Cold Touch

by Leslie Parrish

She sounded like she was trying to convince herself, more than him, and he found himself wondering what else she hadn’t told him. It sure sounded like she had some time line in her head and was trying to make sure all the pieces fit.

  “Could be. Or a handyman, somebody who knows a little about a lot of things,” he said, not wanting to get her hopes up but not wanting to dash them, either.

  “I’m sure you’re wondering if my mind is playing tricks on me,” she said, as if noticing he’d been carefully evaluating every word she said. “If I’m really remembering his face or just projecting it onto that drawing.”

  “Maybe. It’s been a long time. Hell, I can barely remember what my last girlfriend looked like, unless I look at a picture of us together.” Shrugging, he added, “Of course, that’d be impossible, since she ripped ’em all up when she dumped my sorry ass.”

  A tiny smile played on those pretty lips, as he’d wanted it to. She might have sounded calm and cool while relating her own horrifying ordeal, but he knew it had dredged up some stuff she’d probably rather have kept buried down in the black muck of lost memories. He wanted to bring her back into the light, and if playing self-deprecating good ol’ boy accomplished that, that’d be just fine with him. Lord knows he did it enough. Seemed some people equated an accent and a little Southern color with stupid, and sometimes it paid to have a perp underestimate the cop who was questioning him. Gabe had learned that real quick.

  “At least she didn’t burn them.”

  He lifted a wry brow. “That came after the ripping.”

  “Where did the picture of your face as bull’s-eye on a dartboard come in?”

  “Hey,” he said, pretending to take offense, “did you teach her that?”

  “Angry Ex-Girlfriend Secret Handbook.”

  “Guess I missed that one.”

  “Guess you missed the ‘Secret’ part, too,” she told him, actually sounding amused.

  “Is there a chapter in that book about cutting up all a guy’s clothes and dumpin’ ’em on the lawn?”

  “Depends on whether you’re dating a real woman or a Fatal Attraction applicant.”

  “Just kidding. She didn’t cut ’em up.”

  “Dumping them on the lawn?”

  “I’m gonna have to take the Fifth on that one.”

  Her eyes gleamed, but now it wasn’t strictly due to the moisture that had filled them not so long ago. There was good humor there, too. He was glad she hadn’t stopped to evaluate that, figuring she’d start feeling guilty at the very thought of smiling given the roller-coaster ride of emotions she’d probably been on all morning.

  “Please don’t even try to tell me you guys don’t have a secret coded playbook, too,” she said, sounding accusing. “Somehow the word got out that a guy should drunk-dial his ex in the middle of the night to accuse her of breaking his heart.”

  “That I didn’t do. May’ve gotten drunk a time or two, but I deleted her number from my address book the day after she deleted me from her Facebook friends list.”

  She snickered, as if finding it hard to believe he had one. That was perceptive: He didn’t.

  “Whew. Glad to hear you rose above the impulse.”

  “How about you?”

  “I’m not the Facebook type. I try to stay as disconnected and hard to reach as possible.”

  He didn’t point out that he could understand why, given her past. Any kidnapping victim would be pretty damn protective of his or her privacy, he suspected. “I meant the drunk-dialing.”

  “I rarely drink.” The quirk of her lips said she was teasing him, pretending she didn’t understand the question at first. “Okay, I’ve had to have my number changed once or twice.”

  He’d just bet she had. The woman was bright and warm, not to mention incredibly attractive. He didn’t doubt she’d broken some hearts in her day. Having known more than a few crime victims, he had to wonder if she had a hard time really trusting anyone. Most did. Which could lead to some broken hearts if somebody decided to take it personally.

  He’d already snuck a quick glance at her left hand and seen a big, antique-looking silver ring that looked like it had been inherited, not slipped on by a fiancé. At least, that’s how he preferred to think of it, though, having known her all of twenty minutes, he couldn’t say why.

  “So, tell me, Miz Wainwright, is there a chapter in there about ordering gay porn and big-woman skin mags and having them delivered to your ex-boyfriend at work? Because if so, that’s some seriously bad advice and can get you arrested.”

  Whistling, she replied, “She sounds like she was a real piece of work.”

  “Nah, not speaking from personal experience. It’d be pretty stupid to do that to a cop.”

  “Oh, so you ordered the gay porn and big-woman skin mags?”

  “Ha-ha,” he said with a wry grin, liking how quickwitted she was. Especially liking that the evidence of those tears was growing dimmer with every word she spoke.

  “So when was this devastating breakup?” she asked, though whether it was to be polite, or because she was really interested in knowing, he couldn’t say.

  “Year or so ago. And to be honest, it wasn’t that devastating.”

  “Not even to her?”

  “I don’t think so. She was all about settling down and having babies and being with somebody who didn’t risk getting shot every day when he left for the office. Ended up engaged to a guy who runs a bookkeeping business up’n Brunswick.”

  “Somebody nice and normal,” she murmured, sounding thoughtful.

  He leaned back in his chair, hearing it creak, and crossed his arms over his chest. “You sayin’ I’m not nice and normal, Miz Wainwright?”

  A faint sheen of pink might have appeared in her cheeks, and she smoothed her dress, suddenly looking a little more prim and uptight. Embarrassed. Rich Southern ladies didn’t usually go around insulting people, and she apparently thought she had. “Sorry. I didn’t mean . . .”

  “I’m kidding,” he said, gentle and earnest. “Because you’re right. I don’t live a lifestyle that can be called in any way normal. No homicide detective ever could.”

  “I agree. Nobody surrounded by death all the time could ever be said to have an entirely ordinary, sane existence,” she said, that thoughtful tone returning to her voice. “That’s what I meant. Again, I’m sorry if I sounded snotty.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “It’s just, normal’s not in my vocabulary, either.”

  He doubted that. Olivia looked about as normal a member of the Southern elite as anyone he’d ever known, even if she did have a kind streak and spoke in a down-to-earth way that didn’t quite match the dollar signs under which he suspected she’d been born.

  Then he remembered her background, the whole reason she’d come here today.

  Hell. No, normal wasn’t necessarily the word to describe this woman’s life, and it hadn’t been, not since she was fifteen years old. And nothing could make an ivorytowered princess come down to earth faster than realizing she was just as likely to be a victim of crime as any normal person born into a middle-class lifestyle. In her case, with those dollar signs attached to her name, probably even more so. He doubted she’d have been awakened in the middle of the night by a kidnapper if she’d been the daughter of a truck driver and a high school teacher. She’d seen darkness most people couldn’t even imagine.

  Even as he thought it, he saw the way her shoulders gradually slumped as she came to the same realization. Her smile faded. A low sigh emerged from her mouth. It appeared distraction time was over; her mind was heading back toward business.

  “Thanks,” she whispered.

  “You’re welcome,” he replied, knowing exactly what she meant. She appreciated the distraction. The brief segue into normalcy. “And for the record?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m so sorry about what happened to you,” he said, almost surprising himself with the tender note in his own voice. But it was only the truth.
He hated even picturing those awful days, and wished he could turn back the clock and change things so she’d never have to know about such ugliness. No innocent kid ever should.

  “You’re really a nice man, aren’t you?” she asked.

  Feeling stupid for having opened his mouth, he muttered, “Don’t let it get around.”

  “Our little secret,” she said, not laughing, sounding more thoughtful and appreciative than anything else. Then she shook her head, as if shaking out any distractions, and got back to the reason she’d come here. “Now, as to whether I’m basing this just on my memory of what Jack looked like, let me just point out a couple of things.” She raised her hand, ticking off points like a lawyer presenting closing arguments in a case. “The boy I remember seemed to be about twelve or thirteen years old, in line with what the coroner said about the remains you found.”

  “He said nine to twelve.”

  “So he was small for his age. Or mature beyond his years—probably with reason.”

  He nodded, conceding the point.

  “You said you think this might have taken place twelve years ago, around the time the bar underwent renovations after a previous fire?”

  “It’s a theory.”

  A pretty solid one, actually, considering what forensics had discovered. They didn’t believe the body had been disturbed since it had been put inside that wall—at least, not until the fire—and that it had been there for the full period of decomposition. Some tests they’d run on the bones as well as on a few flecks of the clothing and plastic that remained put the time period at no less than a decade, and it was doubtful somebody had moved the boy and walled him up after he’d started to decompose.

  Building permit records had indicated a major renovation twelve years back . . . long before Fast Eddie had ever bought the place from the former owner, who’d since died. And the blueprints on file with the county showed the addition of the very storage room where the boy was found. It was circumstantial, but, like a lot of circumstantial evidence, it all certainly led to a picture that seemed more likely than not to be the truth.

  “My kidnapping happened twelve years ago last spring.”

  “The timing does seem to fit.” Still, he didn’t want her to get her hopes up that her long-held mystery was definitely solved. “But a lot of children go missing each and every year. The chances of it being this one particular boy . . .”

  “I know,” she murmured.

  “Listen, how about I go get the file, bring back the sketch so you can give it a closer look?” And also, he knew, so that he could take a quick look at this woman’s history, just to confirm everything she’d said. Not that he doubted her—he didn’t. But he had the feeling there was more to learn about Olivia Wainwright.

  Rising to leave the room, he paused, his hand on the doorknob, when she spoke again.

  “There’s one more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  She swallowed, a visible gulp of grit to go on with something that bothered her. Gabe geared himself up to hear it, sensing they’d come to something big. Something major, in fact. He loosened his grip on the knob.

  “This bar, this Fast Eddie’s, it’s very close to Laurel Grove.”

  “The north section, yes.”

  Another deep swallow, and he’d swear her hands shook the tiniest bit on the table. She confirmed it by clenching them together again, each long, slim finger twining into another until she looked like she was gonna do that kid’s rhyme about the church and the steeple. Like if she didn’t have something to hold on to—her own other hand—she might falter or lose her nerve.

  Finally, she got down to it. “I’ve been there, Detective Cooper.”

  He hesitated, not entirely sure why that mattered. Hell, in point of fact, she’d pretty well been there just Monday morning.

  Then she laid it out.

  “I was found the fourth morning after the kidnapping, wandering around in Laurel Grove Cemetery. Naked, filthy, badly injured, and nearly out of my mind after having spent the entire night among the dead.”

  Chapter 3

  Tyler Wallace had never been much of a reader, other than doing what he had to for school and work. But as he quickly skimmed through Olivia Wainwright’s case file, he found himself thinking he needed to check out more fiction books. Because, man, did her story ever read like one. He couldn’t bear to put it down.

  When he’d returned from lunch and heard his partner was interviewing a woman about the Jimmy Doe murder, he’d instinctively turned to join him. But no sooner had he reached the hallway when Gabe had come out of the interview room, appearing deep in thought. He also wore that excited look that said he might be on to something.

  Hearing the something was the twelve-year-old memory of a kidnapping victim who thought their vic might have been a kid who’d shared her darkest nightmare didn’t inspire a lot of confidence. In fact, the whole thing sounded far-fetched or, at best, a total shot in the dark.

  Still, Ty had been every bit as hopeful that they’d finally gotten a break. This case was getting to him on a personal level. It had been since they’d first heard that firefighter talk about finding those little bones and had gotten worse when he’d read the autopsy report. Because they weren’t merely talking about the tragic murder of a boy, they were talking about systematic abuse of a kid throughout much of his short life.

  So, yeah, as Gabe had warned him it might, this case had started to mean something to Ty. And it meant a lot to his partner. Even the thinnest lead deserved every bit of respect they could give it. Which was why, together, they’d come back to the bullpen to pull up the report on the Wainwright kidnapping. After doing a little more poking around about Ms. Wainwright, Gabe had frowned, then headed back in to talk to their witness, asking Ty to finish reading over the case file without him.

  It all read pretty normally . . . until it got pretty damn freaky.

  “Kid told him to drown her,” Ty mumbled, his eyes drawn back to one portion of the victim’s statement.

  Any way of dying was bad, death being the main problem with it. But, in Ty’s opinion, some means of getting there seemed a lot worse than others. For him, drowning had always ranked as one of the worst ways to go. It was right up there with being tied down to a set of train tracks, watching a big old freight train barreling down on you. You’d know what was happening, but would have a hell of a time surviving without help.

  Though, to be fair, both were slightly less awful than being eaten by a shark—also too easy to be aware of and tough to escape.

  But being drowned as opposed to accidental drowning—that was some heavy shit. To think about somebody holding you down in water, on purpose, until you stopped struggling—what would it take to survive that? And what kind of person would you become afterward?

  Honestly, part of him wanted to meet this Wainwright woman just to see if she had a whole Elvira, Mistress of the Dark thing going on. Because something like that would have to scar someone for life, put him or her on a first-name basis with the Grim Reaper.

  Then there was that graveyard business. Talk about a nightmare after a bad dream. It was like escaping from Michael Myers only to land in a nightmare with Freddy Krueger.

  When he’d first moved here, he’d walked around Laurel Grove as well as some of the other old cemeteries. Like the city’s famed squares, they were part of Savannah’s unique charm, or so he’d heard. Though, honestly, he had to question the sanity of anybody who would call a cemetery charming.

  To give credit where it was due, if there was one thing the South did well, other than sweet tea and NASCAR, it was death. They knew how to take a biological function and make it mysterious and eerie, each grave telling a story, every headstone seeped in history and ritual.

  Though not as big as the city’s more famous cemetery, Bonaventure, Laurel Grove was still a sprawling site, shadowed with massive, moss-draped trees, all bent and gnarled like giant arthritic limbs. Gated family plots with rust-encrusted wrought-iron
fences vied for space with maudlin mausoleums dripping with marble vines, cherubs and angels. Headstones that had once been black or white were now a mottled gray color, about the shade of two-day-dead skin. And for every twenty graves with bouquets of plastic flowers or small American flags on them, there would be one with a chicken claw, a bit of eggplant or some strange brown powder. Voodoo.

  Amid the commonplace surnames were others that stood out, repeated again and again in testimony to the rich father-to-son tradition around here. Whole sections of the cemetery bore eternal witness to some of the city’s most respected families.

  Of course, stones in the older part of the north cemetery wouldn’t include the names of any black folks. Segregation had been alive and well in Savannah, even when it came to burying, and Laurel Grove South was where they’d have stuck a Wallace like him if he’d died a century ago or, hell, probably fifty years ago.

  One walk-through had been enough for him. Ty had been raised in Florida and far preferred going to theme parks for entertainment rather than graveyards. He’d take a giant cartoon mouse over marble-carved, weeping angels any day.

  The Wainwright woman hadn’t had the choice. It had been made for her. Run or die.

  Those places were bad enough during the day, when other mourners were around, but nighttime, all night long, a teenage girl alone? Worst of all, spending an entire windswept night there after being kidnapped, abused, and brought back from the brink of death?

  He couldn’t even imagine it. Frankly, he didn’t even want to try.

  Olivia hadn’t intended to be so dramatic when telling Gabe Cooper about the final hours of her long-ago ordeal. He’d left right after she’d said it, leaving her to stew, feeling stupid. She’d probably sounded like some phony fortune-teller relaying a ghost story when she’d only wanted him to hear her own certainty, her reasons for being so sure she could help him.

  Mainly, she’d wanted him to trust her before he found out the rest, before he found out who she really was and what she did for a living. Knowing he was headed back to his desk to get the sketch—and, undoubtedly, to do a little research on her—she’d felt compelled to show him just how deeply affected she was by this whole situation.