For the Love of Jazz

by Shiloh Walker

  Softly, he said once more, “I’ll find him, Ayeisha.”

  Nodding once, her proud chin went up in the air. “I’ll hold you to that.” Across the grass, she met the tearful gaze of Betsy Crane. Her silly, red hair was covered by a wide-brimmed hat draped with black netting. It didn’t surprise Ayeisha to see tears in those eyes. Querulous bigot that Betsy was, Betsy had, in her own weird way, really liked Mabel, liked arguing with her, liked insulting her, liked pretending to dislike her.

  Mabel had known, as did Ayeisha.

  A tear spilled out of her eyes, trickled down her cheek as she moved across the wet grass to the headstone. Laying her hand on it, she closed her eyes. “Mama, Tate’s gonna find who did this. I promise.”

  Anne-Marie stood in the Winslow kitchen side by side with Marlie, slicing a loaf of fresh-baked bread. “I just don’t understand it,” she whispered. “Who could kill Mabel? And why?”

  “I don’t know.” Marlie’s voice was husky and thick with tears. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”

  Casting a look over her shoulder, Anne-Marie studied Jazz’s averted profile. “He’s blaming himself. He keeps trying to pull away from me. I think he’s trying to protect me. Whoever did this, did it to get to him.”

  Quietly, making sure nobody could overhear, Marlie murmured, “Tate’s stumped. There are no prints, no connection, really, other than Jazz.”

  Anne-Marie’s reply cut off as Ella entered the room, looking ten years older. Marlie went to Ella and hugged her. “It’s going to be okay, Ella. Tate will find out who did it.”

  Reaching up, Ella stroked her carefully tinted hair. “She just did my hair last week,” she whispered, stricken. “We went to school together. She was too young…

  “It just doesn’t make any sense. What in the world is happening to Briarwood, Marlie?” Ella asked, turning away, staring out into the miserable rain.

  Three weeks passed, three terror-filled, endless weeks. No evidence, no suspects. Nothing. The silence hadn’t lulled anybody into thinking it was over. Instead, people became jumpier and meaner and just plain dangerous. Tate raised his head, staring into the cells across the room from his desk. All three were full.

  That simply didn’t happen in Briarwood, Friday night or not.

  The thin, early morning light shone through the windows as the three drunks continued sleeping it off. The damage done at the bar had been light, this time. But one man was in the hospital after Bobby Mason had broken his hand.

  Tempers were flying high, fear filled every face Tate saw, and there was no end in sight.

  God, he wanted this over.

  He wanted to marry Marlie, take her to bed, and wake up wrapped around her, no thoughts on his mind save for making love to her again.

  Instead, the weddings, both his and Jazz’s, had been postponed.

  “What am I missing?” he asked himself, locking his hands behind his neck and staring down at the reports on his desk.

  With a sour laugh, Tate admitted there wasn’t much to miss. No evidence. No hairs. No fibers. The nail gun had come from Jazz’s toolbox out in the garage. The only prints were his. And, thank God, Jazz had a good alibi for that night.

  When the phone rang, Tate reached for it automatically. “McNeil here.”

  “Tate.”

  The fear in Marlie’s voice had him on his feet. “What’s wrong?”

  “Tate…I need you to come out here.”

  “What’s wrong?” he demanded, the fear filling his gut making him ill.

  “Please come.”

  And the line went dead. He slammed it down and was out of the station house in seconds.

  When he arrived at Marlie’s, he found her sitting in her twin bed, surrounded by locks of pale blonde hair. Her beautiful hair had been hacked away, in some places leaving it hardly longer than an inch. As her eyes met his, he saw they brimmed with confusion and terror. They were oddly dazed, the pupils were wide, not contracted at all when he lifted the shade, letting light flood the room.

  “Somebody cut my hair,” she whispered, reaching up one hand to touch her scalp. “I was sleeping and they just cut it off.”

  “Honey.” It was hard to remember he had to be a cop now, hard to remember he had a job to do, when it was his woman sitting there, her eyes filled with fear and confusion.

  “I called Anne-Marie,” she whispered softly, her voice singsong. “I don’t know why.”

  “What in the hell…?”

  Tate’s eyes turned to see Anne-Marie standing in the doorway. It shook him to discover he hadn’t even heard her drive up. “Somebody is going to pay for this,” he said, rising, lifting Marlie’s shaking form in his arms.

  “Mama?” Marlie asked, lifting her shorn head from Tate’s shoulder. “Is Mama okay?”

  “I’m sure she is,” Anne-Marie said quietly. “I’ll go check on her.”

  Tate settled in the living room after making his call to Darla. Anne-Marie found him there, rocking Marlie back and forth while the young woman whimpered in his arms.

  “Tate.”

  He jerked his head around at Anne-Marie’s voice, feeling the color drain from his face. Please, God, no.

  “Naomi’s not there,” Anne-Marie whispered quietly, casting Marlie a troubled glance. “Not anywhere.”

  With a jerk, Tate pulled down the yellow police tape and stood aside as Jazz unlocked the door.

  “What are we looking for?” Jazz asked as he entered the house.

  I don’t want to be here, he thought, staring at the red smear on the wall. It was Mabel’s blood and brain matter, smeared there by her killer to torment Jazz.

  “I really don’t know,” Tate responded, shaking his head, walking around the living room. “There has got to be something.”

  “How is Marlie?”

  “Holding up. Laura fixed her hair and…”

  “You don’t give a damn about her hair,” Jazz interrupted when Tate’s voice trailed off. “I can’t make any sense of it. Why cut her hair off? Why let her mama go off wandering around alone? The woman’s lucky she ain’t dead somewhere.”

  “I know. It’s got Marlie all torn up inside. I just can’t figure out how they connect to you.”

  “Neither can I.” Turning away, Jazz studied the painting that Mariah had picked out at a flea market. In the glass, he could dimly see Tate’s reflection as he wandered the room.

  “This just doesn’t make any sense.”

  Mumbling, pacing back and forth over the floor, Tate said, “There’s a connection here somewhere. I know it. We’re probably looking right at it.”

  It took two days for them to find Mrs. Muldoon, and then she ended up in the hospital for dehydration and exposure. Tate got nothing from her. From the looks of her, she had done nothing more than wander around, until she was seen by a passing truck driver. The trucker had recognized her from a picture in the local paper when he stopped at the small park where Naomi had stopped to splash in the water like a child.

  A few more days…she would have likely died. Her mind was too far gone to remember things like food and water, even the basics of shelter.

  The killer had most likely known that.

  “Anne, I can go home. I’m fine,” Marlie insisted, following Anne-Marie down the hall, a frown creasing her face.

  Turning on her heel, Anne-Marie studied that pale face dispassionately and decided, “The hell you are.”

  Determined, Marlie said, “I am not going to spend the rest of my life hiding because some nut snuck up on me while I was sleeping and cut my hair.”

  “He could have cut more than that,” Anne-Marie said, jamming her arms into the sleeves of her jacket.

  “Don’t you think I know that?” Marlie asked quietly, arms held stiffly at her sides, hands clenched into fists. “Don’t you think I’ve had nightmares about that? My God, I wake up expecting to find my throat slit.”

  The sheer terror in Marlie’s voice slowed Anne-Marie’s steps. One hand resting on the ne
wel post, Anne-Marie stared straight ahead. It wasn’t a stretch of the imagination, not by any means. The worse thing was that it was nowhere near being over. “All the more reason for you not to be alone,” she finally said, turning to study the face of her new friend.

  “If he wants me bad enough, he’s going to get me, regardless of where I am. I can’t spend my life hiding because of this. My God, you and Jazz put your wedding off. Because of this,” she said, frowning, reaching up to touch her shorn cap of hair.

  “Marlie. Stay here. Please,” Anne-Marie said tiredly. Dragging a hand over her neat braid, she sighed. Studying her face in the decorative mirror, she shook her head. “You and your mom are safer here with me and Dad.”

  “We’ve been here three weeks already. We can’t stay here indefinitely. I want to plan my wedding. I want to dance at yours. Are we going to let this end our lives?”

  “They’ll find out who is doing this,” Anne-Marie responded.

  “And if they don’t? It’s been months since it all started. And Tate, God help him, still doesn’t have a clue who did it”

  “Don’t have much faith in your man, do you, Marlie?”

  “I have complete faith in him. But I don’t want to put my life on hold, waiting for him to finish this. Anne-Marie, I need to go back to my own house.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Anne-Marie—”

  “Please, just a bit longer. Something’s going to happen soon, I know it.”

  One hand on the wheel, Anne-Marie hissed out an irritated breath while she rooted through her bag for her cell phone. “Damn it!” she muttered, smacking her hand against the console before upending the bag and sifting through the contents.

  It wasn’t there. Where in the hell had she put it? Gee, Jazz was going to roast her alive. She’d promised she wouldn’t leave the house without the cell phone.

  She glanced at the clock on the dash. It had only been a few minutes since she took the call from the new nurse at the hospital. “Five minutes. It’ll just take me five minutes to go back—

  “Damnation!” she shouted, jerking the wheel to the side and slamming on the brakes. The impact was expected. She’d been going too fast to stop completely. Still, when she hit the huge, old oak, her brain ceased to function for a moment, just out of shock.

  She teetered for a brief moment at the top of the hill, the passenger’s side wedged up against the tree. With a grinding noise of metal on metal, the car careened the rest of the way down the embankment, settling nose first into the creek. She had only a moment to be thankful it hadn’t been a wet summer before the shock settled and blackness closed in around her.

  The gray mist was receding when a familiar voice spoke from just outside the car door, a few feet away on the bank.

  “You really should learn to slow down a bit, Anne-Marie. Be more careful.”

  “What do you mean, there’s no emergency?” Jazz repeated, his voice rising. Hand clenched tightly around the phone, he said through gritted teeth, “Marlie was here when the new nurse called and said she hadn’t been able to reach Jake Hart and there was an emergency.”

  “I’m sorry,” the unit secretary said. “I don’t know what new nurse you’re talking about. There aren’t any new nurses here. And there’s been no emergency today for any of Dr. Kincaid’s or Dr. Hart’s patients.”

  “No emergency.” Slamming down the receiver, he turned on Marlie. “What time was the phone call?”

  “Three thirty,” she whispered, her face bloodless. “There’s no emergency. No new nurse.”

  “No.” Snatching the phone back up, Jazz dialed Tate’s cell phone.

  “She’s been gone four hours,” Jazz said testily after Tate told him to calm down. “She’s not at the hospital. Not at her house. I call her cell phone and get a damned ‘out of area’ message. He’s got her, Tate.”

  “I’m heading out,” Tate said. “Stay with Marlie—”

  “The hell I will. That’s my woman out there…” The heated anger in Jazz’s voice died away as he turned to study Marlie Muldoon, standing a few feet away with her arm around her mother, tiny and fragile. “Damn it, Tate.”

  “Go find my daughter,” a soft voice said from the doorway.

  “Sir, I can’t leave Marlie alone here.”

  “It’s not Marlie he wants,” Desmond said. “It never was. All of this has revolved around you, Jazz.” As he spoke, he reached down, just out of Jazz’s sight, lifting the heavy, well-oiled shotgun Jazz had always seen hanging above the desk in Desmond’s study. “Besides, boy. I ain’t exactly helpless.”

  It was a wonder he saw it, driving as fast as he was. But that flash of red, all but hidden from sight by trees and brush, caught Jazz’s eyes as he sped down the lane. Slamming the car into reverse, he backed up until he caught the glimpse of red again. But it wasn’t the red paint that caught his eye this time.

  It was the torn and mangled bushes, the tree with huge patches of bark missing, the pale under-skin of the tree married with black streaks and flecks of red paint and metal.

  “Jesus,” he whispered as he fought his way through the tangled undergrowth.

  It was Anne-Marie’s beloved Mustang, the body torn and mangled, all but buried in the deep creek bed that ran just inside the tree line. Only a breath of the trunk was visible from the roadside. Half submerged in the water, it sat empty.

  “Anne-Marie!” he shouted, frantically searching the banks with his eyes after a quick glance inside the car confirmed it to be empty. “Anne-Marie!”

  Splashing his way across the shallow, drought-depleted creek, Jazz’s frantic search came to an abrupt halt.

  There, lying on the pebble-strewn bank was Anne-Marie’s pearl necklace.

  Tate stood in the silent living room of his house, the house he’d grown up in—the “For Sale” sign out front next to another sign announcing an “Open House” every Sunday from one to three.

  His hand closed convulsively around his cell phone and he lowered his lids, blocking out the room and the pictures on the walls. They hadn’t found Anne-Marie. A rain had blown up shortly after dusk and washed away the scent before they had time to utilize the dogs.

  Returning home only to refuel and change out of his mud and rain-stiffened uniform, he had come to an empty house.

  Now, opening his eyes, staring at the pictures on the wall, the missing piece of the puzzle finally fell into place.

  Jazz rubbed his gritty eyes once more before reaching for the thick brew that passed as coffee on the days Darla wasn’t there to brew it. Knocking it back, grimacing at the taste, he willed the phone to ring. Willed the door to open to one of the searchers carrying Anne-Marie.

  But when the door did open, it revealed his cousin. The odd, blank expression in Tate’s eyes had cold chills running down his spine. Oh, God, no, he prayed silently as he rose once more.

  “Anne-Marie? Have they found her?” Jazz was almost afraid to ask, and at the same time, afraid not to.

  “I think I know where she is,” Tate said, his voice flat, his eyes cold. “Come on. We don’t have much time.”

  “Where is she?” Jazz asked, lunging for Tate and seizing him by the collar of his shirt. “Who has her?”

  Tate’s hands reached up, closing over Jazz’s wrists. But he did little more than hold on as he stared into the face so like his own. “My mother,” he said flatly.

  Staring into those calm, gray eyes, seeing no remorse, seeing no regret, seeing no emotion at all, was the most frightening experience of Anne-Marie’s life. Her mind was still befuddled, still trying to grasp the idea that Ella McNeil was the one responsible for all this.

  Ella McNeil.

  Nearly twenty-four hours had passed since she’d crashed into the tree, twenty-four hours since she had, at gunpoint, climbed from the mangled wreck of her car. Ella had been waiting for her, looking cool and chic in a silk, khaki camp shirt and jodhpurs.

  “Aren’t you going to ask why?” Ella asked, cocking her head, he
r honey blonde hair falling around her shoulders. She sat across from Anne-Marie, one leg crossed over the other while she sipped from a tin cup of tea.

  “Does it really matter?” Anne-Marie asked. “If I’m going to die, knowing why won’t bring me back.”

  With a shrug of her shoulders, Ella said, “Most people would want to know why. I imagine I would.”

  “I already know the gist of it,” Anne-Marie responded. She flexed her arms again, straining against the steel cuffs on her wrists. “I’m going to die because you are a certified lunatic.”

  “Now, darling, I’m not crazy,” Ella said, her tinkling laugh sounding in the air.

  “You’re right,” Anne agreed. “You’re freaking psychotic.”

  “I’m sure you think so.” A cool smile crossed Ella’s face, chilling Anne-Marie clear through. Sipping from her tea, she lifted her shoulders in an elegant, casual shrug. “And I suppose I can’t blame you for thinking so. I must say, though, Anne-Marie, I thought you were too smart to fall in love with a man like Jasper McNeil.”

  “What kind of man is that?”

  Ella merely gave her a long silent look. Setting the cup aside, she rose, smoothing her slim-fitting khakis down as she moved across the wooden floor to look out the window. “I’d intended you for Tate, you know. You had no right to give yourself to Jazz.”

  “Excuse me?” Anne-Marie asked, her voice frosty. “I really don’t see how you had any say in the matter.”

  Brushing her comment aside, Ella continued as if Anne-Marie hadn’t even spoken. “And then to fall in love with the man responsible for your brother’s death,” she mused, shaking her head and clucking her tongue.

  “Jazz was not responsible,” Anne-Marie said quietly, her voice trembling with rage and fear.

  “Oh, posh. Everything the man touches is destroyed or dead. His parents, your brother.”