Dark and Twisted Reads: All the Pretty GirlsA Perfect EvilBone Cold (A Taylor Jackson Novel)

by J. T. Ellison

  The dogs were next. They piled out of a dingy white pickup truck, a man in overalls and a John Deere cap herding them. There were two bloodhounds and a bluetick hound. Good trackers.

  A deputy from the sheriff’s office had gone to Christina Dale’s home to check on her whereabouts when they’d first gotten the call that she hadn’t shown up for work. When she wasn’t to be found, the heads-up deputy grabbed a couple of pieces of her clothing. Knowing it was most likely futile, Baldwin watched as the dogs were given the clothing to smell. The handler stuck something cream colored under their noses and they whined and howled, straining on their leads, ready to go. The handler gave his commands and they were off. They ran about twenty yards to the east, baying, then slowed back to a walk, sniffing the ground, working in circles, growing more confused by the minute. The handler looked at Baldwin and shrugged. He must have put her in a car. Not a big surprise.

  Baldwin looked around and felt the scene, despite the confusion, was out of his hands. It was time to find out more about the latest victim.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The man was sweating. He was tired. It was hard work, getting a body in the right spot. But he was finished now, and he stepped back to admire his handiwork, rubbing his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt. Soon, he thought. Soon, it will be done and you will have everything you always dreamed of. You will have the world at your feet and I will be there with you. He smiled to himself and got back in the car. He had things to do.

  He chuckled. “And miles to go before I sleep. Oh yes, miles to go before I sleep.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Whitney Connolly’s home was in a stately neighborhood in Bellevue, an area jokingly referred to as West Belle Meade. Trees lined the streets, the homes were mostly two-story brick with large yards. Children played in the streets and backyards oblivious to the cares of the world; the sun shone its blessings on their cavorting.

  Taylor drove slowly through the neighborhood, wondering if she should look at buying here. It was obviously filled with kids and the homes were gracious and large, much more space than she already had. She’d toyed with the idea of selling the cabin once or twice in the past. With Baldwin around, things were getting a little cramped. Maybe that was the key. Break all her own rules. Buy a house, move in together and let people get over it when they found out she was dating a fed. Hell, her team was discovering her secret and none of them seemed to have any issues with it. Maybe she was the problem; her own prejudices were getting in the way. There was no law on the books against having a boyfriend, after all.

  She’d counted it up last night. They’d been together for four months—just enough time for the newness to begin wearing off. He’d never officially moved in with her, just stopped going to his own house. She’d never encouraged him to leave. They’d fallen into a pattern while she was rehabbing—he’d bring home dinner, they’d talk about their cases, they’d end up in bed. Idyllic. Nothing easier to ruin a good relationship than having to talk about it. She knew he felt it, too, there was no reason to go chasing after it.

  A woman with a yellow Lab walked by and gave her a friendly wave. Taylor sighed and allowed herself a moment of reverie before she pulled herself back into the here and now. There was plenty of time for dreams later.

  She took a left turn and wound deeper into the neighborhood, pulling to a stop in front of a large red-brick house with white columns. Quinn Buckley stood on the porch, her arms wrapped around her body as if she was cold, her pretty face pinched and drawn. She looked terribly tired and uncomfortable. Of course, this house was a far cry from the palatial mansion Quinn was accustomed to, maybe she just felt out of her element.

  Taylor chided herself silently. Now, that wasn’t a very nice thing to think. The woman just lost her sister, give her the benefit of the doubt. She got out of the car and walked across the grass to the front steps. She saw that Quinn had already picked up two copies of the Tennessean and was holding them in her left hand. She held them up, shaking the papers slightly, the plastic covers rustling in her hand.

  “I guess I have to cancel her subscription. I guess I’m going to have to do a lot of things around here.” Quinn gave her a small smile that didn’t make it all the way to her cool blue eyes.

  Taylor nodded. “It’s always hard to get things settled after someone passes. Is there anyone else who can help you? Did Whitney have a boyfriend, someone who was familiar with her everyday things?”

  Quinn laughed, a bitter sound. “No, Whitney didn’t have time for a boyfriend. She didn’t have time for anyone but herself. I’m sorry, Lieutenant, but my sister was one of the most selfish people you could ever meet. Everything revolved around her and her plans, her dreams. She couldn’t be bothered with anyone else.” She turned and stuck a key in the lock. “She left it under the mat for the cleaning lady. She told me that a while ago, I assumed it would still be there and it was. Here we go.”

  The oak door swung open and Taylor was assailed by the smell of furniture polish and Clorox. Her heart sank. “Did the cleaning lady just come?” she asked Quinn.

  “I believe she came once a week, but I’m not sure which day. Usually midweek, I think. Is that a problem?”

  “No, not necessarily a problem. If I was investigating a crime here, it would be, but since this was ruled an accident, it shouldn’t make a difference. But if there was something here that your sister was basing her panicky phone calls to you on, I would want to see it. But maybe we’re grasping at straws. It doesn’t mean that there’s anything tangible. Let’s just look around.”

  Quinn nodded and led the way through the foyer. The house was beautifully decorated to within an inch of its life. Parquet floors led to a spacious kitchen filled with the latest trends—black granite counters with an Italian-stone backsplash, whitewashed cabinets and stainless-steel appliances. An office area and breakfast nook split the kitchen from a large living room. Mullioned windows ran the length of the house along the back, and natural light flooded from the fenced-in backyard. Everything had a place, not a thing was disturbed. It was very homey, yet there was an antiseptic quality to it all. As if a decorator had decided what Whitney would like rather than Whitney herself deciding. Taylor supposed that if she was as busy as Whitney had obviously been, then she might have someone else do the decorating too.

  Taylor moved slowly through the downstairs of the house. The maid had been thorough, there was nothing amiss. Damn, that just made things more difficult. As she turned to go into the living room, a briefcase and a laptop computer caught her eye. The brand-new computer was sitting on the desk of a built-in set of shelves, and the briefcase sat at the foot of the chair. Taylor carefully opened the briefcase but saw nothing that excited her. Whitney didn’t bring a lot of paperwork home.

  She pulled out the chair and sat in front of the computer. She opened the top and was rewarded with a full screen of e-mails. Whitney Connolly hadn’t logged out of her computer when she took off like a bat out of hell for her sister’s house. Taylor scanned the e-mails. She saw that several had come in today, the dates were current and the e-mails were still bolded, indicating they hadn’t been read. She noticed that a few of the messages had red flags next to them. She’d seen Sam do the same thing with her e-mails, she got so many that she had to identify which ones she wanted to pay attention to first. Taylor wasn’t as picky; she just didn’t spend that much time online to have to devise organizational codes for her e-mail.

  She started looking at the red-flagged entries, trying to see if something jumped out at her. She noticed there were a few that had already been opened but still had the red flag next to them. She turned to Quinn.

  “Do I have your permission to go through Whitney’s e-mails?”

  “Of course, do anything you need. I’m going to go out on the back deck for a little air, if you don’t mind.” Quinn stepped out the French doors and turned her back to
Taylor. Just as well, she thought. She wouldn’t want some impersonal stranger to go through all of her things if she keeled over unexpectedly.

  She started looking closer at the previously flagged e-mails and matching them to unread flagged mail. There were a couple that were self-explanatory, alerts from news organizations and the like. But there was one address she saw several times, the subject line always reading “A poem for S.W.” She took a chance and opened the newest mail from that address.

  The window opened and there were just a few lines on the page. Taylor read them aloud:

  “She half enclosed me with her arms

  She pressed me with a weak embrace;

  And bending back her head, looked up,

  And gazed upon my face.

  ’Twas partly love, and partly fear,

  And partly ’twas a bashful art,

  That I might rather feel, than see,

  The swelling of her heart.”

  She closed the e-mail, feeling like a spy. And Quinn thought her sister didn’t have a boyfriend. She scrolled through the list and saw that there were five more e-mails from the mystery man—IM1855195C@yahoo.com. She opened them and glanced through hurriedly. Each held a fragment of poetry like the first had. She wished Baldwin would send her anonymous love poems.

  She went through the rest of the mail but didn’t see anything that leaped out at her. It was time to let Whitney’s sister take a crack at it.

  “Quinn?” Taylor called over her shoulder, and Quinn came in from the deck.

  Taylor pointed to the e-mails. “I’ve been through here and haven’t seen anything that seems terribly out of place. She seems to get a number of e-mails from the same people. Would you like to take a look and see if anything strikes you?”

  “I don’t think that’s necessary, Lieutenant. My sister’s e-mail is just not something I’m interested in. And I can hardly think any of it would have to do with me.”

  “Well, have a quick look anyway. I did find some love poems that had been sent to her. I thought you said she didn’t have a boyfriend.” Taylor’s voice was only slightly accusing. She wondered if there was any chance that Quinn knew anything substantive about her sister’s life.

  “Love poems? Let me see.” Quinn leaned over the desk and Taylor pulled up the latest message. Quinn read the lines and got a strange look on her face. Taylor noticed.

  “Something strike you as odd about this?”

  Quinn’s face took on a soft countenance, and her eyes got moist. “It’s nothing, really.”

  Taylor wasn’t going to let that go; the look on Quinn’s face told her that there was something about the poem. “I think there may be something here. There’re several more. Are you sure they don’t mean anything to you?”

  Taylor looked at Quinn, who was trying to look away. Taylor could see that her shoulders were shaking slightly, and she was amazed to see a tear fall down Quinn’s lovely face.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked softly. “Is this getting to you?”

  Quinn laughed out a sob. “No, it’s nothing like that. I loved my sister, and I’m sick at heart that she’s dead. But the poems, that’s got nothing to do with it. My husband used to send me poems. He doesn’t anymore.” She turned away and gathered herself by walking through the kitchen, grabbing a paper towel, splashing some water on it and holding it to her face. When she turned back to Taylor, her eyes were shining but she was back in control.

  “Silly of me, to think of Jake in the middle of all this. I guess seeing that Whitney has an admirer made me wish that Jake felt like that about me still.” And with that, she left the room. Taylor could hear her rummaging around but decided to leave her alone for a while.

  Taylor swept through the rest of the house, looking for anything that would give them a clue as to why Whitney Connolly was in such desperate straits to reach her sister. If only the maid hadn’t wiped away any obvious intent by straightening and cleaning. If there were papers left out, notes or the like, there was no way to know. Then she had a thought.

  “Quinn?” she called out. “Have the officers from the accident scene given you any of Whitney’s personal effects?”

  Quinn came back into the kitchen. “No, I’m supposed to go to the morgue and pick them up. They said there were a few things in the car… Oh, now that was dumb of me, wasn’t it? We should have gone to get her things before we came all the way out here.”

  Taylor stifled a laugh, as if Bellevue, a scant five minutes farther out from downtown than Belle Meade, was on the other side of the universe. “It’s really no trouble. We can head over there now if you’d like. I think we need to go through and see if anything in her stuff gives us a better idea than what we’ve gotten here.”

  “That’s fine. I can write you a release and you can go through the information on your own, if that’s okay?”

  Taylor studied her for a moment. “I can do that, but you may want to be there.” She hesitated, then decided it would be dumb not to ask. “Quinn, you don’t think this has anything to do with Nathan Chase, do you?”

  Quinn’s face drained of color. “Oh dear God, you don’t think he’s…? Could he have gotten in touch with Whitney somehow?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Has he ever reached out to you or your sister before?”

  Quinn started pacing, a pale manicured hand clasped to her throat. She looked as if she might shatter into a million pieces all over the foyer.

  “No, we’ve had no contact from him. It was part of his sentence. And he’s still in jail, I know, because I check every so often to make sure he’s not getting out. He’s not due for parole for another fifteen years.”

  Taylor digested that for a moment. Kidnapping was one thing, but Chase had been sentenced to at least thirty years. She made a mental note to look up the case and find out what exactly he’d been sentenced for. It probably wasn’t germane to this case, but it wouldn’t hurt to have the whole story.

  “Okay, Quinn. I’ll go and sort through Whitney’s things. If I find anything of note, I’ll let you know.”

  “Thank you. Tell me, when will her body be released? I need to start making plans for the memorial.”

  “Just give the M.E.’s office a call. They’ll be able to give you all of that information. It’ll be soon, I promise.”

  As they made their way toward the door, they didn’t hear the chime go off on the computer to announce that Whitney had another new e-mail.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Christina Louise Dale, better known as Christy to her family and friends, was a sad case. Nineteen years old, petite and brunette, Christy was always hustling, always looking for a way to get it done. She didn’t have the money to go to college nor the grades to get a scholarship, so she worked hard and associated with the college students around Roanoke as often as possible. She was autodidactic, and when she mentioned that, most of the college kids didn’t even know what it meant. On one hand, it was outrageous that she could be so much smarter than the rest of them and still not have a chance to go to school with them. But on the other hand, she secretly gloated, knowing that no matter what, she was better than all of them.

  She continued her quest to educate herself and read everything she could in her spare time. She landed herself a job that would afford her the opportunities that had been denied to her so far in her short life. The parent company of her small community hospital had a program to give scholarships to those needy employees who demonstrated a will and a dedication to getting a higher education, but only in the medical field. That was fine with her. She could always do her time with the company and then branch out when she got a little older.

  Christy bided her time. She was a diligent employee, even if the things she did outside of work were a little questionable. Admittedly, she drank too much. She drank too much and smoked too much. And oftentimes s
he did a few drugs that probably weren’t the most legal things in the world. Nothing hard-core, but the soft stuff, the campus drugs. That way she felt she was experiencing the same things that all nineteen-year-old college girls experience. The booze, the drugs, the boys. Oh yes, the boys. She really liked the boys. But that wasn’t exactly a bad thing, at least in her mind. She was in control of her body, she had the last word in everything she did. The fact that she might have sex on a given night with a guy that never asked for her number wasn’t a problem. If she wanted to see him again, she could find a way to do it.

  So maybe she dressed a little provocatively. Maybe she drank too much, slept around a little too much. What difference did that make?

  Baldwin knew all of this, and more, so when he stared down at Christy’s lifeless body, tossed off the edge of the road in Asheville, North Carolina, he couldn’t help but wonder if poor Christy had any idea of the danger she was putting herself in, over and over, having sex with strange men, riding off in cars that didn’t belong to her and, most importantly, taking a stranger back to the motel that she used when she didn’t want her mom to know she was out fooling around.

  But Christy’s mother had known. She knew everything her daughter did, and either didn’t care enough to do anything about it, or just didn’t believe she could make a difference. When Baldwin had sat down with her, mere hours after they knew Christy’s body had been taken from room 3 at the Happy Roads Inn, Charlie Dale didn’t seem surprised.

  Charlie Dale smoked continuously throughout their interview. Baldwin thought he would choke in the dim air of her trailer, and wondered if there had ever been an open window in the place. It was stacked with laundry, washed or unwashed was anyone’s guess, trash, full ashtrays and dirt, layer upon layer of dirt. Charlie wasn’t much of a housekeeper, and told Baldwin that. He’d smiled and pretended things were fine, which he assumed Charlie had been doing for at least a decade.