by Lisa Jackson
And this piece of gold, this letter from the killer or whoever, was going to start the ball rolling. Maury planned to read the letter on the air, tell the listeners he thought it “might be” from the killer, but believed the letter could well be a hoax, sent by a fraud, thereby baiting the guy who wrote it, hoping the jerk would be stupid enough to call the show. Wouldn’t that be the ticket? All Maury had to do was sucker the note writer in. Only then would he place a call to the police.
That should get the audience going. As he walked along the long hallway from the kitchen, leaving Rob still huddled over his puzzle and racing with the clock, Maury couldn’t help smiling. Deep in his bones, he knew his time had finally come. He had a degree in journalism, for Christ’s sake. He was tired of playing second string; it was time to join the A-team.
“You’re kidding!” Abby couldn’t keep the frustration from her voice. She was on the phone to the fourth security company she’d rung up today. Leaning against the desk in her small office in the heart of New Orleans, she slowly counted to ten and tried not to lose control of her temper.
“No, ma’am, I’m not,” the gravelly voice on the other end of the connection assured her. “Our next free time is . . . let me see . . .” She heard pages flipping and wondered why Stan’s Security Service didn’t have all their appointments on computer. “. . . looks like two weeks from Monday, but something might open up. Ya never know. Trudie, our secretary, she’d know way better’n me, but she’s on a break right now. When she gits back, she can tell you what’s what. She should be back in ten, fifteen minutes.”
“Thank you, I’ll call back,” Abby said and hung up. Who would have thought trying to get a company out to install a simple security system was tantamount to breaking into Fort Knox? She stared at her computer screen, where the latest edition of the Internet yellow pages was glowing, seeming to mock her with the list of security companies and system installers.
Why bother?
She was going to sell the place anyway.
Sean Erwin, the persnickety spiked-haired man who had said nothing nice about her place, was coming over for yet another “look-see” later in the afternoon. This time, along with his tape measure, he was bringing a list of dimensions of his furniture, and a sketch pad on which, he’d informed her, he’d plotted out the layout of his favorite pieces, the things he “absolutely couldn’t live without.”
She thought it was a waste of time, but had agreed to meet him after she’d finished working here in the office, where she’d made phone calls, paid bills, sent out reminders to those clients who were behind, and in general, caught up on her paperwork. She’d eaten lunch on the run, all the while trying to forget about Our Lady of Virtues and the weird sensation that had lingered with her long after she’d left the campus of the hospital. She’d also tried to push Luke’s gruesome death and Detective Reuben Montoya out of her head.
Why the sexy cop kept messing with her mind, she really didn’t understand. It wasn’t as if she were looking for a man, for God’s sake. In fact, until she moved to the West Coast, she’d planned to forget about dating, men, and sex altogether.
But the detective with his crooked smile, dark eyes, and nearly indecent laugh had managed to infiltrate her dreams and her waking thoughts as well. Which was just no good.
All things said and done, it would be far better for her to move and move quickly.
Before it was too late.
It already is, Abby. You’re hooked. Face it.
Okay, then. Before she did something stupid.
Oh, honey, her mind taunted. We’re beyond that. Where Detective Montoya is concerned, you’re well on your way to stupid central and you damned well know it.
Laura Beck was furious.
She drove her Lincoln Continental with a Manolo Blahnik-encased lead foot. That wasn’t really true, she thought ruefully. The leopard print sling backs weren’t really Blahniks, but they were damned good knockoffs and they’d cost over two hundred bucks, so she wasn’t happy that she’d have to walk through the rain and muck and chance ruining them.
Growing up a poor kid in Appalachia, she’d learned the value of a dollar at an early age, and it was only through smarts, grit, and yes, sleeping with the right men, that she’d come close to getting what she wanted from life.
So no low-life squatter was going to ruin the best deal she had going. No way. No how. She’d been in the diamond club of Respected Realty Company for the past eight years, selling over ten million dollars in real estate each and every year, in good times and in bad.
Now, she had a chance to buy out the owner of the realty company and she planned to expand the business to other cities. But even with all the cash she’d squirreled away, she still needed Asa Pomeroy’s account to make it happen.
Damn the man, where was he?
Why the sudden vanishing act?
As she drove along the winding road to his hunting lodge, she had a premonition that he might be dead, and if so, lawsy-mercy, all of her plans would go up in smoke . . . well, unless she talked to his heirs. Fortunately the eldest son, Christian, hadn’t been around for years, but Asa still had a couple of bitter ex-wives, a daughter who was an uptight bitch, and another son who was a blithering idiot and thought he was God’s gift to women. Jeremy Pomeroy had come on to her often enough. Practically at every chance he got. A big bore of a man, Jeremy took after his self-involved daddy, though Jeremy hadn’t been born with his father’s brains or work ethic. And those kids of his! Holy terrors. Just the thought of Asa’s grandsons set Laurie’s teeth on edge. As bad as their swaggering, good-ol’-boy father and as cold as their mother, those two adolescent half-wits were damned scary.
She shuddered thinking how she’d had to put up with the entire Pomeroy family last Christmas, smiling and laughing at off-color jokes, feeling her butt being pinched by too-friendly fingers, getting caught under the mistletoe at every turn.
All because she wanted a piece of the Pomeroy fortune.
She and every other real estate agent in Louisiana.
She turned off the rural road and onto the long gravel lane that ambled through the estate, past century-old trees, and over leaf-strewn ruts. Brush and brambles obscured the view of the lodge from the road, but she noticed that the gates had been left open. Weird. Though the maid service and gardener didn’t have the keys, they knew to close the gates.
It seemed as if nothing about this listing was going right!
“You can pull this off,” she said then caught herself as she heard a bit of her Appalachian twang, the speech pattern she’d spent years disguising. It wasn’t the part of the country that embarrassed her. Lord, some of the nicest people she’d ever known lived in the mountains and hollers of West Virginia, the breathtakingly beautiful country filled with God-fearing, music-loving, hardworking people. It was the poor part of her past that made her skin crawl and caused her to spend her life running from that poverty.
She glanced at her reflection in the rearview mirror. She still looked good, even though the big four-oh loomed just over next spring’s horizon. Her hair was a vibrant red with perfect gold highlights, her green eyes wide and sexy, her body toned by a strict regimen of salads, low-fat dressings, sugar-free yogurt, and two hours in the gym every morning at five. Two cups of black coffee and she was wired for the day.
God, she loved her work.
But not when some idiots tried to sabotage it.
She’d gotten a call from a neighbor that there was a car at the lodge . . . and on tour day! At first she’d thought it was the groundskeeper who had been scheduled to clean up the place, but the neighbor assured her no work was being done on the estate and the car was not the usual beat-up green pickup. Great, she thought angrily. Just . . . freaking great!
She’d already had the interior of the place cleaned to a spit-polished glow, and her car was filled with two thermoses of coffee, a fruit platter, and a basket of mini-beignets for the other agents who were planning on driving all the
way out here as part of the weekly tour. The first of the lot were due to arrive at the Pomeroy hunting lodge in less than two hours. How the hell was that going to happen now?
“Damn it,” she muttered as she spied the old Buick in the drive. The neighbor had been right. Well, whoever was here was going to get the hell out.
Careful, Laura. Tread carefully. Remember what Mama used to say: “You can’t tell a book by its cover.” Maybe whoever is here is interested in buying the place. There could be an armada of Mercedeses and Porsches or Ferraris in this guy’s garage.
No way.
The neighbor had called two hours earlier and Laura doubted a prospective buyer would hang out for hours just waiting. It wasn’t someone here early for the tour and the Regal sure as hell didn’t look like someone’s idea of a hunting rig.
Strange.
She nosed her Lincoln close to the Buick and parked. Climbing out of her car, she felt the first little tickle of a run in her panty hose—dear God, why had she bothered today? No big deal. She’d strip them off and show off her legs. Carefully dodging puddles, she walked up to the Buick. It was unlocked. And empty.
So where was the driver?
Inside?
She looked at the large rambling old lodge with its steep roof, dormers, and pine needles collecting in the gutters. All the windows seemed shut. How would the Buick’s owner get inside? The building was locked and secured with a real estate agent’s lock box. Or had been. Maybe the maid had returned with another key. Or maybe she’d left not only the gate wide open, but the building unlocked as well.
That thought royally pissed Laura off.
The tiny run in her stocking crawled upward and moisture seeped through the sides of her shoes as she marched up to the door, ready to use her electronic release for the lock box and grab the key hidden inside.
But as she mounted the two wide steps, she stopped dead in her tracks. The lock box was missing, not hooked to the handle of the giant door of the lodge as she’d left it two days earlier. Damn it. What did that mean? Her gaze took in the broad porch and she made a mental note to sweep it off before the tour began. The past few nights’ storms had pushed dry leaves and pine needles onto the hundred-year-old floorboards, and the damned lazy landscape maintenance man hadn’t bothered to show up . . . oh, hell. She spied the lock box, its handle snapped clean through, propped against a post of the porch rail.
“Son of a bitch,” she muttered, now not the least bit disconcerted about her twang.
She walked to the door, turned the knob easily, and pushed on the heavy oak panels. So much for security. The door opened as softly as if the hinges had been freshly oiled.
Strange.
Frowning, she took a step inside and had the instant sensation that something was wrong.
Well, no shit! The place is open!
“Hello?” she called out, the knockoffs clicking on the polished hardwood of the foyer. Smudges of dirt and a few dry leaves marred the shine. And there was something else. A hundred-dollar bill. Big as you please. Ben Franklin staring up at her from beneath a small table near the front door. “What the devil?”
Who had been in here and dropped a C-note?
The driver of the Buick?
The person who had broken in?
Glancing up the stairway, where hand-turned rails supported a gleaming banister, she yelled, “Anybody here?”
The rambling country home was silent as a tomb.
“Hello?”
She noticed a second bill in the archway leading to the living area . . . and another. Three hundred dollars. She picked up each of the bills and walked into the living room, where she saw more bills, a dozen or more, lying on the floorboards but they weren’t pristine. They were smudged with dirt and . . . blood?
Her heart kicked. Oh, God. That’s what it was, red stains smudged over Ben Franklin’s face. Then she smelled it, that coppery odor that had accompanied her father when he’d come back from a hunting trip with gutted deer or from slaughtering the pigs . . . Yes, that’s what she smelled. Blood and urine turning acrid, to sting the nostrils with the burn of ammonia.
She took two steps farther into the living area, where she could see the floor in front of the couch.
“Oh, God!”
Two bodies were lying on the floor. Obviously dead. A fully dressed, plump black woman on top of a bare-assed naked Asa Pomeroy.
“Jesus, no!” Laurie cried, backing up, nearly screaming out loud. “Oh, no, no, no . . .” She saw the bullet holes and the blood, pooled beneath Asa and streaking down the side of the woman’s face. A pearl-handled handgun was still clutched in the woman’s right hand.
No, not just any woman, Laura finally realized. As her brain kicked into gear, she recognized the facial features of Gina Jefferson, the woman who’d been reported missing earlier today.
Laurie gagged.
Throughout the room, hundred-dollar bills were scattered, littering the bodies floor and couch, catching in the breeze from the open door.
Laura stumbled, turned on the thin heel of her sling back, ran for the door. She lost one of her shoes in the process. She didn’t stop, nor did she lock up, just leapt off the porch and sprinted to her Lincoln.
Inside, she turned on the ignition. The Lincoln’s tires sprayed gravel as she tore out. Her heart was pounding and she felt as if every hair on her head had turned instantly gray. Asa’s bloated face, his mussed white hair, the stain of blood, and his hideous beached-whale, white carcass, covered with the body of Gina Jefferson.
Her stomach curdled.
“Oh, God,” she whispered and scrabbled in her purse for her cell phone. She dialed 911 on the fly, not stopping at the country road, just careening onto it and nearly hitting a pickup truck loaded with live chickens as she slid over the center line.
The pickup driver laid on his horn and shook his fist, but she barely noticed as the emergency operator answered. “Nine-one-one. Police Dispatch. What’s the nature of your emergency?”
“I need to report a murder. A double murder!” Laura yelled, hyperventilating, her heart pounding, feeling for all the world as if she might pass out as the Lincoln streaked down the highway. “And . . . oh, God . . . you can stop looking. I’ve found Asa Pomeroy and Gina Jefferson. He’s dead! She’s dead! Oh, God, they’re both dead!” she cried, fighting the urge to puke. She cranked on the steering wheel at the next driveway, stood on the brakes, heard the thermoses slosh and the tray of fruit and pastry slam forward against the front seat. For once she didn’t care, just threw open the door and leaned out, heaving up this morning’s coffee.
CHAPTER 18
“Pomeroy owns this place?” Montoya asked as he surveyed the crime scene. The 911 dispatch center had notified homicide as well as the FBI of the call they’d received. The operator had managed to pull the address out of a horrified Laura Beck, the real estate agent who had found the bodies and was now down at the police station talking to Brinkman.
It was late evening and dark. Lights had been set up, and the area roped off with crime-scene tape. Crowded inside this old hunting lodge, there were not only the crime-scene investigators but agents from the local field office, the sheriff’s department, and the Louisiana State Police. Also, detectives from both the Cambrai and New Orleans Police Departments had shown up earlier in the afternoon, trying to work together and stay out of each other’s way.
Bonita Washington, in a no-nonsense mood, had already barked at Montoya twice, first to sign the damned log and then to don covers for his shoes. He’d done both and held his tongue while Inez Santiago measured and took pictures. Another investigator dusted while a fourth studied the blood spatter.
The old hunting lodge was being examined board by board, trace evidence collected, the victims’ hands bagged, not only photographs snapped but a video recording taken as well.
Everyone was tense.
No one cracked a joke.
They knew they were dealing with another serial killer in an area
that had seen far too many.
This scene was staged identically to the Gierman-LaBelle murders with the one exception that Gina Jefferson hadn’t been dressed in a bridal gown. In fact, it appeared as if she was wearing exactly what she had on when she’d gone missing. Her husband, Walter, had described her navy blue pantsuit and blouse to a T.
But Asa was naked as the proverbial jaybird. Not a stitch on. The clothes he’d been wearing had been left in a wrinkled pile near the fireplace: hat, boots, slacks, jacket, and underwear. Without so much as a drop of blood on any piece of the clothing. Nope. He’d been stripped before he was killed, rather than after. Just like Gierman.
The obvious difference in this scene was that over the bodies and the surrounding flooring, hundred-dollar bills had been strewn like snowflakes.
Why?
“Take a closer look at his body,” Bentz said, motioning toward Pomeroy. “Check out the tiny bruise marks on his neck, close together, the skin red.”
“Stun gun?”
“That would be my guess.”
“What about her?” Montoya asked, hitching his chin at the corpse of Gina Jefferson.
“None found yet.”
“So our killer only pulled out the voltage for Pomeroy.”
“Right. But then he’s a lot bigger than the woman and might have put up more of a fight. He had a reputation for being tough.”
“Not tough enough,” Montoya observed, frowning as he rubbed at his goatee. “If we’re talking about the same killer, and I’d put money on it, he’s changing his routine. This is different from how Gierman and LaBelle were handled. No stun gun marks on their bodies. And look here.” He pointed to one side of Gina Jefferson’s face, where a long thin cut sliced down her cheek and blood had oozed only to dry. “This isn’t the same as the first scene either.”
“Maybe these two weren’t as compliant as the first. Or it could be that he’s honing his skills. Something didn’t work as well as he’d wanted the first time, so he improved his system, pulled out the stun gun and knife.”