her head and said, “I can’t do that.”
“Sure you can. You’ve done it before.”
“That was years ago, Marc. Another lifetime ago.” And I had no idea how dangerous it was.
He took another step, and now he was standing in front of her, so close she had to tilt her head to look up at his face.
“It never made my skin crawl, Dani,” he said softly. “It never creeped me out. It was never something I hated. It never made me think of you as anything other than the unique and remarkable woman I loved. Just in case you didn’t know that.”
She had the vague suspicion that her mouth was open.
“Come get me tonight,” Marc repeated. He turned and walked away.
Somehow Dani managed to get herself and her bags into the Jeep. She thought the homemade raisin cake she’d bought was probably crushed, because she’d been holding on to those bags for dear life, and she was sure now that the ice cream was melting. She didn’t much care about either.
Just in case she didn’t know.
Just in case she didn’t know.
Jesus Christ Almighty.
She was still rattled when her cell phone rang, and it took several rings for her to dig it out of her purse. Making a mental note to get another damn purse or at least to better organize this one, she answered, knowing without the need for caller I.D. that it was Paris.
“We have visitors,” Paris announced without preamble.
Dani closed her eyes. “Don’t tell me.”
“Afraid so. Miranda Bishop is here. With John.”
Deputy Jordan Swain prided himself on his professionalism. His dedication and intelligence. His rapier wit. And his ability to look like a cool stud in his uniform, thanks to the kind genetics of blond good looks and a rigorous morning workout routine.
He was also well known for his cast-iron stomach, and it was that which failed him late Wednesday afternoon.
“Sorry about that,” he muttered, as he returned from his hasty visit to the bushes a few yards away and well outside the yellow crime-scene tape.
With a grunt, the sheriff said, “Well, at least you made it outside the tape. I would have been pissed if you’d contaminated the scene, Jordan.”
“How could I possibly have contaminated it any more than it already is?”
“Funny.”
“Actually, it isn’t.” Jordan swallowed and tried not to think about all the blood and viscera spattered and scattered around them. Which was more than difficult since it was all around them and pretty damn well impossible to miss.
The house—vacant and with a FOR SALE sign in the neat front yard—was at the end of a long driveway and on considerable acreage, which was probably why nobody had noticed the butchery that had taken place in the well-maintained, previously very lovely and peaceful backyard patio/pool area.
Nobody, that is, until the gardener had shown up for his routine maintenance work and rounded the back corner of the house, his wheelbarrow filled with the tools and implements he needed to begin getting the plantings ready for the coming winter.
The wheelbarrow, overturned, lay where he had abandoned it just outside the pool area, when he had fled after his first glimpse of the carnage.
And it was a scene of carnage. The comparison that had sent Jordan fleeing into the bushes to lose his lunch was that it looked rather like someone had fed a medium-size cow into a wood chipper.
“Jesus, Marc, what kind of animal would do something like this?”
“The kind we have to catch.” Marc held up a clear plastic evidence bag containing a very large, very bloody hunting knife with a serrated edge. He studied it with a frown. “How many places you figure sell these?”
“Oh, hell, at least a dozen or more in the county. Not counting pawnshops.”
Marc nodded. “That was my take. We’re not likely to get any kind of useful lead from this. Plus, leaving it right here at the scene marks the perp as either very stupid—or very sure we won’t be able to trace the knife back to him.”
“I hate to think of anybody this vicious being smart too,” Jordan said, “but I think we’d regret assuming otherwise.”
“Yeah. Still, we’ll find out what we can.”
“Might get lucky,” Jordan agreed somewhat dubiously.
Marc sent him a wry look, then summoned with a gesture one of his two crime-scene technicians and handed over the knife. “Shorty, you or Teresa find anything we can’t see for ourselves?”
“Not so far, Sheriff.” Shorty, who in the grand tradition of nicknames towered over both other men and, indeed, most people, blinked sleepy eyes and appeared to stifle a yawn. “Might have to move the tape back a few yards, though; I think I’ve found a couple pieces of her right at the periphery of the area.”
Jordan, who had been about to make a caustic demand to know if they were keeping Shorty up, absorbed this new information with another sick twist of his stomach.
Stoic, Marc said, “So the vic was a woman.”
“Hard to tell without the…relevant parts,” Shorty said, “but Teresa thinks so. Me too. We found the tip of a finger with a polished acrylic nail still attached. A pinky, I think.”
Jordan retired to the bushes again.
Shorty looked after him briefly, then directed his attention back to the sheriff’s expressionless face. “My excuse is five years of morgue duty in Atlanta,” he said. “What’s yours?”
“Rage,” Marc Purcell said.
“Ah. You wear your mad like a shield. I’ve known other cops could do that.” Shorty nodded, studying the sheriff openly. This fairly rural county tended to see few murder cases, and most of those were the domestic or grudge type, where the killer was as obvious as the victim was, as like as not still standing over the body, looking bewildered, smoking gun or bloody knife in hand.
Not so hard to solve, those cases.
In the two years Shorty had been with the Prophet County Sheriff’s Department, this was the first real murder scene he had worked with Purcell.
Interesting guy, Shorty thought. Born here, raised here. Went to a top university in North Carolina, earned a law degree, and returned to Venture to practice. Word around the department was that he’d always been slated to hold some kind of elected office, that it was a family thing going back generations, but everybody seemed a bit surprised he’d chosen law enforcement over other political opportunities.
Shorty wasn’t surprised. He’d spent his entire adult life around cops, and this guy was a cop down to his bones. There were some like that, maybe with an innate sense of justice or just outrage—as Purcell had admitted—that the world was chaotic and needed somebody to at least try to impose order. Somebody to wear the white hat and fight the good fight.
A lost cause, Shorty thought, because the bad guys these days were well funded and had access to way too many dangerous toys. But, hey, there were sure as hell worse things to live your life in pursuit of. He was quite aware of that, since his own ambitions usually went no further than a warm and willing piece of ass for the upcoming weekend.
Apparently oblivious to the scrutiny, the sheriff said, “Am I wrong in thinking she was killed here, not just butchered here?”
“There’s some arterial spray over there by the pool, so, yeah, I’d say so. Dunno if she was conscious, but I think she was alive for quite a while from the time she first started bleeding.”
“You’re saying he tortured her?”
“I’m saying he wanted her to bleed, Sheriff. And from all the bloody drag marks, he moved her around while he was doing it.”
“Why, for Christ’s sake?”
“Maybe he was paintin
g a picture for us.” Shorty grimaced when the sheriff stared at him. “Sorry. But I’m not being flippant about that. Most of the drag marks show she was a deadweight—no pun intended—when he was moving her around.” He gestured to one area of the stamped concrete nearest them that even a layman would have defined as a bloody drag mark.
“Like that one. And the one on the other side of the pool. I’m no profiler, but I’ve seen more than my share of bloody murder scenes and this one is…really, really weird.”
“I wish you’d just said grisly and horrible.”
Shorty looked at him curiously and then offered a shrug. “Like I said, I’ve seen bloody crime scenes before. But most of ‘em, they’re the result of somebody getting pissed beyond belief and going nuts. If a knife is the weapon, they stab, they slash, they chase after the vic as long as he or she is still moving. But the only reason they move the body afterward is to get rid of it.
“This guy, either he couldn’t make up his mind where he intended to leave the body or…or he was just having fun. Maybe posing her. Cutting off a piece of her here and there. I’d swear at least a few of the internal organs were placed, arranged, and very carefully.”
With no discernible emotion, Purcell said, “Like the heart on the end of the diving board?”
“Yeah. I imagine a shrink could have a field day with that. Just like they could write a paper or two on why he decided to wrap twelve inches of her small intestine around that rosebush and why exactly half her liver is lying in the center of the birdbath over there. We haven’t found the other half yet.”
Purcell drew a breath. “Shorty, how much of her isn’t here?”
“Well, a lot, really. The tip of that one finger is the only bone we’ve found. A lot of skin, but it’s in pieces, like everything else. Most of the internal organs are here, including some brain matter.”
“He gutted her and opened her head.”
“Looks like. We haven’t found any scalp so far, but there’s what looks to me like an ax or hatchet mark in the stone of the pool coping, and that’s where we found the brain matter.”
“The knife couldn’t have…?”
“Nah, it would have taken something with a lot more heft and a solid edge. Hatchet is about as small as I’d go, and it would have to be a good sharp one. Could be something larger, but the cut in the stone is only about four inches from end to end, and the edges are distinct, so I wouldn’t think it’s any sort of long, curved blade. My money’s on an ax or a hatchet.”